Tolstoi vivant

Tolstoy Living

Suares

I

TOLSTOY

I — Few Stand at His Rank, None Above

On the 10th of September, Tolstoy turned seventy. The world would have honored itself by making that day its feast. Every epoch has its hero: Tolstoy is the hero of ours; for he is the most human of all men. However isolated he may be, however little understood, he is nonetheless the only man in whom nearly all can recognize something of themselves, and the only one who has something for each person. A peasant woman, an idiot, and even, so to speak, a dog, a beast, a humble animal, have some bond with him, as do Napoleon, a soul of steel, or a princely mind. The heart of Tolstoy, and his imagination, are the vastest space that exists today in the world; and this old man is the only example that has been given us of a sublime life. How dear to us is his powerful old age: it is still the most beautiful work of a poet to whom we owe such great ones; it is a marvelous testimony of the heart in favor of the mind. He who could have lived on glory chose to live only on charity. And he for whom genius should have sufficed could not content himself with less than perfect love. Thus the man who had gone furthest in the knowledge of others did not despair of humanity; but, on the contrary, there he cured the doubts conceived of himself. It is the most beautiful triumph of the imagination. It shall not be said that it kills the heart beneath it, for rather it resurrects it. Mediocre, it ruins its man, and reduces him to misery, by forcing him to turn everything into fodder to sustain it. But grand and vivid, how fecund it is! In all things, the essential is to have much more imagination than others, and to know what abyss separates mediocrity from plenitude. It is admirable, finally, that the same man showed that he owed to it his being one of the foremost among saints, after having been one of the foremost among artists.

How touching is the old age a great man consecrates to holiness: even feeble and nearly fallen, at the decline of intelligence, it moves us. How much more does it ravish us when it is robust, green, rich in action, full of works! No man does more honor to man than Tolstoy. He is sublime with simplicity: no effort; it is the impulse of his nature that carries him. Perhaps there have been deeper ones: but broader, vaster, there have not been. This human nature is in the image of his country: it has neither mountains lost in the clouds, nor oceans in tempest, nor deep abysses. But its horizon is immense, its expanse seems infinite; the whole earth unfolds there in a single stretch; and the whole human people find their place there, mingled with the other living beings.

The uncertainty of thoughts, or obstinacy in a few of them --- few old men escape it. Logical solidity is the mark of vigor and the health of the mind. With the years, Tolstoy seems to grow in certainty; and he even gains in suppleness. He has written nothing more vigorous than his last work on Art; and of all objects to define, it is the most elusive, and perhaps the most difficult. Like those strong shoulders on that broad back, this mind is fit to carry every sort of burden. Such is its balance that it never leans more to the side to which it naturally inclines than it departs from the one to which it does not wish to go.

Tolstoy not only refrains from following his inclination: he guards against believing one does not follow it enough. What strength in an apostle who, sure of his truth, passionate to win over other men, neither flatters himself that he will make a miraculous catch --- nor above all complains of catching nothing in his nets. In such a case, it is more beautiful not to believe oneself without effect than to flatter oneself with having an irresistible one.

Tolstoy does not despair. He is not one of those enthusiasts who feed on hopes. His life is sad. But he has God on his side. He thinks that the day of the Lord cannot fail to come. He has that incalculable strength of a faith that speaks to the reason of men. Since he could not have been convinced apart from it, he is confident he will convince it sooner or later within them. He sets little store by those of his own time: he turns away from aged men; he claims nothing over these hardened sinners. He seeks young people, fresh souls, simple hearts.

Tolstoy humiliates too closely his neighbors, his relations, his intimates. So powerful a man is hard to live with; one can accept him only by loving him. Love seems a servitude to souls too small. One thinks to keep one’s independence by arming it against him. One does not see that to struggle against the tyranny of a superior force is no less to gravitate in its orbit. His life is sad, once he separates it from his God and his people. It would doubtless not be bearable for him, without the passion that animates him. And, in the end, his finest reward for having created a world is that he can live in it.

II — On an Epicurean and Evangelical Idea of Life

Tolstoy never reasons about pure ideas; he brings them all back to facts. His religion is impossible to understand if one removes it from fact. Theory is in his eyes only the whole of practice. It is not easy to repel its consequences. In the time when I believed in him, it did not seem to me possible to achieve one’s salvation without tilling the earth. The fundamental idea of Tolstoy is that of the Gospel: Jesus shows little children to his disciples and tells them: “Be like these little ones, if you wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” --- For Jesus, as for all the Ancients, and for Tolstoy himself, the Kingdom of Heaven is the happy life. To be happy, one must be like little children. Jesus is the God of a people of passionate children, who bring a fiery violence to wanting this happy life --- and never believed it impossible for a single moment. That very people died with its God --- I mean those who crucified him; and lived only in him, resurrected --- I mean those who believed him taken up to heaven on the third day. For these, the ideal and life penetrated each other continually. Passionate for heaven, they never left the earth: their mystical will and their real combats were one. That is why Jesus could be the Christ and the Messiah only in that race; and he had to be the God of the Jews before being the God of the world. Later, he was made a metaphysician among the Greeks; eternal Caesar in Rome; finally, preacher of the free right of conscience among the Saxons. But if it were possible to imagine Jesus among the Greeks, as an Athenian slave, he would be perhaps a manner of Epicurus; as a Roman slave, a Stoic in the manner of Epictetus. Now Tolstoy, however evangelical he may be, cannot help having something Greek and Roman about him, like all moderns. Whatever he does, he knows the immense mainspring of the State and of Science. Whatever he wills, he resurrects the Messiah of a people of violent and passionate children only in the modern world, which is Roman in form and Greek in thought. Hence it is that Tolstoy’s heaven seems so far away.

He may well show it in the will freed and disdainful of this world; he cannot escape this world itself. Jesus does not trouble himself with enormous cities, continents in struggle, one end of the earth connected to the other, the sciences and art. Tolstoy is forced to concern himself with them.

The principle of “being like children” is sweet only in a childish world. Even there it has its peril. That world runs the risk of drowning in a river of milk. But if this Eden can defend itself against its own innocence, it will not be able to against the wickedness of others. A horde of Turks will soon have done, here, with putting all to death; there, with destroying all; here and there, with violating little girls and women: thus the race of the wicked will profit from the goodness of the good, to perpetuate its own wickedness. In the world according to Tolstoy, perfection is the exercise of defeat and martyrdom. The Kingdom of Heaven opens onto the fields of Death. No doubt. It is only too true.

Here is where Tolstoy is Epicurean. The same ataraxia reigns at the bottom of his Gospel as at the bottom of the Physics of Epicurus. Epicurus said: Know all --- and let be. --- Tolstoy says: Suffer all --- and let be. Intelligence, in the Greek, and, in the Russian, the love of God, or charity, suffice for all. Tolstoy unites the Stoic and the Epicurean in the same very apostolic abandonment of self. It is curious to see that Christ therein meets with victory. For it was in much this way that nascent Christianity conquered ancient society.

Often I have reflected on the great sadness of Tolstoy’s books. His accent was not so desolate when he did not know where the way of salvation lay, as it has been since he found it. He announces happiness in a somber voice. Is it the horror of present evil that gives him this tone? --- In truth, it seems rather that this happiness is desperate. Jesus is the last word of human wisdom --- for want, perhaps, of there being another. This world of children is the lesser evil of a world of men. Innocence without passion is the end of a creature who cannot be passionate without being criminal. Tolstoy’s enthusiasm for life is not very robust: it was much more vigorous in the time of his doubts, when he feared death so much, when he tortured himself so much about living. He consents to life more than he loves it. It is a philosophy of old age: the word comes, whatever one may do about it, to the lips as to the mind. The Sakyamuni, too, was king, lover, father, before becoming a sage. Resignation to death is the great prize of life. To accept death, in order to forget it. To forget life, in the thoughtless expectation of death. Children are both, and not on principle: in which they have an incalculable advantage. This ignorance is the surety of happiness. And indeed, an innocent child, in good health, of good character, is at once a model Epicurean --- and a perfect Stoic: he accepts, he believes all; --- and he enjoys all according to his faculties.

Man needs more. Hence the care, the pain, the bitterness. He does not wish merely to live: he wishes to feel himself live --- and he learns to feel himself die. It does not suffice him to enjoy the hour: he wishes to enjoy them all; and he composes himself a Self, the clock in which they strike infinitely. He wishes even to enjoy his pains, by contrast. No; man is not a child. He who claims it most can often do it least. He cannot? And if he could, he would no longer wish it, perhaps. The full man, being all will, all act, and all passion, wishes to enjoy his life, what he has, what he has not, what he fears. The child is happy only because he barely exists. What is a child? Almost nothing. --- Then I say to Tolstoy: “At bottom, your Gospel, in order to make us happy, wishes us to be children --- so as barely to be. But another thought hides there, and the sadness, to my taste, extends from it to all things: the true happiness, for man, is not to be. The ideal of life --- if it is not non-being, difficult to conceive, or absurd, for one who is --- is at least a peaceful death: a stream that flows without leaving a smooth sand --- and slowly loses itself in it.” A deep horror floats sometimes over a calm dream.

III — Whether Tolstoy Is Christian

The Churches, born of Christianity, are not always Christian; for they have need to reckon with the world as with God. It is not in my design to say what I think of them. But I wish to make it understood that the opposition of all the Churches on earth could not prevent Tolstoy from being a great Christian.

The Christian Churches may end, so great are the demands of the age, by no longer thinking of Jesus Christ at all. But the great Christians live only on the love of Jesus Christ or of the Gospel, and breathe only him. No sign marks them more expressively; and, however diverse they may be among themselves, it makes them of the same family.

This continual love of Christ, in his person or in his doctrine, is in Saint Bernard as in Saint Francis, in the monk of the Imitation so tender, as in Pascal so terrible, and in that child Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, as in Tolstoy, the most virile of minds. The great love of God has made all these men equally lovers of difficult tasks. The Kingdom of Heaven is the only one in which it is worth the trouble to live; and, as it is the only one in which life is in fact possible, it is not a treasure ready to hand, even though one never pays too dear for it, whatever price one puts on it. The bond of life --- who would not willingly give all his blood to attain it? Consider that you measure your pain only against your wretched joys. Think a little about what life means. And measure your pain, then, against Death --- there is the just standard of life.

Always, and everywhere, Tolstoy looked fixedly at death. He experienced it in every being, in the prince and in the beggar, in the tree, in the beast. No man knows anything who does not see each object, together with himself, obstinately in death. Minds are worth, for life, in proportion to the view they have of death. Penetrate the thoughts of death, you who wish to live. There is no Christian who does not clasp death closely to life, so that he betroths and marries early his life to his death, in order to conceive therefrom a new life, one that endures, that one, that is certain, and that can somewhat fill the dreadful void of our hearts.

Woe to the ideal that is without difficulty: it has nothing solid for the soul. Tolstoy does not accept all who come to him. Like all founders of religion, he wants proofs; he asks the rarest --- a long sincerity with oneself. One must be wary of the faithful of a day. Those who are easy to win are easy to lose. Let each win himself, and obtain himself from himself. Jesus Christ asks much. That is because he promises all and gives it: that is how Tolstoy thinks.

Words, and even the non-lasting impulses of the heart, are not enough to enter the Kingdom of God. And it exists already here, as Jesus said and Tolstoy shows. True love is the rarest flower of the soul. One must till long, for the seed to take and the stem to grow. As Francis of Assisi betrothed himself to Poverty, his Lady, Tolstoy has united himself with Humanity, the sad forsaken of all men. And he has taken in this widow full of tears, for the love of God.

Whether he interprets the Gospel well or ill, no one can tell: for the Gospel recommends first of all to draw inspiration from the spirit, and not to dry up upon the letter. That Tolstoy has its thought, this infinite love alone, which he draws from it, is quite enough to be convinced of it, and the consequences he draws from it for life. It is the grace of the Gospel that the perfection of sentiment is there altogether simple. The passions, through which man ruins himself, are not there ignored; but it seems to go without saying, according to the Gospel, to conquer them. Tolstoy gives a similar impression; he proposes to man a life that appears arduous only if, he says, one has not opened one’s eyes upon the horror and the absurdity of the life of the world, its contrary. As in the Gospel, and in the same spirit, Tolstoy shows, at the evening of each pure day, the open threshold of the Father’s House; and it is not by parable that he makes all men be seen seated around the fraternal table, as brothers equally loved, if they bear one another an equal love, and for whom the white bread and the salt are prepared.

The Gospel has the colors of the Orient. It is natural that Tolstoy, oriental like a poet of the Bible, should have more than anyone the tone and the taste of the Gospel. But, instead of the narrow horizon of Palestine, he has the imagination of the boundless spaces of Russia. If, then, he interprets the holy text too much in his own way, he has its sense by divination. The great rules he gives have the character of perfection, at once near and inaccessible, that one notices in the precepts of Jesus Christ. Their sublime innocence is, at the same time, what there is of the most naïve and the most profound: each mind recognizes in them the plenitude of what it itself brings there, whether naïveté or profundity. And whoever meditates on this teaching discovers in it an unfathomable view upon the human heart.

A philosophy that leaves no place for doubt is a religion.

And every religion in which criticism is exercised ceases even to be a philosophy.

Faith is great in that it obliges. And by that, in spite of all, there is a religion in every philosophy in which doubt no longer has a place. It too creates for man his duties. You have, above all things, need to know your duties. You have been told only too much of your rights. There are no true ones except for those who discover them themselves, in the necessities of their nature, and who obtain them from their sufferings and their combats. There are rights that those who have them have not paid to have. The virtue of them is universal, but only as an example; it does not suffice to give an equal prerogative to those who have not equally suffered for it.

Tolstoy is mute on the rights of man. He proposes to him only duties, in exchange for happiness, which is in the purity of conscience. He offers, then, a religion, for this philosophy has faith; it bears its capital character, which is to draw between the individual and the universe, between self-love and the love of God, an immutable relation, in which doubt is no longer permitted and in which, in regard to the infinitely great, the self is an infinitely small, a negligible quantity, a pure nothing.

All religions have come from the Orient, because the oriental soul immolates entirely the human self to the infinite: whether it crushes it thereunder, or whether it absorbs it therein; whether it measures it against it or loses it in it. Faith is at this price: it is the point where every philosophy worthy of the name meets with religion; whatever their trajectories, the term of the forces is unique, and they coincide there.

The Good is that infinite in which Tolstoy does not even conceive that the nothingness of man resists, for it takes some reality only in relation to it. All Russians, in this regard, have the oriental imagination. The individual seems to them a point, and his pretension to count by himself an absurd vanity. Slav politics is a concrete expression of this spirit. Universal life haunts their thought; and their faith never eludes this omnipresence. Hence their moral grandeur and their role in the world; it must be its hope against the autonomous genius of the Saxon peoples: if indeed it be not illusory to nourish any hope whatever for the human race. It is not bad for you, in any case, to keep it alive. As you hope for yourself, do not despair of it: you have your interest therein.

The Russians know how to suffer; they love it, this suffering, and they practice the communion of it, which alone permits a love so singular. The measure they make of all things by the unique standard of the good engages them to disdain them all. They practice, by nature, that eternal life which renders wretched the promises of the other. In this way, they do not deign, or do not know how, to will.

IV — That Difficulty Makes the Ideal Itself

One conceives it: the philosophy of Tolstoy is a doctrine of an old man. And Tolstoy, in fact, goes against all the passions. He leaves to man only the passion of the good. As he seems to have had, himself, many others, one inclines to grant him that his truth is doubtless true for the man of sixty, but cannot be so for the man of thirty.

Nevertheless, this is not to reason well: or, at least, this philosophy is not that of an old man, for the reasons one gives. --- Even if the man and the Christian could lead a good life only on condition of stripping it of passion, Tolstoy does not say that one is good and just only when purged of all passions. Nor does he give his religion out as easy; and he claims, justly, the difficulty of his ideal as a proof of the goodness of that ideal itself. A mind too mediocre, indeed, attaches itself to an easy ideal, ready to hand. He who touches it destroys it: the infirmity of a more reparable life is to believe in an ideal without difficulty. It is infinitely better not to believe in it: in these matters, the worst course is to take pleasure in deluding oneself.

Tolstoy, young and passionate, would have struggled for his religion, if he had not had to seek it; he would have fought against himself, instead of straying in vain efforts. Where is the man at all noble who does not engage in incessant combats? --- The misfortune is to lose one’s strength, one knows not for the profit of what. With an admirable humility, this proud Tolstoy confesses that he will never be a perfect Christian --- and that he does not ignore it. But what of it? he says: do what I say; do not do what I do. As for myself, I do what I can; do all that you can. Do not say of my doctrine that it is good only for an old man; say only that it is easier for the old man to follow it well. It is true, however, that an old man who is sound, robust and virtuous is a model of a man admirable to imitate.

There is even nothing better than he, when his goodness is strong, when it does not smell of weakness of mind, and cannot in any way pass for an effect of decrepitude. If young people cannot be sages stripped of passion, it is at least possible for them to tend toward wisdom; better still, to love it, and not to be indulgent to their passions, above all to the vilest, as it often happens to them --- and as it always happens to men in the prime of life, when they give themselves up to it. Every virtue supposes a victory. It is good to propose it to oneself over oneself. The old man obtains it perhaps with less effort, and it is doubtless because he also has less strength. But must one conclude from this that the young man cannot do it?

Tolstoy has even always the right to answer that adultery is not only a crime for the old man, but for the graybeard and for the young man. It is perhaps not fatal to human nature that young people cannot live without being adulterous. And, besides, the remedy that Tolstoy sees for it confounds this sophistry. In order not to be adulterous, he shows the young man that his duty is to marry. In this way, this philosophy is not made for the use of old people. If it is easy for the old man not to be adulterous, he has only not to marry. And if the young man has passions that the old man does not have, he has only to take a wife, to which the old man ought no longer to pretend.

The Gospel, according to Tolstoy, is not an easy rule; but it is not legitimate to make of it an impossible rule. Moreover, all morality suffers the same difficulty: in its perfect purity, it is not possible, short of a bold defiance of nature, for man is naturally immoral; and just as natural religion has nothing to do either with religion or with nature, the morality of nature mocks morality.

V — On the Sense of Life and the Sense of Art

They are united in Tolstoy; it cannot be otherwise. All the philosophy of Tolstoy is social. He is the born enemy of metaphysics, the least German of minds. The play of abstractions inspires in him an invincible disgust. He sees nothing to consider outside of man. He calls true that which is human, and concerns man in society: for no philosopher has had, more than he, the conviction that man is the social animal par excellence. Hence it is that he is unjust to the ancients, he who reasons in their manner. Nevertheless, for the city of the citizens he substitutes the city of God. He believes its hour near; and he is as partial to it as Athens. The little circle that encloses the antique city seems to him of a horizon so restricted that he calls it barbarous. It is because he is not sensible to beauty in itself. One sees this well in his theory of art: he denies beauty, and makes of it only a social relation.

Whoever is not sensible to beauty cannot be so to the antique world. Tolstoy wants beauty defined for him: he is right to turn into ridicule all the explanations of words that are given of it. Yet he refuses to define goodness: it is felt of itself; one knows it in conscience; it surpasses all formula. One could say as much of the beautiful. But Tolstoy deserves that one make a more generous effort. Beauty is the living perfection of the self. It is the revelation of a sensible and perfect life, the supreme pleasure of the self in equilibrium, which enjoys fully the harmony between its will and its means, its thought and its senses, its power and its effects. Art is egoistic. Tolstoy does not purify it of the self, or else he must sacrifice it.

Without opposing one aesthetic to another, one must recognize that Tolstoy judges art according to moral rules, as he judges philosophy. It is always according to the social canon; it is always according to the norm of public utility. Now, it happens that the true artist does not trouble himself about it. If one grants Tolstoy his principle, one must grant him everything. One can live humanly only if one does good to all men; one can do it only if one lives for all, and does not live for oneself. --- Tolstoy founds his edifice upon that. Thus, the sense of life, for him, is not a research of the speculative order, nor of that of the sciences. It is an ethical research, and the explanation of an order of facts capital for man in society. In the same manner, the sense of art is a problem, in some sort political.

He often speaks of art like a peasant chased, lost in a museum. He has something of that naïve soul, which is taken first by the real sense of the images; if it is given to him, perhaps: his will accords, without cease, theory with life. He finds a just principle, which the misfortune of the times alone could render doubtful: namely, that the work of art must be intelligible. What is not clear to the mind is not human, and is neither art nor beauty. Art has always been a revelation of the heart by thought, and of thought to the heart. The emotion it gives is universal --- because it addresses itself to the mind by the way of the sentiments. Its privilege is to render clear to the intelligence what is felt by pity, hatred and love. All that one discovers, in the long run, in the great artist, matters far less than what is implied, at the first stroke, in his work, by the emotion it gives. The thought of the poet may lend itself to a multitude of glosses and commentaries. What it has of the essential is universal, is human --- and, by that gaining the heart, establishes itself in all men: the unique condition is that they not be too unequal to the artist, in sensibility. It is therefore true that an art without clarity, without a direct way to the heart, is not viable and has no beauty. An inhuman art is absurd, like an art that denies beauty. The supreme utility of the soul cannot be misjudged: it wishes to raise itself above itself. Art is the means that helps it to it, and by that a sort of religion. The work of art is a prayer. The child sees all his world in the “Our Father,” which he recites with fervor; in his work, the true artist puts all of his. Simplicity is what there is of the greatest, for it contains all the rest. The ambiguous and the recherché have only a false mystery. A poem, simple and clear as a flower, is incommensurable; but it seems what there is of the most comprehensible --- and what the mind of each man would have wished to find to express itself. Horatio, who yet has not the soul of Hamlet, divines the infinity of his troubles: what more is it than a cemetery to cross? What more vulgar than to strike with one’s foot, in the brown earth, freshly turned, a bone already greened? What more shall I say of an admirable poem than that it is a flower of the fields, like the rose in the meadow? Or, less and better still, a green grass in the prairie? --- Who does not know how infinite and mysterious this humble blade of grass is in its being? --- But its form is what the simplest mind conceives without any trouble and what it knows best. What is not an object of thought is nothing for man, and is nothing, either, for art, for the artist is above all the intellectual workman of our emotions. I grant that art reduces itself to the sensations alone: more than ever, it must be direct and even coarse, for the objects of the senses depend still more on the universal laws than do those of thought.

VI — On the Pride of Tolstoy

The pride of Tolstoy is immense; but one judges it ill, commonly. Many persons are wounded by the trenchant verdicts he passes, since he pronounces upon good and evil, upon the good and the bad quality of works, in relation to Christian morality. And perhaps one is so sensible to the severity of his judgments only since the time when he meddles with pronouncing upon the works of the mind. In France, as in Florence or in Athens, severity in this matter is not pardoned; and almost everyone sees in it insolence, for each fears to pass through this ordeal, imagines himself maltreated, and revolts in advance at being so.

When Tolstoy did not make the trial of art, he did not appear of a pride so intolerable. It is not that he was then less harsh and less strong, but he exercised himself only touching life, truth and the good; and these are small objects, beside self-love and the vanity of an author. It is true that a judgment so hard, and so at its ease in contempt, astonishes coming from a Christian soul and from a mind in which charity ought to have the precedence even over exact justice. But it is not permitted, even to the greatest apostles, to be perfect Christians, like the solitaries. They have the sword of Saint Paul; and even when they detest the use of it --- much more, when doubt takes them of its utility --- it is on the blade that they lean, as one sees, according to the profound thought of Raphael, Saint Paul meditating, his hand upon his weapon, upon the singular merits of Saint Cecilia, upon the victory of music and of sweetness alone. The apostles are born to fight; and the struggle bears in itself hardness.

It is doubtful that there was ever a great soul without pride --- or a small one without vanity. All the difference of the pride of some from the pride of others is to know where one has placed it. In all his books, Tolstoy is proud: he accuses his self-love as a child, like his obstinacy as a grown man, who is stubborn in his views, and prefers them to those of others. Nevertheless, the more the pride of Tolstoy is sure of itself and declares itself without regard, the less Tolstoy is severe with it. And there would be good cause for astonishment at it, as at a moral singularity altogether contrary to the idea one forms of a saint, of a Christian, or only of a sage, if this trait were not precisely the most apt to mark the true character of this pride.

At the beginning of his life, Tolstoy blushes for his self-love. Later, he suffers from it. He is so far from vanity that he does not fear, often, to have the appearance of it. In which he does well: there is only a small man, to deceive himself so grossly, and to find his own vanity among the great proud men. Never does one surprise Levin, nor Bezukhov, satisfied at being right. They are determined critics, and they ruin the opinions of others, from need to see clearly and to be sincere with themselves. But they do not give themselves credit for doing it. They suffer from it rather; and even, when they seem intractable to the people of their society, proud to think contrary to all the world, they feel in secret no contentment in it. One holds them proud; and, defending themselves from being so, they suffer above all from not being so.

Is it then that Tolstoy loves pride so much? --- In nothing: he knows its malice; he has experienced its painful hazards, and those ills that go even to convulsive furies; his mind, finally, before being purified of it by the Gospel, leaves him ignorant of no inconvenience of this passion. But he would wish to feel it in himself, to be sure that he feels the cause of it. He would wish to have the pride which, in a man of his sort, is only an effect of the certainty of being right. To say all, the pride of Tolstoy reduces itself to the clear conscience of the truth. This strange pride is a witness of faith.

That is why Tolstoy reproached himself with what resembles it, and combated self-love in himself --- and that is why he gives it free rein in all its strength, and does not seem to trouble himself even to moderate the brilliance of it. It is not easy for men, today, to grant a pride all the more violent in that the proud man believes he puts less of himself into it. Faith counsels humility, and even commands it. But this faith is that which proceeds from Grace, and from a benevolent gift, from the bestowal of God. Now, there is neither grace nor gift granted to prayer in the faith of Tolstoy. I have already said it: his faith is wholly rational. He has the truth; he has found it; and he proves it to men whose heart is pure enough not to corrupt the limpid present that is made to them of the true by reason.

It is reason that persuades reason, and, arming it with truth, convinces it to gain the heart. It follows from this that pride is the force which reason puts into its proofs, and with which it pursues the contrary of truth, whether by sarcasm or by disdain. There is, so to speak, in this pride, nothing of the man nor of the character: it is wholly of the mind.

Truth is, of itself, as violently proud toward error as it is humble with itself --- for nothing else matters to truth than to be true. Consider that all pride is in what we put of our person into our acts and our words. But, however proud they may have been in the bottom of their heart, neither Descartes nor Spinoza has any pride in his theorems. One can reproach Spinoza with his pride only by not listening to what he says, and by giving all one’s attention to his manner of saying it.

Tolstoy is a man of that time --- and I mean of twenty centuries ago. Like Descartes, he gives me the effect of an ancient. Their pride, like all the rest, holds to the capital power they accord to reason. From the moment they believe they hold the truth, they crush falsehood and error with it: and it is well done. Truth will always be harder and more resolute, firmer in its words against error, than the good and virtue against vice and crime itself. Nothing is terrible for error like demonstrated truth: it does not only condemn it --- it annihilates it. In this way, Tolstoy, assured of being true, seizes errors and reduces them to nothing. He does not distinguish between those of judgment and those of conduct.

I do not controvert against Tolstoy; I show him. If his Gospel is the true one, he justly ruins the morals and the works that are opposed to it in principle. He needs only a word of a peasant to deprive Wagner of his rights over the heart of men, and to convince them to flee the charms of this siren. When Tolstoy says of a work that he does not understand it --- he condemns it to disappear; he needs no other motive for it. And, doubtless, if one takes this verdict of his as one would that of another man, it seems full of an intolerable pride: why should the intelligence of this man give itself out as the measure of all intelligence? --- Such an excess of self-regard would be without excuse. Though, moreover, on the occasion, a Tolstoy were warranted in holding in perfect contempt all the authors, save two, and the works he casts into nothingness. But he has a reason for it which dispenses him from any other. He measures human objects by the relation they have to a divine quantity --- which is truth. And the instrument of the measure, this intelligence, which abases to nothing what escapes it, is not, for Tolstoy, the mind of Tolstoy himself: but only the faculty placed in every man of attaining this divine reality, and of recognizing it.

VII — Portraits of Tolstoy

Tolstoy is the center of each of his great works. He makes of it the unity, which the light mind does not see in them at first. These immense tableaux of a whole epoch, of a whole society, are the frame of a particular drama, in which the fate of a conscience is played. It is always a matter of life for these heroes; and, as for Tolstoy, their life has no sense except in its narrow union with universal life.

In War and Peace, it is a matter, above all, of knowing what effect the catastrophes of the fatherland have upon Pierre Bezukhov, and the relation of this life to that of the whole people. Bezukhov is the abridgment of his whole race, the man of a great family in whom, thanks to the mixture of blood and the chance of an irregular birth, the nature of the muzhik takes consciousness of itself; it happens that this history of a single man, far from being an episode of the poem, is its true subject. The immense proportions of a national epic hide this design with an infinite art. The anger of Achilles mingles, in much the same manner, with the war of the Greeks against Troy, which is the Iliad.

Anna Karenina is the occasion, for Tolstoy, to test all the moral ideas and the principles on which our society reposes. He takes them in their purity, and follows them even into the fire of their own revolt, in which they break down and dissolve. The misfortunes of a passionate couple are the most striking episode of this history. But the doubts and the experiences of Levin form the depth of it. The witness of the tragedy, who constantly makes the analysis of it, is the hero of the drama: he is at the heart of this condemned world, whose forms of death are several times on the point of imprisoning him too; but he keeps life, and he owes it, perhaps, to the perpetual search for the conditions in which it is possible. The sorrowful lover, who had in her all the forces and all the seductions of life, is despoiled of them, little by little, by the numberless crimes of a society so absurd that it does evil and undergoes it equally, almost without being criminal: “I have reserved Vengeance to myself,” says the Lord. It is the inscription placed by Tolstoy at the frontispiece of the work. Everything does not end with the death of Anna --- nor upon the despair of Vronsky. They were condemned before being born, being without remorse for this society, whose life is a continual death. War and Peace ends upon a promise of life, melancholy and admirable: one sees a new day dawn, in everything similar to the days elapsed, whose importance seemed unique, whose peripeties without second, whose events irreparable; --- and yet, Bezukhov having founded a family, the sons having taken the place of the fathers, life, similar to itself, begins again. In Anna Karenina, the ills of passion kill their victims; and the men who have escaped them, for one cause or another, continue to live: Levin, who has been the confidant of all, is at last the confidant of life; and the scene closes only upon this capital revelation: it was needful, in the midst of this world, full of contradictions, of absurdity, of ills, of faults and of errors --- that the universe should tell its secret to a human conscience.

The exemplary docility of the Russian people toward destiny has been the instrument of its psychological profundity. Let the consequence not appear singular: the sense of fatality is at the base of a profound conscience. The Russian people, accustomed to suffer, disdains the accident. It easily comes to take little account of what touches it. Nowhere does one give oneself death less --- and nowhere, however, does one die better. I am willing to grant that it falls thereby into torpor, and that an immense number of these poor devils have passed centuries in a stupid brutishment. It suffices that the eyes of thought open upon this interior world in which, during its sleep, it has alone lived --- for them to see there further than the others have been accustomed to. Tolstoy is the Russian who has seen this hidden depth. One knows in him the entire history of the Muscovite genius. Few poets have ever been of such importance for their nation.

Tolstoy was born of a noble family, one of the first of the country, mingled at all times in its history. The great lord, even today, in Russia, is still a product of artifice. To take him only by what he shows of himself, nowhere does such an abyss separate the people from the man of the first class. He is what one wishes him to be. For a century, he was known under the form of the French marquis. He passed from this style to that of England. He has worn yet other clothes, and has always sobered himself in taking them up again. But the mask, however skillfully fixed it may be, is so upon Russian flesh, bones and blood. All the fashions of the Occident do not smother this Oriental. First, he keeps his strength, which he should have lost, having imitated the vices of his masters more easily than their virtues. All sorts of corruptions have not spoiled the depth of this man, who excels at corrupting himself: if he catches the gangrene of Europe, most often it does not bite into his skeleton.

One claims that, in scratching this refined man, one lays bare the barbarian: it is the new and sound being one means to say. The same strength that he carries into vice and hypocrisy is our guarantee of that which he has for the good and for truth. Without any doubt, those of these Russians who yield to a corruption so manifold attain in it an unknown degree of wickedness. They put into it a sensual reality, a cold scepticism, a decided and glacial cruelty, to which the English themselves do not attain; for, in these, reason totters early, and half-madness is habitual to half-balance. The sensible strength that the corrupt Russian can exercise in evil is a prodigy. It would be too long to show whence this monster draws its vigor, and on what marrow it is nourished.

On the contrary, the Russian who resists does not lose his remainder of politeness and re-enters into his virtues as a barbarian. Cultivated soil bears a more vigorous plant. The moral temperament regains the upper hand. From a former captain who would have governed a province in the Tartar manner, there is born sometimes a mystical philanthropist, or one of those dreamers, incapable of acting, but who, even drunkards, put so much humanity into their musings. When the moral crisis through which these men pass leaves their muscles intact for action, they give proof in it of an astonishing intelligence and worth. It has been said of this high class, from which Russia recruits almost all its eminent men and its statesmen, that it forms one of the human groups best endowed, best armed for life, and most bold in enterprises, that have appeared on the scene of the world. Tolstoy would have counted in their number, if he had wished. As they are at the head of the society that he vows to destruction, Tolstoy does not weary of combating them: his obstinacy and his sarcasms are the measure of what they are worth.

Tolstoy knows them well, in what they have of the worst and of the excellent. His brother was a minister. His family has always occupied the greatest employments. He himself was all these men, one after another, before breaking with this social order. He long followed the models of it, as his time offered them to him. Yet the passion he brought to it, and the secret contempt with which he never ceased to pursue himself, distinguished him from it even then. He recounts how, at twenty, he placed the ideal of human life in being “a man comme il faut,” from head to foot; and whatever tortures his pretensions to elegance cost him, he avows never having attained the perfection of inanity. He did not rise in it above the mediocre. He despaired of it. Of a self-love vain and timid, enamored of romantic dreams, a young officer in the Byron manner, like Pushkin and Lermontov, he was not far, at that epoch, from rating very high a noble origin, great possessions, a gallant bearing, the crosses, the cordons, the key on the back and the glory of the courts. Pierre Bezukhov, in War and Peace, still sacrifices, until his thirtieth year, to worldly vanity. But he soon cures himself of ambition, and of playing a role: he feels marvelously that there is, in him, an element --- strength or weakness --- which will always oppose itself to his success in the world. He can no more be a correct employee of the State than he could push himself to the dignity of a man comme il faut. Bezukhov takes part in the great war, and sees it with those eyes that followed the siege of Sevastopol, with so profound an attention. Decisive experience: death, the blood shed, the wounds, the ambulances, the rottenness of the hospital have effaced, in this mind in quest of truth, all credence in heroism. At that time, Tolstoy was thirty years old; and he left the army. --- He paints, in Bezukhov, his personage in the midst of these terrible scenes, how and under what form he came out of them. Bezukhov awakens to conscience, among the ills of war and the sufferings of the people. He seeks his moral way; and, almost without his knowledge, he re-enters into himself, and into man, only by stripping off the great lord. The man of borrowed clothes, as one fabricates him in Petersburg, lets the Muscovite appear. This good giant has in vain forced his nature; he straightens up: one has bent the tree in vain, one has not mutilated it, and it holds to its roots. Bezukhov at once appears what the world did not believe he was: of vast intelligence; of an incorruptible strength and purity of heart; of a candid goodness, which does not fear to lapse into weakness. He lacks only the will; and a firm doctrine on life: for he cannot will, unless he holds the true.

Tolstoy, with that perfection of art that reflection alone perceives, has made of Bezukhov a man timid and awkward, hewn like a colossus. He is fit for everything; but he seems imprisoned in his heavy and powerful nature. He is weak in appearance, obedient, almost asleep; but let a great duty come, let the necessity of acting come --- and one feels what spring moves this mass. He will then show himself powerful in devotion, in love, in exquisite delicacy; and he has the supreme virtue of hearts without defect: an intimate and irresistible courage. In him, it is truly Russia that takes consciousness of itself. He rejects for her the foreign beliefs, after having tried them all: a loyal trial even to naïveté and clumsiness, but which could not suffice.

On the day of danger, one must guide oneself only by oneself --- and not by the example of others, were they the most excellent. Like Bezukhov, Russia, at the moment of the catastrophe, after having so much expected from the generals and the diplomats, from Stein and from Barclay, from the ministers and from the tsar himself, at last turns her eyes upon the muzhik, and the Russian peasant achieves her salvation. To how many errors, to how many involuntary crimes, to how many perverse customs, had not Bezukhov and Russia, blushing at their own forces, short-sighted, their limbs encumbered, abandoned themselves in their softness? --- But when Bezukhov, in the misfortune of the fatherland, has lost everything, and even the interest of living --- the muzhik, who has drawn Russia out of death, gives him back the taste of life. Bezukhov knows a brother in the humble comrade, whose faith neither sufferings nor death disarms. Tolstoy understood that the Russian people was born on that day. From then on, Bezukhov decides to live in the fashion of his people, in peace, almost in community, if it can be, with all the men of his race, by forming a home, in which all have, more than elsewhere, some chance of being admitted --- and as near as possible to the earth.

Levin is none other than Bezukhov retired into his quarters, in the country. The true Russia is in the fields. The towns there are, almost everywhere, great villages. Levin understands soon enough that it is no more possible for the civilized man to make himself a peasant than for the peasant to become a lord. The peasant prefers himself to the lord, and mocks the lord who does not prefer himself to the peasant. What a distance from the appearance of the muzhik to being a muzhik oneself! And besides, what is the use of being one? --- Levin does not touch, at the first stroke, upon this disenchantment. Later, a host of experiences have instructed him: he no longer doubts that he will continue to harm himself if he serves his peasants --- and that he will harm his peasants if he resolves to serve himself. He has seen the social plague that reigns in the Occident and in the towns. He sees with no less clarity what ills gnaw at Russia. The remedies one proposes there seem to him dangerous and ridiculous. He is not paid off with Panslavism or with philanthropy. The family, which he creates in his turn at the very hearth in which he was born, does not satisfy him any more. The universal vanity of all efforts, of all parties, of all the possible conditions of life, obsesses him to the point of preventing him from living. There remains to him only one certain truth: it is that the muzhik, this coarse peasant, alone knows the sense of life; and that, sometimes, this wretched peasant, even in poverty, even in life, even in death, finds happiness.

Tolstoy had learned that he must not count on ever making a true muzhik of himself. He knew, besides, that this peasant is not at all the perfect man. He no longer doubted that no man, of whatever class he might be, gained anything by being of another class than the one he is --- nor admitted it possible. He concluded from this that one must seek a new condition, proper to all alike. Now, having known that the good alone is common and necessary to all --- as being the condition of happiness and its very end --- he finds that if man wishes to answer to these two necessities of his being, if he wishes to be at once happy and just, there remains to him only the unique issue of leading a Christian life.

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The numerous portraits one has of Tolstoy reflect exactly the epochs of his moral life. ¹ One has them from the age of thirty to that of seventy. They all seem to be only sketches, often unfortunate, toward the great image of the old man.

He is not of very tall stature; for a Russian, he is rather of middle height. He has powerful and broad shoulders, a vast back, a thick and robust neck. He breathes strength; his chest is a solid and muscular block. His vigor, even as a child, was already very great. As an old man, he has the appearances of full maturity. He is of a greenness that astonishes, upright, firm on his base, free in his movements, his arms capable of the most painful labors, his legs good and fit for prolonged marches. His skeleton is bony, and in his person the muscles dominate. He has hands more beautiful than one would expect of a man who has made workers of them; broad, moreover, and hard. At the age he has reached, his hair and his beard are white. He had black hair, very thick, rough and abundant. His face, so beautiful today, was not so, by a great deal, as much in his youth. He says himself that he has always been ugly, and that he suffered from it more than from anything else. His complexion is brown, and tanned by an entire life passed in the sun and the open air. He has the forehead bony, round, mediocre in height, fairly broad, with those dry and hollowed temples that one sees on many faces, in the Orient. The eyebrows, naturally very bushy, are still thicker since, as a young man, the fancy took him to shave them, to make them grow, and to give himself an energetic air. The nose is strong, a little thick at the end, and broadly established between two deep folds that go to the mouth. The ears are very large, though of a rather fine design. The mouth is large, the lips strong, of a simple contour, but of an admirable expression: one cannot imagine a more eloquent form; and, even pressed together, they seem full of words. Three great wrinkles run across the forehead, from one temple to the other, in the direction of the eyebrows. It is they, it is their bushy and somber arch, that sets these eyes, of a singular beauty, in which all the life of the face is contained, and of which the sentiment of the mouth is only the reflection. They are rather small, oblong, set back in the orbit, of a gray color; the gaze deep and clear, sometimes keen, as if the lively fire it conceals came to pierce the light veil with which it is covered. This vapor over a burning hearth must have made the great charm of these eyes, which made that of the person. Like many attentive contemplators, Tolstoy is short-sighted. He had nothing to please, and he did not please women: they did not find in him the species of cavalier in the French manner, or of an Englishman, a man of the drawing-room, fine, correct, precise and flattering to carry on the arm, like an object of good make --- toward which go all their preferences, when they do not reserve them for some pleasant and glossy animal, which holds the middle ground between the bravura singer and the courser he mounts in his ballad. --- The consciousness of his ugliness long tormented Tolstoy: how not to be grateful to such a man for an avowal in which a profound truth hides itself, in general unperceived, or which one perfectly mocks for being puerile? It is quite true, as Tolstoy says, that nothing perhaps matters more to one’s whole life than the sentiment one has of one’s physical ugliness, or of one’s beauty. For him, there was a time when he would have given everything, in return for a seductive turn of the head, a long cheek, the complexion and the silky hair of a peer of England --- and for that elegant figure which seems a magnet for feminine desires, and which forms a magnetic field for the attention, and --- avow it --- for the envy of men.

If Tolstoy had need that one justify him for having passed from letters to the Gospel, one would have done enough by comparing the portraits one has of him before his conversion to those that followed it. The pure gold of this nature has freed itself of all alloy. What an incorruptible witness of the soul, sometimes, is the face of a man! Here it is, henceforth, this unforgettable face. In his peasant’s blouse, drawn in by a strap at the waist, whether Tolstoy, capped with a cap, mows the harvest --- or whether he makes, bare-headed, the gesture of taking the word --- his attitude and his features breathe a biblical grandeur and simplicity.

His long beard, mingled with the moustaches, no longer lets one see of the mouth anything but lips in which goodness and conviction strengthen each other; the hair surrounding the ears; those bushy eyebrows, from which the concentrated gaze springs; that ardent and fixed thought, in which there watches something one knows not how disquieting: it is the head of a Hebrew prophet, an indomitable tenacity, a faith that fears nothing, the pride of truth, the reflection of a soul illumined, and which has seen God in the bush.

He has much, in his manner, of a figure of Michelangelo, on the ceiling of the Sistine. And such a one of his portraits, with the fixed gaze, almost terrible, though without a model in the society of the sacred Titans conceived by the great artist, would not be out of place between Ezekiel and Isaiah.

VIII — On a Capital Objection to the Theories of Tolstoy

I do not find it suitable that one make use against Tolstoy of the ordinary arguments, proper to a discussion in form. It is manifest that his doctrine reposes, like a religion, on an act of faith; it matters little if, by chance, he makes it to reason: grace has no less part in it than in any abandonment of self-love to the love of God.

The strongest objection there is to the theories of Tolstoy --- is Tolstoy himself. Not his life, his failings --- which he avows with a heart so admirable; nor that past, magnificent in works of every sort, which he disavows, to render it dearer to us; and, glorious old man, whose glory he increases by not limiting himself to it. This capital difficulty comes from his character. In a word, without what Tolstoy condemns, he would never have found in himself the strength nor the grandeur of soul necessary to condemn it. If he had not been one of the most passionate among men, he would not have had wherewith to combat the passions as he does. If he had not been born rich in strength, even in violence, he would not have been that heroic soldier of the true that one sees him to be. The saints who spread holiness are these same violent men whom their holiness reproves. And those who follow them are those lukewarm and indifferent men whom they detest when they are not followed by them. The same strength that strays and does evil animates the just man, pushes him into the straight way, and makes him do good.

To speak only of war, if Tolstoy had not been capable of giving himself to it, as to the hunt, with all the ardor of a man ready to sacrifice his life, he would not have been capable of having that profound horror of it, in which he shows an equal courage. The lieutenant of Sevastopol is the guarantee of the pacific old man, eager to suffer persecution for justice. It is the young man, delicate on honor and self-love, even to stupidity, who alone can humble pride, as Tolstoy ended by doing: the ardor he put into resenting offenses, he has since put into pardoning them. One must have wished to kill a man, over an insolent look, to take it upon oneself to offer the other cheek to the second blow.

Whoever reasons of violence, without reflecting on the nature of man, has no trouble blackening it, and proving it absurd. It is absurd, indeed, to do evil, above all under the pretext of good: which is the case of war and of revolutions. But it is absurd only if it is possible to do otherwise. Human nature, alone, is judge of its means. Now, the fact is that violence is a sign of strength. The acts of man are not calculated on the arithmetical machine. It is not reasons multiplied one by another that determine actions. Man is not uniquely reasonable. He would be, rather, uniquely the contrary, sometimes. Often, rights that multiply have for result terrible injustices: there are operations that mathematics does not know.

I see well that weakness, corruption, cowardice, and the most infirm states of the human being, take, on occasion, the outward show of violence. But what of it? --- it is a mask they put on --- and precisely that of strength. Partial and well regulated, strength follows a course from which violence seems excluded: a river, however, is no less a river and the life of a country, for breaking its dikes. It is unfortunate that it tears them away; it is more unfortunate still that one has not put them there for it. But the capital point is that this river flows, and that it exists. No one, even of its victims, would prefer that it were not. One cannot persuade the Sicilians of Catania not to plant their vines, a hundred times destroyed by the lava, on the enchanted flanks of Etna: the beauty of the earth, its fecundity, and the quality of the wine it nourishes with its fire, make one pardon the volcano, and forget its furies, when it is in its humor to precipitate ravage and misery.

The evil is that one ruins strength, most often, in making the trial of violence. The strong, I know it, put into it all of theirs --- and it is one of their most certain marks. One would say that they distrust all strength outside of that which they have --- or that they wished all of it for themselves.

The prejudice against war comes from that. It revolts a thinking soul, which broadly experiences human sufferings. But the error is to seek whether war is just --- and not whether it is necessary. It is too easy to answer questions in which one makes an argument of the proposition itself. A certain manner of posing problems resolves them. As for the just, it will never be so, to slaughter one another by myriads, blindly, and to steal the goods of others, leaving behind one heaps of corpses. Nor is it evident, either, that there is advantage, for men, in killing one another by pieces, in carrying death and conflagration about in the fields and through the towns. So, this is not the question. But the question is to know whether war is in the nature of man, equally with envy, hatred or avarice; and whether, when he makes it, he obeys his instinct, as when he makes his bread or makes love --- or as when he launches himself upon the sea, travels through the world, and accomplishes his other labors.

Tolstoy cannot, himself, deny that peoples make war in proportion to their strength. When they no longer make it, they undergo it. They yield --- and Tolstoy finds it good. He fails to weigh the ransom of this precarious goodness, at what price it is bought. Conquering Rome is terrible; but conquered Rome is rotten. In this corrupt Rome, behold one assassinates far more than in bloody Rome. Supposing that corruption and peace from set purpose do not go together --- the inveterate love of repose and weakness do not separate. And, to my taste, who says weakness says impurity: it is not declared, but it is disposed to be. Nothing is pure but that which resists, and does not fear the struggle. Nothing is better armed for life than that which does not dread losing it, and braves death. For one saint who humbles himself, there is an infinite number of cowardly and servile souls who fall asleep in humiliation as in a bed of feathers. Draw the coverlet, and the sheet of death over these inert bodies.

If an example were needed, one would have it in Spain. This country is no longer in a state to make war; and Tolstoy will praise it for that. But it is even less so to do anything --- not even children. This people has cloistered itself. Its laziness is its cloister. And already, although it hides itself, there advances death, which is the prior.

War is indeed a violence. But violence is the sign of strength, and human nature wills it so, even though I do not will it. Now, nothing is worth anything that is not worth something by its strength. Tolstoy is the living proof of it. This incomparable life is that of a violent man. Let him admit it: it is as a violent man that he combats violence. Between the one he wishes to be and the man he is, there is this moving difference, that the humble and gentle man he wishes to make of himself is never willed, nor even thought, by stripping his nature entirely. There was needed, then, this violent man, this sinner, to dream of a life without sin. And that is why there is no graver difficulty to the doctrine of Tolstoy than Tolstoy himself.

IX — That Tolstoy Is in No Way a Mystic

If there were any mysticism in Tolstoy, it would be that of reason. He willingly relies on natural lights, to enlighten man and show him the truth. The faith he has, in the power of good sense and of uncorrupted reason, one may call mystical. He believes that a simple mind, not spoiled by life, receives truth without trouble, and accepts it, as the sound eye does visible objects. False judgment seems to him an effect of social error; but, according to him, the man without malice is not subject to it; and finally, no man of ordinary intelligence, provided it be intact and not vitiated by the culture of falsehood, can refuse his adherence to the Gospel, if one teaches him the word of Jesus Christ, stripped of all theology and of all ecclesiastical ornament. The Oriental, like the Greek, is led to confound mind and character. Tolstoy might give himself as an example: when he understood the doctrine of Christ, he was a Christian. He does not conceive that one should hesitate to do it. He does not enter, perhaps, entirely into the thought of a Montaigne or a Renan, who, understanding the Christian life exactly in his manner, would see in it a sufficient reason for not enslaving himself to it.

Tolstoy believes an idea good because it appears true to him. One has only to prove to him the truth of a doctrine to make him adhere to it. In the time when, despairing of faith, he lived in criticism, he often made of the good the touchstone of the true; at that epoch, the appearance of a truth dissipated itself before his eyes, leaving to be seen only a false idea, in that it was not good. To tell the truth, he was never enamored of ideas for themselves: he asks of them what they have for life. When his mind was exhausting itself in critical efforts, it seemed to him that he was not living. Several times he thought of giving himself death. He repeats it willingly, as one speaks of an old danger from which one has come out happily, and in which others may find matter for instruction. When he says that he was a nihilist, one must not take him at his word. He was in doubt, between contrary ideas, of which not one mattered directly to the good, nor to the good life. There, for Tolstoy, is a mortal and unseemly state. Montaigne saw in it all sorts of conveniences for living well.

It is clear that Montaigne is not a decided negator: but the probable, with which he accommodates himself, appears to Tolstoy a pure nothing. It is because Tolstoy is one of those men above all sensible on the article of morality, and who accept one only in relation with the universal order. They must have faith, at all costs; for, without faith, it seems to them that they have nothing. Such is the inconvenience, for the intelligence, of being more passionate than intelligent, or, at least, of letting the passions gain the threshold of the understanding. Rousseau and Tolstoy resemble each other most.

Tolstoy conceives only a human faith, direct to human interests, and whose truth obliges. It comes back to saying that Tolstoy does not doubt the truth. His gospel is wholly rational. His morality is Socratic: to show men where the true is, is to give them the good, and to force them to it in some sort. War on evil is a criticism of error. Virtue is only truth in action. Tolstoy is a sage, in the manner of the ancients. The saints of Antiquity --- and among the Hebrews even --- are men more intelligent than the others, whose sound intelligence discovers truths useful to all the world. Tolstoy asks faith neither of God nor of prayer; he does not expect it from supernatural graces. Read the Gospel, understand the thought of Jesus Christ: it is simplicity, good sense, truth itself. When you have come to that, you cannot fail to be a Christian; if you are sincere, salvation is in you. There remains to you only to order your life by principles you have proven true. If you hesitate, stupidity is stronger in you than weakness, or weakness, or cowardice. Your good will is not so much at fault as your intelligence. You are sick in mind, before any other infirmity. Cure yourself first of your complaisance for your maladies. For life, which you do not dare to leave, it is frightful and desperate for yourself, as much as detestable in its consequences. You know it well: you would not be a man if you ignored it. But you know your evil; and the knowledge of truth, which is the remedy for it, purges you of it, however little you open your eyes.

Why does one not have better sight, to see the truth? Why does one not even have the sincere desire of it? --- There is an obscure question. Tolstoy tends much more to render society responsible for this blindness than each member in particular. Almost always, those who give great credit to reason have an optimistic judgment of man and of nature. They do not have them in as profound a contempt as they would deserve, and as would be needed. What a strange Christian Tolstoy would seem to the monk of the Imitation! What a prodigy would this Socratic gospel be to him! He demonstrates the good and Christian truth, as Xenophon explains the good and the truth according to Socrates. And yet Socrates has his demon.

---

The inspiration of Tolstoy is more positive: neither demon, nor ecstasy, nor grace, nor the shadow of a mystical power. All that resembles it gives disgust to this powerfully rational soul: a certain mysticism of the heart, of which the sons of woman will not be cured, if it be an evil, irritates Tolstoy. His pity and this love he preaches among all creatures are rather rough, violent, full of demand, than steeped in sweetness and tears.

He did not recognize himself in those whimperings and those doleful insipidities, of which one has spoken so much --- and that pitiable religion of which one has made a fashion. He is even unjust to that piteous repose that souls, poor in everything, give to their egoism when they snivel, and give alms, were it from ostentation: one must, on the contrary, be grateful to them for it, as for a blade of grass, born of mud and sand; but it remains too little to take heed of it. Tolstoy has too much made the experiment of common charity, of alms and of philanthropy. He has touched with his finger the most perverse vanity of the world: for where is there a falser one, richer in error, more satisfied with error? It harms him who does it, as it depraves him to whom it is done. It is that summit of falsehood, in which one puts out one’s eyes so as not to see. It acts in the name of love, and engenders only shame and hatred. It wants but little for philanthropy by habit to be the master error of this world. The hand is there too much, where the heart is not there enough; hence that fatal divorce, in which one ends by doing good without the least goodness.

At the very least, Tolstoy is quite right to maintain that the best alms is the least calculated. And, as for making of it a social means, he is not wrong to unmask in it a too strong hypocrisy. It is vain, indeed, to flatter oneself that a sick society, in which alms is thus laid bare in its infirmities, can cure itself by alms. But if Tolstoy were more sensible to the sweetness of the human heart, if he relished better the tears of tenderness, he would not trouble himself so much about the social good, nor about truth.

I do not know that Tolstoy has, anywhere, spoken of Jesus. The truth of the Gospel always hides from him Him who said it. He names him only in company with the other sacred legislators. Whether he is a God, whether he is a man, one never perceives it. A perfect sage, he puts perfect truths to sleep in a few words. --- “What does he teach? --- What has he for us?” --- There is what the Orient asks of a prophet. The Russian adores only in spirit: whoever he be, a man counts only as a man; this people submits willingly to a faith; it does not seem to trouble itself about him who gives it to it. It is rebellious to the Self.

Thus, Jesus is absent from the work of Tolstoy, this great Christian. What more unexpected? --- For the men of the Occident, this paradox is almost incomprehensible. They would be tempted to complain of it. In France, in Italy, in England, Jesus has always been the great conqueror of Christian souls, and all their love. The most holy ones would not have been Christians without him. The presence of Christ made, for them, the truth of Christianity; his attraction made their patience; his promises sustained their salvation. That infinite number of tears, of cries, of prayers, of confidences; those appeals of death and of life; those joys detached from everything, and those sorrows, detached from oneself; all those movements of the heart, for two thousand years, did not go to a few words, were they the wisest in the world. Strength came to them from Him who made them heard for the first time. The charming Francis of Assisi imitated his Master even in the marks of the cross and the stigmata of the torment. The great Pascal speaks to the loving wounds of his God and would not have done so save to his God. For the least part, let the Christian not see in the Gospel only a collection of maxims. Let him leave the man there, if he removes the God. And here is Tolstoy who, by dint of being human, strips Christianity of both the one and the other, to make the unique place for reason.

By that, one sees well enough that Wagner and he could never have understood each other. They are opposed as two men could not be more so: sentiments, views of the heart and of thought, all in them is contrary. They are at the poles of the same objects. It is not possible to reconcile them. One must not be astonished that Tolstoy judges Wagner with an almost insolent rigor. The more Wagner advanced in the ways of his own genius, the more he shut himself into the depths of intimate sentiment. He loved Jesus, as Michelangelo could do: all that he had of the divine himself went to the incomparable Person, in whom blossomed the purest and the most complete form of the Divinity. The faith of others, even of the most religious humanity, sees scarcely anything but the man in Jesus Christ and adores willingly in him only a human perfection. Wagner encountered the divine. Wagner and those of his species believe in it only with the heart, because of the revelations it makes to itself. The divine person is all that they love, and in which the vow of their whole person is lit up. They really know nothing except under the aspect of the individual. In the most profound of their sentiment, they would willingly say: “The more he is God, the more he is himself. The more he is God, the greater he is, and the more I know him. The more he is God, the more he touches me. A man cannot be enough for me. The sufferings of a God who wishes to be a man, there for my heart is the irresistible emotion. How much, if he is God and if he suffers, is he more beautiful than if he is a man! --- That does not compare.”

Tolstoy, faithful to the spirit of his race, seeks in everything what there is of the most general and the nearest the common. But there are some who seek in everything what there is of the most particular and the most divine. Neither do they have a genius less human, whatever it may seem --- nor are they less men. Perhaps they are poets more than they are apostles. And perhaps, indeed, the apostles and the prophets were more similar to Tolstoy than to Wagner. Nevertheless, Tolstoy does not render justice to that power of love which a Wagner deploys: it might have enlightened him on the nature of this genius. For, after all, this extreme love of the divine wins Wagner to Jesus Christ. Like all love, it engages him to the service and the imitation of the object loved. The precepts of the Gospel, even though Wagner followed them only from a caprice of the heart, he no less offers them to the example of all the world. There is always something of the prince in the great artist: but, granted, if he thinks first of himself, the good he proposes is not useless to others. Wagner, giving himself to the love of Jesus Christ, created, in favor of the divine life, a host of people whose rather low life seemed no longer capable of an emotion so high. The chant, on which all of Parsifal leans, in which the mystery of the Redemption offers itself first, and upon which it must be accomplished --- has the character of a revelation. It bears a grace, it has a power of religion that Tolstoy may deny, if it pleases him, and if he remains insensible to it, but which he cannot prevent many men from having felt. Art has made this miracle. It would have no less worked it, if it were possible that Wagner had not encountered a melody so divine elsewhere than in his heart, filled with a divine sentiment. Let Tolstoy contest the beauty of it: the effect of it remains; it does not depend on him.

The great artist immolates himself entire to his work, after all; and he does not judge it necessary to make to the world another sacrifice. Is there a rarer one? Tolstoy ought not to doubt it. Is not true holiness as difficult as true art? Francis of Assisi is perhaps not so unique as Beethoven. To give the alms of oneself, all one’s life, to wretches, and to give oneself without counting to sublime works, in which the noblest creatures will find that bread which the wheat does not produce --- here or there, which charity is the greatest? --- I imagine that Tolstoy is more irritated by the power of art than by what he cannot do. It is wounding for the apostles that the artist touches the divine, by the ways, in appearance, of egoism; more than one of them has been discouraged by it, if he had been better instructed. That is why they are, most often, simple men, with great hearts, of unpolished mind; ignorance permits them to hold in contempt what they do not know. When they go off, to Athens, to break the statues with hammer-blows, it is very fortunate that the horror of idols, as they say, occupies all their thought: for, if they had any idea of Phidias and of Praxiteles, they would understand in part the gods of them, and they would not break them.

X — On the Humor of Tolstoy

Often Tolstoy overturns his enemy by ridicule. His humor is irresistible. It has that singular character of being still good, even when it strikes terrible blows. There is not, in Tolstoy, the shadow of a wicked will; and when the whole world should make to me six calumnies of him, I would believe Tolstoy and would not believe the whole world. Tolstoy may have been bad, like every man: still there are abysses between the wickedness of one man and that of another. No order counts more degrees, from the infinitely small ones of the bad conscience, which deceive even itself, to the divine ones of the good. It goes without saying that the good will of the mind and the good movement of the heart are everything. Were it the evil, in Tolstoy the will is good. It is admirable that it remains so, with a view so pitiless of human vices, faults and ridicules. But it is because Tolstoy sees no less the bottom of human misery; he has more reason even than verve. It is fine that his charity depends narrowly on his reason. The foolish idea of making of him a preacher of pity! Tolstoy is one of the minds most distant from any sentimental dream. Faith and a complete reasoning are not far from making but one in his eyes. This pity, of which one makes a little everywhere a dogma, and which is one even for the sensibility of the sceptics, scarcely pleases him, if it does not disgust him. Tolstoy is realist in everything: he must have realities. True pity, to his sense, consists in a life pure and without crime.

He would therefore be of an implacable irony, if he did not always have the will of the good. There is the point through which his humor, as strong as that of Swift, is often innocent as that of Dickens. But Swift and Dickens, the two of them, do not make a Tolstoy: for that demon of Swift and that gentle woman of Dickens could not be united in the same man, except by a virtue superior to them both --- which is the genius of this man. Humor is the robust alcohol, which distills in a mind strong enough to suffice itself, and which laughs at an object, without first thinking of making others laugh at it. Humor is the harsh and violent effect of a reason which reasons directly, without troubling itself about the reasons of others. It goes straight before itself, and arranges itself neither to be excused, nor to be lent more attention than what it is worth. Humor does not mock: it wishes to destroy by raillery. It is a sort of reasoning to the absurd, handled by a thought that sees, and that gives the life of ridicule to absurd objects. Humor is the wit of a soul powerful in truth. The reasons of Tolstoy are full of humor for most people, because Tolstoy always seeks the true, attaches himself to the true alone, and omits none of the elements of the true. Most men accept a truth as true, or an error as false, without going beyond. Tolstoy dismembers the realities of it one by one; and as often what passes for a truth of fact is a falsehood in his eyes, humor bursts forth from all the points of the discovery.

XI — The Self

One must hate the self; but, first, one must know it, and that one hate it. One deceives oneself ceaselessly about this depth of man. One confounds love of self with the strength from which it proceeds. Egoism makes man ashamed of man himself. One mingles with the sentiment of self the idea of the wrong that the unique love of self does to others. Finally, one makes use of morality to debase what the mind raises up: for, willing or not, never will the intelligence take the part, in man, against what makes his strength.

Tolstoy as a child is egoistic, like all children. He brings everything back to himself. Most men do the same; but they make themselves feared or hated by it; for the self-love of some clashes with that of others; they combat each other; they envy each other; they harm each other; and it is properly in this that the self is hateful to the self. Tolstoy, under the figure of Bezukhov and of Levin, still gives often enough the effect of a man full of self-love. But, in spite of his violences, one can neither despise him nor hate him. One loves him, on the contrary. As the self of children makes itself loved, his is not odious; and, there even where he seems without charm, he is lovable.

It is because this self does not love itself. With all its pride, its violence and sometimes its brutality, it has no complaisance for itself.

Here one sees how what morality condemns in egoism is not at all what the mind knows of it.

The egoists, according to vulgar opinion, are those who love only their own interest or prefer it to everything. With more or less consciousness, according as they have more or less heart or mind. But, of a child full of life, in whom the whole being is in growth, the soul with the body, and the proper will as the role marked by destiny, one cannot justly say that he is egoistic. He increases and develops his strength. If he had one which defends him against the mass of the universe, he could never carry it to that point of grandeur to which a few men have attained, and at which they have known how to make the sacrifice of it to that very universe. What is true of the child is true of certain men, and of genius. One calls egoistic what is, in them, only the effect of the strength without which they would not be what they are; nor capable above all, the day come, of a perfect sacrifice. In some sort, one can immolate only what one has the most of. One is prodigal only of one’s fortune. One must have a self quite full, great and strong, for a love of others great, and full and strong. And, finally, one must be egoistic, or be able to be, in order also to be able not to be.

One condemns the self on the verdict that love renders against egoism. But that is to confound the species; for egoism is the object of a moral judgment; and the self depends only on intellectual knowledge. Now, the intelligence cannot blame what it knows to be the powerful mainspring of all strength for good and for evil. Then, the mind that truly knows does not condemn. To condemn is not to know.

---

The Self is the knot of strength. Without the self, man is a feeble creature, who has nothing for himself nor for others. Without a powerful self, man can do nothing. The crowd of men is only feeble: and their egoism confesses the feeble.

They have only small interests; and it is natural that these be uniquely their own. They are capable only of a very poor love --- and it is that one which is self-love. They are not egoistic because their self is great; but one must say that their self is wholly egoistic, because their self is small. If the egoist were the one whose self is powerful, one would have to believe that of all men the great egoist is the least subject to what one names egoism. Learn to reconcile the grandeur of the soul with the heart: there is needed for it, perhaps, only a divine imagination.

Love of self and the strength of the self ought, then, not to be confounded. It is of a continual damage, for reason, not to distinguish objects so contrary. What is one to do with a soul without strength? --- Still less the best than the worst of men. One will never have enough the fear of the mediocrity of the heart. It is true: the powerful self brings everything back to itself, or seems to; like the child, it is the center of the universe: but admire that it can be that of caresses. There is a finer virtue than one believes in the art one has of making oneself loved. And whatever the rakes may say --- whoever makes himself much loved, even if he feigns not to love, he loves. The rakes, in conduct or in mind, see only the lesser carnal side. But the vast love of the universe, even the idea of it is foreign to them.

Thus, proud, violent and passionate, Tolstoy, whom rather basely one has called egoistic, is egoistic only in the sense in which he has the soul powerful, in which he knows it, and in which he does not hide this power. Even supposing that he opposes it brutally to the weakness of others, it is not egoism in him, but strength. It is so, however, in you. Does one wish that the strongest man in the world be docile, humble, supple of spine, prompt to yield, without instinct of domination? --- But, even were he to be so, could he, without ceasing to be what he is? --- One expects of the greatest strength that it be feeble in effect? --- It will be able to wish to be so; it will be able to give itself one day this law; and never will it know how to bend to it.

I know that this powerful self frightens. When it has marked what it wishes, and when it applies its strength to it, it makes its way with violence. It has no regard for what stops it; it goes against it, without measure, sometimes even without pity. It overturns the obstacles; it breaks them; or speaks ill of them. It is full of jolts for everyone; it seems insolent, and it is not always without cruelty. The great rain of April, which makes the wheat rise, drowns a host of insects; and these tiny creatures complain of an injustice. But the bread of life is at this price. Jesus Christ is not without pardon; but he is without softness for hardened sinners. The merchants of the Temple must have judged him violent and egoistic. Strength is for all ends. That is why it can have bad appearances. But what is its soul, and what is the soul of the powerful self, is the source of all good.

This strength, finally, remains obscure in its design to most men. They calumniate it, because they fear it. They feel only the presence of it; and, so long as they are not sure that it does not tend uniquely to harm them, they detest it, because they suspect it of it. A great self easily passes for hateful with all the lesser ones. If it is so, it is in that it is not great. They still prefer to see themselves constrained to yield to it, rather than to foresee that they will have to follow it. It humiliates them; but humiliation imposed on all is no longer so hard, and in the end it is a glory undergone.

Let them give credit, however, to this self that dominates them, even if it has the pride of it, for not loving its domination. Nor above all the hidden depth that was able to make it. An invincible sadness is bound to it, as Andromeda to the rock beaten by the wave. It knows it well, this self, and that it does not cease to hate itself, unless it gives itself entirely to what it loves, perfecting the tyrant.

For a long time it is a burden to everyone, and still more to itself, or it remains so. It is so long as it does not know where to exercise itself. Then, it has much of the common egoism, at least in its outward aspect. It is abrupt, irascible, discontented with all, of a jealous and quarrelsome appearance, hard and prompt to abase others, abounding in caprices, and, in the final account, with a violent desire to impose itself on others, reduced to fleeing them without truce, in order to find no contentment in itself.

Tolstoy appeared for thirty years an unsociable man, by turns misanthropic and enthusiastic; a bizarre mind, now haunted by moral chimeras, and now realist, rigorous and practical, almost insensible from set purpose; like a country gentleman of England, enamored of violent games and of rural economy. He loved the races and the hunt, horses and cockfights; he was more chaste from timidity than from natural coldness. Nevertheless, as a few men are, passionate for love even to carnal voluptuousness, the debased woman and the venal caress disgust them too much to leave them sensible even to the pleasure they take in it. The pity of their mother takes them in the defilement of this defiled flesh; and the woman who sleeps enchained in the sad heart of every man makes herself then known as a mother, by her tears. Pity and chastity hold each other by the hand, divine and gentle prisoners, held to the walls of the cavern; and their kinship is a great mystery. --- Finally, it is not only because he succeeded in it that Tolstoy did not love the world: it is that a meat so hollow could not satisfy the savage hunger of this mind. Then, no man, in the midst even of the debauchery of life, was prompter than he to modesty. ² And he threw himself sometimes, head down, to the bottom of disgust, in order to forget it. The shame of living at its intoxication.

---

Some say that he has remained that man, and that in him everything is voluntary, above all virtue. They see only the appearances of it, without knowing him more in what he is than in what he was. The bottom of the heart is the same, and it is admirable that one cannot doubt it. Of all the iron he had for evil and for war, he has made a plough for the good and for peace. This powerful Self at last has found its truth. The will alone fixes the sense of strength.

Tolstoy was ceaselessly irresolute and undecided. His will had no employment. The immense labor it could furnish depended on reason, which alone was to regulate the use of it. He had to have truth, or, as one says, a faith.

He has had it. From then on, in him everything has had its rule. What this strength had of the unique for good and for life has revealed itself.

His criticism ruined all credence. Life and thought seemed to him justly useless; action and love, without object. He must have appeared more egoistic, when he embraced a unique object; when he defined the supreme utility of it; when he attached himself to it with all his forces, and wished to engage in it the whole of humanity. There is but one grace: not even to hold the truth, but to be the truth. --- What would become of a man without truth? Without unity? that is to say, finally, without self? --- A thread of water that passes, mirroring leaves that rustle, and that fall, dried up by a little sun sooner than they have fallen. Derisory fate; more derisory still that one cannot be content with it. There are poor wretches of scholars who hold themselves for the greatest minds in the world, and judge themselves, with gaiety, a play of sensations without any bond: that they believe themselves the best, besides, is what there is of the most comic. It is sweet to see these doctors do themselves justice, and that they are similar in their laboratories to Patagonians on their pirogues, in the channel of Magellan --- or even better, that they do not differ from a polyp. It is true no doubt; but let them be content with it.

Without the self, there will be no true morality. One must carry the self to the highest, in an entire perfection, in order to immolate it perfectly. There is morality. The doctors and the scholars of three kopecks will never have morality. They have no right to it. They have need only of arithmetic, and of scales. Their self weighs justly what their fingers weigh: it is well known that these are only thousandths of a milligram. A very learned doctor scorns any weighing above this weight. How I love to see them do themselves justice.

---

Here, then, are the terms of a great conscience: where there is no love of self, there is no egoism, and were it in the most tyrannical self in the world. It is not egoistic, this self, which cannot do without divine love, and without the good in which it perpetuates itself to infinity, like the species in desire. An ardent hunger of immolation finds its food in it, and, like desire, the self throws itself into its dear abyss. The generations of the soul are far more intoxicating than those of the flesh; and the self precipitates itself into them.

The light of day does not give of itself stronger proofs than Tolstoy gives of this character. He has the perpetual need of love. He has the regret of pure innocence. He has that appetite for universal truth, by which the hunger of immolation is sharpened. It is then that the true is the good; and the good, the love of all creatures.

Let him afterward bend his character as much as he will; let him thwart his manners, and break his tastes. What pettiness to believe, upon that, that the will is there for everything: it is there only for the world and for life, which are nothing; but in no way for the very depth of the self, which is everything. And first, what is a will outside of nature? One wills only as one is.

The will, in Tolstoy and those of his order, depends narrowly on reason. When he knows what he ought to will, he wills it at once. The will is a deep and vast view of the universe. There are scarcely anywhere anything but blind men. They agitate themselves shamefully; and they imagine that they will. And one believes it. Spectacle that makes pity.

Tolstoy, once again, judges of it like Descartes and the ancients: it is a good head; but one that wishes to be the servant, without rest, of love: Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from her. He wills according to his heart, finally, and not according to his habits, or those that the world has for us. He denies that he is good, like all the moralists; and he is sure of it, like very few: this idea ravishes. Equally with every great conscience, he sees how much evil he could have done, if he had not had the good in him. It is the superb secret of the humility of proud souls.

The religion of Tolstoy kills the self: it first vivified it. Is it then that one must kill it? Is so terrible a murder altogether necessary? --- The more Tolstoy says it, the more I see how great his own is. The little egoists never think of killing the self: all men are little egoists. Now, it is for them to kill the self, and to instruct themselves to perpetuate this suave murder. As for Tolstoy, he is a master in this teaching: do not worry whether he follows it, provided he teaches you to follow it. If Tolstoy and those of his sort accomplished this murder of the self, it would be to break the nerve of the world.

The Saints condemn man. So, they distrust him and despise him. There remains to them only to love him. And infinitely better than he loves himself. They lead him, then, to kill the self. Indeed, the little ones have nothing better to do. They cannot direct this self, under the whip of perfection, toward the good and the full sacrifice. Let them kill it, then. Let them be afraid to nourish it.

This strength of the self, a powerful hand is needed to bridle it: like Pegasus who carries off the chariot of the sun, by which the world receives light and life: if it is Phaethon who holds the reins, everything breaks; he sows conflagration and death. If it is the god, the chariot runs the fine course: he has it in hand. The god no longer thinks, a single instant, that Pegasus was given to him only for himself.

Guiding the ploughshare, behind the ox patiently bent under the yoke of life, Tolstoy advances along a similar road. Neither death nor the despair of life occupies him any longer: he has not the time. He has men, whom he makes live; bread to carry to peoples in famine; children to nourish; deaf men to whom to render the sound of truth, and all those blind men to whom to make it be glimpsed. His only doubts are for himself, and his shudders. There is his egoism. He has disciples. He is so resplendent with faith that he no longer separates himself from it; and doubtless his faithful do not separate it from him. He no longer speaks for what he says: but for those who listen to him. A man like himself, he makes them more men. He is human, almost alone in this species, of which humanity is the troubled dream, sorrowful and heavy, ceaselessly stifled by an overwhelming sleep, in its bed of darkness.

And when he triumphs in his action, this great self suppresses itself.

XII — What He Is According to Himself

Never did a man speak of himself with less indulgence: for he does not even crush himself; he does himself justice; he dares to treat himself with truth. To go so far as to be true with oneself, an astonishing courage, which he has had alone, perhaps, with Montaigne, who, however, puts into it some coquetry. Tolstoy seems to look at himself with the eyes of another --- of an exquisite sensibility to see everything --- and of a judgment detached even to perfect insensibility. From the portraits of Tolstoy by himself, to those of others, there is the same difference as from those of Velázquez to the portraits of the other painters. It is life that offers itself to the eyes, and that gives itself to be judged. Nothing indicates the sentiment of the artist. He has perceived everything; he makes everything be perceived; but, like life itself, he does not express the judgment, which it nevertheless implies. Thus, one may differ in sentiment, in presence of these images, as before the living creature. Taine has said of Innocent X, such as he is in Rome, at the Doria palace, all sorts of falsities, to my taste. One agrees only in conceding a miraculous talent; Velázquez did not leave there a portrait of this Pope, but Pope Pamphili in person.

Tolstoy treats his personages with the same dominating liberty: it is not credible that he should do as much of himself. The genius of Montaigne, who decomposes and analyzes ceaselessly the elements of a life, is altogether opposed, one would say, to the genius of Shakespeare, who does not weary of creating living beings, by a prodigy of strength and of sensibility, in which the judging reason seems to have no part. The fact is that Montaigne was the philosopher of Shakespeare: he read him assiduously. And the fact is again that there is no portrait of Shakespeare by himself. Tolstoy, who never intervenes in his narrative, on the account of his personages; who neither praises nor condemns; who lets life alone speak; he would not seem destined to have taken himself as a model. Now, on the contrary, he has always done so.

He has the extraordinary gift of seeing himself in all the details, and in the most secret folds of the soul, without ever recognizing himself. He does not leave himself, so to speak; and is not attached to himself. Hence that incomparable air of truth put into everything. The Ancients paint for us thus Greek simplicity, Oedipus, Ulysses, Philoctetes; but they never painted themselves.

There is no image of Tolstoy, then, that is worth those he has given of himself. One has only to go to his work, and to take them there. One follows him from childhood to old age. The features of the face are not lacking there, either. It is not one of the least merits of it that this portrait was traced little by little, with time, in the course of half a century. The aged Rousseau speaks of Rousseau the young man. But it is Tolstoy the young man who paints Tolstoy the adolescent. Besides the gifts of an admirable memory, Tolstoy, observing himself without respite, did not put off to a later time the fixing of his impressions.

His Recollections of Childhood are the only book, in the world, in which the soul and the mind of the child offer themselves to the eyes, as one finds them in the look, the smile, the caresses, the words of the child. No irony: it is too out of place in the matter. No comparison with mature age: it destroys this impalpable flower of naïveté. And no affectation of puerility: it is a game that smells of the old man. Such a work, with the charm of the masterpiece, is within the reach of a unique study for science. The confidence of the childlike being, which no child makes, because precisely it would be lacking to childhood if it thought of making it, Tolstoy has made. Whoever wishes to know the ideas of this abridgment of a man, all still smeared with the milk of woman, his sentimental method, his proper logic, absolute and instinctive, his being passionate and light, in which the monkish thoughts play themselves in the state of emotions --- has only to read this book, and has, for the rest, to read only that one.

From the beginning, one sees a powerful nature, rebellious to all constraint, save the loving one, which carries to the extreme limit the forces placed in it: before all, a sensibility in continual movement, a sincerity of heart that has no equal save the sincerity of the mind. He experiences, with a rare plenitude, the alternatives of the sentimental life, and first the tender sentiments. But he seems to judge them with no less ardor than he feels them: child or man, he applies all that he has of reflection to the intrigues through which his heart and his soul pass. He is continually avid to render account of himself and of others. The taste of truth is, early, so intimate to him that it confounds itself entirely with the taste of justice; and, if this disposition is childlike, he has not ceased to be a child on this point.

He suffers, even into mature age, from that touchy timidity, almost morbid, which is like the skin almost always laid bare, of a self-love always wounded. He seems never to have been content with himself. His mania for reasoning has distanced him from everyone: for in a violent soul, to reason is to wish to be right. Soon, other men give us the effect of living only on approximations, and of going to the bottom neither of ideas nor of what they feel. If one comes to attach a moral value to the examination of one’s thought, the little profundity one sees in the intelligence of others disgusts you with it more than even grave faults would do. Many great friends of humanity have been misanthropes for this reason.

Tolstoy is not indulgent. An ardent love of truth does not go with indulgence: one must leave it to soft souls, or to those who have returned from everything, and from truth itself. Tolstoy gives himself up willingly only to the terrible innocence of nature: he does not argue with it; hence it is that the simplest creatures have conquered him and held him: children, men of the people, peasants, beasts, trees, and pure women.

His mother is the only person of his family, with an old servant woman, whom he has judged only from the depth of his love. His mind dismantles the springs of all the other beings, of those even whom he loves the most: a brother, a wife, his sister, his children. He does not flatter them because they belong to him; but rather he ill serves them, because he knows them better. His brutal sincerity pushes him to show this cruel knowledge, which he might hide. It is very difficult, having a piercing view of men, and a heart entire enough not to spare them, not to make oneself, in the long run, a sort of merit of being without sparing. Pride dupes us where it wills. Then, one must agree, the knowledge of men inspires the contempt of them; and the habit of being true goes almost nowhere with politeness. One polishes oneself only by dint of lying. The victims of a great man of a rough or morose humor ought to pardon it to him, in part, if they knew at what price he pays for it: the funereal gift of penetrating characters, and of discerning the motives of them, is not a game: only souls light enough amuse themselves at it, were they to have much weight besides. Moreover, it is not possible not to make bitter returns upon oneself: this faculty of a second analysis, and the knowledge of others throws you back upon yourself alone, is properly the revenge of the heart upon the intelligence. There is no loving man without this faculty of returns. And it is the sign that a vast imagination does not stop at its conquests; it passes from there to the current; and presses on against itself to new discoveries.

There is where the source of the good resides: it is a compassion for others, which is born of the disgust of self, to which one was led by the disgust of them. A Tolstoy has all the capacity needed to contain an almost unlimited evil: he could be powerful in it; I am sure that often he remembered it. But compassion prevents him from it; it defends him from that pitiless violence into which the contempt of an intelligence, which cannot restrain itself in its judgments, drags us against the objects of its disdain. Tolstoy has fled men, in fits, at all the epochs of his life, when he was fifteen; when he was thirty; Levin is a sort of solitary. It is because he loved them. From fear of judging them and of hating them. He was not agreeable to his relations, nor to his friends. He had only one, in the time of the first youth, when one loves one’s friend in the manner of a mistress or a lover, without one having, to part, the resource of carnal betrayals. And Tolstoy has made a lamentable picture of this friendship, in which, the minds alone having to depend on each other, there is always one of the two who goes ahead, and who dupes the other: this one lends to that one all the perfections, which lets them be lent to him, and does not afterward pardon the eyes, unsealed by himself, for no longer finding them in him.

Sensible to excess; prompt to tears, as few men are, less from tenderness of heart than from rapidity of imagination; full of self-love, and not loving himself; of an extreme vivacity of mind, of heart, of word, of gesture, but not of resolution; no less timid than violent, according as his self-love bridles him, or as he breaks the trammel of it; insatiably curious of human sentiments and motives; in spite of himself, absolute judge of what he analyzes; a distrustful witness whom one neither deceives nor corrupts; a reason always armed against the vanity of man, and which disarms itself in touching the depth; very instructed in the passions, very fit to experience strong ones, of which the knowledge and the fear greatly increase the strength; avid of love, and incapable of not weighing what he loves; without patience; one with the whole world of creatures without being able to accept the commerce of men as they are; very jealous of tenderness; implacable to falsehood; enamored above all things of purity: such is the rich substance of this redoubtable character, whose equilibrium has established itself only in holiness.

The love of truth founded this establishment. Those who love truth, and those who are only curious of it, are two different species. The curious of truth put nothing of their own into it: it serves them, a humiliated slave, for the excellent and for the worst. Those who love truth make of it a morality: and they will have it sooner or later, for first truth makes them, even if they only seek it, provided it be with love. The rules for the conduct of the mind supply for a long time the rules for conducting oneself well. Right thought is a guarantee of every sort of rectitude. The first use of a good thought is to recognize that man is not, as one says, “an empire within an empire.” And, on whatever side one inclines this thought, as soon as it is felt by the heart, it is the foundation of morality. For love, it is a truth of fact. With Tolstoy it has gone in this way. He began by being all to himself. He was disgusted with solemnity, and with the crowd, after having become enamored of it by instinct, by duty, by compassion. Finally, when it seemed to him that the world was empty, truth, which had not let him satisfy himself with a mediocre answer, discovered to him that the Good was the real plan of universal compassion. It persuaded him that this Good alone gives a reality to what has none; that it creates it incessantly; that it is by that the divine, or reality itself; and that, there being nothing else true but it, it is for it alone that one must live, since, it removed, there is no life.

XIII — Great Solitude

There is a solitude more profound than the arctic night, vaster than the ice-floe of the pole. There is a desert vaster and more immobile than the ice on the roof of Asia, when the moon of winter illumines it. It is man among men; and the will of a single man, grappling with the durable world and the ephemeral days --- there is the abyss of Patmos, where solitude is perfect.

Who ought to know it better than Tolstoy? The great old man has wished the reign of God on the earth --- and it is not of today. He has put all the strength of a powerful logic at the service of this great design. He no longer doubts, for a long time. He can lay it, at least, to madness, to the bewilderment of men, to the mortal slowness of truth, to the troubles it has always had in making itself a way. For a Tolstoy lives, grows, raises himself ceaselessly for this truth he carries; and, yet, his turn comes to grow old, to see the snow of the years cover little by little his perspective; and to look at the tomb that hollows itself, and that forms the stage at the horizon.

The countess Tolstoy said one day: “The count no longer works for Russia, now, but for the world.” It is when one is the most separated from one’s own that one makes oneself all to all; and he who leaves himself is full of the universe. Tolstoy has always been solitary; he is of those men who must have too great a space: they take all the air around them, and as they spread themselves, either they attract the surroundings, or they make the void in them. One must belong to them, or flee them. Tolstoy must have a people. Then he is repelled by them; he flies into a passion against their ill will: in War and Peace, in Anna Karenina, and elsewhere, Tolstoy passes as often for a misanthrope as for a devout and charitable man. He asks too much of them, one says. --- Nor far less than of himself. He asks of them only to believe him. He makes them a false reproach, one says again, of not obeying him, of not letting themselves be convinced: but why should they yield to him? --- Because he is the strongest; because they know it; and because he himself cannot help knowing it.

Tolstoy speaks to the whole world, according to the word of his companion. But it is because he cannot teach his people, his neighbors, nor even his companion. How I see him isolated! His isolation is as vast as he. No man can boast of having been understood by a single other man, during this so short and so long existence. What will it be of the man who is worth an infinity of others? He will not only have the vexation of being unable to make himself understood. He will have the somber sadness of knowing to what point he has not been understood. Let us go further: of knowing that he could not be. Now, this certainty takes nothing from the passion of communicating oneself, for it is properly that of acting, for minds, and their life. The ordinary man is separated from others only by the extent of a self ordinary like himself, so to speak: it is a thickness of nothing, or a thin veil; it can hide a real suffering, but it is quickly dissipated. The other man is divided from all by an immense space: by all the forces, and all the decisions of a will almost infinite. The Church wishes to forge at the base of heresy; it is the will one must put there, the very nerve of the mind. How Tolstoy touches me, as an adolescent and even already advanced in age: Bezukhov and Levin seem sometimes little voluntary; nevertheless, they do only what they will; nothing reduces them. They are of that order of the gentle, expressly born at once to feel, to understand, and to will: but the will comes to them only afterward. They need only a defined faith; then, what they have of power for acting reveals itself. Scarcely does he act, when Tolstoy finds himself plunged into that solitude without end, like the passion for excellence which animates him. There is so much truth in his soul that one does him no lesser wrong by misjudging the whole of it, than by decomposing it into particular truths, and choosing his own from a thousand. Thus, when he has understood on one point, he feels still much more the powerlessness in which he is to make himself understood. Who will tell the melancholy of Tolstoy, when one praises him for having written the most beautiful novels in the world? --- One must feel in his soul such disgusts: how few experience them? One vaunts Tolstoy as much as he is, and wishes to be, an apostle; and one deigns to pardon him his works, in favor of his books. In secret, how he blushes, the admirable old man, at this praise! Here, there is a man --- and one wants an author. Pascal would have taken it in another way.

There is indeed the profound isolation, the one from which one cannot come out, in which one would have to lead the others, there being no other means of uniting oneself to others, and it serving no purpose to go to the others. Isolated by the very thoughts one has the longest brooded over, and which one caresses the most, from human communion. An extended view of the world is a merciless spectacle of our own solitude. I always think of Jesus on his cross, or even of Socrates in his prison. Jesus can doubt all men. Socrates can doubt the City. Yet, Socrates has his friends, and he smiles at the hemlock, in making a vow to Aesculapius: that is why Socrates dies so serenely. He is admirable in wisdom; but already, in him pierces Epicurus, so sad, according to me, being all reason, and the most resigned of all men: better still a life that is agony than a life that is death itself. But you, Jesus, for your only friend you have the sponge and the vinegar on the mouth, and your lips are burned by derision: irony alone slakes your thirst. It is not permitted to compare anything to you. Nevertheless, the powerful solitude also sauces its vinegar, and thereby renders its thirst more acid. No friends: for the friend is he who understands us enough to cherish us, and I find him more sure than even he who loves us enough to understand us. Our hearts are of meat: they spoil, they corrupt; they tear themselves too.

Tolstoy is therefore alone, in spite of his glory. He lives retired. He has not even conquered those of his blood: some resist him. Admiration accompanies him, which thinks it good to corroborate itself with blame: for what it admires above all in him is that he remains incomprehensible to it. The powers of the earth honor in him a power, but do not aid him. He had a companion: he has lost it. Tolstoy, who loves the universe, is in struggle with the universal order: for one must not wish it in his manner. He is not in prison, because there is not one large enough for him.

But he is plunged into the deep dungeon of his condition as a man --- in the midst of the world, and amid that love of truth, which is the impassable desert to almost all. Who dares to enter it? Who has the courage to pursue his way in it? Who, above all, honors enough the blinding light, and without sweetness perhaps, that bathes this arid and sublime space? --- In the fields, Tolstoy therefore speaks willingly to those of Yasnaya Polyana, workmen and peasants; he takes his pleasure with the simplest; it is more easy to lend them the heart upright and strong; and the fresh soul of the child; they venerate naïve grandeur; and they love as they admire. They believe. Now, for Tolstoy, as for all those of his order, the pride and the will are to be believed. One believes, thanks to those who believe; and it is they who render us sure at last that one is worthy of making oneself believed.

One always has need of affirmation. The greatest of men does not depend on the approbation of others, but his work depends on it; he cannot deny it to himself. The tyrants know it well, who force assent. They employ for it means that touch on madness, half absurd, as violence exercised upon thought always seems, which, by nature, escapes the violent. One does not act in the world, if it does not take its part in your affirmation. That is why solitude, so necessary to the man of genius, ends by being for him a necessity so terrible. It ruins in him the belief in his own action. It reduces it, in some sort, to becoming negative.

Now, what indeed is a negative action? There is nothing living in a negation. It is better to be mistaken about what one affirms, than to deny knowingly, and on principle. A great thought, which does not act, solitary from constraint, after having been so from taste, for want of the affirmation of others, becomes unbearable to itself: for it seems to it that it denies. --- Tolstoy has long known this torment; perhaps, he knows it still.

XIV — Glory of Gentleness

You see what this man is, and what a hero. What more beautiful than this hero tearing himself away from himself, and turning into an apostle? --- It is to the glory of gentleness. You have felt his violence; it will perish only with him; he knows it well; and he makes it serve the gospel of the gentlest doctrine. The great violent men are gentle. It is what distinguishes them from the others. Men, dragged by their appetites, incline to violence; and if they fear to give themselves to it, if they have not the strength to brave this fear, they honor in others this violence, even if they detest it, even if it harms them. For they have the morbid superstition of strength. Such are all women, and almost all men too. They adore in violence the strength they have not, to repel violence; and if they had it, indeed, in their turn they would be violent. They exalt thus in others the envy of their own crimes; one would say them almost proud of this strength which decimates them; and perhaps they believe themselves to participate in it, because it strikes them and they are the victims of it. The immense crowd of the violent, from the executioners to the women who admire them, secretly flatters its desire of injustice, and blushes at gentleness. How different by that from the great violent men.

Perhaps also men are gentler in the Orient than elsewhere, and more peaceable. They have much suffered, and for a longer time. They are still ready to undergo every sort of torture. The same strength sustains them in the torments, and in the love of those who tear them to them. There, neither innocence nor gentleness is altogether an object of contempt. But one sees there divine clarities.

All the prophets have been violent by gentleness, even unto death. In his most sublime transport, Jesus keeps silence. He answers all the strength of the universe, Rome, death, the Jews, the abandonment of his friends, the blows, the cross, the mockery even and the thorns, only by the word of a unique gentleness: “Thou hast said it.”

Gentleness is a gift of oneself to the beauty of the world. It triumphs as one humbles oneself. One makes it beautiful, one loves it divine, this world, that it may be so. Incomparable humiliation, in which by love the whole being inclines itself. Gentleness is born in the heart of the great violent men by a view of the vanity of all things. In this little, what is the more, or victory? or empire? --- The great man does not arrive at the term of his work without a bitter smile. For he does not touch the term of his desire. A disgust, profound as repentance, there is his limit. He has need of being pardoned. He seeks the pardon of having been great. For, if he has truly been so, he knows what this grandeur costs. This summit of nothing.

“What work is worth the tears it has made flow? What benefit can equal that of having dried those tears, after that of having spared them? What grandeur approaches goodness, whose chaste caress stops the complaint on the lips, and holds back on the eyes the tears they were going to shed?

“Innocence alone can know happiness; for it ignores evil. Here are laughing children, like the grass in the sun; and the sight of them surpasses all science.

“My grandeur, says this hero, will go even to the stars; but it will not go even to happiness. I shall see God, perhaps; but, as Moses saw the gardens of Canaan --- from the bosom of his own death, and without setting foot on the promised land. I shall be great. And always sad.

“But the innocent creature will live in the heart of God, without pain, and laughing. All the benedictions are for the gentle. It is to them that the beatitudes go. Blessed are the peacemakers, it is said; peace is gentle. Blessed are the poor in spirit: they have gentleness, being without vanity. Blessed are the afflicted: if they suffer, it is that they are gentle. Blessed are the meek: gentleness is in them, in place of interest. Blessed are the merciful: pardon is gentle. Blessed are those who hunger for justice; blessed are the persecuted for justice; blessed are the pure: all their strength comes from their gentleness; blessed therefore alone are the gentle.”

Thus the great violent men, without ceasing to be so, put all their violence, in the end, into the admiration and the love of gentle souls. A strange envy, which dares not believe itself, still mingles itself with it: they cherish in gentleness the infinite loss they have made --- the innocence and the joy of life.

How they love them, these simple creatures, who have lived without seeing themselves live! who were born, grew, and vanished in their day in the prairie of God, like the most humble grasses of the meadow, which are not the least green, nor the least joyous. They cast a passionate look upon all those beings who have passed by doing good --- Transiit nulli faciendo: for, to do only the good is to have done nothing, according to the honor of the world. Most men know life only by the abyss they make of it upon others, or by the one that the life of others makes of them.

There is no mother whom the laugh of a child penetrates as it does the heart of this man, in whom it resurrects a world, of which innocence makes the delight. The purest of things, and the happiest, is the one that knows the least its purity and its happiness. This great soul is therefore full of sadness: it teaches a joy, which it knows as no one does, and which it can no longer relish equally with knowing it. And, doubtless, the greatest of men surprises himself feeling the remorse of his grandeur. Love is all pardon.

There is Tolstoy, and the gentleness in which he puts all his glory.

XV — That Art Imposes Itself on Holiness Itself and Dominates All Life

Let us leave the sun to prefer one harvest to another, in the field it fecundates: it is the whole harvest that matters to those whom it nourishes. In its effect, the work of genius escapes him who creates it. Tolstoy who denies his poems, and Tolstoy who produced them, will soon be but one single man for his people: he will recognize himself, here and there, in him alone. This magnificent life is born from the bosom of action; his art is like it, and imitates it. It is harmonious, with an immense and full majesty, to which life alone can pretend. It unfolds itself, varied in its aspects, unique in its course, swelled insensibly by itself, like a powerful river, of which thought can distinguish the waves, but does not separate them. It is no less what it ought to be at its source than in its delta of thick silt, where it lingers, before ending by a thousand mouths, rich in towns and in houses for the sojourn of men. In the manner of a temple, or of a perfect drama, this admirable life embraces itself in a single look, in which all the details and all the proportions balance themselves in a unique calculation. Whether such a life adopts or repudiates art, it is itself a masterpiece of it; and its apparent candor is only one grace the more, in which the divine Artist has put his mark. Thought, which no longer hinders the bond of appearances, finds again the same truth, on which the illusion of the universe is suspended: thus a pendulum oscillates from one edge of the dream to the other edge: and this fixed point is, that in every thing that counts for man --- in the grandeur of the will, in the strength of fact, in the sacrifice of the saints --- always art presides over its work, and contemplates it.

The most beautiful monuments of art, like the most beautiful lives, are not always made in view of art itself. Here, one may see an admirable relation of art with action. The masterpieces of art are only a result of action. Tolstoy has, so to speak, written only at the dictate of the days he had to live. His poems are the reflection of his life. It was fatal, in his country and in his time, that he should pass from the book to nature, and that he should end by charity. The Russian people seeks continually for God.

The men of the Occident, weary of acting or without strength, make for themselves theories of action, to distract a vague desire from it. They have uncertain ones, and singular ones, in which one feels the powerlessness of men of letters, and the decrepitude to which literature leads. For the most part, they oppose thought and action. They end by no longer understanding action except under the brute species, the most material. It seems to them that a man of action is one who gives punches by trade; at the least, one who makes the tour of the world, or crosses Africa. Whoever believed them would not be far from believing that Descartes, drawing up his method, is not a man of action. Finally, action, as they vaunt it, is only a literary opinion. As the fashion of it comes, so it can pass. I imagine that these idle minds, in their disquiet at not acting as one should by thought, confess above all the vanity of their literature. And, it is true, what they write matters in nothing; but it would matter no more were they to be lazy idlers under the tropics, or acrobats. They are scarcely reasonable, on that, to lay it to Descartes. Action is not in the forms of the act: it depends on the strength of the soul. That souls be capable of acting, there is the point.

Where to see it better than in Tolstoy? --- Art, faith, or religion; paintings of war and of peace; didactic works or apostolate among the peasants in the prey of famine, it is always the same goodness that acts. It is the strength of a people. All the life of Russia is in this soul. It doubts itself; it seeks God; it discovers him, and consecrates itself to him. The states differ, and that is all. The action remains the same: Tolstoy has revealed Russia to Russia. Like her, in the pursuit of a bread of life, he went to seek, without being able to encounter it, this inestimable grain on the threshing-floor, where the other races have beaten their wheat --- and he found it only in re-entering into himself.

He presides over the Russian people, whose action will unfold, in the future, according to the epochs of his own. One hears it said, sometimes, that Tolstoy has no style. A foreigner does not make himself judge of it. According to the opinion of the critics, he has not the learned style like Goncharov, or the refined one like Turgenev. It may be that Tolstoy has no style, if one understands by that the manner of an author. But I wager that he has the one in which Russia will later see the type of Russian expression. One cannot define the style of Homer: it escapes rhetoric; one feels nevertheless that the Odyssey and the Iliad enclose all the genius of the race. Tolstoy has left the epics of a nation disquieted, curious of analysis and of truth, heroic in the moral combat.

The theogony of Homer no longer answered to anything, when Homer was still the foster-father of Greek life. Such is the miracle of art, in which an eternal action has taken its form. When no one will trouble himself whether Tolstoy translated well or ill the words of the Gospel, his thought, his sentiment, his morality, will not cease to live in the soul of his people and to bear fruit there. His art and his religion will be confounded in the love of this people, like the most complete testimony it has received of the divine, that is proper to it. A nation produces only once the man in whom it takes consciousness of its genius. Were it to honor him with the name of a God, one must always see in him an artist.

It is such a man, who will have lived under our eyes --- this Tolstoy, the Homer and the Luther of the Slav world.

August 1898.

II

FOR AND AGAINST TOLSTOY

1907

I am asked often enough why Tolstoy seems to me of so great a price; and since he no longer publishes admirable novels, in what I find him of so much importance.

Some years ago, one day I had to say to myself: I separate myself from Tolstoy. It is my second childhood that I leave. How I would have wished, as a child, to give myself wholly to him.

Farewell, then, to the great old man. And in him, farewell to the child that I was. One must always leave everything. Every morality cracks and lets in water. Art remains. Systems are games. The true game is life.

The Christian desire seemed to me at first to fill all the passions and all the ways of man. It was the passion for holiness. But so naïve, that it hoped to find its end in the love of all men. I have truly known by the inner ardor the charity of the human race. But who was sensible to it, except only those who already loved me, and who since loved me? To be good, one must be a saint.

In giving, in offering oneself even, against a secret modesty, one has the illusion of generosity. I could not betray myself to the point of making others share it. When I most wished to give myself to all men, I most had the air of aspiring to dominate them and to enslave them.

I wrote to Tolstoy, in that time. He understood nothing of my fury of love. At bottom, I wished to be a saint like him in order to be, like him, a father of immortal works, and an artist. Already, I had a presentiment of the profound bond of art with holiness; but I could not discern to what actions holiness engages, and to what sacrifice art obliges. They are the same, and in the same solitude: but art does not exact the silence in which holiness entrenches itself. In art, the passions cannot keep silent.

Then, I believed man good; I have known, since, that goodness too is a work, and that it is not so natural to man as the dam to the beaver. I believed in joy. In what did I not believe? I had so much faith in all that composes life that I appeared to doubt life alone; thus, when all the moments are of pure gold, time has no longer any price.

But I have seen that nothing is good but the power victorious over itself, that it alone is love, it alone is strength.

All that made horror to me, all that does me harm and disgust, I admit it in itself, at present. It is not that I accept it. But Destiny has no more intimate confidant. I reform it in my heart; in the depth of the heart, I grind it, I conquer it, I melt it, I cast it. There is my own fatality and my mission.

I go toward death, like everything. And life is fuller than ever, in me. I cannot and will not reduce it. It is the strong age. It has no illusions, save those it creates.

I see Tolstoy such as he was, and not such as I loved him. I know well that he is not my man. He is no longer so good as I bore him in my credulity. But he is more powerful; he has more shadows; he breathes all the strength of his work; and himself, his religion, his acts and his books, everything here is a work of the will. Tolstoy is not a saint; and he does not love the artists.

Whether I am severe to him, I do not know. He has done me much good, and has done me much harm. He has troubled me, without drawing me out of my troubles. Tula is not the universe, and not everyone can be a muzhik. He would have made me lose four or five years, if one could lose years. But nothing is lost, on the contrary, since I loved him well, and have better known myself. He has not cured me of the Cross, which is the triumph of love in death itself, and in the most frightful torments. But he has cured me of men.

It seems to me that Tolstoy offers to our eyes the whole of Christian politics. It is in him that one can see what the Gospel is worth for life. Neither Jesus, nor the cross is anything in it, not even symbols. When Tolstoy speaks of God, one does not know what he says. For him, it is only a word; but it happens that he lets one be caught by it. Hence those doubts on the person, that uncertainty on the will of God, that obscure piety, those commandments in the name of a truth now abstract, and now living, that mixture which gives to the reasons of Tolstoy a religious odor and a sort of falseness, which make one think, finally, of a falsehood enveloped in incense.

One would say, sometimes, that if a man does not think, it is he. He has no true thoughts, all the while making a magnificent use of reason: nothing offers itself to his eyes or to his mind, on which he does not imprint the singular turn of his system. It is even admirable that he ceases to see life directly, when he wishes to think, he who, besides, has a view so strong and so vivid of living men, and of their acts. What he lacks the most, without which one never really thinks, he no longer doubts the truth he teaches: I mean that he does not consider the world under the eye of destiny, neither in himself nor on the account of others. Everywhere present in his work, necessity is everywhere absent from his morality. He possesses truth, he has thought once for all. He has no other wrong than that of addressing himself always to reason, and of being persuaded that he proves it. For, to be as he is, and to act as he does since he is a prophet in Israel, who would make him the reproach of it? Tolstoy is the most beautiful old man there is in Europe.

He answers, without wishing it, all those who oppose Christian society to Catholic society, and who triumph so easily over the fact that Catholic society is not that of the Gospel, nor Rome the true image of Christ. Now, he is himself cursed, in his country, by a Church that boasts of being the true church of Christ, against Rome. And like him, all these churches are sure of having the truth, and the only one. And they too prove it.

II — FOR AND AGAINST TOLSTOY

I — Depth of Tolstoy

Tolstoy is a pathetic object. Tolstoy is a great spectacle. He is already for us, as if he were no more. One no longer expects anything of him that one does not know. One has so much spoken of his death, six or seven years ago, that one wished it would have done. But he is of a powerful fiber, which does not break at one stroke. Was it not his first illness? Robust as the plain, he will not obtain death without much suffering. At eighty years, he still mounts his horses. He is going to leave for Stockholm. Age has not laid him low: he writes, he acts, he works. But finally he has distanced himself from us. Those who have loved him and whom he has not convinced think of him as of a man of the past. He lingers on the horizon; but when he has descended into the eternal wave, what mourning for the human race! A great light that is extinguished is a calamity for the earth.

His grandeur comes from his conscience. It is pure, it is strong as the diamond; and if it took on only little by little the brilliant water of it, it is only the more beautiful for it. It seeks what it calls the good, as the only air that is breathable to it. Evil, for this avid conscience, is the contrary of truth. Tolstoy has lived only for the true, without separating it from the moral idol. The good is a logic sensible to the heart. Ah, why does Tolstoy not speak uniquely to the sentiment? He distrusts it, far from limiting himself to it.

Beauty of this life: it is one. However diverse it may be, it has unity in spite of all the contradictions. One must be one with oneself. The richer one is in contrary elements, the more the profound unity is beautiful: it is strong with all the will that has made the peace between the powers at war. Most often, the unity of man is in passion. Tolstoy, as soon as he took consciousness, set himself in march for the desired place, where man is filled by evidence. He may have fixed himself, sometimes, in the ditches of the road, lain down even in the mud, slept overwhelmed on the brambles, to cheat the weariness and the fatigue of the journey. But he has never left his line. As one sees him at sixteen give himself to his first friend, so, half a century afterward, he abandons himself entire to the Gospel. His life is an unvanquished effort toward truth, or rather toward that superior form of truth which is faith. Faith is the truth that obliges. It is no longer of the mind: it persuades to act. The understanding is cold beside action.

When I began to know Tolstoy, in my admiration of War and Peace and of Anna Karenina, this Iliad and this Odyssey of the novel, I deplored the abandonment of art by so great an artist. Tolstoy himself seemed to say that art is nothing, and that the violin of Cremona is not worth the gut of the cat, of which one makes the strings. But what of it, one had to honor him for denying his gods: at the summit of his art, he wished for more. I have seen well, since, that he has not ceased to be an artist: even did he not wish it, he would be so in spite of himself. And finally what has he done with all his old age? He sculpts his own statue, for more than twenty years; and his most beautiful work of art is himself.

He has incomparable advantages, which he abdicates. He is a great lord, and makes himself a peasant. Rich in all goods, he deprives himself; and even if he plays at the poor man, it is a game that frightens most people. Not born to be a saint, it is a saint he wishes to be. He exercises himself to conquer himself: he knows well that holiness is the exercise of the powerful. A sacrifice quite hard: he renounces his art; he turns into a village preacher; he keeps an office of useful counsels and of tedium; he publishes a host of little treatises, in which he spells out a humble wisdom for the use of the common folk; and this great voice applies itself to stammering.

§

I see him always in pursuit of the good. And always, he forces himself. Tolstoy wishes to be good. And certainly, he is. But that he should wish it is the proof that he is not so good by nature, nor as one believes him. The desire to be good is a sort of goodness, no doubt; but one that measures itself. His cruel violence appears in his judgments. He is hard on the greatest poets; he plays the buffoon with the most beautiful works; he handles great men with contempt. He has more regard for the thinnest country rhymester than for Wagner and Shakespeare. He is very gentle only to the little ones. Would he be, in spite of all, more sensible in art than in politics? In his quarrel with Turgenev, he was wholly in the wrong; and how much then, and since, did the wise Ivan Sergeyevich show a serene and magnanimous mind.

And I love Tolstoy for all his injustices: he is full of them. His verve is made of them. He is stuffed with passions, and many are bad; or at least, they would be so in another; but strength, even of evil, makes a sort of good. Nothing is wretched but weakness.

All the life of Tolstoy is an essay at domination. Like all the true conquerors, he tends to the hardest conquest. The most difficult victory is the most beautiful. To love difficult tasks.

First, it is a ferocious self. Among all his passions, pride is the strongest. There is no man more stubborn in his own reasons. Wherever he is, he wishes to be the master. The instinct to dominate is in him, like the bone of the back. As a child, he wishes to be loved among all and more than all. As a young man and an officer, he wishes to be Napoleon. And he gives the lesson to Napoleon, when he makes war, were it on paper. Later, he plays the role of the great lord, who gives the example of social reform. He founds schools, to teach pedagogy to the pedagogues. He approves nothing of what is done around him, and what is done without him. Thanks to this humor, he has appeared sometimes to regret the time of serfdom.

Today, in each man he wishes to see only a disciple; and he sees nothing in him, if he does not find one there. A Christian? Assuredly; but according to his Gospel, which is the only Gospel. To make it his own, he has translated and commented the New Testament, against all the Churches. The Gospel has filled the vow of his soul; but he has not discovered it without discovering in it also the occasion of a divine role.

Tolstoy knows only the earth. There are only lords and peasants, in his books. There is no question of the towns. The workmen, the merchants scarcely appear in them; almost never the bourgeois, the Jews, the men of study nor the scholars. He is a poet, not to say an author, without ceasing to be the perfect barin. And what matters the blouse? He must, in spite of himself, make his strength be felt, dominate over the others and be preferred. And if one refuses him the first rank, at least he will make himself feared. Irritated in his self-love, and knowing that he does wrong, he is wicked and cruel with Turgenev; he takes pleasure in abasing him. It is his ideas that he means to make prevail, and at present the Gospel: yes; but our ideas, they are ourselves.

From ten years to ten years, until he fixes himself in Christian truth, Tolstoy has repudiated the action of his time, and his own, whether it were contrary to it or not. He has the Russian gift of fresh beginnings. New idea, new life. But the center is always the same: however diverse he believes them, all these lives of Tolstoy have one same pivot: that he be the master. He wishes to humiliate the whole world, from the moment he humbles himself, and in the very place of his dear humiliation. He wishes to take lessons only from the muzhik; and he takes pleasure in transmitting this humble teaching to the proud. Now, how much pride in his humility, his own!

There is the reason of his strangest judgments. Art is his enemy, as soon as it disdains to be artistic. He disguises himself as a yokel to turn Wagner into ridicule; he passes the plough over Beethoven and analyzes Shakespeare, Goethe and Ibsen with a noose to chase them from his republic, which he calls the Kingdom of God. He makes a clean sweep of all the summits, to leave on the plain nothing more than the sky of the little brats, lit by his gospel. Parsifal is nothing: a popular song is everything. And over all this desert, an uncertain name of Jesus, nothing remains but the new apostle.

I do not detest him for his excesses, which are those of his own self: I love him for them rather. I admire these forces that are ready for everything, if the will puts no brake on them. We are full of crimes, which must be bridled. Tolstoy turns the energy of his instinct into beneficent actions, and into thoughts better still. Yet, he perspires sometimes a few drops of that violent and red sweat. And there remains to him the rage of always contradicting. Why does he abase the great souls of the Occident? There are superior beauties to which, perhaps, he could not attain. He vaunts the people too much, not to vaunt himself in it. No, Leo Nikolayevich, you are not a muzhik: you are a prince.

The popular brain and the brain of the great artists may not differ in nature; but they differ in exercise. Art wants a culture. For want of culture, the highest art is a forbidden world, into which no more than the passer-by does the people enter. And there is our longest misfortune. For the imagination of the people is rich with all human reality. The brain of the wretched elite cannot serve us in anything; it is a terrain exhausted by culture itself. It has the seeds, the machines and certainly all the manures; but it has no longer the natural richness: it yields nothing.

The Kreutzer Sonata is bad, according to Tolstoy: it excites to the passions those who interpret it and those who listen to it. Beethoven is wrong to spread a poison, which he himself resists, but to which men less strong than he must succumb. Such a work is therefore bad; and better than this art is worth the song of the bargemen: Descending the Volga. What a reason! Art is made neither for good nor for evil. It is made to carry, at a single stroke, man into a superior sphere; and there, as in the proper reign of beauty, he tastes a happiness made of pure order, of ardor and of harmony. There, this slave of time believes himself withdrawn from necessity.

Art is the world of emotion. It puts the heart into the eternal. It needs an intuition of knowledge. Here, intensity is the virtue. By that, it is a strength always beneficent. So much the worse, if it loses the feeble! I should like to know what saves them. Beef-meat kills the child at the breast; it is not made for sucklings, but for the athlete. The world and history are poisoned with moralists who propose to men to suckle.

To each the superior sphere he deserves: let each raise himself according to what he is. Macbeth, seen by assassins, may well carry them to crime. Shakespeare is not the murderer. Will one say that Shakespeare is an accomplice? What madness. The great works are all good, provided they be strong. The superior sphere of the artist is always goodness, and even perfect goodness, the absolute renunciation of self: the communion with the universe. There is how far the great works exalt those who produce them, and even those who admire them: in loving them, they are placed in that sphere of perfect love, of entire abandonment of self, into which they would never have been by their own forces, or never even would have dreamed of raising themselves.

The injustice of Tolstoy is fanatic. No doubt, it is not voluntary; it is the will of his temperament. Is there anything more fanatic than a reason sure of itself? We are all there. Blessed are the feeble: they are without passion. As is ordinary with the Russians, in Tolstoy the philosophic faculty is mediocre: the sense of life wills it so. When he philosophizes, Tolstoy suppresses the sick man, to cure the disease. A marvelous view of characters, and of the living space in which the human waves propagate themselves, that is the genius of Tolstoy. The gift of penetrating hearts has made him wholly sensible. The origin of his goodness is there: he sees death and he imagines suffering not as if it were a matter of his suffering and his death, but as if he held that he had to answer for it.

II — Moral Politics

Tolstoy said one day: “I should like my corpse to be thrown to the dogs: that too, for me, would be well.”

A convalescent, the old Tolstoy deplores not having died at the height of the illness: “I was made for it,” he says; “I was already going away, with happiness.” Or else, once more drawn out of trouble, he regrets his state of illness, as a state of perfection. It is not a matter of a passing ordeal, but of a very mortal malady, if one recalls the great age of the sick man. In spite of the ascetic humor toward which his Christian system naturally inclines him, I cannot help entering into a great trouble, when I hear Tolstoy speak in this way. At the gates of death, he is wearied of life. He gives himself with a sort of joy to the sentiments of the inevitable loss. The more I feel myself in the prey of life, the more this forced return upon myself is abrupt, bloody, inexorable. The judgment of Tolstoy freezes me; and it is not from surprise, but because of the truth I feel in it. He condemns all that I force myself to save and to absolve. Happiness, then, is worth nothing? Or is satiety so cruel?

Ah! about what do I disquiet myself? Tolstoy puts back into my memory that happiness, that domestic sun, never shines on the edge of the earth, where man opens his eyes. Possible, happiness is not so. There is no true happiness in living: for duration is lacking to it; and conscience is there. Nothing fills the desire of life. Happiness would be divine, if it could know itself. It is never of happiness that one can speak ill; it is not even of it that one doubts, since it is not.

What is therefore worth nothing, and what ought to make the torment of the heart, is the illusion of happiness. There is the truth that Tolstoy makes one feel. The mortal malady is admirable for stripping off illusion, and rendering man to his fatal nakedness. Such is the secret of Tolstoy, and the terrible renunciation he proposes in this way to all life. He is not so Christian that he is not still more Asiatic and gorged with nothingness. To take away the illusion of life from the unhappy mortals, what a present to make them! It is much more fitting for them to believe in it, and that nothing turn them from it. O man, think of nothing: it is the surest. Let yourself be carried by the hour, as you let yourself be carried, in her belly, by your mother. Hold to being numbed in the moment by the moment, enjoy the time, if it is fine; and the rain, if it rains. One asks too much of you, sad bag-carrier of conscience. Do not listen to the great, the eternal unhappy one, who agitates himself at the bottom of every heart passionate for life, and whom the intelligence of the universe inexpiably works.

Tolstoy is excommunicated. His wife has pleaded for him, without success, before the Holy Synod. She does not believe, however, that the Russian Church will let him die without making peace with this great Christian. Meanwhile, one pursues his little books of instruction and of polemic. In Russia, all that touches the Church touches the State, and what strikes the one wounds the other. Tolstoy is in horror to the clergy. In the convents of Mount Athos, one crosses oneself when one names him. He is the Antichrist for those simple souls. The monks hold him for one of the blackest demons. One stirs up against him the peasants who, showing him the fist, treat him, howling, as impious and as a devil! It is a bitter pleasure for reason to know that one hoots Tolstoy on the road of Tula, and that one casts stones at him in the name of Christ. The heavy irony! How those pebbles are of sadness!

Tolstoy is punished by that for having had so much patience with the powerful of the world. He loves praise. He has received too much of it from those gallows-talents that are born in the mire of rebellion, to flee into the fat of fortune. Among all the honors, he has chosen the rarest: the reverence that the universe and even the wicked cannot refuse to moral grandeur. He takes pleasure in the role he plays; he does not hate the holiness that shines. He abounds in himself, in spite of all.

A long look upon Russia has revealed to him the appalling misery of this people. He has taken there his horror of the State and of all those who reign by force. In times of famine, it is a country where the people who die of hunger must refuse the soup that the State has not steeped. One has seen the Cossacks throw into the river the breads and the flour that had not been sealed at the pot of wine by the ministers. Tolstoy is no less an anarchist than he is a Christian. Besides, the most atheist Russian is a Christian still, witness Kropotkin. They have the passion of morality. All true morality is ascetic, in its depth. They are born in the hatred of the flesh. Every sensual joy is for them a debauch. They have not the light soul. There is delirium and tortures in their voluptuousness. The Russian intoxicates himself with ideas as with white brandy. His dementia is logical. Even if he raves, he does not deliver himself from morality. All Russia speaks for eternity, henceforth, of the Christian sentiment. No society, no morality, according to the Russian, short of the Christian idea.

After all, Tolstoy is the only anarchist who does not revolt reason. He, at least, having ruined the State, ruins also nature. He has a God, to supply for nature and the State.

In Tolstoy, I discern the old leaven of orthodoxy against the Catholic Occident. At forty years, Levin still holds for his church, and follows its practices. Tolstoy is more orthodox than he himself believes.

Like so many others, Tolstoy is virile in what he denies, puerile in what he affirms. He grants himself everything, and first that all men are in conscience like him, or ought to be so. One does not have sixty or eighty years at one stroke, nor the age of wisdom at the evening of a life filled with all gifts. Not one man, perhaps, save Goethe, has had a life happier nor easier than this one. A great lord, full of genius, who lives on his lands, in the midst of a fine family, and who sets himself to make the happiness of his peasants, there is Tolstoy in flesh and bone. And he disdains art, after having developed his genius in five or six books.

The art of making an end, that is the religion of Tolstoy, all plunged into death. He draws from it a doctrine of life for other men. But if men exacted, first, to have lived as he did? Tolstoy is devoured by charity and by zeal for the human race; but sixty years of the most beautiful life is above all a zeal and a charity immense for oneself. The reason that Tolstoy lavishes in his great age is irresistible only at the evening of all the passions. Temperance is then natural. To convince men, at the price of his death itself, one must say it still in the flower of one’s strength and of one’s youth. What is reason? the ashes of sentiment. One does not warm oneself, one does not light oneself by ashes.

Faith is the sense of life, and, purer still, the strength of life itself. In which faith bears no less the State than the Church. All forms of strength justify themselves of themselves. It is not credible that a man like Tolstoy should make himself an idea so false of violence that he can see a prodigy of violence, a sort of diabolic falsehood, in the Church and in the State. But what indeed are the State and the Church without men? Violence is in man, like the seed or the marrow; and perhaps without violence, man would be without love and without faith.

For Tolstoy, the executioner and the pope, the conqueror and the priest, the rich man and the officer are the sons of falsehood and of violence, of the State and of the Church. To kill by trade, to say the mass, to draw rents, to sell land, according to him there is in that a cruelty and an imposture so horrible that they are contrary to human nature. As if anything that man does could not be of his nature! But all that passes for inhuman is human by the same title as the rest. When one does honor to humanity for an act or a sentiment, whatever it be, one honors in it also inhumanity, or what one calls by that name, the repudiated Hagar, whom one makes dine in the kitchen, and whom one goes to lose in the desert, whence one will go to draw her, on the first day there will be need of her.

The Gospel, according to Tolstoy, is not a doctrine for living, but a good news for dying. It would be quite difficult to contradict it, if Tolstoy avowed it. But he could not agree to it, though his action makes the avowal of it for him. For, haunted by death, he who stops at a doctrine of dying well burns to find, and never finds, a teaching for living. If, not reigning to be an optimist, Tolstoy would be true enough. One is always true, in one manner or another, when one is a pessimist.

Love is the god of Tolstoy. This god commands a total abandonment of self, the horror of all violence, patience and resignation, fists bound, to all the excesses of the violent, the disavowal of all the passions and even of justice, manual labor and perfect poverty: in the final account, to have nothing and to be nothing. There is an intemperate system of morality. For this god is an idol of conscience: we must have a surer law: we must have knowledge.

Hence, nevertheless, that Tolstoy pleases so much the communists and the moral atheists, people of system. They are full of morality, like ill-nourished children, of pimples. They would much like their humors to be the sign of health. They must always have signs, and they take them for authority. Tolstoy makes himself an authority of Jesus Christ, and the atheists with morality would wish to make themselves one of Tolstoy.

This love, the son of conscience and of reason, why is it a god, and the only god? How cold it is! how null! Null as an idea: one loves no one, in order to love the human race enough. I would willingly give the human race for the life of a being whom I love. What then? --- Certainly. For I would have given myself a hundred times.

Tolstoy always refers himself to the submissive conscience. At bottom, to take consciousness of oneself is the perfect life; and to have no consciousness, the only happiness or the only innocence: then one undergoes life, and one is withdrawn from death. Why stop at men? The beasts are far more innocent than children. And certainly more unhappy. And more holy too. There is no god in conscience: it is evil and death.

The drama of life is a symphony. Men have sense and value only by the place they occupy in the mass of the chorus. They are questions and answers. None can believe himself without bonds to the others. The most beautiful instrument has timbre and word only at its time in the orchestra. It does not play for itself alone. Music is not made of it alone nor for it. It is a part in the immense symphony. There is neither good nor evil. One cannot say of a man either that he is bad or that he is good. He is the answer that such a line of the text exacts. He is there, on the stage, only to answer. But he answers in an original way for himself, by his pure strength and his passion.

III — Accomplishment

One must be a peasant, or live by a little trade. The labor of one’s hands must nourish man. But Tolstoy, for a muzhik, lives in a palace. He makes light of fortune; but one manages for him great possessions, and one administers with rigor all his interests. He himself, he wears the leather belt over the blouse; but not in a workshop.

He preaches the Gospel of poverty and he persuades the little people. But he does not succeed in convincing his children, nor his own wife who loves him and admires him for half a century. One cannot laugh at it, no doubt, nor be astonished at it. Yet, one is irritated by it.

He breathes only to combat violence. But he suffers all violence to be exercised around him. In a revolution that has moved the heart of the whole world, he has not had a gesture for the victims. Who did not expect it? If the people of Moscow and of Petersburg had armed themselves to obtain rights, it would have been just that Tolstoy should refuse to take up arms. But this people marched as a suppliant toward the dwelling of its masters. It sang psalms. It put itself on its knees to demand a little bread and the right to weep. The hunger of this people is unutterable, and its grief is age-old. It is on its knees that one shot it down. On the parapet of the bridges, and in the trees, one shot the children like sparrows.

The place of Tolstoy was there, not in his writing-desk. It was there that he ought to have died, as a Russian prophet, at the head of his people: since this people, when it revolts, prays and kisses the hand that strikes it.

I understand that Tolstoy dreads that the revolt may, in the end, change the heart of this suffering race. He must fear that it will lose its virtue of patience, and the gift it has received for sacrifice. If it takes the manners of the Occident, without having the genius of it, it will lose the genius of its own mission: for the suffering of this people seems to promise it to a very high destiny. But certainly, it was not a question that Tolstoy should make himself the priest of murder and of the bomb; one asked of him only not to appear neutral between those who exercise all the crimes of violence and those who undergo them. And perhaps, Tolstoy, on the square where the Russian people, on its knees, was massacred, one winter day, with impunity, would have prevented the massacre. For the shame they would have received from it, they would have looked at it twice, those cowards, before killing this man. And what a glory, for him, if one had thrown him into a dungeon, or if one had hanged him! One must not be an apostle, nor a witness of a god, by halves. As Pascal says, I believe only the gods whose witnesses are bloody.

His head is powerful, since he is old. With the white beard of the patriarch, how beautiful it would have been on the gibbet! From up there, how it would have frightened the rats, in the palaces!

The clear and ardent eyes of the old lion, there is the royal trait of this face. They are full of life, of strength, of movement. And the mouth with the thick, fleshy lips expresses an incomparable eloquence. Instinct dominates here, not intelligence.

He is not very tall, for a Russian. Of middle stature, he has not the shoulders so vast as one says. Muscles and nerves, he is very robust, but not of an athletic strength. He has the hand strong and beautiful, the foot small. He has the complexion brown and baked like a ploughman or a sailor. Ill, his pallor is yellow; for he is very bilious. He has the collar and the nape well made, carrying high the long-haired head. Everything in him speaks to me of a man who calls to himself all the wretched, who penetrates them with his strength, who embraces them and does not deny them.

When one has well seen human misery, one can no longer resign oneself to this fatality. And the more one thinks it necessary, the less one can admit the thought of it.

The problem of misery is of the same order, for the City, as the problem of death for the individual. Here and there, it is always a matter of reducing the self. Who conquers himself the most, the most purifies himself. Who would wish to compare this magnificent old man of Tolstoy to the man he has been?

And there is the white pilgrim of the Gospel who goes off toward the North, to take his place at the Congress of Peace, and to speak there in the name of Christ. Where Jesus is, there is peace. He believes it, the antique prophet; he teaches it; and according to him, it would be done with evil, if the world would understand the truth. Man has but one step to dare, to enter into the kingdom of God. Tolstoy forgets nothing, save that the day he could do it, behind this God himself, he put him on the cross.

Where peace is, there is death. Tolstoy invites the world to death. And no doubt, this end is the only one, and the only deliverance. The idea of Tolstoy is the true one, if one wishes to make peace among men. But peace will not be made, so long as men wish to live. The Gospel is the law of a perfect society; and perfection is accomplishment. Tolstoy aspires to it. With what fervor! and how much will he has! “The bodies of the saints are buried in peace.” This hope is his. “Our God is the God who saves: he delivers from death.” And everything is there, indeed: Whoever can say it, and in whatever manner he says it, he has the truth.

He has so much dreamed of giving a law to his people! he is like Peter, if Peter had been the king of Rome. There is but one sovereign in Russia: it is Tolstoy. In a hundred years, or in a thousand, one will no longer even understand what he wished to do. One will laugh perhaps at his stubbornness for the bent back and the plough. One will see in him no more than the poet. His people, in the work of art, will love its own life. For peoples, like men, love nothing but themselves. And yet, we who have lived as he was going to finish living, we know well that in Tolstoy, there is something greater even than his work, and it is himself.

June 1907.

III

AGAINST TOLSTOY

1909

Tolstoy and the Churches

In the rural man, one always recognizes the great lord. One effaces the prince, and the man of the earth remains. The peasant always speaks for the lord who believes he speaks for him. He feigns to hold no longer to anything, save to possessing the truth for his whole heritage; but even in the abandonment of his goods, one feels the possessor of the soil. In Tolstoy, and even without his knowledge, there is much strange feigning. His logic and his temperament are not in accord. They swear at being coupled, and all the more in that the logic has ended by enslaving the nature. Of two men who succeed each other in a single one, and of whom the one contradicts the other, which is true, the one who had passions until the age of retirement, or the old man who buries the passions of his whole life under the ice of morality and the snow of the white hair? The old man, besides, does not die in the new one: one finds him again in all the contradictions: he sees a crime in the property of land; but all his family commits it with him, and he profits from it with her. What weakness to make him a reproach of it: it is better to understand why he makes it to himself.

Tolstoy is the Christian of the pure Church, when there were no churches. He is a man of the past, in all his proceedings. He does not place the golden age in the times gone by; but it would be the golden age, this past plus morality: it is only a matter of understanding at last the Gospel, which has never been understood. The Gospel is the true, and Tolstoy its apostle.

He is always astonished at being right, and alone right; but he takes pleasure in it. There is the instinct of the secret strength, an appetite for the reign, in which I feel the passion.

Who speaks in this faith to his own reason, if not the pride of the self? and what is this desire to convince? This stubborn patience to say his word, to furnish his proof on every occurrence, and always out of place? For one no longer listens to him.

§

To convert is to dominate. Whether it be in the name of truth, or of right, or of the fist, it is always strength. The same power pushes diverse standards and battalions diversely clothed. When Tolstoy preaches, he wishes to be the strongest, as in the time when he put so much anger and so much verve into sapping Napoleon: the muzhik had conquered the Emperor; the scythe in hand, Tolstoy then played the muzhik in the fields.

Morality, in its most candid gentleness, is still only a violence one wishes to do to others, an instinct of strength that means to triumph. The essay at holiness itself is an effort of the self, and often a ruse. There is perhaps no true saint save at the price of madness, according to the common order, and of a complete immolation.

Because they kill life, they do not pretend to adorn it nor to render it better. To kill life in oneself, that is the only means of purifying it. Most of them, they make their happiness in nothingness. There are the saints of the Orient.

And the other means of holiness is to make one’s happiness in suffering: there, the dream; here, the action. Not to suffer in oneself and for oneself, like the ascetics, who are all of the Orient, it seems to me. To suffer in others, in immolating oneself for them or in loving them. If it is a matter of happiness, immolation is no purer than the rest. I avow it. Such a one makes his happiness in shedding his blood for others. And such a one could say that he makes his happiness in shedding the blood of others for himself.

§

Whoever speaks of happiness ruins morality. Yet, there is no solid morality save in seeking happiness for oneself and for others. Hence the fragility of all of them.

Tolstoy is true even to the threshold of nothingness. There, he stops. And why he does not pass the door of the great refusal, it is that he is afraid. One goes as far as negation: one cannot hold to it. The great souls would rather contradict themselves than resign themselves to nothingness. Nothingness too is an idea. Thought is nihilist; but the heart cannot be. Those who are nothing can alone accept that there be nothing, and to be nothing. Tolstoy, he, fixes himself in a dead religion. He does; he knows not where to turn his head in the darkness: a cold logic gathers him in. What is a moral logic, if not a dead religion? It is a code, after all; one obeys it from constraint, one does not love it. Not even if one calls it love. There is no more odious means of doing violence to me than to impose on me the rules of a morality I do not feel.

§

In vain does this love which is god labor with its hands and nourish the first comer, who is hungry and who asks: it is full of laziness. One would say that it dreams of sleep and of forgetting; it tends not to be. There, no doubt, it touches wisdom. But why does it not make the avowal of it?

I surprise the misery of this love in its placid contemplation of death. It is made for it, as for the seasons. It ignores the grief of it to such a point that it seems to wall itself in the ignorance of all grief. What must one think of it, when love and grief are all in death? Tolstoy no longer dreams of it, since he teaches a life so poor that the immense treasure of suffering is absent from it. He preaches the gift and the return of the sacred of the earth to all men, the bread common to all, and a love still more banal and which has almost no more price: as if a billion, or two, or three, of peaceable peasants, in the village of life, eating without biting each other at the same loaf, were a thing to answer to the passions of man, and to all the needs of his strength, which exacts also suffering? What does this loaf and this village do for me? What do they do for my love, if it does not nourish itself at their porringer? And even what do they do for my death? On that, what hatred of variety, which is suffering, but also indeed all the joy and the beauty of the world! And what vexation of the world, after all. What there is of the most horrible in Tolstoy and in the religions of the same order, is that, however good they might be for the whole village, they will always be null for these some two, three, ten or a hundred men, who are infinitely more men than the whole village. I am a man; I am not a beggar of the niche, nor a tree in a field. And no doubt, it would be better that I were so; but I am not so.

Tolstoy and the others, that there be no longer any masters, it is their vow that all men be good slaves, the honest serfs of the loaf. I do not live for your morsel of crumb.

What one is has a right over what one wishes to be. Thus humility: how beautiful and virtuous it appears in the flock, when the shepherd teaches it! But it happens that the great doctors and the prophets never feel their strength better than in founding the religion of humility. It is the revenge of pride.

§

It is quite absurd to make the trial of the Churches in the name of the Gospel. The churches are the forms of the Christian state.

One cannot oppose the Churches to Jesus, without putting Jesus in conflict with men. There is Peter, and there is Paul; and whatever one does, so long as there are men, there are always Peter and Paul. They consent to nothing, save that they wish to live.

And why does Tolstoy speak so much of Jesus, if he thinks only of morality? The Church appeases the conflict between Jesus and men, because it does not pretend to resolve it: it does not invoke morality, but the proper authority of a God. There, at least, reason is out of question.

If even the church of Nicaea lies to the Gospel, it is a matter of knowing whether all men would not have lied to it far more without the Church. Man paints himself in the churches and the states. He does not come from them: they come from him.

Every human order fatally lies to what it pretends to be. For man is what he is, before being what he ought. One must see also what he can.

The dogmas do the office of laws.

No doubt, the dogmas rhyme with nothing. And even they are withdrawn from reason. Tolstoy does not weary of setting dogmas and morality at grips: he triumphs over the fact that morality is as useful as the dogmas are little so. But he forgets that morality draws all its authority only from the dogmas. “One must pardon one’s enemy”: there, he says, is a law necessary and fecund: morality forbids murder and vengeance. But whence does it forbid it? and why? What sanction? For Tolstoy, the question does not pose itself: conscience answers everything. And I answer that the conscience in the manner of Tolstoy is a dogma.

§

Strength is the queen of the world, not opinion. And if opinion reigns, it is that it speaks for strength. To Caesar the master, ministers and idle senate.

§

The state is always founded on the church, whatever it be. And if there is a lay state, it bears upon a lay church. What a noise for a hat, for a form of robe or of band. The costume does nothing to the matter; but it amuses the peoples. They have lived and have killed for much less. And for what, finally? Always for their church.

The church is the body of the spirit that dominates. For the carnal people wishes a visible spirit. One no more separates the church from the state than one makes the body from the thought. But one changes little by little of body and of thought. It is a new age of life, which does not go without malignant fever; and the sick man takes to his bed. Do not say: the State against the Church; but church against church; and there is one of them dead.

There has never been an atheist State. For the State is the god that substitutes itself for all the others.

Faith has nothing to do with the church. Faith is of the individual; the church is of society. Church or State, it is always a matter of having the power, of keeping it, and of exercising alone the puissance. The whole question is in the forms. A beautiful form is not to be disdained. Far from it, since most often all the human effort consists in demolishing a dilapidated house to rebuild a new one, of the same stones, of the same debris; and sometimes the plan of the new dwelling is that of the most ancient one, which one had forgotten. But where there was no longer anything but an uninhabitable facade, one has made a lodging in which one rejoices to dwell.

Supposing that the religion of Tolstoy became that of a people or of a city, ten years after Tolstoy, one would have to reckon with the church of Tolstoy. The heroes and the saints go by their own ways; but men go by churches.

The Church is the reunion of those who will in common. They will as they are; and they are what their interests will that they be. The Gospel of Jesus is the property of the saints. If reason made saints, it is long since the world would be purged of men. Reason is good for every use, and for unreasoning too.

Tolstoy does not fail to irritate the mind by a perpetual confusion of arguments. He proposes to reason the words in their mystic sense; and he offers to the heart the raw words of reason. One does not know what to think of his God. Now, he gives him out as an idea, in the abstract fashion of the philosophers; now, he understands him as a being. Less this God, he would keep good house with the atheists of system, the most dogmatic of men. Tolstoy has his religion, and they have their politics; but the politics of the ones will tomorrow be a religion; and the religion of Tolstoy will be a politics, as soon as he has faithful followers: in brief, a church. They have, finally, the same idols: the good, men, the human race, and many other similar words that have the capital letter for Sinai: from up there, they reveal themselves to mortals one knows not in the name of whom, in sum. This abuse of the miracle, under the title of reason, is unbearable. The sceptics even do not resign themselves to it, there being nothing more dangerous, among all the churches, than that of revealed reason. To say that love is God, without believing in God, nor in Eros, nor even in his fetish, what sense can one find in it?

Nothing separates Tolstoy from the Church, save being a heresy. Granted, the heresies are quite human. But the churches are no less human than the heresies. Between my heresy and the churches, claims Tolstoy, I have shown the abyss of violence: a crime for me, violence is not one for them; I repel it, in not resisting it; they accept it, they give themselves to it, in punishing it, in using violence themselves.

All history is an abyss of violences. The point is to live; and the city lives with the plague, the war, the inundation and the holy synod; for want of better. The Churches therefore live on violence, like the States. And, to have done, like all men. Yes, Leo Nikolayevich, like you.

You, Tolstoy, in yielding to the most ignoble of violences, which multiplies all the crimes by infamy, you have aided innumerable outrages. You are not a grand duke, however, and you have not learned to wash yourself of all this blood in the basin of the ballerinas. The violence of the prince, in Russia, blacker than the plague, more murderous than the cholera, more enraged than the famine, spares only you, Tolstoy, for twenty years. You alone are spared, in the country where the massacre is a game that the police offers to the people for the repose of Sunday, where the spy is the knight of the king, where one awards the employment of the executioner to the lowest bid, where it is not yet enough of three hundred thousand hanged nor of such a heap of murders to reassure the cowardice of the most cowardly of tyrants, holed up with his brood of vipers, at the bottom of a palace, in the desert of denunciation, under the honorable guard of the police spies and the honorable tutelage of the constables. There, however, Leo Nikolayevich, are the assassins and the charnel-house of which your horror of all violence makes you the accomplice. Now, agree that violence is the very effort of life.

I — Violence

A king who has the cross precede the butchery of five hundred thousand men in battle is not a buffoon less sad than a king rendering thanks to his god for having killed a hundred thousand men, his enemies. They are all cousins on that, from the tiger-king of Nineveh to the king of Prussia. It is odious, no doubt, that this man invokes Jesus Christ, but he makes use of Jesus, as Assur of his Baal, as such another, yesterday, of the goddess Rome, or tomorrow of Reason. And it goes without saying that the same man, two thousand years earlier, would have had Jesus nailed to the cross. Today, he makes a weapon of him. A cross less one arm, that is a gibbet: the Russian cross. The church that blesses this sovereign is human like him: a strength that perseveres in itself. There is a people in each church. Violence is the soul of each people that lives. Why does Tolstoy choose among the violent? Why above all between those who strike all the blows and those who undergo them? It is to take the part of the executioner, to stop the raised arm of the victims. I know why Tolstoy lets this suspicion of being for crime and for strength weigh upon him, in detesting them: he does not wish to contradict himself; he wishes to be right. His morality holds him; and by it, he wishes to hold the others. I say that violence is at the kernel of all will.

§

Let us re-enter into violence, to re-enter into life. In the eyes of Tolstoy, all the evil of the world and all the crimes of history come from strength. It is always the abuse. It is always war. For it is violence, under whatever form the falsehood of the violent dissimulates it.

When violence is not between the peoples by war, it is between the sexes by voluptuousness and desire; it is between the men of the same city by the fact of fortune. The rich are the executioners of the poor, whether they know it or not; and men are the executioners of women. The people of the towns, finally, are the executioners of the peasants. He who possesses, whether he will it or not, debases the object of his possession, or ruins it, or kills it. Property, it is violence.

§

Wealth is thus the sign of violence, at all degrees. It is gold that makes the masters: gold, the second age of iron; it is misery that makes the slaves: misery, the second age of servitude.

In sum, violence is the inhuman law that weighs on the multitudes for centuries, and always more. This world would not be the hell of the poor, if it did not bear the yoke of the violent. One must therefore wrest this world from violence. One cannot bear the sight of the misery that reigns in it; and the cry of the poor is a poison for the life of those who have heard it.

Whoever has well opened his eyes upon the misery of men can no longer resign himself to this fatality. And the more one thinks it necessary, the less one is disposed to admit it. As alms can do nothing to it, there remains to you to change your life. Change your life, to change your charity.

§

“The problem of misery is of the same order, for the City, as the problem of death, for the individual. Here and there, it is always a matter of reducing the self to nothing.” Yes. The terrible enigma must have the same solution, in the two cases.

The fatality of human misery strongly leads the mind to contemplate the fatality of suffering, for all life. Then, on all sides, the view of evil extends itself. Death is the circle of all evil.

The good is all that aids life. Is good all that carries the living being to plenitude. All that aids death, and leads to it, it is evil. There is my charity, which Tolstoy detests: it is not social. I go with him as far as the threshold; but I do not pass it: I do not wish to fall into the sepulchre of morality. There is no true morality save the social one, moreover.

The society of the Gospel is an innocent society. The Gospel is the law of a childish world, which does not know death; or the law of a stoic world, which, knowing only death, has found the unique way of conquering it in common: which is to reduce life to almost nothing.

§

Tolstoy labors to constitute the human race. All his effort is to make but one single man of all men. He has the horror of difference; he loves only unity. All that separates is his enemy. All his morality and all his politics disband in fraternal love. One single man, one single family. One single right, one single life among all. There is no other justice.

The strength of Tolstoy is, without his knowledge, in the cruel image he gives us of the classes. The more he calls men to confound themselves in the same love, the more he shows them with crudity the reasons they have to hate one another. Who has better opposed the rich to the poor, and the masters to the slaves? The rich are gods without pity, who live in laziness, who nourish themselves on human blood, in closing their eyes, and who, besides, find themselves very ill of it. The poor are the eternal victims. At bottom, to follow Tolstoy and all the Russians well, one does not see what the muzhik would gain by being no longer the beast of burden that the rich man torments: for all his virtues, all his humanity is in his torments. His suffering makes his virtue; his misery, his goodness. The peasant corrupts himself since he emancipates himself. If Tolstoy affirms that the rich are punished for their wickedness by the madness and the despair in which they end, dying of plethora and of tedium in rotting on their indigestion, he does not seem to conclude that wealth is the very chastisement of the rich. In all his books, the misery of the common people pushes a great cry to justice; but sometimes it seems a privilege that confers holiness. He does not wish to believe in the war of the classes; but he is the strongest painter of it. Not only, in him, is this struggle inexpiable: it is fatal. One conceives quite well, according to Tolstoy, that neither can the rich help consummating all the crimes of wealth, having had the frightful happiness of being born in it; nor can the poor people do otherwise than suffer: and most of them, to degrade themselves; and a few to grow, by suffering, in their eminent dignity. For Tolstoy, there is no worse violence than the war of the classes; and yet, from Tolstoy, it is the morality of the classes at war that one is induced to draw. It is founded uniquely, and in Tolstoy himself, on violence.

§

Violence is the only relation of two enemy classes, irreducibly. Tolstoy concludes in vain to the refusal of all violence: his conclusion is only his. One may conclude from Tolstoy to the use of all violence. It is with this morality as with a figure that one affects with the plus sign or the minus sign, according as one makes of it a positive or a negative quantity. Violence is positive, one must avow it. Thanks to Tolstoy and to his very fault, one agrees that there are not three possible parties for the classes at war: either one must be a Christian, submit oneself absolutely to the enemy force, and offer the right cheek to the blow with which the left cheek still burns; or, if one is not a Christian, one must have recourse to violence: for violence without brake, without limit, without mercy, is the only law of a world without laws, in which one class of men oppresses the other. Violence is the only weapon of those who have none. Firstly, it is the sword of number. Violence will take all the forms, from the union of the workmen against the master, to the civil war. It will not stop before the little games of the artists; it will be able to amuse itself also at the burning of the libraries and the museums: in which it finds Tolstoy again, less the conclusion. Which is the law of the world, and of the slope of nature, violence or the Gospel? Less a God, the Gospel itself is only the law of Tolstoy. Much for him, no doubt; not enough for the others.

Poverty and labor in common, the life of fraternal love finally, Francis of Assisi preached it to men and set it to work. But Francis of Assisi received from God himself his divine betrothed. Neither God nor ages were words for him. Tolstoy is the great poor man and the little brother of reason: it is from these bare and not divine hands that he holds morality, his spouse. Never did one put so much faith into abstraction. Hence those doubts on the will of God, that uncertainty on the person, that obscure piety, those commandments in the name of a truth now abstract, now living, which give to the teachings of Tolstoy a religious odor and a sort of falseness, which make one think sometimes of a falsehood enveloped in incense. I cannot resolve to see such a man satisfied to embrace the void. A grip so powerful upon life and upon characters to loosen itself thus? It is better to believe that there is a God, without saying it, that he knows him, that he speaks to him heart to heart, that he names him. The man who has the strength to create has perhaps that of creating for himself also a Creator.

§

Without the hatred of Rome, how to conceive that Tolstoy ignores Francis of Assisi? If he cites him here and there, it is one name among many others. Now, Saint Francis did all that Tolstoy could not do, and lived exactly as Tolstoy says one must live. Francis of Assisi knew, moreover, the vanity of reason. It did not prevent him from giving himself entire. The strength of sentiment, this degree of fire, is that everything in it is act. Why does Tolstoy not adore, in the Little Poor Man of Assisi, perfect poverty and the law of perfect love? The Russian shows his ear: he repels all that comes from Rome: he execrates in the Church of Rome, not only the mother among all the Churches, but the queen and the example of all. The Holy Synod is no harder than he, against Rome. Tolstoy is still of his Church, whatever he thinks; and as he is a Russian, he is also orthodox. The popes must be quite thick and quite mad, to doubt it; one day they will repent of having condemned him, all the mitres of Kiev and of Moscow.

II — Tolstoy and Shakespeare

The pride of abounding in oneself is the soul of the moralists: the theologians and the philosophers meet there commonly, in the evening, at the promenade.

Tolstoy makes to his own reason a credit without limits. But where reason speaks so high, it takes the word of the character: pride is underneath, in the prompter’s box. One could not otherwise explain such judgments of Tolstoy, full of contempt against the most beautiful artists.

The contempt of Tolstoy for Shakespeare is a feint: it hides much democratic envy. Evangelical envy is of the same order, or if one prefers, that humble superbness so sure of itself; it feeds itself on the hatred of difference.

§

The prince of art is the prince of difference. Shakespeare, prince and confidant of life, has for the divine variety of nature the same love as nature. Morality reposes on a bed of equality. What matters morality to Shakespeare, beside life? he is no more of the people, nor less, than he is prince, or woman, or flower, or forest. It will not be easy to make the passion of diversity understood by all our moralists, so smitten with confounding everything, that they seek music in the song, and true art in a popular art of which the people, besides, have not the least idea. The people was not the sacred architect of Chartres: it was only the benevolent mason of it and the docile burden-bearer. The folly of the cross harnessed it to the labors, not the folly of the cathedral. Neither a song, nor an Iliad makes itself of all, or all alone. Wherever there is a masterpiece, there is an artist, a master of the work; and that one is a prince, were he born among the beggars.

Passionate and jealous of his nature, Tolstoy envies much. His pride is without measure, like that of everyone. As soon as a man is superior, he would wish to be so to the whole universe. I see him with disciples and sons; but if he has had a few friends of his age, either he has devoured them, or he has lost them. One lies about friendship and about admiration, as about the rest.

§

When we are truly born to be masters, we measure the share, with rigor, to every authority on foot and alive, near us. A neighboring strength is a contrary strength; it casts a shadow over us, if it is not submitted to us. The weaker of the two pretends not to believe in this rivalry; and if he feigns to be wounded by it in the name of holy friendship, he is near to betraying simple friendship. We make for ourselves, then, two or three idols in the past, sometimes even the nearest, it matters not, provided it be the past. The kinship of minds governs this choice: there are families even for genius, and scarcely more than three or four sorts. It is there that one entrenches oneself and that one arms oneself against one’s old friends.

§

The Gospel in hand, Tolstoy detests superiority. Every rival must yield to him. And how many I know of, a thousand leagues from being its equal, who do as he does, the one under the cover of humanity, this milch-cow, another armed with the people, this one with progress, and that one with the good. Tolstoy, always moral, was first cruel without excuse and hard without any regard for Turgenev, his elder; but once Turgenev had rendered him his arms, and was dead, Tolstoy was quite just.

He has spoken of Ibsen and of Wagner in outrageous terms. Wagner doubtless ignored even the name of Tolstoy. As for Ibsen, if he knew him, he was too intelligent to say anything of it. The great politics of Ibsen has always been to keep silent. Moreover, more than anyone, Ibsen has lived buried in the dream of the man who creates. If however there ever was a poet powerful in morality, and terrible in purity, it is he. Tolstoy, much more impure, is much more living. But he always has a muzhik in his pocket, to give himself holily right.

One sends this muzhik back to the devil, whence he comes: for he issues from the lowest hell there is in the world, a hut of clods, a sordid lair, in the desert of mind that goes from the Vistula to the Pacific, where the only art that is worth anything is to get drunk, and to sing on the two-stringed guitar a melancholy song, born of suffering and of brandy. The muzhik! There he is, a good judge in art and in thought! Schopenhauer will not be a philosopher, because the muzhik understands nothing of the will to live; and because he understands the “Quartet in C-sharp minor” no more than he sees a drop of a sketch of Rembrandt, one will have to condemn painting and music.

Of a great poet, does the mania of morality therefore make, infallibly, a flatterer of the people, an apostle friend of the humble, as they say? I am afraid of it. If Tolstoy blasphemes Shakespeare, it is again an effect of moral logic. Too many kings, too many princes in Shakespeare, too many heroes for Tolstoy.

§

In wars, the soldier counts more than the captain; the conqueror is the eternal muzhik, not Alexander or Napoleon. Humanity is made of peasants, and not of princes.

The forests are dangerous, all children know it: they tremble to go out alone, in the evening, into the garden. What will it be of the terrible woods, and of the climates forbidden to the crowd of men? Tolstoy would wish to set fire to them, that in their place a lichen of good humility might convert the earth into fallow ground.

The heroes have more dangers still than the forests. It is they who break the course of the sacred human mediocrity, the good peace, the hope of the universal milk-pap; and the whole human race is seated around the mash; and the planet, history, life make but one porringer in which, with an equal finger, equally pious, equally trimmed, and well clipped at the end, that there be no longer a trace of nail, nor of phalanx if it can be, all the living feed an equal appetite with an equal gobbet. Neither hot, nor cold, let the pap be lukewarm, above all. Let it have the just warmth of the breast: we are in the paradise of the wet-nurses. Man will live under the eye of the women; he will hold out his paw until the ferule has made of it a little hand. The royalist woman will be returned among the females of Chicago; one can rely on them to reduce man to the trembling docility of the idiot.

The admirable sentiment that Tolstoy has had of life, and which gave birth in him to the creative pity, in the end makes him misjudge life. Pity is so beautiful and so fecund only on condition of being free, like a gift. The pity I speak of is a victory of strength. For there to be a creative pity, for it to exercise itself, grief must reign over number. And the celestial powers watch over it, or the gods, or the fatal laws, by whatever name one wishes to name them. In the paradise of the wet-nurses, the male sucklings will make a revolt; and first they will violate the squaws, to teach them to make use of the rods, so coarse are the males!

The optimists do not go far enough. The optimists remain at the surface of all the passions.

III — Tolstoy and Kropotkin

After all, Tolstoy is an optimist only in despair of a cause. But no one is more so, by nature, than Kropotkin.

Tolstoy and Kropotkin are much closer than they say. Both of them, religious without religion. And the atheist Kropotkin still more than the other. They hold to each other like the elder and the younger. Between them, has passed Bakunin. The socialist idea, which Kropotkin accepts more or less, Tolstoy repels it. Tolstoy never receives anything from anyone: he wishes, first, to be alone of his party. If he is a Christian, it is in part that Karl Marx and his followers have not left him the world to remake. He has therefore made his return to the Savior, as to the author of the world, for all Russia. Jesus Christ is the greatest name of the country where one applies oneself, on feast days, to bind the New Testament in the bloody skin of the Old. But perhaps the good Russians have come out so little Christian that they do not know what they sing in the church, from one end of the year to the other, nor even that it is the bible of the Jews? Tolstoy has taken it into his head to teach them what one must know of the holy books. Having been the reasoning Homer of a race of slaves, he has wished to be also the Christ of it.

In Tolstoy and Kropotkin, one grasps the powerlessness of the Russian to think freely; and when he thinks, his powerlessness for action. They think only religiously; they act only in religion. The Russians are not yet a people, but a race.

Kropotkin, optimist to the point of supposing that nature teaches charity, one cannot understand that he is not a Christian. To believe in the Gospel, that alone is lacking to him. For, after all, he is Christian even to nausea; I mean by that Christian without Christ. Nothing is so insipid, nor so sugary.

To the pessimist humor of Tolstoy, what is lacking but to be atheist? He is nihilist up to the moment of concluding; there, he falls into religion. The two of them, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, would make a perfect optimist or a perfect pessimist, on condition of concluding the one for the other.

It appears that the book of Kropotkin passes for profound. I see in it a work of the most vain. It has the incurable puerility of the naturalists who permit themselves to conclude, and to extend their conclusions to morality. They take a fact; they make of it a principle; then they seek in nature and among the infinite number of contrary facts, a few handfuls of examples that coincide with their principle. And they need no more of it to offer laws to the moral world. They laugh at all religion; but they find very legitimate the religion of a single idea, on the base of a single fact.

§

Yes, in nature, there is a small number of cases in which the living beings give aid to one another; and it is clear that if the mothers did not come to the succor of their little ones, giving to it their cares, their milk and their blood, it would soon be done with the race and the species. The young, besides, are they distinct from their parents? here and there, is it not the same immortal cell? does one aid it, or does it defend itself? It suffices to open one’s eyes upon the needs of life, in every living being, at every instant of duration, to know how much the war without end, without mercy, without pity, is the very condition of the world: it is so of all nourishment, of every meal we make; and even of every movement. And even, in the depth of our elements, of every essay, of every effort to be. The study of nature makes one afraid. The unheard-of multitude of the murders that a single existence exacts, and that it implies, willing it or not, is terrible. If nothingness is the death of every individual in itself, every life is an abyss of nothingnesses.

§

There is an unbearable blindness in every optimistic view of nature. In what, for the flies, has the fate of men more right or price, than the fate of the flies? The species of faith that certain scholars feign to have in the goodness of nature is assuredly the basest of religions, and the most foolish, if not the most hypocritical. Nature teaches only mechanics. And mechanics teaches only nothingness. As for the spirit of science, if there is one, it is the sceptic to infinity. There is no true pity, there is no love save in the conscience of man. And it is, perhaps, that man is charged with putting an end to nature. Or else, that in him she aspires to it.

All is possible in the dream, for the mind. There is no salvation save in art, or in action. Nature, which teaches nothingness to the scholars, teaches beauty to the artists. The masterpieces of Tolstoy persuade me infinitely more than his reasons. In matter, all is fatal, and all is fatally pitiless. Fatality is the proper negation of love. This terrible wheel must turn, and crush, and turn to crush again. Is it without end? is that what consoles you? What a consolation.

§

I have already said that the religions are all only essays at life. Religion is an order in which faith persuades man that he really lives, and that he can live. If religion is only a mirage, it is in the desert of death.

As he is against the religions, Tolstoy is against life. He does what he can not to be so; but he is. And that he should be against the religions, being himself so religious, is a proof. “Death blessed, blessed, blessed!” he says, with the triple benediction of the prayers. He founds nothing. But he gives the means of putting an end to all the intrigue: Let the whole world live according to the law of the Gospel, and it is done with the world. The great law of love is divine: it is against man and against nature. Human love is an appetite: it devours. It cedes its share only to a very small number of beings, whom it keeps for its hunger. Human love is a law full of injustice and of violence, like the others.

One does so little without religion that the sciences make for themselves one of fatality. As all is necessary, one admires that all should be so. And fatality appears worthy of a cult.

The love of harmony is a fashion like another of abandoning oneself. As one vaunts the harmony of the world, one resigns oneself to it. For want of better, one rejoices to be a leaf in the forest. And it is well done: for, they say, what more would one be, even if one did not consent to it?

It would be by far too strong that a world in which all is fatal should not be harmonious.

If, by chance, all morality or all religion without mystery were only a system for putting an end to life? The religions, founded on the divine person, and on the mystery of God, have so much strength, no doubt, only for this hidden reason: that their mystery and their God, it is the love of life.

END

1896-1909.

Prose of the Escape

1910

I

O! I salute you, holy prophet, in the night of your escape.

Behold you become similar to yourself. You have torn off the mask of the flesh which loves itself from the old man, whose whole ardor is now consumed only for his God. And this cruel world, in which you were, this wretched world that lives, like a dog, only on its mash and three bones of meat in a porringer, this world of men is taken with trembling between the two poles; it shivers between the wheels of the North and of the South; and like the poor Jew whose eyes are unsealed, it is shaken by a great shudder.

II

To be alone with God! to be alone with God! To fall like a drop at the center of the whirlwind, and to repose at the heart of the sun like an atom of fluff! Such was your vow, even from before birth, I know it. The great desire of Elijah, which made for the terrible Crier of the Hour those eyes of embers, this desire is yours. You have obeyed, venerable reader of the Book, following with a knotty finger the line that commands death and that leaps over life, you have obeyed the murmur of conscience. It grumbled in you: this whispering is vaster than the crash of the cataracts, more imperious than the thunder in its power.

Near, ever nearer to nature, O dear Old Man! And above all now that you must retie your bond to the belly of the mother, there whence man came out by great misery, and where he knocks, as a wayfarer, to find again the peace of the bed.

III

They will pity you, some, good old man; and they will laugh, the others. But sneering, they will mock only themselves; and it is themselves they will pity, without expressing it, in the intimate silence. If a thought remains to them, when they put the head, tonight, on the pillow, closing the eyes, as one does that sleep may come, or sometimes in order to see oneself better, it is you they will see. And stirring the hand under the sheets, as if they sought a near treasure, a prayer, touching their heart, their heart will beat for you, and it is of you they will think.

IV

O the beautiful escape!

You have prepared everything with the holy cunning of Paul opening to Peter the prison of Antioch. The door was closed.

You were in the jail of your possessions and of your years, which are eighty-three. You slept in the chamber where your mother kissed your closed eyelids as a newborn. The door was closed. You arose before the dawn. You took your bundle, in the bottom of the wardrobe. As the dawn unstuck its eyelids, to weep that white look, forever astonished, which makes one tremble for her, you descended without noise the staircase of wood, between the soft walls, which saw pass the newlyweds and all the coffins of the family: and you opened the door.

V

After your time of patience, it is that the time has come of holiness: the time that always presses, the time of remaining face to face with God who knows, who wills, who is.

You go to the desert with Anthony the hermit, Alexis and Jerome. All the rich saints will be with you, in the hut with the roof of firmament, those of the Orient and those of the Ponant, those who dip a hand of bronze in the Ganges, and those who crossed the Irish sea in a trough of granite, the old mutes, clothed in mist, Ronan the thaumaturge and Tugdual capped with holly, Herbot with his cow tails, and Thégonnec who covers himself with moss, among the oaks, so motionless and taciturn is he.

VI

They give you great welcome in their silence and in their lairs. Jerome raises the head, with the lion who serves him, as a good dog answers to its name, which is yours; and wagging the tail, one day, Leo will serve Leo. Grisha too, the servant of God, is there, the innocent who has charged himself with chains, and who laments for the sins of others. And the starets Zosima, who visits dreams, as manna comes to Famine; and the gentle Alyosha, with the lips so gay, whose joy is supernatural, and whose tears are the milk of tenderness that pours itself out. And all those who have heard the cry beyond solitude, and known the labor that is the salvation of solitude, all, they take you by the hands. They press these old hands swollen, already roots in the veins, these hands that wish to dig still, to earn the goodness of bread, the boon of sleep, and the ineffable reward: a bed of eternal repose between two sheets of earth.

All, they call you by your name; and each, naming you his brother, sings:

“I salute you in the forest, your bare feet shod with snow, and the gray sky over the head! I salute you in the death of the leaves, when the cold kills the beautiful birds. Like us, you have heard the cry of the world: If you wish to be good, sell all you have and give all to the poor. Shut yourself in your cell. Solitude will teach you Moses and the Prophets. In the silence at last, you will be able to hear the unique voice: You wish to be with God, God wishes to be with you.”

VII

The Old Man with the bushy eyebrows (may they be thickets at Saint-Yves’s day, that the bullfinches may nest there) seeks in the forest a corner for his hermit’s hut. His white hairs are whiter, and whiter his white beard; and grayer his eyes of water on the sand, like the bark of the birch by the April rain, or like the pupils of the caressing lioness. Already, the face of the holy anchorite illumines itself; and the wings of the angels flower in his wrinkles.

VIII

Like Alexis at Edessa, disembarking on the port full of figs and oranges: Before taking a step, he has given all his money to the poor, and the titles of his possessions, and all his gold, this wheat that shines. He held the left hand over his eyes, in order not to see the gifts of the liberal hand; and all the unfortunate surrounded him, like the sparrows around the good fellow who throws them crumbs, in a garden, in winter. He has exchanged his robe of purple for the rags of the beggar, and the absurd laticlave for tatters. Then, he went off, this Alexis, among the beggars, the cripples and the lousy ones, at the portal of Notre-Dame: for that was all his desire, there where one keeps, on the altar, the linen of Veronica, and all alive the face of the Poor One of the Poor in the sweat of blood and in the tears.

IX

Such are you, and it is you, at present, holy old man, the good beggar who, having hoped for more than seventeen years at the door of the church, gathers the fruit of his hope. It is for you that the Lord, above the tabernacle, said yesterday to the guardian:

“Make the man of God enter who has well served me. He is worthy of the celestial kingdom, since for seventeen years he waits at the door. For he has well served me, in spite of all and in spite of himself.”

X

“My son, old son, hast thou truly believed that I would abandon thee? I have always loved thee. Thou hast never been far from me. Never hast thou betrayed me. Thou hast always sought me. Come, thou who wishest to be alone with me. I awaited thee. I knew that thou wouldst not fail me. Here thou art, then, my son, and I am here.”

XI

Dear Tolstoy, in the forest, your eyes of native silver radiate a glory, of which the ingot is not visible, but which, for you, flows in fusion in the crucible of paradise. Neither the hardness of the muscle nor the harsh hairshirt of the body any longer stifles your soul. The word operates in you, and opens you to yourself, like a book well bound, at the chosen page.

You were too great not to be pure, not to be true. Too great to lie. It has flowered, now, on your face, the superhuman joy of the smile that never extinguishes itself, like a rose over a cradle, the smile of the saints.

XII

O, how you desire death, which is the portal of the unique life! Now, to those who gird their loins from midnight, the dawn no longer makes fear. And as they march toward salvation upright with the first sound of the bells, for matins, they no longer dread the darkness, and dissipate it, with a tranquil look that sees noon.

XIII

I praise the patriarch, who has taken the key of the fields. I praise the stubborn old man with the white hair, who has chosen, for flight, the dismal season, the wind of the North on the steppe, and the sky like a shroud, because, being the grain, he wishes to rot in the furrow, to germinate to his God.

XIV

How I would wish, grandfather, to have been the wick of the interior whip that made you arise, at dawn, in the sleep of the house, of the stable and of the manger! When you stood up to go out, before the awakening of the maidservants, the old piebald mare slept the haunch on the partition, the calves blew in a heap against the tawny cows, and you departed.

XV

To be alone with God! You carried a bag and the lamp. You departed, like the pilgrim of Arkhangel and of Kaluga, for the holy places of Zion, which are: a road mounting in the burning stones; a tomb; and such olive trees, on the hill, whose olives at the press have sweated the oil of all remission.

You no longer have before you anything but the road of thorns, so sweet to the brow that they tear, at last drawn from the rose of the heart. You have no more than the sepulchre, the immense empty cradle, in which the flesh purifies itself in three days, and which devours the chrysalis for the eternal jet, so pure, so vivid, so high, so free, lily of the ascension, even to the perfect sun of love.

XVI

You have therefore left the dwelling of the father and the mother; the chamber of the wife, in which you made her mother, in which you made yourself father also; and you have not turned the head.

You have left your wife to sleep, since she does not know how to watch, awaiting the dangerous hour: the companion of fifty years breathed without fear, the brow on the pillow, in the nest of her wrinkles and her gray hair. And you have not had a look for her, O dear old man, because it was necessary at last that you fix your eyes upon yourself; and that you follow to the end the love that wishes to omit the natal roof, the wife, the children, and that surpasses them from so far.

XVII

“I am free!” you have said, on the threshold, I am free! And blessed, blessed be the death I desire, since it is the signature of my text, the lifting of the lock, and the flourish of the Lord, to come out of prison.”

XVIII

The smile of all forgetting is on your lips. The ineffable contentment of the measure at last filled overflows your brow. In your hands shines the lantern, the fire of the road. You have drawn the lamp from the bin of darkness; and the light taken, like a nightingale without feathers, from the bushel under which it was buried, palpitates to guide you.

XIX

The door is open, at present, and will no longer be closed. You are, at present, in the solitary avenue that leads where the chariot of fire carried, at one stroke, Elijah, like an idea, like a flame. Advance into the lane.

Truth is with you, holding your right hand; Purity precedes you, showing your old heart unsealed, like a lark that rises again; and behind you, Death is no longer anything but a shadow.

And, at the end of the lane, a sublime light makes a sign to you; and, burning for you, this call wishes to say: The Lord is with him.

November 11, 1910.

Footnotes

1. The most characteristic are: 1. That of 1856, in which he is in a company of authors, among whom Turgenev, Ostrovsky, and Goncharov. Tolstoy is standing, in uniform, his face clean-shaven. It is the only portrait of his youth in which he holds the attention. The face not handsome; but a somber air, in part willed, and as if determined not to be confounded with the others. Behind them, he seems rather to be guarding these men of letters who form part of their society; one would say him ready to lead them back to prison. --- 2. A portrait of 1876, with the full beard. No affectation, or if any, that of the contrary of elegance. The thick beard covers the face up to the eyes. The hair, cut short, blocks the forehead, drier and more reduced than it is. The eyes and the mouth have a brutal expression. There is the image of a man discontented with everything, and with himself. Yet the gaze already seems to pass beyond the present object. 3. A portrait from Moscow, around 1885, when Tolstoy has just discovered truth and life. ↩

2. Bezukhov, Nekhludov, Levin cannot help blushing at every turn: this blush makes their torment. Image of their soul which disappears with the world: they are out of place, and feel it. One blushes, or pales, or does one or the other, according to temperaments. ↩