THE struggle was ended; the struggle that had lasted for eighty-two years, whose battlefield was this life of ours. A tragic and glorious mellay, in which all the forces of life took part; all the vices and all the virtues. – All the vices excepting one: untruth, which he pursued incessantly, tracking it into its last resort and refuge.
In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the conflict of passions in the stormy darkness, illuminated from time to time by dazzling flashes of light – crises of love and ecstasy and visions of the Eternal. Years of the Caucasus, of Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and restless youth. Then the great peace of the first years of marriage. The happiness of love, of art, of nature – War and peace. The broad daylight of genius, which bathed the whole human horizon, and the spectacle of those struggles which for the soul of the artist were already things of the past. He dominated them, was master of them, and already they were not enough. Like Prince Andrei, his eyes were turned towards the vast skies which shone above the battlefield. It was this sky that attracted him:
“There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure leads to alight in the midst of the crowd, when their pinions are broken; such, for instance, am I. Then they beat their broken wings; they launch themselves desperately, but fall anew. The wings will mend. I shall fly high. May God help me!”
These words were written in the midst of a terrible spiritual tempest, of which the Confessions are the memory and echo. More than once was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his pinions shattered. But he always persevered. He started afresh. We see him hovering in “the vast, profound heavens,”with his two great wings, of which one is reason and the other faith. But he does not find the peace he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest of his passions. There he perceives the apostles of renunciation, and he brings to renunciation the same ardour that he brought to life. But it is always life that he strains to him, with the violence of a lover. He is “maddened with life.”He is “intoxicated with life.”He cannot live without this madness. He is drunk at once with happiness and with unhappiness, with death and with immortality. His renunciation of individual life is only a cry of exalted passion towards the eternal life. The peace which he finds, the peace of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace of death. It is rather the calm of those burning worlds which sail by the forces of gravity through the infinite spaces. With him anger is calm, and the calm is blazing. Faith has given him new weapons with which to wage, even more implacably, unceasing war upon the lies of modern society. He no longer confines himself to a few types of romance; he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, socialism, popular education, benevolence, pacificism. He strikes at all, delivers his desperate attacks upon all.
From time to time the world has sight of these great rebellious spirits, who, like John the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a corrupted civilisation. The last of these was Rousseau. By his love of nature, by his hatred of modern society, by his jealous independence, by his fervent adoration of the Gospel and for Christian morals, Rousseau is a precursor of Tolstoy, who says of him:
“Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that I should have written them.”
But what a difference between the two minds, and how much more purely Christian is Tolstoy’s! What a lack of humility, what Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry from the Confessions of the Genevese: