Avowals, Chapter 7

London: Privately Printed, 1 September 1919, pages 152-164, 4,176 words

Avowals is a nonlinear volume of sixteen chapters. Chapters 12 and 15 are essays in worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the GMi Kindle edition of Avowals.

CHAP. VII.

No man ever walked in the wrong road as well as Tolstoy, and that he never fell into the right one is a pity, for his step is alert and vigorous, and would have carried him into works of the highest genius. But since the quality of genius is an instinctive knowledge of the road we find ourselves being pressed towards, the paradox that Tolstoy is not a man of genius is a paradox as unreasonable as many of Tolstoy's own; he sought reason eagerly, but his search only led him into paradox, for he failed to apprehend that there are two reasons­ — man's little reason within him, and the greater reason outside of him, call it Providence, God, call it what you will, but the fact is clear to everybody that the world is not governed by our reason, and Tolstoy wished it otherwise. Another thing he could not understand: that the charm of life is in the fact it is always going by us, and this stint in his nature drove him into theory; continual, uninterrupted theory from the moment he put pen to paper, and his life must have been theory even before he began to write. Theory began to appear in his book about the Caucasus, and that was a young man's book; and theory raised its head unabashed in its first great work, War and Peace. In the first volume it begins to appear intolerable to Tolstoy that a man whose profession was war should stand before the world as a man of genius; and to destroy the Napoleonic legend was the root idea of War and Peace, rather than the exhibition of man in the enigma of his instincts. He is at pains to tell us, in the second or third volume, that Napoleon's personality counted for little or nothing, and that his wars were merely forces of nature driving men alternately eastward and westward. He would even persuade us that the Russian General who refused to follow­ up Napoleon's retreat was a man of extraordinary genius; his dilatoriness is extolled as a virtue, and he is held up to our admiration as one of the wise fools who, knowing that the hand of Providence is everywhere, is content to allow Providence to work for them. In his next book, Anna Karenina, he walks in the wrong road as well as he did in War and Peace, for it was written to prove that if a woman lives unhappily with one husband, and leaves him for the man she loves, her moral character will disintegrate; and he foresees no end for her but suicide, thereby showing that his theories do not even emerge from facts well observed and collated, but out of mere prejudices. If he had only bethought himself of consultation with a girl-child of fourteen, saying to her: tell me, my dear child, what you think. If a woman were to leave her husband whom she detests, and went to live with a man she loved, do you think she would be unhappy? The child of fourteen would answer: if the man she loved were kind to her, I suppose she would be happy with him. Or if Tolstoy had only thought of consulting the china bowl in the hall, into which visitors' cards are thrown, he would have learnt the truth, for his wife could not have been always without friends who were very unhappy in their first marriage (dissolved through the action of the Divorce Court) and happy in their second.

After writing Anna Karenina, the moral pack always on his trail began to give tongue again, and he tells us how he was forced to write a book entitled My Religion, and the book is in some ways a more interesting one than any of Tolstoy's novels, for Tolstoy was not a liar by nature, lies did not appeal to him, though he was a terrible liar, and it could not be else, for he desired a reasonable world above all things — reasonable according to his reason, and War and Peace and Anna Karenina are examples of the lies a too ardent desire of truth led him into. But in My Religion he is not beset by theory and half-beliefs; he is concerned to relate himself, and he tells the battle between an extraordinarily clear intelligence and an extraordinarily powerful temperament as it has never been told before. His intelligence compels him to admit there is no grounds for believing in the Gospels, but though the Gospels may be fabrications, the Gospel teaching is essential. If he had said essential to me he would have written a better book, but he will have it that the teaching in the Gospels is essential to the world, and almost anybody could have told Tolstoy that Christianity was found to be incompatible with life in the second century, and that the business of the Church was to adapt Christianity to life. In the adaptation the mysteries of Ceres were abolished, hut evening parties received the sanction of the Church, if not in the second, at least some centuries later, and this almost initial mistake on the part of the Church estranged Tolstoy from his Church; one so hopelessly in­telligent as Tolstoy could not do else than regard such religion as essentially unintelligent, and what is worse, unmoral, and having discovered in his memories of his youth that the pleasure we derive from evening parties is directly or indirectly a sexual pleasure, he proceeded to write a story about an evening party, and, as is usual with him, he brings to his job all the extraordinary literary skill that he brought into the world, and it enabled him to devise a fine setting for a story that might have frightened the austere St Jerome, who wrote in a sudden ecstasy: fornication is a dung-heap, marriage is barley, chastity is wheaten-flour.

The teller of Tolstoy's new story is a man who murdered his wife because he committed the fatal mistake of falling in love with her at an evening party, her pretty figure, which a jersey showed off to considerable advantage, being the active cause of the wedding. He tells his story to an innocent passenger in the train: that he loved and hated his wife by turns, and that at last she could bear with him no longer and took to herself a lover, a violinist by profession, one of the concomitants of evening parties, as are immodest gowns, sandwiches and wine. A man must be a man of genius to get the world to listen to such stories; but to continue. Having gotten her lover, a violinist, she does exactly what most women would do in her circumstances, she gives an evening party, and at this party piece of music was performed by the violinist, and the wife, who excelled at the piano, especially in a piece called the Kreutzer Sonata, one more or less known to all cultivated people and looked upon by them as a natural and witty piece of music, in the humour of a Shakespearean comedy. In no other way do we look upon the Kreutzer Sonata, yourself and myself, dear reader; but the murderer, speaking through Tolstoy, heard a violent aphrodisiac in the music, and was at last driven to killing his wife with a stiletto, driving it through and through the jersey which had provoked his love of her.

Every jot of Tolstoy's ugly temperament went into the composition of this book. His intelligence, which is great, must have fought a fierce battle with his temperament, which is strong. Tolstoy must have had a hell of a time of it while writing it, like the parrot that was plucked by the monkey. Of what use in publishing it, his intelligence must have cried out again and again at various points of the story, for surely men will never be born who will marry women who are physically disagree­able to them. It matters not, cried Temperament, for whosoever indulges in the pleasure of female beauty is certain to repeat his pleasure. It may be as you state, Intelligence replied. But of what use to cry out against what cannot be altered, and of all the ugly things you have ever said, this book is the ugliest. It matters not if it be moral, replied Temperament. Stay your hand, Intelligence implored, before it is too late. This book will provoke comment about your relations with your wife, and you have had thirteen children by her. But Tolstoy's temperament was never stayed by his intelligence. Has he not said that if a man has stripped himself of everything but one blanket he should share it with a leper if the leper wants a blanket? And not having found a leper with whom to share his blanket, he, in imitation of the early hermits, elected to live in a shieling, but in a shieling that communicates with folding doors with his wife's apartment. And he will not sleep upon a spring mattress, he must have a feather bed, the one he sleeps upon costs more than any spring mattress. His rooms are quite plain, but to paint and heat them to his liking workmen had to be brought from England. In some ways Tolstoy reminds us of Captain Verney, the discord between conduct and conscience is almost as great. He is loquacious, which Verney was not, and he complains that family ties prevented him from bringing his own life into conformity with his theory of life; and his words on this subject, and indeed on every subject that he writes upon, hardly allow a doubt that Tolstoy's life, in spite of his fortune and his genius, has been one of the unhappiest lives ever lived in this world. Nor is the reason far to seek: everyone is unhappy whose life is not consonant with his ideas. He sought a doctrine of morality in the Gospels; he has not found a sufficient one, for there are earlier and later texts: be not angry with thy brother without just cause is a later text that appears to Tolstoy far too reasonable to be authentic, and he told Mr Stead, moved by a sudden suspicion, how he went to Moscow and looked up the earliest texts, and that it was just as he suspected. The earliest texts ran: be not angry with thy brother, which is, of course, much finer than the later texts, but altogether incompatible with life as it is lived in this world. So Mr Stead felt, and for his own instruction and for his readers' he asked Tolstoy if he admitted no exceptions to his doctrine of the non-resistance of evil: should he not use force to prevent a drunken man from kicking a child to death? Tolstoy admitted that this was an exceptional case, and Mr Stead took his leave on these words. But not long after he received a letter from Tolstoy, who had been thinking it over, an exception invalidated the theory, so he was constrained to write to Mr Stead withdrawing his admission that there might be exceptional cases, saying that not even in the case of a drunkard kicking a child to death should evil be resisted.

Tolstoy is not often pathetic, but he is in this letter; he loved truth, but he loved theory better, and had to write an untruth to Mr Stead. Poor Tolstoy! we must not be too hard on him; we must try to appreciate the fact, however strange it may appear to us to be, that there are some amongst us who cannot live without a theory of life, and for the sake of their theory will sacrifice every truth in argument. We must not be too harsh: we must try to appreciate the fact that abstract intellectualism is necessary to some men, and that because their conduct often impinges on a theory they would not do well to put aside the theory, for that it has not stood the test of actual experience. These are our weaker, our Christian brethren. Were you to say to Tolstoy: I am willing to live in obedience to a moral standard, but which moral standard, for there are many, he would answer that there is but one. Read the Gospels and find it. But it may hap that you know the Gospels as well as Tolstoy, and if so you answer: the Gospels teach different moralities, which am I to accept? Tolstoy would answer: I surmise you yourself are forced to make a selection of Christ's teaching, and you will find one in the Gospels that is in agreement with the voice of conscience, and though sure of nothing else, you are sure that your conscience is speaking. But no man's conscience tells him, Tolstoy's interrogator replies, that he should not use force to prevent a drunkard from kicking a child to death.

Tolstoy's ears are so tuned that he can only hear a regular beat; elisions are disagreeable to his ear, and he is prone to remove nature's, thereby spoiling a beautiful story, for the anecdote that inspired him to write Resurrection is beautiful. A judge who had tried a Finnish girl for stealing told Tolstoy how one of the jurymen, a man who had never shown any interest in ethical questions before, was so overcome by the thought that he and eleven other sinners were called upon to condemn a thirteenth sinner that he obtained permission to visit the girl in prison. He offered himself in marriage, and the girl accepted his offer gladly, seeing in a rich marriage endless gratification of her desires. But perceiving in time that she did not understand the sacrifice he was making, the man withdrew. Some years afterwards he married a girl of his own class, one who shared his ideas, but it appears that he did not succeed in living happily with her. This is the story that came off Nature's loom: it is rare that Nature succeeds in weaving a complete story, but this time Nature was an artist, and Tourguéneff, Nature's accomplice, would have recognised the beauty of the story and judged himself to be the humble reporter of it. But Tolstoy, who was always more of a moralist than an artist, felt that this beautiful story must be altered, and in his version of it the conscientious juryman, who had never seen the girl till he saw her in the dock, became her original seducer, for unless the story could be worked into a theory, that if a girl indulges in love outside of marriage she will become a prostitute and a drunkard, it would not be worth telling. Nor was this alteration sufficient, the story had to be distorted still further, for the law against theft would only allow the judge to condemn the girl to a few months' imprisonment, and for the sake of his morals Tolstoy must needs have her sent to Siberia and is thereby constrained to tell us that the girl did not wish to poison the merchant who visited her, but another woman in the house did, and that the girl was in some measure her dupe.

It seems almost unnecessary to say that a man so interested in moral theories soon lost interest in character, and we remember that when he wrote Pierre, his most successful adventure into art, he was forty years younger, less hard, narrow, one might say less vindictive. Resurrection was written in his old age, and we find in it a portrait of Tolstoy himself, Tolstoy in caricature, The moralist has triumphed altogether over the artist, but the power, the natural gifts that Tolstoy brought into the world, the gift of imaginative vision is in this book as plainly as it is in the other books, though instead of being a help it is a let, a hindrance, making the book a sort of sermon interspersed with realistic descriptions thrown in, one might say scattered broadcast, without order or foresight. Not once but twice our attention is called to the thick sweating neck of an inn servant, a woman who never appears in the story again, nor does the inn in which she serves appear again, and when the conscientious juryman visits his properties he meets a woman carrying a fowl — a fowl that is going to be cooked for the landlord's dinner that night, but the fact that the fowl was within an hour of being converted into food did not prevent Tolstoy from describing it minutely, even to its legs, which we are told were covered with black feathers of a certain length. Yet in his book entitled What is Art? he writes: in literary art this method [the realistic method] consists in describing in minutest details, the external appearance, the faces, the clothes, the gestures, the tones, and the habitations of the characters represented, with all the occurrences met with in life. For instance, in novels, in stories, when one of the characters speaks we are told in what voice he spoke, and what he was doing at the time. And the things said are not given so that they should have as much sense as possible, but as they are in life, disconnectedly, and with interruptions and omissions.

When Tolstoy wrote this passage of exordium he must have forgotten the sweating neck of the inn servant, the feathered legs of the fowl and the twelve jurymen whose appearances are described in such detail that we have forgotten the first before we have read about the third. We should be glad to forget Tolstoy's inconsistencies and enjoy the very amusing description of the rehearsal with which the book begins. Tolstoy, had he been less aggressive in his relation of an opera — Cherubino's Water Carrier­ — an opera from which he must have gotten pleasure at some earlier period of his life, perhaps that is why he is so bitter, insisting that because everyone does not like operas, the money spent on operas had better be spent in a more useful way — this argument would have more force. But would it? For is it not impossible to find several to agree regarding a project on which money may be spent usefully? And passing from the amusing to the serious part of the book, to what Tolstoy would call the useful, and what we call the wasteful, we find that Tolstoy has read everything that the professors of aesthetics have written on the subject, and opinions are given from German, English, French and Italian writers, but none of them can supply a satisfactory definition of what is art, and Tolstoy thereby concludes that because beauty eludes definition it does not exist. But morality is equally hard to define, yet — we will not labour the point. Tolstoy quotes Baumgarten, who held the belief that the Greek ideal beauty is the highest that men have ever discovered. But Tolstoy believes in progress, and it seems to him absurd to think that the very best that can be done by the art of nations after nineteen hundred years of Christian teaching is to choose, as the ideal of their life, an ideal that was held by an unmoral, semi-savage slave­ owning people who lived two thousand years ago, who modelled the human body extremely well, and who erected buildings pleasing to look at. That is how Tolstoy views the race that has occupied the thoughts of men more than any other, preferring by far a tribe of verminous Bedouins who, after wandering for some years in the neighbourhood of Mount Sinai, settled in Palestine. He prefers Hebrew literature to Greek, for although the Bible contained many exhortations to murder, it was not written to give pleasure. And he speaks of these two literatures because they are the oldest and more read to-day than any other, and for that every man must cast his lot with the Greeks or the Hebrews. Tolstoy prefers the Psalms to Aeschylus, but in placing Hebrew literature above Greek he overlooks the fact that Greek literature has survived its mythologies; Prometheus has outlived his persecutor Zeus, and Tolstoy does not trouble to answer the question that comes to everybody's mind to ask: will the Psalms outlive Jehovah? The Idea he desires to press forward is that art is worthless unless inspired by religious ideas. Better still, by a moral idea. We pause to think: moral ideas are always changing, and what is wrong in one age is right in another; whereas beauty may be said to be eternal. We do not plead that the standard of beauty knows no modification, but it is surely certain that the verses of Homer and the sculpture of Phidias have outlived many moralities.

Tolstoy does not like modern French art, but he cannot condemn art as bad art merely because it is incomprehensible to him unless he declares all art to be bad, which he is unwilling to do. So we get back to our friends the peasants. To which peasant, we ask — Russian, English or French? Is he or she fifteen or sixty? Is he or she the most intelligent in the village? Or is he or she the least intelligent? are the questions we put to Tolstoy, and his answer is: the peasant representing the average intelligence of the village. Why should the lowest intelligence be excluded? If the peasant is the best judge of what is art, why should not the best art be produced by peasants? This question Tolstoy dares to face, and this is how he faces it. He tells how he once assisted at a performance of the play of Hamlet, The part was played by one of the greatest actors of the world, but Tolstoy experienced all the time — I give his words — that particular suffering which is caused by false imitations of works of art. And to enable us to follow the drift of his mind he describes the performance of a play given by the Voguls, a savage tribe, in which a bird warns the reindeer of their danger, and this play inspired in Tolstoy feelings which all true art inspires.

A big Vogul and a little one, both dressed in reindeer skins, represent a reindeer doe and its young. A third Vogul with a bow represents a huntsman on snow-shoes, and a fourth imitates with his voice a bird that warns the reindeer of their danger. The play is that the huntsman follows the track that the doe with its young has travelled. The deer run off the scene and again reappear. (Such performances take place in a small tent-house.) The huntsman gains more and more on the pursued. The little deer is tired, and presses against its mother. The doe stops to draw breath. The hunter comes up with them and draws his bow. But just then the bird sounds its note, warning the deer of their danger. They escape. Again there is a chase, and again the hunter gains on them, catches them, and lets fly his arrow. The arrow strikes the young deer. Unable to run, the little one presses against its mother. The mother licks its wound. The hunter draws another arrow. The audience, as the eye-witness describes, are paralysed with suspense; deep groans and even weeping is heard among them. And from mere description I felt that this was a true work of art.

What I am saying will be considered irrational paradox, at which one can only be amazed.

But the question comes of the value of this exhibition of Tolstoy's hard, isolated, tenacious apprehensions. It seems to me that Nature has answered this question by devising a death for Tolstoy that reads so like an admonition that we cannot but suspect the eternal wisdom of a certain watchfulness over human life. Of the nature of this watchfulness we know nothing. We interrogate Nature and get no answer: like a parrot Nature sits, a wrinkled drooping eyelid falling over a round, sleepy eye, but as soon as we forget her, Nature, like the parrot, speaks words so appropriate to the occasion that we find it hard to reject the belief that Polly is not unaware that her words carry a meaning. Can we doubt that St Helena, with Napoleon gazing blankly at the ocean, carries a meaning, and is not the end that Nature devised for Tolstoy as significant, a flight from his wife and home in his eighty-second year, and his death in the waiting-room of a wayside station in the early hours of a March morning?