Björnson was the son of a peasant; it was only in later life that
his father became a pastor, and from him Björnson has inherited a
theological tendency. He is essentially a preacher and religious
teacher, he is never happy unless he has something to proclaim. But as
he is not one of those who enjoy self-denial, he prefers that those
very contradictory truths, which he has preached during the course of
years, should take the form of a manifestation of the joy of life.
This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in
all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All
his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise
between the two.
Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales,
followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began
to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a
standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with
his earlier ones.
In 1869, Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_, which was the first of his
social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I
shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called _A Bankrupt_,
and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s
satire, _i.e._ the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an
overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons,
and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became
the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.
The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was
probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek
for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness
and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to
become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he
might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics
of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating
influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation
of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and
finally--but, as I think, chiefly--the example of Ibsen. Björnson,
as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able
to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical
discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him,
until one came who showed him the way.
Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis
of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was
followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in _The
Editor_. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the
misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama
entitled _The New System_; while in _Leonarda_, the snivelling morality
of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced
views of the grandmother.
Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair
means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance
into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his
tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it
originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full
earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always
mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and
amendment might ensue.
Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of
head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or
economical question on which he had not a weighty--often an ominously
weighty--word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an
opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the
general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new,
brand new problem appeared above the horizon.
This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a
human being and then a woman, it had been handled by Ibsen many
years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known
literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her
children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the
good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the
scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in
authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all
classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature
retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population
of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own
importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s
“works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered.
Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a
protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think
about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in
the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed
from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian
girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity,
her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone
of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman
was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries,
mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and
worshipped her intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew
no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like
a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at
least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation
of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young
women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire
men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics,
bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating
clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for
artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these
there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the
right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the
desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in
themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while
they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities
were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became
students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried
to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any
great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the
production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school
teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they
had succeeded in proving their intellectual gifts, although in order
to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery
of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best
men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone
clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians,
superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally
took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their
male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best
were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they
petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the
right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others
promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts,
and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted
success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one
had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the
unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class
parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children,
and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for
themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided
for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry
and expense.
Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much
later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never
been the pioneer of any cause. It was only when the movement was well
started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his
support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the
right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only
too great a success.
The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into
different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved,
and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds:
freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness,
the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman
whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose
senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of
artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of
the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.
It was in the year 1884 that the novel appeared which was intended to
reform public morals, it was called _Thomas Rendalen_. The introduction
is a kind of ancestral history of the hero’s family, and it may be
counted as one of the greatest things that Björnson has ever written;
its historical spirit and word-colouring are such that one might fancy
it to be a genuine production of the latter half of the seventeenth
century. The continuation of the story describes a model educational
establishment founded on a new moral principle, and is the first
of Björnson’s works which is written from an English and American
standpoint. A victorious warfare is waged against the stupid prejudices
of society and the distorted and harmful system by which girls are
educated. A dissolute man of the world who, with his hypnotic glances,
has seduced a young girl of respectable family, afterwards forsakes
both her and her child in order to marry a rich young lady who offers
no objection in spite of possessing an accurate knowledge of the facts.
The “fallen” girl with her child is honourably received into the model
establishment. But the real hero is Thomas Rendalen, a youth of German
extraction, who was begotten through violence and violation, but is
rescued from this evil inheritance by a wise training, and later on
by an equally wise system of self-training. His mother looks after
him, she has been trained in England as a teacher of gymnastics and is
superintendent of the model establishment, and on one occasion during
her short married life she had a fearful tussle with her brutal husband
in which she sufficiently proved her physical superiority. It is a
novel on the training of the sexual impulse. The idea of the book,
which is repeatedly illustrated by new examples, is to show that the
union between man and woman is not a condition of the highest physical
and spiritual welfare; that philanthropical works, and other more or
less external diversions, are also very fine remedies. In the improved
version of _The Gauntlet_, Björnson maintains that impurity is far
worse than celibacy. A woman beginning life is considered pure, unless
she has been seduced; but a man is considered impure. Education is
held to be the highest means and aim of life, and the union between
man and woman, from being an eternal source of strength for both, is
degraded into a temporary arrangement for the procreation of the race.
_Thomas Rendalen_ became the gospel of the school mistresses, teachers,
telegraph clerks and other women who, on account of their position in
life or their personal idiosyncracies, are debarred from marriage. It
surrounded the compulsory spinsterhood of the feminine portion of our
higher stratum of society with a halo of glory, and the hearts of the
discontented women of the north--married and unmarried--were laid in
thousands at the feet of Björnson.
This was all that he staked in the movement. While new wishes and new
needs were being aroused in a multitude of women, among whom were the
most refined, the most advanced, the most developed of their sex;
while a new type of womanhood was being evolved which sought for
emancipation and groped after it only to find it in an unsatisfying,
stupid, and distorted form; he remained glued to the superficial,
put boarding-school education in the place of domestic discipline,
morality in the place of Christianity, and made woman a generous offer
of independence and personal freedom in return for the renunciation
of her sex. And as to men he had once uttered the celebrated cry,
“Passion must be abolished:” so to women he says: “Sex is nothing,
it is entirely a matter of secondary importance, the fruit of a
poet’s debauched imagination. There are many joys, a teacher’s joys,
a pastor’s joys, a student’s joys, which are far more natural to a
woman’s nature than the artificial and overrated fiction of love.” And
with regard to their intercourse with men, he carried his snivelling
morality and unseemly enquiries as far as the bridal bed.
In his next and, so far, his last novel, Björnson wandered _In God’s
Ways_.
The subject of it is the marriage between a young girl who is
childlike in her ignorance and a man who has become blind and lame
in consequence of his excesses. Their separation, combined with the
subsequent re-marriage of the young woman, is regarded both by society
and by her relatives as an act of adultery. She is unable to endure
the accusation, and dies from the cruelty of her fellow creatures. The
person of next importance in the book is a young man who cures himself
of a secret vice by means of diligent duet-playing with this same young
woman, and by a still more diligent practice of running on all fours
and other gymnastic exercises.
Such is the nature of Björnson’s contribution to the psychology of sex.
With regard to the moral conclusions of his latter period, he takes his
stand beside Tolstoy as an ascetic; and like Tolstoy, who has wasted a
grand psychology, Björnson has squandered a rich lyrical faculty on a
mutilated ideal. Asceticism stands and falls with religious enthusiasm,
and consists, in most cases, of nothing but religious enthusiasm; this
is why, with Tolstoy, it went hand in hand with a return to positive
Christianity; but Björnson, who became a religious freethinker at the
same time that he became an ascetic, planted the moral that he preached
on a far more slippery soil--on the soil of Degeneration.
* * * * *
In Ibsen’s first social drama, _The League of Youth_, he has drawn a
satirical portrait of Björnson in the person of the central figure of
the piece--Stensgaard, the adventurer and popular speaker. Hjalmar
Christensen points out the likeness in his newly published work, called
_Northern Writers_.
When we, at the end of Björnson’s career, examine the collected works
of this celebrated author, we are impressed with the superficiality,
the clap-trap precipitation and inward wavering which he displays
whenever he takes part in the problems and social questions of the day.
Every new book of his clearly proves to us that what he pathetically
offers as gold is in reality nothing but dross, and in his last
collection of _Tales_ the tone of persuasion, which in old time so
often won him the victory, sounds distressingly false. It was always
his ambition to advance with the age, and he has met with the fate
that must ever be the experience of those who aim no higher. The age
does not allow any one to keep pace with it for long, and he who is not
in advance of it will soon find himself in the rear.
_The Women-Haters: Tolstoy and Strindberg_
I
_Leo Tolstoy_
There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when
the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a
feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we
are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our
eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure,
rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning.
Working girls with handkerchiefs over their heads, round, red-cheeked,
merry-faced girls with large hips, dressed in pink cotton skirts,
their stockingless feet in high-heeled spatterdashes; little ladies
with smiling eyes appearing under their flowered hats, and the large,
well-developed figures of grown women kindly disposed, walking with
indolent, matronly carriage--they pass us by one by one; we know their
faces as little as we know their names, they vanish as quickly as they
came, and like all the vague though memorable impressions of our first
childhood, they come softly as the twilight, and glide away like the
image of a dream.
I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the
women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me,
never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only
the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature
and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment.
There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver,
when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which
the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and
the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like
weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes
through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not
seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to
a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. Nowhere
as there, in those Russian wildernesses far removed from civilisation,
does nature speak as clearly, and make humanity her mirror. Nowhere is
happiness so careless and the heart so large, and nowhere does fear so
clutch at the throat like invisible hands which grasp and then slacken
their hold--slacken their hold, only to grasp the tighter....
At the moments when these impressions arise, I see behind them and
through them something which resembles a large and powerful man’s head,
with a broad forehead, and the dark, sparkling, deep-set eyes of a
thinker and seer, eyes which seem as though they were trying to creep
inwards. Sometimes this head is set on a uniform, and sometimes on a
peasant’s smock; sometimes he is young with moustaches, and his hair is
cut short; sometimes he is old with a wrinkled face, and the greasy,
waving hair of a peasant, with a long Russian peasant’s beard; but the
head always rests upon the same broad shoulders, the same giant’s body,
and there is always the same shy, sombre gleam in his eyes, the cold
gleam which betokens the lonely fanatic. The youthful head was the head
of Tolstoy when he wrote _The Cossacks_; the aged one belongs to the
author of _The Kreutzer Sonata_.
In the interval between these two were produced works of such a deep
and genuine character as have not been surpassed by any contemporary
writer, I allude to the story called _Family Happiness_, and the novels
_War and Peace_ and _Anna Karenina_.
A short time ago Tolstoy’s writings were the great literary event of
Europe. His reformatory zeal moved and perplexed even the unbelievers;
his confessions startled society; and his probing into all the layers
of human nature, which had hitherto been ignored in accordance with a
highly-respected custom, aroused the anxiety and excitement of all who
had senses and nerves, especially those with a bad conscience who had
suppressed their senses, and with ill-used nerves that sought vengeance.
Tolstoy writes from the moral standpoint--his own peculiar
standpoint--of the man with a bad conscience.
The man with a bad conscience had long led a hidden existence as a
church penitent when the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche
discovered him and drew him into the light of day out of the darkness
of life and of literature. Since then it has become possible to know
him and to study his character.
But it is not often that this study possesses as many finger-posts
to point the way, as many rifts in the veil, as are disclosed in the
personality of Tolstoy.
His books are the personification of Russian nature with its golden
laugh and soul-devouring melancholy; the healthy frivolity and
spontaneity of the Russian woman and the self-tormenting sectarianism
of the Russian man.
In all Tolstoy’s books there is an ever-recurring figure which is none
other than himself, depicted in a manner that combines an intimate
knowledge with perfect candour. This figure is connected throughout an
extensive network of fine root fibres with the profoundest qualities
of the Russians as a typical race. Concerning Tolstoy as a private
individual, we are, so to speak, lacking in all psychological data,
with the exception of those which he has himself given us in his
various confessions, and which, for that very reason, are almost
useless with regard to their psychology. But like all authors, great or
small, he has unconsciously revealed himself in his novels, especially
in those longer ones which he has since disowned; and now when the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ has fixed a boundary, behind which not even the
most extreme moral severity can discover a second, and when the great
life-painter has attained to the negation of life, there is a peculiar
interest attached to the enquiry as to what were the national and
individual circumstances which conducted him thither, and what were
the stations on the road towards the crucifying of the flesh which are
indicated in his books.
Three main points occur to my mind, although they are apparently quite
unconnected with one another; these are:
A depth of intuition in his grasp and comprehension of woman which is
unequalled by anything in the whole of European literature.
An everlasting bad conscience which wears a squinting expression of
asceticism, and which, in all his writings, takes its stand between him
and the woman and lies in wait for love’s sacrifice.
A secret hardness and spiritual reserve which acts like a bitter taste
in the mouth, and gives the lie to the universal gospel of love in his
later works and the craving for union with the woman in his earlier
ones. With an evil-eyed love of cruelty it attaches itself to the most
private conditions of life, and rejoices when sweetness is turned to
gall; it evinces a refined brutality in self-torture, a sensation of
positive delight in the arousing and enduring of pain, all of which
are national and psychological features in the spiritual life of the
Russian race, and a key to the perversities of its countless religious
sects.
At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a
hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he
is, and lonely where he loves.
No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly
as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time
of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering
indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which
they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience;
think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his
widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde,
of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social
phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the
reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their
astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side
of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive
comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their
sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s
life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her
womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But
that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the
conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature.
In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature
or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at
all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by
morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer,
with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander
whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking
gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is
quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not
only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical
convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German
girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more
natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in
French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved,
and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of
the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only
a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons
why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half
sorrowful individuality.
Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being,
in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact
with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted
to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working
under other aspects.
The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in
this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a
historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible
offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is
not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the
language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young
girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a
woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age
or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function--woman as
a mother--is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the
Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity
had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and
the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.
The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance,
no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception
of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety,
she is more of a natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in
her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than
the woman of western Europe.
No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and
not one has described it with greater intuition.
It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl in _The
Cossacks_, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy
young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more
apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who
loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an
animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of
it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of
all.
This was the origin of that child-woman in _War and Peace_; I think
her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has
just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which
cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at
all,--poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking
to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations
of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and
arms of her mother--still a child, already a woman! This was also the
origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek
one another, play and dance together, and cannot be happy without one
another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and
truth of which is shown at a glance.
There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love
with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from
him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks
for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.
Then, for the third time, and this time the portrait is better executed
and the likeness is more striking, the same young man steps forward
as Lievin in _Anna Karenina_. He is tall and strong, honest, with the
Gallic temperament, but awkward and somewhat clumsy in confiding his
inner life; he belongs to the class of men whom women ignore, whose
presence awakens a vague shyness in them. There is something in his
nature which arouses a feeling of distrust and dislike in women.
What is it? Can it be a want of feeling, an absence of sympathy?
Or is it something in his person that is physically repellent? His
first advances meet with no response, it is possible that they are
misunderstood, and he is bitterly disheartened. Later on, when the
young girl has herself undergone a disappointment in love, she
expresses herself willing, and they marry. But here already, many
years before the aged Tolstoy wrote _The Kreutzer Sonata_, the first
months of marriage are described as a torture. Lievin experiences a
feeling of shame and disillusion. They try to avoid one another, to
avoid being together; they have nothing in common. When they avoid each
other, his conscience reproaches him; when they are together, his bad
conscience is a torture to him. It is really nothing but a process of
animal existence, represented as a psychological mystery. The husband
goes on his way in careless indifference, and held fast by the circle
of ideas belonging to society and the Church, becomes displeased and
irritable. There are a number of men in whom the prudery of the spirit
and the denseness of the perceptions never permit of that refinement of
impulse which is love. It is merely a psychological peculiarity, and
is neither moral nor immoral; but according to our ideas of morality,
love must co-exist with marriage, and the thinker who realises that
it is not there has a bad conscience. His bad conscience makes nature
appear evil in his sight, and casts a halo over everything that might
deliver him from it. Asceticism, as an eternally unsatisfied desire,
possesses the extra advantage of being a never-ending delight, an
inverted pleasure. This feature is deeply impressed on the character
of the Slav; it is a combination of those two principal features of
the Russian temperament--sensibility and passiveness. It is from this,
the psychological standpoint, that we must view Tolstoy’s increasing
moral rigour as displayed in his works. When we remember that it is a
Russian author who chooses this problem for his motive, and that all
great Russian writers are as admirable in their powers of observation
as they are second-rate thinkers, as subtle in their psychology as they
are helpless altruists--both indications of a young literature--then
his obscure personality loses much that is incomprehensible and
confusing.
At last Lievin finds rest for his conscience and satisfaction in his
marriage through the birth of a child, which seems to bring a meaning
into it and also, to a certain extent, an excuse. The other couple,
Anna Karenina and Vronsky, cannot find either, because in their free
union the child is no excuse, but only a burden. With an incomparable
discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and
their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of
this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out
into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has
fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people;
the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on
injured morality.
But before the sinful relationship had begun--as long as love is
nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the
soul of Anna Karenina--what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his
intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman?
With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order
to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the
young girl in _Family Happiness_ is still more worthy of admiration
than that of the matured woman. There we have everything: the innocent
sensuousness of the first awakening of womanhood in the child, the
woman who is such a thorough woman, with her inexplicable attraction,
her thoughtless impatience, and her active imagination which transforms
the first man whom she meets into _the_ man, the beloved man, to whom
she gives her whole affection.
There is a scene in the book after the young girl has had her hot
Russian bath, when, with her hair still wet, she sits at the coffee
table out of doors and turns the head of an elderly gentleman, who is
her only male acquaintance; then there is a second scene where they
both look for cherries on the trees--and such a description of pure
sensuous delight on a warm, damp, dreamy summer’s day as I have never
seen equalled anywhere.
And yet it was this same author who wrote the dangerous, poisonous
_Kreutzer Sonata_, and preached the doctrines of a misogynist on a
basis of universal love for humanity, a love which was to end with the
extermination of the human race.
The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged
from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and
physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is
whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing
love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked
down with an evil eye upon the great natural basis of all love, love
between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority
and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new
instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But
nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and
through, heart and soul.
When we examine the personality of a great master like Tolstoy, what do
we find? First that strange, absorbing impulse, the desire to create,
to reveal himself, which indicates an excessive consciousness of the
ego. In his youth there was apparently an intense longing to make
himself understood without the mental capacity necessary for success;
failure resulted in shyness, uncertainty, doubt, and according to
his own confession he experienced a transient, sensual love without
spiritual depth. He was out of harmony with himself in consequence,
and at last the longed-for event took place--he married. It was a
marriage such as there are thousands: healthy bodies, dried-up souls,
the temperament of a thinker and fanatic with a narrow and obstinate
nature, very little real knowledge, very little power of intellectual
expansion, while with increasing years was added an increase of moral
severity. Discontented with the primal conditions of existence, his
writings showed an increase of pessimism, while an ever greater number
of past joys escaped his memory, and there was no pleasure that did not
leave an after-taste of bitterness. When as an elderly man he looked
back upon the first time when a young girl caused his pulse to beat
the faster, he sought to explain the circumstance in the _Kreutzer
Sonata_ by describing her as the only one who is pure and good, thus
rendering a coarse touch to the imagination which betrays itself in the
glorification of the child-woman. Hence the pose of a social reformer
who takes an egotistic delight in nourishing the consciousness of
martyrdom.
These are a few general outlines contributing to a picture of Tolstoy,
as he appears to me in his writings. For I believe that it is a
man’s personal experiences which determine his opinions and form the
rudiments of his mind and character, and that these rudiments, however
much they may be obscured by time, are still there to be discovered by
those who seek them.