_THE LIGHT OF RUSSIA_
With regard to the Russian novelist, Count Leo Tolstoi, Nordau pursues
the same mode of criticism as he employed against other writers. He
also aims at the same object, firstly, to show that authors suffer
from mental aberration; and, secondly, that the public who read their
books do not do so on account of their literary merit, but because the
readers are mentally afflicted in the same way as the authors.
To prove this against Tolstoi and his admirers is no light enterprise,
and Nordau does not acquit himself of his self-imposed task without a
great deal of shuffling.
He allows nothing for Tolstoi’s surroundings, the social condition
of the country in which he lives, and the life he has led, but lifts
him out of all that tends to interpret this ultra-Russian writer, and
regards him as one who has evolved some extraordinary notions in a
studio far from his native land.
He who says Russia says a great deal: for the expression denotes a vast
empire, consisting of many nationalities and races, held together
by a strong pressure, which seems, like the gravitation of huge
heavenly bodies, to be determined by the size of the body from which
it emanates. The inclusion of so many elements does not prevent Russia
from remaining a great and powerful State, provided its Government soon
becomes to some extent rational. The predominant nationality is made up
of genuine Russians, whose characteristics are such as to render them
capable of being, according to their rulers in the immediate future, an
imminent danger to Europe, or a model nation to be followed by the rest
of the world.
The Russian is good-tempered, patient, loyal, generous, kind-hearted,
and superstitiously religious. He is extremely emotional and dangerous
when aroused. His easy-going manners, his immense self-esteem, and his
intense vitality render him an easy victim to the numerous temptations
which aliens are not slow to hold out to him. He is straightforward
and strongly averse to hypocrisy, and when he is convinced that duty
demands from him that he should assist in filling a trench with his
dead body for the artillery to pass over, or to throw a bomb at the
Czar, he will do it without a murmur.
His passiveness, his loyalty, and long-suffering have been cruelly
taken advantage of by a long succession of Governments, chiefly
consisting of aliens. In Russia the most powerful bureaucracy in the
world, composed chiefly of a German element, has taken possession
of the power, and holds to it in a quasi-unconscious fashion, like a
bull-dog unable to relax his hold.
The Government, with such legislation as exists, has gone on for
centuries with scarcely any regard for the well-being of the people,
and the inevitable results are slowly but surely manifesting
themselves, and point to some terrible catastrophe.
The emancipation of the serfs, from which sanguine people, unacquainted
with Russian circumstances, hoped so much, shook the old institutions
to their very foundations, but brought only momentary relief to the
suffering people. The _mir_-eaters, or village usurers, have swallowed
up the land of the peasants, their cattle, and their implements, and
compelled large hordes of people to move about the country in search
of work. Employment is scarce and labour ill paid. The tax-collectors
are as implacable and the Government officials as corrupt as ever.
The tendency—to be observed all over the civilized world—of dividing
humanity into two classes, the wealthy and the poor, has nowhere
developed to the same extent as in Russia. The rich, comparatively
few in number, are becoming extremely rich, but the great mass of the
people miserably poor.
Extreme poverty, intensified by the pressure of the tax-gatherer and
the inhuman methods of the money-lender, has a gnawing effect on a
people living in an intensely rigorous climate, in miserable villages
sparsely scattered over vast monotonous plains.
The Russians being a sentimental people, it is natural that their
forlorn condition should cause them to brood over their sad lives
during the long and lonely winter nights, or that they should be driven
to drown their consciousness in _vodka_.
Such is the stage on which alone a character like Leo Tolstoi can
become intelligible.
But it is not only the powerful influences from external circumstances
which give that direction to Tolstoi’s mind which Nordau insists in
interpreting as a sign of degeneracy. The mode of life and the sphere
of action he has adopted, in pursuance of the large and noble traits
of his character, must have been powerfully conducive to his peculiar
mood and ideas. Nobody who has read his works, even if only those works
Nordau holds to be of the smallest literary merit and fullest of signs
of degeneracy, would ever conceive the idea that Tolstoi’s mind was
weak or distorted. But if this novelist had been driven to lunacy,
it would have been extremely irrational to account for his mental
aberration without considering the outward circumstances that would
have produced it.
Tolstoi’s sympathies were roused, as those of every noble-minded man
would have been roused, by the miserable existence of a people who
possess all the elements of a great nation. In Russia no such ways
are open to the reformer as in free States. There is no Parliament, no
organized political parties, no free Press. A political career is out
of the question, except in the form of a consistent toadying of those
in power, and of a blind obedience to those who crush the people. Any
opposition to Government, or even proffered suggestions, would lead to
exile in Siberia, and abruptly cut short any man’s activity. Tolstoi
had therefore only two courses open to him: either to expatriate
himself and to thunder forth in a foreign Press against the abuses of
the Russian Government, unheard and unheeded by his own censor-ridden
compatriots or to adopt the line of action he did.
In the cities, where the alien element prevails, and where the scum of
the Russian nation congregates, he would be out of contact with his
people. His emotional nature would have revolted against the police
tyranny and spying rampant in the cities, and he would soon have been
landed in the clutches of the authorities. He therefore elected to live
among the peasants as one of them, convinced both by his feelings and
his reason that he would thus directly benefit his surroundings by his
example and form that leaven by which the whole mass might in time be
leavened; while his writings simultaneously appealed to those of his
countrymen who read books, and those who, outside Russia, sympathize
with the Russian people.
We do not pretend to know Tolstoi’s secret thoughts and his ultimate
hopes, but we believe it possible that he may, without being an
irrational enthusiast, or even a dreamer, have reckoned on his writings
and opinions reaching the highest personages in the Russian empire
through being read by all the upper classes of the world. He may have
hoped that, after establishing his reputation throughout the literary
world, and after having become the pride of his own nation, he would
one day dare to speak such words to the rulers of all the Russians as
might save him and his nation.
Whatever may have been his expectations, there can be little doubt that
he has met with dire disappointment, not so much in his personal career
as in his hopes for his fellow-countrymen.
To the framers of paper constitutions and to theoretical
revolutionists, it may seem easy to introduce a new form of Government
and to regenerate a nation, but, to one who, like Tolstoi, is in close
contact with the masses to be regenerated, who has daily experienced
all the frailty of the material he has to work with, who alone tries to
swim against overwhelming currents,—to him, the uplifting of a nation
or a race is a herculean task impossible to approach with the clap-trap
of the modern agitator.
Tolstoi, finding that it is the _morale_ of the people he has to work
upon, that it is in the religious tendencies of his fellow-men that
their strength lies, concludes, with the full consent of his emotional
being, that religious conceptions, different from the Russian orthodox
Church and from the western university theology, must be the foundation
on which he has to build. What therefore is more rational than that he
should plunge into religious speculation, and thus expose himself to
the mistake of adopting religious views which are prompted as much by
the needs of the situation, the circumstances, his own and his people’s
characteristics, as by logical deductions. Greater men than he—Moses,
Mahomet, and others—had done so before him.
Besides, as the postulates he starts from do not spring from exact
knowledge, but from faith and emotion—as all religious postulates
necessarily must do,—and as these, his postulates, are diametrically
opposed to those which Nordau would pre-suppose, Tolstoi’s conclusions
must be the opposite of his; but to differ from Nordau is to be
degenerate.
It is no wonder then that Tolstoi’s books should be more than novels.
He had a higher purpose in view than gathering in royalties and
entertaining his readers. His books are jam with a considerable amount
of powder in them. If, despite this, they have been widely read
throughout the world, ordinary minds would conclude that in creating
them their author has accomplished tasks which alone a mind of a high
order could hope to perform. Our alienist, determined to come to no
such conclusion, supposes that all those who read Tolstoi’s works are
degenerates, and that the large sale of his books is consequently a
confirmation of Tolstoi’s degeneracy.
Would Nordau apply the same kind of reasoning with regard to the sale
of his own works? He would probably; but instead of starting with the
supposition that contemporary readers of books are incipient lunatics,
he would very likely take for granted that the readers who approve of
his works are highly intelligent, and that the great sale they have
attained proves the soundness of his own mind.
In support of his view, Nordau, who fairly acknowledges the great
qualities of Tolstoi as a writer of fiction, has the audacity to
assert that it is not this great quality of his works that has secured
him his world-wide fame, but that it is due to his mysticism, which
a degenerate race prefers to a literary and moral value. The only
semblance of proof he gives for this view is that Tolstoi’s best
works have not contributed to his reputation so much as the _Kreutzer
Sonata_, “an inferior creation, which in the public opinion of the
western nations placed him in the first rank of living authors.” But
who has decided that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is inferior to Tolstoi’s
other works? Only Nordau, whose opinion runs counter to the “western
nations.” If therefore there is any value in Nordau’s argument it rests
entirely on the astounding fact that the “western nations” are all
degenerate and Nordau alone is sane.
Nordau, like most German bookworms, evidently believes that references
to an authority, however obscure, are enough to prove any assertion. He
has manifestly worked with any number of “conversations-lexicons” and
encyclopedias about him, in quest of some printed confirmation of the
extraordinary opinion that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is a poor book, and
that the preceding works of Tolstoi alone contain those grand qualities
which Nordau recognises. He finds that Franz Bornmüller, an author of
a biographical dictionary, said in 1882 of Tolstoi: “He possesses no
ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due artistic finish, and
which is influenced by a certain one-sidedness in his views of life and
history.”
It should be noticed that Nordau gives this quotation in order to
show that Tolstoi had not attained any European fame in 1882, that
is, before the _Kreutzer Sonata_ was written; but with that amazing
want of logic characterizing his whole work, he does not see that this
Franz Bornmüller thinks very little of the early works of Tolstoi. He
consequently differs from Nordau, and shows every sign of sharing the
opinion of the “western nations.”
Nordau makes a sharp distinction between Tolstoi’s novels as such
and the philosophy they enforce. He is thereby enabled to give some
plausibility to the sophistical assertion that it is not Tolstoi’s
novels, but his philosophy, which brought him popularity. This
philosophy, which is supposed to prove that Tolstoi’s mind is not
sound, Nordau sums up in the following way: “The individual is nothing,
the species is everything, the individual lives in order to do his
fellow-creatures good; thought and inquiry are great evils; science is
perdition; faith is salvation.” Among these items there is only one
which differs from the views of the bulk of humanity—from that ordinary
common-sense which Nordau so often takes as a standard of sanity, even
in the superstitious peasant. We refer to the item in which he says
that thought and inquiry are great evils. Nowhere in Tolstoi’s writings
can such a nonsensical phrase be found. It is one of those little
touches that Nordau so dexterously applies, or which his prejudice
causes him to apply, in order to strengthen his case in his readers’,
or perhaps in his own, eyes. He appears to ignore such works as _My
Confession_, _My Faith_, _A Short Exposition of the Gospel_, and _About
my Life_, all works built up by elaborate thoughts. The whole life of
Tolstoi has been one of “thought and inquiry,” and all his literary
work is an invitation to think and to inquire. Tolstoi objects only
to such thought and inquiry as vainly attempt to carry the methods of
inductive science into spheres where the observation of our senses
is of no avail, and where their failure tempts us to believe in the
non-existence of that all-important portion of the universe into which
faith alone can penetrate.
That Tolstoi should distrust science, after the presumptuous attitude
which scientists have taken up, will surprise nobody who has read
what we have said about this bankruptcy of science. Many scientists,
including Nordau, have in their gratuitous attacks on religion so
recklessly mixed up scientific fact with scientific speculation, that
they must blame themselves if people use the term “science” when it
would be more correct to employ that of “unscientific speculations.”
That a thinker, who is at the same time the instructor of the ignorant
masses, should look upon faith as a means of salvation, is not new, and
cannot be considered as a sign of mental aberration; for millions of
sane common-sense men have for thousands of years held this opinion.
Even if we apply the word salvation exclusively to society in general,
to the race, or to one nation, leaving out any references to individual
salvation in another world, faith of some kind is the only source from
which it could spring. Scientists of Nordau’s type seem unable to
understand that science means the knowledge of absolute facts which,
while quite capable of undermining and destroying the foundations
on which a more or less primitive religion rests, cannot possibly
come into collision with faith in the widest sense of the term. When
a scientist and a religionist differ about things which have not
come under scientific inquiry—such as the final aim of the scheme of
humanity, for example—the dispute is not between science and faith, but
between two different faiths. Science therefore cannot regulate our
conduct, determine our views, or save a nation. This alone can be done
by faith, be it based on science, on tradition, or emotion. A great
scientific knowledge might be degraded into an excuse for, and a means
of, an irresponsible, selfish, and wicked life; or it might ennoble the
mind, intensify the sense of responsibility, and serve as the means of
rendering great services to humanity. All depends on the faith of the
scientist.
The end of what we may call the era of scientific atheism, now at hand,
presents most deplorable results, as we have already pointed out, of
removing the only foundations of a moral balance available to those who
have not had any opportunity of drawing from scientific studies that
strength of character, and those noble aspirations to be met with in
scientists who have a genuine faith—a faith in their science and in
humanity, if in nothing else. Tolstoi, who, like every thinking man of
our time, had seen the disastrous effects which scientific atheism had
produced, cannot possibly be regarded as of weak intellect because he
rejected scientific superstition and proclaimed faith as the true basis
of conduct and character.
Nordau finds traces of degeneracy in Tolstoi’s question, “Wherefore
am I alive?” and in the manner in which Tolstoi finds a reply to that
question. It seems however that Nordau too has asked, himself that
question, for in his book _Degeneration_ (page 149) he replies to it
in a close, well-reasoned, passage, which deserves to be read to its
full extent. We shall quote only a part of it in order to compare the
reply he himself obtains with the reply obtained, by Tolstoi. After
having shown that the aim of a man’s life is necessarily involved in
the greater question—the aim of the universe—and that such an aim
cannot exist objectively in time or space, he says: “But if it is not
objective, if it does not exist in time and space, it must, in order
to be conceivable, exist somewhere, virtually, as idea, as a plan
and design. But that which contains a design, a thought, a plan, we
name consciousness; and consciousness that can conceive a plan of the
universe, and for its realization designedly uses the forces of nature,
is synonymous, with God. If a man however believes in a God, he loses
at once the right to raise the question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ since
it is in that case an insolent presumption, an effort of small, weak
man to look over God’s shoulder, to spy out God’s plan, to aspire to
the height of omniscience. But neither is it in such a case necessary,
since a God without the highest wisdom cannot be conceived; and if
He has devised a plan for the world, this is certain to be perfect,
all its parts are in harmony, and the aim to which every co-operator,
from the smallest to the greatest, will devote himself is the best
conceivable. Thus man can live in complete rest and confidence in the
impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because he, in every case,
fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in a, to him, unknown
Divine plan of the world.”
We here notice his words: “that which contains a design, a thought,
a plan, we name consciousness.” Now, nobody knows better than the
scientists that so far all scientific discovery has revealed plan,
method, and purpose, in the smallest thing and the smallest phenomena
in the universe. Is it then necessary to be degenerate to believe in
a self-conscious Providence? John Stuart Mill observes that the fact
that we find in nature, especially in human and animal bodies, physical
and mechanical problems solved in the same way as engineers had solved
them long before they knew of such solutions in nature, points not only
to the existence of an intelligent Creator, but to a similarity of His
intelligence to that of human beings.
According to the passage from Nordau, then, the planning in nature
proves a conscious force, a conscious force is synonymous with God, and
the man who believes in God can live in complete rest in his faith.
Tolstoi obtained a reply to his question in a manner which he describes
in the following words:
“It was quite the same to me whether Jesus was God or not God; whether
the Holy Ghost proceeded from the one or the other. It was likely
neither necessary nor important for me to know how, when, and by whom
the Gospels, or any one of the parables were composed, and whether
they could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important was
that the light which for eighteen hundred years was the light of the
world is that light still; but what name was to be given to the source
of this light, or what were its component parts, and by whom it was
lighted, was quite indifferent to me.”
The difference in the two replies is one of words only. If therefore
Nordau acknowledged that a sensible man could ask such a question, and
if the reply of Nordau we have just quoted is recognised by him as his
own opinion, he and Tolstoi would stand very much in the same category.
But Nordau does not think that a perfectly sane mind would ask such
a question; and if it was asked, he has another reply. This reply is
however far from being so clear as the other. “If,” he says, “on the
other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also impossible to form
a conception of the aim, for then the aim existing in consciousness
only as an idea, in the absence of a universal consciousness, has no
locus for existence; there is no place for it in nature.” From this it
ought to follow that, if a man does not believe in God, there is no
God, and consequently there can be no aim. He then proceeds to argue
that, if there be no aim, it is useless to ask the question, “Wherefore
am I alive?” but that we can ask the question, “Why do we live?”
His reply to this is characteristic: “We live in obedience to the
mechanical law of causality, which requires no plan and no universal
consciousness.”
It is curious to behold how Nordau cannot perceive that his question,
“Why do we live?” implies the question, “Whence the mechanical law of
causality?” and that his reply is simply, “We live because we live.”
Once he has accepted this self-delusion as a solid foundation, his
reasoning again becomes rational, and does not bear on the point before
us. The most astounding part of it is that Nordau considers Tolstoi,
and all others whose instinct, whose emotion, and whose immutable
reasoning point to a cause behind Nordau’s home-made mechanical law of
causality, as thereby showing signs of mental degeneration.
Nordau, in order to prove the confusion existing in Tolstoi’s ideas,
seems to take for granted that the tendency towards Pantheism,
perceptible in the Russian’s reasoning, is utterly at variance with
Christianity. We would simply point out that Tolstoi has his own
Christianity, framed on his own interpretation of the Gospels, and not
any previously existing Christianity, and is therefore at liberty to
proclaim a creed which has a Pantheistic tendency without exposing
himself to the reproach of being inconsequent. But we consider it more
important to notice the fact that the Gospels, far from laying down any
dogmas, are the record of the life of a man—divine or not divine—whose
mission it was to protest against dogmas. He called God “Father,” in
order to speak of universal consciousness only in its relations to man,
leaving it to the doctrinaires and the philosophers to agree as best
they could on the question of Pantheism or no Pantheism. Besides, the
Gospels certainly emphasize the omnipresence of the Creator; and if
this Pantheistic tendency had not existed among the disciples, it is
not likely that St. Paul would have said, “In Him we live, we move, and
have our being.”
The shallow, superficial manner in which Nordau treats Tolstoi’s
ethics is certainly unworthy of him, and amounts simply to a quibble.
These ethics, correctly summed up, “Resist not evil, judge not, kill
not,” which correspond precisely with the teachings of Christ, Nordau
does not regard as ethics, but proceeds solemnly to test them as
expediencies in peculiar cases, and comes to the conclusion that they
are ridiculous.
Must we then conclude that Nordau has no such ethics, but that he
believes it right to return evil for evil,—_vendetta_ fashion,—that
he objects to suffer wrong for a good cause, and that he revels in
indiscriminate murder? Tolstoi’s ethics, as ethics should do, hold
up the ideal for which we should strive, and as a practical test of
them we must consider not the murder and plunder of one good man by
a bad one, but the state which would ensue if all men conformed to
them. The practical moral we ought to draw from them is not that laws
and law courts should be abolished, but that laws should be framed
and law courts should be managed in such a way as to favour a general
acceptance of such ethics. Here again Nordau indulges in illogical
reasoning, and in contradictions of himself. He takes for granted
that humanity is so utterly depraved that if “the fear of the gallows
did not prevent it, throat-cutting and stealing would be the most
generally adopted trade.” This means that Nordau in one place in his
book declares human beings are too good, too noble, too honest to need
any belief in a hell, but in another place declares that they are far
too depraved to do without the fear of the gallows. He forgets that
good ethics have sprung from the good instincts of our race, and that
crime has largely been fostered by bad laws, bad law courts, and bad
institutions.
In one of his stories, entitled _From the Diary of Nechljudow_,
Tolstoi’s hero, Prince Nechljudow, is a most eccentric character,
created probably for the purpose of showing the absurdity of
indiscriminate charity and other impulsive actions of the erratics of
our day. Nordau gives an account of one of the instances in which the
Prince’s selfish way of practising charity is forcibly brought out.
He evidently does this in order that the Prince’s action should be
accepted as an illustration of what Tolstoi means by charity. This is
both absurd and unjust. It amounts to an identification of the author
with the character he represents—a way of insinuating degeneracy in
authors who simply hold it up in their characters as a warning. To thus
mix up authors with their characters is a mistake frequently committed
by unintelligent readers, but it is surprising to find that with Nordau
it is an habitual method.
With regard to the character Pozdnyscheff, Nordau does the same thing.
He takes for granted that the opinions expressed by this character are
those of the author. The passages he extracts from _Short Expositions_,
in which Tolstoi’s own opinions are expressed, in no wise justify such
a supposition.
Nordau’s explanation of the enormous success Tolstoi’s books have
achieved is that it is due to general degeneration among the upper
classes throughout the world. If he could personally meet the hundreds
of thousands of English people who have read Tolstoi’s works, he would
be able to form an idea of the immensity of his mistake. He would find
that the majority of these people belong to a middle class, consisting
of persons who are not overworked and who indulge in none of the vices
of the continental aristocracies. Their muscles and their nerves have
been strengthened and fortified by a healthy education, and by a love
of bodily exercise, sport and even danger, and by a moral life. They
live in a country where the authorities have found that to proscribe
any licentious book is to promote its sale, and where consequently
there is hardly any check upon morbid literature. Yet there is not a
country where less of it is circulated than in England. It is true
that these readers of Tolstoi have not attained to that height of
intellectual development which would permit them to accept Nordau’s
“mechanical causality” as a satisfying explanation of the universe;
but, on the other hand, it would be difficult to find a people so
religiously inclined, and yet so free from superstition and fanaticism.
Some of them may like Rossetti’s pictures, and many of them Burne
Jones’s, but as a rule they have an equal admiration for Raphael,
Tintoretto, Correggio, and others. They cannot be classed among the
mystics on that account. As few of them write books, they cannot be
called graphomaniacs. Nor do they show any signs of being egomaniacs.
Nor have they any physical stigmata of degenerates. The heads of this
class are generally beautifully shaped, and the ears of the women
are by all foreigners who visit this country proclaimed to be the
finest and daintiest ears in the world. Personal beauty among this
class is decidedly on the increase; for each generation seems to be
better-looking, and the youngest is generally the most beautiful. The
latter fact, we may mention, is no doubt due to the increasing tendency
of the upper and middle classes in England to beautify their homes and
to surround themselves with exquisite objects, as well as to a more
intellectual education, pastimes, pleasures, and arts.
Why then must these readers of Tolstoi’s works be classed as degenerate?
It is not denied that in England there are people who exhibit signs
of mental degeneration, but they are to be found more in literary
and political circles than in the close ranks of the upper and
middle classes. We would not undertake to class them under the
headings established by the alienist, and it would be difficult even
for Nordau to do so. Perhaps they are not sufficiently advanced in
degeneracy to be so classed. Such signs as they exhibit are some of
them as old as the hills, and others are clearly the manifestations
of that intellectual and moral daze which generally follows on the
destruction of the religious foundations of belief involved in the
acceptance of belief in scientific atheism. But the most prevalent
form of degeneracy is that which is palpably the result of financial
depression, felt not only in financial but artistic and literary
circles. For reasons which we leave to the economists to explain,
England’s commerce and agriculture seem to have come to a dead-lock.
The result seems to be diminished incomes all round. Many artists,
_littérateurs_, and politicians are at their wits’ end how to make
an income, and there can be little doubt that this has fostered a
certain amount of demoralization. Extraordinary attempts are made
to produce sensational pictures, to write eccentric poetry, to send
forth books that will shock, and to treat of risky subjects on the
stage. Politicians are obliged to make politics a profession, and, as
popularity is indispensable to it as a profitable profession, they
worship majorities. Any one who is acquainted with London cannot doubt
for a moment that these forms of demoralization spring entirely from
a necessity of making a living. Artists, authors, and politicians
of this class are no more inclined to lunacy than the vast class of
people who do distasteful work, as well as those who have to appear
before the public in dangerous but not much esteemed performances. If
the financial depression is destined to disappear, there can be little
doubt that the majority of these signs of demoralization will also
disappear.
There are in this country, as everywhere else, real degenerates, people
who have weakened their brains and moral faculties by drink, debauch,
overwork, or persons who have inherited mental debility. There are
also among us, we regret to say, an alarming number of destitute people
who have been driven into mental derangement by those terrible pangs
that misery inflicts. But all these degenerates care as little for
Tolstoi’s novels as they do for Rossetti’s or Burne Jones’s pictures.
Though English circumstances are vastly different from continental,
there can be no doubt that the causes which have rendered Tolstoi’s
novels popular are the same here as in other countries. The scientific
atheists have introduced into literature a materialist, selfish,
sceptical, pessimistic, and cynical tone which was tolerated by the
public for a long time. On the continent they had Zola and his wretched
imitators, whose books found their way among us, while England has
produced a crop of neurotic storytellers, playwrights, and versifiers,
made up for the most part of masculine women and effeminate men, who
have exploited to the utmost the atheistic vein.
The noble spirit which atheism was to bring to the front somehow did
not take to literature, and the reading classes of the world began to
miss those pure joys which reading used to afford them. The books of
the day offended their religious feelings, their sense of decency,
their loftiest conceptions of the world, and their self-esteem, without
amusing them. The whole literature of fiction had become stilted, and
the morbid and pessimistic authors departed so widely from nature
and evinced so many signs of utter insincerity that the reading world
longed to be face to face with a man who spoke his innermost thoughts.
The world was therefore ready for a new departure in literature.
What wonder then that Tolstoi’s works were well received. They bore
witness to consummate ability, a close study of human nature. They
presented a true picture of social Russia. They afforded an insight
into the Russian mind. His readers experienced the intellectual treat
offered by few books,—that of feeling the presence of a master-mind,
and of following the thoughts of a thoroughly sincere writer, free from
the cheap ready-made materialist philosophy—a man who devotes both his
life and his work, with almost superhuman energy, to the regeneration
of his race.