Chapter XVIII

CONCLUSION

The struggle was ended; the struggle that had lasted for eighty-two years, whose battlefield was this life of ours. A tragic and glorious mellay, in which all the forces of life took part; all the vices and all the virtues.—All the vices excepting one: untruth, which he pursued incessantly, tracking it into its last resort and refuge.

In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the conflict of passions in the stormy darkness, illuminated from time to time by dazzling flashes of light—crises of love and ecstasy and visions of the Eternal. Years of the Caucasus, of Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and restless youth. Then the great peace of the first years of marriage. The happiness of love, of art, of nature—War and Peace. The broad daylight of genius, which bathed the whole human horizon, and the spectacle of those struggles which for the soul of the artist were already things of the past. He dominated them, was master of them, and already they were not enough. Like Prince Andrei, his eyes were turned towards the vast skies which shone above the battlefield. It was this sky that attracted him:

"There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure leads to alight in the midst of the crowd, when their pinions are broken; such, for instance, am I. Then they beat their broken wings; they launch themselves desperately, but fall anew. The wings will mend. I shall fly high. May God help me!"[1]

These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest, of which the Confessions are the memory and echo. More than once was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always persevered. He started afresh. We see him hovering in "the vast, profound heavens," with his two great wings, of which one is reason and the other faith. But he does not find the peace he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of his passions. There he perceives the apostles of renunciation, and he brings to renunciation the same ardour that he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is "maddened with life." He is "intoxicated with life." He cannot live without this madness.[2] He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality.[3] His renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With him anger is calm,[4]and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, benevolence, pacificism.[5] He strikes at all, delivers his desperate attacks upon all.

From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious spirits, who, like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a corrupted civilisation. The last of these was Rousseau. By his love of nature,[6] by his hatred of modern society, by his jealous independence, by his fervent adoration of the Gospel and for Christian morals, Rousseau is a precursor of Tolstoy, who says of him:

"Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that I should have written them."[7]

But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese:

"Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, if he dare: I was better than that man!"

Or in this defiance of the world:

"I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever could believe me a dishonest man is himself a man to be suppressed."

Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the "crimes" of his past life:

"I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my past baseness, and these memories do not leave me; they poison my life. Usually men regret that they cannot remember after death. What happiness if it should be so! What suffering it would mean if, in that other life, I were to recall all the evil I have done down here!"[8]

Tolstoy was not the man to write his confessions, as did Rousseau, because, as the latter said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil it was in my interest to tell everything."[9] Tolstoy, after having made the attempt, decided not to write his Memoirs; the pen fell from his hands; he did not wish to be an object of offence and scandal to those who would read it.

"People would say: There, then, is the man whom many set so high! And what a shameful fellow he was! Then with us mere mortals it is God who ordains us to be shameful."[10]

Never did Rousseau know the Christian faith, the fine modesty, and the humility that produced the ineffable candour of the aged Tolstoy. Behind Rousseau we see the Rome of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, the innocents, whose tears and naive confessions had touched him as a child.

But beyond and above the struggle with the world, which was common to him and to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life; a magnificent warfare between the highest powers of his mind: Truth and Love.

Truth—"that look which goes straight to the heart," the penetrating light of "those grey eyes which pierce you through"—Truth was his earliest faith, and the empress of his art.

"The heroine of my writings, she whom I love with all the forces of my being, she who always was, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth."[11]

The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the death of his brother.[12] The truth, the pivot of his life, the rock in the midst of an ocean.

But very soon the "horrible truth"[13] was no longer enough for him. Love had supplanted it. It was the living spring of his childhood; "the natural state of his soul."[14] When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never relinquished the truth; he made way for love.[15]

Love is "the basis of energy."[16] Love is the "reason of life; the only reason, with beauty."[17] Love is the essence of Tolstoy ripened by life, of the author of War and Peace and the Letter to the Holy Synod.[18]

This interpenetration of the truth by love makes the unique value of the masterpieces he wrote in the middle part of his life—nel mezzo del cammin—and distinguishes his realism from the realism of Flaubert. The latter places his faith in refraining from loving his characters. Great as he may be, he lacks the Fiat lux! The light of the sun is not enough: we must have the light of the heart. The realism of Tolstoy is incarnate in each of his creatures, and seeing them with their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons for loving them and for making us feel the chain of brotherhood which unites us to all.[19] By love he penetrates to the roots of life.

But this union is a difficult one to maintain. There are hours in which the spectacle of life and its suffering are so bitter that they appear an affront to love, and in order to save it, and to save his faith, a man must withdraw to such a height above the world that faith is in danger of losing truth as well. What shall he do, moreover, who has received at the hands of fate the fatal, magnificent gift of seeing the truth—the gift of being unable to escape from seeing it? Who shall say what Tolstoy suffered from the continual discord of his latter years—the discord between his unpitying vision, which saw the horror of reality, and his impassioned heart, which continued to expect love and to affirm it?

We have all known these tragic conflicts. How often have we had to face the alternative—not to see, or to hate! And how often does an artist—an artist worthy of the name, a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent power of the written word—feel himself weighed down by anguish as he writes the truth![20] This truth, sane and virile, necessary in the midst of modern lies, this vital truth seems to him as the air we breathe.... But then we perceive that this air is more than the lungs of many can bear. It is too strong for the many beings enfeebled by civilisation; too strong for those who are weak simply in the kindness of their hearts. Are we to take no account of this, and plunge them implacably into the truth that kills them? Is there not above all a truth which, as Tolstoy says, "is open to love"? Or is the artist to soothe mankind with consoling lies, as Peer Gynt, with his tales, soothes his old dying mother? Society is always face to face with this dilemma: the truth, or love. It resolves it in general by sacrificing both.

Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two faiths. In the works of his maturity love is the torch of truth. In the works of his later years it is a light shining on high, a ray of mercy which falls upon life, but does not mingle with it. We have seen this in Resurrection, wherein faith dominates the reality, but remains external to it. The people, whom Tolstoy depicts as commonplace and mean when he regards the isolated figures that compose it, takes on a divine sanctity so soon as he considers it in the abstract.[21]

In his everyday life appears the same discord as in his art, but the contrast is even more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what love required of him; he acted otherwise; he lived not according to God but according to the world. And love itself: how was he to behave with regard to love? How distinguish between its many aspects, its contradictory orders? Was love of family, to come first, or love of all humanity? To his last day he was perplexed by these alternatives.

What was the solution? He did not find it. Let us leave the self-sufficient, the coldly intellectual, to judge him with disdain. They, to be sure, have found the truth; they hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could only be of use as a warning. Certainly he is not an example that they can follow: they are not sufficiently alive. Tolstoy did not belong to the self-satisfied elect; he was of no Church; of no sect; he was no more a Scribe, to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this faith or that. He was the highest type of the free Christian, who strives all his life long towards an ideal that is always more remote.[22]

Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, the enfranchised of the world of thought; he speaks to ordinary men—hominibus bonæ voluntatis. He is our conscience. He says what we all think, we average people, and what we all fear to read in ourselves. He is not a master full of pride: one of those haughty geniuses who are throned above humanity upon their art and their intelligence. He is—as he loved to style himself in his letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the most pleasant of all—"our brother."

INDEX (The names of characters and titles of books are in italics.) ALEXANDRA, Tolstoy's aunt, 18 Ancestry, Tolstoy's, 14, 15 Analysis, self-, 29 Andrei Bolkonsky, Prince, 88-90, 94, 100 Anna Karenin (novel), 76, 84, 99, 102, 203 Anna Karenin (character), 103, 104 Arabian Nights, 19, 169 Art— Attacks on modern, 145, 146 Tolstoy's conception of, 147-150 His ignorance of, 151 His religious ideal of art, 156 Christian art extinct, 157 The art of the future, 159 Endowment of, 159 Mission of, 160 Austerlitz, 89, 90 BACH, 153 Bachkirs, the, 102 Bagration, 88 Beethoven, 151, 155, 181,183 Bers family, the, 75 Bers, S. A., 179 Bers, Sophie, see Countess Tolstoy Besoukhov, Pierre, 88, 91-94, 100 Bloody Sunday, 212 Böcklin, 151 Boyer, Paul, 167 Boyhood, 42 Brahms, 151 Breton, Jules, 151 Brothers, Tolstoy's, 17 Brush with the Enemy, A, 44 Bylines, 19, 168 CAUCASUS, Tolstoy joins Army of the, 33 Census, the, Tolstoy assists in taking, 127 Chavannes, P. de, 151 Childhood, Tolstoy's, 17-19 Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, 15, 16, 19, 23 Begun in the Caucasus, 35; 39 Tolstoy's later opinion of, 40; 84 See Boyhood and Youth China, Tolstoy's admiration for, Christ, Tolstoy's conception of, 119 Concordance and Translation of the Four Gospels, 118 Confessions, 106, 120, 238 Cossacks, The, 44 Countess Tolstoy— Character and abilities, 83 As model, 84; 100, 135-138, 226-227 Letter to, 229-231 Creed, Tolstoy's, 123-124 Crimea, transference to the, 49 Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, 118 Criticism of art, destructive, Cycle of Readings, 200 DEATH OF IVAN ILYITCH, THE, 6, 68, 165, 174-175 Decembrists, The (a projected novel), 91 Diary of a Sportsman, 68, 75 Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov, 65 Dmitri Tolstoy, 17 Death of, 106-107 Don Quixote, 158 Dostoyevsky, 158, 193 Dreyfus Affair, the, 154 Droujinine, 61 EDUCATION, Tolstoy's ideas concerning, 23-25, 66 End of a World, The, 201 England, Tolstoy contemplates retiring to, 103 Erochta, the old Cossack, 45 Execution, effect of a public 64 FAITH, Tolstoy's, brings no happiness, 128 Family, Tolstoy's, 16 Family dissensions, 228 Family Happiness, 75-77, 84 Father, Tolstoy's, 16 Feminism, Tolstoy's attitude towards, 138 Flaubert's opinion of Tolstoy's work, 99, 245 GAPON, FATHER, 212 George, Henry, 225 Georgians, the, 213 Goethe, 156 Gontcharov, 61 Great Crime, The, 201, 210 Greek, Tolstoy studies, 101 Gricha, the idiot, 18 Grigorovitch, 61 HADJI MOURAD, 199 Hebrew, Tolstoy studies, 137 Home, Tolstoy's, see Yasnaya Polyana Hugo, Victor, 158 Hunting, renounced, 132 IBSEN, 151 Introspection, Tolstoy's faculty of, 29 Invasion, The, 35, 42 Irtenieff, Nikolas, 15 JOSEPH, the History of, 19, 159 Journal, Tolstoy's, 14, 27, 34 KARENIN, 106 Karatayev, 91 Kazan, 23 Khlopoff, Captain, 43 Kitty Levine, 84, 103 Klinger, Max; 151 Kozeltoff, brothers, in Sebastopol in August, 1855, 56-57 Kreutzer Sonata, The, 165, 174, 176-177, 181 Kutuzov, 88, 90-91 LEVINE, 103,106-108, in Lhermitte, 151 Liberal Party, Tolstoy's disdain of the, 66, 202-203 Life, 120 Literary Society of St. Petersburg, Tolstoy's dislike of, 61-67 Logic, heroic, 129-130 Love— Definition of, 122 Tolstoy's attitude towards sexual, 177 Law of, 211 Lucerne, incident of the singer, 65 MANET, 151 Marriage, Tolstoy's views concerning, 100, 177 Marie, Princess, 88-89 Marie Tolstoy, 16, 94 Maslova, 191 Master and Servant, 165 Michelangelo, 151 Millet, 151 Molière, 158 Moscow, effect of visit to, 127, 130, 147 Music— Love of, 28-29 Ignorance of modern music, 151-152; 153 In the Kreutzer Sonata, 178 Dread of, 179 Suggested State control over, 182-183 NATASHA, 90, 93-94,179-180 Nekhludov, 26-28, 33, 68, 181, 191 Nekhludov, Diary of Prince D., 65 Nikolas Tolstoy, 17, 33 Dies of phthisis, 69 Non-Resistance, 211, 225 OLD BELIEVERS, the, 212 Olenin, 45 Orthodox Church, Tolstoy's relations with the, 117 Ostrovsky, 61 PAKHOM THE PEASANT, 169-170 Parents, Tolstoy's, 15-16 Pascal, 120 Pedagogy, 135 Polikushka, 70, 78 Popular Tales, 42, 165, 168 Popular idiom, 167-168 Portraits of Tolstoy— Of 1848, 26 (note) Of 1851, 35 Of 1856, 61 Of 1885, 129; 140 Posdnicheff, 177, 182 Power of Darkness, The, 165, 170-173 Prashhoukhin, death of, 54 REASON (letter upon), 121 Reason, Tolstoy's distrust of, 108; 120-121 Religion— Tolstoy's vague agnosticism as a youth, 24 Revival of, in the Caucasus, 33-39; 100, 123-124, 135, 209, 215-216 Rembrandt, 151 Resurrection, 166, 187-195, 224, 247 Revolution, Tolstoy prophesies, 209-210 Roumania, Tolstoy joins Army of, 49 Rousseau, J. J., worship of, 27; 240-243 Rules of Life, 25 Russian Proprietor, A, 27 Written in the Caucasus, 35; 42 Russo-Japanese War, 201 ST. PETERSBURG, Tolstoy's dislike of literary society of, 61, 67 Samara, 192 Schopenhauer, 101 (note) Science, Tolstoy attacks, 145 Sebastopol in December, 1854, 52 Sebastopol in May, 1855, 52-56 Sebastopol in August, 1855, 52, 54-57 Sebastopol, the siege of, 49-57 Sexual morality, 177 Shakespeare, 166 Shakespeare, no artist, 152-153, 155-156 Siegfried, hasty judgment on, 152 "Smartness," Tolstoy's worship of, 27 Socialism, Tolstoy's hatred of, 205-208 Society, pictures of Russian, 103 Sophia Bers, see Countess Tolstoy Sovremennik, the (Russian review), 40 Spelling-book, Tolstoy's, 135 State, the, a murderous entity, 130 Stepan Arcadievitch, 105 Sterne, influence of, 41 Story-teller, a blind, 19 Strauss, 151 Stuck, 151 Suarès, 6, 61 Suicidal tendencies, 107, 111, 113 TATIANA, Tolstoy's aunt, 17 Tchaikowsky, 151 Terror, attack of nervous, 100 Three Deaths, 68 Three Old Men, 168 Tolstoy, Countess, 75, 83, 84, 100, 135-138, 226-227, 229-231 Tolstoy, Dmitri, 17 Death of, 106-107 Tolstoy, Leo— Reception of his work in France, 6 Influence of Rousseau and Stendhal, 7 Organic unity of his life, 13 Ancestry and inheritances, Childhood, 17-19 Student days, 23-25 Personal appearance (see Portraits), 25-26 Joins Army of Caucasus, 33 Religious experiences, 33-34 First literary work, 35 Effects of illness, 39 Early work, 41-45 Love of life, 46 Transferred to Crimea, 49 Narratives of Sebastopol, 52 Enters St. Petersburg literary society, 61 Quarrels with Tourgenev, 63 Travels in Europe, 64 Studies pedagogy, 66 Effect of his brother's death 70 Courtship, 75 Marriage, 76-83 War and Peace, 83-95 Anna Karenina, 99 Effect of Dmitri's death, 107 Suicidal tendencies, 111 His "conversion," 115-16 Joins the Orthodox Church, 117 Leaves it, 117 Visits Moscow, 127 Commences to write on religious subjects, 136 Differences with Countess Tolstoy, 136-137 Spiritual loneliness, 140 Attacks upon modern art and science, 145 His ignorance of art, 151 Ignorance of modern music, 152 Attack upon Shakespeare, 153-157 Religious and æsthetic ideals, 156-161 His fear of music, 178-180 Political ideals, 214 Religious ideals, 215-216 Old age, 219 Political hopes, 220 Loneliness, 228 Intends leaving his family, 229 Death, 234 Tolstoy, Nikolas, 17, 33, 69 Töppfer, influence of, 41 Tourgenev, 17, 61-63 Criticism of Tolstoy, 95, 140, 202 Turkey, war declared upon, 49 Two Hussars, The, 68 VOLODYA, see Kozeltoff Vogüé, Melchior de, 140 Vronsky, 103-104 WAGNER, Tolstoy's hasty judgment of, 152, 155 War and Peace, 15, 43, 84, 95, 99-101, 103-105 What I Believe, 141 What is Art t 149-150, 166 What shall we do? 129, 138 Woman, Tolstoy's ideal of, 138-139 Woodcutters, The, 44 YASNAYA POLYANA, 16, 33 Tolstoy returns to, 65 Experiments at, 66-67; 224,228 Youth— Written during the siege of Sebastopol, 50 Lyrical beauty of, 51