But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy’s! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese:
“Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that man!”
Or in this defiance of the world:
“I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man is himself a man to be suppressed.”
Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the “crimes” of his past life:
“I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they cannot remember after death. What happiness if
words: ‘Thy Will be done!’” (Troisième lettre de la Montague.) Compare with:
“I am replacing all my prayers with the Pater Noster. All the requests I can make of God are expressed with greater moral elevation by these words: ‘Thy Will be done!’” (Tolstoy’s Journal, in the Caucasus, 1852–3.)
The similarity of thought is no less striking in the province of art:
“The first rule of the art of writing,” said Rousseau, “is to speak plainly and to express one’s thought exactly.”
And Tolstoy:
“Think what you will, but in such a manner that every word may be understood by all. One cannot write anything bad in perfectly plain language.”
I have demonstrated elsewhere that the satirical descriptions of the Paris Opera in the Nouvelle Héloise have much in common with Tolstoy’s criticisms in What is Art?
