-talk, and not the actual language of the parlor or the street,
with its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and shadings of
phrase and pronunciation which mark different sections of the country
and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect, for example,
were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his romances
certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the growth of a
richer and more complicated society in America fiction has grown more
social and more minute in its observation. It would not be fair to
classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of manners
merely; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim to
describe people not only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also
as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through
manners, which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the
daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of
realism not to select exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take
average men and women and their average experiences. The realists
protest that the moving incident is not their trade, and that the
stories have all been told. They want no plot and no hero. They will
tell no rounded tale with a _denouement_, in which all the parts are
distributed, as in the fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they
will take a transcript from life and end when they get through, without
informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try
to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face."
Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and
Anthony Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology,
honest reports of the writers' impressions, which may not be without a
certain scientific value even.

Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel, a field which
he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with
Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. The novelist received most of
his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with the result
that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan
indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has
constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious
student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment
the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks
at America with th