LITMIR.BIZ

Mr. Howells' father, who was a Welshman, moved to a property on the Little Miami River in southern Ohio to take charge of a sawmill and gristmill and superintend their transformation into paper-mills. Mr. Howells describes a year of this life in a half-settled country, and tells how perfectly happy he was in his home-life and how intensely he suffered from homesickness when obliged to leave his mother to help earn money for a large family. Somehow or other, when Mr. Howells writes ff his boyhood, there is always a tinge of sadness about him. With his love for the comrades of his youth there breathe, as it were, notes of sorrow because they are no longer of the earth. Mr. Howells's emotional instincts in his younger days may not have been at the surface, but were certainly deep in his heart. Nothing he ever wrote can be more tender than the reminiscences of this year spent in a log cabin somewhere in Ohio.

Подробнее

There is rare fun and freshness in Mr. W. D. Howells's. 'Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories', a little volume charming for New Year or Thanksgiving. It is redolent, indeed, of all these, especially of November sweets, when turkey and cranberry sauce crown the board and pumpkin-pies smile saucily from its end. Mr. Howells shows in these tales an unexpected tenderness lurking in a corner of his capacious heart –a tenderness for children under a veil of humor that is particularly attractive and also a grotesque yet merry fancy which cannot fail to delight them. What a delightful world is the child's world and how few there be that enter it! Mr. Howells ' touch is so light, so playful, so understanding, that it is a shame not to tickle childhood with it as this book does. The art of being-grand-père is as rare as the true moonstone. We won't spoil the feast by describing the bill-of fare, but happy infant that gets 'Christmas Every Day' like this.

Подробнее

Mr. Howells has in the present volume given his writings the form of a series of historical stories, in which his native State is described and pictured from as remote a period as the geologic ice age. The slow-moving glaciers in the distant past covered most of the present State of Ohio. They rounded off the corners of her hills, smoothed the contour of her valleys, left glacial scratches on her rocks, and transported boulders from remote points where they had an origin and left them on the various glacial moraines. After the ice age came a strange and mysterious people who left traces of their one-time existence in the shape of curious and wonder-inspiring mounds and other earthworks of which Ohio has perhaps more than any other State. The remains of the ice age and the mound builders compete in interest with any fairy tale for young readers.

Подробнее

'Stops of Various Quills' is a remarkable book, concerning which there will probably be considerable difference of opinion among readers of current verse, though there ought to be none, and will be none among those who are capable of looking beyond and below mere poetic technique into the thing which is poetry itself – the thought which is in the poet's mind, the feeling which is in his heart, and which, whether he has captured it in his verse, or whether it has evaded him, is individual, vital, inevitable. Mr. Howells has given us here a remarkable book, as we have said, and one which we would select as an infallible touchstone of the poetic knowledge or ignorance of its readers. If they are enamored of perfect technique, it may not please them ; but if they know what poetry is, apart from its technique, they will be profoundly touched by it and will return to it again and again.

Подробнее

The sort of autobiography of which 'My Literary Passions' is an example is always interesting. Mr. Howells is by no means the first to write upon the theme of «Books Which Have Influenced Me», but we do not just now think of anyone before him who has made it the subject of a whole volume. Mr. Howells has had many «literary passions»– fifty, or thereabouts, to reckon only from the chapter headings—and in not a few cases it is obvious that he has loved not wisely, but too well. What we particularly like about the book, aside from the unfailing charm of its manner, is the frankly subjective character of the record. Mr. Howells has elsewhere sinned not a little in attempting to pass off his personal likes and dislikes as objective criticism, but in the present case what he writes is just what it pretends to be – a consecutive account of the books that came into his hands during his impressionable early years, and of the feelings with which he read them. There is an occasional touch of Philistinism, as in the plea more than once made for bowdlerizing the English classics in general, or of a lack of appreciation which is simply amazing, as in this opinion: "I do not think I should have lost much if I had never read 'Pericles' and 'Winter's Tale.' " In the present work Mr. Howells is concerned with the books that he read, and not with those that he wrote, but he does have a word to say of his own first volume, and it is to this amusing effect: «The 'Poems of Two Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came back upon the publisher's hands.»

Подробнее

Mr. Howells has this time chosen a subject for illustration which affords plenty of ground for serious thinking. He has written a story of defalcation; the too familiar story of the treasurer of a rich corporation who, himself rich, is greedy for more money; who first uses the funds at his disposal for personal ends; pays them back; uses them again and cannot pay them back; falsifies the books and so gains time to steal more; is at last found out, and b ing given three days to make restitution, finds himself called upon to choose between suicide, surrender, or flight to Canada. It cannot be said that there is anything new in the facts of the defalcation; but these defalcations are monotonously alike. The man who becomes a thief in this way seldom begins with a deliberate purpose to steal. As such a criminal must, by the hypothesis, be a weak man, his first effort is to gloss the character of his actions to himself. He is only borrowing rather irregularly, he tries to think; and he holds to an intention to restore the embezzled funds, which by a hocus-pocus method of word-juggling common to such characters assumes in his mind the aspect of redeeming honesty. When the dream of restoration has been dissipated, as it always is, the thief does not any the more face the truth or admit that he is what he is. In falsifying the books he persuades himself that he is only giving himself further chance of retrieval, and so he goes on till the catastrophe occurs. Now it is evident that a study of such a criminal's mind must be full of interest, and Mr. Howells has made a masterly analysis.

Подробнее

'A Little Swiss Sojourn' was passed in the village of Villeneuve in the canton of Vaud, where a comfortable pension, vineyards galore, a gothic chapel, the placid lake, the snow-covered Alps, an occasional château (to let, furnished, for $500 a year) lent charm, dignity and ample opportunity for reminiscence to the visit of three months of which this narrative records the impressions. It is a pretty picture of an alien civilization, having certain quaint analogies with our own hard-favored rural New England, which Mr. Howells sets forth with characteristic appreciation.

Подробнее

In 'A Hazard of New Fortunes' Mr. Howells took for his hero the editor of a New York magazine. In 'The World of Chance' the leading character is a young journalist of Midland, a town indefinitely located a day's journey west of New York City. He goes to the metropolis with the manuscript of his first novel, «A Modern Romeo,» in his pocket. The adventures of this manuscript, making its way from publisher to publisher, and finally returning to the first one, who had wished to publish it despite the adverse opinions expressed by all his «readers,» are of extreme interest. The book is finally issued by Mr. Brandreth, of the Chapley firm, as an almost desperate attempt to retrieve the fortunes of the house. In the two critical points for the author – the acceptance of his manuscript and the first important review of it – chance here plays the leading part. The leading characters of the book comment repeatedly on the apparent importance of mere luck in such matters. But the insistence of the book is upon the extremely large part which apparent luck, and luck only, plays in the literary world. It can hardly be said, however, by anyone who is well acquainted with these matters from the standpoint of the publisher or the author of experience, that Mr. Howells has greatly exaggerated the element of fortune in the case of authors who have their reputation to make. What it is that makes a book sell ; why, when it has reached a certain large sale, it stops just where it does; and will sell no longer ; and why the shrewdest publishers are again and again mistaken in their opinions, favorable or adverse to a manuscript – all these things are mysterious indeed. Mr. Howells does not write as a practical moralist but there is a very large audience waiting for 'The World of Chance', consisting of would- be authors, who will probably learn the force of some very hard and disagreeable facts in the matter of publishing, and take home the moral to themselves with much more thoroughness from a novel like this than from volumes of advice by publishers or authors of experience The socialistic element which has been so prominent in Mr. Howells' works before is seen here in the Hughes family – the four members of which offer as many careful studies in character of a typical reformer's family. Mr. Howells appears to have turned at length from the discipleship of Tolstoy, Bellamy and other social reformers. 'The World of Chance' is in many ways one of the most thoroughly interesting of Mr. Howells' novels, as well as one of the best written.

Подробнее

In 'Criticism and Fiction' Mr. Howells gives his ideas of the proper functions of critics, and the lines along which he may be supposed to have written his novels . He considers criticism an entirely contemplative branch of literature; finding in it, seemingly, no creative potentialities . The critic, he thinks, should first consider what the author has tried to do, then examine how he has done it . As to whether or not the thing was worth doing that concerns the author, not the critic. The critic need not say whether the book is good or bad; for, in the first place, it is none of his business; in the second, he may judge from a wrong point of view. Above all, he must sign his criticisms; this is his first and greatest duty. Like most realistic sermons the part of the book which deals with fiction is extremely plausible. So plausible, indeed, and inevitable, that one wonders why books that are written in accordance with such recognized theories should be so unlike many phases of life; why, in short, realism should seem such an ideal. Mr. Howells has a very high conception of the power of the novel. It influences men's lives and morals more than most people would imagine. Therefore, the novelist should consider that he holds his power in trust. He should preach by describing things as they are, rather than as they should be. Instead of a delusive New Jerusalem he should paint the squalor and vice of the old one. The book is a good exponent of the realistic point of view. It is always clear, frequently brilliant, and sometimes eloquent. Sometimes a more than usually colloquial passage suggests that Mr. Howells does not take himself quite seriously. An expression like «caught onto,» for instance, rather mars the impression of high seriousness. The book, however, can hardly fail to confirm devotees of realism in their faith even such as have been weakened by stories of Zola sitting amid his bourgeois domesticity, imagining what bad men do. The doubters may still doubt – not so much that they scorn the theory, but that they disbelieve in the practice.

Подробнее

Mr. Howells' latest novel deserves and will receive wide reading. It deals with a problem which had found its way into American social life of his time: «How will a cultivated and beautiful woman feel if she discovers that she has a tinge of negro blood in her veins? How will other people, particularly her lover, feel and act?» Mr. Howells works out the problem with skill, on what seem to us sound lines of reasoning. 'An Imperative Duty' is so mature a work, and so good an example of the author's method, that it invites the closest scrutiny. It is written with his usual acuteness and cleverness, but with even more than his ordinary amount of self-consciousness. He is continually trying to say clever things, and he seems here a kind of intellectual conventionalist ; we feel that he would commit a minor crime rather than fail in the proper tone. As one reads he plants his feet as circumspectly as in threading his way in a crowded parlor where trains abound. One is exhausted in the effort to keep up to the author's intensely self-conscious key. It is too much like the brilliant persiflage of a dinner-party when everybody means more than he says and challenges his listeners to see the target at which he is really aiming. The glow and «fling» of high creative work are thus rendered impossible to the author, and the reader falls into a hyper-critical state of mind. Mr. Howells is at his best when describing distinctive American types. The cultivated Frenchman and the cultivated American are much more alike than are the Frenchman and the American on lower levels; and when a writer selects his characters from Beacon Street and the «Cours la Reine» he has less opportunity to be picturesque than when he deals with Hanover Street and the «Quartier Latin.» Mr. Howells is an artist of the first order like Henry James. He works by rule, and the result is the product of high talent.

Подробнее