that you cannot be understood is bad. The chief defect of Walt Whitman is, that with all his enthusiasm, he yet lacks a clear philosophy of life. On some vital issues he stands at the parting of two ways and does not show us which way to go.

A great literature arises when there is a great moral awakening. Take, for instance, the emancipation period, when the struggle for the abolition of serfdom was going on in Russia, and the antislavery movement was alive in the United States. See what writers appeared: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thoreau, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, and others in America; Dostoyevsky, Tourgényeff, Herzen, Gógol, Nekrásoff, Nádson, and others in Russia. The period that followed, when men were not bracing themselves to sacrifice material considerations for moral ones, would have been a barren time had not some writers, nurtured and formed in the heroic period, been left to carry on its tradition.

Tolstoy speaks very highly of Matthew Arnold's works on religion. He says that the usual estimate puts Arnold's poems first, his critical writings second, and his religious works third; but that this is just the reverse of a true estimate. The religious writings are his best and most important work. That Tolstoy has rightly gauged the "usual estimate" finds confirmation in the book on Matthew Arnold, since published by Professor Saintsbury, in which Literature and Dogma, God

and the Bible, A Comment on Christmas, etc., are classed as "these unfortunate books," and we are told that "nobody wants religion of that sort."

Tolstoy considered that Arnold's essay on his own (Tolstoy's) writings contained sound and just criticism. Indeed, it was Tolstoy's fortune to be introduced to the general reader in England and America by the best sponsors he could have had. Not the least among the services rendered by Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells is the cordial welcome with which, many years ago, each of them on his own side of the Atlantic greeted an author whose views are, even to-day, singularly little understood by some who profess to admire them.

Wishing to induce Tolstoy to admit the merits. of some of Matthew Arnold's poems, I marked a few, such as Rugby Chapel, To a Republican Friend, The Divinity, Progress, Revolution, Selfdependence, and Morality, and sent them to him. He returned the book in a few days with the remark that they were very good, "but what a pity they were not written in prose!"

In poetry Tolstoy is, indeed, hard to please. Why, he asks, need men hamper the clear expression of their thoughts by selecting a style which obliges them to choose, not the words which best express their meaning, but those that best enable them to get the lines to scan? If we can say what we have to say in three words, why use five? Or if a word or two more will avoid the risk of being misunderstood, why not add them?

People have written valuable things in verse; but they could, in most cases, have said them better in prose. And how much worthless stuff has been circulated merely for the sake of the skill with which it was expressed!

Similarly of eloquence: a visitor one day was speaking of the charm of eloquence. "Yes," said Tolstoy, "but what a dangerous thing it is," and he went on to tell how he heard a celebrated advocate pleading a cause and had found it difficult not to allow his own judgment to be warped by the mercenary eloquence of the lawyer.

Tolstoy is too truthful not to tell those who consult him his real opinion of their work; but he is too considerate to like hurting their feelings, and as the standard he sets for himself and for others is very high, he often finds himself in a difficult position.

I remember one afternoon, at Yásnaya Polyana, how he came to the tea-table, set out in the open air, and told us that an old man, retired from Government service, had just been with him in his study showing him a long poem. Tolstoy had asked him to read some verses of it, and, though he feared the old gentleman would be angry, was obliged to tell him that it was terrible rubbish. Indeed, judging by some scraps that Tolstoy laughingly repeated, the poem must have been unusually bad. Fortunately, however, the visitor turned out to be one of the most eventempered of mortals, and merely said: "You

don't mean to say so; why here have I been ten years composing it, and thought it was so good!" and then took his departure, apparently in no way disturbed by the verdict pronounced on his production.

I once asked Tolstoy how he accounted for the supreme rank among authors accorded to Shakespear in Russia and elsewhere. He said he explained it to himself by the fact, that the "cultured crowd" who care for these things have no clear idea of the purpose and aim of life. And they can most readily and heartily admire an author who is like themselves in this respect-i.e. one with no central standpoint from which to measure his relation to all else. Shakespear owes his great reputation to the fact that he is an artist of great and varied abilities; but he owes it yet more to the fact that he shares with his admirers this great weakness-that he has not found the answer to the question, What are we alive for?

From Shakespear to the Review of Reviews is a far cry, but the same perception of man's need of guidance, and of the possibility of good guidance being supplied (as it was by Socrates, Lao-Tsze, Buddha, and others more familiar to us) if our ears are open and we are willing to concentrate our attention primarily on what is really important,underlies the view he expressed of that magazine. It should be premised that he was not comparing the Review of Reviews with other periodicals, but was rather contrasting it with what we should

desire from the literature we read. A visitor remarked that the Review of Reviews (a copy of which happened to be lying about) always gave him a headache, and Tolstoy replied that that was just the effect it had on him, though he had hardly realised it till he heard the remark made. The jumble of facts and opinions of all sorts, not co-ordinated by any consistent central perception, is what causes the mental strain. Even in the original parts of the magazine, what is one to make of the mixture of patriotism and Christianity pulling different ways, but both considered good? love of liberty and laudation of autocrats? love of peace, and desire to have the map of Africa painted red, etc.?

Mr Stead wants to have two patriotisms: a bad patriotism, which he calls Jingoism, and a good patriotism. But he never defines the one or the other, so as to enable us to know when the line of right is being overstepped. Every patriotism (i.e. deliberate preference for our own country), by tending to make us jealous and suspicious of the men of other nations, or willing to injure them, does harm.

Of course the criticism applies to most journalism, and Tolstoy is emphatic as to the advisability of giving a preference to books rather than to ephemeral literature. I hear that Tolstoy, showing a copy of Mr Stead's War against War to a friend recently, spoke of it with approval, saying that he had not time to read it carefully, but that at any rate it was an effort in a right direction,