AUTHORITY FOR CHAPTER XI

Tolstoy's Ispoved: Christchurch, 1901.

Tolstoy's Confession being prohibited in Russia, had to be printed abroad. The edition mentioned above is a reliable one.

CHAPTER XII
WORKS: 1852-1878

Tolstoy's first nineteen stories. Stands in a line of succession. Quality as writer. War and Peace. 'Great' men. Napoleon. The battles of Schöngraben and Borodinó. Tolstoy's influence on war-correspondence. Serfdom. The organisation of society. Characters in War and Peace. Its range. Anna Karénina: Matthew Arnold's essay. Translations. The tendency of the book. Kropótkin's criticism. The volunteers. Tolstoy's attitude towards Government. W. D. Howells's appreciation. Tolstoy's Last Three Decades of work: the magnitude and nature of his effort.

Tolstoy's writings during the first twenty-five years of his literary career divide up into six sections.

First came a series of seventeen stories and sketches, beginning with Childhood and ending with Family Happiness. Next came his series of educational articles in the Yásnaya Polyána magazine. Third came The Cossacks (the finest story he had yet written) and Polikoúshka. Fourth, came War and Peace. Fifth, came the ABC Book, the Readers, and another article on Education; and sixth, came Anna Karénina.

Leaving the educational works out of account, the list can be reduced to nineteen stories and sketches, followed by two great novels.

The nineteen sketches and stories, 'trials of the pen,' as Tolstoy called them, covered a wide range of subjects, from charmingly realistic sketches of childhood to vigorous depictions of Cossack life, and showed their writer to be an amazingly accurate observer of physical facts and qualities, manners, tones and gestures, besides being possessed of a yet more wonderful knowledge of the hearts and minds of all sorts and conditions of men, from the shame-faced child to the officer dying on the field of battle. He is so concerned with the interest and importance of life, that he can hold his reader's attention without having to tell his stories so that they must be guessed like riddles, and he never makes use of elaborate plots. He needs no tricks of that sort. Nor does he strive after effect by the use of pornographic details, the introduction of extraordinary events, or the piling up of many horrible details. His stories are as straightforward as everyday life.

His great novels bear out all the promise of his short stories, with the added power of maturity.

Though highly original and of strong individuality, he stands none the less in the line of succession of great writers which began with Poúshkin, whose genius for simple sincere and direct narrative gave an invaluable direction to Russian literature, was continued by Gógol whose biting irony and remorseless exposure of shams and hypocrisies completed the emancipation from romanticism, and was carried on by Tourgénef, whose art, conscious of and not indifferent to the trend of thought and feeling in the society it describes, reached an extraordinary pitch of artistic perfection.

Tolstoy's works have from the first interested Russia, and now interest the world, because in greater measure than any of his predecessors he possesses the capacity to feel intensely, note accurately, and think deeply. The combination which makes Tolstoy the most interesting of writers, is the scientific accuracy of his observation (which never allows him to take liberties with his characters or events in order to make out a case for the side he sympathises with) and the fact that he is mightily in earnest. Life to him is important, and art is the handmaid of life. He wants to know what is good and what is bad; to help the former and to resist the latter. His work tends to evolve order out of life's chaos; and as that is the most important thing a man can do, his books are among the most interesting and important books of our time. He makes no pretence of standing aloof, cutting off his art from his life, or concealing his desire that kindness should prevail over cruelty. Life interests him, and therefore the reflection of life interests him, and the problems of art are the problems of life: love and passion and death and the desire to do right.

The chief subject reappearing again and again throughout the stories he wrote before War and Peace, is the mental striving of a young Russian nobleman to free himself from the artificial futilities of the society in which he was born, and to see and do what is right. The search is only partially successful. The indictment of society is often convincing, but the heroes' failures and perplexities are frankly admitted. Sometimes there is no hero. In Sevastopol, for instance, he exclaims: 'Where in this tale is the evil shown that should be avoided? Where is the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain, who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad'; and in Lucerne he says: 'Who will define for me what is freedom, what despotism, what civilisation and what barbarism? Or tell me where are the limits of the one or the other? Who has in his soul so immovable a standard of good and evil that by it he can measure the passing facts of life?'

This searching for what is good and rejecting what is false—resulting in a strong distrust and dislike of the predatory masterful domineering types of humanity, and in general of what has usually been regarded as the heroic type, and also in a friendly compassion for all that is humble simple forbearing and sincere—is the keynote of Tolstoy's early tales. They are studies of life, so truthful that the characters seem to have an independent life of their own. They speak for themselves, and at times, like Balaam, bless what they were apparently expected to curse. For instance, when Prince Nehlúdof insists on bringing the wandering musician into the Schweizerhof Hotel in Lucerne, we feel how uncomfortable he thereby makes the poor singer, though that is evidently not what Tolstoy originally set out to make us feel.

War and Peace, besides being maturer than the preceding tales, was composed during the early years of Tolstoy's married life, when he felt more content with himself and with life in general, and when his attitude towards existing things was more tolerant and sympathetic than it had been, or than it became in later years.

He told me that in War and Peace and Anna Karénina his aim was simply to amuse his readers. I am bound to accept his statement; but one has only to read either of those books to see that through them Tolstoy's ardent nature found vent, with all its likes and dislikes, strivings, yearnings, hopes and fears.

I asked Tolstoy why in What is Art? he relegates these great novels to the realm of 'bad art'; and his answer showed, as I expected it would, that he does not really consider them at all bad, but condemns them merely as being too long, and written in a way chiefly adapted to please the leisured well-to-do classes, who have time for reading novels in several volumes, because other people do their rough work for them. Of War and Peace he said, 'It is, one would think, harmless enough, but one never knows how things will affect people,' and he went on to mention, with regret, that one of Professor Zahárin's daughters had told him that from his novels she had acquired a love of balls and parties; things of which, at the time of our conversation, he heartily disapproved.

In form, War and Peace is unlike any English novel, but it resembles Poúshkin's The Captain's Daughter (though the latter is a much shorter story) in that both works are chronicles of Russian families, round whom the stories centre. In War and Peace there are two families, the Rostófs and the Bolkónskys.

The mighty drama of the Napoleonic advance from 1805 to 1812 comes into the novel, in so far as it affects the members of those two families. But Tolstoy is not content merely to tell us of historic events. He introduces a whole philosophy of history, which is sound at bottom though no doubt he somewhat overstates his case, as is his habit. The theory is that the 'great' men of history count for very little. They are the figureheads of forces that are beyond their control. They do most good and least harm when, like Koutoúzof, they are aware of the true direction of the great human forces and adapt themselves to them; but then they are modest, and the world does not esteem them great. The typical case of the impotent 'great' man is Napoleon in 1812, at the time of his invasion of Russia. He posed before the world as a man of destiny whose will and intellect decided the fate of empires. Yet from first to last, during that campaign, he never in the least knew what was about to happen. The result was decided by the spirit of the Russian nation, and by its steadfast endurance. Every common Russian soldier who understood that the Russian people dreaded and detested the thought of a foreign yoke, and who therefore co-operated with the natural course of events, did more to further the result than Napoleon, that 'most insignificant tool of history,' as Tolstoy calls him, who even in St. Helena was never able to understand what had caused his overthrow.

The main theme of the novel, if it be permissible to select a main theme out of the many latent in the story, is Tolstoy's favourite thesis. He tacitly asks: What is good and what is bad? With what must we sympathise and what must we reject? And the reply is that the predatory, artificial and insincere types, exemplified historically by the invading French, as well as by such characters among the Russians as Ellen, Anatole and Dólohof, are repugnant to him, while he loves the humble, the meek and the sincere: Marie and Platon Karatáef, Natásha (so impulsive and charming in her youth, so absorbed in her family later on), and Pierre (who is often humble and always sincere, and loves ideas and ideals).

It is impossible to do justice to this wonderful book in any brief summary. It is not a work to be summed up in a few pages. It has many characters, all of them so distinctly drawn that we know them better than we know our personal acquaintances. It treats of life's deepest experiences from the cradle to the grave; and to read it with the care it deserves is to know life better and see it more sanely and seriously than one ever did before. Some foolish people think that reading novels is a waste of time; but there are hardly any books—at any rate hardly any big books—that are better worth reading than Tolstoy's novels.

He is probably justified in claiming that his history is truer than the historians' history of the battles of Schöngraben, Austerlitz, and Borodinó. The historians, from mendacious military reports drawn up after the action, try to discover what the Commanders-in-Chief meant to do; and to tell their story within moderate limits they have to systematise what was really a huge disorder; thereby giving their readers a completely wrong impression of what a battle is like.

N. N. Mouravyóf, a Commander-in-Chief who distinguished himself in more than one war, declared he had never read a better description of a battle than Tolstoy's account of Schöngraben; and added that he was convinced from his own experience that during a battle it is impossible to carry out a Commander-in-Chief's orders.

Tolstoy, when he wrote the book, was convinced that war is inevitable. The idea that it is man's duty to resist war and to refuse to take part in it, came to him later.

In an article entitled 'Some Words about War and Peace,' which he wrote in 1868 for one of the periodicals, he says:

'Why did millions of people kill one another, when since the foundation of the world it has been known that this is both physically and morally bad?

'Because it was so inevitably necessary, that when doing it they fulfilled the elemental zoological law bees fulfil when they kill one another in autumn, and male animals fulfil when they destroy one another. No other reply can be given to that dreadful question.'

Yet his inveterate truthfulness, and his personal knowledge of war, caused him to describe it so exactly, that the result is tantamount to a condemnation. As Kropótkin says, War and Peace is a powerful indictment of war. The effect which the great writer has exercised in this direction upon his generation can be actually seen in Russia. It was already apparent during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, when it was impossible to find in Russia a correspondent who would have described how 'we peppered the enemy with grape-shot,' or how 'we knocked them down like ninepins.' If any one could have been found to use in his letters such survivals of barbarism, no paper would have dared to print them. The general character of the Russian war-correspondent had totally changed; and during that war there appeared Gárshin the novelist, and Verestchágin the painter, 'with whom to combat war became a life work.'

It has been charged against War and Peace that it neglects to show the evil side of serfdom: the brutality, the cruelty, the immurement of women, the flogging of grown-up sons, the torture of serf girls by their mistresses, etc. But Tolstoy studied the period closely from letters, diaries and traditions, especially from the records of his own grandparents, the Tolstoys and the Volkónskys; and he says he did not find horrors worse than are to be found now, or at any other period. People then loved and envied, and sought for truth and virtue, and were swayed by passions, as now. Their mental and moral life was just as complex, and in the upper circles it was sometimes even more refined than now.... No doubt the greater remoteness of the higher circle from the other classes gave a special character to the period, but not the character of brutal violence.

Tolstoy is in sympathy with that time, sees the poetry of it, and knows how much of goodness, courage, kindliness and high aspiration existed among those politically unenfranchised serf-owners. With our modern, Western desire to organise society efficiently, he never has sympathised. The state of a man's mind has always been to him more important than the conditions of his life, and it seems to him as though there were some antithesis between the two: as though, if you organised your society, it would cease to think truly or feel deeply. We in the West are beginning to believe the opposite, and to suspect that to leave society unorganised or disorganised has an inevitable tendency to blunt our minds and souls. But not the less is it valuable to have so wonderful a picture of Russia as it was at the commencement of the nineteenth century, painted by one who sees it as the best Russians of that period saw it themselves.

Of the history part of the book, it should be noted that Tolstoy says: 'Wherever in my novel historic characters speak or act, I have not invented, but have made use of materials which during my work have accumulated till they form a whole library.'

He told me he considered the defect of the book, besides its size, to be the intrusion of a long philosophic argument into the story. He still holds the opinions he held when he wrote it, as to the influence or impotence of 'great' men, as well as all that he then said about destiny and free will; but he now realises that his novel would have been a better novel without these abstract disquisitions.

The characters in the book are not strictly copied from life, but in the main Tolstoy's father's family are represented by the Rostófs and his mother's by the Bolkónskys. In the magazine article already referred to, Tolstoy says that only two minor characters are taken from life, and 'all the other characters are entirely invented, and I have not even for them any definite prototypes in tradition or in reality.' But when he said that, he was defending himself from the charge of having copied actual people who had played a part in the society of the time, and he clearly overstates his case, for to a considerable extent the characters in the novel correspond to the people mentioned in the following list:

Characters in War and Peace:Members of the Tolstoy or Volkónsky Families:
The old Prince N. Bolkónsky.Tolstoy's grandfather, Prince N. Volkónsky.
His daughter, Princess Marie N. Bolkónsky.Tolstoy's mother, the Princess Marie N. Volkónsky.
The old Count Ilyá A. Rostóf.Tolstoy's grandfather, Count Ilyá A. Tolstoy.
Count Nicholas I. Rostóf.Tolstoy's father. Count Nicholas I. Tolstoy.
Countess Natálya Rostóf.Tatiána Behrs, Tolstoy's youngest sister-in-law.
Sónya.Tatiána A. Érgolsky.
Dólohof is made up of a combination of Count TheodoreTolstoy, a famous traveller, with R. I. Dórohof, anotorious dare-devil of Alexander I.'s days.

Many even of the minor characters, such as Mlle. Bourienne, and Ivánushka the woman pilgrim in man's clothes, are copied more or less closely from people connected with the Volkónskys' home at Yásnaya Polyána.

Tolstoy's sympathies and antipathies in this novel: his appreciation of affection, kindliness, simplicity and truthfulness, and his dislike of what is cruel, pompous, complicated or false, are the same as in his earlier stories, but mellowed and wiser; they are also the same as in his later didactic writings, though there they are formulated, dogmatic and rigid.

The novel covers nearly the whole range of Tolstoy's experience of life: in it we have the aristocracy and the peasants; town life and country life; the Commanders, officers and privates of the army, in action and out of action; the diplomatists and courtiers; flirtation, love, balls, hunting, and a reform movement which is all talk. What Tolstoy does not show, is what he did not know—the middle-class world: the world of merchants, manufacturers, engineers and men of business. Of course these in Russia a hundred years ago, played a comparatively small part; and there was practically no political activity such as that of our County Councils, Borough Councils and Parliament. But that all this was absent from Tolstoy's mind, and that his outlook on life was confined to the aristocracy which consumed and the peasantry which produced, will, in the sequel, help us to understand the social teaching to which he ultimately came. His brother-in-law tells us that Leo Tolstoy 'has in my presence confessed to being both proud and vain. He was a rampant aristocrat, and though he always loved the country folk, he loved the aristocracy still more. To the middle class he was antipathetic. When, after his failures in early life, he became widely famous as a writer, he used to admit that it gave him great pleasure and intense happiness. In his own words, he was pleased to feel that he was both a writer and a noble.'

'When he heard of any of his former comrades or acquaintances receiving important appointments, his comments reminded one of those of Souvórof

A simple world of nobles and peasants, with little organisation, and that of a poor kind: a world the evils of which were mitigated by much kindliness and good intention, and in which, on the whole, the less the Government interfered with anybody or anything, the better—was old Russia as it existed under Alexander I and as it still existed when Tolstoy was young. He has described it with extraordinary vividness, and has made it possible for us to picture to ourselves a country and an age not our own. What effect the limitation of his outlook, referred to above, had on the subsequent development of his opinions, need not here be considered. It does not spoil the novel, for no novel can show us the whole of life; but it had a very serious effect on the formulation of his later philosophy of life. Of certain important types of humanity he has hardly any conception. Of the George Stephenson type, for instance, which masters the brute forces of nature and harnesses them to the service of man—doing this primarily from love of efficient work—he knows nothing; nor does he know any thing of the Sidney Webb type, which sets itself the yet more difficult task of evolving social order out of the partial chaos of modern civilisation; or of the best type of organisers in our great industrial undertakings: the men whose hearts are set on getting much work well done, with little friction and little waste, and to whom the successful accomplishment of a difficult project gives more satisfaction than any effortless acquisition of wealth would do. Tolstoy over-simplifies life's problems. He makes a sharp contrast between the predatory and the humble types; and there is a measure of truth in his presentation. He is right that life is supported by the humble, and is rendered hard by the predatory types; but he has omitted from his scheme of things the man of organising mind: the man who knows how to get his way, and generally gets it (or a good deal of it) but does this mainly from worthy motives; the man who is not perfect, and may take more than is good for him, and may have some of the tendencies of the predatory type, but who still, on the whole, is worth, and more than worth, his salt, and but for whom there would be more of chaos and less of order in the world. Tolstoy has said in one of his later writings that the cause of the Russian famines is the Greek Church; and he is right. All that stupefies, all that impedes thought, tends to make men inefficient even in their agricultural operations. But by parity of reasoning he should see that the introduction of thought into methods of production, distribution and exchange, which has, during the last hundred and fifty years, so revolutionised our Western world, should not be condemned as bad in itself, however ugly many of its manifestations may be; and however often we may see the organising and the predatory types exemplified in one and the same person.

Outside Russia, Anna Karénina is perhaps more popular than War and Peace. The former is a long novel, but not nearly as long as the latter; and though it contains philosophic disquisitions, these fit better into the story and are shorter and clearer than the philosophic chapters in War and Peace. In arrangement, again, Anna Karénina is more like the novels we are accustomed to, though instead of one hero and heroine it has two pairs of lovers, living quite different lives, and not very closely connected.

It deals with the passionate love of a beautiful and attractive woman; and it has a further interest in the fact that Lévin, to a greater degree than any of the author's other characters, represents Tolstoy himself; though Tolstoy made Lévin a very simple fellow in order to get a more effective contrast between him and the representatives of high life in Moscow and Petersburg.

Anna Karénina had the advantage of being introduced to the English reading public by Matthew Arnold in an essay which is one of the very best any one has ever written about Tolstoy. It is so good, and still carries so much weight, that I may be excused for mentioning three points on which it seems to me misleading. First, Arnold's ground for preferring Anna Karénina to War and Peace is ill chosen. He says: 'One prefers, I think, to have the novelist dealing with the life which he knows from having lived it, rather than with the life which he knows from books or hearsay. If one has to choose a representative work of Thackeray, it is Vanity Fair which one would take rather than The Virginians.'

This surely is misleading. War in Russia in 1812 was very similar to war in Russia in 1854, and the son who had fought in the latter war, describing the war in which his father had fought, was not at all in the position of Thackeray describing the life of the Virginians. Tolstoy depicting the homes of his parents and grandparents, which he in part remembered, and which he at any rate knew well from those who had formed part of them, was as close to first-hand experience as he was when describing the life of Karénin the pedantic Petersburg statesman, who belonged to a world which was essentially foreign to Tolstoy, though he had occasionally glanced at it.

But the sentence in Arnold's essay which has done most harm, is that in which he speaks about translations: 'I use the French translation; in general, as I long ago said, work of this kind is better done in France than in England, and Anna Karénina is perhaps also a novel which goes better into French than into English.'

It is true enough that the first English translations of Tolstoy were very poor, and it is also true that the French versions, so long as Tourgénef attended to them, were really good. But Arnold was wrong in supposing that Anna Karénina would naturally go better into French than into English. Had he been able to read the original, or had he been acquainted with Russian life, he would have seen that in Tolstoy's novels there are two sets of people: a Court, Petersburg set, who continually speak French and are Frenchified; and a plain, homely, straightforward Russian (I had almost said, English) set who do not use French phrases, and who are sharply contrasted with the others. This contrast can be made quite clear in an English version, but it is difficult to make it clear in a version where even the most Russian characters have to speak French. The case is worse than that, however: Arnold did not say, as he fairly might have said, that up to his time the French versions were better than the English; he speaks as though it were in the nature of things that any translation into French must be better than any possible translation into English. A prejudice of that kind tends to divert attention from the fact that some French translations are bad, and some English translations are good. As a matter of fact, since Arnold's time the position has been largely reversed. When staying at Yásnaya Polyána in 1902, I heard Tolstoy express considerable dissatisfaction with the new collected French edition of his works, the first volumes of which had then recently appeared, while he commended some recent English versions, including work done by Mrs. Garnett and by my wife.

A grave error, again, is made by Arnold in speaking of Tolstoy's later life, where he says that he 'earns his bread by the labour of his own hands.' Tolstoy never did that, and never claimed to have done it; though it is extraordinary how often and how confidently the statement has been repeated. It is a matter however which need not detain us, for it does not relate to the period with which this volume deals.

Arnold's summary of the story of the novel is excellent, but I can here only quote one more passage from his essay. 'We have,' he says, 'been in a world which misconducts itself nearly as much as the world of a French novel all palpitating with "modernity." But there are two things in which the Russian novel—Count Tolstoi's novel at any rate—is very advantageously distinguished from the type of novel now so much in request in France. In the first place, there is no fine sentiment, at once tiresome and false. We are not told to believe, for example, that Anna is wonderfully exalted and ennobled by her passion for Vrónsky. The English reader is thus saved from many a groan of impatience. The other thing is yet more important. Our Russian novelist deals abundantly with criminal passion and with adultery, but he does not seem to feel himself owing any service to the goddess Lubricity, or bound to put in touches at this goddess's dictation. Much in Anna Karénina is painful, much is unpleasant, but nothing is of a nature to trouble the senses, or to please those who wish their senses troubled. This taint is wholly absent.'

W. D. Howells, who has stood sponsor for Tolstoy in America as Matthew Arnold has done in England, similarly says: 'It is Tolstoy's humanity which is the grace beyond the reach of art in his imaginative work. It does not reach merely the poor and the suffering; it extends to the prosperous and the proud, and does not deny itself to the guilty. There had been many stories of adultery before Anna Karénina, nearly all the great novels outside of English are framed upon that argument, but in Anna Karénina, for the first time the whole truth was told about it. Tolstoy has said of the fiction of Maupassant that the whole truth can never be immoral; and in his own work I have felt that it could never be anything but moral.'

Tolstoy never fears to deal with the real problems of life, and never fears to call a spade a spade; but he also never panders to the animal passions. In a letter relating to Resurrection he remarked: 'When I read a book, what chiefly interests me is the Weltanschauung des Autors: what he likes and what he hates. And I hope that any one who reads my book with that in view will find out what the author likes and dislikes, and will be influenced by the author's feelings.' What is important is not the subject treated of, but the feeling the author imparts when dealing with it.

Arnold, it is true, is rather shocked that Anna should yield so quickly and easily to the persuasions of Vrónsky. He is quite sure that she ought to have resisted. But here we come to a matter on which many Russians disapprove of Tolstoy on quite the opposite ground. Kropótkin in his interesting work Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, has stated their case very clearly, and this is the substance of what he says:

Anna Karénina produced in Russia an impression which brought Tolstoy congratulations from the reactionary camp and a very cool reception from the advanced portion of society. The fact is that the question of marriage and of the separation of husband and wife, had been most earnestly debated in Russia by the best men and women, both in literature and in life. Levity towards marriage such as is continually unveiled in the Divorce Courts, was decidedly condemned, as also was any form of deceit such as supplies the subject for countless French novels and plays. But after levity and deceit had been condemned, the right of a new love—appearing perhaps after years of happy married life—was seriously considered, Tchernyshévsky's novel, What Is To Be Done? may be taken as the best expression of the opinions on marriage which became current among the better portion of the young generation. Once married, it was said, don't take lightly to love affairs or flirtation. Not every fit of passion deserves the name of a new love; and what is called love is often merely temporary desire. Even if it be real, before it has grown deep there is generally time to reflect on the consequences that would result were it allowed to grow. But when all is said and done, there are cases when a new love does come, and comes almost inevitably: as for instance when a girl has been married almost against her will under the continued insistence of her lover, or when the two have married without properly understanding one another, or when one of the two has continued to progress towards an ideal, while the other, after having worn the mask of idealism, falls back into the Philistine happiness of warmed slippers. In such cases separation not only becomes inevitable, but is often to the interest of both. It would be better for both to live through the suffering a separation involves (honest natures are improved by such suffering) than to spoil the entire subsequent life of one—or both in most cases—and to face the evil consequences which living together under such circumstances would be sure to produce on the children. That at any rate was the conclusion to which, both in literature and in life, the best portion of Russian society came.

And into the society Kropótkin describes in the above statement, comes Tolstoy with Anna Karénina. The epigraph of the book is 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' and death by suicide is the fate of poor Anna, who was married young to an old and unattractive man, and who had never known love till she met Vrónsky. Deceit was not in her nature. To maintain a conventional marriage would not have made her husband or child happier. Separation and a new life with Vrónsky, who seriously loved her, was the only possible outcome. At any rate, continues Kropótkin, if the story of Anna Karénina had to end in tragedy, it was not in consequence of an act of supreme justice. The artistic genius of Tolstoy, honest here as everywhere, itself indicated the real cause, in the inconsistency of Vrónsky and Anna. After leaving her husband and defying public opinion—that is, as Tolstoy shows, the opinion of women not honest enough to have a right to a voice in the matter—neither she nor Vrónsky had the courage to break right away from that society, the futility of which Tolstoy describes so exquisitely. Instead of that, when Anna returns with Vrónsky to Petersburg, their chief preoccupation is, how Betsy and other such women will receive her if she reappears among them? 'And it was the opinion of the Betsies—surely not Superhuman Justice—which brought Anna to suicide.'

Whether Matthew Arnold's view or Kropótkin's view be accepted, Tolstoy at any rate does full justice to Anna's charm: 'her large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature which keeps our sympathy' and even our respect; there is no nonsense about her being a degraded or vile person. And after all, Tolstoy's view of marriage sanctity is a very old and a very widely held one; and it is surely good to have that side of the case put so artistically, so persuasively, so well, as he puts it. If ultimately the idea that two uncongenial people ought to live out their lives together because they have married, has to be abandoned, let it not be abandoned without the very best advocates being heard on its behalf.

Anna Karénina contains passages: the ball, the officers' steeplechase, the mowing, the death of Lévin's brother, and others, which for artistic beauty are unsurpassed and, one is tempted to add, unsurpassable. It also, towards the end, contains in admirably concise form much of what Tolstoy has told in his Confession, of his quest after the meaning of life, his thoughts of suicide, and how he learnt from a talk with a peasant that man should live for his soul and for God.

His treatment in this novel of the Russian volunteers who went to fight for Servia, was as bold a slap in the face to the Russian jingoes, who were having things all their own way at that time, as Campbell Bannerman's 'methods of barbarism' speech, or Sir E. Clarke's declaration that the reassertion of England's claim to suzerainty in the internal affairs of the Transvaal, was 'a breach of national faith,' was to our jingoes at the time of the Boer war; but it is curious to note the precise position that (speaking through the mouth of Lévin) Tolstoy took up. He did not say that Russia ought not to fight to free the Christian populations of Turkey; he merely said that no individual Russian had any business to volunteer for the Servian or Bulgarian army, or to take any action to urge the Russian Government towards war.

Of Lévin we are told: 'He, like Miháylitch and the peasants, whose feelings are expressed in the legendary story of the invitation sent to the Varyági by the early inhabitants of Russia, said: "Come and be princes and rule over us. We gladly promise complete submission. All labour, all humiliations, all sacrifices we take on ourselves, but we do not judge or decide."' And Lévin goes on to repudiate the idea that the Russian people have 'now renounced this privilege [the privilege, that is, of not taking any part in Government] bought at so costly a price.'

The connection between the roots of Tolstoy's opinions—manifested in these writings of his first fifty years—and his opinions in their ultimate rigid and dogmatic form, as expressed during the last three decades, is in general so close, the dogmas of the later period grew so naturally out of the sympathies and experiences of the earlier time, that this point—at which there is a clean line of cleavage (the difference between obeying Government and disobeying it)—is worthy of particular note. When finishing Anna Karénina Tolstoy had not yet reached the conclusion that all Governments employing force are immoral; but his later teachings are dominated by that view.

Apart from the special points I have referred to, the general effect and influence of Tolstoy's fiction can hardly be summed up better than they have been summed up by W. D. Howells, who says:

'Up to his time fiction had been a part of the pride of life, and had been governed by the criterions of the world which it amused. But Tolstoy replaced the artistic conscience by the human conscience. Great as my wonder was at the truth in his work, my wonder at the love in it was greater yet. Here, for the first time, I found the most faithful picture of life set in the light of that human conscience which I had falsely taught myself was to be ignored in questions of art, as something inadequate and inappropriate. In the august presence of the masterpieces, I had been afraid and ashamed of the highest interests of my nature as something philistine and provincial. But here I stood in the presence of a master, who told me not to be ashamed of them, but to judge his work by them, since he had himself wrought in honour of them. I found the tests of conduct which I had used in secret with myself, applied as the rules of universal justice, condemning and acquitting in motive and action, and admitting none of those lawyer's pleas which baffle our own consciousness of right and wrong. Often in Tolstoy's ethics I feel a hardness, almost an arrogance (the word says too much); but in his esthetics I have never felt this. He has transmuted the atmosphere of a realm hitherto supposed unmoral into the very air of heaven. I found nowhere in his work those base and cruel lies which cheat us into the belief that wrong may sometimes be right through passion, or genius, or heroism. There was everywhere the grave noble face of the truth that had looked me in the eyes all my life, and that I knew I must confront when I came to die. But there was something more than this, infinitely more. There was that love which is before even the truth, without which there is no truth, and which if there is any last day, must appear the Divine justice....

'As I have already more than once said, his ethics and esthetics are inseparably at one; and that is what gives a vital warmth to all his art. It is never that heartless skill which exists for its own sake, and is content to dazzle with the brilliancy of its triumphs. It seeks always the truth, in the love to which alone the truth unveils itself. If Tolstoy is the greatest imaginative writer who ever lived, it is because, beyond all others, he has written in the spirit of kindness, and not denied his own personal complicity with his art.

'As for the scope of his work, it would not be easy to measure it, for it seems to include all motives and actions, in good and bad, in high and low, and not to leave life untouched at any point as it shows itself in his vast Russian world. Its chief themes are the old themes of art always,—they are love, passion, death, but they are treated with such a sincerity, such a simplicity, that they seem almost new to art, and as effectively his as if they had not been touched before....

'Passion, we have to learn from the great master, who here as everywhere humbles himself to the truth, has in it life and death; but of itself it is something, only as a condition precedent to these; without it neither can be; but it is lost in their importance, and is strictly subordinate to their laws. It has never been more charmingly and reverently studied in its beautiful and noble phases than it is in Tolstoy's fiction; though he has always dealt with it so sincerely, so seriously. As to its obscure and ugly and selfish phases, he is so far above all others who have written of it, that he alone seems truly to have divined it, or portrayed it as experience knows it. He never tries to lift it out of nature in either case, but leaves it more visibly and palpably a part of the lowest as well as the highest humanity....

'He comes nearer unriddling life for us than any other writer. He persuades us that it cannot possibly give us any personal happiness; that there is no room for the selfish joy of any one except as it displaces the joy of some other, but that for unselfish joy there is infinite place and occasion. With the same key he unlocks the mystery of death; and he imagines so strenuously that death is neither more nor less than a transport of self-surrender that he convinces the reason where there can be no proof. The reader will not have forgotten how in those last moments of earth which he has depicted, it is this utter giving up which is made to appear the first moment of heaven. Nothing in his mastery is so wonderful as his power upon us in the scenes of the borderland where his vision seems to pierce the confines of another world.'

Tolstoy of the later phase, the last three decades, with which the second volume of this work will deal, differed from the Tolstoy of the first fifty years; but the later Tolstoy grew out of the earlier, as the branches of a tree grow from its roots.

The difference lay chiefly in this: that from about the year 1878 Tolstoy became sure of himself, succeeded in formulating his outlook on life, and proceeded to examine and pass judgment on all the main phases of human thought and activity. His work was sometimes hasty and often harsh; he painted in black and white, subjects really composed of many shades of colours; but what other man has even attempted so to examine, to portray, and to tell the frank truth about all the greatest problems of life and death?

No one really concerned to leave the world better than he found it—be his line of work what it may—can afford to ignore what Tolstoy has said on his subject.

No such combination of intellectual and artistic force has in our times provoked the attention of mankind. No one has so stimulated thought, or so successfully challenged established opinions. Tolstoy has altered the outlook on life of many men in many lands, and has caused some to alter not their ideas merely, but the settled habits and customs of their lives. Only those who neither know nor understand him at all, ever question his sincerity.

Those who have spoken scornfully of him are those who have not taken the trouble to understand him. On the other hand, the small minority who swallow his opinions whole, do so under the hypnotic influence of his force, fervour and genius. To analyse his opinions, and disentangle what in them is true from what is false, is a task no one has yet adequately performed, but for which the time is ripe, and which, bold as the undertaking may be, I mean to attempt.

Tolstoy's marvellous artistic power, his sincerity, and the love that is so strong a feature of his work, have often been dwelt upon; but what really gives him his supreme importance as a literary force is the union of all these things: artistic capacity, sincerity and love, with a quite extraordinary power of intellect.

It is not given to any man to solve all the problems of life; but no one has made so bold and interesting an attempt to do so as Tolstoy, or has striven so hard to make his solutions plain to every child of man.