We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that, just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with shaping it. Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man, therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police system which strangled the life of Russia. He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict, “Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer. He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; but still his conscience troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort. Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the first one who entered the house.