A few hours' railway journey from St. Petersburg to Tula, and a dashing ride in a three-horse sleigh, through a snowstorm, brought me to Yasnia Poliana, the little village in the heart of European Russia, where the great novelist dwelt with his wife and children, among the rough peasants.

Altogether a strong face. A massive, wrinkled brow; blue-gray eyes, able to see the inside and outside of a man at once; a powerful, flat-nostrilled nose, jutting between high cheek bones; a mouth made for pity; a vast gray beard; a giant body clad in a coarse peasant's dress, gathered in at the waist under a stout leather belt; feet shod in shoes made by the brown, sinewy hands of the wearer.

Such was Count Lyoff Tolstoy, the god of Russian literature, as I found him in the savagely bare house where his greatest novels were written.

It was all so strange, -- and it was stranger still to an American writer, fresh from hard-headed London, Paris, and New York, -- to sit with the great master in this house, whose doors were never closed to the hungry or weary, whose table was always spread, whose owner called every wandering pilgrim a brother.

That night, as I lay in the Count's little iron cot, among his books, I heard the clock strike twelve, and it would not have surprised me if the clock had struck thirteen, so unusual were the ways of that wonderful place.

At the rough little table on which "War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina" were penned, I sat for hours with Count Tolstoy, struggling against the force of his sweeping condemnations of marriage as it is and not as it ought to be. And then I came to know how the husband of a high-souled, loving woman and the father of thirteen children came to write that awful protest against married life in the nineteenth century.

When the wild Count was married, nearly thirty years before, his wife was a mere child. It was this young girl -- a slender beauty of good family and fine breeding -- who for years strangled the cynicism that lurked in the novelist's ink bottle. When he was writing "War and Peace" she read his manuscript, page by page, and pleaded with him to strike bitter and fierce things out of his work, so that youth and innocence might share his beautiful thoughts without having to look into unveiled depths of loathsomeness. No man had a happier life, and no man owed more to marriage. But for the influence of this young wife, the pages of his greatest novels might have been spoiled by the brutalities which she persuaded him to abandon.

These things the Count confessed with almost boyish frankness. And yet, so complex is human nature and the workings of the human mind, that no man in the whole range of literature has held bitterer views of the influence of women upon the higher nature of men. As I saw these two sitting together, after thirty years of unbroken love and sympathy, it was hard to believe that I was talking to the author of the "Kreutzer Sonata."

Ten years before I went to Yasnia Poliana, Count Tolstoy was reading the story of the execution of a group of officers who planned the liberation of the serfs under Nicholas I., when he was seized with a longing to write a romance on the subject that would stir the world.

"But to write such a story I must learn the Russian language more thoroughly," he said to the Countess. "The great ethical truths of the world must be repeated in a new dialect every generation. I will go out on the road that runs past our house and talk to the pilgrims who are going to the holy places in Moscow. I will write down every new word that has any new meaning to me. I must learn to write as the peasants speak. I must learn to think as the peasants think."

"How is it," he would say to the Countess, as he returned at nightfall dusty and bronzed by the weather, "how is it that these people live without money and are happy? I cannot understand it."

As the weeks grew into months the lines on the novelist's forehead wore deeper and his eyes became sadder.

"No, I can't understand it," he would say. "These peasants and pilgrims are happy, really happy. It is no delusion. They know what it is to live. And yet we, who have money and everything that education can give us, are without this peace."

Then the avatar occurred. The soul of the romancist and poet died, and the soul of the reformer and prophet was born.

"It is religion," he cried. "The Church, the blessed Church gives them peace. They care nothing for hunger and nakedness and homelessness when they feel the consolations of true faith. We alone are living without real religion. That is why we cannot understand the happiness of the pilgrims. We are wasting ourselves on empty luxuries."

The Count began to go to church. For days at a time he would pray before the holy ikons. Sometimes prostrating himself face downward for hours on the cold pavement. By fasting, meditation, and appeal he sought heaven. He sternly trampled his grand artist nature under foot.

At this time the reign of Alexander II. ended in a spray of blood, and his stolid son ascended the throne. The liberal epoch had closed. Tolstoy was present in the church of the Kremlin when Alexander III. was crowned, and heard the multitude swear the oath of allegiance. Human eyes never looked upon a more brilliant spectacle than that which surrounded the new emperor, as, with uplifted hand and streaming eyes, he repeated the solemn coronation vows. Tolstoy returned to his Moscow residence in a profound fit of sadness. The Countess was unable to understand the cause of his new unrest, and he was too much absorbed in his own thoughts to offer any explanation. A great light was dawning in his soul. Finally the Count opened his Bible, and turning to the Sermon on the Mount he came to this passage: --

"The Church is a false teacher," he said to the Countess. "I have with my own eyes seen its priests administering an oath upon the very scriptures that forbid oaths. I will trust the Church no more. I must read the gospels for myself."

A few lines further on Tolstoy read aloud: "But I say unto you that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."

That was a moment of soul tempest. The old familiar Bible words were enchanted.

"Then what is the meaning of these hundreds of thousands of soldiers wearing the uniform of the Czar, blessed by the Church, night and morning, and trained to kill their fellow-men," he cried. "If it is wrong to resist evil, then it is wrong to arm men with deadly weapons and turn the world into a military camp. Swear not! Resist not evil! How cruelly the Church has blinded men to the real teachings of Christ. Away with it!"

Day after day Tolstoy studied the New Testament. As he read on, his conviction that the words of Christ were to be taken literally, grew firmer. He talked to the Countess as though he had discovered some new book, repeating to her again and again passages that seemed to conflict with the whole system of modern society.

"All this ceremony and theological mystery is a mockery of true religion," he said. "Christianity is simply love; not the love of one person, but the love of all persons, without distinction of age, sex, relationship, or nationality. Love is religion, and religion is love."

Then began that sweeping, weird change in the Count's life. His splendid house in Moscow was shut up, and he went to make his home with the rough peasants of Yasnia Poliana. His country residence soon gave evidence of his purpose. The carpets disappeared from the floors, the walls were stripped bare, and all objects of luxury were banished. The Count put on the coarse dress of the common moujik, and buckled a leather belt around his waist. He ploughed the fields with his own hands.

"I have no right to ask other men to work with their muscles and avoid manual toil myself," he said simply. The village shoemaker became the Count's chum, and the novelist soon began to make shoes in a little workshop of his own. He fraternized with the peasants, and sent his daughters among them to brighten their lives. Work and love became his religion.

Much of this I heard while I sat with the Countess Tolstoy and her daughters and consumed my black bread and coffee. Then I went down into the little dingy room where the Count worked as a shoemaker. Tolstoy had just come in from a long walk in the snow, and was brushing the wet drops from his beard and blouse. I never saw a more earnest countenance than that which he turned to me as he curled one leg up under him and clasped his muscular hands over his knee. It was all so simple and real -- a man who had struggled out of conventionality, back into naturalness. A spectacled, professorial disciple of the Count, dressed in peasant garb, and belted at the waist, sat on a shoe bench and reverently watched his leader.

"The story of the 'Kreutzer Sonata' is simply a protest against animality and an appeal for the Christianity of Christ," said the Count, searching me with his keen, candid eyes.

"But surely," I said, "you dare not hold up that awful picture as a portrait of the average men and women of to-day?"

"Why not?" he said, as he knotted and unknotted his big fingers. "Why not? Is it not life? Is it not the truth?"

"No," I answered. "I cannot say that it is. There is more pure, noble, spiritual love in marriage than you give humanity credit for. You judge the many by the few. You frighten men and women, drawn together by love, into the belief that there must be something base and loathsome in it."

"Bah! That is how we talk to ourselves," said the Count. "And the most terrible feature of the whole business is that we go on practising this half-conscious self-deceit. We cater to our base passions, and try to persuade ourselves that we have done some high, disinterested deed. Why not be honest, and look at the ugly facts? We approach marriage with preparations that give the lie to our hypocritical pretensions of purity."

"That is a condemnation that needs evidence to support it, Count," I said; "and I think you will find it hard to justify in your own mind, when you look back upon your own married life, the conclusion that the whole plan of nature is wrong, and that men and women who unite with no consciousness of impure motives may not safely trust the promptings that are within them."

Tolstoy unbuckled his belt, and clasped his hands behind his head.

"There you fall into the mistake of those who will not see the truth, because they dread the result of a sincere self-judgment," he said, and his spectacled disciple nodded his head vigorously. "A man or woman has two natures -- the animal and the spiritual. If a man deceives himself into believing that a purely physical passion is an attribute of his higher nature, of course he will go on indulging it and increasing it at the expense of his spiritual growth. That is why I protest against the common idea of married love. It is too much associated with personal gratification, too narrow and selfish, and too much directed to brute pleasure. It is not wrong to eat, but it is bestial to make eating an absorbing object of thought. A man should eat to satisfy hunger, but if he allows his mind to run on his food, he will become a glutton and beast at the cost of his soul. Eating is neither to be praised nor condemned. It is nature."

"And you mean to say, Count, that it is the result of your observation that brute passion is commonly mistaken for love in marriage?"

"I do. It is the principal source of marital unhappiness -- the awakening, the disillusionment. We are all hypocrites to ourselves."

"But I, too, have seen much of the world," I insisted, "and I deny the facts on which your argument is based. What would you say if I told you that I myself was in love, without any carnal consciousness?"

"I would say that you were arguing against yourself to hide the ugly truth. I would say that at the bottom crouched the animal."

"But if the animal is at the bottom, and not at the top, in what does pure affection suffer?"

"Let me explain," said the Count, standing up. "If you take a rope tied to the top of a maypole in your hand, and make it your object merely to go around the pole, the rope will not rise. The rope is your nature. If you make the animal passions a centre for your life, your nature will become baser and baser. Turn your back on the brute, and strain in the opposite direction, and the rope will rise, all that is fine and imperishable in you will be lifted up -- real love, the love that knows no selfish cravings."

"Then you would counsel me never to marry?"

As Tolstoy ceased speaking, I repeated to him Tennyson's argument in " The Princess":  --

"Yes," said the Count, when I had ended, "that is a good picture; but Tennyson was a rhymster. I cannot endure that sort of a poet. When a man has found a word that expresses his thought accurately, and changes that word for the sake of a rhyme, he is a trifler. It is true, though, that a man and a woman joined in pure love make the perfect being."

"In your indictment of the motives that lead to marriage in these days," I said, "you have not counted greatly on the craving for children. Is not the maternal and paternal feeling a desire for a sort of immortality -- a longing to renew one's self beyond the grave, to live again in one's children, with all the errors corrected? Is not this united aspiration of the body and soul pure beyond reproach?"

The Count paced the floor of the shoemaker's room, swinging his long arms as he talked.

"It is nature," he said. "It is like hunger -- neither good nor bad."

"But is it not spiritual? Is not the love of children for dolls the first faint awakening of the soul to this idea?"

"No. In the first place it does not exist in boys, although it is undeniably true that the desire for children is often strong in the minds of pure girls. As I have said, it is simply nature, like the desire for sleep or food."

Tolstoy laughed harshly, and laid his great hand on my shoulder.

"How can you ask that?" he said. "Marriage is the worst kind of selfishness, for it is double. There is no egotism like family egotism. In the selfishness of their life the husband and wife forget the love they owe to the rest of the world. Real love is simply the cohesive force of the spirit which draws the whole race together. That cohesive force I call God. God is simply love. That is what Christ tried to tell the world, but the churches have put another message in his mouth.

"Yes, yes, I know they say I have declared that marriage is a failure. That is nonsense. It is a failure when husband and wife fail to look upon mere passion as selfishness, and as the enemy of spiritual growth. From the worldly standpoint marriage ought to be a great success. Married life is the most economical life. A man stays at home instead of rioting abroad. I know that before I was married I was always in need of money, no matter how much my income was. In the very first month of my married life I found that I had more money than I really needed."

"Count Tolstoy," I said, "how do you define the soul as separate from the body during life? There are faculties of the higher nature that can vanish. The doctors will explain it by telling you that a certain part of the brain is diseased. When the skull is opened after death they can show you the destroyed tissue."

"Lies! lies! lies!" said Tolstoy, fiercely. I had struck him in a tender part. "The belief in doctors has reached the point of superstition. It is the fetich of the century. It used to be miraculous images; now it is doctors. Who verifies their statements? No one. People pretend to look at the evidence, but they don't."

"But if I knock you into unconsciousness, what becomes of the soul without the body?"

"You might just as well ask me where my spirit is when my body is asleep. The soul is simply consciousness and love. It is personality, not individuality. Identity may perish, but personality is indestructible. Consciousness of my being and love for my fellow-man are the substance; the body is only the shadow. If there is anything missing in the shadow, it must also be missing in the substance. The soul is related to the body in this thing only. If a man be paralyzed from head to foot and his consciousness remains, he is alive. If he can wink, he may communicate with others. If he be a king, and a man is brought before him for judgment, he can, with a movement of his eyelid, say whether life or death shall be the result. The soul is there complete, even though the body may be all but dead."

"And you think that the Christian world has rejected Christ?"

"The real Christ -- yes. But men are growing better, and the Christian idea of equality will in the end control."

"But there are some of Christ's teachings, which, if taken literally, can hardly be realized in our present social condition. Christ would have you set an unrepentant fallen woman at the table beside your wife and daughters."

"Why not?" said the Count. "Such a woman is the same in my eyes as my wife or daughters. She is simply unfortunate."

"You would not seat her at your table?"

"I certainly would."

"What right have you to expose innocence and purity to the touch of vice? What right have you to let your own flesh and blood run the risk of corruption?"

"Modern Christians believe that human nature is evil," said the Count, "but the Chinese believe that human nature is good. In this I am Chinese. When good and evil are brought together on equal ground, the good must prevail. That is a law of the universe."