A Modern Instance | Page 3

and created a number of sparkling farces like The Parlor Car.
The real issue of all this practice in the dramatic art was to disengage the characters he created from too close dependence on the kind of circumstance, as of travel, which the author did not invent, and to give them substantial life in the working out of the drama of their spiritual evolution. Thus by the time he was released from editorial work, Mr. Howells was ready for the thorough-going novel, and he gave to readers such examples of art as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and that most important of all his novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes. By the time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly interested, not merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious, complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind, he has sought to trace the evils of individual life to their source in this composite order, and to guess at the mode by which society shall right itself and drink up healthy and life-giving virtues from the soil.
But it must not be inferred that his novels and other literary work have been by any means exclusively concerned with the reconstruction of the social order. He has indeed experimented with this theme, but he has always had a sane interest in life as he sees it, and with the increasing scope of his observation he has drawn his figures from a larger world, which includes indeed the world in which he first began to find his characters and their action.
Not long after retiring from the Atlantic he went to live in New York, and varied his American experience with frequent travels and continued residence in Europe. For a while he maintained a department in _Harper's Magazine_, where he gave expression to his views on literature and the dramatic art, and for a short period returned to the editorial life in conducting _The Cosmopolitan_; later he entered also the field of lecturing, and thus further extended the range of his observation. For many years, Mr. Howells was the writer of "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine. In 1909 he was made president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Howells's death occurred May 11, 1920.
This in fine is the most summary statement of his career in literature,--that he has been a keen and sympathetic observer of life, and has caught its character, not like a reporter going about with a kodak and snapping it aimlessly at any conspicuous object, but like an alert artist who goes back to his studio after a walk and sets down his comments on what he has seen in quick, accurate sketches, now and then resolving numberless undrawn sketches into some one comprehensive and beautiful picture.

THE SEQUENCE OF MR. HOWELLS'S BOOKS.
Mr. Howells is the author of nearly seventy books, from which the following are selected as best representing his work in various fields and at various periods.
Venetian Life. Travel and description. 1867.
Their Wedding Journey. Novel. 1871.
Italian Journeys. Travel and description. 1872.
Suburban Sketches. 1872.
Poems. 1873 and 1895.
A Chance Acquaintance. Novel. 1873.
A Foregone Conclusion. Novel. 1874.
A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. 1877.
The Lady of the Aroostook. Novel. 1879.
The Undiscovered Country. Novel. 1880.
A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories. 1881.
A Modern Instance. Novel. 1881.
The Rise of Silas Lapham. Novel. 1884.
Tuscan Cities. Travel and description. 1885.
April Hopes. Novel. 1887.
A Hazard of New Fortunes. Novel. 1889.
The Sleeping Car, and Other Farces. 1889.
A Boy's Town. Reminiscences. 1890.
Criticism and Fiction. Essays. 1891.
My Literary Passions. Essays. 1895.
Stops of Various Quills. Poems. 1895.
Literary Friends and Acquaintances. Reminiscences, 1900.
Heroines of Fiction. Criticism. 1901.
The Kentons. Novel. 1902.
Literature and Life. Criticism. 1902.
London Films. Travel and Description. 1905.

A MODERN INSTANCE.
I.
The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward, tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered a vast acreage with the lines