Howells is less dramatic than Richardson, yet one may turn pages and chapters of his novels into dramatic form by supplying to the dialogue the names of the speakers. Howells, indeed, acquired a faculty in the construction of sparkling dialogue so brilliant that he exercised it in the production of a surprising number of so-called comedies: _A Counterfeit Presentiment_, _The Mouse-Trap_, _The Elevator_, and the like, dramatic in form but essentially novelistic in all things else. His genius was not dramatic. He evolves his characters and situations slowly. The swift rush and culminating plot of the drama are beyond him. His comedies are chapters of dialogue from unwritten novels--studies in character and manners by means of conversations.
Richardson's novels centered about women; they were written _for_ women; they were praised first of all for their minute knowledge of the feminine heart. There was indeed in his own nature a feminine element that made him the absolute opposite of a masculine type, for instance like Fielding. Howells also centered his work about women. In one of the earliest reviews of his work is the sentence "his knowledge of women is simply marvelous." Like his earlier prototype, he has expended upon them a world of analysis and dissection and description. With what result? To one who has read all of his fictions straight through there emerges at last from the helpless, fluttering, hesitating, rapturous and dejected, paradoxical, April-hoping, charming throng of his heroines--Mrs. March, Kitty Ellison, Lydia, Marcia, Mrs. Campbell, Mrs. Roberts, Helen Harkness, Florida, Mrs. Lapham and her daughters, Dr. Breen, Clara Kingsbury, Rhoda Aldgate, Annie Kilburn, Mrs. Dreyfoos and the hundred others--there emerges a single woman, the Howells type, as distinct a creature as the Richardson type, and as one compares the two he is startled to find them almost identical. The Richardson feminine is a trembling, innocent, helpless creature pursued by men; the Howells type is the same woman transported into the nineteenth century, inconsequent, temperamental, often bird-like and charming, electric at repartee, pursued by men and fleeing flutteringly from them, yet dependent upon them for her very existence. In all of these fictions there is scarcely a feminine figure, at least in a leading rôle, of whom her sex may be proud. His masculine characters are many of them strong and admirable, even to the minor figures like Mr. Harkness and Captain Butler and Squire Gaylord. He has, perhaps, created two characters--Silas Lapham and Bartly Hubbard--to place beside Natty Bumppo, and Uncle Remus, and Yuba Bill, Sam Lawson, Colonel Sellers, and a few others, as permanent additions to the gallery of American types. But with all his studies of women he has added nothing original, no type that can be accepted as characteristic or admirable.