Making a general statement and then arguing by analogy
Making an inference and then developing it by illustration
Masterpieces are dumb, wrote Flaubert, They have a tranquil aspect like the very products of nature, like large animals and mountains. He might have been thinking of War and Peace, that vast, silent work, unfathomable and simple, provoking endless questions through the majesty of its being. Tolstoi s simplicity is overpowering , says the critic Bayley, disconcerting, because it comes from his casual assumption that the world is as he sees it. Like other nineteenth-century Russian writers he is impressive because he means what he says, but he stands apart from all others and from most Western writers in his identity with life, which is so complete as to make us forget he is an artist. He is the center of his work, but his egocentricity is of a special kind. Goethe, for example, says Bayley, cared for nothing but himself. Tolstoi was nothing but himself.
For all his varied modes of writing and the multiplicity of characters in his fiction, Tolstoi and his work are of a piece . The famous conversion of his middle years, movingly recounted in his Confession, was a culmination of his early spiritual life, not a departure from it. The apparently fundamental changes that led from epic narrative to dogmatic parable, from a joyous, buoyant attitude toward life to pessimism and cynicism, from War and Peace to The Kreutzer Sonata, came from the same restless, impressionable depths of an independent spirit yearning to get at the truth of its experience. Truth is my hero, wrote Tolstoi in his youth, reporting the fighting in Sebastopol. Truth remained his hero his own, not others , truth. Others were awed by Napoleon, believed that a single man could change the destinies of nations, adhered to meaningless rituals, formed their tastes on established canons of art. Tolstoi reversed all preconceptions; and in every reversal he overthrew the system, the machine, the externally ordained belief, the conventional behavior in favor of unsystematic, impulsive life, of inward motivation and the solutions of independent thought.
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