greatest after him, Tourguenief, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most American fashion.  In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of modern fiction as much as the American school.  But I do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue.  Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and South, thorough rather than narrow.  In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters.  A new method was necessary in dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because the whole world is more or less Americanized.  Tolstoy is exceptionally voluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might be said that the forte of Tolstoy himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and downward.  ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch’ leaves as vast an impression on the reader’s soul as any episode of ‘War and Peace,’ which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and not as a whole.  I think that our writers may be safely counselled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known.  If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big.  A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied.  Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group.

The whole field of human experience as never so nearly covered by imaginative literature in any age as in this; and American life especially is getting represented with unexampled fulness.  It is true that no one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not possible; our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may forever forbid it.  But a great number of very good writers are instinctively striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civilization known to all the other parts; and their work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense.  The world was once very little, and it is now very large.  Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must devote himself