Howells had passed under the powerful influence of Tolstoy. "As much as one merely human being can help another," he declares, "I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in esthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him." It is absurd, however, to think that any influence could fundamentally have changed the art of a man like Howells in his fiftieth year. What Tolstoy did for him was to confirm and deepen tendencies in his work that already had become established and to turn his mind from the contemplation exclusively of manners and men in their actuality to problems ethical and social. He gave to him a message and a wider view of art. "What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean and sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy." "He has been to me that final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on 'Life.'" As an example of this final Howells we may read _The Landlord of Lion's Head_, or _The Traveler from Altruria_, or _The Quality of Mercy_, which are not so much novels as minute studies of social or moral phases of the times, illustrated by means of a particular case and made clear by voluminous details. Minor characters serve as a chorus as the case proceeds, and the final effect is sermonic rather than novelistic. The poetic and the esthetic have yielded to the ethical and socialistic. In America every art ends at last in a sermon. XI The realism of Howells is of the eighteenth-century type rather than the nineteenth. It is classicism, as Henry James's is classicism. His affinity is with Richardson rather than with Zola. He was timid and conscious of his audience. He had approached Boston with too much of reverence; the "tradition of the _Atlantic_" lay heavily upon him during all of his earlier period; the shadow of Lowell was upon his page and he wrote as in his presence; the suggestive words in a review of one of his earlier books by the _North American Review_, final voice of New England refinement, compelled him: "He has the incapacity to be common." Thus his early writings had in them nothing of the Western audacity and newness. A realistic reaction from the romantic school of the early nineteenth century was everywhere--on the Continent, in England, in America--changing literary standards; Howells felt it and yielded to it, but he yielded only as Longfellow would have yielded had he been of his generation, or Holmes, or Lowell. He yielded to a modified realism, a timid and refined realism, a realism that would not offend the sensibilities of Boston, the "Boston," to quote from _A Chance Acquaintance_, "that would rather perish by fire and sword than to be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, reluctant Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere." He records scarcely a crime in all his volumes: he has not in his voluminous gallery a woman