LYOF TOLSTOY

(1828-1910)

BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

HERE is a certain unsatisfactory meagreness in the facts of
Lyof Tolstoy's life, as they are given outside of his own

works. In these he has imparted himself with a fullness which has an air almost of anxiety to leave nothing unsaid, as if any reticence would rest like a sense of insincerity on his conscience. But such truth as relates to dates and places, and seems the basis of our knowledge concerning other men, is with him hardly at all structural: we do not try to build his moral or intellectual figure upon it or about it.

He is of an aristocratic lineage, which may be traced back to Count Piotr Tolstoy, a friend and comrade of Peter the Great; and he was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana near Tula. His parents died during his childhood, and he was left with their other children to the care of one of his mother's relatives at Kazan, where he entered the university. He did not stay to take a degree, but returned to Yasṇaya Polyana, where he lived in retirement till 1851; when he went into the army, and served in the Caucasus and the Crimea, seeing both the big wars and the little. He quitted the service with the rank of division commander, and gave himself up to literary work at St. Petersburg, where his success was in every sort most brilliant; but when the serfs were set free, he retired to his estates, and took his part in fitting them for freedom by teaching them, personally and through books which he wrote for them.

He learned from these poor people far more than he taught them; and his real life dates from his efforts to make it one with their lives. He had married the daughter of a German physician in Moscow, the admirable woman who was to remain constant to the idealist through all his changing ideals, and a family of children was growing up about him; but neither the cares nor the joys of his horie sufficed to keep him from the despair which all his military nd literary and social success had deepened upon him, and which ad begun to oppress him from the earliest moments of moral contiousness.

The wisdom that he learned from toil and poverty was, that life as no meaning and no happiness except as it is spent for others;

and it did not matter that the toiling poor themselves illustrated the lesson unwittingly and unwillingly. Tolstoy perceived that they had the true way often in spite of themselves; but that their reluctance or their ignorance could not keep the blessing from them which had been withheld from him, and from all the men of his kind and quality. He found that they took sickness and misfortune simply and patiently, and that when their time came to die, they took death simply and patiently. To them life was not a problem or a puzzle: it was often heavy and hard, but it did not mock or deride them; it was not malign, and it was not ironical. He believed that the happiness he saw in them came first of all from their labor.

So he began to work out his salvation with his own hands. He put labor before everything else in his philosophy, and through all his changes and all his seeming changes he kept it there. There had been a time when he thought he must destroy himself, after glory in arms and in letters had failed to suffice him, after the love of wife and children had failed to console him, and nothing would ease the intolerable burden of being. But labor gave him rest; and he tasted the happiness of those whose existence is a continual sacrifice through service to others.

He must work hard every day, or else he must begin to die at heart; and so he believed must every man. But then, for the life which labor renders tolerable and significant, some sort of formulated faith was essential; and Tolstoy began to search the Scriptures. He learned from the teachings of Jesus Christ that he must not only not kill, but he must not hate or despise other men; he must not only keep himself chaste, but he must keep his thoughts from unchastity; he must not only not forswear himself, but he must not swear at all; he must not only not do evil, but he must not resist evil. If his own practice had been the negation of these principles, he could not therefore deny their righteousness; if all civilization, as we see it now, was the negation of these principles, civilization-in so far as it was founded upon war, and pride, and luxury, and oaths, and judgments, and punishments- was wrong and false. The sciences, so far as they failed to better the lot of common men, seemed to him futile; the fine arts, so far as they appealed to the passions, seemed worse than futile; the mechanic arts, with their manifold inventions, were senseless things in the sight of this seer, who sought the kingdom of God. Titles, honors, riches; courts. judges, ecutioners; nationalities, armies, battles; cuiture, pleasure, amusemer he counted these all evil or vain.

The philosophy of Tolstoy is neither more nor less than doctrine of the gospels, chiefly as he found it in the words of J Some of us whose lives it accused, have accused him of going vond Christ in his practice of Christ's precepts. We say hat h

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himself led a worldly, sensual, and violent life, he naturally wished to atone for it by making every one also lead a poor, dull, and ugly life. It is no part of my business to defend him, or to justify him; but as against this anger against him, I cannot do less than remind the reader that Tolstoy, in confessing himself so freely and fully to the world, and preaching the truth as he feels it, claims nothing like infallibility. He compels no man's conscience, he shapes no man's conduct. If the truth which he has learned from the teachings of Jesus, and those other saviors and sages whom he follows less devotedly, compels the conscience and shapes the conduct of the reader, that is because this reader's soul cannot deny it. If the soul rejects it, that is no more than men have been doing ever since saviors and sages came into the world; and Tolstoy is neither to praise nor to blame.

No sincere person, I believe, will deny his sincerity, which is his authority outside of the gospel's: if any man will speak simply and truly to us, he masters us; and this and nothing else is what makes us helpless before the spirit of such books as 'My Confession,' 'My Religion,' 'Life, What to Do,' and before the ethical quality of Tolstoy's fictions. We can remind ourselves that he is no more final than he pretends to be; that on so vital a point as the question of a life hereafter, he seems of late to incline to a belief in it, though at first he held such a belief to be a barbarous superstition. We can justly say that he does not lead a life of true poverty if his wife holds the means of keeping him from want, and from that fear of want which is the sorest burden of poverty. We can point out that his labor in making shoes is a worse than useless travesty, since it may deprive some wretched cobbler of his chance to earn his living by making and selling the shoes which Count Tolstoy makes and gives away. In these things we should have a certain truth on our side; though we should have to own that it was not his fault that he had not really declassed himself, and was constrained to the economic safety in which he dwells. We should have to confess that in this the great matter is the will; and that if benevolence stopped to take account of the harm it might work, there could be no such thing as charity in the world. We should have to ask ourselves whether Tolstoy's conversion to a belief in immortality is not an effect of his unselfish labor; whether his former doubt of immortalit was not a lingering effect of the ambition, vanity, and luxury he nounced. It had not indeed remained for him to discover that tehenever we love, the truth is added unto us; but possibly it had of mained for him to live the fact, to realize that unselfish labor gives i much meaning to human life that its significance cannot be limhed to mortality.

However this may be, Tolstoy's purpose is mainly to make others realize that religion, that Christ, is for this actual world here, and not for some potential world elsewhere. If this is what renders him so hateful to those who postpone the Divine justice to another state of being, they may console themselves with the reflection that his counsel to unselfish labor is almost universally despised. There is so small danger that the kingdom of heaven will come by virtue of his example, that none of all who pray for it need be the least afraid of its coming. In any event his endeavor for a right life cannot be forgotten. Even as a pose, if we are to think so meanly of it as that, it is by far the most impressive spectacle of the century. All that he has said has been the law of Christianity open to any who would read, from the beginning; and he has not differed from most other Christians except in the attempt literally to do the will of Christ. Yet even in this he is not the first. Others have lived the life of labor voluntarily, and have abhorred war, and have suffered evil. But no man so gloriously gifted and so splendidly placed has bowed his neck and taken the yoke upon it. We must recognize Tolstoy as one of the greatest men of all time, before we can measure the extent of his renunciation. He was gifted, noble, rich, famous, honored, courted; and he did his very utmost to become plebeian, poor, obscure, neglected. He sincerely endeavored to cast his lot with the lowliest, and he counted it all joy so far as his efforts succeeded. His scruple against constraining the will of others suffers their will to make his self-sacrifice finally histrionic; but this seems to me not the least part of his self-sacrifice, which it gives a supreme touch of pathos. It is something that in fiction he alone could have imagined, and is akin to the experience of his own Karénin, who in a crucial moment forgives when he perceives that he cannot forgive without being ridiculous. Tolstoy, in allowing his family to keep his wealth, for fear of compelling them to the righteousness which they did not choose, became absurd in his inalienable safety and superiority; but we cannot say that he ought not to have suffered this indignity. There is perhaps a lesson in his fate which we ought not to refuse, if we can learn from it that in our time men are bound together so indissolubly that every advance must include the whole of society, and that even self-renunciation must not accomplish itself at the cost of others' free choice.

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It is usual to speak of the ethical and the æsthetical principles as if they were something separable; but they are hardly en di gent in any artist, and in Tolstoy they have converged from He began to write at a time when realistic fiction was so the established in Russia that there was no question there of an Gogol had found the way out of the mists of romanticism i