of his writing as paradoxical. It is much more likely that we who are
doing and thinking exactly like our neighbors, without thinking if it
is a good thing in itself, are the odd ones, or rather the lazy ones,
because we cannot be bothered to disagree, to incur the disapproval
of our friends, or to have them laughing at us. Emerson said that in
life you must choose between Truth and Repose. By repose he means that
you swallow your convictions for the sake of a quiet life—that you act
always with the majority, or largest number of people, and shout with
the biggest crowd. It is very comfortable to have people agreeing with
you, and to live at ease and in accord with your neighbors, but to do
this you must make up your mind to think very little and never to have
a cause too much at heart, or you will be sure to offend somebody.
You must shut your eyes to the horrors of war, of poverty, of hungry
children, and say it is no use bothering or criticizing, as these
things cannot be remedied. The man who says they can be remedied is
often looked upon with suspicion or contempt, and even anger. All the
greatest men and women have given their allegiance to truth, as we know
by reading history. Thoreau was one of these. He lived at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, when people were no longer sent to the
stake for holding independent views, but they were made, as they still
are now, to suffer all the same. Thoreau, like Garrison and Tolstoy
and others of our heroes, thought that conscience should be above the
State, and that men should be men first and subjects afterwards. But he
was much more consistent than most people. He put himself to a great
deal of trouble to carry out his principles. It was not enough for him
to preach against the things he disapproved of—he lived and acted his
disapproval. He pleaded in public for John Brown when he was condemned
to death, and went to prison for a night for refusing to pay a tax in
support of what he considered an unjust war. He did not enjoy this; it
was a trouble and a bother, but Thoreau did what he thought right.
His was a pure and courageous spirit; he never said a thing for the
sake of pleasing, and he saw with a clear, unprejudiced eye the
futility, the stupidity, the waste of energy, and the sadness of much
we have come to look upon as part of existence itself. But Thoreau was
always, to the end of his rather short life, full of hope and trust. He
would set about improving things by improving himself. His greatness
lay in his originality and independence of character. He thrashed out
questions for himself, and threw a fresh and illuminating light on
them. He was a rebel in his quiet way, as Garibaldi or Cromwell were
rebels on the field of battle.
XII
TOLSTOY
1828–1910
The true life is the common life of all—not the life of the one. All
must labor for the life of others.
Tolstoy, one of the greatest novelists and the greatest thinkers of the
nineteenth century, was a Russian.
His father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, and his mother, Princess Marie
Volkonsky, were both aristocrats, whose ancestors had been well known
and important people for some generations.
Yasnaya Polyana (which means “Bright Glade”), where Leo Tolstoy was
born, belonged to his mother. It was a very pretty place, and consisted
of a large wooden house surrounded by woods and avenues of lime-trees,
and with a river and four lakes and a lot of property belonging to it.
Tolstoy’s mother died when he was a year and a half old, so he could
not remember her; but all he heard about her made him love her memory.
He tells us that she appeared to him as “a creature so elevated,
fine, and spiritual,” that often, during his struggles to be good and
overcome temptation, he prayed to her soul to help him, and that such
prayer always did. She seems to have been a gifted and delightful
woman, speaking five languages and playing the piano exceptionally
well. She had a gift for telling stories too. At balls, it is said, her
young girl-friends would leave the dance and gather together in a dark
room to hear her tell a story, for the Princess had to have the room
darkened or she felt shy.
Tolstoy’s mother was hot-tempered, yet self-controlled. She was
generous and hardly ever condemned anybody, and she was very truthful.
Her son Leo inherited many of her qualities.
Tolstoy lost his father when he was nine years old, but he remembered
him quite well, and writes of him as a good, conscientious man, who
spent his life looking after his estate, not very cleverly, but who
was especially humane and kind for those days, as he never beat his
serfs and was considered lacking in firmness. He was, however, an
independent-minded man, who refused to bow down before the will of
the Russian Government: indeed, he refused always to serve under it.
Tolstoy had a great love and admiration for his father, but nothing
like the feeling he had for the memory of his mother.
[Illustration: TOLSTOY IN 1906
From Aylmer Maude’s “Life of Tolstoy”]
Tolstoy and his three brothers and a sister were brought up at Yasnaya
Polyana by a distant relative, whom they called Aunt Tatiana. She was
rather a remarkable character, and Leo was devoted to her. He tells
us she greatly helped to form his character. Writing about her,
he says: “Aunt Tatiana had the greatest influence on my life. From
earliest childhood she taught me the spiritual delight of love. She
taught me this joy not by words, but by her whole being she filled me
with love. I saw, _I felt_ how she enjoyed loving, and I understood
the joy of love. This was the first thing. Secondly, she taught me the
delights of an unhurried, quiet life.”
His aunt used to welcome all sorts of pilgrims to Yasnaya, beggars and
monks and nuns, people despised by the rest of the world, so that Leo
was brought up in a strange, almost mediæval atmosphere—an atmosphere
that was religious, poetical, simple, and very far from worldly. We
find Tolstoy after a long life of varied experiences returning again
to the habits and beliefs of his youth, and to a life of humility and
simple living.
Tolstoy had the greatest admiration for his eldest brother Nicholas,
who, he always said, was a much greater man than himself; but Nicholas
died before he had time to show what he was capable of. This brother
invented a game called “Ant Brothers.” He told Leo and his two
brothers of six and seven that he possessed a secret and, when it was
known, all men would become happy; there would be no more disease, no
trouble, and no one would be angry with any one else; all would love
one another and become “ant brothers.” The game consisted of sitting
under chairs surrounded by boxes, screening themselves from view with
handkerchiefs, and cuddling against one another in the dark. Tolstoy
says: “The ‘ant brotherhood’ was revealed to us, but not the chief
secret: the way for all men to cease suffering any misfortune, to leave
off quarreling and being angry, and become continuously happy: this
secret Nicholas said he had written on a green stick and buried by the
road at the edge of a certain ravine, at which spot (since my body must
be buried somewhere) I have asked to be buried in memory of Nicholas.”
Writing when he was over seventy, Tolstoy says: “The ideal of ant
brothers lovingly clinging to one another, though not under two
armchairs curtained by handkerchiefs, but of all mankind under the wide
dome of heaven, has remained the same for me. As I then believed that
there existed a little green stick, whereon was written the message
which could destroy all evil in men and give them universal welfare, so
I now believe that such truth exists, and will be revealed to men and
will give them all it promises.”
Tolstoy’s early childhood was on the whole very happy, in spite of
his far-seeing, sensitive, and rather morbid nature. At times he was
certainly very miserable, but, on the other hand, he had an immense
power of enjoyment, and loved games and horses and dogs and the country
itself, and his affections were very strong.
One of the things that worried him as a child was his own looks; he
thought himself so plain. He says in his autobiographical novel
“Childhood”: “I imagined there could be no happiness on earth for a
man with so broad a nose, such thick lips, and such small gray eyes as
mine. I asked God to perform a miracle and change me into a handsome
boy....” He tried to improve his appearance by clipping his eyebrows,
with most disastrous results, as of course he was uglier and unhappier
than ever.
Tolstoy showed no particular talent for anything as a child, though he
was very original, and quite determined not to do things like other
people. When he came into the drawing-room, for instance, he insisted
upon bowing to people backwards, bending his head the wrong way, and
saluting each person thus in turn. He was not good at his lessons,
and mentions somewhere that a student who came to teach him and his
brothers said about them: “Serge both wishes and can, Dmitry wishes
but can’t (This was not true), and Leo neither wishes nor can (This I
think was perfectly true).” This was characteristic of Tolstoy, who
was always hard on himself. But if the tutor lived to see what Tolstoy
became, he must have been rather ashamed of his lack of perception.
Before Tolstoy was sixteen he entered a university with his brothers.
There was no doubt that, like many other young people, he hated study,
though he worked hard and passed well in languages. In history and
geography he failed, and being asked to name the French seaports,
he could not remember a single one. He left the university rather
disgusted with himself and despising intellectual things. His
companions had not really understood him, for he was a strange mixture.
Sometimes he was very proud and aristocratic, yet with advanced Liberal
views; and he was moody, at one moment wildly gay, at another sunk in
gloom. He always looked upon the worst side of himself, and wrote in
his diary that he was awkward, uncleanly, irritable, a bore to others,
ignorant, intolerant, and shamefaced as a child: there was no end to
the names he called himself. He admits that he is honest and that he
loves goodness, but on the whole he is very unfair to himself, for the
reason that he had set up such a high ideal to live up to.
Now he intended, though only nineteen, to devote himself to his
peasants. He went back to his property with great zeal for reform. He
knew of the sufferings of the serfs, the famines and revolts. For a
time he worked among them and learned to know all about their lives.
But he was too young, and lacked patience at present to do much good.
After six months, rather discouraged and disappointed, he was off on
a different experience. He made his home now at St. Petersburg, where
he was most frivolous and idle. He understood quite well what a stupid
life he was leading, and in a religious book he wrote in after years,
called “My Confession,” he says that though he honestly desired to
be good, he stood alone in his search after goodness. Every time he
expressed the longings of his heart for a virtuous life, he met with
contempt and mocking laughter, but every time he was frivolous or
wicked, he was praised and encouraged.
Yet on the whole this gay life at St. Petersburg was not altogether
useless. It taught him something, and he was not really spoilt by it.
He was big enough and intelligent enough to see the utter futility
and uselessness of such a life. It gave him, he says, a scorn for
aristocracy and the life of rich people generally, whose whole
existence was “a mania of selfishness.”
Tolstoy’s favorite brother Nicholas, who was serving in the Russian
army, saw what an unsatisfactory state his brother was in, and so
persuaded Leo to become a soldier and join him in the Caucasus. This
Leo was only too glad to do. He says in a letter at that time, “God
willing, I will amend and become a steady man at last.”
Now, the open-air, primitive life in this part of Russia quite restored
Tolstoy to himself, and he began to write. His first book, “Childhood,”
was written and published while he was there. This novel, though not
strictly speaking a history of his own childhood, is mostly about his
own youthful life; the incidents that occur in it are many of them
true, and the characters are taken from friends and relatives. It is
a very wonderful book, as showing how vividly Tolstoy remembered his
own feelings as a child, how intensely he must have felt and suffered,
and what his powers of thought and observation must have been. He
continued this book, and brought out later other volumes entitled
“Boyhood” and “Youth.” They are all three full of beautiful things.
Tolstoy also wrote about the Caucasus, a novel called “The Cossacks,”
a romantic story of the strange, wild people who inhabit this part of
Russia.
At the time of the Crimean War, Tolstoy experienced as a soldier the
horrors of battle. He was at the siege of Sebastopol, and wrote the
book of that name. It made a great sensation when it came out, soon
after the war was over. Its profound understanding of the feelings of
men who were constantly facing death and danger, and of those who were
dying, made a deep impression on people.
Tolstoy, from seeing war, formed his very strong opinions against it.
He became from that time one of the most passionate apostles of peace.
He saw how much that is splendid is sometimes brought out in people who
face the terrors of war, but, on the other hand, he saw its fearful
uselessness, the waste of noble human beings, the suffering it causes
everywhere, and the destruction, in some, of all human feeling. “It is
not suffering and death that are terrible,” says Tolstoy, “but that
which allows people to inflict suffering and death.”
Tolstoy after Sebastopol left the army and went back to St. Petersburg,
this time to live in a literary circle, where he was welcomed by
distinguished authors as the most promising writer of the day.
Nobody, after reading “Childhood” or “Sebastopol,” could fail to see
Tolstoy’s marvelous genius for seeing things as they are, and his
gift of expression. But he grew impatient in this circle, for his
views were too advanced and his love of truth too strong. He could not
agree with people, and he could not pretend to agree with them. So he
was thought quarrelsome and conceited, and his opinions absurd. He
was always questioning things, such as the meaning of existence, and
whether he himself was of any use; he would take nothing as a matter
of course. Already, before he was twenty-seven, he had conceived the
great idea of devoting his life to founding a new Religion—the Religion
of Christianity, in fact, but cleansed of all its dogmas, which have
nothing to do with Christianity: a practical religion, giving happiness
on earth, not merely the promise of future happiness.
And another great question absorbed him, the question of emancipating
the serfs. Peasants who worked on the land in Russia were held much
as slaves, and were the absolute property of their masters, forced to
work for them so many days a week before they might do any work for
themselves. Tolstoy violently took the side of the peasants in all that
concerned them, and his purpose in life was more or less fixed from
this time onward. Like our other great man of noble birth, William of
Orange, who worked on the side of the people, he was determined to
leave no stone unturned until the conditions of the poor had been
improved and justice done them.
Now, in order to learn more of the habits and customs of other
countries, and principally their systems of education, Tolstoy went
abroad and visited France, Germany, and England. Then, returning to his
home, he settled down as a land-owner and managed his own estates.
In 1861 the serfs were liberated by the Czar Alexander II.
Tolstoy, with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, flung himself into
the work of dividing out lands between nobles and peasants. He acted as
a judge in his own district, and annoyed his aristocratic neighbors by
being fair to the poor: he had seen too often how they had been cheated
out of their rights.
It was difficult, rather discouraging work, because years of oppression
had made the peasants suspicious and grasping, and Tolstoy’s task was
to try to remove this distrust. He became more and more socialistic,
and his literary friends were very much disappointed in him, for he
seemed to be giving up his writing. One wrote: “Tolstoy has grown a
long beard, leaves his hair to fall in curls over his ears, holds
newspapers in detestation, and has no soul for anything but his
property.”
Tolstoy had also started on another enterprise. This was a school after
his own theories at Yasnaya and a monthly magazine which he printed and
edited, all about his views on education. He saw how most learning
is mechanical, and how a child does not learn because he wants to,
but in order not to be punished, or to earn a prize, or to be better
than others, but very seldom from a real desire to know. This Tolstoy
considered was because the child was so drilled and made to behave
unnaturally, and to have a different manner in school than he had out.
He was not free, and only when a child was free and natural and lively,
and allowed to ask questions and to laugh and talk, could he learn
with pleasure and therefore thoroughly. In Tolstoy’s school there was
no order as we know it: children sat on the floor or bunches of them
in an arm-chair; they did just as they pleased, and ran about from
place to place. They answered questions, not in turn but all together,
interrupting one another or helping one another to remember. If one
child left out a bit of story that he had to tell, another jumped up
and put it in.
Tolstoy encouraged the children not to repeat literally what they
had heard, but to tell “out of your own head.” As there were very
few reading books for young children, Tolstoy wrote stories for them
himself, which, as they have been translated into English, we are able
to read ourselves and to judge how they must have delighted his small
pupils. He also read to them and explained to them Bible stories, of
which he was very fond.
There was no doubt that Tolstoy had a gift for teaching and interested
the children as no ordinary teacher could. His methods are not for
every one.
Tolstoy’s classes came to an end after two years, because he was
interfered with by the Government; but he revived them at intervals
during his life, and there is no doubt that his views on education
helped to make teaching in Russia more reasonable and natural, and put
fresh ideas about it into people’s heads.
Tolstoy’s only companion at this time was his aunt Tatiana, but in
1862, when he was thirty-four, he married Miss Sophia Behrs, who was
only eighteen. He had known her as a little girl.
Tolstoy now settled down to a very happy life—the life, indeed, which
had been his ideal, and which he had described as such in a letter to
his aunt, when quite a young man. He pictures himself living with his
wife at Yasnaya—
A gentle creature, kind and affectionate, she has the same love for
you as I have; you live upstairs in the big house, in what used to be
Grandmamma’s room; the whole house is as it was in Papa’s time....
I take Papa’s place, though I despair of ever deserving it. My wife
that of Mamma; the children take ours. If they made me Emperor of
Russia or gave me Peru—in a word, if a fairy came with her wand
asking me what I wished for, I should reply that I only wished that
this dream may become reality.
And all this actually came to pass. Aunt Tatiana, when Tolstoy married,
continued to live with him. He had many children, managed his estates,
taught the peasants, and wrote books, and though he was not living
in the same house in which he was born, for the large wooden house
had been removed and sold to pay his father’s debts, he lived on the
same spot in the stone one erected in its place. His wife helped
in everything, in spite of her large family, for they had thirteen
children. She found time to copy out all her husband’s manuscripts,
which to most people would have been as impossible a task as looking
for a needle in a haystack, they were so extraordinarily badly written,
and scratched out and rewritten. His first great novel, “War and
Peace,” one of the longest novels in existence, is said to have been
copied out by Countess Tolstoy seven times.
Tolstoy always lived with his children, and did not banish them to
nurseries and schoolrooms, as some people do. Up to the age of ten
they were taught by their father and mother; their mother taught
them Russian and music, and their father arithmetic and French. Most
entertaining French it was, which consisted of reading amusing stories
out of illustrated volumes of Jules Verne. If there happened to be a
volume without pictures, Tolstoy made the pictures himself. He drew
very badly, yet his pictures were so amusing that the children liked
them much better than the ordinary ones.
He would discuss and explain interesting things with his children, and
they were always eager to be with him, to go walks with him, and be on
his side in any game he taught them. Clearing the snow off the ponds
in winter under their father’s direction was even more amusing than
the skating itself. They rode and hunted with their father, for in the
earlier part of his life Tolstoy was an enthusiastic sportsman. He was
brave, daring, and an excellent shot, and he enjoyed more than anything
being out in the open air.
In the early morning, before breakfast, Tolstoy would usually go for a
long walk, or ride down to bathe in the river. At morning coffee, or
what we call breakfast, the family all met together, and Tolstoy was
always very merry. He would be up to all sorts of jokes, till he got up
with the words, “One must get to work,” and off he went to his study
to write books, and he would work for many hours on end, though in
summer he would often come out and play with the children. This always
delighted them, as he brought such spirit and interest into their
games, and he would invent new ones himself—which were better than any.
If they had secrets, he always guessed them, so that they regarded him
as a sort of magician. His son writes of him: “My father hardly ever
made us do anything, but it always somehow came about that of our own
initiative we did exactly what he wanted us to. My mother often scolded
us and punished us, but when my father wanted us to do anything, he
merely looked us hard in the eyes, and we understood—the look was far
more effective than any command. It was impossible to hide anything
from him, as impossible as to hide it from your own conscience. He knew
everything, and to deceive him was nearly impossible and quite useless.”
This same son, Ilya, Tolstoy’s second boy, tells many amusing stories
of the Tolstoy family life, and of the great part his father played
in it. One story is as follows: Ilya, when a little boy, was given a
big china cup and saucer by his mother at Christmas-time. He was so
excited that he ran very fast to show it to the others, and as he ran
from one room to another, he caught his foot on the step in the doorway
and fell down and broke his cup to smithereens. When accused by his
mother of being careless, he howled and said it was not his fault, but
the fault of the beastly architect who had gone and put a step in the
doorway. Tolstoy, overhearing him, was much amused, and said, “It is
the architect’s fault, it is the architect’s fault!” This phrase became
a saying in the family, and Tolstoy was always using it when any one
threw the blame on any one else. When one of the children fell off his
horse because he stumbled, or when he did his lessons badly because his
tutor had not explained them properly, and so on, “Of course, I know,”
Tolstoy would say; “it is the architect’s fault.”
Tolstoy had some excellent inventions for making his children
cheerful. When they would all be sitting rather cross and bored after
the departure of some dull visitors, he would suddenly jump up from his
seat, and, lifting one arm in the air with its hand hanging loose from
the wrist, run at full speed round the table at a hopping gallop. Every
one rose and flew after him, hopping and waving their hands. They went
round the room several times, and then sat down again in their chairs,
panting, and quite gay and lively once more. This game, which was known
as “Numidian Cavalry,” had an excellent effect, and many a time the
children’s tears were dried by it and quarrels forgotten.