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.

It is constantly said that the conditions in America are unfavorable to
the higher fiction; that our society is unformed, without centre, without
the definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heine
speaks of in "Don Quixote"; that it lacks types and customs that can be
widely recognized