SCIENCE AND ART
It is a singular fact that in speaking of Tolstoy's ideas concerning
science and art, the most important of the books in which these ideas
are expressed--namely, _What shall we do?_ (1884-86)--is commonly
ignored. There, for the first time, Tolstoy fights the battle between
art and science; and none of the following conflicts was to surpass
the violence of their first encounter. It is a matter for surprise
that no one, during the assaults which have been recently delivered in
France upon the vanity of science and the intellectuals, has thought
of referring to these pages. They constitute the most terrible attack
ever penned against the eunuchs of science" and "the corsairs of art";
against those intellectual castes which, having destroyed the old
ruling castes of the Church, the State, and the Army, have installed
themselves in their place, and, without being able or willing to
perform any service of use to humanity, lay claim to a blind admiration
and service, proclaiming as dogmas an impudent faith in science for
the sake of science and in art for the sake of art--the lying mask
which they seek to make their justification and the apology for their
monstrous egoism and their emptiness.
"Never make me say," continues Tolstoy, "that I deny art or science.
Not only do I not deny them; it is in their name that I seek to drive
the thieves from the temple."
"Science and art are as necessary as bread and water; even more
necessary.... The true science is that of the true welfare of all human
beings. The true art is the expression of the knowledge of the true
welfare of all men."
And he praises those who, "since men have existed, have with the harp
or the cymbal, by images or by words, expressed their struggle against
duplicity, their sufferings in that struggle, their hope in the triumph
of good, their despair at the triumph of evil, and the enthusiasm of
their prophetic vision of the future."
He then draws the character of the perfect artist, in a page burning
with mystical and melancholy earnestness:
"The activity of science and art is only fruitful when it arrogates
no right to itself and considers only its duties. It is only because
that activity is such as it is, because its essence is sacrifice,
that humanity honours it. The men who are called to serve others by
spiritual work always suffer in the accomplishment of that task; for
the spiritual world is brought to birth only in suffering and torture.
Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the thinker and the
artist, for his fate is the good of men. Men are unhappy; they suffer;
they die; there is no time for him to stroll about, to amuse himself.
The thinker or the artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as we are
accustomed to think; he is always in a state of conflict, always in a
state of emotion. He must decide and must say what will further the
welfare of men, what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not
decided it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too
late, and he will die.... The man who is trained in an establishment in
which artists and scientists are formed (to tell the truth, such places
make destroyers of art and of science); the man who receives diplomas
and a pension--he will not be an artist or a thinker; but he who would
be happy not to think, not to express what is implanted in his mind,
yet cannot refrain from thought and self-expression: for he is carried
along by two invisible forces: his inner need and his love of men.
There are no artists who are fat, lovers of life, and satisfied with
themselves."[1]
This splendid page, which throws a tragic light upon the genius of
Tolstoy, was written under the immediate stress of the suffering caused
him by the poverty of Moscow, and under the conviction that science
and art were the accomplices of the entire modern system of social
inequality and hypocritical brutality. This conviction he was never to
lose. But the impression of his first encounter with the misery of the
world slowly faded, and became less poignant; the wound healed,[2]
and in none of his subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain
and of vengeful anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this
sublime profession of the faith of the artist who creates with his
life-blood, this exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering "which are
the lot of the thinker"; this disdain for Olympian art. Those of his
later works which deal with the criticism of art will be found to
treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary and less
mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of that
human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing his
self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when
upon returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation.
I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It
is impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is
the man who writes to Fet:
"If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he
must insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must
mock at them until he splits his sides."[3]
He does not forget to do so, in his writings on art. The negative
portion of this statement--brimming over with insults and sarcasms--is
so vigorously expressed that it is the only part which has struck
the artist. This method has so violently wounded the superstitions
and susceptibilities of the brotherhood that they inevitably see,
in the enemy of their own art, the enemy of all art whatsoever. But
Tolstoy's criticism is never devoid of the reconstructive element. He
never destroys for the sake of destruction, but only to rebuild. In
his modesty he does not even profess to build anything new; he merely
defends Art, which was and ever shall be, from the false artists who
exploit it and dishonour it.
"True science and true art have always existed and will always exist;
it is impossible and useless to attack them," he wrote to me in 1887,
in a letter which anticipated by more than ten years his famous
criticism of art (_What is Art?_).[4] "All the evil of the day comes
from the fact that so-called civilised people, together with the
scientists and artists, form a privileged caste, like so many priests;
and this caste has all the faults of all castes. It degrades and lowers
the principle in virtue of which it was organised. What we in our world
call the sciences and the arts is merely a gigantic _humbug,_ a gross
superstition into which we commonly fall as soon as we free ourselves
from the old superstition of the Church. To keep safely to the road we
ought to follow we must begin at the beginning--we must raise the cowl
which keeps us warm but obscures our sight. The temptation is great. We
are born or we clamber upon the rungs of the ladder; and we find among
the privileged the priests of civilisation, of _Kultur_, as the Germans
have it. Like the Brahmin or Catholic priests, we must have a great
deal of sincerity and a great love of the truth before we cast doubts
upon the principles which assure us of our advantageous position. But
a serious man who ponders the riddle of life cannot hesitate. To begin
to see clearly he must free himself from his superstitions, however
profitable they may be to him. This is a condition _sine quâ non_....
To have no superstition. To force oneself into the attitude of a child
or a Descartes."
This superstition of modern art, in which the interested castes
believe, "this gigantic humbug," is denounced in Tolstoy's _What is
Art?_ With a somewhat ungentle zest he holds it up to ridicule, and
exposes its hypocrisy, its poverty, and its fundamental corruption.
He makes a clean sweep of everything. He brings to this work of
demolition the joy of a child breaking his toys. The whole of this
critical portion is often full of humour, but sometimes of injustice:
it is warfare. Tolstoy used all weapons that came to his hand, and
struck at hazard, without noticing whom he struck. Often enough it
happened--as in all battles--that he wounded those whom it should
have been his duty to defend: Ibsen or Beethoven. This was the result
of his enthusiasm, which left him no time to reflect before acting; of
his passion, which often blinded him to the weakness of his reasons,
and--let us say it--it was also the result of his incomplete artistic
culture.
Setting aside his literary studies, what could he well know of
contemporary art? When was he able to study painting, and what could
he have heard of European music, this country gentleman who had passed
three-fourths of his life in his Muscovite village, and who had not
visited Europe since 1860; and what did he see when he was upon his
travels, except the schools, which were all that interested him? He
speaks of paintings from hearsay, citing pell-mell among the decadents
such painters as Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Monet, Böcklin, Stuck, and
Klinger; confidently admiring Jules Breton and Lhermitte on account
of their excellent sentiments; despising Michelangelo, and among the
painters of the soul never once naming Rembrandt. In music he felt
his way better,[5] but knew hardly anything of it; he could not get
beyond the impressions of his childhood, swore by those who were
already classics about 1840, and had not become familiar with any later
composers (excepting Tchaikowsky, whose music made him weep); he throws
Brahms and Richard Strauss into the bottom of the same bag, teaches
Beethoven his business,[6] and, in order to judge Wagner, he thought
it was sufficient to attend a single representation of _Siegfried_, at
which he arrived after the rise of the curtain, while he left in the
middle of the second act,[7] In the matter of literature he is, it goes
without saying, rather better informed. But by what curious aberration
did he evade the criticism of the Russian writers whom he knew so well,
while he laid down the law to foreign poets, whose temperament was as
far as possible removed from his own, and whose leaves he merely turned
with contemptuous negligence![8]
His intrepid assurance increased with age. It finally impelled him to
write a book for the purpose of proving that Shakespeare "was not an
artist."
"He may have been--no matter what: but he was not an artist."[9]
His certitude is admirable. Tolstoy does not doubt. He does not
discuss. The truth is his. He will tell you:
"The Ninth Symphony is a work which causes social disunion."
Again:
"With the exception of the celebrated air for the violin by Bach, the
Nocturne in E flat by Chopin, and a dozen pieces, not even entire,
chosen from among the works of Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and
Chopin,... all the rest may be rejected and treated with contempt, as
examples of an art which causes social disunion."
Again:
"I am going to prove that Shakespeare cannot be ranked even as a writer
of the fourth order. And as a character-painter he is nowhere."
That the rest of humanity is of a different opinion is no reason for
hesitating: on the contrary.
"My opinion," he proudly says, "is entirely different from the
established opinion concerning Shakespeare throughout Europe."
Obsessed by his hatred of lies, he scents untruth everywhere; and
the more widely an idea is received, the more prickly he becomes in
his treatment of it; he refuses it, suspecting in it, as he says
with reference to the fame of Shakespeare, "one of those epidemic
influences to which men have always been subject. Such were the
Crusades in the Middle Ages, the belief in witchcraft, the search
for the philosopher's stone, and the passion for tulips. Men see
the folly of these influences only when they have won free from
them. With the development of the press these epidemics have become
particularly notable." And he gives as an example the most recent of
these contagious diseases, the Dreyfus Affair, of which he, the enemy
of all injustice, the defender of all the oppressed, speaks with
disdainful indifference;[10] a striking example of the excesses into
which he is drawn by his suspicion of untruth and that instinctive
hatred of "moral epidemics" of which he admits himself the victim, and
which he is unable to master. It is the reverse side of a virtue, this
inconceivable blindness of the seer, the reader of souls, the evoker
of passionate forces, which leads him to refer to _King Lear_ as "an
inept piece of work," and to the proud Cordelia as a "characterless
creature."[11]
Observe that he sees very clearly certain of Shakespeare's actual
defects--faults that we have not the sincerity to admit: the artificial
quality of the poetic diction, which is uniformly attributed to all
his characters; and the rhetoric of passion, of heroism, and even of
simplicity. I can perfectly well understand that a Tolstoy, who was the
least literary of writers, should have been lacking in sympathy for the
art of one who was the most genial of men of letters. But why waste
time in speaking of that which he cannot understand? What is the worth
of judgments upon a world which is closed to the judge?
Nothing, if we seek in these judgments the passport to these unfamiliar
worlds. Inestimably great, if we seek in them the key to Tolstoy's art.
We do not ask of a creative genius the impartiality of the critic. When
a Wagner or a Tolstoy speaks of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, he is
speaking in reality not of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of himself;
he is revealing his own ideals. They do not even try to put us off the
scent. Tolstoy, in criticising Shakespeare, does not attempt to make
himself "objective." More: he reproaches Shakespeare for his objective
art. The painter of _War and Peace_, the master of impersonal art,
cannot sufficiently deride those German critics who, following the lead
of Goethe, "invent Shakespeare," and are responsible for "the theory
that art ought to be objective, that is to say, ought to represent
human beings without any reference to moral values--which is the
negation of the religious object of art."
It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that Tolstoy pronounces his
artistic judgments. We must not look for any personal after-thoughts
in his criticisms. We shall find no trace of such a thing; he is as
pitiless to his own works as to those of others.[12] What, then, does
he really intend? What is the artistic significance of the religious
ideal which he proposes?
This ideal is magnificent. The term "religious art" is apt to mislead
one as to the breadth of the conception. Far from narrowing the
province of art, Tolstoy enlarges it. Art, he says, is everywhere.
"Art creeps into our whole life; what we term art, namely, theatres,
concerts, books, exhibitions, is only an infinitesimal portion of art.
Our life is full of artistic manifestations of every kind, from the
games of children to the offices of religion. Art and speech are the
two organs of human progress. One affords the communion of hearts, the
other the communion of thoughts. If either of the two is perverted,
then society is sick. The art of to-day is perverted."
Since the Renascence it has no longer been possible to speak of the art
of the Christian nations. Class has separated itself from class. The
rich, the privileged, have attempted to claim the monopoly of art; and
they have made their pleasure the criterion of beauty. Art has become
impoverished as it has grown remoter from the poor.
"The category of the emotions experienced by those who do not work
in order to live is far more limited than the emotions of those who
labour. The sentiments of our modern society may be reduced to three:
pride, sensuality, and weariness of life. These three sentiments and
their ramifications constitute almost entirely the subject of the art
of the wealthy."
It infects the world, perverts the people, propagates sexual depravity,
and has become the worst obstacle to the realisation of human
happiness. It is also devoid of real beauty, unnatural and insincere;
an affected, fabricated, cerebral art.
In the face of this lie of the æsthetics, this pastime of the rich,
let us raise the banner of the living, human art: the art which unites
the men of all classes and all nations. The past offers us glorious
examples of such art.
"The majority of mankind has always understood and loved that which
we consider the highest art: the epic of Genesis, the parables of the
Gospel, the legends, tales, and songs of the people."
The greatest art is that which expresses the religious conscience of
the period. By this Tolstoy does not mean the teaching of the Church.
"Every society has a religious conception of life; it is the ideal of
the greatest happiness towards which that society tends." All are to
a certain extent aware of this tendency; a few pioneers express it
clearly.
"A religious conscience always exists. IT IS THE BED IN WHICH THE RIVER
FLOWS."
The religious consciousness of our epoch is the aspiration toward
happiness as realised by the fraternity of mankind. There is no true
art but that which strives for this union. The highest art is that
which accomplishes it directly by the power of love; but there is
another art which participates in the same task, by attacking, with the
weapons of scorn and indignation, all that opposes this fraternity.
Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo's _Les
Misérables_, and the paintings of Millet. But even though it fail to
attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with sympathy
and truth brings men nearer together. Such is _Don Quixote:_ such
are the plays of Molière. It is true that such art as the latter is
continually sinning by its too minute realism and by the poverty of
its subjects "when compared with ancient models, such as the sublime
history of Joseph." The excessive minuteness of detail is detrimental
to such works, which for that reason cannot become universal.
"Modern works of art are spoiled by a realism which might more justly
be called the provincialism of art."
Thus Tolstoy unhesitatingly condemns the principle of his own genius.
What does it signify to him that he should sacrifice himself to the
future--and that nothing of his work should remain?
"The art of the future will not be a development of the art of the
present: it will be founded upon other bases. It will no longer be
the property of a caste. Art is not a trade or profession: it is the
expression of real feelings. Now the artist can only experience real
feelings when he refrains from isolating himself; when he lives the
life natural to man. For this reason the man who is sheltered from life
is in the worst possible conditions for creative work."
In the future "artists will all be endowed." Artistic activity will be
made accessible to all "by the introduction into the elementary schools
of instruction in music and painting, which will be taught to the child
simultaneously with the first principles of grammar." For the rest,
art will no longer call for a complicated technique, as at present; it
will move in the direction of simplicity, clearness, and conciseness,
which are the marks of sane and classic art, and of Homeric art.[13]
How pleasant it will be to translate universal sentiments into the
pure lives of this art of the future! To write a tale or a song, to
design a picture for millions of beings, is a matter of much greater
importance--and of much greater difficulty--than writing a novel or a
symphony. It is an immense and almost virgin province. Thanks to such
works men will learn to appreciate the happiness of brotherly union.
"Art must suppress violence, and only art can do so. Its mission is to
bring about the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of Love."[14]
Which of us would not endorse these generous words? And who can fail
to see that Tolstoy's conception is fundamentally fruitful and vital,
in spite of its Utopianism and a touch of puerility? It is true that
our art as a whole is only the expression of a caste, which is itself
subdivided not only by the fact of nationality, but in each country
also into narrow and hostile clans. There is not a single artist in
Europe who realises in his own personality the union of parties and of
races. The most universal mind of our time was that of Tolstoy himself.
In him men of all nations and all classes have attained fraternity;
and those who have tasted the virile joy of this capacious love can no
longer be satisfied by the shreds and fragments of the vast human soul
which are offered by the art of the European cliques.
[1] _What shall we do?_ p. 378-9.
[2] In time he even came to justify suffering--not only personal
suffering, but the sufferings of others. "For the assuagement of the
sufferings of others is the essence of the rational life. How then
should the object of labour be an object of suffering for the labourer?
It is as though the labourer were to say that an untilled field is a
grief to him." (_Life,_ chap, xxxiv.-xxxv.)
[3] February 23, 1860. _Further Letters,_ pp. 19-20. It was for this
reason that the "melancholy and dyspeptic" art of Tourgenev displeased
him.
[4] This letter (October 4, 1887) has been printed in the _Cahiers de
la Quinzaine,_ 1902, and in the _Further Letters_ (_Correspondance
inédite_), 1907. _What is Art?_ appeared in 1897-98; but Tolstoy had
been pondering the matter for more than fourteen years.
[5] I shall return to this matter when speaking of the _Kreutzer
Sonata._
[6] His intolerance became aggravated after 1886. In _What shall
we do?_ he did not as yet dare to lay hands on Beethoven or on
Shakespeare. Moreover, he reproached contemporary artists for daring
to invoke their names. "The activity of a Galileo, a Shakespeare, a
Beethoven has nothing in common with that of a Tyndall, a Victor Hugo,
or a Wagner; just as the Holy Father would deny all relationship with
the Orthodox popes." (_What shall we do?_)
[7] For that matter, he wished to leave before the end of the first
act. "For me the question was settled. I had no more doubt. There was
nothing to be expected of an author capable of imagining scenes like
these. One could affirm beforehand that he could never write anything
that was not evil."
[8] In order to make a selection from the French poets of the new
schools he conceived the admirable idea of "copying, in each volume,
the verses printed on page 28!"
[9] _Shakespeare,_ 1903. The book was written on the occasion of an
article by Ernest Crosby upon _Shakespeare and the Working Classes._
[10] "Here was one of those incidents which often occur, without
attracting the attention of any one, and without interesting--I do not
say the world--but even the French military world." And further on: "It
was not until some years had passed that men awoke from their hypnosis,
and understood that they could not possibly know whether Dreyfus were
guilty or not, and that each of them had other interests more important
and more immediate than the Affaire Dreyfus." (_Shakespeare._)
[11] "_King Lear_ is a very poor drama, very carelessly constructed,
which can inspire nothing but weariness and disgust."--_Othello_, for
which Tolstoy evinces a certain sympathy, doubtless because the work
is in harmony with his ideas of that time concerning marriage and
jealousy, "while the least wretched of Shakespeare's plays, is only
a tissue of emphatic words." Hamlet has no character at all: "he is
the author's phonograph, who repeats all his ideas in a string." As
for _The Tempest, Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida,_ &c., Tolstoy only
mentions them on account of their "ineptitude."
The only character of Shakespeare's whom he finds natural is Falstaff,
"precisely because here the tongue of Shakespeare, full of frigid
pleasantries and inept puns, is in harmony with the false, vain,
debauched character of this repulsive drunkard."
Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read Shakespeare
with pleasure between 1860 and 1870, especially at the time when he
contemplated writing a historical play about the figure of Peter the
Great. In his notes for 1869 we find that he even takes _Hamlet_ as
his model and his guide. Having mentioned his completed works, and
comparing _War and Peace_ to the Homeric ideal, he adds:
"HAMLET and my future works; the poetry of the romance-writer in the
depicting of character."
[12] He classes his own "works of imagination" in the category of
"harmful art." (_What is Art?_) From this condemnation he does not
except his own plays, "devoid of that religious conception which must
form the basis of the drama of the future."
[13] As early as 1873 Tolstoy had written: "Think what you will, but
in such a fashion that every word may be understood by every one. One
cannot write anything bad in a perfectly clear and simple language.
What is immoral will appear so false if clearly expressed that it will
assuredly be deleted. If a writer seriously wishes to speak to the
people, he has only to force himself to be comprehensible. When not
a word arrests the reader's attention the work is good. If he cannot
relate what he has read the work is worthless."
[14] This ideal of brotherhood and union among men is by no means,
to Tolstoy's mind, the limit of human activity; his insatiable mind
conceives an unknown ideal, above and beyond that of love:
"Science will perhaps one day offer as the basis of art a much higher
ideal, and art will realise it."