<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1> TOLSTOY<br/> </h1>
<p class="t2">
BY L. WINSTANLEY, M.A.<br/></p>
<h3> CHAPTER I </h3>
<p class="t3">
TOLSTOY'S CONTEMPORARIES</p>
<p>The most striking literary phenomenon of the nineteenth
century is, undoubtedly, the rise into power and
prominence of Russian authors.</p>
<p>Some fifty years ago Russian literature was
practically unknown to Western Europe; by the majority of
people its very existence seems to have been
unsuspected; we find even so great an adventurer as Carlyle,
himself guiding his countrymen to many new tracts of
literary discovery, speaking of "the great silent Russians
who are drilling a whole continent into obedience, but
who have produced 'nothing articulate' as yet."[<SPAN name="chap01fn1text"></SPAN><SPAN href="#chap01fn1">1</SPAN>] In
less than thirty years from the time when Carlyle
penned that sentence Russian literature had become
recognised as one of the most powerful and vital in
Europe; its influence, already enormous, increases
every day; it is great in France, in Germany, in
Scandinavia, even in conservative England; hardly since the
Renaissance has Europe beheld such a phenomenon—a
literary advance at once so rapid and so great.</p>
<p class="footnote">
<SPAN name="chap01fn1"></SPAN>
[<SPAN href="#chap01fn1text">1</SPAN>] <i>Heroes and Hero Worship</i>.</p>
<p>The truth is that we have seen in Russia a growth
very similar to that which occurred in Western Europe
at the time of the Renaissance. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries Europe as a whole experienced the
vivifying influence of two great literatures—Greek and
Latin—and it had, at the same time, a mode of life
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P8"></SPAN>8}</span>
to depict and ideas of life to express which differed
widely from those of the classical nations: the great
models showed them the fascination of poetry and art,
and stimulated them to production; the different
conditions of life, the varying ideals, prevented their
production from becoming a mere imitation, and made it
new, significant, and vital. Something very similar
has occurred hi modern Russia. Russia has had the
stimulus of Western Europe—especially of England and
France—but, at the same time, the conditions of its life
are so powerfully individual, so exceedingly unlike those
of England and France, that its authors are hardly even
tempted to produce work which is a mere imitation; as
soon as they observe at all, the result of their
observations is bound to be different. Their production is
thus distinctive and individual, and, in its own turn,
reacts upon the literatures which first inspired it.</p>
<p>The chief literary form in the later nineteenth century
has been the psychological novel, and it is this which
the Russians have taken up, developed, and almost
recreated.</p>
<p>In psychology Russian writers are greatly helped by
their own exceeding truthfulness and candour. France
and England are lands of complex civilisations, of many
social grades and many conventions, and the mental
attitude of their writers is, almost inevitably, conventional,
and thus, to a certain extent, insincere. Russian
life has far fewer social grades and far fewer conventions;
Russian writers are, beyond comparison, more candid
with themselves and with others; they speak the
exact truth with a <i>naïveté</i> almost resembling the <i>naïveté</i>
of children, but with the far-reaching intelligence of
maturity. This invaluable quality of sincerity is found
in all the greatest Russians; Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky,
in especial, hide nothing, but reproduce all they know
with an absence of self-consciousness that amazes even
while it fascinates.</p>
<p>We all of us know in our hearts that this profound
sincerity is essential to really great literature; but,
none the less, we, in a variety of ways, discourage and
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P9"></SPAN>9}</span>
forbid it: in prudish England an author is always
afraid of offending "moral" prejudices; in France
writers, though in moral respects far freer, are most
sensitively afraid of appearing ridiculous or absurd.
To a Russian neither of these fears would seem to exist.
Throughout his work Tolstoy insists with the most
vehement intensity that absolute truthfulness in all
respects is the essential foundation of morals, and
nothing angers him more than concealment, which he
declares to be, always and everywhere, the assistant
and protector of vice, while the fear of being absurd
he dismisses as one of the most ridiculous vanities of
adolescence, unworthy of a sane man.</p>
<p>Another quality that greatly assists Russian writers
is their unique gift of sympathy; there may be,
probably there is, something in the very fibre of the race
essentially feminine and sensitive, but the peculiar
conditions of their government account for much.
Russia is the nation which, above all other great nations
in our days, has the most tragic destiny, suffers most
deeply and undeservedly; it is probably this which
helps to give her great writers so deep a compassion;
they penetrate to the very foundation of human
experience, they fathom the deepest abysses of human
suffering, and they return with an unequalled tenderness,
with a noble beauty of compassion, which has, in
the modern world, no rival at all.</p>
<p>It is worthy of note that the ancient Greeks would
appear to have gained in a similar way some of the
greatest qualities in their national soul. They too had
the experience of a deep suffering; they stood between
East and West, they bore the brunt of long-lasting racial
conflicts, and, when they finally emerged triumphant,
they carried with them the beautiful fruit of that bitter
experience, in their profound understanding of human
suffering, and their knowledge of all the depths of
tragedy. They too gain from their own anguish a unique
tenderness and compassion; Priam kissing the hands
of Achilles, "terrible man-slaying that had slain so
many of his sons," is one of the world's supreme types
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P10"></SPAN>10}</span>
of pathos; this lovely tenderness illumines all the
great Greek poetry from Homer to Euripides.</p>
<p>Latin literature, in comparison with the Greek, is
wanting both in compassion and in depth, but the
Romans had never in the same way suffered, and they
knew less of the secrets of the human soul.</p>
<p>Tolstoy, we are told, read much in Homer, and was
greatly influenced by him in writing his <i>War and Peace</i>.
It is hardly surprising, for, notwithstanding all differences,
there is a considerable similarity—the two are alike in
their heroism, in their understanding of war, their vast
and crowded canvas, their tragic view of human destiny,
and their lovely compassion. It is characteristic of
the Russian breadth of mind and elemental sincerity
that Tolstoy really can take Homer as his model in
writing a modern novel. It is hardly necessary to
remark that he has not Homer's sense of beauty, but
who in this modern world has?</p>
<p>The fecundity of Russian literature is very great; it
is a great mistake to regard Tolstoy as if he stood alone;
like Shakespeare, Tolstoy is only the highest peak, or
perhaps we should say the greatest magnitude, among a
number of writers only less distinguished than himself.</p>
<p>Among Tolstoy's predecessors the Russians
themselves rank Gogol very high; he owes much to the
influence of Dickens; his books show endless comic
verve, are crowded with situations full of laughter, but
at the same time he has, in general, a very serious
purpose behind. Gogol, though humane and good-tempered,
is a keen satirist; comparatively little known
abroad, he is greatly loved by Russians themselves.</p>
<p>Among Tolstoy's leading contemporaries the man
whom, above all others, he most whole-heartedly
admired was Féodor Dostoïevsky. Dostoïevsky had a
tragic history which is reflected in his works; he was
involved in the plots of the Decembrists, condemned to
execution, and only at the last moment reprieved; for
the remainder of his life, possibly in consequence of the
shock to his nervous system, he became an epileptic;
he was exiled for a time to Siberia.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P11"></SPAN>11}</span></p>
<p>Dostoïevsky's books are largely studies in crime, but
quite unlike those familiar to our modern press; the
modern detective story with its police-court atmosphere
and its vulgar shallowness of interest belongs to a world
immeasurably beneath Dostoïevsky; even the world of
tragic crime, depicted so forcibly by the Elizabethans,
stands far apart from his; in Elizabethan dramas
crime is observed for the sake of its passion, it is
invested with a terrible though gloomy allurement, and
its end is the ruin of the noblest or the tragic
destruction of a human soul.</p>
<p>Dostoïevsky's novels of crime are really studies in
redemption: in <i>Crime and Punishment</i> the hero is a
murderer and the heroine a fallen woman, but both
ultimately work out their salvation. To Dostoïevsky
crime is a moral disease, a source of the most exquisite
suffering to the soul; he studies the process by which
the soul, sick to death and horribly distressed, purifies
and cleanses itself. Dostoïevsky is not, like the
Elizabethans, impressed by the tragic beauty of crime; on
the contrary, he realises and makes us realise its
loathsomeness, its sordid horror; but, notwithstanding its
dark and gloomy setting, his work is in essence far
from pessimistic; the expiatory power of suffering,
the innate nobility of the human soul, the miserable
meanness of sin, the beauty of compassion—these are
the impressions which he prints most deeply in the mind.</p>
<p>The nearest western parallel is to be found, no doubt,
in Victor Hugo's <i>Les Miserables</i>, where the redemption
of a human soul is, in somewhat similar method,
described; but Victor Hugo does not penetrate to the
foundations of human life in the same manner as
Dostoïevsky; he—the petted idol of the French public—had
not that first-hand acquaintance with the terrible
realities of oppression; there is something theatrical
and rhetorical, almost insincere, about Hugo if we
compare him with the great Russian.</p>
<p>It is worthy of observation that Tolstoy greatly
admired both <i>Les Miserables</i> and Dostoïevsky; the
older he grew and the more powerfully the influence of
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P12"></SPAN>12}</span>
the latter became manifest, his sympathy with the
oppressed, his interest in redemption, increased, until
in the last of his great novels, <i>Resurrection</i>, we find that
he writes in the very spirit of Dostoïevsky; his heroine
goes down to the depths of shame and degradation,
and yet is redeemed and restored. The pessimist may
perhaps declare that both Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky are
mistaken in thinking that a human being can sink so
low and yet be redeemed; to which it can only be
replied that the unflinching courage with which they
face realities—all realities, however horrible and
sordid—earns them their right to be believed when they
assert the restorative power of purity and love.</p>
<p>Amid all Tolstoy's contemporaries the one most widely
appreciated in Europe is, without doubt, Turgénief. He
was understood earlier and more readily than his
fellow-countrymen, this appreciation being no doubt due to
the fact that there is more foreign influence in his work,
and that he is less purely Russian. Turgénief owes
much to French literature; the influence of its clarity
of style, its artistic form, its sense of proportion, are
evident throughout his writing; he is the most artistic
and literary of Russian authors, but, strong as the
French influence is in his work, no one could ever mistake
him for a Frenchman; he has the depth and tenderness
of the Slavonic temperament, its moral earnestness, its
profound sincerity.</p>
<p>Turgénief and Tolstoy were exceedingly unlike in
life and work; it is not surprising that, when they met,
they were alternately fascinated and repelled. Turgénief
complained that Tolstoy pursued him like a woman in
love and yet, when they were together, was always
quarrelling with him. At one time they were devoted
friends, at another they came near to fighting a duel.
Russia might well have been horrified by the spectacle
of her two greatest men of genius destroying each other;
their friends intervened and separated them, but the
reconciliation was never quite complete. The same
opposition of personality can be plainly perceived in
their work. Tolstoy is by far the more masculine genius,
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P13"></SPAN>13}</span>
enormous in his vitality and power, immense in his
canvases; he loves, in his early work especially, to
study masculine and virile characters, to dwell on war
and hunting, and all the vigorous activities of men;
his heroines, charming as they often are, are rarely or
never heroic; they are nearly always dominated by
their own emotions, they yield only too thoroughly to
the men who, with a cruel masculine egoism, at once
love and destroy them. Again it is hardly until he
reaches <i>Resurrection</i> that he shows a true sense of the
value of women as individuals: in his earlier novels he
consents to value them only in their maternal aspect,
as the mothers of men. His conception of love is nearly
always a masculine passion with, it must be
acknowledged, a somewhat crude masculinity; it is a
disturbance of the senses rather than an emotion of the
soul (Plato would have classed it unquestioningly as
born of the lower Aphrodite), and Tolstoy's finest heroes
nearly always yield to it reluctantly and, as it were,
churlishly.</p>
<p>Like another great masculine genius—Milton—Tolstoy
feels most intimately, but shudders at the power that
women possess over men. How often in his works one
meets with women who are like Milton's Dalila,
possessed of a charm that is mixed with loathing and
disgust. Both Milton and Tolstoy regard with horror,
as one of the worst of snares, the idealising power of
love.</p>
<p>Turgénief is very different. He has not Tolstoy's
enormous vitality nor his immense scope; his novels
are, in comparison, quite brief, and some of his best
work is done in a very small compass, though it is
always so deep in meaning that it never seems slight. He
has achieved nothing more perfect than the little story
of <i>Faust</i>, which might, so far as length goes, be only a
French <i>feuilleton</i>. He is always and essentially poetic; one
of the keenest of all human observers, he dislikes sordid
realism; he avoids war and all other forms of extreme
violence; it is quite characteristic of him that when
he does, for once, choose a soldier hero—Insarov in
<span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P14"></SPAN>14}</span>
<i>On the Eve</i>—he does not accompany him to war, but
makes him die of consumption before the conflict
actually begins. Love plays a far larger part in his
work than in that of Tolstoy, and it is an altogether
nobler kind of love. As a lover, indeed, he belongs to
the great poetic idealists, he is of the same race as Dante,
as Shakespeare, as Shelley. He understands, quite as
well as Tolstoy, the dreadful glamour of an evil passion;
he understands how it leads to atrophy of the heart,
to desolation and to ruin; but he understands also
that nobler passion whose very existence Tolstoy
explicitly and vehemently denies—the love which belongs
both to the senses and to the soul. Passion in Tolstoy
is always a concession to the animal in man; in
Turgénief it is often his redemption. It follows from this
that he understands women far better than Tolstoy;
indeed Turgénief lays his main stress on feminine rather
than on masculine character, and the most heroic and
beautiful figures in his pages are usually those of women.
He draws them, indeed, with a Shakespearean strength
and delicacy; he does not regret the influence they have
over man's life—it is so often for good; even when he
draws the destructive siren who lures men to their doom,
he draws her without the Tolstoyan frenzy of hate; he
gives her the same kind of charm that Shakespeare gave
Cleopatra, and permits her poetry to fascinate even while
he shows with the clearest irony all her sensuality and
her falseness. It is worthy of note that neither Tolstoy
nor Turgénief wholly escape from the influence of their
rank. Widely democratic as they are in sympathies
they yet betray their aristocratic birth—Tolstoy in the
wrath and anger, the almost Satanic fury he turns upon
those with whom he happens to disagree, and Turgénief
in the fastidious delicacy with which he loves the
beautiful, the distinguished, and the rare.</p>
<p>It is Dostoïevsky who is truly the man of the people;
he sees through all the cheats of power, but he hates
no one; he loves purity and beauty, but he finds them
even in the foulest prisons and the lowest slums; of
the three he is the truest democrat.</p>
<p><br/><br/><br/></p>
<p><SPAN name="chap02"></SPAN></p>
<p><span class="pagenum">{<SPAN name="P15"></SPAN>15}</span></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />