a whole nation’s life, to the worlds of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries. [Illustration: THE DEFENDANTS “The third prisoner was Maslova” (From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of “Resurrection,” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson) ] It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the [Illustration: TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA] great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the _appeal_ of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own _progress_. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty, [Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY (Reproduced from _The Review of Reviews_ by kind permission of the Editor)] the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that defines _the way_ Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.