The children had not to pay anything for attending the school, and the relations between them and Tolstoy are illustrated by the account a visitor has given of seeing Tolstoy rush through a gate followed by a crowd of merry youngsters who were snow-balling him. Tolstoy was intent on making his escape, but on seeing the visitor he changed his mind, acknowledged his defeat, and surrendered to his triumphant pursuers.
Tolstoy does not stand before the world to-day primarily as a school-master, and even were I competent to deal with the subject, it would exceed the limits of this biography to attempt a detailed criticism of his precepts and practice; but he evidently possessed, as he claims in one of his articles, 'a certain pedagogic tact'; and he is clearly right in his belief that the rigid discipline of schools, the lack of freedom and initiative, the continual demand for silence and obedience, and the refusal to allow pupils to criticise the lessons they receive, have a constantly stupefying effect.
All that he allowed at Yásnaya Polyána was denied to us when I was at Christ's Hospital, in 1868-1874; and I look back on those six years of mental stultification as the most wretched of my life. At the preparatory school in Hertford, so stupefied were the little boys by terror and discipline, that when the head-master (traditionally an incarnation of all the virtues) became grossly harsh and unfair, they could not see what was happening until his insanity was so pronounced that the doctors had to take him in hand: an event that occurred soon after I had left for the upper school in London.
There, one of the masters (who evidently did not believe that 'history is experience teaching by example') in intervals between whacking the boys on their backs or hands with a long cane, used, I remember, emphatically to announce that 'dates and names are the most important parts of history.' A Latin master, a barrister, who was usually busy at some sort of law work when he should have been teaching us, used to set us to learn by rote rules and illustrations which we did not in the least understand. On one occasion the example given in the grammar was:
Opes irritamenta malorum effodiuntur.
Riches the incentives of crime are dug out of the earth.
The top boy had learnt the rule and illustration by heart (which I never could do); but, departing from his usual routine, the master unexpectedly asked which Latin word corresponded to which English. Each of the first twenty-four boys in the class in turn got caned and sent to the bottom; so that by the time I, who had been last, had come to the top, and it was my turn to reply, only one possible combination remained untried, and I was able to announce that effodiuntur meant 'are dug out of the earth.' Unluckily there was another rule that day, and over this I, in turn, came to grief, and was caned and sent to the bottom.
In the drawing class I remember doing the outline of a cube to the master's satisfaction, and being promoted to the shading class. I had no idea how to shade, and the attempt I made was certainly a very bad one; but instead of receiving advice or assistance, my ears were boxed so violently that I should be tempted to attribute to that assault the slight deafness from which I have since suffered, were it not that such treatment was so common at Christ's Hospital, that none of the victims whose hearing may have been impaired, could be sure to which of the masters they owed that part of their preparation for the battle of life.
I feel sure the stultifying effects of such cruel and senseless treatment would have been even more serious, had not the school authorities, by some strange oversight, allowed one really readable and interesting periodical to find a place among the Sunday magazines and other sterilised literature obtainable in the School Library. This one publication, which I read ardently during my school years, was Chambers's Journal. It contained novels by James Payn, and other matter suited to my powers of mental digestion. From smuggled copies of Captain Marryat's novels I also got a good deal of culture: far more, I am sure, than from any of the lessons we endured.