Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau, because, as the latter said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil it was in my interest to tell everything."[9] Tolstoy, after having made the attempt, decided not to write his _Memoirs;_ the pen fell from his hands; he did not wish to be an object of offence and scandal to those who would read it. "People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who ordains us to be shameful."[10] Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and the humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy. Behind Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, the innocents, whose tears and naive confessions had touched him as a child. But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life; a magnificent warfare between the highest powers of his mind: Truth and Love. Truth--"that look which goes straight to the heart," the penetrating light of "those grey eyes which pierce you through"--Truth was his earliest faith, and the empress of his art. "The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."[11] The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.[12] The truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean. But very soon the "horrible truth"[13] was no longer enough for him. Love had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; "the natural state of his soul."[14] When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never relinquished the truth; he made way for love.[15] Love is "the basis of energy."[16] Love is the "reason of life; the only reason, with beauty."[17] Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened by life, of the author of _War and Peace_ and the _Letter to the Holy Synod_.[18] This interpenetration of the truth by love makes the unique value of the masterpieces he wrote in the middle part of his life--_nel mezzo del cammin_--and distinguishes his realism from the realism of Flaubert. The latter places his faith in refraining from loving his characters. Great as he may be, he lacks the _Fiat lux!_ The light of the sun is not enough: we must have the light of the heart. The realism of Tolstoy is incarnate in each of his creatures, and seeing them with their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons for loving them and for making us feel the chain of brotherhood which unites us to all.[19] By love he penetrates to the roots of life.