Yet one need only come in contact with and chat with any of the common people, to convince oneself that on the contrary the French people are almost what they consider themselves to be: intelligent, clever, sociable, freethinking, and really civilised. Take a workman of, say, thirty years of age: he will write a letter without such mistakes as at school, sometimes even quite correctly; he has some idea of politics, and therefore of recent history and geography; he knows some history from novels, knows something of natural history, and he very often draws, and is able to apply mathematical formulae to his trade. Where did he get all this?
I recently discovered the answer in Marseilles, by wandering about the streets, drink-shops, cafés chantants, museums, workshops, wharves and book-stalls. The very boy who told me that Henry IV was killed by Julius Cæsar, knew the history of The Three Musketeers and of Monte Cristo very well.
In Marseilles Tolstoy found that everybody had read Dumas' works, of which there were twenty-eight cheap editions. He estimated that each week, in the cafés chantants, at least one-fifth of the population received oral education, as the Greeks and Romans used to do. Comedies and sketches were performed, verses declaimed, and the influence for good or evil of this unconscious education far outweighed that of the compulsory education given in schools.
1861
In January he reached Paris, where he spent a large part of his time in omnibuses, amusing himself by observing the people. He declares he never met a passenger who was not represented in one or other of Paul de Kock's stories. Of that writer, as of Dumas père, he thinks highly. 'Don't talk nonsense to me,' he once said, 'about Paul de Kock's immorality. He is, according to English ideas, somewhat improper. He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, but never immoral. In everything he says, and despite his rather free jests, his tendency is quite moral. He is a French Dickens.... As to Dumas, every novelist should know him by heart. His plots are admirable, not to mention the workmanship. I can read and re-read him, though he aims chiefly at plots and intrigue.'
In Paris he again met Tourgénef; and from France he went on to London, where he remained six weeks, not enjoying his visit much as he suffered severely from toothache nearly all the time. It is characteristic of Tolstoy that though he has often been a victim to toothache and has also been much tried by digestive troubles, he never appears to have had his teeth properly attended to by a dentist. A dentist's establishment seems to him so unnatural and artificial that it must be wrong. Moreover, dentists do not always do their work well; and toothache—if one endures it long enough—cures itself, and in the past the majority of mankind have got along without dentists. So he has been inclined to put up with toothache as one of the ills it is best to bear patiently.
During his stay he, and Tourgénef who had also come to London, saw a great deal of Alexander Herzen, who was editing Kólokol (The Bell)—the most influential paper ever published by a Russian exile.
I have already remarked on the fact that the Reform movements of that time left Tolstoy curiously cold; and here again it may be noted that though Tourgénef contributed to Herzen's prohibited paper, Tolstoy never wrote anything for it.
Herzen's little daughter, who had read and greatly enjoyed Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, hearing that the author was coming to see her father, obtained permission to be present when he called. She ensconced herself in an arm-chair in a corner of the study at the appointed time, and when Count Tolstoy was announced, awaited his appearance with beating heart; but she was profoundly disillusioned by the entrance of a man of society manners, fashionably dressed in the latest style of English tailoring, who began at once to tell with gusto of the cock-fights and boxing-matches he had already managed to witness in London. Not a single word with which she could sympathise did she hear from Tolstoy throughout that one and only occasion on which she was privileged to listen to his conversation; and in this she was particularly unlucky, for Tolstoy saw Herzen very frequently during his stay in London, and the two discussed all sorts of important questions together.
One of Herzen's closest friends and co-workers during his long exile from Russia, was the poet N. P. Ogaryóf, who had been his fellow-student at the Moscow University. Ogaryóf, besides being a man of ability, possessed a very amiable character that greatly endeared him to his friends; but in an essay entitled The First Step[43] written in 1892, we get a glimpse of what alienated Tolstoy's sympathy from the progressive movement these men represented. He there says: