The Russian novelists

by vicomte de Eugène-Melchior Vogüé

FOOTNOTES:

[J] An English translation was published in 1886, under the title, “Injury and Insult.”

[K] Published also under the title “Buried Alive.”

CHAPTER VI.
NIHILISM AND MYSTICISM.—TOLSTOÏ.

In Turgenef’s artistic work, illustrative of the national characteristics, we have witnessed the birth of the Russian romance, and how it has naturally tended toward the psychological classification of a few general types; or, perhaps, more justly, toward the contemplation of them, when we consider with what serenity this artist’s moral investigations were conducted. Dostoyevski has shown a spirit quite contrary to this, uncultured and yet subtile, sympathetic, tortured by tragic visions, morbidly preoccupied by exceptional and perverted types. The first of these two writers was constantly coquetting, so to speak, with liberal doctrines: the second was a Slavophile of the most extreme type.

In Tolstoï, other surprises are reserved for us. Younger by ten years than his predecessors, he hardly felt the influences of 1848. Attached to no particular school, totally indifferent to all political parties, despising them in fact, this solitary, meditative nobleman acknowledges no master and no sect; he is himself a spontaneous phenomenon. His first great novel was contemporary with “Fathers and Sons”, but between the two great novelists there is a deep abyss. The one still made use of the traditions of the past, while he acknowledged the supremacy of Western Europe, and appropriated to himself and his work what he learned of us; the other broke off wholly with the past and with foreign bondage; he is a personification of the New Russia, feeling its way out of the darkness, impatient of any tendency toward the adoption of our tastes and ideas, and often incomprehensible to us. Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through. Tolstoï comes to her aid. More truly than any other man, and more completely than any other, he is the translator and propagator of that condition of the Russian mind which is called Nihilism. To seek to know how far he has accomplished this, would be to turn around constantly in the same circle. This writer fills the double function of the mirror which reflects the light and sends it back increased tenfold in intensity, producing fire. In the religious confessions which he has lately written, the novelist, changed into a theologian, gives us, in a few lines, the whole history of his soul’s experience:—

“I have lived in this world fifty-five years; with the exception of the fourteen or fifteen years of childhood, I have lived thirty-five years a Nihilist in the true sense of the word,—not a socialist or a revolutionist according to the perverted sense acquired by usage, but a true Nihilist—that is, subject to no faith or creed whatever.”

This long delayed confession was quite unnecessary; the man’s entire work published it, although the dreadful word is not once expressed by him. Critics have called Turgenef the father of Nihilism because he had given a name to the malady, and described a few cases of it. One might as well affirm the cholera to have been introduced by the first physician who gave the diagnosis of it, instead of by the first person attacked by the scourge. Turgenef discovered the evil, and studied it objectively; Tolstoï suffered from it from the first day of its appearance, without having, at first, a very clear consciousness of his condition; his tortured soul cries out on every page he has written, to express the agony which weighs down so many other souls of his own race. If the most interesting books are those which faithfully picture the existence of a fraction of humanity at a given moment of history, this age has produced nothing more remarkable, in regard to its literary quality, than his work. I do not hesitate in giving my opinion that this writer, when considered merely as a novelist, is one of the greatest masters in literature our century has produced. It may be asked how we can venture to express ourselves so strongly of a still living contemporary, whose overcoat and beard are familiar objects in every-day life, who dines, reads the papers, receives money from his publishers and invests it, who does, in short, just what other men do. How can we thus elevate a man before his body has turned to ashes, and his name become transfigured by the accumulated respect of several generations? As for me, I cannot help seeing this man as great as he will appear after death, or subscribing voluntarily to Flaubert’s exclamation, as he read Turgenef’s translation of Tolstoï, and cried in a voice of thunder, while he stamped heavily upon the ground:—

“He is a second Shakespeare!”

Tolstoï’s troubled, vacillating mind, obscured by the mists of Nihilism, is by a singular and not infrequent contradiction endowed with an unparalleled lucidity and penetration for the scientific study of the phenomena of life. He has a clear, analytical comprehension of everything upon the earth’s surface, of man’s internal life as well as of his exterior nature: first of tangible realities, then the play of his passions, his most volatile motives to action, the slightest disturbances of his conscience. This author might be said to possess the skill of an English chemist with the soul of a Hindu Buddhist. Whoever will undertake to account for that strange combination will be capable of explaining Russia herself.

Tolstoï maintains a certain simplicity of nature in the society of his fellow-beings which seems to be impossible to the writers of our country; he observes, listens, takes in whatever he sees and hears, and for all time, with an exactness which we cannot but admire. Not content with describing the distinctive features of the general physiognomy of society, he resolves them into their original elements with the most assiduous care; always eager to know how and wherefore an act is produced; pursuing the original thought behind the visible act, he does not rest until he has laid it bare, tearing it from the heart with all its secret roots and fibres. Unfortunately, his curiosity will not let him stop here. Of those phenomena which offer him such a free field when he studies them by themselves, he wishes to know the origin, and to go back to the most remote and inaccessible causes which produced them. Then his clear vision grows dim, the intrepid explorer loses his foothold and falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions. Within himself, and all around him he feels nothing but chaos and darkness; to fill this void and illuminate the darkness, the characters through which he speaks have recourse to the unsatisfactory explanations of metaphysics, and, finally, irritated by these pedantic sophistries, they suddenly steal away, and escape from their own explanations.

Gradually, as Tolstoï advances in life and in his work, he is more and more engulfed in doubt; he lavishes his coldest irony upon those children of his fancy who try to believe and to discover and apply a consistent system of morality. But under this apparent coldness you feel that his heart sobs out a longing for what he cannot find, and thirsts for things eternal. Finally, weary of doubt and of search, convinced that all the calculations of reason end only in mortifying failure, fascinated by the mysticism which had long lain in wait for his unsatisfied soul, the Nihilist suddenly throws himself at the feet of a Deity,—and of what a Deity we shall see hereafter.

In finishing this chapter, I must speak of the singular phase into which the writer’s mind has fallen of late. I hope to do this with all the reserve due to a living man, and all due respect for a sincere conviction. There is nothing to me more curious than his statement of the actual condition of his own soul. It is a picture of the crisis which the Russian conscience is now passing through, seen in full sunlight, foreshortened, and upon a lofty height. This thinker is the perfect type of a multitude of minds, as well as their guide; he tries to say what these minds confusedly feel.

I.

Leo Nikolaievitch (Tolstoï) was born in the year 1828. The course of his external life has offered nothing of interest to the lovers of romance, being quite the same as that of Russian gentlemen in general. In his father’s house in the country, and afterwards at the University of Kazan, he received the usual education from foreign masters which gives to the cultivated classes in Russia their cosmopolitan turn of mind. He then entered the army and spent several years in the Caucasus in a regiment of artillery, and was afterwards transferred at his request to Sebastopol. He went through the famous siege in the Crimean War, which he has illustrated by three striking sketches: “Sebastopol in December, in May, and in August.” Resigning his position when peace was declared, Count Tolstoï first travelled extensively, then settled at St. Petersburg and Moscow, living in the society of his own class. He studied society and the court as he had studied the war—with that serious attention which tears away the masks from all faces and reads the inmost heart. After a few winters of fashionable life, he left the capital, partly, it is said, to escape from the different literary circles which were anxious to claim him among their votaries. In 1860, he married and retired to his ancestral estate, near Tula, where he has remained almost constantly for twenty-five years. The whole history of his own life is hardly disguised in the autobiography he wrote, entitled, “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.” The evolution of his inward experience is further carried out in the two great novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” and ends, as might have been foreseen, with the theological and moral essays which have for some years quite absorbed his intellectual activity.

I believe the author’s first composition, while he was an officer in the army of the Caucasus, must have been the novelette published later under the title, “The Cossacks.” This is the least systematic of all his works, and is perhaps the one which best betrays the precocious originality of his mind, and his remarkable power of seeing and representing truth. This book marks a date in literature: the definite rupture of Russian poetry with Byronism and romanticism in the very heart of their former reign. The influence of Byron was so strong that the prejudiced eyes of the poets saw the Orient in which they lived through their poetical fancy, which transfigured both scenery and men. Attracted like so many other writers toward this region, Tolstoï, or, rather, Olenin, the hero of the Cossacks (I believe them to be one and the same), leaves Moscow one beautiful evening, after a farewell supper with his young friends. Weary of civilization, he throws off his habitual thoughts as he would a worn-out garment; his troïka bears him away to a strange country; he longs for a primitive life, new sensations, new interests.

Our traveller installs himself in one of the little Cossack settlements on the river Terek; he adopts the life of his new friends, takes part in their expeditions and hunts; an old mountaineer, who somewhat recalls Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking,” undertakes to be his guide. Olenin quite naturally falls in love with the lovely Marianna, daughter of his host. Tolstoï will now show us the Orient in a new light, in the mirror of truth. For the lyric visions of his predecessors he substitutes a philosophical view of men and things. From the very first this acute observer understood how puerile it is to lend to these creatures of instinct our refinement of thought and feeling, our theatrical way of representing passion. The dramatic interest of his tale consists in the fatal want of mutual understanding that must, perforce, exist between the heart of a civilized being and that of a wild, savage creature, and the total impossibility of two souls of such different calibre blending in a mutual passion. Olenin tries in vain to cultivate simplicity of feeling. Because he dons a Circassian cap, he cannot at the same time change his nature and become primitive. His love cannot separate itself from all the intellectual complications which our literary education lends to this passion. He says:—

“What there is terrible and at the same time interesting in my condition is that I feel that I understand Marianna and that she never will be able to understand me. Not that she is inferior to me,—quite the contrary; but it is impossible for her to understand me. She is happy; she is natural; she is like Nature itself, equable, tranquil, happy in herself.”

The character of this little Asiatic, strange and wild as a young doe, is beautifully drawn. I appeal to those who are familiar with the East and have proved the falsity of those Oriental types invented by European literature. They will find in the “The Cossacks,” a surprising exposure of the falsity of that other moral world. Tolstoï has brought this country before us by his vivid and picturesque descriptions of its natural features. The little idyl serves as a pretext for magnificent descriptions of the Caucasus; steppe, forest, and mountain stand before us as vividly as the characters which inhabit them. The grand voices of Nature join in with and support the human voices, as an orchestra leads and sustains a chorus. The author, absorbed as he was afterwards in the study of the human soul, never again expressed such a profound sympathy with nature as in this work. At this time Tolstoï was inclined to be both pantheist and pessimist, vacillating between the two. “Trois Morts,” a fragment of his, contains the substance of this philosophy:—

“The happiest man, and the best, is he who thinks the least and who lives the simplest life and dies the simplest death. Accordingly, the peasant is better than the lord, the tree is better than the peasant, and the death of an oak-tree is a greater calamity to the world than the death of an old princess.”

This is Rousseau’s doctrine exaggerated: the man who thinks is not only a depraved animal but an inferior plant. But Pantheism is another attempt at a rational explanation of the universe: Nihilism will soon replace it. This monster has already devoured the inmost soul of the man, without his even being conscious of it. It is easy to be convinced of this when we read his “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.” It is the journal of the gradual awakening of an intelligence to life; it lays before us the whole secret of the formation of Tolstoï’s moral character. The author subjects his own conscience to that penetrating, inexorable analysis, which later he will use upon society; he tries his hand upon himself first of all. It is a singular book, lengthy, and sometimes trivial; Dickens is rapid and sketchy in comparison with him. In relating the course of a most ordinary journey from the country into Moscow, he counts every turn of the wheels, notes every passing peasant, every guide-post. But this fastidious observance of details, applied to trivial facts, becomes a wonderful instrument when applied to human nature and to psychological researches. It throws light upon the man’s own inner conscience, without regard to his self-love; he sees himself as he is, and lays bare his soul with all its petty vanities, and the ingratitude and mistrust of an ill-humored child. We shall recognize this same child in the principal characters of his great novels, with its nature quite unchanged. I will quote two passages which show us the very foundation of Nihilism in the brain of a lad of sixteen:—

“Of all philosophical doctrines, the one which attracted me most strongly was skepticism; for a time it brought me to a condition verging upon madness. I would imagine that nothing whatever existed in the world except myself; that all objects were only illusions, evoked by myself just at the moment I gave attention to them, and which vanished the moment I ceased to think of them…. There were times when, possessed by this idea, I was brought into such a bewildered state that I would turn quickly around and look behind me, hoping to be able to pierce through the chaos which lay beyond me. My enfeebled mind could not penetrate through the impenetrable, and would lose by degrees in this wearisome struggle the certainties which for the sake of my own happiness, I ought never to have sought. I reaped nothing from all this intellectual effort but an activity of mind which weakened my will-power, and a habit of incessant moral analysis which robbed every sensation of its freshness and warped my judgment on every subject….”

Such a cry might have been uttered by a disciple of Schelling. But listen to what follows from the heart of a Russian, who speaks for his countrymen as well as himself:—

“When I remember how young I was, and the state of mind I was in, I realize perfectly how the most atrocious crimes might be committed without reason or a desire to injure any one, but, so to speak, from a sort of curiosity or an unconscious necessity of action. There are times when the future appears to a man so dark that he fears to look into it; and he totally suspends the exercise of his own reason within himself, and tries to persuade himself that there is no future and that there has been no past. At such moments, when the mind no longer controls the will, when the material instincts are the only springs of life left to us,—I can understand how an inexperienced child can, without hesitation or fear, and with a smile of curiosity, set fire to his own house, in which all those he loves best—father, mother, and brothers—are sleeping. Under the influence of this temporary eclipse of the mind, which I might call a moment of aberration or distraction,—a young peasant lad of sixteen stands looking at the shining blade of an axe just sharpened, which lies under the bench upon which his old father has fallen asleep: suddenly he brandishes the axe, and finds himself looking with stupid curiosity, upon the stream of blood under the bench which is flowing from the aged head he has just cleft. In this condition of mind, a man likes to lean over a precipice and think: ‘What if I should throw myself over head first!’ or to put a loaded pistol to his forehead and think: ‘Suppose I should pull the trigger!’ or when he sees a person of dignity and consequence surrounded by the universal respect of all, and suddenly feels impelled to go up to him and take him by the nose, saying: ‘Come along, old fellow!’”

This is pure childishness, you will say! So it would be in our steadier brains and more active lives, rarely disturbed by these attacks of nightmare. Turgenef has touched upon this national malady of his fellow-countrymen in his last tale, “Despair,” as well as Dostoyevski in many of his. There are several cases in “Recollections of a Dead House,” identical with those described by Tolstoï, although the two authors’ treatment of this theme are so unlike. The word in their language which expresses this condition is quite untranslatable. Despair approaches it nearest; but the condition is a mixture also of fatalism, barbarism, asceticism, and other qualities, or want of them. It may describe, perhaps, Hamlet’s mental malady or attack of madness, at the moment he ran his sword through Polonius, father of his Ophelia. It seems to be a sort of horrible fascination which belongs to cold countries, to a climate of extremes, where they learn to endure everything better than an ordinary fate, and prefer annihilation to moderation.

Poor Russia! a tempest-tossed sea-gull, hovering over an abyss!

Nihilist and pessimist,—are not these synonymous words, and must they not both exist in the same person? From this time, all Tolstoï’s productions would argue this to be the fact. A few short tales are a prelude to his two great novels, which we must now make a study of, as to them he devoted his highest powers and concentrated upon them his profoundest thought. His talent heretofore had produced but fragmentary compositions and sketches.

II.

“War and Peace” is a picture of Russian society during the great Napoleonic wars, from 1805 to 1815. We question whether this complicated work can be properly called a novel. “War and Peace” is a summary of the author’s observations of human life in general. The interminable series of episodes, portraits, and reflections which Tolstoï presents to us are introduced through a few fictitious characters; but the real hero of this epic is Russia herself, passing through her desperate struggle against the foreign invader. The real characters, Alexander, Napoleon, Kutuzof, Speranski, occupy nearly as much space as the imaginary ones; the simple and rather slack thread of romance serves to bind together the various chapters on history, politics, philosophy, heaped pell-mell into this polygraph of the Russian world. Imagine Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” being re-written by Dickens in his untiring, exhaustless manner, then re-constructed by the cold, searching pen of Stendhal, and you may possibly form an idea of the general arrangement and execution of the work, and of that curious union of epic grandeur and infinitesimal analytical detail. I try to fancy M. Meissonier painting a panorama; I doubt if he could do it, but if he could his twofold talent would illustrate the double character of Tolstoï’s work.

The pleasure to be derived from it resembles that from mountain-climbing; the way is often rough and wild, the path, as you ascend, difficult to find, effort and fatigue are indispensable; but when you reach the summit and look around you the reward is great. Magnificent vistas stretch beneath you; he who has never accomplished the ascent will never know the true face of the country, the course of its rivers or the relative situation of its towns. A stranger, therefore, who would understand Russia of the nineteenth century, must read Tolstoï; and whoever would undertake to write a history of that country would utterly fail in his task if he neglected to consult this exhaustless repository of the national life. Those who have a passion for the study of history will not, perhaps, grow impatient over this mass of characters and succession of trivial incidents with which the work is loaded down. Will it be the same with those who seek only amusement in a work of fiction? For these, Tolstoï will break up all previous habits. This incorrigible analyst is either ignorant of or disdains the very first method of procedure employed by all our writers; we expect our novelist to select out his character or event, and separate it from the surrounding chaos of beings and objects, making a special study of the object of his choice. The Russian, ruled by the sentiment of universal dependence, is never willing to cut the thousand ties which bind men, actions, thoughts, to the rest of the universe; he never forgets the natural mutual dependence of all things. Imagine the Latin and the Slav before a telescope. The first arranges it to suit himself; that is, he voluntarily foreshortens his range of vision, to make more distinct what he sees, and diminish the extent of it; the second requires the full power of the instrument, enlarges his horizon, and sees a confused picture, for the sake of seeing farther.

In a passage in “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoï well defines the contrast between two such natures, and the mutual attraction they exert upon each other. Levin, the dreamer, meets one of his friends, who is of a methodical turn of mind.

“Levin imagined that Katavasof’s clearness of conception came from the poverty and narrowness of his nature; Katavasof thought that Levin’s incoherency of ideas arose from the want of a well disciplined mind; but the clearness of Katavasof pleased Levin, and the natural richness of an undisciplined mind in the latter was agreeable to the other.”

These lines sum up all the grounds of complaint that the Russians have to reproach us with in our literature, and those we have against theirs; which differences explain the pleasure the two races find in an interchange of their literary productions.

It is easy to predict what impressions all readers of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” will receive. I have seen the same effect invariably produced upon all who have read those books. At first, for some time, the reader will hardly find his bearings; not knowing whither he is being led, he will soon grow weary of the task that lies before him. But little by little he will be drawn on, captivated by the complex action of all these characters, among whom he will find himself, as well as some of his friends, and will become most anxious to unravel the secret of their destinies. On closing the book, he feels a sense of regret, as if parting with a family with which he has been for years on terms of familiar intercourse. He has passed through the experience of the traveller thrown into the novelty of new society and surroundings; he feels annoyance and fatigue at first, then curiosity, and finally has formed deeply rooted attachments.

What seems to me the distinction between the classic author and a conscientious painter of life as it is, like Tolstoï, is this: a book is like a drawing-room filled with strangers; the first type of author voluntarily presents you to this company at once, and unveils to you the thousand intertwining combinations, incidents, and intrigues going on there; with the second you must go forward and present yourself, find out for yourself the persons of mark, the various relations and sentiments of the entire circle, live, in fact, in the midst of this fictitious company, just as you have lived in society, among real people. To be able to judge of the respective merit of the two methods, we must interrogate one of the fundamental laws of our being. Is there any pleasure worth having which does not cost some little trouble? Do we not prefer what we have acquired by an effort all our own? Let us reflect upon this. Whatever may be our individual preferences in regard to intellectual pleasure, I think we can agree on one point: in the old, well worn paths of literature, mediocrity may be tolerated; but when an author strikes out in a new path we cannot tolerate a partial success; he must write dramas equal to Shakespeare, and romances as good as Tolstoï’s, to give us a true picture of life as it is. This we have in “War and Peace,” and the question of its success has been decided in the author’s favor. When I visit with him the soldiers in camp, the court, and court society, which has hardly changed in the last half-century, and see how he lays bare the hearts of men, I cry out at every page I read: “How true that is!” As we go on, our curiosity changes into astonishment, astonishment into admiration, before this inexorable judge, who brings every human action before his tribunal, and forces from every heart its secrets. We feel as if drawn on with the current of a tranquil, never-ending stream, the stream of human life, carrying with it the hearts of men, with all their agitated and complicated movements and emotions.

War is one of the social phenomena which has strongly attracted our author and philosopher. He is present at the Council of Generals and at the soldiers’ bivouac; he studies the moral condition of each; he understands the orders, and why they should be obeyed. He presents to us the whole physiognomy of the Russian army. A minute description which he gives of a disorderly retreat is second only to Schiller’s “Camp of Wallenstein.” He describes the first engagement, the first cannon-shot, the fall of the first soldier, the agony of that long-dreaded moment.

In the course of these volumes the imperial battles are portrayed; Austerlitz, Friedland, Borodino. Tolstoï talks of war like a man who has taken part in it; he knows that a battle is never witnessed by the participants. The soldier, officer, or general which the writer introduces never sees but a single point of the combat; but by the way in which a few men fight, think, talk, and die on that spot, we understand the entire action, and know on what side the victory will be.

When Tolstoï wishes to give us a general description of anything, he ingeniously makes use of some artifice; as, for example, in the engagement at Schöngraben he introduces an aide-de-camp who carries an order the whole length of the line of battle. Then the corps commanders bring in their reports, not of what has taken place, but of what naturally ought to have taken place. How is this? “The colonel had so strongly desired to execute this movement, he so regretted not having been able to carry it out, that it seemed to him that all must have taken place as he wished. Perhaps it really had! Is it ever possible in such confusion to find out what has or has not occurred?”—How perfect is this ironical explanation! I appeal to any soldier who has ever taken part in any action in war, and heard an account given of it by the other participants.

We do not demand of this realistic writer the conventional ideas of the classic authors;—an entire army heroic as its leaders, living only for the great causes it accomplishes, wholly absorbed in its lofty aim. Tolstoï reveals human nature: the soldier’s life, careless, occupied with trifling duties; the officers, with their pleasures or schemes of promotion; the generals, with their ambitions and intrigues; all these seeming quite accustomed and indifferent to what to us appears extraordinary and imposing. However, the author, by dint of sheer simplicity, sometimes draws tears of sympathy from us for those unconscious heroes, such as, for example, the pathetic character of Captain Touchino, which recalls Renault, in “Servitude et Grandeur Militaires.”[L] Tolstoï is severe upon the leaders of the Russian army; he reminds us of the councils of war after the late trials; he satirizes the French and German strategists by whom Alexander was surrounded; and, with his Nihilistic ideas, he thoroughly enjoys describing this Babel of tongues and opinions. With one man alone he secretly sympathizes—with the commander-in-chief, Kutuzof. And why?—Because he gave no orders, and went to sleep during the council, giving up everything to fate. All these descriptions of military life converge toward this idea, which is developed in the philosophical appendix to the novel; all action on the part of the commanders is vain and useless; everything depends upon the fortuitous action of small divisions, the only decisive factor being one of those unforeseen impulses or inspirations which at certain times impels an army. As regards battle array, who thinks of it on the spot when thousands of possible combinations arise? The military genius in command sees only the smoke; he invariably receives his information and issues his orders too late. Can the commander carry out any general plan who is leading on his troops, which number ten, fifty, or one hundred men out of one hundred thousand, within a small radius? The rest of the account you may find in the next day’s bulletins! Over the three hundred thousand combatants fighting in the plains of Borodino blows the wind of chance, bringing victory or defeat.

Here is the same mystic spirit of Nihilism which springs up before every problem of life.

After war, the study which Tolstoï loves best, come the intrigues of the higher classes of society and its centre of gravitation, the court. As differences of race grow less distinct as we approach the higher classes of society, the novelist creates no longer merely Russian types, but general, human, universal ones. Since St. Simon, no one has so curiously unveiled the secret mechanism of court life. We are very apt to distrust writers of fiction when they attempt to depict these hidden spheres; we suspect them of listening behind doors and peeping through key-holes. But this Russian author is in his native element; he has frequented and studied the court as he has the army; he talks of his peers in their own language, and has had the same education and culture; therefore his information is copious and correct, like what you obtain from the comedian who divulges the secrets of the boards.

Go with the author into the salons of certain ladies of the court; listen to the tirades of refugees, the opinions expressed upon Buonaparte, the intrigues of the courtiers, and that peculiar accent when they mention any member of the imperial family. Visit with him a statesman’s home; sit down at Speranski’s table (the man who “laughs a stage laugh”); mark the sovereign’s passage through a ball-room by the light which is visible upon every face from the moment he enters the apartment; above all, visit the death-bed of old Count Bezushof, and witness the tragedy which is being acted under the mask of etiquette; the struggle of base instincts around that speechless, expiring old man, and the general agitation. Here a sinister element, as elsewhere a lofty one, lends marvellous force to the simple sincerity of the picture and to the restraint which propriety imposes upon faces and tongues.

Every passage in which the Emperors Napoleon and Alexander appear in action or speech should be read in order to understand the place that Nihilism occupies in the Russian mind so far as regards the denial of the grandeur and respect accorded by general consent to such potentates. The writer speaks in a deferential tone, as if he would in no wise curtail the majesty of power; but by bringing it down to the most trivial exigencies of life he utterly destroys it. Scattered through the tale we find ten or twelve little sketches of Napoleon drawn with great care, without hostility or an approach to caricature; but merely by withdrawing him from the legendary halo surrounding him, the man’s greatness crumbles away. It is generally some physical peculiarity or trivial act, skilfully introduced, which seems quite incompatible with the sceptre and the imperial robes. With Napoleon, Tolstoï evidently takes great liberties; but it is curious to note these descriptive touches when applied to his own sovereign. With infinite precautions and perfect propriety, the spell of majesty is broken through the incongruity of the man’s actual habits and the formidable rôle he plays. I will quote one of the many examples of this kind (Alexander is at Moscow, in 1812; he receives the ovations of his people at the Kremlin, at the solemn hour when war is proclaimed): “When the Tzar had dined, the master of ceremonies said, looking out of the window, ‘The people are hoping to see your Majesty.’ The emperor, who was eating a biscuit, rose and went out on the balcony. The people rushed towards the terrace. ‘Our emperor! Our father! Hurrah! Hurrah!’ cried the people. Many women and a few men actually wept for joy. Quite a large piece of the biscuit the emperor held in his hand broke off and fell upon the balustrade, and from that to the ground. The man nearest to it was a cab-driver, in a blouse, who made a rush for the piece and seized it. Others rushed upon the coachman; whereupon the emperor had a plateful of biscuit brought, and began to throw them from the balcony to the crowd. Pierre’s eyes became blood-shot; the danger of being crushed only excited him the more, and he pressed forward through the crowd. He could not have told why he felt that he positively must have one of those biscuit thrown by the hand of the Tzar….”

Again, there is nothing more true to nature than the account of the audience granted by the Emperor of Austria to Bolkonski, who had been despatched as a courier to Brünn with the news of a victory of the allies. The writer describes so well the gradual disenchantment of the young officer, who sees his great battle vanish before his eyes in the opinion of men. He quitted the scene of the exploit expecting to astonish the world with the announcement he now brings; but on his arrival at Brünn a bucket of cold water has been thrown over his dreams by the “polite” aide-de-camp, the minister of war, the emperor himself, who addresses a few words to him in an absent way—the ordinary questions as to the time of day, the particular spot where the affair took place, and the usual indispensable compliments. When he takes his leave, after reflecting upon the subject from the point of view of other men, according to their respective interests, poor Bolkonski finds his battle much diminished in grandeur, and also a thing of the past.

“Andé felt that his whole interest and joy over the victory was sinking away from him into the indifferent hands of the minister of war and the ‘polite’ aide-de-camp. His whole train of thought had become modified; there seemed to be nothing left to him but a dim, distant recollection of the battle.”

This is one of the phenomena most closely analyzed by Tolstoï—this variable influence exerted upon man by his surroundings. He likes to plunge his characters successively into different atmospheres,—that of the soldier’s life, the country, the fashionable world,—and then to show us the corresponding moral changes in them. When a man, after having for some time been under the empire of thoughts and passions previously foreign to him, returns into his former sphere, his views on all subjects change at once. Let us follow young Nikolai Rostof when he returns from the army to his home, and back again to his cavalry regiment. He is not the same person, but seems to be possessed of two souls. On the journey back and forth to Moscow, he gradually lays aside or resumes the one which his profession requires.

It is useless to multiply examples of Tolstoï’s psychological curiosity, which is ever awake. It forms the principal feature of his genius. He loves to analyze the human puppet in every part. A stranger enters the room; the author studies his expression, voice, and step; he shows us the depths of the man’s soul. He explains a glance interchanged between two persons, in which he discovers friendship, fear, a feeling of superiority in one of them; in fact, a perfect knowledge of the mutual relations of these two men. This relentless physician constantly feels the pulse of every one who crosses his path, and coolly notes down the condition of his health, morally speaking. He proceeds in an objective manner, never directly describing a person except by making him act out his characteristics.

This fundamental precept of classic art has been adopted by this realistic writer in his desire to imitate real life, in which we learn to comprehend people by trivial indications and by points of resemblance, without any information as to their position or qualities. A good deal of art is required to discern clearly in this apparent chaos, and you have a large choice in the formidable accumulation of details. Observe how, in the course of a conversation or the narration of some episode, Tolstoï makes the actors visibly present before us by calling our attention to one of their gestures, or some little absurd, peculiar habit, or by interrupting their conversation to show us the direction of their glances. This occurs constantly.

There is also a good deal of wit in this serious style; not the flashes and sallies of wit that we are familiar with, but of a fine, penetrating quality, with subtle and singularly apt comparisons.

III.

Among the numerous characters in “War and Peace,” the action is concentrated upon two only—Prince André Bolkonski and Pierre Bezushof. These remarkable types of character are well worthy of attention. In them the double aspect of the Russian soul, as well as of the author’s own, is reflected with all its harassing thoughts and contradictions. Prince André is a nobleman of high rank, looking down from his lofty position upon the life he despises; proud, cold, sceptical, atheistic, although at times his mind is tortured with anxiety concerning great problems. Through him the author pronounces his verdicts upon the historical characters of the time, and discourses of the various statesmen and their intrigues.

André is received at Speranski’s. We know the wonderful influence acquired by this man, who almost established a new constitution in Russia. Speranski’s most striking trait, in Prince André’s opinion, was his absolute, unshaken faith in the force and legitimacy of reason. This trait was what particularly attracted André to him, and explains the ascendency that Speranski acquired over his sovereign and his country. André, having been seriously wounded at Austerlitz, lies on the battle-field, his eyes raised to heaven. The dying man exclaims:—

“Oh, could I now but say, ‘Lord, have pity upon me!’ But who will hear me? Shall I address an indefinite, unapproachable Power, which cannot itself be expressed in words, the great All or Nothing, or that image of God which is within the amulet that Marie gave me?… There is nothing certain except the nothingness of everything that I have any conception of, and the majesty of something beyond my conception!”

Pierre Bezushof is more human in character, but his intelligence is of quite as mysterious a quality. He is a stout man, of lymphatic temperament, absent-minded; a man who blushes and weeps easily, susceptible to love, sympathetic with all suffering. He is a type of the kind-hearted Russian noblemen, nervous, deficient in will, a constant prey to the ideas and influence of others; but under his gross exterior lives a soul so subtle, so mystic, that it might well be that of a Hindu monk. One day, after Pierre had given his word of honor to his friend André that he would not go to a midnight revel of some of his young friends, he hesitated when the hour of meeting came.

“‘After all,’ he thought, ‘all pledges of words are purely conventional, without definite meaning, when you reflect about it. I may die to-morrow, or some extraordinary event take place, in consequence of which the question of honor or dishonor will not even arise.’

“Reflections of this sort—destructive of all resolve or method—often occupied Pierre’s mind….” Tolstoï has skilfully made use of this weak nature, which is as receptive of all impressions as a photographer’s plate, to give us a clear conception of the chief currents of ideas in Russia in the reign of Alexander I.; these successively influence this docile adept with all their changes. We see the liberal movement of the earlier years of that reign developed in the mind of Bezushof, as afterwards the mystic and theosophic maze of its later years. Pierre personifies
the sentiments of the people in 1812, the national revolt against foreign intervention, the gloomy madness of conquered Moscow, the burning of which has never been explained, nor is it known by whose hands it was kindled. This destruction of Moscow is the culminating point of the book. The scenes of tragic grandeur, simple in outline, sombre in color, are superior, I must acknowledge, to anything of the kind in literature. He pictures the entrance of the French into the Kremlin, the prisoners and lunatics roaming by night in freedom about the burning city, the roads filled with long columns of fugitives escaping from the flames, beside many other very striking episodes.

Count Pierre remains in the burning city. He leaves his palace in plebeian guise, in a peasant’s costume, and wanders off like a person in a trance; he walks on straight before him, with a vague determination to kill Napoleon and be an expiatory victim and martyr for the people. “He was actuated by two equally strong impulses. The first was the desire to take his part of the self-sacrifice and universal suffering—a feeling which, at Borodino, had impelled him to throw himself into the thick of the battle, and which now drove him out of the house, away from the luxury and habitual refinements of his daily life, to sleep on the ground and eat the coarsest of food. The second came from that indefinable, exclusively Russian sentiment of contempt for everything conventional and artificial, for all that the majority of mankind esteem most desirable in the world. Pierre experienced this strange and intoxicating feeling on the day of his flight, when it had suddenly been impressed upon him that wealth, power, life itself, all that men seek to gain and preserve with such great effort, were absolutely worthless, or, at least, only worth the luxury of the voluntary sacrifice of these so-called blessings.” And through page after page the author unfolds that condition of mind that we discovered in his first writings, that hymn of the Nirvâna, just as it must be sung in Ceylon or Thibet.

Pierre Bezushof is certainly the elder brother of those rich men and scholars who will some day “go among the people,” and willingly share their trials, carrying a dynamite bomb under their cloaks, as Pierre carries a poniard under his, moved by a double impulse: to share the common suffering, and enjoy the anticipated annihilation of themselves and others. Taken prisoner by the French, Bezushof meets, among his companions in misfortune, a poor soldier, a peasant, with an uncultivated mind, one, indeed, rather beneath the average. This man endures the hardships on the march, through these terrible days, with the humble resignation of a beast of burden. He addresses Count Pierre with a cheerful smile, a few ingenuous words, popular proverbs with but a vague meaning, but expressing resignation, fraternity, and, above all, fatalism. One evening, when he can keep up with the others no longer, the soldiers shoot him under a pine-tree, on the snow, and the man receives death with the same indifferent tranquillity that he does everything else, like a wounded dog—in fact, like the brute. At this time a moral revolution takes place in Pierre’s soul. Here I do not expect to be intelligible to my fellow-countrymen; I only record the truth. The noble, cultured, learned Bezushof takes this primitive creature for his model; he has found at last his ideal of life in this man, who is “poor in spirit,” as well as a rational explanation of the moral world. The memory and name of Karatayef are a talisman to him; thenceforward he has but to think of the humble muzhik, to feel at peace, happy, ready to comprehend and to love the entire universe. The intellectual development of our philosopher is accomplished; he has reached the supreme avatar, mystic indifference.

When Tolstoï related this episode, he was twenty-five years of age. Had he then a presentiment that he should ever find his Karatayef, that he would pass through the same crisis, experience the same discipline, and come out of it regenerated? We shall see later on how he had actually prophesied his own experience, and that from this time he, together with Dostoyevski, was destined to establish the ideal of nearly all contemporaneous literature in Russia. Karatayef’s name is legion; under different names and forms, this vegetative form of existence will be presented for our admiration. The perfection of human wisdom is the sanctification, deification of the brute element, which is kind and fraternal in a certain vague way. The root of the idea is this:—

The cultured man finds his reasoning faculties a hindrance to him, because useless, since they do not aid him to explain the object of his life; therefore it is his duty to make an effort to reject them, and descend from complications to simplicity, in life and thought. This is the aim and aspiration, under various forms, of Tolstoï’s whole work.

He has written a series of articles on popular education. The leading idea is this:—

“I would teach the children of the common people to think and to write; but I ought rather to learn of them to write and to think. We seek our ideal beyond us, when it is in reality behind us. The development of man is not the means of realizing that idea of harmony which we bear within us, but, on the contrary, it is an obstacle in the way of its realization. A healthy child born into the world fully satisfies that ideal of truth, beauty, and goodness, which, day by day, he will constantly continue to lose; he is, at birth, nearer to the unthinking beings, to the animal, plant, nature itself, which is the eternal type of truth, beauty, and goodness.”

You can catch the thread of the idea, which is much like the contemplative mistiness of the ancient oriental asceticism. The Occident has not always been free from this evil; in its ascetic errors and deviations, it has ennobled the brute, and falsified the divine allegory of the “poor in spirit.” But the true source of this contagious spirit of renunciation is in Asia, in the doctrines of India, which spring up again, scarcely modified, in that frenzy which is precipitating a part of Russia toward an intellectual and moral abnegation, sometimes developing into a stupid quietism, and again to sublime self-devotion, like the doctrine of Buddha. All extremes meet.

I will dwell no longer upon these scarcely intelligible abstractions, but would say a word concerning the female characters created by Tolstoï. They are very similar to Turgenef’s heroines, treated, perhaps, with more depth but less of tender grace. Two characters call for special attention. First, that of Marie Bolkonski, sister of André, the faithful daughter, devoted to the work of cheering the latter years of a morose old father; a pathetic figure, as pure in outline, under the firm touch of this artist, are the works of the old painters. Of quite another type is Natasha Rostof, the passionate, fascinating young girl, beloved by all, enslaving many hearts, bearing with her an exhalation of love through the whole thread of this severe work. She is sweet-tempered, straightforward, sincere, but the victim of her own extreme sensibility.

Racine might have created a Marie Bolkonski; the Abbé Prévost would have preferred Natasha Rostof. Betrothed to Prince André, the only man she truly loves, Natasha yields to a fatal fancy for a miserable fellow. Disenchanted finally, she learns that André is wounded and dying, and goes to nurse him in a mute agony of despair. This part of the book presents the inexorableness of real life in its sudden calamities. After André’s death, Natasha marries Pierre, who has secretly loved her. French readers will be horror-stricken at these convulsions in the realms of passion; but it is like life, and Tolstoï sacrifices conventionality to the desire to paint it as it is. Do not imagine he sought a romantic conclusion. The young girl’s fickleness ends in conjugal felicity and the solid joys of home life. To these the writer devotes many pages, too many, perhaps, for our taste. He loves to dwell upon domestic life and joys; all other affections are in his eyes unwholesome exceptions—exciting his curiosity but not his sympathy. Thus he analyzes with a skilful pen, but with visible disgust, the flirtations and coquetry carried on in the salons of St. Petersburg. Like Turgenef, Tolstoï does not hold the ladies of court circles in high estimation.

He has added a long philosophical appendix to his romance, in which he brings up again, in a doctrinal form, the metaphysical questions which have tormented him the most, and once more repeats that he is a fatalist. This appendix has not been translated in the French edition, and this is well, for no reader would voluntarily undergo the useless fatigue of wading through it. Tolstoï is unwise in pressing ideas by abstract reasoning which he is so skilful in illustrating through his characters; he does not realize how much more clearly his ideas are expressed in their language and action than in any of his own arguments.

IV.

“Anna Karenina,” which appeared periodically in a Moscow review, was the result of many years’ study. The work was not published in full until 1877, and its appearance was a literary event in Russia. I happened to be a witness of the curiosity and interest it excited there.

The author intended this book to be a picture of the society of the present day, as “War and Peace” illustrated that of its time. The task offered the author more difficulties, for many reasons. In the first place, the present does not belong to us, as does the past; it deceives us, not having become firmly established, so that we cannot get in all the necessary lines and figures to emphasize it, as we could a half-century later. Besides, the liberties that Tolstoï could take with deceased potentates and statesmen, as well as with ideas of the past, he could not allow himself with contemporary ideas and with living men. This second book on Russian life is not as much in the style of an epic, neither is it as strong or as complex, as the first; on the other hand, it is more agreeable to us, as having more unity of subject and more continuity of action; the principal character, too, is more perfectly developed. Although there are two suicides and a case of adultery, Tolstoï has in this work undertaken to write the most strictly moral book in existence, and he has succeeded. The main idea is duty accomplished uninfluenced by the passions. The author portrays an existence wholly outside of conventional lines of conduct; and, as a contrast, the history of a pure, legitimate affection, a happy home, and wholesome labor. He is too much of a realist, however, to picture an earthly paradise under any human conditions.

Karenina, a statesman in the highest circles of St. Petersburg society, is a husband so greatly absorbed in the study of political economy as to be easily blinded and deceived in other matters. Vronski, the seducer of his wife’s affections, is a sincere character, devoted and self-sacrificing. Anna is a very charming woman, tender and faithful where her affections are enlisted. Tolstoï has recourse neither to hysteria nor any nervous ailment whatever, to excuse her fall. He is sagacious enough to know that every one’s feelings are regulated by his or her peculiar organism; that conscience exerts contrary influences, and that it really exists, because it speaks and commands. Take, for example, the description of Anna’s first anxieties, during the night-journey between Moscow and St. Petersburg, when she first comprehends the state of her heart. These pages you can never forget. She discovers Vronski in the train, knows that he is following her, then listens to his avowal of love. The intoxicating poison steals into every vein, her will is no longer her own, the dream has begun.

The writer takes advantage of every outward circumstance to illustrate and color this dream in his inimitable manner, according to his usual method. He describes the poor woman making an effort to fix her thoughts upon an English novel, the snow and hail rattling against the window-panes; then the sketches of fellow-travellers, the various sounds and rushing of the train through the night,—all assume a new and fantastic meaning, as accompaniments of the agony of love and terror which are struggling within that woman’s soul. When, the next morning, Anna leaves the train and steps upon the platform where her husband is awaiting her, she says to herself: “Good heavens! how much longer his ears have grown!” This exclamation reveals to us the change that has taken place within her. How well the author knows how to explain a whole situation with a single phrase!

From the first flutter of fear to the last contortions of despair, which lead the unhappy woman to suicide, the novelist exposes her inmost heart, and notes each palpitation. There is no necessity for any tragic complication to bring about the catastrophe. Anna has given up everything to follow her lover; she has placed herself in such a fatal predicament that life becomes impossible, which is sufficient to explain her resolve.

In contrast with this wrecked life, the innocent affection of Kitty and Levin continues its smooth course. First, it is a sweet idyl, drawn with infinite grace; then the home, the birth of children, bringing additional joys and cares. This is the highly moral and dull theme of the English novel, one may say. It is similar, and yet not the same. The British tale-writer is almost always something of a preacher; you feel that he judges human actions according to some preconceived rule, from the point of view of the Established Church or of puritanic ideas. But Tolstoï is entirely free from all prejudices. I might almost say he has little anxiety as to questions of morality; he constructs his edifices according to his own idea of the best method; the moral lesson springs only from facts and results, both bitter and wholesome. This is no book for the youth of twenty, nor for a lady’s boudoir,—a book containing no charming illusions; but a man in full maturity relates what experience has taught him, for the benefit of mankind.

These volumes present an exception in regard to what is thought to guarantee the permanent success of a literary work. They will be read, and then reflected upon; we shall apply the observations to our own souls and to others’ (the most unimportant as well as the most general ones); then we shall go back to his model, which will invariably verify them. Years may pass after the first reading, notes accumulate on the margins of the leaves, as in many masterpieces of the classics you find at the bottom of the pages the explanatory remarks of generations of commentators. In this case, they need merely to say: “Confer vitam.”

Tolstoï’s style is in this work the same as in “War and Peace.” He is like a scientific engineer who visits some great establishment where machines are manufactured. He studies the mechanism of every engine, examines the most trifling parts, measures the degree of steam-pressure, tries the balance-valves, studies the action of the pistons and gearing; he seeks eagerly to discover the central motive power, the invisible reservoir of force. While he is experimenting with the machinery, we, outside spectators, see only the results of all this labor, the manufactures of delicate fabrics with infinite variety of designs—life itself.

Tolstoï shows the same qualities and defects as in “War and Peace,” and gives the same tediously long descriptions. The parts devoted to the pictures of country life and rural occupations will seem, in France, a little dull. Unfortunately, in one sort of realistic description, we must know the locality to appreciate the artist’s effort and the resemblance of the picture. The description, for instance, of the races at Tsarskoe-Selo, so appreciated by Russian readers, could not have any more interest for us than the brilliant account of le grand prix de Paris in “Nana” would have for the Muscovites; on the other hand, the portraits of Oblonski and Karenina will always retain their power, because they express human sentiments common to all countries and all times. I will carry the analysis of these novels no farther, for they will hardly admit of it; we could scarcely choose a path in this labyrinth for the reader; we must leave him the pleasure of losing himself in it.

Tolstoï belongs to the “school of nature,” if extreme realism of description entitles him to that honor. He carries this tendency sometimes to great excess, even to coarseness. I might quote many examples of this kind, but they would hardly bear translation, and might, occasionally, be almost revolting to us. He is also an impressionist, for his phrases often bring to us every material sensation produced by a sight, object, or sound.

Finally, his being both pessimist and Nihilist gives him, as a narrator, almost the impassibility of a stoic. Persuaded of the vanity of all human action, he can maintain his own coolness in all his delineations, his condition resembling that of a man awaking from sleep at dawn, in the middle of a ball-room, who looks upon the whirling dancers around him as lunatics; or the man who, having eaten to repletion, enters a hall where people are dining, and upon whom the mechanical movements of the mouths and forks make a grotesque impression. In short, a writer who is a pessimist must assume the superiority of an inexorable judge over the characters he has created. Tolstoï employs all these methods, which he carries as far as any of our novelists do. Why is it, then, that he produces such a different impression upon the reader? The question as to how far he is both realist and impressionist in comparison with our authors is the important one. The whole secret is a question of degree. The truth is that what others have sought he has found and adopted. He leaves a large space for trifling details, because life is made up of them, and life is his study; but as he never attacks subjects trifling in themselves, he after all gives to trifles only the secondary place which they hold in everything that demands our attention.

As an impressionist he well knows how to produce certain rapid and subtle sensations, while he is never obscene or unhealthy in tone. “War and Peace” is put into the hands of all young girls in Russia. “Anna Karenina,” which touches upon a perilous subject, is considered a manual of morals.

As to Tolstoï’s impassibility, though his coldness almost approaches irony, we feel, behind and within the man, the shadow of the Infinite, and bow before his right to criticise his fellow-man. Moreover, unlike our own authors, he is never preoccupied with himself or the effect he wishes to produce. He is more logical; he sacrifices style that he himself may be eclipsed, put aside entirely in his work. In his earlier years he was more solicitous in regard to his style; but of late he has quite renounced this seductive temptation. We need not expect of him the beautiful, flowing language of Turgenef. An appropriate and clear form of expression of his ideas is all we shall have. His phraseology is diffuse, sometimes fatiguing from too much repetition; he makes use of a great many adjectives, of all he needs to add the smallest touches of color to a portrait; while incidents rapidly accumulate, from the inexhaustible fund of thought in the farthest recesses of his mind. From our point of view, this absence of style is an unpardonable defect; but to me it appears a necessary consequence of realism which does away with all conventionality. If style is a conventionality, might it not warp our judgment of facts presented to us? We must acknowledge that this contempt of style, if not to our taste, contributes to the impression of sincerity that we receive. Tolstoï, in Pascal’s way, “has not tried to show to us himself, but our own selves; we find in ourselves the truths presented, which before were utterly unknown to us, as in ourselves; this attracts us strongly to him who has enlightened us.”

There is still another difference between Tolstoï’s realism and ours: he applies his, by preference, to the study of characters difficult to deal with, those made more inaccessible to the observer by the refinements of education and the mask of social conventionalities. This struggle between the painter and his model is deeply interesting to me and to many others.

Count Tolstoï would no doubt commiserate us if he found us occupied in discussing his works; for the future he wishes to be only a philosopher and reformer. Let us, then, return to his philosophy. I have said already that the composition of “Anna Karenina,” written at long intervals, occupied many years of the author’s life, the moral fluctuations of which are reflected in the character of Constantin Levin, the child and confidant of his soul. This new incarnation of Bezushof, in “War and Peace,” is the usual hero of modern romance in Russia, the favorite type with Turgenef and with all the young girls. He is a country gentleman, intelligent, educated, though not brilliant, a speculative dreamer, fond of rural life, and interested in all the social questions and difficulties arising from it. Levin studies these questions, and takes his part in all the liberal emotions his country has indulged in for the last twenty years. Of course, his illusions and chimeras vanish, one after another, and his Nihilism triumphs bitterly over their ruins. His Nihilism is not of so severe a kind as that of Pierre Bezushof and Prince André. He drops the most cruel problems and takes up questions of political economy. A calm and laborious country life, with family joys and cares, has strangled the serpent. Years pass, and the tale goes on toward its close.

But suddenly, through several moral shocks in his experience, Levin awakes from his religious indifference, and is tormented by doubts. He becomes overwhelmed with despair, when the muzhik appears who proves his saviour and instructor. His mind becomes clear through some of the aphorisms uttered by this wise peasant. He declares that “every evil comes from the folly, the wickedness of reason. We have only to love and believe, and there is no further difficulty.” Thus ends the long intellectual drama, in a ray of mystic happiness, a hymn of joy, proclaiming the bankruptcy and the downfall of reason.

Reason has but a narrow sphere of its own, is only useful in a limited horizon, as the rag-picker’s lantern is merely of use to light up the few feet of space immediately around him, the heap of rubbish upon which he depends for subsistence. What folly it would be for the poor man to turn those feeble rays toward the starry heavens, seeking to penetrate the inscrutable mysteries of those fathomless spaces!

V.

The consolation of the doctrines of Quietism, the final apotheosis of Tolstoï’s entire literary work, was yet in reserve for him, revealed through an humble apostle of these doctrines. He too was destined to find his Karatayef.

After the appearance of “Anna Karenina,” a new production from this author was impatiently anticipated. He undertook a sequel to “War and Peace,” and published the first three chapters of the work, which promised to be quite equal to his preceding novels; but he soon abandoned the undertaking. Only a few stories for children now appeared, some of which were exquisitely written. In them, however, you could but feel that the soul of the author had already soared above terrestrial aims. At last, the report spread that the novelist had renounced his art, even wishing no allusion made to his former works, as belonging to the vanities of the age, and had given himself up to the care of his soul and the contemplation of religious themes. Count Tolstoï had met with Sutayef, the sectary of Tver. I will not here dwell upon this original character—a gentle idealist, one among the many peasants who preached among the Russian people the gospel of the Communists. The teachings and example of this man exerted a strong influence upon Tolstoï, according to his own statement, and caused him to decide what his true vocation was.

We could have no excuse for intruding upon the domain of conscience, had not the author, now a theologian, invited us so to do, by publishing his late works, “My Confession,” “My Religion,” and “A Commentary on the Gospel.” Although, in reality, the press-censorship has never authorized the publication of these books, there are several hundred autographic copies of them in circulation, spread among university students, women, and even among the common people, and eagerly devoured by them. This shows how the Russian soul hungers for spiritual food. As Tolstoï has expressed the desire that his work should be translated into French, we have every right to criticise it. But I will not abuse the privilege. The only books which can interest us as an explanation of his mental state are the first two.

Even “My Confession” is nothing new to me. In his “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth” we have the same revelation in advance, as well as from the lips of Bezushof and Levin. This is, however, a new and eloquent variation in the same theme, the same wail of anguish from the depths of a human soul. I will give a quotation:—

“I became sceptical quite early in life. For a time I was absorbed, like every one else, in the vanities of life. I wrote books, teaching, as others did, what I knew nothing of myself. Then I became thirsty for more knowledge. The study of humanity furnished no response to the constant, sole question of any importance to me—‘What is the object of my existence?’ Science responded by teaching me other things which I was not anxious to learn. I could but join in the cry of the preacher, ‘All is vanity!’ I would gladly have taken my life. Finally I determined to study the lives of the great majority of men who have none of our anxieties—those classes which you might say are superior to abstract speculations of the mind, but that labor and endure, and yet live tranquil lives and seem to have no doubts as to the end and aim of life. Then I understood that, to live as they did, we must go back to our primitive faith. But the corrupt teachings which the church distributed among the lowly could not satisfy my reason; then I made a closer study of those teachings, in order to distinguish superstition from truth.”

The result of this study is the doctrine brought forth under the title of “My Religion.” This religion is precisely the same as that of Sutayef, but explained with the aid of the theological and scientific knowledge of a cultivated scholar. It is, however, none the clearer for that. The gospel is subjected to the broadest rationalistic interpretation. In fact, Tolstoï’s interpretation of Christ’s doctrine of life is the same as the Sadducees’—that is, of life considered in a collective sense. He denies that the gospel makes any allusion to a resurrection of the body, or to an individual existence of the soul. In this unconscious Pantheism, an attempt at a conciliation between Christianity and Buddhism, life is considered as an indivisible entirety, as one individual soul of the universe, of which we are but ephemeral particles. One thing only is of consequence—morality; which is all contained in the precepts of the gospel, “Be ye perfect…. Judge not…. Thou shalt not kill, …” etc. Therefore there must be no tribunals, no armies, no prisons, no right of retaliation, either public or private, no wars, no trials. The universal law of the world is the struggle for existence; the law of Christ is the sacrifice of one’s life for others. Neither Turkey nor Germany will attack us, if we are true Christians, if we study their advantage. Happiness, the supreme end of a life of morality, is possible only in the union of all men in believing the doctrine of Jesus Christ—that is, in Tolstoï’s version of it, not in that of the church; in the return to a natural mode of life, to communism, giving up cities and all business, as incompatible with these doctrines, and because of the difficulty of their application in such a life. To support his statements, the writer presents to us, with rare eloquence and prophetic vividness, a picture of a life of worldliness from birth to death. This life is more terrible in his eyes than that of the Christian martyrs.

The apostle of the new faith spares not the established church; but, after relating his vain search for comfort in the so-called true orthodoxy, violently attacks this church from Sutayef’s point of view. He declares that she substitutes rites and formalities for the true spirit of the gospel; that she issues catechisms filled with false doctrines; that since the time of Constantine she has ruined herself by deviating from the law of God to follow that of the age; that she has now, in fact, become pagan. Finally, and this is the key-note and the most delicate point of all, no attention should be paid to the commands and prohibitions of any temporal power as long as it ignores the truth. Here I will quote an incident illustrative of this idea:—

“Passing recently through the Borovitzki gate at Moscow, I saw an aged beggar seated in the archway, who was a cripple and had his head bound with a bandage. I drew out my purse to give him alms. Just then a fine-looking young grenadier came running down towards us from the Kremlin. At sight of him, the beggar rose terrified, and ran limping away until he reached the foot of the hill into the Alexander garden. The grenadier pursued him a short distance, calling after him with abusive epithets, because he had been forbidden to sit in the archway. I waited for the soldier, and then asked him if he could read.—‘Yes,’ he replied: ‘why do you ask?’—‘Have you read the Gospel?’—‘Yes.’—‘Have you read the passage in regard to giving bread to the hungry?’—I quoted the whole passage. He knew it, and listened attentively, seeming somewhat confused. Two persons, passing by, stopped to listen. Evidently, the grenadier was ill at ease, as he could not reconcile the having done a wrong act, while strictly fulfilling his duty. He hesitated for a reply. Suddenly his eyes lighted up intelligently, and, turning toward me, he said: ‘May I ask you if you have read the military regulations?’ I acknowledged that I had not.—‘Then you have nothing to say,’ replied the grenadier, nodding his head triumphantly, as he walked slowly away.”

I have, perhaps, said enough respecting “My Religion”; but must give a literal translation of a few lines which show the superb self-confidence always latent in the heart of every reformer:—

“Everything confirmed the truth of the sense in which the doctrine of Christ now appeared to me. But for a long time I could not take in the strange thought that, after the Christian faith had been accepted by so many thousands of men for eighteen centuries, and so many had consecrated their lives to the study of that faith, it should be given to me to discover the law of Christ, as an entirely new thing. But, strange as it was, it was indeed a fact.”

We can now judge what his “Commentary on the Gospel” would be. God forbid that I should disturb the new convert’s tranquillity! Fortunately, that would be impossible, however. Tolstoï joyously affirms, and with perfect sincerity, that his soul has at last found repose, as well as the true object of his life and the rock of his faith. He invites us to follow him, but I fear the hardened sceptics of Western Europe will refuse to enter into any discussion with him upon the new religion, which seems, moreover, almost daily to undergo modifications, according to its founder’s new flights of thought. It eliminates gradually, more and more, the doctrine of a Divine Providence overruling all, and concentrates all duty, hope, and moral activity upon a single object, the reform of all social evils through Communism.

This idea exclusively inspires the last treatise of Tolstoï which I read; it is entitled: “What, then, must be done?” This title is significant enough, and has been used many times in Russia since the famous novel by Tchernishevski was written. It expresses the anxious longing of all these men, and there is something touchingly pathetic in its ingenuousness. What, then, must be done? First of all, quit the populous cities and towns, and disband the work-people in the factories; return to country life and till the ground, each man providing for his own personal necessities. The author first draws a picture of wretchedness in a large capital, as he himself studied it in Moscow. Here his admirable powers of description reappear, together with the habit, peculiar to himself, of looking within his own soul, to discover and expose the little weaknesses and base qualities common to all of us; and he takes the same pleasure in the observation and denunciation of his own as men generally do in criticising those of others. He gives us all a side thrust when he says of himself:—

“I gave three roubles to that poor creature; and, beside the pleasure of feeling that I had done a kind deed, I had the additional one of knowing that other people saw me do it….”

The second part of the treatise is devoted to theory. We cannot relieve the poor and unfortunate for many reasons; First, in cities poverty must exist, because an overplus of workmen are attracted to them; secondly, our class gives them the example of idleness and of superfluous expenditure; thirdly, we do not live according to the doctrine of Christ: charity is not what is wanted, but an equal division of property in brotherly love. Let him who has two cloaks give to him who has none. Sutayef carries out this theory.

Those who draw salaries are in a state of slavery, and an aggravated form of it; and the effect of the modern system of credit continues this slavery into their future. The alms we give are only an obligation we owe to the peasants whom we have induced to come and work in our cities to supply us with our luxuries. The author concludes by giving as the only remedy, a return to rural life, which will guarantee to every laborer all that is necessary to support life.

He does not see that this principle involves, necessarily and logically, a return to an animal state of existence, a general struggle for shelter and food, instead of a methodical system of labor; and that in such a company there must be both wolves and lambs. He sees but one side of the question, the side of justice; he loses sight of the intellectual side, the necessity for mental development, which involves a division of labor.

All this has no great attraction for us. We can obtain no original ideas from this apostle’s revelation; only the first lispings of rationalism in the religious portion, and in the social the doctrine of Communism; only the old dream of the millennium, the old theme, ever renewed since the Middle Ages, by the Vaudois, the Lollards and Anabaptists. Happy Russia! to her these beautiful chimeras are still new! Western Europe is astonished only, to meet them again in the writings of such a great author and such an unusually keen observer of human nature.

But would not the condition of this man’s soul be the result of the natural evolution of his successive experiences? First, a pantheist, then nihilist, pessimist, and mystic. I have heard that Leo Nikolaievitch has defended himself energetically against being thought to have assumed the title of a mystic; he feels its danger, and does not think it applicable to one who believes that the heavenly kingdom is transferred to earth. Our language furnishes us no other word to express his condition; may he pardon us what seems to us the truth. I know that he would prefer to have me praise his doctrines and decry his novels. This I cannot do. I am so enraptured with the novels that I can only feel that the doctrines but deprive me of masterpieces which might have given me additional enjoyment in the future. I have been lavish of praise, but only because of my thorough and sincere appreciation of the books. Now, however, that the author has reached a state of perfect happiness, he needs no more praise, and must be quite indifferent to criticism.

We must, at least, recognize in Tolstoï one of those rare reformers whose actions conform to their precepts. I am assured that he exerts around him a most salutary influence, and has actually returned to the life of the primitive Christians. He daily receives letters from strangers, revenue officers, dishonest clerks, publicans of every type, who put into his hands the sums they have dishonestly acquired; young men asking his advice as well as fallen women who need counsel. He is settled in the country, gives away his wealth, lives and labors with his peasant neighbors. He draws water, works in the fields, and sometimes makes his own boots. He does not wish his novels alluded to. I have seen a picture of him in a peasant’s costume working with a shoemaker’s awl in his hand. Should not this creator of masterpieces feel that the pen is the only tool he should wield? If the inspiration of great thoughts is a gift we have received from Heaven as a consolation for our fellow-beings, it seems to me an act of impiety to throw away this talent. The human soul is the author’s field of action, which he is bound to cultivate and fertilize.

From Paris, where Tolstoï is so highly appreciated, comes back to him again the touching, last request of his dying friend which to me was inspired by a higher religious sentiment than that of Sutayef:—

“This gift comes to you from whence come all our gifts. Return to your literary labors, great author of our beloved Russia!”

I shall not pretend to draw any definite or elaborate conclusions from these initiatory explorations into Russian literature. To make them complete, we should study the less prominent writers, who have a right to bear their testimony as to the actual condition of the nation. If, moreover, the writer of this book has succeeded in presenting his own ideas clearly, the reader should draw his own conclusions from the perusal of it; if the author has failed, any added defence of his ideas would be superfluous, and have little interest or value for the reader.

We have witnessed the at first artificial growth of this literature, for a long time subjected to foreign influence; a weak and servile type of literature, giving us no enlightenment whatever as to the actual interior condition of its own country, which it voluntarily ignored. Again, when turning to its natal soil to seek its objects of study it has become vigorous. Realism is the proper and perfect instrument which it has employed, applied with equal success to material and spiritual life. Although this realism may occasionally lack method and taste, and is at the same time both diffuse and subtile, it is invariably natural and sincere, ennobled by moral sentiments, aspirations toward the Divine, and sympathy for humanity. Not one of these novelists aims merely at literary fame, but all are governed by a love of truth as well as of justice,—a combination of great importance, and well worth our serious reflection, betraying and explaining to us, moreover, the philosophical conceptions of this race.

The Russians seek religious truth because they find the formulas of their doctrines insufficient for them, and the negative arguments which satisfy us would be entirely opposed to all their instincts. Their religious doubts govern, cause, and characterize all their social and political questions and difficulties. The Slav race, under the guise of its apparent orthodoxy, has not yet found its true path, but seeks it still in every grade of society. The formula they are looking forward to must comprise and answer to their double ideal of truth and justice. Moreover, the people still feel the influence of the old Aryan spirit; the cultivated classes also feel that of the teachings of the contemporaneous sciences; hence the resurrection of Buddhism which we now witness in Russia; for I cannot otherwise qualify these tendencies. We see in them the condition of the ancient Hindus vacillating between an extremely high morality and Nihilism, or a metaphysical Pantheism.

The spirit of Buddhism in its great efforts toward the extension of evangelical charity has penetrated the Russian character, which naturally has such intense sympathy for human nature, for the humblest creatures, for the forsaken and unfortunate. This spirit decries reason and elevates the brute, and inspires the deepest compassion in the heart. Moreover, this simple love of the neighbor and infinite tenderness for the suffering gives a peculiarly pathetic quality to their literary works. The initiators of this movement, after having written for the benefit of their peers and the cultivated classes, are strongly drawn toward the people. Gogol with his bitter irony devoted himself to the study of suffering humanity. Turgenef pictured it from his own artistic standpoint rather than from that of an apostle. Tolstoï, his sceptical investigations being over, has become the most determined of the apostles of the unfortunate.

But beyond these mental tortures, beneath the extreme Nihilism of a Tolstoï and the intellectual morbidness of a Dostoyevski, we feel that there is a rich fund of vitality, a fountain of truth and justice, which will surely triumph in the future.