Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/246

242 But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy’s! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese:

“Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that man!”

Or in this defiance of the world:

“I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man is himself a man to be suppressed.”

Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the “crimes” of his past life:

“I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they cannot remember after death. What happiness if