Not in a spirit of hypercriticism, but as curious matter for speculation, it might not be amiss to ask whether Ivan Ilyitch is, after all, a consistent reality? That in conventional critical language he is true to the broad general facts of human nature is undeniable. A man whose career of health and worldly prosperity had been suddenly arrested by sickness and the fear of death might suffer in the way that Ivan Ilyitch does, if he were a man of sensitive moral fibre, no matter what amount of selfishness and indifference to his better impulses his life might have engendered. Tolstoï himself, for example, would have suffered thus if he had been cut down in a similar fashion at any time during the ten years of which he writes, "I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man." Mutatis mutandis, and allowing for some penitential exaggeration, these words would fairly well describe the life of the average young man not only in Russia, but in France or England or America. Tolstoï says that he cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing. But he also says that during those years he had been stifling his higher aspirations. The average man who has no higher aspirations to stifle looks back upon such misspent years with neither horror nor loathing. A tough conscience and a good digestion carry a sinner through life pretty comfortably. The digestion may be impaired, but the tough conscience endureth. The Reviewer remembers hearing a clergyman say that the cheerfuller death-beds were those of the sinners rather than of the saints. In one of his poems Byron asserts that death has greater terrors for the pious ascetic than for the sated voluptuary.
Tolstoï has simply, by a supreme effort of imagination, put himself, with his sensitive conscience, his acuter perceptions, in the place of the stricken Ivan. So Dickens has imagined himself in Bill Sykes's place, in Jonas Chuzzlewit's place, and written out the sensations he would have experienced. A brutal animal like Bill Sykes, a narrow-minded sneak like Chuzzlewit, could never feel as the novelist makes them feel. Hawthorne was more successful with Dimmesdale, for Hawthorne was Dimmesdale, and he could picture to himself his mental furnishment. The greatest genius is as hopelessly limited within the four walls of his own being as the greatest dunce. "The difficult task of knowing another soul," says George Eliot, "is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes." Well, that difficult task is not for the great geniuses either. We are all of us hero-worshippers, and inclined to pay divine honors to our idols. The great genius stares with purblind eyes into the infinite, and because he sees a little further than we do we call him a seer, we reverence him as a demi-god. He casts his poor little plummet into the fathomless ocean of human nature, and because he goes deeper than we do we think he has touched bottom. When we say that a writer has great insight into character, we mean that he describes the people around us in a way that seems to us, who know even less than he, true and life-like. When he concerns himself with fictitious characters it is impossible to find him out. When he deals in history he is equally safe, for he makes better use of the materials that are at every one's command. A vivid conception of a man or a period need not be a true one,—indeed, is probably a false one.
