And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary:
"I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to life within me."
In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of Faust as "the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be expressed by no other art."
Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to his God. But he remained faithful in his admiration of Homer. In August, 1857, he was reading, with equal zest, the Iliad and the Bible. In one of his latest works, the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer that he opposes to Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, balance, and true art.
To be truly sensible of the power of this work, we must take into account its hidden unity. Too many readers, unable to see it in perspective, perceive in it nothing but thousands of details, whose profusion amazes and distracts them. They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the sense of the whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the artist, supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon the face of the waters.
In the beginning, the calm of the ocean. Peace, and the life of Russia before the war. The first hundred pages reflect, with an impassive precision, a detached irony, the yawning emptiness of worldly minds. Only towards the hundredth page do we hear the cry of one of these living dead—the worst among them, Prince Basil:
"We commit sins; we deceive one another; and why do we do it all? My friend, I am more than sixty years old.... All ends in death.... Death—what horror!"
Among these idle, insipid, untruthful souls, capable of every aberration, of every crime, certain saner natures are prominent: genuine natures by their clumsy candour, like Pierre Besoukhov; by their deeply rooted independence, their Old Russian peculiarities, like Marie Dmitrievna; by the freshness of their youth, like the little Rostoffs: natures full of goodness and resignation, like the Princess Marie; and those who, like Prince Andrei, are not good, but proud, and are tormented by an unhealthy existence.
Now comes the first muttering of the waves. The Russian army is in Austria. Fatality is supreme: nowhere more visibly imperious than in the loosing of elementary forces—in the war. The true leaders are those who do not seek to lead or direct, but, like Kutuzov or Bagration, to "allow it to be believed that their personal intentions are in perfect agreement with what is really the simple result of the force of circumstances, the will of subordinates, and the caprices of chance." The advantage of surrendering to the hand of Destiny! The happiness of simple action, a sane and normal state.... The troubled spirits regain their poise. Prince Andrei breathes, begins to live.... And while in the far distance, remote from the lifegiving breath of the holy tempest, Pierre and the Princess Marie are threatened by the contagion of their world and the deception of love, Andrei, wounded at Austerlitz, has suddenly, amid the intoxication of action brutally interrupted, the revelation of the serene immensity of the universe. Lying on his back, "he sees nothing now, except, very far above him, a sky infinitely deep, wherein light, greyish clouds go softly wandering."