1861
Tolstoy's curious tendency to underrate the influence of the Liberal reformers of that time, may be illustrated by an incident that occurred at a dinner in Toúla. The local elections had taken place, and a public banquet was given in honour of those Arbiters of the Peace who were visiting the town. Tolstoy was at this dinner, and when the toast to the health of Alexander II, the 'Tsar-Liberator,' was proposed, Tolstoy remarked to his neighbour: 'I drink this toast with particular pleasure. No others are needed, for in reality we owe the Emancipation to the Emperor alone.'
A yet more curious instance of the same tendency occurs in an article on Progress, and the Definition of Education, which he published a year later, and in which, arguing that printing has been of little use to the people, he says that:
Even taking as an example the abolition of serfdom, I do not see that printing helped the solution of the problem in a progressive sense. Had the Government not said its decisive word in that affair, the press would, beyond a doubt, have explained matters in quite a different way to what it did. We saw that most of the periodicals would have demanded the emancipation of the peasants without any land, and would have produced arguments apparently just as reasonable, witty and sarcastic [as they actually produced in favour of the more Liberal solution ultimately adopted]....
If, however, Tolstoy did not stand in the ranks of the Reformers, he was much less of a partisan of his own class than many of his fellow-nobles desired; and we find the Marshal of the Nobility of Toúla writing to Valoúef, Minister of Home Affairs, complaining of Tolstoy's appointment as Arbiter of the Peace on the ground that he was disliked by the neighbouring landowners. In consequence of this complaint Valoúef made inquiries, and received a 'confidential' reply from the Governor of the Province, stating that:
Knowing Count Tolstoy personally, as an educated man warmly sympathising with the matter in hand, and in view of a wish expressed to me by some of the proprietors of the district that he should be appointed Arbiter, I cannot replace him by some one I do not know.
Tolstoy tried his best to act fairly between peasants and landowners; but from the start his unsuitability for duties involving methodical care was obvious.
The very first 'charter,' regulating the relations between a landlord and his newly-liberated peasants, that he sent up to the Government Board for Peasant Affairs, was signed as follows: 'At the request of such-and-such peasants, because of their illiteracy, the house-serf so-and-so has signed this charter for them.' Not a single name did the charter contain! As Tolstoy had dictated the words, so his servant had written them down, and the charter had been sealed and sent off without being read over.
He could at times be wonderfully patient in dealing with the peasants, though they were exasperatingly pertinacious in demanding more than it was possible to grant. An eye-witness tells how Tolstoy visited a neighbouring estate on which differences had arisen between the peasants and their former master, as to the land which should be allotted to them. Tolstoy received a deputation, consisting of three of the leading peasants of the village, and asked them:
'Well, lads, what do you want?'
They explained what land they wished to have, and Tolstoy replied, 'I am very sorry I can't do what you wish. Were I to do so I should cause your landlord a great loss'; and he proceeded to explain to them how the matter stood.
'But you'll manage it for us somehow, bátushka' [literally, 'little-father'], said the peasants.
'No, I can't do anything of the kind,' repeated Tolstoy.
The peasants glanced at one another, scratched their heads, and reiterated their 'But somehow, bátushka!' and one of them added, 'If only you want to, bátushka, you'll know how to find a way to do it!' at which the other peasants nodded their heads approvingly.
Tolstoy crossed himself, as orthodox Russians are wont to do, and said: 'As God is holy, I swear that I can be of no use at all to you.' But still the peasants repeated: 'You'll take pity on us, and do it somehow, bátushka!' Tolstoy at last turned vehemently to the steward, who was present, and said: 'One can sooner, like Amphion, move the hills and woods, than convince peasants of anything!'
The whole conversation, says the steward, lasted more than an hour, and up to the last minute the Count retained his patient and friendly manner towards the peasants. Their obstinacy did not provoke him to utter a single harsh word.
With the landowners Tolstoy had even more trouble than with the peasants. He received many threatening letters, plans were formed to have him beaten, he was to have been challenged to a duel; and denunciations against him were sent to those in authority.
After some three months of the work, in July 1861, he jotted down in his Diary: 'Arbitration has given me but little material [for literary work], has brought me into conflict with all the landed-proprietors, and has upset my health.'
Here is a sample of the cases he had to deal with. A Mrs. Artukóf complained that a certain Mark Grigóref (who had been a house-serf, and was therefore not entitled to land) had left her, considering himself to be 'perfectly free.'
Tolstoy, in his reply to the lady, said:
Mark, by my order, is at liberty to go immediately, with his wife, where he likes; and I beg you (1) to compensate him for the three-and-a-half months he has been illegally kept at work by you since the Decree was published, and (2) for the blows still more illegally inflicted on his wife. If my decision displeases you, you have a right of appeal to the Magistrates' Sessions and to the Government Sessions. I shall not enter into further explanations on this subject.—With entire respect I have the honour to remain, your humble servant,
Ct. L. Tolstoy.
The lady appealed to the Magistrates' Sessions, and Tolstoy's decision was annulled; but on the case being carried to the Government Sessions, his view of the case prevailed.
Before he had been a year in office we find him writing to the Government of the Toúla Board of Peasant Affairs as follows:
As the complaints [here follows a list of several cases] lodged against my decisions have no legal justification, but yet in these and many other cases my decisions have been and are being repealed, so that almost every decision I give is subsequently reversed; and as under such conditions—destructive both of the peasants' and the landowners' confidence in the Arbiter—the latter's activity becomes not merely useless but impossible, I humbly request the Government Board to authorise one of its members to hasten the examination of the above-mentioned appeals, and I have to inform the Government Board that until such investigations are completed I do not consider it proper that I should exercise the duties of my office, which I have, therefore, handed over to the senior Candidate.
The following month he resumed official work, but six weeks later, on 30th April 1862, on the score of ill-health, he handed the duties over to a substitute; and on 26th May—about a year after he had first assumed the office—the Senate informed the Governor of Toúla that it 'had decided to discharge the Lieutenant of Artillery, Count Leo Tolstoy, on the ground of ill-health' from the post of Arbiter of the Peace.
His unsatisfactory experience of administrative work no doubt helps to account for the anti-Governmental bias shown in his later works. Even at this time, he quite shared the dislike of civil and criminal law expressed by Rousseau when he wrote in his Confession:
The justice and the inutility of my appeals left in my mind a germ of indignation against our stupid civil institutions, in which the true welfare of the public, and veritable justice, are always sacrificed to I know not what apparent order, really destructive of all order, and which merely adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong.
We may at any rate be sure that tiresome, petty administrative work, never quite satisfactory, but at best consisting of compromises and of decisions based on necessity rather than on such principles of abstract justice as are dear to Tolstoy's soul, could never be an occupation satisfactory to him. He has not the plodding patience and studious moderation that such work demands; nor could his impulsive genius find scope in it. It has never been easy for him to be checked by others, or to have to reckon with their opinions and wishes. Like Rousseau, it suits him better to reform the world on paper, or even to alter his own personal habits of life, than to concern himself with the slow social progress, the bit-by-bit amelioration, which alone is possible to those harnessed to the car that carries a whole society of men.
Tolstoy used at this time to find recreation in hunting, and often went out for days together with his friend and relation Prince D. D. Obolénsky, who describes him as having been a bold and active hunter, leaping all sorts of obstacles, and a wonderful man to talk to.
Concurrently with his duties as Arbiter, Tolstoy had been carrying on an enterprise in which he had to deal with people younger and more easy to mould than the peasants and proprietors whose quarrels he found it so hard to adjust; and during the winter of 1861-1862 he devoted himself with especial fervour to the task of educating the peasant children of Yásnaya and the surrounding district.
As we have already seen, a chief aim of his travels abroad had been to study the theory and practice of education; and not only did he now personally devote himself to the school at Yásnaya, but in the surrounding neighbourhood eleven similar schools were soon started, all more or less inspired by his ideals and encouraged by his co-operation. The monthly magazine, Yásnaya Polyána (now a bibliographical rarity) which he produced and edited during 1862, aimed at propagating his theories of education and making known the results attained in his school, and it also contained an account of sums voluntarily contributed for its support. From articles published in it (and republished in his collected writings) we get a vivid description of the work carried on in November and December 1861.[45] Like many Russian magazines, Yásnaya Polyána always appeared late, and, to begin with, the January number was several weeks behind time.
In this educational work, Tolstoy showed the qualities and limitations which in later years marked all his propagandist activity. There was the same characteristic selection of a task of great importance; the same readiness to sweep aside and condemn nearly all that civilised humanity had accomplished up to then; the same assurance that he could untie the Gordian knot; and the same power of devoted genius enabling him really to achieve much more than one would have supposed possible, though not a tithe of what he set himself to do.
In later life Tolstoy laid no particular emphasis on what he wrote in these educational articles: in fact, we shall find him sometimes speaking very scornfully of them; but they throw so much light on his then state of mind, and often come so near to the views he strongly advocated twenty or thirty years later, that it will be worth devoting a good deal of attention to them.
Tolstoy, then, defines Education as: a human activity, aving for its basis a desire for equality, and the constant tendency to advance in knowledge. This he illustrates by saying that the aim of a teacher of arithmetic should be to enable his pupil to grasp all the laws of mathematical reasoning he himself is master of; the aim of a teacher of French, or chemistry, or philosophy, should be similar; and as soon as that aim is attained, the activity will naturally cease. Everywhere and always, teaching which makes the pupil the master's equal, has been considered good. The more nearly and rapidly this is accomplished, the better; the less nearly and more slowly it is accomplished, the worse. Similarly in literature (an indirect method of teaching) those books are written best, in which the author succeeds in transmitting his whole message most easily to the reader.
By 'the constant tendency to advance in knowledge,' Tolstoy meant that the equality aimed at in education can only be obtained on the higher, and not on the lower, level: that is to say, not by the teacher forgetting what he knows, but by the pupil acquiring the teacher's knowledge. Much tuition however is based not on the desire to equalise knowledge, but on quite false foundations.
These are: (1) First and commonest, the child learns in order not to be punished; (2) the child learns in order to earn a reward; (3) the child learns in order to be better than others; (4) the child, or young man, learns in order to obtain an advantageous position in the world....
With reference to the practice of sending boys to school, not for their natural development, but that they may be moulded into a set form, Tolstoy declares that 'Education, as a deliberate moulding of people into certain forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and impossible.'
Of examinations he strongly disapproves, as tending to arbitrariness on the side of the examiners, and deception on the side of the pupils.
Under what circumstances, asks Tolstoy, can a pupil acquire knowledge most rapidly? 'A child or a man is receptive only when he is aroused; and therefore to regard a merry spirit in school as an enemy or a hindrance, is the crudest of blunders.
The pupil's state of mind is the most important condition of successful education; and to secure good results, freedom is indispensable. No child should be forced to learn what it does not want to, or when it does not wish to.
One need only glance at one and the same child at home or in the street, and at school. Here you see a vivacious, inquisitive being, with a smile in his eye and on his mouth, seeking information everywhere as a pleasure, and clearly, and often forcibly, expressing his thoughts in his own way; while there you see a weary, shrinking creature repeating, merely with his lips, some one else's thoughts in some one else's words, with an air of fatigue, fear and listlessness: a creature whose soul has retreated like a snail into its shell. One need but glance at these two conditions to see which of them is the more conducive to the child's development. That strange physiological condition which I call the 'School state of mind,' and which unfortunately we all know so well, consists in all the higher capacities: imagination, creative power and reflection, yielding place to a semi-animal capacity to pronounce words without imagination or reflection.
When the pupils have been reduced to this 'School state of mind' we encounter those 'not accidental, but often-repeated cases,' of the stupidest boy being at the top of the class, and the cleverest boy at the bottom.
In short, a child's mental capacities are really active only when that child is free; and the teacher's chief task lies 'in studying the free child' and discovering how to supply him with knowledge. Therefore 'the only method of education is experiment, and its only criterion is freedom.'
The attempts to enforce obedience and quiet in school-rooms, converts schools into places of torture which have a stupefying effect, well called by the Germans Verdummen.
In Germany nine-tenths of those who pass through the primary schools leave them possessed of an ability to read and write mechanically, but imbued with so strong a loathing for the experience they have had of the paths of knowledge, that they subsequently never take a book in their hands. Let those who doubt what I say, point out to me what books are read by the labourers.... No one who will seriously consider the education of the people, not only in Russia but also in the rest of Europe, can help coming to the conclusion that the people get their mental development quite independently of a knowledge of reading and writing, and that usually, except in a few cases of exceptional ability, these rudiments remain a quite unapplied art—which is even harmful, since nothing in life can remain indifferent....
Schools are not so arranged as to make it convenient for children to learn, but so as to make it convenient for teachers to teach. The voices, movements and mirth of the children, which form a necessary condition of their studying successfully, incommode the teachers, and therefore in the prison-like schools of to-day, questions, conversation, and movement are forbidden.
Schools based on compulsion, supply 'not a shepherd for the flock, but a flock for the shepherd.'
To deal successfully with any object, it is necessary to study it, and in education the object is a free child; yet the pedagogues wish to teach in their own way—the way that seems good in their own eyes; and when this does not act, they want not to alter their way of teaching but the nature of the child. ...Not till experiment becomes the basis of the School, and every school is, so to say, a pedagogic laboratory, will schools cease to lag behind the general level of the world's progress.
For boarding-schools Tolstoy had scant respect:
At home all the comforts of life—water, fires, good food, a well-cooked dinner, the cleanliness and comfort of the rooms—all depended on the work and care of the mother and of the whole family. The more work and care, the greater the comfort; the less work and care, the less comfort. A simple matter this no doubt, but more educational I think, than the French language or a knowledge of Alexander the Great. In a boarding-school, this constant vital reward for labour is so put out of sight, that not only is the dinner no better or worse, the napkins no cleaner or dirtier, and the floors no brighter or duller, because of the girl's exertion or non-exertion, but she has not even a cell or corner of her own to keep straight or leave untidy at her pleasure, and she has no chance of making a costume for herself out of scraps and ribbons.
His general charge against day-schools, boarding-schools and universities alike is that:
At the base of them all lies one and the same principle: the right of one man, or of a small group of men, to shape other people as they like.
He adds that:
It is not enough for School to tear children away from real life for six hours a day during the best years of their life: it wishes to tear three-year-old children from their mother's influence. Institutions have been contrived (Kleinkinderbervahranstalten, infant schools, salles d'asile) about which we shall have to speak more in detail later on. It only remains to invent a steam-engine which will replace the nursing mother! All agree that schools are imperfect; I, personally, am convinced that they are noxious.
He argues that no man or set of men has any right to force any particular kind of education on any one else. The teacher has no right to do more than offer such knowledge as he possesses, and he should respect the child's right to reject it as indigestible, or as badly served up:
On what grounds does the School of to-day teach this and not that, and in this and not that way?
Where, in our day, can we get such faith in the indubitability of our knowledge as would give us a right to educate people compulsorily? Take any medieval school, before or after Luther, take the whole scholastic literature of the Middle Ages, what a strength of belief and what a firm, indubitable knowledge of what was true and what was false, we see in them! It was easy for them to know that a knowledge of Greek was the one essential condition of education; for Aristotle's works were in Greek, and no one doubted the truth of his propositions till centuries later. How could the monks help demanding the study of the Holy Scriptures, which stood on an immovable foundation? It was well for Luther to demand the compulsory study of Hebrew, being sure, as he was, that in that language God himself has revealed the truth to man. Evidently, as long as man's critical sense was not aroused, the school had to be dogmatic; and it was natural for pupils to learn by heart the truths revealed by God, as well as Aristotle's science and the poetic beauties of Virgil and Cicero. For centuries after, no one could imagine any truer truth, or more beautiful beauty. But what is the position of the schools of our time, which retain these same dogmatic principles, while in the room next the class where the immortality of the soul is taught, it is suggested to the pupils that the nerves common to man and to the frog are what was formerly called 'the soul'; and where after hearing the story of Joshua the son of Nun read to him without explanations, the pupil learns that the sun never did go round the earth; and when after the beauties of Virgil have been explained to him, he finds the beauties of Alexandre Dumas (whose novels he can buy for sixpence) much greater; when the only belief held by the teacher is that nothing is true, but that whatever exists is reasonable; and that progress is good and backwardness bad, though nobody knows in what this progress, that is so generally believed in, consists?
Luther insists on teaching the Holy Scriptures from the originals, and not from the commentaries of the Fathers of the Church. Bacon enjoins the study of Nature from Nature, and not from the books of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life from life itself as he understands it, and not from previous experiments. Each step forward in the philosophy of pedagogics merely consists in freeing the schools from the idea of teaching the younger generations what the elder generations believed to be science, and in substituting studies that accord with the needs of the younger generations.
Again, he says
It is very usual to read and hear it said that the home conditions, the coarseness of parents, field labour, village games and so forth, are the chief hindrances to school-work. Possibly they really interfere with the kind of school-work aimed at by the pedagogues; but it is time we understood that those conditions are the chief bases of all education, and far from being inimical to, or hindrances of the School, are its first and chief motive power.... The wish to know anything whatever, and the very questions to which it is the School's business to reply, arise entirely from these home conditions. All instruction should be simply a reply to questions put by life. But School, far from evoking questions, fails even to answer those which life suggests.... To such questions the child receives no reply; more especially as the police regulations of the School do not allow him to open his mouth, even when he wants to be let out for a minute, but obliges him to make signs in order not to break the silence or disturb the teacher.
The great questions, Tolstoy says, are: (1) What must I teach? and (2) How must I teach it? He remarks that a couple of centuries ago, neither in Russia nor in Western Europe could these questions have arisen. Education was then bound up with religion, and to become a scholar meant to learn the Scriptures. In Mohammedan countries this union of religion with education still exists in full force. To learn, means to learn the Koran, and therefore to learn Arabic. But as soon as the criterion of what to learn ceased to be religion, and the School became independent of the Church, the question of what to teach was bound to arise. That it did not arise suddenly, was due to the fact that the emancipation of the School from the Church took place gradually. But the day has at last come when the question must be faced; and no clear guidance is given us either by philosophy or by any definite consensus of opinion among those concerned with education. In the higher schools some advocate a classical, others a scientific, education; while in the primary schools, if the education is controlled by the priests it is carried on in one way, and if it is controlled by the anti-clericals it is carried on in another. Under these circumstances the only possible criterion must be the wish of the pupils or of their parents. Tolstoy then goes on to maintain that the demand of the mass of the Russian people is for tuition in the Russian and Ecclesiastico-Slavonic languages, and for mathematics.
As to how to teach, he contends that this resolves itself into the question, How to establish the best possible relations between those who want to learn and those who want to teach, and he says:
No one, probably, will deny that the best relation between a teacher and his pupils is a natural one, and that the opposite to a natural one is a compulsory one. If that be so, then the measure of all scholastic methods consists in the greater or lesser naturalness, and consequently in the less or more compulsion employed. The less the children are compelled, the better is the method; the more they are compelled, the worse is the method. I am glad that it is not necessary for me to prove this obvious truth. All are agreed that it cannot be good for health to employ foods, medicines, or exercises which create disgust or pain; and so also in learning, there can be no need to compel children to grind at anything dull or repugnant to them; and if it seems necessary to use compulsion, that fact can merely prove the imperfection of the methods employed. All who have taught children have probably noticed that the worse the teacher knows the subject he is dealing with and the less he likes it, the more he has to be stern and the more compulsion he has to use; while on the contrary, the better the teacher knows and loves his subject, the more free and natural will be his tuition.
If history be closely examined, it will be found that every advance in pedagogics has consisted merely in a diminution of compulsion, a facilitation of study, and a greater and greater approach to naturalness in the relations between teacher and pupil.
People have asked, How can we find the degree of freedom to be allowed in school? To which I reply that the limit of that freedom is naturally defined by the teacher, by his knowledge, and by his capacity to manage the school. Such freedom cannot be dictated; its measure is merely the result of the greater or lesser knowledge and talent possessed by the master. Freedom is not a rule, but it serves as a gauge when comparing one school with another, or when judging of new methods. The school in which there is less compulsion, is better than the one in which there is more. That method is good which, when introduced into a school, does not necessitate any increase of discipline; while that is certainly bad which necessitates greater severity.
From his main subject of Education, Tolstoy digresses in these articles into a discussion of other problems, in a way which reminds one of those wonderful essays he began to pour forth a quarter of a century later.
That he had been somewhat influenced by the Slavophils is indicated by his readiness to assume that Russia may advance along a line of her own, entirely different to that the Western nations have travelled. 'Progress,' in which like almost all his contemporaries he had believed, he now questions; and he indulges in a sharp attack on Macaulay for the third chapter of his History, which he says contains no proof that any real progress has been achieved. Buckle, similarly, is roughly handled for the assumption of progress that underlies his History of Civilisation; but most scathing of all is his onslaught upon Hegel, who (till Darwin appeared) was the rock on which many of the intellectual Liberals took their stand.
From the time of Hegel and his famous aphorism: 'What is historic is reasonable,' a very queer mental hocus-pocus has prevailed in literary and in verbal disputes, especially among us, under the name of 'the historic view.' You say, for instance, that man has a right to freedom, or to be tried on the basis of laws of which he himself approves; but the historic view replies that history evolves a certain historic moment conditioning a certain historic legislation and a people's historic relation thereto. You say you believe in a God; and the historic view replies that history evolves certain historic views and humanity's relation to those views. You say the Iliad is the greatest of epic works; and the historic view replies that the Iliad is merely the expression of the historic consciousness of a people at a certain historic moment. On this basis, the historic view does not dispute with you as to whether man needs freedom, or whether there is or is not a God, or whether the Iliad is good or bad: it does nothing to establish the freedom you desire; to persuade or dissuade you of the existence of a God or of the beauty of the Iliad; it merely points out to you the place your inner need or your love of truth or beauty, occupy in history. It merely recognises—and recognises not by direct cognition, but by historic ratiocination.
Say that you love or believe anything, and the historic view tells you: 'Love and believe, and your love and faith will find their place in our historic view. Ages will pass and we shall find the place you are to occupy in history. Know however in advance, that what you love is not absolutely beautiful, and what you believe in is not absolutely true; yet amuse yourselves, children: your love and faith will find their place and application.'
It is only necessary to add the word 'historic' to any conception you like, and that conception loses its real vital meaning, in an artificially-formed historic world-conception.
Of the introduction of telegraphs and railways he remarks that people attribute great importance to these inventions, and boast of the progress that is being made, declaring that:
'Man is mastering the forces of Nature. Thought, with the rapidity of lightning, flies from one end of the world to the other. Time is vanquished.'
This, says Tolstoy, is excellent and touching.
But let us see who gains by it. We are speaking of the progress of the electric telegraph. Evidently the advantage and use of the telegraph is reserved for the upper, so-called 'educated' class; while the people, nine-tenths of the whole, only hear the droning of the wires and are hampered by the strict laws made for the protection of the telegraph.
Along the wires flies the thought that the demand for such-and-such an article has increased, and that the price must therefore be raised; or the thought that I, a Russian landed proprietress, living in Florence, have, thank God, recovered from my nervous prostration, and that I embrace my adored husband and beg him to send me 40,000 francs as quickly as possible.
Without going into exact statistics of the messages sent, one may be quite sure that they all belong to the kind of correspondence of which the above are samples. No peasant of Yásnaya Polyána in the Government of Toúla, or any other Russian peasant (and let it not be forgotten that the peasants form the mass of the people whose welfare 'progress' is supposed to secure) ever has sent or received, or for a long time to come will either send or receive, a single telegram. All the messages that fly above his head add no jot to his welfare, because all he needs he gets from his own fields and his own woods, and he is equally indifferent to the cheapness or dearness of sugar or cotton, to the dethronement of King Otho, the speeches of Palmerston and Napoleon III, or the feelings of the lady in Florence. All those thoughts that fly with the rapidity of lightning round the world, do not increase the fertility of his fields nor diminish the strictness of the keepers in the squire's or the Crown's forests, nor do they add to his or his family's working power, or supply him with an extra labourer. All these great thoughts may impair his welfare, but cannot secure or further it, and can have but a negative interest for him. To the True-Believers in progress, however, the telegraph wires have brought and are bringing immense advantages. I do not deny those advantages: I only wish to prove that one must not think, or persuade others, that what is advantageous for me, is a great blessing to all the world....
In the opinion of the Russian people what increases their welfare is an increase of the fertility of the soil, an increase in the herds of cattle, an increase of the quantity of grain and its consequently becoming cheaper, an increase of working power, an increase in woods and pastures, and the absence of town temptations. (I beg the reader to observe that no peasant ever complains of the cheapness of bread; it is only the political economists of Western Europe who soothe him with the prospect that bread will become dearer and render it more possible for him to purchase manufactured articles, in which he is not interested.)
Which of these benefits does the railway bring to the peasant? It increases the temptations; it destroys the woods; it draws away labourers; it raises the price of grain....
The real people, that is to say those who themselves work and live productively—nine-tenths of the whole nation—without whom no progress is conceivable, are always hostile to the railway. And so what it comes to is this: that the believers in 'progress,' a small part of society, say that railways increase the welfare of the people; while the larger part of the nation say that the railways decrease it.
Interesting, stimulating and suggestive as Tolstoy's articles were, and valuable as was the experience gained in his school, his magazine had very few subscribers and only existed for one year: the twelfth number was the last.
In an article written thirteen years later, he says of his attempts in 1861-2:
At that time I met with no sympathy in the educational journals, nor even with any contradiction, but only with the completest indifference to the question I was raising. There were, it is true, some attacks on a few insignificant details, but the question itself evidently interested no one. I was young at that time, and this indifference galled me. I did not understand that I with my question: How do you know what and how to teach? was like a man who, in an assembly of Turkish Pachas discussing how to collect more taxes from the people, should say to them: Gentlemen, before discussing how much to take from each man, we must first consider what right we have to collect taxes at all? Obviously, the Pachas would continue to discuss the methods of collecting, and would ignore the irrelevant question.
Before passing on to tell of the actual working of the Yásnaya Polyána school, there is one matter to be noted, small indeed in itself, but characteristic, and helpful for the understanding of Tolstoy's later development.
Tolstoy's personal honour has never been questioned, and the reader will remember that at Sevastopol he flatly refused to touch money which, according to the long-standing regimental custom, was at his disposal. Well, in his magazine he printed a story written by one of the boys in the school, and appraised it with enthusiasm. The hero of the story, who had been wretchedly poor, returns from the army with money to spare, and explains the matter to his wife by saying: 'I was a non-commissioned officer and had Crown money to pay out to the soldiers, and some remaining over, I kept it.'
Commenting on this, Tolstoy says:
It is revealed that the soldier has become rich, and has done so in the simplest and most natural manner, just as almost everybody does who becomes rich—that is, by other people's, the Crown's, or somebody's, money remaining in his hands owing to a fortunate accident. Some readers have remarked that this incident is immoral, and that the people's conception of the Crown as a milch cow should be eradicated and not confirmed. But not to speak of its artistic truth, I particularly value that trait in the story. Does not the Crown money always stop somewhere? And why should it not, once in a way, stop with a homeless soldier like Gordéy?
In the views of honesty held by the peasants and the upper class, a complete contrast is often noticeable. The peasants' demands are specially serious and strict with regard to honesty in the nearest relations of life; for instance, in respect to one's family, one's village, or one's commune. In respect to outsiders: the public, the Crown, or foreigners, or the Treasury especially, the applicability of the rules of honesty seems to them obscure. A peasant who would never tell a lie to his brother peasant, and who would bear all possible hardships for the sake of his family, and not take a farthing from a fellow-villager or neighbour without having fully earned it—will be ready to squeeze a foreigner or a townsman like an orange, and at every second word will lie to a gentleman or an official. If he is a soldier, he will without the slightest twinge of conscience stab a French prisoner, and should Crown money come his way, he would consider it a crime to his family not to take it. In the upper class, on the contrary, it is quite the reverse.... I do not say which is better, I only say what I believe to be the case....
To return to the story. The mention of the Crown money, which at first seems immoral, in our opinion has a most sweet and touching character. How often a writer of our circle, when wishing to show his hero as an ideal of honesty, naïvely displays to us the dirty and depraved nature of his own imagination! Here, on the contrary, the author has to make his hero happy. His return to his family would suffice for that, but it was also necessary to remove the poverty which for so many years had weighed on the family. Where was he to take money from? From the impersonal Crown! If the author is to give him wealth, it has to be taken from some one, and it could not have been found in a more legitimate or reasonable way.
No doubt Tolstoy's statement of peasant morality is true enough; but Tolstoy's attitude towards the matter is remarkable. He has always had a keen sense of personal morality, but when public morality was in question, his decisions seem to me often to have been at fault.
Passing from the moral to the economic aspect of the question, to Western ears it sounds strange to hear the medieval or Oriental conception so boldly announced, that property 'has to be taken from some one' before it can be obtained. In our world, wealth has, during the last five generations, been increased enormously by inventions, by organisation, by division of labour, by the skilful utilisation of the forces of Nature, as well as by co-operation and the bringing together into one place of industries and individuals mutually helpful; and it has become impossible for us to believe that the only way to obtain wealth is by depriving some one else of wealth they already possess.