condemns modern culture on account of the differentiation and segregation which it produces, and the art of Shakespeare, Beet-hoven and Pushkin, because it splits men up into different strata instead of uniting them. That which might be spoken of as collectivism and the fight against class distinctions in Tolstoy’s theories, has hardly anything to do, however, with democracy and socialism; it is more the nostalgia of a lonely intellectual for a community from which he awaits above all his own redemption.—When Christ called upon the rich young man to distribute all his possessions among the poor, he wanted, according to Henry George’s interpretation, to help the rich young man, not the poor. Tolstoy also thought that it was the ‘rich young man’ who needed helping. Self-perfection and spiritual salvation are his own goal. This spiritualism and self-centredness explain the unreal, Utopian character of his social gospel and the inner contradictions of his political doctrine. It is this private moral ideal that determines his quietism, his rejection of violent resistance to evil and his endeavour to reform souls, instead of social realities. ‘Nothing does more harm to men’, he writes in his appeal ‘To the Working Class’ after the Revolution of 1905, ‘than the idea that the causes of their distress lie not in themselves but in external conditions.’ Tolstoy’s passive attitude to external reality is in accordance with the pacifism of the saturated ruling class and, with its brooding, self-accusing, self-torturing moralism, it expresses an approach completely alien to the thinking and feeling of the common people.
But Tolstoy can no more be forced into a narrow political category than Dostoevsky. He is an incorruptible observer of social reality, a sincere friend of truth and justice and an unspar-ing critic of capitalism, although he judges the inadequacies and sins of modern society purely and simply from the point of view of the peasantry and agriculture
in general. He fails, on the other hand, to recognize the real causes of the grievances and he preaches a morality which implies an a priori renunciation of all political activity.184 Tolstoy is not only no revolutionary, but he is a decided enemy of all revolutionary attitudes; what distinguishes him, however, from the advocates of ‘order’ and appeasement in the West, the Balzacs, Flauberts and Goncourts, is the fact that he shows even less understanding for the terrorism of the government than for that of the revolutionaries. The murder of Alexander II leaves him quite unmoved, but he protests against the execution of the assassins.185 In spite of his prejudices and errors, Tolstoy represents an enormous revolutionary force. His fight against the lies of the police state and the Church, his enthusiasm for the community of the peasantry and the example of his own life are, whatever may have been the inner motives of his ‘conversion’ and his ultimate flight, among the ferments which undermined the old society and promoted not merely the Russian revolution but also the anti-capitalistic revolutionary movement in the whole of Europe. In the case of Tolstoy one can, in fact, speak not only of a ‘triumph of realism’, but also of a ‘triumph of socialism’, not only of the unprejudiced description of society by an aristocrat, but of the revolutionary influence of a reactionary.
Its uncompromising rationalism preserves Tolstoy’s art and philosophical doctrine from the fate of sterility and ineffectiveness. His sharp and sober eye for physical and psychical facts, and his aversion to lying to himself and others, keep his religiosity free from all mysticism and dogmatism and allows his belief in Christian morality to develop into a political factor of great influence. Dostoevsky’s enthusiasm for Russian orthodoxy is just as foreign to him as the ecclesiastical bias of the Slavophils in general. He reaches his faith by a rational, pragmatic and thoroughly unspontaneous way.186 His so-called conversion is an entirely rational process, which takes place without any direct religious experience. It was, as he says in his Confession, ‘a feeling of fear, of being orphaned and lonely’ that made him a Christian. Not a mystical experience of God and the supernatural, but dissatisfaction with himself, the attempt to find a purpose and an aim in life, despair at his own nothingness and instability, and, above all, his boundless fear of death turn him into a believer. He becomes the apostle of love, because he himself is lacking in love, he glorifies human solidarity, to make up for his mistrust of and contempt for man, and he proclaims the immortality of the human soul, because he cannot bear the thought of death. But his flight from the world has more the character of aristocratic lordliness than of Christian humility; he renounces the world because it cannot be completely mastered and possessed.
The concept of grace is the only irrational element in Tolstoy’s religious philosophy.—He admits into his ‘folk tales’ an old iegend based on medieval sources: Long ago there lived a pious hermit on a lonely island. One day fishermen landed near his hut, amongst them an old man who was so simple-minded that he could barely express himself, indeed he could not even pray. The hermit was profoundly upset by such ignorance and with great trouble and pains taught him the Lord’s prayer. The old man thanked him kindly and left the island with the other fishermen. After some time, when the boat had already vanished in the distance, the holy man suddenly saw a human figure on the horizon walking towards the island on the surface of the water. Soon he recognized the old man, his pupil, and went towards him, speechless and perplexed, to meet him as he set foot on the island. Stammering, the old man gave him to understand that he had forgotten the prayer. ‘You do not need to pray,’ replied the hermit, and left the
old man hurrying back over the water to his fishing boat.—The meaning of this story lies in the idea of a certainty of salvation which is tied to no moral criteria. In another story of his later years, Father Sergius, Tolstoy represents the theme from the opposite angle; the grace which is bestowed on one man without effort, and apparently without merit, is denied to another, in spite of all manner of torment and agony, in spite of the most superhuman sacrifices and the most heroic self-conquest. This conception of grace, which places election above merit and equates predestination with gift and chance, is obviously more deeply related to Tolstoy’s aristocratic background than to his Christianity.
The optimism of the healthy, self-confident aristocrat, who turns War and Peace into an apotheosis of organic, vegetative, endlessly creative life, into a great idyll, a ‘naïve heroic epic’, on whose highest point, as Merezhkovsky remarks with such relish, the novelist plants the napkins of Nastasya’s babies ‘as the guiding banner of mankind’187— this pantheistic optimism is obscured in Anna Karenina and approaches the pessimistic mood of Western literature, but the disillusionment with the conven-tionalism and obtuseness of modern culture expressed here is utterly different from that of Flaubert or Maupassant. The triumph of real life over the romanticism of the emotions was already intermingled with some melancholy in War and Peace, and Tolstoy had already struck a Flaubertian note in his earlier work, thus for example in Family Happiness, by describing the degeneration of the great passions, especially the transformation of love into friendship. The discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, between poetry and prose, youth and old age, never seems so bleak, however, in Tolstoy as in the French writers. His disillusionment never leads to nihilism, never leads to an impeachment of life in general. The novel of Western Europe is always full of a querulous self-pity and self- dramatization of the hero in conflict with reality; here external conditions, society, the state, the social environment, always bear the blame for the antagonism. With Tolstoy, on the other hand, the subjective personality is just as much to blame as objective reality, if it comes to a clash.188 For, if the life which disillusions is too soulless, the disillusioned hero is too soulful, too poetic, too Utopian; if the one is lacking in tolerance for dreamers, the other lacks a sense of reality.
The fact that the form of Tolstoy’s novels is so different from the West European is bound up in the main with this concept of the self and the world and its deviation from the Flaubertian conception. The distance from the naturalistic norm is here, in fact, just as great as in Dostoevsky, only Tolstoy’s remoteness from it lies in the opposite direction. If Dostoevsky’s novels have a dramatic structure, then Tolstoy’s have an epic—epopee- like—character. No attentive reader can ever have failed to feel the surging Homeric flow of these novels, or ever have failed to experience the panoramic, all-embracing picture of the world which they unfold. Tolstoy himself compared his novels to Homer, and the comparison has become a stock formula of Tolstoy criticism. The unromantic, undramatic and unemphatic quality of the form, the forgoing of all theatrical climaxes and intensity, have always been regarded as Homeric. The dramatic concentration of the novel, which first took place with the transformation from the picaresque form of the eighteenth century to the biographical form of pre-romanticism, was not yet adopted by Tolstoy in War and Peace. He considers the conflict between the individual and society not as an unavoidable tragedy, but as a calamity which he attributes, following the eighteenth-century view, to a lack of insight, understanding and moral seriousness. He still lives in the age of the Russian enlightenment, in an intellectual atmosphere of faith in
the world and faith in the future. But while he is working at Anna Karenina, he loses this optimism, and above all his belief in art, which he declares to be absolutely useless, indeed harmful, unless it renounces the refinements and subtleties of modern naturalism and impressionism and turns a luxury article into the universal possession of mankind. In the estrangement of art from the broad masses and the restriction of its public to an ever smaller circle Tolstoy had recognized a real danger. There is no doubt but that the extension of this circle and contact with culturally less exclusive strata of society might well have had fruitful results for art. But how was such a change to be brought about methodically and according to plan, unless the artists who had grown up and were firmly rooted in the tradition of modern art were not prevented from producing works of art and unless it was not made as easy as possible for the dilettanti, who were foreign to this tradition, to engage in artistic activities—to the disadvantage of the others? Tolstoy’s rejection of the highly developed and refined art of the present, and his fondness for the primitive, ‘universally human’ forms of artistic expression, is a symptom of the same Rousseauism with which he plays off the village against the town and identifies the social question with that of the peasantry. It is quite easy to understand why Tolstoy had not much use for Shakespeare, for example. How could a puritan, who hated all exuberance and virtuosity, have found any pleasure in the mannerism of a poet, even though he were the greatest poet of all time? But it is inconceivable that a man who created such artistically exacting works as Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych accepted without reservations out of the whole of modern literature, apart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, only Schiller’s Robbers, Hugo’s Misérables, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from Underground and George Eliot’s Adam Bede.189 Tolstoy’s relationship to art can only be understood as the symptom of a historic change, as the sign of a development which brings the aesthetic culture of the nineteenth century to an end and a generation to the fore that judges art once again as the mediator of ideas.190
What this generation revered in the author of War and Peace was by no means merely the great novelist, the creator of the greatest novel in the literature of the world, but above all the social reformer and the founder of a religion. Tolstoy enjoyed the fame of Voltaire, the popularity of Rousseau, the authority of Goethe and, more than that—he became a legendary figure, whose prestige was reminiscent of that of the old seers and prophets. Yasnaya Polyana became a place to which the members of all nations, social classes and cultural strata went on pilgrimage, and admired the old count in the peasant’s smock as if he were a saint. Gorky will not have been the only one to have seen him and thought ‘This man is like to God!’, a confession with which the unbeliever ends his memories of Tolstoy.191 Many will certainly have had the feeling, as did Thomas Mann, that Europe became ‘without a master’ after his death.192 But these were only feelings and moods, words of gratitude and loyalty. Tolstoy was doubtless something very much like the living con-science of Europe, the great teacher and educator, who expressed, as did no other, the moral unrest and desire for spiritual renewal of his generation, but, with his naïve Rousseauism and quietism, he would never have been able to remain—if he ever really was—the ‘master’ of Europe. For, it may well be sufficient for an artist, as Chekhov thought, to put the right questions, but a man who was to rule over his century would also have to answer them aright.
The frontiers between naturalism and impressionism are fluid; it is impossible to make a clear-cut historical or conceptual distinction between them. The smoothness of the stylistic change corresponds to the continuity of the simultaneous economic development and the stability of social conditions. 1871 is of merely passing significance in the history of France. The predominance of the upper middle class remains essentially unchanged and the conservative Republic takes the place of the ‘liberal’ Empire—that ‘republic without republicans’,193 which is acquiesced in only because it seems to guarantee the smoothest possible solution of the political problems. But a friendly relationship is established with it only after the supporters of the Commune have been rooted out and comfort has been found in the theory of the necessity and the healing power of bleeding.194 The intelligentsia confronts events in a state of absolute helplessness. Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, and with them most of the intellectual leaders of the age, indulge in wild insults and imprecations against the disturbers of the peace. From the Republic they hope at the most for protection against clericalism, and they see in democracy merely the lesser of the two evils.195 Financial and industrial capitalism develops consistently along the lines long since laid down; but, under the surface, important, though for the time being still unobtrusive changes are taking place. Economic life is entering the stage of high capitalism and developing from a ‘free play of forces’ into a rigidly organized and rationalized system, into a close-meshed net of spheres of interest, customs territories, fields of monopoly, cartels, trusts and syndicates. And just as it was feasible for this standardization and concentration of economic life to be called a sign of senility,196 so the marks of insecurity and the omens of dissolution can be recognized throughout middle-class society. It is true that the Commune ends with a more complete defeat for the rebels than any previous revolution, but it is the first to be sustained by an international labour movement and to be followed by a victory for the bourgeoisie associated with a feeling of acute danger.197 This mood of crisis leads to a renewal of the idealistic and mystical trends and produces, as a reaction against the prevailing pessimism, a strong tide of faith. It is only in the course of this development that impressionism loses its connection with naturalism and becomes transformed, especially in literature, into a new form of romanticism.
The enormous technical developments that take place must not induce us to overlook the feeling of crisis that was in the air. The crisis itself must rather be seen as an incentive to new technical achievements and improvements of methods of production.198 Certain signs of the atmosphere of crisis make themselves felt in all the manifestations of technical activity. It is above all the furious speed of the development and the way the pace is forced that seems pathological, particularly when compared with the rate of progress in earlier periods in the history of art and culture. For the rapid development of technology not only accelerates the change of fashion, but also the shifting emphases in the criteria of aesthetic taste; it often brings about a senseless and fruitless mania for innovation, a restless striving for the new for the mere sake of novelty. Industrialists are compelled to intensify the demand for improved products by artificial means and must not allow the feeling that the new is always better to cool down, if they really want to profit from the achievements of technology.199 The continual and increasingly rapid replacement of old articles in everyday use by new ones leads, however, to a diminished
affection for material and soon also for intellectual possessions, too, and readjusts the speed at which philosophical and artistic revaluations occur to that of changing fashion. Modern technology thus introduces an unprecedented dynamism in the whole attitude to life and it is above all this new feeling of speed and change that finds expression in impressionism.
The most striking phenomenon connected with the progress of technology is the development of cultural centres into large cities in the modern sense; these form the soil in which the new art is rooted. Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous