from his ledger
and went out on a tour which was extremely diverting but not at all
remunerative. The company ran on a reef and Frank sent for carfare which
I cheerfully remitted, crediting it to his educational account.

The most vital literary man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean
Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through
the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,--those
who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely
debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life
or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with
keen enjoyment of his delicate humor, and his graceful, incisive
English; in other circles he was condemned because of his "injustice to
the finer sex."

As for me, having begun my literary career (as the reader may recall) by
assaulting this leader of the realistic school I had ended, naturally,
by becoming his public advocate. How could I help it?

It is true a large part of one of my lectures consisted of a gratuitous
slam at "Mr. Howells and the so-called realists," but further reading
and deeper thought along the lines indicated by Whitman, had changed my
view. One of Walt's immortal invitations which had appealed to me with
special power was this:

Stop this day and night with me
And you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand
Nor look through the eyes of the dead,
Nor through my eyes either,
But through your own eyes....
You shall listen to all sides,
And filter them from yourself.

Thus by a circuitous route I had arrived at a position where I found
myself inevitably a supporter not only of Howells but of Henry James
whose work assumed ever larger significance in my mind. I was ready to
concede with the realist that the poet might go round the earth and come
back to find the things nearest at hand the sweetest and best after all,
but that certain injustices, certain cruel facts must not be blinked at,
and so, while admiring the grace, the humor, the satire of Howells'
books, I was saved from anything like imitation by the sterner and
darker material in which I worked.

My wall of prejudice against the author of _A Modern Instance_ really
began to sag when during the second year of my stay in Boston, I took up
and finished _The Undiscovered Country_ (which I had begun five or six
years