I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoï’s have come, but for my own 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 Tolstoï’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself; as for the names, they are necessarily Russian. It is when some one tells me they are “pessimistic” that I really despair. I have always supposed pessimism to be the doctrine of the prevalence of evil, and these books perpetually teach me that the good prevails, and always will prevail whenever men put self aside, and strive simply and humbly to be good. We are all so besotted with dreams and vanities that we have come to think that the right will accomplish itself spectacularly, splendidly; but Tolstoï makes us know that it never can do so. He teaches such of us as will hear him that the Right is the sum of each man’s poor little personal effort to do right, and that the success of this effort means daily, hourly self-renunciation, self-abasement, the sinking of one’s pride in absolute squalor before duty. This is not pleasant; the heroic ideal of righteousness is more picturesque, more attractive; but is this not the truth? Let any one try, and see! I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoï has done in his conception of Karenin 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. In fact, Tolstoï brings us back in his fiction, as in his life, to the Christ ideal. “Except ye become as little children”--that is what he says in every part of his work; and this work, so incomparably good æsthetically, to my thinking, is still greater ethically. You will not find its lessons put at you, any more than you will those of life. No little traps are sprung for your surprise; no calcium light is thrown upon this climax or that; no virtue or vice is posed for you; but if you have ears to hear or eyes to see, listen and look, and you will have the sense of inexhaustible significance.