TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA
great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own progress. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty,
COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY
(Reproduced from The Review of Reviews by kind permission of the Editor)
the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say that “‘Sebastopol’ gives us war under all aspects—war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of ‘Sebastopol’ by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, ‘I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all. ‘Sebastopol,’ therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply