Part 23 (1/2)
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Absolute devotion to the day of her death, Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts Act officiously, not officially Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness Always sumptuously providing out of his dest.i.tution Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence Amuse him, even when they wronged him Amusingly realized the situation to their friends Anglo-American genius for ugliness Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive Appeared to have no grudge left Backed their credulity with their credit Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust Became gratefully strange Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month”
Candle burning on the table for the cigars Celia Thaxter Charles Reade Charles F. Browne Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions Church: ”Oh yes, I go It 'most kills me, but I go,”
Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature Cold-slaw Collective opacity Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong Could make us feel that our faults were other people's Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces Death of the joy that ought to come from work Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life Despair broke in laughter Despised the avoidance of repet.i.tions out of fear of tautology Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced Dinner was at the old-fas.h.i.+oned Boston hour of two Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise Dollars were of so much farther flight than now Edmund Quincy Edward Everett Hale Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it Emerson Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself Espoused the theory of Bacon's authors.h.i.+p of Shakespeare Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly Expectation of those who will come no more Express the appreciation of another's fit word Feigned the grat.i.tude which I could see that he expected Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault Few men last over from one reform to another First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand Found life was not all poetry Francis Parkman Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature George William Curtis Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life Give him your best wine Got out of it all the fun there was in it Greeting of great impersonal cordiality Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love He was not bored because he would not be He did not care much for fiction He was not constructive; he was essentially observant He had no time to make money He was a youth to the end of his days He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection Heine Heroic lies His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event His readers trusted and loved him His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life Honest men are few when it comes to themselves I find this young man worthy I believe neither in heroes nor in saints I did not know, and I hated to ask If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal Incredible in their insipidity Industrial slavery Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there Intellectual poseurs It is well to hold one's country to her promises It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say Jane Austen Julia Ward Howe Left him to do what the cat might Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave Liked to find out good things and great things for himself Lincoln Literary dislikes or contempts Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel Longfellow Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it Love of freedom and the hope of justice Love and grat.i.tude are only semi-articulate at the best Lowell Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave Man who had so much of the boy in him Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other Memory will not be ruled Men who took themselves so seriously as that need Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women Met with kindness, if not honor Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Never saw a man more regardful of negroes Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never paid in anything but hopes of paying No man ever yet told the truth about himself No time to make money No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else Now death has come to join its vague conjectures NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague Old man's tendency to revert to the past Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned Ought not to call coa.r.s.e without calling one's self prudish Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities Person who wished to talk when he could listen Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking Pointed the moral in all they did Polite learning hesitated his praise Praised it enough to satisfy the author Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous Remember the dinner-bell Reparation due from every white to every black man Secret of the man who is universally interesting Seen through the wrong end of the telescope Shackles of belief worn so long Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be So refined, after the gigantic coa.r.s.eness of California Some superst.i.tion, usually of a hygienic sort Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon Sought the things that he could agree with you upon Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your ident.i.ty Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them Stoddard Study in a corner by the porch Stupidly truthful The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it Things common to all, however peculiar in each Th.o.r.eau Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best Times when a man's city was a man's country Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself Truthful Turn of the talk toward the mystical Used to ingrat.i.tude from those he helped Vacuous vulgarity of its texts Visited one of the great mills Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast Whether every human motive was not selfish Whitman's public use of his privately written praise Wit that tries its teeth upon everything Women's rights Wonder why we hate the past so--”It's so d.a.m.ned humiliating!”
Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity Wrote them first and last in the spirit of d.i.c.kens
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Friends, Entire by William Dean Howells
LITERATURE AND LIFE, Entire
by William Dean Howells
CONTENTS: Man of Letters in Business Confessions of a Summer Colonist The Young Contributor Last Days in a Dutch Hotel Anomalies of the Short Story Spanish Prisoners of War American Literary Centers Standard Household Effect Co.
Notes of a Vanished Summer Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage ”Floating down the River on the O-hi-o”
LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
by William Dean Howells
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.
For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did not find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seen reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly I love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as many ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is something read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be no offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which is which. But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will last till I forget my letters.
”So was it when my life began; So is it, now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old.”
It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with gla.s.ses which would at least have helped their vision.
As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. ”The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine; ”Confessions of a Summer Colonist” was done at York Harbor in the fall of 1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; ”American Literary Centres,” ”American Literature in Exile,” ”Puritanism in American Fiction,” ”Politics of American Authors,” were, with three or four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete actuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from an extinct department of ”Life and Letters” which I invented for Harper's Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth century. Notable among these is the ”Last Days in a Dutch Hotel,” which was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer- memoried reader as papers from the ”Editor's Easy Chair” in Harper's Monthly; ”Wild Flowers of the Asphalt” is the review of an ever- delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; ”The Editor's Relations with the Young Contributor” was my endeavor in Youth's Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.
So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well- meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and s.p.a.ce. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running brooks outside.
W. D. HOWELLS.