VI

TOLSTOY

Why, where but in the sense and soul of me, Art's judge? -BROWNING.

IN 1880 Turgenief on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana found Tolstoy much changed: feverishly at work making himself over, pondering God and the universe. With this plunge into self-analysis and mysticism he had little sympathy; he referred to it with indulgent cynicism in a letter to a friend: "Every one kills his fleas in his own way." He feared a loss to Russian literature; few appreciated as he did Tolstoy's art, fine in its characterization, healthy in its animalism, and of an epic breadth. Was this "great writer of our Russian land" to turn ascetic and moralist? Three years later Turgenief sent from what proved to be his death-bed an appeal to Tolstoy not to forsake literature.

The appeal went unheeded. Tolstoy unceremoniously bowed himself off the stage of art and definitely became a critic of life and a social reformer. Never afterward did his work escape the cramping coils of moral purpose. He wrote simple stories for

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the peasants, philosophical essays, pamphlets and manifestoes on questions of the day: all of them very sincere; some of them very true; none of them from an artistic point of view worthy of his earlier work. Even when he turns to the novel, as he did in Resurrection, good material is washed bare of artistic possibilities by too strong a moral corrosive.

There are many who deplore this change this bending to the moral yoke and look with a great deal of distrust on the great crisis in Tolstoy's life. Conversion, they hold, may possibly be good for the man, but assuredly is fatal to the artist. A distorted view of life, they say, has reacted unfavorably on Tolstoy's art and view of art. It is easy to see some grounds for such criticism; if a theory is no stronger than its weakest dictum or application, little can be said in favor of Tolstoy's political, moral, and æsthetic theories; and least of all can be said in favor of his views on art. What can be held of a man who regards King Lear as a mere clutter of improbabilities and denies Shakespeare grasp, sense of measure, and true characterization; of one who rejects Dante and Michael Angelo nonchalantly, and shows as little understanding of the trenchant intellectualism of Ibsen as he does of the elusive art of Maeterlinck or Baudelaire and the rich art of Boecklin, Beethoven, and Wagner? These erratic views are expressed in two essays: What is Art? published in 1898, and Shakespeare,

in 1906. They cannot be set to the score of old age, for nothing could be more virile than Tolstoy at eighty; besides, letters, diaries, reminiscences prove that many of them extend back to ripe manhood. For years Tolstoy tried to force Shakespeare on himself, always without success. "I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment." It would be quite as unfair to set aside because of them Tolstoy's whole theory of art, and to ask: Why consider a blind man's theory of color? To deny that a great artist like Tolstoy has some understanding at least of the essentials of beauty, is too much like going at things with a scoop. Limited in range his feeling for art certainly is, for he could not enjoy verse and its music, and so misjudged the Symbolists utterly. When he tests King Lear by means of retelling the plot in the baldest possible prose, he overlooks the meaning of poetic pitch of character and incident. Highly complex forms of art he could not appreciate, but within this range and its racial, personal and cultural limits his appreciation of art is genuine and in the main convincing and sound; and what is true of his art holds also of his judgment of art: it is truest when nearest the soil. That is why he has such a fine feeling for Homer and for the rich, earthy art of folk-song and folk-epic. Nor is it safe to regard the crisis for which My Confession stands as a sudden wrenching free which ever after

left a moral twist. Some influence must be admitted; some warping of judgment and some estrangement from the artistic as such. But, after all, Tolstoy's art, at its earliest and even at its best, has a moral strain to it. The problem of the reshaping of character is not peculiar to Resurrection; it appears in Anna Karenina and still earlier in terse and virile form in The Cossacks; the question of the meaning of life, which Tolstoy came to use as the test of art, haunts Besuchoff in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina, and figures prominently as far back as 1852 in the unfinished novel Youth. In view of this it is absurd to say that Tolstoy's attitude toward art at some definite time came within the deep shadow of a moral eclipse.

The truth of the matter seems to be this: Back of Tolstoy's art criticisms is a definite and thoughtful theory of art and its relation to life, a theory worked out gradually and unevenly. Erratic as it is, it is much stronger than its weakest link. True or false, it is at least vital; partly because it is himself-his personality caught in one of its sincerest expressive movements and reflects the directness, massiveness, and liveness of his interests; partly because it comes from a creative genius; partly because it is a cultural theory of art: a peculiarly earnest attempt to connect art with life and to see the values of art in relation to whatever else of value a

fixed will and a hungry imagination can snatch from life. It is therefore entitled to a hearing.

Tolstoy's essay on Guy de Maupassant, written in 1894, gives interesting matter. We are told that in 1881 Turgenief brought him the Maison Tellier collection of stories. It was an ill-chosen moment. "That particular period, the year 1881, was for me the fiercest time of the inner reconstruction of my whole understanding of life, and in this reconstruction those employments called the Fine Arts, to which I had formerly given all my power, had not only lost all their former importance in my eyes, but had become altogether obnoxious to me owing to the unnatural position they had hitherto occupied in my life, and which they generally occupy in the estimation of people of the wealthy classes." Maupassant did not escape this general disfavor. His workmanship was admired, but much of his material found repellent, and his attitude towards life, ill-defined. Later when he came back to Maupassant and read Une Vie his estimate changed. Here he saw what he had thought lacking and what he was fast coming to regard as the essential of good art. The essay reflects this juster estimate, and in it are to be found Tolstoy's four tests of good

art.

The first of these four art tests is genius, that is, "the faculty of intense, strenuous attention, applied according to the author's tastes to this or that