When we put beside them the trumpeting and
tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene
purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small
sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect
to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan
and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy
has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist
who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with
Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a
man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of
humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that
dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a
man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending
emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of
their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to
believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the
earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the
landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that
which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is
difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable
insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay
the oppressor flat with his fist.
Pages:
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85