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Tolstoy

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Title: Tolstoy

Author: Romain Rolland

Translator: Bernard Miall


        
Release date: July 13, 2015 [eBook #49435]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOLSTOY ***
TOLSTOY

BY

ROMAIN ROLLAND

AUTHOR OF "JEAN CHRISTOPHE"

TRANSLATED BY

BERNARD MIALL

T. FISHER UNWIN

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20

1911




PREFACE


To those of my own generation, the light that has but lately failed
was the purest that illumined their youth. In the gloomy twilight of
the later nineteenth century it shone as a star of consolation, whose
radiance attracted and appeased our awakening spirits. As one of the
many--for there are many in France--to whom Tolstoy was very much more
than an admired artist: for whom he was a friend, the best of friends,
the one true friend in the whole of European art--I wish to lay before
this sacred memory my tribute of gratitude and of love.

The days when I learned to know him are days that I shall never
forget. It was in 1886. After some years of silent germination the
marvellous flowers of Russian art began to blossom on the soil of
France. Translations of Tolstoy and of Dostoyevsky were being issued in
feverish haste by all the publishing houses of Paris. Between the years
'85 and '87 came _War and Peace_, _Anna Karenin, Childhood and Youth,
Polikushka, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,_ the novels of the Caucasus, and
the _Tales for the People_. In the space of a few months, almost of a
few weeks, there was revealed to our eager eyes the presentment of a
vast, unfamiliar life, in which was reflected a new people, a new world.

I had but newly entered the Normal College. My fellow-scholars were of
widely divergent opinions. In our little world were such realistic and
ironical spirits as the philosopher Georges Dumas; poets, like Suarès,
burning with love of the Italian Renaissance; faithful disciples of
classic tradition; Stendhalians, Wagnerians, atheists and mystics. It
was a world of plentiful discussion, plentiful disagreement; but for
a period of some months we were nearly all united by a common love
of Tolstoy. It is true that each loved him for different reasons,
for each discovered in him himself; but this love was a love that
opened the door to a revelation of life; to the wide world itself. On
every side--in our families, in our country homes--this mighty voice,
which spoke from the confines of Europe, awakened the same emotions,
unexpected as they often were. I remember my amazement upon hearing
some middle-class people of Nivernais, my native province--people
who felt no interest whatever in art, people who read practically
nothing--speak with the most intense feeling of _The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_.

I have read, in the writings of distinguished critics, the theory
that Tolstoy owed the best of his ideas to the French romantics: to
George Sand, to Victor Hugo. We may ignore the absurdity of supposing
that Tolstoy, who could not endure her, could ever have been subject
to the influence of George Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Stendhal; nevertheless, we belittle the
greatness of Tolstoy, and the power of his fascination, if we attribute
them to his ideas. The circle of ideas in which art moves and has its
being is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that his might resides,
but in his expression of them; in the personal accent, the imprint of
the artist, the colour and savour of his life.

Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not borrowed--a matter to be
presently considered--never yet had a voice like to his resounded
throughout Europe. How else can we explain the thrill of emotion which
we all of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, that harmony for
which we had so long waited, and of which we felt the need? In our
opinion the style counted for nothing. Most of us, myself included,
made the acquaintance of Melchior de Vogüé's work on the subject of
the Russian novel[1] after we had read the novels of Tolstoy; and his
admiration of our hero seemed, after ours, a pallid thing. M. de Vogüé
spoke essentially as a man of letters pure and simple. But for our part
it was not enough to admire the presentation of life: we lived it; it
was our own. Ours it was by its ardent love of life, by its quality of
youth; ours by its irony, its disillusion, its pitiless discernment,
and its haunting sense of mortality. Ours by its dreams of brotherly
love, of peace among men; ours by its terrible accusation of the lies
of civilisation; ours by its realism; by its mysticism ours; by its
savour of nature, its sense of invisible forces, its vertigo in the
face of the infinite.

To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were what _Werther_ was to an
earlier generation: the wonderful mirror of our passions, our strength,
our weaknesses, of our hopes, our terrors, our discouragement. We were
in no wise anxious to reconcile these many contradictions; still less
did we concern ourselves to imprison this complex, multiple mind,
full of echoes of the whole wide world, within the narrow limits of
religious or political categories, as have the greater number of
those who have written of Tolstoy in these latter years: incapable
of extricating themselves from the conflict of parties, dragging him
into the arena of their own passions, measuring him by the standards
of their socialistic or clerical coteries. As if our coteries could be
the measure of a genius? What is it to me if Tolstoy is or is not of my
party? Shall I ask of what party Shakespeare was, or Dante, before I
breathe the atmosphere of his magic or steep myself in its light?

We did not say, as do the critics of to-day, that there were two
Tolstoys: the Tolstoy of the period before the crisis and he of the
period after the crisis; that the one was the great artist, while the
other was not an artist at all. For us there was only one Tolstoy, and
we loved the whole of him; for we felt, instinctively, that in such
souls as his all things are bound together and each has its integral
place.


[1] _Le Roman russe._




CONTENTS

           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
of the persistence among them of the same diverse elements; sometimes
allied, sometimes inimical; more often enemies than allies. Unity is
to be found neither in the spirit nor the mind of a Tolstoy; it exists
only in the internal conflict of his passions, in the tragedy of his
art and his life.

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,[1] together with the notes furnished by M.
Birukov,[2] completes this knowledge, and enable us not only to read
almost day by day in the history of Tolstoy's conscience, but also to
reconstitute the world in which his genius struck root, and the minds
from which his own drew sustenance.

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, heroes of the Napoleonic struggle,
Decembrists, and political exiles. This inheritance included family
traditions; old memories to which Tolstoy was indebted for some of the
most original types in his _War and Peace;_ there was the old Prince
Bolkonsky, his maternal grandfather, Voltairian, despotic, a belated
representative of the aristocracy of the days of Catherine II.; Prince
Nikolas Grigorovitch Volkonsky, a cousin of his mother, who was wounded
at Austerlitz, and, like Prince Andrei, was carried off the field of
battle under the eyes of Napoleon; his father, who had some of the
characteristics of Nicolas Rostoff;[3] and his mother, the Princess
Marie, the ugly, charming woman with the beautiful eyes, whose goodness
illumines the pages of _War and Peace._

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."[4]

Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her
indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of
her own invention.

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."[5] Here was the child's
earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion
of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion
to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are
marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his
_Childhood_, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the
death and burial of his mother.

Five children were left orphans in the old house at Yasnaya Polyana.[6]
There Leo Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of August, 1828, and
there, eighty-two years later, he was to die. The youngest of the
five was a girl: that Marie who in later years became a religious;
it was with her that Tolstoy took refuge in dying, when he fled from
home and family. Of the four sons, Sergius was charming and selfish,
"sincere to a degree that I have never known equalled"; Dmitri was
passionate, selfcentred, introspective, and in later years, as a
student, abandoned himself eagerly to the practices of religion; caring
nothing for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the poor, sheltering
the infirm; suddenly, with the same quality of violence, plunging into
debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ransoming a girl whom he had
known in a public brothel, and receiving her into his home; finally
dying of phthisis at the age of twenty-nine.[7] Nikolas, the eldest,
the favourite brother, had inherited his mother's gift of imagination,
her power of telling stories;[8] ironical, nervous, and refined; in
later years an officer in the Caucasus, where he formed the habit of a
drunkard; a man, like his brother, full of Christian kindness, living
in hovels, and sharing with the poor all that he possessed. Tourgenev
said of him "that he put into practice that humble attitude towards
life which his brother Leo was content to develop in theory."

The orphans were cared for by two great-hearted women, one was their
Aunt Tatiana,[9] of whom Tolstoy said that "she had two virtues:
serenity and love." Her whole life was love; a devotion that never
failed. "She made me understand the moral pleasure of loving."

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!"[10]

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 see it through
the medium of the book--this soul of a little child; "this pure, loving
heart, a ray of clear light, which always discovered in others the best
of their qualities"--this more than common tenderness! Being happy, he
ponders on the only creature he knows to be unhappy; he cries at the
thought, and longs to devote himself to his good. He hugs and kisses
an ancient horse, begging his pardon, because he has hurt him. He is
happy in loving, even if he is not loved. Already we can see the germs
of his future genius; his imagination, so vivid that he cries over
his own stories; his brain, always busy, always trying to discover
of what other people think; his precocious powers of memory[11] and
observation; the attentive eyes, which even in the midst of his sorrow
scrutinise the faces about him, and the authenticity of their sorrow.
He tells us that at five years of age he felt for the first time "that
life is not a time of amusement, but a very heavy task."[12]

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.



[1] With the exception of a few interruptions: one especially of
considerable length, between 1865 and 1878.

[2] For his remarkable biography of _Léon Tolstoï, Vie et Oeuvre,
Mémoires, Souvenirs, Lettres, Extraits du Journal intime, Notes et
Documents biographiques, réunis, coordonnés et annotés par P. Birukov,_
revised by Leo Tolstoy, translated into French from the MS. by J. W.
Bienstock.

[3] He also fought in the Napoleonic campaigns, and was a prisoner in
France during the years 1814-15.

[4] _Childhood_, chap. ii.

[5] _Childhood_, chap, xxvii.

[6] Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies "the open glade"
(literally, the "light glade"), is a little village to the south of
Moscow, at a distance of some leagues from Toula, in one of the most
thoroughly Russian of the provinces. "Here the two great regions of
Russia," says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, "the region of the forests and the
agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. In the surrounding
country we meet with no Finns, Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians.
The district of Toula lies at the very heart of Russia."

[7] Tolstoy has depicted him in _Anna Karenin,_ as the brother of
Levine.

[8] He wrote the _Diary of a Hunter._

[9] In reality she was a distant relative. She had loved Tolstoy's
father, and was loved by him; but effaced herself, like Sonia in _War
and Peace_.

[10] _Childhood_, chap. xii.

[11] He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated 1878), to be
able to recall the sensations of being swaddled as a baby, and of being
bathed in a tub. See _First Memories._

[12] _First Memories._




CHAPTER II


BOYHOOD AND YOUTH


He studied at Kazan.[1] He was not a notable student. It used to be
said of the three brothers[2]: "Sergius wants to, and can; Dmitri wants
to, and can't; Leo can't, and doesn't want to."

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_[3] are rich in intimate confessions relating to these years.

He was a solitary. His brain was in a condition of perpetual fever.
For a year he was completely at sea; he roamed from one system of
philosophy to another. As a Stoic, he indulged in self-inflicted
physical tortures. As an Epicurean he debauched himself. Then came a
faith in metempsychosis. Finally he fell into a condition of nihilism
not far removed from insanity; he used to feel that if only he could
turn round with sufficient rapidity he would find himself face to face
with nothingness ... He analysed himself continually:

"I no longer thought of a thing; I thought of what I thought of it."[4]

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.[5]

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;[6] but his faith was not
extinguished; it was only smouldering.

"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."[7]

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[8] he wrote certain
"Rules of Life." He naively assigned himself the duty of "studying
everything, of mastering all subjects: law, medicine, languages,
agriculture, history, geography, and mathematics; to attain the highest
degree of perfection in music and painting," and so forth. I had
"the conviction that the destiny of man was a process of incessant
self-perfection."

Insensibly, under the stress of a boy's passions, of a violent
sensuality and a stupendous pride of self,[9] this faith in perfection
went astray, losing its disinterested quality, becoming material and
practical. If he still wished to perfect his will, his body, and his
mind, it was in order to conquer the world and to enforce its love.[10]
He wished to please.

To please: it was not an easy ambition. He was then of a simian
ugliness: the face was long, heavy, brutish; the hair was cropped
close, growing low upon the forehead; the eyes were small, with a hard,
forbidding glance, deeply sunken in shadowy orbits; the nose was large,
the lips were thick and protruding, and the ears were enormous.[11]
Unable to alter this ugliness, which even as a child had subjected him
to fits of despair,[12] he pretended to a realisation of the ideal man
of the world, _l'homme comme il faut._[13] This ideal led him to do as
did other "men of the world": to gamble, run foolishly into debt, and
to live a completely dissipated existence.[14]

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."[15]

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."[16]

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 Morning_)
(1852); a remarkable novel, whose hero, Prince Nekhludov, Nekhludov
figures also in _Boyhood_ and _Youth_ (1854), in _A Brush with the
Enemy_ (1856); the _Diary of a Sportsman_ (1856); _Lucerne_ (1857);
and _Resurrection_ (1899). We must remember that different characters
appear under this one name. Tolstoy has not always given Nekhludov the
same physical aspect; and the latter commits suicide at the end of the
_Diary of a Sportsman_. These different Nekhludovs are various aspects
of Tolstoy, endowed with his worst and his best characteristics, is
Tolstoy in disguise.

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; his imagination vaguely supplementing the
deficiencies of the actual sound. He heard a choir, an orchestra ...
and his keenest pleasure arose from the enforced activity of his
imagination, which brought before him, without logical connection, but
with astonishing clearness, the most varied scenes and images of the
past and the future...."

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?'"[17]

The entire Tolstoy is already contained in the hero of this first
novel;[18] his piercing vision and his persistent illusions. He
observes men and women with an impeccable realism; but no sooner does
he close his eyes than his dreams resume their sway; his dreams and his
love of mankind.



[1] From 1842 to 1847. Science was as yet unorganised; and its
teachers, even in Western Europe, had not the courage of the facts they
taught. Men still sought for an anchor in the philosophic systems of
the ancients. The theory of evolution, put forward at the beginning
of the century, had fallen into obscurity. Science was dry, dogmatic,
uncoordinated, insignificant. Hence, perhaps, the contempt for science
which distinguished Tolstoy throughout his life, and which made the
later Tolstoy possible.--TRANS.

[2] Nikolas, five years older than Leo, had completed his studies in
1844.

[3] The English translation is entitled _
Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth._

[4] _Youth_, six.

[5] Notably in his first volumes--in the _Tales of Sebastopol_.

[6] This was the time when he used to read Voltaire, and find pleasure
in so doing.

[7] _Confessions,_ vol. i.

[8] In March and April, 1847.

[9] "All that man does he does out of _amour-propre,_" says Nekhludov,
in _Boyhood._ In 1853 Tolstoy writes, in his _Journal_: "My great
failing: pride. A vast self-love, without justification.... I am so
ambitious that if I had to choose between glory and virtue (which I
love) I am sure I should choose the former."

[10] "I wanted to be known by all, loved by all. I wanted every one, at
the mere sound of my name, to be struck with admiration and gratitude."

[11] According to a portrait dated 1848, in which year he attained his
twentieth year.

[12] "I thought there would be no happiness on earth for any one who
had so large a nose, so thick lips, and such small eyes."

[13] "I divided humanity into three classes: the 'correct,' or 'smart,'
who alone were worthy of esteem; those who were not 'correct,' who
deserved only contempt and hatred; and the people, the _plebs,_ who
simply did not exist." (_Youth,_ xxxi.)

[14] Especially during a period spent in St. Petersburg, 1847-48.

[15] _Boyhood._

[16] Conversations with M. Paul Boyer _(Le Temps),_ August 28, 1901.

[17] _A Russian Proprietor._

[18] Contemporary with _Childhood._




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[1] I hardly slept. I began to pray to God. I cannot
possibly express the sweetness of the feeling that came to me when
I prayed. I recited the customary prayers; but I went on praying
for a long time. I felt the desire of something very great, very
beautiful.... What? I cannot say what. I wanted to be one with the
Infinite Being: to be dissolved, comprehended, in Him. I begged Him to
forgive me my trespasses.... But no, I did not beg Him; I felt that
He did pardon me, since He granted me that moment of wonderful joy. I
was praying, yet at the same time I felt that I could not, dared not
pray. I thanked Him, not in words, but in thought.... Scarcely an hour
had passed, and I was listening to the voice of vice. I fell asleep
dreaming of glory, of women: it was stronger than I. Never mind! I
thank God for that moment of happiness: for showing me my pettiness
and my greatness. I want to pray, but I do not know how; I want to
understand, but I dare not. I abandon myself to Thy will!"[2]

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 Caucasus, however
frivolous at the time of conception, was inspired in me from above.
God's hand has guided me. I never cease to thank Him. I feel that
I have become better here; and I am firmly convinced that whatever
happens to me can only be for my good, since it is God Himself who has
wished it...."[3]

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.[4]


[1] The 11th of June, 1851, in the fortified camp of Starï-Iourt, in
the Caucasus.

[2] _Journal._

[3] Letter to his Aunt Tatiana, January, 1852.

[4] A portrait dated 1851 already shows the change which is being
accomplished in his mind. The head is raised; the expression is
somewhat brighter; the cavities of the orbits are less in shadow; the
eyes themselves still retain their fixed severity of look, and the open
mouth, shadowed by a growing moustache, is gloomy and sullen; there is
still a quality of defiant pride, but far more youth.




CHAPTER IV


EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS


_The Story of my Childhood_[1] was commenced in the autumn of 1851,
at Tiflis; it was finished at Piatigorsk in the Caucasus, on the 2nd
of July, 1852. It is curious to note that while in the midst of that
nature by which he was so intoxicated, while leading a life absolutely
novel, in the midst of the stirring risks of warfare, occupied in the
discovery of a world of unfamiliar characters and passions, Tolstoy
should have returned, in this his first work, to the memories of his
past life. But _Childhood_ was written during a period of illness,
when his military activity was suddenly arrested. During the long
leisure of a convalescence, while alone and suffering, his state
of mind inclined to the sentimental;[2] the past unrolled itself
before his eyes at a time when he felt for it a certain tenderness.
After the exhausting tension of the last few unprofitable years, it
was comforting to live again in thought the "marvellous, innocent,
joyous, poetic period" of early childhood; to reconstruct for himself
"the heart of a child, good, sensitive, and capable of love." With
the ardour of youth and its illimitable projects, with the cyclic
character of his poetic imagination, which rarely conceived an isolated
subject, and whose great romances are only the links in a long historic
chain, the fragments of enormous conceptions which he was never
able to execute,[3] Tolstoy at this moment regarded his narrative
of _Childhood_ as merely the opening chapters of a _History of Four
Periods_, which was to include his life in the Caucasus, and was in all
probability to have terminated in the revelation of God by Nature.

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 spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of
touch and emotion, we can understand that it may have displeased the
Tolstoy of later years.

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,[4]
the personality of Tolstoy is barely in evidence.

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."[5]

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 the readers of his earliest efforts found the
writer's countenance familiar. It was not long, however, before his
own personality found self-expression. His _Boyhood_ (_Adolescence_),
though less pure and less perfect than _Childhood_, exhibits a more
original power of psychology, a keen feeling for nature, and a mind
full of distress and conflict, which Dickens or Töppfer would have been
at a loss to express. In the _Russian Proprietor_ (October, 1852[6])
Tolstoy's character appeared sharply defined, marked by his fearless
sincerity and his faith in love. Among the remarkable portraits of
peasants which he has painted in this novel, we find an early sketch
of one of the finest conceptions of his _Popular Tales:_ the old man
with the beehives; a the little old man under the birch-tree, his
hands outstretched, his eyes raised, his bald head shining in the sun,
and all around him the bees, touched with gold, never stinging him,
forming a halo.... But the truly typical works of this period are those
which directly register his present emotions: namely, the novels of
the Caucasus. The first, _The Invasion_ (finished in December, 1852),
impresses the reader deeply by the magnificence of its landscapes:
a sunrise amidst the mountains, on the bank of a river; a wonderful
night-piece, with sounds and shadows noted with a striking intensity;
and the return in the evening, while the distant snowy peaks disappear
in the violet haze, and the clear voices of the regimental singers rise
and fall in the transparent air. Many of the types of _War and Peace_
are here drawn to the life: Captain Khlopoff, the true hero, who by no
means fights because he likes fighting, but because it is his duty; a
man with "one of those truly Russian faces, placid and simple, and eyes
into which it is easy and agreeable to gaze." Heavy, awkward, a trifle
ridiculous, indifferent to his surroundings, he alone is unchanged in
battle, where all the rest are changed; "he is exactly as we have seen
him always: with the same quiet movements, the same level voice, the
same expression of simplicity on his heavy, simple face." Next comes
the lieutenant who imitates the heroes of Lermontov; a most kindly,
affectionate boy, who professes the utmost ferocity. Then comes the
poor little subaltern, delighted at the idea of his first action,
brimming over with affection, ready to fall on his comrade's neck; a
laughable, adorable boy, who, like Petia Rostoff, contrives to get
stupidly killed. In the centre of the picture is the figure of Tolstoy,
the observer, who is mentally aloof from his comrades, and _I_ already
utters his cry of protest against warfare:

"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."[7]

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_.[8] The splendour of the snowy mountains
displaying their noble lines against the luminous sky fills the
whole work with its music. The book is unique, for it belongs to the
flowering-time of genius, "the omnipotent god of youth," as Tolstoy
says, "that rapture which never returns." What a spring-tide torrent!
What an overflow of love!

"'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."[9]

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_.[10] But for those who love him he is no less
truly himself; and the creatures of nature, the beautiful Cossack girl
and her friends, are seen under a searching light, with their egoism,
their cupidity, their venality, and all their vices.

An exceptional occasion was about to offer itself for the exercise of
this heroic veracity.


[1] Published in English as part of _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth._

[2] His letters of this period to his Aunt Tatiana are full of tears
and of sentimentality. He was, as he says, _Liovariova,_ "Leo the
Sniveller" (January 6, 1852).

[3] The _Russian Proprietor_ (_A Landlord's Morning_) is the fragment
of a projected _Romance of a Russian Landowner. The Cossacks_ forms the
first portion of a great romance of the Caucasus. In the author's eyes
the huge _War and Peace_ was only a sort of preface to a contemporary
epic, of which _The Decembrists_ was to have been the nucleus.

[4] See the passage relating to the pilgrim Gricha, or to the death of
his mother.

[5] Letter to Birukov.

[6] Completed only in 1855-56. _The Two Old Men_ (1885).

[7] _The Invasion._

[8] Although completed much later--in 1860--and appearing only in
1863--the bulk of this volume was of this period.

[9] _The Cossacks_.

[10] For example, see Oleniln's letter to his friends in Russia.




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 whose realisation I feel
capable of devoting my whole life. This idea is the foundation of a
new religion; the religion of the Christ, but purified of dogmas and
mysteries.... To act with a clear conscience, in order to unite men by
means of religion."[1]

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.[2] Yet we admire his
calm penetration of the mist of dreams and inchoate ideas which crowd a
young brain. His work is extraordinarily true to itself, and at moments
what poetic freshness!--as in the vivid picture of springtime in the
city, or the tale of the confession, and the journey to the convent,
on account of the forgotten sin! An impassioned pantheism lends to
certain pages a lyric beauty, whose accents recall the tales of the
Caucasus. For example, this description of an evening in the spring:

"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."[3]

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, and recorded their miseries and his own, in his unforgettable
narratives of _Sebastopol._

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[4] the Tsarina wept,
and the Tsar, moved by admiration, commanded that the story should
be translated into French, and the author sent out of danger. We can
readily believe it. Nothing in these pages but exalts warfare and the
fatherland. Tolstoy had just arrived; his enthusiasm was intact; he was
afloat on a tide of heroism. As yet he could see in the defenders of
Sebastopol neither ambition nor vanity, nor any unworthy feeling. For
him the war was a sublime epic; its heroes were "worthy of Greece."
On the other hand, these notes exhibit no effort of the imagination,
no attempt at objective representation. The writer strolls through
the city; he sees with the utmost lucidity, but relates what he sees
in a form which is wanting in freedom: "You see ... you enter ...
you notice...." This is first-class reporting; rich in admirable
impressions.

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,[5] this obsession of death, are
analysed with a terrible sincerity that knows neither shame nor pity.
It was at Sebastopol that Tolstoy learned to eschew sentimentalism,
"that vague, feminine, whimpering passion," as he came disdainfully
to term it; and his genius for analysis, the instinct for which
awoke, as we saw, in the later years of his boyhood, and which was at
times to assume a quality almost morbid,[6] never attained to a more
hypnotic and poignant intensity than in the narrative of the death of
Praskhoukhin. Two whole pages are devoted to the description of all
that passed in the mind of the unhappy man during the second following
upon the fall of the shell, while the fuse was hissing towards
explosion; and one page deals with all that passed before him after it
exploded, when "he was killed on the spot by a fragment which struck
him full in the chest."

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 same great law of love and
of sacrifice, do not, when they perceive what they have done, fall upon
their knees repentant, before Him who in giving them life set within
the heart of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the
good and the beautiful. They do not embrace as brothers, with tears of
joy and happiness!"

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[7] Nekrasov, the editor of the review
_Sovremennik_, wrote to Tolstoy: "That is precisely what Russian
society needs to-day: the truth, the truth, of which, since the death
of Gogol, so little has remained in Russian letters.... This truth
which you bring to our art is something quite novel with us. I have
only one fear: lest the times, and the cowardice of life, the deafness
and dumbness of all that surrounds us, may make of you what it has made
of most of us--lest it may kill the energy in you."[8]

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
Volodya, timid and enthusiastic, with his feverish monologues, his
dreams, his tears?--tears that rise to his eyes for a mere nothing;
tears of tenderness, tears of humiliation--his fear during the first
hours passed in the bastion (the poor boy is still afraid of the dark,
and covers his head with his cloak when he goes to bed); the oppression
caused by the feeling of his own solitude and the indifference of
others; then, when the hour arrives, his joy in danger. He belongs to
the group of poetic figures of youth (of whom are Petia in _War and
Peace_, and the sub-lieutenant in _The Invasion_), who, their hearts
full of affection, make war with laughter on their lips, and are broken
suddenly, uncomprehending, on the wheel of death. The two brothers fall
wounded, both on the same day--the last day of the defence. The novel
ends with these lines, in which we hear the muttering of a patriotic
anger:

"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."[9]



[1] _Journal._

[2] We notice this manner also in _The Woodcutters_, which was
completed at the same period. For example: "There are three kinds
of love: 1. æsthetic love; 2. devoted love; 3. active love," &c.
(_Youth_). "There are three kinds of soldiers: 1. the docile and
subordinate; 2. the authoritative; 3. the boasters--who themselves are
subdivided into: (a) The docile who are cool and lethargic; (b) those
who are earnestly docile; (c) docile soldiers who drink," &c. (_The
Woodcutters_).

[3] _Youth,_ xxxii.

[4] Sent to the review _Sovremennik_ and immediately published.

[5] Tolstoy refers to them again at a much later date, in his
_Conversations_ with his friend Teneromo. He tells him of a crisis
of terror which assailed him one night when he was lying down in the
"lodgement" dug out of the body of the rampart, under the protective
plating. This _Episode of the Siege of Sebastopol_ will be found in the
volume entitled _The Revolutionaries._

[6] Droujinine, a little later, wrote him a friendly letter in which
he sought to put him on his guard against this danger: "You have
a tendency to an excessive minuteness of analysis; it may become
a serious fault. Sometimes you seem on the point of saying that
so-and-so's calf indicated a desire to travel in the Indies.... You
must restrain this tendency: but do not for the world suppress it."
(Letter dated 1856 cited by P. Birukov.)

[7] Mutilated by the censor.

[8] 1 September 2, 1855.

[9] In 1889, when writing a preface to _Memories of Sebastopol, by an
Officer of Artillery_ (A. J. Erchoff), Tolstoy returned in fancy to
these scenes. Every heroic memory had disappeared. He could no longer
remember anything but the fear which lasted for seven months--the
double fear: the fear of death and the fear of shame--and the horrible
moral torture. All the exploits of the siege reduced themselves, for
him, to this: he had been "flesh for cannon."




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; as though
he were ready to march them back to gaol."[1]

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.[2] It was also a characteristic
of his--he himself knew it--to "oppose instinctively all trains of
reasoning, all conclusions, which were generally admitted."[3] A
distrust of mankind, a latent contempt for human reason, made him
always on the alert to discover deception in himself or others.

"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."[4] "How he used to listen! How he used to gaze
at those who spoke to him, from the very depths of his grey eyes,
deeply sunken in their orbits! With what irony his lips were pressed
together!"[5]

"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."[6]

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."[7]

He parted from them. But he did not at once lose their interested faith
in art.[8] His pride was flattered thereby. It was a faith which was
richly rewarded; it brought him "women, money, fame."

"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; for it is
not what men say or do that decides what is good or bad, but my own
heart."[9]

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."[10]

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 founded schools, without precisely knowing what he would
teach. In order to learn, he undertook another journey abroad, which
lasted from the 3rd of July, 1860, to the 23rd of April, 1861.[11]

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.[12] Liberty was his principle. He would not admit that an
elect class, "the privileged Liberal circle," should impose its
knowledge and its errors upon "the people, to whom it is a stranger."
It had no right to do so. This method of forced education had never
succeeded in producing, at the University, "the men of whom humanity
has need; but men of whom a depraved society has need; officials,
official professors, official literary men, or men torn aimlessly from
their old surroundings, whose youth has been spoiled and wasted, and
who can find no plan in life: irritable, puny Liberals."[13] Go to
the people to learn what they want I If they do not value "the art of
reading and writing which the intellectuals force upon them," they have
their reasons for that; they have other spiritual needs, more pressing
and more legitimate. Try to understand those needs, and help them to
satisfy them!

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.[14] At
the same time, he endeavoured to introduce a new human spirit into
agricultural exploitation. Appointed in 1861 territorial arbitrator
for the district of Krapiona, he was the people's champion against the
abuses of power on the part of the landowners and the State.

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 this period bear unfortunate traces of this artistic
and moral uncertainty. _The Two Hussars_ (1856) has a quality of
pretentiousness and elegance, a snobbish worldly flavour, which shocks
one as coming from Tolstoy. _Albert_, written at Dijon in 1857, is
weak and eccentric, with no trace of the writer's habitual depth or
precision. The _Diary of a Sportsman_ (1856), a more striking though
hasty piece of work, seems to betray the disillusionment which Tolstoy
inspired in himself. Prince Nekhludov, his _Doppellganger,_ his double,
kills himself in a gaming-house.

"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 found in the writer's
beautiful landscapes. Taking it as a whole, we hardly know how far it
is intended as a work of art for the sake of art, or whether it has a
moral intention.

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.[16] It was the president of the Society, Khomiakov,
who, after saluting in Tolstoy "the representative of purely artistic
literature," took up the defence of social and moral art.[17]

A year later the death of his dearly-loved brother, Nikolas, who
succumbed to phthisis[18] at Hyères, on the 19th of September, 1860,
completely overcame Tolstoy; shook him to the point of "crushing his
faith in goodness, in everything," and made him deny even his art:

"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."[19]

Less than six months later, however, he returned to the "beautiful
lie" with _Polikushka_,[20] which of all his works is perhaps most
devoid of moral intention, if we except the latent malediction upon
money and its powers for evil; a work written purely for art's sake; a
masterpiece, moreover, whose only flaws are a possibly excessive wealth
of observation, an abundance of material which would have sufficed for
a great novel, and the contrast, which is too severe, a little too
cruel, between the humorous opening and the atrocious climax.[21]



[1] Suarès: _Tolstoï_, edition of the _Union pour l'Action morale,_
1899 (reprinted, in the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine,_ under the title
_Tolstoï vivant_).

[2] Tourgenev complained, in a conversation, of "this stupid nobleman's
pride, his bragging Junkerdom."

[3] "A trait of my character, it may be good or ill, but it is one
which was always peculiar to me, is that in spite of myself I always
used to resist external epidemic influences.... I had a hatred of the
general tendency." (Letter to P. Birukov.)

[4] Tourgenev.

[5] Grigorovitch.

[6] Eugène Gardine: _Souvenirs sur Tourgeniev,_ 1883. See _Vie et
Oeuvre de Tolstoï,_ by Birukov.

[7] _Confessions._

[8] "There was no difference between us and an asylum full of lunatics.
Even at the time I vaguely suspected as much; but as all madmen do, I
regarded them as all mad excepting myself."--_Confessions_.

[9] _Confessions._

[10] _Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov._

[11] At Dresden, during his travels he made the acquaintance of
Auerbach, who had been the first to inspire him with the idea of
educating the people; at Kissingen he met Froebel, in London Herzen,
and in Brussels Proudhon, who seems to have made a great impression
upon him.

[12] Especially in 1861-62.

[13] _Education and Culture._ See _Vie et Oeuvre,_ by Birukov, vol. ii.

[14] Tolstoy explained these principles in the review _Yasnaya
Polyana,_ 1862.

[16] Lecture on _The Superiority of the Artistic Element in Literature
over all its Contemporary Tendencies._

[17] He cited against Tolstoy his own examples, including the old
postilion in _The Three Deaths._

[18] We may remark that another brother, Dmitri, had already died of
the same disease in 1856. Tolstoy himself believed that he was attacked
by it in 1856, in 1862, and in 1871. He was, as he writes (the 28th
of October, 1852), "of a strong constitution, but feeble in health."
He constantly suffered from chills, sore throats, toothache, inflamed
eyes, and rheumatism. In the Caucasus, in 1852, he had "two days in
the week at least to keep his room." Illness stopped him for several
months in 1854, on the road from Silistria to Sebastopol. In 1856, at
Yasnaya, he was seriously ill with an affection of the lungs. In 1862
the fear of phthisis induced him to undergo a _Koumiss_ cure at Samara,
where he lived with the Bachkirs, and after 1870 he returned thither
almost yearly. His correspondence with Fet is full of preoccupations
concerning his health. This physical condition enables one the better
to understand his obsession by the thought of death. In later years he
spoke of this illness as of his best friend:

"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.)


[19] Letter to Fet, October 17, 1860 _(Further Letters_: in the French
version, _Correspondance inédite,_ pp. 27-30).

[20] Written in Brussels, 1861.

[21] Another novel written at this period is a simple narrative of a
journey_--The Snowstorm_--which evokes personal memories, and is full
of the beauty of poetic and quasi-musical impressions. Tolstoy used
almost the same background later, in his _Master and Servant_ (1895).




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.[1] His final choice fell upon the second, but he dared not
confess it. Sophie Andreyevna Bers was still a child; she was seventeen
years old, while Tolstoy was over thirty; he regarded himself as an old
man, who had not the right to associate his soiled and vitiated life
with that of an innocent young girl. He held out for three years.[2]
Afterwards; in _Anna Karenin,_ he related how his declaration to Sophie
Bers was effected, and how she replied to it: both of them tracing with
one finger, under a table, the initials of words they dared not say.

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.[3] For these years he had
been living in the future; through the ineffable days of love that does
not as yet know itself: through the delirious days of love that has
attained self-knowledge, and the hour in which the divine, anticipated
words are whispered; when the tears arise "of a happiness which departs
for ever and will never return again"; and the triumphant reality of
the early days of marriage; the egoism of lovers, "the incessant,
causeless joy," then the approaching weariness, the vague discontent,
the boredom of a monotonous life, the two souls which softly disengage
themselves and grow further and further away from one another; the
dangerous attraction of the world for the young wife--flirtations,
jealousies, fatal misunderstandings;--love dissimulated, love lost;
and at length the sad and tender autumn of the heart; the face of love
which reappears, paler, older, but more touching by reason of tears
and the marks of time; the memory of troubles, the regret for the ill
things done and the years that are lost; the calm of the evening; the
august passage from love to friendship, and the romance of the passion
of maternity.... All that was to come, all this Tolstoy had dreamed of,
tasted in advance; and in order to live through those days more vividly
he lived in the well-beloved. For the first time--perhaps the only
time in all his writings--the story passes in the heart of a woman,
and is told by her; and with what exquisite delicacy, what spiritual
beauty!--the beauty of a soul withdrawn behind a veil of the truest
modesty. For once the analysis of the writer is deprived of its cruder
lights; there is no feverish struggle to present the naked truth. The
secrets of the inward life are divined rather than spoken. The art
and the heart of the artist are both touched and softened; there is
a harmonious balance of thought and form. _Family Happiness_ has the
perfection of a work of Racine.

Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy presented with so limpid a
profundity, was to be his salvation. He was tired, unwell, disgusted
with himself and his efforts. The brilliant success which had crowned
his earlier works had given way to the absolute silence of the critics
and the indifference of the public.[4] He pretended, haughtily, to be
not ill-pleased.

"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!"[5]

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."[6] His social work was abortive. In 1862 he
resigned his appointment as territorial arbitrator. The same year the
police made a search at Yasnaya Polyana, turned everything topsy-turvy,
and closed the school. Tolstoy was absent at the time, suffering from
overwork; fearing that he was attacked by phthisis.

"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 of what had to be
taught, were so disheartening that I fell ill. Perhaps I should then
have fallen into the state of despair to which I was to succumb fifteen
years later, had there not remained to me an unknown aspect of life
which promised salvation--the life of the family."[7]


[1] When a child he had, in a fit of jealousy, pushed from a balcony
the little girl--then aged nine--who afterwards became Madame Bers,
with the result that she was lame for several years.

[2] See, in _Family Happiness,_ the declaration of Sergius: "Suppose
there were a Mr. A, an elderly man who had lived his life, and a lady
B, young and happy, who as yet knew neither men nor life. As the result
of various domestic happenings, he came to love her as a daughter, and
was not aware that he could love her in another way ..." &c.

[3] Perhaps this novel contained the memories also of a romantic love
affair which commenced in 1856, in Moscow, the second party to which
was a young girl very different to himself, very worldly and frivolous,
from whom he finally parted, although they were sincerely attached to
one another.

[4] From 1857 to 1861.

[5] _Journal,_ October, 1857.

[6] Letter to Fet, 1863 (_Vie et Oeuvre_).

[7] _Confessions._




CHAPTER VIII


MARRIAGE


At first he rejoiced in the new life, with the passion which he brought
to everything.[1] The personal influence of Countess Tolstoy was a
godsend to his art. Greatly gifted[2] in a literary sense, she was, as
she says, "a true author's wife," so keenly did she take her husband's
work to heart. She worked with him--worked to his dictation; re-copied
his rough drafts.[3] She sought to protect him from his religious
dæmon, that formidable genie which was already, at moments, whispering
words that meant the death of art. She tried to shut the door upon
all social Utopias.[4] She requickened her husband's creative genius.
She did more: she brought as an offering to that genius the wealth
of a fresh feminine temperament. With the exception of the charming
silhouettes in _Childhood_ and _Boyhood_, there are few women in the
earlier works of Tolstoy, or they remain of secondary importance. Woman
appears in _Family Happiness,_ written under the influence of his love
for Sophie Bers. In the works which follow there are numerous types
of young girls and women, full of intensest life, and even superior
to the male types. One likes to think not only that Countess Tolstoy
served her husband as the model for Natasha in _War and Peace_[5] and
for Kitty in _Anna Karenin_,[6] but that she was enabled, by means of
her confidences and her own vision, to become his discreet and valuable
collaborator. Certain pages of _Anna Karenin_ in particular seem to me
to reveal a woman's touch.

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.[7] He was able, sheltered by love, to dream and
to realise at leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the colossal
monuments which dominate the fiction of the nineteenth century_--War
and Peace_ (1864-69) and _Anna Karenin_ (1873-77).

_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.[8] Moreover, in the
notes, dated 1865, in which he classifies the various departments
of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the same family, "Odyssey,
Iliad, 1805,"[9] The natural development of his mind led him from the
romance of individual destinies to the romance of armies and peoples,
those vast human hordes in which the wills of millions of beings are
dissolved. His tragic experiences at the siege of Sebastopol helped
him to comprehend the soul of the Russian nation and its daily life.
According to his first intentions, the gigantic _War and Peace_ was
to be merely the central panel of a series of epic frescoes, in which
the poem of Russia should be developed from Peter the Great to the
Decembrists.[10]

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 the
whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the artist,
supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon the
face of the waters.

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 believed that their personal intentions
are in perfect agreement with what is really the simple result of the
force of circumstances, the will of subordinates, and the caprices of
chance." The advantage of surrendering to the hand of Destiny! The
happiness of simple action, a sane and normal state.... The troubled
spirits regain their poise. Prince Andrei breathes, begins to live....
And while in the far distance, remote from the lifegiving breath of
the holy tempest, Pierre and the Princess Marie are threatened by the
contagion of their world and the deception of love, Andrei, wounded
at Austerlitz, has suddenly, amid the intoxication of action brutally
interrupted, the revelation of the serene immensity of the universe.
Lying on his back, "he sees nothing now, except, very far above him, a
sky infinitely deep, wherein light, greyish clouds go softly wandering."

"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, which draw
together Prince Andrei and the charming Natasha, to throw her, a moment
later, into the arms of the first seducer to hand. So _I_ much poetry,
so much tenderness, so much purity of heart, tarnished by the world!
And always "the wide sky which broods above the outrage and abjectness
of the earth." But man does not see it. Even Andrei has forgotten the
light of Austerlitz. For him the sky is now only "a dark, heavy vault"
which covers the face of emptiness.

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, which is intended to group
together facts and to draw from them conclusions, is replaced by a
philosophical contemplation of events, devises nothing and undertakes
nothing; but he listens to and remembers everything; he knows how to
profit by it at the right moment; he will hinder nothing that is of
use, he will permit nothing harmful. He sees on the faces of his troops
that inexpressible force which is known as the will to conquer; it is
latent victory. He admits something more powerful than his own will:
the inevitable march of the facts which pass before his eyes; he sees
them, he follows them, and he is able mentally to stand aloof."

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 spent itself, while that following it is
gathering itself together. Already we obtain a glimpse of the heroes to
be, of the conflicts which will ensue between them, and of the dead who
are born again in the living.[11]

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 nobles, Russians, Austrians, Frenchmen! Not a line
savours of improvisation. For this gallery of portraits, unexampled in
European literature, Tolstoy made sketches without number: "combined,"
as he says, "millions of projects"; buried himself in libraries; laid
under contribution his family archives,[12] his previous notes, his
personal memories. This meticulous preparation ensured the solidity
of the work, but did not damp his spontaneity. Tolstoy worked with
enthusiasm, with an eagerness and a delight which communicate
themselves to the reader. Above all, the great charm of _War and Peace_
resides in its spirit of youth. No other work of Tolstoy's presents in
such abundance the soul of childhood and of youth; and each youthful
spirit is a strain of music, pure as a spring, full of a touching and
penetrating grace, like a melody of Mozart's. Of such are the young
Nikolas Rostoff, Sonia, and poor little Petia.

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 with the moonlight, dreams and speaks wildly, above the
window of the listening Andrei ... the emotions of the first ball, the
expectation of love, the burgeoning of riotous dreams and desires, the
sleigh-ride, the night in the snow-bound forest, full of fantastic
lights; Nature, and the embrace of her vague tenderness: the evening at
the Opera, the unfamiliar world of art, in which reason grows confused;
the folly of the heart, and the folly of the body yearning for love;
the misery that floods the soul; the divine pity which watches over
the dying lover.... One cannot evoke these pitiful memories without
emotion; such emotion as one would feel in speaking of a dear and
beloved woman. How such a creation shows the weakness of the female
types in almost the whole of contemporary drama and fiction! Life
itself has been captured; life so fluid, so supple, that we seem to see
it throbbing and changing from one line to another.

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
oscillate perpetually, rather than evolve; they run from one extreme
to the other, yet never advance. One may, of course, reply that in
this they are thoroughly Russian. I find, however, that Russians have
criticised them in similar terms. Tourgenev doubtless had them in mind
when he complained that Tolstoy's psychology was a stationary matter.
"No real development. Eternal hesitations: oscillations of feeling."[13]

Tolstoy himself admitted that he had at times rather sacrificed the
individual character to the historical design.[14]

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.



[1] "Domestic happiness completely absorbs me" (January 5, 1863). "I
am so happy! so happy! I love her so!" (February 8, 1863). See _Vie et
Oeuvre._

[2] She had written several novels.

[3] It is said that she copied _War and Peace_ seven times.

[4] Directly after his marriage Tolstoy suspended his work of teaching,
his review, and his school.

[5] Her sister Tatiana, intelligent and artistic, whose wit and musical
talent were greatly admired by Tolstoy, also served him as a model.
Tolstoy used to say, "I took Tania [Tatiana]; I beat her up with Sonia
{Sophie Bers, Countess Tolstoy}, and out came Natasha" (cited by P.
Birukov).

[6] The installation of Dolly in the tumble-down country house; Dolly
and the children; a number of details of dress and toilet; without
speaking of certain secrets of the feminine mind, which even the
intuition of a man of genius might perhaps have failed to penetrate, if
a woman had not betrayed them to him.

[7] Here is a characteristic instance of Tolstoy's enslavement by his
creative genius: his _Journal_ is interrupted for thirteen years,
from November 1, 1865, when the composition of _War and Peace_ was
in full swing. The egoism of the artist has silenced the monologue
of the conscience.--This period of creation was also a period of
robust physical life. Tolstoy was "mad on hunting." "Hunting, I forget
everything...." (Letter of 1864.) In September, 1864, during a hunt on
horse back, he broke his arm, and it was during his convalescence that
the first portions of _War and Peace_ were dictated.--"On recovering
consciousness after fainting, I said to myself: 'I am an artist.' And
I am, but a lonely artist." (Letter to Fet, January 29, 1865.) All the
letters written at this time to Fet are full of an exulting joy of
creation. "I regard all that I have hitherto published," he says, "as
merely a trial of my pen." (_Ibid._)

[8] Before this date Tolstoy had noted, among the books which
influenced him between the ages of twenty and thirty-five:

"Goethe: _Hermann and Dorothea_--Very great influence."

"Homer: _Iliad and Odyssey_ (in Russian)--Very great influence."

[9] The two first parts of _War and Peace_ appeared in 1865-66 under
the title _The Year 1805._

[10] Tolstoy commenced this work in 1863 by _The Decembrists_, of which
he wrote three fragments. But he saw that the foundations of his plan
were not sufficiently assured, and going further back, to the period
of the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote _War and Peace._ Publication was
commenced in the _Rousski Viestnik_ of January, 1865; the sixth volume
was completed in the autumn of 1869. Then Tolstoy ascended the stream
of history; and he conceived the plan of an epic romance dealing with
Peter the Great; then of another, _Mirovitch_, dealing with the rule
of the Empresses of the eighteenth century and their favourites. He
worked at it from 1870 to 1873, surrounded with documents, and writing
the first drafts of various portions; but his realistic scruples made
him renounce the project: he was conscious that he could never succeed
in resuscitating the spirit of those distant periods in a sufficiently
truthful fashion. Later, in January, 1876, he conceived the idea of
another romance of the period of Nikolas I.; then he eagerly returned
to the _Decembrists_, collecting the evidence of survivors and visiting
the scenes of the action. In 1878 he wrote to his aunt, Countess A. A.
Tolstoy: "This work is so important to me! You cannot imagine how much
it means to me; it is as much to me as your faith is to you. I would
say even more." (_Correspondence_) But in proportion as he plumbed the
subject he grew away from it; his heart was in it no longer. As early
as April, 1879, he wrote to Fet: "_The Decembrists_? If I were thinking
of it, if I were to write it, I should flatter myself with the hope
that the very atmosphere of my mind would be insupportable to those
who fire upon men for the good of humanity." (_Ibid._) At this period
of his life the religious crisis had set in; he was about to burn his
ancient idols.

[11] Pierre Besoukhov, who has married Natasha, will become a
Decembrist. He has founded a secret society to watch over the general
good, a sort of _Tugelbund._ Natasha associates herself with his plans
with the utmost enthusiasm. Denissov cannot conceive of a pacific
revolution; but is quite ready for an armed revolt. Nikolas Rostoff has
retained his blind soldier's loyalty. He who said before Austerlitz,
"We have only one thing to do: to fight and never to think," is angry
with Pierre, and exclaims: "My oath before all! If I were ordered to
march against you with my squadron I should march and I should strike
home." His wife, Princess Marie, agrees with him. Prince Andrei's
son, little Nikolas Bolkonsky, fifteen years old, delicate, sickly,
yet charming, with wide eyes and golden hair, listens feverishly to
the discussion; all his love is Pierre's and Natasha's; he does not
care greatly for Nikolas and Marie; he worships his father, whom he
has never seen; he dreams of growing like him, of being grown up, of
doing something wonderful, he knows not what. "Whatever they tell me,
I will do it.... Yes, I shall do it. _He_ would have been pleased with
me."--And the book ends with the dream of a child, who sees himself in
the guise of one of Plutarch's heroes, with his uncle Pierre by his
side, preceded by Glory, and followed by an army.--If the _Decembrists_
had been written then little Bolkonsky would doubtless have been one of
its heroes.

[12] I have remarked that the two families Rostoff and Bolkonsky, in
_War and Peace,_ recall the families of Tolstoy's father and mother
by many characteristics. Again, in the novels of the Caucasus and
Sebastopol there are many of the types of soldiers, officers and men,
which appear in _War and Peace_.

[13] Letter of February 2, 1868, cited by Birukov.

[14] Notably, he said, that of Prince Andrei in the first part.




CHAPTER IX


"ANNA KARENIN"


_Anna Karenin,_ with _War and Peace,_[1] marks the climax of this
period of maturity. _Anna Karenin_ is the more perfect work; the
work of a mind more certain of its artistic creation, richer too in
experience; a mind for which the world of the heart holds no more
secrets. But it lacks the fire of youth, the freshness of enthusiasm,
the mighty pinions of _War and Peace_. Already Tolstoy has lost
something of the joy of creation. The temporary peace of the first
months of marriage has flown. Into the enchanted circle of love and
art which Countess Tolstoy had drawn about him moral scruples begin to
intrude.

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 and Peace_ the artist was recaptured by his philosophical[2] and
educational preoccupations; he wished to write a spelling-book for the
people; he worked at it feverishly for four years; he was prouder of
it than of _War and Peace_, and when it was finished (1872) he wrote a
second (1875). Then he conceived a passion for Greek; he studied Latin
from morning to night; he abandoned all other work; he discovered "the
delightful Xenophon," and Homer, the real Homer; not the Homer of the
translators, "all these Joukhovskys and Vosses who sing with any sort
of voice they can manage to produce, guttural, peevish, mawkish," but
"this other devil, who sings at the top of his voice, without it ever
entering his head that any one may be listening."[3]

"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 that he falls ill. In 1871 he was forced to go
to Samara to undergo the _koumiss_ cure, staying with the Bachkirs.
Nothing pleased him but his Greek. At the end of a lawsuit, in 1872,
he spoke seriously of selling all that he possessed in Russia and of
settling in England. Countess Tolstoy was in despair:

"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."[4]

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.[5]_ While he worked at it his life I was saddened by
domestic sorrow;[6] his wife was ill. "Happiness does not reign in the
house,"[7] he writes to Fet in 1876.

To some extent the work bears traces of these depressing experiences,
and of passions disillusioned.[8] Save in the charming passages
dealing with the betrothal of Levine, love is no longer presented
with the spirit of youth and poetry which places certain pages of
_War and Peace_ on a level with the most beautiful lyric poetry of
all times. It has assumed a different character: bitter, sensual,
imperious. The fatality which broods over the romance is no longer,
as in _War and Peace_, a kind of Krishna, murderous and serene, the
Destiny of empires, but the madness of love, "Venus herself." She it
is, in the wonderful ball scene, when passion seizes upon Anna and
Vronsky unawares, who endows the innocent beauty of Anna, crowned with
forget-me-not and clothed in black velvet, with "an almost infernal
seductiveness." She it is who, when Vronsky has just declared his
love, throws a light upon Anna's face; but a light "not of joy; it was
the terrible glare of an incendiary fire upon a gloomy night." She it
is who, in the veins of this loyal and reasonable woman, this young,
affectionate mother, pours a voluptuous stream as of irresistible
ichor, and installs herself in her heart, never to leave it until
she has destroyed it. No one can approach Anna without feeling the
attraction and the terror of this hidden dæmon. Kitty is the first to
discover it, with a shock of bewilderment. A mysterious fear mingles
with the delight of Vronsky when he goes to see Anna. Levine, in her
presence, loses all his will. Anna herself is perfectly well aware that
she is no longer her own mistress. As the story develops the implacable
passion consumes, little by little, the whole moral structure of this
proud woman. All that is best in her, her sincere, courageous mind,
crumbles and falls; she has no longer the strength to sacrifice her
worldly vanity; her life has no other object than to please her lover;
she refuses, with shame and terror, to bear children; jealousy tortures
her; the sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her to lie with her
gestures, her voice, her eyes; she falls to the level of those women
who no longer seek anything but the power of making every man turn to
look after them; she uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the
intolerable torments which consume her overcome her with the bitter
sense of her moral downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of the
railway-carriage. "And the little moujik with the untidy beard"--the
sinister vision which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky's--"leaned
over the track from the platform of the carriage"; and, as the
prophetic dream foretold, "he was bent double over a sack, in which
he was hiding the remains of something which had known life, with its
torments, its betrayals, and its sorrow."

"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."[9]

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 _War and Peace_. It may also be said that the perfect realism of
certain of the pictures--the aristocratic circles of St. Petersburg and
their idle discourse--is now and again superfluous and unnecessary.
Finally, and more openly than in _War and Peace_, Tolstoy has presented
his own moral character and his philosophic ideas side by side with
the spectacle of life. None the less, the work is of a marvellous
richness. There is the same profusion of types as in _War and Peace,_
and all are of a striking justness. The portraits of the men seem to me
even superior. Tolstoy has depicted with evident delight the amiable
egoist, Stepan Arcadievitch, whom no one can look at without responding
to his affectionate smile, and Karenin, the perfect type of the high
official, the distinguished and commonplace states-man, with his mania
for concealing his real opinions and feelings under a mask of perpetual
irony: a mixture of dignity and cowardice, of Phariseeism and Christian
feeling: a strange product of an artificial world, from which he can
never completely free himself in spite of his intelligence and his true
generosity; a man afraid to listen to his I own heart, and rightly so
afraid, since when he does surrender to it, he ends by falling into a
state of nonsensical mysticism.

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 personage of Tolstoy's books,
Constantine Levine is the incarnation of the writer himself. Not only
has Tolstoy attributed to him his own ideas--at one and the same
time conservative and democratic--and the anti-Liberalism of the
provincial aristocrat who despises "intellectuals;[10] but he has
made him the gift of part of his own life. The love of Levine and
Kitty and their first years of marriage are a transposition of his
own domestic memories, just as the death of Levine's brother is a
melancholy evocation of the death of Tolstoy's brother, Dmitri. The
latter portion, useless to the romance, gives us an insight into the
troubles which were then oppressing the author. While the epilogue of
_War and Peace_ was an artistic transition to another projected work,
the epilogue to _Anna Karenin_ is an autobiographical transition to the
moral revolution which, two years later, was to find expression in the
_Confessions._ Already, in the course of _Anna Karenin,_ he returns
again and again to a violent or ironical criticism of contemporary
society, which he never ceased to attack in his subsequent works.
War is declared upon deceit: war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as
vicious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable charity, drawing-room
religion, and philanthropy. War against the world, which distorts all
truthful feelings, and inevitably crushes the generous enthusiasm of
the mind! Death throws an unexpected light upon the social conventions.
Before Anna dying, the stilted Karenin is softened. Into this lifeless
soul, in which everything is artificial, shines a ray of love and
of Christian forgiveness. All three--the husband, the wife, and the
lover--are momentarily transformed. All three become simple and loyal.
But as Anna recovers, all three are sensible, "facing the almost holy
moral strength which was guiding them from within, the existence of
another force, brutal but all-powerful, which was directing their lives
despite themselves, and which would not leave them in peace." And they
knew from the beginning that they would be powerless in the coming
struggle, in which they would be obliged to do the evil that the world
would consider necessary."[11]

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."[12] After he beheld his brother die
the terror of his ignorance possessed him. For a time this misery
was stifled by his marriage; but it re-awakened at the birth of his
firstborn. He passed alternately through crises of prayer and negation.
He read the philosophers in vain. He began, in his distracted state,
to fear the temptation of suicide. Physical work was a solace; it
presented no doubts; all was clear. Levine conversed with the peasants;
one of them spoke of the men "who live not for self, but for God."
This was to him an illumination. He saw the antagonism between the
reason and the heart. Reason preached the ferocious struggle for life;
there is nothing reasonable in loving one's neighbour:

"Reason has taught me nothing; all that I know has been given to me,
revealed to me by the heart."[13]

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."[14]


[1] It is regrettable that the beauty of the poetical conception of the
work is often tarnished by the philosophical chatter with which Tolstoy
has loaded his work, especially in the later portions. He is determined
to make an exposition of his theory of the fatality of history. The
pity is that he returns to the point incessantly, and obstinately
repeats himself. Flaubert, who "gave vent to cries of admiration" while
reading the first two volumes, which he declared "sublime" and "full
of Shakespearean things," threw the third volume aside in boredom: "He
goes off horribly. He repeats himself, and he philosophises. We see the
aristocrat, the author, and the Russian, while hitherto we have seen
nothing but Nature and Humanity." (Letter to Tourgenev, January, 1880.)

[2] While he was finishing _War and Peace_, in the summer of 1869,
he discovered Schopenhauer, and was filled with enthusiasm. "I am
convinced that Schopenhauer is the most genial of men. Here is the
whole universe reflected with an extraordinary clearness and beauty."
(Letter to Fet, August 30, 1869.)

[3] "Between Homer and his translators," he says again, "there is the
difference between boiled and distilled water and the spring-water
broken on the rocks, which may carry the sand along with it as it
flows, but becomes more pure and fresh on that account."

[4] Papers of Countess Tolstoy (_Vie et Oeuvre)._

[5] It was completed in 1877. It appeared--minus the epilogue--in the
_Rousski Viestniki._

[6] The death of three children (November 18, 1873, February, 1875,
November, 1875); of his Aunt Tatiana, his adopted mother (June, 1874),
and of his Aunt Pelagia (December, 1875).

[7] Letter to Fet, March, 1876.

[8] "Woman is the stumbling-block of a man's career. It is difficult to
love a woman and to do nothing of any profit; and the only way of not
being reduced to inaction by love is to marry." (_Anna Karenin._)

[9] The motto at the commencement of the book.

[10] Notice also, in the epilogue, the hostility towards warfare,
nationalism, and Pan-Slavism.

[11] "Evil is that which is reasonable to the world. Sacrifice and love
are insanity."

[12] (_Anna Karenin,_ vol. ii.)

[13] _Anna Karenin,_ vol. ii.

[14] _Ibid._




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.[1] He could
work no longer. He remained at a standstill; inert, without will-power,
a prey to selfterror and self-disgust. There, in the emptiness of his
life, rose the great wind which issued from the abyss; the vertigo of
death.

Tolstoy told of these terrible years at a later period, when he was
newly escaped from the abyss.[2]

"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.[3] It seemed to me that life was a dreary farce, which was
being played out before my eyes. Forty years of work, of trouble, of
progress, only to find that there is nothing! Nothing! Nothing will
remain of me but putrescence and worms.... One can live only while one
is intoxicated with life; but the moment the intoxication is over one
sees that all is merely deceit, a clumsy fraud.... My family and art
were no longer enough to satisfy me. My family consisted of unhappy
creatures like myself. Art is a mirror to life. When life no longer
means anything it is no longer amusing to use the mirror. And the
worst of it was, I could not resign myself--I was like a man lost in
a forest, who is seized with horror because he is lost, and who runs
hither and thither and cannot stop, although he knows that at every
step he is straying further."

Salvation came from the people. Tolstoy had always had for them
"a strange affection, absolutely genuine,"[4] which the repeated
experiences of his social disillusions were powerless to shake. Of
late years he, like Levine, had drawn very near to them.[5] He began
to ponder concerning these millions of beings who were excluded from
the narrow circle of the learned, the rich, and the idle who killed
themselves, endeavoured to forget themselves, or, like himself,
were basely prolonging a hopeless life. He asked himself why these
millions of men and women escaped this despair: why they did not kill
themselves. He then perceived that they were living not by the light of
reason, but without even thinking of reason; they were living by faith.
What was this faith which knew nothing of reason?

"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 of "epicurean consolation," threw him
definitely among the simple folk who alone lived lives in agreement
with their faith.

"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."[6]

He was saved. God had appeared to him.[7]

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, he began
by studying the doctrine of the Orthodox Church, of which he was a
member.[8] In order to become more intimately a part of that body he
submitted for three years to all its ceremonies; confessing himself,
communicating; not presuming to judge such matters as shocked him,
inventing explanations for what he found obscure or incomprehensible,
uniting himself, through and in their faith, with all those whom he
loved, whether living or dead, and always cherishing the hope that at
a certain moment "love would open to him the gates of truth." But it
was all useless: his reason and his heart revolted. Such ceremonies as
baptism and communion appeared to him scandalous. When he was forced to
repeat that the host was the true body and true blood of Christ, "he
felt as though a knife were plunged into his heart." But it was not the
dogmas which raised between the Church and himself an insurmountable
wall, but the practical questions, and in especial two: the hateful
and mutual intolerance of the Churches[9] and the sanction, formal or
tacit, of homicide: of war and of capital punishment.

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 longer. Angrily and violently he trampled underfoot the
religion which the day before he was still persistently practising. In
his _Criticism of Dogmatic Theology_ (1879-1881) he termed it not only
an "insanity, but a conscious and interested lie."[10] He contrasted it
with the New Testament, in his _Concordance and Translation of the Four
Gospels_ (1881-83). Finally, upon the Gospel he built his faith _(What
my Faith consists in,_ 1883).

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.[11] Tolstoy is the disciple of these great
religious creators, of these Hindu, Chinese, and Hebrew demi-gods and
prophets. He defends them, as he knows how to defend; defends them by
attacking those whom he calls "the Scribes" and "the Pharisees"; by
attacking the established Churches and the representatives of arrogant
science, or rather of "scientific philosophism." Not that he appealed
from reason to revelation. Once escaped from the period of distress
described in his _Confessions_, he remained essentially a believer in
Reason; one might indeed say a mystic of Reason.

"In the beginning was the Word," he says, with St. John; "the Word,
Logos, that is, Reason.[12] A book of his entitled _Life_ (1887) bears
as epigraph the famous lines of Pascal:[13]

"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 part for the whole and physical
life for the whole of life," but the sovereign law which rules the life
of man, "the law according to which _reasonable beings, that is men,_
must of necessity live their lives."

"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....[14] True
life commences only at the moment when reason is manifested. The only
real life is the life of reason."

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
negation of the possibility of individual good remains an unchangeable
truth for every man of our period who is endowed with reason."

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 individual happiness. It is then that
all the streams of his life go to nourish the noble graft of the true
love: and this graft borrows for its increase all the energies of the
wild stock of animal individuality...."[15]

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:[16]

"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 says, all the law and the
prophets. I believe that the meaning of life for each one of us is
only to increase the love within him; I believe that this development
of our power of loving will reward us in this life with a happiness
which will increase day by day, and with a more perfect felicity in the
other world. I believe that this increase of love will contribute, more
than any other factor, to founding the kingdom of God upon earth; that
is, to replacing an organisation of life in which division, deceit,
and violence are omnipotent, by a new order in which concord, truth,
and brotherhood will reign. I believe that we have only one means of
growing richer in love: namely, our prayers. Not public prayer in the
temple, which Christ has formally reproved (Matt. vi. 5-13), but the
prayer of which he himself has given as an example; the solitary prayer
which confirms in us the consciousness of the meaning of our life and
the feeling that we depend solely upon the will of God.... I believe
in life eternal; I believe that man is rewarded according to his acts,
here and everywhere, now and for ever. I believe all these things so
firmly that at my age, on the verge of the tomb, I have often to make
an effort not to pray for the death of my body, that is, my birth into
a new life."[17]


[1] "Now I am harnessing myself again to the wearisome and vulgar
_Anna Karenin_, with the sole desire of getting rid of it as quickly
as possible." (Letters to Fet, August 26, 1875.) "I must finish the
romance, which is wearying me." (_Ibid._ March 1,1876.)

[2] In his _Confessions_ (1879).

[3] See _Anna Karenin._ "And Levine, who had the love of a woman, and
was the father of a family, put every kind of weapon away out of reach,
as though he was afraid of yielding to the temptation of putting an
end to his sufferings." This frame of mind was not peculiar to Tolstoy
and his characters. Tolstoy was struck by the increasing number of
suicides among the wealthy classes all over Europe, and in Russia
more especially. He often alludes to the fact in such of his books
as were written about this period. It was as though a great wave of
neurasthenia had swept across Europe in 1880, drowning its thousands
of victims. Those who were young men at the time will remember it; and
for them Tolstoy's record of this human experience will have a historic
value. He has written the secret tragedy of a generation. [
F] _Confessions._

[5] His portraits of this period betray this plebeian tendency. A
painting by Kramskoy (1873) represents Tolstoy in a moujik's blouse,
with bowed head: it resembles a German Christ. The forehead is growing
bare at the temples; the cheeks are lined and bearded.--In another
portrait, dated 1881, he has the look of a respectable artisan in his
Sunday clothes: the hair cut short, the beard and whiskers spread
out on either side; the face looks much wider below than above; the
eyebrows are contracted, the eyes gloomy; the wide nostrils have a
dog-like appearance; the ears are enormous.

[6] _Confessions._

[7] To tell the truth--not for the first time. The young volunteer in
the Caucasus, the officer at Sebastopol, Olenin of the _Cossacks,_
Prince Andrei, and Pierre Besoukhov, in _War and Peace,_ had had
similar visions. But Tolstoy was so enthusiastic that each time he
discovered God he believed it was for the first time; that previously
there had been nothing but night and the void. He saw nothing of his
past but its shadows and its shames. We who, through reading his
_Journal_, know better than he himself the story of his heart, know
also how profoundly religious was that heart, even when he was most
astray. But he himself confesses in a passage in the preface to the
_Criticism o; Dogmatic Theology:_ "God! God! I have erred; I have
sought the truth where I should not have sought it; and I knew that I
erred. I flattered my evil passions, knowing them to be evil; _but I
never forgot Thee. I was always conscious of Thee, even when I went
astray_." The crisis of 1878-79 was only more violent than the rest;
perhaps under the influence of repeated loss and the advance of age;
its only novelty was that the image of God, instead of vanishing and
leaving no trace when once the flame of ecstasy flickered out, remained
with him, and the penitent, warned by past experience, hastened to
"walk in the light while he had the light," and to deduce from his
faith a whole system of life. Not that he had not already tried to do
so. (Remember the _Rules of Life_ written when he was a student.) But
at fifty years of age there was less likelihood that his passions would
divert him from his path.

[8] The sub-title of the _Confessions_ is _Introduction to the
Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the Examination of the Christian
Doctrine._

[9] "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was struck with the
fact that religion itself destroyed that which it sought to produce."
(_Confessions_.)

[10] "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church is in
theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross
superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian
doctrine absolutely disappears." (_Reply to the Holy Synod,_ April
4-17, 1901.)

[11] As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of religious truth
throughout human history--and of the kinship of Christ with the other
sages, from Buddha down to Kant and Emerson--grew more and more
accentuated, until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had "any
predilection for Christianity." Of the greatest importance in this
connection is a letter written between July 27 and August 4, 1909,
to the painter Jan Styka, and recently reproduced in _Le Théosophe_
(January 16, 1911). According to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new
conviction, was a little inclined to forget his former state of mind
and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was purely
Christian:

"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."

[12] Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is
modest and knows its limits. (_Life,_ chap. iv. There is a French
version by Countess Tolstoy.)

[13] Tolstoy often read the _Pensées_ during the period of this crisis,
which preceded the _Confessions._ He speaks of Pascal in his letters to
Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 1879), recommending his friend to read
the _Pensées._

[14] In a letter _Upon Reason_, written on November 26, 1894, to
Baroness X (reproduced in _The Revolutionaries_, 1906), Tolstoy says
the same thing:

"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."

[15] _Life_, xxii.-xxv. As in the case of most of these quotations, I
am expressing the sense of several chapters in a few characteristic
phrases.

[16] I hope later, when the complete works of Tolstoy have been
published, to study the various shades of this religious idea, which
has certainly evolved in respect of many points, notably in respect of
the conception of future life.

[17] From a translation in the _Temps_ for May 1, 1901.




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),[1] and the taking of the census, in which
he contrived to lend a hand, gave him the occasion to examine at first
hand the poverty of a great city. The impression produced upon him was
terrible. On the evening of the day when he first came into contact
with this hidden plague of civilisation, while relating to a friend
what he had seen, "he began to shout, to weep, and to brandish his
fist."

"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";[2] because he knew love; because he
could no longer forget the miserable creatures he had seen, and in
the passionate tenderness of his heart he felt as though he were
responsible for their sufferings and their abjectness; they were
the victims of that civilisation in whose privileges he shared; of
that monstrous idol to which an elect and superior class was always
sacrificing millions of human beings. To accept the benefit of such
crimes was to become an accomplice. His conscience would have given him
no repose had he not denounced them.

_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,[3] which I cannot look at without emotion,
tells us plainly what suffering Tolstoy was then enduring. It shows
him facing the camera; seated, with his arms crossed; he is wear-a
moujik's blouse. He looks overwhelmed. His hair is still black, but his
moustache is already grey, and his long beard and whiskers are quite
white. A double furrow traces symmetrical lines in the large, comely
face. There is so much goodness, such tenderness, in the great dog-like
muzzle, in the eyes that regard you with so frank, so clear, so
sorrowful a look. They read your mind so surely! They pity and implore.
The face is furrowed and bears traces of suffering; there are heavy
creases beneath the eyes. He has wept. But he is strong, and ready for
the fight.

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
consisted in pretty words, necessary for conversation, and was not in
the least something to which practice should conform! When I come to
understand a matter on which I have reflected, I cannot do otherwise
than as I have understood."[4]

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.[5]

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.[6] Then comes
the universal seduction of life without labour. Then the State, that
murderous entity, created by the violent in order that they might for
their own profit despoil and enslave the rest of humanity. Then the
Church, an accomplice; science and art, accomplices. How is a man to
oppose this army of evil? In the first place, by refusing to join it.
By refusing to share in the exploitation of humanity. By renouncing
wealth and ownership of the soil,[7] and by refusing to serve the State.

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.[8] And Tolstoy, replying in advance to the ridicule of
the elect, maintains that physical labour does not in any way decrease
the energy of the intellect; but that, on the contrary, it increases
it, and that it responds to the normal demand of nature. Health can
only gain thereby; art will gain even more. But what is more important
still, it will re-establish the union of man with man.

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[9] and the cruel pleasures which kill it.[10] He himself
set the example. In 1884, he sacrificed his most deeply rooted passion:
his love of the chase.[11] He practised abstinence, which strengthens
the will. So an athlete may subject himself to some painful discipline
that he may grapple with it and conquer.

_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.



[1] "I had hitherto passed my whole life away from the city." (_What
shall we do?_)

[2] Tolstoy has many times expressed his antipathy for the "ascetics,
who live for themselves only, apart from their fellows." He puts them
in the same class as the conceited and ignorant revolutionists, "who
pretend to do good to others without knowing what it is that they
themselves need .... I love these two categories of men with the same
love, but I hate their doctrines with the same hate. The only doctrine
is that which orders a constant activity, an existence which responds
to the aspirations of the soul and endeavours to realise the happiness
of others. Such is the Christian doctrine. Equally remote from
religious quietism and the arrogant pretensions of the revolutionists,
who seek to transform the world without knowing in what real happiness
consists." (Letters to a friend, published in the volume entitled
_Cruel Pleasures,_ 1895.)

[3] A daguerreotype of 1885, reproduced in _What shall we do?_ in the
complete French edition.

[4] _What shall we do?_

[5] All the first part of the book (the first fifteen chapters).

[6] "The true cause of poverty is the accumulation of riches in the
hands of those who do not produce, and are concentrated in the cities.
The wealthy classes are gathered together in the cities in order to
enjoy and to defend themselves. And the poor man comes to feed upon the
crumbs of the rich. He is drawn thither by the snare of easy gain: by
peddling, begging, swindling, or in the service of immorality."

[7] "The pivot of the evil is property. Property is merely the means
cf enjoying the labour of others." Property, he says again, is that
which is not ours: it represents other people. "Man calls his wife, his
children, his slaves, his goods his property, but reality shows him his
error; and he must renounce his property or suffer and cause others to
suffer."

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?_)

[8] The peasant-revolutionist Bondarev would have had this law
recognised as a universal obligation. Tolstoy was then subject to his
influence, as also to that of another peasant, Sutayev.--"During the
whole of my life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence
over me, have enriched my mind, and have elucidated for me my own
conception of the world. They were two peasants, Sutayev and Bondarev."
(_What shall we do?_)

In the same book Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Sutayev, and records a
conversation with him.

[9] _Vicious Pleasures,_ or in the French translation _Alcohol and
Tobacco,_ 1895.

[10] _Cruel Pleasures_ (_the Meat-eaters; War; Hunting_), 1895.

[11] The sacrifice was difficult; the passion inherited. He was not
sentimental; he never felt much pity for animals. For him all things
fell into three planes: "1. Reasoning beings; 2. animals and plants;
3. inanimate matter." He was not without a trace of native cruelty. He
relates the pleasure he felt in watching the struggles of a wolf which
he killed. Remorse was of later growth.




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."[1]

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!"[2]

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."[3]

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."[4]

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.'"[5]

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.[6] But of the type whom he calls "the mother-woman," the
woman who knows the real meaning of life, he speaks in terms of pious
admiration; he pronounces a magnificent eulogy of her pains and her
joys, of pregnancy and maternity, of the terrible sufferings, the
years without rest, the invisible, exhausting travail for which no
reward is expected, and of that beatitude which floods the soul at the
happy issue from labour, when the body has accomplished the Law. He
draws the portrait of the valiant wife who is a help, not an obstacle,
to her husband. She knows that "the vocation of man is the obscure,
lonely sacrifice, unrewarded, for the life of others."

"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!"[7]

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 degree my veritable _I_ is despised and disregarded
by all those about me."[8]

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,[9] said ironically of Tolstoy: "I pity him greatly; but
after all, as the French say, every one kills his own fleas in his own
way."[10]

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."[11]

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 your tool!... Our
tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and
nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the
the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: 'It
is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the
spirit broadcast in the world.'"

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."[12]

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
there was a great risk that their art would be the first prey of
the conflagration. They professed to believe that the whole art of
literature was menaced; that the Russian, like Prospero, was burying
for ever his magic ring with its power of creative illusion.

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.


[1] The summer of 1878.

[2] October 8, 1881. _Vie et Oeuvre._

[3] October 14. _Vie et Oeuvre._

[4] 1882.

[5] October 23, 1884. _Vie et Oeuvre._

[6] "The so-called right of women is merely the desire to participate
in the imaginary labours of the wealthy classes, with a view to
enjoying the fruit of the labour of others and to live a life that
satisfies the sensual appetites. No genuine labourer's wife demands the
right to share her husband's work in the mines or in the fields."

[7] These are the last lines of _What shall we do?_ They are dated the
14th of February, 1886.

[8] A letter to a friend, published under the title _Profession of
Faith_, in the volume entitled _Cruel Pleasures,_ 1895.

[9] The reconciliation took place in the spring of 1878. Tolstoy wrote
to Tourgenev asking his pardon. Tourgenev went to Yasnaya Polyana in
August, 1878. Tolstoy returned his visit in July, 1881. Every one was
struck with the change in his manner, his gentleness and his modesty.
He was "as though regenerated."

[10] Letter to Polonski (quoted by Birukov).

[11] Letter to Bougival June 28, 1883.

[12] We find that M. de Vogüé, in the reproach which he addressed to
Tolstoy, unconsciously used the phrases of Tolstoy himself. "Rightly
or wrongly," he said, "for our chastisement perhaps, we have received
from heaven that splendid and essential evil: thought.... To throw down
this cross is an impious revolt." (_Le Roman russe,_ 1886.) Now Tolstoy
wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. A. Tolstoy, in 1883: "Each of us
must bear his cross.... Mine is the travail of the idea; evil, full of
pride and seductiveness." (_Letters._)




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 of science and in art for the sake of art--the lying mask
which they seek to make their justification and the apology for their
monstrous egoism and their emptiness.

"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 thinker and the
artist, for his fate is the good of men. Men are unhappy; they suffer;
they die; there is no time for him to stroll about, to amuse himself.
The thinker or the artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as we are
accustomed to think; he is always in a state of conflict, always in a
state of emotion. He must decide and must say what will further the
welfare of men, what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not
decided it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too
late, and he will die.... The man who is trained in an establishment in
which artists and scientists are formed (to tell the truth, such places
make destroyers of art and of science); the man who receives diplomas
and a pension--he will not be an artist or a thinker; but he who would
be happy not to think, not to express what is implanted in his mind,
yet cannot refrain from thought and self-expression: for he is carried
along by two invisible forces: his inner need and his love of men.
There are no artists who are fat, lovers of life, and satisfied with
themselves."[1]

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 faded, and became less poignant; the wound healed,[2]
and in none of his subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain
and of vengeful anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this
sublime profession of the faith of the artist who creates with his
life-blood, this exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering "which are
the lot of the thinker"; this disdain for Olympian art. Those of his
later works which deal with the criticism of art will be found to
treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary and less
mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of that
human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing his
self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when
upon returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation.

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."[3]

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?_).[4] "All the evil of the day comes
from the fact that so-called civilised people, together with the
scientists and artists, form a privileged caste, like so many priests;
and this caste has all the faults of all castes. It degrades and lowers
the principle in virtue of which it was organised. What we in our world
call the sciences and the arts is merely a gigantic _humbug,_ a gross
superstition into which we commonly fall as soon as we free ourselves
from the old superstition of the Church. To keep safely to the road we
ought to follow we must begin at the beginning--we must raise the cowl
which keeps us warm but obscures our sight. The temptation is great. We
are born or we clamber upon the rungs of the ladder; and we find among
the privileged the priests of civilisation, of _Kultur_, as the Germans
have it. Like the Brahmin or Catholic priests, we must have a great
deal of sincerity and a great love of the truth before we cast doubts
upon the principles which assure us of our advantageous position. But
a serious man who ponders the riddle of life cannot hesitate. To begin
to see clearly he must free himself from his superstitions, however
profitable they may be to him. This is a condition _sine quâ non_....
To have no superstition. To force oneself into the attitude of a child
or a Descartes."

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 wounded those whom it should
have been his duty to defend: Ibsen or Beethoven. This was the result
of his enthusiasm, which left him no time to reflect before acting; of
his passion, which often blinded him to the weakness of his reasons,
and--let us say it--it was also the result of his incomplete artistic
culture.

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,[5] but knew hardly anything of it; he could not get
beyond the impressions of his childhood, swore by those who were
already classics about 1840, and had not become familiar with any later
composers (excepting Tchaikowsky, whose music made him weep); he throws
Brahms and Richard Strauss into the bottom of the same bag, teaches
Beethoven his business,[6] and, in order to judge Wagner, he thought
it was sufficient to attend a single representation of _Siegfried_, at
which he arrived after the rise of the curtain, while he left in the
middle of the second act,[7] In the matter of literature he is, it goes
without saying, rather better informed. But by what curious aberration
did he evade the criticism of the Russian writers whom he knew so well,
while he laid down the law to foreign poets, whose temperament was as
far as possible removed from his own, and whose leaves he merely turned
with contemptuous negligence![8]

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."[9]

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 only when they have won free from
them. With the development of the press these epidemics have become
particularly notable." And he gives as an example the most recent of
these contagious diseases, the Dreyfus Affair, of which he, the enemy
of all injustice, the defender of all the oppressed, speaks with
disdainful indifference;[10] a striking example of the excesses into
which he is drawn by his suspicion of untruth and that instinctive
hatred of "moral epidemics" of which he admits himself the victim, and
which he is unable to master. It is the reverse side of a virtue, this
inconceivable blindness of the seer, the reader of souls, the evoker
of passionate forces, which leads him to refer to _King Lear_ as "an
inept piece of work," and to the proud Cordelia as a "characterless
creature."[11]

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 Beethoven or of Shakespeare, he is
speaking in reality not of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of himself;
he is revealing his own ideals. They do not even try to put us off the
scent. Tolstoy, in criticising Shakespeare, does not attempt to make
himself "objective." More: he reproaches Shakespeare for his objective
art. The painter of _War and Peace_, the master of impersonal art,
cannot sufficiently deride those German critics who, following the lead
of Goethe, "invent Shakespeare," and are responsible for "the theory
that art ought to be objective, that is to say, ought to represent
human beings without any reference to moral values--which is the
negation of the religious object of art."

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.[12] What, then, does
he really intend? What is the artistic significance of the religious
ideal which he proposes?

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 art, namely, theatres,
concerts, books, exhibitions, is only an infinitesimal portion of art.
Our life is full of artistic manifestations of every kind, from the
games of children to the offices of religion. Art and speech are the
two organs of human progress. One affords the communion of hearts, the
other the communion of thoughts. If either of the two is perverted,
then society is sick. The art of to-day is perverted."

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 of all classes and all nations. The past offers us glorious
examples of such art.

"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 subjects "when compared with ancient models, such as the sublime
history of Joseph." The excessive minuteness of detail is detrimental
to such works, which for that reason cannot become universal.

"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 marks of sane and classic art, and of Homeric art.[13]
How pleasant it will be to translate universal sentiments into the
pure lives of this art of the future! To write a tale or a song, to
design a picture for millions of beings, is a matter of much greater
importance--and of much greater difficulty--than writing a novel or a
symphony. It is an immense and almost virgin province. Thanks to such
works men will learn to appreciate the happiness of brotherly union.

"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."[14]

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 expression of a caste, which is itself
subdivided not only by the fact of nationality, but in each country
also into narrow and hostile clans. There is not a single artist in
Europe who realises in his own personality the union of parties and of
races. The most universal mind of our time was that of Tolstoy himself.
In him men of all nations and all classes have attained fraternity;
and those who have tasted the virile joy of this capacious love can no
longer be satisfied by the shreds and fragments of the vast human soul
which are offered by the art of the European cliques.



[1] _What shall we do?_ p. 378-9.

[2] In time he even came to justify suffering--not only personal
suffering, but the sufferings of others. "For the assuagement of the
sufferings of others is the essence of the rational life. How then
should the object of labour be an object of suffering for the labourer?
It is as though the labourer were to say that an untilled field is a
grief to him." (_Life,_ chap, xxxiv.-xxxv.)

[3] February 23, 1860. _Further Letters,_ pp. 19-20. It was for this
reason that the "melancholy and dyspeptic" art of Tourgenev displeased
him.

[4] This letter (October 4, 1887) has been printed in the _Cahiers de
la Quinzaine,_ 1902, and in the _Further Letters_ (_Correspondance
inédite_), 1907. _What is Art?_ appeared in 1897-98; but Tolstoy had
been pondering the matter for more than fourteen years.

[5] I shall return to this matter when speaking of the _Kreutzer
Sonata._

[6] His intolerance became aggravated after 1886. In _What shall
we do?_ he did not as yet dare to lay hands on Beethoven or on
Shakespeare. Moreover, he reproached contemporary artists for daring
to invoke their names. "The activity of a Galileo, a Shakespeare, a
Beethoven has nothing in common with that of a Tyndall, a Victor Hugo,
or a Wagner; just as the Holy Father would deny all relationship with
the Orthodox popes." (_What shall we do?_)

[7] For that matter, he wished to leave before the end of the first
act. "For me the question was settled. I had no more doubt. There was
nothing to be expected of an author capable of imagining scenes like
these. One could affirm beforehand that he could never write anything
that was not evil."

[8] In order to make a selection from the French poets of the new
schools he conceived the admirable idea of "copying, in each volume,
the verses printed on page 28!"

[9] _Shakespeare,_ 1903. The book was written on the occasion of an
article by Ernest Crosby upon _Shakespeare and the Working Classes._

[10] "Here was one of those incidents which often occur, without
attracting the attention of any one, and without interesting--I do not
say the world--but even the French military world." And further on: "It
was not until some years had passed that men awoke from their hypnosis,
and understood that they could not possibly know whether Dreyfus were
guilty or not, and that each of them had other interests more important
and more immediate than the Affaire Dreyfus." (_Shakespeare._)

[11] "_King Lear_ is a very poor drama, very carelessly constructed,
which can inspire nothing but weariness and disgust."--_Othello_, for
which Tolstoy evinces a certain sympathy, doubtless because the work
is in harmony with his ideas of that time concerning marriage and
jealousy, "while the least wretched of Shakespeare's plays, is only
a tissue of emphatic words." Hamlet has no character at all: "he is
the author's phonograph, who repeats all his ideas in a string." As
for _The Tempest, Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida,_ &c., Tolstoy only
mentions them on account of their "ineptitude."

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."

[12] He classes his own "works of imagination" in the category of
"harmful art." (_What is Art?_) From this condemnation he does not
except his own plays, "devoid of that religious conception which must
form the basis of the drama of the future."

[13] As early as 1873 Tolstoy had written: "Think what you will, but
in such a fashion that every word may be understood by every one. One
cannot write anything bad in a perfectly clear and simple language.
What is immoral will appear so false if clearly expressed that it will
assuredly be deleted. If a writer seriously wishes to speak to the
people, he has only to force himself to be comprehensible. When not
a word arrests the reader's attention the work is good. If he cannot
relate what he has read the work is worthless."

[14] This ideal of brotherhood and union among men is by no means,
to Tolstoy's mind, the limit of human activity; his insatiable mind
conceives an unknown ideal, above and beyond that of love:

"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).[1] At the height and end of this artistic period,
like a cathedral with two spires, the one symbolising eternal love and
the other the hatred of the world, stands _Resurrection_ (1899).

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 to spring; the emotion has a quality of
universality; and is freed of all transitory details of local realism;
and finally the diction is rich in illustrations, racy, and smacking of
the soil.

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,[2] "are masters.
Of old, when I used to talk with them, or with the wanderers who,
wallet on shoulder, pass through our countryside, I used carefully
to note such of their expressions as I heard for the first time
expressions often forgotten by our modern literary dialect, but always
good old Russian currency, ringing sound.... Yes, the genius of the
language lives in these men."

He must have been the more sensitive to such elements of the language
in that his mind was not encumbered with literature.[3] Through living
far from any city, in the midst of peasants, he came to think a little
in the manner of the people. He had the slow dialectic, the common
sense which reasons slowly and painfully, step by step, with sudden
disconcerting leaps, the mania for repeating any idea when he was once
convinced, of repeating it unwearingly and indefinitely, and in the
same words.[4]

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.[5]

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[6] like a halo, or hovering in the cabin of
the cobbler Michael; he who, through his skylight on the ground-level,
sees the feet of people passing, and whom the Lord visits in the guise
of the poor whom the good cobbler has succoured.[7] Sometimes in these
tales the parables of the Gospel are mingled with a vague perfume of
Oriental legends, of those _Thousand and One Nights_ which Tolstoy had
loved since childhood.[8] Sometimes, again, the fantastic light takes
on a sinister aspect, lending the tale a terrifying majesty. Such is
_Pakhom the Peasant_,[9] the tale of the man who kills himself in
acquiring a great surface of and--all the land which he can encircle by
walking for a whole day--and who dies on completing his journey.

"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.[10]

"Do not resist whosoever shall do thee evil.[11]

"Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord."[12]

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 play, whether Tolstoy's
faith and his love of the people ever caused him to idealise the people
or betray the truth.

Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dramatic essays,[13] has here
attained to mastery. The characters and the action, are handled
with ease; the coxcomb Nikita, the sensual, headstrong passion of
Anissia, the cynical good-humour of the old woman, Matrena, who gloats
maternally over the adultery of her son, and the sanctity of the old
stammering Hakim--God inhabiting a ridiculous body. Then comes the fall
of Nikita, weak and without real evil, but fettered by his sin; falling
to the depths of crime in spite of his efforts to check himself on the
dreadful declivity; but his mother and his wife drag him downward....

"The peasants aren't worth much.... But the _babas!_ The women! They
are wild animals ... they are afraid of nothing! ... Sisters, there
are millions of you, all Russians, and you are all as blind as moles.
You know nothing, you know nothing!... The moujik at least may manage
to learn something--in the drink-shop, or who knows where?--in prison,
or in the barracks; but the _baba_--what can she know? She has seen
nothing, heard nothing. As she has grown up, so she will die.... They
are like little blind puppies who go running here and there and ramming
their heads against all sorts of filth.... They only know their silly
songs: 'Ho--o--o! Ho--o--o!' What does it mean? Ho--o--o?
They don't know!"[14]

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 night, hear and guess at the crime which is being
enacted off the stage.

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,[15] even while
the apostle is mourning amidst the dark places of the human soul.

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 classes and
the wealthy. At this period the dramatic form was predominant over his
ideas of art. The _Death of Ivan Ilyitch_ and _The Kreutzer Sonata_ are
both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul turned upon itself and
concentrated upon itself, and in _The Kreutzer Sonata_ it is the hero
of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration.

_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 lamentable yet laughable emptiness
in this life (as there is in thousands and thousands of lives),
with its grotesque ambitions, its wretched gratification of vanity,
"always better than spending the evening opposite one's wife"; with
its weariness and hatred of the official career; its privileges, and
the embitterment which they cause; and its one real pleasure: whist.
This ridiculous life is lost for a cause yet more ridiculous--a fall
from a ladder, one day when Ivan wished to hang a curtain over the
drawing-room window. The lie of life. The lie of sickness. The lie
of the well-to-do doctor, who thinks only of himself. The lie of the
family, whom illness disgusts. The lie of the wife, who professes
devotion, and calculates how she will live when her husband is
dead. The universal lie, against which is set only the truth of a
compassionate servant, who does not try to conceal his condition from
the dying man, and helps him out of brotherly kindness. Ivan Ilyitch,
"full of an infinite pity for himself," weeps over his loneliness and
the egoism of men; he suffers horribly, until the day on which he
perceives that his past life has been a lie, and that he can repair
that lie. Immediately all becomes clear--an hour before his death. He
no longer thinks of himself; he thinks of his family; he pities them;
he _must_ die and rid them of himself.

"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 heard these
words and repeated them to himself. 'Death no longer exists,' he told
himself."

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_,"[16] that in writing this book a rigorous logic would bring me
where I have arrived. My own conclusions terrified me at first, and I
was tempted to reject them; but it was impossible for me to refuse to
hear the voice of my reason and my conscience."

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."[17]

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 art lost nothing. In
the power of its effects, in passionate concentration, in the brutal
vividness of its impressions, and in fullness and maturity of form,
nothing Tolstoy has written equals the _Kreutzer Sonata_.

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[18] hears in fancy, and the little Petia, the night before
his death.[19] Although Tolstoy had studied music very indifferently,
it used to move him to tears, and at certain periods of his life he
passionately abandoned himself to its influence. In 1858 he founded a
Musical Society, which in later years became the Moscow Conservatoire.

"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.[20]
Probably he found inspiration in so doing. He always used to accompany
my youngest sister, whose voice he loved. I have noticed that the
sensations which the music evoked in him were accompanied by a slight
pallor and an imperceptible grimace, which seemed expressive of
fear."[21]

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, th

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