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he has told us has been liable to the failings of all
autobiography. He has spoken of his life as it looks to himself.
But Oliver Wendell Holmes says somewhere that when we say
there are two people conversing there are really six. There is
A. as he appears to self, A. as he appears to B, A. as he
appears to God, and the same with B. Tolstoi has given the
first aspect; the second is the one we must take. With our
many burning social questions to-day, it is of more importance
to us to know what such a man as Tolstoi has done and is
doing to bring about their solution, than to be familiar with
the characters in “Anna Karenina,” and others of his novels.
Moreover, I heard from some personal friends of the Count,
that his descriptions of his “wild oats” are very highly
coloured. To those who knew him, he belonged certainly to a
fast set, but on his personal character there was no stain. As
for the third aspect mentioned by Holmes, we must wait awhile
for that, if we are ever able to grasp it.
Tolstoi grew up without the knowledge of a mother’s love;
she died when he was eighteen months old (he was born in
1828, August 28, old style); and his father left his family,
which was a large one, when the little Lyeff Nikolaievitch
was nine years old. So it happened that much of his early
education was in the hands of relatives, of whom one, at least, is
described as hardly fitted to guide a youth’s first steps in the
paths of manly virtue. In his home on his ancestral estate of
Jasnaja Poljana, in the province of Tula, he was under the
care of both a French and a German tutor, the former of
whom remained in the family until, at the age of fifteen, the
young Count entered the University of Kasan. For three years
he studied philology, history, and Russian literature. But he
soon lost faith in that “temple of wisdom,” to which
Puschkin’s words were thoroughly applicable: “As everything
in Russia is purchasable, so examinations and degrees of
learning also are a merchandise with the professors.”
Characteristic both of the state of things at the university and the
views and tendencies of the young Count, is his description of
the teaching given there. “History,” he said, “is nothing
but a collection of fables and details often meaningless or
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