"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor
Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For
each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to
have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there
breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an
immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the
world is colder as well as more empty. They have passed outside the
common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by
the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become
immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet
influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We
can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious
uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for
their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the
eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs,
and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine
that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his
overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia.
In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which
appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his
own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he--in place of the
shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had
nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only
Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he
is not."
And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its
greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more
freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square--I suppose the "Red
Square" in Moscow--on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia
excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There
goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued
to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and
filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions,
principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to
the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of
parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all
lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all
tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the
devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the
most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and
powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be
called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call
themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and
traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their
parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres,
chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books
counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If
it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty
to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the
flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to
say--that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals,
or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the
doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and
miracles--all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence
and the law of his soul--he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he
wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I
consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery,
incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And,
as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:
"I believe in this: I believe in God, whom I understand
as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is
in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of God is most
clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man
Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the
greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies
in fulfilling God's will, and his will is that men should love
one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish
others to do to them--of which it is said in the Gospels that this
is the law and the prophets."
The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and
still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and
governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation
such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world,
after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has
now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them
now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop
at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and
ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to
choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars.
Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the
rest of the reforming or rebellious parties--what were they doing but
struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments,
officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In
the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little
influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of
rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups
of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have
been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil,
and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to
maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It
seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,
"It seems to me now specially important to do what is
right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission
from Government, but consciously avoiding participation
in it.... What can a Government do with a man who
will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his
children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill
people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations,
deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he
thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good,
enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted
in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to
themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus
of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around
them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings.
Public opinion--the only power which subdues Governments--would
become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom
of conscience, justice, and humanity."
From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands
might regard this quietism or wise passiveness as a mere counsel of
despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny,
but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so
they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in
equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European
cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries,
and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him
than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had
preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on
their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled
the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising
these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues,
banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and
fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is
within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He
left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at
nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of
right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the
idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of
independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the
writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the
pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise
against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally
they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism,"
or "a fanatic's intolerance."
Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an
earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft,
and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or
demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even
than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted
sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing
compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and
temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do,
there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron
sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him
a disturbing and incalculable magic--an upheaving force, like leaven
stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered
peace.
Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres;
they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic
circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no
division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to
last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the
highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in
prose)--in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of
Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan
Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the
hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karénin herself, there runs exactly the
same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of
life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the
essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and
of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please,
it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, "That is the
finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compassionate
heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one
human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time
there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is
possible, and no mediocrity golden."
To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple
issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It
was but a return to well-worn commandments. "Do not be angry, do not
lust, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil,
but love your enemies"--these commands have a familiar, an almost
parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of
rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to
the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded
much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant
of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as
Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding
its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other
souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God.
The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay
in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. "O that thou hadst
hearkened unto my commandments!" cried the ancient poet, uttering the
voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; "O that thou hadst
hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river."