cted on
their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled
the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising
these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues,
banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and
fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is
within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He
left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at
nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of
right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the
idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of
independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the
writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the
pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise
against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally
they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism,"
or "a fanatic's intolerance."

Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an
earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft,
and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or
demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even
than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted
sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing
compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and
temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do,
there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron
sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him
a disturbing and incalculable magic--an upheaving force, like leaven
stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered
peace.

Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres;
they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic
circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no
division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to
last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the
highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in
prose)--in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of
Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in th