Thanks to the Count Melchoir de Vogüé, who introduced Tolstoy to the French in Le Roman Russe (containing studies of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenieff, Dosto?evsky) literary Paris was for a time saturated in Russian mysticism, and what the clear-headed Alphonse Daudet called "Russian pity." It was Count de Vogüé, member of the Academy and Neo-Catholic (as the group headed by Ernest Lavisse elected to style itself), who compressed all Tolstoy in an epigram as having ("the mind of an English chemist in the soul of a Hindoo Buddhist") On dirait l\'esprit d\'un chimiste anglais dans l\'ame d\'un buddhiste hindou.
The modulation of a soul, at first stagnant, then plunged into the gulf of hopelessness, and at last catching a glimpse of light, is most clearly expressed by Leo Nikolaievitch in his Resurrection. That by throwing yourself again into the mire you may atone for early transgressions—the muddy sins of your youth—is one of those deadly ideas born in the crazed brain of an East Indian jungle-haunting fanatic. It possibly grew out of the barbarous custom of blood sacrifices. Waiving the tales told of [Pg 69] his insincerity by Frau Anna Seuron, we know that Tolstoy wrestled with the five thousand devils of doubt and despair, and found light, his light, in a most peculiar fashion. But he is often the victim of his own illusions. That, Vogüé, a great admirer, pointed out some years ago. Turgenieff understood Tolstoy; so did Dosto?evsky, and so does latterly the novelist Dmitri Merejkowski.
Turgenieff\'s appeal to Tolstoy is become historic, and all the more pathetic because written on the eve of his death.
Dear and beloved Leo Nikolaievitch: I have not written to you for a long time, for I lie on my deathbed. I cannot get well; that is not to be thought of. But I write in order to tell you how glad I am to have been your contemporary, and to make my last earnest request. My friend, return to literary work. This talent of yours has come from where all else comes. Oh, how happy I should be could I believe that my entreaty would prevail with you. My friend, our great national writer, grant my request.
This may be found, if we remember aright, in the Halperine-Kaminsky memoir.
Turgenieff, who was the greater artist of the pair, knew that Tolstoy was on the wrong path with his crack-brained religious and social notions; knew that in his becoming the writer of illogical tracts and pamphlets, Russia was losing a great artist. What would he have [Pg 70] said if he had lived to read the sad recantation and artistic suicide of Tolstoy: "I consign my own artistic productions to the category of bad art, except the story, God Sees the Truth, which seeks a place in the first class, and The Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second." Also sprach Tolstoy in that madman\'s book called What is Art? a work wherein he tried to outvie Nordau\'s abuse of beautiful art.
The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, Hamlet, Macbeth, Dante, and Goethe, are all consigned to the limbo of bad art; bad because not "understanded of the people." The peasant, the moujik, is to be the criterion of art, an art which, in that case, ought to be a cross between fireworks and the sign-writing of the Aztecs. Vogüé declared that Tolstoy had, like an intrepid explorer, leaped into an abysm of philosophical contradictions. Even the moderate French critic Faguet becomes enraged at the puerilities of the Russian. He wrote: "Tolstoy, comme créateur, comme romancier, comme poète épique, pour mieux dire, est un des quatre ou cinq plus grands génies de notre siècle. Comme penseur, il est un des plus faibles esprits de l\'Europe."
Not all that, replies Remy de Gourmont; Tolstoy may be wildly mistaken, but he is never weak-minded. We think it is his strength, his intensity that sends him caracoling on a dozen different roads in search of salvation.
[Pg 71] How a man lacking the critical faculty may be misled is to be seen in What is Art? To master his subject the deluded novelist read all the essays, disquisitions, and works he could find on the theme of ?sthetics. This as a preparation for clear thinking. It reminds one of that comical artist Pellerin, in Flaubert\'s L\'Education Sentimentale, who devoured all the ?sthetic treatises, ancient and modern, in search of a true theory of the beautiful before he painted a picture; and he had so thoroughly absorbed the methods of various painters that he could not sit down at his easel in the presence of his model without asking himself: Shall I "do" her à la Gainsborough, or, better still, in the romantic and mysterious manner of M. Delacroix, with fierce sunsets, melting moons, guitars, bloodshed, balconies, and the cries of them that are assassinated for the love of love?
Tolstoy reaches, after many hundred pages of his essay, the astoundingly original theory that art "is to establish brotherly union among men," which was better said by Aristotle, and probably first heard by him as a Socratic pearl of wisdom. It remained for Merejkowski to set right the Western world in its estimate of Tolstoy as man and artist. In his frank study, the facts in the case are laid bare by a skilled, impartial hand. What he writes is well known among Russians; it may shock English-speaking worshippers, who do not accept Tolstoy as a great artist, but as the prophet of a new dispensation—and [Pg 72] it may be said, without beating about the bush, he rather liked the niche in which he was placed by these uncritical zealots.
The fate of the engineer hoist by his own petard is Tolstoy\'s. The peasants of his country understand him as little as they understand Beethoven, that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly assailed in The Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select Tristan and Isolde if he wished some fleshly music, some sensualistic caterwauling, as Huxley phrased it? But a melodious violin and piano sonata!) Tolstoy may go barefoot, dig for potatoes, wear his blouse hanging outside, but the peasantry will never accept him as one of their own. He has written volumes about "going to the people," and the people do not want him, do not comprehend him. And that is Tolstoy\'s tragedy, as it was the............