Pierre Bezukhoi—the second hero—is a wholly different type. He is much more Russian and national than Prince Andrei; the two are so unlike that the friendship between them strikes us with the same surprise as it would in real life. Pierre is clumsy and awkward, and not sufficiently strong-willed; he is continually led away to do things he does not desire; his chief fault is sensuality, and this is the rock on which he all but wrecks his life. It leads him into marriage with a woman whom he desires but does not love—the beautiful, profligate Elena. The analysis of his motives is wrought with a terrible sombre power, which anticipatesThe Kreutzer Sonata. Pierre, in the toils of his own sensuality, is, on our first acquaintance with him, a most unattractive character, and we wonder why Tolstoy has allowed him a position so prominent, just as we wonder why the fastidious Prince Andrei can have selected him as a friend; but, by degrees, we realise his true nature; he has indeed a heart of gold and, little by little, his goodness and kindness and simplicity shake his character free from its coarsest faults. He has a genius for sympathy, and he appears to understand all those who surround him better than they understand themselves. The real love of his life is Natasha Rostof, but he does his best, most unselfishly, to reconcile her to Prince Andrei; in a sense he deserves her the better of the two, for, even when her betrothed turns against her, Pierre still loves and appreciates, and his devotion helps her through the darkest hours of her life. It is only fitting that, in the end, Natasha should make him happy. Like Prince Andrei, Pierre finds his moral regeneration in war, but in a different way; he does not enter active service nor is he wounded, but he views other aspects of the great tragedy; he is present at theburning of Moscow, he is captured by the French, and taken as prisoner on their terrible retreat. It is the heroism of the common man, the beauty and nobility of suffering finely borne, which redeem Pierre from the depression which has darkened his mind and which teach him the true meaning of life.
He is especially influenced by one man—the peasant soldier Platon Karatayef—one of Tolstoy's greatest creations. Platon is not clever nor handsome, his whole life has been privation, but he is love itself, kind and sweet to all men. Most tragic is his fate! The French shoot those of the Russian prisoners who cannot keep up with the march, and Pierre, seeing his friend failing, cannot endure the thought of what must happen and keeps away. One morning he sees Platon, not attempting to walk, but sitting beneath a tree with a calm and radiantly happy expression; he gives a beseeching glance to Pierre, but Pierre turns his back and walks off. Shortly afterwards there is heard the sound of a gunshot, two French soldiers pass with guilty faces, and there is the melancholy howling of Karatayef's dog.
Platon's fate is one of the means Tolstoy uses to drive home his lesson of the immense futility of war; it is to the last degree abominable that this most loving and beautiful nature, wholly guiltless, should be murdered in cold blood; even a dog has the sense to lament such a deed.
But the moral of this wonderful nature is not lost upon Pierre; he finds in it "the meaning of life," the clue which he has all along been seeking. As Pierre's sufferings increase so does his heart grow lighter; he learns the joy of endurance and the pleasure even of anguish, and all things are less grievous than he would have thought.
"Of all that which he afterwards called sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst was from his bare, bruised, scurvy-scarred feet. The horse-flesh was palatable and nourishing, the saltpetre odour of the gunpowder which they used instead of salt waseven pleasant ... the vermin which fed upon him warmed his body. The one thing hard at that time was the state of his feet. On the second day of the retreat, Pierre, examining his sores by the fire, felt that it was impossible to take another step on them; but when all got up he went along, treading gingerly, and afterwards, when he was warmed to it, he walked without pain, though when evening came it was more than ever terrible to look at his feet. But he did not look at them and turned his thoughts to other things.... He saw and heard not how the prisoners who straggled were shot down, although more than a hundred had perished in this way.... The more trying his position, the more appalling the future, ... the more joyful and consoling were the thoughts, recollections, and visions which came to him."
Tolstoy's account of this terrible retreat is Homeric in its tragic nobility; Homeric, too, is the spirit of the Russian army: they are short of food, short of clothes, sleeping in the snow at twenty degrees below zero; they melt away to half their numbers, yet they grow ever happier and happier, more and more cheerful, for all the poor-spirited, the weak, and cowardly succumb, and only the heroes remain. In his previous life Pierre has been miserable, disenchanted, and disillusioned, but he emerges from this hell of suffering a man finally happy. And Tolstoy makes us see that it could not be otherwise; his hero has learnt for ever the tremendous capacities of the human soul.
Of Tolstoy's two heroines the Princess Mariya is the nobler type; she is what he imagined his mother to have been, and to this, no doubt, a large part of her fascination may be traced. In her the author has drawn a woman exceedingly plain, not particularly clever, without accomplishments and melancholy by temperament, yet, by sheer spiritual beauty, she compels admiration, affection, even passionate love.
Her physical appearance, on which Tolstoy dwells, gives the clue to her nature; she treads heavily and blushes unbecomingly in patches; this heavy treadshows us her awkwardness and self-distrust, and the blushing her almost painful modesty.
But she is one of those who have life's secret—the gift of love; she idolises her brother; she loves and admires her little selfish sister-in-law, the Princess Lisa; she bears, year in and year out, with the exasperating and even cruel tyrannies of her father, and loves him dearly to the end; she cherishes her nephew. Ultimately, though slowly, she wins her reward for all this patient sweetness; her brother has always understood her at her full value, her father dies acknowledging her as his good angel, and we are not surprised when Nikolai Rostof, cold to more beautiful and more attractive women, turns and gives her his love.
And yet the portrait is not sentimentalised or made incredibly virtuous; the Princess Mariya does not find self-abnegation easy, she longs for a home and happiness, she is jealous of Natasha because Natasha is young and beautiful, and has achieved the poetry of love; to the end, notwithstanding her deep affections, she finds it a little hard to comprehend others.
Tolstoy's second heroine, Natasha Rostof, is, for pure fascination, the most enthralling character in the book. Tolstoy seems to have drawn her from an actual person—his sister-in-law; and she has all the reality of a minute portrait.
Natasha is beautiful or, it would be more correct to say, has the promise of beauty; she has also a lovely voice; but her most remarkable gift is her power of winning love. From her first introduction she is the idolised of all; she and her younger brother, Petya, are her mother's favourite children; Natasha is the adored of her brothers and her father, and almost every man who visits the house falls in love with her. Tolstoy makes us understand why. Natasha is herself prepared to see all that is delightful and all that is good in others; she is highly vitalised; she has strong affections, and an intense joy in life; wherever Natasha is things move; it is she who is always ready to suggest games and amusements; it is she who perceives poetryand romance where others cannot or only in much less degree. Morning in the forest, a moonlight night in spring, sledging over the snow, music—all are to her enrapturing things. That magical period of youth, that period of half-childhood, half-adolescence, when the world is suffused by "the light that never was on sea or land," has nowhere been more beautifully depicted than in her. It is this romantic charm which so powerfully attracts the somewhat cold but poetic nature of Prince Andrei. In the midst of the gloomy tragedies of bloodshed and battle Natasha Rostof shines like an incarnation of springtime, the very joy of life in a human form. The most beautiful passage in the whole novel is probably that which describes Prince Andrei's first meeting with her.
He is in a mood of some sadness, and feels, after all his experiences, old beyond his years; he drives to the Rostofs and perceives a number of young girls running among the trees. "In front of the others ... ran a very slender, indeed a strangely slender maiden, with dark hair and dark eyes, in a yellow chintz dress, with a white handkerchief round her head, the locks emerging from it in ringlets."
It is Natasha, and, that same night, Prince Andrei hears her conversing with her cousin Sonya at the window above his own. "The night was cool and calmly beautiful. In front of the window was a row of clipped trees, dark on one side and silver-bright on the other.... Farther away, beyond the trees, was a roof glittering with dew; farther to the right a tall tree with wide-spreading branches, showed a brilliant white bole and limbs; and directly above it the moon, almost at her full, shone in the bright, nearly starless spring night. Prince Andrei leaned his elbows on the window-sill and fixed his eyes on that sky."
He hears Sonya and Natasha sing a duet, he hears Sonya try to persuade her cousin to sleep and Natasha's protest:
"Sonya! Sonya! How can you go to sleep? Just see how lovely it is! How lovely! Come wake up,Sonya," she said again with, tears in her voice. "Come, now, such a lovely, lovely night was never seen!"
Prince Andrei meets her again at a ball in St. Petersburg, where her childlike happiness brings a breath of pure air into the artificial atmosphere; Natasha is so completely unaffected that, in the very midst of affectations, she keeps her unspoilt romance.
Prince Andrei proposes for her hand, but the Rostofs' family affairs are in confusion, and Prince Andrei's father insists on a year's delay; for that space of time he goes abroad. Prince Andrei does not find the time of delay unreasonably long, and cannot understand that Natasha should do so, but the girl suffers the dangers of her inexperience; Prince Andrei has roused her to a full consciousness of womanhood, and her sensuous and passionate nature cannot endure the blank of his absence; also, since she is extremely sensitive, she is grieved by the cold attitude his family persistently maintain.
She meets Anatol Kuragin, a man exceedingly handsome but unscrupulous, who at once makes violent love to her; she writes a letter to Prince Andrei breaking off their engagement, and consents to elope with Kuragin, this plan being discovered and frustrated by her family. Natasha wakens from her brief madness, realises how badly she has behaved to her betrothed, and, in her remorse and shame, attempts suicide.
Prince Andrei, returning, learns the whole story; he is stung to the quick in his haughty pride; his spiritual nature makes him totally unable to understand the temptation, and he cannot forgive.
It is Natasha's innate generosity which gives them, however, their last chance of reconciliation; the Rostofs are carting their family property away from Moscow, which is threatened by the French, but there are not sufficient horses to transport the Russian wounded, and Natasha, keenly opposing her mother, demands that the family property shall be sacrificed, and the wounded rescued instead; the Rostofs discover Prince Andrei's presence and forbid Natasha to see him, buther own daring takes her to his side, and there follows the most simple but touching of reconciliations.
Natasha becomes his nurse, and proves the depth of her nature by her skill and tenderness. But the brief time of joy is soon over; Prince Andrei's sufferings are agonising, and he passes away.
Natasha feels bereavement with the same intensity as everything else; she herself seems to sink out of the world; thin and pale and visibly wasting away, she sits for hours in silence, gazing at the place where Prince Andrei has lain. Her family have lost all hope of saving her life, but tragic news arrives; the younger brother—Petya—has been killed in battle, and the mother is mad with grief; she screams for her beloved Natasha, who is the only person who can comfort her, and, in straining every nerve to save her mother's reason, the girl herself is restored to life. She lives again by virtue of those profound and passionate affections which had almost destroyed her. She is so greatly changed, however, that, when Pierre meets her again, he does not know her; he cannot recognise in her thin, pale, and stern face the Natasha of adorable and abounding life; yet the moment he shows that he loves her, the old Natasha, with her radiant joy, flashes back into his view, and she is willing, almost at once, to become Pierre's affianced. To the Princess Mariya, with a nature much less emotional but infinitely more constant, Natasha is a continual marvel, and, though she is glad of her friend's happiness, the Princess grieves at the inconstancy to her brother.
The whole portrait is wonderful in its realism, glowing with vitality and with charm, and, just as in the case of the men, Natasha deepens and changes before our very eyes.
But few readers will be inclined, however, to appreciate Tolstoy's final picture of her; he shows us Natasha as Pierre's wife and the mother of four children; she is loving but exacting, very jealous, almost parsimonious in her care for her children, she has become untidy in her personal appearance, and the old poetic charm only in the rarest moments returns.
Natasha, in fact, seems to show us the limitations in Tolstoy's patriarchal view of woman; he regards her not really as an individual, an end in herself, but as a means towards the race, and the individual loss is nothing to regret; he seems to realise and rejoice in the shock he gives us when he tells us of Natasha the generous become parsimonious, of Natasha the sylph tearing round in a dirty morning wrapper; but we are inclined to resent the admiration accorded to this second Natasha, who limits her sympathies to such a narrow circle, and who has become a maternal egoist of the most colossal type. Tolstoy himself found, as we have seen, in his relations with his wife, that the maternal egoist is not quite the finest ideal of humanity.
It is impossible to study in any detail the crowded canvas ofWar and Peace, but the minor characters are often among the best-drawn and the most attractive.
The whole Rostof group are delightfully depicted. Petya Rostof, the dear boy who is killed, has almost the same charm as Natasha. He has intense affections, is full of amusing boyish interests, and possesses a lofty ideal of patriotism; he likes to think himself a hero, and really is one. When only sixteen he insists on joining the army: his brother's friends try to protect him and to keep him out of danger, but his gallantry leads him into every peril, and he is killed, quite uselessly and casually, while exposing himself in a dangerous engagement. It is one more example of the immense futility of war. Nikolai Rostof, Tolstoy's third hero, is more commonplace than Pierre and Prince Andrei, but he gives Tolstoy a splendid opportunity for depicting the psychology of war; we are shown all his emotions from the day when he first joins, is alternately elated with a feeling of heroism and depressed by the conviction that he is a coward, to the time when, as a seasoned veteran, he can hardly recall his old excitement and his old dread; the only trace his former fear has left in his mind shows itself in his compassion for the younger officers, whose mental sufferings he so fully understands. Nikolai Rostof has always a certain humility ofcharacter; he is very ready to reverence others, and is attracted to the Princess Mariya by her great spiritual superiority to himself.
The artillery officer, Tushin, to whom we have already alluded, is evidently Tolstoy's type of a true Russian hero. He is simplicity and modesty itself; his magnificent courage is not in the least sanguinary, but is accompanied by a heart as tender as a woman's; when he is returning after his terrific day he is still kind enough to help the wounded Nikolai Rostof on to the blood-bespattered gun-carriage.
Nor does Tushin stand alone; continually inWar and Peace, as in so many other works, Tolstoy makes us feel the enormous value of man as man.
With the really eminent we cannot but feel that he is less successful. One curious feature of the book is its almost Eastern fatalism. Tolstoy will allow practically nothing to the will of man as an individual; all the great events of the book are due to the power of an unknown destiny urging men on to deeds which are, even to themselves, unexpected and surprising, while the men who think that they are directing all are really as helplessly incapable of any true control as a fly revolving upon a cart-wheel.
Tolstoy is especially embittered towards Napoleon; he does not blame him, like Byron, because his greatness was "antithetically mixed" with so much of meanness; he does not blame him, like Shelley, because, possessing in his genius a unique opportunity for good, he chose to divert that genius to his own self-aggrandisement.
Tolstoy goes much further; he is so excessively angry that he altogether denies Napoleon's genius; he will not acknowledge him to have any talent except of the most trifling kind; to him Napoleon is a mean-souled, small-minded man, contemptible in everything, colossal in his vanity but great in nothing besides. And when the reader asks in amazement how Napoleon won his tremendous victories, how he gained the unparalleled devotion of his army, Tolstoy answers contemptuously that the victories were due mainly to destiny, to theunknown Ruler of the world who so ordained, and that the devotion of the army was mere hypnotism. Nor is it only from Napoleon that he endeavours to strip the borrowed plumes; in several amusing studies Napoleon's great soldier-marshals are revealed as vain, childish, and even absurd, proud of their uniforms and almost infantile in their love of decorations. But, it must be confessed, Tolstoy is impartial in his dislike of the eminent; he is almost as hard on the Russian generals as on the French. The one man whom he praises—Kutuzof—is the man whom the Russians themselves failed to appreciate, and Tolstoy admires him for the somewhat curious reason that he also was a fatalist, that he believed no general could do much, and was always, with Fabian tactics, waiting upon the event.
"ANNA KARÉNINA"
Anna Karéninais, perhaps, considered as a whole, a more artistic work thanWar and Peace; the very fact that its scope is less gigantic permits Tolstoy to make it clearer and more concentrated; everything is directed towards the one end—the tragic death of Anna—and though the novel has an under-plot, that is very skilfully blent with the main plot, and is everywhere kept subordinate.
Anna Karéninais much less distinctively Russian and national thanWar and Peace; it shows very plainly the influence of the French novel, and its plot is of the type that French novelists are fond of selecting, though the moral intensity with which Tolstoy invests it is unusual with them.
Notwithstanding the power and beauty of its telling, it seems, however, somewhat restricted when compared with the vast spaces and terrific issues ofWar and Peace, where individual tragedies, however great, are forgotten in the crisis of a nation.
Anna Karéninais a very great novel, but no one would dream of saying that it suggested Homer. It is a domestic tragedy only, but, like Shakespeare inOthello, Tolstoy has known how to make his domestic tragedy a revelation of the heights and depths, of the passionate potentialities of the human soul.
Tolstoy openly refrains from judging his heroine, and it is a mistake to considerAnna Karéninaas being essentially a protest against the breaking of the marriage bond. Tolstoy does believe in the indissolubility of marriage, but the book is just as much a protest againstthe dangers of marriage without love or the cruel injustice of society.
The truth is that it is a picture of life, and expresses, as Tolstoy acutely says an artistic work always should, a moral relation to life rather than a moral judgment.
Anna Karénina, is, of all Tolstoy's heroines, the most perfect human being; she is a mature woman, possessed of wit, grace, and beauty, and above all, the gift of sympathy; she is one of those people who have strong affections, who love profoundly and appreciate readily all that is best in others, who are also possessed of keen intellectual powers, but who live mainly from impulse and not from principle. Such people are, perhaps, the most attractive characters in the world, and their impulses, springing from a warm heart, are usually right: but it is their peril that, in moments of moral stress, their emotions may be too much for them, and may fatally mislead them. There is a certain resemblance, though not too close, between Anna and Natasha Rostof; both possess the poetic and emotional temperament; they add, wherever they are, to the romance of life; it may be noted too that, though Natasha's fate is happier, that is due mainly to accident, and not to her own achievement, for she twice escaped the ruin of her life only by the intervention of others, and she also came very near to death by her own hand.
There is no surer proof of Anna's sweetness than the charm she possesses for members of her own sex. She appreciates the beauty of the young girl who is her unconscious rival, Kitty Shcherbatsky, and she can enter into the family griefs and troubles of Kitty's sister Dolly, who, although most virtuous herself, clings to Anna through all her ostracism. Even the frivolous and immoral Betsky Tverskáia is grieved to the heart when her own cowardice compels her to desert Anna.
Even before the heroine enters the story the effect of her presence is felt. Her brother who, owing to a matrimonial infidelity, has quarrelled with his wife, looks to her as his only hope; he and Dolly both love her dearly, and they hope that she may find for them away out of the intolerable situation; she does, in fact, prevent the break-up of the home, though she cannot (and this is another example of Tolstoy's quiet ironic truth) either reform her brother or leave Dolly really happy. Tender and sympathetic as Anna at once shows herself to be, she has yet a void in her own life. When quite a young girl she had been married to a government official, Aleksei Karénin, who held an important position but who was twenty years her senior, stiff, dry, and cold; the marriage was entirely due to the intrigues of Anna's clever and unscrupulous aunt.
Anna has one child, her son Serozha, and in the effort to fill her life completely with her maternal affection, she has almost made it an affectation. Though she herself hardly suspects it, the real emotional capacities of her nature have never been developed. It is a stroke of tragic irony that Anna, who comes to Moscow to avert the destruction of her brother's home, should find there what is to prove the ruin of her own. She meets Count Aleksei Vronsky—young, handsome, attractive.
Vronsky has been regarded by everyone, including Kitty herself, as the suitor of Kitty Shcherbatsky, but he is not deeply stirred, and, the moment he meets Anna, he yields to her far greater charm.
Had there been the slightest disrespect in Vronsky's attentions, Anna would have known how to defend herself, but Vronsky is perfectly reverent. His family, on discovering the intrigue, consider Anna simply as an amusement for Vronsky, but he himself has never regarded her in that light; from the first moment he has loved her seriously and profoundly, with all the strength of his nature.
Against all the ordinary infidelities, the light and cheap loves of the society in which she lives, Anna is immune, but she is helplessly ensnared by this love, so immediate that she has no time to be on her guard, so tender and reverent that she cannot feel insulted.
The reader is, at first, somewhat inclined to resent Anna's overwhelming passion, and to consider Vronsky as commonplace, he seems so much the typical militarydandy, his whole life's aim (as he avows even to himself) being the desire to becomme il fautin everything—in dress, speech, manners, and sentiments. He attempts to make his passion for Madame Karénina fit in the conventional framework, but Vronsky is finer than he himself suspects; he really is what Anna had, at the first glimpse, divined him to be—her nature's destined mate; under the exterior of the St. Petersburg dandy, he conceals a nature capable of extraordinary generosities and the most enduring devotion. He realises all the charm of Anna's nature; he realises that her heart is as yet unawakened and that he has the power to arouse it; there is nothing in his moral code to hold him back; he and his society consider the pursuit of a married woman as being quitecomme il faut. Our first real surprise with regard to Vronsky does not occur in his relations to Anna, but comes when we discover that he has, with almost quixotic generosity, sacrificed the greater part of his fortune in favour of his younger brother, for no reason except that his brother wished to marry into a distinguished family, and the fortune would greatly aid.
With the same generosity, Vronsky, when he discovers the need, makes real sacrifices for Anna. He had at first regarded his passion for her as being only an additional joy in life, entailing no responsibility; but Tolstoy, with his unerring accuracy, shows that the responsibilities of an illicit love are not only as great as those of a legal one, but far more difficult and galling, because society, having ordained the responsibilities of marriage, assists the individual to execute them, whereas, in the other case, it incessantly hinders and impedes. Vronsky is compelled either to leave Anna or to sacrifice his ambition, hitherto the dearest thing in his life, and he gives up his ambition.
Matthew Arnold, in his criticisms onAnna Karénina, remarks that it is difficult to imagine an Englishwoman yielding herself as readily as Anna to an illicit love. But we may doubt if this is not a piece of British Pharasaism, for an emotional Englishwoman, living ina society as corrupt as Anna's (and many periods of English society have been as corrupt), would probably yield in the same way. Tolstoy, with his usual insight, has shown us how natural this yielding really is. Anna, though quite young, is well accustomed to marital infidelity; her own brother's, though it distresses, does not shock her; moreover, in the character of this brother, Stepan, we have a subtle side-light thrown upon Anna's; Stepan is a far inferior type, but there is undoubtedly a family affinity. Stepan is affectionate, kind-hearted, and cheerful; wherever he goes he is thoroughly liked; but he altogether fails to realise his obligations, even to those he loves, and in Anna's nature, incomparably more refined, there is, none the less, a touch of the same carelessness.
Anna's husband is not the person to exercise any restraining influence. Tolstoy never agrees with the wife's conception of him as a mere official machine, but he makes us understand how inevitable it is that Anna should take such a view. Karénin is cold by nature, and, in her sense of the word, he has never really loved her; her relations with Vronsky do not so much wound and grieve his affections (Anna could readily understand that), but they fill him with an overmastering fear for his dignity, his place in society, and, to an idealist like Anna, this very fear appears as contemptible.
The course of the long, ever-changing drama between these three is traced with acutest psychological skill. Anna yields to her lover only after long solicitation, and with an instant shame and regret; for a time she hides the truth from Karénin, but concealment of any sort is hateful to her candour, and soon becomes impossible; she is present at a dangerous steeple-chase when Vronsky is thrown, and her emotion is so manifest that her husband rebukes her; she gives way to her own passionate desire for truth, and, notwithstanding her bitter humiliation, acknowledges her infidelity. She hopes that the confession will end an intolerable situation, but her hope is disappointed; her husband simply forbids her to receive Vronsky in his house, andAnna finds that one insufferable situation has only given place to another still worse; to deceive Karénin was a torture, but to live on terms of cold hostility with him, seeing her lover by stealth, is even more wretched. Karénin meditates a divorce, but neither Anna nor he really desires it; he cannot bear to yield her entirely to Vronsky, and Anna knows that it would mean a final separation from her son. In the meantime Vronsky is sacrificing his whole career in order to remain in St. Petersburg. Anna longs for death, and nature seems about to send it; her daughter—Vronsky's child—is born, and for a week she hangs between life and death. In her extremity her mind is oppressed by remorse for the suffering she has caused her husband; she entreats his forgiveness, and with great compassion he does, really and genuinely, forgive; he even consents to be reconciled to Vronsky, and, at Anna's bedside, they clasp hands.
But destiny reveals its customary irony (Tolstoy, we may remark, is as firm a believer in tragic irony as any of the Greeks). The touching reconciliation is based really upon one condition—that Anna dies—and this does not happen. Moreover she, who had, for a moment, exalted her husband above her lover, soon finds the balance redressed. Vronsky discovers himself in a position for which his philosophy has no remedy; instead of being the triumphant lover he finds himself a humiliated offender, pardoned by the man whom he had most grievously injured; there was also the terrible anguish of believing Anna's death inevitable. Vronsky shoots himself, bungles it, and is wounded seriously though not fatally. His attempted suicide is, in part, a supreme sacrifice to his doctrine ofcomme il faut, an attempt to escape humiliation and ridicule, in part a manifestation of the feeling, so strong it amazes even himself, that life without Anna is impossible.
But Anna recovers; Vronsky's attempted suicide has turned her sympathies almost wholly to him, and when once she is convalescent (here again is the tragic irony) she finds her husband as tiresome and tedious as before.
Vronsky and Anna end the intolerable situation by taking flight. For a time all seems well with them; after so many brief and stolen interviews, so many harsh separations, they find it unalloyed bliss to be together without let or hindrance; they spend in Italy an ideally happy honeymoon.
But Tolstoy's art is inexorable, as inexorable as life.
Neither Vronsky nor Anna can remain content in isolation; they are both rich and generous natures, meant for fruitful intercourse with their fellows, and they cannot, in their position, obtain either suitable society or suitable duties. Vronsky has resigned his military profession, which he really loved, and for which he was admirably adapted; he does his best to find occupation in other ways; in Italy he attempts art, but soon discovers that he is a mere dilettante, wasting his efforts and his time. They return to Russia, and he devotes himself to the duties of a landed proprietor, becoming quite reasonably successful. So far as he himself is concerned Vronsky could get along, but he is stabbed through his affection for Anna; the really intolerable burden of the situation falls upon her; men will associate with her, but not her own sex; she is ostracised from the society of good women, and even women who are, morally speaking, infinitely her inferiors venture to insult her; moreover she knows that Vronsky's mother tries to entice him away from her and get him married; she has had to resign her son, and the thought of his destiny, misunderstood, and perhaps neglected, tortures and grieves her. She attempts to obtain a divorce from Karénin, so that her position can be regularised, but her husband, fallen under the sway of a malevolent woman, refuses.
Thrown, as she is, entirely upon Vronsky's honour, she is desperately jealous; every hour that he spends away from her is an anguish, and she is continually tortured by the fear of desertion; conscious that her jealousy exasperates and alienates him, she is still unable to control it.
Vronsky is really a gentleman, and he has true anddeep love; he shows great consideration, but the incessant scenes of jealousy followed by passion and passion followed by jealousy strain his patience to the breaking-point. At length, having tried, as he thinks, everything else, he believes that the only way left is to try indifference; Anna, however, is on the edge of the abyss, and his coldness drives her over.
Vronsky is absent for the day; in terror at her own despair she sends him a note, beseeching him to return; he answers coldly that he will be back at the appointed time, and, yielding to her anguish, she flings herself beneath a train.
All Anna's feelings at this crisis of her fate are depicted with the deepest truth and tragedy. The unhappy creature herself knows whither she is tending, and struggles frantically, but her views of life grow ever more and more gloomy; hatred of herself, hatred of her lover, well up in her heart, and, at last, her only desire is to punish him.
"'There,' she said, looking at the shadow of the carriage thrown upon the black coal-dust which covered the sleepers, 'there, in the centre, he will be punished and I shall be delivered from it all ... and from myself.'
"Her little red travelling-bag caused her to miss the moment when she could throw herself under the wheels of the first carriage, as she was unable to detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had once experienced just before taking a dive in the river came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar action awakened in her soul a crowd of memories of youth and childhood. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her, but she did not remove her eyes from the carriage, and when the centre part, between the wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, lowered her head upon her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees beneath the vehicle, as though prepared to rise again. She had time to feel afraid. 'Where am I? What am I doing? Why?' thought she, tryingto draw back; but a great inflexible mass struck her head and threw her on her back. 'Lord! forgive me all,' she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain. A little muzhik, who was mumbling in his beard, leant from the step of the carriage on to the line.
"And the light—which, for the unfortunate one, had lit up the book of life with its troubles, its deceptions, and its pains—rending the darkness, shone with greater brightness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out for ever."
On Vronsky the terrible punishment takes effect; he rejoins the service a crushed and broken man, having henceforward only one desire—to lose his life in battle.
Mingled with the main story of Anna and Vronsky is the companion one or "under-plot" of Kitty Shcherbatsky and Konstantin Levin. We may notice that Tolstoy's method of construction differs essentially from that of Turgénief; Turgénief, making his work briefer and more concentrated, omits all that is not essential to his main theme, but Tolstoy aims at giving, not so much the drama of life as life itself.
He wishes to show us the slow, deliberate motion of reality, and when in Anna's life there are no events, he fills up the space with the acts and experiences of his other characters.
Kitty Shcherbatsky's story is very simple: she at first refuses Levin, believing herself in love with Vronsky; he, however, deserts her for Anna; she is cruelly mortified, passes through a period of ill-health and depression, but Levin ultimately returns, she marries him, and they are happy. Kitty is a charming girl, but her character seems slight and even common-place beside the depth and richness and passion of Anna's; the two heroines in this book do not balance so well as inWar and Peace, though Tolstoy has most skilfully used them as foils to each other, and helped, by their mutual relations, to reveal their characters; thus there is no stronger proof of Anna's wonderful charm than the fact that Kitty, who has hated her, both from jealousy and because she thinks her wicked,has only to meet her in order to be overwhelmed by love and compassion. Konstantin Levin, is, in some ways, more interesting than Vronsky; he has a much more complex mental development. It is agreed that Levin represents, to some extent, Tolstoy himself. The points of resemblance are many and close; Levin works among his peasants just as Tolstoy did, mowing and reaping in the fields, rejoicing in the health and activity of such a life, and in the lovely pictures of nature that it reveals. Levin's proposal to his wife follows, detail by detail, Tolstoy's proposal to Sophie Behrs; the death of Levin's brother from consumption is like the death of Tolstoy's—even the name is the same—Nicolas; Levin, like Tolstoy, is happy in his family life, but is, nevertheless, so greatly distressed by religious doubts and difficulties that he is driven almost to suicide.
The resemblance being so strong, it is noteworthy and significant that Tolstoy has painted Levin as a great egoist. He is a good fellow at heart, and the reader is thoroughly interested in his mental development, but his egoism is so strong that it continually exasperates and annoys. When Kitty refuses him, Levin is deeply wounded in his affections, but still more hurt in his pride; he cannot get over the fact that he—Levin—has been "refused by a Shcherbatsky," and feels as if the whole world must be cognisant of his disgrace—in fact he becomes really comic. Again, when he hears from her sister that Kitty's affection for Vronsky was really very slight, that her only real regret is the alienation from him, he will not even call at the house, and this though he knows that the whole Vronsky entanglement was due mainly to his own eccentric behaviour. Even when he is married he is incessantly and unnecessarily jealous of his wife, and always, on the slightest pretext, tormenting her with this jealousy.
This irritable self-consciousness is shown no less strikingly in his relations with men who, although they esteem his integrity and talents, find it exceedingly difficult to like him. The same self-consciousnessmakes him clumsy in society, and, when he has to act with other people in public business, he grows caustic and angry because they do not agree with him in everything. The worst egoism of all occurs in his attitude towards his dying brother. When he sees his brother visibly perishing from consumption, he pities him deeply, but, none the less, his chief concern lies in the thought that this horrible and degrading misfortune of illness and death will one day befall himself; he positively disturbs the invalid in the night (how terrible to break that hard-won sleep of the consumptive!) by rising to look in the glass, dreading to find that he has wrinkles and grey hairs and is growing old.
When he and Kitty attend Nikolai's death-bed we see the strongest possible contrast between the unselfish courage of the young wife, thinking only of the sick man, and doing everything possible for him, and the distressing egoism of Levin, who is filled with fear, disgust, and almost anger at the sight of death.
"Levin, though terrified at the thought of lifting this frightful body under the coverlet, submitted to his wife's influence, and put his arms around the invalid, with that resolute air she knew so well": and again, "The sight of the sick man paralysed him; he did not know what to say, how to look or move about.... Kitty apparently did not think about herself, and she had not the time. Occupied only with the invalid, she seemed to have a clear idea of what to do; and she succeeded in her endeavour."
Anna Karéninashows already that fear of death which is such an obsession in Tolstoy's later works. InWar and Peace, he takes the soldier's view of it, as something almost trifling in comparison with greater matters; his noble Prince Andrei grieves over many things, but neither the utmost extremity of peril, nor the anguish of his gangrened wound, nor the immediate presence of dissolution can shake his courage or dismay his soul. It is different with the pitiful, almost animal terror of death shown by poor Nikolai Levin, and it plays an increasing part in Tolstoy's mind until, as he describesinMy Confession, it becomes an obsession which occupies the whole of his mind, and from which he can only shake himself free by an entire conversion. Even then, like a mediæval monk, he allows the thought of death to colour almost the whole of life. The truth is that he thinks too much of it. Even his pagan Homer might have taught him better; Achilles cries:
"My friend, thou too must die; why thus lamentest thou? Patroklos too is dead, who was better far than thou. Seest thou not also what manner of man am I for might and goodliness? and a good man was my father and a goddess-mother bare me. Yet over me too hang death and forceful fate."
Tolstoy had reached, more than once, the height of the heroic age. It is a pity his soul ever condescended to our modern and craven fear of death.
The canvas ofAnna Karéninais rich in minor characters, almost as excellently drawn as the main one. Stepan, Anna's brother, has been already referred to; he is an ironically complete portrait of the man of the world, drawn with a Thackerayan lightness and zest. There are not, as a rule, many resemblances between Thackeray and Tolstoy, for Tolstoy is so much the deeper, but the portrait of Stepan might have come from the same pen as that of Major Pendennis. Stepan is always kind, but his kindness is as purely constitutional as a good digestion. He is faithless to his wife, not once nor twice, but habitually; he deserts the "adorable" women who confide themselves to his protection; he claims an excellent post, and thinks he has fulfilled all its duties by keeping himself invariably well-dressed; he is, of course, aconnoisseurin meats and wines, and, however well-spread the table may be, must always show his fastidiousness by ordering something else. He is very generous, and pays all his debts of honour, but the money for this has to be found by his unfortunate family, who economise even in the necessities of life; one summer they spend their time in a miserable tumble-down house; next year, as the place is positively uninhabitable, they are driven to take refuge with the Levins. But it does not grieve Stepanthat Konstantin Levin should support Stepan's wife and six children; he doubtless thinks that Levin enjoys that sort of thing as much as he—Stepan—the spending of money. Yet Stepan is invariably liked, for he will do a good turn for anyone if he can, and is always tactful and sympathetic. If Tolstoy has drawn a candid and unflattering picture of his own type of egoism in Konstantin Levin, he has drawn in Stepan a portrait of the other type of egoism—the amiable, Epicurean type—which is still more drastically complete.
Stepan's wife—Dolly, sister to Kitty Shcherbatsky—is a thoroughly natural and lovable creature; terribly disillusioned by her husband's infidelity, she is yet persuaded, for the children's sake, to forgive him and reunite the family; she bears with endless patience the worries his extravagance entails, and copes single-handed with the debts and the six children. It is hardly surprising if, at moments, she murmurs, and is almost inclined to think that the people who lead irregular lives (like Anna) have the best of it; it is only after a visit to Anna and Vronsky that she realises her own blessings, and understands that the tortures of a dissatisfied conscience are worse even than debts and a faithless husband. Dolly, however, stands by Anna in all her misfortunes; while women full of secret sins insult Anna in public, Dolly, the irreproachably virtuous, loves her to the end.
Aleksei Karénin—the husband of Anna—is brought before us in all his reality. We see the ugliness which so exasperates Anna—the ears that stick out straight, the habit of cracking the finger-joints—and we realise his cold vanity. And yet it is impossible not to be sorry for Karénin; he suffers a veritable martyrdom; that which he dreads worse than death—ridicule—overwhelms him at all points; he is crushed by the undeserved contempt of his fellows. Tolstoy shows us how little Anna's persecution was dictated by morality, for the cruelty accorded to the guiltless husband is just as great.
For a moment, when Karénin pardons Anna andVronsky, he rises to real heroism, but it is a height to which he cannot keep; the poor man really is, as Anna well knew, a pretentious mediocrity; he is found out as a husband, found out as an official, found out even as a martyr; for a brief space, after the scene of the pardon, the reader is inclined to feel as if Karénin had been all along misjudged, but he returns to his usual self. When Anna has left him he falls under the influence of the stupidly sentimental Lidia Ivanovna; he becomes a convert to the most foolish form of spiritualism, submits Anna's fate to the decision of a medium, and refuses her a divorce because the medium pronounces against it—a course of procedure so extravagantly silly that it amazes even Stepan.
There are in the book many amusing and caustic portraits. One group—Lidia Ivanovna, Betsky Tverskáia, the Princess Miagkaïa, and Veslovsky—might have come from the pen of some eighteenth-century satirist; they have a Sheridan-like keenness and lightness of touch.
Lidia Ivanovna, especially, is excellent: she is a sentimentalist of the rankest type; having disgusted her own husband within a fortnight of marriage, she has ever since been incessantly conceiving romantic affections for one distinguished person after another; most of them are completely unconscious of her adoration, others ignore it, and the remainder are supremely bored; in poor deserted Karénin she finds at last a responsive object for her sentimentality and brings about, indirectly, Anna's tragedy.
"MY CONFESSION"—"MY RELIGION"—"WHAT IS ART?" ETC.
We have seen that, in his fiftieth year, a great mental and moral change came over Tolstoy. The first of his religious works,My Confession, tells the story of this conversion, and it is a wonderful document—as intimate and candid as the confessions of Rousseau, but expressing a nature more profoundly moral, of deepest interest to us, moreover, as rendering a mood of doubt and despair so frequent in the nineteenth century that most of the century's leading minds have experienced something like it at one period or another.
It shows all the agony of a great soul, struggling in the deepest abysses of doubt, astray in a universe where all seems chaotic, dark, and meaningless, with no firm footing anywhere.
Tolstoy traces his own scepticism to the general scepticism of his age; with his usual incisive completeness he depicts for us, in one single paragraph, the whole mentality of such an epoch.
"I remember once in my twelfth year, a boy, now long since dead, Vladimir M——, a pupil in the gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us and brought us the news of the last discovery in the gymnasium—namely, that there was no God, and that all we were taught on the subject was a mere invention (this was in the year 1838).
"I remember well how interested my elder brothers were in this news; I was admitted to their deliberations, and we all eagerly accepted the theory as something particularly attractive and possibly quite true. I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitri,then at the university, with the impulsiveness natural to his character, gave himself up to a passionate faith, began to attend the Church services regularly, to fast, and to lead a pure and moral life, we all of us, and some older than ourselves, never ceased to hold him up to ridicule, and for some incomprehensible reason, gave him the nickname of Noah."
Tolstoy goes on to analyse the situation as he saw it in his youth—that the men of his class did not obey in the least the precepts of the religion which they professed, but, on the contrary, lived in direct opposition to them; their faith had become purely conventional, having no influence upon their lives. He declares: "The open profession of the Orthodox doctrines is mostly found among persons of dull intellects, of stern character, who think much of their own importance. Intelligence, honesty, frankness, a good heart, and moral conduct are oftener met with among those who are disbelievers."
From the age of fifteen years onwards Tolstoy read many philosophical works; being in consequence far more self-conscious than his comrades, he was well aware of the disappearance of his faith; he ceased to pray, to attend the services of the Church, or to fast. He still possessed ideals of moral excellence, and honestly desired to make himself a good and virtuous man, but his passions were very strong, and he found himself almost alone in his search for virtue.
"Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life I was met with contempt and derisive laughter, but directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions I was praised and encouraged."
Then follow the most bitter self-reproaches, describing how he yielded to all the sins and vices of his class.
It is curious and noticeable that Tolstoy does not perceive, in his first literary ambitions, any of the promptings of a higher ideal, but analyses his literary pretensions with contemptuous irony. He declares that he began to write out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. Here, again, he is surely too severe, for the most cursory reader of Tolstoy cannot but perceive that thereis always in his work something true and genuine: sympathy with the lives of others, the pure and healthy joy of the artist.
Tolstoy continues with the same ruthless severity; it is doubtful if there ever has been a literary man more contemptuous in tone to himself and his fellows.
"The view of life taken by these, my fellow-writers, was that life is a development, and the principal part in that development is played by ourselves—the thinkers; the chief influence is again due to ourselves—the poets. Our vocation is to teach mankind. In order to avoid answering the very natural question, 'What do I know, and what can I teach?' the theory in question is made to contain the formula that such is not required to be known, but that the thinker and the poet teach unconsciously."
For a time, he says, he gladly believed this theory, because he earned a great deal of money and praise and everything else he desired. He firmly believed in the theory of progress, and that he himself, though unconsciously, helped it. After some two years, however, he became discontented, and it was his fellow-writers who disenchanted him; they were more dissolute even than his former military associates, and full of vanity. His connection with them, he declares, only added another vice to his character—that of morbid and altogether unreasonable pride. "Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life—what is right and what is wrong—we had no answer, we all went on talking together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one another on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and again turning upon each other in wrath; in short we reproduced the scenes in a madhouse."
There is surely something of unfairness here, and we may suspect that it was the proud and defiant spirit of Tolstoy which made him resent the contradictions of his literary friends. But, as we have pointedout, it was always Tolstoy's fault to underrate the intellectual powers of others, and also, to the end of his life, he underrated the value of intelligence in human affairs.
It was this pride which prevented him from nobly loving, as he might have done, men of the stamp of Turgénief, and, great artist as he was, it prevented him from that entire, humble absorption in his work which has saved the soul of many a lesser man. Tolstoy had to save his soul by a longer and a darker road.
On his tour abroad he still sought for satisfying moral ideas, and still found them, as he believed, in the conception of progress; he thought, at the time, that it had a real meaning.
"In reality I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a boat by the waves and the wind, who to the one important question for him, 'Where are we to steer?' should answer, saying 'We are being carried away somewhere.'"
Tolstoy refers to the execution in Paris as shaking his belief in progress, and giving him a real moral shock. The death of his brother marked another crisis in his mentality. The terrible sense of loss, the cruel fear of death in his brother, were things that made the doctrine of "progress" seem idle and tiresome.
Tolstoy next reviews his educational activity, and judges that too most harshly; he did not, he says, really know what to teach the children, so he evaded the difficulty by trying to make them teach themselves, with results which he describes as whimsical.
Shortly after this he married, and was so engrossed by his happy family life that he wholly ceased to inquire into the real meaning of life. He continued to write. "In my writing I taught what for me was the only truth—that the object of life should be our own happiness and that of our family."
After some ten years, however, he became hopelessly puzzled by the questions "Why?" and "What after?" and his torment increased until, by degrees, he could think of nothing else. His life had come, as it were, toa sudden stop. He could carry on the mechanical business of existence, he could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, but he felt as if there were no real use in life, as if its meaning and its savour were gone. What was still stranger and more terrifying was that he could see nothing left even to desire.
"Had a fairy appeared and offered me all I desired I should not have known what to say.... The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning for me."
His life seemed to him to be a foolish and wicked joke played upon him by he knew not whom, and he refrained from carrying a gun because he was so continually tempted to suicide.
His mind dwelt on the inevitable miseries of human life; illness and death would most certainly come both to himself and to those who loved him best, and there would remain nothing of them but stench and worms.
He found his favourite reading at this time in Schopenhauer and Ecclesiastes. Solomon, the wisest man who had ever lived, declared that all was vanity, and he exactly agreed with him. There was no escape; the theory of "progress" did not apply at all to the individual life; philosophy was uncertain; science was marvellous in its methods and its intellectual power, but it led to no real result.
His conclusion was the conclusion of Schopenhauer and Solomon—that life was an evil poisoned through and through by the thought of death.
He began to study other men and their methods of escape. He saw that the young escaped this evil very largely through ignorance, by simply not perceiving the absurdity of Life, but it was impossible for him to take this means, as people cannot unknow what they know.
The second method was the Epicurean one; this was the favourite method with men of his class, because they really had plenty of means for enjoyment, and sheer selfishness prevented them from seeing or caring that the vast majority of men had no such resource. For this Tolstoy was too clear-sighted. The third means of escape was suicide, which was possible only to the strong and resolute. "The number of those in my own class who thus act continually increases, and those who do this are generally in the prime of life, with their physical strength matured and unweakened."
He considered this means of escape the worthiest, but had not the courage to make use of it.
The one thing that gave him pause was to see that the mass of men did not agree with this view and never had agreed with it; they continued to live as if life were a good thing and one that had meaning.
He turned his attention once more to the labouring classes whom he had always loved, and perceived that they held the true solution. He could not class them among those who failed to understand it, for they put it before themselves with quite extraordinary clearness; still less were they among the Epicureans, for their lives were rough, hard, and laborious; neither did they seek the solution in self-murder, for they looked upon that as the greatest of evils. Where, then, lay their secret? He answered: "In their religion." The peasantry were not like the upper classes; their religion was not for them a convention, but they really lived according to its teachings.
"Their whole lives were passed in heavy labour and unrepining content ... they accepted illness and sorrow in the quiet and firm conviction that all was for the best ... thousands and millions had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die."
Tolstoy sought, passionately and despairingly, to gain this faith; he conformed to all the ceremonial requirements of the Greek Church, prayed morning and evening, fasted and prepared for the Communion; he took a pleasure in sacrificing his bodily comfort by kneeling, by rising to attend early service; he took a pleasure also in mortifying his intellectual pride by forcing himself to believe doctrines which he had formerly condemned.
At the same time his invincible intellectual honestyremained with him and tortured him. Thus when he took the Communion, he tried hard to persuade himself that it meant only a cleansing from sin and a complete acceptance of Christ's teaching.
"But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart; it was no unconsidered word, it was the hard demand of one who could never have known what faith was ... knowing what awaited me I could never go again."
The same invincible intellectual honesty made Tolstoy search into the whole teaching of the Church; he saw that its faith was irrational and merely a tradition, not the staff of life.
He found the Orthodox Church more and more opposed to what he believed: it conducted persecutions, sanctioned massacres, and blessed war. He was obliged to break with it. Once more and with humility he turned to the Gospels themselves; he drew from them what seemed to him the real essence of the Christian religion; from them and from the life of the common man—the Russian muzhik—he made up his own creed and lived as has been described.
Tolstoy followedMy Confessionwith several other works.The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translatedappeared in 1881-2. In this work Tolstoy extracts what he considers essential in the Gospel narratives.
My Religionappeared in 1884. It explains still further and in more detail Tolstoy's religious views. He bases his theories almost entirely on the "Sermon on the Mount"; he accepts quite literally the command against violence, which is henceforth the basis of his creed. "The passage which for me was the key to the whole was verses 38 and 39 of the fifth chapter of Matthew: 'It hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil.' I suddenly for the first time understood the last verse in its direct and simple meaning. I understood that Christ meant precisely what he said.
"These words, 'Do not resist evil,' understood in their direct sense, were for me indeed the key that opened everything to me, and I marvelled how I could have so perverted the clear, definite words."
It is in this spirit that Tolstoy objects so profoundly to the whole organisation of modern society, since it is all based upon force. "Everything which surrounded me, my family's peace and their safety and my own, my property, everything was based on the law which Christ rejected, on the law, 'A tooth for a tooth.'"
From this precept of non-resistance Tolstoy deduces the wickedness of all war, however waged and for whatever object.
From the precept, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," he similarly deduces the wickedness and evil of all law-courts. From the precept, "Swear not at all," he deduces the evil of all oaths, and has no difficulty in showing that nearly all the things he thinks contrary to the law of Christ, "murder in wars, incarcerations, capital punishments, tortures of men," are committed only by the device of the oath, which substitutes a collective responsibility for an individual one, and so takes away from each man the sense he would otherwise have of committing an individual crime. There is in this book a very severe criticism of the Greek Church, which Tolstoy accuses of bolstering up and supporting all the worst evils of the time.
The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1893, is another long work which contrasts life on Christian principles with life as it is actually lived according to the maxims of the Church and State. There is an ironic and bitter analysis of the absurdities of Greek Orthodoxy, and an equally ironic and bitter analysis of the absurd conditions of modern Europe, which keep whole nations armed under the pretence that their ever-increasing military burdens are a way to peace.
With this group of works also we should classWhat is Art?1899. It is the book which carries Tolstoy's asceticism to its climax.
There are many people who, though theysympathise with Tolstoy's ideals, decline to take seriously on the ground that he is a fanatic, and, if the matter be inquired into, it will usually be found that they base the accusation mainly upon his treatment of science and art.
Tolstoy has never a good word for science; he insists upon considering it as if it were concerned solely with abstract questions, and had no practical bearing upon the lives of men. The modern reader is overwhelmed with surprise by such an unwarranted assumption. Even if it were true that science is only valuable on its utilitarian side, we are still driven to confess that that utilitarian value is enormous; it has irrigated deserts, fertilised soils, improved animals, banished many diseases; it has made, even in the one occupation Tolstoy really reverences—agriculture—man's labour tenfold or a hundredfold more productive than it ever was before. If science has not yet effected the transformation of human life that it might have done, that is surely because our imperfect organisation of society prevents us from reaping the full value of its great and beneficent achievement.
And the case is even more astonishing when we turn to art. Tolstoy, himself one of the world's greatest writers, condemns almost all great art, from the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, and almost all modern art—including, characteristically enough, himself. We must remember this truth, that Tolstoy was born an aristocrat, and that the members of aristocracies are nearly always cold to intellectual attainments; they belong to a privileged class which despises work and repudiates intellect. Tolstoy learnt, with all the energy of his strong soul, to exalt and reverence the once-despised labour of the common man, but he never learnt to esteem justly the intellect; he resembles Lord Byron, who, although a great poet, only condescended to the trade of letters, and regarded it always with a certain scorn.
Tolstoy is never, with his whole heart, a man of letters, and he is still less a scholar, for though at times he readsvoraciously, it is almost wholly without system; there are the strangest gaps in his knowledge, and he is singularly impervious to all ideas except those with which he happens to be at the moment in tune.
However,What is Art?contains some admirable things. Tolstoy defines art as a human activity, the aim of which is to communicate to some other person the feelings which the artist has himself experienced. Art is effective in proportion as the artist's feeling is sincere and profound, and the expression of it clear; art is good or bad in accordance with the nature of the feeling transmitted; if the feeling is good it is good art, if the feeling is bad it is bad or debased art.
This is a fine definition, and well worth studying. From Aristotle downwards great critics have agreed that one aim of art is certainly "infection," and that the greater the art the more powerful the "infection" is likely to be.
Tolstoy asserts again that art is one of the great unifying forces of mankind, that it binds together different nations and different generations of men, and that that art is the greatest which has the most universal appeal. Here again there is little with which to quarrel. Tolstoy's definition of great art is almost St. Beuve's definition of a classic.
The amazement lies in the extraordinary manner in which Tolstoy has applied his own most excellent ideas. He loves Homer, and declares that his poems are truly national art, but he declines to admire the Greek tragedians. Why? They are surely as national as Homer himself. Again, he declares that the truly great artist ought always to express the best religious and ethical ideas of his time. Quite probably! Yet he denies this greatness to Dante, but if there ever was a poet who embodied the noblest religious thought of his epoch it was surely Dante! And Tolstoy condemns Goethe, who embodied the new religious conceptions arising upon the ruins of the materialistic eighteenth century. The fact of the matter is that Tolstoy does not really know the content of the world's great classics, and thosewhom he happens to praise—Homer and Molière—he appreciates, not because they are finer moralists than the rest (they are not), but because some accident has directed towards them his attention. It is curious to compare this essay with Shelley'sDefence of Poetry; the underlying ideas in both treatises are identical; Shelley also says that the main aim of art is a unifying aim, and that the artist ought always, as a moral duty, to communicate the best impression that he knows. But what a world of difference in the catholic appreciation of Shelley! Shelley, also a great lover of mankind, never made the mistake of underrating the human intellect.
What is Art?had a sequel, to the English mind still more extraordinary, in two essays on Shakespeare published separately. In them Tolstoy condemns all Shakespeare, but singles outKing Learespecially, mainly on the ground that the plot is absurd and the whole division of the kingdom fantastic. It is strange Tolstoy cannot see thatKing Learis in essence, the thing he himself most admires—a moving and beautiful folk-tale; the very absurdity of the plot Shakespeare took over directly from the old story, and probably left untouched because it was so deeply embedded in his hearers' hearts.
Of course, it is not difficult to see why Tolstoy so dislikes Shakespeare—mainly because he throws such a glamour over aristocracy, and makes his aristocrats so noble in their sorrows, so radiant, generous, and joyful in their prosperity. Tolstoy is always insisting that aristocrats are not really like that—that they are selfish, stupid, and bored to death; but Shakespeare in glorifying aristocracy is only acting as the people, even in folk-tale and fairy-tale, have always done; they prove by that, it is true, nothing but their own naïve and inexhaustible goodness of heart. The truth is that, in belabouring Shakespeare, Tolstoy is doing the thing that would of all others, had he known its true import, have shocked him most: he is Tolstoy—the aristocrat—cuffing Shakespeare—the peasant's son—for being so like a peasant.
Tolstoy has often been blamed for making his uneducated Russian peasants the supreme arbiters of taste, but they would not agree with him about Shakespeare. A friend of mine, a Russian lady, told me she once sawKing Learplayed in a barn, with the roughest of accessories, before a peasant audience, and, at the conclusion of the drama, there was not a dry eye among the audience.
Still Tolstoy's eccentricities need not blind us to those ideas which really are stimulating and valuable. There is his warning against commercialised art—art is not a commercial product, and can never be "ordered" and "paid for" in the same way; there is the warning that schools of art can teach nothing but technique, and that, by an over-elaborate technique, talent itself is often crushed and spoiled; there is the emphatic statement that all great art should be catholic, and that the art which can appeal only to a limited coterie is, almost of necessity, poor art; there is the statement that all art should be as clear as the artist himself can make it, and that "contortions, obscurities, and difficulties" are mostly due to the vain attempt to hide shallowness; and finally, and most important of all, there is the statement that really great art can only be produced by those to whom life is a lovely, a joyous, and a noble thing.