, and, if any
thing were to be objected to the probability of the story, it is that the
climax hinges on delicacies and subtleties which, in real life, when
there is opportunity for explanations, are readily brushed aside. But in
_A Modern Instance_ Howells touched the deeper springs of action. In
this, his strongest work, the catastrophe is brought about, as in George
Eliot's great novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and
the story is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study of manners
can be. His nearest approach to romance is in the _Undiscovered
Country_, 1880, which deals with the Spiritualists and the Shakers, and
in its study of problems that hover on the borders of the supernatural,
in its out-of-the-way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal
poetic flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to
Hawthorne, especially to Hawthorne in the _Blithedale Romance_, where he
comes closer to common ground with other romancers. It is interesting to
compare _Undiscovered Country_ with Henry James's _Bostonians_, the
latest and one of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a
study of the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights' advocates, and all
varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom Boston
has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they become
under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which see more
clearly the {592} charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism,
morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, and vulgar or
ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, than the nobility
and moral enthusiasm which underlie the surface.

Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, and this in the
field of parlor comedy. His little farces, the _Elevator_, the
_Register_, the _Parlor Car_, etc., have a lightness and grace, with an
exquisitely absurd situation, which remind us more of the _Comedies et
Proverbes_ of Alfred de Musset, or the many agreeable dialogues and
monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or
American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of
feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly
illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated
with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls "that great
discovery," Mrs. Nickleby.

1. Theodore Winthrop. Life in the