Sebastopol

Copyright, 1887, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

All rights reserved.

LEO TOLSTOÏ.

When I read in the excellent essay of M. Ernest Dupuy that “Count Leo N. Tolstoï was born on the 28th of August, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, a village near Inla, in the government of Inla,” I have a sense of lunar remoteness in him. It is as if these geographical expressions were descriptive of localities in the ungazetteered regions of the moon; and yet this far-fetched Russian nobleman is precisely the human being with whom at this moment I find myself in the greatest intimacy; not because I know him, but because I know myself through him; because he has written more faithfully of the life common to all men, the universal life which is the most personal life, than any other author whom I have read. This merit the Russian novelists have each in some degree; Tolstoï has it in pre-eminent degree, and that is why the reading of “Peace and War,” “Anna Karenina,” “My Religion,” “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” “Scenes at the Siege of Sebastopol,” “The Cossacks,” “The Death of Ivan Illitch,” “Katia,” and “Polikouchka,” forms an epoch for thoughtful people. In these books you seem to come face to face with human nature for the first time in fiction. All other fiction at times seems fiction; these alone seem the very truth always.

The facts of Tolstoï’s life, as one gathers them from the essays of M. Dupuy and of M. Melchoir de Voguë, are briefly that he studied Oriental languages and the law at the University of Kazan; then entered the army, served in the Crimean war, resigned at its close; gave himself up to society and literature in St. Petersburg; and finally left the capital for his estates, where he has since lived the life of lowly usefulness which he believes to be the true Christian life. The man whose career was in camps, in courts, and in salons, now makes shoes for peasants, and humbly seeks to instruct them and guide them by the little tales he writes for them in the intervals of his great work of newly translating the gospels. He married the daughter of a German physician of Moscow, and his wife and children share his toils and ideals. Not much more is known of the retirement of this very great man; but I heard that an American traveller who lately passed a day with him found him steadfast in the conviction that withdrew him from society--the conviction that Jesus Christ came into the world to teach men how to live in it, and that He meant literally what He said when He forbade us luxury, war, litigation, unchastity, and hypocrisy. His latest book, “Que Faire,” is a relentlessly searching statement of the facts and reasons which forced this conviction upon him.

It is a sorrowful comment on our Christianity that this frank acceptance of Christ’s message seems eccentric and even mad to the world. But it is the “increasing purpose” which runs through all Tolstoï’s work from first to last; it is what makes him great above all others who have written fiction. It does not much matter where you begin with him; you feel instantly that the man is mighty, and mighty through his conscience; that he is not trying to surprise or dazzle you with his art, but that he is trying to make you think clearly and feel rightly about vital things with which “art” has often dealt with diabolical indifference or diabolical malevolence.

I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoï’s have come, but for my own part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me, when I praise them, that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoï’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself; as for the names, they are necessarily Russian. It is when some one tells me they are “pessimistic” that I really despair. I have always supposed pessimism to be the doctrine of the prevalence of evil, and these books perpetually teach me that the good prevails, and always will prevail whenever men put self aside, and strive simply and humbly to be good. We are all so besotted with dreams and vanities that we have come to think that the right will accomplish itself spectacularly, splendidly; but Tolstoï makes us know that it never can do so. He teaches such of us as will hear him that the Right is the sum of each man’s poor little personal effort to do right, and that the success of this effort means daily, hourly self-renunciation, self-abasement, the sinking of one’s pride in absolute squalor before duty. This is not pleasant; the heroic ideal of righteousness is more picturesque, more attractive; but is this not the truth? Let any one try, and see! I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoï has done in his conception of Karenin at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.

In fact, Tolstoï brings us back in his fiction, as in his life, to the Christ ideal. “Except ye become as little children”--that is what he says in every part of his work; and this work, so incomparably good æsthetically, to my thinking, is still greater ethically. You will not find its lessons put at you, any more than you will those of life. No little traps are sprung for your surprise; no calcium light is thrown upon this climax or that; no virtue or vice is posed for you; but if you have ears to hear or eyes to see, listen and look, and you will have the sense of inexhaustible significance.

I happened to begin with “The Cossacks”--that epic of nature, and of a young man’s sorrowful, wandering desire to get into harmony with the divine scheme of beneficence; then I read “Anna Karenina”--that most tragical history of loss and ruin to brilliancy and loveliness, out of which the good can alone save itself; then I came to “Peace and War,” that great assertion of the sufficiency of common men in all crises, and the insufficiency of heroes; I found some chapters of the “Scenes at the Siege of Sebastopol,” and I read them with a yet keener sense of this truth; “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth” made me acquainted for the first time in literature with the real heart of the young of our species; “The Death of Ivan Illitch” expressed the horror and the stress of mortality, with its final bliss, and made it a part of Nature as I never had realized it before; “Polikouchka,” slight, broken, almost unconcluded, was perfect and powerful and infinite in its scope of mercy and sympathy.

I know very well that I do not speak of these books in measured terms; I cannot. As yet my sense of obligation to them is so great that I neither can make nor wish to make a close accounting with their author, and I am not disposed to exploit them for the reader’s entertainment. As often as I have tried to do this their æsthetic interest has escaped me. I have been ashamed to tag them with the tattered old adjectives of praise, and I have found myself thinking of them on their ethical side. But they exist increasingly in English and in French, and the best way, the only way, to get a due sense of them is to read them.

W. D. HOWELLS.

SEBASTOPOL.

SEBASTOPOL IN DECEMBER, 1854.

Dawn tinges the horizon above Mount Sapouné; the shadows of the night have left the surface of the sea, which, now dark blue in color, only awaits the first ray of sunshine to sparkle merrily; a cold wind blows from the fog-enveloped bay; there is no snow on the ground, the earth is black, but frost stings the face and cracks underfoot. The quiet of the morning is disturbed only by the incessant murmuring of the waves, and is broken at long intervals by the dull roar of cannon. All is silent on the men-of-war; the hour-glass has just marked the eighth hour. Towards the north the activity of day replaces little by little the tranquillity of night. On this side a detachment of soldiers is going to relieve the guard, and the click of their guns can be heard; a surgeon hurries towards his hospital; a soldier crawls out of his hut, washes his sunburned face with icy water, turns towards the east, and repeats a prayer, making rapid signs of the cross. On that side an enormous, heavy cart with creaking wheels reaches the cemetery where they are going to bury the corpses heaped almost to the top of the vehicle. Approach the harbor and you are disagreeably surprised by a mixture of odors; you smell coal, manure, moisture, meat. There are thousands of different objects: wood, flour, gabions, beef, thrown in heaps here and there; soldiers of different regiments, some provided with guns and with bags, others with neither guns nor bags, crowd together; they smoke, they quarrel, and they bear loads upon the steamer stationed near the plank bridge and ready to sail. Small private boats, filled with all sorts of people--soldiers, sailors, merchants, and women--are constantly arriving and departing. “This way for Grafskaya!” and two or three retired sailors rise in their boats and offer you their services. You choose the nearest one, stride over the half-decomposed body of a black horse lying in the mud two steps from the boat, and seat yourself near the helm. You push off from the shore; all around you the sea sparkles in the morning sun; in front of you an old sailor in an overcoat of camel’s-hair cloth and a lad with blond hair are diligently rowing. You turn your eyes upon the gigantic ships with scratched hulls scattered over the harbor, upon the shallops,--black dots on the sparkling azure of the water--upon the pretty houses of the town, to whose light-colored tones the rising sun gives a rosy tinge, upon the hostile fleet standing like light-houses in the crystalline distance of the sea, and, at last, upon the foaming waves, where play the salt drops which the oars dash into the air. You hear at the same time the regular sound of voices which comes over the water, and the grand roar of the cannonade at Sebastopol, which seems to increase in strength as you listen.

At the thought that you, you also, are in Sebastopol, your whole soul is filled with a sentiment of pride and of valor, and your blood runs quicker in your veins.

“Straight towards the Constantine, your excellency,” says the old sailor, turning around to the direction you are giving to the helm.

“Look! she has still got all her cannons,” remarks the lad with the blond hair as the boat glides along the side of the ship.

“She is quite new, she ought to have them. Korniloff lives on board,” repeats the old man, examining in his turn the man-of-war.

“There! it has burst!” cries the lad, after a long silence, his eyes fixed upon a small white cloud of drifting smoke suddenly appearing in the sky above the south bay, and accompanied by the strident noise of a shell explosion.