THE INFLUENCE OF TOLSTOY
Tolstoy's influence is a great and growing one, both in Europe as a
whole and in England. He is the most powerful and impressive critic of
our existing social order.
We have seen that, in certain respects, Tolstoy stands apart from the
humanism of Europe; it is impossible to read him without seeing that he
is imperfectly acquainted with the achievements of the human mind, and
very imperfectly indeed with their value. He emphasizes the fact that
he is not a humanist by his intense dislike of the Renaissance and his
continual references to it as a period of moral decay.
But his very limitations are, in some respects, his strength. He has
no unreasonable reverence for civilisation which, to use one of his own
favourite words, can "hypnotise" him into accepting civilisation's
defects.
He insists on trying it, fairly and squarely, by its conformity to the
needs of man, and in condemning it when it does not conform to man's
noblest ideal--brotherhood.
And Tolstoy is the latest and the greatest of the mystics; the essence
of his creed is the Christian mysticism of the Middle Ages, stripped of
its ecclesiasticism and supernaturalism, but insisting most strenuously
on the old ideal of the Catholic Church--the brotherhood of all men
through religion. According to Tolstoy's creed the Spirit of God
exists in each one of us, the highest good for man is to cherish this
Divine Spirit within himself, and the supreme duty, both for the
individual and {90} for the social order, is to further the true
Christian unity.
Moreover, Tolstoy's rule of life is the old monastic rule of poverty,
chastity, and labour, though he substitutes for obedience to an
"Order," the harder and more rigorous command of immediate obedience to
a man's conscience.
The vital spirit of mediæval religion, its unquestioning, wonderful,
literal acceptance of the commands of Christ, lives still among the
Russian peasants; what Tolstoy has done is to take this spirit, shake
it free from ceremonies and dogma, rescue the true and glowing fire
from its incumbent mountains of ashes, and insist, with all the
vehemence of his most vehement soul, that it is the true light of the
world.
Our Christianity, he tells us, is sick to death; it has become so
entangled with paganism and rationalism that it is hardly worth while
calling Christianity at all; indeed we find in some modern
writers--Nietzsche and others--the frankest paganism, calling
Christianity a "slave-morality," and declaring it unworthy of the free.
Tolstoy declares that Christianity is not founded on rationalism but is
divinely inspired; he is original only so far as he insists that this
divine inspiration occurs not in any Church or tradition, but in a
man's own heart; like the seventeenth-century Puritans, he accepts the
Bible as his guide, but he rejects the Old Testament and relies
entirely upon the New.
And Tolstoy's influence is so profound because he announces the
dissatisfaction which, secret and overt, is assailing us on all sides;
we are, none of us, really satisfied with our civilisation as it
stands, we all desire a better one, and Tolstoy's is the most powerful
and eloquent amid those voices which are summoning us to emerge from
the dwelling which has grown too narrow and to build a new.
This is why Tolstoy, the preacher of non-resistance and peace, is
really one of the most powerful of revolutionaries. And, paradoxical
as it may sound, he is also one of the most powerful of individualists.
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It might be imagined, at the first glance, that Tolstoy stands at the
opposite pole from such a writer as Ibsen--Ibsen the uncompromising
individualist, who preaches self-realisation at all costs, and breaks
furiously through our so-called "duties," and Tolstoy who preaches
self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and humility.
But, when we look closer, we see that there is a unity underlying all
seeming differences; both men are profoundly dissatisfied with the
"ideals" of present-day Europe; they insist that all values must be
revalued, that all the old "duties" must be questioned, and rejected if
they will not stand the test of the new morality.
And who is to be the supreme arbiter? Both Tolstoy and Ibsen answer:
"The man's own soul."
No one would trample on the old "duties" more thoroughly than Tolstoy;
he insists that his countrymen must renounce all they have previously
held most sacred, their "duty" to the Czar, their "duty" to the State,
to their oaths, even in the last resort to their families; for, like
Ibsen, he finds the "family snare" one of the worst and deadliest.
Both Ibsen and Tolstoy are quite agreed that, when a man is sure of
himself, he should, if need be, stand alone against the world.
Tolstoy is, indeed, one of the strongest of individualists, and, as the
terrified Greek Church saw when it excommunicated him, his doctrine of
"peaceful anarchy" is the most tremendous solvent for society's
hierarchy that has ever been conceived by the mind of man.
We may sum up briefly the leading channels in which the influence of
Tolstoy runs.
He is one of the most powerful forces in favour of what may be termed
"social justice." The conscience of civilised Europe is more and more
declaring that some reconstruction of our social system has become
imperative, and Tolstoy is among those who have done most to arouse
this conscience. That he overstates in some ways, that he is too hard
on the upper classes--all this is possible, but there is so much in his
indictment {92} which is true and accurate that we all feel guilty
before him.
Again, he is one of the most powerful of all apostles of peace. He is
aware, as we have seen, of the nobler side of war. He knows that it
really can and does rouse an enervated aristocracy to something finer
(in _War and Peace_ he shows us the actual process); but he also
realises that the vast majority of the people--the working class--are
moralised and strengthened by their daily toil. For the mass of the
people war is as needless as it is futile. Tolstoy shows that the ends
for which it is waged are nearly always childish and absurd, and his
unflinching realism has made him an unrivalled exponent of its horrors.
Ruskin and Carlyle have both preached against the horrors of war, but
Tolstoy is more effective than they because he knows it at first hand.
In the third place, Tolstoy is one of the most effective critics of our
penal system and capital punishment. Here again there are many other
writers--such as Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bernard Shaw--who follow in the
same track; they also declare that the faults and sins of the rich, who
almost escape our penal system, are no less serious than the sins of
the poor, who fall victims to it; they also declare that our penal
system is mainly torture and revenge, that it does not cure but only
brutalises, and that the majority of its victims are not foes of
society but only people who are too weak to keep straight, and whom our
harsh industrial system flings to the wall. But here again, though
Tolstoy agrees with other men in his diagnosis of the evil, his
exposition of it is far more masterly than theirs. It is not possible
to name any other work which shows the tragedy and terror of prison
life in the same manner as _Resurrection_.
In social purity, again, Tolstoy's has been one of the most potent
voices. Many people think that he carries his asceticism unnecessarily
far, but, when we think of the corruption which has invaded so large a
part of Europe, we can see that he heads a much-needed revulsion. And
here again he excels by the extraordinary {93} power and fidelity with
which he shows the evil results of loose living: its tragic cruelty to
the seduced woman, its power of corrupting, by a kind of reflex action,
even those who would seem most remote from its sphere. And Tolstoy has
not limited his condemnation to "irregularities"; he condemns the
immoral marriage no less severely, and has given a most drastic
analysis of the vices which underlie "respectability." Tolstoy will
not allow virtue to consist in anything so cheap and easy as mere
legality.
Again, his influence also tells in the direction of simplicity of life.
Many people are arriving at the conclusion that modern civilised life
is too complex, that it achieves not real refinement, but luxury which
enervates and ostentation which vulgarises. Tolstoy joins the cult of
the "simple life" by another road: by pointing out the immensity of the
labour which luxury entails upon others.
And finally, we may point out that in art also the age is feeling its
way towards an attempt to realise, consciously or unconsciously, the
Tolstoyan ideals.
We are beginning to ask for the simplification of art, for its
deliverance from over-elaborate technique; we are beginning to see that
it cannot be truly deep and profound unless it is also national and of
the people; that Tolstoy is essentially right when he declares that
art, by cutting itself off from popular inspiration, becomes barren and
sterile.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHIES OF TOLSTOY
_Life of Tolstoy_. Aylmer Maude.
_Life of Tolstoy_. Holland.
_Life of Tolstoy_. Birukoff.
_Recollections of Tolstoy_. Behrs.
ESSAYS AND STUDIES
_Tolstoy and his Problems_. Aylmer Maude.
_Tolstoy as Man and Artist_. Merejkovski.
_How Tolstoy Lives and Works_. Sergyenko.
_Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature_. Kropotkin.
_Leo N. Tolstoy_. A. Löwenfeld.
_Essays in Criticism_ (2nd Series). Matthew Arnold.
(French) _Tolstoi et les Doukhobors, faits historiques réunis par_
J. Bienstock.
(German) _Graf Leo Tolstoi_. Anna Seuron.
TOLSTOY'S WORKS
(_Specially notable works are marked with an asterisk_)
1852. _Childhood_.*
1853. _The Raid_.
1854. _Boyhood_.*
1855. _Memoirs of a Billiard Marker_.
_The Wood Felling_.
1856. _Sevastopol_* (Complete).
_The Snow Storm_. _Two Hussars_. _A Landed Proprietor_.
1857. _Youth_.* _Lucerne_.
1858. _Albert_.
1859. _Three Deaths_.* _Family Happiness_.*
1863. _The Cossacks_.* _Polikoushka_.
1869. _War and Peace_* (Complete).
1872. _A Prisoner in the Caucasus_.
_God Sees the Truth_.
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1874. _On Popular Education_.
1877. _Anna Karénina_* (Complete).
1878. _First Recollections_.
1879. _My Confession_.*
1880. _Criticism of Dogmatic Theology_.
1881. _What Men Live By_.
_Church and State_.
1882. _The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated_.
_On the Census_.
1884. _What I Believe_.*
_The Decembrists_.
1885. _Where Love Is God Is_.*
_Two Old Men_.*
1886. _What Must We Do?_
_Ivan the Fool_.
_Death of Ivan Ilyitch_.*
_How Much Land Does a Man Need?_
_Eyas_. _The Three Hermits_. _The Candle_.*
_The Power of Darkness_.*
1887. _On Life_ (Philosophical Essay).
1889. _Culture's Holiday_.
_Kreutzer Sonata_.*
1891. _The Fruits of Culture_ (A Comedy).
1892. _Articles on the Famine_.
1893. _The Kingdom of God Is Within You_* (Against War and
Government).
1894. _Season and Religion_.
1895. _Master and Man._*
1898. _What is Art?_
1899. _Resurrection._*
1900. _The Slavery of Our Times_.
_Thou Shalt Not Kill_.
1905. _The One Thing Needful_.
1906. _Shakespeare and the Drama_.
1908. _I Cannot Be Silent_.*
Posthumous. _Father Sergius_.*
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INDEX
Albert, 25
Alexander II, 32
Alexis, 15
Arnold, Matthew, 55
Austerlitz, 36-8
Behrs, Sophia, 28, 60
Borodino, 37-9
Byron, 40, 49, 73
Catherine I, 15
Caucasus, 20-1
_Confession, My_, 71
Crimea, 23
Dostoïevsky, 8, 10-14, 28
Doukhobors, 33, 82
Enns, 37
Filipok, 27
_Four Gospels_, 32
Geneva, 25
_God Sees the Truth_, 33
Gogol, 10
Homer, 10, 43, 62
Hugo, Victor, 11, 86
Ibsen, 91
_Kingdom of God_, 72
Kutuzof, 35, 50
Lucerne, 25
Merejkovsky, 29
Moscow, 32
Napoleon, 49
Peter the Great, 15, 28
_Religion, My_, 32
Rousseau, 26, 65, 88
Schopenhauer, 69
Sebastopol, 23-5
Shakespeare, 14, 51, 73-5
Switzerland, 25
Tolstoy, Nicolas, 16-17, 26, 60-1
Turgénief, 12-14, 68
Volkonsky, 15
Yergolsky, Tatiana, 16-17, 20
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