Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/351

Rh sort of unity by social and political forces generated, for the most part, in the remote past and operative through many centuries, while the people of America have been welded into such unity as they display by the operation of comparatively new forces, in conjunction with many of the older forces operative in Europe. The pressure that makes for equality, the pressure which we may broadly denominate as democratic, has worked more slowly in Europe than it has here, and the spirit of caste has been more powerful. Hence, as it seems to me, there has been more occasion in Europe than in America for the soul of man to brood upon the imperfections of society and to find refuge in liberal and idealistic thought. It is the old story that adversity is a better nurse of virtue than prosperity. I do not wish to push the point too far, but it certainly seems to me to be a significant fact, even after all due allowances are made for the effects of individual genius, to find what many persons regard as the greatest cosmopolitan force in Literature to-day, proceeding from one of the most backward and oppressed of all the great peoples of the world. The most potent voice of my generation, if I know what the words I am using mean, is that of a true cosmopolitan who is also a Russian, Count Tolstoy.

I know that he is sneered at as a visionary, and that one eminent American is said to have pronounced him to be a moral pervert. I know that he preaches love instead of force, and that thereby he lays himself open to the charge of being a weakling. I know that his views with regard to Art and Science, to modern governmental methods and policies, and to that much lauded virtue, patriotism, are, to say the least, not acceptable to the average citizen anywhere, and are anathema to many well-to-do persons plethoric in pocket and neck. But I know also that he is the only living man in private life, and one of the very few since Voltaire, whom an organized and powerful government has with good reason shown itself to be afraid to punish for his unacceptable