At first he rejoiced in the new life, with the passion which he brought to everything.[1] The personal influence of Countess Tolstoy was a godsend to his art. Greatly gifted[2] in a literary sense, she was, as she says, "a true author's wife," so keenly did she take her husband's work to heart. She worked with him--worked to his dictation; re-copied his rough drafts.[3] She sought to protect him from his religious dæmon, that formidable genie which was already, at moments, whispering words that meant the death of art. She tried to shut the door upon all social Utopias.[4] She requickened her husband's creative genius. She did more: she brought as an offering to that genius the wealth of a fresh feminine temperament. With the exception of the charming silhouettes in _Childhood_ and _Boyhood_, there are few women in the earlier works of Tolstoy, or they remain of secondary importance. Woman appears in _Family Happiness,_ written under the influence of his love for Sophie Bers. In the works which follow there are numerous types of young girls and women, full of intensest life, and even superior to the male types. One likes to think not only that Countess Tolstoy served her husband as the model for Natasha in _War and Peace_[5] and for Kitty in _Anna Karenin_,[6] but that she was enabled, by means of her confidences and her own vision, to become his discreet and valuable collaborator. Certain pages of _Anna Karenin_ in particular seem to me to reveal a woman's touch. Thanks to the advantages of this union, Tolstoy enjoyed for a space of twelve or fourteen years a peace and security which had been long unknown to him.[7] He was able, sheltered by love, to dream and to realise at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal monuments which dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century_--War and Peace_ (1864-69) and _Anna Karenin_ (1873-77). _War and Peace_ is the vastest epic of our times--a modern _Iliad._ A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.