ally as the force of life had been annulled within
me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and
imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange
was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient
juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life
was to be BETTER. I gave up the life of the conventional world,
recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its
superfluities simply keep us from comprehending,"--and Tolstoy
thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and
happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.[96]

[96] I have considerably abridged Tolstoy's words in my translation.

As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental
vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was
logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his
outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one
of those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and
insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our
polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the
eternal veracities lie with more natural and animal things. His crisis
was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine
habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were
ways of truth. It was a case of heterogeneous personality tardily and
slowly finding its unity and level. And though not many of us can
imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human
marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be
better for us if we could.

Bunyan's recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together
he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now
down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through
the blood of Christ.

"My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and
trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as full of
guilt and fear as ever heart could hold." When a good text comes home
to him, "This," he writes, "gave me good encouragement for the space of
two or three hours"; or "This was a good day to me, I hope I shall not
forget it", or "The glory of these words was then so weighty on me that
I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet, not with grief and trouble, but
with solid joy and peace"; or "This made