“I have no modesty; that is my great defect.... I am ugly, awkward, uncleanly, and lack society education. I am irritable, a bore to others, not modest; intolerant, and as shamefaced as a child.... I am almost an ignoramus. What I do know I have learnt anyhow, by myself, in snatches, without sequence, without a plan, and it amounts to very little. I am incontinent, undecided, inconstant, and stupidly vain and vehement, like all characterless people. I am not brave.... I am clever, but my cleverness has as yet not been thoroughly tested on anything.... I am honest; that is to say, I love goodness.... There is a thing I love more than goodness, and that is fame. I am so ambitious, and so little has this feeling been gratified, that, should I have to choose between fame and goodness, I fear I may often choose the former. Yes, I am not modest, and therefore I am proud at heart, shamefaced, and shy in society.” At the time that Tolstoy wrote this he was a master, as Mr. Aylmer Maude points out, of the French and German languages, besides having some knowledge of English, Latin, Arabic, and Turco-Tartar. He had published stories which had caused the editors of the best Russian magazines to offer him the rate of pay accorded to the best-known writers. Therefore his discontent with his position, both intellectual and social, was in reality quite unfounded. After the Crimean War, Tolstoy went abroad. He found nothing in Western Europe to satisfy him. On his return he settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, and married; and the great patriarchal phase of his life began, during which every gift and every happiness that man can be blessed with seemed to have fallen to his lot. It was then that he wrote _War and Peace_, in which he describes the conflict between one half of Europe and the other. He takes one of the largest canvases ever attacked by man; and he writes a prose epic on a period full of tremendous events. His piercing glance sees through all the fictions of national prejudice and patriotic bias; and he gives us what we feel to be the facts as they were, the very truth. No detail is too small for him, no catastrophe too great. He traces the growth of the spreading tree to its minute seed, the course of the great river to its tiny source. He makes a whole vanished generation of public and private men live before our eyes in such a way that it is difficult to believe that these people are not a part of our actual experience; and that his creations are not men and women we have seen with our own eyes, and whose voices we have heard with our own ears.