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Title: Tolstoi
Author: William Ernest Henley [
More Titles by Henley]
The Man and the Artist.
There are two men in Tolstoi. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion. These antitheses are both represented in his novels. He has thought out the scheme of things for himself; his interpretation, while deeply tinctured with religion, is also largely and liberally human; he is one to the just and the unjust alike, and he is no more angry with the wicked than he is partial to the good. He asks but one thing of his men and women--that they shall be natural; yet he handles his humbugs and impostors with as cold a kindness and a magnanimity as equable as he displays in his treatment of their opposites. Indeed his interest in humanity is inexhaustible, and his understanding of it is well nigh formidable in its union of breadth with delicacy. Himself an aristocrat and an official, he is able to sympathise with the Russian peasant as completely and to express his sentiments as perfectly as he is able to present the characters and give utterance to the ambitions and the idiosyncrasies of the class to which he belongs and might be assumed to have studied best. It is to be noted, moreover, that he looks for his material at one or other pole of society. He is equally at home with officers and privates, with diplomats and carpenters, with princes and ploughmen; but with the intermediary strata he is out of touch, and he is careful to leave the task of presenting them to others. It is arguable that only in the highest and lowest expressions of society is unsophisticated nature to be found; and that Tolstoi, interested less in manners than in men and studious above all of the elemental qualities of character, has done right to avoid the middle- class and attach himself to the consideration and the representation of the highest and the lowest. Certain it is that here have been his successes. The Prince Andrew of War and Peace--cultured, intelligent, earnest, true lover and true gentleman--is as noble a hero as modern fiction has achieved; but he is no more interesting as a human being and no more successful as art than the Marianna of les Cosaques, who is a savage pure and simple, or the Efim of les Deux Vieillards, who would seem to the haughty Radical no better than a common idiot. It is to be noted of all three--the prince, the savage, and the peasant--that none in himself is sophisticate nor vile but that each is rich in the common, simple, elemental qualities of humanity. It is to these and the manifestations of these that Tolstoi turns for inspiration first of all. If he chose he could be as keen a satirist and as indefatigable a student of the meannesses and the minor miseries of existence, the toothaches and the pimples of experience, as Thackeray. But he does not choose. The epic note sounds in his work. The eternal issues of life, the fundamental interests of character and conduct and emotion, are his material. Love, valour, self-sacrifice, charity, the responsibilities of being, these and their like are the only vital facts to him; they constitute the really important part of the scheme of things as he sees and comprehends it. In their analysis the artist and the mystic meet and take hands; sometimes to each other's profit, more often, to each other's hurt. It is not without significance that no other novelist has looked so closely and penetrated so far into the secret of death: that none has divined so much of it, nor presented his results with so complete and intimate a mastery and so persuasive and inspiring a belief. Plainly Tolstoi has learned 'la vraie signification de la vie'; his faith in its capacities is immense, his acceptance of its consequences is unhesitating. He is the great optimist, and his work is wholesome and encouraging in direct ratio to the vastness of his talent and the perfection of his method.
Ivan Iliitch.
Who does not know that extraordinary Death of Ivan Iliitch? It is an achievement in realism: not the realism of externals and trivial details--though of this there is enough for art if not for the common Zolaphyte--but the higher and better sort, the realism which deals with mental and spiritual conditions, the realism of Othello and Hamlet. There are many deaths in literature, but there is none, I think, in which the gradual processes of dissolution are analysed and presented with such knowledge, such force, such terrible directness, as here. The result is appalling, but the final impression is one of encouragement and consolation. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoi appeals to the primitive nature of man, and the issue is what he wishes it to be. Not for him is the barren pessimism of the latter-day French rhapsodist in fiction, and the last word of his study, inexorable till then, is a word of hope and faith.
War and Peace.
Incomparably his greatest book, however, is War and Peace. It is the true Russian epic; alike in the vastness of its scope and in the completeness of its execution. It tells the story of the great conflict between Koutouzoff and Russia and Napoleon and France, it begins some years before Austerlitz, and it ends when Borodino and Moscow are already ancient history. The canvas is immense: the crowd of figures and the world of incidents almost bewildering. It is not a complete success. In many places the mystic has got the better of the artist: he is responsible for theories of the art of war which, advanced with the greatest confidence, are disproved by the simple narrative of events; and he has made a study of Napoleon in which, for the first and only time in all his work, he appears as an intemperate advocate. But when all is said in blame so much remains to praise that one scarce knows where to begin. Tolstoi's theory of war is mystical and untenable, no doubt; but his pictures of warfare are incomparably good. None has felt and reproduced as he has done what may be called the intimacy of battle--the feeling of the individual soldier, the passion and excitement, the terror and the fury, that taken collectively make up the influence which represents the advance or the retreat of an army in combat. But also, in a far greater degree, none has dealt so wonderfully with the vaster incidents, the more tremendous issues. His Austerlitz is magnificent; his Borodino is (there is no other word for it) epic; his studies of the Retreat are almost worthy of what has gone before. For the first time what has been called 'the peering modern touch' is here applied to great events, with the result that here is a book unique in literature. Of the characters--Natasha, Peter, Mary, Dennissoff, the Rostoffs, Helen, Dologhoff, Bagration, Bolkonsky, and the others; above all, Koutouzoff and Prince Andrew--Prince Andrew the heroic gentleman, Koutouzoff the genius of Russia and the war--to meet them once is to take on a set of friends and enemies for life.
[The end]
William Ernest Henley's essay: Tolstoi
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