Thus the great part which war has played in human history, in art, in poetry, is not, as Rousseau maintains, an arraignment of the human heart, not necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a testimony to man's limitless capacity for devotion to other ends than existence for existence' sake--his pursuit of an ideal, perpetually. § 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR Those critics of the relations of State to State, of nation to nation, to whom I have more than once referred, have recently found in their condemnation of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful ally. Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred sovereigns of the modern mind, Count Tolstoi occupies, in the beginning of the twentieth century, a unique position, not without exterior resemblance to that of Goethe in the beginning of the nineteenth, or to that of Voltaire in the great days of Louis XV. In the gray and neutral region where the spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his words, almost as soon as spoken, rivet the attention, quicken the energies, or provoke the hostility of one-half the world--when he speaks, he speaks not to Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to the wide but undefined limits of Greater Britain. Of no other living writer can this be said. Carlyle had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had Hugo so instantly a universal hearing. How then does Tolstoi regard War? For on this high matter the judgment of such a man cannot but claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his writings, even from _The Cossacks_, through such a masterpiece as _War and Peace_, colossal at once in design and in execution, on to his latest philosophical pamphlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his thought reveals itself--gradually increasing vehemence in the expression of his abhorrence of all war as the instrument of oppression, the enemy of man's advance to the ideal state, forbidden by God, forbidden above all by Christ, and by its continued existence turning our professed faith in Christ into a derision. This general impression is deepened by his treatment of individual incidents and characters. Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a battle, say the Borodino, to describe? That which rivets his attention, absorbs his energies, is the fatuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even of Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the hour of battle itself he sees no heroisms, no devotions, or he turns aside from such spectacles to fasten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched countenance, the agonizing effort of the combatants to conquer their own terror, their own dismay; and to close the scene he throws wide the hospital, and points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the amputated limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel of death. Has he the enigma of modern times to solve, Napoleon I? In Napoleon, who in the sphere of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is in the sphere