Thus the Alps have been surveyed as no other range of mountains in the world has been surveyed, and a public has been provided to take an interest in Alpine science, which but for them would scarcely have come into being. The same thing will happen in Spitzbergen if summer travellers can be persuaded to frequent it. A portion of Arctic land will be minutely studied and exactly surveyed, its changes watched and recorded from year to year, its phenomena patiently investigated, and its record maintained. The interior of Spitzbergen is an almost unknown region. It is now to be brought within ten days of London, and opened for investigation to any person with a six weeks' holiday at command. The glaciers are unmapped, the peaks unclimbed, the valleys, for the most part, untraversed, the ice-sheet absolutely unexplored. Come, then, all ye "who live in houses and go to offices," and taste the delights of the unknown! Your chance is brief, for in a few years the hills of Spitzbergen will be even as the Alps, where there is no more a virgin peak for a man to conquer. In the remainder of this chapter I propose to indicate some of the work that awaits the man of adventure, and how he should be equipped to undertake it. The question of equipment shall be considered first. the army and navy stores, and doubtless elsewhere. It pays to carry a rifle and a few cartridges, for reindeer can generally be procured; but the rifle should not be heavier than can be helped. A Paradox is the best kind to take. A change of foot-gear is necessary, for boots and stockings will be wet through daily. A piece of thin rubbersheeting should form part of each man's pack; it will serve to keep the sleepingbag dry on the march, and for floor to the tent in camp. For food you must carry biscuits, concentrated soups and stews, brick-tea, and the like. When reindeer are not likely to be forthcoming, suitable ration cartridges must be taken, such as those manufactured by the Bovril Company; they are filling, if not exactly appetizing. No good light cooking apparatus exists. The best way is to carry an aluminium saucepan, and to boil it by burning beneath it pure spirits of wine in a small open pan or tray about three inches wide. If this pan be put on the bottom of an empty biscuit tin with some stones round it to support the saucepan, the tin will keep off the wind, and form a more efficient cooking apparatus than the bulky and cumbersome affairs made for travellers by people who have never been away from a town. With such an equipment as this it will be easy to make expeditions for four or five days' duration from the coast, where the party should have a whale-boat more elaborately stored with comforts. With this boat they can row or sail from one base to another, and the whole western part of the island, and, in favorable seasons, much of the north, will be accessible to them. From "The First Crossing of Spitzbergen." By A traveller who would explore the interior of Spitzbergen and climb its mountains must be prepared to carry all his equipment on his own back, or the backs of other members of his party. Hence everything taken must be as light as possible. Thin Willesden drill "Mummery" tents are best, with the ice-axes used for tent-poles. There should be one of these tents for every two, or at the outside three members of the party. For sleeping bags the Norwegian reindeer-skin sacks, though most comfortable, are far too heavy and bulky. The traveller must be content with bags made of eider-down quilt. One kilo of eider-down will suffice for Strange are the relations of the artist a bag. The down may be purchased and the thinker in this wonderful for about thirty kroner a kilo, through writer. With Tourgenieff the thinker Mr. Mack of Tromsö. It should be is latent, he is subjected to the artist; made up in England in a cover of thought is the emanation, the result of woollen sateen of a kind you can get at beauty. In Dostoyevsky, they coexist: TOLSTOI'S NEGATIONS. the thinker predominates, yet he does not expel the artist; he takes much space, he is cumbrous, he makes it difficult for the artist, yet the latter forces his way through the material piled together by the former, and with a single scene of sublime psychological reality enforces pages of philosophy. In Tolstoi, the artist and the thinker also coexist, but they are rivals; they never speak at the same time, they seldom endorse each other's words; as a matter of fact, they sometimes do not agree at all. And yet, it is always the artist who is right; the thinker raises his voice with an intrusive persistence, but the artist will not be outdone, and whenever he reappears in all the indisputable authority of his genius, his serene vision goes further, straighter, and higher than any philosophical lucubrations of the thinker. The literary figure of the great novelist is well known; it is perhaps the first example in the history of universal literature of a writer who during his life has attained to the fullest possible degree of fame, for he is the first great writer to whom it has been given to avail himself of all the means of diffusion offered by modern civilization. Whereas Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, had to wait centuries till they should be translated into all languages; till printing should multiply them to infinity; till the means of transportation should be so developed as to carry them into every corner of the world, Count Tolstoi had the luck of living in a time when just that very civilization which he so much reviles, grants him in the space of a few years the condensed result of centuries; his posthumous glory will not be greater than his popularity. Faithful to our programme we will not so much examine his talent and his ideas as their influence, and how far they have been accepted. Seldom has a writer's talent been so universally acknowledged as the talent of the author of "War and Peace." All parties, all schools, all generations, all nationalities, agree. Indisputable as life itself are his wonderful pictures of life; they are broad and varied as life; they are terrible as life, and as profound. No one has fathomed such secret springs of the human soul; no one has followed it so close to the threshold of earthly existence; no one has wit. such inexorable persistency of analysis hunted up the microbes of insincerity which contaminate the human conscience; no one has ransacked with such cruel serenity the yawning wounds opened by psychological vivisection. And every one who reads Tolstoi's books feels subjugated by this power, and yields to the omnipotency of that genius, which in the epic panoramas of his novels embraces armies, nations, countries, and which in a short tale of two peasants, where the repenting "master" transfuses his life into his frozen "servant," has embraced the whole of humanity, and in the narrow compass of a sledge, lost in a winter tempest and buried under the snow, has concentrated the universe and shown the gates of eternity. Such is the artist-with the greatest uniting power ever displayed by a novelist. But the thinker appears, and seems to make it his aim to undo the work of the artist. It is the most strik ing feature of Tolstoi's intellect, this contrast between the uniting power of his literature and the disintegration preached by his philosophy. The disintegration begins with his own person. The thinker detaches himself from the individual and becomes the analyzer, the judge, and the prosecutor of the artist. The author of "War and Peace" is condemned by the author of "My Religion." Art is declared a plaything unworthy of those who really care for the prosperity of their brethren. Does not the lower people ignore Poushkin, Gogol, Tourgenieff? Does it feel any necessity of knowing them? The upper classes must concentrate their activity only upon such things as bring an immediate benefit to the masses; all that does not aim at this is superfluous, and we must give up all superfluity. The thinker forces the artist to write fairytales for the peasants, and the artist is so beautiful in his universality, so unconscious of social distinctions in his picturing of the human soul, that these fairly-tales composed for peasants become favorites with every one. The thinker forces the artist to give up painting, to drop the brush, to pick up the pen, and to become a philosophical writer. At this point the spirit of disintegration passes from his person into his theories, and finally into the opinions of those who were so unanimous in their judgment of the artist. In a few words, Tolstoi's teachings may be summed up as follows: their basis is non-resistance to evil; their dogma, the perniciousness of civilization as the result of collectivity; their practical prescription, the dissolution of society to the benefit of the individual. We will not pause to consider the good side of his preaching which, in the main, can be reduced to a campaign against human insincerity in all its manifestations-the author pleads his cause well enough himself. We will rather follow up its defects, and even not so much the intrinsic defects of the teaching as the defective side of its influ ence. The real followers of Tolstoi, the regular "Tolstoi-ists," are not numerous; they are people worthy of all esteem for carrying out within the limits of possibility the prescription of abdicating superfluity, though the line is always somewhat hard to draw between that which is really necessary, and that which only seems so. The count himself, at his country-place, gives rather strange examples of practical application. The author of "Anna Karenina" plunges his hands into clay, and builds stoves which afterwards are rebuilt by regular stove builders. Every day he takes an hour of ploughing, after which exercise he enjoys the satisfaction of eating his dinner "in the sweat of his brow." Of all this, is it the plough and stoves the count considers necessary, or is it the dinner he intends with time to eliminate as superfluous? And yet this practical side, however ridiculous in its innocence, is the only positive element of the teaching; all the rest is negative, and just this negation which underlies the theory is the poisonous and yet attractive side of it, at least attractive for those who, themselves never having strained their energies in the cause of positive faith, feel glad to be absolved from any strivings by him who teaches that our ideal lies behind, and not before us. The relaxing of human energy, this is the corrupting element of the theory. Modern society as it has crystallized itself is declared wrong: therefore, all who had but a slight impulse of the sense of duty grasp at the theory as at a deliverance. Why should we work as long as the accomplishment of our best intentions depends upon a state of things which is wrong? All efforts of charity, all real enthusiasm, are undermined; nihilistic laughter greets the best striv ings; a man has founded a hospital, but the hospital depends upon the government, and governments are immoral,— consequently, the man is pitied as one who errs; another gives a sum for charitable institutions; if he were a real Christian, it is said, he ought to have given away everything-tais does not count. Here, we repeat, we do not judge the teaching, we simply state the results of its influence. People start from the point that, if measured by the Gospel, we are all insolvent debtors, and therefore those who make efforts to acquit themselves, at least of a portion of their debts, are ridiculed. The intellectual influence is no less relaxing than the moral; civilization is proclaimed pernicious, and the ignorant by the fact of his ignorance considers himself above all others. Authorities are undermined, all workers of human enlightenment dethroned, people who have never read a line of philosophy declare with profession of competency that there is but one philosopher in the world, and this is Count Tolstoi. The religious influence is still worse. Tolstoi constructs his teaching on a basis of scripture texts; he and his followers consider that they have the monopoly of the right comprehension or the Gospels, and thus people who never believed anything grasp at the Gospel, not in order to learn, but in order to establish the inferiority of those who believe, but cannot live up to its commands; on the basis of Christianity, a sect is aris ing which supplants charity and love growth, therefore future ages will work by criticism and scorn. And what is offered in all this as the positive beacon of hope? Tolstoi himself says he cannot foresee what will become of the world if all men follow his precepts; yet he asserts that our ideal lies "behind us;" this evidently means ages anterior to civilization. Only he does not determine the chronological moment; it is the age of iron or the age of stone? Or if he used the term in the sense of the age of the individual, will he say it was meant as the purity of childhood? Again, the moment is not determined. When does impurity begin? To be completely free from impurity, we must return to those days when we yet did not exist. And indeed, in the "Kreutzer Sonata," mankind is given advice which is equivalent to suicide. A theory, the principle of which is dissolution, could not but lead to death. at the extension, and not at the extinction of that which has been acquired by preceding ages. For the past exists as well as the future, and cannot be forced into non-existence. Count Tolstoi says that the lower people does not know Poushkin, and therefore he concludes Poushkins are useless. But he knows Poushkin, and he cannot force himself to forget him; and so long as he remembers he must want others to know him, for the moment they know him, they will want him. No, Count Tolstoi shall not impede the blossoming of the world; however powerful the thinker, he shall never make any one believe that the author of "War and Peace" is useless because unknown to the ignorant; the philosopher shall not force out the artist, and shall not prevent him from becoming, even in spite of himself, one of the greatest educators of the future generations; the repentant author will not be able to erase himself from the list of the benefactors of humanity, for the artist in him has embodied in beauty too many great ideas, and “beauty, or the incorporated ideal," says our philosopher, “is the better part of our real world, the one which not only exists, but is worthy of existence." From "Pictures of Russian History and Russian Dismemberment of society means retrograding of individuals; and where is the end of this gradual abdication? Shall we retrograde into the depth of centuries till we "return to earth"? Life is not possible without struggles; plants struggle and expel each other; society is the regulator of individual struggles. If society is wrong as it exists, this does not mean that it must be altogether destroyed or that the spirit of sociability is an element of nature which man must counter-check. How long would Count Tolstoi have to wait before individual self-improvement would suppress servitude? there would have been no servitude, he will answer, had humanity not shaped itself into societies. Maybe so, yet we cannot suppress the past, we have to work on the O Saints, dear Saints, so present, yet so given basis, we cannot start the world anew; servitude was a given fact, and once again, how long should we have had to wait for this given fact to die away? The world as it exists is also a fact, a living fact, not a dead sentence which can be erased and another substituted for it; and as it exists it lives, and nothing will arrest its further evolution on the basis of the past. The duty of the future is to regulate, not to suppress the continuation of the world's So Time has framed you with an aureole far! A GROUP OF SONNETS. I cannot touch you with my hand or trace The aspect of your strength, your faith, your grace; Between us lie the years,-the gulf, the But as one tracks the sunlight to the star, space To fret the beauty of its burning face, scar; More circle-rounded than your age fore- And join thee to that nobler, sturdier band Whose worship is not idle, fruitless, dumb. knew; No frailty now can quench that fire of soul! The things ye willed and did not, those ye And strive to pierce the gathering shadein vain. But lo, a torch! And now the brilliant train Is manifest. Who may the bearer be? Not great himself, he maketh greatness plain. Not clay nor wax nor perishable stock thou must When I reflect how small a space I fill The fancy overwhelms me, and deters Who lie before God's altar and are still. But then I think (for healthier moments come), This power of will, this natural force of hand, What do they mean, if working be not wise? Forbear to weigh thy work, O soul! Arise, to me? Mine is a lowly Muse. She cannot sing And break its power; but seeks with single eye To follow in the steps of Love her King, And hold a light for men to see Him by. TO A STRANGE TEACHER. Trouble me no more. The world is very wide And full of souls whose primal faith has fled. Go first to them; and leave one simple head, Wherein the earlier teachings still abide. Why seek to fill a mouth that has not cried, To clog satiety of bread with bread? At least I might give ear to you. But now, To dig new cisterns, till the elder fail? From Edward Craoroft Lefroy: His Life and Poems. By Wilfred Austin Gill. With a Critical Estimate of the Sonnets by the late John Addington Symonds. John Lane, Publisher. |