For instance, the young French writer of de Maupassant's narrative who was to call up out of the deep of European life the individuality of one single French grocer, would himself have and would address an audience who had--whether for better or worse (to my way of thinking, as it chances, for worse)--a fairly fixed social conception of the class of this retail merchant. The American writer who knows very well that General Grant once kept an unsuccessful shoe store, and that some of the most distinguished paintings the country possesses have been selected by the admirably-educated taste and knowledge of one or two public-spirited retail dry-goods merchants; and who also has seen gaunt and poverty-stricken Russian store-keepers standing among stalls of rotten strawberries in Jefferson Street market, in Chicago--that writer will neither speak from nor address this definite social conception according to mere character of occupation which I have indicated as a part of the French author's means of exactitude in expression. Nothing in our own random civilization, as it seems to me, is quite so fixed as that French grocer seated in his doorway, that de Maupassant and Flaubert mention with such charm. Nothing here is so neat as that. To convey social truth, the American writer interested in giving his own impression of a grocer in America, whether rich or poor or moderately prospering, will have to individualize him and all his surrounding condition more, and to classify him and all his surrounding condition less, than de Maupassant does, to convey the social truth his own inimitable sketches impart. Again, ours is a very changing population. Its movement of life through one of our cities is attended with various and choppy and many-toned sounds communicating a varied rhythm of its own. To return to our figure of the retail tradesman--if this tradesman be in Chicago, for instance, he may neither be expressed clearly by typical classifications, nor shown without a genuine error in historical perspective against a static street background and trade life. This background must have change and motion, unless the writer is to copy into his own picture some foreign author's rendition of a totally different place and state of human existence. The tune of the story's text, too, should repeat for the reader's inward ear the special experience of truth the author has perceived, the special ragged sound and rhythm of the motion of life he has heard telling the tale of that special place.