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Title: Three essays
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator: H. T. Lowe-Porter
Release date: September 7, 2025 [eBook #76837]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE ESSAYS ***
THOMAS MANN
THREE
ESSAYS
_Translated
from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter_
NEW YORK · ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1929
COPYRIGHT 1922, 1925 BY S. FISCHER VERLAG, BERLIN
COPYRIGHT 1929 BY ALFRED · A · KNOPF · INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1929
SECOND PRINTING NOVEMBER, 1929
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS
_Friedrich und Die Grosse Koalition_
IN
REDE UND ANTWORT
AND AS
_Goethe und Tolstoi_ and _Okkulte Erlebnisse_
IN
BEMÜHUNGEN
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I · GOETHE AND TOLSTOY · 3
II · FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION · 143
III · AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT · 219
I
GOETHE AND TOLSTOY
GOETHE AND TOLSTOY
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:
_Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,
Ihren Lieblingen ganz:
Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz._
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,
“_Nur dies Herz, es ist von Dauer,
Schwillt in Jugendlichstem Flor;
Unter Schnee und Nebelschauer
Rast ein Ätna dir hervor.
Du beschämst wie Morgenröte
Jener Gipfel ernste Wand,
Und noch einmal fühlet Hatem
Frühlingshauch und Sommerbrand._”
“_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?
_Wie sie sich an mich verschwendet,
Bin ich mir ein wertes Ich;
Hätte sie sich weggewendet,
Augenblicks verlör’ ich mich._
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,_
_Und die Säfte beginnen, im Gliede gesondert zu kreisen:
Aber so ist auch der Mensch, fürcht’ ich, ein Schmerz nur in Gott._”
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:
_Denn hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine._
Truly this is homage which breathes a spirit of the most profound
resignation. For what _is_ “_das Gemeine_”? Nothing else than the
natural, from the point of view of spirit and of freedom. For freedom
is spirit; it is release from nature, rebellion against her; it is
humanity conceived as emancipation from the natural and its bondage,
this emancipation being the thing that is actually human and worthy
of humanity. Here we see the question of aristocracy flowing together
with that of human dignity. Which is finer, which worthier of humanity,
freedom or bonds, self-will or submission, the moral or the natural?
If I refuse to answer, it is in the conviction that this question can
never be answered with finality.
But, on the other hand, the moral “sentimentalist” can be no
“sentimentalist” at all if he does not on his side display an even
livelier and profounder eagerness to pay homage to the aristocracy
which is of nature. Unquestionably there is a certain charming humility
in the attitude of spirit toward nature, a delicate readiness, often
quite unrequited, to pay her respect, which is one of the greatest
and most touching phenomena of the higher life. Dostoyevsky read
Tolstoy’s early work _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_ in Siberia, in the
periodical called _The Contemporary_, and was so taken with it that he
inquired on all sides after the anonymous author. “Calm, deep, clear,
yet unfathomable as nature is unfathomable, that is the impression it
leaves,” he writes. “There it is, and everything, even the smallest
detail, shows the beautiful unity of the temperament from which it
flows.”--No, these are not Dostoyevsky’s words, though they might
have been. It is Schiller who writes thus, about _Wilhelm Meister_,
in that letter in which, for the first time, he apostrophizes Goethe
as “Dearest Friend”: an emotional form of address, in which, so far
as I know, Goethe never explicitly acquiesced. Dostoyevsky wrote
the profoundest and most loving of all existing critiques of _Anna
Karenine_; a masterpiece of enthusiastic exposition, which Tolstoy,
perhaps, never even read (he never did read criticisms of his works),
to say nothing of his ever feeling impelled to write reviews of
anything by Dostoyevsky. When Feodor Michaelovich died, Tolstoy is
said to have said: “I loved that man very much.” But his consciousness
of the fact came a little late in the day; for while Dostoyevsky was
alive Tolstoy never troubled his head about him; while afterwards, in
a letter to Strachof, Dostoyevsky’s biographer, he compared him with
a horse, who seemed a splendid creature and worth a thousand roubles,
until suddenly he went lame, and then the fine strong animal was not
worth a groschen. “The longer I live,” he said, “the more I think of
men who are not lame.” But this horse-philosophy, as applied to the
author of _The Brothers Karamazof_ does not seem quite happy, to put it
mildly.
We know, and we rejoice to know, that in the case of Goethe and
Schiller nature’s attitude to spirit was altogether more brotherly
and dignified, and on a higher plane. But if Goethe played here too
the part of Hatem, the richly bestowing and receiving one, he did not
after all take from the dear friend more than he gave him, to say
nothing of all he gave by virtue of his mere existence, unconsciously,
involuntarily. Was not Schiller’s part in the relationship, after all,
that of service? I think so, myself, simply because it lies in the
nature of the thing, because Schiller did not in the least need, to
keep him fruitful, the meed of praise, love, inspiration, which he
bestowed upon Goethe. And I note that such a letter as his famous first
one, which knit the bond between them, in which with kindly hand he
“gave the sum” of Goethe’s life, he never did get from Goethe in return.
One utterance of Schiller’s to Goethe has always delighted me, it seems
to characterize the relationship so wonderfully. I mean the passage
in a letter where he warns Goethe against Kant, his own spiritual
master and his idol. Goethe, he tells him, can only be a Spinozan; his
beautiful simple nature would be at once vitiated by contact with a
philosophy of freedom. It is no more and no less than the problem of
irony which we catch sight of here: without exception the profoundest
and most fascinating in the world. For we see here that nothing is
more foreign to spirit than a desire to convert nature to itself.
It warns nature against itself. To the moral “sentimentalist,” all
that is nature seems beautiful and highly worth preserving. Knowledge
feels that life is beautiful; and this is the feeling of the moral
for the simple, of the holy for the divine, of nature for spirit; and
in this peculiarly absolute judgment of values resides the ironic
god, resides Eros. Spirit accordingly enters into a relationship with
nature which is in a sense erotic, in a sense determined by male-female
sex-polarity. And by virtue of the relation it can venture to abase
itself and dare the ultimate self-surrender, without thereby resigning
any of its own nobility. Indeed, it will always retain the accent of a
certain tender contempt. In Hölderlin’s lines precisely this emotional
irony is immortalized:
_Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich._
On the other hand, this simple nature too has an ironic mood, which
is one with the objectivity of its character and precisely coincides
with the conception of poetry, inasmuch as it lifts itself above
its subject, above joy and grief, good and bad, death and life, to
play freely with them. Goethe speaks of this mood in _Dichtung und
Wahrheit_, with reference to Herder.
It is plain that what kept Goethe apart from Schiller so long was,
more than anything else, the latter’s prepossessions on the subject
of freedom: his conception of human dignity, which was entirely based
on the dictatorship of spirit--that is, was entirely revolutionary in
character--which conceived in this emancipated sense all humanity, all
nobility, all human nobility--and that, to a nature like Goethe’s,
must have seemed both odious and insulting to nature. It is, for
instance, certain _a priori_ that Goethe took the greatest umbrage at
the famous essay _Über Anmut und Würde_. In it occur things like the
following: “Movements which have as principle only animal sensuousness
belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to physical
nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were possible to
have grace in the manifestations of physical appetites and instincts,
grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve as the
expression of humanity.” That one might describe as idealistic malice
of spirit against nature, and so Goethe must have regarded it. For it
is audacious to assert that grace cannot come out of the sensuous, nor
nature reach to grace. Grace, then, is not a manifestation worthy of
humanity; for that desire can express itself with charm, and instinct
with grace, is a “charming” fact of experience. And when Schiller goes
on to say: “Grace is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by
the subject itself ... it is the beauty of form under the influence
of free will; it is the beauty of those particular phenomena which
the person himself determines. The architectonic beauty does honour
to the author of nature; grace does honour to him who possesses it.
That is a gift, this is a personal merit”--the moral distinction
he draws between talent and personal merit becomes a consummate
affront to Goethe’s vital consciousness and his aristocratic feeling.
“Fools never think,” says Goethe, “how fortune and merit are linked
together.” What he means by “fortune” is what Schiller calls “nature”
and “talent,” and distinguishes from free human merit. While Goethe,
half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the
word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to
talk about “inborn merit.” Everybody is free to call this a logical
contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a
metaphysical certainty higher than itself; and Goethe, who on the
whole was certainly no metaphysician, undoubtedly felt the problem of
freedom to be a metaphysical one. That is to say, an undemonstrable
intuition told him that freedom, and therewith merit and demerit, were
not a matter of the empirical but of the intelligible world; that, to
speak with Schopenhauer, freedom does not consist in _operari_ but in
_esse_. Herein lies the humbleness of his aristocracy, the aristocracy
of his humility; both of them so categorically opposed to Schiller’s
idealistic evaluations, his personal and moral pride in his freedom.
Goethe, when he wants to characterize the principle which composes his
essential nature, speaks humbly and gratefully of a “gift of fortune.”
But the conception of a “gift,” of “grace,” is more aristocratic than
one might think. What it means is the indissoluble union of fortune and
merit, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in short “inborn merit”;
and the gratitude, the humility, carry with them that metaphysical
consciousness of being at all times and absolutely certain of the
favour of destiny.
There is, in Goethe’s case, an amazing bit of evidence on this point,
which I cannot refrain from quoting. Speaking of Bentham, he says it
is the height of madness for the man, at his age, to be so radical. He
is answered that if His Excellence had been born in England he could
hardly have escaped being a radical and reformer. Whereat Goethe, with
Mephistophelian mien: “What do you take me for? You think I would be
spying out abuses and tacking names on to them? I, who if I had been
born in England would have been living on abuses? If I had been born
in England I should have been a duke, or better still a bishop with
revenues of thirty thousand pounds sterling.”--“Very fine. But suppose
Your Excellence had not drawn the big prize in the lottery; suppose you
had drawn a blank?” To which Goethe: “Not everybody, my dear friend,
is _made for the big prize_. Do you think I should have played such a
foolish trick (_sottise_) as to draw a blank?”
All that, of course, is in jest. But is it only in jest? Does it
not rather voice that deep metaphysical certainty that never and
under no circumstances should he or could he be other than favoured
and privileged, ever other than well-born? And in this certainty is
there not after all something like a consciousness of freedom of the
will, if only of freedom after the event? Really, it is priceless.
To be born into the world a starving revolutionary, an idealistic
“sentimentalist,” that he calls a _sottise_. Is that the irony the
children of God wreak on the children of spirit? If there be such a
thing as inborn merit, then there is inborn demerit as well; and if
it is a _sottise_ to come into the world an average man, or poor, or
sick, or stupid, then the criminal is indeed not only empirically but
metaphysically culpable. For merit and reward, guilt and punishment,
are conceptions that belong together. And one punishment at least,
all those merit who have committed the _sottise_ of drawing a blank
in life’s lottery: that of eternal destruction; whereas the chosen
ones get eternal life too at the end. “_Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb,
noch Edles will, gehört den Elementen an; so fahret hin!_” But as the
possibility of nobly aspiring and achieving a name is not a matter
of empirical freedom of the will, this “_so fahret hin_” is a piece
of gross heartlessness. And if the conception of election by grace,
to which that of metaphysical depravity corresponds, is a Christian
conception, at any rate it shows Christianity turning its aristocratic
side outwards.
* * * * *
I said awhile back that it seemed to me not accidental that Schiller
and Dostoyevsky were sick men and did not, like Goethe and Tolstoy,
arrive at a reverend length of days. Rather I was inclined to regard
their poor health as fundamental to their characters. Quite as symbolic
is the further external fact, that the two great realists and creative
artists were of upper station, born to a privileged social status,
whereas the heroes and saints of the idea, Schiller and Dostoyevsky,
one the son of a Swabian army surgeon and the other of a Moscow
hospital physician, were the children of modest people and spent all
their days in pinched and homely, one might almost say undignified
circumstances. I call this biographical fact symbolic, because it
testifies to the Christianity of the spirit, whose kingdom, as the
Scriptures say, is not of this world--in personalities as little as
in the realm of the ideal and the artistic. Wherein it opposes a
perpetual contrast to the kingdom of nature and nature’s favourites,
whose rank and essence are quite and entirely “of this world,” the
physical, pagan world. Therein lies their “realism.” And they were,
both Tolstoy and Goethe, realists enough to feel a naïve enjoyment in
their privileged status, yes, in a sort to lay stress upon it and show
themselves imbued by a consciousness of it; which would impress one as
curiously unenlightened were it not plain that they themselves regard
it in a symbolic sense and even rather childishly assimilate it in
their own minds to their consciousness of their higher, extra-social,
human aristocracy. Goethe’s patrician birth was so dear to him that his
patent of nobility, when he had it in his hands, meant “nothing, simply
nothing.” “We Frankfort patricians,” he said, “always felt ourselves
like nobility.” But in the same conversation and connexion, by way of
refuting a slur upon himself as the obsequious servant of royalty, he
puts it thus: “Yes, I felt so much at ease (_so wohl in meiner Haut_),
and so very much the aristocrat, that if they had made me a prince
it would not have surprised me.” I may say in passing that it would
have become him to be a prince. Had he taken up Napoleon’s invitation
to transfer his activity to Paris, had he written there the _Cæsar_
Napoleon wanted him to write, in which he need only have given vent
to the hatred he had felt as a youth for the “base, the contemptible
murder,” the Emperor would certainly have made him a prince, as by his
own account he would have done for Corneille as well. My point is to
show how, in Goethe’s mind, the consciousness of his social position
lay very close to that of his nobility as a human being, as a child
of God. The two flow together in one and the same consciousness of
nobility, or “inborn merit.”
Count Leo Tolstoy came, as we know, from one of the oldest and finest
of Russian families. When we read his books, _Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth_, or _Anna Karenine_, that picture of high life in Moscow, we
are impressed with the fact that the author is a man who was brought
up with all the advantages. We get the same feeling when we read
_Dichtung und Wahrheit_ or _Die Wahlverwandtschaften_. And in Tolstoy
too we find the same familiar and perhaps childish phenomenon we
noticed in Goethe: his noble blood and the distinction conferred
by his great gifts both belonged to him quite simply because they
belonged to him, and his consciousness of them mingled in his joy in
himself, of which, despite all his attacks of poverty of spirit, he
possessed a very great deal. His fame as a writer, so he wrote to
his father-in-law, delights him very much; he finds it most pleasant
to be an author _and_ a nobleman. An author and a nobleman--all his
Christianity, all his anarchism, to the contrary and notwithstanding,
he never ceased to be a striking combination of those two. When
Turgeniev first made the acquaintance of the youthful Tolstoy he said:
“Not a word, not a gesture of his is natural. He is constantly posing;
it is a mystery to me how such a sensible man can take such childish
pride in his silly title.” This is the same Turgeniev who wrote to a
French publisher: “I am not worthy to untie his shoe-laces”; so it
is unlikely that the first-quoted remark misrepresents the facts. As
for the aged Tolstoy, Gorky relates: “His comfortable, democratic
manner took many people in; and I have often seen Russians, who judge
people by their clothes, gush over him with their famous ‘simplicity
of manner,’ which might better be called ‘beastly familiarity.’ And
suddenly, from under his peasant beard, and his rumpled democratic
blouse, the old Russian _Barin_, the aristocrat of aristocrats, would
peep forth; and in the chill that emanated from him the confiding
visitor’s nose would be frost-bitten. It was a joy to see this
blue-blooded creature: the noble charm of his gestures, the haughty
reticence of his speech, the murderous and fastidious sharpness of
his tongue. He displayed just so much of the _Barin_ as these servile
souls needed to see; when they roused the _Barin_ in Tolstoy it came
easy and natural and overwhelmed them so that they shrivelled up
and whined.”--The blue noses call up memories of Weimar, chilling
memories of receptions and formal calls--only that Goethe was never
malicious enough to put on the democratic pose; and his most frigid
manner concealed more love than Tolstoy ever felt--Tolstoy, whose
last and most frightful secret Turgeniev’s penetrating mind laid
bare: it was that Tolstoy could love nobody but himself! But it was a
“joy,” in Gorky’s sense of the word, to see Tolstoy for instance at
the Petrov yearly fair, whither he drove from his estate in Samara in
the seventies. His charm made him very popular in the merry whirl of
peasants, Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. Even with drunken folk,
we are told, he did not hesitate to strike up a conversation. And
then came the following quiet and characteristic little episode. A
drunken peasant, in his excess of feeling, wanted to embrace Tolstoy.
But one stern and expressive look from Leo Nikolaevich’s eyes met the
man and sobered him in a twinkling. He dropped his hands of himself,
and said: “No? Well, all right, then.” What was there in that look to
make it have such an arresting, quenching, sobering effect? Was it the
consciousness of the _Barin_? Or of the great author? In such a case it
is quite impossible to distinguish between them--as little objectively
as doubtless it was subjectively.
“When Leo Nikolaevich wanted to please,” Gorky tells us, “he could do
it better than a pretty and clever woman. Imagine a crowd of all sorts
of people sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicholai Michailovich,
the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Jalta, a musician, a
German, the poet Bulgakov, and so on; they all look at him with the
same enamoured eyes, while he expounds to them the doctrine of Lao
Tse.... I used to look at him just like the others. And now I long to
look at him once more--and I shall never see him again.”--One thing
is obvious: it was _not_ the doctrine of Lao Tse which brought that
lovelorn look into all their eyes. The teaching would have roused very
scant general interest but for the expounder. But that look in every
eye is the very same that Karl August had in mind when he passed on to
Goethe the greetings sent by Napoleon on the Emperor’s way back from
Russia: “You see,” he added, “heaven and hell are both making eyes at
you.”
Yes, and the democratic moujik blouses were immaculate, made of soft
fine material, highly comfortable and pleasant to wear, and the linen
was scented. Of course, he did not scent it himself. The Countess
attended to that, and he, who liked it very much, pretended not to
notice, just as he pretended not to know that the vegetarian dishes he
exclusively ate were all prepared with _bouillon_. “His face is that of
a peasant,” reports an eyewitness, “with a broad nose, a weather-beaten
skin, and thick, beetling brows with small, piercing grey eyes beneath
them. But, despite the peasant features, no one could fail to recognize
at first glance the fine, cosmopolitan Russian gentleman, member of
the very highest society.” Conversing thus in English or French with a
Grand Duke, he reminds one very much of Goethe, on whom princes waited,
and who thought it no derogation of his nobility, human or divine, to
season it with a little knack for polite nothings. When Tolstoy visited
Alexander Herz in London, his daughter, young Natalia Alexandrovna,
begged to be present in a dark corner, that she might behold in the
flesh the author of _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_. With beating heart
she awaited Tolstoy’s appearance. She was bitterly disappointed to see
a man dressed in the latest fashion, with good manners and a flow of
speech, the subject-matter of which was exclusively the cock-fights and
boxing-matches he had seen in London. “Not a word that came from his
heart, not a word that could have corresponded to my expectations, did
I hear during the single interview at which I was present.”
Nothing of the sort is reported of Dostoyevsky or Schiller. Never
did these by their worldliness disappoint the expectations of their
audience. The sons of spirit make personally a spiritual impression,
as the hopeful average man expects those to do who are soul-shakers.
That lofty, pallid, suffering-saint and criminal look of Dostoyevsky
corresponded to the idea the Russians got of the phenomenon of
his genius, just as Schiller’s mild, intrepid, fanatical, and
equally ailing physiognomy, with open shirt-collar and flowing silk
neckerchief, corresponded to the image which the German mind might
have formed of its hero. Whereas on the other hand Goethe, if we
accept Riemer’s description of him as he moved among his guests in
a blue coat, “the powerful, expressive face showing the effects of
sun and fresh air, with the black side-locks floating about it, the
black hair bound in a queue, was more like a well-to-do, comfortable
farmer, or a much-visited staff-officer in mufti, than like a shrinking
and sensitive poet.” And it is true, _a priori_, that neither of
those other two ever estranged ardent admiration by displaying a
banal enthusiasm for cock-fighting and boxing. Whereas the sense of
sport, the taste for bodily exercise, physical training, and physical
enjoyment, played an essential rôle in Tolstoy’s life as in Goethe’s.
We call these tastes gentlemanly and thus indicate the physical basis
of the well-born-ness which is of this world. “One must see him,”
wrote Riemer about Goethe; “how strong and firm he stands on his feet,
with what bodily agility and sure step he moves. Early gymnastic
training, dancing, skating, riding, even coursing and racing, had
given him this mobility and suppleness; he could never make a false
step on the worst path or be in danger of slipping or falling; easily
and swiftly he passed over smooth ice, narrow foot-paths and bridges,
and rocky steeps. As a youth he climbed among chasms and shingle with
his princely friend, mounted towering rocks and Alpine crags with the
boldness of a chamois; and so throughout his fifty years of geological
exploration no mountain has been too high for him, no shaft too deep
nor passage too low, no cave labyrinthine enough.”
The great interest which Leo Tolstoy took in his body showed itself
negatively as well as positively. Negatively, in his Christian and
ascetic grumblings at his beastly physical, in such utterances as
that the body is a hindrance to the good man, and in such phrases as:
“I am ashamed to speak of my disgusting body.” Positively, in all
the training and care he gave it. His interest in it begins at the
moment--of which he speaks in the _Confessions_--when he sat as a
little child in a wooden tub, enveloped in the smell of the bran-water
in which he was being bathed, and for the first time noticed his little
body with the ribs visible on the breast in front, and straightway
feels drawn to it by a very strong inclination. Tolstoy’s face was,
humanly speaking, ugly, and he suffered greatly on account of it,
convinced that there could be little joy in store for a creature
with such a broad nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes.
He confesses that he would have given anything he had for a handsome
face. The youth who is tortured by the problem of death, and ponders
all the high and ultimate questions with as much maturity as the aged
prophet, this youth is at the same time perpetually occupied with his
own appearance, is obviously possessed by the desire to be elegant
and _comme il faut_; sets the greatest store by physical development,
gymnastic exercise; drills, rides, and hunts as though he had no higher
ambition in his head nor thought of any. His passion for the hunt is
so excessive that he confesses to his wife that of human beings he
never forgot Sophia Alexandrovna, but out hunting he forgot everything
but his double-barrelled shot-gun. From more than one letter of those
who knew him in his prime we see what a daring sportsman he was, how
he sprang with astonishing agility over gullies and chasms and would
spend whole days in the wild. We are told that a better companion could
not be conceived of. The pacifism, Christian, Buddhistic, or Chinese,
of his latter days forbade him of course to kill animals, although
his indestructible physical strength and trained agility would still
have allowed him to hunt and though he still cherished the greatest
desire to. He bade it farewell. He submitted himself to a test and
found he had fortitude enough to let the hares run. And in his case
that meant a good deal, as we see from the following anecdote, related
by Gorky. Tolstoy put on a heavy overcoat and thick boots and took
Gorky for a walk in the birch-woods. He leaped like a schoolboy over
puddles and ditches, shook the rain-drops from the boughs, lovingly
stroked the moist, satiny trunks of the birch-trees, and talked
about Schopenhauer.... “Suddenly a hare got up under our feet. Leo
Nikolaevich gave an excited start, his face lighted up, he let out
a halloo like an old huntsman. Then he looked at me with a curious
smile and began laughing, a hearty human laugh. At this moment he was
irresistible.”--Still finer is the story of the hawk which the old man
saw circling above his chickens, about to swoop. Leo Nikolaevich stares
up at the bird of prey, his hand over his eyes, and says in an “excited
whisper”: “The rascal! Now, now! He’s coming ... oh, he’s afraid....
I’ll call the stable-boy.” He calls, the hawk disappears. But Tolstoy
is taken with regrets. He sighs and says: “I shouldn’t have called.
Then he would have swooped.” They are his chickens. But all the
sympathy of the venerable prophet of pacifism is with the hawk.
Of his son Iliuscha he wrote in a letter: “Iliuscha is lazy, he is
growing, and his soul is not yet overwhelmed by organic processes.”
What does he mean by that? Growing is itself an organic process, and if
growing is innocent, so too will be the organic processes which growth
brings about, and with which Tolstoy was only too well acquainted,
since they made his life a burden to him all his days. The Church’s
conception of woman as _instrumentum diaboli_ was with him something
more than a mood from the time of the _Kreuzer Sonata_; it dates from
much earlier, from the journals of his boyish days; and he speaks of
organic processes in the sense of that early Christian pope who, in
order to mortify the flesh, made a detailed list of all its disgusting
and evil-smelling functions, the functions of this body which in the
end has to submit to the final indignity of putrefaction. That kind
of cross-grained speculation Tolstoy would be just the one to set
about, and he did. Very sensual men well know such moods. Maupassant
somewhere calls the act of coition filthy and ridiculous--“_ordurier et
ridicule_.” Could objectivity further go? But such blithe and cynical
objectivity was not Tolstoy’s sort. His hatred of the organic has a
shattering accent of subjective torment and rage. And yet he is so much
the darling of the creative impulse of organic life that one must go
back to Goethe to find a human being who was “_so wohl in seiner Haut_”
as he. Yes, the parallel is even more exact. In both of them, and in
just the same way, the most beatific organic well-being, amounting to
organic rapture, mingled with a rooted melancholy and the profoundest
intimacy with death. Goethe, when he was a riotous, dandiacal student
in Leipsic, might any moment quit the society of men, the card-play and
dance, and yield himself to solitude. We have plenty of witnesses to
his brilliance, his childish, fantastic extravagances in the circle of
his friends, with the Jacobis, Heinse, Stilling in Elberfeld. He cuts
capers, dances round the table like a clown, in short cannot contain
himself for a mysterious intoxication; the philistines sitting round
think he has gone mad. And that is the same Goethe whose Werther drove
more than one young man to self-destruction, and who practised himself
in suicide by keeping a sharp dagger on his bed-table and trying every
evening to drive it a little further into his body.
We have noted the same excess of animal spirits in Tolstoy; in whom,
indeed, they persisted up to an old age lacking in the dignity,
stateliness, and formal gravity of Goethe’s latest period. Which
need surprise nobody. For we cannot doubt that Goethe led a more
earnest, laborious, exemplary life than the Slavic junker; or that
his cultural activities presupposed far more genuine self-abnegation,
restraint, and discipline than Tolstoy’s uttermost ineffectual efforts
at spiritualization, sticking fast as these always did in a bog of
fantastic absurdity. Tolstoy’s aristocratic charm was, and Gorky so
depicts it, that of a noble animal. He never managed to arrive at
the dignity of man the civilized, man the triumpher over odds. It is
lovely to hear of all the pranks he played with the children, his
droll conceits, the gymnastic feats he performed for and with them; the
endless croquet, lawn-tennis, and leap-frog parties in the garden at
Yasnaya Polyana. He not only shared all the activities of youth, but he
was the life and soul of them. The sixty-year-old man runs races with
the boys, his bicycle trips extend, much to the Countess’s anxiety,
over thirty versts. “When there is some activity requiring agility,
strength, and suppleness,” comments a bystander, “he never takes his
eyes off the players, he puts his whole soul into their success or
failure. Often he cannot resist and joins in with a youthful fire and
muscular flexibility which the onlooker could only envy.” In the family
circle he performed the sheerest absurdities. He had invented a game
called Numidian Horsemen, which made the children weep with delight.
Leo Nikolaevich would suddenly spring from his chair, lifting his hand,
and run about the room flapping it in the air, whereupon everybody,
grown-ups, children, and all, followed suit. That is, I repeat,
charming, though a little bizarre. It becomes more so when we learn
that all these high spirits occur in the years after his “conversion,”
in the period of his soul-crises, his ascetic eclipses and theological
broodings. But what shall be said of the incident recorded by his
father-in-law, Behrs? They were walking about the room together in
light converse, one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang
upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for
a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold--it
gives one an uncanny feeling! I do not ask my readers to imagine
Goethe, in his later period, leaping unexpectedly on a visitor’s
shoulder. There is a decided difference of temperament, that is clear.
But the resemblance is no less so.
* * * * *
Looking more closely at the matter, I find that there is a complex of
problems, a “problematic,” peculiar to the sons of nature, the creative
and objective artists, which is entirely foreign to the children of the
idea, and, for all the brilliant sunshine of favour they move in, casts
a strange dark cloud upon them which must considerably chill their
consciousness of aristocratic well-being. My feeling is that it is pure
error to think that conflict and complexity are things of the spirit,
while nature’s kingdom must be all brightness and harmony. It looks as
though the contrary were the case. If what we call happiness consists
in harmony, clarity, unity with oneself, in the consciousness of a
positive, confident, decisive turn of mind, if, in short, it is peace
resident in the soul, then obviously happiness is a state far easier
for the sons of spirit to arrive at than for the children of nature.
For the latter, though surely singleness of heart should be their lot,
seem never to attain the joy and peace it might confer. Nature herself
appears to weave in their very being a questionable strand, an element
of contradiction, negation, and all-pervasive doubt, which, since it
cannot conduce to goodness, cannot conduce to happiness either. Spirit
is good. Nature is by no means good. One might say she is evil, if
moral categories were admissible with reference to her. She is, then,
neither good nor evil, she escapes definition, as she herself refuses
to define and judge; she is, speaking objectively, indifferent, and as
this indifference of hers appears subjectively and spiritually in her
children, it becomes a complication that has more to do with torment
and evil than with happiness and goodness, and which certainly seems
come not to bring peace into the world, like the human and benevolent
spirit, but rather doubt and dire confusion.
Obviously I am not speaking here of the comparatively harmless conflict
between the Faustian “two souls,” the battle between the impulses
of a strong animal constitution and the yearnings after “_Gefilden
hoher Ahnen_”--a battle, and a “problematic,” of which Goethe speaks
out of such deep experience, and which not only made Tolstoy’s youth
a period of such hardship, so torn with remorse, but persisted in
him up to old age. I am speaking of something which seems at first
blush to be much blither and simpler: a position something like that
of Goethe between Lavater and Basedow, in which Goethe designates
himself as “_das Weltkind in der Mitten_”. That sounds simple, and
pleasant, and self-complacent, and was probably so meant. And yet in
the word “_Weltkind_” and the associations that surround it there is
something sinister, a difficulty and a “problematic,” by contrast
with which the “prophetic” existence is nothing less than sweetness
and light and plain sailing. “Goethe’s tendency to negation,” writes
Chancellor von Müller on some occasion or other, “and his incredible
judicial-mindedness came out strong again.” “There is something,”
Gorky writes about Tolstoy, “which presumably he will never reveal
to a human being, which appears darkly in his conversation, and is
hinted at in his journals. To me it seems like the apotheosis of
negation, the deepest and most hideous nihilism, springing from a
stratum of boundless and hopeless despair, from a solitude of which
probably no one else in the world has ever been so frightfully
aware.” No one? It was not Tolstoy who created the so lyric figure of
Mephistopheles--though indeed the Mephistophelian element was never
lacking to any period of his life. The ceaseless, tormenting effort to
shape that which he calls his conception of life, to arrive at truth
and clarity and inward peace, found expression in his youth, partly in
a gloomy irritability that led to duels and scenes with his friends,
which he took in desperate earnest, as matters of life and death,
killing and dying; but partly also in malicious negation in general,
an inimical spirit of contradictiousness, which, as we are expressly
assured, made a quite Mephistophelian impression. Though of course
this was not a nihilistic but a moral attitude, and was not assumed
save in opposition to things that were not true--only they were simply
everything! In the young Tolstoy there was observable, “from the
beginning, a sort of unconscious enmity toward all accepted laws in
the kingdom of thought. No matter what the opinion expressed; and the
greater the authority of the speaker, the more was Tolstoy at pains
to take up and accentuate an inimical attitude. If you watched him
as he listened, and saw the sarcastic curl of his lip, you could not
avoid the impression that he was thinking, not so much of answering
what was said, as of himself saying something which should surprise
and confound the speaker.” That is nihilism, that is malice. But it is
not so much cold malice as it is a tortured spite against anybody who
fancied he held the secret of clarity and truth. It is a disbelief in
clarity and truth. This spite, and this incredulity, were especially
directed against Turgeniev, the clear-eyed and human man with whom he
never could get on. “Tolstoy,” said Turgeniev, “early developed a trait
which, lying as it does at the root of his gloomy conception of life,
has caused him great suffering. He has never managed to believe in the
sincerity of mankind. Every expression of feeling seemed to him false;
and he had the habit, due to his extraordinarily penetrating gaze, of
boring through with his eye the man he considered insincere.” And when
Turgeniev said this, he added the confession that never in his life had
he encountered anything with such power to dishearten him as this same
piercing gaze, which, accompanied by two or three biting remarks, could
bring to the verge of madness anybody who did not possess particularly
strong self-control. Now Turgeniev’s self-control was strong. He was
at the height of his literary success; serene and untroubled, he could
encounter the complexities of his younger colleague with the calmness
of a man who lived on good terms with himself. But precisely this
security was what troubled Tolstoy. He seems to have gone deliberately
about with this tranquil, good-natured man, working with such a clear
conviction that what he did was right, to goad him past the bounds of
self-control. Simply this conviction that he knew and did what was
right was more than Tolstoy could bear; for certainly he himself did
not in the least know what was right. Garschin says: “In his view, the
people who passed for good were merely hypocrites, who paraded their
goodness and pretended to the certainty that their work served a good
end.” Turgeniev too saw in Tolstoy this strange, sinister, malicious
bent. He resolved to hold fast to what he considered “right” and not to
lose his self-control; so he avoided Tolstoy, left Saint Petersburg,
where the latter was living, and went first to Moscow and then to
his own estate. But--this is most significant of all, as evidence of
Tolstoy’s state of mind--Tolstoy followed him. Followed him step for
step, “like a lovesick girl,” to use Turgeniev’s own phrase.
All which is very telling, very extraordinary. Above all, it shows how
completely the old Tolstoy, of whom Gorky writes, was foreshadowed
in the young one. Did he really ever find out what was “right”--the
real, the true, the incontrovertible? For others he did, he gave them
conviction. But he himself certainly never got free of the negation and
neutrality of the elemental character. “Rousseau,” he said, “lied and
believed his lies.” Did he believe his own lies? No, for he did not
lie. He was elemental, nihilistic, malicious, and unfathomable. “Would
you very much like to know?” he asks.--“Very much.”--“Then I will
not tell you.” And he smiles and plays with his thumbs. This smile,
this “sly little smile”--Gorky speaks of it again and again. There is
something not only extra-moral but extra-mental, extra-human, about
it; it bespeaks the mystery of the “natural,” the elemental, which is
not at all kindly disposed, but rather takes pleasure in confusion.
According to Gorky, the old man loved to put insidious questions. “What
do you think about yourself?” “Do you love your wife?” “How do you like
mine?” “Do you like me, Alexei Maximovich?”--“Disingenuous!” Gorky
cries. “The whole time, he is making an experiment, testing something
out, as though he were going into battle. It is interesting, but not to
my taste. He is the devil, and I am a babe in arms beside him. He ought
to leave me alone.”
One day Gorky sees the aged Tolstoy sitting alone by the sea. This
scene is the crowning point of his reminiscences. “He sat, his head
on his hands; the wind blew the silver hair of his beard through his
fingers. He was looking far out across the sea, and the little green
waves rolled docilely to his feet and caressed them, as though they
wanted to tell the old wizard something about themselves.... He seemed
like an ancient stone come alive, that knew and pondered the beginning
and end of all things, and what and how would be the end of the stones
and grasses of the earth, the waters of the sea, the whole universe
from the sun to the grain of sand. And the sea is a part of his soul,
and all about him comes from him and out of him. In the old man’s
musing quietude I felt something portentous, magic. I cannot express in
words what I more felt than thought at that moment. In my heart were
rejoicing and fear, then all melted together in one single blissful
feeling: ‘I am not bereft on this earth, so long as this old man is
living on it.’” And Gorky steals away on his tiptoes that the sand may
not crunch under his tread and disturb the old man’s thoughts.
The mystical reverence that Gorky here depicts is not that which lays
hold on us at sight of the heroes of the idea. Neither Dostoyevsky nor
Schiller has inspired this sort of awe and shuddering, however saintly
they seemed. So much is certain. Nor can the reverence felt for Goethe
be of just this same nature--though akin to it. The Tolstoyan greatness
and remoteness is wild and primeval and pagan in its nature, it is
antecedent to culture. It lacks the human, the humanistic element.
This ancient of days and of wisdom, musing there at the edge of the
everlasting sea, wrapped up in the All, conning the beginning and end
of things--the picture evokes a twilit, prehuman, uncanny world of
feeling, a world of incantations and runes. What he is pondering, the
norns whisper thee by night. He was like, says the shaken beholder,
an ancient stone come alive: note that, a stone, not anything that
civilization has produced, not man made in the likeness of God, not
a human being like Goethe. Goethe’s humanistic divineness is clearly
something quite different from the primeval, pagan formlessness of
Tolstoy’s, which makes Gorky say of him: “He is the devil.” And still,
at the very bottom, the common factor persists: in Goethe too there
is the elemental, the sinister, the dark, neutral, negation- and
confusion-loving devil.
There is a saying of his, arbitrary enough, yet with an accent of
hidden suffering, that opens to us more of his inner self than many
a clear and wise and ordered utterance. “If I am to listen to the
opinion of others,” he said (and only listen to it, observe, not accept
it), “then it must be positively expressed. Problems I have enough in
myself.” That is a confession, put in the form of a demand. It has
a proud, Olympian accent, but the voice that utters it quivers with
impatience, with painful irritation at the inner complications, which
makes it so imperative that the positive should come from without....
“Out of one of his eyes looks an angel,” writes someone who made his
acquaintance on a journey, “out of the other a devil; and his speech is
deep irony on the score of all human affairs.” Of all? That is great,
but it is not generous--and, after all, is he not a man himself? One
who often saw him says: “Today he was altogether in that mood of bitter
humour and sophistical contradictiousness he is so prone to display.”
Again we have the negation, the spirit of contradiction and malice,
of which gentle young Sulpice Boisserée has such a story to tell in
his diary. “At eleven o’clock I am with Goethe again. The invective
continues.” He has a go at all sorts of things: politics, æsthetics,
society, religion, Germany, France, philhellenism, parties, and so
on, in such a style that poor young Boisserée feels--“_mit allen
diesen moquanten Reden_”--as though he were “at a witches’ sabbath.”
That is saying a good deal. It is either too strong, considering the
word “_moquant_” which he uses, or else that word is a good deal too
weak--which is more likely. Anyhow the entry, from the year 1826,
shows the confusion to which the petulant old man could reduce simple
and humble-minded people. An observer who must have been no fool
wrote something about him which stirs a secret horror that is somehow
paralysing. “He is tolerant, without being mild.” Just consider what
that means. Toleration, indulgence, is always, in our human experience,
associated with mildness, with benevolent feeling toward man and the
universe; so far as I know, it is a product of love. But tolerance
_without_ love, _harsh_ tolerance--what would that be? It is more
than human, it is icy neutrality, it is either something godlike or
something devilish.
* * * * *
I shall be saying nothing new, but it may serve to bring order and
clarity into our thoughts to keep the fact before us: all national
character belongs to the natural sphere, and all tendency toward the
cosmopolitan to the spiritual. The word “ethnic” brings together
two conceptions which we do not ordinarily connect, paganism and
nationalism; thus by implication, and conversely, every super-national
and humane point of view is classified in our mind as Christian in
spirit.
Goethe’s alleged devotion to paganism (in the _Wanderjahre_ he reckons
Judaism among the ethnic and heathen folk-religions) would lead us
accordingly to expect of him an outlook basically anti-humanistic and
folk-national. That we should be entirely wrong in this expectation, as
a basic constitution in him, as “nature,” might be arguable. However,
so far as he was himself aware, he was consciously a humanist and a
citizen of the world. Despite all his nature Olympian and divine, he
was in a high degree Christian in spirit. Nietzsche placed Goethe,
historically and psychologically speaking, between Hellenism and
pietism; and thus expressed the combination of creative and critical,
simple and “sentimental,” ancient and modern, in Goethe’s character.
For Goethe’s “pietism” is of course nothing else than his modernity.
Many centuries of Christian cultivation of the subjective--a whole
century of pietistic, introspective, autobiographical discipline--were
needed to make possible a work like _Werther_. Which is as much as
to say that in the impulse to autobiography Christian and democratic
elements are mingled with that naïve, spoilt-darling claim on the
world’s affections of which we spoke above. They are the same as
that democratic tendency out of which Tolstoy likes to consider his
confessions as emanating; when, in true Rousseauian fashion, he
resolves “to write a history of his life, utterly and entirely true
to fact,” in the belief that this “will be more useful to mankind”
than those previous twelve volumes full of literary twaddle. He seems
unaware that they are quite as autobiographical, quite as ethical
in character, as anything could be, and disowns them as pagan and
artistic, as self-indulgent and “irresponsible.”
Goethe, with all his aversion to the “Cross,” did often and expressly
acknowledge his reverence for the Christian idea. It is as significant
as it is surprising to come upon the idea of the sanctity of suffering
in the Pedagogic Province; and if Goethe saw in the Church “elements
of weakness and instability” and in its precepts “_gar viel Dummes_,”
still he bore witness that “there is in the Gospels an effective
resplendence and majesty, issuing from the person of Christ, of a
character in which only the divine appear upon this earth.” “The human
spirit,” he says, with sympathetic and openly acknowledged fellowship,
“will never rise higher than the majesty and moral elevation of
Christianity, as it radiates from the Gospels.” But Goethe’s
Christianity manifests itself in the admirable attitude, as of a pupil
to a master, which he had toward Spinoza, whom he called “_theissimus_”
and of whom he said that nobody had spoken of the Divinity so like
the Saviour as he. If, indeed, the dualistic separation of God and
nature is the fundamental principle of Christianity, then Spinoza was
a pagan, and Goethe was too. But God and nature are not all the world:
there is the human, the humane, as well; and Spinoza’s conception of
humanity is Christian, in so far as he defines the phenomenon man as
the becoming-_conscious_ of the God-nature in the human being, as a
bursting forth out of mere dull being and living; accordingly, as
liberation from nature, and so as _spirit_. Again, there is absolutely
nothing pagan about that famous _Mastery of the Passions by their
Analysis_; and just as little in the Spinozan motif of renunciation
(“_Entsagung_”), which becomes the general motif of Goethe’s life and
work, like the idea of freedom for Schiller and the idea of redemption
for Wagner.
On the contrary, it was just this pathos of renunciation, which cast
such a Christian shade upon the pagan, aristocratic, child-of-nature
well-being of Goethe’s life and lent his spirited features an expressly
Gothic trait of suffering not to be overlooked save by the gross
popular belief in his aristocratic good fortune. How much resignation
must have darkened the end of this apparently consummate and favoured
existence! His life-work, though almost superhuman, remained entirely
a fragment--it is putting it mildly to say that “not all the dreams of
blossoms ripened”--Wagner’s performance, for instance, or Ibsen’s, is
incomparably more a rounded and effective whole. One may put it that
Goethe’s spirit was far more powerful than his nature, greater than his
power to give it form or than his organically allotted span; and it is
easy to understand that vehement demand of his for immortality, which
is one of the magnificent, dæmonic expressions of his personality:
Nature, he cried, was bound to give him a new body when the one he had
could no longer sustain his spirit.
Consider even his love-life, which likewise the popular mind tends
to think of as sunlit and blissful, divinely favoured and without a
cross. Certainly he was much loved and rich in love; certainly to
him much enjoyment was given. In the realm of the erotic he had his
spells of coarseness, when he behaved a little like a garden god:
when, ingenuous and unsentimental as the antique world, he would enjoy
without stint and indulge without a qualm. His marriage, a misalliance,
socially and intellectually, was a result of this attitude of mind.
But where he loved so that lofty poesy was the result, and not merely
a Venetian epigram ticked out in hexameters on a maiden’s back; where
it was serious, the romance regularly ended in renunciation. He never
actually possessed Lotte or Friederike, nor Lilli, nor the Herzlieb,
nor Marianne, nor even Ulrike--and not even Frau von Stein. He never
loved unrequited--unless in the immensely painful, absurdly agitating
affair with little Levetzof. Yet in all these cases resignation was
the order of the day: either on moral grounds, or for the sake of his
freedom. Mostly he bolted.
But the renunciation I mean was a deeper and higher thing. In his
stature, his lineaments, his proportions as he stands today in the
eyes of the nation, he is what he is as the work of renunciation. I
am not speaking generally, I do not refer to the sense of sacrifice
which is the meaning of all art; nor to the struggle with chaos, the
surrender of freedom, the creative constraint which is its inner
essence. Goethe’s pathos of renunciation--or, since we are speaking
of permanent forces dominating the whole of existence, his ethos of
renunciation--is of a more personal kind. It is his destiny, it is
the instinctive mandate of his especially national gift, which was
essentially civilizing in its mission. Or, rather, might this destiny
and mission, this bond, this conditioning limitation and pedagogic duty
of renunciation, be after all something less personal to him than it
just now appeared? Might it perhaps be the law of his destiny, innate
and inviolable save at the expense of heavy spiritual penalties; the
imperative which is the essence of the German spirit, destined always,
as it is, somehow and in some degree, to feel itself called to a
cultural task?--I spoke of the consciousness of a community of feeling,
which Goethe must, at moments, have felt with Christianity. What did
it consist in, and to what had it reference? Goethe pays homage to
the “moral culture” of Christianity--that is, to its humanity, its
civilizing, anti-barbarian influence. It was the same as his; and the
occasional homage he paid it undoubtedly springs from his recognition
that the mission of Christianity within the confines of the Germanic
peoples bore a likeness to his own. And here, in the fact that he
conceived his task, his duty to his nation, as essentially a civilizing
mission, lies the deepest and the most German significance of his
renunciation. Does anyone doubt that there were in Goethe possibilities
of a greatness and growth, wilder, ranker, more disruptive, more
“natural,” than those which his instinct for self-conquest allowed him
to develop, and which today give our mental picture of him so highly
pedagogic a cast? In his _Iphigenia_ the idea of humanity, as opposed
to barbarism, wears the impress of civilization--not in the polemical
and even political sense in which we use the word today, but in the
sense of moral culture. It was a Frenchman, Maurice Barrès, who pointed
out that the _Iphigenia_ is a “civilizing work,” in that it “stands
for the rights of society against the arrogance of intellect.” The
phrase fits almost better that other monument of self-discipline and
self-correction, yes, almost of self-mortification, which has been a
target for ridicule on account of its affected atmosphere of courts and
culture: I mean the _Tasso_. Both are works of resignation, of German
and schoolmasterish renunciation of all the advantages of barbarism.
Wagner, on the other hand, the voluptuary, did not renounce them; he
yielded to them all, with huge effectiveness; and his punishment is
that the acclaim accorded to his riotously national art grows daily
cruder and more popular.
My subject is still the aspiration of the children of nature toward
spirit; which is just as sentimental in kind as is the converse
striving of the sons of the spirit toward nature, and may function with
varying degrees of aptitude or success, with more or less naïveté or
subtlety. Compared with Goethe’s majestic work of spiritualization,
I cannot find that Tolstoy’s struggles to throw off nature’s yoke
were crowned with great success. But I am whimsical enough to relish
putting my finger on the mighty kernel of racial loyalty which dwelt
at the heart of the Christianity of the one and the humanity of
the other. And that kernel was, of course, in other words, their
aristocratic integrity; for racial loyalty is aristocratic by nature,
while Christianity, humanity, and civilization all represent the
conflicting principle of the spirit of democracy, and the process of
spiritualization is at the same time one of democratization. What
Tolstoy aptly calls his “democratic trend”--aptly, because the word
“trend” implies a will and a direction somewhither, indicating an
effort and not mere being--finds emphatic expression now and again in
Goethe as well. “One would have,” he says, “to become _Catholic_ at
once, in order to have a share in the lives of humanity!” To mingle
with humanity, on equal terms, to lead the life of the people, and in
the market-place, seems at such moments happiness to him. “In these
small sovereign states,” he cries, “what wretched, isolated men
we are!” And he praises Venice as a monument to the power, not of
a single despot, but of a whole people. But such phrases, clearly,
are meant more correctively than absolutely; they are self-critical
comments, meant to redress the balance of his German and Protestant
aristocratism--“tendencies,” then, sentimental leanings, of the same
kind as the radical and pacifistic bent of the Russian giant, in
whose “holiness” a penetrating eye can see so much self-deception,
childishness, and “let’s pretend.”
A close observer like Gorky, or a shrewd critic like Merezhkovsky, felt
at once and keenly the patriarchal and sensual quality, the life-bound
animalism, which lay beneath the sanctification. Tolstoy married at
thirty-four the eighteen-year-old Sophia Alexandrovna Behrs, who from
then on was scarcely ever anything but “expectant,” and was confined
thirteen times. Through long, creative years, his marriage was an idyll
of family life, full of healthy, god-fearing animal pleasure, against
a lavish economic background of agriculture and cattle-breeding. The
atmosphere was Judaic Old Testament rather than Christian. Tolstoy
knows the same great simple love of existence, the everlasting
childlike joy of life, that possessed Goethe’s soul. When he “praises
each day for its beauty,” when he “marvels at the richness of God’s
kingdom” expressing itself therein, how “each day He sends some new
thing to distinguish it,” we feel a better understanding of what lay
at the bottom of Goethe’s conception of “_Behagen_.” Waves of piercing
sensuous enjoyment of nature break upon him even in the years of gloom,
when he meditates suicide, plans the _Confession_--in short, conjures
up that misunderstanding to which his sanctification falls prey, and
dehumanizes and shrinks the majesty of the patriarch, christianizes and
conventionalizes it into the Anglo-Indian model.
Merezhkovsky called him the great seer of the body, in contrast to
Dostoyevsky the visionary of the soul; and truly it is the body to
which his love and deepest interest belong, to which his knowledge
refers, by which his genius is conditioned. We see this so clearly
in his reaction to old age. In 1894 he writes: “Age is approaching.
That means the hair falls out, the teeth decay, the wrinkles come,
the breath gets bad. Even before the end, everything turns frightful,
disgusting; sweat, rouge, powder, all sorts of beastliness. Then
what has become of that which I have served? Where has beauty gone?
It is the essence of everything. Without it there is nothing, no
life.”--This description of dying while the body still lives, may
pass for Christian, by virtue of its insistence on misery and its
characterization of the flesh, revolting and insulting on the spiritual
side. But the physical apprehension of old age and death is through and
through pagan and sensual.
Aksakov says of Tolstoy: “His gift is _bearlike_ in kind and degree.”
And is it not this “bearlike” quality of his genius that made Tolstoy
“the great writer of Russia,” the author of _War and Peace_, the epic
poet of the people’s struggle against Rome, against Napoleon? I openly
declare my deliberate intention to cast doubt on the pacifism which
the prophet of humanity so didactically professed. Not, I hasten to
add, from any anti-pacifistic sentiments on my own part; merely out
of a sense of humour. That Tolstoy was in his youth a soldier and
an officer, we know. From his biography we learn that he was heart
and soul a soldier; and we have evidence of his heroic and warlike
enthusiasm in the Sebastopol days--that “splendid time,” that “glorious
time,” that time of touching pride in the Russian army, when he was
confessedly saturated with patriotic feeling and thrilled by his
experience of comradery under arms, first felt when the serious moment
is at hand. His attitude toward the Serbo-Turkish war of 1877 is still
full of conviction. It is a _real_ war, he says, and it moves him.
The distinction between “real” and “unreal” doubtless indicates some
progress in the direction of pacifism. But is pacifism “real” so long
as it is conditional and must progress in order to exist?
In 1812, at least, there _was_ a “real” war, and its history occupied
Tolstoy long before he became the great writer of Russia by dint of it.
He treated of it, quite in the patriotic key, in his school at Yasnaya
Polyana. From all we hear, he dealt with it on a mythical rather than
a historical basis; but he expressly declared that he presented his
pupils with these legends of a warlike mythology in order to rouse
their patriotic feeling. And then the root-and-branch Russianism, the
fundamental folk-character of his peasant-patrician nature, comes out
strong in his epos, whose theme is a defensive war waged against the
invasion of Latin civilization. _War and Peace_ had a huge popular
success, though the critics and military men had some fault to find.
_On the intellectual side it was weak_, they said; its philosophy of
history was narrow and superficial; it was mysticism and sophistry to
deny the influence of individuals on events. But the creative power,
the “bearlike” strength of it, were unanimously declared to be beyond
all discussion, as well as its enormous genuineness as a folk-epic.
The liberal criticism of Russia admitted that it was “Russian to the
core,” that it “presented the soul of the Russian people, in its
whole range and variety, in all its lofty simplicity, with a sheer
creative power that had never been equalled.” But the critics took in
bad part Tolstoy’s “wilful remoteness from all contemporary _currents
of progress_”--a phenomenon and a reproach which were to recur with
the appearance of _Anna Karenine_. “_Anna Karenine_ I don’t like,”
Turgeniev wrote, “though there are splendid things in it: the race, the
mowing, the hunt. But the whole thing is soured; it _smells of Moscow_,
and old maids and incense and Slavophils and high life and all that.”
In a word, Turgeniev, the _Sapadnik_, rejected with horror the oriental
element in the novel, and with him went the whole liberal-radical
party; some ignored _Anna Karenine_, others sneered or called names,
while the Slavophils and the aristocrats and court party rubbed their
hands in glee. In fact Tolstoy, in an intellectual and political
sense, had the reactionaries on his side; and they could have little
appreciation of the artistic qualities of his work. The liberals were
liberal enough to know how to value these, and they did so, albeit in
that state of bewilderment into which people always fall at the sight
of genius in the camp of reaction. Witness the bewilderment of Europe
over Bismarck.
The paradox is worth a little attention. Our idealists would have us
believe that genius, the creative power, must, as a living force, act
only in the service of progress and human purpose, and be justly denied
to the forces which side against life, show sympathy with death, and
are inimical to freedom and progress and thus bad in the human sense.
We would almost accept it as metaphysical evidence for the goodness
of a thing if a capital piece of writing were done in its name. And
really, it does seem that, as a rule, the reactionary camp suffers
from lack of talent. But not invariably. The reactionary genius does
occur, the brilliant and conquering ability does act as attorney for
retrograde tendencies--and nothing dazes the world more than the
sight of this paradoxical phenomenon. Sainte-Beuve said of Joseph de
Maistre that he had “nothing of a writer but the gift”--a comment which
perfectly expresses this bewilderment and precisely indicates the thing
I mean.
Liberal and progressive Russia must have seen in Tolstoy just this--a
case of a great gift in the service of reaction. But it is clear enough
that this great gift is of one essence with his fundamental Russianism,
his immense integration with the people, his pagan and natural
aristocracy; and that the tendency toward democratic spiritualization
was--just tendency, romantic in its nature and crowned, after all, by
such strikingly indifferent success! His tremendous orientalism found
intellectual expression in this mockery at and denial of European
progress; and this it was which must necessarily and profoundly
alienate all the westernizing and liberalizing, all the “Petrinic”
elements in Russia. Actually, he quite frankly scouted the western
belief in progress, which, he said, had been accepted by the Russia of
Peter the Great. They had, he said, observed the operation of the law
of progress in the Duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three
thousand inhabitants. But then came China, with its two hundred million
inhabitants, and knocked the theory of progress into a cocked hat.
Which did not for one moment prevent them from believing in progress as
a general law of mankind; they took the field with cannons and guns to
instruct the Chinese in their thesis. Yet ordinary human understanding
tells us that if the history of the larger part of mankind, which we
call the Orient, does not confirm the law of progress, then this law
does not obtain for the whole of mankind, but forms at most an article
of faith for a certain part of it. Tolstoy vows that he himself is
unable to find a universal law in the life of mankind, and that history
might be co-ordinated just as well in the light of any other idea or
“historical whimsy” as in that of progress. And more than that, he does
not see the slightest necessity of finding laws for history--quite
apart from the impossibility of the thing. The universal, eternal law
of perfection, he says, stands written in the soul of every human
being; it is only an error to carry it over into the field of history.
So long as it remains personal, this law is fruitful and accessible to
all; applied to historical conceptions, it is idle talk. The general
progress of mankind is an unproved thesis. It does not exist for any
of the nations of the east; hence it is just as unfounded to assert
that progress is a primary law of mankind as it would be to say that
blondness is--all people being blond save those with dark hair.
It is remarkable to see how ideas from the sphere of an idealistic
individualism, which is German, and places human perfection within
the individual soul, are here found in the company of others which
constitute the most decisive challenge to an arrogant Europe setting
itself up as intellectual arbiter of the world. Tolstoy protests
against what he considers the childishness of this attitude, which
confuses western Europe with humanity as a whole; and the protest
betrays that his gaze is directed eastward. It betrays, in a word, his
Asiatic bias: anti-“Petrinic,” primitive Russian, anti-civilization--in
short, _bearlike_. What we hear is the voice of the Russian god on the
maple throne under the golden lime-tree.
The voice of our humanistic deity has a different ring. Goethe, beyond
a doubt, hated and scorned Asia. The element of Sarmatian wildness
in which Tolstoy found himself so much at home and which merely gets
rationalized in his late prophetic period, would always remain remote
and foreign to the spirit of the great German, with its exclusively
cultural bias. A journey Goethe once made into Upper Silesian Poland
was the occasion of what contact he had with the Slav. His impressions
are “mostly remarkable negatively.” He observes ignorance, lack of
culture, low standards of living, stupidity. He feels himself “remote
from cultured men.” His attitude at the time of the War of Liberation,
offensive as it was to patriotic feeling, the admiring and personally
friendly respect he felt for the classic phenomenon of Napoleon (“the
man is too big for you”) belong in this same category. “It is true,” he
says in 1813, “I no longer see French and Italians, but in their stead
I see Cossacks, Bashkirs, Croats, Magyars, Kashubes, brown and other
hussars.” This enumeration of eastern races has an extraordinarily
contemptuous ring. That the Cossacks and Kashubes were in the country
as allies and the French as enemies seems not to matter to him.
He confesses, indeed, that he too is glad to be rid of the Gallic
_soldatesca_; yet he is obviously not far from finding more humiliation
in the alliance with Russia and the dependence of Germany upon the
east than in her subjugation upon the west; and certain it is that the
humanism of the writer who created the _Iphigenia_ has more affiliation
with the humanity of western Europe, which has given the mould to our
civilization, than with the soft and savage human nature of Half-Asia.
Unpatriotically he declared that he could not hate the French--he
owed them far too much of his culture. The words are only right and
proper. But (just as in Tolstoy’s case) the fun begins directly it
is a question of his nature, of that pre-intellectual fundamental
constitution we were talking about, which had its own ways of finding
expression, and which is so extraordinarily un-French that it might
well be described as pre-eminently German. It would be wrong to bring
in evidence here his coldness towards “freedom.” For in the first
place the principle of order (_ordre_) is something just as French
and classic and rationalist as the principle of freedom, which on
party grounds is set over against it. And in the second, there is
nothing un-German about freedom. We know with what éclat Goethe cited
Guizot’s dictum that Germany gave the idea of personal freedom to
the world. But there is in Goethe something that rebels against the
idea, against the doctrinaire and theoretic; a lack of faith that
the particular, existing under definite conditions, could ever be
improved by the method of abstraction; a realism, that is, and a
scepticism, in matters political, which one may as well call un-French
as particularly German--taking France as the country of revolution and
Germany as the country of a certain national weakness for the living,
historically conditioned, “organic.” We must remember that he was a
practical politician, he had governed Saxe-Weimar. But the practical
sphere is not kind to the soul; it is a training in cynicism, as many a
politician has found out, even in France, where more than one radical
has become a conservative and turned the guns on the people after he
came to power. Perhaps Goethe might have been more generous-minded,
politically speaking, if he had not lost his idealism in the practical
field. But this too is unlikely, since from the very beginning he
was insensitive to historical democracy, to history defined as the
evolution of the idea in the masses; he was fundamentally unacquainted
with enthusiasm for political ideas, and in general conceived of
history as the biography of great men--an aristocratism which is as
different from Schiller’s high-flung democratic gesture as it is from
the Christian-moujik disparagement of heroes in _War and Peace_.
It would be foolish to think of him as servile, despite the anecdote
about Beethoven and the imperial company on the promenade at Karlsbad.
His subservience to princes was purely mundane in its character,
wherever no personal friendship came in play. When in 1794 Freiherr
von Gagern published his challenge to the intelligence of Germany, and
to Goethe in particular, to put its pen at the service of the “good,”
that is to say, the conservative cause--no other than that of a new
alliance of German princes for the purpose of saving the country from
anarchy--Goethe, after thanking him politely for the confidence reposed
in him, made the characteristic reply that he considered it impossible
for princes and writers to unite upon a common task. Notwithstanding
which, we need waste no words over his strictly negative attitude
toward the French Revolution.
On the intellectual side, his view of humanity was a cynical one--that
is to say, it was radically sceptical. But we know that this was on
the intellectual side alone, from the fact that it did not prevent him
from loving his fellow-men. We have his confession that the mere sight
of the human countenance could cure him of the blues. What he did not
believe in was drawing up articles and holding love-feasts. We shall
never know whether Hegel was mocking or spoke in honest enthusiasm
when he said: “As long as the sun has stood in the firmament and the
planets circled round it, it has never been seen that a human being
stands on his head--i.e., on his understanding--and bases reality
upon it.” Whether jest or earnest, it was this that revolted Goethe.
He judged it to be entirely against nature to try to insist that
the whole of mankind find just one choice of means, just one route
toward civic happiness. Upon which I may comment as follows: that,
in the first place, one such utterance, by virtue of its strongly
nationalist, individualist, aristocratic emphasis, outweighs the whole
burden of his indifference toward the War of Liberation, and that
surely he who uttered it was only prevented by his admiration for the
genius of Napoleon--likewise aristocratic in its origin--from seeing
in the _Imperator_ the standard-bearer of precisely this democratic
“insistency.” But, in the second place, we must admit that he had a
right to set up as an advocate of nature. To quote again:
_Franztum drängt in unsern verworrenen Tagen, wie einstmals
Luthertum es getan, ruhige Bildung zurück._
(Driven by the spirit of France in our troublous days, as aforetime
By the spirit of Luther oppressed, quiet culture retreats.)
What a telling synthesis this, of France and Luther; how unprejudiced
by national feeling! It is all one to him whether the unrest, the
distraction, come from this side or that of the Rhine. No matter
whence it comes, it is his enemy, the enemy of nature and culture,
of the _ruhige Bildung_ which is at the bottom of his idea of
humanity. The distich shows clearly--shows it despite all _Lust
am Protestieren_--where he would have stood, say, in the sixteenth
century. In the name of that lofty conception of _Bildung_, in
which nature and culture unite, he would have been for Rome against
the Reformation--or else he would have taken up an ambiguous and
irresponsible position, as Erasmus did, of whom Luther said that repose
was dearer to him than the Cross. “The Cross”--a couple of centuries
later, that was the Revolution. Revolution was the spirit--and to
Goethe his _ruhige Bildung_ was dearer.
Here, for a moment, Erasmus and Goethe meet, in an atmosphere of
patrician quietism, humanistic love of peace. But the parallel does
not long hold--there is too much difference in the scale, and, after
all, men’s character, the essence of their being, is greatly affected
by their proportions. Tolstoy’s “folkishness,” for instance--is it not
the expression and apanage of his bearlike bulk? Are they not one and
the same thing? And may we not draw from Goethe’s greatness the _a
priori_ conclusion that his humanistic cosmopolitanism must contain a
good-sized racial core? Erasmus, the subtle, was not “folkish.” It was
Luther who was that. And truly, in scale, in essence, as an embodiment
of Germanic greatness, Goethe belongs more with Luther than with the
humanists--yes, more even with Bismarck, to whom he is much closer than
a certain antithesis, beloved abroad, would seem to show.
Dangerous, perhaps, to say so--as giving aid and comfort to the
cave-bears of nationalism the world over--but sometimes it is hard
not to feel sceptical about the genuineness and validity of Goethe’s
humanism. A godlike man, like Tolstoy. But is it possible that the
antique, humanistic, Jovelike attributes of his godhead were more a
convention than we think; that they did not go very deep, and that he
himself, all the time, like Tolstoy, the Russian god under the golden
lime-tree, was an ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic and
aristocratic paganism which claims both Luther and Bismarck as its
sons, and which, on both sides, played a rôle in the ideology of the
late war?
An open hostility, against Goethe as well as against Bismarck, is at
work in certain literary, humane, and radical circles, a demand for
his dethronement. It cannot be without all sense or justification.
Goethe, as a follower of Spinoza, conceived of all natural final causes
and purposes as anthropomorphic fictions; thus he was disinclined
to an anthropocentric, emancipatory conception of humanity, which
teleologically refers everything to itself and looks upon art
as a servant of mankind. His synthesis of art and nature is not
humanitarian. An approach by the route of the senses is natural to him:
it makes him see the burning of a peasant house as real and appealing
to his sympathies, whereas “the Fall of the Fatherland” he would find
an empty phrase. All which, frankly and flippantly spoken, is never
very far removed from the brute.
There is in him a feeling for power, for the struggle “until one proves
stronger than the other”; in such sentiments the pacifism of spirit
would find it impossible to rejoice. It “makes him sad to be friends
with everybody.” He “needs anger.” Certainly, that is not Christian
love of peace--though Lutheran it may be, and Bismarckian to boot.
One might say much--and much has been said--in evidence of his love of
strife, his fondness for “pitching in and punishing,” his readiness
to close the mouth of opposed opinions by a show of power and to
“remove such people from society.” But best of all I love--if here too
only because it is so amusing--the tale of Kotzebue and the Schiller
celebration which Kotzebue got up with the sole and single purpose of
annoying Goethe and playing Schiller off against him. That low-minded
Kotzebue! He _knows_ that the plan will annoy the old man; he also
knows that Goethe can forbid the celebration by virtue of his office.
So he puts the choice squarely before him: he can forbid it, and
thereby betray his jealousy and despotism; or, if he hesitates to go so
far, he can pocket up the annoyance. With majestic simplicity Goethe
chooses to exercise his power. He _forbids the celebration_. Bismarck
would have done the same.
In the soul-economy of this breed of giants are certain parallel
traits. There is violence and there is sentimentality: crude words
both to describe what I mean, crude and naturalistically derogatory;
yet it is my humour to use them; for even if I wanted to I could not
ignore the hidden irony--quite objective, quite unsuspected irony,
of course--involved in their gigantic loyalties, their aristocratic
servitude. They were both “faithful German servants of their Lord” (oh,
my God!): the “civilian Wallenstein” and the despot of _Kultur_; they
were German “_Edelknechte_” both; and there was nothing hypocritical
about it all, only their giant-sensibilities functioning at full
height. The similarity of the character and situation is so strong
as to bewilder one: Karl August and the simple old man whom Bismarck
“served” blend into one single symbolic figure. In the year 1825 he of
Saxe-Weimar celebrated the fiftieth jubilee of his reign, which was at
the same time the fiftieth year of Goethe’s residence in Weimar. On
this day Goethe calls himself “his master’s most enraptured servant.”
He is the first with his congratulations, at six o’clock at the Roman
villa in the park. The emotion is great and genuine. “Together to our
latest breath!” We see the venerable Wilhelm going to meet Bismarck on
the landing with just such another embrace; while a fugitive red mounts
in the cheeks of Roderich von Posa, who turns away with the words: “I
cannot be a courtier!”
I confessed in the beginning my tendency to make a matter of intrinsic
value out of the matter of size. The greatest German poet must
also be the most German one--that is an association more immediate
and inevitable than even the causal, it is temporal, it is simply
the future tense. And it was sanctioned by a source which will be
universally accepted as authoritative. It was Father Jahn, who, _motu
proprio_, in the year 1810 declared that Goethe was the most German of
poets--quite unperturbed by the fact that Goethe behaved at all times
as distantly and unsympathetically toward _deutsche Bruderschaften_
as Tolstoy toward Slavic. And then, in 1813, when he had very nearly
succeeded in bringing himself into bad odour as a man without a
country, Barnhagen von Ense cried out: “Goethe not a patriotic German?
All the freedom of Germania early found a home in his breast, there
to become, to our never-sufficiently-to-be-acknowledged advantage,
the pattern, the example, and the root of our culture. In the shade
of this tree we all live and move. Never did roots thrust firmer and
deeper into the soul of our Fatherland, never did shoots more lustily
suck strength from its breast. That our youth feel pride in their arms,
loftiness in their spirits, hath more reference to him than to many
another who may lay claim to great activity therein.”
Good, fine, powerful words. They proceed from the truth that in
national matters very little depends on what a man says or the opinions
he holds; on what he does, on the other hand, everything. When a man
has written _Götz_, _Faust_, _Wilhelm Meister_, the _Sprüche in Reimen_
and _Hermann und Dorothea_--a poem which Schlegel honoured with the
epithet “_vaterländisch_”--he can indulge in a bit of cosmopolitan
irresponsibility, just as the “great writer of Russia” could indulge
in the rationalizing Christian pacifism of his latter period. The
national is so much second nature that one may address oneself to the
mind without running the risk of literary unrealism; and as nature
Goethe always felt the national--we see it, among others, in the famous
remark to Eckermann: “National hatred is a queer thing after all. You
will always find it keenest and most violent _in the lowest stages
of culture_. But there is a stage where it quite disappears, and one
stands in a way above the nations and feels the well- or ill-being of
a neighbouring people as though it were one’s own. This stage was
conformable to my nature, and I had confirmed myself in it long before
I reached my sixtieth year.”
Spiritual regeneration. This summons to achieve the spirit is the
sentimental imperative of the favourites of nature; just as that
of the sons of spirit is the summons to achieve the form. And they
respond to it--with more or less of aptitude. Tolstoy’s self-imposed
task of shaking off the natural man was but spiritualizing the savage;
yet a touching and honourable sight, even alongside of Goethe’s
majestic culture. The main thing is that nothing should come too easy.
Effortless nature--that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root--or
substance. A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually
yearn toward each other--that is man.
* * * * *
Gorky says of Tolstoy a quite extraordinary and startling thing: he
suggests the possibility that Tolstoy, despite the strength of his
reason, sometimes hoped, or at least the thought occurred to him,
that possibly nature would make an exception, and grant him physical
immortality. “The whole broad earth looks toward him: from China, from
India, from America, from everywhere stretch hither living, vibrating
threads, his soul is for all and for always. Why should not nature
break her law, and grant one man physical immortality--why not?” What
madness! But even if it is not true, even if the sensible old man
never came on such a monstrously presumptuous thought--even so, it is
very telling that Gorky should have come on it for him. It shows what
seemed to a competent observer to be Tolstoy’s relation to nature and
life.--And Goethe? Is it likely that the grey-haired lover of Fraulein
von Levetzof never rebelled against the limitations of human life, as
Napoleon did at the limitations of human power, when he complained that
men had become unbelievers, unwilling to acknowledge him a god, as they
had his brother Alexander? Shall we imagine him utterly incapable of
the thought which Gorky ascribes to the old Tolstoy: that nature might
conceivably hesitate to destroy him, her darling son, as she did all
ordinary humankind?
Yet die he did, without warning, at the age of eighty-three. Nature, as
it were, tenderly got round him. He had been ailing; he settled down
in his arm-chair for a rest and a nap, and he was gone. The passage
in which Eckermann describes the appearance of the corpse is famous.
“The body lay naked, folded in a white sheet; they had put large
pieces of ice round, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Friedrich
(the servant) unwrapped the sheet, and I was astounded at the godlike
splendour of those limbs. The chest exceedingly powerful, broad and
deep; the arms and thighs full and gently muscular; the feet slender
and very chaste in form; and nowhere on the body a trace of fat or
shrinking or decay. A perfect human being lay in great beauty there
before me; and the delight I felt made me forget for a moment that the
immortal spirit had forsaken such a frame.”
Let there be no misunderstanding. Nobody asserts that Goethe and
Tolstoy were, so to speak, four-square; that by contrast with the
morbid geniuses Schiller and Dostoyevsky they were “normal” in the
common acceptation of the word. Even the genius most endowed by nature
is never natural in the philistine sense; that is to say, normal,
healthy, and according to rule. In his physical there must always be
something high-strung and irritable, prone to crises and disease, in
his psychical always something foreign to the average man, affecting
him uncannily--something almost psychopathic; though the philistine
must not be allowed to put it like that.... No; what I refer to here
is that _sense-endowment_ possessed by the noble race of Antæus
and celebrated by Goethe’s Faust in the words he addresses to the
Earth-Spirit:
_Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu geniessen. Nicht
Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur,
Vergönnest mir, in ihre tiefe Brust
Wie in den Busen eines Freunds, zu schauen_....
“Power to feel and to enjoy nature.” Tolstoy’s sense-endowment, as an
individual, must have been that of a noble, highly sensitive animal,
most perfectly equipped by nature and strengthened and sublimated
by the contemplative power and awareness of the human being. His
eyes, the small, keen grey eyes under the bushy brows, were like
a falcon’s. They saw everything. They were capable of analysis so
penetrating as sometimes to seem fantastic. A critic once wrote
of him: “You are sometimes capable of saying ‘such and such things
about the constitution of a certain man indicated that he wanted
to travel to India.’” His sense of smell, it seems, was especially
penetrating. The fact plays no small part in the sensuous atmosphere
of his writing, and appears to have conflicted at times with his own
human feeling. “However much I dislike to speak of it,” he says in
his _Recollections_, “I can still remember the characteristic sharp
odour which was personal to my aunt, probably in consequence of some
carelessness in dress.”
I have already spoken of Goethe’s sensitiveness to weather conditions.
It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became
positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the
earthquake of Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment which enables
them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The
animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly
irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond
the bounds of the actual senses and issues in the suprasensual, in
natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly
justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His
mood was sometimes priapic--a thing which of course does not happen
with Tolstoy, in whose nature the element of antique culture was
missing. In him the voice of sexual desire spoke in no classic accents;
it revelled Russianly in its strength; yet at the same time it always
had a moral cast, was at all times followed, probably even accompanied,
by profound remorse. Tolstoy’s comrades from his Sebastopol period
bear witness to the fury with which even at that time the battle
between sensual and spiritual impulses raged within him. According to
them young Count Tolstoy was a glorious comrade, the life and soul of
his battery, overflowing with high spirits. When he was away, they
were disconsolate. “We would hear nothing of him,” says the narrator,
“for a whole day, for two or three days. At last he would come back,
the very picture of the prodigal son; gloomy, knocked up, out of sorts
with himself. He would take me aside and begin to confess. He confessed
everything, simply everything, his gambling, his carousing, where he
had spent his days and nights--and, would you believe it, his remorse
and suffering were as deep as though he had committed some great crime.
His despair went so beyond all bounds that it was painful to behold.
That was the sort of man he was. He was, in a word, very remarkable,
and, to tell the truth, I never did quite understand him.”
That we can well believe. The remorse and suffering to which the young
officer was a witness sprang of course from that conflict within
Tolstoy’s own breast which afterwards gave him such unrivalled power
to stir the conscience and prick man’s fear of God awake. But the
depth of his moral necessity is a precise measure of the violence of
his instincts; and though his natural man bore heavier and heavier on
his Christianity as time went on, so that he craved surcease from its
stings, yet he never, up till the end, attained to peace. Tolstoy in
sex matters held out as long as Goethe, who mocked himself thus:
_Alter, hörst du noch nicht auf?
Immer, Mädchen!_
But his state of mind toward woman, whom he had early learned to
regard, after the manner of the Fathers, as _instrumentum diaboli_, had
long since assumed such a form that an experience like that of Goethe
with Ulrike was unthinkable. Stranger still--or no, in a man of his
parts and magnificence it is only what we should expect--we find not
a trace of cant or prudishness or even delicacy in all his recorded
utterances on this subject. On the contrary, they are all of a pagan
frankness that borders on the cynical. He goes walking by the sea with
Gorky and Anton Tschekof, and suddenly he levels at Tschekof a question
about the latter’s youth, using a crude Biblical word with rather
startling effect. Anton Pavlovich is confused; he pulls at his little
beard and mutters something in reply. The old man lets him stammer
awhile, then, looking out to sea, delivers himself in four words, of a
confession of his own, in good round terms, ending with a very low and
vulgar peasant word. “When they come from his rugged lips,” says Gorky,
“words like that lose their barrack-room flavour and sound quite simple
and natural.”
Again, he says: “If Leo Nikolaevich were a natural scientist, he
would certainly evolve the most ingenious hypotheses, and make the
greatest discoveries.” Gorky has not here in mind Tolstoy’s remarkable
sense-equipment; but I am inclined to associate the two ideas. Nor,
it would appear, has he Goethe in mind when he ascribes to Tolstoy a
latent genius for the natural sciences; but I have. To me it seems a
pertinent fact that Goethe, in Venice--this was in 1790, at the time
of those amorous adventures celebrated in the _Epigrams_--saw a broken
sheep-skull on the Lido, and had that morphological insight into the
development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebræ which
shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal
body. When Gorky says that Tolstoy, if he had gone in for it, would
have made brilliant discoveries in the field of natural science, there
can be no doubt of his meaning. He has in mind that initiated sympathy
with organic life which those must possess who are her favoured sons--a
sympathy not far from Eros, and in which Goethe’s biologic intuitions
have their source; for example, his incredibly sure-footed anticipation
of the cell theory.
Does it not find expression, this sympathy, in the youthful Goethe’s
Ganymede-pathos? “_Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne sich an mein Herz
drängt deiner ewigen Wärme heilig Gefühl._”... “_Aufwärts an deinen
Busen, alliebender Vater!_” Does it not find expression in his
pantheism, which is only the objectivation of his feeling, in such
wise that his own utter surrender gives him to know the divine not as
something from without, but as irradiating him through and through?
In any case, this organic sympathy, this living interest, is entirely
directed toward life, toward the “_ewige Wärme_”; whereas--and what
could be more characteristic of the difference between these two,
nature’s great children?--Tolstoy’s strongest, most tormenting,
deepest, and most productive interest has to do with death. It is
the thought of death which dominates his thoughts and writing, to
such an extent that one may say no other great master of literature
has felt and depicted death as he has--felt it with such frightful
penetration, depicted it so insatiably often. Tolstoy’s poetic genius
for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field
of natural science; and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of
both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be
hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was
so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the
life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case,
in his fixation with death, _love_ comes into play too: for the fear of
death, this source of Tolstoy’s poetry and his feeling for religion, is
fear of the love of nature, it is the negative, naturalistic other side
of Goethe’s Ganymede-impulse.
“_Du führst_,” says Goethe-Faust to the Earth-Spirit:
“_Du führst die Reihe der Lebendigen
Vor mir vorbei und lehrst mich meine Brüder
Im stillen Busch, in Luft und Wasser kennen._”
“My brothers.” We know that it was Goethe who took in all seriousness
the idea of “man’s close relation to the beast,” and that before
science had got far enough on to do so; his possession by this thought,
this profound and true intuition, shows us the child of nature in all
his sympathy with the organic. Schiller’s humanity, his conception of
man, which was at bottom emancipatory, haughtily inimical to nature,
would have found little pleasure in such a conception; and one does
not discover ideas to which one is unsympathetic; that is to say,
ideally unsympathetic. There is not such a thing as an assumptionless
science. Scientific discoveries are always the result of an ideal
assumption: the mediæval statement “_Credo ut intellegam_” is eternally
right. Belief is the organ of knowledge; and without the preconceived,
previsioned idea of a unified plan on which is based the development
of the higher vertebrate world, including man--in the plant world the
conception of the “primitive plant”--Goethe never would have found the
_os intermaxillare_ in man. I may speak of the amusing contradiction
between his discovery and the humanistic explanation he gave it. He
says that the intermaxillary bone is variously shaped, in animals,
according to circumstance and necessity; but that when it came to man,
the highest in the scale, it hid itself for shame, “afraid of betraying
an animal voracity.” Ideal human pride might retort that it was truly
inhuman to spy out the shamefaced hidden bone and bring it to the light.
Yet how remarkable and significant it is to see Goethe’s medical and
biological interest being seasoned from the start with the humanistic,
with his concern with man and his beauty! And consequently with art
too; since art with Goethe was a humanistic discipline, and all the
disciplines and faculties of human endeavour, human wisdom, human
power, were seen by him as variations and adumbrations of one and
the same great compelling and enchanting interest and concern, which
is man. To study humanity from the angle of medicine and the natural
sciences did not lie in his family tradition, as it did in Schiller’s
and Dostoyevsky’s, both of whom were sons of physicians, and neither
of whom gave a thought to man’s physical side. On the other hand, we
know that ever since his Leipsic days Goethe had occupied himself with
medicine, associated every day with medical men in Strasburg, worked
in the dissecting-rooms, spent time in the obstetrical clinic and the
clinic for internal diseases. The spirit in which he pursued these
studies, the kind of interest he took in them, is clear from the fact
that he himself later in life lectured to young artists in the academy
on the bony structure of the body. The same thing comes out even
plainer in the words he puts into the mouth of Wilhelm Meister in the
_Wanderjahre_, when the hero takes his surgical training. His primary
interest is in anatomy; and we get some very curious information on the
point of previous preparation in a quite different field of activity.
“By a peculiar method, which no one would guess, I had already made
good progress in knowledge of the human frame; and this was during my
theatrical career. When you come down to it, the physical man, after
all, plays the principal rôle there--a fine man, a fine woman! If
the manager is lucky enough to have got hold of these, the writers
of comedy and tragedy are assured. The free footing upon which such
society lives makes their associates more familiar with the peculiar
beauty of the uncovered limbs than any other relationship; different
costumes often oblige them to make visible what otherwise is generally
concealed. On this point I might have much to say, as also of physical
defects which the sensible actor must recognize in himself or others,
in order, if not to correct, at least to hide them. In this way I was
sufficiently prepared to give consistency to the anatomical course
which taught me to know the outer parts more accurately, whilst
the inner parts too were not strange to me, inasmuch as a certain
perception of them had always been present to me.”
This is, I repeat, a significant bit of information. We learn, not
only that the acquaintance with the human form, which Wilhelm owed to
the “free footing” of theatrical life, was a happy preparation for his
anatomical studies; but also that both, his leaning to the theatre and
his interest in medicine, were expressions of one and the same profound
interest, his sympathy with the organic and its highest revelation,
the human form--an interest, and a sympathy, not far removed, as I
said, from Eros. For instance, when Wilhelm Meister, one day in the
dissecting-room, finds that his subject is “the most beautiful female
arm that ever twined itself about a young man’s neck”--and cannot bring
himself to mutilate with his instruments this “glorious manifestation
of nature.” Out of this incident there comes about his acquaintance
with that remarkable man, the “plastic anatomist,” a sculptor who
prepares from wax or other material anatomical dissections possessing
the fresh colour and appearance of the natural subjects, in the
hope of employing his ingenuity and fertility of method to make the
demonstrations more valuable to students and medical practitioners
the world over. There follow the most pregnant conversations upon
the association of plastic art and anatomical knowledge, and the two
intertwine in the most wonderful way when the master “cast in a shaped
mass the beautiful torso of a youth and now was skilfully trying to
divest the ideal form of the epidermis, to change the beautiful shapes
of life into a veritable preparation of muscular tissue.”
Here the prose work of Goethe’s later period refers to his own youthful
thoughts and experiences as a student. He had early discovered and
stated that a knowledge of nature and a knowledge of art reciprocally
heighten each other. “As I observe nature,” he wrote from Rome, “so I
now observe art, and win what I have so long striven after, a perfect
conception of the highest that has been accomplished by man; and _my
soul gets formed_ more on this side and looks into a freer field.”
“Architecture and sculpture and painting are to me now like mineralogy,
botany, and zoology,” he says in a letter to Herder. And again: “We can
finally rival nature by the use of art only when we have learned from
her, at least to some extent, the way she proceeds in the formation of
her works.... The human form cannot be comprehended merely by looking
at the surface of it; one must lay bare its inwardness, disjoin its
parts, observe the connexion between them, note the dissimilarities,
be instructed in the action and counter-action, print upon one’s mind
the hidden and dormant and basic features of a phenomenon, if one wants
really to see and imitate it as it moves, a beautiful, indivisible
whole, in living waves before our eyes.” These are Goethe’s words, and
who could doubt their truth? Who would deny that it advantages the
artist to have knowledge of something beneath the skin, so that he can
paint what is not seen as well as what is: in other words, if he stand
to nature in another relation besides the lyrical, if, for example, he
is a physician on the side, a physiologist, an anatomist, and quietly
knows what he knows about the _dessous_ as well? The envelope of a
human body consists not only of the mucous membrane and cornea of the
epidermis, but underneath one has to imagine the corium with its oil
and sweat glands, blood-vessels and tubercles, and under that again the
adipose tissue, the upholstery that lends the form its charm. But what
the artist knows and thinks tells too: it flows into his hand and has
its effect; it is not there and yet somehow it is, and just this it
is that gives perspicuousness. Art, I repeat, is only one humanistic
discipline among others; all of them, philosophy, jurisprudence,
medicine, theology, even the natural sciences and technology as well,
are only variations and subspecies of one and the same high and
interesting theme--toward which we can never take up a sufficiently
varied and many-sided attitude, for it is man; and the _human form_ is
the summary of them all, it is, to speak with Goethe, “the _non plus
ultra_ of all human knowledge and activity, the alpha and omega of all
things known unto us.”
* * * * *
Autobiography, and education. The two conceptions meet again when
we envisage this idea of the human form, this loftiest expression
of our sympathy with the organic. Yes, in view of this idea, so
genuinely creative, the two conceptions flow into one humane whole:
the pedagogic element resides, consciously or unconsciously (and if
unconsciously, so much the better), in the autobiographic; it follows
from it, it grows out of it.
Goethe somewhere calls Wilhelm Meister his “beloved likeness (_sein
geliebtes Ebenbild_).” In what sense? Does a man love his own
likeness? Unless he suffer from hopeless self-complacency, should
not the sight of it make him aware of his own shortcomings? Yes, of
course, it should. And this very awareness of a need of improvement
and completion, this consciousness of his own ego as a task, a moral,
æsthetic, cultural obligation, becomes objective in the hero of the
autobiographical novel, the epic of education. To this personage the
creative ego acts as guide, philosopher, and friend--at once identical
and superior--to an extent that makes Goethe once refer to his Wilhelm
as “a poor dog.” The phrase bespeaks a parental tenderness, not only
toward the poor fellow in his _dunklen Drange_ whom he created in his
own image, but also toward himself. And thus, at the very heart of the
autobiographic pathos there takes place the turn for the pedagogic.
And this process of objectivation goes on in Wilhelm Meister through
the introduction of the society of the Turm, which takes in hand
his destiny and human development and leads him in mysterious ways.
More and more plainly in the _Lehrjahre_ does the original idea of a
personally conducted adventure in self-improvement tend toward the
pedagogic; until in the _Travels_ it issues entirely in the social,
yes, even in the political. At the end of the _Faust_ there is an
unmistakable flashing-up in poetry of the same vision of the union of
self and society in the educational process. For the Enlightened, who
on earth “_immer strebend sich bemüht_”, is received on high by the
youthful saved, who sing:
“_Wir wurden früh entfernt
Von Lebechören;
Doch dieser hat gelernt,
Er wird uns lehren._”
Nobody has ever loved his own ego, nobody was ever egocentric, in the
sense of conceiving of his own ego as a cultural task and toiling
early and late in pursuance of it, without reaping, almost as though
by accident, educational influence in the outer world, and the joy and
dignity of a leader and former of youth. The harvest never comes save
at the height of life, and the moment of his realization of it is the
sublime moment in the life of the productive human being. He never
foresees, or even suspects, the moment beforehand. The autobiographical
“poor dog,” with his mind from his youth up wholly on the difficulties
of ploughing his own furrow, or, in the religious phrase, on the saving
and justification of his own soul, will not have imagined he can teach
anything, to improve or to convert men. Yet the day comes when, still
incredulous, still astonished, he realizes that he has been teaching
while he learned--shaping, guiding, leading, training, putting his own
stamp on youth, by the power of words, by that lofty instrument of
culture which is Eros-filled and binds the hearts of men. And from the
day of his realization this knowledge possesses his whole life with
a certainty, a creative bliss which leaves far behind it all ordinary
human joys of love and fatherhood--just as the life of the mind is
wont to exceed all personal and sensual things in value, beauty, and
splendour.
* * * * *
“I am reading Goethe. My mind teems,” Tolstoy wrote in his journal at
the beginning of the sixties. He was then a man of some thirty years
and had not long returned to Russia and begun his work as a preaching
and practising pedagogue. What was he reading? Was it contact with
German idealism and humanism that made his mind so to “teem”? It was
an alien sphere to him. For in Tolstoy (otherwise than in Goethe), the
origin of the pedagogic impulse was immediately social and ethical.
A man of parts and attainments, said he, must share with those who
lack such blessings before he can derive pleasure from them himself.
The motive seems _a poor one_ to me; rationalizing and humanitarian,
like all the conscious thought of the great artist just then, I find
it deeply inferior to the beautiful humanity of Goethe, in whom the
social ideal was an organic outgrowth of the cultural and educational.
But what Tolstoy thought was usually smaller than what he was. And
to come back to our starting-point: what was it made his mind “teem”
when he read Goethe and at the same time set to work as single-handed
schoolmaster and founder of a primary school to put into practice the
pedagogic ideas that rumbled in his belly?
Or, rather, to experiment with them. For he had made up his mind to
settle, by actual experiment, what it was that the people, and in
particular youth, wanted to be taught; it had not been settled, and
that it had to be settled was his primary pedagogical thesis. “The
people,” he said, “this most interested party in the whole situation,
party and judge in one, listens quietly to our more or less ingenious
exposition as to the best way of preparing and presenting its mental
fodder. It is not disturbed; for it perfectly knows that in the great
business of its mental development it will never take a false step, or
accept anything that is false; and that all efforts to force it into
paths unsuited to it, for instance German paths, will be like water
on a duck’s back.” One must recognize, Tolstoy declares in writing
and controversy, that the German type of school is a desirable one;
that is a fact for which history vouches. But, even so, one may as
a Russian hesitate to enter the lists in favour of a primary school
which does not yet exist there. What historical argument can be brought
for the assertion that Russian schools must be like those in the
rest of Europe? The people, he says, need education, and every human
being seeks it unconsciously. The more highly cultivated classes,
society, and government officials, seek to extend the benefits of
their knowledge and to educate the less educated masses. One would
suppose that such a concurrence of the needs of both classes, the
giving as well as the receiving, would suffice. But no. The masses
steadily oppose all efforts made in their behalf to educate them, so
that these are often entirely futile. Whose is the fault? Which is
more justified: the opposition, or the system against which it is
directed? Must the opposition be broken or the system altered? The
latter, Tolstoy decides, is the case. “Shall we not,” he asks, “confess
honourably and openly that we do not, cannot, know what the needs of
the coming generations will be; but that we feel none the less bound
to investigate? That we will not charge the masses with ignorance
because they will not accept our education; but rather accuse ourselves
of both ignorance and arrogance if we go on trying to educate them on
our own lines? Let us at last cease to see hostility in the resistance
of the people to our system; and find in it the expression of the
people’s will, which alone should guide us. Let us at last accept the
fact, so clearly evinced by the whole history of pedagogics, that if
the educating class are to know what is good and what bad, the class
to be educated must have full power to register dissatisfaction,
and opportunity to reject a system which they instinctively find
unsatisfying; that, in short, _freedom_ is the sole criterion of
educational methods.”
“The sole criterion of education is freedom, the sole method
experience, experimentation.” This is Tolstoy’s first and highest
pedagogic maxim. According to him, the school should be at once a means
of education and an experiment performed on the rising generation, an
experiment productive of ever new results. It should, in other words,
be an educational laboratory, where the experiment of pedagogic science
seeks to create a firm basis for itself. To do this, it is necessary
that it function under circumstances that ensure the value of its
results--that is, in freedom. The school as it is, Tolstoy declares,
enfeebles the children by distorting their mental faculties. During
the most precious period of development it wrenches the child out of
the family circle, robs him of the joy of freedom, and makes of him
a jaded, suppressed creature, upon whose face rests an expression of
weariness, fear, and boredom, while with his lips he repeats strange
words in a language he does not know. But if we give the people freedom
during their training, then we also give them the chance to speak out
on the score of their necessities, and furthermore to choose among
the kinds of knowledge offered. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have
unanimously striven to free the school from the fetters of tradition.
They have sought to discover wherein the intellectual needs of man
consist, and to build up new schools on these more or less correctly
envisaged needs. Luther demands that the masses shall study the
Scripture from the original text, and not from the commentaries of the
Fathers. Bacon advises the study of nature from nature herself and not
from the works of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life _from life_,
as he conceives it, and not from outworn experience. All philosophy
stands for freeing the school from the idea of instructing the younger
generation in that which the older generation held to be science; and
in favour of the idea of teaching them what they themselves need. And
we can see by the history of pedagogic science that every step forwards
consists in greater natural _rapport_ between pupil and teacher, in
less compulsion and greater facilitation of the process of learning.
Tolstoy, then, an anarchistic pedagogue, sets his face against
discipline. “The school in which there is less compulsion,” he says,
“is better than the one in which there is more. The method which can
be introduced without increased disciplinary strain is good; one which
requires greater severity is surely wrong. Take a school like mine and
try to carry on conversations about tables and corners of rooms or
shove little dice to and fro. A frightful disorder will reign at once,
and it will be absolutely necessary to restore order. But tell them an
interesting story or set them an interesting task, or let someone write
on the board and the others correct, and _let them all out of their
benches_, and they will all be busy, and there will be no mischief, and
no increased discipline will be necessary. We may safely say that this
way is good.”
“The children bring nothing with them,” thus Tolstoy describes the
procedure at Yasnaya Polyana, “neither primers nor copy-books. There
are no tasks to take home. They need not remember anything--nothing
of what they did the day before. They need carry nothing, either in
their hands or in their heads. They bring nothing with them but their
receptive natures and the conviction that school will be just as jolly
today as it was yesterday; they only think of the instruction when it
has begun. No one who comes late is ever scolded, and they never come
late, except some of the older ones, whose fathers occasionally keep
them to work. When that happens, they run as fast as they can to school
and get there breathless.”
Lucky village children of Yasnaya Polyana! But it is comprehensible
that Tolstoy tries to make the school at least pleasant for his pupils;
his faith in its educational value is weak, and he makes in the end no
secret of his conviction--which he declares he derived from personal
observation in the schools of Paris, Marseilles, and other cities of
western Europe--that the greater part of popular education is gained,
not from school, but from life; and that free public instruction,
by means of lectures, clubs, books, exhibitions, and so on, remains
far superior to any teaching in schools. But be that as it may; what
interests us here is not the rightness or wrongness of Tolstoy’s ideas,
but rather what is characteristic in them; and characteristic they
certainly are, in the highest degree, and from every point of view, not
only in a personal sense, but also as a sign, even as an augury of his
time.
What strikes one first of all, then, is a note that sounds in clearest
contradiction to certain other of his doctrines: to the pacifistic and
antinational ones, to the thesis of democratic equality he preached
in his latter days. It is the national note. He emphasizes the
right of the Russian people to an education suited to their genius,
independently of the foreign spirit. His root-and-branch Russianism,
at this time still quite unregenerate, denies the right of the upper
and official classes, with their west-European liberal education, to
force upon the masses an education not suited to their actual needs.
Here he is turning against Peter the Great, who created these official
classes and gave them their orientation toward liberalism and the
west. Tolstoy’s educational ideas are all extreme anti-“Petrinic,”
anti-western, anti-progressive. He openly declares that the educated
class is not capable of giving the masses their proper training,
conceiving, as it does, that the well-being of the people lies in the
direction of civilization and progress. What speaks out of Tolstoy’s
mouth, what rules his thinking, is Moscow. It is that leaning toward
Asia which so alarmed Turgeniev and others like him in Tolstoy’s
writings and which here is elevated to a pedagogic principle. His
anarchism, his faith in the anarchistic principle as the single
reasonable basis of communal human life; his doctrine that absolute
freedom makes all discipline superfluous--all these are part of it, and
it and they are expressed in Tolstoy’s prescription to “let all the
children out of the benches” and free them from every oppressive sense
of duty.
This “_letting all the children out of the benches_”--a picturesque
and stimulating formula--is a perfect symbol for Tolstoy’s social and
political (or, rather, his anarchistic, antipolitical) views. His
famous letter to Czar Alexander III develops these most concisely. The
new Czar’s father had been murdered on the first of March 1881; and
Tolstoy wrote begging him to exercise clemency toward the murderers. He
here sets down for the Emperor, in words so compelling that one almost
wonders at their not prevailing, the two _political_ expedients which
had been applied up to date against increasing political disorder:
first, force and terror; and second, liberalism, constitution,
parliament. Both these have finally shown themselves impotent. There
remains, however, a third expedient, which is not of a political
nature and which has at least the advantage of having never yet been
tried. It consists in the fulfilment of the divine will regardless of
consequences, without any cautious reservations of policy; quite simply
in love, forgiveness, the requital of evil with good; in mildness, in
non-resistance against evil, in freedom.... In a word, Tolstoy advises
the Czar to “let all the children out of the benches”; he counsels
anarchy--I am not using the word in a derogatory sense, but quite
objectively, to specify a definite social and political gospel of
salvation.
The Asiatic bias of this great Russian genius has already been shown
to be a mixture of various psychical elements: oriental passivity,
religious quietism, and an unmistakable tendency to Sarmatian wildness.
Here, in this anarchistic theory, it lies down with quite different
company: with the revolutionary ideals of western Europe, with the
educational and political conceptions of Rousseau and his pupil
Pestalozzi, in both of whom there is present the element of wildness,
the return to nature--in short, the anarchistic element in another
form and under other colours. Here, then, we are arrived at the common
factor in the education of our two protagonists--but with a difference.
On the educational side, Goethe fell away from his allegiance to
Rousseau. Pedagogic Rousseauianism, as preached and practised by its
founder, revolted him. Furiously, even desperately, he rejected it, and
the anarchical individualism of the revolutionary education.
Boisserée tells how Goethe expressed to him his distress on the
score of Pestalozzi and his system. For its original purpose and
in its original setting, where Pestalozzi had only the children of
the people in mind, the poor who lived in their isolated huts in
Switzerland and could not send their children to school, it might be
a capital idea. But it became the most destructive one in the world
so soon as it ceased to confine itself to elementary teaching and
went on to language, art, the general field of knowledge and power,
which of course presupposed a _previous tradition_.... And then
the insubordination this cursed kind of education aroused: look at
the impudence of the little school-urchins, who feel no awe of any
stranger, but rather put him in a fright instead. All respect gone,
everything done away with that makes human beings human beings in their
relations with each other. “What should I have been,” cried Goethe, “if
I had not always been obliged to show respect for others? And these
men, in their madness and frenzy, to reduce everything to terms of the
single individual and be simply gods of self-sufficiency! They think
to educate a nation which shall stand against the barbaric hordes,
just as soon as the latter shall have mastered the elementary tools of
understanding, which Pestalozzi has made it so very easy for them to
do.”
Tradition, reverence--which “makes human beings human beings in their
relations with each other”--conformity of the ego within a noble and
estimable community; do you not feel the nearness of the Pedagogic
Province? Let me recall a moment that dream so wise and splendid, at
once austere and blithe, in which can be traced much of the humanism of
the eighteenth century, much of the spirit of the _Zauberflöte_, of
Sarastro and the “moving toward good with one’s hand in a friend’s”;
and which at the same time contains so much that is new and bold, and,
humanly speaking, advanced that it cannot be called less revolutionary
than Tolstoy’s educational ideas. Only, of course, the anarchistic
flavour is utterly lacking; while its conception of humanity and
human dignity, culture and civilization, is so consonant with solemn
regulation and gradation, with such a pronounced sense of reverence, of
traditions, symbols, mysteries, and rhythm, with such a symmetrical,
almost choreographic restraint in its freedom, that I may be permitted
to call it statesmanlike in the best and finest sense, by way of
pointing the contrast to Tolstoy’s “letting the children out of the
benches.” However, the boys and youths of Goethe’s dream-province do
not sit glued to their benches either, at least we do not see them
thus. The basis of their education is quite in the Pestalozzan style:
it is husbandry. And their training goes forward in the open air,
work and play constantly accompanied by singing. We are told, quite
explicitly, what its essence is: “Wise men lead the boys to find out
themselves what is fitted for them; and shorten the by-ways into which
man will often too readily turn aside.” Every well-marked bent to a
pursuit is fostered and cultivated, for “to know and practise one thing
rightly gives higher culture than half-way performance of a hundred
things.” But if the education is thus adapted to the individual, it
is not thereby in the very least individualistic--so little, in fact,
that respect for convention is insisted upon, and regarded as a
conspicuous characteristic of genius; for genius understands that art
is called art just because it is not nature; and easily accommodates
itself to paying respect to the conventions, in the view that they
represent “an agreement arrived at by the superior elements of society,
whereby the essential and indispensable is regarded as the best.” That
is hostility toward the voluntary, with a vengeance; and the Head is
at pains to define and interpret it by a musical parallel. “Would a
musician,” he asks, “let a pupil make a wild attack on the keyboard
or invent intervals to please himself? No, the striking thing is that
nothing is left to the choice of the learner. The element in which
he is to work is fixed, the tool he must use put into his hand, even
the way he shall use it is prescribed--I mean the change of fingers,
in order that one get out of the other’s way and make the path plain
for its successor; until by dint of this regulated co-operation and
thus alone the impossible at last becomes the possible.”--It is not by
chance, I insist, that the Heads of the Province draw their parallel
from the field of music: is she not truly the most spirited symbol for
that regulated co-operation of manifold elements toward an end and goal
which is culturally noble and worthy of humanity? In the Pedagogic
Province song presides over all the activities, everything else is
linked with it and communicated by it. “The simplest pleasures as well
as the simplest tasks are animated and impressed by song; yes, even our
instruction in morals and religion is communicated in this wise.” Even
the elements of knowledge, reading, writing, reckoning, are derived
from song, note-writing, and putting text beneath, and from observing
the basic measures and notation--in short, as agriculture is the
natural, so music is the spiritual element of education, “for from it
level paths run out in all directions.”
Another great German and shaper of German destiny comes to mind here:
Luther’s view of music as an instrument of education was very like
Goethe’s. “_Musicam_,” he says, “I have always loved. One should
accustom youth to this art, for it makes fine, capable people. A
schoolmaster who cannot sing I will not look at.” And in the schools
under his influence there was almost as much singing as in the
Pedagogic Province--whereas no one would know whether they sang in
Tolstoy’s school or not. To the wanderer through the Pedagogic Province
it seems as though none of its inhabitants did anything of his own
power, but as though a mysterious spirit animated them through and
through, leading them on toward one single great goal. This spirit is
the spirit of music, of culture, of “regulated co-operation,” whereby
alone at length “the impossible”--that is to say, the state as work of
art--becomes possible; it is a spirit remote from and hostile to all
barbarism; one would like to be allowed to call it a German spirit.
The salutation in three degrees, whose meaning, the threefold
reverence, is kept secret from the boys themselves, because mystery
and respect for the mysterious is a moral and civilizing influence;
the insistence upon modesty and decorum; the lining up and standing
at attention of the young human being in face of the world, and
his honourable comradeship with his kind; the enhancing of his own
honour through the honours he renders; all this militarism so highly
imbued with the spirit and with art--how far it is from the rational
radicalism of Tolstoy’s Christianity, with its heart of wildness! Is
it anyway credible that, in essentials, a remarkable likeness subsists
between the educational conceptions of our two geniuses?
Tolstoy in all pious simplicity once declared that the world can
find salvation simply by no longer doing anything which does not
seem inherently reasonable: that is to say, anything which our whole
European world is doing today; for example, teaching the grammar of
dead languages. What finds utterance, what bursts forth, in this
polemic against the study of ancient tongues is the revolt of the
Russian people against humanistic civilization itself. Tolstoy’s
unclassic paganism stands revealed, his ethnic godhead, which,
according to Gorky, was not Olympian, but more like that of a Russian
god, “sitting on a maple throne, under a golden lime-tree.” Tolstoy’s
pedagogic writing betrays an extremely anti-humanistic, anti-literary,
anti-rhetorical conception of the relative importance of different
branches of study. He has anything but the traditional European
view of the importance of the discipline of reading and writing;
entertaining not the faintest humanistic fear of “analphabetism,”
but rather openly defending what to our way of thinking would almost
amount to a state of barbarism. “We see people,” he says, “who are
equipped with all the knowledge necessary for farming; who perfectly
comprehend all its bearings, though they can neither read nor write;
or capital military leaders, tradespeople, foremen, machine-overseers,
labourers, all people who got their training from life, not books,
and stored up large resources of information and reflection. On the
other hand we see people who can both read and write, but who have not
profited by this advantage to learn any new thing.” When he dwells
upon the conflict between the needs of the people and the learning
forced upon them by the ruling classes, he has in mind the fact that
the elementary schools are an outgrowth of the higher ones. First the
church school, then the higher education, then after that the primary
school--a false hierarchy, for it is false that the primary school,
instead of conforming to its own needs, should conform--only on a
smaller scale--to the demands of the higher education. His meaning is
clear. He finds the folk-school too literary, too much subordinated
to the classical ideal of education, not practical or vital enough,
not guided by the principle of training for a calling in life. But we
shall be mistaken in expecting from him any greater kindness for either
the system or the spirit of the higher institutions of learning. He
accuses them of being “entirely divorced from actual life.” He compares
the true education derived from life itself with that offered to the
academic student, and finds that the former produces men capable in
their calling, the latter merely “so-called people with a university
education--advanced, that is to say irritable, sickly liberals.” He
gives “Latin and rhetoric” another hundred years of life, not more,
and so much only for the reason that “when the medicine has once been
bought, one must take it.” The phrase betrays plainly enough his
attitude toward classical education, toward the traditional European
culture, toward humanism. It betrays at the same time his attitude
toward the west and civilization, his folk-hatred of all that is not of
the people, that is foreign, that comes from abroad, that has merely a
cultural value--in short, the anger of primitive Russia against Peter
the Great.
It is time we looked round in the Pedagogic Province for the place
where youth busies itself with the ancient tongues. And, after all, it
is rather a shock not to find it. Goethe is not such a barbarian as to
despise the study of language or languages, as a cultural instrument.
He calls it enthusiastically the most sensitive in the world, and
emphasizes its value as a civilizing agent, by having his imaginary
pupils take it in connexion with the rude tasks of stable-work; so
that, caring for and training animals, they do not become like animals
themselves. But the languages here are modern languages. The tongues of
various nations are studied in turn--but Latin and Greek, it will be
noted, are not in the curriculum.
Well, there are other things which are not expressly mentioned either.
But that precisely these subjects should be absent is after all rather
striking. Was Goethe a humanist, or was he not? In the first place,
his humanism was always of another and a broader kind than merely the
philological. And in the second place, the impress of a certain high
austerity lies upon all the regulations of the Pedagogic Province,
despite the Parnassian blitheness that reigned there. There is no doubt
that Goethe, in his consciously pedagogic period, felt, curiously
enough, toward the humanistic, Winkelmannian ideal of education much
as Tolstoy and Auerbach did about music: a moral severity against the
sybaritic, dilettante, the roving and ranging, sipping and changing,
which he considered the danger of the “universally human” ideal as
applied to pedagogy. He considered this danger more threatening
than the peril of specialization and its consequent narrowness and
impoverishment--the horrors of which we later comers, to be sure, have
learned to know. He espouses the cause of vocational against verbal
training, out of the same anti-literary tendency which we observed
in Tolstoy; sharing with him the conviction that human culture makes
sounder progress by the method of limitation; he is radical enough
to use the _Wanderjahre_ as a mouth-piece through which to shout
“_Narrenpossen_ (Stuff and nonsense)!” at the “universally human”
educational ideal and “all its works.” That is severe. But today, when
nobody any longer can live on his income, does it not sound like an
uncommonly clear-sighted prophecy when he declares: “Whoever from now
on does not take to either an art or a trade will have a hard time of
it”?
I have made no secret of my tendency to interpret the paganism of the
children of nature in a primarily ethnical sense. And I am greatly
strengthened by this astonishingly radical and decisive rejection, on
Goethe’s part, of a humane and literary education. Almost I might have
dared interpret that gruff “_Narrenpossen!_” as the revolt of Germanic
folkishness against the humanistic culture itself. I have every
warrant for asserting that Goethe would have fought like Tolstoy the
folly of offering watered scholarship to the people for education--a
folly by which one waters the people’s sense and spirit, debases and
insults, instead of, as one fondly imagines, elevating them! Goethe,
who in the _Wahlverwandtschaften_ advances--surreptitiously, “_weil die
Menge gleich verhöhnet_”--the reactionary and esoteric doctrine: “Bring
up the boys to be servants and the girls to be mothers, then all will
be well”: was he the man to advocate the breeding of “advanced, that
is to say irritable and sickly liberals”? And was there not perhaps
prophetic vision at work in the severity and the limitations of his
educational principles? Did his sense of time, like the Russian’s, give
“Latin and rhetoric” a limit of some hundred years of life? Strange
events in our Europe today incline one to regard his maxims in a
prophetic light.
The great revolution in Russia brought to the light of day--that
light which is so good at illuminating the _surface_ of things--the
western Marxism which had put its impress upon Tolstoy’s country. But
it must not blind us to the spectacle of the bolshevist revolution
as the end of an epoch: the epoch of Peter the Great, the western,
liberalizing, European epoch in the history of Russia, which now, with
this revolution, faces eastward once more. It was to no European idea
of progress that the Czar fell victim. In him Peter the Great was
murdered, and his fall opened to his people not the path toward Europe,
but the way home to Asia. But is there not also in western Europe,
precisely since the time of this crisis--whose prophet Leo Tolstoy
was, although Moscow sees it not--is there not also in western Europe
a feeling alive that not only for Russia, but for it, for us, for all
the world there is at hand the ending of an epoch: the bourgeois,
humanistic, liberal epoch, which was born at the Renaissance and
came to power with the French Revolution, and whose last convulsive
twitchings and manifestations of life we are now beholding? The
question is put today whether this Mediterranean, classic, humanistic
tradition is commensurate with humanity and thus coeval with it, or
whether it is only the intellectual expression and apanage of the
bourgeois liberal epoch and destined to perish with its passing.
Europe seems to have answered the question already. The anti-liberal
rebound is more than plain, it is palpable. It finds political
expression in a disgusted turning away from democracy and parliamentary
government, in an about-face toward dictatorship and terror, executed
with frowning brows. Italian fascism is the precise pendant to Russian
bolshevism; all its archaistic gesturings and mummery cannot disguise
its essential hostility to the humane. And on the Iberian peninsula,
where the destruction of the liberal system was still more obvious than
in Italy, things have taken the same course, even more decisively;
military dictatorship has been well established there for some time.
But, indeed, all over Europe--as a consequence of the war and a sign
of an anti-liberal temper--the waters of nationalism are mightily
swollen. The individual peoples of Europe display a turkey-cock
self-assertiveness, a furious self-deification, in striking contrast
to the poverty and prostration of the continent as a whole.
The spiritual destinies of France are remarkable indeed, and of
immediate importance to us Germans. In the first years after the war
no country seemed more confirmed in the bourgeois-classical tradition.
France seemed the one truly conservative country in all Europe. Far
from thinking of war as a new revolution, it was bent instead, after
the victory and on the basis of the victory, on seeing in it nothing
but the confirmation and the consummation of the old, the bourgeois
order of 1789. To such questions as the one I have raised above, France
made answer with tranquil irony. If Germany, she said, wanted to dream
apocalyptic dreams, let her do so by all means; for herself, she felt
very comfortable in her classical tradition. Once on the occasion of
an international exchange of ideas I had sought to get some of these
matters expressed; and I remember how a contributor to the French
official newspaper organ answered me that France had always been and
would always remain _solidement rationaliste et classique_.
But that was the voice of official, bourgeois, conservative France,
not the other France, loftier, young, intellectual, secretly astir.
Certainly, this new France is beginning to “dream apocalyptically”;
there is of late a good deal of reason to doubt that she feels as much
at home as she used to in her tradition. What M. Poincaré, who has no
better name for it, knows and hates as “communism” is nothing but the
process that is going on there of undermining his bourgeois, classical,
old-revolutionary France; the disintegration of the Latin conception
of civilization by the action of spiritual ferments which have filtered
in from the outside and are doing their work in the blood of the
youth--a new, anti-bourgeois, spiritual, and proletarian revolution;
and we in Germany think we have ground for hope that, if there are to
be atmospheric changes, we too may get a little more air to breathe.
For in France the interests of nationalism and of the humanistic
culture coincide, in so far as both are based upon the conviction of
the absolute supremacy of the Latin civilization and its mission of
world-domination as an abiding concern of humanity. Whereas a spirit of
European solidarity, and a certain readiness, however conditional, to
come to terms with Germany, is more likely to be found on the side of
the “communistic” new-revolutionary France, which is no longer quite so
sound on the score of its cultural Latinity.
Germany’s position, with reference to these phenomena to the west of
her, is a difficult and complicated one. For us Germans ourselves, and
for the world at large, it is highly important that she see it clearly
and recognize it for what it is. For in Germany too there exist the
two camps, a humanistic and a “communistic”; from which it follows
that two peoples may behave the same, culturally speaking, and reach
quite different results, and that there are circumstances under which
the pursuance of the same spiritual tendency may be the worst possible
method of arriving at political _rapprochement_.
I do not propose to dwell upon German fascism, nor upon the
circumstances, the quite comprehensible circumstances, of its origin.
It is enough to say that it is a racial religion, with antipathy
not only for international Judaism, but also, quite expressly, for
Christianity, as a humane influence; nor do its priests behave more
friendly toward the humanism of our classical literature. It is a pagan
folk-religion, a Wotan cult: it is, to be invidious--and I mean to be
invidious--romantic barbarism. It is only consistent in the cultural
and educational sphere, where it seeks to check the stream of classical
education, to the advantage of the primitive German heritage. And it
does not or it will not see what an unhappy pendant it thus furnishes
to the anti-Latinism of modern-minded France, and how very much it
plays into the hands of M. Poincaré, the communist-hater. To profess
paganism in Germany today, to worship Odin and hold feasts of the
solstice, to conduct oneself like a folk-barbarian, is to prove those
French patriots in the right who would like to erect on the Rhine the
breastwork of occidental civilization; it is asininely to compromise
the position of those Frenchmen who do not make such fine distinctions
between Latinity and barbarism, and who are interested in peace,
understanding, compromise, and a “gentleman’s agreement” with Germany.
This is what I meant when I said that to pursue the same spiritual
tendency may be the most wrong-headed of all possible ways for two
nations to arrive at a _rapprochement_. Now is not the moment for
Germany to make anti-humanistic gestures; to pattern itself upon
Tolstoy’s pedagogic bolshevism; to characterize as ethnical savagery
the rebuke which Goethe administered to the hedonism of the general
humanistic ideal in education. No, on the contrary, it is the time for
us to lay all possible stress upon our great humane inheritance and
to cultivate it with all the means at our command--not only for its
own sake, but in order to put visibly in the wrong the claims of Latin
civilization. And, in particular, our socialism, which has all too
long allowed its spiritual life to languish in the shallows of a crude
economic materialism, has no greater need than to find access to that
loftier Germany which has always sought with its spirit the land of the
Greeks. It is today, politically speaking, our really national party;
but it will not truly rise to the height of its national task until--if
I may be allowed the extravagance--Karl Marx has read Friedrich
Hölderlin: a consummation which, by the way, seems in a fair way to be
achieved.
* * * * *
Beautiful is resolution. But the really fruitful, the productive,
and hence the artistic principle is that which we call reserve. In
the sphere of music we love it as the prolonged note, the teasing
melancholy of the not-yet, the inward hesitation of the soul, which
bears within itself fulfilment, resolution, and harmony, but denies it
for a space, withholds and delays, scruples exquisitely yet a little
longer to make the final surrender. In the intellectual sphere we love
it as irony: that irony which glances at both sides, which plays slyly
and irresponsibly--yet not without benevolence--among opposites, and
is in no great haste to take sides and come to decisions; guided as
it is by the surmise that in great matters, in matters of humanity,
every decision may prove premature; that the real goal to reach is not
decision, but harmony, accord. And harmony, in a matter of eternal
contraries, may lie in infinity; yet that playful reserve called irony
carries it within itself, as the sustained note carries the resolution.
In the foregoing pages I have tried it, this “infinite” irony; and my
readers may judge upon which extreme it more enjoyed playing, at which
side of the eternal contradiction it took keener aim--and draw their
conclusions accordingly; only not too far-reaching ones!
Irony is the pathos of the middle ... its moral too, its ethos. I said
that it is not, in general, the German way to be hasty in deciding
the aristocratic problem--if I may, in this phrase, sum up the whole
complex of contrasted values dealt with in the present essay. We are a
people of the middle, a world-bourgeoisie; there is a fittingness in
our geographical position and in our _mores_. I have been told that in
Hebrew the words for knowing and insight have the same stem as the word
for between.
That German writer who has most urgently pondered upon the problem
of aristocracy was, philologically speaking, greatly daring when
he invented a derivation for the name of the German people: from
_Tiusche-Volk_; that is, _Täusche-Volk_. But, for all that, the idea
is full of esprit. A people that settles in the bourgeois world-middle
must needs be the _täuschende_, the elusive folk: the race that
practises a sly and ironic reserve toward both sides, that moves
between extremes, easily, with non-committal benevolence; with the
morality, no, the simplicity of that elusive “betweenness” of theirs,
their faith in knowledge and insight, in cosmopolitan culture.
Fruitful difficulty of the middle, thou art freedom and reserve in one!
Let them tell us, as they have told us, that this free-handed policy
of ours brings us, in actual practice, to grief. But this practice is
doubtful, this disaster even more so. More than probably it came upon
us for our own best good; more than probably we were more profoundly
striving to bring it about than man ever strives to encompass his
happiness. Again, humility in the face of failure is no more noble than
humility in the face of success; and nothing but defeatism could shake
our faith in the rightness and sanctity of this spiritual attitude of
ours, whose end and aim is justified, not as a craving for freedom or
as ironic reserve, but as a final synthesis and harmony, the pure idea
of man himself.
That mutual character of the sentimental longing--of the sons of spirit
for nature, of the sons of nature for spirit (for, as we found, it
is not spirit alone that is sentimental)--argues a higher unity as
humanity’s goal; which she, in very truth the standard-bearer of all
aspiration, endows with her own name, with _humanitas_. That instinct
of self-preservation, full of reserve as it is, felt by the German
people in their central position as a world-bourgeoisie, is genuine
nationalism. For that is the name we give to a people’s craving for
freedom, to the pains they take with themselves, to their effort after
self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. So too the artist is loyally and
devotedly convinced that his only thought is to wrest his own work and
his very own dream out of the block of stone; and yet, in some solemn
and moving hour, may learn that the spirit which possessed him had a
purer source, that from the stone he carved there is emerging a loftier
image than he knew.
Folk, and humanity. It was a seer out of the east, one of those who,
like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Whitman, have looked long into the slowly
mounting dawn of a new piety--it was Dmitri Merezhkovsky who has said
that the animal contains the beast-man and the beast-god. The essence
of the beast-god is as yet scarcely comprehended by man, though it is
only the union of the beast-god with the beast-man which will some
day bring about the redemption of the race of mankind. This “some
day,” this idea of a redemption, which is no longer Christian and
yet not pagan either, carries in itself the solution of the problem
of aristocracy, as well as justifying, yes, sanctifying, all ironic
reserve on the subject of ultimate values.
We have treated with some assurance of great natures, great creative
artists, children of God, in whom the beast-god was strong, as also
their sense of self, their feeling for repose, for woman, for the
people; we have enjoyed the wit of those world-spirits who tempered
and humanized their confessed egotism with a strain of the didactic
impulse. More hesitantly we have trenched upon the god-man sphere of
those others, their emotional opposites, the men of deeds, the sons of
spirit, the saintly and sickly. The true saying of that Russian that
the essence of the beast-god is as yet scarcely apprehended by man
might strengthen our faith in the ironic doctrine that there is more
of grace among those who at bottom “can love nobody but themselves.”
But well we know that there is no deciding the question which of these
two lofty types is called to contribute more and better to the highly
cherished idea of a perfected humanity.
1922
II
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION
An Abstract for the Hour
Well, where shall I begin? The writer of history--and in this case the
historical essayist as well--is always subject to the temptation to
which Wagner so magnificently succumbed when, with no more in view than
the presentation of his hero’s downfall, he found himself lured by a
pedantic enthusiasm deeper and deeper into his folktale, and urged to
include a larger and larger area of his background, until at last he
fetched up against the first beginnings and origins of all things; and
there, at the lowest E of the prelude to the prelude, he solemnly and
almost soundlessly set to. But both space and time vigorously protest
against my following Wagner’s example in this sketch of the origins of
a war, the repetition--or continuation--of which we are seeing today.
Rather let me be strict with myself; and since I must begin somewhere,
let me make my beginning with the profound mistrust, the deep-seated
and, to be quite fair, the rather well-founded mistrust felt by all the
world for Frederick II of Prussia.
Consider: here is a young man, boyish of feature, elegantly built,
if rather plump, “the nicest little creature in the kingdom,” a
stranger said of him; fresh-coloured, chubby-cheeked, with large,
short-sighted, sparkling blue eyes and a nose that made a straight
line with his forehead and had a naïve little rosy tip. And this nice
young man is a crown prince, with a perfectly well-known past that has
been somewhat dissipated and by turns alarming and alarmed; by way of
being a _libre-penseur_ too, a pert young philosopher and littérateur,
author of the highly humanistic _Antimachiavelli_. He is totally
unmilitary, so far as can be seen, a civilian of the civilians, even
effeminate; runs up bills, and has his heart set on the pomps and
vanities. And now this young man becomes king--having proved so devoid
of honourable feeling as not to have been provoked by any cudgellings
or neck-twistings on the part of his fearsome papa to put a bullet
through his brain or even to resign in his brother’s favour. And as
king so conducts himself that nobody knows what to think. The day that
he ascended the throne went for ever after by the name “_La journée
des dupes_.” Almost everything turned out contrary to expectations.
Those who had trembled before the revenge of the new master were
not punished, while those who dreamed that their day had come found
themselves disillusioned. The poets and fortune-hunters who swarmed
round the throne and could not huzza loud or long enough, visibly drew
in their horns; and a jolly fellow from Rheinsberg, who knew no better
than to strike up confidently in the key of former days, received a
sparkling blue glance and the cutting words: “_Monsieur, à présent je
suis roi._” In other words, the joke is played out. It is precisely
the scene in Shakespeare, perhaps the finest in the whole of him, where
somebody, with just such a look, says to somebody else: “I know thee
not, old man.”
Some things which the youth does in his very first days of power have
literary _habitus_, are rather high-handed and self-assertive. He
abolishes the torture--so much the better for the thieves! He declares
that the gazettes need not be afraid to be a little amusing, they will
not be prosecuted; and annuls the censorship (and puts it back a year
later). He proclaims religious toleration--that is his much-talked-of
enlightenment, of course. But what has become of that dream of
Parnassus, that court of the muses, where fashion and wit should
reign and all be careless, voluptuous, and gallant? It is nowhere
at all. The new lord turns out to be, of all things in the world, a
rigid economist. No rise in the pay of officials. No reduction of the
high tariffs, however much certain people may have counted on relief.
The chancelleries of the kingdom are notified that the financial
system of his dear departed Majesty will continue strictly in force.
Finance-Minister Boden, a much-hated skinflint, remains in office.
There is no such thing as trust, or easy-going, or _laissez-aller_.
Everybody is watched as never before. And Baron von Pöllnitz actually
said, with a sigh: “I’d give a hundred pistoles to have the old man
back again!”
No revolutionary changes of system, then. No loosening of the reins
of government, no new faces in the Ministry. But one thing, at least,
will surely be different: this is a civilian of civilians who reigns,
he stands for literature and silk dressing-gowns and a definite
end to Potsdam militarism. Surely the corporal’s baton has gone out
of fashion! Well, just here everybody gets the greatest surprise of
all. The slack and rather sensual young philosopher comes out as an
impassioned soldier: he has no thought of weakening the military basis
of the State. Weaken it? He strengthens the army by fifteen battalions,
five squadrons of hussars (introduced on the Austrian model), and
a squadron of _gardes du corps_, bringing it up to a round ninety
thousand men. The uniform once cursed and jeered at he is never seen
out of. His conservatism extends to the retention of all the existing
military ranks. “The army organization is a monument of His Majesty our
dearly beloved father’s wisdom in government; it is, in essentials, not
to be tampered with.” A few barbarities in the recruiting system are
done away with: the flogging of cadets, maltreating the common man,
have to be frowned on for his credit’s sake. But that is all. What
seems to need change is the _meaning_ of the institution, the spirit in
which it is employed--its political significance, in short. And just
here is the suspicious thing.
The military had been something like a foible of the deceased
sovereign, a barbaric and rather costly fad, a laughing-stock at all
the courts of Europe, where it had never weighed in the scale of
affairs. All at once it becomes “the power of the State”--Frederick’s
phrase in one of his first letters as ruler--a curiously practical
conception, further borne out by the way he sets to work to purge the
establishment of the quaint flourishes it had as a fad of the deceased
King. The regiment of giants, a sight worth looking at, but not good
for much else, is done away with, appears for the last time at the
funeral ceremonies of Frederick William. Only a battalion of grenadier
guards is left, for the sake of filial piety. “The power of the State.”
Prussia’s representatives at foreign courts begin suddenly to speak
a language that makes one doubt one’s ears. Prussia takes the stage;
Prussia unmistakably means to be treated as the not negligible entity
she really is. Her astonishing young king behaves as though Prussia
were not so much a state of the German empire as a European one. He
lets it be known that he is not minded for ever to span the bow and
never to let it go, as Europe has long mocked at Prussia for doing.
But what shall we make of all this? Had he been a comedian all this
time? Count Seckendorff once wrote about him to Vienna when he was
still crown prince: “His greatest fault is his dissimulation and
falseness, which makes it necessary to exercise the very greatest
caution in what one tells him.” Yes, that is evidently true.
Seckendorff goes on: “He told me he was a poet, he could write a
hundred lines in an hour. And a musician too, a moral philosopher,
a physicist, a mechanic. What he never will be is a statesman or a
commander-in-chief.” Looked at from this end, it seems as though the
young man had deliberately dissimulated in this respect as well. For
the last surprise is the greatest of all; for the first time it betrays
what is actually to be expected of him.
Frederick has not been on the throne for half a year when Charles VI
dies; and scarcely is the Emperor below ground when Frederick, to the
great consternation of his own ministers, generals, and relatives and
the rest of the world as well, lays some sort of claim to Silesia.
By the letter of the law and by virtue of solemn compacts, the claim
is wholly unfounded; or, if you like, founded on the divers acts of
perfidy and presumption which Brandenburg has had from time immemorial
to endure from Austria. In any case it is a claim which Frederick,
unless Maria Theresa acquiesces, and that she cannot possibly do, is
prepared to maintain with the sword. “Everything is in readiness,” he
writes to Algarotti; “I have only to put into effect the plans I have
had a long time in my head.” A long time? And everything in readiness?
Without saying a word to a soul? Without betraying by the smallest
sign that he had such ideas in his head? Well, he has certainly been
a dissembling, reserved, solitary young man, all the conviviality on
the Remusberg to the contrary notwithstanding! To Voltaire, on the
other hand, he writes: “The Emperor’s death upset all my peaceful
ideas.” This in order that Voltaire in France might not suppose that
the attack had been a matter of long preparation. Oh, a young man both
particularly solitary and particularly sly!
However, there it is: Frederick invades the imperial domains--he,
Margrave of Brandenburg, who, as hereditary arch-chamberlain, has had
to hand the wash-basin to Maria Theresa’s ancestors. “_C’est un fou,
cet homme là est fol_,” said Louis XV, who after all must have known
something about the game of politics. A piece of bravado, a perfectly
reckless beginning, says all Europe. And the English Minister in
Vienna is even then of the opinion that Frederick ought to be outlawed.
But bravado or no--Austria is in bad form, things turn out well for
Frederick. There is the battle of Mollwitz, where he is beaten and
takes to his heels for ten miles, while Schwerin comes up and wins the
day for him. Not a glorious day for the King, but a victory none the
less. Then Bavaria has hankerings after the imperial crown, France
supports her, Austria is hard pressed. On top of that comes Chotusitz,
where Buddenbrock throws the Austrians into the burning village; and
Maria Theresa, who would rather lose a whole province to Bavaria than
a single village to Prussia (she hates this Frederick with the whole
strength of her femininity), must, anguish in her white bosom, tears in
her blue eyes, sign a peace that assures to the King Upper and Lower
Silesia and the Duchy of Gratz. He has them, they are his.
What else? A round two years have passed when Frederick makes war
again--ostensibly as an elector of the realm to bring succour to the
hard-pressed Bavarian emperor, but actually because Maria Theresa
has meanwhile been rather too successful against France and Bavaria,
and Frederick suspects that when she has finished with the others
she will turn round and take Silesia away from him again: beautiful,
never-to-be-forgotten Silesia--she bursts into tears whenever she hears
it mentioned. And she is not without powerful friends: for instance,
King George II of England, conqueror of the French and ally of the
Empress-queen since Worms, 1734. King George wrote to her in these
very words: “_Madame, ce qui est bon à prendre est bon à rendre_”--the
letter fell into Frederick’s hands. England and Austria have helped
each other defend the territories which each had possessed up to 1739.
Up to 1739? That was, to be sure, before Frederick took Silesia. And
there are similar pacts entered into between Austria and Saxony. The
Austrian historians call heaven to witness that the Empress had not
at that time planned any attack, but it was enough for Frederick. He
stood very well with France: since June he had had with Richelieu
a twelve-year offensive alliance; he is not without diplomatic
safeguards. In these two years he has increased the “power of the
State” by eighteen thousand “moustaches,” as Voltaire called them;
greatly strengthened and rebuilt the Silesian fortresses; and in the
middle of the summer of ’44 he strikes again, without even declaring
war; falls upon Bohemia eighty thousand strong, marches through Saxony
without even asking the Elector’s leave, marches toward Prague, marches
actually against Vienna.
It is heavy going. Now and then things look desperate. Charles
of Lorraine hurls himself from Alsace into Bohemia and threatens
Frederick’s Silesian connexions; the Saxon army has the King in the
rear--there is an awkward retreat, due to several foolish decisions
on Frederick’s part, by his own later confession--he learned much
from them. By the next year his generalship shows itself devilishly
improved! Soor follows on Hohenfriedberg; after he has annihilated
the Saxons at Kesselsdorf, Count Harrach comes as broker to Dresden,
and Maria Theresa confirms the cession of Silesia, while Frederick
recognizes her husband, the gallant Francis of Lorraine, as German
emperor. Why not?--Charles VII is dead, and Frederick never set great
store by him anyhow.
But why does he make peace with Habsburg? Because he sees that fortune
has been with France in the Netherlands, and so, for the present,
the Empress-queen’s preponderance is not very great. Also, to the
huge dissatisfaction of France, he makes peace with England too,
withdraws with his booty--Silesia--and sagely resists for the next
three years--for so long does the War of the Pragmatic Sanction go on
between France and Austria supported by the sea powers--all attempts to
draw him out of his neutrality. By the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which
finally brought the struggle to an end in favour of Maria Theresa, he
gets his Silesian “acquisition” expressly guaranteed.
But one thing we must say: if the Silesian “acquisition” be considered
robbery, a piece of property snatched in defiance of justice--and
people did so consider it, and so it was--then they should not have
solemnly guaranteed it to the robber. That they did so guarantee it
meant that they left it to time to right the wrong (as time can do) and
that Europe and Maria Theresa from then on renounced all machinations
and conspiracies against the robber, and accepted the _fait accompli_.
But this they did not do, Maria Theresa in particular did not do it.
She did not abandon the hope that she might yet get Silesia back,
despite the Peace of Aix; and that is a black mark against the name
of that splendid, simple, high-hearted woman, who was otherwise so
deserving of all the interest and sympathy she got from Europe. But why
was it that Europe--or its courts and governments--never felt easy on
the score of this king? Because of the great mistrust, with which our
story began, and which the King repaid with interest. The mistrust was
rooted in his fundamentally strange, enigmatic character. Europe knew
it to be a danger; and its later manifestations kept her constantly
holding her breath.
The fact was that of all the powers who had gone to war over the
Pragmatic Sanction, Frederick alone had gained something, had even
gained a great deal. That he kept the splendid province was the least
of his gains. But this beggarly young Prussia, with its poor two
million souls, had measured itself beside, or against, Austria, as an
equal; it had squeezed in among the great powers of Europe, and claimed
to speak in all their counsels as one of them; it had forced them to
reckon with Prussia as a political factor not merely weighty, but even
decisive--for Frederick had managed to stage himself in the popular
imagination as the balance-wheel of European equilibrium, at least so
far as the relations between France and Austria were concerned. Now,
it is very hard on Europe to be forced to change its attitude like
that. It takes her centuries. She struggles, she scolds, she sneers;
she denies the new factor any political, cultural, above all any moral
justification, she cannot utter enough spite and venom against the
newcomer, she sees nothing but a speedy ruin in store for him; and, if
her prophecies do not look like fulfilling themselves with measurable
haste, then all the old-established society of states are ready to bury
the hatchet of their private quarrels over prestige and interests,
however vital, in order to fall on the kill-joy and crush him. She
will do that, or try to, twice, if need be, within a hundred and fifty
years. Simple people like Frederick’s philosopher friend Jordan, even
in the second Silesian war, can never understand why it is that “the
accounts in the newspapers are never favourable to us.” Yes, it was
strange. But the newspaper accounts could not prevent Frederick from
keeping Silesia. And now, at least, with the guarantee safe in his
pocket, surely he is satiated and satisfied? Apart from measures taken
against him--was he, on his side, well and peacefully minded?
He did not give the impression that he meant to disarm immediately. He
kept his army, after the Peace at Dresden, on a footing of a hundred
and forty thousand men; there were in addition the “supernumerary
troops,” whose strength he doubled, so that he had at his disposition
a trained reserve of sixteen thousand men. That made a hundred and
fifty-six thousand “moustaches,” an absurd figure for a country of
Prussia’s relative rank and economic resources. Louis XV had not so
many soldiers, certainly not so many beastly good ones. For Frederick’s
army, out of all compass as far as numbers went, was put through its
paces in a way that was the talk of Europe.
He made demands, and insisted on performance, with respect to mobility
and tactical precision, unheard of in his time. The foreign military
gentry who were allowed now and then to look on were amazed--and,
even so, they did not get to see the real thing. These masses of
troops wheeled and deployed, they developed the famous oblique
battle-order, invented by the King, in eight various formations, with
a mathematical accuracy that would have made old Prince Eugene, who
had once patronized the Prince at Philippsburg, doubt his own eyes.
And there reigned throughout a practical spirit which was quite the
opposite of amateurish enthusiasm. There were no splendid encampments
and display manœuvres, as in other countries, where huge assemblages
of troops came together in time of peace and went harmlessly through
their exercises. Frederick held manœuvres on a large scale each year
at Spandau or Potsdam; and these forced advances over heavy ground,
these actions on the plain, these river crossings and assaults, these
varied and whole-hearted attacks on the problem of how a superior
enemy--it seemed one reckoned with a superior enemy, possibly with a
combination of enemies?--can be rolled up on the flank and destroyed;
they were all trials of war, in bitter earnest and quite undisguised,
carried out with the sole end and aim of visualizing the actual
conflict and familiarizing officers and troops with the details of
the bloody business. And an aggressive spirit, a purpose of swift and
lively action, was inoculated by every possible means into the blood
of these troops--contrary to the fashion of the time and bordering on
the uncivilized. Frederick had only contempt for the refined methods of
making war as practised in his century--those “capital generals, who
have spent whole campaigns in various manœuvres, without one being able
to get the better of the other--which earned them high praise from the
General Staff.” He despised too the entrenched position, which was held
in such great regard. Battle, at all costs! Force the enemy to fight;
battles must be decisive, that is what they are for. Attack, attack!
_Attaquez donc toujours!_ A bayonet charge is his passion, he was the
first to regulate the details of its execution. “Don’t shoot more than
you need, and, above all, not too soon! At twenty, even ten paces from
the enemy, let off a good stiff salvo under his nose and then give it
him in the ribs with the bayonet.” Then the cavalry: “The King herewith
forbids all officers of cavalry, on pain of disgrace and cassation,
ever to let themselves be attacked in any action; for Prussians must
always attack the enemy.” At a hand-gallop? No, in full career. “Then,
in close formation, they must spur their horses on, at the top of
their lungs, as they charge.” “At the top of their lungs.” “Under
their noses.” “Give it them in the ribs.” It all sounds so savage, so
reckless, so extreme, so inordinate, so violent! The man must be bent
on a ruthless offensive and thinking of nothing else. Is it possible
for anyone to trust him?
Alas, no, probably not. Probably it was not possible, even if anyone
had wanted to--again, quite apart from any measures taken against
him! This king was much too secretive and dissembling; reserved
even with his intimates, or, rather, he had no intimates. Never to
be communicative, never to let anyone guess his thoughts, such was
his first principle as a ruler. He stated it quite frankly one day,
himself: “If I thought,” he said, “that my shirt or my skin knew
anything of my intentions, I would tear them off.” A savage way of
putting it--and very expressive of his extreme and obstinate intention
to keep his own counsel. What could be accomplished by diplomatic
methods, with such a king? The foreign gentlemen found him inscrutable.
His moderation, his neutrality, his good intentions--nobody believed
in them, and he knew that they did not. He said: “In Vienna they take
me for an irreconcilable enemy of the house of Austria; in London they
think me far more restless, more ambitious, richer than I am. Bestuchev
[the Russian imperial chancellor] believes that I am plotting mischief;
in Versailles they say I am falling asleep over my interests. They are
all mistaken. But what makes for trouble is that these misapprehensions
may have evil consequences. What must be done is to anticipate
[?] these consequences, and relieve Europe of her preconception.”
_Pre_-conception? Why, it was a _post_-conception, a conception formed
after the two Silesian wars. Again, perhaps he was speaking quite
sincerely, and merely deceived himself on the score of the danger he
himself was to Europe? A puzzle to everybody, was he perhaps one to
himself as well?
He led a singular life--it contrasted with any and every monarchical
habit of the time. In summer he got up at three o’clock. But three
o’clock is the time to go to bed, when God has placed you in a position
to enjoy life! Scarcely was his hair combed when he began to govern.
Did he govern well? Certainly he governed with a suspiciousness,
a self-will, a despotism which could only be called boundless and
extravagant, and which entered into everything, the smallest as well
as the greatest field, and deprived the work of others of all dignity.
He so loved work that he took it all to himself, and left his servants
not enough; or, rather, what remained was irksome and petty, and he
spied on and scolded and humiliated them even at that. “_Cette race
maudite_” (thus, rightly or wrongly, he called the whole of humanity)
would, he was convinced, begin to deceive him and defraud the State if
it got the least chance; and his complete lack of confidence had at
least this much good about it, that his officials had to reckon with
the fact that the King would see and examine everything, his subjects
might be certain that their complaints and petitions did come before
him instead of falling under the table. He never let anything be lost
sight of, he gave himself pain over the smallest detail.
Yes, self-willed and despotic he certainly was; up to the most
grandiose and down to the pettiest sense of those words. Nobody dared
travel without his permission; in granting which, the King decreed
the amount of the journey money, down to a farthing: for the burgher
so much, for the junker a little more. He awed and astonished all
the world by operations that had something superhuman and fantastic
about them, such as erecting mighty dams to fight the power of the
sea and to wrench from it strips of land which had for centuries been
its prey. Or he ploughed the marshes, turned bogs into fields, set
ten thousand spades to work to make canals through the swamps of the
Oderbruch--callous toward the suffering of his labourers, who might
all die off of swamp-fever, so long as they were sacrificed to the
future and to his impatient will. If a stranger wanted a good seat at
a parade, he had to write to the King, and the King answered in his
own hand. Yet it was this very king who one day declared that he would
no longer sit silent and endure the obsolete abuses and formalities in
the administration of justice; he would mix in and attack the problem
himself--and straightway he created the common law of the land, a great
and bold reform, a model of reason and fair-mindedness, which all other
countries were fain to study and admire.
The army, the administration, service at home and abroad. That was
not all. He “mixed into” other matters too, and did not stop with
“mixing.” He was his own finance minister (obstinately stingy here;
extravagant there, where it was a matter of some large and it might
be impossible scheme or other), his own minister for agriculture (who
simply refused to believe, because Linnæus and others said so, that
the potato was a poisonous plant, and arbitrarily insisted that it be
planted), his own minister for commerce (and as such conservative,
walking in his father’s footsteps, with prohibited schedules and
protection and monopolies, his main idea being that the money should
stop in the country), his own minister of works and mines, his own lord
chamberlain, and what not besides?--for when a man lives separated from
his wife and gets up at three o’clock in the morning, he can get a lot
done in the course of the day.
It took a king like this, a man who could work as he could, to show
the full meaning of the word “despotism.” Until his time no one had
grasped its significance. But the despotism he created was _a new_
kind. He was an enlightened despot--which means that his subjects might
think and say what they liked, provided that he, on his side, might do
as he chose--an arrangement which it must be admitted was useful to
both parties. Religions meant little or nothing to him, he despised
them all. Persecuted irreligion found an asylum and even an official
status in his kingdom. Lampoons, satires, libels directed against him,
moved him not at all. He did not fear brains: his love of them was
balanced by his scorn--so long as they were not backed by any power.
On being told that one of his subjects had criticized him, he asked:
“Has he a hundred thousand men? Then what do you want me to do with
him?” Which was cynical, of course. And, indeed, he did have a cynical
cast of mind, which betrayed itself even in his dress, that got dirtier
and shabbier as time went on; and in the kind of diversions he chose:
the habitual blasphemies at his supper parties, the dry, malicious
pleasure he had in goading on the literary men and philosophers whom he
found in food, in “embroiling” them in disputes and quarrels with each
other. Even his mania for work, was there not something cynical, arid,
inhuman, misanthropic, about it too, to any healthy and right human
sense? For a healthy and right human sense understands--and understood
in Frederick’s time too--that career and accomplishment are not all of
life; that life has its purely human claims and duties of happiness, to
neglect which may be a greater sin than a little easy-goingness toward
oneself and others in the matter of one’s work; and again, according to
the healthy and right human sense, nobody can be called a harmonious
personality who does not understand how to satisfy the just claims of
both sides of life. And this king did not, he had no comprehension of
these facts, though surely a king ought to know them as well as other
people. His insane industry, his insistence on merit and getting things
done, was ascetic and somehow horrible in its nature. He hated monks,
of course, as he hated all religious and clergy; but he was rather like
a monk himself, a monk in a blue soldier coat and yellow waistcoat
always spotted with snuff. And he was a cynical old bachelor, and a
good share of his ill feeling and his uncanniness had surely to do
with his relations with the female sex, which were as a matter of fact
no relations at all, and pretty incomprehensible even to his own age,
highly capricious as that was in its attitude toward sex matters.
He had been, as I said, rather a dissipated youth. When he was fifteen
years old, he visited the luxurious court of Dresden, where he liked
it not a little, and fell in love head over ears with the Countess
Orselska, the daughter and favourite of Augustus II; but the King,
who was somewhat jealous, offered him instead the Countess Formera,
a well-shaped damsel, displaying her first in the guise of a living
picture. This lady accordingly became Frederick’s first mistress.
Afterwards he got hold of the Orselska as well. Such tales are legion:
for instance, there is one about the Freifrau von Wreech, whom he used
to visit when he was at Küstrin, and who supplied him with candles
and books, and even with money, which he is supposed never to have
refunded, though Frau von Wreech gave birth to a child which her
husband never acknowledged. Then there was the daughter of a Potsdam
precentor, who was publicly whipped and sent to the house of correction
“for life.” And in Ruppin and Rheinsberg he had his fill of debauchery;
but Seckendorff wrote to Prince Eugene that “it seemed the body was
not strong enough for the demands made upon it by the desires, and
the Crown Prince appears to seek in his dissipations a reputation for
gallantry rather than to gratify actual sinful inclinations.” All
which might be true and might not. But it is certain that none of
these affairs had anything to do with passion in any higher or deeper
sense, any more than they had with genuine feeling or warmth of heart.
Frederick, when quite young, declared that all he wanted of women was
pleasure, and that, having enjoyed, he despised them. He had never
been in love. Then came a _malheur_; there is talk of an operation
following; and from then on something was broken in his nature. He soon
ceased to act the voluptuary; woman had played out her brief and not
too honourable rôle in his life.
Misogyny is now deep-seated in his nature. Henceforth one cannot
imagine him in any tender situation--it would seem grotesque. His
marriage, of course, was no marriage at all; but that does not signify,
since it was a forced one. It was not merely that the other sex left
him cold. He hated it, he poured scorn on it, he could not endure it
anywhere near him. His wife’s ladies complained: “We do not ask that
the King should love us; but that he simply cannot stand us--that is
hard.” The wife of his hypochondriac friend d’Argens was allowed, as
a particular favour, to live in Sans Souci; save for this the palace
was a sort of cloister. But a cloister is not quite a natural place
to live in. The Italian dancer Barberini passed for some time as the
King’s mistress; but Voltaire, on the subject of the relationship,
expressed himself thus: “_Il en était un peu amoureux parce qu’elle
avait les jambes d’un homme._” So it too was hardly the regular
thing. Frederick’s masculinity was obviously not attracted in the
orthodox way by the feminine counter-pole. Possibly the long years of
soldiering contributed to this state of things and weaned his interests
from the other sex. There are many cases of military who were or who
became women-haters. This man, brought up in an atmosphere of French
femininity, may have grown so accustomed to the maleness of camps
that at last he “could not stand the smell” of women. And this was
in the Frenchest of centuries, a woman’s century _par excellence_,
saturated with the perfume of the _Ewig-Weibliche_. His conception
of soldiership, ascetic to begin with (the highest soldier in his
command durst not in the field eat off anything but tin), made him
so anti-feminine that the soft appeal of love and marriage was quite
shut out. He did not like his officers’ marrying, he wanted them to
be cloistered warriors like himself; and expressed his view in the
witticism he made, that his officers “should find their happiness in
the sword and not in the ...” Anyhow, they should find it in the
sword. In 1778, out of the seventy-four officers of a regiment of
dragoons there was just one married.
Now why was all that? Perhaps at bottom it was not a little political.
We must not forget that the most powerful countries in Europe were at
that time ruled by women: the Empress Elizabeth, the Empress-queen
of Austria, and the Pompadour. Frederick despised and affronted them
to the point of political gaucherie. Aloud, at table, before all his
lackeys, he called them “the three first wh...s in Europe.” This though
he knew, or, rather, because he knew, that no remark of his escaped the
spies of foreign courts. In any case, the ugly word may have fitted
two of them, but certainly it did not Maria Theresa; in vituperating
that chaste and childishly high-minded woman he obviously only levelled
at the sex. The Little Mother, Elizabeth, on the other hand, did lay
herself open by her weakness for strong drink and muscular military;
but these very weaknesses were what kept her a powerful potentate,
and it was most injudicious of Frederick to make them the theme of
scurrilous little rhymes, which of course came to her ears and made
the mistress of Russia his envenomed and everlasting enemy. And why
could he not bring himself to the point of a few friendly words
with the Pompadour, after she had daintily taken pains to meet him
half-way--and considering she was the actual ruler of France? She was
only a butcher’s daughter, named Poisson, the wife of a publican and
procurer, and herself a procuress to boot. Admitted and conceded, that
was what she was. But in the first place, what is the good of being an
enlightened despot if you cannot look beyond such small matters? And
in the second, she was rather more than delicious, with that clever,
roguish little head and that billowing embroidered frock--its measured
décolletage sagely half-hiding, half-revealing delights which an
all-Christian king had known how to value. Scarcely a sign betrayed the
filth whence she came and which remained her element. She knew how to
preside discreetly over a privy council. Frederick, when he wantonly
repulsed her, was aiming at the female rather than at the concubine.
“I do not know her,” he said: “_Je ne la connais pas._” Anybody else,
in his place, would have rued that, later. Maria Theresa--foundress
of the chastity commission, pious and faithful wife--displayed more
self-control. “_Princesse et Cousine_,” she wrote; “_Madame ma très
chère Sœur_”--it sounds scandalous, but it had to be done, for
Silesia’s sake. As for Frederick’s bearing toward the Empress-queen
herself, it sets in the clearest light his callousness where the sex
was concerned. All the chroniclers and critics, chivalrous before
everything else, speak of his behaviour as abominable.
There is a beautiful portrait drawing of the Empress-queen, by Meytens,
in the copperplate collection in Berlin. There is the sumptuous rococo
head, majestic and sturdy at once, proud and naïve: the pure brow,
with a little diadem above it crowning the powdered hair that falls in
curls upon the royal shoulders. There is the double chin, childishly
dignified, the clear eyes, the powerful hooked nose, the wholesome
mouth, full without being coarse. Her voice is said to have had a
compelling charm. Court and people idolized her. She reigned in the
fear of God, piously, patriarchally, comfortably. To her husband, Franz
of Lorraine, a famous petticoat-chaser, she was a loyal wedded wife,
conniving at all his shortcomings. When he died, she turned to his
sobbing mistress, Princess Auersperg, and said: “My dear Princess, we
have both lost much.” She was as good-natured as that. When her son,
Duke Leopold of Tuscany, made her a grandmother for the first time,
she was so beside herself for joy that she ran in her night-dress
through the castle corridors to the Burgtheater, where there was a
performance. Leaning out over the balcony of the royal box she called
down into the house: “Poldy’s got a baby! And, to cap the climax, on
my wedding-anniversary! Isn’t he a love?” We hear her call, we share
the rapture of her audience. She was not yet four-and-twenty when her
father died and bequeathed her the burden of the crown. Her health
tottered beneath the defeat of Mollwitz and the ensuing crisis; for,
to add to everything else, she was with child. “For all my realms were
the field of battle,” she later wrote, “and I knew not where I could
be brought to bed in peace.” Yet with what lofty spirit, what touching
courage, she bore herself! Still weak from her lying-in, on her arm the
infant whom in tears and troubles she had brought into the world, the
crown of Saint Stephen on her head, she stood in Pressburg before the
assembly of the Empire and summoned the chivalry of her Hungary to the
defence of her insulted majesty. And the magnates--one can see them--in
frenzied enthusiasm swung their crooked sabres and pressed round the
throne with the cry: “We will die for our King, Maria Theresa!” But
Frederick was without bowels of feeling for this majestic weakness;
probably the pale maternity of his enemy only added fuel to the
flames of his masculinity, and rather roused disgust than reverence.
Throughout the long, inhuman struggle to which the two Silesian wars
were the prelude, the thought that he was dealing with women never left
him a moment. It recurs in countless of his utterances of that time;
who knows if the shameful thought of being defeated by three women was
not what stiffened his back? At the thanksgiving service after the
victory of Mollwitz he gave out the text from I Timothy ii. 12: “But
I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,
but to be silent.”--Maria Theresa, when she heard about it, was not a
little wroth. She had a name for him, at once childish and oracular;
it seems to show that her woman’s intuition pierced the secret of his
character. She never named him save as “the bad man.” The bad man. Yes,
that he was, with the emphasis as much on man as on bad. The mysteries
of sex are very profound, never will they be quite explained. Was it
that this king could not endure women because he was such a bad man, or
that he was such a bad man because he could not endure women? A riddle
not to be unriddled. But that the two things were somehow dependent on
each other--of that I feel certain.
“The bad man”: he was that to everybody, though it was Maria Theresa
who by preference and from the depths of her heart gave him the name.
There was always a whispering and a plotting and a conspiring round
about him--defensively, of course, in the end, and as precautionary
measures--all directed against him; he had always to realize it,
even when he knew nothing specific; and he parried, as well as he
could, ten years long. Yes, we must agree that during all that time
he was, diplomatically speaking, on the defensive against his worse
nature--though one might, indeed, get the impression that even this
behaviour was dictated by sheer malice and in order to lead honest
people by the nose.... To sum up, the constellation of great powers was
at that time as follows:
The traditional, three-hundred-year-old rivalry between France and
Austria was a settled factor, a political constant, which it seemed
would have to be reckoned with to all eternity. It had brought France
and Prussia together and the alliance of June 1744 had still up to ’56
to run. But that alliance had become rather loose and unreliable, after
Frederick withdrew--prematurely, in the view of France--from the War
of the Succession. As for England, her hostility toward France was if
possible even more venerable than that country’s toward Austria. France
loomed large upon the continent, France had a fleet, overseas interests
(there were disputes in America, more precisely in Canada)--in short,
quite enough to make England keep a sharp eye on her. And George II
could endure Frederick as little as anybody else. He too, though not
a female, had been satirized in an epigram. And so England clave to
Russia, where the amateur of strong drink and muscular soldiers sat
enthroned; and did this with especial reference to Prussia; Prussia
being still regarded as an ally of France, and in a position, in case
of war between the latter and the English, to attack England on her
continental heel of Achilles--in other words, Hanover.... The attitude
of Saxon Poland was particularly curious, involved, and timid--under
an Augustus anything but Strong, or, rather, under his prime minister
and head of the Cabinet, Count Brühl, a great spender, a great roué and
intriguer, who presently ruined the country financially and after that
politically too. This man possessed two hundred pairs of shoes, eight
hundred embroidered night-shirts, five hundred suits of clothes, one
hundred and two watches, eight hundred and forty-three tobacco-boxes,
eighty-seven rings, fifty-seven smelling-bottles, twenty-nine coaches,
and fifteen hundred wigs. But I digress.--On Sweden Frederick thought
he could count, his sister Ulrike being crown princess there. French
influence, also, was paramount in that country--that is, it drew
subsidies from France.
The intrigues, the war of pens and plottings against a greater Prussia,
began, so to speak, while the ink was still wet on the signatures to
the Peace of Dresden. Next to Austria, where the alienation of Silesia
was regarded as entirely temporary, the chief source of the intrigues
was Russia; Austria, of course, always played the rôle of diplomat
with a light touch, whereas Russia, at all times clumsy, at all times
ready to conspire, hammered away at the war and the annexation of
East Prussia. I mentioned that Russia’s leader of foreign affairs was
Bestuchev, the imperial chancellor, who took care, by arrangement with
the Austrian and English agents, to feed the alcoholic hatred of his
mistress for the King of Prussia, and to hold the resources of his
half-savage country at the service of Austria. Scarcely any relations
now subsisted between the courts of Berlin and Saint Petersburg. A sort
of latent state of war obtained. Every spring, troops assembled in the
Baltic Provinces and threatened to overflow the Prussian border. But
there had to be some show of conducting matters in the European way; so
all sorts of documents were drawn up on parchment, with secret clauses
and everything proper and in order.
The fact was that as early as 1745 an alliance had been entered into
by the maritime powers and the Saxon-Polish and Hungarian courts--the
famous Warsaw Alliance, so-called. It had only been ratified in the
spring of that year, at Leipsic, and looked harmless enough on the
surface, but it had a secret clause, the Warsaw Agreement, signed only
by the monarchs of Hungary and Poland, which was definitely directed
against the robber of Silesia. Scarcely had the Peace of Dresden been
signed, when Vienna, through the proper diplomatic channels, let it
be known in Dresden that she hoped the Warsaw Agreement was still
in force. Brühl would have been delighted to utter a hearty yes in
reply; but that he was afraid to; began to wriggle, and through all
the following years continued to wriggle, until the arrival of the
catastrophe. Saxony had come off unharmed from the Peace of Dresden;
contrary to her expectations, for when Frederick was fighting in
Bohemia she had attacked him in the rear. But he contented himself
with an indemnity--the victor of Soor and Kesselsdorf was just then
behaving with great moderation, not to say magnanimity. Brühl, however,
hated Frederick; at that time everything political had a strong
personal coloration, and the hatred of the luxurious and effeminate
minister-president toward the ascetic and industrious soldier was
inborn and indestructible, it yielded nothing in violence to the
Austrian brand. Brühl would have been delighted to give it free vent;
but there was the outward attitude of Saxony toward the Prussian
states, and there was the abominable superiority of the Prussian army.
“The Warsaw Agreement,” answered Brühl: yes, it subsisted, and then
again, it did not subsist. It subsisted conditionally. It subsisted
on condition that it did no harm to Saxony. It subsisted on condition
that Russia joined it. It was indispensable that Russia should join--if
she did, then by all means. It went without saying. “_Parfaitement_,”
replied Austria, and applied to Russia; and Russia barely waited to be
asked, she was on the spot at once, with clumsy and unlimited zeal.
In the year ’46 a defensive alliance--only defensive, of course--was
arranged between Austria and Russia. It contained a secret clause, to
the effect that if the King attacked either of them, he should be held
to have forfeited Silesia thereby--beloved, lamented Silesia, which
grew dearer and dearer to the Empress-queen, the more she saw what
Frederick knew how to get out of it; Catholic Silesia, whose possession
by a heretic and criminal cried to heaven. Brühl was politely invited
to come in ... but Brühl still wriggled. No, no signature, no official
commitment, it was too dangerous. And as they were sure of his good
intentions, they let him off the signature, in God’s name. If anybody
accuses Saxony of having joined an alliance against Frederick, he lies.
Saxony had preserved its neutrality, Saxony had not signed. That it had
done its utmost, with Austria, to stir up trouble in Saint Petersburg
is another matter. It was neutral, none the less; it had not signed.
A defensive alliance, be it known, is an alliance which only begins
to be in force when one or another party to it is attacked by a given
other power or group of powers. But one speaks in strategy of an
offensive defensive; and it would appear that something of the kind
may also occur in the diplomatic sphere; indeed, if it were not for
the conciliatory title, it might sometimes be very hard to distinguish
a defensive alliance from its reprehensible opposite. In politics, as
also in life, the name is mostly a sort of _concession au publique_,
and deals only superficially with the fact it represents. An attack
may be of sheer necessity; but then it is not an attack at all, it
is a defence. And if an attack is advantageous to the members of
the defensive alliance, why, then it becomes as good as impossible
to draw the psychological line where the _casus fœderis_ ceases to
be a contingency which everybody would unite in avoiding, and turns
into something devoutly to be wished. Thus it becomes a question of
sensibility, and has to be left to the feeling of the allies, when
one of them shall and will feel itself attacked; and accordingly, to
invoke the _casus fœderis_ it is only necessary to drive your opponent
to do the attacking--in other words, to force him into the rôle of
formal aggressor, which is scarcely very difficult, and may be,
under some circumstances, very easy. Things will inevitably so shape
themselves, when one of the parties to the defensive alliance is a
power like the Muscovite kingdom, a power whose instinct to expand has
something elemental and irresponsible about it, like the stretching
and the appetite of a giant; a power which, knowing itself ultimately
unconquerable, is at all times clumsily eager for the fray. Now, as for
this defensive alliance between Austria and Russia, aimed at Prussia:
the Empress Maria Theresa had repeatedly and solemnly renounced
Silesia, and she was much too god-fearing a woman even to think of
breaking the compacts of Dresden, Breslau, and Aix-la-Chapelle. But
for that very reason she needed to find a way of getting back Silesia
which should be morally possible; and this she secured by the alliance
with Russia. For if Frederick were to attack, he would lose his right
to the province. Which was now for the good Maria Theresa the _casus
fœderis_--a danger or a desirability? Let us call it a tempting
danger, or a troubling desire. But what Russia understood by the
word “defensive” is clear from the fact that in 1753 it was formally
announced in the council of state in Saint Petersburg, and made the
basis of a protocol, that it would also be permissible to attack
Prussia in case an ally of Russia attacked her first. A corollary
perhaps rather alcoholic in origin, but it makes the question wherein a
defensive alliance differs, except in name, from another, to a certain
extent legitimate.
Well, and did Frederick know of these things? Oh, yes, one thing and
another did come to his ears in the course of these years, if more by
way of a trickle than in a steady stream. He had to put them together
and make sense of them himself. The system of espionage was just
then at the height of its flower, blossoming rather more luxuriantly
than it does today; and Frederick was its greatest supporter,
considering it to be of the highest importance to maintain spies
everywhere, in all the important places. He called them his “_Kujons_”
(rascals) or “_Pfaffen_” (parsons), and never could have too many of
them--especially since they did not cost very much. Brühl had set up a
whole office in Dresden just for deciphering the Prussian dispatches;
so we may consider it in the light of a retort on Frederick’s part
that he kept a “_Kujon_” there in his pay, to post him in events
important for the King to know. This famous _filou_, named Menzel, a
book-keeper by occupation, had access to the files which contained the
secret documents of the government of Saxony, and for years made copies
of the diplomatic correspondence between Russia and Vienna, which,
together with the replies sent by the wriggling Brühl, he punctually
dispatched to Potsdam. From these documents Frederick gleaned precisely
the dealings which Saxony had with Vienna and Saint Petersburg at the
beginning and toward the middle of the fifties. He learned how Brühl
wriggled and twisted in order both to preserve and to betray the
neutrality of Saxony; how Russia was persuaded to come in; how they
egged her on, in her clumsy enthusiasm, to bring things to a point;
how a god-fearing empress set to work to find a valid, an ethical
excuse for action. He learned--if he had not known before--what
sort of thing a defensive alliance might be, when directed against
himself; and, supposing that he, on his side, was not god-fearing and
peaceably disposed, not at all inclined to rest on the laurels of
Hohenfriedberg, but, on the contrary, cherishing all sorts of schemes
and treacheries--then, here in these very papers, he himself possessed
the moral possibility which the good Empress-queen was to reap from
his offensive. As you see, the real inwardness of things was somewhat
complicated, though it was, on Frederick’s side, more downright, more
contemptuous, less involved, than it was with Maria Theresa and the man
who, as Frederick said, had fifteen hundred wigs and no head.
I pass over the numerous provocations, intrigues, and crises of the
second class, which occupied the political world during these years
of peace, without lying on the direct line of the march of events. As
early as the spring of ’49, the eager Bestuchev had come very near to
springing the mine--on the score of the antagonism between France and
England. The Duke of Newcastle, then the head of the English Foreign
Office, was working for an alliance directed against France, which
should include, besides the sea powers, Russia, Austria, Saxony, and a
few other German states--all very much to Bestuchev’s mind, for here
the prospect beckoned him of involving Sweden and Prussia in a general
conflict. He set to work in Sweden, where he thought to bring about a
change in the succession, and wean the country from French and Prussian
influence, drawing it within the sphere of Russian control. He hoped
in this way to force Prussia to act in a military sense. And when he
demanded from England, Austria, and Saxony a declaration that he might
count on their support in his Swedish undertakings, the whole world
expected an immediate catastrophe. But Frederick maliciously drew his
neck out of the noose. He invoked the French interest in behalf of
Sweden, he mildly warned the London uncle; and as he gave emphasis to
his diplomacy by calling up his reserves, England and Austria found
it expedient to dissociate themselves from Russia. Moreover, Denmark
was won over to the Prussian-Swedish-French _entente_; there was even
talk that Turkey would come in. In short, the hostile combination was
sprung, Bestuchev was isolated and obliged to put off the execution of
his plans to a better time.
But the initiative now passed to an Austrian statesman, with a name
famous in history, who at this stage of developments stepped full
length into the picture: lean and stiff, in a peruke powdered with
excessive care, the curls of which were arranged to hide the wrinkles
on his forehead; with a long, calm, blue-eyed, almost English face,
and a huge diamond order in his velvet coat. His name was Kaunitz,
Wenzel Anton Count Kaunitz; Maria Theresa, who early recognized
his great talents, later made him a prince. He was an oddity, such
as the eighteenth century brought forth in numbers. Excessively
hypochondriac--another peculiarity fashionable in that time--he
abominated fresh air, and never went out of doors, so that he was
as white as a cellar plant. In his pocket he carried a whole little
arsenal of dental instruments, which he brought out after a meal--even
when he dined out--and began to rummage about in his mouth with a lot
of rags and lancets and little mirrors. Until one time the French
ambassador said: “_Levons-nous; le prince veut être seul._” After
that Kaunitz left off going into society. Goodness knows how many
other maggots he had in his brain; but as a politician he was shrewd,
far-sighted, judicial, and with an enormous gift for sticking to a
plan once formed. And he had just one thought in his head: Prussia
must be thrown by the heels, if the illustrious house of Austria were
to continue in existence. That was a good and right thought, from his
point of view, but it had in itself nothing original about it. What
was original, original and really magnificent, was the method which
Kaunitz, and Kaunitz alone, evolved in order to put his thought into
execution.
Kaunitz comprehended that to checkmate Prussia and crowd her to
the wall it was necessary not only to break up the Franco-Prussian
alliance, but actually to draw France over to the Austrian side. If
genius consists in essential independence of thought, that was a
conception worthy of the name. All the world over, it was an impossible
idea that France and Austria should ever walk hand in hand. Sooner
would fire and water mix. The mutual jealousy of the two houses had
left its mark on the whole history of Europe--not merely since the days
of the great Richelieu. But, granted that this was so, Kaunitz could
not see why it should be so for ever. “Much is not dared”--so ran his
device--“Much is not dared because it seems hard, much seems hard only
because it is not dared.” He acted upon this motto. If France decided
to join the Saint Petersburg offensive-and-defensive alliance, she
brought Sweden over with her; Saxony too would not hesitate to turn
on Frederick, so soon as she risked nothing by the act; and if the
Versailles government no longer stirred up the German princes against
the house of Austria, the German states were pretty certain to be
loyal. By a general understanding such as that, everybody stood to win.
If France were instrumental in the recovery of Silesia, she would be
allowed as a reward some enlargement in Flanders. East Prussia would
fall to Russia, Magdeburg to Saxon Poland; if Sweden cared in the least
about Pomerania, she would be a fool to stand aside. Anyhow, Sweden
had no choice, she was bound by French money. If hope and hatred once
moved them all to strike this monstrous alliance, then Frederick was
surrounded, hopelessly and helplessly, and a coalition formed such as
the world had never seen before: a glorious coalition, which history
could not but christen with the name of Wenzel Anton Kaunitz.
These ideas did not spring full-grown in one day from the head of
their originator. Like all good things they had deep beginnings. Even
at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which Kaunitz concluded for Austria,
he offered Brabant and Flanders to Versailles, on condition that his
country recovered Silesia by means of French assistance. But France
declined. Considering her position with regard to England, she found
the Prussian alliance too valuable to be weakened by such undertakings.
Since that date Kaunitz had industriously fed and fostered the mistrust
of the bad man at Potsdam in all the courts of Europe. From 1747 to
1748 he was consul in London, where he plied George II with intercepted
Prussian dispatches and a thousand insinuations against his nephew. But
in the year 1751 he came to Paris, and there began the golden age of
his career as an intriguer.
He lived in the Palais Bourbon like a private gentleman of quality,
with several women whom he gave entertainment; but he received very
little. However, with the two important persons, the monarch and the
Poisson person, he was on the best of terms; it was he who brought
his liege lady in Vienna to the point of those _princesse et cousine_
letters which were probably the hardest sacrifice ever legitimacy laid
upon the altar of politics. Kaunitz pursued his aims with a tact and
persistence truly admirable. He knew that at bottom the Most Christian
King, despite the alliance still in force, abominated Frederick. Louis
was bigoted and lazy; coddled, self-indulgent, uxorious; naturally his
active, soldierly, free-thinking, Protestant cousin of Brandenburg
was an offence to him. The alliance existed for reasons of state, of
course; it was directed against England, and threatened Hanover, the
English possession on the continent. But as for personal or dynastic
sympathies, they were nil, there was no basis for them; and setting
the political aside, a friendship between two old, aristocratic houses
like Bourbon and Habsburg was more humanly fitting than the one that
obtained between Versailles and the upstart breed of the Potsdam
drill-sergeant. And the creature had written scurrilous lampoons
against our marquise, and government by mistresses, and our all-highest
and laziest Majesty’s sacred person: Kaunitz hinted very skilfully,
and now and then was in a position to produce a bit of new evidence.
What audacity, what ingratitude this king displayed! What immemorial
disloyalty! For never, unless with France’s help, could he have got
Silesia for himself, and how had he shown his gratitude? By leaving
her in the lurch and crawling off into the woods with his prey. But
that is the way little states always behave when the big ones fall out
among themselves. To whose use and behoof, when you think of it, had
France and Austria been at each others’ throats all these centuries?
_Cui bono?_--to speak Latin. Had either one of them gained anything?
No, they had only weakened each other; the gainers had been the small
and middle-sized states, who otherwise would have had to do as they
were told, and who now were fishing in troubled waters. It was this
Prussian land-grabber who had won; thanks to the discord between France
and Austria, he had gained a position for which nature had not intended
him. Kaunitz was not so radical as to assert that an understanding
between his own country and France was conceivable, possible, perhaps
even necessary. Only it was amusing to imagine how things would be if
such an understanding were to come within the range of possibilities.
It would be like heaven, that was all. Everybody’s cares and troubles
would vanish, you would wish for a thing and it would fall into your
lap. Poor Silesia--it would not take long to wrench it from the
clutches of the bad man. And if France also dreamed dreams--Flemish
dreams--be sure Austria would find an opportunity to show herself
grateful. What else? Nothing else, probably--save that, yes, France
and Austria united would simply be able to do anything they wanted to.
Strengthened on both sides, in splendid equilibrium, without occasion
for jealousy, they would hold sway in Europe, and every foreign will
would have to bow the knee in face of their united front. So would it
be if a concord between them were possible. But such was not the case;
unfortunately, not at all. Tradition compelled them to work against
each other, to the end that neither of them got anything; and so it
must be, to all eternity. Habits were strong, bad habits were the
strongest. Stronger than all else was prejudice, and reason must bow
before it.--Or must it?
This was the sort of thing that Kaunitz dropped into every ear which
stayed still long enough to listen. He trotted out his theory on every
occasion, turned it this side and that, showed it in various lights.
First people laughed, then they stopped to think. It was daring, it was
amusing--after a while they wondered if perhaps it might not be more
than a joke. Gradually it became the _dernier cri_, a political mode,
_très chic_ as a topic of conversation in boudoirs and coffee-houses.
The erstwhile Poisson was enchanted with it--and the Empress had
written her such a charming letter! But there were sound ministerial
reasons for not repudiating the alliance with Prussia; and Kaunitz’s
paradoxes could not so soon have taken on even a half-way tangible
form, had not the man against whom they were directed advantaged all
his labours.
Frederick probably felt that a cooler breeze had begun to blow
from Versailles; and the French attitude seemed the more foolish to
him in that an English-French conflict was looming large and black
on the horizon. They would surely come to blows on the subject of
the French-Canadian border-line; the rivalry of the two maritime
powers was pressing to a warlike issue; and as Frederick’s treaty
with France could not possibly extend to a Prussian guarantee of the
French possessions in America, he felt that France might reasonably
be solicitous about his friendship. What was it Versailles wanted? If
it was a land war, if it wanted to attack England in Hanover, then
surely Prussia’s help was more important than this new flirtation
with Vienna--a joke which would soon be played out when the war with
England was once on. For ever since the days of Louis XIV Austria’s
place, and Holland’s too, had been on the English side in a French and
English war. And as for Russia, England did not spare her guineas when
she set out to bribe the Muscovite navy “against the common foe.” And
the common foe--Frederick might flatter himself that he was the man.
England had in him a not quite comfortable neighbour on the continent,
and she did well to take precautions against a Prussian attack on her
electorate of Hanover. But while she set her diplomacy to work, what
did France do? France did nothing at all, whereas there were three
things at least which she should have done. She should have stirred up
Turkey, to hold the two empires in check. She should have come to an
understanding with Frederick on the subject of Hanover. And, lastly,
she should have brought England to hear reason, by attacking Hanover.
Frederick had been expecting for months that the Duke of Nivernais
would come to Potsdam to negotiate. But he did not come. Obviously,
Kaunitz was at the bottom of that. Frederick thought the petticoat
government at Versailles was showing itself pitiably hare-brained and
silly. England was sending a fleet to America; she was capturing French
ships and King George was threatening in parliament; but Louis and
his one-time Poisson seemed bent on repose. The only step Louis took
was to instruct his foreign minister, Rouillé, to make the following
proposal to the Prussian ambassador: “Write to your sovereign that he
ought to assist us against Hanover. There will be a lot of plunder.
The King of England’s treasury is well filled. The King need only help
himself.” It was brazen. But it shows incidentally what sort of repute
King Frederick enjoyed in Europe and particularly at the court of
Versailles. He sent back the reply that if they had proposals like that
to make they would do better to employ a Mandrin as go-between (Mandrin
being a notorious highway robber). He hoped that in future M. Rouillé
would make a distinction between the persons with whom he had to deal.
A haughty, virtuous answer--and one that would certainly make a good
impression in England.
Frederick had chosen between England and France. He saw the latter
vacillating, feeble, lacking in confidence. And he felt that he was
being undermined in Paris by Prince Kaunitz. He gave France up. He was
convinced that if he attacked Hanover he would have England, Austria,
and Russia against him. On the other hand, if he cast in his lot with
England, in the first place the French would not come to Germany, and
in the second he would have the money-bags on his side in all future
contingencies. An understanding with Russia would thereby be achieved,
and who knew if it might not in the future be possible to prize Russia
loose from Austria, and by thus isolating Maria Theresa wean her from
her hope of regaining Silesia? Here was the reasoning that underlay
Frederick’s humourless retort to M. Rouillé. And England heard it.
Could she win over Hanover’s dangerous neighbour, and thus secure her
continental communications for her naval war with France? England
took steps. And soon the _rapprochement_ came about. By the middle
of January 1756 a convention was signed at Westminster, according to
which Prussia and England vowed mutual peace and friendship, and, in
particular, bound themselves to act to prevent any armed power from
marching into or through Germany. That was all.
Really it was not much. England certainly had no intention of falling
out with Russia and Austria on Frederick’s account. And, on his side,
Frederick perhaps did not believe that an understanding with England
must necessarily mean a break with France. But France was beside
herself. Yes, Kaunitz was right. This man was an out and out wretch.
He openly put himself on the side of France’s enemies. But they would
show him.... They showed him. Kaunitz had meanwhile taken the helm of
foreign affairs at Vienna and was represented at Paris through Count
Starhemberg. He could at once report the most gratifying progress
in his French enterprise. It was at this time that our marquise
showed how well she could preside at a real council of state. In the
boudoir of her château of Babiole there took place those very private
negotiations between her, Count Starhemberg, and the Abbé Bernis, her
protégé, which, on May the first, resulted in a contract of defence
and neutrality between France and Austria: the Treaty of Versailles,
which was the answer to the Convention of Westminster, and which, as a
matter of fact, was so well seasoned that somebody called it a blank
declaration of war for the Austrian chancellor. In it was the statement
that France and Austria would stand together, that in case of need one
of them would place twenty-four thousand men at the disposition of the
other; and there were also included all sorts of things about subsidies
to Austria. It was not set down that Austria would cede territory in
the Netherlands to France as soon as Austria by France’s help had got
back Silesia; but they continually treated of it, and the Marquise so
understood it.
And if it were only France that was outraged! But Russia was outraged
too. “What?” Elizabeth cried; “have we taken so much money from England
only to have her patronize this man who has made a mock of me all
over Europe for the sake of a few harmless little fancies?” Russia
turned her back on England. With furious haste she set herself to get
into touch once more with France. Furiously she proffered Austria a
plain and blunt offensive alliance against Prussia. They could hardly
hold her back. Kaunitz, who had not quite yet got France where he
wanted her, had to preach patience to Saint Petersburg, and advise
discretion, “lest the desperate King of Prussia fall on us prematurely.”
So Frederick, then, had missed his reckoning altogether--granted, of
course, that he had reckoned as the writers of the period (among whom
he was one) say that he did. And granting that he had not known all
the time, in his heart of hearts, that in one way or another he would
one day have to prove the strength of his budding greatness before the
whole of Europe, and had been ready for many a day to do it. Today
it looks as though both alternatives were true: that he had war in
his blood, but that, more out of spite than love of peace, he played
the diplomatic game of balancing powers--just for the fun of leading
destiny by the nose. At all events, the Convention of Westminster
caused an incredible political upheaval; and any critic of the time
might have said that this royal statesman was such a bungler that he
had managed to unite against him all the sworn hereditary enemies of
Europe. A new system of understandings arose: Austria did not stick to
England against France, and Bourbon and Habsburg joined hands. Russia
disregarded the subsidies contracted for with England the previous
year; mad with rage, she went over to France and Austria. And so they
were united, they, the three greatest powers on the continent. And on
the other side stood Frederick; with a single friend, not exaggeratedly
loyal at that, who concealed from him that she was no longer friends
with Russia, and who, moreover, had her hands full with the war
overseas. However, the famous money-belt would be at his disposition,
at least for the present and if things did not go too badly with him.
Such was the position; and it did not take Frederick long to grasp
it. Not in vain did he keep spies at every court. He knew the
secrets of Babiole. From The Hague came hints of the Franco-Russian
_rapprochement_. “Are you sure of the Russians?” he continually asked
Mitchell, the English ambassador. And Mitchell replied: “My government
is sure of them.” Adding _sotto voce_ that he himself was not so sure,
and that just lately a courier had told him that all the roads up to
the Lithuanian frontier were full of marching Russians. For Mitchell
the Scot was an honest man and he had great respect for Frederick.
To make assurance doubly sure, word came from Dresden of Russia’s
eager urging, and of her leaving England in the lurch. The Viennese
ambassador gave further detail about the offensive Austro-French
alliance, which was not signed yet, but was under constant discussion;
comprehensively speaking, it was as follows; on the day when Austria,
with the help of France, won back Silesia, it ceded to France a part
of the Netherlands.--Take it all in all, the Kaunitz schemes, his
coalition and his dreams of partition, were pretty plain.
It was a great deal that Frederick had in his hands; quite enough to
afford him the moral possibility which he was supposed to give the
good Maria Theresa by attacking. It is not hard to guess his state of
mind--to presume to understand his feelings would be more daring. A
bitter, angry, Mephistophelian laughter must have risen to his lips
at the thought of that clique over there striving so hard to preserve
their innocence, to put on him the odium of the offensive--on him,
who was above either the simplicity or the hypocrisy of such clear
psychological distinctions between offensive and defensive; and
who had no fear of either praise or blame. And again, he felt that
Prussia would have in the end to assert herself and show what she
could do; he had war in his blood, he meant war--whereas the others
only meant, in the first instance, diplomatic chicanery. The draft of
that Franco-Austrian alliance, whose aim was the recovery of Silesia,
presupposed an offensive taken by Frederick--and even so it remained
a draft. The whole Kaunitz scheme of a coalition for the destruction
of Prussia was in the first place no more than that, and very little
of it had been put on paper. There is no document in existence from
which Maria Theresa’s intention to attack Prussia can be proved; nor
any showing that Russia’s and Saxony’s part in her plans was either a
neutral or a hostile one. No human being, learned or unlearned, will
ever be able to decide whether these plans would ever have become more
than plans if it had not been that.... One thing more: a contemporary,
who must have known, Count Hertzberg, who at the King’s request
prepared a paper upon the events of the year 1756 and preceding,
declared, thirty years later: “It is, to be sure, a fact that plans
were in existence for the partition of Frederick’s territories; but
they were only provisional, and presupposed the condition that he would
give occasion to carry them out; so it will always remain unsettled
whether or no those plans would have been executed.” If it had not
been that--what? That Frederick himself began.
If one turns to the historians to try to discover whether the frightful
war which thus began was really an offensive or a defensive war on
Frederick’s part, one finds that the historians contradict themselves
to the point of absurdity. All those whose breasts are covered with
orders have one song to sing; everything, they say, is against the
libellous hypothesis of a long-prepared war of attack and conquest: the
bearing of the King, his utterances, public and private, during the
ten years of peace and the last summer months before the catastrophe.
Those whose breasts are not covered with orders (which of course is
only the result and not the cause of the views they hold), who have
a grudge against genius, holding it to be incompatible with virtue,
in the nature of things: these sing a different song: positively
everything, they say, that is known to us of the villain speaks for
the interpretation of an offensive war. His utterances, forsooth! They
are just so many subterfuges, just so much dust in people’s eyes. “If
I thought my shirt or my skin knew anything of my intentions ...” Yes,
we remember. Had he not also said that he had no desire to be like
those princes who become famous by reason of one brilliant operation
and afterwards enjoy peace and quiet? His plans date from far back.
He wanted to conquer Saxony and West Prussia, that was all, and he
spied out the diplomacy of the other powers in order to get pretexts
for attack.--Yes, the historians are a mass of contradictions. For my
part, if anybody asks me, I prefer to say nothing. For it seems to
me that when the various opinions on his life and deeds cancel each
other out, silence is what is left. That Frederick began the war is no
evidence that it was not defensive; for he was encircled, and might
quite possibly have been attacked the following spring. But did he will
the war? The question leads us into the slough of unsolved problems
concerning the freedom of the will. He probably understood quite early
that he would be forced to will it; and after he had led destiny awhile
by the nose, he had enough human pride and human spite to will it
voluntarily.
So much is true: that the others, no matter how much they may have
plotted, began their actual warlike preparations only when those of
Prussia had turned to certainty the great and general mistrust. As
early as the spring of this year 1756 Frederick had sent a corps
to Stolp under Field-marshal Lehwald; and further, ostensibly to
safe-guard Hanover, he took measures to bring up the Westphalian troops
and strongly provisioned the Silesian fortresses. His own officers had
shaken their heads. After the middle of June, “_Alarmzustand_” was
declared in East Prussia as well as Silesia, all leaves were cancelled,
the reserves called in before the end of the regular manœuvres. One
army was by then completely mobilized; it stood in Farther Pomerania
ready to act as reserve in East Prussia. The plan of campaign, drawn
up by the King together with General von Winterfeld, had long been
ready, save for details. Winterfeld, a sort of general chief of staff,
sat bent over route plans and lists. Everywhere horses were being
bought. General von Retzov was intendant in the field. The files were
formed, the marching order of the army in three great divisions was
settled upon. The machine was working smoothly. And Kaunitz smiled and
compressed his lips. “His Majesty of Prussia,” he said, “is already
making the second great mistake in state policy. First Westminster,
and now these preparations. It is good we have not armed up to now,
it might have spoilt everything. Now we and Russia have all the
provocation in the world to hurl our troops against the boundary.” And
Austria set up an extraordinary armament commission; it brought its
regiments on a war footing and concentrated them in Bohemia and Moravia.
On the tenth of July, Frederick ordered his generals to Potsdam;
appeared among them and without more ado declared that the war must
begin. “That it must,” Winterfeld supported him. “Impossible!” said
all the rest; and advised strongly against it. They were Prussian
generals: Haudegen, Schwerin, Keith, Retzov, Schmettau, Ferdinand von
Braunschweig; but they all most strenuously advised against it. The
King’s brother could not trust his ears. “Are we to understand,” cried
Prince Wilhelm, “that Your Majesty hopes to conquer this overwhelming
strength? The greatest powers in Europe, the public opinion of the
continent, are against us. And justice--ah, Sire, it is not on our
side!” “To want to wrest victory from superior power like that is to
court defeat at the hands of Providence!” So cried the princes Henry
and Ferdinand. Frederick pished and pshawed, and jeered at them and
said they might stop at home if they were afraid. At which they
naturally fired up and said that obedience was higher than personal
opinions.
In the whole world he had not one moral support. England never ceased
to warn him not to invoke certain destruction--against which she would
be powerless to save him. But when in the middle of July he learned
that Austria was mobilizing all along the line, he had the question
put in Vienna, which sounded dangerously like an ultimatum: was the
mobilization directed against him? Probably he had in mind to spring
the combination by showing a brusque deportment. If they came to blows
in midsummer, he reckoned, then Russia was not likely to march that
year. Perhaps, even, English gold would keep her still, or there would
be a change of thrones--for the Little Mother was not in the best of
health, her love-affairs were bad for her. And France: she had signed
the Treaty of Versailles, but nothing is easier than to deny the _casus
fœderis_ if you do not want it and cannot have it. And it seemed to the
King like a case of cannot.
But if France and Russia did fall away, would Austria stand up to him
alone? Frederick did not think it, he did not hope for it. But if,
said he, they were really with child by war, he was ready to play the
midwife. A detestable figure! And another allusion to the sex of his
opponent.
They were not ready yet, in Vienna. So they delayed for two weeks
with their answer. Then it came. Maria Theresa explained that in the
universal crisis she had taken steps to secure herself and her allies,
which were not intended to injure anybody. Kaunitz told her what to
say--disingenuous, time-taking rubbish. Frederick still pressed. He
sent word that he could not remain in ignorance of Austria’s agreement
with Russia. If Her Majesty could not give him, in good set terms,
without employing any of the usual Austrian evasions, the assurance
that she would not attack him within the next two years, then she
would have her own exalted self to thank for whatever consequences
might ensue upon her silence. That this demand did not admit of any
discussion was obvious. Frederick’s own ambassador hardly found
the courage to transmit it. But simultaneously with his ultimatum
Frederick in quick succession mobilized first the Pomeranias, then the
Westphalias, Silesia, Brandenburg, and lastly the Berlin garrison. In
six days the troops were in fighting trim and only needed a few days
to reach their rendezvous. Schwerin with thirty thousand men was in
Silesia. The three columns, commanded by the King in person, pushed
toward a certain frontier.... Everything was buried in the profoundest
mystery; not even the divisional commanders were informed. But there
was still a delay.... What was Vienna’s answer? After full three weeks
she haughtily replied: the first steps toward mobilization had been
Prussia’s. Further, the alliance with Russia had existed for a decade,
and was not offensive in its character--from which it followed that
Prussia’s anxiety was groundless.--Kaunitz again. Between the lines
could be read: “If you swallow that, then you are a fool, and we shall
brush you aside. If you don’t, then you are a criminal disturber of the
peace. Take your choice.”--Frederick gave the order to cross the Saxon
frontier.
The Saxon frontier! Why, but Saxony was neutral, wasn’t she? Saxony
was not playing!--That was all one; on the twenty-ninth of August
Frederick, with sixty thousand moustaches, invaded Saxony.
What a hubbub arose in Europe at this unheard-of breach of the peace,
this attack on the rights of nations! We have no idea--or, rather,
yes, perhaps just lately we have had an idea. But let us listen to
Frederick before we listen to Europe: according to him his breach of
the law was due to the following reflections and considerations. He had
to be absolutely certain of Saxony, in order that she might not fight
on the wrong side when she had the chance. Things must not go as they
had in ’44, when Saxony had stuck a dagger in his back. By occupying
the country and disbanding the army or incorporating it in his own,
he should have a secure base for his operations against Bohemia. As
for neutrality, there was none, in any true sense of the word. In her
heart, and with all her evil-disposed intentions, Saxony was with the
coalition, though cowardice prevented her from admitting where she
stood. Frederick, in breaking the letter of the law, in violating a
neutrality that stood on paper, whereas its own betrayal did not so
stand, was actuated by the sternest necessity. He had to take the guilt
upon his own shoulders in order to bring it home to his enemies; he
had to get hold of the archives of the state of Dresden, that nest of
treachery, in order to be able to prove to all the world how Saxony
had manœuvred. If Saxony were wise, she would offer no opposition;
she would let him get across the mountains without delay. But let her
persist in carrying her skin to market for Austria, and he would crush
her once for all. When Schwerin repulsed an invasion into Silesia, and
Frederick surprised them by appearing in Bohemia, then Maria Theresa
might perhaps think better of it? With just one slash, perhaps, he
would have cut the web that bound him, so that the severed pieces
floated harmless away? Of course, the opposite result was conceivable:
the various combinations still in a fluid state about him might
crystallize at his touch, just as ice-cold water in a basin will begin
to freeze when shaken. But one way or the other, things must be brought
to a head.
Thus Frederick. But Europe had no mind at all for such balancings and
experimentations. Europe shrieked as with one voice. It was terrific
to hear her. The public, of course, had no “_Kujons_” in its pay; it
was not posted as to preliminaries, and in its eyes the march into
Saxony had taken place in the middle of the profoundest peace and
was a shameless breach of international law, an attack so wanton and
unprovoked that it put one quite beside oneself. To fall in force
upon a neutral country, a good, innocent country which was not at all
expecting such a barbarous onset and had only lately placed its army on
a pathetically small peace footing, twenty-two thousand men, in order
to enable Brühl to buy more wigs and coaches and scent-bottles! It was
insufferable, it rent the heart, it could not and must not be that this
snuff-taking Satan should tread under the heels of his top-boots all
morality, all justice, all humanity, all that ennobled life, all that
the upright must needs believe in. So Europe shrieked and continued
to shriek; and loudest of all shrieked Austria, pointing her finger
at Frederick and crying over and over again: “Now you see, don’t you?
There you are!”
And, as a matter of fact, Saxony was not in the least resolved on
fight. She had plotted, but she was not in the least resolved. However,
she was carried away by the general indignation, which confirmed her
in a false and sentimental conviction of her own innocence and the
justice of her cause; and she elected to perform the rôle of martyr in
the cause of Austria and the rights of nations--a choice which could
not save her from imminent destruction. It was impossible to withstand
the masterly entry of the Prussian troops, carried out as it was with
the utmost order and discipline. The defence hastily fell back on the
Bohemian frontier, and let Wittenberg, Torgau, Leipsic, let Dresden,
let the whole electorate fall without a blow into Frederick’s hands,
into the power of Prussia. The Saxon army stopped at Pirna, in a
fortified position, and thither came Augustus, in flight from Dresden.
This prince, otherwise rather slack, now displayed an astonishing
obstinacy, backed up by the moral support of all Europe. What Frederick
demanded of him was pretty thick, after all: it was no more, and no
less, than an offensive alliance against Austria, and the oath of
fealty of the Saxon troops. In other words, Saxony was to link her
fate, for better or worse, with Prussia’s; since, as Frederick said,
Saxony and Prussia were indispensable to each other and it was to their
mutual advantage to stick together. We have learned since then that
mutual advantage counsels a permanent alliance not only to Prussia
and Saxony, but to Prussia and Austria as well. But they had not got
so far on in those days; and Frederick’s theory, in the circumstances
under which it was set up, must have sounded Satanic indeed. “How
should I,” asked Augustus in numerous letters, “turn my sword against
a princess who has never given me any ground for doing so? It is my
intention not to take any part in this war ... my integrity, which
I have preserved up to my sixtieth year, encourages me to reply to
Your Majesty that you have possessed yourself of my territory without
any justification. Europe will be the judge of my cause, and of the
genuineness of the schemes you lay at my door, of the non-existence
of which all the courts of Europe are convinced.... It seems Your
Majesty can secure himself in no way save through the destruction of
my army, either by the sword or by famine. Until the second happens it
still lacks much; and with regard to the first, I have hopes that in
the divine protection and in the constancy and loyalty of my troops
I shall rest secure from the ultimate event.” They were good, moving
letters that poor King Augustus wrote, prompted by his consciousness
that he had Europe with him. He addressed his army just as touchingly.
They would, he said, thrust toward Bohemia together--which was sheerly
impossible--despite the strength of the enemy. He was resolved to
sacrifice his life in the attempt; it belonged to his subjects; it was
for them to save the honour of their king, and to defend him to the
last drop of their blood.
The camp at Pirna was surrounded, and the pinch was soon felt. But
until hunger enforced surrender (for Frederick wished to shed no blood,
he wanted to amalgamate the Saxon troops with his own), much precious
time was lost, time of which Austria made good use. Frederick stopped
in Dresden, where he sought by means of ingratiating forms to make his
Draconian regulations more palatable; his purpose being to win over
public opinion by proving from the Saxon archives the necessity he had
been under. But here too he encountered resistance so embittered that
in breaking it down he brought the world, if that were possible, even
more than ever about his ears. The state papers were in the castle,
in the custody of the Queen of Poland, who was living there with her
children. Frederick she loathed; and she stoutly resisted all his
efforts to get hold of the documents. Frederick, however, was not
the man to shrink from using force against a lady. He sent a general
to the Queen, with definite instructions to procure the casket in
which the documents were, using force if necessary. The scene in the
Queen’s apartments is variously depicted. In any case it must have
been extremely humiliating to Augustus’s wife. She fought with all her
strength and with all her pride against surrendering the papers. We are
told that she defended with her own body the door to the cabinet; other
accounts say that she sat on the chest where they were kept; others,
again, that the casket was in her bed, and that Frederick’s general,
after prostrating himself, did not hesitate to violate this place
too. In the end the Queen had to comply, and Frederick got the papers.
He speedily had them published. But the advantage of publication was
outweighed by the harm done by this fresh evidence of his brutality.
The Queen called the foreign ambassadors together, gave them a vivid
account of what had happened, and declared that all the rulers of
Europe had been insulted in her person. Her daughter, who was dauphine
in France, threw herself publicly at the feet of Louis XV and implored
him, with sobs, to avenge her mother’s sufferings--a scene which moved
all Europe to tears of sympathy and righteous anger. The French envoy
in Berlin received orders to break off relations peremptorily. The
Prussian ambassador was forbidden the court at Versailles. Add to all
this that the Queen of Poland died soon after, killed, so everybody
said, by the ignominy she had suffered. For Frederick retorted upon her
conspiracies and agitations by having her closely watched, and she was
not spared further affronts. The King of Prussia, so we are told by
Count Vitzthum, treated the Queen not like a person of royal blood, but
like a canteen woman imprisoned in the middle of a hostile army. And it
killed her. The indignation against Frederick was boundless.
It was, in fact, so deep and general that a heart less stout, a temper
less sardonic than his might have quailed before it--yes, perhaps even
this heart did sometimes quail. In France, a country where he had
close intellectual ties, he passed for a savage, simply; they called
him nothing but the barbarian, the “monster of the north.” Indeed,
he might have searched the whole globe over for a sign of sympathy
and understanding and found none--no spot on earth where he did not
pass for the enemy of mankind, a ravening beast, to draw whose fangs
would be a moral act and a safe-guard to the public. He must be struck
down, must be rendered for ever powerless. Not only must Silesia be
taken from him; Prussia must be reduced to the position which was hers
before the Thirty Years’ War, the king of it once more a petty marquis,
powerless for harm. Yes, the hour had struck when the civilized
states must root out the Prussian spirit and rid the planet from this
poisonous growth. Even those who could still think objectively had to
admit that there was nothing left for Prussia but to sink under the
scorn and hatred heaped upon her by the world.
Quite aside from the material resources which such hatred had at its
disposition, the hatred remains in and for itself a thing to shudder
at. To fear that which is of the spirit is no disgrace; it involves
less cowardice than does fear of physical force. It is upon the
imponderables that the best hopes of victory are based; thus there is
nothing weak or foolish about taking cognizance of the imponderable and
the irrational where it sides against you. The hatred and revulsion
which Prussia roused might be as uninstructed and misguided as ever;
but the question which had to be raised was this: was it conceivable,
or humanly possible, that one man could bear up against the weight of
so general a feeling and carry off the victory? It takes more constancy
of spirit to confront a preponderance of moral feeling than to defy a
superior body of troops. Frederick had to admit to himself that in
case of his defeat the world’s rejoicing and the world’s scorn would
alike be unbounded; that he should get no justice, and not only that,
but that he should actually have been in the wrong. Even on this
ground, it was bitterly necessary for him to conquer. He was not in the
right, in so far as right is a convention, the voice of the majority,
the judgment of humanity. His right was the right of the rising
power, a problematical, still illegitimate, untested right, which had
first to be fought for and won. Defeated, he was the most wretched of
adventurers--_un fou_, as Louis of France called him. Only when success
had shown him to be the agent of destiny, only then would he be in the
right, and proved to have been always in the right. For every deed that
deserves the name is in truth a trial of fate, an effort to create a
right, to guide destiny and realize the course of development. And the
hatred felt against the doer of the deed is, psychologically speaking,
nothing else than an effort to influence the verdict of fate against
him--a naïve and irrational effort, because the verdict is settled
beforehand, but still a spiritual weight and pressure which might well
frighten the bravest. King Frederick is called the Great, not only
because of the audacity with which he laid siege to destiny, but also
and especially because he had the strength to bear up--alone, with
almost superhuman nervous strength--under so heavy a burden of hate.
But all the bitterness of soul, all the cynic disbelief in justice,
which characterizes him who thus tempts fate, speaks in those words
he uttered: “Poor mortals that we are! The world judges our acts not
according to our motives, but according to their success. There is
nothing left for us but to achieve it.”
So now they got their forces together, bodies of troops, armies, in
almost ridiculous superfluity, to overcome him and carve him up in
the shortest possible time at the least expense to each of them.
Each one looked forward to his share. Elizabeth of Russia displayed
great tenacity, she was far from dead yet, she hastened to join the
Versailles concordat and signed a special understanding with Austria,
by virtue of which she was to send eighty thousand men against
Frederick and harry the Prussian coast with her fleet. France, which
up to now had let herself be entreated, showed suddenly a hysterical
zeal. By the invasion of Saxony, she shrieked, the Peace of Westphalia
had been violated, shamefully violated, and the honour of all the
guarantors of that peace demanded that they speedily unite to execute
the evil-doer. A second Versailles Treaty arose, stating that France
would contribute a hundred thousand men and pay twelve million gulden
of yearly subsidy to Austria, until such time as the latter was once
more secure in the possession of Silesia, and Prussia reduced to the
dimensions she had before the Thirty Years’ War (according to which
contract France ought still to be paying to this day). The war against
Prussia, the alliance with Austria, was now so popular in Paris that
the French Academy offered a prize for the best verses in praise of
it; but the French government found the idea silly and suppressed
the offer. And that was not all. Frederick found that he had fallen
foul of the “Empire.” His act, they said, was a breach of peace of
the “_Reich_.” The Emperor commanded him to cease his unheard-of and
wicked sedition, to indemnify King Augustus and withdraw from Saxony.
He ordered all Frederick’s generals to leave their godless lord,
and not to partake in his hideous crime. And as all that did not
in the slightest avail, the whole of Germany (that blind Germany!)
rose against Frederick, sixty princes declared that his proceedings
constituted a predatory attack, and an imperial punitive campaign
was solemnly resolved upon. Sweden, one of the signatories to the
Westphalian Peace, and in leading-strings to France, had perforce to
resign herself to the conquest of Pomerania. And thus populations to
the tune of a hundred million rose against some five; fourteen princes
against one; seven hundred thousand of troops against two hundred and
sixty thousand. Frederick was putting it mildly when he said he was
risking his skin. Nobody had any doubt it would be all up with him in
the shortest possible time.
It will give me the very greatest pleasure to cite from his letters of
the period. They have a way of making one’s memory act in a contrary
direction--namely, forward and not back, a distinctly thrilling kind of
memory.
To the Marquis d’Argens in Berlin: “The French have gone mad. You
cannot imagine the disgraceful things they are saying about me. You
would think that the whole salvation of France depended on the house
of Austria; and the Dauphine’s dreams have made much more impression
than my manifesto against Saxony and the Austrians. In short, my dear
friend, I deplore the consequences of the earthquake that has addled
the brains of all the statesmen in Europe, and I wish them peace,
health, and contentment.”
To Privy Counsellor von Knyphausen of the Paris legation: “It is due
to the Austrian intrigues that I am obliged to recall you. When you
will have left Paris, nothing will stem the tide of slander against me.
My enemies will invent so many stories that the French will only see
with their eyes and hear with their ears. Well, if they want to be my
enemies, very well; it is their own choice.”
To his sister of Bayreuth: “But since things have been pushed to this
point, we must hope now that Providence, if it deigns to mix in poor
human affairs, will not permit the arrogance and malice of my enemies
to triumph over my just cause.”
To Schwerin: “We shall have, my dear Marshal, to confront many
foes--but I am not afraid. I have capital generals, admirable troops,
and if heaven preserve my understanding I hope also to give a good
account of myself.... But we must exert ourselves to the uttermost,
we must crush our enemies, we must fear no numbers, but rather count
it an honour that such a difficult task is ours to perform. We pay
rope-dancers, but not men who merely walk on solid ground; so in
this world all the glory is for those who triumph over difficulties.
Farewell, my dear Marshal, I embrace you.”
To his sister Amalie: “The coming campaign is to me what Pharsalus was
to the Romans, or Leuctra to the Greeks, or Denain to the French, or
the siege of Vienna to the Austrians. Such epochs are decisive, they
change the face of Europe. Before the decision one must endure fearful
hazards; but afterwards the sky is again clear and bright. Our duty
is now not to despair, but to foresee each event, and bear with quiet
countenance what Providence vouchsafes us, without arrogance at good
fortune, or depression at bad.”
To his sister of Bayreuth: “Germany is facing a severe crisis. I must
defend her freedom, her privileges, and her religion. If I am defeated
this time, it will be in this cause. But I am of good cheer; and
however great the number of my foes, I have faith in the goodness of my
cause, the admirable courage of my troops, and their steadfast will,
from the commanding officer down to the lowest soldier.”
To the same: “I am in the position of a traveller surrounded by a
band of rascals and about to be murdered in order that the murderers
may divide their booty among themselves. Since the League of Cambrai
there has been no instance of a conspiracy such as this villainous
triumvirate has forged against me. The thing is contemptible, a
disgrace to humanity and human morals. Has the world ever seen such
a spectacle as three powerful princes banding themselves together to
destroy a fourth who has never done them any harm? I have never had
any differences either with France or with Russia, and certainly not
with Sweden.... _O tempora, O mores!_ One might as well be living
among tigers, leopards, and lynxes as in this supposedly so civilized
century, contemporary of the murderers, thieves, and perjurers who
govern this poor world. Happy is he, my dear sister, who lives
unknown, and has been wise enough from his youth up to abjure any kind
of fame! Since no one knows him, none can envy, and his happiness
cannot make him the prey of every sharper.... They have laid a plot
against me, and the court of Vienna has been pleased to insult me; this
was more than my honour could endure. So the struggle begins and the
band of rascals fling themselves upon me; such is my fate.”
To Minister von Finckenstein: “Be not so fearful. Nothing is lost as
yet and nothing desperate. So long as I am alive I will stand firm and
defend myself like a lion.”
To his sister of Bayreuth: “We must all console ourselves with the
thought that our century is an epoch in the history of the world, and
that we have witnessed events so extraordinary that the course of
things has not for long brought forth their like. That means much for
our curious minds, but little for our happiness. Well, these villains
of emperors, empresses, and kings are forcing me this coming year to
dance upon a tight-rope. I console myself with the hope of giving one
or another of them a good crack over the nose with the balance-pole.
But when that is done, then peace must finally ensue. What a sacrifice
of men! What horrible butchery! I shudder to think of it. But I must
steel my heart and arm myself for murder and massacre; I must face the
odds heroically; though they are always frightful when you see them
close at hand.”
To Earl Marischal Keith: “You say my enemies malign me, even in the
far-away Escorial. I am used to that. I hear nothing but untruths
about myself. I have had more than my fill of the vulgar lies and
contemptible libels spread by hatred and venom all over Europe. But
one can get used to anything. Louis XIV must get just as sick of the
flatteries that are poured into his ears as I am of the shameful things
they say about me. These are unworthy weapons, which a great prince
ought never to employ against his peers; for he inevitably lowers
himself at the same time and exposes to the scorn of the vulgar things
which it is to the common interest of princes to hold in honour.”
To Finckenstein: “It seems unhappily that we are not yet at the end of
our task. We have too many enemies to be able to gain such superiority
over them as to enforce peace. All Europe is marching against us; it
seems to be the fashion to be our enemy, and a title of honour to
contribute to our destruction.”
To Voltaire: “You, who do not fight yourself, do not for God’s sake
laugh at others; be tranquil, be happy, that you have no persecutors,
and learn to be care-free and enjoy the repose you have at last
attained after chasing after it for sixty years.... Are you still, at
sixty, so lacking in common sense? And learn, in your old age, how you
ought to write to me. Please note that certain liberties are permitted
to writers and wits; but when they become impertinent it is too
much.... But enough, I have forgiven all, in a truly Christian spirit.
On the whole, you have given me more pleasure than pain. Your writing
has more power to cheer me than your scratches to hurt.... You cry
out for peace so loudly that I am fain to tell you to turn that lofty
impertinence of yours, which so well becomes you, against those who
are responsible for the delay in concluding peace.... Despite all your
efforts, I will never sign a peace save on conditions consonant with my
country’s honour. The people of your native land, puffed up as they are
with folly and vanity, may rely upon it that I mean what I say.”
To Ferdinand of Brunswick: “Unless France signs a peace with England
we are hopelessly lost; we have too many enemies, too many people
are disheartened by our disasters, and the morale of our troops has
plainly deteriorated. There is nothing left but for you to think up
an inscription for my tombstone. The great calamity will not come to
pass before the middle of August; but by then all will be lost beyond
repair. You know that I am usually not a pessimist; but now there is no
possibility of seeing anything else but black.”
To d’Argens: “The French are amusing asses. I like an enemy that makes
me laugh; I hate my grumpy Austrians, swollen with impudence and pride,
no good for anything except to make one yawn.”
To the same: “You value life as a sybarite, I look at death like a
stoic. Never will I survive that moment in which I am forced to sign
a disadvantageous peace; no eloquence, no inducement, can drive me to
subscribe to my own disgrace. I have told you, and I repeat: never will
I put pen to a shameful peace. I am firmly resolved to stake all upon
this campaign, to perform the most desperate deeds, to conquer or find
an honourable end.”
“The defence,” says Rancke, “earned him high esteem in the states of
Europe. In defending himself, King Frederick became the great man of
his century.”--That is true, and yet not true--in so far, that is,
as it considers Frederick’s war against Europe to have been a purely
defensive one. The dispute among historians as to whether it really
was that--and not rather a war of aggression--waxes louder than ever
today; but the situation is far too complicated, too involved, to
permit of a simple and final answer. In its very last analysis this
gigantic struggle was an offensive war; for the young, the rising
power is always, psychologically speaking, the aggressor, and the
others, the existing powers, are on the defensive against it. Somewhat
more superficially speaking, it was a defensive war, for Prussia was
actually “encircled” and was to be destroyed with all possible speed.
Then it was, again, an offensive war in that Frederick obligingly
picked the quarrel. Yet, once more, it was a war of defence, for
when the odds are one to five, that is tantamount to defence, even
though it was the one who actually declared war against the five--or,
rather, as a matter of fact, failed to declare it. And, fifthly,
it was an offensive war: on the ground that the most desperate and
difficult defence must always needs save itself by attacking. “Attack,
attack! Keep on their heels! _Attaquez donc toujours!_” To that tune,
instinctively, he had always disciplined his troops, he had even made
it instinctive with them; and to it he carried on war, unmindful of the
voices of those who urged him to keep on the defensive--in situations
like that of the year 1759, when the Russians were on his left, and
Daun on his right, and Sweden in his rear.
What friends he had were not worthy of the name. England regarded him
as her soldier against France, she was satisfied to have him hold
France in check in Europe while she quietly annexed the French colonies
in the New World; but, in the interests of business, she refused to
relieve him in the Baltic, against Russia; she paid subsidies as
long as it pleased her, and when it pleased her no longer she left
off. As we know, the war lasted seven years--seven is always the
number of years the princes and the miller’s sons have to serve in
the fairy-tale; but it was a seven years’ test a little severer than
ever falls to their lot; it was, without exaggeration, the severest
test ever a human soul has had to stand upon this earth. To stand it
required such passive and active qualities, such a measure of endurance
and patience, of inventive and resourceful energy, as neither before
nor since, to my knowledge, a man has ever displayed or had occasion
to display. Seven years long did King Frederick march hither and yon,
fighting, beating here one enemy and there another, being beaten
himself too, sometimes almost destroyed; staggering erect again because
he thought of something else which might still be tried; trying it,
with incredible, improbable success and coming safe off once more.
Always in his shabby uniform, booted and spurred, with his uniform
hat on his head, breathing, year in, year out, the dust of his own
troops, in an atmosphere of sweat, leather, blood, and powder smoke,
he would walk up and down in his tent, between two battles, a dismal
defeat and an incredible victory, and play on his flute, or scribble
French verses, or write quarrelsome letters to Voltaire. His mother
died, without his even seeing her; he felt now more forsaken than ever.
His favourite sister died--“_mon Dieu, ma sœur de Bayreuth!_”--and
his anguish at the loss testifies to the tenderness of his iniquitous
heart. In time he himself became grotesque; he was not unconscious of
the frightful comicality of his existence, he compared himself with Don
Quixote, with the Wandering Jew. “The ox must plough the furrow,” he
would say, “the nightingale must sing, the dolphin swim, and I--I must
make war.” He imagined himself condemned to carry on war up to the day
of judgment; he became a spectre to himself. The dreadful weariness of
spectres he knew, their pathetic yearning for rest. “The happy dead!
They are saved from all cares and troubles.” He kept poison always
upon him for the last emergency; but though the last emergency seemed
many times to have arrived, he did not take it, for always some other
plan occurred to him, and the emergency passed. Beneath the frightful
punishment, the cruel vicissitudes, the ceaseless tension, “the nicest
little creature in the kingdom” aged rapidly. He lost his teeth, his
hair went white on one side, his back got bent, his figure leaner and
leaner, he suffered from gout. And besides that, from diarrhœa. It was,
in fact, the tortures of the damned he suffered. But his fame grew
apace--his transgression, his breach of the rights of nations were
forgotten, but his fame as of the chosen of God grew and spread like
a tree and overshadowed the century. It was not alone that he routed
the hosts of Marshal Soubise at Rossbach--that same Marshal Soubise
who stole Alsace and set fire to the Palatinate--and became a hero to
all Germany, a symbol round which their torn loyalties might once more
twine. His deeds, and his sufferings, won him the sympathies of the
people of all nations. Yes, his defeats not less than his victories
occupied near and far the hearts of men, and the grotesque, the
Quixotic flavour, in his personality helped magnify him in the popular
eye and elevate him to a legendary fame: his picture, with the wry
mouth, the sparkling blue eyes, the three-cornered hat, the cane, the
star, the shoulder-cord--it hung in cottage and hall; while he still
lived he was a hero of legend. From now on he was called _der alte
Fritz_: an awe-inspiring name, to anybody with a sense of awe; for it
is really in the highest degree awe-inspiring to find the dæmon become
a household word and given a nickname.
He had outlived the hate, the psychic resistance, of the world; and
thereby had withdrawn an indispensable prop from the morale of his
foes. The rest was done by his radicalism, his readiness to go all
lengths, the depth of his resolution, which seemed to his opponents at
once so offensive and so frightful, like a strange and savage dog--in
the end they all shuddered before him. His moral advantage was that it
was always, with him, a matter of life and death, and that gave him a
sense of absolute values of which the others knew nothing. I will not
speak of his genius as a strategist, being a layman in that field.
And I wish not to speak of his “luck”; for it is always stupid to
distinguish luck from a man’s other merits and count it as undeserved,
instead of part of all the rest. Still, if you like, he was lucky. He
was on the brink of destruction when Elizabeth of Russia surrendered to
her love-affairs and left a poor simpleton named Peter to reign, said
Peter admiring Frederick to the point of idolatry, so that he struck
a peace with him at once. But the King had to win a few more battles
before the others saw at last that it was hopeless, and retired from
the field tired out. He went back home.
He had won nothing tangible, and his territories were ravaged,
depopulated, impoverished, run wild. But Prussia endured, not a village
lost; Silesia was safe, and the end and aim of the Great Coalition a
total failure. It was a deep humiliation for the continent at the hands
of a single man. The verdict of destiny, all the probabilities to the
contrary, had been rendered in his favour; it was impossible to dispute
it in the long run. They had to make way for Prussia, for Germany,
to follow its own path--a path which has since proved as steep and
fateful, as full of manifold and instructive turns of fortune, as any
path a people ever trod.
As for him, his later course, which continued yet for a long time, was
dreary, and chilly, and unlovely. After that frightful seven years
his nature had grown more sardonic than ever before. He had fought
and suffered beyond the capacity of ordinary men; and to him they now
all seemed like a childish breed, an undistinguishable rabble. It
is incomprehensible why he should have gone on wearing himself out
in labour for this breed even while he choked with scorn of it. He
poured himself into the task of making good the harm that he had done,
of healing the ravaged fields and patching the tattered finances, of
summoning whole industries into existence, of adding a whole province
to his kingdom and rescuing it from neglect by a magnificent system of
colonization. And all this would be incomprehensible unless one thinks
of his sense of duty as a sort of possession and of him as the tool
of a higher will. His industry was a cold and joyless passion. He was
burnt out, he was dry and withered and wicked, he loved nobody, and
nobody loved him; his royal existence was a burden, and no honourable
one, to the rest of the world. And when he needed a little animal
warmth, he was fain to share his bed with his favourite greyhound. He
kept a great many dogs, and it was his wish to be buried near them.
When the last one of these died he wept all day long. He still found
a little pleasure in embroiling his philosophers among themselves;
then he sent them all away. For whereas earlier in his life he had
only mocked at religion, now he mocked at philosophy as well; saying
that a good digestion was more important than knowledge of the essence
of things. And he had a very bad digestion, it was spoilt by the
highly spiced dishes he insisted on eating. When at last he died, at
seventy-four, after a tormenting and repulsive illness, everything, we
are told, was deathly still, but no one mourned. There was not a single
clean, whole shirt in his wardrobe, and his valet gave one of his to
clothe the corpse--which was tiny as a child’s.
One is prone to think of him as a sort of hobgoblin, an object of
hatred and detestation, leading the whole world into a quagmire, a
spiteful, sexless troll, for the destruction of whom a hundred million
men toiled to exhaustion in vain, since he was created and sent to
bring about great and inevitable events upon this earth. Then, after
the performance of them, he vanished, leaving behind him a husk like a
little child’s.
The riddle of his existence lay in the dualism which Jean Jacques
Rousseau reduced to a formula: “_Il pense en philosophe et se conduit
en roi._” That is a great antithesis, and comprises many and many a
pair of active opposites: for instance, right and might, thought and
action, freedom and destiny, reason and dæmon, bourgeois morality and
heroic necessity. Such opposites, united in one flesh and blood and
become a strife of instincts, naturally do not make for a comfortable,
logical, and harmonious existence. There is a resulting irony on
both sides, a radical scepticism, a fanatic zeal for achievement at
bottom quite nihilistic, a sense of power as melancholy as it is evil.
Frederick wrote the _Antimachiavelli_, and that was not hypocrisy,
but literature. He loved the humane spirit, reason, dry clarity of
atmosphere--loved them by contraries and out of the depth of his
being, which was essentially dæmonic, essentially a slave to the
destiny which made him its instrument. Thus he loved Voltaire, the
son of the spirit, the father of enlightenment and of all anti-heroic
civilization. He kissed the lean hand that wrote: “I hate all heroes”;
and he himself mocked his seven years’ struggle with the words: “heroic
weakness.” But he set it down in black and white that if he wanted
to visit a province with the severest punishment, he would sentence
it to be governed by writers; his enlightenment was so skin-deep that
he believed himself bullet-proof; and when he wants to explain why
he preferred the frightful strain and bloody horrors of war to the
tranquil repose of a literary life, he speaks largely of a “secret
instinct.” What he means was stronger in him than literature; it guided
his acts, conditioned his life; and it is certainly a most German
thought to think that this secret instinct, this element of the dæmonic
and super-personal in him, was: the urge of destiny, the spirit of
history.
He was a sacrifice. He felt, indeed, that he had sacrificed himself:
his youth to his father, his manhood to the State. But he erred if he
believed that a choice was open to him. He was a sacrifice. He had to
do wrong, he had to lead a life contrary to his thoughts, he had to
be not a philosopher but a king, in order that the destiny of a great
people might be fulfilled.
1914
III
AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT
AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT
Full though this world is of problems--moral, social, intellectual,
artistic--weighty problems, the treatment of which must redound to
the credit of any writer, shedding reflected lustre on his name and
reaping him the praises of a grateful public; yet I here venture to
approach you with a theme which even I myself cannot do otherwise than
regard as preposterous, and, indeed, suspect. Surprise and contempt, I
know, will be my portion from the general at my choice of it. But do
people choose their subjects, I ask? No, they write and they talk of
what they are ridden by, and nothing else; and that though the themes
a man neglects may lay claim to pre-eminent importance, and the one
which has taken his reason captive be actually mischievous. And all my
good, respectable ideas have been vitiated by personal contacts and
observations, which are at once so puerile, and yet to such a degree
unexplainable (if I may talk about degrees of unexplainableness), that
I cannot get away from them, and find myself, for the moment at least,
spoilt for the contemplation of those more unsullied, those saner,
chaster realms of thought where I could move with so much honour and
credit to myself. I say spoilt. And truly it is a sort of corruption
which breathes from the region I have in mind: that probably not
deep, yet subterraneous region, that turbid and equivocal plane of
existence, with which, in my folly, I have put myself in touch; it
lures me astray from my lawful concerns to those which I know full well
are none of mine, though they exercise upon my fancy and my brain a
pungent attraction, like the fumes of wood-alcohol (by contrast with
the bouquet from the pure wine of the spirit of civilization). Well
do I comprehend how a man may fall victim to them as to a vice, and
through that monomaniac, vain-foolish preoccupation be lost for ever to
the moral upper world.
My case is no other than this: I have fallen into the hands of the
occultists. Not precisely the spiritualists--though there were some of
them too in the gathering I lately visited. But we must distinguish.
The spiritualistic dogma is by no means obligatory, among the group
of international scholars--not such a very small group now--whose
members call themselves occultists because they are given to the
study of phenomena which at present seem to us to contradict the
natural order as we know it. The whole spirit-theory, as a method of
explaining certain puzzles, is even, by many investigators, rejected
with a gesture of stern scientific probity. And yet in fairness it
must be said that in the production of occult events these scientific
gentlemen do take advantage of the supra-normal, or at all events
anormal disposition of certain persons who do not weigh very heavy in
the intellectual scale; and that this technique (I refer, of course, to
the somnambulistic state of the so-called mediums) constantly passes
over into the transcendental and metaphysical. But metaphysics, of
course, is not spiritualism; even less is spiritualism metaphysics. The
difference in degree is so great as to become a difference in kind;
and it is surely quite comprehensible that philosophical metaphysics
should aim to keep spiritualism at arm’s length. For spiritualism--the
belief in spirits, ghosts, _revenants_, spook intelligences with whom
one gets into touch by interrogating a table and getting the most
utter banalities by way of reply--spiritualism is in fact a kind of
backstairs metaphysics, a blind credulity which is on the one hand
not up to the conception of idealistic speculation, and on the other
hand quite incapable of metaphysical orgies of emotion. A good example
of the first alternative is Schopenhauer’s masterpiece _The World as
Will and Idea_; while in Wagner’s _Tristan und Isolde_ we possess the
classic _opus metaphysicum_. And one only needs to mention these lofty
flights of intuition to feel at once the lamentable triviality of the
whole of that which calls itself spiritualism--though what it is is
not so much metaphysics as it is a Sunday afternoon diversion for the
servants’ hall.
But is human dignity a criterion of truth? Yes, in a way it is.
There is a man, Herr Krall of Elberfeld, well known for his famous
calculating horses, a man whose trade and activities hover on the
borders of the occult. I heard Herr Krall say: “If there are ghosts,
then there is every reason why a man should pray for a long life; for
there could not possibly be anything more insipid, childish, futile,
confused, and pathetic than the existence of these creatures, to judge
from their supposed manifestations.” One is reminded of the famous
utterance of the shade of Achilles on the Cimmerian shore, the time
that Odysseus held a seance there. Vain and senseless, the son of
Peleus calls the existence of the dead; and, after all, the pagan world
might so conceive the life after death, without making any mistake
about this one as truth, fact, or dogma. On the other hand, it would
go very much against the grain for a Christian to conceive another
world in which things were even paltrier, stupider, and more futile
than they are in this our earthly sphere; and when, as indeed it may
easily happen, an intelligence knocks on a table and introduces itself
to society as the spirit of Aristotle or Napoleon Bonaparte, only to
belie the statement by a hundred blunders, gaucheries, and obviously
intentional shufflings, then I think we are justified, on grounds
of taste, in the conclusion that this is not only not Aristotle or
Napoleon, it is nobody at all, but only acting as though it were;
and that any complaisance toward such goings-on is beneath all human
dignity.
Now, this would all be well and good if only there did not linger a
doubt whether dignity and good taste are absolute criteria in the field
of science, in the search for truth, in that process, in short, whereby
nature explores herself through the mind of man. Dignity there is
only in the province of pure spirit; and metaphysics, in the sense of
transcendental speculation in the theory of knowledge, belongs to that
province. But when metaphysics becomes empirical; when it condescends,
or begins to feel the obligation, or yields to the temptation, to track
out the riddle of the universe _experimentally_--and that is what
it does in occultism, which is nothing but empirical, experimental
metaphysics--then it must not count on keeping its hands clean or
its bearing stately. The only dignity it has left is the irreducible
remnant that must cleave to all honourable service in the cause of
truth; and it must make up its mind that it will have to deal with a
great deal of filth and foolishness. For mediumism and somnambulism,
the sources of occult phenomena, are a mixing of suprasensual mysteries
with the mystery of organic life; and the result is turbid. There is
no longer any talk of taste, of mental or spiritual _niveau_, or of
the beauty of rashness. For here nature takes the field; and nature
is an equivocal element: impure, obscene, spiteful, dæmonic; while
man, proud man, in his very essence opposed to her, loves to put on an
aristocratic air and find his own peculiar dignity in forgetting that
he is a child of nature just as much as he is a child of spirit. And
yet, if one were seriously, on humane grounds, to forbid metaphysics
to become experimental--that is, to practise occultism--that would be
to deny to natural research, to knowledge of nature in general, every
human value and importance, as did the Middle Ages and the Church. As
though the exact natural sciences themselves stop at the point where
an encounter with metaphysics becomes unavoidable! The fact that I
know and understand very little of the famous doctrines of Einstein
(except that, more or less, things have a fourth dimension--namely,
time) prevents me as little as it does every other intelligent layman
from seeing that in this doctrine of relativity the border-line between
mathematical physics and metaphysics has become fluid. Is it still
“physics,” or what is it, when they tell us--and they are telling us
today--that matter is ultimately and inmostly not material, it is just
one manifestation of energy, and its smallest parts, which are neither
small nor large, are, though surrounded indeed by time-spatial fields
of power, themselves timeless and spaceless?
But enough of theorizing. Let us get on to my experiences. They begin
at my acquaintance with a man about whom opinions have been of late
strongly divided, some finding him a charlatan and traitor betrayed,
others respecting him as a genuine and meritorious investigator, and
one of the initiators of a new science. He is Dr. Albert Freiherr von
Schrenck-Notzing. A practising physician, from a family of physicians,
specialist in nervous diseases, sexual pathologist, he more than
thirty years ago arrived at the study of the occult by the route of
hypnotism and somnambulism. It appears that for a time he leaned toward
spiritualism; but today he rejects it, and refers all the unexplainable
phenomena he evokes and observes to the operation of unknown but
natural forces, which will in time be recognized as such.
The appearance of his book _Phenomena of Materialization_, a few
years before the war, produced a full-grown public scandal. From the
official and learned world came a perfect hail of protests against such
a combination of credulity, confused thinking, and fraud. The public,
in so far as it came to hear about it at all, held its sides with
laughter; and really the book was a severe trial of our seriousness,
as to both text and illustrations--photographs which struck one
as at once silly and grotesque. Evidence was not lacking that Dr.
Schrenck-Notzing had been bamboozled--and this was probably true in
more than one case. Most unfortunately, the mediumistic faculty,
however genuine, is no guarantee of good character. On the contrary, it
even seems to have a perfect flair for mystification. Anyhow, it looked
for years as though Schrenck-Notzing had irretrievably damaged his good
name as a scholar.
The years passed. The war came and with it undreamed-of chances and
changes. When the second volume of _Phenomena of Materialization_
came out, it was in an entirely altered atmosphere. Not that the
second volume was less crazy than the first, or that the official
world of science, the press, or the public welcomed it more cordially
than before. No, there was no stinting of scorn and contumely. But
both seemed to lack conviction, to be less fortified than before by
comfortable self-assurance. There was a mild resignation, a fatalistic
_laissez-faire_ in the air. People had borne so much they never dreamed
of bearing, such outrageous experiences had been their lot, that
even their honest indignation lacked the right ring; it betrayed an
unmistakable tendency to compound.
In politics there is always a right and a left wing. So in the
scientific world there is, with reference to the occult, a strongly
conservative and a radical-revolutionist position, together with all
sorts of shadings and gradings between, on the one hand, obstinate
denial of all rationally unexplainable but persistently reported
manifestations like telepathy, true-dreaming, and second sight, and,
on the other, a fanatical and uncritical credulity, based, this last,
less on a solid reverence for the mystery than an inhuman prejudice
against all reason and science. And the intransigent conservative
position has a good deal on its side--as, after all, it has in politics
too. For between the right and the left lies an inclined plane where
it is only too easy to slip; to concede belief in one single case
of the occult is to reach your little finger to a devil who almost
infallibly ends by taking the whole hand and therewith the whole man.
_Principiis obsta!_ There is beginning to prevail in Germany today a
dangerous liberalism in the camp of orthodox science--in Germany, which
might hitherto have been regarded as the stronghold of conservatism
in this respect. Abroad--in England, in France--there had always been
a more yielding temper, and more often displayed. (I will not speak
of America, where an unnecessary amount of humbug seems to have got
mixed up with occult studies.) Perhaps we Germans were influenced by
the fact that Schrenck-Notzing’s book was translated into English;
that the Society for Psychical Research two years ago summoned to
London his principal medium, a person named Eva C., and published a
very serious report of the sittings with her; that French savants like
Richet, Flammarion, Gustave Geley, Dr. Bourbon, and others supported
this report in its boldness, tested its experiments, confirmed
its results. All in all, a slight shakiness is evident, a certain
demoralization of our conservative and sceptical front. There are
traitors, and the traitors are secret before they become public. There
are university professors, and not only philosophers and psychologists,
but natural scientists, physicists, physiologists, and physicians,
who take advantage of the bad street-lighting in Munich to steal like
conspirators to the evening sittings of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing to
see what it does not profit them to see. For they must know, and they
do, that the only way of remaining intact is to shut their eyes and
not see. They are lost, or as good as lost, it is all up with their
scepticism--or, rather, their scepticism _begins_--when they see. There
are instances. A much-sought-after Munich oculist openly confessed
that after what he had seen at Schrenck-Notzing’s he had grown “very
cautious in his scepticism.” A charming phrase--the most equivocal
phrases are usually the charmingest. For I aver that that can be no
true scepticism which is not sceptical of itself; and a sceptic, in
my humble view, is not merely one who believes the prescribed things
and averts his eyes from everything that might imperil his virtue.
Rather your true sceptic will, in ordinary language, find all sorts of
things possible, and he will not, for the sake of convention, deny the
evidence of his sound senses.
As for me, I have always stood, theoretically, rather far left in this
business of the occult; holding, in the sense of the thoroughgoing
scepticism I just defined, that all sorts of things are quite possible;
but not boasting any personal or practical experience in suprasensual
realms. I have rested in a theoretical benevolence. I have felt, and
may have even casually expressed, a desire to attend a sitting, but
nothing came of it, and that nothing came of it was probably my own
doing.
And now? At the present moment? Just lately? You must let me tell
the tale as it fell out. I had a visitor, an artist man from a comic
paper, with an order to make a caricature of me. Very good. He drew me
a crooked nose, and one thing led up to another. God knows how we came
to speak of Herr von Schrenck-Notzing. Had I heard that he was working
with a new medium, my guest asked, as he went on cracking jokes with
his pencil. It was a youth, hardly a man yet, named Willy S., a dentist
by profession and a devil of a fellow in the psychical line. Schrenck
got perfectly crazy manifestations through him. He had discovered him,
brought him to Munich, found him lodgings and a job, besides paying a
deposit to ensure Willy’s exclusive services. He had been working with
him a year now, and had him so well trained, psychically speaking, that
Willy, unlike most mediums, could endure an almost constant change
of audience, with the rarest disappointments. That was important for
Schrenck-Notzing for the sake of the propaganda.--“Might one get to see
a sitting?” I asked. The artist man thought it quite possible. He knew
Schrenck-Notzing, and he would like to go to one himself. Leave it to
him, he would arrange an invitation.
So it came about. There followed an appointment by telephone; and one
winter evening at eight o’clock, toward Christmas-time, I found myself
on the tram with my caricaturist, bound for the seance. Both of us were
in high spirits, exhilarated, curious, in a mood between bluster and
funk, something like the feelings of a young man going for the first
time to a girl.
The palatial residence of Baron von Schrenck-Notzing is near the
Karolinenplatz, in an exclusive quarter. We arrived, and a servant led
us through a marble vestibule and up some steps to an antechamber.
As we took off our things we were greeted by our host, with cool,
aristocratic politeness, and ushered into a good-sized library, where
the other participants in the coming seance were already gathered.
Only one of them was known to me. I addressed him, expressing my
surprise at finding him here. This was Professor G., the zoologist,
an enthusiastic sportsman, ski-runner, yachtsman, and Alpinist, a
beardless, young-looking man, though certainly in the middle forties;
distinctly out-of-doorish and nature-loving--I should never have taxed
him with any hankerings after the occult. Introductions followed. I
was delighted to meet Emanuel Reicher, celebrated actor and hyphenated
American, just then living in Germany. Then there was the medium’s
housekeeper and foster-mother, a widow in middle life, named Frau P.
Likewise a Polish artist, blond and clean-shaven, full of friendly talk
in a gruff, hearty voice. Then this and that member of the Schwabing
intelligentsia. But the intellectual laity were outnumbered, on this
occasion at least, by the medical men and natural scientists. There
was another professor of zoology, a typical _Gelehrter_, mild and shy;
a young doctor from Switzerland; a still youthful German physician,
assistant at a Munich hospital, who had brought along an apparatus to
measure blood-pressure; a jolly, fair-haired lady specialist in nerve
massage.... Many of those present were novices, Reicher for one. He
seemed to have no affiliations with the occult, but merely with the
social circle represented.
The medium, Willy S., kept rather in the background. The Baron
introduced me to him among others. “Here,” he said, “is our star
performer.” He repeated the phrase more than once, obviously with the
idea of stimulating the young man’s sense of importance, but also by
way of prepossessing me in favour of this precious and delicately
organic instrument of his experiments. In my case, his concern was
quite unnecessary. My sympathies were boundless, and I took pains to
let our artist feel that I was no hostile onlooker, present with the
sole idea of pouncing and unmasking, with a bellow of triumph. I was
a sceptic on the positive side, who would rejoice at his success--I
wished him to know that. Deception? Between deception and reality
there were many degrees, and at some point they were one. Perhaps
there was a sort of natural deception, which might be just as good to
talk to as reality! I had come hither, not humbugging myself in the
least, to see what there was to be seen, just that, no more and no
less. I exchanged a few words with Willy S. and tried to get an idea
of his personality. I found a dark-haired youth of some eighteen or
nineteen, not unattractive, certainly with nothing striking about him.
His origins were plainly simple; his speech a South-German-Austrian
dialect, and his manner decent and friendly, with no signs of wanting
to curry favour by over-politeness. His answers to my matter-of-fact
questions were monosyllabic; and he seemed, quite excusably, in a sort
of stage-fright, a state of suppressed excitement united with the
shyness natural to his youth.
The young clinician summoned Master Willy to have his blood-pressure
measured, and I turned away and followed our host’s invitation to have
a look round in the laboratory adjoining. It was a large room, filled
with a confusion of photographic apparatus and arrangements for a
magnesium flash-light. There were tables and chairs upon which stood
or lay a variety of objects: a music-box, a little table-bell with a
handle, a typewriter, several white felt rings, and so on--objects
uninteresting in themselves, which yet would be employed by young
Willy to accomplish strange matters. We shall come back to them. There
was a sort of cage made of fine wire in which they had confined the
youth during a severely scientific and critical sitting. It had not
prevented him from doing what they could not explain. Lastly there was
the so-called “black cabinet,” about which so much had been said and
so much more whispered. Some of Willy’s predecessors had been sorely
in need of it. I looked within. There was nothing special about it.
Indifferent lumber stood behind the ceiling-high curtain which shut
off one corner of the room from the rest. “We shall not require the
cabinet,” said Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing. Willy did not need it. He was
strong. He sat right out in the room in his operations. So much the
better. My positive scepticism had swallowed the cabinet too--but if
Willy was strong, why, so much the better. We returned to the library.
Beyond it lay a study with a writing-table, where Willy made his toilet
for the sitting.
He did not make it by himself. By no means. He made it under the
argus-eyed control of three persons: the master of the house and
two assistants. This time Dr. von Schrenck appointed as assistants
the lively nerve-specialist and myself. And we obliged him--though
privately I doubted my fitness for the office. I felt lax and
benevolent, and inclined to regard the supervision as a formality. I
am not at home in the rôle of misdoubting observer; it embarrasses me,
it is repugnant to my humanity. You cannot expect a man to turn you
his good side when you take his bad one for granted. This youth now
girding up his loins to perform marvels--why should I dash his spirits
by showing him I suspected him of preparing to take me in? I am a
sceptic, but I want something to happen. Yet might not that be the most
fundamental and extreme form of scepticism? Perhaps I, in my laxity and
benevolence, was the most unbelieving of all?--But no more, for the
moment. Make your toilet, young man, I will watch you.
The Baron showed us the black, one-piece tricot affair in which Willy
was to cover himself from neck to ankle. He urged us to subject it
to a careful scrutiny, to feel it all over. He laid great stress
on a critical attitude. A garment, of cotton tricot. Very good. No
sign of deception about that; and Willy drew it on over his tanned,
boyish body. As he did so I caught a shy and solemn look he cast at my
colleague, the blonde lady nerve-specialist, who blithely regarded the
ceiling. But in nothing but the tricot the chap would freeze, that was
humanly plain; so they gave him a dressing-gown besides, a comfortable
old wadded kimono of the Baron’s, which likewise we conscientiously
examined, pockets, lining, and all. A good-natured old dressing-gown.
Good. But it had one curious feature: the Baron explained it to us. It
was trimmed all over with ribbons, on the sleeves, the seams, the hem,
sewed on everywhere. And these ribbons had been treated with a luminous
preparation so that you would be able to see the outline of Willy’s
figure even by a dim light and easily keep it in your eye. That seemed
a sensible precaution. More luminous ribbon went like a diadem about
his head; he stuck his feet into an old pair of Turkish slippers. They
completed the preparations. Or no. For when he stood arrayed he opened
his jaws very wide, like a lion, as though to swallow us. I gasped;
until it was explained to me that this was a matter of controlling the
mouth cavity. The deuce! And I had been within an ace of forgetting the
mouth cavity. He already had one gold tooth in it, to the honour of his
trade. For the rest, it was an irreproachable mouth cavity. We saw it
as far down as the glottis. In God’s name, enough. We returned to the
other room.
A chorus of friendly shouts welcomed us. The old hands hailed their
Willy in his professional disguise. It was a merry masquerade, and
Willy himself, in his talar and priestly bands, laughed too, in
good-natured embarrassment. _Allons, mes enfants!_ The company trooped
into the laboratory and our host shut the door behind us.
Things were looking serious. Unnatural events were to take place in
this strange room that was like a photographic studio even down to the
objects to distract the children’s minds with. I confess to a little
faint-heartedness, an inner resistance, a doubt whether I, personally,
was a suitable candidate for the enterprise. But now the conductor of
the experiment, all unsolicited, entrusted me with the control of the
medium, Willy’s landlady, Frau P., acting as the second control; and
began at once to instruct me in the technique. And technique it was, in
all seriousness, very thorough and gratifying indeed. I sat opposite to
the young man, with my chair close to his, his two knees between mine.
I held both his hands and my assistant both his wrists. Nobody could
deny--and I was far from doing so--that Willy was in safe arrest; we
sat and looked idiotically at each other, while the rest of the company
took their places chattering.
We were grouped in front of the curtain, in an irregular circle,
three-quarters closed. At one end sat the medium, with us “controls,”
and at the other the master of the house. Not all those present found
a place in this circle; two or three people had to move back into a
second row, where they stood or sat as they liked. Among them was the
sporting zoology professor, who to my astonishment had armed himself
with an accordion. It appeared that he was a skilled performer on this
instrument, in demand for excursions and summer evening garden-parties,
and particularly welcome in such gatherings as the present one, for a
medium needs music, almost continuous music, for his demonstrations--a
temperamental requirement which it would be foolish not to gratify.
Professor G. with his concertina added variety to a programme which
would otherwise have been furnished only by a music-box that played one
single and not even very pleasing tune.
The room was still lighted by ordinary white electricity, by which the
Baron put the finishing touches to his arrangements. A little table
stood in our circle, not precisely in the middle, rather nearer to our
host than to the medium, from whom it was some five feet distant. The
Baron measured the distance with a yardstick, and then placed several
objects upon it: a lamp in a red shade, the table-bell, a plate of
flour, a little slate and piece of chalk. A sizable wastepaper-basket
stood upside-down by the table, with a music-box on it; not the one
that was to play (that stood on a shelf behind the Baron’s chair), but
a smaller affair on which Herr Willy’s powers were to be displayed.
The typewriter the Baron set somewhere on the carpet near himself;
then he strewed felt rings about the floor within the circle. They
were luminous, like the ribbons on Willy’s clothes, and to one or two
of them was attached a longish, luminous string. Furthermore, all the
larger objects, so far as was practicable, the waste-paper-basket, the
music-box, the table-bell, were marked with luminous ribbons as well.
These ribbons were the Baron’s own invention, he rather prided himself
on them and used them in profusion.... The light went out.
But it was turned on again; for Willy, sitting there in my arrest and
still in his waking senses, had remembered something. “The pins, Herr
Baron,” he said. He referred, did this honourable youth, to another
precautionary measure which had been overlooked. The Baron bestuck the
sleeves and skirt of the velvet dressing-gown with pins that had thick,
white, illuminated heads. Others of the same kind already stuck in the
curtains, right and left of the opening, so that every movement in
their folds must betray itself. Once more the white light was turned
off. The only illumination now was a dark red shimmer from the shrouded
ceiling light, and from the little lamp on the table, which was
likewise shaded. For the unadjusted eye rather a scanty illumination.
But the Baron assured us that it was the best he could do. His utmost
efforts had not succeeded in securing a greater toleration for light.
“I struggle,” he said, “for every ray, but this is all I can get, up
to now.” However, Willy himself gave out light; so did the felt rings,
the bands on the other objects, and the pins in the curtains. After
all, the field of operations was visible; and after a little while the
top of the table seemed really quite well lighted. We were asked for a
little silence, in which the music-box performed its single number, a
clear and childish tune with a brief recurring melody and a tinkling
accompaniment. We waited. I in particular waited, with Willy’s hands in
mine, neither too tight nor too loose.
Suddenly, after two or three minutes, he shivered. A shudder ran
through him, and his arms, taking mine along, began to perform pumping
and thrusting motions. His breath came short and thick.
“Trance,” announced my experienced assistant.
So the chap had fallen into a trance under my hands! I had never
observed this state before, and gave it my profoundest attention,
convinced as I am that it is a condition of the most far-reaching
implications. While it lasts, Willy’s ego is divided into two symbolic
persons, for the purposes of his dream-performance, a male and a
female. He calls them Erwin and Minna. Childishness. Hocus-pocus.
Nobody takes Erwin and Minna seriously; but for the sake of the
business in hand we are fain to humour the whim: from now on we ignore
Willy’s existence and stick to these two, who have a simple way of
making clear which is which. Erwin is a lout. He manifests himself by
the vigour with which Willy lays about him, but seldom does anything
worth seeing; leaving the serious business to his milder and more
efficient sister. My assistant thought it was Minna who was now shaking
us and pumping with our arms.
“Is Minna there?” asked the Baron.
Yes, she was there. I receive one quick, firm pressure of Willy’s hand;
that is Minna’s way of saying yes. For no there is a sideways motion of
the hands and torso, to and fro. Moreover, the somnambulist will speak
to the controls; his voice is a quick, loud, thick-tongued whisper,
with a certain intensity in it.
The Baron greets Minna. “Good-evening, Minna. There are good friends
here, most of them you know, a few are new, but you don’t mind that, do
you?”
A to-and-fro movement in denial.
“Today the control is a very sympathetic man, full of the most cordial
interest in you and your powers. I hope you will show him something
nice.”
A squeeze of my hand, a short forward thrust of Willy’s torso. Yes, she
promises--absurdly enough, one involuntarily says “she.”
“Well then, Minna, do your best.”
And a general conversation begins. It has to begin, the medium exacts
it. “Talk,” he babbles in my ear, and I pass the word on. The company
have formed a chain and are sitting hand in hand. This may be a vestige
of spiritualistic parlour games, it may be an organic necessity. Hard
to tell. Anyway, Willy insists on it, and keeps whispering us to keep
the chain firm. My neighbour on the left is in touch with me too, his
right hand rests on my shoulder and arm. We talk into the darkness,
saying anything that comes into our heads, scarcely knowing to whom. It
is not easy. The subject-matter dwindles, the forced conversation keeps
breaking off or dying away, for our real attention is not upon it. But
we are warned against watching too eagerly for phenomena. Our leader
recommends a hovering attitude, a mood of suspension, which may be
evoked by the music that now mingles with our loud, artificial voices.
The zoology professor has struck up behind us on his concertina,
wheezing out a brisk succession of lively marches. His resources are
apparently endless; and when he falters, the music-box takes up the
strain with its tinkling little tune.
A fantastic setting. It is not hard to see why science, which sets
store by exact values, is at home in the dry, objective air of the
laboratory and used to purely abstract work with apparatus and prepared
subjects, should feel put off with this all too human kind of
experimentation. It is the same with the layman. He has come keyed up
to a suggestive atmosphere and a mood of consecration and mystery. He
is disappointed to find himself in a situation which probably disgusts
him both intellectually and æsthetically, suggesting as it does the
mawkish revival methods of the Salvation Army. This impression is
strengthened by the shouts with which the audience keeps encouraging
the medium--or, rather, the officiating Minna: “Hullo, Minna, are you
there? Buck up, show us what you can do! Get on with it, Minna!” The
one mystical thing about the situation--and that not in any spiritual
sense, but with reference to organic mysteries, primitive and affecting
at once--is the medium himself, as he tosses and threshes with his
arms, whispering in quick groans and pants: he is the primary object
of my curiosity. His condition and actions quite strikingly and
unmistakably remind me of the act of parturition. The head is now
thrown far back, now it sinks on my shoulder or on our hands, which are
so wet with perspiration that I constantly need to renew my grip. His
efforts come at intervals, like throes; the pauses between are times
of complete rest and inaccessibility, during which he sleeps, the head
drooping sideways on the chest, and assembles new powers. This is deep
trance, from which he rouses himself to resume his procreative labour.
A masculine lying-in, in a reddish darkness, amid chatter and shoutings
and jazz. It was like nothing else in the world. I reflected that
it would have been quite worth seeing even if nothing else were
to happen. And really it looked as though nothing else would. The
“child” did not come. Nothing supernatural felt inclined to show
itself. True, some of our audience, in their eagerness to see things,
anticipated them. Two of the illuminated pins had come out of Willy’s
dressing-gown, though they had been stuck in deep and firmly. They lay
on the floor, one of them rather far off him. The eager said they had
been taken; but it was quite possible if not probable that Willy’s
writhings had forced them out. But then, what about the two lighted
rings which had lain immediately in front of the curtain? They had
originally been visible in all their circumference, not partly hidden
by the hangings; but in the course of the last few minutes their
position had changed, you could see only about a third of them now;
either the curtain had moved forward or the rings back, while the next
time you looked, see, they were once more entirely visible, free of
the curtain and not beneath it. And that was a manifestation. A poor,
uncertain one, but it had to suffice. And had I not felt the breath of
cooler air the medium exhaled--that always heralded new phenomena? No,
to be frank, I should have welcomed any breath of cooler air, but I had
noticed nothing of the sort.
And time passes. It is hard to judge how much has passed already;
perhaps three-quarters of an hour. Evidently the medium is having a
hard time. They ask if this is the case, but he denies it and goes
on struggling. They ask if everything is in order, and the answer is
yes. But I don’t believe him. Privately I take on myself the blame for
our lack of success. From the first I had doubted whether my nature
would be helpful to the good Willy at his work; and now I am certain
that there in his beyond he shares my doubts. He denies it, of course;
that is the merest politeness--however odd it may sound to speak of
somnambulistic politeness. So far as I can observe, it is by no means
impossible that civilized and personal considerations have a hampering
effect in this condition; nor did Willy absolutely deny that this was
so. He said in a whisper: “Do you want the phenomena to come faster?”
Well? And what then? Silence. Did he want a pause? Still silence. Then
he began to kick with his feet; the Baron counted. Fifteen times. A
fifteen-minute pause, then. Good. We stop, temporarily.
The medium is given time to come to before the light is turned on.
He made wonderful preparations: scraping motions of hand and arm at
his side, which, in his fancy at least, served to draw in the organic
forces which had been sent out but not yet manifested. He woke in a
series of starts and blinked stupidly at the light. We betook ourselves
into the next room.
Cigarettes were lighted. Willy smoked too, sitting on the sofa in
his costume. The position was discussed. It was far from being
discouraging. A temporary hitch. The need of rest was not unusual.
An absolutely negative sitting occurred very seldom with our Willy.
Nothing was lost. Willy’s foster-mother diverted us with tales of their
domestic experiences. They would probably have to move into another
apartment. People objected to the uncalled-for things that were always
happening, wherever Willy was: spontaneous phenomena, signs and
wonders. Fists knocked on the walls. Hands did things nobody told them
to. A spook had showed itself most unexpectedly at the dining-room
door. The cook had seen it, and fled with a shriek. All that was to
the good. However, as for us we had so far drawn a blank. The young
clinician took a new measurement with his blood-pressure apparatus, for
purposes of comparison, and discussed its result with Dr. von Schrenck.
Fifteen minutes. The Baron signed for the renewal of the sitting.
I felt sure that Willy had contrived the pause in order to get the
control changed, and so I insisted on giving up my office. But our
host would not hear to it. No, no. We must not give way to all Minna’s
little whims. For the sake of the impression I should get, it was
necessary I should have the medium in my personal charge. But I might
take the second place, Frau P.’s, and give the first to someone else,
either Herr Reicher or Herr von K. Better Herr von K. “Come on, Herr
von K. You always manage to get it out of her.”
Von K. was the Polish painter, the man with the gruff and hearty
voice. He was a direct and vigorous character and the medium’s
favourite control. When a session seemed likely to be a failure,
they always called on him. He held Willy’s hands and encouraged him
with a geniality of which he alone possessed the secret; and almost
always something happened. “_Grüss’ Gott, Minna!_ Old friends together
again, that’s fine, I think, and surely you think the same? You do,
eh? Right-oh--but listen to me, not so hard! You’ll pull my shoulder
out. Minna, is that the way you love me?” Like that. Willy requires
this sort of thing, and almost always responds to it. Soon after the
red light went on again, he had fallen into the magnetic trance. The
music-box rippled, the concertina took its turn. The lying-in went on.
My position was awkward, bent over as I was, without anything to lean
on; but I clutched Willy’s wrists oblivious of all else, and was shaken
by his wrestling. He pulls us to and fro, he pumps and trembles, tosses
and writhes, whispers with foaming lips: “Talk, talk!” “The chain,
the chain!” “The chain,” repeats the devoted von K. “Surely my Minna
may ask that the circle be properly closed!” The longer we sit, the
harder we have to try to keep the dwindling conversation going. The
Baron encourages us. “Talk, gentlemen. Professor G., you are going
to sleep. Herr Mann, are you talking?” “Yes, Baron, I am talking as
hard as I can.” The audience pulls itself together and utters the
sheerest twaddle into the dark. Reicher, the actor, helps himself out
with a sonorous “_Rhabarber, Rhabarber!_” The music is painful. We are
weary to tears of the music-box’s one tinkling little tune, but when
the concertina sets in, with wheezing and puffing, then we want the
harmless tinkling back again. If it is hard for Willy, it is not easy
for us. Almost another hour has passed since the intermission. My back
aches, but I ignore it. The medium starts out of deep trance. He gives
a violent jerk, and seems to be trying to expel something by means of
lurches and lunges. “Brava, Minna,” von K. cajoles her. “You’re on
the way, we can all see that. You’ve only to take hold, it will be
wonderful, I’ll like you twice as much.” In vain. Not a sign. Even Herr
von K.’s blandishments are without result. Resignation glides into all
our hearts. For my part, I feel I have no luck with the mysteries.
I shall go on as before, granting the possibility of all sorts of
things; but I shall have seen nothing. Well, so much the worse for me.
Dyed-in-the-wool materialists have spent evenings here. So have open
enemies, protesting that the whole thing was a trick. So have irascible
physicists with their insistence on the laws of nature. And one and
all have come and seen and gone away with their so-called scepticism
shaken. Whereas my scepticism, which by comparison with theirs is
belief, a faith in nothing and everything--what name shall I give
it?--will have proved essentially unproductive, nihilistic. A slight,
unmistakable bitterness comes over me. Well, anyhow, the impressions of
the evening have been worth taking away.
Our host tries a last expedient. He takes a high tone, and speaks:
“Now, Minna, let’s be fair. We have been sitting here over two hours,
you cannot say we have been impatient. But everything has its limits.
We’ll give you another five or ten minutes, and then if nothing happens
we will call a halt, and these gentlemen will go home and some of
them will certainly think that you can do nothing. They will have no
faith in your powers and they will say so, and the sceptics will be
pleased.”--“No, no,” says von K., and seconds the Baron while seeming
to contradict him. “No, Herr Baron, don’t talk like that--isn’t she
just on the point of doing it? She knows best what she is about, does
my Minna; she puts out her little arm, and when she has stretched it
far enough--eh, what did you say? Want the music stopped? What did you
say, Minna darling?”
The medium has interrupted him in a whisper. The music is still, we are
all still. There comes again, in a painful stammer: “The handkerchief!”
“The handkerchief,” repeats Herr von K. authoritatively. “She knows
just what she is about; she is going to do it for us, is my little
Minna!”
“By all means,” says the Baron. “If that’s all, here is the
handkerchief.” He takes a large fresh one out of his pocket, holds it
by one corner, and drops it on the floor near the table, where it lies,
a white gleam in the twilight. We all lean over and stare at it.
“Push the table further back,” Willy whispers. His face is lying on his
hands. Is that right? “No, not that way.” He cannot see, but in his
dream he knows what is going on, and that something is not as he would
have it. Impatiently, just as though he saw, he tells the Baron what
to do. He wants the table further over, first somewhat to the left and
then nearer to our host. There. That is right. There is now more space
between the table and the handkerchief. “The circle,” whispers Willy;
we squeeze each other’s hands. “Talk,” he whispers, and we hasten to
comply. I begin to utter some nonsense to my neighbour the Pole, I
have turned my head and begun to speak, when I hear somebody say, with
artificial calm: “It’s coming.” I jerk my head round.
You know the place in _Lohengrin_, in the first act, after Else’s
prayer, when the chorus begins in unison: “_Seht! Welch seltsam
Wunder!_” It was just like that. The handkerchief had got up. It rose
from the floor. Before all our eyes, with a swift, assured, vital,
almost beautiful movement it rose out of the shadow into the rays of
light, which coloured it reddish; I say rose, but rose is not the word.
It was not that it was wafted up, empty and fluttering. Rather it
was taken and lifted, there was an active agency in it, like a hand,
you could see the outline of the knuckles, from which it hung down
in folds; it was manipulated from the inside, by some living thing,
compressed, shaken, made to change its shape, in the two or three
seconds during which it was held up in the lamplight. Then, moving with
the same quiet assurance it returned to the floor.
It was not possible--but it happened. May lightning strike me if I
lie. Before my uncorrupted eyes, which would have been just as ready
to see nothing, in case nothing had been there, it happened. Indeed,
it presently happened again. Scarcely had the handkerchief reached the
floor when it came back up again into the light, this time faster than
before; plainly and unmistakably we saw something clutching it from
within, the members of something that held it--it looked to be narrower
than a human hand, more like a claw. Down, and up again, for the third
time up. The handkerchief was violently shaken by the something inside
it, and tossed toward the table, with a poor aim, for it hung by one
corner and then fell to the floor.
Loud shouts of applause and vivas for Minna. Several times the Baron
leaned over to ask me if I saw, if I could see everything quite
clearly. I certainly did; how could I have helped it, unless I had
shut my eyes? And I had never kept them wider open in my life. I
had seen greater things on this earth, more beautiful, more worthy
of admiration. But never before had I seen the impossible happening
despite its own impossibility; and so I kept saying in rather a shaken
voice: “Very good, very good!” though for my own part I felt anything
but good. Here I sat, holding in my very own hands Willy’s wrists in
their tricot sleeves; while immediately next to me I saw his knees in
the custody of the Pole. Not a thought, not a notion, not the shadow
of a possibility that the boy sleeping here could have done what was
happening there. And who else? Nobody. And still it was done. It gave
me a queasy feeling.
The lifting of the handkerchief, I heard said round me, was regularly
the introductory phenomenon. The spell was broken. The medium, who
had been strangely still during these events, sat up with a shiver
and whispered: “Put away the music-box. The bell.” “The bell,” cries
von K., all enthusiasm. “Where is my Minna’s bell? The bell, on
the basket! Good, now we’re off again!” The Baron obeys. He takes
away the music-box and puts the bell on the wastepaper-basket, its
ribbons gleaming in the dusk, and the metal shining redly. Willy
carries his hands and ours to his brow. He sighs. Then the bell is
taken--impossible, of course, but it is taken--by a hand, for what
else can take a bell by the handle? Taken, lifted up, held high and
slanting, rung violently, carried in a curve through the air, rung
again, and then with a swing and a clatter flung under the chair of one
of the audience.
Slight seasickness. Profound wonderment, with a tinge, not of horror,
but of disgust. Minna’s praises resound, loud and unceasingly.
“Unbelievable!” one of the novices cries out. Her head--what am I
saying? I mean his head, Willy’s head--leans toward mine, like a little
child he lays his temple against mine. Good lad, nice lad! You have
done marvels. Shaken and respectful, I let his head rest against mine.
But the Baron says:
“Here, Minna, is something new for you. You haven’t seen it yet, but
it is quite easy to use. It is a bell. You press it, strike on it from
above, you see. Like this. Then it rings. You do it, Minna. Here is the
bell.”
And he sets it on the basket. Tense expectation. At once we hear a
feeling round the bell, as though fingers were touching it uncertainly.
They take it up, shake it slightly; it rings, but not in the right way.
“Not like that,” says the Baron. “You don’t understand. Let me show
you. There, that’s how it’s done.” He strikes the button. “The circle,”
whispers Willy, quivering, against my cheek. But the Baron cannot make
the circle and strike the bell both at the same time. He asks Minna to
realize this. Hardly has he resumed his seat when the fingering and
touching begin again. At last the trick is successful. The fingers
strike the bell from above, weakly, like a child; but the task is
definitely performed. The clapper sounds.
“Brava, Minna,” shouts the audience. “Fantastic!” somebody says. But we
have no time to surrender to our sensations; for more follows. Hardly
has the Baron taken away the bell, when the basket begins to move.
Something knocks it, it totters and tips over; then it is lifted from
the floor and held high in the air. It hangs there askew and unsteady
in the red light, outlined by its illuminated ribbons, for three or
four seconds long, then tumbles to the floor.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” asks the Baron, pridefully. We
admit that we are impressed. Willy hangs sideways from his chair,
in deep trance. Certainly a man must stand in need of profound and
dreamless sleep, after so intense a dream that the events of it
are actually projected outside of him! Wait. Let me think. Let me
withdraw within myself and try to divine where may be the point, when
the magical moment, in which a dream-picture objectivates itself and
becomes a spatial reality, before the eyes of other people. Nausea.
Clearly this point does not lie within the plane of our consciousness,
or of the laws of knowledge as we know them. If anywhere, it is located
in that state in which I see this lad now before me, and which is
certainly a gate--whither? Behind the house, behind the world?... But I
admit that this is not thinking at all--only a mild form of seasickness.
To set things going again, the Baron starts up the music-box. He also
makes a change in the control. Von K. and I are released. I grope my
way in the dark to the other end of the chain and find a seat beside
Reicher, who sits next my host. I have the little table before me.
And scarcely have I taken my chair, and my neighbours’ hands, when a
fingering begins at the music-box on the table. The Baron hastens to
stop the music. And in the stillness, before my eyes, that see nothing
whatever, there is a scratching, rustling, and mysterious feeling-about
over the handle of the instrument, a trying to turn it. Ah, you deep
and immemorially light-shy creature, compact of dream and matter, what
are you doing there in front of our noses? Crick, the handle is turned,
the works go round. “Tell it to stop,” says the Baron. At my command it
stops. “Go on,” I say. And the music plays. This happens several times.
You sit there, bending forward, you command the impossible, and you
are obeyed, by a spook, a panic-striken little monster from behind the
world....
A pause. Then arises a varied activity among the light rings on the
floor. They are shoved to and fro, tossed from place to place. One
rises from the floor with its gleaming string hanging down. It is held
up, carried through space, brought to the table, where it wants to
be put down, and is, with a clumsiness which might lead one to think
that its motive force was blind. But probably the thing is timid,
afraid of being seen, afraid of venturing too far into the circle of
lamplight on the table. The ring is moved to the nearest corner of the
table, by a kind of stealthy shove that makes the felt scrape along
the wood. It just balances. At the same time the thing, in its blind,
clumsy trepidation, knocks so hard against the table that it shakes.
Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what
monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table,
before our face and eyes? Just as I am thinking this, plop, a ring
flies into my face. Something has flung it at me, it drops on my knee
and thence at my feet. What a playful monster! We all laugh. But it
is not amusement we feel, rather a sort of sinking sensation at the
chilling arrogance of this something or other which is perhaps only a
distressingly complicated kind of humbug. But, as I said, a civilized.
It did not throw the music-box in my face, but tactfully chose one of
the soft little rings. People have had their ears boxed, and other
practical jokes have been played, such as unlacing boots. Somebody had
his wristwatch taken off and carried about the room. But nobody, it is
unanimously affirmed, has ever suffered any serious harm from these
powers, and that is an indication of good sense and decent feeling.
On the other hand, they do unmistakably tend to become demoralized,
to play silly tricks and make unmotivated displays of strength. The
need of constant oversight, guidance, and direction is plain--as,
for instance, when the agency now set to work, with a good deal of
persistence, to upset the music-box standing on the table. The Baron
was alarmed for his instrument, and begged Minna to spare him the
heart-breaking annoyance which any kind of repair work costs in these
days. In vain. “It” obstinately persisted in overturning the box, on
which lay the slate and slate-pencil, likewise in danger of breaking.
Something had to be done by way of distraction, and the Baron thought
of the typewriting-machine, which stood on the floor in front of the
curtain, with paper inserted ready for use. “Write, Minna,” he said.
“Do something useful. We will listen to you, and then we shall have the
writing, to prove that we are not hypnotized, as some of your enemies
say.” The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its
efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honour, the writing-machine
begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we
have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering,
ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who
is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the
carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played
on. Willy’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm
free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet,
even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on
the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willy.
But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads
and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is
certainly touching the keys--but is it really only one hand? No, if you
ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one,
they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practised typist;
we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage
being drawn back, the new line begins--the sound breaks off and a pause
ensues.
Then somewhat further back, in front of the dark background of the
curtain, suddenly, swiftly, and fleetingly, the following little
apparition. Something appears, a longish something, vague, and whitely
shimmering; in size and general shape like a human forearm, with closed
fist--but not certainly recognizable as such. It comes and goes,
showing itself before our eyes, lighted by a sort of flash of white
lightning that issues from its own right side and wholly obscures
whatever shape it has--then it is gone.
“There, there is a materialization for you,” says our host, pointing
to it. “I’m glad you have seen one. Wait, perhaps it will make an
impression for us.” And he pleads with Minna to put her hand into the
plate of flour on the table. But I did not for a minute believe that
she would, and she did not, we waited in vain. It was quite light on
the table, the phantom would have exposed itself all too defencelessly
to our view, and to do that did not in the least correspond to the
image I had made to myself of the shy, sly, stealthy, equivocal
character of our elusive guest: a character too insignificant to
have evil intent, on the contrary probably quite well-meaning, but
weak-minded and embarrassed.--Nothing further happened. General
fatigue, it seemed, had supervened. Willy whispered: “Merry Christmas!”
The sitting was over.
It was odd to see in the bald white light the felt ring lying there at
my feet where it had no business to be. Remarkable, too, to observe
the typed writing on the machine, a perfectly nonsensical jumble of
large and small letters; presumably it would have been different
if Willy himself knew how to type. He still lay drunk with sleep,
leaning sideways across the arm of one of the controls. I went up to
him, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him it had been a brilliant
sitting. He looked dumbly up at me with his sleepy eyes, and a
good-natured, rather sad little smile was on his face.
We moved back by groups into the library, in animated discussion over
what we had seen. Tea was served, and did us all much good. The evening
finished off with stage stories narrated by Reicher.
* * * * *
Well, now, what had I seen? Two-thirds of my readers will answer:
swindle, sleight-of-hand, deception. Some day, when our knowledge of
these matters has progressed, the field will be popularized, and they
will deny that such was their judgment. Even now, and even if they take
me for a credulous and suggestible fad-chaser, the testimony of trained
experimenters like the French scholar Gustave Geley ought to make them
less glib. Geley closes his report with the categorical statement:
“I do not merely say that there was no deception present in these
sittings; I say that the possibility of deception was ruled out.” That
is absolutely my own position. I am in that intriguing and confounded
state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on
the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena
I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should
afterwards haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes;
only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the
reflection that deception was definitely impossible.
But, it will be objected, three-quarters of all the mediums _are_
swindlers, and have been exposed as such.--That is a fact, a
bewildering one; the more so that in many of these cases, I might even
say in most of them, the _dolus_, the intent to deceive, is absent.
I am convinced that even our good Willy, if he had had the chance,
would have started hocus-pocussing and so have seriously compromised
his position; for it is conceivable that in his dream he makes no
distinction between what he does with his own hand and what in “other”
ways; and being moved by the quite comprehensible desire to produce
an effect, he might, if he had been “uncontrolled,” have set to, been
discovered, and so discredited the experiments. And this would not
have been any evidence whatever against the genuineness of the occult
phenomena which were produced when he was in safe arrest.
The whole affair, however trifling it looks on the surface, is serious
enough to warrant explanations in a serious and even a solemn key.
Having seen what I saw, I consider it my duty to bear witness that in
the experiments during which I was present, any mechanical deception
or sleight-of-hand tricks were humanly impossible. Some may find such
testimony reckless; and our reason even obliges and forces us to do
so; for we do immediately twist and turn to find a middle way out, by
which we may somehow, even verbally, avoid the alternative of deception
or reality. “Delusion” is such a word; its very vagueness helps by
preventing us from seeing to the bottom of it. The two conceptions of
reality and of deception are mingled in it, and perhaps the mingling
has more justification than we know, and is less strange in nature
than it is to our downright processes of thought. I will say, then,
that what I saw had to do with an occult delusion in the domain of
organic life; with bewilderingly deep and sub-human complexes, at once
primitive and involved. These, undignified by nature and trivial in
their activity as they are, are well calculated to be offensive to
our proud æsthetic sense, but to deny their abnormal reality would be
nothing less than unreasonable obstinacy.
Furthermore, the scientific investigation of these phenomena is no
longer precisely in its infancy. Science has at least got so far as
to have invented a terminology, by means of which one can express
oneself respectably on the subject. What I saw were “telekinetic”
phenomena, phenomena of motion at a distance. This particular medium,
young Willy S., is especially strong in the production of this kind
of manifestations, which in their origins are closely related with
the occult natural phenomenon of materialization--in other words,
the temporary organization of energy outside the medial organism,
its _exteriorization_, so to speak. Among reasonable people it is
agreed that the agent which performs the tricks I have described, the
swinging of the bell, the lifting of the handkerchief, the typing, is
not a spiritistic “intelligence” by the name of Minna, neither is it
Aristotle or Napoleon, but the partly exteriorized medium himself. But
even that does not go far toward making our problem more accessible to
the reason. On the contrary, the popular, spiritualistic hypothesis
is much clearer and simpler than the scientific one; while as for the
problem of exteriorization and materialization, the longer one looks
at it, the more it reveals a complexity apparently calculated for the
express purpose of making a mock of the human intellect. Which is
not surprising--considering that after all it is bound up with the
presumably not occult problem of life itself!
“That which governs life,” Claude Bernard wrote, “is neither chemistry
nor physics, nor anything of the kind; but the ideal principle of the
life-process.” A strangely indefinite saying for a great scientist,
he being a Frenchman to boot; a saying that gropes vaguely after a
mystery, and shows that it is precisely the great world of scholarship
which never loses an inward feeling for the mystery; and that only
the rank and file run the danger of scientific darkness, unmindful
how very little complete, how much mingled with mystery--and riddles
perhaps never-to-be-solved--is all their exact knowledge of nature and
life and its functions. It is accepted as an established fact in the
world of occultism today that the effective and formative principle
at work in the psychological processes does in certain cases assume a
“teleplastic” character: in other words, it passes beyond the limits
of the organism and operates outside it, “ectoplastically.” That is,
it calls into temporary existence, out of the exteriorized, organic
basic substance (the appearance and form of which have already been
observed with some degree of exactitude), shapes, limbs, bodily organs,
particularly hands, which possess all the properties and functions of
normal, physiological, biologically living organs. These teleplastic
end-organs move apparently free in space, but so far as can be observed
have a close physiological and psychological relation with the medium,
in such a way that any impression received through the teleplasm has
its effect upon the medial organism, and vice versa. Here we see
supra-normal physiology vying with the normal to bear witness to the
unity of the organic substance. A fluid, in varying degrees of density,
leaves the body of the medium as an amorphous, unorganized mass;
takes form in various teleplastic organs, hands, feet, heads, and so
on; and after a brief existence in this form, during which, however,
it displays all the attributes of living substance, dissolves and is
reabsorbed into the medial organism. And this fluid, this substance,
this substratum of the various organic formations, is uniform,
undifferentiated; there is not such a thing as a bone-substance as
different from a muscular or visceral or nervous one; there is only the
one substance, the basis and substratum of organic life.
Probably all reasoned thinking and talking in this highly speculative
field of facts is today premature and can only seem to clarify without
doing so. But one thing is certain: we shall be thinking and talking
most inadequately about the phenomena of materialization, as about
the riddle of life in general, if we regard them from the physical
and material side alone, and not from the psychical as well. It was
Hegel who said that the idea, the spirit, is the ultimate source of
all phenomena; and perhaps supra-normal physiology is more apt than
normal to demonstrate his statement. Yes, it undertakes to place the
philosophic demonstration of the primacy of the idea, of the ideal
origin of all reality, alongside the biological demonstration of the
unity of all organic life.
Quite uninstructed, and on my own responsibility, I explained the
telekinetic phenomena as the medium’s magically objectivated dreams.
And the literature of the subject confirms my explanation; with an
awe-inspiring display of technical terms, it explains that the _idea_
of the phenomenon, present in the subconsciousness of the somnambulist,
mingled moreover with that of the other persons present, is by the aid
of psychophysical energy “ectoplastically” moved, by a biopsychical
projection, to a certain distance, and imprinted--that is to say,
“objectivated.” In other words, we call to aid an uninvestigated
_ideoplastic_ faculty possessed by the medial constitution.
Ideoplastic--a word, and a conception, of Platonic power and charm, not
without flattering unction to the artist’s ear, who will be ready from
now on to characterize, not only his own work, but universal reality as
ideoplastic phenomena. Yet a word, and a conception, of quite as turbid
depths as the word “delusion” itself, and, by virtue of its maddening
mixture of elements of the real and the dream, leading straight to the
morbid and the preposterous.
Let me give in closing one single but striking example. We are
repeatedly assured that the ideoplastic formations, for the time
during which they are present, possess all the characteristics of
actual life. When they have been in a good mood they have not only let
themselves be seen and touched, and their objective reality established
by photography and apparatus which registered their telekinetic
activities; but plaster casts have been made, hands of transcendental
origin having been persuaded to dip themselves into basins of warm
water with melted wax floating on top. In this way a mould has been
formed about the spirit member, and hardened by exposure to air. Out of
such a mould no human hand could get free without breaking the mould.
But the teleplastic organ frees itself by dematerialization, and the
experimenters pour plaster of Paris into the wax glove and thus obtain
a cast of the materialized organ, which should correspond to it in all
particulars. It is to be noted that the casts thus obtained show no
resemblance in shape or lines to the hands of the medium, or to those
of anyone else present. Now at one of Willy’s sittings the following
perfectly lunatic thing occurred (and not the only one of its kind).
The medium being under the most careful control, a shape like a hand
appeared, coming from above and behind, and showed itself above a piece
of grey clay on the little table. It had a forearm, and was lighted
by a rosy light, and it hovered about over the surface of the clay;
on which, after the sitting, six flat impressions were found, on the
previously smooth surface. But at the base of Willy’s little finger on
his left hand, and on the back of the fourth finger of the same hand,
_there were traces of clay_.
Now I ask of nature and spirit, I inquire of reason and of logic on her
throne: How, when, and from where came the clay on Willy’s fingers?
No, I will not go to Herr von Schrenck-Notzing’s again. It leads to
nothing, or at least to nothing good. I love that which I called
the moral upper world, I love the human fable, and clear and humane
thought. I abhor luxations of the brain, I abhor morasses of the
spirit. Up to now, indeed, I have seen but a few stray sparks from the
infernal fires--but that must suffice me. I should like of course to
hold, as others have held, a hand like that, a metaphysical delusion
made of flesh and blood, in mine. And perhaps there might appear to me,
as it has to others, Minna’s head, above the shoulder of the sleeping
Willy: the head of a charming girl, Slavic in type, with lively black
eyes. That, however uncanny, must be a wonderful experience.... After
all, I will have another try or so with Herr von Schrenck-Notzing;
two or three times, not more. That much could do me no harm; and I
know myself, I am a man of ephemeral passions; I shall take care that
it leads to nothing, and put the whole thing out of my mind for ever
after. No, I will not go two or three times, I will only go once, just
once more and then not again. I only want to see the handkerchief rise
up into the red light before my eyes. For the sight has got into my
blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my
neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with
the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come
to pass.
1923
Thomas Mann is one of the really great contemporary
men of letters. He, himself, however roundly
resents being labeled a “writer,” and insists
upon considering himself not as an “artist”
at all but only “a good bourgeois drifted by
chance into literature.” To Mann this is no mere
equivocation in terms; rather it represents the
very keynote of his philosophy as revealed in his
works, springing from a deeply held conviction
that the intellectual type is not the ideal
toward which evolution moves, but, instead, the
man-of-action. All of Mann’s writing indeed, from
the epoch-making “Buddenbrooks” of his youth to
“The Magic Mountain,” the masterpiece of his
maturity, constitutes the most elaborate rejection
in literature of the “intellectual” as an unhealthy
growth upon the main body of humanity; but while
this theme dominates Mann’s works, it is only the
scarlet thread in his design, the whole of which
comprises nothing less than the most profound
criticism of the modern world yet vouchsafed by any
novelist.
_This book was set on the linotype in Bodoni,
electrotyped, printed and bound by The Plimpton
Press, Norwood, Mass. The paper was made by S. D.
Warren Co., Boston_
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