'The true standard of the artist is in every man's power...'

Gleanings on Realism | from the Dean of American Letters!

He was nicknamed “The Dean of American Letters”! He was lifelong friends with Mark Twain!

He was editor of the prestigious The Atlantic Monthly!      

He had written Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography titled, Life of Abraham Lincoln.

He has quite carved a niche for himself as one of America’s most popular realist novelists who also doubled up as a realist playwright!

Presenting good ol’ William Dean Howells, ladies and gentlemen!

Howells also happens to be Herne’s close buddy! (the Herne of our past post!)

The Howells-ian Hall to Fame continues…

Indeed, as Ezra Pound to Eliot, so is Howells to Henry James and Mark Twain as well!

Well, William Howells was also on the pally-line with Lowell, Wendell, Henry Adams, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, William James, Waldo Emerson and a host of such acclaimed writers of his era!

American drama had gotten for itself a huge fillip soon after the Civil war came to a close!

This post-Civil war period was marked by an added emphasis on realism with a local touch! In other words, local colour with a touch of realism, became, by default, the writer’s hobson’s choice during the post-Civil war scenario!

Along with an emphasis on realism, American drama of the post-Civil war mode also focused on social comedy.

And as could be surmised, social comedies were an instant hit among audiences of all hues, as they provided a pleasant escape from the unpleasantness of their humdrum existence and drudge of a life.

Howells dabbled in social comedies too! Like his buddy Herne, Howells also highlighted social issues in his plays!

Well, social comedies were usually sharp, witty plays that dealt with pressing social issues of the day. Added, these comedies took for their themes, social customs, rituals, observances and ceremonies that were so cliched, out-moded, antiquated and outworn! Hence these comedies were mostly in the form of hard-hitting knocks on the vices of the social classes of their time! [You may want to compare and contrast social comedy with Shaw’s problem plays!]

In addition, social comedies most often had their settings in the ‘wealthy’ drawing rooms and dining rooms of the rich and the privileged classes.

Langdon Mitchell’s The New York Idea: A Comedy in Four Acts (1906), is considered amongst America’s bestest ever social comedies of the past century. It is a biting satire on the widely prevalent, highly flippant and vainglorious attitude of the rich and privileged social classes in America towards marriage and divorce!

Jesse Lynch Williams’s social comedy titled, Why Marry? (which had incidentally won the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Drama) was an instant hit with the American play-going public! The play, [as Mitchell’s, again,] focalizes on a host of issues connected with marriage and divorce among the wealthy social classes in America.

Theatre, thus, from thenceforth, became a vehicle, a power-vehicle rather, for social criticism of the time, and hence social comedies.

Back again to Howells, ladies and gentlemen, who’s the ‘apple’ of this blogpost!

The literary output of Howells is quite stunning by all means! Howells has given us all a record 36 plays, 35 novels, ten travelogues, nine volumes of short stories, and eight volumes of criticism.

In addition, Howells has also written more than 60 feature articles on drama criticism, through which he takes a passionate stance for a realistic approach to drama.

These feature articles on drama criticism assumes immense significance as they are kinda tributes to the cutting-edge and pioneering work of some of the most famous playwrights of his time – including Shaw, Ibsen, Herne, Harrigan, etc for their pivotal work in the realm of realistic drama.

Howells’s literary credo is equally Herne-ian in its vigour and Shavian in its spirit. He vouches much for the problem play, like Shaw, and he also lays bare his proposition that, a play should strive hard to present on stage, a direct, just and faithful reflection of life, in its dialogue, in its character and in its setting as well! On this aspect, he also toes the mark and walks the line with Herne and a host of his contemporaries!

One of Howells’s high-renowned plays would obviously be Out of the Question! Written in 1877, the play deals with the profound effects of social classes on American society.

Now for Howells’ manifesto on realism for us all! Like Herne’s power-manifesto that vouches for a ‘Art for Truth’s Sake’ portfolio, Howells also gives us all an equal and vigorous plea for ‘simple, natural and honest’ slices from life!

He spells out his stance, clear and bold on his credo, in his literary manifesto, titled, Criticism and Fiction, written in 1891.

Just interesting tidbits from Howells’s manifesto on realism, for us all herein below.

Well, Howells’ lament is that, artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore can do little as guides.

On the contrary, Howells feels that, the true standard of the arts is in every man's power!

Howells Hopes that - 

The time is coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret.

"The true standard of the artist is in every man's power" already, as Burke says; Michelangelo's "light of the piazza," the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe's "boys and blackbirds" have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful.

And what follows are such intense thoughts, such passionate thoughts and such delightful thoughts on a platter, straight from Howells’ heart to ours!

Most of his thoughts are so much in tune with the noted critic Scupin Richards’s, as well!

Before you go ahead and read Howells, quick grab for yourself a cuppa hot coffee, recline on your sette, [or on some grassy meadow,] and then proceed!

like this perhaps... with the cuppa! ;-)

Howells requires such an honour!

Are you ready? So now…

Here goes Howells –

The current crop of writers, according to Howells, have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done.

Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born, the academic.

The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them.

"I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don't waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it's a type. 

It's made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very much like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, and it's served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it's artificial. 

Well, it is artificial; but then it's ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You'll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to admit that it's photographic."

As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always "has the standard of the arts in his power," will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not "simple, natural, and honest," because it is not like a real grasshopper.

But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.

These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest, but was a good deal "amused and misled" by lights now no longer mistakable for heavenly luminaries. 

They belong to a time, just passing away, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular.

Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature's lips and caught her very accent. These moments are not continuous with any authors in the past, and they are rare with all.

Therefore I am not afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the natural, and the honest.

Deivameyyy! He’s endlessly amazing! Ain’t he? :-)

To be continued…

images: this blogger's! | full text archive to Criticism and Fiction here.