a specific Tolstoyan philosophy, and it is impossible for the student to
subscribe unconditionally to the hackneyed formula of the books that
Tolstoy "will be remembered as perhaps the most profound influence of
his day on human thought." Yet the statement might be made measurably
true if it were modified in accordance with the important reservation
made earlier in this sketch. In the field of thought he was not an
original explorer. He was great only as the promulgator, not as the
inventor, of ideas. His work has not enriched the wisdom of man by a
single new thought, nor was he a systematizer and expounder of thought
or a philosopher. In fact he possessed slight familiarity with
philosophical literature. Among the older metaphysicians his principal
guide was Spinoza, and in more modern speculative science he did not
advance beyond Schopenhauer. To the latter he was not altogether unlike
in his mental temper. At least he showed himself indubitably a pessimist
in his works by placing in fullest relief the bad side of the social
state. We perceive the pessimistic disposition also through his personal
behavior, seeing how he desponded under the discords of life, how easily
he lost courage whenever he undertook to cope with practical problems,
and how sedulously he avoided the contact with temptations. It was only
by an almost total withdrawal from the world, and by that entire relief
from its daily and ordinary affairs which he owed to the devotion of his
wife that Tolstoy was enabled during his later years to look upon the
world less despairingly.
Like his theology, so, too, his civic and economic creed was marked by
the utmost and altogether too primitive simplicity. Political questions
were of slight interest to him, unless they touched upon his vital
principles. If, therefore, we turn from his very definite position in
matters of individual conduct to his political views, we shall find that
he was wanting in a program of practical changes. His only positive
contribution to economic discussion was a persistent advocacy of
agrarian reform. Under the influence of Henry George he became an
eloquent pleader for the single tax and the nationalization of the land.
This question he discussed in numerous places, with especial force and
clearness in a long article entitled "A Great Iniquity."(32) He takes
the view that the mission of the State, if it have any at all, can only
consist in guaranteeing the rights of every one of its denizens, but
that in actual fact the State protects only the rights of the
propertied. Intelligent and right-minded citizens must not conspire with
the State to ride rough-shod over the helpless majority. Keenly alive to
the unalterable tendency of organized power to abridge the rights of
individuals and to dominate both their material and spiritual existence,
Tolstoy fell into the opposite extreme and would have abolished with a
clean sweep all factors of social control, including the right of
property and the powers of government, and transformed society into a
community of equals and brothers, relying for its peace and well-being
upon a universal love of liberty and justice.
(32) Printed in the (London) _Times_ of September 10, 1905.
By his disbelief in authority, the rejection of the socialists' schemes
of reconstruction, his mistrust of fixed institutions and reliance on
individual right-mindedness for the maintenance of the common good,
Tolstoy in the sphere of civic thought separated himself from the
political socialists by the whole diameter of initial principle: he
might not unjustly be classified, therefore, as an anarchist, if this
definition were neither too narrow nor too wide. The Christian
Socialists might claim him, because he aspires ardently to ideals
essentially Christian in their nature, and there is surely truth in the
thesis that "every thinker who understands and earnestly accepts the
teaching of the Master is at heart a socialist." At the same time,
Christianity and Socialism do not travel the whole way together. For a
religion that enjoins patience and submission can hardly be conducive to
the full flowering of Socialism. And Tolstoy's attitude towards the
church differs radically from that of the Christian Socialists. On the
whole one had best abstain from classifying men of genius.
The base of Tolstoy's social creed was the non-recognition of private
property. The effect of the present system is to maintain the inequality
of men and thereby to excite envy and stir up hatred among them. Eager
to set a personal example and precedent, Tolstoy rendered himself
nominally penniless by making all his property, real and personal, over
to his wife and children. Likewise he abdicated his copyrights. Thus he
reduced himself to legal pauperism with a completeness of success that
cannot but stir with envy the bosom of any philanthropist who shares Mr.
Andrew Carnegie's conviction that to die rich is to die disgraced.
Tolstoy's detractors have cast a plausible suspicion upon his sincerity.
They pointed out among other things that his relinquishment of pecuniary
profit in his books was apparent, not real. Since Russia has no
copyright conventions with other countries, it was merely making a
virtue of necessity to authorize freely the translation of his works
into foreign languages. As for the Russian editions of his writings, it
is said that in so far as the heavy hand of the censor did not prevent,
the Countess, as her husband's financial agent, managed quite skilfully
to exploit them.
* * * * *
Altogether, did Tolstoy practice what he professed? Inconsistency
between principles and conduct is a not uncommon frailty of genius, as
is notoriously illustrated by Tolstoy's real spiritual progenitor, Jean
Jacques Rousseau.
Now there are many discreditable stories in circulation about the muzhik
lord of Yasnaya Polyana. He urged upon others the gospel commands: "Lay
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth" and: "Take what ye have and
give to the poor," and for his own part lived, according to report, in
sumptuous surroundings. He went ostentatiously on pilgrimages to holy
places, barefooted but with an expert pedicure attending him. He dressed
in a coarse peasant blouse, but underneath it wore fine silk and linen.
He was a vegetarian of the strictest observance, yet so much of an
epicure that his taste for unseasonable dainties strained the domestic
resources. He preached simplicity, and according to rumor dined off
priceless plate; taught the equality of men, and was served by lackies
in livery. He abstained from alcohol and tobacco, but consumed six cups
of strong coffee at a sitting. Finally, he extolled the sexless life and
was the father of thirteen children. It was even murmured that
notwithstanding his professed affection for the muzhik and his incessant
proclamation of universal equality, the peasantry of Yasnaya Polyana was
the most wretchedly-treated to be found in the whole province and that
the extortionate landlordism of the Tolstoys was notorious throughout
the empire.
Much of this, to be sure, is idle gossip, unworthy of serious attention.
Nevertheless, there is evidence enough to show that Tolstoy's insistence
upon a literal acceptance of earlier Christian doctrines led him into
unavoidable inconsistencies and shamed him into a tragical sense of
dishonesty.
Unquestionably Tolstoy lived very simply and laboriously for a man of
great rank, means, and fame, but his life was neither hard nor cramped.
Having had no personal experience of garret and hovel, he could have no
first-hand practical knowledge of the sting of poverty, nor could he
obtain hardship artificially by imposing upon himself a mild imitation
of physical discomfort. For the true test of penury is not the suffering
of to-day but the oppressive dread of to-morrow. His ostensible muzhik
existence, wanting in none of the essentials of civilization, was a
romance that bore to the real squalid pauperism of rural Russia about
the same relation that the bucolic make-belief of Boucher's or Watteau's
swains and shepherdesses bore to the unperfumed truth of a sheep-farm or
a hog-sty. As time passed, and the sage turned his thoughts to a more
rigid enforcement of his renunciations, it was no easy task for a
devoted wife to provide comfort for him without shaking him too rudely
out of his fond illusion that he was enduring privations.
After all, then, his practice did not tally with his theory; and this
consciousness of living contrary to his own teachings was a constant
source of unhappiness which no moral quibbles of his friends could
still.
Yet no man could be farther from being a hypocrite. If at last he broke
down under a burden of conscience, it was a burden imposed by the
reality of human nature which makes it impossible for any man to live up
to intentions of such rigor as Tolstoy's. From the start he realized
that he did not conform his practice entirely to his teachings, and as
he grew old he was resolved that having failed to harmonize his life
with his beliefs he would at least corroborate his sincerity by his
manner of dying. Even in this, however, he was to be thwarted. In his
dramatic ending, still plainly remembered, we feel a grim consistency
with the lifelong defeat of his will to suffer.
Early in 1910 a student by the name of Manzos addressed a rebuke to
Tolstoy for simulating the habits of the poor, denouncing his mode of
life as a form of mummery. He challenged the sage to forsake his
comforts and the affections of his family, and to go forth and beg his
way from place to place. "Do this," entreated the young fanatic, "and
you will be the first true man after Christ." With his typical
large-heartedness, Tolstoy accepted the reproof and said in the course
of his long reply:(33) ... "The fact that I am living with wife and
daughter in terrible and shameful conditions of luxury when poverty
surrounds me on all sides, torments me ever more and more, and there is
not a day when I am not thinking of following your advice. I thank you
very, very much for your letter." As a matter of fact, he had more than
once before made ready to put his convictions to a fiery proof by a
final sacrifice,--leaving his home and spending his remaining days in
utter solitude. But when he finally proceeded to carry out this ascetic
intention and actually set out on a journey to some vague and lonely
destination, he was foiled in his purpose. If ever Tolstoy's behavior
irresistibly provoked misrepresentation of his motives it was by this
somewhat theatrical hegira. The fugitive left Yasnaya Polyana, not
alone, but with his two favorite companions, his daughter Alexandra and
a young Hungarian physician who for some time had occupied the post of
private secretary to him. After paying a farewell visit to his sister, a
nun cloistered in Shamardin, he made a start for the Trans-Caucasus. His
idea was to go somewhere near the Tolstoy colony at the Black Sea. But
in an early stage of the journey, a part of which was made in an
ordinary third-class railway compartment, the old man was overcome by
illness and fatigue. He was moved to a trackman's hut at the station of
Astopovo, not farther than eighty miles from his home, and
here,--surrounded by his hastily summoned family and tenderly nursed for
five days,--he expired. Thus he was denied the summit of martyrdom to
which he had aspired,--a lonely death, unminded of men.
(33) February 17, 1910.
* * * * *
Even a summary review like this of Tolstoy's life and labors cannot be
concluded without some consideration of his final attitude toward the
esthetic embodiment of civilization. The development of his philosophy
of self-abnegation had led irresistibly, as we have seen, to the
condemnation of all self-regarding instincts. Among these, Art appeared
to him as one of the most insidious. He warned against the cultivation
of the beautiful on the ground that it results in the suppression and
destruction of the moral sense. Already in 1883 it was known that he had
made up his mind to abandon his artistic aspirations out of loyalty to
his moral theory, and would henceforth dedicate his talents exclusively
to the propagation of humanitarian views. In vain did the dean of
Russian letters, Turgenieff, appeal to him with a death-bed message: "My
friend, great writer of the Russians, return to literary work! Heed my
prayer." Tolstoy stood firm in his determination. Nevertheless, his
genius refused to be throttled by his conscience; he could not paralyze
his artistic powers; he could merely bend them to his moral aims.
As a logical corollary to his opposition to art for art's sake, Tolstoy
cast from him all his own writings antedating "Confession,"--and
denounced all of them as empty manifestations of worldly conceit. His
authorship of that immortal novel, "War and Peace," filled him with
shame and remorse. His views on Art are plainly and forcibly expounded
in the famous treatise on "What is Art?" and in the one on
"Shakespeare." In both he maintains that Art, no matter of what sort,
should serve the sole purpose of bringing men nearer to each other in
the common purpose of right living. Hence, no art work is legitimate
without a pervasive moral design. The only true touchstone of an art
work is the uplifting strength that proceeds from it. Therefore, a
painting like the "Angelus," or a poem like "The Man with the Hoe" would
transcend in worth the creations of a Michael Angelo or a Heinrich Heine
even as the merits of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe are outmatched
in Tolstoy's judgment by those of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
George Eliot. By the force of this naïve reasoning and his theoretical
antipathy toward true art, he was led to see in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the
veritable acme of literary perfection, for the reason that this book
wielded such an enormous and noble influence upon the most vital
question of its day. He strongly discountenanced the literary practice
of revamping ancient themes, believing with Ibsen that modern writers
should impart their ideas through the medium of modern life. Yet at the
same time he was up in arms against the self-styled "moderns"! They took
their incentives from science, and this Tolstoy decried, because science
did not fulfill its mission of teaching people how rightly to live. In
this whole matter he reasoned doggedly from fixed ideas, no matter to
what ultimates the argument would carry him. For instance, he did not
stick at branding Shakespeare as an utter barbarian, and to explain the
reverence for such "disgusting" plays as "King Lear" as a crass
demonstration of imitative hypocrisy.
Art in general is a practice aiming at the production of the beautiful.
But what is "beautiful"? asked Tolstoy. The current definitions he
pronounced wrong because they were formulated from the standpoint of the
pleasure-seeker. Such at least has been the case since the Renaissance.
From that time forward, Art, like all cults of pleasure, has been evil.
To the pleasure-seeker, the beautiful is that which is enjoyable; hence
he appraises works of art according to their ability to procure
enjoyment. In Tolstoy's opinion this is no less absurd than if we were
to estimate the nutritive value of food-stuffs by the pleasure
accompanying their consumption. So he baldly declares that we must
abolish beauty as a criterion of art, or conversely, must establish
truth as the single standard of beauty. "The heroine of my stories whom
I strive to represent in all her beauty, who was ever beautiful, is so,
and will remain so, is Truth."
His views on art have a certain analogy with two modern schools,--much
against his will, since he strenuously disavows and deprecates
everything modern; they make us think on the one hand of the
"naturalists," inasmuch as like them Tolstoy eschews all intentional
graces of style and diction: and on the other hand of the
"impressionists," with whom he seems united by his fundamental
definition of art, namely that it is the expression of a dominant
emotion calculated to reproduce itself in the reader or beholder.
Lacking, however, a deep and catholic understanding for art, Tolstoy, in
contrast with the modern impressionists, would restrict artists to the
expression of a single type of sentiments, those that reside in the
sphere of religious consciousness. To him art, as properly conceived and
practiced, must be ancillary to religion, and its proper gauge is the
measure of its agreement with accepted moral teachings. Remembering,
then, the primitive form of belief to which Tolstoy contrived to attain,
we find ourselves face to face with a theory of art which sets up as the
final arbiter the man "unspoiled by culture," and he, in Tolstoy's
judgment, is the Russian muzhik.
* * * * *
This course of reasoning on art is in itself sufficient to show the
impossibility for any modern mind of giving sweeping assent to Tolstoy's
teachings. And a like difficulty would be experienced if we tried to
follow him in his meditations on any other major interest of life.
Seeking with a tremendous earnestness of conscience to reduce the
bewildering tangle of human affairs to elementary simplicity, he
enmeshed himself in a new network of contradictions. The effect was
disastrous for the best part of his teaching; his own extremism stamped
as a hopeless fantast a man incontestably gifted by nature, as few men
have been in history, with the cardinal virtues of a sage, a reformer,
and a missionary of social justice. Because of this extremism, his voice
was doomed to remain that of one crying in the wilderness.
The world could not do better than to accept Tolstoy's fundamental
prescriptions: simplicity of living, application to work, and
concentration upon moral culture. But to apply his radical scheme to
existing conditions would amount to a self-stultification of the race,
for it would entail the unpardonably sinful sacrifice of some of the
finest and most hard-won achievements of human progress. For our
quotidian difficulties his example promises no solution. The great mass
of us are not privileged to test our individual schemes of redemption in
the leisured security of an ideal experiment station; not for every man
is there a Yasnaya Polyana, and the Sophia Andreyevnas are thinly sown
in the matrimonial market.
But even though Tolstoyism will not serve as a means of solving the
great social problems, it supplies a helpful method of social criticism.
And its value goes far beyond that: the force of his influence was too
great not to have strengthened enormously the moral conscience of the
world; he has played, and will continue to play, a leading part in the
establishing and safeguarding of democracy. After all, we do not have to
separate meticulously what is true in Tolstoy's teaching from what is
false in order to acknowledge him as a Voice of his epoch. For as Lord
Morley puts the matter in the case of Jean Jacques Rousseau: "There are
some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor an eye
for the exigencies of practical organization, but simply depth and
fervor of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of
touching many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit."
[ Transcriber's Note:
The following is a list of corrections made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
sublimal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
subliminal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
in the writings of the de-gallisized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
in the writings of the de-gallicized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
the same time, the universal decreptitude prevented the despiser of his
the same time, the universal decrepitude prevented the despiser of his
artistic design was dimmed by the obstrusive didactic purpose.
artistic design was dimmed by the obtrusive didactic purpose.
]