Part 17

His aunt used to welcome all sorts of pilgrims to Yasnaya, beggars and monks and nuns, people despised by the rest of the world, so that Leo was brought up in a strange, almost mediæval atmosphere—an atmosphere that was religious, poetical, simple, and very far from worldly. We find Tolstoy after a long life of varied experiences returning again to the habits and beliefs of his youth, and to a life of humility and simple living.

Tolstoy had the greatest admiration for his eldest brother Nicholas, who, he always said, was a much greater man than himself; but Nicholas died before he had time to show what he was capable of. This brother invented a game called “Ant Brothers.” He told Leo and his two brothers of six and seven that he possessed a secret and, when it was known, all men would become happy; there would be no more disease, no trouble, and no one would be angry with any one else; all would love one another and become “ant brothers.” The game consisted of sitting under chairs surrounded by boxes, screening themselves from view with handkerchiefs, and cuddling against one another in the dark. Tolstoy says: “The ‘ant brotherhood’ was revealed to us, but not the chief secret: the way for all men to cease suffering any misfortune, to leave off quarreling and being angry, and become continuously happy: this secret Nicholas said he had written on a green stick and buried by the road at the edge of a certain ravine, at which spot (since my body must be buried somewhere) I have asked to be buried in memory of Nicholas.”

Writing when he was over seventy, Tolstoy says: “The ideal of ant brothers lovingly clinging to one another, though not under two armchairs curtained by handkerchiefs, but of all mankind under the wide dome of heaven, has remained the same for me. As I then believed that there existed a little green stick, whereon was written the message which could destroy all evil in men and give them universal welfare, so I now believe that such truth exists, and will be revealed to men and will give them all it promises.”

Tolstoy’s early childhood was on the whole very happy, in spite of his far-seeing, sensitive, and rather morbid nature. At times he was certainly very miserable, but, on the other hand, he had an immense power of enjoyment, and loved games and horses and dogs and the country itself, and his affections were very strong.

One of the things that worried him as a child was his own looks; he thought himself so plain. He says in his autobiographical novel “Childhood”: “I imagined there could be no happiness on earth for a man with so broad a nose, such thick lips, and such small gray eyes as mine. I asked God to perform a miracle and change me into a handsome boy....” He tried to improve his appearance by clipping his eyebrows, with most disastrous results, as of course he was uglier and unhappier than ever.

Tolstoy showed no particular talent for anything as a child, though he was very original, and quite determined not to do things like other people. When he came into the drawing-room, for instance, he insisted upon bowing to people backwards, bending his head the wrong way, and saluting each person thus in turn. He was not good at his lessons, and mentions somewhere that a student who came to teach him and his brothers said about them: “Serge both wishes and can, Dmitry wishes but can’t (This was not true), and Leo neither wishes nor can (This I think was perfectly true).” This was characteristic of Tolstoy, who was always hard on himself. But if the tutor lived to see what Tolstoy became, he must have been rather ashamed of his lack of perception.

Before Tolstoy was sixteen he entered a university with his brothers. There was no doubt that, like many other young people, he hated study, though he worked hard and passed well in languages. In history and geography he failed, and being asked to name the French seaports, he could not remember a single one. He left the university rather disgusted with himself and despising intellectual things. His companions had not really understood him, for he was a strange mixture. Sometimes he was very proud and aristocratic, yet with advanced Liberal views; and he was moody, at one moment wildly gay, at another sunk in gloom. He always looked upon the worst side of himself, and wrote in his diary that he was awkward, uncleanly, irritable, a bore to others, ignorant, intolerant, and shamefaced as a child: there was no end to the names he called himself. He admits that he is honest and that he loves goodness, but on the whole he is very unfair to himself, for the reason that he had set up such a high ideal to live up to.

Now he intended, though only nineteen, to devote himself to his peasants. He went back to his property with great zeal for reform. He knew of the sufferings of the serfs, the famines and revolts. For a time he worked among them and learned to know all about their lives. But he was too young, and lacked patience at present to do much good. After six months, rather discouraged and disappointed, he was off on a different experience. He made his home now at St. Petersburg, where he was most frivolous and idle. He understood quite well what a stupid life he was leading, and in a religious book he wrote in after years, called “My Confession,” he says that though he honestly desired to be good, he stood alone in his search after goodness. Every time he expressed the longings of his heart for a virtuous life, he met with contempt and mocking laughter, but every time he was frivolous or wicked, he was praised and encouraged.

Yet on the whole this gay life at St. Petersburg was not altogether useless. It taught him something, and he was not really spoilt by it. He was big enough and intelligent enough to see the utter futility and uselessness of such a life. It gave him, he says, a scorn for aristocracy and the life of rich people generally, whose whole existence was “a mania of selfishness.”

Tolstoy’s favorite brother Nicholas, who was serving in the Russian army, saw what an unsatisfactory state his brother was in, and so persuaded Leo to become a soldier and join him in the Caucasus. This Leo was only too glad to do. He says in a letter at that time, “God willing, I will amend and become a steady man at last.”

Now, the open-air, primitive life in this part of Russia quite restored Tolstoy to himself, and he began to write. His first book, “Childhood,” was written and published while he was there. This novel, though not strictly speaking a history of his own childhood, is mostly about his own youthful life; the incidents that occur in it are many of them true, and the characters are taken from friends and relatives. It is a very wonderful book, as showing how vividly Tolstoy remembered his own feelings as a child, how intensely he must have felt and suffered, and what his powers of thought and observation must have been. He continued this book, and brought out later other volumes entitled “Boyhood” and “Youth.” They are all three full of beautiful things. Tolstoy also wrote about the Caucasus, a novel called “The Cossacks,” a romantic story of the strange, wild people who inhabit this part of Russia.

At the time of the Crimean War, Tolstoy experienced as a soldier the horrors of battle. He was at the siege of Sebastopol, and wrote the book of that name. It made a great sensation when it came out, soon after the war was over. Its profound understanding of the feelings of men who were constantly facing death and danger, and of those who were dying, made a deep impression on people.

Tolstoy, from seeing war, formed his very strong opinions against it. He became from that time one of the most passionate apostles of peace. He saw how much that is splendid is sometimes brought out in people who face the terrors of war, but, on the other hand, he saw its fearful uselessness, the waste of noble human beings, the suffering it causes everywhere, and the destruction, in some, of all human feeling. “It is not suffering and death that are terrible,” says Tolstoy, “but that which allows people to inflict suffering and death.”

Tolstoy after Sebastopol left the army and went back to St. Petersburg, this time to live in a literary circle, where he was welcomed by distinguished authors as the most promising writer of the day. Nobody, after reading “Childhood” or “Sebastopol,” could fail to see Tolstoy’s marvelous genius for seeing things as they are, and his gift of expression. But he grew impatient in this circle, for his views were too advanced and his love of truth too strong. He could not agree with people, and he could not pretend to agree with them. So he was thought quarrelsome and conceited, and his opinions absurd. He was always questioning things, such as the meaning of existence, and whether he himself was of any use; he would take nothing as a matter of course. Already, before he was twenty-seven, he had conceived the great idea of devoting his life to founding a new Religion—the Religion of Christianity, in fact, but cleansed of all its dogmas, which have nothing to do with Christianity: a practical religion, giving happiness on earth, not merely the promise of future happiness.

And another great question absorbed him, the question of emancipating the serfs. Peasants who worked on the land in Russia were held much as slaves, and were the absolute property of their masters, forced to work for them so many days a week before they might do any work for themselves. Tolstoy violently took the side of the peasants in all that concerned them, and his purpose in life was more or less fixed from this time onward. Like our other great man of noble birth, William of Orange, who worked on the side of the people, he was determined to leave no stone unturned until the conditions of the poor had been improved and justice done them.

Now, in order to learn more of the habits and customs of other countries, and principally their systems of education, Tolstoy went abroad and visited France, Germany, and England. Then, returning to his home, he settled down as a land-owner and managed his own estates.

In 1861 the serfs were liberated by the Czar Alexander II.

Tolstoy, with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, flung himself into the work of dividing out lands between nobles and peasants. He acted as a judge in his own district, and annoyed his aristocratic neighbors by being fair to the poor: he had seen too often how they had been cheated out of their rights.

It was difficult, rather discouraging work, because years of oppression had made the peasants suspicious and grasping, and Tolstoy’s task was to try to remove this distrust. He became more and more socialistic, and his literary friends were very much disappointed in him, for he seemed to be giving up his writing. One wrote: “Tolstoy has grown a long beard, leaves his hair to fall in curls over his ears, holds newspapers in detestation, and has no soul for anything but his property.”

Tolstoy had also started on another enterprise. This was a school after his own theories at Yasnaya and a monthly magazine which he printed and edited, all about his views on education. He saw how most learning is mechanical, and how a child does not learn because he wants to, but in order not to be punished, or to earn a prize, or to be better than others, but very seldom from a real desire to know. This Tolstoy considered was because the child was so drilled and made to behave unnaturally, and to have a different manner in school than he had out. He was not free, and only when a child was free and natural and lively, and allowed to ask questions and to laugh and talk, could he learn with pleasure and therefore thoroughly. In Tolstoy’s school there was no order as we know it: children sat on the floor or bunches of them in an arm-chair; they did just as they pleased, and ran about from place to place. They answered questions, not in turn but all together, interrupting one another or helping one another to remember. If one child left out a bit of story that he had to tell, another jumped up and put it in.

Tolstoy encouraged the children not to repeat literally what they had heard, but to tell “out of your own head.” As there were very few reading books for young children, Tolstoy wrote stories for them himself, which, as they have been translated into English, we are able to read ourselves and to judge how they must have delighted his small pupils. He also read to them and explained to them Bible stories, of which he was very fond.

There was no doubt that Tolstoy had a gift for teaching and interested the children as no ordinary teacher could. His methods are not for every one.

Tolstoy’s classes came to an end after two years, because he was interfered with by the Government; but he revived them at intervals during his life, and there is no doubt that his views on education helped to make teaching in Russia more reasonable and natural, and put fresh ideas about it into people’s heads.

Tolstoy’s only companion at this time was his aunt Tatiana, but in 1862, when he was thirty-four, he married Miss Sophia Behrs, who was only eighteen. He had known her as a little girl.

Tolstoy now settled down to a very happy life—the life, indeed, which had been his ideal, and which he had described as such in a letter to his aunt, when quite a young man. He pictures himself living with his wife at Yasnaya—

A gentle creature, kind and affectionate, she has the same love for you as I have; you live upstairs in the big house, in what used to be Grandmamma’s room; the whole house is as it was in Papa’s time.... I take Papa’s place, though I despair of ever deserving it. My wife that of Mamma; the children take ours. If they made me Emperor of Russia or gave me Peru—in a word, if a fairy came with her wand asking me what I wished for, I should reply that I only wished that this dream may become reality.

And all this actually came to pass. Aunt Tatiana, when Tolstoy married, continued to live with him. He had many children, managed his estates, taught the peasants, and wrote books, and though he was not living in the same house in which he was born, for the large wooden house had been removed and sold to pay his father’s debts, he lived on the same spot in the stone one erected in its place. His wife helped in everything, in spite of her large family, for they had thirteen children. She found time to copy out all her husband’s manuscripts, which to most people would have been as impossible a task as looking for a needle in a haystack, they were so extraordinarily badly written, and scratched out and rewritten. His first great novel, “War and Peace,” one of the longest novels in existence, is said to have been copied out by Countess Tolstoy seven times.

Tolstoy always lived with his children, and did not banish them to nurseries and schoolrooms, as some people do. Up to the age of ten they were taught by their father and mother; their mother taught them Russian and music, and their father arithmetic and French. Most entertaining French it was, which consisted of reading amusing stories out of illustrated volumes of Jules Verne. If there happened to be a volume without pictures, Tolstoy made the pictures himself. He drew very badly, yet his pictures were so amusing that the children liked them much better than the ordinary ones.

He would discuss and explain interesting things with his children, and they were always eager to be with him, to go walks with him, and be on his side in any game he taught them. Clearing the snow off the ponds in winter under their father’s direction was even more amusing than the skating itself. They rode and hunted with their father, for in the earlier part of his life Tolstoy was an enthusiastic sportsman. He was brave, daring, and an excellent shot, and he enjoyed more than anything being out in the open air.

In the early morning, before breakfast, Tolstoy would usually go for a long walk, or ride down to bathe in the river. At morning coffee, or what we call breakfast, the family all met together, and Tolstoy was always very merry. He would be up to all sorts of jokes, till he got up with the words, “One must get to work,” and off he went to his study to write books, and he would work for many hours on end, though in summer he would often come out and play with the children. This always delighted them, as he brought such spirit and interest into their games, and he would invent new ones himself—which were better than any. If they had secrets, he always guessed them, so that they regarded him as a sort of magician. His son writes of him: “My father hardly ever made us do anything, but it always somehow came about that of our own initiative we did exactly what he wanted us to. My mother often scolded us and punished us, but when my father wanted us to do anything, he merely looked us hard in the eyes, and we understood—the look was far more effective than any command. It was impossible to hide anything from him, as impossible as to hide it from your own conscience. He knew everything, and to deceive him was nearly impossible and quite useless.”

This same son, Ilya, Tolstoy’s second boy, tells many amusing stories of the Tolstoy family life, and of the great part his father played in it. One story is as follows: Ilya, when a little boy, was given a big china cup and saucer by his mother at Christmas-time. He was so excited that he ran very fast to show it to the others, and as he ran from one room to another, he caught his foot on the step in the doorway and fell down and broke his cup to smithereens. When accused by his mother of being careless, he howled and said it was not his fault, but the fault of the beastly architect who had gone and put a step in the doorway. Tolstoy, overhearing him, was much amused, and said, “It is the architect’s fault, it is the architect’s fault!” This phrase became a saying in the family, and Tolstoy was always using it when any one threw the blame on any one else. When one of the children fell off his horse because he stumbled, or when he did his lessons badly because his tutor had not explained them properly, and so on, “Of course, I know,” Tolstoy would say; “it is the architect’s fault.”

Tolstoy had some excellent inventions for making his children cheerful. When they would all be sitting rather cross and bored after the departure of some dull visitors, he would suddenly jump up from his seat, and, lifting one arm in the air with its hand hanging loose from the wrist, run at full speed round the table at a hopping gallop. Every one rose and flew after him, hopping and waving their hands. They went round the room several times, and then sat down again in their chairs, panting, and quite gay and lively once more. This game, which was known as “Numidian Cavalry,” had an excellent effect, and many a time the children’s tears were dried by it and quarrels forgotten.

Tolstoy, amongst other things, enjoyed music, and was fond of playing duets on the piano. After dinner he would settle down to this, usually with his wife’s sister. When he was in difficulties he would say things to make her laugh, so that she had to play slower, and sometimes, if this did not succeed, he would stop and take off one of his boots, saying, “Now it will go all right.”

Tolstoy was as young as anybody in his love of fun and games, the more nonsensical the better; and his laughter was most infectious, beginning on a high note, and his whole body would shake.

People ought to know about this amusing side of Tolstoy’s character, in order to get out of their heads that he was a painfully serious man without a sense of humor, who asked impossibilities of people. He had many sides to his character, as we shall see, and that is what makes him so intensely interesting.

Tolstoy was a deeply affectionate man, loving above all things his home, his wife, and his children. If ever he had to leave them for a time, even if it were only on a hunting expedition, he would always as he approached his home say, “If only all is well at home!” Whatever he did, he did with his whole heart and soul. He was an enthusiastic schoolmaster, a keen sportsman and farmer, and an excellent gardener and beekeeper. He looked into everything on his estate and insisted upon having all his pigs washed, and there were as many as three hundred!

So Tolstoy’s life was as full as it possibly could be. For the first ten years of his married life he was so much occupied with the cares of family life, and the life of a country gentleman, that he had less time for thought and did not worry himself quite so much about the reasons of life. He was also absorbed in his writing, and being a perfect giant for work, was able during this period—in spite of his numberless activities—to write two very great novels, besides many shorter stories and primers for children.

“War and Peace,” an historical novel of the time of Napoleon, and requiring an immense amount of research, and “Anna Karenina” are as great as any novels that have been written in any country. Tolstoy’s extraordinary powers of observation and his acute, almost uncanny, understanding of human nature, make his characters so living and human that, having read about them, they become as people you have known, and you can never forget them.

Also, Tolstoy’s experience of life was wide and varied, and everything he wrote about he had himself known and seen. War in the Crimea, fashionable life in St. Petersburg, life with gipsies in the Caucasus, with peasants in the country, the joys and sorrows of intimate family life with children and animals—nothing escaped his notice, and his books are simply life seen through the medium of his wonderful and penetrating mind; there is nothing like them.

So there he was, the most brilliant and successful writer of the day, with a happy domestic life, money, a delightful property, and devoted servants and tenants. If any one ought to have been contented, it might be said it was Tolstoy. And yet he became dissatisfied and began again, as he had in earlier days, to find fault with himself and with his own life. He was fifty when the change in him began to take place; and yet it was no change really, he had always been the same; and the people who amuse themselves by finding inconsistencies in his character are wrong when they accuse him of being changeable: he merely returned now to his earliest ideals, which had been there all the time, though his intense enjoyment of life and his many occupations had prevented his thinking quite so much of working out his theories. It will be seen that Tolstoy had an extraordinary tenacity of purpose, and during his life carried through nearly all he had dreamed of doing. About the big and important things of life he remained always the same, though at times his high spirits made it appear as though he had forgotten about the problems that had worried him. But now, once more the question of how to lead the best life, and what is meant by religion, became uppermost in his mind, and a great disgust seized him of the life he and his family were leading. Everything he had enjoyed he now despised. He hated the luxury of his life, the fact of having servants to wait on him, his daughters in muslin dresses drinking tea: “The life of our circle of society,” he said, “not only repelled me, but lost all meaning.”