In the process of the new literary discovery of America Howells's part was to discover the prosaic ordinary man of the middle class and to make him tolerable in fiction. He was the leading force in the reaction against the Sylvanus Cobb type of romance that was so powerful in America in the early seventies. He made the new realism respectable. All at once America found that she was full of material for fiction. Hawthorne had taught that the new world was barren of material for the novelist, Cooper had limited American fiction to the period of the settlement and the Revolution; Longfellow and Taylor had turned to romantic Europe. After Howells's minute studies of the New England middle class, every provincial environment in America produced its recorder, and the novel of locality for a time dominated American literature.
In another and more decided way, perhaps, Howells was a potent leader during the period. He has stood for finished art, for perfection of style, for literary finish, for perfect English in an age of slovenliness and slang. No writer of the period has excelled him in accuracy of diction, in brilliancy of expression, in unfailing purity of style. There is an eighteenth-century fastidiousness about every page that he has written.
The tribute of Mark Twain is none too strong: "For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing--he is, in my belief, without peer in the English-speaking world. _Sustained._ I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those qualities as greatly as does he, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between, whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights."
HENRY JAMES. (1843-1916.) _Watch and Ward_ [in the _Atlantic_], 1871; _A Passionate Pilgrim_, _Roderick Hudson_, _Transatlantic Sketches_, 1875; _The American_, 1877; _French Poets and Novelists_, _The Europeans_, _Daisy Miller_, 1878; _An International Episode_, _Life of Hawthorne_, _A Bundle of Letters_, _The Madonna of the Future_, _Confidence_, 1879; _Diary of a Man of Fifty_, _Washington Square_, 1880; _The Portrait of a Lady_, 1881; _The Siege of London_, 1883; _Portraits of Places_, _Tales of Three Cities_, _A Little Tour in France_, 1884; _The Author of Beltraffio_, 1885; _The Bostonians_, _Princess Casamassima_, 1886; _Partial Portraits_, _The Aspern Papers_, _The Reverberator_, 1888; _A London Life_, 1889; _The Tragic Muse_, 1890; _The Lesson of the Master_, 1892; _Terminations_, 1896; _The Spoils of Poynton_, _What Maisie Knew_, 1897; _In the Cage_, 1898; _The Awkward Age_, 1899; _The Soft Side_, _The Sacred Font_, 1901; _The Wings of the Dove_, 1902; _The Better Sort_, _William Wetmore Story and His Friends_, 1903; _The Question of Our Speech_, _The Lesson of Balzac_ [Lectures], 1905; _The American Scene_, 1906; _Italian Hours_, _Julia Bride_, _Novels and Tales_, 24 volumes, 1909; _Finer Grain_, 1910; _The Outcry_, 1911; _A Small Boy and Others_, 1912; _Notes of a Son and Brother_, 1913; _Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes_, 1914.