Art, too, must have contributed to divert his attention from the social problem--at least, from its economic aspects. In _War and Peace_ he developed the philosophy of _the masses versus the heroes_, a philosophy which in those years would have found among the educated men of all Europe very few persons ready to accept it. Was it his poetical genius which revealed to him the part played by the masses in the great war of 1812, and taught him that they--the masses, and not the heroes--had accomplished all the great things in history? Or, was it but a further development of the ideas which inspired him in his Yásnaya Polyána school, in opposition to all the educational theories that had been elaborated by Church and State in the interest of the privileged classes? At any rate, _War and Peace_ must have offered him a problem great enough to absorb his thoughts for a number of years; and in writing this monumental work, in which he strove to promote a new conception of history, he must have felt that he was working in the right way. As to _Anna Karénina_, which had no such reformatory or philosophical purpose, it must have offered to Tolstóy the possibility of living through once more, with all the intensity of poetical creation, the shallow life of the leisured classes, and to contrast it with the life of the peasants and their work. And it was while he was finishing this novel that he began to fully realise how much his own life was in opposition to the ideals of his earlier years.