that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly assailed in The
Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select Tristan
and Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic
caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano
sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse
hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of
their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the
people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy's
tragedy, as it was the tragedy of Walt Whitman.

Curious students can find all they wish of Tolstoy's psychology in
Merejkowski's book. One thing we cannot forbear dwelling
upon--Dostoievsky's significance in any discussion of Tolstoy.
Dostoievsky was a profounder nature, greater than Tolstoy, though he
was not the finished literary artist. All that Tolstoy tried to be,
Dostoievsky was. He did not "go to the people" (that pose of
dilettantish anarchy)--he was born of them; he did not write about
Siberian prisons from hearsay, he lived in them; he did not attempt
to dive into the deep, social waters of the "submerged tenth," because
he himself seldom emerged to the surface. In a word, Dostoievsky is a
profounder psychologist than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his
attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul,
terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal
personality. And he had the courage of his chimera.

Tolstoy feared art as being too artificial, and, as Merejkowski shows:
"From the dread mask of Caliban peeps out the familiar and by no means
awe-inspiring physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat squire,
the gentleman Positivist of the sixties." He never took writing as
seriously as Dostoievsky; in Tolstoy there is a strong leaven of the
aristocrat, the man who rather despises a mere pen worker. Contrast
Dostoievsky's attitude before his work, recall the painful parturition
of books, his sweating, remorseful days and nights when he could not
produce. And now Tolstoy tells us that Uncle Tom's Cabin is greater
than Shakespeare. Is it any wonder Turgenieff remonstrated with him?
Is it any wonder if, after reading one of his latter-day tracts, we
are reminded of The Washerwoman of Finchley Common, that classic in
the polemics of sniffling piety? The truth is that Tolstoy, a
wonderful artist in plastic portraiture, consciously or unconsciously
fashione