the rich only, but by the peasant. That is why his significance is so
great. Sometimes the religious censure prohibits his books; sometimes
it allows them; in either case they are circulated. Published at a few
halfpence, these little books are within the reach of the poorest,
and Tolstoi gives free permission to anyone to reproduce or translate
any of his books. His drama, “The Dominion of Darkness, or when a
bird lets himself be caught by one foot he is lost,” was intended for
the public who frequent the open-air theatres of fairs, and eighty
thousand copies were sold during the first week, although certainly
not altogether among the audience he would have preferred. The stories
for children are circulated in scores of editions of twenty thousand
copies each. Tolstoi has nothing to teach that he has not learnt from
peasants, and which thousands of peasants might not have taught him.
He has used his character and genius as a sounding-board to enable
his voice to reach millions of persons, many of whom, even the most
intelligent, are not aware that he is but repeating the lessons he has
learnt from unlettered _moojiks_.
Now his voice has reached the countries of the West, and it sounds here
far more unfamiliar than in a land so stirred by popular religious
movements as Russia. “My Religion,” that powerful argument _ad hominem_
to the Christian from one who accepts both the letter and the spirit of
Jesus’s simplest and least questionable teaching, has had an especially
large circulation in the West. Such a challenge has never before been
scattered broadcast among the nations. What, one wonders, will be the
outcome?
To most people the simplicity of the challenger is a cause of
astonishment. After the assassination of Alexander II. and the sentence
on the assassins, Tolstoi wrote to the present Tzar imploring him
not to begin his reign with judicial murder, and he was deeply and
genuinely disappointed at the inevitable reception of his appeal.
Count Tolstoi, the author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” made
the same mistake as the simple peasant Soutaieff. That little incident
throws much light on his mental constitution. It is the attitude of
a child, absorbed wholly in one thing at a time, unable to calculate
the nature and the strength of opposing forces. It is the same fact of
mental structure which leads the world-renowned novelist to delight
to learn from children, to be mortified when they do not like his
stories, and to experience one of the greatest excitements of life when
he thinks he detects the dawn of genius in a child of ten. The same
characteristic appears in his treatment of science. He had heard, he
told Mr. Kennan, that a Russian scientist had completely demolished the
Darwinian theory. In “Life,” one of his latest books, this tendency has
carried him far away into a sterile and hopeless region of mystical
phraseology. He dismisses scientific men briefly as the Scribes. It
has not occurred to him apparently that this book, “Life,” is a book
of science. And, certainly, if science could produce nothing better
than “Life,” the language that Tolstoi uses regarding it were not one
whit too strong. This childlike simplicity is not peculiar to Tolstoi;
it is more or less the attitude of every true Russian, of the peasant
who sets up the kingdom of Heaven, as of the Nihilist who thinks he
can emancipate his country by destroying a few Tzars. It is a weakness
that must often mean failure because it cannot estimate the strength
of difficulties. At the same time it is a power. It is by this intense
concentration on one desired object, this heroic inability to see
opposition, that the highest achievement becomes possible.
Whatever Tolstoi’s limitations and failures of perception, those things
which he believes he has seen he grasps with inexorable tenacity.
The violence and misery of the world--that is a reality; a reality,
he feels, which must be fought at all costs. Mr. Kennan tells how he
pressed home on Tolstoi the cases of extreme brutality and oppression
that he had known practised on political prisoners in Siberia, and how,
though Tolstoi’s eyes filled with tears as he imagined the horrors
described, he still pointed out in detail how, by opposing violence
to violence in the cases cited, the misery of the world would be
increased: “At the time when you interposed there was only one centre
of evil and suffering. By your violent interference you have created
half-a-dozen such centres. It does not seem to me, Mr. Kennan, that
that is the way to bring about the reign of peace and good-will on
earth.”[12]
[12] See the interesting paper, “A Visit to Count Tolstoi,” in
“Century,” June, 1887.
Tolstoi possesses that social imagination which, though growing among
us, is still so rare. If at the dinner where cheerful guests prolong
their enjoyment, there were placed behind each chair a starved, ragged
figure, with haggard and haunting face--would not the meal be broken up
as speedily as if every guest had found the sword of Dionysius hanging
by a thread above his head? Yet it is only a lack of imagination which
prevents us from seeing through the few layers of bricks that screen us
off from these realities. For him who has seen it there is little rest,
“so long as I have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I
have two coats and another has none.”
With tears in his voice, and in words whose intense reality pierces
through the translation, though this, we are told, cannot reproduce the
graphic vividness of the original, Tolstoi speaks to us through his
life and his work as he once spoke to the interviewer who came to him:
“People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolaivitch, as far as preaching goes,
you preach; but how about your practice?’ The question is a perfectly
natural one; it is always put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘You
preach,’ it is said, ‘but how do you live?’ I can only reply that I do
not preach--passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through
my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching;
it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of
life. People often say to me, ‘If you think that there is no reasonable
life outside the teachings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable
life, why do you not fulfil the Christian precepts?’ I am guilty and
blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfil them; but at the
same time I say,--not in justification, but in explanation, of my
inconsistency,--Compare my previous life with the life I am now living,
and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true,
fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it
is not because I do not wish to fulfil all, but because I am unable.
Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which
I am entangled,--help me,--and I will fulfil all. I wish and hope to do
it even without help. Condemn me if you choose,--I do that myself,--but
condemn _me_, and not the path which I am following, and which I point
out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know
the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side
to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is
not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to
my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves
confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘Look at him!
He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp!’ You
are not evil spirits from the swamp; you are also human beings, and
you also are going home. You know that I am alone,--you know that I
cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp,--then help me! My heart is
breaking with despair because we have all lost the road; and while I
struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead
of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘See! He is in the
swamp with us!’”
CONCLUSION.
Tolstoi brings us face to face with religion. If we think of it, every
personality we have considered has brought us subtly in contact with
that ineluctable shape. It is strange: men seek to be, or to seem,
atheists, agnostics, cynics, pessimists; at the core of all these
things lurks religion. We may find it in Diderot’s mighty enthusiasm,
in Heine’s passionate cries, in Ibsen’s gigantic faith in the future,
in Whitman’s not less gigantic faith in the present. We see the same
in the music-dramas of Wagner, in Zola’s pathetic belief in a formula,
in Morris’s worship of an ideal past, in the aspirations of every
Socialist who looks for the return of those barbarous times in which
all men equally were fed and clothed and housed. The men who have most
finely felt the pulse of the world, and have, in their turn, most
effectively stirred its pulse, are religious men.
One is forced to ask oneself at last: How can I make clear to myself
this vast and many-shaped religious element of life? It will not
let me pass it by. Can I--without any attempt to theorize or to
explain--reduce it to some common denominator, so that I may at
least gain the satisfaction that comes of the clear and harmonious
presentation of a complex fact? When we have settled the question
of the evolution of religion, another more fundamental question may
still be asked: What is the nature of the impulse that underlies, and
manifests itself in, that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship,
ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal to the vast reservoir
of sexual and filial love, we may succeed in reducing religious
phenomena? On the one hand, this impulse must begin to develop at
least as early as the earliest appearance of worship; on the other
hand, we cannot ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also
examine and compare its more specialized forms. What is there in common
between the religious attitude of the child of to-day, enfranchized
from creeds, and that of, let us say, Lâo-tsze, the child of a day
that is twenty-five centuries old; or between these and the far more
primitive adoration of the Dravidian for his cattle? If the vague
term “religion,” which, as commonly used, contains at least three
elements--moral, scientific, emotional--covers any distinct and
persistent human impulse, what is the nature and scope of that impulse?
I wish to represent to myself, as precisely and as broadly as may be,
man’s religious relation.
When we look out into the universe we see a vast medium, the world,
gradually merging itself indistinctly in a practical infinite, and
in the centre a certain limited number of souls, souls like the
theoretical atoms of the physicist, never under any circumstances
touching. Let two souls approach ever so nearly, there is yet a subtle
chasm, through which
“The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea”
still flows. These souls are made up essentially of mind and body.
There can be no change of consciousness without a corresponding change
in the vascular circulation. There can be no thrill of body in a soul
without a correlated thrill of mind. Matter and mind in the soul are
co-extensive. When we speak of the “spirit” as ruling the body, or as
yielding to it, we are, it must be remembered, using a traditional
method of speech which had its origin in a more primitive theory, just
as we still speak of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no more
be subordinated to the material, strictly speaking, than in water the
oxygen be subordinated to the hydrogen. The old dispute for supremacy
between mind and matter no longer has any significance. Both matter and
mind are in the end equally unknown: _exeunt in mysterium_.
The soul is born and then dies. What do we mean by _birth_ and _death_?
According to the old Hebrew conception a spirit was created out of
nothing and put into a mould of matter, and then at death again passed
back into nothing. But to-day this conception is impossible. _Ex
nihilo nihil fit._ It is clear that both the elements that make up
the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous
cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and
beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the world, whom we are, on this
variegated jet of organic life, to fall back again to our true life, by
whatever unknown ways and under whatever change of form, conscious, it
may be, but, as before birth, no longer with any self to be conscious
of, no longer organic.
Now souls, although they always remain isolated, are acted upon by
the world and by other souls, and when so acted upon they yield an
emotional response. And for the present purpose these actions may
be divided into two classes, corresponding to the two classes of
sympathetic nerve fibres--vaso-constrictor and vaso-dilator--which
control the vascular system, the rougher daily contacts of life, which
contract though they strengthen the soul with their legacy of strong
desires and griefs, and the incomparably rarer contacts at which the
soul for a while and in varying degrees expands with a glad sense of
freedom. As every bodily change in the compacted soul is correlated
with a mental change, these responses may be spoken of indifferently
in mental or material terms. We know that they are on the bodily side
vaso-motorial; that a thrill of joy is accompanied by a change in
arterial tension, and we can therefore use this expression of the part
as the symbol of the whole. It is this enlarged diastole of the soul
that we call _religion_.
“The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single
individual,--namely, to You.” From the religious standpoint this is
essentially true. The soul is situated at the centre of the world,
exposed to a practically infinite number of appeals, to which it is
capable of yielding a practically infinite number of responses or
initiations. Every moment a stream of influences is striking against
the soul and producing a multitudinous stream of responses, new stops
growing, as it were, beneath the player’s touch. We know that for the
most part the harsh and jarring discords predominate, that a soul
that answers to the world’s touch with a music that is ever large and
harmonious, is so rare that we call it by some divine ideal word. Yet
the field of the soul’s liberation is a large one, whether we look
at it on the physical or on the mental side. The simplest functions
of physiological life may be its ministers. Everyone who is at all
acquainted with the Persian mystics, knows how wine may be regarded
as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all
ages, some form of physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking,
sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even
the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight
an extent, a religious exercise. I do not fear to make this assertion;
the expansions of the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality.
If this is but a low rung of the ladder along which pass the angels of
our gladness, at the other end is that vision of divine self-sacrifice,
so marked in the more highly developed religions, which has sustained
through sorrow and defeat some of the world’s loftiest spirits. They
differ, as much as we will, in degree, but between them what hint
by which to draw a line? Whenever an impulse from the world strikes
against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain,
not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous
expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the
infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave
that promises to bear us towards it.[13]
[13] It may be said that religion, as even the etymology of the word
witnesses, has been a force on the side of repression. That also is
true; it cannot indeed be too strongly emphasized. Only in the strength
of that joyous expansion could men have acted and suffered such
intolerable torture in the service of religion. (It must be remembered,
however, that in certain stages of civilization religion is largely
identified with morality). It is necessary to generalize from the most
various and highly specialized cases in order to arrive at a reasonable
definition.
When we try to classify the chief of these affections of the soul
according to the impulses that arouse them, we find that they may be
conveniently divided into four classes:--(1.) Those caused by the
liberation of impulses stored up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by
impulses from other souls. (3.) Those caused by impulses from the
world, as distinct from souls. (4.) Those caused by an intuition of
union with the world.
(1.) Here we are, above all, concerned with art. It is not necessary
here to distinguish between the emotion of the artist and that of him
who merely follows the artist, passing his hand as it were over the
other’s work, and receiving, in a less degree it may be, the same
emotion. We are all artists potentially. The secret of the charm of
art is that it presents to us an external world which is manifestly of
like nature with the soul. “Non merita nome di Creatore,” according
to Tasso’s saying, “se non Iddio ed il Poeta.” The work of art--poem,
statue, music--succeeds in being what every philosophy attempts to
be. Neither change nor death can touch it; also it is immeasurable;
we feel that we are in the presence of the infinite. No art has ever
succeeded in embodying those visions of the infinite which are commonly
regarded as specifically religious--so that even to-day we respond
with a thrill of dilatation--as the old fragmentary art of Egypt in
the ruined temples of the Thebaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation
of the infinite; we may lose ourselves among those subtle curves of
man’s or woman’s body. A Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century
is an embodiment of the infinite world itself. The soul responds
expansively to all these things. When that response is wanting, and the
art therefore, however interesting, is not religious--as in the art of
Pompeii and the Italian post-Raphaelite art--it will generally be found
technically inferior. The subject, one may note, has little or nothing
to do with the matter. A representation of God the Father rarely
evokes any religious response. De Hooge, by means of mere sunlight and
the rubbish of a back-yard, awakes in us an enlarging thrill of joy.
In music the most indefinite and profound mysteries of the soul are
revealed and placed outside us as a gracious and marvellous orb; the
very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world.
That is why no other art smites us with so powerfully religious an
appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about
ourselves.
“O! what is this that knows the road I came?”
It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual
traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted.
There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and a sensory, lying at the
bottom of art and the delight in art. All the constructive instincts
of living things, from bees and ants and worms and birds upwards, have
gone to mould our delight in the fashioning of a whole, and in the
contemplation of its fashion. The same process was carried on into
human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her
hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it
through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all
that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its beauty, and by a true
instinct she called her work a living creature. The baskets that early
men wove, and the weapons that they carved for themselves, and their
rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship, are part of a chain that
presents itself again in Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan
dramas.
Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight
in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the
only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and
food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of
loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer
are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic
expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering,
more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and
strength and skill--such are the impressions that male and female
have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense
emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole
world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to
his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what
lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the
reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty--whether
in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s
music, Shelley’s lyrics--can always appeal, certain of response? One
might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached
in our own time--a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme
religious form--Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as
surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the
sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the
child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the
creation of love.
Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has played a large part
in the history of religion--the art of metaphysic. The savage finds
religious gratification in the exercise of his coarser senses,
in singing or dancing or drinking; the man of large and refined
intellectual development, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in
philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence
they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on
inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has
reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the
joy of the philosophic emotion will construct his own philosophy. A
philosophy is the house of the mind, and no two philosophies can be
alike because no two minds are alike. But the emotion is the same, the
emotion of expansive joy in a house not built with hands, in which the
soul has made for herself a large and harmonious dwelling.
(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart. The lover seeks to be
absorbed altogether in the heaven of the loved personality, but in the
end the heaven remains unsealed.
“_Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas oris et inspirant
pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam._”
And yet a large or lovely personality is not the less an outlook
towards the infinite. We cannot think of certain men of immense range
or power or sweetness--St. Francis, Leonardo, Napoleon, Darwin--without
experiencing a movement of liberation. To pronounce the names of such
men is of the nature of an act of worship. I cannot for a moment
think of Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at such gracious
plenitude of power. No person, probably, ever made so ardent a personal
appeal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole new world of emotional
life, a new expansion of joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took
precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional
world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as
nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest
and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of
so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history
of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from
the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons,
torn and bleeding, yet, _instar generosi cujusdam athletæ_, with the
undying cry on her lips, _Christiana sum!_ It is open to everyone to
give liberating impulses to his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus
that he has, for us, permanently expanded the bounds of individuality.
We all breathe deeper and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter’s
son. “_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_,” said the physician in
the old story, by the bedside of a wretched patient. “_Non est corpus
tam vile pro quo mortuus est Christus_,” unexpectedly returned the
dying man. The charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly
apprehended.