Howells’ love of the ridiculous in literature and life makes a bright, distinctive thread in his writing, from his first Heinesque poems and the newspaper column "News and Humors of the Mail" in the 1840s to his "Editor’s Easy Chair" of February 1917 on American humor and the review of Schevill’s Cervantes in 1919 not long before his death. Any attempt to place Howells in American humor or as a humorist, therefore, involves difficult choices at the outset. One possibility that comes immediately to mind is his wide friendship with humorous writers and his lively comment in reviews, essays, and letters on them and their work. He grew up on Irving and encountered Lowell’s Hosea Biglow and Holmes’ Autocrat early. He knew personally Artemus Ward and Bret Harte and John Hay, Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable. He read J. W. Riley and George Ade with delight. But it was of course the "incomparable" Mark Twain, fellow member with Finley Peter Dunne in the amazingly exclusive "Damned Human Race Luncheon Club," whom he valued most and called "first of those who laugh."’ It might also be well to recognize that Howells was the real editor of Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888), a rich compendium of funny men greater and lesser that represents the Southwestern humorists very well. And the presence of six pieces by Howells himself in the collection suggests that he was included in many other anthologies of contemporary humor. Another point of emphasis might well be Howells’ consciously fostering American vernacular styles in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine and writing them himself in his fiction, since a sectional vernacular and American humor are scarcely separable.

Howells’ contemporaries in fact recognized and enjoyed his humor as relatively few readers of this day do. His one-act farces and comedies were read aloud and performed widely in amateur theatricals, at least one of them in German translation in Milwaukee, and to actors’ and audiences’ delight, as G. B. Shaw and Booth Tarkington testified. Though the farces, which so often show men entangled in their own machines—elevators, phonographs, sleeping and parlor cars—have faded, the domestic and social comedy stands up well. The plays, that is, are worth rereading for their social satire and comedy.

Even in his role of critic for more than half a century, moreover, Howells was stylist, wit, and rhetorical satirist. Much of the criticism that precedes and follows "The Editor’s study" in Harper’s (1886 to 1892) is either warm yet judicial praise and appreciation, or is coolly magisterial. But during his war for the realists, Howells came under regular heavy

attack for his "vulgarity" and replied hotly with "monthly ministrations of gall and wormwood," as he called them. They ranged from casual jibes at the English periodical writers who resented his attempt to devaluate Dickens and Thackeray to the bitter debate between office boy and Easy Chair, at Christmas time in 1891, on the wildly absurd injustice of the American copyright law. In the United Sympathies of Altruria, the Christmas boy explains with boiling irony, every citizen must give up all his property at the end of fifty years, just as authors alone were forced to do in the United States of America. In short, Howells was more sarcastic and satirical in "The Editor’s Study" battle than at any other period of his career, and the criticism of this period must be understood as limited and rhetorical; but his humor never wholly left him. What quiet wit, and truth, reside in his conclusion, about Emily Dickinson’s first series of poems, that she formed a distinctive moment in the national life, and "could as well happen in Amherst, Mass., as in Athens, Att."²

Many of Howells’ plays, then, as we have observed, tend to exploit humor of situation. His critical writing in "The Editor’s Study" sequence is rhetorical: he slashes back, he is sarcastic, he is mock humble, he praises his culture heroes like Tolstoy and Henry James without stint and makes fun of the opposition in alternate breaths. But in his travel works and his prose fiction Howells is probably most himself: as he said of Mark Twain, in 1875, in a review, a really "subtle humorist."³ Consequently I intend to deal with a travel book and two novels, at length, in depth, each from a different period of the writer’s development. They are Venetian Life (1866), Indian Summer (1886), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889).

Howells wrote his first widely-read, enduring prose work, Venetian Life, in the form of letters to the Boston Evening Transcript during the Civil War, while he was United States Consul in Venice, and then cut and carefully revised them for volume publication in 1866. Despite the melancholy decay of Venice and the city’s subjection to Austria in the 1860s, it is mostly a happy book and a decidedly bold attempt to define the character of the Venetians. One of their prime traits, especially of the poor, Howell finds, is their "liveliness of wit".⁴ This trait is ancestral. The Venetians had once insisted that the Paduans ransom three hundred prisoners by paying "two white pullets for each warrior," and when the humiliating ransom was openly paid in Piazza San Marco, had abandoned themselves to "sarcastic exultation" (p. 262). This same "quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonality" had also invented the saying, Conte che non conta, non conta niente, which is to say, "The count who can’t count money counts for nothing" (p. 386). Or, since the Republic of Torcello was long since dead, Venetians liked to describe an improbable nobleman as a "Count from Torcello" (p. 180). They would invite a friend to dine

with the wry formula, "Come eat four grains of rice with me" (p. 86), or dream up the slang term "coal-oil" for the particularly vile local brandy sciampagnin (p. 114). Their poetry and fun were apparent in the street-cries, which entranced Howells: "Melons with hearts of fire" and "Juicy pears that bathe your beard" from the fruiterer, or from the peach vendor, peaches "Ugly, but good!" (p. 108). The Venetians’ capacity for irony was equally evident in their relation to the Jews of the city. As Howells observes, "The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the next world, but Corpo di Bacco! that is no reason why he should not be friends with him in this" (pp. 207-208). It is small wonder, then, that Howells wrote a witty book of foreign travel and residence, considering the humor of the people he so patiently observed and whose dialect he learned early.

Venetian Life opens with a verbal quibble: "One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the stage-box . . . and so we saw the play and the by-play" (p. 9)—and so Howells sets the stage thematically for a book on the everyday back-stage life of the Venetian people, at nearly every level. Thus he tells of the society woman of Florence who asked a foreign savant to sing at her conversazione because, she had been told, he was "virtuous" (p. 395). Howells’ own virtuosity with coined words later in his career is only hinted at in the adaptation "Italianissimism" or his avowal that the perfume of incense stealing through the doors of St. Mark’s is the "reverendest smell" in the world (p. 160). But his skill with humorous figures of speech is already apparent. He says that the Venetians "preferred to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation" (p. 43), and that as the spring advanced, sleepless youths at night "melodiously bayed the moon in chorus" (p. 68). Their cook, Giovanna, writes "a kind of pugilism—the strokes being made straight out from the shoulder" (p. 112), and their door-key, of formidable size, "impresses you at first sight as ordnance" (p. 113). Howells’ amiable talkative barber "has a defective eye, which obliges him to tack before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more favorable to conversation" (p. 296).

The texture of Howells’ writing and his very style, even this early, are fitfully ironic, with that peculiar quizzical awareness he has of himself sharing in the foibles he makes such fun of in others. Two matters furnish him with endless opportunities for ironic comment: the Venetians’ talent for "loafing" (in spite of their being hard workers, like Italians generally), and the cheerfulness with which they assess the foreigner with small overcharges. Thus he sketches the proud response of a noble Venetian father to the query about his son’s profession, "E’ in Piazza!" That is, all

day long the son bore a cane and wore light gloves and ogled the ladies from the windows of Florian’s caffe in Piazza San Marco (p. 59). Yet, Howells adds casually two pages later that the spring is descending on the city and the sea, while "I sit at Florian’s, sharing and studying the universal worthlessness about me. . ." (p. 61). He explains that Mr. —, the Englishman, was "at once our friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know any thing of landlords in Italy)" (p. 101). One of his most amusing stories has to do with his effort to evade being swindled by the woodman who delivered firewood to his door. He takes a boat to the Custom House to get his fuel first hand; bargains at length; insists on straight logs rather than knotty chunks; gets the wood housed at his palazzo; and finds that it cost him just what he had been paying his woodman. "I had.., lost my self-respect in being plundered before my face," he concludes, "and I resolved thereafter to be cheated in quiet dignity behind my back" (p. 110).

Characteristically, Howells’ varied irony involves anti-climax or a humorous drop in tone. So arriving in Venice by gondola late at night and drifting up to stone steps and a barred door, he was fearful until "the door opened, and he beheld the honest swindling countenance of a hotel portier . . . and all . . . doubt and conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the portier suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much" (p. 31). In much the same spirit, Howells takes great pleasure in a new character on the marionette stage, Facanapa. Varying according to various stage roles, Facanapa’s "individual traits are displayed in all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart" (p. 78). Or Howells fishes up from the bottom of the canal (how clear they must have been, then!) a love-letter "full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling" (p. 83). Or at a corner of the Grand Canal and a side canal, two barge captains whose boats have collided cursed each other furiously "while I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s heads"—though the storm "burst in words" only (p. 136). The deflating touch appears finely phrased in the author’s footnoted definition of poverino: "the compassionate generic term for all unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who decline to do so" (p. 27).

That same balloon-pricking tendency and skill suffuse Howells’ anecdotes of the Venetian past. Rhetorically, in apologetic parentheses, Howells asks, "Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?" (p. 96), for example. For further examples, he cites Cooper’s ingenious Bravo, who "had the incredible good luck to hide himself from the sbirri of the Republic" among the tombstones of the

Hebrews on the Lido—which are in fact flat to the ground—along with Lord Byron, whose habit it was "to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous solitude of which the sincere bard was fond" (pp. 175-76). One may even watch the ironic qualification emerge in the following bit of description. The facade of Santa Maria dell’ Orto, Howells asserts, is exquisite, and the church

has two Gothic windows of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart with its inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the men who dreamed these windows out of their faith and piety (if they did, which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if their hands were reverent, which I doubt). (pp. 212–13)

The shifts from apparent admiration to irony and open rejection are perhaps too sudden to be wholly persuasive. More acceptable is Howells’ paradox that "winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates" (p. 40) since the Italian palazzi and churches are heated scantily or not at all. Consequently, he "sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona, in her time, sniffed" with the eternal Venetian cold in the head (p. 45), or he turned involuntarily to Titian’s painting The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence in the chill church of the Redentore, "envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his gridiron amid all that frigidity" (p. 46).

Howells’ satirizing the sentimental longing for "the good old believing days" anticipates Mark Twain’s attitude in Innocents Abroad, just as the irreverent grotesquerie of Desdemona’s cold and St. Lawrence’s warmth suggests American humor. Two other anecdotes remind us further that Howells, even in Italy, cherished the American style of joke. In the first, describing small dealers who cry their wares in boastful clamor in the campi he finds "it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and paper of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils" (p. 65). In the second, he sketches the Venetian river-boatmen who ascend the shallow streams, even "running on the grass of the meadows"—"just as in this day our own western steamers are known to run in a heavy dew" (p. 239). But if Howells writes from an American consciousness, he strikes the note of American humor infrequently. He is looking at and listening to the Venetians.

The development of Howells following Venetian Life is from the humorous observer-narrator to the inventor of fictional characters who provoke or who themselves create laughter. In A Foregone Conclusion

(1875), Howells’ first international novel, the point-of-view character, Ferris, is something of a stick; Don Ippolito, the Italian priest, and Florida Vervain, the American girl, are humorless; but Mrs. Vervain makes up for the others with her invalidism, her non-stop, non-sequitur talk, her sense that men were created to serve women, and her innate gentleness and kindness. In The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the most amusing character is Lapham’s foil, Bromfield Corey, Boston Brahmin, though Howells here has not given up his role as philosopher and commentator; so that when Corey the dilettante decides to call on the Laphams and says, "This is a thing that can’t be done by halves!" Howells simply adds, "He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters."⁵ The development toward dramatic comedy of manners, with international difference, reaches its peak in Indian Summer (1886). The prime sources of amusement in this "biographical novel"⁶ are the gay ironies and persiflage of Theodore Colville, its hero and center of consciousness, and the richly amusing encounters among its characters, who number five ages of men and women and children. Howells augments these encounters metaphorically by reference to changes in weather and seasons and flowers, and by Colville’s recurrent awareness of the American present in the midst of the Florentine past. The plot is simple. Colville, who is forty-one, and Imogene Graham, who is twenty, delude themselves into an engagement to marry and are saved from their folly only by a late return to common sense and the eloquent silence of Lina Bowen, thirty-eight, who loves and is truly loved by the deluded "imperfectly monogamous" hero.

Theodore Colville is the mixed character that Howells and his fellow humorists and realists found rewarding. Architect manqué, he is a newspaper editor of DesVaches, Indiana, now revisiting Florence, where seventeen years earlier he had been jilted by Lina’s pretty companion. He now reencounters Mrs. Bowen, a widow with her jeune fille daughter, and her pretty charge on her first visit to Italy, Imogene Graham. Then, Colville had been shy and self-conscious and sentimental; now, he is the good-natured Italophile in search of his youth in Italy. He is charmed with women and a little afraid of them. Hence his talk is intended both to attract them and to protect his own real feelings. Early in the novel, when the youthfully serious Imogene tells him she likes people to be outspoken and to say everything they think, Colville replies, " ‘Then I foresee that I shall become a favorite . . . I say a great deal more than I think.’"⁷ Mrs. Bowen is just when she charges Colville with playing Shakespeare s Gratiano "a famous talker; he loved to speak an infinite deal of nothing more than any man in Venice" (p. 273). Colville himself acknowledges his mixed way of speaking when he tries to explain an "intricate kind of compliment—sort of salsa agradolce affair—tutti-frutti style—species of

moral mayonnaise" (p. 224). His is distinctly "the American way of talking" (p. 149)—so the elderly Mrs. Amsden insists. Howells evidently wished to impart a distinctly American flavor to Colville’s joking for the sake of international contrast, and for its own sake, as a kind of American humor as well.

Spirited poetic exaggeration is the key. So it is that Colville, responding to a French lady’s query at table in their pensione, whether he has been in Florence before, replies, "Yes, a great while ago; in a state of pre-existence." When she seems puzzled, he adds, "Yes; when I was young. . . . When I was twenty-four. A great while ago" (p. 22). It is by this answer that the Frenchwoman infers that Colville is American. An exchange between Imogene and Colville follows the same vein. When the girl finds it incredible that the elderly Mr. Waters could once have been in love with an American girl, Colville concedes that this is not easy to credit in "such pyramidal antiquity" as the retired New England clergyman’s (p. 39). Their conversation, which also involves Europeanized Mrs. Bowen, then turns to the subject of American girlhood, and Colville contends for "the old national ideal of girlish liberty as wide as the continent, as fast as the Mississippi" (p. 40) much as he had earlier praised the sense and sentiment of the minstrel song, "Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight . . . and dance by the light of the moon" (p. 36). In the winter, he warns Imogene, one should try the churches of Florence only "if one goes well wrapped up in furs, and has a friend along to rouse him and keep him walking when he is about to fall into that lethargy which precedes death by freezing" (p. 48). And one day in the summer, he explains to Mrs. Bowen’s small daughter, Effie:

I walked down Via Tornabuoni across through Porta Rosso and the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizi. You’ve no idea how comfortable and home-like it was—all the statues loafing about in their shirt sleeves, and the objects of interest stretching and yawning round, and having a good rest after their winter’s work. (p. 306)

The effigies were loafing, presumably, Whitman-style.

Colville the exaggerator is also an inveterate composer of witticisms, sometimes in his head for the newspaper audience back home, but more often aloud for his charming, indulgent feminine friends. When Mrs. Bowen complains to him "But you’re not logical," he answers, "No . . . you can’t be logical and complimentary at the same time. It’s too much to ask" (p. 57). Then, when Colville himself is not performing, another character or the novelist himself may fill in for him. So Colville complains to his hostess at tea that she and her compatriots speak nothing but English, even with the shop people, and that he can hardly get them to

speak Italian with him—and the lady retorts, "Perhaps they think you can speak English better," an answer that "went over Florence" at once (p. 95). Howells informs his readers, "A prudent woman does not do an imprudent thing by halves," to explain Mrs. Bowen’s decision to attend the veglione during the carnival (p. 112). He also lets his reader overhear a husband and wife quarreling in the false security of English, the man bidding the woman "not to be a fool," and the woman demanding of him "how she was to endure his company if she was not a fool" (p. 187)—this a fine sharp touch in a novel where a potential mismatch between generations is the not always comic subject. Colville and his creator are, in short, incurably ironic. After Colville has suffered humiliation from Imogene and Mrs. Bowen and is packing to leave town, the question "Does the soul really wear out with the body" flits across his mind as he takes down a pair of trousers and notices that they are considerably frayed about the feet (p. 163).

Gathered up in this way, out of their narrative context in Indian Summer, Colville’s jokes may seem to render him too witty to believe; and in fact Henry James observed that "Theodore Colville is so irrepressibly and happily facetious as to make one wonder whether the author is not prompting him a little" (p. xviii). But Colville can be as foolish and mistaken as he is whimsical or droll, and he is also sensitive enough to come to realize and acknowledge his errors. Howells moreover surrounds his protagonist with a wonderfully varied group of figures of five different ages, most of them foils to his humor.

Indian Summer is truly "all a variation of the one theme" of youth and age, as Howells wrote to Mark Twain.⁸ But what amusing and complex variations Howells manages to draw from his simple theme. Effie Bowen, the Swiss-educated daughter of Lina Bowen, is an American "Jeune fille and simply a wonder—the most perfectly painted child in fiction—at least so far as I know," so J. W. DeForest asserted.⁹ Imogene Graham at the age of twenty belongs to the type of "American girl" that Howells and James created, but is a good deal more innocent, impulsive, and sentimental than Daisy Miller. Mrs. Bowen, thirty-eight and "Europeanized," contrasts with her own daughter (who is perhaps twelve) and with Imogene, her guest in Florence. Forty-one year old Colville’s involvement with all three creates discords and harmonies and movement in the plot. Howells multiplies still further the chances for bemuddlement and humor with a ficelle, the elderly Mrs. Amsden, who is the sort of woman who could "manage her skeleton winningly" (p. 195), and with Mr. Waters, a limited raisonneur of seventy, who studies the Florentine past with fresh enthusiasm and takes still another view of youth and age.

The humor and the pathos inherent in these relationships are worked

out with fine fictional logic. At Madame Ucelli’s ball, early in the story, Colville watches "Miss Graham" dance and suddenly finds his heart in his throat when she gives him an exquisite smile as she dances by. "Your

daughter?" inquires the fond parent at his elbow; "That is mine yonder in red" (p. 60). Colville is equally entranced and amused by Imogene

Graham’s taste for the weird, the fascinating, the cynical, as she puts it, in Poe, Scott, and Thackeray. Hence he is amazed to learn subsequently that the Inglehart boys find Imogene’s talk of literature "mighty brilliant and mighty deep" and praise Mrs. Bowen "as if she were quite an old woman!" But it is no surprise to him that they are awed by Imogene’s dazzling young beauty (pp. 85–86). On the other hand, when Mr. Waters inquires about "our friends at Palazzo Pinti" of Colville and adds, "Such a beautiful young creature," Colville mistakes the elderly minister’s reference: Waters is speaking of Mrs. Bowen. He admits that Imogene is good-looking but finds her as yet "very crude and unformed" (p. 100). Similarly, Imogene is much struck by the minister’s remarking to Colville, at the carnival, "Now, if I were a young man like you—"; whereas Colville himself listens with mixed feelings to Mr. Waters’ leisurely argument, later in the novel, that forty is a beautiful age, with a great part of youth still ahead of it (pp. 119, 145).

Despite his wit and intelligence, Colville is human, and his limitations become a source of ironic humor. "Engaged" to Imogene, he is incensed at Mr. Waters’ suggestion that Mr. Morton, twenty-six, might at one time have been attracted to Mrs. Bowen (p. 245); and he is most genuinely tender with his "fiancée" at the moment when he and Lina Bowen become reconciled friends again (p. 256). One of Howells’ nicer dramatic ironies is unobtrusively to contrast comments by Lina Bowen and Imogene. Early in the novel, the day after he has waltzed with Imogene at the veglione and unawares let Mrs. Bowen make her way home alone with her ill child, Mrs. Bowen remarks to him gaily, sharply, "As I told Imogene, young people will be young people" (p. 129). Conversely, close to the end of Indian Summer, as Imogene realizes more and more strongly her error in becoming engaged to Colville, she remarks to Effie and Mrs. Bowen and Colville, who are sitting in the back seat of the carriage, "you old people will be safer back there" (p. 269). This, it may be noted, is not long before Colville is seriously injured when the frightened horses back the carriage over a retaining wall, after he has gotten everyone safely out of the carriage. A final chord of harmony ends the motif of May-and-September and also concludes the novel. Colville and Lina, married a year, have learned by letter that Mr. Morton is going to Buffalo presumably to see Imogene. Colville asks his wife to speculate why, and she concludes, "If it isn’t Mr. Morton, it will be some one else—some young person."

Whereupon "Colville rose and went around the breakfast table to her. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I have married a young person, and it would only be fair’. . . (pp. 316–17).

Following Indian Summer, one might expect a sharp diminution of humor in Howells’ fiction, for the late 1880s are the time of his daughter Winifred’s death, his risk in defending the right of the Chicago Anarchists to a proper trial, and the depressing evidence of a widening gulf between rich and poor in the United States. But Howells’ belief in the cathartic power of comedy was not lightly held, and it persists strongly, with some darkening into satire, into the panoramic or economic novels, as they have been called, and the chief of these, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889). It even prevails, one may observe, in A Traveler from Altruria (1894), surely one of the few Utopias ever imagined with humor. A Hazard of New Fortunes, then, is a big novel with a "strenuous action" and an impressive catastrophe in the deaths of Conrad Dryfoos and Berthold Lindan in a street-car strike, but its serious fable in no way clashes with the humorous and satirical representation of characters making their way in the gay, chaotic, varied life of New York City.

Aside from the low-keyed ironic dialogue and narration managed through Basil and Isabel March, now in middle age, the humor in the novel arises primarily from the character-in-speech of Fulkerson and from certain episodes managed with brilliant dramatic irony. It seems appropriate, therefore, to trace these two sources of humor through the work. Fulkerson, who is called only by his last name, is a "merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature," 10 a Western man come East, and "a pure advertising essence" (p. 360). He is the inventor-promoter of the magazine which draws the various chief characters together in the sprawling metropolis. Howells took decided pleasure in drawing him and letting him speak at length, out of several motives. Fulkerson was based on Ralph Keeler, a light-hearted jack-of-all-trades whom he and Osgood and Mark Twain and Bret Harte had all befriended in Boston, now long since dead, having vanished without a trace on the way to Cuba.¹¹ He also represents a basic humorous American type that Howells wished to explore, and he affords continual amusement in a story otherwise somber enough.

Fulkerson’s style is evident in his very first talk with March concerning the new magazine in which they will make with the others a "hazard of new fortunes": "‘I tell you, March, this is the greatest idea that has been struck since’—Fulkerson stopped and searched his mind for a fit image—‘since the creation of man’" (p. 3). His Southwestern style flowers as he describes how the natural gas drillers take out stumps from the fields in Indiana. No more burning or stump-extracting, he explains: "‘Now they just touch ’em off with a little dynamite, and they’ve got a cellar dug

and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it’" (p. 87). The magazine manager has his own notion of what kind of cover will attract readers. "‘Sometimes we’re going to have a delicate little landscape like this,’ he says, holding a sketch in his hand, ‘and sometimes we’re going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the law will allow’" (p. 151). But Fulkerson knows his business. "‘What we want to do is to work the ewig Weibliche in this concern,’" he argues, and by this he means "‘real high-tone literature that will show women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously,’" because "‘women form three-fourths of the reading public in this country’" (pp. 153-54). Naturally he has an endless fund of jokes, like "‘You spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the chicken when he swallowed him in a fresh egg’" (p. 358). And naturally, like Mark Twain’s Scotty Briggs, he talks in slang. To March he says:

"Why, old man, you’re coming in on the divvy, you know. . . .
They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her husband what a divvy was.
"It’s a chicken before it’s hatched."
"No! Truly?"
He explained, and she began to spend the divvy. (p. 218)

But Fulkerson has occasional moments of sobriety and even humility. "It’s astonishing," he admits to March, "how you always can get along in this world without the man that is simply indispensable. Makes a fellow realize that he could take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great deal" (pp. 491–92).

Fulkerson of course has his limitations. When he finds he must choose between March and Dryfoos the owner over the issue of firing Lindau, the old socialist translator, for his opinions, it is only the moral views of the girl he is in love with that stiffen his resolve in favor of March. He inveighs bitterly against socialism at the same time that he praises Indiana communities for municipal ownership of their gas-wells. He is nonetheless a shrewd and amusing judge of character. Of March, he observes, "He’s a modest Boston petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am- not that kind of herb myself" (p. 312). Of the Dryfoos girls, he remarks to Mrs. March that when he first saw them, "‘There was the native earth for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt, now, but you ought to have seen her before she was broken to harness. And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in Central Park? That was Christine’" (p. 180). Concerning Beaton, the self-indulgent, talented artist, Fulkerson admits: "Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but he usually takes it out in personal conduct. When it comes to work, he’s a regular horse."

To which March replies, "‘He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule’" (p. 157).

It is striking that the extreme characters of the novel are almost humorless: Colonel Woodburn, quixotic advocate of slavery; Dryfoos, self-made capitalist; Beaton, the complete artist; Lindau, the Marxist; and Conrad Dryfoos, Christian socialist. Strengthening the middle ground of humor are two of Howells’ most vivid young women. Madison Woodburn, a "blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian," is all her father is not, and likes to say, "I shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’ if it wasn’t fo’ the inconvenience" (p. 125). Alma Leighton, who refuses Beaton’s proposals of marriage repeatedly and intends to pick and choose, as a man does, assures her mother: "when my ‘fated fairy prince’ comes along, I shall just simply make furious love to him and grab him. Of course, I shall make a decent pretence of talking in my sleep" (p. 530). Howells, in short, would have agreed with Mark Twain: "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

Berthold Lindau’s heavily accented speech is also a constant source of humor. Howells is painstaking, perhaps too painstaking, in rendering it in print for the reader, even thickening up the accent when Lindau is in drink. After long absence, Lindau greets his former pupil in reading German this way: "Who is your favorite boet now, Passil? You write some boetry yourself yet? No? Well, I am gladt to zee you. Brush those baperss off of that jair. Well, idt is goodt for zore eyess. How didt you findt where I lif?" (p. 204). Or he says to Dryfoos, in angry disagreement at the dinner for the magazine people: "What would you do with the unions of the gabidalists—the drosts—and gompines, and boolss?" But when Dryfoos retorts that he would suppress unions of working men and reserve the right of organization to capitalists, Howells has Lindau whisper to March, in German: "But it is infamous—infamous! What kind of man is this? Who is he? He has the heart of a tyrant" (pp. 380–81).

This sudden shift in diction from the unconsciously humorous to the passionately serious is vividly dramatic and may serve to remind us that A Hazard of New Fortunes, Veblenian before Veblen, is ironic comedy on a grand scale—economic, social, artistic, sectional, linguistic, and moral, as George Arms has argued. The dinner held at the Dryfoos mansion is of course a prime episode in this kind, held ostensibly to bring the contributors of Every Other Week together, but actually to flatter Dryfoos, the financial backer. It is as funny, as satirical, as painful as the comparable dinner scene in The Rise of Silas Lapham. In another bit of action, Howells comments openly through March on the price society may be paying for the exquisitely idealistic Margaret Vance: it is the burly

policeman pursuing a prostitute down the shadowed street (p. 274). What Blake had seen in London, Howells saw in New York.

More covert but quite as ironic are a scene in the Dryfoos home and the last sequence of Beaton’s adventures. In the first of these, Jacob Dryfoos and his wife talk about the farm and the family graveyard they have long since left behind, while bursts of laughter come from Mela and Christine in the drawing-room, where Beaton is trying to teach them to play the banjo and flirting with both girls. When Dryfoos goes in to talk with Beaton briefly, resentment rises strong though unspoken between them. Dryfoos comes back to his wife to talk about Conrad, their unhappy son. And when Mrs. Dryfoos confesses she wants to go back to the farm, the old man is forced to shout angrily, "We can’t go back! . . . there’s no farm any more to go back to" (p. 254). If the Dryfoos family seems lost, however, Angus Beaton comes to seem lost and even damned. He first thinks idly of Margaret Vance and her interest in art, but finds her too "far gone in good works" (p. 521). He is once again, and finally, refused by Alma Leighton—to his great distress even though he would have been in panic if she had accepted him. Much annoyed by the inconvenience the street-car strike puts him to, he pays a final visit to Christine Dryfoos. But in spite of her money and her dark feline beauty, he discovers he simply "could not make it go"—and when he leaves, Christine slashes at his face with her nails in a fury of frustration. Reeking with perspiration back in his rooms, Beaton takes his loaded pistol in hand, lets it slip to the floor, and suffers a burning line across his cheek from the bullet. His case, he thinks to himself, "was not to be dignified into tragedy" (p. 547). Conrad Dryfoos, the reader remembers, had been shot through the heart while attempting to make peace between strikers and police.

As for March, who is spokesman of a sort for Howells, his bitter conclusion is, "And so we go on trembling before Dryfooses and living in gimcrackeries" (p. 487). How grotesque, how absurd, how really very funny, Howells implies, is the American passion to get ahead in an economic chance world, where pecuniary canons of taste dominate all but a few drunken revolutionaries and ineffectual loving martyrs.

One is reminded of Mark Twain’s argument in "The Chronicle of Young Satan"¹² that human beings possess one immensely effective weapon against humbug and tyranny—the power of laughter, which can blow falsehood to smithereens at a blast—though they rarely use it. Of Howells’ humor, Mark Twain said:

I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing all the playing themselves. . . . His is a

humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, healthgiving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.¹³

His humor, Clemens argues, is sanative, pervasive, and subtle. It also ranges widely, from the pleasure to be derived from regarding "the ridiculous human heart"¹⁴ to the "great and dreadful delight" to be found, Howells says, in Henrik Ibsen. That delight comes from his power to disperse "the conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves" and to oblige them to "examine the grounds of their social and moral opinions."¹⁵ Howells’ humor encompasses both. It is present in his writing in a measure, at a depth, and to an effect of delight and enlightenment unappreciated in our age, which could stand more of both.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

NOTES

    ¹Review of A Connecticut Yankee in "Editor’s Study," Harper’s, lxxx (January 1890), 319.
   ²"Editor’s Study," Harper’s, lxxxii (January 1891), 321.
   ³Atlantic, xxxvi (December 1875), 749.
   ⁴Venetian Life (Boston: Osgood, 1872), 121. First published 1866. Page references hereafter appear in the text.
    ⁵(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1949), p. xii.
    ⁶"Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading, An Impersonal Explanation," in Howells and James: A Double Billing (New York: New York Public Library, 1958), p. 23.
    ⁷Indian Summer (New York: Dutton, 1951), p. 79. Introduction by William M. Gibson. Page references hereafter appear in the text.
    ⁸Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain-Howells Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 536.
    ⁹lndian Summer, p. xiv.
    ¹⁰A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Dutton, 1952), p. 11. Introduction by George Warren Arms. Page references hereafter appear in the text. ¹¹Mark Twain-Howells Letters, p. 914.
    ¹²"The Chronicle of Young Satan," in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Strange Manuscripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 165–66. Edited with an introduction by William M. Gibson.
    ¹³What is Man? and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1917), p 235.
    ¹⁴lndian Summer, p. 45.
    ¹⁵"Henrik Ibsen," North American Review, clxxxiii (July 1906), as quoted in Clara and Rudolf Kirk, Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays (New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 141.