Mr. Howells has, naturally enough, the defects of his qualities; and if it were my purpose here to present an exhaustive study of his writings, rather than merely to touch lightly upon his “American” characteristics, it would be desirable to consider some of these in this place.  In his desire to avoid the merely pompous he sometimes falls into the really trifling.  His love of analysis runs away with him at times; and parts of such books as “A World of Chance” must weary all but his most undiscriminating admirers.  His self-restraint sometimes disappoints us of a vivid colour or a passionate throb which we feel to be our due.  His humour and his satire occasionally pass from the fine to the thin.

It is, however, with Mr. Howells in his capacity of literary critic alone that my disappointment is too great to allow of silence.  For the exquisiteness of a writer like Mr. Henry James he has the keenest insight, the warmest appreciation.  His thorough-going conviction in the prime necessity of realism even leads him out of his way to commend Gabriele d’Annunzio, in whom some of us can detect little but a more than Zolaesque coarseness with a total lack of Zola’s genius, insight, purpose, or philosophy.  But when he comes to speak of a Thackeray or a Scott, his attitude is one that, to put it in the most complimentary form that I can think of, reminds us strongly of Homeric drowsiness.  The virtue of James is one thing and the virtue of Scott is another; but surely admiration for both does not make too unreasonable a demand on catholicity of palate?  Mr. Howells could never write himself down an ass, but surely in his criticism of the “Wizard of the North” he has written himself down as one whose literary creed is narrower than his human heart.  The school of which Mr. Henry James is a most accomplished member has added more than one exquisite new flavour to the banquet of letters; but it may well be questioned whether a taste for these may not be acquired at too dear a cost if it necessitates a loss of relish for the steady good sense, the power of historic realisation, the rich humanity, and the marvellously fertile imagination of Walter Scott.  It is not, I hope, a merely national prejudice that makes me oppose Mr. Howells in this point, though, perhaps, there is a touch of remonstrance in the reflection that that great novelist seems to have no use for the Briton in his works except as a foil or a butt for his American characters.

In considering Mr. Howells as an exponent of Americanism in literature, we have left him in an attitude almost of Americanus contra mundum—­at any rate in the posture of one who is so entirely absorbed by his delight in the contemporary and national existence around him as to be partially blind to claims separated from him by tracts of time and space.  My next example of the American in literature is, I think, to the full as national a type as Mr. Howells, though her Americanism is shown rather in subjective character