I have just been reading the letters of one of our highly educated and advanced men of the forties, the exile Ogaryóf, to another yet more highly educated and gifted man, Herzen. In these letters Ogaryóf gives expression to his sincere thoughts and highest aspirations, and one cannot fail to see that—as was natural to a young man—he rather shows off before his friend. He talks of self-perfecting, of sacred friendship, love, the service of science, of humanity, and the like. And at the same time he calmly writes that he often irritates the companion of his life by, as he expresses it, 'returning home in an unsober state, or disappearing for many hours with a fallen, but dear creature.'...
Evidently it never even occurred to this remarkably kind-hearted, talented, and well-educated man that there was anything at all objectionable in the fact that he, a married man, awaiting the confinement of his wife (in his next letter he writes that his wife has given birth to a child) returned home intoxicated, and disappeared with dissolute women. It did not enter his head that until he had commenced the struggle, and had at least to some extent conquered his inclination to drunkenness and fornication, he could not think of friendship and love, and still less of serving any one or any thing. But he not only did not struggle against these vices—he evidently thought there was something very nice in them, and that they did not in the least hinder the struggle for perfection; and therefore instead of hiding them from the friend in whose eyes he wishes to appear in a good light, he exhibits them.
Thus it was half a century ago. I was contemporary with such men. I knew Ogaryóf and Herzen themselves and others of that stamp, and men educated in the same traditions. There was a remarkable absence of consistency in the lives of all these men. Together with a sincere and ardent wish for good, there was an utter looseness of personal desire, which, they thought, could not hinder the living of a good life, nor the performance of good and even great deeds. They put unkneaded loaves into a cold oven, and believed that bread would be baked. And then, when with advancing years they began to remark that the bread did not bake—i.e. that no good came of their lives—they saw in this something peculiarly tragic.
This was written twenty years later; but it was latent in his mind at the time, and furnishes a clue to the fact that he never really made friends with these men.
Of Herzen as a writer Tolstoy ultimately came to have a very high opinion, and admitted that he exerted a very considerable influence on the mind of educated Russia.
In England, as elsewhere, Tolstoy saw as much as he could of the educational methods in vogue. He also visited the House of Commons and heard Palmerston speak for three hours; but he told me he could form no opinion of the oration, for 'at that time I knew English with my eyes but not with my ears.'
While in London, he received news that he had been nominated Arbiter of the Peace for his own district, near Toúla. The duties of the office were to settle disputes between the serfs and their former proprietors. Except a short service on the Zémstvo in 1874, this was the only official position in which Tolstoy ever took much active part after leaving the army.
On 3rd March (new style), the day of Alexander II's famous Manifesto emancipating the serfs, Tolstoy left London for Russia viâ Brussels. In that city he made the acquaintance of Proudhon (the author of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? and a Système des Contradictions Économiques) to whom Herzen had given him a letter of introduction. Proudhon impressed Tolstoy as a strong man who had the courage of his opinions; and though Proudhon's theories had no immediate effect on Tolstoy's life, the social political and economic views expounded by the latter a quarter of a century later, are deeply dyed with Proudhonism. Both writers consider that property is robbery; interest immoral; peaceful anarchy the desirable culmination of social progress, and that every man should be a law unto himself, restrained solely by reason, conscience and moral suasion. Another writer whose acquaintance Tolstoy made in Brussels was the Polish patriot Lelewel, who had taken a prominent part in the rebellion of 1830, and had written on Polish history and on many other subjects. He was at this time a decrepit old man living in great poverty. While in Brussels Tolstoy wrote Polikoúshka, almost the only story of his (besides A Squire's Morning) that implies a condemnation of serfdom.
Passing through Germany, Tolstoy stopped at Weimar, where he stayed with the Russian Ambassador, Von Maltitz, and was introduced to the Grand Duke Carl Alexander. Tolstoy (who had been reading Goethe's Reineke Fuchs not long before) visited the house in which Goethe had lived, but was more interested in a Kindergarten conducted by Minna Schelholm, who had been trained by Froebel. From another school he visited, we hear of his collecting and carrying off the essays the pupils had written, explaining to the master that he was much concerned with the problem, 'How to make thought flow more freely.'
At Jena he made acquaintance with a young mathematician named Keller, whom he persuaded to accompany him to Yásnaya to help him in his educational activities. He also stopped at Dresden, where he again visited Auerbach, concerning whom he jots down in his Diary: