enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The
private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces
with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my
base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man
out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at
forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is
charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I
don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can point him to a
case which proves his rule. Proves it by being an exception to
it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells.
I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare
it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and
I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment. For
forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and
astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great
qualities–clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced
and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing–he is, in my
belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. SUSTAINED.
I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others
who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only
by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of
veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s moon sails
cloudless skies all night and all the nights.
In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior,
I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that
elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have
to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he
has better luck. To me, the others are miners working with the
gold-pan–of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;
whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle–no
grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him. A powerful
agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much
traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE
right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those
intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting
effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt:
it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and
tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that
creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and
vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its
supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable
literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be
likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word
would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. It doesn’t
rain when Howells is at work.
And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his
speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its
architectural felicities of construction, its graces of
expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?
Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good order in the
beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as
extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear
and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I
think his English of today–his perfect English, I wish to say —
can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time
and not be afraid.
I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the
reader to examine this passage from it which I append. I do not
mean examine it in a bird’s-eye way; I mean search it, study it.
And, of course, read it aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my
conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature