WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 269 politan Magazine. Prom 1900 to the present he has written
- The Editor's Easy Chair," of Harper's Magazine.
The manner in which Mr. Howells became a writer of fiction is significant of his literary theory and method. In 1872, he framed in the story of the wedding- journey of a newly-married pair the notes and observations of his trip down the St. Law- rence in 1860. He had no high opinion of the fictive element^ but was agreeably astonished to learn from a friend, to whom he had submitted the story for judgment as to which portions were real and which were fiction, that some of the incidents of Howells 's own invention seemed real to the reader. He has continued to write after this fashion, recording the realities of human life, as they revealed their truth to him, in such man- ner as to transfer the impression of their reality to the reader. For ten years Mr. Howells wrote stories and novels of per- fect art, which delighted all who read them, especially the cul- tured and academic public such as in all its impossible social helplessness Mr. Howells good-naturedly satirized in the steel glass of his realistic method, which so reflected to the flattered self-complacency of ** polite society its own gen- teel image that in the brightness it missed the criticism. Accordingly, in 1883, when Mr. Howells began a deeper, more serious delineation of human life in A Modern Instance^ and continued it in A Womafi's Reason, The Rise of SUas Lapham, The Minister's Charge, Annie KUhurn, and A Haz- ard of New Fortunes^ the helpless, ** exclusive" reviewers and criticasters deplored the passing of the ** gracious charm" of his earlier A Chance Acquaintance, A Foregone Conclusion, The Lady of the Aroostook, A Fearful Responsibility. It is true they gathered consolation from the fact that he enter- tained them with a series of light farces and one novel of man- ners, Indian Summer. The chief difficulty for these readers seems to be that they resented the turning of attention to im- oultured types of people and to vulgar sections of social life by this master of a culture easily recognized as superior to their own. They had deceived themselves into the belief that they themselves were the only fit subjects for the art of Mr.
