But we are all of us, even the merriest hearts that “go all the way,” subject to morbid moods, to fits of depression, black hours when we are ready to deny the world, our ambition in it, our own life, our greatest happiness, and live wilfully in an atmosphere of grief and pessimism, loving sorrow for its own sake, lamenting for the sake of lamentation. We love what Dostoieffsky calls self-laceration. We must every month or so deliver ourselves up to Giant Despair and be cudgelled. The darker the night the clearer the stars, The deeper the sorrow the nearer to God, says a Russian proverb, but these recurrent moods are not really sorrow, they are a being morbid. They have nothing in common with the suffering that comes from destiny itself, nothing of the circumstances of going into the wilderness, or taking the road with the burden on one’s back, nothing of the pangs of new birth, of the _podvig_. Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Toiling and waiting for the morrow, He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers. —Who never ate his bread in real sorrow. Life is of this sort, that if you will stake all of it for a new life you will get the new life. But when you really do give up all the old and dear, that is a dark and terrible hour, the hour of renunciation, of the _podvig_. And on the road of life itself there is a great gulf between the vigorous and Teutonic “Welcome each rebuff that turns earth smoothness rough” and the morbid and Oscar Wildean “living with sorrow,” a great gulf between Father Seraphim kneeling a thousand days on a rock, and the sad “intelligent” who reads to himself in the evening hour: To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows, Without strength to breathe, To stand like Sebastiàn shot through with arrows In shoulder and breast. Tolstoy in his later years was morbid. I suppose if the psychology of Tolstoy’s life were to be followed out we should be surprised at the frequent recurrence of morbid and despondent moods. Nothing seems more characteristic of his later years than fruitless quarreling with the life of Yasnaya Polyana, threatening to run away, lamentations, self-lacerations. But now and again in relief Tolstoy did actually flee. He took the road to Moscow to live like a simple artisan and earn his living by carpentering, or he set off for a monastery where some famous monk lived in his cell, and sought relief by confession and Christian intercourse.