Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/206

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will struggle desperately against its summum bonum. Since race suicide, then, is a hopeless desideratum, the reformer must turn to more practicable methods if he would at least alleviate the worst of our social maladjustments. Idleness is the mother of all mischief, because it superinduces sensual self-indulgence. Therefore we must suppress anything that makes for leisure and pleasure. At this point we grasp the meaning of Tolstoy's vehement recoil from art. It is, to a great extent, the strong-willed resistance of a highly impressionable puritan against the enticements of beauty, — their distracting and disquieting effect, and principally their power of sensuous suggestion.

The last extensive work published by Tolstoy was "Resurrection," (1889). In artistic merit it is not on a level with "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," nor can this be wondered at, considering the opinion about the value of art that had meanwhile ripened in the author.

"Resurrection" was written primarily for a constructive moral purpose, yet the subject matter was such as to secrete, unintendedly, a corrosive criticism of social and religious cant. The satirical connotation of the novel could not have been more