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Tolstoï's philosophy, deeply enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to be a cunning fraud. A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never believe the phenomenal world to be.
He has more colour, a deeper perspective, a greater variety of lights and shadows a more complete portraiture of the spiritual man. Tolstoi's people stand so living and concrete that one feels one can recognise them in the street. Turgenev's are like people whose intimate confessions and private correspondence, unveiling all the secrets of their spiritual life, have been submitted to one.
Yea, it happened in the time when Carlyle, fascinated by German theories, ended the matter and pressed the whole world's history into some few biographies. Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero-Worship" curiously enough was published about the same time as Tolstoi's "War and Peace." Two antipodes!
This is Tolstoi's conception of the man who is to the Aryan race what Hannibal is to the Semitic its crowning glory in war. Consider in contrast with this the attitude towards war of a thinker, a visionary, not less great than Tolstoi Carlyle.
The Richters were here to-day, and the eldest son came too, the lieutenant from Lemberg; he is awfully handsome and made hot love to Dora; Walter is very nice too, he is at the School of Forestry in Modling; to-morrow the lieutenant is going to bring Dora one of Tolstoi's books to read. Then they will do some music together, she piano and he violin; it's a pity I can't play as well as Dora yet.
This question of Tolstoi's arises from that same limiting of examination to a brief, partial, and, as it happens, most transitional and chaotic present, which has given us that cut-and-dried distinction between work and play; and, indeed, the two misconceptions are very closely connected.
For an elaborate and interesting discussion of this subject, see Tolstoi's Physiology of War. As showing the later trend of thought on this general theme, see the excellent summary by Professor Seligman, The Economic Interpretation of History. William James, The Will to Believe and other Essays, pp. 218 ff.; Jastrow, Psych.
They must be significant elements of the world as well. Just test Tolstoï's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to belong:
*For a very unfavourable view of Tolstoi's later conduct, the "Tolstoi legend," see Merezhkovski, Tolstoi as Man and Artist. Even the revolutionary views on art, which he expressed toward the end of the century in his book, "What is Art?" were by no means a sudden discovery, nor do they reveal a change in his attitude. The accomplished translator, Mr.
At any rate, as I heard it this morning it seemed as terrible as anything in Tolstoi's Heart of Darkness, and more than once sent my thoughts back to the sorrows of the house of OEdipus. It startled me a little, too, for I never thought to catch an echo of Greek tragedy out of the full soft lips of a Finnish girl who was helping me wash my breakfast dishes.
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