I Goethe and Tolstoy
At the beginning of our century a man was still living in Weimar, Julius Stötzer by name and schoolmaster by calling, who, as a sixteen-year-old student, had dwelt under the same roof with Dr. Eckermann and only a few steps away from Goethe’s door. Young Stötzer and a schoolmate and fellow-lodger would now and again, with beating hearts, catch gleams and glimpses of the hallowed form as the old man sat by his window. But the lads were possessed by a desire to see him for once close at hand and get a good look at him. They applied to his famulus, their house-mate, and implored him by some means or other to procure them this boon. Eckermann was a kindly soul. One summer day he let the boys in by the back gate to the garden of the illustrious house; and there, hugely confused, they stood and waited for Goethe; who, to their consternation, did actually appear. He was strolling about the garden in a light-coloured house-coat—very probably the famous flannel dressing-gown we wot of—and catching sight of the lads went up to them. There he stood, wafting odours of eau-de-Cologne, with his hands, of course, on his back, and his abdomen to the fore; with that air of a city father beneath which, so we are told, he hid his self-consciousness—and asked the youths their names and what they wanted. Probably all in one breath; which indeed, if it thus happened, so added to the austere effect that they could scarcely get out an answer. However, they stammered something; whereupon the old man bade them be diligent in their tasks—which they were free to interpret as meaning that they would do better to be at them and not stand gaping here—and went his way.
So much for that—it happened in the year 1828.—Thirty-three years afterwards, one day about one o’clock Stötzer—now an experienced and devoted master in the secondary schools—was about to take the second class of the session when a seminary pupil stuck his head in at the door and announced that a stranger wanted to see Herr Stötzer. And without more ado the stranger entered at his heels: a man considerably younger than the schoolmaster, with a thinnish beard, prominent cheek-bones, and small grey eyes, with furrows between the heavy brows. He neglected to introduce or otherwise account for himself; but simply and straightway asked what lessons there were this afternoon, and on hearing that there was first history and then language, professed himself well pleased. He said that he had been visiting schools in southern Germany, France, and England; and sought an acquaintance with those of northern Germany as well. He spoke like a German. You would take him for a schoolmaster, from the comments he made, his well-informed, intelligent questions, and the way he kept putting things down in his notebook. He stopped for the whole of the lesson-hour. The children wrote a theme, an exercise on some subject in their copy-books; and the stranger said he was greatly interested in these compositions—might he take them away with him? “Dear me,” Stötzer thought, “that is naïve.” Who was to reimburse the children for their copy-books? After all, Weimar was a poor city.... He said as much, in politer phrases. But the stranger replied that that might be managed, and went out. Stötzer sent a message to the Director, telling him of the unusual occurrence. And the adjective he used was the correct one—though it was only much later that he understood how correct it had been. For at the moment and on the spot it could not mean much to him, when the stranger came back, with a bundle of writing-paper under his arm, and gave his name to Stötzer and the Director: Count Tolstoy, from Russia. But Schoolmaster Stötzer lived to a ripe old age, and consequently had plenty of time to hear about the gentleman whose acquaintance he had thus made.
This man, then, who lived in Weimar from 1812 to 1905, and whose life was otherwise no doubt uneventful enough, might boast of having enjoyed one extraordinary privilege: the personal acquaintance of both Goethe and Tolstoy, the two great men whose names form the subject of this essay. Yes, Tolstoy was in Weimar! When he was thirty-three years old—for he was born in the year that saw young Stötzer’s interview with Goethe—Count Leo Nikolaevich came to Germany from Brussels (where he had in the first place met Proudhon and been convinced by him that la propriété is le vol, and in the second place had written the story called Polikuschka) and visited the city of Goethe. As a distinguished stranger and guest of the Russian Embassy he was admitted to the house on the Frauenplan, which was not then open to the public. We are told, however, that he was more interested in the Fröbel kindergarten, conducted by one of Fröbel’s own pupils, and studied its pedagogic system with the greatest zeal and curiosity.
You see, of course, why I have told you this little tale. It was in hope to render more palatable the “and” at the top of the page, which must have made you lift your eyebrows at first sight. Goethe and Tolstoy. What sort of arbitrary and unseemly combination is that? Nietzsche once reproached us Germans with a peculiar clumsiness in the use of the word “and.” We said “Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” he sneered; we said “Goethe and Schiller” too—he was very much afraid we even said “Schiller and Goethe”! Setting Schopenhauer and Hartmann aside; as far as Goethe and Schiller are concerned, Nietzsche’s highly subjective dislike of moralists and theatre people should not have led him so far astray as to deny a relationship which is not less valid because of the inherent and typical contrast it displays. Its best spokesman, indeed, was its supposedly affronted half! It was hasty of Nietzsche, it was unjustifiably autocratic, thus to mock, and in his mockery to invoke, or assume, an order of merit which is, and must remain, highly controversial, the most controversial thing in the world. It is not on the whole the German way to be hasty in deciding precisely this question of all questions. We instinctively avoid putting ourselves on record, on one side or the other. We prefer a free-handed policy, and so, personally, do I; and I mean to stick to this policy, to support and glorify it, in all that follows. Precisely this policy, and no other, is the meaning of the conjunction when we say “Goethe and Schiller”: where it converts the combination to an antithesis, and combines with the deliberate intention of contrast. No one who has ever come into contact with the sphere of German thought represented by that classic essay which comprehends all the others and makes them superfluous—I mean Schiller’s Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung—can fail to find this “and” deeply antithetic. Another precisely similar instance is the conjunction “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” On the other hand, if we deny the “and” its right to point a contrast, and confine its function to asserting essential affinity, essential similarity—what then? Would there not at once take place in our fancy a change of partners? On profound intellectual, nay, rather, on profoundly natural grounds, would not Schiller and Dostoyevsky move together, and on the other side—Goethe and Tolstoy?
You will be feeling far from satisfied. Obviously. You will say: there is something besides quality, there is position, there is rank. All honour, you will say, to antithesis, but things which differ so much in order of greatness really cannot be placed alongside like that. Granted that the one was a European humanist and thorough-paced pagan, while the other was an anarchist, and a primitive oriental Christian to boot. But the German world-poet, whose name one names with the highest, with Dante, with Shakespeare, and the realistic novelist who in our own era and not so long ago ended his enigmatic life, and that truly in a most enigmatic manner; to speak of these two in the same breath—it simply will not do, it is an offence against the aristocratic instinct, it is in bad taste.
We put on one side the paganism of the one, the Christianity of the other. Let us leave them there—we may find time to come back to them later on. But as for this aristocratic instinct, if you like to call it that; let me say roundly that so far from offending against it with my parallel, I do it explicit honour. Are you certain you have no delusions—are you sure your perspective is not distorted in this matter of rank and relative greatness? Turgeniev, in his last letter to Tolstoy, written on his death-bed in Paris, in which he conjured his friend to return to literature and stop tormenting himself with theology, Turgeniev was the first to give Tolstoy the title of “the great writer of Russia,” which he has had ever since, and which seems to mean that he holds in the eyes of his countrymen the same rank that the author of Faust and Wilhelm Meister does in ours. Tolstoy himself, as we were saying, was Christian through and through. Yet his humility was not so exaggerated as to prevent him from setting his name boldly beside the greatest, yes, beside the legendary great. He said of War and Peace: “Modesty aside, it is something like the Iliad.” He was heard to say the same of his earliest work, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Was that megalomania? To me, frankly, it sounds like plain and simple fact. “Nur die Lumpe,” says Goethe, “sind bescheiden.” A heathen saying. But Tolstoy subscribed to it. He saw himself always of heroic grandeur; and as early as at thirty-seven, writing in his diary, he ranked his own works, the finished and the still to write, with the great literature of the world.
In the judgment, then, of those competent to render it, the great writer of Russia; by his own estimate, the Homer of his time—but that is not all. After Tolstoy’s death Maxim Gorky published a little book of reminiscences, the best book, in my humble opinion, that he has written. It closes with the words: “And I, who do not believe in God, looked at him timidly, for some dark reason looked at him and thought: The man is godlike.” Godlike. Extraordinary. Nobody ever said or thought that of Dostoyevsky, nobody ever could have thought or said it. He has been called a saint; and one might in all sincerity apply the word to Schiller, at least in the Christian sense which it must always connote, if without the specifically Byzantine flavour. But Goethe and Tolstoy, these two, have been found godlike. The epithet “Olympian” is a commonplace. It was not, however, only as a world-renowned old man of commanding intellect that Goethe had it applied to him; it was while he was still young, still the youth, of whose godlike, compelling gaze Wieland sang, that he had the attribute conferred upon him, a thousand times, by his own contemporaries. Riemer relates that at sixty the old man took occasion to make rather acridly merry over it. “The deuce take godlike,” he cried. “What good does it do me to have people say: ‘That is a godlike man,’ when I go by? They behave just as they like, they impose on me just the same. People only call a man godlike when he lets them have their own way!”—As for Tolstoy, you could not say he was Olympian; he was not a humanistic god, of course. He was, Gorky says, more like some sort of Russian god, sitting on a maple throne under a golden lime-tree; pagan, then, with a difference, compared with the Zeus of Weimar, but pagan none the less, because gods are pagan. Why? Because they are of the same essence as nature. One does not need to be a follower of Spinoza—as Goethe was, and had his own good reasons for it—to feel God and Nature as one, and the nobility that nature confers as godlike. “His superhumanly developed individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost forbidding, he has something in him of the fabled Sviatogor, whom the earth cannot hold.” Thus Gorky, on Tolstoy. And I cite it in this matter of relative greatness. Gorky, for instance, goes on to say: “There is something about him which always makes me want to shout: ‘Behold what a marvellous man lives upon this earth!’ For he is, so to speak, in general and beyond everything else, a human human being, a man.” That sounds like something we have heard before. It reminds us of—whom?
No, the question of rank, the aristocratic problem, is no problem at all, within the grouping I have chosen. It becomes one only when we change partners: when we take saintly humanity and couple it, by means of the antithetic conjunction, with the godlike; when we say “Goethe and Schiller,” “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” Only then, I think, do we pose the question of aristocracy, the problem in ethics and æsthetics: Which is greater? Which is more aristocratic? I shall not answer either of these. I will let the reader come to his individual conclusion in this matter of value, according to his own taste. Or, less glibly put, according to the conception he has of humanity, which—I must add, sotto voce—will have to be one-sided and incomplete to admit of his coming to any decision at all.
Is it not strangely moving to hear that one man had known them both, the creator of Faust and the “great writer of Russia”? For certainly they belonged to different centuries. Tolstoy’s life covered the greater part of the nineteenth. He is absolutely its son. As an artist he exhibits all of its characteristics, and, indeed, those of its second half. As for Goethe, the eighteenth century brought him forth, and essential traits of his character and training belong to it—a statement it would be very easy to substantiate. Yet on the other hand one might say that just as much of the eighteenth, Goethe’s century, survived in Tolstoy as there had already come to birth of Tolstoy’s, of the nineteenth, in Goethe. Tolstoy’s rationalizing Christianity has more in common with the deism of the eighteenth century than it has with Dostoyevsky’s violent and mystical religiosity, which was entirely of the nineteenth. His system of practical religion—the essence of which was a destructive intellectual force that undermined all regulations, human and divine—had more affinity with the social criticism of the eighteenth century than with Dostoyevsky’s moralizations, although those were, on the one hand, far more profound, on the other far more religious. And Tolstoy’s penchant for Utopias, his hatred of civilization, his passion for rusticity, for a bucolic placidity of the soul—an aristocratic passion, the passion of a nobleman—to all that, the eighteenth century, and indeed the French eighteenth century, can lay claim. And, on the other hand, Goethe. What most astonishes us in that masterpiece of his old age, the sociological novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, is the intuition, the keenness and breadth of vision—they seem positively occult, but are simply the expression of a finer organism, the fruit of the most sensitive penetration—which anticipate the whole social and economic development of the nineteenth century: the industrialization of the old cultural and agrarian countries, the triumph of the machine, the rise of the organized labouring classes, the class conflict, democracy, socialism, Americanism itself, with the intellectual and educational consequences of all these.
But when all is said, and whatever the chronological affinity of these two great men, they cannot be called contemporaries. Only four years did the two of them inhabit this mortal sphere together: from 1828, when Tolstoy was born, to 1832, when Goethe died. Which does not prevent them from having one cultural element of their intellectual and spiritual make-up in common, and that a very real and positive one—to say nothing of universally human elements like Homer and the Bible. I mean the element Rousseau.
“I have read the whole of Rousseau, the whole twenty volumes, including the lexicon of music. What I felt for him was more than enthusiasm; it was worship. At fifteen I wore round my neck, instead of the usual crucifix, a medallion with his picture. I am so familiar with some of the passages in his works that I feel as though I had written them myself.” These are Tolstoy’s words, taken from his Confessions. And certainly he was Rousseauian more intimately, more personally, more damagingly, so to speak, than was Goethe, who as a man had nothing in common with poor Jean Jacques’s enigmatic and not always ingratiating complexities. Yet hear Goethe (I quote from an early review): “Religious conditions, and the social conditions so narrowly bound up with them; the pressure of the laws, the still greater pressure of society, to say nothing of a thousand other factors, leave the civilized man or the civilized nation no soul of his own. They stifle the promptings of nature, they obliterate every trait out of which a characteristic picture could be made.” That is, from the literary point of view, Sturm und Drang. But from the intellectual and historical, it is Rousseauianism. It bears the impress of revolution, even of anarchy; though in the Russian seeker after God that impress is religious and early Christian, whereas in Goethe’s words the humanistic trend can be felt, the irradiation of a cultural and self-developing individualism which Tolstoy would have banned as egoistic and unchristian. But unchristian, egoistic, it is not: it means work on man, on mankind, on humanity, and it issues, as the Wanderjahre shows, in the social world.
What two ideas does the very sound of Rousseau’s name inevitably evoke—aside, that is, from the idea of nature, which is, of course, first and foremost? Why, naturally, the idea “education” and the idea “autobiography.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the author of Émile and of the Confessions. Now, both these elements, the pedagogic and the autobiographic, are present in full strength in Goethe as in Tolstoy; they cannot be dissociated from the work or the life of either. It is as an amateur pedagogue that Tolstoy has been introduced in this essay; and we know that for long years he was nothing else, that he forced into this channel the whole violence of the passion that was in him, and wrestled theoretically and practically to the very verge of exhaustion with the problem of the Russian primary school. As for Goethe, it is needless to say that his was a pedagogic nature in the fullest sense of the word. The two great monuments of his life, one in poetry and one in prose, the Faust and the Wilhelm Meister, are both creative treatments of the theme of education. And whereas in the Lehrjahre the idea is still that of the individual forming himself—“for to form myself, just as I am, was darkly, from my youth up, my purpose and my desire,” says Wilhelm Meister—in the Wanderjahre the educational idea is objectivated, and issues in social, even in political concepts; while at the heart of the work is, as you know, the stern and beautiful Utopia of the Pedagogic Province.
The second association, the autobiographic, the confessional, is of course easy to attest in both authors. That all of Goethe’s works represent “fragments of one great confession” we should know ourselves even if he did not tell us; and is not Dichtung und Wahrheit, next to the Confessions of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, the most famous autobiography in the world? Well, and Tolstoy too wrote confessions: I mean in the main a book with that title, laid down throughout on the line of the great self-revelations that runs from the African saint to Strindberg, the son of the servant. But Tolstoy is in the same case with Goethe: not by virtue of one book alone is he autobiographical. Beginning with the Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, throughout the whole body of his work, he is autobiographical to an extent that makes it possible for Merezhkovsky, the great Russian critic, to say: “The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy is at bottom nothing else than one tremendous diary, kept for fifty years, one endless, explicit confession.” Yes, and this critic adds: “In the literatures of all times and peoples there will hardly be found a second example of an author who reveals his personal and private life, often in its most intimate aspects, with such open-hearted sincerity.” Well—open-hearted.... I may be allowed a comment upon the somewhat euphemistic epithet. One might, if one wanted to be invidious, use a different adjective to characterize this sincerity—an adjective that would suggest what Turgeniev had in mind when he once ironically referred to the shortcomings inevitable in a great writer: by which, obviously, he meant the lack of certain restraints, the absence of a customary reserve, discretion, decency, shame, or, on the positive side, the domination of a definite claim on the love of the world—an absolute claim, indeed, in that it is all one to the revealer whether he reveal virtues or vices. He craves to be known and loved, loved because known, or loved although known; that is what I mean by an absolute claim on love. And the remarkable thing is that the world acknowledges and honours the claim.
“A life that is romantic has always self-love at the bottom of it.” I like this saying; and subjoin that self-love is also always at the bottom of all autobiography. For the impulse a man feels to “fixate” his life, to exhibit its development, to celebrate his own destiny in set literary form and passionately invoke the sympathy of his contemporaries and posterity, has for a premise the same uncommonly lively sense of his own ego which, according to that penetrating saying, is at the bottom of a life full of romantic happenings. Subjectively, for the man himself, but also objectively for the world at large. Of course, this love of self is something different, something stronger, deeper, more fruitful, than any mere self-complacency or self-love of the ordinary kind. In the finest instances it is what Goethe in the Wanderjahre calls “Ehrfurcht vor sich selbst,” and celebrates as the highest form of awe. It is the grateful and reverent self-absorption of the darling of the gods, that rings with incomparable sincerity from the lines:
Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,
Ihren Lieblingen ganz:
Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz.
It is a proud and naïve interest in the mystery of high preferment, tangible superiority, perilous privilege, whose standard-bearer the chosen one feels himself to be; it is a craving to bear witness, out of the deeps of experience, how a genius is shaped; a desire to link together, by some miracle of grace, joy, and service; it was this desire which brought forth Dichtung und Wahrheit and in the truest sense inspires all great autobiography.
“I felt the need,” writes Tolstoy of his youthful period, “to be known and loved of all the world; to name my name, the sound of which would greatly impress everybody, so that they would troop round me and thank me for something....” That was quite early, before he had conceived any of his creative works or envisaged the idea of founding a new, practical, earthly, dogmaless religion—though this idea, according to his journal, had occurred to him by the time he was twenty-seven years old. His name, he feels, his mere name, Leo Tolstoy, this formula for his darkly and mightily stirring ego, should, as it were, serve notice to the world; whereby, for some reason as yet unknown, the world should be greatly impressed, and feel impelled to surround him in grateful throngs. Long after that, in 1883—at about the same date that Tolstoy posed for an artist friend, sitting at his table and writing—he reads aloud to another friend and admirer, the one-time officer Tschertkof, from the manuscript of his just-completed personal revelations What Does My Faith Consist In? He reads from this manuscript a categorical reprobation of military service, on the grounds of his Christianity; which so gratifies the ex-officer that he hears nothing else, ceases to listen, and only rouses out of his absorption when he hears, suddenly uttered, the reader’s own name. Tolstoy, coming to the end of his manuscript, had, with particular clarity, says Tschertkof, enunciated the name signed underneath the text: “Leo Tolstoy.”
Goethe once played a little literary hoax with his own name, which I have always found singularly touching. You will recall that in the West-östliche Divan he selected for himself as the lover of Marianne Zuleika the name of Hatem (the most richly giving and receiving one). The choice betrays a blissful self-preoccupation. Now, in one of the poems, a glorious one, he uses this name at the end of a line, where, however, it does not rhyme as according to the structure of the verse it should, and the name which would rhyme if it stood there is another, is Goethe’s own; so that the reader involuntarily makes the substitution mentally as he reads. “Nur dies Herz,” says the already white-haired lover to the youthful beloved,
“Nur dies Herz, es ist von Dauer,
Schwillt in Jugendlichstem Flor;
Unter Schnee und Nebelschauer
Rast ein Ätna dir hervor.
Du beschämst wie Morgenröte
Jener Gipfel ernste Wand,
Und noch einmal fühlet Hatem
Frühlingshauch und Sommerbrand.”
“Und noch einmal fühlet Goethe...” With what delightful playfulness the poet makes the reader eliminate the name Hatem, which does not give the rhyme his ear expects! The eastern masquerade is abandoned for autobiography, the ear confutes the eye, and Goethe’s own name, beloved of men and gods, emerges with peculiar clarity, rhymed to perfection and irradiated by the most beautiful thing the world of sense can show: the rosy dawn.
May one call that “Selbstgefälligkeit,” that awestruck sense of plenitude, of copious abundance, which pervades the consciousness of the darling of the gods? Goethe all his life had set his face against the affectation which might condemn such a feeling. He let it be known that in his opinion self-condemnation was the business of those who had no ground for anything else. He even openly spoke a good word for ordinary vanity, and said that the suppression of it would mean social decay, adding that the vain man can never be entirely crude. Whereupon follows the question: Is love of self ever quite distinguishable from love of humanity?
Wie sie sich an mich verschwendet,
Bin ich mir ein wertes Ich;
Hätte sie sich weggewendet,
Augenblicks verlör’ ich mich.
And is not young Tolstoy’s dream of glory, his craving to be known and loved, evidence of his love to the great Thou of the world? Love of the ego and love of the world are psychologically not to be divorced; which makes the old question whether love is ever altruistic, and not utterly egotistic, the most idle question in the world. In love, the contradiction between egotism and altruism is abrogated quite.
From which it follows that the autobiographical impulse scarcely ever turns out to be a mere dilettante trifling. It seems to carry its own justification with it. Talent, generally speaking, is a ticklish, difficult conception; the point of which is really less whether a man can do something than whether a man is something. One might almost say that talent is nothing more or less than a high state of adequacy to one’s lot in life. But whose life is it that possesses this dignity in the face of destiny? With brains and sensibility anything can be made out of any life, out of any life a romantic existence can be made. Differing in this from the pure poetic impulse, which so often rests upon sheer self-deception, the autobiographic, as it seems, always presupposes a degree of brains and sensibility which justifies it beforehand; so that it need only become productive to be certain of our sympathy. Hence the conclusion I drew: that if the world sanction the love of self, which is at the bottom of the impulse, it will as a rule respond to it as well.
“Behold, what a marvellous creature lives upon this earth!” Gorky, contemplating Tolstoy, utters this inward cry. And this cry it is to which all biography seeks to move the world. Any human life, given brains and sensibility, can be made interesting and sympathetic, even the most wretched. J. J. Rousseau was not precisely one’s idea of a darling of the gods. The father of the French Revolution was an unhappy wretch, half or three-quarters mad, and probably a suicide. Certainly the blend of sensibility and catarrh of the bladder displayed in the Confessions is not, æsthetically speaking, to everybody’s taste. Nevertheless, his self-exposure contains and constitutes a claim upon the love of the world, which has been so abundantly honoured, with so many tears, that really one might call poor Jean Jacques the well-beloved, le bien-aimé. And this world-wide emotional response he owes to his bond with nature—rather a one-sided bond, it must be owned, for certainly this fool of genius, this exhibitionistic world-shaker, was a stepchild of the All-Mother rather than one of her pets, an accident of birth instead of a god-given miracle of favour and preference. His relation to nature was sentimental in the fullest sense of the word, and the tale of his life swept over the world in a wave of sentiment, not to say sentimentality. Poor Jean Jacques!
No, not in this tone does one refer to the two whom men called godlike, divine; in whom, as we have seen, important traits of Rousseau’s character are reproduced. For they were not sentimental, scarcely had they occasion to yearn for nature, they themselves were nature. Their bond with her was not one-sided, like Rousseau’s—or if it was, then it was nature who loved them, her darlings, loved them and clung to them, while on their side they drew away, and strove to free themselves from her heavy and earth-bound domination; with indifferent success, it must be said, looking at them both singly and together. Goethe confesses: “So here I am, with all my thousand thoughts, sent back to be a child again, unacquainted with the moment, in darkness about myself.” And to Schiller, the singer of the highest freedom, he writes: “How great an advantage your sympathy and interest will be to me you will soon see, when you discover in me a sort of sluggishness and gloom which is stronger than myself.” And yet we may agree that Goethe’s highly humanistic effort to “convert the cloudy natural product into a clear image of itself (i.e., of reason) and so discharge the duty and the claim of existence,” as Riemer with extraordinary beauty expresses it, was crowned with a purer success than the attempt of Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy to transform his life into the holy life of our blessed father the Bojar Lev, as Gorky says. This process of making a Christian and a saint of himself, on the part of a human being and artist so loved of nature that she had endowed him with godlikeness, was, as an effort at spiritual regeneration, most inept. Anglo-Saxondom hailed it with acclaim, but, after all, the spectacle is painful rather than gratifying, compared with Goethe’s high endeavour. For there is no conflict between nature and culture; the second only ennobles the first, it does not repudiate it. But Tolstoy’s method was not the ennoblement but the renunciation of self, and that can quite easily become the most mortifying kind of deception. It is true that Goethe, at a certain stage in his development, called Götz the work of an undisciplined boy; but never did he so childishly and miserably calumniate his own art as the ageing Tolstoy did, when he regretted having written Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, the fruit of his fresh youthful vigour, condemning it as insincere, literary, sinful; or when he spoke at large of “the artistic twaddle” that filled the twelve volumes of his works, and to which “people today ascribe an unmerited significance.” That is what I call false self-renunciation, a clumsy attempt at spiritualization. Yet renounce himself as he would in words, his very existence gave him the lie; and Gorky looked at him, the patriarch with the “sly” little smile and the artist hands with their swollen veins, and thought to himself: “The man is godlike.”
Weimar, and Yasnaya Polyana. There is no spot on earth today whence power streams out as once from these two, no shrine strong in grace, the resort of pilgrims, whither the longings and vague hopes of men, their need and craving to adore, turn as they did thitherward at the beginning of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We possess descriptions of the state Goethe kept in Weimar; when he, now no longer merely the creator of certain works of art, but a prince of life, the highest representative of European culture, civilization, and humanity, with his staff of secretaries, his higher aides and eager friends at his back, bore up, with that bestarred official dignity which the world enjoined upon him and behind which he hid the mysteries and abysses of his genius, against the onrushing tide of civilized humanity—princes, artists, youths, and rustics, to whom the consciousness of having been vouchsafed one glimpse of him might gild the rest of their lives; even though the great moment itself might and often did turn out to be a chilling disappointment. In much the same way, I say, the little Russian village became, about 1900, the centre and nodal point, the shrine whose virtue was such that it drew all the world. The host of pilgrims was even more colourful, more international, more heterogeneous; for during the century communications had increased, the world had broadened out. South Africans, Americans, Japanese, Australians, natives of the Malay Peninsula, Siberian refugees, and Indian Brahmins, representatives of all the European nations, scholars, poets, artists, statesmen, governors, senators, students, military personages, workmen, peasants, French politicians, journalists of every stripe, from every country on the globe; and again youth, youth from all over the world. “Who does not go to him?” asks a Russian writer: “to greet him, to express sympathy with his ideas, to seek relief from tormenting problems.” And his biographer Birukov says: “One and all they troop to this village and then go home to talk about the great words and great thoughts of the grey old seer who lives there.”
“Great words and great thoughts.” Of course. But it is quite likely the words and thoughts with which the prophet regaled them were not always so remarkable. Neither were Goethe’s; out of sheer embarrassment he might fail to utter great things to those who waited on him. But it is a question whether people ever went to Weimar or to the village called “Bright Meadow” for the sake of the great words and thoughts they might perchance hear, or were led by a much more profound and elemental craving. I shall be accused of mysticism if I say that the attraction such shrines possess for all the world, so that men promise themselves salvation from a visit, is not at all intellectual in its nature but something else entirely. “Elemental” is the only word for it. For Goethe’s case, I may quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, who declared, a few days after the master’s death, that the strangest thing of all was the way this man had exercised so powerful an influence, without as it were meaning to at all, unconsciously, unintentionally, by the mere fact of his existence; this, he says, quite apart from his intellectual activity as a thinker and poet, and as an outgrowth of his great and unique personality. Well and good. But, after all, we use the word “personality” when we want to express an idea which at bottom escapes definition. Personality is not immediately a matter of mind or spirit—nor yet of culture. Our conception of it is one which takes us outside the domain of the rational, into the sphere of the mystic and elemental, into the natural sphere. “A great nature”—that is another phrase we use in our effort to find a formula and a symbol which shall express power streaming forth and drawing the world to itself. But nature is not spirit; in fact, this antithesis is, I should say, the greatest of all antitheses. Gorky not only disbelieved in Tolstoy’s Christian, Buddhistic, Chinese gospel of wisdom, he did not even believe that Tolstoy believed in it. And yet he gazed at him, and thought, in amaze: “The man is like God.” It was not spirit, but nature, moved him to this inward cry. And when the pilgrims trooped to Weimar and “Bright Meadow” the refreshment and quickening they dimly hoped for was not of the mind; it was the sight of and contact with great vital energy, with human nature richly endowed, with the lofty nobility of a beloved child of God. For one does not need to be a Spinozist, like Goethe, who had his own good reasons for being one, to hail the favourites of nature as the favourites of God.
Schiller, great sufferer though he was, was kinder, more human to his visitors. This we learn for instance from the actor Friederich, who says he left this glorious poet “more consoled,” after having just previously taken a chill, to speak figuratively, at an audience on the Frauenplan. “Goethe’s whole appearance,” he goes on, “seemed measured and formal. I sought in vain a trait that betrayed the genial creator of The Sorrows of Werther or Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. You can imagine how this frigid reception and unfriendly treatment put me off, it was so contrary to all my expectations. Dearly should I have liked to say to Goethe: ‘What sort of graven image are you? It is impossible that you could have written the Lehrjahre.’ But I choked it down.” One is reminded of the Moscow worthy with whom Gorky drove away from Yasnaya Polyana: who for a long time could not get his breath at all, only kept ruefully smiling and ejaculating as in a daze: “Well, well, that was a cold douche! Gracious, but he’s stiff! And I thought he was an anarchist!” Perhaps, even probably, if it had been Dostoyevsky he visited, he would have found him more anarchistic—in other words, less “stiff”—and would have parted from him “more consoled,” as did the good Friederich from the glorious Schiller, who even let Friederich recite to him. On the other hand, neither Schiller’s nor Dostoyevsky’s genius would have turned any odd corner of the earth into a shrine for pilgrims. Anyhow, neither of them lived long enough for that. They died too young, they did not reach the patriarchal years of Goethe and Tolstoy, nature denied them the dignity and consecration of great age, she did not grant them to be characteristically fruitful throughout all the stages of the human scene, to live a whole and classic human life. True, it may be said that the dignity that comes with length of days has nothing to do with spirit. A greybeard may be stupid and ordinary; yet men do regard with religious awe his white hair and wrinkles; his is a natural nobility conferred by length of years—but natural nobility is probably a pleonasm. Nobility is always natural. People are not ennobled, that is rubbish; they are noble by birth, on the ground of their flesh and blood. Nobility then is physical: on the body and not on the mind all nobility has always laid the greatest stress. That may explain a certain strain of brutality which has always been peculiar to human nobility. And is there not something brutal too, in its way, heathenish, sagalike, in the arrogant way Goethe sometimes boasted of his vitality, his indestructibility? When he was eighty-one he said to Soret: “Well, so Sömmering is dead. He was barely a miserable five-and-seventy years old! What poor things men are, not to be brave enough to hold out longer than that! On that score I really must do justice to that highly radical ass my friend Bentham; he is quite well preserved, and he is a few weeks older than I am myself!”
So Schiller and Dostoyevsky, to get back to them, were not vouchsafed the ennoblement that comes with length of days. They died comparatively young. Why? Well, because they were sick men, as everybody knows, both of them; one consumptive, the other epileptic. But I raise two questions: First, do we not feel that their illness was deeply founded in the very being of the two of them, an essential and typical trait of the kind of men they were? And second, does it not seem that in their case it is the disease itself that engenders or brings out a nobility sharply distinguished from that love of self and the autobiographical pride of birth which is part of its consummate sense of its own ego? Schiller’s nobility and Dostoyevsky’s nobility mean a quite different sort of deepening and heightening of their humanity—yes, of their humanity, in view of which does not disease appear precisely as an aristocratic attribute of heightened humanity? It follows then that the phrase “natural nobility” is no pleonasm after all; that there does exist another kind of nobility besides that conferred by nature on her favoured sons. Clearly there are two ways of heightening and enhancing human values: one exalts them up to the godlike, and is a gift of nature’s grace; the other exalts them up to the saintly, by grace of another power, which stands opposed to her and means emancipation from her, eternal revolt from her. That other power is the power of the spirit. But the question which of these two is higher, which kind of enhancement of human values is the nobler: this it is which I called the aristocratic problem.
Here, with all due reserve, a little philosophy of disease may not be out of place. Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a wilful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is? For what can disease be, if not disjunction from nature? “Tut der Finger dir weh,” says Hebbel epigrammatically, “schied er vom Leibe sich ab,
Und die Säfte beginnen, im Gliede gesondert zu kreisen:
Aber so ist auch der Mensch, fürcht’ ich, ein Schmerz nur in Gott.”
Was it not Nietzsche who called man “das kranke Tier”? What did he mean, if not that man is more than beast only in the measure that he is ailing? In spirit, then, in disease, resides the dignity of man; and the genius of disease is more human than the genius of health.
You will deny that; you will not agree to have it so. But, in the first place, disease, as a philosophical term, is by no means a negation and a condemnation. It is merely a statement, which need be no less acceptable than the term “health,” there being a nobility of disease as there is a nobility of health. And, in the second place, may I remind you that Goethe identified the Schillerian conception of the “sentimental” with that of disease? After, that is, he had previously identified the antithesis of “simple and sentimental” with that of classic and romantic. “The conception of classic and romantic poetry,” he said one day to Eckermann, “that is abroad today, and making so much strife and schism, came originally from Schiller and me. My poetical maxim has been objectivity of treatment, and I wanted it to prevail. But Schiller, whose method is entirely subjective, thought his way was right, and wrote the essay on simple and sentimental poetry in defence of his conception.” Again: “I have thought of a new phrase which states not too badly the relation between the classic and the romantic. The classic I call the healthy, the romantic the diseased. If we distinguish classic and romantic on this basis we shall soon clarify the situation.”
Here, then, we have an order of things according to which, on the one hand, the simple, the objective, the sound, and the classic are identical; and, on the other hand, the “sentimental,” the subjective, the pathological, the romantic. Thus one might call man the romantic being, in that he, a spiritual entity, stands outside of and beyond nature, and in this his emotional separation from her, in this his double essence of nature and spirit, finds both his own importance and his own misery. Nature is happy, or she seems so to him. For he, involved in tragical paradox, is a romantically miserable being. Does not all our love of our kind rest on a brotherly, sympathetic recognition of the human being’s well-nigh hopelessly difficult situation? Yes, there is a patriotism of humanity, and it rests on this: we love human beings because they have such a hard time—and because we are one of them ourself!
Tolstoy, in his Confessions, remarks that as a small child he knew nothing of nature, he had not even noticed her existence. “It is not possible,” he says, “that I was given neither flowers nor leaves to play with, that I did not see the grass or the sunlight. And yet up to my fifth or sixth year I have no memory of what we call nature. Probably we have to get free from her in order to see her, and I myself was nature.” From which can be deduced that even the mere seeing of nature, and our so-called enjoyment of her, are not only a specifically human condition, but one full of yearning emotion, in other words pathological, implying as it does our separation from her. Tolstoy’s recollection is that he felt the pain of this separation for the first time when his childhood under the care of nurses came to an end and he moved over to his older brothers and the tutor Feodor Ivanovich in the lower storey. Never again, he assures us, did he feel so strongly what a sense of duty meant, and what, accordingly, moral and ethical obligation: “the feeling of the Cross, to carry which every one of us is called. It was hard for me to part from all I had known since I was born. I was sad, sunk in poetical melancholy; less because I had to part from human beings, my nurse, my sisters, my aunt, than because I was leaving my little bed with its curtains and pillows. Moreover, I was apprehensive of the new life I was entering.” The appearance of the word “Cross” in this connexion is significant, not only with reference to Tolstoy, but also for the thing itself, the process of loosing oneself from nature. This process was felt by Tolstoy as painful and ethical: painful because ethical, and ethical because painful. He gives it a moral and an ascetic significance, as that which actually comprises all man’s ethical obligation. To be humanized means, for him, to be denaturalized; and from that moment on, the struggle of his existence consists in this sort of humanizing process: in the divorce from nature, from everything that was natural and to him peculiarly so, for example from the family, the nation, the State, the Church, from all the passions of the senses and the instincts, from love, the hunt, at bottom from all of physical life, and especially from art, which meant to him quite essentially the life of the body and the senses. It is quite wrong to think of this struggle as a crisis of conversion taking place suddenly in his later years; to make its inception roughly coincide with the beginning of old age. When the news came that the great Russian writer was as though stricken by a sort of mystical madness, the Frenchman Vogué declared that he had long expected it. He was quite justified. The germ of Tolstoy’s intellectual development had lain in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; and the psychology of Levin in Anna Karenine plainly indicated what further course it would take. Besides, we have the evidence of Tolstoy’s comrades in arms when he was an officer, the Sebastopol time. They give the clearest picture of the violence with which the struggle even then raged within him. But here we should note that his wrestling to break the strong bonds in which nature held him, regularly led up to disease, immediately assumed the form of illness. “Leochen is completely consumed by his writing now,” so his wife, Countess Sophia Alexandrovna, puts it, about the year 1880, when he buried himself in theology and the philosophy of religion. It is a sight her love hates to see, and she constantly tries to call him back to creative work. “His eyes are strange and staring, he hardly speaks at all, he is like a being from another world, and is positively not capable of thinking of earthly things....” “Leochen is quite sunk in his work. His head pains him all the time. He is very much changed, and become a rigid and practising Christian. But he has got grey, his health is weak, he is sadder and more silent all the time.”—“Tomorrow we shall have been here a month,” she writes in 1881 from Moscow, “and the first two weeks I wept every day without stopping, because Leochen was not only in a gloomy state, but fallen into a kind of despairing apathy. He ate nothing and did not sleep, sometimes literally wept—I honestly believe I shall lose my reason.” And to her husband himself: “I am beginning to think that when a happy man suddenly begins to see only the horrible side of life, and has no eyes for anything good, he must be ill. You should do something for it, I say this in all seriousness. It seems so clear to me, I suffer so to see you.... Did you never know before that there were people in the world who were hungry, miserable, unhappy, and wicked? Open your eyes: there are also strong and healthy, happy and good ones. If God would only help you—what can I do? You must be ill,” the poor woman wails—and is he not? He himself writes: “My health grows worse and worse, often I wish I could die. Why I am so reduced, I do not know myself. Perhaps it is age, perhaps illness....”
Compare with this the descriptions of him when he had sought in the holy animalism of married life a refuge from the insoluble riddles that his intellect set him; and then, with that power which the critics delighted to call “bearlike”—Turgeniev sought in vain to convince him that it came from the source whence all things come—created his two epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenine. “He was always light-hearted then,” his sister-in-law relates, “in high spirits, as the English say, fresh, healthy, and jolly. On the days when he did not write he went hunting with me or his neighbour Ribikov. We hunted with greyhounds.... Evenings he played patience in Tantchen’s room.” What happy days! Who can blame poor Countess Sophia Alexandrovna for scarcely containing herself for joy when she hears that her hollow-eyed Christian is planning a new imaginative work? Her happiness is touching. “What gladness suddenly filled me, to read that you mean to write something creative again! What I have so long awaited and hoped for has come to you. That is salvation, that is happiness, in it we shall come together again, it will console you and irradiate our life. This is the work you were made for, and outside this sphere there is no joy for your soul. God give you strength to cling to this ray of light, in order that the divine spark may flare up in you again. The thought fills me with ecstasy....”
Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s biographies show that these great writers both alike suppressed for years their gift of plastic creation—for which, as Countess Sophia Alexandrovna says, they were born—and both in the service of a directly social activity—that is to say, on highly moral grounds. Tolstoy suppressed the artist in him in favour of his activities as mirowov posrednik (justice of the peace) and schoolmaster without pay. Goethe governed the dukedom of Saxe-Weimar, for ten years of his early manhood dedicated his powers to excise regulations, details of book manufacture, levies of recruits, construction of streets and water-conduits, workhouses, mines and quarries, finance, and other such matters—while Merck, in the style of Turgeniev, was constantly concerned to rescue him for literature, and he himself, with increasing resignation, steeling himself by inward exhortations to patience and fortitude, held himself to the heavy, hard, unrewarding, unnatural task. Added to all this, in Goethe’s case, there was that somewhat seraphic affair with Frau von Stein. No doubt it was most beautifully instrumental in the process of civilizing the son of the Titans; but after all it did justice to but one of those famous two souls, which had, alas, their dwelling in his breast, and it let the other, the one with the “klammernde Organen,” the “prehensile organs,” go empty away.—Well, in both cases, Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s, the result is illness. “My office as justice of the peace,” writes Tolstoy, “has ended in destroying my good relations with the landowners, quite aside from the fact that it injures my health.” Teaching the village children had the same result. True, in his pedagogical journal he claims that the exercises the children wrote were more accomplished than the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Goethe; yet he discerns something evil and even criminal in his intercourse with them, it seems to him that he abuses and corrupts their souls. “It seemed to go very well,” he says in the Confessions, “but I felt that I was mentally not healthy enough and that it could not go on so for much longer. I was more ailing mentally than physically; I threw it all overboard and drove out to the Kalmucks of the steppes to drink mares’ milk and lead an animal life.”—This absconding to the steppes vividly recalls the secret flight to Italy which was Goethe’s salvation, after he too had seen that it could not go on so for much longer. The thirty-four-year-old man had become silent, taciturn, in plain words melancholy. He thought it was probably natural that a man should become serious over serious things. His health was actually undermined; by the time he was six-and-thirty his face was the face of a victim of exhaustion. For the first time he thought of taking a cure. He began to be aware of the ruinous perversity of his existence; expressed his view in the shrewd understatement that he was meant for private life. And fled before destruction. The parallel continues to hold: for Leo Nikolaevich, returned from the steppes and the mares’ milk cure, marries his Sophia Alexandrovna, who from then on finds herself almost continuously in the family way, and with epic and primeval power creates his two great novels. While Goethe, back from Italy, takes Christiane Vulpius unto himself and, freed from the cares of office, gives his mind to his natural tasks. All which might serve as a gloss upon a philosophy of disease.
Art is objective, creative contemplation, closely bound up with nature. Critique, on the other hand, is the moralizing, analysing attitude toward life and nature. In other words, critique is spirit; whereas creation is the preoccupation of the children of God and nature.
“In poetry my maxim was the objective principle,” says Goethe. “I am a plastic artist.” Indeed, the contrast between Goethe’s position and that of his great counterpart (Schiller standing for idealism, moralization, rhetoric, in short for critique) is too well known to need labouring. Goethe regarded his own inborn poetic gift “quite as nature.” His tolerance, his attitude of live and let live, the complaisance of his character, are all consonant with this view. They are based on the Spinozan concept of the perfectitude and necessity of all being, on the idea of a world free from final ends and final causes, in which evil has its rights like good. “We struggle,” he declares, “to perfect the work of art as an end in itself. They, the moralists, think of the ulterior effect, about which the true artist troubles himself as little as nature does when she makes a lion or a humming-bird.” It is a primary maxim with him that art is as inimical to purpose as nature herself; and this is the point where the follower of Spinoza sympathizes with Kant, who conceives detached contemplation as the genuine æsthetic state, thus making a fundamental distinction between the æsthetic-creative principle and the ethical-critical one. “When,” says Goethe, “philosophy confirms and enhances our original feeling of our oneness with nature, turning it into a profound and tranquil contemplation, then I welcome it.” I could cite ten or twelve other places in his works, where in the name of art he repudiates the moral sanction—which indeed is always social as well. “It is possible, I suppose, for a work of art to have a moral effect; but to demand from the artist a moral purpose and intention is to spoil his craft for him.”—“I have, in my trade as a writer, never asked myself: How shall I be of service to the world at large? All I have ever done was with the view of making myself better and more full of insight, of increasing the content of my own personality; and then only of giving utterance to what I had recognized as the good and the true.”
When we contrast the Christian-social ethics of Tolstoy as an old man with Goethe’s pagan and cultural idealism, we must not forget that the Tolstoyan socialism had its origin in the most private and personal need, the profoundest concern with the salvation of one’s own soul. A permanent dissatisfaction with self, a tortured seeking for the meaning of life, was the source of this socialism. The moralist began all his teachings and reforms with a self-discipline (the Confessions, that is) such as the true and proper social critic never demands of himself. Revolutionary in the real and political sense of the word he can by no means be called. “The significance of the Christian doctrine,” he declares, “is not that in its name society shall forcibly be reformed. It is that one shall find a meaning to life.” And it should be pointed out that Tolstoy’s original conception of art corresponded precisely to Goethe’s—a fact which will surprise none but those who in all good faith accept him as a child of spirit, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, on the ground of his naïve and clumsy efforts at spiritual regeneration, and fail to recognize in him a natural nobility akin to Goethe’s own. Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, which dates from much earlier than is generally realized, undoubtedly has its roots in antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius. It was a reaction against nature, against the simple, against indifference to the moral point of view; and an impulse toward spirit—that is, toward an ethical and even social revaluation—a reaction so whole-souled, indeed, that it ended in his playing off against Shakespeare Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the creator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an absurdity which only goes to show how very much the child of nature he was. Genuine sons of spirit and of the idea, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, do not run aground on such fantastic coasts. Tolstoy’s critical and moral faculty, in short his bias toward spirit, was but a secondary impulse, and a feeble one at that. It always balked at organic union with his mighty creative gift; we have unequivocal declarations from him to the effect that, in his view, pure creative power stood higher than talent with a social coloration. As an old man he criticized Dostoyevsky for going in for politics, much as Goethe had criticized Uhland’s activities in that line. At the age of thirty-one, in 1859, as a member of the Moscow society of the Friends of Russian Literature, he made a speech in which he so sharply accented the superiority of the purely artistic elements in literature over merits due to ulterior or ephemeral causes that the president of the society, Chomiakof, reminded him in a sharp rejoinder that a servant of pure art might very well, without knowing or wishing it, find himself indicting society.
An outburst of intellectual misgivings, of that humility of spirit to which the sons of nature are prone, occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s novel Lucerne. Here is a splendid lament over the fate of man, who, with all his need of positive redemption, is flung into an ever-billowing and shoreless ocean of good and evil. “If man,” cries Tolstoy, “had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain for ever questions! If he would only comprehend that every thought is at once false and true!... Men have divided up into sections this ever-rolling, boundless, eternally mingled chaos of good and bad; they have drawn themselves imaginary boundary-lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide according to their lines. As if it were not possible to make millions of other divisions, from other points of view, and on different planes!... Civilization is good, barbarism evil, freedom is good, unfreedom evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys in human nature the original blissful and instinctive striving towards good.” And asking himself whether in the souls of the poor there may not be more happiness and affirmation of life than in that of the callous rich man against whom, for his own part, his heart revolts, he bursts out with the words: “Endless is the goodness and wisdom of Him who has permitted and commanded all these contradictions. Only to you, poor worm, so presumptuously struggling to accomplish your schemes and devices, only to you do they seem contradictory. He looks mildly down from His radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony wherein in endless conflict you all do move!”
Could one express oneself more “Goethically”? Even the “Harmonie des Unendlichen” is here. This is not mere philosophical or moral doubt; the words are too light, too thin, too intellectual to characterize the piety, the religious submission, the adoration of nature, that breathe from Tolstoy’s page. This is not the voice of the prophet, schoolmaster, and reformer; here speaks the child of this world, the creative artist. Nature was his element, as she was the element, the beloved, kindly mother, of Goethe—and his constant tearing at the bond which held him fast to her, his desperate urging away from her in the direction of spirit and morality, from creation to critique, has much to command our respect and reverence, though at the same time there is about it something painful, tormenting, and humiliating, which is not present in the character of Goethe. Look at Tolstoy’s attitude toward music, it is most instructive. When he met Berthold Auerbach in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself at the piano—that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside Tschaikowsky and listened to the composer’s Quartet in D major, he began to sob at the andante, before everybody. No, unmusical he was not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he was, felt that he ought not to return her love.
There is that legend of the giant Antæus, who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth. The lives of Goethe and Tolstoy irresistibly recall that myth. Both sons of mother earth, they differ only therein, that one of them was aware of the source of his nobility, the other not. There are places in Tolstoy’s remorseful confessions where he touches the earth, and all at once his words, which, so long as they dealt in theory, were wooden and confused, are imbued with the most penetrating sensuousness, with an irresistible force and freshness of life. He recalls how once as a child he went nutting with his grandmother in the hazel-wood. Lackeys instead of horses draw the grandmother’s little carriage into the grove. They break through the undergrowth and bend the boughs, full of ripe, already dropping nuts, down into the old lady’s lap and she gathers them into a bag. Little Leo marvels at the strength of the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich, who bends the heavy branches; when he lets go they spring up again and slowly mingle with the others. “I can feel how hot it was in the sun, how pleasantly cool in the shade, how we breathed the sharp scent of the hazel leaves, while all round us the girls were cracking nuts between their teeth; we munched the full, fresh, white kernels without stopping.”—The fresh, full, white kernels cracking between the girls’ teeth: that is Antæus-Tolstoy, and the strength of his mother the earth streams through him, as it did when he wrote War and Peace, where his rather vague, fine-drawn, not very convincing philosophical digressions are followed by pages of which Turgeniev wrote: “They are glorious, they are the very best there is, everything original, everything descriptive, the hunt, the night boat-ride and all—nobody in Europe can touch him.”
And Goethe: how the Antæus-consciousness governed his whole existence! How constantly it conditioned his seeking and shaping! Nature is to him “healing and comfort” after the visitations of passion; and while he well knows that to know her “one must have moulded all the manifestations of the human being into one definite and distinct entity,” that true research is unthinkable without the gift of imagination, he is wary of the fantastic, avoids speculative natural philosophy, guards himself against losing touch with the earth, and calls the idea “the result of experience.” The imagination that guides his research is intuitive, it is the inborn sympathy of the child of nature with the organic. It is Antæan, like the imaginative power which conditions his creative art, nor is that, either, capricious in its nature, but precise and based on the sense-perceptions. Such is the imagination of the creative artist. The sons of the thought, of the idea, of spirit, theirs is another kind. We will not say that the one creates more reality than the other. But the figures created by the plastic fancy possess the realism of sheer being; while those created by the “sentimental” artist evince their actuality by action. Schiller himself makes this distinction. Apart from the things they do, he himself confesses, they have something shadowy—“etwas Schattenhaftes” is his expression. Translate this from the sphere of German idealism into the Russian and revelational, and you get, as a sort of national pendant to Schiller’s world of idea, rhetoric, and drama, the shadow-world of Dostoyevsky, over-life-size and exaggeratedly true. A catchword occurs to one from the philosophy of art, that is in everybody’s mouth today, or at least was yesterday: the word “expressionism.” Really, what we call expressionism is only a late form, strongly impregnated with the Russian and revelational, of romantic idealism. Its conflict with the epic attitude toward art, the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in on the one side Goethe and Tolstoy, on the other Schiller and Dostoyevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm, and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered, and dogmatic presumption of spirit.
Very much, yes, precisely as Goethe’s “profound and tranquil contemplation,” his precise and sensuous fancy, the lifelikeness of his characters, stand in relation to the ideal visions of Schiller and the activism of his creations, so the mighty sense-appeal of Tolstoy’s art stands to Dostoyevsky’s sickly, distorted dream-and-soul world. Indeed, the contrast becomes even more pointed by reason of differences between nations and periods. Tolstoy, the realistic novelist, the prince-and-peasant scion of a race still young, displays in his art a sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal, than does the German humanist and classicist, bourgeois-born and patrician-bred, in his.
Compared with Eduard and Charlotte, the lovers in the Wahlverwandtschaften, Vronsky and Anna are like a fine strong stallion and a noble mare. The comparison is not mine; it has often been made. A certain school of Russian criticism, hostile, of course, and on a low plane, found most offensive Tolstoy’s animalism, his unheard-of interest in the life of the body, his genius for bringing home to us man’s physical being. These critics wrote, for instance, that Anna Karenine reeked with the classic odour of babies’ diapers. They raved at the salaciousness of certain scenes, and ironically reproached Tolstoy for omitting to describe how Anna takes her bath and Vronsky washes himself. They were wrong even in the fact; for Tolstoy does tell us how Vronsky washes, we see him rubbing his red body. And in War and Peace we are vouchsafed a glimpse of Napoleon naked, in the scene where he has his fat back sprayed with eau-de-Cologne. A critic wrote in Die Tat about this book: “Its main theme is the satisfaction of any and every human being within the fold of wedded bliss, conceived in the grossest sense.” And then the same critic, parodying Tolstoy’s style, proposed to him that he write another novel treating of Levin’s love for his cow Pania.
All this, of course, is on a lower plane than the criticism of Goethe which Caroline Herder wrote to Knebel: “Oh, if he would only give some soul to his characters! If only there were not so much philandering in everything that he writes, or, as he himself so likes to call it, so much ‘good feeling.’” But unenlightened comment such as this may very well be illuminating none the less, even though unawares and as it were on false pretences; and these remarks, in their folly, do undoubtedly contain a grain of truth. Caroline’s “philandering” is a mincing, sentimental word to characterize what Goethe wrote; yet it has a certain aptness, if the comparison is between his frank realism and the lofty insubstantiality of Schiller’s world. It is not such a bad joke, either, to make Levin fall in love with his cow. It hits off the fleshliness of Tolstoy’s art as contrasted with the holy soulfulness of Dostoyevsky’s—especially when we remember Tolstoy’s personal passion for one of the preoccupations of farm life—namely, the breeding of cattle and pigs. It is an interest quite proper, of course, to a landed proprietor; yet where so strongly marked as this surely not quite without deeper meaning.
I am still resolved not to pass judgment. I did, indeed, throw out the question of nobility, the matter of rank. But I am wary of hasty decisions, and even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand and my faith in its ultimate fruitfulness. Why should I not be a cautious judge of the swaying battle, when I know that what I called above the arrogance of spirit is one with that great and highly affecting principle which we call freedom?
Schiller’s loftiest boast is the freedom of the singer. But Goethe’s attitude toward the conception of freedom is at all times cautious, not only in the political field, but consistently, fundamentally, and in every connexion. Of Schiller he says: “In his latter years, when he had had enough of freedom in a physical sense, he went over to it in the realm of the ideal, and I might almost say that it killed him; for it caused him to make demands on his physical powers that were altogether too much for them. I have great respect for the categorical imperative, I know how much good can come of it; but one must not carry it too far, for then this idea of the ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”—I confess that this habit of using Schiller’s heroic life to point a warning against exaggerations in the use of the categorical imperative has always made me smile. To confront the moral with the natural is always humorous. But in other places where this child of God expresses himself about heroes and saints his words have quite a different ring and bear witness frankly and sincerely to the nobility of spirit. He declared one day that he passed for an aristocrat, but that Schiller was at bottom much more of a one than he. The remark bears directly upon the problem of aristocracy: certainly not in the political field, nor yet to the fact that Schiller had spoken of the “eternally blind,” to whom one must not lend Heaven’s torches of light; no, it has immediate reference to the aristocracy of spirit, which Goethe was at the moment comparing with his own, the aristocracy of nature, and finding it the more lofty of the two. “Nothing disturbed him,” he says admiringly, “nothing constrained him, nothing distracted the flight of his thoughts. He was as great at the tea-table as he would have been in the council-chamber.” This admiring wonder rises from the depths of Goethe’s Antæus-nature, which had no consciousness at all of a freedom like that, of such independence and unrestraint. Rather he knew himself to be constantly conditioned by a hundred circumstances; influenced, obligated, willingly indeed, with a certain pride in his earth-bound aristocracy, yet influenced and obligated none the less. Pantheistic necessity was the fundamental feeling of his existence. It is not enough to say he did not believe in the freedom of the will. He denied the conception, he denied that such a thing was even conceivable. “We belong to the laws of nature,” he says, “even when we rebel against them; we are working with her, even when we work against her.” That dæmonic determinism of his whole being was often felt by others. They said he was possessed, and not able to act voluntarily. His earth-bound state manifested itself, for instance, in such sensitiveness to weather that he called himself a regular barometer. And we may not take it that he felt his dependence, which amounted to compulsion, as personally lowering, or that his will had ever rebelled against it. The will is the spirit: nature is by way of being mild and easy-going. Thus the aristocrat in bondage may feel a noble pride as he bends the knee to the dark power to which he belongs and which guides him so well; and yet be capable, as Goethe’s case shows at least, of a gesture of elegant homage before the aristocracy of freedom. “Denn hinter ihm,” says Goethe in the Epilogue to The Bell, with reference to Schiller:
Denn hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.
Truly this is homage which breathes a spirit of the most profound resignation. For what is “das Gemeine”? Nothing else than the natural, from the point of view of spirit and of freedom. For freedom is spirit; it is release from nature, rebellion against her; it is humanity conceived as emancipation from the natural and its bondage, this emancipation being the thing that is actually human and worthy of humanity. Here we see the question of aristocracy flowing together with that of human dignity. Which is finer, which worthier of humanity, freedom or bonds, self-will or submission, the moral or the natural? If I refuse to answer, it is in the conviction that this question can never be answered with finality.
But, on the other hand, the moral “sentimentalist” can be no “sentimentalist” at all if he does not on his side display an even livelier and profounder eagerness to pay homage to the aristocracy which is of nature. Unquestionably there is a certain charming humility in the attitude of spirit toward nature, a delicate readiness, often quite unrequited, to pay her respect, which is one of the greatest and most touching phenomena of the higher life. Dostoyevsky read Tolstoy’s early work Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in Siberia, in the periodical called The Contemporary, and was so taken with it that he inquired on all sides after the anonymous author. “Calm, deep, clear, yet unfathomable as nature is unfathomable, that is the impression it leaves,” he writes. “There it is, and everything, even the smallest detail, shows the beautiful unity of the temperament from which it flows.”—No, these are not Dostoyevsky’s words, though they might have been. It is Schiller who writes thus, about Wilhelm Meister, in that letter in which, for the first time, he apostrophizes Goethe as “Dearest Friend”: an emotional form of address, in which, so far as I know, Goethe never explicitly acquiesced. Dostoyevsky wrote the profoundest and most loving of all existing critiques of Anna Karenine; a masterpiece of enthusiastic exposition, which Tolstoy, perhaps, never even read (he never did read criticisms of his works), to say nothing of his ever feeling impelled to write reviews of anything by Dostoyevsky. When Feodor Michaelovich died, Tolstoy is said to have said: “I loved that man very much.” But his consciousness of the fact came a little late in the day; for while Dostoyevsky was alive Tolstoy never troubled his head about him; while afterwards, in a letter to Strachof, Dostoyevsky’s biographer, he compared him with a horse, who seemed a splendid creature and worth a thousand roubles, until suddenly he went lame, and then the fine strong animal was not worth a groschen. “The longer I live,” he said, “the more I think of men who are not lame.” But this horse-philosophy, as applied to the author of The Brothers Karamazof does not seem quite happy, to put it mildly.
We know, and we rejoice to know, that in the case of Goethe and Schiller nature’s attitude to spirit was altogether more brotherly and dignified, and on a higher plane. But if Goethe played here too the part of Hatem, the richly bestowing and receiving one, he did not after all take from the dear friend more than he gave him, to say nothing of all he gave by virtue of his mere existence, unconsciously, involuntarily. Was not Schiller’s part in the relationship, after all, that of service? I think so, myself, simply because it lies in the nature of the thing, because Schiller did not in the least need, to keep him fruitful, the meed of praise, love, inspiration, which he bestowed upon Goethe. And I note that such a letter as his famous first one, which knit the bond between them, in which with kindly hand he “gave the sum” of Goethe’s life, he never did get from Goethe in return.
One utterance of Schiller’s to Goethe has always delighted me, it seems to characterize the relationship so wonderfully. I mean the passage in a letter where he warns Goethe against Kant, his own spiritual master and his idol. Goethe, he tells him, can only be a Spinozan; his beautiful simple nature would be at once vitiated by contact with a philosophy of freedom. It is no more and no less than the problem of irony which we catch sight of here: without exception the profoundest and most fascinating in the world. For we see here that nothing is more foreign to spirit than a desire to convert nature to itself. It warns nature against itself. To the moral “sentimentalist,” all that is nature seems beautiful and highly worth preserving. Knowledge feels that life is beautiful; and this is the feeling of the moral for the simple, of the holy for the divine, of nature for spirit; and in this peculiarly absolute judgment of values resides the ironic god, resides Eros. Spirit accordingly enters into a relationship with nature which is in a sense erotic, in a sense determined by male-female sex-polarity. And by virtue of the relation it can venture to abase itself and dare the ultimate self-surrender, without thereby resigning any of its own nobility. Indeed, it will always retain the accent of a certain tender contempt. In Hölderlin’s lines precisely this emotional irony is immortalized:
Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich.
On the other hand, this simple nature too has an ironic mood, which is one with the objectivity of its character and precisely coincides with the conception of poetry, inasmuch as it lifts itself above its subject, above joy and grief, good and bad, death and life, to play freely with them. Goethe speaks of this mood in Dichtung und Wahrheit, with reference to Herder.
It is plain that what kept Goethe apart from Schiller so long was, more than anything else, the latter’s prepossessions on the subject of freedom: his conception of human dignity, which was entirely based on the dictatorship of spirit—that is, was entirely revolutionary in character—which conceived in this emancipated sense all humanity, all nobility, all human nobility—and that, to a nature like Goethe’s, must have seemed both odious and insulting to nature. It is, for instance, certain a priori that Goethe took the greatest umbrage at the famous essay Über Anmut und Würde. In it occur things like the following: “Movements which have as principle only animal sensuousness belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to physical nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were possible to have grace in the manifestations of physical appetites and instincts, grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve as the expression of humanity.” That one might describe as idealistic malice of spirit against nature, and so Goethe must have regarded it. For it is audacious to assert that grace cannot come out of the sensuous, nor nature reach to grace. Grace, then, is not a manifestation worthy of humanity; for that desire can express itself with charm, and instinct with grace, is a “charming” fact of experience. And when Schiller goes on to say: “Grace is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by the subject itself... it is the beauty of form under the influence of free will; it is the beauty of those particular phenomena which the person himself determines. The architectonic beauty does honour to the author of nature; grace does honour to him who possesses it. That is a gift, this is a personal merit”—the moral distinction he draws between talent and personal merit becomes a consummate affront to Goethe’s vital consciousness and his aristocratic feeling. “Fools never think,” says Goethe, “how fortune and merit are linked together.” What he means by “fortune” is what Schiller calls “nature” and “talent,” and distinguishes from free human merit. While Goethe, half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to talk about “inborn merit.” Everybody is free to call this a logical contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a metaphysical certainty higher than itself; and Goethe, who on the whole was certainly no metaphysician, undoubtedly felt the problem of freedom to be a metaphysical one. That is to say, an undemonstrable intuition told him that freedom, and therewith merit and demerit, were not a matter of the empirical but of the intelligible world; that, to speak with Schopenhauer, freedom does not consist in operari but in esse. Herein lies the humbleness of his aristocracy, the aristocracy of his humility; both of them so categorically opposed to Schiller’s idealistic evaluations, his personal and moral pride in his freedom. Goethe, when he wants to characterize the principle which composes his essential nature, speaks humbly and gratefully of a “gift of fortune.” But the conception of a “gift,” of “grace,” is more aristocratic than one might think. What it means is the indissoluble union of fortune and merit, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in short “inborn merit”; and the gratitude, the humility, carry with them that metaphysical consciousness of being at all times and absolutely certain of the favour of destiny.
There is, in Goethe’s case, an amazing bit of evidence on this point, which I cannot refrain from quoting. Speaking of Bentham, he says it is the height of madness for the man, at his age, to be so radical. He is answered that if His Excellence had been born in England he could hardly have escaped being a radical and reformer. Whereat Goethe, with Mephistophelian mien: “What do you take me for? You think I would be spying out abuses and tacking names on to them? I, who if I had been born in England would have been living on abuses? If I had been born in England I should have been a duke, or better still a bishop with revenues of thirty thousand pounds sterling.”—“Very fine. But suppose Your Excellence had not drawn the big prize in the lottery; suppose you had drawn a blank?” To which Goethe: “Not everybody, my dear friend, is made for the big prize. Do you think I should have played such a foolish trick (sottise) as to draw a blank?”
All that, of course, is in jest. But is it only in jest? Does it not rather voice that deep metaphysical certainty that never and under no circumstances should he or could he be other than favoured and privileged, ever other than well-born? And in this certainty is there not after all something like a consciousness of freedom of the will, if only of freedom after the event? Really, it is priceless. To be born into the world a starving revolutionary, an idealistic “sentimentalist,” that he calls a sottise. Is that the irony the children of God wreak on the children of spirit? If there be such a thing as inborn merit, then there is inborn demerit as well; and if it is a sottise to come into the world an average man, or poor, or sick, or stupid, then the criminal is indeed not only empirically but metaphysically culpable. For merit and reward, guilt and punishment, are conceptions that belong together. And one punishment at least, all those merit who have committed the sottise of drawing a blank in life’s lottery: that of eternal destruction; whereas the chosen ones get eternal life too at the end. “Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb, noch Edles will, gehört den Elementen an; so fahret hin!” But as the possibility of nobly aspiring and achieving a name is not a matter of empirical freedom of the will, this “so fahret hin” is a piece of gross heartlessness. And if the conception of election by grace, to which that of metaphysical depravity corresponds, is a Christian conception, at any rate it shows Christianity turning its aristocratic side outwards.
I said awhile back that it seemed to me not accidental that Schiller and Dostoyevsky were sick men and did not, like Goethe and Tolstoy, arrive at a reverend length of days. Rather I was inclined to regard their poor health as fundamental to their characters. Quite as symbolic is the further external fact, that the two great realists and creative artists were of upper station, born to a privileged social status, whereas the heroes and saints of the idea, Schiller and Dostoyevsky, one the son of a Swabian army surgeon and the other of a Moscow hospital physician, were the children of modest people and spent all their days in pinched and homely, one might almost say undignified circumstances. I call this biographical fact symbolic, because it testifies to the Christianity of the spirit, whose kingdom, as the Scriptures say, is not of this world—in personalities as little as in the realm of the ideal and the artistic. Wherein it opposes a perpetual contrast to the kingdom of nature and nature’s favourites, whose rank and essence are quite and entirely “of this world,” the physical, pagan world. Therein lies their “realism.” And they were, both Tolstoy and Goethe, realists enough to feel a naïve enjoyment in their privileged status, yes, in a sort to lay stress upon it and show themselves imbued by a consciousness of it; which would impress one as curiously unenlightened were it not plain that they themselves regard it in a symbolic sense and even rather childishly assimilate it in their own minds to their consciousness of their higher, extra-social, human aristocracy. Goethe’s patrician birth was so dear to him that his patent of nobility, when he had it in his hands, meant “nothing, simply nothing.” “We Frankfort patricians,” he said, “always felt ourselves like nobility.” But in the same conversation and connexion, by way of refuting a slur upon himself as the obsequious servant of royalty, he puts it thus: “Yes, I felt so much at ease (so wohl in meiner Haut), and so very much the aristocrat, that if they had made me a prince it would not have surprised me.” I may say in passing that it would have become him to be a prince. Had he taken up Napoleon’s invitation to transfer his activity to Paris, had he written there the Cæsar Napoleon wanted him to write, in which he need only have given vent to the hatred he had felt as a youth for the “base, the contemptible murder,” the Emperor would certainly have made him a prince, as by his own account he would have done for Corneille as well. My point is to show how, in Goethe’s mind, the consciousness of his social position lay very close to that of his nobility as a human being, as a child of God. The two flow together in one and the same consciousness of nobility, or “inborn merit.”
Count Leo Tolstoy came, as we know, from one of the oldest and finest of Russian families. When we read his books, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, or Anna Karenine, that picture of high life in Moscow, we are impressed with the fact that the author is a man who was brought up with all the advantages. We get the same feeling when we read Dichtung und Wahrheit or Die Wahlverwandtschaften. And in Tolstoy too we find the same familiar and perhaps childish phenomenon we noticed in Goethe: his noble blood and the distinction conferred by his great gifts both belonged to him quite simply because they belonged to him, and his consciousness of them mingled in his joy in himself, of which, despite all his attacks of poverty of spirit, he possessed a very great deal. His fame as a writer, so he wrote to his father-in-law, delights him very much; he finds it most pleasant to be an author and a nobleman. An author and a nobleman—all his Christianity, all his anarchism, to the contrary and notwithstanding, he never ceased to be a striking combination of those two. When Turgeniev first made the acquaintance of the youthful Tolstoy he said: “Not a word, not a gesture of his is natural. He is constantly posing; it is a mystery to me how such a sensible man can take such childish pride in his silly title.” This is the same Turgeniev who wrote to a French publisher: “I am not worthy to untie his shoe-laces”; so it is unlikely that the first-quoted remark misrepresents the facts. As for the aged Tolstoy, Gorky relates: “His comfortable, democratic manner took many people in; and I have often seen Russians, who judge people by their clothes, gush over him with their famous ‘simplicity of manner,’ which might better be called ‘beastly familiarity.’ And suddenly, from under his peasant beard, and his rumpled democratic blouse, the old Russian Barin, the aristocrat of aristocrats, would peep forth; and in the chill that emanated from him the confiding visitor’s nose would be frost-bitten. It was a joy to see this blue-blooded creature: the noble charm of his gestures, the haughty reticence of his speech, the murderous and fastidious sharpness of his tongue. He displayed just so much of the Barin as these servile souls needed to see; when they roused the Barin in Tolstoy it came easy and natural and overwhelmed them so that they shrivelled up and whined.”—The blue noses call up memories of Weimar, chilling memories of receptions and formal calls—only that Goethe was never malicious enough to put on the democratic pose; and his most frigid manner concealed more love than Tolstoy ever felt—Tolstoy, whose last and most frightful secret Turgeniev’s penetrating mind laid bare: it was that Tolstoy could love nobody but himself! But it was a “joy,” in Gorky’s sense of the word, to see Tolstoy for instance at the Petrov yearly fair, whither he drove from his estate in Samara in the seventies. His charm made him very popular in the merry whirl of peasants, Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. Even with drunken folk, we are told, he did not hesitate to strike up a conversation. And then came the following quiet and characteristic little episode. A drunken peasant, in his excess of feeling, wanted to embrace Tolstoy. But one stern and expressive look from Leo Nikolaevich’s eyes met the man and sobered him in a twinkling. He dropped his hands of himself, and said: “No? Well, all right, then.” What was there in that look to make it have such an arresting, quenching, sobering effect? Was it the consciousness of the Barin? Or of the great author? In such a case it is quite impossible to distinguish between them—as little objectively as doubtless it was subjectively.
“When Leo Nikolaevich wanted to please,” Gorky tells us, “he could do it better than a pretty and clever woman. Imagine a crowd of all sorts of people sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicholai Michailovich, the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Jalta, a musician, a German, the poet Bulgakov, and so on; they all look at him with the same enamoured eyes, while he expounds to them the doctrine of Lao Tse.... I used to look at him just like the others. And now I long to look at him once more—and I shall never see him again.”—One thing is obvious: it was not the doctrine of Lao Tse which brought that lovelorn look into all their eyes. The teaching would have roused very scant general interest but for the expounder. But that look in every eye is the very same that Karl August had in mind when he passed on to Goethe the greetings sent by Napoleon on the Emperor’s way back from Russia: “You see,” he added, “heaven and hell are both making eyes at you.”
Yes, and the democratic moujik blouses were immaculate, made of soft fine material, highly comfortable and pleasant to wear, and the linen was scented. Of course, he did not scent it himself. The Countess attended to that, and he, who liked it very much, pretended not to notice, just as he pretended not to know that the vegetarian dishes he exclusively ate were all prepared with bouillon. “His face is that of a peasant,” reports an eyewitness, “with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick, beetling brows with small, piercing grey eyes beneath them. But, despite the peasant features, no one could fail to recognize at first glance the fine, cosmopolitan Russian gentleman, member of the very highest society.” Conversing thus in English or French with a Grand Duke, he reminds one very much of Goethe, on whom princes waited, and who thought it no derogation of his nobility, human or divine, to season it with a little knack for polite nothings. When Tolstoy visited Alexander Herz in London, his daughter, young Natalia Alexandrovna, begged to be present in a dark corner, that she might behold in the flesh the author of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. With beating heart she awaited Tolstoy’s appearance. She was bitterly disappointed to see a man dressed in the latest fashion, with good manners and a flow of speech, the subject-matter of which was exclusively the cock-fights and boxing-matches he had seen in London. “Not a word that came from his heart, not a word that could have corresponded to my expectations, did I hear during the single interview at which I was present.”
Nothing of the sort is reported of Dostoyevsky or Schiller. Never did these by their worldliness disappoint the expectations of their audience. The sons of spirit make personally a spiritual impression, as the hopeful average man expects those to do who are soul-shakers. That lofty, pallid, suffering-saint and criminal look of Dostoyevsky corresponded to the idea the Russians got of the phenomenon of his genius, just as Schiller’s mild, intrepid, fanatical, and equally ailing physiognomy, with open shirt-collar and flowing silk neckerchief, corresponded to the image which the German mind might have formed of its hero. Whereas on the other hand Goethe, if we accept Riemer’s description of him as he moved among his guests in a blue coat, “the powerful, expressive face showing the effects of sun and fresh air, with the black side-locks floating about it, the black hair bound in a queue, was more like a well-to-do, comfortable farmer, or a much-visited staff-officer in mufti, than like a shrinking and sensitive poet.” And it is true, a priori, that neither of those other two ever estranged ardent admiration by displaying a banal enthusiasm for cock-fighting and boxing. Whereas the sense of sport, the taste for bodily exercise, physical training, and physical enjoyment, played an essential rôle in Tolstoy’s life as in Goethe’s. We call these tastes gentlemanly and thus indicate the physical basis of the well-born-ness which is of this world. “One must see him,” wrote Riemer about Goethe; “how strong and firm he stands on his feet, with what bodily agility and sure step he moves. Early gymnastic training, dancing, skating, riding, even coursing and racing, had given him this mobility and suppleness; he could never make a false step on the worst path or be in danger of slipping or falling; easily and swiftly he passed over smooth ice, narrow foot-paths and bridges, and rocky steeps. As a youth he climbed among chasms and shingle with his princely friend, mounted towering rocks and Alpine crags with the boldness of a chamois; and so throughout his fifty years of geological exploration no mountain has been too high for him, no shaft too deep nor passage too low, no cave labyrinthine enough.”
The great interest which Leo Tolstoy took in his body showed itself negatively as well as positively. Negatively, in his Christian and ascetic grumblings at his beastly physical, in such utterances as that the body is a hindrance to the good man, and in such phrases as: “I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body.” Positively, in all the training and care he gave it. His interest in it begins at the moment—of which he speaks in the Confessions—when he sat as a little child in a wooden tub, enveloped in the smell of the bran-water in which he was being bathed, and for the first time noticed his little body with the ribs visible on the breast in front, and straightway feels drawn to it by a very strong inclination. Tolstoy’s face was, humanly speaking, ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it, convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes. He confesses that he would have given anything he had for a handsome face. The youth who is tortured by the problem of death, and ponders all the high and ultimate questions with as much maturity as the aged prophet, this youth is at the same time perpetually occupied with his own appearance, is obviously possessed by the desire to be elegant and comme il faut; sets the greatest store by physical development, gymnastic exercise; drills, rides, and hunts as though he had no higher ambition in his head nor thought of any. His passion for the hunt is so excessive that he confesses to his wife that of human beings he never forgot Sophia Alexandrovna, but out hunting he forgot everything but his double-barrelled shot-gun. From more than one letter of those who knew him in his prime we see what a daring sportsman he was, how he sprang with astonishing agility over gullies and chasms and would spend whole days in the wild. We are told that a better companion could not be conceived of. The pacifism, Christian, Buddhistic, or Chinese, of his latter days forbade him of course to kill animals, although his indestructible physical strength and trained agility would still have allowed him to hunt and though he still cherished the greatest desire to. He bade it farewell. He submitted himself to a test and found he had fortitude enough to let the hares run. And in his case that meant a good deal, as we see from the following anecdote, related by Gorky. Tolstoy put on a heavy overcoat and thick boots and took Gorky for a walk in the birch-woods. He leaped like a schoolboy over puddles and ditches, shook the rain-drops from the boughs, lovingly stroked the moist, satiny trunks of the birch-trees, and talked about Schopenhauer.... “Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo Nikolaevich gave an excited start, his face lighted up, he let out a halloo like an old huntsman. Then he looked at me with a curious smile and began laughing, a hearty human laugh. At this moment he was irresistible.”—Still finer is the story of the hawk which the old man saw circling above his chickens, about to swoop. Leo Nikolaevich stares up at the bird of prey, his hand over his eyes, and says in an “excited whisper”: “The rascal! Now, now! He’s coming... oh, he’s afraid.... I’ll call the stable-boy.” He calls, the hawk disappears. But Tolstoy is taken with regrets. He sighs and says: “I shouldn’t have called. Then he would have swooped.” They are his chickens. But all the sympathy of the venerable prophet of pacifism is with the hawk.
Of his son Iliuscha he wrote in a letter: “Iliuscha is lazy, he is growing, and his soul is not yet overwhelmed by organic processes.” What does he mean by that? Growing is itself an organic process, and if growing is innocent, so too will be the organic processes which growth brings about, and with which Tolstoy was only too well acquainted, since they made his life a burden to him all his days. The Church’s conception of woman as instrumentum diaboli was with him something more than a mood from the time of the Kreuzer Sonata; it dates from much earlier, from the journals of his boyish days; and he speaks of organic processes in the sense of that early Christian pope who, in order to mortify the flesh, made a detailed list of all its disgusting and evil-smelling functions, the functions of this body which in the end has to submit to the final indignity of putrefaction. That kind of cross-grained speculation Tolstoy would be just the one to set about, and he did. Very sensual men well know such moods. Maupassant somewhere calls the act of coition filthy and ridiculous—“ordurier et ridicule.” Could objectivity further go? But such blithe and cynical objectivity was not Tolstoy’s sort. His hatred of the organic has a shattering accent of subjective torment and rage. And yet he is so much the darling of the creative impulse of organic life that one must go back to Goethe to find a human being who was “so wohl in seiner Haut” as he. Yes, the parallel is even more exact. In both of them, and in just the same way, the most beatific organic well-being, amounting to organic rapture, mingled with a rooted melancholy and the profoundest intimacy with death. Goethe, when he was a riotous, dandiacal student in Leipsic, might any moment quit the society of men, the card-play and dance, and yield himself to solitude. We have plenty of witnesses to his brilliance, his childish, fantastic extravagances in the circle of his friends, with the Jacobis, Heinse, Stilling in Elberfeld. He cuts capers, dances round the table like a clown, in short cannot contain himself for a mysterious intoxication; the philistines sitting round think he has gone mad. And that is the same Goethe whose Werther drove more than one young man to self-destruction, and who practised himself in suicide by keeping a sharp dagger on his bed-table and trying every evening to drive it a little further into his body.
We have noted the same excess of animal spirits in Tolstoy; in whom, indeed, they persisted up to an old age lacking in the dignity, stateliness, and formal gravity of Goethe’s latest period. Which need surprise nobody. For we cannot doubt that Goethe led a more earnest, laborious, exemplary life than the Slavic junker; or that his cultural activities presupposed far more genuine self-abnegation, restraint, and discipline than Tolstoy’s uttermost ineffectual efforts at spiritualization, sticking fast as these always did in a bog of fantastic absurdity. Tolstoy’s aristocratic charm was, and Gorky so depicts it, that of a noble animal. He never managed to arrive at the dignity of man the civilized, man the triumpher over odds. It is lovely to hear of all the pranks he played with the children, his droll conceits, the gymnastic feats he performed for and with them; the endless croquet, lawn-tennis, and leap-frog parties in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. He not only shared all the activities of youth, but he was the life and soul of them. The sixty-year-old man runs races with the boys, his bicycle trips extend, much to the Countess’s anxiety, over thirty versts. “When there is some activity requiring agility, strength, and suppleness,” comments a bystander, “he never takes his eyes off the players, he puts his whole soul into their success or failure. Often he cannot resist and joins in with a youthful fire and muscular flexibility which the onlooker could only envy.” In the family circle he performed the sheerest absurdities. He had invented a game called Numidian Horsemen, which made the children weep with delight. Leo Nikolaevich would suddenly spring from his chair, lifting his hand, and run about the room flapping it in the air, whereupon everybody, grown-ups, children, and all, followed suit. That is, I repeat, charming, though a little bizarre. It becomes more so when we learn that all these high spirits occur in the years after his “conversion,” in the period of his soul-crises, his ascetic eclipses and theological broodings. But what shall be said of the incident recorded by his father-in-law, Behrs? They were walking about the room together in light converse, one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold—it gives one an uncanny feeling! I do not ask my readers to imagine Goethe, in his later period, leaping unexpectedly on a visitor’s shoulder. There is a decided difference of temperament, that is clear. But the resemblance is no less so.
Looking more closely at the matter, I find that there is a complex of problems, a “problematic,” peculiar to the sons of nature, the creative and objective artists, which is entirely foreign to the children of the idea, and, for all the brilliant sunshine of favour they move in, casts a strange dark cloud upon them which must considerably chill their consciousness of aristocratic well-being. My feeling is that it is pure error to think that conflict and complexity are things of the spirit, while nature’s kingdom must be all brightness and harmony. It looks as though the contrary were the case. If what we call happiness consists in harmony, clarity, unity with oneself, in the consciousness of a positive, confident, decisive turn of mind, if, in short, it is peace resident in the soul, then obviously happiness is a state far easier for the sons of spirit to arrive at than for the children of nature. For the latter, though surely singleness of heart should be their lot, seem never to attain the joy and peace it might confer. Nature herself appears to weave in their very being a questionable strand, an element of contradiction, negation, and all-pervasive doubt, which, since it cannot conduce to goodness, cannot conduce to happiness either. Spirit is good. Nature is by no means good. One might say she is evil, if moral categories were admissible with reference to her. She is, then, neither good nor evil, she escapes definition, as she herself refuses to define and judge; she is, speaking objectively, indifferent, and as this indifference of hers appears subjectively and spiritually in her children, it becomes a complication that has more to do with torment and evil than with happiness and goodness, and which certainly seems come not to bring peace into the world, like the human and benevolent spirit, but rather doubt and dire confusion.
Obviously I am not speaking here of the comparatively harmless conflict between the Faustian “two souls,” the battle between the impulses of a strong animal constitution and the yearnings after “Gefilden hoher Ahnen”—a battle, and a “problematic,” of which Goethe speaks out of such deep experience, and which not only made Tolstoy’s youth a period of such hardship, so torn with remorse, but persisted in him up to old age. I am speaking of something which seems at first blush to be much blither and simpler: a position something like that of Goethe between Lavater and Basedow, in which Goethe designates himself as “das Weltkind in der Mitten”. That sounds simple, and pleasant, and self-complacent, and was probably so meant. And yet in the word “Weltkind” and the associations that surround it there is something sinister, a difficulty and a “problematic,” by contrast with which the “prophetic” existence is nothing less than sweetness and light and plain sailing. “Goethe’s tendency to negation,” writes Chancellor von Müller on some occasion or other, “and his incredible judicial-mindedness came out strong again.” “There is something,” Gorky writes about Tolstoy, “which presumably he will never reveal to a human being, which appears darkly in his conversation, and is hinted at in his journals. To me it seems like the apotheosis of negation, the deepest and most hideous nihilism, springing from a stratum of boundless and hopeless despair, from a solitude of which probably no one else in the world has ever been so frightfully aware.” No one? It was not Tolstoy who created the so lyric figure of Mephistopheles—though indeed the Mephistophelian element was never lacking to any period of his life. The ceaseless, tormenting effort to shape that which he calls his conception of life, to arrive at truth and clarity and inward peace, found expression in his youth, partly in a gloomy irritability that led to duels and scenes with his friends, which he took in desperate earnest, as matters of life and death, killing and dying; but partly also in malicious negation in general, an inimical spirit of contradictiousness, which, as we are expressly assured, made a quite Mephistophelian impression. Though of course this was not a nihilistic but a moral attitude, and was not assumed save in opposition to things that were not true—only they were simply everything! In the young Tolstoy there was observable, “from the beginning, a sort of unconscious enmity toward all accepted laws in the kingdom of thought. No matter what the opinion expressed; and the greater the authority of the speaker, the more was Tolstoy at pains to take up and accentuate an inimical attitude. If you watched him as he listened, and saw the sarcastic curl of his lip, you could not avoid the impression that he was thinking, not so much of answering what was said, as of himself saying something which should surprise and confound the speaker.” That is nihilism, that is malice. But it is not so much cold malice as it is a tortured spite against anybody who fancied he held the secret of clarity and truth. It is a disbelief in clarity and truth. This spite, and this incredulity, were especially directed against Turgeniev, the clear-eyed and human man with whom he never could get on. “Tolstoy,” said Turgeniev, “early developed a trait which, lying as it does at the root of his gloomy conception of life, has caused him great suffering. He has never managed to believe in the sincerity of mankind. Every expression of feeling seemed to him false; and he had the habit, due to his extraordinarily penetrating gaze, of boring through with his eye the man he considered insincere.” And when Turgeniev said this, he added the confession that never in his life had he encountered anything with such power to dishearten him as this same piercing gaze, which, accompanied by two or three biting remarks, could bring to the verge of madness anybody who did not possess particularly strong self-control. Now Turgeniev’s self-control was strong. He was at the height of his literary success; serene and untroubled, he could encounter the complexities of his younger colleague with the calmness of a man who lived on good terms with himself. But precisely this security was what troubled Tolstoy. He seems to have gone deliberately about with this tranquil, good-natured man, working with such a clear conviction that what he did was right, to goad him past the bounds of self-control. Simply this conviction that he knew and did what was right was more than Tolstoy could bear; for certainly he himself did not in the least know what was right. Garschin says: “In his view, the people who passed for good were merely hypocrites, who paraded their goodness and pretended to the certainty that their work served a good end.” Turgeniev too saw in Tolstoy this strange, sinister, malicious bent. He resolved to hold fast to what he considered “right” and not to lose his self-control; so he avoided Tolstoy, left Saint Petersburg, where the latter was living, and went first to Moscow and then to his own estate. But—this is most significant of all, as evidence of Tolstoy’s state of mind—Tolstoy followed him. Followed him step for step, “like a lovesick girl,” to use Turgeniev’s own phrase.
All which is very telling, very extraordinary. Above all, it shows how completely the old Tolstoy, of whom Gorky writes, was foreshadowed in the young one. Did he really ever find out what was “right”—the real, the true, the incontrovertible? For others he did, he gave them conviction. But he himself certainly never got free of the negation and neutrality of the elemental character. “Rousseau,” he said, “lied and believed his lies.” Did he believe his own lies? No, for he did not lie. He was elemental, nihilistic, malicious, and unfathomable. “Would you very much like to know?” he asks.—“Very much.”—“Then I will not tell you.” And he smiles and plays with his thumbs. This smile, this “sly little smile”—Gorky speaks of it again and again. There is something not only extra-moral but extra-mental, extra-human, about it; it bespeaks the mystery of the “natural,” the elemental, which is not at all kindly disposed, but rather takes pleasure in confusion. According to Gorky, the old man loved to put insidious questions. “What do you think about yourself?” “Do you love your wife?” “How do you like mine?” “Do you like me, Alexei Maximovich?”—“Disingenuous!” Gorky cries. “The whole time, he is making an experiment, testing something out, as though he were going into battle. It is interesting, but not to my taste. He is the devil, and I am a babe in arms beside him. He ought to leave me alone.”
One day Gorky sees the aged Tolstoy sitting alone by the sea. This scene is the crowning point of his reminiscences. “He sat, his head on his hands; the wind blew the silver hair of his beard through his fingers. He was looking far out across the sea, and the little green waves rolled docilely to his feet and caressed them, as though they wanted to tell the old wizard something about themselves.... He seemed like an ancient stone come alive, that knew and pondered the beginning and end of all things, and what and how would be the end of the stones and grasses of the earth, the waters of the sea, the whole universe from the sun to the grain of sand. And the sea is a part of his soul, and all about him comes from him and out of him. In the old man’s musing quietude I felt something portentous, magic. I cannot express in words what I more felt than thought at that moment. In my heart were rejoicing and fear, then all melted together in one single blissful feeling: ‘I am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is living on it.’” And Gorky steals away on his tiptoes that the sand may not crunch under his tread and disturb the old man’s thoughts.
The mystical reverence that Gorky here depicts is not that which lays hold on us at sight of the heroes of the idea. Neither Dostoyevsky nor Schiller has inspired this sort of awe and shuddering, however saintly they seemed. So much is certain. Nor can the reverence felt for Goethe be of just this same nature—though akin to it. The Tolstoyan greatness and remoteness is wild and primeval and pagan in its nature, it is antecedent to culture. It lacks the human, the humanistic element. This ancient of days and of wisdom, musing there at the edge of the everlasting sea, wrapped up in the All, conning the beginning and end of things—the picture evokes a twilit, prehuman, uncanny world of feeling, a world of incantations and runes. What he is pondering, the norns whisper thee by night. He was like, says the shaken beholder, an ancient stone come alive: note that, a stone, not anything that civilization has produced, not man made in the likeness of God, not a human being like Goethe. Goethe’s humanistic divineness is clearly something quite different from the primeval, pagan formlessness of Tolstoy’s, which makes Gorky say of him: “He is the devil.” And still, at the very bottom, the common factor persists: in Goethe too there is the elemental, the sinister, the dark, neutral, negation- and confusion-loving devil.
There is a saying of his, arbitrary enough, yet with an accent of hidden suffering, that opens to us more of his inner self than many a clear and wise and ordered utterance. “If I am to listen to the opinion of others,” he said (and only listen to it, observe, not accept it), “then it must be positively expressed. Problems I have enough in myself.” That is a confession, put in the form of a demand. It has a proud, Olympian accent, but the voice that utters it quivers with impatience, with painful irritation at the inner complications, which makes it so imperative that the positive should come from without.... “Out of one of his eyes looks an angel,” writes someone who made his acquaintance on a journey, “out of the other a devil; and his speech is deep irony on the score of all human affairs.” Of all? That is great, but it is not generous—and, after all, is he not a man himself? One who often saw him says: “Today he was altogether in that mood of bitter humour and sophistical contradictiousness he is so prone to display.” Again we have the negation, the spirit of contradiction and malice, of which gentle young Sulpice Boisserée has such a story to tell in his diary. “At eleven o’clock I am with Goethe again. The invective continues.” He has a go at all sorts of things: politics, æsthetics, society, religion, Germany, France, philhellenism, parties, and so on, in such a style that poor young Boisserée feels—“mit allen diesen moquanten Reden”—as though he were “at a witches’ sabbath.” That is saying a good deal. It is either too strong, considering the word “moquant” which he uses, or else that word is a good deal too weak—which is more likely. Anyhow the entry, from the year 1826, shows the confusion to which the petulant old man could reduce simple and humble-minded people. An observer who must have been no fool wrote something about him which stirs a secret horror that is somehow paralysing. “He is tolerant, without being mild.” Just consider what that means. Toleration, indulgence, is always, in our human experience, associated with mildness, with benevolent feeling toward man and the universe; so far as I know, it is a product of love. But tolerance without love, harsh tolerance—what would that be? It is more than human, it is icy neutrality, it is either something godlike or something devilish.
I shall be saying nothing new, but it may serve to bring order and clarity into our thoughts to keep the fact before us: all national character belongs to the natural sphere, and all tendency toward the cosmopolitan to the spiritual. The word “ethnic” brings together two conceptions which we do not ordinarily connect, paganism and nationalism; thus by implication, and conversely, every super-national and humane point of view is classified in our mind as Christian in spirit.
Goethe’s alleged devotion to paganism (in the Wanderjahre he reckons Judaism among the ethnic and heathen folk-religions) would lead us accordingly to expect of him an outlook basically anti-humanistic and folk-national. That we should be entirely wrong in this expectation, as a basic constitution in him, as “nature,” might be arguable. However, so far as he was himself aware, he was consciously a humanist and a citizen of the world. Despite all his nature Olympian and divine, he was in a high degree Christian in spirit. Nietzsche placed Goethe, historically and psychologically speaking, between Hellenism and pietism; and thus expressed the combination of creative and critical, simple and “sentimental,” ancient and modern, in Goethe’s character. For Goethe’s “pietism” is of course nothing else than his modernity. Many centuries of Christian cultivation of the subjective—a whole century of pietistic, introspective, autobiographical discipline—were needed to make possible a work like Werther. Which is as much as to say that in the impulse to autobiography Christian and democratic elements are mingled with that naïve, spoilt-darling claim on the world’s affections of which we spoke above. They are the same as that democratic tendency out of which Tolstoy likes to consider his confessions as emanating; when, in true Rousseauian fashion, he resolves “to write a history of his life, utterly and entirely true to fact,” in the belief that this “will be more useful to mankind” than those previous twelve volumes full of literary twaddle. He seems unaware that they are quite as autobiographical, quite as ethical in character, as anything could be, and disowns them as pagan and artistic, as self-indulgent and “irresponsible.”
Goethe, with all his aversion to the “Cross,” did often and expressly acknowledge his reverence for the Christian idea. It is as significant as it is surprising to come upon the idea of the sanctity of suffering in the Pedagogic Province; and if Goethe saw in the Church “elements of weakness and instability” and in its precepts “gar viel Dummes,” still he bore witness that “there is in the Gospels an effective resplendence and majesty, issuing from the person of Christ, of a character in which only the divine appear upon this earth.” “The human spirit,” he says, with sympathetic and openly acknowledged fellowship, “will never rise higher than the majesty and moral elevation of Christianity, as it radiates from the Gospels.” But Goethe’s Christianity manifests itself in the admirable attitude, as of a pupil to a master, which he had toward Spinoza, whom he called “theissimus” and of whom he said that nobody had spoken of the Divinity so like the Saviour as he. If, indeed, the dualistic separation of God and nature is the fundamental principle of Christianity, then Spinoza was a pagan, and Goethe was too. But God and nature are not all the world: there is the human, the humane, as well; and Spinoza’s conception of humanity is Christian, in so far as he defines the phenomenon man as the becoming-conscious of the God-nature in the human being, as a bursting forth out of mere dull being and living; accordingly, as liberation from nature, and so as spirit. Again, there is absolutely nothing pagan about that famous Mastery of the Passions by their Analysis; and just as little in the Spinozan motif of renunciation (“Entsagung”), which becomes the general motif of Goethe’s life and work, like the idea of freedom for Schiller and the idea of redemption for Wagner.
On the contrary, it was just this pathos of renunciation, which cast such a Christian shade upon the pagan, aristocratic, child-of-nature well-being of Goethe’s life and lent his spirited features an expressly Gothic trait of suffering not to be overlooked save by the gross popular belief in his aristocratic good fortune. How much resignation must have darkened the end of this apparently consummate and favoured existence! His life-work, though almost superhuman, remained entirely a fragment—it is putting it mildly to say that “not all the dreams of blossoms ripened”—Wagner’s performance, for instance, or Ibsen’s, is incomparably more a rounded and effective whole. One may put it that Goethe’s spirit was far more powerful than his nature, greater than his power to give it form or than his organically allotted span; and it is easy to understand that vehement demand of his for immortality, which is one of the magnificent, dæmonic expressions of his personality: Nature, he cried, was bound to give him a new body when the one he had could no longer sustain his spirit.
Consider even his love-life, which likewise the popular mind tends to think of as sunlit and blissful, divinely favoured and without a cross. Certainly he was much loved and rich in love; certainly to him much enjoyment was given. In the realm of the erotic he had his spells of coarseness, when he behaved a little like a garden god: when, ingenuous and unsentimental as the antique world, he would enjoy without stint and indulge without a qualm. His marriage, a misalliance, socially and intellectually, was a result of this attitude of mind. But where he loved so that lofty poesy was the result, and not merely a Venetian epigram ticked out in hexameters on a maiden’s back; where it was serious, the romance regularly ended in renunciation. He never actually possessed Lotte or Friederike, nor Lilli, nor the Herzlieb, nor Marianne, nor even Ulrike—and not even Frau von Stein. He never loved unrequited—unless in the immensely painful, absurdly agitating affair with little Levetzof. Yet in all these cases resignation was the order of the day: either on moral grounds, or for the sake of his freedom. Mostly he bolted.
But the renunciation I mean was a deeper and higher thing. In his stature, his lineaments, his proportions as he stands today in the eyes of the nation, he is what he is as the work of renunciation. I am not speaking generally, I do not refer to the sense of sacrifice which is the meaning of all art; nor to the struggle with chaos, the surrender of freedom, the creative constraint which is its inner essence. Goethe’s pathos of renunciation—or, since we are speaking of permanent forces dominating the whole of existence, his ethos of renunciation—is of a more personal kind. It is his destiny, it is the instinctive mandate of his especially national gift, which was essentially civilizing in its mission. Or, rather, might this destiny and mission, this bond, this conditioning limitation and pedagogic duty of renunciation, be after all something less personal to him than it just now appeared? Might it perhaps be the law of his destiny, innate and inviolable save at the expense of heavy spiritual penalties; the imperative which is the essence of the German spirit, destined always, as it is, somehow and in some degree, to feel itself called to a cultural task?—I spoke of the consciousness of a community of feeling, which Goethe must, at moments, have felt with Christianity. What did it consist in, and to what had it reference? Goethe pays homage to the “moral culture” of Christianity—that is, to its humanity, its civilizing, anti-barbarian influence. It was the same as his; and the occasional homage he paid it undoubtedly springs from his recognition that the mission of Christianity within the confines of the Germanic peoples bore a likeness to his own. And here, in the fact that he conceived his task, his duty to his nation, as essentially a civilizing mission, lies the deepest and the most German significance of his renunciation. Does anyone doubt that there were in Goethe possibilities of a greatness and growth, wilder, ranker, more disruptive, more “natural,” than those which his instinct for self-conquest allowed him to develop, and which today give our mental picture of him so highly pedagogic a cast? In his Iphigenia the idea of humanity, as opposed to barbarism, wears the impress of civilization—not in the polemical and even political sense in which we use the word today, but in the sense of moral culture. It was a Frenchman, Maurice Barrès, who pointed out that the Iphigenia is a “civilizing work,” in that it “stands for the rights of society against the arrogance of intellect.” The phrase fits almost better that other monument of self-discipline and self-correction, yes, almost of self-mortification, which has been a target for ridicule on account of its affected atmosphere of courts and culture: I mean the Tasso. Both are works of resignation, of German and schoolmasterish renunciation of all the advantages of barbarism. Wagner, on the other hand, the voluptuary, did not renounce them; he yielded to them all, with huge effectiveness; and his punishment is that the acclaim accorded to his riotously national art grows daily cruder and more popular.
My subject is still the aspiration of the children of nature toward spirit; which is just as sentimental in kind as is the converse striving of the sons of the spirit toward nature, and may function with varying degrees of aptitude or success, with more or less naïveté or subtlety. Compared with Goethe’s majestic work of spiritualization, I cannot find that Tolstoy’s struggles to throw off nature’s yoke were crowned with great success. But I am whimsical enough to relish putting my finger on the mighty kernel of racial loyalty which dwelt at the heart of the Christianity of the one and the humanity of the other. And that kernel was, of course, in other words, their aristocratic integrity; for racial loyalty is aristocratic by nature, while Christianity, humanity, and civilization all represent the conflicting principle of the spirit of democracy, and the process of spiritualization is at the same time one of democratization. What Tolstoy aptly calls his “democratic trend”—aptly, because the word “trend” implies a will and a direction somewhither, indicating an effort and not mere being—finds emphatic expression now and again in Goethe as well. “One would have,” he says, “to become Catholic at once, in order to have a share in the lives of humanity!” To mingle with humanity, on equal terms, to lead the life of the people, and in the market-place, seems at such moments happiness to him. “In these small sovereign states,” he cries, “what wretched, isolated men we are!” And he praises Venice as a monument to the power, not of a single despot, but of a whole people. But such phrases, clearly, are meant more correctively than absolutely; they are self-critical comments, meant to redress the balance of his German and Protestant aristocratism—“tendencies,” then, sentimental leanings, of the same kind as the radical and pacifistic bent of the Russian giant, in whose “holiness” a penetrating eye can see so much self-deception, childishness, and “let’s pretend.”
A close observer like Gorky, or a shrewd critic like Merezhkovsky, felt at once and keenly the patriarchal and sensual quality, the life-bound animalism, which lay beneath the sanctification. Tolstoy married at thirty-four the eighteen-year-old Sophia Alexandrovna Behrs, who from then on was scarcely ever anything but “expectant,” and was confined thirteen times. Through long, creative years, his marriage was an idyll of family life, full of healthy, god-fearing animal pleasure, against a lavish economic background of agriculture and cattle-breeding. The atmosphere was Judaic Old Testament rather than Christian. Tolstoy knows the same great simple love of existence, the everlasting childlike joy of life, that possessed Goethe’s soul. When he “praises each day for its beauty,” when he “marvels at the richness of God’s kingdom” expressing itself therein, how “each day He sends some new thing to distinguish it,” we feel a better understanding of what lay at the bottom of Goethe’s conception of “Behagen.” Waves of piercing sensuous enjoyment of nature break upon him even in the years of gloom, when he meditates suicide, plans the Confession—in short, conjures up that misunderstanding to which his sanctification falls prey, and dehumanizes and shrinks the majesty of the patriarch, christianizes and conventionalizes it into the Anglo-Indian model.
Merezhkovsky called him the great seer of the body, in contrast to Dostoyevsky the visionary of the soul; and truly it is the body to which his love and deepest interest belong, to which his knowledge refers, by which his genius is conditioned. We see this so clearly in his reaction to old age. In 1894 he writes: “Age is approaching. That means the hair falls out, the teeth decay, the wrinkles come, the breath gets bad. Even before the end, everything turns frightful, disgusting; sweat, rouge, powder, all sorts of beastliness. Then what has become of that which I have served? Where has beauty gone? It is the essence of everything. Without it there is nothing, no life.”—This description of dying while the body still lives, may pass for Christian, by virtue of its insistence on misery and its characterization of the flesh, revolting and insulting on the spiritual side. But the physical apprehension of old age and death is through and through pagan and sensual.
Aksakov says of Tolstoy: “His gift is bearlike in kind and degree.” And is it not this “bearlike” quality of his genius that made Tolstoy “the great writer of Russia,” the author of War and Peace, the epic poet of the people’s struggle against Rome, against Napoleon? I openly declare my deliberate intention to cast doubt on the pacifism which the prophet of humanity so didactically professed. Not, I hasten to add, from any anti-pacifistic sentiments on my own part; merely out of a sense of humour. That Tolstoy was in his youth a soldier and an officer, we know. From his biography we learn that he was heart and soul a soldier; and we have evidence of his heroic and warlike enthusiasm in the Sebastopol days—that “splendid time,” that “glorious time,” that time of touching pride in the Russian army, when he was confessedly saturated with patriotic feeling and thrilled by his experience of comradery under arms, first felt when the serious moment is at hand. His attitude toward the Serbo-Turkish war of 1877 is still full of conviction. It is a real war, he says, and it moves him. The distinction between “real” and “unreal” doubtless indicates some progress in the direction of pacifism. But is pacifism “real” so long as it is conditional and must progress in order to exist?
In 1812, at least, there was a “real” war, and its history occupied Tolstoy long before he became the great writer of Russia by dint of it. He treated of it, quite in the patriotic key, in his school at Yasnaya Polyana. From all we hear, he dealt with it on a mythical rather than a historical basis; but he expressly declared that he presented his pupils with these legends of a warlike mythology in order to rouse their patriotic feeling. And then the root-and-branch Russianism, the fundamental folk-character of his peasant-patrician nature, comes out strong in his epos, whose theme is a defensive war waged against the invasion of Latin civilization. War and Peace had a huge popular success, though the critics and military men had some fault to find. On the intellectual side it was weak, they said; its philosophy of history was narrow and superficial; it was mysticism and sophistry to deny the influence of individuals on events. But the creative power, the “bearlike” strength of it, were unanimously declared to be beyond all discussion, as well as its enormous genuineness as a folk-epic. The liberal criticism of Russia admitted that it was “Russian to the core,” that it “presented the soul of the Russian people, in its whole range and variety, in all its lofty simplicity, with a sheer creative power that had never been equalled.” But the critics took in bad part Tolstoy’s “wilful remoteness from all contemporary currents of progress”—a phenomenon and a reproach which were to recur with the appearance of Anna Karenine. “Anna Karenine I don’t like,” Turgeniev wrote, “though there are splendid things in it: the race, the mowing, the hunt. But the whole thing is soured; it smells of Moscow, and old maids and incense and Slavophils and high life and all that.” In a word, Turgeniev, the Sapadnik, rejected with horror the oriental element in the novel, and with him went the whole liberal-radical party; some ignored Anna Karenine, others sneered or called names, while the Slavophils and the aristocrats and court party rubbed their hands in glee. In fact Tolstoy, in an intellectual and political sense, had the reactionaries on his side; and they could have little appreciation of the artistic qualities of his work. The liberals were liberal enough to know how to value these, and they did so, albeit in that state of bewilderment into which people always fall at the sight of genius in the camp of reaction. Witness the bewilderment of Europe over Bismarck.
The paradox is worth a little attention. Our idealists would have us believe that genius, the creative power, must, as a living force, act only in the service of progress and human purpose, and be justly denied to the forces which side against life, show sympathy with death, and are inimical to freedom and progress and thus bad in the human sense. We would almost accept it as metaphysical evidence for the goodness of a thing if a capital piece of writing were done in its name. And really, it does seem that, as a rule, the reactionary camp suffers from lack of talent. But not invariably. The reactionary genius does occur, the brilliant and conquering ability does act as attorney for retrograde tendencies—and nothing dazes the world more than the sight of this paradoxical phenomenon. Sainte-Beuve said of Joseph de Maistre that he had “nothing of a writer but the gift”—a comment which perfectly expresses this bewilderment and precisely indicates the thing I mean.
Liberal and progressive Russia must have seen in Tolstoy just this—a case of a great gift in the service of reaction. But it is clear enough that this great gift is of one essence with his fundamental Russianism, his immense integration with the people, his pagan and natural aristocracy; and that the tendency toward democratic spiritualization was—just tendency, romantic in its nature and crowned, after all, by such strikingly indifferent success! His tremendous orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery at and denial of European progress; and this it was which must necessarily and profoundly alienate all the westernizing and liberalizing, all the “Petrinic” elements in Russia. Actually, he quite frankly scouted the western belief in progress, which, he said, had been accepted by the Russia of Peter the Great. They had, he said, observed the operation of the law of progress in the Duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three thousand inhabitants. But then came China, with its two hundred million inhabitants, and knocked the theory of progress into a cocked hat. Which did not for one moment prevent them from believing in progress as a general law of mankind; they took the field with cannons and guns to instruct the Chinese in their thesis. Yet ordinary human understanding tells us that if the history of the larger part of mankind, which we call the Orient, does not confirm the law of progress, then this law does not obtain for the whole of mankind, but forms at most an article of faith for a certain part of it. Tolstoy vows that he himself is unable to find a universal law in the life of mankind, and that history might be co-ordinated just as well in the light of any other idea or “historical whimsy” as in that of progress. And more than that, he does not see the slightest necessity of finding laws for history—quite apart from the impossibility of the thing. The universal, eternal law of perfection, he says, stands written in the soul of every human being; it is only an error to carry it over into the field of history. So long as it remains personal, this law is fruitful and accessible to all; applied to historical conceptions, it is idle talk. The general progress of mankind is an unproved thesis. It does not exist for any of the nations of the east; hence it is just as unfounded to assert that progress is a primary law of mankind as it would be to say that blondness is—all people being blond save those with dark hair.
It is remarkable to see how ideas from the sphere of an idealistic individualism, which is German, and places human perfection within the individual soul, are here found in the company of others which constitute the most decisive challenge to an arrogant Europe setting itself up as intellectual arbiter of the world. Tolstoy protests against what he considers the childishness of this attitude, which confuses western Europe with humanity as a whole; and the protest betrays that his gaze is directed eastward. It betrays, in a word, his Asiatic bias: anti-“Petrinic,” primitive Russian, anti-civilization—in short, bearlike. What we hear is the voice of the Russian god on the maple throne under the golden lime-tree.
The voice of our humanistic deity has a different ring. Goethe, beyond a doubt, hated and scorned Asia. The element of Sarmatian wildness in which Tolstoy found himself so much at home and which merely gets rationalized in his late prophetic period, would always remain remote and foreign to the spirit of the great German, with its exclusively cultural bias. A journey Goethe once made into Upper Silesian Poland was the occasion of what contact he had with the Slav. His impressions are “mostly remarkable negatively.” He observes ignorance, lack of culture, low standards of living, stupidity. He feels himself “remote from cultured men.” His attitude at the time of the War of Liberation, offensive as it was to patriotic feeling, the admiring and personally friendly respect he felt for the classic phenomenon of Napoleon (“the man is too big for you”) belong in this same category. “It is true,” he says in 1813, “I no longer see French and Italians, but in their stead I see Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Kashubes, brown and other hussars.” This enumeration of eastern races has an extraordinarily contemptuous ring. That the Cossacks and Kashubes were in the country as allies and the French as enemies seems not to matter to him. He confesses, indeed, that he too is glad to be rid of the Gallic soldatesca; yet he is obviously not far from finding more humiliation in the alliance with Russia and the dependence of Germany upon the east than in her subjugation upon the west; and certain it is that the humanism of the writer who created the Iphigenia has more affiliation with the humanity of western Europe, which has given the mould to our civilization, than with the soft and savage human nature of Half-Asia.
Unpatriotically he declared that he could not hate the French—he owed them far too much of his culture. The words are only right and proper. But (just as in Tolstoy’s case) the fun begins directly it is a question of his nature, of that pre-intellectual fundamental constitution we were talking about, which had its own ways of finding expression, and which is so extraordinarily un-French that it might well be described as pre-eminently German. It would be wrong to bring in evidence here his coldness towards “freedom.” For in the first place the principle of order (ordre) is something just as French and classic and rationalist as the principle of freedom, which on party grounds is set over against it. And in the second, there is nothing un-German about freedom. We know with what éclat Goethe cited Guizot’s dictum that Germany gave the idea of personal freedom to the world. But there is in Goethe something that rebels against the idea, against the doctrinaire and theoretic; a lack of faith that the particular, existing under definite conditions, could ever be improved by the method of abstraction; a realism, that is, and a scepticism, in matters political, which one may as well call un-French as particularly German—taking France as the country of revolution and Germany as the country of a certain national weakness for the living, historically conditioned, “organic.” We must remember that he was a practical politician, he had governed Saxe-Weimar. But the practical sphere is not kind to the soul; it is a training in cynicism, as many a politician has found out, even in France, where more than one radical has become a conservative and turned the guns on the people after he came to power. Perhaps Goethe might have been more generous-minded, politically speaking, if he had not lost his idealism in the practical field. But this too is unlikely, since from the very beginning he was insensitive to historical democracy, to history defined as the evolution of the idea in the masses; he was fundamentally unacquainted with enthusiasm for political ideas, and in general conceived of history as the biography of great men—an aristocratism which is as different from Schiller’s high-flung democratic gesture as it is from the Christian-moujik disparagement of heroes in War and Peace.
It would be foolish to think of him as servile, despite the anecdote about Beethoven and the imperial company on the promenade at Karlsbad. His subservience to princes was purely mundane in its character, wherever no personal friendship came in play. When in 1794 Freiherr von Gagern published his challenge to the intelligence of Germany, and to Goethe in particular, to put its pen at the service of the “good,” that is to say, the conservative cause—no other than that of a new alliance of German princes for the purpose of saving the country from anarchy—Goethe, after thanking him politely for the confidence reposed in him, made the characteristic reply that he considered it impossible for princes and writers to unite upon a common task. Notwithstanding which, we need waste no words over his strictly negative attitude toward the French Revolution.
On the intellectual side, his view of humanity was a cynical one—that is to say, it was radically sceptical. But we know that this was on the intellectual side alone, from the fact that it did not prevent him from loving his fellow-men. We have his confession that the mere sight of the human countenance could cure him of the blues. What he did not believe in was drawing up articles and holding love-feasts. We shall never know whether Hegel was mocking or spoke in honest enthusiasm when he said: “As long as the sun has stood in the firmament and the planets circled round it, it has never been seen that a human being stands on his head—i.e., on his understanding—and bases reality upon it.” Whether jest or earnest, it was this that revolted Goethe. He judged it to be entirely against nature to try to insist that the whole of mankind find just one choice of means, just one route toward civic happiness. Upon which I may comment as follows: that, in the first place, one such utterance, by virtue of its strongly nationalist, individualist, aristocratic emphasis, outweighs the whole burden of his indifference toward the War of Liberation, and that surely he who uttered it was only prevented by his admiration for the genius of Napoleon—likewise aristocratic in its origin—from seeing in the Imperator the standard-bearer of precisely this democratic “insistency.” But, in the second place, we must admit that he had a right to set up as an advocate of nature. To quote again:
Franztum drängt in unsern verworrenen Tagen, wie einstmals
Luthertum es getan, ruhige Bildung zurück.
(Driven by the spirit of France in our troublous days, as aforetime
By the spirit of Luther oppressed, quiet culture retreats.)
What a telling synthesis this, of France and Luther; how unprejudiced by national feeling! It is all one to him whether the unrest, the distraction, come from this side or that of the Rhine. No matter whence it comes, it is his enemy, the enemy of nature and culture, of the ruhige Bildung which is at the bottom of his idea of humanity. The distich shows clearly—shows it despite all Lust am Protestieren—where he would have stood, say, in the sixteenth century. In the name of that lofty conception of Bildung, in which nature and culture unite, he would have been for Rome against the Reformation—or else he would have taken up an ambiguous and irresponsible position, as Erasmus did, of whom Luther said that repose was dearer to him than the Cross. “The Cross”—a couple of centuries later, that was the Revolution. Revolution was the spirit—and to Goethe his ruhige Bildung was dearer.
Here, for a moment, Erasmus and Goethe meet, in an atmosphere of patrician quietism, humanistic love of peace. But the parallel does not long hold—there is too much difference in the scale, and, after all, men’s character, the essence of their being, is greatly affected by their proportions. Tolstoy’s “folkishness,” for instance—is it not the expression and apanage of his bearlike bulk? Are they not one and the same thing? And may we not draw from Goethe’s greatness the a priori conclusion that his humanistic cosmopolitanism must contain a good-sized racial core? Erasmus, the subtle, was not “folkish.” It was Luther who was that. And truly, in scale, in essence, as an embodiment of Germanic greatness, Goethe belongs more with Luther than with the humanists—yes, more even with Bismarck, to whom he is much closer than a certain antithesis, beloved abroad, would seem to show.
Dangerous, perhaps, to say so—as giving aid and comfort to the cave-bears of nationalism the world over—but sometimes it is hard not to feel sceptical about the genuineness and validity of Goethe’s humanism. A godlike man, like Tolstoy. But is it possible that the antique, humanistic, Jovelike attributes of his godhead were more a convention than we think; that they did not go very deep, and that he himself, all the time, like Tolstoy, the Russian god under the golden lime-tree, was an ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic and aristocratic paganism which claims both Luther and Bismarck as its sons, and which, on both sides, played a rôle in the ideology of the late war?
An open hostility, against Goethe as well as against Bismarck, is at work in certain literary, humane, and radical circles, a demand for his dethronement. It cannot be without all sense or justification. Goethe, as a follower of Spinoza, conceived of all natural final causes and purposes as anthropomorphic fictions; thus he was disinclined to an anthropocentric, emancipatory conception of humanity, which teleologically refers everything to itself and looks upon art as a servant of mankind. His synthesis of art and nature is not humanitarian. An approach by the route of the senses is natural to him: it makes him see the burning of a peasant house as real and appealing to his sympathies, whereas “the Fall of the Fatherland” he would find an empty phrase. All which, frankly and flippantly spoken, is never very far removed from the brute.
There is in him a feeling for power, for the struggle “until one proves stronger than the other”; in such sentiments the pacifism of spirit would find it impossible to rejoice. It “makes him sad to be friends with everybody.” He “needs anger.” Certainly, that is not Christian love of peace—though Lutheran it may be, and Bismarckian to boot. One might say much—and much has been said—in evidence of his love of strife, his fondness for “pitching in and punishing,” his readiness to close the mouth of opposed opinions by a show of power and to “remove such people from society.” But best of all I love—if here too only because it is so amusing—the tale of Kotzebue and the Schiller celebration which Kotzebue got up with the sole and single purpose of annoying Goethe and playing Schiller off against him. That low-minded Kotzebue! He knows that the plan will annoy the old man; he also knows that Goethe can forbid the celebration by virtue of his office. So he puts the choice squarely before him: he can forbid it, and thereby betray his jealousy and despotism; or, if he hesitates to go so far, he can pocket up the annoyance. With majestic simplicity Goethe chooses to exercise his power. He forbids the celebration. Bismarck would have done the same.
In the soul-economy of this breed of giants are certain parallel traits. There is violence and there is sentimentality: crude words both to describe what I mean, crude and naturalistically derogatory; yet it is my humour to use them; for even if I wanted to I could not ignore the hidden irony—quite objective, quite unsuspected irony, of course—involved in their gigantic loyalties, their aristocratic servitude. They were both “faithful German servants of their Lord” (oh, my God!): the “civilian Wallenstein” and the despot of Kultur; they were German “Edelknechte” both; and there was nothing hypocritical about it all, only their giant-sensibilities functioning at full height. The similarity of the character and situation is so strong as to bewilder one: Karl August and the simple old man whom Bismarck “served” blend into one single symbolic figure. In the year 1825 he of Saxe-Weimar celebrated the fiftieth jubilee of his reign, which was at the same time the fiftieth year of Goethe’s residence in Weimar. On this day Goethe calls himself “his master’s most enraptured servant.” He is the first with his congratulations, at six o’clock at the Roman villa in the park. The emotion is great and genuine. “Together to our latest breath!” We see the venerable Wilhelm going to meet Bismarck on the landing with just such another embrace; while a fugitive red mounts in the cheeks of Roderich von Posa, who turns away with the words: “I cannot be a courtier!”
I confessed in the beginning my tendency to make a matter of intrinsic value out of the matter of size. The greatest German poet must also be the most German one—that is an association more immediate and inevitable than even the causal, it is temporal, it is simply the future tense. And it was sanctioned by a source which will be universally accepted as authoritative. It was Father Jahn, who, motu proprio, in the year 1810 declared that Goethe was the most German of poets—quite unperturbed by the fact that Goethe behaved at all times as distantly and unsympathetically toward deutsche Bruderschaften as Tolstoy toward Slavic. And then, in 1813, when he had very nearly succeeded in bringing himself into bad odour as a man without a country, Barnhagen von Ense cried out: “Goethe not a patriotic German? All the freedom of Germania early found a home in his breast, there to become, to our never-sufficiently-to-be-acknowledged advantage, the pattern, the example, and the root of our culture. In the shade of this tree we all live and move. Never did roots thrust firmer and deeper into the soul of our Fatherland, never did shoots more lustily suck strength from its breast. That our youth feel pride in their arms, loftiness in their spirits, hath more reference to him than to many another who may lay claim to great activity therein.”
Good, fine, powerful words. They proceed from the truth that in national matters very little depends on what a man says or the opinions he holds; on what he does, on the other hand, everything. When a man has written Götz, Faust, Wilhelm Meister, the Sprüche in Reimen and Hermann und Dorothea—a poem which Schlegel honoured with the epithet “vaterländisch”—he can indulge in a bit of cosmopolitan irresponsibility, just as the “great writer of Russia” could indulge in the rationalizing Christian pacifism of his latter period. The national is so much second nature that one may address oneself to the mind without running the risk of literary unrealism; and as nature Goethe always felt the national—we see it, among others, in the famous remark to Eckermann: “National hatred is a queer thing after all. You will always find it keenest and most violent in the lowest stages of culture. But there is a stage where it quite disappears, and one stands in a way above the nations and feels the well-or ill-being of a neighbouring people as though it were one’s own. This stage was conformable to my nature, and I had confirmed myself in it long before I reached my sixtieth year.”
Spiritual regeneration. This summons to achieve the spirit is the sentimental imperative of the favourites of nature; just as that of the sons of spirit is the summons to achieve the form. And they respond to it—with more or less of aptitude. Tolstoy’s self-imposed task of shaking off the natural man was but spiritualizing the savage; yet a touching and honourable sight, even alongside of Goethe’s majestic culture. The main thing is that nothing should come too easy. Effortless nature—that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root—or substance. A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually yearn toward each other—that is man.
Gorky says of Tolstoy a quite extraordinary and startling thing: he suggests the possibility that Tolstoy, despite the strength of his reason, sometimes hoped, or at least the thought occurred to him, that possibly nature would make an exception, and grant him physical immortality. “The whole broad earth looks toward him: from China, from India, from America, from everywhere stretch hither living, vibrating threads, his soul is for all and for always. Why should not nature break her law, and grant one man physical immortality—why not?” What madness! But even if it is not true, even if the sensible old man never came on such a monstrously presumptuous thought—even so, it is very telling that Gorky should have come on it for him. It shows what seemed to a competent observer to be Tolstoy’s relation to nature and life.—And Goethe? Is it likely that the grey-haired lover of Fraulein von Levetzof never rebelled against the limitations of human life, as Napoleon did at the limitations of human power, when he complained that men had become unbelievers, unwilling to acknowledge him a god, as they had his brother Alexander? Shall we imagine him utterly incapable of the thought which Gorky ascribes to the old Tolstoy: that nature might conceivably hesitate to destroy him, her darling son, as she did all ordinary humankind?
Yet die he did, without warning, at the age of eighty-three. Nature, as it were, tenderly got round him. He had been ailing; he settled down in his arm-chair for a rest and a nap, and he was gone. The passage in which Eckermann describes the appearance of the corpse is famous. “The body lay naked, folded in a white sheet; they had put large pieces of ice round, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Friedrich (the servant) unwrapped the sheet, and I was astounded at the godlike splendour of those limbs. The chest exceedingly powerful, broad and deep; the arms and thighs full and gently muscular; the feet slender and very chaste in form; and nowhere on the body a trace of fat or shrinking or decay. A perfect human being lay in great beauty there before me; and the delight I felt made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had forsaken such a frame.”
Let there be no misunderstanding. Nobody asserts that Goethe and Tolstoy were, so to speak, four-square; that by contrast with the morbid geniuses Schiller and Dostoyevsky they were “normal” in the common acceptation of the word. Even the genius most endowed by nature is never natural in the philistine sense; that is to say, normal, healthy, and according to rule. In his physical there must always be something high-strung and irritable, prone to crises and disease, in his psychical always something foreign to the average man, affecting him uncannily—something almost psychopathic; though the philistine must not be allowed to put it like that.... No; what I refer to here is that sense-endowment possessed by the noble race of Antæus and celebrated by Goethe’s Faust in the words he addresses to the Earth-Spirit:
Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu geniessen. Nicht
Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur,
Vergönnest mir, in ihre tiefe Brust
Wie in den Busen eines Freunds, zu schauen....
“Power to feel and to enjoy nature.” Tolstoy’s sense-endowment, as an individual, must have been that of a noble, highly sensitive animal, most perfectly equipped by nature and strengthened and sublimated by the contemplative power and awareness of the human being. His eyes, the small, keen grey eyes under the bushy brows, were like a falcon’s. They saw everything. They were capable of analysis so penetrating as sometimes to seem fantastic. A critic once wrote of him: “You are sometimes capable of saying ‘such and such things about the constitution of a certain man indicated that he wanted to travel to India.’” His sense of smell, it seems, was especially penetrating. The fact plays no small part in the sensuous atmosphere of his writing, and appears to have conflicted at times with his own human feeling. “However much I dislike to speak of it,” he says in his Recollections, “I can still remember the characteristic sharp odour which was personal to my aunt, probably in consequence of some carelessness in dress.”
I have already spoken of Goethe’s sensitiveness to weather conditions. It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the earthquake of Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment which enables them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses and issues in the suprasensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood was sometimes priapic—a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy, in whose nature the element of antique culture was missing. In him the voice of sexual desire spoke in no classic accents; it revelled Russianly in its strength; yet at the same time it always had a moral cast, was at all times followed, probably even accompanied, by profound remorse. Tolstoy’s comrades from his Sebastopol period bear witness to the fury with which even at that time the battle between sensual and spiritual impulses raged within him. According to them young Count Tolstoy was a glorious comrade, the life and soul of his battery, overflowing with high spirits. When he was away, they were disconsolate. “We would hear nothing of him,” says the narrator, “for a whole day, for two or three days. At last he would come back, the very picture of the prodigal son; gloomy, knocked up, out of sorts with himself. He would take me aside and begin to confess. He confessed everything, simply everything, his gambling, his carousing, where he had spent his days and nights—and, would you believe it, his remorse and suffering were as deep as though he had committed some great crime. His despair went so beyond all bounds that it was painful to behold. That was the sort of man he was. He was, in a word, very remarkable, and, to tell the truth, I never did quite understand him.”
That we can well believe. The remorse and suffering to which the young officer was a witness sprang of course from that conflict within Tolstoy’s own breast which afterwards gave him such unrivalled power to stir the conscience and prick man’s fear of God awake. But the depth of his moral necessity is a precise measure of the violence of his instincts; and though his natural man bore heavier and heavier on his Christianity as time went on, so that he craved surcease from its stings, yet he never, up till the end, attained to peace. Tolstoy in sex matters held out as long as Goethe, who mocked himself thus:
Alter, hörst du noch nicht auf?
Immer, Mädchen!
But his state of mind toward woman, whom he had early learned to regard, after the manner of the Fathers, as instrumentum diaboli, had long since assumed such a form that an experience like that of Goethe with Ulrike was unthinkable. Stranger still—or no, in a man of his parts and magnificence it is only what we should expect—we find not a trace of cant or prudishness or even delicacy in all his recorded utterances on this subject. On the contrary, they are all of a pagan frankness that borders on the cynical. He goes walking by the sea with Gorky and Anton Tschekof, and suddenly he levels at Tschekof a question about the latter’s youth, using a crude Biblical word with rather startling effect. Anton Pavlovich is confused; he pulls at his little beard and mutters something in reply. The old man lets him stammer awhile, then, looking out to sea, delivers himself in four words, of a confession of his own, in good round terms, ending with a very low and vulgar peasant word. “When they come from his rugged lips,” says Gorky, “words like that lose their barrack-room flavour and sound quite simple and natural.”
Again, he says: “If Leo Nikolaevich were a natural scientist, he would certainly evolve the most ingenious hypotheses, and make the greatest discoveries.” Gorky has not here in mind Tolstoy’s remarkable sense-equipment; but I am inclined to associate the two ideas. Nor, it would appear, has he Goethe in mind when he ascribes to Tolstoy a latent genius for the natural sciences; but I have. To me it seems a pertinent fact that Goethe, in Venice—this was in 1790, at the time of those amorous adventures celebrated in the Epigrams—saw a broken sheep-skull on the Lido, and had that morphological insight into the development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebræ which shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal body. When Gorky says that Tolstoy, if he had gone in for it, would have made brilliant discoveries in the field of natural science, there can be no doubt of his meaning. He has in mind that initiated sympathy with organic life which those must possess who are her favoured sons—a sympathy not far from Eros, and in which Goethe’s biologic intuitions have their source; for example, his incredibly sure-footed anticipation of the cell theory.
Does it not find expression, this sympathy, in the youthful Goethe’s Ganymede-pathos? “Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne sich an mein Herz drängt deiner ewigen Wärme heilig Gefühl.”... “Aufwärts an deinen Busen, alliebender Vater!” Does it not find expression in his pantheism, which is only the objectivation of his feeling, in such wise that his own utter surrender gives him to know the divine not as something from without, but as irradiating him through and through? In any case, this organic sympathy, this living interest, is entirely directed toward life, toward the “ewige Wärme”; whereas—and what could be more characteristic of the difference between these two, nature’s great children?—Tolstoy’s strongest, most tormenting, deepest, and most productive interest has to do with death. It is the thought of death which dominates his thoughts and writing, to such an extent that one may say no other great master of literature has felt and depicted death as he has—felt it with such frightful penetration, depicted it so insatiably often. Tolstoy’s poetic genius for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field of natural science; and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case, in his fixation with death, love comes into play too: for the fear of death, this source of Tolstoy’s poetry and his feeling for religion, is fear of the love of nature, it is the negative, naturalistic other side of Goethe’s Ganymede-impulse.
“Du führst,” says Goethe-Faust to the Earth-Spirit:
“Du führst die Reihe der Lebendigen
Vor mir vorbei und lehrst mich meine Brüder
Im stillen Busch, in Luft und Wasser kennen.”
“My brothers.” We know that it was Goethe who took in all seriousness the idea of “man’s close relation to the beast,” and that before science had got far enough on to do so; his possession by this thought, this profound and true intuition, shows us the child of nature in all his sympathy with the organic. Schiller’s humanity, his conception of man, which was at bottom emancipatory, haughtily inimical to nature, would have found little pleasure in such a conception; and one does not discover ideas to which one is unsympathetic; that is to say, ideally unsympathetic. There is not such a thing as an assumptionless science. Scientific discoveries are always the result of an ideal assumption: the mediæval statement “Credo ut intellegam” is eternally right. Belief is the organ of knowledge; and without the preconceived, previsioned idea of a unified plan on which is based the development of the higher vertebrate world, including man—in the plant world the conception of the “primitive plant”—Goethe never would have found the os intermaxillare in man. I may speak of the amusing contradiction between his discovery and the humanistic explanation he gave it. He says that the intermaxillary bone is variously shaped, in animals, according to circumstance and necessity; but that when it came to man, the highest in the scale, it hid itself for shame, “afraid of betraying an animal voracity.” Ideal human pride might retort that it was truly inhuman to spy out the shamefaced hidden bone and bring it to the light.
Yet how remarkable and significant it is to see Goethe’s medical and biological interest being seasoned from the start with the humanistic, with his concern with man and his beauty! And consequently with art too; since art with Goethe was a humanistic discipline, and all the disciplines and faculties of human endeavour, human wisdom, human power, were seen by him as variations and adumbrations of one and the same great compelling and enchanting interest and concern, which is man. To study humanity from the angle of medicine and the natural sciences did not lie in his family tradition, as it did in Schiller’s and Dostoyevsky’s, both of whom were sons of physicians, and neither of whom gave a thought to man’s physical side. On the other hand, we know that ever since his Leipsic days Goethe had occupied himself with medicine, associated every day with medical men in Strasburg, worked in the dissecting-rooms, spent time in the obstetrical clinic and the clinic for internal diseases. The spirit in which he pursued these studies, the kind of interest he took in them, is clear from the fact that he himself later in life lectured to young artists in the academy on the bony structure of the body. The same thing comes out even plainer in the words he puts into the mouth of Wilhelm Meister in the Wanderjahre, when the hero takes his surgical training. His primary interest is in anatomy; and we get some very curious information on the point of previous preparation in a quite different field of activity.
“By a peculiar method, which no one would guess, I had already made good progress in knowledge of the human frame; and this was during my theatrical career. When you come down to it, the physical man, after all, plays the principal rôle there—a fine man, a fine woman! If the manager is lucky enough to have got hold of these, the writers of comedy and tragedy are assured. The free footing upon which such society lives makes their associates more familiar with the peculiar beauty of the uncovered limbs than any other relationship; different costumes often oblige them to make visible what otherwise is generally concealed. On this point I might have much to say, as also of physical defects which the sensible actor must recognize in himself or others, in order, if not to correct, at least to hide them. In this way I was sufficiently prepared to give consistency to the anatomical course which taught me to know the outer parts more accurately, whilst the inner parts too were not strange to me, inasmuch as a certain perception of them had always been present to me.”
This is, I repeat, a significant bit of information. We learn, not only that the acquaintance with the human form, which Wilhelm owed to the “free footing” of theatrical life, was a happy preparation for his anatomical studies; but also that both, his leaning to the theatre and his interest in medicine, were expressions of one and the same profound interest, his sympathy with the organic and its highest revelation, the human form—an interest, and a sympathy, not far removed, as I said, from Eros. For instance, when Wilhelm Meister, one day in the dissecting-room, finds that his subject is “the most beautiful female arm that ever twined itself about a young man’s neck”—and cannot bring himself to mutilate with his instruments this “glorious manifestation of nature.” Out of this incident there comes about his acquaintance with that remarkable man, the “plastic anatomist,” a sculptor who prepares from wax or other material anatomical dissections possessing the fresh colour and appearance of the natural subjects, in the hope of employing his ingenuity and fertility of method to make the demonstrations more valuable to students and medical practitioners the world over. There follow the most pregnant conversations upon the association of plastic art and anatomical knowledge, and the two intertwine in the most wonderful way when the master “cast in a shaped mass the beautiful torso of a youth and now was skilfully trying to divest the ideal form of the epidermis, to change the beautiful shapes of life into a veritable preparation of muscular tissue.”
Here the prose work of Goethe’s later period refers to his own youthful thoughts and experiences as a student. He had early discovered and stated that a knowledge of nature and a knowledge of art reciprocally heighten each other. “As I observe nature,” he wrote from Rome, “so I now observe art, and win what I have so long striven after, a perfect conception of the highest that has been accomplished by man; and my soul gets formed more on this side and looks into a freer field.” “Architecture and sculpture and painting are to me now like mineralogy, botany, and zoology,” he says in a letter to Herder. And again: “We can finally rival nature by the use of art only when we have learned from her, at least to some extent, the way she proceeds in the formation of her works.... The human form cannot be comprehended merely by looking at the surface of it; one must lay bare its inwardness, disjoin its parts, observe the connexion between them, note the dissimilarities, be instructed in the action and counter-action, print upon one’s mind the hidden and dormant and basic features of a phenomenon, if one wants really to see and imitate it as it moves, a beautiful, indivisible whole, in living waves before our eyes.” These are Goethe’s words, and who could doubt their truth? Who would deny that it advantages the artist to have knowledge of something beneath the skin, so that he can paint what is not seen as well as what is: in other words, if he stand to nature in another relation besides the lyrical, if, for example, he is a physician on the side, a physiologist, an anatomist, and quietly knows what he knows about the dessous as well? The envelope of a human body consists not only of the mucous membrane and cornea of the epidermis, but underneath one has to imagine the corium with its oil and sweat glands, blood-vessels and tubercles, and under that again the adipose tissue, the upholstery that lends the form its charm. But what the artist knows and thinks tells too: it flows into his hand and has its effect; it is not there and yet somehow it is, and just this it is that gives perspicuousness. Art, I repeat, is only one humanistic discipline among others; all of them, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, theology, even the natural sciences and technology as well, are only variations and subspecies of one and the same high and interesting theme—toward which we can never take up a sufficiently varied and many-sided attitude, for it is man; and the human form is the summary of them all, it is, to speak with Goethe, “the non plus ultra of all human knowledge and activity, the alpha and omega of all things known unto us.”
Autobiography, and education. The two conceptions meet again when we envisage this idea of the human form, this loftiest expression of our sympathy with the organic. Yes, in view of this idea, so genuinely creative, the two conceptions flow into one humane whole: the pedagogic element resides, consciously or unconsciously (and if unconsciously, so much the better), in the autobiographic; it follows from it, it grows out of it.
Goethe somewhere calls Wilhelm Meister his “beloved likeness (sein geliebtes Ebenbild).” In what sense? Does a man love his own likeness? Unless he suffer from hopeless self-complacency, should not the sight of it make him aware of his own shortcomings? Yes, of course, it should. And this very awareness of a need of improvement and completion, this consciousness of his own ego as a task, a moral, æsthetic, cultural obligation, becomes objective in the hero of the autobiographical novel, the epic of education. To this personage the creative ego acts as guide, philosopher, and friend—at once identical and superior—to an extent that makes Goethe once refer to his Wilhelm as “a poor dog.” The phrase bespeaks a parental tenderness, not only toward the poor fellow in his dunklen Drange whom he created in his own image, but also toward himself. And thus, at the very heart of the autobiographic pathos there takes place the turn for the pedagogic. And this process of objectivation goes on in Wilhelm Meister through the introduction of the society of the Turm, which takes in hand his destiny and human development and leads him in mysterious ways. More and more plainly in the Lehrjahre does the original idea of a personally conducted adventure in self-improvement tend toward the pedagogic; until in the Travels it issues entirely in the social, yes, even in the political. At the end of the Faust there is an unmistakable flashing-up in poetry of the same vision of the union of self and society in the educational process. For the Enlightened, who on earth “immer strebend sich bemüht”, is received on high by the youthful saved, who sing:
“Wir wurden früh entfernt
Von Lebechören;
Doch dieser hat gelernt,
Er wird uns lehren.”
Nobody has ever loved his own ego, nobody was ever egocentric, in the sense of conceiving of his own ego as a cultural task and toiling early and late in pursuance of it, without reaping, almost as though by accident, educational influence in the outer world, and the joy and dignity of a leader and former of youth. The harvest never comes save at the height of life, and the moment of his realization of it is the sublime moment in the life of the productive human being. He never foresees, or even suspects, the moment beforehand. The autobiographical “poor dog,” with his mind from his youth up wholly on the difficulties of ploughing his own furrow, or, in the religious phrase, on the saving and justification of his own soul, will not have imagined he can teach anything, to improve or to convert men. Yet the day comes when, still incredulous, still astonished, he realizes that he has been teaching while he learned—shaping, guiding, leading, training, putting his own stamp on youth, by the power of words, by that lofty instrument of culture which is Eros-filled and binds the hearts of men. And from the day of his realization this knowledge possesses his whole life with a certainty, a creative bliss which leaves far behind it all ordinary human joys of love and fatherhood—just as the life of the mind is wont to exceed all personal and sensual things in value, beauty, and splendour.
“I am reading Goethe. My mind teems,” Tolstoy wrote in his journal at the beginning of the sixties. He was then a man of some thirty years and had not long returned to Russia and begun his work as a preaching and practising pedagogue. What was he reading? Was it contact with German idealism and humanism that made his mind so to “teem”? It was an alien sphere to him. For in Tolstoy (otherwise than in Goethe), the origin of the pedagogic impulse was immediately social and ethical. A man of parts and attainments, said he, must share with those who lack such blessings before he can derive pleasure from them himself. The motive seems a poor one to me; rationalizing and humanitarian, like all the conscious thought of the great artist just then, I find it deeply inferior to the beautiful humanity of Goethe, in whom the social ideal was an organic outgrowth of the cultural and educational. But what Tolstoy thought was usually smaller than what he was. And to come back to our starting-point: what was it made his mind “teem” when he read Goethe and at the same time set to work as single-handed schoolmaster and founder of a primary school to put into practice the pedagogic ideas that rumbled in his belly?
Or, rather, to experiment with them. For he had made up his mind to settle, by actual experiment, what it was that the people, and in particular youth, wanted to be taught; it had not been settled, and that it had to be settled was his primary pedagogical thesis. “The people,” he said, “this most interested party in the whole situation, party and judge in one, listens quietly to our more or less ingenious exposition as to the best way of preparing and presenting its mental fodder. It is not disturbed; for it perfectly knows that in the great business of its mental development it will never take a false step, or accept anything that is false; and that all efforts to force it into paths unsuited to it, for instance German paths, will be like water on a duck’s back.” One must recognize, Tolstoy declares in writing and controversy, that the German type of school is a desirable one; that is a fact for which history vouches. But, even so, one may as a Russian hesitate to enter the lists in favour of a primary school which does not yet exist there. What historical argument can be brought for the assertion that Russian schools must be like those in the rest of Europe? The people, he says, need education, and every human being seeks it unconsciously. The more highly cultivated classes, society, and government officials, seek to extend the benefits of their knowledge and to educate the less educated masses. One would suppose that such a concurrence of the needs of both classes, the giving as well as the receiving, would suffice. But no. The masses steadily oppose all efforts made in their behalf to educate them, so that these are often entirely futile. Whose is the fault? Which is more justified: the opposition, or the system against which it is directed? Must the opposition be broken or the system altered? The latter, Tolstoy decides, is the case. “Shall we not,” he asks, “confess honourably and openly that we do not, cannot, know what the needs of the coming generations will be; but that we feel none the less bound to investigate? That we will not charge the masses with ignorance because they will not accept our education; but rather accuse ourselves of both ignorance and arrogance if we go on trying to educate them on our own lines? Let us at last cease to see hostility in the resistance of the people to our system; and find in it the expression of the people’s will, which alone should guide us. Let us at last accept the fact, so clearly evinced by the whole history of pedagogics, that if the educating class are to know what is good and what bad, the class to be educated must have full power to register dissatisfaction, and opportunity to reject a system which they instinctively find unsatisfying; that, in short, freedom is the sole criterion of educational methods.”
“The sole criterion of education is freedom, the sole method experience, experimentation.” This is Tolstoy’s first and highest pedagogic maxim. According to him, the school should be at once a means of education and an experiment performed on the rising generation, an experiment productive of ever new results. It should, in other words, be an educational laboratory, where the experiment of pedagogic science seeks to create a firm basis for itself. To do this, it is necessary that it function under circumstances that ensure the value of its results—that is, in freedom. The school as it is, Tolstoy declares, enfeebles the children by distorting their mental faculties. During the most precious period of development it wrenches the child out of the family circle, robs him of the joy of freedom, and makes of him a jaded, suppressed creature, upon whose face rests an expression of weariness, fear, and boredom, while with his lips he repeats strange words in a language he does not know. But if we give the people freedom during their training, then we also give them the chance to speak out on the score of their necessities, and furthermore to choose among the kinds of knowledge offered. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have unanimously striven to free the school from the fetters of tradition. They have sought to discover wherein the intellectual needs of man consist, and to build up new schools on these more or less correctly envisaged needs. Luther demands that the masses shall study the Scripture from the original text, and not from the commentaries of the Fathers. Bacon advises the study of nature from nature herself and not from the works of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life from life, as he conceives it, and not from outworn experience. All philosophy stands for freeing the school from the idea of instructing the younger generation in that which the older generation held to be science; and in favour of the idea of teaching them what they themselves need. And we can see by the history of pedagogic science that every step forwards consists in greater natural rapport between pupil and teacher, in less compulsion and greater facilitation of the process of learning.
Tolstoy, then, an anarchistic pedagogue, sets his face against discipline. “The school in which there is less compulsion,” he says, “is better than the one in which there is more. The method which can be introduced without increased disciplinary strain is good; one which requires greater severity is surely wrong. Take a school like mine and try to carry on conversations about tables and corners of rooms or shove little dice to and fro. A frightful disorder will reign at once, and it will be absolutely necessary to restore order. But tell them an interesting story or set them an interesting task, or let someone write on the board and the others correct, and let them all out of their benches, and they will all be busy, and there will be no mischief, and no increased discipline will be necessary. We may safely say that this way is good.”
“The children bring nothing with them,” thus Tolstoy describes the procedure at Yasnaya Polyana, “neither primers nor copy-books. There are no tasks to take home. They need not remember anything—nothing of what they did the day before. They need carry nothing, either in their hands or in their heads. They bring nothing with them but their receptive natures and the conviction that school will be just as jolly today as it was yesterday; they only think of the instruction when it has begun. No one who comes late is ever scolded, and they never come late, except some of the older ones, whose fathers occasionally keep them to work. When that happens, they run as fast as they can to school and get there breathless.”
Lucky village children of Yasnaya Polyana! But it is comprehensible that Tolstoy tries to make the school at least pleasant for his pupils; his faith in its educational value is weak, and he makes in the end no secret of his conviction—which he declares he derived from personal observation in the schools of Paris, Marseilles, and other cities of western Europe—that the greater part of popular education is gained, not from school, but from life; and that free public instruction, by means of lectures, clubs, books, exhibitions, and so on, remains far superior to any teaching in schools. But be that as it may; what interests us here is not the rightness or wrongness of Tolstoy’s ideas, but rather what is characteristic in them; and characteristic they certainly are, in the highest degree, and from every point of view, not only in a personal sense, but also as a sign, even as an augury of his time.
What strikes one first of all, then, is a note that sounds in clearest contradiction to certain other of his doctrines: to the pacifistic and antinational ones, to the thesis of democratic equality he preached in his latter days. It is the national note. He emphasizes the right of the Russian people to an education suited to their genius, independently of the foreign spirit. His root-and-branch Russianism, at this time still quite unregenerate, denies the right of the upper and official classes, with their west-European liberal education, to force upon the masses an education not suited to their actual needs. Here he is turning against Peter the Great, who created these official classes and gave them their orientation toward liberalism and the west. Tolstoy’s educational ideas are all extreme anti-“Petrinic,” anti-western, anti-progressive. He openly declares that the educated class is not capable of giving the masses their proper training, conceiving, as it does, that the well-being of the people lies in the direction of civilization and progress. What speaks out of Tolstoy’s mouth, what rules his thinking, is Moscow. It is that leaning toward Asia which so alarmed Turgeniev and others like him in Tolstoy’s writings and which here is elevated to a pedagogic principle. His anarchism, his faith in the anarchistic principle as the single reasonable basis of communal human life; his doctrine that absolute freedom makes all discipline superfluous—all these are part of it, and it and they are expressed in Tolstoy’s prescription to “let all the children out of the benches” and free them from every oppressive sense of duty.
This “letting all the children out of the benches”—a picturesque and stimulating formula—is a perfect symbol for Tolstoy’s social and political (or, rather, his anarchistic, antipolitical) views. His famous letter to Czar Alexander III develops these most concisely. The new Czar’s father had been murdered on the first of March 1881; and Tolstoy wrote begging him to exercise clemency toward the murderers. He here sets down for the Emperor, in words so compelling that one almost wonders at their not prevailing, the two political expedients which had been applied up to date against increasing political disorder: first, force and terror; and second, liberalism, constitution, parliament. Both these have finally shown themselves impotent. There remains, however, a third expedient, which is not of a political nature and which has at least the advantage of having never yet been tried. It consists in the fulfilment of the divine will regardless of consequences, without any cautious reservations of policy; quite simply in love, forgiveness, the requital of evil with good; in mildness, in non-resistance against evil, in freedom.... In a word, Tolstoy advises the Czar to “let all the children out of the benches”; he counsels anarchy—I am not using the word in a derogatory sense, but quite objectively, to specify a definite social and political gospel of salvation.
The Asiatic bias of this great Russian genius has already been shown to be a mixture of various psychical elements: oriental passivity, religious quietism, and an unmistakable tendency to Sarmatian wildness. Here, in this anarchistic theory, it lies down with quite different company: with the revolutionary ideals of western Europe, with the educational and political conceptions of Rousseau and his pupil Pestalozzi, in both of whom there is present the element of wildness, the return to nature—in short, the anarchistic element in another form and under other colours. Here, then, we are arrived at the common factor in the education of our two protagonists—but with a difference. On the educational side, Goethe fell away from his allegiance to Rousseau. Pedagogic Rousseauianism, as preached and practised by its founder, revolted him. Furiously, even desperately, he rejected it, and the anarchical individualism of the revolutionary education.
Boisserée tells how Goethe expressed to him his distress on the score of Pestalozzi and his system. For its original purpose and in its original setting, where Pestalozzi had only the children of the people in mind, the poor who lived in their isolated huts in Switzerland and could not send their children to school, it might be a capital idea. But it became the most destructive one in the world so soon as it ceased to confine itself to elementary teaching and went on to language, art, the general field of knowledge and power, which of course presupposed a previous tradition.... And then the insubordination this cursed kind of education aroused: look at the impudence of the little school-urchins, who feel no awe of any stranger, but rather put him in a fright instead. All respect gone, everything done away with that makes human beings human beings in their relations with each other. “What should I have been,” cried Goethe, “if I had not always been obliged to show respect for others? And these men, in their madness and frenzy, to reduce everything to terms of the single individual and be simply gods of self-sufficiency! They think to educate a nation which shall stand against the barbaric hordes, just as soon as the latter shall have mastered the elementary tools of understanding, which Pestalozzi has made it so very easy for them to do.”
Tradition, reverence—which “makes human beings human beings in their relations with each other”—conformity of the ego within a noble and estimable community; do you not feel the nearness of the Pedagogic Province? Let me recall a moment that dream so wise and splendid, at once austere and blithe, in which can be traced much of the humanism of the eighteenth century, much of the spirit of the Zauberflöte, of Sarastro and the “moving toward good with one’s hand in a friend’s”; and which at the same time contains so much that is new and bold, and, humanly speaking, advanced that it cannot be called less revolutionary than Tolstoy’s educational ideas. Only, of course, the anarchistic flavour is utterly lacking; while its conception of humanity and human dignity, culture and civilization, is so consonant with solemn regulation and gradation, with such a pronounced sense of reverence, of traditions, symbols, mysteries, and rhythm, with such a symmetrical, almost choreographic restraint in its freedom, that I may be permitted to call it statesmanlike in the best and finest sense, by way of pointing the contrast to Tolstoy’s “letting the children out of the benches.” However, the boys and youths of Goethe’s dream-province do not sit glued to their benches either, at least we do not see them thus. The basis of their education is quite in the Pestalozzan style: it is husbandry. And their training goes forward in the open air, work and play constantly accompanied by singing. We are told, quite explicitly, what its essence is: “Wise men lead the boys to find out themselves what is fitted for them; and shorten the by-ways into which man will often too readily turn aside.” Every well-marked bent to a pursuit is fostered and cultivated, for “to know and practise one thing rightly gives higher culture than half-way performance of a hundred things.” But if the education is thus adapted to the individual, it is not thereby in the very least individualistic—so little, in fact, that respect for convention is insisted upon, and regarded as a conspicuous characteristic of genius; for genius understands that art is called art just because it is not nature; and easily accommodates itself to paying respect to the conventions, in the view that they represent “an agreement arrived at by the superior elements of society, whereby the essential and indispensable is regarded as the best.” That is hostility toward the voluntary, with a vengeance; and the Head is at pains to define and interpret it by a musical parallel. “Would a musician,” he asks, “let a pupil make a wild attack on the keyboard or invent intervals to please himself? No, the striking thing is that nothing is left to the choice of the learner. The element in which he is to work is fixed, the tool he must use put into his hand, even the way he shall use it is prescribed—I mean the change of fingers, in order that one get out of the other’s way and make the path plain for its successor; until by dint of this regulated co-operation and thus alone the impossible at last becomes the possible.”—It is not by chance, I insist, that the Heads of the Province draw their parallel from the field of music: is she not truly the most spirited symbol for that regulated co-operation of manifold elements toward an end and goal which is culturally noble and worthy of humanity? In the Pedagogic Province song presides over all the activities, everything else is linked with it and communicated by it. “The simplest pleasures as well as the simplest tasks are animated and impressed by song; yes, even our instruction in morals and religion is communicated in this wise.” Even the elements of knowledge, reading, writing, reckoning, are derived from song, note-writing, and putting text beneath, and from observing the basic measures and notation—in short, as agriculture is the natural, so music is the spiritual element of education, “for from it level paths run out in all directions.”
Another great German and shaper of German destiny comes to mind here: Luther’s view of music as an instrument of education was very like Goethe’s. “Musicam,” he says, “I have always loved. One should accustom youth to this art, for it makes fine, capable people. A schoolmaster who cannot sing I will not look at.” And in the schools under his influence there was almost as much singing as in the Pedagogic Province—whereas no one would know whether they sang in Tolstoy’s school or not. To the wanderer through the Pedagogic Province it seems as though none of its inhabitants did anything of his own power, but as though a mysterious spirit animated them through and through, leading them on toward one single great goal. This spirit is the spirit of music, of culture, of “regulated co-operation,” whereby alone at length “the impossible”—that is to say, the state as work of art—becomes possible; it is a spirit remote from and hostile to all barbarism; one would like to be allowed to call it a German spirit.
The salutation in three degrees, whose meaning, the threefold reverence, is kept secret from the boys themselves, because mystery and respect for the mysterious is a moral and civilizing influence; the insistence upon modesty and decorum; the lining up and standing at attention of the young human being in face of the world, and his honourable comradeship with his kind; the enhancing of his own honour through the honours he renders; all this militarism so highly imbued with the spirit and with art—how far it is from the rational radicalism of Tolstoy’s Christianity, with its heart of wildness! Is it anyway credible that, in essentials, a remarkable likeness subsists between the educational conceptions of our two geniuses?
Tolstoy in all pious simplicity once declared that the world can find salvation simply by no longer doing anything which does not seem inherently reasonable: that is to say, anything which our whole European world is doing today; for example, teaching the grammar of dead languages. What finds utterance, what bursts forth, in this polemic against the study of ancient tongues is the revolt of the Russian people against humanistic civilization itself. Tolstoy’s unclassic paganism stands revealed, his ethnic godhead, which, according to Gorky, was not Olympian, but more like that of a Russian god, “sitting on a maple throne, under a golden lime-tree.” Tolstoy’s pedagogic writing betrays an extremely anti-humanistic, anti-literary, anti-rhetorical conception of the relative importance of different branches of study. He has anything but the traditional European view of the importance of the discipline of reading and writing; entertaining not the faintest humanistic fear of “analphabetism,” but rather openly defending what to our way of thinking would almost amount to a state of barbarism. “We see people,” he says, “who are equipped with all the knowledge necessary for farming; who perfectly comprehend all its bearings, though they can neither read nor write; or capital military leaders, tradespeople, foremen, machine-overseers, labourers, all people who got their training from life, not books, and stored up large resources of information and reflection. On the other hand we see people who can both read and write, but who have not profited by this advantage to learn any new thing.” When he dwells upon the conflict between the needs of the people and the learning forced upon them by the ruling classes, he has in mind the fact that the elementary schools are an outgrowth of the higher ones. First the church school, then the higher education, then after that the primary school—a false hierarchy, for it is false that the primary school, instead of conforming to its own needs, should conform—only on a smaller scale—to the demands of the higher education. His meaning is clear. He finds the folk-school too literary, too much subordinated to the classical ideal of education, not practical or vital enough, not guided by the principle of training for a calling in life. But we shall be mistaken in expecting from him any greater kindness for either the system or the spirit of the higher institutions of learning. He accuses them of being “entirely divorced from actual life.” He compares the true education derived from life itself with that offered to the academic student, and finds that the former produces men capable in their calling, the latter merely “so-called people with a university education—advanced, that is to say irritable, sickly liberals.” He gives “Latin and rhetoric” another hundred years of life, not more, and so much only for the reason that “when the medicine has once been bought, one must take it.” The phrase betrays plainly enough his attitude toward classical education, toward the traditional European culture, toward humanism. It betrays at the same time his attitude toward the west and civilization, his folk-hatred of all that is not of the people, that is foreign, that comes from abroad, that has merely a cultural value—in short, the anger of primitive Russia against Peter the Great.
It is time we looked round in the Pedagogic Province for the place where youth busies itself with the ancient tongues. And, after all, it is rather a shock not to find it. Goethe is not such a barbarian as to despise the study of language or languages, as a cultural instrument. He calls it enthusiastically the most sensitive in the world, and emphasizes its value as a civilizing agent, by having his imaginary pupils take it in connexion with the rude tasks of stable-work; so that, caring for and training animals, they do not become like animals themselves. But the languages here are modern languages. The tongues of various nations are studied in turn—but Latin and Greek, it will be noted, are not in the curriculum.
Well, there are other things which are not expressly mentioned either. But that precisely these subjects should be absent is after all rather striking. Was Goethe a humanist, or was he not? In the first place, his humanism was always of another and a broader kind than merely the philological. And in the second place, the impress of a certain high austerity lies upon all the regulations of the Pedagogic Province, despite the Parnassian blitheness that reigned there. There is no doubt that Goethe, in his consciously pedagogic period, felt, curiously enough, toward the humanistic, Winkelmannian ideal of education much as Tolstoy and Auerbach did about music: a moral severity against the sybaritic, dilettante, the roving and ranging, sipping and changing, which he considered the danger of the “universally human” ideal as applied to pedagogy. He considered this danger more threatening than the peril of specialization and its consequent narrowness and impoverishment—the horrors of which we later comers, to be sure, have learned to know. He espouses the cause of vocational against verbal training, out of the same anti-literary tendency which we observed in Tolstoy; sharing with him the conviction that human culture makes sounder progress by the method of limitation; he is radical enough to use the Wanderjahre as a mouth-piece through which to shout “Narrenpossen (Stuff and nonsense)!” at the “universally human” educational ideal and “all its works.” That is severe. But today, when nobody any longer can live on his income, does it not sound like an uncommonly clear-sighted prophecy when he declares: “Whoever from now on does not take to either an art or a trade will have a hard time of it”?
I have made no secret of my tendency to interpret the paganism of the children of nature in a primarily ethnical sense. And I am greatly strengthened by this astonishingly radical and decisive rejection, on Goethe’s part, of a humane and literary education. Almost I might have dared interpret that gruff “Narrenpossen!” as the revolt of Germanic folkishness against the humanistic culture itself. I have every warrant for asserting that Goethe would have fought like Tolstoy the folly of offering watered scholarship to the people for education—a folly by which one waters the people’s sense and spirit, debases and insults, instead of, as one fondly imagines, elevating them! Goethe, who in the Wahlverwandtschaften advances—surreptitiously, “weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet”—the reactionary and esoteric doctrine: “Bring up the boys to be servants and the girls to be mothers, then all will be well”: was he the man to advocate the breeding of “advanced, that is to say irritable and sickly liberals”? And was there not perhaps prophetic vision at work in the severity and the limitations of his educational principles? Did his sense of time, like the Russian’s, give “Latin and rhetoric” a limit of some hundred years of life? Strange events in our Europe today incline one to regard his maxims in a prophetic light.
The great revolution in Russia brought to the light of day—that light which is so good at illuminating the surface of things—the western Marxism which had put its impress upon Tolstoy’s country. But it must not blind us to the spectacle of the bolshevist revolution as the end of an epoch: the epoch of Peter the Great, the western, liberalizing, European epoch in the history of Russia, which now, with this revolution, faces eastward once more. It was to no European idea of progress that the Czar fell victim. In him Peter the Great was murdered, and his fall opened to his people not the path toward Europe, but the way home to Asia. But is there not also in western Europe, precisely since the time of this crisis—whose prophet Leo Tolstoy was, although Moscow sees it not—is there not also in western Europe a feeling alive that not only for Russia, but for it, for us, for all the world there is at hand the ending of an epoch: the bourgeois, humanistic, liberal epoch, which was born at the Renaissance and came to power with the French Revolution, and whose last convulsive twitchings and manifestations of life we are now beholding? The question is put today whether this Mediterranean, classic, humanistic tradition is commensurate with humanity and thus coeval with it, or whether it is only the intellectual expression and apanage of the bourgeois liberal epoch and destined to perish with its passing.
Europe seems to have answered the question already. The anti-liberal rebound is more than plain, it is palpable. It finds political expression in a disgusted turning away from democracy and parliamentary government, in an about-face toward dictatorship and terror, executed with frowning brows. Italian fascism is the precise pendant to Russian bolshevism; all its archaistic gesturings and mummery cannot disguise its essential hostility to the humane. And on the Iberian peninsula, where the destruction of the liberal system was still more obvious than in Italy, things have taken the same course, even more decisively; military dictatorship has been well established there for some time. But, indeed, all over Europe—as a consequence of the war and a sign of an anti-liberal temper—the waters of nationalism are mightily swollen. The individual peoples of Europe display a turkey-cock self-assertiveness, a furious self-deification, in striking contrast to the poverty and prostration of the continent as a whole.
The spiritual destinies of France are remarkable indeed, and of immediate importance to us Germans. In the first years after the war no country seemed more confirmed in the bourgeois-classical tradition. France seemed the one truly conservative country in all Europe. Far from thinking of war as a new revolution, it was bent instead, after the victory and on the basis of the victory, on seeing in it nothing but the confirmation and the consummation of the old, the bourgeois order of 1789. To such questions as the one I have raised above, France made answer with tranquil irony. If Germany, she said, wanted to dream apocalyptic dreams, let her do so by all means; for herself, she felt very comfortable in her classical tradition. Once on the occasion of an international exchange of ideas I had sought to get some of these matters expressed; and I remember how a contributor to the French official newspaper organ answered me that France had always been and would always remain solidement rationaliste et classique.
But that was the voice of official, bourgeois, conservative France, not the other France, loftier, young, intellectual, secretly astir. Certainly, this new France is beginning to “dream apocalyptically”; there is of late a good deal of reason to doubt that she feels as much at home as she used to in her tradition. What M. Poincaré, who has no better name for it, knows and hates as “communism” is nothing but the process that is going on there of undermining his bourgeois, classical, old-revolutionary France; the disintegration of the Latin conception of civilization by the action of spiritual ferments which have filtered in from the outside and are doing their work in the blood of the youth—a new, anti-bourgeois, spiritual, and proletarian revolution; and we in Germany think we have ground for hope that, if there are to be atmospheric changes, we too may get a little more air to breathe. For in France the interests of nationalism and of the humanistic culture coincide, in so far as both are based upon the conviction of the absolute supremacy of the Latin civilization and its mission of world-domination as an abiding concern of humanity. Whereas a spirit of European solidarity, and a certain readiness, however conditional, to come to terms with Germany, is more likely to be found on the side of the “communistic” new-revolutionary France, which is no longer quite so sound on the score of its cultural Latinity.
Germany’s position, with reference to these phenomena to the west of her, is a difficult and complicated one. For us Germans ourselves, and for the world at large, it is highly important that she see it clearly and recognize it for what it is. For in Germany too there exist the two camps, a humanistic and a “communistic”; from which it follows that two peoples may behave the same, culturally speaking, and reach quite different results, and that there are circumstances under which the pursuance of the same spiritual tendency may be the worst possible method of arriving at political rapprochement.
I do not propose to dwell upon German fascism, nor upon the circumstances, the quite comprehensible circumstances, of its origin. It is enough to say that it is a racial religion, with antipathy not only for international Judaism, but also, quite expressly, for Christianity, as a humane influence; nor do its priests behave more friendly toward the humanism of our classical literature. It is a pagan folk-religion, a Wotan cult: it is, to be invidious—and I mean to be invidious—romantic barbarism. It is only consistent in the cultural and educational sphere, where it seeks to check the stream of classical education, to the advantage of the primitive German heritage. And it does not or it will not see what an unhappy pendant it thus furnishes to the anti-Latinism of modern-minded France, and how very much it plays into the hands of M. Poincaré, the communist-hater. To profess paganism in Germany today, to worship Odin and hold feasts of the solstice, to conduct oneself like a folk-barbarian, is to prove those French patriots in the right who would like to erect on the Rhine the breastwork of occidental civilization; it is asininely to compromise the position of those Frenchmen who do not make such fine distinctions between Latinity and barbarism, and who are interested in peace, understanding, compromise, and a “gentleman’s agreement” with Germany.
This is what I meant when I said that to pursue the same spiritual tendency may be the most wrong-headed of all possible ways for two nations to arrive at a rapprochement. Now is not the moment for Germany to make anti-humanistic gestures; to pattern itself upon Tolstoy’s pedagogic bolshevism; to characterize as ethnical savagery the rebuke which Goethe administered to the hedonism of the general humanistic ideal in education. No, on the contrary, it is the time for us to lay all possible stress upon our great humane inheritance and to cultivate it with all the means at our command—not only for its own sake, but in order to put visibly in the wrong the claims of Latin civilization. And, in particular, our socialism, which has all too long allowed its spiritual life to languish in the shallows of a crude economic materialism, has no greater need than to find access to that loftier Germany which has always sought with its spirit the land of the Greeks. It is today, politically speaking, our really national party; but it will not truly rise to the height of its national task until—if I may be allowed the extravagance—Karl Marx has read Friedrich Hölderlin: a consummation which, by the way, seems in a fair way to be achieved.
Beautiful is resolution. But the really fruitful, the productive, and hence the artistic principle is that which we call reserve. In the sphere of music we love it as the prolonged note, the teasing melancholy of the not-yet, the inward hesitation of the soul, which bears within itself fulfilment, resolution, and harmony, but denies it for a space, withholds and delays, scruples exquisitely yet a little longer to make the final surrender. In the intellectual sphere we love it as irony: that irony which glances at both sides, which plays slyly and irresponsibly—yet not without benevolence—among opposites, and is in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions; guided as it is by the surmise that in great matters, in matters of humanity, every decision may prove premature; that the real goal to reach is not decision, but harmony, accord. And harmony, in a matter of eternal contraries, may lie in infinity; yet that playful reserve called irony carries it within itself, as the sustained note carries the resolution. In the foregoing pages I have tried it, this “infinite” irony; and my readers may judge upon which extreme it more enjoyed playing, at which side of the eternal contradiction it took keener aim—and draw their conclusions accordingly; only not too far-reaching ones!
Irony is the pathos of the middle... its moral too, its ethos. I said that it is not, in general, the German way to be hasty in deciding the aristocratic problem—if I may, in this phrase, sum up the whole complex of contrasted values dealt with in the present essay. We are a people of the middle, a world-bourgeoisie; there is a fittingness in our geographical position and in our mores. I have been told that in Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word for between.
That German writer who has most urgently pondered upon the problem of aristocracy was, philologically speaking, greatly daring when he invented a derivation for the name of the German people: from Tiusche-Volk; that is, Täusche-Volk. But, for all that, the idea is full of esprit. A people that settles in the bourgeois world-middle must needs be the täuschende, the elusive folk: the race that practises a sly and ironic reserve toward both sides, that moves between extremes, easily, with non-committal benevolence; with the morality, no, the simplicity of that elusive “betweenness” of theirs, their faith in knowledge and insight, in cosmopolitan culture.
Fruitful difficulty of the middle, thou art freedom and reserve in one! Let them tell us, as they have told us, that this free-handed policy of ours brings us, in actual practice, to grief. But this practice is doubtful, this disaster even more so. More than probably it came upon us for our own best good; more than probably we were more profoundly striving to bring it about than man ever strives to encompass his happiness. Again, humility in the face of failure is no more noble than humility in the face of success; and nothing but defeatism could shake our faith in the rightness and sanctity of this spiritual attitude of ours, whose end and aim is justified, not as a craving for freedom or as ironic reserve, but as a final synthesis and harmony, the pure idea of man himself.
That mutual character of the sentimental longing—of the sons of spirit for nature, of the sons of nature for spirit (for, as we found, it is not spirit alone that is sentimental)—argues a higher unity as humanity’s goal; which she, in very truth the standard-bearer of all aspiration, endows with her own name, with humanitas. That instinct of self-preservation, full of reserve as it is, felt by the German people in their central position as a world-bourgeoisie, is genuine nationalism. For that is the name we give to a people’s craving for freedom, to the pains they take with themselves, to their effort after self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. So too the artist is loyally and devotedly convinced that his only thought is to wrest his own work and his very own dream out of the block of stone; and yet, in some solemn and moving hour, may learn that the spirit which possessed him had a purer source, that from the stone he carved there is emerging a loftier image than he knew.
Folk, and humanity. It was a seer out of the east, one of those who, like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Whitman, have looked long into the slowly mounting dawn of a new piety—it was Dmitri Merezhkovsky who has said that the animal contains the beast-man and the beast-god. The essence of the beast-god is as yet scarcely comprehended by man, though it is only the union of the beast-god with the beast-man which will some day bring about the redemption of the race of mankind. This “some day,” this idea of a redemption, which is no longer Christian and yet not pagan either, carries in itself the solution of the problem of aristocracy, as well as justifying, yes, sanctifying, all ironic reserve on the subject of ultimate values.
We have treated with some assurance of great natures, great creative artists, children of God, in whom the beast-god was strong, as also their sense of self, their feeling for repose, for woman, for the people; we have enjoyed the wit of those world-spirits who tempered and humanized their confessed egotism with a strain of the didactic impulse. More hesitantly we have trenched upon the god-man sphere of those others, their emotional opposites, the men of deeds, the sons of spirit, the saintly and sickly. The true saying of that Russian that the essence of the beast-god is as yet scarcely apprehended by man might strengthen our faith in the ironic doctrine that there is more of grace among those who at bottom “can love nobody but themselves.” But well we know that there is no deciding the question which of these two lofty types is called to contribute more and better to the highly cherished idea of a perfected humanity.
1922