Part 4 (1/2)
Yet they could not choose but hear. Mr. Kipling, in agreement with an earlier prophet, once identified rebellion with the sin of witchcraft, and about Tolstoy there was certainly a witching power, a magic or demonic attraction, that gave the hearer no peace. Perhaps more even than from his imaginative strength, it arose from his whole-hearted sincerity, always looking reality straight in the face, always refusing compromise, never hesitating to follow where reason led. Compromise and temporise and choose the line of least resistance, as we habitually do, there still remains in most people a fibre that vibrates to that iron sincerity. And so it was that, from the first, Tolstoy brought with him a disturbing and incalculable magic--an upheaving force, like leaven stirring in the dough, or like a sword in unconditioned and unchartered peace.
Critics have divided his life into artistic and prophetic hemispheres; they have accused him of giving up for man what was meant for artistic circles. But the seas of both hemispheres are the same, and there was no division in Tolstoy's main purpose or outlook upon life from first to last. In his greatest imaginative works (and to me they appear the highest achievement that the human imagination has yet accomplished in prose)--in the struggles and perplexities and final solutions of Petroff, Nekhludoff, and Levin; in the miserable isolation of Ivan Ilyitch; in the resurrection of the prost.i.tute Maslova; and in the hardly endurable tragedy of Anna Karenin herself, there runs exactly the same deep undercurrent of thought and exactly the same solution of life's question as in the briefer and more definite statements of the essays and letters. The greatest men are generally all of a piece, and of no one is this more true than of Tolstoy. Take him where you please, it is strange if after a few lines you are not able to say, ”That is the finger of Tolstoy; there is the widely sympathetic and compa.s.sionate heart, so loving mankind that in all his works he has drawn hardly one human soul altogether detested or contemptible. But at the same time there is the man whose breath is sincerity, and to whom no compromise is possible, and no mediocrity golden.”
To the philosophers of the world his own solution may appear a simple issue, indeed, out of all his questioning, struggles, and rebellions. It was but a return to well-worn commandments. ”Do not be angry, do not l.u.s.t, do not swear obedience to external authority, do not resist evil, but love your enemies”--these commands have a familiar, an almost parochial, sound. Yet in obedience to such simple orders the chief of rebels found man's only happiness, and whether we call it obedience to the voice of the soul or the voice of G.o.d, he would not have minded much. ”He lives for his soul; he does not forget G.o.d,” said one peasant of another in Levin's hearing; and Tolstoy takes those quiet words as Levin's revelation in the way of peace. For him the soul, though finding its highest joy of art and pleasure only in n.o.ble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of G.o.d.
The only submission possible, and the only possible hope of peace, lay in obedience to the self thus isolated and bare. ”O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments!” cried the ancient poet, uttering the voice that speaks to the soul in loneliness; ”O that thou hadst hearkened unto my commandments! Then had thy peace been as a river.”
VIII
THE IRON CROWN
When we read of a man who, for many years, wore on his left arm an iron bracelet, with spikes on the inside which were pressed into the flesh, we feel as though we had taken a long journey from our happy land. When we read that the bracelet was made of steel wire, with the points specially sharpened, and the whole so clamped on to the arm that it could never come off, but had to be cut away after death, we might suppose that we had reached the world where Yogi and Sanyasi wander in the saffron robe, or sit besmeared with ashes, contemplating the eternal verities, unmoved by outward things. Like skeletons of death they sit; thorns tear their skin, their nails pierce into their hands, day and night one arm is held uplifted, iron grows embedded in their flesh, like a railing in a tree trunk, they hang in ecstasy from hooks, they count their thousand miles of pilgrimage by the double yard-measure of head to heel, moving like a geometer caterpillar across the burning dust. To overcome the body so that the soul may win her freedom, to mortify--to murder the flesh so that the spirit may reach its perfect life, to torture sense so that the mind may dwell in peace, to obliterate the limits of s.p.a.ce, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed--that is the purport of their existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abas.e.m.e.nt that the body can endure.
Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable mult.i.tudes swarming around the shrines on India's coral strand, we think all this sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges.
Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and worldly circ.u.mstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of his country, a voice in the destinies of the world--so we see him moving in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in his a.s.sured position, almost superhuman in success. And as he moves, he presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.
”Remember!” We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We listen to the slave whispering in the ear while the triumph blares.
”Remember!” he whispers. ”Remember thou art man. Thou shalt go! Thou shalt go! Thy triumph shall vanish as a cloud. Time's chariot hurries behind thee. It comes quicker than thine own!” So from the iron bracelet a voice tells of the transitory vision. All shall go; the jewelled altars and the dim roofs fragrant with incense; the palaces, the towers, and domed cathedrals; the refined clothing, the select surroundings, the courteous receptions of the great; the comfortable health, the n.o.ble presence, the satisfactory estimation of the world--all shall go. They shall fade away; they shall be removed as a vesture, and like a garment they shall be rolled up. Press the spikes into thy mouldering flesh.
Remember! Even while it lives, it is corrupting, and the end keeps hurrying behind. Remember! Remember thou art man.
But below that familiar voice which warns the transient generations of their mortality, we may find in those sharpened spikes a more profound and n.o.bler intention. ”Remember thou art man,” they say; but it is not against overweening pride that they warn, nor do they remind only of death's wings. ”Remember thou art man,” they say, ”and as man thou art but a little lower than the angels, being crowned with glory and honour.
This putrefying flesh into which we eat our way--this carrion cart of your paltry pains and foolish pleasures--is but the rotten relic of an animal relations.h.i.+p. Remember thou art man. Thou art the paragon of animals, the slowly elaborated link between beast and G.o.d, united by this flesh with tom-cats, swine, and hares, but united by the spirit with those eternal things that move fresh and strong as the ancient heavens in their courses, and know not fear. What pain of spikes and sharpened points, what torment that this body can endure from cold or hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in thy soul? Subdue that b.e.s.t.i.a.l and voracious body, ever seeking to extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou art G.o.d.”
”Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” We have grown so accustomed to the cry that we hardly notice it, and yet that the cry should ever have been raised--that it should have arisen in all ages and in widely separated parts of the world--is the most remarkable thing in history. Pleasure is so agreeable, and none too common; or, if one wanted pain for salt, are there not pains enough in life's common round? Does it not take us all our time to mitigate the cold, the heat, and hunger; to escape the beasts and rocks and thunderbolts that bite and break and blast us; to cure the diseases that rack and burn and twist our poor bodies into hoops? Why should we seek to add pain to pain, and raise a wretched life to the temperature of a torture-room? It is the most extraordinary thing, at variance alike with the laws of reason and moderation. Certainly, there is a kind of self-denial--a carefulness in the selection of pleasure--which all the wise would practise. To exercise restraint, to play the aristocrat in fastidious choice, to guard against satiety, and allow no form of grossness to enter the walled garden or to drink at the fountain sealed--those are to the wise the necessary conditions of calm and radiant pleasure, and in outward behaviour the Epicurean and the Stoic are hardly to be distinguished. For the Epicurean knows well that asceticism stands before the porch of happiness, and the smallest touch of excess brings pleasure tumbling down.
But mankind seems not to trouble itself about this delicate adjustment, this cautious selection of the more precious joy. In matters of the soul, man shows himself unreasonable and immoderate. He forgets the laws of health and chastened happiness. The salvation of his spirit possesses him with a kind of frenzy, making him indifferent to loss of pleasure, or to actual pain and bodily distress. He will seek out pain as a lover, and use her as a secret accomplice in his conspiracy against the body's domination. Under the stress of spiritual pa.s.sion he becomes an incalculable force, carried we know not where by his determination to preserve his soul, to keep alight just that little spark of fire, to save that little breath of life from stifling under the ma.s.s of superinc.u.mbent fat. We may call him crazy, inhuman, a fanatic, a devil-wors.h.i.+pper; he does not mind what we call him. His eyes are full of a vision before which the mult.i.tude of human possessions fade. He is engaged in a contest wherein his soul must either overcome or perish everlastingly; and we may suppose that, even if the soul were not immortal, it would still be worth the saving.
It is true that in this happy country examples of ascetic frenzy are comparatively rare. There is little fear of overdoing the mortification of the flesh. We practise a self-denial that takes the form of training for sport, but, like the spectators at a football match, we do our asceticism chiefly by proxy, and are fairly satisfied if the clergy do not drink or give other cause for scandal. It is very seldom that Englishmen have been affected by spiritual pa.s.sion of any kind, and that is why our country, of all the eastern hemisphere, has been least productive of saints. But still, in the midst of our discreet comfort and sanity of moderation, that spiky bracelet of steel, eating into the flesh of the courtly and sumptuous Archbishop, may help to remind us that, whether in war, or art, or life, it is only by the pa.s.sionate refusal of comfort and moderation that the high places of the spirit are to be reached. ”Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground!” is the song of all pioneers, and if man is to be but a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honour, the crown will be made of iron or, perhaps, of thorns.
IX
”THE IMPERIAL RACE”
”The public are particularly requested not to tease the Cannibals.” So ran one of the many flaming notices outside the show. Other notices proclaimed the unequalled opportunity of beholding ”The Dahomey Warriors of Savage South Africa; a Rare and Peculiar Race of People; all there is Left of them”--as, indeed, it might well be. Another called on the public ”not to fail to see the Coloured Beauties of the Voluptuous Harem,” no doubt also the product of Savage South Africa. But of all the gilded placards the most alluring, to my mind, was the request not to tease the Cannibals. It suggested so appalling a result.
I do not know who the Cannibals were. Those I saw appeared to be half-caste Jamaicans, but there may have been something more savage inside, and certainly a Dahomey warrior from South Africa would have to be ferocious indeed if his fierceness was to equal his rarity. But the particular race did not matter. The really interesting thing was that the English crowd was a.s.sumed to be as far superior to the African savage as to a wild beast in a menagerie. The proportion was the same.
The English crowd was expected to extend to the barbarians the same inquisitive patronage as to jackals and hyenas in a cage, when in front of the cages it is written, ”Do not irritate these animals. They bite.”
The facile a.s.sumption of superiority recalled a paradoxical remark that Huxley made about thirty years ago, when that apostle of evolution suddenly scandalised progressive Liberalism by a.s.serting that a Zulu, if not a more advanced type than a British working man, was at all events happier. ”I should rather be a Zulu than a British workman,” said Huxley in his trenchant way, and the believers in industrialism were not pleased. By the continual practice of war, and by generations of infanticide, under which only the strongest babies survived, the Zulus had certainly at that time raised themselves to high physical excellence, traces of which still remain in spite of the degeneracy that follows foreign subjection. I have known many African tribes between Dahomey and Zululand too well to idealise them into ”the n.o.ble savage.”
I know how rapidly they are losing both their bodily health and their native virtues under the deadly contact of European drink, clothing, disease, and exploitation. Yet, on looking round upon the London crowds that were particularly requested not to tease the cannibals, my first thought was that Huxley's paradox remained true.
The crowds that swarmed the Heath were not lovely things to look at.
Newspapers estimated that nearly half a million human beings were collected on the patch of sand that Macaulay's imagination transfigured into ”Hampstead's swarthy moor.” But even if we followed the safe rule and divided the estimated number by half, a quarter of a million was quite enough. ”Like bugs--the more, the worse,” Emerson said of city crowds, and certainly the most enthusiastic social legislator could hardly wish to make two such men or women stand where one stood before.
Scarlet and yellow booths, gilded roundabouts, sword-swallowers in purple fles.h.i.+ngs, Amazons in green plush and spangles were gay enough.
Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in ma.s.s the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even ”ostridges” and ”pearlies,” that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing of the East and Africa, could so colourless a crowd be seen--a ma.s.s of people so devoid of character in costume, or of tradition and pride in ornament.