Turgénief and Tolstoy were exceedingly unlike in life and work; it is not surprising that, when they met, they were alternately fascinated and repelled. Turgénief complained that Tolstoy pursued him like a woman in love and yet, when they were together, was always quarrelling with him. At one time they were devoted friends, at another they came near to fighting a duel. Russia might well have been horrified by the spectacle of her two greatest men of genius destroying each other; their friends intervened and separated them, but the reconciliation was never quite complete. The same opposition of personality can be plainly perceived in their work. Tolstoy is by far the more masculine genius, {13} enormous in his vitality and power, immense in his canvases; he loves, in his early work especially, to study masculine and virile characters, to dwell on war and hunting, and all the vigorous activities of men; his heroines, charming as they often are, are rarely or never heroic; they are nearly always dominated by their own emotions, they yield only too thoroughly to the men who, with a cruel masculine egoism, at once love and destroy them. Again it is hardly until he reaches _Resurrection_ that he shows a true sense of the value of women as individuals: in his earlier novels he consents to value them only in their maternal aspect, as the mothers of men. His conception of love is nearly always a masculine passion with, it must be acknowledged, a somewhat crude masculinity; it is a disturbance of the senses rather than an emotion of the soul (Plato would have classed it unquestioningly as born of the lower Aphrodite), and Tolstoy's finest heroes nearly always yield to it reluctantly and, as it were, churlishly. Like another great masculine genius--Milton--Tolstoy feels most intimately, but shudders at the power that women possess over men. How often in his works one meets with women who are like Milton's Dalila, possessed of a charm that is mixed with loathing and disgust. Both Milton and Tolstoy regard with horror, as one of the worst of snares, the idealising power of love.