- ture, make his characters so living and human that,
having read about them, they become as people you have known, and you can never forget them.
Also, Tolstoy's experience of life was wide and varied, and everything he wrote about he had himself known and seen. War in the Crimea, fashionable life in St. Petersburg, life with gipsies in the Caucasus, with peasants in the country, the joys and sorrows of intimate family life with children and animals—nothing escaped his notice, and his books are simply life seen through the medium of his wonderful and penetrating mind; there is nothing like them.
So there he was, the most brilliant and successful writer of the day, with a happy domestic life, money, a delightful property, and devoted servants and tenants. If any one ought to have been contented, it might be said it was Tolstoy. And yet he became dissatisfied and began again, as he had in earlier days, to find fault with himself and with his own life. He was fifty when the change in him began to take place; and yet it was no change really, he had always been the same; and the people who amuse themselves by finding inconsistencies in his character are wrong when they accuse him of being changeable: he merely returned now to his earliest ideals, which had been there all the time, though his intense enjoyment of life and his many occupations had prevented his thinking quite so much of working out his theories. It will be seen that Tolstoy had an extraordinary tenacity of
