2. Interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically.
3. Honorable.
I call Dante’s Commedia slightly dishonorable, with never a mention of the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And War and Peace I call downright dishonorable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he wasn’t attractive, even to Tolstoi.
Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his own character.
Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by too much adversity.
If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a character. And a personality is a self-conscious I am: being all that is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality and an almighty I am, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog.
Doesn’t anybody call that dishonorable on Leo’s part? He might just as well have been true to himself! But no! His self-conscious personality was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on himself, by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion that he was! Leo! Léon!
Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts.
How boring, in a great man! And how boring, in a great nation like Russia, to let its old-Adam manhood be so improved upon by these reformers, who all feel themselves short of something, and therefore live by spite, that at last there’s nothing left but a lot of shells of men, improving themselves steadily emptier and emptier, till they rattle with words and formulae, as if they’d swallowed the whole encyclopædia of socialism.
But wait! There is life in the Russians. Something new and strange will emerge out of their weird transmogrification into Bolshevists.