Where else, indeed, may be found another representation of American life during half a century as extended and accurate as that in Howells’s total work? Geographically, indeed, he was limited, in the main, to Ohio, New England, and New York, and to those parts of Europe in which Ohioans, New Englanders, and New Yorkers spend their vacations. He belonged, too, to the older America, the America in which the country still could lie down with the towns and the villages could lead them; the thunder and smoke of the larger industrial America appear in his later work and are reported with exquisite sympathy, but they appear less as realities in themselves than as problems pressing into the lives of the older order of citizens. Howells shut his eyes—at least in his fiction—somewhat singularly also to the brutal, sordid, illicit aspects of his country, not intending to deny them, as Puritans or pedants do, but preferring to move discreetly among them, choosing his subjects “as a sage chooses his conversation, decently.” All these are limitations, but they accuse Howells of nothing worse than too much gentleness. They ask him to stand a little further off from Ibsen and a little nearer Irving; nearer Thackeray than Carlyle; nearer Flaubert than Balzac. And yet by his wealth of observation he belongs with the most luxuriant geniuses, with Scott and Dickens and George Sand. Nor does it contradict the claim that he was so luxuriant to say that doubtless a few of his novels will easily survive the rest—_A Modern Instance_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, _Indian Summer_, _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, _The Kentons_, and that exquisite triumph of art and temper, _A Chance Acquaintance_. (Of this last Howells himself said that it made him more friends than any of the others; he thought _A Modern Instance_ the strongest, and he liked _Indian Summer_ best.) Outside of this charmed, preferred circle there are dozens of other novels which exhibit dozens and hundreds of corners of the American world with sharp eyes and sunny wisdom and golden humour and delicate art.