world literature is its power of psychological analysis, its broad humanity, its manysidedness, its understanding of every type of human character. Those qualities strike us equally in Gogol's "Dead Souls," in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," in Turgenev's "Sportsmen Sketches." And those qualities reach their maturity and perfection in Tolstoy's art.
His power of sympathy is unlimited. He understands the sinner, because he has been a sinner. He understands the saint, because he has aspired to be a saint. He understands the savage and the tramp and the peasant, because he has lived with savages and tramps and peasants. He is a stern moralist, yet his tolerance and charity are infinite. He holds strong views on every problem of life and death, and he expresses those views in stirring pamphlets. But when he writes his stories and delineates his characters, the teacher and preacher vanish. The artist remains. He describes the rake and the drunkard with as much sympathy as the good man. Nay, he describes them more sympathetically, for in "Anna Karenina" the profligate Oblonski and Anna the adulteress and the drunken brother are more appealing than Levine or Karenine. Anna may break hearts around
