Page:The American Review of Reviews - Volume 24.djvu/62

 thing to do with revolution; and in morals he found a better standard among the peasants than anywhere else. He was convinced that culture had nothing to do with morality, and he became therefore a pupil rather than a master in the great peasant school.

It is plainly that which differentiates Tolstoy from the hundreds of other educated Russians who devote their lives to the people and earn in return nothing better than the reputation of ”characters,” and the benevolent contempt of peasants who do not understand them, and whom they do not understand. But Tolstoy found not only his ethical but also his asthetic doctrines realized among the people. The common life, he says, is not only the basis of all true morals, but of all true art. What cannot be understood by the simplest, he argues again and again, is not true art. Art requires no commentary; it is infective In its nature, and if it is not, it is not truc art. It is a “means of communion,” “a condition of human life.” The remark made by another celebrated Russian, that Turgenieff's “Recollections of a Sportsman” had exhausted the life of the people, awakened his wrath, and he asked, indignantly:

“The life of the people exhausted ?—the life of the people with its manifold labors, its dangers on sea and land, its relations with employers, leaders, companions, with men of other faiths and nationalities, its travels, its struggles with nature, with wild beasts, its relations to domestic animals, its work in the forest, on the steppes, in fields and gardens, its family relations, its dealings with fellow-workers, its bearing to economical questions, to intellectual problems, all the problems of life for self and family, —all these interests, all permeated with religious sentiments is this to be regarded as exhausted, and to make way for descriptions of how one hero kissed his lady’s hand, another her arm, a third in some other way,—is this to be given up for that other art whose only objects are to flatter pride, dissipate ennui, and develop eroticism”

This is not art, he says. As the life of the people is the best of all lives, the art which the people create, and which is created by students and imitators of the people, is the best of all art. Tolstoy's ideas of art and morals are thus complementary and mutually indispensable, and his productiveness as an artist, in the sense understood by himself, is multiplied by his mode of life. The work which he does in the fields, his long tramps from village to village, his visits to night-refuges and prisons, his teaching of peasants at his country home, his stories and fables written specially for the people, his popular works on science and on morals, not only form a part of what he regards as the ideal life, but a part also of the necessary equipment of the true artist.

Yet it would be untrue to say that Tolstoy as a teacher enjoys a wide influence among any Russian class. What the future will do with his doctrines, no one can say. At present, the masses of the Russian people are far too susceptible to mystical emotions to find any attraction in a rationalistic guide still in the flesh. But if they remain in their present state of culture, fifty years hence they will be quite capable of reviving Tolstoyism as a religious cult, with its founder endowed with supernatural attributes somewhere in the background, and around his name a great tangle of traditions which Tolstoy would regard with horror. Meantime, Tolstoy as a man, in his immediate circle, enjoys much greater honor than a prophet in a wider sphere.

But if Tolstoy is not a great influence in Russia, what is his value as a representative of Russian ideas? The first thing notable is that his philosophy, even although he finds its germs more widespread in Russia than anywhere else, is a general human philosophy in its application, and is even more generally comprehensible than his art. Yet Tolstoy is really a very faithful representative of Russian life. If Tolstoy has never made a Russian sect, the Russian sects have made Tolstoy. He is a pupil, not a teach. er, in his own country. It is only abroad that Tolstoy stands as a revolutionary apostle of novel moral ideas. His relation to his own country. men is that he expresses, divested of mysticism, the practical religion which animates & large proportion of Russian sectarians, Dukhooortsi, Molokani, Standists, and Vagabonds. How far he is right in declaring that the masses of his country-men are informed by the same spirit is another question. And even if he is right in this, is he right in regarding racial conditions as the deter. mining factor, and not merely a low state of culture? Either view seems to strike at the general applicability of his doctrines. If the Russian peasant is really the spiritual salt of the earth by history and race, what of the other races? If he is merely a better man because he leads a primitive life, what of his future, and what of the future of the advanced races? For Tolstoy is no dreamer, and he knows very well that the machine even of false civilization” cannot be stopped. The answers to these questions put to Tolstoy the practical man are given by Tolstoy the academic thinker, who replies that consequences matter nothing, as they mattered nothing to the preacher of asceticism in “The Kreuzer Sonata.” Let each man settle with his own conscience. The rest may perish.