Tolstoi as man and artist, with an essay on Dostoïevski

TOLSTOI AS MAX AND ARTIST

WORKS BY MEREJK.OWSK.I

THE DEATH OF THE GODS

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TOLSTOI AS MAN
AND ARTIST

WITH AN ESSAY ON
DOSTOIEVSKI

<w '. - v «* « ~»» •»•* • v» T ^W»«. ^r «£9 » \

By DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI

AUTHOR OF " THE DEATH OF THE GODS " AND
"THE FORERUNNER" (THE KOMANCE OF

LEONARDO DA VINCl)

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33 *S

LIFE OF TOLSTOI

1828 Born August 28

1843 Went to Kazan University

1851 Enlisted in the Artillery and went to the Caucasus

1852 Published Childhood, A Landlord's Morning, The Invaders, The

Cossacks (a novel)

1854 Published Boyhood

1855 Became Divisional Commander in the Army
1854-1856 Published Sevastopol Sketches, after serving in the war

1855 Published Youth

1857 Visited Germany, France, Italy, and England, after resigning his

commission
Published Memoirs oj Prince Nekliudofi (Albert : Lucerne)

1859 Published The Three Deaths (an allegorical story), Family Happiness

(a novel)

1860 His brother Nicholas dies in Tolstoi's arms. The long novel War

and Peace is begun

1861 Renewed rupture with Ivan Turgenieff. The Story of a Horse is

published

1862 Married Miss Behrs (he, thirty-four, she, eighteen years old)
1863-1878 The Decembrists (published in fragments)

1864-1869 Published War and Peace (his chief novel) written at Yasnaya Poliana

1869 Published A Prisoner in the Caucasus ; Stories and Translations for

Children

1870 Learned Greek. Spent six weeks in the Bashkir Steppes

1873 Described the Samara famine in newspaper articles. Began Anna

Karenina

1873-1876 Published Anna Karenina (his second masterpiece)
1879-1882 Published My Confession
1880-1881 Published, in Russian, at Geneva, a Criticism of Greek Orthodox

Theology

1880-1882 Published The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised
1881 Published What Men Live By (folk-tale)
1884 Published (abroad) My Religion

1884 Published What's to be Done
1884-1886 Published The Death of Ivan llyitch

1885 Published folk tales, such as The Candle, The Two Pilgrims, Ivan

the Fool, The Long Exile, etc.

1886 Published folk legends, The Three Old Men, etc.
Published The Power of Darkness (a play)

1887 Published Life

1888 Published Work While You Have the Light

1889 Published The Kreuzer Sonata

Published The Frtiits of Enlightenment (a comedy)

1892 Deposited his Memoirs and Diaries in the Rumiantzoft Museum,

Moscow

1893 Published The Kingdom of God is Within You

1894 Wrote a preface to Guy de Maupassant's work.

Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction

1895 Wrote M 'aster and Man

1898 Published his treatise on /Esthetics, What is Art ?
1902 Serious illness at Yalta

Eng. trans. (1898)

Note. — For a fuller list of dates, see Mr. G.
(Fibber Unwin, 1898).— Ed.

H. Ferris' admirable study, Leo Tohtei

LIFE OF DOSTOlEVSKI

1821 Born (October) in Moscow, the son of a surgeon, in a hospital for the
poor

1843 Left the Military School of Engineering as a sub-lieutenant ,

1844 Obtained his discharge from military service to devote himself to

literature

1846 Wrote Poor Folk {at the age of twenty-four), a remarkable psycho-
logical novel

1849 (April 23). Arrested, with thirty-three others, for Fourierism, as an
opponent of marriage and property

1849 (Dec. 22). Reprieved, when at the scaffold

1849-1859 Wrote nothing. Spent four years at hard labour in Siberia, and four
years in service in the ranks

1858 Relumed from Siberia to preach the morality of the "divine spark"
even in the pariah, and the Christian " morality of the slave " : of
pure unselfishness. He brought back from Siberia a young wife —
the widow of a prisoner

1860 Published The Injured and Oppressed (an inferior novel). Became
contributor to various Slavophile newspapers

1862 Published Recollections of the House of the Dead (a masterpiece,
describing his exile)

1865 Falls into the direst poverty. Loses his first wife, his brother, and

child ; and escapes abroad to avoid imprisonment for debt.
Visits Florence and Baden-Baden

1866 Published Crime and Punishment ; a great picture of the poorer

classes in Russian society, teaching the possibility of preserving

purity of soul under any circumstances. His penury continues
1868 Wrote The Idiot
1870 Began to write The Brothers F.aramazov, a great psychological novel,

of which the first part only, in four volumes, has been finished.
1873 Wrote The Possessed
1873 Published An Author's Note Book. He spent his remaining years in

comparative comfort in St. Petersburg

1880 Delivered a great speech on the future of Russia, on the occasion of

the unveiling of a monument to Pouchkine

1881 Died, and was followed to the grave by forty thousand people.

PART FIRST

Tolstoi as Man and Artist, with an
Essay on Dostoi'evski

CHAPTER I

IN the case of both Tolstoi and Dostoievski, but
especially in the case of Tolstoi, their works are
so bound up with their lives, with the personality
of each author, that we cannot speak of the one
without the other. Before studying them as artists,
thinkers, or preachers, we must know what manner
of men they are.

In Russian society, and to some extent among
critics, the opinion has taken root that about 1878,
and in the early years of the next decade, there
took place in Tolstoi a deep-seated moral and re-
ligious change ; a change which radically trans-
formed not only the whole of his own life, but also
his intellectual and literary activity, and as it were
snapped his existence into halves. In the first
period, people say, he was only a great writer,
perhaps too a great man, but at any rate a man
of this world with human and Russian passions,
grievances, doubts, and foibles ; in the second he
shook off all the trammels of historical life and
culture. Some say that he is a Christian champion,
others an atheist, others still that he is a fanatic,
a fourth party that he is a sage who has attained
the highest moral illumination, and, like Socrates,

3

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Buddha, and Confucius, become the founder of a

new religion.

I Tolstoi himself, in his Confession written in 1879,

confirms, and as it were insists on, the unity, un-

changeableness, and finality of this new religious

birth.

" Five years ago something very curious began
to take place in me : I began to experience at first
times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if
I did not know how I was to live or what I was to
do. These suspensions of life always found ex-
pression in the same problem, ' Why am I here ? '
and then, ' What next ? 3 I had lived and lived,
and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice :
I saw clearly that before me there lay nothing but
destruction. With all my might I endeavoured to
escape from this life. And suddenly I, a happy
man, began to hide my bootlaces, that I might not
hang myself between the wardrobes in my room
when undressing alone at night ; and, ceased to take
a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid tempta-
tion by these two means of freeing myself of life."

From this suicidal despair he was saved, as he
conjectures, by becoming friendly with simple be-
lieving folk, with the labouring classes. " I lived
in this way, that is to say in communion with the
people, for two years ; and a change took place in
me. What befel me was that the life of our class —
the wealthy and cultured — not only became re-
pulsive to me, but lost all significance. All our
actions, our judgments, science and art itself, ap-
peared to me in a new light. I realized that it was
all self-indulgence, that it was useless to look for

4

f

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

any meaning in it. I hated myself and acknow-
ledged the truth. Now it had all become clear to

me.'

The most guileless, and therefore most valuable
and trustworthy of the biographers of Tolstoi, his
wife's brother, S. A. Bers, in his Reminiscences, also
speaks of this " transformation ' Curing this decade
of his life, which seemed to " wholly alter the mental
activity and consciousness of Leo Nicolaievich."

" The transformation of his personality which has
taken place in the last decade is in the truest sense
entire and radical. Not only did it change his life
and his attitude towards mankind and all living
things, but his whole way of thinking. Leo became
throughout his being the incarnate idea of love
for his neighbour."

As conclusive is the testimony of his wife, the
Countess : ' If you could know and hear dear Leo
now ! " she wrote to her brother early in 1881. " He
is greatly changed. He has become a Christian,
and a most sincere and earnest one."

It would be difficult to doubt such forcible and
reliable testimony, even if we had not at command
a still more trustworthy source, his own artistic
creations, which in reality from the first to the last
are nothing but one vast diary of fifty years, one
endless and minute " confession." In the literature
of all ages and nations there can scarcely be found
another writer who has laid bare the private, per-
sonal, and sometimes delicate aspects of his own
life with such noble and unreserved candour. He
seems to have told us everything that he had to tell,
and we know all about him that he knows of himself.

5

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

It is impossible not to have recourse to this
artistic, and consequently unintentional and un-
forced confession, if we wish to ascertain the real
significance of the religious transformation that
took place in him at the age of fifty, that is, in the
part of his life immediately preceding old age.

In his first work, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,
a book written when he was twenty, he gives us
his still fresh recollections from the age of fourteen
to fifteen.

" In the remainder of the year, during which I led
a solitary and self-centred moral existence, all
abstract questions as to the destiny of man, a future
life and the immortality of the soul, already planted
themselves before me : and my feeble and childish
intelligence struggled with all the ardour of inex-
perience to solve those questions, the putting of
which constitutes the highest task which the mind
of man can set itself."

Once on a spring morning, when he was helping
the servants to put out the garden frames, he felt
of a sudden the joy and contentment of Christian
self-sacrifice.

" I felt the desire to mortify myself in doing this
service to Nicolas. ' How foolish I was before, how
good and happy I might have been, and may be for
the future ! ' I said to myself. ' I must at once, at
once, this very minute, become another man, and
begin to lead a new life. ' 3

To set to rights all mankind, to exterminate all
the vices and miseries, began to seem to him " a
thing worth doing." And he decided " to write
down for himself all through his life the tale of his

6

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

duties and occupations, to set forth on paper the
object of his existence, and the rules by which he
would always and invariably act." He at once went
upstairs to his room, got a sheet of writing paper,
ruled it, and having defined his duties towards
himself, his neighbour, and God, began to write.

With a mournful, sensitive, and yet superficial
mockery, as if not suspecting all the depth and
morbidity of what was passing in his own soul, he
proceeds to recount the intellectual life which then,
in the phrase of the Apostle James, became " double-
minded in him." The impression conveyed is a
strange one, as if there were in him two hearts, two
beings. The one absorbed in Christian thoughts of
death, who, to inure himself to suffering " in spite
of terrible pain, held out for five minutes at arm's
length the massive lexicons of Tatishchev ; or went
into the pantry and with a rope lashed his bare back
so hard that tears streamed involuntarily down his
face." The other self, impelled by the same
thoughts of death, would suddenly remember that
death was awaiting him every hour, every minute ;
and determine to give up all study and " for three
days do nothing but lie abed and revel in reading
novels and eating gingerbread and Kronov honey,
which he bought with his last few pence." The one
Leo Tolstoi, self-conscious, good and weak, controls
himself, repents, and cultivates loathing of himself
and his vices ; the other, unconscious, wicked, and
violent, " fancies himself a great man, who has dis-
covered for the welfare of all mankind new truths,
and with a proud consciousness of his own merit
looks down on other mortals," finding an especial,

7

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

subtle, and bitter-sweet gratification of pride even
in self -con tempt, humiliation, and self -chastisement.

In telling us these boyish thoughts, he concludes
that at the root of them were four feelings : ' the
first, love for an imaginary woman, or the gratifica-
tion of the flesh " ; the second, " the love of love '
of mortals, i.e. pride or the gratification of the
spirit ; the third, the hope of unwonted and glorious
fortune, this special passion being so powerful and
firmly rooted that it grew to be a madness ; and
the fourth, repulsion for myself and remorse."

But in reality these are not four feelings, but two
— for the first three amount to one — i.e. love for
S2lf, for the body, for the physical life of his own
" ego " : the other, loathing or hatred for himself,
is not love of others or of God, but simply self-
hatred. In both cases the primary cause and link
between these two apparently conflicting feelings
is the " ego " either asserted to the utmost or denied
|jto the utmost. All begins and ends with self.
Neither love nor hatred can break through the en-
circling wall.

So we come to the question, which of the two
combined and blended Tolstois is the more real,
sincere, and lasting — the one that lashes himself
with a rope on the bare back, or the one that, in
Epicurean fashion, gobbles gingerbread and Kronov
honey, lulling himself with the thought of death,
that everything under the sun is vanity of vanities
and vexation of spirit, that better is a live dog than
a dead lion ? Is it the one that loves, or the one that
hates himself ? He who begins all his thoughts,
feelings, and aspirations in a devout Christian way,

8

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

•

or he who weakly gives them up to finish his days
like a heathen ? Or is it perhaps — and this would
be for him the more terrible conclusion — that both
alike are real, both sincere, and both to last as long
as the breath in his body ? In any case he judges
himself and his boyish thoughts, which he calls
" lucubrations," with more severity and justice in
this first of his books than in the sequel he ever does
again, even in the famous and hotly repentant self-
scourgings of the Confession.

" From all this heavy moral travail," he says, " I
carried away nothing but an ingenious mind, which
weakened in me the power of the will, together with
a habit of constant moral introspection which de-
stroyed the freshness of feeling and the clearness of
judgment. A natural bent towards abstract specu-
lation had so greatly and abnormally developed self-
consciousness that often, when I began considering
some simple matter, I fell into an unescapable round
of analysis of my own thoughts ; I gave no more
heed to the question before me, but pondered over
my own reasoning. When I asked myself of what
I was thinking, I answered, Thinking over my
methods of thinking. And again, Of what am I
thinking ? I think I am thinking of what I am
thinking, and so on. Dialectic took the place of
reasoning."

In reference to his first failure with " Rules of
Life," when, meaning to rule the paper, and using
instead of the ruler, which he could not find, a Latin
dictionary, he smeared the pages with a long drawn
smudge, he remarks plaintively, " Why is all so
fair and clear in the mind, yet comes out so shape-

9

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

lessly on paper and in life, when I attempt to put
theory into practice ? ' Is this only the helpless-
ness of a childish intelligence, of a childish conscience,
which will grow with time to full consciousness and
maturity ? Scarcely so. At any rate, even when
he wrote Childhood and Boyhood as a young man of
twenty-four, he realized that this immaturity of
Jiis was independent of age, and that its ineffaceable
stamp would remain on him all through life. ; I
am convinced of one thing, that if I am fated to live
to an advanced age and my recital catches up my
years, as an old man of seventy I shall dream in just
as childishly unpractical a way as I do now."

In these calm and simple words there is more
Christian resignation, if we can ever speak of such
a trait in Tolstoi, than in all his subsequent loud-
voiced and passionate professions of repentance.
Is it not easier to say of oneself in the face of the
world, as he afterwards did, " I am a parasite, a flea,
a prodigal, a thief, and a murderer," than in calm
self-consciousness to acknowledge the actual limits
of one's powers, to say, " I am still just such a child
in my old man's thought as I was in my boyish
reflection. In spite of all the boundless force of
artistic genius that is in me, in my searchings for
God I am not a leader, a prophet, the founder of a
new religion, but just such a weak, morbidly dual
man as are all the men of my time ? "

The Squire's Morning, next in the chronological
order of his productions, which fully corresponds to
the actual order of his life, is a sort of sequel or con-
tinuation of his huge journal. Prince Dmitri
Nekhliudov is none other than Nicolai Irteniev, the

10

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

hero of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, after leaving
the University before the end of his course, where he
realized the vanity of all human knowledge, and
settled in a village as its squire in order to help the
common people. In Nekhliudov there takes place
just such a moral and religious transformation as in
Irteniev. " All that I knew is foolishness, and all
that I believed and loved," he says to himself.
* Lqve and self-sacrifice are the only true happiness,
the only kind of happiness that is independent of
circumstance."

Reality, however, does not satisfy him. " Where
are these dreams ? " he reflects. " It is more than
a year that I have been seeking for happiness on this
path, and what have I found ? True I sometimes
feel that I am self -con ten ted, but it is a barren and
merely intellectual satisfaction."

Nekhliudov is forced to the conclusion that for
all his wish he does not know how to do good to his
fellow men. And the peasants show their suspicion
of the Christian sentiments of the bar inc. The only
outcome of this unsuccessful, and in reality, childish
attempt to combine the virtues of a Lord Bountiful
with those of the Gospel is a painful and fruitless
<eflyy of the -young peasant Iliushka, and that, not of
his spiritual, but his bodily force, his health, his
freshness, the unruffled slumber of his mind and
conscience. We know from the biography of Tolstoi
that after the failure of his Nekhliudov-like experi-
ment with the tenants of Yasnaia Poliana, being
disappointed as to his capabilities as a country
squire, he quitted his property, and went to the
Caucasus, where he entered the Artillery as a cadet

II

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

inspired by romantic dreams of military glory, and
with the charms of the primitive life of the moun-
taineers, like Olenine, the hero of The Cossacks.

•* » CHfc*^*— *^»«*^»

Exactly like Irteniev and Nekhliudov, Olenine is
conscious that he is boundlessly free. This is the
characteristic liberty of the young and wealthy
Russian gentleman of the forties, for whom there are
neither physical nor moral restraints. He could do
anything ; he lacked nothing he wanted, and
nothing curbed his impulses. He had neither
family, nor country, nor religion, nor unsatisfied
wants. He believed in nothing, he acknowledged
nothing. He loved thus far himself alone, and could
not fail so to do, for he expected goodness of nobody
else, and had not yet had time to become thoroughly
disenchanted with himself.

But although he believes in nothing, and owns no
superior ; though he loves himself only, and that
with a simple and childish cynicism, this student,
still at his books, this cadet of Artillery, is already
making his " philosophical discoveries," and setting
his primitive life among the Cossacks of the ' Sta-
nitsa ' (settlement, military colony) over against
the inferior civilized life of the rest of mankind.

The deceptions in which he had hitherto lived,
and which even then had pained him, and which now
he began to feel inexpressibly contemptible and
ridiculous, seemed clearly demonstrated to his mind.
' How pitiable, how feeble, you appear to me ! '
he writes to his Moscow friends. " You do not know
what happiness is, or in what life consists ! You
want for once to experience natural life in all its
unadulterated glory. You want to see and under-

12

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

stand what here I see every day before me : the
eternal inaccessible snow of the mountains, the
majesty of woman in all her primitive beauty, fresh
as when she came from the hands of her Creator.
Then it will flash on you which of us is ruining him-
self, which lives in the truth or in falsehood, you or
I. If only you knew how pitiful, how paltry all your
delusions seem to me ! '

' Men live as Nature lives : they die, are born,
couple themselves, again fructify, fight, drink, eat,
enjoy themselves, and die again ; and there are no
conditions except those invariable ones which Nature
has imposed on the sun, the grass, the animals, the
trees. They have no other laws. Happiness is to
be one with Nature."

This primitive philosophy is incarnated in the
real hero of the story, the old Cossack, Uncle Ye-
roshka, one of the finest and most perfect creations
of Tolstoi, a character who enables us to look into
the darkest and most secret depth of the author's
being ; a depth, perhaps, never laid bare to his own
consciousness. Here for the first, and, it would
seem, the last time, with artistically perfect and
deliberate clearness, stands out one of the two
persons always at issue within him, the person that
is always acting, but saying little of himself, and
still less realizing himself. This familiar, and yet
unfamiliar, this unfathomed and unillumined being
within Tolstoi, seems to writhe and dart in the
character of this giant, who, with the child-like
eyes, an old man's deep and weary wrinkles, and
a young man's muscles, bears about him a strong
savour of new wine, brandy, powder, and ebullient

13

>

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

blood ; I refer to Uncle Yeroshka. His life, like
the life of the half-savage Chechenetses, is replete
with " love of free independence, idleness, plunder,
• and war." He says of himself with simple pride,
' I am a fine fellow, a drunkard, a thief, and a

hunter. A merry man with women ; I love them all,

I -I, Yeroshka ! "

Here we have the unconscious Russian cynic
philosopher. He feels himself as boundlessly free
as the Russian barine Olenine. He too respects
nothing, and believes in nothing. H£_liy£s_Qutside
human laws, beyond good or evil. Tartar Mullahs
and Russian Old Believers awake in him the like
calm and contemptuous jibes. " To my mind it
is all the same. God made all for the delight of
man. There is no fault in anything. Take example
of the animals. They live alike in Tartar thickets
and in ours. What God bestows, that men gather.
But our people say that instead of enjoying this
freedom we are to lick saucepans. I think that
everything is alike a cheat. You die, and the grass
grows : that is all that's real."

He has the old pre-human sagacity, the clear-
eyed and bottomless, yet morbid soul of the Wood-
god, half-divine, half-beast, Faun or Satyr. He can
be, in his own way, good and tender. He loves all
that lives, all of God's creatures. And this love has
a sort of flavour of Christianity about it, perhaps
because in the utmost unconscious depth of hea-
thenism there is the germ of the future change to
Christianity, the organic germ of Dionysus — of self-
abnegation, self -elimination, the fusion of man with
the God Pan, the Father of all being. We must not,

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

however, forget the historical, and still less the
psychological gulf that separates this first wild, and
if we may say, heathenish Christianity from the
later civilized Christian spirit. If they approach
one another, it is in such unlikely fashion as
tremes sometimes meet.

Uncle Yeroshka drives away the night-moths
which flutter over the flickering fire of the candle,
and fall into it.

" ' Fool, fool ! Where are you flying to ? Fool,
fool ! ' He rose, and with his great palm began to
drive the moths away."

Does not the tender smile of Uncle Yeroshka at
this moment recall that of St. Francis of Assisi ?
He has a touch of hot blood in him too, a touch not
merely animal, but human, because on the con-
science of the old " thief " there is, after all, no
murder. Like Nature, he is at once merciful and
crueL He himself does not feel or suspect this
anomaly. That which in the sequel curdles off into
evil and good, in him is as yet blended in a primitive,
unconscious harmony.

Olenine, too, in his own heart, which so eagerly
desires to turn to Christianity, finds inborn in him
an echo of Uncle Yeroshka's cynical philosophy. In
the stillness of the noon hush, in the depths of the
southern forest, with its awe-striking superfluity of
life, he suddenly learns an unchristian self-abnega-
tion, a half-animal, half-godlike fusion with Nature,
the holy but savage love of Fauns and Satyrs, which
seems to men madness, full of enthusiasm and the
terror which the ancients called " panic," born of
the God of the universe.

15

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

" And suddenly on Olenine there came such a
strange feeling of causeless happiness in his love for
the All, that he, from old childish habit, began to
cross himself, and mutter thanks to some one." As
he listens to the buzzing of the gnats, Olenine thinks,
" Each of them is just such a separate Dmitri
Olenine as I myself am." And it became clear to
him that he was in no wise a Russian gentleman, a
member of Moscow society, the friend and relative
of such-an-one or so-and-so, but simply just such
a gnat, or just such a pheasant, or deer, as those
that at the moment had their being about him.
" Like them and Uncle Yeroshka I shall live awhile
and die. And what he says is true : ' only the grass
will grow better?

But he also is twy-natured, and the other Olenine,
Irteniev, like Nekhliudov, keeps on making the
assertion, " Love is self-sacrifice ! It is not enough
to live for oneself ; one must live too for others."
He tries to reconcile the unearthly love of the Wood-
god and Satyr, with the modest, profitable, and
reasonable Christian virtues. He sacrifices his own
love for Mariana, in favour of Lukashka the Cossack.
But nothing comes of this sacrifice, any more than
of Irteniev's rules of life, or Nekhliudov's seigneu-
rial Christianity.

" I am not to blame for beginning to love," is
the startling confession that breaks from him in a
moment of desperation ; " I have saved myself from
my love by self-sacrifice ; I have pictured to myself
delight in the love of Lukashka the Cossack for
Mariana, and I have only excited my passion and
jealousy. I have no will of my own, but some

16

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

elemental force loves her through me, all God's
world, all Nature forces this love into my soul, and
bids me love. I wrote formerly of my new (that is,
my Christian) convictions. No one can know with
what trouble they were worked out in me, with what
joy I recognized them, and saw a new path opened
to me in life. There is nothing in me dearer than
these convictions, nor has been. Well, love came,
and they exist no longer, nor do I regret them.
Even to understand that I could value such a one-
sided, cold, reasoning frame of mind is difficult for
me. Beauty came, and scattered in the dust all the
pyramidal edifice of my inner life. And I have no
regrets for what has vanished. Self-denial is ah
nonsense. It is all pride, an escape from merited
misery, a refuge from envy of the happiness of
others. To live for others, to do good ! Why should
I, when in my soul there is only love for myself ? '
' Only love for himself " : in that all begins and
ends. Love or hatred for self, for self only ; such are
the two main and sole axes, sometimes latent,
sometimes manifest, on which all turns, all moves
in the first, and perhaps most sincere of Leo Tolstoi's
books. And is it only in the first ?

CHAPTER II

OLENINE the cadet dreams of becoming A.D.C. We
know that an artillery cadet, Count L. N. Tolstoi,
also dreamed of being A.D.C. and getting the
Cross of St. George. " When serving in the Cau-
casus," says Bers, " Leo passionately desired to get
the Cross of St. George." At the commencement of
the Crimean campaign he was at first before Silistria,
but afterwards went to Sevastopol, where he was
under fire for three 'days and nights in the Fourth
Bastion, and took part in the assault, displaying
great valour .[ The soldierly ambition of those days
he afterwards expressed with his usual candour in
the secret thoughts of one of his favourite heroes,
Prince Andrei Volkonski, in Peace and War, making
him dream of becoming a Russian Napoleon. J

" If I desire this, desire glory," says the Prince
to himself before the battle of Austerlitz, " wish
to be known to my fellows and be loved by them,
well, am I to blame for willing and living for this
alone ? I will never tell any one this ; but, my Lord,
what am I to do, if I love nothing but glory alone
and the love of my fellows ? Death, wounds, the
loss of my family, nothing has terrors for me. And
however dear, however sweet, many people are to
me — father, sister, wife, for they are the dearest to
me — yet however terrible and unnatural it seems,

18

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

I would give them all at once for a moment of
glory — of triumph over other men, for the love
of other men towards me."

Tolstoi was actually recommended for the deco-
ration he so passionately desired, but he did not
receive it, as Bers declares, " on account of the
personal ill-will of one of his superiors." This
failure greatly grieved him, and at the same time
' changed his attitude towards bravery," as Bers
further asserts with his invariable frankness. It
was to him that Leo once confessed " his pride
and vanity, for when after the failures of his youth,
that is in military matters, he achieved a wide-spread
fame as a writer, he declared to me that this fame
was the greatest delight and happiness to him.
In his own words, there was in him " an agreeable
consciousness of the fact that he was at once a
writer and an aristocrat." Sometimes he said
jocosely, that he had not " won his way to be a
general of artillery, but he had become a general
in literature."

No doubt some of the coarseness and want of
restraint in this admission is not to be ascribed to
Tolstoi : in all probability, even in joke and familiar
intercourse, he managed to express himself more
delicately and modestly. But, on the other hand,
we need to see how deep was the simple and, as it
were, unconscious devotion of Bers to his great
kinsman in order to realize how totally incapable
he was of any malicious or satirical fabrication. He
writes his life of Tolstoi in all simplicity of heart
like the compilers of ancient fairy tales ; and
though, in truth, Bers' ncCiveU is worse at times

19

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

for his hero than subtlety or irony, to the inquirer
it is perhaps more valuable than the highest in-
telligence.

However this may be, having got sick of war
and warlike courage, on which he afterwards took
such immortal and pitiless literary revenge, he re-
tired as lieutenant of artillery, and went first to
St. Petersburg and then abroad. " St. Petersburg,"
remarks Bers, " never pleased him. Neither by hook
nor by crook could he make a show in the highest
circles there ; he had, of course, neither official
career nor large fortune, and his great fame as a
writer was not yet achieved."

Coming back from abroad in the year of the
liberation of the serfs, Tolstoi found employment as
communal arbitrator, and also undertook to teach
in the village school at Yasnaia Poliana. For a
time he contemplated devoting his whole life to
this work, and finding lasting content in it. But
little by little he got tired of the school, as he had
of all his former attempts to do good to his fellows.
And at last he got so far as to see " something
faulty and wrong," as he himself calls it, in his
relations to the children. " It seemed to me that
I was corrupting the pure and primitive souls of
the little peasants. I vaguely felt remorse for a
sort of sacrilege. I remembered the children who are
made by idle and corrupt old men to contort them-
selves and represent voluptuous scenes in order to
excite their worn out and jaded imagination.

The remorse, as always in his case, was sincere,
but unbridled and morbidly excessive. From his
school diaries of that period one thing at least is

20

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

clear, that he really was not as much concerned
about the children as about himself. When he
made Fedka and Senka write compositions, which
he afterwards, in his journal of pedagogy, declared
more perfect than his own works, or Pushkin's,
or Goethe's, he made on the minds of the children
experiments with his own intelligence, that were,
perhaps, too much in his own interest and not
without danger for them. He admired, like some
new Narcissus, his own reflection in the children's
ideas, as in the mirror of a deep and virgin spring.
He, the teacher, so terribly, so fatally influential,

loved in the children himself and himself alone.

I

Things seemed to go well," he admits in his
Confession, " but I felt that I was not wholly sound
mentally, and this could not go on long." A fresh
transformation was already in process in him. 4 1
felt ill," he said, " more spiritually than physically,
threw up everything, and went off to the Steppes,
to the Bashkirs, to drink koumiss, and live the
life of an animal."

When he came back he married Sophia Andreevna
Bers. All his former attempts to settle in life, his
Nekhliudov-like philanthropy of a country-gentle-
manly kind, his barbaric life in the Cossack colony,
war, the school, were only curiosity and dilettantism
(in the widest and older sense of the word), that
is, done for the love of the thing ; for throughout^
his life he has been like Uncle Yeroshka, above all, \
a great lover of endlessly- varied sport. But this—'
step of marriage was neither sport nor play, but
his first business of real importance, renewing all
things, and transfiguring them. It was a business

21

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

to which he not only wished to devote himself, but
actually did devote himself. He was thirty-four
and she eighteen. Directly after their marriage
they retreated to Yasnaia Poliana, and spent there,
almost without a break, some twenty years in
complete isolation, never getting tired of their
quietude or feeling the want of anything beyond
it. These were his best years, and in them he
composed Peace and War and Anna Karenina,
reaching the highest pitch and expression of his
powers. " Her love for her husband was bound-
less," writes the Countess's brother ; " the nearness,
amity and mutual love of the couple were always
a model to me, and the ideal of conjugal happiness.
It was not without reason that her parents said
" We could not wish our Sonia greater bliss."

We see in the Reminiscences of Fet this Natasha
or Kitty, one of the most faultless and perfect
feminine types of the cultured Russian Squirearchy
— "all in white, with a huge bunch of keys at her
belt," simple, quiet, always gay, and generally
enceinte, for she has no less than thirteen children.
" She seven times wrote out Peace and War, and
at the same time that she was so working," adds
Bers, " and went through the cares of the mistress
of a house, even to the minutest kitchen matters,
she found time herself to nurse, teach, and clothe
the children, to their fifteenth year." When their
second daughter was born the mother fell ill, so
that she was at death's door, and after several
attempts found herself unable to nurse the child ;
but when she saw another woman suckling her
daughter she wept for jealousy, suddenly dismissed

22

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

the nurse, and caused the child to be fed with a
bottle. * Leo found this jealousy natural, and
was delighted at the matronly qualities of his
wife."

' Love of children and the bearing of children,"
— the words will not seem too grandiloquent, or
reminiscent of the old patriarchs who received
commandment from the God of Israel, " Be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish the earth."

Whatever we may think of Tolstoi's domestic
happiness, all must admit that there is in this
connexion something solid, firm and well founded,
if not complete. At any rate, it is a compensation,
— it has balance, and is consequently beautiful, or
as the people would say, wholesome ; in other words,
exhibits what is rarest nowadays in Russian Society.
Russian life is neither vigorous and alive, nor quite
dead. It is not wholly moribund, but only eaten
into and maimed, as by some shameful disease,
which lays waste the family by subtle poison.

Cowardly, or bold, all too earnestly intent on
the future, we are apt to rate too low the perfect
patterns and exemplars of past times, that " come-
liness " and " shapeliness," those clinging zoophytic
roots of all human culture, deep seated in their
subterranean, native animal warmth and darkness ;
roots by which the golden-fruited tree life alone
is fed, and in spite of all " grey theories," blooms
for ever. To us the following outspoken, it may
be, too outspoken words of Nicolai Rostov, in the
Epilogue to Peace and War, seem, perhaps, cynically
coarse and bourgeois. "It is all sentimentality
and old wives' fables, all this good of one's neigh-

23

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

bour ! I want our children not to be vagabonds
on the face of the earth ; I want to secure and
protect the existence of my family so long as I
am alive ; that is all."

Pierre Bezukhov looks down on Nicolai Rostov,
fancying himself destined by means of his ' ' philo-
sophisings " to give a new tendency to all Russian
Society — perhaps to the civlized world. Levine,
too, like young Irteniev, considers the salvation
of mankind " a thing that is easily accomplished."
As he busies himself with the ordering of his
stewardship, or in what Rostov more candidly calls
" the ordering of his own property," Levine reflects,
" This matter is not merely my own personal con-
cern, but the common welfare is at stake. There
ought to be a radical change effected in the man-
agement of property, and particularly in the position
of the lower classes. Instead of poverty, there
should be general comfort ; instead of hostility,
concord. In a word, a bloodless revolution, yet
the greatest of revolutions, at first within the nar-
row bounds of our district, then spreading over
the Province, over Russia, and over the world."
f Y et none the less both Levine and Pierre Bezukhov,
\though they talk, do not act. They live still in
. precisely the same manner as Nicolai Rostov says
he himself lives. And in the Confession, Tolstoi
lays bare with true Tolstoyan, Rostovian, or Levinian
candour this last cynical secret of his favourite
heroes.

" The whole energy of my life at that time was
centred in my family, in my children, and there-
fore in my anxiety for the increase of the means

24

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

of living. The striving after protection was already
directly subordinated to the endeavour to make
circumstances as good for my family as possible."

He even declares that he took to authorship at
the time, that is, when he wrote Peace and War,
and Anna Karenina, simply as a means of improving
his material position, and draws the moral that for
him ' there was only one truth, that you must
live in such a way as may be best for you and your
family."

When he used to come home from shooting, or
his brief and grudging business excursions, Bers tells
us, he never failed to express his excitement in
the words, " If only all is right at home ! '

This is not Philistinism. It is of course an
instinct immeasurably more primitive and profound.
It is the eternal voice of Nature, the insuperable
instinct of self-preservation, which bids the beast
keep his lair, the bird its nest, and man kindle
fire on a hearth. " I have been married a fort-
night," he writes to Fet, " and am happy, and a
new, a totally new man. Now how can I write
you a letter ? Now there are invisible, nay, visible
efforts to be made, and with it all I am over head
and ears in farming, and Soniaisas deep in it as I.
We have no steward, and she herself plays bailiff
and keeps the accounts. I have bees and sheep,
and a new garden, and spirit distillery."

He is working for the purchase of the Yasnaia
and Penzeno property, and six thousand desiatines
of land at Samara, where he is going to form a
stud : he is buying up about one hundred Bashkir
mares and counting on profits from the abundance

25

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

of milk ; means to cross them with trotters, riding
horses, English, and other breeds. The old house-
keeper at Yasnaia tells us of his passionate fond-
ness for a breed of swine, a particularly fat and
hairless kind, without a bristle and short-legged.

He above all fell in love with his pigs, of which
he kept three hundred head in couples, in separate
small styes. In these the Count would not allow
the slightest dirt. " Every day I and my assistants
had to clean them all out, and rub the floor and
walls. Then as he went through the piggery of
a morning, the Count would be vastly pleased and
shout, ' What management ! What excellent man-
agement ! ' but Lord deliver us if ever he saw
the slightest dirt. He would straightway fly into
a fit of passion. The Count was a very hot-tem-
pered master."

Anna Seyron, who was governess to the Tolstois,
in her jottings, Six Years with Count Tolstoi (St.
Petersburg, 1895), a volume apparently intended
to be spiteful, though in fact it is rather frivolous
and clumsy, says ironically that their famous suck-
ing pigs were " looked after like children." The
joke is hardly a good one. What of it, if a good
economist found time to look after his children, who,
besides, were surrounded by Swiss, German, or Eng-
lish bonnes, as we know, and after, inspect sucking
pigs as well ? There is nothing despicable in farm-
ing, any more than in the care of the body. What
we have to notice is that on Tolstoi's property
all is to the purpose and well ordered, one to this
post, another to that, and this applies to his people,
animals and plants alike.

26

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

And even if, like Levine, he, while caring for his
warm and sheltered lair, and looking after sucking
pigs, consoled himself with the notion that he was
caring for the good of mankind, and taking part in
the slow and bloodless revolutionizing of the world,
in sober truth, he was only following the deep and
true instinct of animal self-preservation, what of
that ? Pigstyes and nursery, and stud, aviaries or
wine-presses and Soriia Andre vna's ledgers, these
" impalpable and palpable efforts," were in con-
formity with the dictates of Nature, the weaving
of the nest, and a very fine nest too. Above all,
you see here his great and simple love of life, that
eternally childlike joy of living which there was in
Goethe. " Leo," Bers tells us, " every day praises
the day for its beauty, and often adds, quite in
the spirit of the great heathen, ' How many riches
God has ! With Him, every day is set off by some
beauty or other.' " The wondrous dawn," he
writes to Fet, " the bathing, the wild fruit, have
put me in the state of mental languor which I
love ; for two months I have not stained my hands
with ink^br my mind with thinking. It is long
since I have delighted in God's world a? 1 have
this year. I stand gaping, wonderstruck, afraid
to stir for fear of missing anything." And yet
these were his most wearisome and terrible years,
when he contemplated suicide, and was planning
the Confession.

Perhaps he was never more natural, more true
to himself, more worthy of the brush of a great
painter, more as God created him, than at the
Baskhir festival which Bers describes. Through

27

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Mohammed Shah Romanovich notice had been given
that Tolstoi was getting up at his place in Samara
a steeplechase of fifty versts (thirty-four miles).
Prizes were got ready, a bull, a horse, a rifle, a
watch, a dressing-gown, and the like. A level
stretch was chosen, a huge course four miles long
was made and marked out, and posts put up on it.
Roast sheep, and even a horse, were prepared for
the entertainment. On the appointed day, some
thousands of people assembled, Ural Cossacks,
Russian peasants, Bashkirs and Kirghizes, with
their dwellings, koumiss-kettles, and even their
flocks. The desert Steppe, covered with feathery
grasses, was studded with a row of tents, or huts
of branches, and enlivened by a motley crowd. On
a cone-shaped rise, called in the local dialect " Shish-
ka ' (the Wen), carpets and felt were spread, and
on these the Bashkirs seated themselves in a ring,
with their legs tucked under them.

In the middle of the ring a young Bashkir poured
koumiss out of a large cauldron, and handed the
goblet in turn to the squatting figures, a sort of
loving cup. The feast lasted for two days, and
was merry, but at the same time, dignified and de-
corous, " for Leo knew," says Bers, " how to inspire
a crowd with a respect for decency." What an
unforgettable, antique, pastoral idyll we get in this
feast under the sky of the waste, among the waves
of the desert grass ! Even now, in the figure of
Tolstoi at seventy, that harsh, material, almost
coarse peasant visage, that figure which he him-
self, and others have tried in vain to make appear
that of a subdued repentant, and ethereal leader

28

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

of modern thought, I recognize the not unfleshly
sanctity, the comely dignity of one of the old
patriarchs, who led their flocks and herds from
well to well, through the desert, and rejoiced in
their posterity, " more numerous than the sands
of the sea." " I undertook great things," he says
in the Confession, in the words of Ecclesiastes, " I
built myself houses, and planted vineyards, I made
gardens and groves, and placed in them all manner
of fruit trees, I made myself cisterns for the water-
ing of the groves, I got myself men-servants and
maid-servants, and there were attendants in my
house ; also great and small cattle ; I had more
than all those that had been before me in Jerusalem.
And I became great and rich, and wisdom dwelt
with me. Whatever mine eyes desired I did not
deny them, or grudge my heart any gladsomeness."

One day Count Sologub said to him, "What
a lucky man you are, my dear fellow ! Fate has
given you every blessing of which man can dream,
a strapping family, a good and loving wife, world-
wide fame, health, everything."- And certainly if
not in the things of the spirit, yet at least, out-
wardly, his was at that time, the happiest life
imaginable. " If a genie had come," he himself
admits, ' and offered me the world to choose from,
I should not have known what to choose."

And see ! when he has reached this summit of
the welfare attainable by mortals he looks out
over the " evening valley " before him, as if the
gods had at length grown envious of a too happy
man, and were reminding him, not in the startling
voice of misfortune or bereavement, but the low

29

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

whisper of one of the Fates, that over him, too,
destiny was hanging.

He saw that he had been pursuing his life's
journey on and on, till suddenly aware of the close-
ness of the abyss, and that destruction yawned
before him. He realized, like Solomon, that all
was vanity and vexation of spirit, and that the
wise man must die even as the fool. ; I felt terror
at what was awaiting me, though I knew that this
terror was more terrible than my position itself,
but I could not patiently wait for the end.
My horror of the darkness was too great, and I
felt I must rid myself of it as soon as possible by
noose or bullet." Before dwelling on this last
turning-point of his life, the heights from which
he began the descent to "jthe jDlains of evening,'1
w£jnust examine the trait always as strong in him
as the love of life, namely, its obverse, Uie^iear
death.

CHAPTER III

: I AM sorry for those who attach great importance
to the mortality of all living things, who lose them-
selves in the contemplation of earthly insignificance.
For is not life ours merely that we may make what
is perishable imperishable, a task accomplished
only when things mortal and immortal are rightly
discerned and appraised ? "

That is what Goethe says (Maxims and Re flee-
tions).

In the conclusion of Faust he refers to the same
thought, almost in the same words, though still
more succinctly and clearly :

Alles vergangliche
1st nur ein Gleichniss.

' All that is passing is but a semblance, is only
shadow, or symbol. We must combine," Goethe
says, ' must value both treasures — beide Schatzetf

-must combine (wppaXkew, from which comes
(TvpftoXov, a symbol — that is, fuse, weld together,
make one) — we must fuse the idea of the non-
enduring with that of the enduring, must, without
abasing the transitory and the mortal, see in it
and beyond it, what is immortal and unfleeting.
We cannot attain what is supernal save by com-
prehending and growing to love to the end, to

31

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

the utmost limits, what is earthly ; not despising
nor shrinking from the nothingness of the earthly :
we must remember that we have no other ways
of rising, no other stepping-stones to God, save
" likenesses," " manifestations," and " symbols,"
not devoid of flesh and blood, but clothed in the
most living flesh and blood. For the mystery of
our God is not a mystery merely of spirit and
speech, but also of flesh and blood, since for us
the Word was made flesh. " Who eateth not my
flesh and drinketh not my blood, he hath not
eternal life." And so, not without flesh, but through
flesh to that which is behind it, such is the greatest
symbol, the most glorious union ; ah ! to how
many is it still unattainable ! '

This teaching of Goethe's as to the holiness of
what is earthly and transitory, of the incorruptible-
ness of the corruptible, is the best answer to despair
and terror ; to the words of Sakya Muni and
Ecclesiastes, on the corruption of all that has
being ; the best answer to the Nirvana, and the
" vanity of vanities," quoted by Tolstoi in his
Confession, as the profoundest expression of his
own despair.

It is strange that the old Hellenes, and the new
Hellene, Goethe, certainly did not love the world
and worldly delights less than Solomon or Tolstoi.
But the fear of death did not annul for them the
meaning of these delights. On the contrary, the
blackest darkness and the terror of the abyss even
increased for them the charm of life, just as the
blackest velvet enhances the splendour of diamonds.
They did not shrink from that darkness but, as

32

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

it were, deliberately out-gazed it, that they
might overcome it. Tragedy, the boldest illu-
mination of the dreadful in human fate, did not
arise in the most radiant period of Hellenic culture
by an accident. The despair of (Edipus, con-
fronted by the Sphinx's riddle, is more unbounded
than that of Sakya Muni or Solomon. But even
in sight of the Parthenon is the brightest temple
ever erected by man, the theatre of Dionysus, god
of wine and delight. Sophocles, serenest of mortals,
exulted in the sight of this deep despair. " Is
there not," asks Nietzsche, " a special leaning of
man's soul towards the cruel and enigmatical,
proceeding from the thirst for enjoyment, from
the overflow of health, from fulness of life, a special
and seductive daring, full of the keenest insight,
demanding the terrible as a foe, a worthy foe, in
wrestling with whom it can try its strength to
the uttermost ? "

The tragedy of Will, as "Prometheus," the
tragedy of Thought, as Faust, were just such ap-
peals full of " tempting hardihood " — versucherische
Tapferkeit — to the fear of death and the mystery
of life. Only the strongest of the strong, the coolest
of the fearless, ventures with impunity on this
cup of terror, of which Pushkin too, strongest and
most intrepid of the Russian race, speaks, when
he says :

In battle there is rapture,
Rapture in the giddy darkness of a gulf ;
In the tempest-scarred face of ocean,
The gloom and madness of waves :

33 D

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Where the desert heaves in hurricane,

Or the breath of plague is warm ;

Yea, rapture in all that threatens to destroy,

For the heart of a mortal still hides

Black magic that none can divine.

So, Pestilence, praise be to thee,
Fear we not gloom of the grave,
Thy death-boding cry appals not.

When an excessive fear of this " darkness of
[the grave' is present, a too vivid and sobering
consciousness of bodily decay, of the nothingness
of all things earthly, is the first sign that of a surety
the divine sources of that particular civilization
are exhausted or polluted, that in it the vital force
is declining. Af first sight the despair of Sophocles
in (Edipus seems akin to that of Solomon in " Ec-
clesiastes," but in reality they are at opposite
poles. One is an emotional ascent, the other a
descent ; one is a beginning, the other an end.
In the Lalita Vistara of Buddha, in the Ecclesiastes
of Solomon, we hear the voice, not of the soul
awakened, but of the flesh dying. In the weari-
ness of sated Epicureans, in the taedium vitae of
Rome's decline, in the skull placed by philosophers
among the wine-cups and the roses, there is a
coarse fleshliness, alien to the Hellenic body and
spirit, the senile materialism of a culture bereft of
its soul and its gods. For the purest and most
perfect Christianity is as confident of life and as
fearless of death, and has as great a power of mak-
ing the mutable immutable as perfect Hellenism.
What though the lilies of the field to-morrow

34

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

wither, and are cast into the fire ? None the less
to-day the sons of the Kingdom of God rejoice
that " even Solomon in all his glory was not ar-
rayed like one of these." The smile of Francis
of Assisi, as he chanted a hymn to the sun, after
the crucial torments and the vision of Mount
Averno, recalls the smile of Sophocles, chanting
a hymn to Dionysus, god of wine and happiness,
after the bloody horrors of the tragedy of (Edipus.
In one and the other there is youthful fervour,
and yet the calm of perfected wisdom. It is only
those who have stopped half-way, no longer what
they were, and not yet what they shall be ; who
have pushed off from one shore, and not yet made
the further, who are " adrift," in Goethe's phrase,
' in the contemplation of earthly nothingness."
Excessive fear of death generally serves as proof
of religious impotence, or religious imbecility. ^>
In Tolstoi's Childhood he describes the impres-
sion made on a child by his mother's death. He
looks at her as she lies in her coffin. " I could
not believe that that was her face. I began to
look at it more closely, and gradually discovered
in it the familiar and beloved features. I shuddered
with fear when I became sure that it was indeed
she, but why were the closed eyes so fallen in ?
Why was she so terribly pale, and why was there
a blackish mark under the clear skin on one cheek ?
The service came to an end : the face of the dead
woman was uncovered, and all those present, except
ourselves, went up, one after another to the cofnn,
and made their reverence. One of the last to go
up and take leave of her was a peasant- woman,

35

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

with a pretty five-year-old girl in her arms, whom
she had brought with her, Lord knows why. At
that moment I carelessly dropped my wet hand-
kerchief, and wanted to pick it up, but no sooner
did I stoop, than I was startled by a terrible and
piercing cry, full of such horror that if I lived to
be a hundred I should never forget it, and when
I think of it a cold shudder runs over my frame
even now. I raised my head ; on a stool by the
coffin knelt the peasant-woman, with difficulty
holding the little girl in her arms, and her child,
wringing her little hands, turned behind her a
face full of terror, and, fixing staring eyes on the
face, shrieked terribly, wildly. I, too, cried out,
in a voice which I fancy was even more fearful
to hear than that which had so startled me, and
rushed from the room."
,i * We may here say that this unreasoning cry has
never, since then, been hushed in Tolstoi's works.
He has infected the minds of a whole generation
with his own terror. If, in our day, people are
afraid of death, and that with such shameful and
hitherto unheard-of panic ; if we all, in our inmost
hearts, in our flesh and bones, have this cold shudder,
the marrow-piercing chill of which Dante speaks
on seeing the sinners shivering in the infernal lake
— " Then an icy chill passed over me. Even now
I feel it when I remember them " — then we are, in
a very large measure, indebted for it all to Leo
Tolstoi.

However, he had not taken his account of the
death of Irteniev's mother from his own recollections;
for Tolstoi's mother died when he was three years

36

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

old. He neither could remember her nor was
present at her death. But, apparently, in his
description of the hero of Childhood, the awfulness
of death which he depicts with almost cynical
minuteness of realism, was innate in himself,!
exceptional and peculiar to himself, at least in thatl
degree, had dawned in him with the first flashes )
of consciousness, and never quitted his side through
life. Many years later, when a mature man in
the full light of knowledge, he finds that same
dread overhanging his spirit, and is as helpless,
or more so, in face of it than he was as a child.

He writes to Fet, from Hyeres, near Nice, in
a letter dated October 17, 1860, with regard to
the death of his brother Nicolai : " On the 2oth
September he passed away, literally in my arms.
Never in my life has anything had such an effect
on me. He was right when he said to me that
there is nothing worse than death, and if you re-
member that death is the inevitable goal of all
that lives, then it must be confessed that there
is nothing poorer than life. Why should we be
so careful, if, at the end of all things, nothing re-
mains of what was once Nicolai Tolstoi ? He never
said that he felt the approach of death, and yet
I know that he followed it step by step, and was
well aware how long he had to live. Some minutes
before his death he dozed awhile. Suddenly he
started up and murmured in alarm, " What is
this ? He saw that he was passing into nothing-
ness. And if he did not know what to cling to,
what shall I find ? Assuredly even less."

In this letter, astonishing, yet alarming in its

37

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

outspokenness, what most of all strikes one is the
simple unconscious materialism displayed to the
verge of cynical coarseness ; it is a soulless callous-
ness. There is no wavering, no possible questioning,
no doubt as to the fact that death is a " passing
into nothingness.'* He feels no mystery. Shun-
less, fruitless terror is there, senselessly destroying
and drying up the very springs of life. It is like
what the heretical, Judaizing, Russian Nihilists
of the fifteenth century said, " And what is the
Kingdom of Heaven ? What is the Second Coming ?
What is the resurrection of the dead ? There are
no such things. If a man dies, his place knows him
no more." Or as Uncle Yeroshka puts it, "I die,
and the grass grows the better." It is a blind wall,
or, in true Russian phrase, " dead emptiness."

Twenty-five years later, long after his conversion
to Christianity, he expressed the same feelings of
unreasonable animal fear in ' The Death of Ivan
Ilyich.' " He remained once more alone with it.
He was eye to eye with it, and there was nothing
to be done with it. He could only look at it and
shudder."

We know that throughout his life, in many con-
tingencies of actual danger, Tolstoi has shown
remarkable personal courage and even foolhardi-
ness. He almost loved the whistle of bullets in
the deadly fourth Bastion at Sevastopol, and took
a delight in mastering the fear of death by his
vital energy, and it was of death that he thought
least when at the Piatigor " colony ' he fired at
arm's length at a mad wolf, or when, in hunting,
he was borne down by a she-bear, which all but

38

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

throttled him and tore the skin from his skull, so
that " the flesh hung down in tatters over my eyes,"
and there was as much blood on the snow "as if
a sheep had been killed." Getting up from under
the animal, forgetting his wounds and feeling no
pain, but trembling with excitement, he shouted
with a sportsman-like keenness, reminding us much
of Uncle Yeroshka, " Where is the bear ? Where
has the brute gone ? '

No, the fear of death in him in no way proceeds
from bodily timidity. That fear, though at time
it may amount to cowardice, is more inward and
deep-seated. At its original source, in spite of all
animality, it is yet abstract, and, so to speak, a
metaphysical fear. Yet all the more are we alarmed
at these sudden black gaps, in that they occur in
his soul and in his works, side by side with the
most passionate love of life. They are like those \
deceptive mantled pools in marshes, on the surface
covered with the greenest, freshest, most alluring
grass and the brightest flowers. Soon as the travel-
ler sets foot on them they give way and the
quagmire engulfs him. What is this frail and
subtle filament, which makes all the wheels of the
machine suddenly leave their axles and turns order
into chaos ? Whence this drop of venom, warping
his soul, so that life's sweetest honey turns to gall ?

Recalling the passionate psychological exercises
of his youth, which destroyed in him, as he said,
the freshness of feeling and clearness of judgment,
and even then brought a morbid dread of death,
in consequence of which he now, with the remorse
of a Buddhist devotee, scourges his back with

39

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

seven-fold cords, now, in the hopelessness of Solomon,
throws aside lessons for gingerbread, novels and
Kronov honey. He himself declares the cause of

(this temperament to be a preternaturally developed
self-consciousness. And in fact, if we trace the
spiritual life of the man throughout its course, it
is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that
between the conscious and unconscious side of his
mental growth there is a want of correspondence
and equilibrium. To say, however, that this want
of correlation consists precisely in the exceptional
strength of his self-consciousness is, I think, to
miss the truth. All Europeans, at any rate, have
had the opportunity of beholding how a much
greater force of consciousness than that of Tolstoi,
namely Goethe's, did not in the least disturb the
harmony and balance of that spiritual and intel-
lectual life, nay rather enhanced it. No, it is not
to superfluity of consciousness that we must look
for one of the most fertile causes of faultiness and
morbidity in the moral and religious development
of Tolstoi, but rather to the want of, and incom-
pleteness of such consciousness. In him, con-
sciousness is exceptionally trenchant, or at least
acute and strained, but it is not all embracing ; it
is not all-penetrating. It shines brightly, but not
from within, like the sun from behind the trans-
parent atmosphere, thoroughly penetrated by light,
but from without, as a beacon lights dark surfaces
of sea. However bright and widely shed are the
rays of this beacon-like perception, the uncon-
scious elemental life in the waters is of such un-
fathomable depth, that a defiant, subaqueous

40

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

darkness remains impenetrable by any rays. But
what I would lay stress on is that his conscious-
ness has developed, not only from without and
separately, it has grown, not only in another, but
in a wholly opposite direction from the trend of
his unconscious, his sub-conscious existence, so
that there are always in him, as it were, two or

^ -•r.n j_._ ^,

more men, one of them always opposing violently
the other. This internal rift and discord, like the
flaw in a bell, at first scarcely perceptible, gradu-
ally widens and causes a jarring sound. Alas !
the louder and more powerful the voice of the bell,
the more excruciating and fatal is the note of the
flaw! I

The fit of the fear of death, which, at the end of
the seventies, brought him to the verge of suicide
was not the first and apparently not the last, and
at any rate not the only one. He felt something
like it fifteen years before, when his brother Nicolai
died. Then he felt ill and conjectured the presence
of the complaint which killed his brother — consump-
tion. He had constant pain in his chest and side.
He had to go and try to cure himself in the Steppe
by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure him-
self. Formerly, these recurrent attacks of spiritual
or physical weakness were cured in him, not by any
mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his
vitality, its exuberance and intoxication.

Olenine at the thought of death, just like Tolstoi
among the cannon-balls at Sevastopol, recognizes
in himself ' the presence of the all-powerful god
of youth." Now, what is the real reason why
the transformation of the later seventies had

)

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

for Tolstoi such decisive and unique importance ?
He himself explains it, it is true, upon spiritual
grounds. But were there not, as in his former
nervous crises, also physical causes ? Was it not
that special feeling, proper to people in later middle
age, when they realize throughout all their mental
and physical organization that so far they have
been going uphill, but from that time onward they
will be going down ? " The time had come," he
says in his Confession about this very period of
his life, the beginning of its sixties, " when growth
in me came to an end ; I realized that I was no longer •>
expanding, but contracting, that my muscles weref
growing weaker, and my teeth falling out."

Here we hear the profoundly sensual Anacreontic
lament, without the Anacreontic clearness :

Grey have grown, ay, grey have grown
My curls, the glory of my head,
And loose my teeth are in my jaws,
And dimmed the fire of mine eyes.

In just the same way, Levine, alone at night in
his room at the wretched inn where his brother Nico-
lai is dying (how closely this death-scene resembles
the dying scene of Nicolai Tolstoi !) is seized with
this sense of approaching old age, the animal dread,
the marrow-piercing chill of the bones, and sud-
denly realizes throughout his physical being " that
all is coming to an end, that this is death." " He
lit a candle, and got up cautiously and went to
the looking-glass and began to examine his face
and hair. Yes, there was grey hair on his temples.
He opened his mouth : his back teeth had begun
to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes,

42

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

they were pretty strong. But Nicolinka too,
who was breathing yonder with the remnants of
his lungs, had a sound frame."

" What is the meaning of getting on in years ? '
asks Tolstoi in 1894. " It means that your hair
is coming out, your teeth decaying, wrinkles are
coming, your breath unpleasant. Even before all
comes to an end, or becomes dreadful and repulsive,
you become conscious of red and white in the wrong
places, sweat, bad odour, loss of bodily shape. Where
is that of which I was the servant ? Where is beauty
gone ? All is gone ; nothing left. Life is over."
In her letter of 1881, where the Countess assures
her brother that Leo is wholly changed, and " has
become the most sincere and devout of Christians,"
she also says that he " has grown grey, has lost
his health, has become quieter and more low-spirited
than he used to be." This remarkably close con-
nexion between the mental crisis and the gain or
loss, the ebb and flow of his physical health, runs
through his whole life.

The ' all-powerful god of youth ' had taken
flight, the ecstasy of life had evaporated. " We
can live," he owns, " only as long as we are drunk
with life, and when we grow sober, cannot help
seeing that all is deception, illusion, and a stupid
illusion too. If not now, then to-morrow there
will come disease or death on those I love, and
on myself. Nothing will remain but putrefaction
and worms."

The variance and Duality of his conscious and
unconscious life, the flaw, HI: first scarcely percept-
ible, had gradually widened into that " yawning

43

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

gulf," of which he speaks in the Confession, and
drawing near " he clearly saw that there was nothing
before him but annihilation."

" And what was worst of all, was this, that Death
took him (Ivan Ilyich) to itself, not in the heat of ac-
tion, but while he was simply looking it straight in
the eyes ; he had looked, and passively undergone
the torture." And he remained alone with it, " eye
to eye with it, and there was nothing to be done
with it. He could only look at it and shudder."

" And being saved from this state, he sought
consolation ; screens, defences, were found, and
for a short time sheltered him. But these once
more were destroyed or shrivelled up, as if that gaze
had penetrated everything, and nothing could turn
it aside."

Then began that last terror which was so great,
that " he longed to free himself from it as quickly
as possible by noose or bullet."

Tertullian maintains that the human soul "is,
of its very essence, Christian." But are all souls
Christian ? Are not some of them naturally pagan ?
It seems that Tolstoi, in particular, has the soul
of " a born Pagan." If the depth of his conscious-
ness corresponded to the depth of his elemental
life he would ultimately have understood that he
had no reason to fear or be ashamed of his pagan
soul, that it was given him by God ; that he would
find his God, his creed, in fearless and exhaustless
self-love, even as people with souls that are naturally
Christian find their God in endless self-sacrifice
and self-denial.

But owing to the profound incongruity, the want

44

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

of equilibrium, between his consciousness and the
unconscious element, only one of two things is
now left him, either to subordinate his conscious-
ness to the real elements of his nature, which he
did during the first half of his life, or on the other
hand to subordinate his elemental nature to his
consciousness, which he tried to do during the
second half of his life. In the latter case, he would
inevitably come to the conclusion that all self-love,
all life and the development of an isolated per-
sonality, is something fleshly and animal, and
consequently sinful, wicked and diabolical, the
sheer destruction of which should be our highest
good and our sole good. And, in fact, that is the
conclusion he has come to. He is determined to
the uttermost to hate and mortify his own soul ;
in order to save it. When the Confession was
written it seemed to Tolstoi that he had already
finally arrived at, and discovered, absolute truth ;
that there was no occasion to search further. In
the concluding pages he calls to the bar and judges
no longer himself, but only others, calling all human
culture ' self-indulgence," and the men that prac-
tise it " parasites." He says point blank, " I
grew to hate myself, and now all has become clear
to me."

But three or four years after the Confession the
' clearness ' had once again grown dim and con-
fused. Even in 1882, at the time when he wrote
a certain well known series of letters from Moscow ;
and after inspecting the night-refuge at Liapino,
when he was persuading all his acquaintance who
were well-to-do to combine, in order, by private

45

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Christian benevolence, to save that city in the first
place, and then all Russia, and lastly all the human
race, his conscience was ill at ease. The tension,
the diffidence, the discord of the cracked bell, is heard
in this summons, so far from simple, and couched
in language so unlike his own, so reminiscent of
Rostopchin's placards of the year 1812. " Let us
give like fools, like peasants, like labourers, like
Christians ; we pay taxes, we recognize the universal
duty of paying taxes ; why not also of show-
ing brotherly kindness ? Prove your friendship,
brothers, and all together ! '

When, while collecting money for the poor, he
expounded in his friends' houses this new plan for
saving the world, he fancied that his hearers grew
uneasy. " They were perturbed, but it was mainly
for my sake, and by my talking nonsense, though
that nonsense was of such a kind that it could not
be frankly called nonsense. It was as if some
external cause had bound my hearers to assent
to my folly." And after a speech in the Senate,
when conferring with the conductors of the corres-
pondence, he again came to feel that their eyes said,
" Why, out of respect for you, they have wiped
out your folly, but you are returning to it ! '

At length the all-important and, as he thought,
novel truth that private charity is an absurdity,
was revealed to him by the simplest arithmetical
calculation. One Saturday evening Semyon, the
carpenter, with whom Leo was chopping wood,
as he came near the Dorogomitov bridge, came
upon an old beggar, gave him three kopecks, and
asked for two back again. The old man showed

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

his hand with two three-kopeck pieces and one
kopeck in it. Semyon looked, and wanted to
take the kopeck, but then changed his mind, took
off his hat and crossed himself and went on, leaving
the old man the three kopecks. Semyon, as Leo
knew, had savings amounting to six roubles, fifty
kopecks, and he, Leo, had six thousand roubles.

' Semyon," he reflected, " gave three kopecks and
I twenty. What did he and I give respectively ?
How much ought I to give in order to do as much
as he did ? In order to give as much as Semyon,
I ought to have given three thousand roubles, and
asked for two thousand back, and if I could not
get change, left that couple of thousand as well
to the old man, crossed myself and gone on, calmly
talking about life in factories." A further and
final inference from this calculation was irresistible.

' I give a hundred thousand kopecks, and am still
in no position to do good, because I have two
hundred thousand left. Only when I shall have
nothing at all shall I be in a position to do some
little good. That which from the first an inward
monitor told me when I saw the hungry and shiver-
ing at the Liapino house, namely, that it was my
fault, and to live as I live is wrong, wrong, wrong

-that alone is the truth." The whole moral
edifice, raised with such infinite pains, such des-
perate struggles, at once tottered and fell, and he
had once more to own himself wrong, and publicly
to repent. ' I am a wholly enervated parasite,
good for nothing whatever. I, too, although an
insect, feeding on the foliage of the tree, am at-
tempting to further the growth and soundness of

47

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

the trunk, and to cure its disease." A new trans-
formation, a new second birth, had now therefore
to take place in him.

It became clear that he had not only entertained
no proper hatred for himself, and had not found
the truth, as he thought, when penning the Con-
fession, but had not even begun the real search
for it. And at the same time he became convinced
that this time the final and everlasting truth had
been revealed to him ; the putting of it into practice
seemed easy. " A man has only got not to desire
lands or money, in order to enter into the Kingdom
of God.'* He was convinced that the evil which
ruins the world is property ; " It is not a law
of nature, the will of God, or a historical necessity ;
rather, a superstition, neither strong, nor terrible,
but weak and contemptible." To free oneself
from this superstition and destroy it, is as easy
as to stamp on a spider. He determined to carry
out the teaching of Christ ; to leave all — home,
children, lands, to give away his six hundred thou-
sand kopecks and become a beggar — in order to
win the right to do good. The question how far
he succeeded in this undertaking, how far, as a
matter of fact, he renounced personal possessions
and crushed the feeble spider, forms the subject
of our further inquiry.

CHAPTER IV

" MANY people think," remarks the Countess's
brother, in his Reminiscences, " that I have con-
cealed all things not to the credit of Leo. But this
supposition is unfounded, because there is simply
nothing that needed hiding from strangers." This
is a wide assertion, when we know that the great-
est of saints and heroes have had moments of
shame, weakness and shortcoming. The most faith-
ful of Christ's disciples had on his soul a betrayal.
But, however, Bers is first and foremost a maker
of books, and what he writes is not life, but biography.

A yet more astonishing statement is one from
the lips of Tolstoi himself, who, according to the
testimony of one often with him, nowadays often
says, ; I have no secrets whatever from any one
in the world. All are welcome to know what I
do!"

The words are striking. Who is this that is bold
enough to protest, " I have nothing to be ashamed
of ' Is he a man who has a boundless con-
tempt for his fellows, or in very truth a saint ?
There are in the life of every man dates of par-
ticular significance, which correlate and interpret
the meanings of his existence, and decide once and

49 E

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

for all who he is, and what he is worth ; hours
which give, as it were, an internal section of his
whole personality to its inmost depths, betraying
both his conscious and unconscious qualities ;
hours when all the future destiny of the man, to
use a familiar phrase, is in the balance, swaying
on the edge of the blade, ready to fall on one side
or the other.

Precisely such a crisis in the life of Tolstoi was
the decision to distribute his property. But strange
to say, right up to that moment we have the most
minute records of his doings, confessions, repent-
ances, and admissions which enable one to follow
every movement of his volition and conscience. But
at this point they suddenly fail us and break off
short ! The garrulous self-revealer suddenly be-
comes silent, and for ever. True, we should have
had no need of any confessions, if only his deeds,
let alone his words, had spoken for him with suf-
ficient clearness. But it is just Tolstoi's outward
life, the life of his actions still more than that of his
words which leaves us perplexed. As regards the
inward part of his life, we learn about it only from
a few hints that seem to break from him involun-
tarily, hints eagerly caught up, though scarcely
intelligible even to the hearers ; or from his own
superficial accounts, in which we learn something
so unexpected and contradictory as only to increase
our mystification.

" With regard to his fortune," Bers informs us,
" Leo told me that he wanted to get rid of it as an
evil which burdened him, his convictions being
what they were : but at first he acted wrongly

50

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

in wanting to transfer this evil to another, or, in
so many words, to distribute it without fail, and
thus cause another evil, namely, energetic protest
and serious discontent on the part of his wife. In
consequence of this protest he proposed to her to

transfer it all to her name, and when' she declined

t

he made the same offer, but without success, to his
children."

' On one occasion," we are told by another
witness, M. Sergyeenko, in How Count Tolstoi Lives
and Works, " he met in the street a stranger, and
had a talk with him. It turned out that this man
was a bachelor, dining where the fancy took him,
and able at all times, if he willed, to be as solitary
in Moscow as on a desert island. In relating this
encounter, Leo added, with a smile, " And I envied
him so much that I am quite ashamed to own it.
Just think that man can live just as he pleases,
without doing harm to a soul ! That, indeed, is
happiness ! ' What is this ? What was there to
smile at ? What was the smile like ? And what
a curious hidden bitterness there seems to me to
have been in it !

And here is something still stranger, even what
we may call a painful admission.

; I shall look for my friends among the peasants.
No woman can stand to me in the place of a friend.
Why do we deceive our wives by pretending to
consider them our best friends ? For it certainly
is not true."1

Tolstoi also said to M. Jules Huret, " You ask me
whether I consider woman man's equal. I reply that I
know she is, in all respects, morally his inferior."

51

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Did he say that, too, with a smile ? Is that,
too, a joke ? The happiest father of a family,
the modern representative of the Old Testament
patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who had
lived with his wife thirty-seven years, soul to soul,
suddenly at the end of his life envies the freedom
of a bachelor, as if this family life were a secret
slavery, and gives an almost total stranger to
understand that he does not consider his wife
worthy the name of a friend. And the very same
witness, who, just before, had glorified the domestic
felicity of Tolstoi, in the same work, over and over
again, with a light heart and imperturbable clear-
ness, tells us, " However, in their theories of life,
they (Leo and Sophia) are at variance." Well,
" theories of life " are the thing that is most sacred
to him. And if they are at variance in that point,
in what are they at one ? Can you evade such a
variance by a joke ? Yet what Bers tells about
the sentiments of the " new-born ' Tolstoi is still
more startling. " Nowadays, Leo behaves to his
wife with a touch of exact ingness, reproachfulness,
and even displeasure, accusing her of preventing
him giving away his property, and going on bring-
ing up the children in the old way. His wife, for
her part, thinks herself in the right, and complains
of such conduct on her husband's side. In her
there has involuntarily sprung up a hatred and
loathing of his teaching and its consequences. Be-
tween them there has even grown up a tone of
mutual contradiction, the voicing of their com-
plaints against one another. Giving away one's
property to strangers and leaving one's children

52

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

on the world, when no one else is disposed to do
the same, she not only looks on as out of the ques-
tion, but thinks it her duty as a mother to prevent.
Having said as much to me, she added with tears
in her eyes, ' I have hard work now ; I must do
everything myself, whereas formerly I was only a
helper. The property and the education of the
children are entirely in my hands : yet people find
fault with me for doing this, and not going about
begging ! Should I not have gone with him if I
had not had young children ? But he has for-
gotten everything in his doctrines."

And at last came the final, and scarcely credible
admission, c Leo's wife, in order to preserve the
property for her children, was prepared to ask the
authorities to appoint a committee to manage the
property."

Fancy Tolstoi declared incapable of managing
his affairs by his wife ! This is indeed a tragedy,
perhaps the greatest in Russian life to-day, and
in any case, in his life. This is that edge of the
sword on which the whole destiny of the man, when
in the balance, is poised, and we learn all this from
casual observers, from people idly curious. And
this terrible fact is born deaf and dumb, in the
darkest and most secret corner of his life. There
is not a word from himself, though his invariable
habit has hitherto been to write confessions, and
he even now declares that he has nothing to hide
from the public.

But how did he come out of this tragic affair ?
Did he come to feel that he had again overestimated
his real powers, that what seemed easy and simple

53

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

was in reality difficult and complex, and that the
c superstition of property ' was not a " feeble
spider," but the heaviest of the fetters of life, the
last link of which is in the heart, the very flesh and
blood of a man, so that to pluck it from his bosom
means a fearful wound ? Or did he realize that
great and terrible saying of the Master, " A man's
foes shall be those of his own household ' ' ?

We know how, in exactly similar circumstances,
the Christian heroes of the past ages acted. When
Pietro Bernardini, the father of St. Francis of Assisi,
presented a complaint to the Bishop, accusing his
son of wasting the property and wanting to give
it to the poor, Francis, stripping himself of his
clothing to his last shirt, laid the garments and his
money at his father's feet, and said, " Till now I
have called Pietro Bernardini father. But now,
being desirous of serving God, I return to you, O
man, all that I have had from you, and henceforth
shall say, " My father is not Pietro Bernardini, but
the Lord, my Heavenly Father ! ' And wholly
naked, as he came from his mother's womb, adds
the legend, Francis threw himeslf into the arms
of Christ.

So, too, acted the favourite saint of the Russian
people, Alexei, a man of God who had secretly fled
from his parents' house. And so, to the present
hour, all Russian martyrs have acted, wishing to
fulfil the saying of Christ, " Whoso leave th not
house and lands and children for my sake, is not
worthy of Me."

Vlas gave away the last he had,
Till he stood barefoot, naked ;

54

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

He went to gather alms and gold

To build a house unto the Lord.

And consecrated to God's grace

The exceeding strength of his own soul.

And since that day he is beheld

A beggar, close on thirty years.

He lives upon the alms of scorn,

To keep the vow he made.

That is what should have come to pass. The
great writer of our country should have made
himself the champion of the Russian people, a
manifestation yet unknown and unique in our
civilization, and the religious path once more found
across the gulf, opened by Peter's reforms, between
us and the people. It is not for nothing that the
eyes of men are bent with such eagerness on him,
not only on all he writes, but far more on all he
does, on his most private and personal concerns,
his family and home life. No, it is not mere idle
curiosity. There is too much under that roof of
moment to us all, to the whole future of Russian
culture. No fear of being too prying ought to
hold us back. Has he not said himself, " I have
no secrets from any one in the world. Let them
all know what I do " ?

And what does he do ? " Not wishing to oppose
his wife by force," says Bers, " he began to assume
towards his property an attitude of ignoring its
existence ; renounced his income, proceeded to
shut his eyes to what became of it, and ceased to
make use of it, except in so far as to go on living
under the roof of the house at Yasnaia Poliana."
But what does " except in so far ' mean ? He
carried out the word of the Lord, and left house

55

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

and lands and children, " except in so far ' as he
still clung to them. He made himself a beggar
and homeless, and gave away what he had," except
in so far " as he consented, for fear of grieving his
wife, to keep what he had. And what " evil,"
what " violence to his wife J were in question ?
Certainly Christ did not advocate violence. He
did not demand that a man should take away
their living from his wife and children in order to
give it to the poor, but He did demand, and most
emphatically and clearly, that if a man cannot
get rid of his possessions in any other way he should
leave, together with his lands, house and property,
his wife and children, and take up His cross and
follow Him, that, at any rate, he should learn to
the utmost the meaning of that saying, " A man's
foes shall be those of his household."

But then, that is beyond a man's strength ! It
is a revolt against his own flesh and blood ! And
is not the whole teaching of Christ, at any rate
taken from one point of view, as Tolstoi takes it,
a revolt against our own flesh and blood ? Nor
did the Lord say that this was easy, or say that to
renounce our possessions was as " crushing a feeble
spider." He foresaw that this would be man's
most binding chain, the last link of which could
be torn from the bosom only with agony, that
there was no other way he could free himself from
it than by trampling on the most vital, dear, and
implicit of human ties, by leaving, not only his
property, but father and mother, wife and children.
And that is why He said with such unutterable,
mournful and compassionate irony, " Verily, verily,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man
to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

So spoke He, but what says Tolstoi ? He is
silent, as if his acts spoke for him, or there weie
no contradiction in the matter, no tragedy — as if
everything was as before, easy, clear and simple
to him. It is only the strange legend, the biography
of this latter-day saint, that answers for him :
' He tries to shut his eyes, and is wholly absorbed
in carrying out the programme of his life. He
does not wish to see money, and, as far as possible,
avoids taking it in his hands, and never carries it
about him." l

And he has so far succeeded in making his wife's
will accord with the will of God, that of late, Bers
tells us, " the Countess has begun to look more
calmly on the doctrines of her husband ; she has
got used to them." So this is the new way of
remaining a camel, and of yet passing through the
eye of the needle, " not to handle money," " not
to carry it about with you," and to " shut your
eyes " !

Can it be so ? Is not this irony, is it not the
worst kind of mockery of himself, of us, and of the
teaching of Christ ? And if this has any mean-
ing as before a human court, then before God's
judgment-seat the question will be at the last,
' Has he, or has he not, fulfilled the injunction
of Christ ; has he given away his possessions ? '
There will be no evasion : there can be no ambiguity,
only one answer — yes or no. We do not know

1 Anna Seyron.
57

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

what he himself thinks or feels about it, cannot
see the inward side of his life, but the outward
we know to the last detail. Thanks to the busy
eyes of countless journalistic spies, the walls of his
house have become as transparent as glass. We
see how he eats, drinks, sleeps, dresses, works,
cobbles boots and reads books. Perhaps these trifles,
once so important, may give us the clue to the
secret places of his conscience. But the more we
watch, the further we penetrate, the greater our
wonder. It is with special exactitude that the
witnesses describe the plenty and abundance, the
cup of hospitality full to the brim. One of them
puts it, " There is the profusion and solidity of
the old-fashioned gentlefolk in the town-house of
the Tolstois." We see this small two-storied pri
vate house in the Dolgo-Khamovincheski Pereiilok
(cross-street), which, of a winter's night, sends the
light of its windows far amongst the white frost-
spangled trees of the old-world garden. Within
there is an atmosphere of cordial warmth, gaiety,
and " undefinable, high-born simplicity," the broad
staircase, the high, well-lit, rather empty drawing-
rooms, devoid of any unnecessary ornament, the
antique polished mahogany furniture, the " respect-
ful footman ' ' in dress coat and white tie, ushering
in visitors, though it is to be noted that Leo makes
no use of his services, for he keeps his own room
in order and fetches the water in a cask, not on
horseback but on his own back. The study ' re-
minds one, in its simplicity, of Pascal's." It is
a small, low room, with an iron pipe stretching
across the ceiling. " When, early in the eighties,"

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

says Sergyeenko, ' the whole house was rebuilt,
Leo would not sacrifice his study on the altar of
luxury, assuring the Countess that many most
useful workers lived and worked in incomparably
worse surroundings than his." But he might
have said with much truth that few workers live
and work in better rooms than he. Therein is
nothing superfluous, neither pictures, nor rugs
nor nick-nacks. But experienced workers know
that everything unnecessary is mere distraction,
and prevents fixed and concentrated thoughts.
The iron pipe across the ceiling seems unlovely,
but it was specially constructed for Tolstoi on
principles 'of hygiene. Its lamp induces excel-
lent ventilation, and partly heats the worker's
study. It insures a constant, gentle current of
fresh air and a uniform temperature. What could
be better ? But the great merit of this room is
its quiet. After the house was remodelled, this
study, which had remained undisturbed, seemed
perched between heaven and earth. It spoiled the
side view of the house. " But in the matter of
noiselessness and retirement the study had gained
greatly." The windows look on the garden and
not a sound reaches it from the street. This re-
treat, far removed from the living-rooms, always
inclines to contemplation." Only those who pass
all their lives in thought can appreciate at its full
value this greatest virtue of a study, the felicity,
the deep luxury of seclusion and silence — sole and
indispensable luxury of brain -workers. And how
rare it is, how hard to obtain in the large towns of
to-day ! In comparison with this kind of comfort

59

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

how barbarous seem the bourgeois contrivances of
our degenerate taste, coarse in its very effeminacy,
and brutalized to the American level.

Still more pleasant, still more quiet is his work-
room at Yasnaia Poliana, in the hush of the old
park, with its avenues of immemorial birches and
limes, in the noble and patriarchal retreat, one of
the most charming nooks in central Russia. This
room, with its plain floor, arched ceiling and thick
walls, was formerly a store-room. In the hottest
days of summer it was " as cool there as in a cellar."
Various utensils, a shovel, a scythe, a saw, tongs,
and a file give the furniture an idyllic and fresh
charm, as of the days of childhood and Robinson
Crusoe's abode. These two working-rooms, winter
and summer, are two regular cells, quiet and luxuri-
ously simple cells, for this latter-day disciple of
Epicurus, who knows better than any how to
extract from physical and spiritual existence the
purest, most innocent and never-failing pleasure.

And everything in the house, as far as may be,
matches the noble, subtle taste of the master —
his love for refined simplicity. The Countess does
her best to prevent the details of life vexing or
alarming him. " All the complicated and laborious
work of house-keeping and business is in her charge.
She has no helpers."

Meanwhile the household order reigns complete.
The Tolstois' coachman had good reason for saying
to Sergyeenko that the Countess was passionately
fond of order. " She is untiring, and carries into
everything her vital energy, domesticity and good
management. She has only to leave the place for

60

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

a day or two on business for the complicated
machine, called a household, to begin at once to
creak and jar. She is an excellent housewife, full
of foresight, bustling and hospitable. You eat and
drink as well at Yasnaia as anywhere."

At the table, always plentiful, moderate, simple
and tasteful, special vegetarian dishes are served.
This regime gives the Countess much solicitude.
She is much averse to it, and only allows it in the
house as a new kind of cross or thorn in the flesh,
so troublesome and complicated is it. But she
does not complain, and herself sometimes sees to
the getting ready of new dishes in the kitchen.
She has arrived at last at making the vegetarian
table there so appetizing and varied that the car-
nivorous Leo, perhaps, never realizes how much
it has cost her. Those vegetarian dishes, for all
their simplicity, are really more choice than those
of meat, because requiring more inventiveness, skill
and patience on the part of the housekeeper. And
it is certain that if, like Uncle Vlas, he frequented
the highways, or, as he advised his eldest son, hired
himself out as a journeyman labourer to some
farmer, he would be forced to eat forbidden butcher's
meat, some herring or Smolensk liver. Instead
of that the thin mutton broth which he loves is,
of course, scarcely less tasty than the most expen-
sive and complicated soups, compounded by cooks
with a salary of a thousand roubles a year, and
the barley coffee with almond milk, if not as fragrant
as pure Mocha, is all the more wholesome. Add
to this the physical weariness, hunger and thirst,
best of all sauces, and we think of the bilberry-

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water with which the old peasant once entertained
Levine after mowing.

; Well, this is my kvass ! Good, eh ? ' said the
peasant, winking ; and, sure enough Levine had
never drunk such liquor as this warm water, with
leaves floating in it and the acrid taste of the
bilberries. The old man crumbled bread into a
cup, kneaded it with the handle of a spoon, poured
in water from the bilberry jar, cut the bread up
smaller and sprinkling salt on it began to pray,
with his face to the east.

"'There now, squire, try my sopped bread'
(bread steeped in kvass).

" The sopped bread was so appetizing that Levine
changed his mind about going home to dinner."

You see, Tolstoi is a man who knows how to eat
and drink better than the spoiled guests of Trimal-
chio, or the gourmets of to-day.

His dress is just as simple as his food, and far
more comfortable and convenient than our own
ugly, gloomy and ascetic garb, which confines the
body miserably, is not national, and is despised
by the people. Leo wears in winter grey flannel,
very soft and warm, and in summer loose cool
blouses of a peculiar cut. No one knows how to
make them sit on him comfortably and easy, except
old Barbara from the neighbouring village and
perhaps also the Countess. His upper clothes,
caftans, touloups (short pelisses), sheep-skin hat,
high leather boots, are all carefully planned apparel,
suited to drenching rain and dirty weather. Guests,
and the members of the family, are often tempted
to use these garments. This is the true garb of

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

your village artist in comfort, who happens to
live within northern latitudes. There is in all
this a certain curious foppery. In youth he lamented
his visage was just like a common peasant's. Now
he prides himself on the fact. He loves to tell
how, in the streets or strange houses, he is taken
for a real peasant or vagabond.

That means," he winds up, " aristocracy is
not written on the face ! "

On one occasion, in War and Peace, Pierre
Bezukhov, too, you remember, dressed up in peasant
garb and felt childish pride in admiring his bare
feet, ' taking pleasure in putting them in various
postures, and scuffling about in the dirt with his
big toe. And every time he stared down at them
a smile of infinite content and self-satisfaction
passed over his face." In his youth Leo dreamed
with eagerness of the St. George's Cross and the
epaulettes of an A.D.C. Now he is the slave of
other subtler, more modern, marks of distinction.
But in the long run does it really matter much
whether we wear orders, ragged puttees or glit-
tering epaulettes ? And he need not distress him-
self, for aristocracy is, after all, written on his
face in unmistakable characters, and under the
peasant's short pelisse is visible in him the old
unimpeachable man of the world. Under this
rough external travesty the high breeding is, if
possible, more marked and attractive. So, some-
times in the most magnificent Eastern fabrics, the
woven foundation is extremely coarse and rough,
the more richly to serve as foil to the delicate-
sparkling traceries of gold and silken embroidery.

63

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Soft beds, down pillows, he abhors as wearying
and stifling. He prefers ventilated leather bolsters.
But the Sybarite, tossing sleepless on an uneasy
couch, tortured by a crumpled roseleaf, could
not but envy the hard yet easy bed of Leo
Tolstoi.

The idyllic perfume of manure moved almost
to tears one of the most sensitive and sentimental
of the spoiled fops of the eighteenth century, Jean
Jacques Rousseau. Leo, too, loves its savour.
" One morning," says Anna Seyron, " he came in
to breakfast straight from a newly-manured field.
At that time several strangers were staying in
the house at Yasnaia. They had volunteered to
improve the yield of the land, in company with
the Count. All their boots stank of manure, the
doors and the windows of the room were wide open,
else it would have been impossible to breathe.
The Count looked at us half-stifled women with
a quizzical smile." He also likes all fragrances.
When leaving the meadow, after mowing, Bers tells
he always pulls hay from the hay-cock, and smells
at it vigorously. " In summer he always keeps
about him a flower, a single flower, but that of the
sweetest. He keeps it on the table or in his hand
or thrust into his leather belt. You should see
with what: delight he puts it to his nostrils, and
in doing so looks at those about him with a won-
derfully dreamy, tender expression. He is also
very fond of French perfumes and scented linen.
The Countess takes care that there is always a
sachet of petal-dust in the drawer with his under-
clothes." You see the method of this enjoyment.

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

After manure, the perfume of flowers and essences.
Here is the symbol, here the point of union.
Under the peasant Christian's pelisse we get, not
a hair-shirt, no ; linen, lavendered and voluptuous
with eau de Chypre and Parma violets.

That cheerful philosopher in ancient Attica who
tilled little garden with his own hands, who
taught men to be easily content, to believe in no-
thing, either in heaven or earth, but simple enjoy-
ment in the sunlight, flowers, a little brushwood
on the hearth in winter, and in summer a little
spring water out of an earthen cup, would have
recognized in Tolstoi his true and, it would seem,
his sole disciple in this barbaric age, when in the
midst of senseless luxury, coarse, sordid, and bar-
baric American " comfort," we have all, long ago,
forgotten the finer part of pleasure.

The Countess, who has, at last, ceased to quarrel
about the giving up of the property, and with a
sly motherly smile slips among her husband's linen
a sachet with his favourite scents, is a faithful and
trusty collaborator in this refinement of life. " She
learns his wants from his eyes," an observer says ;
4 she cares for him like an untiring nurse," says
another, ' and only leaves him for a little while
at a time. As, for many years, she has studied
minutely the habits of her husband, she can see,
directly Leo leaves his study, from his mere look,
how he has got on with his work and what humour
he is in. And if he wants anything copied she at
once lays aside all the work of which her hands
are always full, and though the sun should fall
from the sky yet, by a certain time, the copy will

65 F

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

have been carefully written out by her hand and
laid on her husband's writing-table."

Even if he seems ungrateful, says that his wife
is ' no friend of his," and heeds her love no more
than the air he breathes, yet she wants no other
reward than the consciousness that he could not
get on without her for a day, and that she has made
him what he is. " The untiring nurse ' rocks,
pampers and lulls, with care and caresses, like the
invisible soft strength in the web of a " feeble
spider," the self-willed, refractory and helpless
child of seventy.

Does the worm gnaw at his heart ? Is he pur-
sued and harassed by the consciousness that he
has not done the bidding of Christ, that, while the
body is gratified the soul is mortally troubled ?
His wife says, in the very letter where she speaks
of his conversion to Christianity, that he has grown
grey and fallen into weak health ; has become
quieter, more languid. Bers also declares that
when he saw Tolstoi again after some years, he at
once felt " that the cheerful bearing, which had
always been conspicuous in Tolstoi, was now wholly
gone. The affectionate and grave tone of his greet-
ing seemed to give me to understand that my
present delight was great but that all such delights
were illusory."

But no particular importance can be attached
to this jadedness. No doubt it was connected
with a temporary indisposition, one of those peri-
odical fluctuations to which he is subject, those
ebbings and flowings of physical vigour con-
comitant with his periodical spiritual upheavals.

66

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

At any rate, Bers says that on the very day of his
arrival his host did not maintain the grave mood,
the new-found and monastic quietude : " Probably
he guessed my sadness at the impression he had
made on me, and to the general delight began to
joke with me and suddenly jumped on my back
as I was walking about the drawing-room." And
in this playfulness, which certainly could hardly
be expected of a man who wished to show by his
demeanour that " these were not real pleasures,"
his visitor at once recognized the old Tolstoi. No,
the delight in life is not yet dead in him, but per-
haps bubbling and pulsating with even greater force
than when he was a boy.

"It is impossible to depict with adequate com-
pleteness the joyous and infectious frame of mind
which reigns at Yasnaia Poliana," says an eye-
witness, " the source of which is always the host
himself. I remember our games of croquet, in
which all took part, children and grown-ups. We
began generally after dinner and ended with the
arrival of candles. I am still ready to look on
the game as one of pure chance, because I played
it with Tolstoi. The children are particularly fond
of his society, and always want to be his partners,
and are always glad when he devises some exercise
for them. To amuse me he mowed, winnowed,
did gymnastics, ran races and played at leap-frog
and touch-last." This was some years ago. But
Sergy£enko, who describes his life in recent years,
says that even now he plays as he used to for
whole days at lawn tennis and runs races with
the children. It is a constant holiday, like some

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

new Golden Age. " At the Tolstois'," he goes on,
" you always get the impression that the day is
one fixed for amateur theatricals and a whole
parterre of young people is getting ready for the
event, filling the house with noisy merriment, in
which, at times, the host joins. Especially if some
amusement is got up that requires activity, en-
durance and skill he will look on for some time at
the players and sympathize in their success or
failure, and often can stand it no longer, and joins
in the game, displaying so much youthful ardour
and muscular flexibility that often people grow
quite jealous as they watch him." Yes, it is a
constant holiday, a constant game, now in the
fields behind the plough, now at lawn-tennis, now
in the meadows with the mowers, now in sweeping
up the snow for tobogganing, now in making a
stove for a poor old woman. And his wife vainly
plagues herself with speculations as to whether
trips of twenty miles on a bicycle can be good for
him at his age. Whatever the doctors may say,
he feels that this constant and seemingly exces-
sive exertion of sinews and muscles, these
constant gymnastics and games, which are still
more delightful and pleasant when they can be
called " work," are indispensable to his health and
existence.

Bers tells us of one game invented by Leo which
aroused in the children very lively and noisy en-
thusiasm. It is called " Numidian Cavalry," and
consists in " Tolstoi's quite unexpectedly springing
up, and raising an arm above his head, but leaving
one wrist free play, while he prances about the

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

rooms. All the children, and sometimes the adults,
follow his example, just as unexpectedly." In
this old man, who, like a young boy, suddenly runs
briskly about and draws even grown people into
the game, I recognize him who says of himself,
with a bright boyish smile, " I am a merry fellow ;
I love everybody ; I am an Uncle Yeroshka."

In picturing the first dream-like remembrance,
bewitching and dark, of his far-off childhood, at
the age of three or four, he gives us one of his hap-
piest and most forcible impressions, of bathing in
a tub. ' I was, for the first time, conscious of
and admired my young body, with the ribs that
I could trace with my finger, and the smooth, dark
tub, the withered hands of the nurse and the warm,
steaming, circling water, its plashing, and above
all the smooth feeling of the wet ends of the tub when
I passed my hands over them." We may say
that, from that moment, when as a child of three
he first noticed and admired his own young naked
body, he has never ceased to worship it. The ,
deepest element in all his feelings and thoughts is
just that first innocent, unalloyed consciousness of
fleshly life — love of the body. This feeling he gave
expression to in picturing the joyful consciousness
of animal vigour, which, on one occasion, came
over Vronski before a certain meeting with Anna
Karenina. ; This feeling was so powerful, that
he laughed in spite of himself. He stretched out
his legs, crossing one over the knee of the other,
and taking it in his hand felt the well-developed
calf, which had been hurt the day before in a fall,
and leaning, breathed deeply several times : " Good,

69

r

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

very good ! " he said to himself. He had before
often felt a pleasant consciousness of his body,
but never had he so loved himself and his own
frame."

I fancy that nowhere is this sheer animal delight
in physical vigour, familiar to the ancients but
now chiefly found in children, expressed with such
frank primitive innocence as by Tolstoi. And with
the lapse of years it has not only not diminished
but actually increased, seemingly set free and
refined from all external admixtures. Like wine,
it is with him stronger the older it gets. The
springtime of his life seems dark and stormy in
comparison with this golden radiantly calm autumn.
As an Italian diplomatist of the fifteenth century
has it about another great lover of life, Pope
Alexander Borgia, Leo " is growing young in his
old age." When he fancies he is preparing for
death in reality he is, as it were, merely preparing
for earthly immortality.

And if, with this earthly life,

The Creator has bounded our fleeting span,

If beyond grave and coffin

And visible world nought awaits us —

Still the death of man finds the Creator justified.

; Who has not been in that small wooden house,
painted in dark ochre ? " says Sergy6enko, lovingly.
" Learned men and authors, artists and actors,
statesmen and financiers, governors, secretaries,
county councillors, senators, students, soldiers,
manufacturers, artisans, peasants, representatives
of all parties and nations, not a day passes in winter
that there does not appear in the Dolgo-Khamov-

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

nicheski Pereiilok some new personage in search
of an interview with the famous Russian author.
Who is there that he does not greet, sometimes
warmly and sympathetically, sometimes with per-
plexing questions and accusations ? Young Rus-
sians and French folk, Americans, Dutchmen, Poles,
English, Baroness Bertha Suttner, and devout
Brahmins from India, the dying Turgeniev ; even
the brigand Churkin, rolling about like a wounded
beast on his death-bed."

"It is delightful to know," the master said one j
day, " of one's influence on others, for then one
has proof that the fire within is real, else it would
not kindle other hearts."

These words remind us of his own confession to
another confidant some years ago, ' ' I did not rise to
be general of artillery, but for all that I have become
a general in literature." Now he could say that
he has become general, not only in literature, but
in the new social-democratic creed that is spreading
through the world. And the second distinction is
more honourable than the first. Thus he has
managed to combine the most subtle refinement
and indulgence of the flesh with glory, the last
luxury and gratification of the spirit.

But where is the commandment of Christ as to
renouncing all possessions, as to complete resigna-
tion, complete poverty, the only path to the King-
dom of God ? Where is that bridge thrown over
the gulf that has yawned between our creed and
that of the Russian folk ever since the days of
Peter's reforms ? Where is the voice of Russia
in the guise of a great martyr ? And what has

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become, alas ! of our hope of the possibility of a
miracle in the history of Russian culture, of a man,
the richest among his fellows not only in material
but spiritual treasure, really earning his bread in
the sweat of his brow, or, like Uncle Vlas, ' bare-
headed, in a rough smock-frock," holding out his
hand for donations towards the building of a Temple
for Russia and the Universe ?

This jolly old pagan " sportsman," like Uncle
Yeroshka, this rejuvenated Epicurean squire, luxuri-
ous in his very moderation and simplicity, with his
admiring retinue of American Quakers, representa-
tives of all political parties, "of all nations," Baroness
Bertha Suttners, Paul Derouledes, governors, stu-
dents, senators, financiers, et hoc genus omne, has
lost his way. The man whom, according to his
own conscience, he should have followed, was one
of whom it was said, in no mere figure of speech,
; The whole might of his soul To God's own cause
was consecrate " ; the man whom, not only in
words, gave away all he had, —

Himself remaining ragged, naked,
Throughout the length and breadth of his own land ;
Treading in footprints of the King of Heaven,
A peasant, penniless.

Full of immedicable grief,
Swarthy, straight-limbed, erect,
Walks he with stately stride and slow,
Through towns and villages.

With Image and with Book he goes ;
Aye communing with his own soul.
And still his iron-pointed staff
Rings gently on the road.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

It is astonishing with what unanimous sympathy
all the biographers dwell on the comfort, warmth
and plenty of the family nest that the pair have
made for themselves. It may be that some one
of them has harboured for an instant some notion
of the contradiction between the words and acts

I

of the man who accuses all human culture of incon-
sistency. But, apparently, it has never dawned
on them that the spectacle must be handled warily
and delicately, that this plenty which they celebrate,
and this lordly, this almost Philistine fulness of
bread, this respectable and virtuous household,
may have an unexpected effect on those who happen
to recollect these words, " One refined life, led in
moderation and within the bounds of decency,
of what is commonly called a virtuous household,
one family life, absorbing as many working days as
would suffice to maintain thousands of the poor
that live in misery hard by, does more to cor-
rupt people than thousands of wild orgies by coarse
tradesmen, officers or artisans given to drunkenness
and debauchery, who smash mirrors and crockery
for sheer fun."

Was it not his own well regulated and comfort-
able life at Yasnaia that Leo had in mind when
he wrote these words ? Must we not gather from
them that he feels in his own house as in a den
of robbers ? Or are these " brave words " only
and nothing more ?

One of the guileless compilers of the Tolstoi
legend, after telling us that the Count, although
he has not distributed his fortune yet has ceased
to make use of it, " except for the fact that he

73

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

remains under the roof of Yasnaia," adds, appa-
rently with a view to silencing at once all possible
doubts and misgivings in the reader's mind, " They
(the Tolstois) give away every year from two to
three thousand roubles to the poor." According
to the calculation which in the eighties had such
an effect on the conscience of the Count, these two
or three thousand roubles would have been equivalent
fifteen years ago to the two or three kopecks of
Semyon the carpenter, and at present only to one
or perhaps half a kopeck, for his fortune has in-
creased considerably of late years ; and goes on
increasing, thanks to the business capacity of his
wife, who, " on the advice of a friend," as Anna
Seyron tells us, " has begun to make a profit out
of the Count's writings." Things go so well
with her that his former publishers, out of jealousy,
are trying to stand in her way, but she fights them
vigorously. This makes the Count's position really
interesting. His religious conviction is ' that
money is harmful, and the root of all evil. Who
gives money, gives a bad thing." And now, sud-
denly, a new gold mine has been discovered in his
own publications. At first he refused to listen
when there was talk of money in connexion with
his books. He assumed a look of consternation
and suffering. But the Countess firmly stood her
ground in order to secure the future of the children.
The former state of things could not go on when
the family increased and the expenses with it."

It was just at this juncture that Leo " tried to
shut his eyes," and " devoted himself wholly to
carry out his plan of life," his " four stages." But

74

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

the more pitilessly he laid bare the contradictions
of the bourgeois life of to-day, the more fervently
he preached the fulfilment of the law of Christ,
renunciation of all one's possessions, the better
Sophia's publications spread, and the more income
poured in. Thus the doctrine that seemed a danger
has happily only furthered the financial prosperity
of the family.

Sergyeenko tells us that on one occasion Leo's
father, being sent in 1813, after the blockade of
Erfurt, to St. Petersburg with despatches, was on
the return journey taken prisoner at the hamlet
of St. Obi, with his orderly, a serf. The latter
succeeded in hiding all his master's gold in his
boot, and during the several months for which they
remained prisoners, never once betrayed his trust,
or was found out. The money made his leg so
sore on the march as to cause a severe wound, but
he never let his pain be seen. And so, when they
got to Paris, his master was able to live in perfect
comfort, and always remembered his faithful
orderly with gratitude.

On the fidelity of such men as this the entire
fabric of patriarchal felicity, the " soberly con-
ducted life of what is called a virtuous family ' is
based, as on a granite foundation. Does the cen-
tenarian housekeeper at Yasnaia, Agafia, remember
the occurrence ? At any rate she must certainly
remember how the old master, Nicolai Tolstoi,
otherwise Rostov of the novel, clenching his beef-
eating fist, said : " That is the way to keep the
peasant whelps in order." This is the same Agafia
who, touching the childhood of the young master,

75

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

relates that he was " a good child, only of weak
character," and when she heard of his new eccen-
tricities, only laughed a strange laugh. It was a
slyer and subtler smile that I saw on the face of
Vasili Sintaev, the peasant of Tver, also an advo-
cate of the gospel of poverty, and one of the cleverest
men in Russia, with whom I chanced to discuss
Tolstoi, not long after the latter had paid Sintaev
a visit. I venture to imagine that some such smile
must, at times, flit over the face of the Countess,
though long since resigned and grown used to the
doctrines of her husband.

Yes, you grandfathers and great-grandfathers,
grandmothers and great-grandmothers, whose an-
cient portraits look down from the walls of the
pleasant country house at Yasnaia, with that gaze
of solicitude peculiar to ancestors, — " If only all is
well at home ! ' You may set your minds at rest ;
all is well at home, all as it was of old, as it was
in your own day, is now, and shall evermore be.
The famous " four stages ' have not proved so
terrible as might at first have been thought. While
Leo is resting from a bicycle ride or peasant work
in the fields, or lawn-tennis, or fixing up a stove
for a poor old woman, the Countess sits up all night
over the proof-sheets of a new edition, " a new gold-
mine," part of which was kept to some purpose
for the master in that faithful orderly's boot, and
the faces of the ancestors retain their benignant
condescension in their faded frames.

" On one occasion, in my presence there came
to see him," relates Bers, " a sick and weather-
beaten peasant to ask for wood to build a shed.

76

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

At his invitation we took our axes and in a few
minutes had felled several trees in the wood on the
estate, lopped the branches, and tied the beams to
the peasant's cart tail. I confess that I took great
pleasure in doing this. I felt a new thrill, per-
haps due to Leo's influence, perhaps partly because
it was a small service to a really sick, exhausted
and needy fellow-creature. The peasant, with his
humble look, stood apart meantime. Leo cer-
tainly noticed my delight and purposely left much
of the work to me, and I felled almost all the trees,
as if wanting in that way to conceal my novel sen-
sations. When we had sent the man away, Leo
said : " Is it possible to doubt the need for, and
satisfaction in doing, such acts ? ' And in fact,
can one doubt it ? But why did the man stand
there all the same, looking humble and distressed,
while the gentlemen were rejoicing in their own
well-doing ? What did he want more ? What did
he expect ? Was it the usual charity in money ?
He must have been well aware that Tolstoi does
not carry money on his person. Or was the sick
man simply cold and sick and tired of waiting till
the gentlemen had done their work ? How sur-
mise what mocking and ungrateful thoughts are
streaming through the mind of a peasant while
gentlemen are taking a particular pleasure in help-
ing him ? Men in general, and the tenants at Yasnaia
in particular, are given to mockery and ingratitude.
The most of them," he himself admits, " look
on me as a horn of plenty, and nothing else. Can
one expect any other attitude ? Their life and
ideas were framed ages ago under the stress of cir-

77

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

cumstances. Can one man change all this single-
handed ? "

This argument is, however, identical with the
Countess's retort when the property was to be
distributed. " I cannot throw the children penni-
less on the world, when no one else wants to follow
your example." This is the main and irrefutable
argument of " the Prince of this World," that
weighty logician who lulls us in heathen indifference,
to whom it is due that Christianity, in the course
of nearly twenty centuries, never advances : ' If
one man cannot change all this, why not let things
go on as they are ? ' This is that paltry neutrality
in which our democratic and Philistine world comes
to a standstill, drags its feet, and finds the web of
" the feeble spider of property " an iron chain. To
our " safely ' Christian feelings speaks the angel
as to the church of Laodicea : " Would thou wert
either hot or cold ; but since thou art but luke-
\warm, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

" I have given you what I could, and can do no
more," says Tolstoi, the apostle, with a touch of
bitterness to the applicants that surround him.

We were making our way through the garden,
when a peasant with a scrofulous child stopped
us. Leo halted. " What is it ? "

The man pushed forward the boy who, after
various confused pretexts, drawling out the words,
begged of him, " Gi-ive me the fo-o-oal."

I felt awkward, and did not know which way
to look.

Leo shrugged his shoulders. " What foal ?
What nonsense ! I have got no foal.

78

L lucti :

55

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

" Yes, there is ! " declares the peasant, pushing
quickly forward.

" Well, I know nothing about it. Be off, in
God's name ! ' answers Leo, and after going a few
steps, jumps briskly over a ditch.

But is Tolstoi absolutely certain that he has no foal ?

In Childhood and Boyhood he tells us how, on
one occasion, having forgotten to confess one of
his sins to the priest, he went to make a fresh
confession. Going home from the monastery in a
cab he felt an agreeable self-satisfaction and pride
in his own piety. And he felt he must talk and
share the feeling with somebody. But as no one
was at hand except the cabman, he clambered to the
box seat, and described to him these fine emotions.

" Really ! ' said the man incredulously, and for
a long while after he sat stock still. I thought he
was thinking of me, what the priest thought, " What
an incomparably good young man ! ' But suddenly
he turned round and said, " And what, sir, may be
your honour's occupation ? "

" What ? " asked I.

" Your occupation, your honour's occupation ? '
he repeated, mumbling his toothless lips.

; Well, he evidently doesn't understand me," I
thought, and talked to him no more till we
arrived at the house.

1 1 blush even now," he adds, " when I remem-
ber the occurrence."

It strikes one that the sick serf who looked on
in humiliation and vexation at the good gentlemen
felling trees for him with their own hands, and the
unabashed peasant who asked Tolstoi for the non-
79

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

existent foal, might have inquired, like the cabman,
" And what, sir, is your honour's occupation ? '

But Tolstoi fulfils the commandment of Christ
by retorting to this inquiry about property — that
spider so easily crushed — " What ? I know no-
thing about it ; be off, in God's name ! Be off ! '

An eye-witness declares that whatever Tolstoi
may do he never appears ridiculous. We remember
the moment when, to evade that unfortunate peas-
ant, with an agility wonderful in an old man of
seventy, he jumped the ditch, and we have our
doubts. I am only too well aware that in such an
act there is, not only a ridiculous, but a pitiful
element, and one terrible, both to himself and to
us all. As is almost always the case in the life of
to-day, the piteously ridiculous is also the dreadful.

Is it not dreadful that even this man, who has
utterly thirst e,d for truth, who has so remorsefully
found fault with himself and others, should have
admitted such a crying deception to soul and
conscience — such a monstrous anomaly ? Despite
all appearances, the smallest and the strongest of
the devils, the latter-day Devil of Property, of
Philistine self -content and neutral pettiness, has
won in this man his last and greatest victory.

If the Tolstoi legend had been concocted in the
twilight of the Middle Ages, we might have taken
that importunate peasant who demanded an im-
possible foal, for some shape assumed by the Fiend.
And when the Count ran away from him, the
Tempter must have grinned and muttered one of
his favourite remarks, " Don't you know that I,
too, am a logician ? '

80

CHAPTER V

You are a king, live alone ! " soliloquized Pushkin ;
but in spite of spiritual solitude, he always lived
in a larger circle of friends than belonged to any
other writer. His capacity for sudden and in-
cautious friendship was astonishing, as was his
simple and easy intercourse with all men, great
and small : with Gogol and Arina Rodionovna, the
Emperor Nicholas, Baratynski, Delvig, Yazykov,
and Lord knows who else — almost any one who
came to hand.

Thou lovedst to come stooping from thy zenith,
To hide thee in the shadows on our plains ;
Thou lovedst sky-thunder, and yet lovedst too
The murmur of the bees in the red rose.

How much he had of unaffected forgiveness and
condescension towards smaller men ! And there is
towards rich and great no shade of envy, self-
interest, or malice. With what frankness he shows
us his heart ! With what regal generosity, nay,
prodigality ! He seems, in all his nature, like others,
a good little Pushkin. He seems like others to the
core ; " that dear, good fellow, Pushkin." Scarcely
one of his friends suspects his awful greatness, his

81 G

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

hopeless solitariness. It was suddenly manifested
only just before his death, when he could say to
himself with quiet bitterness, " You are a king, die
alone ! "

And Goethe, yet more lonely than Pushkin,
knew how to " drop to the shadow of the low
plain ' from the icy summits where the Eternal
Mothers dwell, to make friends with Schiller, the
fiery and the earthly.

In Tolstoi's life we are struck by a peculiar
loneliness, not that proper to genius, but another-
social, terrestrial, and human. He has won for
himself almost all that a man can win, except a
friend. His relations with Fet cannot be called
friendship, for he contemplates him too much
from above. And how could Fet be a friend to
him ? Their intercourse is rather the intercourse
of the chiefs of two gently-born and landed fami-
lies, no more. All his life Tolstoi has had about
him mere relatives, admirers, observers, or observ-
ants, and latterly, disciples, these last being really
farther away from his soul than any. As the years
go on this reasoned and calculated aloofness, this
cautiousness in affection, this complete incapacity
for friendship, increase. Only once did Fate, as if
putting it to the touch, send him a worthy and
illustrious friend, and Tolstoi himself repelled, or
at least failed to retain him. That friend was
Turgeniev.

Their relations form one of the strangest psy-
chological riddles in the history of Russian litera-
ture. Some mysterious force attracted them, time
after time, towards one another, but when within

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

a certain distance impelled them apart, only to
draw them together again later. They were mutu-
ally disagreeable, almost intolerable, and at the
same time most closely akin. They were more
necessary to each other than other men, yet could
never meet in peace. Turgeniev was the first to j
recognize and welcome in Tolstoi a great national
writer. " When this new wine settles, we shall get
a vintage fit for the gods," he wrote as early as
1856 to Drujinin. And upwards of twenty years
later he wrote to Fet : " The name of Tolstoi is
beginning to acquire European celebrity ; we in
Russia have long since known that he was peer-
less." The opinion of a man whom I do not
love," owns Tolstoi, " is dear to me, and that the
more, the more I grow in stature ; I mean the
opinion of Turgeniev." " When we are apart,
although this sounds strange enough," he writes
to Turgeniev himself, " my heart flies to you as
to a brother. In a word, I love you ; of that there
is no doubt." Grigorovich tells us of the soirees
of the Contemporary in Nekrasov's rooms in the
fifties, " Tolstoi lies full length on a morocco
sofa in the central reception room, and snorts
himself into a rage, while Turgeniev, parting the
tails of his short cutaway and sticking his hands
in his pockets, keeps striding to and fro through
the three rooms." To prevent a catastrophe,
Grigorovich goes up to Tolstoi.

' My dear fellow, don't excite yourself, you
know how he appreciates and loves you."

1 1 will not let him insult me," says Tolstoi, with
dilating nostrils. " There he is now, parading up

83

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

and down past me on purpose, and kicking his
democratic heels."

At last the catastrophe which Grigorovich had
reason to fear came to pass at Stepanovka, Fet's
place, in 1861, a quarrel about some trifle 1 which
nevertheless nearly led to a duel. Turgeniev was
to blame, for he lost his temper and spoke too
strongly. Tolstoi was right, as unexceptionable in
attitude as in most of his social relationships, and
in spite of apparent heat, inwardly cool, reserved
and self-controlled. For all that, strange as it
may seem, the culpable Turgeniev makes a better
figure in the dispute than the correct Tolstoi ; for
he at once came to himself, and in a manly, simple
and magnanimous way retracted his words. Tol-
stoi took, or wanted to take, this retraction for
cowardice.

' I despise this man," he wrote to Fet, knowing
that his words would be repeated to his opponent.

' I felt," owned Turgeniev, " that he hated me,
and cannot understand why he is always appealing
to me. I should have kept away from him as
before ; but I tried to make advances, and this
almost brought us to a duel. I never liked him,
and don't know why I was blind to all this before."

It seemed as if all was finally at an end between
them. But lo, seventeen years after, Tolstoi is
again making the first advance to the other, again

1 Another account says : " This furious quarrel arose out
of a cynical remark made by Tolstoi when he heard that
Turgeniev had engaged an English governess to teach his
natural daughter. Turgeniev challenged him, and Tolstoi
avoided a duel by apologizing.-' — EDJ

84

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

" appealing " to him, and offering to make it up.
Turgeniev at once responded with joyful alacrity,
as if he had himself desired, and been waiting for
the reconciliation. He met Tolstoi like one of his
nearest and dearest, after a long and enforced
separation, and his last thought was given to this
" friend."

" Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch," wrote
Turgeniev, " I have not written to you for a long
time, for I lay and lie (in two words) on my death-
bed. I cannot get well ; that is not to be thought
of. But I write in order to tell you how glad I
am to have been your contemporary, and to make
my last earnest request. My friend, return to
literary work. This talent of yours has come down
from whence all else comes. Oh ! how happy
should I be could I believe that my entreaty would
prevail with you. My friend, our great national
writer, grant my request ! "

In these words there is a tacit fear for Tolstoi,
a silent disbelief in his conversion to Christianity.
The public action of Tolstoi did not respond to
the appeal of Turgeniev. And who knows, this
letter may have wounded him, full as it was of that
sincerity with which men speak on the verge of
the grave. It may well have been more painful
than any of their former encounters. Did he not
repeat in his heart, with revived dislike and the
vain desire to be contemptuous, " I despise this
man ' For it has always so happened in those
crises, when we might expect frank, high-minded
and decisive utterance. He shut his ears to the
last prayer of his friend and adversary.

85

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Turgeniev once passed a profound and penetrat-
ing judgment on Tolstoi : " His chief fault con-
sists in the absence of spiritual freedom"
— Of the character Levine, who, as he clearly
saw, is the double of Tolstoi, Turgeniev wrote to
a friend, " Could you for a moment entertain the
idea that Levine is at all capable of caring for any
one ? No ; affection is a passion eliminating * self.'
But Levine, when he learns that he is beloved and
happy, does not cease his devotion to himself.
Levine is an egotist to the marrow of his bones"

" You have one characteristic in a rare, an aston-
ishing degree — candour," remarks Nekhliudov to
Irteniev.

" Yes," agreed Irteniev, not without secret satis-
faction ; "I always say precisely the things I am
ashamed to say."

But it is a strange effect that the " candour " of
Tolstoi produces, if you penetrate into it a little
deeper. This candour enables him the better to
conceal the inmost recesses of his soul, so that the
more frank he appears the more secretive he is.
He always confesses the things that he is ashamed
of, with the exception of the chiefest and most
dread secret of all. That he never mentions to
anybody, not even himself. Turgeniev was the only
man with whom he could not, as with others, be
either silent or guardedly outspoken. Turgeniev
saw too clearly that he could never care for any
one but himself, and that in this lay the last shame,
the last dread which he nowhere dares confess.
In this too great perspicacity of Turgeniev's lies
the cause of that enigmatical force, now attractive,

86

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

now repellent, which played such strange tricks
with the pair. Like two mirrors set opposite each
other, reflecting and fathoming each other to in-
finity, both feared the too clear view of their own
latencies.

Not less noticeable are the relations between
Tolstoi and Dostoievski. They never met, but
the former was for many years meaning to make
the other's acquaintance. " I considered Dostoiev-
ski my friend, and never thought but that we
should meet, and as that never happened it must
be my fault."

He was always intending, but he never carried
out his intention — never found time ; and it was
only after poor Dostoievski' s imposing funeral,
when everybody was talking about him and making
as much fuss as if they had just discovered him,
that Tolstoi at last joined in the general accla-
mation, remembered his deferred affection, and
' suddenly ' realized that this was his " nearest,
dearest and most- valued fellow-creature." "It
was as if a prop had been taken from me. I was
thunderstruck, wept, and am still weeping. A few
days ago, just before his death, I read The Humili-
ated and Oppressed, and was greatly moved by it."

It is curious that Tolstoi's emotion did not
choose something more worthy of it, say Crime
and Punishment, or The Idiot, or The Brothers
Karamazov, but he got no further than one of the
few mediocre and immature productions of Dos-
toievski. Possibly, again, he had not found time.

But there is a more curious passage in the letter
of condolence. " It never occurred to me to com-

8?

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

pare myself with him, never," he declared. " All
his work was such that the more he did the better
I found it. Art excites in me envy, and so does
intellect ; but the work of the heart only pleasure."

How are we to understand this ? Is Tolstoi too
secretive here, or too candid ? He owns to envy
in general terms, but by no means to envy towards ;
his greatest rival ; and in the works of Dostoievski,
the author of Crime and Punishment, there is, for-
sooth, the " work of the heart ' and no more. Is
there really no more ? Is there in Dostoievski
neither the " intelligence ' nor the " art ' which
even Tolstoi might occasionally envy ? Or are
these in his case insignificant and slight, as com-
pared with "feeling"? Such praise as this is
hardly a thing to be proud of. The Count wept,
and no doubt sincerely, but those words make one
feel unaccountably chilly and ill at ease.

What did Dostoievski think of the ethical teach-
ing of the master and his Christian regeneration ?
What did this man, " most near, essential and dear ;
to him, this inward prop of Tolstoi's spiritual life,
think about Tolstoi's holy of holies ?

Dostoievski was the first to point out the coming
world-wide importance of the artistic creations of
Tolstoi, at that time realized by no one else, and
even now not fully understood* And he saw
Tolstoi's weakness as clearly as his strength.
Of Levine he said much the same as Turgeniev
did, " Levine is an egotist to the marrow of his
bones," only in different words. He asks him-
self, " What caused Levine to be so gloomy and
alone, and to stand aside so surlily ? ' And he

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

returns more than once to this question, medi-
tating inter alia on the so-called " democratiza-
tion ' of Levine and Tolstoi, and their attempts
" to return to the soil." Dostoievski felt that,
more than any one else in Russia, he had the right
to express an opinion on this point : "I have seen
our common folk and known them, have lived
years enough with them, eaten with them, slept
with them, have myself been * numbered with the
transgressors,' worked with them at real hard
labour. Do not tell me that I don't know the
people ! I know them well." *

And he considered that the gulf separating such
men as Levine and Tolstoi from the people was
more impassable than they supposed. " There is
nothing more dreadful than to live in a c world '
which is not your own. A peasant transported
from Taganrog to Port Petropavlovsk at once finds
there a familiar Russian peasantry, at once falls
in with them and gets on with them. It is not so
with the man of family. He is utterly parted from
the common people, and this is only fully apparent
when the gentleman is suddenly deprived of his
former privilege, and becomes part of the common-
alty. It is not enough that all your life you have
been in daily contact with the people, as a friend,
as a benefactor and protector ; you never learn
their real inwardness. Your knowledge is an illu-
sion and no more."

You must simply do what your heart bids

Dostoievski writes on Tolstoi's religious ideas in his
Diary of an Author (or Author's Note-book), which was
published periodically from 1873 to 1881. — ED.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

you," continues Dostoievski ; " if it bids you give
away your property, give it ; if it bids you go work
for the common good, do so ; but even then, do
not do as other dreamers, who must take straight-
way to the wheelbarrow, saying, " I will be a
peasant.' The wheelbarrow also may be a mere
uniform, a convention. It is not essential to give
away your substance or put on a smock-frock,
that is only the letter and a form ; what is essen-
tial and of consequence is simply your determina-
tion to do anything as a practical demonstration of
your love. You may candidly admit your own
class limitations. All attempts to ' join the people '
are merely a travesty, uncivil to the people and
humiliating to yourself."

" My doubts have ended," declared Levine, and
in what ? He has not yet precisely denned the
object of his faith. Is it faith ? There can hardly
be final belief in such men as Levine. He loves to
call himself of the people, but he is a gentleman, an
average Moscow fop of the upper class, of which
the historian is undoubtedly Tolstoi. Such men
as this Levine, however long they may live with the
people, never become merged in the people ; nay
more, in many respects never understand them. An
impetuous whim, an angry act of will, however fan-
tastic, will not transform him into a common man.
You may be a squire, and a working squire, and know
a labourer's work, and reap yourself, and know how
to harness a cart, yet still in your soul, however you
may struggle, there will remain a touch of what
I think may be called idleness, that physical and
spiritual idleness which, despite hard effort, clings

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to the class by inheritance, and which, in any case,
the people see in every gentleman. And so Levine
feels now and again some flaw in his faith, and all
at once it topples down. In a word, this simple
soul is empty and chaotic. Otherwise he would
not be a perfect and cultured Russian gentleman,
still less an ordinary member of the noble class."

The coinciding judgment on Levine and Tolstoi
formed by minds so original and opposite as Tur-
geniev the Westernizer and Dostioevski the Slavo-
phil, seems worthy of remark. " He never loved
any one but himself " ; "an egotist to the marrow
of his bones " ; "an ordinary Moscow fop of the
upper class " ; an " empty and chaotic soul," " fai-
neantise" and so on. This seems final condem-
nation.

It appears that Turgeniev and Dostoievski are
right, but the truth seen by them is limited. Com-
batants like him themselves, they have not expressed,
perhaps have not discerned, the seeker after a new
religion in Levine and Tolstoi. For us, farther off
and calmer, it is easier to see into this human soul,
which is still great as no others are — possibly
because we can be more compassionate. And only
in utmost compassion lies perfect justice.

Epicurean qualities — qualities of the hunter
Yeroshka, of the lounging Moscow fop, yes ; but he
is profounder than the Epicureans. The basis of
his soul, as with all the true men of to-day, is deep,
tragic, and terrible. Look in his face, powerful in
ruggedness, the face of a blind subterranean Titan,
and you will feel that this is no mere Russian squire
of the eighteenth century. Through the radiant

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joy of living on that face I trace the mark of Cain,
or of our age, the mark of secret immedicable an-
guish and dark pride. And those whom Baratynski
called

The mighty and gloom-stricken children
Of Poetry's mystical pain

might at times welcome in him one of their own :

" Thou didst drink of the same cup as we —
Of greatness poisoned.11

He has not reached what lies before us, but knows
that to what is behind there is no return. He has
not made the further shore, nor winged his flight
to the further brink of the abyss, but his greatness
is seen even in failure.

He has never loved any man, even himself. He
has never adventured on that greatest love which
is passionless and fearless. But who has thirsted
for love with more avidity than he ? He has
never believed in anything, but who has thirsted
for belief more insatiably ? It is not everything ;
but is it not enough ? " What though," he says
in the Confession, "I, a fallen fledgling, am lying
on my back and crying in the high grass ? I cry
because I know that my mother bore me within
her, covered me, warmed, fed, loved me. Where
is she, that mother ? If she deserted me, then
why did she do so ? I cannot disguise from myself
that some one begot me and tended me with
feelings of love. Who is that some one ? '

I simply do not believe Tolstoi when he declares
that he has found the truth, and is for ever set at rest ;
that now " all is clear ' to him. It seems to me

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

that when he says this he is further than ever from
God and the truth. But I cannot refuse to believe
him when he speaks of himself as a pitiful fledgling
fallen from the nest. Yes, however terrible, it is
true. This Titan, with all his vigour, is lying on
his back and wailing in the high grass, as you and
I and all the rest of us. No, he has found nothing,
no faith, no God. And his whole justification is
solely in this hopeless prayer, this piercing and
plaintive cry of boundless solitude and dread.
Yes^he too, and all of us, can only dimly feel without
as_yetjaiowing how truly pitiful is our plight, de- A

prived of that vast natural and maternal Church,
Ijnean not the Church of the past or the present,
but of the future, that which keeps saying, under
her breath, to mankind, " How often would I have
gathered you as a hen gathers her chickens under
her wings, and ye would not ! "

How near he was to what he sought ! Another
moment, another effort, and all would have been
revealed to him. Why did he not take that step ?
What obstacle kept him from the goal of the future ?
What endless weakness in his endless strength kept
him from bursting the last veil, transparent and thin
as a ' weak spider's web," and having sight of
the Light ? And now, has he accomplished all that
he was destined to accomplish ? Has the wheel of
his spiritual evolution come full circle ? Has he
come to a standstill, turned to stone, or will he
revive again to undergo the last, really the last, re-
generation ? Who can forecast the future of this
man ? Yet more momentous words and actions
we probably must not look for from him now.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Goethe says, " Well it is for that man who can
make the end of his life tally with the beginning,"
that is, the old man's " wisdom of the serpent,"
tally with the " simplicity of the dove " in the child.
Will Tolstoi succeed in making them tally ? Will
the last bandage fall from the eyes of the blind
Titan ?

In his first book there is a picture of vernal nature
after a storm, as it appears to the eyes of a child.
" I spring from the britchka1 and eagerly drink in
the freshened fragrant air. Everything is moist
and sparkles in the sun, as if covered with
varnish. On one side of the road is a fallow
field, stretching out of view, here and there
traversed by shallow hollows, shining with moist
soil and green leaves, and spreading in a shadowy
carpet to the very horizon. On the other, a
pine-wood, overgrown with nut and rock-cherry
underwood, stands still, as if in excess of happiness,
and slowly lets fall from its newly washed boughs
the bright raindrops on the fallen brown foliage.
On all hands crested larks rise, singing gaily, or drop
swiftly down : amongst the moist bushes are heard
young birds pattering, and from the middle of the
copse comes the clear note of a cuckoo. So bewitch-
ing is this wondrous perfume of the woods after the
spring storm, the savour of birch, of violets, dried
leaves and rock-cherries that, springing from the
step of the britchka, I rush to the bushes, and in
spite of a shower of raindrops, tear down one of the
wet boughs of the cherry, beat the blossoms in my
face, and revel in their delicate perfume. My boots

1 Carriage.
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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

are drowned in mire, and stockings long since wet
through, I wade through the dirt and run to the
carriage window.

" ' Liubochka ! Katenka ! ' I cry, handing in
several boughs of cherry, ' Look, how nice ! '

" The girls scream in dismay at the drops and
sigh, and Nini calls to me to come away, or I shall cer-
tainly get a whipping.

" ' Just smell how sweet it is ! ' I cry."

Will this recollection of his childhood flash before I
him in his last hours ? Will he drink once more y
that intoxicating perfume, and feel the fresh touch,
like a child's kiss, of the boughs against his face ?
Will he at last become aware that in this endless
earthly delight and love for the things of earth lay,
for him, the germ of the more than earthly ? Will
he understand that his indomitable inhumanity — his
animal and yet divine love for the body, which he has
struggled vainly all his life to suppress, was in truth
for him all his life as wholly innocent as when he
rolled in self-admiration in his tub as a naked child ?

Tolstoi's love for himself alone would have been
religious, even sublime, if it had continued to the
end, had he loved himself, not for his own sake,
but the God in him, just as he says he loves the
commandments of the Lord, not for themselves,
but because they are God's. Will he at last realize
that here there is nothing high nor low, that paths
diverse, yet equally true, lead to one and the same
goal ; that, in reality, all paths are one ; that it is
not against and not away from things earthly, but
only through things earthly, that we attain the more
than earthly, not in conflict with, or divested of,

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but only through the bodily that we attain the
spiritual ? Shall we fear the flesh — we inheritors
of Him who said, " My blood is drink indeed, and
my flesh is meat indeed," we, whose God's ' ; Word

was made Flesh ' ' ?

Momentous may well be the effect on the world
that Tolstoi, (at present, after all, the greatest and
most influential of Russians) should, before his
death, realize this fact that we have dimly come to
understand; that he should find time, if not to write,
at least to tell us about it. Ah ! we should listen
thirstily to his words ; should treasure them, though
uttered in the last delirium, however weakly
and indistinctly they might fall on the ears of
others ! For to us the spoken word is more preg-
.nant, more essential than the written. What
is said is, and shall be ; that only is written
which has been, and is no more. Our final
truth cannot yet be written down, it can only be
spoken and carried out. Will Tolstoi find time ?
God grant him and us that he may !

CHAPTER VI

UNLIKE Tolstoi, Dostoievski does not eare to talk
about himself. This man, apparently so bold,
even cruel and cynical, an exposer of others' hearts,
is full of modesty and " lofty shamefastness "
about his own. The sufferings he had been through
never embittered or hardened, or made him pose as
a martyr. He bore himself as if there had been
nothing exceptional about his past, and looked
gay and brisk when health would let him. A gush-
ing young lady at one of his brother's editorial
evenings at length said, " Gazing at you I can trace
your suffering."

Visibly vexed, he cried, " What suffering," and
began to joke about indifferent matters.

He drew little on his personal experiences, had
little self-consciousness, complained of no one, but
tried to excuse and ennoble in his imagination the
environment from which he sprang, as if to persuade
himself and others that his life had been happier
than it really was.

; I was one of those to whom the return to the
national, the knowledge of the Russian people's
heart, was easy. I came of an honest Russian
stock. As far back as I remember, I remember
loving my parents. The children in our house

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knew the Gospel from earliest childhood. At
ten years old I knew all the chief episodes of
Russian history, read aloud to us of evenings
by our father. Every visit to the Kremlin and
the Moscow cathedrals was for me a red-letter
day."

He used to say fervently of his dear parents, " Ah !
brother, they were people ahead of their age, and
they would still be so if living now. We shall not
make such fathers or such home-folk, you and I ! '

May we trust these rosy recollections ? The
father appears to have been exceptionally touchy,
impatient, and vehement ; " a surly, highly-strung
suspicious sort of man."

" I am sorry for my poor father," writes the six-
teen-year-old Dostoievski himself, in 1838, " he is
a strange character and endlessly unfortunate ! I
can't help bitter tears when I think I can do nothing
to comfort him."

We get vague hints of the enigmatical and tragic
nature of the strange father. The wearisome nature
of this father, his surliness, irascibility and suspicious-
ness, certainly had an effect on the character of his
son. Only one of his biographers raises the veil
from this family secret, and instantly drops it again.
Speaking of the cause of the falling sickness from
which Dostoievski suffered, he writes, " It dates back
to his earliest youth, and is connected with a tragic
event in their family life."

No doubt this incident in the life of a " truly
Russian and honourable family," as Dostoievski has
it, must have been truly terrible if, as the family
biographer hints, it could cause epilepsy in the child.

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

All was not, probably, as bright and comforting in
this boyhood as it seemed to Dostoi'evski through
the mists of memory. It is his own life that he
refers to when he calls the hero of the story " The
Hobbledehoy," a member of a chance family, in con-
trast, perhaps, to Tolstoi's, who had such a splen-
did " Childhood and Boyhood." And it is surely
of himself that he speaks when he puts these yet
sadder words into his hero's mouth, " The conscious-
ness that in me and with me, however ridiculous
and abject I may seem, lies somewhere that jewel
of power which makes them all, sooner or later,
change their opinion of me, this consciousness, I
say, almost from my earliest and most humble years
formed the only source of my vitality, my guiding
star and solace ; otherwise, I might have killed my-
self while still a child."

Compare his beginnings, merely worldly "chances,"
with Tolstoi's, the descendant on his mother's side
of the Grand Duke St. Michael of Chernigov ; and
on his father's of Peter Andreivich Tolstoi, favourite
of Peter the Great, Chief of the Secret Chancery
and Tutor to the Tzarevich Alexei. Dostoievski
was the son of a staff-surgeon and a tradesman's
daughter, born in a charity-hospital at Moscow,
the Maison Dieu, near the Maria Grove ; sure
enough, member of a " chance family." His first
impressions were of penury. His father, who had
five children, rented an apartment consisting of
two rooms and a kitchen. A dark nursery corner
for the two elder boys, Michael and Fedor, was
carved out of the small entrance-hall by a match-
board partition. " Our father," says one of them,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Andrei, ' used to say he was a poor man, and his
boys must be prepared to fend for themselves, for
at his death they would be left beggars." In 1838
Dostoievski wrote from school, " My dear, kind,
good father, can you suppose that your spn, when
he asks you for help in money, asks for more than is
necessary ? Because of your poverty," he concludes
" I shall not drink tea." " You complain of penni-
lessness," he tells one of his brothers about the same
time ; " well, we must make the best shift we can. I
am not over rich either. Believe me, on leaving
the camps I hadn't a farthing, and fell sick of a
chill in the rains on the road, as well as of hunger,
for I hadn't a sou to moisten my throat with a
mouthful of tea."

Thus the life of Dostoievski begins in poverty,
which was not fated to come to an end till near on
his death, and which depended, not so much on
external accidents, as on his own nature. There are
people who cannot spend and are foredoomed to
hoard ; there are others who cannot save, and are
congenitally damned to thriftlessness. Dostoievski,
like Goldsmith, " never knew how much he had,"
either in money, clothes, or linen. A German doctor,
who endeavoured to teach his house-mate German
carefulness, ' found him without a farthing, living
on bread and milk, and even for that he was in debt
at the little milk-shop."

Fedor belonged to those characters, to live with
whom is good for everybody, but who themselves
are always in want. He was robbed unmercifully,
but was himself so confiding and kindhearted
that he would not look into the matter or blame the

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

servants or their hangers-on, who took advantage of
his trustfulness. " The very fact of living with the
doctor," adds one biographer, " went near to be-
coming for him a cause for fresh expense. For
every poor creature that came to the doctor for
advice the doctor's companion was ready to receive
as an honoured guest."

Tolstoi relates that in the Liapino Night Refuge
he himself sought for folk sufficiently needy to
deserve help in money, to whom he could distribute
thirty-seven roubles, entrusted to him by wealthy
and charitable men in Moscow. This money re-
mained in his hands. He sought, and could not
find, such poor. We may say with confidence,
Dostoievski would have had no difficulty in finding
them. The innate generosity of Dostoievski, his
pr oneness to throw money to the winds, is in queer
contrast to Tolstoi's equally innate disinclination
to the smallest extravagance. The one careful
and domestic, the other a profuse and houseless
vagabond. Dostoievski, you see, has no difficulty
in believing that money is an evil, and that we
ought to renounce property. This victim of poverty
dealt with money as if he held it not an evil, but
utter rubbish. Dostoievski thinks he loves money ;
but money flees him. Tolstoi thinks he hates money
but money loves him, and accumulates about him.
The one, dreaming all his life of wealth, lived, and
but for his wife's business qualities would have died,
a beggar. The other, all his life preaching and
dreaming of poverty, not only has not given away,
but has greatly multiplied his very substantial
possessions.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

All worldly advantages in Tolstoi are so to speak
centripetal, in Dostoievski centrifugal. The latter
felt the presence in his nature of some fateful force,
inviting misfortune. He ascribed the cause of his
sufferings to himself and his so-called " viciousness."
' I have a dreadful vice," he owns to his brother,
" boundless vanity and ambition." " I am as
sensitive as if I had been flayed, and the very air
hurts me," says the hero of Notes from a Cellar,
who, in many respects, resembles Dostoievski him-
self. " A few days ago Turgeniev and Bielinski
found fault with me for my irregular life." ' I
am wrong in the nerves, and suffer from a nervous
fever of some kind ; I cannot live regularly, so
Bohemian am I." There is scarcely real penitence
in such admissions. But we find some sad and
surprising self-criticisms. " The devil knows," he
say in one place, " that if what is good is given to
me, I infallibly spoil it by my vile disposition."
And again, many years later, referring to a loss at
roulette at Baden, " In all places and things I have
crossed the last limits." Our age, which is afraid
of " last limits," could not forgive Dostoievski and
punished him contemptuously and pitilessly. In
this respect, as in many others, he is a man of
another age, and born out of due time. As for
Tolstoi, is it not noticeable that in spite of all the
apparent passionateness of his impulses in the
field of speculation, never in real life or in his
actions did he " take the last plunge, or " overstep
the mark " ?

Dostoievski led off with a success, the novel Poor
Folk. " Am I really so remarkable ? ' he thought

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

in a sort of timid enthusiasm, with regard to the im-
pression made by this book (by a youth of twenty)
on the critics Nekrasov and Grigorovich. c I will
be worthy of these men's praise ! For what men,
what men they are ! I will deserve it, and even to
become as fine a fellow as they."

His next story, The Double, came to grief. Friends
turned away from him, feeling that they had made
a mistake in taking him for a different man.
Fate's irony sent him a momentary success in order
to aggravate subsequent disaster.

From that time his literary career was a life-long
and desperate struggle with what is called " Russian
public opinion," and with the critics. And how
petty and disproportionate, how accidental to us
(who are beginning to realize the true merits of this
writer) seems the fame which came to him not long
before his death, especially as compared with the
life-long fame of Tolstoi !

" Give me the good, aud I shall infallibly turn it
into bad by my disposition." The truth of this
self-criticism was seemingly proved with special
palpableness in the Petrachevski affair, for which
he paid so dearly. The Petrachevski circle or club,
was a group of young men whose aims were not so
much revolutionary or political as socialistic. They
held the doctrines of Fourier.

The following account of the incident is given by
M. Waliszewski in his excellent History of Russian
Literature : " Dostoievski's special function in
connection with it (that is, the club), was to preach
the Slavophil doctrine, according to which, Russia,
sociologically speaking, needed no Western models,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

because in her artels (workman's guilds) and her
system of mutual responsibility for the payment
of taxes (Krougovaia Porouka), she already pos-
sessed the means of realizing a superior form of
social arrangement. One evening he, Dostoievski,
had gone so far as to declaim Pushkin's Ode on
the Abolition of Serfdom, and when, amid the enthu-
siasm stirred by the poet's lines, some one present
expressed a doubt of the possibility of obtaining
the desired reform except by insurrectionary means,
he is said to have replied, " Then insurrection let it
be ! ' No further accusation was brought against
him, but this sufficed. On December 22, after
eight months' imprisonment, he was conducted,
with twenty-one others to a public square where a
scaffold had been erected. The prisoners were all
stripped to their shirts (there were twenty-one
degrees of frost) and their sentence was read out :
they were condemned to death. Dostoievski thought
it must be a horrible dream. He had only just
calmly communicated a plan of some fresh literary
composition to one of his fellow-prisoners. " Is
it possible that we are going to be executed ? '
he asked. The friend to whom he had addressed
the inquiry pointed to a cart laden with objects
which, even under the tarpaulin which covered
them, looked like coffins. The registrar descended
from the scaffold, and the priest ascended it, cross
in hand, and exhorted the condemned men to make
their last confession. One only, a man of the shop-
keeping class, obeyed the summons, — the others
were content with kissing the cross. In a letter
addressed to his brother Michael Dostoievski has

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

thus related the close of the tragic scene. " They
snapped swords over our heads, and they made us
put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned
to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to
stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the
row, I concluded I had only a few minutes to live
before me. I thought of you, and of your dear ones,
and I contrived to kiss Pletcheeiv and Dourov, who
were next to me; and to bid them farewell. Sud-
denly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound,
brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that
his Majesty had spared our lives." The Tzar had
reversed the judgment of the military tribunal,
and commuted the penalty of death to that of hard
labour. The cart really contained convict uniforms,
which the prisoners had at once to put on. One
of them, Grigoriev, had lost his reason."

Dostoievski was more fortunate. He was always
convinced that, but for this experience, he would
have gone mad. " By a singular process of reaction
(continues M. Waliszewski), " the convict prison
strengthened him, both physically and morally.
The Muscovite nature, full of obscure atavism, the
inheritance of centuries of suffering, has an incal-
culable power of resistance. At the end of four
years, the horrible " House of the Dead ' opened
its gates, and the novelist returned to ordinary life,
stronger in body, calmer in nerve, better balanced
in mind. He had still three years to serve in a
regiment as a private soldier. When these were
over, he was promoted to the rank of officer, and
allowed to reside, first at Tver, and then at St.
Petersburg."

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

It is difficult to imagine what exactly led him to
mix himself up with socialism. The dreams of the
Socialists were not only absent, but alien to his
nature. He said that " life in a Fourieristic Com-
mune or phalansttre, seemed to him more dreadful
and repulsive than any convict prison. If we com-
pare his evidence on the trial with what he after-
wards gave to the world voluntarily, it will be
scarcely possible to suspect the sincerity of his con-
tention that he belonged to no socialistic organization/?
being convinced that their establishment, whether
in Russia or France, would entail inevitable ruin.

What chiefly turned him against Socialism, al-
though obstinately endeavouring, like his contem-
poraries, to manage things on earth without God,
and without religion, was the moral materialism of
socialistic doctrine. From the evidence of an eye-
witness, Petrachevski must have repelled him by
the fact that he was " an atheist, and laughed at
all belief." Precisely in the same way, the frivolous
attitude of Bielinski towards religion awoke in him
that unbridled blinding hatred, which during many
years blazed up in him every time with renewed
violence, when he thought of Bielinski as what he
called " the most putrid and shameful manifestation
of Russian life " (Letter to Strakhov, from Dresden,
May 30, 1871). In his Diary for 1873 he very
maliciously and subtly reproduces Bielinski's story,
apparently sarcastic, but in reality in the highest
degree simple-minded ; to say no more about their
philosophical discussions, in which the Russian
critic endeavoured to convert the future author of
The Idiot to atheism. " Every time," says Bielinski,

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" that I speak of Christ in that way his whole face
changes, as if he wanted to cry." 'Why, believe
me, you simple-minded man/ he again attacked me,"
records Dostoievski — " believe that your Christ, if
he had been born to-day, would have been the
most unremarkable and ordinary of men, so utterly
would he have broken down before modern science
and the present movers of humanity." " That man
spoiled my Christ for me," he suddenly breaks out
thirty years later, as if the talk had taken place
only the day before, and full of vehement reproach.
" That man spoiled my Christ for me, though he
never was capable of placing himself and the leaders
of the world side by side with Christ for comparison.
He was never conscious how much there was in
him and them of selfishness, wickedness, impatience,
irritability, of paltriness, but most of all self-seeking.
He did not say to himself at any time, ' But what
are we to put in his place ? Shall it be ourselves,
when we are so contemptible ? ' No, he never
thought of the fact that he was contemptible, he
was self-satisfied to the last degree, and it was a
personal, abominable, and shameful insensibility "
(Letter to N. Strakhov, May 18, 1871, v. his col-
lected works, vol. i. p. 312, St. Petersburg, 1883).

And so, if anybody ever was guiltless of theH
atheistic socialism of that period, it certainly was \ \
Dostoievski. He became a martyr, and almost
perished for what he never for a moment believed
in, but hated with all the force of his nature. But
what attracted him to these men ? Was it not what
all his life made him seek out what mastnost difficult,
disastrous, hard, and terrible, as if he felt suffering

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necessary to the full growth of his powers ? He
broke bounds among these political conspirators,
playing with danger as he always and everywhere
did — as afterwards at cards, at sensual enjoyment,
at mystical terrors. During the eight months in the
Fortress of Peter and Paul he read two Journeys to
the Holy Places and the works of Demetrius of
Rostov. " The latter," he writes, " took up much
of my time."

When the condemned men were brought on to
the Semienovski Square and tied by threes to posts
Dostoievski kept his self-command. He was pale,
but walked quickly on to the scaffold, " more in a
hurry than as if overcome." It only remained for
the words " Let go " to be given, and all would have
been at an end. But when the handkerchief was
waved and the execution stopped, in the words of
one of the condemned, " To many of them the news
of their reprieve came by no means as a matter for
rejoicing • it was an insult, or — as Dostoievski
afterwards put it — " a monstrous and uncalled-for
defamation."

The moments passed by Dostoievski in the ex-
pectation not of probable, but of certain death
" within five minutes," had on his whole after life
an ineffaceable effect. They shifted his angle of
vision with regard to the whole world, and he knew
something which no man could know who had not
been through such moments. Fate sent him, in a
certain rare experience, a new standard, as it were,
of all that is. It was a knowledge not thrown away.
He used it later on to make startling revelations.

" Fancy," he says, through the mouth of his Idiot,

1 08

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

" fancy torture for instance, and add wounds and
physical agony ; and be sure all this will turn your
thoughts from mental suffering, so that your wounds
alone are enough to rack you till you die. And yet
the greatest pain is not in the wounds, but lies in
this — that you know for a certainty that in an hour,
in ten minutes, in half a minute, then directly, then
that instant, the soul will leave your body and you
will no longer be a living being, and that to a cer-
tainty • the great thing is the certainty. So you
put your head right under the knife, and hear it
coming down on your head, and that quarter of a
second is the most fearful of all. Who has said that
human nature was capable of bearing this without
going mad ? Why such shame, so monstrous, un-
necessary, useless ? It may be there lives a man
who has had the sentence read to him, and gone
through the agony, and then been told, ' Listen, you
are pardoned ! ' Such a man as that could, perhaps,
tell us about it. It was of this torture and this
terror that Christ has spoken."

But he accepted his imprisonment with sub-
mission, not complaining, not liking others to pity
him. He endeavoured to elevate and refine his
recollections of his punishment, just as he did those
of his childhood, and saw in it a stern but salutary
lesson of Fate. " I do not murmur," he writes to
his brother from Siberia ; " this is my cross, and
I have deserved it." But if it was true that he did
not murmur, it must not be forgotten how much
resignation cost him.

1 1 am almost in despair. It is difficult to express
how much I have suffered.^ Those four years I look

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

upon as a time of living burial. I was put in a coffin.
The suffering was inexpressible and incessant, be-
cause every hour, every minute weighed down my
spirits like a millstone. In all the four years there
was not a minute in which I forgot I was a convict.
But why talk about it ? If I wrote you one hundred
pages you would never have an idea of that time.
You must at least have seen it — I will not say gone
through it — yourself."

And so if on the whole we may console ourselves
with the thought that his sentence was beneficial to
him, it was only beneficial in a transcendental sense.
Again we encounter mysterious forces, which seem
to watch over all the fortunes of Dostoi'evski and
lead him to a certain goal. His imprisonment was
one of the pains of fate which he courted, moulding
a soul needed to create what he created —

As a spark-shedding sledge-hammer moulds the steel.

All that Tolstoi dreamed of and aimed at, serious
in plan, but play in practice — forswearing property
for manual labour, becoming one with the people,
all this Dostoeivski had to experience under the
crushing vigour of the hardest fact.

The prisoner's short pelisse and fetters were for
him by no means merely a symbol. They were
his own living death, his own expulsion from the
community. How many trees soever Tolstoi felled
for poor villagers, it was, as I have said before, less
work than pleasure, ascetic exercise, gymnastics.
The essence of the poor man's work, physical and
mental alike, consists in the feeling not only of
moral but of physical compulsion, in actual danger,

no

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

fear, humiliation and helplessness, of want : " If I
do not work, then, in a day, in a month, or in a year,
I shall be without a mouthful of bread." This,
commonplace in practice, is not at all easily under-
stood by people with such a bringing up as the
Count. You, the comfortable, have no means of
arriving at a conception of the ache of penury.

Fortunate Dostoi'evski ! When fresh from the
scaffold, in the summer of his first year in prison,
some two months were spent in carrying bricks
from the banks of the Irtysh to a barrack that was
being built, some seventy toises distance, across
the rampart of the fort. " This work," he tells us,
" actually grew to be pleasant to me, though the
rope by which the bricks had to be carried con-
stantly galled my shoulders. But what I liked was
that the work visibly developed my strength."

If the consciousness of his growing strength was^
pleasant to him, yet it was no symbolical toil — not
one of the " four stages," or Epicurean sport, or
mere exercise. He knew that on his bodily strength
life and safety depended, and whether he should
or should not live through his sentence. Refusal to
carry bricks meant reprimand and the lash ; so the
seriousness and necessity of the work gave him a
love of life.

No need to speculate on casting off property. He
was himself an outcast. Tolstoi, on the other hand
-you remember his correct but subsequently fruit-
less calculation — that he ought to have given the
old beggar-man two thousand roubles, in order
to equal in charity the two kopecks of the carpenter
Semyon — was led to doubt whether he had any

in

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

right to help the poor — a doubt up to now ap-
parently undispelled. For Dostoievski the convict
such doubts could not exist. It was for him not to
give, but to receive alms. " It was soon after my
arrival at the prison," he says, " and I was coming
back from the morning work alone with a sentry.
A mother and daughter came towards me — the girl
some ten years old and pretty as an angel. I had
seen them once before. The mother was a soldier's
widow. Her young husband had died in the hospital
of the prison at the time when I myself was lying
there ill. They came to take leave of him ; and both
wept terribly. On catching sight of me the child
flushed, whispered something to her mother, who
instantly stopped, hunted a quarter-kopeck out of
her bundle, and gave it to the child. She ran after
me. ' There, poor man, take this for Christ's sake ! '
she cried, stopping in front of me and pushing the
coin into my hand. I took it, and the child, quite
contented, went back to her mother. That coin I
kept by me for a long time."

Tolstoi may indeed have " ceased to make use
of his property " ; nevertheless we feel that the
shame and pride, the pain and pleasure experienced
by Dostoievski when he accepted the charity of
that little girl have never fallen to the lot of Tolstoi
to experience. Therein lies the vast difference in
the thought and intention, the action and feeling
of these two great writers.

" At the first service in the chapel," Dostoievski
tells us, " we stood in a dense group right round
the doors, in the hindermost place of all. I re-
member how, when a child at church, I used to look

112

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

at the common people crowding thickly round the
entrance, humbly drawing back before the officer's
thick epaulet, the stout gentleman, the lady, gaily
dressed but most devout, who always went forward
to the best places, and were ready at any instant
to fight for them. Yonder, at the entrance, it used
to seem to me then they did not even pray as we
did. They prayed humbly, zealously, like clods,
and as if with full consciousness of their humble
station. Now it was my turn to stand in the same
place, or not even the same, for we were fettered
and in caps, and all avoided us — even seemed to
be afraid of us — and always gave us alms. I re-
member that I actually liked this : a kind of subtle,
strange feeling of gratification rose in me, * Let it
be so, since it must ! ' I thought. The prisoners
prayed very fervently, and each of them every time
brought his beggar's mite for a taper or put it in
the alms-box. ' I, too, am a man,' was perhaps his
thought, or he felt as he gave it, ' Before God all are
equal.' We communicated at the early service.
When the priest, with the cup in his hands, read
the words, ' Are ye come out as against a thief ? '
almost all rolled on the ground, clattering their
fetters, and seeming to think that the words were
literally meant for them."

Such a trial gave him the right to declare that
he had lived with the people and knew them. When,
in company with the other convicts, he repeated in-
wardly, " Are ye come out as against a thief ? " he
did not contemplate an abstraction, but actually
was in the gulf, while Tolstoi's moral theorizing was
always peeping over its edge.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Dostoievski's epilepsy was ascribed by him to
his imprisonment. We know from another witness
that in fact this complaint began in his childhood.
In his exceptionally high and refined sensibility lay
the chief cause of the complaint. But it developed
during the period of his sentence. In the letter to
Alexander II, from " a former State prisoner," he
writes : " My complaint is increasing. Every at-
tack makes me lose memory, imagination, mental
and bodily strength. The outcome of it will be
enervation, death, or madness." He went through
periods when the epilepsy threatened complete
obfuscation of his mental faculties. The attacks
usually came upon him about once a month,
but sometimes, though very seldom, they were
more frequent. He once had two in a single
week.

His friend Strakhov adds in his remarkable ac-
count : "I once saw one of his ordinary attacks.
It was, I fancy, in 1863, just before Easter. Late in
the evening, about eleven o'clock, he came to see
me, and we had a very animated conversation. I
cannot remember the subject of it, but I know that
it was important and abstruse. He got very excited,
and walked about the room, while I sat at the table.
He said something lofty and jubilant, and when I
confirmed his opinion by some remark he turned
to me a face which positively glowed with the most
transcendent inspiration. He paused for a moment,
as if looking for words, and had already opened his
mouth to speak ; I looked at him, all expectant of
fresh revelation. Suddenly from his open mouth
there issued a strange, prolonged, and inarticulate

114

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

moan. He sank senseless on the floor in the middle
of the room."

' At that moment the face — especially the eyes —
suddenly became extraordinarily distorted," begins
his own description in The Idiot. " Convulsions and
tremors came over the whole face and body. An in-
conceivable sound, like no other sound, broke from
his throat. All that was human vanished. A by-
stander could scarcely imagine but that some one
else was crying out from within the man. There was
something mystical in the terror caused by that

sight."

The ancients called this the " sacred sickness."
The nations of the East saw in it also " something
mystical " — the gift of prophecy, second-sight,
divine or demoniacal. In the history of the great
religious movements also we meet with this little-
explained malady, especially at the first inception of
those religions, at their darkest subterranean sources.
In one of his most meaning/ works, The Possessed,
Dostoievski himself often recurs with obstinate
fancifulness to the famous fallen pitcher of the
epileptic Mahomet, which had no time to empty
itself, while the prophet, on Allah's steed, was
girdling the Heavens and Hell. He, too, had felt
that u something lofty and jubilant " — a sort of re-
ligious revelation for which Dostoievski sought and
could not find words in the moment of his swoon.

In any case " the sacred sickness " had a startling
effect on the writer's life. It influenced his whole
artistic creation, his spirit, his philosophical specula-
tions. He speaks of it with a peculiar suppressed
excitement, a kind of mystic fear. The most con-

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

spicuous and opposite of his heroes, the outcast
Smerdiakov, the " holy ' prince Myshkin, the
prophet of the " Man-god," the Nihilist Kirillov
are epilepts. The attacks of the disease were in his
eyes dreadful interludes, cessations of light, but also
suddenly-opened windows, through which he looked
into the light beyond. " Then suddenly it was as
if something had been rent asunder before him,
an unwonted inward light dawned on his soul," he
says in one of his descriptions. " Dostoi'evski many
a time told me," records Strakhov, " that before
an attack there are moments of an exalted state of
mind. " For some instants," he would say, " I ex-
perience such bliss as would be impossible in an
ordinary condition, and of which other people have
no conception. I feel a perfect harmony in myself
and the whole world, and this feeling is so strong
and 'delightful that for some seconds of this rapture
you might give ten years of your life, or even the
whole of it." But " after the attack his condition
was very dreadful, and he could hardly sustain the
state of low-spirited dreariness and sensitiveness.
He then felt himself a criminal of some kind, and
fancied there hung over him a vast, invisible guilt,
a great transgression."

Great sanctity, great criminality, supernal jubila-
tion, supernal dejection, both feelings suddenly
combined and blended in a flash, blinding as light-
ning in the last * quarter of a second," before the
fallen pitcher of Mahomet has had time to empty
itself, while from the breast of the possessed the
awe-inspiring voice is already breaking.

Here we are trenching on what is deepest, most

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

elemental, and unexplained in the nature of the
man. All the threads of the skein are tangled in
this knot. It seems as if these sudden outbursts
of a force inaccessible to our inquiries, but perhaps
silently stored in all of us, dormant but expectant,
made the bodily integument of Dostoi'evski — the
veil of flesh and blood (dividing the soul from that
which is behind all things) — finer and more trans-
parent than in other men. Through this very ail- A
ment he may have been able to discern what is }
invisible to others.

Here again is forced on us the involuntary con-
trast with Tolstoi. The sacred and demoniacal
sickness of the one is by no means necessarily a mere
weakness or poverty, but on the contrary an electric
and accumulating superfluity of vitality, a carrying
over to the utmost limit of the refinement, acuteness,
and concentration of spirituality. Contrast it with
the not less divine and demonic superflux of bodily
carnality, strength, and health in Tolstoi : with the
excess of a vital force, electric and original, as in
the other, only differently manifested, differently
expressed. In the sequel we shall see that Tolstoi
draws his religiousness — not imaginary or falsely
Christian, but really pagan — from its depth in the
recesses of this carnality, this divine animalism ;
I say "divine," meaning that from a certain religious
point of view the animal in man is sacred as the
spiritual. Flesh and spirit are merely opposed in
their provinces and manifestations. Finally, they
ire a unity. The bad old habit of pseudo-Chrisd[-
inity — or more properly, Paulinism — make most
men of the present day, even those who have re-

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

nounced religiosity, depreciate the carnal in favour
of the spiritual, the abstract, the rational, the un-
fleshly, as something lower and sinful, or, at any rate,
coarse, shameful, and bestial. There is, however,
a profounder stage of religious theory, which is
uniting because symbolical — for, as I said before,
symbol, av^o\ov means unification — to which the
flesh is transcendent as the spirit, a theory in which
the world of the animal, which appeared dark and
base, becomes on a par with the world of the spiritual,
deemed so glorious and ethereal, the nocturnal hemi-
sphere of the heavens tallies with the diurnal.
~t>lstoi, as a thinker and artist, having plunged into
the exploration of this world of animality at its
farthest boundaries, finds another principle, eter-
nally opposed to it, and seemingly contradictory to
it — the consciousness of the threatening destruction
of the animal entity, or the consciousness of death.
And it is here that his tragedy begins ; here that
first dawns that "cold, white light," to him the
light of a new Christian revival, which struck
Prince Andrei on the night before the battle of
Austerlitz.

"And from the height of this conception — that is,
the conception of death — all that before had tortured
and busied him suddenly was flooded with a cold
white light, without shadows, without perspective,
without distinction of outlines. All life appeared to
him as a magic lantern, into which he had long
looked through glass and by artificial illumination.
Now he suddenly saw without the glass, in the bright
light of day, these ill-painted pictures. 'Yes, yes,
there they are — these lying shapes that have moved

nd

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

and delighted and tortured me,' said he to himself,
sorting in his imagination the chief scenes of his
life's magic lantern ; but now, looking at them by
this cold white daylight, the well-defined thought
of death, he exclaimed, * All this is terribly simple
and sordid ! ' "

Thus for Tolstoi the light of death is thrown on
life from without, separating and dulling the colours
and shapes of life.

To Dostoi'evski the revealing light comes from
within. The light of death and that of life are in
his eyes a single fire, lit within the magic lantern
of phenomena. To Tolstoi the religious meaning
of life is comprised in the passing from life to death, _ /
to the other world. Dostoievski regards this trivial
passage as if it did not exist : he is dying all the
while he is alive. Constantly yawning declivities,
glimpses of life, the attacks of the " sacred dis-
temper," have refined and made transparent the
fabric of his animal life. His soul's dark cottage
gives forth rays of inward light. To the first the
secret of death lies beyond life ; to the second life
itself is just the same secret. Tojturnjthe cold light
of_jm_every-day St. Petersburg morning is also
the terrible *' white light '* that Tolstoi saw
before battle. For Tolstoi there exists only the
eternal antagonism of life and death ; for Dostoiev-
ski only their eternal oneness. The former looks at
death from within the house of life with the eyes of
this world ; the latter, with the eyes of the spirit
world, looks on life from a footing which, to those
who live, seems death. Which of these two views
is the truer ? Which of these two lives is the finer ?

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

I own that from the first chapter of my inquiry
the reader has cause to suspect me of a prejudice
against Tolstoi and in favour of his contemporary.
As a matter of fact, I only wished to pull back and
fairly adjust the rope, too far strained in the opposite
direction by the popular Christianity of Tolstoi and
of Europe to-day. This kind of Christianity seems
to me one-sided — conceived solely in the ascetic
sense and by prejudiced men. But if I have been
partial, or even apparently unjust, what has been
written is only a prelude : I am going further than
this stage of the inquiry, and shall endeavour to
penetrate further into the artistic, philosophical,
and religious work of the two writers. Hitherto I
have compared them as men, from the so-called
Christian point of view. But if I had also compared
them from the opposite standpoint— the so-called
pagan, or what is deemed heathen — then I should
have been led to conclude that the life of Tolstoi,
with all its inexhaustible freshness, strength, and
unfailing earthly exhilaration, is more perfect or
fairer than that of Dostoi'evski. And lastly, from
the third standpoint, the symbolical, reconciling,
uniting the two opposite religious poles, do not the
two men's lives seem equally, though diversely
admirable ? They are not completely admirable,
because neither the one nor the other has that degree
of culture that even Pushkin postulated — the one
because of the preponderance of the flesh over the
spirit, and the other because of that of the spirit
over the flesh. Yet none the less both these lives,
equally grand, equally typical of our nation, com-
plete and amplify each other. Each is the other's

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

complement, as if expressly created for prophetic
juxtaposition and comparison.

They are like two lines running in opposite direc-
tions from a single point and that at an opposite
point will meet, completing a circle. They are two
prophecies, seemingly contradictory, but really in
accord, of some unseen yet foreseen Russian genius
who shall be elemental and national, as was the poet
Pushkin, from whom both Tolstoi and Dostoievski
derive. He was, it is true, more conscious of
himself, and therefore more universal. What we
need is a genius like his, all-embracing and symbolic.

Tolstoi and Dostoievski are the two great columns, ^
standing apart in the propylseum of the temple —
parts facing each other, set over against each other
in the edifice, incomplete and still obscured by
scaffolding, that temple of Russian religion which
will be, I believe, the future religion of the whole
world.

121

CHAPTER VII

WHEN Pushkin1 died Dostoievski was sixteen years
old. His brother records how " the news of the
death of Pushkin never reached our family till after
our mother's funeral. Probably our own grief and
confusion and the fact that just then the family
went out little into the world was the cause. But
I remember that my brothers almost went out of
their senses when they heard of the death and of
all the accompanying circumstances. My brother
Fedor himself repeated several times that if it had
not been for our family mourning he would have
asked his father's leave to wear black for Pushkin."

The death even of his mother did not stifle in
Dostoievski his grief for the loss of Pushkin. Even
at sixteen he had an instinct of how living was his
bond of kinship with Pushkin, whom he not only
worshipped as a great teacher, but loved as a man.

At the same age, Tolstoi, as he owns in Youth,
looked on Pushkin as on any other Russian writer-
merely as " a little book in a yellow binding, which

1 Pushkin (born 1799, died 1837), half a romanticist,
in Byron's manner, half a realist, was the author of Eugene
Oniegine, perhaps the greatest of Russian poems. He
wrote it during nine years of a stormy career, ended by a
duel. His fame is now at its height.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

he read and studied as a child." He compares, with
shame, his then bad taste with the taste of his
companions at the Moscow University. " Pushkin
and Jukovski l were literature to them. They
despised Dumas, Sue, and Fevalle, and judged far
more correctly and decidedly of literature than I.
At that time Monte Cristo and various ' Mysteries '
had just begun to appear, and I was reading through
the stories of Sue, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. All
the most improbable characters and events were
to me as vivid as reality. I did not venture to
suspect the author of romancing. On the basis of
these stories I had even formed new ideals of moral
excellence, to which I wished to attain. I must live
in all respects and actions as much comme il faut as
possible. In appearance and habits I tried to re-
semble the gay heroes of these stories."2

Such, respectively, was the artistic bringing-up of
Tolstoi and Dostoi'evski. No doubt, even at six-
teen, the latter realized the coarseness and paltriness
of Dumas and Paul de Kock. His literary tastes and
judgments were, for a lad, strikingly subtle, mature,
and independent. To him national and Western
European literature were equally accessible. In
one of his somewhat pompous youthful letters from
the Engineering Institute he tells his brother : " We
have talked over Homer, Shakespeare, Schiller, and
Hoffmann. I have got Schiller by heart, spoken his

Jukovski was a romantic poet, born in 1786. He died
in 1852. He was the natural son of a Russian boyar and
a Turkish slave ; fought at Borodino. After it wrote a
great poem, The Bard in the Russian Camp, in imitation of
Gray. 2 Tolstoi's Youth.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

language, raved about him. The name of Schiller
has become a household word to me." But he
cannot only appreciate Shakespeare and Schiller.
These were comparatively accessible to the compre-
hension of our young people at that day, attracted
as they were by romanticism and the Gothic. He
also highly values the great French Classics of the
seventeenth century, Corneille and Racine, on whom
Bielinski afterwards passed sentence so glibly. The
boy Dostoievski does not share the attitude, then
fashionable amongst us and inspired by German
critics, of pedantic contempt for what is called
" pseudo-classical literature." Deep feeling for the
most far-off and alien culture is shown by the fact
that, while acknowledging the inward artificiality
and imitativeness of the French classics, this Russian
lad of a " decent Moscow family," the son of a
pauper hospital surgeon, is able to revel in the com-
pleteness and rounded harmony of form of the
Court poets of Louis XIV. " But, Phedre, brother !
You will be Lord knows what if you say that this is
not the highest and purest nature and poetry. Why,
it is an outline by Shakespeare, a statue in plaster,
if not in marble ! " Perhaps in all Russian literature
there is no criticism of " Phedre ' more compact
and exact.

In another letter he defends Corneille against the
attacks of his brother. " Have you read The Cid ?
Read it, you wretch, read it, and go down in the
dust before Corneille " !

If you take into consideration the deep natural
religiousness of Dostoievski, then the following com-
parison of Christ and Homer, in spite of its naive

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

enthusiasm, is striking : " Homer — he may be a
legendary personage like Christ, made flesh by God
and sent upon earth — may afford a parallel only
to Christ Himself, and not to Goethe. Fathom him,
brother ; really understand the Iliad ; read it care-
fully ; for confess, you have not read it. Why, in
it Homer gave the whole ancient world its organiza-
tion, its spiritual and earthly frame, in the same
measure as Christ framed the modern world. Now
do you understand ? " And throughout life Dos-
toievski kept this feeling for universal, or in his
phrase " omni-human " culture, this capacity for
feeling at home everywhere and falling in with the
vital ideas of all ages and peoples — a capacity which,
as he told the world in his last Oration, he considered
to be the chief characteristic of Pushkin ; and he
believed the Russian genius in general to be more
universal in its assimilative capacity, and therefore
superior to the geniuses of other European nations.
He writes thus to Strakhov in the summer of 1863, at
the time of his first trip abroad : " Strange ! I am
writing from Rome, and yet am saying not a word
about it. But what could I say to you ? My Lord !
is it possible to describe it in letters ? I came here
at night two days ago. Yesterday morning I saw over
St. Peter's. The impression was a powerful one,
Nicolai, making a cold thrill run down my back.
To-day I saw the Forum and all its ruins ; then
the Colosseum. Well, what am I to say to you ?

He had the right to say afterwards that Europe
to him was " something sacred and strange — that
he had two countries, Russia and Europe. Venice,
Rome, Paris, and the treasures of their knowledge,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

arts, and history were once dearer to him than
Russia." And in this sense he, being next to
Pushkin the most Russian of Russian authors, was
at the same time the greatest of our cosmopolitans.
He showed by his example that to be a Russian
means being in the highest degree European, that
is, cosmopolitan.

Tolstoi, although himself an artist of European
celebrity, and himself deeply characteristic of
Russian nature, is wholly devoid of that capacity
for fully absorbing universal culture, which seemed
to his rival a distinguishing feature of the Russian.
In spite of all his calculated and supposedly Christian
cosmopolitanism, among the great Russian authors
there is not, I think, another so hampered as he,
in his creative power, by conditions of place and
time and the limits of his own nationality. All that
is not Russian and contemporary is, I will not say
inimical, but simply alien to him, incomprehensible
and uninteresting. The creator of Peace and War
(a work meant to be historical) may perhaps on
his intellectual side acknowledge history, and even
be to some extent acquainted with it. But the
imagination of his heart has never felt it ; he never
penetrated, or tried, or thought it worth while to
penetrate into the spiritual life of other ages and
nations. The " enthusiasm for the distant ' for
him does not exist — that inspired realization of
history — nor grief for, nor living delight in, the past.
Every fibre and root in him is fixed in the present.
His only interests are contemporary national ac-
tivity— the Russian working class and the Russian
gentleman. We know that in his youth he was in

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Italy, but he brought thence no impressions. If
we did not know for certain, excluding his biogra-
phers, there would be room to doubt that he had
ever crossed the Alps. " The fragments of sacred
wonders ' awoke in him no tremor. " The old
stones of wonder ' remained dead to him. If on
one occasion, en passant and with a light heart, he
speaks of Michelangelo's Last Judgment as an
' absurd production," it is not from his own recol-
lection, but from having seen some casual copy.

What seems artificial culture may in reality be
just as natural as nature itself. But to Tolstoi culture
is always fictitious, and therefore false. This ex-
aggerated fear of the artificial becomes in him at last
a fear of all cultivation. Therefore prose seems to
him more natural than verse. And forgetting that
metrical speech is really more primitive, and that
people in their most passionate, their most natural
moods are prone, like children and young races, to
express themselves in rhythm, he lays it down that
all poetical works, being artificial, are therefore mere-
tricious. ' Even in his youth he laughed at the
greatest creations of Russian literature, merely
because they were written in verse," a German
biographer of his notes. " Delicacy of form
had, in his eyes, no importance ; because in his
opinion (to which, it may be remarked, he has
always since adhered) such a form fetters thought."
Nowhere is this absence of sympathy with general
culture so clearly expressed as in one of his latest
productions, in which he sums up the artistic
judgments of a lifetime in the book What is Art ?

With regard to the new " decadent ' tendency,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

as it is called, he makes a promise of reserve which
he does not keep. " To blame modern art because
I, a man brought up in the first half of the century,
do not understand it, is what I have no right to,
and cannot do. I can simply say that I do not
understand it. The sole superiority of the art which
I acknowledge (as against the decadent school) lies
in this, that the art which I acknowledge is in-
telligible to a greater number of people than that
of the present day." But not contenting himself
with admitting his failure to understand this art, he
judges and condemns at haphazard and pellmell ; and
tars with one brush alike Bocklin and Klinger, Ibsen
and Baudelaire, Nietzsche and Wagner. On the
" Mysteries " of Maeterlinck and Hauptmann he
expresses himself thus : " They are blind men who
sit on the seashore and, for some unintelligible reason,
keep repeating the same phrase ; they are as real as
Hauptmann's Bell, which flies into a lake, sinks,
and goes on sounding there." Nietzsche seems to
him (as to the most careless of our journalists) a
half-witted idiot.

It might seem that to a " man of the earliest half
of the century ' the artists and poets of former
generations who are not " decadents " ought to be
particularly dear and intelligible. As a matter of
fact, Tolstoi dashes down fames undisputed and
ancient with even greater remorselessness than the
modern and doubtful. Thus he declares that " a
work founded on plagiarism, such as, for instance,
Goethe's Faust, may be very well executed and full
of mind and all manner of beauty, but it cannot
produce on us a real artistic effect, because it is

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

devoid of the chief characteristic of a work of art —
organic unity. To say of such a work that it is
good because it is poetical is like saying of a false
coin that it is good because it is like a genuine one."
Faust is to him false coin, because it is too artistic
and artificial. The love- tales of Boccaccio he re-
gards from an ascetically Christian standpoint as
' a mass of sexual nastiness." The creations of
^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton, and
Shakespeare, the music of Wagner and Beethoven's
later period, he first calls " calculated and un-
spontaneous," and later " coarse, savage, and often
senseless." During a performance of Hamlet he
experienced " that particular malaise which mere-
tricious works produce, and at the same time, from
the mere description of a drama of the chase, acted
by a remote tribe of savages, concludes that " the
latter is a work of true Art " (vol. xv. pp. 167-168).
To the man of Western European culture such
childish blasphemies (which may seem " Russian
barbarity," but which, in fact, are the barbarity
resulting from the present democratic and pseudo-
Christian brutalization of taste in Europe generally)
must appear the mere fury of some savage Caliban,
shattering Egina marbles or slashing to pieces the
portrait of Monna Lisa. But the devil is not as
black as he is painted. This Herostratus,1 who raises
his hand against ^Eschylus and Dante, to whom
Pushkin is still if not " a school-book in a yellow
cover ! yet a dissipated man who wrote improper
love verses, bows down in simplicity before Berthold

Herostratus was an Ephesian, who burnt the famous
temple of Diana merely to win notoriety.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

Auerbach, George Eliot, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In the long run, not so much from what he denies
as from what he admits, you become convinced that
in his conscious judgments on branches of art that
are strange to him Tolstoi, at the closing of his days,
has not gone far from his first youth, when he studied
Fevalle, Dumas, and Paul de Kock. And, more de-
plorable still, from under the dread mask of Caliban
peeps out the familiar and by no means awe-inspiring
physiognomy of the obstinate Russian democrat
squire, the gentleman Positivist of the sixties.

Still more startling is the expression by him of
this helplessness of self-knowledge in relation to
his own creations. " I began to write out of vanity,
love of gain and pride," he assures us in his Con-
fession. " I, the artist, the poet, wrote and taught,
I myself knew not what. They paid me money for
doing this ; I had excellent food, lodging and
society, and I had fame. Apparently what I taught
was very good. The candid opinion of the ' set '
in which I lived was that we wanted to get as much
money and applause as possible. For the attain-
ment of this object we had nothing to do but write
little books and papers. And so we did." " That
activity," he records, after the religious transforma-
tion of the eighties, " which is called creative and
artistic, and to which I formerly devoted my whole
powers, has not only lost in my eyes its former
importance, but has become positively distasteful
to me for the unfitting position which it occupied
in my life and usually occupies in the minds of people
of the well-to-do classes." The testimony of his
biographer Bers on the point that from his present

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

" Christian ' standpoint Tolstoi regards all his
former work as harmful because it describes love
in the sense of sexual attraction and violence, de-
serves all the more credence that this opinion follows
perfectly logically from other judgments of Tolstoi
on Art. Does he not himself, at the end of his life,
when summing up his work as an artist, lay down
with the mixture of deliberate candour and un-
conscious pretension peculiar to him — " I must
further remark that my own literary productions I
assign to the category of bad art, with the exception
of the story God sees the Truth, and The Prisoner of
the Caucasus" that is, with the deliberate exception
of two of the weakest of his didactic tales ?

Even at the height of his productive period he
wished to convince himself and others that he
thought much the same about his works as now.
" I am entering," he writes to Fet in 1875, " on the
tedious and petty Anna Kartnina with only one
wish, to clear the ground for myself as soon as
possible, to have time for other occupations." Was
this saying sincere ? Tolstoi loved Anna Karenina
when he wrote that sentence, although his love must
have been less conscious than Goethe's love for
Faust or Pushkin's for Eugene Oniegine.

In this kind of unconsciousness lies one of the
main differences between him and Dostoievski.
Though a great writer, he was never a great man
of letters in the sense that Pushkin, Goethe, and
Dostoievski were men of letters. They considered
themselves not merely the vicegerents but the
journeymen of Language. To them it was not only
their spiritual, but their daily bread. I mean by

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

' literature ' not something more artificial and
factitious, but merely more deliberate than the
spontaneous " making " of the early poets. Litera-
ture to man, however deliberate, is as natural as
singing to birds. Culture is not necessarily some-
thing at variance with, but educative of human
nature. From an abstract point of view culture
and nature are one, and he who quarrels with the
artificiality of culture quarrels with the nature of
man, and with the most divine and permanent force
in it.1

In Tolstoi's contempt for his own artistic per-
formance there is something dark and complex —
something he has never made clear, even to himself.
At any rate, in his literary self-appraisement there
are queer fluctuations and incongruities. " Never
was there a writer so indifferent to success as I," he
assures Fet on one occasion. Nevertheless on the
appearance of Peace and War he asks this very Fet
with touching outspokenness, " Write and tell me
what will be said in various quarters that you wot
of, but above all tell me the effect on the masses.
I feel sure it will pass unnoticed. I expect and wish
it, so long as they do not curse me, for curses upset
me." But in his own words one of the most simple-
minded and veracious biographers declares there
was always in him " a pleasant consciousness of the
fact that he was both a writer and an aristocrat '
— a writer indeed, or, in the ancient phrase, a " free
artist," but not a man of letters in the same sense
as Pushkin and Goethe. All his life he has been
ashamed of literature ; and, both from the conscious,
1 " The art itself is nature." — Shakspearc.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

popular, and democratic point of view, and from
the unconscious and aristocratic point of view has
despised it, either as something mediocre and
bourgeois, or something artificial, unholy, and
ignoble. In this contempt we have an ill-concealed
pride of birth, more deeply seated than might appear
at the first glance — a " gentility " self-repudiating,
self-ashamed, but frequently visible.

Dostoievski, on the other hand, loved Literature.
He took her as she is with all her conditions, never
stood aloof or cast supercilious slurs on her. This
absence of the slightest intellectual pride was in
him a fine and even touching trait. Our literature
was the soil on which he grew, from which he never
tore himself. He cherished it with a kinsman's love
and gratitude. He knew well that when he came
before the public and into a literary sphere he was
coming out into the square of the market place, and
never dreamed of being ashamed of his craft or of
his fellow workers. He was proud of his calling,
and counted it high and sacred.

As men with the old pride of gentry thought it
degrading to earn their bread by manual labour, so
Tolstoi, from a tyrannical, lofty, and contemptuous
theory of the world, considers it derogatory to take
pay for intellectual labour. From youth up, igno-
rant of want and work, he only shrugs his shoulders
scornfully when he hears that the true artist can
work for money.

Dostoievski writes : "I have never sold any of
my books without getting the price down before-
hand. I am a literary proletarian, and if anybody
wants my work he must insure me by prepay-

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

ment." This man — who has such pride, such
sensitiveness that, as he puts it, " the very air hurt
him," who valued the " free artistry " not less than
Tolstoi himself — was never ashamed to work for
money, like a plain journeyman. He speaks of him-
self as a " post-hack." He writes against time three
and a half printed newspaper pages in two days and
two nights. " Many a time," he confesses, " the
beginning of a chapter of a novel was already at the
printer's and being set up while the end was still
in my brain and had to be ready without fail next
day. Work out of sheer want has crushed and eaten
me up. Will my miseries ever come to an end ?
Oh ! for money, and independence ! ' Such is the
never ceasing cry of his life. Sometimes, when ex-
hausted with the struggle with penury he curses it ;
but he is never ashamed of it. In him there is a
peculiar inward pride in the midst of outward
humiliation inseparable from the position of a
brain worker amidst the commercial society of
to-day.

Immediately after quitting prison, and after a
right Christian chastening, he falls into the sin of
ordinary and cynical hatred : "I know very well
that I write worse than Turgeniev, but not, after
all, very much worse ; and in the end I hope to
write not at all worse. Why should I, when I am
so needy, get only thirty-eight pounds, and Tur-
geniev, who has two thousand serfs, get more than
one hundred and fifty pounds ? Poverty forces me
to hurry, and so, of course, spoil my work." In
the postscript he says that he " sends Katkov, the
great Moscow editor, fifteen sheets at one hundred

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roubles (thirty-eight pounds) a sheet — one thou-
sand and five hundred roubles in all. I have had
five hundred roubles from him ; and besides, when
I had sent three-quarters of the novel I asked for
two hundred to help me along — or seven hundred
altogether. I shall reach Tver without a stiver,
but on the other hand I shall very shortly receive
from Katkov seven or eight hundred roubles. That
is something and I shall have room to turn round in."
The tale is always the same. Endless rows of figures
and accounts, interspersed with desperate en-
treaties for help (" For God's sake, save me ! ' he
writes on one occasion to his brother) fill all the
letters of Dostoievski. It is one long martyrology.
Especially hard for him were the four years from
1865 to 1869, perhaps equivalent to another four
years' penal seritude. As before his first mis-
fortune, Fate began with a caress. The paper he
edited, the Vremya, had some success, and promised
a regular income ; so that he was dreaming of
respite from want, when an unexpected and wholly
undeserved punishment fell on him. The Vremya
was prohibited by the censorship for an article —
harmless, but misunderstood — on the question of
Polish affairs. This blow, like his condemnation to
death, was due to official stupidity. But the mis-
understanding almost ruined him. He was now
forbidden his profession. The authorities could not
see that he was really their ally. Yet perhaps they
were right. Perhaps the future creator of The
Grand Inquisitor was not to them such a valuable
ally as he desired to seem. Dostoievski did not lose
heart, but almost directly after the catastrophe of

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

the Vremya took to publishing a new paper, the
Epocha, though without his former success. The
opportune moment had been let slip irretrievably.
The Epocha incurred the wrath not of the Govern-
ment Censorship, but of the so-called " Liberals,"
whose opinion had always been, and probably
always will be, the inseparable companion and the
most exact and faithful opposite, like a reflection
reversed, as in water, of the opinion of the Govern-
ment. But Dostoievski was the horizon at which
these two censures united. Dostoievski, the idealist
logician, the extremist, found himself between two
fires — a position from which he was not to escape
as long as he lived. He was not only the enemy of
the Government, but the enemy of its enemies.
The Epocha was weaker than its opponents, who
were not held accountable. They permitted them-
selves not only every form of vulgar abuse — calling
Dostoievski " a rapscallion," " mendicant," " a
guttersnipe," and so on — but even ventured to hint
that the Epocha and its staff were dishonourable
Government spies. " I remember," he writes,
" poor Michael1 was greatly vexed when his account
with the subscribers " was somehow unearthed, and
it was made to appear that the editor had over-
reached them. " They " — his " Liberal rivals '
he recorded afterwards in his diary, " declared me a
scribbler that the police ought to deal with."

At this same time his brother Michael, the critic
Grigoriev (his dearest friend and collaborator on
The Times), and his first wife, Maria, all died one

1 Michael was Dosto'ievski's brother and the editor of
the review entitled The Times.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

after another. " And here am I left all alone," he
writes to Wrangel, " and I feel simply broken. My
whole life is broken in two. I have, literally, nothing
left to live for. Shall I make new ties, plan a new
life ? The very thought of it is abhorrent to me.
My brother's family is left without resources of
any kind. They are thrown on the world. I am
the only hope left them. They all, widow and
children, come crowding round me, expecting me
to save them. I loved my brother boundlessly, and
I cannot possibly desert them. By carrying on the
publication of the Epocha I could feed them and
myself, of course, by working from morning to night
for the rest of my life. There are my brother's debts
to pay. I do not wish his name to be held in evil
remembrance." And again : "I have begun to
print ' (the last few numbers of the Epocha) " at
three printers at once, and have spared neither
money nor my own health. I am sole editor, read
all proofs, manage things with authors and with the
Censorship, revise articles, procure money, sit up
till six in the morning, and sleep only five hours
out of the twenty-four. The paper has been got
into order, but it is too late."

Finally the second paper came to grief. Dos-
toievski was forced to own himself, in his own phrase,
' temporarily insolvent." Beside his debt to the
subscribers, he proved to have a debt of some one
thousand four hundred pounds in bills and seven
hundred pounds debts of honour. " O my friend ! '
he writes to Wrangel, " I would gladly go back to
prison again for so many years only to pay off my
debts and feel myself once more free. Now I am

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

beginning to write a novel under the rod, that is,
from necessity and in haste. Of all my store of
strength and energy there is only left in my soul an
unquiet and turbid wreck akin to despair. With
alarms, humiliations, a new habit of coolest calcula-
tion, I am also alone. Of old friendships and my
former forty-year-old self nothing is left." The most
relentless of his creditors, the publishing bookseller
Stellovski, a notorious rascal, threatened to put him
in prison. " The broker's assistant," he writes,
" has already come for an execution." Other credit-
ors threatened the same fate and presented a peti-
tion. He had to choose between the debtor's prison
and flight. He chose the latter, and escaped abroad.
There he spent four years in inexpressible misery.
Of his almost incredible extremes of want — seeing
that even then he was the author of Crime and
Punishment, one of the great Russian writers, and,
to more acute appreciators, one of the great writers
of the world — we get some idea from his letters to
a friend from Dresden during 1869. They merely
relate to the most humdrum details, but these are
necessary to our judgment of the man. If one does
not hear the groans, or see the face of a man in
pain, it is impossible to realize his suffering. " During
the last half year I and my wife have been in such
poverty that our last linen is now at the pawn-
shop. Don't tell any one this," he adds in a par-
enthesis, full of reserve and wretchedness. " I shall
be obliged directly to sell the last and most indis-
pensable article, and for a thing worth one hundred
thalers to take twenty ; and this I shall be forced
to do to save the life of three human beings, if he

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

delays his answer, even though unsatisfactory."
This he — the last hope, the straw at which he
catches — is a certain Mr. Kashpiriev, publisher of
the Dawn, a person quite unknown to Dostoievski,
but whom, nevertheless, he asks for Christ's sake
to rescue them by sending two hundred roubles.
" But as this, perhaps, is difficult to do at the
moment, I ask him to send immediately only seventy-
five roubles (this to save me from going under at
once). Being quite unacquainted personally with
Kashpiriev, I have written in an exaggeratedly
respectful though somewhat insistent tone. (I am
afraid of his getting annoyed, for the respect is
overdone, and the letter, I fancy, written in a very
foolish style)."

Almost a month later he writes : " From Kash-
piriev, so far, I have received no money, only promises.
If you only knew in what position we now are. You
see, there are three of us — I, my wife (his second,
Anna), who is nursing a child and must eat well,
and the child (a new-born daughter, Liuba), who
may get ill through our poverty and die. We must
christen Liuba, but have not yet been able to do
this for want of money."

The rest consists wholly of details, the tragic
significance of which can be understood only by
those who have themselves known want. For
instance, in the second letter to his brother in April,
1864, he says : "I am not going to buy any summer
shoes : I go about in the winter ones." " Does he '
(Kashpiriev), he goes on, " think that I wrote to
him about my necessities simply for the beauty of
the style ? How can I write the novel when aching

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

with hunger — when, in order to get two thalers for
a telegram, I have had to pawn a pair of trousers !
The devil take me and my hunger ! But then she
(his wife) is nursing the child. What if she goes out
by herself to pawn her last warm woollen petticoat ?
And this is the second day we have had snow (I am
not romancing, look at the papers), and she might
catch cold. Can he (Kashpiriev) not understand
that it shames me to explain all this to him ? But
that is not all : there is something still more painful.
So far we have not paid the nurse or the landlady,
and that all in the first month after her confinement.
Does he not realize that it is not only me but my
wife that he has injured in treating me so carelessly
after I myself wrote to him of the needs of my wife ?
Injured, injured ! he has branded me with his words.
Therefore he has not the right to say that he ' spits
at my hunger, and that I dare not hurry him.' And
so on — monotonous groans of senseless pain. The
business letter becomes a delirium of despair, and
moreover unjust to Kashpiriev, who was not re-
sponsible, as it afterwards proved, for the delay
was due to the stupidity of an assistant at the bank
on which the order was made. Dostoievski's voice
bursts forth in shrill, unrestrained excitement, as
before an attack of epilepsy.

" And they expect literature of me now ! ' he
concludes in a fury. " Why, how can I write at all ?
I walk about and tear my hair, and cannot sleep of
nights. I am always thinking, raging, and waiting.
Oh, my God ! Lord, Lord, I cannot describe all the
particulars of my necessities, for I am ashamed to
do so. And after this they expect of me artistic

140

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

feelings, pure poetry, without bombast. They point
to Turgeniev and Goncharov ! Let them see the
state in which I have to work ! '

And such was his whole life, almost to the end.

"I, an artist, a poet, have myself taught I know
not what," says Tolstoi. " They have paid me
money for it ; I have had good food, quarters,
women's society ; I have had Fame. Literature,
just like exemption from service, is an artificial
exploitation, advantageous only to those who write
and publish — useless to the people." " No work
costs the worker so little as literary work."

Well, what if he had seen Dostoi'evski, whom he
considered a true artist — " the man I most need,
the most akin to me " — going to pawn his clothes
to get two thalers for a telegram ; would Tolstoi's
shrug of the shoulders still have been contemptuous ?
Does not a true artist sometimes crave for money ?
And how about that narrow-minded division of
mental from manual labour ? Tolstoi's supercilious
feelings and notions on literature, labour and want,
are not due to coarseness or callousness of heart,
but simply inexperience, total ignorance of real life
from a point of view essential to moral judgments.

The striving after perfection, the satisfaction of
artistic conscience, are to Dostoievski a matter of
life and death. " Do not think," he writes in the
same terrible year, 1869, " that I am baking sweet
cakes. However badly and poorly what I write
turns out, yet the idea of the novel and the work
on it are to poor me, the author, dearer than any-
thing in the world ! Of course I am spoiling the
idea, but what am I to do ? Will you believe it,

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

in spite of its having been written three years I am
rewriting that cherished chapter again and again ?
After finishing one of the best and most profound
of his books, The Idiot, he complains : "I am dis-
satisfied to repulsion with the story. Now I am
making a last effort over the third part. If I put
things right I shall get right myself ; if not I am
done for." And before going abroad, when working
at Crime and Punishment, he says : "At the end of
November much was written and ready, but I burned
it all and began afresh."

" As a rule I work nervously, with difficulty and
much thought," he says ; " but I am now working
harder than usual, and it upsets me, even physically."
In another letter from Geneva : " I must work hard,
very hard. Meanwhile my attacks are decidedly
increasing, and after each one I can get no judgment
out of myself for four days. My attacks now began
to recur every week," he records of his last days
in St. Petersburg, " and to be clearly conscious of
this nerve and brain disturbance was unbearable.
The plain truth is that my judgment was going.
This fact sometimes caused me moments of fury.
Some inward fever is burning me up. I have fever,
in fact, every night, and every ten days an epileptic
attack ; I am dying."

" Yet am I only preparing to live," he owns in
one of his most desperate letters. " Laughable, isn't
it ? Fluctuating vitality ! " A critic says : ' I saw
him in the thick of his troubles, after the suppression
of his paper, after his brother's death, and while
being hunted for debt he never lost heart. It is
impossible to imagine circumstances which would

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

have crushed him. His terrible susceptibility made
self-control difficult, and he generally gave full play
to his feelings. Perhaps this made life possible."
" My fluctuating vitality seems exhaustless," he
says in an early letter, and on the eve of death he
might have repeated, in the words of one of his
characters : "I can bear everything, any suffering,
if I can only keep on saying to myself ' I live ; I
am in a thousand torments, but I live. I am on the
pillar, but I exist. I see the sun, or I do not see the
sun, but I know that it is. And to know that there
is a sun, that is life enough.'

And in these same four years, overwhelmed by
the deaths of his friend, brother, and wife, harassed
by creditors, the authorities, and the " Liberals,"
misunderstood by his readers, in solitude, poverty,
and sickness, he composes one after the other his
greatest productions — in 1866 Crime and Punish-
ment, in 1868 The Idiot, in 1870 The Possessed — and
plans The Brothers Karamazov. From all that he
created, however large in scope, it is evident that
it is nothing to what he could have created under
different social conditions. " Assuredly," says
Strakhov, who was intimately acquainted with his
inner history, " he wrote only a tenth part of the
stories which he for years had planned. Some of
them he told orally in detail, and with great verve,
and of subjects which he had not had time to work
out he had no end."

He was not a mere man of letters, but a true hero
of the literary calling. Yes, in that life, whatever
mistakes and weaknesses there may have been, were
moments crowned with heroic achievement and

M3

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

sanctity. " I am convinced," says Tolstoi, in speak-
ing of the men of letters with whom he was brought
in contact in his youth " — (Dostoievski was not,
although he might have been, among them) — " I am
convinced that almost all these authors were im-
moral men, worthless in character, self-confident
and self-satisfied, as only men can be who are wholly
pious, or ignorant of what piety is. When I re-
member the time and my then frame of mind, and
that of those people, I feel sick, sorry : just the
feeling which one experiences in a madhouse."

Throughout life Tolstoi has remained faithful to
this " madhouse " view of literature. All his life he
has sought justification and sanctity in 'renouncing
cultured society, in recourse to the people, in the
mortification of the flesh, in manual labour, in
everything save that to which he appeared called of
God. Dostoievski has shown by his life a man of
letters may be heroic as any warrior, martyr, or
lawgiver of the past. Among the heroes of lan-
guage, among the heroes of art and knowledge, it
may be that those will yet appear who are to have
chief dominion over men in the third and last dis-
pensation, the kingdom of the soul.

144

CHAPTER VIII

IN the eyes of a man acknowledging only Christian
sanctity and the forcible mastery of spirit over flesh,
mortifying both flesh and spirit, the sentence passed
by Tolstoi on his own career will seem just. " I
devoured the produce of the labour of my peasants ;
punished, misled, deceived them. Falsehood, theft,
debauchery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence,
murder, there was not a crime which I did not
commit." But if, apart from the sanctity of the
spirit, we admit also a sanctity of the body outside
the Christian law — the ancient heathen or Old
Testament standard of righteousness, not abolished,
but only remodelled by Christ — then the life of
Tolstoiwill be oneol the most consistent, uniform,
and admirable of lives. It may even be called
magnificent. From what has been written above
it will have been seen that his self-condemnation
will not stand. The careful master and manager,
the affectionate father of a family, like one of the
Old Testament patriarchs, his whole life breathes
purity and freshness, like some old but lusty tree,
some cool and transparent subterranean spring.

There are no morbid contrasts or deceits in the
life itself, in acts or even in feelings. These begin
to appear only when we proceed to compare his ^

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST
I

perfect pagan conduct with his imperfect Christian
intentions. His acts are not put to shame by acts,
but only by words and thoughts. In order that the
life of Tolstoi may seem stainlessly fair, we must
forget not what he does and feels, but merely what
he says and thinks about his acts and feelings. He
has fulfilled the old law ; and the tragedy of his
life lies in the fact that he has not justified the acts
of his law by his Faith and his Consciousness. It is
the old tragedy of the Old Testament men, of all
spiritual Israel. When the Law has been fulfilled
to the utmost they cease to be satisfied with the
Law and expect a Deliverer. But when the Messiah
comes, being over-weighted with the yoke of the
Law, they have not the strength to acknowledge
Him and His new and terrible liberty, they reject
Him, and again expect Him for ever. And in this
expectation lies their righteousness — a virtue which
is perennial, and perhaps included in Christianity
itself. Judging by that ethical standard alone Leo

Tolstoi had the right to say of himself, ' I have
nothing to hide from people ; let them know all
that I do." This old man's life really stands the
test : the last coverings have been stripped from
it, laid bare before the eyes of the world. There is
nothing for him to be ashamed of — all is pure, all
innocent as the nakedness of a child. Few other
lives of the great to-day would stand such an ordeal ;
certainly not the life of Dostoievski. It is easy to
fall into error and be unjust when comparing the
lives of the two men, because we know all about
the first, while about the second (Dostoievski) we
do not know all. From hints in his letters, from

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

oral traditions, but chiefly from the way in which
his personality is reflected in his writings, we can
surmise much that is hidden. We must do justice,
too, to the nearest friends of Dostoi'evski, who have
endeavoured to give us his biography. His intimate
friends and biographers are men in the highest
degree courteous, respectful — even too respectful —
to the memory of the dead. They have not por-
trayed what the Apocalypse calls " the depths of
Satan " inherent in the man. Even such a subtle
and penetrating mind as that of the critic Strakhov,
I will not say whitewashes, but greatly simplifies
the personality of his friend, softens, modifies, and
smooths, and brings it down to the average level.

Examining the character of Dostoievski as a man,
we must remember his insuperable need as an artist
to fathom dangerous and criminal depths of the
human heart, especially the depths of the passion of
love in all its manifestations. At one end of his
gamut he touches the highest, most spiritual passion,
bordering on religious enthusiasm, of the " angel '
Alesha Karamazov j1 at the other that of the evil
insect, " the she-spider who devours her own mate."
We see the whole spectrum of love in all its blended
shades and transformations, in its most mysterious,
acute, and morbid sinuosities. Remarkable is the
inevitable blood-bond between the monster Smer-
diakov, Ivan, "who fought with God," the cruel

1 The reference is to Dostoievski's great unfinished novel
in four volumes, The Brothers Karamazov. " A most in-
valuable treasury of information concerning the contem-
porary life of Russia, moral, intellectual, and social."
— Waliszewski.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

sensualist Dmitri, who seemed as if stung by a gad-
fly, the stainless cherub Alesha, and their father
according to the flesh, the outcast Fedor Karamazov.
Equally remarkable is the bond between them and
their father in the spirit, Dostoievski himself. He
would have disowned this family, perhaps, before
men, but not before his own conscience or before
God.

There exists in manuscript a posthumously
printed chapter of The Possessed, the confession of
Stavrogine, where, amongst other things, he relates
the seduction of a girl. This is one of the most
powerful creations of Dostoievski, in which we hear
a note of such alarming sincerity that we understand
those who hesitated to print it, even after the writer's
death. It is too lifelike. But in the misdeeds of
Stavrogine, even in the last depths of his fall, there
is at least an unfading demoniacal reflection of what
once was beauty ; there is the dignity of evil. But
Dostoievski does not hesitate to depict even the
most vulgar and commonplace immorality. The
hero of his Notes from Underground stands on the
mental height of his greatest heroes, those that were
nearest to his heart. He expresses the very essence
of the religious struggles and doubts of the artist.
In this confession we feel self-incrimination, self-
castigation, not less unsparing and more austere
than that of the Confession of Tolstoi. And this is
what this " hero " confesses : " At times I suddenly
plunged into a sombre, subterranean, despicable
debauchery, or semi-debauchery. My squalid pas-
sions were keen, glowing with morbid irritability.
The outbursts were hysterical, accompanied by

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

tears1 and convulsions of remorse. Bitterness boiled
in me. I felt an unwholesome thirst for violent
moral contrasts, and so I demeaned myself to
animality. I indulged in it by night, secretly, fear-
fully, foully, with a shame that never left me, even
at the most degrading moments. I carried in my
soul the love of secretiveness ; I was terribly afraid
that I should be seen, met, recognized.".

In delineations of this kind Dostoievski has so
much strength and daring, such novelty of discovery
and revelation, that we ask, " Could he have learnt
all this merely from objective experience of others,
from observation ? Is it the curiosity only of the
artist ? ' Assuredly it was not necessary that he
himself should kill an old woman in order to ex-
perience the feelings of Raskolnikov, the leading
character in Crime and Punishment. Much must be
laid to the account of the insight of genius — much,
but not all. Even if in the acts of the writer there
was nothing corresponding to the curiosity of the
artist, yet it is worthy of notice that such images
could rise before his fancy. The fancy of Tolstoi
would never have been capable of these figures,
though it penetrates into recesses of sensuousness
not less deep. The interest of Dostoievski in " the
stings of the gadfly," the seduction of girls, or the
love adventure of Fedor Karamazov with Lizaveta
the Fetid, Tolstoi would certainly have considered
senseless or revolting. Sexual passion appears with
him at times a cruel, coarse, even animal force, but
never unnatural or perverted. The greatest of
human sins, punished unmercifully by divine justice

1 Compare Dr. Johnson's similar outbursts.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

in the spirit of the Mosaic Law, is, to the creator of
Anna Karenina and the Kreuzer Sonata, the in-
| fringement of conjugal fidelity. The measure with
which he metes out all the phenomena of sex is the
simple, healthy, chaste passion of the patriarchs for
their wives, under the law given to men by Jehovah,
" Increase and multiply" Levine owns that he
could never picture to himself happiness with a
woman otherwise than in the form of marriage ; to
tempt another man's wife seems to the possessor of
Kitty as senseless as, after a costly and ample
dinner, to steal a roll from a stall in the street.
However repentant for his gallantries Tolstoi may
be, we feel that in this respect, as compared with
Dostoievski, he is as innocent as Levine.

When the novelist Turgeniev and Bielinski, the
famous critic, " reproved Dostoievski for his dis-
orderly life," he informs his brother : " I am ill in
the nerves, and afraid of delirium or nervous fever.
Live decently I cannot." His respectful and dis-
creet biographer1 hastens to suggest that he speaks
here of merely monetary irregularities, but the
reader is driven to doubt.

Here is another hint as to the extremes of which
he was capable, not only in imagination, but in act.
" My dear fellow," he writes to Maikov in 1867 from
abroad, " I feel that I can look on you as my judge.
You are a man with a heart, and it does not hurt
me to repent before you. But I am writing for
your eye alone. Do not hand me over to the
tribunal of the world. Travelling not far from
Baden, I took it into my head to turn aside thither.

i O: Mullerj
150

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

I was harassed by the temptation to sacrifice- ten
louis d'or and perhaps gain two thousand francs.
I had before happened to win sometimes. But worse
than this, my nature is wicked and too passionate.
The devil straightway played me a trick, for in three
days I won four thousand francs with unusual ease.
The great thing is the play itself. You don't know
how it weighs on me ! No, I swear to you, it was
not mere greed of gain. I went on risking and lost.
I proceeded to stake my last money, excited to
feverishness, and lost. Then I proceeded to pawn
my clothes. Anna — (his. wife) — pawned everything,
save what she stood in, to the last shred. (What an
angel she is ! How, in our despair, she comforted
me !) ' Then follow prayers for money, humiliating
even if the close friendship between him and Maikov
is taken into account. " I know that you yourself
have no money to spare. I should never apply to
you for help, only I am sinking — have almost com-
pletely gone under. In two or three weeks I shall
be without a farthing, and a drowning man will
clutch at a straw. Except you I have no one, and
if you do not help me I shall perish wholly ! Dear
fellow, save me. I will repay you for ever with
friendship and attachment. If you have nothing,
borrow of some one for me. Forgive me for thus
writing. Do not leave me alone ! God will repay
you for this. Give a drop of water to a soul parching
in the wilderness, for God's sake ! " Notice the
painfully abject language. It reminds one of the
comic personages in his own stories, when they have
lost the sense of self-respect, the drunken little
Marmeladov and the adventurous Captain Lebed-

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

kine, recounting their poverty. Dostoievski him-
self has lost self-control ; does not care what Maikov
thinks of him ; has broken loose into feverish
hysteria ; is still drunk from enjoyment of the game.

We feel that if he had got the money at Baden he
would have again lost control, again played it away.

On one occasion, when young, Tolstoi also lost
heavily at play. But he did not "break loose" ;
he stopped in time with the self-command and
soberness peculiar, not to his speculation, but to
his action. He gave up playing, went to the Cau-
casus, quartered himself in a Cossack camp, and
lived there with the greatest frugality on sixteen
shillings a month, saved money, and paid his debt
for cards. We see the true strength of the man,
the sense of proportion, the power over himself,
the tenacity, and consequently, from a certain
standpoint, his moral superiority over Dostoievski.

All these are trifles, but we know that even in
more important respects the latter " broke loose."
In a fit of youthful boasting he fancied that in
his book The Double, or Alter Ego, he had surpassed
Dead Souls. Thus, in blind anger against Bielinski,
he accused that critic — who, if not sufficiently per-
spicacious, was in the highest degree well-inten-
tioned— of " despicable malice and stupidity." In
the very letter in which he tells Maikov of his losses
at play he notably expounds himself. " Every-
where and in everything I go to extremes : all my
life I have overshot the mark." It is necessary to
add that he had been fated " to overshoot the mark '
not only from strength, but from weakness.

" Do not hand me over to the judgment of men

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

in general," he begs Maikov. This reminds one of
the hero of Notes from Underground — " I was terribly
afraid that I should be seen and recognized." Per-
haps he does not sincerely repent of what he calls his
' paltrily passionate nature." Yet to purify it of
his own set purpose, or to justify it before the tri-
bunal of the world, are tasks beyond his strength.
The evil is not in what he does, but in the fact that
he is ashamed of what he does. His life will not, like
Tolstoi's, stand complete exposure. He has hidden
much, or is fain to hide, and we feel that this dark
side of his life1 is not edifying. If the life of Tolstoi
is the pure and virgin water of a spring, that of
Dostoievski is the upgush of fire from elemental
depths, mixed with lava, ashes, smoke, and sulphur.
It is impossible not to believe in the sincere en-
deavours of Tolstoi to love his neighbours, but we
may doubt whether he has really loved any one
of them as a Christian. But the fire of love, pene-
trating and purifying Dostoievski, glows even in
the most commonplace acts. In one letter he writes
to his orphan stepson : " Pasha is a good boy, a
sweet boy, with no one left to care for him. I will
share my last crust and shirt with him, and my life
as well ! ' This was no empty word : he was ready,
and without abstract reasoning as to the right to
help the poor or no.

4" They tell me as a consolation," he writes, after
the death of his daughter Sonia, " that I shall have
other children. But where is my Sonia ? Where is
that little spirit for whom I boldly declare I would

It is that side of the planet Venus which is always
turned from the sun. — ED.

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

accept the pains of the Cross if only she might live ?
The more time goes on, the more bitter is memory-
trie more clearly do I see her face. There are mo-
ments which it is almost impossible to bear. She
had regained consciousness and recognized me ; and
when on the day of her death I went out (curse me !)
to read the papers, having no idea that in two hours
she would die, she so followed and accompanied me
with her eyes, so looked at me, that I still see those
eyes more and more distinctly. How can I love
another child ? What I want is Sonia." Utterly
self-forgetting, Jie^ loves the child of his flesTi, not
only according to the flesh, but Christianly, accord-
ing to the spirit — as a separate, eternal, irreplaceable
personality. Here is no patriarch Job consoled for
his dead child by others. " But where is Sonia ?
I want Sonia." Has Tolstoi ever uttered such
simple words of simple love ? We remember again
Tolstoi's words to a stranger about his own wife,
Sophia : about her who has devoted her life to him
and cared for him with a mother's tenderness for
thirty years. " I choose myself friends among men.
No woman can take the place of a friend to me.
Why do we lie to our wives, assuring them that we
can hold them friends ? Flat untruth ! " In this
cold and cruel speech is the chill of the whole life,
the chill of the underground spring. But it is as
God created it. I dread only his surface lukewarm-
ness, which aspires to be Christian.

And so both Tolstoi and Dostoi'evski remain im-
perfect in our sight. Neither one nor the other
approaches that highest reconciling and fusing
region of thought and inspiration where the eternal

154

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

azure is transfused by the eternal sun, and opposites
meet in the Absolute.

' > •^•— — — — ^ — -•-

In any case the earth-glow of Dostoievski is to
me sacred as the chill of Tolstoi. Nothing I might
learn of evil, of criminal, about Dostoievski would
darken his figure or dim the light of sanctity round
him. The fire that burnt within him mastered and
purified all. In the latter half of 1880, when he was
finishing The Brothers Karamazov, as Strakhov re-
cords, ' ' he was unusually thin and exhausted. He
lived, it was plain, solely on his nerves. His body
had become so frail that the first slight blow might
destroy it. His mental labour was untiring, al-
though work, as he himself told me, had grown very
difficult to him. In the beginning of 1881 he fell
ill of a severe attack of emphysema, the result of
catarrh of the pulmonary passages. On January 26
he had hemorrhage in the throat. Feeling the ap-
proach of death he wished to confess and take the
Sacrament. He gave the New Testament, used by
him in prison, to his wife to read aloud. The first
passage chanced to be Matthew iii. 14, ' But John
held him back and said, It is I that should be bap-
tized by Thee, and dost Thou come to me ? But
Jesus answered and said unto him, Detain Me not,
for thus it behoves us to fulfil a great truth.' When
his wife had read this he said, ' You hear ? " De-
tain me not " ; that means I am to die.' And he
closed the book." A few hours later he did actually
die instantaneously from the rupture of the pul-
monary artery. He had lived for " the great truth,"
of which he thought in his last moments.

He loved to read out Pushkin's Prophet in the

155

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

evenings. Those who heard him will never forget
it. He began in a jerky, hollow, suppressed voice.
But in the silence of the audience every syllable
could be distinguished. And the voice grew ever
louder, acquiring a power that seemed superhuman ;
and the last line he did not read, but shouted in
tones that shook the room —

And with thy word inflame the heart of Man.

And the colourless, pitiable, " Liberal-Conserva-
tive ' St. Petersburg crowd — perhaps the coldest
and most commonplace crowd in the world, like the
crowd in Maria del Fiore four centuries ago, when
Fra Geronimo Savonarola was preaching — thrilled
at that awe-inspiring cry. At that moment it was
suddenly aware Dostoievski was more than a great
writer — that in him burned the seed of the religious
fires of history.

On one occasion Strakhov read him his poems,
which included the line, addressed to the Russians
of the day —

Could ye but know the powers locked in yourselves !

" In some folks' brain," he says himself, ' there
always remains something not to be imparted to
others, though one wrote volumes of explanations
and explained his thought for five and thirty years.
One thought will hover in his restless head which
can never break out of it, and that perhaps the
most important of all."

This presentiment has been fulfilled. He died
without telling us his chief secret. Twenty years

156

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

after his death, if he knew how he has been under-
stood, would he not be justified in once more ex-
claiming, " They do not understand the main thing,"
and perhaps more especially now, when his fame
is paling before the ever rising and dazzling fame of
his great rival ? But the " main thing," we feel,
in Tolstoi's art is more realized and understood in
Dostoievski. Tolstoi is lord of the present ; Dos-
toi'evski's fame is of the future. I do not say this
to belittle Tolstoi, for I think that the present is
by no means less important than the future. To-
day is already to-morrow unrealized. I wish merely
to say that we already are prescient of a third comer
who is greater than these — he who shall reconcile
both these men's spirits. To him shall be the vic-
tory ; in him the revelation of the " main thing "
that was in them both.

" The works of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgeniev, and
Derjavine," says Tolstoi, " are unknown and useless
to the people. Our literature is not suited to the
people. These works, which we so cherish, remain to
them a sealed book." Once, when talking to a coach-
man, who asked him for Childhood and Youth, Leo
answered : " No, it is a hollow book. In my youth
I wrote much nonsense. But I will give you Come
to the Light while there is Light. That is much better
than Childhood and Youth"

" I am like Paul," says Dostoievski ; " folk don't
praise me, so I must praise myself ! " And not long
before his death, in a notebook under the heading
Myself, he wrote : "I am certainly of the people,
for my tendency issues from the depths of the
Christian — that is, the popular spirit ; although I

157

\

TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

am unknown to the Russian people of to-day I shall
be known to them in the future."

Each of these views is right in its own way.

Of course Tolstoi and Dostoievski are both popular
in the sense that they aim at what really ought to
become popular and part of the universal culture.
They aim at it, but do they attain it ? They have
recognized the gulf that divides culture from the
people, and wish to be of the people. Yet even
Pushkin, though far less conscious of this gulf, is, I
think, more of the people than they. Neither pos-
sesses the perfect simplicity which makes the Iliad
of Homer, the Prometheus of ^Eschylus, and the
Divine Comedy of Dante, expressions of the spirit
of the nation, as of the world-spirit. Both are still
too complicated, too artificial, too much in a hurry
to escape from convention and " become simple."
He who needs to become simple is not yet simple,
and he who wishes to be of the people is not yet of
the people. Pushkin, Tolstoi, and Dostoievski will
long remain " caviare to the general."

The living founder of a new sect, calling itself
" the Church of the Orthodox Christians,!!^ former
convict, living in Sakhaline, named Tikhon Bielo-
nojkin, said recently to a " cultured " Russian, who
was inquiring into popular customs, You collect
oil, I understand. You have put a great deal of it
into a lamp. Light that lamp, that there may be
a light to serve men. If not, what is the good of
your oil ? '

We men of culture and reasoning are oil without
fire. The people, full of strength and belief, are fire
without oil. The oil is being wasted, the fire is

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

sinking. Tolstoi and Dostoi'evski, great precursors
of him who will put the oil and fire together, are
our typical Russians. Taken separately they can
be judged and compared ; we can ascribe to one
superiority over the other. Seen together, I no
longer know which of them is nearer to me, or which
I most love.

'' His was a peasant's face," says one, describing
Tolstoi- ' simple, rustic, with a broad nose, weather-
beaten skin, thick beetling brows, from under which
the small grey keen eyes looked brightly. Some-
times, when he flashes up and gets hot, these eyes
are piercing and penetrating. And with all the
' peasant look,' adds the writer, " you at once
recognize the man of good society, the man of breed-
ing, the Russian gentleman."

It is worthy of note how in the faces of great
Russian writers, as that of Turgeniev when old,
there is this mixture of plebeianism, the " peasant
look," with the look of the noble — the look of
European high breeding. The union seems splendid
and natural, as if one did not interfere with the
other.

Tolstoi's traits are those of a man who has lived/
life long and grandly, perhaps stormily, rarely
happily. The face of Nimrod, mighty hunter beforej
the Lord, in spite of the wrinkles of seventy, it is*.
full of unfading youth, freshness, and somewhat
haughty frigidity.

And here beside it is the face of Dostoievski, never -
young even in youth, shadowed by suffering, and\\
the cheeks sunken. The huge bare brow, bespeaking ';
the clearness and majesty of reason; the piteous/

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

lips, twisted as if by the spasm of the " sacred sick-
ness ; the gaze dim and inexpressibly heavy, as
if turned inwards ; the slight cast in the eyes, as of
one possessed. What is most painful in this face
is a sort of immobility in the midst of movement,
an endeavour arrested and turned to stone at the
height of effort.

In spite of all contrasts, at times these faces are
strangely alike. Dostoievski too has the peasant
look. " He looks quite the private soldier," says
a friend.

If consummate genius has pre-eminently the face
of the people, neither in Tolstoi nor in Dostoievski
have we as yet such a face. They are still too com-
plex, passionate, and turbulent. There is not the
final stillness and serenity, that " decorum ' which
our folk has been seeking for unconsciously for so
many ages in its own Byzantine art, in the old Icons
of its saints and martyrs. And neither of these
faces is beautiful. Russia has never yet possessed
a world-wide face, beautiful and national too, as
that of Homer, the youthful Raphael, or old
Leonardo. Even the outer semblance of Pushkin
appears to us that of a St. Petersburg dandy of the
thirties, in a Childe Harold cloak, arms folded on
the chest like Napoleon's, with the conventional
Byronic meditation in the eyes, curly hair and thick
sensual lips. Yet this was the most national, the
most truly Russian of the Russians. There were
moments of sudden transfiguration, when he became
unrecognizable. As Alcibiades says of Socrates,
the mask of the Satyr betrayed the hidden God.
In all Pushkin — in the outer man, as in his poetry-

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TOLSTOI AS MAN AND ARTIST

there is something over-light, transitory, evasive,
unearthly, volatile. It was not for nothing that
his friends called him " the Spark." For he was no
planet, but a swift shooting star, a presage of
harmony possible to Russia, but even by him never
perfected. And his flight left us only the dim chrysa-
lis, without its glowing inward nucleus. Nobody can
give us now the true portrait of Pushkin. But the
Russian people has not, so far, found its proper
embodiment or type. Its typical man lies not in
Pushkin, or even in Peter, buf still in the Future.
This future man, third and final, perfectly " sym-
metrical," who^will be wholly Russian and yet
cosmopolitan — a face, I fancy, splendidly symmetri-
cal— is to be sought for in a balance between the
two great natures — Tolstoi's and Dostoievski's.
Some day there will flash between them, as between
two opposite poles, a spark of that lightning which
means national conflagration.

In this Russian shall the " Man-god ' be mani-
fested to the Western world, and the " God-man,"
for the first time, to the Eastern, and he shall be,
to those whose thinking already reconciles both
hemispheres, the " One in Two."

161 M

PART SECOND
Tolstoi and Dostoievski as Artists

163

CHAPTER IX

THE Princess jjolkonski, wife of Prince Andrei, as
we learn from the first pages of Tolstoi's great novel
Peace and War, was rather pretty, with a slight
dark down on her upper lip, which was short to
the teeth, but opened all the more sweetly, and
still more sweetly lengthened at times and met the
lower lip. For twenty chapters this lip keeps reap-
pearing. Some months have passed since the open-
ing of the story : " The little princess, who was
enceinte, had meanwhile grown stout, but her eyes
and the short downy lip and its smile, were curled
up just as gaily and sweetly." And two pages later,
" The princess talked incessantly i her short upper
lip with its down constantly descended for a mo-
ment, touched at the right point the red lower one,
and then again parted in a dazzling smile of eyes
and teeth." The princess tells her sister-in-law,
Prince Andrei's sister, Princess Maria, of the depart-
ure of her husband for the war. Princess Maria
turns to her, with caressing eyes on her person ;
" Really ? ' The princess's face changed, and she
sighed. " Yes, really ! ' she replied, " Ah, it is all
very terrible ! ' and the lip of the little princess
descended. In the course of one hundred and fifty
pages we have already four times seen that upper

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

lip with its distinguishing qualifications. Two
hundred pages later we have again, " There was a
general and brisk conversation, thanks to the voice
and the smiling downy lip that rose above the white
teeth of the little princess." In the second part of
the novel she dies in a confinement. Prince Andrei
entered his wife's room : she lay dead in the very
attitude in which he had seen her five minutes before,
and the same expression, in spite of the still eyes
and the paleness of the cheeks, was on this charming
child-like face with the lips covered with dark down.
* I love you all, have harmed nobody. What
have you done with me ? ' This takes place in
the year 1805;

The war had broken out, and the scene of it
was drawing near the Russian frontiers. In the
midst of its dangers the author does not forget to
tell us that over the grave of the little princess there
had been placed a marble monument : an angel
that had a slightly raised upper lip, and the ex-
pression which Prince Andrei had read on the face of
his dead wife, " Why have you done this to me ? '
Years pass. Napoleon has completed his con-
quests in Europe. He is already crossing the fron-
tier of Russia. In the retirement of the Bare Hills,
the son of the dead princess " grew up, changed,
grew rosy, grew a crop of curly dark hair, and with-
out knowing, smiling and gay, raised the upper lip
of his well-shaped mouth just like the little dead
princess." Thanks to these underlinings of one
physical feature first in the living, then in the dead,
and then again on the face of her statue and in her
son the upper lip of the little princess is engraved

1 66

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

on our memory with ineffaceable distinctness. We
cannot remember her without also recalling that
feature.

Princess Maria Volkonski, Prince Andrei's sister,
has a heavy footstep which can be heard from afar.
They were the heavy steps of the Princess Maria."
She came into the room " with her heavy walk, going
on her heels." Her face "grows red in patches"
During a delicate conversation with her brother
about his wife, she " turned red in patches." When
they are preparing to dress her up upon the occasion
of the coming betrothed, she feels herself insulted :
' she flashed out, and her face became flushed in
patches."

In the following volume, in a talk with Pierre
about his old men and beggars, about his " bedes-
men," she becomes confused and " grew red in
patches." Between these two last reminders of
the patches of the princess is the description of the
battle of Austerlitz, the victory of Napoleon, the
gigantic struggle of nations, events that decided
the destiny of the world, yet the artist does not for-
get, and will not to the end, the physical trait he
finds so interesting. We are forced to remember
the glaring eyes, heavy footsteps, and red patches
of the Princess Maria. True, these traits, unim-
portant as they may seem, are really bound up with
deep-seated spiritual characteristics of the dramatis
personae. The upper lip, now gaily tilted, now
piteously dropped, expresses the childlike careless-
ness and helplessness of the little princess. The
clumsy gait of the Princess Maria expresses an ab-
sence of external feminine charm ; both the glaring

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

eyes and the fact that she blushes in patches are
connected with her inward womanly charm and
spiritual modesty. Sometimes these stray character-
istics light up a vast and complex picture, and give
it startling clearness and relief.

At the time of the popular rising in deserted
Moscow, before Napoleon's entry, when Count
Rostopchin, wishing to allay the bestial fury of the
crowd, points to the political criminal Verestchagin
(who happened to be at hand and was totally inno-
cent) as a spy, and the scoundrel who had ruined
Moscow, the thin long neck and the general thinness,
weakness and fragility of his frame of course ex-
press the defencelessness of the victim in face of
the coarse mass of the crowd.

" Where is he ? ' said the Count, and instantly
saw round the corner of a house a young man with a
long thin neck coming out between two dragoons.
He had " dirty, down at heel, thin boots. On his
lean, weak legs the fetters clanked heavily. * Bring
him here,' said Rostopchin, pointing to the lower
step of the perron. The young man, walking heavily
to the step indicated, sighed with a humble gesture,
crossed his thin hands, unused to work, before his
body. ' Children,' said Rostopchin, in a metallic
ringing voice, ' this man is Verestchagin, the
very scoundrel that ruined Moscow.' Verest-
chagin raised his face and endeavoured to meet the
Count's eyes, but he was not looking at him. On
the long thin neck of the young man a vein behind
the ear stood out like a blue cord. The people were
silent, only pressed more closely together. ' Kill
him ! Let the traitor perish, and save from slur

1 68

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

the Russian name,' cried Rostopchin. ' Count ! '
was heard saying amid the renewed stillness the
timid yet theatrical voice of Verestchagin, ' Count,
one God is above us.' And again the large vein
in his thin neck was swollen with blood. One of
the soldiers struck him with the flat of the sword on
the head. Verestchagin, with a cry of terror, with
outstretched hands plunged forward towards the
people. A tall youth against whom he struck clung
with his hands to his thin neck and with a wild cry,
fell with him under the feet of the onrushing roaring
populace." After the crime, the very people who
committed it with hang-dog and piteous looks gazed
on the dead body with the purple blood-stained and
dusty face and the mangled long thin neck. Scarce \
a word of the inward state of the victim, but in five
pages the word thin eight times repeated in various
connexions — and this outward sign fully depicts
the inward condition of Verestchagin in relation to
the crowd. Such is the ordinary artistic resource
of Tolstoi, from the seen to the unseen, from the
external to the internal, from the bodily to the
spiritual, or at any rate to the emotional.

Sometimes in these recurrent traits are implicated
deeper fundamental ideas, main motives of the book.
For instance, the weight of the corpulent general
Kutuzov, his leisurely old man's slowness and want
of mobility, express the apathetic, meditative
stolidity of his mind, his Christian or more truly
Buddhistic renunciation of his own will, the sub-
mission to the will of Fate or the God of this primi-
tive hero ; in the eyes of Tolstoi, a hero pre-emin-
ently Russian and national, the hero of inaction or

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

inertia. He is in contrast with the fruitlessly
energetic, light, active, and self-confident hero of
Western culture, Napoleon.

Prince Andrei watches the commander in chief
at the time of the review of the troops at Tsarevoe
Jaimishche : " Since Andrei had last seen him
Kutuzov had grown still stouter and unwieldy with
fat." An air of weariness was on his face and in
his figure. " Snorting and tossing heavily he sat his
charger." When after finishing the inspection he
entered the court, on his face sat " the joy of a man
set free, purposing to take his ease after acting a part.
He drew his left leg out of the stirrup, rolling his
whole body and, frowning from the effort, with
difficulty raised it over the horse's back. Then he
gasped and sank into the arms of supporting Cos-
sacks and aides-de-camp ; stepped out with a
plunging gait and heavily ascended the staircase
creaking under his weight." When he learns from
Prince Andrei of the death of his father, he sighs
44 profoundly, heaving his whole chest, and is silent
for a time." Then he " embraced Prince Andrei,
pressed him to his stout chest, and for long would
not let him go. When he did so, the prince saw
that the swollen lips of Kutuzov quivered, and tears
were in his eyes." He sighs, and grasping the
bench with both hands to rise, rises heavily and the
folds of his swollen neck disappear.
/^JEven more profound is the significance of rotun-
dity in the frame of another Russian hero, Platon
Karataev. This rotundity typifies the eternal com-
pleteness of all that is simple, natural and artificial,
a self-sufficingness, which seems to the artist the

170

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

primary element of the Russian national genius.
; Platon Karat aev always remained in Pierre's
mind as the strongest and dearest memory and
personification of all that is Russian, good, and
rounded off. When next day, at dawn, Pierre saw
his neighbour, the first impression of something
round was fully confirmed ; the whole figure of
Platon in his French cloak, with a cord girdle, a
forage-cap and bast shoes, was round, the head was
completely round, the back, the chest, the shoulders,
even the arms, which he carried as if he was always
going to lift something, all were round : the pleasant
smile and the great brown tender eyes were round.
Pierre felt something " round, if one might strain
language, in the whole savour of the man" Here, by
one physical trait, carried to the last degree of
geometrical simplicity and obviousness, is expressed
a huge abstract generalization. Tolstoi's religion
and metaphysics enter into the delineation by this
single trait.

Similar deep expressiveness is given by him to
the hands of Napoleon and Speranski, the hands of
men that wield power. At the time of the meeting
of the Emperors in face of the assembled armies,
the former gives a Russian soldier the Legion of
Honour, he " draws off the glove from his white small
hand, and tearing it, throws it away." A few lines
later, " Napoleon reaches back his small plump hand."
Nicolai Rostov remembers " that self-satisfied Bona-
parte with his little white hand." And in the next '
volume, when talking with the Russian diplomat
Balashiev, Napoleon makes " an energetic gesture
of inquiry with his little white, plump hand"

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

He sketches, too, the whole body of the Emperor,
stripping the studious demi-god, till he stands, like
other men, food for cannon.

In the morning, just before the battle of Borodino,
the Emperor, in his tent, is finishing his toilette.
' vSnorting and panting, he turned, now his plump
back, now his overgrown fatty chest to the brush
with which the valet was rubbing him down.
Another valet, holding the mouth of the bottle with
his finger, was sprinkling the pampered little body
with eau-de-cologne, with an air that said he alone
could know how much and where to sprinkle.
Napoleon's short hair was damp and hanging over
his forehead. But his face, though bloated and
yellow, expressed physical well-being. ' More now,
harder now ! ' he cried, stretching and puffing, to
the valet who was rubbing him, then bending and
presenting his fat shoulders."

This white hand denotes the upstart hero who
exploits the masses.

Speranski1 too, has white fat hands, in the de-
scription of which Tolstoi plainly somewhat abuses
his favourite device of repetition and emphasis.
" Prince Andrei watched all Speranski's move-
ments ; but lately he was an insignificant seminarist,
and now in his hands, those white plump hands,
he held the fate of Russia, as Volkonski reflected/1
" In no one had the Prince seen such delicate white-
ness of the face, and still more the hands, which
were rather large, but unusually plump, delicate
and white. Such whiteness and delicacy of com-

1 A handsome guardsman in the great novel Peace and
War.

172

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

plexion he had only seen in soldiers who had been
long in hospital." A little later he again " looks
involuntarily at the white delicate hands of Sper-
anski, as men look generally at the hands of people
in power. The mirror-like glance and the delicate
hand somehow irritated prince Andrei."

The detail is repeated with unwearying insistence
till in the long run this white hand begins to haunt
one like a spectral being.

In comparing himself with Pushkin as an artist,
Tolstoi said to Bers that the difference between
them, amongst other things, was this, that Pushkin
in depicting a characteristic detail does it lightly,
not troubling whether it will be noticed or understood
by the reader, while he himself, as it were, stood over
the reader with this artistic detail, until he had
set it forth distinctly." The comparison is acute.
He does " stand over the reader," not afraid of
sickening him, and flogs in the trait, repeats, lays
on colours, layer after layer, thickening them more
and more, where Pushkin, barely touching, slides
his brush over in light and careless, but invariably
sure and faithful strokes. It seems as if Pushkin,
especially in prose harsh, and even niggardly, gave
little, that we might want the more. But Tolstoi
gives so much that there is nothing more for us to
want ; we are sated, if not glutted.

The descriptions of Pushkin remind one of the
light watery tempera of the old Florentine masters
or Pompeian frescoes, dim, airily translucent col-
ours, like the veil of morning mist. Tolstoi paints
in the more powerful oil colours of the great North-
ern Masters. And side by side with the dense

173

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

black and living shadows we have sudden rays of
the blinding all-penetrating light, drawing out of
the dark some distinct feature, the nakedness of
the body, a fold of drapery, a keen, quick movement,
part of a face stamped with passion or suffering.
We get a startling, almost repulsive and alarming
r vividness. The artist seeks through the natural,
strongly emphasized, the supernatural ; through
the physical exaggerated the hyperphysical.
In all literature there is no writer equal to Tolstoi

^MMMMMMBMMHMHMMiHiMMBMMMMHhHMBMuMgi^^

in depicting the human body. Through he misuses
repetitions, he usually attains what he needs by
them, and he never suffers from the longueurs so
common to other vigorous masters. i|e is accurate,
simple, and as short as possible, selecting only the
few, small, unnoticed facial or personal features and
producing them, not all at once, but gradually and
one by one, distributing them over the whole course
of the story, weaving them into the living web of
the action. Thus at the first appearance of old
Prince V°lkonski l we get only a fleeting sketch, in
four or five lines, " the short figure of the old man
with the powdered wig, small dry hands and grey,
overhanging brows that sometimes, when he was
roused, dimmed the flash of the clever youthful
eyes.n When he sits down to the lathe " by the
movement of his small foot, the firm pressure of his
thin veined hand " (we already know his hands are
dry, but Tolstoi loves to go back to the hands of
his heroes), " you could still see in the Prince the
obstinate and long-enduring force of hale old age."
When he talks to his daughter, Princess Maria,

1 In Peace and War.

174
*

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

" he shows in a cold smile, his strong but yellowish
teeth." When he sits at the table and bends over her,
beginning the usual lesson in geometry, she " feels
herself surrounded with the snuffy, old-age, acrid
savour of her father,'1 which had long been a sign
to her. There he is all before us as if alive, height,
build, hands, feet, eyes, gestures, brows, even the
peculiar savour belonging to each man.

Or take the effect on Vronski when he first sees
Anna Karenina. You could see at a glance she
belonged to the well-born ; that she was very beauti-
ful, that she had red lips, flashing grey eyes, which
looked dark from the thickness of the lashes, and
that ' an excess of life had so filled her being that
in spite of herself it showed, now in the flash of her
eyes, now in her smile.'7 And again as the story
progresses, gradually, imperceptibly, trait is added
to trait, feature to feature i when she gives her
hand to Vronski he is delighted "as by something
exceptional with the vigorous clasp with which
she boldly shook his own." When she is talking
to her sister-in-law Dolly, Anna takes her hand
in 4 her own vigorous little one." The wrist of
this hand is * thin and tiny," we see the " slender
tapering fingers," off which the rings slip easily.

In the hands of Karenina, as in those of other
characters (it may be because the hands are the
only part of the human body always bare and near
elemental nature, and unconscious as the animal),
there is yet greater expressiveness than in the face.
In the hands of Anna lies the whole charm of her
person, the union of strength and delicacy. We
learn when she is standing in the crowd at the ball

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOl'EVSKI AS ARTISTS

' that she always held herself exceptionally erect " ;
when she leaves the railway carriage or walks through
the room she has " a quick, decisive gait, carrying
with strange ease her full and perfectly proportioned
body." When she dances she has " a distinguish-
ing grace, sureness and lightness of movement " ;
when, having gone on a visit to Dolly, she takes
off her hat, her black hair, that catches in every-
thing, " ripples into waves all over," and on another
occasion " the unruly short waves of her curly hair
keep fluttering at the nape and on the temples."
In these unruly curls, so easily becoming unkempt,
there is the same tension, " the excess of something '
ever ready for passion, as in the too bright flash
of the eyes, or the smile, breaking out involuntarily
and " fluctuating between the eyes and the lips."
And lastly, when she goes to the ball, we see her skin.
" The black, low-cut velvet bodice showed her full
shoulders and breast polished like old ivory, and
rounded arms." This polishedness, firmness, and
roundness of the body, as with Platon Karataev, is
to Tolstoi very important and subtle, a mysterious
trait. All these scattered, single features complete
and tally with one another, as in beautiful statues
the shape of one limb always corresponds to the
shape of another. The traits are so harmonized
that they naturally and involuntarily unite, in the
fancy of the reader, into one living, personal whole :
so that when we finish the book we cannot but
recognize Anna Karenina.

« This gift of insight into the body at times, though
seldom, leads Tolstoi into excess. It is easy and
pleasant to him to describe living bodies and their

176

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

movements. He depicts exactly how a horse begins
to start when touched by the spur : " Jarkov
touched his horse with the spurs and it thrice in
irritation shifted its legs, not knowing with which
to begin, reared and leaped." In the first lines of
Anna Karenina Tolstoi is in a hurry to tell us how
Stepan Arcadievich Oblonski, of whom we as yet
know nothing, " draws plenty of air into his broad
pectoral structure," and how he walks with " his
usual brisk step, turning out the feet which so
lightly carry his full frame." This last feature is
significant, because it records the family likeness
of the brother Stepan with his sister Anna. Even
if all this seems extravagant, yet extravagance in
art is not excess, it is even in many cases the most
needful of all things. But here is a character of
third-rate importance, one of those which vanish
almost as soon as they appear, some paltry regi-
mental commander in Peace and War, who has no
sooner flitted before us than we have already seen
that he " is broader from the chest to the back
than from one shoulder to the other," and he stalks
before the front " with a gait that shakes at every
step and his back slightly bent." This shaky
walk is repeated four times in five pages. Perhaps
the observation is both true and picturesque, but
it is here an inappropriate touch and in excess*
Anna Karenina's fingers, " taper at the ends,'*
are important ; but we should not have lost much
if he had not told us that the Tartar footmen who
hand dinner to Levine and Oblonski were broad-
hipped. Sometimes the distinguishing quality of
an artist is shown, not so much by what he has in

177 N

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

due proportion as by the gift which he has to excess.

The language of gesture, if less varied than words,
is more direct, expressive and suggestive. It is
easier to lie in words than by gesture or facial
expression. One glance, one wrinkle, one quiver
of a muscle in the face, may express the unutter-
able. Succeeding series of these unconscious, in-
voluntary movements, impressing and stratifying
themselves on the face and physique, form the ex-
pression of the face and the countenance of the
body. Certain feelings impel us to corresponding
movements, and, on the other hand, certain habi-
tual movements impel to the corresponding inter-
nal states. The man who prays, folds his hands
and bends his knees, and the man too who folds
his hands and bends his knees is near to the pray-
ing frame of mind. Thus there exists an uninter-
rupted current, not only from the internal to the
external, but from the external to the internal.

Tolstoi, with inimitable art, uses this convertible
connexion between the external and the internal.
By the same law of mechanical sympathy which
makes a stationary tense chord vibrate in answer
to a neighbouring chord, the sight of another crying
or laughing awakes in us the desire to cry or laugh ;
we experience when we read similar descriptions
in the nerves and muscles. And so by the motions
of muscles or nerves we enter shortly and directly
into the internal world of his characters, begin to
live with them, and in them.

When we learn that Ivan Ilyich1 cried out three
days for pain " Ugh, U-ugh, Ugh ! " because when he

1 In The Death of Ivan Ilyitchi

178

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOI'EVSKI AS ARTISTS

began to cry " I don't want to ! " he prolonged the
sound " o-o-o," it is easy for us, not only to picture
to ourselves, but ourselves physically experience
this terrible transition from human speech to a
senseless animal howl. And what an endlessly
complex, variegated sense at times a single move-
ment, a single attitude of human limbs receives at
his hands !

After the battle of Borodino, in the marquee for
the wounded, the doctor, in his blood-stained apron
with hands covered with blood " holds in one of
them a cigar between the middle and fore-finger,
so as not to mess it." This position of the fingers
implies both the uninterruptedness of his terrible
employment, and the absence of repugnance for it ;
indifference to wounds and blood, owing to long habit,
weariness, and desire to forget. The complexity
of these internal states is concentrated in one littl
physical detail, in the position of the two fingers, th
description of which fills half a line.

When prince Andrei, learning that Kutuzov is
sending Bagration's force to certain death, feels a
doubt whether the commander-in-chief has the
j" Tight to sacrifice, in this self-confident way, the lives
of thousands of men, he " looks at Kutuzov, and
what involuntarily strikes his eye at a yard's dis-
tance is the clean-washed sutures of the scar on
Kutuzov's temple, where the bullet at Ismail pene-
trated his head, and his lost eye." " Yes, he has
the right," thinks Volkonski.

More than anything which science tells Ivan
Ilyich about his illness by the mouth of the doctors,
more than all his own wonted conventional ideas

179

/•-

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

about death, does a chance look reveal the actual
horror of his state. " Ivan Ilyich began to brush
his hair and looked in the mirror : he was horrified
by the way that his hair clung closely to his long
forehead." No words would suffice to express
animal fear of death, as this state of the hair noticed
in the mirror. The indifference of the healthy to
the sick, or the living to the dying, is realized by
Ivan Ilyich, not from the words people use, but only
by " the brawny, full- veined neck, closely girt by its
white collar, and the powerful limbs habited in tight
black breeches, of Fedor Petrovich " (his daughter's
betrothed).

Between Pierre and Prince Vasili1 the relations
are very strained and delicate. Prince Vasili
wishes to give Pierre his daughter Ellen and is
waiting impatiently for Pierre to make her an offer.
The latter cannot make up his mind. One day, find-
ing himself alone with the father and daughter, he
rises and is for going away, saying it is late. ' Prince
Vasili looked at him with stern inquiry, as if the
remark was so strange that it was impossible to
believe his ears. But presently the look of stern-
ness changed. He took Pierre by the arm, put him
in a chair and smiled caressingly, ' Well, what of
Lelia ? ' he said, turning at once to his daughter
and then again to Pierre, reminding him, not at all
to the point, of a stupid anecdote of a certain Sergye
Kuzmich. Pierre smiled, but it was plain from his
smile that he knew that it was not the story of
Sergye Kuzmich that interested Prince Vasili at the
moment : and Prince Vasili was aware that Pierre

1 In Peace and War.
1 80

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

saw this. The former suddenly muttered something
and left the room. It seemed to Pierre that Prince
Vasili, too, felt confused. He looked at Ellen, and
she too seemed embarrassed, and her eye said, ' Well
you yourself are to blame.' " What complex and
many-sided significance evoked by a single smile !
It is repeated and mirrored in the minds of those
around, in a series of scarcely perceptible half-con-
scious thoughts and feelings, like a ray or a sound.

Pierre sees Natasha after a long separation, and
the death of her first betrothed, Prince Andrei.
She is so changed that he does not recognize her.

' But no, it cannot be,' he thinks. ' This stern, thin,
pale, aged face ? It cannot be she. It is only the
memory of a face.' But at that moment Princess
Maria says, ' Natasha.' And the face with the
observant eyes, with difficulty, with an effort, as
a stuck door is opened, smiled at him and from this
opened door suddenly, startlingly, came the breath,
floating round Pierre, of that long forgotten happi-
ness. It came and took hold of and swallowed him
whole. When she smiled, there could no longer be
a doubt ; it was Natasha, and he loved her." During
this scene, one of the most important and decisive
in the action of this novel, only four words are
pronounced by Princess Maria, " Then don't you
recognize her ? ' But the silent smile of Natasha
is stronger than words ; it decides the fate of Pierre.

Tolstoi depicts by gesture such intangible peculi-
arity of sensation as a bar of music, or of a song.

The drummer and choir leader looked sternly over
the soldiers of his band and frowned. Then having
convinced himself that all eyes were fixed on him,

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

he appeared carefully to raise in both hands some
unseen precious object above their heads, held it
there some seconds and suddenly threw it away
desperately. ' Ah ! alackaday, my tent, my tent !
my new tent ! ' took up twenty men's voices."

He has equally at command the primal elemental
masses and the lightest molecules scattered, like dust,
over our inward atmosphere, the very atoms of
feeling. The same hand which moves mountains
guides these atoms as well. And perhaps the
second operation is more wonderful than the first.
Putting aside all that is general, literary, conven-
tional, and artificial, Tolstoi explores in sensation
what is most private, personal, and particular ;
takes subtle shafts of feeling, and whets and sharpens
these shafts to an almost excessive sharpness, so
that they penetrate and pierce like ineradicable
needles ; the peculiarity of his sensation will become
for ever our own peculiarity. We feel Tolstoi after-
wards, when we return to real life. We may say
that the nervous susceptibility of people who have
read the books of Tolstoi becomes different from
what it was before reading them.

The secret of his effects consists, amongst other
things, in his noticing what others do not, as too
commonplace and which, when illumined by con-
sciousness, precisely in consequence of this common-
place character seems unusual. Thus he first madef
the discovery, apparently so simple and easy, but
which for thousands of years had evaded all obser-
vers, that the smile is reflected, not only on the face,
but in the sound of the voice, that the voice as well
a,s the face can be smiling. Platon Karataev at

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

night, when Pierre cannot see his face, says some-
thing to him, " in a voice changed by a smile."
The living web of art consists in such small but
striking observations and discoveries. He was the
first to notice that the sound of horse-hoofs is, as
it were, a " transparent sound."

His language, usually simple and measured, does
not suffer from an excess of epithet. When the
sensation to be described is so subtle and new that
by no combination of words can it possibly be
expressed, he uses concatenations of onomatopoeic
sounds, which serve children and primitive people
in the construction of language.

In his delirium, Prince Andrei heard a low, whisper-
ing voice, ceaselessly affirming in time " I piti piti
piti," and then " i ti ti," and again " i piti piti piti,"
and once more " i ti ti." At the same time at the
sound of this whispered music Prince Andrei felt
that over his face, over the very middle of it, moved
some strange airy edifice of fine needles or chips.
He felt, although it was hard for him, that he must
assiduously maintain his equilibrium in order that
this delicate fabric might not fall down. But still
it did fall down, and slowly rose again to the sounds
of the rhythmically whispering music. " It rises,
it rises ! It falls to pieces and yet spreads," said he
to himself. " I piti piti piti, i ti ti, i piti piti — bang,
a fly has knocked against it."

Ivan Ilyich, remembering before his death the
stewed plums " which they advise me to eat now,"
remembered also the " dry, crinkled French prunes
when I was a child." It would seem the detail was
sufficiently definite. But the artist enforces it still

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTO'lEVSKI AS ARTISTS

more. Ivan remembered the peculiar taste of
plums and " the abundance of saliva when you got
to the stones." With this sensation of saliva from
plum stones is connected in his mind a whole series
of memories, of his nurse, his brother, his toys, of
his whole childhood, and these memories in their
turn evoke in him a comparison of the then happiness
of his life with his present despair and dread of
death. " No need for that, too painful," he says to
himself. Such are the generalizations to which,
in us all, trifling details lead.

Sonia, when in love with Nicolai Rostov, kisses
him. Pushkin would have stopped at recording the
kiss. But Tolstoi, not content, looks for more
exactness. The thing took place at Christmas,
Sonia was disguised as a hussar, and moustaches
had been marked on her lips with burnt cork. And
so Nicolai remembers "the smell of cork, mixed with
the feel of the kiss."

The most intangible gradations and peculiarities
of sensation are distinguished by him to correspond
with the character, sex, age, bringing up, and status
of the person experiencing them. It seems that in
this region there are no hidden ways for him. His
sensual experience is inexhaustible, as if he had lived
hundreds of lives in various shapes of men and
animals. He fathoms the unusual sensation of
her bared body to a young girl, before going to her
first ball. So, too, the feelings of a woman growing
old and worn out with child bearing, who " shudders
as she remembers the pain of her quivering breasts,
experienced with almost every child." Also of a
nursing mother, who has not yet severed the mys-

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

terious connexion of her body with that of her
child, and who " knows for a certainty, by the
excess of milk in her, that the child is insufficiently
fed." Lastly, the sensations and thoughts of animals,
for instance the sporting dog of Levine, to whom
the face of her master seems " familiar," but his
eyes " always strange."

Not only the old Greeks and Romans, but in all
probability the people of the eighteenth century,
would not have understood the meaning of the
" transparent ' sound of horsehoofs, or how there
can be " a savour of burnt cork mixed with the
feel of a kiss," or dishes " reflect ' an expression
of the human countenance, a pleasant smile, or how
there can be " a roundness " in the savour of a man.
If our critics, the Draconian judges of the new so-
called " decadence " of Art, were consistent through-
out, should they not accuse even Tolstoi of " morbid
obliquity " ? But the truth is that to determine
the fixed units of the healthy and the morbid in
Art is much more difficult than it seems to the
guardians of the Classical canons. Is not the ' obli-
quity ' they presuppose only an intensifying, the
natural and inevitable development, refinement,
and deepening of healthy sensuality ? Perhaps
our children, with their unimpaired susceptibility,
will understand what is unintelligible to our critics
and will justify Tolstoi. Children are well aware
of what some fathers have forgotten, viz. ; that the
different branches of what are called " the five
senses ' are by no means so sharply divided from
one another, but blend, interweave, cover and
supplement one another, so that sounds may seem

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

bright and coloured (" the bright voice of the night-
ingale," Pushkin has it) and concatenations of
movements, colours, or even scents may have the
effect of music (what is called " eurhythmia," )
the harmony of movement, as of colours in painting.
It is usually thought that the physical sensations,
as opposed to mental, are a constant quantity
throughout time in the historical development of
mankind. In reality, the care of physical sensation
changes with the development of intellect. We see
and hear what our ancestors did not see or hear.
However much the admirers of classical antiquity
may complain of the physical degeneracy of the
men of to-day, it is scarcely possible to doubt that
we are creatures more keen-sighted, keen of hearing
and physically acute, than the heroes of the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Does not science, too, con-
jecture that certain sensations, for instance, the last
colours of the spectrum, have become the general
achievement of men, only at a comparatively recent
and historical stage of their existence, and that per-
haps even Homer confused green with dark blue in
one epithet, for the hue of seawater ? Does there
not still go on a similar natural growth and intensi-
fication in other branches of human sentience ?
Will not our children's children see and hear what
we as yet do not see and hear ? Will not the unseen
be seen to them, though undreamed of by our
fathers, our critics, men of worn-out sensitiveness
to impression, nay, even to the boldest and most
advanced of ourselves ? Will not our present " deca-
dent ' over-refinement, which so alarms the old
believers of the day on Art, then seem in its turn

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOl'EVSKI AS ARTISTS

obvious, primitive, Homeric healthiness and coarse-
ness ? In this unchecked development, movement
and flow, where is the fixed standard for dividing
the lawful from the unlawful, wholesome from mor-
bid, natural from corrupt ? Yesterday's exception
becomes to-day's rule. And who shall dare to say
to the living body, the living spirit, " Here shall
you stop, no further may you go " ? Why particu-
larly here ? Why not farther on ?

However this may be, the special glory of Tolstoi
lies exactly in the fact that he was the first to
express (and with what fearless sincerity !), new
branches, unexhausted and inexhaustible, — of over-
subtilizing physical and mental consciousness. We
may say that he gave us new bodily sensations,
new vessels for new wine.

The Apostle Paul divides human existence into
three branches, borrowing the division from the
philosophers of the Alexandrian School, the physical
man, the spiritual and the natural. The last is the
connecting link between the first two, something
intermediate, double, transitional, like twilight ;
neither Flesh nor Spirit, that in which the Flesh is
completed and the Spirit begins, in the language
of psycho-physiology the physico-spiritual pheno-
menon.

Tolstoi is the greatest depictor of this physico-
spiritual region in the natural man ; that side of the
flesh which approaches the spirit, and that side o
the spirit which approaches the flesh, the mys-
terious border-region where the struggle between thef
animal and the God in man takes place; Therein
lies the struggle and the tragedy of his own life.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

He is a " man of the senses," half-heathen, half-
Christian ; neither to the full.

In proportion as he recedes from this neutral
ground in either direction, it matters not whether
towards the region of the cold " pre-animal "
Nature, that region which seems inorganic, insen-
tient, inanimate, " material " (the terrible and
beatific calm of which Turgeniev and Pushkin have
told so well) ; or as he essays the opposite region ;
human spirituality, almost set free from the body,
released from animal nature, the region of pure
thought (the passionate workings of which are so
well embodied by Dostoievski and Tiutchev) the
power of artistic delineation in Tolstoi decreases, and
in the end collapses, so that there are limits which
are for him wholly unattainable. But within the
limits of the purely natural man he is the supreme
artist of the world.

In other provinces of Art, for instance the paint-
ing of the Italian Renaissance and the sculpture of
the ancient Greeks, there have been artists who
with greater completeness than Tolstoi depicted the
bodily man. The music of the present day, and in
part the literature, penetrate us more deeply. But
nowhere, and at no time, has the " natural man '
appeared with such startling truth and nakedness
as he appears in the creations of Tolstoi.

1 88

CHAPTER X

TURGENIEV wrote, with reference to Peace and War,
Tolstoi's novel is an extraordinary affair, but the
weakest thing in it is just that over which the public
is enthusiastic, the history and the psychology.
His history is a puzzle, a deceiving of the eyes with
thin details. Where is the characteristic feature
of the epoch ? Where is the historical colouring ?
The figure of Denisoii is drawn finely, but it would
be good as an arabesque on a background, only
there is no such background."

An unexpected judgment, and one that at first
sight seems unfair. The vast and endlessly varied
course of the Tolstoyan epic gives us so much by the
way that the question of a goal does not occur to
us. But in the long run it is impossible to evade
the question, In what measure is the historical
novel Peace and War true to history ? The well-
known historical personages depicted — Kutuzov,
Alexander I, Napoleon, Speranski — pass before us,
familiar historical events take place, the battles of
Austerlitz and Borodino, the burning of Moscow,
the retreat of the French. We see the whole mov-
ing, yet unmoved face of History, tossed by emotions
and for ever turning to stone, like waves suddenly
petrified. Is the living spirit of its epoch in the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

book ? The spirit of history, the spirit of the time,
that which Turgeniev calls " historical colouring,"
how difficult, how almost impossible is it to deter-
mine in what it consists ! Of course every age has
its own atmosphere, its peculiar savour, nowhere
and never repeated. In the Decameron of Boccaccio
we have the savour of the Italy of the early Renais-
sance, in Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz that of the
Lithuania of the opening of the nineteenth century ;
in Eugene Oniegin, that of Russia in the thirties.
And this colouring, the peculiar reflection of the
historical hour, is reproduced not only in the great,
but in the trifling, as the glow of the morning or
evening is reflected, not only on the hilltops, but in
every blade of grass upon the mountains. Even
the fashions of clothes, women's headgear, house-
furniture, in this sense, never recur.

The more powerful, the more vital the civilization,
the more clinging and distinctive is its historical
savour. And as we plunge into the examination
of a period, it breathes forth, takes hold of us like
the penetrating, subtle and heavy aroma from a
long-sealed casket, or like a strange low music that
goes to the heart. The Napoleonic age is felt, not
only in the majestic language of the proclamations
to the army under the Pyramids, or in the articles
of the Legislative Code, but in the pattern of em-
broidery, the white tunics of the Empress and her
smooth white curule chairs.

In reading Peace and War it is very difficult to
get rid of the astonishing impression that all the
events depicted, in spite of their names and familiar
historical guise, took place in our own day. The

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

characters described, in spite of being portraits,
are our own contemporaries. The air we breathe
in Peace and War is the same so familiar to us in
Anna Karenina and the second half of the nine-
teenth century.

Between the Masonic leanings of Pierre Bezukhov
and the democratic tendencies of Levine, between
the family life of the Rostovs and that of the Sher-
batskis, there is just as liltle difference in the his-
torical colouring. People supposed to be born and
brought up in the fifties and sixties of the eighteenth
century on Derjavine, Sumarokov, Novikov, Vol-
taire, Diderot, and Helvetius, not only speak in
Peace and War our present tongue, but think and
feel the same new thoughts and feelings as we. It
is almost impossible to conceive Prince Andrei, with
his pitilessly keen, delicate and cold sensitiveness, so
over-refined, and so morbid, so modern, as the con-
temporary of Poor Lisa, Vadim, The Thunderers, and
the Singer in the Camp of the Russian Warriors. He
seems to have read and felt Byron and Lermontov,
but also Stendhal> Merimee, and even Flaubert and
Schopenhauer. Levine, in Anna Karenina, has not
a single religious doubt which could seem strange
or unintelligible to Pierre Bezukhov. They are
not only spiritually akin, but of the same year, his-
torical inseparables. To imagine Oniegin1 with-
out a Childe Harold cloak, or otherwise than in the
fashionable clothes of a half-Russian, half-English
dandy, the contemporary of Chateaubriand and
Byron, or Tatiana, except in the dress of a country
young lady of the twenties, is as difficult as to fancy

1 Pushkin's hero:
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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Pierre Bezukhov in stockings and resetted shoes
and a coloured frock-coat with shiny buttons, or
Natasha Rostov in the dress of our great-grand-
mothers. In Tolstoi's historical novel we lose the
prismatic sense of distance between us and the
characters ; not because we are transplanted to
their age, but, on the contrary, because they are
transplanted to ours.

The author himself forgets this prism of distance.
The occasional glimpse of a powdered peruke or
breeches, or of an old-fashioned phrase, surprises the
reader like an anachronism. Of the indoor home
surroundings of a Russian magnate of the Alex-
andrian age we meet in the whole course of Peace
and War only one mention, occupying half a line.
In the Moscow palace of the elder Count Bezukhov,
there is " a plate-glass hall with two rows of statues
in niches." Contrast Homer, with his endless de-
scriptions of the chambers of King Alcinous, or
depicting the exterior and interior of a human
dwelling, the arrangement of the rooms, walls,
beds, ceilings, pillars, beams, cross-beams, and all
the details of household equipment. The work of
men's hands, to the maker of the Iliad, is as sacred
and worthy as the work of divine hands. He de-
scribes the every-day domestic surroundings of his
heroes with the same lovingness as the earth, the
sea, or the sky, and makes instinct with a life in
sympathy with man the web of Penelope, the shield
of Achilles, the raft of Odysseus, the amphoras with
sweet perfumes and the baskets of washed clothes
which Nausicaa is carrying to bleach by the river.
In the whole superstructure of man's civilization

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

over the world of elemental Nature, in all that men
have invented, not only what is artistic, but in
crafts and industries, in all that is the work of art,
but never seems to him artificial, the writers of the
Odyssey imagine something superhuman, divinely
beautiful, the work and contrivance of the cunning
worker Hephaestus, something burning with Prome-
thean fire. And Pushkin, who so understood the
charm of wild nature, at the same time rejoiced in
the beauty of the city created by Peter the Tzar,
' the most soulful of all towns " in the words of
Dostoievski ; delighted in the ironwork in the rails of
St. Petersburg gardens, the Admiralty spire, sparkling
in the moonless glimmer of white nights, and even the
fashionable luxuries of Oniegin, the tongs, combs and
files in his dressing case ; finds fault — in what sound-
ing verse — with the defects of the Odessa aqueducts
and admires the gay variegation of the Nijni Nov-
gorod fair. All that is progressive, all that is human
and tasteful is to Puskhin as important, and from
a certain standpoint as natural as the primitive
and elemental. And so Mickiewicz in Pan Tadeilsz
makes the features of the comfortable old-world life
of the Lithuanian squires blend with the features of
nature in one living organism, in one animated image
of Lithuania, his sacred country.

In face of the inexhaustible riches of Tolstoi in
other quarters, the poverty of the historical, social
and domestic colouring in his works is striking. So
called ' things," the humble and silent companions
of man's life, inanimate but easily animated, re-
flecting man's image, in Tolstoi have no place. Only
in Childhood and Youth is there a sympathetic

193 o

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

description of the domestic surroundings of a
Russian squire's family. In the end this sympathy
with the life of the class from which he sprang is
quenched in him and extinguished by his moral
judgment, and the aim of contrasting that life with
the life of the common people. Even the popular
life throughout his books, from Polikushka to The
Power of Darkness, is shown in darker and darker
colours. It is shown, not massively or epically, as
Pushkin drew it, but scattered, mutilated, and de-
formed by town civilization. Finally, the depiction
of any kind of human life becomes a mere vehicle
for abstract moralizing — for blame or justification.
His real and never-failing artistic power is con-
centrated for Tolstoi, as we have seen, in the physical
frame, in the external movements and internal
physical states and the sensations of his characters
— in their " natural man." As he gets further from
this borderland his light grows dim ; so that we
ever more faintly distinguish their garments, the
details of their domestic life, the internal economy
of their dwellings, the street life of the towns in
which they live, and lastly, least of all that mental
and moral atmosphere of ideas, that historical and
social air which is formed not only of all that is true
and eternal, but all the prejudices and conventions
and artificialities that are peculiar to each age.
Pierre Bezukhov as a Freemason is an unsuccessful
attempt in this kind, and Tolstoi never afterwards
made similar attempts. Pushkin's Tatiana listens
to the stories of her nurse and meditates over the
artless Martin Zadeka and the sentimental Mar-
montel. It is clear to us what effect Darwin and

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Moleshot had on Bazarov, the scientific hero of
Turgeniev's Fathers and Sons ; and what his attitude
would have been towards Pushkin and the Sistine
Madonna. We know well the books depicting
sexual passions which Madame Bovary read, and
exactly how they affected the birth and develop-
ment of her own passion. But we should try in vain'
to conjecture whether Anna Karenina likes Ler-
montov or Pushkin the better, Tiutchev1 or Bara-
tynski.2 Besides, she does not care for books.
Those eyes, so apt to weep and laugh, to glow with
love or hatred, care nothing for art.

The mind even of the practical man of to-day is
the outcome of numberless influences, stratifications,
aggregations of past ages and civilizations, i.e.
culture. Which of us does not live two lives, the
actual and the reflected ? The prober of the minds
of the men of to-day cannot with impunity neglect
this blending of two lives. Tolstoi does neglect it,
and in this point, I think, is therefore inartistic. He
extracts and lays bare the natural or animally human
nucleus from its outward social and historical shell.
All that man has built on to nature, all evolution,
is to him merely conventional, false, and uninterest-
ing. With a light heart he passes by, hastening
away from this atmosphere, which seems to him
infected and polluted by human breath, to the fresh
air of all that is primitive and animal.

But even here, at the last stages of elementally,

1 A Pantheistic poet (born 1803, died 1876). He was a
Slavophile, and his descriptions of Nature are excellent.

2 Baratynski lived from 1800 to 1844. A sentimental
guardsman and Byronic poet.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

of pre-human and pre-animal nature — primal and
apart from man, seemingly animated by another
and not human form of life — there are bounds
eternally inaccessible to Tolstoi. Pushkin first dis-
solved the antagonism of human consciousness and
primitive unconscious nature into a perfect though
unprofitable harmony:

And though at the grave's door
Young life will ever play,
And nature ever heedlessly
Eternal bloom display.

With Lermontov this antagonism becomes more
painful and irreconcilable :

The skies wear majesty —

The earth in the blue radiance sleeps.

Why thus distressed, thus lorn am I ?

Amid the viewless field of space
The ever-fleeing clouds,
The filing herds, the transient crowds
Pass over sky and leave no trace.-

In evil fortune's weary day
Do thou of them alone take heed,
The earthly to its earthly need
Leave, and be careless even as they.

As if he no longer hoped for complete unification
with Nature, he says not " be with them," but " be
as they"

In Tiutchev this contradiction becomes still more
acute. There is unbearable discord :

Whence cometh this discord ?
And why in the universal choir
Sings not the heart as sings the sea,
Or murmurs as the brooding reed ?

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Or, lastly, take Turgeniev. The very essence of
his attitude to Nature lies in this sense of discord
between the murmurs of the " thinking reed ' ' and
the meaningless clearness of Nature.

But Tolstoi's attitude towards Nature is twofold.
To his consciousness, which would fain be Christian, i
Nature is something dark, evil, even fiendish. " It
is that which the Christian should overcome in him-
self and transfigure into the kingdom of God." On
the other hand, to Tolstoi's unreasoning pagan sid^
man is made one with Nature, and disappears in heir
like a drop in the ocean. Olenine, steeped in th£
lore of Uncle Yeroshka, feels himself in the woods
an insect among insects, a leaf among leaves, an
animal among animals. He would have said, like
Lermontov, " Be as they," because he is already of
them. In Tolstoi's Three Deaths the dying young
lady, in spite of her external conventional veneer of
culture, is so little given to thinking that it clearly
does not enter the writer's head to compare " the
murmur of the brooding reed " with the unre-
piningness of the dying tree.

Thus both in the Christian and the pagan Tolstoi j
we find no sense of opposition between Man and|
Nature. In the first case Nature disappears in i
Man ; in the second Man is swallowed up in Nature. \

Pushkin hears in the stillness of the night the
mutter of the old wife, Destiny.

Tiutchev knows " a certain hour of universal
silence ' when gloom thickens —

As Chaos on the waters
Forgetfulness like Atlas weights the land.
Only the Muse's ever virgin soul
By Gods in dreams is haunted and fore-awed.

IQ7

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS
And in the breathless July nights he hears —

Only the flashing lightnings,

Like deaf and dumb daemonic souls,

Talk to each other.

In Turgeniev, too, the icy summits of the Fin-
steraarhorn and the Jungfrau in the deserted pale
green sky, like the demons, hold converse on man-
kind, that pitiful human mildew on the surface of
the globe.

Such visions of Nature have never disturbed the
muse of Tolstoi. He has never heard in the stillness
of the night " the mutter of the old wife, Destiny."

Does he love Nature ? It may be his feeling for
her is stronger and deeper than what people call
" love of Nature." If he does love her, then it is
not as an elemental being apart from and stranger
to man, yet akin to man and full of divine and
daemonic forces. Rather as an elemental comple-
ment of his own nature as " natural man." He loves
himself in her, and her in himself, with enthusiasm,
awe, or intoxication, with that great sober fondness
with which the ancients loved her, and with which
none of the men of to-day has yet learnt to love her.
The strength and weakness of Tolstoi lies precisely
in this — that he never can clearly distinguish the
civilized from the elemental, or Man from Nature.

The gloom and mystery of the other world he,
too, finds in Nature ; but this gloom, this mystery,
are full only of repellent terror. Sometimes he, too,
finds the veil of phenomena lifted.

But behind this lifted veil Tolstoi sees not " the
living chariot of the Universe, rolling in sight to

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Heaven's sanctuary," nor " the flight of angels,"
but a mere bottomless black void — the " bog " into
which Ivan Ilyich, with his long inhuman cry, " I
don't want to — o — o — o ! " is slowly drawn. Even in
the voice of the night wood Tolstoi only hears that
dreary rustle of dry mugwort, in the snow-wrapped
wilderness, which so frightens the dying master in
Master and Man. But while the veil of day is down
he clearly and dreamlessly sees Nature as she is,
nor does her golden tent ever grow for him trans-
parent, translucent, or luminous.

Either total darkness or perfect light, either sleep
or waking. For him there is no twilight hour,
blending sleep with waking ; no morning or evening
mist full of " prophetic dreams " ; no spectral twi-
light, starry and glimmering, like the Pythian
murmur of Pushkin's Fate — nothing fabulous,
magical, or miraculous.

We shall see later that on only one occasion ii
his whole vast creation did he verge on these limits
that seem unattainable to him, where the super-f
natural marches with the natural and is seen, not]
within, but behind and through the natural. Then
he, as it were, overcame himself, went beyond him-
self. This is precisely that excessiveness, that final
miracle of victory over his own nature, which marks
the highest genius. However, when he verged on
these boundaries he did not overstep them, but
drew back.

199

CHAPTER XI

WITH regard to the earlier parts of Peace and We
Flaubert writes to Turgeniev : " Thanks for ei
abling me to read Tolstoi's novel. It is a work of
the highest order. What a painter ! and what a
psychologist ! The first two volumes are excellent,
but the third falls off terribly (degringole affreuse-
ment). He repeats himself and philosophises ; till
at last you see the gentleman himself (le monsieur),
the author, and the Russian; whereas up till then
you had seen only Nature and Mankind."

The criticism is somewhat hasty and superficial.
Flaubert is apparently still diffident, overcome with
astonishment at this literary Leviathan from semi-
barbarous unknown Russia. " I cried out with
enthusiasm while I was reading," he owns, ' but
it is long ! Yet it is powerful, very powerful ! '

It is true that there are startling inequalities in
Peace and War. There are two reservoirs of lan-
v guage, two tongues.

Where he depicts reality, especially the primitive
k " natural ' man, his language is distinguished by
unequalled simplicity, strength, and accuracy. And
if he seems at times to write with too much insistence
and emphasis, in comparison with the winged ease
of Pushkin's prose, it is the ponderousness and

200

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

insistence of the Titan, who piles blocks upon blocks.
Side by side with these Cyclopean masses how as-
tonishing seem the acute, diamond-like particles
and subtleties of his sensual observation !

But directly he enters on abstract psychology,
not of the " natural ' but the " spiritual " man —
' philosophisings ' in Flaubert's phrase, " lucubra-
tions ' to use his own words — as soon as we get to
the moral transformations of Bezukhov, Nekhliudov,
Pozdnyshev, or Levine, something strange happens,
il degringole affreusement, he goes off terribly : his
language seems to dry up, wither, and become
helpless, to cling convulsively to the object de-
picted, and yet to let it escape, like a man half para-
lyzed.

Out of a multitude of instances I will only quote
a few at random. " What crime can there be," says
Pierre, ' ' in my having wished — to do good ? Even
though I did it badly, or only feebly, yet I did some-
thing for that end, and you will not only not persuade
me of this, that that which I did was not good, but
not even that you did not think so."

Touching the attitude towards Natasha's illness
of her father, Count Rostov, and her sister, Sonia,
he says : ' How would the Count have borne the
illness of his beloved daughter if he had not known
that if she did not get better he would not grudge
thousands more to take her abroad ? What would
Sonia have done if she had not had the pleasant
consciousness of this that she had not undressed for
three nights, in order to be ready precisely to carry
out all the directions of the doctor, and that she now
did not get a night's sleep, in order not to let the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

time pass at which the pills ought to be given. And
she was also pleased at this that she, by neglecting
to carry out the instructions, could show that she
did not believe in doctors."

Of the hypocritical solicitude of the sick Ivan
Ilyich's wife we learn that " she had done everything
for him only for her own sake ; and she told him
that she did what she had done simply for her own
sake, as if it were such an improbable thing that he
was bound to take it the other way about." What
a strain of imagination is necessary in order to un-
ravel this grammatical tangle in which the simple
thought is involved !

Numerous instances of this mumbling of repeti-
tions, and even violation of simple grammatical
rules, might be given, but these are only found when
Tolstoi is writing outside his limits.

Even the sensitiveness, usually so acute and ready
in him, to the euphonious construction of language
— what Nietzsche calls " the conscience of the ears '
— deserts him in these cases.

It is as if his language, like a half-tamed savage
animal longing for the woods, suddenly rebels. The
artist struggles with it, vehemently trying to stretch
it on the Procrustes' bed of Christian " medita-
tions." There is no spectacle more pitiable and
instructive. Sometimes he seems proud of careless-
ness in style, with that special pride peculiar to
ascetics in the breach of outward decencies. He
seems to say despotically : " So my style is not
dainty enough ? As if I cared for style ! I speak
what I think. My thoughts are their own recom-
mendation." But owing to an excessive aiming

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at simplicity he sometimes falls into simplesse, and
artificiality.

Turgeniev found the psychology in Peace and War
weak. " What a psychologist ! ' cries Flaubert
enthusiastically, in speaking of the same. These
two judgments, however contradictory they may
seem, may be reconciled.

The nearer Tolstoi is to the body, or that which
connects body and soul — the animally primitive
' natural ' man — the more faithful and profound
is his psychology, or more exactly his psycho-physi-
ology.

But in proportion as, leaving this soil that is
always firm and fruitful under him, he transfers
his operations into the province of independent
spirituality, unconnected with the body and bodily
action, leaving the passions of the heart for the
passions of the mind (for the mind has its passions,
not less complex and strong, and Dostoievski is
their great delineator), the psychology of Tolstoi
becomes doubtful.

It is impossible not to believe that the minute
when Nicolai Rostov saw in the ravine dogs strug-
gling with the hunted wolf, one of which had the
quarry by the throat, was " the happiest moment
in his life." But Christian sentiments, especially
such Christian ideas as those of Irteniev,1 Olenine,
Bezukhov,1 Levine,1 and Nekhliudov,2 excite a
number of doubts. All these pictures of religious
or moral revulsions — written, as it were, by a
different man in another style — stand out on the

Characters in Peace and War and Anna Karenina.
2 In the novel Resurrection

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOfEVSKI AS ARTISTS

ground-fabric of the work sharply and strangely,
interrupting the clear current of the epic by ab-
stract philosophisings in huge, spreading, misty
patches. They do not spring or grow out of the
living action, or add to it.

In these very passages the " psychology ' of
Tolstoi recalls the old Eastern fable of the youth
who, wishing to learn what was inside an onion,
began to take off layer after layer, skin after skin,
but, when he had peeled off the last, nothing, or next
to nothing, was left of the onion. Tolstoi, in his
search for eternal truth, takes off layer after layer,
convention after convention, illusion after illusion,
stripping off the original and vital with the arti-
ficial ; on his undoubtedly existing " onion ' next
to nothing finally remains.

We see Irteniev, the hero of Childhood and Youth, to
the end. He is distinct, unforgettable, and humanly
lear to us ; we see also, though less distinctly, Pierre
Bezukhov, the vigorous Russian gentleman farmer,
with his good-natured open face, his short-sighted,
observant and thoughtful, but not clever eyes.
Pierre, if he has not a vivid personality, yet has at
least a vivid face, and is alive. With still less dis-
tinctness do we see Levine, the ungainly philoso-
pher, though we are not quite convinced that he exists
on his own account. With more and more frequency
there looks out of him Tolstoi himself — le monsieur
et Vauteur. But Pozdnyshev in the Kreuzer Sonata
and Nekhliudov in Resurrection we certainly no
longer discern at all. Pozdnyshev is a mere " plain-
tive voice and a pair of eyes, glowing with feverish
half-crazy fire." In these eyes and the voice was

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centred all the life of his mind, soul, and body.
But we do not even hear the voice of Nekhliudov,
the hero of Resurrection. We get a crystallized life-
less abstraction, a moral and religious vehicle for
a moral and religious deduction. Here is one who
will never revolt against his Creator, or say or do
anything unexpected.

He is a dreary megaphone, through which the
"gentleman author" behind proclaims his theorems
to the moral universe.

Tolstoi, a great creator of human bodies, is only
to aT modified extent a creator of human souls. He
touches only the primitive roots of life. Is he the
creator of what are called " characters " ? Doubt-
less they are outlined by him, put together and
moulded, but are they finished, perfected ? do they /
become separate, individualised, unique and entire,
living organisms ?

The delineations of human individualities in
Tolstoi recall half-rounded human bodies in bas-
relief, which seem at times to be just going to issue
and detach themselves from the flatness in which
they are cast, but which never do detach themselves.
We never see the other side of them.

In the figure of Platon Karataev the painter has,
as it were, achieved the impossible, and succeeded
in denning a living personality by the absence of
all defined features and acute angles ; in a special
" roundness " the effect of which is startlingly
evident, even geometrical, and proceeding not so
much from the inward and spiritual as from the
outward bodily presence. He is a molecule, the
first and the last, the smallest and the greatest, the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

beginning and the end. He does not exist of him-
self : he is only a part of the whole, a drop in the
ocean of the life of the nation. And this life he
reproduces in his very impersonality, just as a drop
of water in its roundness reproduces the world. Be
that as it may, a miracle of art or a clever optical
illusion almost takes place. Karataev, in spite of
his want of personality, seems individual, apart,
unique. Yet we should like to know the other side
of hifh. He is good ; but, maybe, just once in his
life tyrannised over some one. He speaks in pro-
verbs, but perhaps just once he added to these
apothegms a word of his own. One word, one un-
expected trait, and we might have believed him
flesh and blood.

But, just at the moment of our most eager ex-
pectation, he dies, as if to baffle us ; vanishes, is
transformed like a bubble of water in the ocean.
And when he becomes definite in death we are ready
to admit that it would have been impossible for
him to be definite in life. He has not lived, but has
been " perfectly rounded," and by this alone ful-
filled his destiny, so that it only remained for him
to die. And in our memories, as in that of Pierre
Bezukhov, he is for ever imprinted, not as a
living person, but only as a living " personification
of all that is national, good, and perfected." He
is a moral generalisation.

The individuality of Prince Andrei from the
first we see or conjecture. He becomes to us
ever more intelligible in his living contradictions,
combinations of cold reason with fiery dreaminess,
contempt for men with unquenchable thirst for

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

fame ; " love for men," and outward aristocratic
harshness ; secret tenderness, and a sort of childishly
defenceless impressionability of heart.

But here again, at the very moment when it seems
only a few more strokes of the chisel are needed and
his humanity would be complete, Prince Andrei pro-
ceeds to die. Unlike Karataev, he dies slowly and
painfully. Death needs a good deal of time to
smooth down his marked traits, prominent angles,
and excrescences into the perfect " smoothness "
of the original molecule, the bubble of water ready
to mingle with the ocean. So Death tosses and
rounds him slowly, as the sea rounds an angular
stone.

At the time when the process of dying is incom-
plete, when he is delirious and in great pain, in
despair, although with lucid intervals, from his
living face stands out a new, strange, and terrible
one. And this second face so pushes aside and
swallows up the first — the past life of the man, all
his living thoughts, feelings, and actions come to
appear so trivial — that in our memories there is
fixed for ever not the life, but the death of Prince
Andrei ; not the living individual, but that in-
comprehended, inhuman, unearthly second face
of his.

Then take Natasha Rostov, who seems wholly
alive, native, national, akin to ourselves, yet indi-
vidual and unique. How tenderly and firmly is
tied the knot of her human personality ! Of what
evasive, fine, and various gradations of spiritual and
physical life is woven this " chastest model of the
purest charm!' Like Pushkin's Tatiana, she em-

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

bodies the Muse of the poet, and reflects his own view
of the " eternal feminine."

And yet, just at the time when the figure of
Natasha, ripening, attains its highest charm, the
artist introduces one fleeting, but strikingly subtle
and unforgettable trait. The thing happens in the
fields during coursing : the dogs have just run down
a hare, and one of the sportsmen gives the hare
the coup de grace and shakes it about so that the
blood may run out. All are excited, flushed, pant-
ing ; in unusual exultation they boast of and
recount the circumstances of the coursing. Just
then Natasha, without drawing breath, in her
delight and enthusiasm, gave so piercing a yell that
their ears tingled. In this yell she gave expression
to what the other sportsmen gave vent to by all
talking at once. And this yell was so strange and
so wild that she herself would have been ashamed
of it, and all the others astonished, if it had hap-
pened at any other time.

In this wild sportsman's yell of the primordial
instinct to slay, in this woodcraft of the satyr, the
charming features of Natasha, stamped with primal
passion, are almost unrecognizably disfigured. It
is her :c second face," and recurs for ever.

Is not something similar to this wild yell heard
by Pierre Bezukhov ? The same sound is heard in
the inhuman howl and roar of Kitty when in child-
birth. It is in the epilogue to Peace and War, when
Natasha becomes a spouse and a mother, " bears,
brings forth, and nurses," that her figure at the
end of the vast epic arrives at final perfection. But
it does so in unexpected fashion.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

After seven years of marriage Natasha " had
grown stout and broad, so that it was difficult to
recognize in the stalwart mother the slender, active
Natasha of old." " She had run wild to such a
degree that her costumes, her way of doing her hair,
her inept remarks, her jealousy — she was jealous of
Sonia, of the governess, and of every woman, good-
looking or ugly — were the staple jokes of those about
her." Now " she troubled herself no longer, either
about her manners, or the delicacy of her speeches,
or about showing herself to her husband in be-
coming attitudes, or about her toilet. Nor did she
try to avoid annoying her husband by her exacting-
ness. She violated all these rules."

To untidiness and neglect she added stinginess."
There was no intellectual bond between her and
her husband. Of his scientific occupations " she
understood nothing." " She has no words of her
own," says Nicolai Rostov in astonishment, though
he himself does not excel in intelligence or abundance
of speech. Everything human, except concern for
her husband and children, is lost to her. She, as it
were, has grown wild in family life ; avoids people,
and takes delight " only in the society of her own
children, in which, slipshod and in a dressing-gown,
she could stride from the nursery with a face of
delight to inspect swaddling clothes with a yellow
instead of a green stain on them, and hear com-
forting reports that ' now the child was much
better.' She frequently seems to have lost her
soul in her body, and become a mere prolific she-
animal.

Has then the artist abandoned the importance

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

he formerly attached to Natasha ? Has the figure
shrunk and grown dim ? Is there something un-
foreseen which did not enter into his first conception,
a contrast between Natasha the girl, full of innate
grace and mysterious charms — the sister of Pushkin's
Tatiana, the pure and prophetic Muse of Tolstoi-
and this merely conceiving child-bearing animal-
mother in whom " you can see face and body, but
soul not at all ? '

Between these two figures, in the eyes of their
creator, there is not only no discrepancy, but actually
an inevitable bond of organic consistency and
development. It was just to this, the trans-
formation of her into a female, the change of all
that was characteristic, yet conventional and
limited, into the elementally impersonal, uncon-
ventional and universal, that he was leading her
throughout his vast epic. So Nature leads the bud
to the fruit ; and it was only for that that he loved
her. Her figure has neither shrunk nor grown dim,
but on the contrary has only now attained its
greatness — the greatness of motherly nature. That
" ceaselessly burning fire of animation ' which
formed the charm of Natasha the girl has not died
out in Natasha the mother, but sunk deeper, re-
maining divine ; not divinely spiritual, only di-
vinely fleshly. It is a state, not lower than the first,
but merely the first contemplated from another side.
The mystic music and aroma were merely a chrysalis,
a brilliant spring garb, which Nature gave her, as
she gives to flowers perfume, to the birds voice and
plumage, and to fish their magically kaleidoscopic
colouring, for the time of their sexual existence.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

But this passing charm is at the same time lasting ;
for here, in the dawn, in the perfection of sex, in
Love, in the winged and all-winging Eros-desire, is
most deeply and brightly disclosed the divine
meaning of all creation ; the prophetic union of every
breathing creature with the spirit of the life of the
world. The original figure of Natasha is not lost,
but only transformed and swallowed up in the
second. " She felt," Tolstoi tells us, " that those
charms which instinct had taught her to use before
would not only be ridiculous in the eyes of her
husband, to whom from the first moment she had
given herself wholly, with her whole soul, not
leaving a single nook hidden from him ; she felt
that the bond between her and her husband was
maintained, not by those poetic sentiments which
had attracted him to her, but by something different,
undefined but strong, like the link between her own
soul and body"

Here you see Tolstoi, as everywhere and at all
times, reduces everything to this " link between the
soul and body," the connexion of flesh and spirit,
the ' natural man," and that golden chain of Eros

" --^ - - * - **iM^ft<^kte^E^^^^^^^c=4^viB«-rw9viK*=i.ixri0

as Desire, which the gods, in Homer's phrase, have
let down from heaven to earth to link together earth
and heaven and one sex with the other. J

The spring pairing-season is over : lives already
fructified, assuaged, are silently collecting their
forces for parturition and alimentation. All the
time Natasha's power over her husband, formerly
given her, did not diminish, but increased. " Na-
tasha, in her own house," Tolstoi tells us, " though
she put herself on the footing of the slave of her

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

husband, and directly it is a question of judgment,
has no words of her own, uses his words." " Yet
the general opinion was," adds Tolstoi on his own
account, " that Pierre was under the thumb of his
wife ; and it really was so."

Pierre may philosophise, aim at Christian ' re-
vival," dream of the good of his fellows and of the
good of the people as much as he likes. But if
matters had gone as far as putting the dream into
execution, or come near a real distribution of the
property, Natasha would have sooner " put him
under guardianship ' than agreed to anything of
the kind. Then " the slave of her husband," the
mate defending her young, would have shown her
lord her talons, and doubtless subdued him, because
behind her was — all Nature.

Matters, however, never come to such a pass.
Natasha is easy ; Pierre will always merely dream,
merely " theorize," and his life passes unruffled
away. He is more moderate and reasonable than
he seems. Let him philosophise — you must do
anything to soothe a child, thinks the prudent
Natasha. Or again :

" The soul of Countess Maria always aimed at
the endless, the lasting, and the perfect, and there-
fore she never could be quiet." She had " a secret
lofty suffering of the soul, overweighted by the
body." She remarks, however, with naive cyni-
cism, with regard to the Christian dreams of Pierre
as to giving away his property : " He forgets that
we have other and nearer obligations, which God
Himself has shown us, that we may run risks our-
selves, but not for our children"

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

All the heroes of Tolstoi either die or come to
this — there is no other issue.

Pierre and Levine, philosophising rationalism and
the Christian conscience, are under the thumb
of their wives. Kitty and Natasha to all their
' philosophisings ' retort with a silent and irre-
futable argument, the bringing into the world of
a fresh child. " And this good thing will always be,
must always be," the great seer of the body seems to
say in these characters, against his own will and
reason.

Natasha has " no words of her own." But, like
the statue crowning the very pinnacle of some huge
elaborate building, the figure of Natasha, the mother,
silently and majestically reigns over the whole vast
tale of Peace and War. So that the effect of world-
wide tragedies, wars, the upheaval of nations, the
grandeur and the downfall of heroes, seem only the
pediment to this mother and mate. Austerlitz,
Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon,
Alexander the Blessed, may be or may not be
-all passes by, all is forgotten, is wiped off the
tables of universal history by the next wave-
like letters written on the sand. But never will
mothers cease to delight in their babies. On the
very summit of this work, one of the greatest
edifices ever raised by men, Natasha triumphantly
waves- ' swaddling clothes, with a yellow stain
instead of a green," as the guiding banner of man-
kind.

213

V

CHAPTER XII

THE swallowing up of the human individual in
the universal and non-human is one of the prevalent
'burdens' of the Tolstoy an method.

As Nature swallows up Uncle Yeroshka (" I die
and — the grass grows ") Death swallows Plat on
Karataev and the Prince Andrei, childbearing ab-
sorbs Natasha, so the element of unfruitful extra-
conjugal, destroying Love — which from Tolstoi's
standpoint is the wicked and sinful " death-bearing
Eros " — swallows up Anna Karenina. From her
first sight, almost her first silent glance, atVronski,
to her last sight of him, Anna loves, and only loves.
We scarcely know what she has felt and thought, how
she has lived; it would seem that she had really
no existence until Love came : it is impossible to
imagine her as not loving. She is all love, as if her
whole being, soul and body, were compact of love,;
as the Salamander is of fire, or Undine of water.?
Between her and Vronski, as between Natasha and;
Pierre, Kitty and Levine, there is no express and,,
generally speaking, no spiritual bond. There is only
the dark and strong physico-spiritual bond, " the?
bond of the soul on its bodily side." She never
talks to him about anything but Love. Even her
love speeches are poor.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

" ' I danced more at Moscow at that one ball of
yours than all the winter through at St. Petersburg.
I must have a rest before travelling.'

" ' And you are certainly going to-morrow ?
asked Vronski.

"'Yes, I think so,' replied Anna, as if astonished
at the daring of his question. But the unrestrained
quivering flash of her eyes and smile inflamed him
as she said this."

In this society small talk the words express
nothing, but the eyes and smile complete what is
left unsaid. It is the deciding moment of their
passion.

When Vronski confesses his love for Anna the
words again are poor. " Do you not know that you
are all my life to me ? You and I to me are one.
And I do not foresee the possibility of peace either
for myself or for you. I see the possibility of
despair, of misery; or I see the chance of hap-
piness, such happiness ! Is it really impossible ? '
he ended, only shaping the words, yet she heard
him.

' She strained all the powers of her mind to say
what she ought, but instead of that she fixed on
him her glance, full of love, and made no other
reply."

If we compare the awkward, commonplace,
wretched babble of Vronski with the " triumphant
hymns of Love ' ' of the Sakuntala, of Solomon and
the Sulamite, or Romeo and Juliet, how poor it
seems ! But this voiceless gesture and language
of Love is much more effective than any words.

Moreover in Tolstoi the artistic centre of gravity,

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

the force of delineation lies, not in the dramatic,
but in the descriptive part, not in the dialogues
Ipetween the characters or in what they say, but in
rhat is said of them. Their speeches are hurried
'or senseless, but their silence is unfathomable and
pregnant. " She was one of those animals," says
Tolstoi of Frou-frou, Vronski's horse, " who seem
not to speak, only because the mechanical con-
struction of their mouths does not admit of it." We
may say of some of his characters — of Vronski and
Nicolai Rostov, for instance — that they only do
speak because the mechanical conformation of their
mouths admits of it.

Anna too " has not words of her own," like
Natasha, who uses those of her husband, and Platon
Karataev, who uses those of the people, apothegms
and proverbs. How many unforgettable, personal
feelings and sensations of Anna's are preserved in
our memory, but not a single thought, not a single
particular or personal expression, even with regard
to Love. Yet she never seems stupid ; on the con-
trary, we gather that she is mentally more complex
and significant than Dolly, Kitty, or Vronski, and
perhaps (who knows ?) even more so than Levine,
who talks so much. But her position in the working
out of the story, her complete absorption in the
element of passion, are such that they draw her
away from us on the side of intelligence, will, and
the highest, most selfless, and passionate life of
the spirit. Who or what is she, apart from Love ?
We only know that she is a St. Petersburg woman
in high society. But, apart from her rank, where
do the roots of her being find their way into the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

soil of Russia ? For that being is deep and primi-
tive enough to have such roots. What does she
think about in general, about children, people, Duty, \ Q
Nature, Art, Life, Death, and God ? On this we j .
know nothing, or almost nothing. But, on the
other hand, we know exactly how her curls wave
and flutter on her neck and temples, how her slender
fingers taper at the end, and what a round, firm,
polished neck she has ; every expression of her face,
every movement of her body we know. Her body,
where it touches the primitive animal point, soul —
her nightly soul — we see with startling distinctness.
With not less distinctness we also see the primitive
and elemental personality and character of Vron-
ski's horse Frou-frou, and the horse is one of the
characters of the tragedy. If it is true that Vronski
is like a horse in an aide-de-camp's uniform, then
his mare is like a charming woman. And it is not
for nothing that Tolstoi emphasizes the marked
similarity, full of mysterious foreshado wings, of the
' eternally feminine ' in the charm of Frou-frou
as of Anna Karenina.

Frou-frou ' was not perfect according to the
canons," but it is just these irregular " personal "
characteristics that attach Vronski to her. When
he first looks at Anna he is struck by the " race,"
the ' blood ' in her appearance. Frou-frou too
' had in the highest degree this ' blood,' this ' race '
-a quality which made you forget all defects," this
aristocracy of the body. They have both, the mare
and the woman, the same definite expression of
bodily presence, which combines strength and
tenderness, delicacy and energy. The bones of

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Frou-frou " below the knee, looked at in front, were
no thicker than your finger, but sideways seemed
to be very broad. They both have the same active
lightness, sureness, as it were wingedness of move-
ment, the same over-stormy and passionate excess
of vitality?1 Between Frou-frou and her master
there was a strange " spiritual ' bond. She knows
and loves him for his affection, desires and yet fears
it. * Directly Vronski came in she drew a deep
breath, and rolling her prominent eye so that the
white showed the blood, from the opposite side
gazed at the newcomers, shaking her headstall and
nimbly changing her feet.

' Oh, you beauty, oh ! ' cried Vronski, going up
to the mare and coaxing her.

" But the nearer he went the more excited she
got. Only when he went to her head she suddenly
became quiet and the muscles quivered under the
fine delicate skin. Vronski gazed at her strong neck,
set right on the sharp bit the bar which had shifted,
and put his face to her nostrils, soft as a bat's wing.
She noisily drew in and let out again the air, with
dilated nostrils, quivering, then pricked a sharp
ear and put out her powerful black muzzle towards
Vronski, as if meaning to take him by the sleeve.
But remembering the headstall, she shook it and
began again to change her polished feet."
^ Vronski loves the mare almost as a woman.

" Quiet, my pet, quiet ! " said he, again stroking
her. The excitement of the mare communicated
itself to him, and he felt the blood rush to his heart.
Like the mare he wanted to be in motion, to have
his fling — he felt both ill at ease and lively.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

Frou-frou too loves the dreadful mastery of her
lord, and, like Anna, is submissive, even to death.
And on both of them is wrought the cruelty of love,
the boyish sport of death-bearing Eros. At the
races, when Vronski had distanced every one and
is nearing the winning-post, Frou-frou, gathering
her last strength together, flies beneath him like a
bird. ' Oh, my beauty ! " he thinks, with infinite
affection and tenderness. She anticipates every
movement, every thought, every feeling of her rider.
In the exultation of almost supernatural speed, in
the glorious intoxication of their flight, man and
animal are as one body. And then one false ir-
remediable movement : not keeping time with the
motion of the horse, he jerked back in the saddle, /
and suddenly lost his balance." He felt that some-
thing dreadful had happened. He came to the
ground with one foot, and the mare rolled on it.
Scarcely had he succeeded in freeing the foot when
she fell on one side, breathing heavily and making
fruitless efforts to raise her slender perspiring neck,
rolled over on the ground at his feet, like a bird shot
on the wing. The awkward movement that Vronski
had made had broken her back. But this he only
realized much later. For the present he stood
trembling in deep sticky mud ; and before him,
panting heavily, lay Frou-frou. Bending her head
towards him, her beautiful eyes looked at him.
Still not realizing what had happened, Vronski
dragged at her by the rein. She again struggled
like a fish, shaking the flaps of the saddle, and got
free her fore feet ; but, unable to raise her quarters,
at once sank down again and fell on her side. With

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

a face distorted by passion — pale, and his lower jaw
quivering — Vronski struck her with his heel in the
side, and again began to tug at the rein. She did
not stir, but, burying her nose in the ground, simply
stared at her master with speaking eyes.

" ' Ah, ah ! ' groaned Vronski, clapping his hands
to his head ; ' Oh, oh ! what have I done, what have
I done ? ' he cried. * And the race is lost too ! And
it is my fault, my shameful, unpardonable fault ! '

" For the first time in his life he experienced
misery — misery incurable, and of his own making."

And who knows, did not Fate send him a warning
in the death of Frou-frou ? Was he not to destroy .
Anna in just the same way ? Here, as there, it was .
" one wrong movement " — false and irremediable.
He is driven on by that love which, full of hate — the
thirst of physical possession akin to murder — finds
expression in the most passionate endearments of
lovers.

When he looked at the living Anna Vronski " felt
what a murderer must feel when he sees the body
of his victim. Repulsive to him was the remem-
brance of that for which all this terrible price of
shame had been paid. Shame of spirit overcame
her and was imparted to him. But in spite of all
the horror of the murderer in face of the corpse of
his victim, he must take advantage of what he has
gained by the murder. And so with fury he rushed
at this body ; covers it and her shoulders with
kisses."

After Anna's suicide (she threw herself, you re-
member, before a railway train) Vronski sees this
same body " on the barrack table, shamelessly

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^xhibited before strangers, blood-stained, yet full
of the life that had scarcely left it — the head, which
/was intact, bent backward with its heavy plaits;
the hair waving at the temples ; and on the charm-
ing face, with the half-open rosy mouth, a frozen,
strange, pitiful aspect of the lips, and a terrible look
in the glazed, unclosed eyes, as if uttering anew
the harrowing words of parting, ' that he would
repent of it,' which she had used to him at the time
of their quarrel."

Again a misery incurable. Again the blame lay

with himself. Again the eternal wrong of the strong

V towards the weak, the crime of Eros the passionate

\ against Another, who said : " Be ye all one, as Thou,

my Father, art in me and I in Thee, so that they

may be one in us."

Thus, after probing the human till he reaches th*
animal, and the animal, Frou-frou, till he reaches th£
human, Tolstoi finds in the inmost recesses of bot]
a ' symbolical," a uniting first principle. But be
fore he digs his way to these depths through what
stormy abysses of pain he has to pass ! From
Anna Karenina, full of involuntary and innocent
excess of life, to this "blood-stained body,
shameless on the barrack table," how fearful the
journey !

With Tolstoi the utter denudation of man, the
bringing of the likeness of God to the image of the
beast — in sensuality, in illness, in childbirth, in
death — sometimes verges on deliberate cruelty. He
sometimes, like Dante's merry demons, strips despair
till it becomes cynical and ridiculous.

Take the swart face of the grunting Tartar, whose

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back is being probed by the surgeons after the battle
of Borodino. That snub-nosed, dark face, with its
gnashing teeth — is it not a vision of " Hell," of
; The Last Judgment"? Or take poor Anatole,
the pampered darling, and Adonis, sobbing a con-
vulsive farewell to his own white leg — still in its
boot, but amputated.

Take the sprawling, dead, ox-like attitude of the
body of the merchant Brekhunov — frozen to death,
in Master and Man, to save his servant's life ; "to
rise again," thinks Tolstoi perhaps, " at the last
trump," but meanwhile to lie monstrously kicking
and ridiculous. Might not the heroic face of death,
as with the Greeks, have been decently covered ?
Might not the insult to the sanctuary of the human
body have been spared ?

Or take the account of the illness of Ivan Ilyich.
Here the artist purposely dwells on the unconquer-
able human habit of deceiving oneself, of shutting one's
eyes to the ultimate animalism of one's own body,
which is perhaps a trifling, but how ineradicable and
touching, symptom of our super-animal spirituality.

With what pitiless insistence the artist dwells on
the contrast between the young, healthy, fresh,
wholesome, active, powerful, good, simple peasant
Gerasim, and the unclean, evil-smelling gentleman
Ivan, decayed to the loss of all human dignity, and
put to shame by his illness !

The ingenuity and subtlety of the devices — " burn-
ings, as of fire, with appetence," " rearings," and
" throbbings " of complaints, prickings, repentances,
and terrors — through which Tolstoi with a Christian
motive takes Ivan Ilyich, his hero or victim, recall

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the inquiries of the Most Holy Inquisition or the
secret Commission, presided over by one of Tolstoi's
ancestors, one of the instruments of the Tsar Peter,
head of the Secret Chancery — the famous Count
Peter Tolstoi.

Tolstoi has in his 'books no heroes, no characters, "
no personalities, but merely contemplative victims,
who do not struggle or resist. They are swallowed
by the elements.

Therefore there is no tragedy. Everywhere
isolated tragic nodi are tied ; but, not being untied
by human intervention, these pass once more into
the impersonal, the inarticulate, the involuntary,
and the non-human. There is no catastrophe. In
the ocean of that shoreless Epos everything fluctuates
wavelike — is born, lives, and dies, and is born again,
without end and without beginning.

There is no redeeming horror, and there is no re-
deeming laughter. The air is stifling, low, heavy;
there seems nothing to breathe.

The principal victims, or " characters " of Tolstoi,
are all clever people, and honourable and good, or
good-hearted, simple, or nai've ; and yet we never
feel completely at home with them, for they have
something disturbing, painful, about them. At
times it seems as if they all, even the most innocent
girls, ' the chastest models of the chastest charm,"
had that satyr-like animal savour which character-
izes the old savage, Uncle Yeroshka. Whether this
is their own doing, or that of the artist that created
them, you can never be sure but that from out a
familiar human face will look something different,
alien, and primally animal, that, to repeat Voltaire's

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jest on the " social contract ' of Rousseau, his
most charming girls " will not get on all fours — run
off into the woods, and begin to grunt like the
Tartar."

Even Turgeniev remarked on this sensation of
crampedness in the works of Tolstoi, a sort of absence
of the highest liberty, of a certain mountain air,
freshening the spirit's breath and all the mental
faculties. He tried to explain this defect by Tolstoi's
deficiency of knowledge. But would not " conscious-
ness ' be the better word ? "I wish you liberty,
spiritual liberty," he wrote once to Tolstoi. Peace
and War he considered one of the greatest produc-
tions of the world's poesy, but at the same time " the
most lamentable example of the absence of true
comprehensive, spiritual liberty, resulting from the
absence of true knowledge." " Without that at-
mosphere you cannot breathe at ease."

Before Borodino, Prince Andrei sees soldiers
bathing by the hot roadside in a muddy pond. They
were pelting one another, yelling and shouting. " On
the banks, on the dam, in the pond — everywhere
white, healthy, muscular bodies. ' It's not half
bad, your excellency — if you would condescend,'
suggested one of the bathers. ' Dirty,' said the
prince, frowning and filled with repulsion at the
sight of so much chair a canon"

Tolstoi's world must have often appeared to him
like that muddy pond with the many naked bathers
disporting themselves under the low heavy sky and
the red ball of the blazing sun ; or like the low and
stifling marquee for the wounded.

If we feel suffocated — stifled, as by impending

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thunder — it is because of Tolstoi's too great sense of V
the body and too little sense of the spirit. '

Sometimes even his hero-victims rebel, and
struggle towards abstract Christian " musings."
But what a pitiful, wingless flight it is ! " We may
run risks ourselves, but not for our children." So
the family bond of blood speaks, and scarcely have
the heroes risen, when plump ! they fall still more
heavily into that rollicking muddy pond.

225

CHAPTER XIII

" GOD'S creature : there's not only ' God's man,'
but ' God's beast.' " In this popular juxtaposition
of words, apparently so commonplace, lies a mys-
tery.

Man, too, is " God's creature," and God's beast.
The whole living animal creation is the God-beast.

" Love all God's creation — every grain of sand,"
says the holy old man Zosima in Dostoievski's book,
" every leaf, every ray of God, you should love.
Love animals, love plants, love everything. Love
everything, and you will arrive at God's secret in
things."

" God's creature " — a peasant phrase, half-pious,
almost ecclesiastical, but there is something pre-
Christian, pre-historic, Pan-aryan in the idea. With
what careless ease the old Greeks, purest of Aryans,
transform the god-man into the god-beast! The
limbs of the divinely fair, civilized human body are
so knit together and interwoven with the limbs of
animals and plants — Pan with the goat, Pasiphae
with the bull, Leda with the swan, Daphne with the
laurel — that it is difficult to decide where the human
or the divine ends in a man, and the animal, the
bestial, the vegetable begins : one is fused into the

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other. The Greeks are amused by these meta-
morphoses, as by sensual and merry fables ; and
play with erstwhile awful religious blendings or
1 symbols," as with toys.

But a people as bright and joyous as the Greeks,
yet more earnest and calm (I mean the Egyptians)
began pondering over the conjunction in man of the
divine and the animal, and never ceased to ponder
over it during a culture of, perhaps, six thousand
years. Their strange deities, sculptured out of
black, shining, indestructible diorite, half men, half
beasts, human bodies with the heads of cats, dogs,
apes, or crocodiles, or beasts' bodies as those of
the Sphinxes with the subtle and spiritualized human
smiles, bear witness to this immovable, unsatisfied,
terrible, and yet lucid contemplation.

Then another insignificant race, a handful of
wandering Semites, shepherds and nomads — alien
to all, persecuted by all, hated and despised, lost
in the wilderness, and for thousands of years seeing
nothing above it but the sky, or around it but bare
dead regions, and before it the solitary horizon —
set to thinking over the unity of the external and
inward creation.

With incredible arrogance this paltry tribe
declared itself the chosen one of all tribes and
nations, the single people of its God, the one true
God. And in all living bodies it saw only a soulless
body, for blood-sacrifices and holocausts to the one
God of Israel. The face of man, its own face, it
fenced off and separated as the likeness and image
of God from all animal beings by an impassable gulf.
In this idea of terrible loneliness and solitude, in the

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idea of a jealous God, destroying like fire, there is
something of the breath of that fiery wilderness
from which this tribe issued : a breath instantly
heated, and therefore at times startlingly productive,
but also death-dealing and parching.

Judaism at the end of its fight with polyglottism
and polytheism, at its terrible extreme of exclusive-
ness, came in contact with late Hellenism in the
schools of the Alexandrine Neo-platonists, Neo-
pythagoreans, and Gnostics, the crucible in which
lo was fused, like Corinthian brass from a number of
metals, the amalgam called Christian philosophy.
Here for the first time the spirit of Semitism, the
spirit of the waste and of laying waste, breathed on
the magnificent, wild, many-foliaged, magic wood
of the Indo-Europeans, and infected one of its
branches with a powerful and infectious poison.

The freshly arrived and simple northern semi-
barbarians, who had scarcely left the forest defiles,
received the ancient and subtle cult with childish sim-
plicity and coarseness. By Christianity they were
captivated as by fear, attracted as by a precipice.
They seized upon that side of Christianity which
was most alien and opposed to their own nature,
namely, the exclusively Semitic side ; mortification
of the irredeemably sinful body, and fear, became
their faith, and primitive wild nature their Devil

This spirit of revived Judaism, the spirit of the
desert in which Israel had wandered, grew stronger
and stronger in the Middle Ages. It passed like a
fiery whirlwind over all European civilization,
withering the last blossoms and fruits of Graeco-
Roman antiquity, until the very Renaissance, when

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apparently it fell palsied. It recovered, and is
rampant to-day.

We are poisoned by the purely Semitic dread of
nakedness, of our bodily selves.

The blighting Eastern simoon passed, however,
only over the tops of the Aryan forest ; in the thick
of it, nearer to the soil, to the people, enough of
the old Western moisture and freshness remained
partially to revive ; there, in the legendary shade,
in the storied twilight, still teemed and swarmed
the many-tongued, many-deitied " creature of God."
In the national Aryan Church legends of the Middle
Ages, so akin to the Indo-European Epos, this
" creature of God ' constantly appears, God's
animal, the sacred animal — the mystic stag of St.
Hubert, with the cross shining between its antlers ;
the sheep entering a church, and during the eleva-
tion of the " Host ' bending its knees with devout
bleatings, a lamb before the Lamb ; St. Antony of
Padua blessing the fish ; St. Francis of Assisi preach-
ing to the birds ; our own Russian hermit, St.
Sergius of Radonej, taming bears with the cross ;
Sts. Blasius, Florus, and Laurus protecting domestic
animals ; the holy martyr Christopher, who, even
now, is reverenced by the Russian people, and of
whom it is said in an illuminated missal of the
seventeenth century, " This wondrous martyr, who
had a dog's head, came out of the country of the
man-eaters," that is Ethiopia or Lower Egypt.

All these bore witness to the pathetic recognition
of Man's fellowship with the animal.

It is an immemorially old and ineradicable re-
ligious idea in man, this sanctity of the animal and

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vX

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of himself as animal. It is also a prophetic idea,
full of dread and glamour. Man, remembering the
beast in his own nature (that is, the incomplete, the
progressive element, transmuted and unlike the
inorganic, and easily transferable from one physical
mould to another) has a presentiment that he, him-
self, man, is not the last attainable goal, the final
crown of Nature, but merely a means, a transition,
a mere temporary bridge thrown across the chasm
between the pre-human and the superhuman,
between the Beast and the God.

The dark face of the Beast is turned earthwards,
but he has wings, which Man has not.

Prometheus, rebel against Heaven, the ' Fore-
thinker," breath of the infernal snake-bodied Titans,
also " called down fire from heaven to earth." No-
where, perhaps, was the old Semitic dread of the
animal seen as in the writer of the Revelation — who
allows the unexhausted force, the unrevealed know-
ledge of the Beast-shaped, Antichrist, to rebel and
contend with the risen Christ.

Animals at least know much that we, having
forgotten, arrogantly call animal instinct. It is a
nocturnal sight, an innocent direct knowledge ' on
the far side of good and evil."

"" Human musing of the cradle, the deathbed
meditation of Man " : this is the most recondite
speculation of Tolstoi. Here lie the hidden Titanic
roots, the secret sources of his creations. Here is the
loophole and the issue to some other depth, some
other sky.

" And you have killed men ? " asks Olenine of
Uncle Yeroshka. The old man suddenly raised

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

himself by both elbows and put his face close to
Olenine's. "The Devil!" he shouted at him.
" What are you talking about ? You mustn't say
that ! It is hard work to take a life, ugh ! hard
work ! "

Yes, Uncle Yeroshka, the old hunter, not only
" knows," but " pities " and " loves " the moths
and the beasts. He knows them because he loves
them. He loves even that boar which he stalks in
the reeds and strikes down. Here is the purely
Aryan paradox, an elemental offshoot of the tangled
Aryan forest age, alien and unintelligible to the
pitiless straight line, the desert spirit of the Semite,
bare as the limit of the horizon.

Tolstoi, like Yeroshka, knows the Animal be-
cause_he loves hini. For the first time after thou-
sands of years of Semitic desolation and isolation
this great Aryan has ventured fully and fearlessly to
combine by " symbolism " the tragedy of the Animal
and the Man, Anna Karenina and Frou-frou.

One of his most marvellous pieces of description
is of a visit to a slaughter-house.1

" Man, you are king of the beasts — re delle bestie —
for in truth your bestial nature is the greatest,"
writes in his diary Leonardo da Vinci, another great
Aryan, who did not feed from the " slaughter-house,"
and had pity for every living creature. A Florentine
traveller of the sixteenth century, in the depths of
India, in speaking of the Buddhist recluses, remem-
bers his countryman Leonardo, who, even as they,
" did not allow harm to be done in his presence to
any animal or even plant."

1 In a pamphlet called The First Step.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTO'fEVSKI AS ARTISTS

There is an old Indian legend that once, to tempt
Buddha, the Saviour of the world, the Evil Spirit in
the guise of a vulture, pursued a dove ; the dove
hid in Buddha's bosom, and he wished to protect it,
but the Spirit said, " By what right do you take
away my prey ? One of us must die, either it by
my talons or I of hunger. Why are you sorry for
him and not for me ? If you are merciful and wish
none to perish cut me a piece of flesh from your own
body of the same size as the dove." Then he showed
him two scales of a balance. The dove settled on
one. Buddha cut a piece of flesh from his own
body and laid it in the other scale. But it remained
motionless. He threw in another piece, and another
and another, and hacked his whole body, so that the
blood poured out and the bones showed, but the scale
still did not sink. Then with a last effort he went
to it and threw himself into it, and it sank, and the
scale with the dove rose. We can only save others
by giving, not a part of ourselves, but the whole.

Out of this ancient unreasoning Aryan pity for
live creatures proceeded Buddhism ; and, like a
flood which bursts the dams, swept away the
strongest and firmest of the barriers of human
society, the pitiless caste of India separating Brah-
min from pariah as widely as God from an animal.

The shedding of blood, the butchery of numberless
animals, " where blood flows below and drips from
above " — such is the service acceptable to the
" jealous God, consuming like a fire," the God of
Semitism : such is " the sweet savour, pleasing to
the Lord." All tongues, tribes, and nations of the
earth are merely flesh for sacrifice. " I will enter

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My winepress and tread the nations like corn, and
make red My garments with blood." Messiah was
to come and reign by extermination.

And Messiah came, a babe laid among the cattle.
He came " sitting on an ass and a colt, the foal of
an ass." " The beasts have their holes and the birds
their nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to
lay His head." He teaches men the simplicity and
wisdom of animals, and the glory of lilies.

What a change, what a transition towards Aryan-
ism from the parched, desolate wilderness of Israel,
from the smoking remains of victims to the blossom-
ing garden of God ! What an incredible change
from the mortification of the flesh to the resurrection
of the body !

It is as if on reaching its furthest summit Semitism
broke down, and overcame itself, and reverted to its
first state. It was as if the two opposing geniuses
of the world's progress, the Semitic and the Aryan
spirit, the spirit of Death and the spirit of Life, had,
through all ages and races, sought each other, and
finally coalesced.

None of the Aryans has approached so near
(though unconsciously, like a mole, by the nocturnal
sight of instinct) to this last blending mystery of the
spirit and body — the spiritualized body, as Tolstoi.

The never-ending last thoughts and tortures of
Prince Andrei', the unsavouriness, uncleanliness, and
terrible cry of Ivan Ilyich, " I don't want to — o — o ! '
and this silent oscillating and the dying of the branch
on the tree that is being felled ! l Gradual is the
descent of the ladder. Man to animal ; animal to

1 In The Three Deaths,

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

plant ; plant to the cloud, melting in the sky, ever
stiller and stiller, to the last stillness. But even
then there is not nothingness, but the beginning of
life : there is the issue to a new sky : there there is
" the boundless gloom which is more beautiful than
any light" in the words of Plotinus. " In thy no-
thing I shall perchance find everything," replies
Faust to Mephistopheles as he falls into the abyss
below with the keys of the kingdom of " the
Mothers."

" For five years our garden had been neglected,"
records Tolstoi. " I hired labourers with axes and
shovels, and worked myself in the garden with them.
We cut and hacked at the dead wood and rubbish,
superfluous bushes and trees. The trees that had
become overgrown and too dense were the poplars
and the cherries. The poplar grows away from its
roots, and it is no use digging it up, but you must
cut the roots out of the ground. Beyond the pond
was a huge poplar two armsful in girth. About it
was a field, all overgrown with offshoots of poplars.
I wanted to dig them up, for I wished the place to
be more cheerful, and besides I wanted to relieve the
old poplar, because I thought all these young trees
came from it and drew the sap from it. When we
were getting rid of these young poplars it sometimes
went to my heart to see them dug out of the ground,
their roots full of sap, and how afterwards we pulled
four at a time and could not get out the poplar we
had dug up. It held on with all its might, and did
not want to die. I thought, it is plain they want to
live, if they cling so hard to life. But we had to get
rid of them, and I did. Afterwards, when it was

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too late, I realized that there was no occasion to
make an end of them. I thought the offshoots
sucked the sap from the old tree, but the reverse was
the case. When I took them down the old poplar
was already dying. When the leaves came out I
saw (it had been split into two stems) that one stem
was bare, and that same summer it withered. It
had been dying for a long time, and knew it, and
passed on its life to the offshoots. That was why
they ran wild so soon, and I wanted to relieve him,
and only killed all his children." The trees have
their wisdom.

» " One wild cherry had grown up on the trunk of
a nut tree and choked the hazel bushes. I thought
for a long time whether to cut it down or not, for I
was sorry for it. It was not a shrub, but a tree four
or five inches in thickness and four toises in height,
spreading and bushy, and covered with bright white
fragrant blossom. From a distance you caught its
perfume. I was not for cutting it down, but one
of the workmen (I had spoken to him before about
it) began to do so in my absence. When I came he
had already cut some three inches into it, and the
sap flowed under the axe, when he came upon a
blade imbedded in it. ' There is nothing to be done
- it is evidently Fate,' I thought, took an axe
myself, and set to help the man. All work makes
one cheerful, and so does tree-felling. It is meny
work to drive the axe deep sideways and then make
a clean cut on top of that, further and further back
into the tree. I quite forgot about the tree itself,
and thought only of how to get it down. When I
got hot I laid down the axe, leant with the man

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against the tree, and tried to push it down, We
shook it, and its leaves quivered and sent down a
shower of dew and covered us with the white fra-
grant petals of its blossoms. It broke off at the
incision, and with a stagger fell, foliage and blossom,
on the grass. The branches quivered, and the
blossom was done for after the fall.

" ' Ha ! a fine piece of stuff ! ' cried the man ;
' but I'm bitterly sorry.' And I too felt so sorry
that I hastened away to the other workmen."

He is sorry for man, he is sorry for the beast, he
is sorry for the tree, he is sorry for everything, be-
cause all is one live whole, all God's creatures.
What is to be done ? It is sinful to eat from the
slaughter-house — " virtue is incompatible with a
beefsteak," says this vegetarian — we may only eat
harmless vegetable food. But then he is sorry for
plants too. " It was as if something cried out and
wept ' ' when there was a crack in the middle of the
tree. " Bitterly sorry ! " " Will they not have to
answer for this ? ' " No, they will not answer,"
the vegetarian reassures us. " This is a senseless, ex-
aggerated, Buddhistical pity." Yet did not pity for
animals seem, in former ages, senseless and excessive ?

Perhaps^ the time_is_coming when all men will
renounce the slaughter-house.

To live means to cause death. " We make our
life out of others' deaths " — facciamo la nostra vita
delle altrui morte — says Leonardo da Vinci. The
limit of love is the limit of life itself, the end of the
world. And I, for my part, believe that the existing
world is drawing to a time when, by its own free
choice, it will reject slaughtered flesh as food.

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" When did I begin to be ? " says Tolstoi in the
fragment Earliest Recollections. " When did my
life commence ? Did I not live when I had learnt
to see, to hear, to understand, to speak ; when I
slept and drank, and kissed the breast,and laughed,
and delighted my mother ? Yes, I lived, and lived
happily. Did I not then acquire all that by which
I now live, and acquired so much, so quickly, that
all the rest of my life I have not acquired a hundredth
part of the same ? From the five-year-old child to
me there is but a step. Between the newborn child
and the five-year-old there is a terrible distance. Be-
tween the embryo and the newborn is a gulf. And
between the non-existent and the embryo lies far, far
more — a distance utterly inaccessible to our con-
ceptions."

This inaccessible retreat, this gloomy, lower depth
— the ante-natal " journey " of all living things,
animal and vegetable (" Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow ") — always attracted and drew
Tolstoi. Sagely_and fearlessly has he looked into
this gulf, and into the last mystery of Flesh and
Blo_pd.

The mystery, the secret of Flesh and Blood.
When Christ revealed it to His disciples it frightened
yet tempted them ? "He that eateth My Flesh and
drinketh My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise
him up at the last day, for My Flesh is meat indeed,
and My Blood is drink indeed. He that eateth Me
shall live in Me." WThat strange words ! Who can
understand them ? But, like Tolstoi's, these words
aim at unifying body and spirit — divinizing the body.
They were spoken, we remember, by Him who turned

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water into wine, and wine into blood. And I would
have you notice that by the false view of later
Christian asceticism we have carved out the reverse
process of blood being turned into wine and wine
into water, the sacred Body into bodiless sanctity,
the spiritual Flesh into fleshless spirituality, the
resurrection of the Flesh into the mortification of the
Flesh. This is a second betrayal as great as the
first.

If ever the religious thirst of men goes back to
this blighting source, then maybe they will re-
member that Tolstoi, though unconsicously, even
in many cases against his own judgment, trod this
path towards this Symbol.

Apparently with cynical cruelty — in reality with
shamefaced pity — he has laid Man bare of all that
is human : he seeks in him the animal in order to
make that animal divine.

" To every true artist," he says, " there comes
what came to Balaam, who, wishing to bless, found
himself involuntarily cursing what he ought to have
cursed and blessing what he ought to have blessed."

The same thing has happened to Tolstoi himself
as an artist. Precisely where he sees his shame
and shortcoming lies his glory and justification.

238

CHAPTER XIV

IF in the literature of all ages and nations we wished
to find the artist most contrary to Tolstoi we should
have to point to Dostoievski. I say contrary, but
not remote, not alien ; for often they come in
contact, like extremes that meet.

The ' heroes ' of Tolstoi, as we have seen, are
not so much heroes as victims. In them the human
individuality, without being perfected to the full,
is swallowed up in the elements. And as there is
not a single heroic will ruling over all, so there is
not one uniting tragic action : there are only se-
parate tragic nodi and situations — the separate waves
which rise and fall in purposeless motion, not guided
by a current within, but only by external forces.
The fabric of the work, like the fabric of humanity
itself, apparently begins nowhere and ends nowhere.

With Dostoievski there is throughout a human •
personality carried to the extremes of individuality, |
drawing and developing from the dark animal roots
to the last radiant summits of spirituality. Through-
out there is the conflict of heroic will with the
element of moral duty and conscience, as in Raskol-
nikov ; with that of passion, refined, deliberate, as
in Svidrigailov and Versilov ; in conflict with the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

will of the people, the State, the polity, as in Peter
Verkhovenski, Stavrogine, and Shatov ; and lastly
in conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery,
as in Ivan Karamazov,1 Prince Myshkine, and
Kirillov. Passing through the furnace of these
conflicts, the fire of enflaming passions and still more
enflaming will, the kernel of human individuality,
the inward ego, remains undissolved and is laid bare,
" I am bound to display self-will," says Kirillov in
the D&mons, to whom suicide, which seems the limit
of self-abnegation, is in fact the highest pitch of the
assertion of his personality, the limit of ' ' self-will."
All Dostoievski's heroes might say the same. For
the last time they oppose themselves to the elements
that are swallowing them up, and still assert their
ego, their individuality and self-will, when their end
is at hand. In this sense even the Christian resigna-
tion of the Idiot, of Alesha, and old Zosima is an
insuperable resistance to evil forces about them ;
submission to God's will, but not to man's, that is
the inversion of " self-will." The martyr dying for
his belief, his truth, his God, is also a " hero " : he
asserts his inward liberty against outward tyranny,
and so of course " displays self-will."

In accordance with the predominance of heroic
struggle the principal works of Dostoievski are in
reality not novels nor epics, but tragedies.

Peace and War and Anna Karenina, on the other
hand, are really novels, original epics. Here, as we
have seen, the artistic centre of gravity is not in
the dialogue between the characters, but in the

1 In The Brothers Karamazov (trad, into French E;
Halperine et Morice, Paris, 1887);

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

telling of the story ; not in what they say, but in
what is said of them ; not in what we hear with our
ears, but in what we see with our eyes.

With Dostoievski, on the contrary, the narrative
portion is secondary and subservient to the con-
struction of the whole work. And this is apparent
at the first glance ; the story, written always in one
and the same hasty, sometimes clearly neglected
language, is now wearisomely drawn out and in-
volved, heaped with details ; now too concise and
compact. The story is not quite a text, but, as
it were, small writing in brackets, notes on the
drama, explaining the time and place of the action,
the events that have gone before, the surroundings
and exterior of the characters ; it is the setting up of
the scenery, the indispensable theatrical parapher-
nalia— when the characters come on and begin to
speak then at length the piece begins. In Dos-
toievski's dialogue is concentrated all the artistic
power of his delineation i it is in the dialogue that
all is revealed and unrevealed. There is not in all
contemporary literature a writer equal to him for
mastery of dialogue,

Levine uses just the same language as Pierre Bezu-
khov or Prince Andrei, Vronski or Pozdnyshev : Anna
Kar£nina the same phrases as Dolly, Kitty, or
Natasha, If we did not know who was talking, we
should not be able to distinguish one person from
another by the language, the sound of the voice, as
it were, with our eyes shut. True, there is in Tolstoi
a difference between the language of the common
folk and the gentry, but this is not external or
personal, but merely internal and according to class,

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

In its essence the language of all the characters in
Tolstoi is the same, or all but the same : it is col-
loquial parlance, as it were the sound of the voice
of Leo himself, whether in gentleman's or peasant's
dress. And merely for this reason we overlook
the fact that in his works it is not what the
characters say that matters, but how they are silent,
or else groan, howl, roar, yell, or grunt : it is
not their human words that matter, but their
half-animal, inarticulate sounds, or ejaculations-
as in Prince Andrei's delirium " i titi-titi-titi,"
or the " bleating of Vronski over the dead
horse, or the sobbing of Anatole over his own
amputated leg. The repetition of the same vowels,
a — o — u, seems sufficient to express the most com-
plex, terrible, heart-rending, mental and bodily
emotions.

>/ In Dosto'ievski it is impossible not to recognize
the personage speaking, at once, at the first words
uttered. In the scarcely Russian, strange, involved
talk of the Nihilist Kirillov we feel something su-
perior, grating, unpleasant, prophetic, and yet
painful, strained, and recalling attacks of epilepsy
— and so too in the simple, truly national speech
of " holy " Prince Myshkine. When Fedor Kara-
mazov, suddenly getting quite animated and
ingurgitating, addresses his sons thus : " Heigh, you,
children, bairns, little sucking pigs, for me — all my
life through — there were no such thing as touch-me-
nots. Even old maids, in them sometimes you
would make valuable discoveries if you only
made them open their eyes. A beggar woman, and
a touch-me-not : it is necessary at the first go off

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to astonish — that is the way to deal with them. You
must astonish 'em to ecstasy, to compunction, to
shame that such a gentleman has fallen in love with
such a slut as she." We see the heart of the old man,
but also his fat, shaking, Adam's apple, and his moist,
thin lips ; the tiny, shamelessly piercing eyes, and
his whole savage figure — the figure of an old Roman
of the times of the decadence. When we learn that
on a packet of money, sealed and tied with ribbon,
there was also written in his own hand " for my angel
Grushenka, if she wishes to come," and that three
days later he added " and the little darling," he
suddenly stands before us wholly as if alive. We
could not explain how, or why, but we feel that in
this belated "and the little darling" we have caught
some subtle, sensual wrinkle on his face, which make
us feel physically uncomfortable, like the contact
of a revolting insect, a huge spider, or daddy-long-
legs. It is only a word, but it holds flesh and blood.
It is of course imaginary, but it is almost im-
possible to believe it is merely imaginary. It is just
that last little touch which makes the portrait too
lifelike, as if the painter, going beyond the bounds
of his art, had created a portrait which is ever on the
point of stirring and coming out of the frame like
a spectre or a ghost.

In this way Dostoievski has no need to describe
the appearance of his characters, for by their peculiar
form of language and tones of voices they themselves
depict, not only their thoughts and feelings, but
their faces and bodies.

With Tolstoi the movements and gestures of the
outward bodily frame, revealing the inward shapes

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

of mind, often make profoundly significant most
paltry words of his heroes. Not less distinctness in
the physical appearance does Dostoi'evski achieve by
the contrary process : from the internal he arrives
at the external, from the mental at the physical,
from the rational and human we guess at the in-
stinctive and animal. With Tolstoi we hear because
we see, with the other we see because we hear. Not
merely the mastery of dialogue, but other character-
istics of his method bring Dostoi'evski near to the
current of great tragic art. At times it seems as if
he only did not write tragedy because the outward
form of epic narration, that of the novel, was by
chance the prevailing one in the literature of his
day, and also because there was no tragic stage
worthy of him, and what is more, no spectators
worthy of him. Tragedy is, of course, composed
only by the creative powers of artist and audience ;
it is necessary that the public, too, should have the
tragic faculty in order that tragedy may really be
engendered.

Involuntarily and naturally Dostoievski becomes
subject to that inevitable law of the stage which the
new drama has so thoughtlessly abrogated, under
the influence of Shakespeare, and by so doing under-
mined at the root the tragic action. It is the law
of the three unities, time, place, and action, which
gives, in my opinion, such incomparable power, as
against anything in modern poesy, to the creations
of the Greek drama.

In the works of Tolstoi there always, sooner or
later, comes a moment when the reader finally
forgets the main action of the story and the fate of

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the principal characters. How Prince Andrei dies,
or how Nicolai Rostov courses hares, how Kitty bears
children, or Levine does his mowing, are to us so
important and interesting that we lose sight of
Napoleon and Alexander I., Anna, and Vronski. It
is even more interesting, more important to us at
that moment whether Rostov runs down his hare
than whether Napoleon wins the battle of Borodino.
In any case we feel no impatience, we are in no hurry
to learn the ultimate fate of these persons. We are
ready to wait, and have our attention distracted as
much as the author likes. We no longer see the
shore, and have ceased to think of the destination
of our voyage. As in every true epic there is nothing
unimportant ; everything is equally important,
equally leading. In every drop there is the same
salt taste, the same chemical composition of water
as in the whole sea. Every atom of life moves ac-
cording to the same laws as worlds and constellations.
Raskolnikov kills an old woman to prove to
himself that he is already " on the wrong side of
good and evil," that he is not " a shuddering being,"
but a ** lord of creation." But Raskolnikov in
Dostoievski's conception is fated to learn that he
is wrong, that he has killed, not " a principle," but
an old woman, has not " gone beyond," but merely
wished to do so. And when he realizes this he is
bound to turn faint, to get frightened, to get out in
the square and, falling on his knees, to confess before
the crowd. And it is precisely to this extreme
point, to this one last moment in the action of the
story, that everything is directed, gathers itself up
and gravitates ; to this tragic catastrophe every

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

thing tends, as towards a cataract the course of a
river long confined by rocks.

Here there cannot, should not be, and really is not,
anything collateral or extraneous, arresting or divert-
ing the attention from the main action. The events
follow one another ever more and more rapidly,
chase one another ever more unrestrainedly, crowd
together, are heaped on each other, but in reality
subordinated to the main single object, and are
crammed in the greatest possible number into the least
possible space of time. If Dostoi'evski has any rivals
they are not of the present day, but in ancient litera-
ture the creators of Orestes and (Edipus : I mean
in this art of gradual tension, accumulation, increase,
and alarming concentration of dramatic action.

* How well I remember the hapless day," Pod-
rostok cries wonderingly ; "it always seems as if
all these surprises and unforeseen mishaps conspired
together and were showered all at once on my head
from some cornucopia." " It was a day of sur-
prises," remarks the narrator of The Damons, ' a
day of untying of old knots and tying of new, sharp
elucidations, and still worse confusions. In a word,
it was a day when astounding events happened
together." And so it is in all his stories — everywhere
that infernal " cornucopia," from which are poured
on the heads of the heroes unexpected tragedies.
When we finish the first part of The Idiot — fifteen
chapters, ten printed quires — so many events have
taken place, so many situations have been placed
before us, in which are entangled the threads of the
most varied human destinies, and passions and
consciences have been laid bare, that it would seem

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

that long years had passed since the beginning of
the story : in reality it is only a day, twelve hours
from morning to evening. The boundless picture
of the world's history which is enfolded in The

tf

Brothers Karamazov is condensed, if we do not count
the intervals between the acts, into a few days.
But even in one day, in one hour, and that almost
on one and the same spot — between a certain seat
in the Pavlovski Park and the Terminus, between
Garden Street and Haymarket Square — the heroes
of Dostoievski pass through experiences which
ordinary mortals do not taste in a lifetime.

Raskolnikov is standing on the staircase, outside
the door of the old female usurer. " He looked
round for the last time, pulled himself together,
drew himself up, and once more tried the axe on the
lock. ' Shall I not wait a little longer, till my heart
ceases to throb ? ' But his heart did not cease. On
the contrary, as if to spite him, it beat harder and
harder. And he scarcely felt the presence of the rest
of his body"

To all the heroes of Dostoievski there comes the
moment when they cease " to feel their bodies/'
They are not beings without flesh and blood, not
ghosts. We know well what sort of body they had,
when they still felt its presence. But the highest
ascent, the greatest tension of mental existence, the
most burning passions — not of the heart and the
emotions, but of the mind, the will, and the con- -{
science — give them this divorce from the body, a|
sort of supernatural lightness, wingedness, and
spiritualization of the flesh. They have the very
" spiritual, ethereal bodies," of which St. Paul

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

spoke. These are the men who are not suffocated by
flesh and blood, or the Tolstoyan " human bubble."
It seems as if, at times, they were bodily invisible,
only their intense souls could be seen.

1 We look at you and say, * She has the face of a
kind sister,' ' says the Idiot, describing the beauty
of a certain woman. It is curious to compare these
instantaneous, supersensual descriptions of Dosto'iev-
ski with those of Tolstoi — for instance, the figure of
Anna Karenina, so full of deep-seated sensuality ;
the living souls of Dostoi'evski with the overgrown
beef of Tolstoi. All Dostoievski's heroes live, thanks
to his higher spirituality, an incredibly rapid, tenfold
accelerated life : with all of them, as with Raskol-
nikov, " the heart beats harder and harder and
harder." They do not walk like ordinary mortals,
but fly ; and in the intoxication of this flight fly into
the abyss.

In the agitation of the waves we feel the increasing
nearness of the whirlpool.

At times in Greek tragedy, just before the catas-
trophe, there suddenly sounds in our ears an unex-
pectedly joyous chant of the chorus in praise of
Dionysus, god of wine and blood, of mirth and terror.
And in this chant the whole tragedy that is in pro-
gress and almost completed, all the fateful and mys-
terious that there is in human life, is presented to
us as the careless sport of the spectator god. This
mirth in terror, this tragical play, is like the play of
the rainbow, kindling in the foam of some cataract
above a gulf.

Dostoi'evski is nearest of all to us, to the most
inward and deeply-seated principles of Greek

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

tragedy. We find him depicting catastrophes with
something of this terrible gaiety of the chorus.

Tolstoi's " still heat ' before thunder is here
broken, into what roaring of thunder, what lightning
of terror ! It is no longer, as in Tolstoi, difficult to
breathe ; in that dragging, deathly heaviness which
weighs down the heart in everday life. All expands
and expands. At times, even in Dostolevski's work,
we lose our breath from the rapidity of the move-
ment, the whirl of events, the flight into space.
And what reviving freshness, what freedom there
is in this breath of the storm ! The most petty,
paltry, and commonplace features of human life here
become splendid under the lightning.

We may say of the Muse of Tolstoi what Pierre
Bezukhov once said of Natasha. " Is she clever ? '
asked Princess Maria. Pierre hesitated. " I think
not," he said at last, " or rather, she is. She does
not condescend to be clever. No, she is resourceful,
but no more."

The resourcefulness of Tolstoi's Muse lies pre-
cisely in this, that she, as it were, " does not conde-
scend to be clever," that with her you sometimes
forget the existence of the human mind.

As for Dostoievski's Muse, we may doubt any
other qualities of hers we please, only not her in-
telligence. He remarks in one place that an author
ought to have a sting ; " this sting," he proceeds to
explain, " is the rapier point of deep feeling." I
consider that no Russian writer, except Pushkin,
was such a master of " the mental rapier of feeling '
as Dostoievski himself.

In contradistinction with the favourite heroes of

249

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Tolstoi, who are not so much intelligent as " philoso-
phising," the principal heroes of Dostoiievski-
Raskolnikov, Versilov, Stavrogine, Prince Myshkine,
and Ivan Karamazov — are clever men first and
foremost. Indeed it would seem that, taken on the
whole, they are the cleverest, most rational, cultured,
and cosmopolitan of Russians, and are European
because they " in the highest degree belong to
Russia."

We are accustomed to think that the more ab-
stract thought is, the more cold and dipassionate
it is. It is not so ; or at least, it is not so with us.
From the heroes of Dostoievski we may see how
abstract thought may be passionate, how meta-
physical theories and deductions are rooted, not only
in cold reason, but in the heart, emotions and will.

There are thoughts which pour oil on the fire of
the passions and enflame man's flesh and blood more
powerfully than the most unrestrained licence.
There is a logic of the passions, but there are also
passions in logic. And these are essentially our
new passions, peculiar to us and alien to the men
of former civilizations.

Raskolniskov " sharpened his casuistry like a
razor." But with this razor of abstractions he cuts
himself almost fatally. His transgression is the
fruit, as the public prosecutor Porphyry puts it, " of
a heart outraged theoretically." The same may be
said of all the heroes of Dostoievski : their passions,
their misdeeds, committed or merely " resolved on
by conscience," are the natural outcome of their
dialectic. Icy, razor-sharp, this does not extinguish,
but kindle and inflame. In it there is fire and ice

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

at once. They feel deeply because they think
deeply ; they suffer endlessly because they are
endlessly deliberate ; they dare to will because they
have dared to think. And the further, apparently,
it is from life — the more abstract, the more fiery
is their thought, the deeper it enters into their
lives. O strange young Russia !

And the most abstract thought is, at the same
time, the most passionate: the burning thought of
God. ' All my life God has tortured me ! ' owns
the Nihilist Kirillov. And all Dostoievski's heroes
are ' God- tortured." Not the life of the body, its
end and beginning, death and birth, as with Tolstoi,^
but the life of the spirit, the denial or affirmation
of God, are with Dostoievski the ever-boiling source
of all human passions and sufferings. The torrent
of the most real, the most " living " life, falling only
from these very highest summits of metaphysics and
religion, acquires for him that strength of flow, that
turbulence of action and striving, which carries him
to his tragical catastrophes.

The great poets of the past ages, in depicting the
passions of the heart, left out of consideration the
passions of the mind, as if they thought them a
subject out of the reach of the painter's delineation.
If Faust and Hamlet are nearest to us of all heroes, ^
because they think more than any, yet they feel less,
they act less, precisely because they think more. V
The tragedy of both men lies in the contradic-
tion which they cannot solve, between the pas-
sionate heart and passionless thought. But is not a
tragedy of thinking passion or passionate thought
possible ? The future belongs to this tragedy and

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

no other. And Dostoievski was one of the first to
make an approach to it.

has overcome the superstitious timidity, com-
mon to modern artists, of feeling in presence of the
mind. He has recognized and showed us the con-
nexion there is between the tragedy of our hearts
and that of our reason, our philosophical and re-
ligious consciousness. This, in his eyes, is pre-
eminently the Russian tragedy of to-day. He has
observed that cultivated Russians have only to come
together — be it in fashionable drawing-rooms like
the hearers of Prince Myshkine, or in dirty little inns,
like Podrostok with Versilov, in order to begin to
dispute about the most abstract of subjects — the
future of European civilization, the immortality of
the soul, the existence of God. In reality it is not
only men of culture, but the whole Russian people
(witness, for instance, the history of our dissenters),
from the Judaizers of the fifteenth century to the
present day Skoptsy and Dukhobortsy, who are
absorbed in these thoughts. " All men philoso-
phize, all make inquiries about belief on the roads
and in the places of commerce," complained even
the holy Joseph Volotski. And it is just by reason
of this innate philosophical and religious animation
(so Dostoievski thought) that Russians are, " in the
highest degree, Europeans " — I mean the Europeans
of the future. This insatiable religious thirst is
the presage that Russia will share, and perhaps lead,
the universal civilization of the future.

As in our bodily impressionability something is
altered after reading Tolstoi, so after reading Dos-
toievski something is changed in our spiritual im-

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

pressionability. It is impossible to forget, to either
reject or accept him with impunity. His reasonings
penetrate not only into the mind, but into the heart
and the will. They are momentous events which
must have consequences. We remember them some
time or other, and perhaps precisely at the most
decisive impassioned crises of our lives. ' Once
touch the heart," he says himself, " and the wound
remains." Or, as the Apostle Paul puts it, he "is
quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul
and spirit, of joints and marrow."

There are simple-minded readers, with the effem-
inate, sickly sentimentality of our day, to whom
Dostoievski will always seem " cruel," merely " a
cruel genius." In what intolerable, what incredible
situations he places his heroes I What experiments
does he not play with them; through what depths
of moral degeneracy and spiritual trials (contrast
the bodily trials of Ivan Ilyich) does he not lead
them, to crime, suicide, even idiocy ! Does he not
give expression in the humiliating situations in which
he places human souls to that same cynical malice
which Tolstoi finds expression for by terrible and
humiliating physical conditions ? Does it not some-
times seem as if he tortures his " dear victims '
without object, in order to enjoy ? Yes, of a
truth he is one who delights in torture, a grand
Inquisitor, " a cruel genius,"

And is all this suffering natural, possible, real ?
Does it occur ? Where has it been seen ? And even
if it occurs, what have we sane- thinking people to
do with these rare among the rare, exceptional among

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the exceptional cases, these moral and mental
monstrosities, deformities, and abortions, fancies of
fever and delirium ?

Here is the main objection to Dosto'ievski, one
that all can understand, unnaturalness, unusualness,
apparent artificiality, the absence of what is called
" healthy realism." " They call me a psychologist,"
he says himself ; " it is not true, I am only a realist
in the highest sense of the word, i.e. I depict all the
soul's depths." This is what Turgeniev meant in
objecting to Dostoievski's " psychological mole-

runs."

But he is a searcher into human nature ; also at
times " a realist in the highest sense of the word '
— the realist of a new kind of experimental realism.
In making scientific researches he surrounds in his
machines and contrivances the phenomena of Nature
with artificial and exceptional conditions. He ob-
serves how, under the influence of those conditions,
the phenomenon undergoes changes. We might say
that the essence of all scientific research consists
precisely in deliberately " artificialising " the sur-
rounding conditions. Thus the chemist, increasing
the pressure of atmospheres to a degree impossible
in the conditions of nature as known to us, gradually
densifies the air and changes it from gaseous to
liquid. May we not call unreal, unnatural, super-
natural, nay miraculous, that transparent liquid,
dark blue as the clearest sky, evaporating, boiling
and yet cold, inconceivably colder than ice ? There
is no such thing as liquid air, at least in terrestrial
nature as it comes within our scrutiny. It seems a
miracle. We do not find it; yet it exists.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

But is anything of the sort done by Dostoievski
in his experiments with human souls ? He also
places them in extraordinary and artificial condi-
tions, not knowing himself, but waiting to see, what
will become of them. In order that unforeseen
aspects, the powers hidden " in the depths of man's
soul," may be revealed he needs a degree of pressure
of the moral atmosphere rarely met with to-day.
He submits his characters either to the rarefied icy
air of abstract dialectics or the fire of elemental
animal passion, fire at white heat. In these experi-
ments he sometimes arrives at states of the human
mind as novel and seemingly impossible as liquefied
air. Such a state of mind may exist, because the
spiritual world, like the material, " is full," to use
Leonardo da Vinci's words, " of countless possi-
bilities, as yet unembodied." It has never been
known, yet it is more than natural that it should
be ; to give the unembodied a body is a natural
proceeding.

What is called Dostoievski's psychology is there-
fore a huge laboratory of the most delicate and exact
apparatus and contrivances for measuring, testing,
and weighing humanity. It is easy to imagine that
to the uninitiated such a laboratory must seem
something of a " devil's smithy."

Some of his scientific experiments are dangerous
to the experimenter himself. We sometimes feel
alarmed for him. His eyes are the first to see
the unpermitted. He ventures into " depths "
into which no one yet ventured before. Will he
come back ? Will he be able to manage the forces
he has called up ? In this daring of inquiry there is

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOtEVSKI AS ARTISTS

something especially modern and characteristic, it
may be, of European science in general. It is also
a Russian quality that we find in Tolstoi as well.
With the same audacious curiosity Tolstoi scruti-
nizes the body and its past. The two writers supple-
ment each other's work j " deep calleth unto deep."
; In Dostoievski's novels there are peculiar passages
as to which it is difficult to decide (compare some
poems of Goethe's and drawings of Leonardo da
Vinci's) whether they are Art or Science. At any
rate they are not pure Art nor pure Science.
Here accuracy of knowledge and the instinct of
genius are mingled. It is a new " blend," of which
the greatest artists and men of science had a pre-
vision, and for which there is, as yet, no name.

And yet we have here " a cruel genius." This
reproach, like some feeling of vague yet personal
vexation, remains in the hearts of readers blessed
with what is called " mental warmth," which we
sometimes feel inclined to call " mental thaw."
Why these sharp " shafts," these extremes, this
" ice and fire " ? Why not a little more good-
heartedness, a little more warmth ? Perhaps these
readers are right ; perhaps he really is ' cruel,"
yet he is assuredly more merciful than they can
conceive, for the object of his cruelty is knowledge.
There are poisons which kill men, but have no effect
on animals, Those to whom Dostoi'evski seems
cruel will probably survive,

There remains the question, more worthy of our
attention — the question of the cruelty of Dostoievski
towards himself, his morbidity as an artist.

What a strange writer, in good sooth, with in-

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satiable curiosity exploring only the maladies of the
human soul, and for ever raving about plagues, as
if he could not, or would not, speak of anything else !
And what strange heroes these " lucky dogs,"
hysterical women, sensualists, deformed creatures
possessed of the devil, idiots, lunatics ! Perhaps it
is not so much the painter as the healer of mental
diseases we have here, and withal such a healer that
to him we must say, " Physician, heal thyself."
What have we that are whole to do with these, this
plague-stricken collection of clinical cases ?

But then we know tests of shameful disease have
proved permanent sources of healing. Of a truth,
it is only " by his sickness that we are healed."
Ought not we, who have had such a warning from
the history of the world, though we are only nomin-
ally Christians, to deal with less careless self-confi-
dence, with more civilized caution, with all
maladies ?

For instance, we see too clearly the connexion
between health and strength, an abundance of
vitality on the one side and between disease and
weakness and the loss of vitality on the other. Yet
does there not exist a less obvious but not less real
connexion between disease and strength, between
what seems disease and real strength ? If the
seed does not sicken and die and decay, then it
does not bear fruit. If the wingless insect in the
chrysalis does not sicken, then it never gets wings.
And " a woman when she is in travail suffereth pain
because her hour is come." There is a sickness, not
unto death, but unto life. Whole generations,
civilizations, and nations are like to die for pain, but

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this too may be the birth-pang and the natural and
wholesome sickness. In societies, true, it is im-
measurably more difficult to distinguish apparent
from real sickness, Decay from New Birth. Here we
must feel our way. But there are dangerous diseases
of society, which depend not on the want, but the
excess of undeveloped life, of accumulated and
unvented inward power, from the superabundance
of health. Our national champions have sometimes
felt "burdened with strength," as with a load, and
seemed ailing because too strong.

The reverse is, of course, also true. Temporary
excess of vitality and the sharpening of the natural
capacities is the outcome of real sickness. The too
strained cord sounds more loudly before it snaps.

Yes, the more deeply we ponder it the more diffi-
cult and enigmatical becomes the question of social
maladies, and of the " sacred," or not sacred, malady
of Dostoi'evski in particular. Yet it seems clear that
whether he be great or little, at any rate he is unlike
any of the family of world-famous writers. Does
his strength come from his ailment, or his ailment
from his strength ? Is the real holiness — if not of
the author himself (though those that were about
him declare that there were times when he, too,
seemed almost a saint) yet that of the Idiot — the
result of apparent disease ? Or does undoubted
disease result from the doubtful sanctity ?

" ' Go to the doctor,' Raskolnikov advises Svid-
rigailov, who has told him about his ' presenti-
ments.'

" ' I know, without your telling me,' is the reply,
* that I am out of health, though really I don't know

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in what way. In my own way, I feel sure, I am
five times as well as you.'

' I asked, ' Do you believe in previsions — pre-
sentiments ? '

1 No ; nothing will induce me to believe in
them,' cried the other, with a touch of anger.

; Well now, what is the usual remark on the
subject ? ' growled Svidrigailov, as if to himself,
looking on one side and hanging his head down.
; They say, " You are ill : it is all your fancies —
nothing but imagination, delirium." But there's no
strict logic in that. I admit that previsions only
appear to sick men, but then that only argues that
previsions appear only to sick men, and not that
they have no existence in themselves.'

' Certainly they have none,' persisted Raskol-
nikov irritably.

" * No ? You think 'so ? ' resumed the other,
slowly gazing at him. ' Well, how if you settle it
this way (there, help me) : previsions are, so to say,
fragments — pieces of other worlds, beginnings. The
healthy man, of course, can't see them anyhow,
because a healthy man is the most earthly man.
He must, of course, live only the life of this world
for completeness and order's sake. But no sooner
does he fall ill, no sooner is the normal earthly order
broken in his organism, than straightway the possi-
bility of another world begins to dawn on him. The
more ailing he is, the closer, I suggest, his contact
with the other world.' "x

1 From The Crime and the Punishment (English transla-
tion, Vize telly, 1886).

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We can understand why Raskolnikov is irritated :
although he himself has a dialectic on which he
places his whole reliance, " sharpened like a razor,"
he feels that Svidrigailov, whom he despises as a
moonstruck dreamer, has one still keener. Is Svid-
rigailov simply laughing at Raskolnikov ? Is he
merely teasing him with his previsions ? Or is he
exceedingly serious ? Has he arrived at finally
doubting even wwbelief ? He once admits that the
idea of eternity sometimes seems to him discomfort-
ing : "a chamber something like a village bath-
house, long neglected, and with spiders' webs in
all its corners."

It is curious that Dostoievski in his last diary,
when expressing his stray thoughts about Christi-
anity, repeats almost word for word the expression
of Svidrigailov : " The firm belief of mankind in
the contact with other worlds, obstinate and en-
during, is also very significant." Not only so, these
words of Svidrigailov's are also echoed by the
" saintly " old Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov :
" Grown creatures live and are kept alive only by
the sense of contact with other and mysterious
worlds."

In his thoughts about illness as the source of some
higher life, or at least a state of insight not attain-
able in health, Svidrigailov and the Idiot agree with
the " holy " Prince Myshkine.

" He thought, amongst other things, how, in his
epileptic condition, there was one stage, just before
the actual attack, when suddenly in the midst of
sadness, mental darkness, and oppression, his brain,
as it were, flamed up, and with an unv/onted out-

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burst all his vital powers were vivified simultane-
ously. The sensation of living and of self -conscious-
ness at such moments was almost decupled. They
were moments like prolonged lightning. As he
thought over this afterwards, when in a normal state,
he often said to himself that all these flashes and
beams of the highest self-realization and self-
consciousness and doubtless ' highest existence '
were nothing but a disease, the interruption of the
normal state ; and if so, it was by no means the highest
state, but on the contrary must be reckoned as the very
lowest. And yet he came at last to the exceedingly
paradoxical conclusion, ' What matter if it is a
morbid state ? ' Finally he decided, ' What difference
can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result
itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered
and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the
highest degree harmony and beauty ; and gives an
unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion of
balance, of satisfaction, and exultant prayerful fusion
with the highest synthesis of life ? } If at that, the
last instant of consciousness before the attack, he
had happened to say to himself lucidly and de-
liberately ' Yes, for this moment one might give
one's whole life,' then certainly that instant of itself
would be worth a lifetime. However, he did not
stand out for dialectics : obfuscation, mental dark-
ness and idiocy stand before him as the obvious
consequence of these loftiest moments."

It is a pity that Prince Myshkine did not stand
out for the dialectical part of his deduction. For
there is a vast importance attaching to the question,
whether it is worth while to give for " a moment

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of the highest existence ' the life, not merely of a
man, but of all mankind ? In other words, " 7s
the goal of the world's evolution an endless continuation
in time, in the succession of civilizations, in the se-
quence of the generations, or some final culmination
of all the destinies of history, all ' times and seasons,'
in a moment of ' the highest existence ' ; in what
Christian mysticism calls ' the ending of the world ' ? '
This question seems mystical, abstract, aloof from
actuality, but cannot fail, sooner or later, to have
an effect on social life of the whole of mankind.

Before Christianity came mankind lived as the
beasts live, without thought of death, with a sense
of animal perdurability. The first, and so far the
only religion which has felt the imperativeness of the
thought of the end, of death — not only for man in
particular, but also for the whole of mankind — has
been Christianity. And perhaps it is just in this
that lies the main distinction of the influence of
Christianity (an influence that, even yet is not com-
plete) on the moral and political destinies of Europe.

And here the idea of the end of the world, the
last consummation of all earthly destinies in a
moment, when the angel of the Apocalypse ' shall
declare to all living that there shall be no more
time," the moment of the highest harmony of
" higher existence " — last pinnacle of all the civili-
zation of the world — draws near to another idea.
To the crowning idea of the religion of Christ the
God-man draws near from another shore the re-
ligion, the solution of the man-God. Its preacher
in Dostoievski's pages is the Nihilist Kirillov in the
book called The Possessed — Kirillov whom all his

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

life " God has tortured," who repeats even to the
startling coincidence in the turns of expression the
" extreme paradox " uttered on this point by Prince
Myshkine.

" Have you moments of eternal harmony, my
friend ? There are seconds — five of six of them
at most go by at a time — and you feel suddenly the
presence of eternal harmony. It is not earthly, and
I do not say that it is heavenly, but man in his
earthly guise cannot bear them. It is necessary to
be transformed physically or to die. This is a distinct
feeling and one that cannot be disputed. It is as if
you suddenly had the sense of aU Nature and ex-
claimed ' Yes, it is true ' ; just as God, when He
created the world, at the end of every day said,
' Behold, it is good.' It is not softening of heart,
but just a kind of delight. You do not forgive any-
thing, for there is nothing to forgive. Neither do
you ' love,' for it is a feeling higher than love. The
most terrible part is that it is so terribly distinct
and joyful. For more than five seconds the mind
cannot bear it, and must break down. In those five
seconds I live a lifetime, and for them I would give
my lifetime.

'' In order to hold out ten seconds you must be
transformed physically. I think men ought to cease
to propagate. What is the use of children, or of
progress, seeing the goal has been attained ? In the
New Testament it is written that in the resurrection
they shall not have children, but be as the angels
of God."

Here, in reality, Kirillov merely carries to its
farthest consequences the dialectic of Prince Mysh-

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kine when he says " For that moment a man might
give his whole life." Kirillov carries it on and con-
cludes, " For that moment you might give the life of
all mankind" However, Prince Myshkine too at
times seems to approach this pinnacle. He dreads
it, but it is nevertheless inevitable. " At that
moment," he says to an intimate old friend, " there
somehow became intelligible to me that hard saying,
* There shall be no more time.9

" Seriously, of course, he would not have main-
tained it," unexpectedly and timidly concludes
Dostoievski. " In his appreciation of that minute
doubtless there was an error." What error ? " Ob-
fuscation, mental darkness, and idiocy stood before
him as the evident consequence of these loftiest
minutes." But is not this obfuscation, this mental
darkness, the prospect for every man living ?
Might not all mankind voluntarily give up its con-
tinued life for a brief epoch of intensest harmony
with God ? Would not that be a solution of both
Pagan and Christian doctrine ? This question is
rooted in the very heart of Christian, nay, of all
religion.

" Does this state often come to you ? " asks
Shatov of Kirillov, after his admission as to his
moments of eternal harmony.

" Once in three days, or once in a week."

" Have you not got epilepsy ? '

" No."

"Well, it means that you will have it. Take care,
Kirillov ; I have heard that is just the way epilepsy
begins. An epileptic described to me in detail his
sensations before an attack, exactly as you have :

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he mentioned the five seconds, and declared he could
not stand more."

In Prince Myshkirie1 also the spiritual beauty of
nature (undoubted in Dostoievski's eyes) results
from these very flashes of " eternal harmony."

Kirillov anticipates a gradual but literal " physical
transformation of man." We seem actually to hear
echoes of apocalyptic prophecies : " Behold, I make
all things new. There shall be a new heaven and a
new earth." " In Christ Jesus — a new creature"
The " physical transformation of man ' is the new
birth of the flesh — the real " resurrection of the
body." " I tell you a mystery. We shall not all
die, but we shall all be changed."

" Then there will be a new life on earth," says
Kirillov. " Then History will be seen divided into two
vast epochs, the first from the gorilla to the annihila-
tion of the conception of God, and, secondly, from the
extinction of God to "

" To the gorilla ? ' suggested Stavrogine, with
cold mockery.

'' To the transformation of the earth and of man
physically," resumed Kirillov calmly. " Man will
be a god, and be physically transformed in his
powers. The world will be changed, and all things
will be changed, including thought and emotion."

The idea of the physical transformation of man

1 In The Idiot (English translation, Vizetelly, 1887).
" The theory put forward in The Idiot is, that a brain in
which some of those springs which we consider essential
are weakened may yet remain superior, both intellectually
and morally, to others less affected." — WALISZEWSKI.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

gives Kirillov no rest, and haunts him like a fixed
idea.

" I begin and end and open the door. And I
save," he says to Peter Verkhovenski just before
his suicide, in prophetic and pitiful enthusiasm.
" Only this one thing can save all men, and in the
next generation regenerate them physically ; for in
his present physical guise, as far as my conceptions
take me, it is impossible for man to exist anyway
without a previous God. I have sought for three
years the attributes of my deity, and have found it :
his attribute is self-will ! That is the only way I can
materially show my insubmission and my new and
terrible liberty."

To Dostoievski Kirillov is a madman, " possessed,
perhaps, of some spirit," one of those possessed that
even Pushkin had foresight of :

Endless, shapeless, soundless,
In the moon's dim rays
Demons circled, many
As the leaves of November.

Not for nothing were these lines of Pushkin's
taken by Dostoievski as a motto for his Possessed.
He tried to discover in Kirillov to what monstrous
extremes it is possible for the Russian nature to
carry the logical dialectics of atheism.

But then, even Prince Myshkine is also a madman,
possessed of devils, though only in the eyes of " this
world," the wisdom of which is " foolishness with
the Lord," and not in the eyes of his Creator. The
" moments of highest harmony " which light up the
figure of the Idiot with such a glow of unearthly

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beauty and sanctity are due also, according to his
own admission, to the " sacred," or daemonic, sick_-
ness. The most profound and vital thoughts of V,
Kirillov and Prince Myshkine both are in con-
nexion with the prophecy " There shall be no more
time," i.e. that the aim of universal, historical
evolution is not an endless, earthly continuance, biit
the ending of mankind. Here Dostoi'evski hesitates.
He will not fully utter his own thoughts ; he draws
back before some gulf, and closes his eyes : the
thinker is lost in the artist. The Idiot and Kirillov
are two sides of his own being, his two faces — one
open, the other mysterious. Kirillov is the double
of the Idiot.

To recognize that there is no God, and at the
same time not to recognize that you yourself have
become a God, is folly ; otherwise you would in-
fallibly kill yourself." So says the daring Kirillov.
" If there is a God, how can I bear the thought that
I am not that God ? ' So says Friedrich Nietzsche.
; There is no God. He is dead. And we have killed
him. Ought we not to turn ourselves into deities ?
Never was a deed done greater than this. He who shall
be born after us by this alone will belong to a higher
stage in history than any that has gone before." Who
says this ? Kirillov again ? No, Friedrich Nietz-
sche. But Kirillov, as we have seen, says the same,
with his two main epochs of history — including the
extinction of the present conception of God. He too
foretells the transformation of the earth and of the
" physical nature of man," i.e. in other words, the
appearance of the " Man-god," the " Uebermensch."
Although Nietszche called Dostoi'evski "his great

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOfEVSKI AS ARTISTS

master," we know that the principal ideas of Nietz-
sche were framed independently of the latter, under
the influence of the Hellenic world, and mainly of
ancient Tragedy, the philosophy of Kant and
Schopenhauer on the one hand, and on the other the
conclusions of modern experimental science, the
ideas of Darwin, Spencer, and Haeckel on the bio-
logical transformation of species, the world's pro-
gress, natural metamorphosis, and Evolution, as it
is called. Nietzsche merely carried on these scientific
deductions and applied them to questions of soci-
ology and universal history. Man to him is not the
end, the last link of the chain, but only one of the links
of cosmic progress : just as man was the outcome of
the transmutation of animal species, so a new creative
will result from the transmutation of civilized human
species. This very being, the " new creature," is
the " more than man," or, as with ingenious cynicism
Dostoievski's Nihilist puts it, our world proceeds
" from the gorilla to the man, and from man to the
extinction of God," to the Man-god.

Here, of course, we have only the generally ac-
cessible, obvious, and outward aspect of Nietzsche —
one which, in the long run, seemed to himself a coarse
outer shell. He has also another more profound and
hidden aspect. " As regards my complaint," he
owns in one place, " I am undoubtedly more in-
debted to it than to health. I am indebted to it for
the highest kind of health, the kind in which a man is
the stronger for whatever does not kill him. I owe all
my philosophy to it. Great pain alone is the final
emancipator of the soul. Only great agony — that
long-drawn, slow torture in which we seem to be

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burning over damp faggots, a pain which is in no
hurry — only such lets us who are philosophers
descend to our lowest depths and makes us rely on
nothing of faith, good will, concealment, softness
and directness, on which, perhaps, we previously
based our humanity." This Nietzsche, like The
Idiot and Kirillov, finds in the birth-pang, in his
illness, " moments of eternal harmony," the source
of " the highest state." In the death of the human
he finds the first lightnings and glimpses of the

' superhuman."

' Man is what must be overcome," says Zara-
thustra. Only by overcoming, by mortifying, both
in his spirit and in his flesh, all that is "human, too
human," only by casting off " the old man ' with
the animal serpent-like wisdom as an old dead
slough, can man rise to incorruptibility, attain to
the divine existence for which " there is a new
heaven and a new earth."

Pushkin certainly — the most healthy and sane
of our countrymen — had already pondered on this

' physical transformation of man," physical and
spiritual at once, this regeneration and turning
of the " fleshly " flesh into spiritual flesh.

*»

And to my lips he stooped ^

Removed my sinful tongue.-

(Idle of speech and crafty)

And placed with his blood-stained hand,

Within my palsied lips,

The serpent's sting of wisdom.-

Clove my breast with his glaive,
My fluttering heart drew forth,

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And a burning fiery coal
Forced into my bared breast.
Like a corpse in the desert I lay —
Then God's voice called to me :
" Prophet, arise 1 '•»

But the Man lying in the desert will arise no longer
man as we know him.

If the seed does not die, then it does not germinate.
The constructive agony of birth is like the destruc-
tive agony of death.

" There come, as it were, unnecessary and gratui-
tous sufferings," says Tolstoi in The Kingdom of God,
with regard to the inward state, "passing into a new
form of life, untried as yet by man as he is to-day.
Something happens akin to childbearing. All is
ready for the new life, but this life still does not
make its appearance. The situation seems one from
which there is no issue." And a few lines later he
speaks of the flight, the wings, of the new man, who
' feels himself perfectly free, just as a bird would
feel in a fenced-round close, as soon as it chose to
spread its wings."

Who knows ? In others (not in himself) Tolstoi
has sometimes found this illness of the present day
— the pang of birth, the pain of the bursting of wings.
Is he himself as free from such pain as he avers, as
he would wish to be ? Or is he only more skilful
than others in hiding weakness by reproving the
weakness of others ?

" Every man of our day, if we penetrate the con-
trast of his judgment and his life, is in a desperate
condition," he says, as usual speaking of others, of
the people of " this world." But is there another

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" man of our day ' whose reason and life are at
greater variance than his own ? In him the old
struggle still continues in the subterranean quakings
and echoes, like the dull roar of earthquake. In
Tolstoi's Resurrection old Akim celebrates his " new
birth ' and the death of the " animal ' in him —
what he believes to be his final victory over the
Beast. But if it be a victory, what a poor one !
Does not Tolstoi realize in the penetralia of his
artistic conscience that it is just here, at the decisive
moment, that something has broken down and be-
trayed him ? In this " regeneration ' the morti-
fication of the flesh has led to what it always leads to,
the mortification of the spirit. Before our eyes is
taking place the suicide of a man's genius.

Was this the " Resurrection ' that we expected
of him, that he expected of himself ? It is not for
nothing that he abjures those of his works which he
owes to his ' ' world-wide fame." In him there was,
or might have been, a prophet, though by no means
such a one as he considered himself to be. He must
content himself with his fame as mere artist.

Tolstoi has human fame, but not God's fame,
which is man's absence of fame, the persecution of
prophets. His pride must be scourged by the servile
praises of ' innumerable pigmies." The spectacle
recalls the torments of those wretches who, stripped
naked, bound and smeared with honey, were exposed
in the sun for insects to devour.

He is always silent. Silence is his last refuge.
He will not admit his sufferings. But yet he knows
that the hour is at hand when One, to whom nothing
can be refused, will demand an account. We owe

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pity to this man of the day in his most desperate
condition, the most lonely, deserted, and unre-
garded, in spite of all this fame. But sometimes one
fancies that, being so great, he deserves no pity. In
any case, only those who do not love him will believe
in the health, the peace, and happiness, the ' re-
generation " of this man.

His illness is shown by a gradually increasing
silence, callousness, decline, ossification, and petri-
fication of the heart, once the warmest of human
hearts.

It is because his ailment is inward, because he
himself is scarcely conscious of it, that it is more
grievous than the malady of Dostoi'evski or the mad-
ness of Nietzsche. Pushkin carried to the grave
the secret of his great health ; Dostoievski that of
his great sickness. Nietzsche, the corpse of the
" more-than-man," has gone from us, carrying the
secret of his wisdom into the madhouse. And
Tolstoi, too, has deserted us.

This generation is thrice-deserted, timid, ailing,
ridiculous even in its own eyes. We have to solve
a riddle which Gods and Titans could not solve — to
draw the line which separates health in us from
sickness, life from death, resurrection from decay.
We can evade this riddle. Have we courage to
solve it ?

An almost unbearable burden of responsibility is
thus laid on our generation. Perhaps the destinies
of the world never hung so finely in the balance
before, as if on the edge of a sword between two
chasms. The spirit of man is faintly conscious that
the beginning of the end is at hand.

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

Woe to them who awake too early, when all others
are still asleep. But even if we wished we can no
longer deceive ourselves and ignore the blinding
light we behold.

Among the common people, far down out of hear-
ing, there are those who are awaking as we.1 Who
will be the first to arise and say that he is awake ?
Who has overcome the fine delusion of our day,
which confounds in each of us, in minds and life,
the withering of the seed with its revival, the birth-
pang with the death-pang, the sickness of Regenera-
tion with the sickness of Degeneration, the true
' symbolism " with " decadence " ? Action is first
needed ; and only when we have acted can we
speak. Meanwhile here is an end of our open course,
our words, our contemplation ; and a beginning of
our secrecy, our silence, and our action.

1 Merejkowski is thinking of Maxim Gorki. — ED;

273

CHAPTER XV

TOLSTOI has simply ignored St. Petersburg : he has
retired not only from St. Petersburg, but from the
Moscow the Slavophiles love into the country, the
backwoods, the body of Russia. And if in the
country he encounters Petersburg, " Peter's Crea-
tion," in the shape of the new manufacturing " civili-
zation ' of concertinas, brandy, and infectious
diseases, it is only to show that to him the spirit of
commerce, as of the great world, seems " the power
of darkness." The action of Peace and War and
Anna Karenina takes place, it is true, partly in
St. Petersburg, but there is none of the Petrine spirit
there. In all Tolstoi's works we have only the
country, the land, only the body, or dark primitive
soul of Russia. But of the spirit as the power of
light, as the new social and national consciousness,
the quest of the future Russian city, which is beyond
St. Petersburg — the, as yet, unrevealed front and
head of Russia— there is no trace in Tolstoi. Dos-
toievski, with a different, but not inferior sensi-
tiveness, realizes both St. Petersburg and Moscow.
In his The Brothers Karamazov Alesha in the mon-
astery by the coffin of old Zosima awakes from a
portentous dream of Cana of Galilee, and goes forth
from the cell into the garden. " Above him spread

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wide and boundless the vault of heaven, thick with
still, shining stars. From the zenith to the horizon
the as yet dim milky way spread double. The fresh
yet motionless night enwrapped the earth. The
white towers and gilded pinnacles of the cathedral
gleamed in the hyacinthine sky. The luxuriant
flowers of the autumn in the parterres were slumber-
ing till the morning. The stillness of the earth
seemed blended with that of the sky ; its mystery
in contact with the mystery of the stars."

These white towers and golden pinnacles of the
Cathedral, shining in the hyacinth-coloured sky,
remind us of the mysterious mountains and towns
depicted with magical detail in the dim background
of old icons.

And here is a still more icon-like bit of nature ;
from the Possessed, where Lizaveta the deformed
tells about her life in the nunnery.

" I used to go to the shore of the lake : on one
side was our nunnery, and on the other our peaked
mountain, and they call it the Peak. I go up this
mountain, turn my face to the East, fall on the
ground, and weep, I forget how long, and then I
forget everything, and know nothing of it. I get
up by and by and turn back, but the sun comes up
— such a great, fiery, splendid sun. Do you like
looking at the sun ? It is fine, yet sad. I turn back
again towards the east, but the shadow, the shadow
from our mountain, runs far over the lake like a
shaft, narrow and long, very long ; and a half
mile further, right to the island in the lake, and
this stony island is cut in half by the shadow, and
as it cuts it in half the sun goes down altogether,

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and all suddenly grows dark. Then I begin to be
altogether weary, and then suddenly my memory
comes back : — I am afraid of the dark, Shatushka."

Here is the free charm of the knightly legends.
The ballad note is mingled with the peaceful and
dim monastic legend, with a national music as yet
unheard.

There is a notion current that Dosto'ievski. did
not love Nature. But though he certainly but little
and rarely describes it, that is, perhaps, just because
his love for it is too deep not to be restrained. He
does not wear his heart on his sleeve, but all the more
in his rare descriptions there is more vigour than in
anything of the kind in Tolstoi.

No, Dostoi'evski loved the land not less than he
loved the " body ' of Russia, but less the " tan-
gible " frame than the spiritualized face of that land.

Holy Russia lies to him in the past, and in the
yet distant future. Neither for the future nor the
past does he forget the near Russia of St. Petersburg
to-day. IHs for him " the most fantastic of towns,
with the most fantastic history of any town on
the globe"; that boasted "Paradise" of Peter the
Great, built as if on purpose with "Satanic intent,"
as a mock at men and Nature.

On one occasion Raskolnikov,1 after the murder,
is passing on a summer's day over the Nicolaev
Bridge, and stops and turns his face towards the
Neva in the direction of the Palace. " The sky was
without the slightest speck of cloud, and the water
almost a deep blue, a rare thing in the Neva. The

•.

1 In The Crime and the Punishment.

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cupola of the Cathedral, which does not show up
better than from this point, from the bridge, shone
so that through the pure air you could clearly dis-
tinguish each single ornament. An inexplicable chill
breathed on him always from all this magnificent
panorama : this gorgeous picture was to him full
of a deaf and dumb spirit"

From this terrible spirit, which seems alien and
Western, but really is native, the old Russian,
pre-Christian, " Varangian ' spirit of Pushkin and
Peter, came Raskolnikov, and in no small measure
Dostoiievski himself.

The " burgh of Peter " is not only the " most
fantastic," but the most prosaic of human cities.

Who knows St. Petersburg better, and hates it
more, and feels more overcome by it, than Dostoiev-
ski ? Yet, as we see, there are moments when he
suddenly forgives everything, and somehow loves
the place, as Peter loved his monstrous " Paradise '
and as Pushkin loved " Peter's handiwork." The
foundling of nature," the most outcast of towns, of
which even its inhabitants are secretly ashamed,
Dostoievski makes it, by the force of his affection,
pathetic, piteous, almost lovable and homelike,
almost beautiful; though curelessly diseased, yet
with a rare " decadent " beauty not easily attained.
; If I know of some happy places in St. Peters-
burg," admits Podrostok, " that is, places where,
for some reason or other, I have been happy, I save
up those places, and refrain from going to them for
as long as possible, for the express purpose of after-
wards, when I am quite lonely and miserable, going
there to be sad and remember."

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He says : "I love it when they sing to the barrel-
organ of a cold, dark, and damp autumn evening-
particularly when it is damp and all the passers-by
have pale-green and suffering faces ; or, still better,
when a damp snow is falling, quite straight, and the
air is windless, you know, and the gas lamps glimmer
through it."

" He took me," says another character, ' to a
small inn on the canal, down below. There were
few customers. A rickety, squeaking organ was
playing, and there was a smell of dirty napkins. We
took our seats in a corner. No doubt you do not
know the place. I like sometimes, when I am bored,
terribly bored and worried, to go into such dog holes.
The whole scene, the squeaking aria from ' ' Lucia,"
the waiters in national costumes that are scarcely
decent, the smoke-room, the cries from the billiard-
room — all that is so commonplace and prosaic that it
actually borders on the fantastic"

Precisely such dirty slummy inns, the " servants'
halls " of St. Petersburg cosmopolitanism, are to be
found in all Dostoievski's stories. In them take
place his most important, speculative, and im-
passioned conversations. And however strange it
may be, yet you feel that it is just the platitude of
this " cosmopolitan servants' hall " atmosphere, the
sordid realism and the commonplaceness, that give
to these talks their peculiarly modern, national
flavour, and make their stormy and apocalyptic
brilliance, like that of the sky before thunder, come
into full relief.

The granite pedestal of the Bronze Horseman of
St. Petersburg, rearing and reined in with an iron

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bit, though it seems so firm, yet stands on a shifting
putrid morass, from which spring ghostly mists.
' Sometimes," he writes, " it has occurred to me,
; What if, when this fog scatters and lifts, there
should depart with it the whole rotten flimsy town
— vanish like smoke — and only the old Finnish
swamp remain, with the Bronze Horseman for
ornament ? '

He was the first of us to feel and realize that
Peter's Russia, " pulled to her haunches by an iron
bit," like a plunging horse, "had reached some
boundary, and is now rearing over an abyss." ' Per-
haps it is some one's dream. Some one will awake
of a sudden, who has dreamed all this — and then it
will all disappear." Ah, Dostoi'evski knows, for a
certainty, that it will disappear ; knows that Russia
will abandon St. Petersburg ; yet will never go
back to Moscow for a capital, whither the Slavo-
philes call her. Nor will she resort still further back
to Tolstoi's rural Yasnaia Poliana and the plebeian,
but really squirearchal " Kingdom of God." He
knows that Russia will not continue at St. Peters-
burg.

Dostoi'evski saw in the later years of his life where
lies the new and final Russian capital. He quite
definitely realized that Petersburg, the second
capital of Russia, is merely a spectral and transi-
tional capital. That third, imperial, and final
Russian Rome will be Constantinople and the
Oecumenical Russian Cathedral, the Church of
St. Sophia.

What he says about Petersburg, " the most fan-
tastic of cities," Dostoievski says about his own

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works, all his artistic creations. " I am dreadfully
fond of realism in Art, when, so to speak, it is carried
to the fantastic. What can be more fantastic and
unexpected than reality ? Nay, what can, at times,
be more improbable ? What most people call fan-
tastic is, in my eyes, often the very essence of the
real."

All his heroes may be divided into two families,
opposite, yet having many points of contact. Either,
like Alesha, the Idiot, and Zosima, they are the men
of " the city that is to come," of the holy Russia
that is at once too old and too new, not yet in
existence ; or, like Ivan Karamazov, Rogojine,
Raskolnikov, Versilov, Stavrogine, and Svidri-
gailov, they are the men of the existing city, of
contemporary actual St. Petersburg, Petrine Russia.
The first seem spectral, but are real ; the second
seem real, but are spectral — mere " dreams within
a dream," a pitilessly fantastic dream, which has
now, for two centuries, been dreamed by Peter the
Brazen Horseman.

Raskolnikov sees in a dream the room in which
he murdered the old woman ; the huge, round,
copper-red moon was looking straight in at the
windows. "It is so quiet because of the moon,"
he thought. He stood and waited, waited long,
and the stiller the moonlight was the harder beat
his heart, till it ached and stopped ; and still there
was silence. Suddenly there came a momentary
dry cackle, as if some one was breaking a piece of
wood ; then all was silent again. A fly woke up
and suddenly knocked in its flight against the glass,
and buzzed a complaint." He saw the old usurer-

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woman, and struck her with the axe on the crown
once and again, but she broke out into a low, noise-
less laugh. The more he struck her the more she
shook with laughter. " He wanted to cry out, and
-awoke. He drew his breath hard, but, strange to
say, his dream seemed still to go on. His door was
opened wide, and in the doorway stood a man
totally strange to him, and looked steadily at him.
' Am I still dreaming or not ? ' he thought. Some
ten minutes passed. It was still light, but evening
was coming on. In the room there was perfect still-
ness. Even from the staircase not a single sound
came. There was only the buzzing and flapping of
a large fly, beating its wings against the glass."

This realistic, connecting " symbolic ' trait, the
fly buzzing in both the rooms ("all that you have,
we have too," says the Devil to Ivan Karamazov,
that is, all in the world of phenomena is also in
the world of realities — "in both rooms "), so knits
together dream and reality that the reader can
hardly tell where vision ends and reality begins.

' At last it grew intolerable. Raskolnikov sud-
denly sat up on the sofa. ' Well, tell me, what do
you want ? 3

; Why, I knew that you were not asleep, but
only pretending,' was the strange answer of the
unknown, who laughed calmly. ' Allow me to in-
troduce myself, Arkadii Svidrigailov.'

So ends the third part of Crime and Punish-
ment.

' Is this a continuation of my dream ? ' thought
Raskolnikov " ; such is the beginning of the fourth
part.

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' Cautiously and suspiciously he looked at the
unexpected visitor.

" * Svidrigailov ? What nonsense ! It is im-
possible ! ' he at length cried aloud in amazement."

And when, after a long interview, partly on busi-
ness, the visitor went away, Raskolnikov asks his
comrade, Razumikhin the student, " Did you see
him ? "

" * Well yes, I noticed him, noticed him well.'

" * You saw him distinctly ? Quite clearly ? ' in-
sisted he.

" ' Why, yes, I remember him distinctly. I would
know him in a thousand — I have a good memory for
faces.'

" Again there was a pause.

" * Hm — so — so,' muttered Raskolnikov. ' Well,
you know — I thought — it still seems to me — that
it was, perhaps, my fancy. Perhaps I am really
under a delusion and only saw a ghost.'

Svidrigailov is the result of his dream, and he
himself is all a sort of dream, like a thick, dirty-
yellow St. Petersburg fog. But if it is a ghost, then
it is one with flesh and blood. In that lies the horror
of it. There is nothing in it romantic, vague, in-
definite, or abstract. In the action of the story
Svidrigailov more and more takes form and sub-
stance, so that in the long run he proves more real
than the sanguine, beefy heroes of Tolstoi. Gradu-
ally we learn that this " most vicious of men," this
rascal, is capable of chivalrous magnanimity, of
delicate and unselfish feelings : when Raskolnikov's
sister Dunya, the innocent girl whom he has enticed
into a trap in order to seduce her, is already wholly

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in his power he suddenly sets her free, although he
knows for a certainty that this violence to himself
will cost him his own life. Just before his death he
concerns himself simply and self-sacrincingly, as if
for his own daughter, on behalf of the orphan girl
who is a stranger to him, and secures her fortune.
Are we to believe that he has no existence ? We
hear the tones of his voice, we see his face so that
we should " know him at once in a thousand." He
is more living and real to us than most of the people
we meet every day in so-called " real life."

But see, when we have grown finally to believe in
him, then, just as he emerged from the fog, so, most
prosaically, he vanishes into it.

" It was early morning. A milky, thick fog lay
over the town. Svidrigailov went off along the
slippery, muddy wood pavement in the direction of
the Little Neva. Not a passer-by, not a cab, did he
meet along the Prospect. Unlovely and dirty looked
the little bright-yellow houses, with their closed
shutters. The cold and damp seized hold of his
whole frame. He came in front of a large stone
house. A tall watch-tower flashed in sight to his
left. ' Bah ! ' he thought, ' there is the place. At
any rate I have an official witness.' He almost
laughed at the novel idea. At the closed great gates
of the house stood, leaning his shoulder against them,
a little man, muffled in a grey soldier's cloak, with
a brass Achilles helmet. His sleepy eyes rested in-
differently on the approaching Svidrigailov. On
his face appeared the everlasting, sulky discontent
which is bitterly imprinted on the faces of all
Hebrews without exception. They both, Svidri-

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gailov and the Achilles, for some time looked at
each other in silence. At last it occurred to Achilles
that it was irregular for the man not to be drunk
and stand in front of him three paces off, looking
point blank at him and saying nothing.

' Hey, what do you want here ? ' he cried, still
not stirring or changing his posture.

" ' Why, nothing, brother. Good morning ! ' re-
plied Svidrigailov.

" ' Here is no place for you.'

" ' I am going to other countries, lad.'

" ' To other countries ? '

" ' To America.'

" ' To America ? '

' Svidrigailov drew out his revolver and cocked
it. Achilles raised his eyebrows.

" ' Ah, well, this is no place for that sort of shoke '
(joke).

" ' And why is it not a place ? '

" ' Becosh it is not a place.'

" ' Well, lad, it is all the same to me. The place
is a good one ; when you are examined, answer that
I said I was going to America.'

And he put the revolver to his right temple.
* But you mushn't here — here is no place ! '
protested Achilles, opening his eyes still wider.

" Svidrigailov pulled the trigger."

This phantasm Svidrigailov is convincing. And
we, too, " are such stuff as dreams are made of."

The terror of " ordinary apparitions " lies partly
in the fact that, as it were, they are conscious of their
own paltriness and absurdity.

Does Science profess to exhaust all the actual

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possibilities of human consciousness ? Science
answers, " I do not know." But then it is just with
these ; I don't knows ' that the terror of phe-
nomena begins ; and the deeper the ' ignoramus '
(and when was it deeper than now ?) the more our
disquiet. We had hoped that all the shadows of the
non-scientific would vanish in the light of Science,
but, on the contrary, the brighter the light, the
blacker, more distinctly defined and mysterious are
the shadows become. We have but extended the
field of our ignorance. Men have become scientific,
and their shadows, the ghosts, imitating and hurrying
after them, grow scientific too. The phantasms
themselves do not believe, or at least affect disbelief
in their own reality, and laughingly style themselves
delirium, or hallucination.

Not only do Dostoievski's spectres pursue the
living, but the living themselves pursue and terrify
each other like spectres, like their own shadows, like
their doubles. " You and I are fruit off the same
tree," says Svidrigailov to Raskolnikov, and in spite
of all his resistance, his callousness, the latter feels
that it is true ; that they have certain points in
common ; that, perhaps, even their personalities
have a common centre. Svidrigailov has only gone
immeasurably further along the road which Raskol-
nikov has barely begun ; and shows him the inevitable
super-scientific deductions from his own logic about
good and evil — stands him in stead of a magic mirror.
And being conclusively convinced that Svidrigailov
is not a delusion or a ghost, but living, he is just for
that reason far more afraid than ever of his own
shadow, his own double. " I dread that man," he

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says. " Do you know what ? ' Ivan Karamazov
tells his footman Smerdiakov, " I am afraid you are
a vision, a phantom that is sitting there before me."
: There is no ghost here, no,' answers Smerdia-
kov, ' except us two, and some third, other person.
The third man is between us two?

" ' Who is ? What other ? What third ? ' cried
Ivan in alarm, looking about him and hurriedly
searching all the corners with his eyes."

This "third' link, in Smerdiakov's opinion,
Providence, or God, turned out later for Ivan's
benefit the earthly incarnation of the Smerdiakov
spirit, the Devil.

" You have killed," says Smerdiakov to him
("for you are the murderer, and I only the faithful
accomplice). It was at your order that I did it."

Peter Verkhovenski, another character, is also the
faithful accomplice of his master, his demigod, his
legendary " Ivan the Tsarevich," Stavrogine. The
latter plainly says " I laugh at my ape." And this
dark, withered, monkey-like mask, still an endlessly
deep and faithful mirror, is not only ridiculous to
Stavrogine, but terrible. When he chances to call
Peter a buffoon, the latter retorts with terrific
vigour, and what seems justifiable heat, "I am a
buffoon, but I do not wish you, my larger half, to be
one. Do you understand me ? '

' Stavrogine understood, and he alone, it may
be," adds Dostoievski significantly. Stavrogine
alone understands Verkhovenski, as God alone under-
stands the Devil, his everlasting " ape."

Thus with Dostoievski we often get tragical con-
trasted couples of lifelike, realistic people, who seem

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to themselves and others integral personages —
halves of some third divided being, halves that seek
one another, doubles that shadow one another.

Says one half to the other what Ivan, with such
unwarrantable fervour, says to the Devil, " Not for
a moment do I take you for an actual fact. You are
a lie, you are my illness ; only I do not know how
to exorcise you. You are my hallucination, my
other mask. You are only one side of me : my
thoughts and feelings, but only the most contemp-
tible and foolish ones. All that there is of foolish in
my nature," groans he spitefully, "is long since over,
recast, thrown aside as rubbish, and you bring it
to me as a discovery. You say just what I think,
and are unable to say anything new to me"

Ah ! there's the rub ! Can the Demon really
say anything new or not ? All the terror of this
apparition to Ivan — nay, to Dostoievski himself —
lies just in this. Well, what if he can ? In any case
there is no doubt that the Familiar of Ivan Kara-
mazov is one of the greatest national creations of
Dostoievski, unlike anything else in the world's
literature, a creation that has its roots seated in
the inmost recess of his consciousness and of his
unconsciousness. It is not for nothing that he ex-
presses by the mouth of the Familiar his own most
oracular thoughts. We might trace how Dostoiev-
ski arrived at him all through his characters. As
regards his essence, the Demon speaks in almost the
same words as Dostoievski himself of the essence
of his own artistic creations, of the first source of
that generative power from which all his works
proceeded.

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" I am dreadfully fond of realism — realism that is,
so to speak, carried to the fantastic. What most people
call fantastic to me forms the very essence of the real"
says the Demon, " and therefore I love your earthly
realism. Here with you everything is marked out,
here are formulas and geometry, but with us all is
a matter of indefinite equations. I walk about here
and dream. I love to dream. Besides, on earth I
become superstitious — don't laugh, please : I like
it. I accept all your habits here : I have got to like
going to the tradesman's baths, that you may
imagine, and I like steaming in company with
tradesmen and priests. My dream is to be incar-
nated, but finally, irrevocably, and therefore in some
fat eight een-stone tradesman's wife, and to believe
in all that she believes in."

This seems coarse and absurd, but we must re-
member that the keenest and sharpest pain ever
felt by Dostoievski was hidden under this empty
mask : the weariness and revolt of the Devil against
all that is ghostly or fantastic, against all ' in-
definite equations," are the weariness and revolt
of himself : it is his own longing for " earthly
realism," for " incarnation," for the health he had
lost, the disturbed equilibrium of spirit and flesh.
For this earthly " geometry," for his clear, precise
formulas, for his " immutable ' adherence to the
senses, he loved Pushkin as he did ; constantly torn
from the earth, carried away by the whirlwind of
his spectral visions, he sought in Pushkin points of
support, and convulsively clung to him as to his
native soil. He went still further, for in his gravita-
tion towards the " sons of the soil " and the Moscow

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Slavophiles (also in their way " eighteen-stone
tradesmen's wives") he found a refuge for himself
from the terrible, sincere, inhuman reality.

' People take all this comedy ' (the world of
phenomena) " for something serious, in spite of all
their undoubted wit," says the Demon further on
in his talk with Ivan. " In that lies the tragedy.
Well, they suffer, no doubt, but still they live, they
live really, not in fancy : for suffering, too, is life."

But yet the Devil is not for nothing " the third
between the two," the link between the Russian,
half -cosmopolitan, " squireen ' Ivan, and the
national yet cosmopolitan valet, Smerdiakov. The
Demon smacks of the most modern cosmopolitan
frivolity : he seems at times old-fashioned, well-
born, very economical (" has a look of neatness on
very slender means "), and also recalls the sus-
picious " gentleman ' of the latest minor press.
And the apparition seems to take a pride in this
" human, too human " trait, in this " immortal
frivolity of mankind," and teases Ivan with it.

Only at rare intervals, as if by accident, does he
let slip some word which reminds Ivan with whom
Ivan has to do. And then there looks out from
behind the human face " Another " : " All that you
have, we have ; that one secret of ours I reveal to
you as a friend in confidence, although it is against
the rules."

Here is an incomplete revelation from the region
of Noumena, a glimpse of something further and
darker than eye of man has ever reached. This is
abstract dialectics, the " critique of knowledge '
embodied in flesh and blood, laughter and terror.

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Such " noumenal ' thoughts, or mere shadows of
thoughts, must have been puzzling Goethe when he
created the " Mothers " in the second part of Faust,
and Kant when thinking out his Transcendental
Aesthetics.

Ivan, at times, cannot restrain himself ; suddenly
forgets that the Demon " cannot tell him anything
new," and gets curious.

" Is there a God, or not ? ' ' he cries with savage
persistence. " Oh, so you are in earnest ? My dear
fellow, by the Lord / don't know. There's a big
admission for me to make ! '

" You don't know, and yet you see Him ? No, I
forgot, you have no existence of your own — you are
merely my own imagination."

Ivan is angry because he secretly feels himself
wrong ; for, in spite of the wretched pun, the Devil,
by this cynical " I don't know," has answered his
question about God, an idle "unscientific' ques-
tion, with the final agnostic verdict of science.
This " I don't know " is the inevitable fruit, the
dead and deadening fruit of the Tree of Knowledge,
ungrafted on the Tree of Life.

Nietzsche, even at the time when he had over-
come, as he fancied, all the metaphysical ' sur-
vivals ' ' could not get rid of one of them — the most
ancient, feared, and obstinate of all. On one oc-
casion there appears to Zarathustra a dwarf, a
repulsive hunchback, the spirit of " earthly heavi-
ness," and reminds him of this inevitable meta-
physical illusion, the " eternal revisitings." Zara-
thustra, without answering, is seized with fear and
consternation, and falls to the ground as one dead.

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Compare Dostoievski : " You are always thinking
of our present earth," the Devil says to Ivan. " Why,
you know, our present earth has been renewed, per-
haps, a billion times. It has been worn out, frozen,
cracked, split up, dissolved into its component
principles, water has again flooded the face of the
dry land ; then whack ! a comet again. Sun again,
and the sun has brought back the land ; you see
this is evolution, already repeated an endless number
of times, and always in one and the same form to a
hair. It's a terrible bore." " I tell you candidly,"
Svidrigailov once owns to Raskolnikov, with a
wonderful air of simplicity, " / am very bored"

" I like to be magnificently bored." And he orders
" Lucia di Lammermoor " on the barrel organ.

This metaphysical ennui is the most terrible of
human misfortunes and sufferings. In this " earthly
heaviness," in this terrestrial tedium, there is some-
thing unearthly, not of this world, as it were primi-
tive, connected with the similar, likewise " meta-
physical/' delusion about " immortality," for in-
stance. " Eternity ' may be sometimes imagined
as something by no means vast. Say a neglected
village Turkish bath-room, with musty cobwebs in
all its corners.

Svidrigailov, no doubt, is not less aware than the
Posit i vis ts that " spiders " and " a bath-room " are
merely " phenomena," things seen, and that bath-
rooms cannot, of course, exist in the region of the
Noumena. But then phenomena are merely symbols,
only the names for what is behind them.

Sometimes in reading Dostoievski a sort of chill
comes over me : a chill, perhaps, that is not of this

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earth — as it were the chill of the expanses of the
universe where

?Tis fearsome, fearsome, in will's despite,
Amid the viewless plains. . . . . :

This is the terror of the " eternal revisitings," of
the endless repetitions of which the Demon speaks
to Ivan and the dwarf to Zarathustra ; it is the
weariness of the " neglected bath-room with spiders
in the corner " — the endless monotony in variety
of cosmic phenomena, risings and settings, ebbings
and flowings, the kindling and dying out of the
suns — it is that weary " Lucia ' on the cracked
organ, the " solemnity of boredom ' felt at times,
even in the roar of the sea waves and the voices of
the night wind :

Of what is thy crying, wind of the night ?
Of what dost thou plain thee so wildly ?
O sing not these terrible strains
Of chaos in which thou wast born !
How eager the world in the night-mood
To list to the tale that she loves.
From a mortal's lorn bosom it bursts,
Longing to mix with the boundless,
To wake the storms from their sleep,
For beneath them stirs chaos and heaves.

The Demon confesses : "I was there when the
Word that died on the Cross entered into Heaven,
bearing on His bosom the soul of the thief that had
been crucified on His right hand. I heard the joyous
outcries of the Cherubim, singing and shouting ' Ho-
sanna ! ' and the thunderous roar of exultation of
the Seraphim, which shook the sky and the fabric of
the world ; and I swear by all that is holy I wished

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to join the choir and cry with them all * Hosanna ! ' ;
there already escaped, there already broke from my

breast "

But at this point, sparing his victim for the time,
he again hides behind his " human, too human
mask," and concludes with levity : " I am very sen-
timental, you know, and artistically susceptible.
But common sense — my most unfortunate quality —
kept me within due limits, and I let the moment pass.
For what, I asked myself at the time, what would
have resulted after my ' Hosanna ! ' ? That instant
all would have come to a standstill in the world, and
no events would have taken place. And so, simply
from a sense of duty and my social position, I was
forced to suppress in myself the good impulse and
stick to villainy. Some one else takes all the honour
of doing good to himself, and I am left only the bad
for my share."

4 1 know, of course, there is a secret there, but i
They will not reveal it to me at any price, because,
forsooth, if I found out the actual facts I should break
out into a ' Hosanna ! ' and instantly the indispen-
sable minus quantity would vanish. Reason would
begin to reign all over the earth, and with it, of
course, there would be an end of everything. But as
long as this does not happen, as long as the secret is
kept, there exist for me two truths, one up yonder,
Theirs, which is quite unknown to me, and another
which is mine. And it is still unknown which will
be the purer of the two."

These words concerning the two co-existent
Truths, eternally-correlated, yet distinct, as im-
mediately afterwards the Fiend explains, to con-

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

elude the interview, are the truths of the God-man
and that of the Man-god, Christ and Antichrist.

From the contact and collision of these " two
Truths " came Dostoievski's fire of doubt. " Really
I do not believe in Christ and His creed as a boy
believes, but my Hosanna has passed through a great
furnace of doubt, as the Devil says in my pages in
that very story " ; so runs one of his latest diaries.

These " two Truths " have, of course, always
existed for Tolstoi too, not in his deliberate judg-
ment, but in his instinct. But he never had the
strength or courage, like Dostoi'evski, to look them
both straight in the face.

However, even in Dostoi'evski, the strongest of his
heroes cannot stand this view of the two Truths,
side by side : Ivan throws a glass at the Fiend like
a woman, as if in dread that he will in the end really
tell him something new, too new. And it would
seem that he himself could not bear the theory, and
never spoke his last decisive word on the subject.

His Principle of Evil, of Loss, says merely : ' /
am leading you between alternate waves of belief and
disbelief, and that is the object I have in view"

Does it not seem as if this Fiend, in spite of his
tail, like a "Great Dane's," and the fact that "philo-
sophy is not his strong point," had read to advan-
tage the Critique of Pure Reason ? The Voltaireans
of the eighteenth and our own century (for there are
not a few of them in our day, though under other
names), these " philosophers without mathematics,"
as Halley, the friend of Newton, put it, would cer-
tainly have managed to deal with him without much
difficulty. But perhaps minds of more exactitude

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and judgment than theirs, minds of the stamp of
Pascal and Kant, would have had to wrestle in the
same way, to " put forth their manhood " against
this phantom, in order to drive out the " ten-
thousandth part " of doubt or belief, which he still
inspires.

Leaving the Romanticists out of the question,
even such a lover of all that was realistic as Goethe
sometimes felt that the paltriness of the Europe of
his day was getting too much for him ; and in his
search after the supernatural, which, if it did not
quench, at least assuaged the religious thirst, went
to the Middle Ages or classical antiquity. Dos-
toievski first, and so far alone, among writers of
modern times, has had the strength, while adhering
to present-day actuality, to master and transform it
into something more mysterious than all the legends
of past ages. He was the first to see that what
seems most trivial, rough, and fleshly marches with
what is most spiritual, or, as he called it, " fantastic,"
i.e. religious. And he was the first that succeeded
in finding the sources of the supernatural, not in the
remote, but in penetrating the ordinary.

Not in abstract speculations, but in exact experi-
ments, worthy of our present science, in human souls
did Dostoievski show that the work of universal
history, which began with the Renaissance and the
Reformation, the method of strictly scientific, criti-
cal, discriminating thought, if not already completed,
is approaching completion ; that " this road has all
been traversed to the end, so that there is no further
to go," and that not only Russia, but all Europe has
' reached a certain final point and is tottering over

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

an abyss." At the same time he showed with an
almost complete clearness of judgment that we must
inevitably turn to the work of the new thought,
creative and religious.

All the veils of obsolete, theological, or meta-
physical dogmatism have been removed or torn
away by the criticism of knowledge. But behind
these veils there proved to be not barren emptiness,
not unvarying ineptitude (as the facile sceptics of
the eighteenth century supposed, with their light
incredulity), but a living and attracting deep, the
most living and the most attractive ever laid bare
before men's eyes. The overthrow of dogmatism
not only does not prevent, but more than anything
tends to the possibility of a true religion ./Super-
stitious, fabulous phantasms lose their substance,
but reality itself beomes merely conditional, not
superstitious, but only unbelieving, and for some
reason, all the more it does so, more than ever a
phantom. Religious and metaphysical dreams lose
their reality, but waking itself becomes " as real as
dreams." How much more terrible, much more
monstrous than Dante's Hell, in which rules a certain
kind of wild justice, that is religious Cosmos, are
these " waking dreams," no longer sanctified by any
kind of religion, and all chaotic : as fantastical and
yet as real is the raving of Zarathustra about
" eternal revisitings." Is it possible, in fact, to
live with such blind ravings, to which science re-
plies only with her cynical "Go to a doctor," or
with the dry and laconic " I don't know," like
knocking one's forehead against a wall ? No, after
four centuries of labour and critical reflection the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

world does not remain as terrible and mysterious as
it was. It has become still more awe-inspiring and
enigmatic. In spite of all its unspeakable outward
dulness and poorness, in spite of this commonplace-
ness, the world has never yet been so ripe for re-
ligion as in our day, and withal for a religion that
is final and will complete the world's evolution,
partly fulfilled at the first, and predicted for the
second coming of the Word.

In fact present-day European man has before him
the unavoidable choice between three courses. The
first is final recovery from the disease which in that
case men would have to call the " idea of God."
This would be recovery to a greater blank than the
present, because now at least men suffer. Com-
plete positive recovery from " God " is possible only
in the complete, but as yet only dimly foreshadowed,
vacuity of a social tower of Babel. The second
course is to die of this complaint by final degenera-
tion, decay, or " decadence," in the madness of
Nietzsche and Kirillov, the prophets of the Man-
god, who, forsooth, is to extirpate the God-man.
And, lastly, the third resort is the religion of a last
great union, a great Symbolon, the religion of a
Second Coming, the religion of the voluntary end
of all.

Here, by the bye, it is necessary to make a reserva-
tion. Dostoievski was not fully conscious, or pre-
tended not to be conscious of the importance to his
own religious ideas of the most cherished and
profound idea in Christianity, the idea of the end,
of the Second Kingdom, which is to complete and
supplement the first — of the Kingdom of the Spirit,

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

which is to come after that of the Son. Dostoievski
thought more of the first than of the second, more of
the reign of the Son than of that of the Spirit ; and
believed more in Him who was and is than in Him
who was, is, and is to be. That which men have
already received in his eyes outweighed that which
they, as yet, cannot receive.

He only put his riddles to us. From the ne-
cessity of solving them he himself was divided only
by a hair's breadth. But we are face to face with
them ; we must either solve them, or gradually
perish.

298

CHAPTER XVI

WHAT is the true relation between Art and Religion ?
It is a difficult subject. But I may venture to say
that, in the view taken of beauty by the so-called
aesthetes in their doctrine of " Art for Art's sake,"
there is something that is, perhaps, true, but in-
sufficiently modest. Beauty loves to be seen, but
does not love to be pointed at. Beauty, I say, is
modest : she seems altogether the most modest
thing in the world, covering herself as God does,
who covers His inmost spirit with the half-trans-
parent veil of phenomena.

In the aesthetes' view of beauty there is also a
certain lack of pride. Beauty loves to be served,
but loves also to serve. The great artists sometimes
make her a slave, or victim, as if they were sacri-
ficing or were ready to sacrifice her to higher powers,
because they know that at the very last minute,
before the act of sacrifice, like Iphigenia under the
knife of her father Agamemnon, beauty will become
fairer than ever ; in sooth, at that last moment, for
the most part the gods save her by a miracle, and, like
Iphigenia, carry her to inaccessible coasts, where
she becomes their immortal daughter.

Tragedy, the most perfect creation of the Hellenic
spirit, was the outcome of a religious mystery, and

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

throughout its evolution, preserved a living con-
nexion with religion, so that the action of the drama
was half a religious service, the theatre half a temple.
Just in the same way all great art in its prime was
the handmaid of religion. It was only when, by
contact with the coarser and more outward Roman
culture, this link of Art with Religion was snapped,
when they began to collect the gods (from whom
life had already fled) into Pantheons and museums
and palaces of the Caesars as objects of luxury and
gratification, when the phenomena of the beautiful
were exhausted, that talk about beauty began, and
Alexandrian "aestheticism," "Art for Art's sake,"
Art as a religion in itself, came into vogue. And this
doctrine, begotten in a sterile time and generating
nothing, was the precursor of Roman decline and
" decadence."

In the untutored " symbolic " prattle of Christian
wall-painting in the catacombs the severed bond
between Art and Religion is again knit and becomes
more vital, more binding ; from the first subter-
ranean basilicas, the Galilean legends of the Good
Shepherd, to the Gothic spires rising into the sky
of mediaeval cathedrals, and " the consecrated
gestes," the Mystery plays, from which came the
new drama.

The Italian Renaissance seemed once more to
destroy, but in reality only transformed this bond.
The face of Christ in Leonardo's Last Supper is not
the face of the Christ whose vicegerent is the Pope,
whether he be Gregory, Hildebrand, or Alexander
Borgia : the " prophets and sibyls on the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel are the Old Testament ancestors

30Q

TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

and ancestresses of the New Testament, which has
no place in the Catholic Church, and cannot have.
Both the great propagators of the religious spirit of
the Renaissance, Leonardo and Michael Angelo, are
nearest to us, and will probably be nearer to our
descendants than to their own contemporaries. They
both deepened and strengthened the connexion of
Art with Religion, but jwith the Religion not of the
present, but of the future.

In any case, neither of them enters the territory
of " Art for Art's sake " : they are more than artists.
Michael Angelo is a sculptor-painter, a sculptor even
in his painting, the designer of St. Peter's, the
builder of Florentine fortifications, the favourite of
Vittoria Colonna, poet, scholar, thinker, prophet.
But even he seems almost limited compared with
Leonardo. The artistic creations and immense
scientific notebooks of Leonardo, until quite lately
not explored or appreciated, for want of a similarly
all-embracing intelligence, give only a feeble idea of
the actual extent of his powers. Apparently no man
ever carried with him to the grave such a store of
well-nigh superhuman possibilities.

Raphael, as if alarmed at this incredible inheri- ,
tance, took for his province only the smallest and
least weighty part of it. He immensely contracted
and narrowed the sphere of his contemplation : he
confined himself to aiming at the possible, and for
his pains actually achieved it : he wished only to
be an artist, and so really was one in a more com-
plete measure than the two others. But at the same
time through Raphael, this " fortunate lad " —
' fortunato garzon" as Francia calls him — was ac-

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

complished the passage of the great world-historical
mountain-barrier of the Renaissance — the ascent
was at an end, the descent began. He made possible
the phenomenon of such an " asthete," the pre-
cursor of our present-day asthetic repletion and
monotony, as Pietro Aretino, who scowled at Leo-
nardo, laughed at Michael Angelo, and defied Titian,
as the incarnator of " pure beauty," Art, not for
Religion, but as a Religion, the purely material, posi-
tive, epicurean, godless religion of self-gratification,
of " Art for Art's sake."

Now Tolstoi and Dostoievski have two character-
istics which approximate them to the great initiators
of all " Renascence." In the first place the art of
both is in communion with religion, but that not of
the present, but the future. In the second they do
not dwell within the bounds of Art as a self-sufficing
religion, what is called " pure Art." Their feet
cannot but transgress these bounds and pass out
beyond them.

The weakness and the error of Tolstoi lie not in
the fact that he wished to be more, but merely in
this, that in his efforts to be more he sometimes
became less than an artist ; not in his wishing to
serve God by his art, but in his serving not his own,
but another's God.

And yet in him and such as him we feel the real,
though not yet realized, possibility of a profounder,
a more religious theory of Art than the purely
artistic. Is it not just in this constant inward
struggle and suffering, in this insatiate and insatiable
thirst for fame merely as an artist, in this unheard-of
self-mortification and suicide of genius that lies the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

true tragic greatness and glory of the man ? For
even merely to will is sometimes a mark of greatness :
one must first merely will in order that another may
both will and achieve.

As regards Dostoi'evski then, it is already, I fancy,
quite plain that his creations as little satisfy the
' aesthetic," the worshippers of " pure beauty," of
' Art for Art's sake," as their opponents who look
for the useful and the good in the beautiful, to whom
Dostoievski will always seem a " cruel genius." He
not only had in him to fulfil, but in a considerable
measure realized, one of the greatest possibilities of
our day. He had not the special gift of Tolstoi, yet
had one that was not less important. He not only
wished to be, but was, the proclaimer of a new re-
ligious view, and a prophet indeed.

We can understand the consternation of one of
the worthy Popes at the countless number of bare
bodies painted by Michael Angelo on the ceiling and
wall behind the throne of the Sis tine Chapel. He
could not see that these bodies were sacred and
spiritual, or at any rate might be spiritualized.
Perhaps he experienced a feeling like Prince Andrei
at the sight of " the number of soldiers stripped and
disporting themselves ' in the muddy pond on the
Smolensk road, a feeling of terror and aversion.

In fact it is just here in the Sistine Chapel that ;
Michael Angelo, with unheard-of boldness, stripped^
Man of his thousand-year-old Christian covering and,
like the ancients, again looked into the mystic depths
of the body — that inaccessible "gulf," as Tolstoi
calls it. And in the faces of the naked, weeping,
seemingly intoxicated youths, the elemental Demons

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOEVSKI AS ARTISTS

round the Old Testament frescoes in the Sistine, as
in the face of Moses at San Pietro in Vincoli, that
dread, inhuman face, with the monstrous horns
instead of a nimbus, Pan-like, Satyr-like, goatish,
we see revived the Aryan idea, immemorially old,
yet ever new, of the union of the divine and the
animal, of " God's creature," of the God-beast.
These half-gods, half-beasts, by whom the natural
is carried into the supernatural, these beings, huge-
sinewed and muscular, in whom " we see only the
face and the body, but the soul at times seems
absent," are pjrpgtTarvt with an electric, Bacchic
excess of animal life, like the " Night " and " Morn-
ing" of the Medici monument, the "Cumaean Sibyl,"
or the " ^cythian captives," as if they wished, but
could not awake out of a trance, and with vain,
incredible effort were striving after thought, con-
sciousness, spiritualization, deliverance from the
flesh, the stone, the matter which binds them.
There is nothing that has less desire to be Christian
than they.

Now, as Michael Angelo looked into the abyss of
the flesh, so Leonardo contemplated its opposite,
the not less deep abyss of the spirit. He, so to speak,
started at the point which Michael Angelo had just
reached. All his productions are " spiritual bodies,"
carried to a degree of ethereality and transparency
at which it would seem the spirit within burns
through them : they " scarcely feel that they have
bodies on them." Leonardo's caricatures of men
and animals, those faces full of diabolical distortion,
like the other faces in his drawings, full of angelical
charm, in which, as Dostoi'evski puts it, ' ' the secret

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOlEVSKI AS ARTISTS

of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars,"
are like visions or phantoms, but they are phantoms
of mathematically-defined and exact construction,
phantoms with flesh and blood, most fantastic, and
at the same time most life-like. " I love realism
when it is carried to the fantastic," says Dostoievski.
Seemingly both he and Leonardo might say with
the greatest truth, " I love the fantastic when it is
carried to the point of realism." To them both " the
fantastic sometimes constitutes the very essence of the
actual" They both seek and find " what is sub-
stantial as a dream" by pushing to the extremest
limits the realistic and the actual. The creator of
Monna Lisa, too, is a great psychologist, " a realist
in the highest sense," because he " explores all the
depths of the human soul." He, too, makes cruel,
even criminal " experiments with human souls."
In these experiments we find our modern scientific
curiosity that shrinks from nothing, a combination
of geometrical exactness with enthusiastic insight.
His most abstract thought is his most passionate
thought ; it is of God, of the First Mover within the
divine mechanism, Primo Motore. Mechanics and
religion, learning and love, ice and fire, go together.

; Love is the daughter of Learning : the more exact
the learning, the more fiery the love." Leonardo
was the first to depict the new tragedy — the tragedy
not only of the heart, but of reason — in his Last
Supper, in the birth of Evil, by which God died in
Man, through the opposition of the passionate,

' human, too human," figure of Judas and the calm
superhuman figure of the Lord. Who was nearer

than he, to the first secret appearance of the Word

3°5 x

i

TOLSTOI AND DOSTO'fEVSKI AS ARTISTS

made Flesh, to the reign of the Son ? Was it not
only a step that divided the maker of the figure of
Christ in the Last Supper from the second incarna-
tion in which I believe, from the ever-intensifying
reign of the Spirit ? But Leonardo never took that
step ; and so he never finished the face of Christ on
the wall of Maria delle Grazie. His dream- •" to be
incarnated finally and without recall ' -thus re-
mained only a dream. And, in spite of all his love
for Euclidian formulae, for earthly " realism," he
yet passed over the earth, scarcely leaving a trace :
like a shadow, a phantom, a bloodless spirit, with
silent lips and face avertecLy

The excess of spiritual sensitiveness, the acuteness
of it which we find in Leonardo, expressed as much
morbidity, decadence, incompleteness, as the excess
of the bodily, the animal, the elemental " whirl of
chaos " in Michael Angelo.

Such are these two gods or Demons of the Renais-
sance in their external contradiction and their
eternal oneness.

They were two likenesses of Daemons twain :

One like the Delphian image, a young form,

Angered and full of awful majesty

And breathing all of power beyond these realms.

The other, womanlike, and formed for passion,

A dubious phantom and deceptive,

A witching Demon, fair as he was false.

Raphael not only failed to reconcile, but failed to
feel this contradiction. But the truce in him be-
tween the two chimeras was too facile and super-
ficial, too cheaply purchased, safe and rational-
" both ours and yours." This feminine submission

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

./vith regard to Christianity and Paganism, the pro-
phetic vision of Ezekiel and that of Pope Leo X.,
this insinuating flattery of the " fortunate lad,"
opened in the end the door to the hypocritical, cold
Philistine and unoriginal convention of " secentism '
which ruined the Renaissance and prevented its
1 ripening " and succeeding. Even now it is await-
ing completion.

But this contradiction could not be evaded. It
awoke with the spirit of the Renaissance in men like
Goethe and Nietzsche. It could not fail also to j
affect the two latest exponents of national Renais-
sance, Tolstoi and Dostoievski.

We have seen that Tolstoi is the greatest por-
trayer of the human animal in language, as Michael
Angelo was in colours and marble. He is the first
who has dared to strip the human frame of all social
and historical wrapping and again entertain the
Aryan idea. Tolstoi is the Russian Michael Angelo,
the re-discoverer of the human body, and although
we feel all over his works the Semitic dread of the
body, yet he has felt the possibility of a final victory
over this dread, complete as in the days of Praxiteles
and Phidias. J

Just as Tolstoi has explored the depths of the
flesh, so Dostoievski explored those of the spirit, and
showed that the upper gulf is as deep as the lower,
-that one degree of human consciousness is often
divided from another, one thought from another by
as great an inaccessibility as divides the human
embryo from non-existence. And he has wrestled
with the terrors of the Spirit, that of consciouness
/over-distinct and over-acute, with the terror of all

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

that is abstract, spectral, fantastical, and at the
same time pitilessly real and matter-of-fact. Men
feared or hoped that some day reason would dry
up the spring of the heart, that knowledge would
kill emotion, not conscious that they are coupled
and that one is impossible without the other. That
fact embodies our last and highest hope.

Raphael, the uniter, or would-be uniter of the two
opposite poles of the Italian Renaissance, followed
after Leonardo and Michael Angelo. The order of
trinity of our Russian Renaissance is reversed. Our
Raphael is Pushkin. And he precedes Tolstoi and
Dostoi'evski, who have consciously divided and
fathomed what was by nature in Pushkin uncon-
sciously combined. If Tolstoi be the thesis, Dos-
toi'evski the antithesis, there must, by the law of
— - — -' » j

dialectical evolution, follow a final, harmonizing
Symbolon, higher than Pushkin's, because more
profound, religious, and deliberate.

Yet, while thinking of the future, it is impossible
to leave out of the question the present of our
national culture. And that is just where our doubt,
our humility begins. Can we, in fact, disguise from
ourselves that this present is more than painful,
that it seems almost hopeless ? It is hard to believe
that present Russian culture is the same which a
generation and a half ago gave to the world at once
in quick succession two such phenomena as Peter
and Pushkin, and in the following half century
Tohtoi and Dostoievski. It is hard to believe that
scarcely a quarter of a century ago, almost within
the memory of the present generation, the two
greatest works of the European literature of the

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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKI AS ARTISTS

day were produced in Russia — Anna Karenina and
The Brothers Karamazov. After these two great
national attainments, what a sudden falling away,
what an abrupt descent !

Russia may be proud of her geniuses, but would
these geniuses have been proud of their country
to-day ?

On all the phenomena of our modern spirit is set
the seal of philosophic and religious impotence and
unfruitfulness.

Would Dostoi'evski the prophet, if now alive,1
have abjured his prophecy concerning the world-
wide destiny of the Russian spirit ? A friend of
his, once a passionate believer in that destiny,
wrote at last :

And lo ! the Lord inexorably
Has rejected thee, my country !

The political and outward social helplessness of
that social order is vaster still. Nietzsche is the
culminating point — none can go further — of the
revolt against that society. We Russians cannot,
as we have so often done before, evade the responsi-
bility— put it off our shoulders on to those of
Western Europe. We must look to ourselves for \
salvation, if salvation of Europe there is to be.

There is a handful of Russians — certainly no more
— hungering and thirsting after the fulfilment of
their new religious Idea : who believe that in a
fusion between the thought of Tolstoi and that of
Dostoi'evski will be found the Symbol — the union —
to lead and revive.

1 He died in 1881:
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TOLSTOI AND DOSTOIEVSKY AS ARTISTS

A child's hand may unseal the invisible will in any
one of us ; may unseal the spring of immense and
exploding waters — living forces of destruction and
regeneration. It needs, perhaps, but that the
meanest of us should say to himself : " Either I
must do this thing, or none will," and the face of
the earth will be changed.

NOTE. — The author has continued the above subject in a
Study of the Religion of Tolstoi and Dostoevski.
Whether this Study shall be given to the English
and American public will depend upon the reception
accorded to his foregoing book. — ED.

Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.

310

The Forerunner

The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci

By DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI

Crown 8vo. Price 6s.

" A novel of very remarkable interest and power. It
is a most vivid picture of a most vivid and picturesque
time." — Guardian.

" A finer study of the artistic temperament at its
best could scarcely be found. And Leonardo is the
centre of a crowd of striking figures. It is impossible
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PAGE

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND CRITICISM . . 3
TRAVEL . . . . . . . . . . .14

SPORT . . ... . . . . . . 17

NAVAL AND MILITARY . . . . . . . 18

FINE ART 20

EDUCATIONAL AND TECHNICAL . aa

RELIGIOUS 31

FICTION 33

POETRY 43

BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG 47

INDEX 49

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INDEX TO AUTHORS

ADDISON, JOSEPH, 22.

« Alien,' 33.

Allen, Rev. G. C., 42.

Andom, R., 33.

Anitchkow, Michael, 3.

Anon., 3, 33.

Arber, Professor Edward, 22-25.

Argyll, Duke of, 33.

Armstrong, Arthur Coles, 42.

Arnold, T. W., 3.

Arnold, Sir Edwin, 45.

Ascham, Roger, 22, 23.

BACON, LORD, 23.
Bain, R. Nisbet, 3.
Ballin, Mrs. A., 26.
Bankes, Roden, 26.
Barmby, Beatrice Helen, 42.
Barnfield, Richard, 25.
Bartholomew, J.G.,F.R.G.S., 14.
Bates, Arlo, 33.
Battersby, Caryl, 42.
Battye, A. Trevor-, F.L.S., 14.
Baughan, B. E., 42.
Bayley, Sir Steuart Colvin, 7.
Beatty, William, M.D., 3.
Beaumont, Worby, 26.
Berthet, E., 33. '
Bertram, James, 4.
Bidder, George, 42.
Bidder, M., 33.

Birdwood, Sir George, M.D.,
K.C.I.E., C.S.I., LL.D., 15.
Birrell, Augustine, Q. C. , M. P. , 4.
Black, C. E. D., 10.
Blount, Bertram, 26.
Bonavia, Emmanuel, M.D., 26.
Boswell, James, 4.
Bower, Marian, 33.
Brabant, Arthur Baring, 10.
Bradley, A. G., 4.
Brame, J. S. S., 28.
Bright, Charles, F.R.S.E., 4.
Bright, Edward Brailston, C.E.,4.
Brownell, W. C., 20.

Browning, Robert, 42.
Bryden, H. A., 33.
Burroughs, John, 5.

CAIRNES, CAPT. W. E., 33.
Campbell, James Dykes, 42.
Campbell, Lord Archibald, 5.
Capes, Bernard, 33.
Carmichael, M., 34.
Caxton, William, 24.
' Centurion,' 5.
Chailley-Bert, J., 5.
Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. Joseph,

M.P., D.C.L., LL.D., 5.
Chambers, R. W., 34.
Charles, Joseph F., 34.
Charrington, Charles, 34.
Coldstream, J. P. , 26.
Cole, Alan S., 20.
Collins, J. Churton, 5-
Conway, Sir William Martin, 14.
Cooper, Bishop Thomas, 25.
Cooper, E. H., 34.
Cornish, F. Warre, 34.
Courtney, W. L., 5.
Coxon, Ethel, 34.
CunynHiame, Henry, 20.
C^rtt^rMaj.-Gen. Fendall, 5.
Curzori, The Right Hon. George

N. (Lord Curzon of Kedles-

ton), 5.

DALE,T.F. (Stoneclink), 17, 34.
Daniell, A. E., 20, 31.
Danvers, Fred. Charles, 7.
Darnley, Countess of, 34.
Davidson, Thomas, 6.
Decker, Thomas, 24.
Deighton, Kenneth, 6.
De Bury, Mile. Blaze, 6.
Denny, Charles E., 34.
Dinsmore, Charles A. , 6.
Doughty, Charles, 43.
Doyle, C. W., 34.
Dryden, John, 43.

49

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Duff, C. M., 6.
Durand, Lady, 15.
Dutt, K. C, C.I.E,, 6.

KAKLE, ALICE MORSE, 12.
I irle, John, 22.
l-illiott, Robert H., 15.
I'.nglehardt, A. P., 15.

FILIPPI, FlLIPPO DB, 15.
Fish, Simon, 24.
Klowerdew, Herbert, 35.
Forbes- Robertson, Frances, 35.
Ford, Paul Leicester, 35.
Fox, Arthur W., 6.

GAIRDNER, JAMKS, 6.

Gale, Norman, 43.

Gall, John, M.A., LL.B., 27.

Gardner, Edmund, 43.

Gascoigne, George, 22.

Gemmer, C. M., 43.

Glasgow, Ellen, 35.

Godkin, E. L., 6, 7.

GofHc, Charles le, 36.

Gomme, G. Laurence, 7, 36, 37,

47-
Googe, Barnabe, 23.

Gosson, Stephen, 22.
Graham, David, 43.
Granby, Marchioness of, 20.
Greene, Robert, M.A., 24.
Gribble, Francis, *
Guillemard, Dr. l*rie, I
Gwynn, Paul, 35.

HABINOTON, WILLIAM, 23.

Hackel, Eduard, 27.

Hake, A. Egmont, 7.

Hanna, Col. II. B., 7, 18.

Hannan, Charles, F.R.G.S., 35.

Ilarald, J. H., *i.

Harewood, Fred., 33.

Harris, Joel Chandler (Uncle

Remus), 35.
Hayden, E. G., 7.
Hewitt, J. F., 7.
Hewlett, Maurice, 35.
Hodgson, R. LI., 15, 34.
Holden, Ed. S., LL.D., 8.
Holland, Clive, 27.

Hope, W. II. St. John, 8, 20.
Houfe, C. A., 8.
Ilowell, James, 23.
1 1 (inter, Sir W. W., 8.
1 1 ut ten, Baroness von, 35.
Hyde, William, 21.

IRWIN, SIDNEY T., 8.

JAMKS, HENRY, 35, 36.
James, Kinj*, the First, 23.
James, William, 8.
J. inline, Hon. Mr. Justice, 16.
Johnston, Mary, 35, 36.
Joy, George, 25.

KENNEDY, ADMIRAL, 17.
Kingsley, Charles, 36.
Knox, John, 24.
Krehbicl, Henry E., 8.

LACHAMBRE, HENRI, 15.
Lafargue, Philip, 36.
Lane-roole, Stanley, 8.
Latimer, Hugh, 22.
Leach, A. F., M.A., 8, 27.
Leaf, Cecil H., M.A., 27.
Leaf, H. M., M.I.K.E., 27.
Legg, L. G. Wickliam, 8, 21.
Lever, Rev. Thomas, 23.
Lewes, Vivian B., 28.
Loti, Pierre, 36.
Lover, Samuel, 36.
Lyly, John, 22.
Lytton, Lord, 36.

MACFARLANE, CHARLES, 37.
MacGeorge, G. W., 8.
Machuron, Alexis, 15.
M;u:Il\v;iine, Herbert C., 37.
Macleod, Fiona, 37, 48.
MacNair, Major J. F. A. , 9.
Machray, Robert, 37.
Madge, H. D., Rev., 31.
Marprelate, Martin, 24.
Mason, A. E. W., 37.
Masterman, N., 9.
Mayo, John Horsley, 1 8.
M'Candlish, J. M., 10.
Mcllwraith, Jean, 37.
McLaws, Lafayette, 37.

2 WHITEHALL GARDENS, WESTMINSTER

Meakin, A. M. B., 16.
Meredith, George, 9, 21, 37, 38,

43-
Merejkowski, Dmitri, 38.

Metcalfe, Charles Theophilus,

C.S.I., 9.
Meynell, Alice, 21.
Mills, E. I-, 44.
Milton, John, 22.
Mitchell, II. G., 32.
Monier • Williams, Sir M.,

K.C.I. I'.., 7*

Monk of Evesham, A, 23.
Montague, Charles, 39.
More, Sir Thomas, 22.
M orison, M., 9, 28.

Morison, Theodore, 9.
Mowbray, J. P., 39.
Mlinsterberg, Hugo, 9.

NANSEN, FRIDTJOK, 16.
Naunton, Sir Robert, 23.
Nesbit, E., 44.
Newberry, Percy E., 10, 21.
Newman, Mrs., 39.
Nisbet, John, 10.

O'DONOGHUE, J. T., 56.

Ookhtomsky, Prince E. , 16.
Oppert, Gustav, 10.

PAINE, ALBERT BIGBLOW, 48.
Palmer, Walter, M.P., 10.
Parker, Nella, 39.
Payne, Will, 39.
Peel, Mrs., 28.
Penrose, Mrs. H. H., 39.
Perks, Mrs. Hartley, 39.
Piatt, John James, 44.
Piatt, Mrs., 44.
Pickering, Sidney, 39.
Pincott, F., 44.
Popowski, Joseph, 10.
Powell, F. York, 42.
Prichard, Hesketh, 16.
Prichard, K. & Hesketh, 39.
Puttenham, George, 23.

RAIT, R. S., 10, 44, 45.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 23.

Reed, Marcus, 39, 58.

Rice, Louis, 10.

Rinder, E. Wingate, 36.

4 Rita,' 39.

Roberts, Morley, 16.

Robertson, David, 27.

Robinson, Clement, 24.

Rogers, Alexander, 45. •

Rogers, C. J. , 28.

Roosevelt, Theodore, II.

Round, J. Horace, M.A., u.

Roy, W., 23.

Russell, W. Clark, 40.

Ryley, Rev. J. Buchanan, II, 32.

SANGERMANO, FATHER, 16.

Sapte, Brand, 7.

Schweitzer, Georg, 11.

Scott, Eva, II.

Scott, Sir Walter, 40.

Scrutton, Percy E. , 28.

Selden, John, 22.

Selfe, Rose E., 12.

Setoun, Gabriel, 40.

Shakespeare, William, 45.

Sharp, William, 40.

Siborne, Captain William, II, 18.

Sichel, Edith, 12.

Sidney, Sir Philip, 22.

Sinclair, May, 40.

Sinclair, Ven. Archdeacon, D.D.,

52.

Skrine, J. Huntley, 32, 45.
Slaughter, Frances, 34.
Smith, Edward, 12.
Smith, F. Hopicinson, 40.
Smith, Captain John, 25.
Smythe, A. J., 12.
Sneath, E. Hershey, 12, 32.
Soane, John, 40.
Somervell, Arthur, 48.
Somerville, William, 43.
Spalding, Thomas Alfred, 12, 18.
Spenser, Edmund, 45.
Stadling, J., 16.
Stanihurst, Richard, 24.
Stanton, Frank L., 45.
Steel, Flora Annie, 40.
Stein, M. A., 12.
Stevenson, Wallace, 45.
Stoker, Bram, 40, 41.

ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. LTD

Stoneclink (T. F. Dale), 6, 17, 34.
Street, G. S., 12, 41.
Stuart, John, 12.
Sturgis, Julian, 41.

TARVER, J. C., 29.
Thompson, Francis, 46.
Thomson, J. J., F.R.S., 29.
Thomson, James, 46.
Thorburn, S. S., 41.
Thornton, Surg. -General, C.B.,

13-

Torrey, Joseph, 29.

Tottel, R., 23.
Townsend, Meredith, 12.
Traill, H. D., 13.
Trench, Herbert, 38.
Turner, H. H., F.R.S., 29.
Tynan, Katharine, 41.

UDALL, REV. JOHN, 24.
Udall, Nicholas, 23.

VALLERY-RADOT, R., 13.
Vibart, Colonel Henry M., 13, 19.
Villiers, George, 22.

WADDELL, Surg.-Maj. J. A., 16.

Walker, Charles, 17.

Warren, Kate M., 28, 30.

Watson, Thomas, 23.

Webb, Surgeon-Captain, W. W.,

30.

Webbe, E., 22.
Webbe, William, 23.
Wesslau, O. E., 7.
White, W. Hale, 42.
White, Percy, 41.
White, Stewart £.,41.
Whiteway, R. S., 13.
Wicksteed, Rev. P. H., 13, 43.
Wigram, Percy, 7.
Wilkinson, Spenser, 13, 18, 19.
Wilson, A. J., 17.
Wilson, J. M., M.A., 32.
Wilson, Robert, 46.
Wilson, Sarah, 32.
Winslow, Anna Green, 13.
Wood, Walter, 13.

YOUNG, ERNEST, 16.

' ZACK,' 41.
Zimmermann, Dr. A., 50.

A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS

PUBLISHED BY

Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd

Arranged in Order of Prices

*#* Waverley Novels. See page 64.

Anon. Mugglcton College.

Bankes (Roden) A Story Book for Lesson Time.

Bidder (George) Merlin's Youth. Paper.

Bright (Charles) Science and Engineering, 1837-97.

Gale (Norman) Cricket Songs.

Palmer (Walter, M.P.) Poultry Management on a Farm.

Philips (F. C.) A Full Confession. lgt

The Books of the Bible — Psalms, St. Matthew, St. Mark,

St. Luke, St. John. Cloth. Paper label.
The St. George's Kalendar, 1902.

Doughty (Charles) Under Arms, 1900.

Scott (Sir Walter) The Waverley Novels. 48 Volumes.

Label. Per vol. If 0^

The Books of the Bible— Psalms, St. Matthew, St. Mark,

St. Luke, St. John. Cloth gilt.
Warren (Kate M.) Spenser's Faerie Queene. 6 vols. Each.

Chamberlain (Rt. Hon. Joseph, -M.P.) Patriotism. Buck- 2s.

ram.

Coldstream (John P.) Institutions of Austria.

„ „ Italy.

Scott (Sir Walter) The Waverley Novels. 48 vols. Cloth Oq TlTpf

• • , , • AJ KJ • Jb* \S V

gilt. Per vol.

Anon. The Love of an Obsolete Woman. Og firl

Hanna (Col. H. B.) Backwards or Forwards.

Can Russia Invade India?

India's Scientific Frontier.

53

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fi J Holland (Clive) The Use of the Hand Camera.
DU. Houfe (C. A.) The Question of the Houses.

James (William) Human -Immortality.

Lafargue (Philip) The Salt of the Earth.

Pickering (Sidney) The Romance of his Picture.

Scrutton (Percy E.) Electricity in Town and Country
Houses.

Sharp (William) Madge o' the Pool.

Skrine (J. Huntley) A Goodly Heritage.

Stoker (Bram) The Shoulder of Shasta.

Wilkinoon (Spenser) The Brain of an Army.

Lessons of the War.

The Volunteers and the National

Defence.

The Command of the Sea and the

Brain of the Navy.

Og f?d Anon. All Expenses Paid.

Beatty (William, M.D.) An Authentic Narrative of the

Death of Nelson.

Four Gospels. Cloth. Paper label.
Meredith (George) The Novels of. Pocket Edition. 15

vols. Each.

Rait (R. S.) Poems of Montrose and Marvell.
Scott (Sir Walter) The Waverley Novels. 48 vols.

Leather. Per vol.

Shakespeare. The Works of. Illustrated. 20 vols. Each.
The Books of the Bible— Psalms, St. Matthew, St. Mark,

St. Luke, St. John. Leather gilt.
Walker (C.) Amateur Fish Culture.
Warren (Kate M.) Spenser's Faerie Queene. Cloth gilt.

6 vols. Each.

38. Net. Four GosPels- Cloth gilt.

t\f\' Andom (R.) and Harewood (F.) The Fortune of a Spend-
DQ. thrift

Anon. Muggleton College. Cloth.

Ballin (Mrs. Ada) From Cradle to School.

Bryden (H. A.) Tales of South Africa.

Carmichael (Montgomery) Sketches and Stories, Grave

and Gay.
Charrington (Charles) A Sturdy Beggar, and Lady

Bramber's Ghost. Two Stories.
Doyle (C. W.) The Shadow of Quong Lung.

The Taming of the Jungle.

Goffic (C. Le) The Dark Way of Love.
Hannan (Charles, F.R.G.S.) Chin-Chin-Wa.

54

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Kingsley (Charles) Westward Ho! Qc

Lytton (Lord) Harold.

Macfarlane (Charles) The Camp of Refuge.

Reading Abbey.

Macleod (Fiona) Green Fire.

Morison (Theodore) Imperial Rule in India.

Parker (Nella) Dramas of To-Day.

Peel (Mrs. C. S.) The New Home.

Ten Shillings a Head per Week for

House -books.

Perks (Mrs. Hartley) Among the Bracken.
Sinclair (Ven. Archdeacon, D.D.) Simplicity in Christ.
Steele (F. A.) In the Tideway.
Stoker (Bram) The Shoulder of Shasta.
Sturgis (Julian) The Folly of Pen Harrington.
Thorburn (S. S.) His Majesty's Greatest Subject.
Ward (Prof. A. W.) Sir Henry Wotton.

Allen (G. C.) Tales from Tennyson. Q~ £*A

Barmby (B. H.) Gisli Sursson. A Drama. °~1 ou*

Battersby (Caryl) The Song of the Golden Bough. Net.

Courtney (W. L.) The Idea of Tragedy.
Deighton (Kenneth) Conjectural Readings in the Old

Dramatists.

Gemmer (C. M.) Fidelis and other Poems.
Madge (H. D.) Leaves from the Golden Legend.
Meredith (George) Selected Poems. Pocket Edition.
— Tale of Chloe. Pocket Edition.
— The Story of Bhanavar. Pocket Edn,
Rait (R. S.) A Royal Rhetorician.
The Manchester Stage, 1880-1900.

Gall (John, M.A., LL.B.) and Robertson (David, B.Sc.)

Popular Readings in Science.
Lewes (Vivian B.) and Brame (J. S. S.) Laboratory

Note Book for Chemical Students.

Boswell's Account of Dr. Johnson's Tour in the Hebri- AQ
des. 2 volumes. Cloth. **•

Meredith Birthday Book. A*

Thomson (J. J.) The Discharge of Electricity through j /» j
Gases. ^S. OU.

55 Net.

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Baughan (B. E.) Verses.

Bidder (George) By Southern Shore.

--- Merlin's Youth. Cloth.

Four Gospels. Leather.

Gale (Norman) A Country Muse, ist Series.

----- 2nd Series.

Mills (B. J.) My Only Child.

Nesbit (E.) Songs of Love and Empire.

Piatt (J. J.) The Ghost's Entry.

Piatt (Mrs.) Child World Ballads.

Rogers (Alexander) The Widowed Queen.

Skrine (J. H.) Songs of the Maid.

Somervell (A.) and Brooke (Leslie) Singing Time. A

Child's Song Book.

Walker (Charles) Shooting on a Small Income.
Wilkinson (Spenser) The Nation's Awakening.
Wilson (Robert) Laurel Leaves.

£ TIT f Armstrong (Arthur Coles) A Tale from Boccaccio.
OS. JN6b. Davidson (Thomas) A History of Education.

Dinsmore (Charles A.) The Teachings of Dante.

Dryden (John) Aureng-Zebe, Somerville (William) The
Chace. Edited by Kenneth Deighton.

Graham (David) Rizzio.

Darnley.

Mitchell (H. G.) The World Before Abraham.

Seton- Watson (R. W.) Maximilian.

Sneath (E. Hershey) The Mind of Tennyson.

Stanton (Frank L.) Songs of the Soil.

' Alien ' Another Woman's Territory.

Argyll (Duke of) Adventures in Legend.

Bates (Arlo) The Puritans.

Berthet (E.) The Catacombs of Paris.

Bidder (M.) In the Shadow of the Crown.

Bower (Marian) The Puppet Show.

Bradley (A. G.) The Fight with France for North

America.

Cairnes (Captain W. E.) The Coming Waterloo.
Capes (Bernard) Love Like a Gipsy.
Chambers (R. W.) Cardigan.
Charles (Joseph F.) A Statesman's Chance.
Conway (Sir William Martin) The Alps from End to End.
Cooper (E. H.) The Enemies.
Cornish (F. Warre) Sunningwell.
Coxon (Ethel) Within Bounds.
Carrie (Major- Gen. Fendall) Below the Surface.

56

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Dale (T. F.) and Slaughter (F. B.) Two Fortunes and

Old Patch.
Daniell (A. E.) London City Churches.

London Riverside Churches.

Darnley (Countess of) and Hodgson (R. LI.) Elma Trevor.
De Bury (Yetta Blaze) French Literature of To-day.
Denny (Charles E.) The Failure of the Wanderer.
Dutt (R. C.) The Literature of Bengal.
Flowerdew (H.) Retaliation.
Forbes- Robertson (Francis) Odd Stories.

The Potentate.

Ford (Paul Leicester) The Story of an Untold Love.

-Tattle Tales of Cupid.

Janice Meredith.

Gallon (Tom) The Man who Knew Better.
Glasgow (Ellen) The Battle Ground.
Gwynn (Paul) Marta.
Harald (H. J.) The Knowledge of Life.
Harris (Joel Chandler) Sister Jane.
Hewlett (Maurice) New Canterbury Tales.
Hutten (Baroness von) Marr'd in Making.
James (Henry) The Wings of the Dove.
Johnston (Mary) The Old Dominion.

By Order of the Company.

— Audrey.
Krehbiel (Henry E.) Music and Manners in the Classical

Period.

Lachambre and Machuron. Andree and his Balloon.
Lover (Samuel) Handy Andy.

— Treasure Trove.
— Rory O'More.

Legends and Stories of Ireland. Vol. I.

Vol. II.

-Further Stories.

Machray (Robert) Sir Hector.
Macllwaine (Herbert C.) Dinkinbar.

Fate the Fiddler.

Mcllwraith (Jean N.) Curious Career of Robert Camp-
bell.

McLaws (Lafayette) When the Land was Young.
Macleod (Fiona) The Laughter of Peterkin.

The Dominion of Dreams.

Mason (A. E. W.) Ensign Knightley, and other Stories.
Meakin (A. M. B.) A Ribbon of Iron.
Meredith (George) The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

— Rhoda Fleming.
Sandra Belloni.

- Vittoria.

- Diana of the Crossways.

- Beauchamp's Career.

- The Adventures of Harry Richmond.

57

ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. LTD

Meredith (George) The Egoist.

The Tragic Comedians.

Evan Harrington.

The Tale of Chloe and other Stories.

The Shaving of Shagpat.

The Amazing Marriage.

One of Our Conquerors.

Poems. 2 vols. Each.

Lord Ormont and his Aminta.

An Essay on Comedy.

Merejkowski (Dmitri) The Death of the Gods.

The Resurrection of the Gods.

Montague (Charles) The Vigil.

Nansen (Fridtjof) Farthest North.

Newman (Mrs.) His Vindication.

Payne (Will) The Story of Eva.

Penrose (Mrs. H. H.) The Modern Gospel.

Prichard (K. & H.) Karadac.

Reed (Marcus) ' Pride of England.'

« Rita ' The Sin of Jasper Standish.

Russell (W. Clark) The Ship's Adventure.

Scott (Eva) Rupert, Prince Palatine.

Setoun (Gabriel) The Skipper of Barncraig.

Siborne (Captain William) The Waterloo Campaign, 1815.

Sichel (Edith) The Household of the Lafayettes.

Sinclair (May) Two Sides of a Question.

Smith (F. Hopkinson) Caleb West: Master Diver.

Soane (John) The Quest of Mr. East.

Stoker (Bram) Dracula.

Street (G. S.) A Book of Stories.

Sturgis (Julian) Stephen Calinari.

Tarver (J. C.) Some Observations of a Foster Parent.

— Debateable Claims.

Trevor-Battye (Aubyn) A Northern Highway of the

Czar.

Tynan (Katharine) That Sweet Enemy.
Waddell (Major L. A.) Among the Himalayas.
White (Stewart E.) The Westerners.

The Blazed Trail.

Wicksteed (Rev. P. H.) The Chronicle of Villani.
Wilson (Archdeacon J. M.) Truths New and Old.
Wilson (Sarah) The Romance of our Ancient Churches.
Winslow (Mrs. Anna Green) Diary of a Boston School

Girl.

Young (Ernest) The Kingdom of the Yellow Robe.
'Zack' The White Cottage.

BoswelTs Account of Dr. Johnson's Tour in the Hebri-
OS. N6b. des. Half leather. 2 vols. The set.

Browning (Robert) Men and Women. 2 vols. The set.

58

2 WHITEHALL GARDENS, WESTMINSTER

Burroughs (John) Whitman. C« ISTof

Campbell (James Dykes) Coleridge's Poems.
Cunynghame (H. H.) Art Enamelling on Metals. Illus-
trated. Second Edition.

Godkin (B. L.) Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy.
Meredith (George) Odes in Contribution to the Song of

French History.

Selected Poems.

A Reading of Life.

Mowbray (J. P.) The Making of a Country Home.
Miinsterberg (Hugo) Psychology and Life.
Thompson (Francis) New Poems.
Torrey (Joseph) Elementary Studies in Chemistry.
Turner (H. H., F.R.S.) Modern Astronomy.

rr

Bertram (James) Some Memories of Books, Authors and ' **•

Events.

Chailley-Bert (J.) Colonisation of Indo- China.
Collins (Churton) Ephemera Critica.
Curzon (Lord, of Kedleston) Problems of the Far East.
Elliott (Robert) Gold, Sport, and Coffee -Planting in

Mysore.
Godkin (E. L.) Reflections and Comments.

Problems of Modern Democracy.

Hodgson (R. LI.) On Plain and Peak.
Stuart (John) Pictures of War.
Thomson (James) Poems.

Hayden (E. G.) Travels Round our Village. *ZL ^

Masterman (N.) Chalmers on Charity. JN6U.

McCrindle (J. W.) Ancient India as described in Classi-
cal Literature.

Mowbray (J. P.) A Journey to Nature.
Roberts (Morley) The Western Avernus.

Spenser (Edmund) The Faerie Queene. 6 vols. Cloth. 9S. Net.

Bonavia (Emmanuel) Flora of the Assyrian Monuments. IQS. Net.
Hanna (Col. H. B.) The Second Afghan War. Vol. I.

Constable's Hand Gazetteer of India. 10S. 6(1.

Holden (Ed. S.) Mogul Emperors of Hindustan.
Jardine (Hon. Justice) Burma a Hundred Years Ago.

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1f\o £r\ Loti (Pierre) Impressions.

±Ub. OU. McNair (Major J. F. A.) Prisoners their Own Warders.
Ryley and M'Candlish, Scotland's Free Church.

/»J Bain (R. Nisbet) Peter III.

3U. Qairdner (James) The Paston Letters. Supplementary
Net. Volume.

Hackel (Eduard) The True Grasses.

Leaf (Cecil H.) The Surgical Anatomy of the Lymphatic

Glands.

List of 837 London Publishers.
Rogers (C. J.) Coin Collecting in Northern India.
Roosevelt (Theodore) Oliver Cromwell.
Townsend (Meredith) Asia and Europe.

Arnold (T. W.) The Preaching of Islam.

Gardner (E. G.) Dante's Ten Heavens.

Gardner (E. G.) and Wicksteed (P. H.) Dante and Gio-
vanni del Virgilio.

Gomme (G. Laurence) The Principles of Local Govern-
ment.

Hewitt (J. F.) Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times.
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Irwin (S. T.) Letters of T. E. Brown. 2 vols.

Lafargue (Philip) Stephen Brent. 2 vols.

Metcalfe (C. T.) Two Native Narratives of the Mutiny
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Prichard (Hesketh) Where Black Rules White.

Traill (H. D.) England, Egypt and the Sudan.

BoswelTs Life of Johnson. Edited by Augustine Birrell.

6vols.,fcap. 8vo.

Lane Poole (Stanley) Mohammedan Dynasties.
Leach (A. F., M.A., F.S.A.) English Schools at the

Reformation, 1546-48.
Zimmermann (Dr. A.) Botanical Microtechnique.

1 (\ /» j Popowski (Joseph) The Rival Powers in Central Asia.
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f\e\ Campbell (James Dykes) Coleridge's Poems. Large paper.
OU. Morison (M.) Time Table of Modern History.
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Round (J. Horace) The Commune of London.

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Anon. Regeneration. 14.0

Constable's Hand Atlas of India.

Hake (A. B.) and Wesslau (O. E.) The Coming Indivi-
dualism.

Smith (Edward) England and America after Indepen-
dence.

Bain (R. Nisbet) The Daughter of Peter the Great. 15s

Spalding (T. A.) The Life and Times of Richard **"

Badiley, Vice- Admiral of the Fleet.
Wilkinson (Spenser) War and Policy.

Blount (Bertram) Practical Electro -Chemistry. i jrc

Duff (C. M.) The Chronology of India. ltlb*

Pincott (F.) The Prema Sagara.

Spenser (Edmund) The Faerie Queene. 6 volumes. Can-
vas gilt.

Whiteway (R. S.) The Rise of Portuguese Power in
India.

Fox (Arthur W.) A Book of Bachelors.
MacGeorge (G. W.) Ways and Works in India.

Sichel (Edith) Women and Men of the French Renais- ]£<* NV*t

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Webb (W. W.) Coins of the Hindu States of Rajputana.

Thornton (Surgeon -General) Memories of Seven Cam- 1 >7g

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Anitchkow (Michael) War and Labour. -Q

Engelhardt (H.) A Russian Province of the North. lOS.

Gribble (Francis) Lake Geneva, and its Literary Land-
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Hewitt (J. F.) Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times. First
Series.

Stadling (J.) Through Siberia. Edited by Dr. F. H. H.
Guillemard.

Boswell's Life of Johnson. Edited by A. Birrell, K.C. IQe
6 vols., fcap. 8vo, half leather. AO5>'

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Oppert (Gustav) The Original Inhabitants of India.

Dale (T. F.) The Eighth Duke of Beaufort and the
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Bonavia (E.) The Evolution of Animals.

2lS. Net. Dale (T. F.) The History of the Belvoir Hunt.
Gairdner (James) The Paston Letters. 4 vols.
Legg (L. G. Wickham), and Hope (W. H. St. John) Inven-
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Newberry (Percy E.) The Life of Rekhmara.
Sapte (Brand) Memorials of Haileybury College.
Vibart (Col. H. M.) Addiscombe.

Campbell (Lord Archibald) Highland Dress, Arms, and
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SOS. Net* *^ce (Louis) The Mysore Gazetteer.

i (Dr.) The Ascent of Mount St. Elias.

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QOe Scnweitzer (Georg) Emin Pasha: His Life and Work.
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U*D. llOli. (John) Burma under British Rule. 2 vols.

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Oppert (Gustav) The Original Inhabitants of India.
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£2 2S. Beaumont (Worby) Motor Vehicles and Motors.

Granby (Marchioness of) Portraits of Men and Women.

National Worthies.

Rait (R. S.) Lusus Regius.

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Meredith (George) Nature Poems. J?2 12s 6d.

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Bright (E. B. and C.) Life of Sir Charles Tilston Bright, oo Q«
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The Waverley Novels. The Author's Favourite Edition,

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THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.

Facsimile Reprint of the Favourite Edition of SIR
WALTER SCOTT. With all the Original Plates
and Vignettes.

Red cloth, paper back title. Price is. 6d. per vol. net.
Cloth gilt, gilt top. Price 2s. per vol. net.
Quarter leather, gilt top. Price 2s. 6d. per vol. net.

Vols. i, 2. . Waverley.

Vols. 3, 4. . Guy Mannering.

Vols. 5, 6. . The Antiquary.

Vols. 7, 8. . Rob Roy.

Vol. 9. . The Black Dwarf.

Vols. 10, ii. . Old Mortality.

Vols. 12, 13. . Heart of Midlothian.

Vol. 14. . Bride of Lammermoor.

VoL 15. . Legend of Montrose.

Vols. 1 6, 17. . Ivanhoe.

Vols. 1 8, 19. . The Monastery.

Vols. 20, 21. . The Abbot.

Vols. 22, 23. . Kenil worth.

Vols. 24, 25. . The Pirate.

Vols. 26, 27. . Fortunes of Nigel.

Vols. 28, 29, 30. . Peveril of the Peak.

Vols. 31, 32. . Quentin Durward.

Vols. 33, 34. . St. Ronan's Well.

Vols. 35, 36. . Redgauntlet.

Vol. 37. . The Betrothed.

Vol. 38. . The Talisman.

Vols. 39, 40. . Woodstock.

Vol. 41. . Highland Widow, etc.

Vols. 42, 43. . Fair Maid of Perth.

Vols. 44, 45. . Anne of Geierstein.

Vols. 46, 47. . Count Robert of Paris.

Castle Dangerous.

Vol. 48. . The Surgeon's Daughter.

Glossary.

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