Part 3

Tolstoy, in his _Confessions_, remarks that as a small child he knew nothing of nature, he had not even noticed her existence. “It is not possible,” he says, “that I was given neither flowers nor leaves to play with, that I did not see the grass or the sunlight. And yet up to my fifth or sixth year I have no memory of what we call nature. Probably we have to get free from her in order to see her, and I myself was nature.” From which can be deduced that even the mere seeing of nature, and our so-called enjoyment of her, are not only a specifically human condition, but one full of yearning emotion, in other words pathological, implying as it does our separation from her. Tolstoy’s recollection is that he felt the pain of this separation for the first time when his childhood under the care of nurses came to an end and he moved over to his older brothers and the tutor Feodor Ivanovich in the lower storey. Never again, he assures us, did he feel so strongly what a sense of duty meant, and what, accordingly, moral and ethical obligation: “the feeling of the Cross, to carry which every one of us is called. It was hard for me to part from all I had known since I was born. I was sad, sunk in poetical melancholy; less because I had to part from human beings, my nurse, my sisters, my aunt, than because I was leaving my little bed with its curtains and pillows. Moreover, I was apprehensive of the new life I was entering.” The appearance of the word “Cross” in this connexion is significant, not only with reference to Tolstoy, but also for the thing itself, the process of loosing oneself from nature. This process was felt by Tolstoy as painful and ethical: painful because ethical, and ethical because painful. He gives it a moral and an ascetic significance, as that which actually comprises all man’s ethical obligation. To be humanized means, for him, to be denaturalized; and from that moment on, the struggle of his existence consists in this sort of humanizing process: in the divorce from nature, from everything that was natural and to him peculiarly so, for example from the family, the nation, the State, the Church, from all the passions of the senses and the instincts, from love, the hunt, at bottom from all of physical life, and especially from art, which meant to him quite essentially the life of the body and the senses. It is quite wrong to think of this struggle as a crisis of conversion taking place suddenly in his later years; to make its inception roughly coincide with the beginning of old age. When the news came that the great Russian writer was as though stricken by a sort of mystical madness, the Frenchman Vogué declared that he had long expected it. He was quite justified. The germ of Tolstoy’s intellectual development had lain in _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_; and the psychology of Levin in _Anna Karenine_ plainly indicated what further course it would take. Besides, we have the evidence of Tolstoy’s comrades in arms when he was an officer, the Sebastopol time. They give the clearest picture of the violence with which the struggle even then raged within him. But here we should note that his wrestling to break the strong bonds in which nature held him, regularly led up to disease, immediately assumed the form of illness. “Leochen is completely consumed by his writing now,” so his wife, Countess Sophia Alexandrovna, puts it, about the year 1880, when he buried himself in theology and the philosophy of religion. It is a sight her love hates to see, and she constantly tries to call him back to creative work. “His eyes are strange and staring, he hardly speaks at all, he is like a being from another world, and is positively not capable of thinking of earthly things....” “Leochen is quite sunk in his work. His head pains him all the time. He is very much changed, and become a rigid and practising Christian. But he has got grey, his health is weak, he is sadder and more silent all the time.”--“Tomorrow we shall have been here a month,” she writes in 1881 from Moscow, “and the first two weeks I wept every day without stopping, because Leochen was not only in a gloomy state, but fallen into a kind of despairing apathy. He ate nothing and did not sleep, sometimes literally wept--I honestly believe I shall lose my reason.” And to her husband himself: “I am beginning to think that when a happy man suddenly begins to see only the horrible side of life, and has no eyes for anything good, he must be ill. You should do something for it, I say this in all seriousness. It seems so clear to me, I suffer so to see you.... Did you never know before that there were people in the world who were hungry, miserable, unhappy, and wicked? Open your eyes: there are also strong and healthy, happy and good ones. If God would only help you--what can I do? You must be ill,” the poor woman wails--and is he not? He himself writes: “My health grows worse and worse, often I wish I could die. Why I am so reduced, I do not know myself. Perhaps it is age, perhaps illness....”

Compare with this the descriptions of him when he had sought in the holy animalism of married life a refuge from the insoluble riddles that his intellect set him; and then, with that power which the critics delighted to call “bearlike”--Turgeniev sought in vain to convince him that it came from the source whence all things come--created his two epic novels _War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenine_. “He was always light-hearted then,” his sister-in-law relates, “in high spirits, as the English say, fresh, healthy, and jolly. On the days when he did not write he went hunting with me or his neighbour Ribikov. We hunted with greyhounds.... Evenings he played patience in Tantchen’s room.” What happy days! Who can blame poor Countess Sophia Alexandrovna for scarcely containing herself for joy when she hears that her hollow-eyed Christian is planning a new imaginative work? Her happiness is touching. “What gladness suddenly filled me, to read that you mean to write something creative again! What I have so long awaited and hoped for has come to you. That is salvation, that is happiness, in it we shall come together again, it will console you and irradiate our life. This is the work you were made for, and outside this sphere there is no joy for your soul. God give you strength to cling to this ray of light, in order that the divine spark may flare up in you again. The thought fills me with ecstasy....”

Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s biographies show that these great writers both alike suppressed for years their gift of plastic creation--for which, as Countess Sophia Alexandrovna says, they were born--and both in the service of a directly social activity--that is to say, on highly moral grounds. Tolstoy suppressed the artist in him in favour of his activities as _mirowov posrednik_ (justice of the peace) and schoolmaster without pay. Goethe governed the dukedom of Saxe-Weimar, for ten years of his early manhood dedicated his powers to excise regulations, details of book manufacture, levies of recruits, construction of streets and water-conduits, workhouses, mines and quarries, finance, and other such matters--while Merck, in the style of Turgeniev, was constantly concerned to rescue him for literature, and he himself, with increasing resignation, steeling himself by inward exhortations to patience and fortitude, held himself to the heavy, hard, unrewarding, unnatural task. Added to all this, in Goethe’s case, there was that somewhat seraphic affair with Frau von Stein. No doubt it was most beautifully instrumental in the process of civilizing the son of the Titans; but after all it did justice to but one of those famous two souls, which had, alas, their dwelling in his breast, and it let the other, the one with the “_klammernde Organen_,” the “prehensile organs,” go empty away.--Well, in both cases, Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s, the result is illness. “My office as justice of the peace,” writes Tolstoy, “has ended in destroying my good relations with the landowners, quite aside from the fact that it injures my health.” Teaching the village children had the same result. True, in his pedagogical journal he claims that the exercises the children wrote were more accomplished than the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Goethe; yet he discerns something evil and even criminal in his intercourse with them, it seems to him that he abuses and corrupts their souls. “It seemed to go very well,” he says in the _Confessions_, “but I felt that I was mentally not healthy enough and that it could not go on so for much longer. I was more ailing mentally than physically; I threw it all overboard and drove out to the Kalmucks of the steppes to drink mares’ milk and lead an animal life.”--This absconding to the steppes vividly recalls the secret flight to Italy which was Goethe’s salvation, after he too had seen that it could not go on so for much longer. The thirty-four-year-old man had become silent, taciturn, in plain words melancholy. He thought it was probably natural that a man should become serious over serious things. His health was actually undermined; by the time he was six-and-thirty his face was the face of a victim of exhaustion. For the first time he thought of taking a cure. He began to be aware of the ruinous perversity of his existence; expressed his view in the shrewd understatement that he was meant for private life. And fled before destruction. The parallel continues to hold: for Leo Nikolaevich, returned from the steppes and the mares’ milk cure, marries his Sophia Alexandrovna, who from then on finds herself almost continuously in the family way, and with epic and primeval power creates his two great novels. While Goethe, back from Italy, takes Christiane Vulpius unto himself and, freed from the cares of office, gives his mind to his natural tasks. All which might serve as a gloss upon a philosophy of disease.

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Art is objective, creative contemplation, closely bound up with nature. Critique, on the other hand, is the moralizing, analysing attitude toward life and nature. In other words, critique is spirit; whereas creation is the preoccupation of the children of God and nature.

“In poetry my maxim was the objective principle,” says Goethe. “I am a plastic artist.” Indeed, the contrast between Goethe’s position and that of his great counterpart (Schiller standing for idealism, moralization, rhetoric, in short for critique) is too well known to need labouring. Goethe regarded his own inborn poetic gift “quite as nature.” His tolerance, his attitude of live and let live, the complaisance of his character, are all consonant with this view. They are based on the Spinozan concept of the perfectitude and necessity of all being, on the idea of a world free from final ends and final causes, in which evil has its rights like good. “We struggle,” he declares, “to perfect the work of art as an end in itself. They, the moralists, think of the ulterior effect, about which the true artist troubles himself as little as nature does when she makes a lion or a humming-bird.” It is a primary maxim with him that art is as inimical to purpose as nature herself; and this is the point where the follower of Spinoza sympathizes with Kant, who conceives detached contemplation as the genuine æsthetic state, thus making a fundamental distinction between the æsthetic-creative principle and the ethical-critical one. “When,” says Goethe, “philosophy confirms and enhances our original feeling of our oneness with nature, turning it into a profound and tranquil contemplation, then I welcome it.” I could cite ten or twelve other places in his works, where in the name of art he repudiates the moral sanction--which indeed is always social as well. “It is possible, I suppose, for a work of art to have a moral effect; but to demand from the artist a moral purpose and intention is to spoil his craft for him.”--“I have, in my trade as a writer, never asked myself: How shall I be of service to the world at large? All I have ever done was with the view of making myself better and more full of insight, of increasing the content of my own personality; and then only of giving utterance to what I had recognized as the good and the true.”

When we contrast the Christian-social ethics of Tolstoy as an old man with Goethe’s pagan and cultural idealism, we must not forget that the Tolstoyan socialism had its origin in the most private and personal need, the profoundest concern with the salvation of one’s own soul. A permanent dissatisfaction with self, a tortured seeking for the meaning of life, was the source of this socialism. The moralist began all his teachings and reforms with a self-discipline (the _Confessions_, that is) such as the true and proper social critic never demands of himself. Revolutionary in the real and political sense of the word he can by no means be called. “The significance of the Christian doctrine,” he declares, “is not that in its name society shall forcibly be reformed. It is that one shall find a meaning to life.” And it should be pointed out that Tolstoy’s original conception of art corresponded precisely to Goethe’s--a fact which will surprise none but those who in all good faith accept him as a child of spirit, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, on the ground of his naïve and clumsy efforts at spiritual regeneration, and fail to recognize in him a natural nobility akin to Goethe’s own. Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, which dates from much earlier than is generally realized, undoubtedly has its roots in antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius. It was a reaction against nature, against the simple, against indifference to the moral point of view; and an impulse toward spirit--that is, toward an ethical and even social revaluation--a reaction so whole-souled, indeed, that it ended in his playing off against Shakespeare Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the creator of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_--an absurdity which only goes to show how very much the child of nature he was. Genuine sons of spirit and of the idea, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, do not run aground on such fantastic coasts. Tolstoy’s critical and moral faculty, in short his bias toward spirit, was but a secondary impulse, and a feeble one at that. It always balked at organic union with his mighty creative gift; we have unequivocal declarations from him to the effect that, in his view, pure creative power stood higher than talent with a social coloration. As an old man he criticized Dostoyevsky for going in for politics, much as Goethe had criticized Uhland’s activities in that line. At the age of thirty-one, in 1859, as a member of the Moscow society of the Friends of Russian Literature, he made a speech in which he so sharply accented the superiority of the purely artistic elements in literature over merits due to ulterior or ephemeral causes that the president of the society, Chomiakof, reminded him in a sharp rejoinder that a servant of pure art might very well, without knowing or wishing it, find himself indicting society.

An outburst of intellectual misgivings, of that humility of spirit to which the sons of nature are prone, occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s novel _Lucerne_. Here is a splendid lament over the fate of man, who, with all his need of positive redemption, is flung into an ever-billowing and shoreless ocean of good and evil. “If man,” cries Tolstoy, “had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain for ever questions! If he would only comprehend that every thought is at once false and true!... Men have divided up into sections this ever-rolling, boundless, eternally mingled chaos of good and bad; they have drawn themselves imaginary boundary-lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide according to their lines. As if it were not possible to make millions of other divisions, from other points of view, and on different planes!... Civilization is good, barbarism evil, freedom is good, unfreedom evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys in human nature the _original blissful and instinctive striving towards good_.” And asking himself whether in the souls of the poor there may not be more happiness and affirmation of life than in that of the callous rich man against whom, for his own part, his heart revolts, he bursts out with the words: “Endless is the goodness and wisdom of Him who has permitted and commanded all these contradictions. Only to you, poor worm, so presumptuously struggling to accomplish your schemes and devices, only to you do they seem contradictory. He looks mildly down from His radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony wherein in endless conflict you all do move!”

Could one express oneself more “Goethically”? Even the “_Harmonie des Unendlichen_” is here. This is not mere philosophical or moral doubt; the words are too light, too thin, too intellectual to characterize the piety, the religious submission, the adoration of nature, that breathe from Tolstoy’s page. This is not the voice of the prophet, schoolmaster, and reformer; here speaks the child of this world, the creative artist. Nature was his element, as she was the element, the beloved, kindly mother, of Goethe--and his constant tearing at the bond which held him fast to her, his desperate urging away from her in the direction of spirit and morality, from creation to critique, has much to command our respect and reverence, though at the same time there is about it something painful, tormenting, and humiliating, which is not present in the character of Goethe. Look at Tolstoy’s attitude toward music, it is most instructive. When he met Berthold Auerbach in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself at the piano--that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside Tschaikowsky and listened to the composer’s Quartet in D major, he began to sob at the _andante_, before everybody. No, unmusical he was not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he was, felt that he ought not to return her love.

There is that legend of the giant Antæus, who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth. The lives of Goethe and Tolstoy irresistibly recall that myth. Both sons of mother earth, they differ only therein, that one of them was aware of the source of his nobility, the other not. There are places in Tolstoy’s remorseful confessions where he touches the earth, and all at once his words, which, so long as they dealt in theory, were wooden and confused, are imbued with the most penetrating sensuousness, with an irresistible force and freshness of life. He recalls how once as a child he went nutting with his grandmother in the hazel-wood. Lackeys instead of horses draw the grandmother’s little carriage into the grove. They break through the undergrowth and bend the boughs, full of ripe, already dropping nuts, down into the old lady’s lap and she gathers them into a bag. Little Leo marvels at the strength of the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich, who bends the heavy branches; when he lets go they spring up again and slowly mingle with the others. “I can feel how hot it was in the sun, how pleasantly cool in the shade, how we breathed the sharp scent of the hazel leaves, while all round us the girls were cracking nuts between their teeth; we munched the full, fresh, white kernels without stopping.”--The fresh, full, white kernels cracking between the girls’ teeth: that is Antæus-Tolstoy, and the strength of his mother the earth streams through him, as it did when he wrote _War and Peace_, where his rather vague, fine-drawn, not very convincing philosophical digressions are followed by pages of which Turgeniev wrote: “They are glorious, they are the very best there is, everything original, everything descriptive, the hunt, the night boat-ride and all--nobody in Europe can touch him.”

And Goethe: how the Antæus-consciousness governed his whole existence! How constantly it conditioned his seeking and shaping! Nature is to him “healing and comfort” after the visitations of passion; and while he well knows that to know her “one must have moulded all the manifestations of the human being into one definite and distinct entity,” that true research is unthinkable without the gift of imagination, he is wary of the fantastic, avoids speculative natural philosophy, guards himself against losing touch with the earth, and calls the idea “the result of experience.” The imagination that guides his research is intuitive, it is the inborn sympathy of the child of nature with the organic. It is Antæan, like the imaginative power which conditions his creative art, nor is that, either, capricious in its nature, but precise and based on the sense-perceptions. Such is the imagination of the creative artist. The sons of the thought, of the idea, of spirit, theirs is another kind. We will not say that the one creates more reality than the other. But the figures created by the plastic fancy possess the realism of sheer being; while those created by the “sentimental” artist evince their actuality by action. Schiller himself makes this distinction. Apart from the things they do, he himself confesses, they have something shadowy--“_etwas Schattenhaftes_” is his expression. Translate this from the sphere of German idealism into the Russian and revelational, and you get, as a sort of national pendant to Schiller’s world of idea, rhetoric, and drama, the shadow-world of Dostoyevsky, over-life-size and exaggeratedly true. A catchword occurs to one from the philosophy of art, that is in everybody’s mouth today, or at least was yesterday: the word “expressionism.” Really, what we call expressionism is only a late form, strongly impregnated with the Russian and revelational, of romantic idealism. Its conflict with the epic attitude toward art, the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in on the one side Goethe and Tolstoy, on the other Schiller and Dostoyevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm, and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered, and dogmatic presumption of spirit.

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