Une lettre inédite à Romain Rolland
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FOREWORD
Paris, Saturday, February 22, 1902
The dispatches, for the second time, alternately reassure and alarm us about the health of Tolstoy.
We cannot today consider the whole of his life and the whole of his work, the whole of his action. But we cannot let pass without protest the incredible misappropriation that has been made, in France, of the repercussions of this action.
Not only have the snobs, who are in a sense the political parasites of art, just as politicians and political men are in the same sense the snobbish parasites of action, not only have the snobs found it clever, manufacturing counterfeits and shoddy imitations of art, to oppose to true works, which themselves are the strongest critics and most feared enemies of these counterfeits, the hostile criticism of Tolstoy, as if the criticism of Tolstoy, debatable when it aims to strike at true works, did not always fall back with all its weight upon the counterfeits; but political men have found it clever to use Tolstoy for the ends of their false propaganda.
If Tolstoy had been born among us, he would have had no greater enemies than the herd of Tolstoyizing snobs.
But if this great Christian had been born among us, he would have no greater enemies, no more relentless detractors, no more devouring enviers than the crowd of our anticlerical demagogues.
One is permitted to be anti-Christian, and I do believe that in a sense we are un-Christian. But it is through a singular misunderstanding, criminal if it is deliberate, and singularly base if it is unconscious, it is through an unheard-of contradiction, formidable in any case, whether intended or not, and above all stupid, that our militarist anti-militarists, our clericalist anti-clericals, our authoritarian democrats go looking in Tolstoy for incitements that are not there, go stealing from Tolstoy encouragements that were not made for them, Christian exhortations, which were not made for them.
If this great Christian had been born among us, if we had upon us the inexhaustible force of his genius, if in our very affairs, at the heart of our passions, in our sorrows and in our miseries we had not his distant and translated intervention, but his immediate intervention, his very presence, the presence of his love and the presence of his charity, above all if we had amid our struggles and amid the hatreds and amid the envies and jealous envy, the encumbering presence, the real presence of his real peace, of his moral peace, of his knowing peace, of his primary peace, anterior, learned and naive, disillusioned yet full and pregnant with hope, if Tolstoy lived in Paris, went walking in the Luxembourg, had business at the Chamber and the Senate, as he would have business with Antoine and Mounet-Sully, first of all we would know what a true Christian is, and we would know that it is far stronger than the Archbishop of Paris, and we would know that it cannot be consumed as easily in the rich banquets of Fridays once more become holy, but he would have no enemies more hostile than those of our Frenchmen who claim to follow him most closely, for social criticism and for decomposition.
The Russians were not mistaken about this. When last year the excommunication of Tolstoy gave the signal for a movement for freedom in Russia and I tried to produce with certain Russians exiled in Paris this cahier that the bad faith of the prospective authors made impossible, I believed that the Russian revolutionaries had at least respect for Tolstoy. I was astonished when I heard how they spoke of him, and especially how they kept silent about him.
Frenchmen who classify themselves as revolutionaries were not mistaken either. No one has forgotten how the teachings of Tolstoy were first received by M. Gohier. The overexcited acuity, the overwrought hatred of this virulent pamphleteer had divined in Tolstoy an enemy. It was then that M. Gohier was right. It is true that M. Gohier would be the greatest enemy of a French Tolstoy. The man who brings to civil wars a fervor of ferocity that military wars have not always known has nothing in common with the anti-militarism of a Tolstoy.
Anxious to find allies, even irreconcilable ones, and weapons, contradictory ones, M. Gohier, in his feverish haste, has since adopted toward Tolstoy an untenable position. He is a maniac, he tells us, a religious maniac. He believes in God, in the Christian God. Apart from that, his arguments are quite good, and I use them.
But one cannot strip a man down like that. One does not have the right to debone him. All morality and all the progress of the natural sciences stand against such a hypothetical game. Christianity is at the foundation of Tolstoy. It is his framework and his marrow. To quarter this man, to truncate his thought, to distribute his acts, in order to usurp those that please us or that we believe flatter us, is to lie to morality, to lie to science, to lie to history. It is a false amusement, it is a disloyal game.
When a great Christian sets against us the full great whiteness of Christian charity, it is not by cutting off panels of his robe that we will give him the expected answer. It is ourselves, by raising, face to face with white charity, all the sound health of the solidarity that we love. This is difficult. But it is worthwhile. And what is not worthwhile is to disguise oneself as a devotee in order to spy upon the miserable devotees.
It is neither the posturing nor the swarming of the dregs that will decide the fate of humanity. The debates are only effectively pursued in the heights. That one of the two which will ultimately be capable of realizing the better world, of Christian charity or of modern solidarity, the one therefore that will be worth the most, will also be the one that will prove most worthy.
Charles Peguy
INTRODUCTION
The letter that we publish here for the first time dates from a time already distant, when Tolstoy had not yet written any of his great works on art, or rather against art, which he considered in its entirety as a vast system of corruption, a cult of pleasure, a self-interested superstition of the European elite in selfish enjoyment.
But if, in 1887, neither the Kreutzer Sonata nor What Is Art? had appeared, Tolstoy’s violent antipathy for modern art nonetheless showed through all his writings.
I loved deeply --- as I have never ceased to love --- Tolstoy. For two or three years I had been living enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought; I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, than with any of the great French works. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truth of this great man, made of him for me the most reliable guide in the moral anarchy of our time.
But on the other hand, I loved art with passion; since childhood I had nourished myself on art, especially music; I could not have done without it; I may say that music seemed to me an aliment as indispensable to my life as bread. --- And so, how deeply troubled I was, reading in the one I was accustomed to respect and to believe, those violent invectives against the immorality of art! I felt well enough, however, that nothing was purer than the impression that comes from the work of a great artist. In a symphony by Beethoven, or a painting by Rembrandt, one draws not only the forgetting of selfishness, but the strength of intelligence and of goodness, which streams from those great hearts. Tolstoy spoke of the corruption of art, which depraves and isolates men. Where had I better restored myself, where had I better fraternized with men, than in the shared emotions of an Oedipus Rex, or of the Ninth Symphony? But I mistrusted myself, and I had a deep anguish at the idea that I was perhaps wasting my life, which was just beginning, in the service of a bad cause, when my desire was to make it useful to others.
I wrote to Tolstoy. He answered me on October 4, 1883. --- His letter needs no commentary. It reflects the tranquil and limpid light of his soul --- that soul where all is reason and charity. It is written with the evangelical simplicity of this artist, unconcerned with style, uniquely occupied with making himself well understood, not fearing to repeat his thought until it is driven into the mind. One hears his familiar speech: he does not write, he converses.
I wish only to say how much I feel today --- far more even than at the moment when I received this letter --- fully in agreement with his thought. If I regret that Tolstoy was often mistaken in his judgment of this or that great man, like Beethoven or Wagner, whom he had the misfortune of judging without knowing them, or at least without knowing them sufficiently --- if I also regret that he judged French art by a handful of ridiculous decadents (with very rare exceptions) --- which is moreover explained by the fact that he was assailed by their pretentious poems and their unwholesome reviews --- on the other hand, I find his general judgment on art to be of absolute truth.
Yes, “The products of true science and true art are the products of sacrifice and not of material advantages.” --- And it is not only morality, it is art itself that has an interest in art no longer being the property of a privileged social caste. As an artist, I am the first to call with all my wishes for the moment when art will return to the common body of the nation, stripped of its privileges, its pensions, its decorations, its official glory. I call for it in the name of the dignity of art, which is soiled by the thousands of parasites who live shamefully at its expense.
Art must not be a career; it must be a vocation. “Vocation can only be known and proven by the sacrifice that the scholar and the artist make of their rest and their well-being to follow their vocation.” --- Now in our present civilization, it is only the truly great artists who make real sacrifices; they are the only ones who encounter real obstacles, because they are the only ones who refuse to sell their thought and to prostitute themselves for the pleasure of the corrupt clientele that pays its purveyors of intellectual debauchery. By suppressing the privileges of art, by increasing the difficulties of access to it, there is therefore no fear that the true artists will be made to suffer more; one will only eliminate the multitude of idlers who make themselves intellectuals to distance themselves from the people and to avoid more painful labors.
The world does not need, year in and year out, the ten thousand works of art (or so-called works of art) of the Paris Salons, its hundreds of plays, its thousands of novels. It needs three or four geniuses per century, and a people among whom reason, goodness, and the sense of beautiful things are widespread --- a people that has a healthy heart, a healthy intelligence, a healthy gaze, that knows how to see, feel, understand all that is beautiful and good in the world, and that works to adorn life with it.
I would not mind, I confess, if artists could be obliged to return to the common condition, if the sum of manual labor necessary to support and maintain the social edifice could be distributed among all men without exception. Shared among all, it would not be crushing enough to prevent the true artists from making their art as well; but it would suffice to remove from false artists all desire to take their leisure hours to engage in intellectual occupation. --- And how much art would gain in health!
Goethe said somewhere: “By dint of writing or reading books, one becomes a book oneself.” --- The artificial, morbid, etiolated character of our art today comes from the fact that it no longer has roots in the life of the earth; it is no longer the work of living men, but of phantoms of men, of shadows of beings, of larvae, nourished on words, on colors of paintings, on sounds of musical instruments, on extracts of sensations. --- How many true artists have already had to, and still must, in order not to sell their art, live from another intellectual occupation alongside their art! And how much more that intellectual occupation interferes with the creative imagination than manual labor, which tires the body but leaves the mind more free!
But will the beauty of artistic work not suffer? Is art not exclusive? Does it accept being shared with anything at all? And does it not need the entire ownership of its days, of one’s whole life? --- But, I ask any artist in good faith: “Does one produce much more when one has the whole day free than when one has only two hours a day?” I have often found the opposite to be the case for myself. Constraint is not useless to the mind. Too great a liberty is a poor inspirer; it leads thought to apathy and indifference. Man needs spurs. If his life were not so short, he would not hasten so much to live. If he feels enclosed within the narrow limit of the hours, he will act with more passion. Genius requires the obstacle, and the obstacle creates genius. --- As for talents, we have far too many. Our civilization stinks of talents, moreover perfectly useless, indeed perfectly harmful. Were the greater part of them to disappear, were there fewer painters, fewer musicians, fewer writers, fewer critics, fewer pianists, fewer actors, and fewer journalists --- it would not be a great misfortune, but a very great blessing. And even if art lost in correctness, in style, in technical perfection, I would scarcely care if it gained in moral energy and in health. --- There are days when I think without any indignation of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. What does this dead past matter to us, which crushes us, and this scaffolding of sciences, arts, civilizations, piled upon life? Who will free us from it?
“The first science of the world is the science of living so as to do the least harm possible and the most good possible. The first art of the world is the art of knowing how to avoid evil and to produce good with the least effort possible.”
Romain Rolland
I wish to say only that we have scrupulously preserved the spelling of the letter, written in French by Tolstoy. I hope that no one will think of smiling at a few faults of style, but that one will find in these very awkwardnesses something touching, at the thought of this old great man, who labors to reply, in a foreign language, to a young Frenchman in distress. As for me, it has been a very long time since I received this letter; but I keep toward the one who wrote it, as vivid as on the first day, my wholehearted gratitude for his paternal kindness.
Romain Rolland
THE LETTER
October 4, 1883
To Monsieur Romain Rolland
Dear brother!
I received your first letter. It touched my heart. I read it with tears in my eyes. I had the intention of answering it, but I did not have the time, and all the more so because, besides the difficulty I have in writing in French, I would have had to write at great length to answer your questions, most of which are based on a misunderstanding.
To the questions you ask: why does manual labor impose itself upon us as one of the essential conditions of true happiness? Must one voluntarily deprive oneself of the intellectual activity of the sciences and the arts, which seem to you incompatible with manual labor?
To these questions I have answered as best I could in the book entitled What Then Must We Do? which, I am told, has been translated into French. I have never regarded manual labor as a principle, but as the simplest and most natural application of the moral principle, the one that first presents itself to every sincere man.
Manual labor in our depraved society --- the society of so-called civilized people --- imposes itself upon us solely for the reason that the principal defect of this society has been, and still is, to free itself from this labor and to profit, without returning the like, from the labor of the poor, ignorant, and wretched classes, who are slaves, like the slaves of the ancient world.
The first proof of the sincerity of the people of this society, who profess Christian, philosophical, or humanitarian principles, is to try as far as possible to escape from this contradiction.
The simplest means, which is always at hand, for achieving this, is manual labor beginning with the care of one’s own person. I shall never believe in the sincerity of the Christian, philosophical, or humanitarian convictions of a person who has a servant empty her chamber pot.
The simplest and shortest moral formula is to have others serve us as little as possible, and to serve others as much as possible. To demand of others the least possible and to give them the most possible.
This formula, which gives our existence a reasonable meaning, and the happiness that follows from it, resolves at the same time all the difficulties, including the one that faces you: the share that must be given to intellectual activity --- science --- art.
Following this principle, I am happy and content only when, in acting, I have the firm conviction of being useful to others. --- The satisfaction of those for whom I act is an extra, an addition of happiness upon which I do not count, and which cannot influence the choice of my actions. --- My firm conviction that what I do is neither a useless thing, nor an evil, but a good for others, is, for this reason, the principal condition of my happiness.
And this is what involuntarily pushes a moral and sincere man to prefer manual labor to scientific and artistic pursuits: the book I am writing, for which I need the labor of printers; the symphony I am composing, for which I need musicians; the experiments I am performing, for which I need the labor of those who make the instruments of our laboratories; the painting I am making, for which I need those who make the colors and the canvas: --- all these labors may be useful things for men, but they may also be --- as they are for the most part --- completely useless and even harmful things. And so while I am doing all these things whose utility is very doubtful, and to produce which I must furthermore make others work, I have before me and around me things to do without end, all of which are indubitably useful to others, and to produce which I need no one: --- a burden to carry for one who is tired, a field to plow for a proprietor who is ill; a wound to dress; but not to speak of these thousands of things to do that surround us, that need the help of no one, that produce an immediate contentment in those for whose good you do them: --- to plant a tree, to raise a calf, to clean a well --- these are actions indubitably useful to others, and which cannot fail to be preferred by a sincere man to the doubtful occupations which, in our world, are preached as the highest and noblest vocation of man.
The vocation of a prophet is a high and noble vocation. But we know what priests are who believe themselves prophets, solely because it is to their advantage, and because they have the possibility of passing themselves off as such.
A prophet is not one who receives the education of a prophet, but one who has the intimate conviction of what he is and must be, and cannot not be. This conviction is rare and can only be tested by the sacrifices a man makes for his vocation.
The same is true for true science and true art. A Lully, who, at his own risk and peril, leaves the service of the kitchen to play the violin, by the sacrifices he makes, gives proof of his vocation. But the pupil of a Conservatory, a student, whose only duty is to study what they are taught, are not even in a position to give proof of their vocation; they simply profit from a position that seems advantageous to them.
Manual labor is a duty and a happiness for all; intellectual activity is an exceptional activity, which becomes a duty and a happiness only for those who have this vocation. Vocation can only be known and proven by the sacrifice that the scholar or the artist makes of his rest and his well-being to follow his vocation. A man who continues to fulfill his duty: that of sustaining his life by the labor of his hands, and, despite that, takes from the hours of his rest and his sleep to think and produce in the intellectual sphere, gives proof of his vocation. He who frees himself from the moral duty of every man, and, under the pretext of his taste for the sciences and the arts, arranges for himself a life of a parasite, will never produce anything but false science and false art.
The products of true science and true art are the products of sacrifice, and not of certain material advantages.
But what becomes of the sciences and the arts? --- How often I have heard this question, asked by people who cared neither for the sciences nor for the arts, and did not even have a somewhat clear idea of what the sciences and the arts were! One would think that these people had nothing so much at heart as the good of humanity, which, according to their belief, can only be produced by the development of what they call the sciences and the arts.
But how is it that there are people foolish enough to contest the utility of the sciences and the arts? There are manual workers, agricultural workers. No one has ever thought of contesting their utility --- and no worker will ever take it into his head to prove the utility of his labor. He produces; his product is necessary, and a good for others. People profit from it and no one doubts its utility. And still less does anyone prove it.
The workers of the arts and the sciences are in the same conditions. How is it that there are people who strive with all their might to prove their utility?
The reason is that the true workers of the sciences and the arts arrogate no rights to themselves; they give the products of their labor, these products are useful, and they have no need of rights and proofs of their rights. But the great majority of those who call themselves scholars and artists know very well that what they produce is not worth what they consume; and it is only because of this that they take so much trouble, like the priests of all times, to prove that their activity is indispensable to the good of humanity.
True science and true art have always existed and will always exist like all other modes of human activity, and it is impossible and useless to contest them or to prove them.
The false role that the sciences and the arts play in our society comes from the fact that the so-called civilized people, with the scholars and artists at their head, are a privileged caste like the priests. And this caste has all the defects of all castes. It has the defect of degrading and debasing the principle by virtue of which it organizes itself. Instead of a true religion, a false one. Instead of a true science, a false one. The same for art. --- It has the defect of weighing upon the masses, and on top of that, of depriving them of what it claims to propagate. And the greatest defect --- that of the comforting contradiction of the principle they profess with their manner of acting.
Excepting those who uphold the inept principle of science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake, the partisans of civilization are obliged to affirm that science and art are a great good for humanity. In what does this good consist? What are the signs by which one can distinguish good from evil? The partisans of science and art are careful not to answer these questions. They even claim that the definition of good and beauty is impossible. “The good in general,” they say, “the good, the beautiful cannot be defined.” But they lie. From all time, humanity has done nothing else in its progress but define the good and the beautiful. But this definition does not suit them; it unmasks the futility, if not the harmful effects, contrary to the good and the beautiful, of what they call their sciences and their arts. The good and the beautiful have been defined for centuries. The Brahmans, the sages of the Buddhists, the sages of the Chinese, of the Hebrews, of the Egyptians, the Greek Stoics have defined them, and the Gospel has defined them in the most precise manner:
All that unites men is the good and the beautiful --- all that separates them is evil and ugliness.
Everyone knows this formula. It is written in our hearts.
The good and the beautiful for humanity is that which unites men. Well then, if the partisans of the sciences and the arts truly had the good of humanity as their motive, they would not have been ignorant of the good of man, and not being ignorant of it, they would have cultivated only the sciences and the arts that lead to this goal. There would be no juridical sciences, no military science, no science of political economy, nor of finance, which have no other aim than the well-being of certain nations to the detriment of others. If the good had truly been the criterion of science and the arts, never would the researches of the positive sciences, completely futile in relation to the true good of humanity, have acquired the importance they have; nor above all would the products of our arts, good at most for entertaining the idle.
Human wisdom does not consist in the knowledge of things. For there is an infinity of things one can know; and to know the most things possible does not constitute wisdom. Human wisdom consists in knowing the order of things that it is good to know --- consists in knowing how to rank one’s knowledge according to its importance.
Now, of all the sciences that man can and must know, the principal one is the science of living so as to do the least harm and the most good possible; and of all the arts, that of knowing how to avoid evil and produce good with the least effort possible. And so it happens that among all the arts and sciences that claim to serve the good of humanity, the first of the sciences and the first of the arts in their importance not only do not exist, but are excluded from the list of sciences and arts.
What is called in our world the sciences and the arts is only an immense humbug, a great superstition into which we ordinarily fall as soon as we free ourselves from the old superstition of the Church. To see clearly the road that we must follow, we must begin at the beginning --- we must lift the hood that keeps me warm but covers my sight. The temptation is great. We are born --- or through labor, or rather through a certain intellectual cleverness, we hoist ourselves up the rungs of the ladder, and we find ourselves among the privileged, the priests of civilization, of Kultur, as the Germans say; and it takes, as for a Brahman or Catholic priest, much sincerity and a great love of the true and the good to call into question the principles that give you this advantageous position. But for a serious man who, like you, poses the question of life --- there is no choice. To begin to see clearly, he must free himself from the superstition in which he finds himself, even though it may be advantageous to him. This is a condition sine qua non. It is useless to discuss with a man who clings to a certain belief, were it on only a single point.
If the field of reasoning is not completely free, he may discuss as much as he likes, he may reason as much as he likes, he will not come one step closer to the truth. His fixed point will arrest all his reasonings and distort them all. There is religious faith, there is the faith of our civilization. They are entirely analogous. A Catholic says to himself: “I can reason, but not beyond what our Scripture and our tradition teach me, which possess the entire and immutable truth.” A believer in civilization says: “My reasoning stops before the data of civilization: science and art. Our science is the totality of man’s true knowledge. If it does not yet possess all the truth, it will possess it. Our art with its classical traditions is the only true art.” --- The Catholics say: “There exists outside of man a thing in itself, as the Germans say: it is the Church.” The people of our world say: “There exists outside of man a thing in itself: civilization.” --- It is easy for us to see the faults of reasoning in religious superstitions, because we do not share them. But a religious believer, even a Catholic, is fully convinced that there is only one true religion --- his own; and it even seems to him that the truth of his religion is proved by reasoning. The same is true for us, the believers in civilization: we are fully convinced that there exists only one true civilization --- ours; and it is almost impossible for us to see the lack of logic in all our reasonings, which tend only to prove that of all ages and all peoples, there is only our age and the few millions of men inhabiting the peninsula called Europe who find themselves in possession of true civilization, which is composed of true sciences and true arts.
To know the truth of life, which is so simple, one does not need something positive --- a philosophy, a profound science; --- one needs only a negative quality: --- not to have superstitions.
One must put oneself in the state of a child, or of a Descartes, and say to oneself: --- I know nothing, I believe nothing, and I want nothing other than to know the truth of life, which I am obliged to live.
And the answer has been given for centuries, and is simple and clear.
My inner feeling tells me that I need the good, happiness for myself, for myself alone. Reason tells me: all men, all beings desire the same thing. All beings who are like me in the search for their individual happiness will crush me: --- this is clear. I cannot possess the happiness I desire; but the pursuit of happiness is my life. Not being able to possess happiness, not to strive for it, is not to live.
Reasoning tells me that in the order of the world where all beings desire only their own good, I, a being desiring the same thing, can have no good: I cannot live. --- But despite this reasoning, so clear, we live and we seek happiness. We say to ourselves: I could only have had the good, been happy, in the case where all other beings loved me more than they love themselves. This is an impossible thing. But despite this, we all live; and all our activity, our pursuit of fortune, of glory, of power, are only attempts to make ourselves loved by others more than they love themselves. Fortune, glory, power give us the semblances of this state of things; and we are almost content, we forget at moments that it is only a semblance, and not reality. All beings love themselves more than they love us, and happiness is impossible. There are people --- and their number increases from day to day --- who, not being able to resolve this difficulty, blow their brains out, saying to themselves that life is only a deception.
And yet, the solution of the problem is more than simple, and imposes itself of its own accord. I can only be happy if there exists in this world an order such that all beings love others more than they love themselves. The whole world would be happy if beings did not love themselves, but loved others.
I am a human being, and reason gives me the law of happiness for all beings. I must follow the law of my reason --- love others more than I love myself.
Man has only to make this reasoning, for life to present itself to him all at once under an entirely different aspect than it presented itself before. Beings destroy one another; but beings love one another and help one another. Life is not sustained by destruction, but by the reciprocity of beings, which is translated in my heart by the feeling of love. Since I have been able to glimpse the course of the world, I see that it is only the principle of reciprocity that produces the progress of humanity. All of history is nothing other than the increasingly clear conception and the application of this single principle of the solidarity of all beings. Reasoning is corroborated by the experience of history and by personal experience. But besides reasoning, man finds the most convincing proof of the truth of this reasoning in his intimate feeling. The greatest happiness that man knows, the freest, happiest state, is that of self-denial and love. Reason reveals to man the only possible path to happiness, and feeling pushes him toward it.
If the ideas I am trying to communicate to you do not seem clear to you, do not judge them too severely. I hope that you will one day read them set forth in a clearer and more precise manner. I only wished to give you an idea of my way of seeing.
Leon Tolstoy
Finished printing four thousand copies on Tuesday, February 25, 1902, at the Printing House of Suresnes (E. Payen, administrator), 9, rue du Pont.
We are placing this cahier in commerce; we sell it for one franc. We have obtained through the efforts of Leon Deshairs a photograph of Tolstoy and Gorky walking together at Yasnaya Polyana. This photograph was taken by one of Tolstoy’s daughters. It was communicated to Deshairs by Doctor Schlepianoff. We have had it reproduced in three hundred copies. We sell it for two francs.