I could not have denied that this is really my conception, and should, therewith, have hit upon the fundamental opposition between our Western conception of life, as expressed by Goethe, and the exclusively religio-moral one of Tolstoï. I could not, however, compel myself to fill with a fruitless argument the few hours I had to spend with the honored man. I should have been as little able to convince the apostle of seventy-five, whose ascetic philosophy is the product of definite conditions of civilization, as he to convince me, the west-German, whose light-heartedness and confident belief in culture had ripened in the sunshine of the Rhine bank. I therefore evaded the point, and said:
"I have hitherto not taken your rigorous demands upon art as well as upon life quite literally, count. I thought to myself that when one pulls up a horse suddenly he does not wish it to turn around, but only to stop. I supposed that you wished merely to counteract other powerful impulses."
"No," said the count, after a moment's reflection. "That is not so. I believe in the absolute correctness of my demands. I myself, however, was too weakly or too badly trained to submit to them altogether. I cannot, for instance, keep from enjoying Chopin, although I condemn his music as exclusive art, which addresses itself to the understanding and feelings only of the aristocratically cultivated few."
"It seems to me an unattainable ideal that all men should share in enjoyment of art; and the requirement that the artist shall refrain from all work that could be enjoyed only by a limited number of especially cultivated men is impossible and even harmful. It would deprive us of the finest works we possess."
"If the requirement is justified in and of itself, it is quite immaterial what sacrifices must be made to it. Nothing is to be considered in comparison with truth."
I could go no further here, again. For I was talking with the man who repudiates his own immortal works because they are beyond the comprehension of most people, and therefore help to widen the gulf between the educated and the uneducated. I could not even make the objection that almost all learning must be condemned on the same ground, for it is well known that Tolstoï does not shrink from even this conclusion.
It is not, however, a matter of indifference to him whether people consider his views to be scientifically founded—i. e., correctly reasoned out or not. He said to me in the course of the conversation:
"I often laugh, and I also often grow angry, when people cast it in my face that my studies are not scientific. I assert in return that the whole of positivism and materialism is unscientific. If I seek a science by which I can live, I seek it only logically and steadfastly, or scientifically, with no contradiction within itself from its premises to its final conclusion. Scepticism, on the other hand, completely denies every concept of life. And yet the sceptic wishes to live, otherwise he would kill himself. He admits, therefore, by the mere fact that he is alive that his whole philosophy is nothing for him but an idle exercise of the intellect which has no bearing on his life. That means that it is not in the least true for him. I, however, seek the premise from which I can not only live, but live peacefully and cheerfully. This premise is God, and the duty for us that of perfecting ourselves. I follow the consequence of that premise to the end, and feel that I am right not only in words but also in deeds."
No truly scientific thinker needs to be reminded that Tolstoï here, in the a priori assumption that life must have a meaning, departs from the fundamental principle of all scientific reasoning—namely, the starting without a hypothesis, and, like Kant, to whom he feels drawn not without reason, works with postulates instead of with conclusions. But who will not rejoice that the poet, who above all things was and is a passionate human creature, has saved himself from the despair of agnosticism by a bold leap to the rock of faith, which lies beyond all science, and can neither be supported nor shaken by it? How many of the proud agnostics do not secretly cast furtive glances at that rock, where they would like to reserve themselves a place against emergencies? While Tolstoï sincerely acknowledges that without this foundation under his feet he would no longer be able to live. He needed this quieting as to the outcome of things to be able to follow his poetic impulse to look at the world as it is. Only entirely barren, abstract natures find their satisfaction in the voluntarily limited logical sequence of science, confined as it is to the empirical. All men of imagination, including Goethe and Bismarck, have had their share of mystic confidence in that beneficent course of the universe which in popular language is called God or Providence. This poetic faith has, of course, nothing whatever to do with science.
Undervaluation of one's own qualities, however, and enthusiasm for the complementary ones, is a familiar psychological fact. The poet Tolstoï wishes to be a cut-and-dried philosopher. He repudiates his poetry, and likewise speaks coldly—indeed, even with hostility—of the spirits akin to him, of Goethe and Shakespeare. There is only one opinion among lovers of art, and that is that Tolstoï, in the natural spontaneity of his characters and incidents, is to be compared with these two alone, and in the abundance of his psychological traits with Shakespeare only. Yet at present Tolstoï is engaged in writing a book, soon to appear, against Shakespeare and the study of Shakespeare. In our conversation he came back to the indefensible over-estimation of this artist.