Part 18

Yet there was nothing grossly luxurious or selfish about the life led by the Tolstoy family: according to most aristocratic ideas of luxury their life was simple. Nothing could be plainer than the house at Yasnaya, solidly built as it was, with double windows to keep out the cold and large Dutch stoves. The rooms were very bare and the floors mostly uncarpeted, the furniture faded and old-fashioned. But the family fed well, and kept a great many servants, which seemed necessary, as the Tolstoys, like many Russians, had hosts of poor relations living with them, besides tutors, governesses, and old servants; they were also a very large family in themselves.

But now life appeared to Tolstoy as dust and ashes. His wife and children, the praise of men, art—he turned from it all. His family at first could not understand why he should be in such despair; it was difficult to feel sympathy with his sufferings. To them he appeared to possess everything that most people considered good and desirable, and the life he was leading excellent and blameless. So they could not help him, and he had to suffer alone.

Tolstoy’s second son, who has written his recollections of his father, says he began to notice a change in his habits about this time. He left off hunting and shooting and riding, and took instead long walks on the road, where he could meet pilgrims and beggars and have talks with them. At dinner he would tell his family about them. He became gloomy and irritable, and quarreled with his wife over trifles. He no longer played with his children. When they were enjoying themselves acting or playing croquet he would walk in and spoil it all by a word or even a look.

He did not want to spoil their fun, but for all that he did. He had often not said anything, but he had thought it. “We all knew what he had thought, and that was what made us so uncomfortable,” his son says.

It was trying for the children to lose their jolly, delightful companion, who had brought such zest into their games and whose gaiety had been so infectious. Now they rather dreaded the appearance of this stern man who disapproved of them.

He did nothing but blame the useless lives led by ladies and gentlemen, their laziness, greed, and the way they made other people work for them.

This is the sort of thing he said:

Here we sit in our well-heated rooms, and this very day a man was found frozen to death on the high-road. He was frozen to death because no one would give him a night’s lodging.

We stuff ourselves with cutlets and pastry while people are dying by thousands from famine.

The children understood what he said, but it spoiled all their childish amusements and broke up their happy life.

Tolstoy was very unhappy for a period of four or five years and could see no meaning in existence. But at last he discovered a purpose in life and a religion to help him. It was really Christianity, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount became his gospel. The life of a Russian peasant he was convinced was the example of how to live. Man, he thought, should be simple, hardworking, and kind; he should give more than he received and he should rejoice in serving others. Tolstoy saw it was no good preaching without practising, and so he tried to live like a Russian peasant. He ate very little and lived principally upon vegetables. He dressed like a peasant too, in summer in a smock and in the winter in a sheepskin coat and cap and high boots. He refused to have any one to wait on him, and did his own room. This was not easy to him, as, though he had always hated luxury, as an aristocrat he had taken certain things for granted, such as the fact that his clothes would always be folded and brushed and put away by a servant. By nature he was very untidy, and it was really an effort to him to pick up his things and keep them in order. In earlier days, when he had dressed and undressed, he let all his clothes tumble on to the floor, and there they would lie in different parts of the room until they were picked up. To see him pack his portmanteau for a journey was said to be an unforgettable sight, the confusion and disorder was something so hopeless. But now he tried to turn over a new leaf so as not to give people trouble.

Tolstoy saw the utter uselessness of preaching what you never intend to practise. He was quite determined to carry out all he asked others to do. After all it is more by the life you lead and example rather than by words that you persuade people, and Tolstoy tells a true story in this connection. It is as follows:

The Tolstoy family took into their house a dirty, homeless little boy, to teach him and to benefit him generally. “What,” asks Tolstoy, “did the boy see and learn?”

He saw Tolstoy’s own children, older than himself and of his own age, dirtying and spoiling things, breaking and spilling things, and throwing food to the dogs which seemed to the boy delicacies, expecting other people to wait on them and never doing any work themselves. Tolstoy understood then, he says, how absurd it was to take poor people into your house and educate them, when you were yourselves leading such idle, useless lives.

Tolstoy says his one desire was to hide their life from the boy; everything that he told him or tried to teach him he felt was destroyed by the example they were all setting him.

So Tolstoy tried hard to live according to his ideals, and became something like a monk but without a monk’s narrow views and superstitious beliefs. He dropped his title quite naturally, and when a peasant called him “Your Excellency,” Tolstoy replied, “I am called simply Leo Nikolayevitch,” and went on to speak of the matter in hand. Manual labor, which had always been a pleasure to him, now became a sort of religion. Every day he worked for hours at hay-making, plowing, reaping or wood-cutting as the case might be. Nothing absorbed him like mowing, and he would stand among the peasants in his smock listening with perfect happiness to the sound of scythes. Country life, labor, healthy appetite and sound sleep was his idea of a happy life.

In the winter evenings Tolstoy learned to make boots. He engaged a black-bearded shoemaker to come and teach him, and side by side they sat on two stools in a little room near Tolstoy’s study.

Tolstoy was never satisfied until he had done the job exactly as the shoemaker did it. Groaning with the effort of threading a waxed thread, he would refuse the assistance of the bearded man. “I’ll do it!—No, no—I’ll do it myself, it’s the only way to learn,” he would say.

As to the boots which Tolstoy made, a man to whom he had given a pair and who had worn them, was asked whether they were well made. “Couldn’t be worse,” was his reply.

Now for a time the whole Tolstoy family and their friends were filled with this enthusiasm for outdoor work. They rose early, and in company with the peasants the Tolstoy children and their mother, in a Russian dress, uncles, aunts, and even grandmothers, mowed the grass and strove to outdo the other. They had no theories about it, but simply found it a change and a pleasant satisfactory way of taking exercise.

All sorts of people now made pilgrimages to Yasnaya, to learn how to live, for Tolstoy’s fame as a teacher had begun to go about the land. Rich aristocrats wanted to throw away their gold and do the housework, and a governess of the Tolstoys, who has written rather malicious though amusing accounts of Tolstoy’s life at this time, describes enthusiastic ladies who came to Yasnaya and manured the fields in white dressing jackets! Tolstoy suffered from the silliness of some of his followers, and once sadly said he supposed he should be known through them and their eccentricities. There is a good deal of truth in the saying that a man’s admirers are sometimes his worst enemies.

Tolstoy gave up writing novels, and wrote only one more, “Resurrection,” quite at the end of his life. This was written with a great moral purpose, and is a serious and terrible book. His earlier novels he now referred to as “wordy rubbish”; he hated them, as he felt they were frivolous and could only be interesting to the upper classes. He wrote, however, a great many books on life, conduct, and religion, and children’s stories. They were printed very cheaply and taken round by pedlars. The peasants read and loved these books, and they seemed to penetrate right into the heart of Russia. They were written simply, and the peasants understood them. Tolstoy was very happy that he had been able to help and please the poor people.

Now, preaching as Tolstoy did against property and the extraordinarily unfair system which allows one man to have a thousand acres and another not even a foot, he could not satisfy himself until he had got rid of his own property; so difficulties arose with his family. His wife would not have felt so strongly about it, no doubt, if she had had only herself to think of; but it is difficult for a mother to believe that her children will be happier and better without money and possessions; she did not want to see her children impoverished. Tolstoy thought a mother’s love was selfish, and often writes about it in this sense.

Countess Tolstoy had been upset when her husband gave up writing novels, for they brought in a lot of money; and now, with their largely increased family, their income, instead of becoming more, became less. Tolstoy, in a letter to his wife on this subject, says:

... but I cannot help repeating that our happiness or unhappiness cannot in the least depend on whether we lose or acquire something, but only what we ourselves are. Now if we left Kostenka (one of their children) a million, would he be happier?... What our life together is, with our joys and sorrows, will appear to our children real life, but neither languages, nor diplomas, nor society, and still less money, make our happiness or unhappiness, and therefore the question how much our income shrinks cannot occupy me.

Tolstoy finally satisfied himself by giving up his estates to his family. The house itself he left to the youngest, Ivan. This was a tradition in the family, Tolstoy, as his mother’s youngest son, having inherited Yasnaya Polyana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the secret of Tolstoy’s power?