"WAR AND PEACE"
_War and Peace_ is the longest and most important of Tolstoy's single
works. In this book Tolstoy aimed at giving the picture of a whole
epoch, and that one of the most stirring in the history of modern
Europe; the real subject is the conflict between the French and the
Prussians from 1805 to 1812, the historical events of the novel
concluding with the tragedy of the French retreat from Moscow. The
enormous scope of the book, the power of its psychology, the vast
number of characters crowding its pages, its tremendous vitality--all
won for Tolstoy a recognition deservedly world-wide. After reading it
we feel as if we have beheld with our own eyes a terrific and
soul-stirring crisis in the history of a great nation, and one of the
epoch-making events of the world. And yet the work is truly a novel,
and not history in the form of fiction, because we are shown all these
events not in the dry, detached light of the historian (whom Tolstoy
dislikes), but through their effect on the minds and souls of the
private individuals participating in them. Tolstoy selects a little
group of Russian families whose circumstances involve them in all the
main events; we see with their eyes and hear with their ears; we share
in their sufferings, until at the end it is difficult to believe that
we ourselves have not witnessed Austerlitz and Borodino, the
conflagration of Moscow, and the horrors of the French retreat. Yet
the total impression is not one of catastrophe; the great nation,
having shed of its heart's blood and sacrificed its noblest, yet
recuperates and recovers; those who are left continue the race, and
life proceeds as before.
{37}
The whole narrative is grouped around three families: the Bolkonskys,
the Rostofs, and the Bezukhois, whose relations and inter-relations are
very skilfully planned.
The book has three heroes, one in each of the families, and our
attention is first attracted to Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. He is a man
of high rank, son of a distinguished general, possessed of aristocratic
prejudice, handsome, far more intellectual than his companions; the
faults of his character are haughtiness and disdain; far superior to
the majority of human beings, he is only too keenly conscious of the
fact. Yet Prince Andrei is capable of strong and deep affections; he
dearly loves his father, his sister, and one friend--Pierre Bezukhoi.
Bezukhoi is massive, clumsy, and sensuous, but the keen-sighted Prince
Andrei pierces through all his faults and judges his friend justly when
he declares that he has "a heart of gold." Among the people whom
Prince Andrei secretly despises is his own wife, the Princess Lisa: he
finds her cowardly and frivolous, and, though outwardly respectful, he
has little real affection.
Prince Andrei enters military service; he becomes aide-de-camp to
Kutuzof, and Tolstoy thus has an opportunity of showing us the whole
course of the campaign from a really intimate point of view. The great
passion of Prince Andrei's life is ambition--the desire for glory--and
he considers war as being essentially a means to honour; he is present
throughout the battle of Austerlitz, where his calm, cool courage wins
him the highest commendations. But the experience changes all his
views of life. In the first place he realises how seldom the rewards
of courage go to the really deserving.
During the engagement at the Enns the honours of the day really rest
with an obscure artillery officer named Tushin, who keeps his battery
firing upon the French, and at the critical moment covers the Russian
retreat; Tushin's gunners are almost annihilated, but, with the most
heroic courage, the battery stick to their {38} task and the army is
saved. Tushin himself is a modest and unassuming man, and his
superiors are so confused that they not only fail to recognise his
achievement, but are about to reprimand him severely for losing some of
his guns; Prince Andrei's indignant protest that this man has saved the
army spares Tushin the reprimand, but his superiors are too hopelessly
bewildered to recognise the truth. The real hero of the day is thus a
man who gains nothing--not a single reward or honour--and is only too
thankful to escape blame.
At Austerlitz, when the Russian army are broken and in flight, Prince
Andrei attempts to save the day; he stems the tide of the fugitives,
seizes the flag as it falls from the hand of a dying officer, and leads
the whole battalion against a French battery; he is shot down with the
flag still in his hand; he believes himself fatally wounded and, as he
sinks into unconsciousness, realises suddenly the emptiness of all he
has striven for and the beauty of that sweet and profound peace which
lies at the heart of the world, but which, until that moment of
marvellous insight---the insight given by the near approach of
death--he had never even seen.
"He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle between the
artilleryman and the Frenchman ended, and anxious to know whether or
not the red-headed artillerist was killed, and the cannon saved or
captured. But he could see nothing of it. Over him, he could see
nothing except the sky, the lofty sky, no longer clear but still
immeasurably lofty and with light grey clouds slowly wandering over it.
"'How still, calm, and solemn! How entirely different from when I was
running,' said Prince Andrei to himself. 'It was not so when we were
all running and shouting and fighting.... How is it that I never saw
before this lofty sky? And how glad I am that I have learned to know
it at last. Yes! all is empty, all is deception, except these infinite
heavens. Nothing, nothing at all, beside! And even that is nothing
but silence and peace! And thank God!'"
{39}
Prince Andrei, sinking once more into unconsciousness, recovers to find
Napoleon surveying him and calling him "une belle mort." When it is
discovered that he is alive Napoleon congratulates him on his
magnificent courage; but even the praise of this man, hitherto Prince
Andrei's idol, does not move him. He has seen, once and for all, the
emptiness of military glory. He recovers from his wound, and, softened
and tender, returns to his family, who are mourning him as dead; he
finds a son just born to him and his wife dying in childbirth.
Henceforward Prince Andrei is changed, gentle, and tender, but
melancholy, and regarding himself as a man whose life is done.
Interest returns again when he meets Natasha Rostof--one of the most
charming heroines in fiction; Natasha is the very embodiment of joy in
life, all poetry, passion, and romance. She enthrals Prince Andrei, he
is happy as he has never been, and they are betrothed, but the
opposition of his family causes the marriage to be postponed.
Unfortunately Natasha has the defects of her qualities; she allows
herself to be fascinated (though only momentarily) by a hopelessly
inferior man. Prince Andrei, deeply wounded both in his love and in
his pride, refuses to forgive; the old bitterness against life, the old
anger return once more. He seeks his rival, Kuragin, and, not finding
him, re-enters military service.
At the battle of Borodino Prince Andrei is wounded again, and this
time, as it proves, fatally; he lingers for some weeks, and, before his
death, fate grants him one last happiness; the Rostofs, in the flight
from Moscow, sacrifice their own property to save some Russian wounded
among whom, unknown to them, is Prince Andrei; he and Natasha meet
again.
In all Tolstoy's pages none are more lovely and pathetic than those
depicting this union on the edge of the grave; for a time there is
hope--the renewal of his heart's joy assisting the wounded man to
rally--but it is only for a brief space, and there succeeds the tragic
and terrible yet beautiful alienation of death.
{40}
Prince Andrei is one of the few Tolstoyan heroes who have no physical
fear of death, who meet it, not with shuddering nausea, but with noble
and grave composure. If he clings to life it is not from any weak fear
but because life means Natasha, poetry, and joy; when the pang of
resignation is once over, all is peace.
"Prince Andrei not only knew that he was going to die, but he also felt
that he was dying, that he was already half-way towards death. He
experienced a consciousness of alienation from everything earthly, and
a strange beatific exaltation of being. Without impatience and without
anxiety, he waited for what was before him. That ominous Eternal
Presence, unknown and far away, which had never once ceased, throughout
all his life, to haunt his senses, was now near at hand and, by reason
of that strange exhilaration which he felt, almost comprehensible and
palpable."
Natasha and his sister grieve for themselves, but they cannot really
grieve for him. "They both saw how he was sinking, deeper and deeper,
slowly and peacefully away from them, and they both knew that this was
inevitable, and that it was well. He was shrived and partook of the
sacrament. All came to bid him farewell.
"When his little son was brought, he kissed him and turned away, not
because his heart was sore and filled with pity, but simply because
this was all that was required of him."
In this lofty and beautiful isolation the hero passes away. Prince
Andrei has something in him of Byronism; there is the Byronic ideal in
his aristocratic disdain, his mental solitude, his melancholy; he is
Byronic also in his courage, his love of glory and his disillusionment
with glory, but no mere Byronist could ever have drawn the portrait.
The marvellous thing in Tolstoy's art is that he so plainly reveals the
change and development of human character; we never feel that his
people are static and finished; before our very eyes Prince Andrei
changes from Byronic pride to sweetness and tenderness, a bitter
disillusion brings him back to {41} pride, but, once more, the depths
of the man's nature are stirred and his fundamental sweetness is
revealed.
Many times in his epic novel Tolstoy makes us feel the bitter cost of
war, but never more than in the death of this, the noblest of his
heroes, on the threshold of happiness and love.
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 anticipates _The 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 the {42}
burning 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 was
{43} even 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 tread {44} shows 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 poetry {45}
and 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, {46} 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, but {47} her
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.
{48}
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 of _War 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 of {49} character; 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 in _War 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 the {50} unknown 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.
{51}