That art could make men as different as Mark Twain and Henry James—again—unenviously despair. “I should think,” the first of them wrote Howells, on reading _A Foregone Conclusion_, “that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.” And nearly thirty years later Henry James wrote concerning _The Kentons_: “Delightful, in one’s golden afternoon, and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging together, without the faintest ghost of a false note or a weak touch.” To all appearances the art of Howells was one of the easiest for the artist with which a story-teller was ever endowed. Never any signs of awkwardness, or of straining with his material, or of plotting against his action how he shall make it come out at some better point than it seems to wish! From the very first Howells can have had little to learn. He said that the master of his first manner was Turgenev, whose look of artlessness seemed to Howells the perfection of technique; but that after he became acquainted with Tolstoi he could no longer feel satisfied with any sacrifice, however subtle, and so transferred his allegiance to the manner of Tolstoi, which not only seemed but actually was without art. This confession cannot be taken too seriously. When the change came Howells had already written _A Modern Instance_ and _The Rise of Silas Lapham_; and the narratives that follow show no increase in ease and naturalness. Nor, of course, did Howells speak literally in his claim that Tolstoi exhibits no art. All that the episode can mean—and Howells’s account of it—is that he had the native knack of story-telling, and that once started his narratives flowed from him with an orderliness and lucidity and progress toward a destination which thoroughly matched his prose.