Tolstoi is a literary giant. He has a “giant’s strength,” and has
unfortunately learned to “use it like a giant”—which, I take it,
means not necessarily with conscious cruelty, but with stupidity.
Excepting when he confines himself to pure romance, and to creation
of works which, after the manner of Dr. Holmes, may be described as
medicated fable—the man seems to write with the very faintest possible
consciousness of anything good or even passably decent, in human
nature. His characters are moved by motives which are redeemed from
monstrous baseness only by being pettily base. In _War and Peace_, for
example,—a book so crowded with characters, historical and imaginary,
that the author himself can not carry them in his memory without
dropping them all along his trail—there is but one person who is not
either a small rascal or a great fool or both. Such a discreditable
multitude of unpleasant persons no one but their maker—in whose image
they are not made—ever collected between the covers of a single book.
From Napoleon down to the ultimate mujik they go through life with
heads full of confusion, hearts distended with selfishness and mouths
running over with lies. If Tolstoi wrote as a satirist, with obvious
cynicism, all this would be easily enough understood; but nothing,
evidently, is further from his intention; he is essentially a preacher
and honestly believes that his powerful caricatures are portraits from
life; or rather—for that we may admit—that the total impression derived
from a comprehensive view of them is a true picture of human character,
charged in its every shadow (there are no lights) with instruction
and edification. I can not say how it goes with others, but all that
is left to me by this hideous “march past” of detestables; this
sombre tableau of the intellectually dead; this fortuitous concourse
of a random rascalry unlawfully begotten of an exuberant fancy and a
pitiless observation—“all of it all” that remains with me is a taste in
the mouth which I can only describe as pallid.
In his personal character Tolstoi seems to be the only living
Christian, in the sense in which Christ was a Christian—whatever credit
may inhere in that—of whom we have any account; but in judging his
books we have nothing to do with that. He has a superb imagination
and must be master of a matchless style, for we get glimpses of it,
even through the translations of men who are probably familiar enough
with Russian and certainly altogether too familiar with English. The
trouble with him is, as Mr. Matthew Arnold said of Byron, he doesn’t
know enough. He sees everything, but he has not freed his mind from the
captivating absurdity, so dominant in the last generation, that human
events occur without human agency, individual will counting for no more
in the ordering of affairs than does a floating chip in determining
the course of the river. The commander of an army is commanded by
his men. Napoleon was pushed by his soldiers hither and thither all
over Europe; they by some blind, occult impulse which Tolstoi can
not understand. He goes so far as to affirm that an army takes one
route instead of another by silent consent and understanding among
its widely separated fractions; infantinely unaware that not one of
them could move a mile without a dozen sets of detailed instructions
to commanders, quartermasters, chiefs of ordnance, commissaries of
subsistence, engineers and so forth. Tolstoi has entered the camp of
History with a flag of truce and been blindfolded at the outpost.
When Tolstoi trusts to his imagination and doesn’t need to know
anything, he is inaccessible to censure. _The Cossacks_, one of his
earlier works, is a prodigiously clever novel. About a half of the
book, as I remember it, concerns itself with the killing of a single
Circassian by a single Cossack. The shadow of that event is over it
all, ominous, portentous; and I know of nothing finer nor more dramatic
in its way than the narrative of the death of the dead man’s avengers,
knee to knee among the rain-pools of the steppe, chanting through
their beards their last fierce defiance. What to this was the slaughter
at Austerlitz, the conflagration at Moscow, flinging its black shadows
over half a world, if we have not Hugo’s eyes to see them through? Only
the gods look large upon Olympus.
But do me the favor to compare Tolstoi at his worst with other popular
writers at their best. It is eagle and hens. It is sun and tallow
candles. From the heights where he sits conspicuous, they are visible
as black beetles. Nay, they are slugs; their brilliant work is a shine
of slime which dulls behind them even as they creep. When one of these
godlets dies the first man to pass his grave will say: “Why has he no
monument?”—the second: “What! a monument?”—the third: “Who the devil
was he?”
1890.