Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/35

Biography to a friend on October 9th, 1862, he says: "I have been married a fortnight, and I am a happy, a new, an altogether new man. My wife regularly looks after the cash and the accounts, and I have the bees, the sheep, a new garden, and the vines on my hands. Everything goes on pretty well, though of course it is not ideally perfect. My wife is no doll. She is of real help to me." His happiness is so great that it strikes him as being unnatural, but he consoles himself with the reflection that love becomes purer and stronger beneath the threats of despair! On another occasion, however, he admits, without reserve, that he is perfectly happy in his married life. He has discovered that Fanny is not only a loving wife but an excellent mother, and a helper even in his literary work. The advent of children of his own gave him an opportunity of thoroughly applying his pedagogic theories to the great problem of their education. Playthings were banished from the nursery, but the children were allowed the utmost liberty, being never chastised corporally, and brought up as closely as possible beneath the eyes of their parents. Assuming that nowhere was the independence of children so liberally provided for as in England, Tolstoi committed his own children, between the age of three and nine, to the care of an English governess. The young people were strictly forbidden never to command the servants, but to say "if you please" for everything they wanted, their parents setting them the example in this respect. The first symptom of lying was severely repressed by confining the offender to his room or putting him into Coventry, but the xxvii.