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Your lungs are slowly emulating it, and your wits will cloud in time. Read Tolstoi, Mr. Hart. He will teach you how nicotine deadens the conscience." "At last I know why I smoke like a Thames tug," laughed Hart, "but I'm blest if I can understand why you make such a study of the vile weed." "Most criminals are addicted to the habit. I classify them by their brand of tobacco.
Tennyson was cock-sure that the English were God's own people, and in all this bloodshed were doing the blessed work of their Father in heaven. "God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar." Throughout the heat of the conflict, Tolstoi felt its utter absurdity, really holding the same views of war that he held as an old man.
The life of Dostoevski contrasts harshly with the luxurious ease and steady level seen in the outward existence of his two great contemporaries, Turgenev and Tolstoi. From beginning to end he lived in the very heart of storms, in the midst of mortal coil.
Turgenev's place in modern European literature is best defined by saying that while he stands as a great classic in the ranks of the great novelists, along with Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Tolstoi, Flaubert, Maupassant, he is the greatest of them all, in the sense that he is the supreme artist.
Dostojevsky like Tolstoi and Gogol emphasised two things: first, there is no great man; secondly, there is no worthless man. He described the blackest crimes and the deepest fall and showed that the authors of such crimes are men just as other men, with much good hidden under their sins.
This confession, after it was brought to the Czar by Tolstoi, to whom Alexis gave it, was sent by him to the great council of state, to aid them in forming their opinion. The council were occupied for the space of a week in hearing the case, and then they drew up and signed their decision.
Oh, her needs are great, her thirst is immense. She does not need so much what Tolstoi proposed for her, or what Harnack could give her, neither does she thirst after the stricter and clearer juristic definitions, nor after a "sweet reasonableness," as Matthew Arnold expressed Christ's being, a new theology or a new worship. She needs more Christian dramas blended in one.
Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort's or that old French poet's who wrote: Femme, plaisir de demye heure, Et ennuy qui sans fin demeure. Ibsen is as idealistic as Strindberg is materialist.
And he sinks into the despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph.
And it is worth remembering that when Tolstoi was a young man, his aunt advised him to have an intrigue with a married woman, for the added polish and ease it would give to his manners, just as an American mother sends her boy to dancing-school.
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