ABSTRACT
And where will it end, this differencing of doctrine into image and plot? Well, evidently not with the late-century fictions of William Dean Howells and Henry James: relentlessly social in the one case and somewhat more psychological in the other, you’d think their “realism” could give a rest to this wrestling with first principles. But no: society is, as Emerson had shown, a philosophical as well as a political fact; and, for Americans at least, it offers no refuge from that ultimate concern known as religion. In The American, James can’t keep from naming his water-crossing protagonist after the Saint once devoted to that activity, and his moral transformation, begun in a hack that had seen too many Irish funerals, ends up in the cathedral (Notre Dame) that, after St. Peter’s, is the capital of European Christianity. That’s right, a latter-day conversion, as even James’ more analytical brother could surely recognize. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells rewrites the story, sticking harder to the novelistic premise of nature and culture, but in the end, his risen then fallen hero rises again, from the active pursuit of culture to the patient resignation to a morality subtle enough to require an old-time minister to interpret. Manner, Morals, and the Novel of Grace.
