Part 2

“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my work ‘Anna Karènina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself.... I saw only one thing--Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)--a

scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular--“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism,” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a _jehad_ against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution to the subject.

It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The much-condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual characters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and vital for their precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly _Athenæum_

permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make “the ornament of a museum,”--which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a “scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that there was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in the shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of Tolstoy--enormous work!--knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the world-spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land into the largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of thinking men and women.

His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals. Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a world of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. As he calls the politician and the social reformer back to the land and the common people, so he calls the artist back to the elemental forces ever at work beneath the surface-show of nature and humanity. With an extraordinary penetration into the hidden recesses of character, he joins a terrible truthfulness, and that absolute

simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life. There is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes in our Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of personality which glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen. His style is always natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, and the reader who prefers breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art, which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely figure. Theories, prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the daily enlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, the joy, the splendour of human destinies.

G. H. PERRIS.

TOLSTOY’S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

The justness of the word _great_ applied to a nation’s writers is perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his Age, and seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We may take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you realise that the World’s insight into, and understanding of that Age’s life has been supplied us by the special interpretation offered by two or three great minds. In fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their nation’s growth or strife _signifies_. How many dumb ages are there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we have no key!

Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably

must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern

Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of “Anna Karènina” and “War and Peace” has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of “Wilhelm Meister” and of “Resurrection” what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy to-day stands for the triumph of the European _soul_ against civilisation’s routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to _realising_ what the life of the modern man _is_. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer _whole_, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina,” those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing a whole nation’s life, to the worlds of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name. And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.

It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the

great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the _appeal_ of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own _progress_. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty,

relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in ‘Sebastopol’ we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man.”

Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvellously complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of to-day in contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in three or four generations, all the _spirit_ of modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated _cause and effect_ of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for _the modern soul’s alarm in contact with science_. And just as science’s _work_ after its first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more _conscious_ of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it _is_ feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel--this has been the great novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one truth--to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of life--never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man’s animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s _realism_ in art is symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a study ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The _realism_ of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely as _the conscience of the Russian world_ revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.

EDWARD GARNETT.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

[Sidenote: =Count Tolstoy=

_see Frontispiece_]

Lyeff Nikolaevitch Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana on August 28th (September 9th new style), 1828. His father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, was a member of the old Russian nobility. In 1813, after the siege of Erfurt, he was taken prisoner by the French and afterwards retired from the army holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Having assumed the burden of many family debts, he succeeded in paying his creditors in full, thus gaining a reputation for unfailing perseverance. Tolstoy has described his character in “Childhood and Youth.” “He was a man of the last century,” he wrote, “and, like all his contemporaries, he had in him something chivalrous, enterprising, self-possessed, amiable, a passion for pleasure.... His life was so full of all kinds of impulse that he had no time to think about convictions; and besides, he had been so happy all his life that he did not feel it necessary to do so.” His father died before Tolstoy reached the age of ten years, seven years after the death of his mother, of whom he wrote: “When I try to recall to mind my mother as she was then, only her brown eyes arise before me, always the same look of love and kindness in them. If during the most trying moments of my life I could have caught a glimpse of her smile, I should not have known what grief is.”

[Sidenote: =Tolstoy in his Student days=

_see page_ 2]

[Sidenote: =Yasnaya Polyana=

_see page_ 3]

Tolstoy’s early years were passed in the country on the old-fashioned Russian estate, which resembled somewhat in patriarchal habits, aristocratic manners, democratic familiarity, shiftlessness, and superstition, a Southern Plantation in the days of slavery. After the death of his father in 1837 the family was taken charge of by an aunt, the Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, and three years later by relatives of his mother who lived at Kazan. In 1843 Tolstoy entered the University of Kazan, where “Impervious to the ambitions of scholarship and research, unimpressed by the provincial aristocracy, too nice to enjoy the rough revels of the students, and repelled alike from aristocrats, professors, and students by an unsocial and what, with our English emphasis on government, we should call an unregulated disposition, he seems to have had during these two or three years a thoroughly unhappy and unprofitable experience.”[1] Having left the University in 1846 without graduating he returned to the old country home. Yasnaya Polyana descended to Tolstoy from his mother. The estate, which covers an area of some 2,500 acres, partly arable and partly wooded, lies a hundred miles due south of Moscow. It was at one time Tolstoy’s intention to dispossess himself entirely of his property and live as a peasant. Instead of this, however, he has made over the whole of the land to his wife and children, and lives in the house nominally as a guest.

[1] “Leo Tolstoy,” by G. H. Perris.

[Sidenote: =The Gateway to Yasnaya Polyana=

_see page_ 5]

At the entrance to the park are two towers, medieval in style, which were erected by Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather. From them the road runs through the park, rising as it approaches the house, and becomes merged in a level avenue of birch trees. Glimpses of a pond are caught through the dense foliage and of a square smoothly rolled space used as a tennis-ground, the game being one in which Count Tolstoy participates with great enjoyment. It will be noticed that in the photograph on page 31 he is holding a tennis racket in his hand.

[Sidenote: =The Approach to the Park=

_see page_ 4]

[Sidenote: =“The Tree of the Poor”=

_see page_ 7]