Norway, it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality of the characters.  Most of Tourguenief’s books I have read many times over, all of them I have read more than twice.  For a number of years I read them again and again without much caring for other fiction.  It was only the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my first satisfaction in its art.  Perhaps this was because I had reached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even of the artifice that hid itself.  In ‘Smoke’ I was now aware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly operating the story.

I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of the stories of Auerbach.  It is true that I have never cared greatly for ’On the Heights,’ which in its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof from the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fades out into a German mistiness.  But I speak of it with the imperfect knowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I have really no right to speak of it.  The book of his that pleased me most was ‘Edelweiss,’ which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true.  I still think it very delicately done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach’s work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.

XXXIII.  CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES

I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in the lives of persons, and I have at all times read it.  I am not sure but I rather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back over this record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for very little besides fiction.  I read at the time I have just been speaking of, nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to it in its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, or trickled from the antique urns of Italy.

I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to read much in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it.

Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, and autobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading in the world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have never enjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as have reasoned of themselves.

I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not know that I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and Goldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so of Marlow’s, and all of Ibsen’s and Maeterlinck’s.  The taste for the old English dramatists I believe I have never formed.