Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... Ill WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND ALTRIRIA "' Science is the emancipator, the deliverer, the mighty equalizer and leveler-- equalizing and leveling up. Not down but up, always up. Not by making the rich poor, but by making the poor rich. Not by making the wise foolish, but by making the foolish wise. . . . For signs of the world's tomorrow, look not in the programmes of political parties, not in the plottings of princes or plutocrats, but in the crucible of the chemist." David Graham Phillips, The Reign of Gilt, 1905. Here is where Mr. Howells has missed his chance and that trend of the whole world movement of the last sixty years, which his limited artistic creed has tried faithfully to represent and foreshadow in the kind of fiction that he considers American and realistic; in the novelized dreams of an ideal that he finds unattainable here and to-day; and in letters from a land that he surrounds with the shadowy mists of uncertainty and of a spirituality dissipating itself in vague longings that never lead its interpreter or his readers to any permanent, practicable or constructive point d'appui. The trouble with Mr. Howells is that, though his method is realistic under limitations that A Hazard of Xew Fortunes permanently defines, he remains from start to finish incurably a sentimentalist of a type that is passing as inevitably in America as the idle rich are passing: the type drawn to the life in many of his own books, in the Massachusetts family of Mr. Henry James's The Europeans, and innumerable short stories and novels of rudimentary American environment of the school exemplified by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Margaret Deland and others who have farmed out the rocky and barren soil of literary...
