LITMIR.BIZ

Boston had been busied with psychical research for some years, and Prof. William James has had a good deal to say about Mrs. Piper, so that it is not surprising after all to find Mr. W. D. Howells toying with the supernatural in his book 'Questionable Shapes.' Realists need not be startled – Mr. Howells is true to his colors and only takes his ghosts up with the tongs to hold them off as far as possible. His interest lies in the effect the ghost stories have on the bystanders, not in the ghosts themselves, in fact he tells only one ghost story, and that, one that may be explained away, in the three tales that make up the book. The first, 'His Apparition', is written in the style of the late Frank Stockton, though with little of Mr. Stockton's humor. It is a study, we should say, in the etiquette of visions, suggesting how and when and where he who sees an apparition should tell or should abstain from telling about it. Mr. Howells takes occasion, by the way, to draw a caustic picture of one of his very earnest young women. The second story, 'The Angel of the Lord', we can only take as a parody on Mr. Henry James. The talk drags along as inconsequentially and irrelevantly as Mr. James's at his worst. In the last tale in the book, 'Though One Rose from the Dead', Mr. Howells has a really fine story, and we wish he had let it run away with him as he repeatedly seems tempted to do. His irritating psychologist keeps interfering, however, and explaining away, and a good ghost story is well-nigh spoiled in consequence.

Подробнее

Mr. Howells is at his best in this novel. There is in it the same perfection of finish, the same absolute sureness of technique, the same realism (to use an overworked word, but here used in its true sense, not meaning either nastiness or stupidity) which one is always sure to find in his work. But there is something more in this book than in some of his others – more strength, more interest, and a bigger, and successful, attempt to show the more emotional and more vital side of life. The plot is almost precisely that of Ibsen's «Ghosts,» with the very great difference, however, that the young man turns out well, and the book ends happily, instead of in the sickening horror of the Ibsen play. Langbrith senior, dead before the story opens, had been a vicious and criminal man in all respects; his widow had allowed their son to come to manhood as a hero-worshipper of his father, knowing that it was wrong, but never having the courage to tell him the true state of affairs. The son is in love with, and is loved by, the daughter of the man whom his father has most wronged. In a quarrel with his uncle the young man is told what his father really was. This terrible blow overturns his whole attitude toward life. He wishes to sacrifice everyone by confession to the world, but is wisely and sanely persuaded that it is best to bear his burden as it is, till the fitting, not Quixotic, time for disclosure arrives. In his trouble, all the characters show their sweetness and strength in helping him to bear the burden. So meagre an outline of the story necessarily means little ; but imagine this plot filled in with every delicacy and sweetness, with fine character-drawing, with real humanity, and with that beautiful and tolerant point of view of life which has come to Mr. Howells in his old age, and you can easily see how fine a novel is 'The Son of Royal Langbrith', how well worth reading it is by everyone who cares for the best in fiction.

Подробнее

The numerous class of novel readers who for a lifetime have wandered through the fields of fiction, not premeditatedly seeking mental or moral improvement, but with a mind chiefly on «pleasure bent,» have a treat in store in 'Heroines of Fiction.' Mr. Howells does not write of his own heroines of fiction – it is the creations of the English and American novelists of times long ago who have filled an imaginative world with a galaxy of feminine loveliness and charm that he considers. The dear old friends of fiction who have become as real to us, in name and appearance, as if we and they had lived side by side in the passing years. Mr. Howells presents them to us again, recalling many endearing traits and captivating graces—looking at them also from the literary standpoint and their special relation to the story to which they belong. Mr. Howells has his favorites among novel writers, and he frankly avows his likings. Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James he places on a high pedestal far above their contemporaries. Second only to these is the place he awards to Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Beginning with Richardson's «Clarissa Harlowe,» he gives us loving and graceful sketches often set in a dramatic scene from the novel under discussion of the heroines of Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Reade, and many others.

Подробнее

The five stories contained in this volume are «A Pair of Patient Lovers», «The Pursuit of the Piano», «A Difficult Case»," The Magic of a Voice" and «A Circle in the Water». These are stories of the sort that only Mr. Howells knows how to write.

Подробнее

The story of Mr. W. D. Howells's 'Their Silver Wedding Journey' is 'Their Wedding Journey' over again, after an interval of twenty-five years; and a clever and entertaining recital of familiarities it is. It is like looking in the glass to read such a tale, and there are all the sights and sounds of the steamer, too, of the Continent, and of the amiable and happy go-betweens of a lover husband and his wife. Mr. Howells beats his gold out pretty thin, but it is gold all the same; or, to change the figure, the old shapes and colors are here again, but the kaleidoscope has had a shake and the combination is fresh. Particularly will they enjoy the result who are about to take the European tour, or lately have taken it, or never can hope to take it except through the eyes of others, and whose recollections or expectations or imaginations are blessed with a little touch of romance and sentiment.

Подробнее

The heroine of the 'Ragged Lady' is a New England type of young girl – strong, pure, uneducated, loyal, proud; a girl whose head always governs her heart, and whose moral sense permits no confusion in distinguishing right from wrong. She sees and acts, and by her quickness of apprehension causes confusion in the minds of those who differ with her. Into the world, under the care, or rather at the whim, of a vulgar, rich, selfish old woman, this little New England girl, who had never seen a city, goes. Her new life begins, but is never wholly separated from the days of semi-service in a summer hotel. The people of that summer drift across her life in the moments of her greatest social success, which her own charm and unconsciousness make. The little country girl learns worldly wisdom and social arts to meet that world, and protects the white light of truth lighted by a New England ancestor. The 'Ragged Lady' presents average life. There are neither great loves nor hates, nor temptations nor tragedies, save those of temperament. Perhaps Mr. Howells would claim that these are life's real tragedies. This novel, with its definiteness of touch, its sense of values, its truth to life, is one of the most artistic of Mr. Howells's books

Подробнее

'An Open-Eyed Conspiracy' is an extremely delightful book, and delightful in a way in which many American writers have long striven, and are still striving to attract, or distract, the attention of their readers, but in which Howells alone can be said to have attained distinction. He represents an element in the character of his countrymen, literary and otherwise, which may be roughly described as a sleepless sense of humor, which expends itself in some minds in large exaggerations of thought and speech, in others in the invention of tumultuous incidents and the horseplay of practical jokes, and in others in the exploitation of dialects, Eastern, Western, Southern, which never obtained anywhere, the vagaries and absurdities of bad grammar and worse spelling. Mr. Howells is a humorist of a higher kind —of the highest kind, we venture to think— not so much, perhaps, because his intellectual gifts are more abundant than theirs as because he has a clearer idea of their legitimate value and of the uses to which they should be put, because he is a student of humorous literature in its entirety and its specialties, and, more than all, a thoughtful, skillful master of the literary art. With the exception of Washington Irving, he is the only American man of letters of a humorous kind whom it is always a pleasure to read for the sake of his literature, which fulfils all the conditions and violates none of the minor morals of good writing; it is easy and exact, elegant and felicitous, individual and scholarly, and with a certain unpremeditated charm which defies analysis. Primarily a humorist, he is more than a humorist in his novels, and more than a humorist, pure and simple, in his lesser studies of American life and manners, of which 'An Open-Eyed Conspiracy' is a fine example. He calls it 'An Idyll of Saratoga', a sub-title which suggests rather than describes the class of productions that it illustrates. It is more than an idyll, as the phrase is commonly understood, so much more, and so different in some respects, that it might not be amiss to call it a comedy instead. It is jeweled with the liveliness of movement and the lightness of truth which is the life of comedy. The characters are sketched rather than drawn, hinted rather than painted; the situations are amusing, and not too provocative of doubt as to their ending, and here and there are little touches of satiric fun, unexpected gleams of wit, which add a sparkle to the freshness and gayety of the whole. No one who has seen, even casually and without reflection, the kind of hotel life which forms the background of this pretty summer play can fail to perceive the fidelity with which Mr. Howells has transferred its spirit to his pages; the closeness of his observation and his enjoyment of it for its own sake. Like the angler of whom Walton tells us, he handles his worms as if he loved them. A kindly, gentle nature and a satisfying writer, Howells is at his best in this 'Open-Eyed Conspiracy.'

Подробнее

In 'The Landlord at Lion's Head' Mr. Howells has returned to the New England which he knows so well. Indeed, his absolute intimacy with the life there, his vivid power of reproducing it, contradicts Mr. Henry James' opinion that the literary artist should write only of the impressions received in childhood and early youth. When Mr. Howells became familiar with New England he was a man of nearly thirty. But he had sprung from New England stock, and be fitted into the life of Boston as if he had always belonged to it. Perhaps his early years in Ohio enabled him to see New England with a clearer vision than he could have turned upon if it had always been before his eyes. At any rate, in writing of New England life, he invariably gives the impression of having an absolute understanding of it, if not always an absolute sympathy with it. In the opening chapters of this novel the understanding is plainly there, together with a most beautiful and tender sympathy, translating the wild grandeur of the New England mountains into the fine simplicity of prose that Mr. Howells can make so effective and so convincing. In their way, Mr. Howells has done nothing finer than those chapters; they remind one of the beautiful picture of the Harvard Class Day which he has given in «April Hopes.» The rustic figures introduced belong to the landscape, are, in a sense, a part of it. With swift, sure strokes they are outlined, and their identity is at once established. The first presentation of the hero, Jefferson Durgin, as a young bully delighting in the torture of a little girl, strikes the keynote of the character. Indeed, so accurate and so subtle are all the touches in these chapters that the attention of the reader is absorbed in spite of the slow movement of the narrative. It is plain from the beginning that Mr. Howells is lingering fondly over the life of his people and that in his mind the story is of minor importance.

Подробнее

Mr. Howells's 'A Traveler from Altruria' recounts only his social apostle's acts and experiences at a summer hotel in a mountain village of New England, and includes none of the epistles upon the World's Fair and the life of New York that his chronicler has recently sent to him through a magazine. The author calls the book a romance, but its form is a thinly disguised and somewhat acrid tract for the times, marked in the narrative passages by the colloquialisms that now please Mr. Howells. Designedly unindividual, the village, the hotel and some of their characters are broadly typical of their kind. Other characters are only voices. From a remarkably observant banker, a retired manufacturer, a lawyer, a clergyman, a dry-as-dust professor of economics, an «average» woman, the wife of a prosperous broker, and from the romancer himself – all guests at the hotel— the Altrurian, a skillful questioner, hears much of the darker side of our industrial and social order. Through a mother and son of the soil at a neighboring farm, he acquaints himself with our agrarian discontent. Then, by general desire, he, in turn, becomes pedagogue, and, in a sort of a lecture in a grove, explains rather than pictures his own Altruria – an island common wealth that enjoys every virtue and delight of every Utopia from Plato down to Bellamy, where all men – he tells not how – have become good and pure, unselfish, unambitious, passionless.

Подробнее

Mr. Howells has always had a pretty taste in titles, and 'The Coast of Bohemia', by its name alone, brings pleasurable anticipations. Nor are they doomed to disappointment in this instance, for the story is pleasing in all its aspects. The Bohemia upon whose coasts it bids us linger is the somewhat sophisticated and denationalized Bohemia of the New York art schools and studios ; the flavor of its life is very different from that of the enchanted region which Murger opened for us, but its ways are engaging if decorous, and its denizens are very much alive while not too much in earnest. We do not discover among them any of the queer creatures that we have rather learned to expect in a novel by Mr. Howells – for once those creatures with their fads seem to have been shelved – but find merely a little group of humanly interesting men and women, leading lives rational in the main, and brought into relations which elicit the author's best powers of serious analysis, relieved by touches of his dry and delightful humor. The manner is still that of real ism, but a realism not too exclusive of the methods of art, and capable of giving the name of Charmian to one of the characters, no slight concession to the enemy. Moreover, the story is essentially a love-story, and it comes to the proper conclusion of love-stories, although there is one period of suspense when, knowing the perverse capabilities of the writer, the reader wonders if it really is going to end anywhere. It is well that there should be searchings of soul, but it is not well that they should rob stories – as Mr. Howells sometimes permits them to – of their legitimate endings.

Подробнее