Word: tolstoys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Author Cary is an Irish-born, Oxford-educated writer who has been widely acclaimed in England. The Moonlight is the second of his eleven novels to be published here. Readers may conclude that some English critics, who compare him to Tolstoy and Fielding, are overenthusiastic. But The Moonlight is superior to most of the fiction on the stands these days...
...British friend lent him Count Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. The Russian Christian's doctrine of nonviolent resistance to unjust rule gripped the Hindu lawyer's mind. "Young birds," wrote Tolstoy, ". . . know very well when there is no longer room for them in the eggs. ... A man who has outgrown the State can no more be coerced into submission to its laws than can the fledgling be made to re-enter its shell...
When Mann writes in this way of Goethe and Tolstoy, he is not arguing that they simply and naturally kept to the middle of the road. On the contrary, he sees them as men who spent most of their lives and will power struggling to discipline passionate "animal" qualities. Out of this unresolved but "lofty encounter of nature and spirit" came the synthesis most admired by Mann-a harmonious and exalted mixture of primitive ardor and civilized judgment...
...most great men, this struggle raged all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous. Tolstoy, for example (a child of nature whose animal passions filled his novels with "rich streams of ... creative primeval lustiness and health"), fought his passions until he believed he had converted himself from a lecherous, iconoclastic youth into an apostolic, vegetarian writer of Christian tracts ("I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body," he said). But a rabbit had only to jump up under his feet to make him let out a hunter's bloodthirsty yell. One evening, out of sheer exuberance...
...Tolstoy exclaimed, "had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain forever questions!" Thomas Mann echoes him: "Even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand [in a period] which has . . . taken up a position of reaction against classic rationalism and intellectualism." In place of decisive answers, readers of these essays will find a series of rich, undogmatic examinations that rank with the finest of their...