The Man and the Artist.
There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist.
He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is
nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and
dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of
character and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in his
novels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; his
interpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely and
liberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is no
more angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks but
one thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet he
handles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and a
magnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of their
opposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and his
understanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth with
delicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able to
sympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express his
sentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and give
utterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to which
he belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted,
moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society.
He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats and
carpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary strata
he is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the task of presenting
them to others. It is arguable that only in the highest and lowest
expressions of society is unsophisticated nature to be found; and that
Tolstoi, interested less in manners than in men and studious above all of
the elemental qualities of character, has done right to avoid the middle-
class and attach himself to the consideration and the representation of
the highest and the lowest. Certain it is that here have been his
successes. The Prince Andrew of _War and Peace_--cultured, intelligent,
earnest, true lover and true gentleman--is as noble a hero as modern
fiction has achieved; but he is no more interesting as a human being and
no more successful as art than the Marianna of _les Cosaques_, who is a
savage pure and simple, or the Efim of _les Deux Vieillards_, who would
seem to the haughty Radical no better than a common idiot. It is to be
noted of all three--the prince, the savage, and the peasant--that none in
himself is sophisticate nor vile but that each is rich in the common,
simple, elemental qualities of humanity. It is to these and the
manifestations of these that Tolstoi turns for inspiration first of all.
If he chose he could be as keen a satirist and as indefatigable a student
of the meannesses and the minor miseries of existence, the toothaches and
the pimples of experience, as Thackeray. But he does not choose. The
epic note sounds in his work. The eternal issues of life, the
fundamental interests of character and conduct and emotion, are his
material. Love, valour, self-sacrifice, charity, the responsibilities of
being, these and their like are the only vital facts to him; they
constitute the really important part of the scheme of things as he sees
and comprehends it. In their analysis the artist and the mystic meet and
take hands; sometimes to each other's profit, more often, to each other's
hurt. It is not without significance that no other novelist has looked
so closely and penetrated so far into the secret of death: that none has
divined so much of it, nor presented his results with so complete and
intimate a mastery and so persuasive and inspiring a belief. Plainly
Tolstoi has learned 'la vraie signification de la vie'; his faith in its
capacities is immense, his acceptance of its consequences is
unhesitating. He is the great optimist, and his work is wholesome and
encouraging in direct ratio to the vastness of his talent and the
perfection of his method.
Ivan Iliitch.
Who does not know that extraordinary _Death of Ivan Iliitch_? It is an
achievement in realism: not the realism of externals and trivial
details--though of this there is enough for art if not for the common
Zolaphyte--but the higher and better sort, the realism which deals with
mental and spiritual conditions, the realism of _Othello_ and _Hamlet_.
There are many deaths in literature, but there is none, I think, in which
the gradual processes of dissolution are analysed and presented with such
knowledge, such force, such terrible directness, as here. The result is
appalling, but the final impression is one of encouragement and
consolation. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoi appeals to the primitive
nature of man, and the issue is what he wishes it to be. Not for him is
the barren pessimism of the latter-day French rhapsodist in fiction, and
the last word of his study, inexorable till then, is a word of hope and
faith.
War and Peace.
Incomparably his greatest book, however, is _War and Peace_. It is the
true Russian epic; alike in the vastness of its scope and in the
completeness of its execution. It tells the story of the great conflict
between Koutouzoff and Russia and Napoleon and France, it begins some
years before Austerlitz, and it ends when Borodino and Moscow are already
ancient history. The canvas is immense: the crowd of figures and the
world of incidents almost bewildering. It is not a complete success. In
many places the mystic has got the better of the artist: he is
responsible for theories of the art of war which, advanced with the
greatest confidence, are disproved by the simple narrative of events; and
he has made a study of Napoleon in which, for the first and only time in
all his work, he appears as an intemperate advocate. But when all is
said in blame so much remains to praise that one scarce knows where to
begin. Tolstoi's theory of war is mystical and untenable, no doubt; but
his pictures of warfare are incomparably good. None has felt and
reproduced as he has done what may be called the intimacy of battle--the
feeling of the individual soldier, the passion and excitement, the terror
and the fury, that taken collectively make up the influence which
represents the advance or the retreat of an army in combat. But also, in
a far greater degree, none has dealt so wonderfully with the vaster
incidents, the more tremendous issues. His Austerlitz is magnificent;
his Borodino is (there is no other word for it) epic; his studies of the
Retreat are almost worthy of what has gone before. For the first time
what has been called 'the peering modern touch' is here applied to great
events, with the result that here is a book unique in literature. Of the
characters--Natasha, Peter, Mary, Dennissoff, the Rostoffs, Helen,
Dologhoff, Bagration, Bolkonsky, and the others; above all, Koutouzoff
and Prince Andrew--Prince Andrew the heroic gentleman, Koutouzoff the
genius of Russia and the war--to meet them once is to take on a set of
friends and enemies for life.