It is no wonder then that Tolstoi’s books should be more than novels. He had a higher purpose in view than gathering in royalties and entertaining his readers. His books are jam with a considerable amount of powder in them. If, despite this, they have been widely read throughout the world, ordinary minds would conclude that in creating them their author has accomplished tasks which alone a mind of a high order could hope to perform. Our alienist, determined to come to no such conclusion, supposes that all those who read Tolstoi’s works are degenerates, and that the large sale of his books is consequently a confirmation of Tolstoi’s degeneracy. Would Nordau apply the same kind of reasoning with regard to the sale of his own works? He would probably; but instead of starting with the supposition that contemporary readers of books are incipient lunatics, he would very likely take for granted that the readers who approve of his works are highly intelligent, and that the great sale they have attained proves the soundness of his own mind. In support of his view, Nordau, who fairly acknowledges the great qualities of Tolstoi as a writer of fiction, has the audacity to assert that it is not this great quality of his works that has secured him his world-wide fame, but that it is due to his mysticism, which a degenerate race prefers to a literary and moral value. The only semblance of proof he gives for this view is that Tolstoi’s best works have not contributed to his reputation so much as the _Kreutzer Sonata_, “an inferior creation, which in the public opinion of the western nations placed him in the first rank of living authors.” But who has decided that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is inferior to Tolstoi’s other works? Only Nordau, whose opinion runs counter to the “western nations.” If therefore there is any value in Nordau’s argument it rests entirely on the astounding fact that the “western nations” are all degenerate and Nordau alone is sane. Nordau, like most German bookworms, evidently believes that references to an authority, however obscure, are enough to prove any assertion. He has manifestly worked with any number of “conversations-lexicons” and encyclopedias about him, in quest of some printed confirmation of the extraordinary opinion that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is a poor book, and that the preceding works of Tolstoi alone contain those grand qualities which Nordau recognises. He finds that Franz Bornmüller, an author of a biographical dictionary, said in 1882 of Tolstoi: “He possesses no ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due artistic finish, and which is influenced by a certain one-sidedness in his views of life and history.”