The Realism War

James, Twain, and Howells

Nineteenth-century Definitions of Romance

Romance focuses “upon the extraordinary, the mysterious, the imaginary.” –Bliss Perry (1903)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: the romance “has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables)

Nineteenth-Century Definitions of RealismRealism sets itself at work to consider

characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance. George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 313‑24.

Nineteenth-Century Definitions of Realism, continued

Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm. --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Romance and Realism: Taste and Class Romance Aspired to the ideal Thought to be more

genteel since it did not show the vulgar details of life

Realism Thought to be more

democratic Critics stressed the

potential for vulgarity and its emphasis on the commonplace

Potential “poison” for the pure of mind

W. D. Howells Editor of the Atlantic

Monthly, 1871-1881 “Editor’s Study” in

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1886- March 1892)

Criticism and Fiction (1891; collected from “Editor’s Study” columns)

Howells’s Early Novels Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881) A Modern Instance (1882) The Rise of Silas Lapham

(1885) April Hopes (1888) Annie Kilburn (1889)

Howells on Realism“Realism is nothing

more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,”

November 1889.

The Ideal Grasshopper

“We hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man . . . .will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it . . . Because it is not like a real grasshopper” --W. D. Howells, 1887

The Smiling Aspects of Life

We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than in the commonplace.” –W. D. Howells, 1886

Howells on James (Century 1882)

The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray . . . . These great men are of the past.

The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others . . . . This school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James.

The Reaction

A Literary Combination.

Mr. H-w-lls: Are you the tallest now, Mr. James?

Mr. J-mes (ignoring the question): Be so uncommonly kind, H-w-lls, as to let me down easy: it may be we have both got to grow.

 Henry James and Realism “The Art of Fiction,” 1884 Washington Square (1880) The Portrait of a Lady

(1881) The Bostonians (1886) The Princess Casamassima

(1886) The Aspern Papers (1888) The Turn of the Screw

(1898)

Mark Twain “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary

Offenses” North American Review, 1895

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/5)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1890)

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895)

Defending Realism W. D. Howells Henry James H. H. Boyesen, “The

Great Realists and the Empty Story-Tellers”

Mark Twain Hamlin Garland Thomas Sergeant Perry George Pellew

Attacking Realism W. R. Thayer, “The

New Story-tellers and the Doom of Realism” Forum 18 (December 1894): 470-80.

H. C. Vedder. Maurice Thompson.

Attacking Realism (England)

Robert Louis Stevenson H. Rider Haggard Andrew Lang

Attack on Howells I

H. C. Vedder. “Can it be that Mr. Howells gives us in his books a fair representation of life as he has known it? Has his whole experience been of this stale, flat unprofitable sort?”

“Has he never known anybody who has a soul above buttons?” American Writers of Today, 1894.

Attack on Howells II: William Roscoe Thayer

French realism should be called “Epidermism,” not realism, because it reduces “literature, art, and morals to anarchy.”

“the foreign Realists dealt chiefly in moral filth” (477)

The Rise of Silas Lapham was “produced by Epidermist methods” by an author who “smacked his lips” over Zola’s La Terre.

Picture of Emile Zola.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich Romance beside his unstrung lute,

Lies stricken mute.The old-time fire, the antique grace,You will not find them anyplace,Polemic, scientific air:We strip Illusion of her veil;We vivisect the nightingaleTo probe the secret of his note.The Muse in alien ways remoteGoes wandering.

Maurice Thompson: Realism As Disease.

Realists represent “literary decadence” and worship “the vulgar, the commonplace, and the insignificant.”

The best part of Howells is “romance disguised as realism. His literary tissue is healthy, the spirit of his work is even, calm, just, and his purpose is pure,” so he cannot be a realist.

Picture is Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875).

Reaction Against Realism: The Turn Toward Romanticism

“A large number of readers, who have wearied of minute descriptions of the commonplace, are to-day often found condemning an author who does not keep his hero in imminent danger of death through at least seventy-five percent of his pages.“ --John Kendrick Bangs, 1898

Howells to James, 1915

“I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight” (Selected Letters 6: 31).