Despite our immense respect for his literary power, despite the enormous influence for good that his later books have effected, it must be said that of all the great Russian writers, Tolstoi was the most unlovely. These three sketches, taken as one, are grounded on moral ideas--the same ideas that later completely dominated the author's life. We feel his hatred of dissipation and of artificiality. The chapter on Love, in "Youth," might also form a part of the "Kreuzer Sonata," so fully does it harmonise with the teaching of the later work. "I do not speak of the love of a young man for a young girl, and hers for him; I fear these tendernesses, and I have been so unfortunate in life as never to have seen a single spark of truth in this species of love, but only a lie, in which sentiment, connubial relations, money, a desire to bind or to unbind one's hands, have to such an extent confused the feeling itself, that it has been impossible to disentangle it. I am speaking of the love for man."* *Translated by Isabel Hapgood. Throughout this book, as in all Tolstoi's work, is the eternal question WHY? For what purpose is life, and to what end am I living? What is the real meaning of human ambition and human effort? Tolstoi's reputation as an artist quite rightly began with the publication of the three Sevastopol stories, "Sevastopol in December" [1854], "Sevastopol in May, Sevastopol in August." This is the work, not of a promising youth, but of a master. There is not a weak or a superfluous paragraph. Maurice Hewlett has cleverly turned the charge that those 'who oppose war are sentimentalists, by risposting that the believers in war are the real sentimentalists: "they do not see the murder beneath the khaki and the flags." Tolstoi was one of the first novelists to strip war of its glamour, and portray its dull, commonplace filth, and its unspeakable horror. In reading that masterpiece "La Debacle," and every one who believes in war ought to read it, one feels that Zola must have learned something from Tolstoi. The Russian novelist stood in the midst of the flying shells, and how little did any one then realise that his own escape from death was an event of far greater importance to the world than the outcome of the war!