Three essays

At the beginning of our century a man was still living in Weimar, Julius Stötzer by name and schoolmaster by calling, who, as a sixteen-year-old student, had dwelt under the same roof with Dr. Eckermann and only a few steps away from Goethe’s door. Young Stötzer and a schoolmate and fellow-lodger would now and again, with beating hearts, catch gleams and glimpses of the hallowed form as the old man sat by his window. But the lads were possessed by a desire to see him for once close at hand and get a good look at him. They applied to his famulus, their house-mate, and implored him by some means or other to procure them this boon. Eckermann was a kindly soul. One summer day he let the boys in by the back gate to the garden of the illustrious house; and there, hugely confused, they stood and waited for Goethe; who, to their consternation, did actually appear. He was strolling about the garden in a light-coloured house-coat—very probably the famous flannel dressing-gown we wot of—and catching sight of the lads went up to them. There he stood, wafting odours of eau-de-Cologne, with his hands, of course, on his back, and his abdomen to the fore; with that air of a city father beneath which, so we are told, he hid his self-consciousness—and asked the youths their names and what they wanted. Probably all in one breath; which indeed, if it thus happened, so added to the austere effect that they could scarcely get out an answer. However, they stammered something; whereupon the old man bade them be diligent in their tasks—which they were free to interpret as meaning that they would do better to be at them and not stand gaping here—and went his way.

So much for that—it happened in the year 1828.—Thirty-three years afterwards, one day about one o’clock Stötzer—now an experienced and devoted master in the secondary schools—was about to take the second class of the session when a seminary pupil stuck his head in at the door and announced that a stranger wanted to see Herr Stötzer. And without more ado the stranger entered at his heels: a man considerably younger than the schoolmaster, with a thinnish beard, prominent cheek-bones, and small grey eyes, with furrows between the heavy brows. He neglected to introduce or otherwise account for himself; but simply and straightway asked what lessons there were this afternoon, and on hearing that there was first history and then language, professed himself well pleased. He said that he had been visiting schools in southern Germany, France, and England; and sought an acquaintance with those of northern Germany as well. He spoke like a German. You would take him for a schoolmaster, from the comments he made, his well-informed, intelligent questions, and the way he kept putting things down in his notebook. He stopped for the whole of the lesson-hour. The children wrote a theme, an exercise on some subject in their copy-books; and the stranger said he was greatly interested in these compositions—might he take them away with him? “Dear me,” Stötzer thought, “that is naïve.” Who was to reimburse the children for their copy-books? After all, Weimar was a poor city.... He said as much, in politer phrases. But the stranger replied that that might be managed, and went out. Stötzer sent a message to the Director, telling him of the unusual occurrence. And the adjective he used was the correct one—though it was only much later that he understood how correct it had been. For at the moment and on the spot it could not mean much to him, when the stranger came back, with a bundle of writing-paper under his arm, and gave his name to Stötzer and the Director: Count Tolstoy, from Russia. But Schoolmaster Stötzer lived to a ripe old age, and consequently had plenty of time to hear about the gentleman whose acquaintance he had thus made.

This man, then, who lived in Weimar from 1812 to 1905, and whose life was otherwise no doubt uneventful enough, might boast of having enjoyed one extraordinary privilege: the personal acquaintance of both Goethe and Tolstoy, the two great men whose names form the subject of this essay. Yes, Tolstoy was in Weimar! When he was thirty-three years old—for he was born in the year that saw young Stötzer’s interview with Goethe—Count Leo Nikolaevich came to Germany from Brussels (where he had in the first place met Proudhon and been convinced by him that la propriété is le vol, and in the second place had written the story called Polikuschka) and visited the city of Goethe. As a distinguished stranger and guest of the Russian Embassy he was admitted to the house on the Frauenplan, which was not then open to the public. We are told, however, that he was more interested in the Fröbel kindergarten, conducted by one of Fröbel’s own pupils, and studied its pedagogic system with the greatest zeal and curiosity.

You see, of course, why I have told you this little tale. It was in hope to render more palatable the “and” at the top of the page, which must have made you lift your eyebrows at first sight. Goethe and Tolstoy. What sort of arbitrary and unseemly combination is that? Nietzsche once reproached us Germans with a peculiar clumsiness in the use of the word “and.” We said “Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” he sneered; we said “Goethe and Schiller” too—he was very much afraid we even said “Schiller and Goethe”! Setting Schopenhauer and Hartmann aside; as far as Goethe and Schiller are concerned, Nietzsche’s highly subjective dislike of moralists and theatre people should not have led him so far astray as to deny a relationship which is not less valid because of the inherent and typical contrast it displays. Its best spokesman, indeed, was its supposedly affronted half! It was hasty of Nietzsche, it was unjustifiably autocratic, thus to mock, and in his mockery to invoke, or assume, an order of merit which is, and must remain, highly controversial, the most controversial thing in the world. It is not on the whole the German way to be hasty in deciding precisely this question of all questions. We instinctively avoid putting ourselves on record, on one side or the other. We prefer a free-handed policy, and so, personally, do I; and I mean to stick to this policy, to support and glorify it, in all that follows. Precisely this policy, and no other, is the meaning of the conjunction when we say “Goethe and Schiller”: where it converts the combination to an antithesis, and combines with the deliberate intention of contrast. No one who has ever come into contact with the sphere of German thought represented by that classic essay which comprehends all the others and makes them superfluous—I mean Schiller’s Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung—can fail to find this “and” deeply antithetic. Another precisely similar instance is the conjunction “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” On the other hand, if we deny the “and” its right to point a contrast, and confine its function to asserting essential affinity, essential similarity—what then? Would there not at once take place in our fancy a change of partners? On profound intellectual, nay, rather, on profoundly natural grounds, would not Schiller and Dostoyevsky move together, and on the other side—Goethe and Tolstoy?

You will be feeling far from satisfied. Obviously. You will say: there is something besides quality, there is position, there is rank. All honour, you will say, to antithesis, but things which differ so much in order of greatness really cannot be placed alongside like that. Granted that the one was a European humanist and thorough-paced pagan, while the other was an anarchist, and a primitive oriental Christian to boot. But the German world-poet, whose name one names with the highest, with Dante, with Shakespeare, and the realistic novelist who in our own era and not so long ago ended his enigmatic life, and that truly in a most enigmatic manner; to speak of these two in the same breath—it simply will not do, it is an offence against the aristocratic instinct, it is in bad taste.

We put on one side the paganism of the one, the Christianity of the other. Let us leave them there—we may find time to come back to them later on. But as for this aristocratic instinct, if you like to call it that; let me say roundly that so far from offending against it with my parallel, I do it explicit honour. Are you certain you have no delusions—are you sure your perspective is not distorted in this matter of rank and relative greatness? Turgeniev, in his last letter to Tolstoy, written on his death-bed in Paris, in which he conjured his friend to return to literature and stop tormenting himself with theology, Turgeniev was the first to give Tolstoy the title of “the great writer of Russia,” which he has had ever since, and which seems to mean that he holds in the eyes of his countrymen the same rank that the author of Faust and Wilhelm Meister does in ours. Tolstoy himself, as we were saying, was Christian through and through. Yet his humility was not so exaggerated as to prevent him from setting his name boldly beside the greatest, yes, beside the legendary great. He said of War and Peace: “Modesty aside, it is something like the Iliad.” He was heard to say the same of his earliest work, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Was that megalomania? To me, frankly, it sounds like plain and simple fact. “Nur die Lumpe,” says Goethe, “sind bescheiden.” A heathen saying. But Tolstoy subscribed to it. He saw himself always of heroic grandeur; and as early as at thirty-seven, writing in his diary, he ranked his own works, the finished and the still to write, with the great literature of the world.

In the judgment, then, of those competent to render it, the great writer of Russia; by his own estimate, the Homer of his time—but that is not all. After Tolstoy’s death Maxim Gorky published a little book of reminiscences, the best book, in my humble opinion, that he has written. It closes with the words: “And I, who do not believe in God, looked at him timidly, for some dark reason looked at him and thought: The man is godlike.” Godlike. Extraordinary. Nobody ever said or thought that of Dostoyevsky, nobody ever could have thought or said it. He has been called a saint; and one might in all sincerity apply the word to Schiller, at least in the Christian sense which it must always connote, if without the specifically Byzantine flavour. But Goethe and Tolstoy, these two, have been found godlike. The epithet “Olympian” is a commonplace. It was not, however, only as a world-renowned old man of commanding intellect that Goethe had it applied to him; it was while he was still young, still the youth, of whose godlike, compelling gaze Wieland sang, that he had the attribute conferred upon him, a thousand times, by his own contemporaries. Riemer relates that at sixty the old man took occasion to make rather acridly merry over it. “The deuce take godlike,” he cried. “What good does it do me to have people say: ‘That is a godlike man,’ when I go by? They behave just as they like, they impose on me just the same. People only call a man godlike when he lets them have their own way!”—As for Tolstoy, you could not say he was Olympian; he was not a humanistic god, of course. He was, Gorky says, more like some sort of Russian god, sitting on a maple throne under a golden lime-tree; pagan, then, with a difference, compared with the Zeus of Weimar, but pagan none the less, because gods are pagan. Why? Because they are of the same essence as nature. One does not need to be a follower of Spinoza—as Goethe was, and had his own good reasons for it—to feel God and Nature as one, and the nobility that nature confers as godlike. “His superhumanly developed individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost forbidding, he has something in him of the fabled Sviatogor, whom the earth cannot hold.” Thus Gorky, on Tolstoy. And I cite it in this matter of relative greatness. Gorky, for instance, goes on to say: “There is something about him which always makes me want to shout: ‘Behold what a marvellous man lives upon this earth!’ For he is, so to speak, in general and beyond everything else, a human human being, a man.” That sounds like something we have heard before. It reminds us of—whom?

No, the question of rank, the aristocratic problem, is no problem at all, within the grouping I have chosen. It becomes one only when we change partners: when we take saintly humanity and couple it, by means of the antithetic conjunction, with the godlike; when we say “Goethe and Schiller,” “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” Only then, I think, do we pose the question of aristocracy, the problem in ethics and æsthetics: Which is greater? Which is more aristocratic? I shall not answer either of these. I will let the reader come to his individual conclusion in this matter of value, according to his own taste. Or, less glibly put, according to the conception he has of humanity, which—I must add, sotto voce—will have to be one-sided and incomplete to admit of his coming to any decision at all.

Is it not strangely moving to hear that one man had known them both, the creator of Faust and the “great writer of Russia”? For certainly they belonged to different centuries. Tolstoy’s life covered the greater part of the nineteenth. He is absolutely its son. As an artist he exhibits all of its characteristics, and, indeed, those of its second half. As for Goethe, the eighteenth century brought him forth, and essential traits of his character and training belong to it—a statement it would be very easy to substantiate. Yet on the other hand one might say that just as much of the eighteenth, Goethe’s century, survived in Tolstoy as there had already come to birth of Tolstoy’s, of the nineteenth, in Goethe. Tolstoy’s rationalizing Christianity has more in common with the deism of the eighteenth century than it has with Dostoyevsky’s violent and mystical religiosity, which was entirely of the nineteenth. His system of practical religion—the essence of which was a destructive intellectual force that undermined all regulations, human and divine—had more affinity with the social criticism of the eighteenth century than with Dostoyevsky’s moralizations, although those were, on the one hand, far more profound, on the other far more religious. And Tolstoy’s penchant for Utopias, his hatred of civilization, his passion for rusticity, for a bucolic placidity of the soul—an aristocratic passion, the passion of a nobleman—to all that, the eighteenth century, and indeed the French eighteenth century, can lay claim. And, on the other hand, Goethe. What most astonishes us in that masterpiece of his old age, the sociological novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, is the intuition, the keenness and breadth of vision—they seem positively occult, but are simply the expression of a finer organism, the fruit of the most sensitive penetration—which anticipate the whole social and economic development of the nineteenth century: the industrialization of the old cultural and agrarian countries, the triumph of the machine, the rise of the organized labouring classes, the class conflict, democracy, socialism, Americanism itself, with the intellectual and educational consequences of all these.

But when all is said, and whatever the chronological affinity of these two great men, they cannot be called contemporaries. Only four years did the two of them inhabit this mortal sphere together: from 1828, when Tolstoy was born, to 1832, when Goethe died. Which does not prevent them from having one cultural element of their intellectual and spiritual make-up in common, and that a very real and positive one—to say nothing of universally human elements like Homer and the Bible. I mean the element Rousseau.

“I have read the whole of Rousseau, the whole twenty volumes, including the lexicon of music. What I felt for him was more than enthusiasm; it was worship. At fifteen I wore round my neck, instead of the usual crucifix, a medallion with his picture. I am so familiar with some of the passages in his works that I feel as though I had written them myself.” These are Tolstoy’s words, taken from his Confessions. And certainly he was Rousseauian more intimately, more personally, more damagingly, so to speak, than was Goethe, who as a man had nothing in common with poor Jean Jacques’s enigmatic and not always ingratiating complexities. Yet hear Goethe (I quote from an early review): “Religious conditions, and the social conditions so narrowly bound up with them; the pressure of the laws, the still greater pressure of society, to say nothing of a thousand other factors, leave the civilized man or the civilized nation no soul of his own. They stifle the promptings of nature, they obliterate every trait out of which a characteristic picture could be made.” That is, from the literary point of view, Sturm und Drang. But from the intellectual and historical, it is Rousseauianism. It bears the impress of revolution, even of anarchy; though in the Russian seeker after God that impress is religious and early Christian, whereas in Goethe’s words the humanistic trend can be felt, the irradiation of a cultural and self-developing individualism which Tolstoy would have banned as egoistic and unchristian. But unchristian, egoistic, it is not: it means work on man, on mankind, on humanity, and it issues, as the Wanderjahre shows, in the social world.

What two ideas does the very sound of Rousseau’s name inevitably evoke—aside, that is, from the idea of nature, which is, of course, first and foremost? Why, naturally, the idea “education” and the idea “autobiography.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the author of Émile and of the Confessions. Now, both these elements, the pedagogic and the autobiographic, are present in full strength in Goethe as in Tolstoy; they cannot be dissociated from the work or the life of either. It is as an amateur pedagogue that Tolstoy has been introduced in this essay; and we know that for long years he was nothing else, that he forced into this channel the whole violence of the passion that was in him, and wrestled theoretically and practically to the very verge of exhaustion with the problem of the Russian primary school. As for Goethe, it is needless to say that his was a pedagogic nature in the fullest sense of the word. The two great monuments of his life, one in poetry and one in prose, the Faust and the Wilhelm Meister, are both creative treatments of the theme of education. And whereas in the Lehrjahre the idea is still that of the individual forming himself—“for to form myself, just as I am, was darkly, from my youth up, my purpose and my desire,” says Wilhelm Meister—in the Wanderjahre the educational idea is objectivated, and issues in social, even in political concepts; while at the heart of the work is, as you know, the stern and beautiful Utopia of the Pedagogic Province.

The second association, the autobiographic, the confessional, is of course easy to attest in both authors. That all of Goethe’s works represent “fragments of one great confession” we should know ourselves even if he did not tell us; and is not Dichtung und Wahrheit, next to the Confessions of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, the most famous autobiography in the world? Well, and Tolstoy too wrote confessions: I mean in the main a book with that title, laid down throughout on the line of the great self-revelations that runs from the African saint to Strindberg, the son of the servant. But Tolstoy is in the same case with Goethe: not by virtue of one book alone is he autobiographical. Beginning with the Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, throughout the whole body of his work, he is autobiographical to an extent that makes it possible for Merezhkovsky, the great Russian critic, to say: “The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy is at bottom nothing else than one tremendous diary, kept for fifty years, one endless, explicit confession.” Yes, and this critic adds: “In the literatures of all times and peoples there will hardly be found a second example of an author who reveals his personal and private life, often in its most intimate aspects, with such open-hearted sincerity.” Well—open-hearted.... I may be allowed a comment upon the somewhat euphemistic epithet. One might, if one wanted to be invidious, use a different adjective to characterize this sincerity—an adjective that would suggest what Turgeniev had in mind when he once ironically referred to the shortcomings inevitable in a great writer: by which, obviously, he meant the lack of certain restraints, the absence of a customary reserve, discretion, decency, shame, or, on the positive side, the domination of a definite claim on the love of the world—an absolute claim, indeed, in that it is all one to the revealer whether he reveal virtues or vices. He craves to be known and loved, loved because known, or loved although known; that is what I mean by an absolute claim on love. And the remarkable thing is that the world acknowledges and honours the claim.

“A life that is romantic has always self-love at the bottom of it.” I like this saying; and subjoin that self-love is also always at the bottom of all autobiography. For the impulse a man feels to “fixate” his life, to exhibit its development, to celebrate his own destiny in set literary form and passionately invoke the sympathy of his contemporaries and posterity, has for a premise the same uncommonly lively sense of his own ego which, according to that penetrating saying, is at the bottom of a life full of romantic happenings. Subjectively, for the man himself, but also objectively for the world at large. Of course, this love of self is something different, something stronger, deeper, more fruitful, than any mere self-complacency or self-love of the ordinary kind. In the finest instances it is what Goethe in the Wanderjahre calls “Ehrfurcht vor sich selbst,” and celebrates as the highest form of awe. It is the grateful and reverent self-absorption of the darling of the gods, that rings with incomparable sincerity from the lines:

It is a proud and naïve interest in the mystery of high preferment, tangible superiority, perilous privilege, whose standard-bearer the chosen one feels himself to be; it is a craving to bear witness, out of the deeps of experience, how a genius is shaped; a desire to link together, by some miracle of grace, joy, and service; it was this desire which brought forth Dichtung und Wahrheit and in the truest sense inspires all great autobiography.

“I felt the need,” writes Tolstoy of his youthful period, “to be known and loved of all the world; to name my name, the sound of which would greatly impress everybody, so that they would troop round me and thank me for something....” That was quite early, before he had conceived any of his creative works or envisaged the idea of founding a new, practical, earthly, dogmaless religion—though this idea, according to his journal, had occurred to him by the time he was twenty-seven years old. His name, he feels, his mere name, Leo Tolstoy, this formula for his darkly and mightily stirring ego, should, as it were, serve notice to the world; whereby, for some reason as yet unknown, the world should be greatly impressed, and feel impelled to surround him in grateful throngs. Long after that, in 1883—at about the same date that Tolstoy posed for an artist friend, sitting at his table and writing—he reads aloud to another friend and admirer, the one-time officer Tschertkof, from the manuscript of his just-completed personal revelations What Does My Faith Consist In? He reads from this manuscript a categorical reprobation of military service, on the grounds of his Christianity; which so gratifies the ex-officer that he hears nothing else, ceases to listen, and only rouses out of his absorption when he hears, suddenly uttered, the reader’s own name. Tolstoy, coming to the end of his manuscript, had, with particular clarity, says Tschertkof, enunciated the name signed underneath the text: “Leo Tolstoy.”

Goethe once played a little literary hoax with his own name, which I have always found singularly touching. You will recall that in the West-östliche Divan he selected for himself as the lover of Marianne Zuleika the name of Hatem (the most richly giving and receiving one). The choice betrays a blissful self-preoccupation. Now, in one of the poems, a glorious one, he uses this name at the end of a line, where, however, it does not rhyme as according to the structure of the verse it should, and the name which would rhyme if it stood there is another, is Goethe’s own; so that the reader involuntarily makes the substitution mentally as he reads. “Nur dies Herz,” says the already white-haired lover to the youthful beloved,

“Und noch einmal fühlet Goethe ...” With what delightful playfulness the poet makes the reader eliminate the name Hatem, which does not give the rhyme his ear expects! The eastern masquerade is abandoned for autobiography, the ear confutes the eye, and Goethe’s own name, beloved of men and gods, emerges with peculiar clarity, rhymed to perfection and irradiated by the most beautiful thing the world of sense can show: the rosy dawn.

May one call that “Selbstgefälligkeit,” that awestruck sense of plenitude, of copious abundance, which pervades the consciousness of the darling of the gods? Goethe all his life had set his face against the affectation which might condemn such a feeling. He let it be known that in his opinion self-condemnation was the business of those who had no ground for anything else. He even openly spoke a good word for ordinary vanity, and said that the suppression of it would mean social decay, adding that the vain man can never be entirely crude. Whereupon follows the question: Is love of self ever quite distinguishable from love of humanity?

And is not young Tolstoy’s dream of glory, his craving to be known and loved, evidence of his love to the great Thou of the world? Love of the ego and love of the world are psychologically not to be divorced; which makes the old question whether love is ever altruistic, and not utterly egotistic, the most idle question in the world. In love, the contradiction between egotism and altruism is abrogated quite.

From which it follows that the autobiographical impulse scarcely ever turns out to be a mere dilettante trifling. It seems to carry its own justification with it. Talent, generally speaking, is a ticklish, difficult conception; the point of which is really less whether a man can do something than whether a man is something. One might almost say that talent is nothing more or less than a high state of adequacy to one’s lot in life. But whose life is it that possesses this dignity in the face of destiny? With brains and sensibility anything can be made out of any life, out of any life a romantic existence can be made. Differing in this from the pure poetic impulse, which so often rests upon sheer self-deception, the autobiographic, as it seems, always presupposes a degree of brains and sensibility which justifies it beforehand; so that it need only become productive to be certain of our sympathy. Hence the conclusion I drew: that if the world sanction the love of self, which is at the bottom of the impulse, it will as a rule respond to it as well.

“Behold, what a marvellous creature lives upon this earth!” Gorky, contemplating Tolstoy, utters this inward cry. And this cry it is to which all biography seeks to move the world. Any human life, given brains and sensibility, can be made interesting and sympathetic, even the most wretched. J. J. Rousseau was not precisely one’s idea of a darling of the gods. The father of the French Revolution was an unhappy wretch, half or three-quarters mad, and probably a suicide. Certainly the blend of sensibility and catarrh of the bladder displayed in the Confessions is not, æsthetically speaking, to everybody’s taste. Nevertheless, his self-exposure contains and constitutes a claim upon the love of the world, which has been so abundantly honoured, with so many tears, that really one might call poor Jean Jacques the well-beloved, le bien-aimé. And this world-wide emotional response he owes to his bond with nature—rather a one-sided bond, it must be owned, for certainly this fool of genius, this exhibitionistic world-shaker, was a stepchild of the All-Mother rather than one of her pets, an accident of birth instead of a god-given miracle of favour and preference. His relation to nature was sentimental in the fullest sense of the word, and the tale of his life swept over the world in a wave of sentiment, not to say sentimentality. Poor Jean Jacques!

No, not in this tone does one refer to the two whom men called godlike, divine; in whom, as we have seen, important traits of Rousseau’s character are reproduced. For they were not sentimental, scarcely had they occasion to yearn for nature, they themselves were nature. Their bond with her was not one-sided, like Rousseau’s—or if it was, then it was nature who loved them, her darlings, loved them and clung to them, while on their side they drew away, and strove to free themselves from her heavy and earth-bound domination; with indifferent success, it must be said, looking at them both singly and together. Goethe confesses: “So here I am, with all my thousand thoughts, sent back to be a child again, unacquainted with the moment, in darkness about myself.” And to Schiller, the singer of the highest freedom, he writes: “How great an advantage your sympathy and interest will be to me you will soon see, when you discover in me a sort of sluggishness and gloom which is stronger than myself.” And yet we may agree that Goethe’s highly humanistic effort to “convert the cloudy natural product into a clear image of itself (i.e., of reason) and so discharge the duty and the claim of existence,” as Riemer with extraordinary beauty expresses it, was crowned with a purer success than the attempt of Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy to transform his life into the holy life of our blessed father the Bojar Lev, as Gorky says. This process of making a Christian and a saint of himself, on the part of a human being and artist so loved of nature that she had endowed him with godlikeness, was, as an effort at spiritual regeneration, most inept. Anglo-Saxondom hailed it with acclaim, but, after all, the spectacle is painful rather than gratifying, compared with Goethe’s high endeavour. For there is no conflict between nature and culture; the second only ennobles the first, it does not repudiate it. But Tolstoy’s method was not the ennoblement but the renunciation of self, and that can quite easily become the most mortifying kind of deception. It is true that Goethe, at a certain stage in his development, called Götz the work of an undisciplined boy; but never did he so childishly and miserably calumniate his own art as the ageing Tolstoy did, when he regretted having written Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, the fruit of his fresh youthful vigour, condemning it as insincere, literary, sinful; or when he spoke at large of “the artistic twaddle” that filled the twelve volumes of his works, and to which “people today ascribe an unmerited significance.” That is what I call false self-renunciation, a clumsy attempt at spiritualization. Yet renounce himself as he would in words, his very existence gave him the lie; and Gorky looked at him, the patriarch with the “sly” little smile and the artist hands with their swollen veins, and thought to himself: “The man is godlike.”

Weimar, and Yasnaya Polyana. There is no spot on earth today whence power streams out as once from these two, no shrine strong in grace, the resort of pilgrims, whither the longings and vague hopes of men, their need and craving to adore, turn as they did thitherward at the beginning of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We possess descriptions of the state Goethe kept in Weimar; when he, now no longer merely the creator of certain works of art, but a prince of life, the highest representative of European culture, civilization, and humanity, with his staff of secretaries, his higher aides and eager friends at his back, bore up, with that bestarred official dignity which the world enjoined upon him and behind which he hid the mysteries and abysses of his genius, against the onrushing tide of civilized humanity—princes, artists, youths, and rustics, to whom the consciousness of having been vouchsafed one glimpse of him might gild the rest of their lives; even though the great moment itself might and often did turn out to be a chilling disappointment. In much the same way, I say, the little Russian village became, about 1900, the centre and nodal point, the shrine whose virtue was such that it drew all the world. The host of pilgrims was even more colourful, more international, more heterogeneous; for during the century communications had increased, the world had broadened out. South Africans, Americans, Japanese, Australians, natives of the Malay Peninsula, Siberian refugees, and Indian Brahmins, representatives of all the European nations, scholars, poets, artists, statesmen, governors, senators, students, military personages, workmen, peasants, French politicians, journalists of every stripe, from every country on the globe; and again youth, youth from all over the world. “Who does not go to him?” asks a Russian writer: “to greet him, to express sympathy with his ideas, to seek relief from tormenting problems.” And his biographer Birukov says: “One and all they troop to this village and then go home to talk about the great words and great thoughts of the grey old seer who lives there.”

“Great words and great thoughts.” Of course. But it is quite likely the words and thoughts with which the prophet regaled them were not always so remarkable. Neither were Goethe’s; out of sheer embarrassment he might fail to utter great things to those who waited on him. But it is a question whether people ever went to Weimar or to the village called “Bright Meadow” for the sake of the great words and thoughts they might perchance hear, or were led by a much more profound and elemental craving. I shall be accused of mysticism if I say that the attraction such shrines possess for all the world, so that men promise themselves salvation from a visit, is not at all intellectual in its nature but something else entirely. “Elemental” is the only word for it. For Goethe’s case, I may quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, who declared, a few days after the master’s death, that the strangest thing of all was the way this man had exercised so powerful an influence, without as it were meaning to at all, unconsciously, unintentionally, by the mere fact of his existence; this, he says, quite apart from his intellectual activity as a thinker and poet, and as an outgrowth of his great and unique personality. Well and good. But, after all, we use the word “personality” when we want to express an idea which at bottom escapes definition. Personality is not immediately a matter of mind or spirit—nor yet of culture. Our conception of it is one which takes us outside the domain of the rational, into the sphere of the mystic and elemental, into the natural sphere. “A great nature”—that is another phrase we use in our effort to find a formula and a symbol which shall express power streaming forth and drawing the world to itself. But nature is not spirit; in fact, this antithesis is, I should say, the greatest of all antitheses. Gorky not only disbelieved in Tolstoy’s Christian, Buddhistic, Chinese gospel of wisdom, he did not even believe that Tolstoy believed in it. And yet he gazed at him, and thought, in amaze: “The man is like God.” It was not spirit, but nature, moved him to this inward cry. And when the pilgrims trooped to Weimar and “Bright Meadow” the refreshment and quickening they dimly hoped for was not of the mind; it was the sight of and contact with great vital energy, with human nature richly endowed, with the lofty nobility of a beloved child of God. For one does not need to be a Spinozist, like Goethe, who had his own good reasons for being one, to hail the favourites of nature as the favourites of God.

Schiller, great sufferer though he was, was kinder, more human to his visitors. This we learn for instance from the actor Friederich, who says he left this glorious poet “more consoled,” after having just previously taken a chill, to speak figuratively, at an audience on the Frauenplan. “Goethe’s whole appearance,” he goes on, “seemed measured and formal. I sought in vain a trait that betrayed the genial creator of The Sorrows of Werther or Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. You can imagine how this frigid reception and unfriendly treatment put me off, it was so contrary to all my expectations. Dearly should I have liked to say to Goethe: ‘What sort of graven image are you? It is impossible that you could have written the Lehrjahre.’ But I choked it down.” One is reminded of the Moscow worthy with whom Gorky drove away from Yasnaya Polyana: who for a long time could not get his breath at all, only kept ruefully smiling and ejaculating as in a daze: “Well, well, that was a cold douche! Gracious, but he’s stiff! And I thought he was an anarchist!” Perhaps, even probably, if it had been Dostoyevsky he visited, he would have found him more anarchistic—in other words, less “stiff”—and would have parted from him “more consoled,” as did the good Friederich from the glorious Schiller, who even let Friederich recite to him. On the other hand, neither Schiller’s nor Dostoyevsky’s genius would have turned any odd corner of the earth into a shrine for pilgrims. Anyhow, neither of them lived long enough for that. They died too young, they did not reach the patriarchal years of Goethe and Tolstoy, nature denied them the dignity and consecration of great age, she did not grant them to be characteristically fruitful throughout all the stages of the human scene, to live a whole and classic human life. True, it may be said that the dignity that comes with length of days has nothing to do with spirit. A greybeard may be stupid and ordinary; yet men do regard with religious awe his white hair and wrinkles; his is a natural nobility conferred by length of years—but natural nobility is probably a pleonasm. Nobility is always natural. People are not ennobled, that is rubbish; they are noble by birth, on the ground of their flesh and blood. Nobility then is physical: on the body and not on the mind all nobility has always laid the greatest stress. That may explain a certain strain of brutality which has always been peculiar to human nobility. And is there not something brutal too, in its way, heathenish, sagalike, in the arrogant way Goethe sometimes boasted of his vitality, his indestructibility? When he was eighty-one he said to Soret: “Well, so Sömmering is dead. He was barely a miserable five-and-seventy years old! What poor things men are, not to be brave enough to hold out longer than that! On that score I really must do justice to that highly radical ass my friend Bentham; he is quite well preserved, and he is a few weeks older than I am myself!”

So Schiller and Dostoyevsky, to get back to them, were not vouchsafed the ennoblement that comes with length of days. They died comparatively young. Why? Well, because they were sick men, as everybody knows, both of them; one consumptive, the other epileptic. But I raise two questions: First, do we not feel that their illness was deeply founded in the very being of the two of them, an essential and typical trait of the kind of men they were? And second, does it not seem that in their case it is the disease itself that engenders or brings out a nobility sharply distinguished from that love of self and the autobiographical pride of birth which is part of its consummate sense of its own ego? Schiller’s nobility and Dostoyevsky’s nobility mean a quite different sort of deepening and heightening of their humanity—yes, of their humanity, in view of which does not disease appear precisely as an aristocratic attribute of heightened humanity? It follows then that the phrase “natural nobility” is no pleonasm after all; that there does exist another kind of nobility besides that conferred by nature on her favoured sons. Clearly there are two ways of heightening and enhancing human values: one exalts them up to the godlike, and is a gift of nature’s grace; the other exalts them up to the saintly, by grace of another power, which stands opposed to her and means emancipation from her, eternal revolt from her. That other power is the power of the spirit. But the question which of these two is higher, which kind of enhancement of human values is the nobler: this it is which I called the aristocratic problem.

Here, with all due reserve, a little philosophy of disease may not be out of place. Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a wilful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is? For what can disease be, if not disjunction from nature? “Tut der Finger dir weh,” says Hebbel epigrammatically, “schied er vom Leibe sich ab,

Was it not Nietzsche who called man “das kranke Tier”? What did he mean, if not that man is more than beast only in the measure that he is ailing? In spirit, then, in disease, resides the dignity of man; and the genius of disease is more human than the genius of health.

You will deny that; you will not agree to have it so. But, in the first place, disease, as a philosophical term, is by no means a negation and a condemnation. It is merely a statement, which need be no less acceptable than the term “health,” there being a nobility of disease as there is a nobility of health. And, in the second place, may I remind you that Goethe identified the Schillerian conception of the “sentimental” with that of disease? After, that is, he had previously identified the antithesis of “simple and sentimental” with that of classic and romantic. “The conception of classic and romantic poetry,” he said one day to Eckermann, “that is abroad today, and making so much strife and schism, came originally from Schiller and me. My poetical maxim has been objectivity of treatment, and I wanted it to prevail. But Schiller, whose method is entirely subjective, thought his way was right, and wrote the essay on simple and sentimental poetry in defence of his conception.” Again: “I have thought of a new phrase which states not too badly the relation between the classic and the romantic. The classic I call the healthy, the romantic the diseased. If we distinguish classic and romantic on this basis we shall soon clarify the situation.”

Here, then, we have an order of things according to which, on the one hand, the simple, the objective, the sound, and the classic are identical; and, on the other hand, the “sentimental,” the subjective, the pathological, the romantic. Thus one might call man the romantic being, in that he, a spiritual entity, stands outside of and beyond nature, and in this his emotional separation from her, in this his double essence of nature and spirit, finds both his own importance and his own misery. Nature is happy, or she seems so to him. For he, involved in tragical paradox, is a romantically miserable being. Does not all our love of our kind rest on a brotherly, sympathetic recognition of the human being’s well-nigh hopelessly difficult situation? Yes, there is a patriotism of humanity, and it rests on this: we love human beings because they have such a hard time—and because we are one of them ourself!

Tolstoy, in his Confessions, remarks that as a small child he knew nothing of nature, he had not even noticed her existence. “It is not possible,” he says, “that I was given neither flowers nor leaves to play with, that I did not see the grass or the sunlight. And yet up to my fifth or sixth year I have no memory of what we call nature. Probably we have to get free from her in order to see her, and I myself was nature.” From which can be deduced that even the mere seeing of nature, and our so-called enjoyment of her, are not only a specifically human condition, but one full of yearning emotion, in other words pathological, implying as it does our separation from her. Tolstoy’s recollection is that he felt the pain of this separation for the first time when his childhood under the care of nurses came to an end and he moved over to his older brothers and the tutor Feodor Ivanovich in the lower storey. Never again, he assures us, did he feel so strongly what a sense of duty meant, and what, accordingly, moral and ethical obligation: “the feeling of the Cross, to carry which every one of us is called. It was hard for me to part from all I had known since I was born. I was sad, sunk in poetical melancholy; less because I had to part from human beings, my nurse, my sisters, my aunt, than because I was leaving my little bed with its curtains and pillows. Moreover, I was apprehensive of the new life I was entering.” The appearance of the word “Cross” in this connexion is significant, not only with reference to Tolstoy, but also for the thing itself, the process of loosing oneself from nature. This process was felt by Tolstoy as painful and ethical: painful because ethical, and ethical because painful. He gives it a moral and an ascetic significance, as that which actually comprises all man’s ethical obligation. To be humanized means, for him, to be denaturalized; and from that moment on, the struggle of his existence consists in this sort of humanizing process: in the divorce from nature, from everything that was natural and to him peculiarly so, for example from the family, the nation, the State, the Church, from all the passions of the senses and the instincts, from love, the hunt, at bottom from all of physical life, and especially from art, which meant to him quite essentially the life of the body and the senses. It is quite wrong to think of this struggle as a crisis of conversion taking place suddenly in his later years; to make its inception roughly coincide with the beginning of old age. When the news came that the great Russian writer was as though stricken by a sort of mystical madness, the Frenchman Vogué declared that he had long expected it. He was quite justified. The germ of Tolstoy’s intellectual development had lain in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth; and the psychology of Levin in Anna Karenine plainly indicated what further course it would take. Besides, we have the evidence of Tolstoy’s comrades in arms when he was an officer, the Sebastopol time. They give the clearest picture of the violence with which the struggle even then raged within him. But here we should note that his wrestling to break the strong bonds in which nature held him, regularly led up to disease, immediately assumed the form of illness. “Leochen is completely consumed by his writing now,” so his wife, Countess Sophia Alexandrovna, puts it, about the year 1880, when he buried himself in theology and the philosophy of religion. It is a sight her love hates to see, and she constantly tries to call him back to creative work. “His eyes are strange and staring, he hardly speaks at all, he is like a being from another world, and is positively not capable of thinking of earthly things....” “Leochen is quite sunk in his work. His head pains him all the time. He is very much changed, and become a rigid and practising Christian. But he has got grey, his health is weak, he is sadder and more silent all the time.”—“Tomorrow we shall have been here a month,” she writes in 1881 from Moscow, “and the first two weeks I wept every day without stopping, because Leochen was not only in a gloomy state, but fallen into a kind of despairing apathy. He ate nothing and did not sleep, sometimes literally wept—I honestly believe I shall lose my reason.” And to her husband himself: “I am beginning to think that when a happy man suddenly begins to see only the horrible side of life, and has no eyes for anything good, he must be ill. You should do something for it, I say this in all seriousness. It seems so clear to me, I suffer so to see you.... Did you never know before that there were people in the world who were hungry, miserable, unhappy, and wicked? Open your eyes: there are also strong and healthy, happy and good ones. If God would only help you—what can I do? You must be ill,” the poor woman wails—and is he not? He himself writes: “My health grows worse and worse, often I wish I could die. Why I am so reduced, I do not know myself. Perhaps it is age, perhaps illness....”

Compare with this the descriptions of him when he had sought in the holy animalism of married life a refuge from the insoluble riddles that his intellect set him; and then, with that power which the critics delighted to call “bearlike”—Turgeniev sought in vain to convince him that it came from the source whence all things come—created his two epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenine. “He was always light-hearted then,” his sister-in-law relates, “in high spirits, as the English say, fresh, healthy, and jolly. On the days when he did not write he went hunting with me or his neighbour Ribikov. We hunted with greyhounds.... Evenings he played patience in Tantchen’s room.” What happy days! Who can blame poor Countess Sophia Alexandrovna for scarcely containing herself for joy when she hears that her hollow-eyed Christian is planning a new imaginative work? Her happiness is touching. “What gladness suddenly filled me, to read that you mean to write something creative again! What I have so long awaited and hoped for has come to you. That is salvation, that is happiness, in it we shall come together again, it will console you and irradiate our life. This is the work you were made for, and outside this sphere there is no joy for your soul. God give you strength to cling to this ray of light, in order that the divine spark may flare up in you again. The thought fills me with ecstasy....”

Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s biographies show that these great writers both alike suppressed for years their gift of plastic creation—for which, as Countess Sophia Alexandrovna says, they were born—and both in the service of a directly social activity—that is to say, on highly moral grounds. Tolstoy suppressed the artist in him in favour of his activities as mirowov posrednik (justice of the peace) and schoolmaster without pay. Goethe governed the dukedom of Saxe-Weimar, for ten years of his early manhood dedicated his powers to excise regulations, details of book manufacture, levies of recruits, construction of streets and water-conduits, workhouses, mines and quarries, finance, and other such matters—while Merck, in the style of Turgeniev, was constantly concerned to rescue him for literature, and he himself, with increasing resignation, steeling himself by inward exhortations to patience and fortitude, held himself to the heavy, hard, unrewarding, unnatural task. Added to all this, in Goethe’s case, there was that somewhat seraphic affair with Frau von Stein. No doubt it was most beautifully instrumental in the process of civilizing the son of the Titans; but after all it did justice to but one of those famous two souls, which had, alas, their dwelling in his breast, and it let the other, the one with the “klammernde Organen,” the “prehensile organs,” go empty away.—Well, in both cases, Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s, the result is illness. “My office as justice of the peace,” writes Tolstoy, “has ended in destroying my good relations with the landowners, quite aside from the fact that it injures my health.” Teaching the village children had the same result. True, in his pedagogical journal he claims that the exercises the children wrote were more accomplished than the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Goethe; yet he discerns something evil and even criminal in his intercourse with them, it seems to him that he abuses and corrupts their souls. “It seemed to go very well,” he says in the Confessions, “but I felt that I was mentally not healthy enough and that it could not go on so for much longer. I was more ailing mentally than physically; I threw it all overboard and drove out to the Kalmucks of the steppes to drink mares’ milk and lead an animal life.”—This absconding to the steppes vividly recalls the secret flight to Italy which was Goethe’s salvation, after he too had seen that it could not go on so for much longer. The thirty-four-year-old man had become silent, taciturn, in plain words melancholy. He thought it was probably natural that a man should become serious over serious things. His health was actually undermined; by the time he was six-and-thirty his face was the face of a victim of exhaustion. For the first time he thought of taking a cure. He began to be aware of the ruinous perversity of his existence; expressed his view in the shrewd understatement that he was meant for private life. And fled before destruction. The parallel continues to hold: for Leo Nikolaevich, returned from the steppes and the mares’ milk cure, marries his Sophia Alexandrovna, who from then on finds herself almost continuously in the family way, and with epic and primeval power creates his two great novels. While Goethe, back from Italy, takes Christiane Vulpius unto himself and, freed from the cares of office, gives his mind to his natural tasks. All which might serve as a gloss upon a philosophy of disease.

Art is objective, creative contemplation, closely bound up with nature. Critique, on the other hand, is the moralizing, analysing attitude toward life and nature. In other words, critique is spirit; whereas creation is the preoccupation of the children of God and nature.

“In poetry my maxim was the objective principle,” says Goethe. “I am a plastic artist.” Indeed, the contrast between Goethe’s position and that of his great counterpart (Schiller standing for idealism, moralization, rhetoric, in short for critique) is too well known to need labouring. Goethe regarded his own inborn poetic gift “quite as nature.” His tolerance, his attitude of live and let live, the complaisance of his character, are all consonant with this view. They are based on the Spinozan concept of the perfectitude and necessity of all being, on the idea of a world free from final ends and final causes, in which evil has its rights like good. “We struggle,” he declares, “to perfect the work of art as an end in itself. They, the moralists, think of the ulterior effect, about which the true artist troubles himself as little as nature does when she makes a lion or a humming-bird.” It is a primary maxim with him that art is as inimical to purpose as nature herself; and this is the point where the follower of Spinoza sympathizes with Kant, who conceives detached contemplation as the genuine æsthetic state, thus making a fundamental distinction between the æsthetic-creative principle and the ethical-critical one. “When,” says Goethe, “philosophy confirms and enhances our original feeling of our oneness with nature, turning it into a profound and tranquil contemplation, then I welcome it.” I could cite ten or twelve other places in his works, where in the name of art he repudiates the moral sanction—which indeed is always social as well. “It is possible, I suppose, for a work of art to have a moral effect; but to demand from the artist a moral purpose and intention is to spoil his craft for him.”—“I have, in my trade as a writer, never asked myself: How shall I be of service to the world at large? All I have ever done was with the view of making myself better and more full of insight, of increasing the content of my own personality; and then only of giving utterance to what I had recognized as the good and the true.”

When we contrast the Christian-social ethics of Tolstoy as an old man with Goethe’s pagan and cultural idealism, we must not forget that the Tolstoyan socialism had its origin in the most private and personal need, the profoundest concern with the salvation of one’s own soul. A permanent dissatisfaction with self, a tortured seeking for the meaning of life, was the source of this socialism. The moralist began all his teachings and reforms with a self-discipline (the Confessions, that is) such as the true and proper social critic never demands of himself. Revolutionary in the real and political sense of the word he can by no means be called. “The significance of the Christian doctrine,” he declares, “is not that in its name society shall forcibly be reformed. It is that one shall find a meaning to life.” And it should be pointed out that Tolstoy’s original conception of art corresponded precisely to Goethe’s—a fact which will surprise none but those who in all good faith accept him as a child of spirit, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, on the ground of his naïve and clumsy efforts at spiritual regeneration, and fail to recognize in him a natural nobility akin to Goethe’s own. Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, which dates from much earlier than is generally realized, undoubtedly has its roots in antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius. It was a reaction against nature, against the simple, against indifference to the moral point of view; and an impulse toward spirit—that is, toward an ethical and even social revaluation—a reaction so whole-souled, indeed, that it ended in his playing off against Shakespeare Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the creator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an absurdity which only goes to show how very much the child of nature he was. Genuine sons of spirit and of the idea, like Schiller and Dostoyevsky, do not run aground on such fantastic coasts. Tolstoy’s critical and moral faculty, in short his bias toward spirit, was but a secondary impulse, and a feeble one at that. It always balked at organic union with his mighty creative gift; we have unequivocal declarations from him to the effect that, in his view, pure creative power stood higher than talent with a social coloration. As an old man he criticized Dostoyevsky for going in for politics, much as Goethe had criticized Uhland’s activities in that line. At the age of thirty-one, in 1859, as a member of the Moscow society of the Friends of Russian Literature, he made a speech in which he so sharply accented the superiority of the purely artistic elements in literature over merits due to ulterior or ephemeral causes that the president of the society, Chomiakof, reminded him in a sharp rejoinder that a servant of pure art might very well, without knowing or wishing it, find himself indicting society.

An outburst of intellectual misgivings, of that humility of spirit to which the sons of nature are prone, occurs at the end of Tolstoy’s novel Lucerne. Here is a splendid lament over the fate of man, who, with all his need of positive redemption, is flung into an ever-billowing and shoreless ocean of good and evil. “If man,” cries Tolstoy, “had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain for ever questions! If he would only comprehend that every thought is at once false and true!... Men have divided up into sections this ever-rolling, boundless, eternally mingled chaos of good and bad; they have drawn themselves imaginary boundary-lines in this sea, and they expect the sea to divide according to their lines. As if it were not possible to make millions of other divisions, from other points of view, and on different planes!... Civilization is good, barbarism evil, freedom is good, unfreedom evil. This imaginary knowledge destroys in human nature the original blissful and instinctive striving towards good.” And asking himself whether in the souls of the poor there may not be more happiness and affirmation of life than in that of the callous rich man against whom, for his own part, his heart revolts, he bursts out with the words: “Endless is the goodness and wisdom of Him who has permitted and commanded all these contradictions. Only to you, poor worm, so presumptuously struggling to accomplish your schemes and devices, only to you do they seem contradictory. He looks mildly down from His radiant, immeasurable height and rejoices in the endless harmony wherein in endless conflict you all do move!”

Could one express oneself more “Goethically”? Even the “Harmonie des Unendlichen” is here. This is not mere philosophical or moral doubt; the words are too light, too thin, too intellectual to characterize the piety, the religious submission, the adoration of nature, that breathe from Tolstoy’s page. This is not the voice of the prophet, schoolmaster, and reformer; here speaks the child of this world, the creative artist. Nature was his element, as she was the element, the beloved, kindly mother, of Goethe—and his constant tearing at the bond which held him fast to her, his desperate urging away from her in the direction of spirit and morality, from creation to critique, has much to command our respect and reverence, though at the same time there is about it something painful, tormenting, and humiliating, which is not present in the character of Goethe. Look at Tolstoy’s attitude toward music, it is most instructive. When he met Berthold Auerbach in Dresden, that not too profound moralist told him that music is an irresponsible enjoyment, and added that irresponsible enjoyment is the first step toward immorality. Tolstoy, in his journal, made this clever and abominable phrase his own. His hatred and fear of music had the same moral and social basis as his hatred and fear of Shakespeare. We are told that at the sound of music he grew pale and his face became drawn with an expression very like horror. Notwithstanding, he was never able to live without music. In his earlier years he even founded a musical society. Before beginning work he habitually seated himself at the piano—that means a good deal. And in Moscow, when he sat beside Tschaikowsky and listened to the composer’s Quartet in D major, he began to sob at the andante, before everybody. No, unmusical he was not. Music loved him, even though he, great moralizing infant that he was, felt that he ought not to return her love.

There is that legend of the giant Antæus, who was unconquerable because fresh strength streamed into him whenever he touched his mother earth. The lives of Goethe and Tolstoy irresistibly recall that myth. Both sons of mother earth, they differ only therein, that one of them was aware of the source of his nobility, the other not. There are places in Tolstoy’s remorseful confessions where he touches the earth, and all at once his words, which, so long as they dealt in theory, were wooden and confused, are imbued with the most penetrating sensuousness, with an irresistible force and freshness of life. He recalls how once as a child he went nutting with his grandmother in the hazel-wood. Lackeys instead of horses draw the grandmother’s little carriage into the grove. They break through the undergrowth and bend the boughs, full of ripe, already dropping nuts, down into the old lady’s lap and she gathers them into a bag. Little Leo marvels at the strength of the tutor, Feodor Ivanovich, who bends the heavy branches; when he lets go they spring up again and slowly mingle with the others. “I can feel how hot it was in the sun, how pleasantly cool in the shade, how we breathed the sharp scent of the hazel leaves, while all round us the girls were cracking nuts between their teeth; we munched the full, fresh, white kernels without stopping.”—The fresh, full, white kernels cracking between the girls’ teeth: that is Antæus-Tolstoy, and the strength of his mother the earth streams through him, as it did when he wrote War and Peace, where his rather vague, fine-drawn, not very convincing philosophical digressions are followed by pages of which Turgeniev wrote: “They are glorious, they are the very best there is, everything original, everything descriptive, the hunt, the night boat-ride and all—nobody in Europe can touch him.”

And Goethe: how the Antæus-consciousness governed his whole existence! How constantly it conditioned his seeking and shaping! Nature is to him “healing and comfort” after the visitations of passion; and while he well knows that to know her “one must have moulded all the manifestations of the human being into one definite and distinct entity,” that true research is unthinkable without the gift of imagination, he is wary of the fantastic, avoids speculative natural philosophy, guards himself against losing touch with the earth, and calls the idea “the result of experience.” The imagination that guides his research is intuitive, it is the inborn sympathy of the child of nature with the organic. It is Antæan, like the imaginative power which conditions his creative art, nor is that, either, capricious in its nature, but precise and based on the sense-perceptions. Such is the imagination of the creative artist. The sons of the thought, of the idea, of spirit, theirs is another kind. We will not say that the one creates more reality than the other. But the figures created by the plastic fancy possess the realism of sheer being; while those created by the “sentimental” artist evince their actuality by action. Schiller himself makes this distinction. Apart from the things they do, he himself confesses, they have something shadowy—“etwas Schattenhaftes” is his expression. Translate this from the sphere of German idealism into the Russian and revelational, and you get, as a sort of national pendant to Schiller’s world of idea, rhetoric, and drama, the shadow-world of Dostoyevsky, over-life-size and exaggeratedly true. A catchword occurs to one from the philosophy of art, that is in everybody’s mouth today, or at least was yesterday: the word “expressionism.” Really, what we call expressionism is only a late form, strongly impregnated with the Russian and revelational, of romantic idealism. Its conflict with the epic attitude toward art, the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in on the one side Goethe and Tolstoy, on the other Schiller and Dostoyevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm, and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered, and dogmatic presumption of spirit.

Very much, yes, precisely as Goethe’s “profound and tranquil contemplation,” his precise and sensuous fancy, the lifelikeness of his characters, stand in relation to the ideal visions of Schiller and the activism of his creations, so the mighty sense-appeal of Tolstoy’s art stands to Dostoyevsky’s sickly, distorted dream-and-soul world. Indeed, the contrast becomes even more pointed by reason of differences between nations and periods. Tolstoy, the realistic novelist, the prince-and-peasant scion of a race still young, displays in his art a sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal, than does the German humanist and classicist, bourgeois-born and patrician-bred, in his.

Compared with Eduard and Charlotte, the lovers in the Wahlverwandtschaften, Vronsky and Anna are like a fine strong stallion and a noble mare. The comparison is not mine; it has often been made. A certain school of Russian criticism, hostile, of course, and on a low plane, found most offensive Tolstoy’s animalism, his unheard-of interest in the life of the body, his genius for bringing home to us man’s physical being. These critics wrote, for instance, that Anna Karenine reeked with the classic odour of babies’ diapers. They raved at the salaciousness of certain scenes, and ironically reproached Tolstoy for omitting to describe how Anna takes her bath and Vronsky washes himself. They were wrong even in the fact; for Tolstoy does tell us how Vronsky washes, we see him rubbing his red body. And in War and Peace we are vouchsafed a glimpse of Napoleon naked, in the scene where he has his fat back sprayed with eau-de-Cologne. A critic wrote in Die Tat about this book: “Its main theme is the satisfaction of any and every human being within the fold of wedded bliss, conceived in the grossest sense.” And then the same critic, parodying Tolstoy’s style, proposed to him that he write another novel treating of Levin’s love for his cow Pania.

All this, of course, is on a lower plane than the criticism of Goethe which Caroline Herder wrote to Knebel: “Oh, if he would only give some soul to his characters! If only there were not so much philandering in everything that he writes, or, as he himself so likes to call it, so much ‘good feeling.’” But unenlightened comment such as this may very well be illuminating none the less, even though unawares and as it were on false pretences; and these remarks, in their folly, do undoubtedly contain a grain of truth. Caroline’s “philandering” is a mincing, sentimental word to characterize what Goethe wrote; yet it has a certain aptness, if the comparison is between his frank realism and the lofty insubstantiality of Schiller’s world. It is not such a bad joke, either, to make Levin fall in love with his cow. It hits off the fleshliness of Tolstoy’s art as contrasted with the holy soulfulness of Dostoyevsky’s—especially when we remember Tolstoy’s personal passion for one of the preoccupations of farm life—namely, the breeding of cattle and pigs. It is an interest quite proper, of course, to a landed proprietor; yet where so strongly marked as this surely not quite without deeper meaning.

I am still resolved not to pass judgment. I did, indeed, throw out the question of nobility, the matter of rank. But I am wary of hasty decisions, and even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand and my faith in its ultimate fruitfulness. Why should I not be a cautious judge of the swaying battle, when I know that what I called above the arrogance of spirit is one with that great and highly affecting principle which we call freedom?

Schiller’s loftiest boast is the freedom of the singer. But Goethe’s attitude toward the conception of freedom is at all times cautious, not only in the political field, but consistently, fundamentally, and in every connexion. Of Schiller he says: “In his latter years, when he had had enough of freedom in a physical sense, he went over to it in the realm of the ideal, and I might almost say that it killed him; for it caused him to make demands on his physical powers that were altogether too much for them. I have great respect for the categorical imperative, I know how much good can come of it; but one must not carry it too far, for then this idea of the ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”—I confess that this habit of using Schiller’s heroic life to point a warning against exaggerations in the use of the categorical imperative has always made me smile. To confront the moral with the natural is always humorous. But in other places where this child of God expresses himself about heroes and saints his words have quite a different ring and bear witness frankly and sincerely to the nobility of spirit. He declared one day that he passed for an aristocrat, but that Schiller was at bottom much more of a one than he. The remark bears directly upon the problem of aristocracy: certainly not in the political field, nor yet to the fact that Schiller had spoken of the “eternally blind,” to whom one must not lend Heaven’s torches of light; no, it has immediate reference to the aristocracy of spirit, which Goethe was at the moment comparing with his own, the aristocracy of nature, and finding it the more lofty of the two. “Nothing disturbed him,” he says admiringly, “nothing constrained him, nothing distracted the flight of his thoughts. He was as great at the tea-table as he would have been in the council-chamber.” This admiring wonder rises from the depths of Goethe’s Antæus-nature, which had no consciousness at all of a freedom like that, of such independence and unrestraint. Rather he knew himself to be constantly conditioned by a hundred circumstances; influenced, obligated, willingly indeed, with a certain pride in his earth-bound aristocracy, yet influenced and obligated none the less. Pantheistic necessity was the fundamental feeling of his existence. It is not enough to say he did not believe in the freedom of the will. He denied the conception, he denied that such a thing was even conceivable. “We belong to the laws of nature,” he says, “even when we rebel against them; we are working with her, even when we work against her.” That dæmonic determinism of his whole being was often felt by others. They said he was possessed, and not able to act voluntarily. His earth-bound state manifested itself, for instance, in such sensitiveness to weather that he called himself a regular barometer. And we may not take it that he felt his dependence, which amounted to compulsion, as personally lowering, or that his will had ever rebelled against it. The will is the spirit: nature is by way of being mild and easy-going. Thus the aristocrat in bondage may feel a noble pride as he bends the knee to the dark power to which he belongs and which guides him so well; and yet be capable, as Goethe’s case shows at least, of a gesture of elegant homage before the aristocracy of freedom. “Denn hinter ihm,” says Goethe in the Epilogue to The Bell, with reference to Schiller: