resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm himself or perish.  The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt.  “Woman is a stumbling-block in a man’s career,” remarks a philosophical husband in “Anna Karenina.”  “It is difficult to love a woman and do any good work, and the only way to escape being reduced to inaction is to marry.”

Even in his correspondence with the Countess A. A. Tolstoy this slighting tone prevails.  “A woman has but one moral weapon instead of the whole male arsenal.  That is love, and only with this weapon is feminine education successfully carried forward.”  Tolstoy, in fact, betrayed a touch of orientalism in his attitude towards women.  In part no doubt as a result of his motherless youth, in part to the fact that his idealism was never stimulated by any one woman as it was by individual men, his views retained this colouring on sex questions while they became widened and modified in almost every other field of human philosophy.  It was only that, with a revulsion of feeling not seldom experienced by earnest thinkers, attraction was succeeded by a repulsion which reached the high note of exasperation when he wrote to a man friend, “A woman in good health—­why, she is a regular beast of prey!”

None the less, he showed great kindness and sympathy to the women who sought his society, appealing to him for guidance.  One of these (an American, and herself a practical philanthropist), Miss Jane Addams, expressed with feeling her sense of his personal influence.  “The glimpse of Tolstoy has made a profound impression on me, not so much by what he said, as the life, the gentleness, the soul of him.  I am sure you will understand my saying that I got more of Tolstoy’s philosophy from our conversations than I had gotten from our books.” (Quoted by Aylmer Maude in his “Life of Tolstoy.”)

As frequently happens in the lives of reformers, Tolstoy found himself more often in affinity with strangers than with his own kin.  The estrangement of his ideals from those of his wife necessarily affected their conjugal relations, and the decline of mutual sympathy inevitably induced physical alienation.  The stress of mental anguish arising from these conditions found vent in pages of his diaries (much of which I have been permitted to read), pages containing matter too sacred and intimate to use.  The diaries shed a flood of light on Tolstoy’s ideas, motives, and manner of life, and have modified some of my opinions, explaining many hitherto obscure points, while they have also enhanced my admiration for the man.  They not only touch on many delicate subjects—­on his relations to his wife and family—­but they also give the true reasons for leaving his home at last, and explain why he did not do so before.  The time, it seems to me, is not ripe for disclosures of this nature, which so closely concern the living.