To speak of the battle for realism in fiction as a cause won can mean, of course, nothing more than that the cause as Howells led it was won for the moment. Against his sort of civilized and decent reality the tide is always rising. In the nineties there were reactions on two sides from the more or less official realism of Howells and his immediate followers: one the flamboyant and rococo historical romance of the school which first begot “best sellers,” and the other the sterner, angrier naturalism of younger men who were no longer suited by the gentleness with which Howells exposed the truth. It was no secret from his friends that in his later days he felt lonely and outlived. Everywhere criticism applauded him, but his books were less frequently bought and read than they had been. Into the causes of that decline it would need a volume to go deeply: the whole movement of the world is involved, the movement away from an urbane liberalism with its balance and calm and delicate irony to a more insistent clash between extremes of temper which war on one another with an animus surpassed only by that with which they hew down the peace-makers of the middle ground. For twenty years Howells has been under judgment from such partisans, and it is no wonder that the hand of time has been hurried in the task of discriminating between those achievements of his which shall survive and those others which are to enter into their mortality. Naturally, his uncollected trifles will go first, though that universe must be rich which can afford to throw away his various occasional comments on books and men, especially those essays from the Editor’s Study and the Editor’s Easy Chair in which he more than any one else made Americans familiar with the great Latin realists and the greater realists of Russia. Next, without much question, it will be his farces which find their proper niche in oblivion, though here, too, the sacrifice of spirit and mirth is greater than any but a few cheerful antiquarians will ever know. His more formal criticism will go then, having done its work and taken its honest wages. Nor have his many books of travel a good chance long to outlast his criticism, fresh and sunny as some thousands of their pages are, unless perhaps his early Italian volumes have the luck of James Howell’s letters, to be kept alive by the pungency in their observations and the poetry in their wit. A few of Howells’s verses may very well find enduring corners in the anthologies—a form of immortality not really to be sniffed at.