Tolstoi published a work of criticism, and some people think that I got my ideas from it. Therefore, let me say that if you want to find the germ of “Mammonart,” you will do better to consult Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” published a generation before Tolstoi’s work.
The thesis of Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” resembles mine in just one particular; that is, we both believe that art has to do with moral questions—a belief which we share with Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes and Aristophanes and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and Moliere and Victor Hugo and Dostoievski and Tennyson and Ibsen—and so on through a long list of persons still to be considered.
But from what point of view shall the artist approach morality? Tolstoi answers as one who distrusts the intellect, distrusts science, and has no use for or belief in progress, whether social or political or intellectual. He believes that the one basis of hope for human beings is in a return to the primitive, elemental forms of life; he wants art to confine itself to those simple emotions which can be understood by the uneducated peasant. I should say that the easiest way to make plain his thesis would be to change his title from “What Is Art?” to “What Is Children’s Art?”
Whatever faults the critic may have to find with “Mammonart,” I beg him to realize that its author is not a primitive Christian, but a scientific Socialist; one who welcomes the achievements of the human intellect, and looks forward to a complex social order, and to social art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and fastidious individualist culture of our time.
CHAPTER LXXXVII
HEADACHES AND DYSPEPSIA
We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long delayed.
Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality they gave to the creatures of their brain.
It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to that purpose; the style must be flexible, it must, like the music of the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance, they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them, and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an academy of their own.
Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a preface:
Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the people—this world beneath a world—were to remain under the literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.