gifted minds have turned to more serious and more lucrative callings
than literature. But I do not believe it. The sciences show at present
just as few geniuses as the arts. It seems as if there were laws of ebb
and flow here, too. Sometimes a whole billow of inspired intellects is
flung upon the earth, and then there is long drought. We have had no
great writers since Gottfried Keller."
"Gottfried Keller? I have never heard the name before. Who was he? What
did he write?"
"He was a Swiss who inherited Goethe's free outlook on life, and wrote
the best German novels, full of creative art, of racy humor, and of
almost uncanny knowledge of human nature. He would give you much
pleasure."
"How? You say he inherits to some degree from Goethe. In that case my
enthusiasm would be doubtful, for I cannot say I especially love that
Goethe of yours."
"Is it possible?"
"There are some of his works I admire without reserve, which stand among
the finest things that have ever been written: _Hermann and Dorothea_,
for instance. I once knew his dedication by heart. Yet the lyrics of
Heine, for instance, make a deeper impression upon me than Goethe's."
"Pardon the remark, count, but in that case your knowledge of the German
language is not sufficient for you to notice the difference in quality.
Heine is a virtuoso, who plays with form. With Goethe, every word
breathes the deepest spiritual experience and is uttered from inward
necessity."
"The same thing is said here of Pushkin--that his greatness can be
appreciated only by those who are most deeply imbued with the spirit of
the language. I haven't any too much faith in all that, however. To be
sure, a translation is only the wrong side of the carpet; yet I believe
really great works hold their own in translation, so the form of phrase
cannot be the only test for the value of a writing. But what repels me
in Goethe is precisely that play on form of which you accuse Heine.
Goethe and Shakespeare are both artists in the sense in which you
reproach the Moderns. They are bent only upon æsthetic play, and create
only for enjoyment, and not with the heart's blood."
"I could not admit that, count, without repudiating everything I have
ever thought and felt. Not for Shakespeare, in whom, through all the
dramatic conventions of the greater part, we hear the heartbeat often
enough. As for Goethe, whose poems are partly painful confessions,
written only for the reason he himself gives,
"Warum sucht' ich den Weg so sehnsuchtsvoll
Wenn ich ihn nicht den Brüdern zeigen soll?"[15]
"I find much more of this feeling for humanity in Schiller."
"He is more rhetorical, appeals more directly to the middle class and
contemporaries. But, like the overbearing political tribune he was, he
has hardly entered into the joy and sorrow of the human soul."
"And it is exactly this that brings him nearer to me than Goethe and
Shakespeare. He is filled with a sacred sense of purpose in his work. He
had not the cold ambition of the artist to be merely faithful to his
model. He was full of longing that we should be carried away with him.
Of the three requirements I make of the great artist--technical
perfection, worthiness of subject, and self-identification with the
matter--the last is the most important. One may be a great writer even
when technical perfection, complete mastery of the tricks of the trade,
is lacking, as, for instance, in the case of Dostoyevski. But unless a
man writes with his heart's blood he cannot be a great artist."
"I believe the heart's-blood doctrine would rule out all cheerful
_genre_, and that meets perhaps best of all the fundamental purpose of
art."
"You say that because you yourself see in art only a means of enjoyment,
only play."
I could not have denied that this is really my conception, and should,
therewith, have hit upon the fundamental opposition between our Western
conception of life, as expressed by Goethe, and the exclusively
religio-moral one of Tolstoï. I could not, however, compel myself to
fill with a fruitless argument the few hours I had to spend with the
honored man. I should have been as little able to convince the apostle
of seventy-five, whose ascetic philosophy is the product of definite
conditions of civilization, as he to convince me, the west-German, whose
light-heartedness and confident belief in culture had ripened in the
sunshine of the Rhine bank. I therefore evaded the point, and said:
"I have hitherto not taken your rigorous demands upon art as well as
upon life quite literally, count. I thought to myself that when one
pulls up a horse suddenly he does not wish it to turn around, but only
to stop. I supposed that you wished merely to counteract other powerful
impulses."
"No," said the count, after a moment's reflection. "That is not so. I
believe in the absolute correctness of my demands. I myself, however,
was too weakly or too badly trained to submit to them altogether. I
cannot, for instance, keep from enjoying Chopin, although I condemn his
music as exclusive art, which addresses itself to the understanding and
feelings only of the aristocratically cultivated few."
"It seems to me an unattainable ideal that all men should share in
enjoyment of art; and the requirement that the artist shall refrain from
all work that could be enjoyed only by a limited number of especially
cultivated men is impossible and even harmful. It would deprive us of
the finest works we possess."
"If the requirement is justified in and of itself, it is quite
immaterial what sacrifices must be made to it. Nothing is to be
considered in comparison with truth."
I could go no further here, again. For I was talking with the man who
repudiates his own immortal works because they are beyond the
comprehension of most people, and therefore help to widen the gulf
between the educated and the uneducated. I could not even make the
objection that almost all learning must be condemned on the same ground,
for it is well known that Tolstoï does not shrink from even this
conclusion.
It is not, however, a matter of indifference to him whether people
consider his views to be scientifically founded--_i. e._, correctly
reasoned out or not. He said to me in the course of the conversation:
"I often laugh, and I also often grow angry, when people cast it in my
face that my studies are not scientific. I assert in return that the
whole of positivism and materialism is unscientific. If I seek a science
by which I can _live_, I seek it only logically and steadfastly, or
scientifically, with no contradiction within itself from its premises to
its final conclusion. Scepticism, on the other hand, completely denies
every concept of life. And yet the sceptic wishes to live, otherwise he
would kill himself. He admits, therefore, by the mere fact that he is
alive that his whole philosophy is nothing for him but an idle exercise
of the intellect which has no bearing on his life. That means that it is
not in the least _true_ for him. I, however, seek the premise from which
I can not only live, but live peacefully and cheerfully. This premise is
God, and the duty for us that of perfecting ourselves. I follow the
consequence of that premise to the end, and feel that I am right not
only in words but also in deeds."
No truly scientific thinker needs to be reminded that Tolstoï here, in
the _a priori_ assumption that life must have a meaning, departs from
the fundamental principle of all scientific reasoning--namely, the
starting without a hypothesis, and, like Kant, to whom he feels drawn
not without reason, works with postulates instead of with conclusions.
But who will not rejoice that the poet, who above all things was and is
a passionate human creature, has saved himself from the despair of
agnosticism by a bold leap to the rock of faith, which lies beyond all
science, and can neither be supported nor shaken by it? How many of the
proud agnostics do not secretly cast furtive glances at that rock, where
they would like to reserve themselves a place against emergencies? While
Tolstoï sincerely acknowledges that without this foundation under his
feet he would no longer be able to live. He needed this quieting as to
the outcome of things to be able to follow his poetic impulse to look
at the world as it is. Only entirely barren, abstract natures find their
satisfaction in the voluntarily limited logical sequence of science,
confined as it is to the empirical. All men of imagination, including
Goethe and Bismarck, have had their share of mystic confidence in that
beneficent course of the universe which in popular language is called
God or Providence. This poetic faith has, of course, nothing whatever to
do with science.
Undervaluation of one's own qualities, however, and enthusiasm for the
complementary ones, is a familiar psychological fact. The poet Tolstoï
wishes to be a cut-and-dried philosopher. He repudiates his poetry, and
likewise speaks coldly--indeed, even with hostility--of the spirits akin
to him, of Goethe and Shakespeare. There is only one opinion among
lovers of art, and that is that Tolstoï, in the natural spontaneity of
his characters and incidents, is to be compared with these two alone,
and in the abundance of his psychological traits with Shakespeare only.
Yet at present Tolstoï is engaged in writing a book, soon to appear,
against Shakespeare and the study of Shakespeare. In our conversation he
came back to the indefensible over-estimation of this artist.
"If people were capable of approaching Shakespeare impartially they
would lose their unreasonable reverence for this writer. He is crude,
immoral, a toady to the great, an arrogant despiser of the small, a
slanderer of the common people. He lacks good taste in his jests, is
unjust in his sympathies, ignoble, intoxicated with the acquaintance
with which a few aristocrats honored him. Even his art is
over-estimated, for in every case the best comes from his predecessors
or his sources. But people are quite blind. They are under the spell of
the consensus of opinion handed down for centuries. It is truly
incredible what ideas can be awakened in the human mind by consecutive
treatments of one and the same theme."
I believe that one will not go astray in finding in the above-mentioned
book against Shakespeare a prosecution at the same time of Tolstoï's
campaign against the æsthetic-artistic view of life in general. His
purpose is to overthrow one of the chief idols of the æsthetic cult. As
far as the arguments on the moral side are concerned, he will certainly
have a following. The son of a tavern-keeper, himself an actor,
Shakespeare was certainly not the ideal of a gentleman. Tolstoï will,
however, have difficulty in abolishing wonder at the artistic power of
this most sumptuous of all geniuses.
Tolstoï dealt with the influence of general opinion again in another
connection. He was speaking of the mischief that the newspapers do in
the world, but chose, in my opinion, a very inappropriate example of
this.
"During the Dreyfus case," said he, "I received at least a thousand
letters from all parts of the world asking me to express an opinion.
How could I have responded? Here I am in Russia; the transaction was in
France. It was absolutely impossible to get a correct idea of the
proceedings, for every paper reported it differently. In and of itself,
what was the thing that had happened? An innocent officer had been
condemned. That was an unimportant occurrence. There were much greater
crimes committed by those in power. But the whole world took the alarm.
Everybody had an incontrovertible conviction as to the guilt or the
innocence of a man whom nobody knew, and whose judges nobody knew. A
thing like that is an epidemic, not thinking."
One must certainly travel a very strange and lonely road to fail to
appreciate that in this very instance the press accomplished an enormous
work in arousing mankind, and in showing them the danger threatening
from the Jesuits. The Dreyfus affair belongs to world-history as an
epoch-making event. Perhaps the deliverance of the whole white race from
the octopus-like embrace of clericalism and militarism is its work. And
Count Tolstoï, who regards it as his mission to fight militarism, lives
through the chief battle and does not suspect it! One certainly ought
not to forget that he is in Russia, where the incarceration of innocent
men is an every-day affair, and that the Russian papers think they
fulfil their duty to an allied nation by treating the matter from the
stand-point of Méline and Marcier.
Tolstoï's antipathy to this affair does not come at all from any
possible anti-Semitic feeling. He does not love the mercantile Jews, who
have not the slightest trace of Christian spirit. He condemns
anti-Semitism, however, in the most emphatic way. "Anti-Semitism," he
said, "is not a misfortune for the Jews, for he who suffers wrong is not
to be pitied, but he who does wrong. Anti-Semitism demoralizes society.
It is the worst evil of our time, for it poisons whole generations. It
makes them blind to right and wrong, and kills all moral feeling. It
changes the soul into a place of desolation in which all goodness and
nobility are swept away."
In regard to other matters, Tolstoï does not use strong expressions. He
parries them good-humoredly but decisively. When we were talking of the
new romanticists, I used some severe language. I explained the
uproarious applause of certain gifted but degenerate and perverse
artists as a cynical attack on the inborn moral sense, and said,
speaking from my own experience, that I had yet to meet one of those
devotees of immorality whom I had not found on closer acquaintance to be
morally deficient. When, however, I spoke of literary support of vice,
the count raised his hand to stop me, and said:
"Let us be gentle in our judgment of our fellow-men." Then he added, "Go
on."
I had, however, gained command of myself and begged pardon for my
vehemence. I could not go on, however, for what had been on my tongue
was only more bitter words.
He looked at me kindly, and merely said, "Thank you."
It is self-evident that Tolstoï did not mean by this to express sympathy
with the Diabolics and other eccentrics. Moreover, he spoke flatly
against art for art's sake, which he calls tiresome more than anything
else. "Agonized productions of the search for originality, welcomed by
idleness, and intended for the applause of the critics of so-called fine
taste." He shrugged his shoulders over the fact that a monument had been
erected to Baudelaire. He agreed with me, however, when I traced the
interest in exotic suggestion in the creative arts, as for everything
eccentric and bizarre, back to the tendency towards an entirely external
naturalism, which would completely rule out from art the personality of
the artist. He returned again to his text.
"Without the deepest sympathy and complete identification with the
subject no work of art can ever be produced."
He does not admit, however, that this identification with the subject is
found in the experiments of these latter-day writers. He sees in them
only a sudden change from the fashion for objectivity to the fashion for
subjectivity. When, however, I spoke of the good-fortune of the Russian
in not being obliged to take part in all these fashions, because he had
already showed in his deep-hearted realism that it is possible to be
true to reality, and yet be full of warmth and meaning, he again raised
his hand to stop me, and blushed. I could not tell whether it was from
modesty or whether he does not wish any longer to hear of the works of
his "literary" period. I believe, however, that the noise of all this no
longer reaches his ear. When I spoke with warm enthusiasm of the debt we
all owe him, said that his art was a revelation to us, that through him
we had first learned what poetic power lies in the simplest and deepest
fidelity to nature, he stopped me in his gentle way. Only philanthropy
is now a matter of any importance for him. Everything else is empty
trifling. He said to me:
"You are still buried deep in materialism. You must see that you free
yourself from that."
Nevertheless, he was good enough to recognize my honest purpose of
seeking the truth, even though I do not succeed in finding it in all
points as he believes he has found it.
I must certainly admit that in the late hours of the night, as he sat
opposite me, his fine head leaning far back and resting on one hand, his
glowing eyes making him seem as it were transparent, I had great
difficulty in preserving a conventional bearing. Here was one of the
greatest men of all times, who had risen out of the purely human and had
become a saint upon whom rests the divine light. The kindness and
tenderness of his voice and the gentleness of his words are
indescribable. He has the love and the dauntless courage of the prophet
and the apostle without their passion and wrath. It is doubtful whether
any mortal has ever had more understanding of human weakness than he. He
combats only institutions, never men. And yet no other man has had such
influence upon our consciences as he, most compassionate of all judges
in spite of the pitiless keenness of his vision.
It was midnight when the count's sleigh took us to Kozlovka, the nearest
station to the estate. In leaving I could not conceal the extent to
which I was moved. When I think of the final moments, when the count
stood at the head of the stairs and called a last word after me, while I
turned to him to say good-bye once more and forever, it seems to me that
I never in my life experienced anything more overwhelming. I carried
away an impression that the whole hall was filled with the light of his
eyes. Yet it was only a prosaic bit of advice for our return trip to
Moscow, to give which he had hurried after us after the adieus in his
study. The Countess Sasha, however, stood in the starlight by the door,
lovely as a goddess of hospitality. It was gratifying to know that the
saintly old man was in the care of this lovely creature.
Under the twinkling stars we sped at a brisk trot past black forests and
over the silent, deep-buried fields. Within us re-echoed the saying of
Kant, "Two things there are that always fill me with reverent awe: the
starry heavens above me and the moral consciousness within." The man
whose hand I had just grasped embodies the moral consciousness of our
century.
FOOTNOTE:
[15] "Why do I seek the way so ardently, if not that I might show it to
my brothers?"
THE END