Tolstoy's Place in European Literature
                     by Edward Garnett

    From G.K. Chesterton, G. Perris, and Edward Garnett,
            Leo Tolstoy, (New York: Pott, 1903)

    The justness of the word great applied to a nation's 
writers is perhaps best tested by simply taking each writer 
in turn from out his Age, and seeing how far our conception 
of his Age remains unaffected.  We may take away hundreds of 
clever writers, scores of distinguished creators, and the 
Age remains before our eyes, solidly unaffected by their 
absence; but touch one or two central figures, and lo! the 
whole framework of the Age gives in your hands, and you 
realise that the World's insight into, and understanding of 
that Age's life has been supplied us by the special 
interpretation offered by two or three great minds.  In 
fact, every Age seems dwarfed, chaotic, full of confused 
tendencies and general contradiction till the few great men 
have arisen, and symbolised in themselves what their 
nation's growth or strife signifies.  How many dumb ages are 
there in which no great writer has appeared, ages to whose 
inner life in consequence we have no key!
    Tolstoy's significance as the great writer of modern 
Russia can scarcely be augmented in Russian eyes by his 
exceeding significance to Europe as symbolising the 
spiritual unrest of the modern world.  Yet so inevitably 
must the main stream of each age's tendency and the main 
movement of the world's thought be discovered for us by the 
great writers, whenever they appear, that Russia can no more 
keep Tolstoy's significance to herself than could Germany 
keep Goethe's to herself.  True it is that Tolstoy, as great 
novelist, has been absorbed in mirroring the peculiar world 
of half-feudal, modern Russia, a world strange to Western 
Europe, but the spirit of analysis with which the creator of 
Anna Karenina and War and Peace has confronted the modern 
world is more truly representative of our Age's outlook than 
is the spirit of any other of his great contemporaries.  
Between the days of Wilhelm Meister and of Resurrection what 
an extraordinary volume of the rushing tide of modern life 
has swept by!  A century of that "liberation of modern 
Europe from the old routine" has passed since Goethe stood 
forth for "the awakening of the modern spirit."  A century 
of emancipation, of Science, of unbelief, of incessant 
shock, change, and Progress all over the face of Europe, and 
even as Goethe a hundred years ago typified the triumph of 
the new intelligence of Europe over the shackles of its old 
institutions, routine, and dogma (as Matthew Arnold 
affirms), so Tolstoy today stands for the triumph of the 
European soul against civilisation's routine and dogma.  The 
peculiar modernness of Tolstoy's attitude, however, as we 
shall presently show, is that he is inspired largely by the 
modern scientific spirit in his searching analysis of modern 
life.  Apparently at war with Science and Progress, his 
extraordinary fascination for the mind of Europe lies in the 
fact that he of all great contemporary writers has come 
nearest to demonstrating, to realising what the life of the 
modern man is.  He of all the analysts of the civilised 
man's thoughts, emotions, and actions has least idealized, 
least beautified, and least distorted the complex daily life 
of the European world.  With a marked moral bias, driven 
onward in his search for truth by his passionate religious 
temperament, Tolstoy, in his pictures of life, has 
constructed a truer whole, a human world less bounded by the 
artist's individual limitations, more mysteriously living in 
its vast flux and flow than is the world of any writer of 
the century.  War and Peace and Anna Karenina, those great 
worlds where the physical environment, mental outlook, 
emotional aspiration, and moral code of the whole community 
of Russia are reproduced by his art, as some mighty cunning 
phantasmagoria of changing life, are superior in the sense 
of containing a whole nation's life, to the world of Goethe, 
Byron, Scott, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, 
Maupassant, or any latter day creator we can name.  And not 
only so, but Tolstoy's analysis of life throws more light on 
the main currents of thought in our Age, raises deeper 
problems, and explores more untouched territories of the 
mind than does any corresponding analysis by his European 
contemporaries.
    It is by Tolstoy's passionate seeking of the life of the 
soul that the great Russian writer towers above the men of 
our day, and it is because his hunger for spiritual truth 
has led him to probe contemporary life, to examine all 
modern formulas and appearances, to penetrate into the 
secret thought and emotion of men of all grades in our 
complex society, that his work is charged with the essence 
of nearly all that modernity thinks and feels, believes and 
suffers, hopes and fears as it evolves in more and more 
complex forms of our terribly complex civilisation.  The 
soul of humanity is, however, always the appeal of men from 
the life that environs, moulds, and burdens them, to 
instincts that go beyond and transcend their present life.  
Tolstoy is the appeal of the modern world, the cry of the 
modern conscience against the blinded fate of its own 
progress.  To the eye of science everything is possible in 
human life, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sake of 
the progress of the guilty, the crushing and deforming of 
the weak so that the strong may triumph over them, the 
evolution of new serf classes at the dictates of a ruling 
class.  All this the nineteenth century has seen 
accomplished, and not seen alone in Russia.  It is Tolstoy's 
distinction to have combined in his life-work more than any 
other great artist two main conflicting points of view.  He 
has fused by his art the science that defines the way 
Humanity is forced forward blindly and irresponsibly from 
century to century by the mere pressure of events, he has 
fused with this science of our modern world the soul's 
protest against the earthly fate of man which leads the 
generations into taking the ceaseless roads of evil which 
every age unwinds.
    Let us cite Tolstoy's treatment of War as an instance of 
how this great artist symbolises the Age for us and so marks 
the advance in self-consciousness of the modern mind, and as 
a nearer approximation to a realisation of what life is.  We 
have only got to compare Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" (1856) with 
any other document on war by other European writers to 
perceive that Tolstoy alone among artists has realised war, 
his fellows have idealised it.  To quote a passage from a 
former article let us say that:

    "Sebastopol" gives us war under all aspects--war as a 
squalid, honourable, daily affair of mud and glory, of 
vanity, disease, hard work, stupidity, patriotism, and 
inhuman agony.  Tolstoy gets the complex effects of 
"Sebastopol" by keenly analysing the effect of the sights 
and sounds, dangers and pleasures, of war on the brains of a 
variety of typical men, and by placing a special valuation 
of his own on these men's actions, thoughts, and emotions, 
on their courage, altruism, and show of indifference in the 
face of death.  he lifts up, in fact, the veil of 
appearances conventionally drawn by society over the 
actualities of the glorious trade of killing men, and he 
does this chiefly by analysing keenly the insensitiveness 
and indifference of the average mind, which says of the 
worst of war's realities, "I felt so and so, and did so and 
so:  but as to what those other thousands may have felt in 
their agony, that I did not enter into at all."  
"Sebastopol," therefore, though an exceedingly short and 
exceedingly simple narrative, is a psychological document on 
modern war of extraordinary value, for it simply relegates 
to the lumber-room, as unlife-like and hopelessly limited, 
all those theatrical glorifications of war which men of 
letters, romantic poets, and grave historians alike have 
been busily piling up on humanity's shelves from generation 
to generation.  And more:  we feel that in "Sebastopol" we 
have at last the skeptical modern spirit, absorbed in actual 
life, demonstrating what war is, and expressing at length 
the confused sensations of countless men, who have 
heretofore, recognising this man Tolstoy as the most 
advanced product of our civilisation, and likening him to a 
great surgeon, who, not deceived by the world's presentation 
of its own life, penetrates into the essential joy and 
suffering, health and disease of multitudes of men; a 
surgeon who, face to face with the strangest of Nature's 
laws in the constitution of human society, puzzled by all 
the illusions, fatuities, and conventions of the human mind, 
resolutely sets himself to lay bare the roots of all its 
passions, appetites, and incentives in the struggle for 
life, so that at least human reason may advance farther 
along the path of self-knowledge in advancing towards a 
general sociological study of man.
    
    Tolstoy's place in nineteenth-century literature is, 
therefore, in our view, no less fixed and certain than is 
Voltaire's place in the eighteenth century.  Both of these 
writers focus for us in a marvelously complete manner the 
respective methods of analysing life by which the 
rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and 
the science and humanitarianism of the nineteenth century 
have moulded for us the modern world.  All the movements, 
all the problems, all the speculation, all the agitations of 
the world of today in contrast with the immense 
materialistic civilisation that science has hastily built up 
for us in three or four generations, all the spirit of 
modern life is condensed in the pages of Tolstoy's writings, 
because, as we have said, he typifies the soul of the modern 
man gazing, now undaunted, and now in alarm, at the 
formidable array of the newly-tabulated cause and effect of 
humanity's progress, at the appalling cheapness and waste of 
human life in Nature's hands.  Tolstoy thus stands for the 
modern soul's alarm in contact with science.  And just as 
science's work after its first destruction of the past ages' 
formalism, superstition, and dogma is directed more and more 
to the examination and amelioration of human life, so 
Tolstoy's work has been throughout inspired by a passionate 
love of humanity, and by his ceaseless struggle against 
conventional religion, dogmatic science, and society's 
mechanical influence on the minds of its members.  To make 
man more conscious of his acts, to show society its real 
motives and what it is feeling, and not cry out in 
admiration at what it pretends to feel--this has been the 
great novelist's aim in his delineation of Russia's life.  
Ever seeking the one truth--to arrive at men's thoughts and 
sensations under the daily pressure of life--never flinching 
from his exploration of the dark world of man's animalism 
and incessant self-deception, Tolstoy's realism in art is 
symbolical of our absorption in the world of fact, in the 
modern study of natural law, a study of ultimately without 
loss of spirituality, nay, resulting in immense gain to the 
spiritual life.  The realism of the great Russian's novels 
is, therefore, more in line with the modern tendency and 
outlook than is the general tendency of other schools of 
Continental literature.  And Tolstoy must be finally looked 
on, not merely as the conscience of the Russian world 
revolting against the too heavy burden which the Russian 
people have now to bear in Holy Russia's onward march 
towards the building-up of her great Asiatic Empire, but 
also as the soul of the modern world seeking to replace in 
its love of humanity the life of those old religions which 
science is destroying day by day.  In this sense Tolstoy 
will stand in European literature as the conscience of the 
modern world.