fine material, highly comfortable and pleasant to wear, and the linen
was scented. Of course, he did not scent it himself. The Countess
attended to that, and he, who liked it very much, pretended not to
notice, just as he pretended not to know that the vegetarian dishes he
exclusively ate were all prepared with _bouillon_. “His face is that of
a peasant,” reports an eyewitness, “with a broad nose, a weather-beaten
skin, and thick, beetling brows with small, piercing grey eyes beneath
them. But, despite the peasant features, no one could fail to recognize
at first glance the fine, cosmopolitan Russian gentleman, member of
the very highest society.” Conversing thus in English or French with a
Grand Duke, he reminds one very much of Goethe, on whom princes waited,
and who thought it no derogation of his nobility, human or divine, to
season it with a little knack for polite nothings. When Tolstoy visited
Alexander Herz in London, his daughter, young Natalia Alexandrovna,
begged to be present in a dark corner, that she might behold in the
flesh the author of _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_. With beating heart
she awaited Tolstoy’s appearance. She was bitterly disappointed to see
a man dressed in the latest fashion, with good manners and a flow of
speech, the subject-matter of which was exclusively the cock-fights and
boxing-matches he had seen in London. “Not a word that came from his
heart, not a word that could have corresponded to my expectations, did
I hear during the single interview at which I was present.”
Nothing of the sort is reported of Dostoyevsky or Schiller. Never
did these by their worldliness disappoint the expectations of their
audience. The sons of spirit make personally a spiritual impression,
as the hopeful average man expects those to do who are soul-shakers.
That lofty, pallid, suffering-saint and criminal look of Dostoyevsky
corresponded to the idea the Russians got of the phenomenon of
his genius, just as Schiller’s mild, intrepid, fanatical, and
equally ailing physiognomy, with open shirt-collar and flowing silk
neckerchief, corresponded to the image which the German mind might
have formed of its hero. Whereas on the other hand Goethe, if we
accept Riemer’s description of him as he moved among his guests in
a blue coat, “the powerful, expressive face showing the effects of
sun and fresh air, with the black side-locks floating about it, the
black hair bound in a queue, was more like a well-to-do, comfortable
farmer, or a much-visited staff-officer in mufti, than like a shrinking
and sensitive poet.” And it is true, _a priori_, that neither of
those other two ever estranged ardent admiration by displaying a
banal enthusiasm for cock-fighting and boxing. Whereas the sense of
sport, the taste for bodily exercise, physical training, and physical
enjoyment, played an essential rôle in Tolstoy’s life as in Goethe’s.
We call these tastes gentlemanly and thus indicate the physical basis
of the well-born-ness which is of this world. “One must see him,”
wrote Riemer about Goethe; “how strong and firm he stands on his feet,
with what bodily agility and sure step he moves. Early gymnastic
training, dancing, skating, riding, even coursing and racing, had
given him this mobility and suppleness; he could never make a false
step on the worst path or be in danger of slipping or falling; easily
and swiftly he passed over smooth ice, narrow foot-paths and bridges,
and rocky steeps. As a youth he climbed among chasms and shingle with
his princely friend, mounted towering rocks and Alpine crags with the
boldness of a chamois; and so throughout his fifty years of geological
exploration no mountain has been too high for him, no shaft too deep
nor passage too low, no cave labyrinthine enough.”
The great interest which Leo Tolstoy took in his body showed itself
negatively as well as positively. Negatively, in his Christian and
ascetic grumblings at his beastly physical, in such utterances as
that the body is a hindrance to the good man, and in such phrases as:
“I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body.” Positively, in all
the training and care he gave it. His interest in it begins at the
moment--of which he speaks in the _Confessions_--when he sat as a
little child in a wooden tub, enveloped in the smell of the bran-water
in which he was being bathed, and for the first time noticed his little
body with the ribs visible on the breast in front, and straightway
feels drawn to it by a very strong inclination. Tolstoy’s face was,
humanly speaking, ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it,
convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature
with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes.
He confesses that he would have given anything he had for a handsome
face. The youth who is tortured by the problem of death, and ponders
all the high and ultimate questions with as much maturity as the aged
prophet, this youth is at the same time perpetually occupied with his
own appearance, is obviously possessed by the desire to be elegant
and _comme il faut_; sets the greatest store by physical development,
gymnastic exercise; drills, rides, and hunts as though he had no higher
ambition in his head nor thought of any. His passion for the hunt is
so excessive that he confesses to his wife that of human beings he
never forgot Sophia Alexandrovna, but out hunting he forgot everything
but his double-barrelled shot-gun. From more than one letter of those
who knew him in his prime we see what a daring sportsman he was, how
he sprang with astonishing agility over gullies and chasms and would
spend whole days in the wild. We are told that a better companion could
not be conceived of. The pacifism, Christian, Buddhistic, or Chinese,
of his latter days forbade him of course to kill animals, although
his indestructible physical strength and trained agility would still
have allowed him to hunt and though he still cherished the greatest
desire to. He bade it farewell. He submitted himself to a test and
found he had fortitude enough to let the hares run. And in his case
that meant a good deal, as we see from the following anecdote, related
by Gorky. Tolstoy put on a heavy overcoat and thick boots and took
Gorky for a walk in the birch-woods. He leaped like a schoolboy over
puddles and ditches, shook the rain-drops from the boughs, lovingly
stroked the moist, satiny trunks of the birch-trees, and talked
about Schopenhauer.... “Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo
Nikolaevich gave an excited start, his face lighted up, he let out
a halloo like an old huntsman. Then he looked at me with a curious
smile and began laughing, a hearty human laugh. At this moment he was
irresistible.”--Still finer is the story of the hawk which the old man
saw circling above his chickens, about to swoop. Leo Nikolaevich stares
up at the bird of prey, his hand over his eyes, and says in an “excited
whisper”: “The rascal! Now, now! He’s coming ... oh, he’s afraid....
I’ll call the stable-boy.” He calls, the hawk disappears. But Tolstoy
is taken with regrets. He sighs and says: “I shouldn’t have called.
Then he would have swooped.” They are his chickens. But all the
sympathy of the venerable prophet of pacifism is with the hawk.
Of his son Iliuscha he wrote in a letter: “Iliuscha is lazy, he is
growing, and his soul is not yet overwhelmed by organic processes.”
What does he mean by that? Growing is itself an organic process, and if
growing is innocent, so too will be the organic processes which growth
brings about, and with which Tolstoy was only too well acquainted,
since they made his life a burden to him all his days. The Church’s
conception of woman as _instrumentum diaboli_ was with him something
more than a mood from the time of the _Kreuzer Sonata_; it dates from
much earlier, from the journals of his boyish days; and he speaks of
organic processes in the sense of that early Christian pope who, in
order to mortify the flesh, made a detailed list of all its disgusting
and evil-smelling functions, the functions of this body which in the
end has to submit to the final indignity of putrefaction. That kind
of cross-grained speculation Tolstoy would be just the one to set
about, and he did. Very sensual men well know such moods. Maupassant
somewhere calls the act of coition filthy and ridiculous--“_ordurier et
ridicule_.” Could objectivity further go? But such blithe and cynical
objectivity was not Tolstoy’s sort. His hatred of the organic has a
shattering accent of subjective torment and rage. And yet he is so much
the darling of the creative impulse of organic life that one must go
back to Goethe to find a human being who was “_so wohl in seiner Haut_”
as he. Yes, the parallel is even more exact. In both of them, and in
just the same way, the most beatific organic well-being, amounting to
organic rapture, mingled with a rooted melancholy and the profoundest
intimacy with death. Goethe, when he was a riotous, dandiacal student
in Leipsic, might any moment quit the society of men, the card-play and
dance, and yield himself to solitude. We have plenty of witnesses to
his brilliance, his childish, fantastic extravagances in the circle of
his friends, with the Jacobis, Heinse, Stilling in Elberfeld. He cuts
capers, dances round the table like a clown, in short cannot contain
himself for a mysterious intoxication; the philistines sitting round
think he has gone mad. And that is the same Goethe whose Werther drove
more than one young man to self-destruction, and who practised himself
in suicide by keeping a sharp dagger on his bed-table and trying every
evening to drive it a little further into his body.
We have noted the same excess of animal spirits in Tolstoy; in whom,
indeed, they persisted up to an old age lacking in the dignity,
stateliness, and formal gravity of Goethe’s latest period. Which
need surprise nobody. For we cannot doubt that Goethe led a more
earnest, laborious, exemplary life than the Slavic junker; or that
his cultural activities presupposed far more genuine self-abnegation,
restraint, and discipline than Tolstoy’s uttermost ineffectual efforts
at spiritualization, sticking fast as these always did in a bog of
fantastic absurdity. Tolstoy’s aristocratic charm was, and Gorky so
depicts it, that of a noble animal. He never managed to arrive at
the dignity of man the civilized, man the triumpher over odds. It is
lovely to hear of all the pranks he played with the children, his
droll conceits, the gymnastic feats he performed for and with them; the
endless croquet, lawn-tennis, and leap-frog parties in the garden at
Yasnaya Polyana. He not only shared all the activities of youth, but he
was the life and soul of them. The sixty-year-old man runs races with
the boys, his bicycle trips extend, much to the Countess’s anxiety,
over thirty versts. “When there is some activity requiring agility,
strength, and suppleness,” comments a bystander, “he never takes his
eyes off the players, he puts his whole soul into their success or
failure. Often he cannot resist and joins in with a youthful fire and
muscular flexibility which the onlooker could only envy.” In the family
circle he performed the sheerest absurdities. He had invented a game
called Numidian Horsemen, which made the children weep with delight.
Leo Nikolaevich would suddenly spring from his chair, lifting his hand,
and run about the room flapping it in the air, whereupon everybody,
grown-ups, children, and all, followed suit. That is, I repeat,
charming, though a little bizarre. It becomes more so when we learn
that all these high spirits occur in the years after his “conversion,”
in the period of his soul-crises, his ascetic eclipses and theological
broodings. But what shall be said of the incident recorded by his
father-in-law, Behrs? They were walking about the room together in
light converse, one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang
upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for
a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold--it
gives one an uncanny feeling! I do not ask my readers to imagine
Goethe, in his later period, leaping unexpectedly on a visitor’s
shoulder. There is a decided difference of temperament, that is clear.
But the resemblance is no less so.
* * * * *
Looking more closely at the matter, I find that there is a complex of
problems, a “problematic,” peculiar to the sons of nature, the creative
and objective artists, which is entirely foreign to the children of the
idea, and, for all the brilliant sunshine of favour they move in, casts
a strange dark cloud upon them which must considerably chill their
consciousness of aristocratic well-being. My feeling is that it is pure
error to think that conflict and complexity are things of the spirit,
while nature’s kingdom must be all brightness and harmony. It looks as
though the contrary were the case. If what we call happiness consists
in harmony, clarity, unity with oneself, in the consciousness of a
positive, confident, decisive turn of mind, if, in short, it is peace
resident in the soul, then obviously happiness is a state far easier
for the sons of spirit to arrive at than for the children of nature.
For the latter, though surely singleness of heart should be their lot,
seem never to attain the joy and peace it might confer. Nature herself
appears to weave in their very being a questionable strand, an element
of contradiction, negation, and all-pervasive doubt, which, since it
cannot conduce to goodness, cannot conduce to happiness either. Spirit
is good. Nature is by no means good. One might say she is evil, if
moral categories were admissible with reference to her. She is, then,
neither good nor evil, she escapes definition, as she herself refuses
to define and judge; she is, speaking objectively, indifferent, and as
this indifference of hers appears subjectively and spiritually in her
children, it becomes a complication that has more to do with torment
and evil than with happiness and goodness, and which certainly seems
come not to bring peace into the world, like the human and benevolent
spirit, but rather doubt and dire confusion.
Obviously I am not speaking here of the comparatively harmless conflict
between the Faustian “two souls,” the battle between the impulses
of a strong animal constitution and the yearnings after “_Gefilden
hoher Ahnen_”--a battle, and a “problematic,” of which Goethe speaks
out of such deep experience, and which not only made Tolstoy’s youth
a period of such hardship, so torn with remorse, but persisted in
him up to old age. I am speaking of something which seems at first
blush to be much blither and simpler: a position something like that
of Goethe between Lavater and Basedow, in which Goethe designates
himself as “_das Weltkind in der Mitten_”. That sounds simple, and
pleasant, and self-complacent, and was probably so meant. And yet in
the word “_Weltkind_” and the associations that surround it there is
something sinister, a difficulty and a “problematic,” by contrast
with which the “prophetic” existence is nothing less than sweetness
and light and plain sailing. “Goethe’s tendency to negation,” writes
Chancellor von Müller on some occasion or other, “and his incredible
judicial-mindedness came out strong again.” “There is something,”
Gorky writes about Tolstoy, “which presumably he will never reveal
to a human being, which appears darkly in his conversation, and is
hinted at in his journals. To me it seems like the apotheosis of
negation, the deepest and most hideous nihilism, springing from a
stratum of boundless and hopeless despair, from a solitude of which
probably no one else in the world has ever been so frightfully
aware.” No one? It was not Tolstoy who created the so lyric figure of
Mephistopheles--though indeed the Mephistophelian element was never
lacking to any period of his life. The ceaseless, tormenting effort to
shape that which he calls his conception of life, to arrive at truth
and clarity and inward peace, found expression in his youth, partly in
a gloomy irritability that led to duels and scenes with his friends,
which he took in desperate earnest, as matters of life and death,
killing and dying; but partly also in malicious negation in general,
an inimical spirit of contradictiousness, which, as we are expressly
assured, made a quite Mephistophelian impression. Though of course
this was not a nihilistic but a moral attitude, and was not assumed
save in opposition to things that were not true--only they were simply
everything! In the young Tolstoy there was observable, “from the
beginning, a sort of unconscious enmity toward all accepted laws in
the kingdom of thought. No matter what the opinion expressed; and the
greater the authority of the speaker, the more was Tolstoy at pains
to take up and accentuate an inimical attitude. If you watched him
as he listened, and saw the sarcastic curl of his lip, you could not
avoid the impression that he was thinking, not so much of answering
what was said, as of himself saying something which should surprise
and confound the speaker.” That is nihilism, that is malice. But it is
not so much cold malice as it is a tortured spite against anybody who
fancied he held the secret of clarity and truth. It is a disbelief in
clarity and truth. This spite, and this incredulity, were especially
directed against Turgeniev, the clear-eyed and human man with whom he
never could get on. “Tolstoy,” said Turgeniev, “early developed a trait
which, lying as it does at the root of his gloomy conception of life,
has caused him great suffering. He has never managed to believe in the
sincerity of mankind. Every expression of feeling seemed to him false;
and he had the habit, due to his extraordinarily penetrating gaze, of
boring through with his eye the man he considered insincere.” And when
Turgeniev said this, he added the confession that never in his life had
he encountered anything with such power to dishearten him as this same
piercing gaze, which, accompanied by two or three biting remarks, could
bring to the verge of madness anybody who did not possess particularly
strong self-control. Now Turgeniev’s self-control was strong. He was
at the height of his literary success; serene and untroubled, he could
encounter the complexities of his younger colleague with the calmness
of a man who lived on good terms with himself. But precisely this
security was what troubled Tolstoy. He seems to have gone deliberately
about with this tranquil, good-natured man, working with such a clear
conviction that what he did was right, to goad him past the bounds of
self-control. Simply this conviction that he knew and did what was
right was more than Tolstoy could bear; for certainly he himself did
not in the least know what was right. Garschin says: “In his view, the
people who passed for good were merely hypocrites, who paraded their
goodness and pretended to the certainty that their work served a good
end.” Turgeniev too saw in Tolstoy this strange, sinister, malicious
bent. He resolved to hold fast to what he considered “right” and not to
lose his self-control; so he avoided Tolstoy, left Saint Petersburg,
where the latter was living, and went first to Moscow and then to
his own estate. But--this is most significant of all, as evidence of
Tolstoy’s state of mind--Tolstoy followed him. Followed him step for
step, “like a lovesick girl,” to use Turgeniev’s own phrase.
All which is very telling, very extraordinary. Above all, it shows how
completely the old Tolstoy, of whom Gorky writes, was foreshadowed
in the young one. Did he really ever find out what was “right”--the
real, the true, the incontrovertible? For others he did, he gave them
conviction. But he himself certainly never got free of the negation and
neutrality of the elemental character. “Rousseau,” he said, “lied and
believed his lies.” Did he believe his own lies? No, for he did not
lie. He was elemental, nihilistic, malicious, and unfathomable. “Would
you very much like to know?” he asks.--“Very much.”--“Then I will
not tell you.” And he smiles and plays with his thumbs. This smile,
this “sly little smile”--Gorky speaks of it again and again. There is
something not only extra-moral but extra-mental, extra-human, about
it; it bespeaks the mystery of the “natural,” the elemental, which is
not at all kindly disposed, but rather takes pleasure in confusion.
According to Gorky, the old man loved to put insidious questions. “What
do you think about yourself?” “Do you love your wife?” “How do you like
mine?” “Do you like me, Alexei Maximovich?”--“Disingenuous!” Gorky
cries. “The whole time, he is making an experiment, testing something
out, as though he were going into battle. It is interesting, but not to
my taste. He is the devil, and I am a babe in arms beside him. He ought
to leave me alone.”
One day Gorky sees the aged Tolstoy sitting alone by the sea. This
scene is the crowning point of his reminiscences. “He sat, his head
on his hands; the wind blew the silver hair of his beard through his
fingers. He was looking far out across the sea, and the little green
waves rolled docilely to his feet and caressed them, as though they
wanted to tell the old wizard something about themselves.... He seemed
like an ancient stone come alive, that knew and pondered the beginning
and end of all things, and what and how would be the end of the stones
and grasses of the earth, the waters of the sea, the whole universe
from the sun to the grain of sand. And the sea is a part of his soul,
and all about him comes from him and out of him. In the old man’s
musing quietude I felt something portentous, magic. I cannot express in
words what I more felt than thought at that moment. In my heart were
rejoicing and fear, then all melted together in one single blissful
feeling: ‘I am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is
living on it.’” And Gorky steals away on his tiptoes that the sand may
not crunch under his tread and disturb the old man’s thoughts.
The mystical reverence that Gorky here depicts is not that which lays
hold on us at sight of the heroes of the idea. Neither Dostoyevsky nor
Schiller has inspired this sort of awe and shuddering, however saintly
they seemed. So much is certain. Nor can the reverence felt for Goethe
be of just this same nature--though akin to it. The Tolstoyan greatness
and remoteness is wild and primeval and pagan in its nature, it is
antecedent to culture. It lacks the human, the humanistic element.
This ancient of days and of wisdom, musing there at the edge of the
everlasting sea, wrapped up in the All, conning the beginning and end
of things--the picture evokes a twilit, prehuman, uncanny world of
feeling, a world of incantations and runes. What he is pondering, the
norns whisper thee by night. He was like, says the shaken beholder,
an ancient stone come alive: note that, a stone, not anything that
civilization has produced, not man made in the likeness of God, not
a human being like Goethe. Goethe’s humanistic divineness is clearly
something quite different from the primeval, pagan formlessness of
Tolstoy’s, which makes Gorky say of him: “He is the devil.” And still,
at the very bottom, the common factor persists: in Goethe too there
is the elemental, the sinister, the dark, neutral, negation- and
confusion-loving devil.