By ROMAIN ROLLAND 
 
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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSE. 
 
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TOLSTOY 
 
 BY 
 
 ROMAIN ROLLAND 
 
 AUTHOR OF "JEAN CHRISTOPHE" 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 BERNARD MIALL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 EP BUTTON & COMPANY 
 31 West Twenty-Third Street 
 
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 Copyright, 191 1 
 By E. P. Dutton & Company 
 
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 TOLSTOY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 To those of my own generation, the light that 
 has but lately failed was the purest that illu- 
 mined their youth. In the gloomy twilight 
 of the later nineteenth century it shone as a 
 star of consolation, whose radiance attracted 
 and appeased our awakening spirits. As one 
 of the many — for there are many in France — 
 to whom Tolstoy was very much more than 
 an admired artist: for whom he was a friend, 
 the best of friends, the one true friend in the 
 whole European art — I wish to lay before this 
 sacred memory my tribute of gratitude and of 
 love. 
 
 The days when I learned to know him are 
 days that I shall never forget. It was in 1886. 
 After some years of silent germination the 
 marvellous flowers of Russian art began to 
 blossom on the soil of France. Translations 
 of Tolstoy and of Dostoyevsky were being is- 
 
2 PREFACE 
 
 sued in feverish haste by all the publishing- 
 houses of Paris. Between the years '85 and 
 '87 came War and Peace, Anna Karenin, 
 Childhood and Youth, Polikushka, The Death 
 of Ivan Ilyitch, the novels of the Caucasus, 
 and the Tales for the People. In the space 
 of a few months, almost of a few weeks, there 
 was revealed to our eager eyes the present- 
 ment of a vast, unfamiliar life, in which was 
 reflected a new people, a new world. 
 
 I had but newly entered the Normal Col- 
 lege. My fellow-scholars were of widely di- 
 vergent opinions. In our little world were 
 such realistic and ironical spirits as the phi- 
 losopher Georges Dumas; poets, like Suares, 
 burning with love of the Italian Renaissance; 
 faithful disciples of classic tradition; Stend- 
 halians, Wagnerians, atheists and mystics. It 
 was a world of plentiful discussion, plentiful 
 disagreement; but for a period of some 
 months we were nearly all united by a com- 
 mon love of Tolstoy. It is true that each 
 loved him for different reasons, for each dis- 
 covered in him himself; but this love was a 
 love that opened the door to a revelation of 
 
PREFACE 3 
 
 life; to the wide world itself. On every side 
 — in our families, in our country homes — this 
 mighty voice, which spoke from the confines 
 of Europe, awakened the same emotions, un- 
 expected as they often were. I remember 
 my amazement upon hearing some middle- 
 class people of Nivernais, my native province 
 — people who felt no interest whatever in art, 
 people who read practically nothing — speak 
 with the most intense feeling of The Death of 
 Ivan Ilyitch. 
 
 I have read, in the writings of distinguished 
 critics, the theory that Tolstoy owed the best 
 of his ideas to the French romantics: to 
 George Sand, to Victor Hugo. We may 
 ignore the absurdity of supposing that 
 Tolstoy, who could not endure her, could ever 
 have been subject to the influence of George 
 Sand; but we cannot deny the influence of 
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Stendhal; 
 nevertheless, we belittle the greatness of 
 Tolstoy, and the power of his fascination, if 
 we attribute to them his ideas. The circle of 
 ideas in which art moves and has its being 
 is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that 
 
4 PREFACE 
 
 his might resides, but in his expression of 
 them; in the personal accent, the imprint of 
 the artist, the colour and savour of his life. 
 
 Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not 
 borrowed — a matter to be presently con- 
 sidered — never yet had a voice like to his re- 
 sounded throughout Europe. How else can 
 we explain the thrill of emotion which we all 
 of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, 
 that harmony for which we had so long 
 waited, and of which we felt the need? In 
 our opinion the style counted for nothing. 
 Most of us, myself included, made the ac- 
 quaintance of Melchior de Vogue's work on 
 the subject of the Russian novel * after we 
 had read the novels of Tolstoy; and his ad- 
 miration of our hero seemed, after ours, a 
 pallid thing. M. de Vogue spoke essentially 
 as a man of letters pure and simple. But for 
 our part it was not enough to admire the pre- 
 sentation of life: we lived it; it was our own. 
 Ours it was by its ardent love of life, by its 
 quality of youth; ours by its irony, its dis- 
 illusion, its pitiless discernment, and its haunt- 
 1 Le Roman Russe. 
 
PREFACE 5 
 
 ing sense of mortality. Ours by its dreams 
 of brotherly love, of peace among men ; ours 
 by its terrible accusation of the lies of civilisa- 
 tion ; ours by its realism ; by its mysticism ours ; 
 by its savour of nature, its sense of invisible 
 forces, its vertigo in the face of the infinite. 
 
 To many of us the novels of Tolstoy were 
 what Werther was to an earlier generation: 
 the wonderful mirror of our passions, our 
 strength, our weaknesses, of our hopes, our 
 terrors, our discouragement. We were in no 
 wise anxious to reconcile these many contra- 
 dictions; still less did we concern ourselves to 
 imprison this complex, multiple mind, full of 
 echoes of the whole wide world, within the 
 narrow limits of religious or political cate- 
 gories, as have the greater number of those 
 who have written of Tolstoy in these latter 
 years: incapable of extricating themselves 
 from the conflict of parties, dragging him into 
 the arena of their own passions, measuring 
 him by the standards of their socialistic or 
 clerical coteries. As if our coteries could be 
 the measure of a genius! What is it to me 
 if Tolstoy is or is not of my party? Shall I 
 
6 PREFACE 
 
 ask of what party Shakespeare was, or Dante, 
 before I breathe the atmosphere of his magic 
 or steep myself in its light? 
 
 We did not say, as do the critics of to-day, 
 that there were two Tolstoys: the Tolstoy of 
 the period before the crisis and he of the 
 period after the crisis; that the one was the 
 great artist, while the other was not an artist 
 at all. For us there was only one Tolstoy, and 
 we loved the whole of him; for we felt, in- 
 stinctively, that in such souls as his all things 
 are bound together and each has its integral 
 place. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface i 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Childhood ... . . . u 
 
 II Boyhood and Youth 23 
 
 III Youth: The Army 35 
 
 IV Early Work: Tales of the Causasus 41 
 V Sebastopol: War and Religion . . 55 
 
 VI St. Petersburg 71 
 
 VII "Family Happiness" 89 
 
 VIII Marriage 97 
 
 IX "Anna Karenin" . . . . . . .117 
 
 X The Crisis 133 
 
 XI Reality 155 
 
 XII Art and Conscience 167 
 
 XIII Science in Art 181 
 
 XIV Theories of Art: Music .... 207 
 
 XV "Resurrection" 237 
 
 7 
 
8 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XVI Religion and Politics 251 
 
 XVII Old Age 279 
 
 XVIII Conclusion 305 
 
CHAPTER I 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 OUR instinct was conscious then of that which 
 reason must prove to-day. The task is pos- 
 sible now, for the long life has attained its 
 term ; revealing itself, unveiled, to the eyes of 
 all, with unequalled candour, unexampled sin- 
 cerity. To-day we are at once arrested by the 
 degree in which that life has always remained 
 the same, from the beginning to the end, in 
 spite of all the barriers which critics have 
 sought to erect here and there along its course ; 
 in spite of Tolstoy himself, who, like every 
 impassioned mind, was inclined to the belief, 
 when he loved, or conceived a faith, that he 
 
 loved or believed for the first time; that the 
 
 11 
 
12 TOLSTOY 
 
 commencement of his true life dated from 
 that moment. Commencement — recommence- 
 ment! How often his mind was the theatre 
 of the same struggle, the same crises! We 
 cannot speak of the unity of his ideas, for no 
 such unity existed; we can only speak of the 
 persistence among them of the same diverse 
 elements; sometimes allied, sometimes inimi- 
 cal; more often enemies than allies. Unity 
 is to be found neither in the spirit nor the 
 mind of a Tolstoy; it exists only in the internal 
 conflict of his passions, in the tragedy of his 
 art and his life. 
 
 In him life and art are one. Never was 
 work more intimately mingled with the 
 artist's life; it has, almost constantly, the value 
 of autobiography; it enables us to follow the 
 writer, step by step, from the time when he 
 was twenty-five years of age, throughout all 
 the contradictory experiences of his adventur- 
 ous career. His Journal, which he com- 
 menced before the completion of his twentieth 
 year, and continued until his death, 1 together 
 
 1 With the exception of a few interruptions : one espe- 
 cially of considerable length, between 1865 and 1878. 
 
CHILDHOOD 13 
 
 with the notes furnished by M. Birukov, 2 com- 
 pletes this knowledge, and enables us not only 
 to read almost day by day in the history of 
 Tolstoy's conscience, but also to reconstitute 
 the world in which his genius struck root, and 
 the minds from which his own drew suste- 
 nance. 
 
 His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys 
 and the Volkonskys were very ancient families, 
 of the greater nobility, claiming descent from 
 Rurik, numbering among their ancestors com- 
 panions of Peter the Great, generals of the 
 Seven Years' War, heroes of the Napoleonic 
 struggle, Decembrists, and political exiles. 
 This inheritance included family traditions; 
 old memories to which Tolstoy was indebted 
 for some of the most original types in his War 
 and Peace; there was the old Prince Bolkon- 
 sky, his maternal grandfather, Voltairian, des- 
 potic, a belated representative of the aristoc- 
 
 2 For his remarkable biography of Leon Tolsto'i, Vie 
 et CEuvre, Memoires, Souvenirs, Lettres, Extraits du 
 Journal intime, Notes et Documents biographiques, reunis, 
 coordonnes et annotes par P. Birukov, revised by Leo Tol- 
 stoy, translated into French from the MS. by J. W. Bien- 
 stock. 
 
14. TOLSTOY 
 
 racy of the days of Catherine 11.; Prince 
 Nikolas Grigorovitch Volkonsky, a cousin of 
 his mother, who was wounded at Austerlitz, 
 and, like Prince Andrei, was carried off the 
 field of battle under the eyes of Napoleon; 
 his father, who had some of the characteristics 
 of Nicolas Rostoff, 3 and his mother, the Prin- 
 cess Marie, the ugly, charming woman with 
 the beautiful eyes, whose goodness illumines 
 the pages of War and Peace. 
 
 He scarcely knew his parents. Those de- 
 lightful narratives, Childhood and Youth, 
 have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the 
 writer's mother died when he was not yet two 
 years of age. He, therefore, was unable to 
 recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas 
 Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face 
 with a luminous smile, which radiated glad- 
 ness. . . . 
 
 "Ah! if in difficult moments I could only 
 see that smile, I should not know what sor- 
 row is." 4 
 
 3 He also fought in the Napoleonic campaigns, and was 
 a prisoner in France during the years 1 8 14-15. 
 
 4 Childhood, chap. ii. 
 
CHILDHOOD 15 
 
 Yet she doubtless endowed him with her 
 own absolute candour, her indifference to 
 opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating 
 tales of her own invention. 
 
 His father he did in some degree remember. 
 His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sad- 
 eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading 
 an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy 
 was nine years old when he lost him. His 
 death caused him "for the first time to under- 
 stand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with 
 despair." 5 Here was the child's earliest en- 
 counter with the spectre of terror; and hence- 
 forth a portion of his life was to be devoted 
 to fighting the phantom, and a portion to its 
 celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of 
 this agony are marked by a few unforgettable 
 touches in the final chapters of his Childhood, 
 where his memories are transposed in the nar- 
 rative of the death and burial of his mother. 
 
 Five children were left orphans in the old 
 house at Yasnaya Polyana. 6 There Leo 
 
 8 Childhood, chap, xxvii. 
 
 8 Yasnaya Polyana, the name of which signifies "the 
 open glade" (literally, the "light glade"), is a little vil- 
 
16 TOLSTOY 
 
 Nikolayevitch was born, on the 28th of Au- 
 gust, 1828, and there, eighty-two years later, 
 he was to die. The youngest of the five was 
 a girl: that Marie who in later years became 
 a religious ; it was with her that Tolstoy took 
 refuge in dying, when he fled from home and 
 family. Of the four sons, Sergius was charm- 
 ing and selfish, "sincere to a degree that I have 
 never known equalled"; Dmitri was passion- 
 ate, self-centred, introspective, and in later 
 years, as a student, abandoned himself eagerly 
 to the practices of religion; caring nothing 
 for public opinion; fasting, seeking out the 
 poor, sheltering the infirm; suddenly, with 
 the same quality of violence, plunging into 
 debauchery; then, tormented by remorse, ran- 
 soming a girl whom he had known in a public 
 brothel, and receiving her into his home; 
 
 lage to the south of Moscow, at a distance of some leagues 
 from Toula, in one of the most thoroughly Russian of 
 the provinces. "Here the two great regions of Russia," 
 says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, "the region of the forests and 
 the agricultural region, meet and melt into each other. 
 In the surrounding country we meet with no Finns, 
 Tatars, Poles, Jews, or Little Russians. The district of 
 Toula lies at the very heart of Russia." 
 
CHILDHOOD 17 
 
 finally dying of phthisis at the age of twenty- 
 nine; 7 Nikolas, the eldest, the favourite 
 brother, had inherited his mother's gift of im- 
 agination, her power of telling stories ; 8 ironi- 
 cal, nervous, and refined; in later years an 
 officer in the Caucasus, where he formed the 
 habit of a drunkard; a man, like his brother, 
 full of Christian kindness, living in hovels, 
 and sharing with the poor all that he possessed. 
 Tourgenev said of him "that he put into prac- 
 tice that humble attitude towards life which 
 his brother Leo was content to develop in 
 theory." 
 
 The orphans were cared for by two great- 
 hearted women, one was their Aunt Tatiana, 9 
 of whom Tolstoy said that "she had two 
 virtues: serenity and love." Her whole life 
 was love; a devotion that never failed. "She 
 made me understand the moral pleasure of 
 loving." 
 
 7 Tolstoy has depicted him in Anna Karenin, as the 
 brother of Levine. 
 
 8 He wrote the Diary of a Hunter. 
 
 9 In reality she was a distant relative. She had loved 
 Tolstoy's father, and was loved by him; but effaced her- 
 self, like Sonia in War and Peace. 
 
18 TOLSTOY 
 
 The other was their Aunt Alexandra, who 
 was for ever serving others, herself avoiding 
 service, dispensing with the help of servants. 
 Her favourite occupation was reading the 
 lives of the Saints, or conversing with pilgrims 
 or the feeble-minded. Of these "innocents" 
 there were several, men and women, who lived 
 in the house. One, an old woman, a pilgrim, 
 was the godmother of Tolstoy's sister. An- 
 other, the idiot Gricha, knew only how to 
 weep and pray. . ... 
 
 " Gricha, notable Christian! So mighty 
 was your faith that you felt the approach of 
 God; so ardent was your love that words 
 rushed from your lips, words that your reason 
 could not control. And how you used to cele- 
 brate His splendour, when speech failed you, 
 when, all tears, you lay prostrated on the 
 ground!" 10 
 
 Who can fail to understand the influence, 
 in the shaping of Tolstoy, of all these humble 
 souls? In some of them we seem to see an 
 outline, a prophecy, of the Tolstoy of later 
 years. Their prayers and their affection must 
 
 10 Childhood, chap. xii. 
 
CHILDHOOD 19 
 
 have sown the seeds of faith in the child's 
 mind; seeds of which the aged man was to 
 reap the harvest. 
 
 With the exception of the idiot Gricha, 
 Tolstoy does not speak, in his narrative of 
 Childhood, of these humble helpers who as- 
 sisted in the work of building up his mind. 
 But then how clearly we see it through the 
 medium of the book — this soul of a little 
 child; "this pure, loving heart, a ray of clear 
 light, which always discovered in others the 
 best of their qualities" — this more than com- 
 mon tenderness! Being happy, he ponders on 
 the only creature he knows to be unhappy; he 
 cries at the thought, and longs to devote him- 
 self to his good. He hugs and kisses an an- 
 cient horse, begging his pardon, because he 
 has hurt him. He is happy in loving, even 
 if he is not loved. Already we can see the 
 germs of his future genius; his imagination, 
 so vivid that he cries over his own stories ; his 
 brain, always busy, always trying to discover 
 of what other people think; his precocious 
 powers of memory 11 and observation; the at- 
 
 11 He professes, in his autobiographical notes (dated 
 
W TOLSTOY 
 
 tentive eyes, which even in the midst of his 
 sorrow scrutinise the faces about him, and the 
 authenticity of their sorrow. He tells us 
 that at five years of age he felt for the first 
 time "that life is not a time of amusement, but 
 a very heavy task." 12 
 
 Happily he forgot the discovery. In those 
 days he used to soothe his mind with popular 
 tales; those mythical and legendary dreams 
 known in Russia as bylines; stories from the 
 Bible; above all the sublime History of 
 Joseph, which he cited in his old age as a 
 model of narrative art: and, finally, the Ara- 
 bian Nights, which at his grandmother's house 
 were recited every evening, from the vantage 
 of the window-seat^ by a blind story-teller. 
 
 1878), to be able to recall the sensations of being swad- 
 dled as a baby, and of being bathed in a tub. See First 
 Memories. 
 
 12 First Memories, 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 He studied at Kazan. 1 He was not a notable 
 student. It used to be said of the three 
 brothers 2 : "Sergius wants to, and can ; Dmitri 
 wants to, and can't; Leo can't and doesn't 
 want to." 
 
 He passed through the period which he 
 terms "the desert of adolescence"; a desert 
 of sterile sands, blown upon by gales of the 
 
 1 From 1842 to 1847. [Science was as yet unorgan- 
 ised; and its teachers, even in Western Europe, had not 
 the courage of the facts they taught. Men still sought 
 for an anchor in the philosophic systems of the ancients. 
 The theory of evolution, put forward at the beginning of 
 the century, had fallen into obscurity. Science was dry, 
 dogmatic, uncoordinated, insignificant. Hence, perhaps, 
 the contempt for science which distinguished Tolstoy 
 throughout his life, and which made the later Tolstoy 
 possible. — Trans.] 
 
 2 Nikolas, five years older than Leo, had completed his 
 
 studies in 1844. 
 
 23 
 
24 TOLSTOY 
 
 burning winds of folly. The pages of Boy- 
 hood, and in especial those of Youth, 3 are 
 rich in intimate confessions relating to these 
 years. 
 
 He was a solitary. His brain was in a con- 
 dition of perpetual fever. For a year he was 
 completely at sea; he roamed from one system 
 of philosophy to another. As a Stoic, he in- 
 dulged in self-inflicted physical tortures. As 
 an Epicurean he debauched himself. Then 
 came a faith in metempsychosis. Finally he 
 fell into a condition of nihilism not far re- 
 moved from insanity; he used to feel that if 
 only he could turn round with sufficient 
 rapidity he would find himself face to face 
 with nothingness. . . . He analysed him- 
 self continually: 
 
 "I no longer thought of a thing; I thought 
 of what I thought of it." 4 
 
 This perpetual self-analysis, this mechan- 
 ism of reason turning in the void, remained 
 to him as a dangerous habit, which was 
 
 3 The English translation is entitled Childhood, Boy- 
 hood, Youth. 
 
 4 Youth, chap. xix. 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 25 
 
 "often," in his own words, " to be detrimental 
 to me in life"; but by which his art has 
 profited inexpressibly. 5 
 
 As another result of self-analysis, he had 
 lost all his religious convictions; or such was 
 his belief. At sixteen years of age ceased to 
 pray; he went to church no longer; 6 but his 
 faith was not extinguished; it was only 
 smouldering. 
 
 "Nevertheless, I did believe — in some- 
 thing. But in what? I could not say. I 
 still believed in God; or rather I did not deny 
 Him. But in what God? I did not know. 
 Nor did I deny Christ and his teaching; but I 
 could not have said precisely what that doc- 
 trine was." 7 
 
 From time to time he was obsessed by 
 dreams of goodness. He wished to sell his 
 carriage and give the money to the poor: to 
 give them the tenth part of his fortune; to 
 
 5 Notably in his first volumes — in the Tales of Sebas- 
 topol. 
 
 6 This was the time when he used to read Voltaire, 
 and find pleasure in so doing. 
 
 7 Confessions, vol. I. 
 
26 TOLSTOY 
 
 live without the help of servants, "for they 
 were men like himself." During an illness 8 
 he wrote certain "Rules of Life." He 
 naively assigned himself the duty of "study- 
 ing everything, of mastering all subjects: law, 
 medicine, languages, agriculture, history, 
 geography, and mathematics; to attain the 
 highest degree of perfection in music and 
 painting," and so forth. He had "the con- 
 viction that the destiny of man was a process 
 of incessant self-perfection." 
 
 Insensibly, under the stress of a boy's pas- 
 sions, of a violent sensuality and a stupendous 
 pride of self, 9 this faith in perfection went 
 astray, losing its disinterested quality, be- 
 coming material and practical. If he still 
 wished to perfect his will, his body, and his 
 mind, it was in order to conquer the world 
 
 8 In March and April, 1847. 
 
 9 "All that man does he does out of amour-propre" says 
 Nekhludov, in Boyhood. 
 
 In 1853 Tolstoy writes, in his Journal: "My great 
 failing: pride. A vast self-love, without justification. 
 . . . I am so ambitious that if I had to choose between 
 glory and virtue (which I love) I am sure I should 
 choose the former." 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH W 
 
 and to enforce its love. 10 He wished to please. 
 To please : it was not an easy ambition. He 
 was then of a simian ugliness: the face was 
 long, heavy, brutish; the hair was cropped 
 close, growing low upon the forehead; the 
 eyes were small, with a hard, forbidding 
 glance, deeply sunken in shadowy orbits; the 
 nose was large, the lips were thick and pro- 
 truding, and the ears were enormous. 11 Un- 
 able to alter this ugliness, which even as a 
 child had subjected him to fits of despair, 12 he 
 pretended to a realisation of the ideal man of 
 the world, Vhomme comme il faut. 1 * This 
 ideal led him to do as did other "men of the 
 
 10 "I wanted to be known by all, loved by all. I 
 wanted every one, at the mere sound of my name, to be 
 struck with admiration and gratitude." 
 
 11 According to a portrait dated 1848, in which year he 
 attained his twentieth year. 
 
 12 "I thought there would be no happiness on earth for 
 any one who had so large a nose, so thick lips, and such 
 small eyes." 
 
 13 "I divided humanity into three classes : the 'correct,' 
 or 'smart,' who alone were worthy of esteem ; those who 
 were not 'correct,' who deserved only contempt and 
 hatred; and the people, the plebs, who simply did not ex- 
 ist." {Youth, chap, xxxi.) 
 
28 TOLSTOY 
 
 world": to gamble, run foolishly into debt, 
 and to live a completely dissipated exist- 
 ence. 14 
 
 One quality always came to his salvation: 
 his absolute sincerity. 
 
 "Do you know why I like you better than 
 the others?" says Nekhludov to his friend. 
 "You have a precious and surprising quality: 
 candour." 
 
 "Yes, I am always saying things which I 
 am ashamed to own even to myself." 15 
 
 In his wildest moments he judges himself 
 with a pitiless insight. 
 
 "I am living an utterly bestial life," he 
 writes in his Journal. "I am as low as one 
 can fall." Then, with his mania for analysis, 
 he notes minutely the causes of his errors: 
 
 "i. Indecision or lack of energy. 2. Self- 
 deception. 3. Insolence. 4. False modesty. 
 5. Ill-temper. 6. Licentiousness. 7. Spirit 
 of imitation. 8. Versatility. 9. Lack of re- 
 flection." 
 
 14 Especially during a period spent in St. Petersburg, 
 
 1847-48. 
 
 15 Boyhood. 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 29 
 
 While still a student he was applying this 
 independence of judgment to the criticism 
 of social conventions and intellectual supersti- 
 tions. He scoffed at the official science of the 
 University; denied the least importance to 
 historical studies, and was put under arrest 
 for his audacity of thought. At this period 
 he discovered Rousseau, reading his Confes- 
 sions and Emile. The discovery affected him 
 like a mental thunderbolt. 
 
 "I made him an object of religious wor- 
 ship. I wore a medallion portrait of him 
 hung around my neck, as though it were a holy 
 image." 16 
 
 His first essays in philosophy took the form 
 of commentaries on Rousseau (1846-47). 
 
 In the end, however, disgusted with the Uni- 
 versity and with "smartness," he returned to 
 Yasnaya Polyana, to bury himself in the 
 country (1847-51) ; where he once more came 
 into touch with the people. He professed to 
 come to their assistance, as their benefactor 
 and their teacher. His experiences of this 
 
 16 Conversations with M. Paul Boyer (Le Temps), 
 August 28, 1 901. 
 
30 TOLSTOY 
 
 period have been related in one of his earliest 
 books, A Russian Proprietor (A Landlord's 
 Morning) (1852) ; a remarkable novel, whose 
 hero, Prince Nekhludov, 17 is Tolstoy in dis- 
 guise. 
 
 Nekhludov is twenty years old. He has left 
 the University to devote himself to his peas- 
 ants. He has been labouring for a year to do 
 them good. In the course of a visit to the 
 village, we see him striving against jeering 
 indifference, rooted distrust, routine, apathy, 
 vice, and ingratitude. All his efforts are in 
 vain. He returns indoors discouraged, and 
 muses on his dreams of a year ago; his gener- 
 ous enthusiasm, his "idea that love and good- 
 ness were one with happiness and truth: the 
 only happiness and the only truth possible in 
 
 17 Nekhludov figures also in Boyhood and Youth 
 (1854), i n A Brush with the Enemy (1856) ; the Diary 
 of a Sportsman (1856) ; Lucerne (1857) J an d Resurrec- 
 tion (1899). We must remember that different charac- 
 ters appear under this one name. Tolstoy has not always 
 given Nekhludov the same physical aspect; and the latter 
 commits suicide at the end of the Diary of a Sportsman. 
 These different Nekhludovs are various aspects of Tolstoy, 
 endowed with his worst and his best characteristics. 
 
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 31 
 
 this world." He feels himself defeated. He 
 is weary and ashamed. 
 
 "Seated before the piano, his hand uncon- 
 sciously moved upon the keys. A chord 
 sounded ; then a second, then a third. . . . 
 He began to play. The chords were not al- 
 ways perfect in rhythm; they were often ob- 
 vious to the point of banality; they did not re- 
 veal any talent for music; but they gave him 
 a melancholy, indefinable sense of pleasure. 
 At each change of key he awaited, with a flut- 
 ter of the heart, for what was about to fol- 
 low; his imagination vaguely supplementing 
 the deficiencies of the actual sound. He 
 heard a choir, an orchestra . . . and his 
 keenest pleasure arose from the enforced ac- 
 tivity of his imagination, which brought be- 
 fore him, without logical connection, but with 
 astonishing clearness, the most varied scenes 
 and images of the past and the fu- 
 ture. . . ." 
 
 Once more he sees the moujiks — vicious, 
 distrustful, lying, idle, obstinate, contrary, 
 with whom he has lately been speaking; but 
 this time he sees them with all their good 
 
32 TOLSTOY 
 
 qualities and without their vices; he sees into 
 their hearts with the intuition of love; he sees 
 therein their patience, their resignation to the 
 fate which is crushing them; their forgiveness 
 of wrongs, their family affection, and the 
 causes of their pious, mechanical attachment 
 to the past. He recalls their days of honest 
 labour, healthy and fatiguing. . . . 
 
 " 'It is beautiful,' he murmurs . . . 
 'Why am I not one of these?' " 18 
 
 The entire Tolstoy is already contained in 
 the hero of this first novel ; 19 his piercing vi- 
 sion and his persistent illusions. He observes 
 men and women with an impeccable realism ; 
 but no sooner does he close his eyes than his 
 dreams resume their sway; his dreams and his 
 love of mankind. 
 
 38 A Russian Proprietor. 
 
 19 Contemporary with Childhood. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 youth: the army 
 
CHAPTER III 
 youth: the army 
 
 TOLSTOY, in the year 1850, was not as patient 
 as Nekhludov. Yasnaya Polyana had disillu- 
 sioned and disappointed him. He was as 
 weary of the people as he was of the world 
 of fashion; his attitude as benefactor wearied 
 him ; he could bear it no more. Moreover, he 
 was harassed by creditors. In 1851 he es- 
 caped to the Caucasus ; to the army in which 
 his brother Nikolas was already an officer. 
 
 He had hardly arrived, hardly tasted the 
 quiet of the mountains, before he was once 
 more master of himself; before he had re- 
 covered his God. 
 
 "Last night 1 I hardly slept. I began to 
 pray to God. I cannot possibly express the 
 sweetness of the feeling that came to me when 
 
 1 The nth of June, 185 1, in the fortified camp of 
 Stari-Iourt, in the Caucasus. 
 
 35 
 
36 TOLSTOY 
 
 I prayed. I recited the customary prayers; 
 but I went on praying for a long time. I felt 
 the desire of something very great, very beau- 
 tiful. . . . What? I cannot say what. 
 I wanted to be one with the Infinite Being: to 
 be dissolved, comprehended, in Him. I 
 begged Him to forgive me my trespasses. 
 . . . But no, I did not beg Him ; I felt that 
 He did pardon me, since He granted me that 
 moment of wonderful joy. I was praying, yet 
 at the same time I felt that I could not, dared 
 not pray. I thanked Him, not in words, but 
 in thought. . . . Scarcely an hour had 
 passed, and I was listening to the voice of vice. 
 I fell asleep dreaming of glory, of women: 
 it was stronger than I. Never mind! I 
 thank God for that moment of happiness: for 
 showing me my pettiness and my greatness. 
 I want to pray, but I do not know how ; I want 
 to understand, but I dare not. I abandon my- 
 self to Thy will!" 2 
 
 The flesh was not conquered ; not then, nor 
 ever; the struggle between God and the pas- 
 
 2 Journal. 
 
YOUTH: THE ARMY S7 
 
 sions of man continued in the silence of his 
 heart. Tolstoy speaks in his Journal of the 
 three demons which were devouring him: 
 
 i. The passion for. gambling. Possible 
 struggle. 
 
 2. Sensuality. Struggle very difficult. 
 
 3. Vanity. The most terrible of all. 
 
 At the very moment when he was dreaming 
 of living for others and of sacrificing himself, 
 voluptuous or futile thoughts would assail 
 him: the image of some Cossack woman, or 
 "the despair he would feel if his moustache 
 were higher on one side than the other." — 
 "No matter!" God was there; He would not 
 forsake him. Even the effervescence of the 
 struggle was fruitful: all the forces of life 
 were exalted thereby. 
 
 "I think the idea of making a journey to 
 the Caucasus, however frivolous at the time of 
 conception, was inspired in me from above. 
 God's hand has guided me. I never cease to 
 thank Him. I feel that I have become better 
 here; and I am firmly convinced that what- 
 ever happens to me can only be for my good, 
 
38 TOLSTOY 
 
 since it is God Himself who has wished 
 it. . . ." 3 
 
 It is the song of gratitude of the earth in 
 spring. Earth covers herself with flowers ; all 
 is well, all is beautiful. In 1852 the genius 
 of Tolstoy produces its earliest flowers: 
 Childhood, A Russian Proprietor, The In- 
 vasion, Boyhood; and he thanks the Spirit of 
 life who has made him fruitful. 4 
 
 3 Letter to his Aunt Tatiana, January, 1852. 
 
 4 A portrait dated 1851 already shows the change which 
 is being accomplished in his mind. The head is raised; 
 the expression is somewhat brighter; the cavities of the 
 orbits are less in shadow; the eyes themselves still retain 
 their fixed severity of look, and the open mouth, shadowed 
 by a growing moustache, is gloomy and sullen; there is 
 still a quality of defiant pride, but far more youth. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EARLY WORK : TALES OF THE CAUCASUS 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EARLY WORK: TALES OF THE CAUCASUS 
 
 The Story of my Childhood ! was commenced 
 in the autumn of 1 85 1 , at Tiflis ; it was finished 
 at Piatigorsk in the Caucasus, on the 2nd of 
 July, 1852. It is curious to note that while in 
 the midst of that nature by which he was so 
 intoxicated, while leading a life absolutely 
 novel, in the midst of the stirring risks of war- 
 fare, occupied in the discovery of a world of 
 unfamiliar characters and passions, Tolstoy 
 should have returned, in this his first work, to 
 the memories of his past life. But Child- 
 hood was written during a period of illness, 
 when his military activity was suddenly ar- 
 rested. During the long leisure of a conva- 
 lescence, while alone and suffering, his state of 
 mind inclined to the sentimental; 2 the past 
 
 1 Published in English as part of Childhood, Boyhood, 
 Youth. 
 
 2 His letters of this period to his Aunt Tatiana are full 
 
 41 
 
43 TOLSTOY 
 
 unrolled itself before his eyes at a time when 
 he felt for it a certain tenderness. After the 
 exhausting tension of the last few unprofit- 
 able years, it was comforting to live again in 
 thought the "marvellous, innocent, joyous, 
 poetic period" of early childhood; to recon- 
 struct for himself "the heart of a child, good, 
 sensitive, and capable of love." With the ar- 
 dour of youth and its illimitable projects, with 
 the cyclic character of his poetic imagination, 
 which rarely conceived an isolated subject, 
 and whose great romances are only the links 
 in a long historic chain, the fragments of enor- 
 mous conceptions which he was never able to 
 execute, 3 Tolstoy at this moment regarded hi* 
 narrative of Childhood as merely the opening 
 chapters of a History of Four Periods, which 
 
 of tears and of sentimentality. He was, as he says, Liova- 
 riova, "Leo the Sniveller" (January 6, 1852). 
 
 3 A Russian Proprietor {A Landlord's Morning) is 
 the fragment of a projected Romance of a Russian Land- 
 owner. The Cossacks forms the first portion of a great 
 romance of the Caucasus. In the author's eyes the huge 
 War and Peace was only a sort of preface to a contem- 
 porary epic, of which The Decembrists was to have been 
 the nucleus. 
 
EARLY WORK 4S 
 
 was to include his life in the Caucasus, and 
 was in all probability to have terminated in 
 the revelation of God by Nature. 
 
 In later years Tolstoy spoke with great se- 
 verity of his Childhood, to which he owed 
 some part of his popularity. 
 
 "It is so bad," he remarked to M. Birukov: 
 " it is written with so little literary conscience! 
 . . . There is nothing to be got from it." 
 
 He was alone in this opinion. The manu- 
 script was sent, without the author's name, to 
 the great Russian review, the Sovremennik 
 (Contemporary) ; it was published immedi- 
 ately (September 6, 1852), and achieved a 
 general success; a success confirmed by the 
 public of every country in Europe. Yet in 
 spite of its poetic charm, its delicacy of touch 
 and emotion, we can understand that it may 
 have displeased the Tolstoy of later years. 
 
 It displeased him for the very reasons by 
 which it pleased others. We must admit it 
 frankly: except in the recording of certain 
 provincial types, and in a restricted number 
 of passages which are remarkable for their re- 
 ligious feeling or for the realistic treatment of 
 
44 TOLSTOY 
 
 emotion, 4 the personality of Tolstoy is barely 
 in evidence. 
 
 A tender, gentle sentimentality prevails 
 from cover to cover; a quality which was al- 
 ways afterwards antipathetic to Tolstoy, and 
 one which he sedulously excluded from his 
 other romances. We recognise it; these tears, 
 this sentimentality came from Dickens, who 
 was one of Tolstoy's favourite authors between 
 his fourteenth and his twenty-first year. Tol- 
 stoy notes in his Journal: "Dickens: David 
 Copperfield. Influence considerable." He 
 read the book again in the Caucasus. 
 
 Two other influences, to which he himself 
 confesses, were Sterne and Toppfer. "I was 
 then," he says, "under their inspiration." 5 
 
 Who would have thought that the Nouvel- 
 les Genevoises would be the first model of the 
 author of War and Peace? Yet knowing this 
 to be a fact, we discern in Tolstoy's Childhood 
 the same bantering, affected geniality, trans- 
 planted to the soil of a more aristocratic na- 
 
 4 See the passage relating to the pilgrim Gricha, or to 
 the death of his mother. 
 
 5 Letter to Birukov. 
 
EARLY WORK 45 
 
 ture. So we see that the readers of his earliest 
 efforts found the writer's countenance familiar. 
 It was not long, however, before his own per- 
 sonality found self-expression. His Boy- 
 hood (Adolescence), though less pure and 
 less perfect than Childhood exhibits a more 
 orignal power of psychology, a keen feeling 
 for nature, and a mind full of distress and 
 conflict, which Dickens or Toppfer would 
 have been at a loss to express. In A Russian 
 Proprietor (October, 1852 6 ) Tolstoy's char- 
 acter appeared sharply defined, marked by his 
 fearless sincerity and his faith in love. 
 Among the remarkable portraits of peasants 
 which he has painted in this novel, we find 
 an early sketch of one of the finest conceptions 
 of his Popular Tales: the old man with the 
 beehives; 7 the little old man under the birch- 
 tree, his hands outstretched, his eyes raised, 
 his bald head shining in the sun, and all 
 around him the bees, touched with gold, never 
 stinging him, forming a halo. . . . But 
 the truly typical works of this period are those 
 
 6 Completed only in 1855-56. 
 
 7 The Two Old Men (1885). 
 
46 TOLSTOY 
 
 which directly register his present emotions: 
 namely, the novels of the Caucasus. The first, 
 The Invasion (finished in December, 1852), 
 impresses the reader deeply by the magnifi- 
 cence of its landscapes: a sunrise amidst the 
 mountains, on the bank of a river; a won- 
 derful night-piece, with sounds and shadows 
 noted with a striking intensity; and the return 
 in the evening, while the distant snowy peaks 
 disappear in the violet haze, and the clear 
 voices of the regimental singers rise and fall 
 in the transparent air. Many of the types of 
 War and Peace are here drawn to the life: 
 Captain Khlopoff, the true hero, who by no 
 means fights because he likes fighting, but 
 because it is his duty; a man with "one of 
 those truly Russian faces, placid and simple, 
 and eyes into which it is easy and agreeable to 
 gaze." 
 
 Heavy, awkward, a trifle ridiculous, indif- 
 ferent to his surroundings, he alone is un- 
 changed in battle, where all the rest are 
 changed; "he is exactly as we have seen him 
 always: with the same quiet movements, the 
 same level voice, the same expression of sim- 
 
EARLY WORK 4tf 
 
 plicity on his heavy, simple face.". Next 
 comes the lieutenant who imitates the heroes 
 of Lermontov; a most kindly, affectionate 
 boy, who professes the utmost ferocity. Then 
 comes the poor little subaltern, delighted at 
 the idea of his first action, brimming over with 
 affection, ready to fall on his comrade's 
 neck; a laughable, adorable boy, who, like 
 Petia RostorT, contrives to get stupidly killed. 
 In the centre of the picture is the figure of 
 Tolstoy, the observer, who is mentally aloof 
 from his comrades, and already utters his cry 
 of protest against warfare: 
 
 "Is it impossible, then, for men to live in 
 peace, in this world so full of beauty, under 
 this immeasurable starry sky? How is it 
 they are able, here, to retain their feelings of 
 hostility and vengeance, and the lust of de- 
 stroying their fellows? All there is of evil in 
 the human heart ought to disappear at the 
 touch of nature, that most immediate expres- 
 sion of the beautiful and the good." 8 
 
 Other tales of the Caucasus were to follow 
 which were observed at this time, though not 
 
 8 The Invasion. 
 
48 TOLSTOY 
 
 written until a later period. In 1854-55, 
 The Woodcutters was written; a book notable 
 for its exact and rather frigid realism; full of 
 curious records of Russian soldier-psychology 
 — notes to be made use of in the future. In 
 1856 appeared A Brush with the Enemy, in 
 which there is a man of the world, a degraded 
 non-commissioned officer, a wreck, a coward, 
 a drunkard and a liar, who cannot support the 
 idea of being slaughtered like one of the com- 
 mon soldiers he despises, the least of whom is 
 worth a hundred of himself. 
 
 Above all these works, as the summit, so to 
 speak, of this first mountain range, rises one of 
 the most beautiful lyric romances that ever fell 
 from Tolstoy's pen : the song of his youth, the 
 poem of the Caucasus, The Cossacks. 9 The 
 splendour of the snowy mountains displaying 
 their noble lines against the luminous sky fills 
 the whole work with its music. The book is 
 unique, for it belongs to the flowering-time of 
 genius, "the omnipotent god of youth," as 
 
 9 Although completed much later — in i860 — and ap- 
 pearing only in 1863 — the bulk of this volume was of this 
 period. 
 
EARLY WORK 49 
 
 Tolstoy says, "that rapture which never re- 
 turns." What a spring-tide torrent! What 
 an overflow of love! 
 
 " 'I love — I love so much! . . . How 
 brave! How good!' he repeated: and he felt 
 as though he must weep. Why? Who was 
 brave, and whom did he love? That he did 
 not precisely know." 10 
 
 This intoxication of the heart flows on, un- 
 checked. Olenin, the hero, who has come to 
 the Caucasus, as Tolstoy came, to steep him- 
 self in nature, in the life of adventure, be- 
 comes enamoured of a young Cossack girl, 
 and abandons himself to the medley of his 
 contradictory aspirations. At one moment he 
 believes that "happiness is to live for others, 
 to sacrifice oneself," at another, that "self- 
 sacrifice is only stupidity"; finally he is in- 
 clined to believe, with Erochta, the old Cos- 
 sack, that "everything is precious. God has 
 made everything for the delight of man. 
 Nothing is a sin. To amuse oneself with a 
 handsome girl is not a sin: it is only health." 
 But what need to think at all? It is enough 
 
 10 The Cossacks. 
 
50 TOLSTOY 
 
 to live. Life is all good, all happiness; life 
 is all-powerful and universal; life is God. 
 An ardent naturalism uplifts and consumes his 
 soul. Lost in the forest, amidst "the wild- 
 ness of the woods, the multitude of birds and 
 animals, the clouds of midges in the dusky 
 green, in the warm, fragrant air, amidst the 
 little runlets of water which trickle every- 
 where beneath the boughs" ; a few paces from 
 the ambushes of the enemy, Olenin is "seized 
 suddenly by such a sense of causeless happi- 
 ness that in obedience to childish habit he 
 crossed himself and began to give thanks to 
 somebody." Like a Hindu fakir, he rejoices 
 to tell himself that he is alone and lost in this 
 maelstrom of aspiring life: that myriads of 
 invisible beings, hidden on every hand, are 
 that moment hunting him to death ; that these 
 thousands of little insects humming around 
 him are calling: 
 
 " 'Here, brothers, here! Here is some one 
 to biteT " 
 
 And it became obvious to him that he was 
 no longer a Russian gentleman, in Moscow 
 
EARLY WORK 51 
 
 society, but simply a creature like the midge, 
 the pheasant, the stag: like those which were 
 living and prowling about him at that mo- 
 ment. 
 
 "Like. them, I shall live, I shall die. And 
 the grass will grow above me. . . ." 
 
 And his heart is full of happiness. 
 
 Tolstoy lives through this hour of youth in 
 a delirium of vitality and the love of life. 
 He embraces Nature, and sinks himself in her 
 being. To her he pours forth and exalts his 
 griefs, his joys, and his loves; in her he lulls 
 them to sleep. Yet this romantic intoxica- 
 tion never veils the lucidity of his perceptions. 
 Nowhere has he painted landscape with a 
 greater power than in this fervent poem; no- 
 where has he depicted the type with greater 
 truth. The contrast of nature with the world 
 of men, which forms the basis of the book; 
 and which through all Tolstoy's life is to 
 prove one of his favourite themes, and an 
 article of his Credo, has already inspired him, 
 the better to castigate the world, with some- 
 thing of the bitterness to be heard in the 
 
52 TOLSTOY 
 
 Kreutzer Sonata. 11 But for those who love 
 him he is no less truly himself; and the crea- 
 tures of nature, the beautiful Cossack girl and 
 her friends, are seen under a searching light, 
 with their egoism, their cupidity, their 
 venality, and all their vices. 
 
 An exceptional occasion was about to offer 
 itself for the exercise of this heroic veracity. 
 
 11 For example, see Olenin's letter to his friends in 
 Russia. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 sebastopol: war and religion 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 
 
 In November, 1853, war was declared upon 
 Turkey. Tolstoy obtained an appointment to 
 the army of Roumania ; he was transferred to 
 the army of the Crimea, and on November 7, 
 1854, ne arrived in Sebastopol. He was burn- 
 ing with enthusiasm and patriotic faith. He 
 went about his duties courageously, and was 
 often in danger, in especial throughout the 
 April and May of 1855, when he served on 
 every alternate day in the battery of the 4th 
 bastion. 
 
 Living for months in a perpetual tremor 
 and exaltation, face to face with death, his 
 religious mysticism revived. He became fa- 
 miliar with God. In April, 1855, he noted in 
 his diary a prayer to God, thanking Him for 
 His protection in danger and beseeching Him 
 
 to continue it, "so that I may achieve the 
 
 55 
 
56 TOLSTOY 
 
 glorious and eternal end of life, of which I am 
 still ignorant, although I feel a presentiment 
 of it." Already this object of his life was not 
 art, but religion. On March 5, 1855, he 
 wrote : 
 
 "I have been led to conceive a great idea, 
 to whose realisation I feel capable of devot- 
 ing my whole life. This idea is the founda- 
 tion of a new religion; the religion of the 
 Christ, but purified of dogmas and mysteries. 
 . . . To act with a clear conscience, in 
 order to unite men by means of religion." 1 
 
 This was to be the programme of his old 
 age. 
 
 However, to distract himself from the 
 spectacles which surrounded him, he began 
 once more to write. How could he, amidst 
 that hail of lead, find the necessary freedom 
 of mind for the writing of the third part of 
 his memories: Youth? The book is chaotic; 
 and we may attribute to the conditions of its 
 production a quality of disorder, and at times 
 a certain dryness of abstract analysis, which is 
 increased by divisions and subdivisions after 
 1 Journal, 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 57 
 
 the manner of Stendhal. 2 Yet we admire his 
 calm penetration of the mist of dreams and in- 
 choate ideas which crowd a young brain. 
 His work is extraordinarily true to itself, and 
 at moments what poetic freshness! — as in the 
 vivid picture of springtime in the city, or 
 the tale of the confession, and the journey to 
 the convent, on account of the forgotten sin! 
 An impassioned pantheism lends to certain 
 pages a lyric beauty, whose accents recall the 
 tales of the Caucasus. For example, this de- 
 scription of an evening in the spring: 
 
 "The calm splendour of the shining 
 crescent; the gleaming fish-pond; the ancient 
 birch-trees, whose long-tressed boughs were on 
 one side silvered by the moonlight, while on 
 the other they covered the path and the bushes 
 
 2 We notice this manner also in The Woodcutters, 
 which was completed at the same period. For example: 
 "There are three kinds of love: I. aesthetic love; 2. de- 
 voted love; 3. active love," etc. (Youth). "There are 
 three kinds of soldiers: I. the docile and subordinate; 
 2. the authoritative; 3. the boasters — who themselves are 
 subdivided into: (a) The docile who are cool and 
 lethargic; (b) those who are earnestly docile; (c) docile 
 soldiers who drink," etc. (The Woodcutters). 
 
58 TOLSTOY 
 
 with their black shadows; the cry of a quail 
 beyond the pond; the barely perceptible 
 sound of two ancient trees which grazed one 
 another; the humming of the mosquitoes; the 
 fall of an apple on the dry leaves; and the 
 frogs leaping up to the steps of the terrace, 
 their backs gleaming greenish under a ray of 
 moonlight. . . . The moon is mounting; 
 suspended in the limpid sky, she fills all space 
 with her light; the splendour of the moonlit 
 water grows yet more brilliant, the shadows 
 grow blacker, the light more transparent. 
 . . . And to me, an obscure and earthly 
 creature, already soiled with every human 
 passion, but endowed with all the stupendous 
 power of love, it seemed at that moment that 
 all nature, the moon, and I myself were one 
 and the same." 3 
 
 But the present reality, potent and imperi- 
 ous, spoke more loudly than the dreams of the 
 past. Youth remained unfinished; and Cap- 
 tain Count Tolstoy, behind the plating of his 
 bastion, amid the rumbling of the bombard- 
 ment, or in the midst of his company, observed 
 
 3 Youth, chap, xxxii. 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 59 
 
 the dying and the living, and recorded their 
 miseries and his own, in his unforgettable nar- 
 ratives of Sebastopol. 
 
 These three narratives — Sebastopol in De- 
 cember, 1854, Sebastopol in May, l855> ^ e ~ 
 bastopol in August, 1855 — are generally con- 
 founded with one another; but in reality they 
 present many points of difference. The 
 second in particular, in point both of feeling 
 and of art, is greatly superior to the others. 
 The others are dominated by patriotism; the 
 second is charged with implacable truth. 
 
 It is said that after reading the first nar- 
 rative 4 the Tsarina wept, and the Tsar, moved 
 by admiration, commanded that the story 
 should be translated into French, and the 
 author sent out of danger. We can readily 
 believe it. Nothing in these pages but exalts 
 warfare and the fatherland. Tolstoy had just 
 arrived; his enthusiasm was intact; he was 
 afloat on a tide of heroism. As yet he could 
 see in the defenders of Sebastopol neither am- 
 bition nor vanity, nor any unworthy feeling. 
 
 4 Sent to the review Sovremennik and immediately pub- 
 lished. 
 
60 TOLSTOY 
 
 For him the war was a sublime epic ; its heroes 
 were "worthy of Greece." On the other 
 hand, these notes exhibit no effort of the im- 
 agination, no attempt at objective represen- 
 tation. The writer strolls through the city; 
 he sees with the utmost lucidity, but relates 
 what he sees in a form which is wanting 
 in freedom: "You see . . . you enter 
 . . . you notice. . . ." This is first- 
 class reporting; rich in admirable impres- 
 sions. 
 
 Very different is the second scene : Sebasto- 
 pol in May, 1835. In the opening lines we 
 read: 
 
 "Here the self-love, the vanity of thousands 
 of human beings is in conflict, or appeased in 
 death. . . ." 
 
 And further on: 
 
 "And as there were many men, so also were 
 there many forms of vanity. . . . Vanity, 
 vanity, everywhere vanity, even at the door of 
 the tomb! It is the peculiar malady of our 
 century. . . . Why do the Homers and 
 Shakespeares speak of love, of glory, and of 
 suffering, and why is the literature of our 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 61 
 
 century nothing but the interminable history 
 of snobs and egotists?" 
 
 The narrative, which is no longer a simple 
 narrative on the part of the author, but one 
 which sets before us men and their passions, 
 reveals that which is concealed by the mask of 
 heroism. Tolstoy's clear, disillusioned gaze 
 plumbs to the depths the hearts of his com- 
 panions in arms; in them, as in himself, he 
 reads pride, fear, and the comedy of those who 
 continue to play at life though rubbing shoul- 
 ders with death. Fear especially is avowed, 
 stripped of its veils, and shown in all its 
 nakedness. These nervous crises, 5 this ob- 
 session of death, are analysed with a terrible 
 sincerity that knows neither shame nor pity. 
 It was at Sebastopol that Tolstoy learned to 
 eschew sentimentalism, "that vague, feminine, 
 whimpering passion," as he came disdain- 
 
 5 Tolstoy refers to them again at a much later date, in 
 his Conversations with his friend Teneromo. He tells 
 him of a crisis of terror which assailed him one night 
 when he was lying down in the "lodgement" dug out of 
 the body of the rampart, under the protective plating. 
 This Episode of the Siege of Sebastopol will be found in 
 the volume entitled The Revolutionaries. 
 
62 TOLSTOY 
 
 fully to term it; and his genius for analysis, 
 the instinct for which awoke, as we saw, in 
 the later years of his boyhood, and which was 
 at times to assume a quality almost morbid, 6 
 never attained to a more hypnotic and poig- 
 nant intensity than in the narrative of the 
 death of Praskhoukhin. Two whole pages 
 are devoted to the description of all that 
 passed in the mind of the unhappy man dur- 
 ing the second following upon the fall of 
 the shell, while the fuse was hissing towards 
 explosion; and one page deals with all that 
 passed before him after it exploded, when "he 
 was killed on the spot by a fragment which 
 struck him full in the chest." 
 
 As in the intervals of a drama we hear the 
 occasional music of the orchestra, so these 
 scenes of battle are interrupted by wide 
 
 6 Droujinine, a little later, wrote him a friendly letter 
 in which he sought to put him on his guard against this 
 danger: "You have a tendency to an excessive minute- 
 ness of analysis ; it may become a serious fault. Some- 
 times you seem on the point of saying that so-and-so's calf 
 indicated a desire to travel in the Indies. . . . You 
 must restrain this tendency: but do not for the world sup- 
 press it." (Letter dated 1856 cited by P. Birukov.) 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 63 
 
 glimpses of nature; deep perspectives of light; 
 the symphony of the day dawning upon the 
 splendid landscape, in the midst of which 
 thousands are agonising. Tolstoy the Chris- 
 tian, forgetting the patriotism of his first nar- 
 rative, curses this impious war: 
 
 "And these men, Christians, who profess the 
 same great law of love and of sacrifice, do 
 not, when they perceive what they have done, 
 fall upon their knees repentant, before Him 
 who in giving them life set w T ithin the heart 
 of each, together with the fear of death, the 
 love of the good and the beautiful. They do 
 not embrace as brothers, with tears of joy and 
 happiness!" 
 
 As he was completing this novel — a work 
 that has a quality of bitterness which, hitherto, 
 none of his work had betrayed — Tolstoy w r as 
 seized with doubt. Had he done wrong to 
 speak? 
 
 "A painful doubt assails me. Perhaps 
 these things should not have been said. Per- 
 haps what I am telling is one of those mis- 
 chievous truths which, unconsciously hidden 
 in the mind of each one of us, should not be 
 
64 TOLSTOY 
 
 expressed lest they become harmful, like the 
 lees that we must not stir lest we spoil the 
 wine. If so, when is the expression of evil 
 to be avoided? When is the expression of 
 goodness to be imitated? Who is the male- 
 factor and who is the hero? All are good 
 and all are evil. . . ." 
 
 But he proudly regains his poise: "The 
 protagonist of my novel, whom I love with all 
 the strength of my soul, whom I try to present 
 in all her beauty, who always was, is, and shall 
 be beautiful, is Truth." 
 
 After reading these pages 7 Nekrasov, the 
 editor of the review Sovremennik, wrote to 
 Tolstoy: 
 
 "That is precisely what Russian society 
 needs to-day: the truth, the truth, of which, 
 since the death of Gogol, so little has re- 
 mained in Russian letters. . . . This 
 truth which you bring to our art is something 
 quite novel with us. I have only one fear: 
 lest the times, and the cowardice of life, the 
 deafness and dumbness of all that surrounds 
 us, may make of you what it has made of 
 
 7 Mutilated by the censor. 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 65 
 
 most of us — lest it may kill the energy in 
 you." 8 
 
 Nothing of the kind was to be feared. The 
 times, which waste the energies of ordinary 
 men, only tempered those of Tolstoy. Yet 
 for a moment the trials of his country and the 
 capture of Sebastopol aroused a feeling of 
 regret for his perhaps too unfeeling frankness, 
 together with a feeling of sorrowful affec- 
 tion. 
 
 In his third narrative — Sebastopol in 
 August, 1855 — while describing a group of 
 officers playing cards and quarrelling, he in- 
 terrupts himself to say: 
 
 "But let us drop the curtain quickly over 
 this picture. To-morrow — perhaps to-day — 
 each of these men will go cheerfully to meet 
 his death. In the depths of the soul of each 
 there smoulders the spark of nobility which 
 will make him a hero." 
 
 Although this shame detracts in no wise 
 from the forcefulness and realism of the nar- 
 rative, the choice of characters shows plainly 
 enough where lie the sympathies of the writer. 
 
 8 September 2, 1855. 
 
66 TOLSTOY 
 
 The epic of Malakoff and its heroic fall is 
 told as affecting two rare and touching figures : 
 two brothers, of whom the elder, Kozeltoff, 
 has some of the characteristics of Tolstoy. 
 Who can forget the younger, the ensign 
 Volodya, timid and enthusiastic, with his 
 feverish monologues, his dreams, his tears? — 
 tears that rise to his eyes for a mere nothing; 
 tears of tenderness, tears of humiliation — his 
 fear during the first hours passed in the bastion 
 (the poor boy is still afraid of the dark, and 
 covers his head with his cloak when he goes 
 to bed) ; the oppression caused by the feeling 
 of his own solitude and the indifference of 
 others; then, when the hour arrives, his joy 
 in danger. He belongs to the group of poetic 
 figures of youth (of whom are Petia in War 
 and Peace, and the sub-lieutenant in The 
 Invasion), who, their hearts full of affection, 
 make war with laughter on their lips, and are 
 broken suddenly, uncomprehending, on the 
 wheel of death. The two brothers fall 
 wounded, both on the same day — the last day 
 of the defence. The novel ends with these 
 
SEBASTOPOL: WAR AND RELIGION 67 
 
 lines, in which we hear the muttering of a 
 patriotic anger: 
 
 "The army was leaving the town ; and each 
 soldier, as he looked upon deserted Sebastopol, 
 sighed, with an inexpressible bitterness in his 
 heart, and shook his fist in the direction of the 
 enemy." 9 
 
 9 In 1889, when writing a preface to Memories of Se- 
 bastopol, by an Officer of Artillery (A. J. Erchofr), 
 Tolstoy returned in fancy to these scenes. Every heroic 
 memory had disappeared. He could no longer remember 
 anything but the fear which lasted for seven months — 
 the double fear: the fear of death and the fear of shame 
 — and the horrible moral torture. All the exploits of the 
 siege reduced themselves, for him, to this: he had been 
 "flesh for cannon." 
 

CHAPTER VI 
 ST. PETERSBURG 
 

CHAPTER VI 
 
 ST. PETERSBURG 
 
 WHEN, once issued from this hell, where for 
 a year he had touched the extreme of the 
 passions, vanities, and sorrows of humanity, 
 Tolstoy found himself, in November, 1855, 
 amidst the men of letters of St. Petersburg, 
 they inspired him with a feeling of disdain 
 and disillusion. They seemed to him en- 
 tirely mean, ill-natured, and untruthful. 
 These men, who appeared in the distance to 
 wear the halo of art — even Tourgenev, whom 
 he had admired, and to whom he had but 
 lately dedicated The Woodcutters — even he, 
 seen close at hand, had bitterly disappointed 
 him. A portrait of 1856 represents him in 
 the midst of them: Tourgenev, Gontcharov, 
 Ostrovsky, Grigorovitch, Droujinine. He 
 strikes one, in the free-and-easy atmosphere 
 of the others, by reason of his hard, ascetic 
 air, his bony head, his lined cheeks, his rigidly 
 
 71 
 
72 TOLSTOY 
 
 folded arms. Standing upright, in uniform, 
 behind these men of letters, he has the ap- 
 pearance, as Suares has wittily said, "rather 
 of mounting guard over these gentry than of 
 making one of their company; as though he 
 were ready to march them back to gaol." 1 
 
 Yet they all gathered about their young 
 colleague, who came to them with the two- 
 fold glory of the writer and the hero of 
 Sebastopol. Tourgenev, who had "wept and 
 shouted 'Hurrah!'" while reading the pages 
 of Sebastopol, held out a brotherly hand. 
 But the two men could not understand one 
 another. Although both saw the world with 
 the same clear vision, they mingled with that 
 vision the hues of their inimical minds; the 
 one, ironic, resonant, amorous, disillusioned, 
 a devotee of beauty; the other proud, violent, 
 tormented with moral ideas, pregnant with a 
 hidden God. 
 
 What Tolstoy could never forgive in these 
 literary men was that they believed them- 
 
 1 Suares: Tolstoi, edition of the Union pour V Action 
 morale, 1899 (reprinted, in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 
 under the title Tolstoi vivant). 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 73 
 
 selves an elect, superior caste; the crown of 
 humanity. Into his antipathy for them there 
 entered a good deal of the pride of the great 
 noble and the officer who condescendingly 
 mingles with liberal and middle-class scrib- 
 blers. 2 It was also a characteristic of his — 
 he himself knew it — to "oppose instinctively 
 all trains of reasoning, all conclusions, which 
 were generally admitted." 3 A distrust of 
 mankind, a latent contempt for human reason, 
 made him always on the alert to discover de- 
 ception in himself or others. 
 
 "He never believed in the sincerity of any 
 one. All moral exhilaration seemed false to 
 him; and he had a way of fixing, with that 
 extraordinarily piercing gaze of his, the man 
 whom he suspected was not telling the 
 truth." 4 "How he used to listen! How he 
 
 2 Tourgenev complained, in a conversation, of "this 
 stupid nobleman's pride, his bragging Junkerdom." 
 
 3 "A trait of my character, it may be good or ill, but 
 it is one which was always peculiar to me, is that in spite 
 of myself I always used to resist external epidemic influ- 
 ences. ... I had a hatred of the general tendency." 
 (Letter to P. Birukov.) 
 
 4 Tourgenev. 
 
74 TOLSTOY 
 
 used to gaze at those who spoke to him, from 
 the very depths of his grey eyes, deeply sunken 
 in their orbits ! With what irony his lips were 
 pressed together!" 5 
 
 "Tourgenev used to say that he had never 
 experienced anything more painful than this 
 piercing gaze, which, together with two or 
 three words of envenomed observation, was 
 capable of infuriating anybody." 6 
 
 At their first meetings violent scenes oc- 
 curred between Tolstoy and Tourgenev. 
 When at a distance they cooled down and tried 
 to do one another justice. But as time went 
 on Tolstoy's dislike of his literary surround- 
 ings grew deeper. He could not forgive these 
 artists for the combination of their depraved 
 life and their moral pretensions. 
 
 "I acquired the conviction that nearly all 
 were immoral men, unsound, without charac- 
 ter, greatly inferior to those I had met in my 
 Bohemian military life. And they were sure 
 of themselves and self-content, as men might 
 
 5 Grigorovitch. 
 
 6 Eugene Gardine: Souvenirs sur Tourgeniev, 1883. 
 See Vie et (Euvre de Tolstoi, by Birukov. 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 75 
 
 be who were absolutely sound. They dis- 
 gusted me." 7 
 
 He parted from them. But he did not at 
 once lose their interested faith in art. 8 His 
 pride was flattered thereby. It was a faith 
 which was richly rewarded; it brought him 
 "women, money, fame." 
 
 "Of this religion I was one of the pontiffs; 
 an agreeable and highly profitable situation." 
 
 The better to consecrate himself to this re- 
 ligion, he sent in his resignation from the army 
 (November, 1856). 
 
 But a man of his temper could not close his 
 eyes for long. He believed, he was eager to 
 believe, in progress. It seemed to him "that 
 this word signified something." A journey 
 abroad, which lasted from the end of Janu- 
 ary to the end of July of 1857, during which 
 period he visited France, Switzerland, and 
 Germany, resulted in the destruction of this 
 
 7 Confessions. 
 
 8 "There was no difference between us and an asylum 
 full of lunatics. Even at the time I vaguely suspected 
 as much; but as all madmen do, I regarded them as all 
 mad excepting myself." — Ibid. 
 
76 TOLSTOY 
 
 faith. In Paris, on the 6th of April, 1857, the 
 spectacle of a public execution "showed him 
 the emptiness of the superstition of progress." 
 
 "When I saw the head part from the body 
 and fall into the basket I understood in every 
 recess of my being that no theory as to the 
 reason of the present order of things could 
 justify such an act. Even though all the men 
 in the world, supported by this or that theory, 
 were to find it necessary, I myself should 
 know that it was wrong; for it is not what 
 men say or do that decides what is good or 
 bad, but my own heart." 9 
 
 In the month of July the sight of a little 
 perambulating singer at Lucerne, to whom 
 the wealthy English visitors at the Schweizer- 
 hof were refusing alms, made him express 
 in the Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov his con- 
 tempt for all the illusions dear to Liberals, and 
 for those "who trace imaginary lines upon the 
 sea of good and evil." 
 
 "For them civilisation is good; barbarism is 
 bad ; liberty is good ; slavery is bad. And this 
 imaginary knowledge destroys the instinctive, 
 
 9 Confessions. 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 77 
 
 primordial cravings, which are the best. 
 Who will define them for me — liberty, des- 
 potism, civilisation, barbarism? Where does 
 not good co-exist with evil? There is within 
 us only one infallible guide: the universal 
 Spirit which whispers to us to draw closer to 
 one another." 
 
 On his return to Russia and Yasnaya he 
 once more busied himself about the peasants. 
 Not that he had any illusions left concerning 
 them. He writes: 
 
 "The apologists of the people and its good 
 sense speak to no purpose; the crowd is per- 
 haps the union of worthy folk; but if so they 
 unite only on their bestial and contemptible 
 side, a side which expresses nothing but the 
 weakness and cruelty of human nature." 10 
 
 Thus he does not address himself to the 
 crowd, but to the individual conscience of 
 each man, each child of the people. For there 
 light is to be found. He founded schools, 
 without precisely knowing what he would 
 teach. In order to learn, he undertook an- 
 other journey abroad, which lasted from 
 
 10 Diary of Prince D. Nekhludov. 
 
78 TOLSTOY 
 
 the 3rd of July, i860, to the 23rd of April, 
 1861. 11 
 
 He studied the various pedagogic systems 
 of the time. Need we say that he rejected 
 one and all? Two visits to Marseilles taught 
 him that the true education of the people is 
 effected outside the schools (which he con- 
 sidered absurd), by means of the journals, the 
 museums, the libraries, the street, and every- 
 day life, which he termed "the spontaneous 
 school." The spontaneous school, in opposi- 
 tion to the obligatory school, which he con- 
 sidered silly and harmful; this was what he 
 wished and attempted to institute upon his re- 
 turn to Yasnaya Polyana. 12 Liberty was his 
 principle. He would not admit that an elect 
 class, "the privileged Liberal circle," should 
 impose its knowledge and its errors upon "the 
 people, to whom it is a stranger." It had no 
 right to do so. This method of forced edu- 
 
 11 At Dresden, during his travels he made the acquaint- 
 ance of Auerbach, who had been the first to inspire him 
 with the idea of educating the people; at Kissingen he 
 met Froebel, in London Herzen, and in Brussels Proud- 
 hon, who seems to have made a great impression upon him. 
 
 12 Especially in 1861-62. 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 79 
 
 cation had never succeeded in producing, at 
 the University, "the men of whom humanity 
 has need; but men of whom a depraved so- 
 ciety has need; officials, official professors, of- 
 ficial literary men, or men torn aimlessly from 
 their old surroundings, whose youth has been 
 spoiled and wasted, and who can find no plan 
 in life: irritable, puny Liberals." 13 Go to 
 the people to learn what they want! If they 
 do not value "the art of reading and writing 
 which the intellectuals force upon them," they 
 have their reasons for that; they have other 
 spiritual needs, more pressing and more legiti- 
 mate. Try to understand those needs, and 
 help them to satisfy them ! 
 
 These theories, those of a revolutionary 
 Conservative, as Tolstoy always was, he at- 
 tempted to put into practice at Yasnaya, 
 where he was rather the fellow-disciple than 
 the master of his pupils. 14 At the same time, 
 he endeavoured to introduce a new human 
 
 13 Education and Culture. See Vie et CEuvre, by 
 Birukov, vol. if. 
 
 14 Tolstoy explained these principles in the review Yas- 
 naya Poly ana, 1862. 
 
80 TOLSTOY 
 
 spirit into agricultural exploitation. Ap- 
 pointed in 1861 territorial arbitrator for the 
 district of Krapiona, he was the people's 
 champion against the abuses of power on the 
 part of the landowners and the State. 
 
 We must not suppose that this social activity 
 satisfied him, or entirely filled his life. He 
 continued to be the prey of contending pas- 
 sions. Although he had suffered from the 
 world, he always loved it and felt the need 
 of it. Pleasure resumed him at intervals, or 
 else the love of action. He would risk his 
 life in hunting the bear. He played for 
 heavy stakes. He would even fall under the 
 influence of the literary circles of St. Peters- 
 burg, for which he felt such contempt. After 
 these aberrations came crises of disgust. 
 Such of his writings as belong to this period 
 bear unfortunate traces of this artistic and 
 moral uncertainty. The Two Hussars (1856) 
 has a quality of pretentiousness and elegance, 
 a snobbish worldly flavour, which shocks one 
 as coming from Tolstoy. Albert, written at 
 Dijon in 1857, IS weak and eccentric, with no 
 trace of the writer's habitual depth or pre- 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 81 
 
 cision. The Diary of a Sportsman (1856), 
 a more striking though hasty piece of work, 
 seems to betray the disillusionment which 
 Tolstoy inspired in himself. Prince Nekhl- 
 udov, his Doppelganger, his double, kills him- 
 self in a gaming-house. 
 
 "He had everything: wealth, a name, in- 
 tellect, and high ambitions ; he had committed 
 no crime; but he had done still worse: he had 
 killed his courage, his youth; he was lost, 
 without even the excuse of a violent passion; 
 merely from a lack of will." 
 
 The approach of death itself does not alter 
 him: 
 
 "The same strange inconsequence, the 
 same hesitation, the same frivolity of 
 thought. . . ." 
 
 Death ! ... At this period it began to 
 haunt his mind. Three Deaths (1858-59) al- 
 ready foreshadowed the gloomy analysis of 
 The Death of Ivan Ilyitch; the solitude of the 
 dying man, his hatred of the living, his des- 
 perate query — "Why?" The triptych of the 
 three deaths — that of the wealthy woman, that 
 of the old consumptive postilion, and that of 
 
82 TOLSTOY 
 
 the slaughtered dog — is not without majesty; 
 the portraits are well drawn, the images are 
 striking, although the whole work, which has 
 been too highly praised, is somewhat loosely 
 constructed, while the death of the dog lacks 
 the poetic precision to be found in the writer's 
 beautiful landscapes. Taking it as a whole, 
 we hardly know how far it is intended as a 
 work of art for the sake of art, or whether 
 it has a moral intention. 
 
 Tolstoy himself did not know. On the 4th 
 of February, 1858, when he read his essay of 
 admittance before the Muscovite Society of 
 Amateurs of Russian Literature, he chose for 
 his subject the defence of art for art's sake. 15 
 It was the president of the Society, Khomia- 
 kov, who, after saluting in Tolstoy "the repre- 
 sentative of purely artistic literature," took up 
 the defence of social and moral art. 16 
 
 A year later the death of his dearly-loved 
 brother, Nikolas, who succumbed to phthisis 17 
 
 15 Lecture on The Superiority of the Artistic Element 
 in Literature over all its Contemporary Tendencies. 
 
 16 He cited against Tolstoy his own examples, includ- 
 ing the old postilion in The Three Deaths. 
 
 17 We may remark that another brother, Dmitri, had 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 83 
 
 at Hyeres, on the 19th of September, i860, 
 completely overcame Tolstoy; shook him to 
 the point of "crushing his faith in goodness, 
 in everything," and made him deny even his 
 art: 
 
 already died of the same disease in 1856. Tolstoy him- 
 self believed that he was attacked by it in 1856, in 1862, 
 and in 1 87 1. He was, as he writes (the 28th of Oc- 
 tober, 1852), "of a strong constitution, but feeble in 
 health." He constantly suffered from chills, sore throats, 
 toothache, inflamed eyes, and rheumatism. In the Cau- 
 casus, in 1852, he had "two days in the week at least to 
 keep his room." Illness stopped him for several months 
 in 1854, on ^e road from Silistria to Sebastopol. In 
 1856, at Yasnaya, he was seriously ill with an affection 
 of the lungs. In 1862 the fear of phthisis induced him 
 to undergo a Koumiss cure at Samara, where he lived 
 with the Bachkirs, and after 1870 he returned thither al- 
 most yearly. His correspondence with Fet is full of pre- 
 occupations concerning his health. This physical condi- 
 tion enables one the better to understand his obsession by 
 the thought of death. In later years he spoke of this ill- 
 ness as of his best friend : 
 
 "When one is ill one seems to descend a very gentle 
 slope, which at a certain point is barred by a curtain, a 
 light curtain of some filmy stuff; on the hither side is 
 life, beyond is death. How far superior is the state of 
 illness, in moral value, to that of health! Do not speak 
 to me of those people who have never been ill ! They are 
 terrible, the women especially so! A woman who has 
 
84 TOLSTOY 
 
 "Truth is horrible. . . . Doubtless, so 
 long as the desire to know and to speak the 
 truth exists men will try to know and to speak 
 it. This is the only remnant left me of my 
 moral concepts. It is the only thing I shall 
 do ; but not in the form of art ; your art. Art 
 is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful 
 lie." 18 
 
 Less than six months later, however, he re- 
 turned to the "beautiful lie " with Polik- 
 ushka, 19 which of all his works is perhaps most 
 devoid of moral intention, if we except the 
 latent malediction upon money and its powers 
 for evil ; a work written purely for art's sake ; 
 a masterpiece, moreover, whose only flaws are 
 a possibly excessive wealth of observation, an 
 abundance of material which would have 
 sufficed for a great novel, and the contrast, 
 which is too severe, a little too cruel, between 
 
 never known illness is an absolute wild beast!" (Con- 
 versations with M. Paul Boyer, Le Temps, 27th of Au- 
 gust, 1 90 1.) 
 
 18 Letter to Fet, October 17, i860 (Further Letters: 
 in the French version, Correspondance inedite, pp. 27- 
 
 30). 
 
 "Written in Brussels, 1861. 
 
ST. PETERSBURG 85 
 
 the humorous opening and the atrocious cli- 
 max. 20 
 
 20 Another novel written at this period is a simple nar- 
 rative of a journey — The Snowstorm — which evokes per- 
 sonal memories, and is full of the beauty of poetic and 
 quasi-musical impressions. Tolstoy used almost the same 
 background later, in his Master and Servant (1895). 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "family happiness" 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 "family happiness" 
 
 FROM this period of transition, during which 
 the genius of the man was feeling its way 
 blindly, doubtful of itself and apparently ex- 
 hausted, "devoid of strong passion, without a 
 directing will," like Nekhludov in the Diary 
 of a Sportsman — from this period issued a 
 work unique in its tenderness and charm: 
 Family Happiness (1859). This was the 
 miracle of love. 
 
 For many years Tolstoy had been on 
 friendly terms with the Bers family. He had 
 fallen in love with the mother and the three 
 daughters in succession. 1 His final choice fell 
 upon the second, but he dared not confess it. 
 Sophie Andreyevna Bers was still a child; she 
 
 1 When a child he had, in a fit of jealousy, pushed 
 from a balcony the little girl — then aged nine — who after- 
 wards became Madame Bers, with the result that she was 
 lame for several years. 
 
90 TOLSTOY 
 
 was seventeen years old, while Tolstoy was 
 over thirty; he regarded himself as an old 
 man, who had not the right to associate his 
 soiled and vitiated life with that of an in- 
 nocent young girl. He held out for three 
 years. 2 Afterwards, in Anna Karenin, he re- 
 lated how his declaration to Sophie Bers 
 was effected, and how she replied to it: 
 both of them tracing with one finger, under 
 a table, the initials of words they dared not 
 say. 
 
 Like Levine in Anna Karenin, he was so 
 cruelly honest as to place his intimate journal 
 in the hands of his betrothed, in order that 
 she should be unaware of none of his past 
 transgressions; and Sophie, like Kitty in 
 Anna Karenin, was bitterly hurt by its perusal. 
 They were married on the 23rd of Septem- 
 ber, 1862. 
 
 2 See, in Family Happiness, the declaration of Sergius : 
 "Suppose there were a Mr. A, an elderly man who had 
 lived his life, and a lady B, young and happy, who as 
 yet knew neither men nor life. As the result of various 
 domestic happenings, he came to love her as a daughter, 
 and was not aware that he could love her in another way 
 . . ." etc. 
 
"FAMILY HAPPINESS" 91 
 
 In the artist's imagination this marriage 
 was consummated three years earlier, when 
 Family Happiness was written. 3 For these 
 years he had been living in the future; 
 through the ineffable days of love that does 
 not as yet know itself: through the delirious 
 days of love that has attained self-knowledge, 
 and the hour in which the divine, anticipated 
 words are whispered; when the tears arise 
 "of a happiness which departs for ever and 
 will never return again"; and the triumphant 
 reality of the early days of marriage; the 
 egoism of lovers, "the incessant, causeless joy," 
 then the approaching weariness, the vague dis- 
 content, the boredom of a monotonous life, the 
 two souls which softly disengage themselves 
 and grow further and further away from one 
 another; the dangerous attraction of the world 
 for the young life — flirtations, jealousies, fatal 
 misunderstandings; — love dissimulated, love 
 
 3 Perhaps this novel contained the memories also of a 
 romantic love affair which commenced in 1856, in Mos- 
 cow, the second party to which was a young girl very dif- 
 ferent to himself, very worldly and frivolous, from whom 
 he finally parted, although they were sincerely attached to 
 one another. 
 
92 TOLSTOY 
 
 lost; and at length the sad and tender autumn 
 of the heart; the face of love which reappears, 
 paler, older, but more touching by reason of 
 tears and the marks of time; the memory of 
 troubles, the regret for the ill things done and 
 the years that are lost; the calm of the even- 
 ing; the august passage from love to friend- 
 ship, and the romance of the passion of mater- 
 nity. . . . All that was to come, all this 
 Tolstoy had dreamed of, tasted in advance; 
 and in order to live through those days more 
 vividly he lived in the well-beloved. For the 
 first time — perhaps the only time in all his 
 writings — the story passes in the heart of a 
 woman, and is told by her; and with what ex- 
 quisite delicacy, what spiritual beauty! — the 
 beauty of a soul withdrawn behind a veil of 
 the truest modesty. For once the analysis of 
 the writer is deprived of its cruder lights; 
 there is no feverish struggle to present the 
 naked truth. The secrets of the inward life 
 are divined rather than spoken. The art and 
 the heart of the artist are both touched and 
 softened; there is a harmonious balance of 
 
"FAMILY HAPPINESS" 93 
 
 thought and form. Family Happiness has 
 the perfection of a work of Racine. 
 
 Marriage, whose sweet and bitter Tolstoy 
 presented with so limpid a profundity, was to 
 be his salvation. He was tired, unwell, dis- 
 gusted with himself and his efforts. The 
 brilliant success which had crowned his earlier 
 works had given way to the absolute silence of 
 the critics and the indifference of the public. 4 
 He pretended, haughtily, to be not ill- 
 pleased. 
 
 "My reputation has greatly diminished in 
 popularity; a fact which was saddening me. 
 Now I am content; I know that I have to say 
 something, and that I have the power to speak 
 it with no feeble voice. As for the public, 
 let it think what it will !" 5 
 
 But he was boasting: he himself was not 
 sure of his art. Certainly he was the master 
 of his literary instrument; but he did not know 
 what to do with it, as he said in respect of 
 Polikushka: "it was a matter of chattering 
 
 4 From 1857 to 1861. 
 
 5 Journal, October, 1857. 
 
94 TOLSTOY 
 
 about the first subject that came to hand, by 
 a man who knows how to hold his pen." 6 His 
 social work was abortive. In 1862 he re- 
 signed his appointment as territorial arbitra- 
 tor. The same year the police made a search 
 at Yasnaya Polyana, turned everything topsy- 
 turvy, and closed the school. Tolstoy was 
 absent at the time, suffering from overwork; 
 fearing that he was attacked by phthisis. 
 
 "The squabbles of arbitration had become 
 so painful to me, the work of the school so 
 vague, and the doubts which arose from the 
 desire of teaching others while hiding my own 
 ignorance of what had to be taught, were so 
 disheartening that I fell ill. Perhaps I 
 should then have fallen into the state of de- 
 spair to which I was to succumb fifteen years 
 later, had there not remained to me an un- 
 known aspect of life which promised salva- 
 tion — the life of the family." 7 
 
 6 Letter to Fet, 1863 (Vie et GEuvre). 
 
 7 Confessions, 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 AT first he rejoiced in the new life, with the 
 passion which he brought to everything. 1 
 The personal influence of Countess Tolstoy 
 was a godsend to his art. Greatly gifted 2 in 
 a literary sense, she was, as she says, "a true 
 author's wife," so keenly did she take her hus- 
 band's work to heart. She worked with him 
 — worked to his dictation; re-copied his rough 
 drafts. 3 She sought to protect him from his 
 religious daemon, that formidable genie which 
 was already, at moments, whisperingwords that 
 meant the death of art. She tried to shut the 
 door upon all social Utopias. 4 She requick- 
 
 1 "Domestic happiness completely absorbs me" (Janu- 
 ary 5, 1863). "I am so happy! so happy! I love her 
 so!" (February 8, 1863). See Vie et CEuvre. 
 
 2 She had written several novels. 
 
 3 It is said that she copied War and Peace seven times. 
 
 4 Directly after his marriage Tolstoy suspended his 
 work of teaching, his review, and his school. 
 
 »7 
 
98 TOLSTOY 
 
 ened her husband's creative genius. She did 
 more: she brought as an offering to that genius 
 the wealth of a fresh feminine temperament. 
 With the exception of the charming silhouettes 
 in Childhood and Boyhood, there are few 
 women in the earlier works of Tolstoy, or they 
 remain of secondary importance. Woman ap- 
 pears in Family Happiness, written under the 
 influence of his love for Sophie Bers. In the 
 works which follow there are numerous types 
 of young girls and women, full of intensest 
 life, and even superior to the male types. 
 One likes to think not only that Countess 
 Tolstoy served her husband as the model for 
 Natasha in War and Peace 5 and for Kitty in 
 Anna Karenin® but that she was enabled, by 
 
 5 Her sister Tatiana, intelligent and artistic, whose wit 
 and musical talent were greatly admired by Tolstoy, also 
 served him as a model. Tolstoy used to say, "I took 
 Tania [Tatiana] ; I beat her up with Sonia [Sophie Bers, 
 Countess Tolstoy], and out came Natasha" (cited by P. 
 Birukov.) 
 
 6 The installation of Dolly in the tumble-down coun- 
 try house ; Dolly and the children ; a number of details of 
 dress and toilet; without speaking of certain secrets of 
 the feminine mind, which even the intuition of a man of 
 
MARRIAGE 99 
 
 means of her confidences and her own vision, 
 to become his discreet and valuable collabo- 
 rator. Certain pages of Anna Karenin in par- 
 ticular seem to me to reveal a woman's touch. 
 Thanks to the advantages of this union, 
 Tolstoy enjoyed for a space of twelve or four- 
 teen years a peace and security which had 
 been long unknown to him. 7 He was able, 
 sheltered by love, to dream and to realise at 
 
 genius might perhaps have failed to penetrate, if a woman 
 had not betrayed them to him. 
 
 7 Here is a characteristic instance of Tolstoy's enslave- 
 ment by his creative genius: his Journal is interrupted for 
 thirteen years, from November I, 1865, when the com- 
 position of War and Peace was in full swing. The ego- 
 ism of the artist has silenced the monologue of the con- 
 science. — This period of creation was also a period of 
 robust physical life. Tolstoy was "mad on hunting." 
 "Hunting, I forget everything. . . ." (Letter of 
 1864.) In September, 1864, during a hunt on horse- 
 back, he broke his arm, and it was during his convales- 
 cence that the first portions of War and Peace were 
 dictated. — "On recovering consciousness after fainting, I 
 said to myself: 'I am an artist.' And I am, but a lonely 
 artist." (Letter to Fet, January 29, 1865.) All the 
 letters written at this time to Fet are full of an exulting 
 joy of creation. "I regard all that I have hitherto pub- 
 lished," he says, "as merely a trial of my pen." (Ibid.) 
 
100 TOLSTOY 
 
 leisure the masterpieces of his brain, the col- 
 ossal monuments which dominate the fiction 
 
 of the nineteenth century War and Peace 
 
 (1864-69) and Anna Karenin (1873-77). 
 
 War and Peace is the vastest epic of our 
 times — a modern Iliad. A world of faces and 
 of passions moves within it. Over this human 
 ocean of innumerable waves broods a sover- 
 eign mind, which serenely raises or stills the 
 tempest. 
 
 More than once in the past, while contem- 
 plating this work, I was reminded of Homer 
 and of Goethe, in spite of the vastly different 
 spirit and period of the work. Since then I 
 have discovered that at the period of writing 
 these books Tolstoy was as a matter of fact 
 nourishing his mind upon Homer and 
 Goethe. 8 Moreover, in the notes, dated 1865, 
 in which he classifies the various departments 
 
 8 Before this date Tolstoy had noted, among the books 
 which influenced him between the ages of twenty and thir- 
 ty-five : 
 
 "Goethe: Hermann and Dorothea — Very great influ- 
 
MARRIAGE 101 
 
 of letters, he mentions, as belonging to the 
 same family, Odyssey, Iliad, 1805. 9 The 
 natural development of his mind led him from 
 the romance of individual destinies to the ro- 
 mance of armies and peoples, those vast hu- 
 man hordes in which the wills of millions of 
 beings are dissolved. His tragic experiences 
 at the siege of Sebastopol helped him to com- 
 prehend the soul of the Russian nation and 
 its daily life. According to his first inten- 
 
 "Homer: Iliad and Odyssey (in Russian) — Very- 
 great influence." 
 And in June, 1863, he notes in his diary: 
 
 "I am reading Goethe, and many ideas are coming to 
 life within me." 
 
 In the spring of 1863 Tolstoy was re-reading Goethe, 
 and wrote of Faust as "the poetry of the world of 
 thought; the poetry which expresses that which can be 
 expressed by no other art." 
 
 Later he sacrificed Goethe, as he did Shakespeare, to 
 his God. But he remained faithful in his admiration of 
 Homer. In August, 1857, ne was reading, with equal 
 zest, the Iliad and the Bible. In one of his latest works, 
 the pamphlet attacking Shakespeare (1903), it is Homer 
 that he opposes to Shakespeare as an example of sincerity, 
 balance, and true art. 
 
 9 The two first parts of War and Peace appeared in 
 1865-66 under the title The Year 1805. 
 
102 TOLSTOY 
 
 tions, the gigantic War and Peace was to be 
 merely the central panel of a series of epic 
 frescoes, in which the poem of Russia should 
 be developed from Peter the Great to the 
 Decembrists. 10 
 
 10 Tolstoy commenced this work in 1863 by The De- 
 cembrists, of which he wrote three fragments. But he 
 saw that the foundations of his plan were not sufficiently 
 assured, and going further back, to the period of the 
 Napoleonic Wars, he wrote War and Peace. Publica- 
 tion was commenced in the Rousski Viestnik of January, 
 1865; the sixth volume was completed in the autumn of 
 1869. Then Tolstoy ascended the stream of history; and 
 he conceived the plan of an epic romance dealing with 
 Peter the Great; then of another, Mirovitch, dealing 
 with the rule of the Empresses of the eighteenth century 
 and their favourites. He worked at it from 1870 to 
 1873, surrounded with documents, and writing the first 
 drafts of various portions; but his realistic scruples made 
 him renounce the project: he was conscious that he could 
 never succeed in resuscitating the spirit of those distant 
 periods in a sufficiently truthful fashion. Later, in Janu- 
 ary, 1876, he conceived the idea of another romance of 
 the period of Nikolas I. ; then he eagerly returned to the 
 Decembrists, collecting the evidence of survivors and visit- 
 ing the scenes of the action. In 1878 he wrote to his aunt, 
 Countess A. A. Tolstoy: "This work is so important 
 to me! You cannot imagine how much it means to me; 
 it is as much to me as your faith is to you. I would say 
 even more." {Correspondence.) But in proportion as 
 
MARRIAGE 103 
 
 To be truly sensible of the power of this 
 work, we must take into account its hidden 
 unity. Too many readers, unable to see it in 
 perspective, perceive in it nothing but thou- 
 sands of details, whose profusion amazes and 
 distracts them. They are lost in this forest of 
 life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a 
 height; he must attain the view of the un- 
 obstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and 
 meadow; then he will catch the Homeric 
 spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, 
 the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, 
 the sense of the whole of which every de- 
 tail makes a part; and the genius of the artist, 
 supreme over the whole, like the God of 
 Genesis who broods upon the face of the 
 waters. 
 
 he plumbed the subject he grew away from it; his heart 
 was in it no longer. As early as April, 1879, he wrote 
 to Fet: "The Decembrists? If I were thinking of it, 
 if I were to write it, I should flatter myself with the 
 hope that the very atmosphere of my mind would be in- 
 supportable to those who fire upon men for the good of 
 humanity." (Ibid.) At this period of his life the re- 
 ligious crisis had set in ; he was about to burn his ancient 
 idols. 
 
104 TOLSTOY 
 
 In the beginning, the calm of the ocean. 
 Peace, and the life of Russia before the war. 
 The first hundred pages reflect, with an im- 
 passive precision, a detached irony, the yawn- 
 ing emptiness of worldly minds. Only to- 
 wards the hundredth page do we hear the cry 
 of one of these living dead — the worst among 
 them, Prince Basil: 
 
 "We commit sins; we deceive one an- 
 other; and why do we do it all? My friend, 
 I am more than sixty years old. . . . All 
 ends in death. . . . Death — what hor- 
 ror!" 
 
 Among these idle, insipid, untruthful souls, 
 capable of every aberration, of every crime, 
 certain saner natures are prominent: genuine 
 natures by their clumsy candour, like Pierre 
 Besoukhov; by their deeply rooted indepen- 
 dence, their Old Russian peculiarities, like 
 Marie Dmitrievna; by the freshness of their 
 youth, like the little Rostofls : natures full of 
 goodness and resignation, like the Princess 
 Marie; and those who, like Prince Andrei, 
 are not good, but proud, and are tormented 
 by an unhealthy existence. 
 
MARRIAGE 105 
 
 Now comes the first muttering of the waves. 
 The Russian army is in Austria. Fatality is 
 supreme: nowhere more visibly imperious 
 than in the loosing of elementary forces — in 
 the war. The true leaders are those who do 
 not seek to lead or direct, but, like Kutuzov 
 or Bagration, to "allow it to be believed that 
 their personal intentions are in perfect agree- 
 ment with what is really the simple result of 
 the force of circumstances, the will of sub- 
 ordinates, and the caprices of chance." The 
 advantage of surrendering to the hand of Des- 
 tiny! The happiness of simple action, a sane 
 and normal state. . . . The troubled 
 spirits regain their poise. Prince Andrei 
 breathes, begins to live. . . . And while 
 in the far distance, remote from the life- 
 giving breath of the holy tempest, Pierre and 
 the Princess Marie are threatened by the con- 
 tagion of their world and the deception of love, 
 Andrei, wounded at Austerlitz, has suddenly, 
 amid the intoxication of action brutally in- 
 terrupted, the revelation of the serene im- 
 mensity of the universe. Lying on his back, 
 "he sees nothing now, except, very far above 
 
106 TOLSTOY 
 
 him, a sky infinitely deep, wherein light, grey- 
 ish clouds go softly wandering." 
 
 "What peacefulness! How calm!" he was 
 saying to himself; "it was not like this when 
 I was running by and shouting. . . . 
 How was it I did not notice it before, this 
 illimitable depth? How happy I am to have 
 found it at last! Yes, all is emptiness, all is 
 deception, except this. And God be praised 
 for this calm! . . ." 
 
 But life resumes him, and again the wave 
 falls. Left once more to themselves, in the 
 demoralising atmosphere of cities, the rest- 
 less, discouraged souls wander blindly in the 
 darkness. Sometimes through the poisoned 
 atmosphere of the world sweep the intoxicat- 
 ing, maddening odours of nature, love, and 
 springtime; the blind forces, which draw to- 
 gether Prince Andrei and the charming Nat- 
 asha, to throw her, a moment later, into the 
 arms of the first seducer to hand. So much 
 poetry, so much tenderness, so much purity of 
 heart, tarnished by the world! And always 
 "the wide sky which broods above the out- 
 rage and abjectness of the earth." But man 
 
MARRIAGE 107 
 
 does not see it. Even Andrei has forgotten 
 the light of Austerlitz. For him the sky is 
 now only "a dark, heavy vault" which covers 
 the face of emptiness. 
 
 It is time for the hurricane of war to burst 
 once more upon these vitiated minds. The 
 fatherland, Russia, is invaded. Then comes 
 the day of Borodino, with its solemn majesty. 
 Enmities are effaced. Dologhov embraces his 
 enemy Pierre. Andrei, wounded, weeps for 
 pity and compassion over the misery of the 
 man whom he most hated, Anatol Kuraguin, 
 his neighbour in the ambulance. The unity 
 of hearts is accomplished; unity in passionate 
 sacrifice to the country and submission to the 
 divine laws. 
 
 "To accept the frightful necessity of war, 
 seriously and austerely. . . . To human 
 liberty, war is the most painful act of sub- 
 mission to the divine laws. Simplicity of 
 heart consists in submission to the will of 
 God." 
 
 The soul of the Russian people and its sub- 
 mission to Destiny are incarnated in the 
 person of the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov. 
 
108 TOLSTOY 
 
 "This old man, who has no passions left, but 
 only experience, the result of the passions, and 
 in whom intelligence, which is intended to 
 group together facts and to draw from them 
 conclusions, is replaced by a philosophical con- 
 templation of events, devises nothing and un- 
 dertakes nothing; but he listens to and remem- 
 bers everything; he knows how to profit by 
 it at the right moment; he will hinder noth- 
 ing that is of use, he will permit nothing harm- 
 ful. He sees on the faces of his troops that 
 inexpressible force which is known as the will 
 to conquer; it is latent victory. He admits 
 something more powerful than his own will : 
 the inevitable march of the facts which pass 
 before his eyes ; he sees them, he follows them, 
 and he is able mentally to stand aloof." 
 
 In short, he has the heart of a Russian. 
 This fatalism of the Russian people, calmly 
 heroic, is personified also in the poor moujik, 
 Platon Karatayev, simple, pious, and resigned, 
 with his kindly patient smile in suffering and 
 in death. Through suffering and experience, 
 above the ruins of their country, after the hor- 
 rors of its agony, Pierre and Andrei, the two 
 
MARRIAGE 109 
 
 heroes of the book, attain, through love and 
 faith, to the moral deliverance and the mystic 
 joy by which they behold God living. 
 
 Tolstoy does not stop here. The epilogue, 
 of which the action passes in 1820, deals with 
 the transition from one age to another; from 
 one Napoleonic era to the era of the Decem- 
 brists. It produces an impression of con- 
 tinuity, and of the resumption of life. In- 
 stead of commencing and ending in the midst 
 of a crisis, Tolstoy finishes, as he began, at 
 the moment when a great wave has spent it- 
 self, while that following it is gathering it- 
 self together. Already we obtain a glimpse 
 of the heroes to be, of the conflicts which will 
 ensue between them, and of the dead who are 
 born again in the living. 11 
 
 11 Pierre Besoukhov, who has married Natasha, will 
 become a Decembrist. He has founded a secret society 
 to watch over the general good, a sort of Tugelbund. 
 Natasha associates herself with his plans with the utmost 
 enthusiasm. Denissov cannot conceive of a pacific revo- 
 lution; but is quite ready for an armed revolt. Nikolas 
 Rostoff has retained his blind soldier's loyalty. He who 
 said before Austerlitz, "We have only one thing to do: 
 to fight and never to think," is angry with Pierre, and 
 exclaims: "My oath before all! If I were ordered to 
 
110 TOLSTOY 
 
 I have tried to indicate the broad lines of 
 the romance ; for few readers take the trouble 
 to look for them. But what words are ade- 
 quate to describe the extraordinary vitality 
 of these hundreds of heroes, all distinct indi- 
 viduals, all drawn with unforgettable 
 mastery: soldiers, peasants, great nobles, Rus- 
 sians, Austrians, Frenchmen! Not a line 
 savours of improvisation. For this gallery 
 of portraits, unexampled in European litera- 
 ture, Tolstoy made sketches without number: 
 
 march against you with my squadron I should march and 
 I should strike home." His wife, Princess Marie, agrees 
 with him. Prince Andrei's son, little Nikolas Bolkonsky, 
 fifteen years old, delicate, sickly, yet charming, with wide 
 eyes and golden hair, listens feverishly to the discussion; 
 all his love is Pierre's and Natasha's; he does not care 
 greatly for Nikolas and Marie; he worships his father, 
 whom he has never seen ; he dreams of growing like him, 
 of being grown up, of doing something wonderful, he 
 knows not what. "Whatever they tell me, I will do it. 
 . . . Yes, I shall do it. He would have beeij pleased 
 with me." — And the book ends with the dream of a child, 
 who sees himself in the guise of one of Plutarch's heroes, 
 with his uncle Pierre by his side, preceded by Glory, and 
 followed by an army. — If The Decembrists had been writ- 
 ten then little Bolkonsky would doubtless have been one 
 of its heroes. 
 
MARRIAGE 111 
 
 "combined," as he says, "millions of proj- 
 ects" ; buried himself in libraries ; laid under 
 contribution his family archives, 12 his previ- 
 ous notes, his personal memories. This 
 meticulous preparation ensured the solidity 
 of the work, but did not damp his spontaneity. 
 Tolstoy worked with enthusiasm, with an 
 eagerness and a delight which communicate 
 themselves to the reader. Above all, the great 
 charm of War and Peace resides in its spirit 
 of youth. No other work of Tolstoy's pre- 
 sents in such abundance the soul of childhood 
 and of youth; and each youthful spirit is a 
 strain of music, pure as a spring, full of 
 a touching and penetrating grace, like a 
 melody of Mozart's. Of such are the young 
 Nikolas Rostoff, Sonia, and poor little Petia. 
 Most exquisite of all is Natasha. Dear lit- 
 tle girl! — fantastic, full of laughter, her heart 
 full of affection, we see her grow up before 
 
 12 1 have remarked that the two families Rostoff and 
 Bolkonsky, in War and Peace, recall the families of Tol- 
 stoy's father and mother by many characteristics. Again, 
 in the novels of the Caucasus and Sebastopol there are 
 many of the types of soldiers, officers and men, which ap- 
 pear in War and Peace. 
 
112 TOLSTOY 
 
 us, we follow her through life, with the 
 tenderness one would feel for a sister — who 
 that has read of her does not feel that he has 
 known her? . . . That wonderful night 
 of spring, when Natasha, at her window, 
 flooded with the moonlight, dreams and 
 speaks wildly, above the window of the listen- 
 ing Andrei . . . the emotions of the first 
 ball, the expectation of love, the burgeoning 
 of riotous dreams and desires, the sleigh-ride, 
 the night in the snow-bound forest, full of 
 fantastic lights; Nature, and the embrace of 
 her vague tenderness; the evening at the 
 Opera, the unfamiliar world of art, in which 
 reason grows confused ; the folly of the hearty 
 and the folly of the body yearning for love; 
 the misery that floods the soul ; the divine pity 
 which watches over the dying lover. . . . 
 One cannot evoke these pitiful memories 
 without emotion; such emotion as one would 
 feel in speaking of a dear and beloved woman. 
 How such a creation shows the weakness of 
 the female types in almost the whole of con- 
 temporary drama and fiction! Life itself has 
 been captured; life so fluid, so supple, that 
 
MARRIAGE US 
 
 we seem to see it throbbing and changing from 
 one line to another. 
 
 Princess Marie, the ugly woman, whose 
 goodness makes her beautiful, is no less per- 
 fect a portrait; but how the timid, awkward 
 girl would have blushed, how those who re- 
 semble her must blush, at rinding unveiled 
 all the secrets of a heart which hides itself so 
 fearfully from every glance! 
 
 In general the portraits of women are, as 
 I have said, very much finer than the male 
 characters; in especial than those of the two 
 heroes to whom Tolstoy has given his own 
 ideas; the weak, pliable nature of Pierre Be- 
 soukhov, and the hard, eager nature of Prince 
 Andrei Bolkonsky. These are characters 
 which lack a centre of gravity; they oscillate 
 perpetually, rather than evolve; they run 
 from one extreme to the other, yet never ad- 
 vance. One may, of course, reply that in this 
 they are thoroughly Russian. I find, how- 
 ever, that Russians have criticised them in 
 similar terms. Tourgenev doubtless had 
 them in mind when he complained that Tol- 
 stoy's psychology was a stationary matter. 
 
114 TOLSTOY 
 
 u No real development. Eternal hesitations: 
 oscillations of feeling." 13 Tolstoy himself 
 admitted that he had at times rather sacrificed 
 the individual character to the historical de- 
 sign. 14 
 
 It is true, in fact, that the glory of War and 
 Peace resides in the resurrection of a com- 
 plete historical period, with its national mi- 
 grations, its warfare of peoples. Its true he- 
 roes are these peoples; and behind them, as 
 behind the heroes of Homer, the gods who 
 lead them; the forces, invisible, "infinitely 
 small, which direct the masses," the breath of 
 the Infinite. These gigantic conflicts, in 
 which a hidden destiny hurls the blind na- 
 tions together, have a mythical grandeur. 
 Our thoughts go beyond the Iliad: we are re- 
 minded of the Hindu epics. 
 
 13 Letter of February 2, 1868, cited by Birukov. 
 
 14 Notably, he said, that of Prince Andrei in the first 
 part. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 "anna karenin" 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 "ANNA KARENIN" 
 
 Anna Karenin, with War and Peace, 1 marks 
 the climax of this period of maturity. Anna 
 Karenin is a more perfect work; the work of 
 a mind more certain of its artistic creation, 
 richer too in experience; a mind for which 
 the world of the heart holds no more secrets. 
 But it lacks the fire of youth, the freshness of 
 
 1 It is regrettable that the beauty of the poetical concep- 
 tion of the work is often tarnished by the philosophical 
 chatter with which Tolstoy has loaded his work, especially 
 in the later portions. He is determined to make an ex- 
 position of his theory of the fatality of history. The pity 
 is that he returns to the point incessantly, and obstinately 
 repeats himself. Flaubert, who "gave vent to cries of ad- 
 miration" while reading the first two volumes, which he 
 declared "sublime" and "full of Shakespearean things," 
 threw the third volume aside in boredom: "He goes off 
 horribly. He repeats himself, and he philosophises. We 
 see the aristocrat, the author, and the Russian, while hith- 
 erto we have seen nothing but Nature and Humanity." 
 (Letter to Tourgenev, January, 1880.) 
 
 117 
 
118 TOLSTOY 
 
 enthusiasm, the mighty pinions of War and 
 Peace. Already Tolstoy has lost something 
 of the joy of creation. The temporary peace 
 of the first months of marriage has flown. 
 Into the enchanted circle of love and art which 
 Countess Tolstoy had drawn about him moral 
 scruples begin to intrude. 
 
 Even in the early chapters of War and 
 Peace, written one year after marriage, the 
 confidences of Prince Andrei to Pierre upon 
 the subject of marriage denote the disen- 
 chantment of the man who sees in the beloved 
 woman the stranger, the innocent enemy, the 
 involuntary obstacle to his moral develop- 
 ment. Some letters of 1865 announce the 
 coming return of religious troubles. As yet 
 they are only passing threats, blotting out the 
 joy of life. But during the months of 1869, 
 when Tolstoy was finishing War and Peace, 
 there fell a more serious blow. 
 
 He had left his home for a few days to visit 
 a distant estate. One night he was lying in 
 bed; it had just struck two: 
 
 "I was dreadfully tired; I was sleepy, and 
 felt comfortable enough. All of a sudden I 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 119 
 
 was seized by such anguish, such terror as 
 I had never felt in all my life. I will tell 
 you about it in detail ; it was truly frightful. 
 I leapt from the bed and told them to get the 
 horses ready. While they were putting them 
 in I fell asleep, and when I woke again I 
 was completely recovered. Yesterday the 
 same thing happened, but in a much less de- 
 gree." 
 
 The palace of illusion, so laboriously raised 
 by the love of the wife, was tottering. In the 
 spiritual blank which followed the achieve- 
 ment of War and Peace the artist was re- 
 captured by his philosophical 2 and educa- 
 tional preoccupations; he wished to write a 
 spelling-book for the people; he worked at it 
 feverishly for four years; he was prouder of 
 it than of War and Peace, and when it was 
 finished (1872) he wrote a second (1875). 
 Then he conceived a passion for Greek; he 
 
 2 While he was finishing War and Peace, in the sum- 
 mer of 1869, he discovered Schopenhauer, and was filled 
 with enthusiasm. "I am convinced that Schopenhauer is 
 the most genial of men. Here is the whole universe re- 
 flected with an extraordinary clearness and beauty.' , 
 (Letter to Fet, August 30, 1869.) 
 
120 TOLSTOY 
 
 studied Latin from morning to night; he 
 abandoned all other work; he discovered "the 
 delightful Xenophon," and Homer, the real 
 Homer; not the Homer of the translators, 
 "all these Joukhovskys and Vosses who sing 
 with any sort of voice they can manage to pro- 
 duce, guttural, peevish, mawkish," but "this 
 other devil, who sings at the top of his voice, 
 without it ever entering his head that any one 
 may be listening" 3 
 
 "Without a knowledge of Greek, no educa- 
 tion! I am convinced that until now I knew 
 nothing of all that is truly beautiful and of 
 a simple beauty in human speech." 
 
 This is folly, and he admits as much. He 
 goes to school again with such passionate en- 
 thusiasm that he falls ill. In 1871 he was 
 forced to go to Samara to undergo the kou- 
 miss cure, staying with the Bachkirs. Noth- 
 ing pleased him but his Greek. At the end of 
 a lawsuit, in 1872 he spoke seriously of selling 
 
 3 "Between Homer and his translators," he says again, 
 "there is the difference between boiled and distilled water 
 and the spring-water broken on the rocks, which may 
 carry the sand along with it as it flows, but becomes more 
 pure and fresh on that account." 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 121 
 
 all that he possessed in Russia and of settling 
 in England. Countess Tolstoy was in de- 
 spair: 
 
 "If you are always absorbed in your Greeks 
 you will never get well. It is they who have 
 caused this suffering and this indifference 
 concerning your present life. It is not in vain 
 that we call Greek a dead language; it pro- 
 duces a condition of death in the spirit." 4 
 
 Finally, to the great joy of the Countess, 
 after many plans abandoned before they were 
 fairly commenced, on March 19, 1873, ne 
 began to write Anna Karenin. 5 While he 
 worked at it his life was saddened by domestic 
 sorrow; 6 his wife was ill. "Happiness does 
 not reign in the house," 7 he writes to Fet in 
 1876. 
 
 To some extent the work bears traces of 
 
 4 Papers of Countess Tolstoy (Fie et CEuvre). 
 
 6 It was completed in 1877. It appeared — minus the 
 epilogue — in the Rousski Viestniki. 
 
 6 The death of three children (November 18, 1873, 
 February, 1875, November, 1875) ; of his Aunt Tatiana, 
 his adopted mother (June, 1874), and of his Aunt Pela- 
 gia (December, 1875). 
 
 7 Letter to Fet, March, 1876. 
 
122 TOLSTOY 
 
 these depressing experiences, and of passions 
 disillusioned. 8 Save in the charming passages 
 dealing with the betrothal of Levine, love is 
 no longer presented with the spirit of youth 
 and poetry which places certain pages of War 
 and Peace on a level with the most beautiful 
 lyric poetry of all times. It has assumed a 
 different character: bitter, sensual, imperious. 
 The fatality which broods over the romance 
 is no longer, as in War and Peace, a kind of 
 Krishna, murderous and serene, the Destiny 
 of empires, but the madness of love, "Venus 
 herself." She it is, in the wonderful ball 
 scene, when passion seizes upon Anna and 
 Vronsky unawares, who endows the innocent 
 beauty of Anna, crowned with forget-me-not 
 and clothed in black velvet, with "an almost 
 infernal seductiveness." She it is who, when 
 Vronsky has just declared his love, throws a 
 light upon Anna's face; but a light "not of 
 joy; it was the terrible glare of an incendiary 
 
 8 "Woman is the stumbling-block of a man's career. 
 It is difficult to love a woman and to do nothing of any 
 profit ; and the only way of not being reduced to inaction 
 by love is to marry." (Anna Karenin.) 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 123 
 
 fire upon a gloomy night." She it is who, 
 in the veins of this loyal and reasonable 
 woman, this young, affectionate mother, pours 
 a voluptuous stream as of irresistible ichor, 
 and installs herself in her heart, never to 
 leave it until she has destroyed it. No one 
 can approach Anna without feeling the at- 
 traction and the terror of this hidden daemon. 
 Kitty is the first to discover it, with a shock 
 of bewilderment. A mysterious fear mingles 
 with the delight of Vronsky when he goes to 
 see Anna. Levine, in her presence, loses all 
 his will. Anna herself is perfectly well 
 aware that she is no longer her own mistress. 
 As the story develops the implacable passion 
 consumes, little by little, the whole moral 
 structure of this proud woman. All that is 
 best in her, her sincere, courageous mind, 
 crumbles and falls; she has no longer the 
 strength to sacrifice her wordly vanity; her 
 life has no other object than to please her 
 lover; she refuses, with shame and terror, to 
 bear children; jealousy tortures her; the 
 sensual passion which enslaves her obliges her 
 to lie with her gestures, her voice, her eyes; 
 
1*4 TOLSTOY 
 
 she falls to the level of those women who no 
 longer seek anything but the power of mak- 
 ing every man turn to look after them; she 
 uses morphia to dull her sufferings, until the 
 intolerable torments which consume her over- 
 come her with the bitter sense of her moral 
 downfall, and cast her beneath the wheels of 
 the railway-carriage. "And the little moujik 
 with the untidy beard" — the sinister vision 
 which has haunted her dreams and Vronsky's 
 — "leaned over the track from the platform 
 of the carriage"; and, as the prophetic dream 
 foretold, "he was bent double over a sack, in 
 which he was hiding the remains of some- 
 thing which had known life, with its torments, 
 its betrayals, and its sorrows." 
 
 "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." 9 
 
 Around this tragedy of a soul consumed 
 by love and crushed by the law of God — a 
 painting in a single shade, and of terrible 
 gloom — Tolstoy has woven, as in War and 
 Peace, the romances of other lives. Un- 
 fortunately these parallel stories alternate in 
 
 9 The motto at the commencement of the book. 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 125 
 
 a somewhat stiff and artificial manner, with- 
 out achieving the organic unity of the sym- 
 phony of War and Peace. It may also be 
 said that the perfect realism of certain of the 
 pictures — the artistocratic circles of St. 
 Petersburg and their idle discourse — is now 
 and again superfluous and unnecessary. 
 Finally, and more openly than in War and 
 Peace, Tolstoy has presented his own moral 
 character and his philosophic ideas side by 
 side with the spectacle of life. None the less, 
 the work is of a marvellous richness. There 
 is the same profusion of types as in War and 
 Peace, and all are of a striking justness. The 
 portraits of the men seem to me even superior. 
 Tolstoy has depicted with evident delight the 
 amiable egoist, Stepan Arcadievitch, whom 
 no one can look at without responding to his 
 affectionate smile, and Karenin, the perfect 
 type of the high official, the distinguished and 
 commonplace statesman, with his mania for 
 concealing his real opinions and feelings 
 under a mask of perpetual irony: a mixture 
 of dignity and cowardice, of Phariseeism and 
 Christian feeling: a strange product of an 
 
126 TOLSTOY 
 
 artificial world, from which he can never 
 completely free himself in spite of his intel- 
 ligence and his true generosity; a man afraid 
 to listen to his own heart, and rightly so 
 afraid, since when he does surrender to it, 
 he ends by falling into a state of nonsensical 
 mysticism. 
 
 But the principal interest of the romance, 
 besides the tragedy of Anna and the varied 
 pictures of Russian society towards i860 — of 
 salons, officers' clubs, balls, theatres, races — 
 lies in its autobiographical character. More 
 than any other personage of Tolstoy's books, 
 Constantine Levine is the incarnation of the 
 writer himself. Not only has Tolstoy attrib- 
 uted to him his own ideas — at one and the 
 same time conservative and democratic — and 
 the anti-Liberalism of the provincial aristo- 
 crat who despises "intellectuals" ; 10 but he has 
 made him the gift of part of his own life. 
 The love of Levine and Kitty and their first 
 years of marriage are a transposition of his 
 own domestic memories, just as the death of 
 
 10 Notice also, in the epilogue, the hostility towards 
 warfare, nationalism, and Pan-Slavism. 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 127 
 
 Levine's brother is a melancholy evocation of 
 the death of Tolstoy's brother, Dmitri. The 
 latter portion, useless to the romance, gives us 
 an insight into the troubles which were then 
 oppressing the author. While the epilogue 
 of War and Peace was an artistic transition 
 to another projected work, the epilogue to 
 Anna Karenin is an autobiographical transi- 
 tion to the moral revolution which, two years 
 later, was to find expression in the Confes- 
 sions. Already, in the course of Anna Ka- 
 renin, he returns again and again to a violent 
 or ironical criticism of contemporary society, 
 which he never ceased to attack in his subse- 
 quent works. War is declared upon deceit: 
 war upon lies; upon virtuous as well as vi- 
 cious lies; upon liberal chatter, fashionable 
 charity, drawing-room religion, and philan- 
 thropy. War against the world, which dis- 
 torts all truthful feelings, and inevitably 
 crushes the generous enthusiasm of the mind! 
 Death throws an unexpected light upon the 
 social conventions. Before Anna dying, the 
 stilted Karenin is softened. Into this lifeless 
 soul, in which everything is artificial, shines 
 
128 TOLSTOY 
 
 a ray of love and of Christian forgiveness. 
 All three — the husband, the wife, and the 
 lover — are momentarily transformed. All 
 three become simple and loyal. But as Anna 
 recovers, all three are sensible, "facing the 
 almost holy moral strength which was guid- 
 ing them from within, the existence of another 
 force, brutal but all-powerful, which was di- 
 recting their lives despite themselves, and 
 which would not leave them in peace." And 
 they knew from the beginning that they 
 would be powerless in the coming struggle, 
 in which " they would be obliged to do the 
 evil that the world would consider neces- 
 sary." » 
 
 If Levine, like Tolstoy, whose incarnation 
 he is, also became purified in the epilogue to 
 the book, it was because he too was touched 
 by mortality. Previously, "incapable of be- 
 lieving, he was equally incapable of absolute 
 doubt. 12 After he beheld his brother die the 
 terror of his ignorance possessed him. For a 
 
 11 "Evil is that which is reasonable to the world. Sac- 
 rifice and love are insanity." {Anna Karenin, vol. ii.) 
 
 12 Anna Karenin, vol. ii. 
 
"ANNA KARENIN" 129 
 
 time this misery was stifled by his marriage; 
 but it re-awakened at the birth of his first- 
 born. He passed alternately through crises 
 of prayer and negation. He read the phi- 
 losophers in vain. He began, in his dis- 
 tracted state, to fear the temptation of suicide. 
 Physical work was a solace; it presented no 
 doubts ; all was clear. Levine conversed with 
 the peasants ; one of them spoke of the men 
 "who live not for self, but for God." This 
 was to him an illumination. He saw the an- 
 tagonism between the reason and the heart. 
 Reason preached the ferocious struggle for 
 life; there is- nothing reasonable in loving 
 one's neighbour: 
 
 "Reason has taught me nothing; all that I 
 know has been given to me, revealed to me 
 by the heart." 13 
 
 From this time peace returned. The word 
 of the humble peasant, whose heart was his 
 only guide, had led him back to God. . . . 
 To what God? He did not seek to know. 
 His attitude toward the Church at this mo- 
 ment, as was Tolstoy's for a long period, was 
 
 13 Anna Karenin, vol. ii. 
 
130 TOLSTOY 
 
 humble, and in no wise defiant of her dogmas. 
 "There is a truth even in the illusion of the 
 celestial vault and in the apparent movement 
 of the stars." 14 
 
 14 Anna Karenin, vol. ii. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE CRISIS 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CRISIS 
 
 The misery which oppressed Levine, and the 
 longing for suicide which he concealed from 
 Kitty, Tolstoy was at this period concealing 
 from his wife. But he had not as yet 
 achieved the calm which he attributed to his 
 hero. To be truthful, this mental state is 
 hardly communicated to the reader. We feel 
 that it is desired rather than realised, and 
 that Levine's relapse among his doubts is im- 
 minent. Tolstoy was not duped by his de- 
 sires. He had the greatest difficulty in reach- 
 ing the end of his work. Anna Karenin 
 wearied him before he had finished it. 1 He 
 could work no longer. He remained at a 
 
 1 "Now I am harnessing myself again to the wearisome 
 and vulgar Anna Karenin, with the sole desire of getting 
 rid of it as quickly as possible." (Letters to Fet, August 
 26, 1875.) "I must finish the romance, which is weary- 
 ing me." (Ibid., March 1, 1876.) 
 
 133 
 
134 TOLSTOY 
 
 standstill; inert, without will-power, a prey 
 to self-terror and self-disgust. There, in the 
 emptiness of his life, rose the great wind 
 which issued from the abyss; the vertigo of 
 death. 
 
 Tolstoy told of these terrible years at a later 
 period, when he was newly escaped from the 
 abyss. 2 
 
 "I was not fifty," he said; "I loved; I was 
 loved; I had good children, a great estate, 
 fame, health, and moral and physical vigour; 
 I could reap or mow like any peasant; I used 
 to work ten hours at a stretch without fatigue. 
 Suddenly my life came to a standstill. I 
 could breathe, eat, drink and sleep. But this 
 was not to live. I had no desires left. I 
 knew there was nothing to desire. I could 
 not even wish to know the truth. The truth 
 was that life is a piece of insanity. I had 
 reached the abyss, and I saw clearly that there 
 was nothing before me but death. I, a fortu- 
 nate and healthy man, felt that I could not go 
 on living. An irresistible force was urging 
 me to rid myself of life. ... I will not 
 
 2 In his Confessions (1879). 
 
THE CRISIS 135 
 
 say that I wanted to kill myself. The force 
 which was edging me out of life was some- 
 thing stronger than myself; it was an aspira- 
 tion, a desire like my old desire for life, but 
 in an inverse sense. I had to humour, to de- 
 ceive myself, lest I should give way to it too 
 promptly. There I was, a happy man, — and 
 I would hide away a piece of cord lest I 
 should hang myself from the beam that ran 
 between the cupboards of my room, where I 
 was alone every night while undressing. I 
 no longer took my gun out for a little shoot- 
 ing, lest I should be tempted. 3 It seemed to 
 
 3 See Anna Karenin. "And Levine, who had the love 
 of a woman, and was the father of a family, put every 
 kind of weapon away out of reach, as though he was 
 afraid of yielding to the temptation of putting an end to 
 his sufferings." This frame of mind was not peculiar 
 to Tolstoy and his characters. Tolstoy was struck by the 
 increasing number of suicides among the wealthy classes all 
 over Europe, and in Russia more especially. He often 
 alludes to the fact in such of his books as w^ere written 
 about this period. It was as though a great wave of 
 neurasthenia had swept across Europe in 1880, drowning 
 its thousands of victims. Those who w r ere young men at 
 the time will remember it ; and for them Tolstoy's record 
 of this human experience will have a historic value. He 
 has written the secret tragedy of a generation. 
 
136 TOLSTOY 
 
 me that life was a dreary farce, which was be- 
 ing played out before my eyes. Forty years 
 of work, of trouble, of progress, only to find 
 that there is nothing! Nothing! Nothing 
 will remain of me but putrescence and worms. 
 . . . One can live only while one is in- 
 toxicated with life; but the moment the in- 
 toxication is over one sees that all is merely 
 deceit, a clumsy fraud. . . . My family 
 and art were no longer enough to satisfy me. 
 My family consisted of unhappy creatures 
 like myself. Art is a mirror to life. When 
 life no longer means anything it is no longer 
 amusing to use the mirror. And the worst 
 of it was, I could not resign myself — I was 
 like a man lost in a forest, who is seized with 
 horror because he is lost, and who runs hither 
 and thither and cannot stop : although he 
 knows that at every step he is straying fur- 
 ther." 
 
 Salvation came from the people. Tolstoy 
 had always had for them "a strange affection, 
 absolutely genuine," 4 which the repeated ex- 
 periences of his social disillusions were power- 
 
 4 Confessions. 
 
THE CRISIS 187 
 
 less to shake. Of late years he, like Levine, 
 had drawn very near to them. 5 He began to 
 ponder concerning these millions of beings 
 who were excluded from the narrow circle of 
 the learned, the rich, and the idle who killed 
 themselves, endeavoured to forget themselves, 
 or, like himself, were basely prolonging a 
 hopeless life. He asked himself why these 
 millions of men and women escaped this de- 
 spair: why they did not kill themselves. He 
 then perceived that they were living not by 
 the light of reason, but without even thinking 
 of reason; they were living by faith. What 
 was this faith which knew nothing of reason? 
 "Faith is the energy of life. One cannot 
 live without faith. The ideas of religion 
 
 5 His portraits of this period betray this plebeian ten- 
 dency. A painting by Kramskoy (1873) represents Tol- 
 stoy in a moujik's blouse, with bowed head: it resembles 
 a German Christ. The forehead is growing bare at the 
 temples; the cheeks are lined and bearded. — In another 
 portrait, dated 1881, he has the look of a respectable 
 artisan in his Sunday clothes : the hair cut short, the beard 
 and whiskers spread out on either side; the face looks 
 much wider below than above; the eyebrows are con- 
 tracted, the eyes gloomy ; the wide nostrils have a dog-like 
 appearance; the ears are enormous. 
 
138 TOLSTOY 
 
 were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of 
 human thought. The replies given by faith 
 to Life the sphinx contain the deepest wisdom 
 of humanity." 
 
 Is it enough, then, to be acquainted with 
 those formulae of wisdom recorded in the 
 volume of religion? No, for faith is not a 
 science; faith is an act; it has no meaning un- 
 less it is lived. The disgust which Tolstoy 
 felt at the sight of rich and right-thinking 
 people, for whom faith was merely a kind of 
 "epicurean consolation," threw him definitely 
 among the simple folk who alone lived lives 
 in agreement with their faith. 
 
 "And he understood that the life of the 
 labouring people was life itself, and that the 
 meaning to be attributed to that life was 
 truth." 
 
 But how become a part of the people and 
 share its faith? It is not enough to know that 
 others are in the right; it does not depend 
 upon ourselves whether we are like them. 
 We pray to God in vain; in vain we stretch 
 our eager arms toward Him. God flies. 
 Where shall He be found? 
 
THE CRISIS 139 
 
 But one day grace descended: 
 
 "One day of early spring I was alone in 
 the forest, listening to its sounds. ... I 
 was thinking of my distress during the last 
 three years; of my search for God; of my 
 perpetual oscillations from joy to despair. 
 . , . And I suddenly saw that I used to 
 live only when I used to believe in God. At 
 the very thought of Him the delightful waves 
 of life stirred in me. Everything around me 
 grew full of life ; everything received a mean- 
 ing. But the moment I no longer believed 
 life suddenly ceased. 
 
 "Then what am I still searching for? a 
 voice cried within me. For Him, without 
 whom man cannot live! To know God and 
 to live — it is the same thing! For God is 
 Life. . . . 
 
 "Since then this light has never again de- 
 serted me." 6 
 
 He was saved. God had appeared to 
 him. 7 
 
 6 Confessions. 
 
 7 To tell the truth — not for the first time. The young 
 volunteer in the Caucasus, the officer at Sebastopol, 
 
140 TOLSTOY 
 
 But as he was not a Hindu mystic, to whom 
 ecstasy suffices; as to the dreams of the 
 Asiatic was added the thirst for reason and 
 
 Olenin of the Cossacksj Prince Andrei, and Pierre Be- 
 soukhov, in War and Peace, had had similar visions. 
 But Tolstoy was so enthusiastic that each time he discov- 
 ered God he believed it was for the first time; that 
 previously there had been nothing but night and the void. 
 He saw nothing of his past but its shadows and its shames. 
 We who, through reading his Journal, know better than 
 he himself the story of his heart, know also how pro- 
 foundly religious was that heart, even when he was most 
 astray. But he himself confesses in a passage in the 
 preface to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology: "God! 
 God! I have erred; I have sought the truth where I 
 should not have sought it; and I knew that I erred. I 
 flattered my evil passions, knowing them to be evil; but 
 I never forgot Thee. I was always conscious of Thee, 
 even when I went astray" The crisis of 1878-79 was 
 only more violent than the rest ; perhaps under the influ- 
 ence of repeated loss and the advance of age; its only 
 novelty was that the image of God, instead of vanishing 
 and leaving no trace when once the flame of ecstasy flick- 
 ered out, remained with him, and the penitent, warned 
 by past experience, hastened to "walk in the light while 
 he had the light," and to deduce from his faith a whole 
 system of life, not that he had not already tried to do so. 
 (Remember the Rules of Life written when he was a stu- 
 dent.) But at fifty years of age there was less likelihood 
 that his passions would divert him from his path. 
 
THE CRISIS 141 
 
 the need of action of the Occidental, he was 
 moved to translate his revelation into terms 
 of practical faith, and to draw from the holy 
 life the rules of daily existence. Without 
 any previous bias, and sincerely wishing to be- 
 lieve in the beliefs of his own flesh and blood, 
 he began by studying the doctrine of the 
 Orthodox Church, of which he was a mem- 
 ber. 8 In order to become more intimately a 
 part of that body he submitted for three years 
 to all its ceremonies ; confessing himself, com- 
 municating; not presuming to judge such 
 matters as shocked him, inventing explana- 
 tions for what he found obscure or incompre- 
 hensible, uniting himself, through and in their 
 faith, with all those whom he loved, whether 
 living or dead, and always cherishing the 
 hope that at a certain moment "love would 
 open to him the gates of truth." But it was 
 all useless: his reason and his heart revolted. 
 Such ceremonies as baptism and communion 
 appeared to him scandalous. When he was 
 
 8 The sub-title of the Confessions is Introduction to the 
 Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the Examination of 
 the Christian Doctrine. 
 
142 TOLSTOY 
 
 forced to repeat that the host was the true 
 body and true blood of Christ, "he felt as 
 though a knife were plunged into his heart." 
 But it was not the dogmas which raised be- 
 tween the Church and himself an insurmount- 
 able wall, but the practical questions, and in 
 especial two : the hateful and mutual intoler- 
 ance of the Churches 9 and the sanction, 
 formal or tacit, of homicide: of war and of 
 capital punishment. 
 
 So he broke loose, and the rupture was the 
 more violent in that for three years he had 
 suppressed his faculty of thought. He 
 walked delicately no longer. Angrily and 
 violently he trampled underfoot the religion 
 which the day before he was still persistently 
 practising. In his Criticism of Dogmatic 
 Theology (1870-1881) he termed it not only 
 an " insanity, but a conscious and interested 
 lie." 10 He contrasted it with the New 
 
 9 "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was 
 struck with the fact that religion itself destroyed that 
 which it sought to produce." (Confessions.) 
 
 10 "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church 
 is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a con- 
 coction of gross superstitions and witchcraft, under which 
 
THE CRISIS 143 
 
 Testament, in his Concordance and Trans- 
 lation of the Four Gospels (1881-83). 
 Finally, upon the Gospel he built his faith 
 {What my Faith Consists in, 1883). 
 
 It all resides in these words : 
 
 "I believe in the doctrine of the Christ. 
 I believe that happiness is possible on earth 
 only when all men shall accomplish it." 
 
 Its corner-stone is the Sermon on the 
 Mount, whose essential teaching Tolstoy ex- 
 presses in five commandments: 
 
 "1. Do not be angry. 
 
 "2. Do not commit adultery. 
 
 "3. Do not take oaths. 
 
 "4. Do not resist evil by evil. 
 
 "5. Be no man's enemy." 
 
 This is the negative part of the doctrine; 
 the positive portion is contained in this single 
 commandment: 
 
 "Love God, and thy neighbour as thy- 
 self." 
 
 "Christ has said that he who shall have 
 broken the least of these commandments will 
 
 the meaning of the Christian doctrine absolutely disap- 
 pears." {Reply to the Holy Synod, April 4-17, 1901.) 
 
144 TOLSTOY 
 
 hold the lowest place in the kingdom of 
 heaven. " 
 
 And Tolstoy adds naively: 
 
 "Strange as it may seem, I have been 
 obliged, after eighteen centuries, to discover 
 these rules as a novelty." 
 
 Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of 
 Christ? By no means. In what quality does 
 he invoke him? As the greatest of the line 
 of sages — Brahma, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Con- 
 fucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah — who have revealed 
 to man the true happiness to which he aspires, 
 and the way which he must follow. 11 Tol- 
 
 11 As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of re- 
 ligious truth throughout human history — and of the kin- 
 ship of Christ with the other sages, from Buddha down 
 to Kant and Emerson — grew more and more accentuated, 
 until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had "any 
 predilection for Christianity." Of the greatest importance 
 in this connection is a letter written between July 27 and 
 August 4, 1909, to the painter Jan Styka, and recently 
 reproduced in Le Theosophe (January 16, 191 1). Ac- 
 cording to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new conviction, 
 was a little inclined to forget his former state of mind 
 and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was 
 purely Christian: 
 
 "The doctrine of Jesus," he writes, "is to me only one 
 of the beautiful doctrines which we have received from 
 
THE CRISIS 145 
 
 stoy is the disciple of these great religious 
 creators, of these Hindu, Chinese, and He- 
 brew demi-gods and prophets. He defends 
 them, as he knows how to defend; defends 
 them by attacking those whom he calls "the 
 Scribes" and "the Pharisees"; by attacking 
 the established Churches and the representa- 
 tives of arrogant science, or rather of "scien- 
 tific philosophism." Not that he appealed 
 from reason to revelation. Once escaped 
 from the period of distress described in his 
 Confessions, he remained essentially a be- 
 
 the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, 
 China, Greece. The two great principles of Jesus: the 
 love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love 
 of one's neighbour, that is, of all men without distinction, 
 have been preached by all the sages of the world: 
 Krishna, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, 
 Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the moderns, 
 Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many 
 others. Truth, moral and religious, is everywhere and 
 always the same. ... I have no predilection for 
 Christianity. If I have been particularly attracted by the 
 teaching of Jesus, it is (i) because I was born and have 
 lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a 
 great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from 
 the astonishing falsifications created by the Churches." 
 
146 TOLSTOY 
 
 liever in Reason; one might indeed say a 
 mystic of Reason. 
 
 "In the beginning was the Word," he says, 
 with St. John; "the Word, Logos, that is, 
 Reason." 12 
 
 A book of his entitled Life (1887) bears 
 as epigraph the famous lines of Pascal: 13 
 
 "Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble 
 thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. 
 • . . All our dignity resides in thought. 
 . . . Let us then strive to think well : that 
 is the principle of morality." 
 
 The whole book, moreover, is nothing but 
 a hymn to Reason. 
 
 It is true that Tolstoy's Reason is not the 
 scientific reason, the restricted reason "which 
 takes the part for the whole and physical life 
 for the whole of life," but the sovereign law 
 which rules the life of man, "the law accord- 
 
 12 Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, 
 which is modest and knows its limits. (Life, chap. iv. 
 There is a French version by Countess Tolstoy.) 
 
 13 Tolstoy often read the Pensees during the period of 
 this crisis, which preceded the Confessions. He speaks 
 of Pascal in his letters to Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 
 1879), recommending his friend to read the Pensees. 
 
THE CRISIS 147 
 
 ing to which reasonable beings, that is men, 
 must of necessity live their lives." 
 
 "It is a law analogous to those which regu- 
 late the nutrition and the reproduction of the 
 animal, the growth and the blossoming of 
 herb and of tree, the movement of the earth 
 and the planets. It is only in the accom- 
 plishment of this law, in the submission of our 
 animal nature to the law of reason, with a view 
 to acquiring goodness, that we truly live. 
 . . . Reason cannot be defined, and we 
 have no need to define it, for not only do we 
 all know it, but we know nothing else. . . . 
 All that man knows he knows by means of 
 reason and not by faith. . . . 14 True life 
 commences only at the moment when reason is 
 manifested. The only real life is the life of 
 reason." 
 
 14 In a letter Upon Reason, written on November 26, 
 1894, t0 Baroness X (reproduced in The Revolutionaries, 
 1906), Tolstoy says the same thing: 
 
 "Man has received directly from God one sole instru- 
 ment by which he may know himself and his relations 
 with the world: there is no other means. This instru- 
 ment is reason. Reason comes from God. It is not only 
 the highest human quality, but the only means by which 
 the truth is to be known." 
 
148 TOLSTOY 
 
 Then what is the visible life, our individual 
 existence? "It is not our life," says Tolstoy, 
 "for it does not depend upon ourselves. 
 
 "Our animal activity is accomplished with- 
 out ourselves. . . . Humanity has done 
 with the idea of life considered as an indi- 
 vidual existence. The negation of the possi- 
 bility of individual good remains an un- 
 changeable truth for every man of our period 
 who is endowed with reason." 
 
 Then follows a long series of postulates, 
 which I will not here discuss, but which show 
 how Tolstoy was obsessed by the idea of 
 reason. It was in fact a passion, no less 
 blind or jealous than the other passions which 
 had possessed him during the earlier part 
 of his life. One fire was flickering out, the 
 other was kindling; or rather it was al- 
 ways the same fire, but fed with a different 
 fuel. 
 
 A fact which adds to the resemblance be- 
 tween the "individual" passions and this "ra- 
 tional" passion is that neither those nor this 
 can be satisfied with loving. They seek to 
 act; they long for realisation. 
 
THE CRISIS 149 
 
 "Christ has said, we must not speak, but 
 
 act." 
 
 And what is the activity of reason? — Love. 
 
 "Love is the only reasonable activity of 
 man; love is the most reasonable and most 
 enlightened state of the soul. All that man 
 needs is that nothing shall obscure the sun 
 of reason, for that alone can help him to grow. 
 . . . Love is the actual good, the supreme 
 good which resolves all the contradictions of 
 life; which not only dissipates the fear of 
 death, but impels man to sacrifice himself to 
 others : for there is no love but that which en- 
 ables a man to give his life for those he loves : 
 love is not worthy of the name unless it is a 
 sacrifice of self. And the true love can only 
 be realised when man understands that it is not 
 possible for him to acquire individual happi- 
 ness. It is then that all the streams of his life 
 go to nourish the noble graft of the true love : 
 and this graft borrows for its increase all the 
 energies of the wild stock of animal individu- 
 ality. . . ," 15 
 
 Thus Tolstoy did not come to the refuge of 
 
 15 Life, chaps, xxii.-xxv. As in the case of most of 
 
150 TOLSTOY 
 
 faith like an exhausted river which loses it- 
 self among the sands. He brought to it the 
 torrent of impetuous energies amassed during 
 a full and virile life. This we shall presently 
 see. 
 
 This impassioned faith, in which Love and 
 Reason are united in a close embrace, has 
 found its most dignified expression in the 
 famous reply to the Holy Synod which ex- 
 communicated him : 16 
 
 "I believe in God, who for me is Love, the 
 Spirit, the Principle of all things. I believe 
 that He is in me as I am in Him. I believe 
 that the will of God has never been more 
 clearly expressed than in the teaching of the 
 man Christ; but we cannot regard Christ as 
 God and address our prayers to him without 
 committing the greatest sacrilege. I believe 
 that the true happiness of man consists in the 
 
 these quotations, I am expressing the sense of several chap- 
 ters in a few characteristic phrases. 
 
 16 I hope later, when the complete works of Tolstoy 
 have been published, to study the various shades of this 
 religious idea, which has certainly evolved in respect of 
 many points, notably in respect of the conception of future 
 life. 
 
THE CRISIS 151 
 
 accomplishment of the will of God ; I believe 
 that the will of God is that every man shall 
 love his fellows and do unto them always as he 
 would they should do unto him, which con- 
 tains, as the Bible says, all the law and the 
 prophets. I believe that the meaning of life 
 for each one of us is only to increase the love 
 within him ; I believe that this development of 
 our power of loving will reward us in this 
 life with a happiness which will increase day 
 by day, and with a more perfect felicity in 
 the other world. I believe that this increase 
 of love will contribute, more than any other 
 factor, to founding the kingdom of God upon 
 earth; that is, to replacing an organisation of 
 life in which division, deceit, and violence are 
 omnipotent, by a new order in which concord, 
 truth, and brotherhood will reign. I believe 
 that we have only one means of growing richer 
 in love: namely, our prayers. Not public 
 prayer in the temple, which Christ has form- 
 ally reproved (Matt. vi. 5-13), but the prayer 
 of which he himself has given as an example; 
 the solitary prayer which confirms in us the 
 consciousness of the meaning of our life and 
 
152 TOLSTOY 
 
 the feeling that we depend solely upon the will 
 of God. ... I believe in life eternal; I 
 believe that man is rewarded according to his 
 acts, here and everywhere, now and for ever. 
 I believe all these things so firmly that at my 
 age, on the verge of the tomb, I have often 
 to make an effort not to pray for the death 
 of my body, that is, my birth into a new life." 17 
 
 17 From a translation in the Temps for May i, 1901. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 REALITY 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 REALITY 
 
 He thought he had arrived in port, had 
 achieved the haven in which his unquiet soul 
 might take its repose. He was only at the be- 
 ginning of a new period of activity. 
 
 A winter passed in Moscow (his family 
 duties having obliged him to follow his family 
 thither), 1 and the taking of the census, in 
 which he contrived to lend a hand, gave him 
 the occasion to examine at first hand the 
 poverty of a great city. The impression 
 produced upon him was terrible. On the 
 evening of the day when he first came into 
 contact with this hidden plague of civilisa- 
 tion, while relating to a friend what he had 
 seen, "he began to shout, to weep, and to 
 brandish his fist." 
 
 1 "I had hitherto passed my whole life away from the 
 city." {What shall we dof) 
 
 155 
 
156 TOLSTOY 
 
 "People can't live like that!" he cried, sob- 
 bing. "It cannot be! It cannot be!" He 
 fell into a state of terrible despair, which did 
 not leave him for months. Countess Tolstoy 
 wrote to him on the 3rd of March, 1882: 
 
 "You used to say, 'I used to want to hang 
 myself because of my lack of faith.' Now 
 you have faith: why then are you so un- 
 happy?" 
 
 Because he had not the sanctimonious, self- 
 satisfied faith of the Pharisee; because he had 
 not the egoism of the mystic, who is too com- 
 pletely absorbed in the matter of his own sal- 
 vation to think of the salvation of others; 2 
 
 2 Tolstoy has many times expressed his antipathy for 
 the "ascetics, who live for themselves only, apart from 
 their fellows." He puts them in the same class as the 
 conceited and ignorant revolutionists, "who pretend to do 
 good to others without knowing what it is that they them- 
 selves need. ... I love these two categories of men 
 with the same love, but I hate their doctrines with the 
 same hate. The only doctrine is that which orders a 
 constant activity, an existence which responds to the 
 aspirations of the soul and endeavours to realise the hap- 
 piness of others. Such is the Christian doctrine. Equally 
 remote from religious quietism and the arrogant preten- 
 sions of the revolutionists, who seek to transform the 
 
REALITY 157 
 
 because he knew love; because he could no 
 longer forget the miserable creatures he had 
 seen, and in the passionate tenderness of his 
 heart he felt as though he were responsible 
 for their sufferings and their abjectness; they 
 were the victims of that civilisation in whose 
 privileges he shared; of that monstrous idol to 
 which an elect and superior class was always 
 sacrificing millions of human beings. To ac- 
 cept the benefit of such crimes was to become 
 an accomplice. His conscience would have 
 given him no repose had he not denounced 
 them. 
 
 What shall we do? (1884-86) is the expres- 
 sion of this second crisis; a crisis far more 
 tragic than the first, and far richer in conse- 
 quences. What were the personal religious 
 sufferings of Tolstoy in this ocean of human 
 wretchedness — of material misery, not misery 
 created by the mind of a self-wearied idler? 
 It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to 
 it, and having seen it he could but strive, at 
 
 world without knowing in what real happiness consists." 
 (Letters to a friend, published in the volume entitled 
 Cruel Pleasures, 1895.) 
 
158 TOLSTOY 
 
 any cost, to prevent it. Alas ! was such a thing 
 possible? 
 
 An admirable portrait, 3 which I cannot look 
 at without emotion, tells us plainly what suf- 
 fering Tolstoy was then enduring. It shows 
 him facing the camera ; seated, with his arms 
 crossed; he is wearing a moujik's blouse. He 
 looks overwhelmed. His hair is still black, 
 but his moustache is already grey, and his 
 long beard and whiskers are quite white. A 
 double furrow traces symmetrical lines in the 
 large, comely face. There is so much good- 
 ness, such tenderness, in the great dog-like 
 muzzle, in the eyes that regard you with so 
 frank, so clear, so sorrowful a look. They 
 read your mind so surely! They pity and im- 
 plore. The face is furrowed and bears traces 
 of suffering; there are heavy creases beneath 
 the eyes. He has wept. But he is strong, and 
 ready for the fight. 
 
 His logic was heroic: 
 
 "I am always astonished by these words, so 
 often repeated: 'Yes, it is well enough in 
 
 3 A daguerreotype of 1885, reproduced in What shall 
 we dof in the complete French edition. 
 
REALITY 159 
 
 theory, but how would it be in practice?' As 
 if theory consisted in pretty words, necessary 
 for conversation, and was not in the least some- 
 thing to which practice should conform! 
 When I come to understand a matter on which 
 I have reflected, I cannot do otherwise than 
 as I have understood." 4 
 
 He begins by describing, with photographic 
 exactitude, the poverty of Moscow as he has 
 seen it in the course of his visits to the poorer 
 quarters or the night-shelters. 5 
 
 He is convinced that money is not the power, 
 as he had at first supposed, which will save 
 these unhappy creatures, all more or less 
 tainted by the corruption of the cities. Then 
 he seeks bravely for the source of the evil; 
 unwinding link upon link of the terrible chain 
 of responsibility. First come the rich, with 
 the contagion of their accursed luxury, which 
 entices and depraves the soul. 6 Then comes 
 
 4 What shall we dof 
 
 5 All the first part of the book (the first fifteen chap- 
 ters). 
 
 6 "The true cause of poverty is the accumulation of 
 riches in the hands of those who do not produce, and are 
 concentrated in the cities. The wealthy classes are gath- 
 
160 TOLSTOY 
 
 the universal seduction of life without labour. 
 Then the State, that murderous entity, created 
 by the violent in order that they might for 
 their own profit despoil and enslave the rest 
 of humanity. Then the Church, an accom- 
 plice; science and art, accomplices. How is 
 a man to oppose this army of evil? In the 
 first place, by refusing to join it. By refusing 
 to share in the exploitation of humanity. By 
 renouncing wealth and ownership of the soil, 7 
 and by refusing to serve the State. 
 
 ered together in the cities in order to enjoy and to defend 
 themselves. And the poor man comes to feed upon ^he 
 crumbs of the rich. He is drawn thither by the snare of 
 easy gain : by peddling, begging, swindling, or in the serv- 
 ice of immorality." 
 
 7 "The pivot of the evil is property. Property is merely 
 the means of enjoying the labour of others." Property, 
 he says again, is that which is not ours: it represents 
 other people. "Man calls his wife, his children, his 
 slaves, his goods his property, but reality shows him his 
 error; and he must renounce his property or suffer and 
 cause others to suffer." 
 
 Tolstoy was already urging the Russian revolution: 
 "For three or four years now men have cursed us on the 
 highway and called us sluggards and skulkers. The 
 hatred and contempt of the downtrodden people are be- 
 coming more intense." (What shall we do?) 
 
REALITY 161 
 
 But this is not sufficient. One "must not 
 lie," nor be afraid of the truth. One "must 
 repent," and uproot the pride that is implanted 
 by education. Finally, one must work with 
 one's hands. "Thou shalt win thy bread in 
 the sweat of thy brow" is the first command- 
 ment and the most essential. 8 And Tolstoy, 
 replying in advance to the ridicule of the elect, 
 maintains that physical labour does not in any 
 way decrease the energy of the intellect; but 
 that, on the contrary, it increases it, and that 
 it responds to the normal demand of nature. 
 Health can only gain thereby; art will gain 
 even more. But what is more important still, 
 it will re-establish the union of man with man. 
 
 In his subsequent works, Tolstoy was to 
 complete these precepts of moral hygiene. 
 
 8 The peasant-revolutionist Bondarev would have had 
 this law recognised as a universal obligation. Tolstoy- 
 was then subject to his influence, as also to that of an- 
 other peasant, Sutayev. — "During the whole of my life 
 two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence 
 over me, have enriched my mind, and have elucidated for 
 me my own conception of the world. They were two 
 peasants, Sutayev and Bondarev." {What shall we do?) 
 
 In the same book Tolstoy gives us a portrait of Su- 
 tayev, and records a conversation with him. 
 
162 TOLSTOY 
 
 He was anxious to achieve the cure of the 
 soul, to replenish its energy, by proscribing the 
 vicious pleasures which deaden the con- 
 science 9 and the cruel pleasures which kill it. 10 
 He himself set the example. In 1884, he 
 sacrificed his most deeply rooted passion: his 
 love of the chase. 11 He practised abstinence, 
 which strengthens the will. So an athlete may 
 subject himself to some painful discipline that 
 he may grapple with it and conquer. 
 
 What shall we do? marks the first stage of 
 the difficult journey upon which Tolstoy was 
 about to embark, quitting the relative peace 
 of religious meditation for the social mael- 
 strom. It was then that the twenty years' war 
 commenced which the old prophet of Yasnaya 
 
 9 Vicious Pleasures, or in the French translation Alco- 
 hol and Tobacco, 1895. 
 
 10 Cruel Pleasures {the Meat-eaters; War; Hunting), 
 
 1895. 
 
 11 The sacrifice was difficult ; the passion inherited. He 
 was not sentimental ; he never felt much pity for animals. 
 For him all things fell into three planes: "1. Reasoning 
 beings; 2. animals and plants ; 3. inanimate matter." He 
 was not without a trace of native cruelty. He relates the 
 pleasure he felt in watching the struggles of a wolf which 
 he killed. Remorse was of later growth. 
 
REALITY 16S 
 
 Polyana waged in the name of the Gospel, 
 single-handed, outside the limits of all parties, 
 and condemning all; a war upon the crimes 
 and lies of civilisation. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ART AND CONSCIENCE 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ART AND CONSCIENCE 
 
 This moral revolution of Tolstoy's met with 
 little sympathy from his immediate world; his 
 family and his relatives were appalled by it. 
 
 For a long time Countess Tolstoy had been 
 anxiously watching the progress of a symptom 
 against which she had fought in vain. As 
 early as 1874 srie had seen with indignation 
 the amount of time and energy which her hus- 
 band spent in connection with the schools. 
 
 "This spelling-book, this arithmetic, this 
 grammar — I feel a contempt for them, and I 
 cannot assume a semblance of interest in 
 them." 
 
 Matters were very different when pedagogy 
 was succeeded by religion. So hostile was 
 the Countess's reception of the first confidences 
 of the Convert that Tolstoy felt obliged to 
 apologise when he spoke of God in his letters : 
 
 167 
 
168 TOLSTOY 
 
 "Do not be vexed, as you so often are when 
 I mention God; I cannot help it, for He is 
 the very basis of my thought." 1 
 
 The Countess was touched, no doubt; she 
 tried to conceal her impatience; but she did 
 not understand; and she watched her husband 
 anxiously. 
 
 "His eyes are strange and fixed. He 
 scarcely speaks. He does not seem to belong 
 to this world." 
 
 She feared he was ill. 
 
 "Leo is always working, by what he tells 
 me. Alas ! he is writing religious discussions 
 of some kind. He reads and he ponders un- 
 til he gives himself the headache, and all this 
 to prove that the Church is not in agreement 
 with the teaching of the Gospel. He will 
 hardly find a dozen people in Russia whom 
 the matter could possibly interest. But there 
 is nothing to be done. I have only one hope : 
 that he will be done with it all the sooner, 
 and that it will pass off like an illness." 
 
 The illness did not pass away. The situa- 
 tion between husband and wife became more 
 
 1 The summer of 1878. 
 
ART AND CONSCIENCE 169 
 
 and more painful. They loved one another; 
 each had a profound esteem for the other; but 
 it was impossible for them to understand one 
 another. They strove to make mutual con- 
 cessions, which became — as is usually the case 
 — a form of mutual torment. Tolstoy forced 
 himself to follow his family to Moscow. He 
 wrote in his Journal: 
 
 "The most painful month of my life. Get- 
 ting settled in Moscow. All are settling 
 down. But when, then, will they begin to 
 live? All this, not in order to live, but be- 
 cause other folk do the same. Unhappy peo- 
 ple!" 2 
 
 During these days the Countess wrote: 
 
 "Moscow. We shall have been here a 
 month to-morrow. The first two weeks I 
 cried every day, for Leo was not only sad, but 
 absolutely broken. He did not sleep, he did 
 not eat, at times even he wept; I thought I 
 should go mad." 3 
 
 For a time they had to live their lives apart. 
 They begged one another's pardon for caus- 
 
 2 October 8, 1881. Vie et (Euvre. 
 5 October 14. Vie et (Euvre. 
 
170 TOLSTOY 
 
 ing mutual suffering. We see how they 
 always loved each other. He writes to 
 her: 
 
 "You say, 'I love you, and you do not need 
 my love.' It is the only thing I do need. 
 . . . Your love causes me more gladness 
 than anything in the world." 
 
 But as soon as they are together again the 
 same discord occurs. The Countess cannot 
 share this religious mania which is now im- 
 pelling Tolstoy to study Hebrew with a 
 rabbi. 
 
 "Nothing else interests him any longer. 
 He is wasting his energies in foolishness. I 
 cannot conceal my impatience." 4 
 
 She writes to him : 
 
 "It can only sadden me that such intellectual 
 energies should spend themselves in chopping 
 wood, heating the samovar, and cobbling 
 boots." 
 
 She adds, with affectionate, half-ironical 
 humour of a mother who watches a child play- 
 ing a foolish game: 
 
 "Finally, I have pacified myself with the 
 4 1882. 
 
ART AND CONSCIENCE 171 
 
 Russian proverb: 'Let the child play as he 
 will, so long as he doesn't cry.' " 5 
 
 Before the letter was posted she had a men- 
 tal vision of her husband reading these lines, 
 his kind, frank eyes saddened by their ironical 
 tone; and she re-opened the letter, in an im- 
 pulse of affection: 
 
 "Quite suddenly I saw you so clearly, and 
 I felt such a rush of tenderness for you! 
 There is something in you so wise, so naive, so 
 perserving, and it is all lit up by the radiance 
 of goodness, and that look of yours which goes 
 straight to the soul. ... It is something 
 that belongs to you alone." 
 
 In this manner these two creatures who 
 loved also tormented one another and were 
 straightway stricken with wretchedness be- 
 cause of the pain they had the power to in- 
 flict but not the power to avoid. A situation 
 with no escape, which lasted for nearly thirty 
 years; which was to be terminated only by 
 the flight across the steppes, in a moment of 
 aberration, of the ancient Lear, with death 
 already upon him. 
 
 5 October 23, 1884. Vie et (Euvre. 
 
172 TOLSTOY 
 
 Critics have not sufficiently remarked the 
 moving appeal to women which terminates 
 What shall we do? Tolstoy had no sympathy 
 for modern feminism. 6 But of the type whom 
 he calls "the mother-woman," the woman who 
 knows the real meaning of life, he speaks in 
 terms of pious admiration; he pronounces a 
 magnificent eulogy of her pains and her joys, 
 of pregnancy and maternity, of the terrible 
 sufferings, the years without rest, the invisible, 
 exhausting travail for which no reward is ex- 
 pected, and of that beatitude which floods the 
 soul at the happy issue from labour, when the 
 body has accomplished the Law. He draws 
 the portrait of the valiant wife who is a help, 
 not an obstacle, to her husband. She knows 
 that "the vocation of man is the obscure, lonely 
 sacrifice, unrewarded, for the life of others." 
 
 "Such a woman will not only not encourage 
 
 6 "The so-called right of women is merely the desire to 
 participate in the imaginary labours of the wealthy classes, 
 with a view to enjoying the fruit of the labour of others 
 and to live a life that satisfies the sensual appetites. No 
 genuine labourer's wife demands the right to share her 
 husband's work in the mines or in the fields." 
 
ART AND CONSCIENCE 173 
 
 her husband in factitious and meretricious 
 work whose only end is to profit by and enjoy 
 the labour of others ; but she will regard such 
 activity with horror and disgust, as a possible 
 seduction for her children. She will demand 
 of her companion a true labour, which will 
 call for energy and does not fear danger. 
 . . . She knows that the children, the gen- 
 erations to come, are given to men as their 
 holiest vision, and that she exists to further, 
 with all her being, this sacred task. She will 
 develop in her children and in her husband 
 the strength of sacrifice. . . . It is such 
 women who rule men and serve as their 
 guiding star. . . . O mother-women ! In 
 your hands is the salvation of the world !" 7 
 
 This appeal of a voice of supplication, 
 which still has hope — will it not be heard? 
 
 A few years later the last glimmer of hope 
 was dead. 
 
 "Perhaps you will not believe me; but you 
 cannot imagine how isolated I am, nor in what 
 
 7 These are the last lines of What shall we do? They 
 are dated the 14th of February, 1886. 
 
174 TOLSTOY 
 
 a degree my veritable / is despised and dis- 
 regarded by all those about me." 8 
 
 If those who loved him best so misunder- 
 stood the grandeur of the moral transforma- 
 tion which Tolstoy was undergoing, one could 
 not look for more penetration or greater re- 
 spect in others. Tourgenev with whom he 
 had sought to effect a reconciliation, rather 
 in a spirit of Christian humility than because 
 his feelings towards him had suffered any 
 change, 9 said ironically of Tolstoy: "I pity 
 him greatly; but after all, as the French say, 
 every one kills his own fleas in his own way." 10 
 
 A few years later, when on the point of 
 death, he wrote to Tolstoy the well-known 
 letter in which he prayed "his friend, the 
 
 8 A letter to a friend, published under the tide of Pro- 
 fession of Faith, in the volume entitled Cruel Pleasures, 
 
 1895. 
 
 9 The reconciliation took place in the spring of 1878. 
 Tolstoy wrote to Tourgenev asking his pardon. Tour- 
 genev went to Yasnaya Polyana in August, 1878. Tol- 
 stoy returned his visit in July, 1881. Every one was 
 struck with the change in his manner, his gentleness and 
 his modesty. He was "as though regenerated." 
 
 10 Letter to Polonski (quoted by Birukov). 
 
ART AND CONSCIENCE 175 
 
 great writer of the Russian world," to "re- 
 turn to literature." " 
 
 All the artists of Europe shared the anxiety 
 and the prayer of the dying Tourgenev. 
 Melchior de Vogue, at the end of his study 
 of Tolstoy, written in 1886, made a portrait 
 of the writer in peasant costume, handling 
 a drill, the pretext for an eloquent apos- 
 trophe : 
 
 "Craftsman, maker of masterpieces, this is 
 not your tool! . . . Our tool is the pen; 
 our field, the human soul, which we must 
 shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of 
 the words of a Russian peasant, of the first 
 printer of Moscow, when he was sent back 
 to the plough : 'It is not my business to sow 
 grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit 
 broadcast in the world.' " 
 
 As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his 
 vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! 
 In the Introduction to What I Believe he 
 wrote : 
 
 "I believe that my life, my reason,, my light, 
 
 11 Letter to Bougival, June 28, 1883. 
 
176 TOLSTOY 
 
 is given me exclusively for the purpose of 
 enlightening my fellows. I believe that my 
 knowledge of the truth is a talent which is 
 lent me for this object; that this talent is a 
 fire which is a fire only when it is being con- 
 sumed. I believe that the only meaning of my 
 life is that I should live it only by the light 
 within me, and should hold that light on high 
 before men that they may see it." 12 
 
 But this light, this fire "which was a fire 
 only when it was being consumed," was a 
 cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy's 
 fellow-artists. The more intelligent could not 
 but suspect that there was a great risk that 
 their art would be the first prey of the con- 
 flagration. They professed to believe that the 
 whole art of literature was menaced; that the 
 
 12 We find that M. de Vogue, in the reproach which he 
 addressed to Tolstoy, unconsciously used the phrases of 
 Tolstoy himself. "Rightly or wrongly," he said, "for our 
 chastisement perhaps, we have received from heaven that 
 splendid and essential evil: thought. . . . To throw 
 down this cross is an impious revolt." (Le Roman Russe, 
 1886.) Now Tolstoy wrote to his aunt, the Countess 
 A. A. Tolstoy, in 1883 : "Each of us must bear his cross. 
 . . . Mine is the travail of the idea; evil, full of pride 
 and seductiveness." (Letters.) 
 
ART AND CONSCIENCE 177 
 
 Russian, like Prospero, was burying for ever 
 his magic ring with its power of creative 
 illusion. 
 
 Nothing was further from the truth ; and I 
 hope to show that so far from ruining his art 
 Tolstoy was awakening forces which had lain 
 fallow, and that his religious faith, instead of 
 killing his artistic genius, regenerated it com- 
 pletely. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SCIENCE AND ART 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 SCIENCE AND ART 
 
 IT is a singular fact that in speaking of 
 Tolstoy's ideas concerning science and art, the 
 most important of the books in which these 
 ideas are expressed — namely, What shall 
 we do? (1884-86) — is commonly ignored. 
 There, for the first time, Tolstoy fights the bat- 
 tle between art and science; and none of the 
 following conflicts was to surpass the violence 
 of their first encounter. It is a matter for 
 surprise that no one, during the assaults which 
 have been recently delivered in France upon 
 the vanity of science and the intellectuals, has 
 thought of referring to these pages. They 
 constitute the most terrible attack ever penned 
 against "the eunuchs of science" and "the cor- 
 sairs of art"; against those intellectual castes 
 which, having destroyed the old ruling castes 
 of the Church, the State, and the Army, have 
 installed themselves in their place, and, with- 
 
 181 
 
182 TOLSTOY 
 
 out being able or willing to perform any 
 service of use to humanity, lay claim to a 
 blind admiration and service, proclaiming as 
 dogmas an impudent faith in science for the 
 sake of science and in art for the sake of art 
 — the lying mask which they seek to make 
 their justification and the apology for their 
 monstrous egoism and their emptiness. 
 
 "Never make me say," continues Tol- 
 stoy, "that I deny art or science. Not only 
 do I not deny them; it is in their name 
 that I seek to drive the thieves from the 
 temple." 
 
 "Science and art are as necessary as bread 
 and water; even more necessary. . . . 
 The true science is that of the true welfare of 
 all human beings. The true art is the expres- 
 sion of the knowledge of the true welfare of 
 all men." 
 
 And he praises those who, "since men have 
 existed, have with the harp or the cymbal, by 
 images or by words, expressed their struggle 
 against duplicity, their sufferings in that 
 struggle, their hope in the triumph of good, 
 their despair at the triumph of evil, and the 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 183 
 
 enthusiasm of their prophetic vision of the 
 future." 
 
 He then draws the character of the perfect 
 artist, in a page burning with mystical and 
 melancholy earnestness : 
 
 "The activity of science and art is only 
 fruitful when it arrogates no right to itself and 
 considers only its duties. It is only because 
 that activity is such as it is, because its essence 
 is sacrifice, that humanity honours it. The 
 men who are called to serve others by spiritual 
 work always suffer in the accomplishment of 
 that task; for the spiritual world is brought 
 to birth only in suffering and torture. 
 Sacrifice and suffering; such is the fate of 
 the thinker and the artist, for his fate is the 
 good of men. Men are unhappy ; they suffer ; 
 they die; there is no time for him to stroll 
 about, to amuse himself. The thinker or the 
 artist never strays upon Olympian heights, as 
 we are accustomed to think; he is always in a 
 state of conflict, always in a state of emotion. 
 He must decide and must say what will 
 further the welfare of men, what will deliver 
 them from suffering; and he has not decided 
 
184 TOLSTOY 
 
 it, he has not said it; and to-morrow it will 
 perhaps be too late, and he will die. . . . 
 The man who is trained in an establishment 
 in which artists and scientists are formed (to 
 tell the truth, such places make destroyers of 
 art and of science) ; the man who receives 
 diplomas and a pension — he will not be an 
 artist or a thinker; but he who would be 
 happy not to think, not to express what is im- 
 planted in his mind, yet cannot refrain from 
 thought and self-expression: for he is carried 
 along by two invisible forces : his inner need 
 and his love of men. There are no artists who 
 are fat,, lovers of life, and satisfied with them- 
 selves." 1 
 
 This splendid page, which throws a tragic 
 light upon the genius of Tolstoy, was written 
 under the immediate stress of the suffering 
 caused him by the poverty of Moscow, and 
 under the conviction that science and art were 
 the accomplices of the entire modern system 
 of social inequality and hypocritical brutality. 
 This conviction he was never to lose. But the 
 
 1 What shall we dof p. 378-9. 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 185 
 
 impression of his first encounter with the 
 misery of the world slowly faded, and be- 
 came less poignant; the wound healed, 2 and 
 in none of his subsequent books do we re- 
 cover the tremor of pain and of vengeful 
 anger which vibrates in this; nowhere do we 
 find this sublime profession of the faith of 
 the artist who creates with his life-blood, this 
 exaltation of the sacrifice and suffering 
 "which are the lot of the thinker"; this dis- 
 dain for Olympian art. Those of his later 
 works which deal with the criticism of art 
 will be found to treat the question from a 
 standpoint at once more literary and less 
 mystical; the problem of art is detached from 
 the background of that human wretchedness 
 of which Tolstoy could not think without los- 
 ing his self-control, as on the night of his 
 
 2 In time he even came to justify suffering — not only 
 personal suffering, but the sufferings of others. "For the 
 assuagement of the sufferings of others is the essence of 
 the rational life. How then should the object of labour 
 be an object of suffering for the labourer? It is as 
 though the labourer were to say that an untilled field is a 
 grief to him." {Life, chap, xxxiv.-xxxv. ) 
 
186 TOLSTOY 
 
 visit to the night-shelter, when upon return- 
 ing home he sobbed and cried aloud in des- 
 peration. 
 
 I do not mean to suggest that these didactic 
 works are ever frigid. It is impossible for 
 Tolstoy to be frigid. Until the end of his 
 life he is the man who writes to Fet: 
 
 "If he does not love his personages, even 
 the least of them, then he must insult them 
 in such a way as to make the heavens fall, 
 or must mock at them until he splits his 
 sides." 3 
 
 He does not forget to do so, in his writings 
 on art. The negative portion of this state- 
 ment — brimming over with insults and sar- 
 casms — is so vigorously expressed that it is the 
 only part which has struck the artist. This 
 method has so violently wounded the super- 
 stitions and susceptibilities of the brother- 
 hood that they inevitably see, in the enemy 
 of their own art, the enemy of all art what- 
 soever. But Tolstoy's criticism is never de- 
 
 3 February 23, i860. Further Letters, pp. 19-20. It 
 was for this reason that the "melancholy and dyspeptic" 
 art of Tourgenev displeased him. 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 187 
 
 void of the reconstructive element. He never 
 destroys for the sake of destruction, but only 
 to rebuild. In his modesty he does not even 
 profess to build anything new; he merely de- 
 fends Art, which was and ever shall be, from 
 the false artists who exploit it and dishonour 
 it. 
 
 "True science and true art have always ex- 
 isted and will always exist; it is impossible 
 and useless to attack them," he wrote to me 
 in 1887, m a letter which anticipated by more 
 than ten years his famous criticism of art 
 (What is Art?).* "All the evil of the day 
 comes from the fact that so-called civilised 
 people, together with the scientists and artists, 
 form a privileged caste, like so many priests; 
 and this caste has all the faults of all castes. 
 It degrades and lowers the principle in vir- 
 tue of which it was organised. What we in 
 our world call the sciences and the arts is 
 
 4 This letter (October 4, 1887) has been printed in the 
 Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1902, and in the Further Let- 
 ters (Correspondence inedite), 1907. What is Art? ap- 
 peared in 1897-98; but Tolstoy had been pondering the 
 matter for more than fourteen years. 
 
188 TOLSTOY 
 
 merely a gigantic humbug, a gross supersti- 
 tion into which we commonly fall as soon 
 as we free ourselves from the old supersti- 
 tion of the Church. To keep safely to the 
 road we ought to follow we must begin at 
 the beginning — we must raise the cowl which 
 keeps us warm but obscures our sight. The 
 temptation is great. We are born or we 
 clamber upon the rungs of the ladder; and 
 we find among the privileged the priests of 
 civilisation, of Kultur, as the Germans have 
 it. Like the Brahmin or Catholic priests, we 
 must have a great deal of sincerity and a great 
 love of the truth before we cast doubts upon 
 the principles which assure us of our ad- 
 vantageous position. But a serious man who 
 ponders the riddle of life cannot hesitate. To 
 begin to see clearly he must free himself from 
 his superstitions, however profitable they may 
 be to him. This is a condition sine qua non. 
 . . . To have no superstition. To force 
 oneself into the attitude of a child or a 
 Descartes. " 
 
 This superstition of modern art, in which 
 the interested castes believe, "this gigantic 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 189 
 
 humbug," is denounced in Tolstoy's What is 
 Art? With a somewhat ungentle zest he 
 holds it up to ridicule, and exposes its hypoc- 
 risy, its poverty, and its fundamental corrup- 
 tion. He makes a clean sweep of everything. 
 He brings to this work of demolition the joy 
 of a child breaking his toys. The whole of 
 this critical portion is often full of humour, 
 but sometimes of injustice: it is warfare. 
 Tolstoy used all weapons that came to his 
 hand, and struck at hazard, without noticing 
 whom he struck. Often enough it happened 
 — as in all battles — that he wounded those 
 whom it should have been his duty to defend : 
 Ibsen or Beethoven. This was the result of 
 his enthusiasm, which left him no time to re- 
 flect before acting; of his passion, which often 
 blinded him to the weakness of his reasons, 
 and — let us say it — it was also the result of 
 his incomplete artistic culture. 
 
 Setting aside his literary studies, what 
 could he well know of contemporary art? 
 When was he able to study painting, and what 
 could he have heard of European music, this 
 country gentleman who had passed three- 
 
190 TOLSTOY 
 
 fourths of his life in his Muscovite village, 
 and who had not visited Europe since i860; 
 and what did he see when he was upon his 
 travels, except the schools, which were all that 
 interested him? He speaks of paintings from 
 hearsay, citing pell-mell among the decadents 
 such painters as Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, 
 Monet, Bocklin, Stuck, and Klinger; con- 
 fidently admiring Jules Breton and L'Her- 
 mitte on account of their excellent sentiments ; 
 despising Michelangelo, and among the 
 painters of the soul never once naming Rem- 
 brandt. In music he felt his way better, 5 but 
 knew hardly anything of it; he could not get 
 beyond the impressions of his childhood, swore 
 by those who were already classics about 
 1840, and had not become familiar with any 
 later composers (excepting Tchaikowsky, 
 whose music made him weep) ; he throws 
 Brahms and Richard Strauss into the bottom 
 of the same bag, teaches Beethoven his busi- 
 ness, 6 and, in order to judge Wagner, he 
 
 5 1 shall return to this matter when speaking of the 
 Kreutzer Sonata. 
 
 6 His intolerance became aggravated after 1886. In 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 191 
 
 thought it was sufficient to attend a single re- 
 presentation of Siegfried, at which he arrived 
 after the rise of the curtain, while he left in 
 the middle of the second act. 7 In the matter 
 of literature he is, it goes without saying, 
 rather better informed. But by what curious 
 aberration did he evade the criticism of the 
 Russian writers whom he knew so well, while 
 he laid down the law to foreign poets, whose 
 temperament was as far as possible removed 
 from his own, and whose leaves he merely 
 turned with contemptuous negligence! 8 
 His intrepid assurance increased with age. 
 
 What shall we dof he did not as yet dare to lay hands 
 on Beethoven or on Shakespeare. Moreover, he re- 
 proached contemporary artists for daring to invoke their 
 names. "The activity of a Galileo, a Shakespeare, a 
 Beethoven has nothing in common with that of a Tyndall, 
 a Victor Hugo, or a Wagner; just as the Holy Father 
 would deny all relationship with the Orthodox popes." 
 (What shall we dof) 
 
 7 For that matter, he wished to leave before the end of 
 the first act. "For me the question was settled. I had 
 no more doubt. There was nothing to be expected of an 
 author capable of imagining scenes like these. One could 
 affirm beforehand that he could never write anything that 
 was not evil." 
 
 8 In order to make a selection from the French poets 
 
192 TOLSTOY 
 
 It finally impelled him to write a book for 
 the purpose of proving that Shakespeare "was 
 not an artist." 
 
 "He may have been — no matter what: but 
 he was not an artist." 9 
 
 His certitude is admirable. Tolstoy does 
 not doubt. He does not discuss. The truth 
 is his. He will tell you: 
 
 "The Ninth Symphony is a work which 
 causes social disunion." 
 
 Again : 
 
 "With the exception of the celebrated air 
 for the violin by Bach, the Nocturne in E 
 flat by Chopin, and a dozen pieces, not even 
 entire, chosen from among the works of 
 Hadyn, Mozart, Weber, Beethoven, and 
 Chopin, ... all the rest may be rejected 
 and treated with contempt, as examples of an 
 art which causes social disunion." 
 
 Again : 
 
 of the new schools he conceived the admirable idea of 
 "copying, in each volume, the verses printed on page 28 !" 
 9 Shakespeare, 1903. The book was written on the oc- 
 casion of an article by Ernest Crosby upon Shakespeare 
 and the Working Classes. 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 193 
 
 "I am going to prove that Shakespeare can- 
 not be ranked even as a writer of the fourth 
 order. And as a character-painter he is no- 
 where." 
 
 That the rest of humanity is of a different 
 opinion is no reason for hesitating: on the 
 contrary. 
 
 "My opinion," he proudly says, "is entirely 
 different from the established opinion con- 
 cerning Shakespeare throughout Europe." 
 
 Obsessed by his hatred of lies, he scents un- 
 truth everywhere; and the more widely an 
 idea is received, the more prickly he becomes 
 in his treatment of it; he refuses it, suspecting 
 in it, as he says with reference to the fame of 
 Shakespeare, "one of those epidemic in- 
 fluences to which men have always been sub- 
 ject. Such were the Crusades in the Middle 
 Ages, the belief in witchcraft, the search for 
 the philosopher's stone, and the passion for 
 tulips. Men see the folly of these influences 
 only when they have won free from them. 
 With the development of the press these 
 epidemics have become particularly notable." 
 And he gives as an example the most recent 
 
194* TOLSTOY 
 
 of these contagious diseases, the Dreyfus 
 Affair, of which he, the enemy of all injustice, 
 the defender of all the oppressed, speaks with 
 disdainful indifference; 10 a striking example 
 of the excesses into which he is drawn by his 
 suspicion of untruth and that instinctive 
 hatred of "moral epidemics" of which he ad- 
 mits himself the victim, and which he is un- 
 able to master. It is the reverse side of a 
 virtue, this inconceivable blindness of the 
 seer, the reader of souls, the evoker of pas- 
 sionate forces, which leads him to refer to 
 King Lear as "an inept piece of work," and 
 to the proud Cordelia as a "characterless 
 creature." " 
 
 10 "Here was one of those incidents which often occur, 
 without attracting the attention of any one, and without 
 interesting — I do not say the world — but even the French 
 military world." And further on: "It was not until 
 some years had passed that men awoke from their hyp- 
 nosis, and understood that they could not possibly know 
 whether Dreyfus were guilty or not, and that each of 
 them had other interests more important and more imme- 
 diate than the Affaire Dreyfus." {Shakespeare.) 
 
 11 "King Lear is a very poor drama, very carelessly 
 constructed, which can inspire nothing but weariness and 
 disgust." — Othello, for which Tolstoy evinces a certain 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 195 
 
 Observe that he sees very clearly certain of 
 Shakespeare's actual defects — faults that we 
 have not the sincerity to admit: the artificial 
 quality of the poetic diction, which is uni- 
 formly attributed to all his characters; and 
 the rhetoric of passion, of heroism, and even 
 
 sympathy, doubtless because the work is in harmony with 
 his ideas of that time concerning marriage and jealousy, 
 "while the least wretched of Shakespeare's plays, is only 
 a tissue of emphatic words." Hamlet has no character 
 at all: "he is the author's phonograph, who repeats all his 
 ideas in a string." As for The Tempest, Cymbeline, 
 Troilus and Cressida, etc., Tolstoy only mentions them on 
 account of their "ineptitude." 
 
 The only character of Shakespeare's whom he finds 
 natural is Falstafr", "precisely because here the tongue of 
 Shakespeare, full of frigid pleasantries and inept puns, 
 is in harmony with the false, vain, debauched character of 
 this repulsive drunkard." 
 
 Tolstoy had not always been of this opinion. He read 
 Shakespeare with pleasure between i860 and 1870, espe- 
 cially at the time when he contemplated writing a his- 
 torical play about the figure of Peter the Great. In his 
 notes for 1869 we find that he even takes Hamlet as his 
 model and his guide. Having mentioned his completed 
 works, and comparing War and Peace to the Homeric 
 ideal, he adds: 
 
 "Hamlet and my future works; the poetry of the 
 romance-writer in the depicting of character." 
 
196 TOLSTOY 
 
 of simplicity. I can perfectly well under- 
 stand that a Tolstoy, who was the least literary 
 of writers, should have been lacking in sym- 
 pathy for the art of one who was the most 
 genial of men of letters. But why waste time 
 in speaking of that which he cannot under- 
 stand? What is the worth of judgments upon 
 a world which is closed to the judge? 
 
 Nothing, if we seek in these judgments the 
 passport to these unfamiliar worlds. Inestim- 
 ably great, if we seek in them the key to 
 Tolstoy's art. We do not ask of a creative 
 genius the impartiality of the critic. When a 
 Wagner or a Tolstoy speaks of Beethoven or 
 of Shakespeare, he is speaking in reality not 
 of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of him- 
 self ; he is revealing his own ideals. They do 
 not even try to put us off the scent. Tolstoy, 
 in criticising Shakespeare, does not attempt to 
 make himself "objective." More: he re- 
 proaches Shakespeare for his objective art. 
 The painter of War and Peace, the master of 
 impersonal art, cannot sufficiently deride 
 those German critics who, following the lead 
 of Goethe, "invent Shakespeare," and are re- 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 197 
 
 sponsible for "the theory that art ought to be 
 objective, that is to say, ought to represent hu- 
 man beings without any reference to moral 
 values — which is the negation of the religious 
 object of art." 
 
 It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that 
 Tolstoy pronounces his artistic judgments. 
 We must not look for any personal after- 
 thoughts in his criticisms. We shall find no 
 trace of such a thing; he is as pitiless to his 
 own works as to those of others. 12 What, 
 then, does he really intend? What is the 
 artistic significance of the religious ideal 
 which he proposes? 
 
 This ideal is magnificent. The term "re- 
 ligious art" is apt to mislead one as to the 
 breadth of the conception. Far from nar- 
 rowing the province of art, Tolstoy enlarges 
 it. Art, he says, is everywhere. 
 
 "Art creeps into our whole life; what we 
 term art, namely, theatres, concerts, books, ex- 
 
 12 He classes his own "works of imagination" in the 
 category of "harmful art." {What is Artf) From this 
 condemnation he does not except his own plays, "devoid 
 of that religious conception which must form the basis of 
 the drama of the future." 
 
198 TOLSTOY 
 
 hibitions, is only an infinitesimal portion of 
 art. Our life is full of artistic manifestations 
 of every kind, from the games of children to 
 the offices of religion. Art and speech are 
 the two organs of human progress. One 
 affords the communion of hearts, the other the 
 communion of thoughts. If either of the two 
 is perverted, then society is sick. The art of 
 to-day is perverted." 
 
 Since the Renascence it has no longer been 
 possible to speak of the art of the Christian 
 nations. Class has separated itself from class. 
 The rich, the privileged, have attempted to 
 claim the monopoly of art; and they have 
 made their pleasure the criterion of beauty. 
 Art has become impoverished as it has grown 
 remoter from the poor. 
 
 "The category of the emotions experienced 
 by those who do not work in order to live is 
 far more limited than the emotions of those 
 who labour. The sentiments of our modern 
 society may be reduced to three: pride, sen- 
 suality, and weariness of life. These three 
 sentiments and their ramifications constitute 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 199 
 
 almost entirely the subject of the art of the 
 wealthy." 
 
 It infects the world, perverts the people, 
 propagates sexual depravity, and has become 
 the worst obstacle to the realisation of human 
 happiness. It is also devoid of real beauty, 
 unnatural and insincere; an affected, fabri- 
 cated, cerebral art. 
 
 In the face of this lie of the aesthetics, this 
 pastime of the rich, let us raise the banner 
 of the living, human art: the art which unites 
 the men of all classes and all nations. The 
 past offers us glorious examples of such art. 
 
 "The majority of mankind has always un- 
 derstood and loved that which we consider 
 the highest art: the epic of Genesis, the para- 
 bles of the Gospel, the legends, tales, and 
 songs of the people." 
 
 The greatest art is that which expresses the 
 religious conscience of the period. By this 
 Tolstoy does not mean the teaching of the 
 Church. "Every society has a religious con- 
 ception of life; it is the ideal of the greatest 
 happiness towards which that society tends." 
 
200 TOLSTOY 
 
 All are to a certain extent aware of this 
 tendency; a few pioneers express it clearly. 
 
 "A religious conscience always exists. IT 
 IS THE BED IN WHICH THE RIVER FLOWS." 
 
 The religious consciousness of our epoch is 
 the aspiration toward happiness as realised by 
 the fraternity of mankind. There is no true 
 art but that which strives for this union. The 
 highest art is that which accomplishes it di- 
 rectly by the power of love; but there is an- 
 other art which participates in the same task, 
 by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and 
 indignation, all that opposes this fraternity. 
 Such are the novels of Dickens and Do- 
 stoyevsky, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and 
 the paintings of Millet. But even though it 
 fail to attain these heights, all art which rep- 
 resents daily life with sympathy and truth 
 brings men nearer together. Such is Don 
 Quixote: such are the plays of Moliere. It 
 is true that such art as the latter is continually 
 sinning by its too minute realism and by the 
 poverty of its subjects "when compared with 
 ancient models, such as the sublime history of 
 Joseph." The excessive minuteness of detail 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 201 
 
 is detrimental to such works, which for that 
 reason cannot become universal. 
 
 "Modern works of art are spoiled by a 
 realism which might more justly be called the 
 provincialism of art." 
 
 Thus Tolstoy unhesitatingly condemns the 
 principle of his own genius. What does it 
 signify to him that he should sacrifice him- 
 self to the future — and that nothing of his 
 work should remain? 
 
 "The art of the future will not be a de- 
 velopment of the art of the present: it will be 
 founded upon other bases. It will no longer 
 be the property of a caste. Art is not a trade 
 or profession: it is the expression of real feel- 
 ings. Now the artist can only experience real 
 feelings when he refrains from isolating him- 
 self; when he lives the life natural to man. 
 For this reason the man who is sheltered from 
 life is in the worst possible conditions for 
 creative work." 
 
 In the future "artists will all be endowed." 
 Artistic activity will be made accessible to all 
 "by the introduction into the elementary 
 schools of instruction in music and painting, 
 
202 TOLSTOY 
 
 which will be taught to the child simultane- 
 ously with the first principles of grammar." 
 For the rest, art will no longer call for a com- 
 plicated technique, as at present; it will move 
 in the direction of simplicity, clearness, and 
 conciseness, which are the marks of sane and 
 classic art, and of Homeric art 13 How pleas- 
 ant it will be to translate universal senti- 
 ments into the pure lives of this art of the 
 future! To write a tale or a song, to design 
 a picture for millions of beings, is a matter 
 of much greater importance — and of much 
 greater difficulty — than writing a novel or a 
 symphony. It is an immense and almost virgin 
 province. Thanks to such works men will learn 
 to appreciate the happiness of brotherly union. 
 
 13 As early as 1873 Tolstoy had written: "Think 
 what you will, but in such a fashion that every word 
 may be understood by every one. One cannot write any- 
 thing bad in a perfectly clear and simple language. 
 What is immoral will appear so false if clearly expressed 
 that it will assuredly be deleted. If a writer seriously 
 wishes to speak to the people, he has only to force himself 
 to be comprehensible. When not a word arrests the 
 reader's attention the work is good. If he cannot relate 
 what he has read the work is worthless." 
 
SCIENCE AND ART 203 
 
 "Art must suppress violence, and only art 
 can do so. Its mission is to bring about the 
 Kingdom of God, that is to say, of Love." 14 
 
 Which of us would not endorse these gener- 
 ous words? And who can fail to see that Tol- 
 stoy's conception is fundamentally fruitful and 
 vital, in spite of its Utopianism and a touch 
 of puerility? It is true that our art as a 
 whole is only the expression of a caste, which 
 is itself subdivided not only by the fact of 
 nationality, but in each country also into nar- 
 row and hostile clans. There is not a single 
 artist in Europe who realises in his own per- 
 sonality the union of parties and of races. 
 The most universal mind of our time was that 
 of Tolstoy himself. In him men of all na- 
 tions and all classes have attained fraternity; 
 and those who have tasted the virile joy of 
 this capacious love can no longer be satisfied 
 
 14 This ideal of brotherhood and union among men is 
 by no means, to Tolstoy's mind, the limit of human activ- 
 ity; his insatiable mind conceives an unknown ideal, above 
 and beyond that of love: 
 
 "Science will perhaps one day offer as the basis of art 
 a much higher ideal, and art will realise it." 
 
204 TOLSTOY 
 
 by the shreds and fragments of the vast hu- 
 man soul which are offered by the art of the 
 European cliques. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 
 
 THE finest theory finds its value only in the 
 works by which it is exemplified. With Tol- 
 stoy theory and creation are always hand in 
 hand, like faith and action. While he was 
 elaborating his critique of art he was produc- 
 ing types of the new art of which he spoke: 
 of two forms of art, one higher and one less 
 exalted, but both "religious" in the most hu- 
 man sense. In one he sought the union of 
 men through love; in the other he waged war 
 upon the world, the enemy of love. It was 
 during this period that he wrote those master- 
 pieces: The Death of Ivan Ilyitch ( 1884— 
 86), the Popular Tales and Stories (1881- 
 1886), The Power of Darkness (1886), the 
 Kreutzer Sonata (1889), an d Master and 
 Servant (1895). 1 At the height and end of 
 
 1 To these years was attributed, in respect of the date 
 207 
 
208 TOLSTOY 
 
 this artistic period, like a cathedral with two 
 spires, the one symbolising eternal love and 
 the other the hatred of the world, stands 
 Resurrection (1899). 
 
 All these works are distinguished from their 
 predecessors by new artistic qualities. Tol- 
 stoy's ideas had suffered a change, not alone 
 in respect of the object of art, but also in 
 respect of its form. In reading What is Art? 
 or Shakespeare we are struck by the principles 
 of art which Tolstoy has enounced in these 
 two books ; for these principles are for the most 
 part in contradiction to the greatest of his 
 previous works. "Clearness, simplicity, con- 
 
 of publication, and perhaps of completion, a work which 
 was really written during the happy period of betrothal 
 and the first years of marriage: the beautiful story of a 
 horse, Kholstomier (1861-86). Tolstoy speaks of it in 
 1883 i n a letter to Fet {Further Correspondence). The 
 art of the commencement, with its fine landscapes, its 
 penetrating psychological sympathy, its humour, and its 
 youth, has much in common with the art of Tolstoy's ma- 
 turity {Family Happiness, War and Peace). The ma- 
 cabre quality of the end, and the last pages comparing 
 the body of the old horse with that of his master, are 
 full of a realistic brutality characteristic of the years after 
 1880. 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 209 
 
 ciseness," we read in What is Art? Material 
 effects are despised; minute realism is con- 
 demned; and in Shakespeare the classic ideal 
 of perfection and proportion is upheld. 
 "Without the feeling of balance no artists 
 could exist." And although in his new work 
 the unregenerate man, with his genius for 
 analysis and his native savagery, is not entirely 
 effaced, some aspects of the latter quality being 
 even emphasised, his art is profoundly modi- 
 fied in some respects: the design is clearer, 
 more vigorously accented; the minds of his 
 characters are epitomised, foreshortened; the 
 interior drama is intensified, gathered upon it- 
 self like a beast of prey about to spring; the 
 emotion has a quality of universality; and is 
 freed of all transitory details of local realism; 
 and finally the diction is rich in illustrations, 
 racy, and smacking of the soil. 
 
 His love of the people had long led him to 
 appreciate the beauty of the popular idiom. 
 As a child he had been soothed by the tales 
 of mendicant story-tellers. As a grown man 
 and a famous writer, he experienced an artistic 
 delight in chatting with his peasants. 
 
210 TOLSTOY 
 
 "These men," he said in later years to M. 
 Paul Boyer, 2 "are masters. Of old, when I 
 used to talk with them, or with the wanderers 
 who, wallet on shoulder, pass through our 
 countryside, I used carefully to note such of 
 their expressions as I heard for the first time; 
 expressions often forgotten by our modern 
 literary dialect, but always good old Russian 
 currency, ringing sound. . . . Yes, the 
 genius of the language lives in these men." 
 
 He must have been the more sensitive to 
 such elements of the language in that his 
 mind was not encumbered with literature. 3 
 Through living far from any city, in the midst 
 of peasants, he came to think a little in the 
 manner of the people. He had the slow dia- 
 lectic, the common sense which reasons slowly 
 and painfully, step by step, with sudden dis- 
 concerting leaps, the mania for repeating any 
 
 2 Le Temps, August 29, 1901. 
 
 3 "As for style," his friend Droujinin told him in 1856, 
 "You are extremely illiterate ; sometimes like an innovator 
 and a great poet; sometimes like an officer writing to a 
 comrade. All that you write with real pleasure is ad- 
 mirable. The moment you become indifferent your style 
 becomes involved and is horrible." {Vie et CEuvre.) 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 211 
 
 idea when he was once convinced, of repeat- 
 ing it unwearingly and indefinitely, and in 
 the same words. 4 
 
 But these were faults rather than qualities. 
 It was many years before he became aware 
 of the latent genius of the popular tongue; 
 the raciness of its images, its poetic crudity, 
 its wealth of legendary wisdom. Even at the 
 time of writing War and Peace he was already 
 subject to its influence. In March, 1872, he 
 wrote to Strakov: 
 
 "I have altered the method of my diction 
 and my writing. The language of the people 
 has sounds to express all that the poet can 
 say, and it is very dear to me. It is the best 
 poetic regulator. If you try to say anything 
 superfluous, too emphatic, or false, the lan- 
 guage will not suffer it. Whereas our literary 
 tongue has no skeleton, you may pull it about 
 in every direction, and the result is always 
 something resembling literature." 
 
 To the people he owed not only models of 
 style; he owed them many of his inspirations. 
 
 4 Vie et CEuvre. — During the summer of 1879 Tolstoy 
 lived on terms of great intimacy with the peasants. 
 
21 2 TOLSTOY 
 
 In 1877 a teller of bylines came to Yasnaya 
 Polyana, and Tolstoy took notes of several of 
 his stories. Of the number was the legend 
 By What do Men Live? and The Three Old 
 Men, which became, as we know, two of the 
 finest of the Popular Tales and Legends which 
 Tolstoy published a few years later. 5 
 
 This is a work unique in modern art. It is 
 higher than art: for who, in reading it, thinks 
 of literature? The spirit of the Gospel and 
 the pure love of the brotherhood of man are 
 combined with the smiling geniality of the 
 wisdom of the people. It is full of simplicity, 
 limpidity, and ineffable goodness of heart; 
 and that supernatural radiance which from 
 time to time — so naturally and inevitably — 
 bathes the whole picture; surrounding the old 
 Elias 6 like a halo, or hovering in the cabin 
 of the cobbler Michael; he who, through his 
 skylight on the ground-level, sees the feet of 
 people passing, and whom the Lord visits in 
 the guise of the poor whom the good cobbler 
 
 5 In the notes of his readings, between i860 and 1870, 
 Tolstoy wrote: "The bylines — very greatly impressed." 
 •The Two Old Men (1885). 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 213 
 
 has succoured. 7 Sometimes in these tales the 
 parables of the Gospel are mingled with a 
 vague perfume of Oriental legends, of those 
 Thousand and One Nights which Tolstoy had 
 loved since childhood. 8 Sometimes, again, 
 the fantastic light takes on a sinister aspect, 
 lending the tale a terrifying majesty. Such 
 is Pakhom the Peasant? the tale of the man 
 who kills himself in acquiring a great surface 
 of land — all the land which he can encircle 
 by walking for a whole day, and who dies 
 on completing his journey. 
 
 "On the hill the starschina, sitting on the 
 ground, watched him as he ran; and he 
 cackled, holding his stomach with both hands. 
 And Pakhom fell. 
 
 " l Ah I Well done, my merry fellow ! You 
 have won a mighty lot of land P 
 
 "The starschina rose, and threw a mattock 
 to Pakhom's servant. 
 
 " 'There he is: bury him.' 
 
 7 Where Love is, There God is Also (1885). 
 
 8 By What do Men Live? (1881); The Three Old 
 Men (1884) ; The Godchild (1886). 
 
 9 This tale bears the sub-title, Does a Man Need Much 
 Soil? (1886). 
 
214 TOLSTOY 
 
 "The servant was alone. He dug a ditch 
 for Pakhom, just as long as from his feet to 
 his head: two yards, and he buried him." 
 
 Nearly all these tales conceal, beneath their 
 poetic envelope, the same evangelical moral 
 of renunciation and pardon. 
 
 "Do not avenge thyself upon whosoever 
 shall offend thee. 10 
 
 "Do not resist whosover shall do thee 
 evil. 11 
 
 "Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord." 12 
 
 And everywhere, and as the conclusion of 
 all, is love. 
 
 Tolstoy^ who wished to found an art for all 
 men, achieved universality at the first stroke. 
 Throughout the world his work has met with 
 a success which can never fail, for it is purged 
 of all the perishable elements of art, and noth- 
 ing is left but the eternal. 
 
 The Power of Darkness does not rise to this 
 august simplicity of heart; it does not pre- 
 
 10 The Fire that flames does not go out (1885). 
 
 11 The Wax Taper (1885); The Story of Ivan the 
 Idiot. 
 
 12 The Godson (1886). 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 215 
 
 tend to do so. It is the reverse side of the 
 picture. On the one hand is the dream of 
 divine love; on the other, the ghastly reality. 
 We may judge, in reading this play, whether 
 Tolstoy's faith and his love of the people ever 
 caused him to idealise the people or betray 
 the truth. 
 
 Tolstoy, so awkward in most of his dra- 
 matic essays, 13 has here attained to mastery. 
 The characters and the action, are handled 
 with ease; the coxcomb Nikita, the sensual, 
 
 13 The love of the theatre came to him somewhat late 
 in life. It was a discovery of his, and he made this dis- 
 covery during the winter of 1869-70. According to his 
 custom, he was at once afire with enthusiasm. 
 
 " All this winter I have busied myself exclusively with 
 the drama; and, as always happens to men who have 
 never, up to the age of forty, thought about such or such 
 a subject, when they suddenly turn their attention to this 
 neglected subject, it seems to them that they perceive a 
 number of new and wonderful things. ... I have 
 read Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Gogol, and Moliere. 
 . . . I want to read Sophocles and Euripides. . . 
 I have kept my bed a long time, being unwell — and when 
 I am unwell a host of comic or dramatic characters be- 
 gin to struggle for life within me . . . and they do 
 it with much success." — Letters to Fet, February 17-21, 
 1870 {Further Letters). 
 
216 TOLSTOY 
 
 headstrong passion of Anissia, the cynical 
 good-humour of the old woman, Matrena, 
 who gloats maternally over the adultery of 
 her son, and the sancity of the old stammering 
 Hakim — God inhabiting a ridiculous body. 
 Then comes the fall of Nikita, weak and with- 
 out real evil, but fettered by his sin; falling to 
 the depths of crime in spite of his efforts to 
 check himself on the dreadful declivity; but 
 his mother and his wife drag him down- 
 ward. . . . 
 
 "The peasants aren't worth much. . . . 
 But the babas! The women! They are wild 
 animals . . . they are afraid of nothing! 
 . . . Sisters, there are millions of you, all 
 Russians, and you are all as blind as moles. 
 You know nothing, you know nothing! 
 . . . The moujik at least may manage to 
 learn something — in the drink-shop, or who 
 knows where? — in prison, or in the barracks; 
 but the baba — what can she know? She has 
 seen nothing, heard nothing. As she has 
 grown up, so she will die. . . . They are 
 like little blind puppies who go running here 
 and there and ramming their heads against 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 217 
 
 all sorts of filth. . . . They only know 
 their silly songs: 'Ho — o — o! Ho — o — o!' 
 What does it mean? Ho — o — o? They 
 don't know!" 14 
 
 Then comes the terrible scene of the 
 murder of the new-born child. Nikita does 
 not want to kill it. Anissia, who has murdered 
 her husband for him, and whose nerves have 
 ever since been tortured by her crime, be- 
 comes ferocious, maddened, and threatens to 
 give him up. She cries: 
 
 "At least I shan't be alone any longer! 
 He'll be a murderer too! Let him know 
 what it's like!" 
 
 Nikita crushes the child between two 
 boards. In the midst of his crime he flies, 
 terrified; he threatens to kill Anissia and his 
 mother; he sobs, he prays: — 
 
 "Little mother, I can't go on!" He thinks 
 he hears the mangled baby crying. 
 
 "Where shall I go to be safe?" 
 
 It is Shakespearean. Less violent, but still 
 more poignant, is the dialogue of the little 
 girl and the old servant-woman, who, alone 
 
 14 A variant of Act iv. 
 
218 TOLSTOY 
 
 in the house, at night, hear and guess at 
 the crime which is being enacted off the 
 stage. 
 
 The end is voluntary expiation. Nikita, 
 accompanied by his father, the old Hakim, 
 enters barefooted, in the midst of a wedding. 
 He kneels, asks pardon of all, and accuses 
 himself of every crime. Old Hakim en- 
 courages him, looks upon him with a smile 
 of ecstatic suffering. 
 
 "God! Oh, look at him, God!" 
 
 The drama gains quite a special artistic 
 flavour by the use of the peasant dialect. 
 
 "I ransacked my notebooks in order to 
 write The Power of Darkness" Tolstoy told 
 M. Paul Boyer. 
 
 The unexpected images, flowing from the 
 lyrical yet humorous soul of the Russian peo- 
 ple, have a swing and a vigour about them 
 beside which images of the more literary 
 quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy 
 revelled in them ; we feel, in reading the play, 
 that the artist while writing it amused him- 
 self by noting these expressions, these turns of 
 thought; the comic side of them by no means 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 219 
 
 escapes him, 15 even while the apostle is 
 mourning amidst the dark places of the hu- 
 man soul. 
 
 While he was studying the people, and 
 sending into their darkness a ray of light from 
 his station above them, he was also devoting 
 two tragic romances to the still darker night 
 of the middle classes and the wealthy. At 
 this period the dramatic form was predomi- 
 nant over his ideas of art. The Death of 
 Ivan Ilyitch and The Kreutzer Sonata are 
 both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul 
 turned upon itself and concentrated upon it- 
 self, and in The Kreutzer Sonata it is the hero 
 of the drama himself who unfolds it by nar- 
 ration. 
 
 The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86) has 
 impressed the French public as few Russian 
 works have done. At the beginning of this 
 study I mentioned that I had witnessed the 
 sensation caused by this book among the mid- 
 
 15 The creation of this heart-breaking drama must have 
 been a strain. He writes to Teneromo: "I am well and 
 happy. I have been working all this time at my play. 
 It is finished. (January, 1887. Further Letters.) 
 
220 TOLSTOY 
 
 die-class readers in the French provinces, a 
 class apparently indifferent to literature and 
 art. I think the explanation lies in the fact 
 that the book represents, with a painful real- 
 ism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a 
 conscientious functionary, without religion, 
 without ideals, almost without thought; the 
 man who is absorbed in his duties, in his me- 
 chanical life, until the hour of his death, when 
 he sees with terror that he has not lived. 
 Ivan Ilyitch is the representative type of the 
 European bourgeoisie of 1880 which reads 
 Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without 
 holding any faith, is not even irreligious ; for 
 it does not take the trouble either to believe 
 or to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of 
 such matters. 
 
 In the violence of its attacks, alternately 
 bitter and almost comic, upon the world in 
 general, and marriage in particular, The 
 Death of Ivan Ilyitch was the first of a new 
 series of works ; it was the forerunner of the 
 still more morose and unwordly Kreutzer 
 Sonata and Resurrection. There is a lament- 
 able yet laughable emptiness in this life (as 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 221 
 
 there is in thousands and thousands of lives), 
 with its grotesque ambitions, its wretched 
 gratification of vanity, "always better than 
 spending the evening opposite one's wife"; 
 with its weariness and hatred of the official 
 career; its privileges, and the embitterment 
 which they cause; and its one real pleasure: 
 whist. This ridiculous life is lost for a cause 
 yet more ridiculous — a fall from a ladder, one 
 day when Ivan wished to hang a curtain over 
 the drawing-room window. The lie of life. 
 The lie of sickness. The lie of the well-to-do 
 doctor, who thinks only of himself. The lie 
 of the family, whom illness disgusts. The 
 lie of the wife, who professes devotion, and 
 calculates how she will live when her husband 
 is dead. The universal lie, against which is 
 set only the truth of a compassionate servant, 
 who does not try to conceal his condition from 
 the dying man, and helps him out of brotherly 
 kindness. Ivan Ilyitch, "full of an infinite 
 pity for himself," weeps over his loneliness 
 and the egoism of men; he suffers horribly, 
 until the day on which he perceives that his 
 past life has been a lie, and that he can repair 
 
222 TOLSTOY 
 
 that lie. Immediately all becomes clear — an 
 hour before his death. He no longer thinks 
 of himself; he thinks of his family; he pities 
 them; he must die and rid them of himself. 
 
 "Where are you, Pain? Here. . . . 
 Well, you have only to persist. — And Death, 
 where is Death? He did not find it. In 
 place of Death he saw only a ray of light. 'It 
 is over/ said some one.— He heard these 
 words and repeated them to himself. 'Death 
 no longer exists,' he told himself." 
 
 In the Kreutzer Sonata there is not even 
 this "ray of light." It is a ferocious piece of 
 work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a 
 wounded beast avenging itself for what it has 
 suffered. We must not forget that the story 
 is the confession of a human brute, who has 
 taken life, and who is poisoned by the virus 
 of jealousy. Tolstoy hides himself behind his 
 leading character. We certainly find his own 
 ideas, though heightened in tone, in these 
 furious invectives against hypocrisy in 
 general; the hypocrisy of the education of 
 women, of love, of marriage — marriage, that 
 "domestic prostitution"; the hypocrisy of the 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 223 
 
 world, of science, of physicians — those "sowers 
 of crime." But the hero of the book impels 
 the writer into an extraordinary brutality of 
 expression, a violent rush of carnal images — 
 all the excesses of a luxurious body — and, by 
 reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the 
 fear and hatred of the passions; maledictions 
 hurled in the face of life by a monk of the 
 Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. 
 Having written the book Tolstoy himself was 
 alarmed: 
 
 "I never foresaw at all," he said in the 
 Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata/' 16 that in 
 writing this book a rigorous logic would 
 bring me where I have arrived. My own 
 conclusions terrified me at first, and I was 
 tempted to reject them; but it was impossible 
 for me to refuse to hear the voice of my rea- 
 son and my conscience." 
 
 He found himself repeating, in calmer 
 tones, the savage outcry of the murderer 
 Posdnicheff against love and marriage. 
 
 16 A French translation of this Epilogue (Postface), 
 by M. Halperine-Kaminsky was published in the volume 
 Plaisb's vicieux, under the title Des relations entre les 
 sexes. 
 
224. TOLSTOY 
 
 "He who regards woman — above all his 
 wife — with sensuality, already commits adul- 
 tery with her." 
 
 "When the passions have disappeared, then 
 humanity will no longer have a reason for 
 being; it will have executed the Law; the 
 union of mankind will be accomplished." 
 
 He will prove, on the authority of the 
 Gospel according to Matthew, that "the 
 Christian ideal is not marriage; that Chris- 
 tain marriage cannot exist; that marriage, 
 from the Christian point of view, is an ele- 
 ment not of progress but of downfall; that 
 love, with all that precedes and follows it, 
 is an obstacle to the true human ideal." 17 
 
 17 Let us take notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of 
 the simplicity of believing that the ideal of celibacy and 
 absolute chastity was capable of realisation by humanity 
 as we know it. But according to him an ideal is incap- 
 able of realisation by its very definition : it is an appeal to 
 the heroic energies of the soul. 
 
 "The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the 
 union of all living creatures in brotherly love, is irrecon- 
 cilable with the conduct of life, which demands a con- 
 tinual effort towards an ideal which is inaccessible, but 
 does not expect that it will ever be attained." 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 225 
 
 But he had never formulated these ideas 
 clearly, even to himself, until they fell from 
 the lips of PosdnichefL As often happens 
 with great creative artists, the work carried 
 the writer with it; the artist outstripped the 
 thinker; a process by which art lost nothing. 
 In the power of its effects, in passionate con- 
 centration, in the brutal vividness of its im- 
 pressions, and in fulness and maturity of 
 form, nothing Tolstoy has written equals the 
 Kreutzer Sonata. 
 
 I have not explained the title. To be ex- 
 act, it is erroneous ; it gives a false idea of the 
 book, in which music plays only an accessory 
 part. Suppress the sonata, and all would be 
 the same. Tolstoy made the mistake of con- 
 fusing the two matters, both of which he took 
 deeply to heart: the depraving power of 
 music, and the depraving power of love. 
 The demon of music should have been dealt 
 with in a separate volume; the space which 
 Tolstoy has accorded it in the work in ques- 
 tion is insufficient to prove the danger which 
 he wishes to denounce. I must emphasize 
 
226 TOLSTOY 
 
 this matter somewhat; for I do not think the 
 attitude of Tolstoy in respect of music has 
 ever been fully understood. 
 
 He was far from disliking music. Only 
 the things one loves are feared as Tolstoy 
 feared the power of music. Remember what 
 a place the memories of music hold in Child- 
 hood, and above all in Family Happiness, in 
 which the whole cycle of love, from its spring- 
 tide to its autumn, is unrolled to the phrases 
 of the Sonata quasi una fantasia of Beethoven. 
 Remember, too, the wonderful symphonies 
 w T hich Nekhludov 18 hears in fancy, and the 
 little Petia, the night before his death. 19 Al- 
 though Tolstoy had studied music very in- 
 differently, it used to move him to tears, and 
 at certain periods of his life he passionately 
 abandoned himself to its influence. In 1858 
 he founded a Musical Society, which in later 
 years became the Moscow Conservatoire. 
 
 "He was extremely fond of music," writes 
 
 18 At the end of A Russian Proprietor. 
 
 19 War and Peace. — I do not mention Albert (1857), 
 the story of a musician of genius ; the book is weak in the 
 extreme. 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 227 
 
 his brother-in-law, S. A. Bers. "He used to 
 play the piano, and was fond of the classic 
 masters. He would often sit down to the 
 piano before beginning his work. 20 Prob- 
 ably he found inspiration in so doing. He 
 always used to accompany my youngest sister, 
 whose voice he loved. I have noticed that 
 the sensations which the music evoked in him 
 were accompanied by a slight pallor and an 
 imperceptible grimace, which seemed expres- 
 sive of fear." 21 
 
 It was really fear that he felt; fear inspired 
 by the stress of those unknown forces which 
 shook him to the roots of his being. In the 
 world of music he felt his moral will, his rea- 
 son, and all the reality of life dissolve. Let 
 us turn to the scene, in the first volume of 
 War and Peace, in which Nikolas Rostoff, 
 who has just lost heavily at cards, returns in a 
 state of despair. He hears his sister Natasha 
 singing. He forgets everything. 
 
 "He waited with a feverish impatience 
 for the note which was about to follow, and 
 
 20 The period spoken of is 1876-77. 
 
 21 S. A. Bers, Memories of Tolstoy. 
 
228 TOLSTOY 
 
 for a moment the only thing in all the world 
 was the melody in three-quarter-time: Oh! 
 mio crudele affettof 
 
 " 'What an absurd existence ours is!' he 
 thought. 'Unhappiness, money, hatred, hon- 
 our — they are all nothing. . . . Here is 
 the truth, the reality! . . . Natasha, my 
 little dove! . . . Let us see if she is go- 
 ing to reach that B? . . . She has 
 reached it, thank God!' 
 
 "And to emphasize the B he sung the third 
 octave below it in accompaniment. 
 
 " 'How splendid! I have sung it too,' he 
 cried, and the vibration of that octave awoke 
 in his soul all that was best and purest. Be- 
 side this superhuman sensation, what were 
 his losses at play and his word of honour? 
 . . . Follies! One could kill, steal, and 
 yet be happy!" 
 
 Nikolas neither kills nor steals, and for him 
 music is only a passing influence; but Natasha 
 is on the point of losing her self-control. 
 After an evening at the Opera, "in that 
 strange world which is intoxicated and per- 
 verted by art, and a thousand leagues from 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 229 
 
 the real world, a world in which good and 
 evil, the extravagant and the reasonable, are 
 mingled and confounded," she listened to a 
 declaration from Anatol Kouraguin, who was 
 madly in love with her, and she consented to 
 elope with him. 
 
 The older Tolstoy grew, the more he feared 
 music. 22 A man whose influence over him 
 was considerable — Auerbach, whom in i860 
 he had met in Dresden — had doubtless a hand 
 in fortifying his prejudices. "He spoke of 
 music as of a Pflichtloser Genuss (a profligate 
 amusement). According to him, it was an 
 incentive to depravity." 23 
 
 Among so many musicians, some of whose 
 music is at least amoral, why, asks M. Camille 
 Bellaigue, 24 should Tolstoy have chosen Bee- 
 thoven, the purest, the chastest of all? — Be- 
 
 22 But he never ceased to love it. One of the friends 
 of his later years was a musician, Goldenreiser, who spent 
 the summer of 19 10 near Yasnaya. Almost every day 
 he came to play to Tolstoy during the latter's last illness. 
 (Journal des Debats, November 18, 1 910.) 
 
 23 Letter of April 21, 1861. 
 
 24 Tolstoi et la musique (Le Gaulois, January 4, 
 1911). 
 
230 TOLSTOY 
 
 cause he was the most powerful. Tolstoy had 
 early loved his music, and he always loved it. 
 His remotest memories of Childhood were 
 connected with the Sonata Pathetique; and 
 when Nekhludov in Resurrection heard the 
 Andante of the Symphony in C Minor, he 
 could hardly restrain his tears : "he was filled 
 with tenderness for himself and for those he 
 loved." Yet we have seen with what animos- 
 ity Tolstoy referred in his What is Art 25 to the 
 "unhealthy works of the deaf Beethoven" ; and 
 even in 1876 the fury with which "he de- 
 lighted in demolishing Beethoven and in cast- 
 ing doubts upon his genius" had revolted 
 Tchaikowsky and had diminished his admira- 
 tion for Tolstoy. The Kreutzer Sonata en- 
 ables us to plumb the depths of this passion- 
 ate injustice. What does Tolstoy complain 
 of in Beethoven? Of his power. He re- 
 minds us of Goethe; listening to "the Sym- 
 
 25 Not only to the later works of Beethoven. Even in 
 the case of those earlier works which he consented to re- 
 gard as "artistic," Tolstoy complained of "their artificial 
 form." — In a letter to Tchaikowsky he contrasts with 
 Mozart and Haydn "the artificial manner of Beethoven, 
 Schubert, and Berlioz, which produces calculated effects." 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 231 
 
 phony in C Minor, he is overwhelmed by it, 
 and angrily turns upon the imperious master 
 who subjects him against his will. 26 
 
 "This music," says Tolstoy, "transports me 
 immediately into the state of mind which was 
 the composer's when he wrote it. . . . 
 Music ought to be a State matter, as in China. 
 We ought not to let Tom, Dick, and Harry 
 wield so frightful a hypnotic power. . . . 
 As for these things (the first Presto of the 
 Sonata) one ought only to be allowed to play 
 them under particular and important circum- 
 stances. . . ." 
 
 Yet we see, after this revolt, how he sur- 
 renders to the power of Beethoven, and how 
 this power is by his own admission a pure and 
 ennobling force. On hearing the piece in 
 question, Posdnichef? falls into an indefinable 
 state of mind, which he cannot analyse, but 
 of which the consciousness fills him with de- 
 light. "There is no longer room for jeal- 
 
 26 Instance the scene described by M. Paul Boyer : 
 "Tolstoy sat down to play Chopin. At the end of the 
 fourth Ballade, his eyes filled with tears. 'Ah, the ani- 
 mal!' he cried. And suddenly he rose and went out." 
 (Le Temps, November 2, 1902.) 
 
232 TOLSTOY 
 
 ousy." The wife is not less transfigured. 
 She has, while she plays, "a majestic severity 
 of expression"; and "a faint smile, compas- 
 sionate and happy, after she has finished." 
 What is there perverse in all this? This: 
 that the spirit is enslaved; that the unknown 
 power of sound can do with him what it wills ; 
 destroy him, if it please. 
 
 This is true, but Tolstoy forgets one thing: 
 the mediocrity and the lack of vitality in the 
 majority of those who make or listen to music. 
 Music cannot be dangerous to those who feel 
 nothing. The spectacle of the Opera-house 
 during a performance of Salome is quite 
 enough to assure us of the immunity of the 
 public to the more perverse emotions evoked 
 by the art of sounds. To be in danger one 
 must be, like Tolstoy, abounding in life. The 
 truth is that in spite of his injustice where 
 Beethoven was concerned, Tolstoy felt his 
 music more deeply than do the majority of 
 those who now exalt him. He, at least, knew 
 the frenzied passions, the savage violence, 
 which mutter through the art of the "deaf old 
 
THEORIES OF ART: MUSIC 233 
 
 man," but of which the orchestras and the 
 virtuosi of to-day are innocent. Beethoven 
 would perhaps have preferred the hatred of 
 Tolstoy to the enthusiasm of his admirers. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 "RESURRECTION" 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 "resurrection" 
 
 Ten years separated Resurrection from the 
 Kreutzer Sonata; 1 ten years which were more 
 and more absorbed in moral propaganda. 
 Ten years also separated the former book from 
 the end for which this life hungered, famished 
 as it was for the eternal. Resurrection is in 
 a sense the artistic testament of the author. 
 It dominates the end of his life as War and 
 Peace crowned its maturity. It is the last 
 
 1 Master and Servant ( 1895) is more or less of a tran- 
 sition between the gloomy novels which preceded it and 
 Resurrection; which is full of the light of the Divine 
 charity. But it is akin to The Death of Ivan Ilyitch 
 and the Popular Tales rather than to Resurrection, which 
 only presents, towards the end of the book, the sublime 
 transformation of a selfish and morally cowardly man un- 
 der the stress of an impulse of sacrifice. The greater 
 part of the book consists of the extremely realistic picture 
 of a master without kindness and a servant full of resig- 
 nation, who are surprised, by night, on the steppes, by a 
 blizzard, in which they lose their way. The master, who 
 
 237 
 
238 TOLSTOY 
 
 peak, perhaps the highest — if not the most 
 stupendous — whose invisible summit is lost 
 in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old. 
 He contemplates the world, his life, his past 
 mistakes, his faith, his righteous anger. 
 
 He sees them from a height. We find the 
 same ideals as in his previous books; the same 
 warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the 
 artist, as in War and Peace, soars above his 
 subject. To the sombre irony, the mental tu- 
 mult of the Kreutzer Sonata and The Death 
 of Ivan Ilyitch he adds a religious serenity, a 
 
 at first tries to escape, deserting his companion, returns, 
 and finding the latter half-frozen, throws himself upon 
 him, covering him with his body, gives him of his warmth, 
 and sacrifices himself by instinct; he does not know why, 
 but the tears fill his eyes; it seems to him that he has 
 become the man he is seeking to save — Nikita — and that 
 his life is no longer in himself, but in Nikita. "Nikita 
 is alive; then I am still alive, myself." He has almost 
 forgotten who he, Vassili, was. He thinks: "Vassili 
 did not know what had to be done. But I, I know!" 
 He hears the voice of Him whom he was awaiting (here 
 his dream recalls one of the Popular Tales), of Him who, 
 a little while ago, had commanded him to lie upon Nikita. 
 He cries, quite happy: "Lord, I am coming!" and he 
 feels that he is free ; that nothing is keeping him back any 
 longer. He is dead. 
 
"RESURRECTION" 2S9 
 
 detachment from the world, which is faith- 
 fully reflected in himself. One is reminded, 
 at times, of a Christian Goethe. 
 
 All the literary characteristics which we 
 have noted in the works of his later period are 
 to be found here, and of these especially the 
 concentration of the narrative, which is even 
 more striking in a long novel than in a short 
 story. There is a wonderful unity about the 
 book; in which respect it differs widely from 
 War and Peace and Anna Karenin. There 
 are hardly any digressions of an episodic na- 
 ture. A single train of action, tenaciously fol- 
 lowed, is worked out in every detail. There is 
 the same vigorous portraiture, the same ease 
 and fulness of handling, as in the Kreutzer 
 Sonata. The observation is more than ever 
 lucid, robust, pitilessly realistic, revealing the 
 animal in the man — "the terrible persistence 
 of the beast in man, more terrible when this 
 animality is not openly obvious; when it is 
 concealed under a so-called poetical exterior." 
 Witness the drawing-room conversations, 
 which have for their object the mere satisfac- 
 tion of a physical need: "the need of stimulat- 
 
240 TOLSTOY 
 
 ing the digestion by moving the muscles of 
 the tongue and gullet" ; the crude vision of 
 humanity which spares no one; neither the 
 pretty Korchagina, "with her two false teeth, 
 the salient bones of her elbows, and the large- 
 ness of her finger-nails," and her decolletage, 
 which inspires in Nekhludov a feeling of 
 "shame and disgust, disgust and shame" ; nor 
 the heroine, Maslova, nothing of whose de- 
 gradation is hidden; her look of premature 
 age, her vicious, ignoble expression, her pro- 
 vocative smile, the odour of brandy that hangs 
 about her, her red and swollen face. There is 
 a brutality of naturalistic detail: as instance, 
 the woman who converses while crouched 
 over the commode. Youth and the poetic im- 
 agination have vanished; except in the pass- 
 ages which deal with the memories of first 
 love, whose music vibrates in the reader's 
 mind with hypnotic intensity; the night of the 
 Holy Saturday, and the night of Passover; the 
 thaw, the white mist, so thick "that at five 
 paces from the house one saw nothing but a 
 shadowy mass, whence glimmered the red 
 light of a lamp" ; the crowing of the cocks in 
 
"RESURRECTION" Ml 
 
 the night; the sounds from the frozen river, 
 where the ice cracks, snores, bubbles, and tin- 
 kles like a breaking glass ; and the young man 
 who, from the night outside, looks through 
 the window at the young girl who does not see 
 him: seated near the table in the flickering 
 light of the little lamp — Katusha, pensive, 
 dreaming, and smiling at her dreams. 
 
 The lyrical powers of the writer are given 
 but little play. His art has become more im- 
 personal; more alien to his own life. The 
 world of criminals and revolutionaries, which 
 he here describes, was unfamiliar to him; 2 he 
 enters it only by an effort of voluntary sym- 
 pathy; he even admits that before studying 
 them at close quarters the revolutionaries in- 
 spired him with an unconquerable aversion. 
 All the more admirable is his impeccable ob- 
 servation — a faultless mirror. What a wealth 
 of types, of precise details! How everything 
 is seen; baseness and virtue, without hardness, 
 
 2 While on the other hand he had mixed in all the va- 
 rious circles depicted in War and Peace, Anna Karenin, 
 The Cossacks, and Sebastopol; the salons of the nobles, 
 the army, the life of the country estate. He had only to 
 remember. 
 
242 TOLSTOY 
 
 without weakness, but with a serene under- 
 standing and a brotherly pity. . . . The 
 terrible picture of the women in the prison! 
 They are pitiless to one another; but the artist 
 is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of 
 each, the distress that hides beneath humilia- 
 tion, and the tearful eyes beneath the mask of 
 effrontery. The pure, faint light which lit- 
 tle by little waxes within the vicious mind of 
 Maslova, and at last illumines her with a 
 sacrificial flame, has the touching beauty of 
 one of those rays of sunshine which trans- 
 figures some humble scene painted by the 
 brush of Rembrandt. There is no severity 
 here, even for the warders and executioners. 
 "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do!" . . . The worst of it is that 
 often they do know what they do; they feel 
 all the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do 
 otherwise. There broods over the book the 
 sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality 
 which weighs upon those who suffer and those 
 who cause that suffering: the director of the 
 prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his 
 jailer's life as of the pianoforte exercises of the 
 
"RESURRECTION" 24$ 
 
 pale, sickly daughter with the dark circles be- 
 neath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a 
 rhapsody of Liszt; the Governor-General of 
 the Siberian town, intelligent and kindly, who, 
 in the hope of escaping the inevitable conflict 
 between the good he wishes to do and the evil 
 he is forced to do, has been steadily drink- 
 ing since the age of thirty- five ; who is always 
 sufficiently master of himself to keep up ap- 
 pearances, even when he is drunk. And 
 among these people we find the ordinary af- 
 fection for wife and children, although their 
 calling renders them pitiless in respect of 
 the rest of humanity. 
 
 The only character in this book who has no 
 objective reality is Nekhludov himself; and 
 this is so because Tolstoy has invested him 
 with his own ideas. This is a defect of sev- 
 eral of the most notable types in War and 
 Peace and in Anna Karenin; for example, 
 Prince Andrei, Pierre Besoukhov, Levine, 
 and others. The fault was less grave, how- 
 ever, in these earlier books; for the charac- 
 ters, by force of their circumstances and their 
 age, were nearer to the author's actual state 
 
244 TOLSTOY 
 
 of mind. But in Resurrection the author 
 places in the body of an epicurean of thirty- 
 five the disembodied soul of an old man of 
 seventy. I will not say that the moral crisis 
 through which Nekhludov is supposed to pass 
 is absolutely untrue and impossible; nor even 
 that it could not be brought about so sud- 
 denly. 3 But there is nothing in the tempera- 
 ment, the character, the previous life of the 
 man as Tolstoy depicts him, to announce or 
 explain this crisis; and once it has commenced 
 nothing interrupts it. Tolstoy has, it is true, 
 with profound observation, represented the 
 impure alloy which at the outset is mingled 
 with the thoughts of sacrifice; the tears of 
 self-pity and admiration ; and, later, the horror 
 and repugnance which seize upon Nekhludov 
 when he is brought face to face with reality. 
 
 3 "Men carry in them the germ of all the human qual- 
 ities, and they manifest now one, now another, so that 
 they often appear to be not themselves; that is, them- 
 selves as they habitually appear. Among some these 
 changes are more rare; among others more rapid. To 
 the second class of men belongs Nekhludov. Under the 
 influence of various physical or moral causes sudden and 
 complete changes are incessantly being produced within 
 him." {Resurrection.) 
 
"RESURRECTION" 245 
 
 But his resolution never flinches. This crisis 
 has nothing in common with his previous 
 crisis, violent but only momentary. 4 Hence- 
 forth nothing can arrest this weak and unde- 
 cided character. A wealthy prince, much 
 respected, greatly enjoying the good things of 
 the world, on the point of marrying a charm- 
 ing girl who loves him and is not distasteful 
 to him, he suddenly decides to abandon 
 everything — wealth, the world, and social po- 
 sition — and to marry a prostitute in order to 
 atone for a remote offence; and his exalta- 
 tion survives, without flinching, for months; 
 it holds out against every trial, even the news 
 that the woman he wishes to make his wife 
 is continuing her life of debauchery. 5 Here 
 
 4 "Many times in his life he had proceeded to clean up 
 his conscience. This was the term he used to denote 
 those moral crises in which he decided to sweep out the 
 moral refuse which littered his soul. At the conclusion 
 of these crises he never failed to set himself certain rules, 
 which he swore always to keep. He kept a diary; he be- 
 gan a new life. But each time it was not long before he 
 fell once more to the same level, or lower still, than be- 
 fore the crisis." (Resurrection.) 
 
 5 Upon learning that Maslova is engaged in an intrigue 
 with a hospital attendant, Nekhludov is more than ever 
 
246 TOLSTOY 
 
 we have a saintliness of which the psychology 
 of a Dostoyevsky would have shown us the 
 source, in the obscure depths of the con- 
 science or even in the organism of his hero. 
 Nekhludov, however, is by no means one of 
 Dostoyevsky's heroes. He is the type of the 
 average man, commonplace, sane, who is Tol- 
 stoy's usual hero. To be exact, we are con- 
 scious of the juxtaposition of a very material- 
 istic 6 character and a moral crisis which be- 
 longs to another man, and that man the aged 
 Tolstoy. 
 
 The same impression — one of elemental 
 duality — is again produced at the end of the 
 book, where a third part, full of strictly rea- 
 listic observation, is set beside an evangelical 
 conclusion which is not in any way essential ; 
 it is an act of personal faith, 7 which does not 
 
 decided to "sacrifice his liberty in order to redeem the sin 
 of this woman." 
 
 6 Tolstoy has never drawn a character with so sure, 
 so broad a touch as in the beginning of Resurrection. 
 Witness the admirable description of Nekhludov's toilet 
 and his actions of the morning before the first session in 
 the Palace of Justice. 
 
 7 The word "act" to be found here and there in the 
 
"RESURRECTION" 247 
 
 logically issue from the life under observa- 
 tion. 
 
 This is not the first time that Tolstoy's 
 religion has become involved with his real- 
 ism; but in previous works the two elements 
 have been better mingled. Here they are not 
 amalgamated; they simply coexist; and the 
 contrast is the more striking in that Tolstoy's 
 faith is always becoming less and less indif- 
 ferent to proof, while his realism is daily be- 
 coming more finely whetted, more free from 
 convention. Here is a sign, not of fatigue, but 
 of age; a certain stiffness, so to speak, in the 
 joints. The religious conclusion is not the or- 
 ganic development of the work. It is a Deus 
 ex machind. I personally am convinced that 
 right in the depth of Tolstoy's being — in spite 
 of all his affirmations — the fusion between his 
 two diverse natures was by no means corn- 
 text in such phrases as "act of faith," "act of will," is 
 used in a sense peculiar to Catholic and Orthodox Chris- 
 tians. A penitent is told to perform an "act of faith" as 
 penance; which is usually the repetition of certain pray- 
 ers of the nature of a creed. The "act," in short, is a 
 repetition, a declamation, a meditation: anything but an 
 action. — [Trans. ] 
 
248 TOLSTOY 
 
 plete: between the truth of the artist and the 
 truth of the believer. 
 
 Although Resurrection has not the har- 
 monious fulness of the work of his youth, and 
 although I, for my part, prefer War and 
 Peace, it is none the less one of the most beau- 
 tiful poems of human compassion; perhaps 
 the most truthful ever written. More than 
 in any other book I see through the pages of 
 this those bright eyes of Tolstoy's, the pale- 
 grey, piercing eyes, "the look that goes 
 straight to the heart," 8 and in each heart sees 
 its God. 
 
 8 Letter of Countess Tolstoy's, 1884. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 RELIGION AND POLITICS 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 RELIGION AND POLITICS 
 
 TOLSTOY never renounced his art. A great 
 artist cannot, even if he would, abandon the 
 reason of his existence. He can, for religious 
 reasons, cease to publish, but. he cannot cease 
 to write. Tolstoy never interrupted his work 
 of artistic creation. M. Paul Boyer, who saw 
 him, during the last few years, at Yasnaya 
 Polyana, says that he would now give prom- 
 inence to his evangelistic works, now to his 
 works of imagination; he would work at the 
 one as a relaxation from the other. When he 
 had finished some social pamphlet, some Ap- 
 peal to the Rulers or to the Ruled, he would 
 allow himself to resume one of the charming 
 tales which he was, so to speak, in process of 
 recounting to himself; such as his Hadji- 
 Mourad, a military epic, which celebrated an 
 episode of the wars of the Caucasus and the 
 
 251 
 
252 TOLSTOY 
 
 resistance of the mountaineers under Schamyl. 1 
 Art was still his relaxation, his pleasure; but 
 he would have thought it a piece of vanity to 
 make a parade of it. With the exception of 
 his Cycle of Readings for Every Day of the 
 Year ( 1 904-5 ), 2 in which he collected the 
 thoughts of various writers upon Life and the 
 Truth — a true anthology of the poetical wis- 
 dom of the world, from the Holy Books of 
 the East to the works of contemporary writers 
 — nearly all his literary works of art, properly 
 so called, which have been written later than 
 1900 have remained in manuscript. 3 
 
 1 Le Temps, November 2, 1902. 
 
 2 Tolstoy regarded this as one of his most important 
 works. "One of my books — For Every Day — to which I 
 have the conceit to attach a great importance. . . ." 
 (Letter to Jan Styka, July 27-August 9, 1909.) 
 
 3 These works should shortly appear, under the super- 
 vision of Countess Alexandra, Tolstoy's daughter. The 
 list of them has been published in various journals. We 
 may mention Hadji-Mourad, Father Sergius, the psychol- 
 ogy of a monk; She Had Every Virtue, the study of a 
 woman ; the Diary of a Madman, the Diary of a Mother, 
 the Story of a Doukhobor, the Story of a Hive, the Post- 
 humous Journal of Theodore Kouzmitch, Aliocha 
 Govchkoff, Tikhon and Melanie, After the Ball, The 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 253 
 
 On the other hand he was boldly and ar- 
 dently casting his mystical and polemical writ- 
 ings upon the social battlefield. From 1900 
 to 1910 such work absorbed the greater part 
 of his time and energy. Russia was passing 
 through an alarming crisis ; for a moment the 
 empire of the Tsars seemed to totter on its 
 foundations and about to fall in ruin. The 
 Russo-Japanese War, the disasters which fol- 
 lowed it, the revolutionary troubles, the mu- 
 tinies in the army and the fleet, the massacres, 
 the agrarian disorders, seemed to mark "the 
 end of a world," to quote the title of one of 
 
 Moon Shines in the Dark, A Young Tsar, What I Saw 
 in a Dream, Who is the Murderer? (containing social 
 ideas), Modern Socialism, a comedy; The - Learned 
 Woman, Childish Wisdom, sketches of children who con- 
 verse upon moral subjects; The Living Corpse, a drama 
 in seventeen tableaux; 77 is all her Fault, a peasant 
 comedy in two acts, directed against alcohol (apparently 
 Tolstoy's last literary work, as he wrote it in May— June, 
 1910), and a number of social studies. It is announced 
 that they will form two octavo volumes of six hundred 
 pages each. 
 
 But the essential work as yet unpublished is Tolstoy's 
 Journal, which covers forty years of his life, and will fill, 
 so it is said, no less than thirty volumes. 
 
254 TOLSTOY 
 
 Tolstoy's writings. The height of the crisis 
 was reached in 1904 and 1905. During these 
 years Tolstoy published a remarkable series of 
 works: War and Revolution, The Great 
 Crime, The End of a World. During the 
 last ten years of his life he occupied a situation 
 unique not only in Russia but in the world. 
 He was alone, a stranger to all the parties, to 
 all countries, and rejected by his Church, 
 which had excommunicated him. 4 The 
 logic of his reason and the revolutionary char- 
 acter of his faith had "led him to this 
 dilemma; to live a stranger to other men, or 
 a stranger to the truth." He recalls the 
 Russian proverb : "An old man who lies is a 
 rich man who steals," and he severs himself 
 from mankind in order to speak the truth. 
 He tells the whole truth, and to all. The old 
 hunter of lies continues, unweariedly, to mark 
 down all superstitions, religious or social, and 
 all fetishes. The only exceptions are the old 
 
 4 The excommunication of Tolstoy by the Holy Synod 
 was declared on February 22, 1901. The excuse was a 
 chapter of Resurrection relating to Mass and the Eucha- 
 rist. This chapter has unhappily been suppressed in the 
 French edition. 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 255 
 
 maleficent powers — the persecutrix, the 
 Church, and the imperial autocracy. Per- 
 haps his enmity towards them was in some 
 degree appeased now that all were casting 
 stones at them. They were familiar; there- 
 fore they were already not so formidable! 
 After all, too, the Church and the Tsar were 
 carrying on their peculiar trades; they were 
 at least not deceptive. Tolstoy, in his letter to 
 the Tsar Nikolas II., 5 although he speaks the 
 truth in a manner entirely unaccommodating 
 to the man as sovereign, is full of gentleness for 
 the sovereign as man ; addressing him as "dear 
 brother," praying him to "pardon him if he 
 has hurt him unintentionally," and signing 
 himself, "Your brother who wishes you true 
 happiness." 
 
 What Tolstoy can least find it in him 
 to pardon — what he denounces with the ut- 
 most hatred — are the new lies; not the old 
 ones, which are no longer able to deceive; not 
 despotism, but the illusion of liberty. It is 
 difficult to say which he hates the more among 
 
 B On the nationalisation of the soil. ( The Great 
 Crime, 1905.) 
 
256 TOLSTOY 
 
 the followers of the newer idols: whether the 
 Socialists or the "Liberals." 
 
 He had a long-standing antipathy for the 
 Liberals. It had seized upon him suddenly 
 when, as an officer fresh from Sebastopol, he 
 found himself in the society of the literary 
 men of St. Petersburg. It had been one of 
 the causes of his misunderstanding with 
 Tourgenev. The arrogant noble, the man of 
 ancient race, could not support these "intellec- 
 tuals," with their profession of making the 
 nation happy, whether by its will or against it, 
 by forcing their Utopian schemes upon it. 
 Very much a Russian, and of the old stamp, 6 
 he instinctively distrusted all liberal innova- 
 tions, and the constitutional ideas which came 
 from the West; and his two journeys abroad 
 only intensified his prejudices. On his return 
 from his first journey he wrote: 
 
 "To avoid the ambition of Liberalism." 
 
 On his return from the second: 
 
 "A privileged society has no right whatso- 
 
 6 "A 'Great- Russian/ touched with Finnish blood." 
 (M. Leroy-Beaulieu.) 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 257 
 
 ever to educate in its own way the masses of 
 which it knows nothing." 
 
 In Anna Karenin he freely expresses his 
 contempt for Liberals in general. Levine re- 
 fuses to associate himself with the work of the 
 provincial institutions for educating the peo- 
 ple, and the innovations which are the order 
 of the day. The picture of the elections to 
 the provincial assembly exposes the fool's 
 bargain by which the country changes its an- 
 cient Conservative administration for a 
 Liberal regime — nothing is really altered, ex- 
 cept that there is one lie the more, while the 
 masters are of inferior blood. 
 
 "We are not worth very much perhaps," 
 says the representative of the aristocracy, "but 
 none the less we have lasted a thousand years." 
 
 Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in 
 which the Liberals abuse the words, "The 
 People: The Will of the People." What 
 do they know of the people? Who are the 
 People? 
 
 But it is more especially when the Liberal 
 movement seemed on the point of succeeding 
 
258 TOLSTOY 
 
 and achieving the convocation of the first 
 Duma that Tolstoy expressed most violently 
 his disapprobation of its constitutional ideas. 
 "During the last few years the deformation 
 of Christianity has given rise to a new species 
 of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet 
 more firmly in their servility. With the help 
 of a complicated system of parliamentary elec- 
 tions it was suggested to them that by electing 
 their representatives directly they were par- 
 ticipating in the government, and that in obey- 
 ing them they were obeying their own will: 
 in short, that they were free. This is a piece 
 of imposture. The people cannot express its 
 will, even with the aid of universal suffrage 
 — i, because no such collective will of a nation 
 of many millions of inhabitants could exist; 
 2, because even if it existed the majority of 
 voices would not be its expression. Without 
 insisting on the fact that those elected would 
 legislate and administrate not for the general 
 good but in order to maintain themselves in 
 power — without counting on the fact of the 
 popular corruption due to pressure and elec- 
 toral corruption — this fraud is particularly 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 259 
 
 harmful because of the presumptuous slavery 
 into which all those who submit to it fall. 
 . . . These free men recall the prisoners 
 who imagine that they are enjoying freedom 
 when they have the right to elect those of their 
 gaolers who are entrusted with the interior 
 policing of the prison. ... A member of 
 a despotic State may be entirely free, even in 
 the midst of the most brutal violence. But 
 a member of a constitutional State is always 
 a slave, for he recognises the legality of the 
 violence done him. . . . And now men 
 wish to lead the Russian people into the same 
 state of constitutional slavery in which the 
 other European peoples dwell! 7 
 
 7 The End of a World (i 905-6). See the telegram 
 addressed by Tolstoy to an American journal: "The agi- 
 tation in the Zemstvos has as its object the limitation of 
 despotic power and the establishment of a representative 
 government. Whether or no they succeed the result will 
 be a postponement of any true social improvement. Po- 
 litical agitation, while producing the unfortunate illusion 
 of such improvement by external means, arrests true 
 progress, as may be proved by the example of all the con- 
 stitutional States — France, England, America, etc." 
 (Preface to the French translation of The Great Crime, 
 1905.) 
 
260 TOLSTOY 
 
 In his hostility towards Liberalism con- 
 tempt was his dominant feeling. In respect 
 of Socialism his dominant feeling was — or 
 rather would have been — hatred, if Tolstoy 
 had not forbidden himself to hate any- 
 thing whatever. He detested it doubly, 
 
 In a long and interesting letter to a lady who asked 
 him to join a Committee for the Propagation of Reading 
 and Writing among the People, Tolstoy expressed yet 
 other objections to the Liberals. They have always 
 played the part of dupes; they act as the accomplices of 
 the autocracy through fear ; their participation in the gov- 
 ernment gives the latter a moral prestige, and accustoms 
 them to compromises, which quickly make them the in- 
 struments of power. Alexander II. used to say that all 
 the Liberals were ready to sell themselves for honours if 
 not for money; Alexander III. was able, without dan- 
 ger, to eradicate the liberal work of his father. "The 
 Liberals whispered among themselves that this did not 
 please them; but they continued to attend the tribunals, 
 to serve the State and the press ; in the press they alluded 
 to those things to which allusion was allowed, and were 
 silent upon matters to which allusion was prohibited." 
 They did the same under Nikolas II. "When this young 
 man, who knows nothing and understands nothing, re- 
 plies tactlessly and with effrontery to the representa- 
 tives of the people, do the Liberals protest? By no means. 
 . . . From every side they send the young Tsar their 
 cowardly and flattering congratulations." (Further Let- 
 ters,) 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 261 
 
 because Socialism was the amalgamation of 
 two lies: the lie of liberty and the lie of 
 science. Does it not profess to be founded 
 upon some sort of economic science, whose 
 laws absolutely rule the progress of the world? 
 Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has 
 pages full of terrible irony concerning this 
 modern superstition and "these futile prob- 
 lems : the origin of species, spectrum analysis, 
 the nature of radium, the theory of numbers, 
 animal fossils and other nonsense, to which 
 poeple attach as much importance to-day as 
 they attributed in the Middle Ages to the 
 Immaculate Conception or the Duality of 
 Substance." He derides these "sermons of 
 science, who, just as the servants of the 
 Church, persuade themselves and others that 
 they are saving humanity; who, like the 
 Church, believe in their own infallibility, 
 never agree among themselves, divide them- 
 selves into sects, and, like the Church, are the 
 chief cause of unmannerliness, moral igno- 
 rance, and the long delay of humanity in free- 
 ing itself from the evils under which it suffers ; 
 for they have rejected the only thing that 
 
262 TOLSTOY 
 
 could unite humanity: the religious con- 
 science." 8 
 
 But his anxiety redoubles, and his indig- 
 nation bursts its bounds, when he sees the 
 dangerous weapon of the new fanaticism in 
 the hands of those who profess to be regenera- 
 ting humanity. Every revolutionist saddens 
 him when he resorts to violence. But the in- 
 tellectual and theoretical revolutionary in- 
 spires him with horror: he is a pedantic 
 murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence, 
 who loves not men but ideas. 9 
 
 8 War and Revolution. 
 
 In Resurrection, at the hearing of Maslova's appeal, in 
 the Senate, it is a materialistic Darwinist who is most 
 strongly opposed to the revision, because he is secretly 
 shocked that Nekhludov should wish, as a matter of duty, 
 to marry a prostitute ; any manifestation of duty, and still 
 more, of religious feeling, having the effect upon him of a 
 personal insult. 
 
 9 As a type, take Novodvorov, the revolutionary leader 
 in Resurrection, whose excessive vanity and egoism have 
 sterilised a fine intelligence. No imagination; "a total ab- 
 sence of the moral and aesthetic qualities which produce 
 doubt." 
 
 Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the 
 artisan who has become a revolutionist through humilia- 
 tion and the desire for revenge; a passionate worshipper 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 
 
 Moreover, these ideas are of a low order. 
 
 "The object of Socialism is the satisfaction 
 of the lowest needs of man : his material well- 
 being. And it cannot attain even this end by 
 the means it recommends." 10 
 
 At heart, he is without love. He feels only 
 hatred for the oppressors and "a black envy 
 for the assured and easy life of the rich: a 
 greed like that of the flies that gather about 
 ordure." " When Socialism is victorious the 
 aspect of the world will be terrible. The 
 European horde will rush upon the weak and 
 barbarous peoples with redoubled force, and 
 will enslave them, in order that the ancient 
 proletariats of Europe may debauch them- 
 
 of science, which he cannot comprehend ; a fanatical anti- 
 clerical and an ascetic. 
 
 In Three More Dead or The Divine and the Human 
 we shall find a few specimens of the new generation of 
 revolutionaries: Romane and his friends, who despise the 
 old Terrorists, and profess to attain their ends scien- 
 tifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial 
 people. 
 
 10 Letters to the Japanese Izo-Abe, 1904. {Further 
 Letters.) 
 
 11 Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in 
 Revolutionaries, 1906). 
 
264 TOLSTOY 
 
 selves at their leisure by idle luxury, as did 
 the people of Rome. 12 
 
 Happily the principal energies of Social- 
 ism spend themselves in smoke — in speeches, 
 like those of M. Jaures. 
 
 "What an admirable orator! There is 
 something of everything in his speeches — and 
 there is nothing. . . . Socialism is a little 
 like our Russian orthodoxy: you press it, you 
 push it into its last trenches, you think you 
 have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round 
 and tells you: 'No, I'm not the one you 
 think, I'm somebody else.' And it slips out 
 of your hands. . . . Patience! Let time 
 do its work. There will be socialistic theories, 
 as there are women's fashions, which soon 
 pass from the drawing-room to the servants' 
 hall." 13 
 
 Although Tolstoy waged war in this man- 
 ner upon the Liberals and Socialists, it was 
 not — far from it — to leave the field free for 
 
 12 Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in 
 Revolutionaries, 1906). 
 
 13 Conversation with M. Paul Boyer. (Le Temps, 
 November 4, 1902.) 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 265 
 
 autocracy; on the contrary, it was that the 
 battle might be fought in all its fierceness be- 
 tween the old world and the new, after the 
 army of disorderly and dangerous elements 
 had been eliminated. For Tolstoy too was a 
 believer in the Revolution. But his Revolu- 
 tion was of a very different colour to that of 
 the revolutionaries; it was rather that of a 
 believer of the Middle Ages, who looked on 
 the morrow, perhaps that very day, for the 
 reign of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 "I believe that at this very hour the great 
 revolution is beginning which has been pre- 
 paring for two thousand years in the Christian 
 world — the revolution which will substitute 
 for corrupted Christianity and the system of 
 domination which proceeds therefrom the 
 true Christianity, the basis of equality between 
 men and of the true liberty to which all beings 
 endowed with reason aspire." 14 
 
 What time does he choose, this seer and 
 prophet, for his announcement of the new era 
 of love and happiness? The darkest hour of 
 Russian history; the hour of disaster and of 
 
 14 The End of a World. 
 
266 TOLSTOY 
 
 shame! Superb power of creative faith! All 
 around it is light — even in darkness. Tolstoy- 
 saw in death the signs of renewal; in the 
 calamities of the war in Manchuria, in the 
 downfall of the Russian armies, in the fright- 
 ful anarchy and the bloody struggle of the 
 classes. His logic — the logic of a dream! — 
 drew from the victory of Japan the astonish- 
 ing conclusion that Russia should withdraw 
 from all warfare, because the non-Christian 
 peoples will always have the advantage in war- 
 fare over the Christian peoples "who have 
 passed through the phase of servile submis- 
 sion." Does this mean the abdication of the 
 Russian people? No; this is pride at its su- 
 premest. Russia should withdraw from all 
 warfare because she must accomplish "the 
 great revolution." 
 
 "The Revolution of 1905, which will set 
 men free from brutal oppression, must com- 
 mence in Russia. It is beginning." 
 
 Why must Russia play the part of the 
 chosen people? Because the new Revolution 
 must before all repair "The Great Grime" 
 the great monopolisation of the soil for the 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 267 
 
 profit of a few thousands of wealthy men and 
 the slavery of millions of men — the cruellest 
 of enslavements; 15 and because no people was 
 so conscious of this iniquity as the Russian 
 people. 16 
 
 15 "The cruellest enslavement is to be deprived of the 
 earth, for the slave of a master is the slave of only one; 
 but the man deprived of the land is the slave of all the 
 world." (The Great Crime.) 
 
 16 Russia was actually in a somewhat special situation ; 
 and although Tolstoy may have been wrong to found his 
 generalisations concerning other European States upon 
 the condition of Russia, we cannot be surprised that he 
 was most sensible to the sufferings which touched him 
 most nearly. See, in The Great Crime, his conversations 
 on the road to Toula with the peasants, who were all in 
 want of bread because they lacked land, and who were 
 all secretly waiting for the land to be restored to them. 
 The agricultural population of Russia forms 8o per cent, 
 of the nation. A hundred million of men, says Tolstoy, 
 are dying of hunger because of the seizure of the soil by 
 the landed proprietors. When people speak to them of 
 remedying their evils through the agency of the Press, or 
 by the separation of Church and State, or by nationalist 
 representation, or even by the eight-hours day, they impu- 
 dently mock at them: 
 
 "Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the 
 means of bettering the condition of the masses of the peo- 
 ple remind one of what one sees in the theatre, when all 
 the spectators have an excellent view of an actor who 
 
268 TOLSTOY 
 
 Again, and more especially, because the 
 Russian people is of all peoples most thor- 
 oughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that 
 the coming revolution should realise, in the 
 name of Christ, the law of union and of love. 
 Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled un- 
 less it is based upon the law of non-resistance 
 to evil. 17 This non-resistance (let us mark 
 this well, we who have the misfortune to see 
 in it simply an Utopian fad peculiar to Tol- 
 stoy and to a few dreamers) has always been 
 an essential trait of the Russian people. 
 
 "The Russian people has always assumed, 
 
 is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who 
 also have a full view of him, pretend not to see him, and 
 endeavour to distract one another's attention from him." 
 
 There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the 
 labouring people. As a solution of the property question, 
 Tolstoy recommends the doctrine of Henry George and 
 his suggested single tax upon the value of the soil. This 
 is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied, and 
 has assimilated it so thoroughly that in his writings he 
 often uses entire phrases of George's. 
 
 17 "The law of non-resistance to evil is the keystone of 
 the whole building. To admit the law of mutual help 
 while misunderstanding the precept of non-resistance is to 
 build the vault without sealing the central portion." 
 {The End of a World.) 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 269 
 
 with regard to power, an attitude entirely- 
 strange to the other peoples of Europe. It 
 has never entered upon a conflict with power; 
 it has never participated in it, and conse- 
 quently has never been depraved by it. It has 
 regarded power as an evil which must be 
 avoided. An ancient legend represents the 
 Russians as appealing to the Varingians to 
 come and govern them. The majority of the 
 Russians have always preferred to submit to 
 acts of violence rather than respond with 
 violence or participate therein. They have 
 therefore always submitted. 
 
 "A voluntary submission, having nothing in 
 common with servile obedience. 18 
 
 "The true Christian may submit, indeed it 
 is impossible for him not to submit without 
 a struggle to no matter what violence ; but he 
 
 18 In a letter written in 1900 to a friend {Further Let- 
 ters) Tolstoy complains of the false interpretation given 
 to his doctrine of non-resistance. "People," he says, "con- 
 found Do not oppose evil by evil with Do not oppose evil: 
 that is to say, Be indifferent to evil. . . ." "Where- 
 as the conflict with evil is the sole object of Christianity, 
 and the commandment of non-resistance to evil is given as 
 the most effectual means of conflict." 
 
270 TOLSTOY 
 
 could not obey it — that is, he could not recog- 
 nise it as legitimate." 19 
 
 At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy 
 was still subject to the emotion caused by one 
 of the most tragical examples of this heroic 
 nonresistance of a people — the bloody mani- 
 festation of January 22nd in St. Petersburg, 
 when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Ga- 
 pon, allowed itself to be shot down without 
 a cry of hatred or a gesture of self-defence. 
 
 For a long time the Old Believers, known 
 in Russia as the Sectators, had been obstinately 
 practising, in spite of persecution, non-obe- 
 dience to the State, and had refused to recog- 
 nise the legitimacy of its power. 20 The 
 absurdity of the Russo-Japanese War enabled 
 this state of mind to spread without difficulty 
 through the rural districts. Refusals of mili- 
 tary service became more and more general; 
 and the more brutally they were punished the 
 more stubborn the revolt grew in secret. In 
 
 19 The End of a World. 
 
 20 Tolstoy has drawn two types of these "Sectators," 
 one in Resurrection (towards the end) and one In Three 
 More Dead. 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 271 
 
 the provinces, moreover, whole races who 
 knew nothing of Tolstoy had given the exam- 
 ple of an absolute and passive refusal to obey 
 the State — the Doukhobors of the Caucasus 
 as early as 1898 and the Georgians of the 
 Gouri towards 1905. Tolstoy influenced these 
 movements far less than they influenced him ; 
 and the interest of his writings lies in the fact 
 that in spite of the criticisms of those writers 
 who were of the party of revolution, as was 
 Gorky, 21 he was the mouthpiece of the Old 
 Russian people. 
 
 The attitude which he preserved, in respect 
 of men who at the peril of their lives were 
 putting into practice the principles which he 
 professed, 22 was one of extreme modesty and 
 
 21 After Tolstoy's condemnation of the upheaval in the 
 Zemstvos, Gorky, making himself the interpreter of the 
 displeasure of his friends, wrote as follows: "This man 
 has become the slave of his theory. For a long time he 
 has isolated himself from the life of Russia, and he no 
 longer listens to the voice of the people. He hovers over 
 Russia at too great a height." 
 
 22 It was a bitter trial to him that he could not con- 
 trive to be persecuted. He had a thirst for martyrdom; 
 but the Government very wisely took good care not to 
 satisfy him. 
 
<TO TOLSTOY 
 
 dignity. Neither to the Doukhobors and 
 the Gourians nor to the refractory soldiers 
 did he assume the pose of a master or 
 teacher. 
 
 "They are persecuting my friends all around me, and 
 leaving me in peace, although if any one is dangerous it 
 is I. Evidently I am not worth persecution, and I am 
 ashamed of the fact." (Letter to Teneromo, 1892, 
 Further Letters.) 
 
 "Evidently I am not worthy of persecution, and I shall 
 have to die like this, without having ever been able to tes- 
 tify to the truth by physical suffering." (To Teneromo, 
 May 16, 1892, ibid.) 
 
 "It hurts me to be at liberty." (To Teneromo, June 
 1, 1894, ibid.) 
 
 That he was at liberty was, Heaven knows, no fault 
 of his! He insults the Tsars, he attacks the fatherland, 
 "that ghastly fetish to which men sacrifice their life and 
 liberty and reason." {The End of a World.) Then 
 see, in War and Revolution, the summary of Russian his- 
 tory. It is a gallery of monsters: "The maniac Ivan 
 the Terrible, the drunkard Peter I., the ignorant cook, 
 Catherine I., the sensual and profligate Elizabeth, the de- 
 generate Paul, the parricide Alexander I. [the only one 
 of them for whom Tolstoy felt a secret liking], the cruel 
 and ignorant Nikolas I. ; Alexander II., unintelligent and 
 evil rather than good; Alexander III., an undeniable sot, 
 brutal and ignorant; Nikolas II., an innocent young offi- 
 cer of hussars, with an entourage of coxcombs, a young 
 man who knows nothing and understands nothing." 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS 273 
 
 "He who suffers no trials can teach nothing 
 to him who does so suffer." 
 
 He implores "the forgiveness of all those 
 whom his words and his writings may have 
 caused to suffer." 23 
 
 He never urges any one to refuse military 
 service. It is a matter for every man to de- 
 cide for himself. If he discusses the matter 
 with any one who is hesitating, "he always ad- 
 vises him not to refuse obedience so long as it 
 would not be morally impossible." For if a 
 man hesitates it is because he is not ripe; and 
 "it is better to have one soldier the more than 
 a renegade or hypocrite, which is what be- 
 comes of those who undertake a task beyond 
 their strength." 24 He distrusts the resolution 
 of the refractory Gontcharenko. He fears 
 "that this young man may have been carried 
 away by vanity and vainglory, not by the love 
 of God." 25 To the Doukhobors he writes 
 that they should not persist in their refusal of 
 
 23 Letter to Gontcharenko, a "refractory," January 17, 
 1903. {Further Letters.) 
 
 2 * Letter to a friend, 1900. {Correspondence.) 
 28 To Gontcharenko, February 2, 1903 {ibid.). 
 
274 TOLSTOY 
 
 obedience out of pride, but "if they are capa- 
 ble of so doing, they should save their weaker 
 women and their children. No one will 
 blame them for that." They must persist 
 "only if the spirit of Christ is indeed within 
 them, because then they will be happy to suf- 
 fer." 26 In any case he prays those who are 
 persecuted "at any cost not to break their af- 
 fectionate relations with those who persecute 
 them." 27 One must love even Herod, as he 
 says in a letter to a friend: "You say, 'One 
 cannot love Herod.' — I do not know, but I 
 feel, and you also, that one must love him. I 
 know, and you also, that if I do not love him 
 I suffer, that there is no life in me." 28 
 
 The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of 
 this love, which in the end can no longer be 
 contented even by the words of the Gospel: 
 "Love thy neighbour as thyself," because he 
 finds in them a taint of egoism! 
 
 29 
 
 26 To the Doukhobors of the Caucasus, 1898 (ibid.). 
 
 27 To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (ibid.). 
 
 28 To a friend, November, 1901. (Correspondence.) 
 
 29 "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine ; all the 
 vapour of egoism that we wish to drain from the human 
 soul re-enters by it." He ingeniously strives to prove 
 
RELIGION AND POLITICS Tib 
 
 Too vast a love in the opinion of some ; and 
 so free from human egoism that it wastes it- 
 self in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy 
 distrusts "abstract love"? 
 
 "The greatest modern sin : the abstract love 
 of humanity, impersonal love for those who 
 are — somewhere, out of sight. . . . To 
 love those we do not know, those whom we 
 shall never meet, is so easy a thing! There is 
 no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same 
 time we are so pleased with ourselves! The 
 conscience is fooled. — No. We must love 
 our neighbours — those we live with, and who 
 are in our way and embarrass us." 30 
 
 I have read in most of the studies of Tol- 
 stoy's work that his faith and philosophy are 
 not original. It is true; the beauty of these 
 ideas is eternal and can never appear a mo- 
 mentary fashion. Others complain of their 
 Utopian character. This also is true; they 
 
 that the original text has been wrongly read ; that the ex- 
 act wording of the Second Commandment was in fact 
 "Love thy neighbour as Himself (as God)." (Conver- 
 sations with Teneromo.) 
 
 80 Conversations with Teneromo. 
 
276 TOLSTOY 
 
 are Utopian, the New Testament is Utopian. 
 A prophet is a Utopian; he treads the earth 
 but sees the life of eternity; and that this appa- 
 rition should have been granted to us, that we 
 should have seen among us the last of the 
 prophets, that the greatest of our artists should 
 wear this aureole on his brow — there, it seems 
 to me, is a fact more novel and of far greater 
 importance to the world than one religion the 
 more, or a new philosophy. Those are blind 
 who do not perceive the miracle of this great 
 mind, the incarnation of fraternal love in the 
 midst of a people and a century stained with 
 the blood of hatred! 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 OLD AGE 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 OLD AGE 
 
 His face had taken on definite lines; had be- 
 come as it will remain in the memory of men : 
 the large countenance, crossed by the arch of 
 a double furrow; the white, bristling eye- 
 brows; 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 affec- 
 tionate 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 
 
 279 
 
280 TOLSTOY 
 
 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 gath- 
 ered more thickly; the expected light had 
 never risen. To the upheavals of the revolu- 
 tionaries 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 ob- 
 stinate faith sought abroad for other peoples 
 whom he might invest with this mission. He 
 thought of the "great and wise Chinese na- 
 tion." 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 
 
OLD AGE 281 
 
 humanity in the way of Tao 2 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 Doukho- 
 bors 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 
 thitherto been the fairest a man could desire 
 — the Book," 4 were attacked by the malady 
 
 1 Letter to the Chinese, October, 1906. {Further Let- 
 ters. ) 
 
 2 Tolstoy expressed a fear that this might happen in the 
 above letter. 
 
 3 "It was hardly worth while to refuse military and po- 
 lice service only to revert to property, which is main- 
 tained 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 
 
282 TOLSTOY 
 
 of Zionism, that movement of false national- 
 ism, "which is flesh of the flesh of contempo- 
 rary 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 Mohammedan countries, from China 
 and Japan, where Resurrection was translated, 
 and where his ideas upon "the restitution of 
 
 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 cre- 
 ate a new Judenstaat is an abominable sin." {Ibid,) 
 
 * Appeal to Political Men, 1905. 
 
OLD AGE 285 
 
 the land to the people" were being propa- 
 gated. 7 The American papers interviewed 
 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 at- 
 tempts 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 to- 
 gether from all directions, will find ourselves 
 
 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.) 
 
284 TOLSTOY 
 
 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 al- 
 most say that he avoided it, fled from it, hated 
 it. 
 
 "One must thank God for being discon- 
 tented 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 move- 
 ment upwards from the lesser to the greater, 
 from worse to better. And this discord is the 
 
 9 Letters to Teneromo, June, 1882, and to a friend, 
 November, 1901. {Further Letters.) 
 
 10 War and Revolution, 
 
OLD AGE 285 
 
 condition of good. It is an evil when a man 
 is calm and satisfied with himself." " 
 
 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 revo- 
 lutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then 
 orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an athe- 
 ist, 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, for- 
 gotten, 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. 
 
 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 unpub- 
 lished works. 
 
286 TOLSTOY 
 
 "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 
 self-contentment, 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 other- 
 wise." 
 
 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 
 
 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.) 
 
OLD AGE 287 
 
 had gained the people, and was obscurely mov- 
 ing amidst the thousands of the poor. The 
 advance-guard of their threatening army de- 
 filed below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Pol- 
 yana. Three tales, published by the Mercure 
 de France, 1 * 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 
 
 14 December i, 1910. 
 
288 TOLSTOY 
 
 modern civilisation what the Huns and Van- 
 dals 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 de- 
 veloped 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 per- 
 
OLD AGE 289 
 
 fectly 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 ex- 
 pectation and the proclamation of the reign 
 of love, to be forced to close one's eyes 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 con- 
 fess to oneself that one's life has not been 
 lived entirely in accordance with one's prin- 
 ciples. 
 
 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 sor- 
 row, of which Tolstoy endeavoured to keep 
 the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, 
 
290 TOLSTOY 
 
 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 de- 
 nied 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 misun- 
 derstood by his nearest friend. 
 
 "I feel in all my being," he wrote to Tene- 
 romo, "the truth of these words : that the hus- 
 band 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 por- 
 tion 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 ac- 
 cessible to women." 15 
 
 15 May 1 6, 1892. Tolstoy's wife was then mourning 
 the loss of a little boy, and he could do nothing to con- 
 sole her. 
 
OLD AGE 291 
 
 It seems that this wish was never gratified. 
 Countess Tolstoy loved and admired the purity 
 of heart, the candid heroism, and the good- 
 ness 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 fol- 
 low" ; 16 when the Holy Synod excommuni- 
 cated him she bravely undertook his defence 
 and insisted on sharing the danger which 
 threatened him. But she could not force her- 
 self 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 
 
 16 Letter of January, 1883. 
 
 17 "I should never reproach any one for having no re- 
 ligion. 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." 
 
292 TOLSTOY 
 
 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 doc- 
 tor" 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 fa- 
 tiguing 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 sim- 
 ple house, with its almost austere appoint- 
 ments ; 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 pov- 
 
 18 Revue des Deux Monies, December 15, 1910. 
 
 19 Ibid. 
 
OLD AGE 293 
 
 erty about him with the luxury of his own 
 house. 
 
 "My activity," he wrote as early as 1903, 
 "however useful it may appear to certain peo- 
 ple, loses the greater part of its importance by 
 the fact that my life is not entirely in agree- 
 ment with my professions." 20 
 
 Why did he not realise this agreement? If 
 he could not induce his family to cut them- 
 selves off from the world, why did he not leave 
 them, go out of their life, thus avoiding the 
 sarcasm and 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 his loving and unhappy heart: 
 
 20 To a friend, December 10, 1903. 
 
 21 Figaro , December 27, 1910. It was found among 
 Tolstoy's papers after his death. 
 
294 TOLSTOY 
 
 "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 hith- 
 erto 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 strug- 
 gling against you and irritating you, now suc- 
 cumbing myself to the influences and the se- 
 ductions 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 the 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 
 
 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. 
 
OLD AGE 295 
 
 strength desire peace and solitude, and if not 
 an absolute harmony at least not this crying 
 discord between my whole life and my con- 
 science. If I had gone away openly there 
 would have been supplications, discussions, ar- 
 guments; I should have weakened, and per- 
 haps 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 re- 
 member 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 
 
296 TOLSTOY 
 
 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. 
 . . . Good-bye, 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 discussions ; 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: 
 
OLD AGE 297 
 
 "Give this, after my death, to my wife So- 
 phie Andreyevna." 
 
 And this was the end of his plan of ^de- 
 parture. 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 pro- 
 fess?" 
 
 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 con- 
 fused; but I have failed to do it not because 
 
298 TOLSTOY 
 
 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 cry- 
 ing, '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 
 
 23 Letter to a friend, 1895 (the French version being 
 published in Plaisirs cruels, 1895). 
 
OLD AGE S99 
 
 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 him- 
 self; 24 tortured by his weakness and indeci- 
 
 24 It seems that during his last few years, and especially 
 during the last few months, he was influenced by Vladi- 
 mir-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 re- 
 
300 TOLSTOY 
 
 sion, 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 ob- 
 scure little village, never to rise again. 25 On 
 
 bellious and unmanageable spirit, no one could doubt 
 his absolute devotion; and without approving of the al- 
 most inhuman harshness of certain actions apparently com- 
 mitted 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 Verite 
 publishes, in its issue for January I, 191 1, an interesting 
 account of this flight. 
 
 Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana suddenly on October 28, 
 1 9 10 (November 10th European style) about five o'clock 
 in the morning. He was accompanied by Dr. Makovit- 
 ski; 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 monas- 
 tery 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 
 
OLD AGE 301 
 
 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." 
 
 article on the death penalty. On the evening of October 
 29th (November nth) he went to the monastery of Cha- 
 mordino, 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 hum- 
 blest 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 re- 
 treat 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 Tol- 
 stoy fell ill at the railway-station of Astapovo and was 
 forced to take to his bed. It was there that he died. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 The struggle was ended; the struggle that 
 had lasted for eighty-two years, whose battle- 
 field was this life of ours. A tragic and 
 glorious melee, in which all the forces of life 
 took part; all the vices and all the virtues. 
 — All the vices excepting one : untruth, which 
 he pursued incessantly, tracking it into its 
 last resort and refuge. 
 
 In the beginning intoxicated liberty, the 
 conflict of passions in the stormy darkness, 
 illuminated from time to time by dazzling 
 flashes of light — crises of love and ecstasy and 
 visions of the Eternal. Years of the Caucasus, 
 of Sebastopol; years of tumultuous and rest- 
 less youth. Then the great peace of the first 
 years of marriage. The happiness of love, 
 of art, of nature — War and Peace. The 
 broad daylight of genius, which bathed the 
 whole human horizon, and the spectacle of 
 
 305 
 
306 TOLSTOY 
 
 those struggles which for the soul of the artist 
 were already things of the past. He domi- 
 nated them, was master of them, and already 
 they were not enough. Like Prince Andrei, 
 his eyes were turned towards the vast skies 
 which shone above the battlefield. It was 
 this sky that attracted him: 
 
 "There are men with powerful wings whom 
 pleasure leads to alight in the midst of the 
 crowd, w r hen their pinions are broken; such, 
 for instance, am I. Then they beat their 
 broken wings; they launch themselves des- 
 perately, but fall anew. The wings will 
 mend. I shall fly high. May God help 
 me!" 1 
 
 1 Journal, dated October 28, 1879. Here is the entire 
 passage : 
 
 "There are in this world heavy folk, without wings. 
 They struggle down below. There are strong men 
 among them: as Napoleon. He leaves terrible traces 
 among humanity. He sows discord. — There are men 
 who let their wings grow, slowly launch themselves, and 
 hover: the monks. There are light fliers, who easily 
 mount and fall: the worthy idealists. There are men 
 with powerful wings. . . . There are the celestial 
 ones, who out of their love of men descend to earth and 
 fold their wings, and teach others how to fly. Then, 
 
CONCLUSION 307 
 
 These words were written in the midst of 
 a terrible spiritual tempest, of which the Con- 
 fessions are the memory and echo. More 
 than once was Tolstoy thrown to earth, his 
 pinions shattered. But he always persevered. 
 He started afresh. We see him hovering in 
 "the vast, profound heavens," with his two 
 great wings, of which one is reason and the 
 other faith. But he does not find the peace 
 he looked for. Heaven is not without us, but 
 within us. Tolstoy fills it with the tempest 
 of his passions. There he perceives the apos- 
 tles of renunciation, and he brings to renun- 
 ciation the same ardour that he brought to life. 
 But it is always life that he strains to him, 
 with the violence of a lover. He is "mad- 
 dened with life." He is "intoxicated with 
 life." He cannot live without this madness. 2 
 
 when they are no longer needed, they re-ascend: as did 
 Christ." 
 
 2 "One can live only while one is drunken with life" 
 (Confessions, 1879). "I am mad with living. . . . 
 It is summer, the delicious summer. This year I have 
 struggled for a long time; but the beauty of nature has 
 conquered me. I rejoice in life." (Letter to Fet, July, 
 1880.) These lines were written at the height of the re- 
 ligious crisis. 
 
308 TOLSTOY 
 
 He .is drunk at once with happiness and with 
 unhappiness, with death and with immortal- 
 ity. 3 His renunciation of individual life is 
 only a cry of exalted passion towards the eter- 
 nal life. The peace which he finds, the peace 
 of the soul which he invokes, is not the peace 
 of death. It is rather the calm of those burn- 
 ing worlds which sail by the forces of gravity 
 through the infinite spaces. With him anger 
 is calm, 4 and the calm is blazing. Faith has 
 given him new weapons with which to wage, 
 even more implacably, unceasing war upon 
 the lies of modern society. He no longer 
 confines himself to a few types of romance; 
 he attacks all the great idols: the hypocrisies 
 of religion, the State, science, art, liberalism, 
 socialism, popular education, benevolence, 
 
 3 In his Journal, dated May I, 1863 : "The thought of 
 death." ... "I desire and love immortality." 
 
 4 "I was intoxicated with that boiling anger and indig- 
 nation which I love to feel, which I excite even when I 
 feel it naturally, because it acts upon me in such a way 
 as to calm me, and gives me, at least for a few moments, 
 an extraordinary elasticity, and the full fire and energy 
 of all the physical and moral capacities." (Diary of 
 Prince D. Nekhludov, Lucerne, 1857.) 
 
CONCLUSION 309 
 
 pacificism. 5 He strikes at all, delivers his des- 
 perate attacks upon all. 
 
 From time to time the world has sight of 
 these great rebellious spirits, who, like John 
 the Forerunner, hurl anathemas against a cor- 
 rupted civilisation. The last of these was 
 Rousseau. By his love of nature, 6 by his 
 
 5 His article on War, written on the occasion of the 
 Universal Peace Congress in London in 1 891, is a rude 
 satire on the peacemakers who believe in international ar- 
 bitration : 
 
 "This is the story of the bird which is caught after a 
 pinch of salt has been put on his tail. It is quite as easy 
 to catch him without it. They laugh at us who speak 
 of arbitration and disarmament by consent of the Pow- 
 ers. Mere verbiage, this! Naturally the Governments 
 approve: worthy apostles! They know very well that 
 their approval will never prevent their doing as they will." 
 {Cruel Pleasures.) 
 
 6 Nature was always "the best friend" of Tolstoy, as 
 he loved to say : "A friend is good ; but he will die, or 
 he will go abroad, and one cannot follow him; while Na- 
 ture, to which one may be united by an act of purchase 
 or by inheritance, is better. Nature to me is cold and 
 exacting, repulses me and hinders me; yet Nature is a 
 friend whom we keep until death, and into whom we 
 shall enter when we die." (Letter to Fet, May 19, 
 1 86 1. Further Letters.) He shared in the life of na- 
 ture; he was born again in the spring. "March and 
 
310 TOLSTOY 
 
 hatred of modern society, by his jealous in- 
 dependence, by his fervent adoration of the 
 Gospel and for Christian morals, Rousseau 
 is a precursor of Tolstoy, who says of him: 
 
 April are my best months for work." Towards the end 
 of autumn he became more torpid. "To me it is the 
 most dead of all the seasons; I do not think; I do not 
 write; I feel agreeably stupid." (To Fet, October, 
 1869.) But the Nature that spoke so intimately to his 
 heart was that of his own home, Yasnaya Polyana. Al- 
 though he wrote some very charming notes upon the Lake 
 of Geneva when travelling in Switzerland, and especially 
 on the Clarens district, whither the memory of Rousseau 
 attracted him, he felt himself a stranger amid the Swiss 
 landscape; and the ties of his native land appeared more 
 closely drawn and sweeter: "I love Nature when she 
 surrounds me on every side, when on every hand the 
 warm air envelopes me which extends through the infinite 
 distance; when the very same lush grasses that I have 
 crushed in throwing myself on the ground make the ver- 
 dure of the infinite meadows; when the same leaves 
 which, shaken by the wind, throw the shadow on my 
 face, make the sombre blue of the distant forest; when the 
 very air I breathe makes the light-blue background of the 
 infinite sky; when not I alone am delighting in nature; 
 when around me whirl and hum millions of insects and 
 the birds are singing. The greatest delight in nature is 
 when I feel myself making a part of all. Here (in 
 Switzerland) the infinite distance is beautiful, but I have 
 nothing in common with it." (May, 185 1.) 
 
CONCLUSION 311 
 
 "Pages like this go to my heart; I feel that 
 I should have written them." 7 
 
 But what a difference between the two 
 minds, and how much more purely Christian 
 is Tolstoy's! What a lack of humility, what 
 
 7 Conversations with M. Paul Boyer (Le Temps, Au- 
 gust 28, 1901). 
 
 The similarity is really very striking at times, and 
 might well deceive one. Take the profession of faith of 
 the dying Julie : 
 
 "I could not say that I believed what it was impossible 
 for me to believe, and I have always believed what I said 
 I believed. This was as much as rested with me." 
 
 Compare Tolstoy's letter to the Holy Synod: 
 
 "It may be that my beliefs are embarrassing or dis- 
 pleasing. It is not within my power to change them, 
 just as it is not in my power to change my body. I can- 
 not believe anything but what I believe, at this hour 
 when I am preparing to return to that God from whom I 
 came." 
 
 Or this passage from the Reponse a Christophe de 
 Beaumont, which seems pure Tolstoy: 
 
 "I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. My Master has told 
 me that he who loves his brother accomplishes the law." 
 
 Or again: 
 
 "The whole of the Lord's Prayer is expressed in these 
 words: 'Thy Will be done!' ' : (Troisieme lettre de la 
 Montague.) 
 
 Compare with: 
 
 "I am replacing all my prayers with the Pater Noster. 
 
312 TOLSTOY 
 
 Pharisee-like arrogance, in this insolent cry 
 from the Confessions of the Genevese: 
 
 "Eternal Being! Let a single man tell me, 
 if he dare: I was better than that man!" 
 
 Or in this defiance of the world: 
 
 "I say it loudly and fearlessly: whosoever 
 could believe me a dishonest man is himself a 
 man to be suppressed." 
 
 Tolstoy wept tears of blood over the 
 "crimes" of his past life: 
 
 "I suffer the pangs of hell. I recall all my 
 past baseness, and these memories do not leave 
 
 All the requests I can make of God are expressed with 
 greater moral elevation by these words: 'Thy Will be 
 done!'" (Tolstoy's Journal, in the Caucasus, 1852-3.) 
 
 The similarity of thought is no less striking in the 
 province of art: 
 
 "The first rule of the art of writing," said Rousseau, 
 "is to speak plainly and to express one's thought ex- 
 actly." 
 
 And Tolstoy: 
 
 "Think what you will, but in such a manner that every 
 word may be understood by all. One cannot write any- 
 thing bad in perfectly plain language." 
 
 I have demonstrated elsewhere that the satirical de- 
 scriptions of the Paris Opera in the Nouvelle Heloise 
 have much in common with Tolstoy's criticisms in What 
 is Art? 
 
CONCLUSION 313 
 
 me ; they poison my life. Usually men regret 
 that they cannot remember after death. 
 What happiness if it should be so! What 
 suffering it would mean if, in that other life, 
 I were to recall all the evil I have done down 
 here!" 8 
 
 Tolstoy was not the man to write his con- 
 fessions, as did Rousseau, because, as the latter 
 said, "feeling that the good exceeded the evil 
 it was in my interest to tell everything." 9 
 Tolstoy, after having made the attempt, de- 
 cided not to write his Memoirs; the pen fell 
 from his hands ; he did not wish to be an ob- 
 ject of offence and scandal to those who would 
 read it. 
 
 "People would say : There, then, is the man 
 whom many set so high! And what a shame- 
 ful fellow he was! Then with us mere mor- 
 tals it is God who ordains us to be shame- 
 ful." 10 
 
 Never did Rousseau know the Christian 
 faith, the fine modesty, and the humility that 
 
 8 Journal, January 6, 1903. 
 
 9 Quatrieme Promenade. 
 10 Letter to Birukov. 
 
314 TOLSTOY 
 
 produced the ineffable candour of the aged 
 Tolstoy. Behind Rousseau we see the Rome 
 of Calvin. In Tolstoy we see the pilgrims, 
 the innocents, whose tears and na'ive confes- 
 sions had touched him as a child. 
 
 But beyond and above the struggle with 
 the world, which was common to him and 
 to Rousseau, another kind of warfare filled 
 the last thirty years of Tolstoy's life ; a magnif- 
 icent warfare between the highest powers of 
 his mind: Truth and Love. 
 
 Truth — "that look which goes straight to 
 the heart/' the penetrating light of "those grey 
 eyes which pierce you through" — Truth was 
 his earliest faith, and the empress of his art. 
 
 "The heroine of my writings, she whom I 
 love with all the forces of my being, she who 
 always was, is, and will be beautiful, is 
 Truth." " 
 
 The truth alone escaped shipwreck after the 
 death of his brother. 12 The truth, the pivot 
 
 11 Sebastopol in May, 1853. 
 
 12 "The truth. ... the only thing that has been 
 left me of my moral conceptions, the sole thing that I 
 shall still fulfil." (October 17, i860.) 
 
CONCLUSION 315 
 
 of his life, the rock in the midst of an 
 ocean. 
 
 But very soon the "horrible truth" 13 was 
 no longer enough for him. Love had sup- 
 planted it. It was the living spring of his 
 childhood; "the natural state of his soul." 14 
 When the moral crisis of 1880 came he never 
 relinquished the truth; he made way for 
 love. 15 
 
 Love is "the basis of energy." 16 Love is 
 the "reason of life"; the only reason, with 
 beauty." 17 Love is the essence of Tolstoy 
 ripened by life, of the author of War and 
 Peace and the Letter to the Holy Synod. 19, 
 
 "October 17, i860. 
 
 14 "The love of men is the natural state of the soul, 
 and we do not observe it." {Journal, while he was stu- 
 dent at Kazan.) 
 
 15 'The truth will make way for love." (Confes- 
 sions.) 
 
 16 « <You are always talking of energy ? But the basis 
 of energy is love,' said Anna, 'and love does not come at 
 will.'" (Anna Karenin.) 
 
 17 "Beauty and love, those two sole reasons for human 
 existence." (War and Peace.) 
 
 18 "I believe in God, who for me is Love." ( To the 
 Holy Synod, 1 90 1.) 
 
31G TOLSTOY 
 
 This interpenetration of the truth by love 
 makes the unique value of the masterpieces 
 he wrote in the middle part of his life — nel 
 mezzo del cammin — and distinguishes his 
 realism from the realism of Flaubert. The 
 latter places his faith in refraining from lov- 
 ing his characters. Great as he may be, he 
 lacks the Fiat lux! The light of the sun is 
 not enough: we must have the light of the 
 heart. The realism of Tolstoy is incarnate 
 in each of his creatures, and seeing them with 
 their own eyes he finds in the vilest reasons for 
 loving them and for making us feel the chain 
 of brotherhood which unites us to all. 19 By 
 love he penetrates to the roots of life. 
 
 But this union is a difficult one to main- 
 
 " 'Yes, love ! . . . Not selfish love, but love as I 
 knew it, for the first time in my life, when I saw my 
 enemy dying at my side, and loved him. . . . It is 
 the very essence of the soul. To love his neighbour, to 
 love his enemies, to love all and each, is to love God in 
 all His manifestations! . . . To love a creature who 
 is dear to us is human love: to love an enemy is almost 
 divine love!' " (Prince Andrei in War and Peace.) 
 
 19 "The passionate love of the artist for his subject is 
 the soul of art. Without love no work of art is possi- 
 ble." (Letter of September, 1889.) 
 
CONCLUSION 317 
 
 tain. There are hours in which the spectacle 
 of life and its suffering are so bitter that they 
 appear an affront to love, and in order to save 
 it, and to save his faith, a man must withdraw 
 to such a height above the world that faith 
 is in danger of losing truth as well. What 
 shall he do, moreover, who has received at 
 the hands of fate the fatal, magnificent gift 
 of seeing the truth — the gift of being unable 
 to escape from seeing it? Who shall say what 
 Tolstoy suffered from the continual discord 
 of his latter years — the discord between his 
 unpitying vision, which saw the horror of 
 reality, and his impassioned heart, which con- 
 tinued to expect love and to affirm it? 
 
 We have all known these tragic conflicts. 
 How often have we had to face the alter- 
 native — not to see, or to hate ! And how often 
 does an artist — an artist worthy of the name, 
 a writer who knows the terrible, magnificent 
 power of the written word — feel himself 
 weighed down by anguish as he writes the 
 truth! 20 This truth, sane and virile, neces- 
 sary in the midst of modern lies, this vital 
 
 20 " I write books, which is why I know all the evil they 
 
318 TOLSTOY 
 
 truth seems to him as the air we breathe. 
 . . . But then we perceive that this air is 
 more than the lungs of many can bear. It 
 is too strong for the many beings enfeebled 
 by civilisation; too strong for those who are 
 weak simply in the kindness of their hearts. 
 Are we to take no account of this, and plunge 
 them implacably into the truth that kills 
 them? Is there not above all a truth which, 
 as Tolstoy says, "is open to love"? Or is the 
 artist to soothe mankind with consoling lies, 
 as Peer Gynt, with his tales, soothes his old 
 dying mother? Society is always face to face 
 with this dilemma; the truth, or love. It re- 
 solves it in general by sacrificing both. 
 
 Tolstoy has never betrayed either of his two 
 faiths. In the works of his maturity love is 
 the torch of truth. In the works of his later 
 years it is a light shining on high, a ray of 
 mercy which falls upon life, but does not 
 mingle with it. We have seen this in Resur- 
 rection, wherein faith dominates the reality, 
 but remains external to it. The people, 
 
 do." . . . (Letter to P. V. Veriguin, leader of the 
 Doukhobors, 1898. Further Letters.) 
 
CONCLUSION 319 
 
 whom Tolstoy depicts as commonplace and 
 mean when he regards the isolated figures that 
 compose it, takes on a divine sanctity so soon 
 as he considers it in the abstract. 21 
 
 In his everyday life appears the same dis- 
 cord as in his art, but the contrast is even 
 more cruel. It was in vain that he knew what 
 love required of him; he acted otherwise; he 
 lived not according to God but according to 
 the world. And love itself: how was he to 
 behave with regard to love? How distin- 
 guish betweea its many aspects, its con- 
 tradictory orders? Was love of family to 
 come first, or love of all humanity? To his 
 last day he was perplexed by these alter- 
 natives. 
 
 What was the solution? He did not find 
 it. Let us leave the self-sufficient, the coldly 
 intellectual, to judge him with disdain. 
 
 21 See A Russian Proprietor, or see in Confessions, the 
 strongly idealised view of these men, simple, good, con- 
 tent with their lot, living serenely and having the sense 
 of life: or, at the end of the second part of Resurrection, 
 that vision "of a new humanity, a new world," which ap- 
 peared to Nekhludov when he met the workers return- 
 ing from their toil. 
 
320 TOLSTOY 
 
 They, to be sure, have found the truth; they 
 hold it with assurance. For them, Tolstoy 
 was a sentimentalist, a weakling, who could 
 only be of use as a warning. Certainly he is 
 not an example that they can follow: they 
 are not sufficiently alive. Tolstoy did not be- 
 long to the self-satisfied elect; he was of no 
 Church; of no sect; he was no more a Scribe, 
 to borrow his terms, than a Pharisee of this 
 faith or that. He was the highest type of 
 the free Christian, who strives all his life long 
 towards an ideal that is always more re- 
 mote. 22 
 
 Tolstoy does not speak to the privileged, 
 the enfranchised of the world of thought; he 
 speaks to ordinary men — hominibus bonae 
 voluntatis. He is our conscience. He says 
 what we all think, we average people, and 
 
 22 "A Christian should not think whether he is morally- 
 superior or inferior to others; but he is the better Chris- 
 tian as he travels more rapidly along the road to perfec- 
 tion, whatever may be his position upon it at any 
 particular moment. Thus the stationary virtue of the 
 Pharisee is less Christian than that of the thief, whose 
 soul is moving rapidly towards the ideal, and who re- 
 pents upon his cross." {Cruel Pleasures.) 
 
CONCLUSION S21 
 
 what we all fear to read in ourselves. He 
 is not a master full of pride: one of those 
 haughty geniuses who are throned above hu- 
 manity upon their art and their intelligence. 
 He is — as he loved to style himself in his 
 letters, by that most beautiful of titles, the 
 most pleasant of all — "our brother." 
 
 THE END 
 
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