20 November: Boreham on Leo Tolstoy

A Literary Mystic
It was on the 20 November that Leo Tolstoy closed his dramatic and full life. We all seem to have seen the dried-up little creature sitting on his stone bench in the shade of the cypress tree, looking so very lean, so very small, and so very grey. His flashing and vivacious eyes look bewildered. It is as though he has just arrived from some other planet and feels utterly at sea on this one.

Even as a boy he was different from other boys. He has devoted one of his most fascinating books to the inner story of his own childhood. It is a curious, almost grotesque, piece of self-portraiture; but it will always be valuable as an explanation of the phenomenal development that followed. In this astonishing autobiography of his infancy, we catch odd but significant glimpses of a shy little creature who, being shockingly plain, is extremely sensitive about it. He cannot bear to be looked at: he fancies that every observer is secretly committing to memory an image of his ugliness. At times he is so oppressed by this consciousness of his unattractiveness that he runs away and hides in the woods—and thinks.

It was in that sylvan contemplation that his philosophy was born. Among the birds and the squirrels he found signs of suffering and death. His sympathetic spirit recoiled from the idea. What could he do to lessen such anguish? For the birds and the squirrels he could do nothing. But men also suffered and died. Could he not minister to them?

He talks to his brother about it, and they form a society to be called the Ant-Brothers, which is to embrace all mankind in a union of sympathy and affection. It is to minimise cruelty, to abolish war and to resist everything that causes misery or grief or pain. To celebrate the founding of this sublime society, the two boys visit a lonely hillside near their home and bury a green stick as a kind of charm. It is to pledge them to spend their lives for the happiness of men. On that identical spot, more than seventy years afterwards, another burial took place. For, when Tolstoy lay dying, he begged that he might be laid to rest where he and his brother had buried the green stick long years before. As a consequence, that spot will always represent one of humanity's most cherished shrines. It will be visited by men and women of all nations for many centuries to come.

A Passionate Searcher Explores The Universe
Nobody can understand Tolstoy unless he sets out with the axiom that the man's whole life was a search, and that the quest was both audacious and exhaustive. Finding himself endowed with the mystery of life, he was determined to know why. Who had sent him into the world? What end was his life designed to compass? What was to become of him after he had succeeded or failed?

In seeking a solution of these conundrums he overhauled the universe and ransacked everything in it. He took nothing for granted. He closed his mind against no conclusion, however incredible or however appalling. Every guess the philosophers had made was worthy of attention: every theory was entitled to painstaking investigation.

Made in such a mould, Tolstoy was too transparently sincere to be blind to the defects of his own people. He felt acutely that a vast population, illiterate and uninstructed, was at the mercy of any fanatic who knew how to inflame its passions. He realised, in relation to the Russian serfs and peasants, what Booker Washington realised in relation to the American slaves, that, if men are to value, enjoy, and rightly use their freedom, they must be educated and equipped for it. Tolstoy conferred anxiously with some of the most eminent educationists in England and France; and, in order that he might lend the weight of his example to the theory that he so insistently propounded, he became a schoolmaster himself and did his utmost to make learning attractive to the peasants around him. He lost no opportunity of impressing upon the people the fact that they could never hope to realise their destiny by a reliance upon violence.

A Solitary Sees Truth That Moves The Multitude
For nearly a generation, Leo Tolstoy was one of the world's most magnetic and most commanding figures. All nations waited for his next word, and, when it came, it was translated into almost all civilised languages. His authority was peerless. Mr. W. T. Stead regarded him as easily the most notable man of letters then living. "There is," he said, "no Russian so famous; and, outside Russia, there is no literary personality so conspicuous. He is at once a great genius, a consummate artist, and a religious apostle." The intellectual evolution of every outstanding teacher is worth tracing; yet few pilgrimages are more intricate, more involved or more instructive than his.

Tolstoy has, of course, his weaknesses. He attempted too much, and, as an inevitable consequence, he often failed, losing considerable prestige in the process. Moreover, it is difficult to read his writings without feeling that, at many points, he is somewhat out of touch with reality. On a number of really vital matters, his mind was a blank. He never understood money, which is bad; and he never understood women, which is infinitely worse.

He often adopts an attitude that makes one feel that he is aloof and detached from common affairs. He reminds me, says Maxim Gorky, "of those pilgrims who, all their life long, staff in hand, wander about the world, travelling thousands of miles from one monastery to another, terribly homeless and alien to all men and all things." There are a thousand subjects on which his opinion is scarcely worth the paper on which it is inscribed. Yet, although Tolstoy does not pretend to be a jack-of-all trades and an expert upon everything, he saw some of life's cardinal issues with crystal clarity; and the world is, and always must be, infinitely the richer for his strange and gipsylike passage through it.

F W Boreham

Image: Leo Tolstoy