Romain Rolland

“ Thus Tolstoy unhesitatingly condemns the principle of his own genius. What does it signify to him that he should sacrifice himself to the future—and that nothing of his work should remain?
“The art of the future will not be a development of the art of the present: it will be founded upon other bases. It will no longer be the property of a caste. Art is not a trade or profession: it is the expression of real feelings. Now the artist can only experience real feelings when he refrains from isolating himself; when he lives the life natural to man. ”

“ Tolstoy the Christian, forgetting the patriotism of his first narrative, curses this impious war:
“And these men, Christians, who profess the same great law of love and of sacrifice, do not, when they perceive what they have done, fall upon their knees repentant, before Him who in giving them life set within the heart of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and the beautiful. They do not embrace as brothers, with tears of joy and happiness!” ”

“ We may ignore the absurdity of supposing that Tolstoy, who could not endure her, could ever have been subject to the influence of George Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Stendhal; nevertheless, we belittle the greatness we attribute them to his ideas. The circle of ideas in which art moves and has its being is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that his might resides, but in his expression of them; in the personal accent, the imprint of the artist, the colour and savour of his life. ”

“ Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts “abstract love”?
“The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal love for those who are—somewhere, out of sight... To love those we do not know, those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing! There is no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so pleased with ourselves! The conscience is fooled.—No. We must love our neighbours—those we live with, and who are in our way and embarrass us.” ”

“ Resurrection is in a sense the artistic testament of the author. It dominates the end of his life as War and Peace crowned its maturity. It is the last peak, perhaps the highest—if not the most stupendous—whose invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old. He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith, his righteous anger.
He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist, as in War and Peace, soars above his subject. ”

“ In later years he spoke of this illness as of his best friend:
“When one is ill one seems to descend a very gentle slope, which at a certain point is barred by a curtain, a light curtain of some filmy stuff; on the hither side is life, beyond is death. How far superior is the state of illness, in moral value, to that of health! Do not speak to me of those people who have never been ill! They are terrible, the women especially so! A woman who has never known illness is an absolute wild beast!” ”

“ A mysterious fear mingles with the delight of Vronsky when he goes to see Anna. Levine, in her presence, loses all his will. Anna herself is perfectly well aware that she is no longer her own mistress. As the story develops the implacable passion consumes, little by little, the whole moral structure of this proud woman. All that is best in her, her sincere, courageous mind, crumbles and falls; she has no longer the strength to sacrifice her worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to please her lover; she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children; jealousy tortures her ”

“ Anna Karenin is the more perfect work; the work of a mind more certain of its artistic creation, richer too in experience; a mind for which the world of the heart holds no more secrets. But it lacks the fire of youth, the freshness of enthusiasm, the mighty pinions of War and Peace. Already Tolstoy has lost something of the joy of creation. The temporary peace of the first months of marriage has flown. Into the enchanted circle of love and art which Countess Tolstoy had drawn about him moral scruples begin to intrude. ”

“ For once the analysis of the writer is deprived of its cruder lights; there is no feverish struggle to present the naked truth. The secrets of the inward life are divined rather than spoken. The art and the heart of the artist are both touched and softened; there is a harmonious balance of thought and form. Family Happiness has the perfection of a work of Racine.
Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy sented with so limpid a profundity, was to be his salvation. ”

“ What was this faith which knew nothing of reason?
“Faith is the energy of life. One cannot live without faith. The ideas of religion were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of human thought. The replies given by faith to Life the sphinx contain the deepest wisdom of humanity.”
Is it enough, then, to be acquainted with those formulae of wisdom recorded in the volume of religion? No, for faith is not a science; faith is an act; it has no meaning unless it is lived. ”

“ I believe that the true happiness of man consists in the accomplishment of the will of God; I believe that the will of God is that every man shall love his fellows and do unto them always as he would they should do unto him, which contains, as the Bible says, all the law and the prophets. I believe that the meaning of life for each one of us is only to increase the love within him; I believe that this development of our power of loving will reward us in this life with a happiness which will increase day by day, and with a more perfect felicity in the other world. ”

“ And how often does an artist—an artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent power of the written word—feel himself weighed down by anguish as he writes the truth! [20] This truth, sane and virile, necessary in the midst of modern lies, this vital truth seems to him as the air we breathe... But then we perceive that this air is more than the lungs of many can bear. It is too strong for the many beings enfeebled by civilisation; too strong for those who are weak simply in the kindness of their hearts. ”

“ War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.
More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe. ”

“ They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the sense of the whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the artist, supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon the face of the waters. ”

“ Our tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: ‘It is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.’”
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! ”

“ Ours by its dreams of brotherly love, of peace among men; ours by its terrible accusation of the lies of civilisation; ours by its realism; by its mysticism ours; by its savour of nature, its sense of invisible forces, its vertigo in the face of the infinite.
To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were what Werther was to an earlier generation: the wonderful mirror of our passions, our strength, our weaknesses, of our hopes, our terrors, our discouragement. ”

“ Tolstoy worked with enthusiasm, with an eagerness and a delight which communicate themselves to the reader. Above all, the great charm of War and Peace resides in its spirit of youth. No other work of Tolstoy’s presents in such abundance the soul of childhood and of youth; and each youthful spirit is a strain of music, pure as a spring, full of a touching and penetrating grace, like a melody of Mozart’s. Of such are the young Nikolas Rostoff, Sonia, and poor little Petia.
Most exquisite of all is Natasha. ”

“ This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the lack of vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music. Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of the Opera-house during a performance of Salomé is quite enough to assure us of the immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions evoked by the art of sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy, abounding in life. The truth is that in spite of his injustice where Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the majority of those who now exalt him. ”

“ He has left the University to devote himself to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the course of a visit to the village we see him striving against jeering indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his “idea that love and goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the only truth possible in this world.” He feels himself defeated. He is weary and ashamed. ”

“ This truth which you bring to our art is something quite novel with us. I have only one fear: lest the times, and the cowardice of life, the deafness and dumbness of all that surrounds us, may make of you what it has made of most of us—lest it may kill the energy in you.” [8]
Nothing of the kind was to be feared. The times, which waste the energies of ordinary men, only tempered those of Tolstoy. Yet for a moment the trials of his country and the capture of Sebastopol aroused a feeling of regret for his perhaps too unfeeling frankness, together with a feeling of sorrowful affection. ”

“ There is no true art but that which strives for this union. The highest art is that which accomplishes it directly by the power of love; but there is another art which participates in the same task, by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and indignation, all that opposes this fraternity. Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the paintings of Millet. But even though it fail to attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with sympathy and truth brings men nearer together. ”

“ We cannot speak of the unity of his ideas, for no such unity existed; we can only speak of the persistence among them of the same diverse elements; sometimes allied, sometimes inimical; more often enemies than allies. Unity is to be found neither in the spirit nor the mind of a Tolstoy; it exists only in the internal conflict of his passions, in the tragedy of his art and his life. ”

“ All the more admirable is his impeccable observation—a faultless mirror. What a wealth of types, of precise details! How everything is seen; baseness and virtue, without hardness, without weakness, but with a serene understanding and a brotherly pity... The terrible picture of the women in the prison! They are pitiless to one another; but the artist is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of each, the distress that hides beneath humiliation, and the tearful eyes beneath the mask of effrontery. ”

“ A year later the death of his dearly-loved brother, Nikolas, who succumbed to phthisis [17] at Hyeres, on the 19th of September, 1860, completely overcame Tolstoy; shook him to the point of “crushing his faith in goodness, in everything,” and made him deny even his art:
“Truth is horrible... Doubtless, so long as the desire to know and to speak the truth exists men will try to know and to speak it. This is the only remnant left me of my moral concepts. It is the only thing I shall do; but not in the form of art, your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie.” ”