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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated)", readers are invited to explore the vast landscape of American literature through Howells' keen observation and nuanced storytelling. His literary style, characterized by a blend of realism and social critique, captures the complexities of American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This comprehensive collection allows readers to witness Howells' mastery in developing characters that navigate the intricate intersection of personal desire and societal expectations, reflecting the moral dilemmas of his time while also engaging themes of class, race, and identity. Enhanced by illustrations, this volume serves as both a visual and intellectual feast for literature enthusiasts. William Dean Howells, often dubbed the "Dean of American Letters," was a transformative figure in literature, advocating for realism and championing the works of other literary giants such as Mark Twain and Henry James. His background as a novelist, critic, and editor informed his literary approach, as he sought to present an authentic portrayal of American society. Howells' experiences, particularly during the cultural shifts of post-Civil War America, fueled his desire to illuminate social issues through his writing, making this collection not only a testament to his literary prowess but also his socio-political engagement. This illustrated anthology is highly recommended for scholars, students, and general readers seeking to delve into the foundations of modern American literature. Through Howells' perceptive lens, readers encounter a diverse array of characters and scenarios that are as relevant today as they were in his time. This volume not only enriches the literary canon but also provides invaluable insights into the historical and cultural contexts that shaped Howells' work. 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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William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume brings together twenty-seven long narratives by William Dean Howells, accompanied by Charles Dudley Warner’s biographical-critical essay, in a single illustrated collection that foregrounds the breadth of Howells’s achievement in American realism. By assembling major works from across his mature career—domestic studies, social comedies, urban and regional portraits, experiments in romance and reform—the collection enables sustained reading of recurring concerns and evolving techniques without fragmenting the author’s voice. Its scale allows readers to follow characters across linked books and to compare settings, situations, and tonal registers, producing a panoramic view of nineteenth-century American experience as rendered by one of its most influential novelists.
While centered on long-form narrative fiction, the contents represent a range of modes within the novelistic tradition: courtship and marriage narratives, business and professional chronicles, travel narratives, resort idylls, and speculative social romances. Two related Altrurian romances appear alongside realistic studies, and several titles explore theatrical and artistic milieux. The presence of Warner’s introductory essay provides a concise contemporary perspective on Howells’s life and art. Beyond that framing text, the focus here remains on Howells’s storytelling; readers should not expect plays, verse, letters, or diaries, but rather a sustained engagement with prose fiction in its varied subgenres as practiced by a principal advocate of realism.
Taken together, these works illuminate Howells’s abiding commitments: to portray ordinary lives with moral seriousness; to examine the pressures of class, commerce, and conscience; and to test the limits of idealism within practical society. His narratives balance sympathy with scrutiny, avoiding sensationalism in favor of credible motives, plausible consequences, and the incremental drama of manners. Settings shift from small towns to bustling cities and fashionable resorts, yet the emphasis remains on the ethics of everyday decisions. Throughout, readers encounter a lucid, often gently comic style, a finely tuned ear for American speech, and an insistence that literature serve as a truthful record of social reality.
A distinctive continuity is offered by the linked books following Basil and Isabel March—Their Wedding Journey, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Their Silver Wedding Journey—observing a marriage over time as it navigates travel, work, and the changing urban landscape. The early journey sketches the pleasures and awkwardness of modern transportation and public life; the New York sojourn examines the founding of a magazine amid competing ideals and market forces; the later journey revisits past routes with seasoned perspective. Without depending on plot surprises, these narratives reward attention to shifting expectations, marital partnership, and the negotiation between aspiration and responsibility in an increasingly mobile society.
At the center of Howells’s engagement with business and status stands The Rise of Silas Lapham, the portrait of a self-made paint manufacturer whose material success tests his sense of honor and his relationship to established Boston society. The novel’s interest lies not in melodramatic reversals but in the moral texture of decisions about money, taste, and belonging. Its Boston drawing rooms and offices become arenas where character is revealed through speech and custom. The book’s measured irony exemplifies Howells’s belief that realism can illuminate the social meanings of enterprise, ambition, and restraint, while granting dignity to both old families and new fortunes.
Other novels probe social ethics through domestic and civic dilemmas. A Modern Instance considers the strains that public ambition and private expectation place upon marriage, observing how legal and journalistic institutions shape intimate life. The Quality of Mercy explores collisions between economic interest and human accountability, asking what obligations persist when reputations and livelihoods are at stake. The Minister’s Charge (The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker) follows a young man’s uneasy initiation into urban labor and culture under well-meant guidance that proves complicated in practice. In each case, the drama arises from conflicting claims of duty, sympathy, justice, and self-preservation.
Several narratives focus keenly on women’s experience within the conventions of courtship, family, work, and health. Dr. Breen’s Practice portrays a woman physician negotiating professional identity and social skepticism. Annie Kilburn and April Hopes consider reformist zeal and youthful expectation as they encounter the realities of community and marriage. Indian Summer and Ragged Lady turn to the nuanced comedy of attraction, memory, and self-knowledge in settings shaped by tourism and taste. A Pair of Patient Lovers complements these concerns with a delicate attention to constancy and tact. These books examine the constraints and possibilities that late nineteenth-century norms posed for women and men alike.
Howells often drew the arts into his social canvas. The Coast of Bohemia examines the dreams and compromises of aspiring writers and illustrators, revealing the marketplaces and friendships that sustain or disappoint them. The Story of a Play opens the world of the theater, charting the practical and moral tests that attend stage production and reception. Fennel and Rue returns to literary life with an eye for professional rivalry and ethical ambiguity. Across these novels, cultural aspiration is inseparable from commerce, and the comedy of artistic society becomes a means of asking how truth, taste, and integrity can withstand the allure of success.
Two romances, A Traveler from Altruria and its sequel Through the Eye of the Needle, introduce an ideal society as a mirror to American customs, using courteous debate and anecdote to contrast cooperative principles with competitive norms. Their speculative premise sharpens Howells’s questions about labor, leisure, and justice without departing from his preference for dialogue and recognizable social settings. In a different key, The Leatherwood God revisits a historical episode of charismatic leadership and community credulity on the American frontier, examining the interplay of faith, authority, and skepticism. Questionable Shapes turns to moments when uncertainty shadows ordinary conduct, treated with characteristic reserve.
Mobility—physical, social, and imaginative—links many titles here. Their Wedding Journey and Their Silver Wedding Journey frame travel as a lens for observing national character. A Chance Acquaintance begins with strangers meeting in transit, testing the etiquette of disclosure and reserve. The Lady of the Aroostook places a young woman at sea, measuring independence against convention. The Kentons follows a family’s relocation and the adjustments demanded by unfamiliar places. The Landlord at Lion’s Head considers enterprise and hospitality, where local identity meets the flow of visitors. An Open-Eyed Conspiracy: An Idyl of Saratoga captures the season’s rituals at a celebrated resort. A Foregone Conclusion looks abroad to test American sensibilities.
Across these varied settings, Howells’s stylistic hallmarks remain consistent: patient exposition; irony that clarifies rather than ridicules; dialogue that registers region, class, and temperament; and a preference for credible causation over contrived suspense. His narrators often take readers into the ethics of perception—how a gesture or phrase may mean more than it seems—inviting judgment that is tempered by sympathy. Humor arises from social incongruity and earnestness rather than farce. By refining the everyday into art, these novels establish a durable mode of American realism whose influence rests on truthful, humane representation and a commitment to explore the moral significance of ordinary choice.
This volume offers more than convenient access to individual titles; it presents an integrated literary world in which characters, places, and concerns echo across decades of work. Read sequentially or thematically, the novels reward sustained attention to continuity and change in American life as modernization advanced. Warner’s introductory essay situates the author from a near-contemporary vantage, while the illustrations provide visual accompaniment that highlights period settings and manners. Together they frame a corpus whose insights into class, gender, work, art, and belief remain pertinent. The collection invites immersion in the measured pleasures of narrative crafted to illuminate ordinary lives.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, and editor who became the foremost public champion of literary realism in the United States. Active from the Civil War era through the early twentieth century, he guided taste as a magazine editor while producing a large body of fiction, travel writing, and essays. His influence—so extensive that contemporaries called him the "Dean of American Letters"—helped move American literature away from romantic melodrama toward nuanced portrayals of everyday life, class, and conscience. Howells is best remembered for novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham and for his critical advocacy of realism as a democratic art.
Raised in the Ohio River valley, Howells learned the printing trade early and worked as a journalist before he had much formal schooling. The pressroom served as his classroom: he read voraciously, developed a clean prose style, and gained a practical understanding of American politics and culture. In the 1860 presidential campaign he wrote a widely circulated biography of Abraham Lincoln, an effort that brought him national attention. During the Civil War period he served as a U.S. consul in Venice, an experience that deepened his engagement with European languages and literature and furnished material for the travel sketches that first made his name.
Howells returned from Europe with a keen eye for social detail and a realist’s suspicion of sensational plotting. In the later 1860s he published Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, followed by domestic pieces like Suburban Sketches, establishing himself as an urbane observer of manners. About this time he joined The Atlantic Monthly, rising to the editorship through the 1870s. From that influential perch he encouraged local-color writing and the careful study of ordinary behavior, publishing and promoting authors who would shape American letters, including Mark Twain and Henry James. His editorial policies helped institutionalize realism as both an aesthetic and an ethical commitment.
While editing, Howells steadily produced fiction. Their Wedding Journey mapped the textures of travel and marriage; A Modern Instance examined the social and legal meanings of divorce; and The Rise of Silas Lapham probed business morality and social aspiration in post–Civil War Boston. Indian Summer returned to the international scene with a gentler comedy of manners, and A Hazard of New Fortunes surveyed the conflicts of a rapidly changing New York. Critics often praised his psychological tact and social observation, while some readers wished for more dramatic incident. Howells held to the conviction that art should faithfully render common experience without sensationalism.
His critical writings articulated this creed. In Criticism and Fiction and in his long-running columns—first "The Editor’s Study," later "The Editor’s Easy Chair"—he argued for clear, truthful prose and an ethics of representation attentive to ordinary people. He used these platforms to comment on public affairs as well. In the wake of the Haymarket affair he questioned the justice of the proceedings, and in the era of overseas expansion he voiced anti-imperialist doubts, positions that drew controversy. As a tastemaker he also advocated for new voices, helping readers take seriously regional, immigrant, and African American authors who were expanding the compass of American realism.
In the 1890s and after, Howells experimented while holding to realist principles. A Traveler from Altruria and its sequel Through the Eye of the Needle used utopian dialogue to test American assumptions about class, work, and citizenship. He continued to write short stories and plays, and he produced children’s tales such as Christmas Every Day. His memoirs—Literary Friends and Acquaintance, My Literary Passions, and My Mark Twain—offer a candid record of the period’s literary networks and craft. These later works show a writer balancing social critique with humane humor, increasingly reflective about the responsibilities of art in a modern, industrial society.
Howells spent his later years centered in the Northeast, contributing steadily to magazines and revisiting earlier themes with a mellowed tone. By the time of his death in 1920 he had become a touchstone for discussions of American realism, both admired and debated. His novels—especially The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes—remain fixtures in surveys of nineteenth-century literature, valued for their humane scrutiny of class, work, marriage, and moral choice. Equally enduring is his editorial legacy: he helped establish the careers of major writers and set standards for literary discourse that continue to shape how American fiction is read.
Historical Context
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) wrote across the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era, and the span of this volume—from A Chance Acquaintance in 1873 to The Leatherwood God in 1916—registers those transformations. His reputation as the Dean of American Letters rested as much on his editorships and criticism as on fiction, so Charles Dudley Warner’s introductory essay situates him within the very age Warner and Mark Twain named in The Gilded Age (1873). The novels collected here trace the movement from provincial towns to transatlantic cities, from canal and steamboat to railway and ocean liner, and from romantic formulas to a program of American realism that Howells championed in magazine culture.
Born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on March 1, 1837, the son of a printer-editor, Howells learned the trade setting type and writing copy for frontier newspapers in Hamilton, Dayton, and Columbus. The young reporter absorbed the idioms of courthouse, parlor, and shop floor in a state knit together by the National Road, river packets, and the telegraph. These experiences underwrite the speech textures of A Boy’s Town recollection behind The Flight of Pony Baker (1902) and the provincial-to-urban trajectories that surface in Annie Kilburn, The Minister’s Charge, and The Kentons. In the prewar 1850s he also encountered the political journalism that fed his campaign Life of Abraham Lincoln (1860).
His Lincoln biography brought him national notice and, after the election, appointment by President Lincoln as United States consul at Venice (1861–1865). Stationed in a city still under Habsburg control until 1866 and enlisted emotionally in the Risorgimento, Howells watched Old World bureaucracy, clergy, and caste at close range while the American Union fought for survival. Those Venetian years shaped the international manners, clerical politics, and cross-cultural courtships threaded through A Foregone Conclusion, Indian Summer, and the seagoing premise of The Lady of the Aroostook. The consulship also anchored Howells in transatlantic correspondence and comparative culture that later guided the March family’s itineraries.
Returning to Cambridge in 1865, Howells joined The Atlantic Monthly, becoming its editor in 1871 after James Russell Lowell. The Boston-Cambridge milieu—Longfellow’s salons, Charles Eliot Norton’s criticism, Harvard’s classicism, and Beacon Hill’s Brahmin codes—shaped his refinement of a realistic method. In those pages he promoted an American school of fiction distinct from sensation and melodrama, encouraged local-color writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and advocated for Mark Twain and Henry James. The Atlantic’s cultivated readership and the expanding railroad map furnished the social and physical routes for Their Wedding Journey (1871) and the courtship-by-travel of A Chance Acquaintance (1873).
Industrial capitalism’s ascent after the Civil War—concentrated railroads, speculative finance, and the Panic of 1873—provided the moral weather for central Howellsian themes: business probity, class display, and social mobility. Boston’s Back Bay, whose tidal flats were filled between the 1850s and 1880s, became a stage for aspirational architecture and social thresholds memorably dramatized in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Telegraphy, the typewriter, gas and then electric lighting, and the telephone after 1876 reorganized office work and journalistic rhythms that echo through magazine-centered fictions like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and The Story of a Play (1898), while the changed tempo complicates domestic hopes in April Hopes (1887).
Howells left The Atlantic in 1881 for New York, where he soon became a leading critic at Harper and Brothers in the Editor’s Study and later Editor’s Easy Chair columns. The metropolis—elevated railways, tenement districts below Houston Street, and the emerging newspaper empires of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst—supplied the polyglot, contentious setting refined in A Hazard of New Fortunes, with its magazine start-up and capitalist-labor collisions. Against the backdrop of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket affair in Chicago (1886), and later the Homestead (1892) and Pullman (1894) conflicts, his fiction weighs the ethics of wealth and work, themes also central to The Quality of Mercy (1892).
The last third of the nineteenth century saw the New Woman enter higher education and the professions. Vassar opened in 1861, Wellesley in 1875, and women physicians followed pioneers like Elizabeth Blackwell. Debates over coeducation, suffrage, and propriety framed Howells’s portraits of educated heroines and professional women, notably in Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881), while the growing ease of divorce—Indiana and the Dakota Territory became bywords—inflected A Modern Instance (1882). The etiquette of engagements, companionate marriage, and family finance in April Hopes and Annie Kilburn belongs to this era of reform clubs, women’s reading circles, and Boston’s philanthropic networks aligned with the Social Gospel.
Howells’s realism rested on particular places, elevating regional speech and custom over plot contrivance. New England villages and summer towns—seen in The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897) and Annie Kilburn (1888)—register the pressures of tourism, hotel economies, and out-migration. Saratoga Springs, a Gilded Age resort marked by mineral baths, the Grand Union Hotel, and racing seasons, provided the ritualized promenades, flirtations, and social codes of An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (1897) and Ragged Lady (1899). These settings participate in the local-color movement that Howells midwifed from the Atlantic offices, while also measuring the reach of national markets into provincial life in The Minister’s Charge (1887).
Rail corridors, sleeping cars perfected by George Pullman, and ocean steamers turned Americans into tourists and readers of Baedeker guides. Their Wedding Journey observes this new itinerary along the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, and Niagara, while A Chance Acquaintance follows fashionable circuits to Quebec. By 1899, Their Silver Wedding Journey sends the same couple to Germany, Italy, and Spain across a mature tourist infrastructure increasingly standardized by Thomas Cook. Earlier, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879) had already staged the transition from sail to steam as an emblem of cultural passage, and Indian Summer (1886) recalibrated midlife desire within expatriate colonies overseas.
As an arbiter of taste, Howells pressed for a realism informed by European models—Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Ibsen—against sensationalism. His programmatic essays, notably Criticism and Fiction (1891), accompanied fictions that dramatize the art and letters marketplace. The Coast of Bohemia (1893) and Fennel and Rue (1908) inhabit artist studios, newspaper offices, and publishing houses, registering the pull of New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building and the Art Students League (founded 1875). The Story of a Play (1898) explores the late nineteenth-century American stage, with its star system, touring circuits, and the new plausibility of Ibsenite problem drama, even as copyright law began to professionalize authorship.
The periodic convulsions of credit—post-Resumption contraction, the Panic of 1884, and the more devastating Panic of 1893—shaped questions of obligation, bankruptcy, and mercy. The Quality of Mercy and The Landlord at Lion’s Head consider moral calculus amid compromised fortunes; the latter also observes the commercialization of music and the hotel. Charity Organization Societies in Boston and New York (the latter founded in 1882) and the Social Gospel preached by figures like Washington Gladden of Columbus supplied moral languages that Howells’s reform-minded characters speak. His urbane skepticism nevertheless tests benevolence against structural causes of poverty made famous by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890).
A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and its sequel Through the Eye of the Needle (1907) enter the utopian conversation opened by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). They convert drawing-room conversation—among Boston, New York, and resort audiences—into debates over cooperation, wages, and the moral limits of competition. After the Spanish–American War in 1898, Howells joined the American Anti-Imperialist League in Boston alongside Mark Twain and Charles Francis Adams Jr., opposing annexation and colonial rule; the late romance therefore dialogues with contemporary critiques of empire as well as with Howells’s admiration for Tolstoy’s Christian ethics.
Though urban and cosmopolitan in his middle years, Howells returned in late work to Ohio Valley beginnings and the volatile religious marketplace of the early republic. Camp meetings, revivalist enthusiasm, Shaker villages at North Union (founded 1822 near Cleveland), and Mormon episodes at Kirtland (1831–1837) formed the backdrop to frontier credulity and dissent. The Leatherwood God (1916) reimagines a nineteenth-century imposture in rural Ohio to weigh charisma, communal yearning, and the costs of sectarian experiment. The same archival instinct toward remembered boyhood informs The Flight of Pony Baker (1902), set in an antebellum small town where freedom, duty, and mischief collide under vigilant neighbors.
The postwar leisure industry generated spaces where class coded itself through dress, promenade, and polite speech: Saratoga verandas, seaside hotels from Newport to Nahant, and New York’s theaters on Broadway. Howells’s courtship and society novels sift these codes, exposing fragile reputations, provincial audacity, and the bargaining of parents and children. Ragged Lady, An Open-Eyed Conspiracy, and A Pair of Patient Lovers (1901) live among these performances. The conspicuous consumption described by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) provides a contemporary vocabulary for the display that Howells anatomizes, while his preference for ordinary virtue resists the era’s appetite for spectacle.
Between 1880 and 1914, tens of millions arrived in the United States, with Ellis Island opening in 1892. Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic communities reconfigured Boston’s North End and New York’s Lower East Side. Howells’s city scenes, from A Hazard of New Fortunes to The Coast of Bohemia, acknowledge multilingual streets, trade-union halls, and the pressures of assimilation. He often assigned to foreign-born characters candor about American hypocrisies, echoing debates over anarchism after Haymarket and over public education’s role in forging citizens. His ear for dialect—first trained in Ohio print shops—remains central to the ethical realism binding disparate classes and accents.
Gilded Age readers balanced empiricism and fascination with the unseen. The Society for Psychical Research formed in London in 1882, with an American branch in 1885 and affiliates among New England intellectuals, including William James at Harvard. Howells experimented with that cultural borderland in Questionable Shapes (1903), stories where coincidence, grief, and conscience shadow rational lives. More broadly, his fiction absorbs contemporaneous psychology—habit, suggestion, moral suasion—into scenes of social pressure. This negotiated modernity helps explain his steady, anti-sensational tone even when plots touch scandal, and his preference for conversation over crisis in novels from The Kentons to Fennel and Rue.
Most of these works first appeared serially in magazines—The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and occasionally The Century—before book publication at firms such as Houghton, Mifflin and Harper and Brothers. Linotype (1884) and national railroad distribution created the mass audience that sustained Howells’s program. International copyright reform in 1891 altered transatlantic literary commerce he had navigated since Venice. Warner’s prefatory essay keeps him within the circle that named the Gilded Age, yet Howells’s career reaches into the Progressive Era and the First World War. When he died in New York on May 11, 1920, a modernist generation was ascendant, but the realist template he forged endures across this collection.
Synopsis (Selection)
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS by Charles Dudley Warner
A concise biographical and critical portrait of Howells that situates his life, realism, and influence within American letters.
A FOREGONE CONCLUSION
In Venice, an American household and a conscientious Catholic priest become entangled in a restrained cross‑cultural affection that collides with duty and decorum.
A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE
A young woman’s ship-and-river excursion leads to a tentative romance with a formal Bostonian, probing the frictions of region, class, and expectation.
A MODERN INSTANCE
The courtship and unraveling of Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord chart one of American realism’s first frank studies of marriage, journalism, and divorce.
A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS
Two linked New England courtships unfold with quiet humor, tracing how steadfast affection negotiates pride, poverty, and propriety.
A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA: A Romance
A visitor from an egalitarian utopia unsettles a Gilded Age resort with searching conversations about labor, wealth, and civic duty.
AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY: An Idyl of Saratoga
A summer in Saratoga gently orchestrates a courtship while satirizing fashion, flirtation, and the observant complicity of friends.
ANNIE KILBURN
A returning expatriate devotes herself to reform in a New England mill town and discovers the limits of benevolence, class sympathy, and moral certainty.
APRIL HOPES
An engaged couple’s wavering hopes and misgivings, shaped by family pressures and social ritual, capture the hesitations of youthful love.
DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE
A woman physician contends with professional skepticism and personal attraction during a coastal summer, testing resolve and role expectations.
FENNEL AND RUE
A Boston poet’s brush with theatrical celebrity entangles love, loyalty, and the uneasy trade between artistic integrity and publicity.
INDIAN SUMMER
A middle‑aged American in Florence is drawn into a delicate triangle that weighs second chances against propriety and self‑knowledge.
QUESTIONABLE SHAPES
Three subtly uncanny tales in which rational narrators confront apparitions, coincidences, and the ambiguous border between the seen and unseen.
RAGGED LADY
A guileless New England girl enters cosmopolitan circles at home and abroad, her candor and charm quietly testing the pretenses of class and courtship.
THE COAST OF BOHEMIA
A satire of the art world follows aspiring creators and patrons through Boston’s ‘bohemia,’ weighing fashion and pose against sincerity and feeling.
THE KENTONS
A Midwestern judge and his family travel East and to Europe, their encounters with suitors and strangers revealing generational tensions and social pretenses.
THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK
The only woman aboard a transatlantic ship, a sheltered New Englander faces propriety, scrutiny, and an awakening attachment en route to Italy.
THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD
An ambitious New Hampshire native builds a mountain inn into a resort empire, his romantic and business choices probing the costs of success.
THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
On the Ohio frontier, a charismatic imposter proclaims himself divine, exposing the seductions of zeal and the vulnerabilities of a young community.
THE MINISTER'S CHARGE (The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker)
A minister’s well‑meant counsel sends a farm boy to Boston, where missteps and mentors school him in urban realities and self‑reliance.
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
Interlaced Boston lives confront the fallout of financial wrongdoing, balancing demands for justice with acts of compassion and restitution.
THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM
A self‑made paint magnate seeks entry to Boston’s Brahmin world, as family aspirations meet tests of conscience, taste, and love.
THE STORY OF A PLAY
An aspiring dramatist and his circle navigate managers, actors, and critics, revealing the compromises and comedies of staging literature.
THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE: A Romance
A transatlantic bride recounts life inside the utopian commonwealth of Altruria, contrasting its cooperative ideals with American habits of class and competition.
THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER: A Boy's Town Story
A midwestern boy repeatedly plots to run away, only to find adventure, temptation, and gentle lessons in the everyday scrapes of small‑town life.
THE MARCH FAMILY TRILOGY:
Across three novels, Basil and Isabel March age from honeymooners to seasoned travelers, their journeys framing panoramic studies of American cities, class, and marriage.
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY
Newlyweds Basil and Isabel tour Niagara and the Great Lakes, their affectionate banter and keen observations composing a democratic travelogue of postwar America.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
The Marches move to New York to launch a magazine, encountering a cross‑section of the metropolis as business, art, and labor conflicts converge.
THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY
Years later, the Marches revisit Europe, reconsidering places and people through the tempered perspective of long marriage and middle age.
William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (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."
It was not that it was so uncommon to have Italians innocently come out with their whole slender stock of English to him, for the sake of practice, as they told him; but there were peculiarities in Don Ippolito's accent for which he could not account. "What," he exclaimed, "do you know English?"
"I have studied it a little, by myself," answered Don Ippolito, pleased to have his English recognized, and then lapsing into the safety of Italian, he added, "And I had also the help of an English ecclesiastic who sojourned some months in Venice, last year, for his health, and who used to read with me and teach me the pronunciation. He was from Dublin, this ecclesiastic."
"Oh!" said Mr. Ferris, with relief, "I see;" and he perceived that what had puzzled him in Don Ippolito's English was a fine brogue superimposed upon his Italian accent.
"For some time I have had this idea of going to America, and I thought that the first thing to do was to equip myself with the language."
"Um!" said Mr. Ferris, "that was practical, at any rate," and he mused awhile. By and by he continued, more kindly than he had yet spoken, "I wish I could ask you to sit down again: but I have an engagement which I must make haste to keep. Are you going out through the campo? Pray wait a minute, and I will walk with you."
Mr. Ferris went into another room, through the open door of which Don Ippolito saw the paraphernalia of a painter's studio: an easel with a half-finished picture on it; a chair with a palette and brushes, and crushed and twisted tubes of colors; a lay figure in one corner; on the walls scraps of stamped leather, rags of tapestry, desultory sketches on paper.
Mr. Ferris came out again, brushing his hat.
"The Signor Console amuses himself with painting, I see," said Don Ippolito courteously.
"Not at all," replied Mr. Ferris, putting on his gloves; "I am a painter by profession, and I amuse myself with consuling;" [Footnote: Since these words of Mr. Ferris were first printed, I have been told that a more eminent painter, namely Rubens, made very much the same reply to very much the same remark, when Spanish Ambassador in England. "The Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty, I see, amuses himself by painting sometimes," said a visitor who found him at his easel. "I amuse myself by playing the ambassador sometimes," answered Rubens. In spite of the similarity of the speeches, I let that of Mr. Ferris stand, for I am satisfied that he did not know how unhandsomely Rubens had taken the words out of his mouth.] and as so open a matter needed no explanation, he said no more about it. Nor is it quite necessary to tell how, as he was one day painting in New York, it occurred to him to make use of a Congressional friend, and ask for some Italian consulate, he did not care which. That of Venice happened to be vacant: the income was a few hundred dollars; as no one else wanted it, no question was made of Mr. Ferris's fitness for the post, and he presently found himself possessed of a commission requesting the Emperor of Austria to permit him to enjoy and exercise the office of consul of the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, to which the President of the United States appointed him from a special trust in his abilities and integrity. He proceeded at once to his post of duty, called upon the ship's chandler with whom they had been left, for the consular archives, and began to paint some Venetian subjects.
He and Don Ippolito quitted the Consulate together, leaving Marina to digest with her noonday porridge the wonder that he should be walking amicably forth with a priest. The same spectacle was presented to the gaze of the campo, where they paused in friendly converse, and were seen to part with many politenesses by the doctors of the neighborhood, lounging away their leisure, as the Venetian fashion is, at the local pharmacy.
The apothecary craned forward over his counter, and peered through the open door. "What is that blessed Consul of America doing with a priest?"
"The Consul of America with a priest?" demanded a grave old man, a physician with a beautiful silvery beard, and a most reverend and senatorial presence, but one of the worst tongues in Venice. "Oh!" he added, with a laugh, after scrutiny of the two through his glasses, "it's that crack-brain Don Ippolito Rondinelli. He isn't priest enough to hurt the consul. Perhaps he's been selling him a perpetual motion for the use of his government, which needs something of the kind just now. Or maybe he's been posing to him for a picture. He would make a very pretty Joseph, give him Potiphar's wife in the background," said the doctor, who if not maligned would have needed much more to make a Joseph of him.
