Lilian Winstanley

“ Aleksei Karénin—the husband of Anna—is brought before us in all his reality. We see the ugliness which so exasperates Anna—the ears that stick out straight, the habit of cracking the finger-joints—and we realise his cold vanity. And yet it is impossible not to be sorry for Karénin; he suffers a veritable martyrdom; that which he dreads worse than death—ridicule—overwhelms him at all points; he is crushed by the undeserved contempt of his fellows. ”

“ But Nekhlúdof has been corrupted by his own evil life; he cannot for long control his passions, and, in spite of the poor girl's piteous fear, he takes advantage of the fascination he possesses over her to ruin her.
It is a night of spring, with a white mist above the melting snow, the ice tinkling and breaking in the river. Nekhlúdof twice summons Katusha, and twice she evades him, but in the end it is done. Never has the charm and romance of passion been more wonderfully rendered, but Tolstoy makes us feel this seduction terrible as a murder. ”

“ The course of the long, ever-changing drama between these three is traced with acutest psychological skill. Anna yields to her lover only after long solicitation, and with an instant shame and regret; for a time she hides the truth from Karénin, but concealment of any sort is hateful to her candour, and soon becomes impossible; she is present at a dangerous steeple-chase when Vronsky is thrown, and her emotion is so manifest that her husband rebukes her; she gives way to her own passionate desire for truth, and, notwithstanding her bitter humiliation, acknowledges her infidelity. ”

“ The artillery officer, Tushin, to whom we have already alluded, is evidently Tolstoy's type of a true Russian hero. He is simplicity and modesty itself; his magnificent courage is not in the least sanguinary, but is accompanied by a heart as tender as a woman's; when he is returning after his terrific day he is still kind enough to help the wounded Nikolai Rostof on to the blood-bespattered gun-carriage.
Nor does Tushin stand alone; continually in War and Peace, as in so many other works, Tolstoy makes us feel the enormous value of man as man. ”

“ He has a genius for sympathy, and he appears to understand all those who surround him better than they understand themselves. The real love of his life is Natasha Rostof, but he does his best, most unselfishly, to reconcile her to Prince Andrei; in a sense he deserves her the better of the two, for, even when her betrothed turns against her, Pierre still loves and appreciates, and his devotion helps her through the darkest hours of her life. It is only fitting that, in the end, Natasha should make him happy. Like Prince Andrei, Pierre finds his moral regeneration in war, but in a different way ”

“ Tolstoy selects a little group of Russian families whose circumstances involve them in all the main events; we see with their eyes and hear with their ears; we share in their sufferings, until at the end it is difficult to believe that we ourselves have not witnessed Austerlitz and Borodino, the conflagration of Moscow, and the horrors of the French retreat. Yet the total impression is not one of catastrophe; the great nation, having shed of its heart's blood and sacrificed its noblest, yet recuperates and recovers; those who are left continue the race, and life proceeds as before. ”

“ As a lover, indeed, he belongs to the great poetic idealists, he is of the same race as Dante, as Shakespeare, as Shelley. He understands, quite as well as Tolstoy, the dreadful glamour of an evil passion; he understands how it leads to atrophy of the heart, to desolation and to ruin; but he understands also that nobler passion whose very existence Tolstoy explicitly and vehemently denies—the love which belongs both to the senses and to the soul. Passion in Tolstoy is always a concession to the animal in man; in Turgénief it is often his redemption. ”

“ Russian life has far fewer social grades and far fewer conventions; Russian writers are, beyond comparison, more candid with themselves and with others; they speak the exact truth with a naïveté almost resembling the naïveté of children, but with the far-reaching intelligence of maturity. This invaluable quality of sincerity is found in all the greatest Russians; Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky, in especial, hide nothing, but reproduce all they know with an absence of self-consciousness that amazes even while it fascinates. ”

“ When he sees Katusha again the old innocent poetic charm revives once more, but it has now to contend with what Tolstoy called "the dreadful, animal man." For a moment the better nature conquers. No scene in all Tolstoy's pages is more lovely than that of the Easter Mass, when Nekhlúdof rides to the church early in the morning across the snow, sees it brilliantly lighted, the priests in their gorgeous vestments, hears the glorious Easter hymns, and feels as if all the joy, the tenderness, and the beauty were for Katusha and for her alone. ”

“ The Power of Darkness produces a terrible effect on the nerves, for the gloom is as dreadful as in Macbeth, and it is not relieved by heroic battle or the splendours of a crown; it is to the last degree sordid—the concentrated essence of sin. Yet the chain of moral causation is linked as firmly as in Macbeth, and we are shown, in the same unflinching way, how crime haunts and sears the conscience, and how the worst punishment of sin is that it leads on to ever more and more sin. ”

“ Most men are blind either to one side or to the other, but, from the very beginning, Tolstoy keeps both steadily in view. We could not explain the fascination war has possessed for so many of the noblest human minds if it were not for the fact that it is often a school of heroic virtue. Homer himself could hardly better the sublime courage of these Tolstoyan heroes, but Tolstoy's very appreciation teaches him also the vast futility of war; it is such a waste of noble human beings, and the ends for which it is waged are, compared with the tremendous sacrifices it evokes, so childish and futile. ”

“ Tushin himself is a modest and unassuming man, and his superiors are so confused that they not only fail to recognise his achievement, but are about to reprimand him severely for losing some of his guns; Prince Andrei's indignant protest that this man has saved the army spares Tushin the reprimand, but his superiors are too hopelessly bewildered to recognise the truth. The real hero of the day is thus a man who gains nothing—not a single reward or honour—and is only too thankful to escape blame. ”

“ Dostoïevsky's books are largely studies in crime, but quite unlike those familiar to our modern press; the modern detective story with its police-court atmosphere and its vulgar shallowness of interest belongs to a world immeasurably beneath Dostoïevsky; even the world of tragic crime, depicted so forcibly by the Elizabethans, stands far apart from his; in Elizabethan dramas crime is observed for the sake of its passion, it is invested with a terrible though gloomy allurement, and its end is the ruin of the noblest or the tragic destruction of a human soul. ”

“ For Tolstoy's wretched and morbid hero, roused to insight by his own cruel deed, can place the blame where it rightfully belongs; he can see that the real fault does not lie in woman as woman, but in woman as man has corrupted her. With an incisive truth that Strindberg cannot rival he gets to the very root of the mischief and reveals it in man's own sensuality. He makes a serious and passionate plea for purity in men; he speaks with horror of the doctors who encourage vice and of the pseudo-science which declares it necessary. ”

“ Even the tiny gnats which cover Olyénin so that they make him grey from head to foot, have their own peculiar attraction; he grows to feel their stings a part of the forest fascination and freedom; they prevent him from growing somnolent, and keep him alive to that immense joy which he finds everywhere in nature and would not miss even for a moment. ”

“ Nikolai Rostof, Tolstoy's third hero, is more commonplace than Pierre and Prince Andrei, but he gives Tolstoy a splendid opportunity for depicting the psychology of war; we are shown all his emotions from the day when he first joins, is alternately elated with a feeling of heroism and depressed by the conviction that he is a coward, to the time when, as a seasoned veteran, he can hardly recall his old excitement and his old dread; the only trace his former fear has left in his mind shows itself in his compassion for the younger officers, whose mental sufferings he so fully understands. ”

“ He draws them, indeed, with a Shakespearean strength and delicacy; he does not regret the influence they have over man's life—it is so often for good; even when he draws the destructive siren who lures men to their doom, he draws her without the Tolstoyan frenzy of hate; he gives her the same kind of charm that Shakespeare gave Cleopatra, and permits her poetry to fascinate even while he shows with the clearest irony all her sensuality and her falseness. It is worthy of note that neither Tolstoy nor Turgénief wholly escape from the influence of their rank. ”

“ Like his Master, Tolstoy is assured of the redeeming power of penitence and tenderness.
Our redemption may come to us from within, through the struggles of our own soul, or by the aid of another, but it is always accompanied by sweetness and compassion; loving-kindness is the true centre of our being; the supreme sin—the sin against the Holy Spirit—is to transgress, no matter for what motive, the law of love in our dealings with our fellows. ”

“ If Tolstoy has drawn a candid and unflattering picture of his own type of egoism in Konstantin Levin, he has drawn in Stepan a portrait of the other type of egoism—the amiable, Epicurean type—which is still more drastically complete.
Stepan's wife—Dolly, sister to Kitty Shcherbatsky—is a thoroughly natural and lovable creature; terribly disillusioned by her husband's infidelity, she is yet persuaded, for the children's sake, to forgive him and reunite the family; she bears with endless patience the worries his extravagance entails, and copes single-handed with the debts and the six children. ”

“ But Tolstoy's art is inexorable, as inexorable as life.
Neither Vronsky nor Anna can remain content in isolation; they are both rich and generous natures, meant for fruitful intercourse with their fellows, and they cannot, in their position, obtain either suitable society or suitable duties. Vronsky has resigned his military profession, which he really loved, and for which he was admirably adapted; he does his best to find occupation in other ways; in Italy he attempts art, but soon discovers that he is a mere dilettante, wasting his efforts and his time. ”

“ Anna Karénina shows already that fear of death which is such an obsession in Tolstoy's later works. In War and Peace, he takes the soldier's view of it, as something almost trifling in comparison with greater matters; his noble Prince Andrei grieves over many things, but neither the utmost extremity of peril, nor the anguish of his gangrened wound, nor the immediate presence of dissolution can shake his courage or dismay his soul. ”

“ Homeric, too, is the spirit of the Russian army: they are short of food, short of clothes, sleeping in the snow at twenty degrees below zero; they melt away to half their numbers, yet they grow ever happier and happier, more and more cheerful, for all the poor-spirited, the weak, and cowardly succumb, and only the heroes remain. In his previous life Pierre has been miserable, disenchanted, and disillusioned, but he emerges from this hell of suffering a man finally happy. And Tolstoy makes us see that it could not be otherwise ”

“ Anna Karénina, is, of all Tolstoy's heroines, the most perfect human being; she is a mature woman, possessed of wit, grace, and beauty, and above all, the gift of sympathy; she is one of those people who have strong affections, who love profoundly and appreciate readily all that is best in others, who are also possessed of keen intellectual powers, but who live mainly from impulse and not from principle. ”

“ Of course, it is not difficult to see why Tolstoy so dislikes Shakespeare—mainly because he throws such a glamour over aristocracy, and makes his aristocrats so noble in their sorrows, so radiant, generous, and joyful in their prosperity. Tolstoy is always insisting that aristocrats are not really like that—that they are selfish, stupid, and bored to death; but Shakespeare in glorifying aristocracy is only acting as the people, even in folk-tale and fairy-tale, have always done ”

“ Stepan, Anna's brother, has been already referred to; he is an ironically complete portrait of the man of the world, drawn with a Thackerayan lightness and zest. There are not, as a rule, many resemblances between Thackeray and Tolstoy, for Tolstoy is so much the deeper, but the portrait of Stepan might have come from the same pen as that of Major Pendennis. Stepan is always kind, but his kindness is as purely constitutional as a good digestion. He is faithless to his wife, not once nor twice, but habitually; he deserts the "adorable" women who confide themselves to his protection ”

“ Vronsky shoots himself, bungles it, and is wounded seriously though not fatally. His attempted suicide is, in part, a supreme sacrifice to his doctrine of comme il faut, an attempt to escape humiliation and ridicule, in part a manifestation of the feeling, so strong it amazes even himself, that life without Anna is impossible.
But Anna recovers; Vronsky's attempted suicide has turned her sympathies almost wholly to him, and when once she is convalescent (here again is the tragic irony) she finds her husband as tiresome and tedious as before. ”

“ Turgénief is very different. He has not Tolstoy's enormous vitality nor his immense scope; his novels are, in comparison, quite brief, and some of his best work is done in a very small compass, though it is always so deep in meaning that it never seems slight. He has achieved nothing more perfect than the little story of Faust, which might, so far as length goes, be only a French feuilleton. He is always and essentially poetic; one of the keenest of all human observers, he dislikes sordid realism; he avoids war and all other forms of extreme violence ”

“ Everything is at once realistic and full of romance; Tolstoy has brought before us all the clear-cut sharpness of these early impressions of the world before custom has laid upon them a hand "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." ”

“ Prince Andrei is one of the few Tolstoyan heroes who have no physical fear of death, who meet it, not with shuddering nausea, but with noble and grave composure. If he clings to life it is not from any weak fear but because life means Natasha, poetry, and joy; when the pang of resignation is once over, all is peace. ”

“ Tolstoy himself found, as we have seen, in his relations with his wife, that the maternal egoist is not quite the finest ideal of humanity.
It is impossible to study in any detail the crowded canvas of War and Peace, but the minor characters are often among the best-drawn and the most attractive.
The whole Rostof group are delightfully depicted. Petya Rostof, the dear boy who is killed, has almost the same charm as Natasha. He has intense affections, is full of amusing boyish interests, and possesses a lofty ideal of patriotism; he likes to think himself a hero, and really is one. ”

“ Levin works among his peasants just as Tolstoy did, mowing and reaping in the fields, rejoicing in the health and activity of such a life, and in the lovely pictures of nature that it reveals. Levin's proposal to his wife follows, detail by detail, Tolstoy's proposal to Sophie Behrs; the death of Levin's brother from consumption is like the death of Tolstoy's—even the name is the same—Nicolas; Levin, like Tolstoy, is happy in his family life, but is, nevertheless, so greatly distressed by religious doubts and difficulties that he is driven almost to suicide. ”

“ He is especially influenced by one man—the peasant soldier Platon Karatayef—one of Tolstoy's greatest creations. Platon is not clever nor handsome, his whole life has been privation, but he is love itself, kind and sweet to all men. Most tragic is his fate! The French shoot those of the Russian prisoners who cannot keep up with the march, and Pierre, seeing his friend failing, cannot endure the thought of what must happen and keeps away. ”

“ It is characteristic of the Russian breadth of mind and elemental sincerity that Tolstoy really can take Homer as his model in writing a modern novel. It is hardly necessary to remark that he has not Homer's sense of beauty, but who in this modern world has?
The fecundity of Russian literature is very great; it is a great mistake to regard Tolstoy as if he stood alone; like Shakespeare, Tolstoy is only the highest peak, or perhaps we should say the greatest magnitude, among a number of writers only less distinguished than himself. ”

“ Like another great masculine genius—Milton—Tolstoy feels most intimately, but shudders at the power that women possess over men. How often in his works one meets with women who are like Milton's Dalila, possessed of a charm that is mixed with loathing and disgust. Both Milton and Tolstoy regard with horror, as one of the worst of snares, the idealising power of love. ”

“ Throughout Tolstoy's later work he hates civilisation, and we understand why; he is always longing to escape from it to the life that is inspired by the immense joy of nature and freshened by hard physical toil. Characteristically enough, Tolstoy will not idealise even what he loves, and he confesses that the mere touch of civilisation spoils his Yeroshka; he cannot live like a modern man, and his hut is filthy. ”

“ Many people are arriving at the conclusion that modern civilised life is too complex, that it achieves not real refinement, but luxury which enervates and ostentation which vulgarises. Tolstoy joins the cult of the "simple life" by another road: by pointing out the immensity of the labour which luxury entails upon others.
And finally, we may point out that in art also the age is feeling its way towards an attempt to realise, consciously or unconsciously, the Tolstoyan ideals.
We are beginning to ask for the simplification of art, for its deliverance from over-elaborate technique ”

“ Many times in his epic novel Tolstoy makes us feel the bitter cost of war, but never more than in the death of this, the noblest of his heroes, on the threshold of happiness and love.
Pierre Bezukhoi—the second hero—is a wholly different type. He is much more Russian and national than Prince Andrei; the two are so unlike that the friendship between them strikes us with the same surprise as it would in real life. Pierre is clumsy and awkward, and not sufficiently strong-willed; he is continually led away to do things he does not desire ”

“ Widely democratic as they are in sympathies they yet betray their aristocratic birth—Tolstoy in the wrath and anger, the almost Satanic fury he turns upon those with whom he happens to disagree, and Turgénief in the fastidious delicacy with which he loves the beautiful, the distinguished, and the rare.
It is Dostoïevsky who is truly the man of the people; he sees through all the cheats of power, but he hates no one; he loves purity and beauty, but he finds them even in the foulest prisons and the lowest slums ”

“ The pessimist may perhaps declare that both Tolstoy and Dostoïevsky are mistaken in thinking that a human being can sink so low and yet be redeemed; to which it can only be replied that the unflinching courage with which they face realities—all realities, however horrible and sordid—earns them their right to be believed when they assert the restorative power of purity and love. ”

“ Tolstoy defines art as a human activity, the aim of which is to communicate to some other person the feelings which the artist has himself experienced. Art is effective in proportion as the artist's feeling is sincere and profound, and the expression of it clear; art is good or bad in accordance with the nature of the feeling transmitted; if the feeling is good it is good art, if the feeling is bad it is bad or debased art. ”

“ And the case is even more astonishing when we turn to art. Tolstoy, himself one of the world's greatest writers, condemns almost all great art, from the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, and almost all modern art—including, characteristically enough, himself. We must remember this truth, that Tolstoy was born an aristocrat, and that the members of aristocracies are nearly always cold to intellectual attainments; they belong to a privileged class which despises work and repudiates intellect. ”

“ With the same generosity, Vronsky, when he discovers the need, makes real sacrifices for Anna. He had at first regarded his passion for her as being only an additional joy in life, entailing no responsibility; but Tolstoy, with his unerring accuracy, shows that the responsibilities of an illicit love are not only as great as those of a legal one, but far more difficult and galling, because society, having ordained the responsibilities of marriage, assists the individual to execute them, whereas, in the other case, it incessantly hinders and impedes. ”

“ Everywhere men permit many thousands of people to become criminals simply because they are helpless and defective, and then, when they have made them criminals, debase and torture them further by imprisonment. Tolstoy is convinced from the bottom of his heart that the whole penal system is cruel, savage, and unjust, and it is almost impossible to read him without feeling the same. ”

“ Natasha is the adored of her brothers and her father, and almost every man who visits the house falls in love with her. Tolstoy makes us understand why. Natasha is herself prepared to see all that is delightful and all that is good in others; she is highly vitalised; she has strong affections, and an intense joy in life; wherever Natasha is things move; it is she who is always ready to suggest games and amusements; it is she who perceives poetry {45} and romance where others cannot or only in much less degree. ”

“ And Tolstoy's influence is so profound because he announces the dissatisfaction which, secret and overt, is assailing us on all sides; we are, none of us, really satisfied with our civilisation as it stands, we all desire a better one, and Tolstoy's is the most powerful and eloquent amid those voices which are summoning us to emerge from the dwelling which has grown too narrow and to build a new. ”

“ The marvellous thing in Tolstoy's art is that he so plainly reveals the change and development of human character; we never feel that his people are static and finished; before our very eyes Prince Andrei changes from Byronic pride to sweetness and tenderness, a bitter disillusion brings him back to {41} pride, but, once more, the depths of the man's nature are stirred and his fundamental sweetness is revealed. ”