which made him the great humorist he was, and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist as well as a novelist and a philosopher—the elements are scarcely inseparable—though Mr. Howells's humor is of a more delicate quality than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe, where they have represented the best that is in us.
I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr. Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about us in every essential.
Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells's writing, because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just
