Alexander Leggatt has recently remarked "the reluctance of academic critics to acknowledge that farce is a form worthy of attention."¹ This attitude is clearly in the background of Walter J. Meserve’s statement in his introduction to The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells (1960) that "whether the Roberts-Campbell plays and the other one-act dramas should be called farces or comedies is a difficult question."² It is not surprising that the question has not been resolved in the sixteen years since Meserve first introduced Howells’s plays to the attention of "academic critics." Meserve himself concluded that Howells wrote both farces and "social comedy," noting that "in the Roberts-Campbell plays, where the social background vitally affects both action and meaning, Howells chose social occasions which would give him the greatest opportunity to exploit through wit and satire the peculiarities of his society."³ In the light of recent developments in comic theory, however, particularly some advances in the study of the farce form made by Eric Bentley, one wonders whether the distinction between farce and comedy need be made at all in this case. The assumptions underlying the distinctions Meserve had to deal with—that farce is "pure fun," while social comedy has some definite thematic statement to make—have lost their fixity as assumptions, and the distinctions themselves have in turn become less meaningful, despite the tenacity with which academia clings to its well-made definitions, as noted by Leggatt.

In fact, the Howells domestic farce, represented by the series of twelve Campbell-Roberts plays (which Howells himself subtitled farces long before the possibility of their being anything else was ever thought of), serves as an excellent illustration of the point that the farce itself is not only worthy of serious study as a dramatic form, but has a great deal to reveal both about man in his relations with other men, and about the farceur’s view of his world, both conscious and unconscious, a view which emerges both in characteristics which have traditionally been associated with social comedy, and in characteristics which seem to belong strictly and intrinsically to the farce form.

Howells’s series of farces begins in 1882 with "The Sleeping Car," written, significantly, just before Howells’s formal entry into Boston Back Bay society, which culminated in 1884 with the purchase of his house on Beacon Street. "The Sleeping Car" consists of little more than the single farcical device of mistaken identity carried ad absurdum, and is of importance only because it introduces the main characters of the series of twelve one-act farces, Edward and Agnes Roberts, Agnes’s Aunt Mary, and her brother Willis Campbell, who is to acquire a wife later in the course of the series in the person of Amy Somers. What is most significant about "The Sleeping Car" is a negative fact: it does not take place within the framework of Back Bay Boston society as the rest of the farces do, and consequently makes no thematic statement about this society. It simply introduces the characters who are to figure in typical farce roles. Edward is a "literary man" who goes around in a kind of daze most of the time, trying ineffectually to do the bidding of his loving but semi-hysterical wife. Agnes’s chief characteristic as she appears in "The Sleeping Car" is her penchant for non-stop talking. These two have been unanimously recognized as burlesqued portraits of the Howellses. Willis Campbell in this play rather significantly comes back from a long stay in California, and he functions here, as he will in the rest of the series, as the outsider to "the group," the embodiment of good sense and practicality, and at the same time as the practical joker who, when he sees some social mechanism breaking down, is always ready and willing to loosen a few more screws. The resemblance of Willis Campbell to Mark Twain is unmistakable, particularly in his relation to Howells, the unfailing and always willing target of his jokes.

"The Sleeping Car" is merely preparation, exposition, as it were, for the eleven Campbell-Roberts farces which follow it, all of which deal with the social aspect of the lives of the characters, and all of which were written after the Howellses entered Boston society life in earnest. In a sense, in fact, the subject of the farces is the social interaction of the characters—the behavior of people within the framework of Proper Boston society and the assumptions which underlie such behavior. This may seem to be moving the Howells domestic farce back into the realm of social comedy, but, as Eric Bentley has noted in his seminal article entitled "Farce," the old and seemingly unshakeable assumption that farce is meaningless, harmless, pointless joking is not only shakable, but also patently false. Bentley sees the moving force of all farce as "desecration," "to damage the family, to desecrate the household gods."⁴ In

Howells’s case, "the family" becomes the close-knit little group of Back Bay society, and the "household gods" become the seemingly sacred but essentially baseless social assumptions upon which this delicate framework rests. Bentley remarks further in his article that "if farces are examined they will be found to contain very little ‘harmless’ joking and very much that is ‘tendentious.’ Without aggression farce cannot function."⁵ One would perhaps as little expect aggression from William Dean Howells as from Charlie Chaplin. But, as Bentley points out, there is a great deal of aggression directed toward societal assumptions in Chaplin’s work, and so there is in Howells’s. It is, of course, veiled aggression, even ambivalent aggression, as though Howells not only does not want to be caught hacking away at the pillars of society, but is also not even sure himself whether he wants to ruin the careful paint job.

This attitude, as Bentley has so perceptively noted, is precisely what informs the method of farce. It is, as he says, a double dialectic, the farceur hiding, with a wink to the audience, his point behind his joke, and at the same time hiding his seriousness from himself through his farcical form:

The surface of farce is gay and grave at the same time. The gay antics of Harlequin are conducted with pokerfaced gravity. Both the gaiety and the gravity are visible and are part of the style. If we go on to speak of a contrast in farce between mask and face, symbol and thing symbolized, appearance and reality, this will not be a contrast in styles but a contrast between either the gravity or the gaiety on the surface and whatever lies beneath. What do gaiety and gravity have in common? Orderliness and mildness. What lies beneath the surface, on the other hand, is disorderly and violent. It is a double dialectic. On the surface, the contrast of gay and grave, then, secondly, the contrast of surface and beneath-the-surface. The second is a larger and even more dynamic contrast.⁶

The first contrast becomes more and more evident in the Howells farce as the series develops, the ridiculous behavior of the characters and the even more ridiculous action of the plots becoming less and less effectual as a mask to the serious point of the play, which usually has something to do with truth and deceit, the anomalous moral position of a social group which actually functions through deceit in various forms, chiefly the "social lie," but pretends to believe that truth is right and falsity is wrong. The point is most clearly evident in "The Unexpected Guests" (1893), the action of which consists entirely in trying to deceive some unexpected guests into believing they were expected, and in convincing everyone else that they "are not a bit late" when they know perfectly well that they are, all while

a phonograph in the background is squeaking out the quotation from William Cullen Bryant: "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." The same question of truth and deceit informs "The Garroters" (1885), "The Albany Depot" (1892), "A Letter Of Introduction" (1892), and "A Masterpiece of Diplomacy" (1894), each with its variation on the theme that this society, which professes to admire truth, could not function without falsehood and deceit in myriad forms.

A viewer who sat through a production of each of the twelve plays, or even a reader who read each one as it appeared in the Christmas issue of Harper’s, could not miss the serious point about deceit veiled by the surface gaiety of the Howells farce. The second contrast in the double dialectic of the Howells farce is naturally more complex, since it involves an almost unconscious action of the mind on the part of the author, an unmasking of the "disorderly and violent" feelings which lie beneath the surface of his conscious artistic management of gaiety and gravity. For Howells, these unconscious feelings come out not in physical violence or some other form of veiled aggression, as they do in most farces, but in the characterization of two of the members of his little societal group, Edward Roberts and Willis Campbell.

Roberts and Campbell are clearly representative of the two types that are as old as farce itself, gull and coney, or fool and knave as Bentley would call them, or buffoon and churl as Northrop Frye would call them. The point is that neither Roberts nor Campbell is actually a part of the social framework within which they move, Roberts because he is too innocent, and Campbell because he is too wise. Roberts is simply incapable of deceit, and this weakness—as Howells demonstrates, it is a weakness in this society—leaves him at once totally incapable of performing the simplest function, such as engaging a doctor for his sick child ("A Masterpiece of Diplomacy") or hiring a cook for his wife ("The Albany Depot"), and also easy prey for Campbell’s knavish practical jokes.

The most evident appearance of Roberts’s inability to function within the societal framework occurs in "The Garroters," written the same year as The Rise of Silas Lapham, and at a time when Howells was feeling a great deal of anguish about his own social views, as is evident from his daring public response to the Haymarket incident shortly afterward.⁷ The play hinges on three character traits which are essential to the farcical movement of its plot: the absentmindedness and the gullibility of Roberts as fool, and the impish, apparently pointless, mischievousness of Campbell as knave. There

are clearly other issues at stake, however, most of which come out in the characterization of Roberts. He is first introduced telling his wife how he has just been robbed, "garroted," on the Boston Common. His explanation of his motive in chasing the thief and recovering his watch suggests that he is a paragon of civic pride and unselfishness:

I’ve never thought that I had much courage—physical courage; but when I felt my watch was gone, a sort of frenzy came over me. I wasn’t hurt; and for the first time in my life I realized what an abominable outrage theft was. The thought that at six o’clock in the evening, in the very heart of a great city like Boston, an inoffensive citizen could be assaulted and robbed, made me furious.

(p. 341)

If one is left in doubt as to the ironic attitude of the author implied in this statement, Mrs. Roberts soon clears it up in her response to Roberts’s admission that he let the garroter go, after recovering his watch:

And perhaps this was the robbers’ first attempt, and it will be a lesson to them. Oh yes! I’m glad you let them escape, Edward. They may have families. If everyone behaved as you’ve done, there would soon be an end of garroting.

(p. 341)

The absurdity of the Robertses’ "social consciousness" is pointed out by the reaction of Mr. Bemis, whom Roberts has actually robbed of his watch, mistaking him for the garroter, to Mrs. Roberts’s explanation that "he didn’t call for the police, or anything, because it was their first offence, and he couldn’t bear to think of their suffering families" (p. 344). Bemis replies with the realistic view which people of their station would normally take in such a situation: "You may be very sure that if there had been a policeman within call—of course there wasn’t one within cannon-shot—I should have handed the scoundrels over without the slightest remorse" (p. 345). The ironic treatment of the Robertses here brings to mind Howells’s comment to his father in 1888 that he and Mark Twain and their wives were "theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats,"⁸ a hypocritical position which is being openly ridiculed in this play. As Howells once remarked, "every satire is admirable when it is self-satire."⁹

Howells’s satiric attitude here goes much deeper than a simple recognition of his own ambiguous philosophical position, however. Roberts, it has been noted, is incapable of the deceit necessary to carry on in this society. As Campbell says when he is trying to convince Roberts that he must deceive Mr. Bemis about the watch through

the social pretense of its all having been a joke, "They’d be sure to suspect me, and they can’t suspect you of anything—you’re so innocent. The illusion will be complete" (p. 348). The reasoning behind Roberts’s eventual decision to try to deceive Bemis is a burlesque of the philosophy of the melodramatic "moral hero" who was enjoying a great deal of popularity on the American stage at this time:

"Of course I don’t pretend that I should be willing to lie, under ordinary circumstances; but for the sake of Agnes and the children—I don’t want any awkwardness about the matter; it would be the death of me" (p. 347). It is, of course, of the awkwardness that Roberts is thinking, not of Agnes and the children. He inevitably bungles the attempt at social deception and ends up revealing the whole story, but only after the social group has done some deceiving of its own and then been bested by Campbell’s superior wiles. After Roberts confesses, Campbell sums up the value of his "innocence" in being unable to carry off the lie within this social setting: "Well, Aunt Mary, I wish Agnes were here to see Roberts in his character of moral hero. He ‘done’ it with his little hatchet, but he waited to make sure that Bushrod was all right before he owned up" (p. 352, Howells’s italics). So much for the moral hero, and so much for the quality of innocence.

We are left with ambivalent feelings of contempt and empathy regarding Roberts. He mouths doctrines we generally subscribe to, but cannot realistically expect to act on, and he has that mixture of moral cowardice and the desire to be thought well of which we all experience to some degree. Roberts, in short, embodies some qualities which are part of the universal condition, but which we would much rather laugh at than identify or sympathize with. This is one side of that deeper dialectic in farce which Bentley talks about. One means of relieving one’s ambivalent feelings is to attack, and in this play, Howells attacks both the innocence (perhaps ignorance would be a better word in this case) which cannot cope with society and the societal structure which necessarily excludes the innocent from its deceitful workings.

The other end of the spectrum is also evident in this play, in the person of Willis Campbell. He is, like Roberts, quite outside the pale of the social framework, not because he cannot play the games of society, but because he sees through social pretense only too well. His position is clearly indicated in his response to his sister’s rather disjointed description of Roberts’s garroting:

MRS. ROBERTS: And he didn’t call for the police, or anything—
WILLIS: Ah, that showed presence of mind! He knew it wouldn’t have been any use.

124

MRS. ROBERTS: And when he had got his watch away from them, he just let them go, because they had families dependent on them.
WILLIS: I should have let them go in the first place.                        (pp. 343–44)

Willis’s view is simply good sense. He knows the way things work in society; he knows his own strengths and weaknesses; and he does not pretend to any belief or value which does not work out in reality. This is also the position of Dr. Lawton, the representative of humanistic good sense in Howells’s farces. As he says when Campbell asks him in "The Unexpected Guests" what his idea of truth is, "Mine? I have none. I have been a general practitioner for forty years" (p. 420). Willis, however, has certain characteristics which Dr. Lawton lacks. The good doctor is quite willing to use deceit, but only when he sees it as contributory to the welfare of his patients, or to the general comfort of another human being. Willis’s position is closer to "never tell the truth when a lie is just as good." His motive seems to be pure mischief, to cause society, which moves along quite smoothly on a modicum of deceit, to move more bumpily by deceiving the deceivers. He is a Californian, after all, and one of the chief attributes of the stage Californian in the nineteenth century is the telling of "whoppers." This is a rather interesting development for Howells, who was in on the "western" jokes of someone like Mark Twain, thanks to his Ohio upbringing, at the same time that he understood the delicate workings of deceit in the society of which the whopper is a whopping burlesque. His position comes out clearly in "Five O’Clock Tea" (1887) in an exchange between Campbell and Mr. Bemis, perhaps the most "Bostonian" in attitude of the little group of Bostonians in the farces. Bemis speaks of "a California gentleman whom I found looking at Andrea del Sarto in the Pitti Palace at Florence one day—by-the-way, you’ve been a Californian too, Mr. Campbell; but you won’t mind. He seemed to be puzzled over it, and then he said to me—I was standing near him—‘Handpainted, I presume?’" (p. 368, Howells’s italics). The respective responses of Amy Somers and Willis Campbell demonstrate at once the "knowing" snobbery of the insider and the superior knowledge of the outsider who has found him out:

MRS. SOMERS: Ah! ha, ha, ha! How very good! (To the maid, who appears) The tea, Lizzie.
CAMPBELL: You don’t think he was joking?
BEMIS, with misgiving: Why, no, it never occurred to me that he was.

125

CAMPBELL: You can’t always tell when a Californian’s joking.             (p. 368)

At least you can’t if you’re a Bostonian, and the "whopper" which seems to be self-ridicule or "pure fun" on the part of the Californian (or the Ohioan) may be even more effective ridicule of its audience.

In any case, Campbell’s mischief is far from harmless in its Back Bay Boston setting. In his capacity as "outsider" to the societal group, he works as a catalyst to disturb its delicate balance and point out the weaknesses in its foundations. Willis not only realizes the ridiculousness of Roberts’s "moral hero" pose in "The Garroters," but he also knows enough about his actual moral cowardice to play upon his weakness in order to trick him into trying to lie his way out of the situation, as is evident from the following exchange of dialogue:

WILLIS: He’s pretty queer, Bemis is. You can’t say what an old gentleman like that will or won’t do. If he should choose to carry it into court—
ROBERTS: Court!
WILLIS: —it might be embarrassing. And anyway, it would have a very strange look in the papers.
ROBERTS: The papers! Good gracious!                                                  (p. 346)

After he has Roberts totally in his power, Campbell tells the California whopper which shows that he understands the true nature of "moral heroism," and society’s view of it: "Roberts, I honor you! It isn’t everybody who could steal an old gentleman’s watch, and then be so ready to lie out of it. Well, you have got courage—both kinds— moral and physical" (p. 346, Howells’s italics). Roberts’s response, "Thank you, Willis" (p. 347), confirms both his innocence and his ignorance and serves to reinforce the audience’s simultaneous pity and contempt for him. Willis at this point evokes similarly ambivalent emotions. One cannot help but admire his skill at exposing the imposter Roberts (and the imposter society), but at the same time, one feels the cruelty in preying on such an innocent. Roberts, after all, has no idea that he is an imposter, nor does the society, represented here chiefly by Agnes, who has apparently very few ideas at all, except that her husband is a hero and ought to be admired.

The danger that Willis represents as the unmasker of society’s self-deception is recognized, quite fittingly, by Dr. Lawton. His dialogue with Willis is more than entertaining society banter:

WILLIS: Doctor, you read a man’s symptoms at a glance.

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LAWTON: Yes; and I can see that you are in a bad way, Mr. Campbell. . . . This is one of those obscure diseases of the heart—induration of the pericardium—which, if not taken in time, result in deceitfulness above all things, and desperate wickedness.                                                                                     (pp. 350–51)

Dr. Lawton’s words are only too true. They describe the natural reaction of the outsider to the insider, hatred and "desperate wickedness, and the larger and more powerful the "inside" group, the more bitterly impotent the hatred, and the more desperate the wickedness. Fortunately (or unfortunately, according to one’s social point of view), Willis never becomes hardened or bitter about the societal group, largely because he is drawn further into it by his marriage to Amy Somers (as Mark Twain was by his marriage to Olivia Langdon). He remains the knave, lurking always on the fringes of society, pointing out its flaws, its idiosyncrasies, its false assumptions—and torturing poor Roberts to death.

The inner dialectic of farce is clearly evident in Howells’s management of his knave and fool. One simultaneously admires Willis for assaulting falsity that one knows to be wrong and deplores his preying upon what appears in Edward Roberts as innocent stupidity. At the same time, one is pitying Roberts, and yet realizing his false position and feeling contempt for his not recognizing the valueless assumptions upon which it rests. Within this dialectic, Howells manages to work off the aggression which he naturally felt toward a society which reduced him to the impotent "innocence" of an Edward Roberts and Mark Twain to the impotent cleverness of a Willis Campbell.

The farce is the most convenient form for a writer who feels that he is in, but not of, a societal group, as Howells did. As he remarked in his first article on the drama, the comic play is a much more comfortable genre for an author to use for the criticism of society than the novel:

While comedy deals with character as it exists and manifests itself in action, narrative fiction must bare the causes which produce character, and reveal all the feelings and explain the circumstances which influence men to action. The novel of society must needs censure conditions in which odious human traits and characters flourish when it depicts them; the play can laugh them to scorn without a syllable of criticism on the state of things to which they owe their existence.¹⁰

In the eighties and nineties, Howells was hardly about to assail the "conditions" engendered by the extremely elitist and limited societal group in which he was openly trying to make his tenuous position

as "man of letters" into a more secure social niche. But there were aspects of it which he could "laugh to scorn," and more importantly, there was his own ambivalent position, which he recognized only too clearly. I have noted that the absurdity of Edward Roberts’s "social consciousness" in "The Garroters" probably has something to do with its having been written when Howells was wrestling with his conscience over the inconsistency between his socialistic views and his aristocratic life-style. The absurdity becomes more patent when one remembers that "The Albany Depot," "A Letter of Introduction," and "Evening Dress," all plays in which Roberts (aided by Willis Campbell) comes off as a rather cretinous individual totally incapable of dealing with the simplest actions required by society life, were all written at the same time as The Quality of Mercy (1892) and The World of Chance (1893), two of Howells’s economic novels, and that "Five O’Clock Tea" was written in the same year as A Traveler From Altruria (1894), his socialist utopian romance.

In Edward Roberts, Howells was portraying his own position as "moral hero" and "laughing it to scorn," just as he was looking at the elitist social group represented by Proper Boston, of which he had strong and frankly acknowledged ambitions of becoming a real fixity, and exposing it for the sham that it was. As he wrote in 1897 (while he was concocting "A Previous Engagement"), "here [in America] we have apparently no society in the rich, full, English sense; though we have a number of people, agreeable or disagreeable, playing at society in that sense."¹¹ That Howells was one of those people he would be the last to deny. But, as his plays demonstrate, he felt in the depths of his being that the whole thing was a farce. His domestic farces were a means of releasing these ambivalent feelings, a way of presenting the ridiculousness of the situation, and hinting at the essential evil involved in it, without taking responsibility for it, to purge guilt and anxiety through laughter.

ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹"Pinero: From Farce to Social Drama," Modern Drama, 17 (1974), 329.
   ²The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells, (New York: NYU Press, 1960), p. xxii. All page references to the plays are from this edition and appear in the text.
   ³Ibid.
   ⁴"Farce." The Life of the Drama (1964; rpt. in Comedy, Meaning and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan, San Francisco: Chandler, 1965). p. 283.
   ⁵Ibid., p. 292.
   ⁶Ibid., pp. 293–94.
   ⁷Howells’s public letter entitled "Clemency for the Anarchists" appeared in the New York Tribune, 4 November 1887.
   ⁸Mildred Howells, The Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (Garden City: Doubleday, 1928), II, 1.
   ⁹"Life and Letters," Harper’s Weekly, 39 (14 September 1895), 892.
   ¹⁰"Recent Italian Comedy," North American Review, 99 (October, 1864), 368.
   ¹¹"Life and Letters," Harper’s Weekly, 41 (30 January 1897), 107.