“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my work ‘Anna Karènina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself.... I saw only one thing--Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)--a [Illustration: A TOLSTOY MEDALLION] [Illustration: THE COVER OF THE TRACT “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO”] scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular--“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism,” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a _jehad_ against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution to the subject. [Illustration: ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE]