ART AND CONSCIENCE
This moral revolution of Tolstoy's met with little sympathy from his
immediate world; his family and his relatives were appalled by it.
For a long time Countess Tolstoy had been anxiously watching the
progress of a symptom against which she had fought in vain. As early as
1874 she had seen with indignation the amount of time and energy which
her husband spent in connection with the schools.
"This spelling-book, this arithmetic, this grammar--I feel a contempt
for them, and I cannot assume a semblance of interest in them."
Matters were very different when pedagogy was succeeded by religion. So
hostile was the Countess's reception of the first confidences of the
convert that Tolstoy felt obliged to apologise when he spoke of God in
his letters:
"Do not be vexed, as you so often are when I mention God; I cannot help
it, for He is the very basis of my thought."[1]
The Countess was touched, no doubt; she tried to conceal her
impatience; but she did not understand; and she watched her husband
anxiously.
"His eyes are strange and fixed. He scarcely speaks. He does not seem
to belong to this world." She feared he was ill.
"Leo is always working, by what he tells me. Alas! he is writing
religious discussions of some kind. He reads and he ponders until he
gives himself the headache, and all this to prove that the Church is
not in agreement with the teaching of the Gospel. He will hardly find
a dozen people in Russia whom the matter could possibly interest. But
there is nothing to be done. I have only one hope: that he will be done
with it all the sooner, and that it will pass off like an illness."
The illness did not pass away. The situation between husband and
wife became more and more painful. They loved one another; each had
a profound esteem for the other; but it was impossible for them to
understand one another. They strove to make mutual concessions, which
became--as is usually the case--a form of mutual torment. Tolstoy
forced himself to follow his family to Moscow. He wrote in his
_Journal:_
"The most painful month of my life. Getting settled in Moscow. All
are settling down. But when, then, will they begin to live? All this,
not in order to live, but because other folk do the same. Unhappy
people!"[2]
During these days the Countess wrote:
"Moscow. We shall have been here a month tomorrow. The first two weeks
I cried every day, for Leo was not only sad, but absolutely broken.
He did not sleep, he did not eat, at times even he wept; I thought I
should go mad."[3]
For a time they had to live their lives apart. They begged one
another's pardon for causing mutual suffering. We see how they always
loved each other. He writes to her:
"You say, 'I love you, and you do not need my love.' It is the only
thing I do need.... Your love causes me more gladness than anything in
the world."
But as soon as they are together again the same discord occurs. The
Countess cannot share this religious mania which is now impelling
Tolstoy to study Hebrew with a rabbi.
"Nothing else interests him any longer. He is wasting his energies in
foolishness. I cannot conceal my impatience."[4]
She writes to him:
"It can only sadden me that such intellectual energies should spend
themselves in chopping wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling boots."
She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical humour of a mother who
watches a child playing a foolish game:
"Finally, I have pacified myself with the Russian proverb: 'Let the
child play as he will, so long as he doesn't cry.'"[5]
Before the letter was posted she had a mental vision of her husband
reading these lines, his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical
tone; and she re-opened the letter, in an impulse of affection:
"Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and I felt such a rush of
tenderness for you 1 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so
persevering, and it is all lit up by the radiance of goodness, and that
look of yours which goes straight to the soul.... It is something that
belongs to you alone."
In this manner these two creatures who loved also tormented one another
and were straightway stricken with wretchedness because of the pain
they had the power to inflict but not the power to avoid. A situation
with no escape, which lasted for nearly thirty years; which was to
be terminated only by the flight across the steppes, in a moment of
aberration, of the ancient Lear, with death already upon him.
Critics have not sufficiently remarked the moving appeal to women which
terminates _What shall we do?_ Tolstoy had no sympathy for modern
feminism.[6] But of the type whom he calls "the mother-woman," the
woman who knows the real meaning of life, he speaks in terms of pious
admiration; he pronounces a magnificent eulogy of her pains and her
joys, of pregnancy and maternity, of the terrible sufferings, the
years without rest, the invisible, exhausting travail for which no
reward is expected, and of that beatitude which floods the soul at the
happy issue from labour, when the body has accomplished the Law. He
draws the portrait of the valiant wife who is a help, not an obstacle,
to her husband. She knows that "the vocation of man is the obscure,
lonely sacrifice, unrewarded, for the life of others."
"Such a woman will not only not encourage her husband in factitious and
meriticious work whose only end is to profit by and enjoy the labour of
others; but she will regard such activity with horror and disgust, as a
possible seduction for her children. She will demand of her companion
a true labour, which will call for energy and does not fear danger....
She knows that the children, the generations to come, are given to men
as their holiest vision, and that she exists to further, with all her
being, this sacred task. She will develop in her children and in her
husband the strength of sacrifice.... It is such women who rule men and
serve as their guiding star.... O mother-women! In your hands is the
salvation of the world!"[7]
This appeal of a voice of supplication, which still has hope--will it
not be heard?
A few years later the last glimmer of hope was dead.
"Perhaps you will not believe me; but you cannot imagine how isolated I
am, nor in what a degree my veritable _I_ is despised and disregarded
by all those about me."[8]
If those who loved him best so misunderstood the grandeur of the
moral transformation which Tolstoy was undergoing, one could not look
for more penetration or greater respect in others. Tourgenev with
whom he had sought to effect a reconciliation, rather in a spirit of
Christian humility than because his feelings towards him had suffered
any change,[9] said ironically of Tolstoy: "I pity him greatly; but
after all, as the French say, every one kills his own fleas in his own
way."[10]
A few years later, when on the point of death, he wrote to Tolstoy the
well-known letter in which he prayed "his friend, the great writer of
the Russian world," to "return to literature."[11]
All the artists of Europe shared the anxiety and the prayer of the
dying Tourgenev. Melchior de Vogüé, at the end of his study of Tolstoy,
written in 1886, made a portrait of the writer in peasant costume,
handling a drill, the pretext for an eloquent apostrophe:
"Craftsman, maker of masterpieces, this is not your tool!... Our
tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and
nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the
the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: 'It
is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the
spirit broadcast in the world.'"
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the
seed of the mind! In the Introduction to _What I Believe_ he wrote:
"I believe that my life, my reason, my light, is given me exclusively
for the purpose of enlightening my fellows. I believe that my knowledge
of the truth is a talent which is lent me for this object; that this
talent is a fire which is a fire only when it is being consumed. I
believe that the only meaning of my life is that I should live it only
by the light within me, and should hold that light on high before men
that they may see it."[12]
But this light, this fire "which was a fire only when it was being
consumed," was a cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy's
fellow-artists. The more intelligent could not but suspect that
there was a great risk that their art would be the first prey of
the conflagration. They professed to believe that the whole art of
literature was menaced; that the Russian, like Prospero, was burying
for ever his magic ring with its power of creative illusion.
Nothing was further from the truth; and I hope to show that so far from
ruining his art Tolstoy was awakening forces which had lain fallow,
and that his religious faith, instead of killing his artistic genius,
regenerated it completely.
[1] The summer of 1878.
[2] October 8, 1881. _Vie et Oeuvre._
[3] October 14. _Vie et Oeuvre._
[4] 1882.
[5] October 23, 1884. _Vie et Oeuvre._
[6] "The so-called right of women is merely the desire to participate
in the imaginary labours of the wealthy classes, with a view to
enjoying the fruit of the labour of others and to live a life that
satisfies the sensual appetites. No genuine labourer's wife demands the
right to share her husband's work in the mines or in the fields."
[7] These are the last lines of _What shall we do?_ They are dated the
14th of February, 1886.
[8] A letter to a friend, published under the title _Profession of
Faith_, in the volume entitled _Cruel Pleasures,_ 1895.
[9] The reconciliation took place in the spring of 1878. Tolstoy wrote
to Tourgenev asking his pardon. Tourgenev went to Yasnaya Polyana in
August, 1878. Tolstoy returned his visit in July, 1881. Every one was
struck with the change in his manner, his gentleness and his modesty.
He was "as though regenerated."
[10] Letter to Polonski (quoted by Birukov).
[11] Letter to Bougival June 28, 1883.
[12] We find that M. de Vogüé, in the reproach which he addressed to
Tolstoy, unconsciously used the phrases of Tolstoy himself. "Rightly
or wrongly," he said, "for our chastisement perhaps, we have received
from heaven that splendid and essential evil: thought.... To throw down
this cross is an impious revolt." (_Le Roman russe,_ 1886.) Now Tolstoy
wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. A. Tolstoy, in 1883: "Each of us
must bear his cross.... Mine is the travail of the idea; evil, full of
pride and seductiveness." (_Letters._)