Howells then is the rare figure of a lyric poet and a romanticist who deliberately forced himself into classicism as a result of his environment. His earlier works are the record of a transition--enthusiasm, poetic glow, romance, tempered more and more with scientific exactness and coldness and skill. Like James, he learned his profession with infinite toil; like James, he formed himself upon masters and then defended his final position with a summary of the laws of his art. Like James, he schooled himself to distrust the emotions and work wholly from the intellect. The result in the case of both, in the case of all classicists in fact, has been that the reader is touched only in the intellect. One smiles at the flashes of wit; one seldom laughs. No one ever shed a tear over a page either of Howells or James. One admires their skill; one takes a certain pleasure in the lifelikeness of the characters--especially those of Howells--but cold lifelikeness is not the supreme object of art; manners and outward behavior are but a small part of life. Unless the novelist can lay hold of his reader's heart and walk with him with sympathy and conviction he must be content to be ranked at last as a mere showman and not a voice, not a leader, not a prophet. XIII Howells, like James, was peculiarly a product of the later nineteenth century and of the wave of democracy in literature that came both to Europe and America as a reflex from the romanticism of Scott and Coleridge and the German _Sturm und Drang_. Had he lived a generation earlier he would have been a poet of the Dr. Holmes type, an Irving, or a George William Curtis. The spirit of the times and a combination of circumstances made of him the leader of the depicters of democracy in America. From the vantage point of the three leading magazines of the period he was enabled to command a wide audience and to exert enormous influence. His beautiful style disarmed criticism and concealed the leanness of his output. Had he been less timid, had he dared like Mark Twain or Whitman to forget the fastidious circle within which he lived, and write with truth and honesty and sincerity the great nation-wide story with its passion, its tragedy, its comedy, its tremendous significance in the history of humanity, he might have led American fiction into fields far broader than those into which it finally settled.