Browning astonished Carlyle by his confident cheerfulness. And his optimism was founded upon knowledge, or at least did not depend upon ignorance. Though he believed in the triumph of the divine element in every soul--the element of love--he recognised the reality of evil, and saw life as a battle. But not as a battle between the body and the soul, or between vice and virtue: the conflict, for Browning as for Whitman, is ultimately between love as the inmost spirit of life, and all other virtues and vices whatsoever. Love alone "leaves completion in the soul," and solves the enigmas of doubt. Browning's conception of a Democracy, in which all men should "be equal in full-blown powers," and God should cease to make great men, because the average man would have become great, was set forth in some of the earliest work of a genius as precocious in its development as that of his master Shelley. But it would be easy to exaggerate the relationship which I have indicated. For Browning was a cosmopolitan and delightful gentleman, who in his later years cultivated music and studied yellow parchments and the freaks of human nature, in a Venetian palace; while Whitman was sauntering through old age in the suburb of an American city, appearing by comparison uneducated, uncouth and provincial. Appearance is, however, deceptive, for the earth Walt smacks of is the autochthonous red soil of the creation of all things. * * * * * Tolstoi, aristocrat as he is by birth and education, is yet a peasant in his physical and spiritual character; a Russian peasant, with the moujik's almost Oriental stubbornness of resignation and passivity. Like Whitman, he is one of the people, and in some respects he is an incarnation of Russia, as Whitman was of America. But while there are many obvious relations between the two men, their contrast is the more striking. Tolstoi has the Oriental tendency towards pessimism and asceticism. He sees the body and spirit in irreconcilable conflict. And similarly he opposes forever pleasure and duty; so that his is a message of the endless sacrifice of self. An abyss of terror surrounds him, from which he can only escape by a life of resolute and loving self-devotion.[647] His gospel is one of escape, and is in many respects nearer in spirit to Carlyle's than to Whitman's. Tolstoi's detestation of the State is, doubtless, largely traceable to the military despotism under which he has lived.