He is as tedious as Richardson and at times nearly as voluminous. He uses page after page of _The Lady of the Aroostook_ to tell what might have been told in a single sentence. The grandfather and the aunt set the general situation before the reader, then the aunt and the clergymen, then the two passengers, then the passengers and the captain, then the heroine and the cabin boy in six pages, and finally at the very end of the book the heroine and the transplanted New England woman in Venice. Art is "nothing too much." We feel instinctively that the author is making a mountain out of a molehill because he believes his readers will expect him to do it. To Bostonians he believes it would be inexpressibly shocking for a girl to sail for Europe the only woman on board the ship, though she be under the express care of the fatherly old sea captain and though two of the three other passengers are Boston gentlemen. The perturbation of these two model young men, their heroic nerving of themselves to live through the experience, their endless refinings and analyzings of the situation, and all of their subsequent doings are simply Howells's conception of "the quality of Boston."
It is Richardsonism; it is realism of the _Pamela_ order; it is a return to the eighteenth century with its reverence for respectability and the conventions, its dread of letting itself go and making scenes, its avoidance of all that would shock the nerves of the refined circle for which it wrote. The kinship of Howells with Richardson indeed is closer even than that between Howells and James. They approach life from the same angle. Both profess to deal with men and manners in their actuality, both would avoid the moving accident and discard from their fictions all that is fantastic or improbable; both would keep closely within the circle of the highly respectable middle-class society of which they were a part; both professed to work with no other than a moral purpose; and both would reveal the inner life of their characters only as the reader might infer it after having read endless descriptions and interminable conversations; and both wrote, as Tennyson termed _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_, "great still books" that flow on and on with sluggish current to no particular destination.