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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "A Modern Instance," William Dean Howells crafts a compelling narrative that captures the complexities of marriage and societal expectations in post-Civil War America. Set against the backdrop of an evolving social landscape, Howells employs a realist literary style, characterized by its intricate character development and a keen observation of everyday life. The protagonist, George H. Trumbull, embodies the struggles of moral integrity amidst a changing moral code, revealing the tensions between personal desire and social obligation in a rapidly modernizing society. Through deft dialogue and nuanced portrayals, Howells invites readers to interrogate the notion of fidelity and the intricacies of romantic relationships in contemporary American life. William Dean Howells, often heralded as the "Dean of American Letters," was a pivotal figure in American realism. His experiences as a literary critic, editor, and social commentator informed his understanding of the cultural shifts of his time, particularly regarding marriage and gender dynamics. Howells' own views on the importance of moral complexity and social realism are palpable in this novel, positioning him as a reflective voice of his era. This novel is highly recommended for readers interested in the evolution of American literature and societal norms. Howells' acute insights into the human condition make "A Modern Instance" a significant work that remains relevant to contemporary discussions about relationships and societal roles, providing both intellectual engagement and emotional resonance. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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A Modern Instance
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a nation learning to prize self-made success, a marriage becomes the testing ground where personal ambition collides with moral responsibility.
A Modern Instance, by William Dean Howells, stands as a landmark of American realism because it treats ordinary life with uncommon seriousness. Rather than relying on sensational devices, the novel examines how public institutions and private desires shape one another. Its enduring power comes from the way it transforms a familiar subject—courtship, marriage, and the pressures that follow—into a searching inquiry into character, ethics, and social change. The book’s clarity of observation, restraint of tone, and moral intelligence helped define a literary method that would influence American fiction well beyond the nineteenth century.
Published in 1882, the novel belongs to the post–Civil War period often called the Gilded Age, when cities expanded, newspapers multiplied, and debates about marriage and divorce entered everyday conversation. Americans were negotiating new forms of work, mobility, and publicity, and the boundaries between private life and the marketplace were increasingly porous. Howells situates his characters in this unsettled world, letting economic opportunities, social etiquette, and legal standards press upon them. The setting is not merely backdrop; it is the system of forces within which personal choices take on consequence. The result is a study of modernity at eye level.
William Dean Howells, a leading practitioner and advocate of American realism, wrote the novel after establishing himself as a critic, editor, and novelist. As a prominent voice in the literary culture of his day, including service as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he argued that fiction should present life as it is actually lived. A Modern Instance puts that credo into practice. It avoids caricature and moralizing, trusting observation and patient analysis. The book’s appearance solidified Howells’s reputation as an artist committed to representing the tangled relations among desire, conscience, and the social structures that enable—and limit—both.
At its center is the story of a charismatic young reporter and a devoted young woman from a small New England community who fall quickly in love and marry. Their union carries them from the intimacy of provincial life into the busier, more competitive atmosphere of a growing American city, where work, reputation, and money exert new pressures. Each partner brings distinct expectations to the household, and each must navigate the hard difference between the romance of beginning and the responsibilities that follow. Without announcing heroes or villains, the novel traces how temperament and circumstance strain a fragile pact.
Howells builds his dramatic interest not on secrecy or shock but on the accumulation of recognizable moments—conversations that misfire, compromises that become habits, favors that cost more than they first appear to cost. He is equally attentive to the influence of family, neighbors, and professional acquaintances, and to the quiet authority of custom. By showing how communities observe, judge, and sometimes enable the couple, the book asks whether marriage is a purely private covenant or also a social arrangement. The answer emerges not as doctrine but as a living pattern visible in scenes of ordinary decision and consequence.
The novel’s engagement with the press is especially striking. The reporter’s craft offers mobility and excitement but also invites shortcuts, self-advertisement, and a restless chase for novelty. Newsrooms, deadlines, and the marketplace of attention become moral theaters, testing whether talent can coexist with steadiness and care. Howells neither condemns nor glamorizes journalism; instead he reveals the temptations embedded in modern media and the ways publicity can distort both work and love. In tracing those pressures, the book anticipates later American fiction that scrutinizes careers built in public view.
Howells’s art lies in his unshowy precision. He prefers clear prose, carefully weighted scenes, and dialogue that captures the cadence of conversation. His narrative voice is steady and humane, unwilling to simplify complexity into slogans. The realism here is ethical as well as descriptive: it insists that motives are mixed, that virtues may conflict, and that consequences often exceed intention. Readers encounter not a program but a sensibility—one that trusts patient observation over verdicts and understands that sympathy, while not a solution, is a rigorous form of knowledge.
A Modern Instance holds classic status in part because it was among the first American novels to place the problem of divorce at its center, treating it as a social and moral question rather than a mere plot device. By addressing changing laws and public attitudes, Howells broadened the field of subjects available to serious fiction in the United States. The book demonstrated that domestic life could bear the weight of national debates, and that the modern American novel could be both socially attentive and artistically disciplined without turning didactic.
The novel’s influence radiates through the tradition of American realism. Alongside contemporaries who redirected attention from romance to everyday life, Howells helped establish a standard of plausibility and psychological subtlety that later writers extended. Authors interested in the interplay of marriage, money, and social standing, as well as those drawn to the ethics of professional ambition, found in his work a method and a mandate. The emphasis on recognizable settings, moral nuance, and social consequence can be traced in fiction that explores families, cities, and institutions with similar steadiness.
To approach the book today is to encounter not a museum piece but a living argument about how people make choices under pressure. The texture of its scenes—boardinghouses and parlors, editorial rooms and sidewalks—invites readers to notice how small habits accumulate into life courses. The central relationship is presented with candor and fairness, and the surrounding society is shown as a web of expectations that both sustains and constrains. Because the novel resists easy apportioning of blame, it compels reflection on responsibility, kindness, and the often-unseen costs of success.
The questions that animate A Modern Instance remain urgent: How do work and public reputation reshape private promises? What can the law do—and not do—for intimate life? How does a culture built on competition support, or unsettle, fidelity and care? In answering through scenes rather than slogans, the novel earns its place in the American Classics Series. It speaks to readers navigating media-saturated careers, shifting gender expectations, and evolving legal frameworks. Its lasting appeal lies in a sober confidence that clear seeing and humane judgment still matter in modern life.
Synopsis
William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance, first published in 1882, presents a realist study of marriage and social change in post–Civil War America. The narrative begins in a small New England community where local custom, family authority, and personal temperament shape the prospects of two young people. From the outset, the novel signals a clash between romantic expectation and practical life. Howells situates private feeling within public norms, setting up a drama that turns on character rather than melodrama. The early chapters establish the careful, observational tone that marks the book’s method: moral problems emerge from ordinary decisions, and consequences arise from plausible, everyday pressures.
Marcia Gaylord is portrayed as ardent and absolute in her attachments, while Bartley Hubbard—charming, quick-witted, and ambitious—seeks a wider field for his talents. Their courtship unfolds amid parental concern and community scrutiny, especially from Marcia’s father, Squire Gaylord, a shrewd country lawyer. The swift momentum toward marriage promises fulfillment yet hints at latent incompatibilities, as differing expectations are glossed over by urgency and desire. Howells observes how affection, pride, and social appearance intertwine, showing the couple’s union as both a personal choice and a public contract, already marked by the tension between independence and obligation.
The couple soon exchanges the quiet routines of their hometown for the currents of city life, where Bartley’s vocation in journalism offers opportunity and risk. Howells’s realism dwells on practical detail: boarding houses, offices, social calls, and the unremitting cadence of deadlines. The city, often associated with progress, also amplifies insecurity and scrutiny. Marcia endeavors to secure a home that matches her intensity of feeling, while Bartley’s career demands mobility and sociability. In this environment, ideals of romantic unity begin to strain under money concerns, professional exigencies, and the unacknowledged limits of each partner’s capacity to accommodate the other.
Bartley’s resourcefulness brings quick acquaintances and invitations, but the same qualities feed restlessness and questionable judgment. He leans into the spectacle and competition of the press, where success can depend on charm, improvisation, and a flexible regard for principle. Marcia’s devotion, shadowed by jealousy and fear of betrayal, narrows into vigilance that often misfires. The pair’s misunderstandings, initially small and negotiable, accumulate into habitual mistrust. Howells charts how wounded pride and self-justification become patterns, so that practical disputes blur into moral ones. The marriage becomes a proving ground for character, with each testing the other’s endurance and resolve.
A new presence in their orbit, Ben Halleck, epitomizes conscientious self-scrutiny. Educated and reflective, he befriends the couple while confronting his own standards of duty and sympathy. Halleck’s inward debates, rooted in religious and ethical formation, illuminate the moral grammar of the novel’s world. Through him and other observers, Howells widens the perspective from private grievance to social conscience, contrasting personal desire with civic ideals of restraint and charity. The Boston milieu—clubs, parlors, and reform-minded conversation—offers a theater where opinions about marriage, gender, class, and reputation circulate, influencing choices without dictating them.
Material pressures sharpen the fault lines. Irregular income, professional rivalries, and gossip expose how vulnerable domestic trust can be. Marcia turns to her father’s practical wisdom, and Squire Gaylord steps forward with the cool instruments of the law. Legal advice becomes a moral intervention, clarifying rights while complicating affections. The possibility of formal separation or divorce moves from unthinkable to discussable, and the narrative tests the grounds on which such action might stand. Howells uses the lawyer’s office and courtroom corridors to show a society negotiating new rules for private life under public sanction.
True to Howells’s method, the book avoids sensational turns in favor of close psychological observation. He attends to the language of everyday quarrels, the texture of rooms and routines, and the incremental onset of alienation. Institutions—the press, the bar, the church—frame the characters’ choices, while unspoken expectations about masculinity and womanly devotion narrow their options. Communication itself becomes a contested terrain: letters, visits, and third-party messages carry meanings that comfort or corrode. The couple’s domestic responsibilities intensify demands for reliability, even as fatigue and resentment erode patience, making reconciliation more difficult to achieve.
As the crisis matures, friends and family choose cautious positions, sometimes protective, sometimes pragmatic. Legal questions—fault, evidence, and intent—press against the softer, less measurable claims of compassion and remorse. The city’s mobility contrasts with the small town’s memory, and each setting exerts a different kind of judgment. Without disclosing outcomes, the narrative traces how the characters weigh dignity, livelihood, and conscience when love can no longer settle disputes. Halleck confronts his own responsibilities, and Squire Gaylord’s interventions test the line between paternal care and control, keeping the moral dialogue alive without closing it.
A Modern Instance endures as a landmark of American realism for its unsentimental treatment of marriage, ambition, and the emerging culture of divorce. Howells neither applauds nor condemns precipitously; he shows how ideals falter when they meet institutional habit and personal frailty. The novel’s broader message resides in its insistence that modern life reshapes private vows, compelling individuals to reconcile freedom with fidelity and law with love. By anatomizing ordinary motives in recognizable settings, Howells bequeaths a sober, humane inquiry into responsibility, one that remains pertinent wherever personal happiness and social duty enter into difficult negotiation.
Historical Context
A Modern Instance is set in the late 1870s and early 1880s, moving between a small New England community and rapidly modernizing Boston. The era was framed by dominant institutions that ordered everyday life: Protestant churches, the family and marriage, the courts, and an increasingly powerful press. New England towns prized reputation, self-control, and social surveillance, while Boston represented professional ambition and cultural authority. This landscape—where community norms collided with urban opportunity—shaped the novel’s concerns. Howells situates private choices within public institutions, showing how the laws, newspapers, and clerical opinion of the Gilded Age bore directly on intimate relationships and social standing.
Economically, the United States had emerged from the prolonged downturn following the Panic of 1873, often called the Long Depression, which lingered through the late 1870s. Recovery in the 1880s brought railroad expansion, corporate consolidation, and volatile labor markets. White-collar occupations grew, yet salaries were uncertain and subject to boom-and-bust cycles. The entrepreneurial ethos rewarded initiative but tolerated sharp practice. Howells’s story mirrors this climate: ambition, mobility, and the pressures of earning a living in a competitive city unsettle domestic life. The novel’s attention to careerism captures the Gilded Age’s promises and perils for men seeking advancement without secure footing.
New England small-town culture remained influential. Town meetings, dense kin networks, and local newspapers sustained a regime of mutual scrutiny. Congregational and Unitarian traditions shaped civic morals, and the line between private conduct and public reputation was thin. Howells opens with a community whose members read character as a public matter and treat courtship, marriage, and quarrels as topics of common concern. This provincial order provided an ethical template for judging urban behavior. When characters leave for Boston, they carry with them habits of New England discipline even as they encounter looser, more anonymous city life, inviting comparisons between the two worlds.
Boston in the 1880s was a publishing center and commercial hub, home to a self-conscious Brahmin elite and a broad middle class. Its bookstores, subscription libraries, lecture halls, and clubs cultivated a formidable print culture. The Boston Public Library and circulating libraries fed demand for fiction and periodicals. Professional offices crowded downtown streets, while boardinghouses and new neighborhoods accommodated a mobile, ambitious workforce. For Howells’s characters, Boston’s opportunities came with steep costs: competition for status, exposure to fashionable amusements, and dependence on employers and editors. The city’s cultural capital made it the perfect stage for examining respectability and reputation under strain.
The period saw explosive growth in newspapers. The telegraph sped information across Associated Press networks, steam presses increased output, and advertising underwrote cheap daily papers. Editors chased scoops, cultivated lively local columns, and blurred lines between news and promotion. Ethical debates simmered over sensationalism, libel, and personal journalism. A Modern Instance draws on this milieu, following a reporter whose professional shortcuts and self-fashioning reflect the temptations of the trade. Howells, sensitive to the social power of print, shows how the press could magnify scandal, enable self-advancement, and make private matters public—an institutional force shaping both careers and marriages.
The thriving magazine market also mattered. Titles such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Century attracted national audiences through serial fiction and essays. Howells had served as assistant editor (1866) and then editor (1871–1881) of the Atlantic, where he advocated literary realism—depicting ordinary life, moral ambiguity, and social problems rather than romance and melodrama. A Modern Instance, published in 1882, exemplifies that program. Its unvarnished attention to marital discord and professional ethics aligns with a broader movement toward realism in American letters, nourished by magazines, subscription libraries, and a middle-class readership eager for contemporary social narratives.
The novel’s central subject—divorce—arrived amid measurable change. A federal report issued in 1889 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor (covering 1867–1886) documented a sharp rise in divorces, from roughly ten thousand annually in the late 1860s to more than twenty-five thousand by the mid-1880s. Grounds and procedures varied widely by state, fueling controversy and forum-shopping. Clergy, jurists, and editors debated whether easier divorce threatened the family or protected individuals from harm. Howells’s novel is often cited as the first major American work to treat divorce as a central social problem, registering the era’s anxieties without reducing them to a single moral verdict.
Legal change had altered but not erased women’s dependency. Married Women’s Property Acts, enacted state by state from the mid-nineteenth century onward, gave wives greater control over separate property and earnings, yet coverture’s legacy lingered in financial and social customs. Employment opportunities for “respectable” women—teaching, sewing, clerking—were limited and poorly paid. Child custody norms were evolving, with more courts favoring mothers of very young children, but outcomes were uneven and stigmatizing. In A Modern Instance, marital breakdown exposes the precariousness of a woman’s social position and livelihood, capturing a moment when reform outpaced custom only unevenly.
Religion remained a powerful arbiter of conduct in New England. Congregational and Unitarian pulpits shaped attitudes toward marriage, temperance, and public virtue; Sabbath observance and revivalism coexisted with liberal theology. Clerical counsel reached into households, and church-centered gossip policed the boundaries of propriety. The novel reflects this culture of moral commentary, showing how religious sentiment and community judgment bear on intimate decisions. Yet Howells avoids caricature: he presents a spectrum of belief and doubt, and he is attentive to how conscience can be both sincere and socially strategic when reputations—and livelihoods—depend on appearing upright.
Temperance activism provided another backdrop. Maine’s famed “Maine Law” of 1851 made the state a symbol of prohibitionist reform, and struggles over alcohol regulation continued across the Northeast throughout the century. In cities, saloons functioned as male social centers and political outposts, provoking reformers who linked drink to domestic instability and vice. Howells’s urban scenes acknowledge these contested spaces—restaurants, bars, theaters—as places where leisure intersects with temptation and debt. The moral language of temperance, so familiar to New England readers, informed contemporary judgments about husbands’ responsibilities, wives’ grievances, and the credibility of claims in marital disputes.
Mobility reshaped social life. By the 1880s, New England was knit together by a dense rail network, including lines such as the Boston and Maine. Trains enabled weekend travel, commuting, and swift relocation from provincial towns to Boston’s newsrooms and boardinghouses. Within the city, horse-drawn streetcars extended residential horizons and facilitated courtship and work. This ease of movement made reinvention possible, but it also made desertion easier and community oversight weaker. A Modern Instance uses travel and relocation to mark turning points, showing how modern transportation altered the pace of quarrels, reconciliations, and the pursuit—or avoidance—of obligations.
Technological change filtered into offices and parlors. Gas lighting extended working and leisure hours; the telephone, commercialized from the late 1870s, began entering businesses and some homes; and typewriters spread through offices in the early 1880s, changing clerical and journalistic labor. Advertising—especially for patent medicines and household goods—suffused newspapers, shaping both editorial revenue and everyday desires. Howells incorporates these textures: deadlines set by presses and wires, notes dashed off with new office tools, and an urban soundscape punctuated by bells and cars. The cumulative effect is a world where communication accelerates conflict and makes privacy hard to defend.
Class and ethnicity structured Boston’s public life. A long-established Brahmin elite set cultural standards, while Irish immigrant communities and newer arrivals supplied labor and political energy. Boardinghouses mixed classes under one roof, and a pervasive credit economy—installment buying, informal loans—made appearances delicate. Respectability could be performed with borrowed funds and frayed ethics. The novel’s journalist navigates that precarious terrain, chasing recognition in rooms attentive to clothes, diction, and connections. Howells tracks the distance between genteel aspiration and fiscal reality, revealing how class markers and debt intensify the strains already placed on a fragile marriage.
Courts and newspapers intersected in spectacular ways. Divorce petitions, trials, and decrees were matters of public record, and sensational cases drew news coverage that could define reputations. Residency requirements, evidentiary standards, and grounds for divorce differed across states, making legal strategy a practical art as much as a moral claim. Lawyers operated as brokers between private misery and public procedure. In A Modern Instance, the law’s formality and publicity become part of the drama: remedies are available, but they are costly, slow, and exposed to rumor. Howells shows how legal redress, even when justified, can deepen social wounds.
The post–Civil War decades saw expanding reform movements. Women’s rights organizations pressed for property, custody, and suffrage reforms; although the national suffrage merger into the National American Woman Suffrage Association came in 1890, the 1870s and 1880s were rich with agitation and lectures. The Social Gospel, gathering force in the 1880s, urged Christians to confront systemic injustice. Howells’s novel, without polemic, reflects these debates by staging conflicts between idealism and material necessity, personal conscience and institutional constraint. Its characters encounter a moral world in transition, where inherited duties jostle with new claims to autonomy and self-fulfillment.
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) brought unusual authority to the book’s subjects. The son of a printer-editor in Ohio, he learned the newspaper trade early, wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and served as U.S. consul in Venice during the Civil War years. After settling in Boston, he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1871–1881), championing realism and mentoring American writers. His friendships with figures such as Mark Twain and Henry James and his long engagement with publishing furnished intimate knowledge of literary markets and journalism. That experience informs A Modern Instance’s nuanced portrait of the press and its entanglement with private life.
As a mirror of its era, A Modern Instance exposes the joints between public institutions and private hopes. It tracks how the market ethos of the Gilded Age, the ambitions and compromises of the urban press, and the evolving but uneven legal framework of marriage and divorce press upon ordinary people. Howells refuses melodramatic villains; instead, he shows systemic pressures—credit, reputation, speed, publicity—eroding trust. The result is both diagnosis and critique: a realist inquiry into how modern life rearranged love, duty, and self-interest. In registering those changes, the novel remains a clear-sighted document of its historical moment.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, and editor whose advocacy of literary realism helped define U.S. writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often called the "Dean of American Letters," he balanced creative work with influential editorial leadership. His novels—among them A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer, and A Hazard of New Fortunes—mapped everyday manners and moral pressures in an industrial and urbanizing nation. Through essays, reviews, and steady guidance to magazines, he argued that fiction should depict ordinary life with fidelity and ethical seriousness, a stance that shaped both readers' expectations and writers' ambitions.
Howells grew up in Ohio and learned the printing and newspaper trades as a teenager, gaining a practical education that substituted for extended formal schooling. Working in small editorial offices and setting type, he absorbed the mechanics of publication while reading widely in history, poetry, and contemporary fiction. Early pieces in Midwestern papers and magazines honed his plain, observant style. His habits of close reportage and preference for the everyday over the sensational prefigure the realist program he later articulated. While still young he began forming connections in literary circles, developing tastes that would later align him with European realists and with American regional and social narratives.
National attention arrived when Howells wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, a partisan volume that showcased his clarity and tact. The book aided his appointment as United States consul in Venice during the American Civil War, a post he held for several years. Immersion in Italian culture broadened his outlook and introduced him to continental currents of realism. After returning to the United States, he published the travel books Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, combining observation, humor, and democratic sympathy. These books established his voice, launched a steady career in letters, and gave him a cosmopolitan vantage on American experience.
In Boston he joined The Atlantic Monthly, first as assistant editor and later as editor-in-chief, a decade-long stewardship that made him a central arbiter of taste. At the magazine he encouraged writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James and argued for accuracy of speech, character, and social setting in fiction. During these years he also released early novels—including Their Wedding Journey, A Foregone Conclusion, and The Lady of the Aroostook—that tested realist technique within popular forms. His editorial columns and reviews supplied a pedagogical counterpart to his fiction, teaching readers how to value ordinary life on the page without melodramatic distortions.
Howells's mature novels of the 1880s advanced American realism with steady craft and moral inquiry. A Modern Instance explored the strains modern society places on marriage and conscience; The Rise of Silas Lapham examined business success and ethical choice; Indian Summer returned to questions of sentiment and restraint; and A Hazard of New Fortunes surveyed the crosscurrents of class, labor, and culture in a growing metropolis. Critics often praised his even-handed tone and observational acuity, though some readers found his avoidance of sensational plot devices austere. Across these works he refined a humane, democratic art attentive to ordinary people and the structures shaping their lives.
After leaving The Atlantic, Howells became a prominent voice at Harper's, notably in the Editor's Study column, where he promoted realism and assessed new books. He codified his views in Criticism and Fiction, insisting that truthful representation and ethical sympathy were the novel's primary tasks. He engaged current debates about labor, class, and American power, voicing anti-imperialist convictions during the Spanish-American War era. As a mentor-critic, he helped broaden the canon: he praised Stephen Crane's work and wrote the introduction to Paul Laurence Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life, furthering recognition for emerging writers whose subjects and styles expanded the nation's literary map.
Howells remained productive into the early twentieth century, publishing plays, stories, and reflective prose. Autobiographical volumes such as Literary Friends and Acquaintance, My Mark Twain, and Years of My Youth recalled a career spent among major figures and controversies in American letters. He continued to adjust his realism to new social tempos and a transforming media landscape. He died in 1920, having shaped the institutions, aesthetics, and professional standards of U.S. literature. Today his reputation rests on both his fiction and his role as editor-critic—an advocate for humane, truth-telling art whose influence can be traced in subsequent generations of realist and social novels.
A MODERN INSTANCE (American Classics Series)
I
The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains[1q]. They were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward, tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders and white birches.
But winter was full half the year. The snow began at Thanksgiving, and fell snow upon snow till Fast Day[1], thawing between the storms, and packing harder and harder against the break-up in the spring, when it covered the ground in solid levels three feet high, and lay heaped in drifts, that defied the sun far into May. When it did not snow, the weather was keenly clear, and commonly very still. Then the landscape at noon had a stereoscopic glister under the high sun that burned in a heaven without a cloud, and at setting stained the sky and the white waste with freezing pink and violet. On such days the farmers and lumbermen came in to the village stores, and made a stiff and feeble stir about their doorways, and the school children gave the street a little life and color, as they went to and from the Academy in their red and blue woollens. Four times a day the mill, the shrill wheeze of whose saws had become part of the habitual silence, blew its whistle for the hands to begin and leave off work, in blasts that seemed to shatter themselves against the thin air. But otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed.
Behind the black boles of the elms that swept the vista of the street with the fine gray tracery of their boughs, stood the houses, deep-sunken in the accumulating drifts, through which each householder kept a path cut from his doorway to the road, white and clean as if hewn out of marble. Some cross streets straggled away east and west with the poorer dwellings; but this, that followed the northward and southward reach of the plain, was the main thoroughfare, and had its own impressiveness, with those square white houses which they build so large in Northern New England. They were all kept in scrupulous repair, though here and there the frost and thaw of many winters had heaved a fence out of plumb, and threatened the poise of the monumental urns of painted pine on the gate-posts. They had dark-green blinds, of a color harmonious with that of the funereal evergreens in their dooryards; and they themselves had taken the tone of the snowy landscape, as if by the operation of some such law as blanches the fur-bearing animals of the North. They seemed proper to its desolation, while some houses of more modern taste, painted to a warmer tone, looked, with their mansard roofs and jig-sawed piazzas and balconies, intrusive and alien.
At one end of the street stood the Academy, with its classic façade and its belfry; midway was the hotel, with the stores, the printing-office, and the churches; and at the other extreme, one of the square white mansions stood advanced from the rank of the rest, at the top of a deep-plunging valley, defining itself against the mountain beyond so sharply that it seemed as if cut out of its dark, wooded side. It was from the gate before this house, distinct in the pink light which the sunset had left, that, on a Saturday evening in February, a cutter[2], gay with red-lined robes, dashed away, and came musically clashing down the street under the naked elms. For the women who sat with their work at the windows on either side of the way, hesitating whether to light their lamps, and drawing nearer and nearer to the dead-line of the outer cold for the latest glimmer of the day, the passage of this ill-timed vehicle was a vexation little short of grievous. Every movement on the street was precious to them, and, with all the keenness of their starved curiosity, these captives of the winter could not make out the people in the cutter. Afterward it was a mortification to them that they should not have thought at once of Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord. They had seen him go up toward Squire Gaylord's house half an hour before, and they now blamed themselves for not reflecting that of course he was going to take Marcia over to the church sociable at Lower Equity. Their identity being established, other little proofs of it reproached the inquirers; but these perturbed spirits were at peace, and the lamps were out in the houses (where the smell of rats in the wainscot and of potatoes in the cellar strengthened with the growing night), when Bartley and Marcia drove back through the moonlit silence to her father's door. Here, too, the windows were all dark, except for the light that sparely glimmered through the parlor blinds; and the young man slackened the pace of his horse, as if to still the bells, some distance away from the gate.
The girl took the hand he offered her when he dismounted at the gate, and, as she jumped from the cutter, "Won't you come in?" she asked.
"I guess I can blanket my horse and stand him under the wood-shed," answered the young man, going around to the animal's head and leading him away.
When he returned to the door the girl opened it, as if she had been listening for his step; and she now stood holding it ajar for him to enter, and throwing the light upon the threshold from the lamp, which she lifted high in the other hand. The action brought her figure in relief, and revealed the outline of her bust and shoulders, while the lamp flooded with light the face she turned to him, and again averted for a moment, as if startled at some noise behind her. She thus showed a smooth, low forehead, lips and cheeks deeply red, a softly rounded chin touched with a faint dimple, and in turn a nose short and aquiline; her eyes were dark, and her dusky hair flowed crinkling above her fine black brows, and vanished down the curve of a lovely neck. There was a peculiar charm in the form of her upper lip: it was exquisitely arched, and at the corners it projected a little over the lower lip, so that when she smiled it gave a piquant sweetness to her mouth, with a certain demure innocence that qualified the Roman pride of her profile. For the rest, her beauty was of the kind that coming years would only ripen and enrich; at thirty she would be even handsomer than at twenty, and be all the more southern in her type for the paling of that northern, color in her cheeks. The young man who looked up at her from the doorstep had a yellow mustache, shadowing either side of his lip with a broad sweep, like a bird's wing; his chin, deep-cut below his mouth, failed to come strenuously forward; his cheeks were filled to an oval contour, and his face had otherwise the regularity common to Americans; his eyes, a clouded gray, heavy-lidded and long-lashed, were his most striking feature, and he gave her beauty a deliberate look from them as he lightly stamped the snow from his feet, and pulled the seal-skin gloves from his long hands.
"Come in," she whispered, coloring with pleasure under his gaze; and she made haste to shut the door after him, with a luxurious impatience of the cold. She led the way into the room from which she had come, and set down the lamp on the corner of the piano, while he slipped off his overcoat and swung it over the end of the sofa. They drew up chairs to the stove, in which the smouldering fire, revived by the opened draft, roared and snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not stolen or clandestine; it would have interested every one, but would have shocked no one in the village if the whole village had known it; all that a girl's parents ordinarily exacted was that they should not be waked up.
"Ugh!" said the girl. "It seems as if I never should get warm." She leaned forward, and stretched her hands toward the stove, and he presently rose from the rocking-chair in which he sat, somewhat lower than she, and lifted her sack to throw it over her shoulders. But he put it down and took up his overcoat.
"Allow my coat the pleasure," he said, with the ease of a man who is not too far lost to be really flattering.
"Much obliged to the coat," she replied, shrugging herself into it and pulling the collar close about her throat. "I wonder you didn't put it on the sorrel[3]. You could have tied the sleeves around her neck."
"Shall I tie them around yours?" He leaned forward from the low rocking-chair into which he had sunk again, and made a feint at what he had proposed.
But she drew back with a gay "No!" and added: "Some day, father says, that sorrel will be the death of us. He says it's a bad color for a horse. They're always ugly, and when they get heated they're crazy."
"You never seem to be very much frightened when you're riding after the sorrel," said Bartley.
"Oh, I've great faith in your driving."
"Thanks. But I don't believe in this notion about a horse being vicious because he's of a certain color. If your father didn't believe in it, I should call it a superstition; but the Squire has no superstitions."
"I don't know about that," said the girl. "I don't think he likes to see the new moon over his left shoulder."
"I beg his pardon, then," returned Bartley. "I ought to have said religions: the Squire has no religions." The young fellow had a rich, caressing voice, and a securely winning manner which comes from the habit of easily pleasing; in this charming tone, and with this delightful insinuation, he often said things that hurt; but with such a humorous glance from his softly shaded eyes that people felt in some sort flattered at being taken into the joke, even while they winced under it. The girl seemed to wince, as if, in spite of her familiarity with the fact, it wounded her to have her father's scepticism recognized just then. She said nothing, and he added, "I remember we used to think that a redheaded boy was worse-tempered on account of his hair. But I don't believe the sorrel-tops, as we called them, were any more fiery than the rest of us."
Marcia did not answer at once, and then she said, with the vagueness of one not greatly interested by the subject, "You've got a sorrel-top in your office that's fiery enough, if she's anything like what she used to be when she went to school."
"Hannah Morrison?"
"Yes."
"Oh, she isn't so bad. She's pretty lively, but she's very eager to learn the business, and I guess we shall get along. I think she wants to please me."
"Does she! But she must be going on seventeen now."
"I dare say," answered the young man, carelessly, but with perfect intelligence. "She's good-looking in her way, too."
"Oh! Then you admire red hair?"
He perceived the anxiety that the girl's pride could not keep out of her tone, but he answered indifferently, "I'm a little too near that color myself. I hear that red hair's coming into fashion, but I guess it's natural I should prefer black."
She leaned back in her chair, and crushed the velvet collar of his coat under her neck in lifting her head to stare at the high-hung mezzotints and family photographs on the walls, while a flattered smile parted her lips, and there was a little thrill of joy in her voice. "I presume we must be a good deal behind the age in everything at Equity."
"Well, you know my opinion of Equity," returned the young man. "If I didn't have you here to free my mind to once in a while, I don't know what I should do."
She was so proud to be in the secret of his discontent with the narrow world of Equity that she tempted him to disparage it further by pretending to identify herself with it. "I don't see why you abuse Equity to me. I Ve never been anywhere else, except those two winters at school. You'd better look out: I might expose you," she threatened, fondly.
"I'm not afraid. Those two winters make a great difference. You saw girls from other places,—from Augusta, and Bangor, and Bath."
"Well, I couldn't see how they were so very different from Equity girls."
"I dare say they couldn't, either, if they judged from you."
She leaned forward again, and begged for more flattery from him with her happy eyes. "Why, what does make me so different from all the rest? I should really like to know."
"Oh, you don't expect me to tell you to your face!"
"Yes, to my face! I don't believe it's anything complimentary."
"No, it's nothing that you deserve any credit for."
"Pshaw!" cried the girl. "I know you're only talking to make fun of me. How do I know but you make fun of me to other girls, just as you do of them to me? Everybody says you're sarcastic."
"Have I ever been sarcastic with you?"
"You know I wouldn't stand it."
He made no reply, but she admired the ease with which he now turned from her, and took one book after another from the table at his elbow, saying some words of ridicule about each. It gave her a still deeper sense of his intellectual command when he finally discriminated, and began to read out a poem with studied elocutionary effects. He read in a low tone, but at last some responsive noises came from the room overhead; he closed the book, and threw himself into an attitude of deprecation, with his eyes cast up to the ceiling.
"Chicago," he said, laying the book on the table and taking his knee between his hands, while he dazzled her by speaking from the abstraction of one who has carried on a train of thought quite different from that on which he seemed to be intent,—"Chicago is the place for me. I don't think I can stand Equity much longer. You know that chum of mine I told you about; he's written to me to come out there and go into the law with him at once."
"Why don't you go?" the girl forced herself to ask.
"Oh, I'm not ready yet. Should you write to me if I went to Chicago?"
"I don't think you'd find my letters very interesting. You wouldn't want any news from Equity."
"Your letters wouldn't be interesting if you gave me the Equity news; but they would if you left it out. Then you'd have to write about yourself."
"Oh, I don't think that would interest anybody."
"Well, I feel almost like going out to Chicago to see."
"But I haven't promised to write yet," said the girl, laughing for joy in his humor.
"I shall have to stay in Equity till you do, then. Better promise at once."
"Wouldn't that be too much like marrying a man to get rid of him?"
"I don't think that's always such a bad plan—for the man." He waited for her to speak; but she had gone the length of her tether in this direction. "Byron says,—
Do you believe that?" He dwelt upon her with his tree look, in the happy embarrassment with which she let her head droop.
"I don't know," she murmured. "I don't know anything about a man's life."
"It was the woman's I was asking about."
"I don't think I'm competent to answer."
"Well, I'll tell you, then. I think Byron was mistaken. My experience is, that, when a man is in love, there's nothing else of him. That's the reason I've kept out of it altogether of late years. My advice is, don't fall in love: it takes too much time." They both laughed at this. "But about corresponding, now; you haven't said whether you would write to me, or not. Will you?"
"Can't you wait and see?" she asked, slanting a look at him, which she could not keep from being fond.
"No, no. Unless you wrote to me I couldn't go to Chicago."
"Perhaps I ought to promise, then, at once."
"You mean that you wish me to go."
"You said that you were going. You oughtn't to let anything stand in the way of your doing the best you can for yourself."
"But you would miss me a little, wouldn't you? You would try to miss me, now and then?"
"Oh, you are here pretty often. I don't think I should have much difficulty in missing you."
"Thanks, thanks! I can go with a light heart, now. Good by." He made a pretence of rising.
"What! Are you going at once?"
"Yes, this very night,—or to-morrow. Or no, I can't go to-morrow. There's something I was going to do to-morrow."
"Perhaps go to church."
"Oh, that of course. But it was in the afternoon. Stop! I have it! I want you to go sleigh-riding with me in the afternoon."
"I don't know about that," Marcia began.
"But I do," said the young man. "Hold on: I'll put my request in writing." He opened her portfolio, which lay on the table. "What elegant stationery! May I use some of this elegant stationery? The letter is to a lady,—to open a correspondence. May I?" She laughed her assent. "How ought I to begin? Dearest Miss Marcia, or just Dear Marcia: which is better?"
"You had better not put either—"
"But I must. You're one or the other, you know. You're dear—to your family,—and you're Marcia: you can't deny it. The only question is whether you're the dearest of all the Miss Marcias. I may be mistaken, you know. We'll err on the safe side: Dear Marcia:" He wrote it down. "That looks well, and it reads well. It looks very natural, and it reads like poetry,—blank verse; there's no rhyme for it that I can remember. Dear Marcia: Will you go sleigh-riding with me to-morrow afternoon, at two o'clock sharp? Yours—yours? sincerely, or cordially, or affectionately, or what? The 'dear Marcia' seems to call for something out of the common. I think it had better be affectionately." He suggested it with ironical gravity.
"And I think it had better be 'truly,'" protested the girl.
"'Truly' it shall be, then. Your word is law,—statute in such case made and provided." He wrote, "With unutterable devotion, yours truly, Bartley J. Hubbard," and read it aloud.
She leaned forward, and lightly caught it away from him, and made a feint of tearing it. He seized her hands. "Mr. Hubbard!" she cried, in undertone. "Let me go, please."
"On two conditions,—promise not to tear up my letter, and promise to answer it in writing."
She hesitated long, letting him hold her wrists. At last she said, "Well," and he released her wrists, on whose whiteness his clasp left red circles. She wrote a single word on the paper, and pushed it across the table to him. He rose with it, and went around to her side.
"This is very nice. But you haven't spelled it correctly. Anybody would say this was No, to look at it; and you meant to write Yes. Take the pencil in your hand, Miss Gaylord, and I will steady your trembling nerves, so that you can form the characters. Stop! At the slightest resistance on your part, I will call out and alarm the house; or I will—." He put the pencil into her fingers, and took her soft fist into his, and changed the word, while she submitted, helpless with her smothered laughter. "Now the address. Dear—"
"No, no!" she protested.
"Yes, yes! Dear Mr. Hubbard. There, that will do. Now the signature. Yours—"
"I won't write that. I won't, indeed!"
"Oh, yes, you will. You only think you won't. Yours gratefully, Marcia Gaylord. That's right. The Gaylord is not very legible, on account of a slight tremor in the writer's arm, resulting from a constrained posture, perhaps. Thanks, Miss Gaylord. I will be here promptly at the hour indicated—"
The noises renewed themselves overhead,—some one seemed to be moving about. Hubbard laid his hand on that of the girl, still resting on the table, and grasped it in burlesque alarm; she could scarcely stifle her mirth. He released her hand, and, reaching his chair with a theatrical stride, sat there cowering till the noises ceased. Then he began to speak soberly, in a low voice. He spoke of himself; but in application of a lecture which they had lately heard, so that he seemed to be speaking of the lecture. It was on the formation of character, and he told of the processes by which he had formed his own character. They appeared very wonderful to her, and she marvelled at the ease with which he dismissed the frivolity of his recent mood, and was now all seriousness. When he came to speak of the influence of others upon him, she almost trembled with the intensity of her interest. "But of all the women I have known, Marcia," he said, "I believe you have had the strongest influence upon me. I believe you could make me do anything; but you have always influenced me for good; your influence upon me has been ennobling and elevating."
She wished to refuse his praise; but her heart throbbed for bliss and pride in it; her voice dissolved on her lips. They sat in silence; and he took in his the hand that she let hang over the side of her chair. The lamp began to burn low, and she found words to say, "I had better get another," but she did not move.
"No, don't," he said; "I must be going, too. Look at the wick, there, Marcia; it scarcely reaches the oil. In a little while it will not reach it, and the flame will die out. That is the way the ambition to be good and great will die out of me, when my life no longer draws its inspiration from your influence."
This figure took her imagination; it seemed to her very beautiful; and his praise humbled her more and more.
"Good night," he said, in a low, sad voice. He gave her hand a last pressure, and rose to put on his coat. Her admiration of his words, her happiness in his flattery, filled her brain like wine. She moved dizzily as she took up the lamp to light him to the door. "I have tired you," he said, tenderly, and he passed his hand around her to sustain the elbow of the arm with which she held the lamp; she wished to resist, but she could not try.
At the door he bent down his head and kissed her. "Good night, dear—friend."
"Good night," she panted; and after the door had closed upon him, she stooped and kissed the knob on which his hand had rested.
As she turned, she started to see her father coming down the stairs with a candle in his hand. He had his black cravat tied around his throat, but no collar; otherwise, he had on the rusty black clothes in which he ordinarily went about his affairs,—the cassimere pantaloons, the satin vest, and the dress-coat which old-fashioned country lawyers still wore ten years ago, in preference to a frock or sack. He stopped on one of the lower steps, and looked sharply down into her uplifted face, and, as they stood confronted, their consanguinity came out in vivid resemblances and contrasts; his high, hawk-like profile was translated into the fine aquiline outline of hers; the harsh rings of black hair, now grizzled with age, which clustered tightly over his head, except where they had retreated from his deeply seamed and wrinkled forehead, were the crinkled flow above her smooth white brow; and the line of the bristly tufts that overhung his eyes was the same as that of the low arches above hers. Her complexion was from her mother; his skin was dusky yellow; but they had the same mouth, and hers showed how sweet his mouth must have been in his youth. His eyes, deep sunk in their cavernous sockets, had rekindled their dark fires in hers; his whole visage, softened to her sex and girlish years, looked up at him in his daughter's face.
"Why, father! Did we wake you?"
"No. I hadn't been asleep at all. I was coming down to read. But it's time you were in bed, Marcia."
"Yes, I'm going, now. There's a good fire in the parlor stove."
The old man descended the remaining steps, but turned at the parlor door, and looked again at his daughter with a glance that arrested her, with her foot on the lowest stair.
"Marcia," he asked, grimly, "are you engaged to Bartley Hubbard?"
The blood flashed up from her heart into her face like fire, and then, as suddenly, fell back again, and left her white. She let her head droop and turn, till her eyes were wholly averted from him, and she did not speak. He closed the door behind him, and she went upstairs to her own room; in her shame, she seemed to herself to crawl thither, with her father's glance burning upon her.
II
Bartley Hubbard drove his sorrel colt back to the hotel stable through the moonlight, and woke up the hostler[4], asleep behind the counter, on a bunk covered with buffalo-robes. The half-grown boy did not wake easily; he conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet. Then he fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air. He kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin stove[5], sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell into a doze, with his lantern in his hand. "Look here, young man!" said Bartley, shaking him by the shoulder, "you had better go out and put that colt up, and leave this sleeping before the fire to me."
"Guess the colt can wait awhile," grumbled the boy; but he went out, all the same, and Bartley, looking through the window, saw his lantern wavering, a yellow blot in the white moonshine, toward the stable. He sat down in the hostler's chair, and, in his turn, kicked the pine-root with the heel of his shoe, and looked about the room. He had had, as he would have said, a grand good time; but it had left him hungry, and the table in the middle of the room, with the chairs huddled around it, was suggestive, though he knew that it had been barrenly put there for the convenience of the landlord's friends, who came every night to play whist with him, and that nothing to eat or drink had ever been set out on it to interrupt the austere interest of the game. It was long since there had been anything on the shelves behind the counter more cheerful than corn-balls and fancy crackers for the children of the summer boarders; these dainties being out of season, the jars now stood there empty. The young man waited in a hungry reverie, in which it appeared to him that he was undergoing unmerited suffering, till the stable-boy came back, now wide awake, and disposed to let the house share his vigils, as he stamped over the floor in his heavy boots.
"Andy," said Bartley, in a pathetic tone of injury, "can't you scare me up something to eat?"
"There aint anything in the buttery but meat-pie," said the boy.
He meant mince-pie[6], as Hubbard knew, and not a pasty of meat; and the hungry man hesitated. "Well, fetch it," he said, finally. "I guess we can warm it up a little by the coals here."
He had not been so long out of college but the idea of this irregular supper, when he had once formed it, began to have its fascination. He took up the broad fire-shovel, and, by the time the boy had shuffled to and from the pantry beyond the dining-room, Bartley had cleaned the shovel with a piece of newspaper and was already heating it by the embers which he had raked out from under the pine-root. The boy silently transferred the half-pie he had brought from its plate to the shovel. He pulled up a chair and sat down to watch it. The pie began to steam and send out a savory odor; he himself, in thawing, emitted a stronger and stronger smell of stable. He was not without his disdain for the palate which must have its mince-pie warm at midnight,—nor without his respect for it, either. This fastidious taste must be part of the splendor which showed itself in Mr. Hubbard's city-cut clothes, and in his neck-scarfs and the perfection of his finger-nails and mustache. The boy had felt the original impression of these facts deepened rather than effaced by custom; they were for every day, and not, as he had at first conjectured, for some great occasion only.
"You don't suppose, Andy, there is such a thing as cold tea or coffee anywhere, that we could warm up?" asked Bartley, gazing thoughtfully at the pie.
The boy shook his head. "Get you some milk," he said; and, after he had let the dispiriting suggestion sink into the other's mind, he added, "or some water."
"Oh, bring on the milk," groaned Bartley, but with the relief that a choice of evils affords. The boy stumped away for it, and when he came back the young man had got his pie on the plate again, and had drawn his chair up to the table. "Thanks," he said, with his mouth full, as the boy set down the goblet of milk. Andy pulled his chair round so as to get an unrestricted view of a man who ate his pie with his fork as easily as another would with a knife. "That sister of yours is a smart girl," the young man added, making deliberate progress with the pie.
The boy made an inarticulate sound of satisfaction, and resolved in his heart to tell her what Mr. Hubbard had said.
"She's as smart as time," continued Bartley.
This was something concrete. The boy knew he should remember that comparison. "Bring you anything else?" he asked, admiring the young man's skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork. The pie had now vanished.
"Why, there isn't anything else, is there?" Bartley demanded, with the plaintive dismay of a man who fears he has flung away his hunger upon one dish when he might have had something better.
"Cheese," replied the boy.
"Oh!" said Bartley. He reflected awhile. "I suppose I could toast a piece on this fork. But there isn't any more milk."
The boy took away the plate and goblet, and brought them again replenished.
Bartley contrived to get the cheese on his fork and rest it against one of the andirons so that it would not fall into the ashes. When it was done, he ate it as he had eaten the pie, without offering to share his feast with the boy. "There'" he said. "Yes, Andy, if she keeps on as she's been doing, she won't have any trouble. She's a bright girl." He stretched his legs before the fire again, and presently yawned.
"Want your lamp, Mr. Hubbard?" asked the boy.
