Howells on James (Century 1882)
►The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray . . . . These great men are of the past.
►The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others . . . . This school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James.
This essay is sometimes cited as the one that started the “realism war,” although most of the debate occurred later in the 1880s and 1890s.