For Howells was the author of at least seventy-five books, half of them novels, spread over a period of sixty years; and many of his hundreds of characters are familiar to the readers of America in a way with which probably no other American writer can compete. Silas Lapham, Bartley Hubbard, the Lady of the Aroostook, Egeria Boynton, Dr. Breen, Fulkerson, Basil and Isabel March, the Kentons, Lemuel Barker, are but a few of the living figures called from the vasty deep of the unborn by the magic wand of Howells. It is not without reason that Henry James speaks of Howells' 'vast goodly pleasance of art and observation, of appreciation and creation'; or that William James summed up his admiration of Howells' work in the epithet 'cubical,' because 'set it up any way you please, it will stand.' Or that Taine greeted Howells as a precious painter and sovereign witness in his delineation of American life.

To call Howells the Trollope of America does not mean that their work is identical in tone or texture. Still less does it mean that the two writers would recognize kinship or even a claim to reciprocal admiration. Indeed, in A Chance Acquaintance, Howells definitely speaks of Trollope's works as 'dull'; and, if I cannot quote a Trollopian Roland for this Oliver, it is probably merely because the English novelist never bestowed a thought on his American compeer. Their essential likeness to each other lies mainly in the fact that each was so much interested in his fellow-countrymen as such, that they were wholly content to use their art in depicting them simply and directly, in their ordinary goings out and comings in. To Howells the everyday American, to Trollope the everyday Englishman was in himself a theme of such paramount sufficiency that they felt no call to exaggerate his merits or

soften his foibles, no need to bathe hi in the iridescence of imagination or 1 strengthen the picture by dramatic in ventiveness. Each loves his kinsma with an affection that does not ignor the warts and pimples; and each trea the little failings of his creations with humor that is always tender and syn pathetic, never bitter or vindictiv (a fondness that is itself a literar gift'). One can think of Trollope cal ing for his beefsteak, Howells for h baked beans, with a fine disregard fo Gallic kickshaws or Oriental cond ments.

Howells is, perhaps, more often cor scious of his rôle than Trollope. It i easy to quote passages from his work to show his formulated aims in th writing of fiction. 'Ah! poor Real Life which I love, can I make others shar the delight I find in thy foolish and ir sipid face' (Their Wedding Journey In another chapter of the same book h gives us his creed with detailed minute ness. 'As in literature the true artis will spare the use even of real events i they are of an improbable character, s the sincere observer of man will not de sire to look upon his heroic or occa sional phases, but will seek him in hi habitual moods of vacancy and tire someness. To me, at any rate, he is a such times very precious; and I neve perceive him to be so much a man an brother as when I feel the pressure o his vast, natural, unaffected dullness.

And Howells is quite ready to mee the trite charge that it is easy to writ about the ordinary, and that th painter of everyday life is so simply be cause constitutionally unable to dip hi brush in more vivid tints: 'The com monplace is just that light, impal pable, aërial essence, which they (tha is, novelists) have never got into thei confounded books yet. The novelis who could interpret the common feel ings of commonplace people would

have the answer to "the riddle of the painful earth" on his tongue' (Silas Lapham). If a man cannot thrill to the romance of the real and the charm of the common, Howells is not for him. Though Trollope's novels do not contain such direct references to his theory of workmanship as occur in those of Howells, we find the corresponding material amply set forth in his 'Autobiography. There he tells us that ‘a novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos.' The canvas should be crowded with real portraits . . . of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known.' The plot is relatively unimportant; his vital preoccupation is character. He quotes with satisfaction the judgment of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who said of Trollope's works that they were 'solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef, and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. . . It needs an English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should think that human nature would give them success anywhere.' Yes, comments Trollope, I wanted my readers to 'recognize human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons.' Trollope's realism hypnotized himself, he simply could not induce Lily Dale to marry Johnny Lames, he had not the heart to kill Katie Woodward, and he lived to reget his yielding to an overheard detre for the demise of Mrs. Proudie. The art for art's sake devotees would probably place Trollope on a lower esthetic level than Howells because he ankly owned that, in depicting ordi

nary human beings, he hoped to 'impregnate the mind of the novel reader with a feeling that honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure and sweet and unselfish; that a man will be honored as he is true and honest and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious, and things nobly done beautiful and gracious.'

The differences between Howells and

Trollope are at least as much national as individual, are due as much to their material as to the operating mind. This must be remembered in any attempt to weigh their relative merits and demerits. Thus the criticism that Trollope confines himself to conventional classes, while Howells strikes a more broadly human note, is at best but a half-truth. Trollope found these conventions and classes existing to his hand; he could not but recognize them.

The world of western and rural America

with which Howells is mainly concerned is much more homogeneous; the breadth of its civilization was (in his own phrase) 'vertical instead of lateral.' But if we allow the tags of 'provincial' and 'realistic' to our two writers, we must recognize that it is only as opposed to a pseudo-cosmopolitanism and a tinsel romance. The one is really as national as the other; either might be described as plunged up to the neck in a sea of birthright inspiration. Reality with both is a passion, not a makeshift. Trollope's sweep was so wide as to take in practically all English classes (his stage was, for example, wider than Jane Austen's) and

some of his finest characters come from the lowest ranks. Howells, as behooves his Americanism, has less to do with rank distinctions.

It must, I think, be allowed that Trollope had the finer touch in the delineation of the conventionally well

bred. When Howells deals with the denizens of the (relatively) 'upper' spheres of society (for example, the Coreys, or Miles Arbuton), we feel a certain ‘outwardness' in the touch. None of his 'ladies' (for example) rival such figures as Lady Glencora Palliser or Violet Effingham; but here we must allow a personal and deliberate limitation rather than any lack of corresponding American material. The innocent young girls, so charmingly depicted by both writers, are essentially similar, though, perhaps, we feel that the Howells girl is the embryo of a higher development. The contrast of the two societies implicated may be illustrated by (for example) Mrs. Silas Lapham's matter-of-fact assumption that 'if a young man seemed to be coming to see a girl, it was only common sense to suppose that he wished to see her alone,' as compared with the scene in which Mrs. Woodward, after Charley Tudor has saved Katie's life, allows him (as a great concession) to 'come up to her room door, and hear her thanks as he stood in the passage, with the door ajar.'

If Trollope is socially the more refined, Howells is, perhaps, the more refined intellectually. As a literary craftsman, the American has the finer, the more delicate, the more accurate, and the defter touch. He took his technique more seriously. Americanisms apart (and they are integral to the material), the English of Howells is generally surer than that of Trollope. The highest peaks of the Trollopian curve may possibly overtop those of the Howellsian; but it must be admitted that Trollope descends to depths of carelessness and slipshodism, that would make Howells shudder. Even his grammar is not impeccable, and his faulty use of French quotations is inexcusable. If Howells has nowhere risen to such heights of tragic intensity

as the episode of Crawley; if he has not created any character so robustly, so solidly and enduringly humorous as Mrs. Proudie, he has, on the other hand, never produced anything so flat and verfehlt as (say) the story of Crinoline and Macassar in The Three Clerks. Scott's comparison between his own 'big bow-wow' and the 'exquisite touch' of Jane Austen applies (with modification) to Trollope and Howells. Certainly Trollope has nothing to match (in its own way) the Gallic grace and delicate humor of the dialogue in Howells' too little known farces or comediettas. The tributes to his mastership of the writer's technique are innumerable. innumerable. 'Where,' 'Where,' said Mark Twain (to quote but one of these), 'does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech; its cadenced and undulating rhythm; its architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression?'

Perhaps one cause of the humorous and kindly attitude of both Trollope and Howells to common men and women, often rising to an almost divine tolerance and compassion, may be found in the circumstances of their own lives. Both had hard boyhoods. In the case of Howells, this rather took the form of the rigor of external conditions. He began to earn his living when still a boy, and tells us that the printing office was his school, and the reporter's room his university. But his family environment was not unsympathetic, and he was able to carry on its genial tradition without bitterness over the domestic struggles with fortune.

Poor Trollope, on the other hand, had an essentially unhappy boyhood. His troubles arose primarily from 'the mixture of poverty and gentle standing on the part of his father' and involved an ignominious and unpopular career at Harrow and Winchester, where he seems to have made no

friends, and always felt himself to be a dirty and disreputable pariah. He was allowed no share in the school games; he is convinced that he had been flogged oftener than any human being alive. His mother took most of her children with her to America, in her effort to amend the family fortunes. Anthony remained with his father, a gloomy and irascible scholar, who on at least one occasion knocked him down with a folio Bible. Compared with the miseries of Trollope, the outer hardships of Howells were child's play. But the effect was the same in each case. The essentially generous and humane nature of each was so strong, that it was impossible to turn it into gall.

So, too, when Mr. Frederic Harrison declares that Trollope is a realist, and neither a poet nor a satirist, one is a little inclined to cavil at the implied narrowness of definition in the latter epithets. Trollope, it is true, wrote no verse, and did not seek the romantic epithet, but it is over-severe to deny a touch of poetic feeling to his appreciations of English scenery and English girls, to his sympathetic insight into the inner meaning of homespun vicissitudes. And, surely, the clergy and the politicians of England would not deny his power of satire, though it is almost always kindly, and often even gentle. If there is no poetry in the ordinary lives of ordinary men; if poetry requires a face that launches a thousand ships and burns the topless towers of Ilium; if its scenery must be the floor of heaven, thick inlaid with patines of bright gold, or antres vast and deserts idle, or the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war

then we may, perhaps, deny all tinge of poetry to Trollope. But there are moods at least when the tragedy of the Reverend Josiah Crawley, caused by the everyday mishap of a mislaid cheque, seems more poignant and overwhelming than

the far-off and unwonted woes of an Antigone or an Edipus; and it is useless to tell those of us who have felt the agony of the unfortunate incumbent of Hogglestock that the creator of that episode had no poetry in his soul.

As Howells published more than one volume of verse, he enters the specific lists of the poet and throws down an avowedly metrical glove. But the everyday pathos of his prose fiction makes, in its American sphere, almost as imperative an appeal as Trollope. Silas Lapham was in some ways a coarse-grained man, but his creator wrings our heart in sympathy with his disappointments and fears; Lydia Blood is but an unsophisticated country girl, yet her threatened tragedy affects us almost like Juliet's; we feel the obstructions to the higher life of Lemuel Barker as if they had been our own; and the gradual degeneration of Bartley Hubbard, with the reaction on the noble-minded Marcia, involves a tragedy all but epical, and overwhelms us with a sense of wasted values.

I end as I began. Just as no man, whatever be his encyclopædic learning, seems to me thoroughly well-educated unless he can express himself in his native tongue grammatically, accurately, clearly, and with a measure of distinction, so it seems to me that no man can claim to a real knowledge of English literature unless he has read half a dozen of Trollope's best novels, or of American literature who has not paid similar attention to Howells. This may sound like a voice from a bye-gone generation, but young readers should not assume this without a trial of the prescription. As to Howells it is not perhaps too bold to assert that he has alreadyhe has already-if not in any one volume, yet in the general mass of his work-produced the 'Great American Novel,' of which American critics still profess to be in search.

A LESSON TO MY GHOST

BY JOHN DRINKWATER

SHALL it be said that the wind's gone

over

The hill this night, and no ghost there? Not the shape of an old-time lover

Pacing the old road, the high road there?

By the peacock tree, the tree that spreads its branches

Like a proud peacock's tail (so my lady says),

Under a cloudy sky, while the moon launches

Scattered beams of light along the dark silences?

I will be a ghost there, though I yet am breathing,

A living presence still in tight cottage walls,

Sitting by the fire whose smoke goes wreathing

Over fields and farmyards and farmyard stalls.

As a player going to rehearse his faring, I will send my ghost there before my bones are dust,

Bid it learn betimes the sock it shall be wearing

When it bids the clay good-bye as

all ghosts must.