imes_ still remains his
master-piece. All in all, he is, thus far, the most important literary
figure of the New South, and the justness and {583} delicacy of his
representations of life speak volumes for the sobering and refining
agency of the civil war in the States whose "cause" was "lost," but whose
true interests gained even more by the loss than did the interests of the
victorious North.

The four writers last mentioned have all come to the front within the
past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with the plan of this sketch,
receive here a mere passing notice. It remains to close our review of
the literary history of the period since the war with a somewhat more
extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work has done more
than any thing else to shape the movement of recent fiction. These are
Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their writings, though
dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that they are analytic in
method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and simple;
he wrote the romance of adventure and of external incident. Hawthorne
went much deeper, and with a finer spiritual insight dealt with the real
passions of the heart and with men's inner experiences. This he did with
truth and power; but, although himself a keen observer of whatever passed
before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a photographic fidelity to
the surface facts of speech, dress, manners, etc. Thus the talk of his
characters is book talk, and not the actual language of the parlor or the
street, with its slang, its colloquial ease and the intonations and
shadings of phrase {584} and pronunciation which mark different sections
of the country and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect,
for example, were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, and his
romances certainly do not rank as novels of real life. But with the
growth of a richer and more complicated society in America fiction has
grown more social and more minute in its observation. It would not be
fair to classify the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of
manners merely; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim to
describe people not only as they are, in their inmost natures, but also
as they look and talk and dress. They try to express character through
manners, which is the way in which it is most often expressed in the
daily existence of a conventional society. It is a principle of