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.'