G. H. Perris.
TOLSTOY’S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE
THE justness of the word great applied to a nation’s writers is perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his Age, and seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We may take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you realise that the World’s insight into, and understanding of that Age’s life has been supplied us by the special interpretation offered by two or three great minds. In fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their nation’s growth or strife signifies. How many dumb ages are there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we have no key!
One of H. R. Millar’s illustrations in the English edition of “What Men Live By” (written in 1881), reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Walter Scott, Ltd., the publishers
Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably
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ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING OF THE MANY BUSTS OF COUNT TOLSTOY |
must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern