SOURCE: Howells, William Dean. “Realism and the American Novel (1892).” In American Critical Essays: XIXth and XXth Centuries, edited by Norman Foerster, pp. 137-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.

In the following essay, originally published in Criticism and Fiction in 1891, Howells discusses the merits of realism and praises English and American novelists for omitting the details of love and eroticism included by many European Romantic authors.

‘As for those called critics,’ the author [Burke] says, ‘they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore can do little as...