this supreme crisis, rather than in the vernal hour of love's avowal,
the heart is illumined with a joy which is fated "never to return."

The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in fact
delayed in Tolstoy's own life by his wife's intelligent assistance in
his literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the mutual anxieties
and pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children.
Wider horizons opened to his mental vision, his whole being was
quickened and invigorated. "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," all the
splendid fruit of the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear
witness to the stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning
recognition of the power and extent of female influence appears
incidentally in the sketches of high society in those two masterpieces
as well as in the eloquent closing passages of "What then must we do?"
(1886). Having affirmed that "it is women who form public opinion, and
in our day women are particularly powerful," he finally draws a picture
of the ideal wife who shall urge her husband and train her children
to self-sacrifice. "Such women rule men and are their guiding stars. O
women--mothers! The salvation of the world lies in your hands!" In that
appeal to the mothers of the world there lurks a protest which in
later writings developed into overwhelming condemnation. True, he chose
motherhood for the type of self-sacrificing love in the treatise "On
Life," which appeared soon after "What then must we do?" but maternal
love, as exemplified in his own home and elsewhere, appeared to him as a
noble instinct perversely directed.

The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child's
physical well-being is the first essential in the mother's eyes--the
growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly
tenanted--and this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father