And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected by my relations and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others, and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous. And far from being insane or mentally unwell,—on the contrary I enjoyed a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my kind: physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for eight to ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such exertion....

My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: my life is a stupid and spiteful joke some one has played on me. Though I did not acknowledge a 'some one' who created me, yet that form of representation—that some one had played an evil and stupid joke on me by placing me in the world—was the form of expression that suggested itself most naturally to me.

Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, is some one who amuses himself by watching how I live for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how—having now with matured mental powers reached the summit of life, from which it all lies before me, I stand on that summit—like an arch-fool—seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he is amused....

But whether that 'some one' laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action, or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning—it has been so long known to all. To-day or to-morrow sickness and death will come (they have come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my deeds, whatever they may have been, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live when one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it; it is simply cruel and stupid.

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he leaps into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes a twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker, and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below; but still he clings on; and he sees that two mice, a black and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging, and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon's jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around and finds some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig and reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly, and the honey no longer tasted sweet. And this is not a fable, but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.

The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the dragon, now no longer deceives me. No matter how much I may be told: 'You cannot understand the meaning of life, so do not think about it, but live,' I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.

The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing—art as I called it—were no longer sweet to me.

Family ... said I to myself. But my family: wife and children—are also human. They too are placed as I am: they must either live in a lie, or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to that truth. And the truth is death.

'Art, poetry?'... Under the influence of success and the praise of men, I had long assured myself that this was a thing one could do though death was drawing near—death which destroys all things, including my work and its remembrance; but I soon saw that that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art is an adornment to life, an allurement to life. But life had lost its attraction for me; so how could I attract others? As long as I was not living my own life, but was borne on the waves of some other life—as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though one I could not express—the reflection of life in poetry and art of all kinds, afforded me pleasure: it was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art. But when I began to seek the meaning of life, and felt the necessity of living on my own account, that mirror became for me unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. I could no longer soothe myself with what I saw in the mirror, for what I saw was, that my position was stupid and desperate. It was all very well to enjoy the sight when in the depth of my soul I believed that my life had a meaning. Then the play of lights—comic, tragic, touching, beautiful and terrible—in life, amused me. But when I knew life to be meaningless and terrible, the play in the mirror could no longer amuse me. No sweetness of honey could be sweet to me when I saw the dragon, and saw the mice gnawing away my support.

Nor was that all. Had I simply understood that life has no meaning, I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about, wishing to find the road, yet knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more; and still cannot help rushing about.

It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror, I wished to kill myself. I experienced terror at what awaited me—knew that that terror was even worse than the position I was in; but still I could not patiently await the end. However convincing the argument might be that, in any case, some vessel in my heart would give way, or something would burst and all would be over, I could not patiently await that end. The horror of darkness was too great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible by noose or bullet. That was the feeling which drew me most strongly towards suicide.

'But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something? It cannot be that this condition of despair is natural to man!' thought I, and as a perishing man seeks safety, I sought some way of escape.

I sought everywhere; and thanks to a life spent in learning, and thanks also to the relations I had with the scholarly world, I had access to scientists and scholars in all branches of knowledge, and they readily showed me all their knowledge, not only in books, but also in conversation, so that I had at my disposal all that knowledge has to say on this question of life....

The question which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide, was the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man, from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without answering which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was, What will come of what I am doing to-day or shall do to-morrow—What will come of my whole life?

Differently expressed, the question is: Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in life, that the inevitable death awaiting one, does not destroy? All human knowledge I found divided into two kinds. One kind, such as chemistry and mathematics and the exact sciences, did not deal with my question. They were interesting, attractive, and wonderfully definite, but made no attempt to solve the question; while on the other hand the speculative sciences, culminating in metaphysics, dealt with the question, but supplied no satisfactory answer.

Where philosophy does not lose sight of the essential question, its answer is always one and the same: an answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon and Buddha.

'We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life,' said Socrates when preparing for death. 'For what do we who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?'

'The wise man seeks death all his life, and therefore does not fear death.'

And Schopenhauer also says that life is an evil; and Solomon (or whoever wrote the works attributed to him) says:

'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath man of all his labour under the sun?... There is no remembrance of former things, neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come, with those that shall come after....

'Therefore I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous to me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.'

And Sakya Muni when he learnt what age and sickness and death are, could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do this so that even after death life shall not be renewed any more, but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.

These then are the direct replies that human wisdom gives, when it replies to the question of life:

'The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it,' says Socrates.

'Life is that which should not be—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,' says Schopenhauer.

'All that is in the world: folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief—are vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid,' says Solomon.

'To live in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible—we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life,' says Buddha.

And what these strong minds said, has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it.

One cannot deceive oneself. It is all—vanity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life.

Then I began to consider the lives of the men of my own kind; and I found that they met the problem in one or other of four ways.

The first way was that of ignorance. Some people—mostly women, or very young or very dull people—have not yet understood the question of life; but I, having understood it, could not again shut my eyes.

The second way was that of the Epicureans, expressed by Solomon when he said: 'Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.'

That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is an accidental advantage, and that not every one can have a thousand wives and a thousand palaces like Solomon, and that for every man with a thousand wives there are a thousand without wives, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has to-day made me a Solomon, may to-morrow make me Solomon's slave. The dullness of these people's imaginations enables them to forget what gave no peace to Buddha—the inevitability of sickness, age and death, which to-day or to-morrow will destroy all these pleasures. I could not imitate these people: I had not their dullness of imagination, and I could not artificially produce it in myself.

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in understanding that life is an evil and an absurdity, and in destroying it. It is a way adopted by a few exceptionally strong and consistent people. I saw that it was the worthiest way of escape, and I wished to adopt it.

The fourth escape is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation, and yet clinging to life as though one still hoped something from it; and I found myself in that category.

To live like Solomon and Schopenhauer, knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living: washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking and even writing books, was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.

I now see that if I did not kill myself, it was due to some dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. And I began to feel, rather than argue, in this way: 'I, my reason, has acknowledged life to be unreasonable. If there be no higher reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is) then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist, there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life, when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life's son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit, yet reason denies life itself!' I felt that there was something wrong here.

Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. Well then, kill yourself, and cease discussing. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life—then finish it; and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company, where people are contented and like what they are doing: if you find it dull and repulsive—go away!

Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted hussy?

'There is something wrong,' said I to myself; but what was wrong, I could in no way make out. It was long before the fog began to clear, and I began to be able to restate my position.

It had seemed to me that the narrow circle of rich learned and leisured people to whom I belonged, formed the whole of humanity, and that the milliards of others who have lived and are living, were cattle of some sort—not real people.... And it was long before it dawned upon me to ask: 'But what meaning is, and has been, given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?'

I long lived in this state of lunacy, which in fact if not in words is particularly characteristic of us Liberal and learned people. But whether the strange physical affection I have for the real labouring people compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose; or whether it was due to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who know it, and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also.

And on examining the matter I saw that the milliards of mankind always have had and still have a knowledge of the meaning of life, but that knowledge is their faith, which I could not but reject. 'It is God, one and three, the creation in six days, the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason,' said I to myself.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge, except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing but a denial of reason, still more impossible to me than a denial of life.

Finally I saw that my mistake lay in ever expecting an examination of finite things to supply a meaning to life. The finite has no ultimate meaning apart from the infinite. The two must be linked together before an answer to life's problems can be reached.

It had only appeared to me that knowledge gave a definite answer—Schopenhauer's answer: that life has no meaning, and is an evil. On examining the matter further, I understood that the reply is not positive: it was only my feeling that made it seem so. The reply, strictly expressed as the Brahmins and Solomon and Schopenhauer express it, amounts only to an indefinite answer, like the reply given in mathematics when instead of solving an equation we find we have solved an identity: X = X, or 0 = 0. The answer is, that life is nothing. So that philosophic knowledge merely asserts that it cannot solve the question, and the solution remains, as far as it is concerned, indefinite. And I understood, further, that however unreasonable and monstrous might be the replies given by faith, they had this advantage, that they introduce into each reply a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which relation no reply is possible.

Whichever way I put the question, that relation appeared in the answer. How am I to live?—According to the law of God. What real result will come of my life?—Eternal torment or eternal bliss. What meaning has life, that death does not destroy?—Union with the eternal God: heaven.

Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life; and that consequently it makes life possible.

Where there is life, there, since man began, faith has made life possible for him; and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always one and the same. Faith does not consist in agreeing with what some one has said, as is usually supposed; faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself, but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he does not see and recognise the visionary nature of the finite, then he believes in the finite; if he understands the visionary nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.

What am I?—A part of the infinite. In those few words lies the whole problem.

I began dimly to understand that in the replies given by faith, is stored up the deepest human wisdom.

I understood this; but it made matters no better for me.

I was now ready to accept any faith, if only it did not demand of me a direct denial of reason—which would be a falsehood. And I studied Buddhism and Mohammedanism from books, and most of all, I studied Christianity both from books and from living people.

Naturally I first of all turned to the Orthodox of my circle, to people who were learned: to Church theologians, the monks, to the theologians of the newest shade, and even to the Evangelicals[55] who profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. And I seized on these believers and questioned them as to their beliefs, and their understanding of the meaning of life.

But in spite of my readiness to make all possible concessions, I saw that what they gave out as their faith did not explain the meaning of life, but obscured it.

I remember the painful feeling of fear of being thrown back into my former state of despair, after the hope I often and often experienced in my intercourse with these people.

The more fully they explained to me their doctrines, the more clearly did I see their error.... It was not that in their doctrines they mixed many unnecessary and unreasonable things with the Christian truths that had always been near to me: that was not what repelled me. I was repelled by the fact that these people's lives were like my own, with only this difference—that such a life did not correspond to the principles they expounded in their teachings.

No arguments could convince me of the truth of their faith. Only deeds which showed that they saw a meaning in life, which made what was so dreadful to me—poverty sickness and death—not dreadful to them, could convince me. And such deeds I did not see among the various bodies of believers in our circle. On the contrary, I saw such deeds done by people of our circle who were the most unbelieving, but never by the so-called believers of our circle.[56]

And I understood that the belief of these people was not the faith I sought, and that their faith is not a real faith, but an Epicurean consolation in life.

And I began to draw near to the believers among the poor simple unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians and peasants. Among them, too, I found a great deal of superstition mixed with the Christian truths; but their superstitions seemed a necessary and natural part of their lives.... And I began to look well into the life and faith of these people, and the more I considered it, the more I became convinced that they have a real faith, which is a necessity to them and alone gives their life a meaning and makes it possible for them to live.... In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness and amusements and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life.... While we think it terrible that we have to suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and approach death with tranquillity, and in most cases gladly.

And I learnt to love these people. The more I came to know their life the more I loved them, and the easier it became for me to live. So I went on for about two years, and a change took place in me which had long been preparing, and the promise of which had always been in me. The life of our circle, the rich and learned, not merely became distasteful to me but lost all meaning for me; while the life of the whole labouring people, the whole of mankind who produce life, appeared to me in its true light. I understood that that is life itself, and that the meaning given to that life is true; and I accepted it.

I then understood that my answer to the question, 'What is life?' when I said that life is 'evil,' was quite correct. The only mistake was, that that answer referred to my life, but not to life in general. My life, a life of indulgence and desires, was meaningless and evil.... And I understood the truth, which I afterwards found in the Gospels, that men love darkness rather than the light because their deeds are evil; and that to see things as they are, one must think and speak of the life of humanity, and not of the life of the minority who are parasites on life.

And indeed, the bird lives so that it must fly, collect food and build its nest; and when I see the bird doing that, I joy in its joy. The goat, hare and wolf live so that they must feed themselves, and propagate and feed their families, and when they do so, I feel firmly assured that they are happy and that their life is a reasonable one. And what does man do? He should earn a living as the beasts do, but with this difference—that he would perish if he did it alone; he has to procure it not for himself but for all. When he does that, I have a firm assurance that he is happy and that his life is reasonable. And what had I done during the whole thirty years of my conscious life? I had not only not been earning a living for all, I had not even earned my own living. I had lived as a parasite, and when I asked myself what use my life was, I found that my life was useless. If the meaning of human life lies in supporting it, how could I, who for thirty years had occupied myself not with supporting life but with destroying it in myself and in others—how could I obtain any other reply than that my life was senseless and an evil? It was both senseless and evil.

The conviction that a knowledge of life can only be found by living, led me to doubt the goodness of my own life.... During that whole year, when I was asking myself almost every moment, whether I should not end matters with a noose or a bullet—all that time, alongside the course of thought and observation about which I have spoken, my heart was oppressed with a painful feeling which I can only describe as a search for God.

I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God, and I began to refute them. Cause, said I to myself, is not a category such as are Time and Space. If I exist, there must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all, is what men have called 'God.' And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live. But I asked myself: What is that cause, that force? How am I to think of it? What are my relations to that which I call 'God'? And only the familiar replies occurred to me: 'He is the Creator and Preserver.' This reply did not satisfy me, and I felt I was losing within me what I needed for my life. I became terrified and began to pray to him whom I sought, that he should help me. But the more I prayed the more apparent it became to me that he did not hear me, and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: 'Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me!' But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill.

But again and again I returned to the same admission that I could not have come into the world without any cause or reason or meaning; I could not be such a fledgling fallen from its nest as I felt myself to be. Or, granting that I be such, lying on my back in the high grass, even then I cry because I know that a mother has borne me within her, has hatched me, warmed me, fed me and loved me. Where is she—that mother? If she has deserted me, who is it that has done so? I cannot hide from myself that some one bore me, loving me. Who was that some one? Again 'God'?

'He exists,' said I to myself. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being. But again, from the admission of the existence of a God I went on to seek my relations with him; and again I imagined that God—our creator in three persons who sent his son, the Saviour—and again that God, detached from the world and from me, melts like a block of ice, melts before my eyes, and again nothing remains, and again the spring of life dries up within me, and I despair, and feel that I have nothing to do but to kill myself. And the worst of all is, that I feel I cannot do it.

Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I reached those conditions first of joy and animation, and then of despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.

I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years. I was again seeking God.

'Very well, there is no God,' said I to myself; 'there is no one who is not my imagination but a reality like my whole life. He does not exist, and no miracles can prove his existence, because the miracles would be my perceptions, besides being irrational.'

'But my perception of God, of him whom I seek,' asked I of myself, 'where has that perception come from?' And again at this thought the glad waves of life rose within me. All that was around me came to life, and received a meaning. But my joy did not last long. My mind continued its work.

'The conception of God, is not God,' said I to myself. 'The conception, is what takes place within me. The conception of God, is something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That is not what I seek. I seek that, without which there can be no life.' And again all around me and within me began to die, and again I wished to kill myself.

But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within me, and I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget him, or disbelieve in him, and I die.... 'What more do you seek?' exclaimed a voice within me. 'This is he. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.' And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

And I was saved from suicide.... And strange to say, the strength of life which returned to me was not new, but quite old—the same that had borne me along in my earliest days.

I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me, and desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord with that Will. And I returned to the belief that I can find the expression of that Will, in what humanity, in the distant past hidden from me, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfecting, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life....

I turned from the life of our circle: acknowledging that theirs is not life but only a simulacrum of life, and that the conditions of superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life.... The simple labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to them and to the meaning which they give to life. That meaning, if one can put it into words, was the following. Every man has come into this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to save his soul; and to save his soul he must live 'godly,' and to live 'godly' he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labour, humble himself, suffer and be merciful.... The meaning of this was clear and near to my heart. But together with this meaning of the popular faith of our non-sectarian folk among whom I live, much was inseparably bound up that revolted me and seemed to me inexplicable: sacraments, Church services, fasts, and the adoration of relics and icons. The people cannot separate the one from the other, nor could I. And strange as much of it was to me, I accepted everything; and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in prayer, fasted, and prepared to receive the eucharist; and at first my reason did not resist anything. What had formerly seemed to me impossible, did not now evoke in me any resistance....

I told myself that the essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy. Naturally, for a faith to be able to reply to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave tormented by overwork, and of all sorts of people, young and old, wise and foolish,—its answers must be expressed in all sorts of different ways.... But this argument, justifying in my eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not suffice to allow me, in the one great affair of life—religion—to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself, and mock at what was sacred to me, were I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological writers came to my rescue.

According to the explanation these theologians gave, the fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church. From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of true-believers united by love, and therefore possessed of true knowledge, became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain truth one must not separate; and not to separate, one must love and must endure things one may not agree with.

Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the rites of the Church, you transgress against love; and by transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility of recognising the truth. I did not then see the sophistry contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes in the argument, and thanks to it, was able to accept and perform all the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of them.

When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason, submitted to tradition, united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother and grandparents I loved, and with all those millions of the common people whom I respected. When rising before dawn for the early Church services, I knew I was doing well, if only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental pride, and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. However insignificant these sacrifices might be, I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave them a meaning whenever I could.

But this reading of meanings into the rites had its limits.... If I explained to myself the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relatives, by the fact that they are more exposed to temptation than other people and therefore more in need of being prayed for, the prayers about subduing enemies and foes under his feet (even though one tried to say that sin was the foe prayed against) and many other unintelligible prayers—nearly two-thirds of the whole service—either remained quite incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made me feel that I was lying, and thereby quite destroying my relation to God and losing all possibility of believing....

Never shall I forget the painful feeling I experienced the day I received the eucharist for the first time after many years. The service, confession and prayers were quite intelligible and produced in me a glad consciousness that the meaning of life was being revealed to me. The communion itself I explained as an act performed in remembrance of Christ, and indicating a purification from sin and the full acceptance of Christ's teaching. If that explanation was artificial I did not notice its artificiality: so happy was I at humbling and abasing myself before the priest—a simple timid country clergyman—turning all the dirt out of my soul and confessing my vices, so glad was I to merge in thought with the humility of the Fathers who wrote the prayers of the Office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed and now believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation. But when I approached the altar gates, and the priest made me say that I believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh and blood, I felt a pain in my heart: it was not merely a false note, it was a cruel demand made by some one or other who evidently had never known what faith is.

I now permit myself to say that it was a cruel demand, but I did not then think so: only it was indescribably painful to me. At the time, I found in my soul a feeling which helped me to endure it. This was the feeling of self-abasement and humility. I humbled myself, swallowed that flesh and blood without any blasphemous feelings, and with a wish to believe. But the blow had been struck, and knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time.

I continued to fulfil the rites of the Church and still believed that the doctrine I was following contained the truth, when something happened to me which I now understand but which then seemed strange.

I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, about God, faith, life and salvation, when a knowledge of faith revealed itself to me. I drew near to the people, listening to their opinions on life and faith, and I understood the truth. So also was it when I read the Lives of the Saints, which became my favourite books. Putting aside the miracles, and regarding them as fables illustrating thoughts, this reading revealed to me life's meaning. There were the lives of Makarius the Great, of the Tsarévitch Joasafa (the story of Buddha) and there were the stories of the traveller in the well, and the monk who found some gold. There were stories of the martyrs, all announcing that death does not exclude life; and there were the stories of ignorant, stupid men, and such as knew nothing of the teaching of the Church, but who yet were saved.

But as soon as I met learned believers, or took up their books, doubt of myself, dissatisfaction, and exasperated disputation, were roused within me, and I felt that the more I entered into the meaning of these men's speech, the more I went astray from truth and approached an abyss. How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of learning! Those statements in the creeds, which to me were evident absurdities, for them contained nothing false. Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that with truth falsehood was interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not accept it in that form.

So I lived for about three years. At first, when I did not understand something, I said, 'It is my fault, I am sinful'; but the more I fathomed the truth, the clearer became the line between what I do not understand because I am not able to understand it, and what cannot be understood except by lying to oneself.

In spite of my doubts and sufferings, I still clung to the Orthodox Church. But questions of life arose which had to be decided; and the decision of these questions by the Church, contrary to the very bases of the belief by which I lived, obliged me at last to own that communion with Orthodoxy is impossible. These questions were: first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches—to the Catholics and to the so-called sectarians. At that time, in consequence of my interest in religion, I came into touch with believers of various faiths: Catholics, Protestants, Old-Believers, Molokáns and others. And I met many men of lofty morals who were truly religious. I wished to be a brother to them. And what happened? That teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love—that very teaching, in the person of its best representatives, told me that these men were all living a lie; that what gave them their power of life, is a temptation of the devil; and that we alone possess the only possible truth. And I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves, are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics; just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And I saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is naturally so: first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief.... And to me, who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that the faith was itself destroying what it ought to produce.

As people of many different religions behave to one another in this same contemptuous, self-assured manner—the error of such conduct was obvious; and I thought on the matter and read all I could about it, and consulted all whom I could. And no one gave me any explanation except the one which causes the Soúmsky Hussars to consider the Soúmsky Hussars the best regiment in the world, and the Yellow Uhlans to consider that the best regiment in the world is the Yellow Uhlans.... I went to Archimandrites, archbishops, elders, monks of the strictest Orders, and asked them; but none of them made any attempt to explain the matter to me, except one man, who explained it all, and explained it so that I never asked any one any more about it.

I asked him why we should not unite on those main points on which we could agree, and leave the rest for each to decide as he pleases. My collocutor agreed with my thoughts, but told me that such concessions would bring reproach on the spiritual authorities for deserting the faith of our forefathers, and this would produce a split; and the vocation of the spiritual authorities is to safeguard in all its purity the Greco-Russian Orthodox faith inherited from our forefathers.

And I understood it all. I am seeking a faith, the power of life; and they are seeking the best way to fulfil before men certain human obligations.... And I noticed what is done in the name of religion, and was horrified; and I almost entirely abjured Orthodoxy.

The second relation of the Church to a question of life, was with regard to war and executions.

At that time Russia was at war. And Russians, in the name of Christian love, began to kill their fellow-men. It was impossible not to think about this, and not to see that killing is an evil, repugnant to the first principles of any faith. Yet they prayed in the churches for the success of our arms, and the teachers of the faith acknowledged killing to be an act resulting from the faith. And besides the murders during the war, I saw during the disturbances which followed the war, Church dignitaries and teachers and monks of the lesser and stricter Orders, who approved the killing of helpless erring youths. And I took note of all that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.

And I ceased to doubt, and became fully convinced that not all was true in the religion I had joined. Formerly I should have said that it was all false; but I could not say so now, for I had felt its truth and had lived by it. But I no longer doubted that there is in it much that is false. And though among the peasants there was less admixture of what repelled me, still I saw that in their belief also, falsehood was mixed with the truth.

But where did the truth and where did the falsehood come from? Both the falsehood and the truth were contained in the so-called holy tradition and Scriptures. Both the falsehood and the truth had been handed down by what is called the Church.

And whether I liked to or not, I was brought to the study and investigation of these writings and traditions—which till now I had been so afraid to investigate.

And I turned to the examination of that same theology which I had once rejected with such contempt.... On it religious doctrine rests, or at least with it the only knowledge of the meaning of life that I have found, is inseparably connected.... I shall not seek the explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of everything, like the commencement of everything, must be concealed in infinity. But I wish to understand in a way which will bring me to what is inevitably inexplicable. I wish to recognise anything that is inexplicable, as being so, not because the demands of my reason are wrong (they are right, and apart from them I can understand nothing), but because I recognise the limits of my intellect. I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe. I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task. What of falsehood I find in the teaching, and what I find of truth, and to what conclusions I come, will form the following parts of this work, which if it be worth it, and if any one wants it, will probably some day be printed somewhere.

These closing words in which Tolstoy expresses the hope that his work 'will probably some day be printed somewhere,' are a reminder of the difficulties and dangers that had to be encountered in Russia by any man who set out to challenge the authority of the Orthodox Church, whose affairs were managed by the Holy Synod, presided over by a Procurator able to call on the secular powers to enforce his decisions.

AUTHORITY FOR CHAPTER XI

Tolstoy's Ispoved: Christchurch, 1901.

Tolstoy's Confession being prohibited in Russia, had to be printed abroad. The edition mentioned above is a reliable one.

CHAPTER XII
WORKS: 1852-1878

Tolstoy's first nineteen stories. Stands in a line of succession. Quality as writer. War and Peace. 'Great' men. Napoleon. The battles of Schöngraben and Borodinó. Tolstoy's influence on war-correspondence. Serfdom. The organisation of society. Characters in War and Peace. Its range. Anna Karénina: Matthew Arnold's essay. Translations. The tendency of the book. Kropótkin's criticism. The volunteers. Tolstoy's attitude towards Government. W. D. Howells's appreciation. Tolstoy's Last Three Decades of work: the magnitude and nature of his effort.

Tolstoy's writings during the first twenty-five years of his literary career divide up into six sections.

First came a series of seventeen stories and sketches, beginning with Childhood and ending with Family Happiness. Next came his series of educational articles in the Yásnaya Polyána magazine. Third came The Cossacks (the finest story he had yet written) and Polikoúshka. Fourth, came War and Peace. Fifth, came the ABC Book, the Readers, and another article on Education; and sixth, came Anna Karénina.

Leaving the educational works out of account, the list can be reduced to nineteen stories and sketches, followed by two great novels.

The nineteen sketches and stories, 'trials of the pen,' as Tolstoy called them, covered a wide range of subjects, from charmingly realistic sketches of childhood to vigorous depictions of Cossack life, and showed their writer to be an amazingly accurate observer of physical facts and qualities, manners, tones and gestures, besides being possessed of a yet more wonderful knowledge of the hearts and minds of all sorts and conditions of men, from the shame-faced child to the officer dying on the field of battle. He is so concerned with the interest and importance of life, that he can hold his reader's attention without having to tell his stories so that they must be guessed like riddles, and he never makes use of elaborate plots. He needs no tricks of that sort. Nor does he strive after effect by the use of pornographic details, the introduction of extraordinary events, or the piling up of many horrible details. His stories are as straightforward as everyday life.

His great novels bear out all the promise of his short stories, with the added power of maturity.

Though highly original and of strong individuality, he stands none the less in the line of succession of great writers which began with Poúshkin, whose genius for simple sincere and direct narrative gave an invaluable direction to Russian literature, was continued by Gógol whose biting irony and remorseless exposure of shams and hypocrisies completed the emancipation from romanticism, and was carried on by Tourgénef, whose art, conscious of and not indifferent to the trend of thought and feeling in the society it describes, reached an extraordinary pitch of artistic perfection.

Tolstoy's works have from the first interested Russia, and now interest the world, because in greater measure than any of his predecessors he possesses the capacity to feel intensely, note accurately, and think deeply. The combination which makes Tolstoy the most interesting of writers, is the scientific accuracy of his observation (which never allows him to take liberties with his characters or events in order to make out a case for the side he sympathises with) and the fact that he is mightily in earnest. Life to him is important, and art is the handmaid of life. He wants to know what is good and what is bad; to help the former and to resist the latter. His work tends to evolve order out of life's chaos; and as that is the most important thing a man can do, his books are among the most interesting and important books of our time. He makes no pretence of standing aloof, cutting off his art from his life, or concealing his desire that kindness should prevail over cruelty. Life interests him, and therefore the reflection of life interests him, and the problems of art are the problems of life: love and passion and death and the desire to do right.

The chief subject reappearing again and again throughout the stories he wrote before War and Peace, is the mental striving of a young Russian nobleman to free himself from the artificial futilities of the society in which he was born, and to see and do what is right. The search is only partially successful. The indictment of society is often convincing, but the heroes' failures and perplexities are frankly admitted. Sometimes there is no hero. In Sevastopol, for instance, he exclaims: 'Where in this tale is the evil shown that should be avoided? Where is the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain, who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad'; and in Lucerne he says: 'Who will define for me what is freedom, what despotism, what civilisation and what barbarism? Or tell me where are the limits of the one or the other? Who has in his soul so immovable a standard of good and evil that by it he can measure the passing facts of life?'

This searching for what is good and rejecting what is false—resulting in a strong distrust and dislike of the predatory masterful domineering types of humanity, and in general of what has usually been regarded as the heroic type, and also in a friendly compassion for all that is humble simple forbearing and sincere—is the keynote of Tolstoy's early tales. They are studies of life, so truthful that the characters seem to have an independent life of their own. They speak for themselves, and at times, like Balaam, bless what they were apparently expected to curse. For instance, when Prince Nehlúdof insists on bringing the wandering musician into the Schweizerhof Hotel in Lucerne, we feel how uncomfortable he thereby makes the poor singer, though that is evidently not what Tolstoy originally set out to make us feel.

War and Peace, besides being maturer than the preceding tales, was composed during the early years of Tolstoy's married life, when he felt more content with himself and with life in general, and when his attitude towards existing things was more tolerant and sympathetic than it had been, or than it became in later years.

He told me that in War and Peace and Anna Karénina his aim was simply to amuse his readers. I am bound to accept his statement; but one has only to read either of those books to see that through them Tolstoy's ardent nature found vent, with all its likes and dislikes, strivings, yearnings, hopes and fears.

I asked Tolstoy why in What is Art? he relegates these great novels to the realm of 'bad art'; and his answer showed, as I expected it would, that he does not really consider them at all bad, but condemns them merely as being too long, and written in a way chiefly adapted to please the leisured well-to-do classes, who have time for reading novels in several volumes, because other people do their rough work for them. Of War and Peace he said, 'It is, one would think, harmless enough, but one never knows how things will affect people,' and he went on to mention, with regret, that one of Professor Zahárin's daughters had told him that from his novels she had acquired a love of balls and parties; things of which, at the time of our conversation, he heartily disapproved.

In form, War and Peace is unlike any English novel, but it resembles Poúshkin's The Captain's Daughter (though the latter is a much shorter story) in that both works are chronicles of Russian families, round whom the stories centre. In War and Peace there are two families, the Rostófs and the Bolkónskys.

The mighty drama of the Napoleonic advance from 1805 to 1812 comes into the novel, in so far as it affects the members of those two families. But Tolstoy is not content merely to tell us of historic events. He introduces a whole philosophy of history, which is sound at bottom though no doubt he somewhat overstates his case, as is his habit. The theory is that the 'great' men of history count for very little. They are the figureheads of forces that are beyond their control. They do most good and least harm when, like Koutoúzof, they are aware of the true direction of the great human forces and adapt themselves to them; but then they are modest, and the world does not esteem them great. The typical case of the impotent 'great' man is Napoleon in 1812, at the time of his invasion of Russia. He posed before the world as a man of destiny whose will and intellect decided the fate of empires. Yet from first to last, during that campaign, he never in the least knew what was about to happen. The result was decided by the spirit of the Russian nation, and by its steadfast endurance. Every common Russian soldier who understood that the Russian people dreaded and detested the thought of a foreign yoke, and who therefore co-operated with the natural course of events, did more to further the result than Napoleon, that 'most insignificant tool of history,' as Tolstoy calls him, who even in St. Helena was never able to understand what had caused his overthrow.

The main theme of the novel, if it be permissible to select a main theme out of the many latent in the story, is Tolstoy's favourite thesis. He tacitly asks: What is good and what is bad? With what must we sympathise and what must we reject? And the reply is that the predatory, artificial and insincere types, exemplified historically by the invading French, as well as by such characters among the Russians as Ellen, Anatole and Dólohof, are repugnant to him, while he loves the humble, the meek and the sincere: Marie and Platon Karatáef, Natásha (so impulsive and charming in her youth, so absorbed in her family later on), and Pierre (who is often humble and always sincere, and loves ideas and ideals).

It is impossible to do justice to this wonderful book in any brief summary. It is not a work to be summed up in a few pages. It has many characters, all of them so distinctly drawn that we know them better than we know our personal acquaintances. It treats of life's deepest experiences from the cradle to the grave; and to read it with the care it deserves is to know life better and see it more sanely and seriously than one ever did before. Some foolish people think that reading novels is a waste of time; but there are hardly any books—at any rate hardly any big books—that are better worth reading than Tolstoy's novels.

He is probably justified in claiming that his history is truer than the historians' history of the battles of Schöngraben, Austerlitz, and Borodinó. The historians, from mendacious military reports drawn up after the action, try to discover what the Commanders-in-Chief meant to do; and to tell their story within moderate limits they have to systematise what was really a huge disorder; thereby giving their readers a completely wrong impression of what a battle is like.

N. N. Mouravyóf, a Commander-in-Chief who distinguished himself in more than one war, declared he had never read a better description of a battle than Tolstoy's account of Schöngraben; and added that he was convinced from his own experience that during a battle it is impossible to carry out a Commander-in-Chief's orders.

Tolstoy, when he wrote the book, was convinced that war is inevitable. The idea that it is man's duty to resist war and to refuse to take part in it, came to him later.

In an article entitled 'Some Words about War and Peace,' which he wrote in 1868 for one of the periodicals, he says:

'Why did millions of people kill one another, when since the foundation of the world it has been known that this is both physically and morally bad?

'Because it was so inevitably necessary, that when doing it they fulfilled the elemental zoological law bees fulfil when they kill one another in autumn, and male animals fulfil when they destroy one another. No other reply can be given to that dreadful question.'

Yet his inveterate truthfulness, and his personal knowledge of war, caused him to describe it so exactly, that the result is tantamount to a condemnation. As Kropótkin says, War and Peace is a powerful indictment of war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, when it was impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how 'we peppered the enemy with grape-shot,' or how 'we knocked them down like ninepins.' If any one could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of barbarism, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had totally changed; and during that war there appeared Gárshin the novelist, and Verestchágin the painter, 'with whom to combat war became a life work.'

It has been charged against War and Peace that it neglects to show the evil side of serfdom: the brutality, the cruelty, the immurement of women, the flogging of grown-up sons, the torture of serf girls by their mistresses, etc. But Tolstoy studied the period closely from letters, diaries and traditions, especially from the records of his own grandparents, the Tolstoys and the Volkónskys; and he says he did not find horrors worse than are to be found now, or at any other period. People then loved and envied, and sought for truth and virtue, and were swayed by passions, as now. Their mental and moral life was just as complex, and in the upper circles it was sometimes even more refined than now.... No doubt the greater remoteness of the higher circle from the other classes gave a special character to the period, but not the character of brutal violence.

Tolstoy is in sympathy with that time, sees the poetry of it, and knows how much of goodness, courage, kindliness and high aspiration existed among those politically unenfranchised serf-owners. With our modern, Western desire to organise society efficiently, he never has sympathised. The state of a man's mind has always been to him more important than the conditions of his life, and it seems to him as though there were some antithesis between the two: as though, if you organised your society, it would cease to think truly or feel deeply. We in the West are beginning to believe the opposite, and to suspect that to leave society unorganised or disorganised has an inevitable tendency to blunt our minds and souls. But not the less is it valuable to have so wonderful a picture of Russia as it was at the commencement of the nineteenth century, painted by one who sees it as the best Russians of that period saw it themselves.

Of the history part of the book, it should be noted that Tolstoy says: 'Wherever in my novel historic characters speak or act, I have not invented, but have made use of materials which during my work have accumulated till they form a whole library.'

He told me he considered the defect of the book, besides its size, to be the intrusion of a long philosophic argument into the story. He still holds the opinions he held when he wrote it, as to the influence or impotence of 'great' men, as well as all that he then said about destiny and free will; but he now realises that his novel would have been a better novel without these abstract disquisitions.

The characters in the book are not strictly copied from life, but in the main Tolstoy's father's family are represented by the Rostófs and his mother's by the Bolkónskys. In the magazine article already referred to, Tolstoy says that only two minor characters are taken from life, and 'all the other characters are entirely invented, and I have not even for them any definite prototypes in tradition or in reality.' But when he said that, he was defending himself from the charge of having copied actual people who had played a part in the society of the time, and he clearly overstates his case, for to a considerable extent the characters in the novel correspond to the people mentioned in the following list:

Many even of the minor characters, such as Mlle. Bourienne, and Ivánushka the woman pilgrim in man's clothes, are copied more or less closely from people connected with the Volkónskys' home at Yásnaya Polyána.

Tolstoy's sympathies and antipathies in this novel: his appreciation of affection, kindliness, simplicity and truthfulness, and his dislike of what is cruel, pompous, complicated or false, are the same as in his earlier stories, but mellowed and wiser; they are also the same as in his later didactic writings, though there they are formulated, dogmatic and rigid.

The novel covers nearly the whole range of Tolstoy's experience of life: in it we have the aristocracy and the peasants; town life and country life; the Commanders, officers and privates of the army, in action and out of action; the diplomatists and courtiers; flirtation, love, balls, hunting, and a reform movement which is all talk. What Tolstoy does not show, is what he did not know—the middle-class world: the world of merchants, manufacturers, engineers and men of business. Of course these in Russia a hundred years ago, played a comparatively small part; and there was practically no political activity such as that of our County Councils, Borough Councils and Parliament. But that all this was absent from Tolstoy's mind, and that his outlook on life was confined to the aristocracy which consumed and the peasantry which produced, will, in the sequel, help us to understand the social teaching to which he ultimately came. His brother-in-law tells us that Leo Tolstoy 'has in my presence confessed to being both proud and vain. He was a rampant aristocrat, and though he always loved the country folk, he loved the aristocracy still more. To the middle class he was antipathetic. When, after his failures in early life, he became widely famous as a writer, he used to admit that it gave him great pleasure and intense happiness. In his own words, he was pleased to feel that he was both a writer and a noble.'

'When he heard of any of his former comrades or acquaintances receiving important appointments, his comments reminded one of those of Souvórof [a Field-Marshal of Catherine the Great's time], who always maintained that at Court one receives promotion for cringing and flattery, but never for good work. Sometimes he would ironically remark that, though he had himself not earned a Generalship in the artillery, he had at any rate won his Generalship in literature.'

A simple world of nobles and peasants, with little organisation, and that of a poor kind: a world the evils of which were mitigated by much kindliness and good intention, and in which, on the whole, the less the Government interfered with anybody or anything, the better—was old Russia as it existed under Alexander I and as it still existed when Tolstoy was young. He has described it with extraordinary vividness, and has made it possible for us to picture to ourselves a country and an age not our own. What effect the limitation of his outlook, referred to above, had on the subsequent development of his opinions, need not here be considered. It does not spoil the novel, for no novel can show us the whole of life; but it had a very serious effect on the formulation of his later philosophy of life. Of certain important types of humanity he has hardly any conception. Of the George Stephenson type, for instance, which masters the brute forces of nature and harnesses them to the service of man—doing this primarily from love of efficient work—he knows nothing; nor does he know any thing of the Sidney Webb type, which sets itself the yet more difficult task of evolving social order out of the partial chaos of modern civilisation; or of the best type of organisers in our great industrial undertakings: the men whose hearts are set on getting much work well done, with little friction and little waste, and to whom the successful accomplishment of a difficult project gives more satisfaction than any effortless acquisition of wealth would do. Tolstoy over-simplifies life's problems. He makes a sharp contrast between the predatory and the humble types; and there is a measure of truth in his presentation. He is right that life is supported by the humble, and is rendered hard by the predatory types; but he has omitted from his scheme of things the man of organising mind: the man who knows how to get his way, and generally gets it (or a good deal of it) but does this mainly from worthy motives; the man who is not perfect, and may take more than is good for him, and may have some of the tendencies of the predatory type, but who still, on the whole, is worth, and more than worth, his salt, and but for whom there would be more of chaos and less of order in the world. Tolstoy has said in one of his later writings that the cause of the Russian famines is the Greek Church; and he is right. All that stupefies, all that impedes thought, tends to make men inefficient even in their agricultural operations. But by parity of reasoning he should see that the introduction of thought into methods of production, distribution and exchange, which has, during the last hundred and fifty years, so revolutionised our Western world, should not be condemned as bad in itself, however ugly many of its manifestations may be; and however often we may see the organising and the predatory types exemplified in one and the same person.

Outside Russia, Anna Karénina is perhaps more popular than War and Peace. The former is a long novel, but not nearly as long as the latter; and though it contains philosophic disquisitions, these fit better into the story and are shorter and clearer than the philosophic chapters in War and Peace. In arrangement, again, Anna Karénina is more like the novels we are accustomed to, though instead of one hero and heroine it has two pairs of lovers, living quite different lives, and not very closely connected.

It deals with the passionate love of a beautiful and attractive woman; and it has a further interest in the fact that Lévin, to a greater degree than any of the author's other characters, represents Tolstoy himself; though Tolstoy made Lévin a very simple fellow in order to get a more effective contrast between him and the representatives of high life in Moscow and Petersburg.

Anna Karénina had the advantage of being introduced to the English reading public by Matthew Arnold in an essay which is one of the very best any one has ever written about Tolstoy. It is so good, and still carries so much weight, that I may be excused for mentioning three points on which it seems to me misleading. First, Arnold's ground for preferring Anna Karénina to War and Peace is ill chosen. He says: 'One prefers, I think, to have the novelist dealing with the life which he knows from having lived it, rather than with the life which he knows from books or hearsay. If one has to choose a representative work of Thackeray, it is Vanity Fair which one would take rather than The Virginians.'