He had the stature of the nineteenth century, this giant, who bore epic burdens, under which our quick-breathing and more fragile generation would sink. How great was this period, in all its sombreness, its materialism, its scientific inflexibility and asceticism; how great was that race of writers to which Tolstoy belonged, whose creations dominate the five decades before 1900. Does any cosmic insight that we may have, or are beginning to have, does our yet timid dream of a gladder and more confident humanity, justify us in underestimating, as is now our habit, that earlier time; since after all it would be difficult to deny that from the moral stand-point we have fallen far below its level? In striking contrast with it, our detachment and complacent undervaluing of thought and human dignity would not have been tolerated by the "fatalistic" nineteenth century; and while the war was raging, I often reflected that it would not have had the temerity to break out if in 1914 the sharp penetrating grey eyes of the old man of Yasnaya Polyana had still been upon us. A childish thought, perhaps. At any rate, history had ordained it; he was gone and left no one like him. The reins of Europe fell slack with no hand to guide them, and are without one to-day.

Tolstoy has said of Childhood and Adolescence, one of his early works: "Without false modesty . . . , it is something like the Iliad." It was literally true and only in a superficial way is the assertion yet more applicable to the giant-work of his maturity, War and Peace. The Homeric, the typically-epic, was perhaps more marked in Tolstoy than in any other man of genius. In his work is the heaving might and rhythmic uniformity of the sea, its pristine vigour, its native pungency, imperishable health, and deathless realism. For surely it is permissible to see and feel these things as one, health and realism—the world of plastic form, of instinct, of high kinship with nature on the one hand, contrasting with, as I once tried to suggest in a more comprehensive way, the world of hyper-susceptibility and mental aristocracy, Schiller's world of the ideal, Dostoevsky's apocalyptic world of shadows. Goethe and Tolstoy—when their names were first linked together in criticism, surprise and doubt were aroused; but recent psychological studies have enabled us to take such comparisons for granted. To elaborate the parallel beyond the generically-typical would be pedantic caprice. We need not dwell upon the too obvious and predetermined differences of mind, country, or period. As soon as we advert to culture—that formula which implies nature's groping after mind and the inevitable impulse of mind towards nature—we must abandon the too facile analogy. We ought to be honest enough to admit that to those who possess Goethe, Tolstoy's absurd, naively tragic reaching after culture must present the spectacle at once pathetic and sublime, of a child-like barbarian's noble but futile striving towards what is true and human.

Nevertheless, this very Titanic helplessness, recalling the swollen, straining muscles of one of Michael Angelo's tortured creations, lends tremendous moral force to him as an artist. As a story-teller he is without equal; his art, even when he no longer had use for it, except as a means of furthering a dubious and depressing kind of moralizing, affords to any receptive talent (there can be no other) unfailing strength, refreshment, and elemental joy. Not at all with a view to imitating, for who could imitate? He has no following which could accurately be termed a school. Tolstoy's influence, indeed, whether on the spirit or form of a work, makes itself felt in very different ways, and above all, in writings quite unrelated to his own. But even as he, an Antaeus, received fresh creative strength from each contact with earth, so the world of his mighty art is to us, earth and nature—a reincarnation of itself. To reread him, to let that preternaturally sharp gaze of the lower animals cast its spell on us, the force of his imagery, and limpid clarity of style untinctured with mysticism, again so reminiscent of Goethe, is to find release from every phase of artificiality and useless frivolity, a return to what in each of us is fundamentally wholesome.

Merezhkovski has called him the great prophet of the body, in contrast with Dostoevsky, the prophet of the mind. In fact, the soundness of Tolstoy's art consists in its corporeality. Where we have psychology, we have also pathology. Disease derives from the mind, health from the body. Dostoevsky has given us an analysis of Anna Karenina, full of insight and love, reminding us of Schiller's affectionate eulogy of Wilhelm Meister; but Tolstoy was naturally without comprehension of Dostoevsky. For a moment, at the time of Dostoevsky's death, Tolstoy imagined that "he had been very fond of this man," but he had never previously troubled himself about the author of the Brothers Karamazoff and remarks dropped in conversation might have been made by a dunce. "The man was sick himself," he said, "and made all things appear sick." Supposing this to be true, it is an unprofitable truth, as though it should be said of Nietzsche "No, no, from the sick can come only sickness"; which would be not only unworthy but the reverse of the truth. Tolstoy's judgements were those of a great man, arbitrary, objective, and uncompromisingly literal. One need not go back to his unfavourable comparison of Shakespeare, as immoral, with Uncle Tom's Cabin. But has he dealt more "justly" with his own work? Certainly not when he discarded his Titanic masterpieces as irrelevant and harmful beguilements. Earlier, indeed, while writing Anna Karenina, that very greatest novel of society, he threw the manuscript aside as rubbish, again and again; and had no higher regard for it later. This is hardly to be looked upon as mere morbid self-depreciation. He would not have tolerated such criticism from another. His standard of measurement was one he had found in himself. And such impatient disparagement of his own work is contradictorily an artist's acknowledgement of a self transcending his work. It may be a case of having to be more than the thing one creates; of greatness having its origin in something still greater. Apocalyptic wonders such as Leonardo, Goethe, Tolstoy, support the supposition. But why had Tolstoy never the apologetic attitude to his prophesyings and sectarian doctrine, his ideas of moral improvement, that he has shown towards his artistic creations? Why has he never once held them up to ridicule? One is justified perhaps in this inference: since he is greater than his art, he would, naturally, be greater than his ideas.

Ah, yes—Tolstoy's opinions! Regarded as revelations, for that was their true character, autocratic pronunciamentos of what we call "personality" receiving authority from the workings of that natural magic which turned the manor-house in the Province of Tula into a shrine for distressed humanity, a world-centre radiating vitality and healing. Vitality and greatness, greatness and power, in what degree are they synonymous? It is the problem of the "great man"; we have groped for its solution throughout the ages and find it in the Chinese theory of practical democracy—in the proverb which so offends our ears: A great man is a public misfortune. European instinct has been and now is for an aesthetic justification of the phenomenon. However, in matters of leadership, education, and progress, there remains, to put it mildly, a doubt, whether the function or even the existence of a great man may, without straining the truth, be so much as brought into relation with these things, whether he may not be purely incidental, an explosion of force without moral significance; touching in his effort to give himself a moral interpretation—that effort made by the prophet of Yasnaya Polyana with such praiseworthy ineptitude, embarrassed as he was by the absurdity of his disciples. . . . How blessed that life! Blessed in every phase of its tragedy and devout tragi-comedy as power rather than thought; for even the moral sensibility and aspiration of this portentous life teem with expressions of physical exuberance. The incentive? Horror of death in an organism whose thinking was only another manifestation of its immense vitality. We should be frank, without fear of belittling what is great. Even at the last, that famous withdrawal of the saint from home and household signifies as much at least as the social and religious impulse toward salvation, theinstinctive flight of a dying animal.

But why should the so beautiful solemn words of Goethe haunt me—

Denkt er immer sich ins Rechte?Ist er ewig schön und gross?

What modesty, what moral contagion lie in the endeavour to subdue inherent creative power—under no exterior compulsion—to "the search of truth alone" and to dedicate one's vital momentum to the service of humanity and the spirit! Though Tolstoy's genius may have miscarried a hundred times and his thought stumbled into childish, benighted, unbecoming digressions, his laborious anguish will always be "beautiful and great." It had its source in the perception of a very profound truth. Tolstoy realized that a new era was at hand, an age which would not be satisfied with an art serving merely to enhance life, but which would put socially significant virtues—leadership, decisiveness, and clear thought—above individual genius; and value morality and intelligence more than irresponsible beauty; and he never sinned against his innate greatness, never claimed a "great man's" licence to work confusion, atavism, and evil, but to the best of his understanding, in complete humility, laboured for that which is divinely reasonable.

I seem to be presenting him as a pattern. We are a little, at all events a circumscribed, Central European race compared with his, we writers of to-day.

Nothing can absolve us, and least of all fear of ridicule, or the reproaches and contempt of fools, should we fail to accept the challenge of our time and of our conscience, each among his own people, sincerely to "search out truth alone."