in a series of novels that secured for him at once rank among the greatest novelists of his age.

Aided by his writings.

In the second discourse of this series, I spoke of his having deprecated his novels, and of his having expressed his preference for his ethical and religious and sociological and economical and political writings. I ventured to say to him that but for his novels he would have gotten but comparatively few people to look into his other writings, that his fiction had secured a world-wide audience, that they contained many of the teachings of his other books, and that the public swallows a moral pill easiest when offered in the form of a novel. To which he replied "Most readers swallow the sugar-coating and leave the pill untouched, or, if they swallow it, it remains unassimilated."

His novels criticized.

And he was right. I have heard much criticism of Tolstoy's novels. Some find him too realistic, too plain spoken, even coarse. A certain magazine that had begun publishing his "Resurrection" was obliged to discontinue the story, because of complaints by many of its readers. It was a sad commentary, not on the morals of the writer but on the lack of morals, or on the false modesty, of the readers, for that novel has been declared by eminent critics to be "the greatest and most moral novel ever written." Others again value his realism for whatever spice they might find therein, little heeding the serious purpose for which the story was written.

Few know meaning of novel in Russia.

At best, few people understand the meaning of a novel in such a country as Russia, where free press, free pulpit, free platform and free speech are unknown, where the novelist attempts to do the work of all of these, under the guise of fiction, the only form of literature that has a chance to pass the eye of the censor. Whole systems of political and social and moral reform are crowded between the covers of a novel, which, if published in any other form of literature, would condemn the author to life-long imprisonment in the Siberian mines. The novelist in Russia does not look upon himself as an entertainer nor as a money-maker, neither is he looked upon as such. He is the prophet, the leader, the teacher, the tribune of the people, the liberator—the emancipation of the Russian serfs, for instance, was entirely due to the novel. He has serious work to do, and he does it seriously. His eye is not upon rhetoric nor upon aesthetics, but upon the evil he has to uproot, on the corruption he has to expose, on the reform he has to institute, on the philosophy of life he has to unfold, and to do that means the production of a novel like "Anna Karénina" or of a play like "The Power of Darkness." He speaks not to English or American puritans, but to Russians, whose receptivity of strong, plain speech is healthier than ours.

Spoke as a prophet and reformer.

Such a novelist was Tolstoy. His fiction is as powerful as is the art of the Pre-Raphaelites. It is all sincerity. Nothing escapes him. What the X-Ray does in the physical world that his penetrating eye does in the field of morals. He sees the sin through a thousand layers of pretense and hypocrisy, and he describes it as he sees it. Disagreeable as are some of the subjects of which he treats, there is not a line that may not be read without a blush by the pure-minded. Like a surgeon, who cuts into the sore for the purpose of letting out the poison, he lays bare the wrongs and rottenness of church and government for the purpose of affecting the needed cure. As a prophet he speaks the language of prophets. As a reformer he tells the truth as reformers tell it, unvarnished and ungarnished. He spares others as little as he spared himself in his book "My Confession." He wants others to do as he has done, to subject the lusts and appetites and greeds to the rule of conscience, if the kingdom of God is ever to be established on earth.

Opposed by government.

Radical in his reform propositions from the first, he attracted attention at once. The world was amazed at the daring of his thought and at the plainness of his speech, and hailed him as a new prophet. The government, however, looked upon him as a revolutionist, and gave him clearly to understand that he would be silenced if he did not change his views and style of writing. Instead of complying with its wish, he became all the more daring in thought and all the plainer in speech. The humblest peasant could understand as clearly as the shrewdest diplomat what he was after. And it was not long before the government was after him. The publication and sale of certain of his books were prohibited. They were read all the more outside of Russia, and by the thousands of copies within Russia. And the more they were read the larger loomed his world-fame, till he became too large for banishment or prison, for fortress or Siberian mine.

Challenged government to do its worst.

With all the fiery zeal of an ancient Jewish prophet, he challenged the government to do its worst, "to tighten the well-soaped noose about his throat" as it tightened it about the throats of thousands of better men than any that are in the service of the autocrat or of his hirelings, the bureaucrats. Theirs was a government, he said, by might not by right, by gallows and knout, not by law.

His political demands.

He demanded the abolition of the throne and of capital punishment, the disbanding of the army, and the discontinuance of trial by court-martial. He demanded liberty of speech and freedom of conscience. He demanded the surrender to the people of lands and rights that justly belonged to them, and scathingly he denounced those who wasted in riotousness what had been painfully gotten together with the heart's blood of the laboring-people. He denounced the government for its cruelty toward the Jews, and charged it with having instigated the massacres of them. He held the government responsible for every misfortune that befell the country—war, famine, pestilence, intense poverty, hopeless misery, appalling ignorance. In burning words he charged the slaughter of tens of thousands of husbands and fathers and sons, in the Japanese war, to the greed of the mighty. He depicted the Duma as the laughing stock of the world, as composed of people so stupid as not even to recognize what fools they were making of themselves. In his "Resurrection" he held up to the view of the world Russia's courts of law, and her iniquitous prison-system, the blocking of justice, the shocking judicial indifference and laxities in cases involving life-long sentences to penal servitude, the "lives that are shed like water upon the ground" during the transport to Siberia, and the crimes and rebellions that are systematically bred by such crying injustice.