WALKS AND TALKS WITH TOLSTOI -MARCH, 1894 99 



be Suvaroff or Skobeleff or Gourko he may win great 

 battles ; if he be Mendeleieff he may reach some epoch- 

 making discovery in science ; if he be Derjavine he may 

 write a poem like the &quot;Ode to God&quot;; if he be Antokolsky 

 he may carve statues like &quot;Ivan the Terrible&quot;; if he be 

 Nesselrode he may hold all Europe enchained to the ideas 

 of the autocrat ; if he be Miloutine or Samarine or Tcher- 

 kassky he may devise vast plans like those which enabled 

 Alexander II to free twenty millions of serfs and to se 

 cure means of subsistence for each of them ; if he be Prince 

 Khilkoff he may push railway systems over Europe to the 

 extremes of Asia ; if he be De Witte he may reform a vast 

 financial system. 



But when a strong genius in Russia throws himself into 

 philanthropic speculations of an abstract sort, with no 

 chance of discussing his theories until they are full-grown 

 and have taken fast hold upon him, if he be a man of 

 science like Prince Kropotkin, one of the most gifted sci 

 entific thinkers of our time, the result may be a wild 

 revolt, not only against the whole system of his own coun 

 try, but against civilization itself, and finally the adoption 

 of the theory and practice of anarchism, which logically 

 results in the destruction of the entire human race. Or, if 

 he be an accomplished statesman and theologian like Po- 

 bedonostzeff, he may reason himself back into mediaeval 

 methods, and endeavor to fetter all free thought and to 

 crush out all forms of Christianity except the Russo-Greek 

 creed and ritual. Or, if he be a man of the highest genius 

 in literature, like Tolstoi, whose native kindliness holds 

 him back from the extremes of nihilism, he may rear a 

 fabric heaven-high, in which truths, errors, and paradoxes 

 are piled up together until we have a new Tower of Babel. 

 Then we may see this man of genius denouncing all science 

 and commending what he calls &quot;faith&quot;; urging a return 

 to a state of nature, which is simply Rousseau modified by 

 misreadings of the New Testament; repudiating mar 

 riage, yet himself most happily married and the father of 

 sixteen children; holding that ^Eschylus and Dante and 



