The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism--the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem. G. K. CHESTERTON. [Illustration: “THE TREE OF THE POOR” Where Tolstoy receives the peasants and listens with unwearying patience to their tales of distress] [Illustration: TOLSTOY, AN EARLY PORTRAIT] LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER Half the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist--an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly de-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances--it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayer would influence you.... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For [Illustration: COUNT AND COUNTESS TOLSTOY From a Portrait taken in September 1895 (Reproduced by kind permission from “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” by P. A. Sergyeenko) ] once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe--that is one of his supreme values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna Karènina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew [Illustration: LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A SKETCH BY VICTOR PROUT (Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)]