HOW TOLSTOY WROTE

"RESURRECTION"

TOLSTOY is never satisfied with himself, or with what he has accomplished. He is always striving forward and aiming toward perfection. Whether you speak to him about his life, or your own, his novels, or his philosophical works, he will speak with equal clearness and sincerity of what is accomplished and of what is yet lacking. When his fifteen years' efforts to elucidate his view of the relation in which Art stands to Life were approaching completion, and he was finishing What is Art? he remarked to the present writer that he felt to blame for having spent so much time and effort on a work which would be read only by well-to-do and leisured people, on whom too much attention is already lavished. "It is not a book that can reach the people."

I replied that at least it gave me and others like me the clue to a perplexing question with reference to which we had been much at sea, and that that was a great service to us, and made it possible to feel and act as we could not have done without such assistance.

Yes, he quite agreed. It was just what he hoped to accomplish; but the fact remained that he had allowed himself to devote much labour to what

was, at best, but a secondary, not a primary, service of those who most lack aid.

Tolstoy does not seem to be depressed by such reflections. He wishes to see and state things as they are. Another in his place might have emphasised the indirect benefit to the labouring classes that may result from an exposure of the worthless and harmful nature of much that is called "art," and on which, at present, an enormous amount of human labour is wasted. But Tolstoy always considers the sequence. What is the first and most direct duty? is an ever-present question with him.

With regard to his own life-living as he does with his own family, who are comparatively well off-he has, of course, a room, food and clothes, etc., provided for him. And he does not satisfy himself with the thought that his clothes are of the plainest and cheapest; that he is a strict vegetarian, avoiding butter, milk, and eggs, as well as all expensive food, all intoxicants, and even such stimulants as tea and coffee; that his room has only the plainest old furniture, and that he uses as little money as possible. No! he says plainly that he cannot justify this way of life. To allow things to be provided for one by the use of money is not right. Circumstances-family ties have led him into a position which gives him leisure to write books, and he hopes these books do good. But to say, as he does, "I could not see my way to act otherwise-it came naturally to me to act so," though it is an explanation, does

not pretend to be a justification. When all is said and done, we are "unprofitable servants." This, indeed, is the frame of mind to which Tolstoy's view of life inevitably tends to bring every sincere man who accepts it. Ways of life, occupations, customs and beliefs generally approved by society are analysed, and shown to be based on selfishness, credulity, or stupidity. Arriving at these conclusions of the intellect, however, though they may modify our feelings and influence our life, does not abolish those defects or that nature in us which made the former occupations, customs, beliefs, etc., possible. What we shall do, or even what we can do in the future, depends very largely on what we have done in the past. Finite and imperfect beings cannot act perfectly, and if they could they would be out of place in a world in which not perfection but progress is man's normal condition.

All this follows inevitably from the belief that the human race has progressed, is progressing, and should progress. We must not advance at random, or mechanically, but have first to discern some aim ahead of our present practice. Selfsatisfaction produces stagnation. The publican who feels himself to be a sinner is more capable of improvement than the contented pharisee.

To have discerned and to compel others to recognise defects in social, political, national and religious conventions which we are in danger of regarding as sacrosanct is one of the greatest services Tolstoy has performed for his generation.

And nowhere has he done this more powerfully and effectively than in his last novel, Resurrection. It reminds one of Socrates, who told his judges that he was a gadfly stinging that lazy horse, the Athenian people, into action! Humanity must be up and doing -ever approaching a step nearer to the ideal of being "perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect."

The story of the production of Resurrection is marked all through with traces of the struggle between what could be done and what ideally should be done.

When his legal friend, Kóni, gave Tolstoy an outline of the story as it occurred in real life, Tolstoy at once perceived its value as framework for a novel; but he had much other work on hand that seemed more important. His artistic nature, long deprived of free and full scope, drew him on to write the novel, and he knew how many readers can be reached by a novel who can be touched by no other book-work; but there was the other work to do, and it seemed to him of more serious importance. What is Art? was not then written; The Christian Teaching was not finished (indeed, it never has been finished, and was eventually printed in England, in English and in Russian, in a somewhat incomplete condition). He has long wished to write on education, a subject on which prevailing opinions and customs seem to him terribly in need of sweeping reform. A clear, short work on philosophy: one which should put the best human thoughts on life,

death, matter, spirit, goodness, destiny, faith and credulity so simply that they might be grasped by any intelligent cabman, was another of the many tasks he had in contemplation. A thousand and one projects teemed in his fertile brain, and the novel had to struggle for existence with many a project that his conscience more fully approved of.

The result was that the novel got itself written with difficulty, again and again being put aside for other work. We may be quite sure that this struggle was not without influence on the writer and on what he wrote. It was this desire to render the utmost service of which he was capable that made even the novel, of which he only partly approved, what it is-a most powerful piece of propaganda. As W. T. Stead says: "It is gravid with all Count Tolstoy's distinctive teaching. It is a kind of shrapnel-shell of a novel. The novel is but the containing case. The genius of the author is the explosive force, which scatters its doctrines like the closely packed bullets among the enemy." What subjects of vital interest to the forward movement of humanity does it not touch upon? and which of them does it fail to set in a fresh light, almost compelling the reader to share the author's feeling? Non-resistance and the employment of violence among men, government and legality, the sex question, militarism, capital punishment, prisons, luxury, class distinctions, officialism, church superstition, vegetarianism, socialism, the land question, anarchism, nihilism,