Chapter XII: Tolstoy (1828–1910) 269 (9)

This little boy, who was born when Tolstoy was quite old, promised to be very remarkable, and his father took more interest in him than any of his other children. The child Ivan understood things just as his father did. When one day his mother said to him, “Ivan, Yasnaya is yours,” he was very angry and stamped his foot passionately, crying “Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! everything is everyone else’s.” The child died when he was seven, and it was a most bitter grief to Tolstoy. But Masha, his second daughter, was a comfort to him; she took her father’s side when she was only fifteen, and though she was very delicate, she used all the strength she had in working for the poor, looking after the peasants’ wives and doing their work for them when they were ill, minding the children and cleaning and cooking.

Many people blame Countess Tolstoy for not seeing eye to eye with her husband, but I think it would have been a very great deal to expect of any woman, that she should discard all the habits of a lifetime and renounce everything she had been accustomed to, to change her way of living and of bringing up her children. She describes her feelings very well in a letter to her sister, saying that her husband is a leader, one who goes ahead of the crowd pointing the way men should go. “But I am the crowd,” she says; “I live in its current, and see the light of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.”

Countess Tolstoy also felt that her husband was wasting himself; he had a genius for writing novels, and he deliberately gave up writing them and occupied himself instead with log-splitting, reaping, and making boots which anybody could do, and do better. It was tiresome of him to play at being “Robinson Crusoe,” as Countess Tolstoy expressed it.

No doubt he was provoking, but though Tolstoy and his wife sometimes quarreled, they were devoted to one another all the same, as may be seen by the very delightful quotation out of a letter of Countess Tolstoy’s to her husband.

All at once I pictured you vividly to myself, and a sudden flood
of tenderness rose in me. There is something in you so wise, kind,
naïve, and obstinate, and it is all lit up by that tender interest
for every one natural to you alone, and by your look that reaches to
people’s souls.

Sometimes Tolstoy had to accompany his family to Moscow. This became the regular arrangement in the winter, when his daughter Tanya grew up and began to go to balls and parties. Countess Tolstoy was always very energetic, arranging their flat and calling upon people who would ask her daughter to parties.

Tolstoy, after living in the country, found the artificiality of town life almost unbearable, and the luxury of the circle they lived in was to him torture. He had to occupy himself in order to bear it. One winter he spent his time taking a census of people in the poorest part of Moscow.

He was so horrified at the appalling misery he came across that he wanted to run away. He knew poverty in the country, but he had never seen anything like the poverty he came across in the town. Writing about it, he says:

I could not look at our own or anybody else’s drawing-room, or a
clean, well-spread dining-table, or a carriage with well-fed coachman
and horses, or shops or theaters without a feeling of profound
irritation.

It was because he had seen the other side of the picture. And unfortunately there always is another side to the picture.

He saw this side by side with the wretched lodging-houses he had been visiting, filled with cold, hungry, dreadful people, and one he felt was the result of the other.

His son says the look of suffering on his father’s face at that time he shall never forget.

He was simply overcome with pity and with shame and indignation that our civilization can permit such things. So he went back to Yasnaya alone, and feeling ill with despair; he took things to heart in an extraordinary way. But gradually the peace and loneliness of the country comforted him, and he set to work on a book about his experiences with the poor in Moscow, and called it “What Then Must We Do?” He simply wrote down what he had seen and heard, and asked what we were to do to destroy what is in truth slavery—starving people struggling to live and driven to crime by their miserable conditions, while others have riches and luxury, even throwing their superfluous food to the dogs and enjoying the fruit of other people’s labor.

It was impossible for Tolstoy to have any respect for civilization as such, unless it really helped men. He judged it fairly by what it did and found it wanting. He longed to see real progress, not merely mechanical progress. He did not call progress making battleships, inventing flying machines, or electricity, or explosives if people’s hearts remained hard. He wanted to see a spiritual progress, people being kind and helpful to one another.

The root of all the evil lay in man’s selfishness, he thought, and the corruption of Governments: these he considered existed only for the benefit of the rich. We must remember that the Russian Government at that time was one of the most backward of so-called civilized Powers, and what we call representative government did not exist at all, but a government by a few for the few.

Tolstoy also set himself to the great work he had dreamt of doing as a young man, that of separating the true from the false in the teachings of the Church. The Greek or the Russian Church does not differ fundamentally in its doctrines from the Roman Catholic or Protestant churches.

Tolstoy saw that man needed some religion or chart to guide him through life, and being himself profoundly religious by nature, he did not, like Voltaire, merely scoff and destroy, but tried also to build up and to construct something really tangible and helpful to human beings.

The truth he believed lay in the teaching of Christ. “If you wish to understand the truth,” Tolstoy said, “read the Gospels”; and the book he wrote on the Gospels is an explanation of Christ’s teaching. He asked himself, were the things that children and ignorant people taught true? and if they were not they should be exposed publicly. Every honest man should speak out. But people he saw were so confused in their minds about religion that they thought it must be supernatural, senseless, and incomprehensible, or it wasn’t religion.

Tolstoy wanted to make it a real and living force. He told the peasants in his books that God was not the cruel, revengeful, punishing Person they had been taught to believe Him; that He did not go about hardening people’s hearts and directing them to murder, and that they would not go to Hell for being unbaptized. On the contrary, he told them that God was good and that every human being, as the son of God, was good too, and could increase, by loving goodness, the divine in himself, by loving others as himself and by acting toward everybody as you would they should act toward you. But to kill another or abuse him, or to profit at the expense of any man, this was what made misery in the world. Tolstoy preached that all men are equal, as Christ had, and that nothing can be done by force or by violence, but only by love.

The Church in Russia was able to exercise a sort of inquisition, employing people to spy on suspected free-thinkers all over the country. There existed at the time, about a hundred miles from Moscow, a Bastille, or fortress, where persons objected to or suspected by the Russian Church, were shut up. In its dark and damp dungeons innocent people would be left for many years, sometimes forgotten altogether. Tolstoy would most certainly have been arrested and probably sent there, if he had not been an aristocrat with an aunt at court who pleaded for him with the Czar. As it was, he was excommunicated by the Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Church.

Tolstoy was proving dangerous, his influence was beginning to be felt; he was undermining the power of the Church and State by showing the poor people that they have a right to live and that all men are equal; that Christ had said so, and that the Church has no right to misrepresent His words.

Tolstoy’s books were no longer allowed in libraries; newspapers were forbidden to mention any meetings held in his favor. Telegraph offices actually refused to take messages of sympathy sent him, though abusive telegrams arrived quite punctually.

During a terrible famine in Russia, when Tolstoy and his family worked night and day and gave all they possessed to the starving peasants, the priests tried to frighten them and preached against Tolstoy, saying he was Antichrist and they should not eat his food.

But the excommunication of Tolstoy had really quite the opposite effect to what was intended. It shocked the whole world, and Tolstoy’s name was received with more and more sympathy.

The views he expressed and the books he wrote had greater influence than ever before. The Russian people themselves seemed to realize that they possessed one of the greatest moral teachers in the world. But as the people of Russia became freer in their views and less subservient to authority, so in proportion the Government became harder and tightened its hold upon them. Tolstoy had not hitherto written on political life, but the cruel repression of all forms of liberty by violence roused him at the end of his life to write against the Government of his country a tragic letter which he published in the European papers, entitled: “I can keep silent no longer.” He said his life was made unendurable by the suffering of his people, and he begs all to cease from hatred and revenge.

Mr. Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy’s English biographer, visited the great man at Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of his life. He says what struck him most then about Tolstoy was his sympathy and kindness more than his intellect. He had mellowed with age, and from having been impatient, violent in argument, and often obstinate and unjust, he had become patient and gentle, though he was still intensely alive and caring as ardently for things as most people of twenty-five.

The atmosphere he created round him in his old age was peculiarly peaceful, and yet a lively and intelligent interest was taken by every one in everything. The influence of Tolstoy seemed to make all who came into contact with him kind and simple. There were no shams anywhere. Tolstoy had not forced his views on his children, as he was afraid they might follow him insincerely. He wanted them to be completely free and sincere.

When he was eighty-two Tolstoy left his home. His reasons for doing so are not quite clear, and we must form our own conclusions about it. A letter written to his wife some years before, to be opened after his death, explains a good deal.

Tolstoy wanted to devote his last days entirely to God. He wanted complete solitude and peace, in order to avoid at the end any sort of discord between his life and his beliefs. If he had talked about this plan, and told his family, there would have been discussions and perhaps quarrels, and he could not bear that. So he decided to slip away quietly without any one knowing. In the letter he explained that it would not mean that he was angry with his wife or any one else: indeed, he could not bear the idea of giving her pain. He said he should lovingly remember what his wife had been to him. But when the time came he was very weak and had been near death several times. He confided his secret plan to his youngest daughter Alexandra, for she, since his favorite daughter Masha had died a few years before, had been his companion and confidante. So one snowy night at the end of October she helped him to depart. He went with a doctor friend of his who had been living in the house for some time past.

His first wish was to visit his old sister and to take farewell of her. She was living in a convent, and seeing her ending her days so happily and peacefully, he wished he might have been able to enter a monastery, if only it had not been necessary to believe in the Church. On his journey by train—he had not yet made up his mind where he would settle down—he caught cold and had to stop at a little wayside station. There, in the station-master’s house, the cold developed into pneumonia, and as he was very weak there was little hope of his recovery. After a week of suffering he passed peacefully away, surrounded by his family and friends.

Before the end came, a telegram arrived from a high dignitary of the Church urging Tolstoy to return to the bosom of the Church. But it was not shown to him, for a similar message had been sent some years before when Tolstoy was very ill, and he had said, “How is it they do not understand that even when one is face to face with death, two and two still make four?”

Hundreds of people had flocked to the little country station when it was known that Tolstoy lay ill there. It was an extraordinary scene. Peasants who loved him jostled newspaper men who wanted the latest news. Photographers and police officers, literary people and aristocrats were there, and messages and telegrams arrived from all over the world. Multitudes of his poor peasants came to his funeral, and many wept aloud.

“Our great Leo is dead,” cried one. “Long live our great Leo’s spirit.”

Tolstoy’s body was laid where he had wished to lie, on the spot where his brother Nicholas had buried the green stick on which was written the great secret it was Tolstoy’s purpose in life to discover.

What was the secret of Tolstoy’s power?

Every one who came near him seemed to feel it, and most of those who read his books. It is true that there still exists a certain number of people who recognize him only as a novelist. These are generally among the upper classes and among literary people who are impatient with him for having neglected his art. If it had not been for his novels it is probable that his influence would not have been nearly so far-reaching. It is doubtful whether fashionable people would have taken any notice of his serious books at all. But the fact that he had written “Anna Karenina” and had made a great name, roused their curiosity and they read his indictments against society, governments, and the Church with some interest, and many have gradually come under his spell.

It was Tolstoy’s profound sincerity and his warm heart that made people love him. They saw how passionate was his wish to make the world a better place, how he hated small, mean things, and worshiped goodness and truth. He had immense courage, and fame or the praise of men by the time he was middle-aged meant nothing to him. But he confesses that in his younger days he looked for and enjoyed success. His art had been a temptation to him, and that was one of the reasons why he would have nothing more to do with it.

Tolstoy was above all things a human being: indeed, it was his special characteristic. Being so, he was sometimes inconsistent and swayed by his moods and his likes and dislikes, which makes his critics say he did not practise his doctrine of love. He asked people to turn the other cheek and love their enemies, while he himself found it almost impossible to be agreeable to disagreeable people or to stupid people, and he never succeeded in tolerating those whom he considered responsible for the evils of our social system, rulers, politicians, and policemen.

When absorbed in thought he was forgetful and inconsiderate; he did not mean to be selfish, but his wife’s sufferings and what people who lived with him had to put up with did not strike him. He was impetuous, especially in his younger days, and he was always making resolutions which he failed very often to carry out. But all great idealists must suffer from this; it is infinitely better than having no ideals at all and making no mistakes. If a man with Tolstoy’s ideals could carry them all out, he would be the perfect man, and Tolstoy was far from being that. But no one could be more humble or more ready to blame himself, and as he grew older he more and more succeeded in practising in his life what he preached to others.

Tolstoy believed in God, and in the spiritual element that is in all men and women and which all, he insisted, must cherish and try to increase.

He believed that all men are equal as Christ did, and that all are brothers, so there should be no such thing as rivalry among nations, and no wars. If a man is not bent on money-making, on stealing and grasping for himself and taking away from others, if he only desires to treat them as he wishes they would treat himself, then will force become unnecessary. This idea may also be applied to States, for wars arise out of their jealousies and rivalry, in the search after power and wealth.

Tolstoy saw that much wickedness and misery came out of poverty, and a great deal through riches: one is often the cause of the other, and the unequal distribution of wealth is one of the greatest problems of our civilization.

But Tolstoy says, could the meaning of renunciation, of giving up to others, be really understood, the battle would be won, and the need of force would not exist. The only crime is for man to act inhumanly to man. A change of heart is what Tolstoy pleads for, and every man and woman, he says, can do something to help, by example and having a purpose in life. “For life,” he says in a letter to his son, “is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer at times a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal affairs.”

On seeing the terrible sight of capital punishment in France, Tolstoy wrote these striking words:

When I saw the head separate from the body and how they both jumped
into the box at the same moment, I understood not with my mind but
with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our
present progress can justify this deed, and that though everybody
from the creation of the world, on whatever theory had held it to be
necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad, and therefore the
arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do and is
not progress, but is my heart and I.

Who is to be the judge of what is right or wrong? asks Tolstoy, and answers, “A man’s own soul.” A man, he says, must not fear to stand alone. Now the fear of standing alone is not always cowardice; often a man has too little confidence in himself. In answer to the promptings of his heart or conscience he will say, “Perhaps I am wrong: after all, the majority think differently from what I do; they are probably right, for what am I?” But it is very seldom that a man’s conscience will lead him astray, and if he feels that a thing is bad or cruel, he should not stifle or ignore the instinct, but, on the contrary, trust and believe in it, for it is a divine thing created in man for his own safeguarding to direct and help him through the difficult ways of life.

Tolstoy had much in common with W. L. Garrison, whom he greatly admired, and wrote a preface to a Life of him written by a Russian. For both recognized no authority but a man’s own heart and conscience, both set themselves to the task of rousing people to a better understanding by moral persuasion, both detested force.

It is easy to say that Tolstoy was vague, unpractical, and even absurd in the things he taught. Some people think he was quite mistaken; those who honestly believe in force and government by a few privileged people must naturally think so. Tolstoy was very extreme, but what he did was to give people a higher, more spiritual ideal, to show them that life may be a noble thing.

Tolstoy realized as he grew older that we cannot be perfect all at once. Therefore he says, if you cannot love another as yourself, go as far as you can in that direction; if you cannot live in complete simplicity, live rather more simply, and so on.

By degrees we may be able to get somewhere nearer Tolstoy’s ideals, especially if we believe that we are naturally good, and not, as many of us have been taught, “by nature born in sin and the children of wrath.” D. P.

Since this was written a great change has come about in Russia, which may affect the whole of civilized Europe.

The People of Russia—the Workers—have risen against their rulers, and deposed the Czar and his advisers.

It is early days yet to say what the final outcome of the Revolution will be; but the upheaval is a step toward freedom, and behind it the spirit of Tolstoy moves. He, above all others, helped to sow the seed of the Russian Revolution, and maybe of other revolutions yet to come. What joy and thankfulness would have filled his great heart could he have seen the germination of this seed—the downfall of Czarism and the dawning of freedom for the People of Russia!

BOOKS TO READ

The Life and Martyrdom of Girolamo Savonarola, by R. R. Madden.

Savonarola and His Times, by Villari.

Romola, by George Eliot.

William the Silent, by F. Harrison.

The Rise of the Dutch Republic, by Motley.

Life of Tycho Brahe, by J. L. E. Dreyer.

Life of Tycho Brahe, by F. R. Friis.

Cervantes, by J. Fitzmaurice Kelly.

Life of Giordano Bruno, by J. Lewis McIntyre.

Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan, by Miss J. Frith.

Life of Hugo Grotius, by Charles Butler.

Seven Great Statesmen (Grotius), by A. D. White.

Voltaire, by John Morley.

Life of Voltaire, by S. G. Tallantyre.

Essay on Frederick the Great, by Macaulay.

Mazzini, by Bolton King.

The Story of My Life, by Hans Andersen.

Life of W. L. Garrison, by W. P. and F. J. Garrison.

The Moral Crusader, a biographical essay on Garrison, by Goldwin Smith.

H. D. Thoreau, by F. B. Sanborn.

Life of Thoreau, by H. Salt.

Walden, by Thoreau.

The Life of Tolstoy, by Aylmer Maude.

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, by Count Ilya Tolstoy.

Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, by Tolstoy.

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