“I cannot refuse to believe him” (he writes) “when he speaks of himself as a pitiable fledgling fallen from the nest. Yes, however terrible, it is true. This Titan, with all his vigour, is lying on his back and wailing in the high grass, as you and I and all the rest of us. No, he has found nothing; no faith, no God. And his whole justification is solely in his hopeless prayer, this piercing and plaintive cry of boundless solitude and dread.... Will he at last understand that there is no higher or lower in the matter; that the two seemingly contradictory and equally true paths, leading to one and the same goal, are not two paths, but one path which merely seems to be two; and that it is not by going against what is earthly or fleeing from it, but only through what is earthly, that we can reach the Divine; that it is not by divesting ourselves of the flesh, but through the flesh, that we can reach that which is beyond the flesh? Shall we fear the flesh? we, the children of Him who said, ‘My blood is drink indeed, and My flesh is meat indeed’; we, whose God is that God whose Word was made flesh?”[9] Yet, whatever the mistakes of Tolstoy’s teaching may be, they do not detract from the moral authority of the man. All his life he has searched for the truth, and all his life he has said exactly what he thought; and though he has fearlessly attacked all constituted authorities, nobody has dared to touch him. He is too great. This is the first time independent thought has prevailed in Russia; and this victory is the greatest service he has rendered to Russia _as a man_. Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky could endure Tourgeniev; their dislike of him is interesting, and helps us to understand the nature of their work and of their artistic ideals, and the nature of the distance that separates the work of Tourgeniev from that of Tolstoy. “I despise the man,” Tolstoy wrote of Tourgeniev to Fet. Dostoievsky, in his novel _The Possessed_,[10] draws a scathing portrait of Tourgeniev, in which every defect of the man is noted but grossly exaggerated. This portrait is not uninstructive.