of life"--religion is the sense of life, the principle upon which the
details of the moral world are ordered and by which they are to be
interpreted. In a slightly different meaning "the sense of life"
expresses the total effect of Tolstoy's fiction. He wrote to a young
disciple: "Do not bend to your purpose the events in the story, but
follow them wherever they lead you.... Lack of symmetry and the
apparent haphazardness of events is a chief sign of life."
In "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" there are many plots. The unity
is that of the loose-jointed English novel rather than that of the
French, which travels on a straight track. Tolstoy's stories move like
a river with many tributaries; he explores now one, now another of the
branch streams, but the course of the main current is continuous, and
runs in one general direction, as if the slope of the country had been
determined before the recorder came upon the scene to measure and
report.
"War and Peace" is greater than a novel; it is an epic, it is
nation-wide and long as the growth from childhood to maturity. We see
from a peak of the face of eastern Europe and the swarming of peoples
and armies. The sensation of vastness, of humanity surging and flowing
in obedience to obscure collective interests is produced by only one
other modern book that I know, Hardy's "The Dynasts." From the high
pinnacles of omniscience the imagination descends by swift unperceived
transitions to the intimacies of a house in Moscow--to the heart of
the girl Natacha--to the mind of Pierre saturated with alcohol
plotting to assassinate Napoleon. The adventures and purposes of the
characters cross and conflict, interweave and unite, but each goes as
it must and there is no confusion in the telling.
In "Anna Karenina," the story of Levin is but loosely related to the
principal tragedy, and the story of Levin's brother is an excursion
from the highway of Levin's career. One can see that after the book is
done. During its course the reader has no sense that any part is not
precisely placed. The illusion of inevitability is perfect. Levin's
brother is related to him by natural ties in life; it is natural,
then, that he should appear in Levin's story.
The illusion of inevitability springs from Tolstoy's all-encircling
comprehension of events, from his justice to each character and from
his extraordinary physical vividness. He writes with his five senses.
A critic warned him early that he was in danger of making a man's
thigh feel like going on a journey to India.
But his recognition of physical sensations and his power to convey
them (they traverse bodily the stylistic obstacles of translation)
take the story off the flat page and give it three dimensional
reality. The acrid smell of an old man's breath, the coldness of a
man's hand when he is in mental distress, the cracking of Karenin's
knuckles when he clasps his hands in moral satisfaction or the anguish
of wounded pride--such details cling to the mind, and the memory of
them recalls the whole story.
Tolstoy's conception of human character is at once relentlessly
analytic and profoundly pitiful and kind. The whole content of his
thought from its bold surface to its deepest depth is instinct with
compassion. Once when he was walking with Tourgenef they came to an
old broken-down horse in a pasture. Tolstoy went up to it, stroked it,
and uttered its thoughts and sufferings with such moving tenderness
that Tourgenef cried: "You must once have been a horse yourself."
In "Master and Man," a beautiful story of two men lost in a snowstorm,
the horse is a third character--an animal character, be it understood,
for Tolstoy is antipodal to nature-faking. He has confidence that
nature and man will tell their own story and disclose their inherent
lessons. Dogmatic and uncompromising in his private ethical beliefs,
he never sacrifices humanity even upon the altars where he tried to
immolate himself. Valid morality springs spontaneously from his
narrative, and is thereby a hundredfold more impressive than teachings
forced from artificially moulded events. Even in his rewriting of
traditional myths and parables he restores inorganic sermons to life,
creates a living thing in which the ethical intention is assimilated
and vitalized. He told these stories to the peasants, listened with
delight to their retelling of them, and incorporated their racial
turns of phrase. To an old peasant woman with a native gift for
narrative, he said: "You are a real master, Anisya; thank you for
teaching me to speak Russian and to think Russian."
He learned from life and he trusted life to teach the reader. Anna
Karenina commits suicide, not because she is a naughty woman whom the
novelist as guardian of morals must punish for the satisfaction of a
virtuous world, but because the society that surrounds her, the
everyday life of visiting and tea-drinking, inexorably forbids her to
be happy. Tolstoy is a champion of the poor, and he began his career
at a time when, as Mr. Cahan tells us, "the idealization of the
peasant" was one of the staple phrases in essays and editorials. But
in Tolstoy's stories there is no false sublimation of the peasant. He
does not cry, like Dickens, or the professional charity-monger: "Pity
these poor starved brothers." He simply recites their lives. Sometimes
he chronicles the most terrible things in a grim restrained
matter-of-fact tone, more moving than any passionate appeal to the
reader's sympathy. He is, of course, a master of argument and
exhortation, but all that is found in his other books, not in his
fiction.
A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly partisan, complains that in
"War and Peace" all the important characters are aristocrats, and that
the story fails to reveal the motives of the people, of those
inarticulate millions who Tolstoy himself says are the real makers of
history. But this apparent fault is an instance of Tolstoy's
integrity. When he wrote "War and Peace" he knew only aristocrats, or
was chiefly interested in them. He had already begun to discern the
relations between the multitude and the leaders whom history
signalizes; but he had not lived close to peasants and workmen; he had
approached them as lord and master, not yet as brother and
interpreter. Moreover, if there be a moral hero in "War and Peace"
whom the author seems to favor, it is Karataief, the illiterate
soldier, whose simple faith dawns as a regenerative light upon Pierre,
a rich man of the world who has met all philosophies and found them
heartless.
Tolstoy could not write what he did not know or did not feel. His
stories, though not autobiographic in the usual sense of the world,
are the quintessence of his adventures and experiences, accurately
recalled and profoundly meditated. When the manuscript of the
"Kreutzer Sonata" was read in his house to a company of friends,
Tolstoy said in answer to some objections:
"In a work of art it is indispensable that the artist should have
something new, of his own. It is not how it is written that really
matters. People will read the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and say, 'Ah, that is
the way to write!' The indispensable thing is to go beyond what others
have done, to pick off even a very small fresh bit. But it won't do to
be like my friend Fet, who at sixteen wrote, 'The spring bubbles, the
moon shines, and she loves me,' and who went on writing and writing,
and at sixty wrote: 'She loves me, and the spring bubbles, and the
moon shines.'"
It was impossible for Tolstoy, the novelist, to write of people whom
he did not know, merely because he happened to have sympathy with some
of their ideals and habits. It was impossible for him to violate human
nature when he portrayed characters that he did know. Hating
professional psychology and all other sciences and quasi-sciences, he
is the greatest of so-called psychological novelists; his psychology
was made before text-books, and it used to be called "truth to human
nature." You cannot suggest, as you read a novel by Tolstoy, anything
a character ought have done which was not done, any emotion he should
have felt which Tolstoy has not suggested at exactly the right moment.
He penetrates the characters of living men and the characters of
history and romance. The pseudo-psychology of the critics of "Hamlet,"
does not deceive him. Napoleon, mythical monster and genius
unapproachable, fails to over-awe him; Tolstoy draws him, man size,
amid events that dwarf heroes.
In "Resurrection," Nekhludof is represented as holding social theories
which in point of fact Tolstoy held. Nekhludof reads Henry George and
tries to give his land to the peasants as communal property. Tolstoy,
the social reformer, would admit no obstacle to the justice and the
practicability of the plan; a lesser artist would have yielded to the
reformer, the plan would have worked and the story would have proved
the theory. But Tolstoy, the novelist, confronts Nekhludof with the
suspicion, the ignorant shrewdness of the peasants; the plan
encounters all the difficulties, legal and psychological, which life
would offer.
"Resurrection" is the crowning proof of Tolstoy's artistic power. For
twenty years he had developed theories about every problem of life; he
held his opinions tenaciously; hugging them in resolute defiance he
strode roughshod through the domains of church, state and family. His
convictions were strong enough to silence him as an artist, and for
years he obeyed the mandate of conscience that forbade him to write
novels at all. But when, to raise money for the Doukhobors, he
consented to write "Resurrection," his artistic sense was stronger
than the rest of him (if, indeed, there was any antagonism between the
two sides of his nature), and theories powerful enough to disrupt the
universe were kept in bounds by his sense of proportion, his sense of
life.
The feeling that Tolstoy, the artist, and Tolstoy, the reformer, are
in any true sense engaged in struggle is largely due to the false
dialectic of traditional criticism, which he by precept and practice
has confuted. His great moral principles are the sure foundation of
his greatness in art. For us Westerners modern realism--Hardy and Zola
come first to mind--is associated with a godless though very humane
scepticism. Religious sentiment has been left in the weak hands of
romance, and the longer it has been left there the more false it has
become. From the beginning, even before his religious conversion,
Tolstoy had a sound ethical outlook. At the age of forty he wrote of
Tourgenef's "Smoke": "The strength of poetry lies in love, and the
direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of
love there is no poetry. In 'Smoke' there is hardly any love of
anything and very little poetry. There is only love of a light and
playful adultery, and therefore the poetry of that novel is
repulsive." The spirit in that criticism is the guiding spirit in
"Anna Karenina," and it is the same spirit which dictated this passage
in the magnificent sermon on the Russian-Japanese war: "The great
struggle of our time ... is not the struggle in which men engage with
mines, bombs and bullets; it is the spiritual struggle which goes on
incessantly, which is going on now, between the enlightened conscience
of humanity, about to be made manifest, and the shadows and oppression
which surround it and crush it."
III.
To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on church and state seem too
vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously
brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are
complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present
at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand
and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like
that."[3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared
to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and
children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our
horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press,
which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be.
American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities
with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the
sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk
bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles
and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the
one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we
have our public schools and compulsory education laws--in some states.
Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to
the glorious free competition of business, in taking their fathers'
places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag
and read about George Washington.
[3] And we are still saying it, 1922!
Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience
of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters
have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America
must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But
that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the
land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His
indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall
take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his
indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial
agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business
at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that
can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It
is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too
far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is no such thing as a
virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in
which it appears.
Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read articles about the "history
of achievement in the United States," to take democratic short cuts to
superficial knowledge, than to read disconcerting books. Our
healthy-minded confidence in American morals bids us be content with a
little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, and not trouble ourselves
with such a difficult book as "Past and Present." In like fashion we
shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without reading "What, Then, Must We
Do?" or "The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient for us a few
newspaper discussions about "Why Tolstoy Left the Countess and the
Relations Between Family Life and Anarchism." For Tolstoy was an
anarchist, and that disposes of him! We know all about anarchists;
they live in Paterson, N.J., and in the imaginations of journalists,
home secretaries, and framers of immigration laws.
Yet despite our republican wisdom, we cannot quite understand Tolstoy
until we know the true meanings of such words as labor, capital,
exploitation, rent, property, interest, and proletariat. In Russia
these words are understood by many people, also in Germany. But we
Americans, though highly cultivated, are not well informed about
contemporary facts and current philosophies. We have still to be
taught that the Russian revolution is our revolution, that it is part
of a mighty economic change which is in process all over the world. A
study of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct us--some
day--about these momentous relations.
The present status of the revolution is more confused in Russia than
in any other country.[4] The repressive measures of the government
forced a temporary alliance between all types of revolutionaries. It
was this alliance which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers and made
him a retarding force, almost a reactionary, against the progress of
the Social Democracy, that party of orderly Marxians under German
tutelage which was the hope of young Russia. The Czar's government,
which was no respecter of principles, grouped him with all the
malcontents and libertarians. And he returned the compliment. Because
he despised all economics, he could not join a "scientific" party.
Failing to distinguish between the peaceful and the militant
revolutionists, he charged them all with murder and grouped them with
the government. And thus he stood alone, distrustful of peaceful
anarchists because they were not religious, and distrustful of most
religions because they were organized on a property basis. He stood
alone. Yet all liberal men, antithetical to each other as are the
socialists and the anarchists, united in loving him as they united in
hatred of the government. They applauded his terrific indictment of
the society under which we live, though they disagreed from various
points of view with his solution. It was said of him on his eightieth
birthday that whatever conflict there might be between his beliefs and
those of other reformers, the foes of liberty were his foes and the
friends of liberty were his friends.
[4] This refers, of course, to the revolution before the
Great War. I wonder now, 1922, just what Lenin, Trotsky,
Chicherin, et. al., think of Tolstoy, and what he would have
thought of them!
Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian anarchy, a voluntary
communism allied with the teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's
interpretation of them. He taught that all violence is wrong, all
government is robbery, and that the only possible moral order is
founded on love of man and renunciation of legal rights. That he
should have been a champion of Henry Georgeism, a plan that depends on
organized government, is one of his many inconsistencies; what drew
him to the single-tax theory was probably not so much the economic
principles as George's arraignment of landlordism.
It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so-called civilization rather
than his proposed remedies which will quicken the conscience of the
world.[5] His individualism, his doctrine of private goodness, looks
backward and not forward. He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone
time.
[5] Will it? I am not so confident as I was once.
He had lived through the failures of many political revolutions, and
he abhorred anything that pretended to be scientific. He turned his
eyes from the science of men to their souls. In his magnificent self
he justified his individualism, but were we a billion Tolstoys,
saintly and self-disciplined, we must work in organization, or we
cannot work effectively. The world is religious, but religion is a
matter of opinion. The world is also economic, and economics is not a
matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over which the individual
has little control.[6] Like Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because
most professorial economists do not tell the truth. He blamed the
dismal science for the dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its
classic expounders. Had he understood the economic structure of
society (which nobody does understand), he would have seen the
futility of trying to abandon his estates. His singular abnegation
could not put an end to the evils of landlordism, even to the extent
of his own plot of ground. He could not make the burden of landless
people one ounce lighter by dismounting in his own person from their
backs. Nothing can be done until an effective majority of men agree to
abolish private ownership of land and establish communal ownership.
[6] That sounds like good sense. Some of Tolstoy's
countrymen at Genoa seem to have proved it.
Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the power of the individual
soul. But his practice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was
disorganization that caused the famine which he labored to relieve,
and it was his efficient organization that kept the hungry from
starving. That our greatest man of letters should sweat behind a
prehistoric plow is good for his soul and for ours; but, even if we
should all grow perfect in spirit and eager for our share of manual
labor, we should still feed ourselves better by communal use of steam
plows. Tolstoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution for the evils
of property. It is his negative teaching that has positive value. He
is an abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But to say that is
not to answer him, not to deny him. He remains unanswered as long as
the labor of this world is done at the behest of the few and for their
profit. His work is not done, his books cannot be outgrown, until
every man of us looks at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is
impossible to live so! It is impossible to live so!"
MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS
If we had to lose one part or the other of Maeterlinck's work, I think
we should less reluctantly surrender the plays than the essays. The
essays are richer in substance than the dramas and they are as truly
poetic. The sunny garden, where the poet lives with his bees and
flowers, is a more splendid domain than moonlit pseudo-mediaeval
empires, peopled with the wraiths of women. And the little bull-pup of
the essay is a truer dog than the one in "The Blue Bird."
Some years ago, when the essay on the dog was first published in
English, I read it aloud to a woman who owned a Boston terrier, and I
gave it to a professional breeder of dogs. Both liked it. It is an
essay that any one can understand; it illuminates a ground where all
kinds of people meet. Even Bill Sikes would have liked it. Maeterlinck
says what almost everybody thinks, and says it as it has not been said
before, not in "Rab and His Friends." The simple eloquence, the
sincerity, the affectionate humor are the positive virtues of the
essay; and its negative virtue is freedom from a kind of rhetorical
artificiality in which Maeterlinck indulges when he gets away from the
solid realities of life.
Maeterlinck is an amateur botanist and bee-keeper and a professional
poet. He knows, or seems to know, the facts, and he sees them with an
imaginative vision, wondering at them like a child, in the very act of
giving quite lucid "scientific" explanations. He hovers often on the
enchanted borderland between knowledge and fancy, and plays to and fro
between regions which, though adjacent parts of the same universe,
have different habits of thought. I am acquainted with an American
poet and philosopher who does not know the common kinds of dogs such
as any boy of ten knows. I also knew and argued with an eminent
biologist who objected to Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," on the
ground that the poetic phrasing falsified the facts. True, he
conceded, the queen-bee does fly and the strongest male overtakes and
fertilizes her. But for Maeterlinck to poetize the fact as a "nuptial
flight" seemed to the man of science not only untruth to nature, but a
blasphemy against the sacred love of man and woman.
My friend, the biologist, and my acquaintance, the American poet and
philosopher, both seem to be unfortunately incomplete human beings.
The poet and philosopher does not know what any duffer knows, what
anybody who cares not only for animals but for ordinary folks that own
dogs cannot refrain from knowing. He is a man of cosmopolitan
experience and has surely been in the _Bois_ more than once. In
the Garden of Acclimatation is a wonderful kennel; there are at least
fifteen kinds of dogs, each with his specific or sub-specific name
hung on his cage. If you had never seen a dog you could not walk about
that kennel five minutes without learning the names of a half-dozen
varieties (and without discovering in yourself a highly moral desire
to steal one or two of those beautifully kept beasts). Some ignorance
is unpardonable, and some philosophy and some poetry would be more
vital for a little plain back-yard knowledge. On the other hand, what
a pity it is that any man's sense of fact should be so strait as to
forbid entrance to his soul of a honey bee which Maeterlinck sends
forth equipped with these gorgeous unentomological wings of words:
"The yellow fairies of the honey." It's as bad as a democrat who
should object to the phrase "queen-bee."