Ten Novels And Their Authors (41 page)

For when, at length, he left home on the disastrous but celebrated journey which ended in his death, it was not because he had at last decided to take the step which his conscience and the representations of his followers urged him to take, but to get away from his wife. The immediate cause of his action was fortuitous. He had gone to bed and, after a while, heard Sonya rummaging among the papers in his study. The secrecy with which he had made his will preyed upon his mind, and it may be that he thought then that she had somehow learned of its existence and was looking for it. When she had gone, he got up, took some manuscripts, packed a few clothes and, having roused the doctor who had for some time been living in the house, told him that he was leaving home. Alexandra was awakened, the coachman hauled out of bed, the horses were harnessed, and he drove,
accompanied by the doctor, to the station. It was five in the morning. The train was crowded, and he had to stand on the open platform at the end of the carriage in the cold and rain. He stopped first at Shamardin, where his sister was a nun at the convent, and there Alexandra joined him. She brought news that the Countess, on finding that Tolstoy was gone, had tried to commit suicide. She had done this more than once before, but as she took little pains to keep her intention to herself, the attempts resulted not in tragedy, but in fuss and bother. Alexandra pressed him to move on, in case her mother discovered where he was and followed him. They set out for Rostov-on-Don. He had caught cold, and was far from well; in the train he grew so ill that the doctor decided they must stop at the next station. This was at a place called Astapovo. The station-master, hearing who the sick man was, put his house at his disposal.

Next day Tolstoy telegraphed for Chertkov, and Alexandra sent for her eldest brother and asked him to bring a doctor from Moscow. But Tolstoy was too great a figure for his movements to remain unknown, and within twenty-four hours a newspaper-man told the Countess where he was. With those of her children who were at home, she hastened to Astapovo, but he was so ill by then that it was thought better not to tell him of her arrival, and she was not allowed to enter the house. The news of his illness created world-wide concern. During the week it lasted, the station at Astapovo was thronged by representatives of the Government, police officers, railway officials, pressmen, photographers and many others. They lived in railway carriages, side-tracked for their accommodation, and the local telegraph office could hardly cope with the work put on it. Tolstoy was dying in a blaze of publicity. More doctors arrived, till at last there were five to attend him. He was often delirious, but in his lucid moments worried about Sonya, whom he still believed to be at home and unaware of his whereabouts. He knew he was
going to die. He had feared death; he feared it no longer. ‘This is the end,’ he said, ‘and it doesn’t matter.’ He grew worse. In his delirium he continued to cry out: ‘To escape! To escape!’ At last Sonya was admitted into the room. He was unconscious. She fell to her knees and kissed his hand; he sighed, but gave no sign that he knew she had come. A few minutes after six in the morning, on Sunday, November 7, 1910, he died.

(5)

Tolstoy began to write
War and Peace
when he was thirty-six. That is a very good age at which to set about writing a master-piece. By then an author has presumably acquired an adequate knowledge of the technique of his craft, he has gained a wide experience of life, he is still in full possession of his intellectual vigour and his creative power is at its height. The period Tolstoy chose to deal with was that of the Napoleonic wars, and the climax is Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the burning of Moscow and the retreat and destruction of his armies. When he started upon his novel, it was with the notion of writing a tale of family life among the gentry, and the historical incidents were to serve merely as a background. The persons of the story were to undergo a number of experiences which would profoundly affect them spiritually, and in the end, after much suffering, they would enjoy a quiet and happy life. It was only in the course of writing that Tolstoy placed more and more emphasis on the titanic struggle between the opposing powers, and conceived what is somewhat grandly called a philosophy of history. Some time ago, Mr. Isaiah Berlin published a most interesting and instructive little book, called
The Hedgehog and the Fox
, in which he showed that Tolstoy’s ideas on the subject I must now briefly deal with were inspired by those of Joseph de Maistre, an eminent diplomatist, in a work entitled
Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg
. That is
not to discredit Tolstoy. It is no more than novelist’s business to originate ideas than it is to invent the persons who serve as his models. Ideas are there, just as are human beings, their environment of town and country, the incidents of their lives, and in fact everything that concerns them, for him to make use of for his private purpose, which is to create a work of art. Having read Mr. Berlin’s book, I felt constrained to read
Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg
. The ideas which Tolstoy set forth with some elaboration in the second part of the epilogue to
War and Peace
, de Maistre expounded in three pages, and the gist of them is contained in a phrase:
C’est l’opinion qui perd les batailles, et c’est l’opinion qui les gagne
.’ Tolstoy had seen war in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol, and his own experience enabled him to give vivid descriptions of the various battles in which sundry characters in his novel were engaged. What he had observed concorded very well with the views of de Maistre. But the piece he wrote is long-winded and somewhat involved, and I think one gets a better notion of his opinions from scattered remarks in the course of the narrative and from Prince Andrew’s reflections. In passing, I may interject that this is the most suitable way in which a novelist can deliver his ideas.

Tolstoy’s idea was that owing to fortuitous circumstances, unknown forces, errors of judgment, unforeseen accidents, there could be no such thing as an exact science of war, and so there could be no such thing as military genius. It was not, as commonly supposed, great men who affected the course of history, but an obscure force that ran through the nations and drove them unconsciously to victory or defeat. The leader of an advance was in the position of a horse harnessed to a coach and started full-tilt downhill – at a certain point the horse ceases to know whether he is dragging the coach or the coach is forcing him on. It was not by his strategy or his big battalions that Napoleon won his battles, for his
orders were not obeyed, since either the situation had changed or they were not delivered in time; but because the enemy was seized with a conviction that the battle was lost and so abandoned the field. The result depended on a thousand incalculable chances, any one of which might prove decisive in an instant. ‘So far as their own free will was concerned, Napoleon and Alexander contributed no more by their actions to the accomplishment of such and such an event than the private soldier who was compelled to fight for them as a recruit or a conscript.’ ‘Those who are known as great men are really labels in history, they give their name to events, often without having so much connection with the facts as a label has.’ For Tolstoy they were no more than figure-heads, who were carried on by a momentum they could neither resist nor control. There is surely some confusion here. I do not see how he reconciles his conviction of the ‘predestined and irresistible necessity’ of occurrences with the ‘caprices of chance’; for when fate comes in at the door, chance flies out of the window.

It is hard to resist the impression that Tolstoy’s philosophy of history was, in part at least, occasioned by his wish to depreciate Napoleon. He seldom appears in person in the course of
War and Peace
, but when he does, he is made to seem petty, gullible, silly and ridiculous. Tolstoy calls him ‘that infinitesimal tool in history, who at no time, not even in exile, showed any manly dignity’. Tolstoy is outraged that even the Russians should look upon him as a great man. He had not even a good seat on a horse. Here, I think, it is well to pause. The French Revolution gave rise to scores of young men who were as ambitious, as clever, as resolute and as unscrupulous as the son of the Corsican lawyer; and one cannot but ask oneself how it happened that this particular young man, of insignificant appearance, with a foreign accent, without money or influence, managed so to make his way in the world that after winning battle after battle he made
himself dictator of France, and brought half Europe under his sway. If you see a bridge-player win an international tournament, you may ascribe it to luck or to the excellence of his partner; but if, no matter who his partner is, he goes on winning tournaments through a number of years, it is surely simpler to allow that he has a peculiar aptitude for the game, and outstanding gifts, than to claim that his triumphs are the result of the immense, irresistible pressure of antecedent and contingent events. I should have thought a great general needed that same combination of qualities, knowledge, flair, boldness, the intelligence to calculate chances and the intuition that enables him to judge his adversaries’ mentality, as are needed by the great bridge-player. Of course Napoleon was aided by the circumstances of his time, but it is only prejudice that can deny that he had the genius to take advantage of them.

All this, however, does not affect the power and interest of
War and Peace
. The narrative carries you along with the impetuous rush of the Rhône at Geneva as it hurries to meet the placid waters of Lake Leman. There are said to be something like five hundred characters. They stand firmly on their feet. This is a wonderful achievement. The interest is not concentrated, as in most novels, on two or three person, or even on a single group, but on the members of four families belonging to the aristocracy, the Rostovs, the Bolkonskis, the Kuragins and the Bezukhovs. The novel, as the title indicates, deals with war and peace, and that is the sharply contrasted background against which their fates are presented. One of the difficulties a novelist has to cope with when his theme requires him to deal with events violently diverse, with more groups than one, is to make the transition from one set of events to another, from one group to another, so plausible that the reader accepts it with docility. If the author succeeds in doing this, the reader finds he has been told what he needs to be told about one set of circumstances, one set
of persons, and is ready to be told about other circumstances, other persons, whereof for a time he had heard nothing. On the whole, Tolstoy has managed to perform this difficult feat so skilfully that you seem to be following a single thread of narration.

Like writers of fiction in general, he framed his characters on persons he knew, or knew of, but it appears that he did not merely use them as models for his imagination to work upon, but drew faithful portraits of them. The thriftless Count Rostov is a portrait of his grandfather, Nicholas Rostov of his father, and the pathetic, charming, ugly Princess Mary of his mother. It has sometimes been thought that in the two men, Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrew Bolkonski, Tolstoy had himself in mind; and if this is so, it is perhaps not fantastical to suggest that, conscious of the contradictions in himself, in thus creating two contrasted individuals on the one model of himself he sought to clarify and understand his own character.

Both these men, Pierre and Prince Andrew, are in love with Natasha, Count Rostov’s younger daughter, and in her Tolstoy has created the most delightful girl in fiction. Nothing is so difficult as to portray a young girl who is at once charming and interesting. Generally the young girls of fiction are colourless (Amelia in Vanity Fair), priggish (Fanny in
Mansfield Park
), too clever by half (Constantia Durham in
The Egoist
), or little geese (Dora in
David Copperfield
), silly flirts or innocent beyond belief. It is understandable that they should be an awkward subject for the novelist to deal with, for at that tender age the personality is undeveloped. Similarly, a painter can only make a face interesting when the vicissitudes of life, thought, love and suffering have given it character. In the portrait of a girl, the best he can do is to represent the charm and beauty of youth. But Natasha is entirely natural. She is sweet, sensitive and sympathetic, childish, womanly already, idealistic, quick-tempered, warmhearted,
headstrong, capricious and in every way enchanting. Tolstoy created many women, and they are wonderfully real, but never another who wins the affection of the reader as does Natasha. She was drawn from Tanya Bers, the younger sister of his wife, and he was charmed by her as Charles Dickens was charmed by his wife’s younger sister, Mary Hogarth. An instructive parallel!

To both the men who loved her, to Prince Andrew and Pierre, Tolstoy attributed his own passionate search for the meaning and purpose of life. Prince Andrew is the more obvious. He is a product of the conditions prevalent then in Russia. A rich man, in possession of vast estates, he owns a great number of serfs, from whom he can exact forced labour and, if they displease him, have them stripped and flogged, or wrest them from wife and children and send them to serve as common soldiers in the army. And if a girl or married woman takes his fancy, he can send for her and use her for his pleasure. Prince Andrew is handsome, with marked features, weary eyes and an air of boredom. He is in fact the
beau ténébreux
of romantic fiction. A gallant figure, proud of his race and rank, high-minded, but haughty, dictatorial, intolerant and unreasonable. He is cold and arrogant with his equals, patronising but kind with his inferiors. He is intelligent, and ambitious to distinguish himself. With a nice touch, Tolstoy wrote of him: ‘Prince Andrew always became specially keen when he had to guide a young man and help him to wordly success. Under cover of obtaining help for another, which from pride he would never accept for himself, he kept in touch with the circle which confers success and which attracted him.’