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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated) serves as a comprehensive anthology of one of America's foremost literary figures during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known for his keen insights into American society, Howells employs a realist literary style, focusing on the everyday lives and moral dilemmas of ordinary citizens. This collection encompasses his diverse body of work, including novels, essays, and critiques, reflecting the socio-political landscape of his time while delving into the evolving definitions of American identity and culture. The illustrated edition also enhances the text, offering visual interpretations that complement Howells' nuanced prose and enrich the reader's understanding of his themes. William Dean Howells, often referred to as the "Father of American Realism," was deeply influenced by the cultural shifts of his era, particularly those surrounding industrialization and urbanization. His experiences as an editor and an advocate for literary reform positioned him at the forefront of literary discourse, fostering a commitment to creating authentic portrayals of American life. His friendships with contemporaries, such as Mark Twain and Henry James, also significantly shaped his literary outlook and thematic preoccupations. This illustrated collection is invaluable for readers seeking to explore the complexities of American realism through Howells' insightful observations and rich narratives. It is not only an academic treasure for scholars but also an engaging introduction to those unfamiliar with Howells' work. Readers will find themselves captivated by the poignant reflections on society and humanity, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of American literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This illustrated edition gathers the principal writings of William Dean Howells into one coherent reading experience, enabling a panoramic view of his long career and the development of American literary realism. It presents the novels complete, alongside collections of shorter fiction, a full array of comedies and farces for the stage, travel books, critical essays, poems, autobiographical reminiscences, and a popular history. An introductory portrait by Charles Dudley Warner situates the author within his time and craft. Together, these materials invite readers to trace recurring concerns, shifts in method, and the steady refinement of a humane, observant, and ethically attentive art.
This collection spans multiple modes. The long fiction ranges from intimate domestic narratives to panoramic social studies and occasional imaginative romances. The short stories include holiday pieces, humorous sketches, moral parables, boyhood recollections, and psychologically shaded tales. The dramatic writing comprises comedies and farces crafted for contemporary stages. The travel sketches record sustained encounters with Italy, Spain, Switzerland, London, English cities, and American suburbia. The essays and criticism articulate an aesthetic program, assess contemporaries, and meditate on the writer’s vocation. The poems offer reflective counterpoints. Reminiscences recover formative places and experiences, and a concise historical survey presents regional history to a general audience.
The novels, read in sequence or singly, map the American passage from village to metropolis, from provincial certainties to cosmopolitan perplexities. Howells observes courtship, marriage, and family life with a steady eye, yet steadily tests domestic happiness against pressures of money, work, and social ambition. Business ethics, artistic aspiration, religious scruple, and the conduct of friendship recur, tempered by humor and a reluctance to sensationalize. Americans at home compare themselves with Europeans abroad; city living jostles rural memory; youthful hopes meet midlife reckonings. Dialogue, often deceptively casual, carries moral inquiry. The result is a fiction of manners that locates drama within ordinary choices.
Within that realist enterprise, Howells experiments with form and premise. A pair of Altrurian romances introduces a visitor from an imagined cooperative commonwealth, setting democratic ideals against the inequities of Gilded Age society. He pursues theatrical worlds, summer resorts, and regional communities to test how role-playing, leisure, and local custom disclose character. Historical reconstruction, too, allows him to examine the collision of belief and skepticism on the American frontier. Across these variations, the constant is method: plausible psychology, ethical curiosity, and an insistence that fiction serves conscience best when it stays near lived experience, even when a speculative device sharpens the questions.
The shorter fiction concentrates his gifts. Brief holiday tales probe generosity and self-deception with kindly wit. Vignettes of buying, selling, and traveling catch the comedy of everyday transactions. Stories of boyhood and small-town life catalogue games, pranks, anxieties, and loyalties without nostalgia’s blur. Elsewhere, elusive moods—twilight uncertainties, moral hesitations, the unease of chance encounters—are rendered in plain style that lets suggestion do the work. Throughout, laughter remains companion to sympathy, and plot yields to tone and insight. The cumulative effect is a gallery of recognizable types, recognizable because they are ordinary, and significant because the ordinary is where choice matters.
The plays and farces transpose that sensibility to the stage. Scenes unfold in parlors, hotels, stations, and conveyances where strangers meet and conventions strain. Misunderstandings of etiquette, class, and technology power the action, while brisk dialogue exposes the social choreography of lateness, politeness, and pretense. Howells’s theatrical pieces favor crisp situations over elaborate complications, and offer actors roles rooted in recognizable speech rather than declamation. They illuminate his prose from another angle: a trust in the expressive power of small embarrassments, and a conviction that comedy clarifies moral perception by showing how people behave when convenience and conscience collide.
The poems are modest in number and scope, but they reflect the same clarity and ethical tact. Seaside vistas, domestic quiet, and reflective occasions afford him a lyric register in which observation precedes judgment. The diction is plain, the forms steady, and the music subdued, as if the poet wished his lines to keep company with the reader rather than command attention. In the context of this collection, the verse functions as a lyrical parenthesis around concerns more amply treated in prose, reminding us that the same eyes that notice manners and markets also attend to weather, shorelines, and inward weather.
The travel books provide a sustained education in looking. In Italy, he notes light, labor, dialect, and ritual with an affectionate exactness that shaped his lifelong affinity for that culture. In Spain he balances curiosity with restraint, mindful of difference without exoticism. Swiss interludes and English excursions broaden the canvas to landscapes, museums, streets, and stages, while portraits of London and other cities confront modern crowds and infrastructures. A set of suburban pieces returns home to record the near-at-hand. Everywhere, the method is the same: patient attention, preference for the telling detail, and an ethic that travel writing is a mode of citizenship.
The essays and criticism articulate, test, and refine the practice his fiction demonstrates. He argues for fidelity to ordinary life, measures fashion against principle, and reflects on craft and responsibility. A personal retrospect of authorship traces literary friendships and the texture of a working writer’s days. Profiles and appraisals of contemporaries, including Henry James, Emile Zola, and Carl Schurz, model courteous disagreement and generous advocacy. A study of modern Italian poets and versions from their work register his cosmopolitan ear. Other pieces consider psychological tendencies in recent fiction and the economic conditions of literary labor. Together, they offer a practicable poetics.
Autobiographical writings capture a Midwestern boyhood and the making of an author, piecing together streets, schools, newspapers, and households into a social history of memory. The late-life recollections return to early scenes with a measured candor that suits the rest of his work. A concise state history, written for general readers and illustrated in its original form, transforms archival matter into narrative without condescension. These books complement the fiction by displaying sources and scenes that underwrite it: local speech, civic rituals, makeshift ambitions, and the quiet heroism of ordinary perseverance. They also clarify his abiding interest in how communities educate conscience.
Across forms, certain features unify the whole. There is a preference for understatement, a colloquial ease that masks exacting craft, and a belief that the moral life is conducted in conversation—between spouses, friends, strangers, and citizens. Irony is mild, rarely cruel; sympathy is active, never indulgent. Work, money, marriage, and art constitute recurring tests of character. Travel and theater provide laboratories for observing manners under pressure. Even when he adopts a speculative premise, he uses it to illuminate the everyday. The lasting significance of this body of work lies in its confidence that accuracy about life is itself a form of justice.
The illustrations in this edition, where included, enrich the texts by supplying visual context for places, costumes, conveyances, and moods that figure so prominently in his pages. The arrangement allows many points of entry: a reader might begin with a novel, step into a farce, detour through a Venetian promenade, then consider an essay on method, and find each reinforcing the others. The opening portrait by a contemporary man of letters frames the enterprise, yet the works themselves make the argument: that attentive seeing, honest speech, and patient humor can still deepen our understanding of society and of one another.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, editor, and leading advocate of literary realism, often called the "Dean of American Letters." Born in Ohio and active through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he helped shape the nation’s literary taste by insisting that fiction portray ordinary life with moral and social fidelity. His career bridged journalism, diplomacy, and long service in prominent magazines, giving him unusual influence over what American readers encountered. Best known for The Rise of Silas Lapham, he also wrote travel sketches, short stories, plays, and essays that together mapped the movement from romanticism toward a modern, everyday realism.
Howells’s education was largely practical and self-directed. Raised around printing offices and newspapers, he learned the trade as a compositor and reporter rather than in extended formal schooling. Early immersion in languages and wide reading, later deepened by years in Italy, shaped his cosmopolitan outlook. He admired and championed European realists, especially Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, and he corresponded closely with American contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Henry James. Their differing approaches to prose—Twain’s vernacular humor, James’s psychological subtlety, Tolstoy’s ethical seriousness—helped clarify Howells’s own program: a disciplined attention to common manners, plausible motives, and the moral consequences of everyday choices.
By his early twenties, Howells was working in Ohio journalism, writing criticism and reportage while honing a graceful, measured style. During the 1860 presidential campaign he coauthored a favorable life of Abraham Lincoln, a high-profile effort that brought him national notice. In the early 1860s he was appointed U.S. consul at Venice, where he observed European politics and daily life at close range. The experience yielded two influential travel books, Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, which introduced American readers to a reflective, observant narrator more interested in social textures than in grand tours. Those books also prepared his turn toward fiction grounded in lived detail.
Returning to the United States in the later 1860s, Howells joined the Atlantic Monthly, first as a member of the editorial staff and then as editor during the 1870s. The post gave him a platform to publish and guide important American voices while articulating realism as a literary ideal. He helped bring regional writers and humorists to wide attention and encouraged contemporaries including Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. His own early novels and sketches, such as Their Wedding Journey, explored travel, courtship, and manners with a gently comic tone that would darken as his social concerns sharpened.
The 1880s and early 1890s marked Howells’s peak as a novelist of contemporary life. A Modern Instance examined the pressures that erode marriage in a commercial culture, while The Rise of Silas Lapham portrayed a self-made Boston businessman confronting the claims of status and conscience. Indian Summer refined his interest in mature sentiment, and A Hazard of New Fortunes widened his canvas to the urban conflicts of New York, including labor unrest and class friction. Alongside fiction, essays such as Criticism and Fiction and his "Editor's Study" pieces in Harper’s Magazine argued for realism’s ethical purpose and against sensational romance.
Howells’s social conscience widened in the wake of late nineteenth-century labor conflicts, and he became more explicit about economic inequality and civic responsibility. He admired Tolstoy’s moral example, promoted Scandinavian and Russian drama and fiction, and used criticism to advocate humane, democratic art. His utopian satire A Traveler from Altruria, later continued in Through the Eye of the Needle, scrutinized American capitalism. Opposing jingoism after the Spanish-American War, he wrote the short story Editha, a pointed critique of martial enthusiasm. He also used his stature to support emerging writers, notably helping introduce Paul Laurence Dunbar to a national audience with a widely read introduction.
In later years Howells balanced fiction with memoir and literary portraiture, including Literary Friends and Acquaintance, My Literary Passions, and My Mark Twain, which record his encounters and principles with urbane candor. He remained a sought-after arbiter of taste well into the early twentieth century, publishing across genres while living in the cultural centers of the Northeast. He died in 1920. Today he is remembered as the foremost American spokesman for realism: an editor who opened doors, a critic who made a case for ordinary life in art, and a novelist whose best books—especially The Rise of Silas Lapham—retain classroom and scholarly attention.
Historical Context
William Dean Howells, born 1 March 1837 in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and deceased 11 May 1920 in New York, spanned the American transition from Civil War fracture to Progressive Era reform. Editor, critic, novelist, dramatist, and travel writer, he became the leading statesman of literary realism, shaping a national taste that turned from romantic heroics to ordinary lives and social ethics. His career, stretching from midcentury printing offices to magazine modernity, intersects with Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and early twentieth‑century urbanization. Across novels, farces, essays, and reminiscences, his work maps the rise of magazines, the authority of Boston‑Cambridge culture, and the subsequent pull of New York’s commercial publishing.
Howells’s Ohio upbringing anchored his democratic sensibility. The son of printer‑editor William Cooper Howells, he learned typesetting in small river towns linked by canals and railroads, absorbing the rhythms of frontier markets, courthouse politics, and Methodist revivals. That early immersion in journalism and local civic life informed later portraits of provincial aspiration and ethical testing, and underwrote historical syntheses such as Stories of Ohio. His autobiographical depictions of boyhood community, apprenticeships, and the coming of modern conveniences connect the Midwest to broader national change, foreshadowing themes of mobility, self‑improvement, and the pressure of respectability that recur throughout his fiction, essays, and travel sketches.
Howells’s national profile rose when his campaign Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860) helped secure appointment as U.S. consul at Venice (1861–1865). Viewing the American Civil War from abroad while watching the Italian Risorgimento, he confronted parallel struggles over sovereignty and citizenship. Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867) signal his lifelong mediation between Old World manners and New World democracy. The art galleries, piazzas, and lodging houses of Europe became comparative laboratories for American identity, informing later transatlantic scenes and his skepticism about aristocratic pretension. European realism and naturalism, from Balzac to Zola, and the psychological nuance of George Eliot shaped his criteria for truth in narrative art.
On returning, Howells entered the Boston‑Cambridge nexus of letters, first assisting at The Atlantic Monthly (from 1866) and serving as its editor from 1871 to 1881. In a city animated by the legacies of Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell, he cultivated a generation of realists and regionalists, publishing Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charles W. Chesnutt, and George W. Cable. The Atlantic’s serial culture created a national conversation in which manners, class, and conscience could be analyzed issue by issue. Howells’s own stories of courtship, business, and professional life radiate from that milieu of parlor debate, lecture platforms, and cultivated periodical audiences.
Industrial capitalism and rapid urbanization provided his enduring subject. Railroads, trusts, and speculative booms marked the Gilded Age, while the Panics of 1873 and 1893 exposed the volatility of success. Howells anatomized the ethics of enterprise, the fragility of reputations, and the social theater of Boston and New York drawing rooms. His characters grapple with credit, advertising, real estate, and factory labor as moral as well as economic forces. By tracing the migration of provincials to metropolitan centers and the negotiations between old families and new money, he registered the remaking of class boundaries and the burdens of conspicuous virtue in an acquisitive republic.
Transformations in gender roles and professional life were central to his realism. The post‑bellum expansion of women’s higher education, the opening of medical schools and hospitals to female practitioners, and public debates over divorce and custody law furnished both plots and social inquiry. Howells explored the double standards governing reputation, the vocational ambitions of middle‑class women, and the rhetoric of self‑help that often masked structural limits. Courtship narratives intersect with clinic, newsroom, and courtroom settings to test the viability of companionate marriage in an urban, media‑saturated culture. His sympathetic treatment of women’s autonomy reflects progressive currents moving from Boston reform circles into mainstream fiction.
Modern mobility reshaped manners and gave Howells a stage. Pullman sleeping‑cars, ocean steamers, grand hotels, and therapeutic resorts such as Saratoga Springs created new spaces for chance encounters and social masquerade. The proliferation of depots, timetables, and parlors generated comedic misunderstandings and ethical trials as travelers negotiated anonymity and intimacy. Serialized travelogues and later volumes like London Films and Seven English Cities record the democratization of the Grand Tour, including the American habit of measuring selfhood against foreign art and custom. Wedding journeys, silver‑anniversary tours, and the rituals of sightseeing became instruments for testing sincerity, cultural aspiration, and the limits of cosmopolitan tolerance.
Howells’s advocacy of regional realism broadened the map of American letters. He encouraged portrayals of New England villages, Maine coasts, Vermont hill towns, and Ohio river communities with attention to dialect, craft, and local economies. This emphasis on place grounded moral debate in observable custom and landscape, tempering melodrama with social fact. By placing provincial life in dialogue with Boston and New York gentility, he emphasized continuity rather than rupture across the nation’s diverse environments. The country inn, the boardinghouse, the family farm, and the small‑town newspaper reappear as crucibles where aspiration, restraint, and communal judgment shape character across multiple novels and sketches.
Immigration and ethnic pluralism formed the human backdrop of Howells’s urban narratives. The late nineteenth century brought Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European populations into Boston and New York neighborhoods, altering labor markets, street life, and religious landscapes. Howells’s interest in democratic fairness led him to depict interclass encounters on sidewalks, in tenements, and at settlement‑style meetings, while his travel writing probed the myths Americans carried abroad and brought home. He treated accent, custom, and dress as social facts rather than caricature, aligning with his broader insistence that literature attend to ordinary lives. Assimilation, prejudice, and civic reform become recurrent pressures on plot and conscience.
Howells’s politics drifted steadily toward humane reform. The labor conflicts of the Knights of Labor era, the 1886 Haymarket affair, the Homestead and Pullman strikes, and city corruption scandalized middle‑class sensibilities while exposing the costs of industrial order. Writing the Harper’s Magazine columns The Editor’s Study and The Editor’s Easy Chair after 1886, he argued for ethical realism and expressed sympathy for labor’s claims. His utopian romances about Altruria, composed in the 1890s and 1900s, translate these debates into narrative experiments that contrast cooperative ideals with competitive capitalism. Fiction and essay here converge on questions of wages, leisure, consumer desire, and civic responsibility.
No American writer of his era thought more systematically about literary work as work. The rise of national magazines, subscription libraries, and advertising created new routes to authorship and new hazards of fashion. Howells serialized novels, reviewed contemporaries, and lectured on the business of letters, arguing in The Man of Letters as a Man of Business for fair pay and professional standards. International copyright reform achieved in the 1891 Chace Act and the evolution of literary agents altered his trade. He observed how contracts, deadlines, and readership metrics shaped narrative form, a concern equally evident in his plays tailored to the commercial stage.
Contemporaneous science and psychology reframed his aesthetic. Pragmatist currents associated with William James and Charles S. Peirce, the spread of social survey methods, and popular interest in nervous disorders complicated confident moral certainties. In essays such as A Psychological Counter‑Current in Recent Fiction, Howells defended realism against sensationalism while acknowledging the mind’s opacity. Urban life, with its churn of stimuli, became a proving ground for attention, memory, and motive. His prose favors incremental observation, conversational cadence, and ethical scruple, resisting grand plot contrivance. Even his flirtations with the ghostly or uncanny, as in later tales, remain tethered to the plausible and the civic.
Religion’s transformation from revivalist authority to private conscience is a subterranean theme. The Second Great Awakening left behind camp‑meeting fervor, itinerant preachers, and charismatic impostures across the Ohio Valley, material he later historicized and fictionalized. As scientific naturalism, historical criticism of scripture, and Unitarian rationalism matured in Boston and Cambridge, Howells staged conflicts between inherited piety and modern skepticism. Sermons, prayer meetings, and church committees become settings for weighing social kindness against doctrinal rightness. His historical imagination explored how communal belief regulates reputation, while his later novels return to the tensions among conversion, deception, and reform that marked both frontier and metropolis.
Transatlantic debates over realism defined his critical persona. In essays on Emile Zola and Henry James, he weighed naturalism’s determinism and psychological nuance against his own democratic ethics of the everyday. He promoted colleagues whose work explored local truths rather than aristocratic exotica, and he endorsed Charles W. Chesnutt’s examinations of race as a national reality. His friendship with Mark Twain, whose careers he championed from the Atlantic years forward, fortified a broadly American idiom of humor and moral inquiry. Charles Dudley Warner, who supplied an early biographical account of Howells, belonged to this circle of magazine men who professionalized taste and discourse.
Technological novelty furnished Howells with comic material and social diagnosis. Elevators, telephones, typewriters, and the standardized space of depots and hotel corridors tightened urban rhythms and redistributed chance. His farces built from misdelivered messages, mistaken identities, and crowded conveyances, staging the etiquette of strangers in motion. Beyond laughter, these plays anatomize the bureaucracy of schedules and the performance of class in transient public rooms. The mundane mechanics of modernity—registers, tickets, uniforms, bells—become plot devices and social indices. They connect his theater to his fiction’s interest in how technology structures attention, accelerates desire, and exposes the frictions of democratic sociability.
After leaving the Atlantic in 1881 and moving increasingly within New York publishing from the late 1880s, Howells wrote memoirs—Literary Friends and Acquaintance, My Literary Passions, Years of My Youth—that archive a republic of letters from Ohio printing offices to Manhattan editorial boards. The Spanish‑American War of 1898 and subsequent imperial ventures sharpened his anti‑imperialist convictions, echoed in essays and fictional satires of militarist rhetoric. Progressive Era reform campaigns around municipal corruption, consumer protection, and social welfare deepened his emphasis on conscience and civic sympathy. His later travel books on England, Spain, and Switzerland continue the habit of measuring American change against foreign continuities.
By the time of his death in 1920, Howells was widely called the Dean of American Letters, a title reflecting not only prolific output but stewardship of a literary method and public ethic. His novels of business and marriage, his comedies of transit and technology, his essays on fellow writers and the market, and his travel and historical volumes together register the making of modern American life. He bridged the Atlantic while training attention on the commonplace, insisting that citizenship, not spectacle, is the novelist’s subject. Later realists and early modernists inherited his magazine culture, his respect for social fact, and his measured, reformist conscience.
Synopsis (Selection)
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS by Charles Dudley Warner
A concise biographical and critical introduction appraising Howells’s life, realist principles, and place in American letters.
A FOREGONE CONCLUSION
In Venice, an American family’s friendship with an earnest Italian priest leads to a delicate cross-cultural entanglement where faith, duty, and love collide.
A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE
A genteel romance begins aboard St. Lawrence River steamers and ends in quietly ironic fashion, probing class expectations and national manners.
A MODERN INSTANCE
The unraveling of Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord’s marriage exposes the social and moral stresses around love, ambition, and divorce in post–Civil War America.
A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
Two linked novellas of steadfast affection and social comedy, tracing lovers who endure delay, misunderstanding, and changing fortunes before resolution.
A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA: A Romance
A visitor from a cooperative utopia tours Gilded Age America, interrogating its inequalities and competitive creed through conversations with businessmen, workers, and reformers.
AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY: An Idyl of Saratoga
At Saratoga Springs, summer flirtations and candid observation reveal the rituals and pretenses of fashionable society during a brief, charming idyll.
ANNIE KILBURN
A reform-minded woman returns to her New England mill town and confronts the limits of philanthropy, the complexities of conscience, and the realities of class.
APRIL HOPES
An engaged Boston couple navigates the tender frictions and comic misunderstandings of courtship, testing ideals of romance against everyday temperament.
DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE
A pioneering woman physician, vacationing in a seaside resort, must balance professional duty and personal feeling when a medical crisis—and a suitor—arise.
FENNEL AND RUE
A poet’s foray into advertising tangles art with commerce and entangles hearts, satirizing literary celebrity and the theatrical world.
INDIAN SUMMER
A middle-aged American in Florence is drawn between youthful ardor and mature companionship, reconsidering desire, responsibility, and second chances.
QUESTIONABLE SHAPES
Stories of ambiguous marvels and psychological hauntings where the strange brushes the everyday, leaving motives and meanings intriguingly unresolved.
RAGGED LADY
A modest New England girl’s foray into high society and European travel brings suitors and tests of character, ending in a quietly earned happiness.
THE COAST OF BOHEMIA
A young woman ventures into Boston’s artistic circles, meeting editors, painters, and pretensions as she learns the costs and rewards of a creative life.
THE KENTONS
An Ohio judge and his family, traveling east and abroad, face social missteps and a daughter’s perilous romance, revealing the tender protectiveness of family ties.
THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK
Crossing the Atlantic unchaperoned, a New England singer encounters shipboard society and first love, with questions of propriety never far astern.
THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD
A gifted but hard-driving New Englander rises from rural inn to urban hotelier, his ambition chafing against loyalty, love, and class.
THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
Based on an Ohio episode, a charismatic impostor claims divinity and sways a frontier community, exploring faith, delusion, and social contagion.
THE MINISTER'S CHARGE (The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker)
A Boston minister’s impulsive patronage of a country youth exposes both to the perils of charity, urban ambition, and misread responsibility.
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
After a financial crime, intertwined families weigh justice against compassion, tracing how wrongdoing ripples through courts, commerce, and private conscience.
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM
A self-made paint magnate seeks social ascendance and faces a moral crossroads, testing the worth of money, character, and the American success story.
THE STORY OF A PLAY
An earnest dramatist’s first production runs afoul of actors, managers, and investors, giving a wry inside view of the theatre’s art–commerce tangle.
THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE: A Romance
A sequel to Altruria in which American narrators measure their own society against the cooperative commonwealth, probing what must be surrendered for justice.
THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER: A Boy's Town Story
A midwestern boy repeatedly plots to run away, finding adventure, temptation, and the homely pull of community in gently comic episodes.
THE MARCH FAMILY TRILOGY (Their Wedding Journey; A Hazard of New Fortunes; Their Silver Wedding Journey)
Following Basil and Isabel March from a honeymoon travelogue of American manners to a panoramic New York novel of magazine-making and labor-capital strife and finally a reflective return tour, the trilogy traces middle-class ideals, mobility, and conscience over time.
CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY and Other Stories
Whimsical holiday and children’s tales that turn moral lessons into playful narratives, celebrating generosity, imagination, and family.
BOY LIFE
Sketches of midwestern boyhood—pranks, scrapes, and small awakenings—drawn with affectionate realism and gentle humor.
BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT
Compact studies of moral hesitation and eerie coincidence, where the ordinary tips toward the uncanny at the edges of experience.
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE and Other Things in Prose and Verse
A late miscellany of short fiction and occasional verse ranging from domestic dramas to reflective pieces tinged by war and memory.
A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY and Other Stories
Primarily Italianate and travel-linked tales in which duty and desire clash amid picturesque settings and social nuance.
BUYING A HORSE
A humorous monologue on the trials of purchasing a horse, lampooning sales patter, gullibility, and buyer’s remorse.
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS: A Morality
An allegorical Christmas pageant that blends festivity with a simple ethical appeal to charity and reconciliation.
A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT: A Comedy
A comedy of manners about a portrait and its sitter, gently exposing self-deception, artistic vanity, and the hazards of first impressions.
BRIDE ROSES: A Scene
A brief dramatic sketch centered on courtship and social tact, catching a transitional moment with light irony.
ONE-ACT FARCES (A Likely Story; Evening Dress; Five O'CLOCK TEA; The Albany Depot; The Elevator; The Garotters; The Parlor Car; The Register; The Sleeping-Car)
Sprightly, situation-driven comedies of manners—often set in trains, hotels, and drawing rooms—built on mistaken identities, overheard conversations, and the absurdities of everyday respectability.
BY THE SEA and Other Poems
Reflective, conversational verse on nature, travel, domestic affections, and the passing scene, marked by clarity more than high rhetoric.
VENETIAN LIFE
An expatriate’s portrait of Venice—its rituals, dialect, seasons, and trades—observed with patient realism and wry affection.
ITALIAN JOURNEYS
Reports from the road across Italy’s cities and byways, balancing art and history with the foibles of travel.
ROMAN HOLIDAYS and Others
Essays on Rome and Italian scenes that mingle archeology, anecdote, and the everyday life of the modern city.
SUBURBAN SKETCHES
Vignettes of New England suburban habits and characters, turning small routines into social miniatures.
FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS
An American traveler’s encounters with Spanish landscapes, art, inns, and crowds, rendered in crisp, curious prose.
A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN
A light chronicle of village life amid the Alps, attentive to ordinary people as much as panorama.
LONDON FILMS
Impressionistic ‘films’ of London’s streets, spectacles, and types, noted with a flâneur’s eye and journalist’s pace.
SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
Portraits of provincial England—its industries, histories, and civic character—seen through a visiting realist’s lens.
STORIES OF OHIO: An Illustrated History of Ohio
A popular history told in episodic narratives from indigenous cultures and frontier days through statehood and growth, designed for general readers.
CRITICISM AND FICTION: A Collection of Essays
Howells sets out the case for literary realism—truth to ordinary life, moral seriousness, and social breadth—against sensational romance.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship
Memoir-portraits of contemporaries in letters, tracing friendships, editorial life, and the making of a literary generation.
LITERATURE AND LIFE
Essays linking aesthetics to everyday conduct and civic feeling, exploring what literature owes to society and vice versa.
MY LITERARY PASSIONS
An autobiographical tour of the books and authors that shaped Howells, from youth’s enthusiasms to mature convictions.
IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS and Other Essays
Playful, pointed dialogues and essays that let Howells examine public issues and cultural figures at an oblique, satiric angle.
MODERN ITALIAN POETS: Essays and Versions
Critical introductions and translations that bring 19th-century Italian poets to English readers, with commentary on style and national character.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION
An essay identifying a humane, ethical drift running against stark naturalism in contemporary novels.
THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
A candid argument that authorship is a trade as well as an art, contending with markets, magazines, and money.
EMILE ZOLA
A measured appraisal of Zola’s naturalism—its social aims, artistic methods, and moral provocations.
HENRY JAMES
An affectionate, incisive study of James’s narrative art, emphasizing technique, subtlety, and the evolution of realism.
CARL SCHURZ
A memorial sketch of the German-American statesman, honoring his public service and liberal principles.
A BOY'S TOWN
An autobiographical evocation of mid-19th-century Ohio childhood, preserving the feel of games, talk, and local lore.
YEARS OF MY YOUTH
A reflective memoir of formative years, tracing family, apprenticeship in journalism, and the path toward authorship.
The Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)
Introduction:
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Howells, William Dean, author, b. in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, 1 March, 1837. His ancestors on the father's side were Welsh Quakers, and people of substance; his great-grandfather introduced the manufacture of flannel into his town and built three mills; his grandfather, impelled by his democratic sympathies, emigrated to this country, and became an ardent Methodist; while his father adopted the beliefs of Swedenborg, in which young Howells was educated. In all these generations the family was a cultivated race, living in an atmosphere of books and moral and literary refinement. His father had, for the time and place, a good collection of books, but it was mostly poetry, and familiarity with this doubtless decided the nature of his early literary efforts. Almost as soon as he could read he began to make verses and put them in type in his father's printing-office. In his inherited literary tastes and refinement and liberal and undogmatic religious tendency, in the plain living of his early years and his learning a trade, in his contact with a thoroughly democratic society, in the early habit of self-dependence and the knowledge of the realities of life, it is evident what has given the man his charm as a writer, his courage of opinion, his sturdy Americanism, and his profound sympathy with common life. When he was three years old his father removed to Hamilton, Ohio, and bought the Hamilton “Intelligencer,” a weekly journal, in the office of which Howells learned to set type before he was twelve years old. In 1849, the elder Howells, unable, conscientiously, to support a slave-holding president, sold his newspaper, and removed with is family to Dayton, Ohio, where he purchased the Dayton “Transcript,” a semi-weekly newspaper, which he turned into a daily. After a struggle of two years, this enterprise completely failed, not, however, from any want of industry, for all the sons worked at the case, and young Howells often set type till eleven o'clock at night, and then arose at four in the morning to deliver newspapers. The announcement of the catastrophe in business was accepted with American insouciance. “We all,” says the author, “went down to the Miami river, and went in swimming.” In expectation, which was disappointed, of taking the superintendence of a projected paper-mill, the elder Howells took his family to Greene county, where they remained a year. During this year, in a log house, the author had his sole experience of roughing it, away from the amenities of civilization, an experience which he has turned to account in a charming sketch of his boyhood. In 1851, when the father was clerk of the house at the state capital, Howells worked as a compositor on the “Ohio State Journal,” earning four dollars a week, which he contributed to the family treasury. It was here that he made the acquaintance of John J. Piatt, an intimacy which stimulated his poetical tendency. In 1851 the family removed to Ashtabula, and all found employment on the “Sentinel,” which the elder Howells purchased; but this newspaper was subsequently transferred to Jefferson, where it continued under the management of the family. Before this last removal the talents of the young author had attracted attention; at the age of nineteen he was the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati “Gazette,” and when he was twenty-two he was made the news editor of the “State Journal” at Columbus. During his residence in Columbus he published poems in the “Atlantic Monthly,” the first entitled “By the Dead,” and in one year five others, “The Poet's Friends,” “The Pilot's Story,” “Pleasure Pain,” “Lost Beliefs,” and “Andenken.” Upon the nomination of Lincoln in 1860, Howells wrote his life, and from the profits of this book, $160, he made his first excursion into the world, visiting Montreal and Boston, where he formed the acquaintance of James Russell Lowell, then editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” who introduced him to Oliver Wendell Holmes. By President Lincoln he was appointed consul to Venice, and he resided in that city from 1861 till 1865, devoting his leisure hours to the mastering of the Italian language and literature, and the general cultivation of letters. The earliest fruits of this residence were a series of papers on “Venetian Life,” first published in book-form in England, in which was at once recognized the advent of a new writer of uncommon power, one capable of conveying to the reader exquisite delight merely by the charm of an original style, as vivid as it was subtle and flexible. The sketches had the novelty of realism; never was Venice so perfectly photographed, and the reader was agreeably surprised to find that the intrinsic romance of the city of the lagoons was heightened rather than diminished by this delicate and sympathetic analysis. Returning home well equipped for newspaper work, by a knowledge of foreign politics and literature, and the acquisition of French and Italian, Howells was for some time an editorial writer on the New York “Tribune” and the “Times,” and a salaried contributor of the “Nation,” and in 1866 he was made by James T. Fields assistant editor of the “Atlantic Monthly.” In 1872 he became its editor, which post he retained till 1881, when he resigned and was succeeded by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Besides his strictly editorial work on this periodical, he contributed to it a vast amount of criticism, miscellaneous sketches, and fiction. During this period he was an occasional contributor to the “North American Review” of papers on Italian literature, and, residing in Cambridge, he was a valuable member of the coterie that gathered at Longfellow's house to assist in the translation of Dante. About this time. he began his acquaintance with Spanish literature. While editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” he edited with delightful introductory essays a series of “Choice Autobiographies.” His first tentative attempt at a story in “Their Wedding Journey” was so successful with the public that it determined his career as a writer of fiction, and since he dissolved his connection with the “Atlantic” he has pursued the career of a professional man of letters, devoting himself mainly to fiction, with the occasional production of plays, travel sketches, and literary criticism. Since 1881 most of his work has had a preliminary publication in “The Century” and “Harper's Magazine.” In 1882-’3 Mr. Howells was again in Europe with his family, spending some time in England and revisiting Italy. Since his return his residence has been in Boston. In 1886 he made a salaried connection with “Harper's,” taking charge of a new and critical department called the “Editor's Study,” and contributing exclusively to its pages. In this department he exposes and explains his theory of modern fiction, taking part with signal courage and acumen in that conflict which is always raging, under one name or another, between the idealists and the realists. To his apprehension there is a new spirit in the world, or a new era in fiction, which concerns itself with life as it actually is, has a profound sympathy with humanity, and reckons more important the statement of the facts of life than the weaving these facts, by any process of selection, which in a painter would be called “composition,” into any sort of story, more or less ideal. Anything ceases to be commonplace when it is frankly and exactly stated. In this new literary movement, the novels of the past seem unreal and artificial. This tendency is best exemplified in the modern Russian school, which is remorseless in its fidelity to the actual, the lowly, the sordid, the sinful, and the sorrowful in life, and accepts the inevitable, the fateful, without sarcasm, but with a tender pity. Because he portrays life as it is, or rather has the power of transferring the real, throbbing, human life, and not merely its incidents, to his pages as no writer has done before, Mr. Howells regards Count Leo Tolstoi as the first of all novelists that have written. Howells adds to his theory of realism the notion that genius is merely the power of taking conscientious pains. In practice he is a methodical and industrious worker, with a keen literary conscience, mindful of the responsibilities of a writer, serious in mind, but genial and even gay in temperament, and a delightful talker and companion. Mr. Howells married in Paris, 24 Dec., 1862, Elinor G. Mead, sister of Larkin G. Mead, the sculptor. They have three children, two girls and a boy. Besides his occasional uncollected writings, some translations, and four popular farces, “The Parlor Car,” “The Sleeping Car,” “The Register,” and “The Elevator,” the writings of Mr. Howells are “Poems of Two Friends,” with John J. Piatt (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); “Life of Abraham Lincoln” (1860); “Venetian Life” (London and New York, 1866); “Italian Journeys” (1867); “Suburban Sketches” (1868); “o Love Lost, a Poem of Travel” (1868); “Their Wedding Journey” (Boston, 1871); “A Chance Acquaintance” (1873); “A Foregone Conclusion” (1874); “Out of the Question” (Boston, 1876): “Life of Rutherford B. Hayes” (New York, 1876); “A Counterfeit Presentment” (1877); “Choice Biographies,” edited with essays (8 vols., 1877-’8); “The Lady of the Aroostook” (1878); “The Undiscovered Country” (1880); “A Fearful Responsibility, and other Tales” (1882); “Dr. Breen's Practice” (1883); “A Modern Instance” (1883); “A Woman's Reason” (1884); “Three Villages” (1885): “The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1885); “Tuscan Cities” (1885); “A Little Girl among the Old Masters,” drawings by his daughter (1886); “The Minister's Charge” 11886); “Indian Summer” (1886); “Modern Italian Poets” (1887); and “April Hopes” (New York, 1887).
Novels:
A FOREGONE CONCLUSION
I
As Don Ippolito passed down the long narrow calle or footway leading from the Campo San Stefano to the Grand Canal in Venice, he peered anxiously about him: now turning for a backward look up the calle, where there was no living thing in sight but a cat on a garden gate; now running a quick eye along the palace walls that rose vast on either hand and notched the slender strip of blue sky visible overhead with the lines of their jutting balconies, chimneys, and cornices; and now glancing toward the canal, where he could see the noiseless black boats meeting and passing. There was no sound in the calle save his own footfalls and the harsh scream of a parrot that hung in the sunshine in one of the loftiest windows; but the note of a peasant crying pots of pinks and roses in the campo came softened to Don Ippolito's sense, and he heard the gondoliers as they hoarsely jested together and gossiped, with the canal between them, at the next gondola station.
The first tenderness of spring was in the air though down in that calle there was yet enough of the wintry rawness to chill the tip of Don Ippolito's sensitive nose, which he rubbed for comfort with a handkerchief of dark blue calico, and polished for ornament with a handkerchief of white linen. He restored each to a different pocket in the sides of the ecclesiastical talare, or gown, reaching almost to his ankles, and then clutched the pocket in which he had replaced the linen handkerchief, as if to make sure that something he prized was safe within. He paused abruptly, and, looking at the doors he had passed, went back a few paces and stood before one over which hung, slightly tilted forward, an oval sign painted with the effigy of an eagle, a bundle of arrows, and certain thunderbolts, and bearing the legend, CONSULATE OF THE UNITED STATES, in neat characters. Don Ippolito gave a quick sigh, hesitated a moment, and then seized the bell-pull and jerked it so sharply that it seemed to thrust out, like a part of the mechanism, the head of an old serving-woman at the window above him.
"Who is there?" demanded this head.
"Friends," answered Don Ippolito in a rich, sad voice.
"And what do you command?" further asked the old woman.
Don Ippolito paused, apparently searching for his voice, before he inquired, "Is it here that the Consul of America lives?"
"Precisely."
"Is he perhaps at home?"
"I don't know. I will go ask him."
"Do me that pleasure, dear," said Don Ippolito, and remained knotting his fingers before the closed door. Presently the old woman returned, and looking out long enough to say, "The consul is at home," drew some inner bolt by a wire running to the lock, that let the door start open; then, waiting to hear Don Ippolito close it again, she called out from her height, "Favor me above." He climbed the dim stairway to the point where she stood, and followed her to a door, which she flung open into an apartment so brightly lit by a window looking on the sunny canal, that he blinked as he entered. "Signor Console," said the old woman, "behold the gentleman who desired to see you;" and at the same time Don Ippolito, having removed his broad, stiff, three-cornered hat, came forward and made a beautiful bow. He had lost for the moment the trepidation which had marked his approach to the consulate, and bore himself with graceful dignity.
It was in the first year of the war, and from a motive of patriotism common at that time, Mr. Ferris (one of my many predecessors in office at Venice) had just been crossing his two silken gondola flags above the consular bookcase, where with their gilt lance-headed staves, and their vivid stars and stripes, they made a very pretty effect. He filliped a little dust from his coat, and begged Don Ippolito to be seated, with the air of putting even a Venetian priest on a footing of equality with other men under the folds of the national banner. Mr. Ferris had the prejudice of all Italian sympathizers against the priests; but for this he could hardly have found anything in Don Ippolito to alarm dislike. His face was a little thin, and the chin was delicate; the nose had a fine, Dantesque curve, but its final droop gave a melancholy cast to a countenance expressive of a gentle and kindly spirit; the eyes were large and dark and full of a dreamy warmth. Don Ippolito's prevailing tint was that transparent blueishness which comes from much shaving of a heavy black beard; his forehead and temples were marble white; he had a tonsure the size of a dollar. He sat silent for a little space, and softly questioned the consul's face with his dreamy eyes. Apparently he could not gather courage to speak of his business at once, for he turned his gaze upon the window and said, "A beautiful position, Signor Console."
"Yes, it's a pretty place," answered Mr. Ferris, warily.
"So much pleasanter here on the Canalazzo than on the campos or the little canals."
"Oh, without doubt."
"Here there must be constant amusement in watching the boats: great stir, great variety, great life. And now the fine season commences, and the Signor Console's countrymen will be coming to Venice. Perhaps," added Don Ippolito with a polite dismay, and an air of sudden anxiety to escape from his own purpose, "I may be disturbing or detaining the Signor Console?"
"No," said Mr. Ferris; "I am quite at leisure for the present. In what can I have the honor of serving you?"
Don Ippolito heaved a long, ineffectual sigh, and taking his linen handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead with it, and rolled it upon his knee. He looked at the door, and all round the room, and then rose and drew near the consul, who had officially seated himself at his desk.
"I suppose that the Signor Console gives passports?" he asked.
"Sometimes," replied Mr. Ferris, with a clouding face.
Don Ippolito seemed to note the gathering distrust and to be helpless against it. He continued hastily: "Could the Signor Console give a passport for America ... to me?"
"Are you an American citizen?" demanded the consul in the voice of a man whose suspicions are fully roused.
"American citizen?"
"Yes; subject of the American republic."
"No, surely; I have not that happiness. I am an Austrian subject," returned Don Ippolito a little bitterly, as if the last words were an unpleasant morsel in the mouth.
"Then I can't give you a passport," said Mr. Ferris, somewhat more gently. "You know," he explained, "that no government can give passports to foreign subjects. That would be an unheard-of thing."
"But I thought that to go to America an American passport would be needed."
"In America," returned the consul, with proud compassion, "they don't care a fig for passports. You go and you come, and nobody meddles. To be sure," he faltered, "just now, on account of the secessionists, they do require you to show a passport at New York; but," he continued more boldly, "American passports are usually for Europe; and besides, all the American passports in the world wouldn't get you over the frontier at Peschiera. You must have a passport from the Austrian Lieutenancy of Venice."
Don Ippolito nodded his head softly several times, and said, "Precisely," and then added with an indescribable weariness, "Patience! Signor Console, I ask your pardon for the trouble I have given," and he made the consul another low bow.
Whether Mr. Ferris's curiosity was piqued, and feeling himself on the safe side of his visitor he meant to know why he had come on such an errand, or whether he had some kindlier motive, he could hardly have told himself, but he said, "I'm very sorry. Perhaps there is something else in which I could be of use to you."
"Ah, I hardly know," cried Don Ippolito. "I really had a kind of hope in coming to your excellency."
"I am not an excellency," interrupted Mr. Ferris, conscientiously.
"Many excuses! But now it seems a mere bestiality. I was so ignorant about the other matter that doubtless I am also quite deluded in this."
"As to that, of course I can't say," answered Mr. Ferris, "but I hope not."
"Why, listen, signore!" said Don Ippolito, placing his hand over that pocket in which he kept his linen handkerchief. "I had something that it had come into my head to offer your honored government for its advantage in this deplorable rebellion."
"Oh," responded Mr. Ferris with a falling countenance. He had received so many offers of help for his honored government from sympathizing foreigners. Hardly a week passed but a sabre came clanking up his dim staircase with a Herr Graf or a Herr Baron attached, who appeared in the spotless panoply of his Austrian captaincy or lieutenancy, to accept from the consul a brigadier-generalship in the Federal armies, on condition that the consul would pay his expenses to Washington, or at least assure him of an exalted post and reimbursement of all outlays from President Lincoln as soon as he arrived. They were beautiful men, with the complexion of blonde girls; their uniforms fitted like kid gloves; the pale blue, or pure white, or huzzar black of their coats was ravishingly set off by their red or gold trimmings; and they were hard to make understand that brigadiers of American birth swarmed at Washington, and that if they went thither, they must go as soldiers of fortune at their own risk. But they were very polite; they begged pardon when they knocked their scabbards against the consul's furniture, at the door they each made him a magnificent obeisance, said "Servus!" in their great voices, and were shown out by the old Marina, abhorrent of their uniforms and doubtful of the consul's political sympathies. Only yesterday she had called him up at an unwonted hour to receive the visit of a courtly gentleman who addressed him as Monsieur le Ministre, and offered him at a bargain ten thousand stand of probably obsolescent muskets belonging to the late Duke of Parma. Shabby, hungry, incapable exiles of all nations, religions, and politics beset him for places of honor and emolument in the service of the Union; revolutionists out of business, and the minions of banished despots, were alike willing to be fed, clothed, and dispatched to Washington with swords consecrated to the perpetuity of the republic.
"I have here," said Don Ippolito, too intent upon showing whatever it was he had to note the change in the consul's mood, "the model of a weapon of my contrivance, which I thought the government of the North could employ successfully in cases where its batteries were in danger of capture by the Spaniards."
"Spaniards? Spaniards? We have no war with Spain!" cried the consul.
"Yes, yes, I know," Don Ippolito made haste to explain, "but those of South America being Spanish by descent"—
"But we are not fighting the South Americans. We are fighting our own Southern States, I am sorry to say."
"Oh! Many excuses. I am afraid I don't understand," said Don Ippolito meekly; whereupon Mr. Ferris enlightened him in a formula (of which he was beginning to be weary) against European misconception of the American situation. Don Ippolito nodded his head contritely, and when Mr. Ferris had ended, he was so much abashed that he made no motion to show his invention till the other added, "But no matter; I suppose the contrivance would work as well against the Southerners as the South Americans. Let me see it, please;" and then Don Ippolito, with a gratified smile, drew from his pocket the neatly finished model of a breech-loading cannon.
"You perceive, Signor Console," he said with new dignity, "that this is nothing very new as a breech-loader, though I ask you to observe this little improvement for restoring the breech to its place, which is original. The grand feature of my invention, however, is this secret chamber in the breech, which is intended to hold an explosive of high potency, with a fuse coming out below. The gunner, finding his piece in danger, ignites this fuse, and takes refuge in flight. At the moment the enemy seizes the gun the contents of the secret chamber explode, demolishing the piece and destroying its captors."
The dreamy warmth in Don Ippolito's deep eyes kindled to a flame; a dark red glowed in his thin cheeks; he drew a box from the folds of his drapery and took snuff in a great whiff, as if inhaling the sulphurous fumes of battle, or titillating his nostrils with grains of gunpowder. He was at least in full enjoyment of the poetic power of his invention, and no doubt had before his eyes a vivid picture of a score of secessionists surprised and blown to atoms in the very moment of triumph. "Behold, Signor Console!" he said.
"It's certainly very curious," said Mr. Ferris, turning the fearful toy over in his hand, and admiring the neat workmanship of it. "Did you make this model yourself?"
"Surely," answered the priest, with a joyous pride; "I have no money to spend upon artisans; and besides, as you might infer, signore, I am not very well seen by my superiors and associates on account of these little amusements of mine; so keep them as much as I can to myself." Don Ippolito laughed nervously, and then fell silent with his eyes intent upon the consul's face. "What do you think, signore?" he presently resumed. "If this invention were brought to the notice of your generous government, would it not patronize my labors? I have read that America is the land of enterprises. Who knows but your government might invite me to take service under it in some capacity in which I could employ those little gifts that Heaven"—He paused again, apparently puzzled by the compassionate smile on the consul's lips. "But tell me, signore, how this invention appears to you." "Have you had any practical experience in gunnery?" asked Mr. Ferris.
"Why, certainly not."
"Neither have I," continued Mr. Ferris, "but I was wondering whether the explosive in this secret chamber would not become so heated by the frequent discharges of the piece as to go off prematurely sometimes, and kill our own artillerymen instead of waiting for the secessionists?"
Don Ippolito's countenance fell, and a dull shame displaced the exultation that had glowed in it. His head sunk on his breast, and he made no attempt at reply, so that it was again Mr. Ferris who spoke. "You see, I don't really know anything more of the matter than you do, and I don't undertake to say whether your invention is disabled by the possibility I suggest or not. Haven't you any acquaintances among the military, to whom you could show your model?"
"No," answered Don Ippolito, coldly, "I don't consort with the military. Besides, what would be thought of a priest," he asked with a bitter stress on the word, "who exhibited such an invention as that to an officer of our paternal government?"
"I suppose it would certainly surprise the lieutenant-governor somewhat," said Mr. Ferris with a laugh. "May I ask," he pursued after an interval, "whether you have occupied yourself with other inventions?"
"I have attempted a great many," replied Don Ippolito in a tone of dejection.
"Are they all of this warlike temper?" pursued the consul.
"No," said Don Ippolito, blushing a little, "they are nearly all of peaceful intention. It was the wish to produce something of utility which set me about this cannon. Those good friends of mine who have done me the honor of looking at my attempts had blamed me for the uselessness of my inventions; they allowed that they were ingenious, but they said that even if they could be put in operation, they would not be what the world cared for. Perhaps they were right. I know very little of the world," concluded the priest, sadly. He had risen to go, yet seemed not quite able to do so; there was no more to say, but if he had come to the consul with high hopes, it might well have unnerved him to have all end so blankly. He drew a long, sibilant breath between his shut teeth, nodded to himself thrice, and turning to Mr. Ferris with a melancholy bow, said, "Signor Console, I thank you infinitely for your kindness, I beg your pardon for the disturbance, and I take my leave."
"I am sorry," said Mr. Ferris. "Let us see each other again. In regard to the inventions,—well, you must have patience." He dropped into some proverbial phrases which the obliging Latin tongues supply so abundantly for the races who must often talk when they do not feel like thinking, and he gave a start when Don Ippolito replied in English, "Yes, but hope deferred maketh the heart sick."
