The Chief Of Rebels

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Title:     The Chief Of Rebels
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

"It is time that I ceased to fill the world," said the dying Victor Hugo, and we recognise the truth of the saying, though with a smile. For each generation must find its own way, nor would it be a consolation to have even the greatest of ancient prophets living still. But yet there breathes from the living a more intimate influence, for which an immortality of fame cannot compensate. When men like Tolstoy die, the world is colder as well as more empty. They have passed outside the common dangers and affections of man's warm-blooded circle, lighted by the sun and moon. Their spirit may go marching on; it may become immortal and shine with an increasing radiance, perpetual as the sweet influences of the Pleiades. But their place in the heavens is fixed. We can no longer watch how they will meet the glorious or inglorious uncertainties of the daily conflict. We can no longer make appeal for their succour against the new positions and new encroachments of the eternal adversary. The sudden splendour of action is no longer theirs, and if we would know the loss implied in that difference, let us imagine that Tolstoy had died before the summer of 1908, when he uttered his overwhelming protest against the political massacres ordained by Russia. In place of that protest, in place of the poignant indignation which appealed to Stolypin's hangmen to fix their well-soaped noose around his own old neck, since, if any were guilty, it was he--in place of the shame and wrath that cried, "I cannot be silent!" we should have had nothing but our own memory and regret, murmuring to ourselves, "If only Tolstoy had been living now! But perhaps, for his sake, it is better he is not."

And now that he is dead, and the world is chilled by the loss of its greatest and most fiery personality, the adversary may breathe more freely. As Tolstoy was crossing a city square--I suppose the "Red Square" in Moscow--on the day when the Holy Synod of Russia excommunicated him from the Church, he heard someone say, "Look! There goes the devil in human form!" And for the next few weeks he continued to receive letters clotted with anathemas, damnations, threats, and filthy abuse. It was no wonder. To all thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, to all priests of established religions, to the officials of every kind of government, to the Ministers, whether of parliaments or despots, to all naval and military officers, to all lawyers, judges, jurymen, policemen, gaolers, and executioners, to all tax-collectors, speculators, and financiers, Tolstoy was, indeed, the devil in human form. To them he was the gainsayer, the destroyer, the most shattering of existent forces. And, in themselves, how large and powerful a section of every modern State they are! They may almost be called the Church and State incarnate, and they seldom hesitate to call themselves so. But, against all their authorities, formulae, and traditions, Tolstoy stood in perpetual rebellion. To him their parchments and wigs, their cells and rods and hang-ropes, their mitres, chasubles, vestments, incense, chantings, services, bells, and books counted as so much trumpery. For him external law had no authority. If it conflicted with the law of the soul, it was the soul's right and duty to disregard or break it. Speaking of the law which ordained the flogging of peasants for taxes, he wrote: "There is but one thing to say--that no such law can exist; that no ukase, or insignia, or seals, or Imperial commands can make a law out of a crime." Similarly, the doctrines of the Church, her traditions, sacraments, rituals, and miracles--all that appeared to him to conflict with human intelligence and the law of his soul--he disregarded or denied. "I deny them all," he wrote in his answer to the Holy Synod's excommunication (1901); "I consider all the sacraments to be coarse, degrading sorcery, incompatible with the idea of God or with the Christian teaching." And, as the briefest statement of the law of his soul, he added:

"I believe in this: I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all. I believe that he is in me, and I in him. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the greatest blasphemy. I believe that man's true welfare lies in fulfilling God's will, and his will is that men should love one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them--of which it is said in the Gospels that this is the law and the prophets."

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe. To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit. But Tolstoy's rebellion did not stop at Church and State. He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars. Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties--what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names? In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution. He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any. When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul. "It seems to me," he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

"It seems to me now specially important to do what is right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission from Government, but consciously avoiding participation in it.... What can a Government do with a man who will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations, deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he thinks and feels?... It is only necessary for all these good, enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings. Public opinion--the only power which subdues Governments--would become evident, demanding freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, justice, and humanity."

From a distance, the bustling politicians and reformers of happier lands might regard this quietism or wise passiveness as a mere counsel of despair, suitable enough as a shelter in the storm of Russia's tyranny, but having little significance for Western men of affairs. Yet even so they had not silenced the voice of this persistent rebel; for he rose in equal rebellion against the ideals, methods, and standards of European cities. Wealth, commerce, industrial development, inventions, luxuries, and all the complexity of civilisation were of no more account to him than the toys of kings and the tag-rag of the churches. Other rebels had preached the gospel of pleasure to the poor, and had themselves acted on their precepts. Other reformers, even religious reformers, had extolled the delights of women, wine, and song. But here was a man despising these as the things after which the Gentiles seek. Love intrigues, banquets, wealthy establishments, operas, theatres, poetry, and fashionable novels--what had they to do with the kingdom of God that is within? He touched nothing from which he did not strip the adornment. He left life bare and stern as the starry firmament, and he felt awe at nothing, not even at the starry firmament, but only at the sense of right and wrong in man. He did not summon the poor to rise against "the idle rich," but he summoned the idle rich, the well-to-do, the gentry of independent means, the comfortable annuitants, the sportsmen, the writers and dramatists of pleasure, the artists of triviality, the pretty rhymers, and the people who are too busy for thought, to rise against themselves. It was a much harder summons to obey, and generally they answered with a shrug and a mutter of "madness," "mere asceticism," or "a fanatic's intolerance."

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 prostitute 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 compassionate 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 lust, 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 God, he would not have minded much. "He lives for his soul; he does not forget God," 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 noble communion with other souls, stood always lonely and isolated, bare to the presence of God. 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."

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: The Chief Of Rebels

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