The light that shines in darkness; a drama

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Preface

TOLSTOY AS DRAMATIST

In almost every kind of literary work he touched, Tolstoy succeeded at once in reaching the foremost rank.

When he sent his first story, Childhood, anonymously to the poet Nekrasov, editor of The Contemporary (then the leading Petersburg magazine), the latter promptly accepted and published it; Dostoyevsky was so struck by it that he wrote from Siberia to inquire who its talented author was; Turgenev sang its praises, and Panaev was so delighted with it that his friends, it was said, had to avoid him on the Nevsky lest he should insist on reading them extracts from it.

When Tolstoy turned from stories to novels he achieved the same immediate and complete success. The appearance of the first instalment of War and Peace sufficed to place him abreast of the world's greatest writers of fiction.

Fourteen years later he turned to spiritual auto- 5 biography, and his Confession immediately took rank beside those of St. Augustine and Rousseau.

When he propounded his interpretation of Christ's teaching, his works produced a profound impression and, though they were prohibited in Russia, found a large circulation abroad besides a surreptitious one at home.

Next he took to writing short, simple stories for the people, and the very first of these, What Men Live By (v. Twenty-three Tales), circulated by hundreds of thousands of copies in Russia, was translated into ail civilised languages, and delighted people, old and young, in the five continents.

When he turned his attention to social problems, and wrote What Then Must We Do? the book aroused the deepest interest wherever it was read, and was promptly recognised as one of the most remarkable studies of poverty ever penned.

He took to essays, and at once produced a series which many readers have declared to be as interesting and stimulating as any that were ever written.

Interested in the philosophy of art, he wrote What is Art? His preparation for this attempt to put art on a new basis took him, it is true, fifteen years, and a majority of critics everywhere denounced the opinions he expressed; but, at any rate, there was no doubt about the general interest he aroused, and the longer the matter is discussed, the stronger grows the suspicion that on the main point of the discussion Tolstoy saw deeper than his critics, and that, great artist as he was, his philosophy of art as well as his practice of it was fundamentally sound.

Finally his philippics, such as his Reply to the Synod, which had excommunicated him (v. Essays and Letters), and his denunciation of the Courtsmartial in / Cannot be Silent! rang out with a sincerity, courage, and effectiveness unparalleled since Pascal's Provincial Letters, or the famous theses Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg.

Only as a dramatist did Tolstoy fail at his first attempt; and even in that direction success came so promptly that it is his success rather than his failure that surprises one.

As a seventeen-year-old student at Kazan University, he had taken part with much success in two plays given for some charity at Carnival time; and his taste for theatricals did not soon pass, for in later years, when writing of the time after his return from the defence of Sevastopol, and telling of the death of his brother Demetrius, he adds : " I really believe that what hurt me most was that his death prevented my taking part in some private theatricals then being got up at Court and to which I had been invited.'*

While living in Petersburg and Moscow as a young man, Tolstoy was enthusiastic in his admiration of one of the great Russian actors of those days; but he never lived much in cities, and probably no other greajt dramatist ever spent so little time in the theatre as he did. In that, as in many other lines of work, his quickness of perception, tenacity of memory and vividness of emotion enabled him to dispense with the long training men of less genius require.

In 1863, soon after his marriage, he wrote two plays which were never published. One, a farcical comedy called The Nihilist, was privately performed with much success. The other, also a comedy, called The Infected Family, he intended for public performance. With that end in view, Tolstoy took it to Moscow early in 1864. The theatrical season (which in Russia ends at the beginning of Lent) was then, however, too far advanced for any manager to stage the piece that winter; and, as it dealt with a topic of the day which lost some of its freshness by keeping, Tolstoy never afterwards offered it to any one.

That was the one and only rebuff he ever had to face in his literary career, if one excepts the amusing incident of his sending a short prose poem anonymously to a Moscow newspaper, and receiving it back declined with thanks, on the ground that its author was " not yet sufficiently expert in expression ! " For the next six years he seems not to have taken any interest in the drama; but in 1870 we find him writing to Fet: — ■■

" There is much, very much, I want to tell you about. I have been reading a lot of Shakespear, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol and Moliere, and about all of them there is much I want to say to you."

A few days later he again wrote to the same friend : —

" You want to read me a story of cavalry life . . . And I don't want to read you anything, because I am not writing anything; but I very much want to talk about Shakespear and Goethe, and the drama in general. This whole io PREFACE

winter I am occupied only with the drama; and it happens to me, as usually happens to people who, till they are forty, have not thought of a certain subject, or formed any conception of it; and then suddenly, with forty-year-old clearness, turn their attention to this new, untasted subject — it seems to them that they discern in it much that is new. All winter I have enjoyed myself lying down, drowsing, playing bezique, snow-shoeing, skating, and most of all lying in bed (ill) while characters from a drama or comedy have performed for me. And they perform very well. It is about that I want to talk to you. In that, as in everything, you are a classic and understand the essence of the matter very deeply. I should like also to read Sophocles and Euripides."

The mood passed, and for another fifteen years one hears no more about it: Tolstoy being absorbed first in the production of an ABC Book for school-children, then with Anna Karenina, then with his Confession and religious studies, as well as with field-work, hut-building, and bootmaking.

Early in 1886, noting the wretched character of the plays given in the booths at the .Carnival

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Shows on the Maidens' Field just outside Moscow, not far from his own house, and feeling how wrong it was that the dramatic food of the people should consist of the crudest melodramas, he was moved to turn into a play a small Temperance story he had written. This piece, called The First Distiller, is of no great importance in itself, but was the precursor of the splendid dramas he soon afterwards produced.

The following summer, while out ploughing, he hurts his leg, neglects it, and gets erysipelas, which almost leads to blood-poisoning. His life is in imminent danger, he has to undergo a painful operation, is laid up for weeks, and while ill writes most of The Power of Darkness, an immensely powerful play which serves as a touchstone for those who have the Tolstoy feeling in them.

From the poisoning of Peter, the husband, in the beginning, to the murder of the baby in the middle, and Nikita's arrest at the end, the piece is full of horrors which most people, who do not look at things from Tolstoy's point of view, find it wellnigh impossible to endure. To them the play appears to be one of unmitigated blackness. To Tolstoyans it is not so. The lies, the crimes, the horrors are there, as in real life; but in the play one sees more clearly than in common life the clue to the meaning of it all. When Nikita's conscience begins to be touched; when Mitritch, the old soldier, teaches him not to be afraid of men; and finally when Akim, the old father, rejoices that his son has confessed, the heavens open and the purpose of life — the preparing for what is yet to come by getting things straight here and now — is revealed; and the effect of the play, instead of being sordid or painful, becomes inspiring.

The play was founded on fact, though what happened in real life was even more gruesome, for in actual fact Nikita's prototype, when on the point of driving off to Akulina's wedding, suddenly seized a large wooden wedge and aimed a tremendous blow at her younger sister; and he did this not out of malice, but because he felt so sure that it is a misfortune to be alive in a world where things have gone so wrong as they have done in the world we live in. Fortunately his blow, which seemed certain to kill the girl, glanced aside, and merely stunned her without doing her any permanent injury.

The Power of Darkness was prohibited by the Dramatic Censor, and throughout the reign of Alexander III. its public performance in Russia was forbidden.

It was produced for the first time at the Theatre Libre in Paris, in February 1888. Among its most enthusiastic admirers was Zola, who was as anxious about it as he could have been had it been his own work. " Above all, do not strike out a single scene or a single word, and do not fear for its success," said he at one of the rehearsals ; and he was quite right. The piece had a tremendous success, and was played at one and the same time at three different Paris theatres, as well as at the Freie Buhnen in Berlin, where it had a similar triumph. After the accession of Nicholas II. it was acted in Russia, and took rank at once as one of the greatest masterpieces of Russian dramatic art, and as such holds a place in the repertory of the best Moscow and Petersburg theatres.

Many Englishmen who have seen it have been immensely impressed by it. Laurence Irving wrote me : " I suppose England is the only country in Europe where The Power of Darkness has not i 4 PREFACE

been acted. It ought to be done. It is a stupendous tragedy; the effect on the stage is unparalleled." Bernard Shaw, writing to Tolstoy, said, " I remember nothing in the whole range of drama that fascinated me more than the old soldier in your Power of Darkness. One of the things that struck me in that play was the feeling that the preaching of the old man, right as he was, could never be of any use — that it could only anger his son and rub the last grains of selfrespect out of him. But what the pious and good father could not dp, the old rascal of a soldier did as if he was the voice of God. To me that scene, where the two drunkards are wallowing in the straw and the older rascal lifts the younger one above his cowardice and his selfishness, has an intensity of effect that no merely romantic scene could possibly attain." Arthur Symons wrote : " More than any play I have ever seen, this astounding play of Tolstoy's seems to me to fulfil Aristotle's demand upon tragedy: ' Through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.' I had never read it; my impression was gained directly from seeing it on the stage. Well, though as I listened to it I felt the

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pity and fear to be almost insupportable, I left the theatre with a feeling of exultation, as I have left a concert room after hearing a piece of noble and tragic music. How out of such human discords such a divine harmony can be woven I do not know; that is the secret of Tolstoy's genius, as it is the secret of the musician's. Here, achieved in terms of naked horror, I found some of the things that Maeterlinck has aimed at and never quite rendered through an atmosphere and through forms of vague beauty. And I found also another kind of achievement, by the side of which Ibsen's cunning adjustments of reality seemed either trivial or unreal. Here, for once, human life is islanded on the stage, a pin-point of light in an immense darkness; and the sense of that surrounding darkness is conveyed to us as in no other play that I have ever seen, by an awful sincerity and by an unparalleled simplicity. Whether Tolstoy has learnt by instinct some stage-craft which playwrights have been toiling after in vain, or by what conscious and deliberate art he has supplemented instinct, I do not know. But, out of horror and humour, out of the dregs of human life and out of mere faith in those dregs, somehow, as a man of genius does once in an age, Tolstoy has in this play made for us the great modern play, the great play of the nineteenth century."

That Tolstoy should thus have begun successful play-writing at a time when he was supposed to have turned aside from art, and when he was nearly sixty years of age, was remarkable; but at any rate The Power of Darkness was a serious piece, obviously dealing with moral questions which stirred his soul profoundly at the time ; and, moreover, he wrote it for the People's Theatre, started to provide first-rate drama for the peasants. It came, therefore, as a yet greater surprise to many people when, three years later, he was persuaded by his daughters to write a comedy for them to perform at home, Yasnaya Polyana.

One knows pretty well how it happened. The taste for play-writing was strong upon him. After more than twelve years devoted to didactic work which gave his sense of humour little or no scope, it was in the nature of things that he should feel some reaction.

At first the play was to have been only a short two-act affair. He did not like to refuse his daughters' request, and thought that if they must act something, it was better that they should act a play voicing his contempt for the follies and extravagance of society and his consciousness of the peasants' needs. Once started on the work, however, it took hold of him and grew and grew, till it became a full-fledged four-act comedy with over thirty speaking characters in it, and with the didactic purpose overwhelmed by the fun, the bustle, and the stage-craft of it.

After many rehearsals this play, Fruits of Culture, was performed at Yasnaya Polyana on December 30, 1889, with immense success. Tanya, Tolstoy's eldest daughter, took the part of her namesake in the play very successfully, and Mary, his second daughter, played the cook most admirably.

Tolstoy himself heartily enjoyed the performance. One greatly respects his thirty-year struggle to live a simple life, consuming little and giving much; but one does not love him the less for the occasional lapses into whole-hearted gaiety which light up the record of his life, and show us how very human was this giant. Yasnaya Polyana, on New Year's eve 1889, crammed with guests all in the highest spirits; the large upstairs room full of spectators laughing till their sides ached at Tolstoy's comedy, is a scene those who would understand Tolstoy should by no means forget or despise. Yet, even then, the other side of his nature, which never let him rest, caused him to note in his Diary: " I am ashamed of all this expense in the midst of poverty."

The whole company threw themselves into the piece with enthusiasm, and acted really well. In particular, V. M. Lopatin, a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, extracted from the part of the Third Peasant so much more than its author had anticipated or even intended, that Tolstoy, in ecstasies, slapped his thighs and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks ; for he was always extremely susceptible to anything really good, whether in acting or in other forms of art.

I well remember meeting at Yasnaya Polyana, on two different occasions, the sculptor Ginzburg, who was an admirable mimic. He could keep a room full of people entranced while he enacted a Jew tailor stitching clothes, or a nurse tending or neglecting an imaginary baby. None of those present expressed warmer admiration of these performances than did Tolstoy himself, and when he went for a walk with us afterwards, he said to Ginzburg with great animation :

" Ah, if our theatre realists could only be got to understand that what is wanted is not to put real babies on the stage or show the real messes they make, but to convey, as you do, by voice and feature the real feeling that has to be expressed! "

No blunder made by Tolstoy's critics is more gratuitous or indefensible than the pretence that he was indifferent to the form of art, or demanded of it that it should always have a directly didactic intention.

Not without express purpose did he, in What is Art? write, " Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity " ; and he then goes on to say: " Thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."

" If men lacked this capacity of being infected by art, people would be more separated and hostile to one another, and more savage than wild beasts. Therefore, the activity of art is a most important one — as important as the activity of speech itself, and as generally diffused.'* And in a memorable passage he adds, " We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . , But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind — from cradle-song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity."

He insists again and again on the value and prevalence of art, and when speaking of those primitive Christians and others who have wished to repudiate art, he says, " Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied — one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist."

Tolstoy knew very well that a performance must be excellent in its form and method of expression in order to be a work of art. In the illustration he gives of the performance of music, for instance, he says that for musical execution to be artistic and to transmit feeling, many conditions are necessary, of which the three chief are the pitch, the time, and the strength of the sound, and he adds: " Musical execution is only then art, only then infects, when the sound is neither higher nor lower than it should be — that is, when exactly the infinitely small centre of the required note is taken; when that note is continued exactly as long as needed; and when the strength of the sound is neither more nor less than is required. The slightest deviation of pitch in either direction, the slightest increase or decrease in time, or the slightest strengthening or weakening of the sound beyond what is needed, destroys the perfection and, consequently, the infectiousness of the work. So that the feeling of infection by the art of music, which seems so simple and so easily obtained, is a thing we receive only when the performer finds those infinitely minute degrees which are necessary to perfection in music. It is the same in all arts: a wee bit lighter, a wee bit darker, a wee bit higher, lower, to the right or the left — in painting; a wee bit weaker or stronger in intonation, or a wee bit sooner or later — in dramatic art; a wee bit omitted, over-emphasised, or exaggerated — in poetry, and there is no contagion. It is only obtained when an artist finds those infinitely minute degrees of which a work of art consists, and only to the extent to which he finds them."

Confronted by words such as these, it is amazing that any one can pretend that Tolstoy was indifferent to quality in the forms of art; but not less amazing is the ^assertion that only what is directly moralising was considered by him fit subject-matter for art. On this point his words are decisive, when he includes among the subject-matter suitable for good art, " the simplest feelings of common life."

The truth is that, in spite of certain prepossessions which tend to confuse the matter, and in spite of his pugnacious controversial methods, which often led to recrimination rather than to elucidation, Tolstoy's greatness as an artist was increased by the fact that he thoroughly understood the aim and purpose of art; and he was able to speak with authority on the philosophy of art, just because he was one of the most intellectual and intelligent of the world's artists.

As mentioned in my Life of Tolstoy , the main theme in Fruits of Culture was drawn from Tolstoy's acquaintance with the Lvovs, a wealthy and aristocratic family, the head of which wished to convert Tolstoy to spiritualism. The latter sturdily maintained a sceptical attitude, arguing that since mankind has been at the pains to discriminate between matter (which can be investigated by the five senses) and spirit (which is an affair of the conscience, and cannot be investigated by the senses), we must not again confuse the two by attempting to find physical evidence of spiritual existence. If the phenomena we are investigating is cognisable by the senses, then, he argued, such phenomena are, ipso facto, not spiritual, but material. In this, as in certain other matters, Tolstoy, seeking clearness, painted in black and white, and shunned those delicate shades which often elude and perplex us — but without which, after all, it is not always possible to get a true picture.

Fruits of Culture found its way on to the public stage in Russia before The Power of Darkness, and both there and abroad the two plays have been almost equally successful. It is often treated as pure comedy, and the peasants presented as simply comic characters. This Tolstoy did not intend, and did not like. He meant the hardness of their lot and their urgent need of land to stand out in sharp contrast to the waste of wealth by the cultured crowd.

During the last thirty years of his life Tolstoy himself used, as is well known, to dress much like a peasant, though never in the beggar-pilgrim garb in which he is made to figure in a Life of him recently published in this country; and it happened that one winter's day, when Fruits of Culture was being rehearsed in Tula (the nearest town to Yasnaya Polyana), he went, by request, to the hall where it was being staged. Wearing his rough sheepskin overcoat, he attempted to enter, but was roughly shoved out by the doorkeeper, who told him it was no place for the likes of him !

The same year the play was presented at Tsarskoe Selo, by amateurs drawn from the highest circles of Court society, and was witnessed by a dozen Grand Dukes and Grand-Duchesses as well as by the Tsar himself, who warmly thanked the performers for the pleasure it had given him. So the whirligig of time brought it about that Tolstoy, who twenty-three years before had just missed his chance of acting at the Imperial Court, now had a play of his own performed there, while he himself was being mistaken for a peasant, and on that account treated with gross indignity.

We have Tolstoy's word for it that he would have written more plays had it not been for the censor. He once said, " I feel certain the censor would not pass my plays. You would not believe how, from the very commencement of my activity, that horrible censor question has tormented me! I wanted to write what I felt; but at the same time it occurred to me that what I wrote would not be permitted, and involuntarily I had to abandon the work. I abandoned, and went on abandoning, and meanwhile the years passed away."

He once expressed surprise that, in Fruits of Culture, the drunken man-cook's monologue on the ways of the rich folk was allowed to be performed.

Of the three plays left by Tolstoy for publication after his death, one is a short two-act Temperance play called in English The Cause of it All

(the Russian title is a colloquialism difficult to render, but " From it all evil flows " is as near as one can get to it) . It does not claim to be a piece of much importance, but if ever it is staged, it should act easily and well.

Another of these posthumous plays is The Man That Was Dead (The Live Corpse), a powerful piece, in which Tolstoy introduces one of those gipsy choirs which had such an influence on him (and still more on his brother Sergius) when he was a young man of twenty to twenty-three, before he went to the Caucasus and entered the army.

The position of the gipsy choirs in Russia is a peculiar one. Reputedly Egyptian in origin (" Pharaoh's Tribe," one of the characters in the play calls them), they live a life quite distinct from that of the Russians, yet not at all resembling that of the itinerant gipsies one meets travelling about with caravans in England. They possess a remarkable musical talent, having a kind of music both vocal and instrumental all their own. They perform at special restaurants in the suburbs of Moscow, and also give concerts in public halls and at private houses. It is no more unusual for Russian noblemen to marry gipsy girls than it is for English noblemen to marry Gaiety girls. The songs referred to in Scene 11 are all well-known gipsy songs, and if staged with a real gipsy choir to perform them, this should be one of the most striking scenes in the play.

Tolstoy himself held that gipsy music deserved to rank among the best kinds of music, on account of its genuine spontaneity, the depth of feeling in it, and the exquisite perfection with which it is rendered by the gipsies. His own daughters used to play and sing gipsy songs admirably.

The main plot of this play, like that of The Power of Darkness, was supplied to Tolstoy by his friend N. V. Davydov, a Judge and a Lecturer on criminal law at Moscow University, who frequently drew his attention to cases that occurred in the Law Courts, and which Davydov thought might provide suitable subjects for a story or a drama.

Curiously enough, after Tolstoy had written this play, he was visited first by the stepson of the " live corpse," and then by the " live corpse " himself. The latter had been convicted, had served his time, and had returned to Moscow. He had given up drink and was seeking means of subsistence, when he heard of the play Tolstoy was writing, and that it was founded on his own case. Tolstoy questioned him carefully, and as a result of the conversation rewrote the play in order to set the conduct of the corpse in a more favourable light than before. In this revised version Tolstoy makes him finally commit suicide, whereas in an earlier version the law took its course as it did in real life, and matters only settled down and adjusted themselves after his victims had served their sentences and justice had ceased to meddle.

Tolstoy also gave the " corpse " a letter to Davydov, who obtained for him some small post at the Law Courts, where he served till his death; no one but his benefactors and his own family knowing who he was. Some time after his death Davydov told me this about him.

Part of the attraction of the story for Tolstoy lay in the fact that the intervention of the law did no good to any one, but only harm to all concerned; for it was part and parcel of Tolstoy's non-resistant theory that Law Courts and the Administration of justice are purely noxious.

The Man That Was Dead has already been staged at the Artistic Theatre in Moscow, and it is to be hoped that we shall see it in London; but the last of Tolstoy's plays, The Light That Shines in Darkness, was left unfinished, and is hardly likely to be produced, unless by the Stage Society, or some similar organisation. In Russia it is prohibited on account of its allusions to the refusal of military service.