The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories
出版:The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories
The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories-1
THE FORGED COUPON And Other Stories
By Leo Tolstoy
Contents
INTRODUCTION
LIST OF POSTHUMOUS WORKS
PART FIRST
PART SECOND
AFTER THE DANCE
ALYOSHA THE POT
MY DREAM
THERE ARE NO GUILTY PEOPLE
THE YOUNG TSAR
INTRODUCTION
IN an age of materialism like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power is
as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with the
“divine right” of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and
theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of a coercive
weapon of statecraft.
Freed from its ancient shackles of dogma and despotism it eludes analysis.
We know not how to gauge its effect on others, nor even upon ourselves.
Like the wind, it permeates the atmosphere we breathe, and baffles while
it stimulates the mind with its intangible but compelling force.
This psychic power, which the dead weight of materialism is impotent to
suppress, is revealed in the lives and writings of men of the most diverse
creeds and nationalities. Apart from those who, like Buddha and Mahomet,
have been raised to the height of demi-gods by worshipping millions, there
are names which leap inevitably to the mind—such names as
Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Rousseau—which stand for types and
exemplars of spiritual aspiration. To this high priesthood of the quick
among the dead, who can doubt that time will admit Leo Tolstoy—a
genius whose greatness has been obscured from us rather than enhanced by
his duality; a realist who strove to demolish the mysticism of
Christianity, and became himself a mystic in the contemplation of Nature;
a man of ardent temperament and robust physique, keenly susceptible to
human passions and desires, who battled with himself from early manhood
until the spirit, gathering strength with years, inexorably subdued the
flesh.
Tolstoy the realist steps without cavil into the front rank of modern
writers; Tolstoy the idealist has been constantly derided and scorned by
men of like birth and education with himself—his altruism denounced
as impracticable, his preaching compared with his mode of life to prove
him inconsistent, if not insincere. This is the prevailing attitude of
politicians and literary men.
Must one conclude that the mass of mankind has lost touch with idealism?
On the contrary, in spite of modern materialism, or even because of it,
many leaders of spiritual thought have arisen in our times, and have won
the ear of vast audiences. Their message is a call to a simpler life, to a
recognition of the responsibilities of wealth, to the avoidance of war by
arbitration, and sinking of class hatred in a deep sense of universal
brotherhood.
Unhappily, when an idealistic creed is formulated in precise and dogmatic
language, it invariably loses something of its pristine beauty in the
process of transmutation. Hence the Positivist philosophy of Comte, though
embodying noble aspirations, has had but a limited influence. Again, the
poetry of Robert Browning, though less frankly altruistic than that of
Cowper or Wordsworth, is inherently ethical, and reveals strong sympathy
with sinning and suffering humanity, but it is masked by a manner that is
sometimes uncouth and frequently obscure. Owing to these, and other
instances, idealism suggests to the world at large a vague sentimentality
peculiar to the poets, a bloodless abstraction toyed with by philosophers,
which must remain a closed book to struggling humanity.
Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling peasant who believed in
God, rather than in his intellectual superior who believed in himself in
the first place, and gave a conventional assent to the existence of a
deity in the second. For the peasant was still religious at heart with a
naive unquestioning faith—more characteristic of the fourteenth or
fifteenth century than of to-day—and still fervently aspired to God
although sunk in superstition and held down by the despotism of the Greek
Church. It was the cumbrous ritual and dogma of the orthodox state
religion which roused Tolstoy to impassioned protests, and led him step by
step to separate the core of Christianity from its sacerdotal shell, thus
bringing upon himself the ban of excommunication.
The signal mark of the reprobation of “Holy Synod” was slow in coming—it
did not, in fact, become absolute until a couple of years after the
publication of “Resurrection,” in 1901, in spite of the attitude of fierce
hostility to Church and State which Tolstoy had maintained for so long.
This hostility, of which the seeds were primarily sown by the closing of
his school and inquisition of his private papers in the summer of 1862,
soon grew to proportions far greater than those arising from a personal
wrong. The dumb and submissive moujik found in Tolstoy a living voice to
express his sufferings.
Tolstoy was well fitted by nature and circumstances to be the peasant’s
spokesman. He had been brought into intimate contact with him in the
varying conditions of peace and war, and he knew him at his worst and
best. The old home of the family, Yasnaya Polyana, where Tolstoy, his
brothers and sister, spent their early years in charge of two guardian
aunts, was not only a halting-place for pilgrims journeying to and from
the great monastic shrines, but gave shelter to a number of persons of
enfeebled minds belonging to the peasant class, with whom the devout and
kindly Aunt Alexandra spent many hours daily in religious conversation and
prayer.
In “Childhood” Tolstoy apostrophises with feeling one of those
“innocents,” a man named Grisha, “whose faith was so strong that you felt
the nearness of God, your love so ardent that the words flowed from your
lips uncontrolled by your reason. And how did you celebrate his Majesty
when, words failing you, you prostrated yourself on the ground, bathed in
tears” This picture of humble religious faith was amongst Tolstoy’s
earliest memories, and it returned to comfort him and uplift his soul when
it was tossed and engulfed by seas of doubt. But the affection he felt in
boyhood towards the moujiks became tinged with contempt when his attempts
to improve their condition—some of which are described in “Anna
Karenina” and in the “Landlord’s Morning”—ended in failure, owing to
the ignorance and obstinacy of the people. It was not till he passed
through the ordeal of war in Turkey and the Crimea that he discovered in
the common soldier who fought by his side an unconscious heroism, an
unquestioning faith in God, a kindliness and simplicity of heart rarely
possessed by his commanding officer.
The impressions made upon Tolstoy during this period of active service
gave vivid reality to the battle-scenes in “War and Peace,” and are
traceable in the reflections and conversation of the two heroes, Prince
Andre and Pierre Besukhov. On the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince
Andre, talking with Pierre in the presence of his devoted soldier-servant
Timokhine, says,—“‘Success cannot possibly be, nor has it ever been,
the result of strategy or fire-arms or numbers.’
“‘Then what does it result from?’ said Pierre.
“‘From the feeling that is in me, that is in him’—pointing to
Timokhine—‘and that is in each individual soldier.’”
He then contrasts the different spirit animating the officers and the men.
“‘The former,’ he says, ‘have nothing in view but their personal
interests. The critical moment for them is the moment at which they are
able to supplant a rival, to win a cross or a new order. I see only one
thing. To-morrow one hundred thousand Russians and one hundred thousand
Frenchmen will meet to fight; they who fight the hardest and spare
themselves the least will win the day.’
“‘There’s the truth, your Excellency, the real truth,’ murmurs Timokhine;
‘it is not a time to spare oneself. Would you believe it, the men of my
battalion have not tasted brandy? “It’s not a day for that,” they said.’”
During the momentous battle which followed, Pierre was struck by the
steadfastness under fire which has always distinguished the Russian
soldier.
“The fall of each man acted as an increasing stimulus. The faces of the
soldiers brightened more and more, as if challenging the storm let loose
on them.”
In contrast with this picture of fine “morale” is that of the young
white-faced officer, looking nervously about him as he walks backwards
with lowered sword.
In other places Tolstoy does full justice to the courage and patriotism of
all grades in the Russian army, but it is constantly evident that his
sympathies are most heartily with the rank and file. What genuine feeling
and affection rings in this sketch of Plato, a common soldier, in “War and
Peace!”
“Plato Karataev was about fifty, judging by the number of campaigns in
which he had served; he could not have told his exact age himself, and
when he laughed, as he often did, he showed two rows of strong, white
teeth. There was not a grey hair on his head or in his beard, and his
bearing wore the stamp of activity, resolution, and above all, stoicism.
His face, though much lined, had a touching expression of simplicity,
youth, and innocence. When he spoke, in his soft sing-song voice, his
speech flowed as from a well-spring. He never thought about what he had
said or was going to say next, and the vivacity and the rhythmical
inflections of his voice gave it a penetrating persuasiveness. Night and
morning, when going to rest or getting up, he said, ‘O God, let me sleep
like a stone and rise up like a loaf.’ And, sure enough, he had no sooner
lain down than he slept like a lump of lead, and in the morning on waking
he was bright and lively, and ready for any work. He could do anything,
just not very well nor very ill; he cooked, sewed, planed wood, cobbled
his boots, and was always occupied with some job or other, only allowing
himself to chat and sing at night. He sang, not like a singer who knows he
has listeners, but as the birds sing to God, the Father of all, feeling it
as necessary as walking or stretching himself. His singing was tender,
sweet, plaintive, almost feminine, in keeping with his serious
countenance. When, after some weeks of captivity his beard had grown
again, he seemed to have got rid of all that was not his true self, the
borrowed face which his soldiering life had given him, and to have become,
as before, a peasant and a man of the people. In the eyes of the other
prisoners Plato was just a common soldier, whom they chaffed at times and
sent on all manner of errands; but to Pierre he remained ever after the
personification of simplicity and truth, such as he had divined him to be
since the first night spent by his side.”
This clearly is a study from life, a leaf from Tolstoy’s “Crimean
Journal.” It harmonises with the point of view revealed in the “Letters
from Sebastopol” (especially in the second and third series), and shows,
like them, the change effected by the realities of war in the intolerant
young aristocrat, who previously excluded all but the comme-il-faut from
his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to St.
Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by the
elite of letters and courted by society. A few years before he would have
been delighted with such a reception. Now it jarred on his awakened sense
of the tragedy of existence. He found himself entirely out of sympathy
with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with Turgenev at
their head. In Tolstoy’s eyes they were false, paltry, and immoral, and he
was at no pains to disguise his opinions. Dissension, leading to violent
scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy; and the latter,
completely disillusioned both in regard to his great contemporary and to
the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the dust of the capital,
and, after resigning his commission in the army, went abroad on a tour
through Germany, Switzerland, and France.
In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became intensified
by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful thoughts aroused by
the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive spirit for long. He left
France for Switzerland, and there, among beautiful natural surroundings,
and in the society of friends, he enjoyed a respite from mental strain.
“A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed me had
succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a confident
hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive.”
Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually styled
herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the Countess
Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved
exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent and sympathetic, but
strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while Tolstoy’s view of life
gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that of a social reformer,
her own remained unaltered; with the result that at the end of some forty
years of frank and affectionate interchange of ideas, they awoke to the
painful consciousness that the last link of mutual understanding had
snapped and that their friendship was at an end.
But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one of
Tolstoy’s rare friendships with women, revealing in his unguarded
confidences fine shades of his many-sided nature, and throwing light on
the impression he made both on his intimates and on those to whom he was
only known as a writer, while his moral philosophy was yet in embryo. They
are now about to appear in book form under the auspices of M. Stakhovich,
to whose kindness in giving me free access to the originals I am indebted
for the extracts which follow. From one of the countess’s first letters we
learn that the feelings of affection, hope, and happiness which possessed
Tolstoy in Switzerland irresistibly communicated themselves to those about
him.
“You are good in a very uncommon way,” she writes, “and that is why it is
difficult to feel unhappy in your company. I have never seen you without
wishing to be a better creature. Your presence is a consoling idea . . .
know all the elements in you that revive one’s heart, possibly without
your being even aware of it.”
A few years later she gives him an amusing account of the impression his
writings had already made on an eminent statesman.
“I owe you a small episode. Not long ago, when lunching with the Emperor,
I sat next our little Bismarck, and in a spirit of mischief I began
sounding him about you. But I had hardly uttered your name when he went
off at a gallop with the greatest enthusiasm, firing off the list of your
perfections left and right, and so long as he declaimed your praises with
gesticulations, cut and thrust, powder and shot, it was all very well and
quite in character; but seeing that I listened with interest and attention
my man took the bit in his teeth, and flung himself into a psychic
apotheosis. On reaching full pitch he began to get muddled, and floundered
so helplessly in his own phrases! all the while chewing an excellent
cutlet to the bone, that at last I realised nothing but the tips of his
ears—those two great ears of his. What a pity I can’t repeat it
verbatim! but how? There was nothing left but a jumble of confused sounds
and broken words.”
Tolstoy on his side is equally expansive, and in the early stages of the
correspondence falls occasionally into the vein of self-analysis which in
later days became habitual.
“As a child I believed with passion and without any thought. Then at the
age of fourteen I began to think about life and preoccupied myself with
religion, but it did not adjust itself to my theories and so I broke with
it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years . . .
everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no room for
religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible; there were
no more secrets in life, but life itself had lost its significance.”
He goes on to tell of the two years that he spent in the Caucasus before
the Crimean War, when his mind, jaded by youthful excesses, gradually
regained its freshness, and he awoke to a sense of communion with Nature
which he retained to his life’s end.
“I have my notes of that time, and now reading them over I am not able to
understand how a man could attain to the state of mental exaltation which
I arrived at. It was a torturing but a happy time.”
Further on he writes,—“In those two years of intellectual work, I
discovered a truth which is ancient and simple, but which yet I know
better than others do. I found out that immortal life is a reality, that
love is a reality, and that one must live for others if one would be
unceasingly happy.”
At this point one realises the gulf which divides the Slavonic from the
English temperament. No average Englishman of seven-and-twenty (as Tolstoy
was then) would pursue reflections of this kind, or if he did, he would in
all probability keep them sedulously to himself.
To Tolstoy and his aunt, on the contrary, it seemed the most natural thing
in the world to indulge in egoistic abstractions and to expatiate on them;
for a Russian feels none of the Anglo-Saxon’s mauvaise honte in describing
his spiritual condition, and is no more daunted by metaphysics than the
latter is by arguments on politics and sport.
To attune the Anglo-Saxon reader’s mind to sympathy with a mentality so
alien to his own, requires that Tolstoy’s environment should be described
more fully than most of his biographers have cared to do. This prefatory
note aims, therefore, at being less strictly biographical than
illustrative of the contributory elements and circumstances which
sub-consciously influenced Tolstoy’s spiritual evolution, since it is
apparent that in order to judge a man’s actions justly one must be able to
appreciate the motives from which they spring; those motives in turn
requiring the key which lies in his temperament, his associations, his
nationality. Such a key is peculiarly necessary to English or American
students of Tolstoy, because of the marked contrast existing between the
Russian and the Englishman or American in these respects, a contrast by
which Tolstoy himself was forcibly struck during the visit to Switzerland,
of which mention has been already made. It is difficult to restrain a
smile at the poignant mental discomfort endured by the sensitive Slav in
the company of the frigid and silent English frequenters of the
Schweitzerhof (“Journal of Prince D. Nekhludov,” Lucerne, 1857), whose
reserve, he realised, was “not based on pride, but on the absence of any
desire to draw nearer to each other”; while he looked back regretfully to
the pension in Paris where the table d’ hote was a scene of spontaneous
gaiety. The problem of British taciturnity passed his comprehension; but
for us the enigma of Tolstoy’s temperament is half solved if we see him
not harshly silhouetted against a blank wall, but suffused with his native
atmosphere, amid his native surroundings. Not till we understand the main
outlines of the Russian temperament can we realise the individuality of
Tolstoy himself: the personality that made him lovable, the universality
that made him great.
So vast an agglomeration of races as that which constitutes the Russian
empire cannot obviously be represented by a single type, but it will
suffice for our purposes to note the characteristics of the inhabitants of
Great Russia among whom Tolstoy spent the greater part of his lifetime and
to whom he belonged by birth and natural affinities.
It may be said of the average Russian that in exchange for a precocious
childhood he retains much of a child’s lightness of heart throughout his
later years, alternating with attacks of morbid despondency. He is usually
very susceptible to feminine charm, an ardent but unstable lover, whose
passions are apt to be as shortlived as they are violent. Story-telling
and long-winded discussions give him keen enjoyment, for he is garrulous,
metaphysical, and argumentative. In money matters careless and
extravagant, dilatory and venal in affairs; fond, especially in the
peasant class, of singing, dancing, and carousing; but his irresponsible
gaiety and heedlessness of consequences balanced by a fatalistic courage
and endurance in the face of suffering and danger. Capable, besides, of
high flights of idealism, which result in epics, but rarely in actions,
owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained and organised effort. The
Englishman by contrast appears cold and calculating, incapable of rising
above questions of practical utility; neither interested in other men’s
antecedents and experiences nor willing to retail his own. The catechism
which Plato puts Pierre through on their first encounter (“War and Peace”)
as to his family, possessions, and what not, are precisely similar to
those to which I have been subjected over and over again by chance
acquaintances in country-houses or by fellow travellers on journeys by
boat or train. The naivete and kindliness of the questioner makes it
impossible to resent, though one may feebly try to parry his probing. On
the other hand he offers you free access to the inmost recesses of his own
soul, and stupefies you with the candour of his revelations. This, of
course, relates more to the landed and professional classes than to the
peasant, who is slower to express himself, and combines in a curious way a
firm belief in the omnipotence and wisdom of his social superiors with a
rooted distrust of their intentions regarding himself. He is like a beast
of burden who flinches from every approach, expecting always a kick or a
blow. On the other hand, his affection for the animals who share his daily
work is one of the most attractive points in his character, and one which
Tolstoy never wearied of emphasising—describing, with the simple
pathos of which he was master, the moujik inured to his own privations but
pitiful to his horse, shielding him from the storm with his own coat, or
saving him from starvation with his own meagre ration; and mindful of him
even in his prayers, invoking, like Plato, the blessings of Florus and
Laura, patron saints of horses, because “one mustn’t forget the animals.”
The characteristics of a people so embedded in the soil bear a closer
relation to their native landscape than our own migratory populations, and
patriotism with them has a deep and vital meaning, which is expressed
unconsciously in their lives.
This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less the
animating power of the noble epic, “War and Peace,” and of his
peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian
scenery not merely with beauty, but with spiritual significance. I can
think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under the spell
of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with the normal
phenomena of plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to Pantheism,
found responses to his moods in trees, and gained spiritual expansion from
the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings his heroes into
touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate mysticism of his
own temperament, for to him Nature was “a guide to God.” So in the
two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree (“War and Peace”) the
Prince, though a man of action rather than of sentiment and habitually
cynical, is ready to find in the aged oak by the roadside, in early
spring, an animate embodiment of his own despondency.
“‘Springtime, love, happiness?—are you still cherishing those
deceptive illusions?’ the old oak seemed to say. ‘Isn’t it the same
fiction ever? There is neither spring, nor love, nor happiness! Look at
those poor weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty
arms issuing from all up my poor mutilated trunk—here I am, such as
they have made me, and I do not believe either in your hopes or in your
illusions.’”
And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts
backward glances as he passes by, “but the oak maintained its obstinate
and sullen immovability in the midst of the flowers and grass growing at
its feet. ‘Yes, that oak is right, right a thousand times over. One must
leave illusions to youth. But the rest of us know what life is worth; it
has nothing left to offer us.’”
Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his
melancholy torpor by his recent meeting with Natasha.
“The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered the
dust on the road and the grass in the ditch; the left side of the wood
remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by the wind,
glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near and
far the nightingales poured forth their song. ‘I fancy there was an oak
here that understood me,’ said Prince Andre to himself, looking to the
left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he sought. The
transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant, blooming
verdure, which swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the setting sun.
There were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen; its former
aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared; there were
only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through the
centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this
patriarch had really given birth to them. ‘Yes, it is he, indeed!’ cried
Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which the
springtime and this new life gave him . . . ‘No, my life cannot end at
thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is within me,
others must know it too! Pierre and that “slip” of a girl, who would have
fled into cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour theirs,
and their lives must mingle with mine!’”
In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy’s
love of Nature is often-times expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic and
the prophet’s mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the poet in him
wakes when, “with a feeling akin to ecstasy,” he looks up from his
smooth-running sledge at “the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,” or
in early spring feels on a ramble “intoxicated by the beauty of the
morning,” while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs, and
“the birds no longer sing at random,” but have begun to converse.
But though such allusions abound in his diary and private correspondence,
we must turn to “The Cossacks,” and “Conjugal Happiness” for the
exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those early romances
their fresh idyllic charm.
What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in
Nature coexisted with acute intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude.
In “The Cossacks,” the doubts, the mental gropings of Olenine—whose
personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy—haunt him betimes even
among the delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic hero
of “Conjugal Happiness,” calmly acquiesces in the inevitableness of
“love’s sad satiety” amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.
Doubt and despondency, increased by the vexations and failures attending
his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of
suicide.
“The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the schoolwork
so vague, my doubts arising from the wish to teach others, while
dissembling my own ignorance of what should be taught, were so
heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to
which I all but succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a
side of life as yet unknown to me which promised me salvation: this was
family life” (“My Confession”).
In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers (daughter
of Dr. Bers of Moscow) was consummated in the autumn of 1862—after a
somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her extreme youth—and
Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental peace such as he had
never known. His letters of this period to Countess A. A. Tolstoy, his
friend Fet, and others, ring with enraptured allusions to his new-found
joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism and altruism, all were swept
aside by the impetus of triumphant love and of all-sufficing conjugal
happiness. When in June of the following year a child was born, and the
young wife, her features suffused with “a supernatural beauty” lay trying
to smile at the husband who knelt sobbing beside her, Tolstoy must have
realised that for once his prophetic intuition had been unequal to its
task. If his imagination could have conceived in prenuptial days what
depths of emotion might be wakened by fatherhood, he would not have
treated the birth of Masha’s first child in “Conjugal Happiness” as a
trivial material event, in no way affecting the mutual relations of the
disillusioned pair. He would have understood that at this supreme crisis,
rather than in the vernal hour of love’s avowal, the heart is illumined
with a joy which is fated “never to return.”
The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in fact
delayed in Tolstoy’s own life by his wife’s intelligent assistance in his
literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the mutual anxieties and
pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children. Wider
horizons opened to his mental vision, his whole being was quickened and
invigorated. “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” all the splendid fruit of
the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear witness to the
stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning recognition of the
power and extent of female influence appears incidentally in the sketches
of high society in those two masterpieces as well as in the eloquent
closing passages of “What then must we do?” (1886). Having affirmed that
“it is women who form public opinion, and in our day women are
particularly powerful,” he finally draws a picture of the ideal wife who
shall urge her husband and train her children to self-sacrifice. “Such
women rule men and are their guiding stars. O women—mothers! The
salvation of the world lies in your hands!” In that appeal to the mothers
of the world there lurks a protest which in later writings developed into
overwhelming condemnation. True, he chose motherhood for the type of
self-sacrificing love in the treatise “On Life,” which appeared soon after
“What then must we do?” but maternal love, as exemplified in his own home
and elsewhere, appeared to him as a noble instinct perversely directed.
The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child’s
physical well-being is the first essential in the mother’s eyes—the
growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly tenanted—and
this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father accepted, Tolstoy as
idealist condemned; while the penury he courted as a lightening of his
soul’s burden was averted by the strenuous exertions of his wife. So a
rift grew without blame attaching to either, and Tolstoy henceforward
wandered solitary in spirit through a wilderness of thought, seeking rest
and finding none, coming perilously near to suicide before he reached
haven.
To many it will seem that the finest outcome of that period of mental
groping, internal struggle, and contending with current ideas, lies in the
above-mentioned “What then must we do?” Certain it is that no human
document ever revealed the soul of its author with greater sincerity. Not
for its practical suggestions, but for its impassioned humanity, its
infectious altruism, “What then must we do?” takes its rank among the
world’s few living books. It marks that stage of Tolstoy’s evolution when
he made successive essays in practical philanthropy which filled him with
discouragement, yet were “of use to his soul” in teaching him how far
below the surface lie the seeds of human misery. The slums of Moscow,
crowded with beings sunk beyond redemption; the famine-stricken plains of
Samara where disease and starvation reigned, notwithstanding the stream of
charity set flowing by Tolstoy’s appeals and notwithstanding his untiring
personal devotion, strengthened further the conviction, so constantly
affirmed in his writings, of the impotence of money to alleviate distress.
Whatever negations of this dictum our own systems of charitable
organizations may appear to offer, there can be no question but that in
Russia it held and holds true.