But, one asks oneself, what is reality? Zola has frankly explained how a novel ought to be written; how one must get one’s human documents, study them thoroughly, accumulate notes, systematically frequent the society of the people one is studying, watch them, listen to them, minutely observe and record all their surroundings. But have we got reality then? Does the novelist I casually meet, and who has opportunities to take notes of my conversation and appearance, to examine the furniture of my house and to collect gossip about me, know anything whatever of the romance or tragedy which to me is the reality of my life, these other things being but shreds or tatters of life? Or if my romance or tragedy has got into a law-court or a police-court, is he really much nearer then? The unrevealable motives, the charm, the mystery, were not deposed to by the policeman who was immediately summoned, nor by the servant-girl who looked through the key-hole. Certain disagreeable details: do they make up reality? To select the most beautiful and charming woman one knows, and to set a detective artist on her track, to follow her about everywhere, to keep an opera-glass fixed upon her, to catch fragments of her conversation, to enter her house, her bedroom, to examine her dirty linen,—would Helen of Troy emerge beautiful from this procès-verbal? And on which side would be most reality? Nature seems to resent this austere method of approaching her, and when we have closed our hands the reality has slipped through our fingers. A great artist, a Shakespeare or a Goethe, is not afraid of any fact, however repulsive it may seem, so long as it is significant. But it must be significant. Without sympathy and a severe criticism of details, the truly illuminating facts will be missed or lost in the heap. It is interesting to note that Zola himself recognizes this, and admits that he has been carried away by his delight and enthusiasm in attempting to vindicate for Art the whole of Nature. Whatever is really fine in Zola’s work—“La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret,” or the last chapters of “Nana”—is fine because the man of a formula is for awhile subordinated to the artist.
Zola may work as hard as he will in the cause of the formula; he remains, above all, a man of massive temperament and peculiarly strong individuality. That is the real secret of his influence. A youth, developed in the poverty and hunger of a garret on the outskirts of Paris, who was fascinated by the great city he has lovingly painted, as it was there spread out before him, in “Une Page d’Amour,” and condemned to see it only from the outside,—here was material for that irony, unending and absolutely pitiless, that runs through the whole of the vast Rougon-Macquart drama of the world. He is an austere moralist, with no tenderness for human weakness, “un tragique qui se fâche,” as he calls himself, a Republican in spirit long before the Republic was proclaimed, a hater of all hypocrisies and empty prettinesses and fine phrases and elegant circumlocutions, a fighting man ready to fight to the last, with rude weapons but in fair combat. He represents the revolt against the French romantic movement—“une émeute de rhétoriciens,” he calls it—which found its supreme incarnation in Victor Hugo. The Forty Immortals may have laughed serenely, but when Zola declared that he was carrying on the classic tradition he was not altogether wrong. The classic tradition of France is marked by a very vivid sense of life; it has a close grip of the practical and material side of things, a wholesome contempt for all pretence, and sometimes a certain rather rank savour of audacity. Zola will scarcely stand beside Rabelais and Montaigne and Molière; the artist in him is too much crushed by ideas, and he has altogether run too much to seed; but he is fighting on the same side, and he has been proved to possess one quality which leaves little more to be said, effectiveness. Whatever the value of his work, he has turned the tide of novel literature, wherever his influence has spread, from frivolous inanities to the painstaking study of the facts of human life. Whatever we may think for the moment, that is a very wholesome and altogether moral revolution.
As for great art, that is neither here nor there. Shakespeare, Goethe, Flaubert,—for such men the extremes of poetry and of realism are equally welcome. Tolstoi, it is clear, is more of a realist than a poet, but his realism is of the kind that grows naturally out of the experiences of a man who has lived a peculiarly full and varied life. It is life sur le vif, not studied from a garret window. Nothing is omitted, nothing is superfluous; the narrative seems to lead the narrator rather than the narrator it, and through all we catch perpetually what seems an almost accidental fragrance of poetry. See the account of the storm in the “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” or of the child in the raspberry bush, or of the mowing, or the horse-race, in “Anna Karenina,” with their peculiar, intangible yet vivid reality. But these things, it may be said, are poetry, the effluence of some divine moment of life, the record of some unforgettable thrill of blood and brain. Compare, then, the account of a childbirth in “Anna Karenina” (there is an earlier and less successful attempt in “War and Peace”) with a similar scene which is the central episode in Zola’s “La Joie de Vivre.” The latter, doubtless, is instructive from its fidelity; every petty detail is coldly and minutely set forth. Its artistic value is difficult to estimate; it can scarcely be large. Zola presents the subject from the point of view of a disinterested and impossible spectator; in Tolstoi’s scene we have frankly the husband’s point of view. There is no room here for instructive demonstration of the mechanism of birth, of all its physical details and miseries. It is real life, but at such a moment real life is excitement, emotion, and the result is art. What, again, can be more unpromising than a novel about a remote historical war? But read “War and Peace” to see how lifelike, how vivid and fascinating, the narrative becomes in the hands of a man who has known the life of a soldier and all the chances of war.
Tolstoi is not alone among Russian novelists in the character of his realism. Gogol’s “Dead Souls” has something of the wholesome naturalism as well as of the broad art and the good-natured satire of Fielding. He is perpetually insisting on the importance to the artist of those “little things which only seem little when narrated in a book, but which one finds very important in actual life.” In his letters on “Dead Souls” Gogol wrote: “Those who have dissected my literary faculties have not discovered the essential feature of my nature. Poushkin alone perceived it. He always said that no author has been gifted like me to bring into relief the triviality of life, to describe all the platitude of a commonplace man, to make perceptible to all eyes the infinitely little things which escape our vision. That is my dominating faculty.” Tourgueneff declared that the novel must cast aside all hypocrisy, sentimentality, and rhetoric for the simple yet nobler aim of becoming the history of life. Dostoieffski, that tender-hearted student of the perversities of the human heart, so faithful in his studies that he sometimes seems to forget how great an artist he is, justifies himself thus: “What is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must follow? To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally, according to the laws of nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding to human needs. Art has always shown itself faithful to nature, and has marched with social progress. The ideal of beauty cannot perish in a healthy society; we must then give liberty to art, and leave her to herself. Have confidence in her; she will reach her end, and if she strays from the way she will soon reach it again; society itself will be the guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare himself, can prescribe to art her roads and aims.” Tolstoi but followed in the same path when, in one of the earliest of his books, the “Sebastopol Sketches,” he wrote: “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and always will be, most beautiful, is—Truth.”
It is, after all, impossible to disentangle Tolstoi’s art from the man himself and the ideas and aspirations that have stirred him. When we consider his history and development we are sometimes reminded of our own William Morris. They are both men of massive and sanguine temperament, of restless energy, groping their way through life with a vague sense of dissatisfaction; both pure artists through the greater part of their career, and both artists still, when late in life, and under the influence of rather sectarian ideas, they think that they have at length grasped the pillars of the heathen temple of society in which they have so long been groping, and are ready to wreak on it the pent-up unrest of their lives. But they go to work in not quite the same way. Both, it is true, having apparently passed through a very slight religious phase in early life, have had this experience in later life, and in both it has taken on a social character; both, also, have sought their inspiration, not so much in a possible future deduced from the present, as in the past experiences of the race. Tolstoi with his semi-oriental quietism has returned to the rationalistic aspects of the social teaching of Jesus. Morris, who regards Iceland rather than Judæa as the Holy Land of the race, looks to Scandinavian antiquity for light on the problems of to-day. It is on the robust Scandinavian spirit of independence and comfortable well-to-do intolerance of all oppression and domination that Morris relies for the redemption of his own time and people. So far from identifying art, as Tolstoi is inclined to do, with the evil and luxury of the world, Morris finds in art a chief hope for the world. It is not, therefore, surprising that his art has suffered little from the fervour of his convictions, while his varied artistic activities have given him a wholesome grip on life. His new beliefs, on the other hand, have given new meaning to his art. His mastery of prose has only been acquired under the stress of his convictions. It is prose of massive simplicity, a morning freshness, unconscious and effortless. There is about it something of the peculiar charm of the finest Norman architecture. The “Dream of John Ball,” a strong unpretentious piece of work, penetrated at every point by profound social convictions, yet with the artist’s touch throughout, may be read with a delight which the complex and artificial prose we are accustomed to cannot give. England, it is said, is predominantly a Scandinavian country; Morris is significant because he gives expression in an extreme form to the racial instincts of his own people, just as Tolstoi expresses in equally extreme form the deepest instincts of his Sclavonic race.
Against the “Dream of John Ball,” we may place the work produced at the same time by the Russian’s keener and more searching hand, “The Dominion of Darkness.” This sombre and awful tragedy is a terribly real and merciless picture of the worst elements in peasant life, a picture of avarice and lust and murder. Only one pious, stuttering, incoherent moojik, whose employment is to clean out closets, appears as the representative of mercy and justice. So thick is the gloom that it seems the artistic effect would have been heightened if the concluding introduction of the officers of an external and official justice had been omitted, and the curtain had fallen on the tragic merriment of the wedding feast. The same intense earnestness taking, almost unconsciously, an artistic shape, reveals itself in the little stories of which in recent years Tolstoi has produced so many, some indeed comparatively ineffective, but others that are a fascinating combination of simplicity, realism, imaginative insight, brought to the service of social ideas. Such is “What men live by,” the story of the angel who disobeyed God, and was sent to earth to learn that it is only in appearance that men are kept alive through care for themselves, but that in reality they are kept alive through love.
Tolstoi’s voice is heard throughout the vast extent of Russia, not by the rich only, but by the peasant. That is why his significance is so great. Sometimes the religious censure prohibits his books; sometimes it allows them; in either case they are circulated. Published at a few halfpence, these little books are within the reach of the poorest, and Tolstoi gives free permission to anyone to reproduce or translate any of his books. His drama, “The Dominion of Darkness, or when a bird lets himself be caught by one foot he is lost,” was intended for the public who frequent the open-air theatres of fairs, and eighty thousand copies were sold during the first week, although certainly not altogether among the audience he would have preferred. The stories for children are circulated in scores of editions of twenty thousand copies each. Tolstoi has nothing to teach that he has not learnt from peasants, and which thousands of peasants might not have taught him. He has used his character and genius as a sounding-board to enable his voice to reach millions of persons, many of whom, even the most intelligent, are not aware that he is but repeating the lessons he has learnt from unlettered moojiks.
Now his voice has reached the countries of the West, and it sounds here far more unfamiliar than in a land so stirred by popular religious movements as Russia. “My Religion,” that powerful argument ad hominem to the Christian from one who accepts both the letter and the spirit of Jesus’s simplest and least questionable teaching, has had an especially large circulation in the West. Such a challenge has never before been scattered broadcast among the nations. What, one wonders, will be the outcome?
To most people the simplicity of the challenger is a cause of astonishment. After the assassination of Alexander II. and the sentence on the assassins, Tolstoi wrote to the present Tzar imploring him not to begin his reign with judicial murder, and he was deeply and genuinely disappointed at the inevitable reception of his appeal. Count Tolstoi, the author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” made the same mistake as the simple peasant Soutaieff. That little incident throws much light on his mental constitution. It is the attitude of a child, absorbed wholly in one thing at a time, unable to calculate the nature and the strength of opposing forces. It is the same fact of mental structure which leads the world-renowned novelist to delight to learn from children, to be mortified when they do not like his stories, and to experience one of the greatest excitements of life when he thinks he detects the dawn of genius in a child of ten. The same characteristic appears in his treatment of science. He had heard, he told Mr. Kennan, that a Russian scientist had completely demolished the Darwinian theory. In “Life,” one of his latest books, this tendency has carried him far away into a sterile and hopeless region of mystical phraseology. He dismisses scientific men briefly as the Scribes. It has not occurred to him apparently that this book, “Life,” is a book of science. And, certainly, if science could produce nothing better than “Life,” the language that Tolstoi uses regarding it were not one whit too strong. This childlike simplicity is not peculiar to Tolstoi; it is more or less the attitude of every true Russian, of the peasant who sets up the kingdom of Heaven, as of the Nihilist who thinks he can emancipate his country by destroying a few Tzars. It is a weakness that must often mean failure because it cannot estimate the strength of difficulties. At the same time it is a power. It is by this intense concentration on one desired object, this heroic inability to see opposition, that the highest achievement becomes possible.
Whatever Tolstoi’s limitations and failures of perception, those things which he believes he has seen he grasps with inexorable tenacity. The violence and misery of the world—that is a reality; a reality, he feels, which must be fought at all costs. Mr. Kennan tells how he pressed home on Tolstoi the cases of extreme brutality and oppression that he had known practised on political prisoners in Siberia, and how, though Tolstoi’s eyes filled with tears as he imagined the horrors described, he still pointed out in detail how, by opposing violence to violence in the cases cited, the misery of the world would be increased: “At the time when you interposed there was only one centre of evil and suffering. By your violent interference you have created half-a-dozen such centres. It does not seem to me, Mr. Kennan, that that is the way to bring about the reign of peace and good-will on earth.”[12]