progressive degradation; a descent which reaches bottom at last,
when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the
faith-cure and fortune-telling sort.
What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy
street! I don’t think I was ever in a street before when quite
so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred
Madam to Mrs. on their door-plates. And the poor old place has
such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every
house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the
chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on–so to
speak. I don’t know what’s the reason, but these material tokens
of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn’t
dreadfuler than a haggard old house, that’s once been a home, in
a street like this.
Mr. Howells’s pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate
photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them, and
sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say.
As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I
would try, if I had the words that might approximately reach up
to its high place. I do not think any one else can play with
humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as
he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near
making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and
he was not aware that they were at it. For they are unobtrusive,
and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor
which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh
of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no
more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the
blood.
There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in
Mr. Howells’s books. That is his “stage directions”–those
artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human
naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help the
reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which
might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the bare words
of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they
elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time
and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing
and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and
vexed and wish he hadn’t said it all. Other authors’ directions
are brief enough, but it is seldom that the brevity contains
either wit or information. Writers of this school go in rags, in
the matter of state directions; the majority of them having
nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting
into tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to the
bone. They say:
“. . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar.”
(This explains nothing; it only wastes space.)
“. . . responded Richard, with a laugh.” (There was nothing
to laugh about; there never is. The writer puts it in from
habit–automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or
he would see that there is nothing to laugh at; often, when a
remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to
deceive the reader by enlarging the stage direction and making
Richard break into “frenzies of uncontrollable laughter.” This
makes the reader sad.)
“. . . murmured Gladys, blushing.” (This poor old shop-worn
blush is a tiresome thing. We get so we would rather Gladys
would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again.
She is always doing it, and usually irrelevantly. Whenever it is
her turn to murmur she hangs out her blush; it is the only thing
she’s got. In a little while we hate her, just as we do
Richard.)
“. . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.” (This kind
keep a book damp all the time. They can’t say a thing without
crying. They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they
have something to cry ABOUT they have gone dry; they sob, and