and the contiguous dust
of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's
Valreie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna
Karenina are these daughters of earth--flesh and blood, tears and
lust, and the pride of life that killeth.

Despite Tolstoy's religious mania, I have never doubted his sincerity
for a moment. It is a mysterious yet potent factor in the psychology
of such an artist as he that whatever he did he did with tremendous
sincerity. That is the reason his fiction is nearer reality than all
other fictions, and the reason, too, that his realities, _i. e._, his
declarations of faith, are nearer other men's fictions. When he writes
of his conversion, like John Bunyan, he lets you see across the very
sill of his soul. And he does it artistically. He is not conscious
that art enters into the mechanism of this spiritual evisceration;
but it does. St. Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of
their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three
there is a touch of the sublime naivete of childhood's outpourings.

I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points
of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's
extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century. Ibsen's
individualism appeals. Better his torpedo exploding a thousand times
under the social ark than the Oriental passivity of the Russian. There
is hope in the message of Brand; none in Tolstoy's nihilism. One
glorifies the will, the other denies, rejects it. No comparison can be
made between the two wonderful men as playwrights. Yet Tolstoy's
Powers of Darkness is brutal melodrama when compared to Ibsen's
complex dramatic organisms. But what a nerve-shattering revelation is
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. This is the real Tolstoy.

How amateurish is the attitude of the Tolstoy disciple who cavils at
his masterpieces. What is mere art compared to the message! And I say:
what are all his vapourings and fatidical croonings on the tripod of
pseudo-prophecy as compared to Anna Karenina? There is implicit drama,
implicit morality in its noble pages, and a segment of the life of a
nation in War and Peace. With preachers and saviours with quack
nostrums the world is already well stocked. Great artists are rare.
Every day a new religion is born somewhere--and it always finds
followers. But art endures, it outlives dynasties, religions,
divinities. It is with Tolstoy t