All the philosophy and wisdom of the world have never improved on the teachings of the Founder of Christianity. What the individual and society need to-day is not Socialism, Communism, or Nihilism; no temporary palliative sought in political, social, or financial Reform; what we each need is a closer personal contact with the simple truths of the New Testament. The last word on all political, philosophical, and social questions may still be found in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a significant fact, that Tolstoi, after a varied and long experience of human life, after reviewing all the systems of thought that have influenced modern society, should have finally arrived and found rest in the statements that most of us learned in childhood from our mothers' lips.
II
GOGOL
NIKOLAI VASSILIEVICH GOGOL was born at Sorotchinetz, in Little Russia, in March, 1809. The year in which he appeared on the planet proved to be the literary annus mirabilis of the century; for in that same twelvemonth were born Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Abraham Lincoln, Poe, Gladstone, and Holmes. His father was a lover of literature, who wrote dramatic pieces for his own amusement, and who spent his time on the old family estates, not in managing the farms, but in wandering about the fields, and beholding the fowls of the air. The boy inherited much from his father; but, unlike Turgenev, he had the best of all private tutors, a good mother, of whom his biographer says, Elle demeure toujours sa plus intime amie.*
* For the facts in Gogol's life, I have relied chiefly on the doctor's thesis by Raina Tyrneva, Aix, 1901.
At the age of twelve, Nikolai was sent away to the high school at Nezhin, a town near Kiev. There he remained from 1821 to 1828. He was an unpromising student, having no enthusiasm for his lessons, and showing no distinction either in scholarship or deportment. Fortunately, however, the school had a little theatre of its own, and Gogol, who hated mathematics, and cared little for the study of modern languages, here found an outlet for all his mental energy. He soon became the acknowledged leader of the school in matters dramatic, and unconsciously prepared himself for his future career. Like Schiller, he wrote a tragedy, and called it The Robbers.
I think it is probable that Gogol's hatred for the school curriculum inspired a passage in Taras Bulba, though here he ostensibly described the pedagogy of the fifteenth century.
"The style of education in that age differed widely from the manner of life. These scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtleties were decidedly out of consonance with the times, never had any connection with and never were encountered in actual life. Those who studied them could not apply their knowledge to anything whatever, not even the least scholastic of them. The learned men of those days were even more incapable than the rest, because farther removed from all experience."*
* Translated by Isabel Hapgood.
In December, 1828, Gogol took up his residence in St. Petersburg, bringing with him some manuscripts that he had written while at school. He had the temerity to publish one, which was so brutally ridiculed by the critics, that the young genius, in despair, burned all the unsold copies--an unwitting prophecy of a later and more lamentable conflagration. Then he vainly tried various means of subsistence. Suddenly he decided to seek his fortune in America, but he was both homesick and seasick before the ship emerged from the Baltic, and from Lübeck he fled incontinently back to Petersburg. Then he tried to become an actor, but lacked the necessary strength of voice. For a short time he held a minor official position, and a little later was professor of history, an occupation he did not enjoy, saying after his resignation, "Now I am a free Cossack again." Meanwhile his pen was steadily busy, and his sketches of farm life in the Ukraine attracted considerable attention among literary circles in the capital.