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.