familiar with Trollope can be said to be ignorant of England; anyone who knows his Howells has a pretty good idea of America. The fact that Trollope ceased to write forty years ago, and Howells only the other day, makes little difference. For in England, in spite of wars and rumors of wars, forty years are but as a watch in the night; and after all the most typically and purely American of Howells novels were written in the 'seventies and 'eighties.

One does not find the England of the English in such novels as those of George Meredith, for his characters, his scenes, and his treatment are all too remote, exotic, and colored to be typical. One might like to meet Lord Ormonts and their Amintas in ordinary life, but as a matter of fact one does n't. Dickens is purely English in his setting but his characters are burlesqued or sentimentalized out of reality. George Eliot's figures are of English make, but they bear the philosophic brand of their individual manufacturer rather than that of a national product. Thomas Hardy's natives are too romantic to be merely of English growth. And the unsavory young men and maidens of the novel of to-day surely belong to a phase rather than to a national type. Analogous considerations rule out the romantic, the humorous, the idealistic, the analytic, and the merely local color novels of America as nationally characteristic.

In Howells, as in Trollope, we come face to face with the ordinary mortals that we meet every day. The conditions in which they are presented are equally ordinary. We are not called on to deal with highly romantic situations, or marvelously complicated plots, or superhumanly arresting characters, or impossibly brilliant and syncopated talk, or extraordinarily quaint and unexpected phraseology,

or marvelously erudite historical lore, or overwhelmingly profound philosophic reflection. We just meet everyday men in everyday situations, such as we can see ourselves with or in at any time. But it is largely just the fact that the ingredients are so simple and familiar that makes the skill of the chef so exceptionally noteworthy.

The great marvel in the works of Trollope is that he can interest us so profoundly in common men and common events, and that he has produced a gallery of hundreds of portraits, all within the narrow framework of daily experience and yet all as clearly distinct and individual as the actual men and women we know. In the creation of personal acquaintances, who step right out of the covers of his books into the study of our imagination, he ranks with the very greatest of our masters in this field with Shakespeare, with Scott, with Jane Austen, with Thackeray, with Dickens. He never repeats himself, never blurs the identity of even his minor players. There is a sense in which one might say that it is comparatively easy to discriminate Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, and Beatrice, Hamlet and Othello, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, Richard Feverel and Sir Willoughby Patterne, Adam Bede and Romola; but how many of us give credit enough to the art that can make living figures of such relatively minor personages as Chaffanbrass (a favorite of Trollope himself), Lord Dumbello, Rattler, the Duke of St. Bungay, Mr. Toogood, Lord Fawn, Mr. and Mrs. Bunce, Mr. Quintus Slide, Miss Fitzgibbon, Mr. and Mrs. Bonteen, Barrington Earle, Bertie Stanhope, Lady Baldock, and Lady Mason-not to go beyond the covers of two or three of Trollope's best known novels. novels. Mutatis mutandis and relatively to American fiction, very much the same thing may be said of Howells.

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 him in the iridescence of imagination or to strengthen the picture by dramatic inventiveness. Each loves his kinsman with an affection that does not ignore the warts and pimples; and each treats the little failings of his creations with a humor that is always tender and sympathetic, never bitter or vindictive ('a fondness that is itself a literary gift'). One can think of Trollope calling for his beefsteak, Howells for his baked beans, with a fine disregard for Gallic kickshaws or Oriental condiments.

Howells is, perhaps, more often conscious of his rôle than Trollope. It is easy to quote passages from his works to show his formulated aims in the writing of fiction. 'Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face' (Their Wedding Journey). In another chapter of the same book he gives us his creed with detailed minuteness. As in literature the true artist will spare the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness."

And Howells is quite ready to meet the trite charge that it is easy to write about the ordinary, and that the painter of everyday life is so simply because constitutionally unable to dip his brush in more vivid tints: 'The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aërial essence, which they (that is, novelists) have never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings 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 Eames, he had not the heart to kill Katie Woodward, and he lived to regret his yielding to an overheard desire for the demise of Mrs. Proudie. The art for art's sake devotees would probably place Trollope on a lower æsthetic level than Howells because he frankly 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. '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 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.