bears the same character; it wrings the soul, perverts the imagination,
overturns one's ideas of right and wrong to an incredible degree.
Sometimes one is lost in abysms of gloomy uncertainty, like Hamlet;
again one sees the struggle of the evil genius against Providence, like
Faust, or a soul lacerated by remorse like Macbeth; and all his heroes
are fools, madmen, maniacs, and philosophers of hypochondria and
desperation. And yet I say that this is beauty,--tortured, twisted,
Satanic, but intense, grand, and powerful. Dostoiëwsky's are bad books
to read during digestion, or on going to bed at night, when every dim
object takes an unusual shape, and every breath stirs the window
curtains; they are not good books to take to the country, where one sits
under the spreading trees with a fresh and fragrant breeze and a soul
expanded with contentment, and one thanks God only to be alive. But they
are splendid books for the thinker who devours them with reflective
attention,--his brow furrowed under the light of the student-lamp, and
feeling all around him the stir and excitement of a great city like
Paris or St. Petersburg.
But there is a drop of balm in the cup of absinthe to which we may liken
Dostoiëwsky's books; it is the Christianity which appears in them when
and where its consoling presence is least expected. Face to face with
the student who becomes a criminal through pride and injudicious
reading, we see the figure of a pure, modest, pious girl, who redeems
him by her love. This unfortunate girl is a flower that fades before its
time; it is she who, being sacrificed to provide bread for her family,
comes in time to convince the criminal of his sin, enlightens his mind
with the lamp of the Gospels, and brings him to repentance, resignation,
and the joy of regeneration, in the expiation of his crime by
chastisement and the dungeon.
There is one marked difference between "Crime and Punishment" and "The
Dead House." The novel is feverish, the autobiography is calm.
Dostoiëwsky is a madman who owes his lucid intervals to tribulations and
torture. Suffering clears his mind and alleviates his pain; tears
sweeten his bitterness, and sorrow is his supreme religion; like his
student hero, he prostrates himself before human suffering.
The best way of taking the measure of Dostoiëwsky's personality is to
compare him with his competitor and rival, and perhaps his enemy, Ivan
Turguenief. There could be no greater contrast. Turguenief is above all
an artist, almost classic in his serenity, master of the arts of form,
delicate, refined, exquisite, a perfect scene-painter, an always
interesting narrator, reasonable and temperately liberal in his
opinions, optimist, or, if I may be allowed the word, Olympic, to the
extent that he could boast of being able to die tranquilly because he
had enjoyed all that was truly beautiful in life. Dostoiëwsky is a rabid
psychologist, almost an enemy to Nature and the sensuous world, a
furious and implacable painter of prisons, hospitals, public houses and
by-streets of great cities, awkward in his style, taking only a
one-sided view of character, a revolutionary and yet a reactionary in
politics, and not only adverse to every sort of paganism, but hazily
mystical,--the apostle of redemption through suffering, and of the
compassion which seeks wounds to cure with its healing lips. Their two
lives are correlative to their characters,--Turguenief in the Occident,
famous and fortunate; Dostoiëwsky in the Orient, a barbarian, the
plaything of destiny, fighting with poverty shoulder to shoulder. It was
only natural that sooner or later the two novelists should know each
other as enemies. It is sad to relate that Dostoiëwsky attacked
Turguenief in so furious a manner that it can only be attributed to envy
and malice.
In his own country, however, and in respect to his popularity and
influence with young people, the author of "Crime and Punishment" ranked
higher than the author of "Virgin Soil." Just in proportion as
Turguenief was attractive to us in the West, Dostoiëwsky fascinated the
people of his country. "Crime and Punishment" was an event in Russia.
Dostoiëwsky had the honor--if honor it may be called--of dealing a blow
upon the soul of his compatriots, and on this account, as he himself
used sometimes to say, especially after his epileptic attacks, he felt
himself to be a great criminal, and the guilt of a villanous act weighed
upon his soul; and it happened that a certain student, after reading his
book, thought himself possessed by the same impulses as the hero, and
committed a murder with the same circumstances and details.
After writing "Crime and Punishment," Dostoiëwsky's talent declined; his
defects became more marked, his psychology more and more involved and
painful, his heroes more insensate, lunatic, epileptic, and overwrought,
absorbed in inexplicable contemplations, or wandering, rapt in delirious
dreams, through the streets. His novels are, in fact, the antechamber to
the madhouse. But we may once more notice the influence of Cervantes on
Russian minds; for the most important character created by Dostoiëwsky,
after the hero of "Crime and Punishment," is a type, imitated after
Quixote, in "The Idiot,"--a righter of wrongs, a fool, or rather a
sublime innocent.
As much as Dostoiëwsky excels in originality, he lacks in rhythm and
harmony. His way of looking at the world is the way of the
fever-stricken. No one has carried realism so far; but his may be called
a mystic realism. Neither he nor his heroes belong to our light-loving
race or our temperate civilization; they are the outcome of Russian
exuberance, to us almost incomprehensible. He is at one moment an
apostle, at another a maniac, now a philosopher, then a fanatic. Voguié,
in describing his physiognomy, says: "Never have I seen in any other
face such an expression of accumulated suffering; all the agonies of
flesh and spirit were stamped upon it; one read in it, better than in
any book, the recollection of the prison, the long habits of terror,
torture, and anguish. When he was angry, one seemed to see him in the
prisoner's dock. At other times his countenance had the sad meekness of
the aged saints in Russian sacred pictures."
In his last years Dostoiëwsky was the idol of the youth of Russia, who
not only awaited his novels most eagerly, but ran to consult him as they
would a spiritual director, entreating his advice or consolation. The
prestige of Turguenief was for the moment eclipsed. Tolstoï found his
audience chiefly among _the intelligence_, and Dostoiëwsky of the
lacerated heart was the object of the love and devotion of the new
generation. When the monument to Puchkine was unveiled, in 1880, the
popularity of Dostoiëwsky was at its height; when he spoke, the people
sobbed in sympathy; they carried him in triumph; the students assaulted
the drawing-rooms that they might see him near by, and one even fainted
with ecstasy on touching him.
He died, February 10, 1881, almost crazed with patriotic love and
enthusiasm, like Gogol. The multitudes fought for the flowers that were
strewn over his grave, as precious relics. His obsequies were an
imposing manifestation. In a land without liberty this novelist was the
Messiah of the new generations.
IV.
Tolstoï, Nihilist and Mystic.
The youngest of the four great Russian novelists, the only one living
to-day, and in general opinion the most excellent, is Léon, son of
Nicholas Count Tolstoï. His biography may be put into a few lines; it
has no element of the dramatic or curious. He was born in 1828; he was
brought up, like most Russian noblemen of his class, in the country, on
his patrimonial estates; he pursued his studies at the University of
Kazan, receiving the cosmopolitan education--half French, half
German--which is the nursery of the Russian aristocracy; he entered the
military career, spent some years in the Caucasus attached to a regiment
of artillery, was transferred to Sevastopol at his own desire, and
witnessed there the memorable siege, the heroes of which he has
immortalized in three of his volumes; on the conclusion of the peace he
dedicated some time to travel; he resided by turns at both Russian
capitals, frequenting the best society, his congenial atmosphere, yet
without being captivated by it; he finally renounced the life of the
world, married in 1860, and retired to his possessions near Toula, where
he has lived in his own way for twenty-five years or more, and where
to-day the famous novelist, the gentleman, the scholar, the
sceptic,--after falling like Saul on the road to Damascus, blinded by a
heavenly vision, and being converted, as he himself says,--shows
himself, to all who go to visit him, dressed in peasant's garb, swinging
the scythe or drawing the sickle.
The more important biography of Count Tolstoï is that which pertains to
his soul, always restless, always in pursuit of absolute truth and the
divine essence,--a noble aspiration which ameliorates even error. There
is no book of Tolstoï's but reveals himself, particularly so the
autobiography entitled "My Memories," and certain passages of his
novels, and lastly, his theologico-moral works. Tolstoï belongs to the
class of souls that without God lose their hold on life; and yet, by his
own confession, the novelist lived without any sort of faith or creed
from his youth to maturity.
Ever since the time when Tolstoï saw the dreams of his childhood
vanish,--began to think for himself, and to experience the religious
crisis which usually arrives between the ages of fifteen and
twenty-five,--his soul, like a storm-tossed bark, has oscillated between
pantheism and the blackest pessimism. What depths of despair a soul like
that of Tolstoï can know, unable to rest upon the pillow of doubt, when
it abnegates the noblest of human faculties,--thought and
intelligence,--and makes choice of a merely vegetative life in
preference to that of the rational being! Lost in the gloom of this dark
wilderness, he falls into the region of absolute nihilism. He admits
this in his confessions ("My Religion") when he says: "For thirty-five
years of my life I have been a nihilist in the rigorous acceptation of
the term; that is to say, not merely a revolutionary socialist, but a
man who believes in nothing whatever."
In fact, since the age of sixteen, as we read in his "Memoirs," his mind
summoned to judgment all accepted and consecrated doctrines and
philosophical opinions, and that which most suited the boy was
scepticism, or rather a sort of transcendental egoism; he allows himself
to think that nothing exists in the world but himself; that exterior
objects are vain apparitions, no longer real to his mind; impressed and
persuaded by this fixed idea, he believes he sees, materially, behind
and all around him, the abyss of nothingness, and under the effect of
this hallucination he falls into a state of mind that might be called
truly motor madness, though it was transitory and momentary,--a state
proper to the visionary peoples of the North, and to which they give an
involved appellation difficult to pronounce; to translate it exactly,
with all its shades of signification, I should have to mix and mingle
together many words of ours, such as despair, fatalism, asceticism,
intractability, brief delirium, lunacy, mania, hypochondria, and
frenzy,--a species of dementia, in fine, which, snapping the mainspring
of human will, induces inexplicable acts, such as throwing one's self
into an abyss, setting fire to a house for the pleasure of it, holding
the muzzle of a pistol to one's forehead and thinking, "Shall I pull the
trigger?" or, on seeing a person of distinction, to pull him by the nose
and shake him like a child. This momentary but real dementia--from which
nobody is perhaps entirely exempt, and which Shakespeare has so
admirably analyzed in some scenes of "Hamlet"--is to the individual what
panic is to the multitude, or like _epidemia chorea_, or a suicidal
monomania which sometimes seems to be in the air; its origin lies deep
in the mysterious recesses of our moral being, where other strange
psychical phenomena are hidden, such as, for example, the fascination of
seeing blood flow, and the innate love of destruction and death.
But let us turn to the real literary work of Tolstoï before referring to
the actual cause of his perturbed conscience. After the beautiful story
called "The Cossacks," he prepared himself, by other short novels, for
works of larger importance. Among the former should be mentioned the
sweet story of "Katia," which already reveals the profound reader of the
human heart and the great realist writer. For Tolstoï, who knows how to
cover vast canvases with vivid colors, is no less successful in small
pictures; and his short novels, "The Death of Ivan Illitch" and the
first part of "The Horse's Romance," for example, are hardly to be
excelled. But his fame was chiefly assured by two great works,--"War and
Peace" and "Anna Karénina." The former is a sort of cosmorama of Russian
society before and during the French invasion, a series of pictures that
might be called Russian national episodes. Like our own Galdos, Tolstoï
studied the formative epoch of modern society, the heroic age in which
the Great Captain of the century awoke in the nations of Europe, while
endeavoring to subjugate them, a national conscience, just as he
transmitted to them, though unwittingly, the impetus of the French
Revolution. Russia heroically resisting the outsider is Tolstoï's hero.
The action of the novel merely serves as a pretext to intertwine
chapters of history, politics, and philosophy; it is rather a general
panorama of Russian life than an artistic fiction. "War and Peace" is a
complement to the poetic satire of Gogol, delineating the new society
which was to rise upon the ruins of the past. If we apply the rules of
composition in novel-writing, "War and Peace" cannot be defended; there
is neither unity, nor hero, nor hardly plot; so loose and careless is
the thread that binds the story together, and so slowly does the
argument develop, that sometimes the reader has already forgotten the
name of a character when he meets with it again ten chapters farther on.
The vast incoherence of the Russian soul, its lack of mental discipline,
its vagueness and liking for digressions, could have no more complete
personification in literature.
One therefore needs resolution to plunge into the perusal of works in
which art mimics Nature, copying the inimitable extension of the Russian
plains. I once asked a very clever friend how she was occupying herself.
She replied, "I have fallen to the bottom of a Russian novel, and I
cannot get out!" But scarcely has one finished the first two hundred
pages, as a first mouthful, when one's interest begins to awaken,--not a
mere vulgar curiosity as to events, but a noble interest of mind and
heart. It is the stream of life, grand and majestic, which passes before
our eyes like the expanse of a mighty flowing river. Tolstoï--more than
Turguenief, who is always and first of all the artist, and more than
Dostoiëwsky, who sees humanity from the point of view of his own
turbulent mind and confused soul--Tolstoï produces a supreme and
absolute impression of the truth, although, in the light of his
harmonious union of faculties, it is impossible to say whether he hits
the mark by means of external or internal realism,--whether he is more
perfect in his descriptions, his dialogues, or his studies of character.
In reading Tolstoï, we feel as though we were looking at the spectacle
of the universe where nothing seems to us unreal or invented.
Tolstoï's fictitious characters are not more vivid than his historical
ones,--Napoleon or Alexander I., for example; he is as careful in the
expression of a sublime sentiment as in a minute and vulgar detail.
Every touch is wonderful. His description of a battle is amazing (and
who else can describe a battle like Tolstoï!), but he is charming when
he gives us the day-dreams and love-fancies of a child still playing
with her dolls. And what a clear intuition he has of the motives of
human actions! What a penetrating, unwavering, scrutinizing glance that
"trieth the hearts and the reins," as saith the Scripture! Tolstoï does
not exhaust his perspicacity in the study of instinct alone; with eagle
eye he pierces the most complex souls, refined and enveloped in the veil
of education,--courtiers, diplomats, princes, generals, ladies of high
rank, and famous statesmen. No one else has described the drawing-room
so exquisitely and so truly as Tolstoï; and it must be admitted that
the picture of official good society is terribly embarrassing. Some
chapters of "Anna Karénina" and "War and Peace" seem to exhale the warm
soft air that greets us as we enter the door of a luxurious,
aristocratic mansion. The master-painter controls the collectivity as
well as the individual; he dissects the soul of the multitude, the
spirit of the nation, with the same energy and dexterity as that of one
man. The wonderful pictures of the invasion and burning of Moscow are
continual examples of this.
Is "War and Peace" a historical novel in the limited, archæological,
false, and conventional conception? Certainly not. Tolstoï's historical
novel has realized the conjunction of the novel and the epic, with the
good qualities of both. In this novel--so broad, so deep, so human, and
at times so patriotic, as Tolstoï understands patriotism--there is a
subtle breath of nihilism, an essence of euphorbia, a poison of
_ourare_, which colors the whole drift of Russian literature. This
tendency is personified in the hero (if the book may be said to have one
at all), Pierre Besukof, a true Sclavonic soul, expansive, full of
unrest and disquietude, passionate, unstable, the character of a child
united to the investigating intelligence of a philosopher,--a
pre-nihilist (to coin a word) who goes in search of certainty and
repose, and finds them not until he meets at last with one "poor in
spirit," a wretched common soldier, a type of meek resignation and
inconsequent fatalism, who shows him how to attain to his desires
through a mystic indifferentism, a voluntary abrogation of the body,
and a vegetative form of existence, in fact, a form of quietism, of
Indian Nirvana.
This same philosophical concept inspires all of Tolstoï's writings. Once
a nihilist and now converted, culture and the exercise of reason are to
him lamentable gifts; his ideal is not progression, but retrogression;
the final word of human wisdom is to return to pure Nature, the eternal
type of goodness, beauty, and truth. The Catholic Church has also
honored the saintly lives of the poor in spirit, such as Pascual Bailon
and Fray Junipero, _the Idiot_; but assuredly it has never presented
them as models worthy of imitation in general, only as living examples
of grace; and on the contrary, it is the intelligence of great thinkers,
like Augustine, Thomas, and Buenaventura, that is revered and written
about. In the whole catalogue of sins there is perhaps none more
blasphemous than that of spurning the light given by the Creator to
every creature. But to return to Tolstoï.
His literary testament is to be found in "Anna Karénina," a novel but
little less prolix than "War and Peace," published in 1877. While "War
and Peace" pictured society at the beginning of the century, "Anna
Karénina" pictures contemporary society,--a more difficult task, because
it lacks perspective, yet an easier one, because one can better
understand the mode of thought of one's contemporaries; therefore in
"Anna Karénina" the epic quality is inferior to the lyric. The principal
character is amply developed, and the study of passion is complete and
profound.
The argument in "Anna Karénina" is upon an illicit love, young, sincere,
and overpowering. Tolstoï does not justify it; the whole tone of the
book is austere. It would seem as though he proposed to
demonstrate--indirectly, and according to the demands of art--that a
generous soul cannot live outside the moral law; and that even when
circumstances seem entirely favorable, and those obstacles which society
and custom oppose to his passion have disappeared, the discord within
him is enough to poison happiness and make life intolerable.
In both of Tolstoï's novels there is much insistence on the necessity of
believing and contemplating religious matters, the thirst of faith.
Although Tolstoï observes the canon of literary impersonality with a
rigorous care that is equal to that of Flaubert himself, yet it is
plainly to be seen that Pierre Besukof in "War and Peace," and Levine in
"Anna Karénina" are one and the same with the author, with his doubts,
his painful anxiety to get away from indifferentism and to solve the
eternal problem whose explanation Heine demanded of the waves of the
North Sea. Tolstoï cannot consent to the idea of dying an atheist and a
nihilist, or to living without knowing why or for what.
Referring to the autobiography called "Memoirs," we see that from
childhood he was troubled and tortured by the mystery of things about
him and the hereafter. He tells there how his mind reasoned with,
penetrated, and passed in review the diverse solutions offered to the
great enigma; once he thought, like the Stoics, that happiness depends
not upon circumstances, but upon our manner of accepting them, and that
a man inured to suffering could not be afflicted by misfortunes;
possessed with this idea he held a heavy dictionary upon his
outstretched hand for five minutes, enduring frightful pains; he
disciplined himself with a whip until his tears started. Then he turned
to Epicurus; he remembered that life is short; that to man belongs only
the disposition of the present; and under the influence of these ideas
he abandoned his lessons for three days, and spent the time lying on his
bed reading novels or eating sweets. He sees a horse, and at once
inquires, "When this animal dies, where will his spirit go? Into the
body of another horse? Into the body of a man?" And he wearies himself
with questionings, with struggling over knotty problems, with thoughts
upon thoughts, and all the while his ardent imagination conjures before
him dreams of love, happiness, and fame.
Beneath the restless effervescence of fancy and youth the religious
sentiment was pulsating,--the strongest and most deeply rooted sentiment
in his soul. One episode from the "Memoirs" will prove to us the innate
religious nature of the novelist. He tells us that once, when he was
still a child in his father's country-house, a certain beggar came to
the door, a poor vagabond, one-eyed and pock-marked, half idiot and
foolish,--one of those coarse clay vessels in which, according to
contemporaneous Russian literature, the divine light is wont to be
enclosed. He was offered shelter and hospitality, though none knew
whence he came, nor why he followed a mysterious wandering life, always
going from place to place, barefooted and poor, visiting the convents,
distributing religious objects, murmuring incoherent words, and sleeping
wherever a handful of straw was thrown down for him. Within the house,
at supper-time, they fall to discussing him. Tolstoï's mother pities
him, his father abuses him; the latter thinks him little better than a
cheat and a sluggard, the former reveres him as one inspired of God, a
holy man, who earns glory and reward every minute by wearing around his
body a chain sixty pounds in weight. Nevertheless, the vagabond obtains
shelter and food, and the children, whose curiosity has been excited by
the discussion, go and hide in a dark room next to his, so as "to see
Gricha's chain." Tolstoï was filled with awe in his dark corner to hear
the beggar pray, to see him throw himself upon the floor and writhe in
mystic transports amid the clanking of his chain. "Many things have
happened since then," he exclaims, "many other memories have lost all
importance for me; Gricha, the wanderer, has long since reached the end
of his last journey, but the impression which he produced upon me will
never fade; I shall never forget the feelings that he awoke in my soul.
O Gricha! O great Christian! Thy faith was so ardent that thou couldst
feel God near; thy love was so great that the words flowed of themselves
from thy lips, and thou hadst not to ask thy reason for an examination
of them. And how magnificently didst thou praise the Almighty when,
words failing to express the feelings of thy heart, thou threwest
thyself weeping upon the floor!" This episode of childhood will indeed
never fade from the memory or the heart of Tolstoï. After seeking
conviction and repose in arrogant human science and in philosophy,
Tolstoï, like his two heroes, finds them at last in the meekness and
simplicity of the most abject classes. Like his own Pierre Besukof, who
receives the mystic illumination at the mouth of a common soldier who is
to be shot by the French, or like his own Levine, who gets the same from
a poor laboring peasant stacking hay, Tolstoï was converted by one
Sutayef, one of those innumerable _mujiks_ who go about the country
announcing the good tidings of the day of communist fraternity. "Five
years ago," says Tolstoï in "My Religion," "my faith was given to me; I
believed in the teachings of Jesus, and my whole life suddenly changed;
I abhorred what I had loved, and loved what I had abhorred; what before
seemed bad to me, now seemed good, and _vice versa_."
It was a sad day for art when this change of spirit came upon Count
Tolstoï. Its immediate effect was to suspend the publication of a novel
he had begun, to make him despise his master-works, call them empty
vanities, and accuse himself of having speculated with the public in
arousing evil passions and fanning the fires of sensuality. A heretic
and a rationalist (Tolstoï is clearly both; for what he calls his
conversion is neither to Catholicism nor to the Greek Church), he now
abuses the novel, like some persons nearer home with better intentions
than intelligence, as being an incentive to loose actions, the Devil's
bait, and agrees with Saint Francis de Sales that "novels are like
mushrooms,--the best of them are good for nothing." Tolstoï has not cast
aside the pen; he continues to write, but no more such superb pages as
we find in "War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina," no more masterly
silhouettes of fine society or the high ranks of the military, not the
imperial profile of Alexander I. or the charming figure of the Princess
Marie; he writes edifying apologies, Biblical parables dedicated to the
enlightenment of village-folk; exegeses and religious controversies,
professions of faith and dramas for the people. Has the great writer
died? Nay, I believe that he still lives and breathes beneath the coarse
tunic and rope girdle of the peasant-dress he wears, and which I have
seen in his portraits; for in these same books, written with a moral and
religious purpose, such as, for instance, that called "What to do?" in
which he has endeavored to dispense with elegance and suppress beauty of
rhetoric and style, the grace of the artist flows from his pen in spite
of him; his descriptions are word-paintings, and the hand of the master
is revealed in the admirable conciseness of diction; he controls every
resource of art, and is inspired, will-he, nill-he. Tolstoï was right in
reminding himself that genius is a divine gift, and there is no law that
can annul it or cast it out.
I cannot believe that Count Tolstoï will persevere in his present path.
In the first place, I have little confidence in conversion to a
rationalist faith; in the second place, from what I have heard of the
disposition of the incomparable novelist, I think it impossible that he
should long remain stationary and satisfied. In his vigorous, passionate
nature imagination has the strongest part; he is enthusiastic, and given
to extremes, like Prince Besukof in "War and Peace;" he is like a fiery
charger dashing on at full gallop, that leaps and plunges, and stays not
even upon the edge of the precipice. To-day, under the influence of an
unbridled sentiment of compassion, he is playing the part of redeemer
and apostle; he imitates in his proprietary mansion and in the
neighboring towns the primitive fraternal customs of the early
Christians; he follows the plough and swings the scythe, and waits on
himself, rejecting every offer of service and everything that refines
life. To-morrow, perhaps, his lofty understanding will tell him that he
was not born to make shoes but novels, and he will perhaps regret having
thrown away his best years, the prime of life and creative activity.
At present, he has abandoned himself to the grace of God; and to those
of us who are interested in intellectual phenomena, his religious ideas,
which are closely interwoven with his imaginative creations, are
extremely attractive. "My Religion" contains the fullest exposition of
them. He states in it that the whole teaching of Jesus Christ is
revealed in one single principle,--that of non-resistance to evil; it is
to turn the other cheek, not to judge one's neighbor, not to be angry,
not to kill. Tolstoï's experience with the Gospels is like that of the
uninitiated who goes into a physical laboratory, and without having any
previous instruction wishes to understand at once the management of this
or that apparatus or machinery. The sublime and compendious message of
the Son of Man has been for nineteen hundred years explained and defined
by the loftiest minds in theology and philosophy, who have elucidated
every real and profound phase of it as far as is compatible with human
needs and laws; but Tolstoï, extracting at pleasure that passage from
the sacred Book which most strikes his poetic imagination, deduces
therefrom a social state impossible and superhuman; declares tribunals,
prisons, authorities, riches, art, war, and armies, iniquitous and
reprehensible.
In his earliest years Tolstoï dwelt much on thoughts of the tragedy of
war, and in "War and Peace" he gives utterance to some very original and
extraordinary, and sometimes even most ingenious opinions concerning it.
No historian that I know of can be compared to Tolstoï on this point;
none has succeeded in putting in relief the mysterious moral force, the
blind and irresistible impulse which determines the great collisions
between two peoples independently of the external and trivial causes to
which history attributes them. Nor has any one else brought out as
clearly as Tolstoï the part played in war by the army, the anonymous
mass always sacrificed to the personality of two or three celebrated
chiefs,--not only in the campaign bulletins but in the narratives of
Clio herself. I believe it will be long before such another man as
Tolstoï will arise, not only in the realms of the art of depicting great
battle-scenes, but so rich in the gifts of military psychology and
physiology; one who can describe the trembling fear in the recruit as
well as the strategic calculations of the commander; one who can
transfer the impression made upon the soul by the whistling of the bombs
carrying death through the air, as well as the sudden impulse that at a
certain decisive moment seizes upon thousands of souls that were before
vacillating and unstable, lifts them up to a heroic temperature, and
decides, in spite of all strategic combinations, the fate of the battle.
Though the strenuous enemy of war, Tolstoï is perhaps the man who has
written about it better than any other in the world; in every other
respect I can compare him to some one else, but not in this. In French
writings I recall only one page that could be placed beside Tolstoï's;
it is the admirable description of the battle of Waterloo, by Stendhal.
In the name of his own gospel Tolstoï condemns not only human
institutions in general, but the Church in particular (the Greek Church,
of course), accusing it of having substituted the letter for the spirit,
the word of the world for the word of God.
It is not to our purpose to point out Tolstoï's theological errors, but
his artistic and social errors fall within the scope of our
investigations. We know that, applying the principle of non-resistance
in the most rigorous acceptation, he proscribes war, and, as a logical
consequence, he disapproves the sacred love of country, which he
qualifies as an absurd prejudice, and reproaches himself whenever his
own instincts lead him to wish for the triumph of Russia over other
nations. In the light of his theory of non-resistance he condemns the
revolution, and yet he is forwarding it all the while by his own radical
socialism. Tolstoï's social ideal is, not to lift up and instruct the
ignorant, nor even to suppress pauperism, but to create a state entirely
composed of the poor, to annihilate wealth, luxury, the arts, all
delicacy and refinement of custom, and lastly--the lips almost refuse to
utter it--even cleanliness and care of the body. Yes, cleanliness and
instruction, to wash and to learn, are, in Tolstoï's eyes, great sins,
the cause of separation and estrangement among mankind.
Besides this book in which he has set forth his religious ideas, he has
written another called "My Confession" and "A Commentary on the
Gospels." In "My Confession" he says that having lost faith when very
young and given himself up for a time to the vanities of life, and to
making literature in which he taught others what he himself knew nothing
about, and then turning to science for light upon the enigma of life, he
became at last inclined to suicide, when it suddenly occurred to him to
look and see how the humbler classes lived, who suffer and toil and know
the object of life; and it was borne in upon him that he must follow
their example and embrace their simple faith.
Thus Tolstoï formulated the principle enunciated by Gogol, and which is
dominant in Russian literature,--the principle of a return to Nature,
for which the way was prepared by Schopenhauer, and the sort of modern
Buddhism which leads to a subjection of the reason to the animal and the
idiot, and a feeling of unbounded tenderness and reverence for inferior
creatures.
I have devoted thus much attention to Tolstoï's social and religious
ideas, not only because they are interlaced with his novels, and to a
certain extent complement and explain them, but because Tolstoï, though
he has allied himself with no political party, not even with the
Sclavophiles, like Dostoiëwsky, is yet a representative of an order of
ideas and sentiments common in his country and proper to it; he is the
supreme artist of nihilism and pessimism, and at the same time the
apostle of a Christian socialism newly derived from certain theories,
dear to the Middle Ages, concerning the eternal Gospels; he is the
interpreter, to the world of culture, society, letters, and arts, of
that feverish mysticism which manifests itself in more violent forms
among certain Russian sects, independent preachers, voluntary mortifiers
of the body, the direct inheritors of those who, in dark ages past,
declared themselves under the influence of spirits. The spectacle of the
socialist fanatic united to the great writer, of the Quietist almost
exceeding the limits of evangelical charity joined to the novelist of
realism almost _à la_ Zola, is so interesting from an intellectual point
of view, that it is hard to say which most attracts the attention,
Tolstoï or his books.
He has made great mistakes, not the least of which is his renunciation
of novel-writing, if indeed that be his intention, though I have heard
some Russians affirm the contrary. By condemning the arts and luxuries
of urban life, and admitting only the good of the agricultural, for the
sake of its simplicity and laboriousness, instead of helping on the
Golden Age, he compels a retrogression to the age of the animal, as
described by the Roman poet,--"the troglodyte snores, being satisfied
with acorns." By anathematizing letters, poetry, theatres, balls,
banquets, and all the pleasures of intelligence and civilization, he
condemns the most delicate instincts that we possess, sanctions
barbarism, justifies a new irruption of Huns and Vandals, and endeavors
to arrest the faculty of the perception of the Beautiful, which is a
glorious attribute of God himself. And all this for what? To find at the
end of this harsh penance not the love of Jesus Christ, who bids us lean
on his breast and rest after our labors, but a pantheistic numen, a
blind and deaf deity hidden behind a gray mist of abstractions. With
sorrow we hear Tolstoï, the great artist, blaspheme when he would pray;
hear him spurn the gifts of Heaven, condemn that form of art in which
his name shone brightest and shed lustre on his country and all the
world,--calling the novel oil poured upon the flames of sensual love, a
licentious pastime, food for the senses, and a noxious diversion. We see
him, under the hallucination of his mysticism, making shoes and drawing
water with the hands that God gave him for weaving forms and designs of
artistic beauty into the texture of his marvellous narratives.
V.
French Realism and Russian Realism.
The Russian naturalistic school seems to have reached its culmination in
Tolstoï. Concerning Russian naturalism I would say a few words more
before leaving the subject. The opinions expressed are impartial, though
long confirmed in my own mind.
In recapitulating half a century of Russian literature, we see that this
_natural school_ followed close upon an imitation of foreign style and
an effervescence of romanticism; it was founded by Gogol, and defended
by Bielinsky, the estimable critic who did for Russia what Lessing did
for Germany. The _natural school_ professed the principle of adhering
with strict fidelity to the reality, and of copying life exactly in all
its humblest and most trivial details. And this new school, born before
romanticism was well worn-out, grew and prospered quickly, producing a
harvest of novelists even more fertile than the poets of the antecedent
school. The date of its appearance was the period denominated _the
forties_,--the decade between 1840 and 1850.
The general European political agitation, not being able to manifest
itself in Russia by means of insurrections, tumults, and proclamations,
took an intellectual form; and young Russia, returning from German
universities intoxicated with metaphysics, saturated with liberalism and
philanthropy, was eager to pour out its soul, and give vent to its
plethora of ideas. A country without lecture-halls, free-press, or
political liberty of any sort, had to recur to art as the only refuge.
And making use of the sort of subterfuge that love employs when it hides
itself under the veil of friendship, the political radical called
himself in Russia a sort of left-handed Hegelian, to invent a phrase.
Thus Russian letters, in assuming a national character, showed a strong
social and political bias, which contains the clew to its qualities and
defects, and especially to its originality. The academic idea of
literature as a gentle solace and noble recreation has been for the last
half-century less applicable in Russia than anywhere else in the world;
never has literature in Russia become a profession as in France, where
the writer is prone to become more or less the skilful artisan, quick to
observe the variations of public taste, what sort of condiment most
tickles its palate, and straightway takes advantage of it,--an artisan
satisfied, with honorable exceptions, to sell his wares, and to snap his
fingers at the world, at humanity, at France, and even at Paris,
exclusive of that strip of asphalt which runs from the Madeleine to the
Porte St. Martin. Russian literature stands for more than this;
persuaded of the importance of its task, and that it is charged with a
great social work and the conduct of the progress of its country,--Holy
Russia, which is itself called to regenerate the world,--neither glory
nor gold will satisfy it; its object is to enlighten and to teach the
generations. It is but a short step from this to an admonitory and
directive literature; and the noblest Russian geniuses have stumbled
over this propensity at the end of their literary career. Gogol finished
by publishing edificatory epistles, believing them more advantageous
than "Dead Souls;" an analogous condition has to-day befallen Tolstoï.
In spite of the severity of Nicholas I., literature enjoyed a relative
ease and freedom under his sceptre, either because the Autocrat had a
fondness for it, or was not afraid of it. Under the shelter afforded by
literature, political Utopias, nihilistic germs, subversive
philosophies, and dreams of social regeneration were fostered. The
novel--more directly, actively, and efficaciously than the most careful
treatises or occasional articles--propagated the seeds of revolution,
and being filled with sociological ideas, was devoted to the study of
the poor and humble classes, and was marked by realism and sincerity of
design; while the flood of indignation consequent upon repressive and
violent measures broke forth into copious satire.
In this development of a literature aspiring to transform society, the
love of beauty for beauty's sake plays a secondary part, though it is
the proper end and aim of all forms of art. Therefore that which
receives least attention in the Russian novel is perfection of
form,--plot and method best revealing the æsthetic conception. It
abounds in superb pages, admirable passages, prodigies of observation,
and truth; but, except in the case of Turguenief, the composition is
always defective, and there is a sort of incoherence, of palpable and
fearful obscurity, amid which we seem to discover gigantic shapes,
vaguer but grander than those we are accustomed to see about us.
During a period of twenty or thirty years the novel and the critic were
everything to Russia; the national intelligence lived in them, and
within their precincts it elaborated a free world after its own heart.
Like a maiden perpetually shut away from the outside world, dreaming of
some romantic lover whom she has never known or seen, consoling herself
with novels, and fancying that all the fine adventures in them have
happened to herself, Russia has written into the national novel her own
visionary nature, her thirst for political adventures, and her eagerness
for transcendental reforms. One most important reform may be said to be
directly the work of the novel, namely, the emancipation of the serfs.
When the more clement Alexander II. succeeded the austere Nicholas I.,
and the restraints laid upon the political press were loosened so that
it could spread its wings, the novel suffered in consequence. The hope
of great events to come, the approaching liberation of the serfs, the
formation of a sort of liberal cabinet, the efflorescence of new
illusions that bud under every new régime, concurred to infuse the
literature with civic and social tendencies. Beautiful and bright and
poetical is art for art's sake, and as Puchkine understood it; but at
the hour of doubt and strife we ask even art for positive service and
practical solutions. Who stops to see whether the life-preservers thrown
to drowning men struggling with death are of elegant workmanship?
In speaking of nihilism I have mentioned the most important one of the
directive Russian novels, called "What to Do?" by the martyr
Tchernichewsky,--a work of no great literary merit, but which was the
gospel of young Russia. In his wake followed a host of novelists of this
tendency, but inferior, obscure, and without even the inventive power of
their leader in dressing up their ideas as symbolic personages, like his
ascetic socialist Rakmetof, who laid himself down upon a board stuck
through with nail-points. In their turn came the reactionaries, or
rather the conservatives, and in novels as absurd as those of their
predecessors they clothed the nihilists in purple and gold; it finally
resulted that everybody was as ready to produce a novel as to write a
serious article, or to handle a gun at a barricade. If any one of the
neophytes of the school of directive novels possessed genius, it was
swallowed up in the froth of political passion.
As an accomplice in guilt, criticism did not weigh these works of art in
the golden scales of Beauty, but in the leaden ones of Utility. There
were critics who went so far as to declare war upon art, undertaking to
ruin the fame of great authors, because they wrought not in the
interests of transcendentalism; their motive was like that which
impelled the early Christians to destroy the great works of paganism.
The popular novelists condemned the verses of Puchkine and the music of
Glinka, in the name of the down-trodden and suffering people, just as
Tolstoï, in remembrance of the hungry family he had just visited,
refused to partake of the appetizing meal offered him by servants in
livery. As art had not achieved the amelioration of the people's
condition, they considered it not merely a futile recreation, but
actually an obnoxious thing. Bielinsky, with a taint of this same mania,
at last entertained scruples against the pure pleasure enjoyed in
contemplation of the beautiful, and was almost inclined to stop his ears
and shut his eyes so as not to fall into æsthetic sins.
Are the authors and critics the only ones responsible for this directive
character of most Russian novels? No. Two factors are requisite to the
work of art,--the artist and the public. The Russians exact more of the
novel than we; the Latins, at least, regard the novel as a means of
beguiling a few evening hours, or a summer siesta,--a way to kill time.
Not so the Russians. They demand that the novelist shall be a prophet, a
seer of a better future, a guide of new generations, a liberator of the
serf, able to face tyranny, to redeem the country, to reveal the ideal,
in fine, an evangelist and an apostle. Given this conception, it ought
not to astonish us that the students drag Turguenief's carriage through
the streets, that they faint with emotion at Dostoiëwsky's touch, nor
that the enthusiasm of the multitude--in itself contagious--should
sometimes fill the heads of the novelists themselves. The novelists are,
in reality and truth, a faithful echo of the aspirations and needs of
the souls that feed upon their works. The Occidentalism of Turguenief,
the mysticism of Dostoiëwsky, the pessimism of Tolstoï, the charity, the
revolutionary spirit,--each is a manifestation of the national
atmosphere condensed in the brains of two or three foremost geniuses.
Who can doubt the reflex action which the anonymous multitude exercises
on eminent persons, when he contemplates the great Russian novelists?
There is a difference, however, between the novel which is purposely
directive, the novel with a moral, so to speak, and the novel which is
guided by a social drift, by "the spirit of the times." The former is
liable to mediocrity and flatness, the latter is the patrimony of the
loftiest minds. This spirit, this social sympathy, issued from every
pore of Ivan Turguenief, the most able and exquisite of them all,
indirectly and without detriment to his impersonality, and with the full
conviction that it ought to be so; and novel-writing is useful in this
way and no other. He says as much in a sort of autobiographical
fragment, in which he explains how and why he left his country: "I felt
that I must at all costs get away from my enemy in order the better to
deal him a telling blow. And my enemy bore a well-known name; it was
serfdom, slavery. Under the name of slavery I included everything that I
proposed to fight without truce and to the death. This was my oath, and
I was not alone in subscribing thereto. And in order to be faithful to
it I came to the Occident."
If I am not mistaken, the great difference between French and Russian
naturalism lies in this predominant characteristic of social expression.
The defects and merits of French naturalism are bound up with its
condition as a purely literary insurrection and protest against the
rhetoric of romanticism. In vain Zola exerts his Titanic energies to
impress on his works this social significance, whose invigorating power
is not unheeded by his perspicacious mind. He fights against egoism
without and perhaps within; but only in the two which he conceives to be
his master works, "L'Assommoir" and "Germinal," has he approached the
desired mark.
The condition of France is diametrically opposed to that of Russia. I am
only repeating the opinion of a large number of illustrious Frenchmen
who have judged themselves without any great amount of optimism. They
say, "We are an old people, depraved and worn-out, our illusions
vanished, our hopes faded. We have proved all things, and now we cannot
be moved either by military glory which has undone and ruined us, or by
revolutions which have discredited us and made Europe look upon us with
suspicion. We have no religious faith, nor even social faith. We desire
peace, and, if possible, that industry and commerce may flourish; we are
not yet bereft of patriotism, and we expect art to entertain us, which
is difficult,--for what new thing remains for the artist to discover?
Criticism, spread abroad among the multitudes, has killed inspiration;
the generative forces are exhausted. We demand so much of the novelists
that they are at a loss how to whet our appetites, and neither ugliness,
nor unnatural crime, nor monstrous aberrations are sufficient to
stimulate our cloyed palates. They are touched with our coldness, and,
like ourselves, spiritless and inert, sick and disgusted, they feel
beforehand the irremediable and fatal decadence that is coming upon us,
and they believe that art in the Latin races will die with the century."
Thus mourn some of the men of France, and to my mind they have a basis
of truth.
The artist never goes beyond the line marked out by his epoch. And how
should he? Of course there is, in every work of art, something that is
the exclusive property of the individual, something of his own genius;
but as the nature of the fish is to swim, but swim it cannot out of the
water, and the nature of the bird is to fly, but lacking air it flies
not, so, given a social atmosphere, the artist modifies and adapts
himself to it. The novelist cannot have an ideal different from the
society which reads him; and if one but perceives the rigor and
inflexibility of this law, one may avoid many foolish sentiments
expressed with the intent to censure the immorality of the novel. Take
any one of them, Tolstoï's, Zola's, Goncourt's, Dostoiëwsky's, look at
it well, study it closely, and you will find in it the exact expression
and even the artistic interpretation of a tendency of his epoch, his
nation, and his race. This is as evident as that two and two make four.
Novelists are what they must be rather than what they would be, and it
is not in their power to make a world after their own hearts or
according to any ideal pattern.
Melchior de Voguié, it seems to me, has not recognized this truth in
accusing French novelists of materialism, dryness, egoism, and paganism,
and has not taken into account the fact that the reflex action of the
public upon the novelist is greater than that of the latter upon the
former, or at least that the novelist is the first to be influenced,
although afterward his works have an influence in turn, and in lesser
proportion.
"The French realists," says Voguié, "ignore the better part of humanity,
which is the spirit." This is true; and I have said and thought for a
long time that realism, to realize to the full its own program, must
embrace matter and spirit, earth and heaven, human and superhuman. I
entirely agree with Voguié in believing that naturalism--or to call it
by a more comprehensive name, the School of Truth or Realism--should not
close its eyes to the mystery that is beyond rational explanations, nor
deny the divine as a known quantity. And so entirely is this my opinion,
that I could never consent to the narrow and short-sighted idea of some
who imagine that a Catholic, by the act of admitting the supernatural,
the miraculous, and the verity of revelation, is incapacitated for
writing a profound, serious, and good novel, a realistic novel, a novel
that shall breathe a fragrant essence of truth. Aside from the fact that
literary as well as scientific methods do not presuppose a negation of
religion, when did it ever happen that Catholicism, in the days of
liveliest faith, impeded the production of the best of realist novels,
as for example "Don Quixote"? The truth is that the novel, given the
epic element, will be neither Catholic nor religious in those societies
which are neither one nor the other. The lyric element does not demand
this harmony with society: a great Catholic poet may be found in a most
agnostic country, but not a Catholic novelist.
The novel is a clear mirror, a faithful expression of society, and the
actual conditions of the novel in Europe are a proof of it. I think I
have shown that the Russian novel reflects the dreams, sentiments, and
changes of that country; it appears revolutionary and subversive,
because the spirit of both Russian _intelligence_ and Russian educated
people is so. In France, where to-day, in spite of the efforts of the
spiritual and eclectic school, the traditions of the Encyclopædia have
prevailed together with a frivolous sensualist materialism, the novel
follows this road also, and without meaning to strike up Béranger's
famous refrain,--
"C'est la faute de Rousseau,
C'est la faute de Voltaire,"
I affirm that _animalism_, determined materialism, pessimism, and
_decadentism_ may be explained by the light of the great writers of the
eighteenth century, not only through their literary influence, but
because the society which pores over the novels of the present day is
the daughter of the French Revolution, and the latter is the daughter of
the Encyclopædia. Who does not know the relation which exists between
the novel and the fashion in England, and how the former is conditioned,
shaped, and limited exclusively by the latter? In Germany another
curious phenomenon is apparent. The novel in vogue is historical,--a
condition appropriate to a country where everybody is interested only in
epic life and the contingency of war.
On account of this interdependence, or, in fact, unity, of the novel and
society, I cannot agree with Voguié when he says that the books that are
influencing and stimulating the multitudes, the general ideas that are
transforming Europe, are proceeding nowadays not from France but from
Russia. It may be true of the Northern races, but of Latin races it
cannot be more than partially and indirectly so. Does Voguié find in the
French novel as in the Russian the latent fermentation of the
evangelical spirit, or are the currents of mysticism that impregnate
Russia circulating through France?
Russia is Christian, in spite of German materialist philosophers who for
a time set her brains in a whirl, but whom she has finally rejected, as
the sea gives up a dead body; and if I have succeeded in showing clearly
the forms adopted by the social revolution in Russia, and the strange
analogies these sometimes bear to the actions of the early Christians,
if I have shown the love of sacrifice, the ardent charity, the
sympathetic pity and tenderness not only toward the oppressed but toward
even the criminal, the despised, the idiot, and the outcast, which
characterize this society and this literature; if I have shown the
degrees of mystic fervor by which it is permeated and consumed,--no one
need be surprised at my statement and conclusion that although Buddha
and Schopenhauer have a goodly share in the present condition of Russian
thought, the larger part is nevertheless Christian. It is my opinion
that the world is more Christian now than in the Middle Ages, not as to
faith, but as to sentiments and customs; and if in hours of despondency
I were sometimes inclined to doubt the efficiency of the word of Christ,
the sight of its prodigious effects in Russia would certainly correct my
doubts. The heterodox nature of the Russian faith is not a nullification
of it. The most heretical heretic, if he be a sincere Christian, has
more of truth than error in his faith. But error is like sin: one drop
of poison is enough to permeate a glass of pure water; yet it is certain
that there is more water than poison in the glass.
To return to the literary question, the Russian novel demonstrates, if
such demonstration be necessary, the futility of the censures directed
against naturalism, and which confound general principles with the
circumstances and social conditions which environ the novelist. The
Russian novel proves that all the precepts of the art of naturalism may
be realized and fulfilled without committing any of those sins of which
it is accused by those who know it through the medium of half a dozen
French novels. The charge that is oftenest made against the French
realist is the having painted pictures of passion and vice too nakedly
and with too much candor,--and the charge is certainly not without
foundation; and it may be added that some novelists overload the canvas
and go to the extreme of making humanity out to be more sinful than even
physical possibilities admit; but they must not be made to bear the
responsibility alone; the public that gloats and feeds on these comfits,
and grumbles when they are not provided,--the public, I say, must share
it. In Russia, where the readers do not ask the novelist for intricate
plot or high-colored sketches, the novel is chaste: I do not mean in the
English sense of being moral with an air of affectation, and frowns and
false modesty; I mean chaste without effort, like an ancient marble
statue. In "Anna Karénina" Tolstoï depicts an illicit passion,
extravagant, vehement, full of youthful ardor; yet there is not a page
of "Anna Karénina" which cannot be read aloud and without a blush. In
"War and Peace" the most candid pages are models of decorum, of true
decorum, such as education, reason, and the dignity of man approve. In
"Crime and Punishment" Dostoiëwsky introduces the character of a
prostitute; but this character is no such romantic creature as Marie
Gautier or Nana. She is not made poetical, nor is she embellished or
exaggerated; yet she produces an impression (let him read the novel who
doubts) of purity, of suffering, of austerity. In Turguenief, by far the
most sensual of the great Russian novelists, and in Pisemsky, of
secondary rank, there is so much art in the disposition and harmony of
detail and description, that the definitive impression, while less
severe than in the case of the two others mentioned, is equally noble
and lofty.
Are they any the less Realists for this? They are rather more so, in my
opinion. In order to carry out the great precept of modern art, the
novelist must copy life,--the life that we live and that unfolds about
us every day. But life does not unfold as it is represented in many
novels that are the product of French naturalism. The Zola school makes
use of abstraction and accumulation in uniting in one scene and one
character all the aberrations, abominations, and vices that only a
collection of profligates could be capable of, with the result offered
us in pictures such as the house in "Pot-Bouille," that should be
handled with tongs for fear of soiling one's fingers. We turn to the
reality, and we find that all these colors exist, that all these vices
are actual,--yes, but one at a time, intermingled with a thousand good
or commonplace things; then we are in a rage with the novelist, and ever
after bear him a grudge for having a mania for ugliness. The impression
which life makes upon us is quite different; the alternative of good is
evil, of poetry is vulgarity; we demand a recognition of this from the
novelist, and this the Russian novelists have given us, yet without
leaving the firm ground of realist art. They present the material, the
bestial, the trivial, the vile, the obscene, the passionate, as they
appear in life, in due proportion and no more.
We have also to thank them for having recognized the psychical life, and
the spiritual, moral, and religious needs of mankind. And I would make a
distinction between the moral spirit of the English novel and the
Russian. The English judge of human actions according to preconceived
notions derived from a general standard accepted by society and
officially imposed by custom and the Protestant religion. The Russian
moralist feels deeper and thinks higher; morality is not for him a
system of narrow and inalterable rules, but the aspiration of a creature
advancing toward a higher plane, and learning his lessons in the hard
school of truth and the great theatre of art.
The spiritual element in the Russian novel is to me one of its most
singular merits. The novel should not teach the supernatural, nor be the
instrument of any religious propaganda. But from this premise to a
condition of mutilation and mere dry chronicle of physiological
functions is a long way. There are countless facts of our existence that
cannot be explained by the most determined materialist; it is not the
duty of art to explain them, but art cannot justly ignore them. Émile
Zola is both a thinker and an artist. As an artist he is admirable, and
is hardly behind Tolstoï either in poetic or descriptive faculties; but
with the artist he combines the philosopher--may I call it so?--the
philosopher of the lowest and coarsest fibre, whose influence upon
French naturalism has been most pernicious, and has greatly limited the
scope of the novel in his country.
* * * * *
In conclusion, it is my opinion that the only way to understand the
naturalistic movement is in connection with its social environment; the
impulse of our age toward a representation of truth in art everywhere
prevails, and everywhere the novel has become a result of observation,
an analytical study, as we notice in a general view of European
literature for the last forty years. The century which began with lyric
poetry is closing with a triumphant novel.
But the great principle of reality is differently applied in different
countries. Why was romanticism so much the same in England, Germany,
Spain, and Russia? Because it was chiefly rhetoric,--a literary protest,
an artistic insurrection. And why the differences between French
naturalism, the Russian _natural school_, English and Spanish realism,
and Italian _verismo_? Because each one of these phases of the religion
of truth is adequate to the country that conceived it, and to the hour
and the occasion upon which it is focused. It is no objection that
between these various forms there is close communication and relation.
Edmund de Goncourt once remarked to me that the Russian novel is not so
original as people think, for besides the marked influence of Hoffmann
and Edgar Poe upon the genius of Dostoiëwsky, it would not be difficult
to trace in the other great writers the inspiration of Balzac, Flaubert,
Stendhal, and George Sand. Pie was right; and yet Russian literature is
not the less indigenous.
I should always prefer the art that is disinterested, that carries
within itself its aim and object, to the art that is directive, with a
moral purpose; between the art that is pagan and the art that is
imbecile, I should choose the pagan. If we Spaniards, who are like the
Russians, at once an ancient and a young people, still ignorant of what
the future may lead us to, and never able to make our traditions
harmonize with our aspirations,--if we could succeed in incorporating in
our novel not merely bits of fragmentary reality, artistic
individualisms, but the spirit, the heart, the blood of our country,
what we are doing, what we are feeling as a whole,--it would indeed be
well. Yet I think this impossible, not for lack of talent but for lack
of preparation on the part of the public, upon whom at present the novel
exercises no influence at all. The novel is read neither quantitatively
nor qualitatively in Spain. As to quantity, let the authors who publish,
and the booksellers who sell, speak what they know; of the quality, let
the numerous lovers of Montepin and the eager readers of the
translations in the _feuilletines_ tell us. The serious and profound
novel dies here without an echo; criticism makes no comment upon it, and
the public ignores its appearance. Is there a single modern novel that
is popular, in the true meaning of the word, among us? Has any novel had
any influence at all in Spanish political, social, or moral life?
On coming from France, I have often noticed a significant fact, which
is, that at the French station of Hendaye there is a stand for the sale
of all the popular and celebrated novels; while at Irun, just across the
frontier, only a few steps away, but Spanish, there is nothing to be had
but a few miserable, trashy books, and not a sign of even our own best
novelists' works. From the moment we set foot on Spanish soil the
novel, as a social element, disappears. It is sad to say, but it is so
true that it would be madness to build any illusions on this matter. And
yet the instinct, the desire, the inexplicable anxiety of the artist to
embody and transmit the great truths of life, the impulse that lifts men
to great deeds, and to desire to be the voice of the people, is secretly
stimulating the Spanish novelists to break the ice of general
indifference, to put themselves in communication with the sixty million
souls and intelligences that to-day speak our language. Is the goal
which we desire to attain inaccessible? Perhaps; but as the immense
difficulties in the way of penetrating to the Arctic regions and the
discovery of the open Polar Sea are but an incentive to the explorer, so
the impossible in this undertaking should incite and spur on the masters
of the Iberian novel.
A few words of humble confession, and I have done.
I feel that there is a certain indecision and ambiguity running through
these essays of mine. I could not quite condemn the revolution in
Russia, nor could I altogether approve its doctrines and discoveries. A
book must reflect an intellectual condition which, in my case, is one of
uncertainty, vacillation, anxiety, surprise, and interest. My vision has
not been perfectly clear, therefore I have offered no conclusive
judgments,--for conviction and affirmation can only proceed from the
mind they have mastered. Russia is an enigma; let those solve it who
can,--I could not. The Sphinx called to me; I looked into the depths of
her eyes, I felt the sweet and bewildering attraction of the unknown, I
questioned her, and like the German poet I wait, with but moderate hope,
for the answer to come to me, borne by voices of the ocean of Time.