the picturesque, an unusual power of
description, and humor of the most delicate quality; but as yet there was
little approach to narrative. _Their Wedding Journey_ was a revelation
to the public of the interest that may lie in an ordinary bridal trip
across the State of New York, when a close and sympathetic observation is
brought to bear upon the characteristics of American life as it appears
at railway stations and hotels, on steam-boats and in the streets of very
commonplace towns. _A Chance Acquaintance_, 1873, was Howells's first
novel, though even yet the story was set against a background of
travel--pictures, a holiday trip on the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay;
and descriptions of Quebec and the Falls of Montmorenci, etc., rather
predominated over the narrative. Thus, gradually and by a natural
process, complete characters and realistic novels, such as _A Modern
{590} Instance_, 1882, and _Indian Summer_, evolved themselves from
truthful sketches of places and persons seen by the way.

The incompatibility existing between European and American views of life,
which makes the comedy or the tragedy of Henry James's international
fictions, is replaced in Howells's novels by the repulsion between
differing social grades in the same country. The adjustment of these
subtle distinctions forms a part of the problem of life in all
complicated societies. Thus in _A Chance Acquaintance_ the heroine is a
bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged during a pleasure
tour to an irreproachable but offensively priggish young gentleman from
Boston, and the engagement is broken by her in consequence of an
unintended slight--the betrayal on the hero's part of a shade of
mortification when he and his betrothed are suddenly brought into the
presence of some fashionable ladies belonging to his own _monde_. The
little comedy, _Out of the Question_, deals with this same adjustment of
social scales; and in many of Howells's other novels, such as _Silas
Lapham_ and the _Lady of the Aroostook_, one of the main motives may be
described to be the contact of the man who eats with his fork with the
man who eats with his knife, and the shock thereby ensuing. In _Indian
Summer_ the complications arise from the difference in age between the
hero and heroine, and not from a difference in station or social
antecedents. In all of these fictions the {591} misunderstandings come
from an incompatibility of manner rather than of character