Howells

his response to the tragic urgencies of family and
social life, becomes an original and moving poet.
The best of the scant but precious harvest is
found in Stops of Various Quills (1895) and
The Mother and the Father (1909). The liter-
ary critic is best studied in My Literary Passions
(1895) and in Criticism and Fiction (1891); in
the latter he rises to great criticism through the
finality, totality, and unexampled sincerity of his
realistic gospel. As a judge of particular books
he is less decidedly and uniformly satisfactory.
Modern Italian Poets (1887) is a useful mono-
graph; Heroines of Fiction (1901) is popular
in a self-respecting way; and Literature and Life
(1902) is incidentally and mildly critical. He
had always valued life as well as letters, and
from 1900 to 1920 in the "Easy Chair" of Har-
per's Monthly he played his versatile and skilful
part as reviewer of contemporaneities to the very
end. The autobiographies are highly valuable.
In the remarkable Boy's Town (Hamilton, Ohio)
a boy's life is poeticized without being varnished;
My Literary Passions shows a lyric warmth and
tremor; Years of My Youth (1916) retouches
the first decades; and the great Americans in
whom his fidelity exulted furnish matter and en-
during value to Literary Friends and Acquaint-
ance (1900) and My Mark Twain (1910). Most
interesting among the miscellanies are Suburban
Sketches (1871), A Day's Pleasure (1876), 7w-
pressions and Experiences (1896), Imaginary
Interviews (1910), from the "Easy Chair," and
A Little Girl among the Old Masters (1884),
with sketches by Mildred Howells, His Life of
Hayes was published in 1876. Howells edited and
introduced a series, Choice Autobiographies (8
vols., 1877), for Houghton, and performed a
like service for Great Modern American Stories
(1920), an anthology, issued by Boni & Live-
right

Howells' later life was uneventful. For about
six months (1891-92) he edited the Cosmopoli-
tan Magazine. Gifts of academic degrees and
offers of academic posts were frequent. He
was first president of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, serving in that office until
his death. As no man in youth had been more
reverent toward his elders, no man in age was
more generous to youthful aspiration. A distin-
guished assembly, of which President Taft was
one, gathered at Sherry's in New York in 1912
to honor his seventy-fifth anniversary. His fame,
never clamorous even in America, filtered grad-
ually into Britain, and in time penetrated the
literary consciousness in Europe everywhere.
Trips to England and the Continent, still later, to
St. Augustine, Fla., alleviated the burden of the

Howells

years. He owned estates at Kittery Point and
at York Harbor, Me. He had two daughters
and a son. The Venetian daughter, Winifred,
died in 1889 J the younger sister Mildred, artist
and writer, cheered the loneliness that followed
her mother's death in 1910. The son, John Mead
Howells, became an architect of distinction; two
grandsons were the peculiar and unrivaled joy
of Howells' old age.

True poet in late and scant moments, and
everywhere and always a copious and winning
talker, Howells will be mainly remembered as a
realist, the purveyor and upholder of truth in
fiction. Like two other Americans born, Henry
James and Edith Wharton, and unlike many, if
not most, Europeans, he stands for a realism that
takes its key from character and taste and culti-
vation in the realist, using these helps, not, final-
ly, to pervert the result, but, initially, to further
and enrich the process. On two not unlikely as-
sumptions, that realism, and that this form of
realism, should prevail, his high distinction in
the world of letters is secure; a place of honor
will be his without debate. He was an ingrained
and, in essentials, an orthodox moralist, but he
eluded the obloquies of the part by assuming, not
enforcing, the fundamentals and reserving both
his force and his space for the expansion or the
retrenchment of applications. Perhaps his high-
est quality was an undaunted and untemporizing
good faith, which, having once adopted a princi-
ple, such as reality in fiction or equality in eco-
nomics, was prepared, first, to let it go all the
way, and, second, to go all the way with it. This
made him in certain points a radical extremist,
but otherwise he remained a conservative, the
type of conservative which is produced by the
superposition of an intricate Cambridge gentle-
man upon a strong and simple-souled Ohio boy.
The man in later life had to call the boy to his
aid to circumvent the gentleman who, admirable
in most respects, had what Howells chose to
consider as the artist's and humorist's undesir-
able trick of setting literature above humanity.
A plentiful and varied humor, rising to wit or
broadening to farce, humanized and American-
ized a character that might otherwise have lost
virility in daintiness. He had convictions which
he could set forth at times with biting vigor, yet
he had likewise an intelligence that loved to
hover or to swim between alternatives and to
finger possibilities with a tentatively gracious
hand. He carried to his grave one unerring
sign of sterling character, the affection of a gen-
eration that had put aside his manners and ideals.

[The chief sources for Howells' life are the Life M*
Letters of William Dean Howells (2 vols., 1928), ed-

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