William Dean Howells, at the age of forty-five, reached what many still regard his highest point of achievement in American realism.  His novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which was running as a Century serial during the summer of 1882, attracted wide attention, and upon its issue in book form took first place among his published novels.  Mark Twain, to the end of his life, loved all that Howells wrote.  Once, long afterward, he said:  “Most authors give us glimpses of a radiant moon, but Howells’s moon shines and sails all night long.”  When the instalments of The Rise of Silas Lapham began to appear, he overflowed in adjectives, the sincerity of which we need not doubt, in view of his quite open criticisms of the author’s reading delivery.

To W. D. Howells, in Belmont, Mass.: 

My dear Howells,—­I am in a state of wild enthusiasm over this July instalment of your story.  It’s perfectly dazzling—­it’s masterly —­incomparable.  Yet I heard you read it—­without losing my balance.  Well, the difference between your reading and your writing is-remarkable.  I mean, in the effects produced and the impression left behind.  Why, the one is to the other as is one of Joe Twichell’s yarns repeated by a somnambulist.  Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, and it is a gentle, pearly dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; but by and by I strike it in print, and shout to myself, “God bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunset splendors!”

Well, I don’t care how much you read your truck to me, you can’t permanently damage it for me that way.  It is always perfectly fresh and dazzling when I come on it in the magazine.  Of course I recognize the form of it as being familiar—­but that is all.  That is, I remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead and cold, but ready for the match—­and now I see them touched off and all ablaze with blinding fires.  You can read, if you want to, but you don’t read worth a damn.  I know you can read, because your readings of Cable and your repeatings of the German doctor’s remarks prove that.

That’s the best drunk scene—­because the truest—­that I ever read.  There are touches in it that I never saw any writer take note of before.  And they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy.  How very drunk, and how recently drunk, and how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece!

Why I didn’t notice that that religious interview between Marcia and Mrs. Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me—­but dear me, it’s just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it for the “Library.”)

Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now; when you are reading, you glide right along, and I don’t get a chance to let the things soak home; but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in which to gently and thoroughly filter into me.  Your humor is so very subtle, and elusive—­(well, often it’s just a vanishing breath of perfume which a body isn’t certain he smelt till he stops and takes another smell) whereas you can smell other