His Katusha—Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in Resurrection—is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker Sonia in Dostoïevsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes. She is at first much more vital than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical smoke. Walizewski asserts that all Tolstoy's later life was a regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of human greatness, and in the case of this very great man, it is an atavistic feature of the national ... education, which in his case was originally of the most hasty and superficial description."
In As the Hague Ordains, the anonymous author attacks "our great reformer and humbug," Count Leo Tolstoy. She claims that there was hardly a village in China so abounding in filth and ignorance as the Tula village of Yasnaya Polyana, beside Tolstoy's country home.
"I wonder," she writes, "why the procession of foreign visitors who go to Yasnaya Polyana, who lavish adulation and hysterical praises upon that crass socialist and mischief-maker of his day, never think to look around them and use their reasoning powers. Would it not be the logical thing for Yasnaya Polyana to be the model village of Russia? Something cleaner than Edam or Marken? A little of his magnificent humanitarianism and benevolence poured upon that unsanitary village on his own estate would be more practical, it seems to me, than the thin treacle of it spread over the whole universe. Talk is cheap in Yasnaya Polyana, and the Grand Poseur plays his part magnificently. Every visitor goes away completely hypnotised, especially the Americans, with their frothing about equality and the universal brotherhood of man. Universal grandmother! All men are just as equal as all noses or all mouths are equal. The world gets older, but learns nothing, and it cherishes delusions, and the same ones, just as it did in the time of the Greek philosophers. Leo Tolstoy might well have lived in a tub or carried a lantern by day, like the most sensational and theatrical of the ancients. He is only a past master of réclame, of the art of advertising. The Moujik blouse and those delightful tableaux of a real nobleman shoemaking and haymaking make his books sell. That is all. And, under the unsuspecting blouse of the humanitarian is the fine and perfumed linen of the dandy. Leo Tolstoy, the Beau Brummel of his corps in my father's day—the dandy in domino to-day."
III
Tolstoy the artist! When his vagaries are forgotten, when all his books are rags, when his very name shall be a vague memory, there will live the portrait of Anna Karenina. How dwarfed are his other achievements compared with the creation of this woman, and to create a living character is to be as the gods. Tolstoy has painted one of the three women in the fiction of the nineteenth century. If the roll-call of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured "the drums and tramplings" of many conquests, and the contiguous dust of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's Valréie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna Karenina are these daughters of earth—flesh and blood, tears and lust, and the pride of life that killeth.
Despite Tolstoy's religious mania, I have never doubted his sincerity for a moment. It is a mysterious yet potent factor in the psychology of such an artist as he that whatever he did he did with tremendous sincerity. That is the reason his fiction is nearer reality than all other fictions, and the reason, too, that his realities, i. e., his declarations of faith, are nearer other men's fictions. When he writes of his conversion, like John Bunyan, he lets you see across the very sill of his soul. And he does it artistically. He is not conscious that art enters into the mechanism of this spiritual evisceration; but it does. St. Augustine, John Bunyan, John Henry Newman wrote of their adventures of the spirit in letters of fire, and in all three there is a touch of the sublime naïveté of childhood's outpourings.
I agree with the estimate of Tolstoy by Merejkowski. The main points of this study have been known to students who followed Tolstoy's extraordinary career for the past quarter of a century. Ibsen's individualism appeals. Better his torpedo exploding a thousand times under the social ark than the Oriental passivity of the Russian. There is hope in the message of Brand; none in Tolstoy's nihilism. One glorifies the will, the other denies, rejects it. No comparison can be made between the two wonderful men as playwrights. Yet Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness is brutal melodrama when compared to Ibsen's complex dramatic organisms. But what a nerve-shattering revelation is The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. This is the real Tolstoy.
How amateurish is the attitude of the Tolstoy disciple who cavils at his masterpieces. What is mere art compared to the message! And I say: what are all his vapourings and fatidical croonings on the tripod of pseudo-prophecy as compared to Anna Karenina? There is implicit drama, implicit morality in its noble pages, and a segment of the life of a nation in War and Peace. With preachers and saviours with quack nostrums the world is already well stocked. Great artists are rare. Every day a new religion is born somewhere—and it always finds followers. But art endures, it outlives dynasties, religions, divinities. It is with Tolstoy the artist we are enamoured. He may deliver his message of warning to a careless world—which only pricks up its ears when that message takes on questionable colour, as in the unpalatable Kreutzer Sonata. (Yes; that was eagerly devoured for its morbid eroticism.) We prefer the austerer Ibsen, who presents his men and women within the frame of the drama, absolutely without personal comment or parti pris—as before his decadence did Tolstoy in his novels. Ibsen is the type of the philosophical anarch, the believer in man's individuality, in the state for the individual, not the individual for the state. It is at least more dignified than the other's flood of confessions, of hysterical self-accusations, of penitential vows, and abundant lack of restraint. Yet no one doubts Tolstoy's repentance. Like Verlaine's it carried with it its own proofs.
But why publish to the world these intimate soul processes, fascinating as they are to laymen and psychologists alike? Why not keep watch with his God in silence and alone? The reason was (only complicated with a thousand other things, for Tolstoy was a complex being and a Slav), the plain reason was, we repeat, because Leo Nikolaievitch was an artist. He obeyed that demon known to Socrates and Goethe, and minutely recorded his mental and emotional fluctuations. And with Richard Wagner and Dostoïevsky, Tolstoy is one of the three most emotional temperaments of the nineteenth century. Unlike Ibsen or Nietzsche, he does not belong to the twentieth century; his religion, his social doctrines are atavistic, are of the past. Tolstoy is what the French call un cérébral, which, as Arthur Symons points out, is by no means a man of intellect. "Un cérébral is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transformed by emotion." How well that phrase fits Tolstoy—the fever of the soul! He has had the fever of the soul, has subdued it, and his recital of his struggles makes breathless reading. They are depicted by an artist, an emotional artist, and, despite his protestations, by one who will die an artist and be remembered, not as the pontiff of a new dispensation, but as a great world artist.