"One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely the sign of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the greater, from worse to better. And this discord is the condition of good. It is an evil when a man is calm and satisfied with himself."[11] He imagines the following subject for a novel--showing that the persistent discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in him: "I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles, and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias, and finally a Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies, forgotten, in a hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And yet he is a saint."[12] Had he still doubts--he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to a halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards. "Movement is life."[13] Many things must have changed within him during the last few years. Did he not modify his opinion of revolutionaries? Who can even say that his faith in non-resistance to evil was not at length a little shaken? Even in _Resurrection_ the relations of Nekhludov with the condemned "politicals" completely change his ideas as to the Russian revolutionary party. "Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their criminal dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency, their selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them more closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he understood that they could not be otherwise." And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total self-sacrifice. Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from the "intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely moving amidst the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their threatening army defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana. Three tales, published by the _Mercure de France,_[14] which were among the last pages written by Tolstoy, give us a glimpse of the sorrow and the perplexity which this spectacle caused him. The years were indeed remote when the pilgrims wandered through the countryside of Toula, pious and simple of heart. Now he saw the invasion of starving wanderers. They came to him every day. Tolstoy, who chatted with them, was struck by the hatred that animated them; they no longer, as before, saw the rich as "people who save their souls by distributing alms, but as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the labouring people." Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that despair which makes a man capable of anything.