Part 1

LEO TOLSTOY

BY G. K. CHESTERTON, G. H. PERRIS ETC.

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

TORONTO COPP CLARK COMPANY LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

LEO TOLSTOY _Frontispiece_

TOLSTOY AS AN OFFICER 1

TOLSTOY IN HIS STUDENT DAYS 2

YASNAYA POLYANA, THE COUNTRY HOME OF COUNT TOLSTOY 3

THE APPROACH TO THE PARK AT YASNAYA POLYANA 4

THE GATEWAY-ENTRANCE TO YASNAYA POLYANA 5

TOLSTOY WITH HIS BICYCLE 6

“THE TREE OF THE POOR” 7

TOLSTOY, AN EARLY PORTRAIT 7

COUNT AND COUNTESS TOLSTOY 8

LEO TOLSTOY (from a Sketch by Victor Prout) 9

COUNT TOLSTOY AT WORK IN THE FIELDS 10

FACSIMILE OF A PORTION OF TOLSTOY’S MS. 11

COUNT TOLSTOY, HIS WIFE, AND DAUGHTERS 12

TOLSTOY AT WORK IN HIS STUDY AT YASNAYA POLYANA 13

TOLSTOY WRITING AT HIS DESK 14

ONE OF H. R. MILLAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS 15

COUNT TOLSTOY 16

A FAMOUS PAINTING OF TOLSTOY 17

A PHOTOGRAPH OF COUNT TOLSTOY TAKEN AT YASNAYA POLYANA 18

RUSSIAN JAILER AND WOMAN WARDER 19

A TOLSTOY MEDALLION 20

THE COVER OF THE TRACT “WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD IS ALSO” 20

ONE OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED IN MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE 21

TWO OF THE POSTCARDS ISSUED AT MOSCOW IN 1898 TO COMMEMORATE TOLSTOY’S LITERARY JUBILEE 22

COUNT TOLSTOY AT REST (from a Painting by Répin) 23

TOLSTOY IN THE GROUNDS OF YASNAYA POLYANA 24

ONE OF H. R. MILLAR’S ILLUSTRATIONS 25

ONE OF MANY BUSTS OF COUNT TOLSTOY 26

A RECENT PORTRAIT OF COUNT TOLSTOY 27

THE DEFENDANTS 29

TOLSTOY AND HIS DAUGHTER TATYANA 30

COUNT TOLSTOY AND HIS FAMILY 31

LEO TOLSTOY (from a Portrait painted in 1884) 33

MASLOVA’S RETURN TO THE WARD AFTER THE SENTENCE 34

LEO TOLSTOY, 1896 (from a Photograph) 35

TOLSTOY

If any one wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and influence of the great man whose name is prefixed to these remarks, he will not find it in his novels, splendid as they are, or in his ethical views, clearly and finely as they are conceived and expanded. He will find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them. About such an incident as this there is a quality altogether independent of the rightness or wrongness, the sanity or insanity, of the view. It is first and foremost a reminder that the world is still young. There are still theories of life as insanely reasonable as those which were disputed under the clear blue skies of Athens. There are still examples of a faith as fierce and practical as that of the Mahometans, who swept across Africa and Europe, shouting a single word. To the languid contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels. All this, as I

say, seems mere muddle-headed absurdity to the typical leader of human society in this decade, to a man like Mr. Balfour, or Mr. Wyndham. But there is nevertheless a further thing to be said, and that is that, if Mr. Balfour could be converted to a religion which taught him that he was morally bound to walk into the House of Commons on his hands, and he did walk on his hands, if Mr. Wyndham could accept a creed which taught that he ought to dye his hair blue, and he did dye his hair blue, they would both of them be, almost beyond description, better and happier men than they are. For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm--that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece the presence of a god.

This great act of heroic consistency which has taken place in Canada is the best example of the work of Tolstoy. It is true (as I believe) that the Doukhabors have an origin quite independent of the great Russian moralist, but there can surely be little doubt that their emergence into importance and the growth and mental distinction of their sect, is due to his admirable summary and justification of their scheme of ethics. Tolstoy, besides being a magnificent novelist, is one of the very few men alive who have a real, solid, and serious view of life. He is a Catholic church, of which he is the only member, the somewhat arrogant Pope and the somewhat submissive layman. He is one of the two or three men in Europe, who have an attitude towards things so entirely their own, that we could supply their inevitable view on anything--a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, or a pound of tobacco. There are three men in existence who have such an attitude: Tolstoy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and my friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc. They are all diametrically opposed to each other, but they all have this essential resemblance, that, given their basis of thought, their soil of conviction, their opinions on every earthly subject grow there naturally, like flowers in a field. There are certain views of certain things that they must take: they do not form opinions, the opinions form themselves. Take, for instance, in the case of Tolstoy, the mere list of miscellaneous objects which I wrote down at random above, a silk hat, a Home Rule Bill, an Indian poem, and a pound of tobacco. Tolstoy would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this silk hat is a black abortion.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this Home Rule Bill is a mere peddling compromise; it is no good to break up a centralised empire into nations, you must break the nation up into individuals.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, I am interested in this Indian poem, for Eastern ethics, under all their apparent gorgeousness, are far simpler and more Tolstoyan than Western.” He would say: “I believe in the utmost possible simplification of life; therefore, this pound of tobacco is a thing of evil; take it away.” Everything in the world, from the Bible to a bootjack, can be, and is, reduced by Tolstoy to this great fundamental Tolstoyan principle, the simplification of life. When we deal with a body of opinion like this we are dealing with an incident in the history of Europe infinitely more important than the appearance of Napoleon Buonaparte.

This emergence of Tolstoy, with his awful and simple ethics, is important in more ways than one. Among other things it is a very interesting commentary on an attitude which has been taken up for the matter of half a century by all the avowed opponents of religion. The secularist and the sceptic have denounced Christianity first and

foremost, because of its encouragement of fanaticism; because religious excitement led men to burn their neighbours, and to dance naked down the street. How queer it all sounds now. Religion can be swept out of the matter altogether, and still there are philosophical and ethical theories which can produce fanaticism enough to fill the world. Fanaticism has nothing at all to do with religion. There are grave scientific theories which, if carried out logically, would result in the same fires in the market-place and the same nakedness in the street. There are modern æsthetes who would expose themselves like the Adamites if they could do it in elegant attitudes. There are modern scientific moralists who would burn their opponents alive, and would be quite contented if they were burnt by some new chemical process. And if any one doubts this proposition--that fanaticism has nothing to do with religion, but has only to do with human nature--let him take this case of Tolstoy and the Doukhabors. A sect of men start with no theology at all, but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it will always be. Destroy the last copy of the Bible, and persecution and insane orgies will be founded on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy.” Some of the broadest thinkers of the Middle Ages believed in faggots, and some of the broadest thinkers in the nineteenth century believe in dynamite.

The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic: and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism: they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. It is significant that, with all that has been said about the excitability of poets, only one English poet ever went mad, and he went mad from a logical system of theology. He was Cowper, and his poetry retarded his insanity for many years. So poetry, in which Tolstoy is deficient, has always been a tonic and sanative thing. The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism--the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

LEO TOLSTOY AS WRITER

Half the ignorance or misunderstanding of this greatest living figure in literature comes of the attempt to judge him as we judge the specialised Western novelist--an utterly futile method of approach. He is a Russian, in the first place. Had he come to Paris with Turguenieff, he might have been similarly de-nationalised, might possibly have developed into a writer pure and simple; the world might so have gained a few great romances--it would have lost infinitely in other directions. Turguenieff wished it so. “My friend,” he wrote to Tolstoy from his deathbed, “return to literature! Reflect that that gift comes to you whence everything comes to us. Ah! how happy I should be if I could think that my prayer would influence you.... My friend, great writer of our Russian land, hear my entreaty!” For

once, the second greatest of modern Russians took a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy remained a Russian from tip to toe--that is one of his supreme values for us; and he remained an indivisible personality. The artist and the moralist are inseparable in his works. “We are not to take ‘Anna Karènina’ as a work of art,” said Matthew

Arnold; “we are to take it as a piece of life.” The distinction is not very satisfactorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an American edition of the “Sebastopol Sketches”: “I do not know how it is with others to whom these books of Tolstoy’s have come, but for my part I cannot think of them as literature in the artistic sense at all. Some people complain to me when I praise them that they are too long, too diffuse, too confused, that the characters’ names are hard to pronounce, and that the life they portray is very sad and not amusing. In the presence of these criticisms I can only say that I find them nothing of the kind, but that each history of Tolstoy’s is as clear, as orderly, as brief, as something I have lived through myself.... I cannot think of any service which imaginative literature has done the race so great as that which Tolstoy has done in his conception of Karènina at that crucial moment when the cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.” So much being said, however, we may be allowed to emphasise in this small space the great qualities and achievements of Tolstoy as artist, rather than the expositions of Christian Anarchism and the social philippics under which those achievements have been somewhat hidden in recent years.

Morbid introspectiveness and the spirit of revolt inevitably colour what is best in nineteenth-century Russia. Born at Yasnaya Polyana (“Clear Field”), Tula, in 1828, and early orphaned, Tolstoy’s youth

synchronised with the period of reaction that brought the Empire to the humiliating disasters of the Crimean War. No hope was left in the thin layer of society lying between the two mill-stones of the Court and the serfs; none in the little sphere of art where Byronic romanticism was ready to expire. The boy saw from the first the rottenness of the patriarchal aristocracy in which his lot seemed to be cast. Precocious, abnormally sensitive and observant, impatient of discipline and formal learning, awkward and bashful, always brooding, not a little conceited, he was a sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of Kazan in disgust at the stupid conventions of the time and place, without taking his degree. “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth”--which appeared in three sections between 1852 and 1857--tells the story of this period, though the figure of Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a portrait of himself, to whom he is always less fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This book is a most uncompromising exercise in self-analysis. It is of great length, there is no plot, and few outer events are recorded.

The realism is generally morbid, but is varied by some passages of great descriptive power, such as the account of the storm, and occasionally with tender pathos, as in the story of the soldier’s death, as well as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative of the mother’s death. In this earliest work will be found the seeds both of Tolstoy’s artistic genius and of his ethical gospel.

After five years of mildly benevolent efforts among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the disappointments of which he related a few years later in “A Landlord’s Morning,” intended to have been part of a full novel to be called “A Russian Proprietor”), his elder brother Nicholas persuaded him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this favourite stage of classic Russian romance, where for the first time he saw the towering mountains and the tropical sun, and met the rugged adventurous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagination stirred as Byron among the isles of Greece, and his early revulsion against city life confirmed as Wordsworth amid the Lakes, as Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from Nature to his own heart. The largest result of this experience was “The Cossacks” (1852). Turguenieff described this fine prose epic of the contact of civilised and savage man as “the best novel written in our language.” “The Raid” (or “The Invaders,” as Mr. Dole’s translation is entitled), dating from the same year, “The Wood-Cutting Expedition” (1855), “Meeting an Old Acquaintance” (1856), and “A

Prisoner in the Caucasus” (1862) are also drawn from recollections of this sojourn, and show the same descriptive and romantic power. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War the Count was called to Sebastopol, where he had command of a battery, and took part in the defence of the citadel. The immediate product of these dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series of impressions reprinted from one of the leading Russian reviews as “Sebastopol Sketches” (1856). From that day onward Tolstoy knew and told the hateful truth about war and the thoughtless pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into fratricidal slaughter. From that day there was expunged from his mind all the cheap romanticism which depends upon the glorification of the savage side of human nature. These wonderful pictures of the routine of the battlefield established his position in Russia as a writer, and later on created in Western countries an impression like that of the canvases of Verestchagin.

For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in the old and new capitals of Russia by right of talent as well as birth. His very chequered friendship with Turguenieff, one of the oddest chapters in literary history, can only be mentioned here. In 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. It was of these years that he declared in “My Confession” that he could not think of them without horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The catalogue of crime which he charged against himself in his salvationist crisis of twenty years later must not be taken literally; but that there was some ground for it we may guess from the scenic and incidental realism of the “Recollections of a Billiard Marker” (1856), and of many a later page. Several other powerful short novels date from about this time, including “Albert” and “Lucerne,” both of which remind us of the Count’s susceptibility to music; “Polikushka,” a tale of peasant life; and “Family Happiness,” the story of a marriage that failed, a most clear, consistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of work, anticipating in essentials “The Kreutzer Sonata” that was to scandalise the world thirty years afterward.

After all, it was family happiness that saved Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of death had snatched away one of the nearest to him--his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of the army surgeon in Tula--the most fortunate thing that has happened to him in his whole life, I should think. Family responsibilities, those novel and daring experiments in peasant education which are recorded in several volumes of the highest interest, the supervision of the estate, magisterial

work, and last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon “War and Peace” and “Anna Karènina” fill up the next fifteen years. “War and Peace” (1864-9) is a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, with preceding and succeeding episodes in Russian society. These four volumes display in their superlative degree Tolstoy’s indifference to plot and his absorption in individual character; they are rather a series of scenes threaded upon the fortunes of several families than a set novel; but they contain passages of penetrating psychology and vivid description, as well as a certain amount of anarchist theorising. Of this work, by which its author became known in the West, Flaubert (how the name carries us backward!) wrote: “It is of the first order. What a painter and what a psychologist! The two first volumes are sublime, but the third drags frightfully. There are some quite Shakespearean things in it.” The artist’s hand was now strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 appeared “Anna Karènina,” his greatest, and as he intended at the time (but Art is not so easily jilted), his last novel. The fine qualities of this book, which, though long, is

dramatically unified and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. George Meredith has described Anna as “the most perfectly depicted female character in all fiction,” which, from the author of “Diana,”

is praise indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there is a minor subject in the fortunes of Levin and Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of Tolstoy’s own experiences. Matthew Arnold complained that the book contained too many characters and a burdensome multiplicity of actions, but praised its author’s extraordinarily fine perception and no less extraordinary truthfulness, and frankly revelled in Anna’s