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 Seltzer 
 
 Tolstoi: 
 
 A Critical Study of 
 
 Hin and i^s Works
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 IV. 
 
 THE EEOITER'S LIBRARY. DEOEMBEE, 1901. 
 
 No. 12. 
 
 TOLSTOI. 
 
 CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 OF 
 
 HIM AND HIS 
 
 WORKS. 
 
 Library 
 Institute of Industri! 
 University of Califc 
 Lqs Angeles 24, Califj 
 
 Published Monthly at $3.00 a Year 
 Single Numbers, 35 Cents. 
 
 43 and 45 E. I9th St., 
 
 NEW YORK. 
 
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 pyriffht. 190,, by EDO.R S. WERXER .-^UBU^mKO & SUPPLY CO. Entered at N. Y. Post-Onice as seco.ul-.la.s .nail iSTtter. 
 
 Jt»RICE, 35 CENTS.
 
 1 
 
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 Rei. 
 
 Tolstoi: 
 
 <A Critical Study of Him and His Works, 
 
 'By THOMAS SELTZER. 
 
 Copyright, 1901, by Edgar S. Werner Publishing & Supply Co. (Incorporated). 
 THE RUSSIAN NATION: 
 
 The Russian population is a heterogeneous mass composed of up- 
 ward of a hundred nationalities speaking more than forty languages. 
 The predominating element, however, is Slavic which constitutes 
 iibout three-quarters of the entire population ; but besides the Slavs, 
 who are a branch of the great Aryan family, the other two ethno- 
 logical divisions are also largely represented — the Turanian by the 
 Mongolians and the Finns, and the Semitic by the Jews. The Slavic 
 population embraces the Russians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, and a 
 number of smaller races. The Russians proper, who form about 
 two-thirds of the whole number of inhabitants, are again subdivided 
 into Great Russians occupying the northern and central part of the 
 country; the Little Russians inhabiting the Ukraine which comprises 
 the governments of Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava and Kharkov ; and the 
 White Russians who have their homes in Vitebsk and Moghilev. 
 In addition there remains to be mentioned, the German quota of the 
 Russian population, located in the Baltic provinces and Southern 
 Russia. 
 
 THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE: 
 
 Although many languages and dialects are spoken throughout the 
 empire, the literary language of Russia, which is that of the pre- 
 dominating Great Russians, is one. It is the chief unifying factor 
 of the compound of the Russian population and the vehicle of inter- 
 communication among its various constituent elements. It is also, 
 the official language and hence the language of the schools. 
 
 Russian first became a written language in the time of Peter the 
 Great, till which period the old Slavic — the language of the church 
 — had been the only medium of literary expression, and had, in con- 
 
 1 1 17604
 
 2 TOLSTOI: 
 
 sequence, exercised an important inlUience on tlie Russian popular 
 speech, as on that of other Slavic dialects. The Mongol conquest, 
 and the preponderance of Polish elements in the western parts of 
 the empire, have also introduced into the Russian language a great 
 number of Mongolian and I'olish expressions; in addition to which, 
 the efforts of Peter the Great to give his subjects the benefits of 
 western culture have enlarged the Russian vocabulary, especially in 
 arts and industry, with numerous (ierman, h~rencli and Dutch words, 
 llie chief characteristics of Russian as a language are simplicity 
 and naturalness. The grammatical connection of sentences is slight, 
 and the number of conjunctions scanty. Perspicuity and expres- 
 siveness are obtained by the freedom allowed in the placing of words. 
 Auxiliary verbs and articles there are none; while personal pronouns- 
 may or may not be used along with verbs. The vocabulary of Rus- 
 sian is very rich, foreign words l)eing, so to speak. Russianized. 
 The capability of the language for forming compounds and deriva- 
 tives is so great, that from a single root not less than 2,000 words 
 are sometimes derived. The purest and most grammatical Russian 
 is spoken in the center, about Moscow. 
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE : 
 
 Russia has btit lately entered the arena of civilization antl dis- 
 pla}s many characteristics of what may be termed a national par- 
 venu. Leaving out of consideration the symptoms displayed in the 
 internal national events of the country and in its social life, and turn- 
 ing a rapid glance at its prominent men of letters, we notice that in 
 the majority and most typical cases, there is manifested a certain 
 feverish restlessness, a want of practical balance. It is as though 
 they desired to make up for loss of ground. The ideas and ideals 
 which the western nations had taken centuries to develop are rapidly 
 absorbed to some extent, but ill-digested and soon outgrown and 
 rejected. Dissatisfaction sets in. They wander forth in quest of 
 new philosophies, new ideals and often land in the reaction of mys- 
 ticism, despair, pessimism, and even indifference. 
 
 Russian literature, like all the great literatures of Eurf»pe, began 
 with popular poetry. This poetry is based partly on myths, the 
 kernel of which is traceable to the primitive Aryan mythology, and
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 3 
 
 partly deals with the subjects of marriage, love, death, feasts and 
 various other social customs. The oldest literature includes also 
 a number of popular tales in prose. 
 
 The epic poems called bylini are among the most important of 
 this early poetry. They are divided into cycles, most of them cen- 
 tenng about the mythical national hero. Ilia Muromets Others 
 liave reference to legends or historical events as recent even as the 
 early part of the last century. These bylim have been communicated 
 orally by successive generations of popular singers and have been 
 subjected to some changes of detail in their contact with fresh events 
 and new conditions, but have, in the main, preserved their ancient 
 character, which must have become well fixed at some distant period 
 in the past. 
 
 The first chronicle extant, the " Chronicle of Nestor," dates from 
 the latter part of the eleventh century. This was followed by a 
 number of other chronicles, by works on the lives of the saints, and 
 by the famous " Tale of the Troop of Igor," a prose epic originating 
 probably in the twelfth century. 
 
 .1; J^^l^"" f"^ ^ ^^^^ ''"^""'' °^ ^^^^ disastrous Tartar domination 
 that followed, was a period of national stagnation, during which 
 Russian literature almost disappeared. It gradually revived with 
 the overthrow of the foreign yoke, but up to the reign of Peter 
 remained devoid of any remarkable achievements. The culture it 
 spread, however, prepared the way for the reception of the more 
 advanced civilization of the West when Peter extended it his wel- 
 come In 1564, the first printing-press was established in Moscow 
 and the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul were printed' 
 Polish attempts to convert the Russians to Roman Catholicism, and 
 especially the zeal of the Jesuits, led to the foundation of Russian 
 schools, where the Russian language was taught and such other 
 studies promoted as would enable the defenders of the Greek church 
 effectually to meet their opponents in religious controversy 
 
 Peter the Great found it helpful for his reforms to ad'vance the 
 cause of literature, and he himself occasinnallv contributed to the 
 St. Petersburg Ga,ette, the first Russian newspaper, foun<led under 
 his auspices in 1703^ With his reign begins a new era for Russia. 
 Under him flourished the first Russian authors whose incipient at-
 
 4 TOLSTOI: 
 
 tempts developed in organic continuity into the imposing structure 
 of the Russian Hterature of to-day. 
 
 Prince Antiokh Kantemir (1708-44) wrote satires in the style of 
 Boileau, which were translated into French. Vasili Tatishchev 
 (1685-1750) was the authbr of the first history of Russia. With 
 Trediakovski (1703-69), a voluminous translator, began that activity 
 in the rendering of foreign classics to which almost every great 
 Russian author since then has contributed his quota; so that now 
 Russian literature stands uncqualed for the (juality of its reproduc- 
 tions of the literary treasures of every land. The most important 
 figure of that period, however, is Lomonosov (171 1-65). He wrote 
 a. Russian grammar, laid down literary laws which he also taught by 
 example in his own diverse writings, and introduced a new system 
 of versification more suitable to the genius of the language. 
 
 The period that followed, although devoid of any original pro- 
 ductions — French influence and taste then holding sway in Russia 
 as throughout the rest of Europe — is nevertheless not without im- 
 portance. Under Catherine II. (1762-96), who was a patron of art 
 and literature, flourished Kniazhnin (1742-91), author of a number 
 of cumbrous tragedies written in Alexandrine verse; several other 
 tragedians of the same type; von Vizin (1744-92) whose comedies, 
 " Nedorosl " (" The Minor ") and " Brigadier," possess real literary 
 excellence ; and Kniazhnin and Kapnist who wrote comedies with 
 almost equal success. Catharine 11. herself tried her hand at a 
 number of light plays which are said to be not bad. Khenmitzer 
 and Dmitriev were the two prominent fabulists of the time, while 
 Bogdanovich (1743-1803) distinguished himself by his poem " Du- 
 shenka." But the greatest lyric poet was Derzhavin (1743-1816) 
 who ranks with the great European writers of the age. He is best 
 known by his stately odes of which the " Ode to God " was translated 
 into many languages, even including Chinese and Japanese. Of the 
 prose writers, the best are Novikov (1744-1818) and Radishchchev 
 (1749-1802), wlio ])nl)lishcd the " Jf^nrnev from St. Petersburg to 
 Moscow." 
 
 The last years of Catherine's reign were marked by a reaction 
 against everything liberal, and the literature of the country suflFered 
 a depression from which it began to recover only after the fall of
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. '> 
 
 Napoleon. Karanizin (1766-1826) was the most eminent literary 
 ligure of the time. He reformed the literary style, clearing it of its 
 ancient forms, heavy modes of expression and foreign interpola- 
 tions. He also offered models for others to follow by his numerous 
 and various productions. His most famous Avorks are his " History 
 of Russia," " Letters of a Traveler " and the sentimental novel. 
 " Bednaia Louisa " (" Poor Louisa "). The Vestnik Evropy {Mes- 
 senger of Europe) founded by him is still one of the best magazines 
 of the country. To the same period belongs the dramatist Ozerov, 
 whose tragedies, though on the whole following the classical models, 
 already bear evidence of the incoming romantic spirit. 
 
 With the works of Zhukovski (1783-1852), and his translations 
 of some of the poems of Schiller, Wieland and Byron, began the 
 romantic movement which entered Russia at about the same time as 
 the other countries of Europe. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1838), 
 called the Father of Russian poetry, became the foremost exponent 
 of the new school. He early came under the influence of Byron 
 and all that it stood for — life-weariness, satiety and hatred of all 
 conventional restraint. These Byronic elements are the constantly 
 recurring notes in his lyric poems of that period and particularly in 
 the four epic compositions : " The Prisoner of the Caucasus " 
 (1821) ; " The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" (1822) ; " The Brother- 
 Robbers " (1822); and "The Gipsies" (1824), of which the first 
 mentioned poem strongly recalls Byron's " Childe Harold." He 
 later succeeded in throwing off the shackles of Byronism and ap- 
 proached more and more the methods of Shakespeare and Goethe. 
 " Evgeni Oniegin," the most widely read of Pushkin's poems, is a 
 novel in verse, written between the years 1823 and 1831. It falls 
 therefore distinctly under the influence of Byron, especially of his 
 " Childe Harold " and " Don Juan " ; Oniegin is a hero quite after 
 the heart of Byron. Among the other works of Pushkin are " Boris 
 Godunov " (1831), a drama; "Poltava" (1828), an epic; and a 
 number of prose tales. Until the advent of the realistic school Push- 
 kin has been considered the greatest Russian poet. His style, both 
 in prose and poetry, approaches perfection and his verse is distin- 
 guished by its easy, graceful and rapid fluency. Among the other 
 writers of the period are Griboiedov, who produced a comedy of the
 
 6 TOLSTOI: 
 
 very first rank in " Gore ot Uma " (" Trouble from Cleverness ") ; 
 the poets Ryleev and Odoievski ; the critic and story writer, Bestuz- 
 hev ; and the poets Delvig, Jazykov and Gncdich. 
 
 The greatest follower of, antl the greatest poet next to, Pushkin 
 is Lennontov (1814-1841). His works are steeped in the mockery, 
 the sneers and the abandonment of Byronism, but he wrote more 
 subjectively than Pushkin. Permontov was truly a Byronic spirit. 
 He was sincere in his contempt of the world's ways and his revolt 
 was real. Hence he rarely strikes a false note. His best works are 
 his short lyrics, " Altziri " (" The Novice "), " The Demon " " Iz- 
 mael Vey," " Valerin," and his prose tale " Geroi Nashego Vremeni " 
 ('"A Hero of Our Times "). 
 
 The most energetically polemic writer of the romantic school was 
 N. Polevoi (1796-1846), and its great critic was Belinski (1810-48), 
 sometimes called the Russian Lessing. At the same time flourished 
 the world-renowned fable writer Krylov (1768-1844), and the peas- 
 ant poet Koltzov (1809-42), who, although a contemporary of, had 
 no affiliation with, the romantic movement. 
 
 With the works of the first great Russian novelist begins the 
 realistic literature of Russia. This will appear only natural when 
 it is remembered that sentimentalism or feigned emotion is utterly 
 foreign to the Russian nature. Hence a master spirit like Gogol's 
 could not but discover the incongruity of laying the foundation of a 
 national literature on elements borrowed from peoples whose history, 
 traditions and environment diflFered so widely from the Russian and 
 produced racial characteristics at variance with, and often directly 
 opposed to, those of the Russian Slavs. 
 
 The literature of this last period is so rich in great names that 
 it will be possible to enumerate only the most prominent among them. 
 Nikolai Gogol ( 1809- 1852) has produced masterpieces of the highest 
 order in his comedy " The Revisor ", in some of his shorter stories, 
 as " Taras Bulba ", and in the long ncnel, " Mertvyia Dushi " 
 ("Dead Souls"). He was followed by Turgenev (1818-1883), 
 Dostoievski (1822-1887) and Leo Tolstoi, each great in his own and 
 original manner, but the last towering high above them not only by 
 his art but by his life. Goncharov, author of " Oblomov," Garshin. 
 Potapenko, Chekhov and the genial dreamy Korolenko are among
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 7 
 
 the minor fiction writers ; while the youthful Gorki is fast acquiring 
 international celebrity and taking rank with the most illustrious 
 names of modern literature. 
 
 Of the poets of the period, the greatest is Nekrasov (1822-77), 
 whose works are a plea for the poor and oppressed. He was followed 
 by Polonski, Nikitin, Nadson, Konstantin Konstantinovich and a 
 host of others. Aleksei Tolstoi produced an excellent trilogy on 
 the " Death of Ivan the Terrible," and Ostrovski is the chief and 
 most prolific author of the popular drama. Pisarev is the great critic 
 of the realistic school ; Soltykov as a satirist is equaled by few writers 
 of the nineteenth century ; w^hile Hertzen and Chernyshevski, authors 
 respectively of the novels " Kto Vinovat? " (" Whose Fault? ") and 
 " Shto Delat? " (" What is to be Done? "), have struck deep root 
 in the liberal thought of Russia by the spread of their nihilistic 
 teachings. 
 
 TOLSTOI'S RANK AND PLACE: 
 
 Tolstoi stands out as the most gigantic personality in the world's 
 literature of the age. He has been compared to a mighty oak tower- 
 ing high and solitary above his fellows in the field of literature. 
 He is the greatest of contemporary novelists ; Europe does not con- 
 tain his equal. There is no other modern novelist (except Dostoiev- 
 ski) who like Tolstoi reveals to us the secret channels of human 
 thought and feeling, the most hidden mainsprings of human action ; 
 who like him represents the individual and social life-process in all 
 its phases; who is equally at home in all the spheres of modern life 
 (which can not be said of Dostoevski) ; who never seeks for an 
 ideal or heroic motive unless it offers of itself, whether he takes as 
 his subject the misery of everyday life or some significant moment 
 in social or political history. The best testimony for Tolstoi is that 
 his wor ks a re not printed books but life itself. Yet this great author, 
 the greatest interpreter of nineteenth century life, is nevertheless 
 essentially a Russian. His works deal almost exclusively with Russia 
 and the Russians, and when foreigners are even indirectly engaged 
 in them, he evinces a national prejudice, as witness the treatment of 
 Napoleon in " War and Peace." His Russian figures are moreover 
 characteristically Russian, w'ith all the traits and peculiarities inci-
 
 » TOLSTOI: 
 
 dental lo special oiiviruninciit. That llicy none the less appeal im- 
 mediately to the whole world, is due to the completeness and thor- 
 oughness with which he draws his characters in every relation to life, 
 thus bringing out prominently what is universal and true of the whole 
 of modern humanity. In typifying the life of all classes of modern 
 Russia, he paints a picture of the collective civilized world of the 
 present in its most fundamental manifestations. 
 
 It is impossible thus far to know with certainty what the verdict 
 of the future will be as regards the relative importance of Tolstoi 
 the artist, and Tolstoi tlie ethical teacher and man. While scarcely 
 any one denies the permanent quality of his artistic work, there are 
 many predictions, some of them very positive and dogmatic, that his 
 teaching will soon be forgotten ; but there are some who lay particular 
 emphasis on his work as a devotee. It is safe to predict that he will 
 long be studied, if not for the strength and beauty of his great art, 
 at least for the challenge flung at modernity b}- his creed and his 
 spirit, which makes his life-work of greater significance to humanity 
 than that of any of tlie great European artists since Byron's day. 
 
 TOLSTOI'S PHILOSOPHY.* 
 QBNERAL PRINCIPLES : 
 
 Tolstoi bases his philosophy on loz'e as the first principle, from 
 which he deduces the corollary : " Resist not evil " ; that is to say, 
 donot_o£ pose violence \Yith violence. Hence, Tolstoi regards him- 
 self as a follower of the Christian teaching. Tolstoi's Christianity, 
 however, is purely fh-^ rlrtrtrinp qj r^T'*:^ It r epudiate s every es- 
 tablished church, whether Gree k, Catholic or Protestant . The 
 churches, he declares, have nothing in common with the Christian 
 teaching save the name. They are founded on anti-Christian prin- 
 ciples and are hostile to Christianity. The church is presumptio n, 
 v iolence, self-assertion, rigidity and death. Christianity is meek - 
 ness, repentance, submissiveness, progress and hfc . The church 
 having once given way to the world, followed it ever after. The 
 world organized its existence in direct opposition to the doctrine of 
 Christ, and the church invented metaphors according to which it ap- 
 
 • A systematic exposition of Tolstoi's philosophy as gathered from his various 
 religious and philosophical works. To secure accuracy, his own language has been 
 letained as far as possible in this as well as in the sketch of Tolstoi's theory on art
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 9 
 
 peared that men who really lived contrary to the law of Christ lived 
 in accordance with it. And the world began to lead a life which 
 rapidly grew worse than that of the pagans, and the church began 
 to justify this way of living, and to affirm that it was strictly in 
 accordance with the doctrine of Christ. 
 
 Tolstoi does not believe in supernatural revelation, nor in the 
 superhumanity of Christ. Indeed, he rejects all dogmas whatso- 
 ever. By God, he understands the spirit dwelling in man, i hat- 
 spiri^ which every one recognizes within him and which he is con ;;;^ 
 scious of as bein g^ Jree, rational, and independent of the flesh . In 
 this sense it was that Christ called himself the son of God, just as 
 every m an is the son of God , according to the spirit. All the miracu- 
 lous tales concerning his birth and resurrection, Tolstoi declares to 
 be utterly foreign to the spirit of Christ's doctrine, and the invention 
 of a coarse conception. 
 
 Cleared of their supernatural encumbrances, the teachings of 
 Christ find their justification on grounds of pure reason. The belief 
 in Christ is not a belief in the personality of Christ, but a recognition 
 of the truth. Rp;\ ,'^on is thp law recognized by man, according to 
 
 which he must w ork out his life . Since, however, there is no higher 
 reason outside of oneself, one's own reason must become the highest 
 and sole guide in the conduct of life" And the more one's life is con- 
 ducted according to the dictates of reason, the more it is subor- 
 dinated to mere animal existence, the better will that life be. 
 
 Formerly, beliefs were imposed on men. They were not the 
 products of reason. When, through increased intercourse, people 
 learned to know other religions, and were led to reflect as to which, 
 was the true one, it was reason alone that could decide for them. 
 It is by reason and not bv fait h thrlt "^^^ attain tn a recognition of 
 the truth. The law of truth reveals itself to man gradually. It has 
 revealed itselt lor the first time in the midst of a heathen world, to 
 a man said to be Christ. The teaching of Christ is reason itself. It 
 contains the only rules of life whereby it is possible to live according 
 to reason, and hence no one resting himself on reason, has the right 
 to renounce it. 
 
 The love declared by Christ as the highest principle is not what 
 people usually comprehencl under that name. To men who do not 
 
 .Vr- 
 
 v-n
 
 10 TOLSTOI: 
 
 understand life, love is merely that which contributes to their own 
 well-being . Their love for wife, children, friends, is only another 
 form ji Lself-lov e. But true love is a constant denial of seTFfor the 
 sake of another ; it is a condition of "^ood-will toward all — a condi- 
 
 tion natural in children, but which in adults can be brought about 
 only by means of se!f-reniuiciation ; it is an ideal of complete, endless 
 and divine perfection. And in the nearest appn^ach to this divine 
 perfection of which every man is conscious within himself, but 
 which can be reached only in endlessness, consists the true life 
 according to the teaching of Christ, instead of. as was formerly 
 believed, in the fulfilment of commandments, in the fulfilment of the 
 la\v. Since, moreover, love, according to Christ, is the highest law, 
 and the teachings of Christ are founded on reason, love must also be 
 based on reason. Love is the only reasonable activity of man and is 
 that which solves all the contradict-ions of human life. It gives to life 
 that which, in view of the fact of death, would be meaningless, a 
 mea ning independent of time and space. 
 
 Tolstoi believes that there are three and only three views of 
 life: Plrst, embracing tlie individual, or the animal view of life; 
 second, embracing the society or the pagan view of life ; third, em- 
 bracing the whole w-orld, or the divine view of life. In the first 
 theory of life, a man's life is limited to his own individuality; the 
 aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In 
 the second theory, a man's life is limited not to his own individuality, 
 but to certain societies and classes of individuals: to the tribe, the 
 family, the clan, the nation ; the aim of life is limited to the satis- 
 faction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third 
 theory a man's life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, 
 but extends to the principle and source of life — to God. The motor 
 power of his life is love. And his religion is the w^orship in deed 
 and in truth of the principle of the whole — God. 
 
 From the law of love follows necessarily the principle of non- 
 resistance to evil. " Resist not evil " means never resist evil ; that is, 
 never ofYer violenc e to any one, never do anything which_js_QpjQOsecl 
 to love. The precept, not to resist evil, is one which contains the 
 whole substance of Christ's doctrine, if we consider it not only as 
 a saying but as a law we are bound to obey. It is like a latch-key
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 11 
 
 which will open any door, but only if it be well inserted into the 
 lock. The law of love inevitably leads to the principle of non- 
 resistance since it is impossible to find a sure, incontestable criterion 
 for evil. What is evil to one may appear good to another. People 
 invested with sanctity considered that as an evil which to men 
 and institutions invested with secular power appeared good, so t^iat 
 now men have arrived at the full recognition of the fact that an 
 outward, universally binding definition of evil does not and can not 
 exist. 
 
 Non-resistance to evil, however, does not, according to Tolstoi, 
 signify every form of resistance. Tolstoi intends to designate by 
 the precept only resistance by force. In this sense, however, the 
 principle is made applicable in its widest scope. We must not only 
 not resist evil done to ourselves, but also that committed against our 
 neighbor. In support of this Tolstoi quotes the words of Jesus 
 addressed to Peter when the latter in Christ's defense struck the 
 servant of the high priest with the sword : " All they that take the 
 sword shall perish with the sword." Nor is the commandment 
 applicable only to some, but binding on all. It forbids the use of 
 violence by those who are in possession of power, as well as by those 
 who are not. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoi declares, contains five pre- 
 cepts all of which form but one of the steps in the approach to 
 perfection. They are negative in character and therefore can be 
 followed even at the present stage of man's life by all who strive 
 after perfection. The first of this is : " Hold thy peace with every- 
 one, and when peace is disturbed use all efiforts to restore it ; " the 
 second : " Let every man take but one woman and every woman but 
 one man, and let none abandon the other under any pretext ; " the 
 third : " Make no vows ; " the fourth, the most important of all, 
 embodying the non-resistance principle : " Suffer vexation, do not 
 repay evil with evil ; " and the fifth : " Do not break the peace in 
 order to serve your interests." 
 
 SPECIAL APPLICATIONS, (a) LAW. 
 
 On the principle of non-resistance to evil Tolstoi rejects all 
 law. Law is maintained by violence and hence it is impossible to
 
 12 TOLSTOI: 
 
 admit the Godhead of Christ, the basis of whose teaching is non- 
 resistance to evil, and at the same time to work consciously and un- 
 concernedly for the institutions of property, courts of law, king- 
 doms, the army and so on. There may have been a time when the 
 violence of law was milder than the violence of individuals. Such, 
 liQwevcr, is no longer the case among the most highly developed- 
 peoples. Our dispositions have grown gentler. Men, nowadays, 
 recognize the precept of love of the humankind, of pity for one's 
 neighbor, and only desire the possibility of quiet, peaceful living. 
 At any rate it would be much more simple to regulate our lives 
 according to the doctrine of Christ ; and then, if courts of law, execu- 
 tions and war were found indispensable to our welfare, we might pray 
 to have them too. 
 
 P'ormerly people believed in the supernatural origin of laws, and 
 therefore could readily submit to them. From the very commence- 
 ment of Christianity, however, it began to be understood that human 
 laws, though given out for divine laws, were compiled by men, and 
 can not be infallible, whatever the external majesty with which they 
 are invested, and that erring men are not rendered infallible by 
 assembling together and calling themselves a senate or any other 
 name. Indeed, Christ himself directly repudiates law with the 
 words: " Ju dge not and ye shall not be judged" (Matt. vii. i) ; 
 "Condemn not and ye shall not be condemned " (Luke vi. 37), 
 which mean that we are not only never to condemn our brother in 
 word, that is by speaking evil of him, but that we must not institute 
 courts of law for the condemnation of a fellow creature to punish- 
 ment. Tolstoi said that the first point that struck him when he 
 understood the commandment, " Resist not evil," in its true mean- 
 ing, was that human courts were not only contrary to this command- 
 ment, but in direct opposition to the whole doctrine of Christ, and 
 that therefore he must certainly have forbidden them. Christ says, 
 " Resist not evil." The sole object of courts of law is to resist evil. 
 Christ enjoins us to return good for evil. Courts of law return 
 evil for evil. In his prayer Christ enjoins all men. without any ex- 
 ception, to forgive as they hope fo be forgiven. Then how can a 
 man judge and condemn another when, according to the faith he 
 ]irofosses, he is briimd to forgive?
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. V-\ 
 
 Another point he makes against the institution of law is that vio- 
 lence under the fixed form of law condemns only that which public 
 opinion has for the most part long ago disavowed and condemned ; 
 and that while public opinion censures all the acts opposed to the 
 moral law, the law which rests on violence condemns and punishes 
 only a certain very limited range of acts, and by so doing seems 
 to justify all other acts of the same kind which do not come under 
 its scope. Public opinion ever since the time of Moses has regarded 
 covetousness, profligacy and cruelty as wrong, and censured them 
 accordingly. And it condemns every kind of manfestation of covet- 
 ousness, not only the appropriation of the property of others by force 
 or fraud or trickery, but even the cruel abuse of wealth ; it condemns 
 every form of profligacy whether with concubine, slave, divorced 
 woman, or even one's own wife ; it condemns every kind of cruelty, 
 whether shown in blows, in ill-treatment, or in murder, not only of 
 men but even of animals. The law resting on force punishes only 
 certain forms of covetousness, such as robbery and swindling, cer- 
 tain forms of profligacy and cruelty, such as conjugal infidelity, 
 murder, and wounding. And in this way it seems to countenance 
 all the manifestations of covetousness, profligacy, and cruelty, which 
 do not come under its narrow definition. 
 
 Love alone must govern the conduct of men. But to follow the 
 precept of love is to accept the gospel of Christ as the guide of life, 
 and were all to fulfil Christ's doctrine, the kingdom of God would 
 be on earth. If only each one were to begin to do what we must do, 
 and cease to do what we may not do, then the near future would 
 bring the promised kingdom of Heaven, for the kingdom of Go d 
 is not in the world without, but in the soul of manj The kingdom 
 of God is but the following of the commandments of Christ, espe- 
 cially the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 The follower of Christ will be poor, Tolstoi believes, but he will 
 enjoy the blessings given him by God. We have come to consider 
 the word poverty as expressive of misery, yet it really is happiness. 
 " He is poor " means that he does not live in a town, but in the 
 country ; he does not sit idly at home, but labors in the fields or 
 the woods ; he sees the sunshine, the sky, beasts, and birds ; he need 
 not take thought what he shall do to excite his appetite, to facilitate
 
 14 TOLSTOI: 
 
 his digestion; but he feels hungry three times a day. He does not 
 toss about on his soft pillow, thinking how to cure himself of sleep- 
 lessness, but sleeps soundly after his work. He sees his children 
 around him, he lives in friendly communion with men. The main 
 point is that he is not obliged to do work which he hates, and he 
 need not fear the future. He will be ill, suffer, die as others do (and 
 judging by the way the poor suffer and die, his death will be an 
 easier one than that of the rich) ; but he will doubtlessly have led a 
 better life. We must be poor, we must be beggars, wanderers on 
 the face of the earth; that is wliat Christ taught us, and without it 
 we can not enter the kingdom of God. 
 
 (b) aOVERNMBNT. 
 
 Because Tolstoi believes that Christianity is opposed to law, he 
 necessarily believes also that it puts an end to government which is 
 based on law. No honest and serious-minded man of our day can 
 help seeing the incompatibility of true Christianity — the doctrine of 
 meekness, forgiveness of injuries and love — with government, its 
 pomposity, acts of violence, executions, and wars. The profession 
 of true Christianity not only excludes the possibility of recognizing 
 government, but even destroys its very foundations. The state con- 
 ception of life could be justified only so long as all men voluntarily 
 sacrificed their personal interests to the public welfare. But so soon 
 as there were individuals who would not voluntarily sacrifice their 
 own interests, and authority, that is, violence was needed to restrain 
 them, then the disintegrating principle of the coercion of one set 
 of people by another set entered into the social conception of the 
 organization based on it. 
 
 It matters little what the form of government may be, he de- 
 clares. The only difference is that under a despotic form of gov- 
 ernment, the authority is concentrated in a small number of oppress- 
 ors and violence takes a crude form ; under constitutional monarch- 
 ies and republics, as in France and America, authority is divided 
 among a great number of oppressors and the forms assumed by 
 violence are less crude. 
 
 Even if there was once a time when, owing to the low standard 
 of morals, and the disposition of men to violence, the existence of
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 15 
 
 an authority to restrain such violence, was an advantage, because 
 the violence of government was less than the violence of individuals, 
 one can not but see that this advantage could not be lasting. As 
 the disposition of individuals to violence diminished, as the habits of 
 the people became more civilized, and as power grew more demo-, 
 ralized through lack of restraint, this advantage disappeared. Men 
 of the present day hate oppression, inequality, class distinction, and 
 every kind of cruelty to animals, as well as to human beings. It 
 may well be that there are people who can not help regarding all this 
 (government administration) as necessary and indispensable. He 
 does not dispute the question with them, he speaks for himself only ; 
 but says with absolute certainty that he does not need it, and that 
 he can not follow the conduct which it prescribes. 
 
 Government is the rule of the wicked over the good. The whole 
 history of pagan time is nothing but the narration of the manner 
 and means by which the more wicked gained possession of power 
 over the less wicked, and retained it by cruelties and deceptions, 
 ruling over the good under pretense of guarding their rights and 
 protecting them from the wicked. All the revolutions in history arc 
 only examples of the more wicked seizing power and oppressing the 
 good. The wicked will always dominate the good, and will always 
 oppress them. The governments of our day- — all of them, the most 
 despotic and liberal alike — have become what Hertzen so well called 
 " Ghenghis Khan with the telegraph," that is to say, organizations 
 of violence based on no principle but the grossest tyranny, and at 
 the same time taking advantage of all the means invented by science 
 for the peaceful collective social activity of free and equal men, used 
 by them to enslave and oppress their fellows. 
 
 It is said by those who defend the existing order of things that 
 the suppression of government violence can be possible and desirable 
 only when all men have become Christians. So long as among 
 people nominally Christians there are un-Christian wncked men, who 
 for the gratification of their own lusts are ready to do harm to others, 
 the suppression of government authority, far from being a blessing to 
 others, would only increase their miseries. But in saying that ex- 
 cept for the government the bad would oppress the good, the cham- 
 pions of the existing order of things take it for granted that the
 
 18 TOLSTOI: 
 
 good are those who at the present time are in possession of power 
 and the bad are those who are in subjection to it. This would be 
 true if the custom of our society were what is, or rather is supposed 
 to be, the custom in China; that is, that the good always rule, and 
 that directly those at the head of government cease to be better than 
 those they rule over, the citizens are bound to remove them. This 
 is supposed to be the custom in China. In reality it is not so and can , 
 never be so. For to remove the heads of a government ruling by 
 force, it is not the right alone, but the power to do so that is needed. 
 So that even in China this is only an imaginary custom. And in our 
 Christian world we do not even suppose such a custom, and we have 
 nothing on which to build up the supposition that it is the good or 
 the superior who are in power ; in reality it is those who have seized 
 power and who keep it for their own and their retainers' benefit, and 
 power is always seized by those who are less conscientious and less 
 moral. The good can not seize power, nor retain it ; to do this, 
 men must love power. And love of power is inconsistent with 
 goodness ; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities — 
 pride, cunning, cruelty. 
 
 In the t ransit ions of power within a state from onepersonage 
 to another, the power has rarely passed from a worse person to a 
 better ^ne. When Louis XVI. was removed and Robespierre came 
 to power, and afterward Napoleon — who ruled then, a better man 
 or a worse? And when were better men in power, when the Ver- 
 saillist party or when the Commune was in power? When Charles 1. 
 was ruler, or when Cromwell? And when Peter III. was czar, or 
 when he was killed and Catherine was czarina in one half of Russia 
 and Pugachev ruled the other? Which was bad then and which 
 was good ? All men who happen to be in authority assert that their 
 authority is necessary to keep the bad from oppressing the good, 
 assuming that they themselves are the good par excellence, who pro- 
 tect other good people from the bad. In reality, however, vvithdui 
 the aggrandizement and the abasement of others, without hypocri- 
 sies and deceptions, without prisons, fortresses, executions, and 
 murders, no power can come into existence or be maintained. 
 
 Government rests on bodily violence. The possibility of apply- 
 ing bodily violence to people is provided above all by an organiza-
 
 J CRITICAL S'J'UDV. IT 
 
 tion of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to one will. 
 These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are what 
 constitute the army. The army has always been and still is the 
 basis of power. Power is always in the hands of those who control the 
 army, and all men in power — from the Roman Csesars to the Russian 
 and German emperors — take more interest in their army than in 
 any thing, and court popularity therein knowing that if the army is 
 on their side, their power is secure. 
 
 Hitherto it has been supposed by those who submitted to state 
 authority, that governments existed for their benefit; but the policy 
 or even the unconscious tendency of those in power must always 
 be to reduce their subjects to the extreme of weakness, for the 
 weaker the oppressed, the less effort need be made to keep him in 
 subjection. And therefore the oppression of the oppressed always 
 goes on growing up to the furthest limit, beyond which it can not 
 go without killing the goose with the golden eggs. And if the goose 
 lays no more eggs, like the American Indians, negroes, and Fijians, 
 then it is killed in spite of the sincere protests of philanthropists. 
 
 Armies are maintained and strengthened by the governments not 
 only to defend the state against other states but above all to keep 
 enslaved their own subjects. That has always been necessary and 
 has become more and more necessary with the increased diffusion 
 of education among the masses, with the improved communication 
 between people of the same and of different nationalities. It has 
 become particularly indispensable now in the face of communism, 
 socialism, anarchism, and the labor movement generally. Govern- 
 ments feel that it is so and strengthen the force of their disciplined 
 armies. In the German Reichstag not long ago, in reply to a ques- 
 tion why funds were needed for raising the salaries of the under 
 officers, the German Chancellor openly declared that trustworthy 
 under officers were necessary to contend against socialism. Caprivi 
 only said aloud what every statesman knows and assiduously con- 
 ceals from the people. The reason to which he gave expression is 
 essentially the same as that which made the French kings and popes 
 engage Sw-iss and Scotch guards, and makes the Russian authorities 
 of to-day carefully distribute the recruits in such a manner that the 
 regiments from the frontiers are stationed in central districts, and
 
 OA]^ 
 
 IS TOLSTOI: 
 
 the regiments from the center are stationed on the frontiers. The 
 meaning of Caprivi's speech, put into plain language, is that funds 
 are needed, not to resist foreign foes, but to buy under-officers to 
 be ready to act against the enslaved toiling masses. 
 
 The violence of governments is made possible by the violence 
 which it exacts from its subjects. Government not only asks sub- 
 mission to violence but demands violence and thus by means of uni- 
 versal military service, it renders all citizens their own oppressors: 
 It demands obedience by making the oath of allegiance obligatory 
 on all Russian subjects on each new accession to the throne by a 
 czar, by taxes applied to acts of violence, by obligatory police ser- 
 vice, etc. 
 
 Four methods are employed by the government to enlist its sub- 
 , , - jects in the work of violence, organized by the aid of science into a 
 0J/^, skilful system carried to such a point of perfection that every one 
 
 iAiv^ is caught in the circle of violence and has no chance of escape from 
 1^ it. The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in 
 representing the existing state organization — whatever it may be, 
 free republic or the most savage despotism — as something sacred 
 and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it with 
 the crudest punishments. This method is in use now — as it has been 
 from olden times — wdierever there is a government ; in Russia 
 against the so-called nihilists, in America against anarchists, in 
 France against imperialists, legitimists, communards and anarchists. 
 :>. The second method is corruption . It consists of plundering the 
 
 industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes, and 
 distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are bound 
 in return to support and keep up the oppression of the people. These 
 bought officials, from the highest minister to the poorest copying 
 clerks, make up an u})bnjken network of men bound together by the 
 same interest — that of living at the expense of the people. They 
 become the richer the more submissively they carry out the will of 
 the government ; and at all times and places, sticking at nothing in 
 all departments, support by word and deed the violence of govern- 
 ments, on which their own property also rests. 
 
 The third method is what Tolstoi describes as hypnotizing thQ 
 
 1 people. This consists in checking tlie moral development of men
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 19 
 
 and by various suggestions keeping iheni back in the ideal of life, 
 outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government 
 rests. This h}pnotizing process is organized at the present in the 
 most complex manner and starting from childhood, continues to act 
 on men till the day of tlieir death. It begins in their earliest years 
 in the compulsory schools created for this purpose, in which the 
 children have instilled into them, the ideas of life of their ancestors, 
 which are in direct antagonism with the conscience of the modern 
 world. In countries where there is a state religion, they teach the 
 children the senseless blasphemies of the church catechisms, together 
 with the duty of obedience to their superiors. In republican states, 
 they teach them the savage superstition of patriotism and the same 
 pretended obedience to the governing authorities. 
 
 The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who 
 have been stupelied and enslaved by the three former methods a 
 certain number, exposing them to special and intensified means of 
 stupefaction and brutalization, and so maki ng them into a __passi_vx 
 instrument for carrying out a]J the cruelti£s__and brutalities neede(l. 
 ^by the_ gpv ern ment. Intimidation, corruption and hypnotism bring 
 people into a condition in which they are willing to be soldiers ; the 
 soldiers give the power of punishing and plundering them (and pur- 
 chasing officials with the spoils) and hypnotizing them and convert- 
 ing them in time into these same soldiers again. 
 
 The gospel of Christ substitutes the law of love for the state. 
 In a system founded on the precepts of love, men would live in 
 universal brotherhood without recognizing any authority. Such a 
 system is not only desirable but it is compatible with the present 
 stage of moral development, for however ignorant or superstitiou.s 
 he may be, every man of the present day knows that all men have 
 an equal right to life and the good things of life, and that one set of 
 people are no better nor worse than another, that all are equal. 
 Indeed he recognizes the impossibility of the existing order of things 
 and the necessity for the establishment of new forms of life. Under 
 the new order, men will also live in communities, but these com- 
 munities will not be held together by promises, for Christ forbid=; 
 the making of any vows. Society must l)c maintained by spiritual 
 influence, for the man who follows a spiritual influence acts accord-
 
 '.'0 TOLSTOI: 
 
 ing lo liis own desires. The more spiritually advanced exert an 
 influence over the less advanced, and the efficacy of this influence 
 lies in the tendency of the less thinking people to follow the example 
 of those who stand intellectually on a higher level. 
 
 it is asked, how will the function at present performed by the 
 government be fuffilled in the future state of society? In the first 
 place, as to defense against the attacks of the evil-disposed. But 
 who are those evil-disposed persons in our midst from whose attacks 
 we are preserved by the state and its army? Even if three or four 
 centuries ago, when men prided themselves on their war-like prow- 
 ess, when killing men was considered a heroic achievement, there 
 were such persons ; we know very well that there are no such per- 
 sons now, that we do not nowadays carry or use fire-arms, but 
 every one professes humane principles and feels sympathy for his 
 fellows, and wants nothing more than we all do — that is, to be left 
 in peace to enjoy his existence undisturbed. So that nowadays there 
 are no special malefactors from w'hom the state could defend us. 
 If by these evil-disposed persons, is meant the men who are punished 
 as criminals, we know very well that they are not a different kind 
 of beings like wild beasts among sheep, but are men just like our- 
 selves, and no more naturally inclined to crimes than those against 
 whom they commit them. We know that their number can be di- 
 minished only by change of environment and moral influence. So that 
 the justification of state violence on the ground of the protection it 
 gives us from evil-disposed persons, even if it had some foundation 
 three or four centuries ago, has none whatever now. 
 
 Secondly, as to education, culture, means of communication, and 
 so on. Without the state, it is said, men would not have been able to 
 form the social institutions needed for doing anything. This argu- 
 ment too was well founded only some centuries ago. If there was 
 a time when people w^ere so disunited, when they had so little means, 
 of communication and interchange of ideas, that they could not 
 cooperate and agree together in any common action in commerce, 
 economies, or education without the state as a center, this want of 
 common action exists no longer. The great extension of means of 
 communication and interchange of ideas has made men completely 
 able to dispense with state aid in forming societies, associations,
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 21 
 
 corporations, and congresses for scientific, economic and political 
 objects. Indeed government is more often an obstacle than an 
 assistance in attaining these aims. From the end of last century, 
 there has hardly been a single progressive movement of humanity 
 which has not been retarded by the government. 
 
 Thirdly, it is claimed that without governments, nations would 
 be enslaved by their neighbors. The government, they tell us, with 
 its army, is necessary to defend us from neighboring states who might 
 enslave us. But we know this is what all governments say of one 
 another, and yet we know that all the European nations profess the 
 same principles of liberty and fraternity, and therefore stand in no 
 need of protection against one another. And if defense against bar- 
 barous nations is meant, one-thousandth part of the troops now under 
 arms, would be amply sufficient for that purpose. Moreover, a society 
 based on the precepts of. Christ which inflicts no injury on any one, 
 and where the surplus of labor is given away to others, can have 
 no fear of murder or torture at the hands of an enemy, whether it 
 be the Germans, the Turks, or savages. They can take away only 
 what the people would have voluntarily given to them. 
 
 With regard to the new order of things, it is impossible to know 
 precisely the detailed forms it will assume. But this uncertainty 
 ought not to deter men from striving to attain the new life. If 
 Columbus had allowed himself to be guided by such considerations 
 he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set ofif 
 on the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one 
 had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By 
 this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of 
 the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished man- 
 sion to another and a better one, it would make it much easier; but 
 unluckily there is no one to get humanity's new dwelling ready for 
 it. The future is even worse than the ocean — there is nothing there 
 — it will be what men and circumstances make it. 
 
 It is not even this question " What will happen? " that agitates 
 men as much when they hesitate to fulfil the Master's will, as they 
 are troubled by the question how to live without those habitual 
 conditions of life which we call civilization, culture, art and science. 
 Rut all these we know are onlv various manifestations of truth, and
 
 23 TOLSTOI: 
 
 tlie change that is before us is to be made only for the sake of a 
 closer attainment and reahzation of truth. How then can the 
 manifestation of truth disappear through our reaUzing it? These 
 manifestations will be different, higher, better, but they will not 
 cease to be. Only what is false in them will be destroyed ; all the 
 truth in them will only be stronger and more flourishing. 
 
 The unknown world on which men are entering in renouncing 
 their habitual ways of life, appears itself as dreadful to them, but 
 if a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know 
 his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It 
 is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a program of the 
 life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the 
 surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating 
 in the same place. The conditions of the new order of life can not 
 be known by us because we have to create them by our own labors. 
 That is all that life is, to learn the unknoAvn, and to adapt our 
 actions to this new knowledge. That is the life of each individual 
 man, and that is the life of human societies and of humanity. 
 
 {o PROPERTY. 
 
 ''^' Together with laws, Tolstoi repudiates property maintained by 
 law. Even if this system were necessary in the past when the sense 
 of fellowship and humaneness was not as strong in men as it is at 
 present, the existing organization has outlived its time, and must 
 inevitably be reconstructed on new principles. Even if property 
 did not exist, there would be no wild scramble among men of to-day 
 for the possession of goods, for every one recognizes nowadays the 
 commandment of universal love, and every one knows that all men 
 have an equal right to life and the good things of life. 
 
 jProperty is opposed to love and to the -orinciple ^ absolute 
 equality a mong mem It is based on violence inasmuch as it makes 
 the poor dependent on the rich, and hence the rich are guilty by the 
 very fact of being rich. It is a crime that some should live in super- 
 abundance and luxury while thousands suftcr from the want of the 
 bare necessities of existence. 
 
 " Property is the right to the exclusive use of certain objects by 
 their owner whether the owner need them or not. But according to
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 23 
 
 the law of love which f()rl)i(ls the acciiiiiulation of wealth and coiiil 
 niands that each man devote all his life-work for others withoulj 
 demanding the lahor of his fellowmen, and sharing all he has witli 
 them — according to that law, every man who does what work he can,, fitrvvv/n^ 
 should have as much hut only as much as he requires^ v. 
 
 A living example of a state of things where property is non- 
 existent, and goods are held in common, is afforded hy the Russian 
 colonists. These on settling on a piece of ground begin to work it, 
 and it does not occur to them that any one who does not make use 
 of the soil can have any right to it ; on the contrary, the colonists 
 naturally regard the land as common property and consider every 
 man thoroughly justified in plowing and gathering wdiere he will. 
 They make implements for the tilling of the soil, the laying out of 
 gardens, and the construction of houses, and again it does not enter 
 their minds that these could yield an income in and for themselves ; 
 on the contrary, the colonists look on every kind of profit from the 
 means of production, on all interest for borrowed grain, and so on, 
 as an injustice. They work on a land and soil free from any kind 
 of a master, with instruments of labor of their own, or borrowed 
 w ithout interest ; each for himself or all together on a common basis. 
 Such communal societies are not peculiar to the Russian colonists 
 alone. They have existed at all times and still exist wherever the 
 natural condition of man's life has not in some manner been dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 d) THE REAUZATIOS. 
 
 The realization of the new life based on the principles of love is 
 to be brought about according to Tolstoi, not by the violent over- 
 throw of the present order of things, but by the refusal of every man 
 who has arrived at a recognition of the truth, to take a hand in the 
 work of the various institutions which support this system — law, 
 government, properly — and by the endeavor of each to bring as 
 
 /many others as possible to a recognition of the same truth, that is, 
 of the\necessity for every true Christian to strive toward a consum- 
 
 'jjiation of that condition of life in which it shall be possible for all 
 to live in consonance with reason and the law of love. 
 
 As the wrongs of the present system are the outcome not of the
 
 24 TOLSTOI: 
 
 inherent nature of man but of public opinion, it is necessary in 
 order to the reahzation of a hfe in keeping with our recognition of 
 the truth, to replace the present public opinion, no longer answering 
 the inner convictions of men, by a new and living public opinion. 
 There would be no way out of our present position except that a man 
 (and thereby all men) is gifted with the power of forming a differ- 
 ent, higher theory of life, which at once frees him from all the bonds 
 by which he seems indissolubly fettered. This independence is- 
 gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing 
 forms of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. 
 This independence results from the Christian recognizing the law of 
 love, revealed to him by his teacher, as perfectly sufficient for all 
 human relations, and therefore he regards every use of force as un- 
 necessary and unlawful. '' Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
 shall make you free." 
 
 Those who have recognized the truth have it in their power lo 
 bring about this change of public opinion. It must not be argued 
 that because it took eighteen centuries for but a small section of 
 humanity to pass over to Christianity, it must be many times eighteen 
 centuries before all the remainder do the same. Men do not only 
 assimilate a truth through recognizing it by prophetic insight, or bv 
 experience of life. When the truth has become sufficiently diffused, 
 men at a lower stage of development accept it all widely at once 
 simply through confidence in those who have reached it by the inner 
 spiritual way, and are applying it to life. Public opinion has the 
 power of working on men by infection, and with great rapidity gains 
 a hold on great numbers of men. Just as a single shock may be 
 sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at 
 once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now 
 that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over 
 hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion con- 
 sistent with conscience may be established and through this change 
 of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And 
 it depends on us to make this effort. 
 
 The means to bring about the necessary change in public opinion 
 consists, in the first place, in the putting into practise of the new 
 iheorv of life bv llmsc who ha\'o rccocfnized the truth. Truth is
 
 ^ CRITIC AL STUDY. 3a 
 
 imparled to nieii by acls of truth. In reality, therefore, one ought, 
 if a landowner, to give up the lands immediately to the poor; if a 
 capitalist or manufacturer, to turn over the money to his work peo- 
 ple; or if a czar, minister, official, judge or general, to renounce im- 
 mediately the advantages of the position ; or if a soldier on whom all 
 the system of violence is based, to refuse innnediately to obey in 
 spite of all the dangers of insubordination. But it may happen, 
 and it is most likely, that he will not have the strength to do so. 
 lie has relations, a family, subordinates and superiors; he is under 
 an influence so powerful that he can not shake it off. 
 
 Another efifective means to the same end, is the free and open 
 profession of the truth one has come to recognize. A man may not 
 have it in his power to live up immediately to his new concept of life, 
 but there is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to 
 you to be free in life, that is, to profess the truth. If men, nay 
 only single individuals, were to do this, then the old outlived public 
 opinion would at once fall of itself and a new, living and present 
 one spring up in its place. If men who had arrived at the new 
 conception were but bold enough to speak their minds, the uselessness 
 or stupidity and even inconvenience of the present institutions would 
 soon become obvious to all. Those who fill offices based upon 
 violence would find themselves in the position of the emperor in 
 Andersen's tale of " The Emperor's New Clothes," for directly 
 some one who has no interest in concealing their uselessness will 
 exclaim in all simplicity : " But these people have been of no use to 
 any one for a long time past ! " 
 
 In order to bring about the abolition of the present system — law, 
 government, property — it is further necessary that men who have 
 come to a recognition of the truth, should live in accordance with 
 that truth, refusing to take part in any of the acts of violence de- 
 manded by the present order. It is through the efiforts of the 
 people themselves that the new order of life can be brought into the 
 world. 
 
 Not by means of violence, however, must the present order be 
 abolished. The method of the revolutionary enemies is that of 
 attacking the government from without. Christianity does not at- 
 tack it at all, but from within it destroys all the foundations on which
 
 26 TOLSTOI: 
 
 government rests. The revolutionists say: "The form of govern- 
 ment is bad in this respect and that respect ; we must overturn i' 
 and substitute this or that form of government," under which, they 
 maintain, " oppression will be unnecessary." But they deceive them- 
 selves. Even if we admit that under a combination of circum- 
 stances specially unfavorable for the government, as in France in 
 1870, any government might be forcibly overturned and the power 
 transferred to other hands, the new authority would rarely be less 
 oppressive than the old one ; on the contrary, always having to defend 
 itself against its dispossessed and exasperated enemies, it would be 
 more despotic and cruel, as has always been the rule in all revolu- 
 tions. 
 
 The ameliorations of life must be brought about as the result 
 of the personal efforts of individual men. Those who recognize the 
 Christian teaching must refuse all support of the present order, re- 
 fuse to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refuse to pay 
 taxes, refuse to take part in law proceedings or in military service, 
 and live in accordance with his new conception of life. It is thus 
 that every man can free himself. The Christian is independent of 
 every human authority by the fact that he regards the divine law 
 of love, implanted in the soul of every man, and brought before his 
 consciousness by Christ, as the sole guide of his life and other men's 
 also. 
 
 Cases of refusing to comply with the demands of the govenmient 
 when they are opposed to Christianity, such as swearing allegiance 
 to the government, the payment of taxes, acting as jurymen, and 
 especially serving in the army, are of late occurring everywhere — in 
 Russia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France and Sweden — and 
 are becoming more and more freijiK'nt. The governiiK'nts are power- 
 less against them, for in all these cases, the tnotives given are so 
 excellent that, however despotic governments may be, they could 
 hardly punish them. To punish men for refusing to act against 
 their consciences, the government must renounce all claim to good 
 sense and benevolence. Governments can of course, flog to death 
 or execute or keep in perpetual imprisonment all enemies who want 
 to overturn them by violence. But what can they do against men 
 who, without wishing to overturn or destroy anything, desire simply
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY, 27 
 
 for their part to do nothing against the law of Christ, and who, 
 therefore, refuse to perform the commonest state requirements, which 
 are, therefore, the most indispensable to the maintenance of the state? 
 Tlie socialists, the communists, the anarchists, with their bombs ami 
 riots and revolutions, are not nearly so much dreaded by govern- 
 ments as these disconnected individuals coming from different parts, 
 and all justifying their non-compliance on the ground of the same 
 religion, which is known to all the world. 
 
 It may be asserted that no significance can be attached to a few 
 scattered cases of individual men refusing to comply with the de- 
 mands of the government ; that it would be necessary that all the 
 coarse, half-savage men completely incapable of appreciating Chris- 
 tianity or acting on it, of whom there are always a great many in 
 every Christian society, should be converted to Christianity before 
 the Christianizing process could so affect all men one after another 
 that they would pass from the heathen to the Christian conception 
 of life. This criticism would be perfectly just, if the transition from 
 one conception of life to another were only accomplished by the 
 single process of all men, separately and successively, realizing, 
 each for himself, the emptiness of power, and reaching Christian 
 truth by the inner spiritual path. But there is also another external 
 means by which men reach Christianity and by which the transition 
 is less gradual. This transition from one organization of life to 
 another is not accomplished by degrees like the sand running through 
 the hour-glass, grain after grain. It is more like the water filling a 
 vessel floating on water. At first the water only runs in slowly on 
 one side, but as the vessel grows heavier it suddenly begins to sink, 
 and almost instantaneously fills with water. It is just the. same 
 with the transitions of mankind from one conception — and so from 
 one organization of life — to another. At first only gradually and 
 slowly, one after another, men attain to the new truth by the inner 
 spiritual way, and follow it out in life. But when a certain point in 
 the diffusion of the truth has been reached, it is suddenly assimilated, 
 by every one, not by the inner way, but as it were involuntarily. 
 
 If not for further endeavor of each individual to live up to the 
 new truth, it would never be possible for men in the aggregate to 
 attain the new life. Men in their present condition are like a swarm
 
 'iti TOLSTOI: 
 
 of bees hanging" in a cluslcr to a branch. Ihe position of the bees 
 on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They 
 must start oft and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees 
 knows this, and desires to change its own, and the others' position, 
 but no one of them can do it. They can not all start off at once, 
 because one hangs on to another and hinders it from separating 
 from the swa^^m, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It 
 would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just 
 as it seems that worldly men caught in the toils of the state concep-. 
 tion of life, can never escape. And there would be no escape for the 
 bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed 
 with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men 
 if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering 
 into a Christian conception of life. If every bee who could fly, did 
 not try to Hy, the others too would never be stirred, and the swarm 
 would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered 
 the Christian conception of life, would not, without waiting for other 
 people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind 
 would never change its position. But let only one bee spread its 
 wings, start off, and fly away, and after it another and another, 
 and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm 
 of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as 
 Christianity teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and 
 another do the same, and the enchanted circle of existence in the 
 state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be 
 broken through. 
 
 If every man of the present order, who recognizes Christianity, 
 were to live in accordance with it, the ruling authorities would soon 
 find themselves in the position of a conqueror who is trying to save 
 a town which has been set on fire by its own inhabitants. Directly 
 he puts out the conflagration in one place, it is alight in two other 
 places ; directly he gives in to the fire and cuts oflf what is on fire 
 from a large building, the building itself is alight on both ends. 
 These separate fires may be few, but they are burning with a flame 
 which however small a space it starts from, never ceases till it has set 
 the whole ablaze. 
 
 However small the number of men who can arrive at a recogni-
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 39 
 
 tion of new truths through their inner spiritual intuition, all men 
 in varying degrees according to their age, their education, and their 
 race, are capable of understanding the new truths ; and first those 
 who are nearest to the men who have attained the new truth by 
 spiritual intuition, slowly and one by one, but afterward more and 
 more quickly, pass over to the new truth. Thus the number of men 
 who accept the new truth becomes greater and greater, and the 
 truth becomes more and more comprehensible. And thus more con- 
 fidence is aroused in the remainder who are at a less advanced stage 
 of capacity for understanding the truth. And it becomes easier for 
 them to grasp it, and an increasing number accept it. And so the 
 movement goes on more and more quickly, and on an ever-increasing 
 scale, like a snowball, till at last a public opinion in harmony with 
 the new truth is created, and then the whole mass of men is carried 
 over all at once by its momentum to the new truth and establishes 
 a new social order in accordance with it. 
 
 TOLSTOI ON ART: 
 
 Tolstoi's celebrated essay " What is Art " embodies the result of 
 fifteen years ot study and reflecti on. After reviewing the principal 
 theories on art from Baumgarten to Herbert Sf>encer and Grant 
 Allen, he finds them all unsatisfactory and proceeds to formulate 
 his own principle. 
 
 Art, according to Tolstoi, must not be considered as a means 
 of pleasure. It is one of the conditions of human life, one of the 
 means of ^intercourse between man and man. Like speech, jirt 
 serves as a vehicle of communication among men, the difference 
 being that, whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to 
 another, by means of art he transmits his feelings. 
 
 The activity of art is based on the capacity of man to receive 
 another man's expression of feelings and experience those feelings 
 himself. Hence, art begins when one person, with the object of join- 
 ing another or other to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses 
 that feeling by certain external indications. Art, therefore, must 
 be infectious. The spectators or auditors must be infected by the 
 feelings which the author has felt. From this follows the full 
 definition : " Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one
 
 m 
 
 30 TOLSTOI: 
 
 man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to 
 others feelings he has Hved through, and that other people are in- 
 fected by these feelings and also experience them." 
 
 The infection produced by an art-creation must be spontaneous. 
 If a man without exercising effort and without altering his stand- 
 point, on reading, hearing, or seeing another man's work, experiences 
 a mental condition which unites him with that man, and with other 
 people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking 
 that condition is a work of art. Infection, moreover, is not only 
 a necessary condition of art, but the degree of infection is the sole 
 criterion of excelle nce in art. 
 
 Accordmg to the standard of excellence art is to be distinguished 
 into two classes : first, religious art, and, second, universal art. The 
 first, religious art, transmitting both positive feelings o f love toTjod 
 and one's neighbor, and negative feelings of i ndignation and horror 
 at tile vioi atiofrbf lov e, manifests itself chiefly in the form of words, 
 and to some extent also, in painting and sculpture ; the second kind, 
 universal a rt, transmitting feelings accessible to a ll, manifests itself 
 in words, in painting, in sculpture, in dances, in architecture, and 
 most of all in music. 
 
 Art being a mode of intercour se between man and man, a condi- 
 tion of human life, it follows tliai Tfrue art must apj^eal to all men] 
 must be on a level with the common experience g: ff Immanity In 
 so far as it becomes exclusive, and capable of interesting only a small 
 portion of mankind, it is untrue. The object of art is to make at- 
 tainable by all men that (feeling of brothcrlioocn^o w attained only 
 by a few of the best men in society. Art is a means of union among 
 men, joining them in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life 
 and progress toward the well-being of individuals and of humanity. 
 
 Hence we ought to repudiate the fude savag e, and, for us, often 
 meaningless works of the ancient C ireeks : Sophocles, Euripides. 
 
 Aeschylus and especially Aristophane s ; of modern writers, Dante, 
 Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare i m painting. Michael Angelo's absurd 
 " Last Judgment," and every representation of miracles, including 
 Raphael's " Transfiguration "; in nnisic all but Rach's famous violin 
 aria, Chopin's nocturne in E flat major, and certain parts from the 
 works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Chopin. On
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 31 
 
 the other hand Tolstoi instances as exanij^lcs of the highes t art such 
 works as ''The Robbers " by Schiller, " Les Pauvre Gene and 
 " Les Miserables " by Victor Hugo, the works of Dickens, of Dos- 
 toievski, especially his " Notes from a Dead House," " Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin," George Eliot's " Adam Bede " ; in painting, a picture by 
 Walter Langley in the Royal Academy of 1897, a picture by the 
 French artist Morlai», and the pictures by Millet, especially his 
 " Man with the Iloe." 
 
 ANALYTIC STUDY OF TOLSTOI'S WRITINGS. 
 
 Tolstoi's writings fall naturally into two classes: 
 
 L The Purely Literary. 
 IL The EthicO'SocioIogical. 
 
 With the except ion of a few short novels, three dram as and " Resurrec- 
 tion / '^]r~oF^ToTstorsliterar^ 
 
 of his li fe^i828- i87S IP>while those of the second class, the ethico-sociological 
 writings, belong exclusively to the second period of his life (1878-1901), the 
 period of his so-called moral regeneration. 
 
 Period I. (1828=1878). Purely Literary Productions. 
 
 "Memories: Childhood, Boyhood, " Notes of a Marker " (1856). 
 
 Youth" (1852-57). " The Two Hussars " (1856). 
 
 The Caucasian Stories (1854-56): "Albert" (1857). 
 
 " The Cossacks." "Lucerne" (1857). 
 
 "The Invaders." 1" Three Deaths" (1859). 
 
 "The Wood Cutting Expedition." y' Family Happiness" (1859). 
 
 "Snowstorm." \|" Polikushka " (i860). 
 
 "An Old Acquaintance." " Kholstomier " (1861). 
 
 The Crimean Stories (1854-1855) : "War and Peace" (1865-68). 
 
 "Sevastopol in Dec, 1854, in " Anna Karenina " (1874-78). 
 May, 1855, in Aug., 1855." 
 
 Period I. Purely Literary Writings. 
 
 The original character of Tolstoi's creative talent is amply revealed in his 
 earliest compositions. In these are already clearlv manifested the matchless 
 
 vividness of portraiture, th^str ong scn^e for the real in life, \the love of detail, 
 the extraordi nary capacity tor ohscrvation, die (cTislikc of all that is purely. / 
 
 (i magmativc and artificia) J the simplicity of diction, and tlie detached and 
 natural manner of narration. ^_____— — — ~_____ 
 
 Tolstoi almost invariably depicts his own experience. [All h is pe rsons are 
 
 *Teal.~( The events he describes are either those in which he Has tiimself
 
 33 TOLSTOI: 
 
 participated, or such as are paralleled by his experiences. He paints his own 
 character over and over again in its various phases, and draws on his own 
 rich life for the background. It is this feature, added to his remarkable talent 
 for accurate reproduction, which so impresses the reader with a sense of the 
 real and inevitable in his works. 
 
 In his earli est novels, " Memories," " A Morning in the Life of a Landed 
 Proprietor, ■' Klotes of a Marker." and " Lucerne," Tolstoi portrays the auto- 
 biographic character of Nikolai and Irteniev and Prince Nekhludov through 
 various incidents and stages of development, the unifying theme in all being 
 the evil cons equences of a false and artifici al education.. Noble natures at 
 heart, they became mere word-heroes and whimsical eccentrics, and at th^ir 
 first contact with the actual world show their incapacity to cope with the 
 problems of existence, and are soon driven to wreck and ruin. 
 
 Tolstoi's greatest literary writings of his first period are his novels " War 
 and Peace " and " Anna Karenina ; " and " Resurrection " of his ^econd 
 period. Of these, " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina " rank highest 
 among his compositions, and are so far above anything he had written before 
 that they took literary Russia by surprise and quickly gained a universal 
 reputation. 
 
 " War and Peace." 
 
 " War and Peace " is an epic of the time of the Russian Napoleonic war. 
 Its action extends from 1S05 to 1820. War is the symbol of the epoch, but it 
 is nowhere Tolstoi's method to give particular prominence to merely battles 
 and public events as such ; and in this, his chief work, it is apparent from the 
 second part of the title that his aim and scope are far more comprehensive. 
 In fact, he unfolds before us a picture of the entire Russia of that time, and 
 reveals the life of the people of the period in its various phases and depths, 
 with a thoroughness and completeness that make its equal in any of the 
 worl d'g literature still to be supplied. ■^ 
 
 ^hrg e snheresof life l are presented to us,\,three families whos^ fortunes 
 we Tollow down to the minutest detail. In the^"Snt1?5hsKis f'amHy we have 
 the fqther, an old general of Catherine's time; the son, Andrei, statesman and 
 soldier, who takes active part in all the varying fortunes of the country; the 
 daughter, Princess Maria, full of devotion, self-forgetful, all pure love. 
 Without affectation we find the past, present, and future of Russian life mir- 
 rored in them. The Rostov family belongs to that good, honest, mediocre 
 class, the members of which are swept along by the current of life, having 
 no ideas which determine them, and which become significant in their coun 
 try's history. In contrast to these genuine, national, and society types is pre- 
 sented a solitary skeptic, Count Pierre Bezukhov. He possesses a really kind, 
 honest heart, but is prevented from accomplishing much good by a certain 
 helplessness and aimlessness which characterize him.
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. iJS 
 
 It a modern Iliad is possible, " War and Peace " is the Russian Iliad. 
 Historians have described and sketched for us on the basis of authentic 
 sources the contemporary Russian society, Napoleon's and Kutuzov's plans 
 of operation, the character of Napoleon, Murat, Devoust, Czar Alexander, 
 Kutuzov, Bagration, Speranski, Rostopchin. The merest details of the in- 
 vasion of Russia by the French and their remarkable retreat are familiar. 
 The historians have forgotten but one thing (for which, however, they are 
 not to blame) : To breathe life i nto the even ts and characte rs. It is just in 
 this that Tolstoi has succeeded. He has solved the highest problem of his- 
 tory and of poetry, has blended fact_andj)oetry into the highesMiving truth. 
 The times, the people, the intellectual currents, the inner life of single indi- 
 viduals as well as of the masses, the " historically great," the trivial — all 
 this rises vividly before our mental vision in forms of flesh and blood; we 
 see the single storms, which together constitute the character of an epoch, 
 out of which the process of historical life is developed. In a word, we learn 
 _what jiistory does and how it makes itself. And hence " W^r and Peace " is 
 at once a grand historic painting and romance. Both are most intricately 
 interwoven and form a harmonious and inseparable whole. To false great- 
 jiess the poet wished to oppose true greatness as he conceived it. This con- 
 trast is embodied not only in the Russian chief commander, Kutuzov, and in 
 Napoleon, but runs through all the moments of Russia's great national 
 struggle against Napoleon. 
 
 In general the manifold phases and movements of war are so drawn that 
 we can see into the soul of each single so Jdier, whether he be under the fire 
 of th e c anno n, or in a cavalry attack, whether in flight, in the hospital, or in 
 the camp by a cozy fire. All this is usually depicted after the impressions of 
 an eye-witness. The other, the peaceful historic characters, are drawn also 
 with a masterly hand. With a few keen strokes the poet knows how to present 
 the man bodily before us with the full peculiarity of his nature : so Rostopchin, 
 the minister Speranski, the diplomat Bilibin, the court dame Anna Scherer^ 
 The salon of the latter is introduced into the book, with Count Wasili Kura,- 
 gin, the Countess Helene Bezukhov, his daughter, Pierre Bezukhov and the 
 foreigners, the Rustov and Bolkonski families, the notorious and wild circle 
 of the then jcnnesee doree of the highest rank, with Anatole Kuragin, Pif rre, 
 and Dolokhov at its head ; and on the other side the typical aristocrat of the 
 old stamp, who would not yield a tittle of his ancestral pride, eternally m.oody 
 and domineering over all around him, and particularly over his dajghter 
 Marie — this queer old man who despises Prince Bolkoncki, Bonapr te and 
 the whole world, and shows himself a " Roman " at the moment when his son 
 Andrei goes to war: " Remember this one thing. Princ e Andrei," he says, 
 with emotion, ^ if you are kHled, it will pain the old man, your father, but 
 if I learn that you have not borne yourself^ like the son of Nikolai Bolkonski. 
 then I shall be ashamed." And Prince Andrei, one of the chief personages of 
 the novel, fights, loves and dies as aristocrat not only by birth but also in heart.
 
 TOLSTOI: 
 
 The old prince himself dies of a broken heart when he hears that the enemy 
 had penetrated into the interior of the country. 
 
 The chief interest of the novel (the work really contains several novels 
 interwoven) centers in the process of the inner enlightenment of Prince 
 Andrei and his remarkable friend Count Pierre Bezukhov, the two typical 
 representatives of the better Russia of the beginning of the 19th century. 
 The enlightenment is brought about in a different manner in the two; in 
 Andrei Bolkonski, on his death-bed, after being fatally wounded at Boro- 
 dino; in Pierre, in the French prison at Moscow, under the influence of a 
 companion in suffering, the simple soldier and peasant Platon Karataiev. 
 Both Andrei and Pierre are " Stiirmer und Dranger " (" Stormers and 
 Stressers") of their age. In them the first revolutionary ferment of the 
 Russian intellectual world attains full expression. They find no satisfaction 
 either in the engrafted ideals of their own circle, or in the large world, or 
 in the self-satisfied tone of the salon-patriotism, or in family life — the hollow 
 j product of this same world — OT^4n the vague strivings of the philanthropists 
 j of freemasons. They find no outlet from the labyrinth of their own dark 
 I cravings imtil the overwhelming spectacle of mutual destruction, the fearful 
 
 ! slaughter, the annihilation of the hopes and expectations of hundreds of 
 thousands of suffering, dying and killed men, friends and foes, the unworthy 
 doings of the self-authoftsed executors of the " nation's will," rush in on 
 them. Finally, Andrei's own disappointed romance with the beloved and 
 love-reciprocating, Natasha Rostov, breaks his haughtiness and pride and he 
 bows himself before the weight of circumstances, in which he recognizes God's 
 
 ! providence, even though already at the threshold of the grave. Otherwise is 
 the experience of Count Pierre Bezukhov, this great child with the strength 
 of a lion, so easily stirred, this colossus with the soul of a child, open to all 
 { goodness, and yet harborlessly and aimlessly drifting hither and thither like 
 ^ ^ a light boat tossed on a stormy sea; through the manifold mazes of the 
 ^ labyrinth into which youthful follies lead him, his unhappy marriage with a 
 ty wicked society woman who had become his wife in a manner incomprehensi- 
 I b\e to himself, through the meaningless formalism of freemasonry, he is like- 
 \ w-se drawn into the whirl of international events; and thrown together by 
 \ ch-ince with the wounded captured soldier Platon Karataiev in the burning 
 cit> of Moscow, occupied by the French, there opens up to him an altogether 
 new world of which he had not dreamed. Karataiev, the simple man, who 
 in hi: plainness of heart and faithful submissiveness brings love to all whom 
 he meets, and out of his rich treasury of soul and mind scatters golden seeds 
 of deep wisdom of life and of pure human love — Karataiev teaches Pierre to 
 yieltf submissively to Providence that sends good or bad fortune according to 
 heavenly counsel. Karataiev is the embodiment of the principle of love of 
 on e's n eighbor. Ajft^erHis^moral^ regeneration '' Pierre partakes again of the 
 highest earthly happiness. Natasha becomes his wife, and in the last part of 
 the work Tolstoi gives us glimpses of their happy family life. The sister
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. ;]5 
 
 of Andrei Bolkonski, the much tried Princess Marie, marries the good, honest, 
 even though very ordinary Rostov ; and the picture of these two young fami- 
 lies form a significant peaceful epilogue to the stirring times of war. 
 
 '■ Anna Karenina." 
 
 The composition of " Anna Karenina " is as rich in episodes as " War 
 and Peace," but it deals exclusively with contemporaneous family and country 
 life. Here also the novel Js^_ composed of several interw o ven plots, but, as 
 alwgvs_in Tolstoi, it- iq' pytrpn^pl y simple with regard to extern al_ _incident^ 
 Anna Karenina, the wife of a high-placed official in Moscow, is seized with 
 an irresistible love for a j'oung brilliant officer, Alexei Vronski. She be- 
 comes faithless to her husband, discards all social and practical considera- 
 tions, leaves her family and yields herself entirely to her passion, tasting 
 unrestrainedly all the delights of her mad intoxication. When she awakens 
 to sober judgment, she becomes conscious of the horrible reality of her 
 conduct and commits suicide. The other important episode running through 
 the story is that of the love, marriage and family life of the landed proprietor, 
 Konstantine Levin, and of Kitty Shcherbatski. The thread of connection of 
 these with the other chief characters of the work is in their family relation- 
 ship. Stepan Oblonski and his wife Daria, an unhappy family held together 
 by merely ties of convention, are the brother and sister respectively of Anna 
 Karenina and Kitty Shcherbatski. 
 
 " Anna Karenina " is purely a novel, and a Russian novel, but it is not 
 a novel in the ordinary sense of the word; there is, so to speak, no story. 
 It is not the development of a certain plot, with a beginning, a middle, and a 
 end ; it is rather a succession of pictures, of scenes, some of which seem 
 hardly to have any connection with the principal scenes. Such is Tolstoi's 
 manner, so far as he has a manner. He paints life such as it is, sometimes 
 solemn and sometimes dull ; tragical and commonplace — light and shadow 
 constantly intermingled. 
 
 We have in " Anna Karenina " two couples. One is Levin and his wife 
 Kitty, who married for love, and the husband remains a lover. Kitty is very 
 charming, very feminine and pure ; Levin is very good, very ordinary, very 
 weak, jealous when he had not the slightest occasion to be jealous. He is 
 an honest gentleman-farmer, timid, awkward; he detests St. Petersburg and 
 society, he is fond of his country-house, his peasants, his dogs, his horses. 
 He writes a book on agriculture which he will never finish. He is a warm 
 friend, a good neighbor, a capital shot. Tolstoi makes you positively see 
 him, and you feel at the end of the book as if you had always known him, 
 and gone with him after woodcock and heard him and Kitty discuss small 
 domestic matters. They are happy, and their troubles are only like the small 
 clouds that float a moment in a summer's sky and are soon absorbed by the 
 warm rays of the sun. 
 
 It is not so with Anna Karenina. She is lawless. She is one of the
 
 ■AC 
 
 TOLSTOI: 
 
 born rebels of the world. She admires, she even likes her husband — she can 
 not love him ; and she loves another man, a handsome, spirited, fashionable 
 young officer named Vronski. Fatality draws her to him, and he belongs 
 to that class of men who may be said to recognize no duties except to 
 themselves, no obedience except to their own desires and passions. He is a man 
 without a conscience. He is not exactly the bold villain, the bandit, the 
 outlaw, who has long been made prominent in literature. He is the correct 
 man of the world who pays his gambling debts at the appointed time; he is a 
 brave, even a brilliant soldier, an accomplished courtier, but his code of morals 
 is not inspired by any high law. He is eminently and essentially selfish, and 
 knows no God but his own will. 
 
 Anna Karenina is above him; she has a soul; she can feel commiseration 
 and pity. She was made for good, not for evil ; but her fate has tied her to a 
 husband who does not satisfy the cravings of her imagination and of her 
 heart. She falls into the hands of Vronski like a bird fascinated by a serpent. 
 When she feels her.self, to her surprise and almost to her horror, in love, she 
 tries to escape, but is drawn by degress into the vortex of passion. She has 
 the Slavic impetuosity and the Slavic weakness. As soon as Anna has sinned 
 the expiation begins. She begins almost at once to hate the cause of her sin. 
 No outline can convey the powerful impression of her great personality, 
 a personality colored by the various mental states through which she passes, 
 da wning lov e, blind passion, materna[ tenderness, doubt, apprehension, defi- 
 ance, sorrowpand finally despair.. The whole of a passionate woman's heart is 
 laid bare. The realism of Anna Karenina is supreme and merciless. Its 
 fidelity to the life it depicts, its strong delineation of character, above all its 
 masterly treatment of a theme of world-wide interest places it among the 
 leading novels of the century. 
 
 It was first published as a serial in the Russian Contemporary, an English 
 translation appearing in 1886, and instantly creating an enthusiasm. 
 
 "Memories: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." 
 
 " Memories : Childhood, Boyhood, Youth," is the story of the mental and 
 moral development of a boy between the ages of 9 and 18. It consists en- 
 tirely of recollections but not exclusively of his own life. Simple, unpretend- 
 ing pictures from the life of a noble family in the country are presented. 
 Brothers, sisters, parents, governess, teachers, servants are all introduced 
 briefly characterized, and their relations to one another distinctly brought 
 out — never through direct narrative, but incidentally through the natural 
 progress of the story. The history of the inner life of the boy is revealed with 
 close and delicate minuteness. First love, study, friendships, fancies, inclina- 
 tions and dislikes — nothing is deemed too imimportant to make the picture 
 complete. The speculative tendency of the author comes out as unmistakably 
 in this, his first work, as does his artistic power of observation and repre-
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 37 
 
 sentation. Under the influence of a gifted friend the young boy becomes 
 absorbed in a question of abstract morality — the question of goodness and 
 moral perfection, and he creates a world of thoughts, wishes and aims quite 
 different from the world around him. 
 
 " The Caucasian Stories." 
 
 With the Caucasian stories begin those marvelous descriptions of war 
 which culminate and find their highest expression in " War and Peace," and 
 still stand unrivaled as the best productions of the kind in the world's litera- 
 ture. The Caucasian stories include " The Invaders," " The Wood-Cutting 
 Expedition," " An Old Acquaintance," " The Cossacks " and " Snowstorm." 
 
 The chief of the Caucasian stories is " The Cossacks," the composition 
 of which extended over a period of several years. The bare plot is so simple 
 as to appear almost insignificant. Olenin, a young nobleman of the select 
 St. Petersburg society, comes to the Caucasus, falls in love with the beautiful 
 Cossack girl Alarianka and wishes to marry her. She seems inclined to accept 
 him, but in the mean time, Lukashka, a young spirited Cossack lad, to whom 
 she had been engaged before, is accidentally wounded. This makes clear to 
 her how strong a love she bears him. She rejects Olenin and he leaves the 
 village and its wild inhabitants wuth their aboriginal life, their natural loves 
 and passions, under the spell of which he had fallen for a time, and returns 
 to the camp. 
 
 In " Snow storm " Tolstoi depicts a sleigh-ridc through an endless white 
 plain in the territory of the Don Cossacs, while the snow falls incessantly, and 
 drifting into the air, is changed into a restless, wildly wriggling mass. It is 
 a study in simple phraseology of the violent play of nature. 
 
 " The Crimean Stories." 
 
 More important than the Caucasian stories of war are the Crimean 
 stories: "Sevastopol in December, 1854; Sevastopol in May, 1855, and Sevas- 
 topol in August, 1855, an Epic Triology in Miniature." Forwarded from the 
 scene of action and published in Russia, they at once earned Tolstoi a literary 
 celebrity. They are simple portrayals of battles, not the din, the uproar and 
 the large, general effects of war, but plain, life-like presentations of the be- 
 havior of men under fire, revealing a remarkable mastery of every detail of 
 warfare, and a rare psychologic understanding of the workings of the human 
 spirit in extraordinary moments of impending danger. 
 
 Other Works. 
 
 '■ A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor " paints Tolstoi's first 
 experiences in his attempt at the improvement of the peasantry. Nekhludov, 
 an energetic, highly educated aristocrat, desiring to introduce reforms for 
 the amelioration of his peasants, visits their homes one Sunday in June, with 
 the object of gathering information as to their needs. To his great disap-
 
 38 TOLSTOI- 
 
 poiiilmciU lie finds liiinself obstructed by the very people whom he had come 
 to benefit. The peasants do not understand him, do not want to be helped, and 
 show no need for the civilization which Nekhludov' desires to introduce among 
 them. 
 
 With " Notes of a Marker " and " The Two Hussars " Tolstoi enters 
 the field of the free story. He no longer confines himself to his own experi- 
 ences and reminiscences, but the truth and reality of the presentation remain 
 as marked as before. " Notes of a Marker " depicts the ruin of a youth in the 
 thoughtless, corrupt, idle life of high society. 
 
 In " The Two Hu.-^.sars " the heroes belong to the same family but to 
 different generations. They pass through the same experiences of love, 
 enmity, folly, but each in quite a different fashion. In older Russia all is 
 large, open, bold; in younger, small, concealed and artful. 
 
 " Albert " is the story of a starved musician w^honi Tolstoi once took 
 with him to the country. 
 
 " Lucerne " is an episode from Tolstoi's travels in Switzerland. A poor 
 wandering minstrel enters the Sweizerhof Hotel in Lucerne one evening and 
 sings for its rich, fashionable inmates. They seem to enjoy his performance, 
 but no one offers him the scantiest reward. This arouses the sympathy of 
 Nekhludov. the narrator, and one of the guests at the hotel that evening. 
 He befriends the simple, gifted singer, and invites him to sit down with him to 
 a bottle of champagne. Although the singer's manners are irreproachable, this 
 simple act of kindness draws upon Nekhludov the ridicule of the fashionable 
 guests, w'ho even begin to suspect his sanity. 
 
 In " Three Deaths " Tolstoi treats the theme of the different manner 
 in which beings on various scales of existence are affected by death. The 
 higher the culture, the more painful is death. The peasant accepts death 
 quietly and resignedly, as the rest of life. The noble lady suft'crs the torments 
 of death years before the real death comes. Her very life had long since 
 become a virtual death. But the mighty oak struck by the axe of the woods- 
 man trembles in all its frame, and with one loud groan totters to the ground. 
 
 '■ Family Happiness " is Tolstoi's first story of love. It follows no model 
 and is as original in conception as his other works. The personal element 
 is evident, and in describing the love sentiment through the female character 
 he probably gives expression to his own feeling. But he is a matured man. 
 He foresees the course of events. She is young and beautiful. She will love 
 and seek for that life which to him appears so meaningless and hollow. Then 
 in heavy, troubled nights, he will again find himself alone — a loneliness far 
 worse than he had known before he found her. And even if she returns to 
 him again, perhaps tainted with guilt — the man can not keep at a stand- 
 still. Every year of his life presents new problems to him. He has new 
 interests, he becomes another man, he can not go back. She will want to 
 return to the (jld, the first intoxication of love, which is only a point of 
 transition. The rich friendship of mature growth will not satisfy her, and 
 for him it is a necessity, a natural condition of life.
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 39 
 
 " Polikushka " is the story of a poor servant who through the influence 
 of bad company had become addicted to habits of stealing and drunkenness, 
 without, however, losing the better sides of his character — his industry and 
 good nature. He has a wife and five children. For the last seven months he 
 has .shown signs of improvement and given no cause for complaint. His 
 mistress is interested in his well-being, and in order to restore in him a 
 sense of self-esteem entrusts him with the collection of a considerable sum 
 of money. Polikushka is proud of his errand and promises his wife to carry 
 it out with scrupulous exactness, without yielding to temptation. On the 
 way back he loses the money, returns home, answers his wife's questions 
 moodily at'.d brokenly, and then walks up to the garret and hangs himself on 
 a beam. A neighbor sees his body and informs the wife of the accident. 
 Leaving the child she has been bathing in the tub of water, she rushes madly 
 up the stairway, where she drops down unconscious. On recovering, she 
 finds the child drowned. Overcome by the fearful catastrophe she becomes 
 demented and laughs and talks continuously. The village folk who were 
 preparing to celebrate a holiday with music and dancing, crowd eagerly around 
 the scene of accident and add to the general confusion. 
 
 The tragedy is enhanced by the ironic commentary of the accompanying 
 plot. The nephew of Dutlov, an old miser, is recruited for military service in 
 place of P olikushka. whose choice had been benevolently hindered by th e 
 landlady to prevent his separation from wife and children. Dut lov m ight 
 redcemhis nephe w with three hundred rubles. This he refuses to do, and" there 
 is a v iolent scene between the un cle and the nephew at the moment of parting. 
 The nephew calls the old man a robber and a vampire, and has forcibly to 
 be kept from attacking him. As Dutlov returns to the village he finds the 
 money Polikushka had lost and brings it to the proprietress. But she, not 
 yet recovered from the shock of the tragedy in her household, would have 
 nothing to do with the ill-fated money. As Dutlov returns home he sees 
 the dead body of Polikushka hanging from the beam. He has a terrible 
 dream that night, springs up from his bed, hurries after his nephew, whom 
 he succeeds in overtaking, and with the found money furnishes a substitute 
 for him. Thus w-hat had brought disaster to one family, where, whatever the 
 temporary mistakes of the father, a general spirit of kindliness and gentleness 
 pervaded, became the cause of the restoration of peace and happiness to 
 another, whose ruin had been threatened by the niggardliness, stubbornness 
 an d hard-heartedness of its cliief.j( ' 
 
 " Kholstomier " is the story of a horse of noble stock that had once been 
 
 the favorite of his master, but is now old and decayed and abandoned, and 
 of the sport of his young, fresh, frisky and coddled companions in whose 
 midst he had been placed to drag out his useless and wretched existence. At 
 last Kholstomier, the horse, determines to tell them his history and prove 
 to them he had j^nce not been worse than they, and that the same fate 
 awaited them in the end. He had always been a possession, always in the
 
 40 TOLSTOI: 
 
 power of another. He explains the conception of property and comes to thp 
 conclusion that the horse stands above men, for while the life of the former 
 is based on action, man's activity manifests itself merely in words. Such 
 words are in the first place all those which bear reference to property ^ He 
 who can apply the word " mine " to the greatest number of things is regarded 
 by men as the most fortunate. He say s/^X^ Hiy this is so, I can not tell, but it 
 is so. At first I was at pains to explain this on account of some special ad 
 vantage, but it soon appeared that this was false. Many of the people, foi 
 instance, who called me their horse, did not ride me, others rode me. ' They 
 did not feed me, others fed me. Kindness was shown me, not by those who 
 called me their horse, but by the coachman, horse-doctors, and in general, 
 strangers. Later, as the sphere of my observations extended, I convinced 
 myself that it is not only with reference to the horse that the conception 
 mine has no other basis than the low and animal instinct of men, which 
 they call the sense of property or the right of property. The man says, ' The 
 house is mine,' and does not live in it. He is only concerned about its con- 
 struction and its preservation. There are men who call a piece of land ' mine ' 
 and have never seen this land, and have never walked upon it. There are 
 men who call other men ' mine ' and have never seen these men, and all 
 their relations to these men consist in their doing harm to them. And men 
 in their life do not strive to do that which they regard as good, but to call 
 as many things as possible theirs. I am now co nvince d that in this consists 
 the essential difiference between men and us hoi jscs.'^ 
 
 Kholstomier is bought by a prince, and he is proud of having so dis- 
 tinguished a master and of driving him to his mistress. One day the prince 
 learns that his mistress has abandoned him. He pursues her with Kholstomier, 
 running him so unreasonably that the horse becomes permanently crippled and 
 enfeebled. He then passes on from one master to another, sinking lower and 
 lower, until he reaches the condition described at the opening of this story. 
 The prince is met with again in the story as a ruined man, partly dependent on 
 the charitable support of a rich friend. A merciful stroke of the flayer at last 
 relieves the horse from his miserable position, while the man is allowed to rot 
 away alive. 
 
 Period tJ-rTi^T^' 'PoT]} Literary and Ethico°5ociological Writings. 
 
 Literary Writings. 
 
 "Death of Ivan Ilich " (1885). 
 "Power of Darkness" (1887). a drama. 
 "Kreutzer Sonata" (1888). 
 
 " The First Brewer" (1888). a drama. 
 "Master and Workman" (1895). 
 "Resurrection" (1900). 
 "Who Is Right?" (1901).
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 41 
 
 " Resurrection," a later novel, indicates by its very title Tolstoi's radical 
 departure from his former method in his works of fiction. It is true that few 
 of Tolstoi's compositions are purely works of art, that the didactic element 
 is present in most of them, and is particularly conspicuous in " War and 
 Peace " and " Anna Karenina." In all these, however, the ethical and 
 philosophical themes of Tolstoi are for the most part merely supplementary. 
 They do not enter organically into the works themselves, and can easily be 
 distinguished from them. In " Resurrection," on the contrary, the artist is 
 altogether discarded and the philosopher and moralist are allowed to hold 
 the ground undisputed. If, in spite of all this, the artistic quality is evident 
 throughout the work, and now and then rises to a height little if at all 
 beneath the best in " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," it is because 
 Tolstoi, being naturally an artist, his creations spontaneously and unwittingly 
 assume the artistic form. 
 
 The story is briefly this: The hero, a Russian nobleman, has in his 
 youth betrayed a young woman of humble rank, a dependent on his family. 
 When the story opens, ten years have elapsed. She has been driven to a 
 life of shame; he has had the reckless career of the average officer and man 
 of the world. One day he finds himself summoned to serve on a jury, and 
 there he meets once more the woman whom he has wronged. She is accused of 
 poisoning, and her case is one of those which he is required to consider. 
 She is not guilty, yet she is convicted, partly through her own ignorance 
 of the forms of law. and sentenced to exile. His nature is profoundly stirred 
 by these happenings, for he is now old enough to take a serious view of life, 
 and the predisposiiion to do so is not lacking. As he reviews his career his 
 better self is awakened, and this is the " resurrection " to which the title has 
 reference. In making us understand the workings of this* man's mind, at this 
 particular juncture, the author displays his highest powers, and gives us a 
 piece of psychological analysis which has rarely been equaled. The upshot 
 of it is that he determines as far as possible to atone for his crime by making 
 the convict his wife and sharing her banishment to Siberia. But he pleads 
 his cause with her in vain, for her soul is also experiencing a sort of " resur- 
 rection/' and she will not accept what she can not consider other than a 
 sacrifice. He persists, however, in making the journey to Siberia and in 
 doing what he can to ameliorate her condition. Eventually his eflforts secure 
 a commutation of her sentence, and she marries a fellow-prisoner. 
 
 " The Death of Ivan Ilich " is a powerful psychologic study in which is 
 depicted the slow, gradual and painful death in consequence of a seemingly 
 slight injury to the once fresh and life-loving Ilich. 
 
 " Kreuizer Sonata " is the story of a hasty love and marriage and its 
 tragical consequences. Rozdnyschev becomes suspicious of his wife and kills 
 her in a paroxysm of jealousy. The work is not only an arraignment of the 
 present status of the family, but seems to be a plea against the union of 
 man and woman in general and for the extinction of the human race.
 
 49 TOLSTOI: 
 
 " Master and Workman " embodies the antiqne teaching of the vanity of 
 riches. A timber-merchant — rough, coarse, and hard-hearted — goes to the 
 forest with his man. loses his way and is caught in a snow-storm. He un- 
 harnesses the horse, mounts it. and rides away, leaving his humble companion 
 to his fate. The horse, failing to find its way through the tempest, brings 
 him back to the sledge on which the workman is huddled, already stiff with 
 cold, and half-buried in the snow. With a rush, the usele^sness of the 
 cowardly attempt he has just made to save his own life, and the vanity of all 
 his past efforts to accumulate riches, which at such a moment have lost all 
 value in his eyes, surge over the merchant's soul, sweep away the artificial 
 layer of selfishnes.«-, and stir his underlying instinct of altruism and sympathy 
 for his neighbor. His sole idea now is to bring back warmth, with his fur 
 coat and w'ith his own body to the poor wretch to whom he had not given a 
 thought a little while ago. He stretches himself upon his body, and there, a 
 few hours later, he is found in the same posture; he has brought his last 
 undertaking to a successful issue. Death has come to him, indeed, but the 
 W'Orkman is alive. 
 
 The plot of Tolstoi's last novel, " Who is Right? " is as follows: Vladimir 
 Ivanovitch Spessivtzer, who is employed at the Ministry of Agriculture, has 
 been spending some time abroad with his wife, Maria Nikolaievna, and his 
 sixteen-year-old daughter Vera. In the autumn they return to Russia, and on 
 the way to St. Petersburg visit a brother-in-law, Anatol Dimitrivitch Lishchin. 
 who is a district president in one of the governments which have greatly 
 suffered from bad harvests. The first conversation among the relatives does 
 not prove altogether agreeable. The liberalism of the sixties is touched on 
 superficially. Lischin feels insulted at the self-conscious, incautious tone of 
 Spessivtzer, and this meeting places their by no means friendly relations in 
 a very glaring light. During this time a conversation is being carried on in 
 the bedroom between the ladies, while in the nursery the eldest scion of the 
 Lishchin family is enchanted with his cou'^in Verc. a girl full of life, with 
 .sparkling eyes and beautiful teeth. A neighbor, a prince, is expected for a 
 shooting-party which has been arranged for the morrow. During dinner ho 
 appears, and every endeavor is made to be pleasant to him. The next morn- 
 ing they set off on slippery roads for the shooting. On the way a conversa- 
 tion springs up about the conditions under which the peasant population lives, 
 about bad harvests, and the organization of relief. Vera, who is accustomed 
 to having attention paid to her on all sides, feels bored, the conversation does 
 not interest her. Only when she hears that it is intended to organize help 
 for the suffering peasantry, and that she can take part in it, does she become 
 lively again. She finally receives permission to remain three weeks with the 
 Lishchins. At the end of three weeks, when her old nurse comes to take 
 her, she will not return home. In consequence, there is a scene at home be- 
 tween the parents, and the father tries to bring his influence to bear on his 
 daughter, but in vain. It appear"^ that Vcra's feelings and views — her whole
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 43 
 
 nature, in .-hort — have undergone a radical change. She refuses to leave 
 people among whom she has an opportunity to work for the good of her 
 neighbor, and where she can prove herself to be a useful member of human 
 society. Moreover, she repudiates the idea of returning to surroundings 
 where she would be condemned to idle inaction and a mere vegetative 
 existence. 
 
 Ethico^Sociologicai Writings. 
 
 " What is Happiness? " (1882). 
 "What Shall We Do Then?" (1884-5). 
 " My Confessions " (1889). 
 "What I Believe" (1892). 
 
 "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1S93). 
 "Politics and Religion" (1894). 
 "Christianity and Patriotism" (1895). 
 "Letters to a Pole" (1896). 
 " War and Peace " (1896). 
 "What is Art?" . ( 1 898) . 
 " slavery of our Times'' (1000). 
 "My Reply to the Holy Synod" (1901). 
 "The Czar and His Ministers" (1901). 
 
 The pith of these foregoing works is found in the chapter called " Tol- 
 stoi's Philosophy." 
 
 ^njFE^ F LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOL ^"^ f) '^*7' /^ 
 
 Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi was born August 28 (new style September 9), 
 1828, on the estate of Lisnaia Poliana, in the government of Tula. He is a de- 
 scendant of an ancient stock, one of his ancestors in the sixth generation, 
 Peter Andreevich Tolstoi, having obtained the title of count through dis- 
 tinguished service under Peter the Great. Leo was the youngest male member 
 of a family of four sons^ pd one da ughter. His mother, who belonged to 
 the princely family of the yVo lk enskis^ died a yenr and a half after his birth. 
 At the age of nine, he also lost his father. 
 
 lasnaia Poliana is a simple and essentially unattractive country-place; 
 but the close intimacj^ with nature in which Tolstoi's earliest boyhood was 
 spent, the atmosphere of country life and near contact with the peasant popu- 
 lace must have impressed themselves strongly on his boyish susceptibility and 
 doubtless lent permanent color to his manner of viewing life in general. 
 
 In the year 1837, the children of the Tolstoi family, left without parents, 
 were entrusted to the care of two sisters of the father and a distant family 
 relation. Tolstoi first learned to know the cily on entering the school of 
 Kazan in 1843. The conditions then prevailing in the management of the 
 school were not of a kind calculated to inspire the young boy with respect 
 either for the science or the honesty of its administrators. He chose a course
 
 44 TOLSTOI: 
 
 in Oriental languages, but ihe indecision and restlessness which mark his early 
 career did not permit him to devote himself systematically to any single 
 subject of study. He turned to history and law, and even dabbled in mathe- 
 matics, failed signally in a number of his examinations, and at the end ut 
 three years returned to lasnaia Poliana without having been graduated. 
 
 The estate of lasnaia Poliana was badly managed at the time, and young 
 Tolstoi, already fired with ideas for the improvement of the condition of the 
 j peasantry, set about at once introducing reforms which he thought would 
 '^ prove conducive to the improvement of the serfs and the land. He warded 
 to build better houses and lig htg ri the _}ahnr of his men by ma chinery . But 
 his first experiment was doomed to disappointment. He was hampered at 
 every step by the ignorance, the obstinacy and the mistrust of the people. 
 Instead of being welcomed as a friend, he was looked on with suspicion. 
 
 Losing all patience, he left in the fall of 1847 for St. Petersburg and 
 there attempted to complete the course in criminal law which he had begun 
 at Kazan. But his good resolution melted away with the thawing of the ice 
 and snow. He returned again to lasnaia Poliana in the spring and soon after 
 went to Moscow. Plere he threw himself precipitately with all the ardor of a 
 vigorous and passionate nature, into the pleasures which the high society 
 of the ancient metropolis offered. He gambled, drank, dissipated, tasted deep 
 of all the " enjoyments of vice," as he later called them. Years afterward, 
 when he had promised never to touch a card again, he lost a sum which he 
 had not the means to pay. From this difficulty he was extricated by the unex- 
 pected receipt the next day of the honorarium for his " Cossacks," all of 
 which went in payment of the loss, but he seems after this never to have 
 played again. 
 
 Weary of the ceaseless round of pleasures, Tolstoi at length determined 
 to tear himself away from his old acquaintances and surroundings and tempta- 
 tions. With his brother Nikolai, he went in 185 1 to the Caucasus. Here he 
 was deeply impressed and delighted with the grand picturesqueness of the 
 natural scenery, and with the unhampered vigorous life of the primitive 
 native tribes. In order to be able to continue his stay in that region, he was 
 persuaded to enter military service. At that time there existed a state of war 
 between the Russians and the wild mountain tribes. He took part in the 
 various expeditions and had a narrow escape from Tartar captivity. 
 
 The peasants whom he had hitherto known only in their peaceful agri- 
 cullural life, he now met as soldiers, and there gained that deep and close 
 insight into the workings of the human soul under the most varied circum- 
 stances that so strikingly manifests itself in all his works. While himself under 
 fire, he made minute observations of the fighting people around him. It was 
 during his sojourn in the Caucasus that he began the writing of his " Memo- 
 ries: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth," followed by "A Morning in the Life of a 
 Landed Proprietor," " The Invaders " and " The Cossacks." 
 
 In 1853 li^ returned to lasnaia Poliana, but immediately afterward, on the
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 45 
 
 t)Utbieak of the Crimean war, joined Prince Gorcliakov's staff and passed 
 llnoiigh all the dangers and hardships of a severe campaign. He took part in 
 the battle of Chernigof and in the siege of Sevastopol. A captain of artillery 
 serving in the same battery with Tolstoi, gives the following sympathetic 
 account of Tolstoi during the war : 
 
 " With his descriptions and rapidly improvised verses, the Count inspired 
 ail and made us forget the severest hardships of war. He was, in the most 
 thorough sense of the word, the soul of our battery. When he was among 
 us we scarcely noticed how the lime passed; when he was away (which hap- 
 pened very often, as he was fond of taking little excursions to Simferopol) we 
 all hung our noses. At last he returned — like the prodigal son — somber, dis- 
 : pi)oinled, thinned down, at odds with the whole world. Then he would 
 take me aside and begin a general confession, how extravagantly he had played 
 and how he had been drinking, where he had spent the days and even the 
 nights, and so on. And he worried and mortified himself on account of his 
 depravity, and suffered pangs of conscience as if he had committed the Lord 
 knows what crimes. One couldn't help feeling really sorry for the fellow. 
 Such a man was he ! In a word, a peculiar being ! Honestly speaking, I 
 could not quite understand him. At any rate, he was an excellent chum, an 
 iionest soul, and had a golden heart. Whoever came near to him had to like 
 him and could never forget him." 
 
 The immediate literary outcome of his experiences in the Crimean war 
 are the three famous sketches, " Sevastopol in December, 1854, in May and in 
 August, 1855," written at leisure intervals during the war. 
 
 'J'olstoi left the* army in 1855, having greatly distinguished himself as an 
 artillery officer in Sevastopol. The knowledge of men and things he had ac- 
 quired in his war experiences, find their fullest expression in his later incom- 
 parable composition, " War and Peace." He had encountered daily danger 
 at Sevastopol, had undergone all the fatigues and extremes of a hard cam- 
 paign, observed the common soldiers as well as the officers in all situations, 
 in all moods, on the field of battle, as well as in the hospitals and in the camp. 
 At the same time he took note of the conditions of life in the besieged town 
 and of the attitude of its inhabitants. This familiarity with every aspect of 
 war became a wonderful instrument in his hands in the writing of his 
 masterpiece. 
 
 When Tolstoi came to St. Petersburg, he found that his literary fame 
 had preceded him. He entered into social connections with the greatest 
 writers of the time. Then there lived in the capital some of the greatest 
 talents which Russian literature has to boast of — Dostoevski, Turgenev, 
 Goucharov, Grigorovich, Ostrovski. All these he now met, but was particu- 
 larly favored by Turgenev, the greatest writer of Russia at the time, who 
 easily recognized the genius of Tolstoi. " The latter, however, was but ill 
 at ease in the society of these great men. When in the army, he mingled 
 freely with the soldiers, laughed and talked with them, and felt himself in
 
 Hi 
 
 TOLSTOI. 
 
 harmony with llic freedom and democracy of the life tlicre prevailing. 
 Here, on tlic other hand, he found a spirit of exclusiveness, an intellectual 
 aloofness which displeased him, for his nature revolted against every form of 
 aristocracy. Some of their conversations, too, displeased and astonished him. 
 lie could not understand how any one could grow honestly entliusiastic in the 
 discussion of abstract and learned questions, such as the literature and the 
 science of the day. These eccentricities, added to his intolerance of contra- 
 diction, produced interminable frictions, and led to frequent quarrels, par- 
 ticularly with Turgcnev. It is little wonder, then, that he soon tired of this 
 uncongenial intercourse with the intellectual fraternity of the capital, and 
 again left for his estate. 
 
 In 1857 he visited England, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and 
 Italy, and later traveled again in Germany. While in Germany he visited 
 the schools, talked with some of the celebrated educators and examined the 
 educational methods of the country, with the object of finding help for his 
 contemplated scheme of popular education among the peasant children of his 
 estate. 
 
 Although disappointed in his search, he did not desist from his under- 
 taking. He established a school in lasnaia Poliana, conducting it on principles 
 radically different from any system of pedagogy which had as yet been prac- 
 tically tested. There was an utter absence of discipline, no strict limitations 
 as to hours of attendance, no obligations as to attendance at all. Pupils were 
 allowed to sit wherever they pleased, even on the window-sills, the only 
 requirement in this re^pect being that the smaller ones should take the nearer 
 places from where they could see their teacher. Often the teacher was seen in 
 the center and all the scholars grouped around him. Tolstoi himself was one 
 of the teachers. The institution prospered under his care, and in the course of 
 two years there were twelve schools in the district. 
 
 In the subjects and methods of education, the same freedom was observed 
 as in external management. The object was not to force knowledge on un- 
 willing minds, but to learn from the inclinations of the taught what knowledge 
 was most congenial to them. In the opinion of Tolstoi, only such knowledge 
 was of value. Hence, instruction should be made pleasant. With this view 
 Tolstoi tried several experiments without success, until finally he won the 
 Ijeasant children over by telling them, in his own inimitable way, stories from 
 tHe jDld-Xestamenti^ They hung upon every word, and usfHilly cried~fof "more 
 when he had done. From the Old Testament he proceeded in the same man- 
 ner to Russian history. By small courses in chemistry and physics he also 
 introduced them to nature study. 
 
 Tolstoi had the gratification of seeing his eflforts crowned with success. 
 The schoolrooms began to be visited also by adults. The children learned 
 reading and writing, and sotne even displayed remarkable imaginative and 
 creative talent. Special text-books were prepared for the schools, some of 
 them composed by the pupils themselves. All who had visited the schools,
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 47 
 
 among them ^uinc famous padagogists, unanimously conceded the remarkable 
 success of his experiment. In the pedagogic magazine, which he published 
 under the name of lasnaia Toliaita, Tolstoi explained the methods of his 
 schools and their basic principles. The magazine contains some very valuable 
 suggestions on national education. With these, however, he intermingles opin- 
 ions on education in general, on progress and civilization, which are note- 
 worthy as revealing his peculiar position on these subjects, even at that early 
 period. Progress, in his opinion, was useful only to the leisured classes; for 
 all others it was an evil. 
 
 The sad fate of his brother Nikolai, who died in his arms at Nice in 
 October, i860, after a long period of suffering from consumption, left a deep 
 and lasting impression on Tolstoi. The picture of the going out of life which 
 he had witnessed, remained with him for a long time and haunted him. The 
 admirable death-scenes in his subsequent fiction were probably composed under 
 the- intlucnce of this experience. 
 
 During the Crimean war appeared the trilogy, " Sevastopol in December 
 1854; in May, and in August, 1855," followed immediately by "The Wood 
 Cutting Expedition" C1855). In 1856 he published "Notes of a Marker," 
 ■"The Two Hussars," the "Snowstorm," and "An Old Acquaintance;" in 
 1857, "Lucerne" and "Albert;" in 1859, "Three Deaths" and "Family 
 Happiness; " in i860, " Polikushko; " in 1861, " Kholstomier." 
 
 In 1862, Tolstoi married Sophia Andreevna Behrs, the daughter of a 
 physician in Moscow, of German descent, an early-developed girl of stately 
 appearance, extraordinary beauty of figure and very tall. Her delicate face, 
 encircled with thick chestnut-brown hair and an imated with sparkling blue 
 eyes, bespoke spi rit and intelligenc e. She received a good harmonious educa- 
 tion, being neftTTer a one-sided training in accomplishments nor merely intel- 
 lectual ; the imaginative faculties and the intellect were equally developed. 
 She had a knowledge of four languages and read the masterpieces of the 
 Russian, German, French and English literatures. This girl understood to 
 the full the worth of a man like Tolstoi. She saw her highest dream of 
 happiness accomplished when the much admired author declared his love to 
 her. The circumstances of his declaration were precisely the same as those 
 described in " Anna Karenina " between Levin and Kitty. Tolstoi and Sophia 
 Bchrs were sitting at a card-table apart from the other guests at a social gath- 
 ering, when Levin took a piece of chalk and traced the following initial letters' 
 on the table-cloth: " W. y. a. m. t. i. c. n. b. d. y. m. t. o. n. ? " (" When you 
 answered me then, ' it can not be,' did you mean then or never? ") She is said 
 to have understood him immediately and answered in the same manner : 
 " T. I. c. n. a. o." (" Then, I could not answer otherwise.") He was equally 
 quick in deciphering her meaning, and thus they continued their conversation I 
 to the end. 
 
 For the next several years Tolstoi gave himself up entirely to family life 
 and to school work and the management of his estate. In 1865 he began the
 
 48 TOLSTOI: 
 
 piil)lication of his greatest novel, the prose epic, " War and Peace," in the 
 Russian Messenger, completed in 1868. At the same time, he did not abandon 
 his educational activity, publishing class-books, and inventing methods for 
 the easier conveyance of rudimentarj' knowledge, and ingenious mnemonic 
 devices, for children. In 1874 he began to issue his second great novel, " Anna 
 Karenina," completed in 1878. Soon after he renounced his artistic career, 
 and with but few exceptions devoted himself to the publication of religious and 
 ethical books and pamphlets, and to work on his estate for and with the 
 peasants. A pathetic incident connected with Tolstoi's abandonment of the 
 literary art is Turgencv's dying appeal to his friend that he should return 
 again to the calling which nature so plainly indicated as his own. When it is 
 remembered what little appreciation Tolstoi showed of Turgenev, and how the 
 latter had seen him fall asleep over the manuscript of his best novel, " Fathers 
 and Sons," this circumstance assumes magnified importance, both as illus- 
 trating the large-hearted disinterestedness of Turgenev and the extraordinary 
 value he attached to Tolstoi's literary creations. 
 
 " My dear, dear Leo Nikolaevich," wrote Turgenev, " I have not written 
 you for so long, because I was and am still lying, to put it briefly, on my 
 death-bed. I can not recover. But I write you to let you know how glad I 
 am of being your contemporary, and able to place this, my last and sincere 
 request, before you. My friend, return to your literary labors. Does not your 
 talent come from the same source whence all things come? How happy I 
 should be if I could know that my prayer had been granted ! My friend, 
 great writer of the Russian soil, grant my prayer ! " 
 
 In spite of this fervent plea Tolstoi but rarely returned to his old art. 
 Besides his simple popular tales issued in 1880, he published " The Death of 
 Ivan Ilich" (1885); the dramas, "The Power of Darkness" (1887), "The 
 Fruits of Culture" and "The First Brewer;" " Kreutzer Sonata" (1888) ; 
 "Master and Workman" (1895); "Resurrection" (i8go) and "Who Is 
 Right?" (1901). To his ethical, religious, and philosophical writings belong 
 "My Confessions" (1889"); "What I Believe" (1892); "What Is Happi- 
 ness" (1882); "What Shall We Do Then?" (1884-5); "The Kingdom of 
 God is Within You " (1893) ; " Politics and Religion " (1894) ; " Christianity 
 and Patriotism" (1895); "Letters to a Pole" (1896); "War and Peace" 
 (1896); "What is Art?" (1898); "The Slavery of Our Times" ''1900); 
 " My Reply to the Holy Synod " (1901) ; and " The Czar and His Ministers " 
 (1901). 
 
 Tolstoi still continue s active with the pen and ready to serve th e poQr an d 
 t he "oppressed with all the means a t hi;^ ^pmmanH- In 1892, on hearing of the 
 destitution of the peasants in the famine districts, he left all his literary labors, 
 which at that time greatly absorbed his attention, and started a vigorous cam- 
 paign of relief, going to the famine district him.self, and enlisting in the same 
 service, his two daughters and three sons. He established tea stands, soup 
 booths, and corn and clothing stores. He was constantly on his feet from
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 49 
 
 morning till night, in the severest cold, hail, rain or snow, going from house 
 to honsc and gathering information about the needs of each family or indi- 
 vidual. In addition, he found time to publish newspaper articles and pamphlets 
 concerning the condition of the famine-stricken districts. 
 
 It was to assist the emigration to Canada of the Dukhoborchi, a religious 
 sect whose beliefs largely conform to the principles of Tolstoi, that he wrote 
 the novel " Resurrection," the proceeds of which were to go entirely in their 
 aid, and his manly letter protesting against the conduct of the government 
 during the recent internal troubles, is still fresh in the memory'of every news- 
 paper reader. 
 
 From his youth, Tolstoi has been accustomed to vigorous, physical exer- 
 cise. He was as much at home in the chase and on the ice-field as in the 
 fashionable ball-room. Although now seventy-three years of age, he still per- 
 forms manual labor and is a skilful cyclist. 
 
 TOLSTOI, THE MAN. 
 
 It is a truism to say that the works of art, even of genius, suffer in pro- 
 portion as they are not self-intelligible and require biographic or other ex- 
 ternal elucidation. It is this which obscures so much in the works of Goethe 
 and narrows his popularity. Tolstoi is entirely free from such a fault, as are 
 indeed all the best Russian authors, and yet it is a familiar fact that the wide- 
 spread fame of Tolstoi, the author, is, to no small extent, due to the fame of the 
 man. It was indeed a strange and unique spectacle which this count, the 
 creator of " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," offered to the world. 
 Hailed as the greatest author of Russia, gladly welcomed as a distinguished 
 guest in all the circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow society, he suddenly 
 turned his back on the splendors and pleasures which he had hitherto enjoyed 
 and settled on his estate of lasnaia Poliana to live and work as a peasant 
 among the peasants. 
 
 This change, which to the general onlooker must have appeared sudden 
 and abrupt, was nevertheless but the practical expression of a stage of in- 
 tellectual development which commenced with Tolstoi's youth and has never 
 since this turning-point in his life quite cared to undergo modifications. 
 Tolstoi early displayed a meditative and even brooding disposition. He 
 was always skeptical of authority, and original in his views. At an age 
 when the ordinary j^outh, scarcely in the exuberance of his own life 
 so much as realizes the existence of death, Tolstoi's mind was mor- 
 bidly exercised with reflections on this subject, and after witnessing the 
 death of his brother, the thought of the ending of life seems never to have 
 left him. It forms the theme of two of his shorter works, and is circum- 
 stantially described in " Anna Karenina," and in other novels. Later, his 
 speculations on death assume that mystic and metaphysical quality which is 
 characteristic of so much of Tolstoi's constructive philosophy. Death is but 
 "birth to a new life," and a life full of blissful promise, it would appear; 
 
 n
 
 50 TOLSTOI: 
 
 for in his latest pamphlet, " Mj' Reply to the Holy Synod," Tolstoi writes: 
 ■■ Eternal life and retribution I recognize to such a degree, that at my ago, 
 standing as I do on the verge of the grave, I must often make efforts to refrain 
 from desirmg bodily death." This statement is not a little remarkable follow- 
 ing immediately on the declaration of his disbelief in a life beyond the grave, 
 and excluding, as he does in general, every element of the supernatural from 
 the Christianity which he calls his religion. 
 
 From these meditations on death, Tolstoi was naturally led on to the 
 inquiry into the meaning of life itself. Since man's span is limited, how make 
 best use of what time there is? It was needful to work out a theory of life 
 to solve this problem, and the result of his searching obtains its first direct ex- 
 pression in " My Confessions" (1889), the appearance of which may be con- 
 veniently taken to mark the formal severance between the old and the new 
 Tolstoi. 
 
 Tolstoi could never be completely reconciled to the life of pleasure to 
 which he had for a time yielded. Even when most violently borne on the 
 tide of his passions, and when he seemed completely and helplessly under their 
 control, that second element in his dual nature, always strong in Tolstoi, the 
 element which revealed to him the hollowness and emptiness of his existence — 
 in a word, the spiritual clement, was never entirely subdued. In " Notes of a 
 Marker " he depicts the gradual downward progress of Nekhludov, who had 
 become addicted to gambling, and who, in a moment of self-recognition, on 
 realizing the abasement into which he had sunk, ends his life by sending a bullet 
 through his head. This Nekhludov is an autobiographic character. It was 
 not for years to come that he was able completely to extricate himself from 
 the habits of overindulgence to which he had become a victim in conse- 
 quence of the surroundings determined by his class position. 
 
 With this new freedom, however, the solution as to the best mode of 
 life became only the more urgent. He had already begun to be beset by 
 doubts as to the usefulness of his- work as an author. Even as he was writing 
 his finest works, " War and Peace " and " Anna Karenina," he would some- 
 times pause in the midst of his work and ask himself: '"And w-hy are you 
 doing all this? And what, on the whole, is the meaning of your life? " Joy 
 in mere creative work had ceased to satisfy him, had ceased to be a cause 
 sufficient in itself. Fame and riches had lost their meaning. He was groping 
 in the dark, and was in despair. The wherefore of life, and how to live it 
 worthily — these questions came more and more frequently and more and more 
 compellingly, until at last they would no longer leave him. 
 
 Nevertheless, he was in possession of perfect health. " Physically," he 
 writes in his " Confessions," " I could vie with the peasant at hay-making. 
 Mentally, I could work eighteen hours without feeling any harmful conse- 
 quences. And with all this, I had come to such a pass that I was unable to 
 live, and that, in the fear of death, I had to resort to cunning against myself 
 that I might not connnit suicide."
 
 A CRll'lCAL STUDY. 51 
 
 At that time Tolstoi happened to spend a winter in Moscow and under- 
 took to study the problem of poverty as manifested in the conditions of the 
 poor of that city. A census was about to be taken, and he procured the super- 
 vision of the poor's quarter. With the aid of a number of students he went 
 from house to house and had ample opportunity to make observations, and 
 thi- indigence, the want and destitution he encountered surpassed all his ex- 
 pectations. As usual in the case of Tolstoi, contact with the actual fact pro- 
 duced a tremendous impression. Here, then, was something real to be done, 
 the utility of which could not be doubted. The poverty of the city must be 
 eradicated, and with an enthusiasm and a naive characteristic utopianism, 
 Tolstoi set about the consummation of this object. He called together meet- 
 ings of rich friends and organized a subscription fund. But the friends re- 
 mained lukewarm and the subscribed sums were not forthcoming. Incredulous 
 smiles greeted his pleadings. He was told that his efforts were futile, that it 
 was his kind heart that prompted him to enter into such a work, but that poor 
 people there always had been and always will be. 
 
 At first he met these remarks with impatience and even with tears. Soon, 
 however, he came to recognize his mistake. The cause of the misery of the 
 masses lay far deeper than he had expected. It had its origin in the existent 
 economic and social order of things, and any such superficial measure as pro- 
 posed by him, even if successful, could only serve as an inefficient and tem- 
 porary relief. It required a thorough, radical reorganization of society to 
 remove the cause of the evil. What enabled one group of people to live in 
 riches and superabundance, brought about the misery and want of all the rest. 
 Idleness in the one case meant overwork in the other. 
 
 Tolstoi did not shrink from the inevitable conclusions of this recognition. 
 He had long ago regarded himself as useless ; he now found that he was a 
 parasite. But did this parasitism at least bring happiness to those who lived by 
 it? No. On the contrary, it engendered skepticism, disgust of life, despair and 
 suicide. On the other hand, the peasant, who earned his bread by his own 
 toil, did not weary of life. His joys were few, but he was able to live, while 
 Tolstoi, the count, was not. Nor was the peasant tormented with questions as 
 to the meaning of existence. Life and death were accepted as coming from 
 God, and with the peasant this was no mere phrase. It was a reality. God 
 pervaded their whole life, and death was but the last stage of life. 
 
 In all their actions the consciousness of God is constantly present in the 
 peasants' mind, and their simple duties proceed from God. Of these the first 
 is love and helpfulness, the second work. To the peasant it is impossible to 
 doubt the necessity of work. Hence, in order to attain to a recognition of 
 God. the two main requisites are work and a spirit of helpfulness. Tolstoi, 
 in adopting the life of the peasant, found in it not only the liberation from 
 parasitism but the ultimate solution of the entire problem of life. In working 
 for one's own needs and in being helpful to others, he discerned the justifica- 
 tion of his existence. Such a life, if become universal, would, he thought,
 
 53 TOLSTOI: 
 
 bring about Ihc siibsdliilion of a world of good for the present order of force 
 and oppression. 
 
 Personal Appearance. 
 
 The impression of his face is unique. A powerfully arching forehead 
 with numerous wrinkles grouped in parallel lines around a middle deeper 
 furrow. The eyebrows are thick and overhanging. In the sockets underneath 
 are set two little, wise, sharp eyes, whose look seems to issue from the inmost 
 depth and to penetrate into the very being of the person on whom it chances 
 to rest. The nose is wide, almost flat, with thick nostrils. From these two 
 heavy wrinkles run down in the direction of the mouth, whose undcrlip recalls 
 the past life of sensual enjoyment of which he had so copiously tasted. While 
 the hair on his head has gradually thinned, receding further and further from 
 his forehead, but hiding part of his large and ugly ears, the mouth, cheeks 
 and chin are covered completely with a long gray beard descending over the 
 chest. No one will find this face harmonious or handsome in the usual sense ; 
 it has even at first sight something frightening and uncanny. It is only on 
 closer observation that one recognizes in his features the balanced equilibrium 
 between intelligence and will, power and knowledge which lend immediate ex- 
 pression to the personality. Usually the count appears in the country in a 
 simple linen blouse held together by a narrow leather strap. Into this he 
 thrusts one of his powerful hands, especially when looking at something, or 
 engaged in leisure conversation. These hands show not only familiarity with 
 the pen, but a capacity to grapple with whatever the practical demands of 
 life enforce. For small clothes he wears trunk-host, and the feet are covered 
 with a pair of those large, heavy, but well-made shoes, to the possession of 
 which even the poor man of Russia attaches great value. The head is covered 
 with a linen cap, like those worn by peasants. 
 
 Method of Work. 
 
 To this day Tolstoi exhibits a vast amount of interest with regard to all 
 literary questions. As soon as he hears of some characteristic event he traces 
 its causes and examines its possible availability for a story. To become the 
 subject of Tolstoi's elaboration, however, the theme must fulfil many qualifica- 
 tions. In the first place, the subject must be new and intrinsically valuable. 
 Secondly, it must touch a form of life with which Tolstoi is thoroughly famil- 
 iar, for the count does not like to write from hearsay. Finally, and most 
 important of all, the subject must take possession of Tolstoi, as a sick man is 
 caught by a fever, or a man of sound health by a coughing-fit. Only then can 
 Tolstoi turn to his work with a real artistic fervor. Almost all his works un- 
 dergo numerous revisions. In the first place, a bare sketch of the work is pre- 
 pared without any regard to detail. A clean copy of this is then made for Tol- 
 stoi, and being placed on his desk, it is subjected by him to a re-elaboration.
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 
 
 53 
 
 
 SPECIMEN OF TOLSTOI'S MANUSCRIPT. 
 
 £'iti°M~
 
 54 TOLSTOI: 
 
 But this, too, is still only a draft. Soon the manuscript teems with erasures, 
 changes, insertions and references to the other side of the page. Then a 
 second clean copy is prepared and undergoes the same process. The same fate 
 is shared by the third. Some chapters are rewritten by Tolstoi in this manner 
 more than ten times. At the same time, he gives but scant attention to 
 stylistic improvements, and has indeed a contempt for everything polished, 
 linishod and elaborate in art. It serves only, he says, to stifle the thought 
 and injures the effect. He labors under an intense strain on each single 
 chapter, permitting himself but slight intervals of relaxation, during which 
 he keeps patiently to his bed. But few chapters come out successful, so to say, 
 at the first throw, as for instance the race scene in " Anna Karenina," which 
 he wrote under the influence of an account of Prince Obolenski. When finally 
 the work has attained its desired form, Tolstoi would read it first to a circle of 
 friends, whose remarks he would utilize. That the impression on the hearers 
 does not always answer the expectations of the count, is best illustrated by 
 the following incident : 
 
 After completing " The Power of Darkness," Tolstoi read the drama to 
 several peasants to try its effect. What was the consequence? At the most 
 thrilling passages, which Tolstoi could not recite without tears, a number of 
 his hearers suddenly broke out into loud laughter, and thereby cooled the au- 
 thor's ardor considerably. The same thoroughgoing care which he bestows on 
 his manuscripts, he also applies to the proof-sheets, and very often transforms 
 these into new manuscripts. It may be asserted without exaggeration that 
 after Tolstoi had examined ninety-nine proofs of his works, he would still 
 find something to change in the hundredth. The feeling of self-criticism is in 
 general highly developed in our author. It often happens that the very 
 next day he regrets the mistake which he had made the day before. 
 
 GENERAL SURVEY. 
 
 " Tolstoi's writings and life have meant more to me than any other man's. 
 It seems to me that his greatest word is peace ; and in this, as in everything, 
 he appeals to the intellectual and spiritual reality within the official and social 
 simulacrum which hides each of us from the others. 
 
 " Tolstoi's literature, his matchless art, his fiction, which makes all other 
 appear so fcel)le and false, is merely the flower of his love of men, his desire 
 to be true to them. I can not separate his ethics from his esthetics, for he 
 has himself known no difference in them. But it seems to me that in his 
 fiction he works more instinctively and vitally, and I believe that in this he 
 will work longest. As a teacher, he has put into contemporaneous terms the 
 wisdom which has always been in the world for the conduct of men ; but as 
 an artist, he has divined things concerning their nature and character in mys- 
 tical heights and de])ths unreached before, and has portrayed life with an 
 unexampled truth and fulness. 
 
 " One perfect life and one unerring doctrine we had already, and it is 
 praise enough for Tolstoi to say that he teaches these with all his heart and 
 all his mind; and however he falters and wanders, he worships them by a 
 constant endeavor for their goodness and beauty." — IV. D. Hozvclls. 
 
 " To comprehend Tolstoi, the devotee is to remember that he is first of 
 
 J
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 
 
 55 
 
 SPECIMEN OF TOLSTOI'S PROOF CORRECTIONS.
 
 56 TOLSTOI: 
 
 all the creative writer, ihe artist, the poet. His dramatic sense still affects his 
 life. But every great author must be a humanitarian. As a Russian symbolist 
 of the primitive Christianity, Tolstoi is in no wise a fanatic. There is a stern 
 rational purpose in his bearing. He is a man on the ground, with arms out- 
 spread — a living cross — in the pathway of armies and emperors. Tolstoi is 
 the supreme exemplar of an ideal, that of the patient and unselfish labor that 
 is both love and praj'er. An ideal routs the force of conventions ; a single 
 protagonist inspires a host of men. Tolstoi is the chief of living inspirers, 
 and not for Russia alone. The children of his soul spring up in other lands. 
 In my belief the most sincere, the most modest, the most distinguished of our 
 own living writers, he has never been so great as since he openly consecrated 
 his humor, his imagination, his pathos to the service of humanity. If he is 
 not yet fully comprehended, he is beloved^alrcady on our hearts' list for 
 canonization. The rest will fo!low\" — Edmund Clarence Stedman. 
 
 " Looking on Tolstoi simply as a writer, and appreciating him as a 
 reader, there is one book which stands preeminent as a masterpiece of fiction, 
 ' Anna Karenina.' It is certainly Shakespearian in its matchless portraiture, 
 its wide range of human character ; and it appeals to us even more than 
 Shakespeare's work. Now Tolstoi in his converted state disavows his novels 
 and has taken up the idea that all art for art's sake is wrong; in his first years 
 he was guilty of that crime of writmg purely for art's sake." — Zangzvill. 
 
 ■' I desire to pay my tribute to the extraordinary quality of Tolstoi's 
 works of fiction; and especially of those novels which, like ' Sevastopol,' and 
 ■ War and Peace,' lay their scenes among the events of war. To anyone who 
 has been in military service, these books differ in kind from all other novels 
 bearing on the same theme. All other military pictures, before those of Tol- 
 stoi, resembled those familiar engravings of the death of Nelson, in which 
 that hero dies on the quarterdeck, in the midst of battle, surrounded by weep- 
 mg officers, each one of whom has apparently just emerged from a bandbox, 
 in exquisitely fitting garments, in time to strike an attitude and bid his admiral 
 adieu. The waste, the uncertainty, the desultoriness of ordinary war, the dirt, 
 its disease, its neglect, its absence of system and of method — all these things are 
 familiar to those who have read of them in the v/ondrous pages of Tolstoi." — 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 
 
 " Of all distinguished men that I have ever met, Tolstoi seems to me 
 most in need of that enlargement of view and healthful modification of opin- 
 ion which come from observing men, and comparing opinions in different 
 lands and under different conditions. This need has been all the greater 
 because in Russia there is no opportunity to discuss really important questions. 
 Among the whole hundred and twenty millions of people there is no public 
 body in which the discussion of large public questions is allowed ; the press 
 affords no real opportunity for discussion ; indeed, it is more than doubtful 
 whether such discussions would be allowed to any effective extent in cor- 
 respondence or at one's own fireside. Like so many other men of genius in 
 Russia, then — and Russia is fertile in such — he has had little opportunity to 
 take part in any real discussion of leading topics, and the result is that his 
 opinions have been developed without modification by any rational interchange 
 of thought with other men. Under such circumstances, any man, no matter 
 how noble or gifted, having given birth to striking ideas, coddles and pets 
 them until they become the full-grown, spoiled children of his brain. He can 
 see neither spot nor blemish in them, and he at last virtually believes himself 
 infallible. This characteristic I found in several other Russians of marked 
 ability. Each had developed his theories for himself until he had become
 
 57 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 
 
 a.ed .i* .hen,, and •^^i^/:;^^^^^^^'^^-'^^^ 
 ?0US I'l pM^ShS'pTc''^.- b-n developed in Russ,a. -Dr. 
 '^w D. White. . • ,u^ -Rtissian in order to appreciate 
 
 at qualify the man for V'^„C of "•>>>*=" ""'^ "™?' "."''" He i a 
 .unnatural and out of P'^f^J^tlf^an to understand the two. H= '^.f^ 
 ''„^,ttre=°U''is"en":;e,y"al\onis..c to the condt n^^^ 
 
 ^Sfoi slr:S LTs suTroSn.. -- . a state of unrest. - 
 
 ™Kor;cou>d possih. '^r^f^-ttS^'^^^fi^^^ 
 earnestness and .ncerrty of h^e ™-^,^^„„ ■ ^, K'^ols^fo Uo da'y 
 
 .l^fhas euUoie frem his novels. I. .s a nus.ak ^ ^y of ,he man one 
 
 nest H. Crosby. 
 
 -r ;.tr,;'c Philosophy and htntcs. 
 Criticisms on Tolstois 1 nuosop>y thought 
 
 .. A genius of rare order In the Hues of h.s_relg.ous^and so^l | 
 
 ■ Lve! ^-rnsSrSrSion ri n- f^rto'rs-ro:,"'; sSf.e^Sg^ 
 . -I „ tv,pcp lines IS one oi tne great lo.^ relisious and etnicai 
 
 Z''^ ^\°"lffer from h m m many particulars « J^is rehgio ^^^ ^.^^^ 
 
 a'ciLi I'fm^rorundly impressed by the fact tha^^^^^^^^ ^ ^^^ j 
 
 e was talking about and mearitwn^^^^^^ 
 
 ur Gradgrmd mmds. -R. ^'^'\. ^^^ ^han the law of chanty, fra- 
 
 .' Tolstoi knows no better or higher ,^wtn.^^^ ^g^g 
 
 ernity and forgiveness taught by Chnst. 
 
 Criticisms on "War and Peace. ^ ^ . , ^c 
 
 .A .onderiul work, but it-veakest . ie^nd .;at .s^w^^^^^^^^^ 
 
 to life, description, the «^,Vit^i:y P^j^/ 
 
 Tolstoi we do not possess. "J "^^"'"^';. , „5^^ , ^he first two volumes are 
 "What a painter and what a P^y^^'^j^^^^'^ieats himself when he philoso- 
 
 sublim'^but /e thi;^,|f^ifhelj:;San''thrauthor and the Russian-while 
 
 phizes. At the end you see tne g
 
 58 TOLSTOI: 
 
 up to that time you had seen only nature and humanity. It is strong, very 
 strong." — Flaubert. 
 
 " We see neither classic villains, nor classic heroes, we see only human 
 souls, subjected to temporary passions and conditions, but in the main guided 
 by pure and noble aspirations." — Strazow. 
 
 " Anna Karcnina." 
 
 " ' Anna Karenina ' does not please me, though there are truly beautiful 
 passages in it — the races, the mowing, the hunt — but it all tastes sour, and 
 smells of Moscow, incense, old maids. Slavophilism, Junkcrthum." — 
 Tnrguenicf. 
 
 " ' Anna Karenina '■ — one of the most thrilling novels of our time, making 
 light of all romantic literature and trying to find the elements of a purely 
 Christian art." — The Nation, 1898. 
 
 "Memories: Childlwod, BoyJwod, Youtli." 
 
 " Tolstoi's characters are astonishingly real. We get to know them as 
 intimately as persons that we have known in the flesh, sometimes more in- 
 timately. But in .spite of and along with this intimacy, English readers can 
 not help feeling all the while that they are brought into contact with strange 
 and unfamiliar natures, whose thoughts and impulses and actions are not as 
 ours, and yet are irresistibly true to life. This sense of novelty and back- 
 ground of strangeness is not without its charm, for the element of surprise is 
 essential to recreation. 
 
 ''The personages engaged are, in the main, the same throughout — 
 ihe father, the eider brother, and sister, remaining more or less prominent all 
 along. In particular the picture of his nurse, Natalie Savichna, will go 
 straight home to the hearts of all who have been fortunate enough to learn 
 by personal experience of what absolute unselfishness and unfaltering devo- 
 tion old servants are capable. Degraded, as a girl, from the rank of a house- 
 maid to that of a farm -servant for wishing to marry a fellow-domestic, and 
 restored on resignmg her desire, we find her regarding the gift of enfranchise- 
 ment as a sentence of exile, and devoting the remainder of her life to the 
 service of her young mistress. Her simple, affectionate ways, endless industry, 
 and homely, unfeigned grief for the death of Nicola's mother, are illustrated 
 m the most touching way imaginable. The account of her own last days is 
 profoundly touching. 
 
 " Of his mother, the picture, though faint, is lifelike, and the references 
 to her always marked by a rare affection and reverence. Another admirable 
 sketch is his German tutor, a lonely old man, sensitive, easily appeased, with 
 comical methods of self-assertion, and a disinterested affection not wholly 
 exempt from the desire of obtaining material quid pro quo. His father, 
 too, is painted in vivid relief, — chivalrous, susceptible, and emotional; an 
 inveterate gambler; always needing an audience for the performance of a 
 good action ; enviable on account of the perfect skill he showed in hiding from 
 others as well as from himself the unpleasant side of life; and so constantly 
 at the mercy of his impulses that he never had time to acquire any princi- 
 ples; being for the rest quite too well pleased with life to see the necessity of 
 them. 
 
 " Nicholas (Tolstoi himself) is very far from being an ideal character, 
 but rather one strangely compounded of good and evil, of ignoble curiosity, 
 and chivalrous impulses, sensitive and confident by turns. All these shifting 
 traits are delightfully illustrated in the episode of his grandmother's birthday- 
 party, where he loses his heart, child fashion, to the liltlc Sonia.
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 59 
 
 " The second and third divisions of the book are even more absorbingly 
 interesting. They supply the most convincing proof of the proposition that 
 freedom is never denied to genius in the treatment of difficult and delicate 
 problems." — The Spectator, 1889. 
 
 Crimean and Caucasian Stories. 
 
 " Tolstoi does not see in war events of collective masses in which the 
 individual disappears, some grand effects with the sound of trumpets and the 
 waving of banners ; but however well he understands to bring into prominence 
 the main points of an engagement he never forgets that it is the individual 
 men who do the deeds and suffer the sufferings of war. These men he knows 
 not only as soldiers or as material for war, he knows them in their home 
 occupations as peasants and citizens, and the officers according to their social 
 position in peace. It is perhaps the first case in which the prodigious action of 
 war is painted altogether as a human experience. There is no dyeing in fine 
 colors, no exaggeration, it is the actual experience which he relates. And among 
 the large number of individuals that pass under his observation he by no means 
 gives preference to the officers. From the boys who enter the army as ensigns 
 and in whom intoxicating dreams and reality are still mingled confusedly to- 
 gether, down to the gray old man on whom the fate of a family depends, from 
 the harmless amusements at night on the watch down to murderous onslaughts 
 — nothing is lacking. Nor is the environment forgotten — the city with its in- 
 habitants. It is the life, the whole of life, composed of the aggregate mass 
 of active men, in a state of war. With great astonishment the author remarks 
 how the usual interests, conversations, class distinctions, etc., by no means 
 cea.se, and scarcely step in the background before the irruption of the unusual. 
 Glancing over the whole, we see a picture of limitless wealth of features, of 
 telling honesty and convincing truth. Every chapter confirms the author's 
 declaration, that truth alone was his hero. And this hero he loves as only a 
 poet can love his heroes." — Lowenfcld. 
 
 " The Cossacks." 
 
 In this common everyday story Tolstoi has evolved a real human destiny. 
 During his long journey to the Caucasus, Olenin is still filled with arbitrary 
 fancies, like young men who have not yet been seized by the reality of life, 
 and who live more in their imaginings than in the actuality of things. Suddenly 
 he steps into the realm of reality, so powerful, so unlike anything he had 
 known before. The everlasting snow-peaks heave in sight before him. and 
 from his every thought ring out the words, ' But the mountains ! Ah ! the 
 mountains!' And they form a world mightier than our soul, they suffer no 
 life, no feeling within their kingdom that does not accord with them. But 
 the most wonderful thing of all he is yet to learn. This large, living, within- 
 itself-reposing world has also a soul, yes, a human soul. Nature here is also 
 man. The Cossacks living here are, as it were, the conscience and soul of 
 nature. Here are no arbitrary fancies, no disordered, confused jumble of 
 passions and feelings peculiar to the young man of culture. All is well 
 defined, all determined by the exact demands which nature imposes through 
 the changes of seasons. Here is no questioning, no doubt, no indistinct, half- 
 stolen emotion, not even with regard to women. All is simple fact and as 
 naturally self-understood as nature itself." — Lozuenfeld. 
 
 " Finest and most perfect product of Russian literature." — Turguenief. 
 
 "A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor." 
 
 " When we read the little story we ask ourselves whether the peasant 
 has in any literature been characterized more completely and vividly than
 
 60 TOLSTOI: 
 
 here by Tolstoi? Everything is told with such life and originality, and at 
 the same time in stich a simple, self-understood and unpretentious manner. 
 Not a superfluous word and no forced compression disturb the reader. Every 
 sentence is the exhaustive expression of that which should be said, and fra- 
 grant with nature, warmth and reality." — E. Zabel. 
 
 " Polikushka." 
 
 " This novel is terrible, but not hideous, dramatic in the extreme, but 
 without any trace of striving after eff^ect, characteristically true down to the 
 smallest details, and in spile of its brevity so rich in substance that the reader 
 gains the impression of having read a large novel, for the fate of Polikushka 
 is closely interwoven with the portraiture of the broad life of the peasants." — 
 E. Zabel. 
 
 " Resurrection." 
 
 " ' Resurrection ' is not a novel in the accepted meaning of the word, in 
 the sense in which ' Anna Karenina ' is a novel. It is a formless, realistic 
 narration, used to convey a scathing denunciation of social, political and 
 official conditions in Russia. Nothing escapes : The prison management, the 
 judiciary, the jury system, the civil service, the army, the state church, and 
 above all, the horrors of the convoys of convicts to Siberia. In all this Tolstoi 
 traces the corruption and oppression of the system to the shortcomings of 
 the individuals directing it. But for the individual, he says, the system could 
 not exist : those who have power and abuse it are individually responsible, 
 each and every one of them for the misery of the poor, whose indigence, 
 ignorance and darkness are the substratum upon which the whole corrupt 
 superstructure rests, ever pressing it down deeper into the slough. The title 
 does not refer only to the two imaginary characters in the book — the well- 
 born man and the low-born girl whom he starts on the broad path. . . . 
 Tolstoi preaches resurrection for every servant of the Russian state — accord- 
 ing to his picture, a mob of corrupt, self-seeking, loose-living, hard-drinking, 
 well-mannered ' men of the world,' and he holds every Russian of the better 
 classes morally dead. Russia must be born again. The Sermon on the Mount 
 is all the guidance humanity needs." — The Book Buyer. 
 
 ^ ._^ " What is Art?" 
 
 " Tolstoi is more essentially a man of genius than any writer now living. 
 He has carried the methods of the novel further into the soul of man than 
 any novelist that ever lived ; and he has at the same time rendered the com- 
 mon details of life with a more absolute illusion of reality than anyone else. 
 Since he has given up writing novels, he has written a study of the Christian 
 religion which seems to me, from the strictly Christian point of view, to 
 leave nothing more to be said ; and he has followed out his own conclusions in 
 life with the same logic as that with which he has carried them out in 
 writing. He is unique in our time in having made every practical sacrifice 
 to his own ideal. Everything he writes, therefore, we arc bound to receve 
 with that respect which is due alike to every man of genius and to every man 
 of unflinchmg sincerity." — Arthur Symons in Saturday Review, 1898. 
 
 " Tolstoi classifies all his own fictions under the head of bad art. Tol- 
 stoi believes in art; and not only does he admit that humanity can not act on 
 without it, but he believes art t o be one of our most efficacious means for 
 securing the highest ends ! It is not the suppression of art that Tolstoi desires, 
 "but Its reform.
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY. 61 
 
 " This book is the result of profoiiiul reflection, it illustrates both the 
 vigor of the author's mind and his power of keen satire, and that one feels in 
 its every page a warm glow of religious emotion, dominated by the ideal of 
 universal brotherhood. Less than all this would suffice to secure a wide 
 celebrity throughout the lettered world for Tolstoi's ideas on art. What 
 strikes us first is the flood of light which Tolstoi sheds on all that is factitious 
 and violently artificial in the art of to-day, — of the theater, of books. Instead 
 of exalting art above measure, or of relegating it to some exceptional sphere, 
 he merely considers it as one form of human activity, having intimate rela- 
 tions with all the rest. Art is a method of communication between men, a 
 means of bringing them together. 
 
 " To recall an emotion which we have ourselves experienced and then 
 communicate it to others through the medium of gestures, lines, colors, 
 sounds, or verbal characters, such is the proper object of art. Art is one form 
 of human activity, and consists in the conscious and voluntary conveyance of 
 one man's sentiments to another by means of external signs. Art is a device 
 for unifying men through the experience of common feelings; and as such 
 it is indispensable to the life of humanity; and its progress in the path of hap- 
 piness. Art, in short, is language differing from verbal speech, in this respect, 
 that speech transmits the thoughts of man; art, his emotions and sentiments. 
 Tolstoi maintains that art ought never to be followed as a business or pro- 
 fession. 
 
 " The book has many grave defects." — Rene Dominic in Living Age, 1898. 
 
 " The work is a model of lucidity, often brilliantly epigrammatic, although 
 disfigured by exaggerations, by repetitions, by errors of fact, and by glaring 
 omissions such as the name of Ruskin among esthetic writers, and Watts 
 among painters." — Literature, 1898. 
 
 " A book of great importance and value. A direct appeal to the con- 
 science and intelligence of the cultivated classes, summoning them to consider 
 whether for the larger part of that which they applaud as art is art at all in 
 the true sense, and whether its effect on themselves and on the world at large 
 is not injurious rather than beneficial." — Popular Science Monthly, 1898. 
 
 " All the best elements of Tolstoi's nature appear in this book, which in 
 style and interest, is to be compared with the best works of Ruskin." — 
 Bibliotheca Sacra, 1898. 
 
 " What Tolstoi objects to most strenuously is the assumption of writers 
 on art that there is a close and vital connection between art and beauty, and 
 that the object of art is to gratify the esthetic ntt As. "—Victor Yarros in 
 The Dial, 1898. 
 
 " After reviewing briefly the principal existing theories and finding little 
 comfort in them, he proceeds to define art as an activity by which one man 
 hands on to others feelings he has lived through. It is primarily a medium 
 for emotion, as language is a medium for thought. The task for art to 
 accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor, 
 now attained only by the best members of society, the customary feeling and 
 the instinct of all men. And in order that art shall foster this union of all 
 men, it must appeal to all men, and therefore essentially to the natural 
 psychology of the peasant, who thus becomes our criterion. The literature, 
 music and pictures which the peasant can not comprehend are not art; and 
 even that art which merely unites sections of humanity while differentiating 
 them from other sections is base and false — namely, patriotic art and music, 
 and art that is worked into different religions, for these divide the human 
 family against itself."— T/i^ Outlook (English), 1898.
 
 02 TOISTOI: A CRITICAL STUDY. 
 
 " As to Tolstoi's art, we should not be so interested in his opinions if he 
 had not the power of putting the human spirit into htmian language beyond 
 the power of any man now writing." — R. W. Gilder. 
 
 SUGGESTED SELECTIONS. 
 
 " War and Peace." 
 
 Invasion of Russia. 
 
 At Borodino. 
 
 Burning of Moscow. 
 
 Retreat and Destruction of the French Army. 
 
 Battle of Austerlitz. 
 
 Death of Andrei Bolkonski. 
 
 Battle of Schonegrahen. 
 
 '"Anna Karenina." 
 Anna's Illness. 
 Anna and Her Son. 
 Anna Commits Suicide. 
 The Steeple Chase. 
 
 " Resurrection.'' 
 
 Description of Easter Festival in the Country. 
 Revising of the Judgment by the Senate. 
 
 Transportation of the Prisoners from the Central Prison in Moscow to 
 the Train. 
 
 "Memories: Chilhood, Boyhood, Youth." 
 Picture of the Nurse Natalie Savichna. 
 
 " A Morning in the Life of a Landed Proprietor." 
 Nekhludov's Reflections in the Early Morning.
 
 66 
 
 Teacher, 
 
 Vm So Tired:' 
 
 To relieve the little ones' weariness, 
 
 the wise teacher will use the charming ^ ^ ^ ^ 
 
 Schcxjiroom Games, Minute Plays, 
 Action Songs, Action Poems, 
 
 Marchings, or Exercises found in 
 
 Graded Physical Exercises 
 
 By BERTHA LOUISE COLBURN. 
 
 ^ complete iip-to-date system of Physical Culture, specially adapted 
 for use m schools; arranged and graded for eight years' work. 
 
 illustrated by over One Hundred and Fifty Positions and Poses. 
 
 The exercises are arranged in eight groups, one for each year in 
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 veeks. There are also lessons in Marching; Games; Action Sono-s- 
 \ction Poems; also Illustrated Minute Plays. " ' 
 
 This system of exercises has been tested for years in 
 New York and Massachusetts Schools. 
 
 ust issued. Sample pages sent free on request. Correspondence 
 
 solicited with School Boards. Superintendents, 
 
 Principals, and Teachers. 
 
 RRICE, $1.00, NEZX, ROSTRAID 
 
 Address the Publishers, 
 
 :DGAR S. WERNER PUBLISHING & SUPPLY CO. (Incorporated), 
 43 EAST 1 9th STREET, NEW YORK.
 
 WERNER'S MAGAZINE. 
 
 A Monthly Journal of Entertainment for Home, School, Platform, and 
 
 Stage, <with ^radical Hints for the Development of the 
 
 Expressional Po'xoer of Body and Voice, 
 
 REGULAR REIATUREIS : 
 
 I. Dramatic Stories, especially written or adapted for oral reading. 
 
 2 Pantomimes, copiously illustrated by reproductions of photographs from 
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 graphing, photo engraving, and printing. 
 
 3. Elaborate and Analytical Studies of Artists, Composers, Authors, and 
 Dramatists. 
 
 4. Plays, Scenes, Drills Tableau.x, Statue-Poses, or other entertainments 
 suitable for platform use, amateur theatricals, or for school and college use. 
 
 5. Material or suggestions suitable for anniversaries, birthdays, .special 
 days declamations, orations, etc., for school entertainments, exercises and 
 e.Khibitions 
 
 6. Plays, Drills, Pantomimes, Action Songs, Action Poems, and Dialogues 
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 7. Material or suggestions for Charades, Tableaux, Games, Indoor and 
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 8. Monologues, cuttings from or condensations of Novels and Plays, 
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 selections in every number of the magazine.) 
 
 9. Lessons in Elocution, either in speech technique or on the rendering 
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 10. Lessons in Singing, cither in vocal technique or on the rendering 
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 II. Lessons in Public Speaking , in debate, on the stump, in clubs, on the 
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 12. Lessons m Gymnastics, P'encing, Dancing, etc. 
 
 13. Lessons in Pantomime, Make-up, Statue-Posing, Tableaux, etc. 
 
 14. Illustrations from scenes of plays on the boards in New York, with 
 analysis of pictures (tableaux), and comment on technique of acting. 
 
 15. Hints for the Cure of Stuttering, Stammering, and other vocal defects. 
 
 16. Hints on Dress and Costume for Artists. 
 
 Werner's Magazine, $2.00 a Year, Invariably in Advance. 
 
 Addrkss thk Prni.isiiKKs ; 
 
 EDGAR S. WERNER PUBLISHING AND SUPPLY CO. (incorporated) 
 
 43 St 45 East Nineteenth Street, H^ixx York.
 
 A Text -Book that 
 meets the requirements 
 of Twentieth Century 
 Elocution is J* .^^ t3* J* 
 
 Elocution 
 
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 Action. 
 
 By F. TOWNSEND SOUTHWICK. 
 
 )sed b\J /Vlan\J of the I^eading Schools of English^ 
 Speaking America. 
 
 7eII printed and bound, 75 cents net. For class use, 60 cents, postpaid. 
 
 Teachers of Reading and Elocution, 
 
 Don't handicap yourselves any longer 
 with out-of-date text-books. We will 
 allow you a liberal price for them in 
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 "Elocution and Action." 
 
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 Address the Publishers, 
 
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 Hedquarters for Supplies of all kinds for Teaching Reading:, Elocution, Declamation, the 
 
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 Expression as a Fine Art. Write us for information.
 
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