What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the self-sufficient, the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain. They, to be sure, have found the truth; they hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be of use as a warning. Certainly he is not an example that they can follow: they are not sufficiently alive. Tolstoy did not belong to the self-satisfied elect; he was of no Church; of no sect; he was no more a Scribe, to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this faith or that. He was the highest type of the free Christian, who strives all his life long towards an ideal that is always more remote.[22] Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world of thought; he speaks to ordinary men_--hominibus bonæ voluntatis_. He is our conscience. He says what we all think, we average people, and what we all fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of pride: one of those haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity upon their art and their intelligence. He is--as he loved to style himself in his letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the most pleasant of all--"our brother." [1] _Journal_, dated October 28, 1879. Here is the entire passage: "There are in this world heavy folk, without wings. They struggle down below. There are strong men among them: as Napoleon. He leaves terrible traces among humanity. He sows discord.--There are men who let their wings grow, slowly launch themselves, and hover: the monks. There are light fliers, who easily mount and fall: the worthy idealists. There are men with powerful wings.... There are the celestial ones, who out of their love of men descend to earth and fold their wings, and teach others how to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they re-ascend: as did Christ." [2] "One can live only while one is drunken with life." (_Confessions_, 1879). "I am mad with living.... It is summer, the delicious summer. This year. I have struggled for a long time; but the beauty of nature has conquered me. I rejoice in life." (Letter to Fet, July, 1880.) These lines were written at the height of the religious crisis. [3] In his _Journal,_ dated May 1, 1863: "The thought of death." ... "I desire and love immortality." [4] "I was intoxicated with that boiling anger and indignation which I love to feel, which I excite even when I feel it naturally, because it acts upon me in such a way as to calm me, and gives me, at least for a few moments, an extraordinary elasticity, and the full fire and energy of all the physical and moral capacities." (_Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov,_ Lucerne, 1857.) [5] His article on _War,_ written on the occasion of the Universal Peace Congress in London in 1891, is a rude satire on the peacemakers who believe in international arbitration: