it should be so! What suffering it would mean if, in that other life, I were to recall all the evil I have done down here!”[1]
Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau, because, as the latter said, “feeling that the good exceeded the evil it was in my interest to tell everything.”[2] Tolstoy, after having made the attempt, decided not to write his Memoirs; the pen fell from his hands; he did not wish to be an object of offence and scandal to those who would read it.
“People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who ordains us to be shameful.”[3]
Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and the humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy. Behind Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, the innocents, whose tears and naïve confessions had touched him as a child.
But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty years of Tolstoy’s life; a magnificent warfare between the highest powers of his mind: Truth and Love.
Truth—“that look which goes straight to the heart,” the penetrating light of “those grey eyes which pierce you through”—Truth was his earliest faith, and the empress of his art.
