It scarcely need be said that it is not multitude of figures on a literary canvas that secures breadth of treatment.  The novel may be narrow, though it swarms with a hundred personages.  It may be as wide as life, as high as imagination can lift itself; it may image to us a whole social state, though it pats in motion no more persons than we made the acquaintance of in one of the romances of Hawthorne.  Consider for a moment how Thackeray produced his marvelous results.  We follow with him, in one of his novels of society, the fortunes of a very few people.  They are so vividly portrayed that we are convinced the author must have known them in that great world with which he was so familiar; we should not be surprised to meet any of them in the streets of London.  When we visit the Charterhouse School, and see the old forms where the boys sat nearly a century ago, we have in our minds Colonel Newcome as really as we have Charles Lamb and Coleridge and De Quincey.  We are absorbed, as we read, in the evolution of the characters of perhaps only half a dozen people; and yet all the world, all great, roaring, struggling London, is in the story, and Clive, and Philip, and Ethel, and Becky Sharpe, and Captain Costigan are a part of life.  It is the flowery month of May; the scent of the hawthorn is in the air, and the tender flush of the new spring suffuses the Park, where the tide of fashion and pleasure and idleness surges up and down-the sauntering throng, the splendid equipages, the endless cavalcade in Rotten Row, in which Clive descries afar off the white plume of his ladylove dancing on the waves of an unattainable society; the club windows are all occupied; Parliament is in session, with its nightly echoes of imperial politics; the thronged streets roar with life from morn till nearly morn again; the drawing-rooms hum and sparkle in the crush of a London season; as you walk the midnight pavement, through the swinging doors of the cider-cellars comes the burst of bacchanalian song.  Here is the world of the press and of letters; here are institutions, an army, a navy, commerce, glimpses of great ships going to and fro on distant seas, of India, of Australia.  This one book is an epitome of English life, almost of the empire itself.  We are conscious of all this, so much breadth and atmosphere has the artist given his little history of half a dozen people in this struggling world.

But this background of a great city, of an empire, is not essential to the breadth of treatment upon which we insist in fiction, to broad characterization, to the play of imagination about common things which transfigures them into the immortal beauty of artistic creations.  What a simple idyl in itself is Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea”!  It is the creation of a few master-touches, using only common material.  Yet it has in it the breadth of life itself, the depth and passion of all our human struggle in the world-a little story with a vast horizon.