cious of the Eternal behind the transient, of the
Presence unseen that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes
this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation with the
circumstance of war? To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as
to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme
expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic
hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such. To Carlyle
war is therefore neither anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence
in the life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; it is
that manifestation of the world-spirit of which I have spoken above--a
race, a nation, an empire, conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon
the fortunes of the stricken field! Carlyle, as his writings, as his
recorded actions approve, was not less sensitive than Tolstoi to the
pity of human life, to the "tears of things" as Virgil would say; but
are there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, wounds, mangled
limbs, fevers, that make of every day of this sad earth of ours a day
after Borodino? The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the
battlefield, knows but its own suffering; it is the eye of the onlooker
which discovers the united agony. It was a profounder vision, a wider
outlook, not a harder heart, which made Carlyle[6] apparently blind to
that side of war which alone rivets the attention of Tolstoi--the
pathological. And yet Tolstoi and his house have for generations been
loyal to the Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield as
his fathers before him have done. Tolstoi has no system to crown, like
Auguste Comte or Mr. Herbert Spencer, with the coping-stone of
universal peace and a world all sunk in bovine content. Whither then
shall we turn for an explanation of his arraignment of war?

Sec. 4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SLAVONIC GENIUS

Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe was, as Voltaire was, a
characteristic differentiating him from such men at once betrays
itself. The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings seems a
native, or at least a charming visitant, of every clime, of every
epoch; Goethe, impelled more by his innate disposition than by any plan
of culture, draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even wider
than Voltaire's--Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval
Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of