The New Lifetime Reading Plan

It's hard to separate the story from the digressions. Many crit- ics have thought this a weakness in an otherwise great novel. Tolstoy was not a formalist, as Turgenev [81] was. He sprawls. He tells you what's on his mind. You must take him as you find him. If you read slowly enough (and you should; the book sets its own leisurely tempo) you will probably discover that the digressions are no harder to take than were the essays scattered through Tom Jones [55].

When I first wrote about War and Peace many years ago, I sin- gled out for special praise three qualities: its inclusiveness, its nat- uralness, its timelessness. Rereading it fifteen years later, I dis- covered other qualities, particularly Tolstoy^ ability to reveal one to oneself. Now, reading it once more, I am impressed with a virtue that may be simple to the point of banality. Tolstoy once said, "The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.^,> When your canvas is narrow enough, this may not seem so diffi- cult—Hemingway [119] tells the truth about bull-fighting. But your task is overwhelming when you take human life for your sub- ject, and human life is the real subject of War and Peace.

Tolstoy meets his own test. In this gigantic story of the impact of Napoleon^ invasion on a whole country, he never fakes, he never evades, he grasps life at the middle, he conveys the essence of a character by seizing upon precisely the true, the revelatory gesture or phrase. That is why, though it deals in part with war and destruction, it seems one of the sanest novйis ever written. And its sanity flows from Tolstoy's love for his characters, his love for the "procession of the generations," his love for the spectacle of life itself.

Less demanding than War and Peace, and considerably shorter, is Tolstoy's classic love story Anna Karenina. I hope you will find time to read both books.

C.F.

89

HENRICK IBSEN

1828-1906 Selected Plays

Of ali the dramatists discussed in this Plan, Ibsen, though by no means the greatest or most readable, has perhaps had the widest influence on the modern theater. Single-handed he destroyed the lifeless, mechanical, "well-made play" that dom- inated Europe when he began his life work. He turned the theater into a fуrum for the discussion of often disruptive ideas. He introduced a new realism. He made plays out of peo­ple rather than situations. And, being partly responsible for Shaw [99], he is the grandfather of modern Western social drama.

The son of a Norwegian merchant who went bankrupt in Henrik^ eighth year, Ibsen passed through a difficult boyhood and youth. In his twenties he began to write poems and romantic historical dramas, but was at first no more successful as author than he was as stage manager and theater director. In 1864 he left Norway for Rome, on a traveling scholarship. For the next twenty-seven years, except for two brief visits home, he lived abroad, mainly in Germany and Italy. During this fertile period he wrote most of the plays that astounded, shocked, or delighted Europe. Mental illness clouded the last few years of his long and probably not very happy life. There are at least three ways of looking at Ibsen. To H.L. Mencken and many others he is no iconoclast but "a playmaker of astounding skill," a superlative craftsman with­out a message, whose originality consisted in taking ideas gen- erally accepted by intelligent people and giving them a novel setting: the stage. Mencken quotes with approval Ibsen's state- ment: "A dramatisfs business is not to answer questions, but merely to ask them.^,>

However, to Ibsen's disciple George Bernard Shaw, the asking of questions, if they be the right ones, can itself be a revolutionary act; and the Plato [12] who recorded or created Sуcrates would agree with him. Shaw sees Ibsen's theater as the means by which the nineteenth-century middle class was enabled to free itself from false ideas of goodness, from what Shaw calls "idealism." To him Ibsen is essentially a teacher, we may even say a teacher of Shavianism. Whether or not Shaw's interpretation is accurate, it does seem fair to say that Ibsen's plays, particularly those dealing with marriage, the position of women, and the worship of convention, had a decisive effect on the ideas of his generation and the succeed- ing one. My collaborator on this book suggests that I also mention Ibsen's powerful influence in the non-Western world. He points out that translations of A DolVs House, for example, had a huge impact on the literary worlds of China and Japan: That one play helped to liberate an entire genera­tion of writers.