There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Those
novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into
dramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly
unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of
painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and
it is meant to be monotonous. Tolstoi endeavours to give us something
more nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and in
daily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in which
external action takes part. In the drama we can only properly realise
the soul's action through some corresponding or consequent action which
takes place visibly before us. You will find, throughout Tolstoi's work,
many striking single scenes, but never, I think, a scene which can bear
detachment from that network of detail which has led up to it and which
is to come out of it. Often the scene which most profoundly impresses
one is a scene trifling in itself, and owing its impressiveness partly
to that very quality. Take, for instance, in "Resurrection," Book II.,
chapter xxviiii., the scene in the theatre "during the second act of the
eternal 'Dame aux Camélias,' in which a foreign actress once again, and
in a novel manner, showed how women died of consumption." The General's
wife, Mariette, smiles at Nekhludoff in the box, and, outside, in the
street, another woman, the other "half-world," smiles at him, just in
the same way. That is all, but to Nekhludoff it is one of the great
crises of his life. He has seen something, for the first time, in what
he now feels to be its true light, and he sees it "as clearly as he saw
the palace, the sentinels, the fortress, the river, the boats and the
Stock Exchange. And just as on this northern summer night there was no
restful darkness on the earth, but only a dismal, dull light coming from
an invisible source, so in Nekhludoff's soul there was no longer the
restful darkness, ignorance." The chapter is profoundly impressive; it
is one of those chapters which no one but Tolstoi has ever written.
Imagine it transposed to the stage, if that were possible, and the
inevitable disappearance of everything that gives it meaning!
In Tolstoi the story never exists for its own sake, but for the sake of
a very definite moral idea. Even in his later novels Tolstoi is not a
preacher; he gives us an interpretation of life, not a theorising about
life. But, to him, the moral idea is almost everything, and (what is of
more consequence) it gives a great part of its value to his "realism" of
prisons and brothels and police courts. In all forms of art, the point
of view is of more importance than the subject-matter. It is as
essential for the novelist to get the right focus as it is for the
painter. In a page of Zola and in a page of Tolstoi you might find the
same gutter described with the same minuteness; and yet in reading the
one you might see only the filth, while in reading the other you might
feel only some fine human impulse. Tolstoi "sees life steadily" because
he sees it under a divine light; he has a saintly patience with evil,
and so becomes a casuist through sympathy, a psychologist out of that
pity which is understanding. And then, it is as a direct consequence of
this point of view, in the mere process of unravelling things, that his
greatest skill is shown as a novelist. He does not exactly write well;
he is satisfied if his words express their meaning, and no more; his
words have neither beauty nor subtlety in themselves. But, if you will
only give him time, for he needs time, he will creep closer and closer
up to some doubtful and remote truth, not knowing itself for what it is:
he will reveal the soul to itself, like "God's spy."
If you want to know how, daily life goes on among people who know as
little about themselves as you know about your neighbours in a street or
drawing-room, read Jane Austen, and, on that level, you will be
perfectly satisfied. But if you want to know why these people are happy
or unhappy, why the thing which they do deliberately is not the thing
which they either want or ought to do, read Tolstoi; and I can hardly
add that you will be satisfied. I never read Tolstoi without a certain
suspense, sometimes a certain terror. An accusing spirit seems to peer
between every line; I can never tell what new disease of the soul those
pitying and unswerving eyes may not have discovered.
Such, then, is a novel of Tolstoi; such, more than almost any of his
novels, is "Resurrection," the masterpiece of his old age, into which he
has put an art but little less consummate than that of "Anna Karenina,"
together with the finer spirit of his later gospel. Out of this novel a
play in French was put together by M. Henry Bataille and produced at the
Odéon. Now M. Bataille is one of the most powerful and original
dramatists of our time. A play in English, said to be by MM. Henry
Bataille and Michael Morton, has been produced by Mr. Tree at His
Majesty's Theatre; and the play is called, as the French play was
called, Tolstoi's "Resurrection." What Mr. Morton has done with M.
Bataille I cannot say. I have read in a capable French paper that "l'on
est heureux d'avoir pu applaudir une oeuvre vraiment noble, vraiment
pure," in the play of M. Bataille; and I believe it. Are those quite the
words one would use about the play in English?
They are not quite the words I would use about the play in English. It
is a melodrama with one good scene, the scene in the prison; and this is
good only to a certain point. There is another scene which is amusing,
the scene of the jury, but the humour is little more than clowning, and
the tragic note, which should strike through it, is only there in a
parody of itself. Indeed the word parody is the only word which can be
used about the greater part of the play, and it seems to me a pity that
the name of Tolstoi should be brought into such dangerous companionship
with the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heard
people around me confessing that they had not read the book. How
terrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they had
ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that
this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of
drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing
disbelief, was in any sense a mouthpiece for Tolstoi's poor simple
little gospel. Tolstoi according to Captain Marshall, I should be
inclined to define him; but I must give Mr. Tree his full credit in the
matter. When he crucifies himself, so to speak, symbolically, across the
door of the jury-room, remarking in his slowest manner: "The bird
flutters no longer; I must atone, I must atone!" one is, in every sense,
alone with the actor. Mr. Tree has many arts, but he has not the art of
sincerity. His conception of acting is, literally, to act, on every
occasion. Even in the prison scene, in which Miss Ashwell is so good,
until she begins to shout and he to rant, "and then the care is over,"
Mr. Tree cannot be his part without acting it.
That prison scene is, on the whole, well done, and the first part of it,
when the women shout and drink and quarrel, is acted with a satisfying
sense of vulgarity which contrasts singularly with what is meant to be
a suggestion of the manners of society in St. Petersburg in the scene
preceding. Perhaps the most lamentable thing in the play is the first
act. This act takes the place of those astounding chapters in the novel
in which the seduction of Katusha is described with a truth, tact,
frankness, and subtlety unparalleled in any novel I have ever read. I
read them over before I went to the theatre, and when I got to the
theatre I found a scene before me which was not Tolstoi's scene, a
foolish, sentimental conversation in which I recognised hardly more than
a sentence of Tolstoi (and this brought in in the wrong place), and, in
short, the old make-believe of all the hack-writers for the stage,
dished up again, and put before us, with a simplicity of audacity at
which one can only marvel ("a thing imagination boggles at"), as an
"adaptation" from Tolstoi. Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some
translators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention his
name, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "Ah,
monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censor
always against him; some of his books he has never been able to print in
full in Russian. But in the new play at His Majesty's Theatre we have,
in what is boldly called Tolstoi's "Resurrection," something which is
not Tolstoi at all. There is M. Bataille, who is a poet of nature and a
dramatist who has created a new form of drama: let him be exonerated.
Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been
left well alone?