indeed, the latest or the final statement, for Tolstoi is not a man
to stand still--the clearest, most vigorous and complete statement of
his beliefs. He here frankly admits that he has arrived by the road
of his own experience at convictions similar to those of Jesus as
expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. That he has nothing to say in
favour of the Christianity of to-day, which approves of society as it
now is, with its prison cells, its factories, its houses of infamy, its
parliaments, one need scarcely point out. He has nothing but contempt
for “faith” which he regards as merely a kind of lunacy. “But reason,
which illuminates our life and impels us to modify our actions, is not
an illusion, and its authority can never be denied.... Jesus taught
men to do nothing contrary to reason. It is unreasonable to go out to
kill Turks or Germans; it is unreasonable to make use of the labours of
others that you and yours may be clothed in the height of fashion and
maintain that source of _ennui_, a drawing-room; it is unreasonable to
take people, already corrupted by idleness and depravity, and devote
them to further idleness and depravity within prison walls: all this
is unreasonable--and yet it is the life of the European world.” The
doctrine of Jesus is hard, men say. But how much harder, exclaims
Tolstoi, is the doctrine of the world! “In my own life,” he says, “(an
exceptionally happy one, from a worldly point of view), I can reckon
up as much suffering caused by following the doctrine of the world
as many a martyr has endured for the doctrine of Jesus. All the most
painful moments of my life--the orgies and duels in which I took part
as a student, the wars in which I have participated, the diseases that
I have endured, and the abnormal and unsupportable conditions under
which I now live--all these are only so much martyrdom exacted by
fidelity to the doctrine of the world.” And what of those less happily
situated? “Thirty millions of men have perished in wars, fought in
behalf of the doctrine of the world; thousands of millions of beings
have perished, crushed by a social system organized on the principle of
the doctrine of the world.... You will find, perhaps to your surprise,
that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless, and
ought not to exist--that, in fact, the majority of men are martyrs to
the doctrine of the world.”
Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very few heads:--Resist not
evil--Judge not--Be not angry--Love one woman. His creed is entirely
covered by these four points. “My Religion” is chiefly occupied by the
exposition of what they mean, and in his hands they mean much. They
mean nothing less than the abolition of the State and the country.
He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is
a humbug, this State,” he remarked to Mr. Stead. “What you call
a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know;
peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, states,
what are these but fine names invented to conceal the plundering
of honest men by dishonest officials?” Law, tribunals, prisons,
become impossible with the disappearance of the State; and with the
disappearance of the country, and of “that gross imposture called
patriotism,” there can be no more war.
In place of these great and venerable pillars of civilization,
what? The first condition of happiness, he tells us, is that the
link between man and nature shall not be broken, that he may enjoy
the sky above him, and the pure air and the life of the fields.
This involves the nationalization of the land, or rather, to avoid
centralizing tendencies, its communalization. “I quite agree with
George,” he remarked, “that the landlords may be fairly expropriated
without compensation, as a matter of principle. But as a question of
expediency, I think compensation might facilitate the necessary change.
It will come, I suppose, as the emancipation of slaves came. The idea
will spread. A sense of the shamefulness of private ownership will
grow. Someone will write an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ about it; there will
be agitation, and then it will come, and many who own land will do
as did those who owned serfs, voluntarily give it to their tenants.
But for the rest, a loan might be arranged, so as to prevent the work
being stopped by the cry of confiscation. Of course I do not hold with
George about the taxation of the land. If you could get angels from
Heaven to administer the taxes from the land, you might do justice and
prevent mischief. I am against all taxation.” The second condition of
happiness is labour, the intellectual labour that one loves because one
has chosen it freely, and the physical labour that is sweet because
it produces the muscular joy of work, a good appetite, and tranquil
sleep. The third condition of happiness is love. Every healthy man
and woman should have sexual relationships; and Tolstoi makes no
distinction between those that are called by the name of marriage and
those that are not so called; in either case, however, he would demand
that they shall be permanent. The fourth condition is unrestrained
fellowship with men and women generally, without distinction of class.
The fifth is health, though this seems largely the result of obedience
to the others. These are the five points of Tolstoi’s charter. They
seem simple enough, but he is careful to point out that most of them
are closed to the rich. The rich man is hedged in by conventions,
and cannot live a simple and natural life. A peasant can associate
on equal terms with millions of his fellows; the circle of equal
association becomes narrower and narrower the higher the social rank,
until we come to kings and emperors, who have scarcely one person with
whom they may live on equal terms. “Is not the whole system like a
great prison, where each inmate is restricted to association with a
few fellow-convicts?” The rich may, indeed, work, but even then their
work usually consists in official and administrative duties, or the
observance of arduous social conventions which are odious to them: “I
say odious, for I never yet met with a person of this class who was
contented with his work, or took as much satisfaction in it as the man
who shovels the snow from his doorstep.” From this standpoint Tolstoi
has never since greatly varied.
Such as he is now he is known throughout the civilized world. He lives
at his old home at Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by less luxury than
may be found in many a Siberian cottage, writing or shoemaking or
ploughing, or kneading clay in a tub to build incombustible cottages,
or spending the day in spreading manure over the land of some poor
widow. Such we see him in his portraits, in the coarse blouse and
the leather belt that he has always worn, with the massive, earnest,
suffering, baffled face, as of a blind but unconquered Samson.
III.
With Tolstoi the artist we have here little concern. Yet from the
first he has been an artist, and in spite of himself he is an artist
to the last. We cannot pass by his art. One realizes this curiously in
reading “What then must we do?” A profoundly sincere record without
doubt of deeply-felt experiences and of a mental revolution, it is
yet the work of an artist, a tragedy broadly and solemnly unfolding
the misery of the world, the impotence of every scheme or impulse of
charity, the light that comes only from freedom and self-development.
Let us read, again, that little popular tract--“Does a man need much
land?”--brimming over with meaning, about the man who gained permission
to possess as much land as he could walk round from sunrise to sunset.
Can he get so much into the circuit, not omitting this fine stretch of
land, and this other? His constantly growing desires, his efforts, are
told in brief, stern phrase, his feverish and failing strain to reach
the goal, that at sunset is reached, and the man drops down dead. Then
the curt and unaccentuated conclusion: “Pakhom’s man took the hoe, dug
a grave for him, made it just long enough from head and foot--three
arshins--and buried him.” All the tragedy of the nineteenth century is
pressed together into those half-dozen pages by the strong, relentless
hand of the great artist who deigns to point no moral. From the early
and delicious sketch of the frail musician, Albert, down to the sombre
and awful “Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” Tolstoi has produced an immense
body of work that must be considered, above all, as art. One reads
this body of work with ever-growing delight and satisfaction. Gogol
was a finer artist than Dickens, but there are too many suggestions
about him of Dickens and the English novelists. Tourgueneff, a very
great artist--how great, those little prose-poems, “Senilia,” would
alone suffice to show--an artist who thrilled to every touch, suffered
from the excess of his sensitiveness, and perhaps also from an undue
absorption in the western world. In Dostoieffski there is nothing of
the west; he is intimately and intensely personal, with an even morbid
research of all the fibres of organic misery in human nature. In all
his work we seem to hear the groans of the prison-house, the house of
the dead in Siberia. When we have read the wonderful book in which he
has recorded the life of his years there, we know the source of all his
inspiration. Reading all these authors, we are constantly aware of the
neurotic element in Russian life and Russian character, the restless,
diseased element that is revealed to us in cold scientific analysis
by Tarnowsky and S. P. Kowalevski and Dmitri Drill. It is not so when
we turn to Tolstoi. In him we find not merely the insight and the
realistic observation, but a breadth and sanity and wholeness that the
others mostly fail to give us. His art is so full and broad and true
that he seems able to do for his own time and country what Shakespeare
with excess of poetic affluence did for his time, and Balzac for
his. He is equal to every effort, he omits nothing that imports, he
describes everything with the same calm ease and simplicity. It makes
no difference whether, within the limits of a slight sketch, he is
tracing delicately the life of the drunken artist, Albert, or producing
the largest literary canvas of modern times, “War and Peace.” In
“Family Happiness” he analyzes passion, marriage, parenthood, the cycle
of life, in a simple narration, a few chapters, yet nothing is omitted,
and one shudders at the awful ease with which to this man these things
seem to yield their secret. In “Ivan Ilyitch” he analyzes death and the
house of death, quietly, completely, with a hand that never falters.
He writes as a man who has touched life at many points, and tasted
most that it has to offer, its joys and its sorrows, but he gazes upon
it, even from the first, with the luminous and passionless calm of old
age. His art is less perfect than Flaubert’s, but Flaubert’s intense
personal note, the ferocious nihilism of the Norman, is absent. He
holds life up to the light, simply, and says: “This is what it is!”
For one who cannot read Tolstoi in the original, and who misses the
style so much praised by those who are more privileged, Tolstoi seems
an uncompromising realist. He has therefore often been compared with
Zola, the prodigious representative and champion of Latin realism. In
vain Zola himself disclaims this position; it is he more than any other
who has influenced the novel, especially in the Latin countries, in the
direction, if not of realism, at all events in that of anti-idealism;
not Balzac or Stendhal, who have reached sure summits of fame, but
have ceased to be living influences; not the De Goncourts, whose style
cannot be imitated; least of all Flaubert, an idealist of idealists,
whose profound art and marmoreal style are of the sort that it
takes generations even to understand. It is interesting, doubtless,
to put Tolstoi beside Zola, but the resemblance is not deep. Zola
is the avowed prophet of a formula. He has read and pondered the
“Introduction à l’étude de la Médicine Expérimentale,” in which the
great physiologist, Claude Bernard, expounded the principles of the
experimental method as applied to the sciences of physical life. He has
asked himself: “Can we not apply this same method to the psychological
life? Can we not have an experimental novel?” “We seek the causes of
social evil,” he declares in “Le Roman Experimental,” a collection of
essays not less instructive than his novels, and more interesting; “we
present the anatomy of classes and of individuals, in order to explain
the aberrations which are produced in society and in man. This obliges
us often to work on bad subjects, and to descend into the midst of
human miseries and follies. But we bring the documents necessary to be
known by those who would dominate good and evil. Here is what we have
seen, observed, explained in all sincerity. Now it is the turn of the
legislators!” To bring the scientific spirit of the age into the novel:
it was a brilliant idea, and Zola forthwith set to work, with his
immense energy and unshakeable resolution, to draw up a _procès-verbal_
of human life--for this is the most that the “experimental method”
comes to in the novel--which has not ceased to this day.
But, one asks oneself, what _is_ reality? Zola has frankly explained
how a novel ought to be written; how one must get one’s human
documents, study them thoroughly, accumulate notes, systematically
frequent the society of the people one is studying, watch them, listen
to them, minutely observe and record all their surroundings. But have
we got reality then? Does the novelist I casually meet, and who has
opportunities to take notes of my conversation and appearance, to
examine the furniture of my house and to collect gossip about me,
know anything whatever of the romance or tragedy which to me is the
reality of my life, these other things being but shreds or tatters
of life? Or if my romance or tragedy has got into a law-court or a
police-court, is he really much nearer then? The unrevealable motives,
the charm, the mystery, were not deposed to by the policeman who was
immediately summoned, nor by the servant-girl who looked through the
key-hole. Certain disagreeable details: do they make up reality? To
select the most beautiful and charming woman one knows, and to set a
detective artist on her track, to follow her about everywhere, to keep
an opera-glass fixed upon her, to catch fragments of her conversation,
to enter her house, her bedroom, to examine her dirty linen,--would
Helen of Troy emerge beautiful from this _procès-verbal_? And on which
side would be most reality? Nature seems to resent this austere method
of approaching her, and when we have closed our hands the reality has
slipped through our fingers. A great artist, a Shakespeare or a Goethe,
is not afraid of any fact, however repulsive it may seem, so long as
it is significant. But it must be significant. Without sympathy and
a severe criticism of details, the truly illuminating facts will be
missed or lost in the heap. It is interesting to note that Zola himself
recognizes this, and admits that he has been carried away by his
delight and enthusiasm in attempting to vindicate for Art the whole of
Nature. Whatever is really fine in Zola’s work--“La Faute de l’Abbé
Mouret,” or the last chapters of “Nana”--is fine because the man of a
formula is for awhile subordinated to the artist.
Zola may work as hard as he will in the cause of the formula; he
remains, above all, a man of massive temperament and peculiarly strong
individuality. That is the real secret of his influence. A youth,
developed in the poverty and hunger of a garret on the outskirts of
Paris, who was fascinated by the great city he has lovingly painted,
as it was there spread out before him, in “Une Page d’Amour,” and
condemned to see it only from the outside,--here was material for that
irony, unending and absolutely pitiless, that runs through the whole of
the vast Rougon-Macquart drama of the world. He is an austere moralist,
with no tenderness for human weakness, “un tragique qui se fâche,”
as he calls himself, a Republican in spirit long before the Republic
was proclaimed, a hater of all hypocrisies and empty prettinesses and
fine phrases and elegant circumlocutions, a fighting man ready to
fight to the last, with rude weapons but in fair combat. He represents
the revolt against the French romantic movement--“une émeute de
rhétoriciens,” he calls it--which found its supreme incarnation in
Victor Hugo. The Forty Immortals may have laughed serenely, but when
Zola declared that he was carrying on the classic tradition he was not
altogether wrong. The classic tradition of France is marked by a very
vivid sense of life; it has a close grip of the practical and material
side of things, a wholesome contempt for all pretence, and sometimes
a certain rather rank savour of audacity. Zola will scarcely stand
beside Rabelais and Montaigne and Molière; the artist in him is too
much crushed by ideas, and he has altogether run too much to seed; but
he is fighting on the same side, and he has been proved to possess one
quality which leaves little more to be said, effectiveness. Whatever
the value of his work, he has turned the tide of novel literature,
wherever his influence has spread, from frivolous inanities to the
painstaking study of the facts of human life. Whatever we may think for
the moment, that is a very wholesome and altogether moral revolution.
As for great art, that is neither here nor there. Shakespeare, Goethe,
Flaubert,--for such men the extremes of poetry and of realism are
equally welcome. Tolstoi, it is clear, is more of a realist than a
poet, but his realism is of the kind that grows naturally out of the
experiences of a man who has lived a peculiarly full and varied life.
It is life _sur le vif_, not studied from a garret window. Nothing
is omitted, nothing is superfluous; the narrative seems to lead
the narrator rather than the narrator it, and through all we catch
perpetually what seems an almost accidental fragrance of poetry. See
the account of the storm in the “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” or of
the child in the raspberry bush, or of the mowing, or the horse-race,
in “Anna Karenina,” with their peculiar, intangible yet vivid reality.
But these things, it may be said, are poetry, the effluence of some
divine moment of life, the record of some unforgettable thrill of
blood and brain. Compare, then, the account of a childbirth in “Anna
Karenina” (there is an earlier and less successful attempt in “War and
Peace”) with a similar scene which is the central episode in Zola’s
“La Joie de Vivre.” The latter, doubtless, is instructive from its
fidelity; every petty detail is coldly and minutely set forth. Its
artistic value is difficult to estimate; it can scarcely be large. Zola
presents the subject from the point of view of a disinterested and
impossible spectator; in Tolstoi’s scene we have frankly the husband’s
point of view. There is no room here for instructive demonstration of
the mechanism of birth, of all its physical details and miseries. It is
real life, but at such a moment real life is excitement, emotion, and
the result is art. What, again, can be more unpromising than a novel
about a remote historical war? But read “War and Peace” to see how
lifelike, how vivid and fascinating, the narrative becomes in the hands
of a man who has known the life of a soldier and all the chances of war.
Tolstoi is not alone among Russian novelists in the character of his
realism. Gogol’s “Dead Souls” has something of the wholesome naturalism
as well as of the broad art and the good-natured satire of Fielding.
He is perpetually insisting on the importance to the artist of those
“little things which only seem little when narrated in a book, but
which one finds very important in actual life.” In his letters on “Dead
Souls” Gogol wrote: “Those who have dissected my literary faculties
have not discovered the essential feature of my nature. Poushkin alone
perceived it. He always said that no author has been gifted like me to
bring into relief the triviality of life, to describe all the platitude
of a commonplace man, to make perceptible to all eyes the infinitely
little things which escape our vision. That is my dominating faculty.”
Tourgueneff declared that the novel must cast aside all hypocrisy,
sentimentality, and rhetoric for the simple yet nobler aim of becoming
the history of life. Dostoieffski, that tender-hearted student of the
perversities of the human heart, so faithful in his studies that he
sometimes seems to forget how great an artist he is, justifies himself
thus: “What is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must
follow? To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally, according
to the laws of nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding
to human needs. Art has always shown itself faithful to nature, and
has marched with social progress. The ideal of beauty cannot perish in
a healthy society; we must then give liberty to art, and leave her to
herself. Have confidence in her; she will reach her end, and if she
strays from the way she will soon reach it again; society itself will
be the guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare himself, can prescribe
to art her roads and aims.” Tolstoi but followed in the same path when,
in one of the earliest of his books, the “Sebastopol Sketches,” he
wrote: “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my
soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has
always been, is, and always will be, most beautiful, is--Truth.”
It is, after all, impossible to disentangle Tolstoi’s art from the
man himself and the ideas and aspirations that have stirred him. When
we consider his history and development we are sometimes reminded of
our own William Morris. They are both men of massive and sanguine
temperament, of restless energy, groping their way through life with a
vague sense of dissatisfaction; both pure artists through the greater
part of their career, and both artists still, when late in life, and
under the influence of rather sectarian ideas, they think that they
have at length grasped the pillars of the heathen temple of society in
which they have so long been groping, and are ready to wreak on it the
pent-up unrest of their lives. But they go to work in not quite the
same way. Both, it is true, having apparently passed through a very
slight religious phase in early life, have had this experience in later
life, and in both it has taken on a social character; both, also, have
sought their inspiration, not so much in a possible future deduced from
the present, as in the past experiences of the race. Tolstoi with his
semi-oriental quietism has returned to the rationalistic aspects of
the social teaching of Jesus. Morris, who regards Iceland rather than
Judæa as the Holy Land of the race, looks to Scandinavian antiquity
for light on the problems of to-day. It is on the robust Scandinavian
spirit of independence and comfortable well-to-do intolerance of all
oppression and domination that Morris relies for the redemption of
his own time and people. So far from identifying art, as Tolstoi is
inclined to do, with the evil and luxury of the world, Morris finds in
art a chief hope for the world. It is not, therefore, surprising that
his art has suffered little from the fervour of his convictions, while
his varied artistic activities have given him a wholesome grip on life.
His new beliefs, on the other hand, have given new meaning to his art.
His mastery of prose has only been acquired under the stress of his
convictions. It is prose of massive simplicity, a morning freshness,
unconscious and effortless. There is about it something of the peculiar
charm of the finest Norman architecture. The “Dream of John Ball,”
a strong unpretentious piece of work, penetrated at every point by
profound social convictions, yet with the artist’s touch throughout,
may be read with a delight which the complex and artificial prose we
are accustomed to cannot give. England, it is said, is predominantly a
Scandinavian country; Morris is significant because he gives expression
in an extreme form to the racial instincts of his own people, just as
Tolstoi expresses in equally extreme form the deepest instincts of his
Sclavonic race.
Against the “Dream of John Ball,” we may place the work produced at
the same time by the Russian’s keener and more searching hand, “The
Dominion of Darkness.” This sombre and awful tragedy is a terribly
real and merciless picture of the worst elements in peasant life, a
picture of avarice and lust and murder. Only one pious, stuttering,
incoherent _moojik_, whose employment is to clean out closets, appears
as the representative of mercy and justice. So thick is the gloom
that it seems the artistic effect would have been heightened if the
concluding introduction of the officers of an external and official
justice had been omitted, and the curtain had fallen on the tragic
merriment of the wedding feast. The same intense earnestness taking,
almost unconsciously, an artistic shape, reveals itself in the little
stories of which in recent years Tolstoi has produced so many, some
indeed comparatively ineffective, but others that are a fascinating
combination of simplicity, realism, imaginative insight, brought to the
service of social ideas. Such is “What men live by,” the story of the
angel who disobeyed God, and was sent to earth to learn that it is only
in appearance that men are kept alive through care for themselves, but
that in reality they are kept alive through love.