It cannot fail that these novels, even like those of Jane Austen, will be valued in years to come as historical documents. As a picture of the externals of the era they portray there is nothing to compare with them. The Boston of the seventies, gone now as completely as the Boston of the Revolution, lives in these pages. Every phase of its external life has been dwelt upon: its underworld and its lodging houses and its transformed country boys in _The Minister's Charge_; the passing of the old Boston of the India trade days and the helplessness of the daughters of the patricians in _A Woman's Reason_; literary and journalistic Boston in _A Modern Instance_; the high and low of Boston society in _The Rise of Silas Lapham_; the entry of woman into the learned professions in _Dr. Breen's Practice_, and so on and on--he has covered the field with the faithfulness of a sociological historian. He is a painter of manners, evermore manners.
As to whether or not he touched the soul of New England as did Rose Terry Cooke, for instance, is another question. His knowledge of the region was an acquirement, not a birthright. The surface of its society, the peculiarities of its manners and its point of view, the unusual traits of its natives, these he saw with the sharpened eyes of an outsider, but he never became so much a part of what he wrote that he could treat it, as Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman treated it, from the heart outward. The thing perhaps that impressed him first and most deeply as he came a stranger into the provincial little area was the so-called New England conscience, "grim aftercrop of Puritanism, that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father's race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self sacrifice."[103] All of his New England characters have this as their humor, using the word in the Ben Jonsonian sense. Novels like _A Woman's Reason_ and _The Minister's Charge_ turn upon it. With Hawthorne the thing became a moving power, a tragic center of his art that could move the soul to pity or to terror, but Howells treats it never with the sympathy of comprehension. He never so treats it that we feel it; he never shows us a character possessed by its power until it is driven over the brink of tragedy. It is simply one of the details that make up the portrait of a New Englander, as in _The Lady of the Aroostook_, the maiden cries out at the happy moment when her lover declares himself: "'Oh, I knew it, I knew it,' cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to him at last, 'Oh--Oh--are you _sure_ it's right?'" It is an element of manners, a picturesque peculiarity, a "humor."