he artist we are enamoured. He may
deliver his message of warning to a careless world--which only pricks
up its ears when that message takes on questionable colour, as in the
unpalatable Kreutzer Sonata. (Yes; that was eagerly devoured for its
morbid eroticism.) We prefer the austerer Ibsen, who presents his men
and women within the frame of the drama, absolutely without personal
comment or _parti pris_--as before his decadence did Tolstoy in his
novels. Ibsen is the type of the philosophical anarch, the believer in
man's individuality, in the state for the individual, not the
individual for the state. It is at least more dignified than the
other's flood of confessions, of hysterical self-accusations, of
penitential vows, and abundant lack of restraint. Yet no one doubts
Tolstoy's repentance. Like Verlaine's it carried with it its own
proofs.

But why publish to the world these intimate soul processes,
fascinating as they are to laymen and psychologists alike? Why not
keep watch with his God in silence and alone? The reason was (only
complicated with a thousand other things, for Tolstoy was a complex
being and a Slav), the plain reason was, we repeat, because Leo
Nikolaievitch was an artist. He obeyed that demon known to Socrates
and Goethe, and minutely recorded his mental and emotional
fluctuations. And with Richard Wagner and Dostoievsky, Tolstoy is one
of the three most emotional temperaments of the nineteenth century.
Unlike Ibsen or Nietzsche, he does not belong to the twentieth
century; his religion, his social doctrines are atavistic, are of the
past. Tolstoy is what the French call _un cerebral_, which, as Arthur
Symons points out, is by no means a man of intellect. "_Un cerebral_
is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms
itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transformed by emotion."
How well that phrase fits Tolstoy--the fever of the soul! He has had
the fever of the soul, has subdued it, and his recital of his
struggles makes breathless reading. They are depicted by an artist, an
emotional artist, and, despite his protestations, by one who will die
an artist and be remembered, not as the pontiff of a new dispensation,
but as a great world artist.

An admirer has said of him that "confession has become his second
nature"; rather it was a psychological necessity. The voice that cried
from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique
"copy" for newspapers. Alas