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Rh your tool!… Our tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: ‘It is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.’”

As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! In the Introduction to What I Believe he wrote:

“I believe that my life, my reason, my light, is given me exclusively for the purpose of enlightening my fellows. I believe that my knowledge of the truth is a talent which is lent me for this object; that this talent is a fire which is a fire only when it is being consumed. I believe that the only meaning of my life is that I should live it only by the light within me, and should hold that light on high before men that they might see it.”

But this light, this fire “which was a fire only when it was being consumed,” was a cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy’s fellow-artists. The more intelligent could not but suspect that