and his rather uncertain ladies get in and out of
love, and serve themselves of every chance that fortune
offers them of having their own way. We shrink
from the unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy
has divined in the heart of our own race a lingering
heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainly been
no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians.
His heroines especially exemplify it, and I should
be safe in saying that his Ethelbertas, his Eustacias,
his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies, are wholly
pagan. I should not dare to ask how much of their
charm came from that fact; and the author does not
fail to show you how much harm, so that it is not
on my conscience. His people live very close to
the heart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief,
gives you a richer and sweeter sense of her unity
with human nature. Hardy is a great poet as well
as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist
also his humor would be enough to endear him to me.
I come now, though not quite in the order of time,
to the noblest of all these enthusiasms—namely,
my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy.
I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable
truth, yet I do not know how to give a notion of his
influence without the effect of exaggeration.
As much as one merely human being can help another
I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced
me in aesthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that
I can never again see life in the way I saw it before
I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the
will to be a man; not effectively, 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
Presence in which the finest gentleman shows his alloy
of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure
of his miserable egotism. I learned from Tolstoy
to try character and motive by no other test, and
though I am perpetually false to that sublime ideal
myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me
ashamed that I am not true to it. Tolstoy gave
me heart to hope that the world may yet be made over
in the image of Him who died for it, when all Caesars
things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men
shall come into their own, into the right to labor
and the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor,
each one master of himself and servant to every other.
He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever
impossible personal happiness, but as a field for
endeavor towards the happiness of the whole human
family; and I can never lose this vision, however I
close my eyes, and strive to see my own interest as
the highest good. He gave me new criterions,
new principles, which, after all, were those that are
taught us in our earliest childhood, before we have
come to the evil wisdom of the world. As I read
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