Nonfiction > Carl Van Doren > The American Novel > Subject Index > Page 146

CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD · SUBJECT INDEX

Carl Van Doren (1885–1950). The American Novel. 1921.

Page 146

Him who died for it, when all Cæsar’s things shall be finally rendered to Cæsar, and men shall come into their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other. He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personal happiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the whole human family.” Sincere as was his conversion, however, Howells did not turn preacher as Tolstoy had done, and as his radical admirers expected. At fifty he could hardly undergo any more considerable change than that his sympathies should be enlarged and his utterance even further mellowed by the tides of benevolence and brotherhood which all his life had been rising within him and now knew themselves. Tolstoy’s way was impossible to Howells’s will because Howells was a saint not of the other world but of this, a walker of amiable, companionable paths, too friendly for the solitude of the natural martyr, too kindly for the battles of the natural warrior. Others might grow angry for the sake of increasing peace, but Howells could not. Others for the sake of humanity might exchange an art for a mission, but Howells could not. The many books he subsequently wrote show him no less sunny and affectionate than before, though he had now a new eye for social injustices. In his Utopian romances, A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), without compromise with the economic system under which he had been bred, he threw it incontinently over—though how urbanely and serenely!—in favor of the system of his imaginary Altruria, where all work is honorable and servants are unknown, where capital

CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD · SUBJECT INDEX

Click here to shop the Bartleby Bookstore.

Shakespeare · Bible · Saints · Anatomy · Harvard Classics · Lit. History · Quotations · Poetry