On the way I warned him to be on his guard about certain matters, and especially to avoid attacking George Sand, whom he much disliked, but who was devoutly worshipped by many Contemporarians. The dinner passed off all right, Tolstoy being rather quiet at first, but at last he broke out. Some one praised George Sand's new novel, and he abruptly declared his hatred of her, adding that the heroines of the novels she was then writing, if they really existed, ought to be tied to the hangman's cart and driven through the streets of Petersburg. He had, adds Grigoróvitch, already then developed that peculiar view of women and of the woman-question, which he afterwards expressed so vividly in Anna Karénina.
With all the curious convolutions of Tolstoy's character, there is a remarkable tenacity of conviction running through his whole life, and a remark in Resurrection, written nearly half a century later, throws a flood of light on the fact of his so detesting George Sand's emancipated heroines while he was himself living a loose life. In that book, the hero has been attracted as well as repelled first by Mariette, the General's wife, and then by a handsome demi-mondaine he passes in the street, and this is his reflection:
The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting, thought he; but as long as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height of our spiritual life and despise it; and, whether one has fallen or resisted, one remains what one was before. But when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and esthetic feeling, and demands our worship—then we are swallowed up by it completely, and worship animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. Then it is awful!
Prominent Russian Writers, (1856): Tourgénef, Sologoúb, Tolstoy, Nekrásof, Grigóryef, Panáef.
Grigoróvitch in another place speaks of Tolstoy's 'readiness to contradict.' It did not matter what opinion was being expressed; and the more authoritative the speaker appeared to be, the more eager was Tolstoy to oppose him and to begin a verbal duel. 'Watching how he listened to the speaker and pierced him with his eyes, and noticing how ironically he pressed his lips together, one conjectured that he was preparing not a direct reply, but such an expression of opinion as would perplex his opponent by its unexpectedness.'
Danílevsky, the novelist, confirms this impression of Tolstoy's eagerness to oppose. They met at the house of a well-known sculptor. Tolstoy entered the drawing-room while a new work of Herzen's was being read aloud, and quietly took up a position behind the reader's chair. When the reading was over, he began, at first gently and with restraint, then hotly and boldly, to attack Herzen and the enthusiasm then current for his revolutionary and emancipatory works; and he spoke so convincingly and with such sincerity, that Danílevsky says he never afterwards saw one of Herzen's publications in that house.
Tourgénef once said: 'In Tolstoy the character which afterwards lay at the base of his whole outlook on life early made itself manifest. He never believed in people's sincerity. Every spiritual movement seemed to him false, and he used to pierce those on whom his suspicion fell with his extraordinarily penetrating eyes'; and Tourgénef went on to say that personally he had never encountered anything more disconcerting than that inquisitorial look, which, accompanied by two or three biting words, was enough to goad to fury any man who lacked strong self control.
The different sides of men's characters do not always advance simultaneously or harmoniously; and it frequently happens that those awakening to a sense of public duty remain self-indulgent in respect to wine or women, while others become abstainers or respectable husbands while remaining oblivious of the political duties they owe to the community. Among the reformers whose acquaintance Tolstoy made in Petersburg, there was unfortunately a great deal of gluttony, drinking, gambling and loose living, and Tolstoy—though he was often remorseful and repentant about his own excesses with wine, women, and cards—with his innate propensity for demanding all or nothing, bitterly resented this in others. He would no doubt have considered it hypocritical had he himself come forward as a reformer before obtaining mastery over his own appetites, and he judged others by the same standard.
The ill success of the Crimean war had dealt a blow to the prestige of the Tsardom, and a series of wide-reaching reforms were being prepared at this time—among which the most important were the abolition of serfdom, the reform of civil and criminal law, the introduction of trial by jury and of oral proceedings in the law courts, the establishment of a system of Local Government somewhat resembling our County Councils, and some relaxation of the insensate severity of the press censorship. But though Tolstoy reached Petersburg at a moment when Russia was entering on this hopeful and fruitful period of internal reform, neither in his published writings nor in any private utterance we know of, does he express much sympathy with those reforms, or show any perception of the advantage that accrues to a nation whose inhabitants interest themselves in public affairs. He never realised that even if a people make for themselves bad laws, the very fact of being invited to think about large practical matters, and being allowed to test their own conclusions in practice, fosters a habit of not fearing to think and to act in accord with one's thought; and that this habit of applying thought to the guidance of practical affairs, overflows into a nation's commerce and industry and agriculture, and ultimately causes the difference between the comparative material security of our Western world and the chronic fear of famine that oppresses many Eastern lands.