Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his
books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will
live the portrait of Anna Karenina. How dwarfed are his other
achievements compared with the creation of this woman, and to create a
living character is to be as the gods. Tolstoy has painted one of the
three women in the fiction of the nineteenth century. If the roll-call
of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured
"the drums and tramplings" of many conquests, and the contiguous dust
of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's
Valreie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna
Karenina are these daughters of earth--flesh and blood, tears and
lust, and the pride of life that killeth.
Despite Tolstoy's religious mania, I have never doubted his sincerity
for a moment. It is a mysterious yet potent factor in the psychology
of such an artist as he that whatever he did he did with tremendous
sincerity. That is the reason his fiction is nearer reality than all
other fictions, and the reason, too, that his realities, _i. e._, his
declarations of faith, are nearer other men's fictions. When he writes
of his conversion, like John Bunyan, he lets you see across the very
sill of his soul. And he does it artistically. He is not conscious
that art enters into the mechanism of this spiritual evisceration;
but it does. St. Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of
their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three
there is a touch of the sublime naivete of childhood's outpourings.
I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points
of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's
extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century. Ibsen's
individualism appeals. Better his torpedo exploding a thousand times
under the social ark than the Oriental passivity of the Russian. There
is hope in the message of Brand; none in Tolstoy's nihilism. One
glorifies the will, the other denies, rejects it. No comparison can be
made between the two wonderful men as playwrights. Yet Tolstoy's
Powers of Darkness is brutal melodrama when compared to Ibsen's
complex dramatic organisms. But what a nerve-shattering revelation is
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. This is the real Tolstoy.
How amateurish is the attitude of the Tolstoy disciple who cavils at
his masterpieces. What is mere art compared to the message! And I say:
what are all his vapourings and fatidical croonings on the tripod of
pseudo-prophecy as compared to Anna Karenina? There is implicit drama,
implicit morality in its noble pages, and a segment of the life of a
nation in War and Peace. With preachers and saviours with quack
nostrums the world is already well stocked. Great artists are rare.
Every day a new religion is born somewhere--and it always finds
followers. But art endures, it outlives dynasties, religions,
divinities. It is with Tolstoy the artist we are enamoured. He may
deliver his message of warning to a careless world--which only pricks
up its ears when that message takes on questionable colour, as in the
unpalatable Kreutzer Sonata. (Yes; that was eagerly devoured for its
morbid eroticism.) We prefer the austerer Ibsen, who presents his men
and women within the frame of the drama, absolutely without personal
comment or _parti pris_--as before his decadence did Tolstoy in his
novels. Ibsen is the type of the philosophical anarch, the believer in
man's individuality, in the state for the individual, not the
individual for the state. It is at least more dignified than the
other's flood of confessions, of hysterical self-accusations, of
penitential vows, and abundant lack of restraint. Yet no one doubts
Tolstoy's repentance. Like Verlaine's it carried with it its own
proofs.
But why publish to the world these intimate soul processes,
fascinating as they are to laymen and psychologists alike? Why not
keep watch with his God in silence and alone? The reason was (only
complicated with a thousand other things, for Tolstoy was a complex
being and a Slav), the plain reason was, we repeat, because Leo
Nikolaievitch was an artist. He obeyed that demon known to Socrates
and Goethe, and minutely recorded his mental and emotional
fluctuations. And with Richard Wagner and Dostoievsky, Tolstoy is one
of the three most emotional temperaments of the nineteenth century.
Unlike Ibsen or Nietzsche, he does not belong to the twentieth
century; his religion, his social doctrines are atavistic, are of the
past. Tolstoy is what the French call _un cerebral_, which, as Arthur
Symons points out, is by no means a man of intellect. "_Un cerebral_
is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms
itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transformed by emotion."
How well that phrase fits Tolstoy--the fever of the soul! He has had
the fever of the soul, has subdued it, and his recital of his
struggles makes breathless reading. They are depicted by an artist, an
emotional artist, and, despite his protestations, by one who will die
an artist and be remembered, not as the pontiff of a new dispensation,
but as a great world artist.
An admirer has said of him that "confession has become his second
nature"; rather it was a psychological necessity. The voice that cried
from the comfortable wilderness of Yasnaya Polyana furnished unique
"copy" for newspapers. Alas! the pity of it all. The moral dyspepsia
that overtook Carlyle in middle life was the result of a lean,
spoiled, half-starved youth; the moral dyspepsia that seized the soul
of the wonderful Tolstoy was the outcome of a riotous youth, a youth
overflowing with the "joy of life." Ibsen, like Carlyle, battled in
his early days with poverty; but his message--if you will have a
definite message (Oh, these literal, unimaginative folk of the
Gradgrind sort, who would wring from the dumb mysterious beauty of
nature definite meanings--as if sheer existence itself is not its own
glorious vindication!)--may be a hopeful one. The individual is all in
all; he is the evangel of the future; his belief is buoyant and
Northern; whereas Tolstoy's sour outlook, his constant girding at the
vanities of life (after he had, Solomon-like, tasted of them to the
full) is Eastern; his is the Oriental fatalism, the hopeless doctrine
of determinism. He discovers a new sin every day. Better one hour of
Nietzsche's dancing madness than a cycle of Tolstoy's pessimistic
renunciations. And all his ethical propaganda does not shake in the
least our conviction of the truth and grandeur of Tolstoy's art.
Of the disciples the son of Tolstoy, Count Ilya, tells us in no
uncertain accents:
My father had good reason for saying that the "Tolstoyites" were to
him the most incomprehensible sect and the furthest removed from his
way of thinking that he had ever come across. "I shall soon be dead,"
he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to
plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been
trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most
important of all, they will forget."