the blood and nerves of men. It tells us that Hen-Toy, the Chinaman, is as agonizingly unsatisfied with the love of woman as Don Juan, the Spaniard; that the Abyssinian sings the same songs of the sorrows and joys of love as the Frenchman; that there is an equal pathos in the love of a Japanese Geisha and Manon Lescaut; that man's longing to find in woman the other half of his soul has burned and burns with an equal flame men of all lands, all times.
A murderer in Asia is as loathsome as in Europe; the Russian miser Plushkin is as pitiable as the French Grandet; the Tartufes of all countries are alike, Misanthropes are equally miserable everywhere, and everywhere every one is equally charmed by the touching image of Don Quixote, the Knight of the Spirit. And after all, all men, in all languages, always speak of the same things, of themselves and their fate. Men of brute instincts are everywhere alike, the world of the intellect alone is infinitely varied.
With a clearness irresistibly convincing, fine literature gives us all these innumerable likenesses and infinite varieties—literature, the pulsing mirror of life, reflecting with quiet sadness or with anger, with the kindly laugh of a Dickens or the frightful grimace of Dostoevsky, all the complications of our spiritual life, the whole world of our desires, the bottomless stagnant pools of banality and folly, our heroism and cowardice in the face of destiny, the courage of love and the strength of hatred, all the nastiness of our hypocrisy and the shameful abundance of lies, the disgusting stagnation of our minds and our endless agonies, our thrilling hopes and sacred dreams—all by which the world lives, all that quivers in the hearts of men. Watching man with the eyes of a sensitive friend, or with the stern glance of a judge, sympathizing with him, laughing at him, admiring his courage, cursing his nullity—literature rises above life, and, together with science, lights up for men the paths to the achievement of their goals, to the development of what is good in them.
