OLD AGE
His face had taken on definite lines; had become as it will remain in
the memory of men: the large countenance, crossed by the arch of a
double furrow; the white, bristling eyebrows; the patriarchal beard,
recalling that of the Moses of Dijon. The aged face was gentler and
softer; it bore the traces of illness, of sorrow, of disappointment,
and of affectionate kindness. What a change from the almost animal
brutality of the same face at twenty, and the heavy rigidity of the
soldier of Sebastopol! But the eyes have always the same profound
fixity, the same look of loyalty, which hides nothing and from which
nothing is hidden.
Nine years before his death, in his reply to the Holy Synod (April 17,
1901) Tolstoy had said:
"I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able
also, in peace and gladness, to travel on towards death."
Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "that we should call
no man happy until he is dead."
Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of
possessing?
The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows
had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the
upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of
the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even
in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic
vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad
for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of
the "great and wise Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of
the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the
Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery"; and that China,
at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation
of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.[1]
A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was
decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to
imitate Europe.[2] The persecuted Doukhobors had migrated to Canada,
and there, to the scandal of Tolstoy, they immediately reverted to the
property system.[3] The Gourians were scarcely delivered from the yoke
of the State when they began to destroy those who did not think as they
did; and the Russian troops were called out to put matters in order.
The very Jews, "whose native country had hitherto been the fairest a
man could desire--the Book,"[4] were attacked by the malady of Zionism,
that movement of false nationalism, "which is flesh of the flesh of
contemporary Europeanism, or rather its rickety child."[5]
Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in
the future.
"All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye.
Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates,
until the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which
finally becomes a tree."[6]
But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone;
glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from
Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where _Resurrection_ was
translated, and where his ideas upon "the restitution of the land to
the people" were being propagated.[7] The American papers interviewed
viewed him; the French consulted him on matters of art, or the
separation of Church and State.[8]
But he had not three hundred disciples, and he knew it. Moreover,
he did not take pains to make them. He repulsed the attempts of his
friends to form groups of Tolstoyans.
"We must not go in search of one another, but we must all seek God....
You say: 'Together it is easier.'--What? To labour, to reap, yes. But
to draw near to God--one can only do so in isolation.... I see the
world as an enormous temple in which the light falls from on high and
precisely in the middle. To become united we must all go towards the
light. Then all of us, come together from all directions, will find
ourselves in the company of men we did not look for; in that is the
joy."[9]
How many have found themselves together under the ray which falls from
the dome? What matter! It is enough to be one and alone if one is with
God.
"As only a burning object can communicate fire to other objects, so
only the true faith and life of a man can communicate themselves to
other men and to spread the truth."[10]
Perhaps; but to what point was this isolated faith able to assure
Tolstoy of happiness? How far he was, in his latter days, from the
voluntary calm of a Goethe! One would almost say that he avoided it,
fled from it, hated it.
"One must thank God for being discontented with oneself. If one could
always be so! The discord of life with what ought to be is precisely
the sign of life itself, the movement upwards from the lesser to the
greater, from worse to better. And this discord is the condition of
good. It is an evil when a man is calm and satisfied with himself."[11]
He imagines the following subject for a novel--showing that the
persistent discontent of a Levine or a Besoukhov was not yet extinct in
him:
"I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles,
and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then
orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias,
and finally a Doukhobor. He takes up everything and is always forsaking
everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing, and dies,
forgotten, in a hospital. Dying, he thinks he has wasted his life. And
yet he is a saint."[12]
Had he still doubts--he, so full of faith? Who knows? In a man who has
remained robust in body and mind even into old age life cannot come to
a halt at a definite stage of thought. Life goes onwards.
"Movement is life."[13]
Many things must have changed within him during the last few years.
Did he not modify his opinion of revolutionaries? Who can even say
that his faith in non-resistance to evil was not at length a little
shaken? Even in _Resurrection_ the relations of Nekhludov with the
condemned "politicals" completely change his ideas as to the Russian
revolutionary party.
"Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their
criminal dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency,
their selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them
more closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he
understood that they could not be otherwise."
And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total
self-sacrifice.
Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from
the "intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely
moving amidst the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their
threatening army defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana.
Three tales, published by the _Mercure de France,_[14] which were among
the last pages written by Tolstoy, give us a glimpse of the sorrow
and the perplexity which this spectacle caused him. The years were
indeed remote when the pilgrims wandered through the countryside of
Toula, pious and simple of heart. Now he saw the invasion of starving
wanderers. They came to him every day. Tolstoy, who chatted with them,
was struck by the hatred that animated them; they no longer, as before,
saw the rich as "people who save their souls by distributing alms, but
as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the labouring people."
Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that despair which
makes a man capable of anything.
"It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities
and on the great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do
to modern civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient
civilisation."
So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:
"The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly
terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing
of the curbs, the _convenances_ and public opinion, which are so
strongly developed among European peoples."
Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against
his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that
the rulers and the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by
cries of "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!" Did Tolstoy still condemn
them? We do not know. But when, a few days later, he saw in his own
village the villagers weeping while their sheep and their samovars
were seized and taken from them by callous authorities, he also cried
vengeance in vain against these thieves, "these ministers and their
acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy traffic, or in teaching men to
murder, or condemning men to deportation, prison, or the gallows--these
men, all perfectly convinced that the samovars, sheep, calves, and
linen which they took from the miserable peasants would find their
highest use in furthering the distillation of brandy which poisons the
drinker, in the manufacture of murderous weapons, in the construction
of jails and convict prisons, and above all in the distribution of
appointments to their assistants and themselves."
It is sad, after a whole life lived in the expectation and the
proclamation of the reign of love, to be forced to close ones eye's
in the midst of these threatening visions, and to feel one's whole
position crumbling. It is still sadder for one with the impeccably
truthful conscience of a Tolstoy to be forced to confess to oneself
that one's life has not been lived entirely in accordance with one's
principles.
Here we touch upon the most pitiful point of these latter years--should
we say of the last thirty years?--and we can only touch upon it with a
pious and tentative hand, for this sorrow, of which Tolstoy endeavoured
to keep the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, but to others
who are living, whom he loved, and who loved him.
He was never able to communicate his faith to those who were dearest
to him--his wife and children. We have seen how the loyal comrade, who
had so valiantly shared his artistic life and labour, suffered when he
denied his faith in art for a different and a moral faith, which she
did not understand. Tolstoy suffered no less at feeling that he was
misunderstood by his nearest friend.
"I feel in all my being," he wrote to Teneromo, "the truth of these
words: that the husband and the wife are not separate beings, but are
as one.... I wish most earnestly that I had the power to transmit to
my wife a portion of that religious conscience which gives me the
possibility of sometimes raising myself above the sorrows of life. I
hope that it will be given her; very probably not by me, but by God,
although this conscience is hardly accessible to women."[15]
It seems that this wish was never gratified. Countess Tolstoy loved
and admired the purity of heart, the candid heroism, and the goodness
of the great man who was "as one" with her; she saw that "he marched
ahead of the host and showed men the way they should follow";[16] when
the Holy Synod excommunicated him she bravely undertook his defence
and insisted on sharing the danger which threatened him. But she could
not force herself to believe what she did not believe; and Tolstoy was
too sincere to urge her to pretend--he who loathed the petty deceits
of faith and love even more than the negation of faith and love.[17]
How then could he constrain her, not believing, to modify her life, to
sacrifice her fortune and that of her children?
With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw
Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that "at table, when
the father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and
unbelief."[18] His faith had only slightly affected two or three of his
daughters, of whom one, Marie, was dead. He was morally isolated in the
heart of his family. "He had scarcely any one but his youngest daughter
and his doctor"[19] to understand him.
He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the
social relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing
visitors from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly
curious, who wore him out; he suffered from the "luxury" in which his
family life forced him to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to
believe the accounts of those who saw him in his simple house, with its
almost austere appointments; in his little room, with its iron bed, its
cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But even this poor comfort weighed
upon him; it was a cause of perpetual remorse. In the second of the
tales published by the _Mercure de France_ he bitterly contrasts the
spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of his own house.
"My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, "however useful it may
appear to certain people, loses the greater part of its importance
by the fact that my life is not entirely in agreement with my
professions."[20]
Why did he not realise this agreement? If he could not induce his
family to cut themselves off from the world, why did he not leave them,
go out of their life, thus avoiding the sarcasm and the reproach of
hypocrisy expressed by his enemies, who were only too glad to follow
his example and make it an excuse for denying his doctrines?
He had thought of so doing. For a long time he was quite resolved. A
remarkable letter[21] of his has recently been found and published; it
was written to his wife on the 8th of June, 1897. The greater part of
it is printed below. Nothing could better express the secret of this
loving and unhappy heart:
"For a long time, dear Sophie, I have been suffering from the discord
between my life and my beliefs. I cannot force you to change your life
or your habits. Neither have I hitherto been able to leave you, for I
felt that by my departure I should deprive the children, still very
young, of the little influence I might be able to exert over them, and
also that I should cause you all a great deal of pain. But I cannot
continue to live as I have lived during these last sixteen years,[22]
now struggling against you and irritating you, now succumbing myself
to the influences and the seductions to which I am accustomed and which
surround me. I have resolved now to do what I have wished to do for
a long time: to go away.... Just as the Hindoos, when they arrive at
their sixtieth year, go away into the forest; just as every aged and
religious man wishes to consecrate the last years of his life to God
and not to jesting, punning, family tittle-tattle, and lawn-tennis; so
do I with all my strength desire peace and solitude, and, if not an
absolute harmony, at least not this crying discord between my whole
life and my conscience. If I had gone away openly there would have
been supplications, discussions, arguments; I should have weakened,
and perhaps I should not have carried out my decision, and it ought to
be carried out. I beg you therefore to forgive me if my action grieves
you. And you in particular, Sophie--let me go, do not try to find me,
do not be angry with me, and do not blame me. The fact that I have left
you does not prove that I have any grievance against you.... I know
that you _could not, could not_ see and think with me; this is why you
could not change your life, could not sacrifice yourself to something
you did not understand. I do not blame you at all; on the contrary, I
remember with love and gratitude the thirty-five long years of our life
together, and above all the first half of that period, when, with the
courage and devotion of your mother's nature, you valiantly fulfilled
what you saw as your mission. You have given to me and the world what
you had to give. You have given much maternal love and made great
sacrifices. ... But in the latter period of our life, in the last
fifteen years, our paths have lain apart. I cannot believe that I am
the guilty one; I know that I have changed; it was not your doing, nor
the world's; it was because I could not do otherwise. I cannot blame
you for not having followed me, and I shall always remember with love
what you have given me.... Goodbye, my dear Sophie. I love you."
"_The fact that I have left you_." He did not leave her. Poor letter!
It seemed to him that it was enough to write, and his resolution would
be fulfilled. ... Having written, his resolution was already exhausted.
"If I had gone away openly there would have been supplications, I
should have weakened." ... There was no need of supplications, of
discussion; it was enough for him to see, a moment later, those whom he
wished to leave; he felt that he _could not, could not_ leave them; and
he took the letter in his pocket and buried it among his papers, with
this subscription:
"Give this, after my death, to my wife Sophie Andreyevna."
And this was the end of his plan of departure. Was he not strong
enough? Was he not capable of sacrificing his affections to his God? In
the Christian annals there is no lack of saints with tougher hearts,
who never hesitated to trample fearlessly underfoot both their own
affections and those of others. But how could he? He was not of their
company; he was weak: he was a man; and it is for that reason that we
love him.
More than fifteen years earlier, on a page full of heart-breaking
wretchedness, he had asked himself: "Well, Leo Tolstoy, are you living
according to the principles you profess?"
He replied miserably:
"I am dying of shame; I am guilty; I am contemptible.... Yet compare
my former life with my life of to-day. You will see that I am trying
to live according to the laws of God. I have not done the thousandth
part of what I ought to do, and I am confused; but I have failed to do
it not because I did not wish to do it, but because I could not. ...
Blame me, but not the path I am taking. If I know the road to my house,
and if I stagger along it like a drunken man, does that show that the
road is bad? Show me another, or follow me along the true path, as I
am ready to follow you. But do not discourage me, do not rejoice in
my distress, do not joyfully cry out: 'Look! He said he was going to
the house, and he is falling into the ditch!' No, do not be glad, but
help me, support me!... Help me! My heart is torn with despair lest we
should all be astray; and when I make every effort to escape you, at
each effort, instead of having compassion, point at me with your finger
crying, 'Look, he is falling into the ditch with us!'"[23]
When death was nearer, he wrote once more:
"I am not a saint: I have never professed to be one. I am a man who
allows himself to be carried away, and who often does not say all that
he thinks and feels; not because he does not want to, but because he
cannot, because it often happens that he exaggerates or is mistaken. In
my actions it is still worse. I am altogether a weak man with vicious
habits, who wishes to serve the God of truth, but who is constantly
stumbling. If I am considered as a man who cannot be mistaken, then
each of my mistakes must appear as a lie or a hypocrisy. But if I am
regarded as a weak man, I appear then what I am in reality: a pitiable
creature, yet sincere; who has constantly and with all his soul
desired, and who still desires, to become a good man, a good servant of
God."
Thus he remained, tormented by remorse, pursued by the mute reproaches
of disciples more energetic and less human than himself;[24] tortured
by his weakness and indecision, torn between the love of his family
and the love of God--until the day when a sudden fit of despair, and
perhaps the fever which rises at the approach of death, drove him
forth from the shelter of his house, out upon the roads, wandering,
fleeing, knocking at the doors of a convent, then resuming his flight,
and at last falling upon the way, in an obscure little village, never
to rise again.[25] On his death-bed he wept, not for himself, but for
the unhappy; and he said, in the midst of his sobs:
"There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering: why do
you think only of me?"
Then it came--it was Sunday, November 20, 1910, a little after six in
the morning--the "deliverance," as he named it: "Death, blessed Death."
[1] Letter to the Chinese, October, 1906. (_Further Letters_).
[2] Tolstoy expressed a fear that this might happen in the above letter.
[3] "It was hardly worth while to refuse military and police service
only to revert to property, which is maintained only by those two
services. Those who enter the service and profit by property act better
than those who refuse all service and enjoy property." (Letter to the
Doukhobors of Canada, 1899. _Further Letters_).
[4] In the _Conversations with Teneromo_ there is a fine page dealing
with "the wise Jew, who, immersed in this Book, has not seen the
centuries crumble above his head, nor the peoples that appear and
disappear from the face of the earth."
[5] "To see the progress of Europe in the horrors of the modern State,
the bloodstained State, and to wish to create a new _Judenstaat_ is an
abominable sin." (_Ibid._)
[6] _Appeal to Political Men,_ 1905.
[7] In the appendix to _The Great Crime_ and in the French translation
of _Advice to the Ruled_ is the appeal of a Japanese society for the
_Re-establishment of the Liberty of the Earth._
[8] Letter to Paul Sabatier, November 7, 1906. (_Further Letters._)
[9] Letters to Teneromo, June, 1882, and to a friend, November, 1901.
(_Further Letters_.)
[10] _War and Revolution._
[11] _War and Revolution._
[12] Perhaps this refers to the History of a Doukhobor, the title of
which figures in the list of Tolstoy's unpublished works.
[13] "Suppose that all the men who had the truth were to be installed
all together on an island. Would that be life?" (To a friend, March,
1901. _Further Letters._)
[14] December 1, 1910.
[15] May 16, 1892. Tolstoy's wife was then mourning the loss of a
little boy, and he could do nothing to console her.
[16] Letter of January, 1883.
[17] "I should never reproach any one for having no religion. The
shocking thing is when men lie and pretend to religion." And further:
"May God preserve us from pretending to love; it is worse than hatred."
[18] _Revue des Deux Mondes,_ December 15, 1910.
[19] _Ibid._
[20] To a friend, December 10, 1903.
[21] _Figaro,_ December 27, 1910. It was found among Tolstoy's papers
after his death.
[22] This state of suffering dates, as we see, from 1881; that is,
from the winter passed in Moscow, and Tolstoy's discovery of social
wretchedness.
[23] Letter to a friend, 1895 (the French version being published in
_Plaisirs cruels,_ 1895).
[24] It seems that during his last few years, and especially during the
last few months, he was influenced by Vladimir-Grigorovitch Tchertkoff,
a devoted friend, who, long established in England, had consecrated
his fortune to the publication and distribution of Tolstoy's complete
works. Tchertkoff had been violently attacked by Leo, Tolstoy's eldest
son. But although he was accused of being a rebellious and unmanageable
spirit, no one could doubt his absolute devotion; and without approving
of the almost inhuman harshness of certain actions apparently committed
under his inspiration (such as the will by which Tolstoy deprived his
wife of all property in his writings without exception, including his
private correspondence), we are forced to believe that he thought more
of Tolstoy's fame than Tolstoy himself.
[25] The _Correspondance_ of the _Union pour la Verili_ publishes, in
its issue for January 1, 1911, an interesting account of this flight.
Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly on October 28, 1910 (November
10th European style) about five o'clock in the morning. He was
accompanied by Dr. Makovitski; his daughter Alexandra, whom Tchertkoff
calls "his most intimate collaborator," was in the secret. At six in
the evening of the same day he reached the monastery of Optina, one of
the most celebrated sanctuaries of Russia, which he had often visited
in pilgrimage. He passed the night there; the next morning he wrote
a long article on the death penalty. On the evening of October 29th
(November 11th) he went to the monastery of Chamordino, where his
sister Marie was a nun. He dined with her, and spoke of how he would
have wished to pass the end of his life at Optina, "performing the
humblest tasks, on condition that he was not forced to go to church."
He slept at Chamordino, and next morning took a walk through the
neighbouring village, where he thought of taking a lodging; returning
to his sister in the afternoon. At five o'clock his daughter Alexandra
unexpectedly arrived. She doubtless told him that his retreat was
known, and that he was being followed; they left at once in the night.
"Tolstoy, Alexandra, and Makovitski were making for the Koselk station,
probably intending to gain the southern provinces, or perhaps the
Doukhobor colonies in the Caucasus." On the way Tolstoy fell ill at the
railway-station of Astapovo and was forced to take to his bed. It was
there that he died.