CONCERNING TOLSTOY
423
of which he was told at the age of five by his brother Nicholas-that
it was buried by the road at the edge of a certain ravine and that on
it was inscribed the secret by means of which "all men would cease
suffering misfortunes, leave off quarreling and being angry, and be–
come continuously happy." The legend of the green twig was part
of a game played by the Tolstoy children, called the Ant-Brothers,
which consisted of crawling under chairs screened off by shawls and
cuddling together in the dark. Tolstoy asked to be buried on the very
spot at the edge of the ravine at Yasnaya Polyana which he loved
because of its association with the imaginary green twig and the ideal
of human brotherhood. And when he was an old man he wrote that
"the idea of ant-brothers loving by clinging to one another, though not
under two arm-chairs curtained by shawls but of all mankind under
the wide dome of heaven, has remained unaltered in me.
As
I then
believed that there existed a little green twig whereon was written the
message which would destroy all evil in men and give them universal
welfare, so I now believe that such truth exists and will be revealed to
men and will give them all it promises." It is clear that the change in
Tolstoy by which Turgenev was so appalled was entirely natural, was
presupposed by all the conditions of his development and of his crea–
tive consciousness. In the total Tolstoyan perspective the black trunk
of his old .age represents exactly the same thing as the green twig of
his childhood.
Even the crude heresies he expounded in
What is Art?
lose much
of their offensiveness in that perspective. In itself when examined
without reference to the author's compelling grasp of the central and
most fear£ul problems of human existepce, the argument of that book
strikes us as a
~illful
inflation of the idea of moral utility at the ex–
pense of the values of the imagination. But actually the fault of the
argument is not that it is wholly implausible-as a matter of fact,
it is of a long and reputable lineage in the history of culture-as that
it is advanced recklessly and with a logic at once narrow and exces–
sive; the Tolstoyan insight is here vitiated in the same way as the
insight into sexual relations is vitiated in
The Kreut zer Sonata.
Still,
both works, the onslaught on modern love and marriage as well as
the onslaught on the fetishism of art to which the modern sensibility
has succumbed, are significantly expressive of Tolstoy's spiritual crisis
-a crisis badly understood by many people, who take it as a pheno–
menon disruptive of his creative power despite the fact that, in the last
analysis, it is impossible to speak of two Tolstoys, the creative and
the noncreative, for there is no real discontinuity in his career. Though
