One underlying reason why American writers so seldom pursue such studies and methods as these is the prevailing disesteem for clearly-focussed attention we have described. Another reason is that the American writer of fiction who loves the pursuit of precise expression will indubitably have to face a number of difficulties which may perhaps not be readily apparent to the writers of other countries.
Naturally enough, in his more newly-settled, or rather his settling, nation, made up of many nationalities, the American writer who desires to "particularize" a subject from his country's contemporary history, and "to distinguish this from all the other beings and all the other objects of the same race," will have many more heretofore unexpressed conditions and basic circumstances to evoke in his reader's mind than the German or French or English writer must summon.
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.