Part 19

Even the deepest reverence does not require uncritical adoration. Moreover, Tolstoï is of such phenomenal importance for us all that the narrator who can communicate his own perceptions is bound to reproduce them with the most absolute fidelity. Therefore, I believe I ought not to conceal the thoughts which refused to leave me during the walk through this village. I had to admire once more the deep humanity of the Tolstoïs when I saw the Countess Sasha, in her beauty and purity, go into the damp, dirty hovels of the peasants, and caress the ragged and filthy children, just as Katyusha, in _The Resurrection_, kissed a deformed beggar on the mouth in Easter greeting after the Easter mass. This absolute Christian brotherliness receives expression also in the whole attitude of the family. Countess Sasha says, quite in the spirit of her father: "The industrious peasant stands much higher morally than we who own the land and do not work it. Otherwise he differs in no way from us in his virtues and vices." This brotherliness, however, has this shortcoming, that it leaves the brother where it finds him, and does not compel him to conform to different and more refined ways of living. The Tolstoï family teaches the village children. It has established a little clinic in the village. But it does not make its influence felt in teaching the villagers personal cleanliness, taking, say, the German colonists in the south as a model. I cannot conceive of the peasants of Yasnaya Polyana looking as they would if the landlord were an English or Dutch philanthropist instead of a Russian; and I cannot believe, either, that the simplicity of manners or the warmth of brotherly love would suffer if the village looked, for instance, like those of the Moravians, which shine with cleanliness. To be sure, the count refrains from any pressure on the people about him, and if his muzhik feels better unwashed, as his fathers were before him, and prefers a dirty, unaired room, shared with the dear cattle, to one in which he would have to take off his shoes to prevent soiling the floor, the count will not exhort him to change into a Swabian or a Dutchman. Æsthetic demands do not form any part of the Tolstoï view of life--I believe that for this reason it will find slow acceptance in the West.

There is the meekness and "lowliness" of early Christianity, there is an anti-Hellenic principle in the village dirt of Yasnaya Polyana. It is true that Hellenism leads in its final outcome to the abominable "Herrenmenschenthüm"[14] of Nietzsche, to Nero's hatred of the "many too many." A predominant æsthetic valuation of the good things of life leads in a negative way to the immoral in conduct. Every final consequence, however--that is, every extreme--is absurd; even absolute spirituality, indifferent to all outward things, as well as the heartless cult of mere external beauty. If we may learn from the muzhik patience in misfortune, we have also something to offer him in return for this in ideas of how to care for the body and of æsthetically refined ways of living. But Leo Tolstoï is an enemy of all compromise, and perhaps must be so. If the impulse towards the spiritualizing of our life, towards brotherly kindness and holiness, which goes out from him, is to work in its full force, it must be free from any foreign admixture, at least in him, its source. In the actual world counteracting forces are not wanting, moreover, and in some way the balance is always struck. The synthesis of Nietzsche and Tolstoï is really not so very hard to find. It was given long ago in the "kaho-kayadin" (beauty and goodness) of the ancients as well as in the rightly understood conception of the gentleman. If Tolstoï's human ideal wears the form of the muzhik and flatly rejects every concession to the claims of an æsthetic culture, the fact leads back ultimately to the repulsion which the St. Petersburg type of civilization must awaken in every unspoiled mind. One perceives there that luxury cannot uplift man. Indeed, it is easy to come to the Tolstoï conviction that it ruins instead of ennobling him. An isolated thinker like Tolstoï reaches in this revulsion very extreme consequences. In any case the bodily uncleanness of the peasants is less unpleasant to him and his daughter than the moral impurity of the town dwellers. The dirt of the peasants is for him nature, like the clinging clay of the field.

Suppressing our thoughts, we followed our brave guide into the houses of the village. With a few blows of her stick she put to flight the snarling curs that stood in her way. In the first house there was great wretchedness. The muzhik lay sick on the oven, beside him a stunted, hunchback child. The wife sat at the loom, surrounded by a heap of other children, flaxen-haired and unspeakably filthy. Half a dozen lambs shared the room and its frightful air with the peasants, sick and well. The young countess had a friendly word for each. One of the children was a pupil of hers, and was at that very time working at her writing lesson. This, of course, was praised. There was, however, something obsequiously cringing about the peasant woman I did not like. It was all quite different in the next house, which belonged to a rich muzhik. He likewise lay on the oven. The room was lighter, thanks to a larger window, but the floor was equally dirty, and the inevitable lambs were pushing each other about in the straw in the same way. At our entrance the muzhik awoke and got up. His mighty brown beard almost covered his breast, which showed through his open shirt, and was covered with a thick crust. This peasant, however, read the paper, spoke of the war, and put a very interesting question. A little while before the Countess Sasha had been at his house with Bryan, who had visited her father. The muzhik and his visitor had become rather friendly. Now the muzhik read in the paper that the Americans are enemies of Russia. How about his friend Bryan? The countess, therefore, had to tell him whether Bryan had now become his personal enemy. She reassured him, laughing. The peasant woman accompanied us out of the house, and made the characteristic speech: "I am ashamed; we live here like pigs; but what is any one to do? We are so, and can't help it!"

In the same house is the little village hospital, which for the present is only a movable affair. This is kept really clean. The amount of illness is large. The peasants from the surrounding country come also, and the doctor often has to treat forty patients in a single office hour. He is said to be an able man and a good one--a matter of course in Tolstoï's vicinity. Whether one wishes it or not, one is drawn out here in the atmosphere of pure kindliness. When I came back from the village I was almost ashamed that I had held my breath in the peasant's room.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] The theory that the elect few alone deserve to live and that the masses are superfluous.

XXX

A VISIT TO TOLSTOÏ--_CONTINUED_

At six o'clock we were summoned to dinner, at which the count appeared. As entrée there were baked fish--for the count, rice cutlets--then a roast and vegetables, of which the count took only the latter; then dessert and black coffee. We drank kvass, later tea, with cakes. Everything was very well prepared. A man-servant waited at table. It is by no means petty to tell all this. The Tolstoïs do not live on locusts and wild honey, but like other good families in Russia. We have, thank Heaven, outgrown the days when genius had to assert itself by extravagant conduct. Brilliant originality is entirely compatible with conformity to custom in all every-day usages, according to our way of thinking. Conversely, all originality immediately becomes suspicious in our eyes when it labors to assert itself in trifles. "A wise man behaves like other people." The individuality of Tolstoï shows in no way the stamp of the idle wish to differentiate itself in each and every particular from other people.

No one will expect me to reproduce every detail of the conversation, which began at dinner and ended almost six hours later at the house door. I certainly have not forgotten a word of it, but I cannot answer for the order of succession of subjects, nor even for every expression and every turn of speech. I therefore reconstruct from memory only what seems to me the most important, and ask every indulgence for this report. It is as faithful as is possible to human inadequacy after such fatigues and excitements, and with rather tardy notes.

"I am now under the influence of two Germans," began the count. "I am reading Kant and Lichtenberg--selections, to be sure, for I do not possess an original edition. I am fascinated by the clearness and grace of their style, and in particular by Lichtenberg's keen wit."

"Goethe says, 'When Lichtenberg makes a jest, a whole system is hidden behind it,'" I threw in.

"I do not understand how the Germans of to-day can so neglect their writer and go so mad over a coquettish feuilletonist like Nietzsche. He is no philosopher, and has no honest purpose of seeking and speaking the truth."

"But he has an unprecedented polish of style, and an endless amount of temperament."

"Schopenhauer seems to me greater as a stylist. Still, I agree with you that he has a glittering polish, though it is only the facile grace of the feuilletonist, which does not entitle him to a place among the great thinkers and teachers of humanity."

"He flatters, however, the aristocratic instincts of the new-Germans, who have attained power and honor, and he works against the evils of socialism."

"What is the condition of socialism in Germany?" asked the count, immediately, with great interest.

"I fear it has lost in depth and strength what it has gained in breadth."

"You may be right," he answered. "I have the same impression. The belief in its invincibility is broken, and its internal strength of conviction begins to weaken. It had to be so. Socialism cannot free humanity. No system and no doctrine can do that--nothing but religion."

"The Church says that, too."

"But she teaches it falsely. What is religion? The striving of each individual soul towards perfection; the subordination to an ideal. As long as a man has that he feels a purpose in life, can endure all sufferings, and is capable of any strain. It does not need necessarily to be a lofty ideal. A man may have an ambition to develop his biceps to an uncommon degree. If he takes this as his particular purpose in life this aim carries him along completely. To be sure, a man's choice of an ideal can be only apparently capricious. In reality we are all products of our environment; and after nineteen hundred years of Christianity we cannot with any true conviction set up ideals which contradict the real Christianity. We can make ourselves believe something else for a while. But the conscience will not submit to be silenced. Peace is attained only by the religious ideal of perfection and of love of humanity. Nothing is deadly except cynicism and nihilism."

"I remember your metaphor, comparing a society without religion or moral enthusiasm to an orchestra that has lost its leader. It keeps in time for a while, then come the discords."

"We are now in the first measure after his departure. All will go well for a while, but then every one will get out of time; the leaders first, because they are most exposed to temptation; then, class by class, the lower ones also."

"I believe a state is like a magnet, in which every smallest particle must have its direction, or else the whole loses its strength and cohesion."

"Exactly. A state or a society, like the individual, is fit for life only so long as it feels as a whole a reason for being. This life principle of totality is, however, identical with the idea of the individual. It is the stream that encircles each particle and brings it into polarity."

"People try to reach it by the ideal of nationalism and patriotism."

"That is no ideal. It is an absurd idea, which immediately comes into irreconcilable conflict with our better feelings. An ideal that can and does require me to kill my neighbor in order to gain an advantage for the group to which I belong is criminal."

"Yet it is dangerous to stand out against it. You had a controversy on that point with Spielhagen, who cast it up to you that you incline people to fling themselves under the wheels of a flying express-train."

"I remember. But Spielhagen does not know how many people already comply with the requirements of the gospel. The Doukhobors are such people."

"But they were obliged to leave the country."

"What difference does that make? They were able to remain true to themselves. That is better than remaining at home. And when we have once changed education, and have taken the sinful glorification of deeds of murder out of the hands of our children, then there will be not merely thousands, but millions, who will refuse to sacrifice themselves, or have themselves murdered for the ambition or the material advantage of a few individuals. And then this chapter of world-history will end."

"But the school is a matter of politics, and the state or the influential classes will be careful not to permit an education that will make their lower classes unavailable for purposes of war."

"Certainly. And as long as there is a church which by its fundamental teaching delivers itself over as an assistant to the state, and which blesses weapons of murder, so long will it be hard to fight against the evil instincts thus aroused. But school, of course, does not end man's education. Later reading is much more important. We have, therefore, created something that might well be imitated abroad also, our 'Posrednik,' books for the people. The thing that suppresses bad reading among the people is good books, especially stories. The books are sold very cheaply. Our artists design frontispieces for them. You must look at them in Moscow. I will give you a letter to the publisher, my friend Ivan Ivanovitch Gorbunov, who can tell you the details."

He did so. With his kind letter I afterwards looked up Gorbunov in Moscow. Under the pressure of the Russian censorship he accomplishes the immense work of spreading among the people every year several million good books at a cost of a few kopeks each, without having needed to add to his original capital of thirty thousand rubles. I fulfil a duty, and at the same time a wish of Tolstoï's, in here calling attention most emphatically to this magnificent Russian enterprise, which should be an example for all other nations.

I took up the subject of socialism again, and said, "In the West, Social Democracy is trying to solve the problem of educating the masses and to emancipate them."

"This is certainly meritorious," replied the count. "The mistake lies in the teaching of the Social Democrats that some other organization of society will automatically abolish evil from the world. The principal thing, however, is always to raise the individual to better morals and better ways of thinking. Without this no system can be permanent. Each leads only to new violence. People ought not to wish to better the world, but to better themselves."

"In that you agree essentially with our Moderns, who likewise take a stand against socialism and preach an extreme individualism. I see in that only a reactionary manoeuvre, however."

"How so?" asked the count.

"I believe that all wars for culture are always fought in a small class of thinking people. For the masses, provision for material needs is really the principal thing. In the thinking class, however, there are two parties: one, consisting of the feudalists, the plutocrats, and university-bred business men, fortune-hunters, seeks for itself the privilege of exploiting others; the other consists of the idealists, who desire progress--that is, the education and freeing of the masses. Sometimes the one class, with its aristocratic philosophy of profit, wins the upper hand, sometimes the other. We do not yet know in what Hellenic or Sidonian laws the spiritual ebb and flow will find its consummation. It is certain, however, that each party uses as a means of attraction the declaration that its point of view is the more progressive and that the opposite is the losing side. The individualists, in their scorn of socialism, render the most valuable service towards fundamental and complete reaction to the aristocratic-plutocratic party of exploitation, because they spread confusion in the ranks of the idealists by discrediting their solidarity. Nevertheless, they call themselves "the Moderns," and dub the advocates of solidarity 'old fogies.' The most modern thing in the West is a vile cult of the Uebermensch (over-man) Renaissance sentimentalism and the cult of beauty in bearing--æsthetic snobism."

"All that originates with Nietzsche. The mistake, however, does not lie in the principle of individualism, which does not exclude solidarity, but, on the contrary, advances it. For the individual unquestionably attains solidarity in the very struggle towards his own perfection. The mistake lies in the æstheticism, in the basing of life on externals and on enjoyment. Connected with this is the strangest thing of all, that this resurrection of the madness of the Renaissance has not made use of art. For all that is produced is nothing but pure silliness. I have not laughed so much for years as at an entirely serious account of the contents of _Mona Vanna_, or at the poems which our æsthete and decadent Balmont read to me. None of those things are to be taken seriously as art. They will only confuse people through their absurdity, which could not exist if the healthy human understanding had not been brought into discredit. It is no better with you in Germany. Why is your literary product so low?"

"Who knows, count? It has already been asserted that since 1870 the gifted minds have turned to more serious and more lucrative callings than literature. But I do not believe it. The sciences show at present just as few geniuses as the arts. It seems as if there were laws of ebb and flow here, too. Sometimes a whole billow of inspired intellects is flung upon the earth, and then there is long drought. We have had no great writers since Gottfried Keller."

"Gottfried Keller? I have never heard the name before. Who was he? What did he write?"

"He was a Swiss who inherited Goethe's free outlook on life, and wrote the best German novels, full of creative art, of racy humor, and of almost uncanny knowledge of human nature. He would give you much pleasure."

"How? You say he inherits to some degree from Goethe. In that case my enthusiasm would be doubtful, for I cannot say I especially love that Goethe of yours."

"Is it possible?"

"There are some of his works I admire without reserve, which stand among the finest things that have ever been written: _Hermann and Dorothea_, for instance. I once knew his dedication by heart. Yet the lyrics of Heine, for instance, make a deeper impression upon me than Goethe's."

"Pardon the remark, count, but in that case your knowledge of the German language is not sufficient for you to notice the difference in quality. Heine is a virtuoso, who plays with form. With Goethe, every word breathes the deepest spiritual experience and is uttered from inward necessity."

"The same thing is said here of Pushkin--that his greatness can be appreciated only by those who are most deeply imbued with the spirit of the language. I haven't any too much faith in all that, however. To be sure, a translation is only the wrong side of the carpet; yet I believe really great works hold their own in translation, so the form of phrase cannot be the only test for the value of a writing. But what repels me in Goethe is precisely that play on form of which you accuse Heine. Goethe and Shakespeare are both artists in the sense in which you reproach the Moderns. They are bent only upon æsthetic play, and create only for enjoyment, and not with the heart's blood."

"I could not admit that, count, without repudiating everything I have ever thought and felt. Not for Shakespeare, in whom, through all the dramatic conventions of the greater part, we hear the heartbeat often enough. As for Goethe, whose poems are partly painful confessions, written only for the reason he himself gives,

"Warum sucht' ich den Weg so sehnsuchtsvoll Wenn ich ihn nicht den Brüdern zeigen soll?"[15]

"I find much more of this feeling for humanity in Schiller."

"He is more rhetorical, appeals more directly to the middle class and contemporaries. But, like the overbearing political tribune he was, he has hardly entered into the joy and sorrow of the human soul."

"And it is exactly this that brings him nearer to me than Goethe and Shakespeare. He is filled with a sacred sense of purpose in his work. He had not the cold ambition of the artist to be merely faithful to his model. He was full of longing that we should be carried away with him. Of the three requirements I make of the great artist--technical perfection, worthiness of subject, and self-identification with the matter--the last is the most important. One may be a great writer even when technical perfection, complete mastery of the tricks of the trade, is lacking, as, for instance, in the case of Dostoyevski. But unless a man writes with his heart's blood he cannot be a great artist."

"I believe the heart's-blood doctrine would rule out all cheerful _genre_, and that meets perhaps best of all the fundamental purpose of art."

"You say that because you yourself see in art only a means of enjoyment, only play."

I could not have denied that this is really my conception, and should, therewith, have hit upon the fundamental opposition between our Western conception of life, as expressed by Goethe, and the exclusively religio-moral one of Tolstoï. I could not, however, compel myself to fill with a fruitless argument the few hours I had to spend with the honored man. I should have been as little able to convince the apostle of seventy-five, whose ascetic philosophy is the product of definite conditions of civilization, as he to convince me, the west-German, whose light-heartedness and confident belief in culture had ripened in the sunshine of the Rhine bank. I therefore evaded the point, and said:

"I have hitherto not taken your rigorous demands upon art as well as upon life quite literally, count. I thought to myself that when one pulls up a horse suddenly he does not wish it to turn around, but only to stop. I supposed that you wished merely to counteract other powerful impulses."

"No," said the count, after a moment's reflection. "That is not so. I believe in the absolute correctness of my demands. I myself, however, was too weakly or too badly trained to submit to them altogether. I cannot, for instance, keep from enjoying Chopin, although I condemn his music as exclusive art, which addresses itself to the understanding and feelings only of the aristocratically cultivated few."

"It seems to me an unattainable ideal that all men should share in enjoyment of art; and the requirement that the artist shall refrain from all work that could be enjoyed only by a limited number of especially cultivated men is impossible and even harmful. It would deprive us of the finest works we possess."

"If the requirement is justified in and of itself, it is quite immaterial what sacrifices must be made to it. Nothing is to be considered in comparison with truth."

I could go no further here, again. For I was talking with the man who repudiates his own immortal works because they are beyond the comprehension of most people, and therefore help to widen the gulf between the educated and the uneducated. I could not even make the objection that almost all learning must be condemned on the same ground, for it is well known that Tolstoï does not shrink from even this conclusion.