ing far towards
the levelling of social inequalities. But to inoculate the landed
proprietors of Russia as a class with those theories was a task which
even his genius could not hope to accomplish.

He recognised the necessity of proceeding from the particular to the
general, and that the perfecting of human institutions was impossible
without a corresponding perfection in the individual. To this end
therefore the remainder of his life was dedicated. He had always held in
aversion what he termed external epidemic influences: he now endeavoured
to free himself not only from all current conventions, but from every
association which he had formerly cherished. Self-analysis and general
observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that
sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts,
if it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he
forcibly expressed in the "Kreutzer Sonata," in which Woman and Music,
the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already,
in "War and Peace" and in "Anna Karenina," his descriptions of female
charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm
himself or perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming
shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently
an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with
her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera
and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. "Woman is a stumbling-block
in a man's career," remarks a philosophical husband in "Anna Karenina."
"It is difficult to love a woman and do any good work, and the only way
to escape being reduced to inaction is to marry."

Even in his correspondence with the Countess A. A. Tolstoy this
slighting tone prevails. "A woman has but one moral weapon instead
of the whole male arsenal. That is love, and only with this weapon is
feminine education successfully carried forward." Tolstoy, in fact,
betrayed a touch of orientalism in his attitude towards women. In part
no doubt as a result of his motherless youth, in part to the fact
that his idealism was never stimulated by any one woman as it was by
individual men, his views retained this colouring on sex questions while
they became widened and modified in almost every other field of human
philosophy. It was only that, with a revulsion of feeling not seldom
experienced by earnest thinkers, attraction