IN an age of materialism like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power
is as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with
the “divine right” of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and
theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of a coercive
weapon of statecraft.
Freed from its ancient shackles of dogma and despotism it eludes
analysis. We know not how to gauge its effect on others, nor even upon
ourselves. Like the wind, it permeates the atmosphere we breathe, and
baffles while it stimulates the mind with its intangible but compelling
force.
This psychic power, which the dead weight of materialism is impotent
to suppress, is revealed in the lives and writings of men of the most
diverse creeds and nationalities. Apart from those who, like Buddha
and Mahomet, have been raised to the height of demi-gods by worshipping
millions, there are names which leap inevitably to the mind--such names
as Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau--which stand for types and
exemplars of spiritual aspiration. To this high priesthood of the quick
among the dead, who can doubt that time will admit Leo Tolstoy--a genius
whose greatness has been obscured from us rather than enhanced by his
duality; a realist who strove to demolish the mysticism of Christianity,
and became himself a mystic in the contemplation of Nature; a man of
ardent temperament and robust physique, keenly susceptible to human
passions and desires, who battled with himself from early manhood until
the spirit, gathering strength with years, inexorably subdued the flesh.
Tolstoy the realist steps without cavil into the front rank of modern
writers; Tolstoy the idealist has been constantly derided and scorned by
men of like birth and education with himself--his altruism denounced as
impracticable, his preaching compared with his mode of life to prove
him inconsistent, if not insincere. This is the prevailing attitude of
politicians and literary men.
Must one conclude that the mass of mankind has lost touch with idealism?
On the contrary, in spite of modern materialism, or even because of it,
many leaders of spiritual thought have arisen in our times, and have won
the ear of vast audiences. Their message is a call to a simpler life, to
a recognition of the responsibilities of wealth, to the avoidance of war
by arbitration, and sinking of class hatred in a deep sense of universal
brotherhood.
Unhappily, when an idealistic creed is formulated in precise and
dogmatic language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty
in the process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy
of Comte, though embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited
influence. Again, the poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly
altruistic than that of Cowper or Wordsworth, is inherently ethical, and
reveals strong sympathy with sinning and suffering humanity, but it is
masked by a manner that is sometimes uncouth and frequently obscure.
Owing to these, and other instances, idealism suggests to the world
at large a vague sentimentality peculiar to the poets, a bloodless
abstraction toyed with by philosophers, which must remain a closed book
to struggling humanity.
Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in
God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself
in the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a
deity in the second. For the peasant was still religious at heart with
a naive unquestioning faith--more characteristic of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century than of to-day--and still fervently aspired to God
although sunk in superstition and held down by the despotism of the
Greek Church. It was the cumbrous ritual and dogma of the orthodox state
religion which roused Tolstoy to impassioned protests, and led him step
by step to separate the core of Christianity from its sacerdotal shell,
thus bringing upon himself the ban of excommunication.
The signal mark of the reprobation of “Holy Synod” was slow in
coming--it did not, in fact, become absolute until a couple of years
after the publication of “Resurrection,” in 1901, in spite of the
attitude of fierce hostility to Church and State which Tolstoy had
maintained for so long. This hostility, of which the seeds were
primarily sown by the closing of his school and inquisition of his
private papers in the summer of 1862, soon grew to proportions
far greater than those arising from a personal wrong. The dumb and
submissive moujik found in Tolstoy a living voice to express his
sufferings.
Tolstoy was well fitted by nature and circumstances to be the peasant’s
spokesman. He had been brought into intimate contact with him in the
varying conditions of peace and war, and he knew him at his worst and
best. The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his
brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian
aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from
the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of
enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and
kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation
and prayer.
In “Childhood” Tolstoy apostrophises with feeling one of those
“innocents,” a man named Grisha, “whose faith was so strong that you
felt the nearness of God, your love so ardent that the words flowed from
your lips uncontrolled by your reason. And how did you celebrate his
Majesty when, words failing you, you prostrated yourself on the ground,
bathed in tears” This picture of humble religious faith was amongst
Tolstoy’s earliest memories, and it returned to comfort him and uplift
his soul when it was tossed and engulfed by seas of doubt. But the
affection he felt in boyhood towards the moujiks became tinged with
contempt when his attempts to improve their condition--some of which are
described in “Anna Karenina” and in the “Landlord’s Morning”--ended in
failure, owing to the ignorance and obstinacy of the people. It was not
till he passed through the ordeal of war in Turkey and the Crimea
that he discovered in the common soldier who fought by his side an
unconscious heroism, an unquestioning faith in God, a kindliness and
simplicity of heart rarely possessed by his commanding officer.
The impressions made upon Tolstoy during this period of active service
gave vivid reality to the battle-scenes in “War and Peace,” and are
traceable in the reflections and conversation of the two heroes, Prince
Andre and Pierre Besukhov. On the eve of the battle of Borodino,
Prince Andre, talking with Pierre in the presence of his devoted
soldier-servant Timokhine, says,--“‘Success cannot possibly be, nor has
it ever been, the result of strategy or fire-arms or numbers.’
“‘Then what does it result from?’ said Pierre.
“‘From the feeling that is in me, that is in him’--pointing to
Timokhine--‘and that is in each individual soldier.’”
He then contrasts the different spirit animating the officers and the
men.
“‘The former,’ he says, ‘have nothing in view but their personal
interests. The critical moment for them is the moment at which they are
able to supplant a rival, to win a cross or a new order. I see only one
thing. To-morrow one hundred thousand Russians and one hundred thousand
Frenchmen will meet to fight; they who fight the hardest and spare
themselves the least will win the day.’
“‘There’s the truth, your Excellency, the real truth,’ murmurs
Timokhine; ‘it is not a time to spare oneself. Would you believe it, the
men of my battalion have not tasted brandy? “It’s not a day for that,”
they said.’”
During the momentous battle which followed, Pierre was struck by the
steadfastness under fire which has always distinguished the Russian
soldier.
“The fall of each man acted as an increasing stimulus. The faces of the
soldiers brightened more and more, as if challenging the storm let loose
on them.”
In contrast with this picture of fine “morale” is that of the young
white-faced officer, looking nervously about him as he walks backwards
with lowered sword.
In other places Tolstoy does full justice to the courage and patriotism
of all grades in the Russian army, but it is constantly evident that
his sympathies are most heartily with the rank and file. What genuine
feeling and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier,
in “War and Peace!”
“Plato Karataev was about fifty, judging by the number of campaigns in
which he had served; he could not have told his exact age himself, and
when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white
teeth. There was not a grey hair on his head or in his beard, and his
bearing wore the stamp of activity, resolution, and above all, stoicism.
His face, though much lined, had a touching expression of simplicity,
youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his
speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he
had said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical
inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and
morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, ‘O God, let me
sleep like a stone and rise up like a loaf.’ And, sure enough, he had no
sooner lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning
on waking he was bright and lively, and ready for any work. He could
do anything, just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed
wood, cobbled his boots, and was always occupied with some job or other,
only allowing himself to chat and sing at night. He sang, not like a
singer who knows he has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the
Father of all, feeling it as necessary as walking or stretching himself.
His singing was tender, sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping
with his serious countenance. When, after some weeks of captivity his
beard had grown again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his
true self, the borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him,
and to have become, as before, a peasant and a man of the people. In the
eyes of the other prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom they
chaffed at times and sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he
remained ever after the personification of simplicity and truth, such as
he had divined him to be since the first night spent by his side.”
This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy’s “Crimean
Journal.” It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the “Letters
from Sebastopol” (especially in the second and third series), and shows,
like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant
young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut from
his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to
St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by
the elite of letters and courted by society. A few years before he would
have been delighted with such a reception. Now it jarred on his awakened
sense of the tragedy of existence. He found himself entirely out of
sympathy with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with
Turgenev at their head. In Tolstoy’s eyes they were false, paltry, and
immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his opinions. Dissension,
leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy;
and the latter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great
contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the
dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army,
went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.
In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he
enjoyed a respite from mental strain.
“A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive.”
Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually
styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the
Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved
exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent and sympathetic, but
strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while Tolstoy’s view of
life gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that of a social
reformer, her own remained unaltered; with the result that at the end
of some forty years of frank and affectionate interchange of ideas,
they awoke to the painful consciousness that the last link of mutual
understanding had snapped and that their friendship was at an end.
But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one
of Tolstoy’s rare friendships with women, revealing in his unguarded
confidences fine shades of his many-sided nature, and throwing light on
the impression he made both on his intimates and on those to whom he was
only known as a writer, while his moral philosophy was yet in embryo.
They are now about to appear in book form under the auspices of M.
Stakhovich, to whose kindness in giving me free access to the originals
I am indebted for the extracts which follow. From one of the countess’s
first letters we learn that the feelings of affection, hope, and
happiness which possessed Tolstoy in Switzerland irresistibly
communicated themselves to those about him.
“You are good in a very uncommon way,” she writes, “and that is why
it is difficult to feel unhappy in your company. I have never seen you
without wishing to be a better creature. Your presence is a consoling
idea . . . know all the elements in you that revive one’s heart,
possibly without your being even aware of it.”
A few years later she gives him an amusing account of the impression his
writings had already made on an eminent statesman.
“I owe you a small episode. Not long ago, when lunching with the
Emperor, I sat next our little Bismarck, and in a spirit of mischief I
began sounding him about you. But I had hardly uttered your name when he
went off at a gallop with the greatest enthusiasm, firing off the list
of your perfections left and right, and so long as he declaimed your
praises with gesticulations, cut and thrust, powder and shot, it was
all very well and quite in character; but seeing that I listened with
interest and attention my man took the bit in his teeth, and flung
himself into a psychic apotheosis. On reaching full pitch he began to
get muddled, and floundered so helplessly in his own phrases! all the
while chewing an excellent cutlet to the bone, that at last I realised
nothing but the tips of his ears--those two great ears of his. What a
pity I can’t repeat it verbatim! but how? There was nothing left but a
jumble of confused sounds and broken words.”
Tolstoy on his side is equally expansive, and in the early stages of the
correspondence falls occasionally into the vein of self-analysis which
in later days became habitual.
“As a child I believed with passion and without any thought. Then at the
age of fourteen I began to think about life and preoccupied myself with
religion, but it did not adjust itself to my theories and so I broke
with it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years
. . . everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no
room for religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible;
there were no more secrets in life, but life itself had lost its
significance.”
He goes on to tell of the two years that he spent in the Caucasus before
the Crimean War, when his mind, jaded by youthful excesses, gradually
regained its freshness, and he awoke to a sense of communion with Nature
which he retained to his life’s end.
“I have my notes of that time, and now reading them over I am not able
to understand how a man could attain to the state of mental exaltation
which I arrived at. It was a torturing but a happy time.”
Further on he writes,--“In those two years of intellectual work, I
discovered a truth which is ancient and simple, but which yet I know
better than others do. I found out that immortal life is a reality, that
love is a reality, and that one must live for others if one would be
unceasingly happy.”
At this point one realises the gulf which divides the Slavonic from
the English temperament. No average Englishman of seven-and-twenty (as
Tolstoy was then) would pursue reflections of this kind, or if he did,
he would in all probability keep them sedulously to himself.
To Tolstoy and his aunt, on the contrary, it seemed the most natural
thing in the world to indulge in egoistic abstractions and to expatiate
on them; for a Russian feels none of the Anglo-Saxon’s mauvaise honte
in describing his spiritual condition, and is no more daunted by
metaphysics than the latter is by arguments on politics and sport.
To attune the Anglo-Saxon reader’s mind to sympathy with a mentality
so alien to his own, requires that Tolstoy’s environment should be
described more fully than most of his biographers have cared to do. This
prefatory note aims, therefore, at being less strictly biographical
than illustrative of the contributory elements and circumstances which
sub-consciously influenced Tolstoy’s spiritual evolution, since it is
apparent that in order to judge a man’s actions justly one must be able
to appreciate the motives from which they spring; those motives in turn
requiring the key which lies in his temperament, his associations, his
nationality. Such a key is peculiarly necessary to English or American
students of Tolstoy, because of the marked contrast existing between the
Russian and the Englishman or American in these respects, a contrast
by which Tolstoy himself was forcibly struck during the visit to
Switzerland, of which mention has been already made. It is difficult
to restrain a smile at the poignant mental discomfort endured by
the sensitive Slav in the company of the frigid and silent English
frequenters of the Schweitzerhof (“Journal of Prince D. Nekhludov,”
Lucerne, 1857), whose reserve, he realised, was “not based on pride,
but on the absence of any desire to draw nearer to each other”; while he
looked back regretfully to the pension in Paris where the table d’ hote
was a scene of spontaneous gaiety. The problem of British taciturnity
passed his comprehension; but for us the enigma of Tolstoy’s temperament
is half solved if we see him not harshly silhouetted against a
blank wall, but suffused with his native atmosphere, amid his native
surroundings. Not till we understand the main outlines of the Russian
temperament can we realise the individuality of Tolstoy himself: the
personality that made him lovable, the universality that made him great.
So vast an agglomeration of races as that which constitutes the Russian
empire cannot obviously be represented by a single type, but it will
suffice for our purposes to note the characteristics of the inhabitants
of Great Russia among whom Tolstoy spent the greater part of his
lifetime and to whom he belonged by birth and natural affinities.
It may be said of the average Russian that in exchange for a precocious
childhood he retains much of a child’s lightness of heart throughout
his later years, alternating with attacks of morbid despondency. He
is usually very susceptible to feminine charm, an ardent but unstable
lover, whose passions are apt to be as shortlived as they are violent.
Story-telling and long-winded discussions give him keen enjoyment,
for he is garrulous, metaphysical, and argumentative. In money
matters careless and extravagant, dilatory and venal in affairs; fond,
especially in the peasant class, of singing, dancing, and carousing; but
his irresponsible gaiety and heedlessness of consequences balanced by
a fatalistic courage and endurance in the face of suffering and danger.
Capable, besides, of high flights of idealism, which result in epics,
but rarely in actions, owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained
and organised effort. The Englishman by contrast appears cold and
calculating, incapable of rising above questions of practical utility;
neither interested in other men’s antecedents and experiences nor
willing to retail his own. The catechism which Plato puts Pierre
through on their first encounter (“War and Peace”) as to his family,
possessions, and what not, are precisely similar to those to which
I have been subjected over and over again by chance acquaintances in
country-houses or by fellow travellers on journeys by boat or train. The
naivete and kindliness of the questioner makes it impossible to resent,
though one may feebly try to parry his probing. On the other hand he
offers you free access to the inmost recesses of his own soul, and
stupefies you with the candour of his revelations. This, of course,
relates more to the landed and professional classes than to the peasant,
who is slower to express himself, and combines in a curious way a firm
belief in the omnipotence and wisdom of his social superiors with a
rooted distrust of their intentions regarding himself. He is like a
beast of burden who flinches from every approach, expecting always a
kick or a blow. On the other hand, his affection for the animals
who share his daily work is one of the most attractive points
in his character, and one which Tolstoy never wearied of
emphasising--describing, with the simple pathos of which he was master,
the moujik inured to his own privations but pitiful to his horse,
shielding him from the storm with his own coat, or saving him from
starvation with his own meagre ration; and mindful of him even in his
prayers, invoking, like Plato, the blessings of Florus and Laura, patron
saints of horses, because “one mustn’t forget the animals.”
The characteristics of a people so embedded in the soil bear a closer
relation to their native landscape than our own migratory populations,
and patriotism with them has a deep and vital meaning, which is
expressed unconsciously in their lives.
This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less
the animating power of the noble epic, “War and Peace,” and of his
peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian
scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under the
spell of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with
the normal phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to
Pantheism, found responses to his moods in trees, and gained spiritual
expansion from the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings
his heroes into touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate
mysticism of his own temperament, for to him Nature was “a guide to
God.” So in the two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree (“War
and Peace”) the Prince, though a man of action rather than of sentiment
and habitually cynical, is ready to find in the aged oak by the
roadside, in early spring, an animate embodiment of his own despondency.
“‘Springtime, love, happiness?--are you still cherishing those deceptive
illusions?’ the old oak seemed to say. ‘Isn’t it the same fiction ever?
There is neither spring, nor love, nor happiness! Look at those poor
weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty arms
issuing from all up my poor mutilated trunk--here I am, such as they
have made me, and I do not believe either in your hopes or in your
illusions.’”
And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts
backward glances as he passes by, “but the oak maintained its obstinate
and sullen immovability in the midst of the flowers and grass growing at
its feet. ‘Yes, that oak is right, right a thousand times over. One must
leave illusions to youth. But the rest of us know what life is worth; it
has nothing left to offer us.’”
Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his
melancholy torpor by his recent meeting with Natasha.
“The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered
the dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the
wood remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind,
glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near
and far the nightingales poured forth their song. ‘I fancy there was an
oak here that understood me,’ said Prince Andre to himself, looking
to the left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he
sought. The transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant,
blooming verdure, which swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the
setting sun. There were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen;
its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared;
there were only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through
the centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this
patriarch had really given birth to them. ‘Yes, it is he, indeed!’ cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which
the springtime and this new life gave him . . . ‘No, my life cannot end
at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me,
others must know it too! Pierre and that “slip” of a girl, who would
have fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour
theirs, and their lives must mingle with mine!’”
In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy’s
love of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic
and the prophet’s mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in
him wakes when, “with a feeling akin to ecstasy,” he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge at “the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,”
or in early spring feels on a ramble “intoxicated by the beauty of the
morning,” while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs, and
“the birds no longer sing at random,” but have begun to converse.
But though such allusions abound in his diary and private
correspondence, we must turn to “The Cossacks,” and “Conjugal Happiness”
for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those early
romances their fresh idyllic charm.
What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in
Nature coexisted with acute intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude.
In “The Cossacks,” the doubts, the mental gropings of Olenine--whose
personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy--haunt him betimes even
among the delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic
hero of “Conjugal Happiness,” calmly acquiesces in the inevitableness
of “love’s sad satiety” amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.
Doubt and despondency, increased by the vexations and failures attending
his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of
suicide.
“The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the
schoolwork so vague, my doubts arising from the wish to teach others,
while dissembling my own ignorance of what should be taught, were so
heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to
which I all but succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a
side of life as yet unknown to me which promised me salvation: this was
family life” (“My Confession”).
In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers
(daughter of Dr. Bers of Moscow) was consummated in the autumn of
1862--after a somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her extreme
youth--and Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental peace
such as he had never known. His letters of this period to Countess A. A.
Tolstoy, his friend Fet, and others, ring with enraptured allusions to
his new-found joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism and altruism, all
were swept aside by the impetus of triumphant love and of all-sufficing
conjugal happiness. When in June of the following year a child was born,
and the young wife, her features suffused with “a supernatural beauty”
lay trying to smile at the husband who knelt sobbing beside her, Tolstoy
must have realised that for once his prophetic intuition had been
unequal to its task. If his imagination could have conceived in
prenuptial days what depths of emotion might be wakened by fatherhood,
he would not have treated the birth of Masha’s first child in “Conjugal
Happiness” as a trivial material event, in no way affecting the mutual
relations of the disillusioned pair. He would have understood that at
this supreme crisis, rather than in the vernal hour of love’s avowal,
the heart is illumined with a joy which is fated “never to return.”
The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in fact
delayed in Tolstoy’s own life by his wife’s intelligent assistance in
his literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the mutual anxieties
and pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children.
Wider horizons opened to his mental vision, his whole being was
quickened and invigorated. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” all the
splendid fruit of the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear
witness to the stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning
recognition of the power and extent of female influence appears
incidentally in the sketches of high society in those two masterpieces
as well as in the eloquent closing passages of “What then must we do?”
(1886). Having affirmed that “it is women who form public opinion, and
in our day women are particularly powerful,” he finally draws a picture
of the ideal wife who shall urge her husband and train her children
to self-sacrifice. “Such women rule men and are their guiding stars. O
women--mothers! The salvation of the world lies in your hands!” In that
appeal to the mothers of the world there lurks a protest which in
later writings developed into overwhelming condemnation. True, he chose
motherhood for the type of self-sacrificing love in the treatise “On
Life,” which appeared soon after “What then must we do?” but maternal
love, as exemplified in his own home and elsewhere, appeared to him as a
noble instinct perversely directed.
The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child’s
physical well-being is the first essential in the mother’s eyes--the
growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly
tenanted--and this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father
accepted, Tolstoy as idealist condemned; while the penury he courted as
a lightening of his soul’s burden was averted by the strenuous exertions
of his wife. So a rift grew without blame attaching to either, and
Tolstoy henceforward wandered solitary in spirit through a wilderness
of thought, seeking rest and finding none, coming perilously near to
suicide before he reached haven.
To many it will seem that the finest outcome of that period of mental
groping, internal struggle, and contending with current ideas, lies in
the above-mentioned “What then must we do?” Certain it is that no human
document ever revealed the soul of its author with greater sincerity.
Not for its practical suggestions, but for its impassioned humanity, its
infectious altruism, “What then must we do?” takes its rank among the
world’s few living books. It marks that stage of Tolstoy’s evolution
when he made successive essays in practical philanthropy which filled
him with discouragement, yet were “of use to his soul” in teaching him
how far below the surface lie the seeds of human misery. The slums of
Moscow, crowded with beings sunk beyond redemption; the famine-stricken
plains of Samara where disease and starvation reigned, notwithstanding
the stream of charity set flowing by Tolstoy’s appeals and
notwithstanding his untiring personal devotion, strengthened further the
conviction, so constantly affirmed in his writings, of the impotence of
money to alleviate distress. Whatever negations of this dictum our own
systems of charitable organizations may appear to offer, there can be no
question but that in Russia it held and holds true.
The social condition of Russia is like a tideless sea, whose sullen
quiescence is broken from time to time by terrific storms which spend
themselves in unavailing fury. Reaction follows upon every forward
motion, and the advance made by each succeeding generation is barely
perceptible.
But in the period of peace following upon the close of the Crimean
War the soul of the Russian people was deeply stirred by the spirit of
Progress, and hope rose high on the accession of Alexander II.
The emancipation of the serfs was only one among a number of projected
reforms which engaged men’s minds. The national conscience awoke and
echoed the cry of the exiled patriot Herzen, “Now or never!” Educational
enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children
were started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana
(1861). The literary world throbbed with new life, and a brilliant
company of young writers came to the surface, counting among them names
of European celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov.
Unhappily the reign of Progress was short. The bureaucratic circle
hemming in the Czar took alarm, and made haste to secure their
ascendancy by fresh measures of oppression. Many schools were closed,
including that of Tolstoy, and the nascent liberty of the Press was
stifled by the most rigid censorship.
In this lamentable manner the history of Russia’s internal misrule
and disorder has continued to repeat itself for the last sixty
years, revolving in the same vicious circle of fierce repression and
persecution and utter disregard of the rights of individuals, followed
by fierce reprisals on the part of the persecuted; the voice of protest
no sooner raised than silenced in a prison cell or among Siberian
snow-fields, yet rising again and again with inextinguishable
reiteration; appeals for political freedom, for constitutional
government, for better systems and wider dissemination of education, for
liberty of the Press, and for an enlightened treatment of the masses,
callously received and rejected. The answer with which these appeals
have been met by the rulers of Russia is only too well known to the
civilised world, but the obduracy of Pharoah has called forth the
plagues of Egypt. Despite the unrivalled agrarian fertility of Russia,
famines recur with dire frequency, with disease and riot in their train,
while the ignominious termination of the Russo-Japanese war showed that
even the magnificent morale of the Russian soldier had been undermined
and was tainted by the rottenness of the authorities set over him. What
in such circumstances as these can a handful of philanthropists achieve,
and what avails alms-giving or the scattering of largesse to a people on
the point of spiritual dissolution?
In these conditions Tolstoy’s abhorrence of money, and his assertion
of its futility as a panacea for human suffering, appears not merely
comprehensible but inevitable, and his renunciation of personal property
the strictly logical outcome of his conclusions. The partition of his
estates between his wife and children, shortly before the outbreak of
the great famine in 1892, served to relieve his mind partially; and
the writings of Henry George, with which he became acquainted at this
critical time, were an additional incentive to concentrate his thoughts
on the land question. He began by reading the American propagandist’s
“Social Problems,” which arrested his attention by its main principles
and by the clearness and novelty of his arguments. Deeply impressed by
the study of this book, no sooner had he finished it than he possessed
himself of its forerunner, “Progress and Poverty,” in which the essence
of George’s revolutionary doctrines is worked out.
The plan of land nationalisation there explained provided Tolstoy with
well thought-out and logical reasons for a policy that was already more
than sympathetic to him. Here at last was a means of ensuring economic
equality for all, from the largest landowner to the humblest peasant--a
practical suggestion how to reduce the inequalities between rich and
poor.
Henry George’s ideas and methods are easy of comprehension. The land was
made by God for every human creature that was born into the world, and
therefore to confine the ownership of land to the few is wrong. If a man
wants a piece of land, he ought to pay the rest of the community for the
enjoyment of it. This payment or rent should be the only tax paid into
the Treasury of the State. Taxation on men’s own property (the produce
of their own labour) should be done away with, and a rent graduated
according to the site-value of the land should be substituted.
Monopolies would cease without violently and unjustly disturbing society
with confiscation and redistribution. No one would keep land idle if he
were taxed according to its value to the community, and not according
to the use to which he individually wished to put it. A man would then
readily obtain possession of land, and could turn it to account and
develop it without being taxed on his own industry. All human beings
would thus become free in their lives and in their labour. They would no
longer be forced to toil at demoralising work for low wages; they
would be independent producers instead of earning a living by providing
luxuries for the rich, who had enslaved them by monopolising the land.
The single tax thus created would ultimately overthrow the present
“civilisation” which is chiefly built up on wage-slavery.
Tolstoy gave his whole-hearted adhesion to this doctrine, predicting a
day of enlightenment when men would no longer tolerate a form of slavery
which he considered as revolting as that which had so recently been
abolished. Some long conversations with Henry George, while he was on
a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, gave additional strength to Tolstoy’s
conviction that in these theories lay the elements essential to the
transformation and rejuvenation of human nature, going far towards
the levelling of social inequalities. But to inoculate the landed
proprietors of Russia as a class with those theories was a task which
even his genius could not hope to accomplish.
He recognised the necessity of proceeding from the particular to the
general, and that the perfecting of human institutions was impossible
without a corresponding perfection in the individual. To this end
therefore the remainder of his life was dedicated. He had always held in
aversion what he termed external epidemic influences: he now endeavoured
to free himself not only from all current conventions, but from every
association which he had formerly cherished. Self-analysis and general
observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that
sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts,
if it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he
forcibly expressed in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” in which Woman and Music,
the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already,
in “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina,” his descriptions of female
charms resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm
himself or perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming
shoulders, her faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently
an object of aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with
her petty coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera
and elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. “Woman is a stumbling-block
in a man’s career,” remarks a philosophical husband in “Anna Karenina.”
“It is difficult to love a woman and do any good work, and the only way
to escape being reduced to inaction is to marry.”
Even in his correspondence with the Countess A. A. Tolstoy this
slighting tone prevails. “A woman has but one moral weapon instead
of the whole male arsenal. That is love, and only with this weapon is
feminine education successfully carried forward.” Tolstoy, in fact,
betrayed a touch of orientalism in his attitude towards women. In part
no doubt as a result of his motherless youth, in part to the fact
that his idealism was never stimulated by any one woman as it was by
individual men, his views retained this colouring on sex questions while
they became widened and modified in almost every other field of human
philosophy. It was only that, with a revulsion of feeling not seldom
experienced by earnest thinkers, attraction was succeeded by a repulsion
which reached the high note of exasperation when he wrote to a man
friend, “A woman in good health--why, she is a regular beast of prey!”
None the less, he showed great kindness and sympathy to the women who
sought his society, appealing to him for guidance. One of these (an
American, and herself a practical philanthropist), Miss Jane Addams,
expressed with feeling her sense of his personal influence. “The glimpse
of Tolstoy has made a profound impression on me, not so much by what he
said, as the life, the gentleness, the soul of him. I am sure you will
understand my saying that I got more of Tolstoy’s philosophy from our
conversations than I had gotten from our books.” (Quoted by Aylmer Maude
in his “Life of Tolstoy.”)
As frequently happens in the lives of reformers, Tolstoy found himself
more often in affinity with strangers than with his own kin. The
estrangement of his ideals from those of his wife necessarily affected
their conjugal relations, and the decline of mutual sympathy inevitably
induced physical alienation. The stress of mental anguish arising from
these conditions found vent in pages of his diaries (much of which I
have been permitted to read), pages containing matter too sacred and
intimate to use. The diaries shed a flood of light on Tolstoy’s ideas,
motives, and manner of life, and have modified some of my opinions,
explaining many hitherto obscure points, while they have also enhanced
my admiration for the man. They not only touch on many delicate
subjects--on his relations to his wife and family--but they also give
the true reasons for leaving his home at last, and explain why he did
not do so before. The time, it seems to me, is not ripe for disclosures
of this nature, which so closely concern the living.
Despite a strong rein of restraint his mental distress permeates the
touching letter of farewell which he wrote some sixteen years before his
death. He, however, shrank from acting upon it, being unable to satisfy
himself that it was a right step. This letter has already appeared in
foreign publications,* but it is quoted here because “I have suffered
long, dear Sophie, from the discord between my life and my beliefs.
* And in Birukov’s short Life of Tolstoy, 1911. of the
light which it throws on the character and disposition of
the writer, the workings of his mind being of greater moment
to us than those impulsive actions by which he was too often
judged.
“I cannot constrain you to alter your life or your accustomed ways.
Neither have I had the strength to leave you ere this, for I thought
my absence might deprive the little ones, still so young, of whatever
influence I may have over them, and above all that I should grieve
you. But I can no longer live as I have lived these last sixteen years,
sometimes battling with you and irritating you, sometimes myself giving
way to the influences and seductions to which I am accustomed and which
surround me. I have now resolved to do what I have long desired: to go
away . . . Even as the Hindoos, at the age of sixty, betake themselves
to the jungle; even as every aged and religious-minded man desires to
consecrate the last years of his life to God and not to idle talk, to
making jokes, to gossiping, to lawn-tennis; so I, having reached the
age of seventy, long with all my soul for calm and solitude, and if not
perfect harmony, at least a cessation from this horrible discord between
my whole life and my conscience.
“If I had gone away openly there would have been entreaties,
discussions: I should have wavered, and perhaps failed to act on my
decision, whereas it must be so. I pray of you to forgive me if my
action grieves you. And do you, Sophie, in particular let me go, neither
seeking me out, nor bearing me ill-will, nor blaming me . . . the
fact that I have left you does not mean that I have cause of complaint
against you . . . I know you were not able, you were incapable of
thinking and seeing as I do, and therefore you could not change your
life and make sacrifices to that which you did not accept. Besides, I do
not blame you; on the contrary, I remember with love and gratitude the
thirty-five long years of our life in common, and especially the first
half of the time when, with the courage and devotion of your maternal
nature, you bravely bore what you regarded as your mission. You have
given largely of maternal love and made some heavy sacrifices . . . but
during the latter part of our life together, during the last fifteen
years, our ways have parted. I cannot think myself the guilty one; I
know that if I have changed it is not owing to you, or to the world,
but because I could not do otherwise; nor can I judge you for not having
followed me, and I thank you for what you have given me and will ever
remember it with affection.
“Adieu, my dear Sophie, I love you.”
The personal isolation he craved was never to be his; but the isolation
of spirit essential to leadership, whether of thought or action, grew
year by year, so that in his own household he was veritably “in it but
not of it.”
At times his loneliness weighed upon him, as when he wrote: “You would
find it difficult to imagine how isolated I am, to what an extent my
true self is despised by those who surround me.” But he must, none
the less, have realised, as all prophets and seers have done, that
solitariness of soul and freedom from the petty complexities of social
life are necessary to the mystic whose constant endeavour is to simplify
and to winnow, the transient from the eternal.
Notwithstanding the isolation of his inner life he remained--or it might
more accurately be said he became--the most accessible of men.
Appeals for guidance came to him from all parts of the world--America,
France, China, Japan--while Yasnaya Polyana was the frequent resort of
those needing advice, sympathy, or practical assistance. None appealed
to him in vain; at the same time, he was exceedingly chary of explicit
rules of conduct. It might be said of Tolstoy that he became a spiritual
leader in spite of himself, so averse was he from assuming authority.
His aim was ever to teach his followers themselves to hear the inward
monitory voice, and to obey it of their own accord. “To know the meaning
of Life, you must first know the meaning of Love,” he would say; “and
then see that you do what love bids you.” His distrust of “epidemic
ideas” extended to religious communities and congregations.
“We must not go to meet each other, but go each of us to God. You say
it is easier to go all together? Why yes, to dig or to mow. But one can
only draw near to God in isolation . . . I picture the world to myself
as a vast temple, in which the light falls from above in the very
centre. To meet together all must go towards the light. There we shall
find ourselves, gathered from many quarters, united with men we did not
expect to see; therein is joy.”
The humility which had so completely supplanted his youthful arrogance,
and which made him shrink from impelling others to follow in his steps,
endued him also with the teachableness of a child towards those whom
he accepted as his spiritual mentors. It was a peasant nonconformist
writer, Soutaev, who by conversing with him on the revelations of the
Gospels helped him to regain his childhood’s faith, and incidentally
brought him into closer relations with religious, but otherwise
untaught, men of the people. He saw how instead of railing against fate
after the manner of their social superiors, they endured sickness and
misfortune with a calm confidence that all was by the will of God, as it
must be and should be. From his peasant teachers he drew the watchwords
Faith, Love, and Labour, and by their light he established that concord
in his own life without which the concord of the universe remains
impossible to realise. The process of inward struggle--told with
unsparing truth in “Confession”--is finely painted in “Father Serge,”
whose life story points to the conclusion at which Tolstoy ultimately
arrived, namely, that not in withdrawal from the common trials and
temptations of men, but in sharing them, lies our best fulfilment of our
duty towards mankind and towards God. Tolstoy gave practical effect to
this principle, and to this long-felt desire to be of use to the poor of
the country, by editing and publishing, aided by his friend Chertkov,*
modern literature has awakened so universal a sense of sympathy and
admiration, perhaps because none has been so entirely a labour of love.
* In Russia and out of it Mr. Chertkov has been the subject
of violent attack. Many of the misunderstandings of
Tolstoy’s later years have also been attributed by critics,
and by those who hate or belittle his ideas, to the
influence of this friend. These attacks are very regrettable
and require a word of protest. From tales, suited to the
means and intelligence of the humblest peasant. The
undertaking was initiated in 1885, and continued for many
years to occupy much of Tolstoy’s time and energies. He
threw himself with ardour into his editorial duties; reading
and correcting manuscripts, returning them sometimes to the
authors with advice as to their reconstruction, and making
translations from foreign works--all this in addition to his
own original contributions, in which he carried out the
principle which he constantly laid down for his
collaborators, that literary graces must be set aside, and
that the mental calibre of those for whom the books were
primarily intended must be constantly borne in mind. He
attained a splendid fulfilment of his own theories,
employing the moujik’s expressive vernacular in portraying
his homely wisdom, religious faith, and goodness of nature.
Sometimes the prevailing simplicity of style and motive is
tinged with a vague colouring of oriental legend, but the
personal accent is marked throughout. No similar achievement
in the beginning Mr. Chertkov has striven to spread the
ideas of Tolstoy, and has won neither glory nor money from
his faithful and single-hearted devotion. He has carried on
his work with a rare love and sympathy in spite of
difficulties. No one appreciated or valued his friendship
and self-sacrifice more than Tolstoy himself, who was firmly
attached to him from the date of his first meeting,
consulting him and confiding in him at every moment, even
during Mr. Chertkov’s long exile.
The series of educational primers which Tolstoy prepared and published
concurrently with the “Popular Tales” have had an equally large, though
exclusively Russian, circulation, being admirably suited to their
purpose--that of teaching young children the rudiments of history,
geography, and science. Little leisure remained for the service of Art.
The history of Tolstoy as a man of letters forms a separate page of his
biography, and one into which it is not possible to enter in the brief
compass of this introduction. It requires, however, a passing allusion.
Tolstoy even in his early days never seems to have approached near to
that manner of life which the literary man leads: neither to have shut
himself up in his study, nor to have barred the entrance to disturbing
friends. On the one hand, he was fond of society, and during his brief
residence in St. Petersburg was never so engrossed in authorship as to
forego the pleasure of a ball or evening entertainment. Little wonder,
when one looks back at the brilliant young officer surrounded and petted
by the great hostesses of Russia. On the other hand, he was no devotee
at the literary altar. No patron of literature could claim him as his
constant visitor; no inner circle of men of letters monopolised his idle
hours. Afterwards, when he left the capital and settled in the country,
he was almost entirely cut off from the association of literary men, and
never seems to have sought their companionship. Nevertheless, he had all
through his life many fast friends, among them such as the poet Fet,
the novelist Chekhov, and the great Russian librarian Stassov, who often
came to him. These visits always gave him pleasure. The discussions,
whether on the literary movements of the day or on the merits of Goethe
or the humour of Gogol, were welcome interruptions to his ever-absorbing
metaphysical studies. In later life, also, though never in touch with
the rising generation of authors, we find him corresponding with them,
criticising their style and subject matter. When Andreev, the most
modern of all modern Russian writers, came to pay his respects to
Tolstoy some months before his death, he was received with cordiality,
although Tolstoy, as he expressed himself afterwards, felt that there
was a great gulf fixed between them.
Literature, as literature, had lost its charm for him. “You are
perfectly right,” he writes to a friend; “I care only for the idea, and
I pay no attention to my style.” The idea was the important thing to
Tolstoy in everything that he read or wrote. When his attention was
drawn to an illuminating essay on the poet Lermontov he was pleased with
it, not because it demonstrated Lermontov’s position in the literary
history of Russia, but because it pointed out the moral aims which
underlay the wild Byronism of his works. He reproached the novelist
Leskov, who had sent him his latest novel, for the “exuberance” of his
flowers of speech and for his florid sentences--beautiful in their way,
he says, but inexpedient and unnecessary. He even counselled the younger
generation to give up poetry as a form of expression and to use prose
instead. Poetry, he maintained, was always artificial and obscure.
His attitude towards the art of writing remained to the end one of
hostility. Whenever he caught himself working for art he was wont to
reproach himself, and his diaries contain many recriminations against
his own weakness in yielding to this besetting temptation. Yet to these
very lapses we are indebted for this collection of fragments.
The greater number of stories and plays contained in these volumes
date from the years following upon Tolstoy’s pedagogic activity. Long
intervals, however, elapsed in most cases between the original synopsis
and the final touches. Thus “Father Serge,” of which he sketched the
outline to Mr. Chertkov in 1890, was so often put aside to make way for
purely ethical writings that not till 1898 does the entry occur in his
diary, “To-day, quite unexpectedly, I finished Serge.” A year previously
a dramatic incident had come to his knowledge, which he elaborated
in the play entitled “The Man who was dead.” It ran on the lines
familiarised by Enoch Arden and similar stories, of a wife deserted
by her husband and supported in his absence by a benefactor, whom
she subsequently marries. In this instance the supposed dead man was
suddenly resuscitated as the result of his own admissions in his
cups, the wife and her second husband being consequently arrested and
condemned to a term of imprisonment. Tolstoy seriously attacked the
subject during the summer of 1900, and having brought it within a
measurable distance of completion in a shorter time than was usual with
him, submitted it to the judgment of a circle of friends. The drama made
a deep impression on the privileged few who read it, and some mention of
it appeared in the newspapers.
Shortly afterwards a young man came to see Tolstoy in private. He begged
him to refrain from publishing “The Man who was dead,” as it was the
history of his mother’s life, and would distress her gravely, besides
possibly occasioning further police intervention. Tolstoy promptly
consented, and the play remained, as it now appears, in an unfinished
condition. He had already felt doubtful whether “it was a thing God
would approve,” Art for Art’s sake having in his eyes no right to
existence. For this reason a didactic tendency is increasingly evident
in these later stories. “After the Ball” gives a painful picture of
Russian military cruelty; “The Forged Coupon” traces the cancerous
growth of evil, and demonstrates with dramatic force the cumulative
misery resulting from one apparently trivial act of wrongdoing.
Of the three plays included in these volumes, “The Light that shines
in Darkness” has a special claim to our attention as an example of
autobiography in the guise of drama. It is a specimen of Tolstoy’s gift
of seeing himself as others saw him, and viewing a question in all
its bearings. It presents not actions but ideas, giving with entire
impartiality the opinions of his home circle, of his friends, of the
Church and of the State, in regard to his altruistic propaganda and
to the anarchism of which he has been accused. The scene of the
renunciation of the estates of the hero may be taken as a literal
version of what actually took place in regard to Tolstoy himself,
while the dialogues by which the piece is carried forward are more like
verbatim records than imaginary conversations.
This play was, in addition, a medium by which Tolstoy emphasised
his abhorrence of military service, and probably for this reason its
production is absolutely forbidden in Russia. A word may be said here on
Tolstoy’s so-called Anarchy, a term admitting of grave misconstruction.
In that he denied the benefit of existing governments to the people
over whom they ruled, and in that he stigmatised standing armies as
“collections of disciplined murderers,” Tolstoy was an Anarchist; but in
that he reprobated the methods of violence, no matter how righteous
the cause at stake, and upheld by word and deed the gospel of Love
and submission, he cannot be judged guilty of Anarchism in its full
significance. He could not, however, suppress the sympathy which he
felt with those whose resistance to oppression brought them into deadly
conflict with autocracy. He found in the Caucasian chieftain, Hadji
Murat, a subject full of human interest and dramatic possibilities; and
though some eight years passed before he corrected the manuscript for
the last time (in 1903), it is evident from the numbers of entries in
his diary that it had greatly occupied his thoughts so far back even
as the period which he spent in Tiflis prior to the Crimean war. It was
then that the final subjugation of the Caucasus took place, and Shamil
and his devoted band made their last struggle for freedom. After the
lapse of half a century, Tolstoy gave vent in “Hadji Murat” to the
resentment which the military despotism of Nicholas I. had roused in his
sensitive and fearless spirit.
Courage was the dominant note in Tolstoy’s character, and none have
excelled him in portraying brave men. His own fearlessness was of the
rarest, in that it was both physical and moral. The mettle tried and
proved at Sebastopol sustained him when he had drawn on himself the
bitter animosity of “Holy Synod” and the relentless anger of Czardom.
In spite of his nonresistance doctrine, Tolstoy’s courage was not of
the passive order. It was his natural bent to rouse his foes to combat,
rather than wait for their attack, to put on the defensive every
falsehood and every wrong of which he was cognisant. Truth in himself
and in others was what he most desired, and that to which he strove at
all costs to attain. He was his own severest critic, weighing his own
actions, analysing his own thoughts, and baring himself to the eyes
of the world with unflinching candour. Greatest of autobiographers, he
extenuates nothing: you see the whole man with his worst faults and
best qualities; weaknesses accentuated by the energy with which they
are charactered, apparent waste of mental forces bent on solving the
insoluble, inherited tastes and prejudices, altruistic impulses
and virile passions, egoism and idealism, all strangely mingled and
continually warring against each other, until from the death-throes of
spiritual conflict issued a new birth and a new life. In the ancient
Scripture “God is love” Tolstoy discerned fresh meaning, and strove with
superhuman energy to bring home that meaning to the world at large. His
doctrine in fact appears less as a new light in the darkness than as a
revival of the pure flame of “the Mystic of the Galilean hills,” whose
teaching he accepted while denying His divinity.
Of Tolstoy’s beliefs in regard to the Christian religion it may be said
that with advancing years he became more and more disposed to regard
religious truth as one continuous stream of spiritual thought flowing
through the ages of man’s history, emanating principally from the
inspired prophets and seers of Israel, India, and China. Finally,
in 1909, in a letter to a friend he summed up his conviction in the
following words:--“For me the doctrine of Jesus is simply one of those
beautiful religious doctrines which we have received from Egyptian,
Jewish, Hindoo, Chinese, and Greek antiquity. The two great principles
of Jesus: love of God--in a word absolute perfection--and love of one’s
neighbour, that is to say, love of all men without distinction, have
been preached by all the sages of the world--Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse,
Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and among the
moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others.
Religious and moral truth is everywhere and always the same. I have
no predilection whatever for Christianity. If I have been particularly
interested in the doctrine of Jesus it is, firstly, because I was born
in that religion and have lived among Christians; secondly, because I
have found a great spiritual joy in freeing the doctrine in its purity
from the astounding falsifications wrought by the Churches.”
Tolstoy’s life-work was indeed a splendid striving to free truth from
falsehood, to simplify the complexities of civilisation and demonstrate
their futility. Realists as gifted have come and gone and left but
little trace. It is conceivable that the great trilogy of “Anna
Karenina,” “War and Peace,” and “Resurrection” may one day be forgotten,
but Tolstoy’s teaching stands on firmer foundations, and has stirred the
hearts of thousands who are indifferent to the finest display of psychic
analysis. He has taught men to venture beyond the limits set by reason,
to rise above the actual and to find the meaning of life in love. It was
his mission to probe our moral ulcers to the roots and to raise moribund
ideals from the dust, breathing his own vitality into them, till they
rose before our eyes as living aspirations. The spiritual joy of
which he wrote was no rhetorical hyperbole; it was manifest in the man
himself, and was the fount of the lofty idealism which made him not only
“the Conscience of Russia” but of the civilised world.
Idealism is one of those large abstractions which are invested by
various minds with varying shades of meaning, and which find expression
in an infinite number of forms. Ideals bred and fostered in the heart of
man receive at birth an impress from the life that engenders them, and
when that life is tempest-tossed the thought that springs from it
must bear a birth-mark of the storm. That birth-mark is stamped on all
Tolstoy’s utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though
he did not pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with
eyes undimmed from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is
not thereby invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none
the less a state of perfection to which we must continually aspire,
undaunted by partial failure.
“There is nothing wrong in not living up to the ideal which you have
made for yourself, but what is wrong is, if on looking back, you cannot
see that you have made the least step nearer to your ideal.”
How far Tolstoy’s doctrines may influence succeeding generations it is
impossible to foretell; but when time has extinguished what is merely
personal or racial, the divine spark which he received from his great
spiritual forerunners in other times and countries will undoubtedly be
found alight. His universality enabled him to unite himself closely with
them in mental sympathy; sometimes so closely, as in the case of J. J.
Rousseau, as to raise analogies and comparisons designed to show that he
merely followed in a well-worn pathway. Yet the similarity of Tolstoy’s
ideas to those of the author of the “Contrat Social” hardly goes beyond
a mutual distrust of Art and Science as aids to human happiness
and virtue, and a desire to establish among mankind a true sense of
brotherhood. For the rest, the appeals which they individually made to
Humanity were as dissimilar as the currents of their lives, and equally
dissimilar in effect.
The magic flute of Rousseau’s eloquence breathed fanaticism into his
disciples, and a desire to mass themselves against the foes of liberty.
Tolstoy’s trumpet-call sounds a deeper note. It pierces the heart,
summoning each man to the inquisition of his own conscience, and to
justify his existence by labour, that he may thereafter sleep the sleep
of peace.
The exaltation which he awakens owes nothing to rhythmical language
nor to subtle interpretations of sensuous emotion; it proceeds from a
perception of eternal truth, the truth that has love, faith, courage,
and self-sacrifice for the cornerstones of its enduring edifice.