ABSTRACT
To most Victorians realism meant Zola, sex, and the exploitation of the animal, and all the pruderies of the Age of Innocence rose up in protest against defiling letters with such themes. The new realism was a native growth, sprung from the soil, unconcerned with European technique. It was the first mistake of Henry James that he romanticized Europe, not for its fragments of the medieval picturesque, but for a fine and gracious culture that he professed to discover there. The spirit of Henry James marks the last refinement of the genteel tradition, the completest embodiment of its vague cultural aspirations. From such nostalgia, that left a note of wistfulness in his pages, William Dean Howells was saved by his frank and undivided loyalties. Commonplace men and neurotic women are poor materials from which to fashion an adequate realism, and with the passing of the Age of Innocence the scruples of William Dean Howells went out of fashion.
