Great Russia/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
TOLSTOY THE BYZANTINE
I
THERE are a hundred and forty million peasants settled on the outskirts of Continental Europe, and rapidly taking possession of the Asiatic plain. It seems, in the fitness of things, that Russian expansion should move Eastwards, for it seems almost impossible to consider the Russian as belonging to the West. We are loth to admit him to the franchise of European civilization. "Scratch a Russian moujik" we are told, "and you find the Tartar." Let him, therefore, go back to Tartary, the cradle of his race.
The time-honoured saying about the Russian Tartar is only a sorry joke. For if it means that the Russian peasant, being engaged in a perpetual struggle with the hostile forces of Nature, with drought and cold, with hunger and plague, is nearer to elemental human nature, then it is only a commonplace and a misleading one. For elemental human nature is not Tartar, and the stoical and heroic struggle with Nature is more characteristic of the West than of the East. If, on the other hand, the saying means that the Russian peasant is at heart a Tartar and a heathen, that his Christianity is only skin-deep, then it entirely misrepresents his character. As a matter of fact, the Russian moujik moves and lives and has his bearing in Christianity.
To anyone who, like the writer of these lines, has lived with Russian pilgrims at Kiev or Jerusalem, it would almost seem as if Russia and Siberia were the only Christian countries left in the world. In Tolstoy's marvellous and gruesome drama, "The Powers of Darkness," Christianity is the one light which illumines the moujik sunk in vice and degradation. On the other hand, if popular Christianity remains the great civilizing force, it is almost equally true to say that official Christianity has itself become "a power of darkness." And it is one of the most difficult tasks for the student of modern Russia to dissociate popular Christianity from official Christianity. In Russia religion and humanity are to-day working at cross-purposes. The intellectual minority who believe in reform do not believe in Christianity. The masses who believe in Christianity do not believe in reform, and their religion is being exploited in the interests of a corrupt bureaucracy and of an effete Church.
II
There lies, to my mind, the deep-seated cause of the ghastly failure of the abortive Revolution of 1905. When, eight years ago, Russia from the Baltic to the Pacific was convulsed by Civil War, publicists confidently foretold the imminent downfall of Tsardom and the triumph of liberty. I had not been a month in Russia when I as confidently predicted that absolutely nothing would happen, and that reaction would emerge from the crisis more powerful than ever. I realized that an absolute divorce existed between the people and its supposed leaders. I realized that a band of agnostic doctrinaires would never move a profoundly religious people. But whilst realizing the helplessness of the present outlook, I felt equally hopeful for the future. I felt that the day would soon come when the tremendous spiritual forces latent in the people would be released, when those inarticulate millions would find their own spokesmen and leaders. Then would dawn the day of the Great Russian Revolution, compared with which even the French Revolution would have been only a minor episode.
III
If it is entirely misleading to say that "to scratch a Russian peasant is to find the Tartar," it is entirely true to say "that if you scratch the Russian nobleman you find the Byzantine." And if it is pretty easy to understand the moujik, even though you may never have seen a single exemplar of the type, it is extremely difficult to understand a Russian Intellectual, even though you may have met him in every corner of Europe, either as a rich absentee or as a poor refugee.
When, seven hundred years ago, the Crusaders first came into touch with the Greek Empire, they were bewildered by the mental complexity and perversity of the rulers and of the people of Byzantium. And the Byzantine soon became a byword for duplicity and perfidious subtlety. There is a great deal of the Byzantine about the educated Russian. Like the mediæval Greek, he is elusive and evasive. He is a bundle of contradictions. You never know how to get hold of his real opinion, and even when he has a real opinion, it is impossible to get him to carry it into practice. With him it is the unexpected that always happens. He may be at the same time a Reactionary and a Progressive, a Mystic and an Agnostic, an Imperialist and a Pacifist, a Liberal and an Antisemite.
To wander through the Russian Empire is not only to move through vast distances of space from the ice-bound plain in the North to the vine-clad mills in the South, it is also to wander through æons of time, it is to travel down the ages through every stage of human advance. Visit a Moscow drawing-room, and you will listen to the most progressive thought of the twentieth century, where even the English Radicals are discredited as old-fashioned. You go to the neighbouring provincial town, and you are transported back to the eighteenth century. You move to one of the cities of innumerable shrines and pilgrimages and convents, to Kieff or Kazan, and you seem to be carried back to the Middle Ages. You take a voyage down the Volga, or you ascend the mountain ranges of the Caucasus, and you leave civilization behind.
IV
There lies the explanation of the bewildering complexity of the Russian mind. The Russian has a multiple personality, because he lives and moves in contradictory worlds. The Russian Intellectual lives in the Utopian future, while his parents and sisters still live in the days of serfdom. He has assimilated the doctrines of Marx and of Nietzsche, while his rulers are still carrying on the traditions of Peter the Great and the police are still applying the methods of Ivan the Terrible. And the Russian Intellectual must needs adapt himself, unless he is prepared to leave the country or to go to prison or to commit suicide. And having thus from childhood learned to adapt himself, he develops a pliability, a suppleness, and subtlety which are becoming the main characteristics of his type.
That versatility and power of adaptation gives us the secret both of the moral weakness and of the intellectual quality of Russian culture.
On the one hand it is obvious that this versatility must be injurious to moral character. The co-existence of contradictory ideals must produce indecision of purpose. The contradiction between theory and practice, whilst it is perfectly compatable with sincerity, must be destructive of will-power, and must be fatal to political advance.
On the other hand, it is equally obvious that the extraordinary variety of intellectual and political experiences which any educated Russian has to go through must produce a breadth of sympathy, a range of intellectual vision, a tolerant understanding, a receptivity for ideas which are the charm of the best Russian Society.
Some years ago a Russian prince sent me for approval a religious tract which proved to be a masterpiece of mystic lore. The writer had been living in a circle of English Puritans and pietists. Shortly after I made his acquaintance in England his nomadic instinct took him to Paris. A few months after he had settled in Paris he sent me a literary composition of a very different nature from the first, a Parisian love story, which in its bold cynicism and perverse wit reminded me of the most realistic tales of Maupassant. It was a characteristically Russian incident. In an incredibly short time, and with Slav thoroughness, my friend had adapted himself to the mystic surroundings of English Puritanism, and to the licence of the City of Pleasure.
V
This seems to be a devious and circuitous way of approaching the character and work of Tolstoy, but I am sure it is the only way to reach a deeper understanding of his personality and of his Art. Most critics approach the Russian giant in complete ignorance of the mental and spiritual atmosphere and climate in which his genius developed. They study his character under the strange impression that the preacher of the simple life was himself a simple man.
As a matter of fact, Tolstoy never was a simple man. Indeed, I do not know in the whole range of European literature a personality more uncannily complex and perplexing. Two years ago, Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a brief and striking estimate of Tolstoy for the Fabian News, and it was amusing to observe how the great English master of paradox was simply bewildered by the paradox of Tolstoy's personality.
Tolstoy's biography illustrates better than any other the distracting contrasts of the typical Russian nobleman and Intellectual. He saw from the inside every phase of Russian life. He lived in the soldiers' camp and in the Courts of Royalty, in the drawing-rooms of fashion and in the haunts of Bohemia. He lived the savage life in the Caucasus, and the patriarchal life at Yasnaya Polyana. A man of uncontrollable passions, he committed every sin that it was fashionable for a man of his caste to commit. He gambled away his ancestral home, he joined the rebels of his fellow-officers, and wasted his substance in the company of gipsy girls. Yet from an early age he aspired to sanctity. Although professionally a soldier, he early became an apostle of peace. A literary lion in the circles of Moscow, he became the exponent of the simple life. An aristocrat to his finger-tips, he preached the gospel of democracy. A big landowner, he ended by being an advocate of the ideas of Henry George. A Christian ascetic and a woman-hater, yet his wife bore him sixteen children.
VI
Even as Tolstoy's surroundings provide the key to his life and character, they give us an explanation of his art. The one supreme and original contribution of the Russian mind to world literature is its power of psychological analysis, its broad humanity, its manysidedness, its understanding of every type of human character. Those qualities strike us equally in Gogol's "Dead Souls," in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," in Turgenev's "Sportsmen Sketches." And those qualities reach their maturity and perfection in Tolstoy's art.
His power of sympathy is unlimited. He understands the sinner, because he has been a sinner. He understands the saint, because he has aspired to be a saint. He understands the savage and the tramp and the peasant, because he has lived with savages and tramps and peasants. He is a stern moralist, yet his tolerance and charity are infinite. He holds strong views on every problem of life and death, and he expresses those views in stirring pamphlets. But when he writes his stories and delineates his characters, the teacher and preacher vanish. The artist remains. He describes the rake and the drunkard with as much sympathy as the good man. Nay, he describes them more sympathetically, for in "Anna Karenina" the profligate Oblonski and Anna the adulteress and the drunken brother are more appealing than Levine or Karenine. Anna may break hearts around her, but she continues to cast a spell over the reader, even as she fascinates her victims.
There exists a mysterious Indian poison, the curare, once dear to the vivisectionist, and which possesses the terrible power of dissociating the sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The scientist who curarises a dog can torture him with impunity, for the dog feels the pain but cannot stir a muscle to express his sensations. I often think of this weird poison and of the methods of the physiologist when I read the novels of Tolstoy, and when I observe this complete severance and dissociation of the artist and the moralist. I think of him as the anatomist of the soul, who, unlike the professor of anatomy of Rembrandt, is dissecting living bodies and bleeding hearts, whilst all the time he himself remains unmoved, serene, partial, and absorbed in his creations.
It is by virtue of that artistic detachment, that absolute truthfulness and sincerity, as well as by virtue of this power of universal sympathy, it is as the supreme anatomist of the soul, that Tolstoy occupies his unique position in world literature. It is those qualities which place "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" above any novels that have ever been written.