ARNOLD ZWEIG

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 891, 7 February 1930, Page 14

ARNOLD ZWEIG

A GREAT MODERN (Written for THE SUN) vpiIERE are so many reasons for considering Arnold Zweig a great writer that one feels somewhat at a loss to select the crucial one. Like Dickens, Thackeray and Tolstoy, he is magnificently aware of the struggle which humanity is constantly compelled to make in order that it may remain human. Like Conrad, he sees and understands the workings of the soul which will cause a mind to dictate such seemingly inexplicable actions to a body . . . those workings that we have come to refer to as

“Psychology”; and like Balzac, he has an extraordinary sense of the vitality in superficially unemotional objects—the trunks of trees and the leaves on the branches of those trees; a sense enabling him to recreate on paper the thousand-and-one significant aspects of a seemingly insignificant thing. In brief, he is profoundly observant of externals and internals —and I use the word “profoundly” in its most potent sense. By the author of “Sergeant Grischa,” one cannot help but be reminded vividly of that wonderful Russian, Tolstoy. Quite apart from the writing of books, there is a fundamental likeness between their tw'o minds. From both of them one derives a sense of the colossal futility which is always striving to insinuate itself into the minds of men, the sense which, if it once achieved its aim, would cause the complete negation of all that is Christlike in the world, the sense which those two writers—by the sheer fact of their artistic and human consciences—have done, and are doing, so much to counteract. And in their written work, this similarity is also apparent. Both Tolstoy, dead, and Zweig, living, are driven onward by ' a force, an urge. Each of these writers, in his sphere of experience, has seen, ’and understood, the devastating effects that are wrought by an overwhelming pride. So far there has been a similarity between these two artists: here, now, is the essential difference. Tolstoy was an aristocrat in the days when Russia had a class aristocracy; Zweig is an amazingly pure thinker in times when Aristocracy has ceased to be a limited, and limiting, term. Moreover, Zweig has recently fought through four years of the most shattering slaughter known to our present day civilisation (it is droll —that remark about civilisation!). Tolstoy of course, did burn with a zeal to ameliorate the lot of the peasants, his countryfolk. But beyond that, he could not go. Tolstoy loved his fellow men and women, sickened at the pains which were theirs in the days of serfdom (for the moment, I am assuming that the Russians really do regard a Red Russia as being Utopian), but beyond his own folk hs could not see. He was limited—circumscribed in the manner that the early French Realists were circumscribed —by the slice of humanity that he has taken for his subject-matter. Not so Zweig, however. Where formerly Tolstoy (from whom, I imagine, Zweig derives very considerably) yearned for happiness for a section of humanity, Arnold Zweig has a father-feeling which embraces the whole world.

This feeling is revealed to us in his surpassingly fine work, “The Case of Sergeant Grischa.” The book has been reviewed in scores of papers in dozens of countries as being “the greatest war book yet written.” And that> no doubt, is very true. But the work is more than that; it is not too much to assert that it is the most influential peace book, that we have had since wars have been Indulged iu. With Sergeant Grischa, Zweig has typified the universal longing of exiled mankind for home; and in the same book he has typified, in Major-General Schieffenzahn, the lust for mechanisation which is so unfortunately modern. Schieffenzahn is for us a. very dreadful example of a man in the grip of a cold-blooded passion (if such a thing is not too paradoxical to be possible) for acquiring things—from souls to sovereignties. And this German officer was largely representative of the spirit in which the army was run. Further, the then spirit of the German military lords is, when one comes to look at the matter closely, remarkably akin to the feeling dominating the world at the present day. Arnold Zweig has seen—more power to him!—the dire results of this system of repression which turns kindly human beings into over-trained automata, and he has written his book (using the cumbersome legislative side of war as an inspired foil for the outlet of his judgment) to bring before mankind a picture of ruin, and the basic futility of ruin, which is overwhelming in its force and which is yet outstanding in its restraint. Zweig has done what Tolstoy, on a smaller scale, did: he has visualised the: cool savagery of arrogance. The German, though, is a greater writer than the Russian. For his is a canvas the size of the atlas, where the other’s was a fragment no larger than a half-length portrait. CHARLES CUNNINGHAM.