Meanwhile lawyer Atherton sips a cup of Souchong tea sweetened and tempered with Jersey cream which William Dean Howells guarantees pure. (With how many lumps of sugar, however, he does not say.) Atherton’s wife is also a Puritan and yet she finds the indictment just. How can one pass judgment upon his fellow mortals when he is so snug and comfortable at home? Atherton is not taken aback by the rejoinder of his wife. The fact, he replies, that there are saints and sinners, Athertons and Hubbards, is a piece of divine ordinance. I am not sure that Howells ever read Voltaire’s “Candide” and still less that he enjoyed it, but Atherton speaks exactly like Doctor Pangloss. Effects, according to him, always follow causes; sinners are responsible for the consequences of their sins; we have been foreordained by our parents to go to heaven or hell; hell is an euphemism for the hereditary disorders in our will; in the long run, even the fate of the wicked will prove equitable. Such was the moral dungeon in which William Dean Howells imprisoned his characters and this is what became of Calvin’s predestination after having been blended in the _chiaro-oscuro_, of the Puritan conscience, with Emerson’s compensations and scientific heredity. * * * * * Howells tried to confine in a prison of the same sort the chief character of “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” one of his most interesting novels, and also one of the most repulsive for its morals. The hero of the book is also a foredoomed sinner. His name is Jeff Durgin. Jeff is the son of the innkeeper at Lion’s Head. He is not perfect. He is a born teaser and has an irritable temper. He likes to play tricks on people. While a student at Harvard he remains waterproof to “college spirit.” His personality is too strong. He approaches society but behaves in it like a bull in a china shop. His conduct is not above reproach. He does not show himself a perfect gentleman according to Boston standards. And yet, when all is told, he is not so bad as that. But Howells needed him to teach a moral lesson and he gave him the third degree for that. To make Jeff atone he invented one of the most virtuous villains of his novels, the painter Westover. How Howells could fail to detect the hypocrisy of such a character is beyond comprehension. Jeff’s crime consisted of shaking the branches of a New England apple tree loaded with fruits over the head of vindictive and priggish Westover. Was it necessary for that to reserve a seat in hell for Jeff Durgin? Was there any proportion between Jeff’s venial offence and the wrath of the virtuous Westover in branding Jeff with this terrible indictment: “What you are you will remain forever”? Howells seems not to have heeded Westover’s hypocrisy when, at the end of the book, he wins away by his sermons the girl whom Jeff had loved all his life. _Summum jus, summa injuria._ Such sophisticated and twisted