Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/199

 so far astray from ecclesiastical paths that in due course of time he was unavoidably exconmiunicated from his church. His convictions made him a vehement antagonist of churchdom because of its stiffness of creed and laxness of practice. For his own part he soon arrived at a full and absolute acceptance of the Christian faith in what he considered to be its primitive and essential form. In "Walk Ye in the Light," (1893), the reversion of a confirmed worldling to this original conception of Christianity gives the story of the writer's own change of heart.

To the period under discussion belongs Tolstoy's drama, "The Power of Darkness," (1886). It is a piece of matchless realism, probably the first unmixedly naturalistic play ever wrought out. It is brutally, terribly true to life, and that to life at its worst, both in respect of the plot and the actors, who are individualized down to the minutest characteristics of utterance and gesture. Withal it is a species of modern morality, replete with a reformatory purpose that reflects deeply the author's tensely didactic state of mind. His instructional zeal is heightened by intimate knowledge of the Russian peasant, on his