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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Rise of Silas Lapham," William Dean Howells masterfully explores the complexities of American society during the late 19th century. This unabridged work is a keen social commentary that delves into the life of Silas Lapham, a self-made man who strikes gold in the paint industry yet finds himself ensnared in the web of social pretensions and moral dilemmas. Through Howells' meticulous realism, readers encounter Lapham's aspirations and failures while navigating a world rife with class distinctions, ethical conflicts, and the deep-rooted American dream. Howells employs a subtle humor and an incisive narrative style, weaving together a rich tapestry of dialogue and internal conflict that vividly portrays the changing social landscape of his time. William Dean Howells, often referred to as the "Dean of American Letters," was pivotal in the development of American realism. A close observer of his contemporaries, Howells' own experiences in the literary and social milieu of the time shaped his perspective on class and morality. His commitment to realistic portrayals of American life was revolutionary, aligning with his belief in literature's social function, which profoundly influenced both his writing and the narrative trajectory of "Silas Lapham." This profound exploration of ambition, identity, and societal expectations make "The Rise of Silas Lapham" indispensable for readers interested in the evolution of American literature and culture. Howells' nuanced characterization invites readers to reflect on their own perceptions of success and morality, making it a timeless classic that resonates even in today's societal context. Recommended for both literary scholars and general readers alike, this novel provides a window into a pivotal era in American history. 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: 2024
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THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A man paints his way to Boston’s bright parlors only to find that the hardest surface to cover is his own conscience.
William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham examines the tension between prosperity and principle with the calm precision of a master realist. Set amid the social currents of post–Civil War Boston, the novel follows a self-made industrialist whose good fortune invites a new set of moral tests. Its drama unfolds not in duels or melodramas but in conversations, business decisions, and the subtle pressures of drawing-room expectations. By tracing how money touches manners, marriage, and identity, Howells crafts a study of character that is as lucid as it is humane, revealing the human cost of success and the temptations of appearance.
This novel is a classic because it helped define American literary realism—an art committed to truthful representation of ordinary life. Howells, often called the dean of that movement, rejects romantic exaggeration in favor of social nuance, ethical ambiguity, and everyday speech. His achievement lies in making quiet choices thunder, showing how the moral life unfolds in small moments. The book’s influence radiates through later American social fiction, which increasingly centered on work, money, and class. Its careful attention to the textures of experience—habits, rooms, routines—offered a template for serious novels about modern life and established a standard for moral clarity without moralism.
The Rise of Silas Lapham broadened the American novel’s scope by placing a businessman at its center and treating his world with sympathetic scrutiny. That focus drew literature closer to the realities of industrial capitalism, tracing how market pressures shape private values. Critics and teachers have long recognized the book’s deft balance: it neither glorifies wealth nor despises it, but examines how character contends with circumstance. Its quiet ironies, firm ethical framework, and sociological acuity have influenced how subsequent writers portray professional life, class aspiration, and the rituals of polite society. In showing that commerce could be serious subject matter, Howells permanently expanded the novel’s agenda.
Key facts anchor its significance. The Rise of Silas Lapham was written by William Dean Howells and first appeared in serial form in 1884–1885, before publication in book form in 1885. It is set primarily in Boston during the Gilded Age, when new fortunes challenged older social hierarchies. The story concerns a self-made paint manufacturer whose financial success prompts entry into elite circles, where business decisions and social ambitions converge. Howells’s intention was not to stage sensational events but to depict recognizable lives with moral precision, allowing readers to assess motives, customs, and consequences in a faithful mirror of American society.
At its heart lies a simple, potent premise: a family that has risen quickly must learn what their new position demands—and what it cannot buy. Silas Lapham, born outside the centers of power, brings industrious habits and a celebrated mineral paint to Boston’s avenues. As his public stature grows, so do the complexities of his private responsibilities. Howells follows these pressures into parlors and offices, mapping the frictions between inherited codes of conduct and the improvisations of newcomers. The result is not a tale of spectacle but of choices—personal, professional, and ethical—made under the watchful gaze of a society keen to measure worth.
Howells’s broader purpose aligned with his lifelong advocacy of realism: to present life as it is lived, not as romance would polish it. He believed that ordinary people, observed in ordinary circumstances, reveal the most compelling drama. In this novel, he extends that creed to the worlds of commerce and social ritual, where good intentions can be strained by ambition and where success invites constant evaluation. He asks readers to engage not in hero worship or condemnation, but in sympathetic judgment—an examination of the ways conscience navigates opportunity, affection, and public scrutiny. The moral field is intricate, yet the narrative remains clear-eyed and fair.
Stylistically, Howells employs measured prose, gentle irony, and exact social observation. Dialogue carries weight, revealing character through cadence as much as content. Rooms, clothes, dinners, and offices are described not for ornament but for evidence; each detail shows the pressures and performances of class. The pacing favors reflection over sensation, drawing readers into the slow accretion of motives and consequences. Humor softens severity, while restraint prevents caricature. The narrative method exemplifies a signature realist virtue: an even temper that trusts readers to weigh competing claims. By illuminating surfaces—the sheen of paint, the choreography of introductions—Howells leads us toward the depths beneath them.
The historical setting is crucial. In the Gilded Age, rapid industrial growth created fortunes that unsettled older social orders, especially in a city like Boston, with its established families and civic traditions. New wealth sought legitimacy; old wealth guarded prestige. Business expanded the nation’s possibilities, yet it also raised questions about fairness, honor, and responsibility. Howells captures this moment through a lens both local and national: Boston’s parlors and streets become a stage for American dilemmas. The novel maps the protocols of respectability, the language of manners, and the hard arithmetic of commerce, showing how individuals negotiate the expectations of class in a time of change.
The themes that animate the book remain resonant: integrity under pressure, authenticity versus display, and the uneasy alliance between moral ideals and material success. Howells is fascinated by surfaces—literal and figurative—and by the human longing to render them presentable. Paint becomes a motif for identity: what we show, what we cover, and what inevitably seeps through. Family loyalty, romantic feeling, and civic duty intersect with the market’s demands, inviting readers to consider what counts as true worth. The narrative does not lean on grand pronouncements; instead, it proposes that character is proved by choices made when no one applauds.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s relevance is immediate. Questions about social mobility, networking, corporate responsibility, and the role of personal branding echo across its pages. The pressures that accompany sudden success—visibility, expectation, and ethical compromise—are hardly confined to the nineteenth century. Howells’s evenhanded vantage offers a useful counterpoint to cynical satire and celebratory myth alike. He reminds us that prosperity can clarify as well as distort, and that communities judge not only what we earn but how we earn it. In an age of public performance, the book’s attention to appearances and their costs feels both timely and instructive.
To read The Rise of Silas Lapham unabridged is to encounter Howells’s full design: a complete, patient anatomy of ambition, conscience, and class. Its lasting appeal lies in the steadiness of its gaze—sympathetic, skeptical, and exact. The novel offers the satisfactions of social comedy and the gravity of moral inquiry, inviting readers to test their values against its characters’ trials. It remains engaging because it respects the ordinary as the source of truth, recognizing that lives turn on quiet decisions. Here is a classic that continues to speak clearly: success demands a reckoning, and the measure of a life is found in how it is met.
Synopsis
Silas Lapham rises from a Vermont farmhand to a prosperous Boston manufacturer after discovering a deposit of mineral paint on his family land. Industrious, plain-spoken, and proud of having made his money himself, he stakes his identity on the success of his paint. He moves his wife, Persis, and their two daughters, Irene and Penelope, to Boston, where new wealth meets entrenched tradition. As the novel opens, Silas enjoys national sales, newspaper attention, and a confident sense of having arrived. Yet his language, habits, and blunt business manners set him apart from the city’s old families, establishing the central tension between success and acceptance.
Determined to confirm his new status, Lapham purchases a lot in the Back Bay and begins building a grand house, a tangible emblem of arrival. Persis, practical and morally steady, supports him yet questions the costs—financial and social—of such display. The older daughter, Penelope, wry and observant, watches Boston society with ironic distance, while Irene, admired for her beauty, becomes the apparent focus of social hopes. Lapham’s offices bustle; the factory in Vermont anchors the family’s story to its origins. Architectural plans, furnishing choices, and visiting lists become measures of aspiration, as the family learns where money opens doors and where it does not.
Tom Corey, a well-bred young man from an established Boston family, seeks meaningful work and is drawn to Lapham’s thriving enterprise. His request to join the paint business surprises both households: the Coreys view it as unconventional, and Lapham wonders whether refinement can mix with trade. Lapham tests Tom’s intentions, then hires him, finding that the newcomer’s tact and education complement his own shrewdness. In the office, Tom studies formulas, markets, and the company’s national distribution, while gradually coming to know the Laphams at home. His presence quietly connects two social worlds, bringing possibilities for partnership—and friction—beyond the counting room.
The families meet with cautious curiosity. Bromfield Corey, Tom’s cultivated father, regards industry with detached amusement, whereas Mrs. Corey worries about appearances and prospects. Lapham, blunt yet eager to do right, labors to present himself well at formal visits and dinners where small mistakes grow large. Conversations about culture, taste, and history reveal gaps between old Boston and new enterprise. Yet business remains the shared language: Lapham’s paint, its colors and uses, impress even skeptics. Social rituals—calls, carriages, invitations—map the terrain of inclusion and exclusion, and the Laphams learn that entry into Boston’s inner circle requires more than checks and stonework.
A summer by the seaside brings the Laphams and Tom Corey into easier proximity, away from rigorous drawing-room etiquette. Walks, drives, and daylight visits soften formal barriers and encourage misunderstandings. Tom’s considerate manner and frequent calls seem to single out the lovely Irene, whose promise of a brilliant match excites family expectations. Penelope, quieter and sharper in conversation, finds herself drawn into confidences she neither sought nor welcomes. Glances, silences, and small decisions shape a delicate triangle whose implications none of them fully face. The season ends with feelings unspoken but deepened, returning everyone to Boston with more at stake.
Meanwhile, strains appear in Lapham’s business. A former associate presses unsettled accounts and unfavorable terms, and speculative investments tighten cash flow just as competition intensifies. The new house, increasingly expensive, becomes a symbol of overextension. Bankers watch balances; creditors multiply; and Lapham confronts an offer that would relieve pressure at the cost of another’s ignorance. His wife reminds him of early hardships and the principles that once guided every deal. Decisions about discounts, credit, and expansion shift from routine to consequential, and the man who defined himself by bold action must consider restraint, disclosure, and fairness to strangers who trust his word.
Social hopes falter as rumors and realities converge. Invitations do not materialize; polite calls take on a cooler tone. A formal dinner intended to confirm respectability exposes awkward contrasts in taste and speech, leaving all parties chastened. The span between Lapham’s granite self-confidence and the Coreys’ inherited ease widens, even as Tom’s daily work binds the families in practical ways. At home, Persis urges caution; the daughters confront the limits of their expectations. The uncompleted Back Bay house stands in scaffolding, costly and mute, while the office ledger fills with numbers that no longer promise security. The balance between pride and prudence narrows.
Private and public pressures crest together. The unspoken complications of affection must at last be acknowledged, forcing choices that consider loyalty, kindness, and the difference between sentiment and resolve. In the office, a decisive moment tests Lapham’s integrity, setting immediate advantage against long-term honor. Advice arrives from unexpected quarters, and consequences follow quickly. The family faces sudden adjustments, measuring what can be conserved and what must be surrendered. Without detailing outcomes, the narrative presents a reckoning in which reputation, livelihood, and domestic harmony depend on a few irrevocable acts that reveal the character beneath prosperity and the cost of keeping one’s conscience.
The Rise of Silas Lapham concludes its portrait of American success by emphasizing moral substance over spectacle. Howells presents a self-made man confronting boundaries that money cannot erase: the etiquette of class, the duties of fairness in commerce, and the claims of family feeling. The story moves from confident ascent through testing events toward a sober understanding of what endures when fortune shifts. Its measured realism favors ordinary decisions over sensational twists, proposing that true worth lies in honest dealing and sympathy, not display. Readers come away with a clear sense of the era’s social map and the choices that define character.
Historical Context
William Dean Howells situates The Rise of Silas Lapham in Boston and its environs during the late 1870s and early 1880s, a quintessential Gilded Age cityscape marked by rapid industrial growth, social stratification, and urban transformation after the Civil War (1861–1865). The novel moves between the commercial core, the aging South End, and the newly fashionable Back Bay, with recollections of rural Vermont, where Lapham’s mineral paint originates. Boston in this period combined venerable Puritan institutions with modern finance, rail connections, and national markets. The city’s reconstruction after the 1872 fire and its Back Bay land-reclamation project created a public stage on which new wealth confronted old lineage and tastes.
The time frame follows the waning of Reconstruction (ending 1877) and the stabilization of national finances by the Resumption Act (effective 1879), when Boston prospered amid tighter, gold-based credit. The social map is precise: Nankeen Square (modeled on South End squares like Worcester or Chester Square) reflects fading mid-century gentility; Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay signify peak status. Workplaces range from offices downtown to factories supplied by rail and coastal shipping. The setting exposes a city negotiating the terms of modern capitalism—its speculation, advertising, and corporate ethics—under the eye of an entrenched Brahmin elite that policed taste and connections as carefully as contracts.
Post–Civil War industrialization reshaped New England between 1865 and 1885. Boston’s port, rail hubs (e.g., Boston & Albany), and finance connected manufacturers to national markets in textiles, shoes, iron goods, and building materials. The paint industry grew with urban rebuilding, linseed oil refining, and factory-produced pigments; mineral paints from Vermont, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey supplied affordable protective coatings for wood and brick. The novel aligns with this surge: Silas Lapham’s fortune derives from a Vermont mineral deposit leveraged by rail distribution and modern machinery. His ascent mirrors thousands of postwar entrepreneurs who turned natural resources and mechanical process into branded commodities for a rapidly constructing nation.
The Great Boston Fire of November 9–10, 1872 destroyed roughly 65 acres and 776 buildings, inflicting more than $70 million in losses. It incinerated much of the commercial district south of Milk and Summer Streets, precipitating a massive rebuilding campaign of brick, granite, and iron. Insurance failures and reconstruction contracts reverberated through banks, suppliers, and trades. The fire accelerated modernization of water, fire, and building codes, and spurred demand for construction materials and finishes. Howells’s world assumes this rebuilt Boston: an environment where an industrial supplier of paints could find consistent demand, and where the city’s physical renewal became a proving ground for reputations, credit, and taste.
Boston’s Back Bay reclamation, largely undertaken between 1857 and the early 1880s by the Boston Water Power Company and the Commonwealth, filled tidal flats with gravel hauled by rail from Needham. The result was a gridded, sanitary, and fashionable district centered on Commonwealth Avenue, with Beacon Street townhouses and Copley Square landmarks. Architects Peabody & Stearns and H. H. Richardson shaped its look. Ownership here signaled arrival into elite circles. In the novel, Lapham’s decision to build on Beacon Street embodies the social meaning of Back Bay: a calculated public declaration of refinement and legitimacy, set against the scrutiny of established families who read façades as character.
The Boston Brahmin elite—families like the Cabots, Lowells, Peabodys, Lawrences, and Adamses—wielded authority through lineage, education (Harvard), philanthropy, and clubs such as the Somerset Club (founded 1852) and, later, the St. Botolph Club (1880). Their cultural institutions included the Boston Athenæum and, from 1876 at Copley Square, the Museum of Fine Arts. They prized understatement, public service, and transatlantic polish. In the book, the Corey family embodies this stratum, filtering business and marriage through taste and character. Lapham’s encounters with Brahmin codes dramatize a historical social regime in which cultural capital rationed access to reputational credit as powerfully as ledgers did.
The Panic of 1873 inaugurated a prolonged contraction known as the Long Depression (1873–1879), driven by railroad overbuilding, speculative finance (notably the collapse of Jay Cooke & Company on September 18, 1873), and tightening credit. Thousands of firms failed as prices and wages fell. The federal Resumption Act of January 14, 1875, restoring specie payments on January 1, 1879, successfully anchored the dollar but further constrained liquidity, rewarding well-capitalized, cautious firms and punishing the overleveraged. Boston banks recovered relatively quickly, yet merchants and manufacturers operated under conservative lending and close scrutiny. A later shock, the Panic of 1884, erupted in New York with the failure of Grant & Ward and the Marine National Bank in May, unsettling credit lines nationwide. British investors—heavy holders of U.S. railroad and industrial securities—grew wary, underscoring the era’s transatlantic capital dependence. In this cyclical environment, fortunes made in boom years could evaporate when inventories stalled or paper values deflated. Howells channels these dynamics directly into Lapham’s arc: the hero’s paint business, real-estate commitments, and dealings with outside capital become vulnerable under tight money. Crucially, the moral question—whether to unload dubious assets on unsuspecting foreign investors—mirrors a widely discussed ethical fault line of the period, when distressed proprietors sometimes disguised liabilities to survive. Lapham’s refusal marks a critique of speculative opportunism normalized by the age’s crises, while his bankruptcy registers the human cost of honor in a system primed for ruthless self-preservation.
Anglo-American finance integrated the U.S. and British capital markets in the 1870s–1880s. London houses like Baring Brothers and Rothschilds underwrote American railroad and industrial securities; by the 1880s, British investors held billions in U.S. assets, including an estimated quarter of railroad bonds. Syndicates sought natural-resource ventures and manufacturing concerns promising exportable returns. This capital brought scrutiny and the temptation to window-dress accounts. Howells threads this phenomenon into the plot via a prospective sale to English investors: the moral calculus of disclosing impairments to foreign buyers reflects the period’s transatlantic due diligence gaps and the pressure American proprietors felt to meet British standards—or exploit their distance.
U.S. insolvency law shifted dramatically when the federal Bankruptcy Act of 1867—enacted during postwar turbulence—was repealed in 1878, leaving no permanent national bankruptcy regime until 1898. Creditors and debtors navigated failures through state assignments, receiverships, compositions, and reputational negotiations mediated by local banks and trade associations. Stigma attached to failure, but mechanisms existed to preserve going concerns if owners behaved honorably. Howells builds on this legal and moral terrain: Lapham’s collapse proceeds through negotiated remedies rather than a uniform federal process, highlighting the community’s judgment. His conscientious conduct—eschewing fraud, accepting losses—aligns with a contemporary ideal of commercial citizenship amid imperfect legal safety nets.
The rise of mass print culture and advertising transformed business after 1865. Agencies like N. W. Ayer & Son (founded 1868) placed national campaigns; newspaper circulations ballooned—The Boston Globe launched in 1872—cultivating the reporter’s interview as a genre. Manufacturers branded goods and promised scientific efficacy to consumers reading weeklies and ladies’ magazines. The novel opens with journalist Bartley Hubbard extracting Lapham’s life story, dramatizing the new publicity economy. Lapham’s paint is marketed through puffery, testimonials, and logos, capturing the era’s blend of innovation and exaggeration. Howells thus situates character within a marketplace where reputation could be purchased, shaped, or imperiled in print.
The Civil War’s legacy permeated Northern society. Veterans joined the Grand Army of the Republic (founded 1866), which organized commemorations, charity, and political influence. Memorial Day observances spread after General John A. Logan’s 1868 order; a federal law recognized the holiday in 1888. Wartime service conferred civic authority and a moral vocabulary of sacrifice, duty, and comradeship. Silas Lapham, like many self-made industrialists of his cohort, is marked by Union service, which undergirds his sense of honor and country. Howells taps this history to frame Lapham’s choices: military-tested integrity becomes the lens through which he evaluates profit, obligation, and fair dealing in peacetime commerce.
Boston’s urban geography shifted as the South End declined and Back Bay rose between the 1860s and 1880s. Horsecar lines and commuter rail reshaped residential choice; sanitary reforms and tree-lined boulevards drew wealth westward. South End squares, once elite, faced crowding and boarding-house conversion, while Beacon Street townhouses projected stability and pedigree. Real estate thus encoded class. In the novel, the Laphams’ move from Nankeen Square toward Back Bay signals a bid to rewrite status through architecture and address. Howells captures the social meanings of frontage, floor plans, and drawing rooms as instruments by which industrial fortunes sought to purchase entry into established circles.
Women’s roles in Boston evolved through education and public culture. The Harvard Annex (founded 1879, later Radcliffe College in 1894) and institutions like the Boston University School of Medicine (admitting women since 1873) expanded opportunities. Women’s clubs, church networks, and charitable societies extended influence beyond the home, while prevailing norms still prized domestic virtue. In the novel, the Lapham daughters, Penelope and Irene, encounter expectations around courtship, refinement, and conversational polish that reflect these transitions. The marriage plot—linking families across class boundaries—mirrors social practices in which women’s cultural capital, demeanor, and taste served as currencies equal to dowries or business alliances.
Labor organization surged in the 1870s and 1880s. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, grew to some 700,000 members by 1886, advocating the eight-hour day, cooperative enterprise, and inclusive membership. Boston saw strikes and shorter-hours agitation, especially in building trades and manufacturing. National flashpoints like the 1877 railroad strikes and the 1886 Haymarket affair shaped employer anxieties even in relatively genteel Boston. While Howells does not center strikes, his business milieu presumes wage pressures and the moral debate over paternalism versus market discipline. Lapham’s stance as an employer—firm yet mindful—echoes a wider negotiation between industrial capital and an increasingly organized workforce.
Cultural institutions consolidated elite authority in the 1870s–1880s. The Museum of Fine Arts opened at Copley Square in 1876; Trinity Church, designed by H. H. Richardson, was consecrated in 1877; the Boston Athenæum and the Massachusetts Historical Society fostered a classical canon. Clubs curated conversation, art patronage, and philanthropy, separating taste from mere expenditure. The Coreys’ serene confidence in paintings, travel, and measured speech manifests this ecosystem. Howells uses their world to test Lapham’s instincts, showing how cultural capital regulated markets: contracts, introductions, and even investment opportunities often flowed through galleries and parlors, where a misjudged word could be costlier than a mispriced barrel of paint.
As social critique, the book exposes the moral hazards of Gilded Age capitalism: speculative real estate, opaque accounts, and the temptation to shift losses onto remote investors. It portrays credit as a social judgment—part ledger, part character audit—thus indicting a system that rewards polish over principle. By dramatizing Lapham’s refusal to defraud and his ensuing ruin, Howells interrogates a political economy that externalizes risk and privatizes honor. The clash with Brahmin standards questions whether elite taste is a civic good or a gatekeeping device that preserves power while disclaiming responsibility for the rougher mechanics of wealth creation.
The narrative also scrutinizes class boundaries structured by Boston’s geography and institutions. It criticizes inequities that confound upward mobility even when merit and honesty are present, revealing how addresses, accents, and acquaintances determine outcomes. Domestic scenes probe gendered expectations that assign women the labor of cultural mediation in social alliances. The portrait of journalism and advertising underscores a public sphere vulnerable to sensation and manipulation. Taken together, the book functions as a political parable of its time: a call for ethical transparency in markets, humility in elites, and sympathy across classes, set against the concrete realities of postwar finance, city planning, and social hierarchy.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, and editor whose advocacy of literary realism shaped U.S. fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often called the 'Dean of American Letters,' he combined a prolific output of novels and essays with editorial leadership at major magazines. His best-known fiction, including The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Modern Instance, examined the ethics of business, marriage, and class with an observant, understated style. As a tastemaker and mediator between American and European traditions, he helped set the tone for a postwar national literature that favored ordinary life over romance and melodrama.
Howells grew up in Ohio, where early work in printing offices and newspapers provided practical training and access to books. His formal schooling was limited, but he educated himself widely through reading and journalism. As a young writer he published poems, sketches, and reviews, building a reputation in the regional press. The habits formed in the composing room—attention to language economy, accuracy, and the cadence of everyday speech—later informed his prose. Early encounters with New England writers and with European models encountered through periodicals oriented him toward a cosmopolitan, yet distinctly American, literary practice grounded in observed social detail.
In the late 1850s he emerged nationally as a journalist, and a campaign life of Abraham Lincoln brought him wider notice. During the Civil War era he served as a United States consul in Venice, an appointment that immersed him in European culture and broadened his perspective on art and society. From this experience came travel books such as Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, which balanced descriptive detail with reflective commentary. These works announced his preference for everyday scenes over sensational incident and demonstrated the poised, conversational tone that would characterize his later novels and critical essays.
Returning to the United States after his consular service, Howells joined The Atlantic Monthly, eventually rising to a leading editorial role. There he cultivated American realism, encouraging writers who shared his interest in ordinary characters and contemporary settings, and he helped introduce readers to authors such as Mark Twain and Henry James. Alongside his editorial work he produced early novels and travel fictions—Their Wedding Journey, A Chance Acquaintance, A Foregone Conclusion, and The Lady of the Aroostook—that explored manners, regional types, and the textures of travel. Critics praised his clarity and tact, noting his careful delineation of social nuance.
Howells’s mature realist fiction secured his reputation. A Modern Instance addressed the breakdown of a marriage in a commercializing society, while The Rise of Silas Lapham traced a businessman’s moral testing amid Boston’s social hierarchies. Indian Summer and The Minister’s Charge continued his interest in class, vocation, and the ties between country and city. A Hazard of New Fortunes, set around a magazine office in New York, widened his canvas to include labor conflict and urban change. Contemporary reviewers admired his fidelity to everyday speech and motive, though some desired sharper drama; later scholars value the irony and sympathy balancing his social critique.
As a critic and public intellectual, Howells articulated the principles of realism in essays and columns. Criticism and Fiction argued for truthfulness to ordinary experience and against sensational excess, while My Literary Passions surveyed the reading that shaped his taste. Writing in influential magazine forums, he supported international realists—especially Russian authors like Tolstoy and Turgenev—and advocated for emerging American talents. His portraits of contemporaries, including My Mark Twain in the early twentieth century, combined appraisal with affectionate remembrance. Across these writings he linked ethics and aesthetics, urging writers to observe accurately and to treat social issues with candor and restraint.
In later years Howells continued to publish novels, farces, stories, and autobiographical reflections, such as The Story of a Play and other late reminiscences. He remained active in the periodical world and was widely consulted on literary matters until his death in the early 1920s. His legacy endures in the central place of realism within American literary history and in the magazine culture he helped professionalize. Students and critics read his novels today for their portrait of Gilded Age society, their disciplined style, and their humane intelligence. He is remembered as a bridge between regional traditions and an international modern sensibility.
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM (Unabridged)
I
When Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the “Solid Men of Boston[1]” series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.
“Walk right in!” he called out to the journalist, whom he caught sight of through the door of the counting-room.
He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his large head in the direction of a vacant chair. “Sit down! I’ll be with you in just half a minute.”
“Take your time,” said Bartley, with the ease he instantly felt. “I’m in no hurry.” He took a note-book from his pocket, laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil.
“There!” Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the envelope he had been addressing.
“William!” he called out, and he handed the letter to a boy who came to get it. “I want that to go right away. Well, sir,” he continued, wheeling round in his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and facing Bartley, seated so near that their knees almost touched, “so you want my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man?”
“That’s what I’m after,” said Bartley. “Your money or your life.”
“I guess you wouldn’t want my life without the money,” said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong these moments of preparation.
“Take ’em both,” Bartley suggested. “Don’t want your money without your life, if you come to that. But you’re just one million times more interesting to the public than if you hadn’t a dollar; and you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham. There’s no use beating about the bush.”
“No,” said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge foot and pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside.
“In personal appearance,” wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue, “Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head droops somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of massive shoulders.”
“I don’t know as I know just where you want me to begin,” said Lapham.
“Might begin with your birth; that’s where most of us begin,” replied Bartley.
A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham’s blue eyes.
“I didn’t know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that,” he said. “But there’s no disgrace in having been born, and I was born in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line — so well up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was about — well, let me see! — pretty near sixty years ago: this is ‘75, and that was ‘20. Well, say I’m fifty-five years old; and I’ve LIVED ’em, too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm, and ——”
“Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing?” Bartley cut in.
“Regulation thing,” said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly.
“Parents poor, of course,” suggested the journalist. “Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know,” said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.
Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect, “I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won’t interest you.”
“Oh yes, it will,” returned Bartley, unabashed. “You’ll see; it’ll come out all right.” And in fact it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.
“Mr. Lapham,” he wrote, “passed rapidly over the story of his early life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children. They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the fashion of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard’s Almanac[4].”
Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham’s unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other people would consider it sincere reporter’s rhetoric.
“You know,” he explained to Lapham, “that we have to look at all these facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying them. Sometimes a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would never think of.” He went on to put several queries, and it was from Lapham’s answers that he generalised the history of his childhood. “Mr. Lapham, although he did not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their reality.” This was what he added in the interview, and by the time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans are all pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances, their sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness of the check he had received, and had him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.
“Yes, sir,” said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to interrupt again, “a man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it’s too late to let her know [1q]that he sees it. Why, my mother —” he stopped. “It gives me a lump in the throat,” he said apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: “She was a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from daylight till dark — and from dark till daylight, I was going to say; for I don’t know how she got any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD. But it ain’t her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I’d run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet yet!” Bartley looked at Lapham’s No. 10 boots, and softly whistled through his teeth. “We were patched all over; but we wa’n’t ragged. I don’t know how she got through it. She didn’t seem to think it was anything; and I guess it was no more than my father expected of her. HE worked like a horse in doors and out — up at daylight, feeding the stock, and groaning round all day with his rheumatism, but not stopping.”
Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably, if he could have spoken his mind, he would have suggested to Lapham that he was not there for the purpose of interviewing his ancestry. But Bartley had learned to practise a patience with his victims which he did not always feel, and to feign an interest in their digressions till he could bring them up with a round turn.
“I tell you,” said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife into the writing-pad on the desk before him, “when I hear women complaining nowadays that their lives are stunted and empty, I want to tell ’em about my MOTHER’S life. I could paint it out for ’em.”
Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in. “And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm yourself?”
Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. “I didn’t discover it,” he said scrupulously. “My father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree blowing down. There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking to the roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with ’em. I don’t know what give him the idea that there was money in it, but he did think so from the start. I guess, if they’d had the word in those days, they’d considered him pretty much of a crank about it. He was trying as long as he lived to get that paint introduced; but he couldn’t make it go. The country was so poor they couldn’t paint their houses with anything; and father hadn’t any facilities. It got to be a kind of joke with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much as any one thing to make us boys clear out as soon as we got old enough. All my brothers went West, and took up land; but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was — and the graves. Well,” said Lapham, as if unwilling to give himself too much credit, “there wouldn’t been any market for it, anyway. You can go through that part of the State and buy more farms than you can shake a stick at for less money than it cost to build the barns on ’em. Of course, it’s turned out a good thing. I keep the old house up in good shape, and we spend a month or so there every summer. M’ wife kind of likes it, and the girls. Pretty place; sightly all round it. I’ve got a force of men at work there the whole time, and I’ve got a man and his wife in the house. Had a family meeting there last year; the whole connection from out West. There!” Lapham rose from his seat and took down a large warped, unframed photograph from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it, and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust. “There we are, ALL of us.”
“I don’t need to look twice at YOU,” said Bartley, putting his finger on one of the heads.
“Well, that’s Bill,” said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. “He’s about as brainy as any of us, I guess. He’s one of their leading lawyers, out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice. That’s his son — just graduated at Yale — alongside of my youngest girl. Good-looking chap, ain’t he?”
“SHE’S a good-looking chap,” said Bartley, with prompt irreverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham’s eyes, “What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too.”
“She is good,” said the father, relenting.
“And, after all, that’s about the best thing in a woman,” said the potential reprobate. “If my wife wasn’t good enough to keep both of us straight, I don’t know what would become of me.” “My other daughter,” said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face of singular gravity. “Mis’ Lapham,” he continued, touching his wife’s effigy with his little finger. “My brother Willard and his family — farm at Kankakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife — Baptist preacher in Kansas. Jim and his three girls — milling business at Minneapolis. Ben and his family — practising medicine in Fort Wayne.”
The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza. The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady’s face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it. “I presume,” he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk, “that we sha’n’t soon get together again, all of us.”
“And you say,” suggested Bartley, “that you stayed right along on the old place, when the rest cleared out West?”
“No o-o-o,” said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; “I cleared out West too, first off. Went to Texas. Texas was all the cry in those days. But I got enough of the Lone Star[3] in about three months, and I come back with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me.”
“Fatted calf business?” queried Bartley, with his pencil poised above his note-book.
“I presume they were glad to see me,” said Lapham, with dignity. “Mother,” he added gently, “died that winter, and I stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get. I worked round at the saw-mills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel — I always DID like a good horse. Well, I WA’N’T exactly a college graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to driving the stage after while, and by and by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired the tavern-stand, and — well to make a long story short, then I got married. Yes,” said Lapham, with pride, “I married the school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and PUT it off, as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, ‘Well, let’s paint up. Why, Pert,’— m’wife’s name’s Persis — ‘I’ve got a whole paint-mine out on the farm. Let’s go out and look at it.’ So we drove out. I’d let the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif’less kind of a Kanuck that had come down that way; and I’d hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude, and I tried it burnt; and I liked it. M’wife she liked it too. There wa’n’t any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern’s got that coat of paint on it yet, and it hain’t ever had any other, and I don’t know’s it ever will. Well, you know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all the while; and I presume I shouldn’t have tried it but I kind of liked to do it because father’d always set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I’d got the first coat on,”— Lapham called it CUT — “I presume I must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed it. I’ve had my share of luck in this world, and I ain’t a-going to complain on my OWN account, but I’ve noticed that most things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad, and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of father. Seemed to me I might ‘a taken more interest in it when he was by to see; but we’ve got to live and learn. Well, I called my wife out — I’d tried it on the back of the house, you know — and she left her dishes — I can remember she came out with her sleeves rolled up and set down alongside of me on the trestle — and says I, ‘What do you think, Persis?’ And says she, ‘Well, you hain’t got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham; you’ve got a GOLD-mine.’ She always was just so enthusiastic about things. Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt up out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great cry about non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what was in her mind. ‘Well, I guess it ain’t any gold-mine, Persis,’ says I; ‘but I guess it IS a paint-mine. I’m going to have it analysed, and if it turns out what I think it is, I’m going to work it. And if father hadn’t had such a long name, I should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint. But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and every package, big or little, has got to have the initials and figures N.L.f. 1835, S.L.t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried it in 1855.’”
“‘S.T. — 1860 — X.’ business,” said Bartley.
“Yes,” said Lapham, “but I hadn’t heard of Plantation Bitters then, and I hadn’t seen any of the fellow’s labels. I set to work and I got a man down from Boston; and I carried him out to the farm, and he analysed it — made a regular Job of it. Well, sir, we built a kiln, and we kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence of iron in the ore showed with the magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he found out that it contained about seventy-five per cent. of the peroxide of iron.”
Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of reverent satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little lingering uncertainty as to what peroxide was. He accented it as if it were purr-ox-EYED[2]; and Bartley had to get him to spell it.
“Well, and what then?” he asked, when he had made a note of the percentage.
“What then?” echoed Lapham. “Well, then, the fellow set down and told me, ‘You’ve got a paint here,’ says he, ‘that’s going to drive every other mineral paint out of the market. Why’ says he, ‘it’ll drive ’em right into the Back Bay!’ Of course, I didn’t know what the Back Bay was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I’d had ’em open before, but I guess I hadn’t. Says he, ‘That paint has got hydraulic cement in it, and it can stand fire and water and acids;’ he named over a lot of things. Says he, ‘It’ll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you want to use it boiled or raw; and it ain’t a-going to crack nor fade any; and it ain’t a-going to scale. When you’ve got your arrangements for burning it properly, you’re going to have a paint that will stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.’ Then he went into a lot of particulars, and I begun to think he was drawing a long-bow, and meant to make his bill accordingly. So I kept pretty cool; but the fellow’s bill didn’t amount to anything hardly — said I might pay him after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy; but every word he said was gospel. Well, I ain’t a-going to brag up my paint; I don’t suppose you came here to hear me blow.”
“Oh yes, I did,” said Bartley. “That’s what I want. Tell all there is to tell, and I can boil it down afterward. A man can’t make a greater mistake with a reporter than to hold back anything out of modesty. It may be the very thing we want to know. What we want is the whole truth; and more; we’ve got so much modesty of our own that we can temper almost any statement.”
Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone, and he resumed a little more quietly. “Oh, there isn’t really very much more to say about the paint itself. But you can use it for almost anything where a paint is wanted, inside or out. It’ll prevent decay, and it’ll stop it, after it’s begun, in tin or iron. You can paint the inside of a cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water won’t hurt it; and you can paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won’t. You can cover a brick wall with it, or a railroad car, or the deck of a steamboat, and you can’t do a better thing for either.”
“Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose,” suggested Bartley.
“No, sir,” replied Lapham gravely. “I guess you want to keep that as free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it. I never cared to try any of it on mine.” Lapham suddenly lifted his bulk up out of his swivel-chair, and led the way out into the wareroom beyond the office partitions, where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs stretched dimly back to the rear of the building, and diffused an honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and paint. They were labelled and branded as containing each so many pounds of Lapham’s Mineral Paint, and each bore the mystic devices, N.L.f. 1835 — S.L.t. 1855. “There!” said Lapham, kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of his boot, “that’s about our biggest package; and here,” he added, laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very small keg, as if it were the head of a child, which it resembled in size, “this is the smallest. We used to put the paint on the market dry, but now we grind every ounce of it in oil — very best quality of linseed oil — and warrant it. We find it gives more satisfaction. Now, come back to the office, and I’ll show you our fancy brands.”
It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom, with the rafters showing overhead in a cloudy perspective, and darkening away into the perpetual twilight at the rear of the building; and Bartley had found an agreeable seat on the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he was reluctant to leave. But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon was just beginning to glare in at the window. On shelves opposite Lapham’s desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering cylinders, and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top, the same label borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom. Lapham merely waved his hand toward these; but when Bartley, after a comprehensive glance at them, gave his whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where different tints of the paint showed through flawless glass, Lapham smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.
“Hello!” said Bartley. “That’s pretty!”
“Yes,” assented Lapham, “it is rather nice. It’s our latest thing, and we find it takes with customers first-rate. Look here!” he said, taking down one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.
Bartley read, “THE PERSIS BRAND,” and then he looked at Lapham and smiled.
“After HER, of course,” said Lapham. “Got it up and put the first of it on the market her last birthday. She was pleased.”
“I should think she might have been,” said Bartley, while he made a note of the appearance of the jars.
“I don’t know about your mentioning it in your interview,” said Lapham dubiously.
“That’s going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing else does. Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel.” It was in the dawn of Bartley’s prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles with Marcia had seriously begun.
“Is that so?” said Lapham, recognising with a smile another of the vast majority of married Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the rest think them supernal in intelligence and capability. “Well,” he added, “we must see about that. Where’d you say you lived?”
“We don’t live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place.”
“Well, we’ve all got to commence that way,” suggested Lapham consolingly.
“Yes; but we’ve about got to the end of our string. I expect to be under a roof of my own on Clover Street before long. I suppose,” said Bartley, returning to business, “that you didn’t let the grass grow under your feet much after you found out what was in your paint-mine?”
“No, sir,” answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the first days of his married life. “I went right back to Lumberville and sold out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint. And Mis’ Lapham was with me every time. No hang back about HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!”
Bartley laughed. “That’s the sort most of us marry.”
“No, we don’t,” said Lapham. “Most of us marry silly little girls grown up to LOOK like women.”
“Well, I guess that’s about so,” assented Bartley, as if upon second thought.
“If it hadn’t been for her,” resumed Lapham, “the paint wouldn’t have come to anything. I used to tell her it wa’n’t the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it was the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER.”
“Good!” cried Bartley. “I’ll tell Marcia that.”
“In less’n six months there wa’n’t a board-fence, nor a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in that whole region that didn’t have ‘Lapham’s Mineral Paint — Specimen’ on it in the three colours we begun by making.” Bartley had taken his seat on the window-sill, and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge foot close to Bartley’s thigh; neither of them minded that.
“I’ve heard a good deal of talk about that S.T. — 1860 — X. man, and the stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised in that way; and I’ve read articles about it in the papers; but I don’t see where the joke comes in, exactly. So long as the people that own the barns and fences don’t object, I don’t see what the public has got to do with it. And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn’t do to put mineral paint on it in three colours. I wish some of the people that talk about the landscape, and WRITE about it, had to bu’st one of them rocks OUT of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we used to have to do up on the farm; I guess they’d sing a little different tune about the profanation of scenery. There ain’t any man enjoys a sightly bit of nature — a smooth piece of interval with half a dozen good-sized wine-glass elms in it — more than I do. But I ain’t a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we were all a set of dumn Druids. I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape.”
“Yes,” said Bartley carelessly; “it was made for the stove-polish man and the kidney-cure man.”
“It was made for any man that knows how to use it,” Lapham returned, insensible to Bartley’s irony. “Let ’em go and live with nature in the WINTER, up there along the Canada line, and I guess they’ll get enough of her for one while. Well — where was I?”
“Decorating the landscape,” said Bartley.
“Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville, and it give the place a start too. You won’t find it on the map now; and you won’t find it in the gazetteer. I give a pretty good lump of money to build a town-hall, about five years back, and the first meeting they held in it they voted to change the name — Lumberville WA’N’T a name — and it’s Lapham now.”
“Isn’t it somewhere up in that region that they get the old Brandon red?” asked Bartley.
“We’re about ninety miles from Brandon. The Brandon’s a good paint,” said Lapham conscientiously. “Like to show you round up at our place some odd time, if you get off.”
“Thanks. I should like it first-rate. WORKS there?”
“Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the time I got started, the war broke out; and it knocked my paint higher than a kite. The thing dropped perfectly dead. I presume that if I’d had any sort of influence, I might have got it into Government hands, for gun-carriages and army wagons, and may be on board Government vessels. But I hadn’t, and we had to face the music. I was about broken-hearted, but m’wife she looked at it another way. ‘I guess it’s a providence,’ says she. ‘Silas, I guess you’ve got a country that’s worth fighting for. Any rate, you better go out and give it a chance.’ Well, sir, I went. I knew she meant business. It might kill her to have me go, but it would kill her sure if I stayed. She was one of that kind. I went. Her last words was, ‘I’ll look after the paint, Si.’ We hadn’t but just one little girl then — boy’d died — and Mis’ Lapham’s mother was livin’ with us; and I knew if times DID anyways come up again, m’wife’d know just what to do. So I went. I got through; and you can call me Colonel, if you want to. Feel there!” Lapham took Bartley’s thumb and forefinger and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee. “Anything hard?”
“Ball?”
Lapham nodded. “Gettysburg. That’s my thermometer. If it wa’n’t for that, I shouldn’t know enough to come in when it rains.”
Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences of wear. “And when you came back, you took hold of the paint and rushed it.”
“I took hold of the paint and rushed it — all I could,” said Lapham, with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in his autobiography. “But I found that I had got back to another world. The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country. My wife was at me all the time to take a partner — somebody with capital; but I couldn’t seem to bear the idea. That paint was like my own blood to me. To have anybody else concerned in it was like — well, I don’t know what. I saw it was the thing to do; but I tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off. I used to say, ‘Why didn’t you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was away?’ And she’d say, ‘Well, if you hadn’t come back, I should, Si.’ Always DID like a joke about as well as any woman I ever saw. Well, I had to come to it. I took a partner.” Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with which he had been till now staring into Bartley’s face, and the reporter knew that here was a place for asterisks in his interview, if interviews were faithful. “He had money enough,” continued Lapham, with a suppressed sigh; “but he didn’t know anything about paint. We hung on together for a year or two. And then we quit.”
