THE AMERICAN NOVEL

him so much that the story moved forward almost without
his conscious agency; "though," he carefully insisted, "I
should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact/'
A Hazard of New Fortunes, which encountered greater im-
mediate favor than any of his previous novels, outdoes them
all, and the subsequent ones too, in its conduct of different
groups of characters, in the perfect naturalness with which
now one and now another rises to the surface of the narrative
and then retreats at the due moment without a trace of
management* The episode of the street-car strike, brought in
near the end, dramatizes the struggle which has heretofore
been in the novel rather a shadow than a fact; I lowells employs
it as a sort of focal point to which the attention of all his
characters is drawn, with the result that, having already re-
vealed themselves generally, they are more particularly re-
vealed in their varying degrees of sympathy.

Howells wrote from the point of view of the older America
which in 1890 was mystified by labor unrest and horrified by
a strike; the America in which the country had been one with
the towns, and the villages had ruled them both; the America
which knew the thunder and smoke of the industrial nation
less as realities in themselves than as new problems crowding
in upon the older order of Americans* So New York was for
Howells, in spite of his fine sympathies, a community of
established Americans moving somewhat gingerly among its
immigrants, and not a new Rome or a new Constantinople
for the Western hemisphere. The book partially suggests a
volume of travels in a city where the traveler lives with the
ruling class, without digging very deeply into the commoner
soil of life, except as he encounters some chance individual
who belongs with the unpriviliged or who out of conscience
consorts with them in the hope of lightening their burdens.
Howells's sympathies were as wide as the metropolis, but his
knowledge was restricted. For this reason his narrative seems
quiet in comparison with the jagged, multicolored, whirling.