Chapter XI

In the preceding chapter it was necessary, in speaking of Gogol, to make some passing reference to Moscow Slavophilism. It was also hardly possible to speak of Hawthorne without some reference to New England Transcendentalism. These two great currents of thought, though they did not of themselves produce the talent that was attracted to them, were of such importance in the history of Russian and American culture that it is impossible to write a summary of either without some reference to them. It is the more necessary to do so, since these two forces both took their rise from popular mysticism.

Mysticism is a constant factor in the development of any nation. Only in most European countries, especially in Latin and Catholic countries, the aim of the spiritual rulers has been to keep mysticism in check, to give it practical and constructive aims. This has been only possible insofar as the Christian Church has itself assumed the discipline and ordered ranks of the Roman army. The breakdown of discipline before the Reformation led not, as Catholic historians would have us believe, to any orgy of license, but to an unchecked explosion of popular mysticism. This mysticism did not differ in kind, but only in degree, from the famous mysticism of the Middle Ages. It was less architectural, less social in essence; it depended more and more on an individual and personal approach to God, on what the Catholic critic would call “private judgment.” This “private judgment” was not long in invading the Catholic Church itself. Compare for example St. Augustine with Saint Theresa. The former is just as mystical at bottom as the latter; but he constructs his “City of God” objectively, as a refuge for all men. In Saint Theresa, on the other hand, all depends upon personal approach, everything is transformed into a subjective relation between the soul itself and its Maker, and all this has no end, no beginning; it is an ecstasy equally out of time and place. Small wonder that the theologians of Saint Theresa’s day thought her doctrine suspect, if not highly heretical.

Transcendentalism is simply a carrying to its logical end of this doctrine of personal and popular mysticism. In New England, for a century and a half before the Revolution, a battle had been waged for the rights of the individual conscience, which had successively been held to be superior to the organised church, to the combined church and state, and ultimately to the law itself. To the Transcendentalists there remained no longer any barrier between man and God; and Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance as well as his notion of the oversoul, practically said “Let us be God.” It is well known how the Emersonian oversoul led directly to the superman of Nietzsche; the only difficulty that the Transcendentalists had in making themselves into supermen was a lack of training. It was suddenly discovered, by whom it does not matter, that the Hindoo ascetics possessed such training. The only sure method therefore of transforming New England yokels and small-town tradesmen into thorough-going “oversouls” was to become as Hindoo as possible. Everyone went about reciting the Bhagavad-Gita; and Emerson was able to refer in his Journal to the New England summer as being a “Hindoo day.”

It escaped the attention of the Transcendentalists that the Hindoo ascetics whom they strove to imitate had not at all proclaimed the liberty of conscience and the complete right of self-reliance which the Americans asserted. The Hindoo ascetic accepts the idol of the meanest of his compatriots, as authentically representing a god. This the Transcendentalists were not prepared to do. They were individualists, yet so democratic in theory as to suppose that merely by saying to quite ordinary people, “Here is Emerson; go and make yourself more like him,” the ordinary people would all be magically transformed into New England Brahmins. Unfortunately human nature is not like that--as Thoreau, at once the shrewdest and most sincere of the Transcendentalists, admitted.

Transcendentalism was therefore a brilliant pose, and its leaders soon showed its lack of root in reality by upholding the fanatic minority of the abolitionists, as well as by defending the conduct of such born outlaws and desperadoes as John Brown. The same remark may be largely applied to Slavophilism. This movement began as an aristocratic, idealistic, sentimental movement on the part of the more intelligent Moscow nobility to preserve authentic Russian culture against the onslaughts of western European materialism. It therefore had distinct leanings towards the Orthodox Church, and the maintenance of the Czar’s power. Unfortunately, the Orthodox Church had become, since Peter the Great, merely another branch of the State bureaucracy, under the control of a Procurator of the Holy Synod, from whom the Patriarch took orders; and the Czar himself had no idea of improving the system, or of helping Russian culture, but only of maintaining his power intact. The Slavophil movement therefore tended to play into the hands of the reactionaries, and its belief in “Holy Russia” was as much a pose as the belief of the Transcendentalists in Brahmin New England. It nevertheless produced interesting minor figures, notably Aksakov, who presents a curious parallel to Thoreau, which we here lack space to discuss.

These two movements, both mystical in essence, both quasi-oriental in approach--for Slavophilism derives something from Buddhism, as Transcendentalism owes much to Hinduism--produced between them the four greatest geniuses that Russia and America have given to the world. These four geniuses bridged in their life and work the great crises of the sixties; the crisis marked by the Civil War between the States in America, in Russia by the liberation of the serfs, and the tragic reign of Alexander II. The value of these four great men, and still more their failure, give us more than a merely political and social picture of their respective epochs, a true insight into the measure of the problems that Russia and America were given to contend with. We will take the two men who made the more objective approach to these problems first: Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy.

It is utterly impossible to treat Tolstoy and Whitman apart for the purposes of this study. Both were so completely and aboriginally a part of their country in outlook that neither resembles anything whatsoever European. Tolstoy’s natural view of European art and culture was that everything in it was artificial, morbid, false, and above all, sexually provocative--and Whitman persisted throughout his lifetime in the error that European art simply glorified the airs and trappings of outworn feudalism. Both turned away from an elaborate and complex culture to the simplest native elements they could find; in Whitman the dock-labourers, stage-drivers, longshoremen, and common workmen, and in Tolstoy the shrewd and simple Kutuzov, the Cossack bandit, the peasant saint. Apart from the fact that Whitman wrote in a rhythmical poetry that was to be like no other poetry ever conceived, having nothing of the stock poetical touches, the heightened style of the old masterpieces, alternating from a direct realism to a vague and incoherent mysticism, while Tolstoy wrote in a prose that at its best is unparalleled for direct powers of keen observation, and at its worst is dry and tedious like a Government report--apart from this fact, Whitman and Tolstoy present precisely the same problem to the critical intelligence. Both were divinely gifted amateurs, natures of immense animal vitality and range of experience, imbued with a perpetual itch for self-expression; pioneers and path-breakers of an art that was to be at once popular and folk-art, and yet was to disdain all the background of mythological fantasy on which folk-art ultimately rests, and remain cold, clear, and rational. They combined together in two unique and practically interchangeable individualities the most elemental and earthern mysticism of the unspoilt, savage, and the completely practical aim of the modern scientific philanthropist.

There are, it is true, certain minor and slight differences between them. Neither, despite their intense nationalism, was racially completely assimilated to the country in which he lived and worked. Tolstoy’s ancestry goes back to a Baltic, possibly East Prussian strain; Whitman, as is well known, had Dutch blood in his veins. This slight foreign element perhaps explains the self-centred aloofness of either from the main intellectual current of their times. The idealistic Orthodoxy of the Slavophil movement made no appeal to Tolstoy; and Whitman, after a period in which he came under the direct influence of Emerson, threw overboard Transcendentalism, with its insistence on scholarship and intellectual culture. One may say also that Whitman’s best work was all done before his breakdown in 1872, was in fact done by the time of the close of the Civil War in 1865, while Tolstoy’s best work was all done after that date down to his death. This was to a certain extent due to the fact that Whitman was by nine years the elder, but also due to the working of social and personal factors that it will be part of our task to examine. Apart from this, and apart from some minor differences such as the fact that Whitman’s was fundamentally a feminine nature, glorifying sex theoretically as a biological function, but in practice apt to dwell almost to the point of mawkish morbidity on the magnetic charm of athletic masculinity, while Tolstoy was so profoundly masculine as to despise women utterly and yet to be always swayed by their sexual attractiveness--apart from this purely personal divergence, the two forces in their literary resultant, are interchangeable. Each represents an unalterable granitic insensitive residue of final perception, at war with all outside influences, rejecting every European refinement, and struggling to spread itself over the world. These two, Tolstoy and Whitman, stand alone in the history of their country’s thought as neither barbarians nor decadents, but something far more elemental. They were essentially backwoodsmen.

Both had what is only common to the backwoodsman and the savage: absolutely Adamic vision. If we can suppose a stage in human consciousness when man is not subjective, does not project his longings into the past or the future, is not concerned with what follows upon death or what is the purpose of life, lets reason follow upon impulse without any ulterior speculation as to whether reason is adequate to explain, or impulse adequate to guide his effort--if we can suppose such a stage, then Tolstoy and Whitman both stood in it from the beginning. Whitman has marvellously described this stage in his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth,” and Tolstoy in a passage of his autobiography, and to this stage they both returned again and again. Both stood on the same level of undifferentiated animal consciousness. The intellectual development of both was fragmentary, the spiritual evolution always at the mercy of some catastrophic “conversion.” What Tolstoy describes himself as being at twenty he remained at fifty, and the Whitman of the earliest “Leaves of Grass” is the same Whitman that wrote “Specimen Days” twenty years later. To live in this fashion is extremely difficult under modern civilised conditions, and Tolstoy might have easily passed through a physical breakdown similar to that which cut short Whitman’s career, had he not married an able and efficient woman, and been the inheritor of a large estate. For the Adamic vision, as I have described it, neither looks at things with the practical materialistic vision of most modern men, nor at them with the idealistic vision of the minority. It sees at once both sides, and neither. To it a tree is not only a symbol of grateful shade, greenness and eternal retreat from men, but also so much mere wood to be cut down and burnt, and ultimately only a tree. The civilised man sees now one side, now the other; the primitive man, the true Adamite sees both.

It would be very easy to show how passage after passage in Tolstoy’s work corresponds with other passages in Whitman’s work in this quality of Adamic vision. One need only contrast the horse race in “Anna Karenina,” the battle-fields or the burning of Moscow in “War and Peace,” or that marvellous scene (also in “Anna Karenina”) where the peasants mow the grass, and the proprietor of the fields takes part in their labour, with many a passage out of Whitman--the superb description of late afternoon in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the passage beginning “I am the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken” in “Song of Myself,” the completely captured sense of flight in “To the Man-of-War-Bird,” the amazing rhythm and pulse of the sea-shore in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and many another poem. These two men were so completely innocent and indifferent as regards intellectual aspirations and metaphysical struggles that when confronted with nature in its grandest and simplest aspects (which too is innocent and indifferent) they at once felt at home, and gave us not “nature seen through a temperament,” so much as nature itself.

It is important also in this connection to note that both possessed a supreme power of painting war. Whitman doubtless inherited a dislike of war from his Quaker ancestry, and Tolstoy certainly opposed war theoretically as being contrary to his favourite doctrine of non-resistance. Yet it was precisely these two non-resisters who gave us the most supreme war documents that we possess. The battle scenes in “War and Peace” are unmatched in all literature except by Whitman’s own “Drum-Taps.” Nor is there anything strange in this. To the non-resistant, the man whose soul has learned a wise passivity, the upholder of “vegetable life,” such as Whitman and Tolstoy were, war is simply the spectacle of nature seen at its highest moment: casually beautiful, unconsciously cruel, monotonous, arbitrary, heedless of both good and evil. It is the logician, the metaphysician, who escapes from this viewpoint and regards war as purposive action, or as purposeless savagery. Neither Whitman nor Tolstoy were able to take this attitude. To both war remained a Dionysiac orgy of nature, in which they were able to merge their own passivity, and neither had the slightest notion of the aims for which the side to which they happened not to be attached was fighting for. Whitman supposed that the North in the Civil War was fighting nothing but the “southern slave power,” forgetting that the ranks of the South were filled not by mercenaries (which every slave-power supports) but by free mountaineers in butternut homespun, who had never owned a slave in their lives, were utterly undisciplined in their ideas of freedom, and loved the cause of local independence more than their lives; while the northern armies increasingly became full of conscripted German and Irish immigrants without the remotest attachment to their adopted country. And Tolstoy equally marred the whole plan of his “War and Peace” with a portrait of Napoleon that is nothing but spiteful and partisan caricature--he makes Napoleon little short of idiotic, forgetting utterly that the Napoleon who crossed the Russian frontier was a Napoleon who had acquired the fatal habit of hesitation--extremely common in Russia--and that the army he led had equally acquired the habit of indiscipline--another Russian trait.

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But this is not the place for a complete estimate of these two great men. Otherwise, we would be obliged to take into account the fact that Tolstoy began as a psychological analyst, and progressed through ever broader objectivity to his final transformation into a moral feuilletonist, while Whitman exactly reversed the process. Our object here is a more difficult one; to examine the type of mind likely to be produced by such frontier civilisations as America and Russia, and thereby to estimate their influence on other minds. The problem is psychological and social, rather than cultural and literary. Therefore we must pass on from the great achievements of these two men to the narrower and more purely personal foundations of æsthetic theory on which those achievements rested.

The aim of the Transcendentalists was to transform native New England independence of character into something culturally significant by interfusing it with pantheistic mysticism derived alike from Hindu and American Indian sources. The aim of the Slavophils was to exalt the primitive folk culture and institutions of the Russian peasant by similarly emphasising its mystic and Orthodox Christian side. The one rested on the zemstvo of the Russian village; the other on the New England town meeting. Each was in fact nothing more than a theory based upon the assumption that the Russian, or American, was as such superior to the European.

To this theory Whitman and Tolstoy responded by making a practical experiment. What they said in effect was this:--“You say the ordinary bark-shoed peasant, the ordinary New England backwoodsman, is capable of finer shades of feeling than any that Europe can show. Very well then. We will be respectively in our lives a backwoodsman and a peasant, and thereby transform ourselves into the greatest artists of our country.”

Viewed from this standpoint Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” and his Preface to the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” are the most important of his writings, as Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” and his later polemics are the most important of his. Both artists started from themselves, and tried to deduce a general law from a particular instance. Whitman’s proposition (to take that first) was, if we disengage it from the vague phraseology in which he chose to wrap it, as follows:--

“America differs from anything either European or Asiatic in the fact that it is politically entirely a democracy. Yet this democracy will never come to anything unless it produces forms of art, literature, religion to correspond to its native institutions. These forms of art can only grow on this soil, in their appropriate atmosphere, and to make them grow I will produce poems such as I think any democratic person can truly read and enjoy. These works or works akin in spirit to them must become, in the future, the perfect canons of form.”

To this specious plea American democracy responded by twice prosecuting Whitman’s work for alleged indecency; by almost literally starving him to death--if he had not been maintained by special European financial support after his breakdown in 1872, this starvation might have been an accomplished fact--and by neglecting him in his life and afterwards. It is true that Whitman took compensation in his last years by surrounding himself with a small group of adulators who went to the extent of comparing him to Buddha and Christ. But his own work and his life suffered. If he had not mistakenly thought his own message (with all its blunders) more important than any life he might live, he might perhaps have married Mrs. Gilchrist or another, and have recovered strength enough to give us a second masterpiece, equal to “Leaves of Grass.” His achievement, with its very human traits, has suffered woefully from being concealed in the clouds of incense cast to heaven by a tiny minority of Whitman-idolaters. As a matter of fact, not one in ten thousand or a hundred thousand Americans is ever able to get anything out of his poetry, or to realise that his theory is anything but an utter confusion of art and morals. Whitman has had no successor in his own country, and the chief influence of his work has been abroad.

Tolstoy’s problem was very similar. He, too, as a combination of mystic and rationalist, set himself the task of practically realising the programme of Slavophilism; but the path he had to pursue to this end was in itself very different from that which the Slavophils followed. He had first of all to forget the fact that he was born a landowner, with all the caste prejudices and conservative impulses of the agricultural nobility; and he had to become as nearly as possible, inwardly and outwardly a peasant. It took Tolstoy a long time, and in the end left him with a much clearer, albeit a more radical message, than Whitman. This message he sets out in his famous “What is Art?”

The basis of Tolstoy’s æsthetics is contained in the following sentences:--“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings that he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” And further “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or of God; it is not, as the æsthetic physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotion by external signs, it is not the production of pleasing objects, and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.”

It is worth noting, in regard to the first part of this definition, that apparently an art which has ceased to infect humanity with its feelings, has ceased to become art in Tolstoy’s eyes. Let us take for example the well-known example of Cretan art. Undoubtedly, this was art, and infected people with its feelings at one time. The Cretan civilisation however perished, and remained unknown till the late nineteenth century. During all this time, the Cretans according to Tolstoy’s definition, were not artists since their art infected no one with its feelings. Suddenly, after Sir Arthur Evans’ discoveries the Cretans became artists again. In other words, Tolstoy takes the capacity of art to influence others for good or ill, for art itself. Precisely the same mistake was made by Whitman. He too supposed that poetry, simply because it was poetry, would have the capacity to breed a “huskier race of orators and bards,” would unite America in “the manly love of comrades,” would even be eugenic in its effect of producing the ideally perfect type of woman. The error in both cases is rather like that of a man who has mistaken the programme of a concert for the effect of the music upon him.

But there is still a more serious error behind Tolstoy’s doctrine. He declares, in revolt against the “art for art’s sake” doctrine fashionable in his time, that “art is a means for union among men, joining them together in the same feelings.” He might have reflected that the only art that had historically done so was, like the cathedral-art of the Middle Ages, rooted entirely in a religious doctrine accepted by all ranks of society, and it was this religious and moral doctrine, and not the quality of the work itself, that made it “a means for union among men.” But Tolstoy in his rationalistic fervour, had already rejected the mystical solution of the Orthodox faith, and unlike Whitman, did not hope to replace the older attitude towards religion with any new outlook. Consequently he argued that art which did not teach human unity and brotherhood was not art at all, and devoted himself to demolishing Shakespeare and Wagner, the nineteenth century Frenchmen, and ultimately his own best work. He tried to transform art into a moral tract for peasant consumption; and supposed that unless he became a peasant himself, he could not any longer be an artist. The error was enormous. It is not by wearing bast shoes and plowing one’s own fields that one acquires the range of power and feeling necessary to create an epic like “War and Peace” or the “Iliad.” To behave as Tolstoy did, is simply to mistake the outward means of life for its end in inner spirituality. A Saint Francis, a Lao-Tze, could cast away the whole apparatus of luxury and vanity and remain great artists, because the feeling of such men remained on the same plane of transcendental human understanding as that of Beethoven or of Shakespeare. But Tolstoy did not ultimately understand or share anyone’s feelings but his own, and he made war incessantly upon his own nature. Therefore he drew upon himself Dostoevsky’s profound criticism that he was like “an animal who runs in a certain direction till he has to turn his head, and cannot do so without turning his entire body, and running in the opposite direction.” And the profound criticism of Whitman is to be found in the writings of a Southerner, Lanier, who remarked that just because the Mississippi River or Niagara Falls were great, Whitman thought he could become equally great by writing about them.

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Whitman and Tolstoy both failed in their aims, but Whitman’s enforced admission of failure wrung from him in the end an attitude that is more attractive, humanly speaking, than Tolstoy’s final inhuman rejection of all human contact. It was fortunate, however, that both died before they saw the inevitable end to which their theories led. Whitman’s glorification of the average American, instead of the rare exception, developed a race of human beings of which Mr. Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” is the type; the completely self-satisfied, idea-hating, greedy and noisily vulgar herd-man of the Middle West, without æsthetic imagination or spiritual depth of any kind. Tolstoy’s ideal of a peasant aristocracy no less in the end developed the “kulak,” becoming familiar to us since the Bolshevist accession to power:--the peasant who having made his bargain with the community, becomes so inert and rooted in his power that he will not even grow a grain of corn more than is necessary to feed himself, nor acquire the education that is offered him beyond the extent that his own interests dictate. The two types closely resemble each other and we may have more to say about them. For the present it is enough to observe that Tolstoy and Whitman sacrificed their lives and strength and talents (which were not small ones) towards the establishment of states of society and of human types that, if either were alive to-day, they would be the first to reject. The reason why this result came about was due, however, not to some personal fault of their own, but to mistaken premises on the part of great masses of their own countrymen. The Transcendentalists had exalted self-reliance, which in the end comes down to a bare personal preference by which the Philistine is the equal of the artist and above all social discipline. Whitman simply led this hypothesis to its natural conclusion. The Slavophils had mistaken the rooted inertia and conservatism of the peasant for a superior spiritual faith; Tolstoy showed that this faith could not subsist on the same terms as the faith that had produced the masterpieces of higher culture. Each made what was essentially the same mistake. Both overlooked the fact that we cannot make man better, or nobler, or happier in the last resort--we cannot lift life above the level on which it stands--merely by multiplying the common denominator of the needs and desires of humanity.