Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/243

Rh ardour that he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is “maddened with life.” He is “intoxicated with life.” He cannot live without this madness. He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality. His renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With him anger is calm, and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education,