THE ROOTS OF MODERN TASTE
519
Howells' historical importance is further confirmed by the posi–
tion he attained in the institutional life of American letters. Not
long after Howells died, H.
L.
Mencken, who had been at pains to
make his name a byword of evasive gentility, wrote to regret his
death, because, as he said, with irony enough but with some serious–
ness, there was now no American writer who could serve as the repre–
sentative of American letters, no figure who, by reason of age,
length of service, bulk of work, and public respect, could stand as
a literary patriarch. And since Mencken wrote, no such figure has
arisen. Howells was indeed patriarchal as he grew older, large and
most fatherly, and if he exercised his paternity only in the mild,
puzzled American way, still he was the head of the family and took
his responsibility seriously. He asserted the dignity of the worker
in
literature at the same time that he defined the writer's place as being
economically and socially with the manual worker rather than with
the business man. He was receptive to the new and the strange; his
defense of Emily Dickinson, for example, does him great credit. His
personal and cultural timidity about sexual matters made
him
speak
harshly of writers more daring
in
such things than himself, yet he
fought effectively for the acceptance of contemporary European lit–
erature, and he was tireless in helping even those of the young men
who did not share his reticences. Edmund Wilson recently defined the
literary character of Stephen Crane by differentiating
him
from
"the comfortable family men of whom Howells was chief," yet
Crane was
in
Howells' debt, as were Boyesen, Hamlin Garland,
Norris and Herrick.
He was not a man of great moral intensity, but he was stub–
born; his comportment in the Haymarket affair marks, I think, the
beginning
in
our life of the problem of what came to be called the
writer's "integrity," and
his
novel
A Hazard of New Fortunes
is
probably the first treatment of the theme which became almost obses–
sive in our fiction in the 'thirties, the intellectual's risking his class
position by opposing the prejudices of his class. He was most in–
telligently aware of what was happening in American life, and his
discontent is almost the more cogent because it
was
only intermittently
courageous. He is not like Henry Adams or Henry James, who
thought of America in reference to their own grand ambitions.
Howells' ambitiousness reached its peak in youth and then compro-
