For the best part of the nineteenth century Russia was intellectually divided between two hostile camps—the ‘Westernizers’ and the ‘Slavophils.’ Had Russia a particular mission of her own, or was she to follow the rest of Europe? The Slavophils stood for a national culture : they believed that Russia, with her profound religious sense, might bring together the scattered elements of mankind into an inner organic union. The Westernizers, on the other hand, were all for cosmopolitan eclecticism; some looking for salvation to a close co-operation with the Catholic West; others—the radicals—inclining to the scientific, liberal and socialistic ideas, then becoming prevalent in Europe.

From the early thirties of last century to the sixties both schools were under the influence of second-rate philosophers, mostly French and German. Spencer, Stuart Mill, and Comte did not influence Russian thought until later on. These theories, imported from abroad and followed with great enthusiasm, did not produce a single original thinker. For the last century Russia can only boast of one really great philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. His was a creative mind. A great scholar, a profound thinker, one of the most delicate of Russian poets, Soloviev had no equal among his contemporaries. Apart from him all Russian philosophic and social thought found expression in fiction.

It was into this welter of religious, scientific, and political argument that Leo Tolstoy was born in August, 1828. The age in which he was born and ripened into manhood, and which he ultimately influenced so profoundly with his own writings, was not only an age of ardent quest for truth in all spheres of human activity, but—for Russia especially—one of great passions and cruel strife.

Madame Blavatsky, purple-lilac (I thought her colour that of a certain type of stout female foreigner, red and white blended into violet, but as her most vivid chronicler insists on her livid earth-grey skin, it must have been the purple-lilac of wrath) sat on the great sofa in the great drawing room in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. Her unwieldy girth obscured her colossal height. She wore a black sacque, not her familiar red flannel wrapper. She smoked. Her small boneless hands, her many rings, her pale turquoise eyes—how they have been described, how they have cheated, flashed, deceived. I would call her the Thérèse Humbert of Theosophy if Theosophy contained as much as the empty safe of Madame Humbert. She was attacking Frederick Myers, the Zelator of the Phantasms of the living, as I came in : no doubt the S. P. R.’s adverse report, though not yet published, was known to her. She was afraid and indignant. Her hostess, who had patted and fed so many lions, so many lambs, in Paris and in London, who had figured so romantically in Flaubert’s life, so unforgettably in Mérimée’s reminiscences, could not shield her son-in-law from the outraged Priestess of Isis. She could not, as once in the Place Vendôme, decapitate all Oscar Wilde’s stories with hospitable interruptions : Encore un biscuit, chère Princesse! Encore un verre d’orgeat, chère Princesse! Madame Blavatsky was no mere Danubian (no Nubian even like Anatole France’s minuscule adorer), and she cried out: ‘Mr. Myers, if you had not made me so angry I would cause all the bells in this house to ring’ (we all held our breaths —would she relent?), ‘but I will not do so.’

It was the twenty-ninth of January, 1577. The city of Salamanca, that Athens of sixteenth century Spain, showed no signs of unwonted animation. The students of its famous University prepared to attend their classes apparently unconscious of any untoward happening. Nevertheless an historic scene was about to be enacted in their midst. One of their professors, that valiant fighter, Fray Luis de Leon, was about to resume among them his interesting and instructive lectures after an interruption of five years. The ignorance of some, the malice of others, the impetuosity of his own temperament, had condemned him to pass that period in a harsh prison. Now at length, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had given sentence, exculpatory, even honourable for the accused, establishing his innocence and putting an end to his confinement, as was the invariable custom of this Tribunal in its dealings with those who had been found blameless.

The throng of hearers who knew full well the passionate nature of our hero were in eager expectation of hearing from his lips either some virulent denunciation of his enemies, some biting allusions to their attacks, or at least a lively, animated and at the same time harrowing exposition of the sufferings he had been compelled to undergo. But what was not their astonishment when their revered professor opened his lecture in these memorable terms: Dicebamus hesterna die; as we were saying yesterday.... just as if the five years spent in prison had been completely blotted out from his memory, leaving not the faintest trace of bitterness against the authors of his punishment, This lofty and noble attitude won for him the respect and admiration of his contemporaries whilst bringing into relief his ardent and impetuous, withal generous and magnanimous disposition.

This sketch of C— H— is written against my death. Ever since God took him down from his cross there has murmured in my conscience the phrase, ‘You must tell the world of him before you die.’ To leave his story untold would be to meet death with unpaid debts. To tell his story will be a royal preparation to go where he went even if in my cowardice, I cannot follow his hero way of going.

His father, who held high office in his native town of M------, thought to prepare him for citizenship of England by sending him to Oxford. I am not sure he ever won, or even sought to win, academic honours. It was Oxford of the playing fields and playing honours that made him captive. Perhaps with fine medieval chivalry he could not brook the sacrilege of a liberal education used as a mere preparation for a business career. An instinct, the very soul of scholarship, forbade him to make the higher serve the lower even at the risk of losing kindred or friends.

It was in the playing fields, where honour, and not gain, is youth’s only prize that C— H— learned to follow his leader, Jesus Christ. Perhaps it befell him as it befell the youth Edmund—who in these same playing fields of Oxford saw Jesus of Nazareth as a fair, smiling boy! Be that as it may, when C— H— heard the call of Christ beckoning him out of the playing fields of Oxford and of life into the Church and into the cloister he did not lag in following his leader.

Not in the Pictures from Italy, published in 1846 after the first long visit to that country, is the true perception of monasticism revealed. In the presence of ceremonial activities the comic spirit possessed Dickens. Ludicrous comparisons invaded his mind when he gazed upon ecclesiastical or civil solemnities. The constitutional irreverence of the newspaper reporter could not be subdued—not even in Rome itself. Dickens noted that the Pope had ‘a pleasant and venerable face,’ but the carrying of his Holiness in a chair round St. Peter’s on a great occasion after High Mass had ‘nothing solemn or effective in it; and certainly much that was droll and tawdry.’ The ‘whole ceremony’ indeed left no other impression ; ‘except the raising of the Host, when every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the ground; which had a fine effect.’

Dickens, of course, poked fun at the regular clergy —as good men have done in every age—and he found them everywhere in Italy in the forties. Dislike of the Jesuits is not concealed. The sons of St. Ignatius are ‘stealthy,’ they ‘creep in and out’ of St. Peter’s; in Milan they were observed in the streets ‘slinking noiselessly about in pairs.’ (But how did Dickens know they were Jesuits? Did the ‘velvet tread’ of popular repute give them away? Is the footgear of the Jesuit really unique? Father Thurston might clear up the mystery).