Tolstoy’s failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children. Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their “un-Christian” ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous novels and plays.
The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy’s painting, which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we envisage the author of War and Peace. A few words from the description of Tolstoy’s face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:
His face was a true peasant’s face: simple, rustic, with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society—with polished, unconstrained manners.
... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people, and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the sweetness of meekness....
In this chain of seething, imperious instincts linked with delicate spiritual organization lies the profound tragicness of Tolstoy’s personality.
Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy’s works and teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian’s eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government. To say that the Czar and his ministers “dared not touch” the outspoken anarchist and heretic “out of dread of Europe—nay, of Russia,” is to reveal one’s ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: “Herr Kossack, schämen Sie sich!” Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers? Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in The Times during the revolution of 1905: “To free oneself from the government it is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it. Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing: moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the participation in their crimes”? Another tragic contradiction of the restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the despots.
—Alexander S. Kaun.
INTROSPECTION
Chance, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.]
Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is the atmosphere of Chance. Not academically deep, but deep from the standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.