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 to a single department. It is so in everything--all arts,
all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the universal rule
against universality. He contributes his share to a thorough knowledge
of groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspiring
novelty and interest. He works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfully
than the novelist ever worked before; his work, or much of it, may be
destined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines; but if he
turns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the British or other
classics, he knows that they, too, are for the most part dead; he knows
that the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at