COUNT TOLSTOI'S EARLY REMINISCENCES.* THERE are few more touching incidents
in the personal history of literature than that of the letter written by Tourguenief during his last illness to Tolstoi, in which he besought his great rival and friend to return once more to that field of study in which be had already won lasting fame. Such instances of generous loyalty among contemporaries—of which Thackeray's admiration for Dickens furnishes another charming example—go a great way towards confirming the verdict of ordinary critics. Tourguenief, though sympathetic, was exceedingly fastidious ; but in any case, the eloquent witness which one of the greatest novelists of the century was content to bear in favour of his compatriot must be allowed to have supreme weight, coming as it did at a supreme moment. And that his estimate was exaggerated, few readers of the present work will be prepared to affirm. It is true that it is not such a colossal achievement as his War and Peace, but none the less is it a work which only a genius of the very first order could have produced. Some readers, especially women, find the immensity of his canvas and the minuteness of his portraiture excessively fatiguing, and are never able to sur- mount the initial difficulty of Russian nomenclature. The latter obstacle remains in the present work, though the dramatis persons are far fewer ; but the frame is no longer (L) Souvenirs: Enfance —Adolescence—.7eunesm. Ouvrage trailnit Cu Busse, avec l'Autorisation de l'Autenv, pr Arvede Leanne. Paris: Librairie Hachette. —(2.) Mos Mintoireo : Enfance —Adolcsoonce—Jounesse. Tradait avec FAutorisa- tion de lAutenr, par E. Halperine. Paris : Perrin et Cie.—(3.) Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. By Count Lyof N. To!stoi. London: Yizetolly and CO.
epic, but domestic, and often idyllic in character and episodes. Again, there is less than usual of that grey atmosphere of hopelessness which broods over the work of most Russian novelists. Tolstoi is not so great an artist as Tourguenief ; but he is certainly less uniformly sombre, and his " Memories" abound in playful touches, forming an admirable contrast to those more forcible manifestations of his genius in which he best realises M. de Vogile's description of him as,—" Ce prodigienx Tolstoi qui terrasse mon admiration et enchaine mon jugement."
To these "Memories," which are now for the first time pre- sented to us in an English dress, a peculiar interest attaches from the fact that all Tolstoi's biographers unite in identifying him with Nicolas Irteneff, the central figure of this strangely fascinating work. In it the author has given a picture of the entire mental and moral growth of a boy between the ages of nine and eighteen, as told by himself in a series of discon- nected chapters, which combine the vividness of an instan- taneous record with the sympathy and insight of a mature observer. It is just this very combination which will prove a stumbling-block to some readers. No man, they will say, could recall with such astonishing vividness the events of his childhood, and no boy could have written such a diary at the time of the events described. Whether this be true or not, we can only say, speaking for ourselves, that it has had an effect little short of magical in evoking the scenes and senti- ments of childhood, a result which a mere literary tour de force could never have had the power of achieving.
Tolstoi's characters are astonishingly real. We get to know them as intimately as persons that we have known in the flesh, sometimes more intimately. But in spite of and along with this intimacy, English readers cannot help feeling all the while that they are brought into contact with strange and unfamiliar natures, whose thoughts and impulses and actions are not as ours, and yet are irresistibly true to life. This sense of novelty and background of strangeness is not without its charm, for the element of surprise is essential to recreation. It is to be noticed that these " Memories " remain a fragment, for Tolstoi, having begun them in 1851, laid them aside in 1857. As one of his translators remarks,—" Tolstoi seems to have hesitated, on resolving to publish these fragments, which passages to print and which to suppress. Successive editions vary in their contents : paragraphs, even whole chapters, have been printed, then suppressed, then reinserted." There is no effort at continuity in the plan of the work, but the gaps are not disconcerting, nor is the scene shifted so constantly as in War and Peace. The personages engaged are, in the main, the same throughout,—the father, the elder brother, and sister remaining more or less prominent all along. Others drop out, though in two cases their influence on the central character is abiding and indelible. In particular, the portrait of his nurse, Natalie Savichna, will go straight home to the hearts of all who have been fortunate enough to learn by personal experience of what absolute unselfishness and unfaltering devotion old servants are capable. Degraded, as a girl, from the rank of a housemaid to that of a farm-servant for wishing to marry a fellow-domestic, and restored on resigning her desire, we find her regarding the gift of enfranchisement as a sentence of exile, and devoting the remainder of her life to the service of her young mistress. Her simple, affectionate ways, endless industry, and homely, unfeigned grief for the death of Nicolas's mother, are illustrated in the most touching way imaginable. The account of her own last days is profoundly touching, and concludes with the following beautiful passage :
"She quitted life without regret, having no fear of death, but rather welcoming it as a boon. One often makes use of that ex- pression, but how rarely it is true ! It was impossible for Natalie Savichna to fear death, for she died in an unshaken faith, and she had fulfilled the law of the Gospel : her whole life had been nothing but pure and disinterested love and self-sacrifice. What because her religion might have been more elevated, because her life might have had a more exalted aim, shall we say that this rare soul is less worthy of tenderness and admiration She achieved the greatest and best work in the world : she died without regret or fear. They buried her, by her desire, not far from the chapel built over my mother's tomb. The nettles and thistles have invaded the spot where she rests. I never fail, when I visit the chapel, to approach the black railing which surrounds the grave of Natalie Savichna, and bow low before it. Sometimes I stop half-way between the chapel and the railing. Painful memories suddenly arise in my mind. I ask myself,—Has Providence only united me to these two beings in order to condemn me to eternal regrets ?"
Of his mother he says :—" When one tries to recall the features of a beloved person, so many recollections emerge at once that they obscure one's sight just as tears do. These are the tears of the heart." He can only recall a few charming details, but the ensemble escapes him. And yet the picture, though faint, is lifelike, and the references to his mother always marked by a rare affection and reverence. Another admirable sketch in this account of his childhood is that of his German tutor, a lonely old man, sensitive, but easily appeased ; with comical methods of self-assertion, and a dis- • interested affection not wholly exempt from the desire of obtaining a material quid pro quo. His father, too, is painted in vivid relief,—chivalrous, susceptible, and emotional ; an ' inveterate gambler; always needing an audience for the per- formance of a good action ; enviable on account of the perfect skill he showed in hiding from others as well as from himself the unpleasant side of life ; and so constantly at the mercy of his impulses that he never had time to acquire any principles ; being, for the rest, quite too well pleased with life to see the necessity of them. Here, of corn-se, the picture is considerably filled in from the point of view of subsequent experience, though the slow process of disillusionment which Nicholas • underwent in his boyhood is indicated with wonderful skill. But if the narrator is mercilessly candid in his descrip- tions of others, he is no less so towards himself. Nicholas is very far from being an ideal character, but rather one strangely compounded of good and evil, of ignoble curiosity and chivalrous impulses, sensitive and confident by turns. All these shifting traits are delightfully illustrated in the episode of his grandmother's birthday-party, where he loses his heart, child fashion, to the little Sonia, of whom he remarks that her face was one of those on which you do not expect to see a smile, and therefore, when it does come, it is all the more bewitching. In abrupt contrast to the pleasures and excitements of this first visit to Moscow, follow the chapters describing the sum- mons home to their mother's death-bed, and the strangely mingled feelings which the first death in a family arouses in the heart of a child. His chief consolation after all was over, was in the conversations he used to have with the old house- keeper, and in her simple faith, firmly believing with her that the soul of the departed remained forty days on the spot before , entering Paradise. On one occasion, immediately after a most touching exhibition of her grief, Natalie was able to grumble at having to serve out stores to a fellow-servant, on which Tolstoi acutely comments as follows :—
1 "At the period of which I write, I was much struck by this . abrupt transition from touching emotion to such grumbling and meddling. Afterwards, I understood by reflecting on it that what went on in her mind gave her the courage to attend to her duties, and that force of habit attracted her towards her usual occupations. Her grief was so violent that she found it useless to conceal the fact that she was able to busy herself about trifling matters : in- deed, she would not have understood how any one could have ever entertained such an idea. Vanity is the sentiment most incom- patible with genuine grief ; and, at the same time, vanity is such an integral part of human nature that it rarely loses its rights in the face of anguish, however violent. It then disguises itself under a desire to appear afflicted, or unhappy, or courageous ; and these base sentiments, which we do not own even to ourselves, but which we rarely escape from—even in the most acute suffering— enervate and degrade our grief and deprive it of sincerity. But Natalie Savichna was too profoundly wretched to have room in her heart for any such desire : she only lived by sheer force of habit."
The second and third divisions of the book, entitled " Boy- hood " and " Youth " respectively, are even more absorbingly interesting than the chapters of the charm Of which we have just given a hasty and imperfect outline. They supply the most convincing proof of the proposition, often maintained in these columns, that freedom is never denied to genius in the treat- ment of difficult and delicate problems. Frank and outspoken though Count Tolstoi is, no wholesome mind could take the slightest harm from the perusal of these pages, any more than that of War and Peace. Such a work, partaking largely of the nature of confessions, must perhaps at times exert a humiliating effect upon the reader ; but Count Tolstoi has shown that a realistic treatment need involve no in- herent degradation. Such a theme as that which he has chosen might prove insupportable in the hands of one of that school who think that their readers can never be too often reminded that man is an animal. In Count Tolstoi's hands it has been developed into a work of strange and fascinating in- terest, in reading which a reviewer falls so completely under the magician's spell that the exercise of his critical faculty is entirely suspended, and the duty of commenting upon what he has read provokes the unsatisfactory conviction that the utmost praise he can bestow, while doubtless appearing exaggerated to persons unfamiliar with the work, will fall far short of the expectation of those who have read it.
In the quotations which occur in the foregoing notice, while fully conscious of their shortcomings, we have pre- ferred our own renderings from one of the two authorised French versions, to the recently published anonymous English translation for which Messrs. Vizetelly are re- sponsible. Failing a knowledge of the original, it is im- possible for us to state positively whether it is faithful or not. It is, at any rate, almost unreadably angular, and some of the finest passages—notably the wonderful description of a summer day in the country (see p. 323 et seqq.)—are reduced to the strangest bathos by the grotesque homeliness of the language employed,—e.g. : "When tiny gray morning clouds filled the heavens, and I shivered after my bath, I often set out on a pathless tramp across forest and meadow, wetting my boots through and through with delight in the fresh dew." Far less ungainly is the version of E. Halperine :—" Quand le ciel etait convert de petits nuages gris et que je me sentais refroidi par le bain, je m'en allais, souvent sans m'inquieter de ma route, it ti-avers les champs et les bois, en mouillant delicieusement mes pieds k travers mes bottes dans la rosee du matin." In the same chapter, the English translator has "the sound of the snipe" (p. 327), where both French versions have caille. It is only fair to add that the French versions differ widely inter se. Thus, air de vigueur in that of M. Arvede Barine, becomes forte corpulence in that of M. Halperine. But in point of literary finish and picturesque- ness, they are at all points infinitely superior to that published by Messrs. Vizetelly.
Previous page
