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262 CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
'Atlantic Monthly' for eight years, and as the worthy successor
of George William Curtis in the 'Editor's Easy Chair'
of 'Harper's Magazine' for fourteen years and up to the time
of his last illness, we get an idea of his mental activity. Yet
he never hurried or scamped his work; it always had the mark
of culture and almost of leisure. . .
Personally, Mr. Howells was a man of native courtesy, of
sound and wide culture, and of fine perceptions and generous
impulse. He was a notable figure in American life as well as
in American literature."
Mr: Howells's literary career was an interesting one and
one which should encourage those aspirants to a literary
career, who do not have their path made easy by the circumstances
in which they are placed. William Lyon Phelps in
his "Essays on Modern Novelists" presents this side of Mr.
Howells's career along with a critical estimate of his work.
Born in a little village in Ohio over seventy years ago, and growing
up with small Latin and less Greek, Mr. Howells may fairly be
called a self-educated man. Just why the epithet "self-made" should
be applied to those non-college-graduates who succeed in business, and
withheld from those who succeed in poetry and fiction, seems not entirely
clear. Perhaps it is tacitly assumed that those who become captains
of industry achieve prominence without divine assistance; whereas
men of letters, with or without early advantages, and whether grateful
or not, have unconscious communication with hidden forces. Be this
as it may, the boy Howells had little schooling and no college. All the
public institutions in the world, however, are but a poor makeshift in
the absence of good home training; and the future novelist's father was
the right sort of man and had the right sort of occupation to stimulate
a clever and ambitious son. The elder Howells was the editor of a
country newspaper, which, like a country doctor, makes up in variety
of information what it loses in spread of influence. The boy was a
compositor before he was a composer, as plenty of literary men since
Richardson have been; he helped to set up lyrics, news items, local gossip,
the funny column, and patent medicine advertisements. From
mechanical he passed to original work, both in his father's office and
in other sanctums about the state; sometimes acting not only as contributor,
but "moulding public opinion" from the editor's chair. And indeed
he has never entirely stepped out of the editorial role. During an amazingly
busy life as novelist, dramatist, poet, and foreign diplomat, Mr.
Howells has acted as editorial writer on the Nation, the Atlantic, the
Cosmopolitan Magazine, and Harper's Monthly. I think he would sometimes
be appalled at the prodigious amount of merely "timely" articles
that he has written, were it not for the fact that during his long career
he has never published a single line of which he need feel ashamed.