When I suggested that a town question had also arisen now, besides the claim of peasants to the land, he admitted that town influence was the greatest danger. “Towns,” he said, “are the places where mankind has begun to rot, and unhappily the rottenness spreads. The mistake of our Liberal politicians in the towns is that they are always preaching the blessings of some English or American constitution. But constitutions of that kind, having once been realized, have already become things of the past. They belong to a different age from ours, and an ideal, whether in statesmanship or art, is never a thing of the past, but always of the future. For Russia as she exists now, we ought to aim at something entirely different from your worn-out methods of government.”
So he conversed through the winter morning, eager to speak, and as eager to hear. He asked much about Central Africa from which I had lately returned, and much about the new national movement in Ireland, nor should I have been surprised if he had continued the conversation in Gaelic, so fresh and vigorous was his interest in the world. Only when I told him rather carelessly, that the intellectual movement there was producing a large number of poets, his face fell, and he turned to other things, merely remarking that poets were very little good. In passing, he said he had been pleased to find that his fellow Puritan, Mr. Bernard Shaw, thought very lightly of Shakespeare, in whom he had never himself discovered any satisfaction, though he had read him once all through in English, and twice in German.
But it was not his interest in the common affairs of the world that gave him his true attraction. Apart from all this, there hung over him that separate and distinguishing grace which our fathers called sanctity and considered a thing to be worshipped. It was the grace of a toilsome and abstemious life, unflinchingly devoted to one high aim, and sacrificing all worldly pleasure and success to an ideal which could never be reached. I believe the modern name for it is fanaticism.
I say one high aim, for I see no reason to agree with the many critics who draw a sharp dividing line in his career and in the process of his mind. All the principles of his later teaching are to be found illustrated in the two great imaginative works of his earlier manhood, and if there is any fault to be found with a life so courageous and inspiring, I should seek it only in a rather inhuman and remorseless consistency of reason—a logic which, having for instance, condemned the pleasures of sense, would doom the human race to rapid extinction because life cannot be maintained and handed on without pleasure. But such returns to the strict Christianity of earlier centuries ought not to astonish people who call themselves Christians, especially as there seems no danger at present that the logic of their teaching will be followed in human action. And, in any case, I should rather leave it to others to reveal such limitations as they may find in so beneficient and gracious a personality.
TOLSTOY IN MIDDLE AGE.
CHAPTER VI
THE STATE OF MOSCOW
On the morning of Saturday, December 9th, the day after I had arrived in Moscow, I happened to be passing the unfinished buildings of the empty University. Minute snow was lashing through the air before a bitter wind, but it thawed as it fell, and people in goloshes went slopping about among the filthy puddles of the street.
Trailing in disorder through the dirt and wind, mixed up with the market people and the little open cabs like sledges that were always dashing up and down with men and women in furs, came a loose string of soldiers, slowly making their way westward. They had just passed the canvas booths where butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and other loyalists set upon the students with knives the month before; they had reached the point where the soldiers from behind walls fired blindly into the thick of the unarmed procession which accompanied the funeral of the student Baumann. There they halted, because the cross road which passes the great Riding School Barrack and cuts the University in half was blocked with traffic, and then a few passers-by began to look at them curiously.
They were not to be called a column, nor were they organized as an advanced party. They were not organized at all; but a few cavalry came first, their hairy little horses throwing up a steam into the wind; then a few straggling infantry—not more than half a battalion—covered with filth, their uniforms torn and patched, some in low, flat caps like our own men, some in high, furry caps, matted with mud and snow. And under the caps were faces yellow, thin, and as though bemused with wonder. Behind the infantry followed a rambling line of various kinds of cart, and inside the carts were stretched muffled and pallid forms, their heads or arms or feet bound up with dirty and blood-stained bandages.