The Forged Coupon | Page 9

by the vexations and failures
attending his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to
the verge of suicide.
"The disputes over arbitration had become so painful to me, the
schoolwork so vague, my doubts arising from the wish to teach others,
while dissembling my own ignorance of what should be taught, were so
heartrending that I fell ill. I might then have reached the despair to
which I all but succumbed fifteen years later, if there had not been a
side of life as yet unknown to me which promised me salvation: this
was family life" ("My Confession").
In a word, his marriage with Mademoiselle Sophie Andreevna Bers
(daughter of Dr. Bers of Moscow) was consummated in the autumn of
1862--after a somewhat protracted courtship, owing to her extreme
youth--and Tolstoy entered upon a period of happiness and mental
peace such as he had never known. His letters of this period to
Countess A. A. Tolstoy, his friend Fet, and others, ring with enraptured
allusions to his new-found joy. Lassitude and indecision, mysticism
and altruism, all were swept aside by the impetus of triumphant love
and of all-sufficing conjugal happiness. When in June of the following
year a child was born, and the young wife, her features suffused with "a
supernatural beauty" lay trying to smile at the husband who knelt
sobbing beside her, Tolstoy must have realised that for once his
prophetic intuition had been unequal to its task. If his imagination
could have conceived in prenuptial days what depths of emotion might
be wakened by fatherhood, he would not have treated the birth of
Masha's first child in "Conjugal Happiness" as a trivial material event,

in no way affecting the mutual relations of the disillusioned pair. He
would have understood that at this supreme crisis, rather than in the
vernal hour of love's avowal, the heart is illumined with a joy which is
fated "never to return."
The parting of the ways, so soon reached by Serge and Masha, was in
fact delayed in Tolstoy's own life by his wife's intelligent assistance in
his literary work as an untiring amanuensis, and in the mutual anxieties
and pleasures attending the care of a large family of young children.
Wider horizons opened to his mental vision, his whole being was
quickened and invigorated. "War and Peace," "Anna Karenina," all the
splendid fruit of the teeming years following upon his marriage, bear
witness to the stimulus which his genius had received. His dawning
recognition of the power and extent of female influence appears
incidentally in the sketches of high society in those two masterpieces as
well as in the eloquent closing passages of "What then must we do?"
(1886). Having affirmed that "it is women who form public opinion,
and in our day women are particularly powerful," he finally draws a
picture of the ideal wife who shall urge her husband and train her
children to self-sacrifice. "Such women rule men and are their guiding
stars. O women--mothers! The salvation of the world lies in your
hands!" In that appeal to the mothers of the world there lurks a protest
which in later writings developed into overwhelming condemnation.
True, he chose motherhood for the type of self-sacrificing love in the
treatise "On Life," which appeared soon after "What then must we do?"
but maternal love, as exemplified in his own home and elsewhere,
appeared to him as a noble instinct perversely directed.
The roots of maternal love are sunk deep in conservatism. The child's
physical well-being is the first essential in the mother's eyes--the
growth of a vigorous body by which a vigorous mind may be fitly
tenanted--and this form of materialism which Tolstoy as a father
accepted, Tolstoy as idealist condemned; while the penury he courted
as a lightening of his soul's burden was averted by the strenuous
exertions of his wife. So a rift grew without blame attaching to either,
and Tolstoy henceforward wandered solitary in spirit through a
wilderness of thought, seeking rest and finding none, coming perilously

near to suicide before he reached haven.
To many it will seem that the finest outcome of that period of mental
groping, internal struggle, and contending with current ideas, lies in the
above-mentioned "What then must we do?" Certain it is that no human
document ever revealed the soul of its author with greater sincerity. Not
for its practical suggestions, but for its impassioned humanity, its
infectious altruism, "What then must we do?" takes its rank among the
world's few living books. It marks that stage of Tolstoy's evolution
when he made successive essays in practical philanthropy which filled
him with discouragement, yet were "of use to his soul" in teaching him
how far below the surface lie the seeds of human misery. The slums of
Moscow, crowded with beings sunk beyond