There remain two departments of his work which in the light of such a scrutiny draw very close together: his memoirs and his novels. Perhaps the travel books ought to be mentioned here again. Indeed, Howells himself many years ago explained that in his first novel, _Their Wedding Journey_, he started out “to mingle fiction and travel—fiction got the best of it.” On the whole, however, his travels suffer from comparison with his memoirs and novels by reason of the very quality which makes most novels inferior to his—inferior in the actual amount of human life present. Howells would have been one of the first to argue that a traveller sees too many formal displays to see much reality; sees too many types to see many men and women; sees too many facts to see much truth. Life, he steadily maintained, can never be judged nor can it be veraciously represented by its picturesque aspects. On this point Howells deserves to be called perhaps the most truly democratic of all novelists. Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne in their day, and Henry James in his, could never leave off complaining that a democracy lacks the elements of saliency and colour upon which the novelist must base his prosperity. No, said Howells to all such complaints. Whatever in life tends to raise individuals arbitrarily above the average in wealth or station tends to make them formal and typical, and so no longer truly individual—and so no longer true. What essentially characterizes and distinguishes men from one another and so varies the pattern of life and fiction is the minutiae of daily differences—and they are the true concern of the novelist. No wonder then that Howells’s memoirs are so close to his novels in tone and substance. It was with the same method that he set forth the people whom he had known in the flesh and those he had known only in the larger world of his imagination. His pen moved quite naturally from Lowell to Silas Lapham, and it would be difficult to say which is richer in verisimilitude, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ or _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_. The first is more intimate, because, as the characters were all Howells’s own, he could do with their secrets as he liked; the second is more spacious, because it deals with a group of men who led lives of spacious learning and reflection; but the truth is in both of them. Memoirs and novels must consequently be taken together to make up that documentary revelation which Henry James admired.