While Mr. Howells has been prolific in criticism, description, narratives of travel, literary and personal reminiscences, and lighter essays, his most significant work has been done in his novels. His first appearance as a writer of fiction was in 1871, with “Their Wedding Journey,” a slight but delicately humorous tale of a Boston couple, the Marches, who go to Canada to spend their honeymoon. “A Chance Acquaintance” (1873) is a subtle study of incompatibility of temperament. “A Foregone Conclusion” (1875) transports us to Venice, where we watch the unhappy love story, dramatically told, of an agnostic priest and an American girl. “The Lady of the Aroostook” (1879) is an amusing, healthy story of New England provincial manners. The theme of “The Undiscovered Country” (1880) is spiritualism and mesmerism. “A Fearful Responsibility” (1881) is the story of an American professor in Venice whose charge, a young girl, is loved by an Austrian officer. In “Dr. Breen’s Practice” (1881) we have pictures of summer life in a small seaside village in Maine and a study of modern Puritanism. With “A Modern Instance” (1881) may be said to begin the extremely realistic stories in Mr. Howells’ later manner; others are: “A Woman’s Reason” (1883), “The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1885), “Indian Summer” (1886), “The Minister’s Charge, or The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker” (1887), “April Hopes” (1887), “Annie Kilburn” (1888), “A Hazard of New Fortunes” (1890), in which the Marches have characteristic experiences in New York, “The Quality of Mercy” (1892), a painful but well told story, “The Coast of Bohemia” (1893), “An Open-Eyed Conspiracy” (1897), “Ragged Lady” (1899), “The Flight of Pony Baker” (1902), a captivating boys’ story, belonging with “A Boy’s Town,” “The Kentons” (1903), and “The Son of Royal Langbrith” (1905). From these novels, after the manner of Tolstoi, the romantic and even the ideal are rigorously excluded; we are treated to exhaustive, minutely detailed accounts of the daily lives of ordinary, generally commonplace people. Plot and incident are of secondary importance, although some chapters fairly bristle with incident; Mr. Howells holds that any transcript of real life, even though made at random, if skilfully handled, is of sufficient interest to form a good story. Naturally this view of the novel has found many opponents, and Mr. Howells’ books have been somewhat less popular of late years than they were in the eighties. After all, the hunger for the ideal cannot be wholly appeased by disagreeable actualities; and there are people whom we know all too well in the flesh to care to see them, in all their pettiness and meanness and duplicity, in the pages of fiction. Mr. Howells’ followers, however,--and there are many of them--contend that nothing is so interesting as real, actual, present life; that no detail of our daily round is without its significance; that the slightest act or omission of an act may affect our destiny.