it is a light shining on high, a ray of mercy which falls upon life, but does not mingle with it. We have seen this in Resurrection, wherein faith dominates the reality, but remains external to it. The people, whom Tolstoy depicts as commonplace and mean when he regards the isolated figures that compose it, takes on a divine sanctity so soon as he considers it in the abstract.[1]
In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the contrast is even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love required of him; he acted otherwise; he lived not according to God but according to the world. And love itself: how was he to behave with regard to love? How distinguish between its many aspects, its contradictory orders? Was love of family to come first, or love of all humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by these alternatives.
What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the self-sufficient, the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain. They, to be sure, have found the truth; they hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be of use as a warning. Certainly he is not an example that
- ↑ See the Russian Proprietor, or see in Confessions, the strongly idealised view of these men, simple, good, content with their lot, living serenely and having the sense of life: or, at the end of the second part of Resurrection, that vision “of a new humanity, a new world,” which appeared to Nekhludov when he met the workers returning from their toil.
