The Realism War
James, Twain,
and Howells
Nineteenth-century Definitions of
Romance
Romance focuses “upon the extraordinary,
the mysterious, the imaginary.” –Bliss
Perry (1903)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: the romance “has
fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the
writer’s own choosing or creation”
(Preface to The House of the Seven
Gables)
Nineteenth-Century
Definitions of Realism
Realism sets itself at work to consider
characters and events which are apparently
the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order
to extract from these their full value and true
meaning. In short, realism reveals. Where we
thought nothing worth of notice, it shows
everything to be rife with significance.
George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its
Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September
1874): 313-24.
Nineteenth-Century Definitions of
Realism, continued
Realism, n. The art of
depicting nature as it is
seen by toads. The
charm suffusing a
landscape painted by a
mole, or a story written
by a measuring-worm. -Ambrose Bierce The
Devil's Dictionary
(1911)
Romance and Realism: Taste
and Class
 Romance
 Realism
 Aspired to the ideal
 Thought to be more
 Thought to be more
genteel since it did
not show the vulgar
details of life
democratic
 Critics stressed the
potential for vulgarity
and its emphasis on the
commonplace
 Potential “poison” for
the pure of mind
W. D. Howells
 Editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, 1871-1881
 “Editor’s Study” in
Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine (January
1886- March 1892)
 Criticism and Fiction
(1891; collected from
“Editor’s Study”
columns)
Howells’s Early Novels
 Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881)
 A Modern Instance (1882)
 The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885)
 April Hopes (1888)
 Annie Kilburn (1889)
Howells on Realism
“Realism is nothing
more and nothing
less than the
truthful treatment of
material” --William Dean
Howells, “Editor’s Study,” November
1889
.
The Ideal Grasshopper
“We hope the time is
coming when not only
the artist, but the
common, average man
. . . .will reject the ideal
grasshopper wherever
he finds it . . . Because
it is not like a real
grasshopper” --W. D.
Howells, 1887
The Smiling Aspects of Life
We invite our novelists, therefore, to
concern themselves with the more
smiling aspects of life, which are the
more American, and to seek the
universal in the individual rather than in
the commonplace.” –W. D. Howells,
1886
Howells on James (Century 1882)
 The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer
art in our day than it was with Dickens and
Thackeray . . . . These great men are of the
past.
 The new school derives from Hawthorne and
George Eliot rather than any others . . . . This
school, which is so largely of the future as
well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in
Mr. James.
The Reaction
A Literary Combination.
Mr. H-w-lls: Are you the
tallest now, Mr. James?
Mr. J-mes (ignoring the
question): Be so
uncommonly kind, H-wlls, as to let me down
easy: it may be we have
both got to grow.
Henry James and Realism
 “The Art of Fiction,” 1884
 Washington Square (1880)
 The Portrait of a Lady




(1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima
(1886)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Turn of the Screw
(1898)
Mark Twain
 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary
Offenses” North American
Review, 1895
 The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884/5)
 A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court (1890)
 Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc (1895)
Defending Realism
 W. D. Howells
 Henry James
 H. H. Boyesen, “The




Great Realists and the
Empty Story-Tellers”
Mark Twain
Hamlin Garland
Thomas Sergeant Perry
George Pellew
Attacking Realism
 W. R. Thayer, “The
New Story-tellers and
the Doom of Realism”
Forum 18 (December
1894): 470-80.
 H. C. Vedder.
 Maurice Thompson.
Attacking Realism (England)
 Robert Louis Stevenson
 H. Rider Haggard
 Andrew Lang
Attack on Howells I
 H. C. Vedder. “Can it
be that Mr. Howells
gives us in his books a
fair representation of life
as he has known it?
Has his whole
experience been of this
stale, flat unprofitable
sort?”
 “Has he never known
anybody who has a soul
above buttons?”
American Writers of Today,
1894.
Attack on Howells II: William
Roscoe Thayer
 French realism should be
called “Epidermism,” not
realism, because it reduces
“literature, art, and morals to
anarchy.”
 “the foreign Realists dealt
chiefly in moral filth” (477)
 The Rise of Silas Lapham
was “produced by Epidermist
methods” by an author who
“smacked his lips” over
Zola’s La Terre.
 Picture of Emile Zola.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
 Romance beside his unstrung lute,
Lies stricken mute.
The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anyplace,
Polemic, scientific air:
We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.
Maurice Thompson: Realism As
Disease.
 Realists represent “literary
decadence” and worship “the
vulgar, the commonplace,
and the insignificant.”
 The best part of Howells is
“romance disguised as
realism. His literary tissue is
healthy, the spirit of his work
is even, calm, just, and his
purpose is pure,” so he
cannot be a realist.
 Picture is Thomas Eakins’s
The Gross Clinic (1875).
Reaction Against Realism: The
Turn Toward Romanticism
 “A large number of readers,
who have wearied of minute
descriptions of the
commonplace, are to-day often
found condemning an author
who does not keep his hero in
imminent danger of death
through at least seventy-five
percent of his pages.“ --John
Kendrick Bangs, 1898
Howells to James, 1915
“I am comparatively a
dead cult with my
statues cast down and
the grass growing over
them in the pale
moonlight” (Selected
Letters 6: 31).