Author Description

THE prologue, with its guest-table and shadowy modern personages, is, on the whole, unnecessary, though no doubt it does serve the useful, if obvious, purpose of giving the keynote of what is to follow. The guests are not individual personages, but conventional modern types. Apart from the main text, this prologue is interesting as an admirable example of Tolstoy's almost unique faculty for condensation-a faculty genuinely natural to him, though it may seem to some strange to affirm this of the author of the most diffuse works of fiction of our time. With a few keen rapid touches he sways the reader's mind this way and that, till he suddenly brings it up short, as a bewildered person traversing the dark after a swift guide abruptly comes upon a dead wall, with these concluding words:-" It appears, therefore, that no one should lead a good, upright, spiritual life; the utmost people may do is to discourse about it." Then, without further preamble, the story opens, one hundred years after the birth of Christ, in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, and at the house of one Juvenal, a wealthy merchant of Tarsus in the province of Cilicia. This Juvenal has a son Julius, who is the chief personage in the story. He and his friend, Pamphilius, respectively represent Worldly Wisdom and Christianity à la Leo Tolstoy, and the whole narrative turns upon the intellectual ebb and flow set in motion by the mental and other differences of the two friends. The old physician, who plays so important a part in restraining Julius from accepting Christianity, is clearly meant to typify the scientific mind. No one can deny the singular fairness and frankness of Count Tolstoy in this remarkable book. So frank, so fair is he, indeed, that again and again he, as Pamphilius, distinctly emerges the worse from the intellectual encounter. A Christian of his own sect might read Work While Ye Have the Light, and despairingly exclaim, '' Almost thou persuadest me to be a Pagan." When, i