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Count Tolstoi accepts the full responsibility of them, and presses them still further. He is now the un-blenching apostle of real Christianity not the Christianity of the Churches, but the Christianity of Christ; and his new evangel will alarm the growing army of "advanced Christians," who are always canting, in their sentimental way, the very phrase which he develops in all its terrific meaning.
Othello kills Desdemona without moralising on the sinfulness of marriage, and Pozdnischeff stabs his wife from sheer jealousy. All the preaching is by the way. It might be cut out without affecting the work, and that is its condemnation. When the preacher steps forward the artist retires. And as we are dealing with Tolstoi the preacher we shall go straight to his article in the Universal Review.
Prophets of the Nineteenth Century: Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tolstoi. Bates, Herbert. Annotated edition, with Introduction, of Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" and "The King of the Golden River." Ruskin's "Praeterita": An Autobiography.
He shakes the foundations of our fancied security by boldly questioning what we had come to regard as axioms. As the late M. de Vogue remarked, when little children sit on our knee and pelt us with questions that go to the roots of our philosophy, we get rid of the bother of it by telling the children to go away and play; but when a Tolstoi puts such questions, we cannot get rid of him so easily.
In 1903, a newspaper in Russia sent out thousands of blanks to high school boys and girls all over the country, to discover what books constituted their favourite reading. Among native authors, Tolstoi was first, closely followed by Gorki; among foreign writers, Guy de Maupassant was the most popular!
In the same letter he wrote, "'Poor Lisa' drew tears and received homage, but no one reads her any more, while popular songs and tales, and folk-lore ballads will live as long as the Russian language." In his views of art, in his views of morals, in his views of religion, Tolstoi developed, but he did not change.
It has been said that Tolstoi asserted for the first time in "The Kreuzer Sonata" that hate and love were the same passion. But the truth is, Wagner knew it long before Tolstoi, just as Shakespeare knew it long before Wagner; and the whole of this first act turns on it. Isolda sends for Tristan and tells him he has wronged her, and begs him to drink the cup of peace with her.
Tolstoi has realised that this is the present condition of human labour, and his view of it has been corrected neither by historical knowledge nor by psychological observation. Initiation and training, we have returned to those wretched words, for we also had recognised that without initiation and training there could be no real enjoyment of art.
In his "Leaves," we again hear the note of destiny, again see the universal laws and forces exemplified in the human personality, and turned upon life with love and triumph. The world always has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi, Ibsen.
"Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it. You quote Marx and Hyndman and Kautsky what are they? shines! Tolstoi? his garret is full of rats.
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