It is a singular fact that in speaking of Tolstoy's ideas concerning science and art, the most important of the books in which these ideas are expressed—namely, What shall we do? (1884-86)—is commonly ignored. There, for the first time, Tolstoy fights the battle between art and science; and none of the following conflicts was to surpass the violence of their first encounter. It is a matter for surprise that no one, during the assaults which have been recently delivered in France upon the vanity of science and the intellectuals, has thought of referring to these pages. They constitute the most terrible attack ever penned against the eunuchs of science" and "the corsairs of art"; against those intellectual castes which, having destroyed the old ruling castes of the Church, the State, and the Army, have installed themselves in their place, and, without being able or willing to perform any service of use to humanity, lay claim to a blind admiration and service, proclaiming as dogmas an impudent faith in science for the sake of science and in art for the sake of art—the lying mask which they seek to make their justification and the apology for their monstrous egoism and their emptiness.
"Never make me say," continues Tolstoy, "that I deny art or science. Not only do I not deny them; it is in their name that I seek to drive the thieves from the temple."
"Science and art are as necessary as bread and water; even more necessary.... The true science is that of the true welfare of all human beings. The true art is the expression of the knowledge of the true welfare of all men."
And he praises those who, "since men have existed, have with the harp or the cymbal, by images or by words, expressed their struggle against duplicity, their sufferings in that struggle, their hope in the triumph of good, their despair at the triumph of evil, and the enthusiasm of their prophetic vision of the future."
He then draws the character of the perfect artist, in a page burning with mystical and melancholy earnestness:
"The activity of science and art is only fruitful when it arrogates no right to itself and considers only its duties. It is only because that activity is such as it is, because its essence is sacrifice, that humanity honours it. The men who are called to serve others by spiritual work always suffer in the accomplishment of that task; for the spiritual world is brought to birth only in suffering and torture. Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of the thinker and the artist, for his fate is the good of men. Men are unhappy; they suffer; they die; there is no time for him to stroll about, to amuse himself. The thinker or the artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as we are accustomed to think; he is always in a state of conflict, always in a state of emotion. He must decide and must say what will further the welfare of men, what will deliver them from suffering; and he has not decided it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will perhaps be too late, and he will die.... The man who is trained in an establishment in which artists and scientists are formed (to tell the truth, such places make destroyers of art and of science); the man who receives diplomas and a pension—he will not be an artist or a thinker; but he who would be happy not to think, not to express what is implanted in his mind, yet cannot refrain from thought and self-expression: for he is carried along by two invisible forces: his inner need and his love of men. There are no artists who are fat, lovers of life, and satisfied with themselves."[1]
This splendid page, which throws a tragic light upon the genius of Tolstoy, was written under the immediate stress of the suffering caused him by the poverty of Moscow, and under the conviction that science and art were the accomplices of the entire modern system of social inequality and hypocritical brutality. This conviction he was never to lose. But the impression of his first encounter with the misery of the world slowly faded, and became less poignant; the wound healed,[2] and in none of his subsequent books do we recover the tremor of pain and of vengeful anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we find this sublime profession of the faith of the artist who creates with his life-blood, this exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering "which are the lot of the thinker"; this disdain for Olympian art. Those of his later works which deal with the criticism of art will be found to treat the question from a standpoint at once more literary and less mystical; the problem of art is detached from the background of that human wretchedness of which Tolstoy could not think without losing his self-control, as on the night of his visit to the night-shelter, when upon returning home he sobbed and cried aloud in desperation.
I do not mean to suggest that these didactic works are ever frigid. It is impossible for Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his life he is the man who writes to Fet:
"If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he must insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must mock at them until he splits his sides."[3]