Tolstoy

by Lilian Winstanley

CHAPTER VIII

THE INFLUENCE OF TOLSTOY

Tolstoy's influence is a great and growing one, both in Europe as a whole and in England. He is the most powerful and impressive critic of our existing social order.

We have seen that, in certain respects, Tolstoy stands apart from the humanism of Europe; it is impossible to read him without seeing that he is imperfectly acquainted with the achievements of the human mind, and very imperfectly indeed with their value. He emphasizes the fact that he is not a humanist by his intense dislike of the Renaissance and his continual references to it as a period of moral decay.

But his very limitations are, in some respects, his strength. He has no unreasonable reverence for civilisation which, to use one of his own favourite words, can "hypnotise" him into accepting civilisation's defects.

He insists on trying it, fairly and squarely, by its conformity to the needs of man, and in condemning it when it does not conform to man's noblest ideal—brotherhood.

And Tolstoy is the latest and the greatest of the mystics; the essence of his creed is the Christian mysticism of the Middle Ages, stripped of its ecclesiasticism and supernaturalism, but insisting most strenuously on the old ideal of the Catholic Church—the brotherhood of all men through religion. According to Tolstoy's creed the Spirit of God exists in each one of us, the highest good for man is to cherish this Divine Spirit within himself, and the supreme duty, both for the individual and for the social order, is to further the true Christian unity.

Moreover, Tolstoy's rule of life is the old monastic rule of poverty, chastity, and labour, though he substitutes for obedience to an "Order," the harder and more rigorous command of immediate obedience to a man's conscience.

The vital spirit of mediæval religion, its unquestioning, wonderful, literal acceptance of the commands of Christ, lives still among the Russian peasants; what Tolstoy has done is to take this spirit, shake it free from ceremonies and dogma, rescue the true and glowing fire from its incumbent mountains of ashes, and insist, with all the vehemence of his most vehement soul, that it is the true light of the world.

Our Christianity, he tells us, is sick to death; it has become so entangled with paganism and rationalism that it is hardly worth while calling Christianity at all; indeed we find in some modern writers—Nietzsche and others—the frankest paganism, calling Christianity a "slave-morality," and declaring it unworthy of the free. Tolstoy declares that Christianity is not founded on rationalism but is divinely inspired; he is original only so far as he insists that this divine inspiration occurs not in any Church or tradition, but in a man's own heart; like the seventeenth-century Puritans, he accepts the Bible as his guide, but he rejects the Old Testament and relies entirely upon the New.

And Tolstoy's influence is so profound because he announces the dissatisfaction which, secret and overt, is assailing us on all sides; we are, none of us, really satisfied with our civilisation as it stands, we all desire a better one, and Tolstoy's is the most powerful and eloquent amid those voices which are summoning us to emerge from the dwelling which has grown too narrow and to build a new.

This is why Tolstoy, the preacher of non-resistance and peace, is really one of the most powerful of revolutionaries. And, paradoxical as it may sound, he is also one of the most powerful of individualists.

It might be imagined, at the first glance, that Tolstoy stands at the opposite pole from such a writer as Ibsen—Ibsen the uncompromising individualist, who preaches self-realisation at all costs, and breaks furiously through our so-called "duties," and Tolstoy who preaches self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and humility.

But, when we look closer, we see that there is a unity underlying all seeming differences; both men are profoundly dissatisfied with the "ideals" of present-day Europe; they insist that all values must be revalued, that all the old "duties" must be questioned, and rejected if they will not stand the test of the new morality.

And who is to be the supreme arbiter? Both Tolstoy and Ibsen answer: "The man's own soul."

No one would trample on the old "duties" more thoroughly than Tolstoy; he insists that his countrymen must renounce all they have previously held most sacred, their "duty" to the Czar, their "duty" to the State, to their oaths, even in the last resort to their families; for, like Ibsen, he finds the "family snare" one of the worst and deadliest.

Both Ibsen and Tolstoy are quite agreed that, when a man is sure of himself, he should, if need be, stand alone against the world.

Tolstoy is, indeed, one of the strongest of individualists, and, as the terrified Greek Church saw when it excommunicated him, his doctrine of "peaceful anarchy" is the most tremendous solvent for society's hierarchy that has ever been conceived by the mind of man.

We may sum up briefly the leading channels in which the influence of Tolstoy runs.

He is one of the most powerful forces in favour of what may be termed "social justice." The conscience of civilised Europe is more and more declaring that some reconstruction of our social system has become imperative, and Tolstoy is among those who have done most to arouse this conscience. That he overstates in some ways, that he is too hard on the upper classes—all this is possible, but there is so much in his indictment which is true and accurate that we all feel guilty before him.

Again, he is one of the most powerful of all apostles of peace. He is aware, as we have seen, of the nobler side of war. He knows that it really can and does rouse an enervated aristocracy to something finer (in War and Peace he shows us the actual process); but he also realises that the vast majority of the people—the working class—are moralised and strengthened by their daily toil. For the mass of the people war is as needless as it is futile. Tolstoy shows that the ends for which it is waged are nearly always childish and absurd, and his unflinching realism has made him an unrivalled exponent of its horrors. Ruskin and Carlyle have both preached against the horrors of war, but Tolstoy is more effective than they because he knows it at first hand.

In the third place, Tolstoy is one of the most effective critics of our penal system and capital punishment. Here again there are many other writers—such as Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bernard Shaw—who follow in the same track; they also declare that the faults and sins of the rich, who almost escape our penal system, are no less serious than the sins of the poor, who fall victims to it; they also declare that our penal system is mainly torture and revenge, that it does not cure but only brutalises, and that the majority of its victims are not foes of society but only people who are too weak to keep straight, and whom our harsh industrial system flings to the wall. But here again, though Tolstoy agrees with other men in his diagnosis of the evil, his exposition of it is far more masterly than theirs. It is not possible to name any other work which shows the tragedy and terror of prison life in the same manner as Resurrection.

In social purity, again, Tolstoy's has been one of the most potent voices. Many people think that he carries his asceticism unnecessarily far, but, when we think of the corruption which has invaded so large a part of Europe, we can see that he heads a much-needed revulsion. And here again he excels by the extraordinary power and fidelity with which he shows the evil results of loose living: its tragic cruelty to the seduced woman, its power of corrupting, by a kind of reflex action, even those who would seem most remote from its sphere. And Tolstoy has not limited his condemnation to "irregularities"; he condemns the immoral marriage no less severely, and has given a most drastic analysis of the vices which underlie "respectability." Tolstoy will not allow virtue to consist in anything so cheap and easy as mere legality.

Again, his influence also tells in the direction of simplicity of life. Many people are arriving at the conclusion that modern civilised life is too complex, that it achieves not real refinement, but luxury which enervates and ostentation which vulgarises. Tolstoy joins the cult of the "simple life" by another road: by pointing out the immensity of the labour which luxury entails upon others.

And finally, we may point out that in art also the age is feeling its way towards an attempt to realise, consciously or unconsciously, the Tolstoyan ideals.

We are beginning to ask for the simplification of art, for its deliverance from over-elaborate technique; we are beginning to see that it cannot be truly deep and profound unless it is also national and of the people; that Tolstoy is essentially right when he declares that art, by cutting itself off from popular inspiration, becomes barren and sterile.