THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
525
rendered to "romanticism." He meant that the matter of Zola's
realism would lead his readers away from the facts of their middle–
class lives. For Howells the center of reality was the family life of
the middle class.
The feeling for the family with which Howells' theory of the com–
monplace was bound up was very strong in him, and Mr. Wilson is
accurate when he makes it definitive of Howells' quality. His family
piety seems to have amounted almost to a superstitiousness, for as
such we must interpret his having said to Mark Twain, "I would
rather see and talk with you than with any other man in the world,"
and then adding "outside my own family." His sorrows were family
sorrows; after
his
marriage the direction of his life was given chiefly
by the family necessities. And it is a fact worth noting, and even
more remarkable for what it tells us about American literature than
for what it tells us about Howells himself, that he is the only nine–
teenth-century American writer of large reputation who deals directly
and immediately with the family.
I do not know whether or not anyone has remarked the peculiar
power the idea of the family has in literature-perhaps it has never
been worth anyone's while to remark what is so simple and ob–
vious, so easily to be observed from the time of the Greek epics and
of the Greek drama down through the course of European literature.
Even today, when our sense of family has become much attenuated,
the familial theme shows its power
in
our most notable literature,
in Joyce, in Proust, in Faulkner, in Kafka. But our present sense of
the family is of the family in dissolution, and although of course
the point of any family story has always been a threatened or an
actual dissolution, this was once thought to be calamity where with us
it is the natural course of things. Weare sure that the nineteenth–
century family was an elaborate hoax and against nature.
It
is true
that almost every second-rate novel
will
represent one of its good
characters expressing the hope of a quiet home and charming and
satisfying children;
it
is true that the family is at the center of the
essential mythology of our social and economic life, the good and
sufficient reason for accumulation and expenditure, and that the
maintenance of the family
in
peace is the study of our psychological
science, yet in our literature the family serves as but an ideality, a
