THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC
The finest theory finds its value only in the works by which it is
exemplified. With Tolstoy theory and creation are always hand in hand,
like faith and action. While he was elaborating his critique of art
he was producing types of the new art of which he spoke: of two forms
of art, one higher and one less exalted, but both "religious" in the
most human sense. In one he sought the union of men through love;
in the other he waged war upon the world, the enemy of love. It was
during this period that he wrote those masterpieces: _The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_ (1884-86), the _Popular Tales and Stories_ (1881-1886), _The
Power of Darkness_ (1886), the _Kreutzer Sonata_ (1889), and _Master
and Servant_ (1895).[1] At the height and end of this artistic period,
like a cathedral with two spires, the one symbolising eternal love and
the other the hatred of the world, stands _Resurrection_ (1899).
All these works are distinguished from their predecessors by new
artistic qualities. Tolstoy's ideas had suffered a change, not alone
in respect of the object of art, but also in respect of its form. In
reading _What is Art?_ or _Shakespeare_ we are struck by the principles
of art which Tolstoy has enounced in these two books; for these
principles are for the most part in contradiction to the greatest of
his previous works. "Clearness, simplicity, conciseness," we read
in _What is Art?_ Material effects are despised; minute realism is
condemned; and in _Shakespeare_ the classic ideal of perfection and
proportion is upheld. "Without the feeling of balance no artists could
exist." And although in his new work the unregenerate man, with his
genius for analysis and his native savagery, is not entirely effaced,
some aspects of the latter quality being even emphasised, his art is
profoundly modified in some respects: the design is clearer, more
vigorously accented; the minds of his characters are epitomised,
foreshortened; the interior drama is intensified, gathered upon itself
like a beast of prey about to spring; the emotion has a quality of
universality; and is freed of all transitory details of local realism;
and finally the diction is rich in illustrations, racy, and smacking of
the soil.
His love of the people had long led him to appreciate the beauty of the
popular idiom. As a child he had been soothed by the tales of mendicant
story-tellers. As a grown man and a famous writer, he experienced an
artistic delight in chatting with his peasants.
"These men," he said in later years to M. Paul Boyer,[2] "are masters.
Of old, when I used to talk with them, or with the wanderers who,
wallet on shoulder, pass through our countryside, I used carefully
to note such of their expressions as I heard for the first time
expressions often forgotten by our modern literary dialect, but always
good old Russian currency, ringing sound.... Yes, the genius of the
language lives in these men."
He must have been the more sensitive to such elements of the language
in that his mind was not encumbered with literature.[3] Through living
far from any city, in the midst of peasants, he came to think a little
in the manner of the people. He had the slow dialectic, the common
sense which reasons slowly and painfully, step by step, with sudden
disconcerting leaps, the mania for repeating any idea when he was once
convinced, of repeating it unwearingly and indefinitely, and in the
same words.[4]
But these were faults rather than qualities. It was many years before
he became aware of the latent genius of the popular tongue; the
raciness of its images, its poetic crudity, its wealth of legendary
wisdom. Even at the time of writing _War and Peace_ he was already
subject to its influence. In March, 1872, he wrote to Strakov:
"I have altered the method of my diction and my writing. The language
of the people has sounds to express all that the poet can say, and it
is very dear to me. It is the best poetic regulator. If you try to say
anything superfluous, too emphatic, or false, the language will not
suffer it. Whereas our literary tongue has no skeleton, you may pull it
about in every direction, and the result is always something resembling
literature."
To the people he owed not only models of style; he owed them many
of his inspirations. In 1877 a teller of _bylines_ came to Yasnaya
Polyana, and Tolstoy took notes of several of his stories. Of the
number was the legend _By what do Men live?_ and _The Three Old Men_,
which became, as we know, two of the finest of the _Popular Tales and
Legends_ which Tolstoy published a few years later.[5]
This is a work unique in modern art. It is higher than art: for who, in
reading it, thinks of literature? The spirit of the Gospel and the pure
love of the brotherhood of man are combined with the smiling geniality
of the wisdom of the people. It is full of simplicity, limpidity, and
ineffable goodness of heart; and that supernatural radiance which from
time to time--so naturally and inevitably--bathes the whole picture;
surrounding the old Elias[6] like a halo, or hovering in the cabin of
the cobbler Michael; he who, through his skylight on the ground-level,
sees the feet of people passing, and whom the Lord visits in the guise
of the poor whom the good cobbler has succoured.[7] Sometimes in these
tales the parables of the Gospel are mingled with a vague perfume of
Oriental legends, of those _Thousand and One Nights_ which Tolstoy had
loved since childhood.[8] Sometimes, again, the fantastic light takes
on a sinister aspect, lending the tale a terrifying majesty. Such is
_Pakhom the Peasant_,[9] the tale of the man who kills himself in
acquiring a great surface of and--all the land which he can encircle by
walking for a whole day--and who dies on completing his journey.
"On the hill the _starschina_, sitting on the ground, watched him as he
ran; and he cackled, holding his stomach with both hands. And Pakhom
fell.
"'Ah! Well done, my merry fellow! You have won a mighty lot of land!'
"The _starschina_ rose, and threw a mattock to Pakhom's servant.
"'There he is: bury him.'
"The servant was alone. He dug a ditch for Pakhom, just as long as from
his feet to his head: two yards, and he buried him."
Nearly all these tales conceal, beneath their poetic envelope, the same
evangelical moral of renunciation and pardon.
"Do not avenge thyself upon whosoever shall offend thee.[10]
"Do not resist whosoever shall do thee evil.[11]
"Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord."[12]
And everywhere, and as the conclusion of all, is love.
Tolstoy, who wished to found an art for all men, achieved universality
at the first stroke. Throughout the world his work has met with a
success which can never fail, for it is purged of all the perishable
elements of art, and nothing is left but the eternal.
_The Power of Darkness_ does not rise to this august simplicity of
heart: it does not pretend to do so. It is the reverse side of the
picture. On the one hand is the dream of divine love; on the other, the
ghastly reality. We may judge, in reading this play, whether Tolstoy's
faith and his love of the people ever caused him to idealise the people
or betray the truth.
Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dramatic essays,[13] has here
attained to mastery. The characters and the action, are handled
with ease; the coxcomb Nikita, the sensual, headstrong passion of
Anissia, the cynical good-humour of the old woman, Matrena, who gloats
maternally over the adultery of her son, and the sanctity of the old
stammering Hakim--God inhabiting a ridiculous body. Then comes the fall
of Nikita, weak and without real evil, but fettered by his sin; falling
to the depths of crime in spite of his efforts to check himself on the
dreadful declivity; but his mother and his wife drag him downward....
"The peasants aren't worth much.... But the _babas!_ The women! They
are wild animals ... they are afraid of nothing! ... Sisters, there
are millions of you, all Russians, and you are all as blind as moles.
You know nothing, you know nothing!... The moujik at least may manage
to learn something--in the drink-shop, or who knows where?--in prison,
or in the barracks; but the _baba_--what can she know? She has seen
nothing, heard nothing. As she has grown up, so she will die.... They
are like little blind puppies who go running here and there and ramming
their heads against all sorts of filth.... They only know their silly
songs: 'Ho--o--o! Ho--o--o!' What does it mean? Ho--o--o?
They don't know!"[14]
Then comes the terrible scene of the murder of the new-born child.
Nikita does not want to kill it. Anissia, who has murdered her husband
for him, and whose nerves have ever since been tortured by her crime,
becomes ferocious, maddened, and threatens to give him up. She cries:
"At least I shan't be alone any longer! He'll be a murderer too 1 Let
him know what it's like!" Nikita crushes the child between two boards.
In the midst of his crime he flies, terrified; he threatens to kill
Anissia and his mother; he sobs, he prays:--
"Little mother, I can't go on!" He thinks he hears the mangled baby
crying.
"Where shall I go to be safe?"
It is Shakespearean. Less violent, but still more poignant, is the
dialogue of the little girl and the old servant-woman, who, alone
in the house, at night, hear and guess at the crime which is being
enacted off the stage.
The end is voluntary expiation. Nikita, accompanied by his father, the
old Hakim, enters barefooted, in the midst of a wedding. He kneels,
asks pardon of all, and accuses himself of every crime. Old Hakim
encourages him, looks upon him with a smile of ecstatic suffering.
"God! Oh, look at him, God!"
The drama gains quite a special artistic flavour by the use of the
peasant dialect.
"I ransacked my notebooks in order to write _The Power of Darkness_,"
Tolstoy told M. Paul Boyer.
The unexpected images, flowing from the lyrical yet humorous soul of
the Russian people, have a swing and a vigour about them beside which
images of the more literary quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy
revelled in them; we feel, in reading the play, that the artist while
writing it amused himself by noting these expressions, these turns of
thought; the comic side of them by no means escapes him,[15] even while
the apostle is mourning amidst the dark places of the human soul.
While he was studying the people, and sending into their darkness a
ray of light from his station above them, he was also devoting two
tragic romances to the still darker night of the middle classes and
the wealthy. At this period the dramatic form was predominant over his
ideas of art. The _Death of Ivan Ilyitch_ and _The Kreutzer Sonata_ are
both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul turned upon itself and
concentrated upon itself, and in _The Kreutzer Sonata_ it is the hero
of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration.
_The Death of Ivan Ilyitch_ (1884-86) has impressed the French public
as few Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I
mentioned that I had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among
the middle-class readers in the French provinces, a class apparently
indifferent to literature and art. I think the explanation lies in the
fact that the book represents, with a painful realism, a type of the
average, mediocre man; a conscientious functionary, without religion,
without ideals, almost without thought; the man who is absorbed in
his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of his death,
when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the
representative type of the European _bourgeoisie_ of 1880 which reads
Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not
even irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or
to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of such matters.
In the violence of its attacks, alternately bitter and almost comic,
upon the world in general, and marriage in particular, the _Death
of Ivan Ilyitch_ was the first of a new series of works; it was the
forerunner of the still more morose and unworldly _Kreutzer Sonata_
and _Resurrection_. There is a lamentable yet laughable emptiness
in this life (as there is in thousands and thousands of lives),
with its grotesque ambitions, its wretched gratification of vanity,
"always better than spending the evening opposite one's wife"; with
its weariness and hatred of the official career; its privileges, and
the embitterment which they cause; and its one real pleasure: whist.
This ridiculous life is lost for a cause yet more ridiculous--a fall
from a ladder, one day when Ivan wished to hang a curtain over the
drawing-room window. The lie of life. The lie of sickness. The lie
of the well-to-do doctor, who thinks only of himself. The lie of the
family, whom illness disgusts. The lie of the wife, who professes
devotion, and calculates how she will live when her husband is
dead. The universal lie, against which is set only the truth of a
compassionate servant, who does not try to conceal his condition from
the dying man, and helps him out of brotherly kindness. Ivan Ilyitch,
"full of an infinite pity for himself," weeps over his loneliness and
the egoism of men; he suffers horribly, until the day on which he
perceives that his past life has been a lie, and that he can repair
that lie. Immediately all becomes clear--an hour before his death. He
no longer thinks of himself; he thinks of his family; he pities them;
he _must_ die and rid them of himself.
"Where are you, Pain? Here.... Well, you have only to persist.--And
Death, where is Death? He did not find it. In place of Death he saw
only a ray of light. 'It is over,' said some one.--He heard these
words and repeated them to himself. 'Death no longer exists,' he told
himself."
In _The Kreutzer Sonata_ there is not even this "ray of light." It
is a ferocious piece of work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a
wounded beast avenging itself for what it has suffered. We must not
forget that the story is the confession of a human brute, who has
taken life, and who is poisoned by the virus of jealousy. Tolstoy
hides himself behind his leading character. We certainly find his own
ideas, though heightened in tone, in these furious invectives against
hypocrisy in general; the hypocrisy of the education of women, of love,
of marriage--marriage, that "domestic prostitution"; the hypocrisy of
the world, of science, of physicians--those "sowers of crime." But the
hero of the book impels the writer into an extraordinary brutality of
expression, a violent rush of carnal images--all the excesses of a
luxurious body--and, by reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the
fear and hatred of the passions; maledictions hurled in the face of
life by a monk of the Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. Having
written the book Tolstoy himself was alarmed:
"I never foresaw at all," he said in the _Epilogue to the Kreutzer
Sonata_,"[16] that in writing this book a rigorous logic would bring me
where I have arrived. My own conclusions terrified me at first, and I
was tempted to reject them; but it was impossible for me to refuse to
hear the voice of my reason and my conscience."
He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the
murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage.
"He who regards woman--above all his wife--with sensuality, already
commits adultery with her."
"When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have
a reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind
will be accomplished."
He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew,
that "the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage
cannot exist; that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an
element not of progress but of downfall; that love, with all that
precedes and follows it, is an obstacle to the true human ideal."[17]
But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until
they fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great
creative artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist
outstripped the thinker; a process by which art lost nothing. In
the power of its effects, in passionate concentration, in the brutal
vividness of its impressions, and in fullness and maturity of form,
nothing Tolstoy has written equals the _Kreutzer Sonata_.
I have not explained the title. To be exact, it is erroneous; it gives
a false idea of the book, in which music plays only an accessory
part. Suppress the sonata, and all would be the same. Tolstoy made
the mistake of confusing two matters, both of which he took deeply to
heart: the depraving power of music, and the depraving power of love.
The demon of music should have been dealt with in a separate volume;
the space which Tolstoy has accorded it in the work in question is
insufficient to prove the danger which he wishes to denounce. I must
emphasise this matter somewhat; for I do not think the attitude of
Tolstoy in respect of music has ever been fully understood.
He was far from disliking music. Only the things one loves are
feared as Tolstoy feared the power of music. Remember what a place
the memories of music hold in _Childhood_, and above all in _Family
Happiness,_ in which the whole cycle of love, from its springtide
to its autumn, is unrolled to the phrases of the _Sonata quasi una
fantasia_ of Beethoven. Remember, too, the wonderful symphonies which
Nekhludov[18] hears in fancy, and the little Petia, the night before
his death.[19] Although Tolstoy had studied music very indifferently,
it used to move him to tears, and at certain periods of his life he
passionately abandoned himself to its influence. In 1858 he founded a
Musical Society, which in later years became the Moscow Conservatoire.
"He was extremely fond of music," writes his brother-in-law, S. A.
Bers. "He used to play the piano, and was fond of the classic masters.
He would often sit down to the piano before beginning his work.[20]
Probably he found inspiration in so doing. He always used to accompany
my youngest sister, whose voice he loved. I have noticed that the
sensations which the music evoked in him were accompanied by a slight
pallor and an imperceptible grimace, which seemed expressive of
fear."[21]
It was really fear that he felt; fear inspired by the stress of those
unknown forces which shook him to the roots of his being. In the world
of music he felt his moral will, his reason, and all the reality of
life dissolve. Let us turn to the scene, in the first volume of _War
and Peace_, in which Nikolas Rostoff, who has just lost heavily at
cards, returns in a state of despair. He hears his sister Natasha
singing. He forgets everything.
"He waited with a feverish impatience for the note which was about to
follow, and for a moment the only thing in all the world was the melody
in three-quarter-time: _Oh! mio crudele affetto!_
"'What an absurd existence ours is!' he thought. 'Unhappiness, money,
hatred, honour--they are all nothing.... Here is the truth, the
reality!... Natasha, my little dove!... Let us see if she is going to
reach that B?... She has reached it, thank God!'
"And to emphasise the B he sung the third octave below it in
accompaniment.
"'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he cried, and the vibration of
that octave awoke in his soul all that was best and purest. Beside this
superhuman sensation, what were his losses at play and his word of
honour?... Follies! One could kill, steal, and yet be happy!"
Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him music is only a passing
influence; but Natasha is on the point of losing her self-control.
After an evening at the Opera, "in that strange world which is
intoxicated and perverted by art, and a thousand leagues from the
real world; a world in which good and evil, the extravagant and the
reasonable, are mingled and confounded," she listened to a declaration
from Anatol Kouraguin, who was madly in love with her, and she
consented to elope with him.
The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared music.[22] A man whose
influence over him was considerable--Auerbach, whom in 1860 he had
met in Dresden--had doubtless a hand in fortifying his prejudices. "He
spoke of music as of a _Pflichtloser Genuss_ (a profligate amusement).
According to him, it was an incentive to depravity."[23]
Among so many musicians, some of whose music is at least amoral, why,
asks M. Camille Bellaigue,[24] should Tolstoy have chosen Beethoven,
the purest, the chastest of all?--Because he was the most powerful.
Tolstoy had early loved his music, and he always loved it. His remotest
memories of _Childhood_ were connected with the _Sonata Pathétique;_
and when Nekhludov in _Resurrection_ heard the _andante_ of the
_Symphony in C Minor_, he could hardly restrain his tears: "he was
filled with tenderness for himself and for those he loved." Yet we have
seen with what animosity Tolstoy referred in his _What is Art?_[25]
to the "unhealthy works of the deaf Beethoven"; and even in 1876 the
fury with which "he delighted in demolishing Beethoven and in casting
doubts upon his genius" had revolted Tchaikowsky and had diminished his
admiration for Tolstoy. The _Kreutzer Sonata_ enables us to plumb the
depths of this passionate injustice. What does Tolstoy complain of
in Beethoven? Of his power. He reminds us of Goethe; listening to the
_Symphony in C Minor_, he is overwhelmed by it, and angrily turns upon
the imperious master who subjects him against his will.[26]
"This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me immediately into the state
of mind which was the composer's when he wrote it.... Music ought to be
a State matter, as in China. We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry
wield so frightful a hypnotic power.... As for these things (the first
_Presto_ of the Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play them under
particular and important circumstances...."
Yet we see, after this revolt, how he surrenders to the power of
Beethoven, and how this power is by his own admission a pure and
ennobling force. On hearing the piece in question, Posdnicheff falls
into an indefinable state of mind, which he cannot analyse, but of
which the consciousness fills him with delight. "There is no longer
room for jealousy." The wife is not less transfigured. She has, while
she plays, "a majestic severity of expression"; and "a faint smile,
compassionate and happy, after she has finished." What is there
perverse in all this? This: that the spirit is enslaved: that the
unknown power of sound can do with him what it wills; destroy him, if
it please.
This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: the mediocrity and the
lack of vitality in the majority of those who make or listen to music.
Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel nothing. The spectacle of
the Opera-house during a performance of _Salomé_ is quite enough to
assure us of the immunity of the public to the more perverse emotions
evoked by the art of sounds. To be in danger one must be, like Tolstoy,
abounding in life. The truth is that in spite of his injustice where
Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his music more deeply than do the
majority of those who now exalt him. He, at least, knew the frenzied
passions, the savage violence, which mutter through the art of the
"deaf old man," but of which the orchestras and the virtuosi of to-day
are innocent. Beethoven would perhaps have preferred the hatred of
Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers.
[1] To these years was attributed, in respect of the date of
publication, and perhaps of completion, a work which was really written
during the happy period of betrothal and the first years of marriage:
the beautiful story of a horse, _Kholstomier_ (1861-86). Tolstoy
speaks of it in 1883 in a letter to Fet (_Further Correspondence_.)
The art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its penetrating
psychological sympathy, its humour, and its youth, has much in common
with the art of Tolstoy's maturity (_Family Happiness, War and Peace_),
The _macabre_ quality of the end, and the last pages comparing the
body of the old horse with that of his master, are full of a realistic
brutality characteristic of the years after 1880.
[2] _Le Temps,_ August 29, 1901.
[3] "As for style," his friend Droujinin told him in 1856, "You are
extremely illiterate; sometimes like an innovator and a great poet;
sometimes like an officer writing to a comrade. All that you write with
real pleasure is admirable. The moment you become indifferent your
style becomes involved and is horrible." (_Vie et Oeuvre._)
[4] _Vie et Oeuvre._--During the summer of 1879 Tolstoy lived on terms
of great intimacy with the peasants.
[5] In the notes of his readings, between 1860 and 1870, Tolstoy wrote:
"The _bylines_--very greatly impressed."
[6] _The Two Old Men_ (1885).
[7] _Where Love is, there God is also_ (1885).
[8] _By what do Men live?_ (1881); _The Three Old Men_ (1884); _The
Godchild_ (1886).
[9] This tale bears the sub-title, _Does a Man need much Soil?_ (1886).
[10] _The Fire that flames does not go out_ (1885).
[11] _The Wax Taper_ (1885); _The Story of Ivan the Idiot._
[12] _The Godson_ (1886).
[13] The love of the theatre came to him somewhat late in life. It was
a discovery of his, and he made this discovery during the winter of
1869-70. According to his custom, he was at once afire with enthusiasm.
"All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with the drama;
and, as always happens to men who have never, up to the age of
forty, thought about such or such a subject, when they suddenly turn
their attention to this neglected subject, it seems to them that
they perceive a number of new and wonderful things.... I have read
Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Molière.... I want to read
Sophocles and Euripides.... I have kept my bed a long time, being
unwell--and when I am unwell a host of comic or dramatic characters
begin to struggle for life within me ... and they do it with much
success."--Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 1870 (_Further Letters_).
[14] A variant of Act iv.
[15] The creation of this heart-breaking drama must have been a strain.
He writes to Teneromo: "I am well and happy. I have been working
all this time at my play. It is finished." (January, 1887. _Further
Letters._)
[16] A French translation of this Epilogue (_Postface_), by M.
Halpérine-Kaminsky was published in the volume _Plaisirs vicieux_,
under the title _Des relations entre les sexes._
[17] Let us take notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of the simplicity
of believing that the ideal of celibacy and absolute chastity was
capable of realisation by humanity as we know it. But according to him
an ideal is incapable of realisation by its very definition: it is an
appeal to the heroic energies of the soul.
"The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the union of all
living creatures in brotherly love, is irreconcilable with the conduct
of life, which demands a continual effort towards an ideal which is
inaccessible, but does not expect that it will ever be attained."
[18] At the end of _A Russian Proprietor._
[19] _War and Peace_.--I do not mention _Albert_ (1857), the story of a
musician of genius; the book is weak in the extreme.
[20] The period spoken of is 1876-77.
[21] S. A. Bers, _Memories of Tolstoy._
[22] But he never ceased to love it. One of the friends of his later
years was a musician, Goldenreiser, who spent the summer of 1910
near Yasnaya. Almost every day he came to play to Tolstoy during the
latter's last illness. (_Journal des Débats,_ November 18, 1910.)
[23] Letter of April 21, 1861.
[24] _Tolstoï et la musique_ (_Le Gaulois,_ January 4, 1911).
[25] Not only to the later works of Beethoven. Even in the case of
those earlier works which he consented to regard as "artistic," Tolstoy
complained of "their artificial form."--In a letter to Tchaikowsky he
contrasts with Mozart and Haydn "the artificial manner of Beethoven,
Schubert, and Berlioz, which produces calculated effects."
[26] Instance the scene described by M. Paul Boyer: "Tolstoy sat down
to play Chopin. At the end of the fourth Ballade, his eyes filled with
tears. 'Ah, the animal!' he cried. And suddenly he rose and went
out." (_Le Temps,_ November 2, 1902.)