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Title: Tolstoy

Author: Romain Rolland

Translator: Bernard Miall

Release date: July 13, 2015 [eBook #49435]
                Most recently updated: April 4, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Clare Graham and Marc D'Hooghe


*** 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, the
reality!... Natasha, my little dove!... Let us see if she is going to
reach that B?... She has reached it, thank God!'

"And to emphasise the B he sung the third octave below it in
accompaniment.

"'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he cried, and the vibration of
that octave awoke in his soul all that was best and purest. Beside this
superhuman sensation, what were his losses at play and his word of
honour?... Follies! One could kill, steal, and yet be happy!"

Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him music is only a passing
influence; but Natasha is on the point of losing her self-control.
After an evening at the Opera, "in that strange world which is
intoxicated and perverted by art, and a thousand leagues from the
real world; a world in which good and evil, the extravagant and the
reasonable, are mingled and confounded," she listened to a declaration
from Anatol Kouraguin, who was madly in love with her, and she
consented to elope with him.

The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared music.[22] A man whose
influence over him was considerable--Auerbach, whom in 1860 he had
met in Dresden--had doubtless a hand in fortifying his prejudices. "He
spoke of music as of a _Pflichtloser Genuss_ (a profligate amusement).
According to him, it was an incentive to depravity."[23]

Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why,
asks M. Camille Bellaigue,[24] should Tolstoy have chosen Beethoven,
the purest, the chastest of all?--Because he was the most powerful.
Tolstoy had early loved his music, and he always loved it. His remotest
memories of _Childhood_ were connected with the _Sonata Pathétique;_
and when Nekhludov in _Resurrection_ heard the _andante_ of the
_Symphony in C Minor_, he could hardly restrain his tears: "he was
filled with tenderness for himself and for those he loved." Yet we have
seen with what animosity Tolstoy referred in his _What is Art?_[25]
to the "unhealthy works of the deaf Beethoven"; and even in 1876 the
fury with which "he delighted in demolishing Beethoven and in casting
doubts upon his genius" had revolted Tchaikowsky and had diminished his
admiration for Tolstoy. The _Kreutzer Sonata_ enables us to plumb the
depths of this passionate injustice. What does Tolstoy complain of
in Beethoven? Of his power. He reminds us of Goethe; listening to the
_Symphony in C Minor_, he is overwhelmed by it, and angrily turns upon
the imperious master who subjects him against his will.[26]

"This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me immediately into the state
of mind which was the composer's when he wrote it.... Music ought to be
a State matter, as in China. We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry
wield so frightful a hypnotic power.... As for these things (the first
_Presto_ of the Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play them under
particular and important circumstances...."

Yet we see, after this revolt, how he surrenders to the power of
Beethoven, and how this power is by his own admission a pure and
ennobling force. On hearing the piece in question, Posdnicheff falls
into an indefinable state of mind, which he cannot analyse, but of
which the consciousness fills him with delight. "There is no longer
room for jealousy." The wife is not less transfigured. She has, while
she plays, "a majestic severity of expression"; and "a faint smile,
compassionate and happy, after she has finished." What is there
perverse in all this? This: that the spirit is enslaved: that the
unknown power of sound can do with him what it wills; destroy him, if
it please.

This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the
lack of vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music.
Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of
the Opera-house during a performance of _Salomé_ is quite enough to
assure us of the immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions
evoked by the art of sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy,
abounding in life. The truth is that in spite of his injustice where
Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the
majority of those who now exalt him. He, at least, knew the frenzied
passions, the savage violence, which mutter through the art of the
"deaf old man," but of which the orchestras and the virtuosi of to-day
are innocent. Beethoven would perhaps have preferred the hatred of
Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers.



[1] To these years was attributed, in respect of the date of
publication, and perhaps of completion, a work which was really written
during the happy period of betrothal and the first years of marriage:
the beautiful story of a horse, _Kholstomier_ (1861-86). Tolstoy
speaks of it in 1883 in a letter to Fet (_Further Correspondence_.)
The art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its penetrating
psychological sympathy, its humour, and its youth, has much in common
with the art of Tolstoy's maturity (_Family Happiness, War and Peace_),
The _macabre_ quality of the end, and the last pages comparing the
body of the old horse with that of his master, are full of a realistic
brutality characteristic of the years after 1880.

[2] _Le Temps,_ August 29, 1901.

[3] "As for style," his friend Droujinin told him in 1856, "You are
extremely illiterate; sometimes like an innovator and a great poet;
sometimes like an officer writing to a comrade. All that you write with
real pleasure is admirable. The moment you become indifferent your
style becomes involved and is horrible." (_Vie et Oeuvre._)

[4] _Vie et Oeuvre._--During the summer of 1879 Tolstoy lived on terms
of great intimacy with the peasants.

[5] In the notes of his readings, between 1860 and 1870, Tolstoy wrote:
"The _bylines_--very greatly impressed."

[6] _The Two Old Men_ (1885).

[7] _Where Love is, there God is also_ (1885).

[8] _By what do Men live?_ (1881); _The Three Old Men_ (1884); _The
Godchild_ (1886).

[9] This tale bears the sub-title, _Does a Man need much Soil?_ (1886).

[10] _The Fire that flames does not go out_ (1885).

[11] _The Wax Taper_ (1885); _The Story of Ivan the Idiot._

[12] _The Godson_ (1886).

[13] The love of the theatre came to him somewhat late in life. It was
a discovery of his, and he made this discovery during the winter of
1869-70. According to his custom, he was at once afire with enthusiasm.

"All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with the drama;
and, as always happens to men who have never, up to the age of
forty, thought about such or such a subject, when they suddenly turn
their attention to this neglected subject, it seems to them that
they perceive a number of new and wonderful things.... I have read
Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Molière.... I want to read
Sophocles and Euripides.... I have kept my bed a long time, being
unwell--and when I am unwell a host of comic or dramatic characters
begin to struggle for life within me ... and they do it with much
success."--Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 1870 (_Further Letters_).

[14] A variant of Act iv.

[15] The creation of this heart-breaking drama must have been a strain.
He writes to Teneromo: "I am well and happy. I have been working
all this time at my play. It is finished." (January, 1887. _Further
Letters._)

[16] A French translation of this Epilogue (_Postface_), by M.
Halpérine-Kaminsky was published in the volume _Plaisirs vicieux_,
under the title _Des relations entre les sexes._

[17] Let us take notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of the simplicity
of believing that the ideal of celibacy and absolute chastity was
capable of realisation by humanity as we know it. But according to him
an ideal is incapable of realisation by its very definition: it is an
appeal to the heroic energies of the soul.

"The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the union of all
living creatures in brotherly love, is irreconcilable with the conduct
of life, which demands a continual effort towards an ideal which is
inaccessible, but does not expect that it will ever be attained."

[18] At the end of _A Russian Proprietor._

[19] _War and Peace_.--I do not mention _Albert_ (1857), the story of a
musician of genius; the book is weak in the extreme.

[20] The period spoken of is 1876-77.

[21] S. A. Bers, _Memories of Tolstoy._

[22] But he never ceased to love it. One of the friends of his later
years was a musician, Goldenreiser, who spent the summer of 1910
near Yasnaya. Almost every day he came to play to Tolstoy during the
latter's last illness. (_Journal des Débats,_ November 18, 1910.)

[23] Letter of April 21, 1861.

[24] _Tolstoï et la musique_ (_Le Gaulois,_ January 4, 1911).

[25] Not only to the later works of Beethoven. Even in the case of
those earlier works which he consented to regard as "artistic," Tolstoy
complained of "their artificial form."--In a letter to Tchaikowsky he
contrasts with Mozart and Haydn "the artificial manner of Beethoven,
Schubert, and Berlioz, which produces calculated effects."

[26] Instance the scene described by M. Paul Boyer: "Tolstoy sat down
to play Chopin. At the end of the fourth Ballade, his eyes filled with
tears. 'Ah, the animal!' he cried. And suddenly he rose and went
out." (_Le Temps,_ November 2, 1902.)




CHAPTER XV


"RESURRECTION"


Ten years separated _Resurrection_ from the _Kreutzer Sonata_.[1]
ten years which were more and more absorbed in moral propaganda. Ten
years also separated the former book from the end for which this
life hungered, famished as it was for the eternal. _Resurrection_ is
in a sense the artistic testament of the author. It dominates the
end of his life as _War and Peace_ crowned its maturity. It is the
last peak, perhaps the highest--if not the most stupendous--whose
invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old.
He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith, his
righteous anger.

He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous
books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist,
as in _War and Peace_, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony,
the mental tumult of the _Kreutzer Sonata_ and _The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_ he adds a religious serenity, a detachment from the world,
which is faithfully reflected in himself. One is reminded, at times, of
a Christian Goethe.

All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works
of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially
the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a
long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about
the book; in which respect it differs widely from _War and Peace_
and _Anna Karenin._ There are hardly any digressions of an episodic
nature. A single train of action, tenaciously followed, is worked
out in every detail. There is the same vigorous portraiture, the
same ease and fullness of handling, as in the _Kreutzer Sonata._ The
observation is more than ever lucid, robust, pitilessly realistic,
revealing the animal in the man "the terrible persistence of the beast
in man, more terrible when this animality is not openly obvious;
when it is concealed under a so-called poetical exterior." Witness
the drawing-room conversations, which have for their object the mere
satisfaction of a physical need: "the need of stimulating the digestion
by moving the muscles of the tongue and gullet"; the crude vision of
humanity which spares no one; neither the pretty Korchagina, "with her
two false teeth, the salient bones of her elbows, and the largeness of
her finger-nails," and her _décolletage,_ which inspires in Nekhludov
a feeling of "shame and disgust, disgust and shame"; nor the herione,
Maslova, nothing of whose degradation is hidden; her look of premature
age, her vicious, ignoble expression, her provocative smile, the odour
of brandy that hangs about her, her red and swollen face. There is a
brutality of naturalistic detail: as instance, the woman who converses
while crouched over the commode. Youth and the poetic imagination
have vanished; except in the passages which deal with the memories of
first love, whose music vibrates in the reader's mind with hypnotic
intensity; the night of the Holy Saturday, and the night of Passover;
the thaw, the white mist so thick "that at five paces from the house
one saw nothing but a shadowy mass, whence glimmered the red light of
a lamp"; the crowing of the cocks in the night; the sounds from the
frozen river, where the ice cracks, snores, bubbles, and tinkles like
a breaking glass; and the young man who, from the night outside, looks
through the window at the young girl who does not see him: seated near
the table in the flickering light of the little lamp--Katusha, pensive,
dreaming, and smiling at her dreams.

The lyrical powers of the writer are given but little play. His art
has become more impersonal; more alien to his own life. The world
of criminals and revolutionaries, which he here describes, was
unfamiliar to him;[2] he enters it only by an effort of voluntary
sympathy; he even admits that before studying them at close quarters
the revolutionaries inspired him with an unconquerable aversion. All
the more admirable is his impeccable observation--a faultless mirror.
What a wealth of types, of precise details! How everything is _seen_;
baseness and virtue, without hardness, without weakness, but with a
serene understanding and a brotherly pity.... The terrible picture
of the women in the prison! They are pitiless to one another; but
the artist is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of each, the
distress that hides beneath humiliation, and the tearful eyes beneath
the mask of effrontery. The pure, faint light which little by little
waxes within the vicious mind of Maslova, and at last illumines her
with a sacrificial flame, has the touching beauty of one of those rays
of sunshine which transfigure some humble scene painted by the brush
of Rembrandt. There is no severity here, even for the warders and
executioners. "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" ...
The worst of it is that often they do know what they do; they feel all
the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do otherwise. There broods over
the book the sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality which weighs
upon those who suffer and those who cause that suffering: the director
of the prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his jailer's life
as of the pianoforte exercises of the pale, sickly daughter with the
dark circles beneath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a rhapsody
of Liszt; the Governor-General of the Siberian town, intelligent
and kindly, who, in the hope of escaping the inevitable conflict
between the good he wishes to do and the evil he is forced to do, has
been steadily drinking since the age of thirty-five; who is always
sufficiently master of himself to keep up appearances, even when he is
drunk. And among these people we find the ordinary affection for wife
and children, although their calling renders them pitiless in respect
of the rest of humanity.

The only character in this book who has no objective reality is
Nekhludov himself; and this is so because Tolstoy has invested him
with his own ideas. This is a defect of several of the most notable
types in _War and Peace_ and in _Anna Karenin_; for example, Prince
Andrei, Pierre Besoukhov, Levine, and others. The fault was less
grave, however, in these earlier books; for the characters, by force
of their circumstances and their age, were nearer to the author's
actual state of mind. But in _Resurrection_ the author places in the
body of an epicurean of thirty-five the disembodied soul of an old
man of seventy. I will not say that the moral crisis through which
Nekhludov is supposed to pass is absolutely untrue and impossible;
nor even that it could not be brought about so suddenly.[3] But there
is nothing in the temperament, the character, the previous life of
the man as Tolstoy depicts him, to announce or explain this crisis;
and once it has commenced nothing interrupts it. Tolstoy has, it is
true, with profound observation, represented the impure alloy which
at the outset is mingled with the thoughts of sacrifice; the tears of
self-pity and admiration; and, later, the horror and repugnance which
seize upon Nekhludov when he is brought face to face with reality. But
his resolution never flinches. This crisis has nothing in common with
his previous crises, violent but only momentary.[4] Henceforth nothing
can arrest this weak and undecided character. A wealthy prince, much
respected, greatly enjoying the good things of the world, on the point
of marrying a charming girl who loves him and is not distasteful to
him, he suddenly decides to abandon everything--wealth, the world, and
social position--and to marry a prostitute in order to atone for a
remote offence; and his exaltation survives, without flinching, for
months; it holds out against every trial, even the news that the woman
he wishes to make his wife is continuing her life of debauchery.[5]
Here we have a saintliness of which the psychology of a Dostoyevsky
would have shown us the source, in the obscure depths of the conscience
or even in the organism of his hero. Nekhludov, however, is by no
means one of Dostoyevsky's heroes. He is the type of the average man,
commonplace, sane, who is Tolstoy's usual hero. To be exact, we are
conscious of the juxtaposition of a very materialistic[6] character
and a moral crisis which belongs to another man, and that man the aged
Tolstoy.

The same impression--one of elemental duality--is again produced at
the end of the book, where a third part, full of strictly realistic
observation, is set beside an evangelical conclusion which is not in
any way essential; it is an act of personal faith,[7] which does not
logically issue from the life under observation. This is not the first
time that Tolstoy's religion has become involved with his realism; but
in previous works the two elements have been better mingled. Here they
are not amalgamated; they simply co-exist; and the contrast is the
more striking in that Tolstoy's faith is always becoming less and less
indifferent to proof, while his realism is daily becoming more finely
whetted, more free from convention. Here is a sign, not of fatigue, but
of age; a certain stiffness, so to speak, in the joints. The religious
conclusion is not the organic development of the work. It is a _Deus
ex machinâ_. I personally am convinced that right in the depth of
Tolstoy's being--in spite of all his affirmations--the fusion between
his two diverse natures was by no means complete: between the truth of
the artist and the truth of the believer.

Although _Resurrection_ has not the harmonious fullness of the work
of his youth, and although I, for my part, prefer _War and Peace_, it
is none the less one of the most beautiful poems of human compassion;
perhaps the most truthful ever written. More than in any other book
I see through the pages of this those bright eyes of Tolstoy's,
the pale-grey, piercing eyes, "the look that goes straight to the
heart,"[8] and in each heart sees its God.


[1] _Master and Servant_ (1895) is more or less of a transition between
the gloomy novels which preceded it and _Resurrection;_ which is full
of the light of the Divine charity. But it is akin to _The Death of
Ivan Ilyitch_ and the _Popular Tales_ rather than to _Resurrection,_
which only presents, towards the end of the book, the sublime
transformation of a selfish and morally cowardly man under the stress
of an impulse of sacrifice. The greater part of the book consists
of the extremely realistic picture of a master without kindness and
a servant full of resignation, who are surprised, by night, on the
steppes, by a blizzard, in which they lose their way. The master, who
at first tries to escape, deserting his companion, returns, and finding
the latter half-frozen, throws himself upon him, covering him with his
body, gives him of his warmth, and sacrifices himself by instinct; he
does not know why, but the tears fill his eyes; it seems to him that
he has become the man he is seeking to save--Nikita--and that his life
is no longer in himself, but in Nikita. "Nikita is alive; then I am
still alive, myself." He has almost forgotten who he, Vassili, was. He
thinks: "Vassili did not know what had to be done. But I, I know!" He
hears the voice of Him whom he was awaiting (here his dream recalls one
of the _Popular Tales),_ of Him who, a little while ago, had commanded
him to lie upon Nikita. He cries, quite happy: "Lord, I am coming!" and
he feels that he is free; that nothing is keeping him back any longer.
He is dead.

[2] While on the other hand he had mixed in all the various circles
depicted in _War and Peace, Anna Karenin, The Cossacks,_ and
_Sebastopol_; the _salons_ of the nobles, the army, the life of the
country estate. He had only to remember.

[3] "Men carry in them the germ of all the human qualities, and they
manifest now one, now another, so that they often appear to be not
themselves; that is, themselves as they habitually appear. Among some
these changes are more rare; among others more rapid. To the second
class of men belongs Nekhludov. Under the influence of various physical
or moral causes sudden and complete changes are incessantly being
produced within him." (_Resurrection_.)

[4] "Many times in his life he had proceeded to _clean up his
conscience._ This was the term he used to denote those moral crises
in which he decided to sweep out the moral refuse which littered his
soul. At the conclusion of these crises he never failed to set himself
certain rules, which he swore always to keep. He kept a diary; he
began a new life. But each time it was not long before he fell once
more to the same level, or lower still, than before the crisis."
(_Resurrection.)_

[5] Upon learning that Maslova is engaged in an intrigue with a
hospital attendant, Nekhludov is more than ever decided to "sacrifice
his liberty in order to redeem the sin of this woman."

[6] Tolstoy has never drawn a character with so sure, so broad a
touch as in the beginning of _Resurrection._ Witness the admirable
description of Nekhludov's toilet and his actions of the morning before
the first session in the Palace of Justice.

[7] The word "act" to be found here and there in the text in such
phrases as "act of faith" "act of will," is used in a sense peculiar
to Catholic and Orthodox Christians. A penitent is told to perform an
"act of faith" as penance; which is usually the repetition of certain
prayers of the nature of a creed. The "act," in short, is a repetition,
a declamation, a meditation: anything but an action.--(TRANS.)

[8] Letter of Countess Tolstoy's, 1884.




CHAPTER XVI


RELIGION AND POLITICS


Tolstoy never renounced his art. A great artist cannot, even if he
would, abandon the reason of his existence. He can, for religious
reasons, cease to publish, but he cannot cease to write. Tolstoy
never interrupted his work of artistic creation. M. Paul Boyer, who
saw him, during the last few years, at Yasnaya Polyana, says that he
would now give prominence to his evangelistic works, now to his works
of imagination; he would work at the one as a relaxation from the
other. When he had finished some social pamphlet, some _Appeal to the
Rulers_ or _to the Ruled,_ he would allow himself to resume one of the
charming tales which he was, so to speak, in process of recounting to
himself; such as his _Hadji-Mourad,_ a military epic, which celebrated
an episode of the wars of the Caucasus and the resistance of the
mountaineers under Schamyl.[1] Art was still his relaxation, his
pleasure; but he would have thought it a piece of vanity to make a
parade of it. With the exception of his _Cycle of Readings for Every
Day of the Year_ (1904-5),[2] in which he collected the thoughts of
various writers upon _Life and the Truth_--a true anthology of the
poetical wisdom of the world, from the Holy Books of the East to the
works of contemporary writers--nearly all his literary works of art,
properly so called, which have been written later than 1900 have
remained in manuscript.[3]

On the other hand he was boldly and ardently casting his mystical and
polemical writings upon the social battlefield. From 1900 to 1910
such work absorbed the greater part of his time and energy. Russia
was passing through an alarming crisis; for a moment the empire of
the Tsars seemed to totter on its foundations and about to fall in
ruin. The Russo-Japanese war, the disasters which followed it, the
revolutionary troubles, the mutinies in the army and the fleet, the
massacres, the agrarian disorders, seemed to mark "the end of a
world," to quote the title of one of Tolstoy's writings. The height of
the crisis was reached in 1904 and 1905. During these years Tolstoy
published a remarkable series of works: _War and Revolution, The Great
Crime, The End of a World._ During the last ten years of his life
he occupied a situation unique not only in Russia but in the world.
He was alone, a stranger to all the parties, to all countries, and
rejected by his Church, which had excommunicated him.[4] The logic of
his reason and the revolutionary character of his faith had "led him
to this dilemma; to live a stranger to other men, or a stranger to the
truth." He recalls the Russian proverb: "An old man who lies is a rich
man who steals," and he severs himself from mankind in order to speak
the truth. He tells the whole truth, and to all. The old hunter of lies
continues, unweariedly, to mark down all superstitions, religious or
social, and all fetishes. The only exceptions are the old maleficent
powers--the persecutrix, the Church, and the imperial autocracy.
Perhaps his enmity towards them was in some degree appeased now that
all were casting stones at them. They were familiar; therefore they
were already not so formidable! After all, too, the Church and the
Tsar were carrying on their peculiar trades; they were at least not
deceptive. Tolstoy, in his letter to the Tsar Nikolas II.,[5] although
he speaks the truth in a manner entirely unaccommodating to the man as
sovereign, is full of gentleness for the sovereign as man; addressing
him as "dear brother," praying him to "pardon him if he has hurt him
unintentionally," and signing himself, "Your brother who wishes you
true happiness."

What Tolstoy can least find it in him to pardon--what he denounces with
the utmost hatred--are the new lies; not the old ones, which are no
longer able to deceive; not despotism, but the illusion of liberty. It
is difficult to say which he hates the more among the followers of the
newer idols: whether the Socialists or the "Liberals."

He had a long-standing antipathy for the Liberals. It had seized upon
him suddenly when, as an officer fresh from Sebastopol, he found
himself in the society of the literary men of St. Petersburg. It had
been one of the causes of his misunderstanding with Tourgenev. The
arrogant noble, the man of ancient race, could not support these
"intellectuals," with their profession of making the nation happy,
whether by its will or against it, by forcing their Utopian schemes
upon it. Very much a Russian, and of the old stamp,[6] he instinctively
distrusted all liberal innovations, and the constitutional ideas which
came from the West; and his two journeys abroad only intensified his
prejudices. On his return from his first journey he wrote:

"To avoid the ambition of Liberalism."

On his return from the second:

"A privileged society has no right whatsoever to educate in its own way
the masses of which it knows nothing."

In _Anna Karenin_ he freely expresses his contempt for Liberals in
general. Levine refuses to associate himself with the work of the
provincial institutions for educating the people, and the innovations
which are the order of the day. The picture of the elections to the
provincial assembly exposes the fool's bargain by which the country
changes its ancient Conservative administration for a Liberal
_régime_--nothing is really altered, except that there is one lie the
more, while the masters are of inferior blood.

"We are not worth very much perhaps," says the representative of the
aristocracy, "but none the less we have lasted a thousand years."

Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in which the Liberals abuse the
words, "The People: The Will of the People." What do they know of the
people? Who are the People?

But it is more especially when the Liberal movement seemed on the
point of succeeding and achieving the convocation of, the first
Duma that Tolstoy expressed most violently his disapprobation of its
constitutional ideas.

"During the last few years the deformation of Christianity has given
rise to a new species of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet more
firmly in their servility. With the help of a complicated system of
parliamentary elections it was suggested to them that by electing their
representatives directly they were participating in the government,
and that in obeying them they were obeying their own will: in short,
that they were free. This is a piece of imposture. The people cannot
express its will, even with the aid of universal suffrage--1, because
no such collective will of a nation of many millions of inhabitants
could exist; 2, because even if it existed the majority of voices would
not be its expression. Without insisting on the fact that those elected
would legislate and administrate not for the general good but in order
to maintain themselves in power--without counting on the fact of the
popular corruption due to pressure and electoral corruption--this fraud
is particularly harmful because of the presumptuous slavery into which
all those who submit to it fall.... These free men recall the prisoners
who imagine that they are enjoying freedom when they have the right
to elect those of their gaolers who are entrusted with the interior
policing of the prison.... A member of a despotic State may be entirely
free, even in the midst of the most brutal violence. But a member of a
constitutional State is always a slave, for he recognises the legality
of the violence done him.... And now men wish to lead the Russian
people into the same state of constitutional slavery in which the other
European peoples dwell!"[7]

In his hostility towards Liberalism contempt was his dominant feeling.
In respect of Socialism his dominant feeling was--or rather would have
been--hatred, if Tolstoy had not forbidden himself to hate anything
whatever. He detested it doubly, because Socialism was the amalgamation
of two lies: the lie of liberty and the lie of science. Does it not
profess to be founded upon some sort of economic science, whose laws
absolutely rule the progress of the world?

Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony
concerning this modern superstition and "these futile problems: the
origin of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory
of numbers, animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach
as much importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to
the Immaculate Conception or the Duality of Substance." He derides
these "servants of science, who, just as the servants of the Church,
persuade themselves and others that they are saving humanity; who,
like the Church, believe in their own infallibility, never agree among
themselves, divide themselves into sects, and, like the Church, are
the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral ignorance, and the long delay
of humanity in freeing itself from the evils under which it suffers;
for they have rejected the only thing that could unite humanity:
the religious conscience."[8] But his anxiety redoubles, and his
indignation bursts its bounds, when he sees the dangerous weapon of the
new fanaticism in the hands of those who profess to be regenerating
humanity. Every revolutionist saddens him when he resorts to violence.
But the intellectual and theoretical revolutionary inspires him with
horror: he is a pedantic murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence,
who loves not men but ideas.[9]

Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.

"The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of
man: his material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the
means it recommends."[10]

At heart, he is without love. He feels only hatred for the oppressors
and "a black envy for the assured and easy life of the rich: a greed
like that of the flies that gather about ordure."[11] When Socialism
is victorious the aspect of the world will be terrible. The European
horde will rush upon the weak and barbarous peoples with redoubled
force, and will enslave them, in order that the ancient proletariats of
Europe may debauch themselves at their leisure by idle luxury, as did
the people of Rome.[12]

Happily the principal energies of Socialism spend themselves in
smoke--in speeches, like those of M. Jaurès.

"What an admirable orator! There is something of everything in his
speeches--and there is nothing.... Socialism is a little like our
Russian orthodoxy: you press it, you push it into its last trenches,
you think you have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round and tells
you: 'No, I'm not the one you think, I'm somebody else.' And it slips
out of your hands.... Patience! Let time do its work. There will be
socialistic theories, as there are women's fashions, which soon pass
from the drawing-room to the servants' hall."[13]

Although Tolstoy waged war in this manner upon the Liberals and
Socialists, it was not--far from it--to leave the field free for
autocracy; on the contrary, it was that the battle might be fought in
all its fierceness between the old world and the new, after the army
of disorderly and dangerous elements had been eliminated. For Tolstoy
too was a believer in the Revolution. But his Revolution was of a very
different colour to that of the revolutionaries; it was rather that of
a believer of the Middle Ages, who looked on the morrow, perhaps that
very day, for the reign of the Holy Spirit.

"I believe that at this very hour the great revolution is beginning
which has been preparing for two thousand years in the Christian
world--the revolution which will substitute for corrupted Christianity
and the system of domination which proceeds therefrom the true
Christianity, the basis of equality between men and of the true liberty
to which all beings endowed with reason aspire."[14]

What time does he choose, this seer and prophet, for his announcement
of the new era of love and happiness? The darkest hour of Russian
history; the hour of disaster and of shame! Superb power of creative
faith! All around it is light--even in darkness. Tolstoy saw in death
the signs of renewal; in the calamities of the war in Manchuria, in
the downfall of the Russian armies, in the frightful anarchy and the
bloody struggle of the classes. His logic--the logic of a dream!--drew
from the victory of Japan the astonishing conclusion that Russia
should withdraw from all warfare, because the non-Christian peoples
will always have the advantage in warfare over the Christian peoples
"who have passed through the phase of servile submission." Does this
mean the abdication of the Russian people? No; this is pride at its
supremest. Russia should withdraw from all warfare because she must
accomplish "the great revolution."

"The Revolution of 1905, which will set men free from brutal
oppression, must commence in Russia. It is beginning."

Why must Russia play the part of the chosen people? Because the
new Revolution must before all repair the "Great Crime," the great
monopolisation of the soil for the profit of a few thousands of
wealthy men and the slavery of millions of men--the cruellest of
enslavements;[15] and because no people was so conscious of this
iniquity as the Russian people.[16]

Again, and more especially, because the Russian people is of all
peoples most thoroughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that
the coming revolution should realise, in the name of Christ, the
law of union and of love. Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled
unless it is based upon the law of non-resistance to evil.[17] This
non-resistance (let us mark this well, we who have the misfortune
to see in it simply an Utopian fad peculiar to Tolstoy and to a few
dreamers) has always been an essential trait of the Russian people.

"The Russian people has always assumed, with regard to power, an
attitude entirely strange to the other peoples of Europe. It has never
entered upon a conflict with power; it has never participated in it,
and consequently has never been depraved by it. It has regarded power
as an evil which must be avoided. An ancient legend represents the
Russians as appealing to the Varingians to come and govern them. The
majority of the Russians have always preferred to submit to acts of
violence rather than respond with violence or participate therein. They
have therefore always submitted.

"A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile
obedience.[18]

"The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to
submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not
obey it--that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate."[19]

At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the
emotion caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic
nonresistance of a people--the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in
St. Petersburg, when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed
itself to be shot down without a cry of hatred or a gesture of
self-defence.

For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the _Sectators_,
had been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience
to the State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy of its
power.[20] The absurdity of the Russo-Japanese war enabled this state
of mind to spread without difficulty through the rural districts.
Refusals of military service became more and more general; and the
more brutally they were punished the more stubborn the revolt grew
in secret. In the provinces, moreover, whole races who knew nothing
of Tolstoy had given the example of an absolute and passive refusal
to obey the State--the Doukhobors of the Caucasus as early as 1898
and the Georgians of the Gouri towards 1905. Tolstoy influenced these
movements far less than they influenced him; and the interest of his
writings lies in the fact that in spite of the criticisms of those
writers who were of the party of revolution, as was Gorky,[21] he was
the mouthpiece of the Old Russian people.

The attitude which he preserved, in respect of men who at the peril
of their lives were putting into practice the principles which he
professed,[22] was one of extreme modesty and dignity. Neither to
the Doukhobors and the Gourians nor to the refractory soldiers did he
assume the pose of a master or teacher.

"He who suffers no trials can teach nothing to him who does so suffer."

He implores "the forgiveness of all those whom his words and his
writings may have caused to suffer."[23]

He never urges any one to refuse military service. It is a matter for
every man to decide for himself. If he discusses the matter with any
one who is hesitating, "he always advises him not to refuse obedience
so long as it would not be morally impossible." For if a man hesitates
it is because he is not ripe; and "it is better to have one soldier
the more than a renegade or hypocrite, which is what becomes of those
who undertake a task beyond their strength."[24] He distrusts the
resolution of the refractory Gontcharenko. He fears "that this young
man may have been carried away by vanity and vainglory, not by the love
of God."[25] To the Doukhobors he writes that they should not persist
in their refusal of obedience out of pride, but "if they are capable of
so doing, they should save their weaker women and their children. No
one will blame them for that." They must persist "only if the spirit
of Christ is indeed within them, because then they will be happy to
suffer."[26] In any case he prays those who are persecuted "at any cost
not to break their affectionate relations with those who persecute
them."[27] One must love even Herod, as he says in a letter to a
friend: "You say, 'One cannot love Herod.'--I do not know, but I feel,
and you also, that one must love him. I know, and you also, that if I
do not love him I suffer, that there is no life in me."[28]

The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end
can no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: "Love thy
neighbour as thyself," because he finds in them a taint of egoism![29]

Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism
that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts
"abstract love"?

"The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal
love for those who are--somewhere, out of sight.... To love those
we do not know, those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing!
There is no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so
pleased with ourselves! The conscience is fooled.--No. We must love our
neighbours--those we live with, and who are in our way and embarrass
us."[30]

I have read in most of the studies of Tolstoy's work that his faith
and philosophy are not original. It is true; the beauty of these ideas
is eternal and can never appear a momentary fashion. Others complain
of their Utopian character. This also is true; they are Utopian, the
New Testament is Utopian. A prophet is a Utopian; he treads the earth
but sees the life of eternity; and that this apparition should have
been granted to us, that we should have seen among us the last of the
prophets, that the greatest of our artists should wear this aureole
on his brow--there, it seems to me, is a fact more novel and of far
greater importance to the world than one religion the more, or a new
philosophy. Those are blind who do not perceive the miracle of this
great mind, the incarnation of fraternal love in the midst of a people
and a century stained with the blood of hatred!



[1] _Le Temps_, November 2, 1902.

[2] Tolstoy regarded this as one of his most important works. "One of
my books--_For Every Day_--to which I have the conceit to attach a
great importance...." (Letter to Jan Styka, July 27 August 9, 1909).

[3] These works should shortly appear, under the supervision of
Countess Alexandra, Tolstoy's daughter. The list of them has been
published in various journals. We may mention _Hadji-Mourad, Father
Sergius,_ the psychology of a monk; _She Had Every Virtue,_ the study
of a woman; the _Diary of a Madman,_ the _Diary of a Mother,_ the
_Story of a Doukhobor,_ the _Story of a Hive,_ the _Posthumous Journal
of Theodore Kouzmitch, Aliocha Govchkoff, Tikhon and Melanie, After the
Ball, The Moon shines in the Dark, A Young Tsar, What I saw in a Dream,
Who is the Murderer?_ (containing social ideas), _Modern Socialism,_ a
comedy; _The Learned Woman, Childish Wisdom,_ sketches of children who
converse upon moral subjects; _The Living Corpse,_ a drama in seventeen
tableaux; _It is all her Fault,_ a peasant comedy in two acts, directed
against alcohol (apparently Tolstoy's last literary work, as he wrote
it in May-June, 1910), and a number of social studies. It is announced
that they will form two octavo volumes of six hundred pages each.

But the essential work as yet unpublished is Tolstoy's _Journal,_ which
covers forty years of his life, and will fill, so it is said, no less
than thirty volumes.

[4] The excommunication of Tolstoy by the Holy Synod was declared on
February 22, 1901. The excuse was a chapter of _Resurrection_ relating
to Mass and the Eucharist. This chapter has unhappily been suppressed
in the French edition.

[5] On the nationalisation of the soil. _(The Great Crime,_ 1905.)

[6] "A 'Great-Russian,' touched with Finnish blood." (M.
Leroy-Beaulieu.)

[7] _The End of a World_ (1905-6). See the telegram addressed by
Tolstoy to an American journal: "The agitation in the Zemstvos has as
its object the limitation of despotic power and the establishment of a
representative government. Whether or no they succeed the result will
be a postponement of any true social improvement. Political agitation,
while producing the unfortunate illusion of such improvement by
external means, arrests true progress, as may be proved by the example
of all the constitutional States--France, England, America, &c."
(Preface to the French translation of _The Great Crime_, 1905.)

In a long and interesting letter to a lady who asked him to join
a _Committee for the Propagation of Reading and Writing among the
People_, Tolstoy expressed yet other objections to the Liberals: they
have always played the part of dupes; they act as the accomplices of
the autocracy through fear; their participation in the government
gives the latter a moral prestige, and accustoms them to compromises,
which quickly make them the instruments of power. Alexander II.
used to say that all the Liberals were ready to sell themselves for
honours if not for money; Alexander III. was able, without danger,
to eradicate the liberal work of his father. "The Liberals whispered
among themselves that this did not please them; but they continued to
attend the tribunals, to serve the State and the press; in the press
they alluded to those things to which allusion was allowed, and were
silent upon matters to which allusion was prohibited." They did the
same under Nikolas II. "When this young man, who knows nothing and
understands nothing, replies tactlessly and with effrontery to the
representatives of the people, do the Liberals protest? By no means ...
From every side they send the young Tsar their cowardly and flattering
congratulations." (_Further Letters._)

[8] _War and Revolution._

In _Resurrection,_ at the hearing of Maslova's appeal, in the Senate,
it is a materialistic Darwinist who is most strongly opposed to the
revision, because he is secretly shocked that Nekhludov should wish,
as a matter of duty, to marry a prostitute; any manifestation of duty,
and still more, of religious feeling, having the effect upon him of a
personal insult.

[9] As a type, take Novodvorov, the revolutionary leader in
_Resurrection,_ whose excessive vanity and egoism have sterilised a
fine intelligence. No imagination; "a total absence of the moral and
æsthetic qualities which produce doubt."

Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the artisan who has
become a revolutionist through humiliation and the desire for revenge;
a passionate worshipper of science, which he cannot comprehend; a
fanatical anticlerical and an ascetic.

In _Three More Dead_ or _The Divine and the Human_ we shall find a few
specimens of the new generation of revolutionaries: Romane and his
friends, who despise the old Terrorists, and profess to attain their
ends scientifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial
people.

[10] Letters to the Japanese Izo-Abe, 1904. (_Further Letters_).

[11] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in
_Revolutionaries,_ 1906).

[12] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in
_Revolutionaries,_ 1906).

[13] Conversation with M. Paul Boyer. (_Le Temps_, November 4, 1902.)

[14] _The End of a World_.

[15] "The cruellest enslavement is to be deprived of the earth, for the
slave of a master is the slave of only one; but the man deprived of the
land is the slave of all the world." (_The Great Crime_)

[16] Russia was actually in a somewhat special situation; and although
Tolstoy may have been wrong to found his generalisations concerning
other European States upon the condition of Russia, we cannot be
surprised that he was most sensible to the sufferings which touched
him most nearly. See, in _The Great Crime,_ his conversations on the
road to Toula with the peasants, who were all in want of bread because
they lacked land, and who were all secretly waiting for the land to
be restored to them. The agricultural population of Russia forms 80
per cent, of the nation. A hundred million of men, says Tolstoy, are
dying of hunger because of the seizure of the soil by the landed
proprietors. When people speak to them of remedying their evils through
the agency of the Press, or by the separation of Church and State, or
by nationalist representation, or even by the eight-hours day, they
impudently mock at them:

"Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the means of bettering
the condition of the masses of the people remind one of what one sees
in the theatre, when all the spectators have an excellent view of an
actor who is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who
also have a full view of him, pretend not to see him, and endeavour to
distract one another's attention from him."

There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the labouring
people. As a solution of the property question, Tolstoy recommends the
doctrine of Henry George and his suggested single tax upon the value
of the soil. This is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied,
and has assimilated it so thoroughly that in his writings he often uses
entire phrases of George's.

[17] "The law of non-resistance to evil is the keystone of the whole
building. To admit the law of mutual help while misunderstanding the
precept of non-resistance is to build the vault without sealing the
central portion." (_The End of a World._)

[18] In a letter written in 1900 to a friend (_Further Letters_)
Tolstoy complains of the false interpretation given to his doctrine
of non-resistance. "People," he says, "confound _Do not oppose evil
by evil_ with _Do not oppose evil_: that is to say, _Be indifferent
to evil._ ..." "Whereas the conflict with evil is the sole object of
Christianity, and the commandment of non-resistance to evil is given as
the most effectual means of conflict."

[19] _The End of a World._

[20] Tolstoy has drawn two types of these "Sectators," one in
_Resurrection_ (towards the end) and one in _Three More Dead._

[21] After Tolstoy's condemnation of the upheaval in the Zemstvos,
Gorky, making himself the interpreter of the displeasure of his
friends, wrote as follows: "This man has become the slave of his
theory. For a long time he has isolated himself from the life of
Russia, and he no longer listens to the voice of the people. He hovers
over Russia at too great a height."

[22] It was a bitter trial to him that he could not contrive to be
persecuted. He had a thirst for martyrdom; but the Government very
wisely took good care not to satisfy him.

"They are persecuting my friends all around me, and leaving me in
peace, although if any one is dangerous it is I. Evidently I am not
worth persecution, and I am ashamed of the fact." (Letter to Teneromo,
1892, _Further Letters.)_

"Evidently I am not worthy of persecution, and I shall have to die like
this, without having ever been able to testify to the truth by physical
suffering." (To Teneromo, May 16,1892, _ibid._)

"It hurts me to be at liberty." (To Teneromo, June i, 1894, _ibid._)

That he was at liberty was, Heaven knows, no fault of his! He insults
the Tsars, he attacks the fatherland, "that ghastly fetish to which men
sacrifice their life and liberty and reason." (_The End of a World._)
Then see, in _War and Revolution,_ the summary of Russian history. It
is a gallery of monsters: "The maniac Ivan the Terrible, the drunkard
Peter I., the ignorant cook, Catherine I., the sensual and profligate
Elizabeth, the degenerate Paul, the parricide Alexander I. [the only
one of them for whom Tolstoy felt a secret liking], the cruel and
ignorant Nikolas I.; Alexander II., unintelligent and evil rather than
good; Alexander III., an undeniable sot, brutal and ignorant; Nikolas
II., an innocent young officer of hussars, with an _entourage_ of
coxcombs, a young man who knows nothing and understands nothing."

[23] Letter to Gontcharenko, a "refractory," January 17, 1903.
(_Further Letters._)

[24] Letter to a friend, 1900. (_Correspondence_.)

[25] To Gontcharenko, February 2, 1903 (_ibid._).

[26] To the Doukhobors of the Caucasus, 1898 (_ibid._).

[27] To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (_ibid._).

[28] To a friend, November, 1901. (_Correspondence_).

[29] "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of
egoism that we wish to drain from the human soul re-enters by it." He
ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been wrongly
read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact
"Love thy neighbour as _Himself_ (as God)." (_Conversations with
Teneromo._)

[30] _Conversations with Teneromo._




CHAPTER XVII


OLD AGE


His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in
the memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a
double furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard,
recalling that of the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and
softer; it bore the traces of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment,
and of affectionate kindness. What a change from the almost animal
brutality of the same face at twenty, and the heavy rigidity of the
soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the same profound
fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and from which
nothing is hidden.

Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17,
1901) Tolstoy had said:

"I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able
also, in peace and gladness, to travel on towards death."

Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "that we should call
no man happy until he is dead."

Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of
possessing?

The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows
had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the
upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of
the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even
in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic
vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad
for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of
the "great and wise Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of
the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the
Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery"; and that China,
at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation
of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.[1]

A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was
decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to
imitate Europe.[2] The persecuted Doukhobors had migrated to Canada,
and there, to the scandal of Tolstoy, they immediately reverted to the
property system.[3] The Gourians were scarcely delivered from the yoke
of the State when they began to destroy those who did not think as they
did; and the Russian troops were called out to put matters in order.
The very Jews, "whose native country had hitherto been the fairest a
man could desire--the Book,"[4] were attacked by the malady of Zionism,
that movement of false nationalism, "which is flesh of the flesh of
contemporary Europeanism, or rather its rickety child."[5]

Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in
the future.

"All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye.
Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates,
until the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which
finally becomes a tree."[6]

But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone;
glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from
Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where _Resurrection_ was
translated, and where his ideas upon "the restitution of the land to
the people" were being propagated.[7] The American papers interviewed
viewed him; the French consulted him on matters of art, or the
separation of Church and State.[8]

But he had not three hundred disciples, and he knew it. Moreover,
he did not take pains to make them. He repulsed the attempts of his
friends to form groups of Tolstoyans.

"We must not go in search of one another, but we must all seek God....
You say: 'Together it is easier.'--What? To labour, to reap, yes. But
to draw near to God--one can only do so in isolation.... I see the
world as an enormous temple in which the light falls from on high and
precisely in the middle. To become united we must all go towards the
light. Then all of us, come together from all directions, will find
ourselves in the company of men we did not look for; in that is the
joy."[9]

How many have found themselves together under the ray which falls from
the dome? What matter! It is enough to be one and alone if one is with
God.

"As only a burning object can communicate fire to other objects, so
only the true faith and life of a man can communicate themselves to
other men and to spread the truth."[10]

Perhaps; but to what point was this isolated faith able to assure
Tolstoy of happiness? How far he was, in his latter days, from the
voluntary calm of a Goethe! One would almost say that he avoided it,
fled from it, hated it.

"One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could
always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely
the sign of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the
greater, from worse to better. And this discord is the condition of
good. It is an evil when a man is calm and satisfied with himself."[11]

He imagines the following subject for a novel--showing that the
persistent discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in
him:

"I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles,
and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then
orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias,
and finally a Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking
everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies,
forgotten, in a hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And
yet he is a saint."[12]

Had he still doubts--he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has
remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to
a halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards.

"Movement is life."[13]

Many things must have changed within him during the last few years.
Did he not modify his opinion of revolutionaries? Who can even say
that his faith in non-resistance to evil was not at length a little
shaken? Even in _Resurrection_ the relations of Nekhludov with the
condemned "politicals" completely change his ideas as to the Russian
revolutionary party.

"Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their
criminal dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency,
their selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them
more closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he
understood that they could not be otherwise."

And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total
self-sacrifice.

Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from
the "intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely
moving amidst the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their
threatening army defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana.
Three tales, published by the _Mercure de France,_[14] which were among
the last pages written by Tolstoy, give us a glimpse of the sorrow
and the perplexity which this spectacle caused him. The years were
indeed remote when the pilgrims wandered through the countryside of
Toula, pious and simple of heart. Now he saw the invasion of starving
wanderers. They came to him every day. Tolstoy, who chatted with them,
was struck by the hatred that animated them; they no longer, as before,
saw the rich as "people who save their souls by distributing alms, but
as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the labouring people."
Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that despair which
makes a man capable of anything.

"It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities
and on the great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do
to modern civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient
civilisation."

So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:

"The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly
terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing
of the curbs, the _convenances_ and public opinion, which are so
strongly developed among European peoples."

Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against
his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that
the rulers and the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by
cries of "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!" Did Tolstoy still condemn
them? We do not know. But when, a few days later, he saw in his own
village the villagers weeping while their sheep and their samovars
were seized and taken from them by callous authorities, he also cried
vengeance in vain against these thieves, "these ministers and their
acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy traffic, or in teaching men to
murder, or condemning men to deportation, prison, or the gallows--these
men, all perfectly convinced that the samovars, sheep, calves, and
linen which they took from the miserable peasants would find their
highest use in furthering the distillation of brandy which poisons the
drinker, in the manufacture of murderous weapons, in the construction
of jails and convict prisons, and above all in the distribution of
appointments to their assistants and themselves."

It is sad, after a whole life lived in the expectation and the
proclamation of the reign of love, to be forced to close ones eye's
in the midst of these threatening visions, and to feel one's whole
position crumbling. It is still sadder for one with the impeccably
truthful conscience of a Tolstoy to be forced to confess to oneself
that one's life has not been lived entirely in accordance with one's
principles.

Here we touch upon the most pitiful point of these latter years--should
we say of the last thirty years?--and we can only touch upon it with a
pious and tentative hand, for this sorrow, of which Tolstoy endeavoured
to keep the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, but to others
who are living, whom he loved, and who loved him.

He was never able to communicate his faith to those who were dearest
to him--his wife and children. We have seen how the loyal comrade, who
had so valiantly shared his artistic life and labour, suffered when he
denied his faith in art for a different and a moral faith, which she
did not understand. Tolstoy suffered no less at feeling that he was
misunderstood by his nearest friend.

"I feel in all my being," he wrote to Teneromo, "the truth of these
words: that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are
as one.... I wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to
my wife a portion of that religious conscience which gives me the
possibility of sometimes raising myself above the sorrows of life. I
hope that it will be given her; very probably not by me, but by God,
although this conscience is hardly accessible to women."[15]

It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved
and admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness
of the great man who was "as one" with her; she saw that "he marched
ahead of the host and showed men the way they should follow";[16] when
the Holy Synod excommunicated him she bravely undertook his defence
and insisted on sharing the danger which threatened him. But she could
not force herself to believe what she did not believe; and Tolstoy was
too sincere to urge her to pretend--he who loathed the petty deceits
of faith and love even more than the negation of faith and love.[17]
How then could he constrain her, not believing, to modify her life, to
sacrifice her fortune and that of her children?

With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw
Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that "at table, when
the father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and
unbelief."[18] His faith had only slightly affected two or three of his
daughters, of whom one, Marie, was dead. He was morally isolated in the
heart of his family. "He had scarcely any one but his youngest daughter
and his doctor"[19] to understand him.

He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the
social relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing
visitors from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly
curious, who wore him out; he suffered from the "luxury" in which his
family life forced him to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to
believe the accounts of those who saw him in his simple house, with its
almost austere appointments; in his little room, with its iron bed, its
cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But even this poor comfort weighed
upon him; it was a cause of perpetual remorse. In the second of the
tales published by the _Mercure de France_ he bitterly contrasts the
spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of his own house.

"My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, "however useful it may
appear to certain people, loses the greater part of its importance
by the fact that my life is not entirely in agreement with my
professions."[20]

Why did he not realise this agreement? If he could not induce his
family to cut themselves off from the world, why did he not leave them,
go out of their life, thus avoiding the sarcasm and the reproach of
hypocrisy expressed by his enemies, who were only too glad to follow
his example and make it an excuse for denying his doctrines?

He had thought of so doing. For a long time he was quite resolved. A
remarkable letter[21] of his has recently been found and published; it
was written to his wife on the 8th of June, 1897. The greater part of
it is printed below. Nothing could better express the secret of this
loving and unhappy heart:

"For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord
between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life
or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I
felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very
young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and
also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot
continue to live as I have lived during these last sixteen years,[22]
now struggling against you and irritating you, now succumbing myself
to the influences and the seductions to which I am accustomed and which
surround me. I have resolved now to do what I have wished to do for
a long time: to go away.... Just as the Hindoos, when they arrive at
their sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged and
religious man wishes to consecrate the last years of his life to God
and not to jesting, punning, family tittle-tattle, and lawn-tennis; so
do I with all my strength desire peace and solitude, and, if not an
absolute harmony, at least not this crying discord between my whole
life and my conscience. If I had gone away openly there would have
been supplications, discussions, arguments; I should have weakened,
and perhaps I should not have carried out my decision, and it ought to
be carried out. I beg you therefore to forgive me if my action grieves
you. And you in particular, Sophie--let me go, do not try to find me,
do not be angry with me, and do not blame me. The fact that I have left
you does not prove that I have any grievance against you.... I know
that you _could not, could not_ see and think with me; this is why you
could not change your life, could not sacrifice yourself to something
you did not understand. I do not blame you at all; on the contrary, I
remember with love and gratitude the thirty-five long years of our life
together, and above all the first half of that period, when, with the
courage and devotion of your mother's nature, you valiantly fulfilled
what you saw as your mission. You have given to me and the world what
you had to give. You have given much maternal love and made great
sacrifices. ... But in the latter period of our life, in the last
fifteen years, our paths have lain apart. I cannot believe that I am
the guilty one; I know that I have changed; it was not your doing, nor
the world's; it was because I could not do otherwise. I cannot blame
you for not having followed me, and I shall always remember with love
what you have given me.... Goodbye, my dear Sophie. I love you."

"_The fact that I have left you_." He did not leave her. Poor letter!
It seemed to him that it was enough to write, and his resolution would
be fulfilled. ... Having written, his resolution was already exhausted.
"If I had gone away openly there would have been supplications, I
should have weakened." ... There was no need of supplications, of
discussion; it was enough for him to see, a moment later, those whom he
wished to leave; he felt that he _could not, could not_ leave them; and
he took the letter in his pocket and buried it among his papers, with
this subscription:

"Give this, after my death, to my wife Sophie Andreyevna."

And this was the end of his plan of departure. Was he not strong
enough? Was he not capable of sacrificing his affections to his God? In
the Christian annals there is no lack of saints with tougher hearts,
who never hesitated to trample fearlessly underfoot both their own
affections and those of others. But how could he? He was not of their
company; he was weak: he was a man; and it is for that reason that we
love him.

More than fifteen years earlier, on a page full of heart-breaking
wretchedness, he had asked himself: "Well, Leo Tolstoy, are you living
according to the principles you profess?"

He replied miserably:

"I am dying of shame; I am guilty; I am contemptible.... Yet compare
my former life with my life of to-day. You will see that I am trying
to live according to the laws of God. I have not done the thousandth
part of what I ought to do, and I am confused; but I have failed to do
it not because I did not wish to do it, but because I could not. ...
Blame me, but not the path I am taking. If I know the road to my house,
and if I stagger along it like a drunken man, does that show that the
road is bad? Show me another, or follow me along the true path, as I
am ready to follow you. But do not discourage me, do not rejoice in
my distress, do not joyfully cry out: 'Look! He said he was going to
the house, and he is falling into the ditch!' No, do not be glad, but
help me, support me!... Help me! My heart is torn with despair lest we
should all be astray; and when I make every effort to escape you, at
each effort, instead of having compassion, point at me with your finger
crying, 'Look, he is falling into the ditch with us!'"[23]

When death was nearer, he wrote once more:

"I am not a saint: I have never professed to be one. I am a man who
allows himself to be carried away, and who often does not say all that
he thinks and feels; not because he does not want to, but because he
cannot, because it often happens that he exaggerates or is mistaken. In
my actions it is still worse. I am altogether a weak man with vicious
habits, who wishes to serve the God of truth, but who is constantly
stumbling. If I am considered as a man who cannot be mistaken, then
each of my mistakes must appear as a lie or a hypocrisy. But if I am
regarded as a weak man, I appear then what I am in reality: a pitiable
creature, yet sincere; who has constantly and with all his soul
desired, and who still desires, to become a good man, a good servant of
God."

Thus he remained, tormented by remorse, pursued by the mute reproaches
of disciples more energetic and less human than himself;[24] tortured
by his weakness and indecision, torn between the love of his family
and the love of God--until the day when a sudden fit of despair, and
perhaps the fever which rises at the approach of death, drove him
forth from the shelter of his house, out upon the roads, wandering,
fleeing, knocking at the doors of a convent, then resuming his flight,
and at last falling upon the way, in an obscure little village, never
to rise again.[25] On his death-bed he wept, not for himself, but for
the unhappy; and he said, in the midst of his sobs:

"There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering: why do
you think only of me?"

Then it came--it was Sunday, November 20, 1910, a little after six in
the morning--the "deliverance," as he named it: "Death, blessed Death."



[1] Letter to the Chinese, October, 1906. (_Further Letters_).

[2] Tolstoy expressed a fear that this might happen in the above letter.

[3] "It was hardly worth while to refuse military and police service
only to revert to property, which is maintained only by those two
services. Those who enter the service and profit by property act better
than those who refuse all service and enjoy property." (Letter to the
Doukhobors of Canada, 1899. _Further Letters_).

[4] In the _Conversations with Teneromo_ there is a fine page dealing
with "the wise Jew, who, immersed in this Book, has not seen the
centuries crumble above his head, nor the peoples that appear and
disappear from the face of the earth."

[5] "To see the progress of Europe in the horrors of the modern State,
the bloodstained State, and to wish to create a new _Judenstaat_ is an
abominable sin." (_Ibid._)

[6] _Appeal to Political Men,_ 1905.

[7] In the appendix to _The Great Crime_ and in the French translation
of _Advice to the Ruled_ is the appeal of a Japanese society for the
_Re-establishment of the Liberty of the Earth._

[8] Letter to Paul Sabatier, November 7, 1906. (_Further Letters._)

[9] Letters to Teneromo, June, 1882, and to a friend, November, 1901.
(_Further Letters_.)

[10] _War and Revolution._

[11] _War and Revolution._

[12] Perhaps this refers to the History of a Doukhobor, the title of
which figures in the list of Tolstoy's unpublished works.

[13] "Suppose that all the men who had the truth were to be installed
all together on an island. Would that be life?" (To a friend, March,
1901. _Further Letters._)

[14] December 1, 1910.

[15] May 16, 1892. Tolstoy's wife was then mourning the loss of a
little boy, and he could do nothing to console her.

[16] Letter of January, 1883.

[17] "I should never reproach any one for having no religion. The
shocking thing is when men lie and pretend to religion." And further:
"May God preserve us from pretending to love; it is worse than hatred."

[18] _Revue des Deux Mondes,_ December 15, 1910.

[19] _Ibid._

[20] To a friend, December 10, 1903.

[21] _Figaro,_ December 27, 1910. It was found among Tolstoy's papers
after his death.

[22] This state of suffering dates, as we see, from 1881; that is,
from the winter passed in Moscow, and Tolstoy's discovery of social
wretchedness.

[23] Letter to a friend, 1895 (the French version being published in
_Plaisirs cruels,_ 1895).

[24] It seems that during his last few years, and especially during the
last few months, he was influenced by Vladimir-Grigorovitch Tchertkoff,
a devoted friend, who, long established in England, had consecrated
his fortune to the publication and distribution of Tolstoy's complete
works. Tchertkoff had been violently attacked by Leo, Tolstoy's eldest
son. But although he was accused of being a rebellious and unmanageable
spirit, no one could doubt his absolute devotion; and without approving
of the almost inhuman harshness of certain actions apparently committed
under his inspiration (such as the will by which Tolstoy deprived his
wife of all property in his writings without exception, including his
private correspondence), we are forced to believe that he thought more
of Tolstoy's fame than Tolstoy himself.

[25] The _Correspondance_ of the _Union pour la Verili_ publishes, in
its issue for January 1, 1911, an interesting account of this flight.

Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly on October 28, 1910 (November
10th European style) about five o'clock in the morning. He was
accompanied by Dr. Makovitski; his daughter Alexandra, whom Tchertkoff
calls "his most intimate collaborator," was in the secret. At six in
the evening of the same day he reached the monastery of Optina, one of
the most celebrated sanctuaries of Russia, which he had often visited
in pilgrimage. He passed the night there; the next morning he wrote
a long article on the death penalty. On the evening of October 29th
(November 11th) he went to the monastery of Chamordino, where his
sister Marie was a nun. He dined with her, and spoke of how he would
have wished to pass the end of his life at Optina, "performing the
humblest tasks, on condition that he was not forced to go to church."
He slept at Chamordino, and next morning took a walk through the
neighbouring village, where he thought of taking a lodging; returning
to his sister in the afternoon. At five o'clock his daughter Alexandra
unexpectedly arrived. She doubtless told him that his retreat was
known, and that he was being followed; they left at once in the night.
"Tolstoy, Alexandra, and Makovitski were making for the Koselk station,
probably intending to gain the southern provinces, or perhaps the
Doukhobor colonies in the Caucasus." On the way Tolstoy fell ill at the
railway-station of Astapovo and was forced to take to his bed. It was
there that he died.




CHAPTER XVIII


CONCLUSION


The struggle was ended; the struggle that had lasted for eighty-two
years, whose battlefield was this life of ours. A tragic and glorious
mellay, in which all the forces of life took part; all the vices and
all the virtues.--All the vices excepting one: untruth, which he
pursued incessantly, tracking it into its last resort and refuge.

In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the conflict of passions in the
stormy darkness, illuminated from time to time by dazzling flashes of
light--crises of love and ecstasy and visions of the Eternal. Years of
the Caucasus, of Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and restless youth.
Then the great peace of the first years of marriage. The happiness
of love, of art, of nature_--War and Peace_. The broad daylight of
genius, which bathed the whole human horizon, and the spectacle of
those struggles which for the soul of the artist were already things of
the past. He dominated them, was master of them, and already they were
not enough. Like Prince Andrei, his eyes were turned towards the vast
skies which shone above the battlefield. It was this sky that attracted
him:

"There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure leads to alight in the
midst of the crowd, when their pinions are broken; such, for instance,
am I. Then they beat their broken wings; they launch themselves
desperately, but fall anew. The wings will mend. I shall fly high. May
God help me!"[1]

These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest,
of which the _Confessions_ are the memory and echo. More than once
was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always
persevered. He started afresh. We see him hovering in "the vast,
profound heavens," with his two great wings, of which one is reason and
the other faith. But he does not find the peace he looked for. Heaven
is not without us, but within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of
his passions. There he perceives the apostles of renunciation, and he
brings to renunciation the same ardour that he brought to life. But it
is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He
is "maddened with life." He is "intoxicated with life." He cannot live
without this madness.[2] He is drunk at once with happiness and with
unhappiness, with death and with immortality.[3] His renunciation of
individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal
life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes,
is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning
worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces.
With him anger is calm,[4]and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him
new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war
upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a
few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies
of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular
education, benevolence, pacificism.[5] He strikes at all, delivers his
desperate attacks upon all.

From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious
spirits, who, like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a
corrupted civilisation. The last of these was Rousseau. By his
love of nature,[6] by his hatred of modern society, by his jealous
independence, by his fervent adoration of the Gospel and for Christian
morals, Rousseau is a precursor of Tolstoy, who says of him:

"Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that I should have written
them."[7]

But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely
Christian is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like
arrogance, in this insolent cry from the _Confessions_ of the Genevese:

"Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than
that man!"

Or in this defiance of the world:

"I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest
man is himself a man to be suppressed."

Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the "crimes" of his past life:

"I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these
memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that
they cannot remember after death. What happiness if it should be so!
What suffering it would mean if, in that other life, I were to recall
all the evil I have done down here!"[8]

Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau,
because, as the latter said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil
it was in my interest to tell everything."[9] Tolstoy, after having
made the attempt, decided not to write his _Memoirs;_ the pen fell from
his hands; he did not wish to be an object of offence and scandal to
those who would read it.

"People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And
what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who
ordains us to be shameful."[10]

Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and
the humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy.
Behind Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the
pilgrims, the innocents, whose tears and naive confessions had touched
him as a child.

But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to
him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty
years of Tolstoy's life; a magnificent warfare between the highest
powers of his mind: Truth and Love.

Truth--"that look which goes straight to the heart," the penetrating
light of "those grey eyes which pierce you through"--Truth was his
earliest faith, and the empress of his art.

"The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my
being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."[11]

The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.[12]
The truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean.

But very soon the "horrible truth"[13] was no longer enough for him.
Love had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; "the
natural state of his soul."[14] When the moral crisis of 1880 came he
never relinquished the truth; he made way for love.[15]

Love is "the basis of energy."[16] Love is the "reason of life; the
only reason, with beauty."[17] Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened
by life, of the author of _War and Peace_ and the _Letter to the Holy
Synod_.[18]

This interpenetration of the truth by love makes the unique value
of the masterpieces he wrote in the middle part of his life--_nel
mezzo del cammin_--and distinguishes his realism from the realism of
Flaubert. The latter places his faith in refraining from loving his
characters. Great as he may be, he lacks the _Fiat lux!_ The light of
the sun is not enough: we must have the light of the heart. The realism
of Tolstoy is incarnate in each of his creatures, and seeing them with
their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons for loving them and for
making us feel the chain of brotherhood which unites us to all.[19] By
love he penetrates to the roots of life.

But this union is a difficult one to maintain. There are hours in which
the spectacle of life and its suffering are so bitter that they appear
an affront to love, and in order to save it, and to save his faith, a
man must withdraw to such a height above the world that faith is in
danger of losing truth as well. What shall he do, moreover, who has
received at the hands of fate the fatal, magnificent gift of seeing the
truth--the gift of being unable to escape from seeing it? Who shall
say what Tolstoy suffered from the continual discord of his latter
years--the discord between his unpitying vision, which saw the horror
of reality, and his impassioned heart, which continued to expect love
and to affirm it?

We have all known these tragic conflicts. How often have we had to
face the alternative--not to see, or to hate! And how often does an
artist--an artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible,
magnificent power of the written word--feel himself weighed down by
anguish as he writes the truth![20] This truth, sane and virile,
necessary in the midst of modern lies, this vital truth seems to him
as the air we breathe.... But then we perceive that this air is more
than the lungs of many can bear. It is too strong for the many beings
enfeebled by civilisation; too strong for those who are weak simply in
the kindness of their hearts. Are we to take no account of this, and
plunge them implacably into the truth that kills them? Is there not
above all a truth which, as Tolstoy says, "is open to love"? Or is the
artist to soothe mankind with consoling lies, as Peer Gynt, with his
tales, soothes his old dying mother? Society is always face to face
with this dilemma: the truth, or love. It resolves it in general by
sacrificing both.

Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two faiths. In the works of
his maturity love is the torch of truth. In the works of his later
years it is a light shining on high, a ray of mercy which falls upon
life, but does not mingle with it. We have seen this in _Resurrection_,
wherein faith dominates the reality, but remains external to it. The
people, whom Tolstoy depicts as commonplace and mean when he regards
the isolated figures that compose it, takes on a divine sanctity so
soon as he considers it in the abstract.[21]

In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the
contrast is even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love
required of him; he acted otherwise; he lived not according to God
but according to the world. And love itself: how was he to behave
with regard to love? How distinguish between its many aspects, its
contradictory orders? Was love of family, to come first, or love of all
humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by these alternatives.

What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the
self-sufficient, the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain.
They, to be sure, have found the truth; they hold it with assurance.
For them, Tolstoy was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be
of use as a warning. Certainly he is not an example that they can
follow: they are not sufficiently alive. Tolstoy did not belong to the
self-satisfied elect; he was of no Church; of no sect; he was no more
a Scribe, to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this faith or that.
He was the highest type of the free Christian, who strives all his life
long towards an ideal that is always more remote.[22]

Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world
of thought; he speaks to ordinary men_--hominibus bonæ voluntatis_.
He is our conscience. He says what we all think, we average people,
and what we all fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of
pride: one of those haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity
upon their art and their intelligence. He is--as he loved to style
himself in his letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the most
pleasant of all--"our brother."


[1] _Journal_, dated October 28, 1879. Here is the entire passage:

"There are in this world heavy folk, without wings. They struggle down
below. There are strong men among them: as Napoleon. He leaves terrible
traces among humanity. He sows discord.--There are men who let their
wings grow, slowly launch themselves, and hover: the monks. There are
light fliers, who easily mount and fall: the worthy idealists. There
are men with powerful wings.... There are the celestial ones, who
out of their love of men descend to earth and fold their wings, and
teach others how to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they
re-ascend: as did Christ."

[2] "One can live only while one is drunken with life." (_Confessions_,
1879). "I am mad with living.... It is summer, the delicious summer.
This year. I have struggled for a long time; but the beauty of nature
has conquered me. I rejoice in life." (Letter to Fet, July, 1880.)
These lines were written at the height of the religious crisis.

[3] In his _Journal,_ dated May 1, 1863: "The thought of death." ... "I
desire and love immortality."

[4] "I was intoxicated with that boiling anger and indignation which
I love to feel, which I excite even when I feel it naturally, because
it acts upon me in such a way as to calm me, and gives me, at least
for a few moments, an extraordinary elasticity, and the full fire and
energy of all the physical and moral capacities." (_Diary of Prince D.
Nekhludov,_ Lucerne, 1857.)

[5] His article on _War,_ written on the occasion of the Universal
Peace Congress in London in 1891, is a rude satire on the peacemakers
who believe in international arbitration:

"This is the story of the bird which is caught after a pinch of salt
has been put on his tail. It is quite as easy to catch him without it.
They laugh at us who speak of arbitration and disarmament by consent
of the Powers. Mere verbiage, this! Naturally the Governments approve:
worthy apostles! They know very well that their approval will never
prevent their doing as they will." (_Cruel Pleasures._)

[6] Nature was always "the best friend" of Tolstoy, as he loved to
say: "A friend is good; but he will die, or he will go abroad, and one
cannot follow him; while Nature, to which one may be united by an act
of purchase or by inheritance, is better. Nature to me is cold and
exacting, repulses me and hinders me; yet Nature is a friend whom we
keep until death, and into whom we shall enter when we die." (Letter
to Fet, May 19, 1861. _Further Letters_.) He shared in the life of
nature; he was born again in the spring. "March and April are my best
months for work." Towards the end of autumn he became more torpid.
"To me it is the most dead of all the seasons; I do not think; I do
not write; I feel agreeably stupid." (To Fet, October, 1869.) But the
Nature that spoke so intimately to his heart was that of his own home,
Yasnaya Polyana. Although he wrote some very charming notes upon the
Lake of Geneva when travelling in Switzerland, and especially on the
Clarens district, whither the memory of Rousseau attracted him, he
felt himself a stranger amid the Swiss landscape; and the ties of his
native land appeared more closely drawn and sweeter: "I love Nature
when she surrounds me on every side, when on every hand the warm air
envelopes me which extends through the infinite distance; when the very
same lush grasses that I have crushed in throwing myself on the ground
make the verdure of the infinite meadows; when the same leaves which,
shaken by the wind, throw the shadow on my face, make the sombre blue
of the distant forest; when the very air I breathe makes the light-blue
background of the infinite sky; when not I alone am delighting in
nature; when around me whirl and hum millions of insects and the birds
are singing. The greatest delight in nature is when I feel myself
making a part of all. Here (in Switzerland) the infinite distance is
beautiful, but I have nothing in common with it." (May, 1851.)

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

The similarity is really very striking at times, and might well deceive
one. Take the profession of faith of the dying Julie:

"I could not say that I believed what it was impossible for me to
believe, and I have always believed what I said I believed. This was as
much as rested with me."

Compare Tolstoy's letter to the Holy Synod:

"It may be that my beliefs are embarrassing or displeasing. It is not
within my power to change them, just as it is not in my power to change
my body. I cannot believe anything but what I believe, at this hour
when I am preparing to return to that God from whom I came."

Or this passage from the _Réponse à Christophe de Beaumont,_ which
seems pure Tolstoy:

"I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. My Master has told me that he who
loves his brother accomplishes the law."

Or again:

"The whole of the Lord's Prayer is expressed in these words: 'Thy Will
be done!'" (_Troisième lettre de la Montague._)

Compare with:

"I am replacing all my prayers with the _Pater Nosier._ All the
requests I can make of God are expressed with greater moral elevation
by these words: 'Thy Will be done!'" (Tolstoy's _Journal,_ in the
Caucasus, 1852-3.)

The similarity of thought is no less striking in the province of art:

"The first rule of the art of writing," said Rousseau, "is to speak
plainly and to express one's thought exactly."

And Tolstoy:

"Think what you will, but in such a manner that every word may be
understood by all. One cannot write anything bad in perfectly plain
language."

I have demonstrated elsewhere that the satirical descriptions of
the Paris Opera in the _Nouvelle Héloise_ have much in common with
Tolstoy's criticisms in _What is Art?_

[8] _Journal_, January 6, 1903.

[9] _Quatrième Promenade._

[10] Letter to Birukov.

[11] _Sebastopol in May, 1853._

[12] "The truth.... the only thing that has been left me of my moral
conceptions, the sole thing that I shall still fulfil." (October 17,
1860.)

[13] _Ibid._

[14] "The love of men is the natural state of the soul, and we do not
observe it." (_Journal,_ while he was a student at Kazan.)

[15] "The truth will make way for love." (_Confessions._)

[16] "'You are always talking of energy? But the basis of energy is
love,' said Anna, 'and love does not come at will.'" (_Anna Karenin._)

[17] "Beauty and love, those two sole reasons for human existence."
(_War and Peace._)

[18] "I believe in God, who for me is Love." (_To the Holy Synod,_
1901.)

"'Yes, love!... Not selfish love, but love as I knew it, for the first
time in my life, when I saw my enemy dying at my side, and loved
him.... It is the very essence of the soul. To love his neighbour,
to love his enemies, to love all and each, is to love God in all His
manifestations!... To love a creature who is dear to us is human love:
to love an enemy is almost divine love!'" (Prince Andrei in _War and
Peace_.)

[19] "The passionate love of the artist for his subject is the soul of
art. Without love no work of art is possible." (Letter of September,
1889.)

[20] "I write books, which is why I know all the evil they do." ...
(Letter to P. V. Veriguin, leader of the Doukhobors, 1898. _Further
Letters_.)

[21] See the _Russian Proprietor,_ or see in _Confessions,_ the
strongly idealised view of these men, simple, good, content with their
lot, living serenely and having the sense of life: or, at the end of
the second part of _Resurrection,_ that vision "of a new humanity,
a new world," which appeared to Nekhludov when he met the workers
returning from their toil.

[22] "A Christian should not think whether he is morally superior or
inferior to others; but he is the better Christian as he travels more
rapidly along the road to perfection, whatever may be his position
upon it at any particular moment. Thus the stationary virtue of the
Pharisee is less Christian than that of the thief, whose soul is moving
rapidly towards the ideal, and who repents upon his cross." (_Cruel
Pleasures_.)



    INDEX

    (_The names of characters and titles of books are in italics._)


    ALEXANDRA, Tolstoy's aunt

    Ancestry, Tolstoy's
    Analysis, self-
    _Andrei Bolkonsky, Prince_
    _Anna Karenin_ (novel)
    _Anna Karenin_ (character)
    Arabian Nights
    Art--
    Attacks on modern
      Tolstoy's conception of
      His ignorance of
      His religious ideal of art
      Christian art extinct
      The art of the future
      Endowment of
      Mission of
    Austerlitz

    BACH
    Bachkirs, the
    _Bagration_
    Beethoven
    Bers family, the
    Bers, S. A., 179
    Bers, Sophie, _see_ Countess Tolstoy
    Besoukhov, Pierre
    Bloody Sunday
    Böcklin
    Boyer, Paul
    _Boyhood_
    Brahms
    Breton, Jules
    Brothers, Tolstoy's
    _Brush with the Enemy, A_
    Bylines

    CAUCASUS, Tolstoy joins Army of the
    Census, the, Tolstoy assists in taking
    Chavannes, P. de
    Childhood, Tolstoy's
    _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_
      Begun in the Caucasus
      Tolstoy's later opinion of
      See _Boyhood_ and _Youth_
    China, Tolstoy's admiration for,
    Christ, Tolstoy's conception of
    _Concordance and Translation
      of the Four Gospels,_
    _Confessions,_
    _Cossacks, The,_
    Countess Tolstoy--
    Character and abilities
      As model
      Letter to
    Creed, Tolstoy's
    Crimea, transference to the
    _Criticism of Dogmatic Theology_
    Criticism of art, destructive
    _Cycle of Readings_

    _DEATH OF IVAN ILYITCH, THE_
    _Decembrists, The_ (a projected novel)
    _Diary of a Sportsman,_
    _Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov_
    Dmitri Tolstoy
      Death of
    Don Quixote
    Dostoyevsky
    Dreyfus Affair, the
    Droujinine

    EDUCATION, Tolstoy's ideas concerning
    _End of a World, The_
    England, Tolstoy contemplates retiring to
    _Erochta,_ the old Cossack
    Execution, effect of a public

    FAITH, Tolstoy's, brings no happiness
    Family, Tolstoy's
    Family dissensions
    _Family Happiness_
    Father, Tolstoy's
    Feminism, Tolstoy's attitude towards
    Flaubert's opinion of Tolstoy's work

    GAPON, FATHER
    George, Henry
    Georgians, the
    Goethe
    Gontcharov
    _Great Crime, The_
    Greek, Tolstoy studies
    _Gricha,_ the idiot
    Grigorovitch

    HADJI MOURAD
    Hebrew, Tolstoy studies
    Home, Tolstoy's, _see_ Yasnaya Polyana
    Hugo, Victor
    Hunting, renounced

    IBSEN
    Introspection, Tolstoy's faculty of
    _Invasion, The_
    _Irtenieff, Nikolas_

    JOSEPH, the History of
    _Journal, Tolstoy's_

    _KARENIN_
    Karatayev
    Kazan
    _Khlopoff, Captain_
    _Kitty Levine_
    Klinger, Max
    _Kozeltoff,_ brothers, in _Sebastopol in August, 1855_
    _Kreutzer Sonata, The_
    _Kutuzov_

    _LEVINE_ in Lhermitte

    Liberal Party, Tolstoy's disdain of the
    _Life_
    Literary Society of St. Petersburg,
    Tolstoy's dislike of

    Logic, heroic
    Love--
      Definition of
      Tolstoy's attitude towards sexual
    Law of
    Lucerne, incident of the singer

    MANET
    Marriage, Tolstoy's views concerning
    _Marie, Princess_
    Marie Tolstoy
    _Maslova_
    _Master and Servant_
    Michelangelo
    Millet
    Molière
    Moscow, effect of visit to
    Music--
      Love of
      Ignorance of modern music
      In the _Kreutzer Sonata_
      Dread of
      Suggested State control over

    _NATASHA_
    _Nekhludov_
    _Nekhludov, Diary of Prince D._
    Nikolas Tolstoy
    Dies of phthisis
    Non-Resistance

    OLD BELIEVERS, the
    _Olenin_
    Orthodox Church, Tolstoy's relations with the
    Ostrovsky

    _PAKHOM THE PEASANT_
    Parents, Tolstoy's
    Pascal
    Pedagogy
    _Polikushka,_
    _Popular Tales_
    Popular idiom
    Portraits of Tolstoy--
      Of 1848
      Of 1851
      Of 1856
      Of 1885
    _Posdnicheff_
    _Power of Darkness, The_
    _Prashhoukhin,_ death of

    REASON (letter upon)
    Reason, Tolstoy's distrust of
    Religion--
      Tolstoy's vague agnosticism as a youth
    Revival of, in the Caucasus
    Rembrandt
    _Resurrection_
    Revolution, Tolstoy prophesies
    Roumania, Tolstoy joins Army of
    Rousseau, J. J., worship of
    _Rules of Life_
    _Russian Proprietor, A_
      Written in the Caucasus
    Russo-Japanese War

    ST. PETERSBURG, Tolstoy's dislike of literary society of
    Samara
    Schopenhauer
    Science, Tolstoy attacks
    _Sebastopol in December, 1854_
    _Sebastopol in May, 1855_
    _Sebastopol in August, 1855_
    Sebastopol, the siege of
    Sexual morality
    _Shakespeare_
    Shakespeare, no artist
    Siegfried, hasty judgment on
    "Smartness," Tolstoy's worship of
    Socialism, Tolstoy's hatred of
    Society, pictures of Russian
    Sophia Bers, _see_ Countess Tolstoy
    _Sovremennik,_ the (Russian review)
    Spelling-book, Tolstoy's
    State, the, a murderous entity
    Stepan Arcadievitch
    Sterne, influence of
    Story-teller, a blind
    Strauss
    Stuck
    Suarès
    Suicidal tendencies

    TATIANA, Tolstoy's aunt
    Tchaikowsky
    Terror, attack of nervous
    _Three Deaths_
    _Three Old Men_
    Tolstoy, Countess
    Tolstoy, Dmitri
    Death of
    Tolstoy, Leo--
      Reception of his work in France
      Influence of Rousseau and Stendhal
      Organic unity of his life
      Ancestry and inheritances,
      Childhood
      Student days
      Personal appearance _(see_ Portraits)
      Joins Army of Caucasus
      Religious experiences
      First literary work
      Effects of illness
      Early work
      Love of life
      Transferred to Crimea
      Narratives of Sebastopol
      Enters St. Petersburg literary society
      Quarrels with Tourgenev
      Travels in Europe
      Studies pedagogy
      Effect of his brother's death
      Courtship
      Marriage
      _War and Peace_
      _Anna Karenina_
      Effect of Dmitri's death
      Suicidal tendencies
      His "conversion"
      Joins the Orthodox Church
      Leaves it
      Visits Moscow
      Commences to write on religious subjects
      Differences with Countess Tolstoy
      Spiritual loneliness
      Attacks upon modern art and science
      His ignorance of art
      Ignorance of modern music
      Attack upon Shakespeare
      Religious and æsthetic ideals
      His fear of music
      Political ideals
      Religious ideals
      Old age
      Political hopes
      Loneliness
      Intends leaving his family
      Death
    Tolstoy, Nikolas
    Töppfer, influence of
    Tourgenev
    Criticism of Tolstoy
    Turkey, war declared upon
    _Two Hussars, The_

    _VOLODYA_, see _Kozeltoff_
    Vogüé, Melchior de
    _Vronsky_

    WAGNER, Tolstoy's hasty judgment of
    _War and Peace_
    _What I Believe_
    _What is Art?_
    _What shall we do?_
    Woman, Tolstoy's ideal of
    _Woodcutters, The_

    YASNAYA POLYANA
    Tolstoy returns to
    Experiments at
    _Youth_--
      Written during the siege of Sebastopol
      Lyrical beauty of







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