Then came Lucerne. It is told in that story how the same Neklúdoff, bitterly struck by the indifference of a party of English tourists who sat on the balcony of a rich Swiss hotel and refused to throw even a few pennies to a poor singer to whose songs they had listened with evident emotion, brings the singer to the hotel, takes him to the dining-hall, to the great scandal of the English visitors, and treats him there to a bottle of champagne. The feelings of Neklúdoff are certainly very just; but while reading this story one suffers all the while for the poor musician, and experiences a sense of anger against the Russian nobleman who uses him as a rod to chastise the tourists, without even noticing how he makes the old man miserable during this lesson in morals. The worst of it is that the author, too, seems not to remark the false note which rings in the conduct of Neklúdoff, nor to realise how a man with really humane feelings would have taken the singer to some small wine-shop and would have had with him a friendly talk over a picholette of common wine. Yet we see again all Tolstóy’s force of talent. He so honestly, so fully, and so truly describes the uneasiness of the singer during the whole scene that the reader’s unavoidable conclusion is that although the young aristocrat was right in protesting against stone-heartedness, his ways were as unsympathetic as those of the self-contented Englishmen at the hotel. Tolstóy’s artistic power carries him beyond and above his theories.
This is not the only case where such a remark may be made concerning Tolstóy’s work. His appreciation of this or that action, of this or that of his heroes, may be wrong; his own “philosophy” may be open to objection; but the force of his descriptive talent and his literary honesty are always so great, that he will often make the feelings and actions of his heroes speak against their creator, and prove something very different from what he intended to prove.[16] This is probably why Turguéneff, and apparently other literary friends, too, told him: “Don’t put your ‘philosophy into your art.’ Trust to your artistic feeling, and you will create great things.” In fact, notwithstanding Tolstóy’s distrust of science, I must say that I always feel in reading his works that he is possessed of the most scientific insight I know of among artists. He may be wrong in his conclusions, but never is he wrong in his statement of data. True science and true art are not hostile to each other, but always work in harmony.
SMALL STORIES—THE COSSACKS
Several of Tolstóy’s novels and stories appeared in the years 1857-1862 (The Snow-Storm, The Two Hussars, Three Deaths, The Cossacks) and each one of them won new admiration for his talent. The first is a mere trifle, and yet it is a gem of art; it concerns the wanderings of a traveller during a snow-storm, in the plains of Central Russia. The same remark is true of the Two Hussars, in which two generations are sketched on a few pages with striking accuracy. As to the deeply pantheistic Three Deaths, in which the death of a rich lady, a poor horse-driver, and a birch-tree are contrasted, it is a piece of poetry in prose that deserves a place beside Goethe’s best pieces of pantheistic poetry, while for its social significance it is already a forerunner of the Tolstóy of the later epoch.
The Cossacks is an autobiographical novel, and relates to the time, already mentioned on a previous page, when Tolstóy at twenty-four, running away from the meaningless life he was living, went to Pyatigórsk, and then to a lonely Cossack village on the Térek, hunted there in company with the old Cossack Yeróshka and the young Lukáshka, and found in the poetical enjoyment of a beautiful nature, in the plain life of these squatters, and in the mute adoration of a Cossack girl, the awakening of his wonderful literary genius.
The appearance of this novel, in which one feels a most genuine touch of genius, provoked violent discussions. It was begun in 1852, but was not published till 1860, when all Russia was awaiting with anxiety the results of the work of the Abolition of Serfdom Committees, foreseeing that when serfdom should be done away with a complete destruction of all other rotten, obsolete, and barbarous institutions of past ages would have to begin. For this great work of reform Russia looked to Western civilisation for inspiration and for teachings. And there came a young writer who, following in the steps of Rousseau, revolted against that civilisation and preached a return to nature and the throwing off of the artificialities we call civilised life, which are in reality a poor substitute for the happiness of free work amidst a free nature. Everyone knows by this time the dominant idea of The Cossacks. It is the contrast between the natural life of these sons of the prairies and the artificial life of the young officer thrown in their midst. He tells of strong men who are similar to the American squatters, and have been developed in the Steppes at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, by a perilous life, in which force, endurance, and calm courage are a first necessity. Into their midst comes one of the sickly products of our semi-intellectual town life, and at every step he feels himself the inferior of the Cossack Lukáshka. He wishes to do something on a grand scale, but has neither the intellectual nor the physical force to accomplish it. Even his love is not the strong healthy love of the prairie man, but a sort of slight excitement of the nerves, which evidently will not last, and which only produces a similar restlessness in the Cossack girl, but cannot carry her away. And when he talks to her of love, in the force of which he himself does not believe, she sends him off with the words: “Go away, you weakling!”
Some saw in that powerful novel such glorification of the semi-savage state as that in which writers of the eighteenth century, and especially Rousseau, are supposed to have indulged. There is in Tolstóy nothing of the sort, as there was nothing of the sort in Rousseau. But Tolstóy saw that in the life of the Cossacks there is more vitality, more vigour, more power, than in his well-born hero’s life—and he told it in a beautiful and impressive form. His hero—like whom there are thousands upon thousands—has none of the powers that come from manual work and struggle with nature; and neither has he those powers which knowledge and true civilisation might have given him. A real intellectual power is not asking itself at every moment, “Am I right, or am I wrong?” It feels that there are principles in which it is not wrong. The same is true of a moral force: it knows that to such an extent it can trust to itself. But, like so many thousands of men in the so-called educated classes, Neklúdoff has neither of these powers. He is a weakling, and Tolstóy brought out his intellectual and moral frailty with a distinctness that was bound to produce a deep impression.
EDUCATIONAL WORK
In the years 1859-1862 the struggle between the “fathers” and the “sons” which called forth violent attacks against the young generation, even from such an “objective” writer as Gontcharóff—to say nothing of Písemskiy and several others,—was going on all over Russia. But we do not know which side had Tolstóy’s sympathy. It must be said, though, that most of this time he was abroad, with his elder brother Nicholas, who died of consumption in the south of France. All we know is that the failure of Western civilisation in attaining any approach to well-being and equality for the great masses of the people deeply struck Tolstóy; and we are told by Venguéroff that the only men of mark whom he went to see during this journey abroad were Auerbach, who wrote at that time his Schwartzwald stories from the life of the peasants and edited popular almanacks, and Proudhon, who was then in exile at Brussels. Tolstóy returned to Russia at the moment when the serfs were freed, accepted the position of a mirovóy posrédnik, or arbitrator of peace between the landlords and the freed serfs, and, settling at Yásnaya Polyána, began there his work of education of children. This he started on entirely independent lines,—that is, on purely anarchistic principles, totally free from the artificial methods of education which had been worked out by German pedagogists, and were then greatly admired in Russia. There was no sort of discipline in his school. Instead of working out programmes according to which the children are to be taught, the teacher, Tolstóy said, must learn from the children themselves what to teach them, and must adapt his teaching to the individual tastes and capacities of each child. Tolstóy carried this out with his pupils, and obtained excellent results. His methods, however, have as yet received but little attention; and only one great writer—another poet, William Morris,—has advocated (in News from Nowhere) the same freedom in education. But we may be sure that some day Tolstóy’s Yásnaya Polyána papers, studied by some gifted teacher, as Rousseau’s Emile was studied by Froebel, will become the starting point of an educational reform much deeper than the reforms of Pestalozzi and Froebel.
It is now known that a violent end to this educational experiment was put by the Russian Government. During Tolstóy’s absence from his estate a searching was made by the gendarmes, who not only frightened to death Tolstóy’s old aunt (she fell ill after that) but visited every corner of the house and read aloud, with cynical comments, the most intimate diary which the great writer had kept since his youth. More searchings were promised, so that Tolstóy intended to emigrate for ever to London, and warned Alexander II., through the Countess A. A. Tolstáya that he kept a loaded revolver by his side and would shoot down the first police officer who would dare to enter his house. The school had evidently to be closed.