Now glance at Tolstoi for a moment, that arch Russian bore, and at his book of Sebastopol sketches. He was an hereditary noble, and it is rather difficult to say that an hereditary noble is not a gentleman. But can the English journalist in his “_fort interieur_” admit that Tolstoi was a gentleman, all things considered? These foreign “nobles” are a funny sort of gentlemen, anyway. For let us see how Tolstoi writes of the Russians at Sebastopol.= He arrives at the town of Sebastopol. He has read in the Moscow newspapers of the “heroic defenders of Sebastopol.” His first impression is one of astonishment and disappointment of a sort. For there is nothing noticeably heroic about the demeanour of the soldiers working at the quays or walking in the streets. They are not even heroic by reason of the ineffable “cheeriness” of the British Tommy—(No journalist would be tolerated for a moment who did not, once in every twenty lines, remark on this ineffable national heroism of humour.)=Tolstoi, that is, does not _want_ to see heroes, but men under given conditions and, that is, sure enough, what he sees. He also, being an hereditary noble and so on, does not want to make his living. One more opportunity of truth and clearness! Next, when Tolstoi gets up to the bastions, he again sees no heroes with any ineffable national cachet. The “heroes” of his sketches and tales, in fact, stoop and scurry along behind parapets in lonely sectors, and when they see another man coming straighten themselves out, and clank their spurs. They kill people in nightmares, and pray pessimistically to their God. You cannot at the end apply _any_ labels to them. Tolstoi’s account of their sensations and genuine exploits would not strike terror in the heart of future enemies of the Russian race; it is not an advertisement, or the ordinary mawkish bluff thrown over a reality. He had the sense to see human beings and not Russians. And _Russians_ are chiefly redoubtable, and admirable, because of this capacity of impersonal seeing and feeling. Where they are least Russian in fact. The discriminating enemy in reading these sketches, would fear that more than he would any unreal or interested gush. There always remains the question as to whether, by gush and bluff and painting a pretty picture of a man, you cannot make him _become_ that picture=and whether, politically, it may not be desirable to manufacture illusions of that description. But what have we got to do with politicians? Again, I am not saying that Russians have not a national gush. Tolstoi himself indulges in it. Everybody indulges in such things. It is a question only of the scale of such indulgence; of the absence per head in a population of the reverse.