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PARTISAN REVIEW
There is a deep split between Howells's conscious goals and his subcon–
scious impulse . For all his best intentions, Howells's vision of reality is
sadistic. It punishes the reader ; as its long-standing reputation for drabness
makes clear, and even more it punishes those characters with whom both
reader and writer should identify.
In his best known novel,
The Rise
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Silas Lapham,
Howells does not
quite advocate the enduring appreciation of "tasteless" or "sordid" things,
but he does say that we must tolerate much in the novel that is "not
amusing ." During table conversation at a Beacon Hill dinner party the
author's views on realistic fiction are voiced through the Reverend Sewall , a
man who functions as the moral touchstone and observer throughout the
book . And even if we allow for some lightly ironic distance between
Howells himself and his mouthpiece, there is something so rigorous about
Sewall's notions that they grate:
The novels might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life
as it is , and human feelings in their true proportion and relation but
for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious .
To this someone responds, "But what iflife as it is isn't amusing? Aren't we
to be amused?" "Not to our hurt, " is the answer . What Howells advocates ,
through Sewall, is a vision of human life that adequately describes the
quality of daily life: a vision that interprets the meaning of suffering and
remains fundamentally optimistic about the commonplace activity of life,
activity marked by " that light, impalpable aerial essence which they've
never got into their books yet ." The novelist who could interpret these
common feelings of commonplace people would have, says the Reverend ,
"the riddle of the painful earth" on his tongue. But as these matters are not
to be "amusing" to our hurt the reader is forced to entertain himself by
continually acknowledging that even tasteless and embarrassing characters
can exemplify a moral ideal.
Indeed, characters seem punished in Howells's work precisely because
they are made first and foremost to exemplify an ideal. If the illusion of
reality is created in Howells's characterization, if we believe as we read the
novel that Silas Lapham is a person, we feel in conclusion that his life has
been rounded off rather definitively, pared down according to a particular
idealized notion. Not that the particular ideal of realism which Howells
enforces on the reader is one that he takes lightly: it is composed of a very
fine balance of the good, the beautiful, the very honorable, and the bad, the
tasteless, and the lugubrious. In his rigorous attempt to be fair to reality , to
