r not; moreover, he was gifted
with the power of describing what he saw during this long journey
through the world of fact and the world of ideas, whether it were the
general or the particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, the
panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the miniature, with the strong
simplicity of a Homer, and the colour and reality of a Velasquez. This
made him one of the world's greatest writers, and the world's greatest
artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity of his search was
that he pursued it with eagle eyes, but with blinkers.

In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: "In spite of his colossal artistic talent,
Tolstoy is one of those Russian minds which only see that which is
right before their eyes, and thus press towards that point. They have
not the power of turning their necks to the right or to the left to
see what lies on one side; to do this, they would have to turn with
their whole bodies. If they do turn, they will quite probably maintain
the exact opposite of what they have been hitherto professing; for
they are rigidly honest." It is this search carried on by eyes of
unsurpassed penetration between blinkers, by a man who every now and
then did turn his whole body, which accounts for the many apparent
changes and contradictions of Tolstoy's career.

Another source of contradiction was that by temperament the Lucifer
element predominated in him, and the ideal he was for ever seeking was
the humility of Mwyshkin, the pure fool, an ideal which he could not
reach, because he could not sufficiently humble himself. Thus when
death overtook him he was engaged on his last and his greatest voyage
of discovery; and there is something solemn and great about his having
met with death at a small railway station.

Tolstoy's works are a long record of this search, and of the memories
and experiences which he gathered on the way. There is not a detail,
not a phase of feeling, not a shade or mood in his spiritual life that
he has not told us of in his works. In his _Childhood, Boyhood and
Youth_, he re-creates his own childhood, boyhood and youth, not always
exactly as it happened in reality; there is _Dichtung_ as well as
_Wahrheit_; but the _Dichtung_ is as true as the _Wahrheit_, because
his aim was to recreate the impressions he had received from his early
surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of his eyes even then fell
mercilessly upon everything that was unreal, sham and conventional.

As soon as