saw from the inside every phase of Russian life. He lived in the soldiers' camp and in the Courts of Royalty, in the drawing-rooms of fashion and in the haunts of Bohemia. He lived the savage life in the Caucasus, and the patriarchal life at Yasnaya Polyana. A man of uncontrollable passions, he committed every sin that it was fashionable for a man of his caste to commit. He gambled away his ancestral home, he joined the rebels of his fellow-officers, and wasted his substance in the company of gipsy girls. Yet from an early age he aspired to sanctity. Although professionally a soldier, he early became an apostle of peace. A literary lion in the circles of Moscow, he became the exponent of the simple life. An aristocrat to his finger-tips, he preached the gospel of democracy. A big landowner, he ended by being an advocate of the ideas of Henry George. A Christian ascetic and a woman-hater, yet his wife bore him sixteen children.
VI
Even as Tolstoy's surroundings provide the key to his life and character, they give us an explanation of his art. The one supreme and original contribution of the Russian mind to
