ABSTRACT
A face overgrown with hair, showing more coverts than clearings, thickets barring the way to inspection of the inner man. The patriarchal beard, streaming in the wind, climbs high up on to the cheeks, for decades hides the full lips, and covers the brown and seamed and bark-like skin. One cannot but try to unclothe this hair-clad countenance in imagination, to clip away the outgrowths, to conjure up the nude face as index to the soul within - and the portraits of Tolstoy in youth, when he was clean-shaven, are a help here. Genius, forever a wanderer, had found house-room in a lowly habitation, in a Russian physiognomy of everyday type, within whose walls one might expect to discover anything in the world except the man who lived for the things of the spirit, except the poet and dreamer, except the creative worker.
