Thanks to the Count Melchoir de Voguee, who introduced Tolstoy to the
French in Le Roman Russe (containing studies of Pushkin, Gogol,
Turgenieff, Dostoievsky) literary Paris was for a time saturated in
Russian mysticism, and what the clear-headed Alphonse Daudet called
"Russian pity." It was Count de Voguee, member of the Academy and
Neo-Catholic (as the group headed by Ernest Lavisse elected to style
itself), who compressed all Tolstoy in an epigram as having ("the mind
of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist") On dirait
l'esprit d'un chimiste anglais dans l'ame d'un buddhiste hindou.
The modulation of a soul, at first stagnant, then plunged into the
gulf of hopelessness, and at last catching a glimpse of light, is most
clearly expressed by Leo Nikolaievitch in his Resurrection. That by
throwing yourself again into the mire you may atone for early
transgressions--the muddy sins of your youth--is one of those deadly
ideas born in the crazed brain of an East Indian jungle-haunting
fanatic. It possibly grew out of the barbarous custom of blood
sacrifices. Waiving the tales told of his insincerity by Frau Anna
Seuron, we know that Tolstoy wrestled with the five thousand devils of
doubt and despair, and found light, his light, in a most peculiar
fashion. But he is often the victim of his own illusions. That, Voguee,
a great admirer, pointed out some years ago. Turgenieff understood
Tolstoy; so did Dostoievsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri
Merejkowski.
Turgenieff's appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more
pathetic because written on the eve of his death.
Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you
for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well;
that is not to be thought of. But I write in order to tell
you how glad I am to have been your contemporary, and to make
my last earnest request. My friend, return to literary work.
This talent of yours has come from where all else comes. Oh,
how happy I should be could I believe that my entreaty would
prevail with you. My friend, our great national writer, grant
my request.
This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky
memoir.
Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy
was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social
notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and
pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have said
if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of
Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad
art, except the story, God Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the
first class, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the
second." Also sprach Tolstoy in that madman's book called What is Art?
a work wherein he tried to outvie Nordau's abuse of beautiful art.
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Hamlet, Macbeth, Dante, and Goethe,
are all consigned to the limbo of bad art; bad because not
"understanded of the people." The peasant, the moujik, is to be the
criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross
between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Voguee declared
that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of
philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet
becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian. He wrote: "Tolstoy,
comme createur, comme romancier, comme poete epique, pour mieux dire,
est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands genies de notre siecle. Comme
penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l'Europe."
Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly
mistaken, but he is never weak-minded. We think it is his strength,
his intensity that sends him caracoling on a dozen different roads in
search of salvation.
How a man lacking the critical faculty may be misled is to be seen in
What is Art? To master his subject the deluded novelist read all the
essays, disquisitions, and works he could find on the theme of
aesthetics. This as a preparation for clear thinking. It reminds one of
that comical artist Pellerin, in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale,
who devoured all the aesthetic treatises, ancient and modern, in search
of a true theory of the beautiful before he painted a picture; and he
had so thoroughly absorbed the methods of various painters that he
could not sit down at his easel in the presence of his model without
asking himself: Shall I "do" her a la Gainsborough, or, better still,
in the romantic and mysterious manner of M. Delacroix, with fierce
sunsets, melting moons, guitars, bloodshed, balconies, and the cries
of them that are assassinated for the love of love?
Tolstoy reaches, after many hundred pages of his essay, the
astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly
union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably
first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for
Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy
as man and artist. In his frank study, the facts in the case are laid
bare by a skilled, impartial hand. What he writes is well known among
Russians; it may shock English-speaking worshippers, who do not
accept Tolstoy as a great artist, but as the prophet of a new
dispensation--and it may be said, without beating about the bush, he
rather liked the niche in which he was placed by these uncritical
zealots.
The fate of the engineer hoist by his own petard is Tolstoy's. The
peasants of his country understand him as little as they understand
Beethoven, that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly assailed in The
Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select Tristan
and Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic
caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano
sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse
hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of
their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the
people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy's
tragedy, as it was the tragedy of Walt Whitman.
Curious students can find all they wish of Tolstoy's psychology in
Merejkowski's book. One thing we cannot forbear dwelling
upon--Dostoievsky's significance in any discussion of Tolstoy.
Dostoievsky was a profounder nature, greater than Tolstoy, though he
was not the finished literary artist. All that Tolstoy tried to be,
Dostoievsky was. He did not "go to the people" (that pose of
dilettantish anarchy)--he was born of them; he did not write about
Siberian prisons from hearsay, he lived in them; he did not attempt
to dive into the deep, social waters of the "submerged tenth," because
he himself seldom emerged to the surface. In a word, Dostoievsky is a
profounder psychologist than Tolstoy; his faith was firmer; his
attacks of epilepsy gave him glimpses of the underworld of the soul,
terrifying visions of his subconscious self, of his subliminal
personality. And he had the courage of his chimera.
Tolstoy feared art as being too artificial, and, as Merejkowski shows:
"From the dread mask of Caliban peeps out the familiar and by no means
awe-inspiring physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat squire,
the gentleman Positivist of the sixties." He never took writing as
seriously as Dostoievsky; in Tolstoy there is a strong leaven of the
aristocrat, the man who rather despises a mere pen worker. Contrast
Dostoievsky's attitude before his work, recall the painful parturition
of books, his sweating, remorseful days and nights when he could not
produce. And now Tolstoy tells us that Uncle Tom's Cabin is greater
than Shakespeare. Is it any wonder Turgenieff remonstrated with him?
Is it any wonder if, after reading one of his latter-day tracts, we
are reminded of The Washerwoman of Finchley Common, that classic in
the polemics of sniffling piety? The truth is that Tolstoy, a
wonderful artist in plastic portraiture, consciously or unconsciously
fashioned the Tolstoy legend, as did Richard Wagner the Wagner legend,
Victor Hugo the Hugo legend. Men of genius and imagination are nearly
all play-actors in matters autobiographical.
It is to Dostoievsky, once the despised outcast, that we must go for
the human documents of misery, the naked soul, the heart of man
buffeted by fate. If you think Resurrection strong, then read
Dostoievsky's The House of the Dead. If Anna Karenina has wooed
you--as it must--take up The Idiot; and if you are impressed by the
epical magnitude of War and Peace, study that other epic of souls, The
Brothers Karamazov, which illuminates, as if with ghastly flashes of
lightning, the stormy hearts of mankind. Tolstoy wrote of life;
Dostoievsky lived it, drank its sour dregs--for he was a man accursed
by luck and, like the apocalyptic dreamer of Patmos, a seer of visions
denied to the robust, ever fleshly Tolstoy. His influence on Tolstoy
was more than Stendhal's--Stendhal whom Tolstoy called his master.
Tolstoy denies life, even hates it after having enjoyed it to the
full. His religion in the last analysis is nihilism, and if carried to
its logical conclusion would turn the civilised world into a desert.
Our great man, after his family was in bed, sometimes ate forbidden
slices of beef, and he had been seen enjoying a sly cigarette, all of
which should endear him to us, for it proves his unquenchable
humanity. Yet that roast-beef sandwich shook the faith of thousands.
No--it will not do to take Tolstoy seriously in his attempts at
evolving a parody of early Christianity. He is doubtlessly sincere,
but sincerity is often the cloak for a multitude of errors.
His Katusha--Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in
Resurrection--is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker
Sonia in Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while
poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins
the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which
Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes. She is at first much more vital
than her betrayer, who is an unreal bundle of theories; but in company
with the rest of the characters she soon goes up in metaphysical
smoke. Walizewski asserts that all Tolstoy's later life was a
regrettable pose. "But this is the usual price of every kind of human
greatness, and in the case of this very great man, it is an atavistic
feature of the national ... education, which in his case was
originally of the most hasty and superficial description."
In As the Hague Ordains, the anonymous author attacks "our great
reformer and humbug," Count Leo Tolstoy. She claims that there was
hardly a village in China so abounding in filth and ignorance as the
Tula village of Yasnaya Polyana, beside Tolstoy's country home.
"I wonder," she writes, "why the procession of foreign visitors who go
to Yasnaya Polyana, who lavish adulation and hysterical praises upon
that crass socialist and mischief-maker of his day, never think to
look around them and use their reasoning powers. Would it not be the
logical thing for Yasnaya Polyana to be the model village of Russia?
Something cleaner than Edam or Marken? A little of his magnificent
humanitarianism and benevolence poured upon that unsanitary village on
his own estate would be more practical, it seems to me, than the thin
treacle of it spread over the whole universe. Talk is cheap in Yasnaya
Polyana, and the Grand Poseur plays his part magnificently. Every
visitor goes away completely hypnotised, especially the Americans,
with their frothing about equality and the universal brotherhood of
man. Universal grandmother! All men are just as equal as all noses or
all mouths are equal. The world gets older, but learns nothing, and it
cherishes delusions, and the same ones, just as it did in the time of
the Greek philosophers. Leo Tolstoy might well have lived in a tub or
carried a lantern by day, like the most sensational and theatrical of
the ancients. He is only a past master of reclame, of the art of
advertising. The Moujik blouse and those delightful tableaux of a real
nobleman shoemaking and haymaking make his books sell. That is all.
And, under the unsuspecting blouse of the humanitarian is the fine and
perfumed linen of the dandy. Leo Tolstoy, the Beau Brummel of his
corps in my father's day--the dandy in domino to-day."