II.
Every artist writes his own autobiography. Even Shakespeare’s works contain a life of himself for those who know how to read it. There is little difficulty in reading Tolstoi’s; moreover, it is very copious, and possesses the additional advantage of being written from at least two distinct points of view. It is seldom necessary to consult any other authority for the essential facts of his life and growth. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” the earliest of his large books, and one of the most attractive, tells us all that we need to know of his early life. An English critic has remarked that, if Tolstoi has here described his boyhood, he must have been a very commonplace child. The early life of men of genius is rarely a record of precocities. The boy here described so minutely, with his abnormal sensitiveness, his shy awkwardness and profound admiration of the comme il faut, his perpetual self-analysis, his brooding dreams, his amusing self-conceit, bears in him the germs of a great artist much more certainly than any small monster of perfection. It is scarcely necessary to say that the autobiography here is not one of incident, as some persons have foolishly supposed; it is neither complete nor historically accurate. Tolstoi uses his material as an artist, but the material is himself. The artist craves to express the inward experiences of his past life, of which he can scarcely speak. He invents certain imaginary events, or rearranges actual events as a frame into which he fits his own inward experiences. Whatever is most poignant and vivid in the novelist’s art is so produced; and you say to him, “This is so real; you are narrating your own history.” He will be able to reply laughingly, “Oh, no! my life is not at all like that.” Imagination is a poor substitute for experience. There is sufficient external evidence extant, even if it were possible to doubt the internal, that Tolstoi is here throughout drawing on his own youthful experiences. Like Irteneff, young Tolstoi followed Franklin’s injunctions as to the use of “Rules of Life;” his favourite books are the same; like him, also, he early developed a love of metaphysics, owing to which, young Irteneff says, “I lost one after the other the convictions which, for the happiness of my own life, I never should have dared to touch.” All the slight indications in the “Confessions” of young Tolstoi’s spiritual experiences agree with young Irteneff’s. Even the plain face, “exactly like that of a common peasant,” the small grey eyes and thick lips and wide nose, that caused the boy of the story to look at himself in the glass with such sorrow and aversion, to pray so fervently to God to be made handsome, correspond exactly to those of the real hero. No sign of the boy’s early development is left untouched. We feel that this book, in which the artist is first fully revealed, was the outcome of an overmastering impulse to give expression to the accumulated experiences of an intense and sensitive childhood, now receding for ever into the past.
Descended from a well-known minister and friend of Peter the Great, and belonging to a family that has been eminent for two hundred years in war, diplomacy, literature, and art, Lyof Tolstoi was born in 1828, the youngest of four sons; his mother, the Princess Marie Volkonsky, was the daughter of a general in Catherine’s time, and, according to friends of the novelist’s family, she resembled the Marie Bolkonsky of “War and Peace.” Both parents were, he says, in the general esteem, “good, cultivated, gentle, and devout.” He was early left an orphan, his mother dying when he was not yet two years of age, his father when he was nine. At the age of fifteen he went to the University of Kazan; he left it suddenly to settle on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana which had fallen to him. In 1851, at the age of twenty-three, he became a yunker (the usual position of a nobleman entering the army, doing the work of a common soldier and associating with the officers) in the artillery at the Caucasus; he was stationed on the Terek. This expedition to the Caucasus was a memorable event in young Tolstoi’s life. It determined finally his artistic vocation. A centre of military activity on the most interesting frontier of the empire, it is a land of wonderful scenery and strange primitive customs, hallowed with association with Poushkin and Gogol. Tolstoi’s elder and most loved brother Nikolai had just come home on leave from the Caucasus; it was natural that young Lyof, who had never yet left the neighbourhood of Moscow, should be attracted to a land which held for him a fascination so manifold. Under the influence of this strange and new environment he became, almost at once, a great artist, and “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth” was written in 1852.
Tolstoi’s critics have sometimes regretted that he never continued this story. The only possible continuation of “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth” is “The Cossacks.” The young Irteneff of the end of the former book corresponds as closely as possible with the Olyenin who is analyzed at the beginning of the latter. A few years only have intervened. These years he long after summed up briefly and too sternly in the “Confessions”: “I cannot think of those years without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. There was no vice or crime that in those days I would not have committed. Lying, theft, pleasure of all sorts, intemperance, violence, murder—I have committed all. I lived on my estate, I consumed in drink or at cards what the labour of the peasants had produced. I punished them, and sold them, and deceived them; and for all that I was praised.” Tolstoi condemns himself without mercy, as Bunyan condemned himself in his “Grace Abounding;” even in the “Confessions” he admits that at this time his aspirations after good were the central element in his nature, and it was out of desire to benefit his peasants that he left the university prematurely to settle on his estate.
Tolstoi’s spiritual autobiography is carried on as accurately as anyone need desire in “The Cossacks.” It was in the Caucasus that he first powerfully realized what nature is, and natural life; he was, for the first time, forced to consider his own relation to such life. Lukashka, the healthy, coarse young Cossack soldier, Maryana, the beautiful robust Cossack girl, and the delightful figure of Uncle Jeroshka, the old hunter, display their vivid and active life before Olyenin, the child of civilization. He lives constantly in the presence of the “eternal and inaccessible mountain snows and a majestic woman endowed with the primitive beauty of the first woman;” he feels the contrast between this and the life of cities: “happiness is to be with Nature, to see her, to hold converse with her;” and he longs to mingle himself with the life of Maryana. In vain. “Now if I could only become a Cossack like Lukashka, steal horses, get tipsy on red wine, shout ribald songs, shoot men down, and then while drunk creep in through the window where she was, without a thought of what I was doing or why I did it, that would be another thing, then we should understand one another, then I might be happy.... She fails to understand me, not because she is beneath me, not at all; it would be out of the nature of things for her to understand me. She is light-hearted; she is like Nature, calm, tranquil, sufficient to herself. But I, an incomplete feeble creature, wish her to understand my ugliness and my anguish.” The book is full of strongly-drawn pictures of the beauty of natural strength and health; sometimes recalling Whitman at his best. They are strange, these resemblances between three great typical artists of to-day, so far apart, so little known to each other, Millet, Whitman, and Tolstoi. In “The Cossacks” Tolstoi gives his first statement of that problem of man’s natural function in life which he has been seeking to solve ever since. Here he has no sort of solution to offer; “some voice seemed to bid him wait, not decide hastily.”
In 1854 Tolstoi was transferred at his own request to the Crimea, to obtain command of a mountain battery, doing good service at the battle of the Tchernaya. At this period also he wrote his “Sketches of Sebastopol.” By this time he had attracted considerable attention as a writer, and by command of the Emperor, who said that “the life of that young man must be looked after,” he was, much to his own annoyance, removed to a place of comparative safety.
When peace was made, Tolstoi, then twenty-six years of age, left the army and settled in St. Petersburg, where he was warmly received by the chief literary circle of the capital, then including Tourgueneff, Gregorovitch, and Ostroffsky; the first, who was a comparatively near neighbour at Yasnaya Polyana, becoming one of his most intimate friends. During the following ten years he wrote little, but travelled in Germany, France, and Italy, and devoted himself to the education of the serfs on his estate, marrying in 1862 the young and beautiful daughter of a German military doctor at Tula. Although he wrote little, he was enlarging his conception of art and studying literature. He admired English novels, both for their art and naturalism, and among French novelists he preferred Dumas and Paul de Kock, whom he called the French Dickens. Schopenhauer was a favourite writer at this period. He found his chief recreations in that love of sport in all its forms which has left such vivid and delightful traces throughout his work. In his portraits he appears with a shaggy bearded face, with large prominent irregular features, and rather a stern fixed and reserved expression; the deep eyes are watchful yet sympathetic, and at the same time melancholy, and the thick lips are sensitive. His acquaintances described him as not easy to approach, very shy and rather wild (très-farouche et très-sauvage), but those who approached him found him “extremely amiable.” In his later “Confessions” he thus summarizes his view of things, and that of the group to which he belonged, during this literary period of his life, more especially with reference to the earlier part of it. “The view of life of my literary comrades lay in the opinion that in general life developed itself; that in this development we, the men of intellect, took the chief part, and among the men of intellect we, artists and poets, stood first. Our vocation was to instruct people. The very natural question, ‘What do I know and what can I teach,’ was unnecessary, for, according to the theory, one needed to know nothing. The artist, the poet, taught unconsciously. I held myself for a wonderful artist and poet, and very naturally appropriated this theory. I was paid for it, I had excellent food, a good habitation, women, society; I was famous.... When I look back to that time, to my state of mind then, and to that of the people I lived with (there are thousands of them, even now), it seems to me melancholy, horrible, ludicrous; I feel as one feels in a lunatic asylum. We were all then convinced that we must talk, talk, write and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible; because it was necessary for the good of humanity.” This is by no means a satisfactory or final account of the matter.
“War and Peace,” Tolstoi’s longest and most ambitious work, which began to appear in 1865, is from the present point of view of comparatively slight interest. His art had now become more complex, and this was a serious attempt to give life to various aspects of a great historical period. Much of himself, certainly, we find scattered through the work, especially in Pierre Besoukhoff, though it is unnecessary to say that a very large part of Pierre’s experiences had no counterpart in Tolstoi’s; the not very life-like or interesting Masonic episode, for instance, has clearly been read up. Pierre, however, appears before us, from first to last, as Tolstoi appears before us, a seeker.
“Anna Karenina” is full of biographic material of intense interest. In Vronsky, doubtless much of his earlier experience, and in Levine, his own inner history at that time, are written clearly enough. From this standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all that he ever wrote, still groping, but now more restlessly and eagerly, with growing desperation. The nets are drawn tight around him, and when we close the book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which he is still unconscious.
I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a large northern town. All day long, it seemed to me, the hearses were trundling along their dead to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I walked out I met men carrying coffins, and if I glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name of the child I saw two days ago in his mother’s lap; or I was greeted by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home, thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the whole of life, a road full of the noise of the preparation of death. How daintily soever we danced along, each person, laughing so merrily or in such downright earnest, was merely a corpse, screwed down in an invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as might be to the grave-edge.—It was at such a point of view that Tolstoi arrived in his fiftieth year.
“When I had ended my book ‘Anna Karenina,’” he wrote in his “Confessions,” “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think, think, of the horrible condition in which I found myself.... Questions never ceased multiplying and pressing for answers, and like lines converging all to one point, so these unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. And with horror and a consciousness of my weakness, I remained standing before this spot. I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to this, that I—a healthy and happy man—felt that I could no longer live.... Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as well as a peasant. Mentally, I could work for eighteen hours at a time without feeling any ill consequence. And yet I had come to this, that I could no longer live.... I only saw one thing—Death. Everything else was a lie.”
The greater part of the “Confessions” is occupied with the analysis of this mental condition, and with the earlier stages of his deliverance, for when he wrote the book he was scarcely yet quite free. The direction in which light was to break in upon him is very clear even to the reader of “Anna Karenina.” It seemed to him at length that the awful questions which had oppressed him so long had been solved for thousands of years by millions upon millions of persons who had never reasoned about them at all. “From the time when men first began to live anywhere,” he says in the “Confessions,” “they already knew the meaning of life, and they carried on this life so that it reached me. Everything in me and around me, corporeal and incorporeal, is the fruit of their experiences of life; even the means by which I judge and condemn life, all this is not mine, but brought forth by them. I myself have been born, bred, grown up, thanks to them. They have dug out the iron, have tamed cattle and horses, have taught how to till the ground, and how to live together and to order life; they have taught me to think and to reason. And I, their production, receiving my meat and drink from them, instructed by their thoughts and words, have proved to them they are an absurdity!... It is clear that I have only called absurd what I do not understand.”
When he had made this great discovery the rest followed, slowly, but simply and naturally. First, he understood the meaning of God. He had all his life been seeking God. Now, one day in early spring, he was in the wood, trying to catch among the tones of the forest the cry of the snipe, listening and waiting, and thinking of the things he had been thinking of for the last three years, especially of this question of God. There was no God—that he knew was an intellectual truth. But is the knowledge of God an intellectual matter? And it seemed to him that he realized that God is life, and that to live is to know God. “And from that moment the consciousness of God, as known by living, has remained with me.”
Following up this clue, he proceeded to attend church regularly, and to fulfil all the orthodox ceremonies. This, however, was a failure. He could not get rid of the consciousness that these things were—“bosh.” He turned from the church to the Gospels. At this point the “Confessions” end. In the year 1879, in which he wrote that book, he heard of, and met, Soutaieff.
One evening a beggar woman had knocked at Soutaieff’s door, asking shelter for the night. She was given food and a place of rest. Next morning all the family went to work in the field. The woman took the opportunity of collecting all the valuables she could lay her hands on, and fled. Some peasants at work saw her, stopped her, examined her bundle, and having bound her hands, led her before the local authorities. Soutaieff heard of this, and soon arrived. “Why have you arrested her?” he asked. “She is a thief; she must be punished,” they cried. “Judge not, and you will not be judged,” he said solemnly; “we are all guilty at some point. What is the good of condemning her? She will be put in prison, and what advantage will that be? It would be much better to give her something to eat, and to let her go in the grace of God.” Such curiously Christ-like stories as this of the peasant-teacher reached Tolstoi, and made a deep impression on him. They were in the line of his mental development, and threw light on his own experiences. The influence of Soutaieff appears in “What then must we do?”—a further chapter in the history of Tolstoi’s development, and perhaps the most memorable of his attempts at the solution of social questions.
What then must we do? It was the question the people asked of John the Baptist, and we know his brief and practical answer. It was the question that pressed itself for solution on Tolstoi when he began to investigate the misery of Moscow, and to start philanthropic plans for its amelioration. He tells us in this narrative, which has a dramatic vividness of its own that will not bear abbreviation, how he was gradually forced, by his own well-meaning attempts and mistakes, to abandon his philanthropic projects, and to realize that he himself and all other respectable and well-to-do people were the direct causes of the misery of poverty.
He investigated the worst parts of the city, finding more comfort and happiness amidst rags than he had expected, and only discovering one hopelessly useless class—the class of those who had seen better days, who had been brought up in the notions that he himself had been brought up in as to the relative position of those who are workers and those who are not workers.
He met with a prostitute who stayed at home nursing the child of a dying woman. He asked her if she would not like to change her life—to become, he suggested at random, a cook. She laughed: “A cook? I cannot even bake bread;” but he detected in her face an expression of contempt for the occupation of a cook. “This woman, who, like the widow of the Gospel, had in the simplest way sacrificed all that she possessed for a dying person, thought, like her companions, that work was low and contemptible. Therein was her misfortune. But who of us, man or woman, can save her from this false view of life? Where among us are the people who are convinced that a life of labour is more honourable than one of idleness, who live according to such a conviction, and value and respect men accordingly?” He came across another prostitute who had brought up her daughter of thirteen to the same trade. He determined to save the child, to put her in the hands of some compassionate ladies, but it was impossible to persuade the woman that she had not done the best for the daughter whom she had cared for all her life and brought up to the same occupation as herself; and he realized that it was the mother herself who had to be saved from a false view of life, according to which it was right to live without bearing children and without working, in the service of sensuality. “When I had considered this, I understood that the majority of ladies whom I would have called on to save this girl, not only themselves live without bearing children and without working, but also bring up their daughters to live such a life; the one mother sends her daughter to the public-house, the other to the ball. But both mothers possess the same view of life, namely, that a woman must be fed, clothed, and taken care of, to satisfy the wantonness of a man. How, then, could our ladies improve this woman and her daughter?” He was anxious to befriend a bright boy of twelve, and took him into his own house among the servants, pending some better arrangement to give him work. At the end of a week this ungrateful little boy ran away, and was subsequently found at the circus, acting as conductor to an elephant, for thirty kopecks a day. “To make him happy and to improve him I had taken him into my house, where he saw—what? My children—older, younger, and the same age as himself—who not only did not work for themselves, but in every way gave work to others: they spoiled everything they came in contact with, over-ate themselves with sweets and delicacies, broke crockery, and threw to the dogs what to this boy would seem dainties.... I ought to have understood how foolish it was on my part—I who brought up my children in luxury to do nothing—to try to improve other people and their children, who lived in what I called ‘dens,’ but three-fourths of whom worked for themselves and for others.” His experience was the same throughout, and he brings his usual keen insight to the analysis of his mental attitude when he gave money in charity, and to the mental attitude of the recipients of his charity. He found also that, even if his charity were to rival that of the poor, he would have to give 3,000 roubles to make a gift proportioned to the three kopecks bestowed by a peasant, or to sacrifice his whole living for days at a time, like the prostitute who nursed the dying woman’s child.
It seemed to him that he was like a man trying to draw another man out of a swamp, while he himself was standing on the same shifting and treacherous ground; every effort only served to show the character of the ground that he stood upon himself. When he was at the Night Shelter at Moscow, and looked at the wretched crowd who sought admission, he recalled his impression when he had seen a man guillotined at Paris thirty years previously, and with his whole being had understood that murder would always be murder, and that he had his share in the guilt. “So, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of men, I understood, not with my reason, but with my heart and my whole being, that the existence of ten thousand such men in Moscow, while I and other thousands eat daintily, clothe our horses and cover our floors—let the learned say as much as they will that it is inevitable—is a crime, committed not once but constantly, and that I with my luxury do not merely permit the crime, but take a direct part in it. The difference in the two impressions consisted only in this—that before the guillotine all I could have done would have been to cry out to the murderers that they were doing evil, and to try to prevent them. Even then I should have known beforehand that the deed would not have been prevented. But here I could have given, not merely a warm drink or the little money that I had about me, but I could have given the coat from my body, and all that I had in my house. I did not do so, and therefore I felt, and still feel, and shall never cease to feel, that I am a partaker in that never-ceasing crime, so long as I have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I have two coats and another has none.”
“My Religion,” the best known of Tolstoi’s social works, contains—not, indeed, the latest or the final statement, for Tolstoi is not a man to stand still—the clearest, most vigorous and complete statement of his beliefs. He here frankly admits that he has arrived by the road of his own experience at convictions similar to those of Jesus as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. That he has nothing to say in favour of the Christianity of to-day, which approves of society as it now is, with its prison cells, its factories, its houses of infamy, its parliaments, one need scarcely point out. He has nothing but contempt for “faith” which he regards as merely a kind of lunacy. “But reason, which illuminates our life and impels us to modify our actions, is not an illusion, and its authority can never be denied.... Jesus taught men to do nothing contrary to reason. It is unreasonable to go out to kill Turks or Germans; it is unreasonable to make use of the labours of others that you and yours may be clothed in the height of fashion and maintain that source of ennui, a drawing-room; it is unreasonable to take people, already corrupted by idleness and depravity, and devote them to further idleness and depravity within prison walls: all this is unreasonable—and yet it is the life of the European world.” The doctrine of Jesus is hard, men say. But how much harder, exclaims Tolstoi, is the doctrine of the world! “In my own life,” he says, “(an exceptionally happy one, from a worldly point of view), I can reckon up as much suffering caused by following the doctrine of the world as many a martyr has endured for the doctrine of Jesus. All the most painful moments of my life—the orgies and duels in which I took part as a student, the wars in which I have participated, the diseases that I have endured, and the abnormal and unsupportable conditions under which I now live—all these are only so much martyrdom exacted by fidelity to the doctrine of the world.” And what of those less happily situated? “Thirty millions of men have perished in wars, fought in behalf of the doctrine of the world; thousands of millions of beings have perished, crushed by a social system organized on the principle of the doctrine of the world.... You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless, and ought not to exist—that, in fact, the majority of men are martyrs to the doctrine of the world.”
Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very few heads:—Resist not evil—Judge not—Be not angry—Love one woman. His creed is entirely covered by these four points. “My Religion” is chiefly occupied by the exposition of what they mean, and in his hands they mean much. They mean nothing less than the abolition of the State and the country. He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is a humbug, this State,” he remarked to Mr. Stead. “What you call a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know; peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, states, what are these but fine names invented to conceal the plundering of honest men by dishonest officials?” Law, tribunals, prisons, become impossible with the disappearance of the State; and with the disappearance of the country, and of “that gross imposture called patriotism,” there can be no more war.
In place of these great and venerable pillars of civilization, what? The first condition of happiness, he tells us, is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken, that he may enjoy the sky above him, and the pure air and the life of the fields. This involves the nationalization of the land, or rather, to avoid centralizing tendencies, its communalization. “I quite agree with George,” he remarked, “that the landlords may be fairly expropriated without compensation, as a matter of principle. But as a question of expediency, I think compensation might facilitate the necessary change. It will come, I suppose, as the emancipation of slaves came. The idea will spread. A sense of the shamefulness of private ownership will grow. Someone will write an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ about it; there will be agitation, and then it will come, and many who own land will do as did those who owned serfs, voluntarily give it to their tenants. But for the rest, a loan might be arranged, so as to prevent the work being stopped by the cry of confiscation. Of course I do not hold with George about the taxation of the land. If you could get angels from Heaven to administer the taxes from the land, you might do justice and prevent mischief. I am against all taxation.” The second condition of happiness is labour, the intellectual labour that one loves because one has chosen it freely, and the physical labour that is sweet because it produces the muscular joy of work, a good appetite, and tranquil sleep. The third condition of happiness is love. Every healthy man and woman should have sexual relationships; and Tolstoi makes no distinction between those that are called by the name of marriage and those that are not so called; in either case, however, he would demand that they shall be permanent. The fourth condition is unrestrained fellowship with men and women generally, without distinction of class. The fifth is health, though this seems largely the result of obedience to the others. These are the five points of Tolstoi’s charter. They seem simple enough, but he is careful to point out that most of them are closed to the rich. The rich man is hedged in by conventions, and cannot live a simple and natural life. A peasant can associate on equal terms with millions of his fellows; the circle of equal association becomes narrower and narrower the higher the social rank, until we come to kings and emperors, who have scarcely one person with whom they may live on equal terms. “Is not the whole system like a great prison, where each inmate is restricted to association with a few fellow-convicts?” The rich may, indeed, work, but even then their work usually consists in official and administrative duties, or the observance of arduous social conventions which are odious to them: “I say odious, for I never yet met with a person of this class who was contented with his work, or took as much satisfaction in it as the man who shovels the snow from his doorstep.” From this standpoint Tolstoi has never since greatly varied.
Such as he is now he is known throughout the civilized world. He lives at his old home at Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by less luxury than may be found in many a Siberian cottage, writing or shoemaking or ploughing, or kneading clay in a tub to build incombustible cottages, or spending the day in spreading manure over the land of some poor widow. Such we see him in his portraits, in the coarse blouse and the leather belt that he has always worn, with the massive, earnest, suffering, baffled face, as of a blind but unconquered Samson.