The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked down with an evil eye upon the great natural basis of all love, love between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and through, heart and soul. When we examine the personality of a great master like Tolstoy, what do we find? First that strange, absorbing impulse, the desire to create, to reveal himself, which indicates an excessive consciousness of the ego. In his youth there was apparently an intense longing to make himself understood without the mental capacity necessary for success; failure resulted in shyness, uncertainty, doubt, and according to his own confession he experienced a transient, sensual love without spiritual depth. He was out of harmony with himself in consequence, and at last the longed-for event took place--he married. It was a marriage such as there are thousands: healthy bodies, dried-up souls, the temperament of a thinker and fanatic with a narrow and obstinate nature, very little real knowledge, very little power of intellectual expansion, while with increasing years was added an increase of moral severity. Discontented with the primal conditions of existence, his writings showed an increase of pessimism, while an ever greater number of past joys escaped his memory, and there was no pleasure that did not leave an after-taste of bitterness. When as an elderly man he looked back upon the first time when a young girl caused his pulse to beat the faster, he sought to explain the circumstance in the _Kreutzer Sonata_ by describing her as the only one who is pure and good, thus rendering a coarse touch to the imagination which betrays itself in the glorification of the child-woman. Hence the pose of a social reformer who takes an egotistic delight in nourishing the consciousness of martyrdom. These are a few general outlines contributing to a picture of Tolstoy, as he appears to me in his writings. For I believe that it is a man’s personal experiences which determine his opinions and form the rudiments of his mind and character, and that these rudiments, however much they may be obscured by time, are still there to be discovered by those who seek them. II _August Strindberg_