FOOTNOTES:

“In days of doubt, in the days of burdensome musing over the fate of my country, thou alone art my support and my mainstay, oh great, mighty, truthful, and unfettered Russian language! Were it not for thee, how should I not fall into despair at the sight of all that is being done at home? But how can I believe that such a tongue was given to any but a great people?”

No greater praise can be given to Tourgeniev than to say that he was worthy of his medium, and that no Russian prose writer ever handled the great instrument of his inheritance with a more delicate touch or a surer execution.

When Tourgeniev was dying, he wrote to Tolstoy and implored him to return to literature. “That gift,” he wrote, “came whence all comes to us. Return to your literary work, great writer of our Russian land!”

All through Tourgeniev’s life, in spite of his frequent quarrels with Tolstoy, he never ceased to admire the works of his rival. Tourgeniev had the gift of admiration. Tolstoy is absolutely devoid of it. The “Lucifer” spirit in him refuses to bow down before Shakespeare or Beethoven, simply because it is incapable of bending at all. To justify this want, this incapacity to admire the great masterpieces of the world, Tolstoy wrote a book calledWhat is Art?in which he condemned theories he had himself enunciated years before. In this, and in a book on Shakespeare, he treats all art, the very greatest, as if it were in the same category with that of æsthetes who confine themselves to prattling of “Art for Art’s sake.” Beethoven he brushes aside because, he says, such music can only appeal to specialists. “What proportion of the world’s population,” he asks, “have ever heard the Ninth Symphony or seen‘King Lear’? And how many of them enjoyed the one or the other?” If these things be the highest art, and yet the bulk of men live without them, and do not need them, then the highest art lacks all claim to such respect as Tolstoy is ready to accord to art. In commenting on this,Mr.Aylmer Maude writes: “The case of the specialists, when Tolstoy calls in question the merits of ‘King Lear’ or of the Ninth Symphony, is an easy one.”

But the fallacy does not lie here. The fallacy lies in thinking the matter is a case for specialists at all. It is not a case for specialists. Beethoven’s later quartettes may be a case for the specialist, just as the obscurer passages in Shakespeare may be a case for the specialist. This does not alter the fact that the whole of the German nation, and multitudes of people outside Germany, meet together to hear Beethoven’s symphonies played, and enjoy them. It does not alter the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are translated into every language and enjoyed, and, when they are performed, are enjoyed by the simplest and the most uneducated people. The highest receipts are obtained at the Théâtre Français on holidays and feast days, when the plays of Molière are given. Tolstoy leaves out the fact that very great art, such as that of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Beethoven, Mozart, appeals at thesame time, and possibly for different reasons, to the highly trained specialist and to the most uncultivated ignoramus. This,Dr.Johnson points out, is the great merit of Bunyan’sPilgrim’s Progress: the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and a child knows nothing more amusing. This is also true ofParadise Lost, an appreciation of which is held in England to be the highest criterion of scholarship. AndParadise Lost, translated into simple prose, is sold in cheap editions, with coloured pictures, all over Russia,[14]and greedily read by the peasants, who have no idea that it is a poem, but enjoy it as a tale of fantastic adventure and miraculous events. It appeals at the same time to their religious feeling and to their love of fairy tales, and impresses them by a certain elevation in the language (just as the chants in church impress them) which they unconsciously feel does them good.

It is this inability to admire which is the whole defect of Tolstoy, and it arises from his indomitable pride, which is the strength of his character, and causes him to tower like a giant over all his contemporaries. Therefore, in reviewing his whole work and his whole life, and in reviewing it inconnection with that of his contemporaries, one comes to this conclusion. If Tolstoy, being as great as he is, has this great limitation, we can only repeat the platitude that no genius, however great, is without limitations; no ruby without a flaw. Were it otherwise—Had there been combined with Tolstoy’s power and directness of vision and creative genius, the large love and the childlike simplicity of Dostoievsky—we should have had, united in one man, the complete expression of the Russian race; that is to say, we should have had a complete man—which is impossible.

Tourgeniev, on the other hand, is full to the brim of the power of admiration and appreciation which Tolstoy lacks; but then he also lacks Tolstoy’s strength and power. Dostoievsky has a power different from Tolstoy’s, but equal in scale, and titanic. He has a power of admiration, an appreciation wider and deeper than Tourgeniev’s, and the humility of a man who has descended into hell, who has been face to face with the sufferings and the agonies of humanity and the vilest aspects of human nature; who, far from losing his faith in the divine, has detected it in every human being, however vile, and in every circumstance, however hideous; and who in dust and ashes has felt himself face to face with God. Yet, in spite of all this, Dostoievsky is far from being thecomplete expression of the Russian genius, or a complete man. His limitations are as great as Tolstoy’s; and no one was ever more conscious of them than himself. They do not concern us here. What does concern us is that in modern Russian literature, in the literature of this century, leaving the poets out of the question, the two great figures, the two great columns which support the temple of Russian literature, are Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Tourgeniev’s place is inside that temple; there he has a shrine and an altar which are his own, which no one can dispute with him, and which are bathed in serene radiance and visited by shy visions and voices of haunting loveliness. But neither as a writer nor as a man can he be called the great representative of even half the Russian genius; for he complements the genius of neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky. He possesses in a minor degree qualities which they both possessed; and the qualities which are his and his only, exquisite as they are, are not of the kind which belong to the greatest representatives of a nation or of a race.

FOOTNOTES:[7]Life of Tolstoy, p. 38.[8]Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.[9]Tolstoy as Man and Artist, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated from the Russian edition.[10]It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it spoils the whole book.[11]With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and noble characters.[12]Life, p. 189.[13]Life, p. 312.[14]The popular edition ofParadise Lostin Russian prose, with rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin, Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.

[7]Life of Tolstoy, p. 38.

[8]Matthew Arnold is a notable exception.

[9]Tolstoy as Man and Artist, pp. 93, 95. This passage is translated from the Russian edition.

[10]It should be said that this portrait is so unfair, and yet contains elements of truth so acutely observed, that for some people it spoils the whole book.

[11]With the exception of Marianna, one of his most beautiful and noble characters.

[12]Life, p. 189.

[13]Life, p. 312.

[14]The popular edition ofParadise Lostin Russian prose, with rough coloured pictures, is published by the Tipografia, T. D. Sitin, Piatnitzkaia Oolitza, Moscow.

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