TOLSTOY IN 1906TOLSTOY IN 1906From Aylmer Maude’s “Life of Tolstoy”
TOLSTOY IN 1906From Aylmer Maude’s “Life of Tolstoy”
Tolstoy and his three brothers and a sister were brought up at Yasnaya Polyana by a distant relative, whom they called Aunt Tatiana. She was rather a remarkable character, and Leo was devoted to her. He tells us she greatly helped to form his character.Writing about her, he says: “Aunt Tatiana had the greatest influence on my life. From earliest childhood she taught me the spiritual delight of love. She taught me this joy not by words, but by her whole being she filled me with love. I saw,I felthow she enjoyed loving, and I understood the joy of love. This was the first thing. Secondly, she taught me the delights of an unhurried, quiet life.”
His aunt used to welcome all sorts of pilgrims to Yasnaya, beggars and monks and nuns, people despised by the rest of the world, so that Leo was brought up in a strange, almost mediæval atmosphere—an atmosphere that was religious, poetical, simple, and very far from worldly. We find Tolstoy after a long life of varied experiences returning again to the habits and beliefs of his youth, and to a life of humility and simple living.
Tolstoy had the greatest admiration for his eldest brother Nicholas, who, he always said, was a much greater man than himself; but Nicholas died before he had time to show what he was capable of. This brother invented a game called “Ant Brothers.” He told Leo and his two brothers of six and seven that he possessed a secret and, when it was known, all men would become happy; there would be no more disease, no trouble, and no one would be angry with any one else; all would love one another and become “ant brothers.” The game consisted of sitting under chairs surrounded by boxes, screening themselvesfrom view with handkerchiefs, and cuddling against one another in the dark. Tolstoy says: “The ‘ant brotherhood’ was revealed to us, but not the chief secret: the way for all men to cease suffering any misfortune, to leave off quarreling and being angry, and become continuously happy: this secret Nicholas said he had written on a green stick and buried by the road at the edge of a certain ravine, at which spot (since my body must be buried somewhere) I have asked to be buried in memory of Nicholas.”
Writing when he was over seventy, Tolstoy says: “The ideal of ant brothers lovingly clinging to one another, though not under two armchairs curtained by handkerchiefs, but of all mankind under the wide dome of heaven, has remained the same for me. As I then believed that there existed a little green stick, whereon was written the message which could destroy all evil in men and give them universal welfare, so I now believe that such truth exists, and will be revealed to men and will give them all it promises.”
Tolstoy’s early childhood was on the whole very happy, in spite of his far-seeing, sensitive, and rather morbid nature. At times he was certainly very miserable, but, on the other hand, he had an immense power of enjoyment, and loved games and horses and dogs and the country itself, and his affections were very strong.
One of the things that worried him as a child was his own looks; he thought himself so plain. He saysin his autobiographical novel “Childhood”: “I imagined there could be no happiness on earth for a man with so broad a nose, such thick lips, and such small gray eyes as mine. I asked God to perform a miracle and change me into a handsome boy....” He tried to improve his appearance by clipping his eyebrows, with most disastrous results, as of course he was uglier and unhappier than ever.
Tolstoy showed no particular talent for anything as a child, though he was very original, and quite determined not to do things like other people. When he came into the drawing-room, for instance, he insisted upon bowing to people backwards, bending his head the wrong way, and saluting each person thus in turn. He was not good at his lessons, and mentions somewhere that a student who came to teach him and his brothers said about them: “Serge both wishes and can, Dmitry wishes but can’t (This was not true), and Leo neither wishes nor can (This I think was perfectly true).” This was characteristic of Tolstoy, who was always hard on himself. But if the tutor lived to see what Tolstoy became, he must have been rather ashamed of his lack of perception.
Before Tolstoy was sixteen he entered a university with his brothers. There was no doubt that, like many other young people, he hated study, though he worked hard and passed well in languages. In history and geography he failed, and being asked to name the French seaports, he could not remember a single one.He left the university rather disgusted with himself and despising intellectual things. His companions had not really understood him, for he was a strange mixture. Sometimes he was very proud and aristocratic, yet with advanced Liberal views; and he was moody, at one moment wildly gay, at another sunk in gloom. He always looked upon the worst side of himself, and wrote in his diary that he was awkward, uncleanly, irritable, a bore to others, ignorant, intolerant, and shamefaced as a child: there was no end to the names he called himself. He admits that he is honest and that he loves goodness, but on the whole he is very unfair to himself, for the reason that he had set up such a high ideal to live up to.
Now he intended, though only nineteen, to devote himself to his peasants. He went back to his property with great zeal for reform. He knew of the sufferings of the serfs, the famines and revolts. For a time he worked among them and learned to know all about their lives. But he was too young, and lacked patience at present to do much good. After six months, rather discouraged and disappointed, he was off on a different experience. He made his home now at St. Petersburg, where he was most frivolous and idle. He understood quite well what a stupid life he was leading, and in a religious book he wrote in after years, called “My Confession,” he says that though he honestly desired to be good, he stood alone in his search after goodness. Every time he expressed the longingsof his heart for a virtuous life, he met with contempt and mocking laughter, but every time he was frivolous or wicked, he was praised and encouraged.
Yet on the whole this gay life at St. Petersburg was not altogether useless. It taught him something, and he was not really spoilt by it. He was big enough and intelligent enough to see the utter futility and uselessness of such a life. It gave him, he says, a scorn for aristocracy and the life of rich people generally, whose whole existence was “a mania of selfishness.”
Tolstoy’s favorite brother Nicholas, who was serving in the Russian army, saw what an unsatisfactory state his brother was in, and so persuaded Leo to become a soldier and join him in the Caucasus. This Leo was only too glad to do. He says in a letter at that time, “God willing, I will amend and become a steady man at last.”
Now, the open-air, primitive life in this part of Russia quite restored Tolstoy to himself, and he began to write. His first book, “Childhood,” was written and published while he was there. This novel, though not strictly speaking a history of his own childhood, is mostly about his own youthful life; the incidents that occur in it are many of them true, and the characters are taken from friends and relatives. It is a very wonderful book, as showing how vividly Tolstoy remembered his own feelings as a child, how intensely he must have felt and suffered, and whathis powers of thought and observation must have been. He continued this book, and brought out later other volumes entitled “Boyhood” and “Youth.” They are all three full of beautiful things. Tolstoy also wrote about the Caucasus, a novel called “The Cossacks,” a romantic story of the strange, wild people who inhabit this part of Russia.
At the time of the Crimean War, Tolstoy experienced as a soldier the horrors of battle. He was at the siege of Sebastopol, and wrote the book of that name. It made a great sensation when it came out, soon after the war was over. Its profound understanding of the feelings of men who were constantly facing death and danger, and of those who were dying, made a deep impression on people.
Tolstoy, from seeing war, formed his very strong opinions against it. He became from that time one of the most passionate apostles of peace. He saw how much that is splendid is sometimes brought out in people who face the terrors of war, but, on the other hand, he saw its fearful uselessness, the waste of noble human beings, the suffering it causes everywhere, and the destruction, in some, of all human feeling. “It is not suffering and death that are terrible,” says Tolstoy, “but that which allows people to inflict suffering and death.”
Tolstoy after Sebastopol left the army and went back to St. Petersburg, this time to live in a literary circle, where he was welcomed by distinguished authors as the most promising writer of the day. Nobody, after reading “Childhood” or “Sebastopol,” could fail to see Tolstoy’s marvelous genius for seeing things as they are, and his gift of expression. But he grew impatient in this circle, for his views were too advanced and his love of truth too strong. He could not agree with people, and he could not pretend to agree with them. So he was thought quarrelsome and conceited, and his opinions absurd. He was always questioning things, such as the meaning of existence, and whether he himself was of any use; he would take nothing as a matter of course. Already, before he was twenty-seven, he had conceived the great idea of devoting his life to founding a new Religion—the Religion of Christianity, in fact, but cleansed of all its dogmas, which have nothing to do with Christianity: a practical religion, giving happiness on earth, not merely the promise of future happiness.
And another great question absorbed him, the question of emancipating the serfs. Peasants who worked on the land in Russia were held much as slaves, and were the absolute property of their masters, forced to work for them so many days a week before they might do any work for themselves. Tolstoy violently took the side of the peasants in all that concerned them, and his purpose in life was more or less fixed from this time onward. Like our other great man of noble birth, William of Orange, who worked on the side of the people, he was determined to leaveno stone unturned until the conditions of the poor had been improved and justice done them.
Now, in order to learn more of the habits and customs of other countries, and principally their systems of education, Tolstoy went abroad and visited France, Germany, and England. Then, returning to his home, he settled down as a land-owner and managed his own estates.
In 1861 the serfs were liberated by the Czar Alexander II.
Tolstoy, with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, flung himself into the work of dividing out lands between nobles and peasants. He acted as a judge in his own district, and annoyed his aristocratic neighbors by being fair to the poor: he had seen too often how they had been cheated out of their rights.
It was difficult, rather discouraging work, because years of oppression had made the peasants suspicious and grasping, and Tolstoy’s task was to try to remove this distrust. He became more and more socialistic, and his literary friends were very much disappointed in him, for he seemed to be giving up his writing. One wrote: “Tolstoy has grown a long beard, leaves his hair to fall in curls over his ears, holds newspapers in detestation, and has no soul for anything but his property.”
Tolstoy had also started on another enterprise. This was a school after his own theories at Yasnaya and a monthly magazine which he printed and edited,all about his views on education. He saw how most learning is mechanical, and how a child does not learn because he wants to, but in order not to be punished, or to earn a prize, or to be better than others, but very seldom from a real desire to know. This Tolstoy considered was because the child was so drilled and made to behave unnaturally, and to have a different manner in school than he had out. He was not free, and only when a child was free and natural and lively, and allowed to ask questions and to laugh and talk, could he learn with pleasure and therefore thoroughly. In Tolstoy’s school there was no order as we know it: children sat on the floor or bunches of them in an arm-chair; they did just as they pleased, and ran about from place to place. They answered questions, not in turn but all together, interrupting one another or helping one another to remember. If one child left out a bit of story that he had to tell, another jumped up and put it in.
Tolstoy encouraged the children not to repeat literally what they had heard, but to tell “out of your own head.” As there were very few reading books for young children, Tolstoy wrote stories for them himself, which, as they have been translated into English, we are able to read ourselves and to judge how they must have delighted his small pupils. He also read to them and explained to them Bible stories, of which he was very fond.
There was no doubt that Tolstoy had a gift forteaching and interested the children as no ordinary teacher could. His methods are not for every one.
Tolstoy’s classes came to an end after two years, because he was interfered with by the Government; but he revived them at intervals during his life, and there is no doubt that his views on education helped to make teaching in Russia more reasonable and natural, and put fresh ideas about it into people’s heads.
Tolstoy’s only companion at this time was his aunt Tatiana, but in 1862, when he was thirty-four, he married Miss Sophia Behrs, who was only eighteen. He had known her as a little girl.
Tolstoy now settled down to a very happy life—the life, indeed, which had been his ideal, and which he had described as such in a letter to his aunt, when quite a young man. He pictures himself living with his wife at Yasnaya—
A gentle creature, kind and affectionate, she has the same love for you as I have; you live upstairs in the big house, in what used to be Grandmamma’s room; the whole house is as it was in Papa’s time.... I take Papa’s place, though I despair of ever deserving it. My wife that of Mamma; the children take ours. If they made me Emperor of Russia or gave me Peru—in a word, if a fairy came with her wand asking me what I wished for, I should reply that I only wished that this dream may become reality.
And all this actually came to pass. Aunt Tatiana, when Tolstoy married, continued to live with him.He had many children, managed his estates, taught the peasants, and wrote books, and though he was not living in the same house in which he was born, for the large wooden house had been removed and sold to pay his father’s debts, he lived on the same spot in the stone one erected in its place. His wife helped in everything, in spite of her large family, for they had thirteen children. She found time to copy out all her husband’s manuscripts, which to most people would have been as impossible a task as looking for a needle in a haystack, they were so extraordinarily badly written, and scratched out and rewritten. His first great novel, “War and Peace,” one of the longest novels in existence, is said to have been copied out by Countess Tolstoy seven times.
Tolstoy always lived with his children, and did not banish them to nurseries and schoolrooms, as some people do. Up to the age of ten they were taught by their father and mother; their mother taught them Russian and music, and their father arithmetic and French. Most entertaining French it was, which consisted of reading amusing stories out of illustrated volumes of Jules Verne. If there happened to be a volume without pictures, Tolstoy made the pictures himself. He drew very badly, yet his pictures were so amusing that the children liked them much better than the ordinary ones.
He would discuss and explain interesting things with his children, and they were always eager to bewith him, to go walks with him, and be on his side in any game he taught them. Clearing the snow off the ponds in winter under their father’s direction was even more amusing than the skating itself. They rode and hunted with their father, for in the earlier part of his life Tolstoy was an enthusiastic sportsman. He was brave, daring, and an excellent shot, and he enjoyed more than anything being out in the open air.
In the early morning, before breakfast, Tolstoy would usually go for a long walk, or ride down to bathe in the river. At morning coffee, or what we call breakfast, the family all met together, and Tolstoy was always very merry. He would be up to all sorts of jokes, till he got up with the words, “One must get to work,” and off he went to his study to write books, and he would work for many hours on end, though in summer he would often come out and play with the children. This always delighted them, as he brought such spirit and interest into their games, and he would invent new ones himself—which were better than any. If they had secrets, he always guessed them, so that they regarded him as a sort of magician. His son writes of him: “My father hardly ever made us do anything, but it always somehow came about that of our own initiative we did exactly what he wanted us to. My mother often scolded us and punished us, but when my father wanted us to do anything, he merely looked us hardin the eyes, and we understood—the look was far more effective than any command. It was impossible to hide anything from him, as impossible as to hide it from your own conscience. He knew everything, and to deceive him was nearly impossible and quite useless.”
This same son, Ilya, Tolstoy’s second boy, tells many amusing stories of the Tolstoy family life, and of the great part his father played in it. One story is as follows: Ilya, when a little boy, was given a big china cup and saucer by his mother at Christmas-time. He was so excited that he ran very fast to show it to the others, and as he ran from one room to another, he caught his foot on the step in the doorway and fell down and broke his cup to smithereens. When accused by his mother of being careless, he howled and said it was not his fault, but the fault of the beastly architect who had gone and put a step in the doorway. Tolstoy, overhearing him, was much amused, and said, “It is the architect’s fault, it is the architect’s fault!” This phrase became a saying in the family, and Tolstoy was always using it when any one threw the blame on any one else. When one of the children fell off his horse because he stumbled, or when he did his lessons badly because his tutor had not explained them properly, and so on, “Of course, I know,” Tolstoy would say; “it is the architect’s fault.”
Tolstoy had some excellent inventions for makinghis children cheerful. When they would all be sitting rather cross and bored after the departure of some dull visitors, he would suddenly jump up from his seat, and, lifting one arm in the air with its hand hanging loose from the wrist, run at full speed round the table at a hopping gallop. Every one rose and flew after him, hopping and waving their hands. They went round the room several times, and then sat down again in their chairs, panting, and quite gay and lively once more. This game, which was known as “Numidian Cavalry,” had an excellent effect, and many a time the children’s tears were dried by it and quarrels forgotten.
Tolstoy, amongst other things, enjoyed music, and was fond of playing duets on the piano. After dinner he would settle down to this, usually with his wife’s sister. When he was in difficulties he would say things to make her laugh, so that she had to play slower, and sometimes, if this did not succeed, he would stop and take off one of his boots, saying, “Now it will go all right.”
Tolstoy was as young as anybody in his love of fun and games, the more nonsensical the better; and his laughter was most infectious, beginning on a high note, and his whole body would shake.
People ought to know about this amusing side of Tolstoy’s character, in order to get out of their heads that he was a painfully serious man without a sense of humor, who asked impossibilities of people. Hehad many sides to his character, as we shall see, and that is what makes him so intensely interesting.
Tolstoy was a deeply affectionate man, loving above all things his home, his wife, and his children. If ever he had to leave them for a time, even if it were only on a hunting expedition, he would always as he approached his home say, “If only all is well at home!” Whatever he did, he did with his whole heart and soul. He was an enthusiastic schoolmaster, a keen sportsman and farmer, and an excellent gardener and beekeeper. He looked into everything on his estate and insisted upon having all his pigs washed, and there were as many as three hundred!
So Tolstoy’s life was as full as it possibly could be. For the first ten years of his married life he was so much occupied with the cares of family life, and the life of a country gentleman, that he had less time for thought and did not worry himself quite so much about the reasons of life. He was also absorbed in his writing, and being a perfect giant for work, was able during this period—in spite of his numberless activities—to write two very great novels, besides many shorter stories and primers for children.
“War and Peace,” an historical novel of the time of Napoleon, and requiring an immense amount of research, and “Anna Karenina” are as great as any novels that have been written in any country. Tolstoy’s extraordinary powers of observation and his acute, almost uncanny, understanding of human nature, make his characters so living and human that, having read about them, they become as people you have known, and you can never forget them.
Also, Tolstoy’s experience of life was wide and varied, and everything he wrote about he had himself known and seen. War in the Crimea, fashionable life in St. Petersburg, life with gipsies in the Caucasus, with peasants in the country, the joys and sorrows of intimate family life with children and animals—nothing escaped his notice, and his books are simply life seen through the medium of his wonderful and penetrating mind; there is nothing like them.
So there he was, the most brilliant and successful writer of the day, with a happy domestic life, money, a delightful property, and devoted servants and tenants. If any one ought to have been contented, it might be said it was Tolstoy. And yet he became dissatisfied and began again, as he had in earlier days, to find fault with himself and with his own life. He was fifty when the change in him began to take place; and yet it was no change really, he had always been the same; and the people who amuse themselves by finding inconsistencies in his character are wrong when they accuse him of being changeable: he merely returned now to his earliest ideals, which had been there all the time, though his intense enjoyment of life and his many occupations had prevented his thinking quite so much of working out his theories. It will be seen that Tolstoy had an extraordinary tenacity ofpurpose, and during his life carried through nearly all he had dreamed of doing. About the big and important things of life he remained always the same, though at times his high spirits made it appear as though he had forgotten about the problems that had worried him. But now, once more the question of how to lead the best life, and what is meant by religion, became uppermost in his mind, and a great disgust seized him of the life he and his family were leading. Everything he had enjoyed he now despised. He hated the luxury of his life, the fact of having servants to wait on him, his daughters in muslin dresses drinking tea: “The life of our circle of society,” he said, “not only repelled me, but lost all meaning.”
Yet there was nothing grossly luxurious or selfish about the life led by the Tolstoy family: according to most aristocratic ideas of luxury their life was simple. Nothing could be plainer than the house at Yasnaya, solidly built as it was, with double windows to keep out the cold and large Dutch stoves. The rooms were very bare and the floors mostly uncarpeted, the furniture faded and old-fashioned. But the family fed well, and kept a great many servants, which seemed necessary, as the Tolstoys, like many Russians, had hosts of poor relations living with them, besides tutors, governesses, and old servants; they were also a very large family in themselves.
But now life appeared to Tolstoy as dust and ashes.His wife and children, the praise of men, art—he turned from it all. His family at first could not understand why he should be in such despair; it was difficult to feel sympathy with his sufferings. To them he appeared to possess everything that most people considered good and desirable, and the life he was leading excellent and blameless. So they could not help him, and he had to suffer alone.
Tolstoy’s second son, who has written his recollections of his father, says he began to notice a change in his habits about this time. He left off hunting and shooting and riding, and took instead long walks on the road, where he could meet pilgrims and beggars and have talks with them. At dinner he would tell his family about them. He became gloomy and irritable, and quarreled with his wife over trifles. He no longer played with his children. When they were enjoying themselves acting or playing croquet he would walk in and spoil it all by a word or even a look.
He did not want to spoil their fun, but for all that he did. He had often not said anything, but he had thought it. “We all knew what he had thought, and that was what made us so uncomfortable,” his son says.
It was trying for the children to lose their jolly, delightful companion, who had brought such zest into their games and whose gaiety had been so infectious.Now they rather dreaded the appearance of this stern man who disapproved of them.
He did nothing but blame the useless lives led by ladies and gentlemen, their laziness, greed, and the way they made other people work for them.
This is the sort of thing he said:
Here we sit in our well-heated rooms, and this very day a man was found frozen to death on the high-road. He was frozen to death because no one would give him a night’s lodging.We stuff ourselves with cutlets and pastry while people are dying by thousands from famine.
The children understood what he said, but it spoiled all their childish amusements and broke up their happy life.
Tolstoy was very unhappy for a period of four or five years and could see no meaning in existence. But at last he discovered a purpose in life and a religion to help him. It was really Christianity, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount became his gospel. The life of a Russian peasant he was convinced was the example of how to live. Man, he thought, should be simple, hardworking, and kind; he should give more than he received and he should rejoice in serving others. Tolstoy saw it was no good preaching without practising, and so he tried to live like a Russian peasant. He ate very little and lived principallyupon vegetables. He dressed like a peasant too, in summer in a smock and in the winter in a sheepskin coat and cap and high boots. He refused to have any one to wait on him, and did his own room. This was not easy to him, as, though he had always hated luxury, as an aristocrat he had taken certain things for granted, such as the fact that his clothes would always be folded and brushed and put away by a servant. By nature he was very untidy, and it was really an effort to him to pick up his things and keep them in order. In earlier days, when he had dressed and undressed, he let all his clothes tumble on to the floor, and there they would lie in different parts of the room until they were picked up. To see him pack his portmanteau for a journey was said to be an unforgettable sight, the confusion and disorder was something so hopeless. But now he tried to turn over a new leaf so as not to give people trouble.
Tolstoy saw the utter uselessness of preaching what you never intend to practise. He was quite determined to carry out all he asked others to do. After all it is more by the life you lead and example rather than by words that you persuade people, and Tolstoy tells a true story in this connection. It is as follows:
The Tolstoy family took into their house a dirty, homeless little boy, to teach him and to benefit him generally. “What,” asks Tolstoy, “did the boy see and learn?”
He saw Tolstoy’s own children, older than himselfand of his own age, dirtying and spoiling things, breaking and spilling things, and throwing food to the dogs which seemed to the boy delicacies, expecting other people to wait on them and never doing any work themselves. Tolstoy understood then, he says, how absurd it was to take poor people into your house and educate them, when you were yourselves leading such idle, useless lives.
Tolstoy says his one desire was to hide their life from the boy; everything that he told him or tried to teach him he felt was destroyed by the example they were all setting him.
So Tolstoy tried hard to live according to his ideals, and became something like a monk but without a monk’s narrow views and superstitious beliefs. He dropped his title quite naturally, and when a peasant called him “Your Excellency,” Tolstoy replied, “I am called simply Leo Nikolayevitch,” and went on to speak of the matter in hand. Manual labor, which had always been a pleasure to him, now became a sort of religion. Every day he worked for hours at hay-making, plowing, reaping or wood-cutting as the case might be. Nothing absorbed him like mowing, and he would stand among the peasants in his smock listening with perfect happiness to the sound of scythes. Country life, labor, healthy appetite and sound sleep was his idea of a happy life.
In the winter evenings Tolstoy learned to make boots. He engaged a black-bearded shoemaker to comeand teach him, and side by side they sat on two stools in a little room near Tolstoy’s study.
Tolstoy was never satisfied until he had done the job exactly as the shoemaker did it. Groaning with the effort of threading a waxed thread, he would refuse the assistance of the bearded man. “I’ll do it!—No, no—I’ll do it myself, it’s the only way to learn,” he would say.
As to the boots which Tolstoy made, a man to whom he had given a pair and who had worn them, was asked whether they were well made. “Couldn’t be worse,” was his reply.
Now for a time the whole Tolstoy family and their friends were filled with this enthusiasm for outdoor work. They rose early, and in company with the peasants the Tolstoy children and their mother, in a Russian dress, uncles, aunts, and even grandmothers, mowed the grass and strove to outdo the other. They had no theories about it, but simply found it a change and a pleasant satisfactory way of taking exercise.
All sorts of people now made pilgrimages to Yasnaya, to learn how to live, for Tolstoy’s fame as a teacher had begun to go about the land. Rich aristocrats wanted to throw away their gold and do the housework, and a governess of the Tolstoys, who has written rather malicious though amusing accounts of Tolstoy’s life at this time, describes enthusiastic ladies who came to Yasnaya and manured the fields in white dressing jackets!Tolstoy suffered from the silliness of some of his followers, and once sadly said he supposed he should be known through them and their eccentricities. There is a good deal of truth in the saying that a man’s admirers are sometimes his worst enemies.
Tolstoy gave up writing novels, and wrote only one more, “Resurrection,” quite at the end of his life. This was written with a great moral purpose, and is a serious and terrible book. His earlier novels he now referred to as “wordy rubbish”; he hated them, as he felt they were frivolous and could only be interesting to the upper classes. He wrote, however, a great many books on life, conduct, and religion, and children’s stories. They were printed very cheaply and taken round by pedlars. The peasants read and loved these books, and they seemed to penetrate right into the heart of Russia. They were written simply, and the peasants understood them. Tolstoy was very happy that he had been able to help and please the poor people.
Now, preaching as Tolstoy did against property and the extraordinarily unfair system which allows one man to have a thousand acres and another not even a foot, he could not satisfy himself until he had got rid of his own property; so difficulties arose with his family. His wife would not have felt so strongly about it, no doubt, if she had had only herself to think of; but it is difficult for a mother to believe that her children will be happier and better without moneyand possessions; she did not want to see her children impoverished. Tolstoy thought a mother’s love was selfish, and often writes about it in this sense.
Countess Tolstoy had been upset when her husband gave up writing novels, for they brought in a lot of money; and now, with their largely increased family, their income, instead of becoming more, became less. Tolstoy, in a letter to his wife on this subject, says:
... but I cannot help repeating that our happiness or unhappiness cannot in the least depend on whether we lose or acquire something, but only what we ourselves are. Now if we left Kostenka (one of their children) a million, would he be happier?... What our life together is, with our joys and sorrows, will appear to our children real life, but neither languages, nor diplomas, nor society, and still less money, make our happiness or unhappiness, and therefore the question how much our income shrinks cannot occupy me.
Tolstoy finally satisfied himself by giving up his estates to his family. The house itself he left to the youngest, Ivan. This was a tradition in the family, Tolstoy, as his mother’s youngest son, having inherited Yasnaya Polyana.
This little boy, who was born when Tolstoy was quite old, promised to be very remarkable, and his father took more interest in him than any of his other children. The child Ivan understood things just as his father did. When one day his mother said to him, “Ivan, Yasnaya is yours,” he was very angry andstamped his foot passionately, crying “Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! everything is everyone else’s.” The child died when he was seven, and it was a most bitter grief to Tolstoy. But Masha, his second daughter, was a comfort to him; she took her father’s side when she was only fifteen, and though she was very delicate, she used all the strength she had in working for the poor, looking after the peasants’ wives and doing their work for them when they were ill, minding the children and cleaning and cooking.
Many people blame Countess Tolstoy for not seeing eye to eye with her husband, but I think it would have been a very great deal to expect of any woman, that she should discard all the habits of a lifetime and renounce everything she had been accustomed to, to change her way of living and of bringing up her children. She describes her feelings very well in a letter to her sister, saying that her husband is a leader, one who goes ahead of the crowd pointing the way men should go. “But I am the crowd,” she says; “I live in its current, and see the light of the lamp which every leader, and Leo of course, carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster; I am held by the crowd and by my surroundings and habits.”
Countess Tolstoy also felt that her husband was wasting himself; he had a genius for writing novels, and he deliberately gave up writing them and occupied himself instead with log-splitting, reaping, and making boots which anybody could do, and do better. It was tiresome of him to play at being “Robinson Crusoe,” as Countess Tolstoy expressed it.
No doubt he was provoking, but though Tolstoy and his wife sometimes quarreled, they were devoted to one another all the same, as may be seen by the very delightful quotation out of a letter of Countess Tolstoy’s to her husband.
All at once I pictured you vividly to myself, and a sudden flood of tenderness rose in me. There is something in you so wise, kind, naïve, and obstinate, and it is all lit up by that tender interest for every one natural to you alone, and by your look that reaches to people’s souls.
Sometimes Tolstoy had to accompany his family to Moscow. This became the regular arrangement in the winter, when his daughter Tanya grew up and began to go to balls and parties. Countess Tolstoy was always very energetic, arranging their flat and calling upon people who would ask her daughter to parties.
Tolstoy, after living in the country, found the artificiality of town life almost unbearable, and the luxury of the circle they lived in was to him torture. He had to occupy himself in order to bear it. One winter he spent his time taking a census of people in the poorest part of Moscow.
He was so horrified at the appalling misery he cameacross that he wanted to run away. He knew poverty in the country, but he had never seen anything like the poverty he came across in the town. Writing about it, he says:
I could not look at our own or anybody else’s drawing-room, or a clean, well-spread dining-table, or a carriage with well-fed coachman and horses, or shops or theaters without a feeling of profound irritation.
It was because he had seen the other side of the picture. And unfortunately there always is another side to the picture.
He saw this side by side with the wretched lodging-houses he had been visiting, filled with cold, hungry, dreadful people, and one he felt was the result of the other.
His son says the look of suffering on his father’s face at that time he shall never forget.
He was simply overcome with pity and with shame and indignation that our civilization can permit such things. So he went back to Yasnaya alone, and feeling ill with despair; he took things to heart in an extraordinary way. But gradually the peace and loneliness of the country comforted him, and he set to work on a book about his experiences with the poor in Moscow, and called it “What Then Must We Do?” He simply wrote down what he had seen and heard, and asked what we were to do to destroy what is in truth slavery—starving people struggling to live anddriven to crime by their miserable conditions, while others have riches and luxury, even throwing their superfluous food to the dogs and enjoying the fruit of other people’s labor.
It was impossible for Tolstoy to have any respect for civilization as such, unless it really helped men. He judged it fairly by what it did and found it wanting. He longed to see real progress, not merely mechanical progress. He did not call progress making battleships, inventing flying machines, or electricity, or explosives if people’s hearts remained hard. He wanted to see a spiritual progress, people being kind and helpful to one another.
The root of all the evil lay in man’s selfishness, he thought, and the corruption of Governments: these he considered existed only for the benefit of the rich. We must remember that the Russian Government at that time was one of the most backward of so-called civilized Powers, and what we call representative government did not exist at all, but a government by a few for the few.
Tolstoy also set himself to the great work he had dreamt of doing as a young man, that of separating the true from the false in the teachings of the Church. The Greek or the Russian Church does not differ fundamentally in its doctrines from the Roman Catholic or Protestant churches.
Tolstoy saw that man needed some religion or chart to guide him through life, and being himself profoundly religious by nature, he did not, like Voltaire, merely scoff and destroy, but tried also to build up and to construct something really tangible and helpful to human beings.
The truth he believed lay in the teaching of Christ. “If you wish to understand the truth,” Tolstoy said, “read the Gospels”; and the book he wrote on the Gospels is an explanation of Christ’s teaching. He asked himself, were the things that children and ignorant people taught true? and if they were not they should be exposed publicly. Every honest man should speak out. But people he saw were so confused in their minds about religion that they thought it must be supernatural, senseless, and incomprehensible, or it wasn’t religion.
Tolstoy wanted to make it a real and living force. He told the peasants in his books that God was not the cruel, revengeful, punishing Person they had been taught to believe Him; that He did not go about hardening people’s hearts and directing them to murder, and that they would not go to Hell for being unbaptized. On the contrary, he told them that God was good and that every human being, as the son of God, was good too, and could increase, by loving goodness, the divine in himself, by loving others as himself and by acting toward everybody as you would they should act toward you. But to kill another or abuse him, or to profit at the expense of any man, this was what made misery in the world. Tolstoypreached that all men are equal, as Christ had, and that nothing can be done by force or by violence, but only by love.
The Church in Russia was able to exercise a sort of inquisition, employing people to spy on suspected free-thinkers all over the country. There existed at the time, about a hundred miles from Moscow, a Bastille, or fortress, where persons objected to or suspected by the Russian Church, were shut up. In its dark and damp dungeons innocent people would be left for many years, sometimes forgotten altogether. Tolstoy would most certainly have been arrested and probably sent there, if he had not been an aristocrat with an aunt at court who pleaded for him with the Czar. As it was, he was excommunicated by the Holy Synod, the head of the Russian Church.
Tolstoy was proving dangerous, his influence was beginning to be felt; he was undermining the power of the Church and State by showing the poor people that they have a right to live and that all men are equal; that Christ had said so, and that the Church has no right to misrepresent His words.
Tolstoy’s books were no longer allowed in libraries; newspapers were forbidden to mention any meetings held in his favor. Telegraph offices actually refused to take messages of sympathy sent him, though abusive telegrams arrived quite punctually.
During a terrible famine in Russia, when Tolstoy and his family worked night and day and gave allthey possessed to the starving peasants, the priests tried to frighten them and preached against Tolstoy, saying he was Antichrist and they should not eat his food.
But the excommunication of Tolstoy had really quite the opposite effect to what was intended. It shocked the whole world, and Tolstoy’s name was received with more and more sympathy.
The views he expressed and the books he wrote had greater influence than ever before. The Russian people themselves seemed to realize that they possessed one of the greatest moral teachers in the world. But as the people of Russia became freer in their views and less subservient to authority, so in proportion the Government became harder and tightened its hold upon them. Tolstoy had not hitherto written on political life, but the cruel repression of all forms of liberty by violence roused him at the end of his life to write against the Government of his country a tragic letter which he published in the European papers, entitled: “I can keep silent no longer.” He said his life was made unendurable by the suffering of his people, and he begs all to cease from hatred and revenge.
Mr. Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy’s English biographer, visited the great man at Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of his life. He says what struck him most then about Tolstoy was his sympathy and kindness more than his intellect. He had mellowed with age, andfrom having been impatient, violent in argument, and often obstinate and unjust, he had become patient and gentle, though he was still intensely alive and caring as ardently for things as most people of twenty-five.
The atmosphere he created round him in his old age was peculiarly peaceful, and yet a lively and intelligent interest was taken by every one in everything. The influence of Tolstoy seemed to make all who came into contact with him kind and simple. There were no shams anywhere. Tolstoy had not forced his views on his children, as he was afraid they might follow him insincerely. He wanted them to be completely free and sincere.
When he was eighty-two Tolstoy left his home. His reasons for doing so are not quite clear, and we must form our own conclusions about it. A letter written to his wife some years before, to be opened after his death, explains a good deal.
Tolstoy wanted to devote his last days entirely to God. He wanted complete solitude and peace, in order to avoid at the end any sort of discord between his life and his beliefs. If he had talked about this plan, and told his family, there would have been discussions and perhaps quarrels, and he could not bear that. So he decided to slip away quietly without any one knowing. In the letter he explained that it would not mean that he was angry with his wife or any one else: indeed, he could not bear the idea of giving herpain. He said he should lovingly remember what his wife had been to him. But when the time came he was very weak and had been near death several times. He confided his secret plan to his youngest daughter Alexandra, for she, since his favorite daughter Masha had died a few years before, had been his companion and confidante. So one snowy night at the end of October she helped him to depart. He went with a doctor friend of his who had been living in the house for some time past.
His first wish was to visit his old sister and to take farewell of her. She was living in a convent, and seeing her ending her days so happily and peacefully, he wished he might have been able to enter a monastery, if only it had not been necessary to believe in the Church. On his journey by train—he had not yet made up his mind where he would settle down—he caught cold and had to stop at a little wayside station. There, in the station-master’s house, the cold developed into pneumonia, and as he was very weak there was little hope of his recovery. After a week of suffering he passed peacefully away, surrounded by his family and friends.
Before the end came, a telegram arrived from a high dignitary of the Church urging Tolstoy to return to the bosom of the Church. But it was not shown to him, for a similar message had been sent some years before when Tolstoy was very ill, and he had said, “How is it they do not understand that evenwhen one is face to face with death, two and two still make four?”
Hundreds of people had flocked to the little country station when it was known that Tolstoy lay ill there. It was an extraordinary scene. Peasants who loved him jostled newspaper men who wanted the latest news. Photographers and police officers, literary people and aristocrats were there, and messages and telegrams arrived from all over the world. Multitudes of his poor peasants came to his funeral, and many wept aloud.
“Our great Leo is dead,” cried one. “Long live our great Leo’s spirit.”
Tolstoy’s body was laid where he had wished to lie, on the spot where his brother Nicholas had buried the green stick on which was written the great secret it was Tolstoy’s purpose in life to discover.
What was the secret of Tolstoy’s power?
Every one who came near him seemed to feel it, and most of those who read his books. It is true that there still exists a certain number of people who recognize him only as a novelist. These are generally among the upper classes and among literary people who are impatient with him for having neglected his art. If it had not been for his novels it is probable that his influence would not have been nearly so far-reaching. It is doubtful whether fashionable people would have taken any notice of his serious books at all. But the fact that he had written “Anna Karenina” and had made a great name, roused their curiosity and they read his indictments against society, governments, and the Church with some interest, and many have gradually come under his spell.
It was Tolstoy’s profound sincerity and his warm heart that made people love him. They saw how passionate was his wish to make the world a better place, how he hated small, mean things, and worshiped goodness and truth. He had immense courage, and fame or the praise of men by the time he was middle-aged meant nothing to him. But he confesses that in his younger days he looked for and enjoyed success. His art had been a temptation to him, and that was one of the reasons why he would have nothing more to do with it.
Tolstoy was above all things a human being: indeed, it was his special characteristic. Being so, he was sometimes inconsistent and swayed by his moods and his likes and dislikes, which makes his critics say he did not practise his doctrine of love. He asked people to turn the other cheek and love their enemies, while he himself found it almost impossible to be agreeable to disagreeable people or to stupid people, and he never succeeded in tolerating those whom he considered responsible for the evils of our social system, rulers, politicians, and policemen.
When absorbed in thought he was forgetful and inconsiderate; he did not mean to be selfish, but hiswife’s sufferings and what people who lived with him had to put up with did not strike him. He was impetuous, especially in his younger days, and he was always making resolutions which he failed very often to carry out. But all great idealists must suffer from this; it is infinitely better than having no ideals at all and making no mistakes. If a man with Tolstoy’s ideals could carry them all out, he would be the perfect man, and Tolstoy was far from being that. But no one could be more humble or more ready to blame himself, and as he grew older he more and more succeeded in practising in his life what he preached to others.
Tolstoy believed in God, and in the spiritual element that is in all men and women and which all, he insisted, must cherish and try to increase.
He believed that all men are equal as Christ did, and that all are brothers, so there should be no such thing as rivalry among nations, and no wars. If a man is not bent on money-making, on stealing and grasping for himself and taking away from others, if he only desires to treat them as he wishes they would treat himself, then will force become unnecessary. This idea may also be applied to States, for wars arise out of their jealousies and rivalry, in the search after power and wealth.
Tolstoy saw that much wickedness and misery came out of poverty, and a great deal through riches: one is often the cause of the other, and the unequal distribution of wealth is one of the greatest problems of our civilization.
But Tolstoy says, could the meaning of renunciation, of giving up to others, be really understood, the battle would be won, and the need of force would not exist. The only crime is for man to act inhumanly to man. A change of heart is what Tolstoy pleads for, and every man and woman, he says, can do something to help, by example and having a purpose in life. “For life,” he says in a letter to his son, “is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer at times a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal affairs.”
On seeing the terrible sight of capital punishment in France, Tolstoy wrote these striking words:
When I saw the head separate from the body and how they both jumped into the box at the same moment, I understood not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed, and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad, and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do and is not progress, but is my heart and I.
Who is to be the judge of what is right or wrong? asks Tolstoy, and answers, “A man’s own soul.” Aman, he says, must not fear to stand alone. Now the fear of standing alone is not always cowardice; often a man has too little confidence in himself. In answer to the promptings of his heart or conscience he will say, “Perhaps I am wrong: after all, the majority think differently from what I do; they are probably right, for what am I?” But it is very seldom that a man’s conscience will lead him astray, and if he feels that a thing is bad or cruel, he should not stifle or ignore the instinct, but, on the contrary, trust and believe in it, for it is a divine thing created in man for his own safeguarding to direct and help him through the difficult ways of life.
Tolstoy had much in common with W. L. Garrison, whom he greatly admired, and wrote a preface to a Life of him written by a Russian. For both recognized no authority but a man’s own heart and conscience, both set themselves to the task of rousing people to a better understanding by moral persuasion, both detested force.
It is easy to say that Tolstoy was vague, unpractical, and even absurd in the things he taught. Some people think he was quite mistaken; those who honestly believe in force and government by a few privileged people must naturally think so. Tolstoy was very extreme, but what he did was to give people a higher, more spiritual ideal, to show them that life may be a noble thing.
Tolstoy realized as he grew older that we cannotbe perfect all at once. Therefore he says, if you cannot love another as yourself, go as far as you can in that direction; if you cannot live in complete simplicity, live rather more simply, and so on.
By degrees we may be able to get somewhere nearer Tolstoy’s ideals, especially if we believe that we are naturally good, and not, as many of us have been taught, “by nature born in sin and the children of wrath.”
D. P.
Since this was written a great change has come about in Russia, which may affect the whole of civilized Europe.
The People of Russia—the Workers—have risen against their rulers, and deposed the Czar and his advisers.
It is early days yet to say what the final outcome of the Revolution will be; but the upheaval is a step toward freedom, and behind it the spirit of Tolstoy moves. He, above all others, helped to sow the seed of the Russian Revolution, and maybe of other revolutions yet to come. What joy and thankfulness would have filled his great heart could he have seen the germination of this seed—the downfall of Czarism and the dawning of freedom for the People of Russia!
BOOKS TO READ
The Life and Martyrdom of Girolamo Savonarola, by R. R. Madden.
Savonarola and His Times, by Villari.
Romola, by George Eliot.
William the Silent, by F. Harrison.
The Rise of the Dutch Republic, by Motley.
Life of Tycho Brahe, by J. L. E. Dreyer.
Life of Tycho Brahe, by F. R. Friis.
Cervantes, by J. Fitzmaurice Kelly.
Life of Giordano Bruno, by J. Lewis McIntyre.
Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan, by Miss J. Frith.
Life of Hugo Grotius, by Charles Butler.
Seven Great Statesmen (Grotius), by A. D. White.
Voltaire, by John Morley.
Life of Voltaire, by S. G. Tallantyre.
Essay on Frederick the Great, by Macaulay.
Mazzini, by Bolton King.
The Story of My Life, by Hans Andersen.
Life of W. L. Garrison, by W. P. and F. J. Garrison.
The Moral Crusader, a biographical essay on Garrison, by Goldwin Smith.
H. D. Thoreau, by F. B. Sanborn.
Life of Thoreau, by H. Salt.
Walden, by Thoreau.
The Life of Tolstoy, by Aylmer Maude.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, by Count Ilya Tolstoy.
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, by Tolstoy.
STANDARD CYCLOPÆDIAS FOR YOUNG OR OLDCHAMPLIN’SYoung Folks’ CyclopædiasBy JOHN D. CHAMPLINLate Associate Editor of the American Cyclopædia
Bound in substantial red buckram. Each volume complete in itself and sold separately. 12mo, $3.00 per volume, net.
COMMON THINGSNew, Enlarged Edition, 850 pp. Profusely Illustrated
“A book which will be of permanent value to any boy or girl to whom it may be given, and which fills a place in the juvenile library, never, so far as I know, supplied before.”—Susan Coolidge.
PERSONS AND PLACESNew, Up-to-Date Edition, 985 pp. Over 375 Illustrations
“We know copies of the work to which their young owners turn instantly for information upon every theme about which they have questions to ask. More than this, we know that some of these copies are read daily, as well as consulted; that their owners turn the leaves as they might those of a fairy book, reading intently articles of which they had not thought before seeing them, and treating the book simply as one capable of furnishing the rarest entertainment in exhaustless quantities.”—N. Y. Evening Post.
LITERATURE AND ART604 pp. 270 Illustrations
“Few poems, plays, novels, pictures, statues, or fictitious characters that children—or most of their parents—of our day are likely to inquire about will be missed here. Mr. Champlin’s judgment seems unusually sound.”—The Nation.
GAMES AND SPORTSByJohn D. ChamplinandArthur BostwickRevised Edition, 784 pp. 900 Illustrations
“Should form a part of every juvenile library, whether public or private.”—The Independent.
NATURAL HISTORYByJohn D. Champlin, assisted byFrederick A. Lucas725 pp. Over 800 Illustrations
“Here, in compact and attractive form, is valuable and reliable information on every phase of natural history, on every item of interest to the student. Invaluable to the teacher and school, and should be on every teacher’s desk for ready reference, and the children should be taught to go to this volume for information useful and interesting.”—Journal of Education.
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THE CHILDREN OF THE NEW FOREST
ByCaptain Marryat. Illustrated in color and line byE. Boyd Smith. Special library binding. $1.35 net.
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
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In every detail of illustration and manufacture these editions are made as if these books were being published for the first time for young folks. This attempt to put the juvenile classics in a form which on its looks will attract children, is meeting with widespread support from the public and librarians.
The text is not abridged.
Mr. Smith’s pictures need no commendation, but he seems to have treated these stories with unusual skill and sympathy.
HALF A HUNDRED HERO TALES
Of Ulysses and the Men of Old. By various authors, includingNathaniel Hawthorne. Illustrated. Special library binding. $1.35 net.
The Greek and Roman mythological heroes whose stories are here collected are not covered in any other one volume. The arrangement gives the interest of connected narrative to the account of the fall of Troy, the Æneas stories, and the Adventures of Ulysses.
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BOOKS FOR YOUNG FOLKS
MAGIC PICTURES OF THE LONG AGOByAnna Curtis ChandlerWith some forty illustrations. $1.30 net
These stories grew out of Miss Chandler’s popular Story Hours for Children at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Each recounts the youth and something of the later life of some striking character in art, history, or literature, and is made very vivid by reproductions of famous pictures, etc.
THE DOGS OF BOYTOWNByWalter A. DyerAuthor of “Pierrot, Dog of Belgium,” etc.Illustrated. $1.50 net
New York Sun: “It takes the cake—in this case, of course, a dog biscuit.... It is the most unusual book of its kind.... Dyer enters a new field for boys ... all boys will want to know about Dogs—their ways and habits, their histories and origins.... Threaded through this wonderful textbook on dogs is the story of adventures of two boys ... shows the reader where to find out about everything from bench shows and the care of puppies to fleas ... illustrated with photographs and excellent pen sketches....”
BLUE HERON COVEByFannie Lee McKinneyAuthor of “Nora-Square-Accounts.”Illustrated. $1.35 net
Tells how Blue Heron Island and its seafaring folks change “a little German countess in white satin” into “a real, authentic American girl.”
THE GUN BOOK ByThomas H. McKeeProfusely illustrated. $1.60 net
A book about guns for boys of all ages. The history is accurate; boys will remember the anecdotes; and the technical parts are sensibly adapted to show “just how it works.”
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ByALFRED BISHOP MASON
TOM STRONG, WASHINGTON’S SCOUTIllustrated. $1.30 net.
A story of adventure. The principal characters, a boy and a trapper, are in the Revolutionary army from the defeat at Brooklyn to the victory at Yorktown.
“The most important events of the Revolution and much general historical information are woven into this interesting and very well constructed story of Tom and a trapper, who serve their country bravely and well. Historical details are correctly given.”—American Library Association Booklet.
TOM STRONG, BOY-CAPTAINIllustrated. $1.30 net.
Tom Strong and a sturdy old trapper take part in such stirring events following the Revolution as the Indian raid with Crawford and a flat-boat voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, etc.
TOM STRONG, JUNIORIllustrated. $1.30 net.
The story of the son of Tom Strong in the young United States. Tom sees the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr; is in Washington during the presidency of Jefferson; is on board of the “Clermont” on its first trip, and serves in the United States Navy during the War of 1812.
TOM STRONG, THIRDIllustrated. $1.30 net.
Tom Strong, Junior’s son helps his father build the first railroad in the United States and then goes with Kit Carson on the Lewis and Clarke Expedition.
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COMPANION STORIES OF COUNTRY LIFE FOR BOYSBy CHARLES P. BURTON
THE BOYS OF BOB’S HILLIllustrated byGeorge A. Williams. 12mo. $1.35 net.
A lively story of a party of boys in a small New England town.
“A first-rate juvenile ... a real story for the live human boy—any boy will read it eagerly to the end ... quite thrilling adventures.”—Chicago Record-Herald.
THE BOB’S CAVE BOYSIllustrated byVictor Perard. $1.35 net.
“It would be hard to find anything better in the literature of New England boy life. Healthy, red-blooded, human boys, full of fun, into trouble and out again, but frank, honest, and clean.”—The Congregationalist.
THE BOB’S HILL BRAVESIllustrated byH. S. DeLay. 12mo. $1.35 net.
The “Bob’s Hill” band spend a vacation in Illinois, where they play at being Indians, hear thrilling tales of real Indians, and learn much frontier history. A history of especial interest to “Boy Scouts.”
“Merry youngsters. Capital. Thrilling tales of the red men and explorers. These healthy red-blooded, New England boys.”—Philadelphia Press.
THE BOY SCOUTS OF BOB’S HILLIllustrated byGordon Grant. 12mo. $1.35 net.
The “Bob’s Hill” band organizes a Boy Scouts band and have many adventures. Mr. Burton brings in tales told around a camp-fire of La Salle, Joliet, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Northwestern Reservation.
CAMP BOB’S HILLIllustrated byGordon Grant. $1.35 net.
A tale of Boy Scouts on their summer vacation.
THE RAVEN PATROL OF BOB’S HILLIllustrated byGordon Grant. $1.35 net.
The account of a camping trip of the Raven Patrol of the Boy Scouts to the Massachusetts coast, with much real boy fun and wholesome adventure.
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THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE FOR YOUNG FOLKSCompiled byBurton E. Stevenson,Editor of “The Home Book of Verse.”With cover, and illustrations in color and black and white by WILLY POGANY. Over 500 pages, large 12mo. $2.25 net.
Not a rambling, haphazard collection but a vade-mecum for youth from the ages of six or seven to sixteen or seventeen. It opens with Nursery Rhymes and lullabies, progresses through child rhymes and jingles to more mature nonsense verse; then come fairy verses and Christmas poems; then nature verse and favorite rhymed stories; then through the trumpet and drum period (where an attempt is made to teach true patriotism) to the final appeal of “Life Lessons” and “A Garland of Gold” (the great poems for all ages).
This arrangement secures sequence of sentiment and a sort of cumulative appeal. Nearly all the children’s classics are included, and along with them a body of verse not so well known but almost equally deserving. There are many real “finds,” most of which have never before appeared in any anthology.
Mr. Stevenson has banished doleful and pessimistic verse, and has dwelt on hope, courage, cheerfulness and helpfulness. The book should serve, too, as an introduction to the greater poems, informing taste for them and appreciation of them, against the time when the boy or girl, grown into youth and maiden, is ready to swim out into the full current of English poetry.
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