nothing of nature, he had not even noticed her existence. “It is not
possible,” he says, “that I was given neither flowers nor leaves to
play with, that I did not see the grass or the sunlight. And yet up
to my fifth or sixth year I have no memory of what we call nature.
Probably we have to get free from her in order to see her, and I myself
was nature.” From which can be deduced that even the mere seeing of
nature, and our so-called enjoyment of her, are not only a specifically
human condition, but one full of yearning emotion, in other words
pathological, implying as it does our separation from her. Tolstoy’s
recollection is that he felt the pain of this separation for the first
time when his childhood under the care of nurses came to an end and
he moved over to his older brothers and the tutor Feodor Ivanovich in
the lower storey. Never again, he assures us, did he feel so strongly
what a sense of duty meant, and what, accordingly, moral and ethical
obligation: “the feeling of the Cross, to carry which every one of us
is called. It was hard for me to part from all I had known since I was
born. I was sad, sunk in poetical melancholy; less because I had to
part from human beings, my nurse, my sisters, my aunt, than because I
was leaving my little bed with its curtains and pillows. Moreover, I
was apprehensive of the new life I was entering.” The appearance of the
word “Cross” in this connexion is significant, not only with reference
to Tolstoy, but also for the thing itself, the process of loosing
oneself from nature. This process was felt by Tolstoy as painful and
ethical: painful because ethical, and ethical because painful. He
gives it a moral and an ascetic significance, as that which actually
comprises all man’s ethical obligation. To be humanized means, for
him, to be denaturalized; and from that moment on, the struggle of his
existence consists in this sort of humanizing process: in the divorce
from nature, from everything that was natural and to him peculiarly so,
for example from the family, the nation, the State, the Church, from
all the passions of the senses and the instincts, from love, the hunt,
at bottom from all of physical life, and especially from art, which
meant to him quite essentially the life of the body and the senses.
It is quite wrong to think of this struggle as a crisis of conversion
taking place suddenly in his later years; to make its inception roughly
coincide with the beginning of old age. When the news came that the
great Russian writer was as though stricken by a sort of mystical
madness, the Frenchman Vogué declared that he had long expected it. He
was quite justified. The germ of Tolstoy’s intellectual development had
lain in _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_; and the psychology of Levin in
_Anna Karenine_ plainly indicated what further course it would take.
Besides, we have the evidence of Tolstoy’s comrades in arms when he
was an officer, the Sebastopol time. They give the clearest picture of
the violence with which the struggle even then raged within him. But
here we should note that his wrestling to break the strong bonds in
which nature held him, regularly led up to disease, immediately assumed
the form of illness. “Leochen is completely consumed by his writing
now,” so his wife, Countess Sophia Alexandrovna, puts it, about the
year 1880, when he buried himself in theology and the philosophy of
religion. It is a sight her love hates to see, and she constantly tries
to call him back to creative work. “His eyes are strange and staring,
he hardly speaks at all, he is like a being from another world, and
is positively not capable of thinking of earthly things....” “Leochen
is quite sunk in his work. His head pains him all the time. He is
very much changed, and become a rigid and practising Christian. But
he has got grey, his health is weak, he is sadder and more silent all
the time.”--“Tomorrow we shall have been here a month,” she writes in
1881 from Moscow, “and the first two weeks I wept every day without
stopping, because Leochen was not only in a gloomy state, but fallen
into a kind of despairing apathy. He ate nothing and did not sleep,
sometimes literally wept--I honestly believe I shall lose my reason.”
And to her husband himself: “I am beginning to think that when a happy
man suddenly begins to see only the horrible side of life, and has no
eyes for anything good, he must be ill. You should do something for
it, I say this in all seriousness. It seems so clear to me, I suffer
so to see you.... Did you never know before that there were people in
the world who were hungry, miserable, unhappy, and wicked? Open your
eyes: there are also strong and healthy, happy and good ones. If God
would only help you--what can I do? You must be ill,” the poor woman
wails--and is he not? He himself writes: “My health grows worse and
worse, often I wish I could die. Why I am so reduced, I do not know
myself. Perhaps it is age, perhaps illness....”
Compare with this the descriptions of him when he had sought in the
holy animalism of married life a refuge from the insoluble riddles that
his intellect set him; and then, with that power which the critics
delighted to call “bearlike”--Turgeniev sought in vain to convince
him that it came from the source whence all things come--created his
two epic novels _War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenine_. “He was always
light-hearted then,” his sister-in-law relates, “in high spirits, as
the English say, fresh, healthy, and jolly. On the days when he did
not write he went hunting with me or his neighbour Ribikov. We hunted
with greyhounds.... Evenings he played patience in Tantchen’s room.”
What happy days! Who can blame poor Countess Sophia Alexandrovna for
scarcely containing herself for joy when she hears that her hollow-eyed
Christian is planning a new imaginative work? Her happiness is
touching. “What gladness suddenly filled me, to read that you mean to
write something creative again! What I have so long awaited and hoped
for has come to you. That is salvation, that is happiness, in it we
shall come together again, it will console you and irradiate our life.
This is the work you were made for, and outside this sphere there is no
joy for your soul. God give you strength to cling to this ray of light,
in order that the divine spark may flare up in you again. The thought
fills me with ecstasy....”
Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s biographies show that these great writers
both alike suppressed for years their gift of plastic creation--for
which, as Countess Sophia Alexandrovna says, they were born--and
both in the service of a directly social activity--that is to say,
on highly moral grounds. Tolstoy suppressed the artist in him in
favour of his activities as _mirowov posrednik_ (justice of the
peace) and schoolmaster without pay. Goethe governed the dukedom
of Saxe-Weimar, for ten years of his early manhood dedicated his
powers to excise regulations, details of book manufacture, levies of
recruits, construction of streets and water-conduits, workhouses,
mines and quarries, finance, and other such matters--while Merck, in
the style of Turgeniev, was constantly concerned to rescue him for
literature, and he himself, with increasing resignation, steeling
himself by inward exhortations to patience and fortitude, held himself
to the heavy, hard, unrewarding, unnatural task. Added to all this, in
Goethe’s case, there was that somewhat seraphic affair with Frau von
Stein. No doubt it was most beautifully instrumental in the process
of civilizing the son of the Titans; but after all it did justice to
but one of those famous two souls, which had, alas, their dwelling
in his breast, and it let the other, the one with the “_klammernde
Organen_,” the “prehensile organs,” go empty away.--Well, in both
cases, Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s, the result is illness. “My office as
justice of the peace,” writes Tolstoy, “has ended in destroying my
good relations with the landowners, quite aside from the fact that
it injures my health.” Teaching the village children had the same
result. True, in his pedagogical journal he claims that the exercises
the children wrote were more accomplished than the writings of Leo
Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Goethe; yet he discerns something evil and even
criminal in his intercourse with them, it seems to him that he abuses
and corrupts their souls. “It seemed to go very well,” he says in the
_Confessions_, “but I felt that I was mentally not healthy enough
and that it could not go on so for much longer. I was more ailing
mentally than physically; I threw it all overboard and drove out to
the Kalmucks of the steppes to drink mares’ milk and lead an animal
life.”--This absconding to the steppes vividly recalls the secret
flight to Italy which was Goethe’s salvation, after he too had seen
that it could not go on so for much longer. The thirty-four-year-old
man had become silent, taciturn, in plain words melancholy. He thought
it was probably natural that a man should become serious over serious
things. His health was actually undermined; by the time he was
six-and-thirty his face was the face of a victim of exhaustion. For
the first time he thought of taking a cure. He began to be aware of the
ruinous perversity of his existence; expressed his view in the shrewd
understatement that he was meant for private life. And fled before
destruction. The parallel continues to hold: for Leo Nikolaevich,
returned from the steppes and the mares’ milk cure, marries his Sophia
Alexandrovna, who from then on finds herself almost continuously in
the family way, and with epic and primeval power creates his two great
novels. While Goethe, back from Italy, takes Christiane Vulpius unto
himself and, freed from the cares of office, gives his mind to his
natural tasks. All which might serve as a gloss upon a philosophy of
disease.
* * * * *
Art is objective, creative contemplation, closely bound up with nature.
Critique, on the other hand, is the moralizing, analysing attitude
toward life and nature. In other words, critique is spirit; whereas
creation is the preoccupation of the children of God and nature.
“In poetry my maxim was the objective principle,” says Goethe. “I am
a plastic artist.” Indeed, the contrast between Goethe’s position
and that of his great counterpart (Schiller standing for idealism,
moralization, rhetoric, in short for critique) is too well known to
need labouring. Goethe regarded his own inborn poetic gift “quite
as nature.” His tolerance, his attitude of live and let live, the
complaisance of his character, are all consonant with this view. They
are based on the Spinozan concept of the perfectitude and necessity
of all being, on the idea of a world free from final ends and final
causes, in which evil has its rights like good. “We struggle,” he
declares, “to perfect the work of art as an end in itself. They, the
moralists, think of the ulterior effect, about which the true artist
troubles himself as little as nature does when she makes a lion or a
humming-bird.” It is a primary maxim with him that art is as inimical
to purpose as nature herself; and this is the point where the follower
of Spinoza sympathizes with Kant, who conceives detached contemplation
as the genuine æsthetic state, thus making a fundamental distinction
between the æsthetic-creative principle and the ethical-critical one.
“When,” says Goethe, “philosophy confirms and enhances our original
feeling of our oneness with nature, turning it into a profound and
tranquil contemplation, then I welcome it.” I could cite ten or twelve
other places in his works, where in the name of art he repudiates the
moral sanction--which indeed is always social as well. “It is possible,
I suppose, for a work of art to have a moral effect; but to demand
from the artist a moral purpose and intention is to spoil his craft
for him.”--“I have, in my trade as a writer, never asked myself: How
shall I be of service to the world at large? All I have ever done was
with the view of making myself better and more full of insight, of
increasing the content of my own personality; and then only of giving
utterance to what I had recognized as the good and the true.”
When we contrast the Christian-social ethics of Tolstoy as an old man
with Goethe’s pagan and cultural idealism, we must not forget that the
Tolstoyan socialism had its origin in the most private and personal
need, the profoundest concern with the salvation of one’s own soul. A
permanent dissatisfaction with self, a tortured seeking for the meaning
of life, was the source of this socialism. The moralist began all his
teachings and reforms with a self-discipline (the _Confessions_, that
is) such as the true and proper social critic never demands of himself.
Revolutionary in the real and political sense of the word he can by
no means be called. “The significance of the Christian doctrine,”
he declares, “is not that in its name society shall forcibly be
reformed. It is that one shall find a meaning to life.” And it should
be pointed out that Tolstoy’s original conception of art corresponded
precisely to Goethe’s--a fact which will surprise none but those who
in all good faith accept him as a child of spirit, like Schiller and
Dostoyevsky, on the ground of his naïve and clumsy efforts at spiritual
regeneration, and fail to recognize in him a natural nobility akin
to Goethe’s own. Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, which dates from
much earlier than is generally realized, undoubtedly has its roots in
antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the
jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face
of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius. It was a reaction
against nature, against the simple, against indifference to the moral
point of view; and an impulse toward spirit--that is, toward an ethical
and even social revaluation--a reaction so whole-souled, indeed, that
it ended in his playing off against Shakespeare Mrs. Harriet Beecher
Stowe, the creator of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_--an absurdity which only
goes to show how very much the child of nature he was. Genuine sons
of spirit and of the idea, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, do not run
aground on such fantastic coasts. Tolstoy’s critical and moral faculty,
in short his bias toward spirit, was but a secondary impulse, and a
feeble one at that. It always balked at organic union with his mighty
creative gift; we have unequivocal declarations from him to the effect
that, in his view, pure creative power stood higher than talent with a
social coloration. As an old man he criticized Dostoyevsky for going
in for politics, much as Goethe had criticized Uhland’s activities in
that line. At the age of thirty-one, in 1859, as a member of the Moscow
society of the Friends of Russian Literature, he made a speech in which
he so sharply accented the superiority of the purely artistic elements
in literature over merits due to ulterior or ephemeral causes that the
president of the society, Chomiakof, reminded him in a sharp rejoinder
that a servant of pure art might very well, without knowing or wishing
it, find himself indicting society.
An outburst of intellectual misgivings, of that humility of spirit to
which the sons of nature are prone, occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s
novel _Lucerne_. Here is a splendid lament over the fate of man,
who, with all his need of positive redemption, is flung into an
ever-billowing and shoreless ocean of good and evil. “If man,” cries
Tolstoy, “had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and
decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only
put in order that they may remain for ever questions! If he would
only comprehend that every thought is at once false and true!... Men
have divided up into sections this ever-rolling, boundless, eternally
mingled chaos of good and bad; they have drawn themselves imaginary
boundary-lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide according
to their lines. As if it were not possible to make millions of other
divisions, from other points of view, and on different planes!...
Civilization is good, barbarism evil, freedom is good, unfreedom
evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys in human nature the _original
blissful and instinctive striving towards good_.” And asking himself
whether in the souls of the poor there may not be more happiness and
affirmation of life than in that of the callous rich man against
whom, for his own part, his heart revolts, he bursts out with the
words: “Endless is the goodness and wisdom of Him who has permitted
and commanded all these contradictions. Only to you, poor worm, so
presumptuously struggling to accomplish your schemes and devices,
only to you do they seem contradictory. He looks mildly down from
His radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony
wherein in endless conflict you all do move!”
Could one express oneself more “Goethically”? Even the “_Harmonie des
Unendlichen_” is here. This is not mere philosophical or moral doubt;
the words are too light, too thin, too intellectual to characterize
the piety, the religious submission, the adoration of nature, that
breathe from Tolstoy’s page. This is not the voice of the prophet,
schoolmaster, and reformer; here speaks the child of this world, the
creative artist. Nature was his element, as she was the element, the
beloved, kindly mother, of Goethe--and his constant tearing at the bond
which held him fast to her, his desperate urging away from her in the
direction of spirit and morality, from creation to critique, has much
to command our respect and reverence, though at the same time there
is about it something painful, tormenting, and humiliating, which is
not present in the character of Goethe. Look at Tolstoy’s attitude
toward music, it is most instructive. When he met Berthold Auerbach
in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an
irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the
first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever
and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the
same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We
are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became
drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was
never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded
a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself
at the piano--that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside
Tschaikowsky and listened to the composer’s Quartet in D major, he
began to sob at the _andante_, before everybody. No, unmusical he was
not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he
was, felt that he ought not to return her love.
There is that legend of the giant Antæus, who was unconquerable because
fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth.
The lives of Goethe and Tolstoy irresistibly recall that myth. Both
sons of mother earth, they differ only therein, that one of them was
aware of the source of his nobility, the other not. There are places
in Tolstoy’s remorseful confessions where he touches the earth, and
all at once his words, which, so long as they dealt in theory, were
wooden and confused, are imbued with the most penetrating sensuousness,
with an irresistible force and freshness of life. He recalls how once
as a child he went nutting with his grandmother in the hazel-wood.
Lackeys instead of horses draw the grandmother’s little carriage into
the grove. They break through the undergrowth and bend the boughs,
full of ripe, already dropping nuts, down into the old lady’s lap and
she gathers them into a bag. Little Leo marvels at the strength of
the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich, who bends the heavy branches; when he
lets go they spring up again and slowly mingle with the others. “I
can feel how hot it was in the sun, how pleasantly cool in the shade,
how we breathed the sharp scent of the hazel leaves, while all round
us the girls were cracking nuts between their teeth; we munched the
full, fresh, white kernels without stopping.”--The fresh, full, white
kernels cracking between the girls’ teeth: that is Antæus-Tolstoy, and
the strength of his mother the earth streams through him, as it did
when he wrote _War and Peace_, where his rather vague, fine-drawn, not
very convincing philosophical digressions are followed by pages of
which Turgeniev wrote: “They are glorious, they are the very best there
is, everything original, everything descriptive, the hunt, the night
boat-ride and all--nobody in Europe can touch him.”
And Goethe: how the Antæus-consciousness governed his whole existence!
How constantly it conditioned his seeking and shaping! Nature is
to him “healing and comfort” after the visitations of passion; and
while he well knows that to know her “one must have moulded all the
manifestations of the human being into one definite and distinct
entity,” that true research is unthinkable without the gift of
imagination, he is wary of the fantastic, avoids speculative natural
philosophy, guards himself against losing touch with the earth, and
calls the idea “the result of experience.” The imagination that guides
his research is intuitive, it is the inborn sympathy of the child of
nature with the organic. It is Antæan, like the imaginative power
which conditions his creative art, nor is that, either, capricious
in its nature, but precise and based on the sense-perceptions. Such
is the imagination of the creative artist. The sons of the thought,
of the idea, of spirit, theirs is another kind. We will not say that
the one creates more reality than the other. But the figures created
by the plastic fancy possess the realism of sheer being; while those
created by the “sentimental” artist evince their actuality by action.
Schiller himself makes this distinction. Apart from the things they
do, he himself confesses, they have something shadowy--“_etwas
Schattenhaftes_” is his expression. Translate this from the sphere
of German idealism into the Russian and revelational, and you get,
as a sort of national pendant to Schiller’s world of idea, rhetoric,
and drama, the shadow-world of Dostoyevsky, over-life-size and
exaggeratedly true. A catchword occurs to one from the philosophy of
art, that is in everybody’s mouth today, or at least was yesterday:
the word “expressionism.” Really, what we call expressionism is only
a late form, strongly impregnated with the Russian and revelational,
of romantic idealism. Its conflict with the epic attitude toward art,
the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new
nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in on the one
side Goethe and Tolstoy, on the other Schiller and Dostoyevsky. And to
all eternity the truth, power, calm, and humility of nature will be in
conflict with the disproportionate, fevered, and dogmatic presumption
of spirit.
* * * * *
Very much, yes, precisely as Goethe’s “profound and tranquil
contemplation,” his precise and sensuous fancy, the lifelikeness of
his characters, stand in relation to the ideal visions of Schiller and
the activism of his creations, so the mighty sense-appeal of Tolstoy’s
art stands to Dostoyevsky’s sickly, distorted dream-and-soul world.
Indeed, the contrast becomes even more pointed by reason of differences
between nations and periods. Tolstoy, the realistic novelist, the
prince-and-peasant scion of a race still young, displays in his art a
sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal,
than does the German humanist and classicist, bourgeois-born and
patrician-bred, in his.
Compared with Eduard and Charlotte, the lovers in the
_Wahlverwandtschaften_, Vronsky and Anna are like a fine strong
stallion and a noble mare. The comparison is not mine; it has often
been made. A certain school of Russian criticism, hostile, of course,
and on a low plane, found most offensive Tolstoy’s animalism, his
unheard-of interest in the life of the body, his genius for bringing
home to us man’s physical being. These critics wrote, for instance,
that _Anna Karenine_ reeked with the classic odour of babies’ diapers.
They raved at the salaciousness of certain scenes, and ironically
reproached Tolstoy for omitting to describe how Anna takes her bath and
Vronsky washes himself. They were wrong even in the fact; for Tolstoy
does tell us how Vronsky washes, we see him rubbing his red body. And
in _War and Peace_ we are vouchsafed a glimpse of Napoleon naked,
in the scene where he has his fat back sprayed with eau-de-Cologne.
A critic wrote in _Die Tat_ about this book: “Its main theme is the
satisfaction of any and every human being within the fold of wedded
bliss, conceived in the grossest sense.” And then the same critic,
parodying Tolstoy’s style, proposed to him that he write another novel
treating of Levin’s love for his cow Pania.
All this, of course, is on a lower plane than the criticism of Goethe
which Caroline Herder wrote to Knebel: “Oh, if he would only give some
soul to his characters! If only there were not so much philandering in
everything that he writes, or, as he himself so likes to call it, so
much ‘good feeling.’” But unenlightened comment such as this may very
well be illuminating none the less, even though unawares and as it were
on false pretences; and these remarks, in their folly, do undoubtedly
contain a grain of truth. Caroline’s “philandering” is a mincing,
sentimental word to characterize what Goethe wrote; yet it has a
certain aptness, if the comparison is between his frank realism and
the lofty insubstantiality of Schiller’s world. It is not such a bad
joke, either, to make Levin fall in love with his cow. It hits off the
fleshliness of Tolstoy’s art as contrasted with the holy soulfulness of
Dostoyevsky’s--especially when we remember Tolstoy’s personal passion
for one of the preoccupations of farm life--namely, the breeding of
cattle and pigs. It is an interest quite proper, of course, to a landed
proprietor; yet where so strongly marked as this surely not quite
without deeper meaning.
* * * * *