faded, and became less poignant; the wound healed,[1] and in none of his subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain and of vengeful anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this sublime profession of the faith of the artist who creates with his life-blood, this exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering “which are the lot of the thinker”; this disdain for Olympian art. Those of his later works which deal with the criticism of art will be found to treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary and less mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of that human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing his self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when upon returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation.
I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It is impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is the man who writes to Fet:
“If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he must insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must mock at them until he spits his sides.”[2]
- ↑ In time he even came to justify suffering—not only personal suffering, but the sufferings of others. “For the assuagement of the sufferings of others is the essence of the rational life. How then should the object of labour be an object of suffering for the labourer? It is as though the labourer were to say that an untilled field is a grief to him.” (Life, chap, xxxiv.-xxxv.)
- ↑ February 23, 1860. Further Letters, pp. 19-20. It was for this reason that the “melancholy and dyspeptic” art of Tourgenev displeased him.
