are not essential: a novel may be excellent,
and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the
better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this
age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the
great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and
before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind
that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its
exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand
or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men,
working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their
complexity, yet underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that
simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their
excellence.

II

Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the
lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none
ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those
of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,
the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there
is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a
form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange
forgetfulness of the history of the race! Meanwhile, by a glance at his
own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of
this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little
orthodoxies of the day--no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday
or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are
exclusive--the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary,
I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of
an originally strong romantic bent--a certain glow of romance still
resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by
accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as
often as not, that his reader rejoices--justly, as I contend. For in all
this excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central
human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean
himself? A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances
of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and
aspirations than those he loves to draw. And why should he suppress
hi