THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2896, 15 September 1909, Page 78

THE SKETCHER.

THREE GREAT RUSSIAN NOVELISTS. TOLSTOY, TURGENIEV, AND DOS- • TOIEVSKY. Hon. Maurice Baring makes a most interesting analysis of the genius of three great Russian novelists in the new issue of the Quarterly Review. His subject nominally is "Tolstoy and Turgeniev," but he discusses Dostoievsky, too, as he holds that he and Tolstoy stand far above Turgeniev. Thirty years ago, he contends, critics said that Tolstoy, and Turgeniev were the giants of modern Russian literature, but not now. " The other giant, the complement of Tolstoy, almost any Russian critic of the present day, without hesitation," he says, * 'would pronounce to be Dostoievsky, and the foreign critic who is thoroughly acquainted' with Dostoievsky's work cannot but agree with him." Mr Baring then points out the two dominating characters ia Russian fiction : — ■ — The Russian Character. — "The Russian character can, roughly speaking, be divided," be says, "into two types, and these two -types dominate the whole' of Russian, literature. "The first is that- which I shall call, for want of a> better name, Lucifer, the fallen angel. The second type is that of the he»o : of all ' Russian .fade-take, Ivan Durak, Ivan TOSe Fool, or the Little Fool. There are innumerable folk-tales in Russian which teH the adventures of Ivan, the Fool, who, by bis -pery simplicity and foolishness, outwits the wisdom of the world. This type is profoundly characteristic of one Rusaiam ideal. The simple fool is venerated in Russia as something holy It is acknowledged that his childish innocence is more precious thav the wisdom- of the wise. *' Ivan Durak may be said to be the hero of all Dostoievsky's novels. He is the aim and ideal of Dostoievsky's life, an aim and ideal which he fully achieves. He is also the aim and ideal of Tolstoy's teaching, but an aim and ideal which Tolstoy recommends to others and only partly achieves himself. —Where Tolstoy Failed.— *' Now, while Dostoievsky is the incarnation of the second type, of Ivan the Fool, Tolstoy is the incarnation of the first. It i* true that, at a certain stage of his career, Tolstoy announced to the whole world that the ideal of Ivan Durak w«s the only ideal wortt following. He perceives thos aim with luminous clearness, and, in preaching it, he has made a multitude of his disciples ; tbe only thing he ba» never been • able to da Js t© JBAke the supreme submission, the final eurren- . der, anoV to Wxrme the type himself. —Tolstoy's Fear of the ©ark.— "In 'Anna Kixeniaa' and in, 'War and Pease' we. feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark ; that to him in the whole of human life- there is, something essentially wrong— a radical mistake, fie is conscious that, with oil his genius, he has only been, able to record the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same, time, that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found, nor in what it consists. It is at this moment that the crisis occurred in Tolstoy's life which divides it outwardly into two sections, although it constitutes no break in his inward evolution. The fear of the dark, of the abyss yawning in front of him, is so strong that he felt he must xid himeelf of it at all costs. — Tolstoy's Great Change. — " Then came- the change which be describes thus in hb ' Confession' : — " ' I grew to hate myself ; and now all h«s become clear to me.' This was the preliminary 6tep of the development which led him to believe that he had at last found the final and everlasting truth. ' A man has only got not to desire lands or money in ouder to enter into the kingdom of God.' Property he came to believe, was the eource of all evil. 'It is not a law of Nature, the will of God, or an historical necessity ; rather a superstition, neither strong nor terrible, but weak and contemptible.' To free oneself from this superstition he thought was as easy as to stamp on a spider He desired literally to carry out the teaching of the Gospels, to give up all he had, and to become a beggar. This ideal he was not able to carry out in practice. — Teaching Inconsistent with Ideals.— » "His affairs were, and still are, managed for him ; and he continued to live as he had done before. No sane person would think of blaming Tolstoy for this. He was not by nature a St. Francis ; he was not by nature a Russian martyr, but the reverse. What one does resent is not that his practice is inconsistent with his teaching, but that his teaching is inconsistent with the ideal which it professes to embody. He takes the Christian teaching, and tells the world that it is the only hope of salvation — the only key to the riddle of life. At the same time, he neglects the first truth on which that teaching is 'based — namely, that man must be born again ; he must humble himself and become as a little child. It is just tliis final and absolute surrender that Tolstoy has been unable to make. Instead of loving God through, himeelf, and loving himself for the God in him, he hates himself, and refuses to recognise the gifts that God has given him »— Tolstoy's Spiritual Pride. — *' It is for this reason that he talks of all his great work, with the exception of a few stories written for children, as being worthless. It is ior this reason that he ceased writing novels and attempted to plough the fields. And the cause of all this is simply spiritual pride, 'because he was unwilling to do ' has duty

in that state of life .to which it had pleased God to call hint.'- Providence had made him a novelist and a writer, and not a tiller of the fields; Providence had made him not only a novelist, but perhaps tbe greatest novelist that has, ever lived ; yet he deliberately turns upon this gift ] and spurns it and spits upon it^ saying that it is worth nothing. — The Question Is.— » "The question is^ — Has a human being the right to do this, especially if, for any reasons whatever, he is not able to make the full and complete renunciation, and to cut himeelf off from the world altogether? " The answer is that, if this be the foundation of Tolstoy's teaching, people have a right to complain of there being something wrong in it. If he had left the world, and become a pilgrim, like one of the early Russian, saints, not a word could have been said ; or if he had remained in the world preaching the ideals of Christianity, and carrying them out as far as he could, not a word could have been said. But while he has not followed the first course, he has preached that the second coarse is wrong. He has striven after the ideal of Ivan Durak, but has been unable to find it, simply because he has been unable to humble himself j be. has rewritten' the Gospels to suit hjg; own temperament. The-' -cry of his youth, 'X have ao modesty !'" remains true of -him 'after his conversion. ' ' , "- —Tolstoy's Lack' of Humility .•«- . "It is rather that he has no humility, and, instead of acknowledging that every info is appointed to a definite task, and that there is no such, thing as a superfluous man or a superfluous task, he has preached that all tasks are superfluous except what he himself considers to be necessary; instead of preaching the love of the divine ' image of the King,' with which man is stamped like a coin, he has told us to love the Maker of the coin by hatred of his handiwork, quite regardless of the image with which it is stamped. — His Dual Personality. — "This all arises from the dual personality in the man — the conflict between the titanic ' Lucifer' element w him and the other, for ever searching fox the ideal of Ivan Durak. The Titan is consumed with desire to become Ivan Durak ; he preaches to the whole world that they should do so, but he cannot do it himself. Other proud and titanic natures have done it, but Tolstoy cannot da what Dante did. Dante was proud and a Titan, but Dante divested himself *of his- pride, and, seeing the truth, said, 'In. la sua volontate c ncstca pace.' — His Moral Authority. — "Yet what the .mistakes of Tolstoy's teaching may b«, they ,xk> jßct detract frewi the moral authority; .ol the man. AJLbklife- he has searched for the, truth, and all his life he. has said exactly what he thought, and,' though be has fearlessly . attacked ail constituted authorities, nobody ha* dared to touch, him. Se is- too great. This is. the first, instance of such a thing happening in v Russia, ; .it is the service he lias rendered to Russia as a mail — Targeniev's Prose. — "Turgeniev was a great poet. What time has not taken away from him, and ■what time can never take away, is the beauty of his language and the poetry which is in his work. Every Russian schoolboy has read the works of Turgeniev before he has left school, and every Russian schoolboy will probably, continue to do so, because Turgeniev's prose remains a classic model of simple, beautiful, and harmonious language, and as such it can never be excelled. — Tolstoy and Turgeniev Contrasted. — "The difference between the work of Toletoy and Turgeniev is tha— that Turgeniev's characters are as living as any characters ever are in books, but they belong to booklaztd, and are thus conventional; whereas Tolstoy's characters belong to life. The fault which Russian critics find with Turgeniev's characters' is that they are- exaggerated, that there is an element of caricature in them, and that they are permeated by the faults of the author's own character— namely, s iis weakness and, above all, his estf-consciouwiiees. "When Turgeniev was dying he wrote to Tolstoy and implored hhr to return to literature. ' That gift,' he wrote, ' came whence all comes to us. Return to- your literary work, great writer of our Russian land!' "All through Turgeniev's life, in spite of his frequent quarrels with Tolstoy, he never o&aeed to admire the works of liis rival. Turgeniev had the gift of admiration. Tolstoy is absolutely devoid of it. The ' Lucifer' spirit in him refuses to bow down before Shakespeare or Beethoven simply because it is incapable of bending at all. — His Inability to Admire. — "It is this inability to admire which is the whole defect of Tolstoy, and it arises from his indomitable pride, which is the strength of his character, and causes him to tower like a giant over all his contem-poraria?. Therefore, in reviewing his who'<e work and his whole life, and in reviewing it in connection with that of his contemporaries, one comes tc the following conclusion : " If Tolstoy, being as great as he is, has this great limitation, we can only repeat the platitude that no genius, however great, is without limitations; no ruby without a flaw. Were it otherwise^ — had Tolstoy combined with his power and directness of vision and creative genius the all-embracing love and childlike simplicity of Dostoievsky — we should have had, united in one man, the complete expression of the Russian race ; that is to say, we should have had a complete man — which is impossible. — Turgeniev's Power of Admiration.—* "Turgeniev, on the other hand, is full to the brim of the power of admiration and appreciation which Tolstoy lacks; but

th«n he also lacks Tolstoy's strength, and power • " "- "Dostoievsky has a power different from Tolstoy's, but equal in scale, and titanic. He has a power of admiration, an appreciation trider and deeper than Turgeniev's, and the simplicity and humility of a man Av'ho has descended into hell, wHo has been face to face with the deepest sufferings, the sorest agonies of humanity, and the vilest aspects of human nafcare; who, far from losing his faith in the divine, has detected i* in every human being, however vile, and in every circumstance, however hideous ; and who, in dust and ashes, has felt himself face to face with, God. — Two Columns of Russian Literature.-— " Yet, in s-pite of all this, Dostoievsky is far from being the complete expression of the Russian genius or a. complete man. His limitations arte as great as Tolstoy's, and no one was more conscious of them than oimself . They do- not, however, concern us here. What does concern us is the fact that in modern Enssian literature, in the literature of this century, leaving the poets out of the question, the two great figures, the two great columns which support the temple of Russian Uteratore, are Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. " — Turgeniev's Place.— ; : - " Tttrgeniev's. plaoe i& inside that.tempfe, Ther^fr he has a ftbiine and, an altar which . are his own,, which no one can dispute , wiih horn, aad which are, bathed in serene , radiance and viodtcd. by «hy visions and • voioes of haunting loveiinesej Bui neither as a writer nor as a man can he be called : the gfeat representative of even fealf the • Russian, genius, ioi he complemente the genius of neither Tolstoy nor Dostoievsky. He possesses in a minor degree qualities whacb they both possess; and the qualities which, are bis, and bis only, exquisite as they are, are not of the kind which, belong to the greatest representatives ci a nation or of a race." °> — Europe Discovers Russian Literature. — "One reason of the abundant and perhaps excessive praise which, was showered on Turgeniev by European critics is that it was chiefly through Turgeniev's work .that Europe discovered Russian literature, and became aware that novels were being written in which dramatic issues as poignant and terrible a? those of Greek tragedy arise simply out of the clash of certain characters m. everyday Jlife. The simplicity of Russian literature, the naturalness of the characters in Russian fiction, came like a revelation to Europe ; and as this revelation came- about partly through the work of Turgeniev, it .s not difficult to understand that he received the pxaie© not only due to bin is >an artist, bat i! l *.pbtitif..fQfc-9P ,«« 4*»lities .**actt ; «o ;jr»epara&l»-f«*m, $c work of any Btmb^d. -*■ - \ ■■ -' .