Part 15

Tolstoi possesses that social imagination which, though growing among us, is still so rare. If at the dinner where cheerful guests prolong their enjoyment, there were placed behind each chair a starved, ragged figure, with haggard and haunting face--would not the meal be broken up as speedily as if every guest had found the sword of Dionysius hanging by a thread above his head? Yet it is only a lack of imagination which prevents us from seeing through the few layers of bricks that screen us off from these realities. For him who has seen it there is little rest, “so long as I have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I have two coats and another has none.”

With tears in his voice, and in words whose intense reality pierces through the translation, though this, we are told, cannot reproduce the graphic vividness of the original, Tolstoi speaks to us through his life and his work as he once spoke to the interviewer who came to him:

“People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolaivitch, as far as preaching goes, you preach; but how about your practice?’ The question is a perfectly natural one; it is always put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘You preach,’ it is said, ‘but how do you live?’ I can only reply that I do not preach--passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching; it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of life. People often say to me, ‘If you think that there is no reasonable life outside the teachings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable life, why do you not fulfil the Christian precepts?’ I am guilty and blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfil them; but at the same time I say,--not in justification, but in explanation, of my inconsistency,--Compare my previous life with the life I am now living, and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true, fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it is not because I do not wish to fulfil all, but because I am unable. Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which I am entangled,--help me,--and I will fulfil all. I wish and hope to do it even without help. Condemn me if you choose,--I do that myself,--but condemn _me_, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘Look at him! He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp!’ You are not evil spirits from the swamp; you are also human beings, and you also are going home. You know that I am alone,--you know that I cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp,--then help me! My heart is breaking with despair because we have all lost the road; and while I struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘See! He is in the swamp with us!’”

CONCLUSION.

Tolstoi brings us face to face with religion. If we think of it, every personality we have considered has brought us subtly in contact with that ineluctable shape. It is strange: men seek to be, or to seem, atheists, agnostics, cynics, pessimists; at the core of all these things lurks religion. We may find it in Diderot’s mighty enthusiasm, in Heine’s passionate cries, in Ibsen’s gigantic faith in the future, in Whitman’s not less gigantic faith in the present. We see the same in the music-dramas of Wagner, in Zola’s pathetic belief in a formula, in Morris’s worship of an ideal past, in the aspirations of every Socialist who looks for the return of those barbarous times in which all men equally were fed and clothed and housed. The men who have most finely felt the pulse of the world, and have, in their turn, most effectively stirred its pulse, are religious men.

One is forced to ask oneself at last: How can I make clear to myself this vast and many-shaped religious element of life? It will not let me pass it by. Can I--without any attempt to theorize or to explain--reduce it to some common denominator, so that I may at least gain the satisfaction that comes of the clear and harmonious presentation of a complex fact? When we have settled the question of the evolution of religion, another more fundamental question may still be asked: What is the nature of the impulse that underlies, and manifests itself in, that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship, ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal to the vast reservoir of sexual and filial love, we may succeed in reducing religious phenomena? On the one hand, this impulse must begin to develop at least as early as the earliest appearance of worship; on the other hand, we cannot ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also examine and compare its more specialized forms. What is there in common between the religious attitude of the child of to-day, enfranchized from creeds, and that of, let us say, Lâo-tsze, the child of a day that is twenty-five centuries old; or between these and the far more primitive adoration of the Dravidian for his cattle? If the vague term “religion,” which, as commonly used, contains at least three elements--moral, scientific, emotional--covers any distinct and persistent human impulse, what is the nature and scope of that impulse? I wish to represent to myself, as precisely and as broadly as may be, man’s religious relation.

When we look out into the universe we see a vast medium, the world, gradually merging itself indistinctly in a practical infinite, and in the centre a certain limited number of souls, souls like the theoretical atoms of the physicist, never under any circumstances touching. Let two souls approach ever so nearly, there is yet a subtle chasm, through which

“The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea”

still flows. These souls are made up essentially of mind and body. There can be no change of consciousness without a corresponding change in the vascular circulation. There can be no thrill of body in a soul without a correlated thrill of mind. Matter and mind in the soul are co-extensive. When we speak of the “spirit” as ruling the body, or as yielding to it, we are, it must be remembered, using a traditional method of speech which had its origin in a more primitive theory, just as we still speak of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no more be subordinated to the material, strictly speaking, than in water the oxygen be subordinated to the hydrogen. The old dispute for supremacy between mind and matter no longer has any significance. Both matter and mind are in the end equally unknown: _exeunt in mysterium_.

The soul is born and then dies. What do we mean by _birth_ and _death_? According to the old Hebrew conception a spirit was created out of nothing and put into a mould of matter, and then at death again passed back into nothing. But to-day this conception is impossible. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ It is clear that both the elements that make up the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the world, whom we are, on this variegated jet of organic life, to fall back again to our true life, by whatever unknown ways and under whatever change of form, conscious, it may be, but, as before birth, no longer with any self to be conscious of, no longer organic.

Now souls, although they always remain isolated, are acted upon by the world and by other souls, and when so acted upon they yield an emotional response. And for the present purpose these actions may be divided into two classes, corresponding to the two classes of sympathetic nerve fibres--vaso-constrictor and vaso-dilator--which control the vascular system, the rougher daily contacts of life, which contract though they strengthen the soul with their legacy of strong desires and griefs, and the incomparably rarer contacts at which the soul for a while and in varying degrees expands with a glad sense of freedom. As every bodily change in the compacted soul is correlated with a mental change, these responses may be spoken of indifferently in mental or material terms. We know that they are on the bodily side vaso-motorial; that a thrill of joy is accompanied by a change in arterial tension, and we can therefore use this expression of the part as the symbol of the whole. It is this enlarged diastole of the soul that we call _religion_.

“The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual,--namely, to You.” From the religious standpoint this is essentially true. The soul is situated at the centre of the world, exposed to a practically infinite number of appeals, to which it is capable of yielding a practically infinite number of responses or initiations. Every moment a stream of influences is striking against the soul and producing a multitudinous stream of responses, new stops growing, as it were, beneath the player’s touch. We know that for the most part the harsh and jarring discords predominate, that a soul that answers to the world’s touch with a music that is ever large and harmonious, is so rare that we call it by some divine ideal word. Yet the field of the soul’s liberation is a large one, whether we look at it on the physical or on the mental side. The simplest functions of physiological life may be its ministers. Everyone who is at all acquainted with the Persian mystics, knows how wine may be regarded as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all ages, some form of physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking, sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious exercise. I do not fear to make this assertion; the expansions of the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality. If this is but a low rung of the ladder along which pass the angels of our gladness, at the other end is that vision of divine self-sacrifice, so marked in the more highly developed religions, which has sustained through sorrow and defeat some of the world’s loftiest spirits. They differ, as much as we will, in degree, but between them what hint by which to draw a line? Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to bear us towards it.[13]

[13] It may be said that religion, as even the etymology of the word witnesses, has been a force on the side of repression. That also is true; it cannot indeed be too strongly emphasized. Only in the strength of that joyous expansion could men have acted and suffered such intolerable torture in the service of religion. (It must be remembered, however, that in certain stages of civilization religion is largely identified with morality). It is necessary to generalize from the most various and highly specialized cases in order to arrive at a reasonable definition.

When we try to classify the chief of these affections of the soul according to the impulses that arouse them, we find that they may be conveniently divided into four classes:--(1.) Those caused by the liberation of impulses stored up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by impulses from other souls. (3.) Those caused by impulses from the world, as distinct from souls. (4.) Those caused by an intuition of union with the world.

(1.) Here we are, above all, concerned with art. It is not necessary here to distinguish between the emotion of the artist and that of him who merely follows the artist, passing his hand as it were over the other’s work, and receiving, in a less degree it may be, the same emotion. We are all artists potentially. The secret of the charm of art is that it presents to us an external world which is manifestly of like nature with the soul. “Non merita nome di Creatore,” according to Tasso’s saying, “se non Iddio ed il Poeta.” The work of art--poem, statue, music--succeeds in being what every philosophy attempts to be. Neither change nor death can touch it; also it is immeasurable; we feel that we are in the presence of the infinite. No art has ever succeeded in embodying those visions of the infinite which are commonly regarded as specifically religious--so that even to-day we respond with a thrill of dilatation--as the old fragmentary art of Egypt in the ruined temples of the Thebaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation of the infinite; we may lose ourselves among those subtle curves of man’s or woman’s body. A Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century is an embodiment of the infinite world itself. The soul responds expansively to all these things. When that response is wanting, and the art therefore, however interesting, is not religious--as in the art of Pompeii and the Italian post-Raphaelite art--it will generally be found technically inferior. The subject, one may note, has little or nothing to do with the matter. A representation of God the Father rarely evokes any religious response. De Hooge, by means of mere sunlight and the rubbish of a back-yard, awakes in us an enlarging thrill of joy. In music the most indefinite and profound mysteries of the soul are revealed and placed outside us as a gracious and marvellous orb; the very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world. That is why no other art smites us with so powerfully religious an appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves.

“O! what is this that knows the road I came?”

It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted.

There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and a sensory, lying at the bottom of art and the delight in art. All the constructive instincts of living things, from bees and ants and worms and birds upwards, have gone to mould our delight in the fashioning of a whole, and in the contemplation of its fashion. The same process was carried on into human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its beauty, and by a true instinct she called her work a living creature. The baskets that early men wove, and the weapons that they carved for themselves, and their rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship, are part of a chain that presents itself again in Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan dramas.

Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering, more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and strength and skill--such are the impressions that male and female have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty--whether in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s music, Shelley’s lyrics--can always appeal, certain of response? One might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached in our own time--a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme religious form--Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the creation of love.

Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has played a large part in the history of religion--the art of metaphysic. The savage finds religious gratification in the exercise of his coarser senses, in singing or dancing or drinking; the man of large and refined intellectual development, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the joy of the philosophic emotion will construct his own philosophy. A philosophy is the house of the mind, and no two philosophies can be alike because no two minds are alike. But the emotion is the same, the emotion of expansive joy in a house not built with hands, in which the soul has made for herself a large and harmonious dwelling.

(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart. The lover seeks to be absorbed altogether in the heaven of the loved personality, but in the end the heaven remains unsealed.

“_Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam._”

And yet a large or lovely personality is not the less an outlook towards the infinite. We cannot think of certain men of immense range or power or sweetness--St. Francis, Leonardo, Napoleon, Darwin--without experiencing a movement of liberation. To pronounce the names of such men is of the nature of an act of worship. I cannot for a moment think of Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at such gracious plenitude of power. No person, probably, ever made so ardent a personal appeal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole new world of emotional life, a new expansion of joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons, torn and bleeding, yet, _instar generosi cujusdam athletæ_, with the undying cry on her lips, _Christiana sum!_ It is open to everyone to give liberating impulses to his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus that he has, for us, permanently expanded the bounds of individuality. We all breathe deeper and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter’s son. “_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_,” said the physician in the old story, by the bedside of a wretched patient. “_Non est corpus tam vile pro quo mortuus est Christus_,” unexpectedly returned the dying man. The charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly apprehended.

But it is not alone the large mystery of exceptional personalities which calls out this response. To certain finely-tempered spirits no human thing is too mean to fail in making this emotional appeal. The chief religious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed above all things the harmonious development of the individual in its higher forms. It still remained to show the loveliness of the complete ordinary personality. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” cannot in this respect be over-estimated.[14]

[14] The late William Cyples, in his charming and neglected _magnum opus_, “The Process of Human Experience” (p. 462), rightly traces this form of religion to the feeling generated between lovers, friends, parent and children. “A few have at intervals walked in the world,” he adds, “who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel ... it has proved sufficient for them even to wish enough to help their race; instantly these secret delights have risen in their hearts. Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial madness. Beggars’ rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial acts, but only welcome services. It was the humblest, the easiest, the readiest of duties to lay down life for the ignorant, the ill-behaved, the unkind,--for any and all who did but wear the familiar human shape. That this ecstasy of humanity should rise so much higher than any other is according to the plain working of the law of accumulation of finer consciousness by complexity in the occasioning activity. Remember by how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other things are dull, meagre, tame beside him. If the most part of us are only as dross to one another, in place of being of this priceless value, it can only be from the lack of mutual services among us. Without these how can we but want sufficient adaptiveness of mood,--how can we help groaning under the weight of instincts half organized or wholly unfulfilled?”

(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer than has sometimes been supposed, and among men of science, probably, it is seldom found. Strauss’s “Old Faith and New” is one of the chief attempts by a man of science to present the scientific attitude as food for the religious consciousness. The result is dreary in the extreme, in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of religion, and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science has little to do with magnificent generalizations; he is concerned chiefly with the patient investigation of details; it is but rarely that he feels called upon, like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional response to the grandeur and uniformity of law. Yet to many this vision of universal law has come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness of the world.