This spirit of patriotism which Tolstoy repudiated is none the less the animating power of the noble

epic, “War and Peace,” and of his peasant-tales, of his rare gift of reproducing the expressive Slav
vernacular, and of his magical art of infusing his pictures of Russian scenery not merely with beauty,
but with spiritual significance. I can think of no prose writer, unless it be Thoreau, so wholly under
the spell of Nature as Tolstoy; and while Thoreau was preoccupied with the normal phenomena of
plant and animal life, Tolstoy, coming near to Pantheism, found responses to his moods in trees, and
gained spiritual expansion from the illimitable skies and plains. He frequently brings his heroes into
touch with Nature, and endows them with all the innate mysticism of his own temperament, for to
him Nature was “a guide to God.” So in the two-fold incident of Prince Andre and the oak tree (“War
and Peace”) the Prince, though a man of action rather than of sentiment and habitually cynical, is
ready to find in the aged oak by the roadside, in early spring, an animate embodiment of his own
despondency.

“‘Springtime, love, happiness?—are you still cherishing those deceptive illusions?’ the old oak
seemed to say. ‘Isn’t it the same fiction ever? There is neither spring, nor love, nor happiness! Look
at those poor weather-beaten firs, always the same . . . look at the knotty arms issuing from all up
my poor mutilated trunk—here I am, such as they have made me, and I do not believe either in your
hopes or in your illusions.’”

And after thus exercising his imagination, Prince Andre still casts backward glances as he passes by,
“but the oak maintained its obstinate and sullen immovability in the midst of the flowers and grass
growing at its feet. ‘Yes, that oak is right, right a thousand times over. One must leave illusions to
youth. But the rest of us know what life is worth; it has nothing left to offer us.’”

Six weeks later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his melancholy torpor by his recent
meeting with Natasha.

“The day was hot, there was storm in the air; a slight shower watered the dust on the road and the
grass in the ditch; the left side of the wood remained in the shade; the right side, lightly stirred by
the wind, glittered all wet in the sun; everything was in flower, and from near and far the
nightingales poured forth their song. ‘I fancy there was an oak here that understood me,’ said Prince
Andre to himself, looking to the left and attracted unawares by the beauty of the very tree he
sought. The transformed old oak spread out in a dome of deep, luxuriant, blooming verdure, which
swayed in a light breeze in the rays of the setting sun. There were no longer cloven branches nor
rents to be seen; its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared; there were
only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through the centenarian bark, making the
beholder question with surprise if this patriarch had really given birth to them. ‘Yes, it is he, indeed!’
cried Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which the springtime and this
new life gave him . . . ‘No, my life cannot end at thirty-one! . . . It is not enough myself to feel what is
within me, others must know it too! Pierre and that “slip” of a girl, who would have fled into
cloudland, must learn to know me! My life must colour theirs, and their lives must mingle with
mine!’”

In letters to his wife, to intimate friends, and in his diary, Tolstoy’s love of Nature is often-times
expressed. The hair shirt of the ascetic and the prophet’s mantle fall from his shoulders, and all the
poet in him wakes when, “with a feeling akin to ecstasy,” he looks up from his smooth-running
sledge at “the enchanting, starry winter sky overhead,” or in early spring feels on a ramble
“intoxicated by the beauty of the morning,” while he notes that the buds are swelling on the lilacs,
and “the birds no longer sing at random,” but have begun to converse.

But though such allusions abound in his diary and private correspondence, we must turn to “The
Cossacks,” and “Conjugal Happiness” for the exquisitely elaborated rural studies, which give those
early romances their fresh idyllic charm.

What is interesting to note is that this artistic freshness and joy in Nature coexisted with acute
intermittent attacks of spiritual lassitude. In “The Cossacks,” the doubts, the mental gropings of
Olenine—whose personality but thinly veils that of Tolstoy—haunt him betimes even among the
delights of the Caucasian woodland; Serge, the fatalistic hero of “Conjugal Happiness,” calmly
acquiesces in the inevitableness of “love’s sad satiety” amid the scent of roses and the songs of
nightingales.

Doubt and despondency, increased by the vexations and failures attending his philanthropic
endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of suicide.

“The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the schoolwork so vague, my doubts
arising from the wish to teach others, while dissembling my own ignorance of what should be
taught, were so heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to which I all but
succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a side of life as yet unknown to me which
promised me salvation: this was family life” (“My Confession”).

In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers (daughter of Dr. Bers of Moscow)
was consummated in the autumn of 1862—after a somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her
extreme youth—and Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental peace such as he had
never known. His letters of this period to Countess A. A. Tolstoy, his friend Fet, and others, ring with
enraptured allusions to his new-found joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism and altruism, all were
swept aside by the impetus of triumphant love and of all-sufficing conjugal happiness. When in June
of the following year a child was born, and the young wife, her features suffused with “a
supernatural beauty” lay trying to smile at the husband who knelt sobbing beside her, Tolstoy must
have realised that for once his prophetic intuition had been unequal to its task. If his imagination
could have conceived in prenuptial days what depths of emotion might be wakened by fatherhood,
he would not have treated the birth of Masha’s first child in “Conjugal Happiness” as a trivial
material event, in no way affecting the mutual relations of the disillusioned pair. He would have
understood that at this supreme crisis, rather than in the vernal hour of love’s avowal, the heart is
illumined with a joy which is fated “never to return.”

The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in fact delayed in Tolstoy’s own
life by his wife’s intelligent assistance in his literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the
mutual anxieties and pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children. Wider horizons
opened to his mental vision, his whole being was quickened and invigorated. “War and Peace,”
“Anna Karenina,” all the splendid fruit of the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear
witness to the stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning recognition of the power and
extent of female influence appears incidentally in the sketches of high society in those two
masterpieces as well as in the eloquent closing passages of “What then must we do?” (1886). Having
affirmed that “it is women who form public opinion, and in our day women are particularly
powerful,” he finally draws a picture of the ideal wife who shall urge her husband and train her
children to self-sacrifice. “Such women rule men and are their guiding stars. O women—mothers!
The salvation of the world lies in your hands!” In that appeal to the mothers of the world there lurks
a protest which in later writings developed into overwhelming condemnation. True, he chose
motherhood for the type of self-sacrificing love in the treatise “On Life,” which appeared soon after
“What then must we do?” but maternal love, as exemplified in his own home and elsewhere,
appeared to him as a noble instinct perversely directed.

The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child’s physical well-being is the first
essential in the mother’s eyes—the growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly
tenanted—and this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father accepted, Tolstoy as idealist
condemned; while the penury he courted as a lightening of his soul’s burden was averted by the
strenuous exertions of his wife. So a rift grew without blame attaching to either, and Tolstoy
henceforward wandered solitary in spirit through a wilderness of thought, seeking rest and finding
none, coming perilously near to suicide before he reached haven.

To many it will seem that the finest outcome of that period of mental groping, internal struggle, and
contending with current ideas, lies in the above-mentioned “What then must we do?” Certain it is
that no human document ever revealed the soul of its author with greater sincerity. Not for its
practical suggestions, but for its impassioned humanity, its infectious altruism, “What then must we
do?” takes its rank among the world’s few living books. It marks that stage of Tolstoy’s evolution
when he made successive essays in practical philanthropy which filled him with discouragement, yet
were “of use to his soul” in teaching him how far below the surface lie the seeds of human misery.
The slums of Moscow, crowded with beings sunk beyond redemption; the famine-stricken plains of
Samara where disease and starvation reigned, notwithstanding the stream of charity set flowing by
Tolstoy’s appeals and notwithstanding his untiring personal devotion, strengthened further the
conviction, so constantly affirmed in his writings, of the impotence of money to alleviate distress.
Whatever negations of this dictum our own systems of charitable organizations may appear to offer,
there can be no question but that in Russia it held and holds true.

The social condition of Russia is like a tideless sea, whose sullen quiescence is broken from time to
time by terrific storms which spend themselves in unavailing fury. Reaction follows upon every
forward motion, and the advance made by each succeeding generation is barely perceptible.

But in the period of peace following upon the close of the Crimean War the soul of the Russian
people was deeply stirred by the spirit of Progress, and hope rose high on the accession of Alexander
II.

The emancipation of the serfs was only one among a number of projected reforms which engaged
men’s minds. The national conscience awoke and echoed the cry of the exiled patriot Herzen, “Now
or never!” Educational enterprise was aroused, and some forty schools for peasant children were
started on the model of that opened by Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (1861). The literary world
throbbed with new life, and a brilliant company of young writers came to the surface, counting
among them names of European celebrity, such as Dostoevsky, Nekrassov, and Saltykov. Unhappily
the reign of Progress was short. The bureaucratic circle hemming in the Czar took alarm, and made
haste to secure their ascendancy by fresh measures of oppression. Many schools were closed,
including that of Tolstoy, and the nascent liberty of the Press was stifled by the most rigid
censorship.

In this lamentable manner the history of Russia’s internal misrule and disorder has continued to
repeat itself for the last sixty years, revolving in the same vicious circle of fierce repression and
persecution and utter disregard of the rights of individuals, followed by fierce reprisals on the part of
the persecuted; the voice of protest no sooner raised than silenced in a prison cell or among Siberian
snow-fields, yet rising again and again with inextinguishable reiteration; appeals for political
freedom, for constitutional government, for better systems and wider dissemination of education,
for liberty of the Press, and for an enlightened treatment of the masses, callously received and
rejected. The answer with which these appeals have been met by the rulers of Russia is only too well
known to the civilised world, but the obduracy of Pharoah has called forth the plagues of Egypt.
Despite the unrivalled agrarian fertility of Russia, famines recur with dire frequency, with disease
and riot in their train, while the ignominious termination of the Russo-Japanese war showed that
even the magnificent morale of the Russian soldier had been undermined and was tainted by the
rottenness of the authorities set over him. What in such circumstances as these can a handful of
philanthropists achieve, and what avails alms-giving or the scattering of largesse to a people on the
point of spiritual dissolution?
In these conditions Tolstoy’s abhorrence of money, and his assertion of its futility as a panacea for
human suffering, appears not merely comprehensible but inevitable, and his renunciation of
personal property the strictly logical outcome of his conclusions. The partition of his estates
between his wife and children, shortly before the outbreak of the great famine in 1892, served to
relieve his mind partially; and the writings of Henry George, with which he became acquainted at
this critical time, were an additional incentive to concentrate his thoughts on the land question. He
began by reading the American propagandist’s “Social Problems,” which arrested his attention by its
main principles and by the clearness and novelty of his arguments. Deeply impressed by the study of
this book, no sooner had he finished it than he possessed himself of its forerunner, “Progress and
Poverty,” in which the essence of George’s revolutionary doctrines is worked out.

The plan of land nationalisation there explained provided Tolstoy with well thought-out and logical
reasons for a policy that was already more than sympathetic to him. Here at last was a means of
ensuring economic equality for all, from the largest landowner to the humblest peasant—a practical
suggestion how to reduce the inequalities between rich and poor.

Henry George’s ideas and methods are easy of comprehension. The land was made by God for every
human creature that was born into the world, and therefore to confine the ownership of land to the
few is wrong. If a man wants a piece of land, he ought to pay the rest of the community for the
enjoyment of it. This payment or rent should be the only tax paid into the Treasury of the State.
Taxation on men’s own property (the produce of their own labour) should be done away with, and a
rent graduated according to the site-value of the land should be substituted. Monopolies would
cease without violently and unjustly disturbing society with confiscation and redistribution. No one
would keep land idle if he were taxed according to its value to the community, and not according to
the use to which he individually wished to put it. A man would then readily obtain possession of
land, and could turn it to account and develop it without being taxed on his own industry. All human
beings would thus become free in their lives and in their labour. They would no longer be forced to
toil at demoralising work for low wages; they would be independent producers instead of earning a
living by providing luxuries for the rich, who had enslaved them by monopolising the land. The single
tax thus created would ultimately overthrow the present “civilisation” which is chiefly built up on
wage-slavery.