LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
[Leo Tolstoy][Frontispiece]
[Tolstoy as an Officer][1]
[Tolstoy in his Student Days][2]
[Yasnaya Polyana, the Country Home of Count Tolstoy][3]
[The Approach to the Park at Yasnaya Polyana][4]
[The Gateway-Entrance to Yasnaya Polyana][5]
[Tolstoy with his Bicycle][6]
[“The Tree of the Poor”][7]
[Tolstoy, an Early Portrait][7]
[Count and Countess Tolstoy][8]
[Leo Tolstoy (from a Sketch by Victor Prout)][9]
[Count Tolstoy at Work in the Fields][10]
[Facsimile of a Portion of Tolstoy’s MS.][11]
[Count Tolstoy, his Wife, and Daughters][12]
[Tolstoy at Work in his Study at Yasnaya Polyana][13]
[Tolstoy Writing at his Desk][14]
[One of H. R. Millar’s Illustrations][15]
[Count Tolstoy][16]
[A Famous Painting of Tolstoy][17]
[A Photograph of Count Tolstoy taken at Yasnaya Polyana][18]
[Russian Jailer and Woman Warder][19]
[A Tolstoy Medallion][20]
[The Cover of the Tract “Where Love is, there God is also”][20]
[One of the Postcards Issued in Moscow in 1898 to Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary Jubilee][21]
[Two of the Postcards Issued at Moscow in 1898 to Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary Jubilee][22]
[Count Tolstoy at Rest (from a Painting by Répin)][23]
[Tolstoy in the Grounds of Yasnaya Polyana][24]
[One of H. R. Millar’s Illustrations][25]
[One of many Busts of Count Tolstoy][26]
[A Recent Portrait of Count Tolstoy][27]
[The Defendants][29]
[Tolstoy and his Daughter Tatyana][30]
[Count Tolstoy and his Family][31]
[Leo Tolstoy (from a Portrait painted in 1884)][33]
[Maslova’s Return to the Ward after the Sentence][34]
[Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (from a Photograph)][35]

TOLSTOY

TOLSTOY AS AN OFFICER

IF any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical views, clearly and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them. About such an incident as this there is a quality altogether independent of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of the view. It is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels.

TOLSTOY
IN
HIS
STUDENT
DAYS

All this, as I say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that he was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands, and he did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which taught that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm—that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the presence of a god.