was inevitable; yet Tolstoi stands before the world today as a good man and an earnest one, who never lay upon a couch of down while he preached abnegation for others. An insatiable psychological curiosity possessed the Russian master from youth to the close of his fiction-writing years. In the exercise of this minute observing power, he is as amazing a realist as was Balzac, and when he confines his examinations to humans he is quite as profoundly interesting, but rather tiresome when he records the numberless details of inanimate nature. A character so given to scrutiny would naturally be introspective, so that his novels are markedly autobiographical. And it is always the struggling, set-upon, brooding character which the novelist chooses through which to depict his own nature. How different from the romantic self-exploitation of Byron! In “Childhood,” _Nikolenka_ is Tolstoi himself, as _Olénine_ is in “The Cossacks.” So too in _Levine_ of “Anna Karenina,” _Pozdnichev_, of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” and _Nekhlioudov_, of “Resurrection” (his final creed-summary), we have pictures of the self-recognized characteristics and beliefs of the author. Each of these distinguished novels exhibits the same loosely-knit, diffuse, and digressive literary method, and the same marvellous perfection of character analysis and description. Each, also, advances a step toward that morbid idealism which was always seeking a new expression for a philosophy which was never finally set, but remained a shifting formulary to the last. “War and Peace” is a huge study of the times of Napoleon and Alexander, brilliant and tedious by turns, and requiring leisure for its reading--in the last analysis, a really great novel. “Anna Karenina” treats with great frankness and high moral purpose contemporaneous Russian society. Both these remarkable books abound in striking comparisons, witty comments, well differentiated character work, and convincing pictures of their times. Shortly after finishing these works, Tolstoi emerged from his groping, pessimistic, skeptical, nihilistic philosophy and “discovered” the Sermon on the Mount. Thenceforward he was the Preacher. It is true that, as his devoted wife playfully said, he changed his views every two years, yet his devotion to his altruistic creed--the creed of his youth, as we have seen--was so firm that neither the dying adjurations of his friend Turgenev nor the clamors of the forty-five peoples into whose separate languages his writings have been translated could induce him to return to fiction--he felt that the mantle of a new spiritual leadership was upon his shoulders, and thenceforward the story-teller’s art, when exercised at all, was to be merely a means to the ulterior end of teaching.