The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-05-31

he has undertaken to criticize the late Count Tostoy and the thousands of friends of the dead philosopher here and in Russia are hot on his trail although Shaw at the beginning of his essay pays a warm tribute to Tolstoys genius, say ing: He was a man of genius and In the very first flight of that rare spe- cies'' and ends with the eloquent pas sage.
 If you have a baby who can speak with Tsars in the gate, who can make Europe and America stop and listen when he opens his mouth, who can smite with unerring aim straight at the sor- est spots in the worlds conscience: who can break through all censorships and all barriers of language; who can thun- der on the gates of the most terrible prisons in the world, and place his neck under the keenest and bloodiest axes only to find that for him the gates dare not open and the axes dare not fall, then indeed you have baby that must be nursed and coddled and petted and let go his own way, in spite of all the wisdom of. governesses and schoolmas- ters.
 What Shaw attacks is the intelligence and honesty of Tolstoys personal con- duct and it is these characteristcally vigorous and irreverent passages which have aroused indignation here and in Russia. He writes:
 And yet no English old maid of coun- try family, living in cathedral town on s1500 year, could have made more ab- surd attempts to start an ideal social system by private misconduct than he. He put on the dress of a moulik exactly as Don Quixote put on a suit of armor. He tried to ignore money as Don Quix- ote did. He left his own skilled work to build houses that could hardly be in- duced to stand, and to make boots that an army contractor would have been ashamed of. He let his property drift to the verge of insolvency and ruin like the laziest Irish squire because he dis approved of property as an institution.
 And he was neither honest nor res- pectable in his follies. He connived at all sorts of evasions. He could not take money on a Journey; but he would take companion who would buy railroad tickets and pay hotel bills behind his back. He would not own property or copyrights; but he would make them over to his wife and children, and live in their country house in Yasnaya and their town house in Moscow very com fortably, only occasionally easing his conscience by making things as difficult and unpleasant for them as possible.
 "In the ordinary affairs of life he shrked every uncongenial responsibility, whilst availing himself of every luxury he really cared for. And he railed at his wife and family for enabling him to do it, treating his wife as ethically infe rior because she insisted on saving the family from ruin, until at last she gave him up as impossible, and managed for him without saying anything harsher than her Russian formula, Nothing matters so long as the baby is not cry ing"
 In another passage MT. Shaw shows that Tolstoy's discontent with his envi- ronment once took an aspect of "inhu- man callousness," as 1t led him to leave home and keep his wife for hours in the greatest anxiety at a time when the most ordinary considerateness would have led him to save her all possible excitement. MT. Shaw is ''amazed at the extent to which a man who was boundlessly sym pathetic on power with imaginary be- ngs could be so outrageously inconsid- crate to real people in his own home.