On 17th October Tolstoy writes to Fet:
I think you already know what has happened. On 20 September he died, literally in my arms. Nothing in my life has so impressed me. It is true, as he said, that nothing is worse than death. And when one reflects well that yet that is the end of all, then there is nothing worse than life. Why strive or try, since of what was Nicholas Tolstoy nothing remains his? He did not say that he felt the approach of death, but I know he watched each step of its approach and knew with certainty how much remained. Some moments before his death he drowsed off, but awoke suddenly and whispered with horror: 'What is that?' That was when he saw it—the absorption of himself into Nothingness. And if he found nothing to cling to, what can I find? Still less! And assuredly neither I nor any one will fight it to the last moment, as he did. Two days before, I said to him: 'We ought to put a commode in your room.'
'No,' said he, 'I am weak, but not yet so weak as that; I will struggle on yet awhile.'
To the last he did not yield, but did everything for himself, and always tried to be occupied. He wrote, questioned me about my writings, and advised me. But it seemed to me that he did all this not from any inner impulse, but on principle. One thing—his love of Nature—remained to the last. The day before, he went into his bedroom and from weakness fell on his bed by the open window. I came to him, and he said with tears in his eyes, 'How I have enjoyed this whole hour.'
From earth we come, and to the earth we go. One thing is left—a dim hope that there, in Nature, of which we become part in the earth, something will remain and will be found.
All who knew and saw his last moments, say: 'How wonderfully calmly, peacefully he died'; but I know with what terrible pain, for not one feeling of his escaped me.
A thousand times I say to myself: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' One must make some use of the strength which remains to one, but one cannot persuade a stone to fall upwards instead of downwards whither it is drawn. One cannot laugh at a joke one is weary of. One cannot eat when one does not want to. And what is life all for, when to-morrow the torments of death will begin, with all the abomination of falsehood and self-deception, and will end in annihilation for oneself? An amusing thing! Be useful, be beneficent, be happy while life lasts,—say people to one another; but you, and happiness, and virtue, and utility, consist of truth. And the truth I have learned in thirty-two years is, that the position in which we are placed is terrible. 'Take life as it is; you have put yourselves in that position.' How! I take life as it is. As soon as man reaches the highest degree of development, he sees clearly that it is all nonsense and deception, and that the truth—which he still loves better than all else—is terrible. That when you look at it well and clearly, you wake with a start and say with terror, as my brother did: 'What is that?'
Of course, so long as the desire to know and speak the truth lasts, one tries to know and speak. That alone remains to me of the moral world; higher than that I cannot place myself. That alone I will do, but not in the form of your art. Art is a lie, and I can no longer love a beautiful lie.
I shall remain here for the winter because I am here, and it is all the same where one lives. Please write to me. I love you as my brother loved you, and he remembered you to his last moment.
A month later we find him writing in a different state of mind:
A boy of thirteen has died in torment from consumption. What for? The only explanation is given by faith in the compensation of a future life. If that does not exist, there is no justice, and justice is vain, and the demand for justice—a superstition.
Justice forms the most essential demand of man to man. And man looks for the same in his relation to the universe. Without a future life it is lacking. Expediency is the sole, the unalterable law of Nature, say the naturalists. But in the best manifestations of man's soul: love and poetry—it is absent. This has all existed and has died—often without expressing itself. Nature, if her one law be expediency, far o'erstepped her aim when she gave man the need of poetry and love.
Nearly twenty years later, in his Confession, Tolstoy referred to his brother's death in the words:
Another event which showed me that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother's death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived, and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.
Any one who has read the works Tolstoy wrote during the quarter of a century which succeeded his brother's death, will be aware how long he remained in doubt on this matter of a future life, and how he expressed now one, and now another view.
At Hyères he continued to study the question of education, and for that purpose made many visits to Marseilles. He also wrote: continuing The Cossacks and commencing an article on Popular Education. We get a glimpse of him at this period from his sister, who tells us that they had been invited to an At Home at Prince Doundoukóf-Korsákof's; but Tolstoy, who was to have been the lion of the occasion, failed to put in an appearance. The company, which included all the 'best' people, were getting dull, despite everything the hostess could devise for their amusement, when at last, very late, Count Tolstoy was announced. The hostess and her guests immediately brightened up; but what was their astonishment to see him appear in tourist garb and wearing wooden sabots! He had been for a long walk, and returning late, had come to the party without calling at his lodgings; and no sooner was he in the room than he began assuring everybody that wooden sabots were the very best and most comfortable of foot-gear, and advising every one to adopt them. Even in those days he was a man to whom all things were allowed, and the evening, instead of being spoilt, became all the gayer from his eccentricity. There was a great deal of singing, and it fell to Tolstoy's lot to accompany the singers.
At Hyères, after his brother's death, Tolstoy lived with his sister and her three children in a pension where the only other lodgers were a Madame Pláksin and her delicate nine-year-old son Sergéy, whose lungs were thought to be affected, but who lived to become a poet and to publish his recollections of Tolstoy. Pláksin describes him as having been at that time a strongly built, broad-shouldered man, with a good-natured smile on his face, which was fringed by a thick, dark-brown beard. Under a large forehead, still bearing a deep scar from the wound inflicted by the bear two years before, wise, kind eyes shone out of very deep sockets. 'Tolstoy,' says Pláksin, 'was the soul of our little society, and I never saw him dull; on the contrary, he liked to amuse us with his stories, which were sometimes extremely fantastic.' Tolstoy rose early, and while he was at work the children were not allowed to disturb him beyond running in for a moment to say 'good-morning.' Being himself an indefatigable walker, Tolstoy used to plan out excursions for the company, constantly discovering new places to visit: the salterns on the peninsula of Porquerolle; the holy hill where the chapel with the wonder-working image of the Madonna stands; or the ruins of the castle called Trou des Fées. They used to have with them on these excursions, a small ass carrying provisions, fruit and wine.
On the way Tolstoy used to tell us various tales; I remember one about a golden horse and a giant tree, from the top of which all the seas and all towns were visible. Knowing that my lungs were delicate, he often took me on his shoulder and continued his tale as he walked along. Need I say that we would have laid down our lives for him?
At dinner-time Tolstoy used to tell the French proprietors of the pension the strangest stories about Russia, which they never knew whether or not to believe until the Countess or Madame Pláksin came to their rescue by separating the truth from the fiction.
After dinner, either on the terrace or indoors, a performance commenced, opera or ballet, to the sound of the piano: the children 'mercilessly tormenting the ears of the audience' (which consisted of the two ladies, Tolstoy, and Pláksin's nurse). Next came gymnastic exercises, in which Tolstoy acted as professor. 'He would lie at full length on the floor, making us do the same, and we had then to get up without using our hands.' He also contrived an apparatus out of rope, which he fixed up in the doorway; and on this he performed somersaults, to the great delight of his juvenile audience.
When the latter became too turbulent and the ladies begged Tolstoy to subdue the noise, he would set the children round the table, and tell them to bring pens and ink.
The following is an example of the sort of occupation he provided:
'Listen,' said he one day; 'I am going to give you a lesson.'
'What on?' demanded bright-eyed Lisa.
Disregarding his niece's question, he continued:
'Write...'
'But what are we to write, uncle?' persisted Lisa.
'Listen; I will give you a theme...!'
'What will you give us?'
'A theme!' firmly replied Tolstoy. 'In what respect does Russia differ from other countries? Write it here, in my presence, and don't copy from one another! Do you hear?' added he, impressively.
In half an hour the 'compositions' were ready. Pláksin had to read his own, as his lines were so irregular that no one else could decipher them. In his opinion Russia differed from other countries in that, at carnival time, Russians eat pancakes and slide down ice-hills, and at Easter they colour eggs.
'Bravo!' said Tolstoy, and proceeded to make out Kólya's MS., in which Russia was distinguished by its snow, and Lisa's, in which 'troikas' (three-horse conveyances) played the chief part.
In reward for these evening exercises, Tolstoy brought water-colour paints from Marseilles and taught the children drawing.
He often spent nearly the whole day with the children, teaching them, taking part in their games, and intervening in their disputes, which he analysed, proving to them who was in the right and who in the wrong.
There was at this time some mutual attraction between Tolstoy and a young Russian lady, Miss Yákovlef, who was staying at Hyères; but, like many other similar affairs, it came to nothing.
On leaving Hyères, Tolstoy, his sister, and her children, went to Geneva, and from thence he proceeded alone to Nice, Leghorn, Florence, Rome, and Naples. In Italy he says he experienced his first lively impression of antiquity; but very little record remains of this journey, and it is nowhere reflected in his writings.
He returned to Paris viâ Marseilles, the schools and other institutions of which he observed closely, trying to discover how man's intelligence is really best developed.
He was very unfavourably impressed by the popular schools of Marseilles. The studies, he says, consisted in learning by heart the Catechism, sacred and general History, the four rules of Arithmetic, French spelling and Book-keeping—the latter without sufficient comprehension of the use of arithmetic to enable the children to deal sensibly with the simplest practical problems requiring addition and subtraction, though they could do long multiplication sums quickly and well when only abstract figures were given. Similarly, they answered well by rote questions in French History, but, when asked at hazard, they would give such answers as that Henry IV was killed by Julius Cæsar.
He observed the instruction given by the Churches, and visited the adult schools of the town, as well as its Salles d'Asile, in which, he says:
I saw four-year-old children perform like soldiers, evolutions round benches to orders given by whistle, and raise and cross their arms to the word of command, and with strange trembling voices sing hymns of praise to God and their benefactors; and I became convinced that the educational establishments of Marseilles were extremely bad.
Any one seeing them would naturally conclude that the French people must be ignorant, coarse, hypocritical, full of superstition and almost savage.
Yet one need only come in contact with and chat with any of the common people, to convince oneself that on the contrary the French people are almost what they consider themselves to be: intelligent, clever, sociable, freethinking, and really civilised. Take a workman of, say, thirty years of age: he will write a letter without such mistakes as at school, sometimes even quite correctly; he has some idea of politics, and therefore of recent history and geography; he knows some history from novels, knows something of natural history, and he very often draws, and is able to apply mathematical formulae to his trade. Where did he get all this?
I recently discovered the answer in Marseilles, by wandering about the streets, drink-shops, cafés chantants, museums, workshops, wharves and book-stalls. The very boy who told me that Henry IV was killed by Julius Cæsar, knew the history of The Three Musketeers and of Monte Cristo very well.
In Marseilles Tolstoy found that everybody had read Dumas' works, of which there were twenty-eight cheap editions. He estimated that each week, in the cafés chantants, at least one-fifth of the population received oral education, as the Greeks and Romans used to do. Comedies and sketches were performed, verses declaimed, and the influence for good or evil of this unconscious education far outweighed that of the compulsory education given in schools.
In January he reached Paris, where he spent a large part of his time in omnibuses, amusing himself by observing the people. He declares he never met a passenger who was not represented in one or other of Paul de Kock's stories. Of that writer, as of Dumas père, he thinks highly. 'Don't talk nonsense to me,' he once said, 'about Paul de Kock's immorality. He is, according to English ideas, somewhat improper. He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, but never immoral. In everything he says, and despite his rather free jests, his tendency is quite moral. He is a French Dickens.... As to Dumas, every novelist should know him by heart. His plots are admirable, not to mention the workmanship. I can read and re-read him, though he aims chiefly at plots and intrigue.'
In Paris he again met Tourgénef; and from France he went on to London, where he remained six weeks, not enjoying his visit much as he suffered severely from toothache nearly all the time. It is characteristic of Tolstoy that though he has often been a victim to toothache and has also been much tried by digestive troubles, he never appears to have had his teeth properly attended to by a dentist. A dentist's establishment seems to him so unnatural and artificial that it must be wrong. Moreover, dentists do not always do their work well; and toothache—if one endures it long enough—cures itself, and in the past the majority of mankind have got along without dentists. So he has been inclined to put up with toothache as one of the ills it is best to bear patiently.
During his stay he, and Tourgénef who had also come to London, saw a great deal of Alexander Herzen, who was editing Kólokol (The Bell)—the most influential paper ever published by a Russian exile.
I have already remarked on the fact that the Reform movements of that time left Tolstoy curiously cold; and here again it may be noted that though Tourgénef contributed to Herzen's prohibited paper, Tolstoy never wrote anything for it.
Herzen's little daughter, who had read and greatly enjoyed Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, hearing that the author was coming to see her father, obtained permission to be present when he called. She ensconced herself in an arm-chair in a corner of the study at the appointed time, and when Count Tolstoy was announced, awaited his appearance with beating heart; but she was profoundly disillusioned by the entrance of a man of society manners, fashionably dressed in the latest style of English tailoring, who began at once to tell with gusto of the cock-fights and boxing-matches he had already managed to witness in London. Not a single word with which she could sympathise did she hear from Tolstoy throughout that one and only occasion on which she was privileged to listen to his conversation; and in this she was particularly unlucky, for Tolstoy saw Herzen very frequently during his stay in London, and the two discussed all sorts of important questions together.
One of Herzen's closest friends and co-workers during his long exile from Russia, was the poet N. P. Ogaryóf, who had been his fellow-student at the Moscow University. Ogaryóf, besides being a man of ability, possessed a very amiable character that greatly endeared him to his friends; but in an essay entitled The First Step[43] written in 1892, we get a glimpse of what alienated Tolstoy's sympathy from the progressive movement these men represented. He there says:
I have just been reading the letters of one of our highly educated and advanced men of the forties, the exile Ogaryóf, to another yet more highly educated and gifted man, Herzen. In these letters Ogaryóf gives expression to his sincere thoughts and highest aspirations, and one cannot fail to see that—as was natural to a young man—he rather shows off before his friend. He talks of self-perfecting, of sacred friendship, love, the service of science, of humanity, and the like. And at the same time he calmly writes that he often irritates the companion of his life by, as he expresses it, 'returning home in an unsober state, or disappearing for many hours with a fallen, but dear creature.'...
Evidently it never even occurred to this remarkably kind-hearted, talented, and well-educated man that there was anything at all objectionable in the fact that he, a married man, awaiting the confinement of his wife (in his next letter he writes that his wife has given birth to a child) returned home intoxicated, and disappeared with dissolute women. It did not enter his head that until he had commenced the struggle, and had at least to some extent conquered his inclination to drunkenness and fornication, he could not think of friendship and love, and still less of serving any one or any thing. But he not only did not struggle against these vices—he evidently thought there was something very nice in them, and that they did not in the least hinder the struggle for perfection; and therefore instead of hiding them from the friend in whose eyes he wishes to appear in a good light, he exhibits them.
Thus it was half a century ago. I was contemporary with such men. I knew Ogaryóf and Herzen themselves and others of that stamp, and men educated in the same traditions. There was a remarkable absence of consistency in the lives of all these men. Together with a sincere and ardent wish for good, there was an utter looseness of personal desire, which, they thought, could not hinder the living of a good life, nor the performance of good and even great deeds. They put unkneaded loaves into a cold oven, and believed that bread would be baked. And then, when with advancing years they began to remark that the bread did not bake—i.e. that no good came of their lives—they saw in this something peculiarly tragic.
This was written twenty years later; but it was latent in his mind at the time, and furnishes a clue to the fact that he never really made friends with these men.
Of Herzen as a writer Tolstoy ultimately came to have a very high opinion, and admitted that he exerted a very considerable influence on the mind of educated Russia.
In England, as elsewhere, Tolstoy saw as much as he could of the educational methods in vogue. He also visited the House of Commons and heard Palmerston speak for three hours; but he told me he could form no opinion of the oration, for 'at that time I knew English with my eyes but not with my ears.'
While in London, he received news that he had been nominated Arbiter of the Peace for his own district, near Toúla. The duties of the office were to settle disputes between the serfs and their former proprietors. Except a short service on the Zémstvo in 1874, this was the only official position in which Tolstoy ever took much active part after leaving the army.
On 3rd March (new style), the day of Alexander II's famous Manifesto emancipating the serfs, Tolstoy left London for Russia viâ Brussels. In that city he made the acquaintance of Proudhon (the author of Qu'est-ce que la Propriété? and a Système des Contradictions Économiques) to whom Herzen had given him a letter of introduction. Proudhon impressed Tolstoy as a strong man who had the courage of his opinions; and though Proudhon's theories had no immediate effect on Tolstoy's life, the social political and economic views expounded by the latter a quarter of a century later, are deeply dyed with Proudhonism. Both writers consider that property is robbery; interest immoral; peaceful anarchy the desirable culmination of social progress, and that every man should be a law unto himself, restrained solely by reason, conscience and moral suasion. Another writer whose acquaintance Tolstoy made in Brussels was the Polish patriot Lelewel, who had taken a prominent part in the rebellion of 1830, and had written on Polish history and on many other subjects. He was at this time a decrepit old man living in great poverty. While in Brussels Tolstoy wrote Polikoúshka, almost the only story of his (besides A Squire's Morning) that implies a condemnation of serfdom.
Passing through Germany, Tolstoy stopped at Weimar, where he stayed with the Russian Ambassador, Von Maltitz, and was introduced to the Grand Duke Carl Alexander. Tolstoy (who had been reading Goethe's Reineke Fuchs not long before) visited the house in which Goethe had lived, but was more interested in a Kindergarten conducted by Minna Schelholm, who had been trained by Froebel. From another school he visited, we hear of his collecting and carrying off the essays the pupils had written, explaining to the master that he was much concerned with the problem, 'How to make thought flow more freely.'
At Jena he made acquaintance with a young mathematician named Keller, whom he persuaded to accompany him to Yásnaya to help him in his educational activities. He also stopped at Dresden, where he again visited Auerbach, concerning whom he jots down in his Diary:
21 April, Dresden: Auerbach is a most charming man. Has given me a light.... He spoke of Christianity as the spirit of humanity, than which there is nothing higher. He reads verse enchantingly. Of Music as Pflichtloser Genuss (dutyless pleasure).... He is 49 years old. Straightforward, youthful, believing, not troubled by negation.
On another occasion Tolstoy expressed surprise at never having seen Auerbach's Village Tales of the Black Forest in any German peasant's house, and declared that Russian peasants would have wept over such stories.
From Dresden he wrote to his Aunt Tatiána:
[44] Je me porte bien et brûle d'envie de retourner en Russie. Mais une fois en Europe et ne sachant quand j'y retournerai, vous comprenez que j'ai voulu profiter, autant que possible, de mon voyage. Et je crois l'avoir fait. Je rapporte une si grande quantité d'impressions, de connaissances, que je devrai travailler longtemps, avant de pouvoir mettre tout cela en ordre dans ma tête.
I am bringing with me a German from the University, to be a teacher and clerk, a very nice, well-educated man, but still very young and unpractical.
He adds that he intends to return to Yásnaya viâ St. Petersburg, as he wants to obtain permission to publish an educational magazine he is projecting.
On 22nd April he was already in Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of the head of the Teachers' Seminary, the son of the celebrated pedagogue Diesterweg, whom, to his disappointment, he found to be 'a cold, soulless pedant, who thinks he can develop and guide the souls of children by rules and regulations.'
On 23rd April (old style) he re-entered Russia, after a stay abroad of nearly ten months.
He brought with him complete editions of the works of several of the greatest European writers. They were kept at the Custom House to be submitted to the Censor, and, as Tolstoy plaintively remarked nearly half a century later, 'he is still reading them!'
Birukof.
Bitovt.
Fet, Moi Vospominaniya: Moscow, 1890.
Tolstoy's Confession.
Golovatcheva-Panaeva, Rousskie Pisateli i Artisty.
Tourgenef, Letters.
S. Plaksin, Graf L. Tolstoy sredi detey.
Tolstoy's works, vol. iv.: Moscow, 1903.
R. Löwenfeld, Leo N. Tolstoj.
R. Löwenfeld, Gespräche über und mit Tolstoy.
Quarrel with Tourgénef. Attitude towards Reforms. Arbiter of the Peace. Educational Magazine.
After the winter's snow has so far thawed that sleighing is impracticable, there comes a time during which there is still too much snow left, and the roads have become too soft to allow of travelling on wheels, and when transit is practically impossible. Tolstoy reached Moscow at this transition period, but had not to wait long before the roads were dry enough for carriage traffic. He made the journey southward to Toúla in company with Mrs. Fet, wife of his friend the poet. Mrs. Fet was travelling in her own carriage, accompanied by her maid, to the estate Fet had purchased at some distance from Yásnaya. Tolstoy had his own conveyance, but for company's sake changed places with the maid and travelled with Mrs. Fet. In the cool of the evening he borrowed and wrapped himself in a cloak of Fet's, declaring that this would be sure to result in his producing a lyric poem.
Soon after reaching Yásnaya he wrote (in the third week of May) to congratulate Fet on having become a landed proprietor:
How long it is since we met, and how much has happened to both of us meanwhile! I do not know how to rejoice sufficiently when I hear or think of your activity as a farmer, and I am rather proud to have had at least some hand in the matter.... It is good to have a friend; but he may die or go away, or one may not be able to keep pace with him; but Nature, to which one is wedded by a Notarial Deed, or to which one has been born by inheritance, is still better. It is one's own bit of Nature. She is cold, obdurate, disdainful and exacting, but then she is a friend one does not lose till death, and even then one will be absorbed into her. I am however at present less devoted to this friend: I have other affairs that attract me; yet but for the consciousness that she is there, and that if I stumble she is at hand to hold on to—life would be but a sad business.
A few days later, having received an invitation from Tourgénef, Tolstoy paid him a visit the first hours of which passed off to their mutual satisfaction. Tourgénef had just finished his favourite novel, Fathers and Sons, and it was arranged that after dinner Tolstoy was to read it and give his opinion on it. To do this the more comfortably, Tolstoy, left in the drawing-room by himself, lay down on a large sofa. He began to read; but the story seemed to him so artificially constructed and so unimportant in its subject-matter, that he fell fast asleep.
'I awoke,' he narrates, 'with a strange sensation, and when I opened my eyes I saw Tourgénef's back just disappearing.'
In spite of this occurrence and the unpleasant feeling it occasioned, the two novelists set out next morning to visit Fet, who was not expecting them that day.
While the visitors rested for a couple of hours, recovering from the fatigue of their journey, Mrs. Fet saw to it that the dinner assumed 'a more substantial and inviting appearance.' During the meal the whole party began an animated conversation, and Tourgénef, always fond of good eating, fully appreciated the efforts Fet's excellent man-cook had made. Champagne flowed, as was usual at such reunions. After dinner the three friends strolled to a wood a couple of hundred yards from the house, and lying down in the high grass at its outskirts, continued their talk with yet more freedom and animation.
Next morning at the usual breakfast time, about eight o'clock, the visitors entered the room where Mrs. Fet presided at the samovár. Fet sat at the opposite end of the table, Tourgénef at the hostess's right hand, and Tolstoy at her left. Knowing the importance Tourgénef attached to the education of his natural daughter, who was being brought up in France, Mrs. Fet inquired whether he was satisfied with her English governess. Tourgénef praised the latter highly, and mentioned that, with English exactitude, she had requested him to fix the sum his daughter might give away in charity. 'And now,' added Tourgénef, 'she requires my daughter to take in hand and mend the tattered clothes of the poor.'
To Tolstoy, the foreign education Tourgénef was giving his daughter, who was quite forgetting her own language, was very distasteful; and his feeling no doubt showed itself in his question:
'And you consider that good?'
'Certainly: it places the doer of charity in touch with everyday needs.'
'And I consider that a well-dressed girl with dirty, ill-smelling rags on her lap, is acting an insincere, theatrical farce.'
'I beg you not to say that!' exclaimed Tourgénef, with dilated nostrils.
'Why should I not say what I am convinced is true?' replied Tolstoy.
'Then you consider that I educate my daughter badly?'
Tolstoy replied that his thought corresponded to his speech.
Before Fet could interpose, Tourgénef, white with rage, exclaimed: 'If you speak in that way I will punch your head!' and, jumping up from the table and seizing his head in his hands, he rushed into the next room. A second later he returned and, addressing Mrs. Fet, said: 'For heaven's sake excuse my improper conduct, which I deeply regret!' and again left the room.
Fet, realising the impossibility of keeping his visitors together after what had happened, was perplexed what to do, for they had both arrived in Tourgénef's vehicle, and, newly established in the country, Fet, though he had horses, had none accustomed to be driven in the only conveyance he possessed. To get Tourgénef off was easy; but it was not without some difficulty and even danger from the restive horses, that Tolstoy was conveyed to the nearest post-station at which a hired conveyance could be procured.
From Novosélok, the first country house Tolstoy reached, he wrote Tourgénef a letter demanding an apology; and asked for an answer to be sent to the next post-house at Bogousláf. Tourgénef, not noticing this request, sent his reply to Fet's house, in consequence of which it was several hours late in reaching Tolstoy—who was so enraged at this (as it seemed to him) fresh act of discourtesy, that from Bogousláf he sent a messenger to procure pistols, and wrote a second letter containing a challenge to Tourgénef, and stating that he did not wish to fight in a merely formal manner, like literary men who finish up with champagne, but that he was in earnest, and hoped Tourgénef would meet him with pistols at the outskirt of the Bogousláf woods.
That night was a sleepless one for Tolstoy. The morning brought Tourgénef's reply to his first letter. It commenced in the usual formal manner of polite communications:
Gracious Sir, Leo Nikoláyevitch!—In reply to your letter, I can only repeat, what I myself considered it my duty to announce to you at Fet's: namely, that carried away by a feeling of involuntary enmity, the causes of which need not here be considered, I insulted you without any definite provocation; and I asked your pardon. What happened this morning proved clearly that attempts at intimacy between such opposite natures as yours and mine can lead to no good result; and I the more readily fulfil my duty to you, because the present letter probably terminates our relations with one another. I heartily hope it may satisfy you, and I consent in advance to your making what use you please of it.
With perfect respect, I have the honour to remain, Gracious Sir, your most humble servant,
Iv. Tourgénef.
Spássky, 27 May 1861.
P.S. 10.30 P.M.:
Iván Petróvitch has just brought back my letter, which my servant stupidly sent to Novosélok instead of to Bogousláf. I humbly beg you to excuse this accidental and regrettable mistake, and I hope my messenger will still find you at Bogousláf.
Tolstoy thereupon wrote to Fet:
I could not resist opening another letter from Mr. Tourgénef in reply to mine. I wish you well of your relations with that man, but I despise him. I have written to him, and therewith have terminated all relations, except that I hold myself ready to give him any satisfaction he may desire. Notwithstanding all my apparent tranquillity, I was disturbed in spirit and felt I must demand a more explicit apology from Mr. Tourgénef; I did this in my letter from Novosélok. Here is his answer, which I accept as satisfactory, merely informing him that my reason for excusing him is not our opposite natures, but one he may himself surmise.
In consequence of the delay which occurred, I sent besides this, another letter, harsh enough and containing a challenge, to which I have not received any reply; but should I receive one I shall return it unopened. So there is an end of that sad story, which, if it goes beyond your house, should do so with this addendum.
Tourgénef's reply to the challenge came to hand later, and ran as follows:
Your servant says you desire a reply to your letter; but I do not see what I can add to what I have already written; unless it be that I admit your right to demand satisfaction, weapons in hand. You have preferred to accept my spoken and repeated apology. That was as you pleased. I will say without phrases, that I would willingly stand your fire in order to efface my truly insane words. That I should have uttered them is so unlike the habits of my whole life, that I can only attribute my action to irritability evoked by the extreme and constant antagonism of our views. This is not an apology—I mean to say, not a justification—but an explanation. And therefore, at parting from you for ever—for such occurrences are indelible and irrevocable—I consider it my duty to repeat once again that in this affair you were in the right and I in the wrong. I add that what is here in question is not the courage I wish, or do not wish, to show, but an acknowledgment of your right to call me out to fight, in the accepted manner of course (with seconds), as well as your right to pardon me. You have chosen as you pleased, and I have only to submit to your decision. I renew my assurance of my entire respect,
Iv. Tourgénef.
The quarrel was not, however, destined to die out so quickly. Even good-natured Fet got into trouble by trying to reconcile the irascible novelists. Here is one of the notes he received from Tolstoy:
I request you not to write to me again, as I shall return your letters, as well as Tourgénef's, unopened.
Fet remarks: 'So all my attempts to put the matter right ended in a formal rupture of my relations with Tolstoy, and I cannot now even remember how friendly intercourse between us was renewed.'
Before four months had passed, Tolstoy repented him of his quarrel. Like Prince Nehlúdof in Resurrection, he used from time to time to repent of all his sins and all his quarrels, and undertook a sort of spring- or autumn-cleaning of his soul. It was at such a moment that, on 25th September, he wrote to Tourgénef expressing regret that their relations to one another were hostile, and he added: 'If I have insulted you, forgive me; I find it unendurably hard to think I have an enemy.' Not knowing Tourgénef's address in France, he sent this letter to a bookseller in Petersburg (with whom he knew Tourgénef corresponded) to be forwarded. The letter took more than three months to reach its destination, nor was this the only thing that went wrong, as is shown by the following portion of a letter, dated 8th November, from Tourgénef to Fet:
Apropos, 'one more last remark' about the unfortunate affair with Tolstoy. Passing through Petersburg I learned from certain 'reliable people' (Oh, those reliable people!) that copies of Tolstoy's last letter to me (the letter in which he 'despises' me) are circulating in Moscow, and are said to have been distributed by Tolstoy himself. That enraged me, and I sent him a challenge to fight when I return to Russia. Tolstoy has answered that the circulation of the copies is pure invention, and he encloses another letter in which, recapitulating that, and how, I insulted him, he asks my forgiveness and declines my challenge. Of course the matter must end there, and I will only ask you to tell him (for he writes that he will consider any fresh communication from me to him as an insult) that I myself repudiate any duel, etc., and hope the whole matter is buried for ever. His letter (apologising) I have destroyed. Another letter, which he says he sent me through the bookseller Davídof, I never received. And now as to the whole matter—de profundis.
Tolstoy noted in his Diary one day in October:
Yesterday I received a letter from Tourgénef in which he accuses me of saying he is a coward and of circulating copies of my letter. I have written him that it is nonsense, and I have also sent him a letter: 'You call my action dishonourable and you formerly wished to punch my head; but I consider myself guilty, ask pardon, and refuse the challenge.'
Even then the matter was not at an end, for on 7th January [new style?] Tourgénef writes to Fet:
And now a plain question: Have you seen Tolstoy? I have only to-day received the letter he sent me in September through Davídof's bookshop (how accurate are our Russian merchants!). In this letter he speaks of his intention to insult me, and apologises, etc. And almost at that very time, in consequence of some gossip about which I think I wrote you, I sent him a challenge. From all this one must conclude that our constellations move through space in definitely hostile conjunction, and that therefore we had better, as he himself says, avoid meeting. But you may write or tell him (if you see him) that I (without phrase or joke) from afar love him very much, respect him and watch his fate with sympathetic interest; but that in proximity all takes a different turn. What's to be done? We must live as though we inhabited different planets or different centuries.
Tolstoy evidently took umbrage at Tourgénef's message, and visited his wrath on Fet's innocent head. To be profoundly humble and forgiving at his own command, was always, it seems, easier for Tolstoy than to let his opponent have an opinion of his own. Tolstoy likes things to be quite clear-cut and definite, and it complicates matters to have to reckon with any one else's views. At any rate Tourgénef writes:
Paris, 14 Jan. [o.s.?] 1862.
Dearest Afanásy Afanásyevitch! [Fet's Christian name and patronymic].—First of all I must ask your pardon for the quite unexpected tile (tuile, as the French say) that tumbled on your head as a result of my letter. The one thing which somewhat consoles me is that I could not possibly have expected such a freak on Tolstoy's part, and thought I was arranging all for the best. It seems it is a wound of a kind better not touched at all.
To judge the relations between these two great writers fairly, one must remember that Tourgénef was ten years the elder and, until War and Peace appeared, ranked higher in popular esteem; yet Tolstoy showed him no deference, but on the contrary often attacked him and his views with mordant irony. Tourgénef was neither ill-natured nor quarrelsome. If Tolstoy had treated him with consideration or had been willing to let him alone, there would have been no question either of insult or of challenge. But the younger man sought the elder's company, and then made himself disagreeable; and this, not of malice prepense, but because it is his nature to demand perfection from great men, and vehemently to attack those who fail to reach the standard he sets up. This conduct was no doubt all the more trying for Tourgénef, because Tolstoy neither co-operated with the Liberal movement then current, nor lived more abstemiously with regard to food, wine, women, and cards than others of his set whom he scolded; or if he did so, he did it so spasmodically and with such serious lapses, as to be little entitled to condemn others with the fervour he frequently displayed. On the occasion of the great quarrel Tourgénef was certainly the aggressor, and his prompt apology was not addressed to Tolstoy, whom he had chiefly offended, but to Mrs. Fet. It is, however, plain that he acted, as he said, on the irritable impulse of the moment. Tolstoy aggravated matters by sending a challenge before receiving a reply to his first letter, and also by suggesting that he despised Tourgénef and pardoned him for reasons 'he may himself surmise.' Again, in relation to Fet, who merely wished to pour oil on the troubled waters, Tolstoy showed a strange irritability. No one however can read the Recollections Fet wrote thirty years later, without seeing that that poet—who not only witnessed this affair, but had been the confidant of both writers for years—respected Tolstoy far more than he respected Tourgénef.
In this whole story, one may detect traces of the qualities which have made Tolstoy so interesting and so perplexing a personality. He cares intensely about everything with which he is occupied. Tourgénef, and Tourgénef's opinions and conduct, were of tremendous importance to him. So were his own views of how young ladies should be brought up. So was the question whether he ought to challenge his enemy; and, later on, the question whether he ought to forgive him, and whether Fet should be allowed to act as mediator. It is this fact—that he cares about things a hundred times more than other people care about them—that makes Tolstoy a genius and a great writer. What was admirable in his conduct was not that he acted well (as a matter of fact he acted very badly) but that he wished to act well.
The same spirit which made him so intolerant with Tourgénef: his strong feeling that 'To whom much is given, of him much shall be required'—had something to do, later in life, with his fierce attacks on Governments, on Shakespear, on Wagner, and on other great institutions and men. At the same time, the incident throws light on that side of Tolstoy's character which has brought it about that, despite the very real charm he possesses, and despite the fact that many men and women have been immensely attracted by his writings, he has had very few intimate friends, and has constantly been misunderstood.
V. P. Bótkin, who was in touch both with Tolstoy and Tourgénef, wrote to Fet after hearing of the quarrel:
The scene between him [Tourgénef] and Tolstoy at your house, produced on me a sad impression. But do you know, I believe that in reality Tolstoy has a passionately loving soul; only he wants to love Tourgénef ardently, and unfortunately his impulsive feeling encounters merely mild, good-natured indifference. That is what he cannot reconcile himself to. And then (again unfortunately) his mind is in a chaos, i.e. I wish to say it has not yet reached any definite outlook on life and the world's affairs. That is why his conviction changes so often, and why he is so apt to run to extremes. His soul burns with unquenchable thirst; I say 'unquenchable,' because what satisfied it yesterday, is to-day broken up by his analysis. But that analysis has no durable and firm reagents, and consequently its results evaporate ins blaue hinein. Without some firm ground under one's feet it is impossible to write. And that is why at present he cannot write, and this will continue to be the case till his soul finds something on which it can rest.
To any one acquainted with the history of Russia at that period, but not acquainted with Tolstoy's idiosyncrasies, it must indeed seem strange that the story of his life can be told with so little reference to the Emancipation or the Reform movements of the years 1860-1864, to which allusion has already been made. Two passages written by him in 1904 state his relation to those movements with the sincerity which is so prominent and valuable a feature of his character:
As to my attitude at that time to the excited condition of our whole society, I must say (and this is a good and bad trait always characteristic of me) that I always involuntarily opposed any external, epidemic pressure; and that if I was excited and happy at that time, this proceeded from my own personal, inner motives: those which drew me to my school work and into touch with the peasants.
I recognise in myself now the same feeling of resistance to the excitement at present prevailing; which resembles that which, in a more timid form, was then current.
When the Emancipation came, the peasants received freedom, and an allotment of land, subject to a special land-tax for sixty years; while their masters retained the rest of the land and received State Bonds for the capitalised value of the peasants' land-tax. An expedient resorted to by many a proprietor was, to allot land to the peasants in such a way that the latter were left without any pasture, and (being surrounded by the owner's estate) found themselves obliged to hire pasture land of him on his own terms. There were, till the Emancipation, two ways of holding serfs: (1) the primitive way of obliging them to work so many days a week for their master, before they could, on the other days, provide for their own wants; and (2) another way, which left the serf free to work for himself, provided that he paid obrók, i.e. a certain yearly tribute to his owner. These explanations will render intelligible the second passage referred to above and quoted below:
Some three or four years before the Emancipation, I let my serfs go on obrók. When complying with the Emancipation Decree I arranged, as the law required, to leave the peasants in possession of the land they were cultivating on their own behalf, which amounted to rather less than eight acres per head, and (to my shame be it said) I added nothing thereto. The only thing I did—or the one evil I refrained from doing—was that I abstained from obliging the peasants to exchange land (as I was advised to do) and left them in possession of the pasture they needed. In general, however, I did not show any disinterested feeling in the affair.
In the first edition of Tolstoy and his Problems I erroneously stated that Tolstoy, before the Decree of Emancipation, voluntarily freed his serfs; and though this was corrected in the second edition, it is necessary to repeat the correction here, as the same mistake occurs in the article on Tolstoy in the Encyclopædia Britannica. I therefore quote the following passage from a letter he wrote me on the subject:
I have received your book and read it with pleasure. The short biography is excellent, except the place where you, quoting the words of Sophia Andréyevna, say that 'he liberated his peasants before the Emancipation.' That is wrong: I placed them on obrók instead of keeping them on bárstchina [i.e. the state in which the peasants rendered labour dues]. It would not have been possible to emancipate them....
Tolstoy's curious tendency to underrate the influence of the Liberal reformers of that time, may be illustrated by an incident that occurred at a dinner in Toúla. The local elections had taken place, and a public banquet was given in honour of those Arbiters of the Peace who were visiting the town. Tolstoy was at this dinner, and when the toast to the health of Alexander II, the 'Tsar-Liberator,' was proposed, Tolstoy remarked to his neighbour: 'I drink this toast with particular pleasure. No others are needed, for in reality we owe the Emancipation to the Emperor alone.'
A yet more curious instance of the same tendency occurs in an article on Progress, and the Definition of Education, which he published a year later, and in which, arguing that printing has been of little use to the people, he says that:
Even taking as an example the abolition of serfdom, I do not see that printing helped the solution of the problem in a progressive sense. Had the Government not said its decisive word in that affair, the press would, beyond a doubt, have explained matters in quite a different way to what it did. We saw that most of the periodicals would have demanded the emancipation of the peasants without any land, and would have produced arguments apparently just as reasonable, witty and sarcastic [as they actually produced in favour of the more Liberal solution ultimately adopted]....
If, however, Tolstoy did not stand in the ranks of the Reformers, he was much less of a partisan of his own class than many of his fellow-nobles desired; and we find the Marshal of the Nobility of Toúla writing to Valoúef, Minister of Home Affairs, complaining of Tolstoy's appointment as Arbiter of the Peace on the ground that he was disliked by the neighbouring landowners. In consequence of this complaint Valoúef made inquiries, and received a 'confidential' reply from the Governor of the Province, stating that:
Knowing Count Tolstoy personally, as an educated man warmly sympathising with the matter in hand, and in view of a wish expressed to me by some of the proprietors of the district that he should be appointed Arbiter, I cannot replace him by some one I do not know.
Tolstoy tried his best to act fairly between peasants and landowners; but from the start his unsuitability for duties involving methodical care was obvious.
The very first 'charter,' regulating the relations between a landlord and his newly-liberated peasants, that he sent up to the Government Board for Peasant Affairs, was signed as follows: 'At the request of such-and-such peasants, because of their illiteracy, the house-serf so-and-so has signed this charter for them.' Not a single name did the charter contain! As Tolstoy had dictated the words, so his servant had written them down, and the charter had been sealed and sent off without being read over.
He could at times be wonderfully patient in dealing with the peasants, though they were exasperatingly pertinacious in demanding more than it was possible to grant. An eye-witness tells how Tolstoy visited a neighbouring estate on which differences had arisen between the peasants and their former master, as to the land which should be allotted to them. Tolstoy received a deputation, consisting of three of the leading peasants of the village, and asked them:
'Well, lads, what do you want?'
They explained what land they wished to have, and Tolstoy replied, 'I am very sorry I can't do what you wish. Were I to do so I should cause your landlord a great loss'; and he proceeded to explain to them how the matter stood.
'But you'll manage it for us somehow, bátushka' [literally, 'little-father'], said the peasants.
'No, I can't do anything of the kind,' repeated Tolstoy.
The peasants glanced at one another, scratched their heads, and reiterated their 'But somehow, bátushka!' and one of them added, 'If only you want to, bátushka, you'll know how to find a way to do it!' at which the other peasants nodded their heads approvingly.
Tolstoy crossed himself, as orthodox Russians are wont to do, and said: 'As God is holy, I swear that I can be of no use at all to you.' But still the peasants repeated: 'You'll take pity on us, and do it somehow, bátushka!' Tolstoy at last turned vehemently to the steward, who was present, and said: 'One can sooner, like Amphion, move the hills and woods, than convince peasants of anything!'
The whole conversation, says the steward, lasted more than an hour, and up to the last minute the Count retained his patient and friendly manner towards the peasants. Their obstinacy did not provoke him to utter a single harsh word.
With the landowners Tolstoy had even more trouble than with the peasants. He received many threatening letters, plans were formed to have him beaten, he was to have been challenged to a duel; and denunciations against him were sent to those in authority.
After some three months of the work, in July 1861, he jotted down in his Diary: 'Arbitration has given me but little material [for literary work], has brought me into conflict with all the landed-proprietors, and has upset my health.'
Here is a sample of the cases he had to deal with. A Mrs. Artukóf complained that a certain Mark Grigóref (who had been a house-serf, and was therefore not entitled to land) had left her, considering himself to be 'perfectly free.'
Tolstoy, in his reply to the lady, said:
Mark, by my order, is at liberty to go immediately, with his wife, where he likes; and I beg you (1) to compensate him for the three-and-a-half months he has been illegally kept at work by you since the Decree was published, and (2) for the blows still more illegally inflicted on his wife. If my decision displeases you, you have a right of appeal to the Magistrates' Sessions and to the Government Sessions. I shall not enter into further explanations on this subject.—With entire respect I have the honour to remain, your humble servant,
Ct. L. Tolstoy.
The lady appealed to the Magistrates' Sessions, and Tolstoy's decision was annulled; but on the case being carried to the Government Sessions, his view of the case prevailed.
Before he had been a year in office we find him writing to the Government of the Toúla Board of Peasant Affairs as follows:
As the complaints [here follows a list of several cases] lodged against my decisions have no legal justification, but yet in these and many other cases my decisions have been and are being repealed, so that almost every decision I give is subsequently reversed; and as under such conditions—destructive both of the peasants' and the landowners' confidence in the Arbiter—the latter's activity becomes not merely useless but impossible, I humbly request the Government Board to authorise one of its members to hasten the examination of the above-mentioned appeals, and I have to inform the Government Board that until such investigations are completed I do not consider it proper that I should exercise the duties of my office, which I have, therefore, handed over to the senior Candidate.
The following month he resumed official work, but six weeks later, on 30th April 1862, on the score of ill-health, he handed the duties over to a substitute; and on 26th May—about a year after he had first assumed the office—the Senate informed the Governor of Toúla that it 'had decided to discharge the Lieutenant of Artillery, Count Leo Tolstoy, on the ground of ill-health' from the post of Arbiter of the Peace.
His unsatisfactory experience of administrative work no doubt helps to account for the anti-Governmental bias shown in his later works. Even at this time, he quite shared the dislike of civil and criminal law expressed by Rousseau when he wrote in his Confession:
The justice and the inutility of my appeals left in my mind a germ of indignation against our stupid civil institutions, in which the true welfare of the public, and veritable justice, are always sacrificed to I know not what apparent order, really destructive of all order, and which merely adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong.
We may at any rate be sure that tiresome, petty administrative work, never quite satisfactory, but at best consisting of compromises and of decisions based on necessity rather than on such principles of abstract justice as are dear to Tolstoy's soul, could never be an occupation satisfactory to him. He has not the plodding patience and studious moderation that such work demands; nor could his impulsive genius find scope in it. It has never been easy for him to be checked by others, or to have to reckon with their opinions and wishes. Like Rousseau, it suits him better to reform the world on paper, or even to alter his own personal habits of life, than to concern himself with the slow social progress, the bit-by-bit amelioration, which alone is possible to those harnessed to the car that carries a whole society of men.
Tolstoy used at this time to find recreation in hunting, and often went out for days together with his friend and relation Prince D. D. Obolénsky, who describes him as having been a bold and active hunter, leaping all sorts of obstacles, and a wonderful man to talk to.
Concurrently with his duties as Arbiter, Tolstoy had been carrying on an enterprise in which he had to deal with people younger and more easy to mould than the peasants and proprietors whose quarrels he found it so hard to adjust; and during the winter of 1861-1862 he devoted himself with especial fervour to the task of educating the peasant children of Yásnaya and the surrounding district.
As we have already seen, a chief aim of his travels abroad had been to study the theory and practice of education; and not only did he now personally devote himself to the school at Yásnaya, but in the surrounding neighbourhood eleven similar schools were soon started, all more or less inspired by his ideals and encouraged by his co-operation. The monthly magazine, Yásnaya Polyána (now a bibliographical rarity) which he produced and edited during 1862, aimed at propagating his theories of education and making known the results attained in his school, and it also contained an account of sums voluntarily contributed for its support. From articles published in it (and republished in his collected writings) we get a vivid description of the work carried on in November and December 1861.[45] Like many Russian magazines, Yásnaya Polyána always appeared late, and, to begin with, the January number was several weeks behind time.
In this educational work, Tolstoy showed the qualities and limitations which in later years marked all his propagandist activity. There was the same characteristic selection of a task of great importance; the same readiness to sweep aside and condemn nearly all that civilised humanity had accomplished up to then; the same assurance that he could untie the Gordian knot; and the same power of devoted genius enabling him really to achieve much more than one would have supposed possible, though not a tithe of what he set himself to do.
In later life Tolstoy laid no particular emphasis on what he wrote in these educational articles: in fact, we shall find him sometimes speaking very scornfully of them; but they throw so much light on his then state of mind, and often come so near to the views he strongly advocated twenty or thirty years later, that it will be worth devoting a good deal of attention to them.
Tolstoy, then, defines Education as: a human activity, aving for its basis a desire for equality, and the constant tendency to advance in knowledge. This he illustrates by saying that the aim of a teacher of arithmetic should be to enable his pupil to grasp all the laws of mathematical reasoning he himself is master of; the aim of a teacher of French, or chemistry, or philosophy, should be similar; and as soon as that aim is attained, the activity will naturally cease. Everywhere and always, teaching which makes the pupil the master's equal, has been considered good. The more nearly and rapidly this is accomplished, the better; the less nearly and more slowly it is accomplished, the worse. Similarly in literature (an indirect method of teaching) those books are written best, in which the author succeeds in transmitting his whole message most easily to the reader.
By 'the constant tendency to advance in knowledge,' Tolstoy meant that the equality aimed at in education can only be obtained on the higher, and not on the lower, level: that is to say, not by the teacher forgetting what he knows, but by the pupil acquiring the teacher's knowledge. Much tuition however is based not on the desire to equalise knowledge, but on quite false foundations.
These are: (1) First and commonest, the child learns in order not to be punished; (2) the child learns in order to earn a reward; (3) the child learns in order to be better than others; (4) the child, or young man, learns in order to obtain an advantageous position in the world....
With reference to the practice of sending boys to school, not for their natural development, but that they may be moulded into a set form, Tolstoy declares that 'Education, as a deliberate moulding of people into certain forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and impossible.'
Of examinations he strongly disapproves, as tending to arbitrariness on the side of the examiners, and deception on the side of the pupils.
Under what circumstances, asks Tolstoy, can a pupil acquire knowledge most rapidly? 'A child or a man is receptive only when he is aroused; and therefore to regard a merry spirit in school as an enemy or a hindrance, is the crudest of blunders.
The pupil's state of mind is the most important condition of successful education; and to secure good results, freedom is indispensable. No child should be forced to learn what it does not want to, or when it does not wish to.
One need only glance at one and the same child at home or in the street, and at school. Here you see a vivacious, inquisitive being, with a smile in his eye and on his mouth, seeking information everywhere as a pleasure, and clearly, and often forcibly, expressing his thoughts in his own way; while there you see a weary, shrinking creature repeating, merely with his lips, some one else's thoughts in some one else's words, with an air of fatigue, fear and listlessness: a creature whose soul has retreated like a snail into its shell. One need but glance at these two conditions to see which of them is the more conducive to the child's development. That strange physiological condition which I call the 'School state of mind,' and which unfortunately we all know so well, consists in all the higher capacities: imagination, creative power and reflection, yielding place to a semi-animal capacity to pronounce words without imagination or reflection.
When the pupils have been reduced to this 'School state of mind' we encounter those 'not accidental, but often-repeated cases,' of the stupidest boy being at the top of the class, and the cleverest boy at the bottom.
In short, a child's mental capacities are really active only when that child is free; and the teacher's chief task lies 'in studying the free child' and discovering how to supply him with knowledge. Therefore 'the only method of education is experiment, and its only criterion is freedom.'
The attempts to enforce obedience and quiet in school-rooms, converts schools into places of torture which have a stupefying effect, well called by the Germans Verdummen.
In Germany nine-tenths of those who pass through the primary schools leave them possessed of an ability to read and write mechanically, but imbued with so strong a loathing for the experience they have had of the paths of knowledge, that they subsequently never take a book in their hands. Let those who doubt what I say, point out to me what books are read by the labourers.... No one who will seriously consider the education of the people, not only in Russia but also in the rest of Europe, can help coming to the conclusion that the people get their mental development quite independently of a knowledge of reading and writing, and that usually, except in a few cases of exceptional ability, these rudiments remain a quite unapplied art—which is even harmful, since nothing in life can remain indifferent....
Schools are not so arranged as to make it convenient for children to learn, but so as to make it convenient for teachers to teach. The voices, movements and mirth of the children, which form a necessary condition of their studying successfully, incommode the teachers, and therefore in the prison-like schools of to-day, questions, conversation, and movement are forbidden.
Schools based on compulsion, supply 'not a shepherd for the flock, but a flock for the shepherd.'
To deal successfully with any object, it is necessary to study it, and in education the object is a free child; yet the pedagogues wish to teach in their own way—the way that seems good in their own eyes; and when this does not act, they want not to alter their way of teaching but the nature of the child. ...Not till experiment becomes the basis of the School, and every school is, so to say, a pedagogic laboratory, will schools cease to lag behind the general level of the world's progress.
For boarding-schools Tolstoy had scant respect:
At home all the comforts of life—water, fires, good food, a well-cooked dinner, the cleanliness and comfort of the rooms—all depended on the work and care of the mother and of the whole family. The more work and care, the greater the comfort; the less work and care, the less comfort. A simple matter this no doubt, but more educational I think, than the French language or a knowledge of Alexander the Great. In a boarding-school, this constant vital reward for labour is so put out of sight, that not only is the dinner no better or worse, the napkins no cleaner or dirtier, and the floors no brighter or duller, because of the girl's exertion or non-exertion, but she has not even a cell or corner of her own to keep straight or leave untidy at her pleasure, and she has no chance of making a costume for herself out of scraps and ribbons.
His general charge against day-schools, boarding-schools and universities alike is that:
At the base of them all lies one and the same principle: the right of one man, or of a small group of men, to shape other people as they like.
He adds that:
It is not enough for School to tear children away from real life for six hours a day during the best years of their life: it wishes to tear three-year-old children from their mother's influence. Institutions have been contrived (Kleinkinderbervahranstalten, infant schools, salles d'asile) about which we shall have to speak more in detail later on. It only remains to invent a steam-engine which will replace the nursing mother! All agree that schools are imperfect; I, personally, am convinced that they are noxious.
He argues that no man or set of men has any right to force any particular kind of education on any one else. The teacher has no right to do more than offer such knowledge as he possesses, and he should respect the child's right to reject it as indigestible, or as badly served up: