Review of December, 1908, on the occasion of his hero's eightieth birthday:

"The century in which Tolstoi mostly lived and mostly wrought had among many great names few more memorable than his, if it had any. There was Napoleon and there was Lincoln, and then there was Tolstoi in an order which time may change, though it appears to me certain that time will not change the number of these supreme names.

"I do not think that in fiction he has any peer or even any rival, because from the beginning he 'took truth for his sole hero,' and would have no other in any extremity or for any end. But even with his devotion to reality in the study of life, which, so far as I know, was absolute, the prime affair was to captivate the reader, to lead his fancy, not to convince and persuade his reason. But when once the call of Religion came to Tolstoi, it came so powerfully, so loudly, that it must shut from his senses every voice that called; there he stood, so help him God, he could no other than obey it, and it alone, testifying for it with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. The moral spectacle is of unsurpassed sublimity, and no riches of fiction is conceivable, fiction even from him, the supreme master, which would console our poverty if we had failed of such books as 'My Confession,' 'My Religion,' 'The Kingdom of God,' 'Life,' 'What is to be Done?' and many of the briefer essays and occasional appeals to the world in signal events and emergencies against its blindness and cruelty and folly."

This extraordinary eulogy may well stagger us today. And Matthew Arnold's wise criticism, later on in the same essay from which I have already quoted, comes in patly: "Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere said, 'Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up."

The unfortunate conjunction of the name of the Emperor Napoleon with that of Count Tolstoi as one of the supreme peerless ones of modern history is also significant. While Bonaparte saved France from anarchy, he inoculated her with a pinchbeck love of military glory that wasted her manhood. Inherently a selfish man, for the past six years of his life at least he was a danger to civilization, and his fall was inevitable. It is a pity that another Ohio journalist now before the public eye should have confessed that he early chose the Emperor Napoleon as his world hero. It has taken almost a century for Frenchmen to get rid of the unfortunate glamor of his name. Especially weak toward the close of his career was his sense of fairplay and brotherhood; his marshals became convenient attachments on whom to throw the blame of failure. Here also was Tolstoi weak; he always stood aloof from concerted action, and never could “pull in harness." At the very close of his life he left the wife who had been his devoted partner, to go into solitude and find "Truth." She was not even allowed to be with him in his last moments of consciousness. Where in either case is the personality on which to build character? For Napoleon divorced the devoted Josephine for "state reasons," a wholly indefensible act; yet of a piece with all his later policy.

In the vital matter of human brotherhood, these two brilliantly endowed men, the heroes of Howells, proved defective. It is at the very heart of Christianity, which began with the brotherhood of the twelve apostles, and has continued as a brotherhood ever since. A Christian nation is in fact a great brotherhood, whose concerted action for all purposes, civil and defensive, lies at the basis of our civilization and saves the world from anarchy. Emperors and empires have disappeared in the recent giant catastrophe, but the Christian nation remains, continuing the

traditions of ideal personality that have come down to us from the remote past.

It was from the attractive side of a great spirit who grieved over the wrongs of the Russian peasantry, and fonged for a speedy millennium that Tolstoi appealed to our idealistic Dean of Letters. Both were strong in the diagnosis of social disease; but the capable diagnostician is not the last or the best type of physician. He may merely turn the case over to the hands of the cheap experimenter, who poisons instead of heals. Still we must all welcome the skilled interpreter who makes us know our common humanity better. And in the matter of close and incisive analysis of character-types in our American life of the past generation, William Dean Howells was peerless. In many ways he continued feminine traditions as the successor of such experts in the novel of manners as Jane Austen and George Eliot. To continue the parallel: it is by no means necessary to adopt the philosophy of Marian Evans and land ourselves in Positivism, in order to enjoy her revelations of English life and character.

I have always considered "A Modern Instance" as the ablest and best of his stories. Indeed it might be termed the keenest analysis of American life in the generation after the Civil War, just as Sam Blythe's fascinating “The Price of Place" depicts American life of thirty years later. The personages are all types, and they live and move on the novelist's pages. Both are studies of steady deterioration of character in the protagonist, like Shakespeare's Macbeth, Milton's Satan, George Eliot's Tito Melema in "Romola." Its Romola is Marcia, quite a type of American womanhood.

Marcia had been preceded by Lydia, the heroine of the "Lady of the Aroostook," an American girl who crosses over to Europe and impresses people there with her clearcut personality. Readers in the Old Country felt that a

vivid and original depicter of American life had now begun to write; and an enterprising Edinburgh publisher began to bring out his volumes, as they appeared, in dainty shilling volumes, which had a wide sale.

To compare Howells again with George Eliot, with whom he has so much in common as a writer. It will be remembered that the Englishwoman, anxious to be taken very seriously, adopted a masculine pen-name for her earlier stories, considered as "evidently the production of a country clergyman." The title she gave to the collection of her first studies, "Scenes from Clerical Life," supported this conception. The insight of Dickens, however, detected the feminine touch in "Adam Bede"; he could not conceive of the Hetty scene, when she disrobes at the mirror, as being the work of a man. Had Howells written under a feminine or neutral pen name, he might have been congratulated on his woman's intuition. The books are particularly valuable for their insight into American womanhood as a new type. Take for instance the remarkable self-effacement of the American mother, in the personality of Mrs. Gaylord. When the young man calls who is finally to wed Marcia, she holds the fort nervously till her daughter appears. In referring to her, “she spoke with awe of her daughter and her judgments which is one of the pathetic idiosyncrasies of a certain class of American mothers. They feel themselves to be not so well educated as their daughters, whose fancied knowledge of the world they let outweigh their own experience of life; they are used to deferring to them, and they shrink willingly into household drudges before them, and leave them to order the social affairs of the family."

The father is almost equally complacent in all social matters. Marcia was expecting some friends to visit the town of Equity in which they lived. "Now, father, I want to do something for them!' she cried, feeling an

American daughter's right to dispose of her father, and all his possessions, for the behoof of her friends at the time."

When she married, Marcia, idealist and loving wife as she was, did not surrender her personality. Commenting on her wifely doubts and troubles, Howells remarks: "Women are more apt to theorize their husbands than men in their stupid self-absorption ever realize. When a man is married, his wife almost ceases to be exterior to his consciousness; she afflicts or consoles him like a condition of health or sickness, she is literally part of him in a spiritual sense, even when he is rather indifferent to her; but the most devoted wife has always a corner of her soul in which she thinks of her husband as him; in which she philosophizes him wholly aloof from herself."

Notwithstanding his foreign travel and residence, and his wide acquaintance with other literatures, Howells retained to the last a distinct domesticity, a lack of that thorough thinking on national affairs that is so necessary for the complete man. Two fields of thought were foreign to him, religion and statesmanship. His religious man was a mere social servant, who was a good element in the body politic but a bit of a survival. His statesman was a politician. Religion throughout "A Modern Instance" is dealt with, not irreverently, with with a mild analytic aloofness. It justifies itself pragmatically, it is true. His heroine Marcia finds the people she trusts in a family that has been brought up religiously, and where the parents still remain sincere church goers. So Marcia decides that she will join their church for the sake of her little girl. "I want to do everything I can for Flavia," she tells Mrs. Halleck. "I want Flavia should be baptized into your church. . . . I can't tell whether it's the true church or not, and I don't know that I ever could; but I shall be satisfied-if it's made you what you are,