The Forged Coupon, and Other Stories-2

The social condition of Russia is like a tideless sea, whose sullen

quiescence is broken from time to time by terrific storms which spend

themselves in unavailing fury. Reaction follows upon every forward motion,

and the advance made by each succeeding generation is barely perceptible.

But in the period of peace following upon the close of the Crimean War the

soul of the Russian people was deeply stirred by the spirit of Progress,

and hope rose high on the accession of Alexander II.

The emancipation of the serfs was only one among a number of projected

reforms which engaged men’s minds. The national conscience awoke and

echoed the cry of the exiled patriot Herzen, “Now or never!” Educational

enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children were

started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (1861).

The literary world throbbed with new life, and a brilliant company of

young writers came to the surface, counting among them names of European

celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov. Unhappily the

reign of Progress was short. The bureaucratic circle hemming in the Czar

took alarm, and made haste to secure their ascendancy by fresh measures of

oppression. Many schools were closed, including that of Tolstoy, and the

nascent liberty of the Press was stifled by the most rigid censorship.

In this lamentable manner the history of Russia’s internal misrule and

disorder has continued to repeat itself for the last sixty years,

revolving in the same vicious circle of fierce repression and persecution

and utter disregard of the rights of individuals, followed by fierce

reprisals on the part of the persecuted; the voice of protest no sooner

raised than silenced in a prison cell or among Siberian snow-fields, yet

rising again and again with inextinguishable reiteration; appeals for

political freedom, for constitutional government, for better systems and

wider dissemination of education, for liberty of the Press, and for an

enlightened treatment of the masses, callously received and rejected. The

answer with which these appeals have been met by the rulers of Russia is

only too well known to the civilised world, but the obduracy of Pharoah

has called forth the plagues of Egypt. Despite the unrivalled agrarian

fertility of Russia, famines recur with dire frequency, with disease and

riot in their train, while the ignominious termination of the

Russo-Japanese war showed that even the magnificent morale of the Russian

soldier had been undermined and was tainted by the rottenness of the

authorities set over him. What in such circumstances as these can a

handful of philanthropists achieve, and what avails alms-giving or the

scattering of largesse to a people on the point of spiritual dissolution?

In these conditions Tolstoy’s abhorrence of money, and his assertion of

its futility as a panacea for human suffering, appears not merely

comprehensible but inevitable, and his renunciation of personal property

the strictly logical outcome of his conclusions. The partition of his

estates between his wife and children, shortly before the outbreak of the

great famine in 1892, served to relieve his mind partially; and the

writings of Henry George, with which he became acquainted at this critical

time, were an additional incentive to concentrate his thoughts on the land

question. He began by reading the American propagandist’s “Social

Problems,” which arrested his attention by its main principles and by the

clearness and novelty of his arguments. Deeply impressed by the study of

this book, no sooner had he finished it than he possessed himself of its

forerunner, “Progress and Poverty,” in which the essence of George’s

revolutionary doctrines is worked out.

The plan of land nationalisation there explained provided Tolstoy with

well thought-out and logical reasons for a policy that was already more

than sympathetic to him. Here at last was a means of ensuring economic

equality for all, from the largest landowner to the humblest peasant—a

practical suggestion how to reduce the inequalities between rich and poor.

Henry George’s ideas and methods are easy of comprehension. The land was

made by God for every human creature that was born into the world, and

therefore to confine the ownership of land to the few is wrong. If a man

wants a piece of land, he ought to pay the rest of the community for the

enjoyment of it. This payment or rent should be the only tax paid into the

Treasury of the State. Taxation on men’s own property (the produce of

their own labour) should be done away with, and a rent graduated according

to the site-value of the land should be substituted. Monopolies would

cease without violently and unjustly disturbing society with confiscation

and redistribution. No one would keep land idle if he were taxed according

to its value to the community, and not according to the use to which he

individually wished to put it. A man would then readily obtain possession

of land, and could turn it to account and develop it without being taxed

on his own industry. All human beings would thus become free in their

lives and in their labour. They would no longer be forced to toil at

demoralising work for low wages; they would be independent producers

instead of earning a living by providing luxuries for the rich, who had

enslaved them by monopolising the land. The single tax thus created would

ultimately overthrow the present “civilisation” which is chiefly built up

on wage-slavery.

Tolstoy gave his whole-hearted adhesion to this doctrine, predicting a day

of enlightenment when men would no longer tolerate a form of slavery which

he considered as revolting as that which had so recently been abolished.

Some long conversations with Henry George, while he was on a visit to

Yasnaya Polyana, gave additional strength to Tolstoy’s conviction that in

these theories lay the elements essential to the transformation and

rejuvenation of human nature, going far towards the levelling of social

inequalities. But to inoculate the landed proprietors of Russia as a class

with those theories was a task which even his genius could not hope to

accomplish.

He recognised the necessity of proceeding from the particular to the

general, and that the perfecting of human institutions was impossible

without a corresponding perfection in the individual. To this end

therefore the remainder of his life was dedicated. He had always held in

aversion what he termed external epidemic influences: he now endeavoured

to free himself not only from all current conventions, but from every

association which he had formerly cherished. Self-analysis and general

observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that

sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts, if

it were not for Art, and especially for Music. This view of life he

forcibly expressed in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” in which Woman and Music, the

two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil. Already, in

“War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina,” his descriptions of female charms

resembled catalogues of weapons against which a man must arm himself or

perish. The beautiful Princess Helena, with her gleaming shoulders, her

faultless white bosom, and her eternal smile is evidently an object of

aversion to her creator; even as the Countess Betsy, with her petty

coquetries and devices for attracting attention at the Opera and

elsewhere, is a target for his contempt. “Woman is a stumbling-block in a

man’s career,” remarks a philosophical husband in “Anna Karenina.” “It is

difficult to love a woman and do any good work, and the only way to escape

being reduced to inaction is to marry.”

Even in his correspondence with the Countess A. A. Tolstoy this slighting

tone prevails. “A woman has but one moral weapon instead of the whole male

arsenal. That is love, and only with this weapon is feminine education

successfully carried forward.” Tolstoy, in fact, betrayed a touch of

orientalism in his attitude towards women. In part no doubt as a result of

his motherless youth, in part to the fact that his idealism was never

stimulated by any one woman as it was by individual men, his views

retained this colouring on sex questions while they became widened and

modified in almost every other field of human philosophy. It was only

that, with a revulsion of feeling not seldom experienced by earnest

thinkers, attraction was succeeded by a repulsion which reached the high

note of exasperation when he wrote to a man friend, “A woman in good

health—why, she is a regular beast of prey!”

None the less, he showed great kindness and sympathy to the women who

sought his society, appealing to him for guidance. One of these (an

American, and herself a practical philanthropist), Miss Jane Addams,

expressed with feeling her sense of his personal influence. “The glimpse

of Tolstoy has made a profound impression on me, not so much by what he

said, as the life, the gentleness, the soul of him. I am sure you will

understand my saying that I got more of Tolstoy’s philosophy from our

conversations than I had gotten from our books.” (Quoted by Aylmer Maude

in his “Life of Tolstoy.”)

As frequently happens in the lives of reformers, Tolstoy found himself

more often in affinity with strangers than with his own kin. The

estrangement of his ideals from those of his wife necessarily affected

their conjugal relations, and the decline of mutual sympathy inevitably

induced physical alienation. The stress of mental anguish arising from

these conditions found vent in pages of his diaries (much of which I have

been permitted to read), pages containing matter too sacred and intimate

to use. The diaries shed a flood of light on Tolstoy’s ideas, motives, and

manner of life, and have modified some of my opinions, explaining many

hitherto obscure points, while they have also enhanced my admiration for

the man. They not only touch on many delicate subjects—on his

relations to his wife and family—but they also give the true reasons

for leaving his home at last, and explain why he did not do so before. The

time, it seems to me, is not ripe for disclosures of this nature, which so

closely concern the living.

Despite a strong rein of restraint his mental distress permeates the

touching letter of farewell which he wrote some sixteen years before his

death. He, however, shrank from acting upon it, being unable to satisfy

himself that it was a right step. This letter has already appeared in

foreign publications,* but it is quoted here because “I have suffered

long, dear Sophie, from the discord between my life and my beliefs.

* And in Birukov’s short Life of Tolstoy, 1911. of the

light which it throws on the character and disposition of

the writer, the workings of his mind being of greater moment

to us than those impulsive actions by which he was too often

judged.

“I cannot constrain you to alter your life or your accustomed ways.

Neither have I had the strength to leave you ere this, for I thought my

absence might deprive the little ones, still so young, of whatever

influence I may have over them, and above all that I should grieve you.

But I can no longer live as I have lived these last sixteen years,

sometimes battling with you and irritating you, sometimes myself giving

way to the influences and seductions to which I am accustomed and which

surround me. I have now resolved to do what I have long desired: to go

away . . . Even as the Hindoos, at the age of sixty, betake themselves to

the jungle; even as every aged and religious-minded man desires to

consecrate the last years of his life to God and not to idle talk, to

making jokes, to gossiping, to lawn-tennis; so I, having reached the age

of seventy, long with all my soul for calm and solitude, and if not

perfect harmony, at least a cessation from this horrible discord between

my whole life and my conscience.

“If I had gone away openly there would have been entreaties, discussions:

I should have wavered, and perhaps failed to act on my decision, whereas

it must be so. I pray of you to forgive me if my action grieves you. And

do you, Sophie, in particular let me go, neither seeking me out, nor

bearing me ill-will, nor blaming me . . . the fact that I have left you

does not mean that I have cause of complaint against you . . . I know you

were not able, you were incapable of thinking and seeing as I do, and

therefore you could not change your life and make sacrifices to that which

you did not accept. Besides, I do not blame you; on the contrary, I

remember with love and gratitude the thirty-five long years of our life in

common, and especially the first half of the time when, with the courage

and devotion of your maternal nature, you bravely bore what you regarded

as your mission. You have given largely of maternal love and made some

heavy sacrifices . . . but during the latter part of our life together,

during the last fifteen years, our ways have parted. I cannot think myself

the guilty one; I know that if I have changed it is not owing to you, or

to the world, but because I could not do otherwise; nor can I judge you

for not having followed me, and I thank you for what you have given me and

will ever remember it with affection.

“Adieu, my dear Sophie, I love you.”

The personal isolation he craved was never to be his; but the isolation of

spirit essential to leadership, whether of thought or action, grew year by

year, so that in his own household he was veritably “in it but not of it.”

At times his loneliness weighed upon him, as when he wrote: “You would

find it difficult to imagine how isolated I am, to what an extent my true

self is despised by those who surround me.” But he must, none the less,

have realised, as all prophets and seers have done, that solitariness of

soul and freedom from the petty complexities of social life are necessary

to the mystic whose constant endeavour is to simplify and to winnow, the

transient from the eternal.

Notwithstanding the isolation of his inner life he remained—or it

might more accurately be said he became—the most accessible of men.

Appeals for guidance came to him from all parts of the world—America,

France, China, Japan—while Yasnaya Polyana was the frequent resort

of those needing advice, sympathy, or practical assistance. None appealed

to him in vain; at the same time, he was exceedingly chary of explicit

rules of conduct. It might be said of Tolstoy that he became a spiritual

leader in spite of himself, so averse was he from assuming authority. His

aim was ever to teach his followers themselves to hear the inward monitory

voice, and to obey it of their own accord. “To know the meaning of Life,

you must first know the meaning of Love,” he would say; “and then see that

you do what love bids you.” His distrust of “epidemic ideas” extended to

religious communities and congregations.

“We must not go to meet each other, but go each of us to God. You say it

is easier to go all together? Why yes, to dig or to mow. But one can only

draw near to God in isolation . . . I picture the world to myself as a

vast temple, in which the light falls from above in the very centre. To

meet together all must go towards the light. There we shall find

ourselves, gathered from many quarters, united with men we did not expect

to see; therein is joy.”

The humility which had so completely supplanted his youthful arrogance,

and which made him shrink from impelling others to follow in his steps,

endued him also with the teachableness of a child towards those whom he

accepted as his spiritual mentors. It was a peasant nonconformist writer,

Soutaev, who by conversing with him on the revelations of the Gospels

helped him to regain his childhood’s faith, and incidentally brought him

into closer relations with religious, but otherwise untaught, men of the

people. He saw how instead of railing against fate after the manner of

their social superiors, they endured sickness and misfortune with a calm

confidence that all was by the will of God, as it must be and should be.

From his peasant teachers he drew the watchwords Faith, Love, and Labour,

and by their light he established that concord in his own life without

which the concord of the universe remains impossible to realise. The

process of inward struggle—told with unsparing truth in “Confession”—is

finely painted in “Father Serge,” whose life story points to the

conclusion at which Tolstoy ultimately arrived, namely, that not in

withdrawal from the common trials and temptations of men, but in sharing

them, lies our best fulfilment of our duty towards mankind and towards

God. Tolstoy gave practical effect to this principle, and to this

long-felt desire to be of use to the poor of the country, by editing and

publishing, aided by his friend Chertkov,* modern literature has awakened

so universal a sense of sympathy and admiration, perhaps because none has

been so entirely a labour of love.

* In Russia and out of it Mr. Chertkov has been the subject

of violent attack. Many of the misunderstandings of

Tolstoy’s later years have also been attributed by critics,

and by those who hate or belittle his ideas, to the

influence of this friend. These attacks are very regrettable

and require a word of protest. From tales, suited to the

means and intelligence of the humblest peasant. The

undertaking was initiated in 1885, and continued for many

years to occupy much of Tolstoy’s time and energies. He

threw himself with ardour into his editorial duties; reading

and correcting manuscripts, returning them sometimes to the

authors with advice as to their reconstruction, and making

translations from foreign works—all this in addition to his

own original contributions, in which he carried out the

principle which he constantly laid down for his

collaborators, that literary graces must be set aside, and

that the mental calibre of those for whom the books were

primarily intended must be constantly borne in mind. He

attained a splendid fulfilment of his own theories,

employing the moujik’s expressive vernacular in portraying

his homely wisdom, religious faith, and goodness of nature.

Sometimes the prevailing simplicity of style and motive is

tinged with a vague colouring of oriental legend, but the

personal accent is marked throughout. No similar achievement

in the beginning Mr. Chertkov has striven to spread the

ideas of Tolstoy, and has won neither glory nor money from

his faithful and single-hearted devotion. He has carried on

his work with a rare love and sympathy in spite of

difficulties. No one appreciated or valued his friendship

and self-sacrifice more than Tolstoy himself, who was firmly

attached to him from the date of his first meeting,

consulting him and confiding in him at every moment, even

during Mr. Chertkov’s long exile.

The series of educational primers which Tolstoy prepared and published

concurrently with the “Popular Tales” have had an equally large, though

exclusively Russian, circulation, being admirably suited to their purpose—that

of teaching young children the rudiments of history, geography, and

science. Little leisure remained for the service of Art.

The history of Tolstoy as a man of letters forms a separate page of his

biography, and one into which it is not possible to enter in the brief

compass of this introduction. It requires, however, a passing allusion.

Tolstoy even in his early days never seems to have approached near to that

manner of life which the literary man leads: neither to have shut himself

up in his study, nor to have barred the entrance to disturbing friends. On

the one hand, he was fond of society, and during his brief residence in

St. Petersburg was never so engrossed in authorship as to forego the

pleasure of a ball or evening entertainment. Little wonder, when one looks

back at the brilliant young officer surrounded and petted by the great

hostesses of Russia. On the other hand, he was no devotee at the literary

altar. No patron of literature could claim him as his constant visitor; no

inner circle of men of letters monopolised his idle hours. Afterwards,

when he left the capital and settled in the country, he was almost

entirely cut off from the association of literary men, and never seems to

have sought their companionship. Nevertheless, he had all through his life

many fast friends, among them such as the poet Fet, the novelist Chekhov,

and the great Russian librarian Stassov, who often came to him. These

visits always gave him pleasure. The discussions, whether on the literary

movements of the day or on the merits of Goethe or the humour of Gogol,

were welcome interruptions to his ever-absorbing metaphysical studies. In

later life, also, though never in touch with the rising generation of

authors, we find him corresponding with them, criticising their style and

subject matter. When Andreev, the most modern of all modern Russian

writers, came to pay his respects to Tolstoy some months before his death,

he was received with cordiality, although Tolstoy, as he expressed himself

afterwards, felt that there was a great gulf fixed between them.

Literature, as literature, had lost its charm for him. “You are perfectly

right,” he writes to a friend; “I care only for the idea, and I pay no

attention to my style.” The idea was the important thing to Tolstoy in

everything that he read or wrote. When his attention was drawn to an

illuminating essay on the poet Lermontov he was pleased with it, not

because it demonstrated Lermontov’s position in the literary history of

Russia, but because it pointed out the moral aims which underlay the wild

Byronism of his works. He reproached the novelist Leskov, who had sent him

his latest novel, for the “exuberance” of his flowers of speech and for

his florid sentences—beautiful in their way, he says, but

inexpedient and unnecessary. He even counselled the younger generation to

give up poetry as a form of expression and to use prose instead. Poetry,

he maintained, was always artificial and obscure. His attitude towards the

art of writing remained to the end one of hostility. Whenever he caught

himself working for art he was wont to reproach himself, and his diaries

contain many recriminations against his own weakness in yielding to this

besetting temptation. Yet to these very lapses we are indebted for this

collection of fragments.

The greater number of stories and plays contained in these volumes date

from the years following upon Tolstoy’s pedagogic activity. Long

intervals, however, elapsed in most cases between the original synopsis

and the final touches. Thus “Father Serge,” of which he sketched the

outline to Mr. Chertkov in 1890, was so often put aside to make way for

purely ethical writings that not till 1898 does the entry occur in his

diary, “To-day, quite unexpectedly, I finished Serge.” A year previously a

dramatic incident had come to his knowledge, which he elaborated in the

play entitled “The Man who was dead.” It ran on the lines familiarised by

Enoch Arden and similar stories, of a wife deserted by her husband and

supported in his absence by a benefactor, whom she subsequently marries.

In this instance the supposed dead man was suddenly resuscitated as the

result of his own admissions in his cups, the wife and her second husband

being consequently arrested and condemned to a term of imprisonment.

Tolstoy seriously attacked the subject during the summer of 1900, and

having brought it within a measurable distance of completion in a shorter

time than was usual with him, submitted it to the judgment of a circle of

friends. The drama made a deep impression on the privileged few who read

it, and some mention of it appeared in the newspapers.

Shortly afterwards a young man came to see Tolstoy in private. He begged

him to refrain from publishing “The Man who was dead,” as it was the

history of his mother’s life, and would distress her gravely, besides

possibly occasioning further police intervention. Tolstoy promptly

consented, and the play remained, as it now appears, in an unfinished

condition. He had already felt doubtful whether “it was a thing God would

approve,” Art for Art’s sake having in his eyes no right to existence. For

this reason a didactic tendency is increasingly evident in these later

stories. “After the Ball” gives a painful picture of Russian military

cruelty; “The Forged Coupon” traces the cancerous growth of evil, and

demonstrates with dramatic force the cumulative misery resulting from one

apparently trivial act of wrongdoing.

Of the three plays included in these volumes, “The Light that shines in

Darkness” has a special claim to our attention as an example of

autobiography in the guise of drama. It is a specimen of Tolstoy’s gift of

seeing himself as others saw him, and viewing a question in all its

bearings. It presents not actions but ideas, giving with entire

impartiality the opinions of his home circle, of his friends, of the

Church and of the State, in regard to his altruistic propaganda and to the

anarchism of which he has been accused. The scene of the renunciation of

the estates of the hero may be taken as a literal version of what actually

took place in regard to Tolstoy himself, while the dialogues by which the

piece is carried forward are more like verbatim records than imaginary

conversations.

This play was, in addition, a medium by which Tolstoy emphasised his

abhorrence of military service, and probably for this reason its

production is absolutely forbidden in Russia. A word may be said here on

Tolstoy’s so-called Anarchy, a term admitting of grave misconstruction. In

that he denied the benefit of existing governments to the people over whom

they ruled, and in that he stigmatised standing armies as “collections of

disciplined murderers,” Tolstoy was an Anarchist; but in that he

reprobated the methods of violence, no matter how righteous the cause at

stake, and upheld by word and deed the gospel of Love and submission, he

cannot be judged guilty of Anarchism in its full significance. He could

not, however, suppress the sympathy which he felt with those whose

resistance to oppression brought them into deadly conflict with autocracy.

He found in the Caucasian chieftain, Hadji Murat, a subject full of human

interest and dramatic possibilities; and though some eight years passed

before he corrected the manuscript for the last time (in 1903), it is

evident from the numbers of entries in his diary that it had greatly

occupied his thoughts so far back even as the period which he spent in

Tiflis prior to the Crimean war. It was then that the final subjugation of

the Caucasus took place, and Shamil and his devoted band made their last

struggle for freedom. After the lapse of half a century, Tolstoy gave vent

in “Hadji Murat” to the resentment which the military despotism of

Nicholas I. had roused in his sensitive and fearless spirit.

Courage was the dominant note in Tolstoy’s character, and none have

excelled him in portraying brave men. His own fearlessness was of the

rarest, in that it was both physical and moral. The mettle tried and

proved at Sebastopol sustained him when he had drawn on himself the bitter

animosity of “Holy Synod” and the relentless anger of Czardom. In spite of

his nonresistance doctrine, Tolstoy’s courage was not of the passive

order. It was his natural bent to rouse his foes to combat, rather than

wait for their attack, to put on the defensive every falsehood and every

wrong of which he was cognisant. Truth in himself and in others was what

he most desired, and that to which he strove at all costs to attain. He

was his own severest critic, weighing his own actions, analysing his own

thoughts, and baring himself to the eyes of the world with unflinching

candour. Greatest of autobiographers, he extenuates nothing: you see the

whole man with his worst faults and best qualities; weaknesses accentuated

by the energy with which they are charactered, apparent waste of mental

forces bent on solving the insoluble, inherited tastes and prejudices,

altruistic impulses and virile passions, egoism and idealism, all

strangely mingled and continually warring against each other, until from

the death-throes of spiritual conflict issued a new birth and a new life.

In the ancient Scripture “God is love” Tolstoy discerned fresh meaning,

and strove with superhuman energy to bring home that meaning to the world

at large. His doctrine in fact appears less as a new light in the darkness

than as a revival of the pure flame of “the Mystic of the Galilean hills,”

whose teaching he accepted while denying His divinity.

Of Tolstoy’s beliefs in regard to the Christian religion it may be said

that with advancing years he became more and more disposed to regard

religious truth as one continuous stream of spiritual thought flowing

through the ages of man’s history, emanating principally from the inspired

prophets and seers of Israel, India, and China. Finally, in 1909, in a

letter to a friend he summed up his conviction in the following words:—“For

me the doctrine of Jesus is simply one of those beautiful religious

doctrines which we have received from Egyptian, Jewish, Hindoo, Chinese,

and Greek antiquity. The two great principles of Jesus: love of God—in

a word absolute perfection—and love of one’s neighbour, that is to

say, love of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the

sages of the world—Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse, Confucius, Socrates,

Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and among the moderns, Rousseau,

Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Religious and moral

truth is everywhere and always the same. I have no predilection whatever

for Christianity. If I have been particularly interested in the doctrine

of Jesus it is, firstly, because I was born in that religion and have

lived among Christians; secondly, because I have found a great spiritual

joy in freeing the doctrine in its purity from the astounding

falsifications wrought by the Churches.”

Tolstoy’s life-work was indeed a splendid striving to free truth from

falsehood, to simplify the complexities of civilisation and demonstrate

their futility. Realists as gifted have come and gone and left but little

trace. It is conceivable that the great trilogy of “Anna Karenina,” “War

and Peace,” and “Resurrection” may one day be forgotten, but Tolstoy’s

teaching stands on firmer foundations, and has stirred the hearts of

thousands who are indifferent to the finest display of psychic analysis.

He has taught men to venture beyond the limits set by reason, to rise

above the actual and to find the meaning of life in love. It was his

mission to probe our moral ulcers to the roots and to raise moribund

ideals from the dust, breathing his own vitality into them, till they rose

before our eyes as living aspirations. The spiritual joy of which he wrote

was no rhetorical hyperbole; it was manifest in the man himself, and was

the fount of the lofty idealism which made him not only “the Conscience of

Russia” but of the civilised world.

Idealism is one of those large abstractions which are invested by various

minds with varying shades of meaning, and which find expression in an

infinite number of forms. Ideals bred and fostered in the heart of man

receive at birth an impress from the life that engenders them, and when

that life is tempest-tossed the thought that springs from it must bear a

birth-mark of the storm. That birth-mark is stamped on all Tolstoy’s

utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though he did not

pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with eyes undimmed

from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is not thereby

invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none the less a state

of perfection to which we must continually aspire, undaunted by partial

failure.

“There is nothing wrong in not living up to the ideal which you have made

for yourself, but what is wrong is, if on looking back, you cannot see

that you have made the least step nearer to your ideal.”

How far Tolstoy’s doctrines may influence succeeding generations it is

impossible to foretell; but when time has extinguished what is merely

personal or racial, the divine spark which he received from his great

spiritual forerunners in other times and countries will undoubtedly be

found alight. His universality enabled him to unite himself closely with

them in mental sympathy; sometimes so closely, as in the case of J. J.

Rousseau, as to raise analogies and comparisons designed to show that he

merely followed in a well-worn pathway. Yet the similarity of Tolstoy’s

ideas to those of the author of the “Contrat Social” hardly goes beyond a

mutual distrust of Art and Science as aids to human happiness and virtue,

and a desire to establish among mankind a true sense of brotherhood. For

the rest, the appeals which they individually made to Humanity were as

dissimilar as the currents of their lives, and equally dissimilar in

effect.

The magic flute of Rousseau’s eloquence breathed fanaticism into his

disciples, and a desire to mass themselves against the foes of liberty.

Tolstoy’s trumpet-call sounds a deeper note. It pierces the heart,

summoning each man to the inquisition of his own conscience, and to

justify his existence by labour, that he may thereafter sleep the sleep of

peace.