Had he lived in any other country, he would have been a power mighty and permanent in influencing its thought and in directing its policy; as it is, his thought will pass mainly as the confused, incoherent wail and cry of a giant struggling against the heavy adverse currents in that vast ocean of Russian life:
"The cry of some strong swimmer in his agony."
The evolution of Tolstoi's ideas has evidently been mainly determined by his environment. During two centuries Russia has been coming slowly out of the middle ages—indeed, out of perhaps the most cruel phases of mediaeval life. Her history is, in its details, discouraging; her daily life disheartening. Even the aspects of nature are to the last degree depressing: no mountains; no hills; no horizon; no variety in forests; a soil during a large part of the year frozen or parched; a people whose upper classes are mainly given up to pleasure and whose lower classes are sunk in fetishism; all their poetry and music in the minor key; old oppressions of every sort still lingering; no help in sight; and, to use their own cry, "God so high and the Czar so distant."
When, then, a great man arises in Russia, if he gives himself wholly to some well-defined purpose, looking to one high aim and rigidly excluding sight or thought of the ocean of sorrow about him, he may do great things. If he be Suvaroff or Skobeleff or Gourko he may win great battles; if he be Mendeleieff he may reach some epoch-making discovery in science; if he be Derjavine he may write a poem like the "Ode to God"; if he be Antokolsky he may carve statues like "Ivan the Terrible"; if he be Nesselrode he may hold all Europe enchained to the ideas of the autocrat; if he be Miloutine or Samarine or Tcherkassky he may devise vast plans like those which enabled Alexander II to free twenty millions of serfs and to secure means of subsistence for each of them; if he be Prince Khilkoff he may push railway systems over Europe to the extremes of Asia; if he be De Witte he may reform a vast financial system.
But when a strong genius in Russia throws himself into philanthropic speculations of an abstract sort, with no chance of discussing his theories until they are full-grown and have taken fast hold upon him,—if he be a man of science like Prince Kropotkin, one of the most gifted scientific thinkers of our time,—the result may be a wild revolt, not only against the whole system of his own country, but against civilization itself, and finally the adoption of the theory and practice of anarchism, which logically results in the destruction of the entire human race. Or, if he be an accomplished statesman and theologian like Pobedonostzeff, he may reason himself back into mediaeval methods, and endeavor to fetter all free thought and to crush out all forms of Christianity except the Russo-Greek creed and ritual. Or, if he be a man of the highest genius in literature, like Tolstoi, whose native kindliness holds him back from the extremes of nihilism, he may rear a fabric heaven-high, in which truths, errors, and paradoxes are piled up together until we have a new Tower of Babel. Then we may see this man of genius denouncing all science and commending what he calls "faith"; urging a return to a state of nature, which is simply Rousseau modified by misreadings of the New Testament; repudiating marriage, yet himself most happily married and the father of sixteen children; holding that Aeschylus and Dante and Shakspere were not great in literature, and making Adin Ballou a literary idol; holding that Michelangelo and Raphael were not great in sculpture and painting, yet insisting on the greatness of sundry unknown artists who have painted brutally; holding that Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Wagner were not great in music, but that some unknown performer outside any healthful musical evolution has given us the music of the future; declaring Napoleon to have had no genius, but presenting Koutousoff as a military ideal; loathing science—that organized knowledge which has done more than all else to bring us out of mediaeval cruelty into a better world—and extolling a "faith" which has always been the most effective pretext for bloodshed and oppression.
The long, slow, every-day work of developing a better future for his countrymen is to be done by others far less gifted than Tolstoi. His paradoxes will be forgotten; but his devoted life, his noble thoughts, and his lofty ideals will, as centuries roll on, more and more give life and light to the new Russia.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
OFFICIAL LIFE IN ST. PETERSBURG—1892-1894
The difficulties of a stranger seeking information in Russia seem at times insurmountable. First of these is the government policy of suppressing news. Foreign journals come to ordinary subscribers with paragraphs and articles rubbed out with pumice or blotted out with ink; consequently our Russian friends were wont to visit the legation, seeking to read in our papers what had been erased in their own, and making the most amusing discoveries as to the stupidity of the official censorship: paragraphs perfectly harmless being frequently blotted out, and really serious attacks on the government unnoticed.
Very striking, as showing control over the newspaper press, was an occurrence during my first summer at Helsingfors. One day our family doctor came in, and reported a rumor that an iron-clad monitor had sunk, the night before, on its way across the gulf from Reval. Soon the story was found to be true. A squadron of three ships had started; had encountered a squall; and in the morning one of them—an old-fashioned iron-clad monitor—was nowhere to be seen. She had sunk with all on board. Considerable speculation concerning the matter arose, and sundry very guarded remarks were ventured to the effect that the authorities at Cronstadt would have been wiser had they not allowed the ship to go out in such a condition that the first squall would send her to the bottom. This discussion continued for about a week, when suddenly the proper authorities served notice upon the press that nothing more must be said on the subject.