270 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS HowellSi whom they regarded as an acclimated Bostonian in- terested in nothing outside their own narrow circle and with sympathy no wider and imaginative insight no keener than their own. Consequently, when this broad-hearted, clear-seeing Ameri- can portrayed in his novels such of his countrymen as worked with their hands and rendered possible the cultua of the elegant social epicureans, the latter lamented Mr. Howells's departure from his earlier high artistic standards. Since the publication of A Hazard of New Fortunes^ in 1890, Mr. How- ells has shown that this expression of a changed interest in human life was due to the influence of the great Russian writer Tolstoy. ** Tolstoy awakens in his readers the will to be a man ; not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leads you back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of the gentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men, but identified with them, to that Pres- ence in which the finest gentleman shows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure of his miser- able egotism. . . From his supreme art I have learned forever to place art below humanity. ' ' Mr. Howells came to know Tolstoy, not earlier than 1887 — * * after I had turned the comer of my fiftieth year^' — and this corresponds exactly to the period in which he widened his outlook to see the whole social range of New York City, to which he gave expression in the most representative single American novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes. Mr. Howells states his literary belief most forcefully in tiie directions given to young writers: **Look to nature and to actuality for your model — not to any book, or man, or num- ber of men. Be true to yourself. Write of that of which you know the most, and follow faithfully the changes in your feel- ing. Put yourself down before common realities, before com- mon hopes, common men, till their pathos and mystery and significance flood you like a sea, and, when (the life that is all about you is so rich with drama and poetry and the vista of human thought and paeeion, so infinite that you are in despair of ever expressing a thousandth part of what you feel,then all .
