Howells

that remembers and respects the gravity which
it momentarily displaces. They are still classed
as the author's best work by persons for whom
the union of the comic and the fine is the prime
desideratum in a work of fiction. Even here
there are hints of other qualities. Two of the
tales, infringing an imperious convention, end
in disappointments; the airiest has a bitter
episode; and the excellent Foregone Conclu-
sion, without faithlessness to its blither purpose,
achieves passion and borders tragedy. Howells
is already the realistic observer of highly select
material, too select to find ready verification in
average experience.

Between 1880 and 1890 he forsook the Atlan-
tic Monthly, and wrote several novels for the
younger and more popular Century Magazine,
by way of prologue to the intimate and enduring
bond which made the press of Harper & Brothers
from 1885 to 1916 his chosen outlet His decisive
removal to New York took place in 1891. The
novels put off their Bostonian quiet, and apply
themselves with modest vigor to a wider range of
more aggressive themes and problems. In Dr.
Preen's Practice, the last of the Atlantic serials,
a novelette packed with masterly delineations, a
woman fails in medicine less because she is a
woman than because she is a lady. A Woman's
Reason (1883) returns to the charge with its
picture of the futility of attempted self-support
on the part of an untrained woman whose voca-
tion is reducible to charm. In The Undiscovered
Country spiritualism is disapproved as a thesis,
and disallowed as a gospel (the latter on the just,
though rare, ground of anti-spirituality), and
there is a friendly picture of the Shakers, a sect
which, by its renunciation alike of sexuality and
competition, cast a curious and twofold spell upon
the mind of Howells. A Modern Instance (1882)
is a vigorous departure; the grasp of life is
widened, and the capable supple narrative moves
forward with unaccustomed and vivifying speed.
It recounts the shipwreck of an inharmonious
marriage brought about by simple, normal, un-
reverberating causes, and it is highly charac-
teristic that Howells never returned to this class
of topic, finding perhaps an objectionable vio-
lence in a theme which half the novelists of our
febrile age would have rejected as objectionably
tame. Bartley Hubbard in this book is a proof
of the author's unsuspected power to vitalize a
brilliant and consummate blackguard, a figure
which he draws with a mixture of abhorrence
and mercy which emulates, if it does not quite
achieve, impartiality.

From this foray, Howells returned in The
Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) to the cherished

Howells
theme of the jostle and recoil of unadjusted so-
cial castes; this time the culture of Boston con-
sorts with its untutored wealth. Here, however,
a graver purpose guides the comedy. Howells,
moralist and anti-romanticist, is severe beyond
his gentle wont toward romantic morality, and
insists that two people who love should marry
even if the marriage disconcerts a sister's expec-
tations. The current now sets decisively toward
realism. Few men after fifty in an age of doubt
are capable of surrender to a transforming en-
thusiasm. Contact with the luminous and in-
genuous realism of Tolstoy made Howells a
partaker in that rare experience. His old faiths
blended with his new fervors in a gospel which
may be summarized in the dictum that every-
thing real in human nature is valuable, and that
nothing unreal is valuable except by way of
sportive interlude. Stated in this coldly abstract
form, the doctrine is rather sedative than pro-
voking, but it became redoubtable through the
vigor and the rigor of the censorship it applied
to several of the greatest and the dearest names
in the history of fiction. It found a clear and
powerful voice in the widely read and keenly
controverted "Editor's Study" (criticisms in
Harper's Monthly, 1886-91), of which the tiny
but weighty manifesto, Criticism and Fiction
(1891), was the unsparingly distilled quintes-
sence.
The new gospel widened the scope and deep-
ened the significance of the critic's own fiction,
but was not wholly favorable to that delicately
specific, though bounded and sheltered, art
which had formed a public in its own likeness.
To this art he could still return; Indian Summer
(1886), Florentine in setting, is a charming re-
version to the sunny, though never quite un-
shadowed, mood of his earlier successes. In The
Minister's Charge (1887), however, a parti-
colored, yet on the whole leaden, work, he paints
many sides and levels of Boston with a hand too
conscientious to be kind; in this book he pro-
poses "complicity" as a label for the interlace-
ment of responsibilities in human society. Some
coercion of the taste by the heart and the con-
science is again perceptible in A Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890), his first delineation of New
York, in which a thing so very much in Howells'
way as the birth of a periodical is obliged to find
houseroom for something so very little in his
way as a street-railway strike. Painfulness is as-
sociated with real, though fluctuating, power in
The Quality of Mercy (1892), a study of the
diversely ramifying effects of crime in a society
which is itself the primary felon. The attempt to
rationalize morality by the elimination of fan-