Leo Tolstoy by G. K. Chesterton, G. H. Perris, and Edward Garnett
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Leo TolstoyChesterton, G. K. ; Perris, G. H. ; Garnett, Edward. Leo Tolstoy

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Leo Tolstoy

Chesterton, G. K. ; Perris, G. H. ; Garnett, Edward

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About the print version

Leo Tolstoy

G. K. Chesterton, G. H. Parris, and Edward Garnett

Hodder and Stoughton

London

1903

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Leo Tolstoy

-1-

TOLSTOY

Tolstoy as an Officer

IF any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and
influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will not
find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical views, clearly
and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will find it best expressed in
the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian
anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to
possess them or control them. About such an incident as this there is a quality
altogether independent of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of
the view. It is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young.

There are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were
disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a
faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa
and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and
philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this
iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots
and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of
the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel,
because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to
imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and
bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels. All this, as I

-2-

Tolstoy in His Student Days

say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human society
in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But there is
nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if Mr. Balfour could
be converted to a religion which taught him that he was morally bound to walk
into the House of Commons on his hands, and he did walk on his hands, if Mr.

Wyndham could accept a creed which taught that he ought to dye his hair blue,
and he did dye his hair blue, they would both of them be, almost beyond
description, better and happier men than they are. For there is only one
happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm-that
strange and splendid

-3-

Yasnaya Polvana, The Country Home of Count Tolstoy

word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the
eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the
presence of a god.

This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is the
best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that the

Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian moralist, but
there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into importance and the
growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due to his admirable summary and
justification of their scheme of ethics. Tolstoy, besides being a magnificent
novelist, is one of the very few men alive who have a real, solid, and serious
view of life. He is a Catholic church, of which he is the only member, the
somewhat arrogant Pope and the somewhat submissive layman. He is one of the two
or three men in Europe, who have an attitude towards things so entirely their
own, that we could supply their inevitable view on anything-a silk hat, a Home

Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a pound of tobacco. There are three men in
existence who have such an attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and my friend

Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they
all have this essential resemblance,

-4-

The Approach to the Park at Yasnaya Polyana

that, given their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their opinions on
every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a field. There are
certain views of certain things that they must take; they do not form opinions,
the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in the case of Tolstoy, the
mere list of miscellaneous objects which I wrote down at random above, a silk
hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, and a pound of tobacco. Tolstoy would
say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this
silk hat is a black abortion.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible
simplification of life; therefore, this Home Rule Bill is a mere peddling
compromise; it is no good to break up a centralised empire into nations, you
must break the nation up into individuals.” He would say: “I believe in the
utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, I am interested in this

Indian poem, for Eastern ethics, under all their apparent gorgeousness, are far
simpler and more Tolstoyan than Western.” He would say: ” I believe in the
utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this pound of tobacco is a
thing of evil; take it away.” Everything in the world. from the Bible to a
bootjack, can be, and is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan
principle, the simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like
this we are dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely-more
important than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.

This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important in
more ways than one. Among other things it is a very interesting commentary on an
attitude which has been taken up for the matter of half a century by all the
avowed opponents of religion. The secularist and the sceptic have denounced

Christianity first and

-5-

The Gateway-Entrance to Yasnaya Polyana

foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious
excitement led men to burn their neighbours and to dance naked down the street.

How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the matter altogether,
and still there are philosophical and ethical theories which can produce
fanaticism enough to fill the world. Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with
religion. There are grave scientific theories which, if carried out logically,
would result in the same fires in the market-place and the same nakedness in the
street. There are modern esthetes who would expose themselves like the Adamites
if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There are modern scientific moralists
who would burn their opponents alive, and would be quite contented if they were
burnt by some new chemical process. And if any one doubts this proposition-that
fanaticism has nothing to do with religion, but has only to do with human
nature-let him take this case of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start
with no theology at all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our
neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to
carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases
theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches
alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of
reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is
torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind
and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by
maintaining that the sexual

-6-

Tolstoy with His Bicycle (Photographed in 1896)

relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is
positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it will always
be. Destroy the last copy of he Bible, and persecution and insane orgies will be
founded on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy.” Some of the broadest
thinkers of the Middle Ages believed in faggots, and some of the broadest
thinkers in the nineteenth century believe in dynamite.

The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith,
with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one
faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a
tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been
produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from
the beginning of time, mysticisrn has kept men sane. The thing that has driven
them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about
the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad
from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his
insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always
been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men
from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and
the lethal chamber, has been mysticism-the belief that logic is misleading, and
that things are not what they seem.

G. K. CHESTERSON.

-7-

LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER

“The Tree of the Poor” Where Tolstoy receives the peasants and listens with
unwearying patience to their tales of distress

Tolstoy, An Early Portrait

HALF the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in
literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western
novelist — an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first
place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly
re-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple;
the world might so have gained a few great romances-it would have lost
infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. ” My friend,” he wrote
to Tolstoy from his deathbed, ” return to literature ! Reflect that that gift
comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could
think that my prayers could influence you…. My friend, great writer of our

Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For

-8-

Count and Countess Tolstoy

once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and
destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a

Russian from tip to toe-that is one of his supreme values for us; and he
remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable
in his works. “We are not to take ‘ Anna Karenina ‘ as a work of art,” said

Matthew

-9-

Leo Tolstoy, From a Sketch by Victor Prout

Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very
satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his
introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know
how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my
part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some
people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse,
too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the
life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these
criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each
history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have
lived through myself. I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature
has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of

Karenina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he
cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of
art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to
emphasise in this qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than
the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics

-10-

Count Tolstoy at Work in the Fields

under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.

Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is
best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”),

Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth

-11-

Facsimile of a Portion of Tolstoy’s MS.

synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the
humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of
society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in
the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy
saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his
lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient
of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a
little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan
in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his
degree. ” Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”-which appeared in three sections
between 1852 and 1857-tells the story of this period, though the figure of

Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he
is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most
uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It of great length, there is no plot,
and few outer events are recorded.

-12-

Count Tolstoy, His Wife, and Daughters

The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great
descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with
tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly
vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work
will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical
gospel.

After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya

Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A

Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel called “A

Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army,
and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this
favourite stage of Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering
mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders,

Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his
early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as

Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest
result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this
fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel
written in our language.” ” The Raid ” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s
translation is entitled), same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition ” (1855),

“Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A

-13-

Tolstoy at Work in His Study at Yasnaya Polyana

-14-

Tolstoy Writing at His Desk.

Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of this
sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the outbreak of
the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he had command of a
battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The immediate product of
these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series of impressions reprinted
from one of the leading Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From
that day onward Tolstoy knew and hateful truth about war and the thoughtless
pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that
there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon
the glorification of the savage nature. These wonderful pictures of the routine
of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer, and later on
created in Western countries an impression like that of the canvases of

Verestchagin.

-15-

One of H.R. Miller’s illustrations in the English edition of “Where Love is,
there God is also”

For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of

Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with

Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be
mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. lt was of
these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think of them
without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he
charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must
not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from
the scenic and incidental realism of the ” Recollections of a Billiard Marker”

(1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short novels date from
about this time, including ” Albert ” and ” Lucerne,” both of which remind us of
the Count’s susceptibility to music; ” Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and

“Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage that failed, a most clear,
consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of work, anticipating in
essentials ” The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to scandalise the world thirty years
afterward.

After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time
the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him-his brother

Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army
surgeon in Tula-the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole
life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel and daring
experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several volumes of the
highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial

-16-

Count Tolstoy

work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon ” War and Peace ” and

” Anna Karenina ” fill up the next fifteen years. ” War and Peace” (1864-9) is a
huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, with preceding and succeeding
episodes in Russian society. These four volumes display in their superlative
degree Tolstoy’s indifference to plot and his absorption in individual
character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of
several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating
psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist
theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert

(how the name carries us backward !) wrote: ” It is of the first order. What a
painter and what a psychologist ! The two first volumes are sublime, but the
third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The
artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared

“Anna Karenina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so
easily jilted), his last novel. The fine qualities of this book, which, though
long, is

-17-

A Famous Painting of Tolstoy

dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I
need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “
the most perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the
author of “Diana,”

-18-

A Photograph of Count Tolstoy Taken at Yasnaya Polyana

is praise indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and

Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the
reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold
complained that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome
multiplicity of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine
perception and no less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in

Anna’s

-19-

Russian Jailer and Woman Warder

“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” ” When I had ended my work

‘Anna Karenina,’ ” said Tolstoy in ” My Confession” (1879-82), ” my despair
reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible
condition in which I found myself…. I saw only one thing-Death. Everything
else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that
it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change,
principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His
subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of
books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated,

Compared, and Harmonised ” (1880-2), ” What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced
abroad in 1884, ” What is to be Done ? ” (1884-5), ” Life ” (1887), ” Work “

(1888), ” The Kingdom of God is Within You ” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894),

“Patriotism and Christianity” (1896) —

-20-

A Tolstoy Medallion

The Cover of the Tract “Where Love Is, There God is Also”

crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all

Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maudej
the ” Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for
their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly
good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare
utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a
jehad against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and
all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short
but luminous essay on ” Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a scathing
attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in
particular-“The Christian Teaching ” (1898), and ” The Slavery of our Times “

(1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious
persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the
failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled ” Nihilism” Tolstoy has
gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a
public

-21-

One of the Postcards Issued in Moscow in 1898 to Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary

Jubilee

more satisfactory contribution to the subject.

It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if
fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the
evangelist to the last. ” Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite
short stories ever written. ” The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “

Resurrection ” (1599’ are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The
much condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and ” Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will
be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit
of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand

Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like ” Resurrection” to the summary
treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large
picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a
master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and
essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality of
these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a conventionally
limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which they are founded,
then the inexorable development of individual characters, and ever and anon in
the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the
characters, the episodes are all too real and precious British self-complacency.

The grandmotherly Athenoeum

-22-

Two of the Postcards Issued at Moscow in 1898 to Commemorate Tolstoy’s Literary

Jubilee

permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase that
has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make ” the ornament of
a museum,” — which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before a well-known
literary society in London describe him lately as a “scavenger,” and that a city
bookseller assured me the other day that there was something almost amounting to
a boycott against his fiction in the shops. The publisher who is preparing a
complete edition of Tolstoy — enormous work! — knows better, knows that

Tolstoy is one of the world-spirits whose advance out of the

-23-

Count Tolstoy at Rest, From a Painting by Répin

obscurity of a benighted land into the largest contemporary circulation is but a
foretaste of an influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth
of thinking men and women.

His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals.

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

-24-

Tolstoy in the Grounds of Yasnaya Polyana

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

G. H. PERRIS.

Tolstoy’s Place in European Literature

-25-

One of H.R. Millar’s illustrations in the English edition of “What Men Live By”

(written in 1881), reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd.,
the publishers

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

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

-26-

One of the Most Striking of the Many Busts of Count Tolstoy

must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s
thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that

Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany
keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been
absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern

-27-

A Recent Portrait of Count Tolstoy

-28-

Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which
the creator of Anna Karenina and War and Peace has confronted the modern world
is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any
other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of Wilhelm Meister and of

Resurrection what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has
swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine”

has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A
century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change,
and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago
typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its
old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy
today stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation’s routine
and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall
presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit
in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and

Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact
that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to
realising what the life of the modern man is. He of all the analysts of the
civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealized, least
beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world.

With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his
passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has
constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual
limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the
world of any writer of the century. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, those great
worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and
moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some
mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of
containing a whole nation’s life, to the world of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor

Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can
name.

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The Defendants

And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main
currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more
untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his

European contemporaries.

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

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Tolstoy and His Daughter Tatyana

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

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Count Tolstoy and His Family

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the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them,
the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this
the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It
is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other
great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the
science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and
irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has
fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the
earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads
of evil which every age unwinds.

Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great
artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness
of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life
is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other
document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among
artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from
a former article let us say that: “Sebastopol” gives us war under all aspects —
war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease,
hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex
effects of “Sebastopol” by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds,
dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by
placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and
emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of
death. he lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by
society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does
this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the
average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, “I felt so and so, and
did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their
agony, that I did not enter into at all.” “Sebastopol,” therefore, though an
exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document
on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply

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Leo Tolstoy, From a Portrait Painted in 1884

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Maslova’s Return to the Ward After the Sentence

relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those
theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave
historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from
generation to generation. And more: we feel that in “Sebastopol” we have at last
the skeptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is,
and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have
heretofore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our
civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the
world’s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and
suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face
with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the

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Leo Tolstoy, 1896

constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and
conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of
all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at
least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in
advancing towards a general sociological study of man.

Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our view,
no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth century.

Both of these writers focus for us in a marvelously complete manner the
respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth
century have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements, all the
problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of today in
contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily
built up for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of modern life is
condensed in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he
typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at
the formidable array

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of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity’s progress, at the appalling
cheapness and waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for the
modern soul’s alarm in contact with science. And just as science’s work after
its first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is
directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so

Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity,
and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science,
and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more
conscious of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it is feeling,
and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel — this has been the
great novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one
truth — to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of
life — never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man’s
animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s realism in art is symbolical
of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a
study of ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain
to the spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore,
more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency
of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked
on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too
heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward
march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul
of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those
old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will
stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.