WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 271 idea of discapleship will be at an end. Tour whole aim will be to be tme to yourself and your infinite teacher, nature, and you will no longer strive to delineate beauty, but truth, and, at last, truth will be beauty. ' ' Some critics of differing aesthetic creeds have urged that Mr. Howells is not and can not be consistent with the theory stated above. They claim that to follow his belief he must be a mere camera and show in his novels, as a camera does on its film, a mere physical impression of the appearance of reality ; this, they charge, Mr. Howells does not do. Of course he does not; he is an artist. The difference between the realism of Mr. Howells and the romanticism of some other writers is not, as most critics seem to think, a difference between the pseudo- objectivity of realism and the subjectivity, or artistic personal- ity, in romanticism, but a difference between the kind of sub- jectivity Mr. Howells consciously expresses and the kind of subjectivity the romanticist thinks himself to express. For the realist is subjective ; otherwise he would be no artist ; he aims and succeeds in giving a true rendering of things as they are — to his eyes ; omniscience could do no more ; his subjec- tivity is nearest the real object, and therefore the fusion of himself and his work gives the illusion of reality and the il- lusion is the requisite of art. The romanticist, aiming at the illusion first of all, has his subjectivity, or self-emphasis, placed on the means of the deception so that he constructs artificially and falsely, and often gains no illusion whatever — for the reader. De Vigny's Cinq-Mars is a pertinent ex- ample of the latter, and any novel of Mr. Howells is an ex- cellent instance of the former. Mr. Howells never offers the solution of the problem in his fiction ; he allows the convincing illusion of reality to state the problem so clearly that the reader is enabled to make his own solution if he has con- science or mind enough to do so. Perhaps the last demand ex- plains the difficulty certain critics have experienced in accept- ing the greater William Dean Howells. After all, the comment of no academic critic, favorable or the reverse, is half so valuable in the case of a writer, as the testimony of his fellow-craftsmen. Mark Twain wrote of
