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