to that elder generation of humanists who never learned, and were never required, to specialise themselves down to the level of technical education boards, county council committees, and schools of economics. They stood-Emerson, Carlyle, Mazzini, Ruskin- for morals as a whole, and especially for the union of ethics and economics. They were nearer to the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, for one thing; liberty, equality, and fraternity always presented themselves to their minds as an inseparable tri-unity. The cult of the expert can offer us no substitute for a rounded conception of the ideal life and the ethics which that conception demands. It is absurd to suggest that the antiState sentiment natural in Russia is equally proper here. But only those have a right to scoff at the principle of no-government who feel confident that a State which decent men may loyally support is attainable, and who are prepared to give their lives for its attainment. For the rest, Tolstoy's absorbing interest in the moral potentiality of the individual, in woman, in art, in the labourer, in the abolition of ruling castes, established hypocrisies, and prejudices and violence between nations, gives tremendous force to his appeal to thousands of men who cannot accept all his particular deductions.

The farcical excommunication reminds me that he has escaped martyrdom, so far, just because he is the one person in the empire whom the

Tsar himself dare not touch. That fact is eloquent testimony not only of his genius, which is universally admitted, but of the effectiveness and practicality of his teaching, which by foreign critics are very generally disputed. It is, indeed, one of the most remarkable spectacles in history, this immunity of the arch sedition-monger under the completest despotism of the time. Hardly a page that he has put forth in the last twenty years but has contained some scathing indictment of the falseness, the cruelty, of the social forms maintained by imperial authority around him. His contemporaries have to content themselves with indirect comments upon the diseases of public life, with veiled satire and allegorical fiction. He alone can say the plain truth without fear of the direst penalties; and surely the surgeon's knife was never used so unsparingly. What the censor forbids is secretly copied and passed from hand to hand throughout the empire, and more than one self-appointed missionary has suffered imprisonment for zeal in this direction.

He has founded no sect, no school larger than the little group of troubled peasants who gather for advice and assistance under the 'poor people's tree' at Yasnaya Polyana. A mere handful of men have followed the extreme lengths of his example in the renunciation of wealth, power, and luxury. It is only in spirit that his own household is united. He represents heaven, as P. A. Sergyenko puts it, while his wife, the

excellent woman to whom the world owes so much, represents the earth. But it is the spirit of operative love, of unflinching sincerity and faithfulness to high ideals, not the particular application and precept, that is the essential thing. There is no need to exaggerate the material sacrifices which Leo Tolstoy has made. Actually he lives in assured comfort, though in perfect simplicity. In his seventy-third year he still rode the horse and the bicycle, played tennis, enjoyed music, romped with the children, and, in brief, showed himself, a sane, highly-vitalised personality, far removed from the narrowness of the eastern ascetic. It is this sanity and grip of real things that make his example so powerful, his spirit so infectious. In the record of the last decade in Europe, few finer episodes will be found than the aged writer's campaigns against famine, religious persecution, the flogging of peasants, and militarism. No other modern teacher has had to contend with such a desperate environment, and no other has succeeded in giving such an inspiring picture of love triumphant over the world. One cannot think of so very human a figure as, in the false old sense, a saint. He will not be canonised by any church; and it is only after long years of laborious growth into complete self-possession and self-expression that this rare mind shows us, reflected, all the agonising search and struggle of the soul of our time. As we glance back over the story of his life, theories,

prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we can think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the dailyenlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, the splendour and joy of human destinies.

G. H. PERRIS.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

IN preparing the following extracts, I have received the most generous aid from Russian and English friends of Count Tolstoy, and from his translators and publishers. Mr. and Mrs.

Aylmer Maude have given me franchise of their excellent translations, and Mr. Tchertkoff has extended this privilege to all the publications of the Free Age Press. I am also indebted to the house of Walter Scott, Limited, pioneers in publishing Tolstoy in English, for permission to quote from some of their translations, especially What must We do, then? and The Kingdom of God is within You. A few extracts are now translated for the first time, and a larger number have been specially rendered; for these I have to thank Mr. T. Rothstein and Mr. F. Volkhovsky. In the work of selection and compression, I have been helped by my brother, F. F. Perris.

It will, of course, be understood that I am solely responsible for the choice of passages-especially for the perhaps rather impertinent experiment of an autobiographical chapter-and for their abbreviation and arrangement. The great bulk of Tolstoy's writings and their richness of thought have made it,