us, "may refuse
to commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed
worse than he actually is," since this results in "a loss to the world
of moral force which cannot be afforded." The final test of the
fineness of fiction lies in its veracity. "Romance is the poetry of
circumstance," as Stevenson tells us, and "drama is the poetry of
conduct"; we may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of a
novelist's circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as regards
conduct. As far as the successive happenings of his story are
concerned, the mere incidents, the author may on occasion ask our
indulgence and tax our credulity a little; but he must not expect us
to forgive him for any violation of the fundamental truths of human
nature.

It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable, which makes
"Anna Karenina" one of the noblest works of art that the nineteenth
century devised to the twentieth, just as it is the absence of this
fidelity to the facts of life, the twisting of character to prove a
thesis, which vitiates the "Kreutzer Sonata," and makes it unworthy of
the great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is not too
much to say that the development of Tolstoi as a militant moralist is
coincident with his decline as an artist. He is no longer content to
picture life as he sees it; he insists on preaching. And when he uses
his art, not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate his
own individual theories, although his great gifts are not taken from
him, the result is that his later novels lack the broad and deep moral
effect which gave his earlier studies of life and character their
abiding value.

Stevenson had in him "something of the shorter catechist"; and the
Scotch artist in letters, enamored of words as he was, seized firmly
the indispensable law. "The most influential books, and the truest in
their influence, are works of fiction," he declared. "They do not pin
their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be
inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn.
They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they
disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of
others, and they show us the web of experience not as we can see it
for ourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming
ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be
reasonably true to the human co