Part 4

Count Tolstoy is a man of genius, a great novelist. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karénina,” “The Cossacks,” “Sebastopol,” are great books. As a novelist he has added materially to the sum of production of his generation. As a professional philosopher and moralist I doubt if his influence has really been very extensive among men of action; of course it has a certain weight among men who live only in the closet, in the library; and among the high-minded men of this type, who, because of their sheltered lives, naturally reject what is immoral, and do not have to deal with what is fantastic, in Tolstoy’s teachings, it is probable that the really lofty side of these teachings gives them a certain sense of spiritual exaltation. But I have no question that whatever little influence Tolstoy has exerted among men of action has told, on the whole, for evil. I do not think his influence over men of action has been great, for I think he has swayed or dominated only the feeble folk and the fantastic folk. No man who possesses both robust common sense and high ideals, and who strives to apply both in actual living, is affected by Tolstoy’s teachings, save as he is affected by the teachings of hundreds of other men in whose writings there are occasional truths mixed with masses of what is commonplace or erroneous. Strong men may gain something from Tolstoy’s moral teachings, but only on condition that they are strong enough and sane enough to be repelled by those parts of his teachings which are foolish or immoral. Weak persons are hurt by the teachings. Still, I think that the mere fact that these weak persons are influenced sufficiently to be marred means that there was not in them a very great quantity of potential usefulness to mar. In the United States we suffer from grave moral dangers; but they are for the most part dangers which Tolstoy would neither perceive nor know how to combat. Moreover, the real and dreadful evils which do in fact share in his denunciation of an attack upon both good and evil are usually not evils which are of much moment among us. On the other hand, we are not liable to certain kinds of wickedness which there is real danger of his writings inculcating; for it is a lamentable fact that, as is so often the case with a certain type of mystical zealot, there is in him a dark streak which tells of moral perversion. That side of his teachings which is partially manifested in the revolting “Kreutzer Sonata” can do exceedingly little damage in America, for it would appeal only to decadents; exactly as it could have come only from a man who, however high he may stand in certain respects, has in him certain dreadful qualities of the moral pervert.

The usual effect of prolonged and excessive indulgence in Tolstoyism on American disciples is comic rather than serious. One of these disciples, for instance, not long ago wrote a book on American municipal problems, which ascribed our ethical and social shortcomings in municipal matters in part to the sin of “militarism.” Now the mind of this particular writer in making such a statement was influenced not in the least by what had actually occurred or was occurring in our cities, but by one of Tolstoy’s theories which has no possible bearing upon American life. Militarism is a real factor for good or for evil in most European countries. In America it has not the smallest effect one way or the other; it is a negligible quantity. There are undoubtedly states of society where militarism is a grave evil, and there are plenty of circumstances in which the prime duty of man may be to strive against it. But it is not righteous war, not even war itself, which is the absolute evil, the evil which is evil always and under all circumstances. Militarism which takes the form of a police force, municipal or national, may be the prime factor for upholding peace and righteousness. Militarism is to be condemned or not purely according to the conditions. So eating horse meat is in itself a mere matter of taste; but the early Christian missionaries in Scandinavia found that serious evil sprang from the custom of eating horse meat in honor of Odin. It is literally true that our very grave municipal problems in New York or Chicago have no more to do with militarism than with eating the meat of horses that have been sacrificed to pagan deities; and a crusade against one habit, as an element in municipal reform, is just about as rational as would be a crusade against the other. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that it had taken a century to remove the lark from American literature; because the poets insisted upon writing, not about the birds they saw, but about the birds they had read of in the writings of other poets. Militarism as an evil in our social life is as purely a figment of the imagination as the skylark in our literature. Moreover, the fact that in spite of this total absence of militarism there is so much that is evil in our life, so much need for reform, ought to show persons who think that the destruction of militarism would bring about the millennium how completely they lack the sense of perspective.

Another disciple used to write poetry in defense of the Mahdi, apparently under the vague impression that this also was a protest against militarism and therefore in line with Tolstoy’s teachings――as very possibly it was. Now, Mahdism was as hideous an exhibition of bloodthirsty cruelty, governmental tyranny, corruption and inefficiency, and homicidal religious fanaticism as the world has ever seen. Its immediate result was to destroy over half the population in the area where it held sway, and to bring the most dreadful degradation and suffering to the remainder. It represented in the aggregate more wickedness, more wrong-doing, more human suffering, than all the wickedness, wrong-doing, and human suffering in all the Christian communities put together during the same period. It was characteristic of the fantastic perversion of morality which naturally results from the serious acceptance of Tolstoy as a moral teacher that one manifestation of this acceptance should have been a defense of Mahdism. Of course when the Anglo-Egyptian army overthrew Mahdism it conferred a boon upon all mankind, and most of all upon the wretched inhabitants of the Sudan.

So much for Tolstoyism in America, the only place where I have studied it in action, and where its effect, although insignificant for good, has been not much more significant for evil, being absurd rather than serious. As to the effect in Russia itself, I am not competent to speak. But the history of the Duma proved in the most emphatic way that the greatest danger to liberalism in Russia sprang from the fact that the liberals were saturated with just such folly as that taught by Tolstoy. The flat contradiction between his theory and practice in such matters as his preaching concerning the relations of the sexes, and also concerning private property――for of course it is an unlovely thing to profit by the private property of one’s wife and children, while affecting to cast it aside――is explicable only by one of two very sad hypotheses, neither of which it is necessary here to discuss. The important point is that his preaching is compounded of some very beautiful and lofty sentiments, with much that is utterly fantastic, and with some things that are grossly immoral. The Duma fell far short of what its friends in other lands hoped for, just because it showed these very same traits, and because it failed to develop the power for practical common-sense work. There were plenty of members who could utter the loftiest moral sentiments, sentiments quite as lofty as those once uttered by Robespierre; but there was an insufficiency of members able and willing to go to work in practical fashion, able and willing to try to make society measurably better by cutting out the abuses that could be cut out, and by starting things on the right road, instead of insisting upon doing nothing unless they could immediately introduce the millennium and reform all the abuses of society out of hand with a jump. What was needed was a body of men like those who made our Constitution; men accustomed to work with their fellows, accustomed to compromise; men who clung to high ideals, but who were imbued with the philosophy which Abraham Lincoln afterwards so strikingly exemplified, and were content to take the best possible where the best absolute could not be secured. This was the spirit of Washington and his associates in one great crisis of our National life, of Lincoln and his associates in the other great crisis. It is the only spirit from which it will ever be possible to secure good results in a free country; and it is the direct negation of Tolstoyism.

To minimize the chance of anything but willful misunderstanding, let me repeat that Tolstoy is a great writer, a great novelist; that the unconscious influence of his novels is probably, on the whole, good, even disregarding their standing as works of art; that even as a professional moralist and philosophical adviser of mankind in religious matters he has some excellent theories and on some points develops a noble and elevating teaching; but that taken as a whole, and if generally diffused, his moral and philosophical teachings, so far as they had any influence at all, would have an influence for bad; partly because on certain points they teach downright immorality, but much more because they tend to be both foolish and fantastic, and if logically applied would mean the extinction of humanity in a generation.

A Southerner’s View of the South

It seems rather queer to go abroad and discover an American author. Two books have appeared in England during the last year or two, named “The Scar” and “The Scourge.” They have been a success, not only in England, but on the Continent; for translations have appeared or are appearing in German, French, and Russian. Yet they are by an American, Mr. Warrington Dawson, of South Carolina; and they deal with localities, questions, and types exclusively and typically American. It is not very creditable to us that this American, writing with unusual power of American scenes and problems, should have an exclusively European audience.

Mr. Dawson’s stories are laid in the country districts and small towns of Virginia. In each volume a Northerner, in the first a woman, in the second a man, is thrown into intimate contact with the members of a proud caste of provincial aristocrats, who have been slowly sinking under the burden of grinding poverty, whose poverty-stricken lives are both hardening and narrowing, but in whose strongly individualized natures there dwell qualities and capacities of the highest kind. It is in his studies of these native Southern whites――both men and women, both those who are painfully struggling upwards and those whom an iron fate is slowly forcing downwards――and in his studies of the dark-skinned alien race standing so utterly aloof from them and so intimately connected with them, that Mr. Dawson excels; and it is not necessary to agree with all his conclusions in order to appreciate the value of his work. But almost equally good is the study of the Northerner who dwells South, who has made a real business success, who is in his own fashion devoted to the interests of the people with whom he has spent his life, but whom they at bottom never cease to regard as an interloper; and Mr. Dawson is entirely just in showing how ungenerous and unwarranted part of this attitude is, and, on the other hand, the measure of justification which it has in the hard narrowness that makes the intruder insist on trying to do good to the community in many ways which represent what is either unnecessary or even injurious.

I have no intention of writing a criticism of Mr. Dawson’s two books; but it is worth while calling attention to the fact that this author, who writes with power and interest of vital home matters, has his critics and his audience abroad, but has neither critics nor audience at home. He should have both.

The Thraldom of Names

It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names, and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the reverence for or antipathy toward a given name in order to achieve some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of “liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word “order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a State or by a private corporation.

Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of the Second Republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny and all public order have disappeared together. The Second Empire in France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did not produce another violent reaction, but left the French Republic standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be ruled by a king as by a mob.

Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the direction of the Great Monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.

We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist, between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement of the Eighth Commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”

First and foremost we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern exposure of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into a terror-struck defense of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential that we should wrest the control of the Government out of the hands of rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to put the control of the Government into the hands of demagogues and visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with, as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it would make no more difference that one was called individualism, and the other collectivism, than it made in French history whether tyranny was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a Committee of National Safety, or of a King.

The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical, are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his own devices, he will utterly discredit the entire system of government by individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will, he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by the State that any abuses connected with the untrammeled control of all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We cannot afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits. It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the functions of the State. It has been shown beyond power of refutation that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” cannot be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private monopoly if the State does not interfere at all, as it would be crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets of the extreme Socialists.

In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential both to the material and moral progress of the country that these forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth. What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr. Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex American character; it would have been marvelous if a stranger of his slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):