The art of Howells is essentially of this present world. Of the soul of man and the higher life of his dreams and aspirations he has nothing to tell. He writes of Hawthorne: "In all his books there is the line of thoughts that we think of only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow in sore doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things that can never be said." Howells would ignore such themes. He is of the age of doubt, the classical age, rather than of the age of faith that sees and creates. Lightly he skims over the surface of material things, noting the set of a garment or the shade of a cravat, recording rather than creating, interested in life only as it is affected by manners, sketching with rapid pen characters evolved by a provincial environment, tracing with leisurely thoroughness the love story of a boy and girl, recording the April changes of a maiden's heart, the gossip of an afternoon tea--a feminine task one would suppose, work for a Fanny Burney, a Maria Edgeworth or a Mrs. Gaskell, no work indeed for a great novelist at the dawn of a new period in a new land. While the West, of which his earlier life was a part, was crashing out a new civilization; while the air was electric with the rush and stir of rising cities; while a new star of hope for the nations was rising in the West; while a mighty war of freedom was waging about him and the soul of man was being tried as by fire, Howells, like Clarissa Harlowe, is interested "in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles." And yet even as we class him as a painter of manners we remember that America has no manners in the narrower sense of the term. New England had the nearest approach to manners, yet New England, all must admit, was wholly imitative; she was enamoured of Europe. Howells has another side to his classicism, one utterly wanting in Richardson--he is a satirist of manners, a critic and a reformer. Richardson took English manners as he took the English Constitution and the English language as a matter of course. He never dreamed of changing the order of things; he would only portray it and teach individuals how best to deport themselves under its laws. Howells, after his first awe of New England had subsided, became critical. He would change manners; he would portray them that men by seeing them would learn their ridiculousness--in short, he became, what every classicist must sooner or later become, a satirist--a chafer under the conventions that bind him,--a critic.