Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself.... I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of Karènina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this small space the great qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years. [Illustration: COUNT TOLSTOY AT WORK IN THE FIELDS] Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS. (Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Nisbet & Co., from “How Count Tolstoy Lives and Works,” by P. A. Sergyeenko)] synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”--which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857--tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It is of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.