the delicate art, intricate, lucid, economical, by which Mr. Howe keeps the soft play of life on his subject from his childhood to his old age in a succession of pictures from all points of view, constantly changing yet cohering in effect like those moving screens which exhibit the unfolding of a plant from seed to flower. The essence of his art is motion and the scrupulous avoidance of a stated thesis and a fixed portrait. I am enamored of the skill with which the thing has been done, but when I try to suggest what has been done I fall at once into violations of the principles which govern the art that I admire. I snatch a single picture from the moving series; to correct its incompleteness I snatch another, and juxtapose the two in a glaring contrast; and truth with her infinite gradations escapes me.
As a small boy Barrett Wendell appears to have been a little prig, encouraged at the age of nine, with the other boys in his private school, to write out for their master "our different opinions about gentlemen, and how to distinguish them from other persons." Mr. Howe quietly connects this childish exercise with the question proposed in the famous "English Composition": "What does a man mean, for example, who asserts that another is or is not a gentleman?" The constant recurrence of that question to Wendell's mind might easily be seized upon by a thesis-writer as his complete and adequate "explanation." It might be said, for example, to explain his "Literary History of America," with its tremendous emphasis upon the pure and blameless Harvard gentlemen who produced "the Renaissance of New England," and its dismissive gesture toward the rest of the country as a territory
