[29] "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of egoism that we wish to drain from the human soul re-enters by it." He ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been wrongly read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact "Love thy neighbour as _Himself_ (as God)." (_Conversations with Teneromo._) [30] _Conversations with Teneromo._ CHAPTER XVII OLD AGE His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in the memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a double furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard, recalling that of the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and softer; it bore the traces of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment, and of affectionate kindness. What a change from the almost animal brutality of the same face at twenty, and the heavy rigidity of the soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the same profound fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and from which nothing is hidden. Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17, 1901) Tolstoy had said: "I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able also, in peace and gladness, to travel on towards death." Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "that we should call no man happy until he is dead." Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of possessing? The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of the "great and wise Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery"; and that China, at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.[1]