life, when there is opportunity for explanations, are readily brushed aside.  But in A Modern Instance Howells touched the deeper springs of action.  In this, his strongest work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot’s great novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and the story is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners can be.  His nearest approach to romance is in The Undiscovered Country, 1880, which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and in its study of problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, in its out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne, especially to Hawthorne in the Blithedale Romance, where he comes closer to common ground with other romancers.  It is interesting to compare the Undiscovered Country with Henry James’s Bostonians, the latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman’s rights advocates, and all varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of “causes,” for whom Boston has long been notorious.  A most unlovely race of people they become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James’s cosmopolitan eyes, which see more clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface.

Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in the field of parlor comedy.  His little farces, the Elevator, the Register, the Parlor-Car, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an exquisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of the Comedies et Proverbes of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or American hands.  His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable.  In his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls “that great discovery,” Mrs. Nickleby.

1.  Theodore Winthrop. Life in the Open Air. Cecil Dreeme.

2.  Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Life in a Black Regiment.

3. Poetry of the Civil War.  Edited by Richard Grant White.  New York. 1866.

4.  Charles Farrar Browne. Artemus Ward—­His Book. Lecture on the Mormons. Artemus Ward in London.

5.  Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The Jumping Frog. Roughing It. The Mississippi Pilot.

6.  Charles Godfrey Leland. Hans Breitmann’s Ballads.

7.  Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes, and Perhaps. His Level Best, and Other Stories.