THE CRISIS
The misery which oppressed Levine, and the longing for suicide which he
concealed from Kitty, Tolstoy was at this period concealing from his
wife. But he had not as yet achieved the calm which he attributed to
his hero. To be truthful, this mental state is hardly communicated to
the reader. We feel that it is desired rather than realised, and that
Levine's relapse among his doubts is imminent. Tolstoy was not duped by
his desires. He had the greatest difficulty in reaching the end of his
work. _Anna Karenin_ wearied him before he had finished it.[1] He could
work no longer. He remained at a standstill; inert, without will-power,
a prey to selfterror and self-disgust. There, in the emptiness of his
life, rose the great wind which issued from the abyss; the vertigo of
death.
Tolstoy told of these terrible years at a later period, when he was
newly escaped from the abyss.[2]
"I was not fifty," he said; "I loved; I was loved; I had good children,
a great estate, fame, health, and moral and physical vigour; I could
reap or mow like any peasant; I used to work ten hours at a stretch
without fatigue. Suddenly my life came to a standstill. I could
breathe, eat, drink and sleep. But this was not to live. I had no
desires left. I knew there was nothing to desire. I could not even wish
to know the truth. The truth was that life is a piece of insanity. I
had reached the abyss, and I saw clearly that there was nothing before
me but death. I, a fortunate and healthy man, felt that I could not
go on living. An irresistible force was urging me to rid myself of
life.... I will not say that I wanted to kill myself. The force which
was edging me out of life was something stronger than myself; it was
an aspiration, a desire like my old desire for life, but in an inverse
sense. I had to humour, to deceive myself, lest I should give way to it
too promptly. There I was, a happy man,--and I would hide away a piece
of cord lest I should hang myself from the beam that ran between the
cupboards of my room, where I was alone every night while undressing.
I no longer took my gun out for a little shooting, lest I should be
tempted.[3] It seemed to me that life was a dreary farce, which was
being played out before my eyes. Forty years of work, of trouble, of
progress, only to find that there is nothing! Nothing! Nothing will
remain of me but putrescence and worms.... One can live only while one
is intoxicated with life; but the moment the intoxication is over one
sees that all is merely deceit, a clumsy fraud.... My family and art
were no longer enough to satisfy me. My family consisted of unhappy
creatures like myself. Art is a mirror to life. When life no longer
means anything it is no longer amusing to use the mirror. And the
worst of it was, I could not resign myself--I was like a man lost in
a forest, who is seized with horror because he is lost, and who runs
hither and thither and cannot stop, although he knows that at every
step he is straying further."
Salvation came from the people. Tolstoy had always had for them
"a strange affection, absolutely genuine,"[4] which the repeated
experiences of his social disillusions were powerless to shake. Of
late years he, like Levine, had drawn very near to them.[5] He began
to ponder concerning these millions of beings who were excluded from
the narrow circle of the learned, the rich, and the idle who killed
themselves, endeavoured to forget themselves, or, like himself,
were basely prolonging a hopeless life. He asked himself why these
millions of men and women escaped this despair: why they did not kill
themselves. He then perceived that they were living not by the light of
reason, but without even thinking of reason; they were living by faith.
What was this faith which knew nothing of reason?
"Faith is the energy of life. One cannot live without faith. The
ideas of religion were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of human
thought. The replies given by faith to Life the sphinx contain the
deepest wisdom of humanity."
Is it enough, then, to be acquainted with those formulæ of wisdom
recorded in the volume of religion? No, for faith is not a science;
faith is an act; it has no meaning unless it is lived. The disgust
which Tolstoy felt at the sight of rich and _right-thinking_ people,
for whom faith was merely a kind of "epicurean consolation," threw him
definitely among the simple folk who alone lived lives in agreement
with their faith.
"And he understood that the life of the labouring people was life
itself, and that the meaning to be attributed to that life was truth."
But how become a part of the people and share its faith? It is not
enough to know that others are in the right; it does not depend upon
ourselves whether we are like them. We pray to God in vain; in vain we
stretch our eager arms toward Him. God flies. Where shall He be found?
But one day grace descended:
"One day of early spring I was alone in the forest, listening to
its sounds.... I was thinking of my distress during the last three
years; of my search for God; of my perpetual oscillations from joy to
despair.... And I suddenly saw that I used to live only when I used
to believe in God. At the very thought of Him the delightful waves of
life stirred in me. Everything around me grew full of life; everything
received a meaning. But the moment I no longer believed life suddenly
ceased.
"Then what am I still searching for? a voice cried within me. For Him,
without whom man cannot live! To know God and to live--it is the same
thing! For God is Life....
"Since then this light has never again deserted me."[6]
He was saved. God had appeared to him.[7]
But as he was not a Hindu mystic, to whom ecstasy suffices; as to the
dreams of the Asiatic was added the thirst for reason and the need of
action of the Occidental, he was moved to translate his revelation
into terms of practical faith, and to draw from the holy life the
rules of daily existence. Without any previous bias, and sincerely
wishing to believe in the beliefs of his own flesh and blood, he began
by studying the doctrine of the Orthodox Church, of which he was a
member.[8] In order to become more intimately a part of that body he
submitted for three years to all its ceremonies; confessing himself,
communicating; not presuming to judge such matters as shocked him,
inventing explanations for what he found obscure or incomprehensible,
uniting himself, through and in their faith, with all those whom he
loved, whether living or dead, and always cherishing the hope that at
a certain moment "love would open to him the gates of truth." But it
was all useless: his reason and his heart revolted. Such ceremonies as
baptism and communion appeared to him scandalous. When he was forced to
repeat that the host was the true body and true blood of Christ, "he
felt as though a knife were plunged into his heart." But it was not the
dogmas which raised between the Church and himself an insurmountable
wall, but the practical questions, and in especial two: the hateful
and mutual intolerance of the Churches[9] and the sanction, formal or
tacit, of homicide: of war and of capital punishment.
So he broke loose, and the rupture was the more violent in that for
three years he had suppressed his faculty of thought. He walked
delicately no longer. Angrily and violently he trampled underfoot the
religion which the day before he was still persistently practising. In
his _Criticism of Dogmatic Theology_ (1879-1881) he termed it not only
an "insanity, but a conscious and interested lie."[10] He contrasted it
with the New Testament, in his _Concordance and Translation of the Four
Gospels_ (1881-83). Finally, upon the Gospel he built his faith _(What
my Faith consists in,_ 1883).
It all resides in these words:
"I believe in the doctrine of the Christ. I believe that happiness is
possible on earth only when all men shall accomplish it."
Its corner-stone is the Sermon on the Mount, whose essential teaching
Tolstoy expresses in five commandments:
"1. Do not be angry.
"2. Do not commit adultery.
"3. Do not take oaths.
"4. Do not resist evil by evil.
"5. Be no man's enemy."
This is the negative part of the doctrine; the positive portion is
contained in this single commandment:
"Love God, and thy neighbour as thyself."
"Christ has said that he who shall have broken the least of these
commandments will hold the lowest place in the kingdom of heaven."
And Tolstoy adds naively:
"Strange as it may seem, I have been obliged, after eighteen centuries,
to discover these rules as a novelty."
Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of Christ? By no means. In
what quality does he invoke him? As the greatest of the line of
sages--Brahma, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah--who
have revealed to man the true happiness to which he aspires, and the
way which he must follow.[11] Tolstoy is the disciple of these great
religious creators, of these Hindu, Chinese, and Hebrew demi-gods and
prophets. He defends them, as he knows how to defend; defends them by
attacking those whom he calls "the Scribes" and "the Pharisees"; by
attacking the established Churches and the representatives of arrogant
science, or rather of "scientific philosophism." Not that he appealed
from reason to revelation. Once escaped from the period of distress
described in his _Confessions_, he remained essentially a believer in
Reason; one might indeed say a mystic of Reason.
"In the beginning was the Word," he says, with St. John; "the Word,
Logos, that is, Reason.[12] A book of his entitled _Life_ (1887) bears
as epigraph the famous lines of Pascal:[13]
"Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is
a thinking reed.... All our dignity resides in thought.... Let us then
strive to think well: that is the principle of morality."
The whole book, moreover, is nothing but a hymn to Reason.
It is true that Tolstoy's Reason is not the scientific reason, the
restricted reason "which takes the part for the whole and physical
life for the whole of life," but the sovereign law which rules the life
of man, "the law according to which _reasonable beings, that is men,_
must of necessity live their lives."
"It is a law analogous to those which regulate the nutrition and the
reproduction of the animal, the growth and the blossoming of herb and
of tree, the movement of the earth and the planets. It is only in the
accomplishment of this law, in the submission of our animal nature to
the law of reason, with a view to acquiring goodness, that we truly
live.... Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it,
for not only do we all know it, but we know nothing else.... All that
man knows he knows by means of reason and not by faith....[14] True
life commences only at the moment when reason is manifested. The only
real life is the life of reason."
Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? "It is not our
life," says Tolstoy, "for it does not depend upon ourselves.
"Our animal activity is accomplished without ourselves.... Humanity has
done with the idea of life considered as an individual existence. The
negation of the possibility of individual good remains an unchangeable
truth for every man of our period who is endowed with reason."
Then follows a long series of postulates, which I will not here
discuss, but which show how Tolstoy was obsessed by the idea of reason.
It was in fact a passion, no less blind or jealous than the other
passions which had possessed him during the earlier part of his life.
One fire was flickering out, the other was kindling; or rather it was
always the same fire, but fed with a different fuel.
A fact which adds to the resemblance between the "individual" passions
and this "rational" passion is that neither those nor this can be
satisfied with loving. They seek to act; they long for realisation.
"Christ has said, we must not speak, but act."
And what is the activity of reason?--Love.
"Love is the only reasonable activity of man; love is the most
reasonable and most enlightened state of the soul. All that man needs
is that nothing shall obscure the sun of reason, for that alone can
help him to grow.... Love is the actual good, the supreme good which
resolves all the contradictions of life; which not only dissipates the
fear of death, but impels man to sacrifice himself to others: for there
is no love but that which enables a man to give his life for those he
loves: love is not worthy of the name unless it is a sacrifice of self.
And the true love can only be realised when man understands that it is
not possible for him to acquire individual happiness. It is then that
all the streams of his life go to nourish the noble graft of the true
love: and this graft borrows for its increase all the energies of the
wild stock of animal individuality...."[15]
Thus Tolstoy did not come to the refuge of faith like an exhausted
river which loses itself among the sands. He brought to it the torrent
of impetuous energies amassed during a full and virile life. This we
shall presently see.
This impassioned faith, in which Love and Reason are united in a close
embrace, has found its most dignified expression in the famous reply to
the Holy Synod which excommunicated him:[16]
"I believe in God, who for me is Love, the Spirit, the Principle of all
things. I believe that He is in me as I am in Him. I believe that the
will of God has never been more clearly expressed than in the teaching
of the man Christ; but we cannot regard Christ as God and address our
prayers to him without committing the greatest sacrilege. I believe
that the true happiness of man consists in the accomplishment of the
will of God; I believe that the will of God is that every man shall
love his fellows and do unto them always as he would they should do
unto him, which contains, as the Bible says, all the law and the
prophets. I believe that the meaning of life for each one of us is
only to increase the love within him; I believe that this development
of our power of loving will reward us in this life with a happiness
which will increase day by day, and with a more perfect felicity in the
other world. I believe that this increase of love will contribute, more
than any other factor, to founding the kingdom of God upon earth; that
is, to replacing an organisation of life in which division, deceit,
and violence are omnipotent, by a new order in which concord, truth,
and brotherhood will reign. I believe that we have only one means of
growing richer in love: namely, our prayers. Not public prayer in the
temple, which Christ has formally reproved (Matt. vi. 5-13), but the
prayer of which he himself has given as an example; the solitary prayer
which confirms in us the consciousness of the meaning of our life and
the feeling that we depend solely upon the will of God.... I believe
in life eternal; I believe that man is rewarded according to his acts,
here and everywhere, now and for ever. I believe all these things so
firmly that at my age, on the verge of the tomb, I have often to make
an effort not to pray for the death of my body, that is, my birth into
a new life."[17]
[1] "Now I am harnessing myself again to the wearisome and vulgar
_Anna Karenin_, with the sole desire of getting rid of it as quickly
as possible." (Letters to Fet, August 26, 1875.) "I must finish the
romance, which is wearying me." (_Ibid._ March 1,1876.)
[2] In his _Confessions_ (1879).
[3] See _Anna Karenin._ "And Levine, who had the love of a woman, and
was the father of a family, put every kind of weapon away out of reach,
as though he was afraid of yielding to the temptation of putting an
end to his sufferings." This frame of mind was not peculiar to Tolstoy
and his characters. Tolstoy was struck by the increasing number of
suicides among the wealthy classes all over Europe, and in Russia
more especially. He often alludes to the fact in such of his books
as were written about this period. It was as though a great wave of
neurasthenia had swept across Europe in 1880, drowning its thousands
of victims. Those who were young men at the time will remember it; and
for them Tolstoy's record of this human experience will have a historic
value. He has written the secret tragedy of a generation. [
F] _Confessions._
[5] His portraits of this period betray this plebeian tendency. A
painting by Kramskoy (1873) represents Tolstoy in a moujik's blouse,
with bowed head: it resembles a German Christ. The forehead is growing
bare at the temples; the cheeks are lined and bearded.--In another
portrait, dated 1881, he has the look of a respectable artisan in his
Sunday clothes: the hair cut short, the beard and whiskers spread
out on either side; the face looks much wider below than above; the
eyebrows are contracted, the eyes gloomy; the wide nostrils have a
dog-like appearance; the ears are enormous.
[6] _Confessions._
[7] To tell the truth--not for the first time. The young volunteer in
the Caucasus, the officer at Sebastopol, Olenin of the _Cossacks,_
Prince Andrei, and Pierre Besoukhov, in _War and Peace,_ had had
similar visions. But Tolstoy was so enthusiastic that each time he
discovered God he believed it was for the first time; that previously
there had been nothing but night and the void. He saw nothing of his
past but its shadows and its shames. We who, through reading his
_Journal_, know better than he himself the story of his heart, know
also how profoundly religious was that heart, even when he was most
astray. But he himself confesses in a passage in the preface to the
_Criticism o; Dogmatic Theology:_ "God! God! I have erred; I have
sought the truth where I should not have sought it; and I knew that I
erred. I flattered my evil passions, knowing them to be evil; _but I
never forgot Thee. I was always conscious of Thee, even when I went
astray_." The crisis of 1878-79 was only more violent than the rest;
perhaps under the influence of repeated loss and the advance of age;
its only novelty was that the image of God, instead of vanishing and
leaving no trace when once the flame of ecstasy flickered out, remained
with him, and the penitent, warned by past experience, hastened to
"walk in the light while he had the light," and to deduce from his
faith a whole system of life. Not that he had not already tried to do
so. (Remember the _Rules of Life_ written when he was a student.) But
at fifty years of age there was less likelihood that his passions would
divert him from his path.
[8] The sub-title of the _Confessions_ is _Introduction to the
Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the Examination of the Christian
Doctrine._
[9] "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was struck with the
fact that religion itself destroyed that which it sought to produce."
(_Confessions_.)
[10] "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church is in
theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross
superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian
doctrine absolutely disappears." (_Reply to the Holy Synod,_ April
4-17, 1901.)
[11] As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of religious truth
throughout human history--and of the kinship of Christ with the other
sages, from Buddha down to Kant and Emerson--grew more and more
accentuated, until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had "any
predilection for Christianity." Of the greatest importance in this
connection is a letter written between July 27 and August 4, 1909,
to the painter Jan Styka, and recently reproduced in _Le Théosophe_
(January 16, 1911). According to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new
conviction, was a little inclined to forget his former state of mind
and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was purely
Christian:
"The doctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one of the beautiful
doctrines which we have received from the ancient civilisations of
Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, China, Greece. The two great principles of
Jesus: the love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love
of one's neighbour, that is, of all men without distinction, have been
preached by all the sages of the world: Krishna, Buddha, Lao-Tse,
Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the
moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others.
Truth, moral and religious, is everywhere and always the same.... I
have no predilection for Christianity. If I have been particularly
attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and
have lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a great
spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing
falsifications created by the Churches."
[12] Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is
modest and knows its limits. (_Life,_ chap. iv. There is a French
version by Countess Tolstoy.)
[13] Tolstoy often read the _Pensées_ during the period of this crisis,
which preceded the _Confessions._ He speaks of Pascal in his letters to
Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 1879), recommending his friend to read
the _Pensées._
[14] In a letter _Upon Reason_, written on November 26, 1894, to
Baroness X (reproduced in _The Revolutionaries_, 1906), Tolstoy says
the same thing:
"Man has received directly from God one sole instrument by which he may
know himself and his relations with the world: there is no other means.
This instrument is reason. Reason comes from God. It is not only the
highest human quality, but the only means by which the truth is to be
known."
[15] _Life_, xxii.-xxv. As in the case of most of these quotations, I
am expressing the sense of several chapters in a few characteristic
phrases.
[16] I hope later, when the complete works of Tolstoy have been
published, to study the various shades of this religious idea, which
has certainly evolved in respect of many points, notably in respect of
the conception of future life.
[17] From a translation in the _Temps_ for May 1, 1901.