The New Spirit

erious blending or transition may be witnessed. Apart from complexion, it has been said, many a Russian peasant might pass in Lahore or Benares as a native of the Ganges valley. Whatever the ethnologist may say, one way or another, as to the racial elements of the country, anyone who approaches the study of Russian men and Russian things perpetually meets with traits that are not fam

opinion, be set down as Eastern. Sometimes the art of Russia seems to have been almost effaced by Byzantine or Hindu influences, yet it ultimately assimilated all these Eastern influences until it reached its highest point of development at the end of the sixteenth century. In the gilded bulbous domes we see Hindu influence. Persian influence was peculiarly strong; the beautiful Holy Gate of the Church of St. John at Rostoff, the work of sixteenth century Russian artists, is of thoroughly Persian character. All that Russia took from Central Asia and Persia strengthened her art, though it[176] retained its own characteristics, shown partly by the love of splendour peculiar to a

but followed in the steps of the Russian novel, which has, as its supreme representatives, Tourgueneff, Dostoieffski, and Tolstoi. Tourgueneff, so delicate and sensitive in his realism, with its atmosphere of ineffable melancholy, a Corot among novelists, as De Vogüé calls him, is great not only by the breadth and insight of his art, but by the unique position he holds in the development of Russian literature. The “Stories by a Hunter,” published a few years before the emancipation of the serfs, to which they are supposed to have contributed, turned the Russian novel in the direction of peasant life. The study of the peasant which occupies so much attention in Russia to-day is much more than a mere fashion, for the peasant in Russia represents by far the chief element in the population; certainly the interest in him has already left an ineffaceable mark on those great Russian novelists whose influence is world-wide. Tolstoi,

largely mystical; it is simply a mystical communism. Sympathy and the need of com[179]radeship, which seem to be deeply rooted in the national character, are the characteristics of Russian religion. “Pity for a fallen creature is a very national trait,” wrote Gogol, and among the great Russian novelists, Dostoieffski, who is the most intensely Russian, is throughout penetrated by the passion of pity. This spirit shows itself in the remarkable sympathy with which, in Russian popular stories, the devil is treated. “He is represented,” Stepniak remarks, “as the enemy of man, d

flourish, together with the ineradicable belief that the land must be the property of everyone. In some parts of the country it is not uncommon for a poor man to help himself to the corn of a rich man, the loan being repaid with interest in subsequent years. The deeply-rooted indifference of the people to external laws appears in the difficulty with which they have been induced to accept an officially recognized marriage ceremony, and in the indulgence which is still felt towards liberty, which is not always licence, in such matters. In some parts of Russia, even to-day, it is said, a kind of Pervigilium Veneris is held periodically; the young people ascend a mountain

stinguishes Russia to-day from the rest of Europe, these religious sects have everywhere sprung up and flourished; some of an ascetic type, with Asiatic tendencies, belonging more especially to the north of Russia, such as those frantic devotees, the Skoptsy, who mutilate themselves after the manner of the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele; or of those sects, belonging more to the south, and rapidly gaining ground over the others, who desire to lead a life of reason and love, such as the Doukhobory, who recognize no more divinity in Jesus than resides in all men, deny all dogmas, ceremonies, authority, give equal rights to every man and woman, treat children with the same respect as the aged, practise free marriages, and are in their daily lives both more moral and more prosperous than their neighbours. One of the most recent of these sects is the Soutaiefftsky, that first became generally known about 1880. Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging to the centre of Russia, from his early years pondered and dreamed over the misery of t

ch render men hypocritical. At the same time he rejects all faith in angels or devils, or in the supernatural generally, and is absolutely indifferent to the question of a future life. We have to

living. But this end is to be gained, not by violence, but by persuasion; men will recognize the hypocrisy and injustice of their lives, and those who persist in evil will be shut out from the fraternal community. Soutaieff refused, at one period at all events, to pay taxes. Once he went to St. Pe

, on going to his barn, he found several men carrying away sacks of flour. Without saying a word, he entered the barn and found a sack that the robbers had not yet carried off. He pursued them, and on catc

?” a hearer once asked him. “Truth,” answered Soutaie

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tainly[186] than any small monster of perfection. It is scarcely necessary to say that the autobiography here is not one of incident, as some persons have foolishly supposed; it is neither complete nor historically accurate. Tolstoi uses his material as an artist, but the material is himself. The artist craves to express the inward experiences of his past life, of which he can scarcely speak. He invents certain imaginary events, or rearranges actual events as a frame into which he fits his own inward experiences. Whatever is most poignant and vivid in the novelist’s art is so produced; and you say to him, “This is so real; you are narrating your own history.” He will be able to reply laughingly, “Oh, no! my life is not at all like that.” Imagination is a poor substitute for experience. There is sufficient external evidence extant, even if it were possible to doubt the internal, that Tolstoi is here throughout drawing on his own youthful experiences. Like Irteneff, young Tolstoi followed Franklin’s inj

yet two years of age, his father when he was nine. At the age of fifteen he went to the University of Kazan; he left it suddenly to settle on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana which had fallen to him. In 1851,[188] at the age of twenty-three, he became a yunker (the usual position of a nobleman entering the army, doing the work of a common soldier and associating with the officers) in the artillery at the Caucasus; he was stationed on the Terek. This expedition to the Caucasus was a memorable event in young Tolstoi’s life. It determined finally his artistic vocation. A centre of mili

too sternly in[189] the “Confessions”: “I cannot think of those years without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. There was no vice or crime that in those days I would not have committed. Lying, theft, pleasure of all sorts, intemperance, violence, murder—I have committed all. I lived on my estate, I consumed in drink or at cards what the labour of the peasants had produced. I punished them,

contrast between this and the life of cities: “happiness is to be with Nature, to see her, to hold converse with her;” and he longs to mingle himself with the life of Maryana. In vain. “Now if I could only become a Cossack like Lukashka, steal horses, get tipsy on red wine, shout ribald songs, shoot men down, and then while drunk creep in through the window where she was, without a thought of what I was doing or why I did it, that would be another thing, then we should understand one another, then I might be happy.... She fails to understand me, not because she is beneath me, not at all; it would be out of the nature of things for her to understand me. She is light-hearted; she

rnaya. At this period also he wrote his “Sketches of Sebastopol.” By this time he had attracted considerable attention as a writer, and by command of t

ns in that love of sport in all its forms which has left such vivid and delightful traces throughout his work. In his portraits he appears with a shaggy bearded face, with large prominent irregular features, and rather a stern fixed and reserved expression; the deep eyes are watchful yet sympathetic, and at the same time melancholy, and the thick lips are sensitive. His acquaintances described him as not easy to approach, very shy and rather wild (très-farouche et très-sauvage), but those who approached him found him “extremely amiable.” In his later “Confessions” he thus summarizes his view of things, and that of the group to which he belonged, during this literary period of his life, more especially with reference to the earlier part of it. “The view of life of my literary comrades lay in the opinion that in general life developed itself; that in this development we, the men of intellect, took the chief part, and am

give life to various aspects of a great historical period. Much of himself, certainly, we find scattered through the work, especially in Pierre Besoukhoff, though it is unnecessary to say that a very large part of Pierre’s exper

ly enough. From this standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all that he ever wrote, still groping,

lap; or I was greeted by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home, thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the whole of life, a road full of the

these unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. And with horror and a consciousness of my weakness, I remained standing before this spot. I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to this, that I—a healthy and

on millions of persons who had never reasoned about them at all. “From the time when men first began to live anywhere,” he says in the “Confessions,” “they already knew the meaning of life, and they carried on this life so that it reached me. Everything in me and around me, corporeal and incorporeal, is the fruit of their experiences of life; even the means by which I judge and condemn life, all this is not mine, but brought forth by them. I myse

ng the tones of the forest the cry of the snipe, listening and waiting, and thinking of the things he had been thinking of for the last three[197] years, especially of this question of God. There was no God—that he knew was an intellectual

was a failure. He could not get rid of the consciousness that these things were—“bosh.” He turned from the church to the Go

Soutaieff heard of this, and soon arrived. “Why have you arrested her?” he asked. “She is a thief; she must be punished,” they cried. “Judge not, and you will not be judged,” he said solemnly; “we are all guilty at some point. What is the[198] good of condemning her? She will be put in prison, and what advantage will that be? It would be much better to give her something to eat, and to let her go in the grace of

te the misery of Moscow, and to start philanthropic plans for its amelioration. He tells us in this narrative, which has a dramatic vividness of its own that will not bear abbreviation, how he was gradually forced,

scovering one[199] hopelessly useless class—the class of those who had seen better days, who had been brought up in the notio

same occupation as her[200]self; and he realized that it was the mother herself who had to be saved from a false view of life, according to which it was right to live without bearing children and without working, in the service of sensuality. “When I had considered this, I understood that the majority of ladies whom I would have called on to save this girl, not only themselves live without bearing children and without working, but also bring up their daughters to live such a life; the one mother sends her daughter to the public-house, the other to the ball. But both mothers possess the same view of life, namely, that a woman must be fed, clothed, and taken care of, to satisfy the wantonness of a man. How, then, could our ladies improve this woman and her daughter?” He was anxious to befriend a bright boy of twelve, and took him into his own house among the servants, pending some better arrangement to give him work. At the end of a week this ungrateful little boy ran away, and was subsequently found at the circus, acting as conductor to an elephant, for thirty kopecks a day. “To make him happy and to improve h

he hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of men, I understood, not with my reason, but with my heart and my whole being, that the existence of ten thousand such men in Moscow, while I and other thousands eat daintily, clothe our horses and cover our floors—let the learned say as much as they will that it is inevitable—is a crime, committed not once but constantly, and that I with my luxury do not merely permit the crime, but take a direct part in it. The difference in the two impressions consisted only in this—that before the guillotine all I could have done would have been

... Jesus taught men to do nothing contrary to reason. It is unreasonable to go out to kill Turks or Germans; it is unreasonable to make use of the labours of others that you and yours may be clothed in the height of fashion and maintain that source of ennui, a drawing-room; it is unreasonable to take people, already corrupted by idleness and depravity, and devote them to further idleness and depravity within prison walls: all this is unreasonable—and yet it is the life of the European world.” The doctrine of Jesus is hard, men say. But how much harder, exclaims Tolstoi, is the doctrine of the world! “In my own life,” he says, “(an exceptionally happy one, from a worldly point of view), I can reckon up as much suffer[204]ing caused by following the doctrine of the world as many a martyr has endured for the d

ition of the State and the country. He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is a humbug, this State,” he remarked[205] to Mr. Stead. “What you call a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know; peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, stat

being stopped by the cry of confiscation. Of course I do not hold with George about the taxation of the land. If you could get angels from Heaven to administer the taxes from the land, you might do justice and prevent mischief. I am against all taxation.” The second condition of happiness is labour, the intellectual labour that one loves because one has chosen it freely, and the physical labour that is sweet because it produces the muscular joy of work, a good appetite, and tranquil sleep. The third condition of happiness is love. Every healthy man and woman should have sexual relationships; and Tolstoi makes no distinction between those that are called by the name of marriage and those that are not so called; in either case, however, he would demand that they shall be permanent. The fourth condition is unrestrained fellowship with men and women generally, without distinction of class. The fifth is health, though this seems largely the result of obedience to the others. These are the five points of To

writing or shoemaking or ploughing, or kneading clay in a tub to build incombustible cottages, or spending the day in spreading manure over the land of some poor widow. Such we se

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I

arly and delicious sketch of the frail musician, Albert, down to the sombre and awful “Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” Tolstoi has produced an immense body of work that must be considered, above all, as art. One reads this body of work with ever-growing delight and satisfaction. Gogol was a finer artist than Dickens, but there are too many suggestions about him of Dickens and the English novelists. Tourgueneff, a very great artist—how great, those little prose-poems, “Senilia,” would alone suffice to show—an artist who thrilled to every touch, suffered from the excess of his sensitiveness, and perhaps also from an undue absorption in the western world. In Dostoieffski there is nothing of the west; he is intimately and intensely personal, with an even morbid research of all the fibres of organic misery in human nature. In all his work we seem to hear the groans of the prison-house, the house of the dead in Siberia. When we have read the wonderful book in which he has recorded the life of his years there, we know the source of all his inspiration. Reading all these authors, we are constantly aware of the neurotic element in Russian life and Russian character, the restless, diseased element that is revealed to us in cold scientific[210] analysis by Tarnowsky and S. P. Kowalevski and Dmitri Drill. It is not so when we turn to Tolstoi. In him we find not merely the insight and the

le are of the sort that it takes generations even to understand. It is interesting, doubtless, to put Tolstoi beside Zola, but the resemblance is not deep. Zola is the avowed prophet of a formula. He has read and pondered the “Introduction à l’étude de la Médicine Expérimentale,” in which the great physiologist, Claude Bernard, expounded the principles of the experimental method as applied to the sciences of physical life. He has asked himself: “Can we not apply this same method to the psychological life? Can we not have an experi[212]mental novel?” “We seek the causes of social evil,” he declares in “Le Roman Experimental,” a collection of essays not less instructive than his novels, and more interesting; “we present the an

law-court or a police-court, is he really much nearer then? The unrevealable motives, the charm, the mystery, were not deposed to by the policeman who was immediately summoned, nor by the servant-girl who looked through the key-hole. Certain disagreeable details: do they make up reality? To select the most beautiful and charming woman one knows, and to set a detective artist on her track, to follow her about everywhere, to keep an opera-glass fixed upon her, to catch fragments of her conversation, to enter her house, her bedroom, to examine her dirty linen,—would Helen of Troy emerge beautiful from this procès-verbal? And on which side would be most reality? Nature seems to resent this austere method of approaching he

he calls himself, a Republican in spirit long before the Republic was proclaimed, a hater of all hypocrisies and empty prettinesses and fine phrases and elegant circumlocutions, a fighting man ready to fight to the last, with rude weapons but in fair combat. He represents the revolt against the French romantic movement—“une émeute de rhétoriciens,” he calls it—which found its supreme[215] incarnation in Victor Hugo. The Forty Immortals may have laughed serenely, but when Zola declared that he was carrying on the classic tradition he was not altogether wrong. The classic tradition of France is marked by a very vivid sense of life; it has a close grip of the practical and material s

Youth,” or of the child in the raspberry bush, or of the mowing, or the horse-race, in “Anna Karenina,” with their peculiar, intangible yet vivid reality. But these things, it may be said, are poetry, the effluence of some divine moment of life, the record of some unforgettable thrill of blood and brain. Compare, then, the account of a childbirth in “Anna Karenina” (there is an earlier and less successful attempt in “War and Peace”) with a similar scene which is the central episode in Zola’s “La Joie de Vivre.” The latter, doubtless, is instructive from its fidelity; every petty detail is coldly and minutely set forth. Its artistic value is difficult to estimat

n, to make perceptible to all eyes the infinitely little things which escape our vision. That is my dominating faculty.” Tourgueneff declared that the novel must cast aside all hypocrisy, sentimentality, and rhetoric for the simple yet nobler aim of becoming the history of life. Dostoieffski, that tender-hearted student of the perversities of the human heart, so faithful in his studies that he sometimes seems to forget how great an artist he is, justifies himself thus: “What is the good of prescribing to[218] art the roads that it must follow? To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally, according to the laws of nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding to human needs. Art has always shown i

nd in both it has taken on a social character; both, also, have sought their inspiration, not so much in a possible future deduced from the present, as in the past experiences of the race. Tolstoi with his semi-oriental quietism has returned to the rationalistic aspects of the social teaching of Jesus. Morris, who regards Iceland rather than Jud?a as the Holy Land of the race, looks to Scandinavian antiquity for light on the problems of to-day. It is on the robust Scandinavian spirit of independence and comfortable well-to-do intolerance of all oppression and domination that Morris relies for the redemption of his own time and people. So far from identifying art, as Tolstoi is inclined to do, with the evil and luxury of the world, Morris finds in art a chief hope for the world. It is not, therefore, surprising that his art has suffered little from the fervour of his convictions, while his varied art

of mercy and justice. So thick is the gloom that it seems the artistic[221] effect would have been heightened if the concluding introduction of the officers of an external and official justice had been omitted, and the curtain had fallen on the tragic merriment of the wedding feast. The same intense earnestness taking, almost unconsciously, an artistic shape, reveals itself in the little stories of which in recent years Tolsto

e or translate any of his books. His drama, “The Dominion of Darkness, or when a bird lets himself be caught by one foot he is lost,” was intended for the public who frequent the open-air theatres of[222] fairs, and eighty thousand copies were sold during the first week, although certainly not altogether among the audience he would have preferred. The stories for children are circulated in scores of

igion,” that powerful argument ad hominem to the Christian from one who accepts both the letter and the spirit of Jesus’s simplest and least questionable teaching, has

ental structure which leads the world-renowned novelist to delight to learn from children, to be mortified when they do not like his stories, and to experience one of the greatest excitements of life when he thinks he detects the dawn of genius in a child of ten. The same characteristic appears in his treatment of science. He had heard, he told Mr. Kennan, that a Russian scientist had completely demolished the Darwinian theory. In “Life,” one of his latest books, this tendency has carried him far away into a sterile and hopeless region of mystical phraseology. He dismisses scientific men briefly as the Scribes. It has not occurred to him apparently that this book, “Life,” is a boo

e cases of extreme brutality and oppression that he had known practised on political prisoners in Siberia, and how, though Tolstoi’s eyes filled with tears as he imagined the horrors described, he still pointed out in detail how, by opposing violence to violence in the cases cited, the misery of the

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ggard and haunting face—would not the meal be broken up as speedily as if every guest had found the sword of Dionysius hanging by a thread above his head? Yet it is only a lack of imagination which prevents us from seeing thr

though this, we are told, cannot reproduce the graphic vividness of the original, Tolstoi s

e time I say,—not in justification, but in explanation, of my inconsistency,—Compare my previous life with the life I am now living, and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true, fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it is not because I do not wish to fulfil all, but because I am unable. Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which I am entangled,—help me,—and I will fulfil all. I wish and hope to do it even without help. Condemn me if you choose,—I do that myself,—but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that