as the word "correct" was in the eighteenth century, and has been equally conventionalized and restricted in its meaning. In any large sense of the words, Addison and Pope were not as correct as Shakespeare and Milton, nor are Howells and James as real as Thackeray and Scott. Tolstoï, in everything but contemporaneity, stands as far apart from the American novelists as Swift did from the rest of the Queen Anne men. There is a perpetual sense of grasp and vigor in his writings, an earnestness, a sincerity, a moral force, which are lacking in the Americans. On the other hand, he lacks their winning grace, their deft and artistic touch, their humor, as well as that sense of conventional fitness which is an excellent thing in its way, but which prevents them from ministering to the higher needs of the soul, exactly as it prevented the trim muses of the Queen Anne period. There seems to be a certain propriety in speaking of Mr. Howells and Mr. James, of Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, but somehow one is reluctant to give these artificial titles to those great writers who, while they are not so careful about the "realism" or the "correctness" of their accessories, touch the truer and deeper self of the reader. Tolstoï has been called a realist, but the realism of "Anna Karenina" is a very different thing from the realism of any American novel. And no American realist would be so courageous, so earnest, or so mentally unsophisticated as to produce a book like "My Confession" (Crowell), which in its frank directness, its logical eccentricity, its mournful impressiveness, its fiery zeal, reminds one by turns of Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" and of St. Augustine's "Confessions."
All thoughtful men are impressed by the disparity between man—who claims to be a reasonable and immortal being, who appears upon this planet for a brief to-day, a halting-ground between two eternities, with mysteries pressing above, around, and within him for solution—and his follies, his pettinesses, his absorbing interest in the trivialities of daily life. The average man, however, though he may occasionally be stirred from his security when a marvel like birth or death enters into his own circle, soon returns to common working life and the feelings and habits which this world engenders. We call him the practical man, the man of common sense. Other men also return to daily life, retaining a vivid impression of their deeper thoughts, feeling the contrast keenly, but struck rather with its oddity than its sadness. These are the humorists,—the Horaces, the Montaignes, the Lambs, the Howellses. Other men, again, recoil with scorn or wrath or pity from the lower side of life. The vanity, the transitoriness, of all human pursuits presses at all times upon their consciousness. They would fain have the whole world be as men picture it to themselves when temporarily regarding it under the influence of their higher thoughts only. These are the poets, the prophets, the religious enthusiasts,—the Buddhas, Dantes, Carlyles, Tolstoïs. They are often one-sided, they often lack the balance of mind which humor bestows, but their very one-sidedness makes them the more intense, and intensity is more powerful than humor. It is these men who impress themselves most upon their fellows and add most largely to the vein of thought which feeds the moral life of society. The world puts its own interpretation on their teaching, and brings it within the possibilities of actual life; nevertheless it receives it and abides by it, until other teaching comes to supersede it.
One of the most entertaining books that have recently been issued is Henry T. Finck's "Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: their Development, Causal
