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Updated: May 8, 2025
Therefore AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, in their greatest works did not give the Public what it wants, did not satisfy the average human being, their more comfortable and normal selves, and as artists were not true to the reason of their existence. Therefore they were not artists, which is unthinkable; therefore I have not yet found the Public!"
And in all the tons of rubbish that have been written about Tolstoy, the story told by Anna Seuron is the most significant. But a human being is better than a half-god. Bearing this in mind I refused to be scared in advance by the notorious reputation of Frank Wedekind, whose chief claim to recognition in New York is his Spring's Awakening, produced at the Irving Place Theatre seasons ago.
I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant.
There is in most souls a hunger for beauty, just as there is physical hunger. Beauty speaks to their spirits through the senses; but Tolstoy would have your house barren to the verge of hardship. My veneration for Count Tolstoy is profound, yet I mention him here to show the grave danger that lies in allowing any man, even one of the wisest of men, to dictate to us what is best.
The leaders were exiled and some hundreds enrolled in "a disciplinary regiment" as a punishment. Tolstoy managed to rouse sympathy for them in England, and they were allowed to emigrate instead of suffering persecution. He wrote Resurrection, a novel dealing with the terrible life of Russian prisons, to get money for their relief.
Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself in the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a deity in the second.
A woman may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. One feels this true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in point.
"But why, why is it?" said Tolstoy, with a touch of impatience. "If you will read the whole thing when written by foreign authors, why do you not encourage your own?" "I am sure I don't know," I said, "unless it is on the simple principle that many men enjoy the ballet scene in opera, while they would not permit their wives and daughters to take part in it."
In that story though there, too, Tolstoy's method is far from being consistent the effect is mainly based on our free sharing in the hopes and fears and meditations of the chosen few. In the one case Tolstoy is immediately beside us, narrating; in the other it is Peter and Andrew, Nicholas and Natasha, who are with us and about us, and Tolstoy is effaced.
From whatever land we come we may thrill to the words of English Shakespeare or Florentine Dante, to the chords of German Wagner and Italian Verdi, to the colors of Raphael and Murillo, to the noble thoughts of Athenian Plato, Roman Marcus Aurelius, and Russian Tolstoy.
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