TOLSTOISM.
COUNT LEO TOLSTOI has become in the last few years one of the
best-known, and apparently, also, of the most widely-read authors in
the world. Every one of his words awakens an echo among all civilized
nations on the globe. His strong influence over his contemporaries is
unmistakable. But it is no artistic influence. No one has yet imitated
him--at least, for the present. He has formed no school after the
manner of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. The already large number
of writings to which he has given occasion are explanatory or critical.
There are no poetical creations modelled upon his own. The influence
which he exercises over contemporary thoughts and feelings is a moral
one, and applies far more to the great bulk of his readers than to the
smaller circle of struggling authors who are on the look-out for a
leader. What we, then, can call Tolstoism is no æsthetic theory, but
rather a conception of life.
In order to bring forward the proof that Tolstoism is a mental
aberration, that it is a form of the phenomenon of degeneration, it
will be necessary to look critically first at Tolstoi himself, and then
at the public which is inspired by his thoughts.
Tolstoi is at once a poet and a philosopher, the latter in the widest
sense--_i.e._, he is a theologian, a moralist, and a social theorist.
As the author of works of imagination he stands very high, even if he
does not equal his countryman Tourgenieff, whom he at present appears
in the estimation of most people to have thrown into the shade.
Tolstoi does not possess the splendid sense of artistic proportion of
Tourgenieff, with whom there is never a word too much, who neither
protracts his subject nor digresses from his point, and who, as a
grand and genuine creator of men, stands Prometheus-like over the
figures he has inspired with life. Even Tolstoi’s greatest admirers
admit that he is long-winded, loses himself in details, and does not
always know how to sacrifice the unessential in order, with sure
judgment, to enhance the indispensable. Speaking of the novel _War
and Peace_, M. de Vogüé[155] says: ‘Is this complicated work properly
to be termed a novel?... The very simple and very loose thread of the
plot serves to connect chapters on history, politics, philosophy,
which are all crammed promiscuously into this polygraphy of Russian
life.... Enjoyment has here to be purchased in a manner resembling a
mountain ascent. The way is often wearisome and hard; at times one
goes astray; effort is necessary and toil.... Those who only seek
diversion in fiction are by Tolstoi driven from their wonted ways.
This close analyst does not know, or else disdains, the first duty of
analysis, which is so natural to the French genius; we desire that the
novelist should select; that he should set apart a person, a fact, out
of the chaos of beings and things, in order to observe the objects
of his choice. The Russian, governed by the feeling of universal
interdependence, cannot make up his mind to cut the thousand cords
which unite a man, a fact, a thought, to the whole course of the world.’
Vogüé sees rightly that these facts are deserving of notice, but he
cannot explain them. Unconsciously he has clearly characterized the
method with which a mystical degenerate looks upon the world, and
depicts its phenomena. We know that it is lack of attention which
constitutes the peculiarity of mystical thought. It is attention which
selects from the chaos of phenomena, and so groups what it selects as
to illustrate the predominating thought in the mind of the beholder.
If attention fails, the world appears to the beholder like a uniform
stream of enigmatic states, which emerge and disappear without any
connection, and remain completely without expression to consciousness.
These primary facts of mental life must ever be kept in view by the
reader. The attitude of the attentive man in the face of external
phenomena is one of activity; that of the inattentive man is passive;
the former orders them according to a plan which he has worked out in
his mind; the latter receives the turmoil of their impress without
attempting to organize, separate, or co-ordinate. The difference is
the same as that between the reproduction of the scenes of nature by a
good painter and a photographic plate. The painting suppresses certain
features in the world’s phenomena, and brings others into prominence,
so that it at once permits a distinct external incident, or a definite
internal emotion of the painter, to be recognised. The photograph
reflects the whole scene with all its details indiscriminately, so
that it is without meaning, until the beholder brings into play his
attention, which the sensitive plate could not do. At the same time it
is to be observed that even the photograph is not a true impression
of reality, for the sensitive plate is only sensitive to certain
colours; it records the blue and violet, and receives from yellow and
red either a weak impression or none at all. The sensitiveness of
the chemical plate corresponds to the emotionalism of the degenerate
mind. The latter also makes a choice among phenomena, not, however,
according to the laws of conscious attention, but according to the
impulse of unconscious emotionalism. He perceives whatever is in tune
with his emotions; what is not consonant with them does not exist for
him. Thus arises the method of work which Vogüé has pointed out in
Tolstoi’s novels. The details are perceived equally, and placed side
by side, not according to their importance for the leading idea, but
according to their relation with the emotions of the novelist. For that
matter, there is scarcely any leading idea, or none at all. The reader
must first carry it into the novel, as he would carry it into Nature
herself, into a landscape, into a crowd of people, into the course of
events. The novel is only written because the novelist felt certain
strong emotions, and certain features of the world’s panorama as it
unrolled before his eyes intensified these emotions. Thus, the novel
of Tolstoi resembles the picture of the pre-Raphaelites: an abundance
of amazingly accurate details,[156] a mystically blurred, scarcely
recognisable, leading idea,[157] a deep and strong emotion.[158] This
is also distinctly felt by M. de Vogüé, but again without his being
able to explain it. He says:[159] ‘Through a peculiar and frequent
contradiction, this troubled, vacillating mind, steeped as it is in the
mists of Nihilism, is endowed with an incomparable clearness and power
of penetration for the scientific (?) study of the phenomena of life.
He sees distinctly, rapidly, analytically, everything on earth.... One
might say, the mind of an English chemist in the soul of an Indian
Buddhist. Let anyone who can explain this singular union; whoever
succeeds will be able to explain Russia.... These phenomena, which
offer so firm a basis to him when he observes them singly, he wishes
to know in their universal relations, and to arrive at the definite
laws governing these relations, and at their inaccessible causes. Then
it is that this clear vision darkens, the intrepid inquirer loses his
footing, he falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions; in
him and around him he feels only nothingness and night.’
M. de Vogüé wishes for an explanation of this ‘singular union’ between
great clearness in apprehension of details, and complete incapacity of
understanding their relations to each other. The explanation is now
familiar to my readers. The mystical intellect, the intellect without
attention, of the _émotif_ conveys to his consciousness isolated
impressions, which can be very distinct if they relate to his emotions;
but it is not in the condition to connect these isolated impressions
intelligibly, just because it is deficient in the attention necessary
to this object.
Grand as are the qualities which Tolstoi’s works of fiction possess, it
is not them he has to thank for his world-wide fame, or his influence
on his contemporaries. His novels were recognised as remarkable works,
but for decades of years neither _Peace and War_, nor _Anna Karenina_,
nor his short stories, had very many readers outside Russia; and the
critics bestowed upon their author only a guarded commendation. In
Germany, as recently as 1882, Franz Bornmüller said of Tolstoi in his
_Biographical Dictionary of Authors of the Present Time_: ‘He possesses
no ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due artistic finish,
and which is influenced by a certain one-sidedness in his views of life
and history.’ This was the opinion until a few years ago of the not
very numerous non-Russian readers who knew him at all.
In 1889 his _Kreutzer Sonata_ appeared, and was the first of his
works to carry his name to the borders of civilization. This little
tale was the first to be translated into all cultivated languages. It
was disseminated in hundreds of thousands of copies, and was read by
millions with lively emotion. From this time onward the public opinion
of the Western nations placed him in the first rank of living authors:
his name was in everyone’s mouth, and universal sympathy turned not
only towards his early writings (which had remained unnoticed for
decades), but also to his person and his career, and he became, as it
were, in a night what he unquestionably is now in the evening of his
life--one of the chief representative figures of the departing century.
Yet the _Kreutzer Sonata_ stands, as a poetic creation, not so high
as most of his older works. A fame which was not gained by _War and
Peace_, _The Cossacks_, _Anna Karenina_, etc., nor, indeed, until long
after the appearance of these rich creations, but came at one stroke
through the _Kreutzer Sonata_, cannot therefore depend either solely
or principally on æsthetic excellence. The history of this fame shows
consequently that Tolstoi the novelist is not the cause of Tolstoism.
In fact, the tendency of mind so named is far more--perhaps wholly and
entirely--traceable to Tolstoi the philosopher. The philosopher is,
therefore, incomparably more important to our inquiry than the novelist.
Tolstoi has formed certain views on the position of man in the world,
on his relation to collective humanity, and on the aim of his life,
which are visible in all his creations, but which he has also set forth
connectedly in several theoretic works, especially in _My Confession_,
_My Faith_, _A Short Exposition of the Gospel_, and _About my Life_.
These views are but little complicated, and can be condensed in a
few words: the individual is nothing; the species is everything; the
individual lives in order to do his fellow-creatures good; thought and
inquiry are great evils; science is perdition; faith is salvation.
How he arrived at these results is related in _My Confessions_: ‘I lost
my faith early. I lived for a long time like everyone else, in the
frivolities of life. I wrote books, and taught, like everyone else,
what I did not know. Then the Sphinx began to follow me more and more
ruthlessly: “Guess my problem or I will tear thee to pieces.” Science
has explained absolutely nothing to me. In answer to my everlasting
question, the only one which means anything, “Wherefore am I alive?”
Science replied by teaching me things that were indifferent to me.
Science only said ...: “Life is a senseless evil.” I wanted to kill
myself. Finally I had a fancy to see how the vast majority of men lived
who, unlike us of the so-called upper classes, who give ourselves up to
pondering and investigation, work and suffer, and are, nevertheless,
quiet and clear in their minds over the aim of life. I understood that
to live like these men one must return to their simple beliefs.’
If this train of thought is seriously considered, it will be recognised
at once as nonsensical. The question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ is
incorrectly and superficially put. It tacitly presupposes the idea of
finality in nature, and it is just upon this presupposition that the
mind, thirsting earnestly for truth and knowledge, has to exercise its
criticism.
In order to ask, ‘What is the aim of our life?’ we must take for
granted, above all, that our life has a definite aim, and since it is
only a particular phenomenon in the universal life of nature, in the
evolution of our earth, of our solar system, of all solar systems,
this assumption includes in itself the wider one, that the universal
life of Nature has a definite aim. This assumption, again, necessarily
presupposes the rule of a conscious, prescient, and guiding mind over
the universe. For what is an aim? The fore-ordained effect in the
future of forces active in the present. The aim exercises an influence
on these forces in pointing out to them a direction, and is thus itself
a force. It cannot, however, exist objectively, in time and space,
because then it would cease to be an aim and become a cause, _i.e._, a
force fitting in with the general mechanism of the forces of nature,
and all the speculation concerning the aim would fall to the ground.
But if it is not objective, if it does not exist in time and space, it
must, in order to be conceivable, exist somewhere, virtually, as idea,
as a plan and design. But that which contains a design, a thought, a
plan, we name consciousness; and a consciousness that can conceive
a plan of the universe, and for its realization designedly uses the
forces of nature, is synonymous with God. If a man, however, believes
in a God, he loses at once the right to raise the question, ‘Wherefore
am I alive?’ Since it is in that case an insolent presumption, an
effort of small, weak man to look over God’s shoulder, to spy out God’s
plan, to aspire to the height of omniscience. But neither is it in such
a case necessary, since a God without the highest wisdom cannot be
conceived, and if He has devised a plan for the world, this is certain
to be perfect, all its parts are in harmony, and the aim to which every
co-operator, from the smallest to the greatest, will devote himself
is the best conceivable. Thus, man can live in complete rest and
confidence in the impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because
he, in every case, fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in
a, to him, unknown Divine plan of the world.
If, on the other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also
impossible to form a conception of the aim, for then the aim, existing
in consciousness only as an idea, in the absence of a universal
consciousness, has no locus for its existence; there is no place
for it in Nature. But if there is no aim, then one cannot ask the
question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ Then life has not a predetermined
aim, but only causes. We have then to concern ourselves only with these
causes--at least, with the more proximate, and which are accessible to
our examination, since the remote, and especially the first, causes
elude our cognition. Our question must then run, ‘Why do we live?’
and we find the answer to it without difficulty. We live, because we
stand, like the rest of cognizable Nature, under the universal law of
causality. This is a mechanical law, which requires no predetermined
plan, and no design, consequently also no universal consciousness.
According to this law present phenomena are grounded on the past,
not on the future. We live because we are engendered by our parents,
because we have received from them a definite measure of force, which
makes it possible for us to resist for a given time the influence
upon us of Nature’s forces of dissolution. How our life is shaped is
determined by the constant interaction of our inherited organic forces
and of our environment. Our life is, therefore, objectively viewed,
the necessary result of the law-governed activity of the mechanical
forces of Nature. Subjectively it includes a quantity of pleasures and
pains. We feel as pleasure the satisfaction of our organic impulses, as
pain their fruitless struggles for satisfaction. In a sound organism,
possessing a high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only attain
development, the satisfaction of which is possible--at least, to a
certain degree--and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the
individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails decidedly
over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an evil, but as a great
good. In the organism deranged by disease degenerate appetites exist
which cannot be satisfied, or of which the gratification injures
or destroys the individual, or the degenerate organism is too weak
or too inapt to gratify the legitimate impulses. In his life pain
necessarily predominates, and he looks upon existence as an evil.
My interpretation of the riddle of life is nearly related to the
well-known theory of eudæmonism, but it is founded on a biological,
not a metaphysical, basis. It explains optimism and pessimism simply
as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence or absence of
adaptability, as health or illness. Unprejudiced observation of life
shows that the whole of mankind stands knowingly or unknowingly at the
same philosophical standpoint. Men live willingly, and rather quietly
happy than sadly, so long as existence affords them gratification. If
the sufferings are stronger than the feeling of pleasure conferred
by the satisfaction of the first and most important of all organic
impulses--the impulse of life or self-preservation--then they do not
hesitate to kill themselves. When Prince Bismarck once said, ‘I do
not know why I should bear all the troubles of life, if I were not
able to believe in a God and a future life,’ it only shows that he is
insufficiently acquainted with the progress of human thought since
Hamlet, who raised somewhat the same question. He bears the troubles
of life because, and as long as, he can bear them, and he throws them
down infallibly at the moment in which his strength is no longer
adequate to carry them. The unbeliever lives and is happy, so long as
the sweets of life weigh down the scale, and for this reason also the
believer, as experience daily teaches, will commit suicide if he sees
his balance of life’s account yielding a deficit of satisfaction. The
arguments of religion have undoubtedly in the mind of the believer, as
have the arguments of duty and honour in the mind of the unbeliever, a
convincing force, and must likewise be taken into account as so many
assets. Nevertheless they have only a limited, if high value, and can
counterbalance their own equivalent of suffering only, and no more.
From these considerations it follows that the terrible
question--‘Wherefore am I alive?’--which nearly drove Tolstoi to
suicide, is to be answered satisfactorily and without difficulty. The
believer, who accepts the fact that his life must have an aim, will
live according to his inclinations and powers, and tell himself that he
performs correctly, in this way, his allotted portion of the world’s
work without knowing its final aim; as also a soldier, at that point
of the field of battle where he is placed, does his duty willingly,
without having any notion of the general progress of the fight, and
of its significance for the whole campaign. The unbeliever, who is
convinced that his life is a particular instance of the universal
life of Nature, that his individuality has blossomed into existence
as a necessary law-governed operation of eternal organic forces,
knows also very well not only ‘wherefore,’ but also ‘what for,’ he is
alive; he lives because, and as long as, life is to him a source of
gratification--that is to say, of joy and happiness.
Has Tolstoi found any other answer by his desperate seeking? No. The
explanation which his pondering and searching did not offer him was,
as we have seen in the above-quoted passage in _My Confessions_, given
him by ‘the enormous majority of mankind, who ... labour and suffer,
and, nevertheless, are quiet and clear in their minds as to the aim
of life.’ ‘I understood,’ he adds, ‘that one must return to their
simple faith to live as these men do.’ The conclusion is arbitrary,
and is a _saltum_ of mystic thought. ‘The masses live quietly, and are
clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ not because they have
a ‘simple faith,’ but because they are healthy, because they like
to feel themselves alive, because life gives them, in every organic
function, in every manifestation of their powers, at every moment,
some gratification. The ‘simple faith’ is the accidental accompanying
phenomenon of this natural optimism. No doubt the majority of the
uneducated classes, who represent the healthy portion of mankind,
and therefore certainly rejoice in life, receive, during childhood,
instruction in religious faith, and afterwards only rarely rectify
through their own thought the errors which, for state reasons, have
been imparted to them; but their unthinking belief is a consequence
of their poverty and ignorance, like their bad clothing, insufficient
food, and insanitary dwellings. To say that the majority ‘live quietly,
and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ because they ‘have
simple faith,’ is quite as logical a sequitur as the assertion that
this majority ‘live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim
of life’ because they chiefly eat potatoes, or because they live in
cellars, or because they seldom take baths.
Tolstoi has rightly noticed the fact that the majority do not share
his pessimism, and rejoice in their life, but he has explained it
mystically. Instead of recognising that the optimism of the masses is
simply a sign of their vitality, he traces it to their belief, and
then seeks in faith the clue to the aim of his existence. ‘I was led
to Christianity,’ he writes in another book,[160] ‘neither through
theological nor historical research, but by the circumstance that
when, at fifty years of age, I asked myself and the wise among my
acquaintance what myself and my life might signify, and received the
answer: “You are an accidental concatenation of parts; there is no
significance in life; life as such is an evil.”--I was then brought
to despair, and wished to kill myself. Remembering, however, that
formerly, in childhood, when I believed, life had a meaning for me,
and that the people about me who believe--the greater number being men
unspoilt by riches--both believe and lead real lives, I doubted the
accuracy of the answer which had been given me by the wisdom of my
circle, and endeavoured to understand that answer which Christianity
gives to men who lead a real life.’[161]
He found this answer ‘in the Gospels, that source of light.’ ‘It was
quite the same thing to me,’ he goes on to say, ‘whether Jesus was
God or not God; whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from the one or the
other. It was likewise neither necessary nor important for me to know
when and by whom the Gospel, or any one of the parables, was composed,
and whether they could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was
important was that Light, which for eighteen hundred years was the
Light of the World, and is that Light still, but what name was to be
given to the source of this Light, or what were its component parts,
and by whom it was lighted, was quite indifferent to me.’
Let us appraise this process of thought in a mystical mind. The
Gospel is the source of truth; it is, however, quite the same thing
whether the Gospel is God’s revelation or man’s work, and whether it
contains the genuine tradition of the life of Christ, or whether it
was written down hundreds of years after his death on the basis of
obscured and distorted traditions. Tolstoi himself feels that he here
makes a great error of thought, but he deceives himself over and out
of it in genuine mystical fashion, in that he makes use of a simile,
and pretends that his image was the matter-of-fact truth. He speaks,
namely, of the Gospel as a light, and says it is indifferent to him
what that light is called, and of what it consists. This is correct if
it concerns a real, material light, but the Gospel is only figuratively
a light, and can obviously, therefore, be compared to a light only if
it contains the truth. Whether it does contain the truth should first
be decided by inquiry. Should inquiry result in establishing that it
is man’s work, and consists only in unauthenticated traditions, then
it would evidently be no receptacle of truth, and one could not any
longer compare it with light, and the magnificent image with which
Tolstoi cuts short inquiry into the source of the light would vanish
into air. While, therefore, Tolstoi calls the Gospel a light, and
denies the necessity of following up its origin, he forthwith takes as
proven the very thing which is to be proved, namely, that the Gospel
is a light. We know already, however, the peculiarity of mystics to
found all their conclusions on the most senseless premises, alleging
contempt of reality and resisting all reasonable verification of their
starting-point. I only remind the reader of Rossetti’s sentence, ‘What
does it matter to me whether the sun revolves round the earth, or the
earth round the sun?’ and of Mallarmé’s expression, ‘The world is made
in order to lead to a beautiful book.’
One can read for one’s self in his _Short Exposition_ how Tolstoi
handles the Gospel, so that it may give him the required explanation.
He does not trouble himself in the least about the literal sense of
the Scriptures, but puts into them what is in his own head. The Gospel
which he has so recast has about as much resemblance to the canonical
Scriptures as the _Physiognomische Fragmente_, which Jean Paul’s
‘merry little schoolmaster, Maria Wuz in Auenthal,’ ‘drew out of his
own head,’ had with Lavater’s work of the same title. This Gospel of
his taught him concerning the importance of life as follows:[162] ‘Men
imagine that they are isolated beings, each one shaping his own life
as he wills. This, however, is a delusion. The only true life is that
which acknowledges the will of the Father as the source of life. This
unity of life my teaching reveals, and represents that life, not as
separate shoots, but as a single tree on which all the shoots grow. He
only who lives in the will of the Father, like a shoot on the tree,
has life; but he who would live according to his own will, like a
severed shoot, dies.’ He has already said that the Father is synonymous
with God, and that God, who ‘is the eternal origin of all things,’
is synonymous with ‘Spirit.’ If, then, this passage has any sense at
all, it can only be that the whole of Nature is a single living being,
that every single living being, therefore also every human being, is a
portion of universal life, and that this universal life is God. This
teaching is, however, not invented by Tolstoi. It has a name in the
history of philosophy, and is called Pantheism. It is shadowed forth in
Buddhism[163] and Greek Hylozoism, and was elaborated by Spinoza. It
is certainly not contained in the Gospel, and it is a definite denial
of Christianity which, let its dogmas be ever so rationalistically
interpreted and tortured, can never give up its doctrine of a personal
God and the Divine nature of Christ without ridding itself of its whole
religious import and its vitally important organs, and ceasing to be a
creed.
Thus we see that, though Tolstoi supposes he has succeeded in his
attempt to explain life’s problems by the Christian faith of the
masses, he has, on the contrary, fallen into its very opposite,
namely, Pantheism. The reply of the ‘wise,’ that he ‘is an accidental
concatenation of parts, and that there is no significance in life,’
‘drove him almost to suicide’; he is, on the contrary, quite tranquil
in the knowledge that[164] ‘the true life is ...not the life which is
past, nor that which will be, but is the life which now is, that which
confronts everyone at the present minute’; he expressly denies in _My
Religion_ the resurrection of the body and the individuality of the
soul, and does not notice that the teaching which contents him is quite
the same as that of the ‘wise,’ who ‘almost drove him into suicide.’
For if life exists only in the present, it can have no aim, since this
would refer to the future; and if the body does not rise again, and the
soul has no individual existence, then the ‘wise’ are quite right to
call the human being (certainly not accidental, but necessary, because
causally conditioned) ‘a concatenation of parts.’
Tolstoi’s theory of life, the fruit of the despairing mental labour
of his whole life, is therefore, nothing but a haze, a failure to
comprehend his own questions and answers, and hollow verbiage. His
ethics--on which he himself lays a far greater stress than on his
philosophy--is not in much better case than the latter. He comprises
them[165] in five laws, of which the fourth is the most important: ‘Do
not resist evil; suffer wrong, and do more than men ask; and so judge
not, nor suffer to be judged....’ To avenge one’s self only teaches to
avenge one’s self. His admirer, M. de Vogüé, expresses Tolstoi’s moral
philosophy in this form:[166] ‘Resist not evil, judge not, kill not.
Consequently no courts of justice, no armies, no prisons, no public
or private reprisals. No wars nor judgments. The world’s law is the
struggle for existence; the law of Christ is the sacrifice of one’s own
existence for others.’
Is it still necessary to point out the unreasonableness of these
ethics? It is obvious to sound common-sense without saying any more.
If the murderer had no longer to fear the gallows, and the thief the
prison, throat-cutting and stealing would be soon by far the most
generally adopted trade. It is so much more convenient to filch baked
bread and ready-made boots than to rack one’s self at the plough and in
the workshop. If society should cease to take care that crime should
be a dangerous risk, what would there be, forsooth, to deter wicked
men, who certainly exist, according to Tolstoi’s assumption, from
surrendering themselves to their basest impulses; and how could the
great mass of indifferent people be restrained, who have no pronounced
leaning either for good or for evil, from imitating the example of the
criminal? Certainly not Tolstoi’s own teaching that ‘the true life is
life in the present.’ The first active measures of society, for the
sake of which individuals originally formed themselves into a society,
is the protection of their members against those who are diseased
with homicidal mania, and against the parasites--another unhealthy
variation from the normal human type--who can only live by the work of
others, and who, to appease all their lusts, unscrupulously overpower
every human being who crosses their path. Individuals with anti-social
impulses would soon be in the majority if the healthy members did not
subdue them, and make it difficult for them to thrive. Were they once
to become the stronger, society, and soon mankind itself, would of a
necessity be devoted to destruction.
In addition to the negative precept that one should not resist evil,
Tolstoi’s moral philosophy has yet a positive precept, viz.: we ought
to love all men; to sacrifice everything, even one’s own life, for
them; to do good to them where we can. ‘It is necessary to understand
that man, if he does good, only does that to which he is bound--what
he cannot leave undone.... If he gives up his carnal life for the
good, he does nothing for which he need be thanked and praised....
Only those live who do good’ (_Short Exposition of the Gospel_). ‘Not
is alms-giving effectual, but brotherly sharing. Whoever has two
cloaks should give one to him who has none’ (_What ought one to Do?_).
This distinction between charity and sharing cannot be maintained in
earnest. Every gift that a man receives from some other man without
work, without reciprocal service, is an alms, and as such is deeply
immoral. The sick, the old, the weak, those who cannot work, must be
supported and tended by their fellow-creatures; it is their duty,
and it is also their natural impulse. But to give to men capable of
working is under all circumstances a sin and a self-deception. If men
capable of work find no work, this is obviously attributable to some
defect in the economical structure of society; and it is the duty of
each individual to assist earnestly in removing this defect, but not
to facilitate its continuance by pacifying for awhile the victim of
the defective circumstances by a gift. Charity has in this case merely
the aim of deadening the conscience of the donor, and furnishing him
with an excuse why he should shirk his duty of curing recognised evils
in the constitution of society. Should, however, the capable man be
averse to labour, then charity spoils him completely, and kills in
him entirely any inclination to put his powers into action, which
alone keeps the organism healthy and moral. Thus alms, extended to
an able-bodied man, degrades both the donor and the recipient, and
operates like poison on the feeling of duty and the morality of both.
But the love of our neighbour which exhibits itself in alms-giving,
or even brotherly sharing, is, properly speaking, no such love if
we look at it closely. Love in its simplest and most original form
(I speak here not of sexual love, but of general sympathy for some
other living being, and that need not even be a human being) is a
selfish impulse, which seeks only its own gratification, not that of
the beloved being; in its higher development, on the contrary, it
is principally, or wholly, bent upon the happiness of the beloved
being, and forgets itself. The healthy man, who has no anti-social
impulses, enjoys the company of other men; he therefore avoids almost
unconsciously those actions which would cause his fellow-creatures to
avoid him, and he does that which, without costing himself too much
effort, is sufficiently pleasant to his fellows to attract them to him.
In the same healthy man the idea of sufferings, even when they are
not his own, produces pain, which is always greater or less according
to the degree of excitability of his brain; the more active the idea
of suffering, the more violent is the accompanying feeling of pain.
Because the ideas excited by direct sense-impressions are the most
vivid, the sufferings which he sees with his own eyes cause him the
sharpest pain, and in order to escape from this, he makes suitable
efforts to put an end to this extraneous suffering, or often, it is
true, only not to witness it. This degree of love to our neighbour is,
as was said above, pure self-love; it merely aims at averting pain
from self, and at increasing one’s own feelings of pleasure. The love
of our neighbour, on the contrary, which Tolstoi obviously wishes to
preach, claims to be unselfish. It contemplates the diminution of the
sufferings, and the increase of the happiness, of others; it can no
longer be exercised instinctively, for it demands an exact knowledge of
the conditions of life, and the feelings and wishes of others, and the
acquisition of this knowledge presupposes observation, reflection, and
judgment. One must earnestly consider what is really needful and good
for one’s neighbour. One must come out of one’s self, must set aside
one’s own habits and ideas completely, and strive to slip into the
skin of him to whom one would show love. One must regard the intended
benefit with the other’s eyes, and feel with his nature, and not with
one’s own. Does Tolstoi do this? His novels, in which he shows his
alleged love between fellow-men living and working, prove the exact
contrary.
In the tale _Albert_[167] Delessow takes up a sickly, strolling
violin-player out of admiration for his great talent, and out of pity
for his poverty and helplessness. But the unhappy artist is a drunkard.
Delessow locks him up in his dwelling, places him under the care of
his servant Sachar, and keeps him from intoxicating drinks. On the
first day Albert the artist submits, but is very depressed and out of
temper. On the second day he is already casting ‘malignant glances’ at
his benefactor. ‘He seemed to fear Delessow, and whenever their eyes
met a deadly terror was depicted on his face.... He did not answer the
questions which were put to him.’ Finally, on the third day Albert
rebels against the restraint to which he believes himself subjected.
‘You have no right to shut me up here,’ he cries. ‘My passport is in
order. I have stolen nothing from you; you can search me. I will go
to the superintendent of police.’ The servant Sachar tries to appease
him. Albert becomes more and more enraged, and suddenly ‘shrieks out at
the top of his voice: “Police!”’ Delessow allows him to depart. Albert
‘goes out of the door without taking leave, and constantly muttering to
himself incomprehensible words.’
Delessow had taken Albert home, because the sight was painful to him
of the poorly-clad, sickly, pale artist, trembling in the cold of a
Russian winter. When he saw him in his warm house, before a well-spread
table, in his own handsome dressing-gown, Delessow felt contented and
happy. But was Albert also contented? Tolstoi testifies that Albert
feels himself much more unhappy in the new position than in the old--so
unhappy that very soon he could not bear it, and freed himself from it
with an outburst of fury. To whom, then, had Delessow done good, to
himself or to Albert?
In this narrative a mentally diseased man is depicted, and, it must
be admitted, upon such a one a benefit has frequently to be forcibly
pressed, which he does not understand or appreciate as such, though,
of course, in a manner more consistent, persistent, and prudent than
Delessow’s. In another story in the same volume, however, _From the
Diary of the Prince Nechljudow, Lucerne_, the absurdity of love for
one’s fellow-creature which does not trouble itself about the real
needs of the fellow-creature is brought out more vividly and without
any excuse.
One glorious evening in July, in front of the Schweizer-Hof, in
Lucerne, Prince Nechljudow heard a street-singer whose songs touched
and enraptured him deeply. The singer is a poor, small, hump-backed
man, insufficiently clad and looking half starved. On all the balconies
of the sumptuous hotel rich Englishmen and their wives are standing;
all have enjoyed the glorious singing of the poor cripple, but when he
takes off his hat and begs a small reward for his artistic performance,
not one person throws even the smallest coin to him. Nechljudow falls
into the most violent excitement. He is beside himself over the fact
that ‘the singer could beg three times for a gift, and no one gave him
the smallest thing, while the greater number laughed at him.’ It seems
to him ‘an event which the historian of our times should inscribe in
the pages of history with indelible letters of fire.’ He, for his part,
will not be a participator in this unprecedented sin. He hastens after
the poor devil, overtakes him and invites him to drink a bottle of wine
with him. The singer accepts. ‘Close by is a small café,’ says he; ‘we
can go in there--it is a cheap one,’ he continued. ‘The words, “a cheap
one,” involuntarily suggested the idea,’ relates Nechljudow in his
diary, ‘not to go to a cheap cafe, but into the Schweizer-Hof, where
were the people who had listened to his singing. Although he refused
the Schweizer-Hof several times in timid agitation, because he thought
it was much too grand there, I persisted in it.’
He leads the singer into the splendid hotel. Although he appears in the
company of the princely guest, the servants look at the badly dressed
vagabond with hostile and contemptuous glances. They show the pair into
the ‘saloon on the left, the drinking-bar for the people.’ The singer
is very much embarrassed, and wishes himself far away, but he conceals
his feelings. The Prince orders champagne. The singer drinks without
any real pleasure and without confidence. He talks about his life,
and says suddenly: ‘I know what you wish. You want to make me drunk,
and then see what can be got out of me.’ Nechljudow, annoyed by the
scornful and insolent demeanour of the servants jumps up and goes with
his guest into the handsome dining-room on the right hand, which is set
apart for the visitors. He will be served here and nowhere else. The
English, who are present, indignantly leave the room; the waiters are
dismayed, but do not venture to oppose the angry Russian Prince. ‘The
singer drew a very miserable, terrified face, and begged me, as soon as
possible, to go away, evidently not understanding why I was angry and
what I wished.’ The little mannikin ‘sat more dead than alive’ near the
Prince, and was very happy when Nechljudow finally dismissed him.
It must be noticed how extremely absurdly Prince Nechljudow behaves
from beginning to end. He invites the singer to a bottle of wine,
although, if he had possessed the faintest glimmer of sound
common-sense, he might have said to himself that a hot supper, or,
still better, a five-franc piece, would be far more necessary and
useful to the poor devil than a bottle of wine. The singer proposes to
go to a modest restaurant, where he himself would feel comfortable.
The Prince pays not the smallest attention to this natural, reasonable
desire, but drags the poor devil into a leading hotel, where he feels
extremely uncomfortable in his bad clothing, under the cross-fire
of the waiters’ insolent and scornful looks. The Prince does not
care about this, but orders champagne, to which the singer is not
accustomed, and which gives him so little pleasure that the thought
occurs to him that his noble host desires to make sport of him by
seeing him drunk. Nechljudow begins to squabble with the waiters,
proceeds to the finest saloon of the hotel, scares away the remaining
guests, who do not desire to sit at supper with the street-singer,
and does not concern himself during the whole of this time about the
feelings of his guest, who sits on hot coals, and would far rather
sink into the floor, and who only breathes again when his terrible
benefactor lets him escape out of his fangs.
Did Nechljudow exercise neighbourly love? No. He did nothing pleasant
to the singer. He tormented him. He only satisfied himself. He wished
to revenge himself on the hard-hearted English people, with whom he was
furious, and he did so at the expense of the poor devil. Nechljudow
calls it an unheard-of occurrence that the wealthy Englishmen should
give nothing to the singer, but what he did to the latter is worse.
The odious niggardliness of the English people annoyed the singer for
a quarter of an hour, perhaps; Nechljudow’s foolish entertainment
tortured him for an hour. The Prince never took the trouble to
consider, even for a moment, what would be agreeable and useful to
the singer; he thought always of himself only, of his own feelings,
his anger, his indignation. This tender-hearted philanthropist is a
dangerous, depraved egoist.
The irrational neighbourly love of the emotional mystic fails
necessarily in its ostensible aim, because it does not arise from a
knowledge of the true needs of the neighbour. The mystic practises a
sentimental anthropomorphism. He transfers his own feelings, without
more ado, to other beings, who feel quite differently from himself. He
is in a condition bitterly to commiserate the moles because they are
condemned to brood in perpetual darkness in their underground passages,
and dreams, perhaps with tears in his eyes, of introducing electric
light into their burrows. Because he, as seeing, would suffer severely
under the conditions of a mole’s life, therefore this animal is
naturally to be pitied also, although it is blind and so does not miss
the light. An anecdote relates that a child poured some hot water into
the drawing-room aquarium one winter’s day because it must have been
so intolerably cold for the gold-fish; and in comic papers there is
frequently a hit at the benevolent societies which bestow warm winter
clothing on the negroes at the equator. This is Tolstoi’s love of one’s
neighbour put into practice.
One especial point of his moral doctrine is the mortification of the
flesh. All sexual intercourse is for him unchaste; marriage is quite as
impure as the loosest tie. The _Kreutzer Sonata_ is the most complete,
and at the same time most celebrated, embodiment of these propositions.
Pozdnyscheff, the murderer from motives of jealousy, says:[168] ‘There
is nothing pleasant in the honeymoon; on the contrary, it is a period
of continual embarrassment, a shame, a profound depression, and, above
all, boredom--fearful boredom! I can only compare the situation to
that of a youth who is beginning to smoke: he feels sick, swallows his
saliva, and pretends to like it very much. If the cigar is to give him
any pleasure, it can only be later on, as it is with marriage. In order
to enjoy it, the married couple must first accustom themselves to the
vice.’
‘How do you mean--to the vice? You are speaking of one of the most
natural things--of an instinct.’
‘Natural thing? An instinct? Not in the least. Allow me to tell you
that I have been brought to, and maintain, the opposite conviction. I,
the depraved and dissolute, assert that it is something unnatural....
It is an entirely unnatural treatment for any pure girl, just as it
would be for a child.’
Further on Pozdnyscheff develops the following crazy theory of the law
of life: ‘The object of man, as of humanity in general, is happiness,
and to attain it humanity has a law which must be carried out. This law
consists in the union of the individual beings which compose humanity.
Human passions only impede this union, particularly the strongest and
worst of all, sensual love, sexual pleasures. When human passions,
especially the most violent, sensuality, shall have been suppressed,
the union will be accomplished, and humanity, having attained its end,
will have no further reason for existing.’ And his last words are:
‘People should understand that the true meaning of the words of St.
Matthew, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart,” applies to one’s sister, and
not only to a strange woman, but also, and above all, to one’s own
wife.’
Tolstoi, in whom, as in every ‘higher degenerate,’ two natures
co-exist, of whom the one notices and judges the follies of the other,
has yet a distinct feeling of the senselessness of his _Kreutzer
Sonata_ theory, and he makes his mouthpiece, Pozdnyscheff, declare[169]
that he ‘was looked upon as cracked.’ But in the _Short Exposition_,
where Tolstoi speaks in his own name, he develops, if with somewhat
more reserve, the same philosophy.[170] The temptation to break the
seventh commandment is due to the fact that we believe woman to have
been created for carnal pleasure, and that, if a man leave one wife
and take another, he will have more pleasure. Not to fall into this
temptation, we must remember that it is not the will of the Father
that the man should have pleasure through feminine charms....’ In the
story _Family Happiness_[171] he likewise explains that a husband and
wife, even if they have married from love, must become enemies in
their wedded life, and it is quite purposeless to attempt a lasting
cultivation of the original feelings.
It is not indeed necessary to refute a theory which pours contempt on
all experience, all observations of nature, all institutions and laws
that have been historically developed, and the known aim of which is
the destruction of humanity. The thought of assailing it with zeal
could only occur to men who were themselves more or less deranged. It
is sufficient for the healthy minded to state it in distinct language;
it is at once recognisable, then, for what it is--insanity.
For Tolstoi the great enemy is science. In _My Confession_ he is never
tired of accusing and abusing it. It is of no use to the people, but
only to governments and to capitalists. It occupies itself with idle
and vain things, such as the inquiries into protoplasm and spectrum
analysis, but has never yet thought of anything useful, _e.g._, ‘how an
axe and an axe-handle can best be manufactured; how a good saw ought to
be fashioned; how good bread can be baked, which species of flour is
best adapted for the purpose, how to manage the yeast, construct and
heat the baking-oven; what foods and beverages are the most wholesome;
what mushrooms are edible,’ etc.
He is, be it noted, particularly unfortunate in his examples, since,
as a matter of fact, every beginner takes up all the subjects he
enumerates in the scientific study of hygiene and mechanics. In
accordance with his poetic nature, he has had a strong desire to embody
his views on science artistically. This he has done in the comedy
_The Fruits of Enlightenment_. What does he scoff at in that? At the
pitiable blockheads who believe in spirits and, in dread of death, hunt
after bacteria. Spiritualism, and the opinions created in uneducated
men of the world by the imperfectly understood news of the day,
conveyed in political papers, respecting infectious micro-organisms,
are what he takes for science, and against them he directs the arrows
of his satire.
Real science does not need to be protected against attacks of this
sort. I have already proved, in estimating the value of the reproaches
which the neo-Catholic Symbolists and their critical patrons raised
against natural science, that all those phrases were either childish
or dishonest. The accusation of dishonesty cannot be brought against
Tolstoi. He believes what he says. But childish his complaints and
his mockery certainly are. He speaks of science as a blind man of
colour. He has evidently no suspicion of its essence, its mission, its
methods and the subjects with which it deals. He resembles Bouvard and
Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two idiots, who, completely ignorant, without
teachers or guides, skim through a number of books indiscriminately,
and fancy themselves in this sportive manner to have gained positive
knowledge; this they seek to apply with the candour of a trained
Krooboy, commit, self-evidently, one hair-raising stupidity after
another, and then believe themselves justified in sneering at science,
and declaring it a vain folly and deception. Flaubert avenged himself
on the absurdity of his own efforts to conquer science as a lieutenant
conquers a music-hall singer, by tarring and feathering Bouvard and
Pécuchet. Tolstoi exploded his little fuss and fume on Science, that
proud, disdainful beauty, who is only to be won by long, earnest,
unselfish service, by lampooning the blockheads of his _Fruits of
Enlightenment_. The degenerate Flaubert and the degenerate Tolstoi meet
here in the same frenzy.
The way to happiness is, according to Tolstoi, the turning away from
science, the renunciation of reason, and the return to the life of
Nature; that is, to agriculture. ‘The town must be abandoned, the
people must be sent away from the factories and into the country to
work with their hands; the aim of every man should be to satisfy all
his wants himself’ (_What ought one to Do?_).
How oddly is reason mixed with nonsense even in these economic demands!
Tolstoi has rightly discerned the evils which follow the uprooting
of the people from fostering Mother Earth, and the incubation of a
day-wage-earning, urban industrial proletariate. It is true, also, that
agriculture could employ very many more men healthily and profitably
than at present if the land were the property of the community,
and each one received only such a share, and that only for his
lifetime, as he could himself cultivate thoroughly. But must industry
on this account be destroyed? Would not that mean the destruction
of civilization itself? Is it not rather the duty of intelligent
philanthropy and justice carefully to maintain the division of labour,
this necessary and profitable result of a long evolution, but at the
same time, through a better system of economy, to transform the artisan
from a factory convict, condemned to misery and ill-health, into a free
producer of wealth, who enjoys the fruits of his labour himself, and
works no more than is compatible with his health and his claims on life?
It is vain to seek for even the slightest hint of such a solution in
Tolstoi. He contents himself with a barren enthusiasm for country life,
which, if beautiful in Horace, has become annoying and ridiculous in
Rousseau; and he garrulously plagiarizes the hollow phrases about the
worthlessness of civilization of the eloquent Genevese, who, smitten
with the mania of persecution, could only have led a sentimental
century like his own by the nose. Return to nature! It is not possible
to compress more absurdity into fewer words. On our earth Nature is
our enemy, whom we must fight, before whom we dare not lay down our
weapons. In order to maintain our span of life we must create endlessly
complicated artificial conditions; we must clothe our bodies, build a
roof over our heads, and store up provisions for many months, during
which Nature denies us every nourishment. There is only one very
narrow strip of our planet where mankind can live without exertion,
without inventions and arts, like the beast in the forest and the fish
in the water, and that is on some of the South Sea islands. There,
in perpetual spring, he certainly needs no clothes and no dwelling,
or only some palm-leaves as a shelter from occasional rain. There,
at all seasons of the year, he finds food constantly prepared for
him in the cocoanut palm, the bread-fruit tree, the banana, in some
domestic animals, in fish and mussels. No beast of prey threatens his
safety, and forces on him the development of strength and contempt of
death. But how many men can this earthly paradise maintain? Perhaps
a hundredth part of present humanity. The remaining ninety-nine
hundredths have only the alternative either of perishing, or of
settling in regions of our planet where the table is not spread, and
the pillow of delight is not prepared, but in which everything which
life demands for its sustenance must be procured artificially and
laboriously. The ‘return to Nature’ means, in our degrees of latitude,
the return to hunger, to freezing, to being devoured by wolves and
bears. Not in the impossible ‘return to Nature’ lies healing for human
misery, but in the reasonable organization of our struggle with Nature,
I might say, in universal and obligatory service against it, from which
only the crippled should be exempted.
We have now learnt to know the particular ideas which together
constitute Tolstoism. As a philosophy it gives explanations of the
world and of life, with unmeaning or contradictory paraphrases of some
intentionally misunderstood Bible verses. As ethics, it prescribes the
renunciation of resistance against vice and crime, the distribution
of property, and the annihilation of mankind by complete abstinence.
As sociological and economic doctrine it preaches the uselessness
of science, the happiness of becoming stupid, the renunciation of
manufactured products, and the duty of agriculture, though without
betraying from whence the farmer is to get the necessary soil for
cultivation. The remarkable thing in this system is, that it does not
notice its own superfluity. If it understood itself, it would restrict
itself to one single point--abstinence--since it is evident that it is
unnecessary to break one’s head over the aim and import of human life,
over crime and love of your neighbour, and particularly over country
or town life, if in any case through abstinence humanity is to die out
with the present generation.
Rod[172] denies that Tolstoi is a mystic. ‘Mysticism was always, as the
word indicates, a transcendental doctrine. The mystics, especially the
Christian mystics, have always sacrificed the present to the future
life.... What, on the contrary, astonishes an unprejudiced mind in
Tolstoi’s books is the almost complete absence of all metaphysics, his
indifference to the so-called questions of the other world.’
Rod simply does not know what mysticism is. He unduly restricts the
sense of the word, if he only uses it to mean the investigation of
‘other-world questions.’ If he were less superficial he would know that
religious enthusiasm is only one special instance of a general mental
condition, and that mysticism is any morbid obscuration and incoherence
of thought which is accompanied by emotionalism, and therefore includes
that thought, the fruit of which is the system at once Materialistic,
Pantheistic Christian, Ascetic, Rousseauistic and Communistic, of Leo
Tolstoi.
Raphael Löwenfeld, whom we have to thank for the first complete German
edition of Tolstoi’s works, has also written a very commendable
biography of the Russian novelist, yet in which he feels himself
obliged, not only to take sides vehemently with his hero, but also to
assure that hero’s possible critics beforehand of his deep contempt
for them. ‘Want of comprehension,’ he says,[173] ‘calls them (the
“independent phenomena” of Tolstoi’s sort) eccentrics, unwilling
to allow that anyone should be a head taller than the rest. The
unprejudiced man, who is capable of admiring greatness, sees in their
independence the expression of an extraordinary power which has
outgrown the possibilities of the time, and, leading on, points out
the paths to those coming after.’ It is indeed hazardous forthwith
to accuse all who are not of his opinion of ‘want of comprehension.’
One who judges so autocratically will have to put up with the answer,
that he is guilty of ‘want of comprehension’ who, without the most
elementary training, enters upon the criticism of a phenomenon, to the
understanding of which some degree of æsthetical and literary so-called
‘knowledge’ and personal feeling are very far from sufficient.
Löwenfeld boasts of his capacity to admire greatness. He is possibly
wrong not to presuppose this capacity in others also. What he precisely
has to prove is this, that what he admires deserves in truth the
designation of greatness. His assertion, however, is the only proof he
brings on this most important point. He calls himself unprejudiced.
It may be admitted that he is free from prejudices, but then he is
free also from the preliminary knowledge that alone entitles anyone
to form an opinion on psychological phenomena, which strike even the
uninitiated as extraordinary, and to present them with self-assurance.
Did he possess this preliminary knowledge he would know that Tolstoi,
who, ‘leading, is to point out the paths to those coming after,’ is a
mere copy of a class of men who have had their representatives in every
age. Lombroso[174] instances a certain Knudsen, a madman, who lived in
Schleswig about 1680, and asserted that there was neither a God nor a
hell; that priests and judges were useless and pernicious, and marriage
an immorality; that men ceased to exist after death; that everyone must
be guided by his own inward insight,’ etc. Here we have the principal
features of Tolstoi’s cosmology and moral philosophy. Knudsen has,
however, so little ‘pointed out, leading, the way to those coming
after,’ that he still only exists as an instructive case of mental
aberration in books on diseases of the mind.
The truth is that all Tolstoi’s idiosyncrasies could be traced to the
best-known and most often observed stigmata of higher degeneration. He
even relates of himself:[175] ‘Scepticism brought me at one time to
a condition nearly bordering on frenzy. I had the idea that besides
myself nobody and nothing existed in the whole world; that things were
not things, but presentations, which only became phenomenal at what
time I directed my attention to them, and that these presentations
disappeared at once when I ceased to think of them.... There were hours
when, under the influence of this fixed idea, I came to such a pitch
of mental bewilderment that I at times looked quickly the other way,
in the hope that in the place where I was not, I might be surprised
by nothingness.’ And in his _Confession_ he says explicitly: ‘I felt
that I was not quite mentally sound.’[176] His feeling was correct. He
was suffering from a mania of brooding doubt, observable in many of
the ‘higher degenerates.’ Professor Kowalewski[177] explains the mania
of doubt straight away as exclusively a psychosis of degeneration.
Griesinger[178] relates the case of a patient who continually brooded
over the notions of beauty, existence, etc., and put endless questions
about them. Griesinger, however, was less familiar with the phenomena
of degeneration, and therefore held his case as ‘one little known.’
Lombroso[179] mentions in the enumeration of the symptoms of his
maniacs of genius: ‘Almost all are taken up, in the most painful
manner, with religious doubts, which disturb the mind and oppress the
timid conscience and sick heart, like a crime.’ It is not, then, the
noble desire for knowledge which forces Tolstoi to be ceaselessly
occupied with questions concerning the aim and meaning of life, but
the degeneration-mania of doubt and brooding thought, which is barren,
because no answer, no explanation can satisfy them. For it is obvious
that be the ‘therefore’ never so clear, never so exhaustive, it can
never silence the mechanically impulsive ‘wherefore’ proceeding from
the Unconscious.
A special form of the phenomenon of scepticism and brooding thought is
a rage for contradiction, and the inclination to bizarre assertions, as
is noted by many clinicists--_e.g._, Sollier[180]--as a special stigma
of degeneration. It has appeared very strongly in Tolstoi at certain
times. ‘In the struggles for independence,’ relates Löwenfeld,[181]
‘Tolstoi frequently overstepped the limits of good taste, while he
combated tradition only because it was tradition. Thus he called ...
Shakespeare a scribbler by the dozen, and asserted that the admiration
... for the great Englishman ...has properly no other origin than the
custom of echoing strange opinions with thoughtless obsequiousness.’
What one finds most touching and most worthy of admiration in Tolstoi
is his boundless spirit of fraternity. I have already shown above that
it is foolish in its starting-points and manifestations. Here, however,
I may have to point out that it is likewise a stigma of degeneration.
Though he has not the experience of an alienist, the clear-minded,
healthy Tourgenieff has, by his own common-sense, ‘scoffingly’
called Tolstoi’s fervent love for the oppressed people ‘hysterical,’
as Löwenfeld[182] says. We shall find it again in many degenerate
subjects. ‘In contrast to the selfish imbecile,’ Legrain[183] teaches,
‘we have the imbeciles who are good to excess, who are philanthropic,
who set up a thousand absurd systems in order to advance the happiness
of humanity.’ And further on: ‘Full of his love for humanity, the
imbecile patient, without reflection, takes up the social question
on its most difficult side, and settles it confidently in a series
of grotesque inventions.’ This irrational philanthropy, untutored
by judgment, which Tourgenieff, with just surmise if incorrect
designation, called ‘hysterical,’ is nothing else than a manifestation
of that emotionalism which constitutes for Morel the fundamental
character of degeneration. Nothing in this diagnosis is altered by
the fact that Tolstoi had the good fortune, during the recent famine,
of being able to develop the most highly effective and most devoted
helpfulness for the alleviation of the misery of his countrymen. The
case happened to be very simple. The need of his fellow-creatures was
of the most primitive form, want of bodily food. Fraternal love could
likewise set to work in its most primitive form, in the distribution of
food and clothing. A special power of judgment, a deep comprehension
of the need of his fellow-creatures, was here unnecessary. And that
Tolstoi’s preparations for the relief of the sufferers were more
effective than those of the proper authorities only proved the
stupidity and incapacity of the latter.
Tolstoi’s attitude towards women also, which must remain
incomprehensible to a healthy human understanding, will, in the light
of clinical experience, forthwith be understood. It has been repeatedly
pointed out in these pages that the emotionalism of the degenerate
has, as a rule, an erotic colouring, because of the pathological
alteration in their sexual centres. The abnormal excitability of
these parts of the nervous system can have as a consequence both an
especial attraction towards woman and an especial antipathy to her.
The common element connecting these opposing effects of one and the
same organic condition is the being constantly occupied with woman, the
being constantly engrossed with presentations in consciousness from the
region of sexuality.[184]
In the mental life of a sane man, woman is far from filling the part
she plays in that of the degenerate. The physiological relation of
man to woman is that of desire for the time being toward her, and
of indifference when the state of desire is not present. Antipathy,
let alone violent enmity, to woman, the normal man never feels. If
he desires the woman, he loves her; if his erotic excitement is
appeased, he becomes cool and more distant in his attitude, though
without feeling aversion or fear. The man, from his purely subjective,
physiological necessities and inclinations, would certainly never have
invented marriage, the persistent alliance with woman. This is not
a sexual but a social arrangement. It does not rest on the organic
instincts of the individual man, but on the need of collectivity.
It depends on the existing economic order and the dominant opinions
about the State, its problems and its relations to the individual, and
changes its form with these. A man may--or at least should--choose a
certain woman for his consort out of love; but what holds him fast
married, after a suitable choice and successful courtship, is no
longer physiological love, but a complex mixture of habit, gratitude,
unsexual friendship, convenience, the wish to obtain for himself social
advantages (to which must naturally be added an ordered household,
social representation, etc.), considerations of duty towards children
and State; more or less, also, unthinking imitation of a universal
observance. But feelings such as are described in the _Kreutzer Sonata_
and in _Family Happiness_ the normal man never experiences towards his
wife, even if he has ceased to love her in the natural sense of the
word.
These relations are quite otherwise in the degenerate. The morbid
activity of his sexual centres completely rules him. The thought of
woman has for him the power of an ‘obsession.’ He feels that he cannot
resist the exciting influences proceeding from the woman, that he is
her helpless slave, and would commit any folly, any madness, any crime,
at her beck and call. He necessarily, therefore, sees in woman an
uncanny, overpowering force of nature, bestowing supreme delights or
dealing destruction, and he trembles before this power, to which he is
defencelessly exposed. If, then, besides this, the almost never-failing
aberrations set in, if he, in fact, commits things for woman for which
he must condemn and despise himself; or if woman, without its coming
to actual deeds, awakens in him emotions and thoughts before whose
baseness and infamy he is horrified, then, in the moment of exhaustion,
when judgment is stronger than impulse, the dread which woman inspires
him withal will be suddenly changed into aversion and savage hatred.
The erotomaniac ‘degenerate’ stands in the same position to the woman
as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. Magnan[185] has given an
appalling picture of the struggles waged in the mind of a dipsomaniac
by the passionate eagerness for the bottle, and the loathing and
horror of it. The mind of an erotomaniac presents a similar spectacle,
but probably still stronger struggles. These frequently lead the
unhappy creature, who sees no other means of escaping from his sexual
obsession, to self-mutilation. There are in Russia, as is well
known, a whole sect of ‘degenerates,’ the Skoptzi, by whom this is
systematically exercised, as the only effective treatment to escape
the devil and be saved. Pozdnyscheff, in the _Kreutzer Sonata_, is
a Skopetz without knowing it, and the sexual morality which Tolstoi
teaches in this narrative and in his theoretic writings is the
expression in literature of the sexual psychopathy of the Skoptzi.
The universal success of Tolstoi’s writings is undoubtedly due in
part to his high literary gifts. But that part is not the greatest;
for, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter, it was not his
artistically most important creations, the works of his best years, but
his later mystical works, which have won for him his body of believers.
This effect is to be explained, not on æsthetical, but on pathological
grounds. Tolstoi would have remained unnoticed, like any Knudsen of
the seventeenth century, if his extravagances as a degenerate mystic
had not found his contemporaries prepared for their reception. The
widespread hysteria from exhaustion was the requisite soil in which
alone Tolstoism could flourish.
That the rise and expansion of Tolstoism is to be traced, not to the
intrinsic merit of Tolstoi’s writings, but to the mental condition
of his readers, is made clear in the most significant manner by the
difference in those parts of his system which have made an impression
in various countries. In every nation just such tones awakened an echo
as were attuned with its own nervous system.
In England it was Tolstoi’s sexual morality that excited the greatest
interest, for in that country economic reasons condemn a formidable
number of girls, particularly of the educated classes, to forego
marriage; and, from a theory which honoured chastity as the highest
dignity and noblest human destiny, and branded marriage with gloomy
wrath as abominable depravity, these poor creatures would naturally
derive rich consolation for their lonely, empty lives, and their cruel
exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling their natural calling. The
_Kreutzer Sonata_ has, therefore, become the book of devotion of all
the spinsters of England.
In France Tolstoism is particularly valued for the way in which
it casts out science, deposes the intellect from all offices and
dignities, preaches the return to implicit faith, and praises the poor
in spirit as alone happy. This is water to the mill of neo-Catholics,
and those mystics, from political motives, or from degeneration, who
erect a cathedral to pious symbolism, raise up also a high altar to
Tolstoi in their church.
In Germany, on the whole, but little enthusiasm is evinced for the
abstinence-morality of the _Kreutzer Sonata_, and the intellectual
reaction of _My Confession_, _My Religion_, and _Fruits of
Enlightenment_. On the other hand, his followers in that country
exalt Tolstoi’s vague socialism and his morbid fraternal love into
their dogma. All the muddle-headed among our people who, not from
sober scientific conviction, but from hysterical emotionalism,
feel a leaning towards a sickly, impotent socialism, which tends
principally towards ministering cheap broth to proletarians, and
towards revelling in sentimental romances and melodramas from the
pretended life of the city worker, naturally discovered in Tolstoi’s
‘give-me-something-communism,’ with its scorn for all economic and
moral laws, the expression of their--very platonic!--love for the
disinherited. And in the circles in which Herr von Egidy’s watery
rationalism (at least a hundred years behind time) could rise into
notoriety, and in which his first writing could call forth nearly
a hundred replies, assents, and explanations, Tolstoi’s _Short
Exposition of the Gospel_, with its denial of the divine nature
of Christ, and of existence after death, with its effusions of a
superabundance of feelings of aimless love, its incomprehensible
personal sanctification and rhetoric morality, and especially with its
astounding misinterpretation of the clearest passages from Scripture,
must indeed have been an event. All the adherents of Herr von Egidy are
predestined followers of Tolstoi, and all Tolstoi’s admirers perpetrate
an inconsistency if they do not enter into the new Salvation Army of
Herr von Egidy.
By the special _timbre_ of the echo which Tolstoism calls forth in
different countries, he has become an instrument which is better fitted
than any other tendency of degeneration in contemporary literature for
the determination, measurement, and comparison, in kind and degree, of
degeneration and hysteria among those civilized nations in which the
phenomenon of the Dusk of the Nations has been observed.