Part 5

Count Leo Tolstoy came, as we know, from one of the oldest and finest of Russian families. When we read his books, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, or _Anna Karenine_, that picture of high life in Moscow, we are impressed with the fact that the author is a man who was brought up with all the advantages. We get the same feeling when we read _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ or _Die Wahlverwandtschaften_. And in Tolstoy too we find the same familiar and perhaps childish phenomenon we noticed in Goethe: his noble blood and the distinction conferred by his great gifts both belonged to him quite simply because they belonged to him, and his consciousness of them mingled in his joy in himself, of which, despite all his attacks of poverty of spirit, he possessed a very great deal. His fame as a writer, so he wrote to his father-in-law, delights him very much; he finds it most pleasant to be an author _and_ a nobleman. An author and a nobleman--all his Christianity, all his anarchism, to the contrary and notwithstanding, he never ceased to be a striking combination of those two. When Turgeniev first made the acquaintance of the youthful Tolstoy he said: “Not a word, not a gesture of his is natural. He is constantly posing; it is a mystery to me how such a sensible man can take such childish pride in his silly title.” This is the same Turgeniev who wrote to a French publisher: “I am not worthy to untie his shoe-laces”; so it is unlikely that the first-quoted remark misrepresents the facts. As for the aged Tolstoy, Gorky relates: “His comfortable, democratic manner took many people in; and I have often seen Russians, who judge people by their clothes, gush over him with their famous ‘simplicity of manner,’ which might better be called ‘beastly familiarity.’ And suddenly, from under his peasant beard, and his rumpled democratic blouse, the old Russian _Barin_, the aristocrat of aristocrats, would peep forth; and in the chill that emanated from him the confiding visitor’s nose would be frost-bitten. It was a joy to see this blue-blooded creature: the noble charm of his gestures, the haughty reticence of his speech, the murderous and fastidious sharpness of his tongue. He displayed just so much of the _Barin_ as these servile souls needed to see; when they roused the _Barin_ in Tolstoy it came easy and natural and overwhelmed them so that they shrivelled up and whined.”--The blue noses call up memories of Weimar, chilling memories of receptions and formal calls--only that Goethe was never malicious enough to put on the democratic pose; and his most frigid manner concealed more love than Tolstoy ever felt--Tolstoy, whose last and most frightful secret Turgeniev’s penetrating mind laid bare: it was that Tolstoy could love nobody but himself! But it was a “joy,” in Gorky’s sense of the word, to see Tolstoy for instance at the Petrov yearly fair, whither he drove from his estate in Samara in the seventies. His charm made him very popular in the merry whirl of peasants, Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. Even with drunken folk, we are told, he did not hesitate to strike up a conversation. And then came the following quiet and characteristic little episode. A drunken peasant, in his excess of feeling, wanted to embrace Tolstoy. But one stern and expressive look from Leo Nikolaevich’s eyes met the man and sobered him in a twinkling. He dropped his hands of himself, and said: “No? Well, all right, then.” What was there in that look to make it have such an arresting, quenching, sobering effect? Was it the consciousness of the _Barin_? Or of the great author? In such a case it is quite impossible to distinguish between them--as little objectively as doubtless it was subjectively.

“When Leo Nikolaevich wanted to please,” Gorky tells us, “he could do it better than a pretty and clever woman. Imagine a crowd of all sorts of people sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicholai Michailovich, the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Jalta, a musician, a German, the poet Bulgakov, and so on; they all look at him with the same enamoured eyes, while he expounds to them the doctrine of Lao Tse.... I used to look at him just like the others. And now I long to look at him once more--and I shall never see him again.”--One thing is obvious: it was _not_ the doctrine of Lao Tse which brought that lovelorn look into all their eyes. The teaching would have roused very scant general interest but for the expounder. But that look in every eye is the very same that Karl August had in mind when he passed on to Goethe the greetings sent by Napoleon on the Emperor’s way back from Russia: “You see,” he added, “heaven and hell are both making eyes at you.”

Yes, and the democratic moujik blouses were immaculate, made of soft fine material, highly comfortable and pleasant to wear, and the linen was scented. Of course, he did not scent it himself. The Countess attended to that, and he, who liked it very much, pretended not to notice, just as he pretended not to know that the vegetarian dishes he exclusively ate were all prepared with _bouillon_. “His face is that of a peasant,” reports an eyewitness, “with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick, beetling brows with small, piercing grey eyes beneath them. But, despite the peasant features, no one could fail to recognize at first glance the fine, cosmopolitan Russian gentleman, member of the very highest society.” Conversing thus in English or French with a Grand Duke, he reminds one very much of Goethe, on whom princes waited, and who thought it no derogation of his nobility, human or divine, to season it with a little knack for polite nothings. When Tolstoy visited Alexander Herz in London, his daughter, young Natalia Alexandrovna, begged to be present in a dark corner, that she might behold in the flesh the author of _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_. With beating heart she awaited Tolstoy’s appearance. She was bitterly disappointed to see a man dressed in the latest fashion, with good manners and a flow of speech, the subject-matter of which was exclusively the cock-fights and boxing-matches he had seen in London. “Not a word that came from his heart, not a word that could have corresponded to my expectations, did I hear during the single interview at which I was present.”

Nothing of the sort is reported of Dostoyevsky or Schiller. Never did these by their worldliness disappoint the expectations of their audience. The sons of spirit make personally a spiritual impression, as the hopeful average man expects those to do who are soul-shakers. That lofty, pallid, suffering-saint and criminal look of Dostoyevsky corresponded to the idea the Russians got of the phenomenon of his genius, just as Schiller’s mild, intrepid, fanatical, and equally ailing physiognomy, with open shirt-collar and flowing silk neckerchief, corresponded to the image which the German mind might have formed of its hero. Whereas on the other hand Goethe, if we accept Riemer’s description of him as he moved among his guests in a blue coat, “the powerful, expressive face showing the effects of sun and fresh air, with the black side-locks floating about it, the black hair bound in a queue, was more like a well-to-do, comfortable farmer, or a much-visited staff-officer in mufti, than like a shrinking and sensitive poet.” And it is true, _a priori_, that neither of those other two ever estranged ardent admiration by displaying a banal enthusiasm for cock-fighting and boxing. Whereas the sense of sport, the taste for bodily exercise, physical training, and physical enjoyment, played an essential rôle in Tolstoy’s life as in Goethe’s. We call these tastes gentlemanly and thus indicate the physical basis of the well-born-ness which is of this world. “One must see him,” wrote Riemer about Goethe; “how strong and firm he stands on his feet, with what bodily agility and sure step he moves. Early gymnastic training, dancing, skating, riding, even coursing and racing, had given him this mobility and suppleness; he could never make a false step on the worst path or be in danger of slipping or falling; easily and swiftly he passed over smooth ice, narrow foot-paths and bridges, and rocky steeps. As a youth he climbed among chasms and shingle with his princely friend, mounted towering rocks and Alpine crags with the boldness of a chamois; and so throughout his fifty years of geological exploration no mountain has been too high for him, no shaft too deep nor passage too low, no cave labyrinthine enough.”

The great interest which Leo Tolstoy took in his body showed itself negatively as well as positively. Negatively, in his Christian and ascetic grumblings at his beastly physical, in such utterances as that the body is a hindrance to the good man, and in such phrases as: “I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body.” Positively, in all the training and care he gave it. His interest in it begins at the moment--of which he speaks in the _Confessions_--when he sat as a little child in a wooden tub, enveloped in the smell of the bran-water in which he was being bathed, and for the first time noticed his little body with the ribs visible on the breast in front, and straightway feels drawn to it by a very strong inclination. Tolstoy’s face was, humanly speaking, ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it, convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes. He confesses that he would have given anything he had for a handsome face. The youth who is tortured by the problem of death, and ponders all the high and ultimate questions with as much maturity as the aged prophet, this youth is at the same time perpetually occupied with his own appearance, is obviously possessed by the desire to be elegant and _comme il faut_; sets the greatest store by physical development, gymnastic exercise; drills, rides, and hunts as though he had no higher ambition in his head nor thought of any. His passion for the hunt is so excessive that he confesses to his wife that of human beings he never forgot Sophia Alexandrovna, but out hunting he forgot everything but his double-barrelled shot-gun. From more than one letter of those who knew him in his prime we see what a daring sportsman he was, how he sprang with astonishing agility over gullies and chasms and would spend whole days in the wild. We are told that a better companion could not be conceived of. The pacifism, Christian, Buddhistic, or Chinese, of his latter days forbade him of course to kill animals, although his indestructible physical strength and trained agility would still have allowed him to hunt and though he still cherished the greatest desire to. He bade it farewell. He submitted himself to a test and found he had fortitude enough to let the hares run. And in his case that meant a good deal, as we see from the following anecdote, related by Gorky. Tolstoy put on a heavy overcoat and thick boots and took Gorky for a walk in the birch-woods. He leaped like a schoolboy over puddles and ditches, shook the rain-drops from the boughs, lovingly stroked the moist, satiny trunks of the birch-trees, and talked about Schopenhauer.... “Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo Nikolaevich gave an excited start, his face lighted up, he let out a halloo like an old huntsman. Then he looked at me with a curious smile and began laughing, a hearty human laugh. At this moment he was irresistible.”--Still finer is the story of the hawk which the old man saw circling above his chickens, about to swoop. Leo Nikolaevich stares up at the bird of prey, his hand over his eyes, and says in an “excited whisper”: “The rascal! Now, now! He’s coming ... oh, he’s afraid.... I’ll call the stable-boy.” He calls, the hawk disappears. But Tolstoy is taken with regrets. He sighs and says: “I shouldn’t have called. Then he would have swooped.” They are his chickens. But all the sympathy of the venerable prophet of pacifism is with the hawk.

Of his son Iliuscha he wrote in a letter: “Iliuscha is lazy, he is growing, and his soul is not yet overwhelmed by organic processes.” What does he mean by that? Growing is itself an organic process, and if growing is innocent, so too will be the organic processes which growth brings about, and with which Tolstoy was only too well acquainted, since they made his life a burden to him all his days. The Church’s conception of woman as _instrumentum diaboli_ was with him something more than a mood from the time of the _Kreuzer Sonata_; it dates from much earlier, from the journals of his boyish days; and he speaks of organic processes in the sense of that early Christian pope who, in order to mortify the flesh, made a detailed list of all its disgusting and evil-smelling functions, the functions of this body which in the end has to submit to the final indignity of putrefaction. That kind of cross-grained speculation Tolstoy would be just the one to set about, and he did. Very sensual men well know such moods. Maupassant somewhere calls the act of coition filthy and ridiculous--“_ordurier et ridicule_.” Could objectivity further go? But such blithe and cynical objectivity was not Tolstoy’s sort. His hatred of the organic has a shattering accent of subjective torment and rage. And yet he is so much the darling of the creative impulse of organic life that one must go back to Goethe to find a human being who was “_so wohl in seiner Haut_” as he. Yes, the parallel is even more exact. In both of them, and in just the same way, the most beatific organic well-being, amounting to organic rapture, mingled with a rooted melancholy and the profoundest intimacy with death. Goethe, when he was a riotous, dandiacal student in Leipsic, might any moment quit the society of men, the card-play and dance, and yield himself to solitude. We have plenty of witnesses to his brilliance, his childish, fantastic extravagances in the circle of his friends, with the Jacobis, Heinse, Stilling in Elberfeld. He cuts capers, dances round the table like a clown, in short cannot contain himself for a mysterious intoxication; the philistines sitting round think he has gone mad. And that is the same Goethe whose Werther drove more than one young man to self-destruction, and who practised himself in suicide by keeping a sharp dagger on his bed-table and trying every evening to drive it a little further into his body.

We have noted the same excess of animal spirits in Tolstoy; in whom, indeed, they persisted up to an old age lacking in the dignity, stateliness, and formal gravity of Goethe’s latest period. Which need surprise nobody. For we cannot doubt that Goethe led a more earnest, laborious, exemplary life than the Slavic junker; or that his cultural activities presupposed far more genuine self-abnegation, restraint, and discipline than Tolstoy’s uttermost ineffectual efforts at spiritualization, sticking fast as these always did in a bog of fantastic absurdity. Tolstoy’s aristocratic charm was, and Gorky so depicts it, that of a noble animal. He never managed to arrive at the dignity of man the civilized, man the triumpher over odds. It is lovely to hear of all the pranks he played with the children, his droll conceits, the gymnastic feats he performed for and with them; the endless croquet, lawn-tennis, and leap-frog parties in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. He not only shared all the activities of youth, but he was the life and soul of them. The sixty-year-old man runs races with the boys, his bicycle trips extend, much to the Countess’s anxiety, over thirty versts. “When there is some activity requiring agility, strength, and suppleness,” comments a bystander, “he never takes his eyes off the players, he puts his whole soul into their success or failure. Often he cannot resist and joins in with a youthful fire and muscular flexibility which the onlooker could only envy.” In the family circle he performed the sheerest absurdities. He had invented a game called Numidian Horsemen, which made the children weep with delight. Leo Nikolaevich would suddenly spring from his chair, lifting his hand, and run about the room flapping it in the air, whereupon everybody, grown-ups, children, and all, followed suit. That is, I repeat, charming, though a little bizarre. It becomes more so when we learn that all these high spirits occur in the years after his “conversion,” in the period of his soul-crises, his ascetic eclipses and theological broodings. But what shall be said of the incident recorded by his father-in-law, Behrs? They were walking about the room together in light converse, one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold--it gives one an uncanny feeling! I do not ask my readers to imagine Goethe, in his later period, leaping unexpectedly on a visitor’s shoulder. There is a decided difference of temperament, that is clear. But the resemblance is no less so.

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Looking more closely at the matter, I find that there is a complex of problems, a “problematic,” peculiar to the sons of nature, the creative and objective artists, which is entirely foreign to the children of the idea, and, for all the brilliant sunshine of favour they move in, casts a strange dark cloud upon them which must considerably chill their consciousness of aristocratic well-being. My feeling is that it is pure error to think that conflict and complexity are things of the spirit, while nature’s kingdom must be all brightness and harmony. It looks as though the contrary were the case. If what we call happiness consists in harmony, clarity, unity with oneself, in the consciousness of a positive, confident, decisive turn of mind, if, in short, it is peace resident in the soul, then obviously happiness is a state far easier for the sons of spirit to arrive at than for the children of nature. For the latter, though surely singleness of heart should be their lot, seem never to attain the joy and peace it might confer. Nature herself appears to weave in their very being a questionable strand, an element of contradiction, negation, and all-pervasive doubt, which, since it cannot conduce to goodness, cannot conduce to happiness either. Spirit is good. Nature is by no means good. One might say she is evil, if moral categories were admissible with reference to her. She is, then, neither good nor evil, she escapes definition, as she herself refuses to define and judge; she is, speaking objectively, indifferent, and as this indifference of hers appears subjectively and spiritually in her children, it becomes a complication that has more to do with torment and evil than with happiness and goodness, and which certainly seems come not to bring peace into the world, like the human and benevolent spirit, but rather doubt and dire confusion.