Part 6

Obviously I am not speaking here of the comparatively harmless conflict between the Faustian “two souls,” the battle between the impulses of a strong animal constitution and the yearnings after “_Gefilden hoher Ahnen_”--a battle, and a “problematic,” of which Goethe speaks out of such deep experience, and which not only made Tolstoy’s youth a period of such hardship, so torn with remorse, but persisted in him up to old age. I am speaking of something which seems at first blush to be much blither and simpler: a position something like that of Goethe between Lavater and Basedow, in which Goethe designates himself as “_das Weltkind in der Mitten_”. That sounds simple, and pleasant, and self-complacent, and was probably so meant. And yet in the word “_Weltkind_” and the associations that surround it there is something sinister, a difficulty and a “problematic,” by contrast with which the “prophetic” existence is nothing less than sweetness and light and plain sailing. “Goethe’s tendency to negation,” writes Chancellor von Müller on some occasion or other, “and his incredible judicial-mindedness came out strong again.” “There is something,” Gorky writes about Tolstoy, “which presumably he will never reveal to a human being, which appears darkly in his conversation, and is hinted at in his journals. To me it seems like the apotheosis of negation, the deepest and most hideous nihilism, springing from a stratum of boundless and hopeless despair, from a solitude of which probably no one else in the world has ever been so frightfully aware.” No one? It was not Tolstoy who created the so lyric figure of Mephistopheles--though indeed the Mephistophelian element was never lacking to any period of his life. The ceaseless, tormenting effort to shape that which he calls his conception of life, to arrive at truth and clarity and inward peace, found expression in his youth, partly in a gloomy irritability that led to duels and scenes with his friends, which he took in desperate earnest, as matters of life and death, killing and dying; but partly also in malicious negation in general, an inimical spirit of contradictiousness, which, as we are expressly assured, made a quite Mephistophelian impression. Though of course this was not a nihilistic but a moral attitude, and was not assumed save in opposition to things that were not true--only they were simply everything! In the young Tolstoy there was observable, “from the beginning, a sort of unconscious enmity toward all accepted laws in the kingdom of thought. No matter what the opinion expressed; and the greater the authority of the speaker, the more was Tolstoy at pains to take up and accentuate an inimical attitude. If you watched him as he listened, and saw the sarcastic curl of his lip, you could not avoid the impression that he was thinking, not so much of answering what was said, as of himself saying something which should surprise and confound the speaker.” That is nihilism, that is malice. But it is not so much cold malice as it is a tortured spite against anybody who fancied he held the secret of clarity and truth. It is a disbelief in clarity and truth. This spite, and this incredulity, were especially directed against Turgeniev, the clear-eyed and human man with whom he never could get on. “Tolstoy,” said Turgeniev, “early developed a trait which, lying as it does at the root of his gloomy conception of life, has caused him great suffering. He has never managed to believe in the sincerity of mankind. Every expression of feeling seemed to him false; and he had the habit, due to his extraordinarily penetrating gaze, of boring through with his eye the man he considered insincere.” And when Turgeniev said this, he added the confession that never in his life had he encountered anything with such power to dishearten him as this same piercing gaze, which, accompanied by two or three biting remarks, could bring to the verge of madness anybody who did not possess particularly strong self-control. Now Turgeniev’s self-control was strong. He was at the height of his literary success; serene and untroubled, he could encounter the complexities of his younger colleague with the calmness of a man who lived on good terms with himself. But precisely this security was what troubled Tolstoy. He seems to have gone deliberately about with this tranquil, good-natured man, working with such a clear conviction that what he did was right, to goad him past the bounds of self-control. Simply this conviction that he knew and did what was right was more than Tolstoy could bear; for certainly he himself did not in the least know what was right. Garschin says: “In his view, the people who passed for good were merely hypocrites, who paraded their goodness and pretended to the certainty that their work served a good end.” Turgeniev too saw in Tolstoy this strange, sinister, malicious bent. He resolved to hold fast to what he considered “right” and not to lose his self-control; so he avoided Tolstoy, left Saint Petersburg, where the latter was living, and went first to Moscow and then to his own estate. But--this is most significant of all, as evidence of Tolstoy’s state of mind--Tolstoy followed him. Followed him step for step, “like a lovesick girl,” to use Turgeniev’s own phrase.

All which is very telling, very extraordinary. Above all, it shows how completely the old Tolstoy, of whom Gorky writes, was foreshadowed in the young one. Did he really ever find out what was “right”--the real, the true, the incontrovertible? For others he did, he gave them conviction. But he himself certainly never got free of the negation and neutrality of the elemental character. “Rousseau,” he said, “lied and believed his lies.” Did he believe his own lies? No, for he did not lie. He was elemental, nihilistic, malicious, and unfathomable. “Would you very much like to know?” he asks.--“Very much.”--“Then I will not tell you.” And he smiles and plays with his thumbs. This smile, this “sly little smile”--Gorky speaks of it again and again. There is something not only extra-moral but extra-mental, extra-human, about it; it bespeaks the mystery of the “natural,” the elemental, which is not at all kindly disposed, but rather takes pleasure in confusion. According to Gorky, the old man loved to put insidious questions. “What do you think about yourself?” “Do you love your wife?” “How do you like mine?” “Do you like me, Alexei Maximovich?”--“Disingenuous!” Gorky cries. “The whole time, he is making an experiment, testing something out, as though he were going into battle. It is interesting, but not to my taste. He is the devil, and I am a babe in arms beside him. He ought to leave me alone.”

One day Gorky sees the aged Tolstoy sitting alone by the sea. This scene is the crowning point of his reminiscences. “He sat, his head on his hands; the wind blew the silver hair of his beard through his fingers. He was looking far out across the sea, and the little green waves rolled docilely to his feet and caressed them, as though they wanted to tell the old wizard something about themselves.... He seemed like an ancient stone come alive, that knew and pondered the beginning and end of all things, and what and how would be the end of the stones and grasses of the earth, the waters of the sea, the whole universe from the sun to the grain of sand. And the sea is a part of his soul, and all about him comes from him and out of him. In the old man’s musing quietude I felt something portentous, magic. I cannot express in words what I more felt than thought at that moment. In my heart were rejoicing and fear, then all melted together in one single blissful feeling: ‘I am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is living on it.’” And Gorky steals away on his tiptoes that the sand may not crunch under his tread and disturb the old man’s thoughts.

The mystical reverence that Gorky here depicts is not that which lays hold on us at sight of the heroes of the idea. Neither Dostoyevsky nor Schiller has inspired this sort of awe and shuddering, however saintly they seemed. So much is certain. Nor can the reverence felt for Goethe be of just this same nature--though akin to it. The Tolstoyan greatness and remoteness is wild and primeval and pagan in its nature, it is antecedent to culture. It lacks the human, the humanistic element. This ancient of days and of wisdom, musing there at the edge of the everlasting sea, wrapped up in the All, conning the beginning and end of things--the picture evokes a twilit, prehuman, uncanny world of feeling, a world of incantations and runes. What he is pondering, the norns whisper thee by night. He was like, says the shaken beholder, an ancient stone come alive: note that, a stone, not anything that civilization has produced, not man made in the likeness of God, not a human being like Goethe. Goethe’s humanistic divineness is clearly something quite different from the primeval, pagan formlessness of Tolstoy’s, which makes Gorky say of him: “He is the devil.” And still, at the very bottom, the common factor persists: in Goethe too there is the elemental, the sinister, the dark, neutral, negation- and confusion-loving devil.

There is a saying of his, arbitrary enough, yet with an accent of hidden suffering, that opens to us more of his inner self than many a clear and wise and ordered utterance. “If I am to listen to the opinion of others,” he said (and only listen to it, observe, not accept it), “then it must be positively expressed. Problems I have enough in myself.” That is a confession, put in the form of a demand. It has a proud, Olympian accent, but the voice that utters it quivers with impatience, with painful irritation at the inner complications, which makes it so imperative that the positive should come from without.... “Out of one of his eyes looks an angel,” writes someone who made his acquaintance on a journey, “out of the other a devil; and his speech is deep irony on the score of all human affairs.” Of all? That is great, but it is not generous--and, after all, is he not a man himself? One who often saw him says: “Today he was altogether in that mood of bitter humour and sophistical contradictiousness he is so prone to display.” Again we have the negation, the spirit of contradiction and malice, of which gentle young Sulpice Boisserée has such a story to tell in his diary. “At eleven o’clock I am with Goethe again. The invective continues.” He has a go at all sorts of things: politics, æsthetics, society, religion, Germany, France, philhellenism, parties, and so on, in such a style that poor young Boisserée feels--“_mit allen diesen moquanten Reden_”--as though he were “at a witches’ sabbath.” That is saying a good deal. It is either too strong, considering the word “_moquant_” which he uses, or else that word is a good deal too weak--which is more likely. Anyhow the entry, from the year 1826, shows the confusion to which the petulant old man could reduce simple and humble-minded people. An observer who must have been no fool wrote something about him which stirs a secret horror that is somehow paralysing. “He is tolerant, without being mild.” Just consider what that means. Toleration, indulgence, is always, in our human experience, associated with mildness, with benevolent feeling toward man and the universe; so far as I know, it is a product of love. But tolerance _without_ love, _harsh_ tolerance--what would that be? It is more than human, it is icy neutrality, it is either something godlike or something devilish.

* * * * *

I shall be saying nothing new, but it may serve to bring order and clarity into our thoughts to keep the fact before us: all national character belongs to the natural sphere, and all tendency toward the cosmopolitan to the spiritual. The word “ethnic” brings together two conceptions which we do not ordinarily connect, paganism and nationalism; thus by implication, and conversely, every super-national and humane point of view is classified in our mind as Christian in spirit.

Goethe’s alleged devotion to paganism (in the _Wanderjahre_ he reckons Judaism among the ethnic and heathen folk-religions) would lead us accordingly to expect of him an outlook basically anti-humanistic and folk-national. That we should be entirely wrong in this expectation, as a basic constitution in him, as “nature,” might be arguable. However, so far as he was himself aware, he was consciously a humanist and a citizen of the world. Despite all his nature Olympian and divine, he was in a high degree Christian in spirit. Nietzsche placed Goethe, historically and psychologically speaking, between Hellenism and pietism; and thus expressed the combination of creative and critical, simple and “sentimental,” ancient and modern, in Goethe’s character. For Goethe’s “pietism” is of course nothing else than his modernity. Many centuries of Christian cultivation of the subjective--a whole century of pietistic, introspective, autobiographical discipline--were needed to make possible a work like _Werther_. Which is as much as to say that in the impulse to autobiography Christian and democratic elements are mingled with that naïve, spoilt-darling claim on the world’s affections of which we spoke above. They are the same as that democratic tendency out of which Tolstoy likes to consider his confessions as emanating; when, in true Rousseauian fashion, he resolves “to write a history of his life, utterly and entirely true to fact,” in the belief that this “will be more useful to mankind” than those previous twelve volumes full of literary twaddle. He seems unaware that they are quite as autobiographical, quite as ethical in character, as anything could be, and disowns them as pagan and artistic, as self-indulgent and “irresponsible.”

Goethe, with all his aversion to the “Cross,” did often and expressly acknowledge his reverence for the Christian idea. It is as significant as it is surprising to come upon the idea of the sanctity of suffering in the Pedagogic Province; and if Goethe saw in the Church “elements of weakness and instability” and in its precepts “_gar viel Dummes_,” still he bore witness that “there is in the Gospels an effective resplendence and majesty, issuing from the person of Christ, of a character in which only the divine appear upon this earth.” “The human spirit,” he says, with sympathetic and openly acknowledged fellowship, “will never rise higher than the majesty and moral elevation of Christianity, as it radiates from the Gospels.” But Goethe’s Christianity manifests itself in the admirable attitude, as of a pupil to a master, which he had toward Spinoza, whom he called “_theissimus_” and of whom he said that nobody had spoken of the Divinity so like the Saviour as he. If, indeed, the dualistic separation of God and nature is the fundamental principle of Christianity, then Spinoza was a pagan, and Goethe was too. But God and nature are not all the world: there is the human, the humane, as well; and Spinoza’s conception of humanity is Christian, in so far as he defines the phenomenon man as the becoming-_conscious_ of the God-nature in the human being, as a bursting forth out of mere dull being and living; accordingly, as liberation from nature, and so as _spirit_. Again, there is absolutely nothing pagan about that famous _Mastery of the Passions by their Analysis_; and just as little in the Spinozan motif of renunciation (“_Entsagung_”), which becomes the general motif of Goethe’s life and work, like the idea of freedom for Schiller and the idea of redemption for Wagner.

On the contrary, it was just this pathos of renunciation, which cast such a Christian shade upon the pagan, aristocratic, child-of-nature well-being of Goethe’s life and lent his spirited features an expressly Gothic trait of suffering not to be overlooked save by the gross popular belief in his aristocratic good fortune. How much resignation must have darkened the end of this apparently consummate and favoured existence! His life-work, though almost superhuman, remained entirely a fragment--it is putting it mildly to say that “not all the dreams of blossoms ripened”--Wagner’s performance, for instance, or Ibsen’s, is incomparably more a rounded and effective whole. One may put it that Goethe’s spirit was far more powerful than his nature, greater than his power to give it form or than his organically allotted span; and it is easy to understand that vehement demand of his for immortality, which is one of the magnificent, dæmonic expressions of his personality: Nature, he cried, was bound to give him a new body when the one he had could no longer sustain his spirit.

Consider even his love-life, which likewise the popular mind tends to think of as sunlit and blissful, divinely favoured and without a cross. Certainly he was much loved and rich in love; certainly to him much enjoyment was given. In the realm of the erotic he had his spells of coarseness, when he behaved a little like a garden god: when, ingenuous and unsentimental as the antique world, he would enjoy without stint and indulge without a qualm. His marriage, a misalliance, socially and intellectually, was a result of this attitude of mind. But where he loved so that lofty poesy was the result, and not merely a Venetian epigram ticked out in hexameters on a maiden’s back; where it was serious, the romance regularly ended in renunciation. He never actually possessed Lotte or Friederike, nor Lilli, nor the Herzlieb, nor Marianne, nor even Ulrike--and not even Frau von Stein. He never loved unrequited--unless in the immensely painful, absurdly agitating affair with little Levetzof. Yet in all these cases resignation was the order of the day: either on moral grounds, or for the sake of his freedom. Mostly he bolted.

But the renunciation I mean was a deeper and higher thing. In his stature, his lineaments, his proportions as he stands today in the eyes of the nation, he is what he is as the work of renunciation. I am not speaking generally, I do not refer to the sense of sacrifice which is the meaning of all art; nor to the struggle with chaos, the surrender of freedom, the creative constraint which is its inner essence. Goethe’s pathos of renunciation--or, since we are speaking of permanent forces dominating the whole of existence, his ethos of renunciation--is of a more personal kind. It is his destiny, it is the instinctive mandate of his especially national gift, which was essentially civilizing in its mission. Or, rather, might this destiny and mission, this bond, this conditioning limitation and pedagogic duty of renunciation, be after all something less personal to him than it just now appeared? Might it perhaps be the law of his destiny, innate and inviolable save at the expense of heavy spiritual penalties; the imperative which is the essence of the German spirit, destined always, as it is, somehow and in some degree, to feel itself called to a cultural task?--I spoke of the consciousness of a community of feeling, which Goethe must, at moments, have felt with Christianity. What did it consist in, and to what had it reference? Goethe pays homage to the “moral culture” of Christianity--that is, to its humanity, its civilizing, anti-barbarian influence. It was the same as his; and the occasional homage he paid it undoubtedly springs from his recognition that the mission of Christianity within the confines of the Germanic peoples bore a likeness to his own. And here, in the fact that he conceived his task, his duty to his nation, as essentially a civilizing mission, lies the deepest and the most German significance of his renunciation. Does anyone doubt that there were in Goethe possibilities of a greatness and growth, wilder, ranker, more disruptive, more “natural,” than those which his instinct for self-conquest allowed him to develop, and which today give our mental picture of him so highly pedagogic a cast? In his _Iphigenia_ the idea of humanity, as opposed to barbarism, wears the impress of civilization--not in the polemical and even political sense in which we use the word today, but in the sense of moral culture. It was a Frenchman, Maurice Barrès, who pointed out that the _Iphigenia_ is a “civilizing work,” in that it “stands for the rights of society against the arrogance of intellect.” The phrase fits almost better that other monument of self-discipline and self-correction, yes, almost of self-mortification, which has been a target for ridicule on account of its affected atmosphere of courts and culture: I mean the _Tasso_. Both are works of resignation, of German and schoolmasterish renunciation of all the advantages of barbarism. Wagner, on the other hand, the voluptuary, did not renounce them; he yielded to them all, with huge effectiveness; and his punishment is that the acclaim accorded to his riotously national art grows daily cruder and more popular.

My subject is still the aspiration of the children of nature toward spirit; which is just as sentimental in kind as is the converse striving of the sons of the spirit toward nature, and may function with varying degrees of aptitude or success, with more or less naïveté or subtlety. Compared with Goethe’s majestic work of spiritualization, I cannot find that Tolstoy’s struggles to throw off nature’s yoke were crowned with great success. But I am whimsical enough to relish putting my finger on the mighty kernel of racial loyalty which dwelt at the heart of the Christianity of the one and the humanity of the other. And that kernel was, of course, in other words, their aristocratic integrity; for racial loyalty is aristocratic by nature, while Christianity, humanity, and civilization all represent the conflicting principle of the spirit of democracy, and the process of spiritualization is at the same time one of democratization. What Tolstoy aptly calls his “democratic trend”--aptly, because the word “trend” implies a will and a direction somewhither, indicating an effort and not mere being--finds emphatic expression now and again in Goethe as well. “One would have,” he says, “to become _Catholic_ at once, in order to have a share in the lives of humanity!” To mingle with humanity, on equal terms, to lead the life of the people, and in the market-place, seems at such moments happiness to him. “In these small sovereign states,” he cries, “what wretched, isolated men we are!” And he praises Venice as a monument to the power, not of a single despot, but of a whole people. But such phrases, clearly, are meant more correctively than absolutely; they are self-critical comments, meant to redress the balance of his German and Protestant aristocratism--“tendencies,” then, sentimental leanings, of the same kind as the radical and pacifistic bent of the Russian giant, in whose “holiness” a penetrating eye can see so much self-deception, childishness, and “let’s pretend.”