Karenin, who was
singular in being a congenital cripple. His body was bent so that he
walked with difficulty, suffered much pain as he grew older, and had
at last to undergo two operations. The second killed him. Already
malformation, which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages
so that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world. It had a
curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling towards him was
mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that it needed usage rather
than reason to overcome. He had a strong face, with little bright brown
eyes rather deeply sunken and a large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His
skin was very yellow and wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all
times an impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust through
his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige was very great.
To him far more than to any contemporary is it due that self-abnegation,
self-identification with the world spirit, was made the basis of
universal education. That general memorandum to the teachers which is
the key-note of the modern educational system, was probably entirely his
work.

'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is the
device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point of all
we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything but a plain
statement of fact. It is the basis for your work. You have to teach
self-forgetfulness, and everything else that you have to teach is
contributory and subordinate to that end. Education is the release
of man from self. You have to widen the horizons of your children,
encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and
cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under
your guidance and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they
have to shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities,
and passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened out
until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose. And this
that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously yourselves.
Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill, every sort of service,
love: these are the means of salvation from that narrow lon