Chapter I: Goethe and Tolstoy (3)

We have noted the same excess of animal spirits in Tolstoy; in whom, indeed, they persisted up to an old age lacking in the dignity, stateliness, and formal gravity of Goethe’s latest period. Which need surprise nobody. For we cannot doubt that Goethe led a more earnest, laborious, exemplary life than the Slavic junker; or that his cultural activities presupposed far more genuine self-abnegation, restraint, and discipline than Tolstoy’s uttermost ineffectual efforts at spiritualization, sticking fast as these always did in a bog of fantastic absurdity. Tolstoy’s aristocratic charm was, and Gorky so depicts it, that of a noble animal. He never managed to arrive at the dignity of man the civilized, man the triumpher over odds. It is lovely to hear of all the pranks he played with the children, his droll conceits, the gymnastic feats he performed for and with them; the endless croquet, lawn-tennis, and leap-frog parties in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana. He not only shared all the activities of youth, but he was the life and soul of them. The sixty-year-old man runs races with the boys, his bicycle trips extend, much to the Countess’s anxiety, over thirty versts. “When there is some activity requiring agility, strength, and suppleness,” comments a bystander, “he never takes his eyes off the players, he puts his whole soul into their success or failure. Often he cannot resist and joins in with a youthful fire and muscular flexibility which the onlooker could only envy.” In the family circle he performed the sheerest absurdities. He had invented a game called Numidian Horsemen, which made the children weep with delight. Leo Nikolaevich would suddenly spring from his chair, lifting his hand, and run about the room flapping it in the air, whereupon everybody, grown-ups, children, and all, followed suit. That is, I repeat, charming, though a little bizarre. It becomes more so when we learn that all these high spirits occur in the years after his “conversion,” in the period of his soul-crises, his ascetic eclipses and theological broodings. But what shall be said of the incident recorded by his father-in-law, Behrs? They were walking about the room together in light converse, one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold--it gives one an uncanny feeling! I do not ask my readers to imagine Goethe, in his later period, leaping unexpectedly on a visitor’s shoulder. There is a decided difference of temperament, that is clear. But the resemblance is no less so.

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Looking more closely at the matter, I find that there is a complex of problems, a “problematic,” peculiar to the sons of nature, the creative and objective artists, which is entirely foreign to the children of the idea, and, for all the brilliant sunshine of favour they move in, casts a strange dark cloud upon them which must considerably chill their consciousness of aristocratic well-being. My feeling is that it is pure error to think that conflict and complexity are things of the spirit, while nature’s kingdom must be all brightness and harmony. It looks as though the contrary were the case. If what we call happiness consists in harmony, clarity, unity with oneself, in the consciousness of a positive, confident, decisive turn of mind, if, in short, it is peace resident in the soul, then obviously happiness is a state far easier for the sons of spirit to arrive at than for the children of nature. For the latter, though surely singleness of heart should be their lot, seem never to attain the joy and peace it might confer. Nature herself appears to weave in their very being a questionable strand, an element of contradiction, negation, and all-pervasive doubt, which, since it cannot conduce to goodness, cannot conduce to happiness either. Spirit is good. Nature is by no means good. One might say she is evil, if moral categories were admissible with reference to her. She is, then, neither good nor evil, she escapes definition, as she herself refuses to define and judge; she is, speaking objectively, indifferent, and as this indifference of hers appears subjectively and spiritually in her children, it becomes a complication that has more to do with torment and evil than with happiness and goodness, and which certainly seems come not to bring peace into the world, like the human and benevolent spirit, but rather doubt and dire confusion.

Obviously I am not speaking here of the comparatively harmless conflict between the Faustian “two souls,” the battle between the impulses of a strong animal constitution and the yearnings after “_Gefilden hoher Ahnen_”--a battle, and a “problematic,” of which Goethe speaks out of such deep experience, and which not only made Tolstoy’s youth a period of such hardship, so torn with remorse, but persisted in him up to old age. I am speaking of something which seems at first blush to be much blither and simpler: a position something like that of Goethe between Lavater and Basedow, in which Goethe designates himself as “_das Weltkind in der Mitten_”. That sounds simple, and pleasant, and self-complacent, and was probably so meant. And yet in the word “_Weltkind_” and the associations that surround it there is something sinister, a difficulty and a “problematic,” by contrast with which the “prophetic” existence is nothing less than sweetness and light and plain sailing. “Goethe’s tendency to negation,” writes Chancellor von Müller on some occasion or other, “and his incredible judicial-mindedness came out strong again.” “There is something,” Gorky writes about Tolstoy, “which presumably he will never reveal to a human being, which appears darkly in his conversation, and is hinted at in his journals. To me it seems like the apotheosis of negation, the deepest and most hideous nihilism, springing from a stratum of boundless and hopeless despair, from a solitude of which probably no one else in the world has ever been so frightfully aware.” No one? It was not Tolstoy who created the so lyric figure of Mephistopheles--though indeed the Mephistophelian element was never lacking to any period of his life. The ceaseless, tormenting effort to shape that which he calls his conception of life, to arrive at truth and clarity and inward peace, found expression in his youth, partly in a gloomy irritability that led to duels and scenes with his friends, which he took in desperate earnest, as matters of life and death, killing and dying; but partly also in malicious negation in general, an inimical spirit of contradictiousness, which, as we are expressly assured, made a quite Mephistophelian impression. Though of course this was not a nihilistic but a moral attitude, and was not assumed save in opposition to things that were not true--only they were simply everything! In the young Tolstoy there was observable, “from the beginning, a sort of unconscious enmity toward all accepted laws in the kingdom of thought. No matter what the opinion expressed; and the greater the authority of the speaker, the more was Tolstoy at pains to take up and accentuate an inimical attitude. If you watched him as he listened, and saw the sarcastic curl of his lip, you could not avoid the impression that he was thinking, not so much of answering what was said, as of himself saying something which should surprise and confound the speaker.” That is nihilism, that is malice. But it is not so much cold malice as it is a tortured spite against anybody who fancied he held the secret of clarity and truth. It is a disbelief in clarity and truth. This spite, and this incredulity, were especially directed against Turgeniev, the clear-eyed and human man with whom he never could get on. “Tolstoy,” said Turgeniev, “early developed a trait which, lying as it does at the root of his gloomy conception of life, has caused him great suffering. He has never managed to believe in the sincerity of mankind. Every expression of feeling seemed to him false; and he had the habit, due to his extraordinarily penetrating gaze, of boring through with his eye the man he considered insincere.” And when Turgeniev said this, he added the confession that never in his life had he encountered anything with such power to dishearten him as this same piercing gaze, which, accompanied by two or three biting remarks, could bring to the verge of madness anybody who did not possess particularly strong self-control. Now Turgeniev’s self-control was strong. He was at the height of his literary success; serene and untroubled, he could encounter the complexities of his younger colleague with the calmness of a man who lived on good terms with himself. But precisely this security was what troubled Tolstoy. He seems to have gone deliberately about with this tranquil, good-natured man, working with such a clear conviction that what he did was right, to goad him past the bounds of self-control. Simply this conviction that he knew and did what was right was more than Tolstoy could bear; for certainly he himself did not in the least know what was right. Garschin says: “In his view, the people who passed for good were merely hypocrites, who paraded their goodness and pretended to the certainty that their work served a good end.” Turgeniev too saw in Tolstoy this strange, sinister, malicious bent. He resolved to hold fast to what he considered “right” and not to lose his self-control; so he avoided Tolstoy, left Saint Petersburg, where the latter was living, and went first to Moscow and then to his own estate. But--this is most significant of all, as evidence of Tolstoy’s state of mind--Tolstoy followed him. Followed him step for step, “like a lovesick girl,” to use Turgeniev’s own phrase.

All which is very telling, very extraordinary. Above all, it shows how completely the old Tolstoy, of whom Gorky writes, was foreshadowed in the young one. Did he really ever find out what was “right”--the real, the true, the incontrovertible? For others he did, he gave them conviction. But he himself certainly never got free of the negation and neutrality of the elemental character. “Rousseau,” he said, “lied and believed his lies.” Did he believe his own lies? No, for he did not lie. He was elemental, nihilistic, malicious, and unfathomable. “Would you very much like to know?” he asks.--“Very much.”--“Then I will not tell you.” And he smiles and plays with his thumbs. This smile, this “sly little smile”--Gorky speaks of it again and again. There is something not only extra-moral but extra-mental, extra-human, about it; it bespeaks the mystery of the “natural,” the elemental, which is not at all kindly disposed, but rather takes pleasure in confusion. According to Gorky, the old man loved to put insidious questions. “What do you think about yourself?” “Do you love your wife?” “How do you like mine?” “Do you like me, Alexei Maximovich?”--“Disingenuous!” Gorky cries. “The whole time, he is making an experiment, testing something out, as though he were going into battle. It is interesting, but not to my taste. He is the devil, and I am a babe in arms beside him. He ought to leave me alone.”

One day Gorky sees the aged Tolstoy sitting alone by the sea. This scene is the crowning point of his reminiscences. “He sat, his head on his hands; the wind blew the silver hair of his beard through his fingers. He was looking far out across the sea, and the little green waves rolled docilely to his feet and caressed them, as though they wanted to tell the old wizard something about themselves.... He seemed like an ancient stone come alive, that knew and pondered the beginning and end of all things, and what and how would be the end of the stones and grasses of the earth, the waters of the sea, the whole universe from the sun to the grain of sand. And the sea is a part of his soul, and all about him comes from him and out of him. In the old man’s musing quietude I felt something portentous, magic. I cannot express in words what I more felt than thought at that moment. In my heart were rejoicing and fear, then all melted together in one single blissful feeling: ‘I am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is living on it.’” And Gorky steals away on his tiptoes that the sand may not crunch under his tread and disturb the old man’s thoughts.

The mystical reverence that Gorky here depicts is not that which lays hold on us at sight of the heroes of the idea. Neither Dostoyevsky nor Schiller has inspired this sort of awe and shuddering, however saintly they seemed. So much is certain. Nor can the reverence felt for Goethe be of just this same nature--though akin to it. The Tolstoyan greatness and remoteness is wild and primeval and pagan in its nature, it is antecedent to culture. It lacks the human, the humanistic element. This ancient of days and of wisdom, musing there at the edge of the everlasting sea, wrapped up in the All, conning the beginning and end of things--the picture evokes a twilit, prehuman, uncanny world of feeling, a world of incantations and runes. What he is pondering, the norns whisper thee by night. He was like, says the shaken beholder, an ancient stone come alive: note that, a stone, not anything that civilization has produced, not man made in the likeness of God, not a human being like Goethe. Goethe’s humanistic divineness is clearly something quite different from the primeval, pagan formlessness of Tolstoy’s, which makes Gorky say of him: “He is the devil.” And still, at the very bottom, the common factor persists: in Goethe too there is the elemental, the sinister, the dark, neutral, negation- and confusion-loving devil.

There is a saying of his, arbitrary enough, yet with an accent of hidden suffering, that opens to us more of his inner self than many a clear and wise and ordered utterance. “If I am to listen to the opinion of others,” he said (and only listen to it, observe, not accept it), “then it must be positively expressed. Problems I have enough in myself.” That is a confession, put in the form of a demand. It has a proud, Olympian accent, but the voice that utters it quivers with impatience, with painful irritation at the inner complications, which makes it so imperative that the positive should come from without.... “Out of one of his eyes looks an angel,” writes someone who made his acquaintance on a journey, “out of the other a devil; and his speech is deep irony on the score of all human affairs.” Of all? That is great, but it is not generous--and, after all, is he not a man himself? One who often saw him says: “Today he was altogether in that mood of bitter humour and sophistical contradictiousness he is so prone to display.” Again we have the negation, the spirit of contradiction and malice, of which gentle young Sulpice Boisserée has such a story to tell in his diary. “At eleven o’clock I am with Goethe again. The invective continues.” He has a go at all sorts of things: politics, æsthetics, society, religion, Germany, France, philhellenism, parties, and so on, in such a style that poor young Boisserée feels--“_mit allen diesen moquanten Reden_”--as though he were “at a witches’ sabbath.” That is saying a good deal. It is either too strong, considering the word “_moquant_” which he uses, or else that word is a good deal too weak--which is more likely. Anyhow the entry, from the year 1826, shows the confusion to which the petulant old man could reduce simple and humble-minded people. An observer who must have been no fool wrote something about him which stirs a secret horror that is somehow paralysing. “He is tolerant, without being mild.” Just consider what that means. Toleration, indulgence, is always, in our human experience, associated with mildness, with benevolent feeling toward man and the universe; so far as I know, it is a product of love. But tolerance _without_ love, _harsh_ tolerance--what would that be? It is more than human, it is icy neutrality, it is either something godlike or something devilish.

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I shall be saying nothing new, but it may serve to bring order and clarity into our thoughts to keep the fact before us: all national character belongs to the natural sphere, and all tendency toward the cosmopolitan to the spiritual. The word “ethnic” brings together two conceptions which we do not ordinarily connect, paganism and nationalism; thus by implication, and conversely, every super-national and humane point of view is classified in our mind as Christian in spirit.

Goethe’s alleged devotion to paganism (in the _Wanderjahre_ he reckons Judaism among the ethnic and heathen folk-religions) would lead us accordingly to expect of him an outlook basically anti-humanistic and folk-national. That we should be entirely wrong in this expectation, as a basic constitution in him, as “nature,” might be arguable. However, so far as he was himself aware, he was consciously a humanist and a citizen of the world. Despite all his nature Olympian and divine, he was in a high degree Christian in spirit. Nietzsche placed Goethe, historically and psychologically speaking, between Hellenism and pietism; and thus expressed the combination of creative and critical, simple and “sentimental,” ancient and modern, in Goethe’s character. For Goethe’s “pietism” is of course nothing else than his modernity. Many centuries of Christian cultivation of the subjective--a whole century of pietistic, introspective, autobiographical discipline--were needed to make possible a work like _Werther_. Which is as much as to say that in the impulse to autobiography Christian and democratic elements are mingled with that naïve, spoilt-darling claim on the world’s affections of which we spoke above. They are the same as that democratic tendency out of which Tolstoy likes to consider his confessions as emanating; when, in true Rousseauian fashion, he resolves “to write a history of his life, utterly and entirely true to fact,” in the belief that this “will be more useful to mankind” than those previous twelve volumes full of literary twaddle. He seems unaware that they are quite as autobiographical, quite as ethical in character, as anything could be, and disowns them as pagan and artistic, as self-indulgent and “irresponsible.”

Goethe, with all his aversion to the “Cross,” did often and expressly acknowledge his reverence for the Christian idea. It is as significant as it is surprising to come upon the idea of the sanctity of suffering in the Pedagogic Province; and if Goethe saw in the Church “elements of weakness and instability” and in its precepts “_gar viel Dummes_,” still he bore witness that “there is in the Gospels an effective resplendence and majesty, issuing from the person of Christ, of a character in which only the divine appear upon this earth.” “The human spirit,” he says, with sympathetic and openly acknowledged fellowship, “will never rise higher than the majesty and moral elevation of Christianity, as it radiates from the Gospels.” But Goethe’s Christianity manifests itself in the admirable attitude, as of a pupil to a master, which he had toward Spinoza, whom he called “_theissimus_” and of whom he said that nobody had spoken of the Divinity so like the Saviour as he. If, indeed, the dualistic separation of God and nature is the fundamental principle of Christianity, then Spinoza was a pagan, and Goethe was too. But God and nature are not all the world: there is the human, the humane, as well; and Spinoza’s conception of humanity is Christian, in so far as he defines the phenomenon man as the becoming-_conscious_ of the God-nature in the human being, as a bursting forth out of mere dull being and living; accordingly, as liberation from nature, and so as _spirit_. Again, there is absolutely nothing pagan about that famous _Mastery of the Passions by their Analysis_; and just as little in the Spinozan motif of renunciation (“_Entsagung_”), which becomes the general motif of Goethe’s life and work, like the idea of freedom for Schiller and the idea of redemption for Wagner.

On the contrary, it was just this pathos of renunciation, which cast such a Christian shade upon the pagan, aristocratic, child-of-nature well-being of Goethe’s life and lent his spirited features an expressly Gothic trait of suffering not to be overlooked save by the gross popular belief in his aristocratic good fortune. How much resignation must have darkened the end of this apparently consummate and favoured existence! His life-work, though almost superhuman, remained entirely a fragment--it is putting it mildly to say that “not all the dreams of blossoms ripened”--Wagner’s performance, for instance, or Ibsen’s, is incomparably more a rounded and effective whole. One may put it that Goethe’s spirit was far more powerful than his nature, greater than his power to give it form or than his organically allotted span; and it is easy to understand that vehement demand of his for immortality, which is one of the magnificent, dæmonic expressions of his personality: Nature, he cried, was bound to give him a new body when the one he had could no longer sustain his spirit.

Consider even his love-life, which likewise the popular mind tends to think of as sunlit and blissful, divinely favoured and without a cross. Certainly he was much loved and rich in love; certainly to him much enjoyment was given. In the realm of the erotic he had his spells of coarseness, when he behaved a little like a garden god: when, ingenuous and unsentimental as the antique world, he would enjoy without stint and indulge without a qualm. His marriage, a misalliance, socially and intellectually, was a result of this attitude of mind. But where he loved so that lofty poesy was the result, and not merely a Venetian epigram ticked out in hexameters on a maiden’s back; where it was serious, the romance regularly ended in renunciation. He never actually possessed Lotte or Friederike, nor Lilli, nor the Herzlieb, nor Marianne, nor even Ulrike--and not even Frau von Stein. He never loved unrequited--unless in the immensely painful, absurdly agitating affair with little Levetzof. Yet in all these cases resignation was the order of the day: either on moral grounds, or for the sake of his freedom. Mostly he bolted.

But the renunciation I mean was a deeper and higher thing. In his stature, his lineaments, his proportions as he stands today in the eyes of the nation, he is what he is as the work of renunciation. I am not speaking generally, I do not refer to the sense of sacrifice which is the meaning of all art; nor to the struggle with chaos, the surrender of freedom, the creative constraint which is its inner essence. Goethe’s pathos of renunciation--or, since we are speaking of permanent forces dominating the whole of existence, his ethos of renunciation--is of a more personal kind. It is his destiny, it is the instinctive mandate of his especially national gift, which was essentially civilizing in its mission. Or, rather, might this destiny and mission, this bond, this conditioning limitation and pedagogic duty of renunciation, be after all something less personal to him than it just now appeared? Might it perhaps be the law of his destiny, innate and inviolable save at the expense of heavy spiritual penalties; the imperative which is the essence of the German spirit, destined always, as it is, somehow and in some degree, to feel itself called to a cultural task?--I spoke of the consciousness of a community of feeling, which Goethe must, at moments, have felt with Christianity. What did it consist in, and to what had it reference? Goethe pays homage to the “moral culture” of Christianity--that is, to its humanity, its civilizing, anti-barbarian influence. It was the same as his; and the occasional homage he paid it undoubtedly springs from his recognition that the mission of Christianity within the confines of the Germanic peoples bore a likeness to his own. And here, in the fact that he conceived his task, his duty to his nation, as essentially a civilizing mission, lies the deepest and the most German significance of his renunciation. Does anyone doubt that there were in Goethe possibilities of a greatness and growth, wilder, ranker, more disruptive, more “natural,” than those which his instinct for self-conquest allowed him to develop, and which today give our mental picture of him so highly pedagogic a cast? In his _Iphigenia_ the idea of humanity, as opposed to barbarism, wears the impress of civilization--not in the polemical and even political sense in which we use the word today, but in the sense of moral culture. It was a Frenchman, Maurice Barrès, who pointed out that the _Iphigenia_ is a “civilizing work,” in that it “stands for the rights of society against the arrogance of intellect.” The phrase fits almost better that other monument of self-discipline and self-correction, yes, almost of self-mortification, which has been a target for ridicule on account of its affected atmosphere of courts and culture: I mean the _Tasso_. Both are works of resignation, of German and schoolmasterish renunciation of all the advantages of barbarism. Wagner, on the other hand, the voluptuary, did not renounce them; he yielded to them all, with huge effectiveness; and his punishment is that the acclaim accorded to his riotously national art grows daily cruder and more popular.

My subject is still the aspiration of the children of nature toward spirit; which is just as sentimental in kind as is the converse striving of the sons of the spirit toward nature, and may function with varying degrees of aptitude or success, with more or less naïveté or subtlety. Compared with Goethe’s majestic work of spiritualization, I cannot find that Tolstoy’s struggles to throw off nature’s yoke were crowned with great success. But I am whimsical enough to relish putting my finger on the mighty kernel of racial loyalty which dwelt at the heart of the Christianity of the one and the humanity of the other. And that kernel was, of course, in other words, their aristocratic integrity; for racial loyalty is aristocratic by nature, while Christianity, humanity, and civilization all represent the conflicting principle of the spirit of democracy, and the process of spiritualization is at the same time one of democratization. What Tolstoy aptly calls his “democratic trend”--aptly, because the word “trend” implies a will and a direction somewhither, indicating an effort and not mere being--finds emphatic expression now and again in Goethe as well. “One would have,” he says, “to become _Catholic_ at once, in order to have a share in the lives of humanity!” To mingle with humanity, on equal terms, to lead the life of the people, and in the market-place, seems at such moments happiness to him. “In these small sovereign states,” he cries, “what wretched, isolated men we are!” And he praises Venice as a monument to the power, not of a single despot, but of a whole people. But such phrases, clearly, are meant more correctively than absolutely; they are self-critical comments, meant to redress the balance of his German and Protestant aristocratism--“tendencies,” then, sentimental leanings, of the same kind as the radical and pacifistic bent of the Russian giant, in whose “holiness” a penetrating eye can see so much self-deception, childishness, and “let’s pretend.”

A close observer like Gorky, or a shrewd critic like Merezhkovsky, felt at once and keenly the patriarchal and sensual quality, the life-bound animalism, which lay beneath the sanctification. Tolstoy married at thirty-four the eighteen-year-old Sophia Alexandrovna Behrs, who from then on was scarcely ever anything but “expectant,” and was confined thirteen times. Through long, creative years, his marriage was an idyll of family life, full of healthy, god-fearing animal pleasure, against a lavish economic background of agriculture and cattle-breeding. The atmosphere was Judaic Old Testament rather than Christian. Tolstoy knows the same great simple love of existence, the everlasting childlike joy of life, that possessed Goethe’s soul. When he “praises each day for its beauty,” when he “marvels at the richness of God’s kingdom” expressing itself therein, how “each day He sends some new thing to distinguish it,” we feel a better understanding of what lay at the bottom of Goethe’s conception of “_Behagen_.” Waves of piercing sensuous enjoyment of nature break upon him even in the years of gloom, when he meditates suicide, plans the _Confession_--in short, conjures up that misunderstanding to which his sanctification falls prey, and dehumanizes and shrinks the majesty of the patriarch, christianizes and conventionalizes it into the Anglo-Indian model.

Merezhkovsky called him the great seer of the body, in contrast to Dostoyevsky the visionary of the soul; and truly it is the body to which his love and deepest interest belong, to which his knowledge refers, by which his genius is conditioned. We see this so clearly in his reaction to old age. In 1894 he writes: “Age is approaching. That means the hair falls out, the teeth decay, the wrinkles come, the breath gets bad. Even before the end, everything turns frightful, disgusting; sweat, rouge, powder, all sorts of beastliness. Then what has become of that which I have served? Where has beauty gone? It is the essence of everything. Without it there is nothing, no life.”--This description of dying while the body still lives, may pass for Christian, by virtue of its insistence on misery and its characterization of the flesh, revolting and insulting on the spiritual side. But the physical apprehension of old age and death is through and through pagan and sensual.

Aksakov says of Tolstoy: “His gift is _bearlike_ in kind and degree.” And is it not this “bearlike” quality of his genius that made Tolstoy “the great writer of Russia,” the author of _War and Peace_, the epic poet of the people’s struggle against Rome, against Napoleon? I openly declare my deliberate intention to cast doubt on the pacifism which the prophet of humanity so didactically professed. Not, I hasten to add, from any anti-pacifistic sentiments on my own part; merely out of a sense of humour. That Tolstoy was in his youth a soldier and an officer, we know. From his biography we learn that he was heart and soul a soldier; and we have evidence of his heroic and warlike enthusiasm in the Sebastopol days--that “splendid time,” that “glorious time,” that time of touching pride in the Russian army, when he was confessedly saturated with patriotic feeling and thrilled by his experience of comradery under arms, first felt when the serious moment is at hand. His attitude toward the Serbo-Turkish war of 1877 is still full of conviction. It is a _real_ war, he says, and it moves him. The distinction between “real” and “unreal” doubtless indicates some progress in the direction of pacifism. But is pacifism “real” so long as it is conditional and must progress in order to exist?

In 1812, at least, there _was_ a “real” war, and its history occupied Tolstoy long before he became the great writer of Russia by dint of it. He treated of it, quite in the patriotic key, in his school at Yasnaya Polyana. From all we hear, he dealt with it on a mythical rather than a historical basis; but he expressly declared that he presented his pupils with these legends of a warlike mythology in order to rouse their patriotic feeling. And then the root-and-branch Russianism, the fundamental folk-character of his peasant-patrician nature, comes out strong in his epos, whose theme is a defensive war waged against the invasion of Latin civilization. _War and Peace_ had a huge popular success, though the critics and military men had some fault to find. _On the intellectual side it was weak_, they said; its philosophy of history was narrow and superficial; it was mysticism and sophistry to deny the influence of individuals on events. But the creative power, the “bearlike” strength of it, were unanimously declared to be beyond all discussion, as well as its enormous genuineness as a folk-epic. The liberal criticism of Russia admitted that it was “Russian to the core,” that it “presented the soul of the Russian people, in its whole range and variety, in all its lofty simplicity, with a sheer creative power that had never been equalled.” But the critics took in bad part Tolstoy’s “wilful remoteness from all contemporary _currents of progress_”--a phenomenon and a reproach which were to recur with the appearance of _Anna Karenine_. “_Anna Karenine_ I don’t like,” Turgeniev wrote, “though there are splendid things in it: the race, the mowing, the hunt. But the whole thing is soured; it _smells of Moscow_, and old maids and incense and Slavophils and high life and all that.” In a word, Turgeniev, the _Sapadnik_, rejected with horror the oriental element in the novel, and with him went the whole liberal-radical party; some ignored _Anna Karenine_, others sneered or called names, while the Slavophils and the aristocrats and court party rubbed their hands in glee. In fact Tolstoy, in an intellectual and political sense, had the reactionaries on his side; and they could have little appreciation of the artistic qualities of his work. The liberals were liberal enough to know how to value these, and they did so, albeit in that state of bewilderment into which people always fall at the sight of genius in the camp of reaction. Witness the bewilderment of Europe over Bismarck.

The paradox is worth a little attention. Our idealists would have us believe that genius, the creative power, must, as a living force, act only in the service of progress and human purpose, and be justly denied to the forces which side against life, show sympathy with death, and are inimical to freedom and progress and thus bad in the human sense. We would almost accept it as metaphysical evidence for the goodness of a thing if a capital piece of writing were done in its name. And really, it does seem that, as a rule, the reactionary camp suffers from lack of talent. But not invariably. The reactionary genius does occur, the brilliant and conquering ability does act as attorney for retrograde tendencies--and nothing dazes the world more than the sight of this paradoxical phenomenon. Sainte-Beuve said of Joseph de Maistre that he had “nothing of a writer but the gift”--a comment which perfectly expresses this bewilderment and precisely indicates the thing I mean.

Liberal and progressive Russia must have seen in Tolstoy just this--a case of a great gift in the service of reaction. But it is clear enough that this great gift is of one essence with his fundamental Russianism, his immense integration with the people, his pagan and natural aristocracy; and that the tendency toward democratic spiritualization was--just tendency, romantic in its nature and crowned, after all, by such strikingly indifferent success! His tremendous orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery at and denial of European progress; and this it was which must necessarily and profoundly alienate all the westernizing and liberalizing, all the “Petrinic” elements in Russia. Actually, he quite frankly scouted the western belief in progress, which, he said, had been accepted by the Russia of Peter the Great. They had, he said, observed the operation of the law of progress in the Duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three thousand inhabitants. But then came China, with its two hundred million inhabitants, and knocked the theory of progress into a cocked hat. Which did not for one moment prevent them from believing in progress as a general law of mankind; they took the field with cannons and guns to instruct the Chinese in their thesis. Yet ordinary human understanding tells us that if the history of the larger part of mankind, which we call the Orient, does not confirm the law of progress, then this law does not obtain for the whole of mankind, but forms at most an article of faith for a certain part of it. Tolstoy vows that he himself is unable to find a universal law in the life of mankind, and that history might be co-ordinated just as well in the light of any other idea or “historical whimsy” as in that of progress. And more than that, he does not see the slightest necessity of finding laws for history--quite apart from the impossibility of the thing. The universal, eternal law of perfection, he says, stands written in the soul of every human being; it is only an error to carry it over into the field of history. So long as it remains personal, this law is fruitful and accessible to all; applied to historical conceptions, it is idle talk. The general progress of mankind is an unproved thesis. It does not exist for any of the nations of the east; hence it is just as unfounded to assert that progress is a primary law of mankind as it would be to say that blondness is--all people being blond save those with dark hair.

It is remarkable to see how ideas from the sphere of an idealistic individualism, which is German, and places human perfection within the individual soul, are here found in the company of others which constitute the most decisive challenge to an arrogant Europe setting itself up as intellectual arbiter of the world. Tolstoy protests against what he considers the childishness of this attitude, which confuses western Europe with humanity as a whole; and the protest betrays that his gaze is directed eastward. It betrays, in a word, his Asiatic bias: anti-“Petrinic,” primitive Russian, anti-civilization--in short, _bearlike_. What we hear is the voice of the Russian god on the maple throne under the golden lime-tree.

The voice of our humanistic deity has a different ring. Goethe, beyond a doubt, hated and scorned Asia. The element of Sarmatian wildness in which Tolstoy found himself so much at home and which merely gets rationalized in his late prophetic period, would always remain remote and foreign to the spirit of the great German, with its exclusively cultural bias. A journey Goethe once made into Upper Silesian Poland was the occasion of what contact he had with the Slav. His impressions are “mostly remarkable negatively.” He observes ignorance, lack of culture, low standards of living, stupidity. He feels himself “remote from cultured men.” His attitude at the time of the War of Liberation, offensive as it was to patriotic feeling, the admiring and personally friendly respect he felt for the classic phenomenon of Napoleon (“the man is too big for you”) belong in this same category. “It is true,” he says in 1813, “I no longer see French and Italians, but in their stead I see Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Kashubes, brown and other hussars.” This enumeration of eastern races has an extraordinarily contemptuous ring. That the Cossacks and Kashubes were in the country as allies and the French as enemies seems not to matter to him. He confesses, indeed, that he too is glad to be rid of the Gallic _soldatesca_; yet he is obviously not far from finding more humiliation in the alliance with Russia and the dependence of Germany upon the east than in her subjugation upon the west; and certain it is that the humanism of the writer who created the _Iphigenia_ has more affiliation with the humanity of western Europe, which has given the mould to our civilization, than with the soft and savage human nature of Half-Asia.

Unpatriotically he declared that he could not hate the French--he owed them far too much of his culture. The words are only right and proper. But (just as in Tolstoy’s case) the fun begins directly it is a question of his nature, of that pre-intellectual fundamental constitution we were talking about, which had its own ways of finding expression, and which is so extraordinarily un-French that it might well be described as pre-eminently German. It would be wrong to bring in evidence here his coldness towards “freedom.” For in the first place the principle of order (_ordre_) is something just as French and classic and rationalist as the principle of freedom, which on party grounds is set over against it. And in the second, there is nothing un-German about freedom. We know with what éclat Goethe cited Guizot’s dictum that Germany gave the idea of personal freedom to the world. But there is in Goethe something that rebels against the idea, against the doctrinaire and theoretic; a lack of faith that the particular, existing under definite conditions, could ever be improved by the method of abstraction; a realism, that is, and a scepticism, in matters political, which one may as well call un-French as particularly German--taking France as the country of revolution and Germany as the country of a certain national weakness for the living, historically conditioned, “organic.” We must remember that he was a practical politician, he had governed Saxe-Weimar. But the practical sphere is not kind to the soul; it is a training in cynicism, as many a politician has found out, even in France, where more than one radical has become a conservative and turned the guns on the people after he came to power. Perhaps Goethe might have been more generous-minded, politically speaking, if he had not lost his idealism in the practical field. But this too is unlikely, since from the very beginning he was insensitive to historical democracy, to history defined as the evolution of the idea in the masses; he was fundamentally unacquainted with enthusiasm for political ideas, and in general conceived of history as the biography of great men--an aristocratism which is as different from Schiller’s high-flung democratic gesture as it is from the Christian-moujik disparagement of heroes in _War and Peace_.

It would be foolish to think of him as servile, despite the anecdote about Beethoven and the imperial company on the promenade at Karlsbad. His subservience to princes was purely mundane in its character, wherever no personal friendship came in play. When in 1794 Freiherr von Gagern published his challenge to the intelligence of Germany, and to Goethe in particular, to put its pen at the service of the “good,” that is to say, the conservative cause--no other than that of a new alliance of German princes for the purpose of saving the country from anarchy--Goethe, after thanking him politely for the confidence reposed in him, made the characteristic reply that he considered it impossible for princes and writers to unite upon a common task. Notwithstanding which, we need waste no words over his strictly negative attitude toward the French Revolution.

On the intellectual side, his view of humanity was a cynical one--that is to say, it was radically sceptical. But we know that this was on the intellectual side alone, from the fact that it did not prevent him from loving his fellow-men. We have his confession that the mere sight of the human countenance could cure him of the blues. What he did not believe in was drawing up articles and holding love-feasts. We shall never know whether Hegel was mocking or spoke in honest enthusiasm when he said: “As long as the sun has stood in the firmament and the planets circled round it, it has never been seen that a human being stands on his head--i.e., on his understanding--and bases reality upon it.” Whether jest or earnest, it was this that revolted Goethe. He judged it to be entirely against nature to try to insist that the whole of mankind find just one choice of means, just one route toward civic happiness. Upon which I may comment as follows: that, in the first place, one such utterance, by virtue of its strongly nationalist, individualist, aristocratic emphasis, outweighs the whole burden of his indifference toward the War of Liberation, and that surely he who uttered it was only prevented by his admiration for the genius of Napoleon--likewise aristocratic in its origin--from seeing in the _Imperator_ the standard-bearer of precisely this democratic “insistency.” But, in the second place, we must admit that he had a right to set up as an advocate of nature. To quote again:

_Franztum drängt in unsern verworrenen Tagen, wie einstmals
Luthertum es getan, ruhige Bildung zurück._

(Driven by the spirit of France in our troublous days, as aforetime
By the spirit of Luther oppressed, quiet culture retreats.)

What a telling synthesis this, of France and Luther; how unprejudiced by national feeling! It is all one to him whether the unrest, the distraction, come from this side or that of the Rhine. No matter whence it comes, it is his enemy, the enemy of nature and culture, of the _ruhige Bildung_ which is at the bottom of his idea of humanity. The distich shows clearly--shows it despite all _Lust am Protestieren_--where he would have stood, say, in the sixteenth century. In the name of that lofty conception of _Bildung_, in which nature and culture unite, he would have been for Rome against the Reformation--or else he would have taken up an ambiguous and irresponsible position, as Erasmus did, of whom Luther said that repose was dearer to him than the Cross. “The Cross”--a couple of centuries later, that was the Revolution. Revolution was the spirit--and to Goethe his _ruhige Bildung_ was dearer.

Here, for a moment, Erasmus and Goethe meet, in an atmosphere of patrician quietism, humanistic love of peace. But the parallel does not long hold--there is too much difference in the scale, and, after all, men’s character, the essence of their being, is greatly affected by their proportions. Tolstoy’s “folkishness,” for instance--is it not the expression and apanage of his bearlike bulk? Are they not one and the same thing? And may we not draw from Goethe’s greatness the _a priori_ conclusion that his humanistic cosmopolitanism must contain a good-sized racial core? Erasmus, the subtle, was not “folkish.” It was Luther who was that. And truly, in scale, in essence, as an embodiment of Germanic greatness, Goethe belongs more with Luther than with the humanists--yes, more even with Bismarck, to whom he is much closer than a certain antithesis, beloved abroad, would seem to show.

Dangerous, perhaps, to say so--as giving aid and comfort to the cave-bears of nationalism the world over--but sometimes it is hard not to feel sceptical about the genuineness and validity of Goethe’s humanism. A godlike man, like Tolstoy. But is it possible that the antique, humanistic, Jovelike attributes of his godhead were more a convention than we think; that they did not go very deep, and that he himself, all the time, like Tolstoy, the Russian god under the golden lime-tree, was an ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic and aristocratic paganism which claims both Luther and Bismarck as its sons, and which, on both sides, played a rôle in the ideology of the late war?

An open hostility, against Goethe as well as against Bismarck, is at work in certain literary, humane, and radical circles, a demand for his dethronement. It cannot be without all sense or justification. Goethe, as a follower of Spinoza, conceived of all natural final causes and purposes as anthropomorphic fictions; thus he was disinclined to an anthropocentric, emancipatory conception of humanity, which teleologically refers everything to itself and looks upon art as a servant of mankind. His synthesis of art and nature is not humanitarian. An approach by the route of the senses is natural to him: it makes him see the burning of a peasant house as real and appealing to his sympathies, whereas “the Fall of the Fatherland” he would find an empty phrase. All which, frankly and flippantly spoken, is never very far removed from the brute.

There is in him a feeling for power, for the struggle “until one proves stronger than the other”; in such sentiments the pacifism of spirit would find it impossible to rejoice. It “makes him sad to be friends with everybody.” He “needs anger.” Certainly, that is not Christian love of peace--though Lutheran it may be, and Bismarckian to boot. One might say much--and much has been said--in evidence of his love of strife, his fondness for “pitching in and punishing,” his readiness to close the mouth of opposed opinions by a show of power and to “remove such people from society.” But best of all I love--if here too only because it is so amusing--the tale of Kotzebue and the Schiller celebration which Kotzebue got up with the sole and single purpose of annoying Goethe and playing Schiller off against him. That low-minded Kotzebue! He _knows_ that the plan will annoy the old man; he also knows that Goethe can forbid the celebration by virtue of his office. So he puts the choice squarely before him: he can forbid it, and thereby betray his jealousy and despotism; or, if he hesitates to go so far, he can pocket up the annoyance. With majestic simplicity Goethe chooses to exercise his power. He _forbids the celebration_. Bismarck would have done the same.

In the soul-economy of this breed of giants are certain parallel traits. There is violence and there is sentimentality: crude words both to describe what I mean, crude and naturalistically derogatory; yet it is my humour to use them; for even if I wanted to I could not ignore the hidden irony--quite objective, quite unsuspected irony, of course--involved in their gigantic loyalties, their aristocratic servitude. They were both “faithful German servants of their Lord” (oh, my God!): the “civilian Wallenstein” and the despot of _Kultur_; they were German “_Edelknechte_” both; and there was nothing hypocritical about it all, only their giant-sensibilities functioning at full height. The similarity of the character and situation is so strong as to bewilder one: Karl August and the simple old man whom Bismarck “served” blend into one single symbolic figure. In the year 1825 he of Saxe-Weimar celebrated the fiftieth jubilee of his reign, which was at the same time the fiftieth year of Goethe’s residence in Weimar. On this day Goethe calls himself “his master’s most enraptured servant.” He is the first with his congratulations, at six o’clock at the Roman villa in the park. The emotion is great and genuine. “Together to our latest breath!” We see the venerable Wilhelm going to meet Bismarck on the landing with just such another embrace; while a fugitive red mounts in the cheeks of Roderich von Posa, who turns away with the words: “I cannot be a courtier!”

I confessed in the beginning my tendency to make a matter of intrinsic value out of the matter of size. The greatest German poet must also be the most German one--that is an association more immediate and inevitable than even the causal, it is temporal, it is simply the future tense. And it was sanctioned by a source which will be universally accepted as authoritative. It was Father Jahn, who, _motu proprio_, in the year 1810 declared that Goethe was the most German of poets--quite unperturbed by the fact that Goethe behaved at all times as distantly and unsympathetically toward _deutsche Bruderschaften_ as Tolstoy toward Slavic. And then, in 1813, when he had very nearly succeeded in bringing himself into bad odour as a man without a country, Barnhagen von Ense cried out: “Goethe not a patriotic German? All the freedom of Germania early found a home in his breast, there to become, to our never-sufficiently-to-be-acknowledged advantage, the pattern, the example, and the root of our culture. In the shade of this tree we all live and move. Never did roots thrust firmer and deeper into the soul of our Fatherland, never did shoots more lustily suck strength from its breast. That our youth feel pride in their arms, loftiness in their spirits, hath more reference to him than to many another who may lay claim to great activity therein.”

Good, fine, powerful words. They proceed from the truth that in national matters very little depends on what a man says or the opinions he holds; on what he does, on the other hand, everything. When a man has written _Götz_, _Faust_, _Wilhelm Meister_, the _Sprüche in Reimen_ and _Hermann und Dorothea_--a poem which Schlegel honoured with the epithet “_vaterländisch_”--he can indulge in a bit of cosmopolitan irresponsibility, just as the “great writer of Russia” could indulge in the rationalizing Christian pacifism of his latter period. The national is so much second nature that one may address oneself to the mind without running the risk of literary unrealism; and as nature Goethe always felt the national--we see it, among others, in the famous remark to Eckermann: “National hatred is a queer thing after all. You will always find it keenest and most violent _in the lowest stages of culture_. But there is a stage where it quite disappears, and one stands in a way above the nations and feels the well- or ill-being of a neighbouring people as though it were one’s own. This stage was conformable to my nature, and I had confirmed myself in it long before I reached my sixtieth year.”

Spiritual regeneration. This summons to achieve the spirit is the sentimental imperative of the favourites of nature; just as that of the sons of spirit is the summons to achieve the form. And they respond to it--with more or less of aptitude. Tolstoy’s self-imposed task of shaking off the natural man was but spiritualizing the savage; yet a touching and honourable sight, even alongside of Goethe’s majestic culture. The main thing is that nothing should come too easy. Effortless nature--that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root--or substance. A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually yearn toward each other--that is man.

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