Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably [Illustration: ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING OF THE MANY BUSTS OF COUNT TOLSTOY ] must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern [Illustration: A RECENT PORTRAIT OF COUNT TOLSTOY _From Photo by_] [_Rek Matild, Zsolna_] Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of “Anna Karènina” and “War and Peace” has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of “Wilhelm Meister” and of “Resurrection” what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-day stands for the triumph of the European _soul_ against civilisation’s routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to _realising_ what the life of the modern man _is_. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer _whole_, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina,” those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing