HALF the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist—an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly de-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances—it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayer would influence you.... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For

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

Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself.... 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. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this small space the great qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.

Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth

synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”—which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857—tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It is of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.

The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.

After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel to be called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this favourite stage of classic Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), dating from the same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A

Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward Tolstoy knew and told the hateful truth about war and the thoughtless pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that day there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon the glorification of the savage side of human nature. These wonderful pictures of the routine of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer, and later on created in Western countries an impression like that of the canvases of Verestchagin.

For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. It was of these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think of them without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from the scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a Billiard Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,” both of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music; “Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to scandalise the world thirty years afterward.

After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him—his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army surgeon in Tula—the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole life, I should think. 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

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; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna KarÈnina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel.

The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “the most perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the author of “Diana, is praise indeed.”

Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold complained that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome multiplicity of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s

“large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature.” “When I had ended my work ‘Anna KarÈnina,’” said Tolstoy in “My Confession” (1879-82), “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think of the horrible condition in which I found myself.... I saw only one thing—Death. Everything else was a lie.” Of that spiritual crisis nothing need be said here except that it only intensified, and did not really, as it seemed to do, vitally change, principles and instincts which had possessed Tolstoy from the beginning. His subsequent ethical and religious development may be traced in a long series of books and pamphlets, of which the most important are “The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised” (1880-2), “What I Believe” [“My Religion”], produced abroad in 1884, “What is to be Done?” (1884-5), “Life” (1887), “Work” (1888), “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), “Non-Action” (1894), “Patriotism and Christianity” (1896)—a

scathing attack upon militarism in general and the Franco-Russian Alliance in particular—“The Christian Teaching” (1898), and “The Slavery of our Times” (1900). Various letters on the successive famines and on the religious persecutions in Russia deserve separate mention; they remind us that since the failure of the revolutionary movement miscalled “Nihilism,” 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. Mr. Tchertkoff, Mr. Aylmer Maude, the “Brotherhood Publishing Co.,” and the “Free Age Press” deserve praise for their efforts to popularise these and other works of the Count in thoroughly good translations. In “What is Art?” (1898), not content with the bare utilitarian argument that it is merely a means of social union, he launched a jehad against all modern ideas of Art which rely upon a conception of beauty and all ideas of beauty into which pleasure enters as a leading constituent. A short but luminous essay on “Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction” is a more satisfactory contribution to the subject.

It is more to our purpose to note that in this volcanic and fecund if fundamentally simple personality the artist has dogged the steps of the evangelist to the last. “Master and Man” (1895) is one of the most exquisite short stories ever written. “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” (1884) and “Resurrection” (1899) are in some ways the most powerful of all his works. The much-condemned “Dominion of Darkness” (1886) and “Kreutzer Sonata” (1889) will be more fairly judged when the average Englishman has learned the supreme merit of that uncompromising truthfulness which gives nobility to every line the grand Russian ever wrote. To submit a work like “Resurrection” to the summary treatment which the ordinary novel receives and merits is absurd. It is a large picture of the fall and rise of man done by the swift and restless hand of a master who stands in a category apart, with an eye that sees externals and essentials with like accuracy and rapidity. 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. The idea, the characters, the episodes are all too real and vital for their precious British self-complacency. The grandmotherly AthenÆum

permits some person to describe this Promethean figure as “a precious vase that has been broken,” and can now only be pieced together to make “the ornament of a museum,”—which reminds me that I heard a lecturer before a well-known literary society in London describe him lately as a “scavenger,” and that a city bookseller assured me the other day that there was something almost amounting to a boycott against his fiction in the shops. The publisher who is preparing a complete edition of Tolstoy—enormous work!—knows better, knows that Tolstoy is one of the world-spirits whose advance out of the obscurity of a benighted land into the largest contemporary circulation is but a foretaste of an influence that will soon be co-extensive with the commonwealth of thinking men and women.

His service to literature is precisely the same as his service to morals. Like Bunyan and Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in a world of decadent conventions the gauge of the democratic ideal. 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

TOLSTOY IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA