act. As you read this, it will easily
prove to you my insanity. The style and the ideas are incoherent
enough--I can see that myself. But I cannot keep myself from being
either crazy or an idiot; and, as things are, from whom should I ask
pity? I am defenseless against the invisible enemy who is tightening
his coils around me. I should be no better armed against him even if I
saw him, or had seen him. Oh, if he would but kill me, devil take him!
Death, death, once for all! But I stop. I have raved to you long
enough. I say raved, for I can write no otherwise, having neither
brain nor thoughts left. O God! what a misfortune to be born! Born
like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning; and how
true and right I was when in our philosophy-year in college I chewed
the cud of bitterness with the pessimists. Yes, indeed, there is more
pain in life than gladness--it is one long agony until the grave.
Think how gay it makes me to remember that this horrible misery of
mine, coupled with this unspeakable fear, may last fifty, one hundred,
who knows how many more years!"[78]

[78] Roubinovitch et Toulouse: La Melancolie, 1897, p. 170, abridged.

This letter shows two things. First, you see how the entire
consciousness of the poor man is so choked with the feeling of evil
that the sense of there being any good in the world is lost for him
altogether. His attention excludes it, cannot admit it: the sun has
left his heaven. And secondly you see how the querulous temper of his
misery keeps his mind from taking a religious direction. Querulousness
of mind tends in fact rather towards irreligion; and it has played, so
far as I know, no part whatever in the construction of religious
systems.

Religious melancholy must be cast in a more melting mood. Tolstoy has
left us, in his book called My Confession, a wonderful account of the
attack of melancholy which led him to his own religious conclusions.
The latter in some respects are peculiar; but the melancholy presents
two characters which make it a typical document for our present
purpose. First it is a well-marked case of anhedonia, of passive loss
of appetite for all life's values; and second, it shows how the altered
and estranged aspect which the world assumed in consequence of this
stimulated Tolstoy's intellect to a gnawing, carking questioning and
effort for philosophic relief. I mean to quote Tolstoy at some length;
but before doing so, I wi