“‘What is bad business, father?’
“‘Your wife,’ replied the old man bluntly, accenting the word.
“‘I don’t understand you.’
“‘Well, my dear fellow, you can’t do any thing, you see; you can’t get unmarried. Don’t worry, ... I won’t tell anyone: but—you know it as well as I do—it’s the truth.’ He seized his son’s hand with his lean, bony fingers, and pressed it, while his piercing eyes seemed to look to the very bottom of his being. His son answered with a silent confession,—a sigh.”
The weight of this paternal dictatorship, which constantly crushes the Princess Marya, has an effect upon her which it is important to note. She is thrown into a sort of mysticism, somewhat like that which we have seen come over Tolstoï himself. She has frequent interviews with beggars, pilgrims, the poor in spirit; she listens to them, and gets instruction, not from their coarse anecdotes about the wonder-working Virgin whose cheeks sweat blood, but from their resignation at the torments of life. Thus she succeeds in forgetting her most bitter disappointments, or at least in bearing them with a steadfastness which no stoicism can approach. She also gets from her faith, her gentleness in judging those who come near her.
“Akh, Andréi,” she says to her brother, “what a treasure of a wife you have!—a real child, gay, animated. How I love her!” Andréi had taken a seat by his sister: he did not speak; an ironical smile played on his lips. She noticed it, and went on: “Her little weaknesses call for indulgence.... Who is there without some?... To understand every thing is to forgive.” And she forgives every thing, even the most cruel insult, even the wound inflicted on the most sensitive part of her sensitive nature,—of her loving heart. The handsome Anatoli Kuragin comes with his father, Prince Vasíli, to ask her hand in marriage, she being an heiress. While waiting to carry off this dowry with a high hand, he plays, in the Bolkonsky house, as everywhere else, his game of seduction; and he has rendezvous with the demoiselle de compagnie, a young and pretty French girl. Marya catches them accidentally. She refuses the marriage which she had eagerly anticipated. “I shall be called to some other good fortune. I shall be happy in devotion, and in making others happy.” She dreams of seeing the man whom she loved marry the one who has so shamefully insulted her. “I should be so glad to see her his wife: she is so sad, so lonely, so abandoned! How she must love him when he forgets her so! Who knows? Perhaps I should have done the same.”
Andréi goes to war; and Tolstoï takes us with him into a world of action, which he describes with rare power. We are dazzled at first by the brilliant art with which the novelist moves armies, carries out the combinations of tacticians, shows the troops with their passionate dash or their senseless terrors, represents their leaders with their hesitations or their unconscionable activity, but all alive, true, recognizable, from the humblest of the German officers to Napoleon the great captain. We are singularly struck by certain of his preferred methods; like that, for instance, of being true to fact in his painting of what is always idealized. Napoleon has vulgarities of character and expression, and the unexpected meeting with them gives us at first a shock of admiration. Instead of saying simply, “What realism!” we exclaim, “What reality!” Yet I do not hesitate to consider this portion of “War and Peace” as inferior to others. The historian in Tolstoï inspires me with a certain feeling of distrust: it seems to me that the painter of battles, with his first-class ability, here and there takes advantage of our fairness. There is a tinsel effect in his painting; the details are far too numerous, and there is not so much variety among them as one would think.
What is incomparable in the war part of the romance are the descriptions of military customs, the scenes of camp-life, the impressions of certain hours of day and night, the reminiscences of evening conversations, the effects of groups lighted up by the weird light of the bivouac, the heart-rending aspects of the battle-field or the hospital-wards. The marvellous beauty of all this wealth of feelings felt and experienced adds its glory to the more commonplace and less valuable woof of the historical narration. Turgénief, who understood this, noted somewhere or other this difference; but there are very few readers who can thus bethink themselves, and take account of their illusions.
Wounded at Austerlitz, and taken to the French hospital, Andréi sees Napoleon approach his bedside; that is to say, he sees the one who, in his eyes, represents the ideal, the superhuman man, the hero, the demigod. At death’s door, Andréi sees all things in a light which reduces them to their real proportions. To him all Napoleon’s acts, all his words, all the motives which make him act and speak, seem empty of interest. He turns from the sight of what is only human, and, with his eyes fixed solely on the medal which Marya hung around his neck on the day of his departure, he endeavors to believe “in that ideal heaven which alone promises him peace.”
Scarcely recovered from his wound, Andréi returns to his father’s home, which he reaches in time to be present at his wife’s confinement. There is here an admirable scene, which will be surpassed only by the birth-scene described in the romance of “Anna Karénina.” All that is dramatic, august, mysterious, in the opening flower of maternity has been expressed by Tolstoï in these two passages. That of “Anna Karénina” is famous. We feel nothing of the equivocal impressions and the lugubrious effects, which, under the pretext of realism, the author of “La Joie de Vivre” will put into a similar description. But a parallel between the realism of Tolstoï and the realism of Zola would carry us too far from our subject.