Part 7

A close observer like Gorky, or a shrewd critic like Merezhkovsky, felt at once and keenly the patriarchal and sensual quality, the life-bound animalism, which lay beneath the sanctification. Tolstoy married at thirty-four the eighteen-year-old Sophia Alexandrovna Behrs, who from then on was scarcely ever anything but “expectant,” and was confined thirteen times. Through long, creative years, his marriage was an idyll of family life, full of healthy, god-fearing animal pleasure, against a lavish economic background of agriculture and cattle-breeding. The atmosphere was Judaic Old Testament rather than Christian. Tolstoy knows the same great simple love of existence, the everlasting childlike joy of life, that possessed Goethe’s soul. When he “praises each day for its beauty,” when he “marvels at the richness of God’s kingdom” expressing itself therein, how “each day He sends some new thing to distinguish it,” we feel a better understanding of what lay at the bottom of Goethe’s conception of “_Behagen_.” Waves of piercing sensuous enjoyment of nature break upon him even in the years of gloom, when he meditates suicide, plans the _Confession_--in short, conjures up that misunderstanding to which his sanctification falls prey, and dehumanizes and shrinks the majesty of the patriarch, christianizes and conventionalizes it into the Anglo-Indian model.

Merezhkovsky called him the great seer of the body, in contrast to Dostoyevsky the visionary of the soul; and truly it is the body to which his love and deepest interest belong, to which his knowledge refers, by which his genius is conditioned. We see this so clearly in his reaction to old age. In 1894 he writes: “Age is approaching. That means the hair falls out, the teeth decay, the wrinkles come, the breath gets bad. Even before the end, everything turns frightful, disgusting; sweat, rouge, powder, all sorts of beastliness. Then what has become of that which I have served? Where has beauty gone? It is the essence of everything. Without it there is nothing, no life.”--This description of dying while the body still lives, may pass for Christian, by virtue of its insistence on misery and its characterization of the flesh, revolting and insulting on the spiritual side. But the physical apprehension of old age and death is through and through pagan and sensual.

Aksakov says of Tolstoy: “His gift is _bearlike_ in kind and degree.” And is it not this “bearlike” quality of his genius that made Tolstoy “the great writer of Russia,” the author of _War and Peace_, the epic poet of the people’s struggle against Rome, against Napoleon? I openly declare my deliberate intention to cast doubt on the pacifism which the prophet of humanity so didactically professed. Not, I hasten to add, from any anti-pacifistic sentiments on my own part; merely out of a sense of humour. That Tolstoy was in his youth a soldier and an officer, we know. From his biography we learn that he was heart and soul a soldier; and we have evidence of his heroic and warlike enthusiasm in the Sebastopol days--that “splendid time,” that “glorious time,” that time of touching pride in the Russian army, when he was confessedly saturated with patriotic feeling and thrilled by his experience of comradery under arms, first felt when the serious moment is at hand. His attitude toward the Serbo-Turkish war of 1877 is still full of conviction. It is a _real_ war, he says, and it moves him. The distinction between “real” and “unreal” doubtless indicates some progress in the direction of pacifism. But is pacifism “real” so long as it is conditional and must progress in order to exist?

In 1812, at least, there _was_ a “real” war, and its history occupied Tolstoy long before he became the great writer of Russia by dint of it. He treated of it, quite in the patriotic key, in his school at Yasnaya Polyana. From all we hear, he dealt with it on a mythical rather than a historical basis; but he expressly declared that he presented his pupils with these legends of a warlike mythology in order to rouse their patriotic feeling. And then the root-and-branch Russianism, the fundamental folk-character of his peasant-patrician nature, comes out strong in his epos, whose theme is a defensive war waged against the invasion of Latin civilization. _War and Peace_ had a huge popular success, though the critics and military men had some fault to find. _On the intellectual side it was weak_, they said; its philosophy of history was narrow and superficial; it was mysticism and sophistry to deny the influence of individuals on events. But the creative power, the “bearlike” strength of it, were unanimously declared to be beyond all discussion, as well as its enormous genuineness as a folk-epic. The liberal criticism of Russia admitted that it was “Russian to the core,” that it “presented the soul of the Russian people, in its whole range and variety, in all its lofty simplicity, with a sheer creative power that had never been equalled.” But the critics took in bad part Tolstoy’s “wilful remoteness from all contemporary _currents of progress_”--a phenomenon and a reproach which were to recur with the appearance of _Anna Karenine_. “_Anna Karenine_ I don’t like,” Turgeniev wrote, “though there are splendid things in it: the race, the mowing, the hunt. But the whole thing is soured; it _smells of Moscow_, and old maids and incense and Slavophils and high life and all that.” In a word, Turgeniev, the _Sapadnik_, rejected with horror the oriental element in the novel, and with him went the whole liberal-radical party; some ignored _Anna Karenine_, others sneered or called names, while the Slavophils and the aristocrats and court party rubbed their hands in glee. In fact Tolstoy, in an intellectual and political sense, had the reactionaries on his side; and they could have little appreciation of the artistic qualities of his work. The liberals were liberal enough to know how to value these, and they did so, albeit in that state of bewilderment into which people always fall at the sight of genius in the camp of reaction. Witness the bewilderment of Europe over Bismarck.

The paradox is worth a little attention. Our idealists would have us believe that genius, the creative power, must, as a living force, act only in the service of progress and human purpose, and be justly denied to the forces which side against life, show sympathy with death, and are inimical to freedom and progress and thus bad in the human sense. We would almost accept it as metaphysical evidence for the goodness of a thing if a capital piece of writing were done in its name. And really, it does seem that, as a rule, the reactionary camp suffers from lack of talent. But not invariably. The reactionary genius does occur, the brilliant and conquering ability does act as attorney for retrograde tendencies--and nothing dazes the world more than the sight of this paradoxical phenomenon. Sainte-Beuve said of Joseph de Maistre that he had “nothing of a writer but the gift”--a comment which perfectly expresses this bewilderment and precisely indicates the thing I mean.

Liberal and progressive Russia must have seen in Tolstoy just this--a case of a great gift in the service of reaction. But it is clear enough that this great gift is of one essence with his fundamental Russianism, his immense integration with the people, his pagan and natural aristocracy; and that the tendency toward democratic spiritualization was--just tendency, romantic in its nature and crowned, after all, by such strikingly indifferent success! His tremendous orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery at and denial of European progress; and this it was which must necessarily and profoundly alienate all the westernizing and liberalizing, all the “Petrinic” elements in Russia. Actually, he quite frankly scouted the western belief in progress, which, he said, had been accepted by the Russia of Peter the Great. They had, he said, observed the operation of the law of progress in the Duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three thousand inhabitants. But then came China, with its two hundred million inhabitants, and knocked the theory of progress into a cocked hat. Which did not for one moment prevent them from believing in progress as a general law of mankind; they took the field with cannons and guns to instruct the Chinese in their thesis. Yet ordinary human understanding tells us that if the history of the larger part of mankind, which we call the Orient, does not confirm the law of progress, then this law does not obtain for the whole of mankind, but forms at most an article of faith for a certain part of it. Tolstoy vows that he himself is unable to find a universal law in the life of mankind, and that history might be co-ordinated just as well in the light of any other idea or “historical whimsy” as in that of progress. And more than that, he does not see the slightest necessity of finding laws for history--quite apart from the impossibility of the thing. The universal, eternal law of perfection, he says, stands written in the soul of every human being; it is only an error to carry it over into the field of history. So long as it remains personal, this law is fruitful and accessible to all; applied to historical conceptions, it is idle talk. The general progress of mankind is an unproved thesis. It does not exist for any of the nations of the east; hence it is just as unfounded to assert that progress is a primary law of mankind as it would be to say that blondness is--all people being blond save those with dark hair.

It is remarkable to see how ideas from the sphere of an idealistic individualism, which is German, and places human perfection within the individual soul, are here found in the company of others which constitute the most decisive challenge to an arrogant Europe setting itself up as intellectual arbiter of the world. Tolstoy protests against what he considers the childishness of this attitude, which confuses western Europe with humanity as a whole; and the protest betrays that his gaze is directed eastward. It betrays, in a word, his Asiatic bias: anti-“Petrinic,” primitive Russian, anti-civilization--in short, _bearlike_. What we hear is the voice of the Russian god on the maple throne under the golden lime-tree.

The voice of our humanistic deity has a different ring. Goethe, beyond a doubt, hated and scorned Asia. The element of Sarmatian wildness in which Tolstoy found himself so much at home and which merely gets rationalized in his late prophetic period, would always remain remote and foreign to the spirit of the great German, with its exclusively cultural bias. A journey Goethe once made into Upper Silesian Poland was the occasion of what contact he had with the Slav. His impressions are “mostly remarkable negatively.” He observes ignorance, lack of culture, low standards of living, stupidity. He feels himself “remote from cultured men.” His attitude at the time of the War of Liberation, offensive as it was to patriotic feeling, the admiring and personally friendly respect he felt for the classic phenomenon of Napoleon (“the man is too big for you”) belong in this same category. “It is true,” he says in 1813, “I no longer see French and Italians, but in their stead I see Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Kashubes, brown and other hussars.” This enumeration of eastern races has an extraordinarily contemptuous ring. That the Cossacks and Kashubes were in the country as allies and the French as enemies seems not to matter to him. He confesses, indeed, that he too is glad to be rid of the Gallic _soldatesca_; yet he is obviously not far from finding more humiliation in the alliance with Russia and the dependence of Germany upon the east than in her subjugation upon the west; and certain it is that the humanism of the writer who created the _Iphigenia_ has more affiliation with the humanity of western Europe, which has given the mould to our civilization, than with the soft and savage human nature of Half-Asia.

Unpatriotically he declared that he could not hate the French--he owed them far too much of his culture. The words are only right and proper. But (just as in Tolstoy’s case) the fun begins directly it is a question of his nature, of that pre-intellectual fundamental constitution we were talking about, which had its own ways of finding expression, and which is so extraordinarily un-French that it might well be described as pre-eminently German. It would be wrong to bring in evidence here his coldness towards “freedom.” For in the first place the principle of order (_ordre_) is something just as French and classic and rationalist as the principle of freedom, which on party grounds is set over against it. And in the second, there is nothing un-German about freedom. We know with what éclat Goethe cited Guizot’s dictum that Germany gave the idea of personal freedom to the world. But there is in Goethe something that rebels against the idea, against the doctrinaire and theoretic; a lack of faith that the particular, existing under definite conditions, could ever be improved by the method of abstraction; a realism, that is, and a scepticism, in matters political, which one may as well call un-French as particularly German--taking France as the country of revolution and Germany as the country of a certain national weakness for the living, historically conditioned, “organic.” We must remember that he was a practical politician, he had governed Saxe-Weimar. But the practical sphere is not kind to the soul; it is a training in cynicism, as many a politician has found out, even in France, where more than one radical has become a conservative and turned the guns on the people after he came to power. Perhaps Goethe might have been more generous-minded, politically speaking, if he had not lost his idealism in the practical field. But this too is unlikely, since from the very beginning he was insensitive to historical democracy, to history defined as the evolution of the idea in the masses; he was fundamentally unacquainted with enthusiasm for political ideas, and in general conceived of history as the biography of great men--an aristocratism which is as different from Schiller’s high-flung democratic gesture as it is from the Christian-moujik disparagement of heroes in _War and Peace_.

It would be foolish to think of him as servile, despite the anecdote about Beethoven and the imperial company on the promenade at Karlsbad. His subservience to princes was purely mundane in its character, wherever no personal friendship came in play. When in 1794 Freiherr von Gagern published his challenge to the intelligence of Germany, and to Goethe in particular, to put its pen at the service of the “good,” that is to say, the conservative cause--no other than that of a new alliance of German princes for the purpose of saving the country from anarchy--Goethe, after thanking him politely for the confidence reposed in him, made the characteristic reply that he considered it impossible for princes and writers to unite upon a common task. Notwithstanding which, we need waste no words over his strictly negative attitude toward the French Revolution.

On the intellectual side, his view of humanity was a cynical one--that is to say, it was radically sceptical. But we know that this was on the intellectual side alone, from the fact that it did not prevent him from loving his fellow-men. We have his confession that the mere sight of the human countenance could cure him of the blues. What he did not believe in was drawing up articles and holding love-feasts. We shall never know whether Hegel was mocking or spoke in honest enthusiasm when he said: “As long as the sun has stood in the firmament and the planets circled round it, it has never been seen that a human being stands on his head--i.e., on his understanding--and bases reality upon it.” Whether jest or earnest, it was this that revolted Goethe. He judged it to be entirely against nature to try to insist that the whole of mankind find just one choice of means, just one route toward civic happiness. Upon which I may comment as follows: that, in the first place, one such utterance, by virtue of its strongly nationalist, individualist, aristocratic emphasis, outweighs the whole burden of his indifference toward the War of Liberation, and that surely he who uttered it was only prevented by his admiration for the genius of Napoleon--likewise aristocratic in its origin--from seeing in the _Imperator_ the standard-bearer of precisely this democratic “insistency.” But, in the second place, we must admit that he had a right to set up as an advocate of nature. To quote again:

_Franztum drängt in unsern verworrenen Tagen, wie einstmals Luthertum es getan, ruhige Bildung zurück._

(Driven by the spirit of France in our troublous days, as aforetime By the spirit of Luther oppressed, quiet culture retreats.)

What a telling synthesis this, of France and Luther; how unprejudiced by national feeling! It is all one to him whether the unrest, the distraction, come from this side or that of the Rhine. No matter whence it comes, it is his enemy, the enemy of nature and culture, of the _ruhige Bildung_ which is at the bottom of his idea of humanity. The distich shows clearly--shows it despite all _Lust am Protestieren_--where he would have stood, say, in the sixteenth century. In the name of that lofty conception of _Bildung_, in which nature and culture unite, he would have been for Rome against the Reformation--or else he would have taken up an ambiguous and irresponsible position, as Erasmus did, of whom Luther said that repose was dearer to him than the Cross. “The Cross”--a couple of centuries later, that was the Revolution. Revolution was the spirit--and to Goethe his _ruhige Bildung_ was dearer.

Here, for a moment, Erasmus and Goethe meet, in an atmosphere of patrician quietism, humanistic love of peace. But the parallel does not long hold--there is too much difference in the scale, and, after all, men’s character, the essence of their being, is greatly affected by their proportions. Tolstoy’s “folkishness,” for instance--is it not the expression and apanage of his bearlike bulk? Are they not one and the same thing? And may we not draw from Goethe’s greatness the _a priori_ conclusion that his humanistic cosmopolitanism must contain a good-sized racial core? Erasmus, the subtle, was not “folkish.” It was Luther who was that. And truly, in scale, in essence, as an embodiment of Germanic greatness, Goethe belongs more with Luther than with the humanists--yes, more even with Bismarck, to whom he is much closer than a certain antithesis, beloved abroad, would seem to show.

Dangerous, perhaps, to say so--as giving aid and comfort to the cave-bears of nationalism the world over--but sometimes it is hard not to feel sceptical about the genuineness and validity of Goethe’s humanism. A godlike man, like Tolstoy. But is it possible that the antique, humanistic, Jovelike attributes of his godhead were more a convention than we think; that they did not go very deep, and that he himself, all the time, like Tolstoy, the Russian god under the golden lime-tree, was an ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic and aristocratic paganism which claims both Luther and Bismarck as its sons, and which, on both sides, played a rôle in the ideology of the late war?

An open hostility, against Goethe as well as against Bismarck, is at work in certain literary, humane, and radical circles, a demand for his dethronement. It cannot be without all sense or justification. Goethe, as a follower of Spinoza, conceived of all natural final causes and purposes as anthropomorphic fictions; thus he was disinclined to an anthropocentric, emancipatory conception of humanity, which teleologically refers everything to itself and looks upon art as a servant of mankind. His synthesis of art and nature is not humanitarian. An approach by the route of the senses is natural to him: it makes him see the burning of a peasant house as real and appealing to his sympathies, whereas “the Fall of the Fatherland” he would find an empty phrase. All which, frankly and flippantly spoken, is never very far removed from the brute.

There is in him a feeling for power, for the struggle “until one proves stronger than the other”; in such sentiments the pacifism of spirit would find it impossible to rejoice. It “makes him sad to be friends with everybody.” He “needs anger.” Certainly, that is not Christian love of peace--though Lutheran it may be, and Bismarckian to boot. One might say much--and much has been said--in evidence of his love of strife, his fondness for “pitching in and punishing,” his readiness to close the mouth of opposed opinions by a show of power and to “remove such people from society.” But best of all I love--if here too only because it is so amusing--the tale of Kotzebue and the Schiller celebration which Kotzebue got up with the sole and single purpose of annoying Goethe and playing Schiller off against him. That low-minded Kotzebue! He _knows_ that the plan will annoy the old man; he also knows that Goethe can forbid the celebration by virtue of his office. So he puts the choice squarely before him: he can forbid it, and thereby betray his jealousy and despotism; or, if he hesitates to go so far, he can pocket up the annoyance. With majestic simplicity Goethe chooses to exercise his power. He _forbids the celebration_. Bismarck would have done the same.

In the soul-economy of this breed of giants are certain parallel traits. There is violence and there is sentimentality: crude words both to describe what I mean, crude and naturalistically derogatory; yet it is my humour to use them; for even if I wanted to I could not ignore the hidden irony--quite objective, quite unsuspected irony, of course--involved in their gigantic loyalties, their aristocratic servitude. They were both “faithful German servants of their Lord” (oh, my God!): the “civilian Wallenstein” and the despot of _Kultur_; they were German “_Edelknechte_” both; and there was nothing hypocritical about it all, only their giant-sensibilities functioning at full height. The similarity of the character and situation is so strong as to bewilder one: Karl August and the simple old man whom Bismarck “served” blend into one single symbolic figure. In the year 1825 he of Saxe-Weimar celebrated the fiftieth jubilee of his reign, which was at the same time the fiftieth year of Goethe’s residence in Weimar. On this day Goethe calls himself “his master’s most enraptured servant.” He is the first with his congratulations, at six o’clock at the Roman villa in the park. The emotion is great and genuine. “Together to our latest breath!” We see the venerable Wilhelm going to meet Bismarck on the landing with just such another embrace; while a fugitive red mounts in the cheeks of Roderich von Posa, who turns away with the words: “I cannot be a courtier!”