as though he were ready to march them back to gaol.”[1]
Yet they all gathered about their young colleague, who came to them with the twofold glory of the writer and the hero of Sebastopol. Tourgenev, who had “wept and shouted ‘Hurrah !’” while reading the pages of Sebastopol, held out a brotherly hand. But the two men could not understand one another. Although both saw the world with the same clear vision, they mingled with that vision the hues of their inimical minds; the one, ironic, resonant, amorous, disillusioned, a devotee of beauty; the other proud, violent tormented with moral ideas, pregnant with a hidden God.
What Tolstoy could never forgive in these literary men was that they believed themselves an elect, superior caste; the crown of humanity. Into his antipathy for them there entered a good deal of the pride of the great noble and the officer who condescendingly mingles with liberal and middle-class scribblers.[2] It was also a characteristic of his—he himself knew it—to “oppose instinctively all trains of reasoning, all conclusions, which were generally admitted.”[3] A distrust of mankind, a latent con-
- ↑ Suarès: Tolstoï, edition of the Union pour l’Action morale, 1899 (reprinted, in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, under the title Tolstoï vivant).
- ↑ Tourgenev complained, in a conversation, of “this stupid nobleman’s pride, his bragging Junkerdom.”
- ↑ “A trait of my character, it may be good or ill, but it is one which was always peculiar to me, is that in spite of myself I always used to resist external epidemic influences… I had a hatred of the general tendency.” (Letter to P. Birukov.)
