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Though he discouraged the revolutionaries, he denounced the Government fiercely and said that no good man would obey it. It is strange to think of the greatest Russian, in this critical period of Russian history, standing apart from both parties, and while his country is striving to win the freedom of the West, urging it to seek the inner peace of the East. "True freedom," he cried, " is attained not by barricades or "murders, not by any kind of new institution coercively introduced, but only by the cessation of obedience to any human authority whatever."

That is not a doctrine to satisfy revolutionaries, but it is one which authorities may well fear; and indeed the destructive criticism of Tolstoy may play as large a part in Russian evolution as the destructive criticism of Rousseau played in that of France.

It is easy to call his doctrines impracticable; so were Rousseau's; and yet Roursseau, of all writers the most abhorrent to practical men, has had more influence upon men's actions than any other writer of his time. And TolstoY was a greater than Rousseau, greater both in genius and in character. He came to his ideas not by any easy generalizing process nor by any pleasant indulgence in sensibility. The author of "War and Peace" was not a sentimentalist nor ignorant of human nature. We may refuse to accept his doctrines, just as we may refuse to accept the doctrines of any great man; but only a fool would find mere folly in them. The wise man sees that they are doctrines of the East with all their Orientalism intensified by their Western interpreters' view of existing conditions in Russia.

Genius is always apt to react against its surroundings; and the worse they are, the more extreme will be the reaction. Yet there are some men of genius who express all their reaction in art; and when they have expressed it pass into a period of Olympian calm surrounded by the glory of their own achievements. Tolstoy was not one of these. There was no calm for him while hie lived, and his glory was nothing to him. It was his lot to turn from the labours of art to labours more arduous and far more doubtful of success.

Like Morris, who in his last illness burst into tears at the thought of the suferings of the poor, Tolstoy never lost the unrest and passion of life. Since there was no peace in the world about him. he would not accept the peace of old age for himself, and his outcries were silenced only by the peace of death.