Howells

tastic scruple is again to the fore in three novels
less interesting for the teaching than for the
momentum of the passions which constitute its
vehicle. April Hopes (1888) paints love with a
delectable reality, which does not spare us a sar-
donic after-taste. The Shadow cf a Dream
(1890), also passionate, shows a gift for the pic-
turesque and the romantic which is almost scan-
dalous in a realist. An Imperative Duty (1893)
treats with equal vigor and delicacy the difficult
problem of an Ethiopian tincture in the blood
of a girl whom a white man seeks in marriage.

The range of the novelist's subjects, during
his fifties and sixties, expanded in two directions.
In an artist's later life, as the field of the unat-
tempted shrinks, and experience in art itself in-
creases, the temptation to turn to art itself for
themes gains force. In Howells this comes out
distinctly in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890);
it reappears in the young novelist of The World
of Chance (1893), a trim and gliding pleasure-
craft, with dynamite in the form of sacrificial
murder in its hold; in the young dramatist of the
admirable Story of a Play (1898) ; in the woman
art-student of the rather unexciting Coast of Bo-
hernia (1893) ; and—more faintly—in the young
journalist of Letters Home (1903), with its in-
stant mastery of the troublesome epistolary form.
The second form of novel subject is the economic
problem or class struggle, a theme to which
Howells, here again seconded, if not inspired, by
Tolstoy, was led by the simplest and highest of
incentives, the misery induced in a vivid imagina-
tion and a feeling heart by the presence (actual
or mental) of cold, hunger, and rags in their im-
mediate vicinity. The railway strike has been
already noted; in the variously interesting Annie
Kilburn (1889) Howells exposed the weakness
of charitable endeavor; and, by distant reference
in A Traveler from Altmria (1894) and, much
later, by direct portrayal in Through the Eye of
the Needle (1907), he sketched a model com-
monwealth the nucleus of which is a central store
replenished by everybody's labor and available
to everybody's wants. This is socialism of a sort,
unprofessional, unpartisan, undogmatic social-
ism, and his repudiation of war might be traced
to the same source if it were not so much more
probably and pleasantly traceable to his human-
ity.

His capacities did not age with the man. Dur-
ing his sixties censure might point to abating
force in Ragged Lady (1899), in Their Silver
Wedding Journey (1899), which reanimates
rather than revitalizes the invaluable Marches,
in the slender Miss Bellard's Inspiration (1905)*
where his tardy pen first overtakes the new wo-

Howells

man, in the penitential Fennel and Rue (1908) ;
but admiration could retort by pointing to The
Kentons (1902) and to two of his weightiest and
most robustly vital novels, The Landlord at
Lion's ^Head (1897), with its equally profound
and vigorous characterization of the genially
carnivorous Jeff Durgin, and The Son of Royal
Langbrith (1904), in which passion and pathos
vivify a moral problem as abstruse as it is prac-
tical. There are few novels after 1908, but New
Leaf Mills (1913) and The Leatheruuood God
(1916) are curious reversions to the homely
scenes and characters of his mid-Western youth.
He had gone around the circuit The rare had
taught him to esteem the commonplace, and the
exquisite had been his tutor in the virtues of
rusticity.

The minor works may be compactly treated.
He early mastered and speedily gave up the
short tale, returning to it after long absence with
a touch that did not quite return to mastery.
There are five volumes of tales, mostly of small
bulk, one for children, two that touch charily the
fringe of the occult, a fourth normal and sedate,
and, finally, the remarkable Daughter of the Stor-
age (1916), in parts as somberly vivacious as a
dancing skeleton. His dramas, which the stage
uncomplainingly relinquished to the drawing-
room, comprise thirty-one publications, and a
range of types which includes regular comedy
(with a strong charge of narrative), farce, comic
opera, a so-called mystery-play, and blank-verse
dialogues of tragic poignancy. Out of the Ques-
tion (1877) and A Counterfeit Presentment
(1877) are perhaps the best examples, not of
comedy, but of literature in comedy, that Amer-
ica can offer. In A Letter of Introduction (1892)
and The Unexpected Guests (1893), Howells at
one stroke originated and perfected a new type
of farce, that in which the characters are au-
thentic, not merely titular, ladies and gentlemen.
Yorick's Love, adapted from the Spanish by
Howells, was played successfully by Lawrence
Barrett in 1878. There are eleven books of
travel, graceful, leisurely, bland, sometimes a lit-
tle tenuous; among the heartiest and lustiest are
the first in date, Venetian Life (1866), and the
last but one, Familiar Spanish Travels (1913)-
Three more treat of Italy and three of England,
the last of which, The Seen and Unseen at Strat-
ford-on-Avon (1914), introduces the ghosts of
Shakespeare and Bacon to the twentieth cen-
tury.

Howells is one of the rare instances of a man
aspiring to poetry and writing in his teens and
twenties acceptable but unarresting verse, who,
in late maturity, by the continuous quickening of

3°9