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William Dean Howells.
Among those writing letters on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of Leo Tolstoy were Edmund C. Stedman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Howells (his published in 33 [Oct. 1898], 288). Howells's letter, dated August 21, 1898, from York Harbor, Maine, is listed in the Bibliography of his works by William M. Gibson and George Arms (1948; p. 127) and was reprinted in part in the Bookman of New York in October 1898 (8: 107). It is not, however, one of the Selected Letters of the sixvolume Twayne edition. The passage included in the Bookman is the third of four paragraphs of the letter printed in The Critic, which I quote in its entirety.
York Harbor, Maine, August 21, 1898.
I am sorry that I shall not be able to join with his other friends in keeping the seventieth birthday of Leo Tolstoy. His writings and his life have meant more to me than any other man's; and if I could be with you I should try to express my deep sense of the import of his philosophy to such an age as this, and to a people who have been the latest, as I wish they might be the last, to make war.
It seems to me that Tolstoy's greatest word is peace; and in this as in everything he appeals to the intellectual and spiritual reality within the official and social simulacrum which hides each of us from the others. It has been his mission to give men a bad conscience, to alarm them and distress them in the opinions and conventions in which they rested so comfortably. He repeats to us the divinely simple truth which the good and wise have known from the beginning, in terms which the most modern intelligence cannot refuse as trite. He arrives at a moment of civilization when no one any longer contends that the evils which war sums up in itself are justifiable apart from it, and he asks us to refrain from them by refraining from war, which makes imperative things essentially and immutably wrong.
Tolstoy's literature, his matchless art, his fiction, which makes all other appear so feeble and false, is merely the flower of his love of men, his desire to be true to them. All that he has written, so far as I know it, is of one effect with all that he has been since he came to his moral consciousness. I cannot separate his aesthetics from his ethics, for he has himself known no difference in them. But it seems to me that in his fiction he works more instinctively and vitally, and I believe that in this he will work longest. As a teacher he has put in contemporaneous terms the wisdom which has always been in the world for the conduct of men; but as an artist he has divined things concerning their nature and character in mystical heights and depths unreached before, and has portrayed life with an unexampled truth and fullness.
Such a man was sure to come when he was needed most; and in order that he should perform his office to the generation to which he was sent it was not necessary that his own life should be perfect, or his whole doctrine unerring. One perfect life and one unerring doctrine we had already, and it is praise enough for Tolstoy to say that he teaches these with all his heart and all his mind; and however he falters or wanders, he worships them by a constant endeavor for their goodness and beauty.
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