"MY CONFESSION"--"MY RELIGION"--"WHAT IS ART?" ETC.
We have seen that, in his fiftieth year, a great mental and moral
change came over Tolstoy. The first of his religious works, _My
Confession_, tells the story of this conversion, and it is a wonderful
document--as intimate and candid as the confessions of Rousseau, but
expressing a nature more profoundly moral, of deepest interest to us,
moreover, as rendering a mood of doubt and despair so frequent in the
nineteenth century that most of the century's leading minds have
experienced something like it at one period or another.
It shows all the agony of a great soul, struggling in the deepest
abysses of doubt, astray in a universe where all seems chaotic, dark,
and meaningless, with no firm footing anywhere.
Tolstoy traces his own scepticism to the general scepticism of his age;
with his usual incisive completeness he depicts for us, in one single
paragraph, the whole mentality of such an epoch.
"I remember once in my twelfth year, a boy, now long since dead,
Vladimir M----, a pupil in the gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us and
brought us the news of the last discovery in the gymnasium--namely,
that there was no God, and that all we were taught on the subject was a
mere invention (this was in the year 1838).
"I remember well how interested my elder brothers were in this news; I
was admitted to their deliberations, and we all eagerly accepted the
theory as something particularly attractive and possibly quite true. I
remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitri, {66} then at the
university, with the impulsiveness natural to his character, gave
himself up to a passionate faith, began to attend the Church services
regularly, to fast, and to lead a pure and moral life, we all of us,
and some older than ourselves, never ceased to hold him up to ridicule,
and for some incomprehensible reason, gave him the nickname of Noah."
Tolstoy goes on to analyse the situation as he saw it in his
youth--that the men of his class did not obey in the least the precepts
of the religion which they professed, but, on the contrary, lived in
direct opposition to them; their faith had become purely conventional,
having no influence upon their lives. He declares: "The open
profession of the Orthodox doctrines is mostly found among persons of
dull intellects, of stern character, who think much of their own
importance. Intelligence, honesty, frankness, a good heart, and moral
conduct are oftener met with among those who are disbelievers."
From the age of fifteen years onwards Tolstoy read many philosophical
works; being in consequence far more self-conscious than his comrades,
he was well aware of the disappearance of his faith; he ceased to pray,
to attend the services of the Church, or to fast. He still possessed
ideals of moral excellence, and honestly desired to make himself a good
and virtuous man, but his passions were very strong, and he found
himself almost alone in his search for virtue.
"Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly
virtuous life I was met with contempt and derisive laughter, but
directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions I was praised and
encouraged."
Then follow the most bitter self-reproaches, describing how he yielded
to all the sins and vices of his class.
It is curious and noticeable that Tolstoy does not perceive, in his
first literary ambitions, any of the promptings of a higher ideal, but
analyses his literary pretensions with contemptuous irony. He declares
that he began to write out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. Here,
again, he is surely too severe, for the most cursory reader of Tolstoy
cannot but perceive that there {67} is always in his work something
true and genuine: sympathy with the lives of others, the pure and
healthy joy of the artist.
Tolstoy continues with the same ruthless severity; it is doubtful if
there ever has been a literary man more contemptuous in tone to himself
and his fellows.
"The view of life taken by these, my fellow-writers, was that life is a
development, and the principal part in that development is played by
ourselves--the thinkers; the chief influence is again due to
ourselves--the poets. Our vocation is to teach mankind. In order to
avoid answering the very natural question, 'What do I know, and what
can I teach?' the theory in question is made to contain the formula
that such is not required to be known, but that the thinker and the
poet teach unconsciously."
For a time, he says, he gladly believed this theory, because he earned
a great deal of money and praise and everything else he desired. He
firmly believed in the theory of progress, and that he himself, though
unconsciously, helped it. After some two years, however, he became
discontented, and it was his fellow-writers who disenchanted him; they
were more dissolute even than his former military associates, and full
of vanity. His connection with them, he declares, only added another
vice to his character--that of morbid and altogether unreasonable
pride. "Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while
confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves
knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life--what is
right and what is wrong--we had no answer, we all went on talking
together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one
another on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and
again turning upon each other in wrath; in short we reproduced the
scenes in a madhouse."
There is surely something of unfairness here, and we may suspect that
it was the proud and defiant spirit of Tolstoy which made him resent
the contradictions of his literary friends. But, as we have pointed
{68} out, it was always Tolstoy's fault to underrate the intellectual
powers of others, and also, to the end of his life, he underrated the
value of intelligence in human affairs.
It was this pride which prevented him from nobly loving, as he might
have done, men of the stamp of Turgénief, and, great artist as he was,
it prevented him from that entire, humble absorption in his work which
has saved the soul of many a lesser man. Tolstoy had to save his soul
by a longer and a darker road.
On his tour abroad he still sought for satisfying moral ideas, and
still found them, as he believed, in the conception of progress; he
thought, at the time, that it had a real meaning.
"In reality I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a
boat by the waves and the wind, who to the one important question for
him, 'Where are we to steer?' should answer, saying 'We are being
carried away somewhere.'"
Tolstoy refers to the execution in Paris as shaking his belief in
progress, and giving him a real moral shock. The death of his brother
marked another crisis in his mentality. The terrible sense of loss,
the cruel fear of death in his brother, were things that made the
doctrine of "progress" seem idle and tiresome.
Tolstoy next reviews his educational activity, and judges that too most
harshly; he did not, he says, really know what to teach the children,
so he evaded the difficulty by trying to make them teach themselves,
with results which he describes as whimsical.
Shortly after this he married, and was so engrossed by his happy family
life that he wholly ceased to inquire into the real meaning of life.
He continued to write. "In my writing I taught what for me was the
only truth--that the object of life should be our own happiness and
that of our family."
After some ten years, however, he became hopelessly puzzled by the
questions "Why?" and "What after?" and his torment increased until, by
degrees, he could think of nothing else. His life had come, as it
were, to {69} a sudden stop. He could carry on the mechanical business
of existence, he could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, but he felt as
if there were no real use in life, as if its meaning and its savour
were gone. What was still stranger and more terrifying was that he
could see nothing left even to desire.
"Had a fairy appeared and offered me all I desired I should not have
known what to say.... The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning
for me."
His life seemed to him to be a foolish and wicked joke played upon him
by he knew not whom, and he refrained from carrying a gun because he
was so continually tempted to suicide.
His mind dwelt on the inevitable miseries of human life; illness and
death would most certainly come both to himself and to those who loved
him best, and there would remain nothing of them but stench and worms.
He found his favourite reading at this time in Schopenhauer and
Ecclesiastes. Solomon, the wisest man who had ever lived, declared
that all was vanity, and he exactly agreed with him. There was no
escape; the theory of "progress" did not apply at all to the individual
life; philosophy was uncertain; science was marvellous in its methods
and its intellectual power, but it led to no real result.
His conclusion was the conclusion of Schopenhauer and Solomon--that
life was an evil poisoned through and through by the thought of death.
He began to study other men and their methods of escape. He saw that
the young escaped this evil very largely through ignorance, by simply
not perceiving the absurdity of Life, but it was impossible for him to
take this means, as people cannot unknow what they know.
The second method was the Epicurean one; this was the favourite method
with men of his class, because they really had plenty of means for
enjoyment, and sheer selfishness prevented them from seeing or caring
that the vast majority of men had no such resource. For this Tolstoy
was too clear-sighted. The third means of escape was suicide, which
was possible only to the strong and resolute. "The number of those in
my own class who thus act continually increases, and those who do this
are generally in the prime of life, with their physical strength
matured and unweakened."
He considered this means of escape the worthiest, but had not the
courage to make use of it.
The one thing that gave him pause was to see that the mass of men did
not agree with this view and never had agreed with it; they continued
to live as if life were a good thing and one that had meaning.
He turned his attention once more to the labouring classes whom he had
always loved, and perceived that they held the true solution. He could
not class them among those who failed to understand it, for they put it
before themselves with quite extraordinary clearness; still less were
they among the Epicureans, for their lives were rough, hard, and
laborious; neither did they seek the solution in self-murder, for they
looked upon that as the greatest of evils. Where, then, lay their
secret? He answered: "In their religion." The peasantry were not like
the upper classes; their religion was not for them a convention, but
they really lived according to its teachings.
"Their whole lives were passed in heavy labour and unrepining content
... they accepted illness and sorrow in the quiet and firm conviction
that all was for the best ... thousands and millions had so understood
the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die."
Tolstoy sought, passionately and despairingly, to gain this faith; he
conformed to all the ceremonial requirements of the Greek Church,
prayed morning and evening, fasted and prepared for the Communion; he
took a pleasure in sacrificing his bodily comfort by kneeling, by
rising to attend early service; he took a pleasure also in mortifying
his intellectual pride by forcing himself to believe doctrines which he
had formerly condemned.
At the same time his invincible intellectual honesty {71} remained with
him and tortured him. Thus when he took the Communion, he tried hard
to persuade himself that it meant only a cleansing from sin and a
complete acceptance of Christ's teaching.
"But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest called upon me to
repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real
body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart; it was no
unconsidered word, it was the hard demand of one who could never have
known what faith was ... knowing what awaited me I could never go
again."
The same invincible intellectual honesty made Tolstoy search into the
whole teaching of the Church; he saw that its faith was irrational and
merely a tradition, not the staff of life.
He found the Orthodox Church more and more opposed to what he believed:
it conducted persecutions, sanctioned massacres, and blessed war. He
was obliged to break with it. Once more and with humility he turned to
the Gospels themselves; he drew from them what seemed to him the real
essence of the Christian religion; from them and from the life of the
common man--the Russian muzhik--he made up his own creed and lived as
has been described.
Tolstoy followed _My Confession_ with several other works. _The Four
Gospels Harmonised and Translated_ appeared in 1881-2. In this work
Tolstoy extracts what he considers essential in the Gospel narratives.
_My Religion_ appeared in 1884. It explains still further and in more
detail Tolstoy's religious views. He bases his theories almost
entirely on the "Sermon on the Mount"; he accepts quite literally the
command against violence, which is henceforth the basis of his creed.
"The passage which for me was the key to the whole was verses 38 and 39
of the fifth chapter of Matthew: 'It hath been said, An eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil.'
I suddenly for the first time understood the last verse in its direct
and simple meaning. I understood that Christ meant precisely what he
said.
{72}
"These words, 'Do not resist evil,' understood in their direct sense,
were for me indeed the key that opened everything to me, and I
marvelled how I could have so perverted the clear, definite words."
It is in this spirit that Tolstoy objects so profoundly to the whole
organisation of modern society, since it is all based upon force.
"Everything which surrounded me, my family's peace and their safety and
my own, my property, everything was based on the law which Christ
rejected, on the law, 'A tooth for a tooth.'"
From this precept of non-resistance Tolstoy deduces the wickedness of
all war, however waged and for whatever object.
From the precept, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," he similarly
deduces the wickedness and evil of all law-courts. From the precept,
"Swear not at all," he deduces the evil of all oaths, and has no
difficulty in showing that nearly all the things he thinks contrary to
the law of Christ, "murder in wars, incarcerations, capital
punishments, tortures of men," are committed only by the device of the
oath, which substitutes a collective responsibility for an individual
one, and so takes away from each man the sense he would otherwise have
of committing an individual crime. There is in this book a very severe
criticism of the Greek Church, which Tolstoy accuses of bolstering up
and supporting all the worst evils of the time.
_The Kingdom of God is Within You_, 1893, is another long work which
contrasts life on Christian principles with life as it is actually
lived according to the maxims of the Church and State. There is an
ironic and bitter analysis of the absurdities of Greek Orthodoxy, and
an equally ironic and bitter analysis of the absurd conditions of
modern Europe, which keep whole nations armed under the pretence that
their ever-increasing military burdens are a way to peace.
With this group of works also we should class _What is Art?_ 1899. It
is the book which carries Tolstoy's asceticism to its climax.
There are many people who, though they {73} sympathise with Tolstoy's
ideals, decline to take seriously on the ground that he is a fanatic,
and, if the matter be inquired into, it will usually be found that they
base the accusation mainly upon his treatment of science and art.
Tolstoy has never a good word for science; he insists upon considering
it as if it were concerned solely with abstract questions, and had no
practical bearing upon the lives of men. The modern reader is
overwhelmed with surprise by such an unwarranted assumption. Even if
it were true that science is only valuable on its utilitarian side, we
are still driven to confess that that utilitarian value is enormous; it
has irrigated deserts, fertilised soils, improved animals, banished
many diseases; it has made, even in the one occupation Tolstoy really
reverences--agriculture--man's labour tenfold or a hundredfold more
productive than it ever was before. If science has not yet effected
the transformation of human life that it might have done, that is
surely because our imperfect organisation of society prevents us from
reaping the full value of its great and beneficent achievement.
And the case is even more astonishing when we turn to art. Tolstoy,
himself one of the world's greatest writers, condemns almost all great
art, from the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, and almost all modern
art--including, characteristically enough, himself. We must remember
this truth, that Tolstoy was born an aristocrat, and that the members
of aristocracies are nearly always cold to intellectual attainments;
they belong to a privileged class which despises work and repudiates
intellect. Tolstoy learnt, with all the energy of his strong soul, to
exalt and reverence the once-despised labour of the common man, but he
never learnt to esteem justly the intellect; he resembles Lord Byron,
who, although a great poet, only condescended to the trade of letters,
and regarded it always with a certain scorn.
Tolstoy is never, with his whole heart, a man of letters, and he is
still less a scholar, for though at times he reads {74} voraciously, it
is almost wholly without system; there are the strangest gaps in his
knowledge, and he is singularly impervious to all ideas except those
with which he happens to be at the moment in tune.
However, _What is Art?_ contains some admirable things. Tolstoy
defines art as a human activity, the aim of which is to communicate to
some other person the feelings which the artist has himself
experienced. Art is effective in proportion as the artist's feeling is
sincere and profound, and the expression of it clear; art is good or
bad in accordance with the nature of the feeling transmitted; if the
feeling is good it is good art, if the feeling is bad it is bad or
debased art.
This is a fine definition, and well worth studying. From Aristotle
downwards great critics have agreed that one aim of art is certainly
"infection," and that the greater the art the more powerful the
"infection" is likely to be.
Tolstoy asserts again that art is one of the great unifying forces of
mankind, that it binds together different nations and different
generations of men, and that that art is the greatest which has the
most universal appeal. Here again there is little with which to
quarrel. Tolstoy's definition of great art is almost St. Beuve's
definition of a classic.
The amazement lies in the extraordinary manner in which Tolstoy has
applied his own most excellent ideas. He loves Homer, and declares
that his poems are truly national art, but he declines to admire the
Greek tragedians. Why? They are surely as national as Homer himself.
Again, he declares that the truly great artist ought always to express
the best religious and ethical ideas of his time. Quite probably! Yet
he denies this greatness to Dante, but if there ever was a poet who
embodied the noblest religious thought of his epoch it was surely
Dante! And Tolstoy condemns Goethe, who embodied the new religious
conceptions arising upon the ruins of the materialistic eighteenth
century. The fact of the matter is that Tolstoy does not really know
the content of the world's great classics, and those {75} whom he
happens to praise--Homer and Molière--he appreciates, not because they
are finer moralists than the rest (they are not), but because some
accident has directed towards them his attention. It is curious to
compare this essay with Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_; the underlying
ideas in both treatises are identical; Shelley also says that the main
aim of art is a unifying aim, and that the artist ought always, as a
moral duty, to communicate the best impression that he knows. But what
a world of difference in the catholic appreciation of Shelley!
Shelley, also a great lover of mankind, never made the mistake of
underrating the human intellect.
_What is Art?_ had a sequel, to the English mind still more
extraordinary, in two essays on Shakespeare published separately. In
them Tolstoy condemns all Shakespeare, but singles out _King Lear_
especially, mainly on the ground that the plot is absurd and the whole
division of the kingdom fantastic. It is strange Tolstoy cannot see
that _King Lear_ is in essence, the thing he himself most admires--a
moving and beautiful folk-tale; the very absurdity of the plot
Shakespeare took over directly from the old story, and probably left
untouched because it was so deeply embedded in his hearers' hearts.
Of course, it is not difficult to see why Tolstoy so dislikes
Shakespeare--mainly because he throws such a glamour over aristocracy,
and makes his aristocrats so noble in their sorrows, so radiant,
generous, and joyful in their prosperity. Tolstoy is always insisting
that aristocrats are not really like that--that they are selfish,
stupid, and bored to death; but Shakespeare in glorifying aristocracy
is only acting as the people, even in folk-tale and fairy-tale, have
always done; they prove by that, it is true, nothing but their own
naïve and inexhaustible goodness of heart. The truth is that, in
belabouring Shakespeare, Tolstoy is doing the thing that would of all
others, had he known its true import, have shocked him most: he is
Tolstoy--the aristocrat--cuffing Shakespeare--the peasant's son--for
being so like a peasant.
{76}
Tolstoy has often been blamed for making his uneducated Russian
peasants the supreme arbiters of taste, but they would not agree with
him about Shakespeare. A friend of mine, a Russian lady, told me she
once saw _King Lear_ played in a barn, with the roughest of
accessories, before a peasant audience, and, at the conclusion of the
drama, there was not a dry eye among the audience.
Still Tolstoy's eccentricities need not blind us to those ideas which
really are stimulating and valuable. There is his warning against
commercialised art--art is not a commercial product, and can never be
"ordered" and "paid for" in the same way; there is the warning that
schools of art can teach nothing but technique, and that, by an
over-elaborate technique, talent itself is often crushed and spoiled;
there is the emphatic statement that all great art should be catholic,
and that the art which can appeal only to a limited coterie is, almost
of necessity, poor art; there is the statement that all art should be
as clear as the artist himself can make it, and that "contortions,
obscurities, and difficulties" are mostly due to the vain attempt to
hide shallowness; and finally, and most important of all, there is the
statement that really great art can only be produced by those to whom
life is a lovely, a joyous, and a noble thing.
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