CHAPTER XXXVII
WALKS AND TALES WITH TOLSTOI—MARCH, 1894
Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White | ||
37.
CHAPTER XXXVII
WALKS AND TALES WITH TOLSTOI—MARCH, 1894
REVISITING Moscow after an absence of thirty-five years, the most surprising thing to me was that there had been so little change. With the exception of the new gallery of Russian art, and the bazaar opposite the sacred gate of the Kremlin, things seemed as I had left them just after the accession of Alexander II. There were the same unkempt streets; the same peasantry clad in sheepskins; the same troops of beggars, sturdy and dirty; the same squalid crowds crossing themselves before the images at the street corners; the same throngs of worshipers knocking their heads against the pavements of churches; and above all loomed, now as then, the tower of Ivan and the domes of St. Basil, gloomy, gaudy, and barbaric. Only one change had taken place which interested me: for the first time in the history of Russia, a man of world-wide fame in literature and thought was abiding there—Count Leo Tolstoi.
On the evening of my arrival I went with my secretary to his weekly reception. As we entered his house on the outskirts of the city, two servants in evening dress came forward, removed our fur coats, and opened the doors into the reception-room of the master. Then came a surprise. His living-room seemed the cabin of a Russian peasant. It was wainscoted almost rudely and furnished very simply; and there approached us a tall, gaunt Russian, unmistakably born to command, yet clad as a peasant, his hair thrown back over his ears on either side,
Nothing could be more kindly than his greeting. While his dress was that of a peasant, his bearing was the very opposite; for, instead of the depressed, demure, hangdog expression of the average muzhik, his manner, though cordial, was dignified and impressive. Having given us a hearty welcome, he made us acquainted with various other guests. It was a singular assemblage. There were foreigners in evening dress, Moscow professors in any dress they liked, and a certain number of youth, evidently disciples, who, though clearly not of the peasant class, wore the peasant costume. I observed these with interest but certainly as long as they were under the spell of the master they communicated nothing worth preserving; they seemed to show "the contortions of the sibyl without the inspiration.''
The professors were much more engaging. The University of Moscow has in its teaching body several strong men, and some of these were present. One of them, whose department was philosophy, especially interested and encouraged me by assurances that the movement of Russian philosophy is "back to Kant.'' In the strange welter of whims and dreams which one finds in Russia, this was to me an unexpected evidence of healthful thought.
Naturally, I soon asked to be presented to the lady of the house, and the count escorted us through a series of rooms to a salon furnished much like any handsome apartment in Paris or St. Petersburg, where the countess, with other ladies, all in full evening dress, received us cordially. This sudden transition from the peasant cabin of the master to these sumptuous rooms of the mistress was startling; it seemed like scene-shifting at a theater.
After some friendly talk, all returned to the rooms of the master of the house, where tea was served at a long table from the bubbling brazen urn—the samovar; and though there were some twenty or thirty guests, nothing
My first question was upon the condition of the people. Our American legation had corresponded with Count Tolstoi and his family as to distributing a portion of the famine fund sent from the United States, hence this subject naturally arose at the outset. He said that the condition of the peasants was still very bad; that they had very generally eaten their draught-animals, burned portions of their buildings to keep life in their bodies, and reduced themselves to hopeless want. On my suggesting that the new commercial treaty with Germany might help matters, he thought that it would have but little effect, since only a small portion of the total product of Russian agriculture is consumed abroad. This led him to speak of some Americans and Englishmen who had visited the famine-stricken districts, and, while he referred kindly to them all, he seemed especially attracted by the Quaker John Bellows of Gloucester, England, the author of the wonderful little French dictionary. This led him to say that he sympathized with the Quakers in everything save their belief in property; that in this they were utterly illogical; that property presupposes force to protect it. I remarked that most American Quakers knew nothing of such force; that none of them had ever seen an American soldier, save during our Civil War, and that probably not one in hundreds of them had ever seen a soldier at all. He answered, "But you forget the policeman.'' He evidently put policemen and soldiers in the same category—as using force to protect property, and therefore to be alike abhorred.
I found that to his disbelief in any right of ownership literary property formed no exception. He told me that, in his view, he had no right to receive money for the permission to print a book. To this I naturally answered that by carrying out this doctrine he would simply lavish large sums upon publishers in every country of Europe and America, many of them rich and some of them
He then went on to express an interest in the Shakers, and especially in Frederick Evans. He had evidently formed an idea of them very unlike the reality; in fact, the Shaker his imagination had developed was as different from a Lebanon Shaker as an eagle from a duck, and his notion of their influence on American society was comical.
He spoke at some length regarding religion in Russia, evidently believing that its present dominant form is soon to pass away. I asked him how then he could account for the fact that while in other countries women are greatly in the majority at church services, in every Russian church the majority are men; and that during the thirty-five years since my last visit to Moscow this tendency had apparently increased. He answered, "All this is on the surface; there is much deeper thought below, and the great want of Russia is liberty to utter it.'' He then gave some examples to show this, among them the case of a gentleman and lady in St. Petersburg, whose children had been taken from them and given to Princess —, their grandmother, because the latter is of the Orthodox Church and the former are not. I answered that I had seen the children; that their grandmother had told me that their mother was a screaming atheist with nihilistic tendencies, who had left her husband and was bringing up the children in
Tolstoi also referred to the difficulties which translators had found in securing publishers for his most recent book—"The Kingdom of God.'' On my assuring him that American publishers of high standing would certainly be glad to take it, he said that he had supposed the ideas in it so contrary to opinions dominant in America as to prevent its publication there.
Returning to the subject of religion in Russia, he referred to some curious incongruities; as, for example, the portrait of Socrates forming part of a religious picture in the Annunciation Church at the Kremlin. He said that evidently some monk, who had dipped into Plato, had thus placed Socrates among the precursors of Christ. I cited the reason assigned by Melanchthon for Christ's descent into hell—namely, the desire of the Redeemer to make himself known to Socrates, Plato, and the best of the ancient philosophers; and I compared this with Luther's idea, so characteristic of him, that Christ descended into hell in order to have a hand-to-hand grapple and wrestle with Satan. This led Tolstoi to give me a Russian legend of the descent into hell, which was that, when
In regard to the Jews, he said that he sympathized with them, but that the statements regarding the persecution of them were somewhat exaggerated. Kennan's statements regarding the treatment of prisoners in Siberia he thought overdrawn at times, but substantially true. He expressed his surprise that certain leading men in the empire, whom he named, could believe that persecution and the forcible repression of thought would have any permanent effect at the end of the nineteenth century.
He then dwelt upon sundry evil conditions in Russia, on which my comment was that every country, of course, had its own grievous shortcomings; and I cited, as to America, the proverb: "No one knows so well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it.'' At this he asked me about lynch law in the United States, and expressed his horror of it. I showed him that it was the inevitable result of a wretched laxity and sham humanity in the administration of our criminal law, which had led great bodies of people, more especially in the Southern and extreme Western parts of the country, to revert to natural justice and take the law into their own hands; and I cited Goldwin Smith's profound remark that "some American lynchings are proofs not so much of lawlessness as of a respect for law.''
He asked me where, besides this, the shoe pinched in the United States. I told him that it pinched in various places, but that perhaps the worst pinch arises from the premature admission to full political rights of men who have been so benumbed and stunted intellectually and morally in other countries that their exercise of political rights in America is frequently an injury, not only to others, but to themselves. In proof of this I cited the case of the crowds whom I had seen some years before huddled together in New York tenement-houses, preyed upon
We then passed to the subject of the trans-Siberian Railway. In this he seemed interested, but in a vague way which added nothing to my knowledge.
Asking me regarding my former visit to Moscow, and learning that it was during the Crimean War, he said, "At that time I was in Sebastopol, and continued there as a soldier during the siege.''
As to his relations with the imperial government at present, he said that he had been recently elected to a learned society in Moscow, but that the St. Petersburg government had interfered to stop the election; and he added that every morning, when he awoke, he wondered that he was not on his way to Siberia.
On my leaving him, both he and the countess invited me to meet them next day at the Tretiakof Museum of Russian Pictures; and accordingly, on the following afternoon, I met them at that greatest of all galleries devoted purely to Russian art. They were accompanied by several friends, among them a little knot of disciples—young men clad in simple peasant costume like that worn by the master. It was evident that he was an acknowledged lion at the old Russian capital, for as he led me about to see the pictures which he liked best, he was followed and stared at by many.
Pointing out to me some modern religious pictures in Byzantine style painted for the Cathedral of Kieff, he said, "They represent an effort as futile as trying to persuade chickens to reënter the egg-shells from which they have escaped.'' He next showed me two religious pictures; the
The other picture represented the Crucifixion. It was painted in the most realistic manner possible; nothing was idealized; it was even more vividly realistic than Gebhardt's picture of the Lord's Supper, at Berlin; so that it at first repelled me, though it afterward exercised a certain fascination. That Tolstoi was deeply interested was clear. He stood for a time in silence, as if musing upon all that the sacrifice on Calvary had brought to the world. Other representations of similar scenes, in the conventional style of the older masters, he had passed without a glance; but this spectacle of the young Galilean peasant, with unattractive features, sordid garb, poverty-stricken companions, and repulsive surroundings, tortured to death for preaching the "kingdom of God'' to the poor and down-trodden, seemed to hold him fast, and as he pointed out various features in the picture it became even more clear to me that sympathy with the peasant class, and a yearning to enter into their cares and sorrows, form the real groundwork of his life.
He then took me to a small picture of Jesus and his disciples leaving the upper room at Jerusalem after the Last Supper. This, too, was painted in the most realistic manner. The disciples, simple-minded fishermen, rude in features and dress, were plodding homeward, while Christ himself gazed at the stars and drew the attention of his nearest companions to some of the brightest. Tolstoi expressed especial admiration for this picture, saying that at times it affected him like beautiful music,—like music
Among the pictures, not to be classed as religious, before which he thus lingered were those representing the arrest of a nihilist and the return of an exile from Siberia. Both were well painted, and both revealed the same characteristic—sympathy with the poor, even with criminals.
Some of the more famous historical pictures in the collection he thought exaggerated; especially those representing the fury of the Grand Duchess Sophia in her monastery prison, and the remorse of Ivan the Terrible after murdering his son.
To my surprise, he agreed with me, and even went beyond me, in rating landscape infinitely below religious and historical painting, saying that he cared for landscape-painting only as accessory to pictures revealing human life.
Among genre pictures, we halted before one representing a peasant family grouped about the mother, who, with a sacred picture laid upon her breast, after the Russian manner, was dying of famine. This also seemed deeply to impress him.
We stopped next before a picture of a lady of high birth brought before the authorities in order to be sent, evidently against her will, to a convent. I cited the similar story from Manzoni's "Promessi Sposi''; but, to my surprise, he seemed to know little of that most fascinating of historical romances. This led to a discussion in which he said he had once liked Walter Scott, but had not read anything of his for many years; and he seemed interested in my statement that although always an especial admirer of Scott, I had found it almost impossible to induce the younger generation to read him.
Stopping before a picture of Peter the Great's fatal
We next halted before a picture representing the horrible execution of the Strelitzes. I said that "such pictures prove that the world does, after all, progress slowly, in spite of what pessimists say, and that in order to refute pessimists one has only to refer to the improvements in criminal law.'' To this he agreed cordially, and declared the abolition of torture in procedure and penalty to be one great gain, at any rate.
We spoke of the present condition of things in Europe, and I told him that at St. Petersburg the opinion very general among the more thoughtful members of the diplomatic corps was that war was not imminent; that the Czar, having himself seen the cruelties of war during the late struggle in the Balkans, had acquired an invincible repugnance to it. He acquiesced in this, but said that it seemed monstrous to him that the peace of the empire and of Europe should depend upon so slender a thread as the will of any one man.
Our next walk was taken across the river Moskwa, on the ice, to and through the Kremlin, and as we walked the conversation fell upon literature. As to French literature, he thought Maupassant the man of greatest talent, by far, in recent days, but that he was depraved and centered all his fiction in women. For Balzac, Tolstoi evidently preserved admiration, but he cared little, apparently, for Daudet, Zola, and their compeers.
As to American literature, he said that Tourgueneff had once told him that there was nothing in it worth reading; nothing new or original; that it was simply a copy of English literature. To this I replied that such criticism seemed to me very shallow; that American literature was, of course, largely a growth out of the parent stock of English
The next day he came over to my hotel and we went out for a stroll. As we passed along the streets I noticed especially what I had remarked during our previous walks, that Tolstoi had a large quantity of small Russian coins in his pockets; that this was evidently known to the swarms of beggars who infest the Kremlin and the public places generally; and that he always gave to them.
On my speaking of this, he said he thought that any one, when asked for money, ought to give it. Arguing against this doctrine, I said that in the United States there are virtually no beggars, and I might have gone on to discuss the subject from the politico-economical point of view, showing how such indiscriminate almsgiving in perpetual driblets is sure to create the absurd and immoral system which one sees throughout Russia,—hordes of men and women who are able to take care of themselves, and who ought to be far above beggary, cringing and whining to the passers-by for alms; but I had come to know the man well enough to feel sure that a politico-economical argument would slide off him like water from a duck's back, so I attempted to take him upon another side, and said: "In the United States there are virtually no beggars, though my countrymen are, I really believe, among the most charitable in the world.'' To this last statement he assented, referring in a general way to our shipments of provisions to aid the famine-stricken in Russia.
Incidentally I expressed wonder that he had not traveled more. He then spoke with some disapprobation of travel. He had lived abroad for a time, he said, and in St. Petersburg a few years, but the rest of his life had been spent mainly in Moscow and the interior of Russia. The more we talked together, the more it became clear that this last statement explained some of his main defects. Of all distinguished men that I have ever met, Tolstoi seems to me most in need of that enlargement of view and healthful modification of opinion which come from meeting men and comparing views with them in different lands and under different conditions. This need is all the greater because in Russia there is no opportunity to discuss really important questions. Among the whole one hundred and twenty millions of people there is no public body in which the discussion of large public questions is allowed; the press affords no real opportunity for discussion; indeed, it is more than doubtful whether such discussion would be allowed to any effective extent even in private correspondence or at one's own fireside.
I remember well that during my former stay in St. Petersburg, people who could talk English at their tables generally did so in order that they might not betray themselves
Still worse, no one, unless a member of the diplomatic corps or specially privileged, is allowed to read such books or newspapers as he chooses, so that even this access to the thoughts of others is denied to the very men who most need it.
Like so many other men of genius in Russia, then,—and Russia is fertile in such,—Tolstoi has had little opportunity to take part in any real discussion of leading topics; and the result is that his opinions have been developed without modification by any rational interchange of thought with other men. Under such circumstances any man, no matter how noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and pets them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of his brain. He can at last see neither spot nor blemish in them, and comes virtually to believe himself infallible. This characteristic I found in several other Russians of marked ability. Each had developed his theories for himself until he had become infatuated with them, and despised everything differing from them.
This is a main cause why sundry ghastly creeds, doctrines, and sects—religious, social, political, and philosophic—have been developed in Russia. One of these religious creeds favors the murder of new-born children in order to save their souls; another enjoins ghastly bodily mutilations for a similar purpose; others still would plunge the world in flames and blood for the difference of a phrase in a creed, or a vowel in a name, or a finger more or less in making the sign of the cross, or for this garment in a ritual, or that gesture in a ceremony.
In social creeds they have developed nihilism, which virtually assumes the right of an individual to sit in judgment upon the whole human race and condemn to death every other human being who may differ in opinion or position from this self-constituted judge.
In political creeds they have conceived the monarch as
In various branches of philosophy they have developed doctrines which involve the rejection of the best to which man has attained in science, literature, and art, and a return to barbarism.
In the theory of life and duty they have devised a pessimistic process under which the human race would cease to exist.
Every one of these theories is the outcome of some original mind of more or less strength, discouraged, disheartened, and overwhelmed by the sorrows of Russian life; developing its ideas logically and without any possibility of adequate discussion with other men. This alone explains a fact which struck me forcibly—the fact that all Tolstoi's love of humanity, real though it certainly is, seems accompanied by a depreciation of the ideas, statements, and proposals of almost every other human being, and by virtual intolerance of all thought which seems in the slightest degree different from his own.
Arriving in the Kremlin, he took me to the Church of the Annunciation to see the portrait of Socrates in the religious picture of which he had spoken; but we were too late to enter, and so went to the Palace of the Synod, where we looked at the picture of the Trinity, which, by a device frequently used in street signs, represents, when looked at from one side, the suffering Christ, from the other the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, and from the front the Almighty as an old man with a white beard. What Tolstoi thought of the doctrine thus illustrated came out in a subsequent conversation.
The next day he came again to my rooms and at once began speaking upon religion. He said that every man is religious and has in him a religion of his own; that religion results from the conception which a man forms of his relations to his fellow-men, and to the principle which
This led to questions in regard to American women generally, and he wished to know something of their condition and prospects. I explained some features of woman's condition among us, showing its evolution, first through the betterment of her legal status, and next through provision for her advanced education; but told him that so far as political rights are concerned, there had
At this, he took up his parable and said that women ought to have all other rights except political; that they are unfit to discharge political duties; that, indeed, one of the great difficulties of the world at present lies in their possession of far more consideration and control than they ought to have. "Go into the streets and bazaars,'' he said, "and you will see the vast majority of shops devoted to their necessities. In France everything centers in women, and women have complete control of life: all contemporary French literature shows this. Woman is not man's equal in the highest qualities; she is not so self-sacrificing as man. Men will, at times, sacrifice their families for an idea; women will not.'' On my demurring to this latter statement, he asked me if I ever knew a woman who loved other people's children as much as her own. I gladly answered in the negative, but cited Florence Nightingale, Sister Dora, and others, expressing my surprise at his assertion that women are incapable of making as complete sacrifices for any good cause as men. I pointed to the persecutions in the early church, when women showed themselves superior to men in suffering torture, degradation, and death in behalf of the new religion, and added similar instances from the history of witchcraft. To this he answered that in spite of all such history, women will not make sacrifices of their own interest for a good cause which does not strikingly appeal to their feelings, while men will do so; that he had known but two or three really self-sacrificing women in his life; and that these were unmarried. On my saying that observation had led me to a very different conclusion, his indictment took another form. He insisted that woman hangs upon the past; that public opinion progresses, but that women are prone to act on the opinion
On our next walk, he took me to the funeral of one of his friends. He said that to look upon the dead should rather give pleasure than pain; that memento mori is a wise maxim, and looking upon the faces of the dead a good way of putting it in practice. I asked him if he had formed a theory as to a future life, and he said in substance that he had not; but that, as we came at birth from beyond the forms of space and time, so at death we returned whence we came. I said, "You use the word `forms' in the Kantian sense?'' "Yes,'' he said, "space and time have no reality.''
We arrived just too late at the house of mourning. The dead man had been taken away; but many of those who had come to do him honor still lingered, and were evidently enjoying the "funeral baked meats.'' There were clear signs of a carousal. The friends who came out to meet us had, most of them, flushed faces, and one young man in military uniform, coming down the stairs, staggered and seemed likely to break his neck.
Tolstoi refused to go in, and, as we turned away, expressed
On our way through the street, we passed a shrine at which a mob of peasants were adoring a sacred picture. He dwelt on the fetishism involved in this, and said that Jesus Christ would be infinitely surprised and pained were he to return to earth and see what men were worshiping in his name. He added a story of a converted pagan who, being asked how many gods he worshiped, said: "One, and I ate him this morning.'' At this I cited Browning's lines put into the mouth of the bishop who wished, from his tomb,
And see God made and eaten all day long.''
I reminded him of his definition of religion given me on one of our previous walks, and he repeated it, declaring religion to be the feeling which man has regarding his relation to the universe, including his fellow-men, and to the power which governs all.
The afternoon was closed with a visit to a Raskolnik, or Old Believer, and of all our experiences this turned out to be the most curious. The Raskolniks, or Old Believers, compose that wide-spread sect which broke off from the main body of the Russian Church when the patriarch of Moscow, Nikon, in the seventeenth century attempted to remove various textual errors from the Bible and ceremonial books. These books had been copied and recopied during centuries until their condition had become monstrous. Through a mistake of some careless transcriber, even the name of Jesus had been travestied and had come to be spelled with two e's; the crudest absurdities
This particular Raskolnik, or Old Believer, to whom Tolstoi took me, was a Muscovite merchant of great wealth, living in a superb villa on the outskirts of the city, with a large park about it; the apartments, for size and beauty of decoration, fit for a royal palace—the ceilings
The old man's voice, so gentle at first, had steadily risen during this catechism of his, in which he propounded the questions and recited the answers, until this last utterance came with an outcry of horror. The beginning of this catechism was given much after the manner of a boy reciting mechanically the pons asinorum, but the end was like the testimony of an ancient prophet against the sins which doomed Israel.
This last burst was evidently too much for Tolstoi. He said not a word in reply, but seemed wrapped in overpowering thought, and anxious to break away. We walked out with the old Raskolnik, and at the door I thanked him for his kindness; but even there, and all the way down the long walk through the park, Tolstoi remained silent. As we came into the road he suddenly turned to me and said almost fiercely, "That man is a hypocrite; he can't believe that; he is a shrewd, long-headed man; how can he believe such trash? Impossible!'' At this I reminded him of Theodore Parker's distinction between men who believe and men who "believe that they believe,'' and said that possibly our Raskolnik was one of the latter. This changed the subject. He said that he had read Parker's biography, and liked it all save one thing, which was that he gave a pistol to a fugitive slave and advised him to defend himself. This Tolstoi condemned on the ground that we are not to resist evil. I told him of the advice I had given to Dobroluboff, a very winning Russian student at Cornell University, when he was returning to Russia to practise his profession as an engineer. That advice was that he should bear in mind Buckle's idea as to the agency of railways and telegraphs in extending better civilization, and devote himself to his profession of engineering, with the certainty that its ultimate result would be to aid in the enlightenment of the empire; but never, on any account, to conspire against the government; telling him that he might be sure that he could do far
He spoke of young professors in the universities, of their difficulties, and of the risk to their positions if they spoke out at all. I asked him if there was any liberality or breadth of thought in the Russo-Greek Church. He answered that occasionally a priest had tried to unite broader thought with orthodox dogma, but that every such attempt had proved futile.
From Parker we passed to Lowell, and I again tried to find if he really knew anything of Lowell's writings. He evidently knew very little, and asked me what Lowell had written. He then said that he had no liking for verse, and he acquiesced in Carlyle's saying that nobody had ever said anything in verse which could not have been better said in prose.
A day or two later, on another of our walks, I asked him how and when, in his opinion, a decided advance in Russian liberty and civilization would be made. He answered that he thought it would come soon, and with great power. On my expressing the opinion that such progress would be the result of a long evolutionary process, with a series of actions and reactions, as heretofore in Russian history, he dissented, and said that the change for the better would come soon, suddenly, and with great force.
As we passed along the streets he was, as during our previous walks, approached by many beggars, to each of
I then asked him about his manual labor. He said that his habit was to rise early and read or write until noon, then to take his luncheon and a short sleep, and after that to work in his garden or fields. He thought this good for him on every account, and herein we fully agreed.
On our return through the Kremlin, passing the heaps and rows of cannon taken from the French in 1812, I asked him if he still adhered to the low opinion of Napoleon expressed in "War and Peace.'' He said that he did, and more than ever since he had recently read a book on Napoleon's relations to women which showed that he took the lowest possible view of womankind. I then asked him if he still denied Napoleon's military genius. He answered that he certainly did; that he did not believe in the existence of any such thing as military genius; that he had never been able to understand what is meant by the term. I asked, "How then do you account for the amazing series of Napoleon's successes?'' He answered, "By
He then went on to say that battles are won by force of circumstances, by chance, by luck; and he quoted Suvaroff to this effect. He liked Lanfrey's "History of Napoleon'' and Taine's book on the Empire, evidently because both are denunciatory of men and things he dislikes, but said that he did not believe in Thiers.
We came finally under the shade of the great tower and into the gateway through which Napoleon entered the Kremlin; and there we parted with a hearty good-bye.
The question has been asked me, at various times since, whether, in my opinion, Tolstoi is really sincere; and allusion has been made to a book published by a lady who claims to have been in close relations with his family, which would seem to reveal a theatrical element in his whole life. To this my answer has always been, and still is, that I believe him to be one of the most sincere and devoted men alive, a man of great genius and, at the same time, of very deep sympathy with his fellow-creatures.
Out of this character of his come his theories of art and literature; and, despite their faults, they seem to me more profound and far-reaching than any put forth by any other man in our time.
There is in them, for the current cant regarding art and literature, a sound, sturdy, hearty contempt which braces and strengthens one who reads or listens to him. It does one good to hear his quiet sarcasms against the whole fin-de-siècle business—the "impressionism,'' the "sensationalism,'' the vague futilities of every sort, the "great poets'' wallowing in the mud of Paris, the "great musicians'' making night hideous in German concert-halls, the "great painters'' of various countries mixing their colors with as much filth as the police will allow. His keen thrusts at these incarnations of folly and obscenity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially at those who seek to hide the poverty of their ideas in the obscurity of their phrases, encourage one to think that in
Yet here come in his unfortunate limitations. From his substitutions of assertion for inference, and from the inadequacy of his view regarding sundry growths in art, literature, and science, arises endless confusion.
For who will not be skeptical as to the value of any criticism by a man who pours contempt over the pictures of Puvis de Chavannes, stigmatizes one of Beethoven's purest creations as "corrupting,'' and calls Shakspere a "scribbler''!
Nothing can be more genuine than his manner: there is no posing, no orating, no phrase-making; a quiet earnestness pervades all his utterances. The great defect in him arises, as I have already said, from a peculiarity in the development of his opinions: namely, that during so large a part of his life he has been wont to discuss subjects with himself and not with other men; that he has, therefore, come to worship idols of his own creation, and often very unsubstantial idols, and to look with misgiving and distrust on the ideas of others. Very rarely during our conversations did I hear him speak with any real enthusiasm regarding any human being: his nearest approach to it was with reference to the writings of the Rev. Adin Ballou, when he declared him the foremost literary character that America has produced. A result of all this is that when he is driven into a corner his logic becomes so subtle as to be imperceptible, and he is very likely to take refuge in paradoxes.
At times, as we walked together, he would pour forth a stream of reasoning so lucid, out of depths so profound,
As to the moral side, the stream of his thought was usually limpid, but at times it became turbid and his better ideas seemed to float on the surface as iridescent bubbles.
Had he lived in any other country, he would have been a power mighty and permanent in influencing its thought and in directing its policy; as it is, his thought will pass mainly as the confused, incoherent wail and cry of a giant struggling against the heavy adverse currents in that vast ocean of Russian life:
The evolution of Tolstoi's ideas has evidently been mainly determined by his environment. During two centuries Russia has been coming slowly out of the middle ages—indeed, out of perhaps the most cruel phases of mediæval life. Her history is, in its details, discouraging; her daily life disheartening. Even the aspects of nature are to the last degree depressing: no mountains; no hills; no horizon; no variety in forests; a soil during a large part of the year frozen or parched; a people whose upper classes are mainly given up to pleasure and whose lower classes are sunk in fetishism; all their poetry and music in the minor key; old oppressions of every sort still lingering; no help in sight; and, to use their own cry, "God so high and the Czar so distant.''
When, then, a great man arises in Russia, if he gives himself wholly to some well-defined purpose, looking to one high aim and rigidly excluding sight or thought of the ocean of sorrow about him, he may do great things. If he
But when a strong genius in Russia throws himself into philanthropic speculations of an abstract sort, with no chance of discussing his theories until they are full-grown and have taken fast hold upon him,—if he be a man of science like Prince Kropotkin, one of the most gifted scientific thinkers of our time,—the result may be a wild revolt, not only against the whole system of his own country, but against civilization itself, and finally the adoption of the theory and practice of anarchism, which logically results in the destruction of the entire human race. Or, if he be an accomplished statesman and theologian like Pobedonostzeff, he may reason himself back into mediæval methods, and endeavor to fetter all free thought and to crush out all forms of Christianity except the Russo-Greek creed and ritual. Or, if he be a man of the highest genius in literature, like Tolstoi, whose native kindliness holds him back from the extremes of nihilism, he may rear a fabric heaven-high, in which truths, errors, and paradoxes are piled up together until we have a new Tower of Babel. Then we may see this man of genius denouncing all science and commending what he calls "faith''; urging a return to a state of nature, which is simply Rousseau modified by misreadings of the New Testament; repudiating marriage, yet himself most happily married and the father of sixteen children; holding that Æschylus and Dante and
The long, slow, every-day work of developing a better future for his countrymen is to be done by others far less gifted than Tolstoi. His paradoxes will be forgotten; but his devoted life, his noble thoughts, and his lofty ideals will, as centuries roll on, more and more give life and light to the new Russia.
CHAPTER XXXVII
WALKS AND TALES WITH TOLSTOI—MARCH, 1894
Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White | ||