of poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, of novelists like
Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi, is not at the command of all men; and
yet all men may share in it and be enlarged by it. This is one of the
most important services which literature renders to its lover: it
makes him a companion of the most interesting personalities in their
most significant moments; it enables him to break the bars of
individual experience and escape into the wider and richer life of the
race. Within the compass of a very small room, on a very few shelves,
the real story of man in this world may be collected in the books of
life in which it is written; and the solitary reader, whose personal
contacts with men and events are few and lacking in distinction and
interest, may enter, through his books, into the most thrilling life
of the race in some of its most significant moments.

No man can read "In Memoriam" or "The Ring and the Book" without
passing beyond the boundaries of his individual experience into
experiences which broaden and quicken his own spirit; and no one can
become familiar with the novels of Tourguéneff or Tolstoi without
touching life at new points and passing through emotions which would
never have been stirred in him by the happenings of his own life. Such
a story as "Anna Karénina" leaves no reader of imagination or heart
entirely unchanged; its elemental moral and artistic force strikes
into every receptive mind and leaves there a knowledge of life not
possessed before. The work of the Russian novelists has been, indeed,
a new reading in the book of experience; it has made a notable
addition to the sum total of humanity's knowledge of itself. In the
pages of Gogol, Dostoievski, Tourguéneff, and Tolstoi, the majority of
readers have found a world absolutely new to them; and in reading
those pages, so penetrated with the dramatic spirit, they have come
into the possession of a knowledge of life not formal and didactic,