Page:The American Review of Reviews - Volume 24.djvu/54

 ing together in the hot air, and in the exhalations of their own bodies. The offer was a tempting one, and only fear of intrusion led me to refuse.

In Tolstoy's way of composition there is nothing very remarkable except his industry and the extraordinary care which he lavishes upon the correction and revision of his manuscripts. A corrected proof is often as difficult for the printer as the original manuscript, and the manuscript, even after copying and recopying innumerable times—a work which is performed by members of his family—is quite unintelligible at first glance. But in spite of all this elaboration, Tolstoy's style has none of the finish and limpidity of Turgenieffs. Letters and articles for the foreign press prohibited by the censor in Russia are reproduced by the cyclostyle process in violet ink. The Countess Tolstoy is his chief—not always an appreciative—critic. Though Tolstoy is rather impatient of objections against his teachings on general grounds, he is indulgent to criticism in detail, and he regards indiscriminate admiration with distrust. It is said that on one occasion when told of the raptures of critics over "Master and Man," he asked, "Have I written anything very stupid?" The remark is too epigrammatic to be genuine. But that the story should be told is significant of Tolstoy's deep distrust of the general tendencies of criticism in art and in life.

II.—TOLSTOY ON WAR AND PEACE.

It was inevitable that any one who visited Count Tolstoy in the winter of 1890 should hear his opinions of war and peace in general, and on the coming conference at The Hague in particular. The South African trouble had not then assumed an acute form, and the one great subject of interest in western Europe was the proposal of the Czar. In Russia, the interest was hardly as keen, for the students riots overshadowed everything, and the Finnish trouble was growing bigger and bigger every day. But Tolstoy's interest, always acute in such matters, was greatly stimulated by appeals for his opinion from England and the Continent. At the time of my second visit, he had just completed a long letter in reply to a request for advice from some members of the Swedish Parliament. It was the first of a series of letters to societies and individuals, in all of which he condemned the Czar's proposals emphatically, and prophesied their failure. His Swedish correspondents had made, among others, what seemed an excellent practical suggestion,— that all persons who refused on conscientious grounds to undergo military training should pay their debt to the state by performing an equivalent amount of useful work. But the idea, which appealed to Tolstoy at first on its merits, he rejected unhesitatingly. No conference called together by governments as they existed could do anything to abolish war or lessen its evils, he declared; and he read his letter aloud in Russian in his peculiar peasant's voice, punctuating every sentence with the words, "You understand?" When he had concluded, he said, emphatically: "That is what I think of the Emperor's conference! " Adding, angrily: "It is all baseness and hypocrisy—nothing more." These were his arguments:

The first reason why governments cannot and will not abolish war is that armies and war are not accidental evils, but are symptoms and essential parts of government as it exists itself. When I say, therefore, that the conference is hypocritical, I do not mean that it is essentially so. But when you declare your intention to do something which cannot be done without changing your whole life, and when you do not intend to change your whole life, you must be a hypocrite. Thus the Czar's proposal is a hypocritical proposal, and its acceptance by other nations is a hypocritical acceptance, without any faith in its success.

You see that the governments are proposing merely to conceal the symptoms of their own disease by diminishing the opportunities for war. By such means they think to turn the minds of people from the true remedy, which is only to be found in their own consciences. Yet they cannot succeed even in this attempt. A conference summoned by governments cannot in any way lessen the dangers of war or even diminish its evils. Because there can be no trust between two armed men who imagine that their interests are in conflict. They cannot agree to limit their armaments, localise they have no faith in one another's promises. If they had faith in one another's promises, they would need no armies at all. And if it is not necessary to have a million men to decide a quarrel, why is it necessary to have half a million? Why not a quarter of a million? And if they really can decide to equalize their forces at a quarter of a million, why not at ten or one? The reason is that they do not trust one another. At the siege of Sebastopol, Prince Urusov, seeing that one of the bastions had been taken and retaken several times, and that its ultimate retention rested merely on chance, proposed to the general in command that the opposing forces should select an officer to play chess for the possession of the bastion. Of course, his proposal was laughed at. Because the commander knew that while each might consent to play chess on the chance of getting the bastion without any trouble, there was nothing to prevent the loser making a fresh attempt to capture it by force of arms. The reason why killing men instead of playing chess was adopted as a means of solving disputes was that it was the ultima ratio; and when you have killed sufficient men, your enemy must keep terms with you. But making war with limited armies is not the ultima ratio, and there is nothing to prevent the beaten side raising another army to continue the killing. It is quite true that a peace conference may lay down rules against this. But since every nation that goes to war justifies itself on the ground that its enemy has not kept faith, no nation in time of