When the lion swallows the lamb, fluff and all, he usually gets a pain, and there’s a rumpus. But when the lion tries to force himself down the throat of the huge and popular lamb—a nasty old sheep, really—then it’s a phenomenon. Old Leo did it: wedged himself bit by bit down the throat of wooly Russia. And now out of the mouth of the bolshevist lambkin still waves an angry, mistaken, tufted leonine tail, like an agitated exclamation mark.
Meanwhile it’s a deadlock.
But what a dishonorable thing for that claw-biting little Leo to do! And in his novels you see him at it. So that the papery lips of Resurrection whisper: “Alas! I would have been a novel. But Leo spoiled me.”
Count Tolstoi had that last weakness of a great man: he wanted the absolute: the absolute of love, if you like to call it that. Talk about the “last infirmity of noble minds”! It’s a perfect epidemic of senility. He wanted to be absolute: a universal brother. Leo was too tight for Tolstoi. He wanted to puff, and puff, and puff, till he became Universal Brotherhood itself, the great gooseberry of our globe.
Then pop went Leo! And from the bits sprang up bolshevists.
It’s all bunk. No man can be absolute. No man can be absolutely good or absolutely right, nor absolutely lovable, nor absolutely beloved, nor absolutely loving. Even Jesus, the paragon, was only relatively good and relatively right. Judas could take him by the nose.
No god, that men can conceive of, could possibly be absolute or absolutely right. All the gods that men ever discovered are still God: and they contradict one another and fly down one another’s throats, marvellously. Yet they are all God: the incalculable Pan.
It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are; and have been, and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them, falls flat. This makes even eternity lively.
But man, poor man, bobbing like a cork in the stream of time, must hitch himself to some absolute star of righteousness overhead. So he throws out his line, and hooks on. Only to find, after a while, that his star is slowly falling: till it drops into the stream of time with a fizzle, and there’s another absolute star gone out.
Then we scan the heavens afresh.