THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
521
Yet
if
we praise Howells only as· a man who is historically in–
teresting, or only as an observer who testifies truthfully about the
American social fact of his time, we may be dealing as generously
and as piously with his memory as the nature of
his
achievements
permits, but we cannot be happy over having added to the number
of American writers who must be praised thus circumspectly if they
are to be praised at all. We have all too many American writers who
live for us only because they can be so neatly "placed," whose life
in literature consists of their being influences or precursors, or of
being symbols of intellectual tendencies, which is to say that their
life is not in literature at all but in the history of culture.
Perhaps this is the fate to which we must abandon Howells. The
analogy that is made between him and Trollope, while it suggests
something of his quality, also suggests his limitations, which are
considerable. As an American, and for reasons that Henry James
made clear, he did not have Trollope's social advantages, he did not
have that thickneSs of the English scene and of the English character
which were of such inestimable value to the English novelists as a
standing invitation to energy, gusto, and happy excess. Nor did he
have Trollope's assumption of a society essentially settled despite
the changes that might be appearing;
his
consciousness of the past
could not be of sufficient weight to balance the pull of the future,
and so his present could never be as solid as Trollope's. "Life here,"
as he said, "is still for the future- it is a land of Emersons-and I
like a little present moment in mine." He never got as much present
moment as the novelist presumably needs, and his novels are likely
to seem to most readers to be of the past because nothing in America
is quite so dead as an American future of a few decades back,
unless it is an American personage of the same time.
And yet it is still possible that Howells deserves something
better than a place in the mere background of American literature.
It is clear enough that he is not of a kind with Hawthorne, Melville,
James, and Whitman, nor of a kind with Emerson and Thoreau,
nor with Poe, nor with Mark Twain at his best. Yet neither is he of
a kind with H. B. Fuller and Robert Herrick, whose names are usual–
ly mentioned with
his
as being in a line of descent from him.
If
Howells is experienced not as he exists in the textbooks, but as he
really is on
his
own page, we have to see that there is something in-
