Literary Friends And Acquaintance
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Mr. William Dean Howells has written many books of several kinds which have entertained a great many people of all kinds, but no single book of any kind in which his various talents appear to such advantage to themselves and enjoyment of their readers as in his 'Literary Friends and Acquaintance', which, briefly described as a personal retrospect of American authorship, is in reality a series of portraits and miniatures of American men, women and, figuratively, in some cases, children of the pen, a gallery of literary likenesses, drawn from life, with a skillful but kindly pencil, and in the light that lingers like a halo around their lessening memories. Mr. Howells divides his retrospects into eight parts, and being personal they are in a sense chronological – successive records of his autorial career, the steps of his journeys into the domain of authorship, and his impressions of certain of their inhabitants, of their individualities – their work, or play, or whatever else seemed to distinguish them at the moment from the profane or vulgar, who did not write for fame, or scribble for bread. The headings of these parts, or chapters, are indications of these journeys, which were eastward, Mr. Howells' course of empire reversing that of Bishop Berkeley, which took its way westward, the first being entitled '"My First Visit to New England," the second «First Impressions of Literary New York,» the third and fourth «Roundabout to Boston» and «Literary Boston as I Knew It,» and so on through separate personal chapters devoted to Holmes, Longfellow and Lowell, the last being a gathering-in of Mr. Howells' «Cambridge Neighbors.»
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Literary Friends And Acquaintance
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
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The kind old ship’s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities, which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia, where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to the tree that stood
“Auf brennender Felsenwand.”
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