The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-10-20
COUNT TOLST0|, OR A LIFE THAT FAILED Exhibition Was Gallery of
 Frustrated Hopes MISSION OF TOLSTOI Greatest Tragedy in Whole History of Genius, and One With the
 Finest Part-Did He
 Die Victorious?


 Richard Whiteing in the London Clarion. l wonder how many of my readers missed the Tostoi exhibition in Bond
 street. It was worth seeing, though it was a far cry from Earl's Court and Olympia to those parts of the town where the people live who think because they have 10 think to live. Russian attend-
 ants took you round as they would have
 taken a friend, and talked as though
 from personal knowledge of the master
 and his work leading you from photo graph to photograph quite out of keeping
 one with another. For a certain disson-
 anee was the note of all of it, the dis |sonanee between the life the great teach
 CT wanted to lead, the life he only half
 succeeded in leading. and the sense of
 failure that killed him at last for he really died as we all know, of running
 away from home. There came a moment unfortunately 1t came in his old age
 when he had to jump up from a sick bed and just bolt for it, where he did not exactly know. As it turned out, it
 was into the fogs and the mists and the
 snows of the Russian winter, until finally he was brought up in a little railway
 station where in sort of worst inns best room, he gave up the ghost.
 He died of being baulked of the life of his choice. What he wanted to do was to cut himself off entirely from the vices and the tempetations of modern civiliza- tion, and in very enlarged sense of the term and a very noble sense of it. to get back to the land of homely virtues and generous ideals. The land. in the sense of the primitive life that best
 thrives on it, he never was able fully
 to reach. The exhibition was a sort of
 gallery of frustrate hopes. One saw the tall. magnificent figure of the greatest thinker of the age in his rustic garb, trying to be a working man for all he was worth. and side by side with this, the same subject in the quality of grand seigneur, and in his family setting of
 members of the high Russian aristocracy, all very decidedly people about town" So, even when the noble peasant puts on his big boots and slips away to his ploughing and his wood-chopping in search of simplicity of life, he still seems like the fast man of the song who, amid his widest dissipations, always came home to tea At that meal or at luncheon
 or dinner there he is, with all the family about him, the Countess and whole cluster of progeny, most of them, it is to be feared, sorry for daddy as a crank. We had the abundant service of the household of a great noble. the Countess
 drawing-room, even the masters study, carefully furnished indeed for plainness of living, yet for all that betraying opu- lence in costly trifles that had strayed into it from other parts of the premises. If in one picture there was the fine figure with the devoted daughter by his side as typist and amanuensis in another we had private or public theatricals on a | gigantic scale, and an attempt to illus | trate the splendor of completeness in the mounting of one of his plays.
 The Countess notoriously was an af- l fectionate and motherly helpmeet rather than a disciple. She loved him. and she put up with him, but she must have re- garded the doctrines that were dearest l to his heart as not much more than un- accountable eccentricities which it was her business to make as harmless as possible. Here and there when he Is all alone, he seems to win for brief space to his chosen part, and we may if we like imagine him as the recluse in his cell. But all too soon we find him talk ing horse exercise with a servant at call, or driving in an exceedingly well-ap- pointed turnout. In this way he was as thes man of the well-known story who could never escape from his oWn shadow, or at any rate from the shadow of an-
 
 him. Sometimes that shadow is projected
 by family physician in constant at tendance as part of the state of the noble household, sometimes it takes the form of a distinguished friend who has come to look in, as though at something that no fellow in his senses can be ex- pected to understand If certain hooks
 and corners of the shrubbery attest the hermit in the solitudes of nature, every clearance of it discloses a perspective Of
 the inevitable family mansion that dis pels the Illusion. At heart a saviour of society, circumstances reduced him 10 the appearance of mere nobeman with
 a whm. The composition which had be- gun as a Moses the Mount ended as
 a Duke of Portland at Welbeck.
 Yet there can be no doubt that deep down in him, his passion for holy liv- ing was Gle very rigour of the game. Religion, he said. bitterly, will soon be-
 come superfluity. like the human ap- penalty that has outworn it's use His
 sincerity was attested by the fact that
 the courts held him incapable of man. aging his affaiEs and gave the Countess control of the property. He held, more or less with all the great souls of all
 time, that man wants but little here be- low. and that the happiness which Is his
 beings end and aim must come to him
 only through the happiness he gives to
 others. He was profoundly suspicious Of the benefit of mere intellectual labor.
 Man, he thought, Is by nature, and ever will be, primarily a worker with hiJ hands. Health and sanity are his abund- ant reward for the sweat of his brow It is better for ones own sake, and for the sake of all concerned. to spend your self in useful labor with plough or spade than to achieve the highest speculations in philosophy The speculations may be
 all wrong the manual duty that lies
 nearest to you can hardly fall to be right Never trouble to teach the peasant how not to sleep on the ground. but learn to sleep there yourself. Marcus Aurelius
 he said. did that and what was good enough for him ought to be good enough for anybody. So one visitor found
 'To,stoi a sort of prisoner in his wife's
 dra wing-room, and retiring wistfuly to a corner of it to a wofls-beach where he put in q forlorn half-hour In cobbling shoes.
 His misfortune 1t was, rather than 1 his fault. that he could not make his ! work of self salvation thorough The dream and the business were for ever | at odds and there was no bringing them | into harmony. It was as though a Simeon | Sty1tes had knocked off at to obey the summons of dinner-bell. There must
 always have been something going for
 ward in the noblemans mansion to re-