3. 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; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the
whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you
realise that the World's insight into, and understanding of
that Age's life has been supplied us by the special
interpretation offered by two or three great minds. 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. How many dumb ages are
there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose
inner life in consequence we have no key!
Tolstoy's significance as the great writer of modern
Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his
exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the
spiritual unrest of the modern world. Yet so inevitably
must the main stream of each age's tendency and the main
movement of the world's thought be discovered for us by the
great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more
keep Tolstoy's significance to herself than could Germany
keep Goethe's to herself. True it is that Tolstoy, as great
novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world
of half-feudal, modern
Russia, a world strange to Western
Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of
Anna Karenina and War and Peace has confronted the modern
world is more truly representative of our Age's outlook than
is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries.
Between the days of Wilhelm Meister and of Resurrection what
an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life
has swept by! A century of that "liberation of modern
Europe from the old routine" has passed since Goethe stood
forth for "the awakening of the modern spirit." A century
of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant
shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and
even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of
the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old
institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold
affirms), so Tolstoy today stands for the triumph of the
European
soul against civilisation's routine and dogma. 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. He of all the analysts of the civilised
man's thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealized,
least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life
of the European world. 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. War and Peace and Anna Karenina, those great
worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook,
emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community
of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning
phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense
of containing a whole nation's life, to the world of Goethe,
Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray,
Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name.
And not only so, but Tolstoy's analysis of life throws more light on
the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper
problems, and explores more untouched territories of the
mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European
contemporaries.
It is by Tolstoy's passionate seeking of the life of the
soul that the
great Russian writer towers above the men of
our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth
has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all
modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the
secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our
complex society, that his work is charged with the essence
of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and
suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more
complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation. 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. To the eye of science everything is possible in
human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of
the progress of the guilty,
the crushing and deforming of
the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the
evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling
class. All this the nineteenth century has seen
accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia. It is Tolstoy's
distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any
other great artist two main conflicting points of view. He
has fused by his art the science that defines
the way
Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from
century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has
fused with this science of our modern world the soul's
protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the
generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which
every age unwinds.
Let us cite Tolstoy's treatment of War as an instance of
how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks
the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as
a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is. We
have only got to compare Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" (1856) with
any other document on war by other European writers to
perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war,
his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from a
former article let us say that: "Sebastopol" gives us war under all aspects—war as a
squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of
vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and
inhuman agony. Tolstoy gets the complex effects of
"Sebastopol" by keenly analysing the effect of the sights
and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a
variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation
of his own on these men's actions, thoughts, and emotions,
on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the
face of death. he lifts up, in fact, the veil of
appearances conventionally drawn by society over the
actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he
does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness
and indifference of the average mind, which says of the
worst of war's realities, "I felt so and so, and did so and
so: but as to what those other thousands may have felt in
their agony, that I did not enter into at all."
"Sebastopol," therefore, though an exceedingly short and
exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on
modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply
relegates to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited,
all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of
letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have
been busily piling up on humanity's shelves from generation
to generation. And more: we feel that in "Sebastopol" we
have at last the skeptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual
life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length
the confused sensations of countless men, who have
heretofore, 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; a
surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature's
laws in the
constitution of human society, puzzled by all
the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind,
resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its
passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for
life, so that at least human reason may advance farther
along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a
general sociological study of man.
Tolstoy's place in nineteenth-century literature is,
therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is
Voltaire's place in the eighteenth century. Both of these
writers focus for us in a marvelously complete manner the
respective methods of analysing life by which the
rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and
the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century
have moulded for us the modern world. All the movements,
all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of
the world of today in contrast with the immense
materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up
for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of
modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy's writings,
because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern
man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the
formidable array
of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of
humanity's progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of
human life in Nature's hands. 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. 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.
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 of ultimately without
loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the
spiritual life. The realism of the great Russian's novels
is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and
outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of
Continental literature. And Tolstoy must be finally looked
on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world
revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian
people have now to bear in Holy Russia's onward march
towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but
also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in
its love of humanity the life of those old religions which
science is destroying day by day. In this sense Tolstoy
will stand in European literature as the conscience of the
modern world.