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Updated: May 8, 2025
I cannot say I have ever been greatly helped by what I have read concerning the standards for literary criticism. Of the many wise and learned critics to whose works I have gone for light, I can remember only Aristotle, Longinus, Tolstoy, and Anatole France probably because it is easy for the innocent to agree with dominating men.
He seemed to have it firmly fixed in his brain that, although Count Tolstoy worked in the fields "like one of us poor brethren," he really did no work whatever.
"I shall soon be dead," he sadly predicted, "and people will say that Tolstoy taught men to plough and reap and make boots; while the chief thing that I have been trying so hard to say all my life, the thing I believe in the most important of all, they will forget." Let us believe that Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Dostoïevsky, Turgenieff, and Tolstoy are classics.
The works which we call democratic are many of them expressive of phases merely of the popular life, just as so much American literature is expressive of localities and groups in America. And usually the works of genius that we do possess have been written by converted aristocrats, like Tolstoy, and have a little of the fanaticism and over-emphasis of the convert.
As a pendant to this old-fashioned lesson witnessed by Tolstoy in an elementary school in Germany, we may cite the following lesson recently set forth by a distinguished French pedagogist and philosopher, whose text-books are classics in the schools of his own country and in those of many foreign lands, and are also in use in the teachers' training colleges in Italy.
The books thus issued in the original Russian version outside of the famous author's native land are all purely spiritual, and are written in the most elevated tone. In this "Confession" Tolstoy emphatically strikes the keynote which is the motif of all his didactic writings.
The literati bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art? The whole world pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration. Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world.
Some there be who regard pictures as implements of idolatry; while the Hook-and-Eye Baptists look upon buttons as immoral. Strange evolutions are often witnessed within the life of one individual. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, a great and good man, at one time a sensualist, has now turned ascetic; a common evolution in the lives of the saints.
For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for reality, come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so profound because so patient of aberration and exception.
It was the cumbrous ritual and dogma of the orthodox state religion which roused Tolstoy to impassioned protests, and led him step by step to separate the core of Christianity from its sacerdotal shell, thus bringing upon himself the ban of excommunication.
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