The quietness with which Howells lived, though as an author he was so busy, has kept not only the general public but the more or less literary public from realizing the part he played in the literary life of his time. His relations to Henry James and Mark Twain but epitomize his relations to many others of fainter reputation. In Hamlin Garland’s _Son of the Middle Border_ there is a significant chapter which tells how a passionate young pilgrim from a prairie farm approached the “most vital literary man in all America at this time”—the middle eighties, when “reading Boston was divided into two parts—those who liked Howells and those who fought him.” And in Brand Whitlock’s _Forty Years of It_—among the most moving of American books—appear constant references, in the midst of a world of warfare for justice and decency, to another young writer’s charmed intervals of passion for a master, particularly an account of certain “long summer afternoons in company with William Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my reverence, for him, I had gone there [to New England from Ohio] to see. He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less in intensity, I am sure, than those with which Moses came down out of Mount Horeb.” In a dozen memoirs, if one wanted to quote them all, there are already such testimonies; and more dozens will be written wherein testimony will be borne to the effect that Howells more completely than almost any other American led and fought for and exemplified and accomplished a notable literary movement. The very extent to which he succeeded in his persuasive battles for realism in fiction has somewhat obscured his deeds. No one now goes—or needs to go—over the arguments for simple truthfulness which Howells had to make in the eighties. Even his classical little treatise “Criticism and Fiction”—let alone the body of book reviews and slighter essays of his minor skirmishes—seems doctrine too unquestioned to call for argument. Of course, its vitality has gone out of it only in the sense that the vitality has gone out of any seed from which a plant has grown up. The energy has passed into the flower and the fruit. Just how large was this expended energy it is still too soon to estimate; but any serious study in the intellectual and spiritual history of America discovers more and more lines converging to the controversies of the decade from 1880 to 1890 when Howells’s was the most eloquent voice. Even the theatre—that native home of the tinsel which Howells hated—had for a time its James A. Herne trying “to write plays which should be as true in their local colour as Howells’s stories.”