that she is 'the
aboriginal Woman's Rights person'; and it is a fact that she and Helena
and Desdemona and Ophelia are practically a thousand years apart. And
this is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm:
that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering
individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to
independence--of choice, volition, action--with man, had not begun to be.
That of itself would suffice to make _Clarissa_ memorable; and that is
the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book
remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but it
has never been equalled. It is Richardson's only title to fame; but it
is enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor more
incapable of ruin.

TOLSTOI

The Man and the Artist.

There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist.
He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is
nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and
dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of
character and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in his
novels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; his
interpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely and
liberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is no
more angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks but
one thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet he
handles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and a
magnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of their
opposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and his
understanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth with
delicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able to
sympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express his
sentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and give
utterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to which
he belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted,
moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society.
He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats and
carpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary strata
he is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the