It is precisely this poise which men of the highest productive power secure; for it is this nice adjustment of the individual discovery of truth to the general discovery of truth which gives a man of imaginative faculty range, power, and sanity of view.  To see, feel, think, and act strongly and intelligently in our own individual world gives us first-hand relations to that world, and first-hand knowledge of it; to pass beyond the limits of this small sphere, which we touch with our own hands, into the larger spheres which other men touch, not only widens our knowledge but vastly increases our power.  It is like exchanging the power of a small stream for the general power which plays through Nature.  One of the measures of greatness is furnished by this ability to pass through individual into national or racial experience; for a man’s spiritual dimensions, as revealed through any form of art, are determined by his power of discerning essential qualities and experiences in the greatest number of people.  The four writers who hold the highest places in literature justify their claims by their universality; that is to say, by the range of their knowledge of life as that knowledge lies revealed in the experience of the race.

It is the fortune of a very small group of men in any age to possess the power of divining, by the gift of genius, the world which lies, nebulous and shadowy, in the lives of men about them, or in the lives of men of other times; in the nature of things, the clairvoyant vision of poets like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo, of novelists like Thackeray, Balzac, and Tolstoi, is not at the command of all men; and yet all men may share in it and be enlarged by it.  This is one of the most important services which literature renders to its lover:  it makes him a companion of the most interesting personalities in their most significant moments; it enables him to break the bars of individual experience and escape into the wider and richer life of the race.  Within the compass of a very small room, on a very few shelves, the real story of man in this world may be collected in the books of life in which it is written; and the solitary reader, whose personal contacts with men and events are few and lacking in distinction and interest, may enter, through his books, into the most thrilling life of the race in some of its most significant moments.

No man can read “In Memoriam” or “The Ring and the Book” without passing beyond the boundaries of his individual experience into experiences which broaden and quicken his own spirit; and no one can become familiar with the novels of Tourgueneff or Tolstoi without touching life at new points and passing through emotions which would never have been stirred in him by the 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