little trace. It is conceivable that the great trilogy of "Anna
Karenina," "War and Peace," and "Resurrection" may one day be forgotten,
but Tolstoy's teaching stands on firmer foundations, and has stirred the
hearts of thousands who are indifferent to the finest display of psychic
analysis. He has taught men to venture beyond the limits set by reason,
to rise above the actual and to find the meaning of life in love. It was
his mission to probe our moral ulcers to the roots and to raise moribund
ideals from the dust, breathing his own vitality into them, till they
rose before our eyes as living aspirations. The spiritual joy of
which he wrote was no rhetorical hyperbole; it was manifest in the man
himself, and was the fount of the lofty idealism which made him not only
"the Conscience of Russia" but of the civilised world.

Idealism is one of those large abstractions which are invested by
various minds with varying shades of meaning, and which find expression
in an infinite number of forms. Ideals bred and fostered in the heart of
man receive at birth an impress from the life that engenders them, and
when that life is tempest-tossed the thought that springs from it
must bear a birth-mark of the storm. That birth-mark is stamped on all
Tolstoy's utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though
he did not pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with
eyes undimmed from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is
not thereby invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none
the less a state of perfection to which we must continually aspire,
undaunted by partial failure.

"There is nothing wrong in not living up to the ideal which you have
made for yourself, but what is wrong is, if on looking back, you cannot
see that you have made the least step nearer to your ideal."