Chapter I: Goethe and Tolstoy (2)

Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s biographies show that these great writers both alike suppressed for years their gift of plastic creation--for which, as Countess Sophia Alexandrovna says, they were born--and both in the service of a directly social activity--that is to say, on highly moral grounds. Tolstoy suppressed the artist in him in favour of his activities as _mirowov posrednik_ (justice of the peace) and schoolmaster without pay. Goethe governed the dukedom of Saxe-Weimar, for ten years of his early manhood dedicated his powers to excise regulations, details of book manufacture, levies of recruits, construction of streets and water-conduits, workhouses, mines and quarries, finance, and other such matters--while Merck, in the style of Turgeniev, was constantly concerned to rescue him for literature, and he himself, with increasing resignation, steeling himself by inward exhortations to patience and fortitude, held himself to the heavy, hard, unrewarding, unnatural task. Added to all this, in Goethe’s case, there was that somewhat seraphic affair with Frau von Stein. No doubt it was most beautifully instrumental in the process of civilizing the son of the Titans; but after all it did justice to but one of those famous two souls, which had, alas, their dwelling in his breast, and it let the other, the one with the “_klammernde Organen_,” the “prehensile organs,” go empty away.--Well, in both cases, Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s, the result is illness. “My office as justice of the peace,” writes Tolstoy, “has ended in destroying my good relations with the landowners, quite aside from the fact that it injures my health.” Teaching the village children had the same result. True, in his pedagogical journal he claims that the exercises the children wrote were more accomplished than the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Goethe; yet he discerns something evil and even criminal in his intercourse with them, it seems to him that he abuses and corrupts their souls. “It seemed to go very well,” he says in the _Confessions_, “but I felt that I was mentally not healthy enough and that it could not go on so for much longer. I was more ailing mentally than physically; I threw it all overboard and drove out to the Kalmucks of the steppes to drink mares’ milk and lead an animal life.”--This absconding to the steppes vividly recalls the secret flight to Italy which was Goethe’s salvation, after he too had seen that it could not go on so for much longer. The thirty-four-year-old man had become silent, taciturn, in plain words melancholy. He thought it was probably natural that a man should become serious over serious things. His health was actually undermined; by the time he was six-and-thirty his face was the face of a victim of exhaustion. For the first time he thought of taking a cure. He began to be aware of the ruinous perversity of his existence; expressed his view in the shrewd understatement that he was meant for private life. And fled before destruction. The parallel continues to hold: for Leo Nikolaevich, returned from the steppes and the mares’ milk cure, marries his Sophia Alexandrovna, who from then on finds herself almost continuously in the family way, and with epic and primeval power creates his two great novels. While Goethe, back from Italy, takes Christiane Vulpius unto himself and, freed from the cares of office, gives his mind to his natural tasks. All which might serve as a gloss upon a philosophy of disease.

* * * * *

Art is objective, creative contemplation, closely bound up with nature. Critique, on the other hand, is the moralizing, analysing attitude toward life and nature. In other words, critique is spirit; whereas creation is the preoccupation of the children of God and nature.

“In poetry my maxim was the objective principle,” says Goethe. “I am a plastic artist.” Indeed, the contrast between Goethe’s position and that of his great counterpart (Schiller standing for idealism, moralization, rhetoric, in short for critique) is too well known to need labouring. Goethe regarded his own inborn poetic gift “quite as nature.” His tolerance, his attitude of live and let live, the complaisance of his character, are all consonant with this view. They are based on the Spinozan concept of the perfectitude and necessity of all being, on the idea of a world free from final ends and final causes, in which evil has its rights like good. “We struggle,” he declares, “to perfect the work of art as an end in itself. They, the moralists, think of the ulterior effect, about which the true artist troubles himself as little as nature does when she makes a lion or a humming-bird.” It is a primary maxim with him that art is as inimical to purpose as nature herself; and this is the point where the follower of Spinoza sympathizes with Kant, who conceives detached contemplation as the genuine æsthetic state, thus making a fundamental distinction between the æsthetic-creative principle and the ethical-critical one. “When,” says Goethe, “philosophy confirms and enhances our original feeling of our oneness with nature, turning it into a profound and tranquil contemplation, then I welcome it.” I could cite ten or twelve other places in his works, where in the name of art he repudiates the moral sanction--which indeed is always social as well. “It is possible, I suppose, for a work of art to have a moral effect; but to demand from the artist a moral purpose and intention is to spoil his craft for him.”--“I have, in my trade as a writer, never asked myself: How shall I be of service to the world at large? All I have ever done was with the view of making myself better and more full of insight, of increasing the content of my own personality; and then only of giving utterance to what I had recognized as the good and the true.”

When we contrast the Christian-social ethics of Tolstoy as an old man with Goethe’s pagan and cultural idealism, we must not forget that the Tolstoyan socialism had its origin in the most private and personal need, the profoundest concern with the salvation of one’s own soul. A permanent dissatisfaction with self, a tortured seeking for the meaning of life, was the source of this socialism. The moralist began all his teachings and reforms with a self-discipline (the _Confessions_, that is) such as the true and proper social critic never demands of himself. Revolutionary in the real and political sense of the word he can by no means be called. “The significance of the Christian doctrine,” he declares, “is not that in its name society shall forcibly be reformed. It is that one shall find a meaning to life.” And it should be pointed out that Tolstoy’s original conception of art corresponded precisely to Goethe’s--a fact which will surprise none but those who in all good faith accept him as a child of spirit, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, on the ground of his naïve and clumsy efforts at spiritual regeneration, and fail to recognize in him a natural nobility akin to Goethe’s own. Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, which dates from much earlier than is generally realized, undoubtedly has its roots in antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius. It was a reaction against nature, against the simple, against indifference to the moral point of view; and an impulse toward spirit--that is, toward an ethical and even social revaluation--a reaction so whole-souled, indeed, that it ended in his playing off against Shakespeare Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the creator of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_--an absurdity which only goes to show how very much the child of nature he was. Genuine sons of spirit and of the idea, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, do not run aground on such fantastic coasts. Tolstoy’s critical and moral faculty, in short his bias toward spirit, was but a secondary impulse, and a feeble one at that. It always balked at organic union with his mighty creative gift; we have unequivocal declarations from him to the effect that, in his view, pure creative power stood higher than talent with a social coloration. As an old man he criticized Dostoyevsky for going in for politics, much as Goethe had criticized Uhland’s activities in that line. At the age of thirty-one, in 1859, as a member of the Moscow society of the Friends of Russian Literature, he made a speech in which he so sharply accented the superiority of the purely artistic elements in literature over merits due to ulterior or ephemeral causes that the president of the society, Chomiakof, reminded him in a sharp rejoinder that a servant of pure art might very well, without knowing or wishing it, find himself indicting society.

An outburst of intellectual misgivings, of that humility of spirit to which the sons of nature are prone, occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s novel _Lucerne_. Here is a splendid lament over the fate of man, who, with all his need of positive redemption, is flung into an ever-billowing and shoreless ocean of good and evil. “If man,” cries Tolstoy, “had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain for ever questions! If he would only comprehend that every thought is at once false and true!... Men have divided up into sections this ever-rolling, boundless, eternally mingled chaos of good and bad; they have drawn themselves imaginary boundary-lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide according to their lines. As if it were not possible to make millions of other divisions, from other points of view, and on different planes!... Civilization is good, barbarism evil, freedom is good, unfreedom evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys in human nature the _original blissful and instinctive striving towards good_.” And asking himself whether in the souls of the poor there may not be more happiness and affirmation of life than in that of the callous rich man against whom, for his own part, his heart revolts, he bursts out with the words: “Endless is the goodness and wisdom of Him who has permitted and commanded all these contradictions. Only to you, poor worm, so presumptuously struggling to accomplish your schemes and devices, only to you do they seem contradictory. He looks mildly down from His radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony wherein in endless conflict you all do move!”

Could one express oneself more “Goethically”? Even the “_Harmonie des Unendlichen_” is here. This is not mere philosophical or moral doubt; the words are too light, too thin, too intellectual to characterize the piety, the religious submission, the adoration of nature, that breathe from Tolstoy’s page. This is not the voice of the prophet, schoolmaster, and reformer; here speaks the child of this world, the creative artist. Nature was his element, as she was the element, the beloved, kindly mother, of Goethe--and his constant tearing at the bond which held him fast to her, his desperate urging away from her in the direction of spirit and morality, from creation to critique, has much to command our respect and reverence, though at the same time there is about it something painful, tormenting, and humiliating, which is not present in the character of Goethe. Look at Tolstoy’s attitude toward music, it is most instructive. When he met Berthold Auerbach in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself at the piano--that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside Tschaikowsky and listened to the composer’s Quartet in D major, he began to sob at the _andante_, before everybody. No, unmusical he was not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he was, felt that he ought not to return her love.

There is that legend of the giant Antæus, who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth. The lives of Goethe and Tolstoy irresistibly recall that myth. Both sons of mother earth, they differ only therein, that one of them was aware of the source of his nobility, the other not. There are places in Tolstoy’s remorseful confessions where he touches the earth, and all at once his words, which, so long as they dealt in theory, were wooden and confused, are imbued with the most penetrating sensuousness, with an irresistible force and freshness of life. He recalls how once as a child he went nutting with his grandmother in the hazel-wood. Lackeys instead of horses draw the grandmother’s little carriage into the grove. They break through the undergrowth and bend the boughs, full of ripe, already dropping nuts, down into the old lady’s lap and she gathers them into a bag. Little Leo marvels at the strength of the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich, who bends the heavy branches; when he lets go they spring up again and slowly mingle with the others. “I can feel how hot it was in the sun, how pleasantly cool in the shade, how we breathed the sharp scent of the hazel leaves, while all round us the girls were cracking nuts between their teeth; we munched the full, fresh, white kernels without stopping.”--The fresh, full, white kernels cracking between the girls’ teeth: that is Antæus-Tolstoy, and the strength of his mother the earth streams through him, as it did when he wrote _War and Peace_, where his rather vague, fine-drawn, not very convincing philosophical digressions are followed by pages of which Turgeniev wrote: “They are glorious, they are the very best there is, everything original, everything descriptive, the hunt, the night boat-ride and all--nobody in Europe can touch him.”

And Goethe: how the Antæus-consciousness governed his whole existence! How constantly it conditioned his seeking and shaping! Nature is to him “healing and comfort” after the visitations of passion; and while he well knows that to know her “one must have moulded all the manifestations of the human being into one definite and distinct entity,” that true research is unthinkable without the gift of imagination, he is wary of the fantastic, avoids speculative natural philosophy, guards himself against losing touch with the earth, and calls the idea “the result of experience.” The imagination that guides his research is intuitive, it is the inborn sympathy of the child of nature with the organic. It is Antæan, like the imaginative power which conditions his creative art, nor is that, either, capricious in its nature, but precise and based on the sense-perceptions. Such is the imagination of the creative artist. The sons of the thought, of the idea, of spirit, theirs is another kind. We will not say that the one creates more reality than the other. But the figures created by the plastic fancy possess the realism of sheer being; while those created by the “sentimental” artist evince their actuality by action. Schiller himself makes this distinction. Apart from the things they do, he himself confesses, they have something shadowy--“_etwas Schattenhaftes_” is his expression. Translate this from the sphere of German idealism into the Russian and revelational, and you get, as a sort of national pendant to Schiller’s world of idea, rhetoric, and drama, the shadow-world of Dostoyevsky, over-life-size and exaggeratedly true. A catchword occurs to one from the philosophy of art, that is in everybody’s mouth today, or at least was yesterday: the word “expressionism.” Really, what we call expressionism is only a late form, strongly impregnated with the Russian and revelational, of romantic idealism. Its conflict with the epic attitude toward art, the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in on the one side Goethe and Tolstoy, on the other Schiller and Dostoyevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm, and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered, and dogmatic presumption of spirit.

* * * * *

Very much, yes, precisely as Goethe’s “profound and tranquil contemplation,” his precise and sensuous fancy, the lifelikeness of his characters, stand in relation to the ideal visions of Schiller and the activism of his creations, so the mighty sense-appeal of Tolstoy’s art stands to Dostoyevsky’s sickly, distorted dream-and-soul world. Indeed, the contrast becomes even more pointed by reason of differences between nations and periods. Tolstoy, the realistic novelist, the prince-and-peasant scion of a race still young, displays in his art a sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal, than does the German humanist and classicist, bourgeois-born and patrician-bred, in his.

Compared with Eduard and Charlotte, the lovers in the _Wahlverwandtschaften_, Vronsky and Anna are like a fine strong stallion and a noble mare. The comparison is not mine; it has often been made. A certain school of Russian criticism, hostile, of course, and on a low plane, found most offensive Tolstoy’s animalism, his unheard-of interest in the life of the body, his genius for bringing home to us man’s physical being. These critics wrote, for instance, that _Anna Karenine_ reeked with the classic odour of babies’ diapers. They raved at the salaciousness of certain scenes, and ironically reproached Tolstoy for omitting to describe how Anna takes her bath and Vronsky washes himself. They were wrong even in the fact; for Tolstoy does tell us how Vronsky washes, we see him rubbing his red body. And in _War and Peace_ we are vouchsafed a glimpse of Napoleon naked, in the scene where he has his fat back sprayed with eau-de-Cologne. A critic wrote in _Die Tat_ about this book: “Its main theme is the satisfaction of any and every human being within the fold of wedded bliss, conceived in the grossest sense.” And then the same critic, parodying Tolstoy’s style, proposed to him that he write another novel treating of Levin’s love for his cow Pania.

All this, of course, is on a lower plane than the criticism of Goethe which Caroline Herder wrote to Knebel: “Oh, if he would only give some soul to his characters! If only there were not so much philandering in everything that he writes, or, as he himself so likes to call it, so much ‘good feeling.’” But unenlightened comment such as this may very well be illuminating none the less, even though unawares and as it were on false pretences; and these remarks, in their folly, do undoubtedly contain a grain of truth. Caroline’s “philandering” is a mincing, sentimental word to characterize what Goethe wrote; yet it has a certain aptness, if the comparison is between his frank realism and the lofty insubstantiality of Schiller’s world. It is not such a bad joke, either, to make Levin fall in love with his cow. It hits off the fleshliness of Tolstoy’s art as contrasted with the holy soulfulness of Dostoyevsky’s--especially when we remember Tolstoy’s personal passion for one of the preoccupations of farm life--namely, the breeding of cattle and pigs. It is an interest quite proper, of course, to a landed proprietor; yet where so strongly marked as this surely not quite without deeper meaning.

* * * * *

I am still resolved not to pass judgment. I did, indeed, throw out the question of nobility, the matter of rank. But I am wary of hasty decisions, and even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand and my faith in its ultimate fruitfulness. Why should I not be a cautious judge of the swaying battle, when I know that what I called above the arrogance of spirit is one with that great and highly affecting principle which we call freedom?

Schiller’s loftiest boast is the freedom of the singer. But Goethe’s attitude toward the conception of freedom is at all times cautious, not only in the political field, but consistently, fundamentally, and in every connexion. Of Schiller he says: “In his latter years, when he had had enough of freedom in a physical sense, he went over to it in the realm of the ideal, and I might almost say that it killed him; for it caused him to make demands on his physical powers that were altogether too much for them. I have great respect for the categorical imperative, I know how much good can come of it; but one must not carry it too far, for then this idea of the ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”--I confess that this habit of using Schiller’s heroic life to point a warning against exaggerations in the use of the categorical imperative has always made me smile. To confront the moral with the natural is always humorous. But in other places where this child of God expresses himself about heroes and saints his words have quite a different ring and bear witness frankly and sincerely to the nobility of spirit. He declared one day that he passed for an aristocrat, but that Schiller was at bottom much more of a one than he. The remark bears directly upon the problem of aristocracy: certainly not in the political field, nor yet to the fact that Schiller had spoken of the “eternally blind,” to whom one must not lend Heaven’s torches of light; no, it has immediate reference to the aristocracy of spirit, which Goethe was at the moment comparing with his own, the aristocracy of nature, and finding it the more lofty of the two. “Nothing disturbed him,” he says admiringly, “nothing constrained him, nothing distracted the flight of his thoughts. He was as great at the tea-table as he would have been in the council-chamber.” This admiring wonder rises from the depths of Goethe’s Antæus-nature, which had no consciousness at all of a freedom like that, of such independence and unrestraint. Rather he knew himself to be constantly conditioned by a hundred circumstances; influenced, obligated, willingly indeed, with a certain pride in his earth-bound aristocracy, yet influenced and obligated none the less. Pantheistic necessity was the fundamental feeling of his existence. It is not enough to say he did not believe in the freedom of the will. He denied the conception, he denied that such a thing was even conceivable. “We belong to the laws of nature,” he says, “even when we rebel against them; we are working with her, even when we work against her.” That dæmonic determinism of his whole being was often felt by others. They said he was possessed, and not able to act voluntarily. His earth-bound state manifested itself, for instance, in such sensitiveness to weather that he called himself a regular barometer. And we may not take it that he felt his dependence, which amounted to compulsion, as personally lowering, or that his will had ever rebelled against it. The will is the spirit: nature is by way of being mild and easy-going. Thus the aristocrat in bondage may feel a noble pride as he bends the knee to the dark power to which he belongs and which guides him so well; and yet be capable, as Goethe’s case shows at least, of a gesture of elegant homage before the aristocracy of freedom. “_Denn hinter ihm_,” says Goethe in the Epilogue to _The Bell_, with reference to Schiller:

_Denn hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine._

Truly this is homage which breathes a spirit of the most profound resignation. For what _is_ “_das Gemeine_”? Nothing else than the natural, from the point of view of spirit and of freedom. For freedom is spirit; it is release from nature, rebellion against her; it is humanity conceived as emancipation from the natural and its bondage, this emancipation being the thing that is actually human and worthy of humanity. Here we see the question of aristocracy flowing together with that of human dignity. Which is finer, which worthier of humanity, freedom or bonds, self-will or submission, the moral or the natural? If I refuse to answer, it is in the conviction that this question can never be answered with finality.

But, on the other hand, the moral “sentimentalist” can be no “sentimentalist” at all if he does not on his side display an even livelier and profounder eagerness to pay homage to the aristocracy which is of nature. Unquestionably there is a certain charming humility in the attitude of spirit toward nature, a delicate readiness, often quite unrequited, to pay her respect, which is one of the greatest and most touching phenomena of the higher life. Dostoyevsky read Tolstoy’s early work _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_ in Siberia, in the periodical called _The Contemporary_, and was so taken with it that he inquired on all sides after the anonymous author. “Calm, deep, clear, yet unfathomable as nature is unfathomable, that is the impression it leaves,” he writes. “There it is, and everything, even the smallest detail, shows the beautiful unity of the temperament from which it flows.”--No, these are not Dostoyevsky’s words, though they might have been. It is Schiller who writes thus, about _Wilhelm Meister_, in that letter in which, for the first time, he apostrophizes Goethe as “Dearest Friend”: an emotional form of address, in which, so far as I know, Goethe never explicitly acquiesced. Dostoyevsky wrote the profoundest and most loving of all existing critiques of _Anna Karenine_; a masterpiece of enthusiastic exposition, which Tolstoy, perhaps, never even read (he never did read criticisms of his works), to say nothing of his ever feeling impelled to write reviews of anything by Dostoyevsky. When Feodor Michaelovich died, Tolstoy is said to have said: “I loved that man very much.” But his consciousness of the fact came a little late in the day; for while Dostoyevsky was alive Tolstoy never troubled his head about him; while afterwards, in a letter to Strachof, Dostoyevsky’s biographer, he compared him with a horse, who seemed a splendid creature and worth a thousand roubles, until suddenly he went lame, and then the fine strong animal was not worth a groschen. “The longer I live,” he said, “the more I think of men who are not lame.” But this horse-philosophy, as applied to the author of _The Brothers Karamazof_ does not seem quite happy, to put it mildly.

We know, and we rejoice to know, that in the case of Goethe and Schiller nature’s attitude to spirit was altogether more brotherly and dignified, and on a higher plane. But if Goethe played here too the part of Hatem, the richly bestowing and receiving one, he did not after all take from the dear friend more than he gave him, to say nothing of all he gave by virtue of his mere existence, unconsciously, involuntarily. Was not Schiller’s part in the relationship, after all, that of service? I think so, myself, simply because it lies in the nature of the thing, because Schiller did not in the least need, to keep him fruitful, the meed of praise, love, inspiration, which he bestowed upon Goethe. And I note that such a letter as his famous first one, which knit the bond between them, in which with kindly hand he “gave the sum” of Goethe’s life, he never did get from Goethe in return.

One utterance of Schiller’s to Goethe has always delighted me, it seems to characterize the relationship so wonderfully. I mean the passage in a letter where he warns Goethe against Kant, his own spiritual master and his idol. Goethe, he tells him, can only be a Spinozan; his beautiful simple nature would be at once vitiated by contact with a philosophy of freedom. It is no more and no less than the problem of irony which we catch sight of here: without exception the profoundest and most fascinating in the world. For we see here that nothing is more foreign to spirit than a desire to convert nature to itself. It warns nature against itself. To the moral “sentimentalist,” all that is nature seems beautiful and highly worth preserving. Knowledge feels that life is beautiful; and this is the feeling of the moral for the simple, of the holy for the divine, of nature for spirit; and in this peculiarly absolute judgment of values resides the ironic god, resides Eros. Spirit accordingly enters into a relationship with nature which is in a sense erotic, in a sense determined by male-female sex-polarity. And by virtue of the relation it can venture to abase itself and dare the ultimate self-surrender, without thereby resigning any of its own nobility. Indeed, it will always retain the accent of a certain tender contempt. In Hölderlin’s lines precisely this emotional irony is immortalized:

_Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich._

On the other hand, this simple nature too has an ironic mood, which is one with the objectivity of its character and precisely coincides with the conception of poetry, inasmuch as it lifts itself above its subject, above joy and grief, good and bad, death and life, to play freely with them. Goethe speaks of this mood in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, with reference to Herder.

It is plain that what kept Goethe apart from Schiller so long was, more than anything else, the latter’s prepossessions on the subject of freedom: his conception of human dignity, which was entirely based on the dictatorship of spirit--that is, was entirely revolutionary in character--which conceived in this emancipated sense all humanity, all nobility, all human nobility--and that, to a nature like Goethe’s, must have seemed both odious and insulting to nature. It is, for instance, certain _a priori_ that Goethe took the greatest umbrage at the famous essay _Über Anmut und Würde_. In it occur things like the following: “Movements which have as principle only animal sensuousness belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to physical nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were possible to have grace in the manifestations of physical appetites and instincts, grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve as the expression of humanity.” That one might describe as idealistic malice of spirit against nature, and so Goethe must have regarded it. For it is audacious to assert that grace cannot come out of the sensuous, nor nature reach to grace. Grace, then, is not a manifestation worthy of humanity; for that desire can express itself with charm, and instinct with grace, is a “charming” fact of experience. And when Schiller goes on to say: “Grace is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by the subject itself ... it is the beauty of form under the influence of free will; it is the beauty of those particular phenomena which the person himself determines. The architectonic beauty does honour to the author of nature; grace does honour to him who possesses it. That is a gift, this is a personal merit”--the moral distinction he draws between talent and personal merit becomes a consummate affront to Goethe’s vital consciousness and his aristocratic feeling. “Fools never think,” says Goethe, “how fortune and merit are linked together.” What he means by “fortune” is what Schiller calls “nature” and “talent,” and distinguishes from free human merit. While Goethe, half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to talk about “inborn merit.” Everybody is free to call this a logical contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a metaphysical certainty higher than itself; and Goethe, who on the whole was certainly no metaphysician, undoubtedly felt the problem of freedom to be a metaphysical one. That is to say, an undemonstrable intuition told him that freedom, and therewith merit and demerit, were not a matter of the empirical but of the intelligible world; that, to speak with Schopenhauer, freedom does not consist in _operari_ but in _esse_. Herein lies the humbleness of his aristocracy, the aristocracy of his humility; both of them so categorically opposed to Schiller’s idealistic evaluations, his personal and moral pride in his freedom. Goethe, when he wants to characterize the principle which composes his essential nature, speaks humbly and gratefully of a “gift of fortune.” But the conception of a “gift,” of “grace,” is more aristocratic than one might think. What it means is the indissoluble union of fortune and merit, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in short “inborn merit”; and the gratitude, the humility, carry with them that metaphysical consciousness of being at all times and absolutely certain of the favour of destiny.

There is, in Goethe’s case, an amazing bit of evidence on this point, which I cannot refrain from quoting. Speaking of Bentham, he says it is the height of madness for the man, at his age, to be so radical. He is answered that if His Excellence had been born in England he could hardly have escaped being a radical and reformer. Whereat Goethe, with Mephistophelian mien: “What do you take me for? You think I would be spying out abuses and tacking names on to them? I, who if I had been born in England would have been living on abuses? If I had been born in England I should have been a duke, or better still a bishop with revenues of thirty thousand pounds sterling.”--“Very fine. But suppose Your Excellence had not drawn the big prize in the lottery; suppose you had drawn a blank?” To which Goethe: “Not everybody, my dear friend, is _made for the big prize_. Do you think I should have played such a foolish trick (_sottise_) as to draw a blank?”

All that, of course, is in jest. But is it only in jest? Does it not rather voice that deep metaphysical certainty that never and under no circumstances should he or could he be other than favoured and privileged, ever other than well-born? And in this certainty is there not after all something like a consciousness of freedom of the will, if only of freedom after the event? Really, it is priceless. To be born into the world a starving revolutionary, an idealistic “sentimentalist,” that he calls a _sottise_. Is that the irony the children of God wreak on the children of spirit? If there be such a thing as inborn merit, then there is inborn demerit as well; and if it is a _sottise_ to come into the world an average man, or poor, or sick, or stupid, then the criminal is indeed not only empirically but metaphysically culpable. For merit and reward, guilt and punishment, are conceptions that belong together. And one punishment at least, all those merit who have committed the _sottise_ of drawing a blank in life’s lottery: that of eternal destruction; whereas the chosen ones get eternal life too at the end. “_Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb, noch Edles will, gehört den Elementen an; so fahret hin!_” But as the possibility of nobly aspiring and achieving a name is not a matter of empirical freedom of the will, this “_so fahret hin_” is a piece of gross heartlessness. And if the conception of election by grace, to which that of metaphysical depravity corresponds, is a Christian conception, at any rate it shows Christianity turning its aristocratic side outwards.

* * * * *

I said awhile back that it seemed to me not accidental that Schiller and Dostoyevsky were sick men and did not, like Goethe and Tolstoy, arrive at a reverend length of days. Rather I was inclined to regard their poor health as fundamental to their characters. Quite as symbolic is the further external fact, that the two great realists and creative artists were of upper station, born to a privileged social status, whereas the heroes and saints of the idea, Schiller and Dostoyevsky, one the son of a Swabian army surgeon and the other of a Moscow hospital physician, were the children of modest people and spent all their days in pinched and homely, one might almost say undignified circumstances. I call this biographical fact symbolic, because it testifies to the Christianity of the spirit, whose kingdom, as the Scriptures say, is not of this world--in personalities as little as in the realm of the ideal and the artistic. Wherein it opposes a perpetual contrast to the kingdom of nature and nature’s favourites, whose rank and essence are quite and entirely “of this world,” the physical, pagan world. Therein lies their “realism.” And they were, both Tolstoy and Goethe, realists enough to feel a naïve enjoyment in their privileged status, yes, in a sort to lay stress upon it and show themselves imbued by a consciousness of it; which would impress one as curiously unenlightened were it not plain that they themselves regard it in a symbolic sense and even rather childishly assimilate it in their own minds to their consciousness of their higher, extra-social, human aristocracy. Goethe’s patrician birth was so dear to him that his patent of nobility, when he had it in his hands, meant “nothing, simply nothing.” “We Frankfort patricians,” he said, “always felt ourselves like nobility.” But in the same conversation and connexion, by way of refuting a slur upon himself as the obsequious servant of royalty, he puts it thus: “Yes, I felt so much at ease (_so wohl in meiner Haut_), and so very much the aristocrat, that if they had made me a prince it would not have surprised me.” I may say in passing that it would have become him to be a prince. Had he taken up Napoleon’s invitation to transfer his activity to Paris, had he written there the _Cæsar_ Napoleon wanted him to write, in which he need only have given vent to the hatred he had felt as a youth for the “base, the contemptible murder,” the Emperor would certainly have made him a prince, as by his own account he would have done for Corneille as well. My point is to show how, in Goethe’s mind, the consciousness of his social position lay very close to that of his nobility as a human being, as a child of God. The two flow together in one and the same consciousness of nobility, or “inborn merit.”

Count Leo Tolstoy came, as we know, from one of the oldest and finest of Russian families. When we read his books, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, or _Anna Karenine_, that picture of high life in Moscow, we are impressed with the fact that the author is a man who was brought up with all the advantages. We get the same feeling when we read _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ or _Die Wahlverwandtschaften_. And in Tolstoy too we find the same familiar and perhaps childish phenomenon we noticed in Goethe: his noble blood and the distinction conferred by his great gifts both belonged to him quite simply because they belonged to him, and his consciousness of them mingled in his joy in himself, of which, despite all his attacks of poverty of spirit, he possessed a very great deal. His fame as a writer, so he wrote to his father-in-law, delights him very much; he finds it most pleasant to be an author _and_ a nobleman. An author and a nobleman--all his Christianity, all his anarchism, to the contrary and notwithstanding, he never ceased to be a striking combination of those two. When Turgeniev first made the acquaintance of the youthful Tolstoy he said: “Not a word, not a gesture of his is natural. He is constantly posing; it is a mystery to me how such a sensible man can take such childish pride in his silly title.” This is the same Turgeniev who wrote to a French publisher: “I am not worthy to untie his shoe-laces”; so it is unlikely that the first-quoted remark misrepresents the facts. As for the aged Tolstoy, Gorky relates: “His comfortable, democratic manner took many people in; and I have often seen Russians, who judge people by their clothes, gush over him with their famous ‘simplicity of manner,’ which might better be called ‘beastly familiarity.’ And suddenly, from under his peasant beard, and his rumpled democratic blouse, the old Russian _Barin_, the aristocrat of aristocrats, would peep forth; and in the chill that emanated from him the confiding visitor’s nose would be frost-bitten. It was a joy to see this blue-blooded creature: the noble charm of his gestures, the haughty reticence of his speech, the murderous and fastidious sharpness of his tongue. He displayed just so much of the _Barin_ as these servile souls needed to see; when they roused the _Barin_ in Tolstoy it came easy and natural and overwhelmed them so that they shrivelled up and whined.”--The blue noses call up memories of Weimar, chilling memories of receptions and formal calls--only that Goethe was never malicious enough to put on the democratic pose; and his most frigid manner concealed more love than Tolstoy ever felt--Tolstoy, whose last and most frightful secret Turgeniev’s penetrating mind laid bare: it was that Tolstoy could love nobody but himself! But it was a “joy,” in Gorky’s sense of the word, to see Tolstoy for instance at the Petrov yearly fair, whither he drove from his estate in Samara in the seventies. His charm made him very popular in the merry whirl of peasants, Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. Even with drunken folk, we are told, he did not hesitate to strike up a conversation. And then came the following quiet and characteristic little episode. A drunken peasant, in his excess of feeling, wanted to embrace Tolstoy. But one stern and expressive look from Leo Nikolaevich’s eyes met the man and sobered him in a twinkling. He dropped his hands of himself, and said: “No? Well, all right, then.” What was there in that look to make it have such an arresting, quenching, sobering effect? Was it the consciousness of the _Barin_? Or of the great author? In such a case it is quite impossible to distinguish between them--as little objectively as doubtless it was subjectively.

“When Leo Nikolaevich wanted to please,” Gorky tells us, “he could do it better than a pretty and clever woman. Imagine a crowd of all sorts of people sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicholai Michailovich, the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Jalta, a musician, a German, the poet Bulgakov, and so on; they all look at him with the same enamoured eyes, while he expounds to them the doctrine of Lao Tse.... I used to look at him just like the others. And now I long to look at him once more--and I shall never see him again.”--One thing is obvious: it was _not_ the doctrine of Lao Tse which brought that lovelorn look into all their eyes. The teaching would have roused very scant general interest but for the expounder. But that look in every eye is the very same that Karl August had in mind when he passed on to Goethe the greetings sent by Napoleon on the Emperor’s way back from Russia: “You see,” he added, “heaven and hell are both making eyes at you.”

Yes, and the democratic moujik blouses were immaculate, made of soft fine material, highly comfortable and pleasant to wear, and the linen was scented. Of course, he did not scent it himself. The Countess attended to that, and he, who liked it very much, pretended not to notice, just as he pretended not to know that the vegetarian dishes he exclusively ate were all prepared with _bouillon_. “His face is that of a peasant,” reports an eyewitness, “with a broad nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick, beetling brows with small, piercing grey eyes beneath them. But, despite the peasant features, no one could fail to recognize at first glance the fine, cosmopolitan Russian gentleman, member of the very highest society.” Conversing thus in English or French with a Grand Duke, he reminds one very much of Goethe, on whom princes waited, and who thought it no derogation of his nobility, human or divine, to season it with a little knack for polite nothings. When Tolstoy visited Alexander Herz in London, his daughter, young Natalia Alexandrovna, begged to be present in a dark corner, that she might behold in the flesh the author of _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_. With beating heart she awaited Tolstoy’s appearance. She was bitterly disappointed to see a man dressed in the latest fashion, with good manners and a flow of speech, the subject-matter of which was exclusively the cock-fights and boxing-matches he had seen in London. “Not a word that came from his heart, not a word that could have corresponded to my expectations, did I hear during the single interview at which I was present.”

Nothing of the sort is reported of Dostoyevsky or Schiller. Never did these by their worldliness disappoint the expectations of their audience. The sons of spirit make personally a spiritual impression, as the hopeful average man expects those to do who are soul-shakers. That lofty, pallid, suffering-saint and criminal look of Dostoyevsky corresponded to the idea the Russians got of the phenomenon of his genius, just as Schiller’s mild, intrepid, fanatical, and equally ailing physiognomy, with open shirt-collar and flowing silk neckerchief, corresponded to the image which the German mind might have formed of its hero. Whereas on the other hand Goethe, if we accept Riemer’s description of him as he moved among his guests in a blue coat, “the powerful, expressive face showing the effects of sun and fresh air, with the black side-locks floating about it, the black hair bound in a queue, was more like a well-to-do, comfortable farmer, or a much-visited staff-officer in mufti, than like a shrinking and sensitive poet.” And it is true, _a priori_, that neither of those other two ever estranged ardent admiration by displaying a banal enthusiasm for cock-fighting and boxing. Whereas the sense of sport, the taste for bodily exercise, physical training, and physical enjoyment, played an essential rôle in Tolstoy’s life as in Goethe’s. We call these tastes gentlemanly and thus indicate the physical basis of the well-born-ness which is of this world. “One must see him,” wrote Riemer about Goethe; “how strong and firm he stands on his feet, with what bodily agility and sure step he moves. Early gymnastic training, dancing, skating, riding, even coursing and racing, had given him this mobility and suppleness; he could never make a false step on the worst path or be in danger of slipping or falling; easily and swiftly he passed over smooth ice, narrow foot-paths and bridges, and rocky steeps. As a youth he climbed among chasms and shingle with his princely friend, mounted towering rocks and Alpine crags with the boldness of a chamois; and so throughout his fifty years of geological exploration no mountain has been too high for him, no shaft too deep nor passage too low, no cave labyrinthine enough.”

The great interest which Leo Tolstoy took in his body showed itself negatively as well as positively. Negatively, in his Christian and ascetic grumblings at his beastly physical, in such utterances as that the body is a hindrance to the good man, and in such phrases as: “I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body.” Positively, in all the training and care he gave it. His interest in it begins at the moment--of which he speaks in the _Confessions_--when he sat as a little child in a wooden tub, enveloped in the smell of the bran-water in which he was being bathed, and for the first time noticed his little body with the ribs visible on the breast in front, and straightway feels drawn to it by a very strong inclination. Tolstoy’s face was, humanly speaking, ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it, convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes. He confesses that he would have given anything he had for a handsome face. The youth who is tortured by the problem of death, and ponders all the high and ultimate questions with as much maturity as the aged prophet, this youth is at the same time perpetually occupied with his own appearance, is obviously possessed by the desire to be elegant and _comme il faut_; sets the greatest store by physical development, gymnastic exercise; drills, rides, and hunts as though he had no higher ambition in his head nor thought of any. His passion for the hunt is so excessive that he confesses to his wife that of human beings he never forgot Sophia Alexandrovna, but out hunting he forgot everything but his double-barrelled shot-gun. From more than one letter of those who knew him in his prime we see what a daring sportsman he was, how he sprang with astonishing agility over gullies and chasms and would spend whole days in the wild. We are told that a better companion could not be conceived of. The pacifism, Christian, Buddhistic, or Chinese, of his latter days forbade him of course to kill animals, although his indestructible physical strength and trained agility would still have allowed him to hunt and though he still cherished the greatest desire to. He bade it farewell. He submitted himself to a test and found he had fortitude enough to let the hares run. And in his case that meant a good deal, as we see from the following anecdote, related by Gorky. Tolstoy put on a heavy overcoat and thick boots and took Gorky for a walk in the birch-woods. He leaped like a schoolboy over puddles and ditches, shook the rain-drops from the boughs, lovingly stroked the moist, satiny trunks of the birch-trees, and talked about Schopenhauer.... “Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo Nikolaevich gave an excited start, his face lighted up, he let out a halloo like an old huntsman. Then he looked at me with a curious smile and began laughing, a hearty human laugh. At this moment he was irresistible.”--Still finer is the story of the hawk which the old man saw circling above his chickens, about to swoop. Leo Nikolaevich stares up at the bird of prey, his hand over his eyes, and says in an “excited whisper”: “The rascal! Now, now! He’s coming ... oh, he’s afraid.... I’ll call the stable-boy.” He calls, the hawk disappears. But Tolstoy is taken with regrets. He sighs and says: “I shouldn’t have called. Then he would have swooped.” They are his chickens. But all the sympathy of the venerable prophet of pacifism is with the hawk.

Of his son Iliuscha he wrote in a letter: “Iliuscha is lazy, he is growing, and his soul is not yet overwhelmed by organic processes.” What does he mean by that? Growing is itself an organic process, and if growing is innocent, so too will be the organic processes which growth brings about, and with which Tolstoy was only too well acquainted, since they made his life a burden to him all his days. The Church’s conception of woman as _instrumentum diaboli_ was with him something more than a mood from the time of the _Kreuzer Sonata_; it dates from much earlier, from the journals of his boyish days; and he speaks of organic processes in the sense of that early Christian pope who, in order to mortify the flesh, made a detailed list of all its disgusting and evil-smelling functions, the functions of this body which in the end has to submit to the final indignity of putrefaction. That kind of cross-grained speculation Tolstoy would be just the one to set about, and he did. Very sensual men well know such moods. Maupassant somewhere calls the act of coition filthy and ridiculous--“_ordurier et ridicule_.” Could objectivity further go? But such blithe and cynical objectivity was not Tolstoy’s sort. His hatred of the organic has a shattering accent of subjective torment and rage. And yet he is so much the darling of the creative impulse of organic life that one must go back to Goethe to find a human being who was “_so wohl in seiner Haut_” as he. Yes, the parallel is even more exact. In both of them, and in just the same way, the most beatific organic well-being, amounting to organic rapture, mingled with a rooted melancholy and the profoundest intimacy with death. Goethe, when he was a riotous, dandiacal student in Leipsic, might any moment quit the society of men, the card-play and dance, and yield himself to solitude. We have plenty of witnesses to his brilliance, his childish, fantastic extravagances in the circle of his friends, with the Jacobis, Heinse, Stilling in Elberfeld. He cuts capers, dances round the table like a clown, in short cannot contain himself for a mysterious intoxication; the philistines sitting round think he has gone mad. And that is the same Goethe whose Werther drove more than one young man to self-destruction, and who practised himself in suicide by keeping a sharp dagger on his bed-table and trying every evening to drive it a little further into his body.