There was something truly Balzacian in Howells. He could tell a story; he was not without ideas of his own; his psychology was superficial, but not more so than that of the average man or woman whom he portrayed. He was an expert conversationalist. His novels are spiced with humor and geniality. How could such a ferocious moralist hide under such a gentle smile? While American writers, like Henry James and Jack London, took refuge against the invading dullness by a flight into “the golden bowl” or the wilds of Alaska, or while they evaded boredom by sarcasms, like Mark Twain, Howells courted American democracy and accepted it _en bloc_. He adopted Babbittry. He claimed that fiction did not need adventure, romanticism or legend, and that Life was enough. He was a realist and hugged the commonplace to his bosom. Howells had excellent intentions which, unfortunately, he was unable to fulfill. As a psychologist and a moralist he does not come up to Hawthorne’s level. In the first place his realism is limited. The same man who declared that the artist’s business was to be “a colorless medium through which the reader clearly sees the right and wrong” confined himself in the description of what he called the most smiling aspects of life, _i.e._, the most American. He tagged as poison the art and literature which flattered the passions, and, in order not to flatter the passions, he denied to himself and others the right to describe them. He forced upon the reader of his books self-appointed ghostly confessors and directors of conscience,--clergymen, lawyers, professors, artists. He was impassionate but he was not impartial. His ethics are abominable. Hawthorne did not ignore the grandeur of sin. He found sinners and blackguards interesting or made them so. Middle-class morality did not seem to him poetic. He carefully kept his saints in contact with evil so that they could be more pathetic and human. Howells’ Puritanism was of a very different brand. It belonged to another period in the development of American culture. Puritanism had changed since Hawthorne. It had become permeated with Emersonian optimism. The worship for respectability evinced the strong convictions of former days. Hawthorne bowed to the devil. Howells was afraid of him. Hawthorne saw the duplicity of man himself. Howells needed a rosier view of life, so he divided society into two entirely opposite classes. Instead of presenting man double within himself, as he is, and of using human duplicity as a source of pathos, he put aside the elect, entirely and hopelessly good, and, in opposition to them, he placed the wicked--the _a priori_ foredoomed wicked. This was bad psychology and still worse stagecraft. * * * * *