W. D. Howells strives to make a frieze, a fresco of life as he sees it, and then, he himself withdrawing from his work, leads us to the spectacle. We are to be equally with himself the philosopher; he merely presents the text.The reason why so many o... Read more

W. D. Howells strives to make a frieze, a fresco of life as he sees it, and then, he himself withdrawing from his work, leads us to the spectacle. We are to be equally with himself the philosopher; he merely presents the text.The reason why so many of us find his work not altogether to our personal liking lies simply in the choice of a field for his researches. To study the commonplace, the mean in life, has been his constant occupation, just as if the essence of humanity could be most clearly and completely viewed through the still, shallow waters of the everyday — variations being but ripples to obscure. We feel, many of us, that the elemental human is deep in every condition of life, and to be found in far greater range and richness, depth and beauty amid the stress of the unusual—in the prince and in the pauper, rather than in the peasant and the burgess. Romance, not the dead level of actuality, is the true revelation of human nature.Ragged Lady, needless to say, is a typical study in the commonplace. The material is not promising; the canvas is very narrow, the observation very minute. The difficulty in art so opposed to the impressionistic, so different from the easy, broad sketches in which Mr. Warner covers the whole social range, is, while rendering the detail, to keep the proportion of the whole. That Mr. Howells succeeds in this is beyond all question. The sketch of Mrs. Lander, that awful picture of the vulgar, selfish woman, grows more painfully life-like with each succeeding touch. But here Mr. Howells;s real triumph is in his heroine, Clementina. In her he somehow succeeds in gilding the commonplace in fiction with some of the glory it possesses in real life. To present a heroine who has no ideal characteristics, who can neither converse nor think, who talks a strange dialect—and here Mr. Howells very inartistically over-emphasizes a detail—but who is still charming and capable of enrolling us among her many admirers, is an achievement. For the average male in literature expects the Woman Wonderful—particularly in intellect and her ability to cope with man in his own field—just as the average female will have her Prince Charming: each oblivious in this imaginative sphere, that in the work-a-day world of prose, love goes by no allotment of the heroic, in beauty, strength, or intellect. In short, Clementina is not the sort of girl whom we should expect to carry us captive through a novel, though it is well we should know that nothing is more likely than this in the strange mysteries of flesh and blood. That Mr. Howells can so present in fiction some hint of those subtle influences and affinities that play fast and loose with so many of our intellectual ideals, is no small thing to have compassed, even though it does not produce the really great art that stirs and stimulates.* * * * *Including Ten Illustrations by A. I. Keller as they appeared in the Harper & Brothers publication of 1899 Less