"Henry Esmond," "Romola," "The French Revolution," merely prove that writers of genius have been able to represent to themselves the periods to which these works refer under certain aspects, not that those aspects are true. Paint Savonarola, Marlborough, Danton, in a sufficiently vivid manner, and none will question the likeness. Scott's Louis XI. is, in critical cant, very complete, but that does not prove that it is like the original. It merely proves that Scott had a more vivid imagination than is usually granted to the sons of men. If the writer of insight deals with the characters around him, he is more liable to be tripped up. When Carlyle speaks of "the most popular of men,—inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left," he produces an epigram that standing apart from the context is striking and life-like and apparently true. Its untruth is revealed the moment we find that Charles Sumner is the person so described. If Hawthorne had applied his clever and acute description of Margaret Fuller to a fictitious character, no one would have questioned its truth to nature. But when he labelled it Margaret Fuller its injustice became apparent to those who knew that lady better than he did. Dickens in one of his prefaces says, "I have never touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of that character has incredulously asked me, Now, really, did I ever really see one like it?" Probably the inquirer was right, the novelist wrong. Indeed, the novelist gives himself away, to use the expressive argot of the street, in his next sentence. "All the Peeksniff family upon earth" (he continues) "are quite agreed, I believe, that Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever existed." Well, Mr. Pecksniff never did exist. As a type of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness he is excellent, as an attempt at the portrayal of individual character he is a monstrous failure.
The fourteen other stories in the volume were originally written as tracts for the people, to enforce certain favorite doctrines of the author in simple and homely language. They will all repay perusal. Quaint, ingenious, and fanciful in themselves, they are doubly interesting from the insight they give into the personality of a very remarkable man. Of "Ivan the Fool" this is especially true; but, though that story is a work of genius in a literary sense, from a politico-economical stand-point it can no more betaken seriously than can the fulminations of that great and erratic Englishman, John Raskin. Indeed, if the author were unknown, it might almost be mistaken for a malicious burlesque on his pet doctrine of non-resistance. The translation is generally good but in his anxiety to preserve the flavor of the original Mr. Dole has occasionally sacrificed good English and even good sense to literalness. In a school-boy's composition the insertion of the brackets in the sentence "Immediately his belly [ache] went away" might not have the same ludicrous effect it has in the present instance. And if this were indeed a school-boy's composition, would not Master Dole get a bad mark for a paragraph such as this?—"Pakhom settled down. He got cattle. He had three times as much land as he bad had before, and the land was fertile. Life was tenfold better than it had been in the old time; had all the arable land and fodder that he needed. Keep as many cattle as you like."
The criticism which groups Tolstoï with Howells and James as a "realist" seems a very narrow and mistaken one. Indeed, the word "realist" is getting to be as much of a shibboleth in this latter part of the nineteenth century
