IV Tolstoï, Nihilist and Mystic
The youngest of the four great Russian novelists, the only one living to-day, and in general opinion the most excellent, is Léon, son of Nicholas Count Tolstoï. His biography may be put into a few lines; it has no element of the dramatic or curious. He was born in 1828; he was brought up, like most Russian noblemen of his class, in the country, on his patrimonial estates; he pursued his studies at the University of Kazan, receiving the cosmopolitan education—half French, half German—which is the nursery of the Russian aristocracy; he entered the military career, spent some years in the Caucasus attached to a regiment of artillery, was transferred to Sevastopol at his own desire, and witnessed there the memorable siege, the heroes of which he has immortalized in three of his volumes; on the conclusion of the peace he dedicated some time to travel; he resided by turns at both Russian capitals, frequenting the best society, his congenial atmosphere, yet without being captivated by it; he finally renounced the life of the world, married in 1860, and retired to his possessions near Toula, where he has lived in his own way for twenty-five years or more, and where to-day the famous novelist, the gentleman, the scholar, the sceptic,—after falling like Saul on the road to Damascus, blinded by a heavenly vision, and being converted, as he himself says,—shows himself, to all who go to visit him, dressed in peasant’s garb, swinging the scythe or drawing the sickle.
The more important biography of Count Tolstoï is that which pertains to his soul, always restless, always in pursuit of absolute truth and the divine essence,—a noble aspiration which ameliorates even error. There is no book of Tolstoï’s but reveals himself, particularly so the autobiography entitled “My Memories,” and certain passages of his novels, and lastly, his theologico-moral works. Tolstoï belongs to the class of souls that without God lose their hold on life; and yet, by his own confession, the novelist lived without any sort of faith or creed from his youth to maturity.
Ever since the time when Tolstoï saw the dreams of his childhood vanish,—began to think for himself, and to experience the religious crisis which usually arrives between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five,—his soul, like a storm-tossed bark, has oscillated between pantheism and the blackest pessimism. What depths of despair a soul like that of Tolstoï can know, unable to rest upon the pillow of doubt, when it abnegates the noblest of human faculties,—thought and intelligence,—and makes choice of a merely vegetative life in preference to that of the rational being! Lost in the gloom of this dark wilderness, he falls into the region of absolute nihilism. He admits this in his confessions (“My Religion”) when he says: “For thirty-five years of my life I have been a nihilist in the rigorous acceptation of the term; that is to say, not merely a revolutionary socialist, but a man who believes in nothing whatever.”
In fact, since the age of sixteen, as we read in his “Memoirs,” his mind summoned to judgment all accepted and consecrated doctrines and philosophical opinions, and that which most suited the boy was scepticism, or rather a sort of transcendental egoism; he allows himself to think that nothing exists in the world but himself; that exterior objects are vain apparitions, no longer real to his mind; impressed and persuaded by this fixed idea, he believes he sees, materially, behind and all around him, the abyss of nothingness, and under the effect of this hallucination he falls into a state of mind that might be called truly motor madness, though it was transitory and momentary,—a state proper to the visionary peoples of the North, and to which they give an involved appellation difficult to pronounce; to translate it exactly, with all its shades of signification, I should have to mix and mingle together many words of ours, such as despair, fatalism, asceticism, intractability, brief delirium, lunacy, mania, hypochondria, and frenzy,—a species of dementia, in fine, which, snapping the mainspring of human will, induces inexplicable acts, such as throwing one’s self into an abyss, setting fire to a house for the pleasure of it, holding the muzzle of a pistol to one’s forehead and thinking, “Shall I pull the trigger?” or, on seeing a person of distinction, to pull him by the nose and shake him like a child. This momentary but real dementia—from which nobody is perhaps entirely exempt, and which Shakespeare has so admirably analyzed in some scenes of “Hamlet”—is to the individual what panic is to the multitude, or like epidemia chorea, or a suicidal monomania which sometimes seems to be in the air; its origin lies deep in the mysterious recesses of our moral being, where other strange psychical phenomena are hidden, such as, for example, the fascination of seeing blood flow, and the innate love of destruction and death.
But let us turn to the real literary work of Tolstoï before referring to the actual cause of his perturbed conscience. After the beautiful story called “The Cossacks,” he prepared himself, by other short novels, for works of larger importance. Among the former should be mentioned the sweet story of “Katia,” which already reveals the profound reader of the human heart and the great realist writer. For Tolstoï, who knows how to cover vast canvases with vivid colors, is no less successful in small pictures; and his short novels, “The Death of Ivan Illitch” and the first part of “The Horse’s Romance,” for example, are hardly to be excelled. But his fame was chiefly assured by two great works,—“War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina.” The former is a sort of cosmorama of Russian society before and during the French invasion, a series of pictures that might be called Russian national episodes. Like our own Galdos, Tolstoï studied the formative epoch of modern society, the heroic age in which the Great Captain of the century awoke in the nations of Europe, while endeavoring to subjugate them, a national conscience, just as he transmitted to them, though unwittingly, the impetus of the French Revolution. Russia heroically resisting the outsider is Tolstoï’s hero.
The action of the novel merely serves as a pretext to intertwine chapters of history, politics, and philosophy; it is rather a general panorama of Russian life than an artistic fiction. “War and Peace” is a complement to the poetic satire of Gogol, delineating the new society which was to rise upon the ruins of the past. If we apply the rules of composition in novel-writing, “War and Peace” cannot be defended; there is neither unity, nor hero, nor hardly plot; so loose and careless is the thread that binds the story together, and so slowly does the argument develop, that sometimes the reader has already forgotten the name of a character when he meets with it again ten chapters farther on. The vast incoherence of the Russian soul, its lack of mental discipline, its vagueness and liking for digressions, could have no more complete personification in literature.
One therefore needs resolution to plunge into the perusal of works in which art mimics Nature, copying the inimitable extension of the Russian plains. I once asked a very clever friend how she was occupying herself. She replied, “I have fallen to the bottom of a Russian novel, and I cannot get out!” But scarcely has one finished the first two hundred pages, as a first mouthful, when one’s interest begins to awaken,—not a mere vulgar curiosity as to events, but a noble interest of mind and heart. It is the stream of life, grand and majestic, which passes before our eyes like the expanse of a mighty flowing river. Tolstoï—more than Turguenief, who is always and first of all the artist, and more than Dostoiëwsky, who sees humanity from the point of view of his own turbulent mind and confused soul—Tolstoï produces a supreme and absolute impression of the truth, although, in the light of his harmonious union of faculties, it is impossible to say whether he hits the mark by means of external or internal realism,—whether he is more perfect in his descriptions, his dialogues, or his studies of character. In reading Tolstoï, we feel as though we were looking at the spectacle of the universe where nothing seems to us unreal or invented.
Tolstoï’s fictitious characters are not more vivid than his historical ones,—Napoleon or Alexander I., for example; he is as careful in the expression of a sublime sentiment as in a minute and vulgar detail. Every touch is wonderful. His description of a battle is amazing (and who else can describe a battle like Tolstoï!), but he is charming when he gives us the day-dreams and love-fancies of a child still playing with her dolls. And what a clear intuition he has of the motives of human actions! What a penetrating, unwavering, scrutinizing glance that “trieth the hearts and the reins,” as saith the Scripture! Tolstoï does not exhaust his perspicacity in the study of instinct alone; with eagle eye he pierces the most complex souls, refined and enveloped in the veil of education,—courtiers, diplomats, princes, generals, ladies of high rank, and famous statesmen. No one else has described the drawing-room so exquisitely and so truly as Tolstoï; and it must be admitted that the picture of official good society is terribly embarrassing. Some chapters of “Anna Karénina” and “War and Peace” seem to exhale the warm soft air that greets us as we enter the door of a luxurious, aristocratic mansion. The master-painter controls the collectivity as well as the individual; he dissects the soul of the multitude, the spirit of the nation, with the same energy and dexterity as that of one man. The wonderful pictures of the invasion and burning of Moscow are continual examples of this.
Is “War and Peace” a historical novel in the limited, archæological, false, and conventional conception? Certainly not. Tolstoï’s historical novel has realized the conjunction of the novel and the epic, with the good qualities of both. In this novel—so broad, so deep, so human, and at times so patriotic, as Tolstoï understands patriotism—there is a subtle breath of nihilism, an essence of euphorbia, a poison of ourare, which colors the whole drift of Russian literature. This tendency is personified in the hero (if the book may be said to have one at all), Pierre Besukof, a true Sclavonic soul, expansive, full of unrest and disquietude, passionate, unstable, the character of a child united to the investigating intelligence of a philosopher,—a pre-nihilist (to coin a word) who goes in search of certainty and repose, and finds them not until he meets at last with one “poor in spirit,” a wretched common soldier, a type of meek resignation and inconsequent fatalism, who shows him how to attain to his desires through a mystic indifferentism, a voluntary abrogation of the body, and a vegetative form of existence, in fact, a form of quietism, of Indian Nirvana.
This same philosophical concept inspires all of Tolstoï’s writings. Once a nihilist and now converted, culture and the exercise of reason are to him lamentable gifts; his ideal is not progression, but retrogression; the final word of human wisdom is to return to pure Nature, the eternal type of goodness, beauty, and truth. The Catholic Church has also honored the saintly lives of the poor in spirit, such as Pascual Bailon and Fray Junipero, the Idiot; but assuredly it has never presented them as models worthy of imitation in general, only as living examples of grace; and on the contrary, it is the intelligence of great thinkers, like Augustine, Thomas, and Buenaventura, that is revered and written about. In the whole catalogue of sins there is perhaps none more blasphemous than that of spurning the light given by the Creator to every creature. But to return to Tolstoï.
His literary testament is to be found in “Anna Karénina,” a novel but little less prolix than “War and Peace,” published in 1877. While “War and Peace” pictured society at the beginning of the century, “Anna Karénina” pictures contemporary society,—a more difficult task, because it lacks perspective, yet an easier one, because one can better understand the mode of thought of one’s contemporaries; therefore in “Anna Karénina” the epic quality is inferior to the lyric. The principal character is amply developed, and the study of passion is complete and profound.
The argument in “Anna Karénina” is upon an illicit love, young, sincere, and overpowering. Tolstoï does not justify it; the whole tone of the book is austere. It would seem as though he proposed to demonstrate—indirectly, and according to the demands of art—that a generous soul cannot live outside the moral law; and that even when circumstances seem entirely favorable, and those obstacles which society and custom oppose to his passion have disappeared, the discord within him is enough to poison happiness and make life intolerable.
In both of Tolstoï’s novels there is much insistence on the necessity of believing and contemplating religious matters, the thirst of faith. Although Tolstoï observes the canon of literary impersonality with a rigorous care that is equal to that of Flaubert himself, yet it is plainly to be seen that Pierre Besukof in “War and Peace,” and Levine in “Anna Karénina” are one and the same with the author, with his doubts, his painful anxiety to get away from indifferentism and to solve the eternal problem whose explanation Heine demanded of the waves of the North Sea. Tolstoï cannot consent to the idea of dying an atheist and a nihilist, or to living without knowing why or for what.
Referring to the autobiography called “Memoirs,” we see that from childhood he was troubled and tortured by the mystery of things about him and the hereafter. He tells there how his mind reasoned with, penetrated, and passed in review the diverse solutions offered to the great enigma; once he thought, like the Stoics, that happiness depends not upon circumstances, but upon our manner of accepting them, and that a man inured to suffering could not be afflicted by misfortunes; possessed with this idea he held a heavy dictionary upon his outstretched hand for five minutes, enduring frightful pains; he disciplined himself with a whip until his tears started. Then he turned to Epicurus; he remembered that life is short; that to man belongs only the disposition of the present; and under the influence of these ideas he abandoned his lessons for three days, and spent the time lying on his bed reading novels or eating sweets. He sees a horse, and at once inquires, “When this animal dies, where will his spirit go? Into the body of another horse? Into the body of a man?” And he wearies himself with questionings, with struggling over knotty problems, with thoughts upon thoughts, and all the while his ardent imagination conjures before him dreams of love, happiness, and fame.
Beneath the restless effervescence of fancy and youth the religious sentiment was pulsating,—the strongest and most deeply rooted sentiment in his soul. One episode from the “Memoirs” will prove to us the innate religious nature of the novelist. He tells us that once, when he was still a child in his father’s country-house, a certain beggar came to the door, a poor vagabond, one-eyed and pock-marked, half idiot and foolish,—one of those coarse clay vessels in which, according to contemporaneous Russian literature, the divine light is wont to be enclosed. He was offered shelter and hospitality, though none knew whence he came, nor why he followed a mysterious wandering life, always going from place to place, barefooted and poor, visiting the convents, distributing religious objects, murmuring incoherent words, and sleeping wherever a handful of straw was thrown down for him. Within the house, at supper-time, they fall to discussing him. Tolstoï’s mother pities him, his father abuses him; the latter thinks him little better than a cheat and a sluggard, the former reveres him as one inspired of God, a holy man, who earns glory and reward every minute by wearing around his body a chain sixty pounds in weight. Nevertheless, the vagabond obtains shelter and food, and the children, whose curiosity has been excited by the discussion, go and hide in a dark room next to his, so as “to see Gricha’s chain.” Tolstoï was filled with awe in his dark corner to hear the beggar pray, to see him throw himself upon the floor and writhe in mystic transports amid the clanking of his chain. “Many things have happened since then,” he exclaims, “many other memories have lost all importance for me; Gricha, the wanderer, has long since reached the end of his last journey, but the impression which he produced upon me will never fade; I shall never forget the feelings that he awoke in my soul. O Gricha! O great Christian! Thy faith was so ardent that thou couldst feel God near; thy love was so great that the words flowed of themselves from thy lips, and thou hadst not to ask thy reason for an examination of them. And how magnificently didst thou praise the Almighty when, words failing to express the feelings of thy heart, thou threwest thyself weeping upon the floor!” This episode of childhood will indeed never fade from the memory or the heart of Tolstoï. After seeking conviction and repose in arrogant human science and in philosophy, Tolstoï, like his two heroes, finds them at last in the meekness and simplicity of the most abject classes. Like his own Pierre Besukof, who receives the mystic illumination at the mouth of a common soldier who is to be shot by the French, or like his own Levine, who gets the same from a poor laboring peasant stacking hay, Tolstoï was converted by one Sutayef, one of those innumerable mujiks who go about the country announcing the good tidings of the day of communist fraternity. “Five years ago,” says Tolstoï in “My Religion,” “my faith was given to me; I believed in the teachings of Jesus, and my whole life suddenly changed; I abhorred what I had loved, and loved what I had abhorred; what before seemed bad to me, now seemed good, and vice versa.”
It was a sad day for art when this change of spirit came upon Count Tolstoï. Its immediate effect was to suspend the publication of a novel he had begun, to make him despise his master-works, call them empty vanities, and accuse himself of having speculated with the public in arousing evil passions and fanning the fires of sensuality. A heretic and a rationalist (Tolstoï is clearly both; for what he calls his conversion is neither to Catholicism nor to the Greek Church), he now abuses the novel, like some persons nearer home with better intentions than intelligence, as being an incentive to loose actions, the Devil’s bait, and agrees with Saint Francis de Sales that “novels are like mushrooms,—the best of them are good for nothing.” Tolstoï has not cast aside the pen; he continues to write, but no more such superb pages as we find in “War and Peace” and “Anna Karénina,” no more masterly silhouettes of fine society or the high ranks of the military, not the imperial profile of Alexander I. or the charming figure of the Princess Marie; he writes edifying apologies, Biblical parables dedicated to the enlightenment of village-folk; exegeses and religious controversies, professions of faith and dramas for the people. Has the great writer died? Nay, I believe that he still lives and breathes beneath the coarse tunic and rope girdle of the peasant-dress he wears, and which I have seen in his portraits; for in these same books, written with a moral and religious purpose, such as, for instance, that called “What to do?” in which he has endeavored to dispense with elegance and suppress beauty of rhetoric and style, the grace of the artist flows from his pen in spite of him; his descriptions are word-paintings, and the hand of the master is revealed in the admirable conciseness of diction; he controls every resource of art, and is inspired, will-he, nill-he. Tolstoï was right in reminding himself that genius is a divine gift, and there is no law that can annul it or cast it out.
I cannot believe that Count Tolstoï will persevere in his present path. In the first place, I have little confidence in conversion to a rationalist faith; in the second place, from what I have heard of the disposition of the incomparable novelist, I think it impossible that he should long remain stationary and satisfied. In his vigorous, passionate nature imagination has the strongest part; he is enthusiastic, and given to extremes, like Prince Besukof in “War and Peace;” he is like a fiery charger dashing on at full gallop, that leaps and plunges, and stays not even upon the edge of the precipice. To-day, under the influence of an unbridled sentiment of compassion, he is playing the part of redeemer and apostle; he imitates in his proprietary mansion and in the neighboring towns the primitive fraternal customs of the early Christians; he follows the plough and swings the scythe, and waits on himself, rejecting every offer of service and everything that refines life. To-morrow, perhaps, his lofty understanding will tell him that he was not born to make shoes but novels, and he will perhaps regret having thrown away his best years, the prime of life and creative activity.
At present, he has abandoned himself to the grace of God; and to those of us who are interested in intellectual phenomena, his religious ideas, which are closely interwoven with his imaginative creations, are extremely attractive. “My Religion” contains the fullest exposition of them. He states in it that the whole teaching of Jesus Christ is revealed in one single principle,—that of non-resistance to evil; it is to turn the other cheek, not to judge one’s neighbor, not to be angry, not to kill. Tolstoï’s experience with the Gospels is like that of the uninitiated who goes into a physical laboratory, and without having any previous instruction wishes to understand at once the management of this or that apparatus or machinery. The sublime and compendious message of the Son of Man has been for nineteen hundred years explained and defined by the loftiest minds in theology and philosophy, who have elucidated every real and profound phase of it as far as is compatible with human needs and laws; but Tolstoï, extracting at pleasure that passage from the sacred Book which most strikes his poetic imagination, deduces therefrom a social state impossible and superhuman; declares tribunals, prisons, authorities, riches, art, war, and armies, iniquitous and reprehensible.
In his earliest years Tolstoï dwelt much on thoughts of the tragedy of war, and in “War and Peace” he gives utterance to some very original and extraordinary, and sometimes even most ingenious opinions concerning it. No historian that I know of can be compared to Tolstoï on this point; none has succeeded in putting in relief the mysterious moral force, the blind and irresistible impulse which determines the great collisions between two peoples independently of the external and trivial causes to which history attributes them. Nor has any one else brought out as clearly as Tolstoï the part played in war by the army, the anonymous mass always sacrificed to the personality of two or three celebrated chiefs,—not only in the campaign bulletins but in the narratives of Clio herself. I believe it will be long before such another man as Tolstoï will arise, not only in the realms of the art of depicting great battle-scenes, but so rich in the gifts of military psychology and physiology; one who can describe the trembling fear in the recruit as well as the strategic calculations of the commander; one who can transfer the impression made upon the soul by the whistling of the bombs carrying death through the air, as well as the sudden impulse that at a certain decisive moment seizes upon thousands of souls that were before vacillating and unstable, lifts them up to a heroic temperature, and decides, in spite of all strategic combinations, the fate of the battle. Though the strenuous enemy of war, Tolstoï is perhaps the man who has written about it better than any other in the world; in every other respect I can compare him to some one else, but not in this. In French writings I recall only one page that could be placed beside Tolstoï’s; it is the admirable description of the battle of Waterloo, by Stendhal.
In the name of his own gospel Tolstoï condemns not only human institutions in general, but the Church in particular (the Greek Church, of course), accusing it of having substituted the letter for the spirit, the word of the world for the word of God.
It is not to our purpose to point out Tolstoï’s theological errors, but his artistic and social errors fall within the scope of our investigations. We know that, applying the principle of non-resistance in the most rigorous acceptation, he proscribes war, and, as a logical consequence, he disapproves the sacred love of country, which he qualifies as an absurd prejudice, and reproaches himself whenever his own instincts lead him to wish for the triumph of Russia over other nations. In the light of his theory of non-resistance he condemns the revolution, and yet he is forwarding it all the while by his own radical socialism. Tolstoï’s social ideal is, not to lift up and instruct the ignorant, nor even to suppress pauperism, but to create a state entirely composed of the poor, to annihilate wealth, luxury, the arts, all delicacy and refinement of custom, and lastly—the lips almost refuse to utter it—even cleanliness and care of the body. Yes, cleanliness and instruction, to wash and to learn, are, in Tolstoï’s eyes, great sins, the cause of separation and estrangement among mankind.
Besides this book in which he has set forth his religious ideas, he has written another called “My Confession” and “A Commentary on the Gospels.” In “My Confession” he says that having lost faith when very young and given himself up for a time to the vanities of life, and to making literature in which he taught others what he himself knew nothing about, and then turning to science for light upon the enigma of life, he became at last inclined to suicide, when it suddenly occurred to him to look and see how the humbler classes lived, who suffer and toil and know the object of life; and it was borne in upon him that he must follow their example and embrace their simple faith.
Thus Tolstoï formulated the principle enunciated by Gogol, and which is dominant in Russian literature,—the principle of a return to Nature, for which the way was prepared by Schopenhauer, and the sort of modern Buddhism which leads to a subjection of the reason to the animal and the idiot, and a feeling of unbounded tenderness and reverence for inferior creatures.
I have devoted thus much attention to Tolstoï’s social and religious ideas, not only because they are interlaced with his novels, and to a certain extent complement and explain them, but because Tolstoï, though he has allied himself with no political party, not even with the Sclavophiles, like Dostoiëwsky, is yet a representative of an order of ideas and sentiments common in his country and proper to it; he is the supreme artist of nihilism and pessimism, and at the same time the apostle of a Christian socialism newly derived from certain theories, dear to the Middle Ages, concerning the eternal Gospels; he is the interpreter, to the world of culture, society, letters, and arts, of that feverish mysticism which manifests itself in more violent forms among certain Russian sects, independent preachers, voluntary mortifiers of the body, the direct inheritors of those who, in dark ages past, declared themselves under the influence of spirits. The spectacle of the socialist fanatic united to the great writer, of the Quietist almost exceeding the limits of evangelical charity joined to the novelist of realism almost à la Zola, is so interesting from an intellectual point of view, that it is hard to say which most attracts the attention, Tolstoï or his books.
He has made great mistakes, not the least of which is his renunciation of novel-writing, if indeed that be his intention, though I have heard some Russians affirm the contrary. By condemning the arts and luxuries of urban life, and admitting only the good of the agricultural, for the sake of its simplicity and laboriousness, instead of helping on the Golden Age, he compels a retrogression to the age of the animal, as described by the Roman poet,—“the troglodyte snores, being satisfied with acorns.” By anathematizing letters, poetry, theatres, balls, banquets, and all the pleasures of intelligence and civilization, he condemns the most delicate instincts that we possess, sanctions barbarism, justifies a new irruption of Huns and Vandals, and endeavors to arrest the faculty of the perception of the Beautiful, which is a glorious attribute of God himself. And all this for what? To find at the end of this harsh penance not the love of Jesus Christ, who bids us lean on his breast and rest after our labors, but a pantheistic numen, a blind and deaf deity hidden behind a gray mist of abstractions. With sorrow we hear Tolstoï, the great artist, blaspheme when he would pray; hear him spurn the gifts of Heaven, condemn that form of art in which his name shone brightest and shed lustre on his country and all the world,—calling the novel oil poured upon the flames of sensual love, a licentious pastime, food for the senses, and a noxious diversion. We see him, under the hallucination of his mysticism, making shoes and drawing water with the hands that God gave him for weaving forms and designs of artistic beauty into the texture of his marvellous narratives.