Tolstoy himself might have been imagined by Cervantes. That is the thought that occurs in reading Mr. Noyes's book directly after Mr. Schevill's. Apart from that, no two great artists could be more dissimilar. Tolstoy is always uneasy. It is his uneasiness which caused his quarrel with Turgenev. It is his uneasiness which makes it impossible for him to remain steadfast to his own convictions. For years there was a false idea of Tolstoy, which is only gradually yielding to the facts. He was neither saint nor prophet; but an ordinary man with a capacity for self-analysis enormously magnified—so magnified that he seems a giant. It is this huge quality which makes so many critics, as Mr. Noyes, class him far beyond Turgenev and Dostoevsky, and put him in a position which he is willing to occupy in the future. Of direct personal criticism Mr. Noyes gives us little. He is overcome by the amount of his material, and is too fond of approaching his subject through the books of other critics. For instance, he quotes Mereshkovsky's comment on the end of War and Peace, as if it was a locus classicus on Natasha's psychology, instead of a piece of ill-natured criticism on a great artist by a showman. The end of War and Peace, which shows us Natasha absorbed in Cervantes' life, is the same criticism on wars, grandeurs, and world-spooks as is made by Hardy's poem on The Breaking of Nations; and neither has any cynicism in it. Mr. Noyes's picture of Tolstoy the man adds nothing to Aylmer Maude's exhaustive volumes; and he values too seriously and literally a great deal of Tolstoy's detailed religious writing. His book is, however, worth having, even if only for the superb lines written by Tolstoy to some abject person who objected to Resurrection as "smutty." We will not give his name, but he was, alas! English. Tolstoy, writing in English, defends himself and then says:
When I wrote the book I abhorred with all my heart the lust, and to express this abhorrence was one of the chief aims of the book. If I have failed in it I am very sorry, and I am pleading guilty if I was so inconsiderate in the scene of which you write that I could have produced such a bad impression on your mind. I think that we will be judged by our consciences and by God, not for the results of our ideas, which we cannot know, but for our intentions, and I hope my intentions were not bad.
Did ever great artist humble himself so generously? His attacker, with his unpleasant mind, will be numbered with the excellent Mr. Hyde, who inspired Stevenson to his defence of Damien.
BOOKS IN THE WAR. By Theodore Wesley Koch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
VILLAGE LIBRARIES. By A. Sayle. Richards. 5s.
Mr. Koch's amply illustrated book is, in the main, a record of the achievements in the war of the American Library Association. As such it is exhaustive, if rather wanting in variety. The soldiers' demand for books, after all, and gratitude for their bestowal, were much the same in America as in France, in the trenches as in hospitals, so that by the time he has finished this book the reader is somewhat wearied by the repetition of feats of distribution, surveys of the vast literary field covered, instances of literary recalcitrance overcome by deft suggestion and so forth. Nevertheless, it is a book of considerable interest and will bear permanent witness to the fact that, in all future wars, libraries will have to be mobilised with the armies. Over and over again the fact, which we have all learned, is insisted on that food for the mind is one of the most important sustainers of moral. Not only is reading an anodyne, but it is a disinfectant and a prophylactic, as necessary in war as chloroform, lysol, and anti-typhoid vaccine. In all that vast organisation of intense welfare—work which, spasmodic and fragmentary in peace, was by a supreme irony perfected in war—the supplying of books to soldiers and sailors held a high place. Every taste had to be catered for, every degree of education given its appropriate food. To some the Army was an elementary school, to others it almost fulfilled the functions of a university, especially after the Armistice, when ambitious educational schemes were set on foot to calm idle and chafing warriors, and when our own War Office deluged France and Germany with piles of lofty literature, very little of which, we believe, was read.
The belligerent nations learned at last that it was just as worth while to tempt a soldier to read as to teach him to shoot. The question now remains what fruit this discovery is going to bear in peace, where the problem, apparently simpler, is really harder. Soldiers at war had not the opportunity of using their leisure as they wished; they were circumscribed in place and opportunity. The free citizen is less fettered, and, being more scattered, is less amenable to propaganda. Yet for citizens at peace, no less than for soldiers at war, propaganda, tactful and patient, is necessary if they are to be induced to apply the medicine of reading to their minds. From a quite different point of view this truth is made clear by Miss Sayle's little book, which is a development of an attractive article in the New Statesman describing the beginning and development of a library in a small Hampshire village. It is a book which all who have similar ambitions for their villages should read, for it will save them many natural and fatal errors, besides telling them all they need know about organisation, finance, book-buying and book-housing, in plain words with plenty of humour.
Miss Sayle very strongly insists on it that a village library must be simply and solely a circulating library, stocking the books which its members want to read and no others. More ambitious efforts may be made wherever the Public Libraries Act is applied, but a village library will almost always be supported by voluntary subscriptions, and can only afford books which pay their way. She shows how much propaganda is needed to start even such a library and to keep it going—a library from which practically every book that was not agreeable fiction had to be ruthlessly weeded. In twelve years the one visible sign of progress has been the tendency of Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick to replace Mrs. Henry Wood as the favourite. Yet she holds that it has been worth while, and we agree. A small agricultural community has been induced to own, manage, and take a pride in a library, and even the fact that "father went less often to the 'Anchor' as the result" is a solid testimony to its value. If life of villages in the future regains its old vigour without becoming entirely urban in character, enterprises of this kind will be a duty incumbent on their more enlightened members. And they will only be successful if Miss Sayle's maxims are followed. Her "dont's" are admirable, and the biggest one of all is "don't get slack." She might have added the lesson of Mr. Koch's book and of the whole war: "don't forget that any reading is better than a vacant mind."
FROM FRIEND TO FRIEND. By Lady Ritchie. Murray. 6s. net.
Perhaps the most distinguishing of the pleasant Victorian characteristics was the combination of dignity with charm, and few of the artists of the period had that combination to a greater degree than Thackeray's daughter. This last volume of hers is entirely civilised and urbane in its appeal, and yet has, with its urbanity, a warmth of affection and a genuine love for and interest in others which are often lacking in the better, more highly-coloured works of contemporary art. It is a book of memories, and what Lady Ritchie remembers is not mere gossip, not what can be had by observation, but the deeper things of friendly intercourse, and the light thrown on character by circumstance and intimacy. The title-essay is mainly concerned with that remarkable woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, who was the friend of all the great men of her day, and the first woman to attempt artistic portraiture in photography. In telling of her Lady Ritchie cannot avoid a certain kindly humour; but the Victorians' laughter was not cruel, and though Mrs. Cameron must have been at times rather a burden, one can feel sure no one of her friends let her guess it. Certainly worse fates might overcome one than to be nursed by her. Mr. Cameron was ill and his wife gave him "home care and comforts." During the crisis he had "strong beef-tea thickened with arrowroot six times a day," and when he was convalescent,