And this is why Pierre, for example, in War and Peace, is more dull and less quick than Prince André. Pierre is quite nicely related to ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow, diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats, lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet-paper, is sluggish and mussy. He’s not quick enough.
The really quick, Tolstoi loved to kill them off or muss them over. Like a true Bolshevist. One can’t help feeling Natasha is rather mussy and unfresh, married to that Pierre.
Pierre was what we call, “so human”. Which means, “so limited”. Men clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi, the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? I myself, I could belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.
And that is man! That, really, was Tolstoi. That, even, was Lenin, God in the machine of Christian-brotherhood, that hashes men up into social sausage-meat.
Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like the limerick, the lamb is inside.
“They returned from the ride
With lamb Leo inside
And a smile on the face of the tiger!
Sing fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!”
For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be left to monsters like the right-angled triangle, which does only exist in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse, let him try as he may.
Ay! Ay! Ay!—Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation, not even a radish!
Holy Moses!
“Honour thy father and thy mother!” That’s awfully cute! But supposing they are not honorable? How then, Moses?