ely
swept onward by the popular current. But his first pamphlet on his new
propaganda is ten years later than the date he assigns to the change.
Thereafter for many years he devoted his chief efforts to this new class
of work, "Life," "What Is to Be Done?" "My Confession," and so forth,
being the more bulky outcome. Some of the stories, written for the
people during this interval, are delightful, both in tone and artistic
qualities. Others are surcharged with "morals," which in many cases
either directly conflict with the moral of other stories in the same
volume, or even with the secondary moral of the same story. Even his
last work--"in my former style," as he described it--"Resurrection," has
special doctrines and aims too emphatically insisted upon to permit of
the reader deriving from it the pure literary pleasure afforded by his
masterpieces. In short, with all due respect to the entire sincerity of
this magnificent writer, it must be said that those who would enjoy and
appreciate him rightly, should ignore his philosophico-religious
treatises, which are contradictory and confusing to the last degree. As
an illustration, let me cite the case of the famine in Russia of
1891-92. Great sums of money[45] were sent to Count Tolstoy, chiefly
from America, and were expended by him in the most practicable and
irreproachable manner--so any one would have supposed--for the relief of
the starving peasants. Count Tolstoy and his assistants lived the life
of the peasants, and underwent severe hardships; the Count even fell
ill, and his wife was obliged to go to him and nurse him. It would seem
that his conscience had no cause for reproach, and that the situation
was an ideal one for him. But before that famine was well over, or the
funds expended, he wrote a letter to a London newspaper, in which he
declared that helping people by means of money was all wrong--positively
a sin. He felt that collecting and distributing money was not the best
thing of which he was capable, and called it "making a pipe of one's
self," personal service with brains, heart, and muscles being the only
right service for God or man. This service he certainly rendered, and
without the money he could not have rendered it.

Nothing could more perfectly illustrate this point of view than the
following little story, written in 1881, called "The Two Brothers and
the Gold."

In ancient times there lived not far from Jerusalem two
brothers, the eld