rushing life, through laughter seen by the world and tears invisible and unknown to it." It is this quality again that moved a foreign critic to say that Tolstoy "possesses the skill of an English chemist with the soul of a Hindu Buddhist."
To what extraordinary lengths this gift of sympathy with the characters depicted, of placing themselves so to speak in their heroes' skin, can go with the Russian writers, may be gathered from the following anecdote, sufficiently attested to be quoted here.
"One dreary winter day Tolstoy and Turgenieff, in their aimless rambles, came upon a broken-down old horse waiting for its driver, in the piercing cold. Tolstoy walked over to the horse and tenderly patting the shivering animal, depicted its pedigree, past history, and its feelings at the moment, in a few masterly strokes, with such power, boundless love and compassion, that Turgenieff half-jokingly burst out: 'Lyoff Nikolayevich! you surely must have had several generations of horses among your ancestors, for otherwise you could not feel so deeply for this horse.'"
This was the secret mainspring that enabled Tolstoy (in common with the other great Russian writers) to depict with equal facility, sureness of touch and unerring power, all kinds of characters: children, adults, and old folk; men and women in all walks of life, from rulers of nations, through ministers, statesmen, courtiers, great noblemen and clergymen, down to the smallest prison official who can be bought with a pound of sugar; the martyrs of the Russian revolution and its dungeon-keepers, executioners, and hardened jailbirds; the most ideal representatives of Russian womanhood and the women of the gutter.
But this altruism in dealing with others makes them just as cruel in dealing with themselves (in their remorseless self-analysis and self-criticism) as they are tender in dealing with others, for in depicting in both cases with equal fidelity to actual life, they are drawn by their extreme idealism to
