novelists of England and America today were cut up into little pieces
(and we might sacrifice a few for the sake of the experiment), there is
no inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. The
diverse indications would puzzle the most acute dissector. Lost in the
variety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysis
and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all
its variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is
its narrowness--narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with
lives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broad
perception. We are accustomed to think that with the advent of the
genuine novel of society, in the first part of this century, a great step
forward was taken in fiction. And so there was. If the artist did not use
a big canvas, he adopted a broad treatment. But the tendency now is to
push analysis of individual peculiarities to an extreme, and to
substitute a study of traits for a representation of human life.

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,