 
|
| PREFACE | ||
| I. | CHILDHOOD | |
| II. | BOYHOOD AND YOUTH | |
| III. | YOUTH: THE ARMY | |
| IV. | EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS | |
| V. | SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION | |
| VI. | ST. PETERSBURG | |
| VII. | "FAMILY HAPPINESS" | |
| VIII. | MARRIAGE | |
| IX. | "ANNA KARENIN" | |
| X. | THE CRISIS | |
| XI. | REALITY | |
| XII. | ART AND CONSCIENCE | |
| XIII. | SCIENCE AND ART | |
| XIV. | THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC | |
| XV. | "RESURRECTION" | |
| XVI. | RELIGION AND POLITICS | |
| XVII. | OLD AGE | |
| XVIII. | CONCLUSION | |
| INDEX |
TOLSTOY
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Our instinct was conscious then of that which reason must prove to-day. The task is possible now, for the long life has attained its term; revealing itself, unveiled, to the eyes of all, with unequalled candour, unexampled sincerity. To-day we are at once arrested by the degree in which that life has always remained the same, from the beginning to the end, in spite of all the barriers which critics have sought to erect here and there along its course; in spite of Tolstoy himself, who, like every impassioned mind, was inclined to the belief, when he loved, or conceived a faith, that he loved or believed for the first time; that the commencement of his true life dated from that moment. Commencement—recommencement!' How often his mind was the theatre of the same struggles, the same crises I We cannot speak of the unity of his ideas, for no such unity existed; we can only speak
In him life and art are one. Never was work more intimately mingled with the artist's life; it has, almost constantly, the value of autobiography; it enables us to follow the writer, step by step, from the time when he was twenty-five years of age, throughout all the contradictory experiences of his adventurous career. His Journal, which he commenced before the completion of his twentieth year, and continued until his death,
His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys were very ancient families, of the greater nobility, claiming descent from Rurik; numbering among their ancestors companions of Peter the Great, generals of the Seven Years' War,
He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, Childhood and Youth, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer's mother died when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was unable to recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face with a luminous smile, which radiated gladness....
"Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not know what sorrow is."
Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her indifference to opinion, and
His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death caused him "for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with despair."
Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana.
The orphans were cared for by two great-hearted women, one was their Aunt Tatiana,
The other was their Aunt Alexandra, who was for ever serving others, herself avoiding service, dispensing with the help of servants. Her favourite occupation was reading the lives of the Saints, or conversing with pilgrims or the feeble-minded. Of these "innocents" there were several, men and women, who lived in the house. One, an old woman, a pilgrim, was the godmother of Tolstoy's sister. Another, the idiot Gricha, knew only how to weep and pray....
"Gricha, notable Christian! So mighty was your faith that you felt the approach of God; so ardent was your love that words rushed from your lips, words that your reason could not control. And how you used to celebrate His splendour, when speech failed you, when, all tears, you lay prostrated on the ground!"
Who can fail to understand the influence, in the shaping of Tolstoy, of all these humble souls? In some of them we seem to see an outline, a prophecy, of the Tolstoy of later years. Their prayers and their affection must have sown the seeds of faith in the child's mind; seeds of which the aged man was to reap the harvest.
With the exception of the idiot Gricha, Tolstoy does not speak, in his narrative of Childhood, of these humble helpers who assisted in the work of building up his mind. But then how clearly we
Happily he forgot the discovery. In those days he used to soothe his mind with popular tales; those mythical and legendary dreams known in Russia as bylines; stories from the Bible; above all the sublime History of Joseph, which he cited in his old age as a model of narrative art: and, finally, the Arabian Nights, which at his grandmother's house were recited every evening, from the vantage of the window-seat, by a blind story-teller.
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
He studied at Kazan.
He passed through the period which he terms "the desert of adolescence"; a desert of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the burning winds of folly. The pages of Boyhood, and in especial those of Youth
He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition
"I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it."
This perpetual self-analysis, this mechanism of reason turning in the void, remained to him as a dangerous habit, which was "often," in his own words, "to be detrimental to me in life"; but by which his art has profited inexpressibly.
As another result of self-analysis, he had lost all his religious convictions; or such was his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to pray; he went to church no longer;
"Nevertheless, I did believe—in something. But in what? I could not say. I still believed in God; or rather I did not deny Him. But in what God? I did not know. Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I could not have said precisely what that doctrine was."
From time to time he was obsessed by dreams of goodness. He wished to sell his carriage and give the money to the poor: to give them the tenth part of his fortune; to live without the help of servants, "for they were men like himself." During an illness
Insensibly, under the stress of a boy's passions, of a violent sensuality and a stupendous pride of self,
To please: it was not an easy ambition. He was then of a simian ugliness: the face was long, heavy,
One quality always came to his salvation: his absolute sincerity.
"Do you know why I like you better than the others?" says Nekhludov to his friend. "You have a precious and surprising quality: candour."
"Yes, I am always saying things which I am ashamed to own even to myself."
In his wildest moments he judges himself with a pitiless insight.
"I am living an utterly bestial life," he writes in his Journal. "I am as low as one can fall." Then, with his mania for analysis, he notes minutely the causes of his errors:
"1. Indecision or lack of energy. 2. Self-deception. 3. Insolence. 4. False modesty. 5. Ill-temper. 6. Licentiousness. 7. Spirit of imitation. 8. Versatility. 9. Lack of reflection."
While still a student he was applying this independence of judgment to the criticism of social conventions and intellectual superstitions. He scoffed at the official science of the University; denied the least importance to historical studies, and was put under arrest for his audacity of thought. At this period he discovered Rousseau, reading his Confessions and Émile. The discovery affected him like a mental thunderbolt.
"I made him an object of religious worship. I wore a medallion portrait of him hung round my neck, as though it were a holy image."
His first essays in philosophy took the form of commentaries on Rousseau (1846-47).
In the end, however, disgusted with the University and with "smartness," he returned to Yasnaya Polyana, to bury himself in the country (1847-51); where he once more came into touch with the people. He professed to come to their assistance, as their benefactor and their teacher. His experiences of this period have been related in one of his earliest books, A Russian Proprietor (A Landlord's
Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left the University to devote himself to his peasants. He has been labouring for a year to do them good. In the course of a visit to the village we see him striving against jeering indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and muses on his dreams of a year ago; his generous enthusiasm, his "idea that love and goodness were one with happiness and truth: the only happiness and the only truth possible in this world." He feels himself defeated. He is weary and ashamed.
"Seated before the piano, his hand unconsciously moved upon the keys. A chord sounded; then a second, then a third.... He began to play. The chords were not always perfect in rhythm; they were often obvious to the point of banality; they did not reveal any talent for music; but they gave him a melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. At each change of key he awaited, with a flutter of the heart, for what was about to follow;
Once more he sees the moujiks—vicious, distrustful, lying, idle, obstinate, contrary, with whom he has lately been speaking; but this time he sees them with all their good qualities and without their vices; he sees into their hearts with the intuition of love; he sees therein their patience, their resignation to the fate which is crushing them; their forgiveness of wrongs, their family affection, and the causes of their pious, mechanical attachment to the past. He recalls their days of honest labour, healthy and fatiguing....
"'It is beautiful,' he murmurs.... Why am I not one of these?'"
The entire Tolstoy is already contained in the hero of this first novel;
CHAPTER III
YOUTH: THE ARMY
Tolstoy, in the year 1850, was not as patient as Nekhludov. Yasnaya Polyana had disillusioned and disappointed him. He was as weary of the people as he was of the world of fashion; his attitude as benefactor wearied him; he could bear it no more. Moreover, he was harassed by creditors. In 1851 he escaped to the Caucasus; to the army in which his brother Nikolas was already an officer.
He had hardly arrived, hardly tasted the quiet of the mountains, before he was once more master of himself; before he had recovered his God.
"Last night
The flesh was not conquered; not then, nor ever; the struggle between God and the passions of man continued in the silence of his heart. Tolstoy speaks in his Journal of the three demons which were devouring him:
1. The passion for gambling. Possible struggle.
2. Sensuality. Struggle very difficult.
3. Vanity. The most terrible of all.
At the very moment when he was dreaming of living for others and of sacrificing himself, voluptuous or futile thoughts would assail him: the image of some Cossack woman, or "the despair he would feel if his moustache were higher on one side than the other."—"No matter!" God was there; He would not forsake him. Even the effervescence of the struggle was fruitful: all the forces of life were exalted thereby.
"I think the idea of making a journey to the
It is the song of gratitude of the earth in spring. Earth covers herself with flowers; all is well, all is beautiful. In 1852 the genius of Tolstoy produces its earliest flowers: Childhood, The Russian Proprietor, The Invasion, Boyhood; and he thanks the Spirit of life who has made him fruitful.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS
The Story of my Childhood
In later years Tolstoy spoke with great severity of his Childhood, to which he owed some part of his popularity.
"It is so bad," he remarked to M. Birukov: "it is written with so little literary conscience!... There is nothing to be got from it."
He was alone in this opinion. The manuscript was sent, without the author's name, to the great Russian review, the Sovremennik (Contemporary); it was published immediately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a general success; a success confirmed by the public of every country in Europe. Yet in
It displeased him for the very reasons by which it pleased others. We must admit it frankly: except in the recording of certain provincial types, and in a restricted number of passages which are remarkable for their religious feeling or for the realistic treatment of emotion,
A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails from cover to cover; a quality which was always afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and one which he sedulously excluded from his other romances. We recognise it; these tears, this sentimentality came from Dickens, who was one of Tolstoy's favourite authors between his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tolstoy notes in his Journal: "Dickens: David Copperfield. Influence considerable." He read the book again in the Caucasus.
Two other influences, to which he himself confesses, were Sterne and TÖppfer. "I was then," he says, "under their inspiration."
Who would have thought that the Nouvelles Genevoises would be the first model of the author of War and Peace? Yet knowing this to be a fact, we discern in Tolstoy's Childhood the same bantering, affected geniality, transplanted to the soil of a more aristocratic nature. So we see that
"Is it impossible, then, for men to live in peace, in this world so full of beauty, under this immeasurable starry sky? How is it they are able, here, to retain their feelings of hostility and vengeance, and the lust of destroying their fellows? All there is of evil in the human heart ought to disappear at the touch of nature, that most immediate expression of the beautiful and the good."
Other tales of the Caucasus were to follow which were observed at this time, though not written until a later period. In 1854-55. The Woodcutters was written; a book notable for its exact and rather frigid realism; full of curious records of Russian soldier-psychology—notes to be made use of in the future. In 1856 appeared A Brush with the Enemy, in which there is a man of the world, a degraded non-commissioned officer, a wreck, a coward, a drunkard and a liar, who cannot support the idea of being slaughtered like one of the common soldiers he despises, the least of whom is worth a hundred of himself.
Above all these works, as the summit, so to speak, of this first mountain range, rises one of the most beautiful lyric romances that ever fell from Tolstoy's pen: the song of his youth, the poem of the Caucasus, The Cossacks.
"'I love—I love so much!... How brave! How good!' he repeated: and he felt as though he must weep. Why? Who was brave, and whom did he love? That he did not precisely know."
This intoxication of the heart flows on, unchecked. Olenin, the hero, who has come to the Caucasus, as Tolstoy came, to steep himself in nature, in the life of adventure, becomes enamoured of a young Cossack girl, and abandons himself to the medley of his contradictory aspirations. At one moment he believes that "happiness is to live for others, to sacrifice oneself," at another, that "self-sacrifice is only stupidity"; finally he is inclined to believe, with Erochta, the old Cossack, that "everything is precious. God has made everything for the delight of man. Nothing is a sin. To amuse oneself with a handsome girl is not a sin: it is only health." But what need to think at all? It is enough to live. Life is all good, all happiness; life is all-powerful and universal; life is God. An ardent naturalism uplifts and consumes his soul. Lost in the forest, amidst "the wildness of the woods, the multitude of birds and animals, the clouds of midges in the dusky green, in the warm, fragrant air, amidst the little runlets of water which trickle everywhere beneath the boughs"; a few paces from the ambushes of the enemy, Olenin is "seized suddenly by such a sense of causeless happiness that in obedience to childish habit he crossed himself and began to give thanks to somebody." Like a Hindu fakir, he rejoices to tell himself that he is alone and lost in this maËlstrom of aspiring life: that myriads of invisible beings, hidden on every hand, are that moment hunting him to death; that these thousands of little insects humming around him are calling:
"Here, brothers, here! Here is some one to bite!"
And it became obvious to him that he was no longer a Russian gentleman, in Moscow society, but simply a creature like the midge, the pheasant, the stag: like those which were living and prowling about him at that moment.
"Like them, I shall live, I shall die. And the grass will grow above me...."
And his heart is full of happiness.
Tolstoy lives through this hour of youth in a delirium of vitality and the love of life. He embraces Nature, and sinks himself in her being. To her he pours forth and exalts his griefs, his joys, and his loves; in her he lulls them to sleep. Yet this romantic intoxication never veils the lucidity of his perceptions. Nowhere has he painted landscape with a greater power than in this fervent poem; nowhere has he depicted the type with greater truth. The contrast of nature with the world of men, which forms the basis of the book; and which through all Tolstoy's life is to prove one of his favourite themes, and an article of his Credo, has already inspired him, the better to castigate the world, with something of the bitterness to be heard in the Kreutzer Sonata.
An exceptional occasion was about to offer itself for the exercise of this heroic veracity.
CHAPTER V
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION
In November, 1853, war was declared upon Turkey. Tolstoy obtained an appointment to the army of Roumania; he was transferred to the army of the Crimea, and on November 7, 1854, he arrived in Sebastopol. He was burning with enthusiasm and patriotic faith. He went about his duties courageously, and was often in danger, in especial throughout the April and May of 1855, when he served on every alternate day in the battery of of the 4th bastion.
Living for months in a perpetual tremor and exaltation, face to face with death, his religious mysticism revived. He became familiar with God. In April, 1855, he noted in his diary a prayer to God, thanking Him for His protection in danger and beseeching Him to continue it, "so that I may achieve the glorious and eternal end of life, of which I am still ignorant, although I feel a presentiment of it." Already this object of his life was not art, but religion. On March 5, 1855, he wrote:
"I have been led to conceive a great idea, to
This was to be the programme of his old age.
However, to distract himself from the spectacles which surrounded him, he began once more to write. How could he, amidst that hail of lead, find the necessary freedom of mind for the writing of the third part of his memories: Youth? The book is chaotic; and we may attribute to the conditions of its production a quality of disorder, and at times a certain dryness of abstract analysis, which is increased by divisions and subdivisions after the manner of Stendhal.
"The calm splendour of the shining crescent; the gleaming fish-pond; the ancient birch-trees, whose long-tressed boughs were on one side silvered by the moonlight, while on the other they covered the path and the bushes with their black shadows; the cry of a quail beyond the pond; the barely perceptible sound of two ancient trees which grazed one another; the humming of the mosquitoes; the fall of an apple on the dry leaves; and the frogs leaping up to the steps of the terrace, their backs gleaming greenish under a ray of moonlight.... The moon is mounting; suspended in the limpid sky, she fills all space with her light; the splendour of the moonlit water grows yet more brilliant, the shadows grow blacker, the light more transparent.... And to me, an obscure and earthy creature, already soiled with every human passion, but endowed with all the stupendous power of love, it seemed at that moment that all nature, the moon, and I myself were one and the same."
But the present reality, potent and imperious, spoke more loudly than the dreams of the past. Youth remained unfinished; and Captain Count Tolstoy, behind the plating of his bastion, amid the rumbling of the bombardment, or in the midst of his company, observed the dying and the living,
These three narratives—Sebastopol in December, 1854, Sebastopol in May, 1855, Sebastopol in August, 1855—are generally confounded with one another; but in reality they present many points of difference. The second in particular, in point both of feeling and of art, is greatly superior to the others. The others are dominated by patriotism; the second is charged with implacable truth.
It is said that after reading the first narrative
Very different is the second scene: Sebastopol in May, 1855. In the opening lines we read:
"Here the self-love, the vanity of thousands of human beings is in conflict, or appeased in death...."
And further on:
"And as there were many men, so also were there many forms of vanity.... Vanity, vanity, everywhere vanity, even at the door of the tomb! It is the peculiar malady of our century.... Why do the Homers and Shakespeares speak of love, of glory, and of suffering, and why is the literature of our century nothing but the interminable history of snobs and egotists?"
The narrative, which is no longer a simple narrative on the part of the author, but one which sets before us men and their passions, reveals that which is concealed by the mask of heroism. Tolstoy's clear, disillusioned gaze plumbs to the depths the hearts of his companions in arms; in them, as in himself, he reads pride, fear, and the comedy of those who continue to play at life though rubbing shoulders with death. Fear especially is avowed, stripped of its veils, and shown in all its nakedness. These nervous crises,
As in the intervals of a drama we hear the occasional music of the orchestra, so these scenes of battle are interrupted by wide glimpses of nature; deep perspectives of light; the symphony of the day dawning upon the splendid landscape, in the midst of which thousands are agonising. Tolstoy the Christian, forgetting the patriotism of his first narrative, curses this impious war:
"And these men, Christians, who profess the
As he was completing this novel—a work that has a quality of bitterness which, hitherto, none of his work had betrayed—Tolstoy was seized with doubt. Had he done wrong to speak?
"A painful doubt assails me. Perhaps these things should not have been said. Perhaps what I am telling is one of those mischievous truths which, unconsciously hidden in the mind of each one of us, should not be expressed lest they become harmful, like the lees that we must not stir lest we spoil the wine. If so, when is the expression of evil to be avoided? When is the expression of goodness to be imitated? Who is the malefactor and who is the hero? All are good and all are evil...."
But he proudly regains his poise: "The protagonist of my novel, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I try to present in all her beauty, who always was, is, and shall be beautiful, is Truth."
After reading these pages
Nothing of the kind was to be feared. The times, which waste the energies of ordinary men, only tempered those of Tolstoy. Yet for a moment the trials of his country and the capture of Sebastopol aroused a feeling of regret for his perhaps too unfeeling frankness, together with a feeling of sorrowful affection.
In his third narrative—Sebastopol in August, 1855—while describing a group of officers playing cards and quarrelling, he interrupts himself to say:
"But let us drop the curtain quickly over this picture. To-morrow—perhaps to-day—each of these men will go cheerfully to meet his death. In the depths of the soul of each there smoulders the spark of nobility which will make him a hero."
Although this shame detracts in no wise from the forcefulness and realism of the narrative, the choice of characters shows plainly enough where lie the sympathies of the writer. The epic of Malakoff and its heroic fall is told as affecting two rare and touching figures: two brothers, of whom the elder, Kozeltoff, has some of the characteristics of Tolstoy. Who can forget the younger, the ensign
"The army was leaving the town; and each soldier, as he looked upon deserted Sebastopol, sighed, with an inexpressible bitterness in his heart, and shook his fist in the direction of the enemy."
CHAPTER VI
ST. PETERSBURG
When, once issued from this hell, where for a year he had touched the extreme of the passions, vanities, and sorrows of humanity, Tolstoy found himself, in November, 1855, amidst the men of letters of St. Petersburg, they inspired him with a feeling of disdain and disillusion. They seemed to him entirely mean, ill-natured, and untruthful. These men, who appeared in the distance to wear the halo of art—even Tourgenev, whom he had admired, and to whom he had but lately dedicated The Woodcutters—even he, seen close at hand, had bitterly disappointed him. A portrait of 1856 represents him in the midst of them: Tourgenev, Gontcharov, Ostrovsky, Grigorovitch, Droujinine. He strikes one, in the free-and-easy atmosphere of the others, by reason of his hard, ascetic air, his bony head, his lined cheeks, his rigidly folded arms. Standing upright, in uniform, behind these men of letters, he has the appearance, as SuarÈs has wittily said, "rather of mounting guard over these gentry than of making one of their company;
Yet they all gathered about their young colleague, who came to them with the twofold glory of the writer and the hero of Sebastopol. Tourgenev, who had "wept and shouted 'Hurrah!'" while reading the pages of Sebastopol, held out a brotherly hand. But the two men could not understand one another. Although both saw the world with the same clear vision, they mingled with that vision the hues of their inimical minds; the one, ironic, resonant, amorous, disillusioned, a devotee of beauty; the other proud, violent tormented with moral ideas, pregnant with a hidden God.
What Tolstoy could never forgive in these literary men was that they believed themselves an elect, superior caste; the crown of humanity. Into his antipathy for them there entered a good deal of the pride of the great noble and the officer who condescendingly mingles with liberal and middle-class scribblers.
"He never believed in the sincerity of any one. All moral exhilaration seemed false to him; and he had a way of fixing, with that extraordinarily piercing gaze of his, the man whom he suspected was not telling the truth."
"Tourgenev used to say that he had never experienced anything more painful than this piercing gaze, which, together with two or three words of envenomed observation, was capable of infuriating anybody."
At their first meetings violent scenes occurred between Tolstoy and Tourgenev. When at a distance they cooled down and tried to do one another justice. But as time went on Tolstoy's dislike of his literary surroundings grew deeper. He could not forgive these artists for the combination of their depraved life and their moral pretensions.
"I acquired the conviction that nearly all were immoral men, unsound, without character, greatly inferior to those I had met in my Bohemian military life. And they were sure of themselves and selfcontent, as men might be who were absolutely sound. They disgusted me."
He parted from them. But he did not at once lose their interested faith in art.
"Of this religion I was one of the pontiffs; an agreeable and highly profitable situation."
The better to consecrate himself to this religion, he sent in his resignation from the army (November, 1856).
But a man of his temper could not close his eyes for long. He believed, he was eager to believe, in progress. It seemed to him "that this word signified something." A journey abroad, which lasted from the end of January to the end of July of 1857, during which period he visited France, Switzerland, and Germany, resulted in the destruction of this faith. In Paris, on the 6th of April, 1857, the spectacle of a public execution "showed him the emptiness of the superstition of progress."
"When I saw the head part from the body and fall into the basket I understood in every recess of my being that no theory as to the reason of the present order of things could justify such an act. Even though all the men in the world, supported by this or that theory, were to find it necessary, I myself should know that it was wrong;
In the month of July the sight of a little perambulating singer at Lucerne, to whom the wealthy English visitors at the Schweizerhof were refusing alms, made him express in the Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov his contempt for all the illusions dear to Liberals, and for those "who trace imaginary lines upon the sea of good and evil."
"For them civilisation is good; barbarism is bad; liberty is good; slavery is bad. And this imaginary knowledge destroys the instinctive, primordial cravings, which are the best. Who will define them for me—liberty, despotism, civilisation, barbarism? Where does not good co-exist with evil? There is within us only one infallible guide: the universal Spirit which whispers to us to draw closer to one another."
On his return to Russia and Yasnaya he once more busied himself about the peasants. Not that he had any illusions left concerning them. He writes:
"The apologists of the people and its good sense speak to no purpose; the crowd is perhaps the union of worthy folk; but if so they unite only on their bestial and contemptible side, a side which expresses nothing but the weakness and cruelty of human nature."
Thus he does not address himself to the crowd, but to the individual conscience of each man, each child of the people. For there light is to be found.
He studied the various pedagogic systems of the time. Need we say that he rejected one and all? Two visits to Marseilles taught him that the true education of the people is effected outside the schools (which he considered absurd), by means of the journals, the museums, the libraries, the street, and everyday life, which he termed "the spontaneous school." The spontaneous school, in opposition to the obligatory school, which he considered silly and harmful; this was what he wished and attempted to institute upon his return to Yasnaya Polyana.
These theories, those of a revolutionary Conservative, as Tolstoy always was, he attempted to put into practice at Yasnaya, where he was rather the fellow-disciple than the master of his pupils.
We must not suppose that this social activity satisfied him, or entirely filled his life. He continued to be the prey of contending passions. Although he had suffered from the world, he always loved it and felt the need of it. Pleasure resumed him at intervals, or else the love of action. He would risk his life in hunting the bear. He played for heavy stakes. He would even fall under the influence of the literary circles of St. Petersburg, for which he felt such contempt. After these aberrations came crises of disgust. Such of his writings as belong to
"He had everything: wealth, a name, intellect, and high ambitions; he had committed no crime; but he had done still worse: he had killed his courage, his youth; he was lost, without even the excuse of a violent passion; merely from a lack of will."
The approach of death itself does not alter him:
"The same strange inconsequence, the same hesitation, the same frivolity of thought...."
Death!... At this period it began to haunt his mind. Three Deaths (1858-59) already foreshadowed the gloomy analysis of The Death of Ivan Ilyitch; the solitude of the dying man, his hatred of the living, his desperate query—"Why?" The triptych of the three deaths—that of the wealthy woman, that of the old consumptive postilion, and that of the slaughtered dog—is not without majesty; the portraits are well drawn, the images are striking, although the whole work, which has been too highly praised, is somewhat loosely constructed, while the death of the dog lacks the poetic precision to be
Tolstoy himself did not know. On the 4th of February, 1858, when he read his essay of admittance before the Muscovite Society of Amateurs of Russian Literature, he chose for his subject the defence of art for art's sake.
A year later the death of his dearly-loved brother, Nikolas, who succumbed to phthisis
"Truth is horrible.... Doubless, so long as the desire to know and to speak the truth exists men will try to know and to speak it. This is the only remnant left me of my moral concepts. It is the only thing I shall do; but not in the form of art, your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie."
Less than six months later, however, he returned to the "beautiful lie" with Polikushka,
"When one is ill one seems to descend a very gentle slope, which at a certain point is barred by a curtain, a light curtain of some filmy stuff; on the hither side is life, beyond is death. How far superior is the state of illness, in moral value, to that of health! Do not speak to me of those people who have never been ill! They are terrible, the women especially so! A woman who has never known illness is an absolute wild beast!" (Conversations with M. Paul Boyer, Le Temps, 27th of August, 1901.)
CHAPTER VII
"FAMILY HAPPINESS"
From this period of transition, during which the genius of the man was feeling its way blindly, doubtful of itself and apparently exhausted, "devoid of strong passion, without a directing will," like Nekhludov in the Diary of a Sportsman—from this period issued a work unique in its tenderness and charm: Family Happiness (1859). This was the miracle of love.
For many years Tolstoy had been on friendly terms with the Bers family. He had fallen in love with the mother and the three daughters in succession.
Like Levine in Anna Karenin, he was so cruelly honest as to place his intimate journal in the hands of his betrothed, in order that she should be unaware of none of his past transgressions; and Sophie, like Kitty in Anna Karenin, was bitterly hurt by its perusal. They were married on the 23rd of September, 1862.
In the artist's imagination this marriage was consummated three years earlier, when Family Happiness was written.
Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy presented
"My reputation has greatly diminished in popularity; a fact which was saddening me. Now I am content; I know that I have to say something, and that I have the power to speak it with no feeble voice. As for the public, let it think what it will!"
But he was boasting: he himself was not sure of his art. Certainly he was the master of his literary instrument; but he did not know what to do with it, as he said in respect of Polikuskha: "it was a matter of chattering about the first subject that came to hand, by a man who knows how to hold his pen."
"The squabbles of arbitration had become so painful to me, the work of the school so vague, and the doubts which arose from the desire of teaching others while hiding my own ignorance
CHAPTER VIII
MARRIAGE
At first he rejoiced in the new life, with the passion which he brought to everything.
Thanks to the advantages of this union, Tolstoy enjoyed for a space of twelve or fourteen years a peace and security which had been long unknown to him.
War and Peace is the vastest epic of our times—a modern Iliad. A world of faces and of passions moves within it. Over this human ocean of innumerable waves broods a sovereign mind, which serenely raises or stills the tempest.
More than once in the past, while contemplating this work, I was reminded of Homer and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different spirit and period of the work. Since then I have discovered that at the period of writing these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact nourishing his mind upon Homer and Goethe.
And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary:
"I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to life within me."
In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, and wrote of Faust as "the poetry of the world of thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be expressed by no other art."
Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to his God. But he remained faithful in his admiration of Homer. In August, 1857, he was reading, with equal zest, the Iliad and the Bible. In one of his latest works, the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer that he opposes to Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, balance, and true art.
To be truly sensible of the power of this work, we must take into account its hidden unity. Too many readers, unable to see it in perspective, perceive in it nothing but thousands of details, whose profusion amazes and distracts them. They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the sense of
In the beginning, the calm of the ocean. Peace, and the life of Russia before the war. The first hundred pages reflect, with an impassive precision, a detached irony, the yawning emptiness of worldly minds. Only towards the hundredth page do we hear the cry of one of these living dead—the worst among them, Prince Basil:
"We commit sins; we deceive one another; and why do we do it all? My friend, I am more than sixty years old.... All ends in death.... Death—what horror!"
Among these idle, insipid, untruthful souls, capable of every aberration, of every crime, certain saner natures are prominent: genuine natures by their clumsy candour, like Pierre Besoukhov; by their deeply rooted independence, their Old Russian peculiarities, like Marie Dmitrievna; by the freshness of their youth, like the little Rostoffs: natures full of goodness and resignation, like the Princess Marie; and those who, like Prince Andrei, are not good, but proud, and are tormented by an unhealthy existence.
Now comes the first muttering of the waves. The Russian army is in Austria. Fatality is supreme: nowhere more visibly imperious than in the loosing of elementary forces—in the war. The true leaders are those who do not seek to lead or direct, but, like Kutuzov or Bagration, to "allow it to be
"What peacefulness! How calm!" he was saying to himself; "it was not like this when I was running by and shouting.... How was it I did not notice it before, this illimitable depth? How happy I am to have found it at last! Yes, all is emptiness, all is deception, except this. And God be praised for this calm!..."
But life resumes him, and again the wave falls. Left once more to themselves, in the demoralising atmosphere of cities, the restless, discouraged souls wander blindly in the darkness. Sometimes through the poisoned atmosphere of the world sweep the intoxicating, maddening odours of nature, love, and springtime; the blind forces,
It is time for the hurricane of war to burst once more upon these vitiated minds. The fatherland, Russia, is invaded. Then comes the day of Borodino, with its solemn majesty. Enmities are effaced. Dologhov embraces his enemy Pierre. Andrei, wounded, weeps for pity and compassion over the misery of the man whom he most hated, Anatol Kuraguin, his neighbour in the ambulance. The unity of hearts is accomplished; unity in passionate sacrifice to the country and submission to the divine laws.
"To accept the frightful necessity of war, seriously and austerely.... To human liberty, war is the most painful act of submission to the divine laws. Simplicity of heart consists in submission to the will of God."
The soul of the Russian people and its submission to Destiny are incarnated in the person of the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov. "This old man, who has no passions left, but only experience, the result of the passions, and in whom intelligence,
In short, he has the heart of a Russian. This fatalism of the Russian people, calmly heroic, is personified also in the poor moujik, Platon Karatayev, simple, pious, and resigned, with his kindly patient smile in suffering and in death. Through suffering and experience, above the ruins of their country, after the horrors of its agony, Pierre and Andrei, the two heroes of the book, attain, through love and faith, to the moral deliverance and the mystic joy by which they behold God living.
Tolstoy does not stop here. The epilogue, of which the action passes in 1820, deals with the transition from one age to another: from one Napoleonic era to the era of the Decembrists. It produces an impression of continuity, and of the resumption of life. Instead of commencing and ending in the midst of a crisis, Tolstoy finishes, as he began, at the moment when a great wave has
I have tried to indicate the broad lines of the romance; for few readers take the trouble to look for them. But what words are adequate to describe the extraordinary vitality of these hundreds of heroes, all distinct individuals, all drawn with unforgettable mastery: soldiers, peasants, great
Most exquisite of all is Natasha. Dear little girl!—fantastic, full of laughter, her heart full of affection, we see her grow up before us, we follow her through life, with the tenderness one would feel for a sister—who that has read of her does not feel that he has known her?... That wonderful night of spring, when Natasha, at her window, flooded
Princess Marie, the ugly woman, whose goodness makes her beautiful, is no less perfect a portrait; but how the timid, awkward girl would have blushed, how those who resemble her must blush, at finding unveiled all the secrets of a heart which hides itself so fearfully from every glance!
In general the portraits of women are, as I have said, very much finer than the male characters; in especial than those of the two heroes to whom Tolstoy has given his own ideas: the weak, pliable nature of Pierre Besoukhov, and the hard, eager nature of Prince Andrie Bolkonsky. These are characters which lack a centre of gravity; they
Tolstoy himself admitted that he had at times rather sacrificed the individual character to the historical design.
It is true, in fact, that the glory of War and Peace resides in the resurrection of a complete historical period, with its national migrations, its warfare of peoples. Its true heroes are these peoples; and behind them, as behind the heroes of Homer, the gods who lead them; the forces, invisible, "infinitely small, which direct the masses," the breath of the Infinite. These gigantic conflicts, in which a hidden destiny hurls the blind nations together, have a mythical grandeur. Our thoughts go beyond the Iliad: we are reminded of the Hindu epics.
"Goethe: Hermann and Dorothea—Very great influence."
"Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (in Russian)—Very great influence."
CHAPTER IX
"ANNA KARENIN"
Anna Karenin, with War and Peace,
Even in the early chapters of War and Peace, written one year after marriage, the confidences of Prince Andrei to Pierre upon the subject of marriage denote the disenchantment of the man who sees in the beloved woman the stranger, the innocent enemy, the involuntary obstacle to his moral development. Some letters of 1865 announce the coming return of religious troubles. As yet they are only passing threats, blotting out the joy of life. But during the months of 1869, when Tolstoy was finishing War and Peace, there fell a more serious blow.
He had left his home for a few days to visit a distant estate. One night he was lying in bed; it had just struck two:
"I was dreadfully tired; I was sleepy, and felt comfortable enough. All of a sudden I was seized by such anguish, such terror as I had never felt in all my life. I will tell you about it in detail; it was truly frightful. I leapt from the bed and told them to get the horses ready. While they were putting them in I fell asleep, and when I woke again I was completely recovered. Yesterday the same thing happened, but in a much less degree."
The palace of illusion, so laboriously raised by the love of the wife, was tottering. In the spiritual blank which followed the achievement of War
"Without a knowledge of Greek, no education! I am convinced that until now I knew nothing of all that is truly beautiful and of a simple beauty in human speech."
This is folly, and he admits as much. He goes to school again with such passionate enthusiasm
"If you are always absorbed in your Greeks you will never get well. It is they who have caused this suffering and this indifference concerning your present life. It is not in vain that we call Greek a dead language; it produces a condition of death in the spirit."
Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, after many plans abandoned before they were fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, he began to write Anna Karenin.
To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences, and of passions disillusioned.
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."
Around this tragedy of a soul consumed by love and crushed by the law of God—a painting in a single shade, and of terrible gloom—Tolstoy has woven, as in War and Peace, the romances of other lives. Unfortunately these parallel stories alternate in a somewhat stiff and artificial manner, without achieving the organic unity of the symphony of
But the principal interest of the romance, besides the tragedy of Anna and the varied pictures of Russian society towards 1860—of salons, officers' clubs, balls, theatres, races—lies in its autobiographical character. More than any other
If Levine, like Tolstoy, whose incarnation he is, also became purified in the epilogue to the book, it was because he too was touched by mortality. Previously, "incapable of believing, he was equally incapable of absolute doubt."
"Reason has taught me nothing; all that I know has been given to me, revealed to me by the heart."
From this time peace returned. The word of the humble peasant, whose heart was his only guide, had led him back to God.... To what God? He did not seek to know. His attitude toward the Church at this moment, as was Tolstoy's for a long period, was humble, and in no wise defiant of her dogmas.
"There is a truth even in the illusion of the celestial vault and in the apparent movement of the stars."
CHAPTER X
THE CRISIS
The misery which oppressed Levine, and the longing for suicide which he concealed from Kitty, Tolstoy was at this period concealing from his wife. But he had not as yet achieved the calm which he attributed to his hero. To be truthful, this mental state is hardly communicated to the reader. We feel that it is desired rather than realised, and that Levine's relapse among his doubts is imminent. Tolstoy was not duped by his desires. He had the greatest difficulty in reaching the end of his work. Anna Karenin wearied him before he had finished it.
Tolstoy told of these terrible years at a later
"I was not fifty," he said; "I loved; I was loved; I had good children, a great estate, fame, health, and moral and physical vigour; I could reap or mow like any peasant; I used to work ten hours at a stretch without fatigue. Suddenly my life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep. But this was not to live. I had no desires left. I knew there was nothing to desire. I could not even wish to know the truth. The truth was that life is a piece of insanity. I had reached the abyss, and I saw clearly that there was nothing before me but death. I, a fortunate and healthy man, felt that I could not go on living. An irresistible force was urging me to rid myself of life.... I will not say that I wanted to kill myself. The force which was edging me out of life was something stronger than myself; it was an aspiration, a desire like my old desire for life, but in an inverse sense. I had to humour, to deceive myself, lest I should give way to it too promptly. There I was, a happy man,—and I would hide away a piece of cord lest I should hang myself from the beam that ran between the cupboards of my room, where I was alone every night while undressing. I no longer took my gun out for a little shooting, lest I should be tempted.
Salvation came from the people. Tolstoy had always had for them "a strange affection, absolutely genuine,"
"Faith is the energy of life. One cannot live without faith. The ideas of religion were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of human thought. The replies given by faith to Life the sphinx contain the deepest wisdom of humanity."
Is it enough, then, to be acquainted with those formulÆ of wisdom recorded in the volume of religion? No, for faith is not a science; faith is an act; it has no meaning unless it is lived. The disgust which Tolstoy felt at the sight of rich and right-thinking people, for whom faith was merely a kind
"And he understood that the life of the labouring people was life itself, and that the meaning to be attributed to that life was truth."
But how become a part of the people and share its faith? It is not enough to know that others are in the right; it does not depend upon ourselves whether we are like them. We pray to God in vain; in vain we stretch our eager arms toward Him. God flies. Where shall He be found?
But one day grace descended:
"One day of early spring I was alone in the forest, listening to its sounds.... I was thinking of my distress during the last three years; of my search for God; of my perpetual oscillations from joy to despair.... And I suddenly saw that I used to live only when I used to believe in God. At the very thought of Him the delightful waves of life stirred in me. Everything around me grew full of life; everything received a meaning. But the moment I no longer believed life suddenly ceased.
"Then what am I still searching for? a voice cried within me. For Him, without whom man cannot live! To know God and to live—it is the same thing! For God is Life....
"Since then this light has never again deserted me."
He was saved. God had appeared to him.
But as he was not a Hindu mystic, to whom ecstasy suffices; as to the dreams of the Asiatic was added the thirst for reason and the need of action of the Occidental, he was moved to translate his revelation into terms of practical faith, and to draw from the holy life the rules of daily existence. Without any previous bias, and sincerely wishing to believe in the beliefs of his own flesh and blood,
So he broke loose, and the rupture was the more violent in that for three years he had suppressed his faculty of thought. He walked delicately no
It all resides in these words:
"I believe in the doctrine of the Christ. I believe that happiness is possible on earth only when all men shall accomplish it."
Its corner-stone is the Sermon on the Mount, whose essential teaching Tolstoy expresses in five commandments:
"1. Do not be angry.
"2. Do not commit adultery.
"3. Do not take oaths.
"4. Do not resist evil by evil.
"5. Be no man's enemy."
This is the negative part of the doctrine; the positive portion is contained in this single commandment:
"Love God, and thy neighbour as thyself."
"Christ has said that he who shall have broken the least of these commandments will hold the lowest place in the kingdom of heaven."
And Tolstoy adds naively:
"Strange as it may seem, I have been obliged, after eighteen centuries, to discover these rules as a novelty."
Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of Christ? By no means. In what quality does he invoke him? As the greatest of the line of sages—Brahma, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah—who have revealed to man the true happiness to which he aspires, and the way which he must follow.
"In the beginning was the Word," he says, with St. John; "the Word, Logos, that is, Reason.
"Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.... All our dignity resides in thought.... Let us then strive to think well: that is the principle of morality."
The whole book, moreover, is nothing but a hymn to Reason.
It is true that Tolstoy's Reason is not the scientific reason, the restricted reason "which takes the
"It is a law analogous to those which regulate the nutrition and the reproduction of the animal, the growth and the blossoming of herb and of tree, the movement of the earth and the planets. It is only in the accomplishment of this law, in the submission of our animal nature to the law of reason, with a view to acquiring goodness, that we truly live.... Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it, for not only do we all know it, but we know nothing else.... All that man knows he knows by means of reason and not by faith....
Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? "It is not our life," says Tolstoy, "for it does not depend upon ourselves.
"Our animal activity is accomplished without ourselves.... Humanity has done with the idea of life considered as an individual existence. The
Then follows a long series of postulates, which I will not here discuss, but which show how Tolstoy was obsessed by the idea of reason. It was in fact a passion, no less blind or jealous than the other passions which had possessed him during the earlier part of his life. One fire was flickering out, the other was kindling; or rather it was always the same fire, but fed with a different fuel.
A fact which adds to the resemblance between the "individual" passions and this "rational" passion is that neither those nor this can be satisfied with loving. They seek to act; they long for realisation.
"Christ has said, we must not speak, but act."
And what is the activity of reason?—Love.
"Love is the only reasonable activity of man; love is the most reasonable and most enlightened state of the soul. All that man needs is that nothing shall obscure the sun of reason, for that alone can help him to grow.... Love is the actual good, the supreme good which resolves all the contradictions of life; which not only dissipates the fear of death, but impels man to sacrifice himself to others: for there is no love but that which enables a man to give his life for those he loves: love is not worthy of the name unless it is a sacrifice of self. And the true love can only be realised when man understands that it is not possible for him to acquire
Thus Tolstoy did not come to the refuge of faith like an exhausted river which loses itself among the sands. He brought to it the torrent of impetuous energies amassed during a full and virile life. This we shall presently see.
This impassioned faith, in which Love and Reason are united in a close embrace, has found its most dignified expression in the famous reply to the Holy Synod which excommunicated him:
"I believe in God, who for me is Love, the Spirit, the Principle of all things. I believe that He is in me as I am in Him. I believe that the will of God has never been more clearly expressed than in the teaching of the man Christ; but we cannot regard Christ as God and address our prayers to him without committing the greatest sacrilege. I believe that the true happiness of man consists in the accomplishment of the will of God; I believe that the will of God is that every man shall love his fellows and do unto them always as he would they should do unto him, which contains, as the Bible
"The doctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one of the beautiful doctrines which we have received from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, China, Greece. The two great principles of Jesus: the love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love of one's neighbour, that is, of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world: Krishna, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Truth, moral and religious, is everywhere and always the same.... I have no predilection for Christianity. If I have been particularly attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and have lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing falsifications created by the Churches."
"Man has received directly from God one sole instrument by which he may know himself and his relations with the world: there is no other means. This instrument is reason. Reason comes from God. It is not only the highest human quality, but the only means by which the truth is to be known."
CHAPTER XI
REALITY
He thought he had arrived in port, had achieved the haven in which his unquiet soul might take its repose. He was only at the beginning of a new period of activity.
A winter passed in Moscow (his family duties having obliged him to follow his family thither),
"People can't live like that!" he cried, sobbing. "It cannot be! It cannot be!" He fell into a state of terrible despair, which did not leave him for months. Countess Tolstoy wrote to him on the 3rd of March, 1882:
"You used to say, 'I used to want to hang myself because of my lack of faith.' Now you have faith: why then are you so unhappy?"
Because he had not the sanctimonious, selfsatisfied faith of the Pharisee; because he had not the egoism of the mystic, "who is too completely absorbed in the matter of his own salvation to think of the salvation of others";
What shall we do? (1884-86) is the expression of this second crisis; a crisis far more tragic than the first, and far richer in consequences. What were the personal religious sufferings of Tolstoy in this ocean of human wretchedness—of material misery, not misery created by the mind of a self-wearied idler? It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to it, and having seen it he could but strive, at any cost, to prevent it. Alas! was such a thing possible?
An admirable portrait,
His logic was heroic:
"I am always astonished by these words, so often repeated: 'Yes, it is well enough in theory, but how would it be in practice?' As if theory
He begins by describing, with photographic exactitude, the poverty of Moscow as he has seen it in the course of his visits to the poorer quarters or the night-shelters.
He is convinced that money is not the power, as he had at first supposed, which will save these unhappy creatures, all more or less tainted by the corruption of the cities. Then he seeks bravely for the source of the evil; unwinding link upon link of the terrible chain of responsibility. First come the rich, with the contagion of their accursed luxury, which entices and depraves the soul.
But this is not sufficient. One "must not lie," nor be afraid of the truth. One "must repent," and uproot the pride that is implanted by education. Finally, one must work with one's hands. "Thou shalt win thy bread in the sweat of thy brow" is the first commandment and the most essential.
In his subsequent works, Tolstoy was to complete these precepts of moral hygiene. He was anxious to achieve the cure of the soul, to replenish its energy, by proscribing the vicious pleasures which deaden the conscience
What shall we do? marks the first stage of the difficult journey upon which Tolstoy was about to embark, quitting the relative peace of religious meditation for the social maËlstrom. It was then that the twenty years' war commenced which the old prophet of Yasnaya Polyana waged in the name of the Gospel, single-handed, outside the limits of all parties, and condemning all; a war upon the crimes and lies of civilisation.
Tolstoy was already urging the Russian revolution: "For three or four years now men have cursed us on the highway and called us sluggards and skulkers. The hatred and contempt of the downtrodden people are becoming more intense." (What shall we do?)
In the same book Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Sutayev, and records a conversation with him.
CHAPTER XII
ART AND CONSCIENCE
This moral revolution of Tolstoy's met with little sympathy from his immediate world; his family and his relatives were appalled by it.
For a long time Countess Tolstoy had been anxiously watching the progress of a symptom against which she had fought in vain. As early as 1874 she had seen with indignation the amount of time and energy which her husband spent in connection with the schools.
"This spelling-book, this arithmetic, this grammar—I feel a contempt for them, and I cannot assume a semblance of interest in them."
Matters were very different when pedagogy was succeeded by religion. So hostile was the Countess's reception of the first confidences of the convert that Tolstoy felt obliged to apologise when he spoke of God in his letters:
"Do not be vexed, as you so often are when I mention God; I cannot help it, for He is the very basis of my thought."
The Countess was touched, no doubt; she tried to conceal her impatience; but she did not understand; and she watched her husband anxiously.
"His eyes are strange and fixed. He scarcely speaks. He does not seem to belong to this world." She feared he was ill.
"Leo is always working, by what he tells me. Alas! he is writing religious discussions of some kind. He reads and he ponders until he gives himself the headache, and all this to prove that the Church is not in agreement with the teaching of the Gospel. He will hardly find a dozen people in Russia whom the matter could possibly interest. But there is nothing to be done. I have only one hope: that he will be done with it all the sooner, and that it will pass off like an illness."
The illness did not pass away. The situation between husband and wife became more and more painful. They loved one another; each had a profound esteem for the other; but it was impossible for them to understand one another. They strove to make mutual concessions, which became—as is usually the case—a form of mutual torment. Tolstoy forced himself to follow his family to Moscow. He wrote in his Journal:
"The most painful month of my life. Getting settled in Moscow. All are settling down. But when, then, will they begin to live? All this, not in order to live, but because other folk do the same. Unhappy people!"
During these days the Countess wrote:
"Moscow. We shall have been here a month tomorrow. The first two weeks I cried every day, for Leo was not only sad, but absolutely broken. He did not sleep, he did not eat, at times even he wept; I thought I should go mad."
For a time they had to live their lives apart. They begged one another's pardon for causing mutual suffering. We see how they always loved each other. He writes to her:
"You say, 'I love you, and you do not need my love.' It is the only thing I do need.... Your love causes me more gladness than anything in the world."
But as soon as they are together again the same discord occurs. The Countess cannot share this religious mania which is now impelling Tolstoy to study Hebrew with a rabbi.
"Nothing else interests him any longer. He is wasting his energies in foolishness. I cannot conceal my impatience."
She writes to him:
"It can only sadden me that such intellectual energies should spend themselves in chopping wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling boots."
She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical humour of a mother who watches a child playing a foolish game:
"Finally, I have pacified myself with the Russian proverb: 'Let the child play as he will, so long as he doesn't cry.'"
Before the letter was posted she had a mental vision of her husband reading these lines, his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical tone; and she re-opened the letter, in an impulse of affection:
"Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and I felt such a rush of tenderness for you 1 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so persevering, and it is all lit up by the radiance of goodness, and that look of yours which goes straight to the soul.... It is something that belongs to you alone."
In this manner these two creatures who loved also tormented one another and were straightway stricken with wretchedness because of the pain they had the power to inflict but not the power to avoid. A situation with no escape, which lasted for nearly thirty years; which was to be terminated only by the flight across the steppes, in a moment of aberration, of the ancient Lear, with death already upon him.
Critics have not sufficiently remarked the moving appeal to women which terminates What shall we do? Tolstoy had no sympathy for modern feminism.
"Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband in factitious and meriticious work whose only end is to profit by and enjoy the labour of others; but she will regard such activity with horror and disgust, as a possible seduction for her children. She will demand of her companion a true labour, which will call for energy and does not fear danger.... She knows that the children, the generations to come, are given to men as their holiest vision, and that she exists to further, with all her being, this sacred task. She will develop in her children and in her husband the strength of sacrifice.... It is such women who rule men and serve as their guiding star.... O mother-women! In your hands is the salvation of the world!"
This appeal of a voice of supplication, which still has hope—will it not be heard?
A few years later the last glimmer of hope was dead.
"Perhaps you will not believe me; but you cannot imagine how isolated I am, nor in what a
If those who loved him best so misunderstood the grandeur of the moral transformation which Tolstoy was undergoing, one could not look for more penetration or greater respect in others. Tourgenev with whom he had sought to effect a reconciliation, rather in a spirit of Christian humility than because his feelings towards him had suffered any change,
A few years later, when on the point of death, he wrote to Tolstoy the well-known letter in which he prayed "his friend, the great writer of the Russian world," to "return to literature."
All the artists of Europe shared the anxiety and the prayer of the dying Tourgenev. Melchior de VogÜÉ, at the end of his study of Tolstoy, written in 1886, made a portrait of the writer in peasant costume, handling a drill, the pretext for an eloquent apostrophe:
"Craftsman, maker of masterpieces, this is not
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! In the Introduction to What I Believe he wrote:
"I believe that my life, my reason, my light, is given me exclusively for the purpose of enlightening my fellows. I believe that my knowledge of the truth is a talent which is lent me for this object; that this talent is a fire which is a fire only when it is being consumed. I believe that the only meaning of my life is that I should live it only by the light within me, and should hold that light on high before men that they may see it."
But this light, this fire "which was a fire only when it was being consumed," was a cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy's fellow-artists. The more intelligent could not but suspect that
Nothing was further from the truth; and I hope to show that so far from ruining his art Tolstoy was awakening forces which had lain fallow, and that his religious faith, instead of killing his artistic genius, regenerated it completely.
CHAPTER XIII
SCIENCE AND ART
It is a singular fact that in speaking of Tolstoy's ideas concerning science and art, the most important of the books in which these ideas are expressed—namely, What shall we do? (1884-86)—is commonly ignored. There, for the first time, Tolstoy fights the battle between art and science; and none of the following conflicts was to surpass the violence of their first encounter. It is a matter for surprise that no one, during the assaults which have been recently delivered in France upon the vanity of science and the intellectuals, has thought of referring to these pages. They constitute the most terrible attack ever penned against the eunuchs of science" and "the corsairs of art"; against those intellectual castes which, having destroyed the old ruling castes of the Church, the State, and the Army, have installed themselves in their place, and, without being able or willing to perform any service of use to humanity, lay claim to a blind admiration and service, proclaiming as dogmas an impudent faith in science for the sake
"Never make me say," continues Tolstoy, "that I deny art or science. Not only do I not deny them; it is in their name that I seek to drive the thieves from the temple."
"Science and art are as necessary as bread and water; even more necessary.... The true science is that of the true welfare of all human beings. The true art is the expression of the knowledge of the true welfare of all men."
And he praises those who, "since men have existed, have with the harp or the cymbal, by images or by words, expressed their struggle against duplicity, their sufferings in that struggle, their hope in the triumph of good, their despair at the triumph of evil, and the enthusiasm of their prophetic vision of the future."
He then draws the character of the perfect artist, in a page burning with mystical and melancholy earnestness:
"The activity of science and art is only fruitful when it arrogates no right to itself and considers only its duties. It is only because that activity is such as it is, because its essence is sacrifice, that humanity honours it. The men who are called to serve others by spiritual work always suffer in the accomplishment of that task; for the spiritual world is brought to birth only in suffering and torture. Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the
This splendid page, which throws a tragic light upon the genius of Tolstoy, was written under the immediate stress of the suffering caused him by the poverty of Moscow, and under the conviction that science and art were the accomplices of the entire modern system of social inequality and hypocritical brutality. This conviction he was never to lose. But the impression of his first encounter with the misery of the world slowly
I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It is impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is the man who writes to Fet:
"If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he must insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must mock at them until he splits his sides."
He does not forget to do so, in his writings on art. The negative portion of this statement—brimming over with insults and sarcasms—is so vigorously expressed that it is the only part which has struck the artist. This method has so violently wounded the superstitions and susceptibilities of the brotherhood that they inevitably see, in the enemy of their own art, the enemy of all art whatsoever. But Tolstoy's criticism is never devoid of the reconstructive element. He never destroys for the sake of destruction, but only to rebuild. In his modesty he does not even profess to build anything new; he merely defends Art, which was and ever shall be, from the false artists who exploit it and dishonour it.
"True science and true art have always existed and will always exist; it is impossible and useless to attack them," he wrote to me in 1887, in a letter which anticipated by more than ten years his famous criticism of art (What is Art?).
This superstition of modern art, in which the interested castes believe, "this gigantic humbug," is denounced in Tolstoy's What is Art? With a somewhat ungentle zest he holds it up to ridicule, and exposes its hypocrisy, its poverty, and its fundamental corruption. He makes a clean sweep of everything. He brings to this work of demolition the joy of a child breaking his toys. The whole of this critical portion is often full of humour, but sometimes of injustice: it is warfare. Tolstoy used all weapons that came to his hand, and struck at hazard, without noticing whom he struck. Often enough it happened—as in all battles—that he
Setting aside his literary studies, what could he well know of contemporary art? When was he able to study painting, and what could he have heard of European music, this country gentleman who had passed three-fourths of his life in his Muscovite village, and who had not visited Europe since 1860; and what did he see when he was upon his travels, except the schools, which were all that interested him? He speaks of paintings from hearsay, citing pell-mell among the decadents such painters as Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Monet, BÖcklin, Stuck, and Klinger; confidently admiring Jules Breton and Lhermitte on account of their excellent sentiments; despising Michelangelo, and among the painters of the soul never once naming Rembrandt. In music he felt his way better,
His intrepid assurance increased with age. It finally impelled him to write a book for the purpose of proving that Shakespeare "was not an artist."
"He may have been—no matter what: but he was not an artist."
His certitude is admirable. Tolstoy does not doubt. He does not discuss. The truth is his. He will tell you:
"The Ninth Symphony is a work which causes social disunion."
Again:
"With the exception of the celebrated air for the violin by Bach, the Nocturne in E flat by Chopin, and a dozen pieces, not even entire, chosen from among the works of Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and Chopin,... all the rest may be rejected and treated with contempt, as examples of an art which causes social disunion."
Again:
"I am going to prove that Shakespeare cannot be ranked even as a writer of the fourth order. And as a character-painter he is nowhere."
That the rest of humanity is of a different opinion is no reason for hesitating: on the contrary.
"My opinion," he proudly says, "is entirely different from the established opinion concerning Shakespeare throughout Europe."
Obsessed by his hatred of lies, he scents untruth everywhere; and the more widely an idea is received, the more prickly he becomes in his treatment of it; he refuses it, suspecting in it, as he says with reference to the fame of Shakespeare, "one of those epidemic influences to which men have always been subject. Such were the Crusades in the Middle Ages, the belief in witchcraft, the search for the philosopher's stone, and the passion for tulips. Men see the folly of these influences
Observe that he sees very clearly certain of Shakespeare's actual defects—faults that we have not the sincerity to admit: the artificial quality of the poetic diction, which is uniformly attributed to all his characters; and the rhetoric of passion, of heroism, and even of simplicity. I can perfectly well understand that a Tolstoy, who was the least literary of writers, should have been lacking in sympathy for the art of one who was the most genial of men of letters. But why waste time in speaking of that which he cannot understand? What is the worth of judgments upon a world which is closed to the judge?
Nothing, if we seek in these judgments the passport to these unfamiliar worlds. Inestimably great, if we seek in them the key to Tolstoy's art. We do not ask of a creative genius the impartiality of the critic. When a Wagner or a Tolstoy speaks of
It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that Tolstoy pronounces his artistic judgments. We must not look for any personal after-thoughts in his criticisms. We shall find no trace of such a thing; he is as pitiless to his own works as to those of others.
This ideal is magnificent. The term "religious art" is apt to mislead one as to the breadth of the conception. Far from narrowing the province of art, Tolstoy enlarges it. Art, he says, is everywhere.
"Art creeps into our whole life; what we term
Since the Renascence it has no longer been possible to speak of the art of the Christian nations. Class has separated itself from class. The rich, the privileged, have attempted to claim the monopoly of art; and they have made their pleasure the criterion of beauty. Art has become impoverished as it has grown remoter from the poor.
"The category of the emotions experienced by those who do not work in order to live is far more limited than the emotions of those who labour. The sentiments of our modern society may be reduced to three: pride, sensuality, and weariness of life. These three sentiments and their ramifications constitute almost entirely the subject of the art of the wealthy."
It infects the world, perverts the people, propagates sexual depravity, and has become the worst obstacle to the realisation of human happiness. It is also devoid of real beauty, unnatural and insincere; an affected, fabricated, cerebral art.
In the face of this lie of the Æsthetics, this pastime of the rich, let us raise the banner of the living, human art: the art which unites the men
"The majority of mankind has always understood and loved that which we consider the highest art: the epic of Genesis, the parables of the Gospel, the legends, tales, and songs of the people."
The greatest art is that which expresses the religious conscience of the period. By this Tolstoy does not mean the teaching of the Church. "Every society has a religious conception of life; it is the ideal of the greatest happiness towards which that society tends." All are to a certain extent aware of this tendency; a few pioneers express it clearly.
"A religious conscience always exists. IT IS THE BED IN WHICH THE RIVER FLOWS."
The religious consciousness of our epoch is the aspiration toward happiness as realised by the fraternity of mankind. There is no true art but that which strives for this union. The highest art is that which accomplishes it directly by the power of love; but there is another art which participates in the same task, by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and indignation, all that opposes this fraternity. Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo's Les MisÉrables, and the paintings of Millet. But even though it fail to attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with sympathy and truth brings men nearer together. Such is Don Quixote: such are the plays of MoliÈre. It is true that such art as the latter is continually sinning by its too minute realism and by the poverty of its
"Modern works of art are spoiled by a realism which might more justly be called the provincialism of art."
Thus Tolstoy unhesitatingly condemns the principle of his own genius. What does it signify to him that he should sacrifice himself to the future—and that nothing of his work should remain?
"The art of the future will not be a development of the art of the present: it will be founded upon other bases. It will no longer be the property of a caste. Art is not a trade or profession: it is the expression of real feelings. Now the artist can only experience real feelings when he refrains from isolating himself; when he lives the life natural to man. For this reason the man who is sheltered from life is in the worst possible conditions for creative work."
In the future "artists will all be endowed." Artistic activity will be made accessible to all "by the introduction into the elementary schools of instruction in music and painting, which will be taught to the child simultaneously with the first principles of grammar." For the rest, art will no longer call for a complicated technique, as at present; it will move in the direction of simplicity, clearness, and conciseness, which are the
"Art must suppress violence, and only art can do so. Its mission is to bring about the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of Love."
Which of us would not endorse these generous words? And who can fail to see that Tolstoy's conception is fundamentally fruitful and vital, in spite of its Utopianism and a touch of puerility? It is true that our art as a whole is only the
The only character of Shakespeare's whom he finds natural is Falstaff, "precisely because here the tongue of Shakespeare, full of frigid pleasantries and inept puns, is in harmony with the false, vain, debauched character of this repulsive drunkard."
Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read Shakespeare with pleasure between 1860 and 1870, especially at the time when he contemplated writing a historical play about the figure of Peter the Great. In his notes for 1869 we find that he even takes Hamlet as his model and his guide. Having mentioned his completed works, and comparing War and Peace to the Homeric ideal, he adds:
"HAMLET and my future works; the poetry of the romance-writer in the depicting of character."
"Science will perhaps one day offer as the basis of art a much higher ideal, and art will realise it."
CHAPTER XIV
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC
The finest theory finds its value only in the works by which it is exemplified. With Tolstoy theory and creation are always hand in hand, like faith and action. While he was elaborating his critique of art he was producing types of the new art of which he spoke: of two forms of art, one higher and one less exalted, but both "religious" in the most human sense. In one he sought the union of men through love; in the other he waged war upon the world, the enemy of love. It was during this period that he wrote those masterpieces: The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86), the Popular Tales and Stories (1881-1886), The Power of Darkness (1886), the Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and Master and Servant (1895).
All these works are distinguished from their predecessors by new artistic qualities. Tolstoy's ideas had suffered a change, not alone in respect of the object of art, but also in respect of its form. In reading What is Art? or Shakespeare we are struck by the principles of art which Tolstoy has enounced in these two books; for these principles are for the most part in contradiction to the greatest of his previous works. "Clearness, simplicity, conciseness," we read in What is Art? Material effects are despised; minute realism is condemned; and in Shakespeare the classic ideal of perfection and proportion is upheld. "Without the feeling of balance no artists could exist." And although in his new work the unregenerate man, with his genius for analysis and his native savagery, is not entirely effaced, some aspects of the latter quality being even emphasised, his art is profoundly modified in some respects: the design is clearer, more vigorously accented; the minds of his characters are epitomised, foreshortened; the interior drama is intensified, gathered upon itself like a beast of prey about
His love of the people had long led him to appreciate the beauty of the popular idiom. As a child he had been soothed by the tales of mendicant story-tellers. As a grown man and a famous writer, he experienced an artistic delight in chatting with his peasants.
"These men," he said in later years to M. Paul Boyer,
He must have been the more sensitive to such elements of the language in that his mind was not encumbered with literature.
But these were faults rather than qualities. It was many years before he became aware of the latent genius of the popular tongue; the raciness of its images, its poetic crudity, its wealth of legendary wisdom. Even at the time of writing War and Peace he was already subject to its influence. In March, 1872, he wrote to Strakov:
"I have altered the method of my diction and my writing. The language of the people has sounds to express all that the poet can say, and it is very dear to me. It is the best poetic regulator. If you try to say anything superfluous, too emphatic, or false, the language will not suffer it. Whereas our literary tongue has no skeleton, you may pull it about in every direction, and the result is always something resembling literature."
To the people he owed not only models of style; he owed them many of his inspirations. In 1877 a teller of bylines came to Yasnaya Polyana, and Tolstoy took notes of several of his stories. Of the number was the legend By what do Men live? and The Three Old Men, which became, as we know, two of the finest of the Popular Tales and Legends which Tolstoy published a few years later.
This is a work unique in modern art. It is higher than art: for who, in reading it, thinks of literature? The spirit of the Gospel and the pure love of the brotherhood of man are combined with the smiling geniality of the wisdom of the people. It is full of simplicity, limpidity, and ineffable goodness of heart; and that supernatural radiance which from time to time—so naturally and inevitably—bathes the whole picture; surrounding the old Elias
"On the hill the starschina, sitting on the ground, watched him as he ran; and he cackled, holding his stomach with both hands. And Pakhom fell.
"'Ah! Well done, my merry fellow! You have won a mighty lot of land!'
"The starschina rose, and threw a mattock to Pakhom's servant.
"'There he is: bury him.'
"The servant was alone. He dug a ditch for Pakhom, just as long as from his feet to his head: two yards, and he buried him."
Nearly all these tales conceal, beneath their poetic envelope, the same evangelical moral of renunciation and pardon.
"Do not avenge thyself upon whosoever shall offend thee.
"Do not resist whosoever shall do thee evil.
"Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord."
And everywhere, and as the conclusion of all, is love.
Tolstoy, who wished to found an art for all men, achieved universality at the first stroke. Throughout the world his work has met with a success which can never fail, for it is purged of all the perishable elements of art, and nothing is left but the eternal.
The Power of Darkness does not rise to this august simplicity of heart: it does not pretend to do so. It is the reverse side of the picture. On the one hand is the dream of divine love; on the other, the ghastly reality. We may judge, in reading this
Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dramatic essays,
"The peasants aren't worth much.... But the babas! The women! They are wild animals ... they are afraid of nothing! ... Sisters, there are
Then comes the terrible scene of the murder of the new-born child. Nikita does not want to kill it. Anissia, who has murdered her husband for him, and whose nerves have ever since been tortured by her crime, becomes ferocious, maddened, and threatens to give him up. She cries:
"At least I shan't be alone any longer! He'll be a murderer too 1 Let him know what it's like!" Nikita crushes the child between two boards. In the midst of his crime he flies, terrified; he threatens to kill Anissia and his mother; he sobs, he prays:—
"Little mother, I can't go on!" He thinks he hears the mangled baby crying.
"Where shall I go to be safe?"
It is Shakespearean. Less violent, but still more poignant, is the dialogue of the little girl and the old servant-woman, who, alone in the house, at
The end is voluntary expiation. Nikita, accompanied by his father, the old Hakim, enters barefooted, in the midst of a wedding. He kneels, asks pardon of all, and accuses himself of every crime. Old Hakim encourages him, looks upon him with a smile of ecstatic suffering.
"God! Oh, look at him, God!"
The drama gains quite a special artistic flavour by the use of the peasant dialect.
"I ransacked my notebooks in order to write The Power of Darkness," Tolstoy told M. Paul Boyer.
The unexpected images, flowing from the lyrical yet humorous soul of the Russian people, have a swing and a vigour about them beside which images of the more literary quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy revelled in them; we feel, in reading the play, that the artist while writing it amused himself by noting these expressions, these turns of thought; the comic side of them by no means escapes him,
While he was studying the people, and sending into their darkness a ray of light from his station above them, he was also devoting two tragic romances to the still darker night of the middle
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86) has impressed the French public as few Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I mentioned that I had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among the middle-class readers in the French provinces, a class apparently indifferent to literature and art. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the book represents, with a painful realism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a conscientious functionary, without religion, without ideals, almost without thought; the man who is absorbed in his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of his death, when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the representative type of the European bourgeoisie of 1880 which reads Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not even irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of such matters.
In the violence of its attacks, alternately bitter and almost comic, upon the world in general, and marriage in particular, the Death of Ivan Ilyitch was the first of a new series of works; it was the forerunner of the still more morose and unworldly Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. There is a
"Where are you, Pain? Here.... Well, you have only to persist.—And Death, where is Death? He did not find it. In place of Death he saw only a ray of light. 'It is over,' said some one.—He
In The Kreutzer Sonata there is not even this "ray of light." It is a ferocious piece of work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a wounded beast avenging itself for what it has suffered. We must not forget that the story is the confession of a human brute, who has taken life, and who is poisoned by the virus of jealousy. Tolstoy hides himself behind his leading character. We certainly find his own ideas, though heightened in tone, in these furious invectives against hypocrisy in general; the hypocrisy of the education of women, of love, of marriage—marriage, that "domestic prostitution"; the hypocrisy of the world, of science, of physicians—those "sowers of crime." But the hero of the book impels the writer into an extraordinary brutality of expression, a violent rush of carnal images—all the excesses of a luxurious body—and, by reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the fear and hatred of the passions; maledictions hurled in the face of life by a monk of the Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. Having written the book Tolstoy himself was alarmed:
"I never foresaw at all," he said in the Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata,"
He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage.
"He who regards woman—above all his wife—with sensuality, already commits adultery with her."
"When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have a reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind will be accomplished."
He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew, that "the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage cannot exist; that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an element not of progress but of downfall; that love, with all that precedes and follows it, is an obstacle to the true human ideal."
But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until they fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great creative artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist outstripped the thinker; a process by which
I have not explained the title. To be exact, it is erroneous; it gives a false idea of the book, in which music plays only an accessory part. Suppress the sonata, and all would be the same. Tolstoy made the mistake of confusing two matters, both of which he took deeply to heart: the depraving power of music, and the depraving power of love. The demon of music should have been dealt with in a separate volume; the space which Tolstoy has accorded it in the work in question is insufficient to prove the danger which he wishes to denounce. I must emphasise this matter somewhat; for I do not think the attitude of Tolstoy in respect of music has ever been fully understood.
He was far from disliking music. Only the things one loves are feared as Tolstoy feared the power of music. Remember what a place the memories of music hold in Childhood, and above all in Family Happiness, in which the whole cycle of love, from its springtide to its autumn, is unrolled to the phrases of the Sonata quasi una fantasia of Beethoven. Remember, too, the wonderful symphonies which Nekhludov
"He was extremely fond of music," writes his brother-in-law, S. A. Bers. "He used to play the piano, and was fond of the classic masters. He would often sit down to the piano before beginning his work.
It was really fear that he felt; fear inspired by the stress of those unknown forces which shook him to the roots of his being. In the world of music he felt his moral will, his reason, and all the reality of life dissolve. Let us turn to the scene, in the first volume of War and Peace, in which Nikolas Rostoff, who has just lost heavily at cards, returns in a state of despair. He hears his sister Natasha singing. He forgets everything.
"He waited with a feverish impatience for the note which was about to follow, and for a moment the only thing in all the world was the melody in three-quarter-time: Oh! mio crudele affetto!
"'What an absurd existence ours is!' he thought. 'Unhappiness, money, hatred, honour—they are all nothing.... Here is the truth, the reality!... Natasha, my little dove!... Let us see if she is going to reach that B?... She has reached it, thank God!'
"And to emphasise the B he sung the third octave below it in accompaniment.
"'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he cried, and the vibration of that octave awoke in his soul all that was best and purest. Beside this superhuman sensation, what were his losses at play and his word of honour?... Follies! One could kill, steal, and yet be happy!"
Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him music is only a passing influence; but Natasha is on the point of losing her self-control. After an evening at the Opera, "in that strange world which is intoxicated and perverted by art, and a thousand leagues from the real world; a world in which good and evil, the extravagant and the reasonable, are mingled and confounded," she listened to a declaration from Anatol Kouraguin, who was madly in love with her, and she consented to elope with him.
The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared music.
Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why, asks M. Camille Bellaigue,
"This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me immediately into the state of mind which was the composer's when he wrote it.... Music ought to be a State matter, as in China. We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry wield so frightful a hypnotic power.... As for these things (the first Presto of the Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play them under particular and important circumstances...."
Yet we see, after this revolt, how he surrenders to the power of Beethoven, and how this power is by his own admission a pure and ennobling force. On hearing the piece in question, Posdnicheff falls into an indefinable state of mind, which he cannot analyse, but of which the consciousness fills him with delight. "There is no longer room for jealousy." The wife is not less transfigured. She has, while she plays, "a majestic severity of expression"; and "a faint smile, compassionate and happy, after she has finished." What is there perverse in all this? This: that the spirit is
This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the lack of vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music. Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of the Opera-house during a performance of SalomÉ is quite enough to assure us of the immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions evoked by the art of sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy, abounding in life. The truth is that in spite of his injustice where Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the majority of those who now exalt him. He, at least, knew the frenzied passions, the savage violence, which mutter through the art of the "deaf old man," but of which the orchestras and the virtuosi of to-day are innocent. Beethoven would perhaps have preferred the hatred of Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers.
"All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with the drama; and, as always happens to men who have never, up to the age of forty, thought about such or such a subject, when they suddenly turn their attention to this neglected subject, it seems to them that they perceive a number of new and wonderful things.... I have read Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and MoliÈre.... I want to read Sophocles and Euripides.... I have kept my bed a long time, being unwell—and when I am unwell a host of comic or dramatic characters begin to struggle for life within me ... and they do it with much success."—Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 1870 (Further Letters).
"The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the union of all living creatures in brotherly love, is irreconcilable with the conduct of life, which demands a continual effort towards an ideal which is inaccessible, but does not expect that it will ever be attained."
CHAPTER XV
"RESURRECTION"
Ten years separated Resurrection from the Kreutzer Sonata.
He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist, as in War and Peace, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony, the mental tumult of the Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch he adds a religious serenity, a detachment from the world, which is faithfully reflected in himself. One is reminded, at times, of a Christian Goethe.
All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about the book; in which respect it differs widely from War and Peace and Anna Karenin. There are hardly any digressions of an
The lyrical powers of the writer are given but little play. His art has become more impersonal; more alien to his own life. The world of criminals and revolutionaries, which he here describes, was unfamiliar to him;
The only character in this book who has no objective reality is Nekhludov himself; and this
The same impression—one of elemental duality—is again produced at the end of the book, where a third part, full of strictly realistic observation, is set beside an evangelical conclusion which is not in any way essential; it is an act of personal faith,
Although Resurrection has not the harmonious fullness of the work of his youth, and although I, for my part, prefer War and Peace, it is none the less one of the most beautiful poems of human compassion; perhaps the most truthful ever written. More than in any other book I see through the pages of this those bright eyes of Tolstoy's, the pale-grey, piercing eyes, "the look that goes straight to the heart,"
CHAPTER XVI
RELIGION AND POLITICS
Tolstoy never renounced his art. A great artist cannot, even if he would, abandon the reason of his existence. He can, for religious reasons, cease to publish, but he cannot cease to write. Tolstoy never interrupted his work of artistic creation. M. Paul Boyer, who saw him, during the last few years, at Yasnaya Polyana, says that he would now give prominence to his evangelistic works, now to his works of imagination; he would work at the one as a relaxation from the other. When he had finished some social pamphlet, some Appeal to the Rulers or to the Ruled, he would allow himself to resume one of the charming tales which he was, so to speak, in process of recounting to himself; such as his Hadji-Mourad, a military epic, which celebrated an episode of the wars of the Caucasus and the resistance of the mountaineers under Schamyl.
On the other hand he was boldly and ardently casting his mystical and polemical writings up
What Tolstoy can least find it in him to pardon—what he denounces with the utmost hatred—are the new lies; not the old ones, which are no longer able to deceive; not despotism, but the illusion of liberty. It is difficult to say which he hates the more among the followers of the newer idols: whether the Socialists or the "Liberals."
He had a long-standing antipathy for the Liberals. It had seized upon him suddenly when, as an officer fresh from Sebastopol, he found himself in the society of the literary men of St. Petersburg. It had been one of the causes of his misunderstanding with Tourgenev. The arrogant noble, the man of ancient race, could not support these "intellectuals," with their profession of making the nation happy, whether by its will or against it,
"To avoid the ambition of Liberalism."
On his return from the second:
"A privileged society has no right whatsoever to educate in its own way the masses of which it knows nothing."
In Anna Karenin he freely expresses his contempt for Liberals in general. Levine refuses to associate himself with the work of the provincial institutions for educating the people, and the innovations which are the order of the day. The picture of the elections to the provincial assembly exposes the fool's bargain by which the country changes its ancient Conservative administration for a Liberal rÉgime—nothing is really altered, except that there is one lie the more, while the masters are of inferior blood.
"We are not worth very much perhaps," says the representative of the aristocracy, "but none the less we have lasted a thousand years."
Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in which the Liberals abuse the words, "The People: The Will of the People." What do they know of the people? Who are the People?
But it is more especially when the Liberal movement seemed on the point of succeeding and
"During the last few years the deformation of Christianity has given rise to a new species of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet more firmly in their servility. With the help of a complicated system of parliamentary elections it was suggested to them that by electing their representatives directly they were participating in the government, and that in obeying them they were obeying their own will: in short, that they were free. This is a piece of imposture. The people cannot express its will, even with the aid of universal suffrage—1, because no such collective will of a nation of many millions of inhabitants could exist; 2, because even if it existed the majority of voices would not be its expression. Without insisting on the fact that those elected would legislate and administrate not for the general good but in order to maintain themselves in power—without counting on the fact of the popular corruption due to pressure and electoral corruption—this fraud is particularly harmful because of the presumptuous slavery into which all those who submit to it fall.... These free men recall the prisoners who imagine that they are enjoying freedom when they have the right to elect those of their gaolers who are entrusted with the interior policing of the prison.... A member of a despotic State may be entirely free, even in the midst of the most brutal violence. But a member of a constitutional State is always a slave, for he recognises th
In his hostility towards Liberalism contempt was
Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony concerning this modern superstition and "these futile problems: the origin of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory of numbers, animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach as much importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to the Immaculate Conception or the Duality of Substance." He derides these "servants of science, who, just as the servants of the Church, persuade themselves and others that they are saving humanity; who, like the Church, believe in their own infallibility, never agree among themselves, divide themselves into sects, and, like the Church, are the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral ignorance, and the long delay of humanity in freeing itself from the evils under which it suffers; for they have rejected the only thing that co
Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.
"The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends."
At heart, he is without love. He feels only hatred for the oppressors and "a black envy for the assured and easy life of the rich: a greed like
Happily the principal energies of Socialism spend themselves in smoke—in speeches, like those of M. JaurÈs.
"What an admirable orator! There is something of everything in his speeches—and there is nothing.... Socialism is a little like our Russian orthodoxy: you press it, you push it into its last trenches, you think you have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round and tells you: 'No, I'm not the one you think, I'm somebody else.' And it slips out of your hands.... Patience! Let time do its work. There will be socialistic theories, as there are women's fashions, which soon pass from the drawing-room to the servants' hall."
Although Tolstoy waged war in this manner upon the Liberals and Socialists, it was not—far from it—to leave the field free for autocracy; on the contrary, it was that the battle might be fought in all its fierceness between the old world and the new, after the army of disorderly and dangerous elements had been eliminated. For Tolstoy too
"I believe that at this very hour the great revolution is beginning which has been preparing for two thousand years in the Christian world—the revolution which will substitute for corrupted Christianity and the system of domination which proceeds therefrom the true Christianity, the basis of equality between men and of the true liberty to which all beings endowed with reason aspire."
What time does he choose, this seer and prophet, for his announcement of the new era of love and happiness? The darkest hour of Russian history; the hour of disaster and of shame! Superb power of creative faith! All around it is light—even in darkness. Tolstoy saw in death the signs of renewal; in the calamities of the war in Manchuria, in the downfall of the Russian armies, in the frightful anarchy and the bloody struggle of the classes. His logic—the logic of a dream!—drew from the victory of Japan the astonishing conclusion that Russia should withdraw from all warfare, because the non-Christian peoples will always have the advantage in warfare over the Christian peoples "who have passed through the phase of servile submission." Does this mean the abdication of the Russian people? No; this is pride at its supremest. Russia should withdraw from all warfare bec
"The Revolution of 1905, which will set men free from brutal oppression, must commence in Russia. It is beginning."
Why must Russia play the part of the chosen people? Because the new Revolution must before all repair the "Great Crime," the great monopolisation of the soil for the profit of a few thousands of wealthy men and the slavery of millions of men—the cruellest of enslavements;
Again, and more especially, because the Russian people is of all peoples most thoroughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that the coming revolution should realise, in the name of Christ, the law of union and of love. Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled unless it is based upon the law of non-resistance to evil.
"The Russian people has always assumed, with regard to power, an attitude entirely strange to the other peoples of Europe. It has never entered upon a conflict with power; it has never participated in it, and consequently has never been depraved by it. It has regarded power as an evil which must be avoided. An ancient legend represents the Russians as appealing to the Varingians
"A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile obedience.
"The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not obey it—that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate."
At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the emotion caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic nonresistance of a people—the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in St. Petersburg, when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed itself to be shot down without a cry of hatred or a gesture of self-defence.
For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the Sectators, had been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience to the State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy
The attitude which he preserved, in respect of men who at the peril of their lives were putting into practice the principles which he professed,
"He who suffers no trials can teach nothing to him who does so suffer."
He implores "the forgiveness of all those whom his words and his writings may have caused to suffer."
He never urges any one to refuse military service. It is a matter for every man to decide for himself. If he discusses the matter with any one who is hesitating, "he always advises him not to refuse obedience so long as it would not be morally impossible." For if a man hesitates it is because he is not ripe; and "it is better to have one soldier the more than a renegade or hypocrite, which is what
The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end can no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: "Love thy neighbour as thyself,
Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts "abstract love"?
"The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal love for those who are—somewhere, out of sight.... To love those we do not know, those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing! There is no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so pleased with ourselves! The conscience is fooled.—No. We must love our neighbours—those we live with, and who are in our way and embarrass us."
I have read in most of the studies of Tolstoy's work that his faith and philosophy are not original. It is true; the beauty of these ideas is eternal and can never appear a momentary fashion. Others complain of their Utopian character. This also is true; they are Utopian, the New Testament is Utopian. A prophet is a Utopian; he treads the earth but sees the life of eternity; and that this apparition should have been granted to us, that we should have seen among us the last of the prophets, that the greatest of our artists should wear this aureole on his brow—there, it seems to me, is a fact more novel and of far greater importance to the world than one religion the more, or a new philosophy. Those are blind who do not perceive the miracle of this great mind, the incarnation of fraternal love in the midst of a people and a century stained with the blood of hatred!
But the essential work as yet unpublished is Tolstoy's Journal, which covers forty years of his life, and will fill, so it is said, no less than thirty volumes.
In a long and interesting letter to a lady who asked him to join a Committee for the Propagation of Reading and Writing among the People, Tolstoy expressed yet other objections to the Liberals: they have always played the part of dupes; they act as the accomplices of the autocracy through fear; their participation in the government gives the latter a moral prestige, and accustoms them to compromises, which quickly make them the instruments of power. Alexander II. used to say that all the Liberals were ready to sell themselves for honours if not for money; Alexander III. was able, without danger, to eradicate the liberal work of his father. "The Liberals whispered among themselves that this did not please them; but they continued to attend the tribunals, to serve the State and the press; in the press they alluded to those things to which allusion was allowed, and were silent upon matters to which allusion was prohibited." They did the same under Nikolas II. "When this young man, who knows nothing and understands nothing, replies tactlessly and with effrontery to the representatives of the people, do the Liberals protest? By no means ... From every side they send the young Tsar their cowardly and flattering congratulations." (Further Letters.)
In Resurrection, at the hearing of Maslova's appeal, in the Senate, it is a materialistic Darwinist who is most strongly opposed to the revision, because he is secretly shocked that Nekhludov should wish, as a matter of duty, to marry a prostitute; any manifestation of duty, and still more, of religious feeling, having the effect upon him of a personal insult.
Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the artisan who has become a revolutionist through humiliation and the desire for revenge; a passionate worshipper of science, which he cannot comprehend; a fanatical anticlerical and an ascetic.
In Three More Dead or The Divine and the Human we shall find a few specimens of the new generation of revolutionaries: Romane and his friends, who despise the old Terrorists, and profess to attain their ends scientifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial people.
"Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the means of bettering the condition of the masses of the people remind one of what one sees in the theatre, when all the spectators have an excellent view of an actor who is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who also have a full view of him, pretend not to see him, and endeavour to distract one another's attention from him."
There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the labouring people. As a solution of the property question, Tolstoy recommends the doctrine of Henry George and his suggested single tax upon the value of the soil. This is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied, and has assimilated it so thoroughly that in his writings he often uses entire phrases of George's.
"They are persecuting my friends all around me, and leaving me in peace, although if any one is dangerous it is I. Evidently I am not worth persecution, and I am ashamed of the fact." (Letter to Teneromo, 1892, Further Letters.)
"Evidently I am not worthy of persecution, and I shall have to die like this, without having ever been able to testify to the truth by physical suffering." (To Teneromo, May 16,1892, ibid.)
"It hurts me to be at liberty." (To Teneromo, June i, 1894, ibid.)
That he was at liberty was, Heaven knows, no fault of his! He insults the Tsars, he attacks the fatherland, "that ghastly fetish to which men sacrifice their life and liberty and reason." (The End of a World.) Then see, in War and Revolution, the summary of Russian history. It is a gallery of monsters: "The maniac Ivan the Terrible, the drunkard Peter I., the ignorant cook, Catherine I., the sensual and profligate Elizabeth, the degenerate Paul, the parricide Alexander I. [the only one of them for whom Tolstoy felt a secret liking], the cruel and ignorant Nikolas I.; Alexander II., unintelligent and evil rather than good; Alexander III., an undeniable sot, brutal and ignorant; Nikolas II., an innocent young officer of hussars, with an entourage of coxcombs, a young man who knows nothing and understands nothing."
CHAPTER XVII
OLD AGE
His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in the memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a double furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard, recalling that of the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and softer; it bore the traces of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment, and of affectionate kindness. What a change from the almost animal brutality of the same face at twenty, and the heavy rigidity of the soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the same profound fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and from which nothing is hidden.
Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17, 1901) Tolstoy had said:
"I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able also, in peace and gladness, to travel on towards death."
Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "tha
Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of possessing?
The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of the "great and wise Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery"; and that China, at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.
A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to imitate Europe.
Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in the future.
"All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye. Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates, until the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which finally becomes a tree."
But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone; glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where Resurrection was translated, and where his ideas upon "the restitution of the land to the people" were
But he had not three hundred disciples, and he knew it. Moreover, he did not take pains to make them. He repulsed the attempts of his friends to form groups of Tolstoyans.
"We must not go in search of one another, but we must all seek God.... You say: 'Together it is easier.'—What? To labour, to reap, yes. But to draw near to God—one can only do so in isolation.... I see the world as an enormous temple in which the light falls from on high and precisely in the middle. To become united we must all go towards the light. Then all of us, come together from all directions, will find ourselves in the company of men we did not look for; in that is the joy."
How many have found themselves together under the ray which falls from the dome? What matter! It is enough to be one and alone if one is with God.
"As only a burning object can communicate fire to other objects, so only the true faith and life of a man can communicate themselves to other men and to spread the truth."
Perhaps; but to what point was this isolated fa
"One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely the sign of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the greater, from worse to better. And this discord is the condition of good. It is an evil when a man is calm and satisfied with himself."
He imagines the following subject for a novel—showing that the persistent discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in him:
"I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles, and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias, and finally a Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies, forgotten, in a hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And yet he is a saint."
Had he still doubts—he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to a halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards.
"Movement is life."
Many things must have changed within him during the last few years. Did he not modify his opinion of revolutionaries? Who can even say that his faith in non-resistance to evil was not at length a little shaken? Even in Resurrection the relations of Nekhludov with the condemned "politicals" completely change his ideas as to the Russian revolutionary party.
"Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their criminal dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency, their selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them more closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he understood that they could not be otherwise."
And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total self-sacrifice.
Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from the "intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely moving amidst the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their threatening army defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana. Three tales, published by the Mercure de France,
"It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities and on the great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do to modern civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient civilisation."
So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:
"The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing of the curbs, the convenances and public opinion, which are so strongly developed among European peoples."
Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that the rulers and the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by cries of "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!" Did Tolstoy still condemn them? We do not know. But when, a few days later, he saw in his own village the villagers weeping while their sheep and their samovars were seized and taken from them by callous authorities, he also cried vengeance in vain against these thieves, "these ministers and their acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy
It is sad, after a whole life lived in the expectation and the proclamation of the reign of love, to be forced to close ones eye's in the midst of these threatening visions, and to feel one's whole position crumbling. It is still sadder for one with the impeccably truthful conscience of a Tolstoy to be forced to confess to oneself that one's life has not been lived entirely in accordance with one's principles.
Here we touch upon the most pitiful point of these latter years—should we say of the last thirty years?—and we can only touch upon it with a pious and tentative hand, for this sorrow, of which Tolstoy endeavoured to keep the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, but to others who are living, whom he loved, and who loved him.
He was never able to communicate his faith to those who were dearest to him—his wife and children. We have seen how the loyal comrade, who had so valiantly shared his artistic life and labour, suffered when he denied his faith in art for a different and a moral faith, which she did
"I feel in all my being," he wrote to Teneromo, "the truth of these words: that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are as one.... I wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to my wife a portion of that religious conscience which gives me the possibility of sometimes raising myself above the sorrows of life. I hope that it will be given her; very probably not by me, but by God, although this conscience is hardly accessible to women."
It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved and admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness of the great man who was "as one" with her; she saw that "he marched ahead of the host and showed men the way they should follow";
With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that "at table, when the father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and unbelief."
He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the social relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing visitors from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly curious, who wore him out; he suffered from the "luxury" in which his family life forced him to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to believe the accounts of those who saw him in his simple house, with its almost austere appointments; in his little room, with its iron bed, its cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But even this poor comfort weighed upon him; it was a cause of perpetual remorse. In the second of the tales published by the Mercure de France he bitterly contrasts the spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of his own house.
"My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, "ho
Why did he not realise this agreement? If he could not induce his family to cut themselves off from the world, why did he not leave them, go out of their life, thus avoiding the sarcasm and the reproach of hypocrisy expressed by his enemies, who were only too glad to follow his example and make it an excuse for denying his doctrines?
He had thought of so doing. For a long time he was quite resolved. A remarkable letter
"For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot continue to live as I have lived during these last sixteen years,
"The fact that I have left you." He did not leave her. Poor letter! It seemed to him that it was enough to write, and his resolution would be fulfilled. ... Having written, his resolution was already exhausted. "If I had gone away openly there would have been supplications, I should have weakened." ... There was no need of supplications, of discussion; it was enough for him to see, a moment later, those whom he wished to leave; he felt that he could not, could not leave them; and he took the letter in his pocket and buried it among his papers, with this subscription:
"Give this, after my death, to my wife Sophie Andreyevna."
And this was the end of his plan of departure. Was he not strong enough? Was he not capable of sacrificing his affections to his God? In the Christian annals there is no lack of saints with tougher hearts, who never hesitated to trample fearlessly underfoot both their own affections and those of others. But how could he? He was not of their company; he was weak: he was a man; and it is for that reason that we love him.
More than fifteen years earlier, on a page full of heart-breaking wretchedness, he had asked himself: "Well, Leo Tolstoy, are you living according to the principles you profess?"
He replied miserably:
"I am dying of shame; I am guilty; I am contemptible.... Yet compare my former life with my life of to-day. You will see that I am trying to live according to the laws of God. I have not done the thousandth part of what I ought to do, and I am confused; but I have failed to do it not because I did not wish to do it, but because I could not. ... Blame me, but not the path I am taking. If I know the road to my house, and if I stagger along it like a drunken man, does that show that the road is bad? Show me another, or follow me along the true path, as I am ready to follow you. But do not discourage me, do not rejoice in my distress, do not joyfully cry out: 'Look! He said he was going to the house, and he is falling into the ditch!' No, do not be glad, but help me, support me!... Help me! My heart is torn with despair lest we should all be astray; and when I make every effort to escape you, at each effort, instead of having compassion, point at me with your finger crying, 'Look, he is falling into the ditch with us!'"
When death was nearer, he wrote once more:
"I am not a saint: I have never professed to be one. I am a man who allows himself to be carried away, and who often does not say all that he th
Thus he remained, tormented by remorse, pursued by the mute reproaches of disciples more energetic and less human than himself;
"There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering: why do you think only of me?"
Then it came—it was Sunday, November 20, 1910, a little after six in the morning—the "deliverance," as he named it: "Death, blessed Death."
Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly on October 28, 1910 (November 10th European style) about five o'clock in the morning. He was accompanied by Dr. Makovitski; his daughter Alexandra, whom Tchertkoff calls "his most intimate collaborator," was in the secret. At six in the evening of the same day he reached the monastery of Optina, one of the most celebrated sanctuaries of Russia, which he had often visited in pilgrimage. He passed the night there; the next morning he wrote a long article on the death penalty. On the evening of October 29th (November 11th) he went to the monastery of Chamordino, where his sister Marie was a nun. He dined with her, and spoke of how he would have wished to pass the end of his life at Optina, "performing the humblest tasks, on condition that he was not forced to go to church." He slept at Chamordino, and next morning took a walk through the neighbouring village, where he thought of taking a lodging; returning to his sister in the afternoon. At five o'clock his daughter Alexandra unexpectedly arrived. She doubtless told him that his retreat was known, and that he was being followed; they left at once in the night. "Tolstoy, Alexandra, and Makovitski were making for the Koselk station, probably intending to gain the southern provinces, or perhaps the Doukhobor colonies in the Caucasus." On the way Tolstoy fell ill at the railway-station of Astapovo and was forced to take to his bed. It was there that he died.
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCLUSION
The struggle was ended; the struggle that had lasted for eighty-two years, whose battlefield was this life of ours. A tragic and glorious mellay, in which all the forces of life took part; all the vices and all the virtues.—All the vices excepting one: untruth, which he pursued incessantly, tracking it into its last resort and refuge.
In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the conflict of passions in the stormy darkness, illuminated from time to time by dazzling flashes of light—crises of love and ecstasy and visions of the Eternal. Years of the Caucasus, of Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and restless youth. Then the great peace of the first years of marriage. The happiness of love, of art, of nature—War and Peace. The broad daylight of genius, which bathed the whole human horizon, and the spectacle of those struggles which for the soul of the artist were already things of the past. He dominated them, was master of them, and already they were not enough. Like
"There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure leads to alight in the midst of the crowd, when their pinions are broken; such, for instance, am I. Then they beat their broken wings; they launch themselves desperately, but fall anew. The wings will mend. I shall fly high. May God help me!"
These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest, of which the Confessions are the memory and echo. More than once was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always persevered. He started afresh. We see him hovering in "the vast, profound heavens," with his two great wings, of which one is reason and the other faith. But he does not find the peace he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of his passions. There he perceives the apost
From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious spirits, who, like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a corrupted civilisation. The last of these was Rousseau. By his love
"Pages like this go to my hea
But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese:
"Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that man!"
Or in this defiance of the world:
"I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man is himself a man to be suppressed."
Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the "crimes" of his past life:
"I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they
Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau, because, as the latter said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil it was in my interest to tell everything."
"People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who ordains us to be shameful."
Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and the humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy. Behind Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, the innocents, whose tears and naive confessions had touched him as a child.
But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life; a magnificent warfare between the highest powers of his mind: Truth and Love.
Truth—"that look which goes straight to the heart," the penetrating light of "those grey eyes which pierce you through"—Truth w
"The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."
The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.
But very soon the "horrible truth"
Love is "the basis of energy."
This interpenetration of the truth by love makes the unique value of the masterpieces he wrote in the middle part of his life—nel mezzo del cammin—and distinguishes his realism from the realism of Flaubert. The latter places his faith in refraining from loving his characters. Great as he may be, he lacks the Fiat lux! The light of the sun is not enough: we must have the light of the heart. The realism of Tolstoy is incarnate in each of his creatures, and seeing them with their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons for loving them and for making us feel the chain of brotherhood which unites us to all.
But this union is a difficult one to maintain. There are hours in which the spectacle of life and its suffering are so bitter that they appear an affront to love, and in order to save it, and to save his faith, a man must withdraw to such a height above the world that faith is in danger of losing truth as well. What shall he do, moreover, who has received at the hands of fate the fatal, magnificent gift of seeing the truth—the gift of being unable to escape from seeing it? Who
We have all known these tragic conflicts. How often have we had to face the alternative—not to see, or to hate! And how often does an artist—an artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent power of the written word—feel himself weighed down by anguish as he writes the truth!
Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two faiths. In the works of his maturity love is th
In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the contrast is even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love required of him; he acted otherwise; he lived not according to God but according to the world. And love itself: how was he to behave with regard to love? How distinguish between its many aspects, its contradictory orders? Was love of family, to come first, or love of all humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by these alternatives.
What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the self-sufficient, the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain. They, to be sure, have found the truth; they hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be of use as a
Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world of thought; he speaks to ordinary men—hominibus bonÆ voluntatis. He is our conscience. He says what we all think, we average people, and what we all fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of pride: one of those haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity upon their art and their intelligence. He is—as he loved to style himself in his letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the most pleasant of all—"our brother."
"There are in this world heavy folk, without wings. They struggle down below. There are strong men among them: as Napoleon. He leaves terrible traces among humanity. He sows discord.—There are men who let their wings grow, slowly launch themselves, and hover: the monks. There are light fliers, who easily mount and fall: the worthy idealists. There are men with powerful wings.... There are the celestial ones, who out of their love of men descend to earth and fold their wings, and teach others how to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they re-ascend: as did Christ."
"This is the story of the bird which is caught after a pinch of salt has been put on his tail. It is quite as easy to catch him without it. They laugh at us who speak of arbitration and disarmament by consent of the Powers. Mere verbiage, this! Naturally the Governments approve: worthy apostles! They know very well that their approval will never prevent their doing as they will." (Cruel Pleasures.)
The similarity is really very striking at times, and might well deceive one. Take the profession of faith of the dying Julie:
"I could not say that I believed what it was impossible for me to believe, and I have always believed what I said I believed. This was as much as rested with me."
Compare Tolstoy's letter to the Holy Synod:
"It may be that my beliefs are embarrassing or displeasing. It is not within my power to change them, just as it is not in my power to change my body. I cannot believe anything but what I believe, at this hour when I am preparing to return to that God from whom I came."
Or this passage from the RÉponse À Christophe de Beaumont, which seems pure Tolstoy:
"I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. My Master has told me that he who loves his brother accomplishes the law."
Or again:
"The whole of the Lord's Prayer is expressed in these words: 'Thy Will be done!'" (TroisiÈme lettre de la Montague.)
Compare with:
"I am replacing all my prayers with the Pater Nosier. All the requests I can make of God are expressed with greater moral elevation by these words: 'Thy Will be done!'" (Tolstoy's Journal, in the Caucasus, 1852-3.)
The similarity of thought is no less striking in the province of art:
"The first rule of the art of writing," said Rousseau, "is to speak plainly and to express one's thought exactly."
And Tolstoy:
"Think what you will, but in such a manner that every word may be understood by all. One cannot write anything bad in perfectly plain language."
I have demonstrated elsewhere that the satirical descriptions of the Paris Opera in the Nouvelle HÉloise have much in common with Tolstoy's criticisms in What is Art?
"'Yes, love!... Not selfish love, but love as I knew it, for the first time in my life, when I saw my enemy dying at my side, and loved him.... It is the very essence of the soul. To love his neighbour, to love his enemies, to love all and each, is to love God in all His manifestations!... To love a creature who is dear to us is human love: to love an enemy is almost divine love!'" (Prince Andrei in War and Peace.)
(The names of characters and titles of books are in italics.)
ALEXANDRA, Tolstoy's aunt, 18
Ancestry, Tolstoy's, 14, 15
Analysis, self-, 29
Andrei Bolkonsky, Prince, 88-90, 94, 100
Anna Karenin (novel), 76, 84, 99, 102, 203
Anna Karenin (character), 103, 104
Arabian Nights, 19, 169
Art—
Attacks on modern, 145, 146
Tolstoy's conception of, 147-150
His ignorance of, 151
His religious ideal of art, 156
Christian art extinct, 157
The art of the future, 159
Endowment of, 159
Mission of, 160
Austerlitz, 89, 90
BACH, 153
Bachkirs, the, 102
Bagration, 88
Beethoven, 151, 155, 181,183
Bers family, the, 75
Bers, S. A., 179
Bers, Sophie, see Countess Tolstoy
Besoukhov, Pierre, 88, 91-94, 100
Bloody Sunday, 212
BÖcklin, 151
Boyer, Paul, 167
Boyhood, 42
Brahms, 151
Breton, Jules, 151
Brothers, Tolstoy's, 17
Brush with the Enemy, A, 44
Bylines, 19, 168
CAUCASUS, Tolstoy joins Army of the, 33
Census, the, Tolstoy assists in taking, 127
Chavannes, P. de, 151
Childhood, Tolstoy's, 17-19
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 15, 16, 19, 23
Begun in the Caucasus, 35; 39
Tolstoy's later opinion of, 40; 84
China, Tolstoy's admiration for,
Christ, Tolstoy's conception of, 119
Concordance and Translation of the Four Gospels, 118
Confessions, 106, 120, 238
Cossacks, The, 44
Countess Tolstoy—
Character and abilities, 83
As model, 84; 100, 135-138, 226-227
Letter to, 229-231
Creed, Tolstoy's, 123-124
Crimea, transference to the, 49
Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, 118
Criticism of art, destructive,
Cycle of Readings, 200
DEATH OF IVAN ILYITCH, THE, 6, 68, 165, 174-175
Decembrists, The (a projected novel), 91
Diary of a Sportsman, 68, 75
Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov, 65
Dmitri Tolstoy, 17
Death of, 106-107
Don Quixote, 158
Dostoyevsky, 158, 193
Dreyfus Affair, the, 154
Droujinine, 61
EDUCATION, Tolstoy's ideas concerning, 23-25, 66
End of a World, The, 201
England, Tolstoy contemplates retiring to, 103
Erochta, the old Cossack, 45
Execution, effect of a public 64
FAITH, Tolstoy's, brings no happiness, 128
Family, Tolstoy's, 16
Family dissensions, 228
Family Happiness, 75-77, 84
Father, Tolstoy's, 16
Feminism, Tolstoy's attitude towards, 138
Flaubert's opinion of Tolstoy's work, 99, 245
GAPON, FATHER, 212
George, Henry, 225
Georgians, the, 213
Goethe, 156
Gontcharov, 61
Great Crime, The, 201, 210
Greek, Tolstoy studies, 101
Gricha, the idiot, 18
Grigorovitch, 61
HADJI MOURAD, 199
Hebrew, Tolstoy studies, 137
Home, Tolstoy's, see Yasnaya Polyana
Hugo, Victor, 158
Hunting, renounced, 132
IBSEN, 151
Introspection, Tolstoy's faculty of, 29
Invasion, The, 35, 42
Irtenieff, Nikolas, 15
Journal, Tolstoy's, 14, 27, 34
KARENIN, 106
Karatayev, 91
Kazan, 23
Khlopoff, Captain, 43
Kitty Levine, 84, 103
Klinger, Max; 151
Kozeltoff, brothers, in Sebastopol in August, 1855, 56-57
Kreutzer Sonata, The, 165, 174, 176-177, 181
Kutuzov, 88, 90-91
LEVINE, 103,106-108, in Lhermitte, 151
Liberal Party, Tolstoy's disdain of the, 66, 202-203
Life, 120
Literary Society of St. Petersburg,
Tolstoy's dislike of, 61-67
Logic, heroic, 129-130
Love—
Definition of, 122
Tolstoy's attitude towards sexual, 177
Law of, 211
Lucerne, incident of the singer, 65
MANET, 151
Marriage, Tolstoy's views concerning, 100, 177
Marie, Princess, 88-89
Marie Tolstoy, 16, 94
Maslova, 191
Master and Servant, 165
Michelangelo, 151
Millet, 151
MoliÈre, 158
Moscow, effect of visit to, 127, 130, 147
Music—
Love of, 28-29
Ignorance of modern music, 151-152; 153
In the Kreutzer Sonata, 178
Dread of, 179
Suggested State control over, 182-183
NATASHA, 90, 93-94,179-180
Nekhludov, 26-28, 33, 68, 181, 191
Nekhludov, Diary of Prince D., 65
Nikolas Tolstoy, 17, 33
Dies of phthisis, 69
Non-Resistance, 211, 225
OLD BELIEVERS, the, 212
Olenin, 45
Orthodox Church, Tolstoy's relations with the, 117
Ostrovsky, 61
PAKHOM THE PEASANT, 169-170
Parents, Tolstoy's, 15-16
Pascal, 120
Pedagogy, 135
Polikushka, 70, 78
Popular Tales, 42, 165, 168
Popular idiom, 167-168
Portraits of Tolstoy—
Of 1848, 26 (note)
Of 1851, 35
Of 1885, 129; 140
Posdnicheff, 177, 182
Power of Darkness, The, 165, 170-173
Prashhoukhin, death of, 54
REASON (letter upon), 121
Reason, Tolstoy's distrust of, 108; 120-121
Religion—
Tolstoy's vague agnosticism as a youth, 24
Revival of, in the Caucasus, 33-39; 100, 123-124, 135, 209, 215-216
Rembrandt, 151
Resurrection, 166, 187-195, 224, 247
Revolution, Tolstoy prophesies, 209-210
Roumania, Tolstoy joins Army of, 49
Rousseau, J. J., worship of, 27; 240-243
Rules of Life, 25
Russian Proprietor, A, 27
Written in the Caucasus, 35; 42
Russo-Japanese War, 201
ST. PETERSBURG, Tolstoy's dislike of literary society of, 61, 67
Samara, 192
Schopenhauer, 101 (note)
Science, Tolstoy attacks, 145
Sebastopol in December, 1854, 52
Sebastopol in May, 1855, 52-56
Sebastopol in August, 1855, 52, 54-57
Sebastopol, the siege of, 49-57
Sexual morality, 177
Shakespeare, 166
Shakespeare, no artist, 152-153, 155-156
Siegfried, hasty judgment on, 152
"Smartness," Tolstoy's worship of, 27
Socialism, Tolstoy's hatred of, 205-208
Society, pictures of Russian, 103
Sophia Bers, see Countess Tolstoy
Sovremennik, the (Russian review), 40
Spelling-book, Tolstoy's, 135
State, the, a murderous entity, 130
Stepan Arcadievitch, 105
Sterne, influence of,
