Now, while Dostoievsky is the incarnation of the first type, of Ivan the Fool, Tolstoy is the incarnation of the second. It is true that, at a certain stage of his career, Tolstoy announced to the world that the ideal of Ivan Durak was the only ideal worth following. He perceives this aim with clearness, and, in preaching it, he has made a multitude of disciples; the only thing he has never been able to do is to make the supreme submission, the final surrender, and to become the type himself.
We know everything about Tolstoy, not only from the biographical writings of Fet and Behrs, but from his own autobiography, his novels, and his Confession. He gives us a panorama of events down to the smallest detail of his long career, as well as of every phase of feeling, and every shade and mood of his spiritual existence. The English reader who wishes to be acquainted with all the important facts of Tolstoy’s material and spiritual life cannot do better than read Mr. Aylmer Maude’s Life of Tolstoy, which compresses into one well-planned and admirably executed volume all that is of interest during the first fifty years of Tolstoy’s career. In reading this book a phrase of Tourgeniev’s occurs to one. “Man is the same, from the cradle to the grave.” Tolstoy had been called inconsistent; but the student of his life and work, far from finding inconsistency, will rather be struck by the unvarying and obstinate consistency of his ideas. Here, for instance, is an event recorded in Tolstoy’s Confession (p. 1):
“I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy, Vladimir Miliutin, long since dead, visited us one Sunday, and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. The discovery was that there is no God at all, and all we are taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council, and we all, I remember, became animated, and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible.”
There is already the germ of the man who was afterwards to look with such independent eyes on the accepted beliefs and ideas of mankind, to play havoc with preconceived opinions, and to establish to his own satisfaction whether what was true for others was true for himself or not. Later he says:
“I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. Before I left the university, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed anything I had been taught.”[7]
A Russian writer, M. Kurbski, describes how, when he first met Tolstoy, he was overwhelmed by the look in Tolstoy’s eyes. They were more than eyes, he said; they were like electric searchlights, which penetrated into the depths of your mind, and, like a photographic lens, seized and retained for ever a positive picture. In his Childhood and Youth, Tolstoy gives us the most vivid, the most natural, the most sensitive picture of childhood and youth that has ever been penned by the hand of man. And yet, after reading it, one is left half-unconsciously with the impression that the author feels there is something wrong, something unsatisfactory behind it all.
Tolstoy then passes on to describe the life of a grown-up man, in The Morning of a Landowner, in which he tells how he tried to work in his own home, on his property, and to teach the peasants, and how nothing came of his experiments. And again we have the feeling of something unsatisfactory, and something wanting, something towards which the man is straining, and which escapes him.
A little later, Tolstoy goes to the Caucasus, to the war, where life is primitive and simple, where he is nearer to nature, and where man himself is more natural. And then we have The Cossacks, in which Tolstoy’s searchlights are thrown upon the primitive life of the old huntsman, the Cossack, Yeroshka, who lives as the grass lives, without care, without grief, and without reflection. Once more we feel that the soul of the writer is dissatisfied, still searching for something he has not found.
In 1854, Tolstoy took part in the Crimean War, which supplied him with the stuff for what are perhaps the most truthful pictures of war that have ever been written. But even here, we feel he has not yet found his heart’s desire. Something is wrong. He was recommended for the St. George’s Cross, but owing to his being without some necessary official document at the time of his recommendation, he failed to receive it. This incident is a symbol of the greater failure, the failure to achieve the inward happiness that he is seeking—a solid ground to tread on, a bridge to the infinite, a final place of peace. In his private diary there is an entry made at the commencement of the war, while he was at Silistria, which runs as follows: