-----
Footnote 46:
Published in the _Fortnightly Review_, December, 1887.
-----
In reviewing at the time of its first publication, thirty years ago,
Flaubert’s remarkable novel of _Madame Bovary_, Sainte-Beuve observed
that in Flaubert we come to another manner, another kind of inspiration,
from those which had prevailed hitherto; we find ourselves dealing, he
said, with a man of a new and different generation from novelists like
George Sand. The ideal has ceased, the lyric vein is dried up; the new
men are cured of lyricism and the ideal; “a severe and pitiless truth
has made its entry, as the last word of experience, even into art
itself.” The characters of the new literature of fiction are “science, a
spirit of observation, maturity, force, a touch of hardness.” _L’idéal a
cessé, le lyrique a tari._
The spirit of observation and the touch of hardness (let us retain these
mild and inoffensive terms) have since been carried in the French novel
very far. So far have they been carried, indeed, that in spite of the
advantage which the French language, familiar to the cultivated classes
everywhere, confers on the French novel, this novel has lost much of its
attraction for those classes; it no longer commands their attention as
it did formerly. The famous English novelists have passed away, and have
left no successors of like fame. It is not the English novel, therefore,
which has inherited the vogue lost by the French novel. It is a novel of
a country new to literature, or at any rate unregarded, till lately, by
the general public of readers: it is the novel of Russia. The Russian
novel has now the vogue, and deserves to have it. If fresh literary
productions maintain this vogue and enhance it, we shall all be learning
Russian.
The Slav nature, or at any rate the Russian nature, the Russian nature
as it shows itself in the Russian novels, seems marked by an extreme
sensitiveness, a consciousness most quick and acute both for what the
man’s self is experiencing, and also for what others in contact with him
are thinking and feeling. In a nation full of life, but young, and newly
in contact with an old and powerful civilization, this sensitiveness and
self-consciousness are prompt to appear. In the Americans, as well as in
the Russians, we see them active in a high degree. They are somewhat
agitating and disquieting agents to their possessor, but they have, if
they get fair play, great powers for evoking and enriching a literature.
But the Americans, as we know, are apt to set them at rest in the manner
of my friend Colonel Higginson of Boston. “As I take it, Nature said,
some years since: “Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had
Englishmen enough; we need something with a little more buoyancy than
the Englishman; let us lighten the structure, even at some peril in the
process. Put in one drop more of the nervous fluid, and make the
American.” With that drop, a new range of promise opened on the human
race, and a lighter, finer, more highly organized type of mankind was
born.” People who by this sort of thing give rest to their sensitive and
busy self-consciousness may very well, perhaps, be on their way to great
material prosperity, to great political power; but they are scarcely on
the right way to a great literature, a serious art.
The Russian does not assuage his sensitiveness in this fashion. The
Russian man of letters does not make Nature say: “The Russian is my best
race.” He finds relief to his sensitiveness in letting his perceptions
have perfectly free play, and in recording their reports with perfect
fidelity. The sincereness with which the reports are given has even
something childlike and touching. In the novel of which I am going to
speak there is not a line, not a trait, brought in for the glorification
of Russia, or to feel vanity; things and characters go as nature takes
them, and the author is absorbed in seeing how nature takes them and in
relating it. But we have here a condition of things which is highly
favorable to the production of good literature, of good art. We have
great sensitiveness, subtlety, and finesse, addressing themselves with
entire disinterestedness and simplicity to the representation of human
life. The Russian novelist is thus master of a spell to which the
secrets of human nature—both what is external and what is internal,
gesture and manner no less than thought and feeling—willingly make
themselves known. The crown of literature is poetry, and the Russians
have not yet had a great poet. But in that form of imaginative
literature which in our day is the most popular and the most possible,
the Russians at the present moment seem to me to hold, as Mr. Gladstone
would say, the field. They have great novelists, and one of their great
novelists I wish now to speak.
Count Leo Tolstoi is about sixty years old, and tells us that he shall
write novels no more. He is now occupied with religion and with the
Christian life. His writings concerning these great matters are not
allowed, I believe, to obtain publication in Russia, but instalments of
them in French and English reach us from time to time. I find them very
interesting, but I find his novel of _Anna Karénine_ more interesting
still. I believe that many readers prefer to _Anna Karénine_ Count
Tolstoi’s other great novel, _La Guerre et la Paix_. But in the novel
one prefers, I think, to have the novelist dealing with the life which
he knows from having lived it, rather than with the life which he knows
from books or hearsay. If one has to choose a representative work of
Thackeray, it is _Vanity Fair_ which one could take rather than _The
Virginians_. In like manner I take _Anna Karénine_ as the novel best
representing Count Tolstoi. I use the French translation; in general, as
I long ago said, work of this kind is better done in France than in
England, and _Anna Karénine_ is perhaps also a novel which goes better
into French than into English, just as Frederika Bremer’s _Home_ goes
into English better than into French. After I have done with _Anna
Karénine_ I must say something of Count Tolstoi’s religious writings. Of
these too I use the French translation, so far as it is available. The
English translation, however, which came into my hands late, seems to be
in general clear and good. Let me say in passing that it has neither the
same arrangement, nor the same titles, nor altogether the same contents,
with the French translation.
There are many characters in _Anna Karénine_—too many if we look in it
for a work of art in which the action shall be vigorously one, and to
that one action everything shall converge. There are even two main
actions extending throughout the book, and we keep passing from one of
them to the other—from the affairs of Anna and Wronsky to the affairs of
Kitty and Levine. People appear in connection with these two main
actions whose appearance and proceedings do not in the least contribute
to develop them; incidents are multiplied which we expect are to lead to
something important, but which do not. What, for instance, does the
episode of Kitty’s friend Warinka and Levine’s brother Serge Ivanitch,
their inclination for one another and its failure to come to anything,
contribute to the development of either the character or the fortunes of
Kitty and Levine? What does the incident of Levine’s long delay in
getting to church to be married, a delay which as we read of it seems to
have significance, really import? It turns out to import absolutely
nothing, and to be introduced solely to give the author the pleasure of
telling us that all Levine’s shirts had been packed up.
But the truth is we are not to take _Anna Karénine_ as a work of art; we
are to take it as a piece of life. A piece of life it is. The author has
not invented and combined it, he has seen it; it has all happened before
his inward eye, and it was in this wise that it happened. Levine’s
shirts were packed up, and he was late for his wedding in consequence;
Warinka and Serge Ivanitch met at Levine’s country-house and went out
walking together; Serge was very near proposing, but did not. The author
saw it all happening so—saw it, and therefore relates it; and what his
novel in this way loses in art it gains in reality.
For this is the result which, by his extraordinary fineness of
perception, and by his sincere fidelity to it, the author achieves; he
works in us a sense of the absolute reality of his personages and their
doings. Anna’s shoulders, and masses of hair, and half-shut eyes; Alexis
Karénine’s up-drawn eyebrows, and tired smile, and cracking
finger-joints; Stiva’s eyes suffused with facile moisture—these are as
real to us as any of those outward peculiarities which in our own circle
of acquaintance we are noticing daily, while the inner man of our own
circle of acquaintance, happily or unhappily, lies a great deal less
clearly revealed to us than that of Count Tolstoi’s creations.
I must speak of only a few of these creations, the chief personages and
no more. The book opens with “Stiva,” and who that has once made Stiva’s
acquaintance will ever forget him? We are living, in Count Tolstoi’s
novel, among the great people of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the nobles
and the high functionaries, the governing class of Russia. Stépane
Arcadiévitch—“Stiva”—is Prince Oblonsky, and descended from Rurik,
although to think of him as anything except “Stiva” is difficult. His
_air souriant_, his good looks, his satisfaction; his “ray,” which made
the Tartar waiter at the club joyful in contemplating it; his pleasure
in oysters and champagne, his pleasure in making people happy and in
rendering services; his need of money, his attachment to the French
governess, his distress at his wife’s distress, his affection for her
and the children; his emotion and suffused eyes, while he quite
dismisses the care of providing funds for household expenses and
education; and the French attachment, contritely given up to-day only to
be succeeded by some other attachment to-morrow—no never, certainly,
shall we come to forget Stiva. Anna, the heroine, is Stiva’s sister. His
wife Dolly (these English diminutives are common among Count Tolstoi’s
ladies) is daughter of the Prince and Princess Cherbatzky, grandees who
show us Russian high life by its most respectable side; the Prince, in
particular, is excellent—simple, sensible, right-feeling; a man of
dignity and honor. His daughters, Dolly and Kitty, are charming. Dolly,
Stiva’s wife, is sorely tried by her husband, full of anxieties for the
children, with no money to spend on them or herself, poorly dressed,
worn and aged before her time. She has moments of despairing doubt
whether the gay people may not be after all in the right, whether virtue
and principle answer; whether happiness does not dwell with
adventuresses and profligates, brilliant and perfectly dressed
adventuresses and profligates, in a land flowing with roubles and
champagne. But in a quarter of an hour she comes right again and is
herself—a nature straight, honest, faithful, loving, sound to the core;
such she is and such she remains; she can be no other. Her sister Kitty
is at bottom of the same temper, but she has her experience to get,
while Dolly, when the book begins, has already acquired hers. Kitty is
adored by Levine, in whom we are told that many traits are to be found
of the character and history of Count Tolstoi himself. Levine belongs to
the world of great people by his birth and property, but he is not at
all a man of the world. He has been a reader and thinker, he has a
conscience, he has public spirit and would ameliorate the condition of
the people, he lives on his estate in the country, and occupies himself
zealously with local business, schools and agriculture. But he is shy,
apt to suspect and to take offence, somewhat impracticable, out of his
element in the gay world of Moscow. Kitty likes him, but her fancy has
been taken by a brilliant guardsman, Count Wronsky, who has paid her
attentions. Wronsky is described to us by Stiva; he is “one of the
finest specimens of the _jeunesse dorée_ of St. Petersburg; immensely
rich, handsome, aide-de-camp to the emperor, great interest at his back,
and a good fellow notwithstanding; more than a good fellow, intelligent
besides and well read—a man who has a splendid career before him.” Let
us complete the picture by adding that Wronsky is a powerful man, over
thirty, bald at the top of his head, with irreproachable manners, cool
and calm, but a little haughty. A hero, one murmurs to oneself, too much
of the Guy Livingstone type, though without the bravado and
exaggeration. And such is, justly enough perhaps, the first impression,
an impression which continues all through the first volume; but Wronsky,
as we shall see, improves towards the end.
Kitty discourages Levine, who retires in misery and confusion. But
Wronsky is attracted by Anna Karénine, and ceases his attentions to
Kitty. The impression made on her heart by Wronsky was not deep; but she
is so keenly mortified with herself, so ashamed, and so upset, that she
falls ill, and is sent with her family to winter abroad. There she
regains health and mental composure, and discovers at the same time that
her liking for Levine was deeper than she knew, that it was a genuine
feeling, a strong and lasting one. On her return they meet, their hearts
come together, they are married; and in spite of Levine’s waywardness,
irritability, and unsettlement of mind, of which I shall have more to
say presently, they are profoundly happy. Well, and who could help being
happy with Kitty? So I find myself adding impatiently. Count Tolstoi’s
heroines are really so living and charming that one takes them, fiction
though they are, too seriously.
But the interest of the book centers in Anna Karénine. She is Stiva’s
sister, married to a high official at St. Petersburg, Alexis Karénine.
She has been married to him nine years, and has one child, a boy named
Serge. The marriage had not brought happiness to her, she had found in
it no satisfaction to her heart and soul, she had a sense of want and
isolation; but she is devoted to her boy, occupied, calm. The charm of
her personality is felt even before she appears, from the moment when we
hear of her being sent for as the good angel to reconcile Dolly with
Stiva. Then she arrives at the Moscow station from St. Petersburg, and
we see the gray eyes with their long eyelashes, the graceful carriage,
the gentle and caressing smile on the fresh lips, the vivacity
restrained but waiting to break through, the fulness of life, the
softness and strength joined, the harmony, the bloom, the charm. She
goes to Dolly, and achieves, with infinite tact and tenderness, the task
of reconciliation. At a ball a few days later, we add to our first
impression of Anna’s beauty, dark hair, a quantity of little curls over
her temples and at the back of her neck, sculptural shoulders, firm
throat, and beautiful arms. She is in a plain dress of black velvet with
a pearl necklace, a bunch of forget-me-nots in the front of her dress,
another in her hair. This is Anna Karénine.
She had traveled from St. Petersburg with Wronsky’s mother; had seen him
at the Moscow station, where he came to meet his mother, had been struck
with his looks and manner, and touched by his behavior in an accident
which happened while they were in the station to a poor workman crushed
by a train. At the ball she meets him again; she is fascinated by him
and he by her. She had been told of Kitty’s fancy, and had gone to the
ball meaning to help Kitty; but Kitty is forgotten, or any rate
neglected; the spell which draws Wronsky and Anna is irresistible. Kitty
finds herself opposite to them in a quadrille together:—
“She seemed to remark in Anna the symptoms of an over-excitement which
she herself knew from experience—that of success. Anna appeared to her
as if intoxicated with it. Kitty knew to what to attribute that
brilliant and animated look, that happy and triumphant smile, those
half-parted lips, those movements full of grace and harmony.”
Anna returns to St. Petersburg, and Wronsky returns there at the same
time; they meet on the journey, they keep meeting in society, and Anna
begins to find her husband, who before had not been sympathetic,
intolerable. Alexis Karénine is much older than herself, a bureaucrat, a
formalist, a poor creature; he has conscience, there is a root of
goodness in him, but on the surface and until deeply stirred he is
tiresome, pedantic, vain, exasperating. The change in Anna is not in the
slightest degree comprehended by him; he sees nothing which an
intelligent man might in such a case see, and does nothing which an
intelligent man would do. Anna abandons herself to her passion for
Wronsky.
I remember M. Nisard saying to me many years ago at the École Normale in
Paris, that he respected the English because they are _une nation qui
sait se gêner_—people who can put constraint on themselves and go
through what is disagreeable. Perhaps in the Slav nature this valuable
faculty is somewhat wanting; a very strong impulse is too much regarded
as irresistible, too little as what can be resisted and ought to be
resisted however difficult and disagreeable the resistance may be. In
our high society with its pleasure and dissipation, laxer notions may to
some extent prevail; but in general an English mind will be startled by
Anna’s suffering herself to be so overwhelmed and irretrievably carried
away by her passion, by her almost at once regarding it, apparently, as
something which it was hopeless to fight against. And this I say
irrespectively of the worth of her lover. Wronsky’s gifts and graces
hardly qualify him, one might think, to be the object of so
instantaneous and mighty a passion on the part of a woman like Anna. But
that is not the question. Let us allow that these passions are
incalculable; let us allow that one of the male sex scarcely does
justice, perhaps, to the powerful and handsome guardsman and his
attractions. But if Wronsky had been even such a lover as Alcibiades or
the Master of Ravenswood, still that Anna, being what she is and her
circumstances being what they are, should show not a hope, hardly a
thought, of conquering her passion, of escaping from its fatal power, is
to our notions strange and a little bewildering.
I state the objection; let me add that it is the triumph of Anna’s charm
that it remains paramount for us nevertheless; that throughout her
course, with its failures, errors, and miseries, still the impression of
her large, fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature, never leaves
us—keeps our sympathy, keeps even, I had almost said, our respect.
To return to the story. Soon enough poor Anna begins to experience the
truth of what the Wise Man told us long ago, that “the way of
transgressors is hard.” Her agitation at a steeple-chase where Wronsky
is in danger attracts her husband’s notice and provokes his
remonstrance. He is bitter and contemptuous. In a transport of passion
Anna declares to him that she is his wife no longer; that she loves
Wronsky, belongs to Wronsky. Hard at first, formal, cruel, thinking only
of himself, Karénine, who, as I have said, has a conscience, is touched
by grace at the moment when Anna’s troubles reach their height. He
returns to her to find her with a child just born to her and Wronsky,
the lover in the house and Anna apparently dying. Karénine has words of
kindness and forgiveness only. The noble and victorious effort
transfigures him, and all that her husband gains in the eyes of Anna,
her lover Wronsky loses. Wronsky comes to Anna’s bedside, and standing
there by Karénine, buries his face in his hands. Anna says to him, in
the hurried voice of fever:—
“‘Uncover your face; look at that man; he is a saint. Yes, uncover
your face; uncover it,’ she repeated with an angry air. ‘Alexis,
uncover his face; I want to see him.’
“Alexis took the hands of Wronsky and uncovered his face, disfigured
by suffering and humiliation.
“‘Give him your hand; pardon him.’
“Alexis stretched out his hand without even seeking to restrain his
tears.
“‘Thank God, thank God!’ she said; ‘all is ready now. How ugly those
flowers are.’ she went on, pointing to the wallpaper; ‘they are not a
bit like violets. My God, my God! when will all this end? Give me
morphine, doctor—I want morphine. Oh, my God, my God!’”
She seems dying, and Wronsky rushes out and shoots himself. And so, in a
common novel, the story would end. Anna would die, Wronsky would commit
suicide, Karénine would survive, in possession of our admiration and
sympathy. But the story does not always end so in life; neither does it
end so in Count Tolstoi’s novel. Anna recovers from her fever, Wronsky
from his wound. Anna’s passion for Wronsky reawakens, her estrangement
from Karénine returns. Nor does Karénine remain at the height at which
in the forgiveness scene we saw him. He is formal, pedantic, irritating.
Alas! even if he were not all these, perhaps even his _pince-nez_, and
his rising eyebrows, and his cracking finger-joints, would have been
provocation enough. Anna and Wronsky depart together. They stay for a
time in Italy, then return to Russia. But her position is false, her
disquietude incessant, and happiness is impossible for her. She takes
opium every night, only to find that “not poppy nor mandragora shall
ever medicine her to that sweet sleep which she owed yesterday.”
Jealousy and irritability grow upon her; she tortures Wronsky, she
tortures herself. Under these trials Wronsky, it must be said, comes out
well, and rises in our esteem. His love for Anna endures; he behaves, as
our English phrase is, “like a gentleman”; his patience is in general
exemplary. But then Anna, let us remember, is to the last, through all
the fret and misery, still Anna; always with something which charms;
nay, with something in her nature, which consoles and does good. Her
life, however, was becoming impossible under its existing conditions. A
trifling misunderstanding brought the inevitable end. After a quarrel
with Anna, Wronsky had gone one morning into the country to see his
mother; Anna summons him by telegraph to return at once, and receives an
answer from him that he cannot return before ten at night. She follows
him to his mother’s place in the country, and at the station hears what
leads her to believe that he is not coming back. Maddened with jealousy
and misery, she descends the platform and throws herself under the
wheels of a goods train passing through the station. It is over—the
graceful head is untouched, but all the rest is a crushed, formless
heap. Poor Anna!
We have been in a world which misconducts itself nearly as much as the
world of a French novel all palpitating with “modernity.” But there are
two things in which the Russian novel—Count Tolstoi’s novel at any
rate—is very advantageously distinguished from the type of novel now so
much in request in France. In the first place, there is no fine
sentiment, at once tiresome and false. We are not told to believe, for
example, that Anna is wonderfully exalted and ennobled by her passion
for Wronsky. The English reader is thus saved from many a groan of
impatience. The other thing is yet more important. Our Russian novelist
deals abundantly with criminal passion and with adultery, but he does
not seem to feel himself owing any service to the goddess Lubricity, or
bound to put in touches at this goddess’s dictation. Much in _Anna
Karénine_ is painful, much is unpleasant, but nothing is of a nature to
trouble the senses, or to please those who wish their senses troubled.
This taint is wholly absent. In the French novels where it is so
abundantly present its baneful effects do not end with itself. Burns
long ago remarked with deep truth that it _petrifies feeling._ Let us
revert for a moment to the powerful novel of which I spoke at the
outset, _Madame Bovary_. Undoubtedly the taint in question is present in
_Madame Bovary_, although to a much less degree than in more recent
French novels, which will be in every one’s mind. But _Madame Bovary_,
with this taint, is a work of _petrified feeling_; over it hangs an
atmosphere of bitterness, irony, impotence; not a personage in the book
to rejoice or console us; the springs of freshness and feeling are not
there to create such personages. Emma Bovary follows a course in some
respects like that of Anna, but where, in Emma Bovary, is Anna’s charm?
The treasures of compassion, tenderness, insight, which alone, amid such
guilt and misery, can enable charm to subsist and to emerge, are wanting
to Flaubert. He is cruel with the cruelty of petrified feeling, to his
poor heroine; he pursues her without pity or pause, as with malignity;
he is harder upon her himself than any reader even, I think, will be
inclined to be.
But where the springs of feeling have carried Count Tolstoi, since he
created Anna ten or twelve years ago, we have now to see.
We must return to Constantine Dmitrich Levine. Levine, as I have already
said, thinks. Between the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he had
lost, he tells us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up,
a loss of which examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, but which
in Russia, as in France, is among all young men of the upper and
cultivated class more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more
avowed, than it is with us. Levine had adopted the scientific notions
current all round him; talked of cells, organisms, the indestructibility
of matter, the conservation of force, and was of opinion, with his
comrades of the university, that religion no longer existed. But he was
of a serious nature, and the question what his life meant, whence it
came, whither it tended, presented themselves to him in moments of
crisis and affliction with irresistible importunity, and getting no
answer, haunted him, tortured him, made him think of suicide.
Two things, meanwhile, he noticed. One was, that he and his university
friends had been mistaken in supposing that Christian belief no longer
existed; they had lost it, but they were not all the world. Levine
observed that the persons to whom he was most attached, his own wife
Kitty amongst the number, retained it and drew comfort from it; that the
women generally, and almost the whole of the Russian common people,
retained it and drew comfort from it. The other was, that his scientific
friends, though not troubled like himself by questionings about the
meaning of human life, were untroubled by such questionings, not because
they had got an answer to them, but because, entertaining themselves
intellectually with the consideration of the cell theory, and evolution,
and the indestructibility of matter, and the conservation of force, and
the like, they were satisfied with this entertainment, and did not
perplex themselves with investigating the meaning and object of their
own life at all.
But Levine noticed further that he himself did not actually proceed to
commit suicide; on the contrary, he lived on his lands as his father had
done before him, busied himself with all the duties of his station,
married Kitty, was delighted when a son was born to him. Nevertheless he
was indubitably not happy at bottom, restless and disquieted, his
disquietude sometimes amounting to agony.
Now on one of his bad days he was in the field with his peasants, and
one of them happened to say to him, in answer to a question from Levine
why one farmer should in a certain case act more humanly than another:
“Men are not all alike: one man lives for his belly, like Mitiovuck,
another for his soul, for God, like old Plato.”[47]—“What do you call,”
cried Levine, “living for his soul, for God?” The peasant answered:
“It’s quite simple—living by the rule of God, of the truth. All men are
not the same, that’s certain. You yourself, for instance, Constantine
Dmitrich, you wouldn’t do wrong by a poor man.” Levine gave no answer,
but turned away with the phrase, _living by the rule of God, of the
truth_, sounding in his ears.
-----
Footnote 47:
A common name among Russian peasants.
-----
Then he reflected that he had been born of parents professing this rule,
as their parents again had professed it before them; that he had sucked
it in with his mother’s milk; that some sense of it, some strength and
nourishment from it, had been ever with him although he knew it not;
that if he had tried to do the duties of his station it was by help of
the secret support ministered by this rule; that if in his moments of
despairing restlessness and agony, when he was driven to think of
suicide, he had yet not committed suicide, it was because this rule had
silently enabled him to do his duty in some degree, and had given him
some hold upon life and happiness in consequence.
The words came to him as a clue of which he could never again lose
sight, and which with full consciousness and strenuous endeavor he must
henceforth follow. He sees his nephews and nieces throwing their milk at
one another and scolded by Dolly for it. He says to himself that these
children are wasting their subsistence because they have not to earn it
for themselves and do not know its value, and he exclaims inwardly: “I,
a Christian, brought up in the faith, my life filled with the benefits
of Christianity, living on these benefits without being conscious of it,
I, like these children, I have been trying to destroy what makes and
builds up my life.” But now the feeling has been borne in upon him,
clear and precious, that what he has to do is _be good_; he has “cried
to _Him_.” What will come of it?
“I shall probably continue to get out of temper with my coachman, to
get into useless arguments, to air my ideas unseasonably; I shall
always feel a barrier between the sanctuary of my soul and the soul of
other people, even that of my wife; I shall always be holding her
responsible for my annoyances and feeling sorry for it directly
afterwards. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to
myself why I pray; but my inner life has won its liberty; it will no
longer be at the mercy of events, and every minute of my existence
will have a meaning sure and profound which it will be in my power to
impress on every single one of my actions, that of _being good_.”
With these words the novel of _Anna Karénine_ ends. But in Levine’s
religious experiences Count Tolstoi was relating his own, and the
history is continued in three autobiographical works translated from
him, which have within the last two or three years been published in
Paris: _Ma Confession_, _Ma Religion_, and _Que Faire_. Our author
announces further, “two great works,” on which he has spent six years:
one a criticism of dogmatic theology, the other a new translation of the
four Gospels, with a concordance of his own arranging. The results which
he claims to have established in these two works, are, however,
indicated sufficiently in the three published volumes which I have named
above.
These autobiographical volumes show the same extraordinary penetration,
the same perfect sincerity, which are exhibited in the author’s novel.
As autobiography they are of profound interest, and they are full,
moreover, of acute and fruitful remarks. I have spoken of the advantages
which the Russian genius possesses for imaginative literature. Perhaps
for Biblical exegesis, for the criticism of religion and its documents,
the advantage lies more with the older nations of the West. They will
have more of the experience, width of knowledge, patience, sobriety,
requisite for these studies; they may probably be less impulsive, less
heady.
Count Tolstoi regards the change accomplished in himself during the last
half-dozen years, he regards his recent studies and the ideas which he
has acquired through them, as epoch-making in his life and of capital
importance:—
“Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the doctrine of Jesus,
and all my life suddenly changed. I ceased to desire that which
previously I desired, and, on the other hand, I took to desiring what
I had never desired before. That which formerly used to appear good in
my eyes appeared evil, that which used to appear evil appeared good.”
The novel of _Anna Karénine_ belongs to that past which Count Tolstoi
has left behind him; his new studies and the works founded on them are
what is important; light and salvation are there. Yet I will venture to
express my doubt whether these works contain, as their contribution to
the cause of religion and to the establishment of the true mind and
message of Jesus, much that had not already been given or indicated by
Count Tolstoi in relating, in _Anna Karénine_, Levine’s mental history.
Points raised in that history are developed and enforced; there is an
abundant and admirable exhibition of knowledge of human nature,
penetrating insight, fearless sincerity, wit, sarcasm, eloquence, style.
And we have too the direct autobiography of a man not only interesting
to us from his soul and talent, but highly interesting also from his
nationality, position, and course of proceeding. But to light and
salvation in the Christian religion we are not, I think, brought very
much nearer than in Levine’s history. I ought to add that what was
already present in that history seems to me of high importance and
value. Let us see what it amounts to.
I must be general and I must be brief; neither my limits nor my purpose
permit the introduction of what is abstract. But in Count Tolstoi’s
religious philosophy there is very little which is abstract, arid. The
idea of _life_ is his master idea in studying and establishing religion.
He speaks impatiently of St. Paul as a source, in common with the
Fathers and the Reformers, of that ecclesiastical theology which misses
the essential and fails to present Christ’s Gospel aright. Yet Paul’s
“law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus freeing me from the law of
sin and death” is the pith and ground of all Count Tolstoi’s theology.
Moral life is the gift of God, is God, and this true life, this union
with God to which we aspire, we reach through Jesus. We reach it through
union with Jesus and by adopting his life. This doctrine is proved true
for us by the life in God, to be acquired through Jesus, being what our
nature feels after and moves to, by the warning of misery if we are
served from it, the sanction of happiness if we find it. Of the access
for _us_, at any rate, to the spirit of life, us who are born in
Christendom, are in touch, conscious or unconscious, with Christianity,
this is the true account. Questions over which the churches spend so
much labor and time—questions about the Trinity, about the godhead of
Christ, about the procession of the Holy Ghost, are not vital; what is
vital is the doctrine of access to the spirit of life through Jesus.
Sound and saving doctrine, in my opinion, this is. It may be gathered in
a great degree from what Count Tolstoi had already given us in the novel
of _Anna Karénine_. But of course it is greatly developed, in the
special works which have followed. Many of these developments are, I
will repeat, of striking force, interest, and value. In _Anna Karénine_
we had been told of the scepticism of the upper and educated classes in
Russia. But what reality is added by such an anecdote as the following
from _Ma Confession_:—
“I remember that when I was about eleven years old we had a visit one
Sunday from a boy, since dead, who announced to my brother and me, as
great news, a discovery just made at his public school. This discovery
was to the effect that God had no existence, and that everything which
we were taught about Him was pure invention.”
Count Tolstoi touched, in _Anna Karénine_, on the failure of science to
tell a man what his life means. Many a sharp stroke does he add in his
latter writings:—
“Development is going on, and there are laws which guide it. You
yourself are a part of the whole. Having come to understand the whole
so far as is possible, and having comprehended the law of development,
you will comprehend also your place in that whole, you will understand
yourself.
“In spite of all the shame the confession costs me, there was a time,
I declare, when I tried to look as if I was satisfied with this sort
of thing!”
But the men of science may take comfort from hearing that Count Tolstoi
treats the men of letters no better than them, although he is a man of
letters himself:—
“The judgment which my literary companions passed on life was to the
effect that life in general is in a state of progress, and that in
this development we, the men of letters, take the principal part. The
vocation of us artists and poets is to instruct the world; and to
prevent my coming out with the natural question, ‘What am I, and what
am I to teach?’ it was explained to me that it was useless to know
that, and that the artist and the poet taught without perceiving how.
I passed for a superb artist, a great poet, and consequently it was
but natural I should appropriate this theory. I, the artist, the
poet—I wrote, I taught, without myself knowing what. I was paid for
what I did. I had everything: splendid fare and lodging, women,
society; I had _la gloire_. Consequently, what I taught was very good.
This faith in the importance of poetry and of the development of life
was a religion, and I was one of its priests—a very agreeable and
advantageous office.
“And I lived ever so long in this belief, never doubting but that it
was true!”
The adepts of this literary and scientific religion are not numerous, to
be sure, in comparison with the mass of the people, and the mass of the
people, as Levine had remarked, find comfort still in the old religion
of Christendom; but of the mass of the people our literary and
scientific instructors make no account. Like Solomon and Schopenhauer,
these gentlemen, and “society” along with them, are, moreover, apt to
say that life is, after all, vanity: but then they all know of no life
except their own.
“It used to appear to me that the small number of cultivated, rich,
and idle men, of whom I was one, composed the whole of humanity, and
that the millions and millions of other men who had lived and are
still living were not in reality men at all. Incomprehensible as it
now seems to me, that I should have gone on considering life without
seeing the life which was surrounding me on all sides, the life of
humanity; strange as it is to think that I should have been so
mistaken, and have fancied my life, the life of the Solomons and the
Schopenhauers, to be the veritable and normal life, while the life of
the masses was but a matter of no importance—strangely odd as this
seems to me now,—so it was, notwithstanding.”
And this pretentious minority, who call themselves “society,” “the
world,” and to whom their own life, the life of “the world,” seems the
only life worth naming, are all the while miserable! Our author found it
so in his own experience:—
“In my life, an exceptionally happy one from a worldly point of view,
I can number such a quantity of sufferings endured for the sake of
“the world,” that they would be enough to furnish a martyr for Jesus.
All the most painful passages in my life, beginning with the orgies
and duels of my student days, the wars I have been in, the illnesses,
and the abnormal and unbearable conditions in which I am living
now—all this is but one martyrdom endured in the name of the doctrine
of the world. Yes, and I speak of my own life, exceptionally happy
from the world’s point of view.
“Let any sincere man pass his life in review, and he will perceive
that never, not once, has he suffered through practising the doctrine
of Jesus; the chief part of the miseries of his life have proceeded
solely from his following, contrary to his inclination, the spell of
the doctrine of the world.”
On the other hand, the simple, the multitudes, outside of this spell,
are comparatively contented:—
“In opposition to what I saw in our circle, where life without faith
is possible, and where I doubt whether one in a thousand would confess
himself a believer, I conceive that among the people (in Russia) there
is not one sceptic to many thousands of believers. Just contrary to
what I saw in our circle, where life passes in idleness, amusements,
and discontent with life, I saw that of these men of the people the
whole life was passed in severe labor, and yet they were contented
with life. Instead of complaining like the persons in our world of the
hardship of their lot, these poor people received sickness and
disappointments without any revolt, without opposition, but with a
firm and tranquil confidence that so it was to be, that it could not
be otherwise, and that it was all right.”
All this is but development, sometimes rather surprising, but always
powerful and interesting, of what we have already had in the pages of
_Anna Karénine_. And like Levine in that novel, Count Tolstoi was driven
by his inward struggle and misery very near to suicide. What is new in
the recent books is the solution and cure announced. Levine had accepted
a provisional solution of the difficulties oppressing him; he had lived
right on, so to speak, obeying his conscience, but not asking how far
all his actions hung together and were consistent:—
“He advanced money to a peasant to get him out of the clutches of a
money-lender, but did not give up the arrears due to himself; he
punished thefts of wood strictly, but would have scrupled to impound a
peasant’s cattle trespassing on his fields; he did not pay the wages
of a laborer whose father’s death caused him to leave work in the
middle of harvest, but he pensioned and maintained his old servants;
he let his peasants wait while he went to give his wife a kiss after
he came home, but would not have made them wait while he went to visit
his bees.”
Count Tolstoi has since advanced to a far more definite and stringent
rule of life—the positive doctrine, he thinks, of Jesus. It is the
determination and promulgation of this rule which is the novelty in our
author’s recent works. He extracts this essential doctrine, or rule of
Jesus, from the Sermon on the Mount, and presents it in a body of
commandments—Christ’s commandments; the pith, he says, of the New
Testament, as the Decalogue is the pith of the Old. These all-important
commandments of Christ are “commandments of peace,” and five in number.
The first commandment is: “Live in peace with all men; treat no one as
contemptible and beneath you. Not only allow yourself no anger, but do
not rest until you have dissipated even unreasonable anger in others
against yourself.” The second is: “No libertinage and no divorce; let
every man have one wife and every woman one husband.” The third: “Never
on any pretext take an oath of service of any kind; all such oaths are
imposed for a bad purpose.” The fourth: “Never employ force against the
evil-doer; bear whatever wrong is done to you without opposing the
wrong-doer or seeking to have him punished.” The fifth and last:
“Renounce all distinction of nationality; do not admit that men of
another nation may ever be treated by you as enemies; love all men alike
as alike near to you; do good to all alike.”
If these five commandments were generally observed, says Count Tolstoi,
all men would become brothers. Certainly the actual society in which we
live would be changed and dissolved. Armies and wars would be renounced;
courts of justice, police, property, would be renounced also. And
whatever the rest of us may do, Count Tolstoi at least will do his duty
and follow Christ’s commandments sincerely. He has given up rank,
office, and property, and earns his bread by the labor of his own hands.
“I believe in Christ’s commandments,” he says, “and this faith changes
my whole former estimate of what is good and great, bad and low, in
human life.” At present—
“Everything which I used to think bad and low—the rusticity of the
peasant, the plainness of lodging, food, clothing, manners—all this
has become good and great in my eyes. At present I can no longer
contribute to anything which raises me externally above others, which
separates me from them. I cannot, as formerly, recognize either in my
own case or in that of others any title, rank, or quality beyond the
title and quality of man. I cannot seek fame and praise; I cannot seek
a culture which separates me from men. I cannot refrain from seeking
in my whole existence—in my lodging, my food, my clothing, and my ways
of going on with people—whatever, far from separating me from the mass
of mankind, draws me nearer to them.”
Whatever else we have or have not in Count Tolstoi, we have at least a
great soul and a great writer. In his Biblical exegesis, in the
criticism by which he extracts and constructs his Five Commandments of
Christ which are to be the rule of our lives, I find much which is
questionable along with much which is ingenious and powerful. But I have
neither space, nor, indeed, inclination, to criticise his exegesis here.
The right moment, besides, for criticising this will come when the “two
great works,” which are in preparation, shall have appeared.
For the present I limit myself to a single criticism only—a general one.
Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have
somewhere or other said, “Christianity is a _source_; no one supply of
water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of
Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit
any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the
ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.”
And the reason mainly lies in the character of the Founder of
Christianity and in the nature of his utterances. Not less important
than the teachings given by Jesus in the _temper_ of their giver, his
temper of sweetness and reasonableness, of _epieikeia_. Goethe calls him
a _Schäwrmer_, a fanatic; he may much more rightly be called an
opportunist. But he is an opportunist of an opposite kind from those who
in politics, that “wild and dreamlike trade” of insincerity, give
themselves this name. They push or slacken, press their points hard or
let them be, as may best suit the interests of their self-aggrandizement
and of their party. Jesus has in view simply “the rule of God, of the
truth.” But this is served by waiting as well as by hasting forward, and
sometimes served better.
Count Tolstoi sees rightly that whatever the propertied and satisfied
classes may think, the world, ever since Jesus Christ came, is judged;
“a new earth” is in prospect. It was ever in prospect with Jesus, and
should be ever in prospect with his followers. And the ideal in prospect
has to be realized. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do
them.” But they are to be done through a great and widespread and
long-continued change, and a change of the inner man to begin with. The
most important and fruitful utterances of Jesus, therefore, are not
things which can be drawn up as a table of stiff and stark external
commands, but the things which have most soul in them; because these can
best sink down into our soul, work there, set up an influence, form
habits of conduct, and prepare the future. The Beatitudes are on this
account more helpful than the utterances from which Count Tolstoi builds
up his Five Commandments. The very _secret_ of Jesus, “He that loveth
his life shall lose it, he that will lose his life shall save it,” does
not give us a command to be taken and followed in the letter, but an
idea to work in our mind and soul, and of inexhaustible value there.
Jesus paid tribute to the government and dined with the publicans,
although neither the empire of Rome nor the high finance of Judea were
compatible with his ideal and with the “new earth” which that ideal must
in the end create. Perhaps Levine’s provisional solution, in a society
like ours, was nearer to “the rule of God, of the truth,” than the more
trenchant solution which Count Tolstoi has adopted for himself since. It
seems calculated to be of more use. I do not know how it is in Russia,
but in an English village the determination of “our circle” to earn
their bread by the work of their hands would produce only dismay, not
fraternal joy, amongst that “majority” who are so earning it already.
“There are plenty of us to compete as things stand,” the gardeners,
carpenters, and smiths would say; “pray stick to your articles, your
poetry, and nonsense; in manual labor you will interfere with us, and be
taking the bread out of our mouths.”
So I arrive at the conclusion that Count Tolstoi has perhaps not done
well in abandoning the work of the poet and artist, and that he might
with advantage return to it. But whatever he may do in the future, the
work which he has already done, and his work in religion as well as his
work in imaginative literature, is more than sufficient to signalize him
as one of the most marking, interesting, and sympathy-inspiring men of
our time—an honor, I must add, to Russia, although he forbids us to heed
nationality.