Leo Tolstoy. Prophet of Europe

I

“Judge of a tree by its fruit." Looking backward through, history, along the line of the world's great names, whom do we see to have been the world's great benefactors? These: the men who have most deeply discerned, and most effectively conveyed to others, the truth of life. They are such as Lao-tze, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Socrates, Jesus; from whom epochs are dated, and by whose teachings thousands of millions, age after age, suppose themselves to live.

And, indeed, it is by such men and their teachings that mankind do live; for these “prophets“ reveal the ideal towards which those who come after them must necessarily strive, though it be through all manner of ignorance and hypocrisy. The sign of a prophet is that he, of all men, deals with the simple and vital questions of life which are every man's problem, and agitates, revolutionises, renews, society by his solutions. Only the ages that come after him can estimate the worth and power of a prophet, but even his own day can judge whether or not a man be a prophet. And all over the world, by the few who believe with him, by the many who reject him, by multitudes who cannot or will not understand him, it is felt and known that Leo Tolstoy, the Russian, is indeed a prophet, a revealer.

That spare, strong-looking old man with Socrates-like face and long grey hair and beard, who lives so quietly in Moscow or in the country near, it is not too much to say, is the greatest power in the world to-day.

“What," you ask, “the greatest power in the world?" And I answer, Yes. He is, for instance, the declared opponent of the wielders of the largest militarism in the world, and they do not dare to lay hands on him.

His power is moral power, his rule is the rule of ideas; the enlightened consciences of men everywhere are with him. The mere circulation of his writings evidences that there is no man living who is so dominant over the thoughts of men to-day; even his enemies are influenced and moved by him.

The prophet deals with the simple and vital questions of life which are every man's problem. And all these questions are, and for men in society always have been, summed up in one the Social Question; the question, How shall we live in society? Even the matter of “personal salvation “is involved in this prior question. Our Christian religion declares this when it shows that salvation for the individual depends upon his obedience to the principle, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." All history, with its rise and fall of nations and states, growth and decay of religions, strifes for power and against oppression, pageantry and misery, war, murder, devotion and sacrifice all history may be best understood as the effort of humanity to rightly grasp in meaning and justly apply in practice, this great social principle, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The obvious and all-embracing practical implications of that principle are well expressed in that great cry of the French Revolution for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." To be in order, however, with the instinctive working and historic progress of the mind of man, let us change the positions of the words, and say, “Equality, Fraternity, Liberty." Then, looking upon the social struggle that is rending civilisation through its foundations, we may detect the general and ancient movement towards Equality, growing and spreading under its present-day name of Socialism.

"Equality of opportunity" is the conscious demand of millions of people, revolted by experience of the inequality which gives the power of property, with leisure and luxury, to the rich, and slavery, overwork, and want to the poor.

Within this wide range of Socialism is a less wide but deeper movement, which has for its hope Fraternity.

Turning from the prevalent state of war open war of the battle-field, veiled war of armed peace, and trade war called competition, the conscience of man desires even more than equality of opportunity, namely, co-operation, brotherly treatment of man by man. Communism, the movement arising hence is called.

And yet again, within these others is a less wide, still deeper movement, for Liberty. Men ask, “What restrains us from Equality and Fraternity?“ And the answer is given, “An evil principle, accepted as right in theory, and applied ruthlessly in social practice; the principle, namely, that it is right and necessary for some men to rule others by force, by law which rests on armed violence, military power.” Those who give this answer are called Anarchists, and their movement, Anarchy or Anarchism. The complete Anarchist is the perfect idealist; the man whose goal is entire freedom of action for all, knowing this to be the only possible condition in which equality and fraternity can exist. And this perfect freedom is seen to be compatible only with a perfect morality.

The true place and power of Tolstoy are not to be appreciated by those who are unaware of the vast area and true nature of all this social movement.

Those who limit their thought and outlook to newspapers and novels, Piccadilly and Parliament, the office and the suburban residence, the factory and the beer shop, must necessarily remain unaware of what and where the heart and brain of the social body are prompting and leading. To them, Socialism is today's craze of the unavoidable percentage of fanatics in society, Communism is folly, Anarchism is crime, Tolstoy is a dim vague figure of genius, very noble (no doubt), but not to be taken seriously, a little mad; they do not, they cannot, know that they themselves are the dullards, the deadweights of humanity; that the Social Movement is of men, better and wiser than they, whose foremost prophet is Tolstoy, a prophet of the ages. This man, who acts and speaks so peaceably in the name of the Christ, has practised and taught the last doctrines of Socialism, Communism, Anarchism, and finds them summed up in the rediscovered Gospel.

II

Our British “piety“ has, on the whole, felt itself compelled to reverence the pure teaching and consistent life of Tolstoy. But the more it has spoken this reverence, the more it has rejected his doctrine. A first reason given for this rejection is that Tolstoy's teaching and example are a natural product of Russia, but do not apply in England. To at all benefit from Tolstoy, this illusion must be taken for what it is, and put aside. As far as any matter of Christian principle goes, the conditions of life are the same in Russia as in England. In both countries men need food, clothing and shelter, which need hand-and-head labour to produce. In both countries men buy and sell in the same way, hold property by similar laws; they put the same power of government in control of society, with emperor or queen at the head, with supporting legislative councils and parliaments, law-courts and judges, tax-gatherers and officials, police, army and navy. In both countries an orthodox religion prevails, which approves the system of government, declares the existing state of things to be the will of God, and discountenances change.

It is hard to persuade the mass of people, to whom the foreigner remains so very foreign, of the identity of life, in all but some superficial aspects, in all civilized countries. The slight dissimilarities between English and Russian habits must be understood and seen in their proper proportions to the whole of life, and Tolstoy will then be read in England as a man appealing equally to all men. And we must come to see that the ballot, absence of a literary censorship, freedom of speech, and voluntarism in the army, have not created different issues of life for Englishmen and Russians.

A difference that has importance, lies in the fact that while in Russia over eighty per cent, of the people are peasant-agriculturists, and the rest are city-dwellers and the rich, in England eighty per cent, are of the town, and the rest are of the country. On their great plains, amid their forests, the Russians are nearer nature than we, and therefore simpler in habit and thought. The opposition of the two classes, rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed, is more readily seen in such a society than in ours, where the middle classes break the contrast. This character of the national life about him has undoubtedly given a certain shape and quality to Tolstoy's work; it has also helped him to that searching simplicity and directness which is more difficult to attain in the greater complication and confusion of our western life.

The Tolstoy family is of high aristocracy, dating from Peter the Great's time. On his mother's side, Leo Tolstoy has for ancestor a Prince of Montenegro, whom he is said to greatly resemble in feature. The principal estate of the family is at Yasnaya Polyana, eighty miles or thereabout south from Moscow, and near Tula. There Leo Tolstoy (who, as every one knows, is hereditarily a Count) was born, now sixty-nine years ago, on 28th August, 1828. To understand his childhood one must read Boyhood (otherwise known in English as Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth) written by him in his early twenties; not actually, but essentially, this book is autobiography, as is so much in his other stories and novels. Let us at once remark that Tolstoy's method and power consist in entire devotion to truth in life and nature; this devotion, born in him as a master-impulse, having been consciously adopted and followed from reading Rousseau in his youth. It results that, of all writers, Tolstoy is the most consistently self-revealing; and one will in vain seek through literature for such another record of the gradual, inevitable, convincing, illuminating, unfoldment of a soul, as the record he has given us. He is Rousseau with a difference; difference of the age, and of his own superior spirituality.

The age has led him to apply to human life the accurate method applied by science to physical nature; his spirituality has enabled him to enter the sphere and proclaim the realities of the spirit.

His early years, spent out on those great plains, among rich relations, servants and peasants, exercised the deep love of nature which informs all his writing.

Picture the “great estate“ with its varied life of peasant and aristocrat; the expanses of sky, plain and forest; the mansion, and the wooden huts of the village; the idle pleasures of “the family," and the toil of the peasants. All these made the first deep impressions in the child's mind, and gave material for the work of the man. One need not enlarge upon this; it suffices to say that, amid these surroundings, he was a child, full of life and animation, deeply observant, in many ways extraordinarily, even awkwardly, sensitive, with a great power and habit of introspection the especially Russian faculty of “self-picking." It is said that in these early years his disposition towards goodness, rightness of life, was shown in such ways as the keeping of a diary to note his faults and guide him in their correction.

In his teens he saw something of life in Moscow, that city, half a capital; and was entered at the Kazan University. There he learned what he chose, and no more; consequently, from a professorial point of view, his career was not distinguished. However, he unquestionably took thence much of his own choosing; for instance, “At eighteen I became a freethinker," he says. The easy, indifferent, and in the fullest sense immoral, life of his class, and the evident absence of reality in the profession and teaching of religion around him, thus early produced their effect, inevitable with a sincere and well-disposed mind. At about twenty he entered the army, and while with his brother serving against the tribes of the Caucasus, he wrote the pieces which compose Boyhood. At twenty-six he was in the Crimea serving against the allies. His great talent and liveliness wrought upon all about him; his sayings "went the round," and a song of his was sung by the whole army. But his real employment then was to gather from experience data for his last, ripe teaching upon the world-crime of war. Not yet seeing clearly, still his book of the period, Sevastopol, is so simple, so thrilling, so obviously matter-of-fact, that it is in itself sufficient to turn one from war for ever. The Tsar, hearing something of what Tolstoy was doing, had the promising author taken from danger and put to serve in a place of safety.

And now let me direct attention to a second “criticism“ of Tolstoy, put up as a defence against the power of his doctrine. The first criticism, which sets up an assumed essential difference between life in England and in Russia, may be termed feeble; this second criticism can only be termed base. It is, that Tolstoy is a reformed libertine, one who in his age repents the crimes of his youth and manhood in order to gain heaven. “The excesses of his youth have produced old-age asceticism in him," is said in so many words. (And the people who so speak are nearly always ready to call Tolstoy “saint “and “prophet," while they say, “We need not follow his exaggerations "; they forget, or will not see, that those so-called “exaggerations “make him precisely what he is, and distinguish him from them, who do not wish or who fear to be "saints“ and "prophets.") That a man's past affects his present is a truism. But is John Banyan less true in his Puritan Evangel, because of his bitterly-repented evil youth? Is Francis of Assisi less holy in life because of his bitterly-repented first manhood? Is Paul less a Christian because he first murdered Christians? And, in any case, it is not to his own personal worth that Tolstoy calls our attention; but to solid reasons, actual experiences, verifiable truths, which, once discovered, are, and must be, the same for all human perception, whatever the individual's past may be.

This accusation against Tolstoy is the echo of his own declaration in My Confession, a book which, truly read, yields the key to his life. His words are:

“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all committed by me, not one crime omitted, and -“

His accusers omit what follows:

"Yet I was not the less considered by my equals a comparatively moral man. Such was my life during ten years."

He speaks of his early manhood. We are apt to forget that he accuses himself of living as the great majority of our own English army officers and fashionable men are accustomed to live indeed, he says, he lived not quite so badly as his class. Tolstoy tells us of his early desire for virtue, his struggles for virtue, the laughter and opposition he met, the applause he found for his evil deeds; “not one word was spoken, not a finger lifted, to help." All his books are the faithful record of that struggle, thus early begun, and of his errors and his attainment. It is not well to speak of him as has been done. Those who know him as he is can gauge the shallowness of the accusers.

III

Living between Moscow and St. Petersburg, moving in fashionable, literary, and generally “cultured“ (as it is called) society, and travelling abroad occasionally, Tolstoy's fame as a writer grew. Though he more and more felt himself to be without any certain guidance in life, still his writings ("studies by the way," these earlier pieces may be called) show more and more of large purpose, seriousness, and moral direction.

Albert, Lucerne, The Two Hussars, A Russian Proprietor, exhibit this growth.

At last he married the daughter of a German physician in Moscow. The courtship is told as that of Kitty and Levine in “Anna Karenina; “the history of Levine in that story being Tolstoy's own history up to this period of his life. Now thirty-four years old, he settled at Yasnaya Polyana, and the course of his life for fifteen years may be briefly described.

He managed his estates and increased their value and income; sought to improve the condition of the peasants; experimented with schools for his peasants and their children; wrote largely of these labours and the novel ideas and principles he discovered and applied; became known as "a practical philanthropist," his writings upon the children's schools, which he practically yielded to the children to conduct in their own way, being found especially interesting and useful; gave himself heartily to the large family of sons and daughters which grew up to him. And all this while he laboured in succession upon the great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy now desires no one to read those books, though they contain the germs of all he has since developed. The material for his argument upon life is gathered there, but the all-important conclusions are wanting. If I now dwell upon these works it is only briefly to affirm the qualities of the writer discovered in them; qualities attested by the criticism, not of one circle or one country, but of all circles and countries. The note of all criticism of Tolstoy is that “his novels are life itself." In other writers one may find colour and distortion of the medium; in Tolstoy, the reader powerfully feels the absence of these. "Life itself“ moves before him. We are given the life Tolstoy has felt and seen, the people he has known, the motives he has discerned. The pre-eminent qualities of his work are three; these we may well consider in some detail, and as to them critics generally are agreed.

Let us first put sincerity.

There is in Tolstoy's writing, from first to last, one clear purpose of truth telling.

No improbable romance, no artificial situations; only ordinary people, ordinary affairs, ordinary feelings, but all made strong, absorbing as “life itself," by this depth of truth. He is a discoverer of reality.

Let us put next, breadth. The theatre of these novels is nothing smaller than all modern society.

They are Russian, and yet cosmopolitan. The author has “seen all." "We feel that, as they must in life, so all classes of men and women, from emperors to beggars, priests and profligates, the learned and the unlearned, idlers, tradesmen, artists, peasants, rich and poor, move here. And we feel that all this life is, in an especial way, subject to him who describes it. This author sees the life of man as one, and exposes its unity under all bewildering varieties of outward appearance.

And thirdly, let us say insight. Tolstoy is the furthest from those story-tellers whose automata are only interesting because of the adventures that whirl about and alternately humiliate and glorify their bodies; he has no part with those who give us superior persons, heroines and heroes; his faculty is for divining the deep motives of our own hearts; his people are interesting because we know ourselves in them. Not in the motives we give out to the world, not even in the motives we proclaim to ourselves, but in the real motives, the great currents of desire that sweep us on in these Tolstoy deals. He shows us our basic selves.

I find no point where any of his contemporaries, his opponents, can justly place a finger and say, “This man fails in this or that qualification to be a judge of life." He has, in regard to his later work, been accused of want of exact scholarship and technical philosophical training, “which," say his critics, “are only obtainable, each of them, by a life's study; and even a man of genius who becomes a novelist, must forego these other acquisitions, and remain content to leave untouched the work of scholars and philosophers." In this way “the learned“ repudiate his conclusions (really without understanding them), not feeling that they have in Tolstoy a man who is their master, and who well knows what to take of their, the scholars’ and schoolmen's, results, for the use of his own larger purpose. Before men of genius all life is subserviently departmentised, and the kings of mind draw from their offices of state, from each department, such truth as their kingdom needs.

Readers and critics in all civilisation have established Tolstoy the novelist in the front rank of his order. Now, it is said among these same readers and critics, that Tolstoy the teacher, the “religionist," has sunk into a fanaticism; is, indeed, a little mad. In proceeding to consider his later developments, we may well keep in mind always the question, "Have we in these teachings and this life the inevitable outcome, the ripe fruit, of great sanity, or the disease and folly of genius? For assuredly, in the case of Tolstoy, it is one or the other.

IV

Inevitably, any exposition of Tolstoy's teaching must follow the course of his life, because of that sincere and consistent development of his mind in his writings already remarked upon. And also, because he always presents his conclusions as drawn from actual experience, from living practice; no mere theory, speculation, word-weaving.

In My Confession Tolstoy has told of the great change which came over his life as he drew near fifty years of age. He then found himself rich, famous, prosperous in his family, able to choose what friends he would, and in complete health. Amid all this, there grew upon him a new, strange unrest. It was as though he had found out that his life was without meaning. Continually he asked himself, "Why?" and "What after?" It was no light sentiment, but a life-and-death agony of soul upon which he was entered. He feared to live under this sense of the incomprehensibility, the purposelessness, of life. All his former conceptions of life he now saw to be insufficient, empty, for they did not even suggest what is the end of it all, for himself, for all men.

His agony became such that he put ropes and guns out of his way, lest he should at some moment be driven to suicide. He wondered how in the past he could have lived without solving the problem. Surely he must, he considered, in all his reading of ancients and moderns, philosophers and religious teachers, in all his intercourse with his cultured friends, have missed that explanation of life which they surely must have known! Again he read, again he discussed.

But he only saw the more clearly that philosophy and culture had no practical and satisfying answer to the problem; they only confessed its existence, and despaired of it.

“From Solomon to Schopenhauer," they showed life as a thing incomprehensible; on the whole an evil thing; to be endured while one must, and to be met with the effort to get from it as much happiness as possible while it is ours. He found the last state of philosophy and culture to be Pessimism.

There was no "faith," no confidence in life to be gained, sufficient to carry one on through life.

At last he reflected that the philosophers and men of culture people of that circle to which he himself belonged, who assumed (as he himself had done) that all possibility of understanding life lay with their own superior intelligence and learning were, after all, a very small fraction of humanity. Outside them lay the vast mass of mankind, the labouring folk, "the common people." With a renewed interest in those whom he had loved and studied all his life, Tolstoy again examined the life of the mass, the Russian people. And here, despite labours and miseries, despite ignorance, error and sin, here he found a faith in life.

The peasants are free from the pessimism which rules the cultured; they display a satisfaction in following their seemingly intolerable toils, and they meet death with an ease and confidence, which are not felt by the rich, the comfortable, the cultured. They find something to live for; a current of life that carries them along. Not as an excuse for keeping the labouring poor in labour and poverty, but as a fact of experience, Tolstoy, the deep observer, announces this.

He perceived that there was in this “faith“ something of a religious character; something related to his own boyish recollections of the Gospel, and to his life-long secret instinct that there is in the Gospel a superior truth. He perceived that the basis of this “faith“ was acceptance of “God," that concept of a Power Who overrules all, which belongs to all religions. Again he associated himself with Orthodoxy, sharing the worship, the sacraments, the observances of the church, with the common people.

And he envied the unlearned peasants their ability to receive without question the forms and ceremonies with which the Gospel is bound up for them. For himself, he was compelled to discriminate. The injunction, "love one another in unity" he could receive with joy, reason assenting; but the transubstantiation, the Trinity, and so forth, his reason, as formerly, could not rest in. He made his discrimination. The “living faith “in a God, the Father of all, and the duty of loving and serving all men, our brothers, as ourselves, he detached from the mass of Church accretions, finding this to be the pure, essential Christian doctrine. The Churches Greek, Romish, Protestant, Dissenting oppose each other; that is not unity. They countenance war of Christians against Christians; that is not love. He could not be of the Church. And he perceived that all the good he had seen in the life of men, while associated with the simple faith of the Gospel, is yet outside, indeed opposed by, the Churches.

For "the faith" which lives in the people is that confidence in life which enables them day by day to toil on at the labours by the fruit of which all men live. It is they, the labouring people, who are the servants of all, duly fulfilling (and under the exactions of the non-producing rich trebly fulfilling) the law, which says for all men, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." In this direction, Leo Tolstoy found the light.

V

Tolstoy is his own best biographer, and we shall best follow him onward from this point by reading What Shall We Do Then? a book written to answer the question of men and women in positions like Tolstoy's own; the question of people who come to see the truth discovered in My Confession. This work is virtually in three parts, dealing respectively with Charity, Property, and Labour.

It appears that as the light dawned, Tolstoy, feeling himself compelled to walk by it, set himself to discover how he, a non-producing rich man, might enter into right relations with those labouring poor upon whom he had so far been a parasite. In Moscow he applied himself to what we in England have learned to call “slumming;“ visiting and assisting in all ways the extremely poor, founding a relief society for collecting information and alms, and for distributing the alms. So he attempted to justify himself. He was not satisfied, and came to see the error he was still in by the aid of one Sutaieff, a peasant-preacher who, from being a village merchant, had given himself to a very simple and honest following of the Gospel. In this man's presence, Tolstoy, to gain his opinion, described his own "works of charity." Sutaieff would not approve, and when pressed for his own remedy, told Tolstoy to take into his house two destitute men he himself would take one and with these they should live as brothers, eating, working and speaking together. Tolstoy says he at once saw the truth that same truth expressed thus by John Ruskin: "The mistake of the best men, through generation after generation, has been that great one of thinking to help the poor by almsgiving, and by preaching of patience or of hope, and by every other means, emollient or consolatory, except the one thing which God orders for them, justice." This "justice," Ruskin goes on to say, is: “By the best men denied in its trial time, by the mass of men hated whenever it appears." And Leo Tolstoy was now to become the preacher of this denied and hated justice.

The failure of "charity" led on to a deeper examination of the relations between rich and poor; to new study of economics, history, philosophy and life.

The result, as shown in the chapters discussing Property, the money-power, is precisely that economic presentment made by Socialists everywhere, but here given in Tolstoy's own way. The rich are in possession of property and the power of government. By exaction of rent, interest, profit and taxes, they take from the labourer all but that “subsistence-wage“ which orthodox economists assert to be his miserable final portion. Sometimes even that is taken. The whole process Tolstoy well describes; but a singular value of these chapters is the searching examination of the nature and operation of Money, too long to be adequately dealt with here. Money is shown to be the chain of the labourer's slavery; he must have it, to pay rent and taxes, and to buy what he cannot himself produce. To get it, he must sell his labour or his produce, and by the operation of monopoly and competition his labour and produce are made cheap, and the things he must buy are made dear. For any surplus left him, government takes that away, to spend in official salaries and militarism.

Graphic pictures of these things in the doing Tolstoy gives to us. He shows us the rich family in their summer country residence, settled to a life of pianos and picnics, made possible by an array of well-fed, leisurely domestics. Opposite the house are the sloping fields, dotted with black figures of men and women, old people and little children, who come out to work with the morning sun, and cease with the sunset. All day long, having only black bread to eat and kvass to drink, they sweat and toil, getting in the hay. And see, the hay of last year is being trodden into the earth of the road under the feet of the horses at the door of the great house! So it is, says Tolstoy to the rich, that the starved and slavish toil of these poor is wasted upon your idle luxury.