TOLSTOY'S PLACE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE.

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EDWARD GARNETT, in " The Bookman." 

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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 100 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 to-day 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.

MODERN LIFE.

He of all the analysts of the civilised man's thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealised, least beautified, and least distorted the complex dally 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 worlds of either Goethe, Byron, Victor Hugo, Dickens, Thackeray, Maupassant, or any contemporary 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.

HUNGER FOR SPIRITUAL TRUTH.

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 throughout the world 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 blind fate of its own progress. In the eye of science everything is possible in Humanity's 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 divines 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 records.

TOLSTOY AND WAR.

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 of the human spirit to a realisation of what life is. We have only got to compare Tolstoy's " Sebastopol" (1856) with any other document on war by the other European creators to perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, his fellows have idealised it. To quote a passage from ourselves, let us say again 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 unlifelike 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 sceptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length the confused sensations of countless men, who have heretofore never found a genius who can make humanity realise what it knows half-consciously and consciously evades. We cannot help, therefore, 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."

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

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 marvellously 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 created the modern world. All the movements, all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of the world of to-day 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 frightful array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of humanity's progress, at the frightful meaninglessness, at the appalling cheapness and waste of human life in Nature's hands. Tolstoy may thus be defined in part as 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 animality and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy's realism in art is symbolical of our Age's study of, and absorption in the world of fact, of the modern study of Nature, a study 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 age's 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 of " Progress," 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.

Brisbane Courier (Qld.), Saturday 8 March 1902

 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/19154767