But this union is a difficult one to maintain. There are hours in which the spectacle of life and its suffering are so bitter that they appear an affront to love, and in order to save it, and to save his faith, a man must withdraw to such a height above the world that faith is in danger of losing truth as well. What shall he do, moreover, who has received at the hands of fate the fatal, magnificent gift of seeing the truth--the gift of being unable to escape from seeing it? Who shall say what Tolstoy suffered from the continual discord of his latter years--the discord between his unpitying vision, which saw the horror of reality, and his impassioned heart, which continued to expect love and to affirm it? We have all known these tragic conflicts. How often have we had to face the alternative--not to see, or to hate! And how often does an artist--an artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent power of the written word--feel himself weighed down by anguish as he writes the truth![20] This truth, sane and virile, necessary in the midst of modern lies, this vital truth seems to him as the air we breathe.... But then we perceive that this air is more than the lungs of many can bear. It is too strong for the many beings enfeebled by civilisation; too strong for those who are weak simply in the kindness of their hearts. Are we to take no account of this, and plunge them implacably into the truth that kills them? Is there not above all a truth which, as Tolstoy says, "is open to love"? Or is the artist to soothe mankind with consoling lies, as Peer Gynt, with his tales, soothes his old dying mother? Society is always face to face with this dilemma: the truth, or love. It resolves it in general by sacrificing both. Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two faiths. In the works of his maturity love is the torch of truth. In the works of his later years it is a light shining on high, a ray of mercy which falls upon life, but does not mingle with it. We have seen this in _Resurrection_, wherein faith dominates the reality, but remains external to it. The people, whom Tolstoy depicts as commonplace and mean when he regards the isolated figures that compose it, takes on a divine sanctity so soon as he considers it in the abstract.[21] In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the contrast is even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love required of him; he acted otherwise; he lived not according to God but according to the world. And love itself: how was he to behave with regard to love? How distinguish between its many aspects, its contradictory orders? Was love of family, to come first, or love of all humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by these alternatives.