XIII
Howells, like James, was peculiarly a product of the later nineteenth century and of the wave of democracy in literature that came both to Europe and America as a reflex from the romanticism of Scott and Coleridge and the German Sturm und Drang. Had he lived a generation earlier he would have been a poet of the Dr. Holmes type, an Irving, or a George William Curtis. The spirit of the times and a combination of circumstances made of him the leader of the depicters of democracy in America. From the vantage point of the three leading magazines of the period he was enabled to command a wide audience and to exert enormous influence. His beautiful style disarmed criticism and concealed the leanness of his output. Had he been less timid, had he dared like Mark Twain or Whitman to forget the fastidious circle within which he lived, and write with truth and honesty and sincerity the great nation-wide story with its passion, its tragedy, its comedy, its tremendous significance in the history of humanity, he might have led American fiction into fields far broader than those into which it finally settled.
In the process of the new literary discovery of America Howells's part was to discover the prosaic ordinary man of the middle class and to make him tolerable in fiction. He was the leading force in the reaction against the Sylvanus Cobb type of romance that was so powerful in America in the early seventies. He made the new realism respectable. All at once America found that she was full of material for fiction. Hawthorne had taught that the new world was barren of material for the novelist, Cooper had limited American fiction to the period of the settlement and the Revolution; Longfellow and Taylor had turned to romantic Europe. After Howells's minute studies of the New England middle class, every provincial environment in America produced its recorder, and the novel of locality for a time dominated American literature.
In another and more decided way, perhaps, Howells was a potent leader during the period. He has stood for finished art, for perfection of style, for literary finish, for perfect English in an age of slovenliness and slang. No writer of the period has excelled him in accuracy of diction, in brilliancy of expression, in unfailing purity of style. There is an eighteenth-century fastidiousness about every page that he has written.
The tribute of Mark Twain is none too strong: "For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without peer in the English-speaking world. Sustained. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those qualities as greatly as does he, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between, whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights."