YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cloven J&00. THE LIFE OF TOLSTOY LATER YEARS BY AYLMER MAUDE NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1910 PREFACE With reference to the statement of Tolstoy's religious views in Chapter II of this volume, he writes me': ' I have just read your presentation of my religious views, and have found it quite good. Here and there I have pencilled remarks on it. It is for you to decide whether you agree with these remarks and accept them ' [they have all been adopted]. ' For my own part, I repeat that the presentation of the whole is very good, and I heartily thank you for it.' His approval relates only to my statement of his views, for I did not trouble him with my own, and naturally he is in no way answerable for them. Throughout the work I have aimed at explaining Tolstoy's views clearly and sympathetically, and have been more anxious to throw light on what seems to me true and valu able in them, than to enlarge on what seems defective ; but when necessary I have not shrunk from frankly expressing dissent ; and in so doing I have but trodden in his footsteps, for he is the frankest and sincerest of writers, and never forgets the duty an author owes to his readers. That is one of the characteristics that have greatly endeared him to many among us. In the course of the work I quote several commendations from Tolstoy, and more than one reproof ; and it is only fair that I should, here add another of the latter, which reaches me while the last chapters are being printed. Tolstoy is a2 vi LEO TOLSTOY not sensitive on his own account, but he is so on account of the man who for many years pasb has been his chief friend and assistant, and he writes me: 'I very much regret your unkindly attitude towards Tchertkdf, as such an attitude is unnatural and incorrect in a biographer, and must mislead the reader.1 I have expunged from the last chapter the particular sentence which provoked that reproof, and I think Tolstoy's remark will amply counterbalance any bias unfavourable to his friend that may appear in the few pages of my book in which he is mentioned. Being thus amply warned, the reader will, I hope, be able to allow for that ' personal equation' which — in books as in astronomy — cannot be altogether eliminated. AYLMER MAUDE. Great Baddow, Chelmsford, England, i$th August 1910. NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES The spelling of Russian names in Latin letters in a work of this kind, presents great difficulties. To begin with, we have as yet (though it is much needed) no accepted method of transliteration from Russian into English ; and though it is not difficult for any one to frame or select their own system of transliteration — as I have done for my translations — this does not entirely meet the case when one has to deal with the names of people, many of whom have adopted a spelling of their own. On the one hand, a man has a right to decide how he will have his own name spelt ; but on the other hand, the inclusion of a dozen different systems of transliteration in one book, is apt to create confusion. I have had to do the best I could under the circum stances. To pronounce the names correctly, in accord with the system of transliteration I have adopted, the reader should note the following : I. Lay stress on the syllable marked with an accent. II. Vowel sounds are broad and open : a as in father. c as a in fate. But e initial and unaccented is pronounced ye. i as ee in meet. o as in loch. u as you. viii LEO TOLSTOY In diphthongs the broad sounds are retained: ou as oo in boot. ya as in yard. ye as in yes. yo as in yove. ay as eye. ey as in 'Cb.ey. oy as in hoy. III. y with a vowel forms a diphthong ; y at the end of a word, after a consonant, sounds something like ie in hygiene. V. Consonants : G is hard, as in go. Zh is like z in azure. R is sounded strongly, as in rough, barren. S is sharp, as in seat, -pass. Where I know of a spelling deliberately adopted by the owner of a name, I have felt bound to follow it. For instance, the name which under my system of translitera tion I should have spelt ' Suhotin,' appears in the book as Soohoteen, but in such cases, on the first occasion on which the name occurs, I have given my usual transliteration in square brackets. I hope the day is not distant when some system will be generally agreed upon in this matter. Any system would be better than the present anarchy. CONTENTS PREFACE V NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES . . vii CHAP. i. The Transition Stage 1 ii. Theology and the Gospels 25 hi. Letter to the Tsar 64 iv. Riches and Poverty 100 v. Renunciations 150 vi. The New Life 205 vii. What Then Must We Do ? 238 vm. A Strenuous Year 284. - ix. Effects of the Teaching . 319 x. Non-Resistance 349 xi. The Sex Question . 380 xii. The Famine 415 xiii. Patriotism 452 xiv. The Doukhob6rs . 491 xv. Excommunication . 536 xvi. Conclusion 584 chronology 653 list of writings 658 appendix I . 666 appendix II 673 APPENDIX III 676 INDEX 681 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Tolstoy in 1906, .... Frontispiece Facing page Gay's Portrait of Tolstoy, Moscow, 1884, . . 191 Countess Tatiana L. Tolstoy, by Gay, 1885, 234 Repin's Portrait of Tolstoy, 1887, . . . 337 Countess Mary L. Tolstoy, by Gay, 1890, . . 407 Tolstoy in his Room at Yasnaya Polyana; painted by Repin, 1890, .... 408 'What is Truth?' painted by Gay, 1890, . . 410 Countess S. A. Tolstoy, 1908, . . 636 CHAPTER I THE TRANSITION STAGE Change of outlook. Writings. [1878] Renan's Life of Jesus. Recommences Diary. Letter to Countess. V. I. Alexeyef and Orthodoxy. [1879] Strain on health. Letters to Fet. Talks with pilgrims. Slavophilism. Visits Kief. Fasting. Anti-Church writings. Skobelef and Verestchagin. War and Peace in French. [1880] The Poushkin Celebration. Tourgenef at Yasnaya. Prince L. D. Ourousof. Prose Poems. Dostoyevsky. Tourgenef, and Tolstoy's new views. Religious works unpublishable. Helps peasants. Having reached a fresh understanding of life, Tolstoy felt, he tells us, as though while walking from home he had suddenly understood that the errand he had started upon was unnecessary, and had turned back. All that had formerly been on his right hand now appeared on his left, and all that had been on his left was now on his right. What he had desired : honour, riches, and self-aggrandise ment — now seemed evil ; while poverty, humility, self- sacrifice and the service of others seemed good. Those who have followed his earlier career will find it hard to detect the external signs of so great and sudden a change. The stories and novels he had previously written foreshadowed the views he now preached ; and his work in the schools at Yasnaya had pointed practically in the same direction. No sudden break was apparent in his external life : what followed, evolved from what had gone before ; so that it seems less natural to speak of his 2 LEO TOLSTOY crossing the Rubicon, than of his gradual ascent of a mountain. His works, however, clearly indicate that at this time a profound change occurred. His stories written before his Confession are works of observation. He had watched life, and seen the workings of his own mind with marvel lous clearness, and remembered it all to the smallest details with extraordinary accuracy. Those earlier stories almost always centred in himself. Nikdlenka Irtenef in Youth; Nehliidof in A Squire's Morning, A Billiard Marker's Memoirs, and Lucerne ; Olenin in The Cossacks ; Pierre (and to some extent Prince Andrey) in War and Peace, as well as Levin in Anna Karenina, were all to a large extent Tolstoy himself. He had not felt sufficiently sure about things, nor had he possessed any sufficiently clear chart of life, to abandon the coast-lines familiar to him and steer right out into the ocean. But after he had found or framed his religion and drawn his map of life — after what we may call his Conversion — he wrote differently. Much of his work then became professedly didactic, and was merely incidentally artistic ; and even the stories, novels, and plays he produced, from Ivan Ilyitch to Resur rection, differed from his previous ones. They were no longer self-centred works of observation, but rather experi mental studies illustrating the operation of certain moral forces. He lost none of his artistic power of causing his readers to share his feelings, his technical cunning remained undiminished, and his work was always marvellously true to life— but its centre of gravity had shifted. This change does not yet show itself in the fragments of The Decembrists, which he wrote a little before 1878 (his second and third attempts at that abortive novel) nor in the fragmentary First Recollections, from which I have quoted freely, and which was written about this time. His Confession, written at about this time, was not finally completed till later ; but as it narrates his mental TRANSITION 3 struggles, in the years 1874-78, I have already dealt with it when writing of those years. In the spring of 1878 Tolstoy read Renan's Life of Jesus, and what he wrote about it to his friend N. N. Strahof, who had given him the book, throws light upon his own attitude towards the study that was to be his chief occupation during the next few years : To-day I fasted, and read the Gospels and Renan's Life of Jesus. I read it through, and wondered at you [who admired it] all the time I was reading. ... If Renan has any thoughts of his own, they are the two following: (1) that Christ did not know V evolution et le progres, and in this respect Renan tries to correct him, and criticises him from the height of that concep tion. . . . But if Christian truth is high and deep, it is so only because it is subjectively absolute. . . . (2) Renan's other new thought is that as Christian teaching exists, there must have been a man of some kind behind it, and this man certainly sweated and obeyed nature's calls. For us, all human, demean ing, realistic details have vanished from the life of Jesus, for the same reason that all details about all Jews and others who ever lived have vanished, as all vanishes that is not eternal. In other words, the sand that was not wanted has been washed away by an unalterable law, and the gold has remained. One would think the only thing, therefore, was to accept the gold. But no ! Renan says. If there is gold, there must have been sand ; and he tries to rediscover the sand ; and does it all with an air of profundity ! But what would be yet more amusing, were it not so horribly stupid, is that he does not even find any sand, but only declares that it must have been there. I read it all, and searched long, and asked myself: Well, what new thing have you learnt from these historical details ? . . . And if you recall them, you will confess that you learnt nothing, simply nothing. ... It may be that to know a plant, one has to know its surroundings ; or even that to know man as a political animal, one must know his surroundings and growth and development ; but to understand beauty, truth and good ness, no study of surroundings will help, or has anything in 4 LEO TOLSTOY common with the matter under consideration. In the one case, things go along a level ; in the other, they go in quite a different direction : up and down. Moral truth may and can be studied, nor is there any end to its study ; but as carried on by religious people it goes deep, while this study of Renan s is merely a childish, trivial and mean prank. In other words, Tolstoy considered that in the Gospels we can find absolute truth ; and that to understand them it is not necessary to undertake any minute study of the conditions of time and place in which Jesus lived. We shall see, later on, how this view affected his own work. That summer he again began to keep a Diary, after having discontinued it for nearly thirteen years ; and the very first entry, on 22nd May 1878, relates to the religious questions that now filled his mind. I went to Mass on Sunday, and could find a meaning that satisfied me in the whole service, except that ' vanquish his enemies ' is blasphemy. A Christian should pray for his enemies, not against them. On 5th June follows an entry which reveals the closeness of his observation of Nature : A hot midday. 2 o'clock. I walk in the rich, high meadow- grass. Quiet, and sweet and strong scent of St. John's Wort and clover surrounds me and intoxicates. In the strath, towards the wood, the grass is yet higher, and the same intoxication reigns; the paths in the wood smell like a con servatory. Immense plane leaves. By the cut timber, a bee gathers honey from one after another of a cluster of yellow flowers. From the thirteenth, humming, it flies away, full. That day Tolstoy caught a bad cold, and was ill for a week. Then he went to Samara, taking the elder children with him. The Countess, with the younger ones, joined him there somewhat later in the summer. In a letter written while going down the Volga, he says : TRANSITION 5 I am again writing on board the same steamer. The children are well and asleep, and have been good. It is ten o'clock at night, and to-morrow at four, all being well, we shall be at Samara, and shall reach the farm by evening. To-day has again passed quietly, peacefully, and pleasantly. I was inter ested in a talk with some Priestless Old Believers from Vyatsk Government : peasants and tradesmen ; very simple, wise, decent, and serious folk. We had an excellent talk about Faith. Further light is thrown on his transitional state of mind by an account given by V. I. Alexeyef to P. I. Birukdf of his first acquaintance with Tolstoy : I was literally starving. Through some acquaintances, a place as tutor at Count Tolstoy's was offered me. I was so frightened by the Count's title, that at first I declined. But they persuaded me ; and I set out for Yasnaya Polyana and settled in a peasant's hut in the village, and used to go to Leo Nikolayevitch's 1 house to give lessons. Subsequently I moved into a wing close to his own house. From the very first his affability overcame all my fears, and very friendly relations were established between us. Leo Nikolayevitch was then still sincerely Orthodox. I myself was at that time an atheist, and also frank and sincere about it. It seemed to me that one chief motive of his Orthodoxy was his fondness for the peasants, and his wish to share in the life of the people, to study it, to under stand it, and to help it. Nevertheless, when talking to him, I frequently expressed surprise that with his culture, intellect and sincerity, he could go to church, pray, and observe the Church rites. I remember a conversation one clear and frosty day in the sitting-room of his house at Yasnaya. He was sitting opposite a window which through its frosty tracery admitted the slanting rays of the setting sun. After hearing me, he remarked : ' Look now at that tracery lit up by the sun. We only see the sun's reflection in it, but yet we know that beyond it, somewhere afar, is the real sun, the source of light that pro duces the picture we see. The people see that reflection in 1 This use of Christian name and patronymic (instead of surname) is the usual and polite Russian fashion. 6 LEO TOLSTOY religion ; but I look further, and see— or at least know— that there is the very source of light. That difference in our relation to the facts does not prevent our communion ; we both look at this reflection of the sun; only our reason penetrates it to different depths.' I noticed, however, that from time to time a dissatisfied feeling crept into his soul. Once on returning from church he said to me : ' No, I can't do it ! It oppresses me. I stand among them, and hear their fingers tap against their sheep skin coats as they make the sign of the cross ; and at the very same time I hear them, both men and women, whispering about the most everyday affairs, that have no connection with the service. Their talk on village matters, and the women's gossip, whispered to one another at the most solemn moments of the service, show that their relation to it is one of complete unconsciousness.' Of course I treated with all possible delicacy the process going on in him, and only expressed my opinions frankly when he questioned me. Sometimes we started a conversation on economic and social themes. I had a copy of the Gospels, left from the days of my Socialist propaganda among the people. Passages relating to social questions were underlined in it, and I often pointed these out to Leo Nikolayevitch. The work constantly going on within him gave him no peace, and at last brought on a crisis. We have mention of the days when Tolstoy was approaching this crisis and writing his Confession, in a letter from his wife to her sister Tatiana Kouzminsky : 8 November 1878. — Lyovotchka has now quite settled down to his writing. His eyes are fixed and strange, he hardly talks at all, has quite ceased to belong to this world, and is positively incapable of thinking about everyday matters. Many indications are given in other letters of the fact that the strain of mental and spiritual effort was affecting his health. For instance, on 1 6th Feb ruary he wrote to Fet : TRANSITION 7 I am still poorly, dear Afanasy Afanasyevitch, and so did not at once reply to your letter with the excellent poem. This one is quite beautiful. Should it ever be broken and fall to ruins, and only the fragment 7*00 many Tears be found, people will place that in a museum and use it as a model. I am neither ill nor well, but the mental and spiritual vigour I need are absent. Not as in your case ! The tree is dry ! On 5 th March the Countess wrote to her sister : Ly6votchka reads, reads, reads . . . writes very little, but sometimes says : ' Now it is clearing up,' or, ' Ah, God willing, what I am going to write will be very important ! ' On 17th April he wrote again to Fet : There is a prayer which says : ' Not according to our merits, but according to Thy mercy.' So, I to you. I have received your long and good letter. I will certainly, and soon, go to Kief and come to Vorobyevka [Fet's place] and will then tell you everything ; for the present I will only reply to your fears. Heaven knows where my Decembrists now are. I do not think about them, and were I to do so and to write, I flatter myself that my breath alone, of which they would smell, would be unendurable to those who shoot men for the good of humanity. . . . But I should mention that, even now [the war with Turkey was just over] I conscientiously abstain from read ing the newspapers, and consider it a duty to wean every one from that pernicious practice. . . . An elderly and good man sits in Vorobyevka, and after melting two or three pages of Schopenhauer in his brain and pouring them out again in Russian, he plays a game of billiards, shoots some woodcock, admires the colts out of Zakrasa [a mare], and sits with his wife drinking excellent tea, smoking a cigar, loving every one and loved by all ; when suddenly a stinking, damp sheet of paper is brought, nasty to handle and harmful to the eyes, and it at once evokes in his heart angry condemnation and a feel ing of estrangement : the feeling that ' I love nobody and nobody loves me,' and then he begins to talk and talk, and gets angry and suffers. One should chuck it ! Then things would go much better. 8 LEO TOLSTOY On 25th May he wrote apologising for having post poned his promised visit to Fet. The delay he says was caused by the boys' examinations : . . . Another cause has been the beautiful spring. It is long since I so enjoyed God's world as I have done this year. One stands open-mouthed, delighting in it and fearing to move lest one should miss anything. ... My wife has gone to Toula with the children, and I am reading good books, and shall presently go for a three- or four-hours' walk. In June he at last set out for Kief, which with its great catacomb-Monastery is one of the chief places, of pilgrimage in Russia. Thousands flock there every year seeking spiritual nourishment. Of Tolstoy's interest in such pilgrims we get a glimpse in a letter from Strahof to Danilevsky, the writer, which also shows that Tolstoy had by that time shaken off his indisposition : I found Tolstoy in excellent spirits this time. With what vivacity he is carried away by his ideas ! Only young people seek truth as ardently as he ; and I can say positively that he is now in the very bloom of his strength. He has abandoned all his plans and is writing nothing, but works tremendously. One day he took me with him and showed me one of the things that occupy him. He walks to the high-road (a quarter- of-a-mile from his house), and there at once finds men and women pilgrims. With them he starts conversation, and if he chances upon good specimens and is himself in good form, he hears wonderful tales. About a mile-and-a-half away, lies a small hamlet in which are two rest-houses for pilgrims (main tained not for profit, but for soul-saving) [that is, for the good of the soul of the endower]. We entered one of them. Some eight people were there — old men and women — doing what ever they liked ; supping, praying, or resting. There is always some one talking, narrating, or explaining, and it is very interesting to listen. Besides the religious side, to which he is much devoted (he observes the fasts and goes to church on Sundays) Tolstoy is also concerned with the language. He TRANSITION 9 has come to appreciate the beauty of our folk-language wonder fully. Every day he discovers new words and expressions, and every day he more and more denounces our literary language, calling it not Russian but Spanish. All this, I am convinced^, will yield rich fruit. . . . The chief theme of Tolstoy's thoughts, if I am not mistaken, is the contrast between old Russia and new Europeanised Russia. He repeats as new, much that was said by the Slavo phils, but he will experience it and understand it all as no one else has done. Some one will no doubt some day write an essay on the influence of the Slavophils on Tolstoy's thought. They and he alike regard Russia as superior to, and more truly Christian than, the rest of the world, and conclude that she should therefore not follow in the footsteps of Western constitutionalism. Tolstoy's feeling, that to remedy life's ills men should forgive and endure, but should not rule, and that the more they can escape the responsibility and guilt of ruling, the better it will be, as also his ardent endeavour at this period to unite with the Orthodox Russian Church, were all in accord with Slavophil doctrines. It is true it was not long before Orthodoxy became in tolerable to him, but no one who studies the matter can help seeing how deeply and permanently his trend of thought has been tinged by Slavophil ideas and feelings. His genius for attractive expression has made the Western world aware of these ideas ; but even his genius has not enabled us to assimilate them. If they be really sound, it is the fate of the Western world still to sit in darkness. His journey to Kief was not a success. In a letter to his wife from thence he writes, on 1 4th June : All morning, till 3 o'clock, I went about among the churches catacombs and monks, and am very dissatisfied with my expedition. It was not worth coming. At 7 o'clock I went to the Monastery to see Anthony, the Skimnik [a monk of the strictest Order] and got little from him that was of any use. 10 LEO TOLSTOY Tolstoy was equally disappointed next day, and did not remain long in the holy city ; which now bears the reputa tion of being one of the most dissolute in Europe. On his road home he paid his promised visit to Fet, and after reaching Yasnaya, wrote him, on 13th July : Do not be vexed with me, dear Afanasy Afanasyevitch, for not writing to thank you for the pleasant day I spent at your place, and for not answering your last letter. It is pro bably true that I was out of spirits while with you (forgive me for it) and I am still not in good spirits. I am ever capricious, tormenting myself, troubled, correcting myself, and learning ; and I wonder whether, like V. P. Botkin, I shall not ' fill up a gap ' and then die [Botkin, conscious of a gap in his erudition, read up the history of India just before his death]; but still I cannot refrain from turning myself inside out. We still have measles in the house. It has picked out half the children already, and we are expecting the rest to take it. On 28th July he wrote again : Thank you for your last kind letter, dear Afanasy Afanasye vitch, and for the apologue about the hawk, which pleases me, but which I should like more fully explained. . If I am that hawk, and if, as indicated by what follows, my too distant flights mean that I reject real life, then I must justify myself. I reject neither real life, nor the labour necessary for its maintenance ; but it seems to me that the greater part of my life and yours is taken up with satisfying not our natural wants, but wants invented by us, or artificially inoculated by our education, and that have become habitual to us ; and that nine-tenths of the work we devote to satisfying those demands, is idle work. I should very much like to be firmly convinced that I give people more than I take from them ; but as I feel myself much disposed to value my own work high and other people's work low, I do not hope by simply intensifying my labour and choosing what is most difficult, to assure myself that their account with me does not land them in a loss (I am sure to tell myself that the work I like, is the most necessary and difficult). Therefore I wish to take as little from others as TRANSITION 11 possible, and to work as much as possible for the satisfaction of my own needs ; and I think that is the easiest way to avoid making a mistake. The next letter, of 31st August 1879, was less argumentative : Dear Afanasy Afanasyevitch, — Of course I am again to blame towards you, but of course, not from lack of love for you or remembrance of you. Strahof and I had, in fact, been talking about you, and judging and disposing of you as we all judge of one another, and as God grant others may judge of me. Strahof was highly pleased with his visit to you, and yet more so with your translation [of Schopenhauer]. I have successfully recommended to you The Arabian Nights and Pascal ; the one and the other, I will not say pleased, but suited you. I now have a book to offer you which no one has yet read, and which I read the other day for the first time; and continue to read with exclamations of delight. I hope it will be to your taste, especially as it has much in common with Schopenhauer : it is the Proverbs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Wisdom. It would be difficult to find anything more modern ; but if you read it, read it in Slavonic. I have a new Russian translation which is very bad. The English version is also bad. If you had the Greek, you would see what it is like. . . . Since Strahof' s visit, we have had guests one after the other : private theatricals, and all the devils let loose. Thirty-four sheets in use for the guests, and thirty people at dinner, and all went off well, and all — including myself — were gay. The following brief notes occur in his Diary, dated 28th October : There are worldly people, heavy and wingless. Their sphere is down below. There are among them strong ones : Napoleon. They leave terrible traces among men, and cause an uproar, but it is all on the earth. There are those whose wings grow equably, and who slowly rise and fly : monks. There are light people, winged, who rise easily from among the crowd and again descend : good idealists. There are strong-winged ones, 12 LEO TOLSTOY who, drawn by carnal desires, descend among the crowd and break their wings. Such am I. Then they struggle with broken wings, flutter strongly, and fall. If my wings heal, I will fly high. God grant it. . . ! There are those who have heavenly /wings, and purposely —from love to men— descend to earth (folding their wings) and teach men to fly. When they are no more needed, they fly away : Christ. During this period of storm and stress in Tolstoy's soul, one comes again and again on signs of change and growth and altered habits. Up to this time he had submitted to the Church ; and even when his doctor advised him, on grounds of health, not to observe the Fasts, instead of deciding the matter for himself, he went to the Troitsa Monastery of St. Sergius (forty-four miles north of Moscow) to consult, and obtain the consent of, the famous monk, Leonid. A little later, the Church's hold on him had so weakened that he entirely abandoned fasting. V. I. Alexeyef tells the story as follows : The Countess, like her husband, observed the Fasts, and made the children do so. When she noticed that her husband was wavering, she increased the strictness of the Fast so that every one in the house fasted except the French tutor, M. Nief, and myself. I told the Countess that though I did not fast, I could eat anything that was served up ; but she always ordered meat to be cooked for us two tutors. And so, one day, fast-food was handed to every one else, and some nice cutlets were served for us. We helped ourselves, and the footman left the dish on the window-sill. Then Leo Nikolayevitch, turning to his son, said : ' Iliisha [Ilya, the second son], give me a cutlet.' The lad brought it, and Leo Nikolayevitch ate the meat with a good appetite, and gave up fasting from that day forth. Before the end of the year, Tolstoy had definitely concluded that it was impossible to reconcile the demands of the Church with the demands of his own reason and conscience. TRANSITION 13 In November the Countess wrote to her sister : Ly6votchka is always at work, as he expresses it ; but alas ! he is writing some sort of religious discussion. He reads and thinks till his head aches, and all to show how incompatible the Church is with the teaching of the Gospel. Hardly ten people in Russia will be interested in it ; but there is nothing to be done. I only wish he would get it done quicker, and that it would pass like an illness ! No one on earth can control him or impose this or that mental work upon him : it is not even in his own power to do so. His wife's letters give us a glimpse of the trouble sure to occur from the close union of two people of strong individuality, one of whom changed his outlook on life, and wished to change his way of life accordingly. I once knew a lady who said that no man should change his opinions after he was married ! The Countess Tolstoy must often have felt inclined to say something like that, when she saw her husband consumed by a fervent devotion to conclusions not her own, and to which, since they went on continually evolving and developing, it was all the more impossible for her to adjust herself. She gave birth to a tenth child on 20th December 1879 : a boy who was christened Michael. As three had died in infancy, there were now seven children in the family. It has been mentioned that after their marriage the Tolstoys had not many visitors, except relations ; but with the growth of the younger generation this altered, and Yasnaya Polyana began to swarm with young people. Tolstoy's change of outlook on life also made him more accessible to all sorts and conditions of men, though it caused him to reject some acquaintances whom almost any one else would have been glad to know. Prince D. Obolensky has recounted that Tolstoy allowed him to introduce friends without obtaining special per mission to do so each time. On one occasion, however, 14 LEO TOLSTOY to Obolensky's dismay, Tolstoy definitely avoided an intro duction he was anxious to give, and this in reference to General Skdbelef — then at the very height of his fame after the Turkish War and the capture of Plevna. A similar case occurred somewhat later, when Tolstoy refused the acquaintance of the painter, V. V. Verestchagin. Light is thrown on his feelings towards these men by his references to them in the Preface to Sevastopol.1 The passage in Verestchagin's Memoirs where that artist mentions persuading General Stroukof to hasten the hang ing of two Turks, that he might sketch the execution, aroused Tolstoy's profoundest indignation, criminals though the victims doubtless were. In December, Tolstoy received a letter from Tourgenef, who wrote from Paris : The Princess Paskevitch, who has translated your War and Peace, has at last sent 500 copies here, of which I have received ten. I have given them to the most influential critics (Taine and About, among others). . . . The translation is somewhat feeble, but has been done with zeal and love. A couple of days ago I read, for the fifth or sixth time, with real pleasure, that truly great production of yours. Tolstoy was by this time so absorbed in other concerns that the fate of the French translation of his great novel seems to have interested him less than it did Tourgenef; indeed it never was Tolstoy's way to trouble himself much about the fate of his books after they had once left his hands. Tourgenef, an ardent admirer of Poiishkin, returned to Russia in 1880, to take part in the celebration of the eightieth anniversary of that poet's birth. Aware of Tolstoy's dislike of jubilees and public celebrations, the 1 Strictly speaking, it is a Preface to Ershof's Recollections of Sevastopol, but it has been used in English as a Preface to the edition of Tolstoy's Sevastopol, issued by Constable in London, and Funk and Wagnall in New York. TRANSITION 15 committee requested Tourgenef to use his personal in fluence to persuade Tolstoy to be present at the unveiling of the Poushkin Monument in Moscow ; and with this purpose Tourgenef visited Yasnaya the week after Easter. He was very cordially received. A woodcock- shooting expedition was arranged in his honour in the woods near by. In the dusk of the spring evening the Countess stood beside him awaiting the flight of the birds. While he was getting his gun ready, she asked him : ' Why have you not written anything for so long ? ' Tourgenef glanced round, and in his touchingly frank way, with a guilty smile, said : ' Are we out of hearing ? Well, I will tell you. . . . Every time I planned anything, I was shaken by the fever of love ! Now that is all over : I am old, and can no longer either love or write.' To Tolstoy, also, Tourgenef spoke of the change that had come over him — him to whom love-affairs had formed so large a part of the joy of life. ' I had an affair the other day,' said he, ' and, will you believe it ? I found it dull ! ' ' Ah,' exclaimed Tolstoy, ' if only I were like that ! ' It was, indeed, a matter on which their views differed radically, and on which the younger man's struggle for self-mastery was still far from fully achieved. On returning to the house they found awaiting them Prince L. D. Ourousof, Vice-Governor of Toula, a cousin of Prince S. S. Ourousof previously mentioned. He was one of Tolstoy's most intimate friends and shared his outlook on life. Tourgenef, too, was glad to see Ourousof, though the two seldom met without a strenuous dispute. Tolstoy's profoundly artistic nature has again and again caused him to long to turn, and sometimes actually to turn, from didactic or philosophic work to the creation of works of art ; and a little before this, he had hit on the idea of writing short prose-poems. Having composed one, he sent it, signed in the name of an old servant, to 16 LEO TOLSTOY Aksakof's paper, Rous. The MS. came back declined with thanks, on the ground that its author was ' not yet sufficiently expert in expression ! ' Resigning himself to his failure, Tolstoy passed on the idea to Tourgenef, and to it we owe the latter's Poems in Prose. One of these, The Dog, he had brought with him, and after the shooting-party had returned to the house, he read it aloud. Its attitude towards death, and to man and dog, were not in tune with Tolstoy's or Ourousofs feelings ; and, the reading ended, an awkward pause ensued. Soon, however. Ourousof and Tourgenef were warmly discussing the need of a religious outlook on life. Tourgenef sat at the head of the table, Tolstoy at his right hand, and Ourousof at his left. The latter kept emphasising his remarks by vigorously pointing a forefinger at Tourgenef ; and gradually becoming increasingly animated, he balanced his chair more and more on its front legs till it suddenly slipped from under him and he sprawled on his back on the floor, continuing in that position to argue, until a general roar of laughter compelled him to pause. Hastily resuming his seat, he then continued his contention as though nothing had occurred. Next day Tourgenef and Tolstoy went for a walk together, and apparently Tourgenef took this oppor tunity to broach his mission. Tolstoy's admiration for Poushkin, whom he regards as the foremost of Russian writers, and the fact that this was the first time it had been permitted to pay public honour to the memory of a Russian man of letters, led Tourgenef to assume that his host would surely agree to take part in the Jubilee. But to Tolstoy, the feasting, the expense, the artificiality, and the fictitious enthusiasm accompanying such affairs, were profoundly repugnant, and he met the request with a definite refusal. The following passage from What is Art? written seventeen years later, explains his motives : TRANSITION 17 When fifty years had elapsed after Poiishkin' s death, and simultaneously the cheap edition of his works began to circulate among the people and a monument was erected to him in Moscow, I received more than a dozen letters from different peasants asking why Poiishkin was raised to such dignity ? And only the other day a man from Saratof called on me who had evidently gone out of his mind on this very question. He was on his way to Moscow to expose the clergy for having taken part in raising a ' monament ' to Mr. Poushkin. Indeed one need only imagine to oneself what the state of mind of such a man must be when he learns from such rumours and newspapers as reach him, that the clergy, the Government officials, and all the best people in Russia, are triumphantly unveiling a statue to a great man, the benefactor, the pride of Russia — Poushkin, of whom till then he had never heard. From all sides he reads or hears about this, and he naturally supposes that if such honours are rendered to any one, it must undoubtedly be to a man who has done something extraordinary — either some feat of strength or of goodness. He tries to learn who Poushkin was, and having discovered that Poushkin was neither a hero nor a general, but a private person and a writer, he comes to the conclusion that he must have been a saint and a teacher of goodness, and he hastens to read or hear his life and works. But what must be his perplexity when he learns that Poushkin was a man of more than easy morals, who was killed in a duel — that is, when attempting to murder another man — and that all his services consisted in writing verses about love, which were often very indecent. That a hero, or Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or Napoleon was great, he understands, for any one of them could have crushed him and a thousand like him ; that Buddha, Socrates, and Christ were great he also understands, for he knows and feels that he and all men should be like them ; but why a man should be great because he wrote verses about the love of women, he cannot make out. . . . And it is the same with children. I remember how I passed through this stage of amazement and stupefaction, and only reconciled myself to this exaltation of artists to the level of heroes and saints by lowering in my own estimation the 18. LEO TOLSTOY importance of moral excellence ; and by attributing a false, unnatural meaning to works of art. And a similar confusion must occur in the soul of each child and each man of the people, when he hears of the strange honours and rewards that are lavished on artists. We have no account of what passed between the two men that day, but the Countess has recorded that : The dinner-bell had sounded. All had assembled, but neither Tourgenef nor Leo Nikolayevitch appeared. At last, after long waiting, I guessed where to look for them. Not far from the house, in the wood among the old oaks, stood a small hut Leo Nikolayevitch had built for himself in order, in summer, to have solitude for his work and to escape from flies, children, and visitors. I ran to that hut, which was built on four pillars, and ascended the steps, and through the open door saw the two writers hotly disputing. No rupture of friendly relations occurred, but so great was Tourgenef's dismay at Tolstoy's uncompromising refusal, that when, shortly afterwards, Dostoyevsky — the third of the trio of great Russian novelists then living — wished to visit Yasnaya, and consulted Tourgenef on the matter, the latter spoke of Tolstoy's mood in such a way that Dostoyevsky abandoned his intention, and died a year later without having ever met Tolstoy, whose writings he had, from the first, so much admired, and to whose Anna Karenina he had publicly referred as the most palpable proof Russia could offer to the Western world of her capacity to contribute something great to the solution of the problems that oppress humanity. From this time onward Tourgenef, without ceasing to be interested in Tolstoy personally, and while continuing to praise him enthusiastically as a novelist, never missed an opportunity to express his distrust of, and regret con cerning, those new interests which were so profoundly stirring the depths of Tolstoy's nature, and were destined to move the minds of men in many lands far more pro- TRANSITION 19 foundly than his novels had ever done, but the power and importance of which the elder writer realised as little as a man suffering from colour-blindness realises the values in a picture. The same clash of feeling between those to whom Tolstoy's later work is important, and those to whom it is not, shows itself continually. Generally those who condemn it have shown, as Tourgenef did, a touch of contemptuous irritability, which suggests that at the back of their minds there lurks a suspicion that to consider the purpose of man's life is, after all, more important than to enjoy art's anaesthetics. To Poldnsky, Tourgenef wrote in December 1880 :' I am very sorry for Tolstoy. . . . However, as the French say, Chacun a sa manitre de tuer ses puces ' (Every one kills his fleas his own way). A few months later he wrote : It is an unpardonable sin that Leo Tolstoy has stopped writing — he is a man who could be extraordinarily useful, but what can one do with him ? He does not utter a word, and worse than that, he has plunged into mysticism. Such an artist, such first-class talent, we have never had, nor now have, among us. I, for instance, am considered an artist, but what am I worth compared to him ! In contemporary European literature he has no equal. Whatever he takes up, it all becomes alive under his pen. And how wide the sphere of his creative power — it is simply amazing ! Whether he describes a whole historic epoch, as in War and Peace, or a man of our day with high spiritual interests and aspirations, or simply a peasant with a purely Russian soul, he always remains a master. He depicts a lady of the higher circles, and she is lifelike ; and so is a semi-savage Circassian. Just see how he describes even an animal ! . . . how, for instance, he depicts the mental condition of a horse ! But what is one to do with him ? He has plunged headlong into another sphere : has surrounded himself with Bibles and Gospels in nearly all languages, and has written a whole heap of papers. He has a trunk full of these mystical ethics and of various pseudo- interpretations. He read me some of it, which I simply do 20 LEO TOLSTOY not understand. ... I told him, ' That was not the real thing'; but he replied : ' It is just the real thing.' . . . Very probably he will give nothing more to literature, or if he reappears, it will be with that trunk. . . . And he has followers : Garshin, for instance, is undoubtedly his follower. The mention in the above letter of Tolstoy's capacity to enter into the mind of a horse, recalls an event that occurred during one of Tourgenefs visits to Yasnaya. Coming on an old worn-out horse grazing in a field, Tolstoy went up to it and stroked it, and began to voice its thoughts and sad feelings so vividly and convincingly, that Tourgenef at last exclaimed : ' I am sure, Leo Nikolayevitch, you must once have been a horse yourself ! ' The remark at the end of Tolstoy's Confession, to the effect that he was setting to work to disentangle the truth from the falsehood he found in the Church teaching, and that this would form the next part of his work, * which if it be worth it, and if any one wants it, will probably some day be printed somewhere,' indicates the difficulty in which he now found himself with reference to the publication of his works. Books calling in question the bases of the Church faith had hardly a chance of getting published in Russia. A capricious Censor might now and then happen to pass one such work or some part of it ; but the whole business was dangerous and uncertain, and might easily involve all concerned not merely in material loss, but also in serious danger. Tolstoy was working primarily to clear matters up for himself. He never had been accustomed to trouble himself much about the fate of his writings, and in later life he has felt that that is not his business, and that his books will, one day or other, be sure to circulate. This faith has saved him much worry, and has enabled him to go on working under conditions in which another's hands would have dropped. For the present he put aside his practically completed TRANSITION 21 Confession, and proceeded to write A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, which was followed in turn by a voluminous Union and Translation of the Four Gospels, and a fourth book, What do I Believe ? (sometimes called My Religion) — the whole series occupying him for several years, almost to the exclusion of other work. All this involved a tremend ous concentration of effort, and was done with no possibility of pecuniary profit, no apparent chance of being allowed to publish in Russia, and without any definite plan for publication abroad. Were all other evidence lacking, this alone would suffice to prove both Tolstoy's sincerity and his sense of the overwhelming importance of the matters with which he was dealing. On 31st May 1 880, we find him again apologising to Fet : Before telling you how ashamed I am, and how I feel myself to blame towards you, let me first of all say that I am tremendously grateful to you, dear Afanasy Afanasyevitch, for your kind, excellent and, above all, wise letter. You had cause to be displeased with me, and instead of expressing the dis pleasure which might well exist, you have told me its cause good-naturedly, and above all, in such a way that I feel you still care for me. Your letter produced in me a feeling of softened emotion, and of shame at my slovenliness — nothing more. This is what happened, and these are my final impressions about our relation : You wrote to me, as usual. I, as usual, received your letter gladly, and — not as usual, but with even greater inaccuracy than befofe (in consequence of my specially intense pre occupation this year) — replied to your letter ; but towards spring I received from you another, which showed that you considered me to blame for something. My only — and not real — fault towards you, was that on reading that letter I did not at once, as I wished to, write asking you to explain why you were dissatisfied with me. Again my occupations are some small excuse, and I beg you to forgive me. ... In any case forgive me, and do not change towards me, as I shall not change towards you while we remain alive. I am very, very much 22 LEO TOLSTOY obliged to you for your letter. I now feel so comfortable, for I firmly hope to receive from you a nice note, and perhaps you will show that you have quite forgiven me, by coming to see us. My wife greets you; she felt as I did about you, only more strongly. On 8th July he writes again to the same correspondent : It is now summer and a charming summer, and as usual I go crazy with life and forget my work. This year I struggled long, but the beauty of the world conquered me. I enjoy life and do hardly anything else. Our house is full of visitors. The children have got up theatricals, and it is noisy and merry. I have with difficulty found a corner, and snatched a moment, to write you a word. . . . In August, Strahof, again visiting Yasnaya, wrote to Danilevsky : At Yasnaya Polyana, as always, most strenuous mental work is going on. ... I am carried away and subdued by it, so that it even oppresses me. Tolstoy, following his unalterable path, has reached a religious frame of mind, which partly found expression in the latter part of Anna Karenina. He has under stood the Christian ideal wonderfully. It is strange how we pass by the Gospels without seeing their simplest meaning. He is now engrossed in studying their text, and he has explained much in it with striking simplicity and acuteness. I greatly fear that from lack of practice in the exposition of abstract thought, and in writing prose 'generally [to Strahof, poetry includes fiction — the word being frequently so used in Russian], he will not succeed in expressing his arguments briefly and clearly, but the contents of the book he is composing are truly magnificent. While working so hard at his books, Tolstoy did not abstain from rendering practical help to the peasantry around him. Arboiizof, in his Recollections of his master, tells of an event that occurred in this year, 1880 : The peasants who had been serfs of a neighbouring landlord, Homyak6f, happened to discover that their former owner had appropriated 175 acres of land that properly belonged to the TRANSITION 23 village Commune. They applied to Tolstoy for assistance, and he took much trouble on their behalf, and eventually enabled them to recover the land. Wishing to show their gratitude, they reaped his hay and grain crops for him, intending not to charge anything for this service; but seeing that they had worked well, he paid them at more than the usual rate for the time they had given, and also treated them to a good dinner with plenty of v6dka. In another place Arbouzof recounts that Prince Ourousof used to come over to Yasnaya on Saturdays from Toiila. Once in midwinter the two friends went out for a walk with Tolstoy's three eldest sons. Before they had gone far, Tolstoy observed something black lying in the snow. On examination, it turned out to be a frozen man. The boys were sent home quickly to bid the coachman bring a carrier's sledge and a fur coat. Tolstoy and Ourousof wrapped the man in the fur coat, lifted him on to the sledge, and took him to the steward's house in the village. There they employed all possible means to restore him to life. They rubbed him, gave him spirits, and continued their exertions for hours, but without result. The Count had a coffin made, and a grave dug in the frozen ground, and hired a priest to read the burial service, and he and the Prince paid all the expenses. It was an immense advantage to the peasants of the district to have a man of education and influence to whom they could turn in time of trouble. Much of the help Tolstoy gave was of such an everyday nature that though it left its trace on the hearts and lives of those who received it, it is nowhere recorded, and now escapes our observation. It has always been his practice to listen to, and advise, those who come to consult him ; and some come every day. He has written for them innumerable petitions, state ments, and letters of introduction ; and no doubt his in veterate dislike of law and jurisprudence has largely grown from his experience of the extreme difficulty of obtaining 24 LEO TOLSTOY elementary justice for poor ignorant and oppressed peasants. There is much in Tolstoy's life at this period on which one would be glad to have more exact information : for instance, the non-publication of the books he wrote makes it uncertain just when some of them were completed. CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER I P. Birukof : Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy : Biografiya : Moscow, 1908 ; vol. ii. Fet : Moi Vospominaniya : Moscow, 1890. P. A. Sergeyenko, in Niva, No. 9 ; 1906 ; Petersburg. Arbouzof: GrafL. N. Tolstoy, Vospominaniya: Moscow, 1908. Ioe Sobranie pisem Tourgeneva : Petersburg, 1884. D. D. Obolensky, in 0 Tolstom : Moscow, 1909. Article by Countess S. A. Tolstoy, in Orlovsky Vestnik : 22nd August 1903 ; quoted by Birukof. Peterbourgsky Listok : 28th August 1908 (re Prose Poems). CHAPTER II THEOLOGY AND THE GOSPELS The Church and Religion. A Criticism of Dogmatic Ideology. How to Read the Gospels. A Summary of Tolstoy's view of religion. Christ's Five Commandments. Tolstoy's inter pretation. Darwinism prevalent. Tolstoy and the Ethical Movement. Old Testament Scriptures. Paul's Epistles. The Gospels. Future life. Spiritualism. Miracles. Feed ing the Five Thousand. Faith-cures. Oaths. Individualist versus Nationalist perception. Objection to Tolstoy's view. The value of definiteness. The ethical basis of the existing order. The value of Tolstoy's protest. The Four Gospels. Jesus and his teaching. Method of interpretation. Demagnetising the Gospels. Changing view of Christ. Manual labour and the Sermon on the Mount. Church and State. The Gospel in Brief. What do I Believe? Sexual fidelity. Patriotism. Tolstoy's superstitions. His moral indictment. Walter Bagehot. Prayer. The problem before Tolstoy was that of separating what is true from what is false in the teachings of the Church and in the Bible. He had learnt by experience that man needs guidance, and requires a chart of life to enable him to steer his course ; but he was too sincere to adopt a creed merely because he needed one, or to accept anything he saw no sufficient reason to believe. Other men have felt the need for religion as keenly as he, and not a few have shared his courage and truthfulness ; but he alone, in our time, combined this profoundly religious spirit and fear less truthfulness, with a genius for literary expression which secured for what he had to say the attention of the world. 25 26 LEO TOLSTOY Owing moreover to the personal risk he (in Russia) ran, his words became heroic deeds, causing the blood of those who heard them to flow faster in their veins. He first carefully examined the dogmas of the Orthodox Russian Church as stated in the Creeds, and in the Dogmatic Theology of Makarius, Metropolitan of Moscow. These, including as they do the doctrine of the Trinity, the miraculous birth of Christ, and the scheme of Redemp tion and Atonement, do not differ essentially from the dogmas of the Catholic or Protestant Churches. The conclusion Tolstoy slowly and reluctantly reached, was that they, and the whole theology in which they are embedded, are utterly false. The more he looked into the matter, the more shocked was he at the levity with which the Churches have accepted conclusions based on evidence which, he says, will not stand the simplest tests of logic. He found it difficult to understand why the theologians say such strange things, and why they support their assertions by arguments that insult human intelli gence. But he tells us that he gradually traced out the shallow verbal tricks by which their tenets are pieced together, and found himself driven to the conclusion that dogmatic theology is a fraud which endures only because it is screened from exposure by the authority of the Church ; and examining further what the Church itself is, he came to the conclusion that it is, ' Power in the hands of certain men.' Tolstoy charges the Church with lack of intellectual in tegrity ; and since the end of the 'seventies, when he finally discriminated between the Church dogmas and Christ's teaching, he has never ceased to regard the influ ence of the former as a terrible obstacle to man's moral progress, and to the spread of any right understanding of religion. He maintains that though many people credulously accept and repeat the Church dogmas, nobody really THEOLOGY 27 believes them, for they mean nothing at all, and a state ment must have a meaning before it can be believed. For instance, the statement that some one went up a hill and then rose up into heaven and sat down there, may have had a meaning when people lived on a flat earth with a burning hell down below, and a solid firmament up above ; but with our conception of astronomy, if a man began to rise from the top of a hill, there is nowhere for him to stop ! And if he tried to sit down, he would have nothing to sit on and would tumble back again. For people who believe in the solar system to say they believe in the Ascension, is merely to talk nonsense. Faith is a great virtue ; but to be faithful to a belief, you must have a belief ; and a real belief is not attain able by credulity (which is a vice) but by vigorous mental effort. Tolstoy's denunciations of the Church are, at times, as unstinted as those of the late Mr. Bradlaugh. In his Appeal to the Clergy, written in 1902 (Essays and Letters, p. 347) for instance, he says : Drive a wedge between the floor-boards of a granary, and no matter how much grain you pour in, it will not stay there. Just so a head into which the wedge has been driven of a Trinity, or of a God who became man and redeemed the human race by his sufferings and then flew up into the sky, can no longer grasp any reasonable or firm understanding of life. However much you may put into that granary, all will run out, and whatever you may put into a mind which has accepted nonsense as a matter of faith, nothing will remain in it. . . . It may be true, and I think it is true, that Tolstoy goes to an extreme in his denunciations of the Churches ; for if one hunts back carefully and sympathetically enough, one may discover that doctrines which will' not now stand the simplest tests of common-sense, meant something genuine to those who first formulated them ; and Churches have done good as well as evil. Had there been no 28 LEO TOLSTOY Churches or Monastic Orders, or Priests or Popes, it is doubtful whether the world would have been any better than it is. On the whole, the tendency of religious com munities, Church or Chapel, as long as they retain any vitality, is to keep people in moral touch with one another, and to make it easier for them to abstain from flagrant wrong-doing. Tolstoy, however, in his direct way, took theology at its own valuation, and asked whether in its plain, literal sense, as it is given to and accepted by children and ignorant people, it is really true. And having come to the conclusion that it is not, he denounced it as a fraud which it is the duty of every honest man to expose, and a disgrace for any decent man to trade in. Had his nature not been profoundly religious he might have stopped there, and contented himself, as Voltaire and Bradlaugh did, with ridiculing and denouncing the super stitions by which mankind are hoodwinked ; but being differently made, he hastened on to constructive work, and proclaimed the power and worth of the teaching of Jesus more ardently than he condemned the Church's teaching. His book, A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, was com pleted about the year 1880, but was only printed in 1891, when a Russian edition was issued at Geneva. It was carelessly edited and produced, and ultimately super seded by a better edition published by A. Tchertkdf at Christchurch, in 1903. This book is, probably, the least read of all Tolstoy's works. The only English translation is in Professor Wiener's edition, which I cannot commend. Those who are at the pains to read the original Russian, will, however, find that the attack on a Church directed by a Holy Synod controlled by Pobedondstsef and guarded by gendarmes, is a very remarkable and fervent piece of work, and deserves a larger circle of readers than it has had. In it, Tolstoy tells us that he came to see that, far THEOLOGY 29 from coinciding with Christ's teaching, the dogmas the Churches are concerned to enforce are expressly designed to divert men's minds from the things Jesus cared for and spoke most about. It is abundantly plain from the Gospels that he constantly spoke of love and pity, and of man's duty to man, and to that Father in heaven who sends the Spirit of Truth to be our Comforter ; but he never talked about the Fall of Adam, or the scheme of Redemption, or said that God was a Trinity, or asserted that God was his Father in any sense in which he may not be our Father too ; nor did he explain to any one that the Holy Spirit was the third person of a Trinity. It is true he often identified himself with his heavenly Father, as when, in John's Gospel, he said, ' I and the Father are one,' and ' Before Abraham was, lam'; but he also wished us to be identified with him in the same way : ' I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you ' ; and again, ' That they may be one, even as we are one ; I in them, and they in me.' He also taught his disciples to pray to ' Our Father ' ; and in the Synoptic Gospels, making a very clear distinction between himself and God, he said : ' My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ? ' and in another passage he said, ' Why callest thou me good ? None is good save one, even God.' The Gospels often attribute to Jesus language evidently not used literally, as when he says he is ' the door,' or ' the vine ' ; and it lies with the reader to take his words reasonably or unreasonably. This applies equally to the statement that he was the ' Son of God.' To make this mean that God was his father in the same way that Mary was his mother, would be absurd ; whereas to admit that God was his Father in a mystic sense, makes it extremely difficult to differentiate between God's Fatherhood of Jesus and his Fatherhood of the rest of humanity ; and as soon as that is admitted, a door is opened enabling Christians to unite with the rest of humanity. 30 LEO TOLSTOY In the short article entitled, How to Read the Gospels l (1896), Tolstoy remarks that: A great teacher is great just because he is able to express the truth so that it can neither be hidden nor obscured, but is as plain as daylight. . . . The truth is there, for all who will read the Gospels with a sincere wish to know the truth, without prejudice and, above all without supposing that they contain some special sort of wisdom beyond human reason. That is how I read the Gospels, and I found in them truth plain enough for little children to understand, as indeed is there said. . . . And therefore, to the question how Christ's teaching should be understood, I reply : ' If you wish to understand it, read the Gospels. Read them, putting aside all foregone conclusions ; read them with the sole desire to understand what is there said. But just because the Gospels are holy books, read them considerately, reasonably, and with discernment, and not haphazard or mechanically, as though all the words were of equal weight.' To understand any book one must choose out the parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure or confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work. Then, on the basis of what we have understood, we may proceed to make out what is confused or not quite intelligible. That is how we read all kinds of books. And it is particularly necessary thus to read the Gospels, which have passed through a multiplicity of compilations, translations, and transcriptions, and were composed eighteen centuries ago, by men who were not highly educated, and were super stitious. Therefore, in order to understand the Gospels, we must first of all separate what is quite simple and intelligible from what is confused and unintelligible, and must afterwards read this clear and intelligible part several times over, trying fully to assimilate it. Then, helped by our comprehension of the general meaning, we can try to explain to ourselves the drift of the parts which seemed involved and obscure. That was how I read the Gospels, and the meaning of Christ's 1 Published in Essays and Letters. THEOLOGY 31 teaching became so clear to me that it was impossible to have any doubts about it. And I advise every one who wishes to understand the true meaning of Christ's teaching to follow the same plan. Let each man, in reading the Gospels, select all that seems to him quite plain, clear, and comprehensible., and let him score it down the margin — say with a blue pencil — and then, taking the marked passages first, let him separate Christ's words from those of the Evangelists by marking Christ's words a second time with, say, a red pencil. Then let him read over these doubly-scored passages several times. Only after he has thoroughly assimilated these, let him again read the words attributed to Christ which he did not understand when he first read them, and let him score, in red, those which have become plain to him. Let him leave unscored the words of Christ which remain quite unintelligible, and also unintelligible words by the writers of the Gospels. The passages marked in red will supply the reader with the essence of Christ's teach ing. They will give what all men need, and what Christ therefore said in a way that all can understand. The places marked only in blue will give what the authors of the Gospels said that is intelligible. Very likely in selecting what is, from what is not, fully comprehensible, people will not all choose the same passages. What is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important, and these are things which will be found quite intelligible to every one. It is just this — just what is fully comprehen sible to all men — that constitutes the essence of Christ's teaching. It must strike any one who reads the Gospels with an open mind and compares them with the Church Creeds, that if Jesus knew that God would go on punishing man kind for Adam's sin until atonement was made, and if Jesus approved of this, and made it the chief aim of his life and death to appease such a God ; and if, moreover, he knew that men's eternal salvation depends on these things and on their believing rightly about them, it is 32 LEO TOLSTOY singularly unfortunate that he forgot to mention the matter, and left us to pick it up from obscure remarks made, years later, by St. Paul — whom he never met, and whose mind, character, and work differed considerably from his own. To those who have read Tolstoy and his Problems, I must apologise for repeating, with but little alteration, what I there said of his understanding of Christ's teach ing. It was approved of by Tolstoy himself, so that one is sure it represents his meaning correctly. Each one of us has a reason and a conscience that come to us from somewhere : we did not make them ourselves. They oblige us to differentiate between good and evil ; we must approve of some things and disapprove of others. In this respect we are all alike, all members of one family, and sons of one Father. Dormant or active, in each of us there is a higher and better nature : a spiritual, divine nature. If we open our hearts and minds we can, to some extent, discern good from evil in relation to our own conduct : the law is ' very nigh unto you, in your mouth and in your heart.' The purpose of our life on earth should be to serve — not our lower, animal nature, but that Power to which our higher nature recognises its kinship. Jesus boldly identifies himself with his higher nature, speaks of himself and of us as Sons of the Father, and bids us be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. This then is the answer to the question : What is the meaning and purpose of my life ? There is a Power enabling me to discern what is good ; I am in touch with it, my reason and conscience flow from it, and the purpose of my conscious life is to do its will : that is, to do good. Nor do the Gospels leave us without an application of this teaching to practical life. The Sermon on the Mount had always attracted Tolstoy, but much of it had also THEOLOGY 33 perplexed him, especially the text ; ' Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.' This seemed to him unreason able, and shocked all the prejudices of aristocratic family and personal ' honour ' in which he had been brought up. But he tells us that so long as he rejected and tried to explain away that saying, he could get no coherent sense out of the teaching of Jesus, or out of the story of his life. As soon as he admitted to himself that perhaps Jesus meant that saying seriously, it was as though he had found the key to a puzzle ; the teaching and the example fitted together and formed one complete and admirable whole. He saw that in these chapters Jesus is very definitely summing up his practical advice : pointing out, five times over, what had been taught by ' them of old times,' and following it each time by the words, ' but I say unto you,' and giving an extension, or even a flat contradiction, to the old precept. Here are the Five Commandments of Christ, an accept ance of which, or even a comprehension of, and an attempt to follow which, would alter the whole course of men's lives in our society. 1. ' Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill ; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment ; but I say unto you, that every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.' Let me mention in passing, and as it were in parenthesis, that in the Russian version, as in our Authorised Version, the words, ' without a cause,' occur after the word ' angry.' This makes nonsense of the whole passage, for no one ever is angry without supposing that he has some cause ! Comparing different Greek texts, Tolstoy found that those words are an interpolation (the correction has been made in our English Revised Version), and he found other passages in 34 LEO TOLSTOY which the current translations obscure Christ's teaching : as for instance the popular libel which represents him as having flogged people in the Temple with a scourge ; a matter again corrected in our Revised Version. Three of the Gospels do not mention that Jesus had a scourge at all, and the one that mentions it, only says, ' He made a scourge of cords, and cast all out of the temple, both the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew their tables ; and to them that sold doves he said, Take these things hence. . . .' Not a single Gospel, in the Revised Version, says that he struck any one ! Returning to the first great guiding rule for a Christian, we find then that it is : Do not be angry. Some people will say, 'We do not accept Christ's authority, so why should we not be angry ? ' But test it any way you like : by experience, by the advice of other great teachers, or by the example of the best men and women in their best moods, and you will find that the advice is good. But, finally, one may say, ' I cannot help being angry, it is my nature : I am made so.' Very well ; there is no danger of your not doing what you must do ; but religion and philosophy exist to help us to think and feel rightly, and to guide us, in so far as our animal nature allows us to be guided. If you can't abstain from anger altogether, abstain from it as much as you can. 2. ' Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery : but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.' This second great rule of conduct is : Do not lust. It is not generally accepted as good advice. In all our towns things exist — certain ways of dressing, ways of danc ing, some entertainments, pictures, and theatrical posters — THEOLOGY 35 which would not be there if every one agreed that lust is a bad thing, spoiling our lives. Being animals we probably cannot help lusting, but the fact that we are imperfect does not prevent the advice from being good; so lust as little as you can, if you cannot be perfectly pure. 3. ' Again, ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths : but I say unto you, Swear not at all. . . . But let your speech be, Yea, yea ; Nay, nay.' How absurd ! says some one. Here are five great commandments to guide us in life : the first is, ' Don't be angry,' the second is, ' Don't lust.' These are really broad, sweeping rules of conduct ; but the third is, ' Don't say damn ! ' What is the particular harm, or importance, of using a few swear-words ? But that is not at all the meaning of the commandment. It^ too, is a broad, sweeping rule, and means : Do not give away the control of your future actions. You have a reason and a conscience to guide you, but if you set them aside and swear allegiance elsewhere — to Tsar, Emperor, Kaiser, King, Queen, President or General — they may some day tell you to commit the most awful crimes ; perhaps even to kill your fellow-men. What are you going to do then ? Break your oath ? or commit a crime you never would have dreamt of committing had you not first sworn an oath ? The present Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II, once addressed some naval recruits just after they had taken the oath of allegiance to him. (It had been administered by a salaried servant of the Prince of Peace, on the book which says, 'Swear not at all.') Wilhelm II reminded them that they had taken the oath, and that if he called them out to shoot their own fathers they must now obey ! 36 LEO TOLSTOY The whole organised and premeditated system of whole sale murder called war, is, Tolstoy says, based and built up in all lands on this practice of inducing people to entrust their consciences to the keeping of others. 4. ' Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth : but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil ; but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' That means, says Tolstoy, do not use physical violence against men who act in a way you disapprove of. Ulti mately, taken in conjunction with other Commandments, it means much more than that. There are two opposite ways of trying to promote the triumph of good over evil. One way is that followed by the best men, from Buddha in India and Jesus in Palestine, down to the Non-Resisters of our own time. It is, to seek to see the truth of things clearly, to speak it out fearlessly, and to endeavour to act up to it, leaving it to influence others as the rain and sunshine act upon the plants. The influence of men who live in that way spreads from land to land and from age to age. But there is another plan, much more often tried ; which consists in making up one's mind what other people should do, and then using physical violence if necessary to make them do it. People who act like that ¦ — ¦ Ahab, Attila, Caesar, Napoleon, and the Governments and militarists of to-day — influence people as long as they can reach them, and even longer ; but the effect that lives after them and spreads furthest, is a bad one, inflaming men's hearts with anger, with patriotism, and with malice. These two lines of conduct are contrary the one to the other, for you cannot persuade a man while he thinks you wish to hit or coerce him. This Fourth Commandment, as Tolstoy understands it, THEOLOGY 37 is very precise and definite, and leads to extremely far- reaching conclusions. The words which follow : ' If any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. . . . Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away,' involve, he says, a complete condemnation of all legal proceedings in which force is actually or implicitly employed to oblige any of those concerned, whether as principals or witnesses, to be present and take part. This teaching involves nothing less than the entire abolition of all compulsory legislation, Law Courts, police and prisons, as well as of all forcible restraint of man by man. The Tightness or wrongness of using physical force to restrain human beings is the crux of the whole matter, and it is a point I will deal with later. The last of these Five Commandments is the most sweeping of all : 5. ' Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy ; but I say unto you, Love your enemies . . . that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven : for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. For if ye love them that love you . . . what do ye more than others ? Do not even the Gentiles (foreigners, Germans, etc.) the same ? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.' The meaning of these Five Commandments — backed as they are by the example of Jesus and the drift and sub stance of his most emphatic teaching — is too plain, Tolstoy says, to be misunderstood ; and it is becoming more and more difficult for the commentators and expositors to obscure it, though to many of them the words apply : ' Ye have made void the word of God because of your tradi tions.' What Jesus meant us to do, the direction in which he pointed us, and the example he set us, are unmistakable. One great superiority of Tolstoy's interpretation over 38 LEO TOLSTOY the Orthodox, lies in the fact that his statement, whether it be a right or wrong presentation of the mind of Jesus, means something clear and definite, and links religion to daily life. He discriminates between what we know and what we do not know, and makes no assertions about the personality of God, or His nature, or the creation and redemption of the world. For Tolstoy's statement that man owes a duty to a Higher Power which reveals itself through the work ings of our reason and conscience, is a fact of personal experience, confirmed by the testimony of the Saints and Sages of all religions. Socrates and Emerson (and their predecessors and successors) faced by the necessity of supposing either that we live in a moral chaos where nothing is right or wrong, or in a moral order to which we can in some measure conform, chose the latter alternative, and became assured by experience that they had chosen right. By arriving at the conclusion that we are parts of a moral universe, and that only in so far as we discern that order and adjust ourselves to it, has life any meaning and purpose that is not defeated by death — Tolstoy reached the ultimate root of religion. Through strife and suffer ing to have found it by his own effort, and to have pro claimed it in the teeth of those who denounced him as heretic and atheist, as well as of those who sneered at him as a superstitious dotard, is an achievement that entitles him to rank among the prophets. Superstitions — beliefs credulously accepted and passed on unverified — immensely hinder the spread of true religion. Yet such is the force of reaction, that few men educated in them can throw them off without, at least for a while, losing their consciousness of dependence upon and co-operation with the unseen Power that makes for righteousness. A man who has rejected his early beliefs but retains his old religious ardour, and is as eager to fight the battle of the Lord as he was when he still believed THEOLOGY 39 that God wrote His Law on tablets of stone and handed them down to Moses on the top of a mountain, is as rare as he is valuable ; and Tolstoy is such a man. He has seen quite clearly that we cannot make the precise statements of the old theology, without landing our selves in inextricable confusion ; for, as J. S. Mill said, it is inconceivable that an all-powerful and all-good God can have created a world in which evil exists. Yet we believe that evil does exist, and that it is our duty to help to get rid of it. Only by confining ourselves, as mathematicians do, to what is ' necessary and sufficient,' and by refraining from precise and definite statements concerning things we do not really know, can we get an intellectually honest religion. That there is a Moral Law, with which our natures can be brought at least partly into accord, is, as I have said, not a thing to be credulously accepted, but a matter of experience; and no fact in history is more obvious than that those who have most widely, profoundly, and enduringly influenced the minds and hearts of men, have firmly believed that they were co-operating with forces beyond the ken of our five senses. In the early 'eighties, in Russia — that country of strange contradictions — alongside of the dominance of the official Church maintained by the police, and of the peasants' naive devotion to the Church, a rampant Ma terialism prevailed as a consequence of the success of the Darwinian movement ; and many highly educated men were fully persuaded that Science was about to reveal the origin of life, and, more than that, to explain the soul of man by the integration and disintegration of atoms. Under these circumstances it was as difficult for the views Tolstoy announced to obtain a hearing from the arrogant worshippers in the temples of Science, as from the scandalised followers of Mother Church. That marks the greatness of his service. No pro- 40 LEO TOLSTOY gress was possible without an emancipation from the petrified ecclesiasticism that masqueraded as religion ; and for any spiritual progress it was necessary that those intoxicated with the successes achieved by biological science should learn that we cannot obtain moral guidance for a race endowed with reason and conscience, by studying species comparatively destitute of the one and of the other. Almost alone, Tolstoy maintained the need of religion, while unflinchingly denouncing its existing forms. It must not be supposed that he held a position identical with Dr. Stanton Coit and the Ethical Societies. The difference is, that Tolstoy recognised that man needs a clear philosophy of life ; and wants to know why he approves and disapproves ; and that to have validity, the answer to this ' Why ? ' must fit into a general view of life. The difference between Tolstoyism and the Ethical Movement is most plainly seen at times of crisis, say, for instance, when a war breaks out. No one who has read Tolstoy can doubt what his attitude will be at such a crisis ; whereas the Ethical Movement, having no clear outlook on life, may drift anywhere. The prevalent opinion of the community in which it finds itself, is as valid a criterion of right and wrong as that Movement possesses. Tolstoy's ' Law of God ' is often only too clear and definite, and too oblivious of the complexity of things. But it is as important for a religion as it is for a man, to have a back-bone; and Tolstoy's teaching is at any rate vertebrate. In his treatment of the Bible, he ranks the Old Testa ment with the Scriptures of other nations : that is to say, he regards it as religious literature of varying quality, containing much that is excellent and some of the best literary art the world has ever produced, but much also that is crude, primitive, and immoral. In the New Testament, he frankly dislikes and dis approves of much in the Epistles of Paul, whom he THEOLOGY 41 accuses of having given a fatal bias to Christianity, which enabled the Church to ally itself with the State, and prevented the majority of men from understanding what Jesus meant. Paul's mind was of an administrative, organising type, foreign and repugnant to Tolstoy's anar chistic nature, which instinctively resents anything that, aiming at practical results, tolerates imperfect institutions. Tolstoy is particularly indignant at Paul's approval of Government. ' The powers that be are ordained of God,' says Paul, and thereby provokes Tolstoy's indignant query : ' Which powers ? Those of Pougatchef 1 or those of Catherine II ? ' For Tolstoy maintains that man owes allegiance to God alone, and that it is impossible to yield obedience to earthly potentates without being ready, at their bidding, to act contrary to His laws. The alliance of Church and State under Constantine was, he holds, tantamount to the abandonment of Christianity, which he says is, by its very nature, opposed to all rule that em ploys physical violence. The Gospels he regards as by far the most important Scriptures, and above all he values the words of Jesus. The parables (except one or two obscure ones) he holds to be exquisite works of religious art, and the Sermon on the Mount an expression of sacred and eternal truth. Regarding a future life, Tolstoy's views have changed since, in the early 'eighties, he began to write of these things. At first he saw no reason for believing in a life after death ; but since he has transferred his interest from personal matters to ' the service of God,' that is to say to matters of universal interest, the consciousness that his most real ' self ' is part and parcel of the Infinite has grown so strong within him that now, for many years, it has appeared to him inconceivable that it should cease at the death of his body. But, observing carefully the distinction 1 The rebel leader who for a while held the Volga Provinces under his sway. 42 LEO TOLSTOY between what we know and what merely seems plausible or possible, he refrains from definite assertions as to the kind of existence that will succeed the death of our bodies. Whether there be a personal immortality; whether we shall merge into the Infinite as rain-drops fall into the ocean ; whether reincarnation awaits us ; whether groups of those who have been nearest in soul to one another will become one, or what other experience the future may have for various types of men — he holds to be beyond our ken, nor does he think it desirable or important that we should know these things. For whatever the future may have in store, we shall best prepare by helping to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, here and now. His feeling is that which Whittier expressed in the verse : ' I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise. Assured alone that life and death His goodness underlies, And so, beside the Silent Sea I wait the muffled oar ; No harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore. I know not where His islands lift their fronded palms in air ; I only know I cannot drift beyond His love and care.' He is not interested in Spiritualism, nor even in Psychical Research. Of the former he speaks scornfully, holding that mankind, having made a useful discrimination between matter and spirit, should not be in a hurry to obliterate it. He maintains that the attempt to investigate the spirit-world on the physical plane, is based on a confusion of thought. In treating of the Gospel miracles, Tolstoy is interested only in what moral they convey, for he feels much as Matthew Arnold did : that if one sees a man walking on the water, one may be perplexed, but not, therefore, as sured that he is going to speak the truth ; for ability to walk on the water is a physical matter, whereas truth- telling is spiritual. He tells the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand somewhat as follows : THEOLOGY 43 A popular preacher went out into the country, and the people flocked to hear him. They carried baskets with them, and probably did not take them empty. When meal-time came, Jesus (whose teaching was of love and service to one's neighbour) had the people arranged in groups of fifty, and set a practical example by dis tributing, not to his own group, but to the others, the few loaves and fishes his party had with them. Following as this did upon his teaching, it was imitated by the rest; with the result that none of the five thousand went hungry, and twelve basketsful of scraps were gathered up after all had eaten. The lesson of the story, read in this way, is obvious ; whereas, if we suppose that Jesus miraculously multiplied the loaves of bread and the fishes, he set us an example we cannot imitate. For the most part, Tolstoy, regarding the miracles as mentally indigestible, simply omits them from his translations. A suggestion Tolstoy does not refer to, but which goes far towards explaining some at least of the Gospel miracles, is that they grew out of the parables. The parable of the barren fig-tree which was to be hewn down if it did not bear fruit may, for instance, easily have given rise to the perplexing story of the fig-tree blasted by Christ's curse ; and other miracles admit of similar explanation. This assumes, as Tolstoy himself does, that the Gospels are not supernaturally inspired. The point of which the Christian Scientists make so much, namely the effect of religion on health, is one which Tolstoy disregards altogether. He is concerned about the soul, and believes that sickness, weakness, and death play a necessary and beneficent part in our spiritual progress. He is therefore neither impressed nor attracted by the promises Mrs. Eddy holds out of perpetual health. No doubt he has chosen the main and chief side of 44 LEO TOLSTOY religion ; but still, I think that by disregarding the Gospel stories of physical cures, he has missed what is neither an accidental, nor unimportant, nor altogether incredible part of the narrative : for unquestionably the mind influences the body, and even in the Tolstoyan Movement I have known nervous, irritable, and sickly people who, when their hearts were lit up and their minds illumined by Tolstoy's wide, generous, and noble ideas and ideals, became physically as well as mentally more robust than before. Moreover, though it is a matter about which I know very little, my impression is that the investigations of the Psychical Research Society, as well as the records of many religious movements, indicate that there are forces at work about us, of which our present-day science is profoundly ignorant. Returning to the consideration of Christ's Five Com mandments, I would say that, striking as are Tolstoy's remarks on oaths, and valuable as is his protest against militarism (with which I shall deal in another chapter), it is possible that he may be mistaken as to what really was in the mind of Jesus when he said, ' Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, for thou canst not make one hair white or black.1 Oaths were originally based on the idea that man could call on the Higher Powers to destroy him for speaking falsely. As soon as