Chapter 5

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them? Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the "Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line, But with a sigh I wish it mine; When he can in one couplet fix More sense than I can do in six, It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.' I grieve to be outdone by Gay In my own humorous biting way; Arbuthnot is no more my friend Who dares to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce; Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em, Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing whilst he was still a youth, in _The Tale of a Tub_, he composed a terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical bareness of style seem foretold: "Last week," he says, "I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse." "Only a woman's hair," was found written on the packet in which the memorial of Stella was preserved, and I do not know in what elegy there breathes a prouder or more poignant sorrow.

When he wrote the _Drapier Letters_, Ireland lay before him like a woman flayed. Of the misery of Ireland it was said (I think by Sheridan):

"It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times half frantic with furious indignation, it sunk him at times in abysses of sullen despondency, it awoke in him emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal injuries."

This cruel rage over the wrongs of a people whom he did not love, and whom he repeatedly disowned, drove him to the savage denunciations in which he said of England's nominee: "It is no dishonour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country, that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery." It inspired his _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures_, in which the advice to "burn everything that came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public. Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast, baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at oppression extended to all mankind. In _Gulliver's Travels_ it is the human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists--unlike Juvenal or Pope or the author of _Penguin Island_, who comes nearest to his manner--he pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice, but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to Pope soon after _Gulliver_ was published, "I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh--a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by various lusts.

"Noli aemulari," sang the cheerful Psalmist; "Fret not thyself because of evildoers." How easy for most of us it is to follow that comfortable counsel! How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage! And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment. It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. They would gladly be rid of it, for, indeed, it stifles their existence, depriving them alike of pleasure, friends, and the objects of ambition--isolating them in the end as Swift was isolated. If only the causes of their indignation might cease, how gladly they would welcome the interludes of quiet! But hardly is one surmounted than another overtops them like a wave, nor have the stern victims of indignation the smallest hope of deliverance from their suffering, until they lie, as Swift has now lain for so many years, where cruel rage can tear the heart no more--"Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit."

VII

THE CHIEF OF REBELS

"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the world is colder as well as more empty. They have passed outside the common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs, and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia. In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he--in place of the shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he is not."

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square--I suppose the "Red Square" in Moscow--on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres, chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to say--that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals, or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and miracles--all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence and the law of his soul--he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery, incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And, as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

"I believe in this: I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies in fulfilling God's will, and his will is that men should love one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them--of which it is said in the Gospels that this is the law and the prophets."

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars. Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties--what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

"It seems to me now specially important to do what is right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission from Government, but consciously avoiding participation in it.... What can a Government do with a man who will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations, deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good, enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings. Public opinion--the only power which subdues Governments--would become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, justice, and humanity."

From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands might regard this quietism or wise passiveness as a mere counsel of despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny, but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries, and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues, banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism," or "a fanatic's intolerance."

Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft, and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do, there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him a disturbing and incalculable magic--an upheaving force, like leaven stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered peace.

Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres; they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in prose)--in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prostitute Maslova; and in the hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karénin herself, there runs exactly the same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please, it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, "That is the finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compassionate heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is possible, and no mediocrity golden."

To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It was but a return to well-worn commandments. "Do not be angry, do not lust, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil, but love your enemies"--these commands have a familiar, an almost parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to the voice of the soul or the voice of God, he would not have minded much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," said one peasant of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding its highest joy of art and pleasure only in noble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God. The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments!" cried the ancient poet, uttering the voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; "O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river."

VIII

THE IRON CROWN

When we read of a man who, for many years, wore on his left arm an iron bracelet, with spikes on the inside which were pressed into the flesh, we feel as though we had taken a long journey from our happy land. When we read that the bracelet was made of steel wire, with the points specially sharpened, and the whole so clamped on to the arm that it could never come off, but had to be cut away after death, we might suppose that we had reached the world where Yogi and Sanyasi wander in the saffron robe, or sit besmeared with ashes, contemplating the eternal verities, unmoved by outward things. Like skeletons of death they sit; thorns tear their skin, their nails pierce into their hands, day and night one arm is held uplifted, iron grows embedded in their flesh, like a railing in a tree trunk, they hang in ecstasy from hooks, they count their thousand miles of pilgrimage by the double yard-measure of head to heel, moving like a geometer caterpillar across the burning dust. To overcome the body so that the soul may win her freedom, to mortify--to murder the flesh so that the spirit may reach its perfect life, to torture sense so that the mind may dwell in peace, to obliterate the limits of space, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed--that is the purport of their existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abasement that the body can endure.

Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable multitudes swarming around the shrines on India's coral strand, we think all this sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and worldly circumstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of his country, a voice in the destinies of the world--so we see him moving in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in his assured position, almost superhuman in success. And as he moves, he presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.