The Roving Critic by Carl Van Doren — Read

EULOGIUM

Mark Twain and Henry James could have agreed on few subjects, but William Dean Howells was one of them. To such antipodean geniuses he stood as equally great writer and great friend. "For forty years," said Mark Twain in a familiar passage, "his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities -- clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing -- he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world, _Sustained._ I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights. " Henry James never ceased to exclaim at the abundance no less than the discipline of Howells's "great garden,... the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to this day.... They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case....