life of politics and unvarnished local life. Kindly and human, he was never an idealist; journalism trains cynics rather than believers. At the early age of fourteen he went up with his father to Columbus, where the elder Howells had secured the clerkship in the state senate, as well as a job on the Ohio State Journal. The boy immediately became an active reporter, one of the youngest on record. He developed an incisive style, and got to be at home in Spanish, which gave his mind an international bent, marking his whole career. Practically he became a student of manners, with a wonderful insight into character and eccentricities. But he was self-taught and an individualist, with "the defects of his qualities," as the French say. Though bearing degrees from five colleges, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Oxford and Adelbert in his own home state, he never had a college training. The brotherhood-culture to be found there-such as was at its best in an organization, for instance, like the Cambridge Apostles of Tennyson's college days,-together with the trained teaching of real philosophers who have so often. been guiding stars to unsettled youth; these enriching influences were denied him. He never seems to have got beyond the chilling realism of his early book, "Poems of Two Friends," published before the Civil War, when he was only twenty-two. The quatrains of his "Bubbles" breathe a strange pessimism, as if the writer had no "star" for his guidance, but was left without the help so needed by the pilot:

BUBBLES
I.

I stood on the brink in childhood,
And watched the bubbles go
From the rock-fretted, sunny ripple
To the smoother tide below;

And over the white creek-bottom,
Under them every one,

Went golden stars in the water,
All luminous with the sun.

But the bubbles broke on the surface,
And under, the stars of gold
Broke; and the hurrying water
Flowed onward, swift and cold.

II.

I stood on the brink in manhood,
And it came to my weary brain,
And my heart, so dull and heavy
After the years of pain,-

That every hollowest bubble

Which over my life had past

Still into its deeper current

Some heavenly gleam had cast;

That, however I mocked it gayly,

And guessed at its hollowness,

Still shone, with each bursting bubble,
One star in my soul the less.

The qualities of the "star" in our most cherished literature are remote from subjective experiences and the changeableness of the individual life; a "star" is linked to the eternal and the unchanging. So it is in the last sonnet of Keats:

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art!"

So Tennyson, in an early lyric, addressed to Margaret: "You are the evening star, alway

Remaining betwixt dark and night."

And he reserves the same symbolism of the unchanging and the unchangeable for his parting message in "Crossing the Bar," a hymn which Benjamin Jowett declared would "live forever in men's hearts":

"Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!"

With Browning also the word is sacred as typifying the immortal and spiritual. It is the final term of appreciation that he can use for his beloved wife. And in "Abt Vogler," where he finds in music the qualities of the eternal, when the gifted musician creates a melody that is to last forever, he resorts to the symbolism of the "star":

"And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound but a star."

And to close with Shakespeare's wonderful sonnet, treating of ideal love, which finally makes high character, the great Elizabethan terms it

"an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark."

At the close of his essay on Shakespeare, Howells tells us whimsically that "he had never surpassed Shakespeare as a poet, though he once firmly meant to do so." No wonder, with his unsteady and changeable stars!

The gifted young American journalist, indeed, desirous to see things as they really are, without illusion, and have no creed that would not stand the closest analysis and explanation, thus broke with the mystic traditions of spiritual faith for which the "majority" have not, and never had, any particular use. No wonder that later he fell a victim to the insidious glamor of Tolstoi's visionary teaching.

Making a "hit" with a biography of Abraham Lincoln, written for campaign purposes, Howells received the consulship at Venice as a reward, and sailed for Italy at the beginning of the Civil War. He was therefore in train

ing for the international note at a time when the national cult would have deepened and strengthened his spiritual message; and he got neither. It will be remembered that the fifth and last of Tolstoi's so-called "positive doctrines of Jesus" is the renunciation of nationality:—“Renounce all distinctions of nationality; do not admit that men of another nation may ever be treated by you as enemies; love all men as alike near to you; do good to all alike."

Society today recognizes the awful calamities that will fall upon a people who, under the spell of a theoretic perfection such as taught by Count Tolstoi, overthrow all the landmarks of civilization and endeavor to remake the world. Matthew Arnold, who during his lifetime might have been termed the Dean of English Letters, and whose philosophy of life was just a little tainted with the superficialism of the literary man, was saved by his intense and clear-ringing nationalism-an inheritance he received from his great father-from making an idol of Tolstoi as Howells unfortunately did. He foresaw anarchy and a possible reign of terror as a result of breaking with the past because of a Russian's dream. When it came to national health and safety, Arnold preferred the inherited national life, found in such personalities as his father, to any glittering "sweetness and light."

Here is Tolstoi's teaching as summed up by Arnold in one of the latest of his essays:

"Count Tolstoi has since advanced a far more definite and stringent rule of life-the positive doctrine, he thinks, of Jesus. These all-important commandments of Christ are 'commandments of peace,' and five in number. The first commandment is 'Live in peace with all men; treat no one as contemptible and beneath you. Not only allow yourself no anger, but do not rest until you have dissipated even unreasonable anger in others against yourself.' The second is: 'No libertinage and no divorce; let every man have one wife and every woman have one husband.'

The third: 'Never on any pretext take an oath of service of any kind; all such oaths are imposed for a bad purpose.' The fourth: 'Never employ force against the evil-doer; bear whatever wrong is done to you without opposing the wrong-doer or seeking to have him punished. The fifth and last: 'Renounce all distinction of nationality.

"If these five commandments were generally observed, says Count Tolstoi, all men would become brothers. Certainly the actual society in which we live would be changed and dissolved. Armies and wars would be renounced; courts of justice, police, property, would be renounced also."

The direful results forecast by Arnold are only too apparent in Soviet Russia of today. And if Count Tolstoi is in a considerable measure responsible, it must be remembered that he was not in the line of high-souled statesmanship. It was an aristocracy divorced from the responsibilities and training of actual government, and left to dream and play at Versailles and elsewhere, that found itself helpless in 1789 to stem the terrors of the Red Revolution. By supplanting the old landed aristocracy with a more subservient and up-to-date officialdom, Peter the Great also loosened the final foundations of Russian society, and when the deadly crisis came in the late war, in 1918, the empire fell. For the past two centuries the Russian nobility has had no national note; their life was largely international in a merely social sense, in Paris and elsewhere, and the bond that bound them to their native land was comparatively slight. No wonder that Count Tolstoi's doctrines were destructive rather than constructive, theoretical rather than practical. How could it be otherwise with a Russian "Count"?

Our detached American abroad is apt to be gulled with the same International Vision. This explains why William Dean Howells could give a whole-souled endorsement to Tolstoi so recently as twelve years ago. Here is his eulogy, contributed to the pages of the North American