Howells

normally deficient became almost the character-
istic property of his mind

Howells passed his boyhood in various Ohio
towns, Martin's Ferry, Hamilton, Dayton, Ash-
tabula, Jefferson, and Columbus. In the last-
named town, between 1856 and 1861, he was re-
porter, exchange editor, and editorial writer on
the Ohio State Journal, and two happy winters
in this period when opportunity, both social and
literary, was freshest, became in his grateful ret-
rospect the "heyday of life." At twenty-two he
published in association with John J. Piatt Poems
of Two Friends (1860), a volume which the pub-
lic with great unanimity declined to buy; but the
majestic Atlantic Monthly published five of his
poems in one year, and a trip to New England in
1860 brought him into personal contact with
Lowell, Fields, Emerson, Holmes, and Haw-
thorne, the high society in which his maturity
was destined to rejoice.

A life of Lincoln which he compiled in the
summer of 1860 from supplied materials found
a market in the West, and the grateful President
named the author for the consulate in Venice.
The Confederate privateers whose maneuvers
in that seaport Howells was expected to outwit
forbore to show themselves, and he devoted four
years (1861-65) to observations of the people—
embodied in the agreeable and valuable Venetian
Life (1866)—and to a study of the language and
literature which later found in Modern Italian
Poets (1887) a slender but discriminating out-
let. He preferred the modern and human Venice
to the ancient and spectacular city, and the novels
he was soon to write suggest that the least Vene-
tian thing about the place—the foreign visitor—
was the thing that struck his imagination most
distinctly. There is nothing really anomalous
in the fact that in Venice, where fact itself is
supposedly a convert to romance, the hitherto
vaguely poetic young American found his mind
taking, almost imperceptibly, "the course of crit-
ical observance of books and men in their actual-
ity." Marriage and the birth of his first child
enriched the spot with indestructible associations.
On Dec. 24,1862, he was married to Elinor Ger-
trude Mead of Brattleboro, Vt, a woman whom
he had loved in Columbus, and in whom, through-
out a union of forty-seven years, he found a high
literary conscience that seconded and fortified
his own,

Returning to America in 1865, Howells faced
briefly and for the only time in his life the strin-
gencies of the baffled seeker for the imperatively
needed job. The ordeal ended with his appoint-
ment to the staff of the New York Nation under
E. L. Godkin, and his delight in this work im-

Howells

parted a tinge of sacrifice to his acceptance a
few months later of the sub-editorship of the
Atlantic Monthly under James T. Fields, the
Boston publisher, at a salary of fifty dollars a
week. His connection with this periodical, then
still in the first vigor of its youth and the first
warmth of its ideals, lasted fifteen years (1866-
81) ; in July 1871 he became editor-in-chief. In
Cambridge, where he dwelt for years, he found
himself part of a social life "so refined, so intel-
ligent, so gracefully simple" that he doubted if
the world could show its equal, and Lowell, his
earliest and wannest friend, felicitated him on
the completeness of his assimilation of all the
good to be derived from that society. There was,
indeed, between that society and Howells, an or-
ganic kinship: both stood for the exquisite on a
basis of the primitively wholesome; only in Cam-
bridge the wholesome had put on the unobtru-
siveness of age, and in Howells the exquisite
had not lost the sheen of novelty. He had the
zeal of the convert, the convert to his own nat-
ural affinities, and perhaps neither history nor
geography can show a Boston so Bostonian as
the city which bears that name in his otherwise
unswervingly veracious novels. The other man
in him, the hardworking, firm-fibered Westerner,
survived, and proved the energy of its survival
by the formation of a lifelong friendship with
Mark Twain. This double nature is manifest in
the group of novels written between 1871 and
1881, the beginnings of his memorable work in
fiction.

The group type is clearest in five short works,
Their Wedding Journey (1872), virtually a
travel-sketch, A Chance Acquaintance (1873), A
Foregone Conclusion (1875), The Lady of the
Aroostook (1879), A Fearful Responsibility
(1881). Looser pendants to the group are "Pri-
vate Theatricals" (Atlantic, November 1875-
May 1876; issued in book form as Mrs. Farrett,
1921), The Undiscovered Country (1880), and
Dr. Breen's Practice (1881). Howells had
known America and Europe, the West and the
East; the contacts of sophistication and ingenu-
ousness in both regions had amused his fancy,
and this amusement—with the very real sympa-
thy which it embosomed—took form in tales that
were comedies of manners: more specifically, of
the incongruities of manners. Howells' wit had
shafts, as his sympathy had balm, for both sides
in these encounters of disparities. The style of
these tales is urbane, the art is mature, the psy-
chology subtle, and the humor as inescapable as
it is unassuming. They are among the best speci-
mens in English fiction of the playfulness that
carries refinement into pungency, of the laugh

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