the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be "English," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk "English." There is also this serious disadvantage about "English,” that if we wrote the best "English" in the world, probably the Eng10 lish themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as they find it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people will use them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.

heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art: and the reproach which Arnold was half right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be "distinguished."

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 5 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 and 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.

In the mean time it has been said with a superficial justice that our fiction is 10 narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present English fiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in a certain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief and restricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, is narrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except zo Tolstoi, are narrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguéneff, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the 25 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 35 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, 40 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 45 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 so never to be reprinted from the monthly

is world-wide, because the whole world
is more or less Americanized. Tolstoi
is exceptionally voluminous among mod-
ern writers, even Russian writers and it
might be said that the forte of Tolstoi 55
himself is not in his breadth sidewise,
but in his breadth upward and down-
ward. The Death of Ivan Illitch leaves

The whole field of human experience was 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 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 contributed 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

magazines; but if he turns to his bookshelf 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 last, with all its surviving literature upon it. The question is merely one of time. He con

JOAQUIN MILLER (1841-1913)

Cincinnatus Heiner Miller - he adopted the 'Joaquin' later as a pen name— was born, according to his own statement, on the line between Ohio and Indiana while his parents were migrating westward. 'My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west.' He spent his early boyhood in a frontier settlement east of the Mississippi, and when he was eleven went with his family across the continent in oxen-drawn wagons, arriving in Oregon after seven months. He saw much of frontier life, and, if we may trust his autobiographical narrative, went through a surprising series of adventures with Indians, miners, desperadoes, and finally with the Walker filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. He returned at length to Oregon, picked up a smattering of culture at a mission school, edited a paper which was suppressed for disloyalty at the beginning of the war, studied law for a few weeks, became a frontier judge, wrote Byronic verses, and in 1868 published them in a volume entitled Specimens, published another, Joaquin et al, 1869, and the following year went to San Francisco to join the brotherhood of poets. Disappointed by his reception, he started eastward, and disappointed again in New York, went on to London. After a most discouraging year in the metropolis,— a year devoted almost feverishly to poetic composition and to efforts to secure a publisher, he was enabled in 1871 to bring out his volume Songs of the Sierras. Its reception by the poets and critics of England was enough to turn the head of a far more balanced nature than his. He started in to make poetry his profession, but after the first outburst of surprise the public became more critical. He did not overcome his early crudenesses as it was supposed he would do, but rather tended more and more to cheapness and mediocrity. His later life was a picturesque one. He lived for a time in a log cabin of his own construction in Washington, D.C,. but finally settled in California, which he made his home during his later years. After his first London volume he published in various places no less than twenty-four books of prose and verse, but in America he was not taken with seriousness, and his poetry, save for a few lyrics, is little read.

There is a vein of the flamboyant and the high-falutin in Miller that is apt to disgust his reader so completely that he has no patience to find the really strong pieces that here and there are to be found in his work. The greater part of all he wrote is worthless, but the small residue,- poems dealing with the Sierras and the great plains, is thoroughly American and, moreover, really poetic. The lyric Columbus' bids fair to hold its place in the most select American anthologies,

1 Permission to use the poems of Miller in this collection was granted by the Harr Wagner Publishing Co., San Francisco, Cal., publishers of the complete works of Joaquin Miller.