Nearly twenty years ago, Mr. Thomas Sargent Perry wrote of Mr. Howells: “He has made over the American novel, taught it gracefulness and compactness, and has given it a place in literature along with the best of modern work.” This was far from the first word of praise and appreciation evoked by Mr. Howells, who, as editor of a leading literary magazine, as poet and as novelist, had already firmly established himself in the ranks of the writers of to-day. And since his name first became known it has grown constantly more familiar and more loved, until to-day it is regarded as that of the most typically American of American writers, without a rival in his particular field of work. This field of work has been the subject of more or less discussion among his readers, regarding its merits and demerits. But however much discussion there may be, as to the subject he has chosen, there can be absolutely no doubt as to the excellency of his treatment of it. He has chosen, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson tells us: “To look away from great passions, and rather to elevate the commonplace by minute touches.” He began by throwing aside all the meaningless conventionalities that then hung around the novel, boldly asserting that, “As for him, he was a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles--an observer and a portrayer of the trivial commonplaces of life.” Yet in truth he is far more than this; to quote Mr. Perry again, Mr. Howells touches the reader’s shoulder and points out the beauty hidden in simple actions, the pathos lurking beneath seemingly indifferent words--in short, the humanity of life.” To “paint the thing as he sees it” has been and is ever Mr. Howells’s chief aim in his work. And because of his patient, conscientious adherence to this principle, he gives us life, his characters are not puppets, conjured from a wild imagination and moved mechanically by strings, but living, human men and women, such as we meet any and every day--very ordinary, perhaps, and at times even uninteresting, except that, as Browning has it: “We’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we’ve passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.” It is as the leading exponent of realism in art that Mr. Howells stands to-day--for realism as opposed to romanticism, for living interest in the world around us instead of a vague, fanciful dreaming about the past. Mr. Howells himself has told us that we cannot have romanticism back because we live now in an age of hopeful doing and striving, not of mere dreaming. “Like Tolstoi and Ibsen,” some one has written of him, “his types are drawn directly from the reality he knows, and have no prototypes in fiction. All romantic traditions are discarded and the story moves on, not only with the strictest regard for probability, but with the inevitableness of life itself.”