"The activity of science and art is only fruitful when it arrogates no right to itself and considers only its duties. It is only because that activity is such as it is, because its essence is sacrifice, that humanity honours it. The men who are called to serve others by spiritual work always suffer in the accomplishment of that task; for the spiritual world is brought to birth only in suffering and torture. Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the thinker and the artist, for his fate is the good of men. Men are unhappy; they suffer; they die; there is no time for him to stroll about, to amuse himself. The thinker or the artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as we are accustomed to think; he is always in a state of conflict, always in a state of emotion. He must decide and must say what will further the welfare of men, what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not decided it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too late, and he will die.... The man who is trained in an establishment in which artists and scientists are formed (to tell the truth, such places make destroyers of art and of science); the man who receives diplomas and a pension--he will not be an artist or a thinker; but he who would be happy not to think, not to express what is implanted in his mind, yet cannot refrain from thought and self-expression: for he is carried along by two invisible forces: his inner need and his love of men. There are no artists who are fat, lovers of life, and satisfied with themselves."[1] This splendid page, which throws a tragic light upon the genius of Tolstoy, was written under the immediate stress of the suffering caused him by the poverty of Moscow, and under the conviction that science and art were the accomplices of the entire modern system of social inequality and hypocritical brutality. This conviction he was never to lose. But the impression of his first encounter with the misery of the world slowly faded, and became less poignant; the wound healed,[2] and in none of his subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain and of vengeful anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this sublime profession of the faith of the artist who creates with his life-blood, this exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering "which are the lot of the thinker"; this disdain for Olympian art. Those of his later works which deal with the criticism of art will be found to treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary and less mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of that human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing his self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when upon returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation. I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It is impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is the man who writes to Fet: