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 272 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS Mr. Ho wells 's work in superlative terms: ^'for sustained ex- hibition of certain great qualities — clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing, he is without his peer in the English- writing world. His pictures are not mere stiflf, hard, accurate photographs; but photographs with feeling in them. His is a humor which flows softly all around and about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health- giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood.*' Mr. Garland, in the most nearly adequate appreciation of Mr. Howells's greatest novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes^ states, ^^Howells is greatest when most humble, perceiving and recording realities. . . He is self-confident. . . bows only to truth. Genuine love for reality must be the con- dition of mind on which the law of reaUsm is founded. . . Mr. Howells stood for this amid assaults which would have driven another from the field. * * Mr. Winston Churchill made the most comprehensive and concisely spoken speech of congratulation at the dinner given in honor of Mr. Howells 's seventy-fifth birthday on March 2, 1912, in New York City. He said, ** Analyzing with some def- initeness what Mr. Howells has meant to me, I find that he stands for honest workmanship — how the thing is done ; — a consistent philosophy — a viewpoint of life; — and for the purity of the language. He has kept himself and his work clear of the commercialism and materialism which have swept over the country. ' * Mr. Howells has written many valuable records of travel in America and abroad, in addition to the earlier Italian sketches, but those of greatest fascination for the lover of the real Mr. Howells in life as well as in literature must be those of the A country of his boyish air-castles — Spain. The great writer has now reached the venerable age of seventy-seven but he is still the young Howells. Witness his own testimony at the be- ginning of Familiar Spanish T ravels j ''As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward Granada on the soft, but not too soft evening of November 6, 1911, the air that