Count Tolstoy is dead. Only yesterday we commented on his desertion of his home and family to spend his last days in retirement. He never reached his retreat, but has died in a railway station on the way.

Never surely was there a man of genius so bewildering to his contemporaries as Tolstoy. We speak of him as a great writer, and all the world over he is renowned as one who has written epics of prose not inferior to the chief epics of poetry. But he, who while living had come to enjoy all the security of posthumous fame, looked upon his own masterpieces as if they were the works of a dead man, as if they themselves were as dead as the past that begot them.

There are many cases known to us of men who have changed their lives and seemed to change their very natures under the pressure of some strong conviction that has suddenly or gradually mastered their minds and made all their past seem perverse and trifling. But, even if in the fervour of the new life they have thought too meanly of the old, most of them have convinced the world that the new life was the better.

St Augustine, no doubt, made too much of his early sins, yet we are all agreed that he was greater and nobler as a saint than as a worldling. But the old life which Tolstoy abjured was the life, not of a worldling, but of one who moved men to noble laughter and tears, who persuaded them to live well as powerfully as any prophet, and that without preaching or denunciation, but by true pictures of life as it is, and by contrasts of good and evil neither romantically heightened nor cynically dulled.

That one who could do this should think it a task not worthy of his life is indeed almost incredible; yet we cannot accept the explanation that the change in Tolstoy's mind was due to any enfeeblement of his powers. Whatever strange things he chose to say, he always said them like a great man. He himself could not smother the fire of his genius; and scarcelv could he obscure its light. Certainly when that change came upon him, at a time when he had just written "Anna Karenin", he did not turn to religion because art was turning away from him. He was not one of those who make a virtue of necessity, and renounce the world only when it has exhausted them.

There was another great artist of our time who sacrificed his art, though less completely than Tolstoy; but he made that sacrifice in the cause of art itself. William Morris turned away from the work that he wvas born to do to other work that he took no pleasure in; but not because that earlier work of his, the art in which he delighted, lost its value for him. His aim was to make art easier for other men in the future, and for that he was ready to sacrifice himself.

The difference between him and Tolstoy is the difference between a man whose heart remains set upon the noblest things of this life, and one who turns away from this life altogether and counts even its noblest things as mere distractions from the all-important preparation for a life to come. It is the difference between East and West, for European disgust of this life is apt to be the disgust of failure or excess, but in all Eastern religion there is an instinct that revolts from this life even at its fairest. There is this irreconcilable element in Christianity itself, suppressed for the most part even in the most devout of Western Christians, but seized upon by Tolstoy and made the essence of his faith.

In Russia Europe and Asia meet; and in Tolstoy's mind they have met and Asia has conquered. But only after a long struggle; for, until religion took possession of his mind, he was a European writer, the greatest of his time, the chief of realists, with a mystical purpose not yet clear to himself which only served to give significance to his realism. Then, he observed men and women with the disinterested keenness of Shakespeare, and wrote of them With Shakespeare's loving impartiality.

There was nothing in "War and Peace" or in "Anna Karenin" that a European could not understand and admire. He might feel that the writer of them had some secret principle upon which he chose all the innumerable facts which he related; but the interest of all those facts seemed to prove that his principle was a right one. They fill the reader with a sense that life has some profound purpose, but he is never driven to revolt against Tolstoy's conception of that purpose.

And yet we can see now, in the light of after events, that even in "War and Peace" the Eastern instincts of his mind were working. Pierre in that book and Levin in "Anna Karenin" are parts of himself, of a self still unconscious of its future destiny. They think of themselves as European gentlemen, but it would take a very little to turn them into Oriental mystics. Both end as quiet fathers of families absorbed in domestic life; but that is only a provisional ending. In Pierre's case, at any rate, we cannot believe that it will be final. There is something strange and uncompromising in him that forebodes the future of his creator. Both his and Levin's bewilderment over politics and philosophies, their sense that the eager intriguers and speculators of the world are all missing the point of things, which is better understood by the simple peasant at his plough; these are symptoms of the convictions that afterwards were to overwhelm Tolstoy and to make him feel that even he, great writer as he was, had been no nearer to true wisdom than the philosophers and politicians.

In his later years he may seem to have been much concerned in politics; but he intervened always to insist that the world could only be bettered by a change of heart in men, that the beginning and end of wisdom is to know that this life only matters as a preparation for another. He had no desire to be a revolutionary, and he addressed the Tsar as his dear brother, not because he wished to dethrone him, but because they were both men.

In theory he was an anarchist; government, he said, like a true Oriental, was always a burden; but not one to be removed by force, for force was as much an evil as government itself. Those who try to reform government by force begin at the wrong end; they can only produce a change of evils. What is needed is a reform in the hearts of men which will make government unnecessary and impossible. It is not wonderful that these doctrines of his should have pleased only a few disciples of his own.