A man who can write like that of himself is the happiest of mortals, for he knows that he belongs among the immortals.
[1] "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. Authorized Translation by Anthony M. Ludovico. New York: Doubleday Page & Co.
TOLSTOY
I.
Tolstoy closes the second part of "Sevastopol" with these words: "The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and ever will be beautiful, is Truth." That sentence was written when Tolstoy was twenty-seven. For fifty years, in novels, tales, essays, and exhortations, he celebrated his hero with unflagging devotion. The deeds and lineaments of the hero are not always as other men have seen them, but the identity, the character of the hero is never in doubt. The hero changes and utters conflicting wisdom, not because of the worshiper's inconstancy, but because Tolstoy develops, because he outgrows and disavows his previous selves and violates consistency between one book and another in his zeal to find consistency between his next book and Truth.
In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led through the most stirring intellectual and moral experiences which modern man has undergone. He is part of all that we have met; from the remotest of European countries, from a moment in the world's thought that is already well behind us, his messages have encircled the globe and modify the living ideas of today. He touched all departments of thought and left none as it had been.
He plunged into the nineteenth century warfare of religion and science, found that both parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and wrested from both the right of the individual to a simple faith and to knowledge free from the cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble of the contest between privilege and labor—the most portentous war the world has seen and not yet at its crisis—assaulted his ears; he hearkened while most other members of the narrow circle of culture were deaf or indifferent, and he took his stand on the side of the workers against his own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of war, in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and became a militant champion of peace. The unholy alliance of culture, religion, and civil authority he strove to dissolve by broadsides against each member of the triune tyranny, and so he conceived a new theory of art, a new reading of the gospels, and an anarchism so individual that it excludes most other anarchists. Under the solemnity of marriage and the thin poetry of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with a virile puritanism, so powerful in its terms, so subversive of our timid codes that bashful Morality shrank from her bravest defender.