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Tolstoi was right when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that this passage from one class to another does occasionally take place, and is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean that we have no castes.
A drama of Shakespeare or a novel of Tolstoi, with their long roll of dramatis personae, are more like life than a Greek tragedy with its absence of byplot and its few, central, characters. A modern historian would have recorded and discussed aspects of the history of fifth-century Greece which Thucydides ignores.
But a peculiarity of Flaubert's, and one more personal, which even most of the naturalists have not shared with him, neither the Dutch in their paintings, nor the English in the history of romance (the author of Tom Jones or of Clarissa Harlowe), nor the Russians, Tolstoi or Dostoiefski, is to despise the rôle of irony in art. "My personages are profoundly repugnant to me," he wrote,
When therefore Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judgment merely but the judgment of the race. In his conception of war the force of the Slavonic race behind him masters his own individual genius. Capacity in a race for war is distinct from valour.
When the muzhik told Levin that one man lived for his belly, and another for his soul, he became greatly excited, and eagerly demanded further knowledge of his humble teacher. He was once more told that man must live according to God according to truth. His soul was immediately filled, says Tolstoi, with brilliant light.
Tolstoi has been hardly treated by some translators and by many critics; in his own country, if you mention his name, you are as likely as not to be met by a shrug and an "Ah, monsieur, il divague un peu!" In his own country he has the censor always against him; some of his books he has never been able to print in full in Russian.
And all these officers, who walk in the Valley of the Shadow, have their selfish ambitions, their absurd social distinctions, and their overweening, egotistical vanity. At the end of the middle sketch, "Sevastopol in May," Tolstoi wrote out the only creed to which he remained consistently true all his life, the creed of Art. "Who is the villain, who the hero? All are good and all are evil.
Artists would wish you to talk unceasingly about the emotions their pain of making pictures arouse in you; but, under lifelong enemies, do not suggest to artists the theories under which they should paint. That is hitting below the belt. The poor artist is as God made him; and no one, not even a Tolstoi, is competent to undertake his re-creation.
Finally appeared Leo Tolstoi, whose literary career extended nearly sixty years. During the last twenty years of his life, he was generally regarded as the world's greatest living author; his books enjoyed an enormous circulation, and he probably influenced more individuals by his pen than any other man of his time.
To enquiring minds, sure that an answer to this question exists, but uncertain where to look for it, the fact that one of the thinkers of the century has, in a recent “Evangel,” given to the world a definition of “Art,” the result of many years’ meditation, will be received with joy. “Art,” says Tolstoi, “is simply a condition of life.
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