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PARTISAN REVIEW
domitable about him; at least while we are reading him he does not
consent to being consigned to the half-life of the background of
literature. For one thing, his wit and humor save him. Much must
be granted to the man who created the wealthy, guilty, hypersensi–
tive Clara Kingsbury, called her "a large blonde mass of suffering"
and conceived that she might say to poor Marcia Hubbard, "Why,
my child, you're a Roman matron!" and come away in agony that
Marcia would think she meant her nose. And the man is not easily
settled with who at eighty-three, in the year of his death, wrote
that strange realistic romance,
The Vacation of the K elwyns,
with
its paraphernalia of gypsies and dancing bears and its infinitely
touching impulse to speak out against the negation and repression
of emotion, its passionate wish to speak out for the benign relaxation
of the will. When we praise his social observation, we must see that
it is of a precision and subtlety which carry it beyond sociology to
literature; it is literature and not sociology to understand with
Howells' innocent clarity the relationship of the · American social
classes, to know that a lady from Cambridge and the farmer's wife
with whom she boards will have a natural antagonism which will be
expressed in the great cultural issue of whether steak should be
fried or broiled. Again, when we have said all that there is to say
about Howells' theory of character, have taken full account of its
lack of glory, we must see that in its reasoned neutrality, in its in–
sistence on the virtual equality in any person of the good and the
bad, or of the interesting and the dull, there is a kind of love, per–
haps not so much of persons as of persons in society, of the social idea.
At the heart of Merrick there is deadness and even a kind of malice;
at the heart of Fuller there is a sort of moral inertness; but at the
heart of Howells there
is
a loving wonder at what Burke called "the
great mysterious incorporation of the human race."
I don't mean by this to define the whole quality and virtue of
Howells but only to offer enough in his defense to make his case
at least doubtful, because I want to ask how far our present friendly
indifference to him is of
his
making and how far it is of ours.
It
is a question which no doubt cannot be fully answered at this time
but only in some later generation that is as remote from our assump–
tions as from Howells', yet it is worth attempting for what small self–
knowledge the effort might bring.
