Page:My literary passions (IA myliterarypassio00howerich).pdf/264

 quality as War and Peace; and I read Policoushka and most of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I had never felt with the people of other fiction.

His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle into allegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with the simple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomes impatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher, he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can move only through the realization of themselves in others. The simple pathos, and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of Policoushka, the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large than all his parables; and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, the Philistine worldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the world than such pale fables of the early Christian life as Work while ye have the Light. A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to let it rust out in disuse.

Terrible as the Kreutzer Sonata was, it had a moral effect dramatically which it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, and applied to marriage