Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has _realised_ war, his fellows have _idealised_ it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say that “‘Sebastopol’ gives us war under _all_ aspects--war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of ‘Sebastopol’ by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, ‘I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all. ‘Sebastopol,’ therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply [Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED IN 1884] [Illustration: MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE SENTENCE “She could bear it no longer; her face quivered and she burst into sobs” (From an illustration by Pasternak in the English Edition of “Resurrection” reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)]