motives and influences that have made nihilism, so that we feel that
nothing essential on that score remains to be learnt.

The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent
and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's
private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of
thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents
them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its
dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means
blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, the reader must open his eyes to
be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the
characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his
memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he
is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental
condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens
that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into his stories--
characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some
eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a
reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in
its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not
that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming
contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the
harmony beneath the discord.

Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of
England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even
confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must
be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and
associations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is
better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist