To complete his documentation on the subject dear to his heart, he went to Marseilles one day and visited eight State schools. As in Germany, he found an atmosphere of stifling discipline in the classrooms. The children's talent for duplicity was cultivated by over-harsh treatment, and their memories were developed at the expense of their intelligence by forcing them to learn their lessons by heart. They gave the visitor the right answers as long as he asked his questions on the history of France in the order they occurred in the textbook, but when he began to skip from one chapter to another they told him that Ilcnri IV had been slain by Julius Caesar. The orphanage he visited next was, to his mind, a prison for little children. "At the sound of the whistle," he wrote, "four-year-olds revolve around their benches like soldiers, raising and crossing their arms on command, and in strange, quavering voices, sing hymns to God and their benefactors."
And yet, in the streets, the personalities of the most ordinary people, their conversation and repartee, proved that they had all the wit they needed. "The French arc nearly all the things they believe they are: ingenious, intelligent, sociable, open-minded and, it is true, civilized. Look at a thirty-year-old town laborer: he can write a letter with fewer mistakes than the children in school can, sometimes without any at all; he has some notion of politics, history and modem geography. . . . Where has he learned it all?"15 The answer, for Tolstoy, was simple: the Frenchman did not get his education at school—where the instruction was preposterous—but in his life, reading the newspapers and novels (among others, those of Alexandre Dumas), going to museums and theaters and the cafes, and to the guinguettes (country inns where people went to dance). He estimated that twenty-five thousand souls passed daily through each of the two huge cafes-concerts of Marseilles, where one could drink for ten sous. That made fifty thousand a day, watching comic sketches, listening to poems and songs. . . . There were two hundred and fifty thousand people in the city and so one- fifth of the entire population, according to Tolstoy, could be said to l>c informed every day "as the Greeks and Romans were in their amphitheaters." He called this "spontaneous education," the kind that would "put compulsory schooling out of business." True, he could hardly open a cafe-concert at Yasnaya Polyana, but there, as here, education must be a joyful pursuit. On October 13 (25) he wrote in his diary: "School is not at school, but in the newspapers and cafds."
Toward mid-December, feeling that his pedagogical research was still incomplete, he went to Italy: Florence, Livomo, Naples, Pompeii— where he came unawares upon "an image of Antiquity"—and Rome, where he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the ruins and the treasures in the museums; but what he was really in search of as he journeyed from one town to another was man, not works of art. One day at the top of the Pincio, the hill with the finest view of the city, he heard a little boy crying for a toy. Suddenly the Villa Medici, the gardens and far-off ruins vanished. The only thing that existed and mattered in the world was the unknown child with the shrill voice. Thirty- eight years later, thinking back to Rome, it was not the celebrated monuments that came into his mind, but a dirty, tear-stained little face with eyes as black as olives and a scrcaming mouth: Date mi un baloccol"ie
In less than two months he had exhausted Italy's stores of tourist and academic attractions and returned to Hyfcrcs. At the beginning of February' 1861 he went to Paris, which had left such an unpleasant taste in his mouth because of its women of easy virtue and its guillotine. In the capital he met Turgenev again, and was delighted with him, bought quantities of books on education, visited more schools and entertained himself by observing the French people in public buses.
All the passengers seemed copied out of a book by Paul de Kock! On February 17 (March 1) he wrote to his brother that the reason he was prolonging his long trip abroad was "so that nobody in Russia could tell [him] anything about what was being done abroad in the field of education." That day he left for London and arrived, once again, with a toothache.
The moment the pain subsided, he dressed himself up as a dandy- top hat and palmerstonf— and went out to mix with the people, in order to learn and criticize. The foggy, smoky town, with yellow gas- lamps glowing here and there, impressed him by its orderliness, discipline and tedium. Not one curious glance in the street, not one over- hasty movement, not a cry, not a smile. Nothing but measured, sober citizens hiding their souls and going about their business with 110 concern for that of others. Although London instilled in him "a loathing for modern civilization," he was fascinated by the cockfights and boxing matches, by a sitting in the House of Commons during which Lord Palmerston spoke for three solid hours, and by a lecture on education given by Dickens. The memory of Dickens also pursued him as he toured the English schools—no more alluring than those of Paris, Rome, Geneva and Berlin. But with what joy and pride, on the other hand, he went to call on Herzen, the revolutionary, who was living in a comfortable little cottage with his daughter Natalya. The fiery editorialist of The Bell had had a hard time recovering from the series of misfortunes that had befallen him in recent years. His mother and his son had perished in the shipwreck of the Marseilles-Nice mailboat off the Hyeres Islands; his wife had died in childbirth, after being unfaithful to him. However, instead of the monument of woe he was preparing to greet, it was a paunchy, bearded, jovial little man who came into the room. Herzen's eyes were alight with intelligence. He exuded a kind of electricity. They complimented one another, talked of Russia, freedom, the Decembrists, popular education, the peasant problem—and literature, too. . . . On February 23 (March 7), 1861 Herzen wrote to Turgenev: "I am seeing a lot of Tolstoy. We have already quarreled. He is stubborn and talks nonsense, but is naive and a good man." And, five days later, "Count Tolstoy often oversteps the limits. His brain does not take time to digest the impressions it absorbs."
On March 5 (17) Tolstoy read in the newspapers of the publication in Russia of the imperial manifesto of February 18 (March 3), 1861 abolishing serfdom. He was deeply moved, no doubt, but did not have
f A long coat fashionable in 1860.
time to share his impressions with Ilcrzcn, for lie was leaving that day for Belgium. I low had the muzhiks of Yasnaya Polyana reacted to the news? Had someone managed to explain the terms of the proclamation to them? Would there not be some hardheads among the people who would demand their freedom immediately and without payment? Tolstoy should have hurried home, to spare his beloved muzhiks any doubts or fears; yet once he reached Brussels, he showed no inclination to leave. After all, the abolition of serfdom did not concern him. Ah, if the government had only let him free his muzhiks first, with what zeal he would have rushed home to urge other landowners to follow his example! But as he had not been the instigator of the movement, his desire for social justice was frustrated. A man of his temperament could not be expected to display the same ardor in obedience as in apostlehood. He was made to storm the citadel alone, not to follow in the anonymous flood of foot-soldiers. Since the manifesto, published in every newspaper and posted on every church door, had bccome the law of the land, he would conform to it, certainly, but lie was not going to break his neck over it.