happenings of his own life. Such
a story as "Anna Karenina" 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, Tourgueneff, 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,
but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance. To possess
the knowledge of an experience at once so remote and so rich in
disclosure of character, so charged with tragic interest, is to push
back the horizons of our own experience, to secure a real contribution
to our own enrichment and development. Whoever carries that process
far enough brings into his individual experience much of the richness
and splendour of the experience of the race.

Chapter XV.

Freshness of Feeling.

The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it
reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness,
exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its
magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the
experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the
prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and
power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in
the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the
succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals;
even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind
fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must
disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit.
Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of
interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material with
which he deals.

That fresh bloom which lies on the very face of poetry, and in which
not only its obvious but its enduring charm resides, is the expression
of a feeling for nature, for life, and for the happenings which make
up the common lot, which keeps its earliest receptivity and
responsivenes