Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  Tolstoy, therefore, is the most clear-seeing of all artists, and yet no seer; he is an incomparably able recorder of truth, while he lacks the power of creative fancy. (I reiterate to press my meaning home.) In his task of fashioning an amazingly comprehensive and multiform picture of the world, he has no assistant but the five senses; alert, subtle, swift, accurate, and yet bodily, mechanical, earthly. Not through the nerves, like Dostoevsky, not through visions, like Hölderlin and Shelley, does Tolstoy secure his supremely delicate perceptions. The coordinated activities of his senses are enough. One may conceive of them sallying forth like bees, returning again and again with their load of tinted dust, passionate seekers of the particulate elements of the real, for elaboration into the golden honey of the work of art. Or, to vary the image, this unwinged artist is like a chemist in his laboratory, patiently distilling ethereal oils from sweet-scented blossoms. The simplicity of Tolstoy’s writings is always the outcome of overwhelming myriads of detail observations. If Tolstoy is to know a man’s thoughts and feelings, he must first of all have studied every jot of his subject’s physical being. He begins like a doctor, with an inventory of the patient’s bodily peculiarities. Not until this preliminary investigation is finished does he go on to the epic process of distillation he applies to the universe of his novels. “You cannot conceive,” he writes to a friend, “how arduous is the preparatory labor of plowing the soil in which I purpose to sow the seed. It is terribly hard to consider and reconsider beforehand everything that may happen to all the characters in the work I have planned. It is very difficult to reflect upon the thousand possible combinations of so many actions, and to choose no more than one out of a million possibilities.” Since this process of assembling details and condensing them into a unity (a process which is mechanical rather than imaginative) has to be repeated in the case of each one of the characters, a simple calculation will show that myriads upon myriads of grains must be patiently ground to powder, and the resulting atoms patiently recombined, before the desired form can emerge.

  Thus Tolstoy examines all the bodily peculiarities of his dramatis personae with cold accuracy, as with a magnifying glass. After the Holbein manner, line upon line, a mouth is shaped, upper lip and lower lip being separately described with their individual anomalies. Every twitch of the corners associated with particular moods is precisely noted; and the wrinkles or folds that show themselves to express amusement or anger are sedulously described. Then the author slowly paints in the hue of the lips, explores their fullness or their firmness with an investigatory finger, traces the moustache that overhangs them. These details give us the form of the lips, their fleshly characteristics. Then comes a description of their functioning, as influenced by and influencing the voice and the speech — particular attributes of this particular mouth. Nose, cheeks, chin, and hair are described with the same, almost alarming, anatomical accuracy, detail after detail being carved with the utmost precision. Then, in the artist’s laboratory, the various acoustic, phonetic, optical, and motor observations are weighed and measured and mutually adapted; for gesture must correspond mathematically with glance, glance with smile, and smile with verbal emphasis, if the figure as a whole is to exhibit harmonious unity. From this mass of observations, the author proceeds to extract the square root or the cube root. He sifts his materials finely, so that only essentials remain, while inessentials are scrapped. Contrasted, therefore, with the abundance of preliminary details, we have a thrifty use of the derivative attributes — but these few recur again and again throughout the book, so that, after a time, as each figure reappears upon the stage, the appropriate characteristics rise spontaneously in the reader’s mind thanks to an associative process. How skilled a craftsman is Tolstoy! He, who seems to describe haphazard, and without set purpose, is, in truth, a past master of his art. A whole book would be needed to trace the mechanism of this method in its minutiae, and to show that the apparent artlessness of Tolstoy’s writing is the outcome of an art which creates the persons of his drama by the condensation of a perplexing multitude of observations into a unity.

  Not until all the necessary sensual elements have been provided, not until the bodily machine has been completed with geometrical accuracy, does the Golem, the laboratory-made human being, begin to speak, to breathe, to live. In Tolstoy’s works, the soul, Psyche, the divine imago, is always prisoned in a thousand-meshed net of observations, enwrapped in and held fast by a web of skin and muscles and nerves. In those of Dostoevsky, the clairvoyant, Tolstoy’s great counterpart, individuation begins at the antipode, begins with the soul. For Dostoevsky, soul is primary, and spontaneously weaves its own destiny; the body is but a loose and light integument, a thin pupa-case through which shines a fiery core. In happy moments, this fiery core can consume its wrappings, can free itself, can soar up into the ether of the feelings, into pure ecstasy. But for Tolstoy, the perspicacious, the artist who neither sees visions nor dreams dreams, the soul has no wings, nor even the power to draw free breath. For him, it is always coffined within the body, subject to the inexorable law of gravitation. That is why even the most aspiring of his creatures can never wing their way upwards to God, can never spread pinions that would enable them to outsoar this terrestrial sphere. When they would like to climb towards holiness and purification, they must do so laboriously, step by step, carrying the burden of the flesh. Psyche cannot fly back straightway into the Platonic realm, but must remain on earth while undergoing transformations, subject to the restrictions of gravity and to the universal heritage of original sin. In large measure, the tragic gloom of Tolstoy’s work would seem to be dependent upon this primacy which he allots to the bodily over the spiritual; for again and again, when we read this wingless and humorless writer, we are painfully reminded that we live on earth and are doomed to die; that we must ever go afoot; that we cannot shake off the bonds of the corporeal; that in the midst of life we are in death, are face to face with Nothing, are slaves to reality, are wanderers in a maze which has no outlet. “I wish you more spiritual freedom,” wrote Turgenev to Tolstoy, with a brilliant flash of insight. We wish the same thing for the characters in Tolstoy’s books: more spiritual freedom; the power to soar on spiritual pinions; ability to escape from the circumstantial and the bodily, to become cheerful, light-hearted, carefree; or at least we wish for them a capacity to dream of a purer and serener world.

  His art is autumnal. All its outlines rise sharply above the level horizon of the Russian steppe, and the air is heavy with the acrid smell of withering and rotting vegetation. The skies are uniformly grey; no cloud shadows drift, like dream smiles, across the somber landscape; the existence of the sun behind the dull canopy of heaven has been forgotten. Hence, the author’s cold and clear illumination brings no warmth to the heart and differs greatly from the cheerful radiance of spring, which never fails to arouse a passionate expectation of blossoming in woods and meadows and in the hearts of men. When we read Tolstoy, we feel that winter will soon be here; that nature is dying; that all men are grass, and that our own particular embodiment of the universal human life must before long perish. We are shown a world without dreams, without illusions, without lies; a terribly empty world; a world without God — for Tolstoy discovers God as an afterthought, because life needs God; just as Kant puts God into the cosmos as an afterthought, for reasons of State. It is a world in which the only light is relentless truth. Perhaps, at first sight, Dostoevsky’s spiritual world may seem even gloomier, more somber, and more tragic than Tolstoy’s, with its equable, cold clarity; but Dostoevsky often pierces the gloom with flashes of intoxicating rapture, during which, for fleeting instants, we are transported to visionary heavens. Tolstoy’s art, on the other hand, knows nothing of the joy of intoxication; it is always as sober, translucent, and uninebriating as water. So limpid is it that we can see into its uttermost depths; yet such glimpses do not take us quite out of ourselves or fill our minds with ecstasy. One who, like Tolstoy, can never dream, can never forget the realities
of the present to wanton in visions of a beauty that is not of this world, one to whom naked truth is all important, may have an unrivalled perception of nature’s comprehensive grip, of the inescapable ties of our own warm and living bodies, of the universal destiny of mortal men; but he will never have an inkling of the freedom which enables the soul to escape from the thraldom of its own gloom. These books make readers serious and reflective, as does science with its dry light, its patient boring into reality; they do not confer the boon of happiness.

  What did the man himself, this man of profound insight, think of his own unmerciful and disillusioning observation, of his art that lacked the golden kindliness of the dream, the seductive impetus of cheerfulness, the graciousness of music? At bottom, he never loved it, for it was unable to inspire either in himself or in others a happy and affirmative acceptance of the life it portrayed. How hopeless is the aspect assumed by existence under these remorseless eyes, which look upon the soul as no more than a palpitating little fragment of bodily mechanism amid the vast spaces of death; upon history as a meaningless chaos of haphazard incidents; upon human beings as skeletons which for a brief space inhabit tenements of warm flesh; and upon the inexplicable and disorderly activities of these creatures as having no more significance than the running of water or the withering of a leaf. Never for a moment does music sound over this dull succession of ordinary events; never is the burden of this nihilism discarded; never a smile to throw a fugitive charm across these unmeaning activities; always a ruthless, a cruelly sober portrayal of gloom, an uninterrupted analysis of a madhouse drama, the impressions of an embittered observer who will not allow himself to be deluded by any false consolers.

  Can we be surprised that, after thirty years of such macabre portraiture, Tolstoy should suddenly have been seized with the desire to do something else than make his fellows cruelly aware of the inexorability of their earthly lot; should have longed for a method of self-expression which would not only disburden his own shoulders, but would make life easier for others; should have yearned for an art “which would awaken higher and better feelings”? Was it not natural that he should have wished to touch the silver strings of the lute of hope, to develop an art that would help to deliver people from the weight of earthly things? Vain the desire, vain the attempt! Tolstoy, pitilessly keen of vision, with eyes focused to see things as they were, could not see them otherwise; could not but see life as overshadowed by death, as a dark and issueless maze. His art, which did not know how to lie and did not wish to lie, could not bring solace. Presumably that was why in old age, since he could not look upon life or describe it as anything other than a tragedy, Tolstoy became inspired with the hope that life itself could be changed; that men and women could be made better, could be animated by a moral ideal; that a kingdom of heaven could be built in the soul, as a retreat from the gloomy realm of the mechanical and the corporeal. Thus, in his second phase, Tolstoy, as artist, is no longer satisfied with describing life; he tries to give his art an ethical meaning, to subordinate it to a moral task, to devote it to the service of purifying and uplifting the soul. Henceforward his novels and his tales are not merely to image life but to mold it; they are to present prototypes of the right way of acting. A new and desirable type of humanity is to be sharply distinguished from the type of those who have not yet become aware of the truth, and the former is thus to become a model for the latter, to be “educative.” The writings are to be something more than entertaining and descriptive; they are to be “stimulating”; they are to warn the reader by bad example, and to encourage him by good example. The new Tolstoy, not content to be life’s recorder, has become its judge.

  This doctrinaire trend is already manifest in Anna Karenina. On the plane of the unconscious there is still more evident an intention to contrast the respective destinies of the moral and the immoral. Vronsky and Anna, unbelievers, living for the pleasures of the senses, egoists enslaved by their own passions, are “punished,” are cast into the purgatorial fires of spiritual unrest. Kitty and Levin, on the other hand, rise to heights of purification. For the first time the author, hitherto incorruptible, takes a side for or against the creatures of his own fancy. He has discovered a moral standard. Henceforward the tendency to underline the articles of his creed, to draw attention to them by the use of notes of exclamation and by quotation marks, this doctrinaire purpose (subsidiary, to begin with), inclines more and more to get the upper hand. At last, in The Kreutzer Sonata and in Resurrection, the nudity of the sermon is but thinly veiled behind imaginative trappings; and the artist has become subservient to the preacher. By degrees, Tolstoy has ceased to look upon art as an end in itself. Now he can find pleasure in a “pretty lie” only in so far as it serves “truth”: and when he talks of truth, he no longer means what he used to mean, a faithful presentation of the actual, a sincere portrayal of a sensual-psychical reality; he means that which, in the days of crisis, has revealed itself to him as higher, as spiritual, as religious truth. Henceforward, when he calls books “good,” he is not referring to the most perfectly finished, carefully thought out, and broadly conceived pictures of men and things that have been limned by writers of genius; he means those which (no matter whether good or bad, artistically speaking) tend to promote the “good cause,” those which will help to make men more patient, gentler, more Christian, more humane, kindlier, and more social. That is why he regards the worthy but dull Bertold Auerbach as more important than the “mischievous” Shakespeare. More and more the measuring rod tends to pass from the hands of Tolstoy the artist into those of Tolstoy the moralist, for whom art is merely an instrument for building up a new religiosity, and not something endowed with a sublime mission of its own.

  Art, impatient and jealous like other gods, takes vengeance on apostates. When asked to serve a purpose, when expected to endure subordination to some other deity proclaimed her superior, she impetuously refuses to help even those who have been her favorite disciples. Whenever Tolstoy, abandoning the purposelessness of art, becomes doctrinaire, his characters pale, and are no longer convincing. They wither in the cold, grey light of reason. The reader stumbles over logical prolixities, and wearily gropes his way to the exit. Though the second Tolstoy was wont to speak contemptuously of the writings of the first; to say, under stress of his recently won moral fanaticism, that Childhood and War and Peace were “bad, futile, useless books,” because they provided no more than aesthetic enjoyment, which was (hearken, Apollo!) “enjoyment of a lower kind” — in actual fact, these are his masterpieces, compared with which the preachments of his old age are failures. The more Tolstoy surrenders to the “despotism of morality,” the more he departs from the sensuous veracity which is the primal element of his genius to lose himself in a dialectical Cuckoo-Cloudland, the more does he deteriorate as an artist. Like Antaeus, he derives his strength from contact with Mother Earth. Far on into old age, when, with those diamond-keen eyes of his, he is looking into the sensual world, he remains a writer of genius; but when he gets off the solid ground and soars into a metaphysical empyrean, his talents dwindle painfully. Deplorable in the extreme is it to see him making frantic efforts to wing his way through the realms of the spiritual, this artist foreordained to walk with heavy tread on the hard earth — to till it, to understand it, and to picture it more splendidly than any other writer of our days.

  How tragic a discord, perpetually renewed in all works of art and in all ages! A mood of conviction, and a determination to impart that conviction to others, which ought to beautify the work of art, usually frustrate it by belittling the artist. True art is egotistical; it “seeketh but itself to please,” and desires nothing in the world save its own perfection. The true artist must think only of his work, and must ignore mankind, for whom it is destined. Tolstoy, therefore, is supreme as artist when he is indifferent, dispassionate, unconcerned, incorruptible, neither confused nor led astray by sympathy; when, in this mood, he depicts the world disclosed to him by his senses. When he grows compass
ionate, when he wants his work to help people, to make them better, to guide them and to teach — then his art ceases to convince, and he himself is fated to become a more pitiful being than any of the creatures of his fancy.

  SELF-PORTRAITURE

  To know our life, means to know oneself.

  TO RUSSANOV, 1903

  Contemplating the world with pitiless severity, he is no less severe in his contemplation of himself. His nature is one of those which cannot tolerate ambiguity. There must be nothing hazy, nothing obscure, either without or within. Thus, being accustomed as artist to study with precision every detail in his environment, from the shape of a tree to the twitching movements of a frightened dog, he cannot endure that he himself should be a confused medley of uncertain ingredients. It was inevitable, therefore, that from youth upwards his impulse to investigate should be turned upon himself as well as upon the outer world. “I want to know myself through and through,” he writes in his diary when he is nineteen years old. Thenceforward until his death at the age of eighty-three, he is ever on the alert, critical and mistrustful, to study the morphology of his own soul. Ruthless towards himself as towards others, he traces the ramifications of every nerve of feeling, dissects every thought when it is still warm from the minting. Not content to feel acutely, he wishes to know himself acutely as well. Tolstoy, a fanatical devotee of truth, cannot fail to be an ardent autobiographer.

  But self-portraiture can never, as can depiction of the outer world, be finished once and for all, to attain the finality of objective works of art. The forms of others, imagined or observed, can be completed by the creator, in that he definitely incorporates them in his work. When the birth has taken place, the navel string is cut, and the creature enters upon an independent existence, extruded as the newborn infant is extruded from the maternal circulation. By the act of creation, the artist has freed himself from the creature. The ego, on the other hand, can never be cut adrift by the act of representation, for it is perennially mutable, and therefore cannot be contemplated once for all. That is why masters of the art of self-portraiture go on depicting themselves again and again throughout life. Dürer, Rembrandt, Titian — they paint their earliest pictures as they sit before the mirror; and they are still contemplating their own image when the brush drops from the failing hand. A self-portrait is quickly submerged by the flux of time’s waters, and these autospective artists want to record the metamorphoses in their physical being no less than the unchanging elements of their bodily form. In like manner Tolstoy, the arch-realist, can never finish the work of self-portraiture. Scarcely has he completed one portrait of himself, as Nekhlyudov or Bezukhov or Levin, than he finds the picture unrecognizable, and must start afresh to paint the new man he has become. The artist has grasped the shadow of the soul; the substance of the self has eluded him, has winged its way on new flights, in the endeavor to attain the unattainable — and once more Tolstoy, the indefatigable, sets out in pursuit. Thus it is that during sixty years of stupendous labor, he produces no work which does not contain a portrait of himself, nor one in which this portrait is adequate to his complexity. We must study them all, novels and tales and diaries and letters, if we are to get a veracious likeness. In the mass they give the most many-sided and most carefully elaborated, the most vigilant and continuous example of self-portraiture achieved by anyone in our own century.