in English, he is not quite an old story which every literate child
should know. Professional students of philosophy seemed to have missed
him or to have tardily recognized him, and the mere casual reader of
philosophy may quietly dodge Mr. Mencken's bludgeon: "Only blockheads
to-day know nothing of them [Nietzsche's ideas] and only fools are
unshaken by them." That sort of aggressiveness on the part of a
champion of Nietzsche will not help the master's ideas to prevail;
though it may seem to be a disciple's repetition of Nietzsche's superb
arrogance, it is really not true to his spirit. For Nietzsche attacked
thoughts and thinkers, quarrelled with opponents who were somewhere
near his size, ignored the opinions of the brainless multitude, and
was content to wait for time and the slow-moving world to find him
out.
Certainly he can not be jammed down our throat, and quite as certainly
his stimulating and cathartic doses can not be snatched from our lips
by moralistic prohibitionists. It is possible, of course, for a doctor
to take advantage of one's innocence and ignorance and put one to
sleep with drugs. That was my own experience. Dr. Paul Elmer More
stole up on me in the dark with a soporific little book, the first I
had ever read about Nietzsche. When I came to, the world was at war. A
wild German philosopher, who had been quoted by a brutal German
general named Bernhardi, was responsible for the violation of Belgian
women. This was manifestly absurd, but there was no time to
investigate and explain, even for one's private satisfaction, the
causes of this ridiculous misunderstanding not only of an individual
philosopher but of the relation of book-philosophy to appallingly
unphilosophic crimes.
It is amazing to find that the absurdity persists, that it is
necessary for Dr. Levy to try to prove in 1921 that Nietzsche did not
incite the Germans to a war of conquest! Has not the hysteria
sufficiently subsided for wise men to quit wasting their energies in a
contest with spooks? It was part of Nietzsche's work to ridicule
ghosts and blow away myths, and that he should have become a myth
himself is an irony that he might have enjoyed. He gloried in being
misunderstood. The true philosopher has always been in lonely
opposition to the dominant ideals of his time. It is in a tone not of
resentment or complaint but of haughty satisfaction that he writes to
Georg Brandes, in the last year of his intellectual life:
Your opinion of present-day Germans is more favourable than mine
... all profound events escape them. Take, for example, my "Beyond
Good and Evil." What bewilderment it has caused them. I have not
heard of a single intelligent utterance about it, much less of an
intelligent sentiment. I believe that it has not dawned on the
most well-intentioned of my readers that here is the outcome of a
sane philosophic sensibility, and not a medley of a hundred
outworn paradoxes and heterodoxes. Not a soul has ever experienced
the same sort of thing that I have. I never meet anyone who has
been through a thousandth part of the same passionate struggle.
Nietzsche's philosophic solitude accounts in part for the excellence
of his letters. In his struggles with the world, and his wilful
alienation from it, he clung passionately to the few who were allied
to him by the ties of blood, friendship, or intellectual sympathy. The
letters contain no philosophic ideas which he did not express again
and again in his professional writings. They do contain something
else, however, moods, emotions, pleasures and private difficulties,
intimacies which are never quite apart from the incessant battle of
thought yet belong to moments of comparative ease when the soldier is
off duty. This philosopher, whose work is so intensely personal, who
says that he wrote his books with his whole body and life, did not
completely express himself in his books. He poured his soul into them
and was honestly naked and unashamed. But for all his autobiographical
candor, his work is not a promiscuous confession. He labored over his
paragraphs like an artist, calculated their effect, and made them
personal only in so far as suited his philosophic purpose. There
remains a sensitive and reticent Nietzsche who revealed himself to his
friends alone.
He was fortunate in his friends. When he writes in the preface of
"Human, All-Too-Human," that he has evolved an as yet non-existent
company of free spirits, because he needs them and because they are
some compensation for lack of friends, he is posing in a philosophic
attitude which is quite justified by his experience as a thinker and
writer but which is not quite true to the private history of Friedrich
Nietzsche. He never lacked friends, and his isolation was in great
measure self-imposed. The most distinguished friend he lost was
Wagner; the break came late in the older man's life, and it seems to
have been the younger man who disrupted the friendship.
Even without Wagner, Nietzsche's correspondents are numerous and
varied, as many and of as many kinds as a wise man needs, if he
chooses to make the most of them. The lonely philosopher was not
neglected as man and brother. He preferred to flock by himself. His
ill health rather than the animosity of his countrymen drove him out
of Germany; and he was happiest, as close as he ever came to
happiness, when he concentrated his energy in his work. He makes a
philosophic virtue of necessity, affects to despise what he can not
have, laments his solitude and is proud of it. To his sister he writes:
You can not think how lonely and out of it I always feel when I am
in the midst of all the kindly Tartufferie of those people whom
you call 'good,' and how intensely I yearn at times for a man who
is honest and who can talk even if he were a monster, but of
course I should prefer discourse with demi-gods.... Oh, this
infernal solitude!
A few months later, when this aged philosopher is forty, he writes to
an old friend that all the people he loves belong to the past and
regard him with merely merciful indulgence.
We see each other, we talk in order to avoid being silent--we
still write each other in order to avoid being silent. Truth,
however, glances from their eyes, and these tell me (I hear it
well enough): 'Friend Nietzsche, you are now quite alone!'
That's what I have lived and fought for!
The last sentence may be taken in two ways. It may mean that Nietzsche
strove for isolation, or it may be interpreted bitterly: "So _that's_
what I get from my friends for all my labor and struggle!" Perhaps
both meanings are there. The letter ends: "Ah, dear friend, what an
absurdly silent life I lead! So much alone, so much alone! So
'childless'! Remain fond of me; I am truly fond of you." That sounds
like a not too human cry of hunger for affection. The man who prefers
demi-gods and is confident that he would be worthy of their
companionship is not immune from the pangs of ordinary mortals.
Nietzsche had a self-critical knowledge of his own needs and nature,
and, so far as circumstances permitted, he followed the course that
pleased him. He sometimes groaned but he never whined. In a letter to
his sister, who had evidently suggested the possibility of marriage,
he says that he cheerfully accepts the disadvantages of independence.
The list of requirements that he lays down are enough to make us
congratulate the impossible she whom he wisely refrained from
marrying. "I know the women folk of half Europe," he writes, "and
wherever I have observed the influence of women on men, I have noticed
a sort of gradual decline as the result." That is one of the
philosopher's amusing errors. He did not know women folk at all; the
most fatuous, almost the only fatuous, passages in his works and his
letters are those about the ladies, and his letters to ladies are the
declarations of a free spirit shying off from something "agreeable
though perhaps a trifle dangerous."
Nietzsche is at his best, of course, when he writes to distinguished
men, the few who recognized his genius and made him glow in his cold
solitude. Nietzsche craved recognition; his contempt for fame was
largely a contempt for sour grapes. Brandes and Strindberg put wreaths
on his head, and he was proud of them. He writes to Strindberg:
I am the most powerful intellect of the age, condemned to fulfill
a stupendous mission.... It is possible that I have explored more
terrible and more questionable worlds of thought than anyone else,
but simply because it is in my nature to love the silent
backwater. I reckon cheerfulness among the proofs of my
philosophy.
A man who can write like that of himself is the happiest of mortals,
for he knows that he belongs among the immortals.
TOLSTOY
I.
Tolstoy closes the second part of "Sevastopol" with these words: "The
hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I
have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and ever
will be beautiful, is Truth." That sentence was written when Tolstoy
was twenty-seven. For fifty years, in novels, tales, essays, and
exhortations, he celebrated his hero with unflagging devotion. The
deeds and lineaments of the hero are not always as other men have seen
them, but the identity, the character of the hero is never in doubt.
The hero changes and utters conflicting wisdom, not because of the
worshiper's inconstancy, but because Tolstoy develops, because he
outgrows and disavows his previous selves and violates consistency
between one book and another in his zeal to find consistency between
his next book and Truth.
In ceaseless pursuit of Truth, Tolstoy is led through the most
stirring intellectual and moral experiences which modern man has
undergone. He is part of all that we have met; from the remotest of
European countries, from a moment in the world's thought that is
already well behind us, his messages have encircled the globe and
modify the living ideas of today. He touched all departments of
thought and left none as it had been.
He plunged into the nineteenth century warfare of religion and
science, found that both parties were priest-ridden and arrogant, and
wrested from both the right of the individual to a simple faith and to
knowledge free from the cant of the laboratory. The increasing grumble
of the contest between privilege and labor--the most portentous war
the world has seen and not yet at its crisis--assaulted his ears; he
hearkened while most other members of the narrow circle of culture
were deaf or indifferent, and he took his stand on the side of the
workers against his own rank and kin. He laid bare the motives of war,
in which he had drawn a guilty sword, and became a militant champion
of peace. The unholy alliance of culture, religion, and civil
authority he strove to dissolve by broadsides against each member of
the triune tyranny, and so he conceived a new theory of art, a new
reading of the gospels, and an anarchism so individual that it
excludes most other anarchists. Under the solemnity of marriage and
the thin poetry of romance he discerned the cloven hoof of
self-indulgence, and he shocked the world with a virile puritanism, so
powerful in its terms, so subversive of our timid codes that bashful
Morality shrank from her bravest defender.
All the main thoroughfares of nineteenth century thought crossed
before the doorway of Tolstoy's house. He trafficked with all the
passengers, but joined no special group. Even his own disciples he
allowed to go their own way; he took no part in their organization and
left them to make their own interpretation and their own application
of his teachings. Loving all mankind, having sympathetic knowledge of
all sorts and conditions of men, he was nevertheless strangely
solitary. At the end of his life his devotion to his ideas alienated
from his family this most tender, home-loving man.[1] The young
idealists of the world left him behind, for they broke out new
highways of thought which he could not travel; young Russia sees in
him a splendid survival of an elder age of storm and struggle, calls
him master but not leader.
[1] As this book goes to press, Madam Tolstoy's
"Autobiography" is being published in _The Freeman_.
Her views of the great man should be illuminating,
especially if she does not try to minimize his defects.
He justified in his own life his theoretic individualism, because he
was great and strong enough to stand alone. The spirit of irony can
not but deal gently with the sincerest, bravest of men. Yet may she
note under the gray garment of humility a mien incorrigibly
aristocratic and domineering. The most powerful mind in the world
proclaimed self-submersion as the perfect virtue, because it is the
most difficult virtue for a daring and vigorous spirit to attain. The
foe of privilege, preaching that all men are brothers in love and
alike before the Lord as they should be before the law of man, enjoyed
a unique privilege--he was almost the only man in Russia who could
with impunity say what he thought. He won this right because he was an
aristocrat with friends at court and because the Russian government
dared not disregard the admiration of the world which had made Tolstoy
an international hero. He warned the mighty to walk in the fear of
God, but they walked in the fear of Leo Tolstoy.
To remind ourselves of the titles of some of his books and the order
in which they appeared, we may divide his work into seven parts. The
first part includes military tales and autobiographic sketches:
"Sevastopol," "Two Hussars," "The Raid," "The Cossacks," "Childhood,"
"Boyhood," "Youth." The second part, beginning in 1861, embraces his
experience as school teacher, his discourses on education, school
books, and stories for children and peasants. The third part, from
1864 to 1878, comprises "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." The
fourth part begins with his religious conversion in 1878, and is
devoted to theological, ethical and sociological essays: "My
Confession," "Union and Translation of the Four Gospels," "My
Religion," "What, Then, Must We Do?" The subjects treated in these
books he expounds over and over for the rest of his life. Because it
is salient from his other work we may say that the "Kreutzer Sonata"
(1889) constitutes a fifth part. "What is Art?" and "Resurrection" may
be thought of as a sixth part. Then follows the concluding decade of
warfare in pamphlets, essays, letters, upon civil and ecclesiastical
authority and other powers of darkness.
Any such partition of Tolstoy's work is untrue to its organic
continuity, its massive unity. His books are embedded in his life.
Though each novel stands alone in self-sustaining integrity,
intelligible to all the world, yet each gains in clearness and power
for being understood in relation to the mind that produced it. This
colossus of solitary protest, rising rough and volcanic above the
flats of modern thought, is vaster when seen close to his intellectual
base. Viewed from a distance some sides of him, some contours, are
blurred and deceptive. No part of his work can be wholly apprehended
unless all parts are brought into the range of vision.
On the day of his death he was the most famous man of letters in the
world. From the first report of his final illness bulletins flew over
the cables in hourly succession. Yet for several weeks after his
death, repeated inquiry among the dealers in English and foreign books
in Boston (reputed center of culture and high thinking) showed that
there never had been much demand for Tolstoy's books, except his
novels, and that the momentary rise of interest caused by his death
had not disturbed the dust on such books as "What, Then, Must We Do?"
and "My Confession."
This seems to indicate that not all the articles and sermons which
followed the ultimate news from Russia were grounded upon first-hand
knowledge of Tolstoy. The truth is that his opinions have trickled
through to us Westerners in diluted streams. He is already a
tradition, and it is the habit of tradition to weaken as it spreads,
to lose the effect which a drinker at the sources feels in their
concentration, in their full and proportioned measure of ingredients.
Tolstoy is abroad in the world; he has permeated the thought of the
best minds and tinged the currents of our present beliefs. But few
Westerners know him in his overwhelming entirety. This man who laid
open his whole mind and heart with prodigal frankness is borne
westward on the winds of rumor as a mythical prodigy. The outlines of
his thought are misty and wavering to many of those who call him
great. He spared no pains to clarify his beliefs; he expounded the
same principle many times with undiminished force and ever new
transparency; he gave sweeping permission to the world to translate
and print his books. Yet there is no complete authorized edition of
his works in any language, even in Russian, thanks to the censors and
his own indifference to practical concerns.[2]
[2] This is no longer true in the troubled year of grace,
1922. Every scrap of Tolstoy is published in Russia. And
probably before long there will be complete translations in
many modern languages.
Thus for the moment a partial chaos has descended upon the work of
Tolstoy, a coherent luminous body of work, which left his hand as free
from ambiguity as his extraordinary skill and industry could make it,
but which has been scattered in transmission. It will take some years
for his loyal followers in England and America to give us a complete
and adequate translation; and in spite of Matthew Arnold's naive
confidence in the French, the most patient collator will have
difficulty in finding Tolstoy's work or recognizing even the titles,
in the books which the Parisian publishers have sent forth under his
name. One who has assembled such of his books as are procurable in
French and English would say with all emphasis possible:
"Withhold judgment about any particular belief expressed or supposed
to have been expressed by Tolstoy until you have read as many of his
books as you can get--and do not fail to read them." He is the one
noble speaker who has happened in our time, "who may be named and
stand as the mark and acme" of modern literature.
A little knowledge of Tolstoy is more than proverbially dangerous. He
laid his vigorous hand upon every problem that vexes and strengthens
the soul. His utterance on each problem is intense and aggressive. He
boldly pursues an idea whither it leads, or drives it with passionate
conviction to a foreseen conclusion, and stays not for the beliefs of
any majority or minority of men. His magnitude overflows the accepted
area of such an adjective as intolerant. Yet approached for the first
time by a reader accustomed to the persuasive amenities of other
saints and sages, he seems to bristle with outrageous denial; some of
his opinions, isolated from the rest, stand as repellant outposts,
forbidding many minds which, entering from another side, would go
straight to the heart of him. For example, our traditional reverence
for Shakespeare is wounded by his downright statement that Shakespeare
was not an artist; the offended judgment retorts that thereby Tolstoy
proves that he is himself no artist, or that in crotchety old age he
outgrew the poetry of his virile years. It must be understood that the
essay on Shakespeare is in the nature of an appendix to his essay,
"What Is Art?" That in turn is closely related to his ethical and
social teachings. Those again are inseparably bound with his tales and
novels. And his fiction, finally, is rooted in Russian life, not only
because, as is obvious, it deals with Russian people, but because
during Tolstoy's prime, there was, as we shall presently see, an
attitude toward the novel and all literary art which was peculiar to
intellectual Russians.
Happily for English readers the foundation for complete understanding
of Tolstoy has been laid by Mr. Aylmer Maude in his "Life," the second
volume of which appeared a few days before his master's death. Mr.
Maude has entire knowledge of his subject and perfect sympathy; he is
a sane and independent thinker, and his work is admirable for its
balance, its candor, its sturdy devotion, which, however, admits no
surrender of the biographer's private beliefs. To the reader who cares
merely for an interesting story Tolstoy's career offers more than that
of most men of letters. It is laid amid the plots and counterplots of
bloody Russia, the most melodramatic background of modern history. The
man is spectacular, compelling, in all violation of his own doctrines
of self-abasement. The peasant's smock, which he wore as symbol of his
unity with common man, served only to make him the more picturesque.
This ascetic religious philosopher was a master of thrilling war
stories. He knew equally well the heart of a lady in the high life of
Moscow, and the soul of a peasant woman. He was of athletic stature,
and his huge hand was sensitive to the finger tips; with it he gripped
a scythe, played the piano, wrote a tirade against modern music, and
indited an exposition of the gospel of love which estranged some of
his best friends! It is no wonder that his fiction bears the seal of
reality, that it has the abundance, the variety, the jostling
contrasts of life itself.
II.
In Russia prose fiction has been for a century the vehicle of the
soberest reflections upon contemporary problems. It was dangerous for
a Russian radical to express his beliefs directly in essays and
expositions; what he was not allowed to utter in editorial and
parliamentary debate he set forth indirectly through the novel, which
thus became a sort of realistic parable. Suppression increased his
emotional intensity. Feeling himself a member of a down-trodden class,
he became the champion of other down-trodden classes. When Tolstoy
began to write, the novel was already a tempered weapon against abuse,
the skilful handling of it was a tradition among the literati, and
there were masters to coach and encourage the beginner. The Russian
novel records the deepest motives of Russian history. Tourgenef voiced
the philosophic resignation and scepticism of the educated Russian and
the evils of serfdom. Tolstoy portrayed the vices of the educated
Russian and the evils of wage-slavery which followed the emancipation
of the serfs. Russian fiction is great, because it treats the gravest
struggles of life and because its authors have trained themselves in
the art of expounding ideas in the form of fiction without
transgressing the laws of narrative; they have learned to be the
mouthpiece of life and to let life preach the sermons. To Tolstoy and
other Russians the greatest American book is "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
because it is the chronicle of a bleeding issue; I have seen many
references to that book by Russian writers but scarcely a mention of
Hawthorne.
Mr. Maude quotes a letter to Tolstoy from Drouzhinin, critic,
novelist, and translator of Shakespeare: "An Englishman or an
American," he says, "may laugh at the fact that in Russia not merely
men of thirty, but gray-haired owners of 2,000 serfs sweat over
stories of a hundred pages, which appear in the magazines, are
devoured by everybody, and arouse discussion in society for a whole
day. However much artistic quality may have to do with this result,
you cannot explain it merely by art. What in other lands is a matter
of idle talk and careless dilettantism, with us is quite another
affair. Among us things have taken such shape that a story--the most
frivolous and insignificant form of literature--becomes one of two
things: either it is rubbish, or else it is the voice of a leader
sounding through the empire."
Tolstoy's realism is, then, the result both of his own temperamental
passion for truth and of a theory of art which prevailed in his
literary circle. There were, to be sure, silly novelists in Russia;
there, as everywhere, only the best minds regarded fiction as a vital
matter. But there were enough such serious minds to welcome Tolstoy
and encourage him. Nekrasof, editor of _The Contemporary_, found in
Tolstoy's first work, "the truth--the truth, of which, since Gogol's
death, so little has remained in Russian literature." Tourgenef
repeatedly called Tolstoy the greatest of Russians, and on his
deathbed pencilled the pathetic letter in which he pleaded with
Tolstoy to return to his art. "I am glad," he said, "to have been your
contemporary." Had he lived sixteen years longer, "Resurrection" might
have made him happy.