Self-study, the pursuit of every fleeting impression, became in the author at last a veritable obsession. In his later books like _Notes of a Son and Brother_, for instance, and _The American Scene_, his finger is constantly upon his own pulse. He seeks the source of his every fleeting emotion. He does not tell us why he did not want to enter Harvard; he tries rather to trace the subtle thread of causation that could have led him not to _want_ to want to go. When _A Small Boy and Others_ appeared the world cried out, "Is it possible that at last Henry James has revealed himself?" whereas the truth was that few men ever have revealed themselves more. All this endless dissection and analysis and scrutiny of the inner workings is in reality an analysis of Henry James himself. Objective he could not be. He could only stand in his solitude and interpret his own introspections. And his solitude it has been and his self-contemplation that have evolved his later manner. A consciously wrought-out style like Pater's or Maupassant's comes always as a result of solitude, of self-conscious concentration, of classicism. Eternal contemplation of manner can result only in mannerism more and more, until mannerism becomes the ruling characteristic. Classicism perishes at last of its own refinement. VI The evolution of William Dean Howells is a problem vastly different. To place Howells as a leader of those forces of refinement that followed after the New England period is seemingly to ignore the facts of his origin and his early training, for the little river town on the Ohio where he was born in 1837 was as far removed from New England manners and sentiments as was even the Hannibal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was reared to despise Yankees as a mean-spirited race, and he spent his childhood and young manhood in close contact with the rough, virile material that was shaping up the great West. Howells was of the third generation in Ohio, a Westerner of the Westerners. His grandfather, a Welsh manufacturer, "came to this country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences of the village where he was managing some woolen mills."[98] He finally settled down as a druggist and bookseller in a small village, and his son, perhaps from contact with his father's wares, developed a passion for literature--strange acquisition, it would seem, to gain in the wilderness.