simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people—universal art.”[173] As instances of these types of good modern art, Tolstoy gives his amazing list—Schiller’s Robbers, Les Misérables, Dickens’s and Dostoievsky’s novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Adam Bede. In painting we are to take as types of excellence “the drawing by Kramskoy (worth many of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room with a balcony past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby and a boy. They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother, covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa, sobbing.” Or one may turn to “a picture by the French artist, Morlon, depicting a lifeboat hastening in a heavy storm to the relief of a steamer that is being wrecked.”[174] It is easy to make fun of this headlong descent to the level of the parish magazine, but it is not so easy to challenge the position from which Tolstoy deduces his criticisms of individual works, or to deny that he has again and again struck home with incomparable force against the factitious art so current in the present day. His book is a piece of genuine thinking, and in this it has few rivals among contemporary works of æsthetic criticism, especially in English. Most of these works are either pæans of praise for what the critic finds attractive and stimulating to his own temperament, or attacks conducted with every resource of satire and ridicule on what he does not understand or care for. But a serious attempt like that of Tolstoy to discover and to apply a true principle of art criticism is very much to seek; and I venture to think that many critics who are horrified at the notion of putting Uncle Tom’s Cabin above King Lear would find it by no means so easy as they suppose to give a rational account of the faith that is in them. Tolstoy’s conclusions, like those of Plato in The Republic (which they very much resemble), are wrong-headed, but his manner of thinking is that of a massive and nobly ordered intellect, and is well worthy of respectful imitation at whatever distance lesser powers can contrive to follow it.