Leo Tolstoy
Chesterton, G. K.; Perris, G. H.; Garnett, Edward
Hodder and Stoughton 1903
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
IF any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical views, clearly and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them. About such an incident as this there is a quality altogether independent of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of the view. It is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels. All this, as I say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that he was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands, and he did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which taught that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm—that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the presence of a god.
This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is the best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that the Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian moralist, but there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into importance and the growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due to his admirable summary and justification of their scheme of ethics. Tolstoy, besides being a magnificent novelist, is one of the very few men alive who have a real, solid, and serious view of life. He is a Catholic church, of which he is the only member, the somewhat arrogant Pope and the somewhat submissive layman. He is one of the two or three men in Europe, who have an attitude towards things so entirely their own, that we could supply their inevitable view on anything—a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a pound of tobacco. There are three men in existence who have such an attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and my friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they all have this essential resemblance, that, given their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their opinions on every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a field. There are certain views of certain things that they must take; they do not form opinions, the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in the case of Tolstoy, the mere list of miscellaneous objects which I wrote down at random above, a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, and a pound of tobacco. Tolstoy would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this silk hat is a black abortion.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this Home Rule Bill is a mere peddling compromise; it is no good to break up a centralised empire into nations, you must break the nation up into individuals.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, I am interested in this Indian poem, for Eastern ethics, under all their apparent gorgeousness, are far simpler and more Tolstoyan than Western.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this pound of tobacco is a thing of evil; take it away.” Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like this we are dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely more important than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.
This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important in more ways than one. Among other things it is a very interesting commentary on an attitude which has been taken up for the matter of half a century by all the avowed opponents of religion. The secularist and the sceptic have denounced Christianity first and foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious excitement led men to burn their neighbours and to dance naked down the street. How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the matter altogether, and still there are philosophical and ethical theories which can produce fanaticism enough to fill the world. Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with religion. There are grave scientific theories which, if carried out logically, would result in the same fires in the market-place and the same nakedness in the street. There are modern esthetes who would expose themselves like the Adamites if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There are modern scientific moralists who would burn their opponents alive, and would be quite contented if they were burnt by some new chemical process. And if any one doubts this proposition—that fanaticism has nothing to do with religion, but has only to do with human nature—let him take this case of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start with no theology at all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it will always be. Destroy the last copy of he Bible, and persecution and insane orgies will be founded on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy.” Some of the broadest thinkers of the Middle Ages believed in faggots, and some of the broadest thinkers in the nineteenth century believe in dynamite.
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticisrn has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism—the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER
HALF the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist—an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly re-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances—it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayers could influence you… My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe—that is one of his supreme values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna Karenina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself. I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of Karenina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.
Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”—which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857—tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.
The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.
After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this favourite stage of Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward Tolstoy knew and hateful truth about war and the thoughtless pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon the glorification of the savage nature. These wonderful pictures of the routine of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer, and later on created in Western countries an impression like that of the canvases of Verestchagin.
For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. It was of these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think of them without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from the scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a Billiard Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,” both of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music; “Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to scandalise the world thirty years afterward.
After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him—his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army surgeon in Tula—the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel and daring experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several volumes of the highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” fill up the next fifteen years. “War and Peace” (1864-9) is a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, with preceding and succeeding episodes in Russian society. These four volumes display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s indifference to plot and his absorption in individual character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna Karenina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel. The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “the most perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the author of “Diana,” is praise indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold complained that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome multiplicity of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s “large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my work ‘Anna Karenina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself… I saw only one thing—Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)—crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maudej the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a jehad against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular—“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public more satisfactory contribution to the subject.
It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The much condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual characters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly Athenoeum permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make “the ornament of a museum,“—which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a “scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that there was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in the shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of Tolstoy— enormous work!—knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the world-spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land into the largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of thinking men and women.
His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals. Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a world of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. As he calls the politician and the social reformer back to the land and the common people, so he calls the artist back to the elemental forces ever at work beneath the surface-show of nature and humanity. With an extraordinary penetration into the hidden recesses of character, he joins a terrible truthfulness, and that absolute simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life. There is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes in our Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of personality which glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen. His style is always natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, and the reader who prefers breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art, which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely figure. Theories, prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the daily enlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, the joy, the splendour of human destinies.
G. H. PERRIS.
Tolstoy’s Place in European Literature
The justness of the word great applied to a nation’s writers is perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his Age, and seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We may take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you realise that the World’s insight into, and understanding of that Age’s life has been supplied us by the special interpretation offered by two or three great minds. In fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their nation’s growth or strife signifies. How many dumb ages are there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we have no key!
Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of Anna Karenina and War and Peace has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of Wilhelm Meister and of Resurrection what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy today stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation’s routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the modern man is. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealized, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing a whole nation’s life, to the world of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name.
And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.
It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own progress. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty, the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say that: “Sebastopol” gives us war under all aspects—war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of “Sebastopol” by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, “I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all.” “Sebastopol,” therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in “Sebastopol” we have at last the skeptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world’s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man.
Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvelously complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of today in contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for the modern soul’s alarm in contact with science. And just as science’s work after its first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel—this has been the great novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one truth— to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of life—never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man’s animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s realism in art is symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a study of ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.
Leo Tolstoy
Chesterton, G. K.; Perris, G. H.; Garnett, Edward
Hodder and Stoughton 1903
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
IF any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical views, clearly and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them. About such an incident as this there is a quality altogether independent of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of the view. It is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels. All this, as I say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that he was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands, and he did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which taught that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm—that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the presence of a god.
This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is the best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that the Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian moralist, but there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into importance and the growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due to his admirable summary and justification of their scheme of ethics. Tolstoy, besides being a magnificent novelist, is one of the very few men alive who have a real, solid, and serious view of life. He is a Catholic church, of which he is the only member, the somewhat arrogant Pope and the somewhat submissive layman. He is one of the two or three men in Europe, who have an attitude towards things so entirely their own, that we could supply their inevitable view on anything—a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a pound of tobacco. There are three men in existence who have such an attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and my friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they all have this essential resemblance, that, given their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their opinions on every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a field. There are certain views of certain things that they must take; they do not form opinions, the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in the case of Tolstoy, the mere list of miscellaneous objects which I wrote down at random above, a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, and a pound of tobacco. Tolstoy would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this silk hat is a black abortion.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this Home Rule Bill is a mere peddling compromise; it is no good to break up a centralised empire into nations, you must break the nation up into individuals.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, I am interested in this Indian poem, for Eastern ethics, under all their apparent gorgeousness, are far simpler and more Tolstoyan than Western.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this pound of tobacco is a thing of evil; take it away.” Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like this we are dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely more important than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.
This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important in more ways than one. Among other things it is a very interesting commentary on an attitude which has been taken up for the matter of half a century by all the avowed opponents of religion. The secularist and the sceptic have denounced Christianity first and foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious excitement led men to burn their neighbours and to dance naked down the street. How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the matter altogether, and still there are philosophical and ethical theories which can produce fanaticism enough to fill the world. Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with religion. There are grave scientific theories which, if carried out logically, would result in the same fires in the market-place and the same nakedness in the street. There are modern esthetes who would expose themselves like the Adamites if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There are modern scientific moralists who would burn their opponents alive, and would be quite contented if they were burnt by some new chemical process. And if any one doubts this proposition—that fanaticism has nothing to do with religion, but has only to do with human nature—let him take this case of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start with no theology at all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it will always be. Destroy the last copy of he Bible, and persecution and insane orgies will be founded on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy.” Some of the broadest thinkers of the Middle Ages believed in faggots, and some of the broadest thinkers in the nineteenth century believe in dynamite.
Leo Tolstoj
Chesterton, G. K.; Perris, G. H.; Garnett, Edward
Hodder and Stoughton 1903
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
SE qualcuno desidera formarsi la stima più piena del carattere e dell’influenza reali del grande uomo il cui nome è premesso a queste osservazioni, non la troverà nei suoi romanzi, per quanto splendidi essi siano, né nelle sue vedute etiche, per quanto chiaramente e finemente concepite ed esposte. La troverà espressa nel modo migliore nella notizia giunta di recente dal Canada, secondo cui una setta di anarchici cristiani russi ha liberato tutti i suoi animali, sulla base del fatto che è immorale possederli o controllarli. In un episodio come questo c’è una qualità del tutto indipendente dalla giustezza o dall’erroneità, dalla sanità mentale o dalla follia, di quella veduta. Esso è anzitutto e soprattutto un promemoria che il mondo è ancora giovane. Vi sono ancora teorie della vita altrettanto folli e insieme ragionevoli di quelle che si dibattevano sotto i limpidi cieli azzurri di Atene. Vi sono ancora esempi di una fede fiera e concreta come quella dei maomettani, che dilagarono per l’Africa e l’Europa gridando una sola parola. Al languido politico e filosofo contemporaneo pare senza dubbio qualcosa uscito da un sogno che, in questa età ferrigna, omogenea e meccanica, una compagnia di uomini europei in stivali e panciotto si metta a insistere per togliere il cavallo dalle stanghe dell’omnibus, e sollevare il maiale dal suo porcile e il cane dal suo canile, per uno scrupolo o una teoria morale. È come una pagina di qualche farsa fatata immaginare il Doukhabor scortare solennemente una gallina fino al cancello del cortile e darle un benevolo commiato mentre essa parte per i suoi viaggi. Tutto ciò, come dico, pare pura assurdità confusa al tipico capo della società umana in questo decennio, a un uomo come il signor Balfour o il signor Wyndham. Eppure c’è un’ulteriore cosa da dire, ed è questa: che se il signor Balfour potesse essere convertito a una religione che gli insegnasse che era moralmente tenuto a entrare nella Camera dei Comuni camminando sulle mani, ed egli davvero camminasse sulle mani; se il signor Wyndham potesse accogliere un credo che insegnasse che egli dovrebbe tingersi i capelli di azzurro, ed egli davvero si tingesse i capelli di azzurro, entrambi sarebbero, quasi al di là di ogni descrizione, uomini migliori e più felici di quanto siano. Poiché non vi è che una sola felicità possibile o concepibile sotto il sole, ed è l’entusiasmo—quella strana e splendida parola passata attraverso tante vicissitudini, che nel diciottesimo secolo significava la condizione di un pazzo, e nell’antica Grecia la presenza di un dio.
Questo grande atto di eroica coerenza avvenuto in Canada è il migliore esempio dell’opera di Tolstoj. È vero (come credo) che i Doukhabor hanno un’origine del tutto indipendente dal grande moralista russo, ma non può esservi che poco dubbio che la loro emersione all’importanza e la crescita e distinzione intellettuale della loro setta siano dovute alla sua mirabile sintesi e giustificazione del loro schema etico. Tolstoj, oltre a essere un magnifico romanziere, è uno dei pochissimi uomini viventi che abbiano una veduta della vita reale, solida e seria. Egli è una chiesa cattolica di cui è l’unico membro, il papa alquanto arrogante e il laico alquanto sottomesso. È uno dei due o tre uomini in Europa che hanno verso le cose un atteggiamento così interamente proprio che potremmo fornire la loro inevitabile veduta su qualsiasi cosa—un cilindro di seta, un disegno di legge sull’Home Rule, un poema indiano, o una libbra di tabacco. Vi sono tre uomini al mondo che possiedono un tale atteggiamento: Tolstoj, il signor Bernard Shaw e il mio amico signor Hilaire Belloc. Sono tutti diametralmente opposti l’uno all’altro, ma hanno tutti questa somiglianza essenziale: che, data la loro base di pensiero, il loro terreno di convinzione, le loro opinioni su ogni argomento terreno vi crescono naturalmente, come fiori in un campo. Vi sono certe vedute su certe cose che essi devono per forza avere; non formano opinioni, le opinioni si formano da sé. Prendete, per esempio, nel caso di Tolstoj, la semplice lista di oggetti disparati che ho annotato a caso qui sopra: un cilindro di seta, un disegno di legge sull’Home Rule, un poema indiano e una libbra di tabacco. Tolstoj direbbe: “Io credo nella massima semplificazione possibile della vita; perciò questo cilindro di seta è un nero aborto.” Direbbe: “Io credo nella massima semplificazione possibile della vita; perciò questo disegno di legge sull’Home Rule è un misero compromesso da mercantucolo; non serve a nulla frantumare un impero centralizzato in nazioni, bisogna frantumare la nazione in individui.” Direbbe: “Io credo nella massima semplificazione possibile della vita; perciò mi interessa questo poema indiano, poiché l’etica orientale, sotto tutta la sua apparente sfarzosità, è assai più semplice e più tolstoiana di quella occidentale.” Direbbe: “Io credo nella massima semplificazione possibile della vita; perciò questa libbra di tabacco è cosa malvagia; portatela via.” Ogni cosa al mondo, dalla Bibbia a un cavastivali, può essere, ed è, ridotta da Tolstoj a questo grande principio fondamentale tolstoiano, la semplificazione della vita. Quando ci occupiamo di un corpo di opinioni come questo, ci occupiamo di un episodio nella storia d’Europa infinitamente più importante della comparsa di Napoleone Buonaparte.
Questa emersione di Tolstoj, con la sua etica tremenda e semplice, è importante per più di una ragione. Tra le altre cose è un commento assai interessante a un atteggiamento assunto da mezzo secolo da tutti i dichiarati avversari della religione. Il laicista e lo scettico hanno denunciato il Cristianesimo prima di tutto e soprattutto a causa del suo incoraggiamento al fanatismo; perché l’eccitazione religiosa portava gli uomini a bruciare i loro vicini e a danzare nudi per la strada. Come suona tutto ciò strano ora. La religione può essere spazzata via del tutto dalla questione, e restano ancora teorie filosofiche ed etiche che possono produrre fanatismo a sufficienza per riempire il mondo. Il fanatismo non ha nulla a che vedere con la religione. Vi sono gravi teorie scientifiche che, se portate alle loro conseguenze logiche, produrrebbero gli stessi roghi nella piazza del mercato e la stessa nudità per la strada. Vi sono esteti moderni che si esporrebbero come gli Adamiti, se potessero farlo in eleganti pose. Vi sono moralisti scientifici moderni che brucerebbero vivi i loro avversari, e sarebbero del tutto soddisfatti se venissero bruciati mediante qualche nuovo procedimento chimico. E se qualcuno dubita di questa proposizione—che il fanatismo non ha nulla a che vedere con la religione, ma solo con la natura umana—prenda in esame questo caso di Tolstoj e dei Doukhabor. Una setta di uomini parte senza teologia alcuna, ma con la semplice dottrina che dobbiamo amare il nostro prossimo e non usare alcuna forza contro di lui, e finisce col ritenere cosa malvagia portare una borsa di cuoio, o viaggiare in carretto. Un grande scrittore moderno che cancella del tutto la teologia, nega la validità delle Scritture e delle Chiese allo stesso modo, formula una teoria puramente etica secondo cui l’amore dovrebbe essere lo strumento della riforma, e finisce col sostenere che non abbiamo il diritto di colpire un uomo se sta torturando un bambino sotto i nostri occhi. Prosegue, sviluppa una teoria della mente e delle emozioni che potrebbe essere sostenuta dal più rigido ateo, e finisce col sostenere che la relazione sessuale da cui è venuta tutta l’umanità non è soltanto non morale, ma è positivamente non naturale. Questo è il fanatismo come è stato e come sarà sempre. Distruggete l’ultima copia della Bibbia, e persecuzione e orge insensate verranno fondate sulla “Filosofia Sintetica” del signor Herbert Spencer. Alcuni dei pensatori più larghi del Medioevo credevano nelle fascine, e alcuni dei pensatori più larghi del diciannovesimo secolo credono nella dinamite.
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticisrn has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism—the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER
HALF the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist—an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly re-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances—it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayers could influence you… My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe—that is one of his supreme values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna Karenina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself. I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of Karenina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.
Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”—which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857—tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.
The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.
After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this favourite stage of Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward Tolstoy knew and hateful truth about war and the thoughtless pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon the glorification of the savage nature. These wonderful pictures of the routine of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer, and later on created in Western countries an impression like that of the canvases of Verestchagin.
La verità è che Tolstoj, con il suo immenso genio, con la sua colossale fede, con la sua vasta intrepidezza e la sua vasta conoscenza della vita, è carente in una facoltà e in una facoltà soltanto. Non è un mistico: e perciò ha una tendenza a impazzire. Gli uomini parlano delle stravaganze e delle frenesie prodotte dal misticismo: sono una goccia nel mare. Nel complesso, e fin dall’inizio del tempo, il misticismo ha mantenuto sani gli uomini. La cosa che li ha spinti alla follia è stata la logica. È significativo che, con tutto ciò che è stato detto sull’eccitabilità dei poeti, un solo poeta inglese sia mai impazzito, ed egli impazzì per un sistema logico di teologia. Era Cowper, e la sua poesia ne ritardò per molti anni la follia. Così la poesia, in cui Tolstoj è carente, è sempre stata una cosa tonica e risanatrice. L’unica cosa che ha tenuto la razza degli uomini lontana dagli estremi folli del convento e della galea del pirata, del night-club e della camera letale, è stata il misticismo—la convinzione che la logica sia fuorviante, e che le cose non siano ciò che sembrano.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
LEO TOLSTOJ COME SCRITTORE
METÀ dell’ignoranza o dell’incomprensione di questa figura, la più grande figura vivente della letteratura, deriva dal tentativo di giudicarlo come giudichiamo lo specializzato romanziere occidentale—un metodo di approccio del tutto futile. Egli è un russo, in primo luogo. Se fosse venuto a Parigi con Turgenev, forse sarebbe stato similmente ri-nazionalizzato, forse si sarebbe potuto sviluppare in uno scrittore puro e semplice; il mondo avrebbe così potuto guadagnare qualche grande romanzo—ma avrebbe perduto infinitamente in altre direzioni. Turgenev lo desiderava. “Amico mio,” scrisse a Tolstoj dal letto di morte, “torna alla letteratura! Rifletti che quel dono ti viene di là donde ci viene ogni cosa. Ah! come sarei felice se potessi pensare che le mie preghiere possano influenzarti… Amico mio, grande scrittore della nostra terra russa, ascolta la mia supplica!” Per una volta, il secondo più grande dei russi moderni prese una veduta angusta del carattere e del destino. Il genio deve svilupparsi secondo le proprie linee. Tolstoj rimase russo dalla testa ai piedi—questo è uno dei suoi supremi valori per noi; e rimase una personalità indivisibile. L’artista e il moralista sono inseparabili nelle sue opere. “Non dobbiamo prendere ‘Anna Karenina’ come un’opera d’arte,” disse Matthew Arnold; “dobbiamo prenderla come un pezzo di vita.” La distinzione non è formulata in modo molto soddisfacente, ma il significato è chiaro. Così, del pari, W. D. Howells, nella sua introduzione a un’edizione americana dei “Racconti di Sebastopoli”: “Non so come sia per gli altri a cui sono giunti questi libri di Tolstoj, ma per parte mia non riesco a pensarli affatto come letteratura in senso artistico. Alcuni si lamentano con me, quando li lodo, che sono troppo lunghi, troppo diffusi, troppo confusi, che i nomi dei personaggi sono difficili da pronunciare, e che la vita che ritraggono è molto triste e poco divertente. Di fronte a queste critiche posso solo dire che li trovo tutt’altro, e che ogni storia di Tolstoj è chiara, ordinata, breve come qualcosa che io stesso abbia vissuto. Non riesco a pensare ad alcun servizio reso alla razza dalla letteratura d’immaginazione così grande come quello che Tolstoj ha reso nella sua concezione della Karenina in quel momento cruciale in cui l’uomo crudelmente oltraggiato vede di non poter essere buono con dignità. Ciò lascia immensamente indietro tutti gli artifici della fantasia, tutti gli effetti dell’arte.” Detto ciò, tuttavia, ci sia consentito porre l’accento qui sulle qualità e sulle conquiste di Tolstoj come artista, piuttosto che sulle esposizioni dell’Anarchismo Cristiano e sulle filippiche sociali sotto cui quelle conquiste sono state in qualche modo nascoste negli anni recenti.
L’introspettività morbosa e lo spirito di rivolta colorano inevitabilmente ciò che di meglio vi è nella Russia del diciannovesimo secolo. Nato a Yasnaya Polyana (“Campo Chiaro”), Tula, nel 1828, e presto orfano, la giovinezza di Tolstoj si sincronizzò con il periodo di reazione che condusse l’Impero agli umilianti disastri della Guerra di Crimea. Nessuna speranza restava nel sottile strato di società posto fra le due macine della Corte e dei servi della gleba; nessuna nella piccola sfera dell’arte, dove il romanticismo byroniano era pronto a spegnersi. Il fanciullo vide fin da principio il marciume dell’aristocrazia patriarcale in cui la sua sorte pareva essere gettata. Precoce, anormalmente sensibile e osservatore, insofferente della disciplina e dell’apprendimento formale, goffo e timido, sempre rimuginante, non poco presuntuoso, era uno scettico a quindici anni, e lasciò l’Università di Kazan disgustato dalle stupide convenzioni del tempo e del luogo, senza conseguire la laurea. “Infanzia, Adolescenza e Giovinezza”—apparso in tre parti fra il 1852 e il 1857—narra la storia di questo periodo, benché la figura di Irtenieff sia probabilmente una proiezione più che un ritratto di se stesso, verso il quale è sempre meno giusto, per non dire misericordioso, che verso gli altri. Questo libro è un esercizio quanto mai intransigente di analisi del sé. È di grande lunghezza, non vi è alcun intreccio, e pochi eventi esteriori sono registrati.
Il realismo è generalmente morboso, ma è variato da alcuni passi di grande potenza descrittiva, come il racconto della tempesta, e occasionalmente da tenero pathos, come nella storia della morte del soldato, nonché da pagine cupamente vivide, come la narrazione della morte della madre. In quest’opera primissima si troveranno i semi tanto del genio artistico di Tolstoj quanto del suo vangelo etico.
Dopo cinque anni di sforzi mitemente benevoli tra i suoi servi della gleba a Yasnaya Polyana (le cui delusioni egli narrò pochi anni dopo in “La mattinata di un possidente”, pensata per far parte di un intero romanzo intitolato “Un proprietario russo”), il fratello maggiore Nicholas lo persuase ad arruolarsi nell’esercito, e nel 1851 fu inviato nel Caucaso come ufficiale d’artiglieria. Su questo prediletto palcoscenico del romanzo russo, dove per la prima volta vide le montagne torreggianti e il sole tropicale, e incontrò i rudi e avventurosi montanari, Tolstoj sentì la propria immaginazione scossa come Byron tra le isole di Grecia, e la sua precoce ripulsa per la vita di città confermata come Wordsworth fra i Laghi, come Thoreau a Walden, da un richiamo diretto della Natura al suo cuore. Il maggior frutto di questa esperienza fu “I Cosacchi” (1852). Turgenev descrisse questa bella epopea in prosa del contatto fra l’uomo civilizzato e l’uomo selvaggio come “il miglior romanzo scritto nella nostra lingua.” “L’incursione” (o “Gli invasori”, come è intitolata la traduzione del signor Dole), dello stesso anno, “Il taglio del bosco” (1855), “L’incontro con un vecchio conoscente” (1856) e “Un prigioniero nel Caucaso” (1862) sono anch’essi tratti dai ricordi di questo soggiorno, e mostrano la medesima potenza descrittiva e romantica. Allo scoppio della Guerra di Crimea il Conte fu chiamato a Sebastopoli, dove ebbe il comando di una batteria e prese parte alla difesa della cittadella. Il prodotto immediato di quei bui mesi di spargimento di sangue fu l’emozionante serie di impressioni ristampata da una delle principali riviste russe come “Racconti di Sebastopoli” (1856). Da quel giorno in poi Tolstoj conobbe l’odiosa verità sulla guerra e sullo sconsiderato pseudo-patriottismo che precipita le nazioni nella strage fratricida. Da allora fu espunto dalla sua mente tutto il romanticismo a buon mercato che dipende dalla glorificazione della natura selvaggia. Questi meravigliosi quadri della routine del campo di battaglia consolidarono la sua posizione in Russia come scrittore, e più tardi crearono nei paesi occidentali un’impressione pari a quella delle tele di Verestchagin.
For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. It was of these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think of them without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from the scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a Billiard Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,” both of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music; “Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to scandalise the world thirty years afterward.
After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him—his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army surgeon in Tula—the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel and daring experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several volumes of the highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” fill up the next fifteen years. “War and Peace” (1864-9) is a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, with preceding and succeeding episodes in Russian society. These four volumes display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s indifference to plot and his absorption in individual character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna Karenina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel. The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “the most perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the author of “Diana,” is praise indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold complained that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome multiplicity of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s “large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my work ‘Anna Karenina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself… I saw only one thing—Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)—crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maudej the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a jehad against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular—“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism” Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public more satisfactory contribution to the subject.
Per un breve tempo Tolstoj divenne una figura nelle capitali vecchia e nuova della Russia per diritto di talento oltre che di nascita. La sua assai variegata amicizia con Turgenev, uno dei capitoli più singolari della storia letteraria, può qui soltanto essere accennata. Nel 1857 viaggiò in Germania, Francia e Italia. Fu di questi anni che egli dichiarò in “La mia confessione” di non poter pensare a essi senza orrore, disgusto e pena del cuore. Il catalogo di colpe di cui si accusò nella sua crisi salvazionista di vent’anni più tardi non va preso alla lettera; ma che vi fosse qualche fondamento possiamo indovinarlo dal realismo scenico e incidentale dei “Ricordi di un marcatore di biliardo” (1856), e di molte pagine successive. Diverse altre potenti novelle risalgono all’incirca a questo tempo, tra cui “Albert” e “Lucerna”, entrambe le quali ci ricordano la sensibilità del Conte per la musica; “Polikushka”, un racconto di vita contadina; e “Felicità familiare”, la storia di un matrimonio fallito, un pezzo di lavoro quanto mai chiaro, coerente, vigoroso e in alcune parti bello, che anticipa nell’essenziale “La sonata a Kreutzer” che avrebbe scandalizzato il mondo trent’anni dopo.
Dopotutto, fu la felicità familiare che salvò Leo Tolstoj. Per la terza volta la mano della morte gli aveva strappato uno dei più prossimi a lui—il fratello Nicholas. Due anni dopo, nel 1862, sposò la signorina Behrs, figlia del chirurgo dell’esercito a Tula—la cosa più fortunata che gli sia capitata in tutta la sua vita, direi. Le responsabilità familiari, quei nuovi e arditi esperimenti di educazione contadina che sono registrati in vari volumi del più alto interesse, la sovrintendenza della tenuta, il lavoro di magistrato, e ultimo ma non meno importante, le prolungate fatiche su “Guerra e pace” e “Anna Karenina” riempiono i quindici anni successivi. “Guerra e pace” (1864-9) è un enorme panorama della campagna napoleonica del 1812, con episodi precedenti e seguenti nella società russa. Questi quattro volumi mostrano al loro grado superlativo l’indifferenza di Tolstoj per l’intreccio e il suo assorbimento nel carattere individuale; sono piuttosto una serie di scene infilate sulle sorti di più famiglie che un romanzo compiuto; ma contengono passi di psicologia penetrante e vivida descrizione, oltre che una certa dose di teorizzazione anarchica. Di quest’opera, per la quale il suo autore divenne noto in Occidente, Flaubert (come il nome ci trasporta indietro!) scrisse: “È di primissimo ordine. Che pittore e che psicologo! I due primi volumi sono sublimi, ma il terzo si trascina spaventosamente. Vi sono in esso alcune cose del tutto shakespeariane.” La mano dell’artista si andava ora rafforzando per la sua più alta conquista. Nel 1876 apparve “Anna Karenina”, il suo più grande romanzo e, come egli intendeva al tempo (ma l’Arte non si lascia piantare in asso tanto facilmente), il suo ultimo romanzo. Le fini qualità di questo libro, che, benché lungo, è drammaticamente unificato e vitalmente coerente, sono state riconosciute così pienamente che non ho bisogno di tentare di descriverle. Il signor George Meredith ha descritto Anna come “il personaggio femminile più perfettamente ritratto in tutta la narrativa”, il che, dall’autore di “Diana”, è davvero un elogio. Parallelamente al soggetto principale dell’amore illecito di Anna e Vronskij vi è un soggetto minore nelle sorti di Levin e Kitty, in cui il lettore scoprirà molte delle esperienze di Tolstoj stesso. Matthew Arnold lamentò che il libro contenesse troppi personaggi e una gravosa molteplicità di azioni, ma lodò la percezione straordinariamente fine dell’autore e la sua non meno straordinaria veridicità, e si abbandonò francamente al piacere della “ampia, fresca, ricca, generosa, deliziosa natura” di Anna. “Quando ebbi finito la mia opera ‘Anna Karenina’,” disse Tolstoj in “La mia confessione” (1879-82), “la mia disperazione raggiunse un’altezza tale che non potevo far altro che pensare all’orribile condizione in cui mi trovavo… Vedevo una sola cosa—la Morte. Tutto il resto era menzogna.” Di quella crisi spirituale nulla occorre dire qui, se non che essa non fece che intensificare, e non mutò veramente, per quanto sembrasse farlo, i principi e gli istinti che avevano posseduto Tolstoj fin dal principio. Il suo successivo sviluppo etico e religioso può essere seguito in una lunga serie di libri e opuscoli, dei quali i più importanti sono “I Vangeli tradotti, confrontati e armonizzati” (1880-2), “In che cosa credo” [“La mia religione”], prodotto all’estero nel 1884, “Che fare?” (1884-5), “La vita” (1887), “Il lavoro” (1888), “Il regno di Dio è dentro di voi” (1893), “La non-azione” (1894), “Patriottismo e Cristianesimo” (1896)—una crociata, almeno nelle stampe estere e clandestine, contro ogni autorità imperiale e contro le disfunzioni sociali. Il signor Tchertkoff, il signor Aylmer Maude, la “Brotherhood Publishing Co.” e la “Free Age Press” meritano lode per i loro sforzi di divulgare queste e altre opere del Conte in traduzioni davvero buone. In “Che cos’è l’arte?” (1898), non contento del nudo argomento utilitario secondo cui essa è meramente un mezzo di unione sociale, lanciò una jihad contro tutte le idee moderne dell’Arte che si fondano su una concezione della Bellezza e contro tutte le idee della Bellezza in cui il piacere entra come elemento dominante. Un breve ma luminoso saggio su “Guy de Maupassant e l’arte della narrativa” è un feroce attacco al militarismo in generale e all’Alleanza franco-russa in particolare—“L’insegnamento cristiano” (1898), e “La Schiavitù dei nostri tempi” (1900). Varie lettere sulle successive carestie e sulle persecuzioni religiose in Russia meritano menzione separata; esse ci ricordano che, dal fallimento del movimento rivoluzionario malamente chiamato “Nichilismo”, Tolstoj si è gradualmente elevato alla posizione dell’unico uomo che possa continuare impunemente a offrire un contributo pubblico più soddisfacente all’argomento.
It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The much condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. Because the dramatic quality of these living pictures lies, not in their organisation into a conventionally limited plot, but first in the challenging idea upon which they are founded, then the inexorable development of individual characters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly Athenoeum permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make “the ornament of a museum,“—which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a “scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that there was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in the shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of Tolstoy— enormous work!—knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the world-spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land into the largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of thinking men and women.
His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals. Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a world of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. As he calls the politician and the social reformer back to the land and the common people, so he calls the artist back to the elemental forces ever at work beneath the surface-show of nature and humanity. With an extraordinary penetration into the hidden recesses of character, he joins a terrible truthfulness, and that absolute simplicity of manner which we generally associate with genius. He is a realist, not merely of the outer, but more especially of the inner life. There is no staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He has no heroes in our Western sense, none, even, of those sensational types of personality which glorify the name of his Northern contemporary, Ibsen. His style is always natural, direct, irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, and the reader who prefers breadth to depth of knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes crept into his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar entertainment he knows nothing; in the world of true art, which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he stands, a princely figure. Theories, prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and we think only with love and reverence of this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the daily enlarging congregation of the hearts he has awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, the joy, the splendour of human destinies.
G. H. PERRIS.
Tolstoy’s Place in European Literature
The justness of the word great applied to a nation’s writers is perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer in turn from out his Age, and seeing how far our conception of his Age remains unaffected. We may take away hundreds of clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and the Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you realise that the World’s insight into, and understanding of that Age’s life has been supplied us by the special interpretation offered by two or three great minds. In fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their nation’s growth or strife signifies. How many dumb ages are there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose inner life in consequence we have no key!
Tolstoy’s significance as the great writer of modern Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably must the main stream of each age’s tendency and the main movement of the world’s thought be discovered for us by the great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more keep Tolstoy’s significance to herself than could Germany keep Goethe’s to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world of half-feudal, modern Russia, a world strange to Western Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of Anna Karenina and War and Peace has confronted the modern world is more truly representative of our Age’s outlook than is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries. Between the days of Wilhelm Meister and of Resurrection what an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life has swept by! A century of that “liberation of modern Europe from the old routine” has passed since Goethe stood forth for “the awakening of the modern spirit.” A century of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold affirms), so Tolstoy today stands for the triumph of the European soul against civilisation’s routine and dogma. The peculiar modernness of Tolstoy’s attitude, however, as we shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern life. Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the modern man is. He of all the analysts of the civilised man’s thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealized, least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life of the European world. With a marked moral bias, driven onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the artist’s individual limitations, more mysteriously living in its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of the century. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, those great worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense of containing a whole nation’s life, to the world of Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name.
È più consono al nostro proposito osservare che in questa personalità vulcanica e feconda, se pur fondamentalmente semplice, l’artista ha seguito le orme dell’evangelista fino all’ultimo. “Padrone e servo” (1895) è una delle novelle più squisite mai scritte. “La Morte di Ivan Ilic” (1884) e “Resurrezione” (1899) sono per certi versi le più potenti di tutte le sue opere. Il tanto condannato “La potenza delle tenebre” (1886) e “La sonata a Kreutzer” (1889) saranno giudicati più equamente quando l’inglese medio avrà appreso il supremo merito di quell’intransigente veridicità che dà nobiltà a ogni riga che il grande russo abbia mai scritto. Sottoporre un’opera come “Resurrezione” al trattamento sommario che il comune romanzo riceve e merita è assurdo. È un grande quadro della caduta e della risalita dell’uomo, tracciato dalla mano rapida e inquieta di un maestro che sta in una categoria a sé, con un occhio che vede l’esteriore e l’essenziale con pari accuratezza e rapidità. Poiché la qualità drammatica di questi quadri viventi risiede non nella loro organizzazione in un intreccio convenzionalmente circoscritto, ma anzitutto nell’idea provocatoria su cui essi si fondano, poi nell’inesorabile sviluppo dei caratteri individuali, e di quando in quando nella presa di episodi particolari, i piccoli critici sghignazzano. L’idea, i personaggi, gli episodi sono tutti troppo reali e preziosi per la compiacenza di sé britannica. Il nonnesco Athenoeum permette a qualcuno di descrivere questa figura prometeica come “un vaso prezioso andato in frantumi”, che ora può soltanto essere ricomposto per farne “l’ornamento di un museo”—il che mi ricorda che udii un conferenziere, davanti a una nota società letteraria di Londra, descriverlo di recente come uno “spazzino”, e che un libraio di città mi assicurò l’altro giorno che nelle librerie esisteva qualcosa che quasi equivaleva a un boicottaggio della sua narrativa. L’editore che sta preparando un’edizione completa di Tolstoj—opera immane!—la sa più lunga, sa che Tolstoj è uno di quegli spiriti universali il cui avanzare dall’oscurità di una terra ottenebrata fino alla più ampia diffusione contemporanea è soltanto un anticipo di un’influenza che presto sarà coestensiva alla comunità degli uomini e delle donne pensanti.
Il suo servizio alla letteratura è precisamente lo stesso del suo servizio alla morale. Come Bunyan e Burns, Dickens e Whitman, egli getta, in un mondo di convenzioni decadenti, il guanto di sfida dell’ideale democratico. Come richiama il politico e il riformatore sociale alla terra e al popolo comune, così richiama l’artista alle forze elementari sempre all’opera sotto lo spettacolo di superficie della natura e dell’umanità. A una straordinaria penetrazione nei recessi nascosti del carattere egli unisce una terribile veridicità, e quella assoluta semplicità di maniera che generalmente associamo al genio. È un realista, non soltanto della vita esteriore, ma più specialmente della vita interiore. Non vi è teatralità, non vi è sentimentalismo nella sua opera. Non ha eroi nel nostro senso occidentale, nessuno, neppure, di quei tipi sensazionali di personalità che glorificano il nome del suo contemporaneo del Nord, Ibsen. Il suo stile è sempre naturale, diretto, irresistibile come un processo fisico. Egli ha raramente errato oltre l’alveo della propria esperienza, e il lettore che preferisce l’ampiezza alla profondità della conoscenza deve cercare altrove. Ha poco umorismo, ma una nota cupamente satirica si è talvolta insinuata nel suo scrivere, come l’arcidiacono Farrar ricorderà. Dell’artificio ideato per il divertimento volgare egli non sa nulla; nel mondo dell’arte vera, che è il torchio dell’anima dell’uomo, egli sta, figura principesca. Teorie, prescrizioni e discussioni sono dimenticate, e noi pensiamo soltanto con amore e reverenza a questo patriarca moderno, così solo in mezzo alla congregazione ogni giorno più ampia dei cuori che egli ha risvegliati al senso del mistero, del terrore, della gioia, dello splendore dei destini umani.
G. H. PERRIS.
Il posto di Tolstoj nella letteratura europea
La giustezza della parola grande applicata agli scrittori di una nazione si prova forse meglio prendendo semplicemente a turno ciascuno scrittore fuori dalla sua Epoca, e vedendo fino a che punto la nostra concezione della sua Epoca resti inalterata. Possiamo togliere via centinaia di scrittori abili, decine di illustri creatori, e l’Epoca rimane davanti ai nostri occhi, saldamente inalterata dalla loro assenza; ma toccate una o due figure centrali, ed ecco! l’intera armatura dell’Epoca cede tra le vostre mani, e vi rendete conto che la penetrazione e la comprensione che il Mondo ha della vita di quell’Epoca ci sono state fornite dall’interpretazione speciale offerta da due o tre grandi menti. In effetti, ogni Epoca sembra rimpicciolita, caotica, piena di tendenze confuse e di generale contraddizione, finché i pochi grandi uomini non sono sorti, e non hanno simboleggiato in sé ciò che la crescita o la lotta della loro nazione significa. Quante epoche mute vi sono in cui nessun grande scrittore è comparso, epoche alla cui vita interiore non abbiamo di conseguenza alcuna chiave!
Il significato di Tolstoj come grande scrittore della Russia moderna difficilmente può essere accresciuto agli occhi russi dal suo eccezionale significato per l’Europa in quanto simbolo dell’inquietudine spirituale del mondo moderno. Eppure, tanto inevitabilmente la corrente principale della tendenza di ogni epoca e il movimento principale del pensiero del mondo devono esserci rivelati dai grandi scrittori, ogni volta che compaiono, che la Russia non può tenere per sé il significato di Tolstoj più di quanto la Germania potesse tenere per sé quello di Goethe. È vero che Tolstoj, come grande romanziere, è stato assorbito nel rispecchiare il peculiare mondo della Russia moderna, semifeudale, un mondo estraneo all’Europa occidentale, ma lo spirito di analisi con cui il creatore di Anna Karenina e di Guerra e pace ha affrontato il mondo moderno è più veramente rappresentativo della prospettiva della nostra Epoca di quanto non lo sia lo spirito di qualsiasi altro dei suoi grandi contemporanei. Fra i giorni di Wilhelm Meister e quelli di Resurrezione che straordinaria massa dell’onda impetuosa della vita moderna è passata! Un secolo di quella “liberazione dell’Europa moderna dalla vecchia routine” è trascorso da quando Goethe si levò a difesa del “risveglio dello spirito moderno”. Un secolo di emancipazione, di Scienza, di incredulità, di incessante scossa, mutamento e Progresso su tutta la faccia dell’Europa, e proprio come Goethe cent’anni fa impersonò il trionfo della nuova intelligenza dell’Europa sui ceppi delle sue vecchie istituzioni, routine e dogmi (come afferma Matthew Arnold), così Tolstoj oggi incarna il trionfo dell’anima europea contro la routine e il dogma della civiltà. La peculiare modernità dell’atteggiamento di Tolstoj, tuttavia, come mostreremo tra breve, sta nel fatto che egli è ispirato in gran parte dal moderno spirito scientifico nella sua penetrante analisi della vita moderna. Apparentemente in guerra con la Scienza e il Progresso, la sua straordinaria attrazione per la mente d’Europa risiede nel fatto che egli, fra tutti i grandi scrittori contemporanei, si è avvicinato più di ogni altro a dimostrare, a rendere reale che cosa sia la vita dell’uomo moderno. Egli, fra tutti gli analisti dei pensieri, delle emozioni e delle azioni dell’uomo civilizzato, ha meno idealizzato, meno abbellito e meno distorto la complessa vita quotidiana del mondo europeo. Con una marcata inclinazione morale, spinto avanti nella sua ricerca della Verità dal suo appassionato temperamento religioso, Tolstoj, nei suoi quadri della vita, ha costruito un tutto più veritiero, un mondo umano meno circoscritto dai limiti individuali dell’artista, più misteriosamente vivo nel suo vasto flusso e riflusso di quanto non lo sia il mondo di qualsiasi scrittore del secolo. Guerra e pace e Anna Karenina, quei grandi mondi in cui l’ambiente fisico, la prospettiva mentale, l’aspirazione emotiva e il codice morale dell’intera comunità della Russia sono riprodotti dalla sua arte, come una potente e ingegnosa fantasmagoria di vita mutevole, sono superiori, nel senso di contenere la vita di un’intera nazione, al mondo di Goethe, Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, o di qualsiasi altro creatore recente che possiamo nominare.
And not only so, but Tolstoy’s analysis of life throws more light on the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper problems, and explores more untouched territories of the mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European contemporaries.
It is by Tolstoy’s passionate seeking of the life of the soul that the great Russian writer towers above the men of our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our complex society, that his work is charged with the essence of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. The soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life. Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own progress. To the eye of science everything is possible in human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of the progress of the guilty, the crushing and deforming of the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling class. All this the nineteenth century has seen accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy’s distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He has fused by his art the science that defines the way Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has fused with this science of our modern world the soul’s protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy’s treatment of War as an instance of how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” (1856) with any other document on war by other European writers to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a former article let us say that: “Sebastopol” gives us war under all aspects—war as a squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of “Sebastopol” by keenly analysing the effect of the sights and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation of his own on these men’s actions, thoughts, and emotions, on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the face of death. He lifts up, in fact, the veil of appearances conventionally drawn by society over the actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness and indifference of the average mind, which says of the worst of war’s realities, “I felt so and so, and did so and so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in their agony, that I did not enter into at all.” “Sebastopol,” therefore, though an exceedingly short and exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have been busily piling up on humanity’s shelves from generation to generation. And more: we feel that in “Sebastopol” we have at last the skeptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world’s presentation of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature’s laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for life, so that at least human reason may advance farther along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a general sociological study of man.
Tolstoy’s place in nineteenth-century literature is, therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is Voltaire’s place in the eighteenth century. Both of these writers focus for us in a marvelously complete manner the respective methods of analysing life by which the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of today in contrast with the immense materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy’s writings, because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the formidable array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity’s progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature’s hands. Tolstoy thus stands for the modern soul’s alarm in contact with science. And just as science’s work after its first destruction of the past ages’ formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more to the examination and amelioration of human life, so Tolstoy’s work has been throughout inspired by a passionate love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society’s mechanical influence on the minds of its members. To make man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in admiration at what it pretends to feel—this has been the great novelist’s aim in his delineation of Russia’s life. Ever seeking the one truth— to arrive at men’s thoughts and sensations under the daily pressure of life—never flinching from his exploration of the dark world of man’s animalism and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy’s realism in art is symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the modern study of natural law, a study of ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian’s novels is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian people have now to bear in Holy Russia’s onward march towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in its love of humanity the life of those old religions which science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy will stand in European literature as the conscience of the modern world.
E non solo, ma l’analisi della vita di Tolstoj getta più luce sulle correnti principali del pensiero nella nostra Epoca, solleva problemi più profondi, ed esplora territori della mente più inviolati di qualsiasi analisi corrispondente compiuta dai suoi contemporanei europei.
È per l’appassionata ricerca di Tolstoj della vita dell’anima che il grande scrittore russo torreggia sopra gli uomini del nostro tempo, ed è perché la sua fame di Verità spirituale lo ha condotto a sondare la vita contemporanea, a esaminare tutte le formule e apparenze moderne, a penetrare nel pensiero e nell’emozione segreti degli uomini di ogni grado nella nostra complessa società, che la sua opera è carica dell’essenza di quasi tutto ciò che la modernità pensa e sente, crede e soffre, spera e teme mentre si evolve in forme sempre più complesse della nostra terribilmente complessa civiltà. L’anima dell’umanità è, tuttavia, sempre l’appello degli uomini dalla vita che li circonda, li plasma e li opprime, agli istinti che vanno al di là e trascendono la loro vita presente. Tolstoj è l’appello del mondo moderno, il grido della coscienza moderna contro il cieco destino del proprio progresso. All’occhio della scienza tutto è possibile nella vita umana: il sacrificio dell’innocente in nome del progresso del colpevole, lo schiacciamento e la deformazione del debole affinché il forte trionfi su di lui, l’evoluzione di nuove classi servili per dettato di una classe dominante. Tutto ciò il diciannovesimo secolo lo ha visto compiersi, e non lo ha visto soltanto in Russia. È merito di Tolstoj l’aver combinato nella sua opera di una vita, più di ogni altro grande artista, due principali punti di vista in conflitto. Egli ha fuso con la sua arte la scienza che definisce il modo in cui l’Umanità è spinta avanti ciecamente e irresponsabilmente di secolo in secolo dalla mera pressione degli eventi; ha fuso con questa scienza del nostro mondo moderno la protesta dell’anima contro il destino terreno dell’uomo, che conduce le generazioni a imboccare le incessanti strade del male che ogni epoca srotola.
Citiamo il trattamento della Guerra da parte di Tolstoj come esempio di come questo grande artista simboleggia per noi l’Epoca e così segna l’avanzamento nella consapevolezza di sé della mente moderna, e come un’approssimazione più prossima alla comprensione di ciò che la vita è. Non abbiamo che da confrontare “Sebastopoli” (1856) di Tolstoj con qualsiasi altro documento sulla guerra di altri scrittori europei per percepire che Tolstoj solo fra gli artisti ha reso reale la guerra, mentre i suoi simili l’hanno idealizzata. Per citare un passo da un precedente articolo, diciamo che: “Sebastopoli” ci dà la guerra sotto tutti gli aspetti—la guerra come squallida, onorevole, quotidiana faccenda di fango e di gloria, di vanità, malattia, duro lavoro, stupidità, patriottismo e agonia disumana. Tolstoj ottiene i complessi effetti di “Sebastopoli” analizzando acutamente l’effetto delle immagini e dei suoni, dei pericoli e dei piaceri della guerra sui cervelli di una varietà di uomini tipici, e ponendo una speciale valutazione tutta sua sulle azioni, i pensieri e le emozioni di questi uomini, sul loro coraggio, altruismo e ostentazione d’indifferenza di fronte alla morte. Egli solleva, di fatto, il velo delle apparenze convenzionalmente steso dalla società sulle realtà del glorioso mestiere di uccidere gli uomini, e fa questo soprattutto analizzando acutamente l’insensibilità e l’indifferenza della mente media, la quale dice della peggiore delle realtà della guerra: “Io provai questo e quello, e feci questo e quello: ma quanto a ciò che quelle altre migliaia possono aver provato nella loro agonia, in ciò non entrai affatto.” “Sebastopoli”, dunque, benché racconto oltremodo breve e oltremodo semplice, è un documento psicologico sulla guerra moderna di straordinario valore, poiché relega semplicemente in soffitta, come non conformi alla vita e senza speranza limitati, tutte quelle teatrali glorificazioni della guerra che letterati, poeti romantici e gravi storici allo stesso modo sono andati assiduamente accumulando sugli scaffali dell’umanità di generazione in generazione. E c’è di più: sentiamo che in “Sebastopoli” abbiamo finalmente lo spirito moderno scettico, assorto nella vita reale, che dimostra che cos’è la guerra ed esprime per esteso le confuse sensazioni di innumerevoli uomini, i quali finora, riconoscendo quest’uomo, Tolstoj, come il prodotto più avanzato della nostra civiltà, e paragonandolo a un grande chirurgo che, non ingannato dalla presentazione che il mondo dà della propria vita, penetra nella gioia e nel patire essenziali, nella salute e nella malattia di moltitudini di uomini; un chirurgo che, faccia a faccia con le più strane delle leggi della Natura nella costituzione della società umana, sconcertato da tutte le illusioni, le fatuità e le convenzioni della mente umana, si accinge risolutamente a mettere a nudo le radici di tutte le sue passioni, appetiti e incentivi nella lotta per la vita, affinché almeno la ragione umana possa avanzare più oltre lungo il cammino della conoscenza di sé nel procedere verso uno studio sociologico generale dell’uomo.
Il posto di Tolstoj nella letteratura del diciannovesimo secolo è, dunque, a nostro avviso, non meno fisso e certo di quanto sia il posto di Voltaire nel diciottesimo secolo. Entrambi questi scrittori mettono a fuoco per noi in maniera meravigliosamente completa i rispettivi metodi di analizzare la vita mediante i quali il razionalismo del diciassettesimo e del diciottesimo secolo, e la scienza e l’umanitarismo del diciannovesimo secolo hanno plasmato per noi il mondo moderno. Tutti i movimenti, tutti i problemi, tutta la speculazione, tutte le agitazioni del mondo d’oggi in contrasto con l’immensa civiltà materialistica che la scienza ha frettolosamente edificato per noi in tre o quattro generazioni, tutto lo spirito della vita moderna è condensato nelle pagine degli scritti di Tolstoj, perché, come abbiamo detto, egli impersona l’anima dell’uomo moderno che contempla, ora impavido e ora allarmato, la formidabile schiera delle cause ed effetti del progresso dell’umanità appena catalogati, l’atroce vilezza e lo spreco della vita umana nelle mani della Natura. Tolstoj rappresenta così l’allarme dell’anima moderna al contatto con la scienza. E proprio come l’opera della scienza, dopo la sua prima distruzione del formalismo, della superstizione e del dogma delle età passate, è rivolta sempre più all’esame e al miglioramento della vita umana, così l’opera di Tolstoj è stata per tutto il tempo ispirata da un appassionato amore dell’umanità, e dalla sua incessante lotta contro la religione convenzionale, la scienza dogmatica e l’influenza meccanica della società sulle menti dei suoi membri. Rendere l’uomo più consapevole dei propri atti, mostrare alla società i suoi veri moventi e ciò che essa sente, e non gridare d’ammirazione per ciò che finge di sentire—questo è stato lo scopo del grande romanziere nella sua rappresentazione della vita della Russia. Cercando sempre l’unica Verità—giungere ai pensieri e alle sensazioni degli uomini sotto la quotidiana pressione della vita—senza mai indietreggiare dalla sua esplorazione del buio mondo dell’animalità dell’uomo e del suo incessante inganno di sé, il realismo di Tolstoj nell’arte è simbolico del nostro assorbimento nel mondo del fatto, nello studio moderno della legge naturale, uno studio in ultima analisi senza perdita di spiritualità, anzi, con immenso guadagno per la vita spirituale. Il realismo dei romanzi del grande russo è, perciò, più in linea con la tendenza e la prospettiva moderne di quanto non lo sia la tendenza generale delle altre scuole della letteratura continentale. E Tolstoj dev’essere infine considerato non soltanto come la coscienza del mondo russo che si ribella al troppo pesante fardello che il popolo russo deve ora portare nella marcia in avanti della Santa Russia verso l’edificazione del suo grande Impero asiatico, ma anche come l’anima del mondo moderno che cerca di sostituire, nel suo amore dell’umanità, la vita di quelle antiche religioni che la scienza va distruggendo giorno dopo giorno. In questo senso Tolstoj resterà nella letteratura europea come la coscienza del mondo moderno.