About the Book
THE prologue, with its guest-table and shadowy modern personages, is, on the whole, unnecessary, though no doubt it does serve the useful, if obvious, purpose of giving the keynote of what is to follow. The guests are not individual personages, but conventional modern types. Apart from the main text, this prologue is interesting as an admirable example of Tolstoy's almost unique faculty for condensation-a faculty genuinely natural to him, though it may seem to some strange to affirm this of the author of the most diffuse works of fiction of our time. With a few keen rapid touches he sways the reader's mind this way and that, till he suddenly brings it up short, as a bewildered person traversing the dark after a swift guide abruptly comes upon a dead wall, with these concluding words: -" It appears, therefore, that no one should lead a good, upright, spiritual life; the utmost people may do is to discourse about it." Then, without further preamble, the story opens, one hundred years after the birth of Christ, in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, and at the house of one Juvenal, a wealthy merchant of Tarsus in the province of Cilicia. This Juvenal has a son Julius, who is the chief personage in the story. He and his friend, Pamphilius, respectively represent Worldly Wisdom and Christianity "a la" Leo Tolstoy, and the whole narrative turns upon the intellectual ebb and flow set in motion by the mental and other differences of the two friends. The old physician, who plays so important a part in restraining Julius from accepting Christianity, is clearly meant to typify the scientific mind.
No one can deny the singular fairness and frankness of Count Tolstoy in this remarkable book. So frank, so fair is he, indeed, that again and again he, as Pamphilius, distinctly emerges the worse from the intellectual encounter. A Christian of his own sect might read Work While Ye Have the Light, and despairingly exclaim, '' Almost thou persuadest me to be a Pagan." When, in the end, Julius does join the serene company wherein his friend Pamphilius moves like some beneficent being altogether above the frailties of common humanity, one is apt to think-at any rate, many readers will think-that his case is but another instance of "when the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be." It is only fair to add that iu the sayings of Pamphilius, who is unmistakably no other than Count Tolstoy himself, there is little or nothing of that barren ethical rigour, of that almost savage abnegation of what are commonly called the just claims of the body, which characterizes the Kreutzer Sonata and various essays and sketches of a similar nature. At the same time, it is the Asiatic fanatic rather than the Western enthusiast who speaks to us even in the soft low words, even in the serene thoughts, of Pamphilius. Tolstoy may be forgiven his belief in the nobility and beauty of the ethics of the Thebaid if he give us, in his old age, work so good, even if of a polemical nature.
After perusal of the predecessor of this book, one was tempted to apply to Tolstoy Senex what Horace wrote of one whom he knew well, and recognized as a familiar type,
"Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti
Se puero, castigator censorquc minorum."
Now that temptation is removed. Difficult and hard to accept is the ethical teaching of this Slav prophet; uninviting, the way of salvation he indicates; he has a bitter tongue for the comfortable hypocrisies of the day; an unsparing censor he of all moralities but that which he believes to be the only morality, indivisible and incorruptible, and not to be mistaken. But he has removed, now and conclusively, that reproach of barren fantasy which lay like a shade against the light of his genius.
-"The Academy," Volume 39"
