Letters Home. By W. D. Howells. (Harper and Brothers. 6s.)
—What Hazlitt would have called "the perfection of" Mr. Howells's "inestimable art" has seldom been more deftly dis- played than in this novel. The medium which Mr. Howells has chosen for the unfolding of his story is not the easiest with which to rivet the attention of the casual novel- reader, for the book consists of a series of letters written, not by one of the characters, but by the combined force of almost the whole of the dramatis perbonae. It takes some time, therefore, for the reader to grasp the con- nection between these "letters home," written by a set of people who have no apparent connection with each other except that of having come to settle in New York at the same time from different parts of the American Continent. But Mr. Howells, like a clever weaver throwing his shuttle, slowly allows the pattern to grow upon his cloth, and by the middle of the book it becomes obvious that the threads of destiny are inextricably interwoven in the case of the principal persons of the story. It is quite unnecessary to praise the exquisite delicacy of Mr. Howells's character drawing, though we may applaud his courage in christening his heroine "America," and in making her typical of a certain type of the young women of his nation. But the real tour tie force is the way in which Mr. Howells contrives to see the city of New York with the eyes of a stranger, or rather, with the eyes of several strangers, all of whom in the first letters record the impressions made on them by their first days in New York. In the words with which Wallace Ardith, the hero of the story, describes his feeling for the city the stranger finds an echo of his own innermost thoughts on his own first view of that mysteriously fascinating place. "She [New York] has inspired me with a new passion, she herself is my passion, and I will never cease to love her evermore. Radiant, peerless divinity, but majestic and awful too, her splendour dazzles me, her sovereign beauty enthralls me, her charm intoxicates, maddens me. What is any mortal girl to this apotheosis of Opportunity, this myriad-visaged Chance, this Fortune on a million wheels P" The first intoxicating charm of New York probably does not last more than a few weeks at most, but it must be owned that at the first glimpse the city has a fascination the cause of which it is as difficult to define as it is impossible to deny. We advise all readers who care for fine anti delicate literary work to read Mr. Howells's latest volume.
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