hidden suffering, that opens to us more of his inner self than many
a clear and wise and ordered utterance. “If I am to listen to the
opinion of others,” he said (and only listen to it, observe, not accept
it), “then it must be positively expressed. Problems I have enough in
myself.” That is a confession, put in the form of a demand. It has
a proud, Olympian accent, but the voice that utters it quivers with
impatience, with painful irritation at the inner complications, which
makes it so imperative that the positive should come from without....
“Out of one of his eyes looks an angel,” writes someone who made his
acquaintance on a journey, “out of the other a devil; and his speech is
deep irony on the score of all human affairs.” Of all? That is great,
but it is not generous--and, after all, is he not a man himself? One
who often saw him says: “Today he was altogether in that mood of bitter
humour and sophistical contradictiousness he is so prone to display.”
Again we have the negation, the spirit of contradiction and malice,
of which gentle young Sulpice Boisserée has such a story to tell in
his diary. “At eleven o’clock I am with Goethe again. The invective
continues.” He has a go at all sorts of things: politics, æsthetics,
society, religion, Germany, France, philhellenism, parties, and so
on, in such a style that poor young Boisserée feels--“_mit allen
diesen moquanten Reden_”--as though he were “at a witches’ sabbath.”
That is saying a good deal. It is either too strong, considering the
word “_moquant_” which he uses, or else that word is a good deal too
weak--which is more likely. Anyhow the entry, from the year 1826,
shows the confusion to which the petulant old man could reduce simple
and humble-minded people. An observer who must have been no fool
wrote something about him which stirs a secret horror that is somehow
paralysing. “He is tolerant, without being mild.” Just consider what
that means. Toleration, indulgence, is always, in our human experience,
associated with mildness, with benevolent feeling toward man and the
universe; so far as I know, it is a product of love. But tolerance
_without_ love, _harsh_ tolerance--what would that be? It is more
than human, it is icy neutrality, it is either something godlike or
something devilish.
* * * * *
I shall be saying nothing new, but it may serve to bring order and
clarity into our thoughts to keep the fact before us: all national
character belongs to the natural sphere, and all tendency toward the
cosmopolitan to the spiritual. The word “ethnic” brings together
two conceptions which we do not ordinarily connect, paganism and
nationalism; thus by implication, and conversely, every super-national
and humane point of view is classified in our mind as Christian in
spirit.
Goethe’s alleged devotion to paganism (in the _Wanderjahre_ he reckons
Judaism among the ethnic and heathen folk-religions) would lead us
accordingly to expect of him an outlook basically anti-humanistic and
folk-national. That we should be entirely wrong in this expectation, as
a basic constitution in him, as “nature,” might be arguable. However,
so far as he was himself aware, he was consciously a humanist and a
citizen of the world. Despite all his nature Olympian and divine, he
was in a high degree Christian in spirit. Nietzsche placed Goethe,
historically and psychologically speaking, between Hellenism and
pietism; and thus expressed the combination of creative and critical,
simple and “sentimental,” ancient and modern, in Goethe’s character.
For Goethe’s “pietism” is of course nothing else than his modernity.
Many centuries of Christian cultivation of the subjective--a whole
century of pietistic, introspective, autobiographical discipline--were
needed to make possible a work like _Werther_. Which is as much as
to say that in the impulse to autobiography Christian and democratic
elements are mingled with that naïve, spoilt-darling claim on the
world’s affections of which we spoke above. They are the same as
that democratic tendency out of which Tolstoy likes to consider his
confessions as emanating; when, in true Rousseauian fashion, he
resolves “to write a history of his life, utterly and entirely true
to fact,” in the belief that this “will be more useful to mankind”
than those previous twelve volumes full of literary twaddle. He seems
unaware that they are quite as autobiographical, quite as ethical
in character, as anything could be, and disowns them as pagan and
artistic, as self-indulgent and “irresponsible.”
Goethe, with all his aversion to the “Cross,” did often and expressly
acknowledge his reverence for the Christian idea. It is as significant
as it is surprising to come upon the idea of the sanctity of suffering
in the Pedagogic Province; and if Goethe saw in the Church “elements
of weakness and instability” and in its precepts “_gar viel Dummes_,”
still he bore witness that “there is in the Gospels an effective
resplendence and majesty, issuing from the person of Christ, of a
character in which only the divine appear upon this earth.” “The human
spirit,” he says, with sympathetic and openly acknowledged fellowship,
“will never rise higher than the majesty and moral elevation of
Christianity, as it radiates from the Gospels.” But Goethe’s
Christianity manifests itself in the admirable attitude, as of a pupil
to a master, which he had toward Spinoza, whom he called “_theissimus_”
and of whom he said that nobody had spoken of the Divinity so like
the Saviour as he. If, indeed, the dualistic separation of God and
nature is the fundamental principle of Christianity, then Spinoza was
a pagan, and Goethe was too. But God and nature are not all the world:
there is the human, the humane, as well; and Spinoza’s conception of
humanity is Christian, in so far as he defines the phenomenon man as
the becoming-_conscious_ of the God-nature in the human being, as a
bursting forth out of mere dull being and living; accordingly, as
liberation from nature, and so as _spirit_. Again, there is absolutely
nothing pagan about that famous _Mastery of the Passions by their
Analysis_; and just as little in the Spinozan motif of renunciation
(“_Entsagung_”), which becomes the general motif of Goethe’s life and
work, like the idea of freedom for Schiller and the idea of redemption
for Wagner.
On the contrary, it was just this pathos of renunciation, which cast
such a Christian shade upon the pagan, aristocratic, child-of-nature
well-being of Goethe’s life and lent his spirited features an expressly
Gothic trait of suffering not to be overlooked save by the gross
popular belief in his aristocratic good fortune. How much resignation
must have darkened the end of this apparently consummate and favoured
existence! His life-work, though almost superhuman, remained entirely
a fragment--it is putting it mildly to say that “not all the dreams of
blossoms ripened”--Wagner’s performance, for instance, or Ibsen’s, is
incomparably more a rounded and effective whole. One may put it that
Goethe’s spirit was far more powerful than his nature, greater than his
power to give it form or than his organically allotted span; and it is
easy to understand that vehement demand of his for immortality, which
is one of the magnificent, dæmonic expressions of his personality:
Nature, he cried, was bound to give him a new body when the one he had
could no longer sustain his spirit.
Consider even his love-life, which likewise the popular mind tends
to think of as sunlit and blissful, divinely favoured and without a
cross. Certainly he was much loved and rich in love; certainly to
him much enjoyment was given. In the realm of the erotic he had his
spells of coarseness, when he behaved a little like a garden god:
when, ingenuous and unsentimental as the antique world, he would enjoy
without stint and indulge without a qualm. His marriage, a misalliance,
socially and intellectually, was a result of this attitude of mind.
But where he loved so that lofty poesy was the result, and not merely
a Venetian epigram ticked out in hexameters on a maiden’s back; where
it was serious, the romance regularly ended in renunciation. He never
actually possessed Lotte or Friederike, nor Lilli, nor the Herzlieb,
nor Marianne, nor even Ulrike--and not even Frau von Stein. He never
loved unrequited--unless in the immensely painful, absurdly agitating
affair with little Levetzof. Yet in all these cases resignation was
the order of the day: either on moral grounds, or for the sake of his
freedom. Mostly he bolted.
But the renunciation I mean was a deeper and higher thing. In his
stature, his lineaments, his proportions as he stands today in the
eyes of the nation, he is what he is as the work of renunciation. I
am not speaking generally, I do not refer to the sense of sacrifice
which is the meaning of all art; nor to the struggle with chaos, the
surrender of freedom, the creative constraint which is its inner
essence. Goethe’s pathos of renunciation--or, since we are speaking
of permanent forces dominating the whole of existence, his ethos of
renunciation--is of a more personal kind. It is his destiny, it is
the instinctive mandate of his especially national gift, which was
essentially civilizing in its mission. Or, rather, might this destiny
and mission, this bond, this conditioning limitation and pedagogic duty
of renunciation, be after all something less personal to him than it
just now appeared? Might it perhaps be the law of his destiny, innate
and inviolable save at the expense of heavy spiritual penalties; the
imperative which is the essence of the German spirit, destined always,
as it is, somehow and in some degree, to feel itself called to a
cultural task?--I spoke of the consciousness of a community of feeling,
which Goethe must, at moments, have felt with Christianity. What did
it consist in, and to what had it reference? Goethe pays homage to
the “moral culture” of Christianity--that is, to its humanity, its
civilizing, anti-barbarian influence. It was the same as his; and the
occasional homage he paid it undoubtedly springs from his recognition
that the mission of Christianity within the confines of the Germanic
peoples bore a likeness to his own. And here, in the fact that he
conceived his task, his duty to his nation, as essentially a civilizing
mission, lies the deepest and the most German significance of his
renunciation. Does anyone doubt that there were in Goethe possibilities
of a greatness and growth, wilder, ranker, more disruptive, more
“natural,” than those which his instinct for self-conquest allowed him
to develop, and which today give our mental picture of him so highly
pedagogic a cast? In his _Iphigenia_ the idea of humanity, as opposed
to barbarism, wears the impress of civilization--not in the polemical
and even political sense in which we use the word today, but in the
sense of moral culture. It was a Frenchman, Maurice Barrès, who pointed
out that the _Iphigenia_ is a “civilizing work,” in that it “stands
for the rights of society against the arrogance of intellect.” The
phrase fits almost better that other monument of self-discipline and
self-correction, yes, almost of self-mortification, which has been a
target for ridicule on account of its affected atmosphere of courts and
culture: I mean the _Tasso_. Both are works of resignation, of German
and schoolmasterish renunciation of all the advantages of barbarism.
Wagner, on the other hand, the voluptuary, did not renounce them; he
yielded to them all, with huge effectiveness; and his punishment is
that the acclaim accorded to his riotously national art grows daily
cruder and more popular.
My subject is still the aspiration of the children of nature toward
spirit; which is just as sentimental in kind as is the converse
striving of the sons of the spirit toward nature, and may function with
varying degrees of aptitude or success, with more or less naïveté or
subtlety. Compared with Goethe’s majestic work of spiritualization,
I cannot find that Tolstoy’s struggles to throw off nature’s yoke
were crowned with great success. But I am whimsical enough to relish
putting my finger on the mighty kernel of racial loyalty which dwelt
at the heart of the Christianity of the one and the humanity of
the other. And that kernel was, of course, in other words, their
aristocratic integrity; for racial loyalty is aristocratic by nature,
while Christianity, humanity, and civilization all represent the
conflicting principle of the spirit of democracy, and the process of
spiritualization is at the same time one of democratization. What
Tolstoy aptly calls his “democratic trend”--aptly, because the word
“trend” implies a will and a direction somewhither, indicating an
effort and not mere being--finds emphatic expression now and again in
Goethe as well. “One would have,” he says, “to become _Catholic_ at
once, in order to have a share in the lives of humanity!” To mingle
with humanity, on equal terms, to lead the life of the people, and in
the market-place, seems at such moments happiness to him. “In these
small sovereign states,” he cries, “what wretched, isolated men
we are!” And he praises Venice as a monument to the power, not of
a single despot, but of a whole people. But such phrases, clearly,
are meant more correctively than absolutely; they are self-critical
comments, meant to redress the balance of his German and Protestant
aristocratism--“tendencies,” then, sentimental leanings, of the same
kind as the radical and pacifistic bent of the Russian giant, in
whose “holiness” a penetrating eye can see so much self-deception,
childishness, and “let’s pretend.”
A close observer like Gorky, or a shrewd critic like Merezhkovsky, felt
at once and keenly the patriarchal and sensual quality, the life-bound
animalism, which lay beneath the sanctification. Tolstoy married at
thirty-four the eighteen-year-old Sophia Alexandrovna Behrs, who from
then on was scarcely ever anything but “expectant,” and was confined
thirteen times. Through long, creative years, his marriage was an idyll
of family life, full of healthy, god-fearing animal pleasure, against
a lavish economic background of agriculture and cattle-breeding. The
atmosphere was Judaic Old Testament rather than Christian. Tolstoy
knows the same great simple love of existence, the everlasting
childlike joy of life, that possessed Goethe’s soul. When he “praises
each day for its beauty,” when he “marvels at the richness of God’s
kingdom” expressing itself therein, how “each day He sends some new
thing to distinguish it,” we feel a better understanding of what lay
at the bottom of Goethe’s conception of “_Behagen_.” Waves of piercing
sensuous enjoyment of nature break upon him even in the years of gloom,
when he meditates suicide, plans the _Confession_--in short, conjures
up that misunderstanding to which his sanctification falls prey, and
dehumanizes and shrinks the majesty of the patriarch, christianizes and
conventionalizes it into the Anglo-Indian model.
Merezhkovsky called him the great seer of the body, in contrast to
Dostoyevsky the visionary of the soul; and truly it is the body to
which his love and deepest interest belong, to which his knowledge
refers, by which his genius is conditioned. We see this so clearly
in his reaction to old age. In 1894 he writes: “Age is approaching.
That means the hair falls out, the teeth decay, the wrinkles come,
the breath gets bad. Even before the end, everything turns frightful,
disgusting; sweat, rouge, powder, all sorts of beastliness. Then
what has become of that which I have served? Where has beauty gone?
It is the essence of everything. Without it there is nothing, no
life.”--This description of dying while the body still lives, may
pass for Christian, by virtue of its insistence on misery and its
characterization of the flesh, revolting and insulting on the spiritual
side. But the physical apprehension of old age and death is through and
through pagan and sensual.
Aksakov says of Tolstoy: “His gift is _bearlike_ in kind and degree.”
And is it not this “bearlike” quality of his genius that made Tolstoy
“the great writer of Russia,” the author of _War and Peace_, the epic
poet of the people’s struggle against Rome, against Napoleon? I openly
declare my deliberate intention to cast doubt on the pacifism which
the prophet of humanity so didactically professed. Not, I hasten to
add, from any anti-pacifistic sentiments on my own part; merely out
of a sense of humour. That Tolstoy was in his youth a soldier and
an officer, we know. From his biography we learn that he was heart
and soul a soldier; and we have evidence of his heroic and warlike
enthusiasm in the Sebastopol days--that “splendid time,” that “glorious
time,” that time of touching pride in the Russian army, when he was
confessedly saturated with patriotic feeling and thrilled by his
experience of comradery under arms, first felt when the serious moment
is at hand. His attitude toward the Serbo-Turkish war of 1877 is still
full of conviction. It is a _real_ war, he says, and it moves him.
The distinction between “real” and “unreal” doubtless indicates some
progress in the direction of pacifism. But is pacifism “real” so long
as it is conditional and must progress in order to exist?
In 1812, at least, there _was_ a “real” war, and its history occupied
Tolstoy long before he became the great writer of Russia by dint of it.
He treated of it, quite in the patriotic key, in his school at Yasnaya
Polyana. From all we hear, he dealt with it on a mythical rather than
a historical basis; but he expressly declared that he presented his
pupils with these legends of a warlike mythology in order to rouse
their patriotic feeling. And then the root-and-branch Russianism, the
fundamental folk-character of his peasant-patrician nature, comes out
strong in his epos, whose theme is a defensive war waged against the
invasion of Latin civilization. _War and Peace_ had a huge popular
success, though the critics and military men had some fault to find.
_On the intellectual side it was weak_, they said; its philosophy of
history was narrow and superficial; it was mysticism and sophistry to
deny the influence of individuals on events. But the creative power,
the “bearlike” strength of it, were unanimously declared to be beyond
all discussion, as well as its enormous genuineness as a folk-epic.
The liberal criticism of Russia admitted that it was “Russian to the
core,” that it “presented the soul of the Russian people, in its
whole range and variety, in all its lofty simplicity, with a sheer
creative power that had never been equalled.” But the critics took in
bad part Tolstoy’s “wilful remoteness from all contemporary _currents
of progress_”--a phenomenon and a reproach which were to recur with
the appearance of _Anna Karenine_. “_Anna Karenine_ I don’t like,”
Turgeniev wrote, “though there are splendid things in it: the race, the
mowing, the hunt. But the whole thing is soured; it _smells of Moscow_,
and old maids and incense and Slavophils and high life and all that.”
In a word, Turgeniev, the _Sapadnik_, rejected with horror the oriental
element in the novel, and with him went the whole liberal-radical
party; some ignored _Anna Karenine_, others sneered or called names,
while the Slavophils and the aristocrats and court party rubbed their
hands in glee. In fact Tolstoy, in an intellectual and political
sense, had the reactionaries on his side; and they could have little
appreciation of the artistic qualities of his work. The liberals were
liberal enough to know how to value these, and they did so, albeit in
that state of bewilderment into which people always fall at the sight
of genius in the camp of reaction. Witness the bewilderment of Europe
over Bismarck.
The paradox is worth a little attention. Our idealists would have us
believe that genius, the creative power, must, as a living force, act
only in the service of progress and human purpose, and be justly denied
to the forces which side against life, show sympathy with death, and
are inimical to freedom and progress and thus bad in the human sense.
We would almost accept it as metaphysical evidence for the goodness
of a thing if a capital piece of writing were done in its name. And
really, it does seem that, as a rule, the reactionary camp suffers
from lack of talent. But not invariably. The reactionary genius does
occur, the brilliant and conquering ability does act as attorney for
retrograde tendencies--and nothing dazes the world more than the
sight of this paradoxical phenomenon. Sainte-Beuve said of Joseph de
Maistre that he had “nothing of a writer but the gift”--a comment which
perfectly expresses this bewilderment and precisely indicates the thing
I mean.
Liberal and progressive Russia must have seen in Tolstoy just this--a
case of a great gift in the service of reaction. But it is clear enough
that this great gift is of one essence with his fundamental Russianism,
his immense integration with the people, his pagan and natural
aristocracy; and that the tendency toward democratic spiritualization
was--just tendency, romantic in its nature and crowned, after all, by
such strikingly indifferent success! His tremendous orientalism found
intellectual expression in this mockery at and denial of European
progress; and this it was which must necessarily and profoundly
alienate all the westernizing and liberalizing, all the “Petrinic”
elements in Russia. Actually, he quite frankly scouted the western
belief in progress, which, he said, had been accepted by the Russia of
Peter the Great. They had, he said, observed the operation of the law
of progress in the Duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three
thousand inhabitants. But then came China, with its two hundred million
inhabitants, and knocked the theory of progress into a cocked hat.
Which did not for one moment prevent them from believing in progress as
a general law of mankind; they took the field with cannons and guns to
instruct the Chinese in their thesis. Yet ordinary human understanding
tells us that if the history of the larger part of mankind, which we
call the Orient, does not confirm the law of progress, then this law
does not obtain for the whole of mankind, but forms at most an article
of faith for a certain part of it. Tolstoy vows that he himself is
unable to find a universal law in the life of mankind, and that history
might be co-ordinated just as well in the light of any other idea or
“historical whimsy” as in that of progress. And more than that, he does
not see the slightest necessity of finding laws for history--quite
apart from the impossibility of the thing. The universal, eternal law
of perfection, he says, stands written in the soul of every human
being; it is only an error to carry it over into the field of history.
So long as it remains personal, this law is fruitful and accessible to
all; applied to historical conceptions, it is idle talk. The general
progress of mankind is an unproved thesis. It does not exist for any
of the nations of the east; hence it is just as unfounded to assert
that progress is a primary law of mankind as it would be to say that
blondness is--all people being blond save those with dark hair.
It is remarkable to see how ideas from the sphere of an idealistic
individualism, which is German, and places human perfection within
the individual soul, are here found in the company of others which
constitute the most decisive challenge to an arrogant Europe setting
itself up as intellectual arbiter of the world. Tolstoy protests
against what he considers the childishness of this attitude, which
confuses western Europe with humanity as a whole; and the protest
betrays that his gaze is directed eastward. It betrays, in a word, his
Asiatic bias: anti-“Petrinic,” primitive Russian, anti-civilization--in
short, _bearlike_. What we hear is the voice of the Russian god on the
maple throne under the golden lime-tree.
The voice of our humanistic deity has a different ring. Goethe, beyond
a doubt, hated and scorned Asia. The element of Sarmatian wildness
in which Tolstoy found himself so much at home and which merely gets
rationalized in his late prophetic period, would always remain remote
and foreign to the spirit of the great German, with its exclusively
cultural bias. A journey Goethe once made into Upper Silesian Poland
was the occasion of what contact he had with the Slav. His impressions
are “mostly remarkable negatively.” He observes ignorance, lack of
culture, low standards of living, stupidity. He feels himself “remote
from cultured men.” His attitude at the time of the War of Liberation,
offensive as it was to patriotic feeling, the admiring and personally
friendly respect he felt for the classic phenomenon of Napoleon (“the
man is too big for you”) belong in this same category. “It is true,” he
says in 1813, “I no longer see French and Italians, but in their stead
I see Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Kashubes, brown and other
hussars.” This enumeration of eastern races has an extraordinarily
contemptuous ring. That the Cossacks and Kashubes were in the country
as allies and the French as enemies seems not to matter to him.
He confesses, indeed, that he too is glad to be rid of the Gallic
_soldatesca_; yet he is obviously not far from finding more humiliation
in the alliance with Russia and the dependence of Germany upon the
east than in her subjugation upon the west; and certain it is that the
humanism of the writer who created the _Iphigenia_ has more affiliation
with the humanity of western Europe, which has given the mould to our
civilization, than with the soft and savage human nature of Half-Asia.