That is Yale, and the spirit of Yale; the academic apologist of the most efficient system of plunder yet seen upon the face of the earth. Capitalistic exploitation is Yale’s religion; and you will note that in all essentials it is identical with the religion of Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas. When the tsar’s armies marched out to protect the lumber concessions of the grand dukes on the Yalu River, the priests and archbishops in the Kremlin officially blessed the ikons. And just so do chaplains of New Haven bless the flags when the American marines set out to shoot up natives in the West Indies and Central America, for failing to pay their interest upon the bonds of J. P. Morgan and his Yale trustees.
This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.
Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes them—precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion—just as Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the “Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers through a hundred thousand years.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to the Bull-dog.”
Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t get it away from them.”
CHAPTER LXXXVI
THE PEASANT COUNT
We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that, just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with shaping it.
Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man, therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police system which strangled the life of Russia.
He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict, “Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer.
He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; but still his conscience troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort. Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the first one who entered the house.