CHAPTER III
LIFE OF TOLSTOY (continued)—JOURNEY ABROAD—PEASANT
SCHOOLS—"TALES FOR CHILDREN"—MARRIED
LIFE—RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES—CONVERSION
Soon after the capitulation of Sebastopol, Tolstoy, disgusted, with the mere idea of military glory, left military service and returned to St. Petersburg. He was received into the chief literary society of the day, introduced to Turgénief and the poet Fet, who became his most intimate friend. Tolstoy, however, never cared much for literary society; he spoke of it afterwards very slightingly and even scornfully, and he soon left.
In January 1857 he started on a tour in Europe; he visited Paris, and, while there, witnessed an execution which gave him his life-long horror of capital punishment. He declares that he had previously accepted it as a necessity, but, when he saw the ghastly preparations, when he heard the dull sound made by the head falling into the basket, he realised suddenly that, no matter what laws or customs countenanced this act, it was wrong and would always remain wrong. Even the horrors of war did not inspire him with an aversion quite so sickening; what he so disliked was the cold-blooded, premeditated violence wreaked upon a bound and helpless man.
Tolstoy also visited Switzerland—Geneva and Lucerne. At the latter place he was disagreeably impressed by the arrogance of the English tourists. One of the most charming of his minor tales—a little sketch entitled Albert—tells the story of a wandering musician treated with haughty severity by the English and, as the candid narrator admits, entertained by Tolstoy himself, with a somewhat exaggerated and theatrical kindness. It shows Tolstoy's habit of digging down to the very foundations of social life in seeking a remedy for the simplest injustice.
In 1860 consumption declared itself in Nicolas Tolstoy and he was soon seriously ill; he went in search of health to Soden and afterwards to Hyères.
Leo went to help in nursing him, and, on September 20th, Nicolas died in his brother's arms.
This event made a deep and tragic impression upon Tolstoy: it was not only the personal loss, though he loved Nicolas more than any other human being, but the worst horror lay in his brother's fear of death, and in the unavailing struggle against it. The circumstances are described in the death of Nicolas Levin in Anna Karénina.
Tolstoy next studied elementary education in France, Germany, and England.
In February 1861 the Russian serfs were liberated, and a new era in Russian history began; Tolstoy tried to play his part by starting peasants' schools upon his estate. In his theories of education he was largely influenced by Rousseau; it was from Rousseau that he obtained his ideas of "freedom," and of permitting unchecked development to the child; he organised his schools in a very original manner, and his theories seem to have had a far-reaching effect on Russian education in making it more free and flexible than that of Western Europe.
The tales he wrote for his peasant children, and embodied in various school-readers, form a charming portion of his work; they are exquisitely simple, and full of that fresh observation of the ways of animals and plants and the ways of children themselves which the young so love.
Among the best are stories of his dogs, Milton and Bulka; tales of bear-hunting and its perils; there is an unforgettable study of the hare and its timid ways, another which tells how mother-wolves train their young to hunt. Nor does Tolstoy limit his sympathies to animals—he can make the trees live for us in the same vivid and forcible way; thus he tells how hundreds of young poplars sprang up around an old poplar which was decaying, and how he ordered the young trees to be cut down since he could see that they were taking the sap from the old one. The young trees resisted stoutly: "Sometimes four of us would try to pull up the roots of some young poplar that had been cut down, and found it impossible; it would resist with all its might and would not die." However he persists in destroying them; the old tree itself dies and Tolstoy comments: "He had been long dying, and was conscious of it, and was giving all his life to his shoots. That was the reason why they had grown so rapidly, and I, who had wished to help him, had only killed all his children."
Perfectly charming also are the little studies of peasant children, such as the boy "Filipok," who is passionately eager to go to school but, when he gets there, cannot say a word through shyness; however they leave him alone, and he comes to himself and makes one of the best scholars.
Tolstoy's own educational experiments were not permitted to continue for long; the officials became jealous of his schools, and they were accordingly closed.
In dividing out the land between the nobles and the peasants many disputes occurred, and Tolstoy offered his services as arbitrator; he incurred a good deal of odium among his aristocratic neighbours because he so often took the part of the poor; he saw how the peasants were steadily cheated out of their fair share of land. It is this unfair division which explains the terrible severity of the Russian famines; the peasant has never been allowed sufficient land to support himself, and he cannot, with his best efforts, keep any reserve for bad times. Tolstoy perceived this and, to the best of his ability, struggled against it; like the heroism of the common soldier at Sebastopol, it served its purpose in making him the ardent champion of the poor.
In the year 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Behrs, with whose family he had been for some time acquainted; he was thirty-four and his bride eighteen.
There ensued a period of great family happiness and of powerful creative work. It was, in the ordinary sense, the happiest time of Tolstoy's life, though he himself, with his ever-progressing moral development and his ever-increasing idealism, later on condemned its happiness as selfish and enervating.
Tolstoy managed his own estate and, by the testimony of many observers, was exceedingly successful with his stock, his buildings, and his crops; he succeeded also in making his peasants happy and contented. His family was large, and his wife proved herself an admirable mother, devoting herself passionately to her children.
It was during this period that Tolstoy achieved his European reputation as a novelist by producing his two great works of War and Peace, 1864-9, and Anna Karénina, 1873-6.
Tolstoy was a most conscientious and exacting literary artist. Before writing War and Peace, he made careful historical studies; it is his longest and most ambitious work, and might be termed a prose epic rather than a novel.
Tolstoy also planned a novel on the period of Peter the Great, but the more he studied this subject the less he liked it; he found the whole epoch unsympathetic, and declared that Peter's so-called reforms were not really intended for the good of the people, but mainly for his own personal profit, and that what he really desired was freedom for a life of immorality.
Tolstoy's next great novel, Anna Karénina, was based on an event which had occurred in real life—the suicide of a young lady who, owing to an unhappy love affair, flung herself before a train. Tolstoy chose as a motto for his book the biblical saying: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," the fundamental idea being that people have no right to judge others, and that for human relations there is but one law—the law of mercy. Among all Tolstoy's critics Dostoïevsky appears to have been the only one who understood him in this sense; most readers seem to have interpreted the motto in the narrowest possible way as meaning the punishment of Anna for her breach of the marriage vow.
During all this period of literary activity Tolstoy was greatly aided by his wife; she served as his amanuensis, she alone being able to interpret his crabbed and difficult handwriting with its endless corrections, and one of her relatives records that she seven times re-copied the enormous MS. of War and Peace.
It was, as he himself tells us, about his fiftieth year that a great change came over Tolstoy. His life had been one of brilliant success; he had achieved great distinction, he had an excellent property, a congenial wife, a happy family, but he became profoundly dissatisfied. Merejkovsky, the most severe of Tolstoy's critics, ascribes this condition mainly to the ebb of vitality natural at his age, and considers it to be, in its origin, essentially physical and egoistic; but Merejkovsky surely forgets the intense interest in moral and religious problems which Tolstoy had always taken even in his youth; in The Cossacks, and in War and Peace, Tolstoy's heroes are continually searching for "the meaning of life."
The truth would appear to be that Tolstoy, in his youth greatly perplexed by philosophical and religious doubts, had never solved his problems, but had done what so many men do—evaded them by taking refuge in the joys and duties of practical life; but to most really thoughtful natures there comes a crisis when these duties will no longer serve as anodynes, and the old questionings, ten times stronger for their repression, return once more.
This was really the "Sturm und Drang" period of Tolstoy's life; it came unnaturally late, and its severity was proportioned to its delay. In the book entitled My Confession, Tolstoy has given a most sincere, graphic, and terrible account of his sufferings at this period. He traces its inception (surely with accuracy!) to the lack of any true religious faith in his youth. He tells how he had momentary gleams of revelation which showed him what a true religion might be, but his faith soon became merely conventional. Moreover, the new scientific materialism was spreading over Russia, and reaching the intellectual élite in the schools and colleges; the ceremonial, superstitious religion of the Greek Church, so essentially mediæval in all its methods of thought, could not stand against this dry, scientific determinism. Tolstoy gave way to scepticism and dissipation, and afterwards forgot and buried deep down his longings for a higher life.
After, as we shall see later, a desperate and almost overwhelming struggle, Tolstoy emerged from his darkness convinced that the true faith lay in a literal obedience to the precepts of the Gospel and especially to the Sermon on the Mount. He thought the precepts of the Gospel were realised more completely in the life of the Russian peasants than in that of any other human beings, and, taking their life as his model, he built up his creed: that the great essentials of life are labour and love, that man should be simple, laborious, and kind, that he ought to give more than he receives, to contribute to the common stock more than he takes from it, that he should rejoice in service; in this life he will find health and happiness, and he will not fear death because if he banishes egoism, the loss of his own personality—even to its total extinction—will not appear to him an evil.
This, stated in its essence, is the "solution" at which Tolstoy arrived, and from the year 1879 onwards we find him devoting his life almost entirely to moral and religious teaching.
Taking peasant life always as his model, he himself lived very frugally and simply; he partook only of the plainest food—vegetarian; he dressed like a peasant, he waited upon himself and did the work of his own room, and he "paid" even for this simple sustenance with the labour of his own hands; he worked at haymaking and reaping in the fields, at woodcutting in the woods, and in the winter he made shoes. He spent a portion of each day in manual labour, giving himself appetite to enjoy his simple diet; his temperance and toil kept him strong and vigorous, and he declared that he had as much time as ever to devote to intellectual work. Tolstoy, had, in fact, returned to the passionate and practical faith of the Middle Ages; his life was the life of a mediæval monk when monasticism was at its best—ascetic, laborious, intellectual—but his nineteenth century scepticism had caused him to omit and reject mediæval dogmas and superstitions.
Tolstoy, like so many other religious mystics, wished to yield up his property entirely and strip himself of all worldly goods. It was here that, as with others before him, he came into conflict with his own family.
Another, though a much less reformer of our own time, General Booth, was able to interest all the members of his own family, and to find in them his best and most willing helpers, but he had the advantage of a wife who was, from the beginning, on his side.
Tolstoy was in a different position: the Countess proved herself an admirable wife so long as he devoted himself to adding lustre and aggrandisement to his family; she helped him in the management of his estates, she understood his literary work and gloried in his renown, but further she could not go; she could not comprehend his moral and religious crisis, and her great terror was lest her children should be, in any degree, impoverished. It is painful to hear that at one time she contemplated appealing to the authorities to have her husband declared insane and incapable of managing his own property.
The truth was that Tolstoy's idealism had come in conflict with that maternal egoism which is the dark side of maternal altruism, and one of the strongest forces of the world. This experience helps us to understand the curious bias against maternity which occurs in much of Tolstoy's later work. With regard to this situation Tolstoy ultimately compromised and, in the year 1888, renounced his estates in favour of his family.
He continued to produce religious works: The Four Gospels Harmonised and Translated, 1881-2; My Religion, 1884; The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1893, &c.
Political events in Russia more and more grieved and distressed him. The Revolutionary Executive Committee condemned Alexander II to death, and carried out their sentence. This event shook the whole nation. Tolstoy was horrified by the crime but he profoundly pitied the criminals; he addressed an open letter to the new emperor, Alexander III, imploring him in the name of Christ to forgive the culprits, and declaring that the only way to Russia's salvation lay in following the precepts of Jesus; the other possible methods—cruel repression and liberal reforms—had both been tried and found wanting. No answer was made, and the regicides were put to death.
Throughout Tolstoy's later work we perceive a horror of violence in all its forms, whether legal or illegal: to him all violent death is murder, and, no matter whether it is inflicted by the sentence of revolutionary committees or by the sentence of the law, it is equally criminal.
Tolstoy went for a time to reside in Moscow, and was, more than ever, startled and dismayed by the great contrasts between the extremes of poverty and of wealth.
In 1882 a census was taken; Tolstoy volunteered his help, and was thus enabled to plumb to the very depths the miseries of Moscow. A full account of this census is given in the book entitled What to Do? It is a most clear, graphic, and ruthless study of the miseries of poverty and vice; Tolstoy shows with ironic completeness the total insufficiency of charity to compete with the evil, and asks what remedies are possible.
He arrives at the same conclusion as Mr. Bernard Shaw: "What is wrong with the rich is idleness; what is wrong with the poor is poverty."
He shows how the honest and hard-working toiler is defrauded of his comforts because the results of his labour are appropriated to find luxuries for his masters; he shows how the work of the community is distracted from the production of the necessities required by all to luxuries available only for a few and enervating even to them; moreover the rich themselves, corrupted by their idleness, spread corruption around them which disseminates itself through all classes and creates a race of idlers, parasitic upon the labour of others; the analysis of social conditions given in this little book is acute and keen.
Tolstoy found the city too artificial, and returned to the country, where he resumed his simple life. He composed much popular literature; it was printed by a special press in the form of very cheap booklets, which were carried round by pedlars and sold to the people. Tolstoy henceforth regarded his former literary work as bad and selfish, considering it as being in essence a luxury intended for the entertainment of a limited class. His booklets achieved the purpose he had in view; they were greatly loved by the common people, and have penetrated, in the most remarkable way, to every corner of Russia. So great was the demand that each pamphlet was printed in an edition of twenty-four thousand copies, and of most there were five editions in a single year; towards the end of the fourth year the number of copies sold amounted to twelve millions. The first publications were taken from his reading books for children, and included such tales as The Prisoner of the Caucasia, God Sees the Truth, Where Love Is God Is, &c.
It is interesting to note that other distinguished Russian authors have since followed Tolstoy's example. During an illness he wrote The Power of Darkness, which was, however, prohibited for a number of years.
In 1891-2 he was occupied in relieving the dreadful Russian famine, procuring assistance by his appeals to Western Europe and, with the money obtained, organising relief-works in different districts.
Tolstoy became greatly interested in the Doukbobors: they were a Russian Nonconformist sect, many of whose principles—condemnation of violence, of taking life and of all church-ritual—were closely akin to his own. They were cruelly persecuted, and Tolstoy did his utmost to aid them; at length they received permission to emigrate to Canada, but were without money for the passage, and, in order to provide it, Tolstoy finished and published his last great novel, Resurrection, in 1899; it had been begun some time previously but abandoned.
In March 1901 Tolstoy was formally excommunicated by the Russian Church, as the unorthodox character of his writings and teachings was undeniable, while their great and ever-increasing influence made them too powerful to be ignored.
But this excommunication had the opposite effect to the one intended; the Russian people seemed to awaken suddenly to the fact that this man was indeed their great prophet, and the noblest moral teacher they had ever possessed; he was treated with an ever-growing reverence and sympathy; incessant deputations were sent to express the national admiration.
Tolstoy's influence grew, not only in his own country but abroad: he continued to work at his literary labours, and, even at his death, left a considerable amount of MS. which is still in process of publication. His old age was far from peaceful; the unhappy condition of his country tore his heart.
Silent for long on political matters, the cruel repression of the revolution was too much for him; he published in the leading organs of the European press the mournful and tragic letter beginning, "I can keep silence no longer." He declares that his unhappy country is so given over to crimes of violence, both legal and illegal, that, if men had their way, there would be literally not one human being left uncondemned, but all would perish. He summons all parties, as their only way of salvation, to cease from hatred and revenge, and he tells the Government that, if they must have victims, he offers his "own old throat," as an expiation: but little of his life is left, and that little is made unendurable by the sight of sufferings so terrible.
Tolstoy was also distressed by the luxury of his wife and family; he longed to leave them, but it was against his principles to grieve anyone wilfully. At length, however, he felt that he must have a time of peace for the end. He fled from his home on a snowy autumn night in company with one trusted friend, but the chill and the exposure were too much for him; he was compelled to relinquish his journey at a little wayside station, and he died there in the house of the station-master, a man belonging to the peasant class whom he so loved, and who touchingly and simply received him. The date was November 20, 1910. He was buried on his own estate without, of course, any ceremony from the Church which had repudiated him; the service was conducted mainly by the peasants who had loved him like a father. The Russian Government, which had not dared to touch him, kept over his followers to the last the iron hand of repression; thousands who had wished to attend his funeral were prohibited from doing so; many of his works are still censored, and his disciples still persecuted.