The Critical Game Part 3

This ascetic religious philosopher was a master of thrilling war stories. He knew equally well the heart of a lady in the high life of Moscow, and the soul of a peasant woman. He was of athletic stature, and his huge hand was sensitive to the finger tips; with it he gripped a scythe, played the piano, wrote a tirade against modern music, and indited an exposition of the gospel of love which estranged some of his best friends! It is no wonder that his fiction bears the seal of reality, that it has the abundance, the variety, the jostling contrasts of life itself.

II.

In Russia prose fiction has been for a century the vehicle of the soberest reflections upon contemporary problems. It was dangerous for a Russian radical to express his beliefs directly in essays and expositions; what he was not allowed to utter in editorial and parliamentary debate he set forth indirectly through the novel, which thus became a sort of realistic parable. Suppression increased his emotional intensity. Feeling himself a member of a down-trodden cla.s.s, he became the champion of other down-trodden cla.s.ses. When Tolstoy began to write, the novel was already a tempered weapon against abuse, the skilful handling of it was a tradition among the literati, and there were masters to coach and encourage the beginner. The Russian novel records the deepest motives of Russian history. Tourgenef voiced the philosophic resignation and scepticism of the educated Russian and the evils of serfdom. Tolstoy portrayed the vices of the educated Russian and the evils of wage-slavery which followed the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs. Russian fiction is great, because it treats the gravest struggles of life and because its authors have trained themselves in the art of expounding ideas in the form of fiction without transgressing the laws of narrative; they have learned to be the mouthpiece of life and to let life preach the sermons. To Tolstoy and other Russians the greatest American book is "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"

because it is the chronicle of a bleeding issue; I have seen many references to that book by Russian writers but scarcely a mention of Hawthorne.

Mr. Maude quotes a letter to Tolstoy from Drouzhinin, critic, novelist, and translator of Shakespeare: "An Englishman or an American," he says, "may laugh at the fact that in Russia not merely men of thirty, but gray-haired owners of 2,000 serfs sweat over stories of a hundred pages, which appear in the magazines, are devoured by everybody, and arouse discussion in society for a whole day. However much artistic quality may have to do with this result, you cannot explain it merely by art. What in other lands is a matter of idle talk and careless dilettantism, with us is quite another affair. Among us things have taken such shape that a story--the most frivolous and insignificant form of literature--becomes one of two things: either it is rubbish, or else it is the voice of a leader sounding through the empire."

Tolstoy's realism is, then, the result both of his own temperamental pa.s.sion for truth and of a theory of art which prevailed in his literary circle. There were, to be sure, silly novelists in Russia; there, as everywhere, only the best minds regarded fiction as a vital matter. But there were enough such serious minds to welcome Tolstoy and encourage him. Nekrasof, editor of _The Contemporary_, found in Tolstoy's first work, "the truth--the truth, of which, since Gogol's death, so little has remained in Russian literature." Tourgenef repeatedly called Tolstoy the greatest of Russians, and on his deathbed pencilled the pathetic letter in which he pleaded with Tolstoy to return to his art. "I am glad," he said, "to have been your contemporary." Had he lived sixteen years longer, "Resurrection" might have made him happy.

In Tolstoy's discourses on religion appear many times the words "sense of life"--religion is the sense of life, the principle upon which the details of the moral world are ordered and by which they are to be interpreted. In a slightly different meaning "the sense of life"

expresses the total effect of Tolstoy's fiction. He wrote to a young disciple: "Do not bend to your purpose the events in the story, but follow them wherever they lead you.... Lack of symmetry and the apparent haphazardness of events is a chief sign of life."

In "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" there are many plots. The unity is that of the loose-jointed English novel rather than that of the French, which travels on a straight track. Tolstoy's stories move like a river with many tributaries; he explores now one, now another of the branch streams, but the course of the main current is continuous, and runs in one general direction, as if the slope of the country had been determined before the recorder came upon the scene to measure and report.

"War and Peace" is greater than a novel; it is an epic, it is nation-wide and long as the growth from childhood to maturity. We see from a peak of the face of eastern Europe and the swarming of peoples and armies. The sensation of vastness, of humanity surging and flowing in obedience to obscure collective interests is produced by only one other modern book that I know, Hardy's "The Dynasts." From the high pinnacles of omniscience the imagination descends by swift unperceived transitions to the intimacies of a house in Moscow--to the heart of the girl Natacha--to the mind of Pierre saturated with alcohol plotting to a.s.sa.s.sinate Napoleon. The adventures and purposes of the characters cross and conflict, interweave and unite, but each goes as it must and there is no confusion in the telling.

In "Anna Karenina," the story of Levin is but loosely related to the princ.i.p.al tragedy, and the story of Levin's brother is an excursion from the highway of Levin's career. One can see that after the book is done. During its course the reader has no sense that any part is not precisely placed. The illusion of inevitability is perfect. Levin's brother is related to him by natural ties in life; it is natural, then, that he should appear in Levin's story.

The illusion of inevitability springs from Tolstoy's all-encircling comprehension of events, from his justice to each character and from his extraordinary physical vividness. He writes with his five senses.

A critic warned him early that he was in danger of making a man's thigh feel like going on a journey to India.

But his recognition of physical sensations and his power to convey them (they traverse bodily the stylistic obstacles of translation) take the story off the flat page and give it three dimensional reality. The acrid smell of an old man's breath, the coldness of a man's hand when he is in mental distress, the cracking of Karenin's knuckles when he clasps his hands in moral satisfaction or the anguish of wounded pride--such details cling to the mind, and the memory of them recalls the whole story.

Tolstoy's conception of human character is at once relentlessly a.n.a.lytic and profoundly pitiful and kind. The whole content of his thought from its bold surface to its deepest depth is instinct with compa.s.sion. Once when he was walking with Tourgenef they came to an old broken-down horse in a pasture. Tolstoy went up to it, stroked it, and uttered its thoughts and sufferings with such moving tenderness that Tourgenef cried: "You must once have been a horse yourself."

In "Master and Man," a beautiful story of two men lost in a snowstorm, the horse is a third character--an animal character, be it understood, for Tolstoy is antipodal to nature-faking. He has confidence that nature and man will tell their own story and disclose their inherent lessons. Dogmatic and uncompromising in his private ethical beliefs, he never sacrifices humanity even upon the altars where he tried to immolate himself. Valid morality springs spontaneously from his narrative, and is thereby a hundredfold more impressive than teachings forced from artificially moulded events. Even in his rewriting of traditional myths and parables he restores inorganic sermons to life, creates a living thing in which the ethical intention is a.s.similated and vitalized. He told these stories to the peasants, listened with delight to their retelling of them, and incorporated their racial turns of phrase. To an old peasant woman with a native gift for narrative, he said: "You are a real master, Anisya; thank you for teaching me to speak Russian and to think Russian."

He learned from life and he trusted life to teach the reader. Anna Karenina commits suicide, not because she is a naughty woman whom the novelist as guardian of morals must punish for the satisfaction of a virtuous world, but because the society that surrounds her, the everyday life of visiting and tea-drinking, inexorably forbids her to be happy. Tolstoy is a champion of the poor, and he began his career at a time when, as Mr. Cahan tells us, "the idealization of the peasant" was one of the staple phrases in essays and editorials. But in Tolstoy's stories there is no false sublimation of the peasant. He does not cry, like d.i.c.kens, or the professional charity-monger: "Pity these poor starved brothers." He simply recites their lives. Sometimes he chronicles the most terrible things in a grim restrained matter-of-fact tone, more moving than any pa.s.sionate appeal to the reader's sympathy. He is, of course, a master of argument and exhortation, but all that is found in his other books, not in his fiction.

A critic, whose democracy is too narrowly partisan, complains that in "War and Peace" all the important characters are aristocrats, and that the story fails to reveal the motives of the people, of those inarticulate millions who Tolstoy himself says are the real makers of history. But this apparent fault is an instance of Tolstoy's integrity. When he wrote "War and Peace" he knew only aristocrats, or was chiefly interested in them. He had already begun to discern the relations between the mult.i.tude and the leaders whom history signalizes; but he had not lived close to peasants and workmen; he had approached them as lord and master, not yet as brother and interpreter. Moreover, if there be a moral hero in "War and Peace"

whom the author seems to favor, it is Karataief, the illiterate soldier, whose simple faith dawns as a regenerative light upon Pierre, a rich man of the world who has met all philosophies and found them heartless.

Tolstoy could not write what he did not know or did not feel. His stories, though not autobiographic in the usual sense of the world, are the quintessence of his adventures and experiences, accurately recalled and profoundly meditated. When the ma.n.u.script of the "Kreutzer Sonata" was read in his house to a company of friends, Tolstoy said in answer to some objections:

"In a work of art it is indispensable that the artist should have something new, of his own. It is not how it is written that really matters. People will read the 'Kreutzer Sonata' and say, 'Ah, that is the way to write!' The indispensable thing is to go beyond what others have done, to pick off even a very small fresh bit. But it won't do to be like my friend Fet, who at sixteen wrote, 'The spring bubbles, the moon shines, and she loves me,' and who went on writing and writing, and at sixty wrote: 'She loves me, and the spring bubbles, and the moon shines.'"

It was impossible for Tolstoy, the novelist, to write of people whom he did not know, merely because he happened to have sympathy with some of their ideals and habits. It was impossible for him to violate human nature when he portrayed characters that he did know. Hating professional psychology and all other sciences and quasi-sciences, he is the greatest of so-called psychological novelists; his psychology was made before text-books, and it used to be called "truth to human nature." You cannot suggest, as you read a novel by Tolstoy, anything a character ought have done which was not done, any emotion he should have felt which Tolstoy has not suggested at exactly the right moment.

He penetrates the characters of living men and the characters of history and romance. The pseudo-psychology of the critics of "Hamlet,"

does not deceive him. Napoleon, mythical monster and genius unapproachable, fails to over-awe him; Tolstoy draws him, man size, amid events that dwarf heroes.

In "Resurrection," Nekhludof is represented as holding social theories which in point of fact Tolstoy held. Nekhludof reads Henry George and tries to give his land to the peasants as communal property. Tolstoy, the social reformer, would admit no obstacle to the justice and the practicability of the plan; a lesser artist would have yielded to the reformer, the plan would have worked and the story would have proved the theory. But Tolstoy, the novelist, confronts Nekhludof with the suspicion, the ignorant shrewdness of the peasants; the plan encounters all the difficulties, legal and psychological, which life would offer.

"Resurrection" is the crowning proof of Tolstoy's artistic power. For twenty years he had developed theories about every problem of life; he held his opinions tenaciously; hugging them in resolute defiance he strode roughshod through the domains of church, state and family. His convictions were strong enough to silence him as an artist, and for years he obeyed the mandate of conscience that forbade him to write novels at all. But when, to raise money for the Doukhobors, he consented to write "Resurrection," his artistic sense was stronger than the rest of him (if, indeed, there was any antagonism between the two sides of his nature), and theories powerful enough to disrupt the universe were kept in bounds by his sense of proportion, his sense of life.

The feeling that Tolstoy, the artist, and Tolstoy, the reformer, are in any true sense engaged in struggle is largely due to the false dialectic of traditional criticism, which he by precept and practice has confuted. His great moral principles are the sure foundation of his greatness in art. For us Westerners modern realism--Hardy and Zola come first to mind--is a.s.sociated with a G.o.dless though very humane scepticism. Religious sentiment has been left in the weak hands of romance, and the longer it has been left there the more false it has become. From the beginning, even before his religious conversion, Tolstoy had a sound ethical outlook. At the age of forty he wrote of Tourgenef's "Smoke": "The strength of poetry lies in love, and the direction of that strength depends on character. Without strength of love there is no poetry. In 'Smoke' there is hardly any love of anything and very little poetry. There is only love of a light and playful adultery, and therefore the poetry of that novel is repulsive." The spirit in that criticism is the guiding spirit in "Anna Karenina," and it is the same spirit which dictated this pa.s.sage in the magnificent sermon on the Russian-j.a.panese war: "The great struggle of our time ... is not the struggle in which men engage with mines, bombs and bullets; it is the spiritual struggle which goes on incessantly, which is going on now, between the enlightened conscience of humanity, about to be made manifest, and the shadows and oppression which surround it and crush it."

III.

To western liberals Tolstoy's a.s.saults on church and state seem too vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like that."[3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press, which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be.

American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we have our public schools and compulsory education laws--in some states.

Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to the glorious free compet.i.tion of business, in taking their fathers'

places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag and read about George Washington.

[3] And we are still saying it, 1922!

Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too far." Did he not sweepingly a.s.sert that there is no such thing as a virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in which it appears.

Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read articles about the "history of achievement in the United States," to take democratic short cuts to superficial knowledge, than to read disconcerting books. Our healthy-minded confidence in American morals bids us be content with a little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, and not trouble ourselves with such a difficult book as "Past and Present." In like fashion we shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without reading "What, Then, Must We Do?" or "The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient for us a few newspaper discussions about "Why Tolstoy Left the Countess and the Relations Between Family Life and Anarchism." For Tolstoy was an anarchist, and that disposes of him! We know all about anarchists; they live in Paterson, N.J., and in the imaginations of journalists, home secretaries, and framers of immigration laws.

Yet despite our republican wisdom, we cannot quite understand Tolstoy until we know the true meanings of such words as labor, capital, exploitation, rent, property, interest, and proletariat. In Russia these words are understood by many people, also in Germany. But we Americans, though highly cultivated, are not well informed about contemporary facts and current philosophies. We have still to be taught that the Russian revolution is our revolution, that it is part of a mighty economic change which is in process all over the world. A study of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct us--some day--about these momentous relations.

The present status of the revolution is more confused in Russia than in any other country.[4] The repressive measures of the government forced a temporary alliance between all types of revolutionaries. It was this alliance which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers and made him a r.e.t.a.r.ding force, almost a reactionary, against the progress of the Social Democracy, that party of orderly Marxians under German tutelage which was the hope of young Russia. The Czar's government, which was no respecter of principles, grouped him with all the malcontents and libertarians. And he returned the compliment. Because he despised all economics, he could not join a "scientific" party.

Failing to distinguish between the peaceful and the militant revolutionists, he charged them all with murder and grouped them with the government. And thus he stood alone, distrustful of peaceful anarchists because they were not religious, and distrustful of most religions because they were organized on a property basis. He stood alone. Yet all liberal men, ant.i.thetical to each other as are the socialists and the anarchists, united in loving him as they united in hatred of the government. They applauded his terrific indictment of the society under which we live, though they disagreed from various points of view with his solution. It was said of him on his eightieth birthday that whatever conflict there might be between his beliefs and those of other reformers, the foes of liberty were his foes and the friends of liberty were his friends.

[4] This refers, of course, to the revolution before the Great War. I wonder now, 1922, just what Lenin, Trotsky, Chicherin, et. al., think of Tolstoy, and what he would have thought of them!

Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian anarchy, a voluntary communism allied with the teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's interpretation of them. He taught that all violence is wrong, all government is robbery, and that the only possible moral order is founded on love of man and renunciation of legal rights. That he should have been a champion of Henry Georgeism, a plan that depends on organized government, is one of his many inconsistencies; what drew him to the single-tax theory was probably not so much the economic principles as George's arraignment of landlordism.

It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so-called civilization rather than his proposed remedies which will quicken the conscience of the world.[5] His individualism, his doctrine of private goodness, looks backward and not forward. He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone time.

[5] Will it? I am not so confident as I was once.

He had lived through the failures of many political revolutions, and he abhorred anything that pretended to be scientific. He turned his eyes from the science of men to their souls. In his magnificent self he justified his individualism, but were we a billion Tolstoys, saintly and self-disciplined, we must work in organization, or we cannot work effectively. The world is religious, but religion is a matter of opinion. The world is also economic, and economics is not a matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over which the individual has little control.[6] Like Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because most professorial economists do not tell the truth. He blamed the dismal science for the dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its cla.s.sic expounders. Had he understood the economic structure of society (which n.o.body does understand), he would have seen the futility of trying to abandon his estates. His singular abnegation could not put an end to the evils of landlordism, even to the extent of his own plot of ground. He could not make the burden of landless people one ounce lighter by dismounting in his own person from their backs. Nothing can be done until an effective majority of men agree to abolish private ownership of land and establish communal ownership.

[6] That sounds like good sense. Some of Tolstoy's countrymen at Genoa seem to have proved it.

Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the power of the individual soul. But his practice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was disorganization that caused the famine which he labored to relieve, and it was his efficient organization that kept the hungry from starving. That our greatest man of letters should sweat behind a prehistoric plow is good for his soul and for ours; but, even if we should all grow perfect in spirit and eager for our share of manual labor, we should still feed ourselves better by communal use of steam plows. Tolstoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution for the evils of property. It is his negative teaching that has positive value. He is an abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But to say that is not to answer him, not to deny him. He remains unanswered as long as the labor of this world is done at the behest of the few and for their profit. His work is not done, his books cannot be outgrown, until every man of us looks at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is impossible to live so! It is impossible to live so!"

MAETERLINCK'S ESSAYS

If we had to lose one part or the other of Maeterlinck's work, I think we should less reluctantly surrender the plays than the essays. The essays are richer in substance than the dramas and they are as truly poetic. The sunny garden, where the poet lives with his bees and flowers, is a more splendid domain than moonlit pseudo-mediaeval empires, peopled with the wraiths of women. And the little bull-pup of the essay is a truer dog than the one in "The Blue Bird."

Some years ago, when the essay on the dog was first published in English, I read it aloud to a woman who owned a Boston terrier, and I gave it to a professional breeder of dogs. Both liked it. It is an essay that any one can understand; it illuminates a ground where all kinds of people meet. Even Bill Sikes would have liked it. Maeterlinck says what almost everybody thinks, and says it as it has not been said before, not in "Rab and His Friends." The simple eloquence, the sincerity, the affectionate humor are the positive virtues of the essay; and its negative virtue is freedom from a kind of rhetorical artificiality in which Maeterlinck indulges when he gets away from the solid realities of life.

Maeterlinck is an amateur botanist and bee-keeper and a professional poet. He knows, or seems to know, the facts, and he sees them with an imaginative vision, wondering at them like a child, in the very act of giving quite lucid "scientific" explanations. He hovers often on the enchanted borderland between knowledge and fancy, and plays to and fro between regions which, though adjacent parts of the same universe, have different habits of thought. I am acquainted with an American poet and philosopher who does not know the common kinds of dogs such as any boy of ten knows. I also knew and argued with an eminent biologist who objected to Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," on the ground that the poetic phrasing falsified the facts. True, he conceded, the queen-bee does fly and the strongest male overtakes and fertilizes her. But for Maeterlinck to poetize the fact as a "nuptial flight" seemed to the man of science not only untruth to nature, but a blasphemy against the sacred love of man and woman.

My friend, the biologist, and my acquaintance, the American poet and philosopher, both seem to be unfortunately incomplete human beings.

The poet and philosopher does not know what any duffer knows, what anybody who cares not only for animals but for ordinary folks that own dogs cannot refrain from knowing. He is a man of cosmopolitan experience and has surely been in the _Bois_ more than once. In the Garden of Acclimatation is a wonderful kennel; there are at least fifteen kinds of dogs, each with his specific or sub-specific name hung on his cage. If you had never seen a dog you could not walk about that kennel five minutes without learning the names of a half-dozen varieties (and without discovering in yourself a highly moral desire to steal one or two of those beautifully kept beasts). Some ignorance is unpardonable, and some philosophy and some poetry would be more vital for a little plain back-yard knowledge. On the other hand, what a pity it is that any man's sense of fact should be so strait as to forbid entrance to his soul of a honey bee which Maeterlinck sends forth equipped with these gorgeous unentomological wings of words: "The yellow fairies of the honey." It's as bad as a democrat who should object to the phrase "queen-bee."

Maeterlinck has knowledge of nature, not only such knowledge as Wordsworth had, but a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous science.

He has learned lessons from Fabre, whom he admires. He has studied his own garden in the light of what botanists have told him and in the other light, which is not hostile to botany, but is different, the light of poetry. He loves to speculate about unsettled questions. And his speculations have a very great intellectual merit. He is, on the whole, content to be uncertain about uncertain things and to express his inclinations toward one or another conclusion in a persuasive, wistful manner. Like many other poets, he leans toward the belief that nature, which includes us, knows more than we do, and that to ascribe intelligence, in a restricting way, to man alone is probably to leave out a good deal of the magic of growing things, and to omit some potential explanations of their mystery, their mystery in the poet's sense and in the stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot question about what knowledge is, what instinct is. It's a very fine question, and it becomes hottest when the men of imagination and the men of science (happily they are not mutually exclusive) argue about whether a dog knows that he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a dog: