and professional classes than to the peasant,
who is slower to express himself, and combines in a curious way a firm
belief in the omnipotence and wisdom of his social superiors with a
rooted distrust of their intentions regarding himself. He is like a
beast of burden who flinches from every approach, expecting always a
kick or a blow. On the other hand, his affection for the animals
who share his daily work is one of the most attractive points
in his character, and one which Tolstoy never wearied of
emphasising--describing, with the simple pathos of which he was master,
the moujik inured to his own privations but pitiful to his horse,
shielding him from the storm with his own coat, or saving him from
starvation with his own meagre ration; and mindful of him even in his
prayers, invoking, like Plato, the blessings of Florus and Laura, patron
saints of horses, because "one mustn't forget the animals."

The characteristics of a people so embedded in the soil bear a closer
relation to their native landscape than our own migratory populations,
and patriotism with them has a deep and vital meaning, which is
expressed unconsciously in their lives.

This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less
the animating power of the noble epic, "War and Peace," and of his
peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian
scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under the
spell of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with
the normal phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to
Pantheism, found responses to his moods in trees, and gained spiritual
expansion from the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings
his heroes into touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate
mysticism of his own temperament, for to him Nature was "a guide to
God." So in the two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree ("War
and Peace") the Prince, though a man of action rather than of sentiment
and habitually cynical, is ready to find in the aged oak by the
roadside, in early spring, an animate embodiment of his own despondency.

"'Springtime, love, happiness?--are you still cherishing those deceptive
illusions?' the old oak seemed to say. 'Isn't it the same fiction ever?
There is neither spring, nor love, nor hap