me fashionable ladies belonging to his own
_monde_. The little comedy, _Out of the Question_, deals with this
same adjustment of social scales; and in many of Howells's other
novels, such as _Silas Lapham_ and the _Lady of the Aroustook_, one of
the main motives may be described to be the contact of the man who eats
with his fork with the man who eats with his knife, and the shock
thereby ensuing. In _Indian Summer_ the complications arise from the
difference in age between the hero and heroine, and not from a
difference in station or social antecedents. In all of these fictions
the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility of manners rather
than of character, and, if any thing were to be objected to the
probability of the story, it is that the climax hinges on delicacies
and subtleties which, in real life, when there is opportunity for
explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in _A Modern Instance_
Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In this, his strongest
work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's great
novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and the story
is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners can be.
His nearest approach to romance is in _The Undiscovered Country_, 1880,
which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and in its study of
problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural, in its
out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic
flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to Hawthorne,
especially to Hawthorne in the _Blithedale Romance_, where he comes
closer to common ground with other romancers. It is interesting to
compare the _Undiscovered Country_ with Henry James's _Bostonians_, the
latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a
study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights advocates, and all
varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom
Boston has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they
become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which
see more clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken
fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity,
and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians,
than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface.

Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in
the field of parlor