I am re-reading Jane Austen’s Emma and came upon a passage that demonstrated her superiority to Leo Tolstoy.
When I think of Tolstoy, I think of War and Peace and Platon Karataev. Platon is humble in the way that only a truly humble person can be: he is simple; he doesn’t think much of himself. He has no ambition. It’s not clear he even knows what ambition is. He views men of high status as equals, though unequally placed. He doesn’t seem to think they desire differently than he does, or think differently than he does. Here are some illustrative quotes from when Pierre first meets him.
“And here we live, thank heaven, without offense. Among these peasants, too, there are good men as well as bad.”
“Here, eat a bit, sir,” said he, resuming his former respectful tone as he unwrapped and offered Pierre some baked potatoes. “We had soup for dinner and the potatoes are grand!”
“Where there’s law there’s injustice,” put in the little man.
“I say things happen not as we plan but as God judges.”
“The great thing is to live in harmony....”
“Ah, my dear fellow!” rejoined Karatáev, “never decline a prison or a beggar’s sack!”
“Well, lad,” and a smile changed the tone of his voice, “we thought it was a misfortune but it turned out a blessing! If it had not been for my sin, my brother would have had to go as a soldier.”
“…he fell asleep immediately.”
So this man, very humble, is Tolstoy’s ideal. I think this claim—that Platon is his ideal—bears itself out in the novel and in Tolstoy’s own life. In the novel, Pierre finds humility and happiness through it. In his life, Tolstoy forsook all his attainments and wished only to be a peasant.
But Tolstoy could never be a peasant—and that’s the rub. It’s like a human wishing to live the life of a dog. I have been told a saying, “he who knows he has no choice is happiest.” These are, properly, LARPs. I don’t see how we can have time for these kinds of things, but, I suppose, the misery of men is often very great. If they can’t see a way through, a way to overcome the difficulty they face, then I suppose it is only natural they wish to abolish the evil altogether: if their intelligence is causing pain, they wish to abolish intelligence. I would say this is my definition of cowardice, namely, feeling some pain or injustice and, instead of facing up to the power behind that pain or injustice, to claim instead that its source can be simply, simply, abolished. Behind every pain there is a pleasure; behind every injustice there is a righteousness; behind every vice there is a virtue. There is a solution to this problem. It is cowardice that leads men to seek abolition of problems rather than solutions to problems. It’s cowardice to prefer to label entire civilizations evil rather than face up to the difficulties of virtue and life.
Well, Tolstoy was a coward. He suffered from the power of his intellect and sought to abolish it. I mean, he didn’t, as far as I know, addict himself to alcohol and opioids to really simplify his brain. He tried instead to label his ambition as vanity, to use every device of reason to attack the use of reason—i.e., to use the power of his intellect to make himself as simple as those without intellect.
This fool’s errand explains much of the sentimentality of the man and his writing.
Compare him though with Jane Austen, who is as unsentimental as Plato. In Jane Austen, God and nature gave the English people a genuinely ruthless woman. Don’t mistake me: people like Hillary Clinton are “ruthless” but not “a woman.” It’s important that Jane Austen is both. She combines the charms of women and beauty with an unforgiving taste—every character is, in some way, weak and Jane Austen is always equal to the task distinguishing between irrationality and good sense. She knows how the tiniest things like a posture or tone of voice can betray a man’s entire insecurity, viciousness, or timidity. She sees through women to the embarrassment of women (and glory of women). Her judgment is never-stinting. She is always willing to render a judgment before the reader and, in so doing, challenges the reader’s own judgment.
Tolstoy attacks you and hopes, under his attack, that you accept man in all his weakness. Austen attacks everyone in front of you and challenges you to understand what she is thinking. She doesn’t attack “man”; she attacks “these failures of man’s kind.” Are you able to render the caustic verdict Jane Austen has, or will your own weakness lead you to identify with the character she is mocking or misinterpret the whole story-line?
Austen mocks her favorite character Emma, for briefly considering the Tolstoy route.
In the novel, Emma has made an error in judgment. She has taken a girl of no real background, and is trying to elevate her in society. She has the girl reject a suitable offer of marriage because she is filling her head with “pipe dreams”; Harriet Smith (and there is jest in the name “Smith”) turns down a good farming family in the hopes of a marital-connection she has no business seeking. When Emma’s schemes fall through, she really hurts this poor girl Harriet Smith—Emma’s own vanity led her to encourage a simple girl to ambitiously fall in love with a greater man. Emma sets this poor girl up for romantic, social, and economic failure. And, at the end of the day, what horrifies Emma the most, is not the plight of this poor girl, but the error of her own judgment. It horrifies her and she, for a moment, almost wishes she were simpler:
Her [Harriet Smith’s] tears fell abundantly—but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma’s eyes—and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding—really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two—and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do.
It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life. Her second duty now, inferior only to her father’s claims, was to promote Harriet’s comfort, and endeavour to prove her own affection in some better method than by match-making. She got her to Hartfield, and shewed her the most unvarying kindness, striving to occupy and amuse her, and by books and conversation, to drive Mr. Elton from her thoughts.
Emma, for a moment, wishes she were living a simpler life and were a simpler person. For a moment she became an abolitionist. Jane Austen shows that mistake for what it is. There is a rapid succession of ideas in Emma: first, she wishes to be as simple as Harriet; then, barring that impossibility, she resolves to be “humble and discreet.” That resolution will then play itself out in the rest of the novel. What the reader finds is that Emma, to be humble and discreet, deploys endless and fascinating artifice.
In sum:
Jane Austen understood that, for the better types of men and women, there was no retreat. If you want to keep your virtues, you either have to make peace with your vices or overcome the tension between virtue and vice.
Let this be a general lesson: people have a hard time ranking “art” or literature. They have a hard time because they have no rankings of their own. Often times, an intelligent man understands that all the rankings produced by “fashion” are completely gay frivolous, and so he sees through many things; but he ultimately doesn’t have a real way of ranking on his own. Relativism is essentially a failure of culture. First, the culture demands a ranking that is stupid and indefensible. Then, the cultured men in “the culture,” reject the ability of man to rank at all.
Well, in opposition to such confusion, let it be set down here: Jane Austen is superior to Leo Tolstoy, because unlike him, she understands that power (intelligence) is something that a good man must learn to wield rather than a creator of evil that can eventually be abolished or humbled out of existence.
The great authors are seeking out ways to become internally consistent. The great questions are the obstacles to this internal consistency. Therefore, a great author is one who notices the obstacles to that consistency and addresses them. Essentially, most authors do not tend to be serious enough. When they are, like Tolstoy, sufficiently serious, they are rarely courageous enough (or intelligent enough). Jane Austen is serious like Tolstoy, but unlike him she is healthy: the obstacles to internal consistency do not make her angry. Jane Austen isn’t tragic, in the slightest.
Tolstoy went in for abolition: he wanted to abolish intellect and ambition. Jane Austen answered correctly on these questions and proved herself superior thereby.
Austen always hits right. Tolstoy will always be thought of as misguided.
'Jane Austen is superior to Leo Tolstoy, because [ethics].' It's infinitely more important to maintain the distinction between ethics and aesthetics than to use aesthetics as an excuse or an occasion for ethics. That in itself is peak culture-war flabbiness!