Howells kept idealism close to the ground, creeping. He never soared and his saints were clipped of all wings. The elect in his books showed very little inclination for leaving their earthly comfort to join Fra Angelico’s mystic band in Heaven. Virtue for Howells’ happy few was an insurance on life. They made rich marriages. They were perfect fathers and mothers, dutiful children, model husbands and wives, prosperous and respectable business people. Golden mediocrity, if not fortune, was the reward of their good behavior. The sinners, on the contrary, were branded from birth by Howells. They went from bad to worse and were denied all redemption and atonement. The “flood of sunshine,” as Hawthorne called the scene in the forest between Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale, and their ecstasy of gratified emotion, must have been a shock to Howells when he read “The Scarlet Letter.” From the start his philosophy of life vitiated his novels. It did hide from him the veritable aspects of existence. It limited his psychology and made it almost childish. Mr. Firkins, who had the courage to undertake a sentimental journey with the Puritan novelist through several hundred pages of a bulky biography, measured his limitations as follows. Howells never represented adultery. He handled the question of divorce only once and with utmost caution. Only once did he dare to deal with the troubles of marital life. Only once, and very cautiously again, did he approach the problem of crime, which Hawthorne discussed so freely, before Dostoievski and Theodore Dreiser. Politics, religion, science were expurgated from his books in order not to disturb the serenity of the good people whom he chaperoned in literature. It is impossible to read the novels of Howells and not to feel the iniquity of his moral system. Puritanism made him hit upon disconcerting paradoxes and, in particular, upon that of mistaking ethics for bourgeois respectability. Virtue in his books is the exclusive monopoly of the well-to-do. Morality is an effort on their part to secure for themselves the absolute monopoly of a “personality picture” without blemish. The slightest move to alter their Puritan identity and to mar the show which they make before the world is denounced by them as a crime. The saints and the sinners live carefully apart in his novels, or, if they mix, it is only through the good offices of some charity monger or preacher of morals. He wraps his saints in isinglass as carefully as a prophylactic toothbrush. He protects them from all contacts. He tells us frankly that the lawlessness of the sinners has no importance, but that the sins of a gentleman and of a well-educated person fall upon the entire caste and imperil the whole social order.