Back Aa

Tolstoy

<h3> CHAPTER VI </h3> "MY CONFESSION"—"MY RELIGION"—"WHAT IS ART?" ETC. We have seen that, in his fiftieth year, a great mental and moral change came over Tolstoy. The first of his religious works, My Confession, tells the story of this conversion, and it is a wonderful document—as intimate and candid as the confessions of Rousseau, but expressing a nature more profoundly moral, of deepest interest to us, moreover, as rendering a mood of doubt and despair so frequent in the nineteenth century that most of the century's leading minds have experienced something like it at one period or another. It shows all the agony of a great soul, struggling in the deepest abysses of doubt, astray in a universe where all seems chaotic, dark, and meaningless, with no firm footing anywhere. Tolstoy traces his own scepticism to the general scepticism of his age; with his usual incisive completeness he depicts for us, in one single paragraph, the whole mentality of such an epoch. "I remember once in my twelfth year, a boy, now long since dead, Vladimir M——, a pupil in the gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us and brought us the news of the last discovery in the gymnasium—namely, that there was no God, and that all we were taught on the subject was a mere invention (this was in the year 1838). "I remember well how interested my elder brothers were in this news; I was admitted to their deliberations, and we all eagerly accepted the theory as something particularly attractive and possibly quite true. I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitri, {66} then at the university, with the impulsiveness natural to his character, gave himself up to a passionate faith, began to attend the Church services regularly, to fast, and to lead a pure and moral life, we all of us, and some older than ourselves, never ceased to hold him up to ridicule, and for some incomprehensible reason, gave him the nickname of Noah." Tolstoy goes on to analyse the situation as he saw it in his youth—that the men of his class did not obey in the least the precepts of the religion which they professed, but, on the contrary, lived in direct opposition to them; their faith had become purely conventional, having no influence upon their lives. He declares: "The open profession of the Orthodox doctrines is mostly found among persons of dull intellects, of stern character, who think much of their own importance. Intelligence, honesty, frankness, a good heart, and moral conduct are oftener met with among those who are disbelievers." From the age of fifteen years onwards Tolstoy read many philosophical works; being in consequence far more self-conscious than his comrades, he was well aware of the disappearance of his faith; he ceased to pray, to attend the services of the Church, or to fast. He still possessed ideals of moral excellence, and honestly desired to make himself a good and virtuous man, but his passions were very strong, and he found himself almost alone in his search for virtue. "Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life I was met with contempt and derisive laughter, but directly I gave way to the lowest of my passions I was praised and encouraged." Then follow the most bitter self-reproaches, describing how he yielded to all the sins and vices of his class. It is curious and noticeable that Tolstoy does not perceive, in his first literary ambitions, any of the promptings of a higher ideal, but analyses his literary pretensions with contemptuous irony. He declares that he began to write out of vanity, love of gain, and pride. Here, again, he is surely too severe, for the most cursory reader of Tolstoy cannot but perceive that there {67} is always in his work something true and genuine: sympathy with the lives of others, the pure and healthy joy of the artist. Tolstoy continues with the same ruthless severity; it is doubtful if there ever has been a literary man more contemptuous in tone to himself and his fellows. "The view of life taken by these, my fellow-writers, was that life is a development, and the principal part in that development is played by ourselves—the thinkers; the chief influence is again due to ourselves—the poets. Our vocation is to teach mankind. In order to avoid answering the very natural question, 'What do I know, and what can I teach?' the theory in question is made to contain the formula that such is not required to be known, but that the thinker and the poet teach unconsciously." For a time, he says, he gladly believed this theory, because he earned a great deal of money and praise and everything else he desired. He firmly believed in the theory of progress, and that he himself, though unconsciously, helped it. After some two years, however, he became discontented, and it was his fellow-writers who disenchanted him; they were more dissolute even than his former military associates, and full of vanity. His connection with them, he declares, only added another vice to his character—that of morbid and altogether unreasonable pride. "Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life—what is right and what is wrong—we had no answer, we all went on talking together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one another on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and again turning upon each other in wrath; in short we reproduced the scenes in a madhouse." There is surely something of unfairness here, and we may suspect that it was the proud and defiant spirit of Tolstoy which made him resent the contradictions of his literary friends. But, as we have pointed {68} out, it was always Tolstoy's fault to underrate the intellectual powers of others, and also, to the end of his life, he underrated the value of intelligence in human affairs. It was this pride which prevented him from nobly loving, as he might have done, men of the stamp of Turgénief, and, great artist as he was, it prevented him from that entire, humble absorption in his work which has saved the soul of many a lesser man. Tolstoy had to save his soul by a longer and a darker road. On his tour abroad he still sought for satisfying moral ideas, and still found them, as he believed, in the conception of progress; he thought, at the time, that it had a real meaning. "In reality I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a boat by the waves and the wind, who to the one important question for him, 'Where are we to steer?' should answer, saying 'We are being carried away somewhere.'" Tolstoy refers to the execution in Paris as shaking his belief in progress, and giving him a real moral shock. The death of his brother marked another crisis in his mentality. The terrible sense of loss, the cruel fear of death in his brother, were things that made the doctrine of "progress" seem idle and tiresome. Tolstoy next reviews his educational activity, and judges that too most harshly; he did not, he says, really know what to teach the children, so he evaded the difficulty by trying to make them teach themselves, with results which he describes as whimsical. Shortly after this he married, and was so engrossed by his happy family life that he wholly ceased to inquire into the real meaning of life. He continued to write. "In my writing I taught what for me was the only truth—that the object of life should be our own happiness and that of our family." After some ten years, however, he became hopelessly puzzled by the questions "Why?" and "What after?" and his torment increased until, by degrees, he could think of nothing else. His life had come, as it were, to {69} a sudden stop. He could carry on the mechanical business of existence, he could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, but he felt as if there were no real use in life, as if its meaning and its savour were gone. What was still stranger and more terrifying was that he could see nothing left even to desire. "Had a fairy appeared and offered me all I desired I should not have known what to say.... The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning for me." His life seemed to him to be a foolish and wicked joke played upon him by he knew not whom, and he refrained from carrying a gun because he was so continually tempted to suicide. His mind dwelt on the inevitable miseries of human life; illness and death would most certainly come both to himself and to those who loved him best, and there would remain nothing of them but stench and worms. He found his favourite reading at this time in Schopenhauer and Ecclesiastes. Solomon, the wisest man who had ever lived, declared that all was vanity, and he exactly agreed with him. There was no escape; the theory of "progress" did not apply at all to the individual life; philosophy was uncertain; science was marvellous in its methods and its intellectual power, but it led to no real result. His conclusion was the conclusion of Schopenhauer and Solomon—that life was an evil poisoned through and through by the thought of death. He began to study other men and their methods of escape. He saw that the young escaped this evil very largely through ignorance, by simply not perceiving the absurdity of Life, but it was impossible for him to take this means, as people cannot unknow what they know. The second method was the Epicurean one; this was the favourite method with men of his class, because they really had plenty of means for enjoyment, and sheer selfishness prevented them from seeing or caring that the vast majority of men had no such resource. For this Tolstoy was too clear-sighted. The third means of escape was suicide, which was possible only to the strong and resolute. "The number of those in my own class who thus act continually increases, and those who do this are generally in the prime of life, with their physical strength matured and unweakened." He considered this means of escape the worthiest, but had not the courage to make use of it. The one thing that gave him pause was to see that the mass of men did not agree with this view and never had agreed with it; they continued to live as if life were a good thing and one that had meaning. He turned his attention once more to the labouring classes whom he had always loved, and perceived that they held the true solution. He could not class them among those who failed to understand it, for they put it before themselves with quite extraordinary clearness; still less were they among the Epicureans, for their lives were rough, hard, and laborious; neither did they seek the solution in self-murder, for they looked upon that as the greatest of evils. Where, then, lay their secret? He answered: "In their religion." The peasantry were not like the upper classes; their religion was not for them a convention, but they really lived according to its teachings. "Their whole lives were passed in heavy labour and unrepining content ... they accepted illness and sorrow in the quiet and firm conviction that all was for the best ... thousands and millions had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die." Tolstoy sought, passionately and despairingly, to gain this faith; he conformed to all the ceremonial requirements of the Greek Church, prayed morning and evening, fasted and prepared for the Communion; he took a pleasure in sacrificing his bodily comfort by kneeling, by rising to attend early service; he took a pleasure also in mortifying his intellectual pride by forcing himself to believe doctrines which he had formerly condemned. At the same time his invincible intellectual honesty {71} remained with him and tortured him. Thus when he took the Communion, he tried hard to persuade himself that it meant only a cleansing from sin and a complete acceptance of Christ's teaching. "But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I was about to swallow was the real body and blood, I felt a sharp pain at the heart; it was no unconsidered word, it was the hard demand of one who could never have known what faith was ... knowing what awaited me I could never go again." The same invincible intellectual honesty made Tolstoy search into the whole teaching of the Church; he saw that its faith was irrational and merely a tradition, not the staff of life. He found the Orthodox Church more and more opposed to what he believed: it conducted persecutions, sanctioned massacres, and blessed war. He was obliged to break with it. Once more and with humility he turned to the Gospels themselves; he drew from them what seemed to him the real essence of the Christian religion; from them and from the life of the common man—the Russian muzhik—he made up his own creed and lived as has been described. Tolstoy followed My Confession with several other works. The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated appeared in 1881-2. In this work Tolstoy extracts what he considers essential in the Gospel narratives. My Religion appeared in 1884. It explains still further and in more detail Tolstoy's religious views. He bases his theories almost entirely on the "Sermon on the Mount"; he accepts quite literally the command against violence, which is henceforth the basis of his creed. "The passage which for me was the key to the whole was verses 38 and 39 of the fifth chapter of Matthew: 'It hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil.' I suddenly for the first time understood the last verse in its direct and simple meaning. I understood that Christ meant precisely what he said. {72} "These words, 'Do not resist evil,' understood in their direct sense, were for me indeed the key that opened everything to me, and I marvelled how I could have so perverted the clear, definite words." It is in this spirit that Tolstoy objects so profoundly to the whole organisation of modern society, since it is all based upon force. "Everything which surrounded me, my family's peace and their safety and my own, my property, everything was based on the law which Christ rejected, on the law, 'A tooth for a tooth.'" From this precept of non-resistance Tolstoy deduces the wickedness of all war, however waged and for whatever object. From the precept, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," he similarly deduces the wickedness and evil of all law-courts. From the precept, "Swear not at all," he deduces the evil of all oaths, and has no difficulty in showing that nearly all the things he thinks contrary to the law of Christ, "murder in wars, incarcerations, capital punishments, tortures of men," are committed only by the device of the oath, which substitutes a collective responsibility for an individual one, and so takes away from each man the sense he would otherwise have of committing an individual crime. There is in this book a very severe criticism of the Greek Church, which Tolstoy accuses of bolstering up and supporting all the worst evils of the time. The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1893, is another long work which contrasts life on Christian principles with life as it is actually lived according to the maxims of the Church and State. There is an ironic and bitter analysis of the absurdities of Greek Orthodoxy, and an equally ironic and bitter analysis of the absurd conditions of modern Europe, which keep whole nations armed under the pretence that their ever-increasing military burdens are a way to peace. With this group of works also we should class What is Art? 1899. It is the book which carries Tolstoy's asceticism to its climax. There are many people who, though they {73} sympathise with Tolstoy's ideals, decline to take seriously on the ground that he is a fanatic, and, if the matter be inquired into, it will usually be found that they base the accusation mainly upon his treatment of science and art. Tolstoy has never a good word for science; he insists upon considering it as if it were concerned solely with abstract questions, and had no practical bearing upon the lives of men. The modern reader is overwhelmed with surprise by such an unwarranted assumption. Even if it were true that science is only valuable on its utilitarian side, we are still driven to confess that that utilitarian value is enormous; it has irrigated deserts, fertilised soils, improved animals, banished many diseases; it has made, even in the one occupation Tolstoy really reverences—agriculture—man's labour tenfold or a hundredfold more productive than it ever was before. If science has not yet effected the transformation of human life that it might have done, that is surely because our imperfect organisation of society prevents us from reaping the full value of its great and beneficent achievement. And the case is even more astonishing when we turn to art. Tolstoy, himself one of the world's greatest writers, condemns almost all great art, from the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, and almost all modern art—including, characteristically enough, himself. We must remember this truth, that Tolstoy was born an aristocrat, and that the members of aristocracies are nearly always cold to intellectual attainments; they belong to a privileged class which despises work and repudiates intellect. Tolstoy learnt, with all the energy of his strong soul, to exalt and reverence the once-despised labour of the common man, but he never learnt to esteem justly the intellect; he resembles Lord Byron, who, although a great poet, only condescended to the trade of letters, and regarded it always with a certain scorn. Tolstoy is never, with his whole heart, a man of letters, and he is still less a scholar, for though at times he reads {74} voraciously, it is almost wholly without system; there are the strangest gaps in his knowledge, and he is singularly impervious to all ideas except those with which he happens to be at the moment in tune. However, What is Art? contains some admirable things. Tolstoy defines art as a human activity, the aim of which is to communicate to some other person the feelings which the artist has himself experienced. Art is effective in proportion as the artist's feeling is sincere and profound, and the expression of it clear; art is good or bad in accordance with the nature of the feeling transmitted; if the feeling is good it is good art, if the feeling is bad it is bad or debased art. This is a fine definition, and well worth studying. From Aristotle downwards great critics have agreed that one aim of art is certainly "infection," and that the greater the art the more powerful the "infection" is likely to be. Tolstoy asserts again that art is one of the great unifying forces of mankind, that it binds together different nations and different generations of men, and that that art is the greatest which has the most universal appeal. Here again there is little with which to quarrel. Tolstoy's definition of great art is almost St. Beuve's definition of a classic. The amazement lies in the extraordinary manner in which Tolstoy has applied his own most excellent ideas. He loves Homer, and declares that his poems are truly national art, but he declines to admire the Greek tragedians. Why? They are surely as national as Homer himself. Again, he declares that the truly great artist ought always to express the best religious and ethical ideas of his time. Quite probably! Yet he denies this greatness to Dante, but if there ever was a poet who embodied the noblest religious thought of his epoch it was surely Dante! And Tolstoy condemns Goethe, who embodied the new religious conceptions arising upon the ruins of the materialistic eighteenth century. The fact of the matter is that Tolstoy does not really know the content of the world's great classics, and those {75} whom he happens to praise—Homer and Molière—he appreciates, not because they are finer moralists than the rest (they are not), but because some accident has directed towards them his attention. It is curious to compare this essay with Shelley's Defence of Poetry; the underlying ideas in both treatises are identical; Shelley also says that the main aim of art is a unifying aim, and that the artist ought always, as a moral duty, to communicate the best impression that he knows. But what a world of difference in the catholic appreciation of Shelley! Shelley, also a great lover of mankind, never made the mistake of underrating the human intellect. What is Art? had a sequel, to the English mind still more extraordinary, in two essays on Shakespeare published separately. In them Tolstoy condemns all Shakespeare, but singles out King Lear especially, mainly on the ground that the plot is absurd and the whole division of the kingdom fantastic. It is strange Tolstoy cannot see that King Lear is in essence, the thing he himself most admires—a moving and beautiful folk-tale; the very absurdity of the plot Shakespeare took over directly from the old story, and probably left untouched because it was so deeply embedded in his hearers' hearts. Of course, it is not difficult to see why Tolstoy so dislikes Shakespeare—mainly because he throws such a glamour over aristocracy, and makes his aristocrats so noble in their sorrows, so radiant, generous, and joyful in their prosperity. Tolstoy is always insisting that aristocrats are not really like that—that they are selfish, stupid, and bored to death; but Shakespeare in glorifying aristocracy is only acting as the people, even in folk-tale and fairy-tale, have always done; they prove by that, it is true, nothing but their own naïve and inexhaustible goodness of heart. The truth is that, in belabouring Shakespeare, Tolstoy is doing the thing that would of all others, had he known its true import, have shocked him most: he is Tolstoy—the aristocrat—cuffing Shakespeare—the peasant's son—for being so like a peasant. {76} Tolstoy has often been blamed for making his uneducated Russian peasants the supreme arbiters of taste, but they would not agree with him about Shakespeare. A friend of mine, a Russian lady, told me she once saw King Lear played in a barn, with the roughest of accessories, before a peasant audience, and, at the conclusion of the drama, there was not a dry eye among the audience. Still Tolstoy's eccentricities need not blind us to those ideas which really are stimulating and valuable. There is his warning against commercialised art—art is not a commercial product, and can never be "ordered" and "paid for" in the same way; there is the warning that schools of art can teach nothing but technique, and that, by an over-elaborate technique, talent itself is often crushed and spoiled; there is the emphatic statement that all great art should be catholic, and that the art which can appeal only to a limited coterie is, almost of necessity, poor art; there is the statement that all art should be as clear as the artist himself can make it, and that "contortions, obscurities, and difficulties" are mostly due to the vain attempt to hide shallowness; and finally, and most important of all, there is the statement that really great art can only be produced by those to whom life is a lovely, a joyous, and a noble thing. {77} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.