BERNARD SHAW AND TOLSTOY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3264, 8 July 1911, Page 3

BERNARD SHAW AND TOLSTOY.

AUTHOR OF “RESURRECTION” ACCUSED OF “INHUMAN CALLOUSNESS.” RUSSIA INDIGNANT. A review of Mr Aylmer Maude’s “Life of Tolstoy,” by Mr G. Bernard Shaw, which apnears in the current number of the “Fabian- News,” has aroused a storm of indignation in Russia, where it is described as wantonly and venomously malevolent, and prompted solely by the British publicist’s overweening predilection for per-sonal-notoriety. In the course of his review Mr Shaw writes;—“Arid yet no English old maid of county family, living in a cathedral town on £3OO a year, could have made more absurd attempts to start an ideal social system by private misconduct than he. He put on the dress of a moujik exactly as Don Quixote put on a suit of armour. He tried to ignore money as Don Quixote did. ‘ ‘He left his own skilled work to build houses that could hardly be induced to stand, and to make hoots that an Army contractor would have ben ashamed of. He let his property drift to the verge of insolvency and ruin like the laziest Irish squire because he disapproved of property as an institution. “And he was neither honest nor respectable in his follies. He connived at all sorts of evasions. Ho would n-ot take money on a journey, but lie would take a companion who would buy rail-wav tickets and pay hotel bills behind his back.

“He would not own property or copyrights ; but he wou'd make them over to his wife and children, and live in their country house in Vasnaya and their town house in Moscow very comfortably, only occasionally casing his conscience by making things as difficult and unpleasant for them as possible. “In the ordinary affairs of life he shirked every uncongenial responsibility, whilst availing himself of every luxury he really eared for. And he railed at his wife and family for enabling him to do it, treating his wife as ethically inferior because she insisted on saving the family from ruin, until at last she gave up as impossible, and managed for him without saying anything harsher than her Russian formula, _ ‘Nothing matters so long as the baby is not cry-

ing.’ ” In another passage Mr Shaw shows that Tolstoy “s discontent with liis environment- once took an aspect of “inhuman callousness,” as it led him to leave home and keep his wife for hours in the greatest anxiety at a time when the most ordinary considerateness would have led him to save her all possible excitement. Mr Shaw is “amazed at the extent to which a man who was boundlessly sympathetic on paper with imaginary beings could be so outrageously inconsiderate to real people in Ins own home.” ' All this is very stinging, but Mr. Shaw does not forget to pay tribute to Tolstoy’s genius. In one passage ho takes the “baby” quotation mentioned above, and says;—“lf you have a baby who can speak with Tsars in the gate, who can make Europe and America stop and listen when he opens his mouth who can smite with unerring aim straight at the sorest spots in the world’s conscience, who can break through all oensorships and all barriers of language, who can thunder on the gates of toe most terrible prisons in the world and place ids neck under the keenest and bloodiest axes only to find that for mm the gates dare not open and the axes dare not fall, then indeed you have a baby that- must be nursed and coddled end petted and let go his own way, m spite of all the wisdom of governesses and schoolmasters. 5 ’