notions of right and wrong could enter only a diseased conscience. * * * * * Had Howells at least succeeded in making his saints as interesting as his sinners! But this was not the case. His ideals were those of the average and banal humanity, of the sentimental middle classes against which American literature is now in revolt. Babbitt himself would have proved too modern, too genial, too “peppy” for Howells. Main Street would be his paradise without Carol Kennicott for a neighbor. Carol was much too progressive and natural for “the Supreme Court of Appeal of American Literature,” as Mark Twain liked to call the author of “The Lady of the Aroostook.” Howells’ ideal people were the Laphams and the Kentons, the dull couples whose lives were wasted in pursuit of commonplace felicity and comfort without any higher ambition than to brood under their wings (if they had any), sons and daughters as dull as they were themselves. Howells’ characters do not worry much about subconsciousness. They ran no danger of becoming patients of Doctor Freud. They were much too “normal” for that. A plunge into subconsciousness would have made them unhappy. It would have revealed to them the inanity of their ethics and the lies of their petty lives. They had better ignore it, and follow Colonel Silas Lapham’s advice. One day Colonel Lapham had taken the boat to go to his country residence. He is a typical American bourgeois. According to the legend, when the ostrich wants to ignore the storm, she buries her head in the sand. Thus did Colonel Lapham bury his head in the newspapers. When he was through with the news, he felt an immense boredom. But why not observe the people around him, and try to find, as a solace, what there was in their minds? Here is the Colonel’s answer: “Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he is in his own hands, there is some hopes of his doing something with himself; but, if a fellow has been found out--even if he has not been found out to be so very bad--it’s pretty much all up with him. _No, sir, I don’t want to know people through and through._” Howells was true to his word. He did not want to be a true realist. Optimism and respectability made him take the side of hypocrisy against truth at any cost. To better defend the bourgeois standards he volunteered, early in his career, as the sponsor and knight in attendance of the _jeune fille_, as the protector of the unamended marital institutions and the irreconcilable enemy of divorce. He became in particular the advocate of the _motherly feeling_ which modern critics regard justly as the American _complex par excellence_. He viewed life as a blind alley, and matrimony as a chamber of torture which reminds one of Edgar Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” _Lasciate ogni speranza voi ché entrate!_