The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul. I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist in having violent and stormy passions and intense and overwhelming convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and cruel, or heroic and sublime--then I am disturbed in my literary dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism, propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission. Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing. Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life, and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from which it is only now escaping. I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda department of J. P. Morgan and Company.