Page:Rolland Life of Tolstoy.djvu/248

244 “The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”

The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother. The truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean.

But very soon the “horrible truth” was no longer enough for him. Love had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; “the natural state of his soul” When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never relinquished the truth; he made way for love.

Love is “the basis of energy.” Love is the “reason of life; the only reason, with beauty.” Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened by life, of the author of War and Peace and the Letter to the Holy Synod.