G. K. Chesterton

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ultimately without loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the spiritual life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Karènina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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, mysticism 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And more: we feel that in ‘Sebastopol’ we have at last the sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. ”

“ 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{6} relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tolstoy was also an enthusiastic sportsman—a diversion which occasioned him two serious accidents—and, in addition to fulfilling the duties of a Justice of the Peace, he set himself to grapple with the novel conditions of land-owning, a complicated and arduous task to which he applied himself with characteristic energy and shrewdness. ”

“ They are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they all have this essential resemblance,{4} 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
THE APPROACH TO THE PARK AT YASNAYA POLYANA
This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important in more ways than one. ”

“ We cannot help, therefore, 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 ”

“ It was during the period following upon his University career that Tolstoy threw all his energies into the task of raising both the economical and moral standard of peasant life, and suffered much disappointment at the hands of the peasants, who refused to allow him to pull down their dilapidated hovels even that he might erect new and convenient ones at his own cost. ”

“ 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{24}
TOLSTOY IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA
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. ”

“ Tolstoy has gradually risen to the position of the one man who can continue with impunity a public crusade, in the foreign and the clandestine presses at least, against all Imperial authority and social maladjustments. ”

“ For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm—that strange and splendid{3} 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. ”

“ Concerning these pictures there is an interesting note in the preface of the French edition of the novel from which it may be gathered that the drawings tallied very closely with Tolstoy’s own conception of the appearance of his characters. It was the artist’s usual custom to submit each design on its completion to the eminent novelist for his opinion. Invariably Tolstoy showed his approval of the clever realisation of his ideas. ”

“ Attaching great importance to manual labour, he takes a share in the housework, lighting his own fire and carrying water. At one time he learned bootmaking, and it is wonderful what an amount of physical exertion he was able to undergo at the age of seventy in the way of heavy labour in the field, of riding scores of versts on his bicycle, or of playing for hours at lawn tennis. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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{16}
COUNT TOLSTOY
work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina” 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For{8}
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 Karènina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew{9}
LEO TOLSTOY, FROM A SKETCH BY VICTOR PROUT
(Reproduced by kind permission of Mr. F. R. Henderson)
Arnold ”

“ The MS. is speedily covered with erasures and interpolations. Whole sentences replace others. The work is then copied again, and some chapters Tolstoy writes more than ten times. He usually writes on quarto sheets of cheap plain paper in a large involved hand, and sometimes covers as many as twenty pages in one day. He regards the interval between nine o’clock and three as the best time for work.
Tolstoy at work in his study at Yasnaya Polyana
see page 13
His study at Yasnaya Polyana is a small room with an uncarpeted floor, a vaulted ceiling, and thick stone walls. ”