520
PARTISAN REVIEW
inised itself, or democratized itself, so that in much of
his
work he
is only the journeyman, a craftsman quite without the artist's expect–
ably aristocratic notions, and in his life, although he was a child of
light and a son of the covenant, he also kept up his connections with
the Philistines--he was, we remember, the original of James's
Str~ther;
and when such a man complains about America, we do
not discount, we do not resist, we listen and are convinced.
His
literary criticism
still
has force and point because it is so doggedly
partisan with a certain kind of literature and because it always had
a social end in view.
It is of course in his novels that Howells is at his best as a social
witness, and he can be very good indeed. The reader who wants to
test for himself what were in actual fact Howells' powers of social
insight which have for so long been slighted in most accounts of
them might best read
A Modern Instance)
and he would do well to
read it alongside so perceptive a work of modem sociology as David
Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd)
for the two books address themselves
to the same situation, a change in the American
ch~racter,
a debilita–
tion of the American psychic tone, the loss of an adequate moral
temion. Nothing could be more telling than Howells' description of
the religious mood of the 'seventies and 'eighties, the movement
from the last vestiges of faith to a genteel plausibility, the displace–
ment of doctrine and moral strenuousness by a concern with social
adjustment and the amelioration of boredom. And the chief figure
of the novel, Bartley Hubbard, is worthy to stand with Dickens'
Bradley Headstone, or James's Basil Ransom and Paul Muniment, or
Flaubert's Senecal, or Dostoevsky'S Smerdyakov and Shigalov, as one
of a class of fictional characters who envisage a large social actuality
of the future. Howells has caught in Hubbard the quintessence of
the average sensual man as the most sanguine of us have come to
fear our culture breeds him, a man somewhat gifted-and how
right a touch that Hubbard should be a writer of sorts, how deep in
our democratic culture is the need to claim some special undeveloped
gift of intellect or art!- a man trading upon sincerity and half–
truth, vain yet self-doubting, aggressive yet self-pitying, self-indulgent
yet with starts of conscience, friendly and helpful but not loyal,
impelled to the tender relationships yet wishing above all to live to'
himself and by himself, essentially resenting all human ties.