humanity's knowledge of itself. In
the pages of Gogol, Dostoievski,
Tourgueneff, and Tolstoi, the major-
ity of readers have found a world ab-
solutely new to them; and in reading
those pages, so penetrated with the
dramatic spirit, they have come into
the possession of a knowledge of life
not formal and didactic, but deep,
vital, and racial in its range and sig-
nificance. To possess the knowledge
of an experience at once so remote
and so rich in disclosure of character,
so charged with tragic interest, is to
push back the horizons of our own
experience, to secure a real contri-
bution to our own enrichment and
development. Whoever carries that
process far enough brings into his in-
dividual experience much of the rich-
ness and splendour of the experience
of the race.

[[173]]

p172 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p173w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p174

v?