d 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