O 
 
N MEMORIAM 
 
 JESSICA PEIXOTTO 
 

 
THE LIFE AND TEACHING 
 
 OF 
 
 LEO TOLSTOY 
 
THE WORKS OF LEO TOLSTOY. 
 
 Translated by Mr. and Mrs. AYLMER MAUDE. 
 
 THE REVISED EDITION OF THE WORKS OF 
 LEO TOLSTOY. 
 
 EDITED BY AYLMER MAUDE. 
 
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 Sevastopol, and other Military Tales. With 
 
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 XXIV. 
 
 Resurrection. With Preface, Appendix, and 33 
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THE LIFE AND TEACHING 
 
 OF 
 
 LEO TOLSTOY 
 
 A BOOK OF EXTRACTS 
 
 With an Introduction 
 
 BY 
 G. H. FERRIS 
 
 CHEAP EDITION 
 
 Xonfcon 
 GRANT RICHARDS 
 
 48 LEICESTER SQUARE, W.C. 
 
ODED 
 
 ORIGINAL TO BE 
 RETAINED 
 
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 FIRST EDITION, November, 1901 
 SECOND EDITION, ^<?, 1904. 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION . i 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT 47 
 
 I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE ... 49 
 
 i. Youth ii. Soldier, Landlord, Artist iii. Con- 
 version iv. Contra Mundutn. 
 
 II. SOCIETY 96 
 
 i. The State in an Age of Violence ii. Property, 
 Luxury, and the Exploitation of Labour 
 iii. Some Proposed Remedies. 
 
 III, THE GREAT COMMANDMENTS . . . .139 
 
 i. The Law of Reason ii. The Law of Peace, or 
 Non-Resistance by Force iii. The Law of 
 Labour iv. The Law of Purity v. The Law 
 of Sacrifice. 
 
 IV. SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 182 
 
 V. ART, FALSE AND TRUE 196 
 
 VI. EDUCATION 226 
 
 VII. RELIGION 239 
 
 i. The New Life-Conception ii. The Place of 
 Ethics iii. God iv. Sins and Snares v. 
 Scripture, The Church, Prayer vi. The 
 Meaning of Life vii. Hereafter. 
 
 M141398 
 
The Life and Teaching of 
 Leo Tolstoy 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE genius of Leo Tolstoy speaks for itself. 
 What I wish rather to emphasise in these intro- 
 ductory pages is the actuality and inevitability 
 of the man and his gospel. Academic foot-rules 
 are useless here ; it is no armchair philosopher, 
 bombinans in vacuo, no mere preacher of a school 
 of doctrine, that we have before us. Tolstoy 
 arises in a time of need out of the hard facts 
 of life, as all the great prophets have done as 
 Moses, Jesus, Sakya Muni did in the ancient 
 world. With ear close to earth and the popular 
 heart, as the unwritten age-old songs of the 
 peasantry are caught by the traveller, was this 
 gospel of real life set down. Under the hand 
 of the grand artist it takes form. As we con- 
 sider it more, it seems like a pure diamond flash- 
 ing forth the light of heaven in a single piercing 
 beam or a prism of many colours. In essentials 
 as old as the human conscience, it is yet the 
 last lesson of human experience ; in the courts 
 
 A 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 of the Babylonian kings, the Pharaohs, the de- 
 spots of the hoary East, in Pilate's hall, in the 
 arena at Rome, in the dungeons of the Inquisi- 
 tion, the Star Chamber, the Bastile, the fortress 
 of SS. Peter and Paul, in the sweating dens of 
 London and New York, it has ' made its proofs ' 
 and given its testimony to the indestructibility 
 of the soul. Only the new applications seem 
 strange amid the artificialities, the more re- 
 fined cruelties and sins, of our modern western 
 life. Then appears the prophet, mediator be- 
 tween what is and what may be, demonstrator 
 of the ideal as the practical, the real, the in- 
 evitable ; and suddenly we recognise that our 
 present state can no more be final than was 
 that of the Church before Luther or French 
 society under the later Bourbons. Here stands 
 Leo Tolstoy, then, the Luther and the Rousseau 
 of our day, heralding a new reformation in religion, 
 a new revolution in politics and social relations. 
 We have the privilege, but also the disadvantage, 
 of watching him at comparatively close quarters 
 as contemporaries. Let us anticipate the hardest 
 scientific tests, and consider him in relation to 
 his environment: the wonder of what he has 
 already effected will be the greater. We see 
 him, with feet always firmly planted on the 
 Russian earth, towering up into a rare cosmo- 
 politan ether. The western Philistine shouts that 
 he is one of those mad Russians, and supposes 
 the matter settled. Thus his ancestors may have 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 dismissed St. Francis as one of those mad 
 Italians, Luther as one of those mad Germans, 
 Rousseau as one of those mad (and immoral) 
 Frenchmen. In the qualities and circumstances 
 that make him an incarnation of what is best 
 in Russia, the point of incandescence of the 
 Russian genius, I see, on the contrary, a guaran- 
 tee of reality and permanence. And inasmuch 
 as this ' New Testament country ' may be said 
 to be situate between east and west, between 
 an old and a new social order, we have a con- 
 junction of still larger, if hardly calculable, sig- 
 nificance. 
 
 Count Lyoff Nicholaievitch Tolstoy was born 
 very near the geographic centre of European 
 Russia, in the region where the gloomy forests 
 begin to merge into the rich wheat-lands of the 
 south, in the year 1828 that is to say, seven 
 years after the death of Napoleon, three years 
 after the suppression of the ill-starred ' Decem- 
 brist' revolt in St. Petersburg and the accession 
 of Nicholas I., two years before Comte's Philo- 
 sophie Positive and the opening of the Liver- 
 pool-Manchester railway, and four years before 
 the first English Reform Act and the deaths of 
 Bentham and Goethe a long period indeed in 
 the west, but one that has seen fewer changes 
 in Russia, where factory-industry and the new 
 finance are only now beginning to make serious 
 inroads upon the old rural life. Having lost his 
 father, a military man, and his mother, a sweet 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 being of whom we catch glimpses in his early 
 writings, before he was well out of the nursery, 
 his precocious and morbid mind was from the 
 first burdened with the inheritance of a decrepit 
 aristocracy. Compare the environment of his 
 childhood with that of the southern states of 
 America about the same time, and you realise 
 how badly Russia has been injured by the success 
 of the Tsars in repressing all independence and 
 originality in the small noble class. Tolstoy is 
 one of many ' repentant noblemen ' in Russia 
 a singular phenomenon, due not simply to the 
 strong strain of spirituality in the Slavic character, 
 but also to the fact that under the autocratic 
 regime aristocracy has had no genuine raison 
 d'etre whatever. Under the military despotism 
 of Nicholas I. public life offered no opportunity 
 for an honest man. Criticism of the Government 
 was crushed out unmercifully, and every sign of 
 free intelligence brought down the heavy heel 
 of the administration. After the many failures 
 of '48 there was despair throughout Europe, but 
 it was deepest of all in Russia. There have 
 been many men of genius in the Empire during 
 the second half of the century great poets, 
 novelists, critics, musicians, painters, economists, 
 scientists and few of them have escaped mar- 
 tyrdom. During all this time the sort of social 
 and political activity which is the reasonable 
 ambition of intelligent youth in the west has 
 been absolutely impossible. Hence, Russia is 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 the only European State in which an avowedly 
 revolutionary movement is maintained, and in 
 which anarchism is a widespread school of 
 thought. Whatever we may think of the un- 
 lettered peasants, there is not, and never has 
 been, any question about the capacity of the 
 Russians of the educated class ; yet they are 
 almost as impotent in politics as the Ottoman 
 Turk or the Asiatic native., and in the whole 
 field of social endeavour and enterprise they are 
 subject to the most brutal and stupid restric- 
 tions and penalties. It is impossible thus to 
 cripple a great community without producing, 
 even in the minds of its most capable members, 
 all sorts of morbid developments. 
 
 Tolstoy was by birth over-sensitive and intro- 
 spective ; and all the circumstances of his youth 
 the hollow conditions of the society in which 
 his guardians lived, and its helplessness under 
 the autocratic reaction that led straight to the 
 disasters of the Crimean War helped to deepen 
 these traits. Precocious, keenly observant, im- 
 patient of discipline and formal learning, awk- 
 ward and bashful, always brooding, he was a 
 sceptic at fifteen, and left the University of 
 Kazan, in disgust at the stupid conventions of 
 the time and place, without taking his degree. 
 Childhood, Boyhood^ and Youth which appeared 
 in three sections between 1852 and 1857 tells 
 the story of this period, though the figure of 
 Irtenieff is probably a projection rather than a 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 portrait of himself, to whom he is always less 
 fair, not to say merciful, than to others. This 
 book is a most uncompromising exercise in self- 
 analysis. It is of great length, there is no plot, 
 and few outer events are recorded. The realism 
 is often morbid, but is varied by some passages 
 of great descriptive power, such as the account 
 of the storm, and occasionally by tender pathos, 
 as in the story of the soldier's death, as well 
 as by grimly vivid pages, such as the narrative 
 of the mother's death. In this earliest work will 
 be found the seeds both of Tolstoy's artistic 
 genius and of his ethical gospel. 
 * After five years of mildly benevolent efforts 
 among his serfs at Yasnaya Polyana (the dis- 
 appointments of which he related a few years 
 later in A Landlord's Morning, intended to have 
 been part of a full novel to be called A Russian 
 Proprietor}, his elder brother Nicholas persuaded 
 him to join the army, and in 1851 he was drafted 
 to the Caucasus as an artillery officer. On this 
 favourite stage of classic Russian romance, where 
 for the first time he saw the towering mountains 
 and the tropical sun, and met the rugged, ad- 
 venturous highlanders, Tolstoy felt his imagina- 
 tion stirred as Byron did among the isles of 
 Greece, and his early revulsion against city life 
 confirmed as Wordsworth did amid the lakes, 
 and Thoreau at Walden, by a direct call from 
 Nature to his own heart. The largest result of 
 this experience was The Cossacks (1852). Turgenieff 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 described this fine prose epic of the contact 
 of civilised and savage man as ' the best novel 
 written in our language.' The Raid (or The 
 Invaders, as Mr. Dole's translation is entitled), 
 dating from the same year, The Woodcutting 
 Expedition (1855), Meeting an Old Acquaintance 
 (1856), and A Prisoner in the Caucasus (1862), 
 are also drawn from recollections of this sojourn, 
 and show the same descriptive and romantic 
 power. Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War 
 he was called to Sebastopol, where he had com- 
 mand of a battery and took part in the defence 
 of the citadel. The immediate product of these 
 dark months of bloodshed was the thrilling series 
 of impressions reprinted from one of the leading 
 Russian reviews as Sebastopol Sketches (1856). 
 From that day onward Tolstoy knew and told 
 the hateful truth about war and the thoughtless 
 pseudo-patriotism which hurries nations into 
 fratricidal slaughter. From that day there was 
 expunged from his mind all the cheap roman- 
 ticism which depends upon a glorification of 
 the savage side of human nature. These wonder- 
 ful pictures of the routine of the battlefield 
 established his position in Russia as a writer, 
 and later on created in western countries an 
 impression like that made by the canvases of 
 Verestchagin. 
 
 For a brief time Tolstoy became a figure in 
 the old and new capitals of Russia by right of 
 talent as well as birth. His chequered friendship 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 with Turgenieff, one of the oddest chapters in 
 literary history, can only be mentioned here. In 
 1857 he travelled in Germany, France, and Italy. 
 It was of these years that he declared in My 
 Confession that he could not think of them with- 
 out horror, disgust, and pain of heart. The 
 catalogue of crime which he charged against 
 himself in his Salvationist crisis of twenty years 
 later must not be taken literally ; but that there 
 was some ground for it we may guess from the 
 scenic and incidental realism of the Recollections 
 of a Billiard-marker (1856), and of many a later 
 page'. Several other powerful short novels date 
 from about this time, including Albert and 
 Lucerne, both of which remind us of Tolstoy's 
 susceptibility to music ; Polikushka, a tale of 
 peasant life ; and Family Happiness, the story 
 of a marriage that failed, a most clear, con- 
 sistent, forceful, and in parts beautiful piece of 
 work, anticipating in essentials The Kreutzer 
 Sonata, that was to scandalise the world thirty 
 years later. 
 
 After all, it was family happiness that saved 
 Leo Tolstoy. For the third time the hand of 
 death had snatched away one of the nearest to 
 him his brother Nicholas. Two years later, in 
 1862, he married Miss Behrs, daughter of an army 
 surgeon in Tula the most fortunate external 
 event in his whole life, I should think. Family 
 responsibilities, those novel and daring experi- 
 ments in peasant education which are recorded 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 in several volumes of the highest interest, the 
 supervision of the estate, magisterial work, and 
 last, but not least, the prolonged labours upon 
 War and Peace and Anna Kartnina, fill up the 
 next fifteen years. War and Peace (1864-69) is 
 a huge panorama of the Napoleonic campaign of 
 1812, with preceding and succeeding episodes in 
 Russian society. ; These Jour volumes display in 
 their superlative degree Tolstoy's indifference to 
 plot and his absorption * in individual character ; 
 they are rather a series of scenes, threaded upon 
 the fortunes of several families, than a set novel, 
 but they contain passages of penetrating psy- 
 chology and vivid description, as well as some 
 suggestions toward an anarchist philosophy of 
 history. Of this work, which carried its author's 
 fame into the west, Flaubert (how the name 
 carries us backward !) wrote, ' It is of the first 
 order. What a painter, and what a psychologist ! 
 The two first volumes are sublime, but the third 
 drags frightfully. There are some quite Shake- 
 spearean things in it.' The artist's hand was now 
 strengthening for his highest attainment. In 1876 
 appeared Anna Kartnina, his greatest and, as he 
 intended at the time (but Art is not so easily 
 jilted), his last novel. The fine qualities of this 
 book, which, though long, is dramatically unified 
 and vitally coherent, have been so fully recognised 
 that I need not attempt to describe them. Mr. 
 George Meredith has described Anna as 'the 
 most perfectly depicted female character in all 
 
io TOLSTOY 
 
 fiction/ which, from the author of Diana, is praise 
 indeed. Parallel with the main subject of the 
 illicit love of Anna and Vronsky there is a 
 minor subject in the fortunes of Levine and 
 Kitty, wherein the reader will discover many of 
 Tolstoy's own experiences. Matthew Arnold 
 complained that the book contained too many 
 characters and a burdensome multiplicity of 
 actions, but praised its author's extraordinarily 
 fine perception and no less extraordinary truth- 
 fulness, and frankly revelled in Anna's ' large, 
 fresh, rich, generous, delightful nature/ 
 
 Settled for good on the paternal estate, among 
 the mujiks whom he had always loved, the deeper 
 questions of life were stilled, but not extinguished, 
 by the pressure and the comfort of immediate duties. 
 His mind reflected the unsettlement of a time 
 when religion as by law and [power established 
 was everywhere shaking under the blows of 
 physical science, a time of especial unsettlement 
 in Russian life. In speaking of these days 
 Tolstoy always pictures himself as wandering in 
 the arid desert of materialistic scepticism ; but to 
 us the ethical bias of his mind is apparent through- 
 out his work. A diet of physics and philanthropy 
 could not for ever satisfy a soul so strenuous. 
 In Anna Kartnina Levine says, 'I am going 
 to enrich medicine with a new term the labour 
 cure. It is a sovereign specific against nervous 
 troubles.'..' In over-laborious England the idea 
 had been familiarised twenty years before by 
 
INTRODUCTION n 
 
 Carlyle ; but I have no reason to suppose that 
 Tolstoy was influenced by the stern sage of 
 Craigenputtock and Chelsea. Indeed, the his- 
 torical anarchism which he worked out at such 
 portentous length in War and Peace is the exact 
 antithesis of the philosophy of Heroes and Hero- 
 Worship. * Tolstoy's ' labour cure ' sprang from the 
 exigencies of his situation the needs of a growing 
 family, and of that larger peasant family which 
 required sympathetic and skilled leadership more 
 than ever after the Emancipation. It was, and is, 
 directed rather to the idle rich than to the 
 ignorant poor ; and if ' labour ' has with Tolstoy 
 nearly always and exclusively meant useful agri- 
 cultural labour ' bread-work/ as he called it later 
 on he has distinctly warned his readers against 
 ' the idolatry of labour,' and a fine balance of 
 mental and manual activity has been presumed 
 in his preaching as clearly as it has been shown 
 in his life for the last forty years. The period 
 of his ' discovery of the " labour cure," ' which for 
 him meant actually sharing the toil of his field- 
 hands, was the period wherein he accomplished 
 his largest and his finest imaginative productions. 
 It was the time also when he carried out his 
 quaint essays in anarchist schooling. He ad- 
 mitted their failure afterwards ; the educational 
 world has yet to learn their full value. For a 
 short time, too, he was occupied as a district 
 magistrate ; he made studies in scientific agricul- 
 ture / he was a model father and husband, and 
 
12 TOLSTOY 
 
 an enthusiastic sportsman. Anna Kartnina, which 
 was completely published in 1876, won him not 
 only the highest place among Russian literary 
 artists, but a seat among the world's immortals. 
 
 Then came the shock of his ' conversion.' The 
 artist, so far from respecting his laurels, had chosen 
 the moment of supreme honour as the occasion 
 of most utter self-abasement There were to be 
 no more novels, no more plays ; the master-artist 
 had .'got religion.' Henceforth there would be 
 nothing for him but the gospel. It is difficult 
 for us to realise the effect of My Confession on 
 the educated class in Russia, whose praise was 
 thus scorned and turned to naught, because it 
 is difficult for us to realise a condition of society 
 in which, for that class, religion has been so 
 far starved and persecuted out of existence by 
 the allied powers of State and Church. In the 
 early eighties the new non-conformist sects in 
 Russia, like the Stundists and Dukhobortsi, had 
 scarcely begun to take the dimensions they have 
 since reached. No one thought of the possi- 
 bility of an effective religious revolt against the 
 autocracy. Tolstoy himself never put such an 
 idea into words. Yet he was very much in 
 earnest. 'When I had ended my work Anna 
 Kartnina] he said in My Confession (1879-82), 
 'my despair reached such a height that I could 
 do nothing but think of the horrible condition 
 in which I found myself. ... I saw only one 
 thing death. Everything else was a lie.' The 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 critics everywhere took him at his word, and 
 managed to get the episode quite out of focus 
 with the facts of the man's history and environ- 
 ment. So you would gather to this day from 
 a certain type of writer that there are really two 
 Tolstoys the artist whose work was closed in 
 1876, and the preacher who has since bored the 
 world with dubious theology and an impossible 
 moral code. If he had ceased his activities, say, 
 in 1884 by which time his criticism of Greek 
 Orthodox theology, his reconstruction of the 
 Gospels, and My Religion had been produced 
 it is to be feared that this false idea would have 
 gone down into history. It is easy to get a 
 truer view to-day. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch 
 (1884), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), Master and 
 Man (1895), and the extraordinarily powerful 
 story Resurrection (1900) to name only a few 
 of the works that have flowed from his fertile 
 pen in the meantime effectually disposed of the 
 notion that art and religion are mutually in- 
 compatible factors in the activity of genius. 
 This, of course, does not mean that the 'con- 
 version ' is a negligible quantity in Tolstoy's 
 history. On the contrary, it is highly significant 
 and characteristic. But it was not quite the ' new 
 fact' which his protestations would suggest to 
 the superficial reader. It was new only in degree. 
 The meeting with the peasant preacher Sutayeff, 
 in 1879, was just the spark which fired his old 
 faith in the mujik and in pure ethical motive- 
 
14 TOLSTOY 
 
 forces to the burning point. That faith was 
 latent in his earliest writings ; it sustained him 
 in the disappointments of his country life ; it broke 
 forth in the person of Levine in his great novel. 
 Now, at the meridian of fifty years, and in a 
 fresh crisis in his country's development, a hunger 
 fell upon him which neither art nor science nor 
 the ordinary round of bodily toil could satisfy. 
 
 The life of a Tolstoy is not to be flattened 
 out into the semblance of a map in which the 
 course of .every road and stream and coast-line 
 is visible. But the coincidence of the acute 
 period of his ' conversion ' with the acute period 
 of the revolutionary movement commonly but 
 stupidly named ' Nihilism ' is too suggestive to 
 be overlooked. The large towns of Russia were 
 in a state of civil war. Official terrorism had 
 provoked the most desperate campaign of venge- 
 ance that any country had witnessed during the 
 latter part of the nineteenth century. The prisons 
 were full of political suspects and offenders ; 
 the salons echoed with stories of .these horrible 
 dens of filth, disease, and cruelty. The famous 
 ' Executive Committee ' loomed large in the 
 popular imagination. Though the peasantry 
 made but little response, it was no mere ven- 
 detta of a few malcontents. A very large part 
 of the educated class was in revolt. Thousands 
 of men and women, many of whom would have 
 been honoured leaders of thought and social 
 activity in any free country, were swept away 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 to Siberia, to die a dog's death in the mines or 
 among the half-savage natives of the sub-arctic 
 zone. The very roots of moral order and pro- 
 gress were torn up ; not a ray of hope illumined 
 the future. Perturbation ruled to the point of 
 nightmare in the minds of intelligent observers, 
 and most of all, perhaps, in the minds of those 
 few elect who, like Tolstoy, while honestly 
 unable to side with either party in this violent 
 struggle, yet vainly groped about for a third 
 line of action. There is to be found at least 
 one impulse towards the new departure marked 
 by My Confession. 
 
 His subsequent ethical and religious develop- 
 ment may be traced in a long series of books 
 and pamphlets, of which the most important are 
 The Gospels Translated, Compared, and Harmonised 
 (1880-2), What I Believe (My Religion), produced 
 abroad in 1884, What is to be Done? (1884-5), 
 Life (1887), The First Step (1892), The Kingdom of 
 God is within You (1893), Patriotism and Chris- 
 tianity (1896), The Christian Teaching (1898), 
 What is Art? (1898), The Slavery of Our Times 
 (1900), TJie Meaning of Life (1901). In addition 
 to these there are many smaller letters and articles 
 on the successive famines and the religious per- 
 secutions in Russia, on social evils and remedies, 
 and passages from private diaries on aspects of the 
 personal religious life, most of which are available 
 in the excellent cheap editions of the Free Age 
 Press. From this friendly and authoritative source 
 
1 6 TOLSTOY 
 
 there has been poured of late a succession of book- 
 lets, pamphlets, and leaflets in which the great 
 writer reaffirms, illustrates, amplifies the thoughts 
 that have pretty consistently possessed him for the 
 last fifty years. In all the vast flood of polemical 
 literature and of pulpit eloquence there is nothing 
 like these simple, direct, strenuous appeals to the 
 thinking mind to direct itself to the realities of life. 
 No doubt it is the spirit of the man, not any literal 
 interpretation, that we need. But such is his pre- 
 eminence, not only of aim but of power and interest, 
 that there is nothing he has written that will not 
 help the careful reader. 
 
 All the time, in this volcanic and fecund if funda- 
 mentally simple personality, the artist has dogged 
 the steps of the evangelist. Master and Man (1895) 
 is one of the most exquisite short stories ever 
 written. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884) is a 
 powerful portrayal of the end of a Philistine. 
 The much-condemned drama of peasant life, The 
 Dominion of Darkness (1886), and The Kreutzer 
 Sonata (1889), will be more fairly judged when the 
 average Englishman has learned the merit of simple 
 truthfulness in art. One stands aghast at the in- 
 solence with which the average professional critic 
 treats a work like Resurrection. To submit such a 
 book to the summary treatment which the ordinary 
 novel receives and merits is absurd. Tolstoy is a 
 man apart, standing head and shoulders above any 
 living teacher and every living literary artist with 
 one or two possible exceptions. Rarely in human 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 history has there been an influence comparable 
 with his. Yet this influence is only in the spring- 
 time of its increase. A century hence Tolstoy will 
 be known as Milton and Bunyan and Dickens, 
 perhaps even as Isaiah and Paul, Augustine and 
 Shakespeare, are known. The column of news- 
 paper twaddle in such a case is unusually futile. 
 An English publisher, in a jocular mood one sup- 
 poses, affixed to Resurrection a couple of pages of 
 ' press notices.' They show that Mr. So-and-So, 
 an intelligent reader, regards this as Tolstoy's 
 1 greatest work.' Perhaps so ; it is not so easy to 
 judge between War and Peace, The Cossacks, 
 Family Happiness, Anna Karenina, and Resurrec- 
 tion. In these altitudes the normal standards fail ; 
 and such comparisons seem to me to be peculiarly 
 worthless in Tolstoy's case, because the same great 
 qualities run through all his works from first to 
 last. From Childhood and Youth, produced fifty 
 years ago, downwards through the long catalogue, 
 the same uncompromising veracity, the same ex- 
 traordinary insight into the recesses of character, 
 the same passionate yet tender humanism, the same 
 dramatic skill conditioned by the same thirst after 
 righteousness, are to be found. He is the same 
 Tolstoy all the time, before and after the Salvationist 
 episodes of twenty years ago. The last lines of 
 this novel are highly characteristic. NekhludofT, 
 the idle aristocrat, has realised his sin and tried to 
 atone for it ; he has brought unhappiness to many of 
 the friends whom he leaves behind in the heartless 
 
 B 
 
1 8 TOLSTOY 
 
 and brainless society of his youth, some gleams 
 of light into the lives of those whom he accom- 
 panies into prison and exile. The last romantic 
 idea of his philanthropic period is broken when 
 the peasant girl whom he has ruined and would 
 help bravely refuses his sacrifice, and goes out to 
 seek her own salvation. * " Scarcely have I finished 
 one life," says Nekhludoff, " and another has com- 
 menced." And a perfectly new life dawned that 
 night for Nekhludoff, not because he had entered 
 into new conditions of life, but because everything 
 he did after that night had a new and quite dif- 
 ferent significance. How this new period of his life 
 will end, time alone will prove.' That is Tolstoy 
 all over. All his great works have ended with a 
 similar prospective note, and one has always a sense 
 that the writer is looking forward to a yet further 
 statement of the old radical problems, a new 
 staging of the old drama, before the task is 
 finished. * With restless hand and an eye that sees 
 externals and essentials with like accuracy and 
 rapidity, the master paints his panorama of the 
 fall and recovery of man. Because the dramatic 
 quality of these pictures lies, not in their organisa- 
 tion in a conventionally limited plot, but, first, in 
 the great moral idea upon which they are threaded, 
 then in the life-likeness of individual charac- 
 ters, and ever and anon in the grip of particular 
 episodes, the little critics scoff. The idea, the 
 characters, the episodes, all shock their precious 
 British self-complacency. One of them observes that 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 ' Resurrection is thoroughly bad art/ and then some- 
 what overshoots his mark by adding that ' it is as 
 if written by Zola in collaboration with the Pro- 
 phet Isaiah/ a collaboration for which, I imagine, 
 the world would gladly sacrifice much of what 
 passes for art in our decrepit societies. ' Benumb- 
 ing influence of over-development of the ethical 
 theory is remarkably conspicuous/ according to a 
 leading literary journal. Tolstoy, it appears, is ' a 
 precious vase which has been broken ' ; all we can 
 do now with him is to glue the pieces together, 
 and make him ' the ornament of a museum.' The 
 Oxford Review bemoans ' the absence of clever 
 dialogue, the lack of rhetoric, and utter want of 
 softening touches.' If the supreme work of a 
 Tolstoy whose genius, now strengthened and re- 
 fined by seventy years of strenuous life, is unques- 
 tionable is to be smothered in this sort of rubbish, 
 we may guess how little chance any younger or 
 less robust talent has at the hands of our erstwhile 
 ' fourth estate.' 
 
 The fact we have to recognise amid our diseased 
 civilisation, as Tolstoy himself has had to do with 
 his beloved peasants, is that there are thousands 
 of 'good-natured' and 'intelligent' people who do 
 not want to be good, to love their neighbour, to 
 maintain themselves honestly ; who do not want 
 peace, do not want truth. Yes, above all, they do 
 not want to know or speak the truth. So we find 
 men who are in no way able to call his accuracy 
 in question, and who do not dispute the sympathy 
 
20 TOLSTOY 
 
 and delicacy of his method, complaining that 
 Tolstoy's subjects are repulsive and some of his 
 scenes horrible. What they want in a novel is 
 pleasure, and the moral evolution of a young 
 rout and his victim, told as the archangel might 
 tell it in the books of doom, is not pleasant. 
 However innocent they may have thought them- 
 selves, there are too many old friends in this, at 
 first sight, strange company of noblemen and 
 officials, judges, advocates, and jurors, prostitutes 
 and thieves, peasants, servants, revolutionists too 
 many people just like you and me for their 
 portrayal, just as they are, to give us the objec- 
 tive amusement we demand of Messrs. Mudie. 
 Used to judging a book, we suddenly find a 
 book judging us. With a very few microscopic 
 exceptions, set there to remind us that our 
 magician is but human after all, there is not a 
 word of preaching from end to end ; the Russians 
 are men and brothers ; the hero is neither a cox- 
 comb nor a ranter ; Maslova wins us in spite 01 
 her demoralisation. The morality is intrinsic ; 
 it is that, not of the pulpit, but of real life, a 
 growth out of the coarse soil. The thing is told 
 as it was. As we read, the eyes of a god seem 
 to be upon us, pitilessly searching ; the voice of 
 a god with inexorable tenderness whispers, ' Thou 
 art the man ! ' To awakened minds this is the 
 most precious of gifts. For a septuagenarian, 
 Resurrection is an almost unparalleled tour de 
 force ; we can hardly hope that it will be surpassed. 
 
INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 It crowns an already immense achievement. 
 Tolstoy is one of the most prolific writers of a 
 prolific century. He has written something like 
 fifty full books, and innumerable fragments. At 
 first sight there is little variety of subject-matter 
 or scenery. Yet, what compensation when we 
 get below the surface, behind the scenery, to the 
 play of character! what wonderful insight into 
 the tragedy of the human soul ! No other modern 
 writer, Shakespeare himself only occasionally, gives 
 one this sense of absolute knowledge of the secrets 
 hidden away in the innermost chambers of the 
 mind, and of absolute honesty in their exposure. 
 This perennial interest in the depths of character 
 and in the elemental and crucial questions of 
 conduct, this extreme honesty of speech, seem to 
 me to be the most precious qualities of modern 
 Russian literature. In giving us the rarest pre- 
 sentation of them, Tolstoy reveals to us, so that 
 he who runs may read, the genius of a people 
 too long unknown or misrepresented a people 
 destined in the future to play a part in the 
 world's history greater, perhaps, than the most 
 ardent Panslavists have dreamed of. When Tur- 
 genieff, writing from his death- bed, begged his 
 friend to ' return to literature/ he took, for once, 
 a narrow view of character and destiny. Genius 
 must work itself out on its own lines. Tolstoy 
 remained a Russian from tip to toe that is one 
 of his supreme values for us. And he remained 
 an indivisible personality. The artist and the 
 
22 TOLSTOY 
 
 moralist are inseparable in his works. 'We are 
 not to take Anna Kartnina as a work of art/ 
 said Matthew Arnold ; ' we are to take it as a 
 piece of life.' The distinction is not very satis- 
 factorily stated, but the meaning is clear. So, 
 too, W. D. Howells, in his introduction to an 
 American edition of the Sebastopol Sketches, ' I 
 do not know how it is with others to whom 
 these books of Tolstoy's have come, but for my 
 part I cannot think of them as literature in the 
 artistic sense at all. Some people complain to 
 me, when I praise them, that they are too long, 
 too diffuse, too confused, that the characters' 
 names are hard to pronounce, and that the life 
 they portray is very sad and not amusing. In 
 the presence of these criticisms I can only say 
 that I find them nothing of the kind, but that 
 each history of Tolstoy's is as clear, as orderly, 
 as brief as something I have lived through myself. 
 ... I cannot think of any service which imagina- 
 tive literature has done the race so great as that 
 which Tolstoy has done in his conception of 
 Karenina at that crucial moment when the 
 cruelly outraged man sees that he cannot be 
 good with dignity. This leaves all tricks of 
 fancy, all effects of art, immeasurably behind.' 
 
 His service to literature is, in fact, precisely the 
 same as his service to morals. Like Bunyan and 
 Burns, Dickens and Whitman, he throws down in 
 a world of decadent conventions the gage of the 
 democratic ideal. As he calls the politician and 
 
INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 the social reformer back to the land and the 
 common people, so he calls the artist back to 
 the elemental forces ever at work beneath the 
 surface-show of nature and humanity. To ex- 
 ceptional insight and sincerity he adds that 
 absolute simplicity of manner which we gener- 
 ally associate with genius. He is a realist, not 
 of the outer, but of the inner life. There is no 
 staginess, no sentimentality, in his work. He 
 has no heroes in our western sense none, even, 
 of those sensational types of personality which 
 glorify the name of his northern contemporary 
 Ibsen. His style is always natural, direct, 
 irresistible as a physical process. He has rarely 
 strayed beyond the channel of his own experience, 
 and the reader who prefers breadth to depth of 
 knowledge must seek elsewhere. He has little 
 humour, but a grimly satiric note has sometimes 
 crept into his writing, as Archdeacon Farrar will 
 remember. Of artifice designed for vulgar enter- 
 tainment he knows nothing ; in the world of true 
 art, which is the wine-press of the soul of man, he 
 is a princely figure. 
 
 Such is the man whom I have ventured in 
 another place to describe as ' The Grand Mujik/ 
 because his qualities seemed to me to be the 
 qualities of the best Russian peasant type carried 
 up to the point of genius. It is, if I see it aright, 
 an untutored, irregular, persistent, volcanic genius ; 
 hardly capable of finished, judicial self-expres- 
 sion ; shrewd, naive, impetuous, yet wonderfully 
 
24 TOLSTOY 
 
 consistent from first to last ; immensely fertile and 
 suggestive ; incapable of trickery ; always respon- 
 sive, amid its ceaseless tides of emotion, to certain 
 fundamental moral interests and principles ; con- 
 centrated more and more as youth passes upon 
 the two desperate problems, 'What is the 
 meaning of life ? ' and ' What, then, is to be 
 done ? ' 
 
 Tolstoyism, as it has been elaborated during 
 these later years, is neither theology nor philosophy 
 nor scholarship as we commonly understand those 
 terms. It is rather a moral code, as exacting as 
 can be formulated by a- sane and eminently prac- 
 tical man, yet simple enough for all to understand, 
 and as inspiring and bracing as it is simple. 
 Reason and Love these are its two eternal 
 pillars. The essence of Tolstoy's religion is a 
 complete faith in the efficiency of these two im- 
 measurable forces ; its most striking characteristic, 
 as compared with the armchair philosophies of 
 the day, is its insistent association of faith and 
 works, precept and practice. It appeals not to 
 controversial tests, not to any appearance of 
 ' sweet reasonableness/ but to actual trial in the 
 rough and tumble of daily life ; and it will accept 
 no other judgment. I have attempted to sum- 
 marise its practical and critical side in a five-fold 
 commandment a warning against dogma, mysti- 
 cism, ceremonial hypnotism, the binding of the 
 mind and will by oaths, and other inventions of 
 external authority in religion and politics, or the 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 law of Reason ; a warning against participation 
 in violence, individual or social, and organisations 
 dependent on violence, or the law of Peace ; a 
 warning against exploitation, luxury, and material 
 property, or the law of Labour ; a warning against 
 self-degradation, or the law of Purity ; and, finally, 
 a warning against devotion to self, or the law of 
 Sacrifice. It is impossible here fully to discuss 
 even the more challenging of these articles of 
 faith ; but a few words must be said in regard to 
 two of them the principle of non-resistance, so- 
 called, and the general political implications of 
 Tolstoy's Christian anarchism ; and the principle 
 of bread-labour, as worked out into an indictment 
 of our whole industrial system and the social 
 relations based on it. 
 
 The word ' non-resistance ' is unhappy. Tolstoy- 
 is very far from being a quietist. No prophet 
 has told the truth in the very citadel of lies with 
 more boldness or with more scathing analytic 
 power. What Tolstoy recommends is not sub- 
 mission, but moral resistance. For the first time 
 in the modern world, adequate expression has 
 been given in his writings and in his life to the 
 enormous possibilities of resisting tyranny and 
 cruelty without blood-guiltiness. The spectacle 
 of this single man defying the whole armed" 
 strength of the Tsardom, and speaking to the 
 world from a little village in the heart of Russia, 
 has a grandeur equalled by few things in human 
 history. I said at the outset that the qualities m 
 
26 TOLSTOY 
 
 which he is essentially Russian, so far from pro- 
 viding an excuse for neglecting or minimising his 
 teaching, give an additional reason for the gravest 
 consideration, and this for two reasons. In the 
 first place, his teaching is no invention of the study 
 or school, no mere product of that unreal, irre- 
 sponsible condition which we call genius and 
 associate with insanity ; it is the rare essence of 
 popular wisdom, distilled during centuries of 
 labour and suffering. And, secondly, at this 
 moment it is standing the sternest practical tests. 
 The struggle against despotism will appeal to the 
 best instincts of mankind so long as despotism 
 remains, and the Russian revolutionist has been 
 a peculiarly heroic figure. But he must indeed be 
 blind who, looking back over the history of the 
 last century, fails to see that violent methods have 
 rarely, if ever, done permanent service to the 
 popular cause, that force is in the long-run always 
 on the side, not of the big battalions of the people, 
 but on that of the small battalions of the autocrats, 
 plutocrats, and aristocrats. Tolstoy reminds us, in 
 phrases which are a sort of moral dynamite, that 
 there are modes of revolutionary activity which 
 have yet to be fully tried, and which, when they 
 are put to the test by a whole people, or even a 
 large number of them, may yield some astonishing 
 results. The Irish ( no-rent ' campaign collapsed 
 because the Irish people are comparatively deficient 
 in that capacity for silent, dogged endurance which 
 the mujik possesses in a very high degree. If 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 for ' non- resistance ' we read passive or moral 
 resistance, possibilities arise, which, as between a 
 hundred million peasants and a hundred thousand 
 officials, give ground for hoping that the last word 
 of popular right has not yet been said. The 
 failure if such it can be called of the Dukho- 
 bortsi is no worse than the failure of the con- 
 spirators of twenty years ago ; and history records 
 as many victories for liberty won at the martyrs' 
 stake as on the battlefield. This is not merely 
 a Russian lesson. As Russia under the Tsars 
 is a lurid illustration, of militarism, imperialism, 
 and administrative authority in their ultima ratio, 
 so Tolstoy has become the extreme embodiment 
 of the reaction against diseased developments 
 which are common, though in different degree, to 
 the whole western world the triumphs of money 
 and machinery, and the justifying theories to 
 which they have given birth. Tolstoy insists more 
 than once upon the importance of taking social 
 evils in the order of their real gravity ; his part 
 has been to show that, after a century's struggle 
 against poverty on the part of humane people, not 
 poverty but violence, not political and economic, 
 but moral inequality, are the worst evils which 
 block the way to a happier order. For the purpose 
 of these few sentences I shall take it for granted 
 that the reader agrees with me in regarding 
 Tolstoy's indictment of society as it stands as 
 being, in the main, accurate. As to his prescrip- 
 tions, I will not here go farther than to insist that 
 
28 TOLSTOY 
 
 the only criticisms that have any moral value are 
 those which rest upon a prior appreciation. No 
 moral formula that man has ever devised is quite 
 beyond question, but we have the right to demand 
 that any critic of the great commandments shall 
 have appreciated their strength before he expects 
 us to listen to his statement of their weakness. If 
 this procedure be applied to the principle of ' non- 
 resistance' as it is re-stated by the great Russian 
 teacher, we shall be on the way to the truth. 
 Once get men to admit, on the one hand, the waste 
 and cruelty of force, as we see it all around us, and, 
 on the other hand, the enormous effectiveness of 
 the moral influence which Tolstoy's life exemplifies 
 as well as his works inculcate it, and criticisms 
 will fall into their natural place. Take, for in- 
 stance, the familiar argument that violence must 
 be justifiable when used to restrain violence the 
 violence of the would-be murderer or adulterer 
 is the stock example. What must strike the open- 
 minded man, in the first place, is the unreality of 
 the case in point ; an exceedingly rare incident 
 which appeals to generous emotion is being used 
 to buttress the use of force in cases of daily 
 occurrence which mal*e no such appeal to the 
 better instincts. We might as well quote the 
 unhappy experience of a given man or woman 
 against monogamy in general, or in favour of easy 
 divorce. It will hardly be denied that a prejudice 
 against the use of force is of the essence of 
 civilisation. If, instead of darkening counsel with 
 
INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 the discussion of ultimate questions, and raising 
 logical stumbling-blocks in the way of the weaker 
 brethren, we were taking care in the common 
 junctures of our daily life that, so far as possible, 
 our bias and influence should be on the side 
 of love and peace, and against that of force and 
 purely external authority, the whole social out- 
 look would be lightened. At present the bias of 
 the great majority of men on the great majority 
 of occasions is on the side of force and authority ; 
 and the settlement of social life, the elaboration of 
 the industrial system, and the daily wider ramifi- 
 cation of governmental organisation tend more 
 and more to attenuate the old faith in moral 
 influence and voluntary co-operation. It used to 
 be said, without risk of denial, that ' The blood of 
 the martyrs is the seed of the Church.' Now, I 
 find an honoured leader of the peace movement, a 
 man whose life is one long testimony to the 
 efficacy of moral influence, falling to the sceptical 
 objection that 'If a righteous and useful man 
 allow himself to be murdered by a scoundrel on 
 the ground that one man's life is as sacred as that 
 of another, the result would be the triumph of evil 
 over good.' Logically pursued, this would mean 
 that all good and heroic lives have been vain and 
 mistaken, because they have been continually 
 thwarted by scoundrels. 
 
 Tolstoy's position is that the ' ground ' which 
 necessitates a certain view of things the con- 
 dition of mind for which all lives seem equally 
 
30 TOLSTOY 
 
 sacred is more important than the destiny of 
 the bodily life itself; that if you believe the 
 hypothetical scoundrel's life to be sacred sacred 
 because potentially good no personal inconveni- 
 ence and no appearance of a triumph of evil 
 can justify your killing him ; that you never can 
 be sure even of an immediate and relative good 
 coming of violence ; that the only real triumph 
 of evil is the good man's betrayal of his prin- 
 ciples ; that the greatest turning-points, the most 
 influential events of history, are the martyrdoms 
 of good men by scoundrels. And as to the ex- 
 tension of this plea into a fear of nations 'fore- 
 most in wisdom and in usefulness ' being 
 ' extinguished by savages and barbarians,' who 
 can tell us which nation is wise and which 
 savage ? Does it not come to this, that no 
 nation should kill any other nation, and no in- 
 dividual any other individual ? If we are going 
 to claim that there may be some exceptions to 
 this rule, or at least some cases in which vio- 
 lence is comparatively excusable, it is still the 
 rule, not the exception, we should emphasise. 
 It is, I repeat, the emphasis that is all-im- 
 portant. By men who do not, and perhaps do 
 not wish to, understand him, Tolstoy is generally 
 condemned as a dreamer. In fact, he is 
 intensely practical. The theoretical question 
 whether violence is in any case morally justi- 
 fiable may never be settled ; at any rate, it is 
 not settled in the mind of the present writer. 
 
INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 The practical, immediate, and momentous ques- 
 tion whether the violence and the worship of 
 external authority that fill our daily lives are 
 good or bad, on the whole, may be settled at 
 once and decisively by any man who can use 
 his eyes, ears, and brain. And the fulfilment 
 of the simple moral requirement will work a 
 revolution, both in our individual and our social 
 life, large enough to satisfy the most exalted 
 ambition of the twentieth century. 
 
 So much said the waste, injustice, and general 
 ineffectiveness of force being supposed to be 
 admitted we may attempt to decide in which 
 fields the application of this principle is more 
 and in which it is less urgently required. Here 
 history gives us plain guidance. Whereas the 
 growth of a State means the modification of 
 violence, the suppression of its crudest forms, 
 within a certain area, States in their mutual re- 
 lations lag far behind in this pacific develop- 
 ment. This arrest, or even reversion to the 
 savagery of ancient times, takes two special 
 forms in our day, according as the countries in 
 question are equal or unequal in power. As 
 between fairly equal nations or groups of nations 
 we have the evils of militarism, or what is called 
 the armed peace, which is a sort of permanent 
 civil war in the general comity. As between 
 strong and weak peoples we have the evils of 
 imperialism, which is now, as it has been through- 
 out history, the exploitation of feebler races by 
 
32 TOLSTOY 
 
 a camarilla of capitalists, aristocrats, officials, and 
 soldiers, that has first become dominant in a 
 powerful State. It is remarkable that the three 
 clearest indictments of militarism in recent years 
 have come from three Russians Count Tolstoy, 
 the Tsar Nicholas II. in his rescript of invita- 
 tion* to the Hague Conference, and M. Jean de 
 Bloch in his theory of the 'impossibility' of 
 modern warfare. Of these, Tolstoy's work is 
 infinitely the most far-reaching. He knows by 
 experience what war means ; he rightly holds 
 that, at bottom, imperialism is the same thing 
 whether it has a Slavic or a Saxon name ; and 
 he exhibits militarism as the schooling of whole 
 nations to mutual hatred, their perversion from 
 domestic industry and reform to be the fighting 
 serfs of small ruling classes who play with them 
 as with pawns on a chess-board. Against the 
 double evil he offers a great principle the prin- 
 ciple of internationalism, which has found in him 
 its most thorough-going modern advocate, and 
 a practical plan of campaign, the strike against 
 military service. Here, again, I ask the reader to 
 consider the truth and the practical importance of 
 his teaching before he considers the occasional 
 and minor perversities which mark its statement. 
 There is truth even in those perversities. Take his 
 contemptuous references to the Peace Movement, 
 and such a passage as this from ' Letters on War ' : 
 'If people who think little or but superficially 
 were able to comfort themselves with the idea 
 
INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 that international courts of arbitration would 
 supersede wars and ever-increasing armaments, 
 the Hague Conference and the war that followed 
 it demonstrated in the most obvious manner the 
 impossibility of finding a solution of the diffi- 
 culty in that way. After the Hague Conference 
 it became obvious that, as long as governments 
 with armies exist, the termination of armaments 
 and of wars is impossible. That an agreement 
 should become possible it is necessary that the 
 parties to it should trust each other. And in 
 order that the Powers should trust each other 
 they must lay down their arms.' 
 
 No nation has ever acted on this last precept, 
 and yet, as Tolstoy himself contends, the mind 
 of the nations has been continually advancing 
 in the direction of general peace. The analogy 
 of internal peace shows that disarmament may 
 proceed very slowly, pari passu with the growth 
 of mutual trust and the perception of common 
 interests ; and this trust and perception of com- 
 munity are in nothing more clearly shown than 
 in the multiplication of public conferences and 
 the increasing vogue of arbitration. To doubt 
 the value of these new developments is to doubt 
 the power of reason in social relations. The 
 custom of arbitration, which in the last few 
 years has entered so largely into our daily 
 commercial life, is, even from the point of 
 view of the high Tolstoyan ideal, a great ad- 
 vance upon appeals to the law ; international 
 
 C 
 
34 TOLSTOY 
 
 arbitration has settled many grave disputes, it 
 is being every year more widely practised, and 
 the institution at the Hague of a permanent 
 tribunal in which twenty-six independent states 
 are represented will give a great stimulus to this 
 attempt to substitute equity for brute force. 
 But, when all this is said when we have dis- 
 counted Tolstoy's vigorous preconceptions, his 
 anti-scientific bias, his peremptory temper, those 
 traces of mother earth which cling to the freest 
 brain, the bias of Slavic anarchism in the mind 
 of this citizen of the world there still remains 
 a measure of truth which is of special moment 
 to us westerners, who have become so thoroughly 
 inoculated with faith in legislation and repre- 
 sentation that we can hardly realise any possi- 
 bility of effective individual action. In the first 
 place, the governments will not abolish militarism 
 of their own accord they will, on the contrary, 
 resist its abolition by every means in their power. 
 If they agree to the limitation of warfare, it is 
 because warfare as between the great white 
 peoples has ceased to serve the purposes of the 
 ruling caste. In the second place, the sort of 
 propaganda that has been conducted by the 
 peace societies, with excellent spirit and not 
 without success, in the past century is only too 
 evidently unequal to the needs of the situation. 
 Only when the pacific movement had a Glad- 
 stone or a Bright at its head did it attain really 
 popular proportions ; but we seem to have 
 
INTRODUCTION 35 
 
 passed beyond this heroic period in our political 
 history. The word of to-morrow is democracy. 
 How, then, is the common man to secure peace ? 
 By union, we expect. It is here that Tolstoy 
 comes in. 'You are threatened in England/ he 
 might say, ' with conscription in some form. 
 Not that the military system, as you have it, is 
 morally much superior, since it depends upon 
 the training of pauper boys under economic com- 
 pulsion to the trade of human butchery. But 
 let us admit that conscription would be a step 
 backward. You propose to organise a national 
 agitation through local organisations, mass meet- 
 ings, and so on an effort that will require great 
 expenditure of labour and money, that will be 
 misrepresented or boycotted by the press, and 
 will provoke a counter-agitation which will have 
 the support of the government, its political 
 followers, and all the wealthy classes. How much 
 more simply and effectively this evil could be 
 dealt with ! If the people do not object to military 
 service they will not support your agitation ; if 
 they do, and if only a thousand young men are 
 sufficiently in earnest to refuse either to be com- 
 pelled or to be cajoled into barracks' slavery, 
 and go to prison instead, there will soon be an 
 end of the attempt to enforce military service, 
 for a fire like this spreads quickly. A good many 
 thousands of "ignorant" Russian peasants have 
 set the example ; if there are not even a thou- 
 sand Englishmen earnest enough to follow it, 
 
36 TOLSTOY 
 
 what are we to think of your vaunted " freedom " 
 and of the theory on which your political in- 
 stitutions are based ? ' 
 
 In some of the later pamphlets, the anarchist 
 strain is pushed to a further extreme than is 
 reached, except by implication, in Tolstoy's larger 
 works. Hatred of all political organisation is, to 
 say the least, more natural in a Russian than in 
 an Englishman or Frenchman ; and here we have 
 not only the glorification of individual goodness 
 and the indictment of society as it stands, with all 
 its sins thick upon it, but some unsympathetic 
 criticism of western humanitarian movements, and, 
 finally, a radical objection to governments of every 
 kind. ' Not only military governments but govern- 
 ments in general' are useless and harmful, The 
 issue between voluntarism and the representative 
 system opens long vistas of debate ; and on many 
 points the answer to Tolstoy is obvious. Govern- 
 ments could only be harmless, he says, 'if they 
 consisted of immaculate, holy people/ But it is 
 surely a legitimate retort that his own idea of 
 society is impossible without a still larger assump- 
 tion not a few, but a whole nation of ' immaculate 
 people.' In Some Social Remedies he rebukes this 
 easy trick of making a scapegoat of the govern- 
 ment, while the people themselves are professing 
 ' a distortion of Christianity ' which allows of orgies 
 of brutal greed. Again, when he objects to the 
 ideal of Socialism that people do not want it, the 
 retort is obvious. 'None but the wise and pure 
 
INTRODUCTION 37 
 
 can choose the wise and pure.' Very well ; but 
 the question is whether men who have a little 
 wisdom and a little purity cannot choose other 
 men who have a little more than they. The fact 
 that they often fail to do so does not in any way 
 justify us in declaring that they cannot. 'And if 
 all men were wise and pure there would be no need 
 of organisation.' This sentence cannot exactly 
 express the author's thought. Who can imagine a 
 state of society where organisation is not needed ? 
 There may, indeed, be people such as those against 
 whom Tolstoy launches a special warning, ' modern 
 Sadducees who, in the name of science and civil- 
 isation, aiming only at the continuation of the 
 present state of things, assemble at meetings, write 
 books and make speeches, promising to organise 
 a good and peaceful life for people without their 
 making any effort.' But there are also, as we 
 know, men and women who conceive of society 
 as an organised brotherhood in which the most 
 important gains will be not material, but mental 
 and moral. It is not enough to tell these people 
 that governments are necessarily base, for they 
 know that, in some countries at least, the people 
 can at any time, if they will it, have a government 
 that reflects the best things in their own minds. 
 Not only is the objection to everything that can 
 be represented as coercion carried to lengths 
 which would render every kind of social union and 
 every large social undertaking say, the relief of 
 famine or the transportation of the Dukhobortsi 
 
38 TOLSTOY 
 
 impossible, but ultimately the logic of anarchism 
 breaks down in Tolstoy's own thought. In a 
 paper in support of Henry George's land theory 
 he says, * Humanity advances continually to- 
 wards the enlightenment of its consciousness, 
 and to the institution of modes of life corre- 
 sponding to this consciousness.' Just so. He 
 instances the abolition of slavery (which would 
 never have come about if the more enlightened 
 social consciousness of the time had had no 
 governmental organisation through which to act), 
 and he goes on to declare that 'to-morrow 
 committees might be appointed to examine and 
 deliberate on his (Henry George's) scheme and 
 its transformation into law.' And, as Mr. Aylmer 
 Maude says,* ' Tolstoy himself does not profess to 
 have ceased to use postage-stamps which are 
 issued, or the highway that is maintained, by a 
 government which collects taxes by force.' 
 
 These are the easy, the obvious, criticisms. A 
 certain over-emphasis is characteristic of the pro- 
 phetic mind. The fundamental truth remains, and 
 men can only ignore it at their peril. In the 
 measure in which it expresses force, and not co- 
 operation or consent, government is an evil. That 
 gives us a perfectly clear and a sufficiently high 
 standard of judgment. True civilisation consists 
 in the liberation of love from the bondage of outer 
 authority. History is strewn with the dead bones 
 
 * Tolstoy and His Problems a book of the utmost interest 
 and value to the student. 
 
INTRODUCTION 39 
 
 of empires that depended on force; and if they 
 persist in following their present paths the empires 
 of Britain and Russia will follow those of Rome 
 and Byzantium into oblivion. Religion and art 
 are always worlds of real life because there, strong 
 as convention and self-interest may be, the soul of 
 man is always stronger and gaining strength. In 
 western countries the belief in authoritative in- 
 stitutions has reached the last degree of infatuation. 
 The evils of a bureaucratic system are patent 
 enough, yet every little reform must needs be 
 embodied in an Act of Parliament or a County 
 Council bylaw and enforced through a new body 
 of officials. The immediate money cost of internal 
 government increases nearly as rapidly as that of 
 foreign adventure ; and the money cost is nothing 
 beside the weakening of individual and social 
 initiative. The belief in big businesses and big 
 political machines has become a positive mania ; 
 only a man here and there dares to withstand it. 
 The law stands over the individual as Mother 
 Church once did majestic, all-embracing, infallible ; 
 contempt of humanity is inculcated in a thousand 
 forms ; ' contempt of court ' is a horrible offence. 
 Unconvicted scoundrels flourish, and even claim 
 our homage. But let the starving tramp intrude 
 upon an absentee landlord's game preserve and he 
 shall suffer. On the ground of armaments which it 
 has itself supplied, Birmingham, greedy after more 
 gold-mines, may make war upon a little State 
 of old-fashioned farmers ; but it is the duped 
 
40 TOLSTOY 
 
 country that must pay the piper. Add to these 
 normal operations of unrestrained class power the 
 hypnotic influence of the newspaper press, which 
 holds the masses as the circus did in imperial 
 Rome, the starving of the young mind in board 
 schools, the degradation of the young body in 
 factory towns, the corruption that prevails in 
 commerce, the disappearance even of the ideal of 
 a free, open life in touch with Nature, and how 
 can any vagary of lunacy or crime surprise us ? 
 In this oppressive and hopeless emergency, when 
 all the grand old voices of England are dead, it 
 is to a small village in central Russia that we turn 
 for a reminder of the simple truth. 
 
 Tolstoy has, then, lessons both for the individ- 
 ualist and the socialist. Most of the ordinary 
 arguments against anarchism leave him untouched, 
 because his appeal is not to individual right but 
 to individual duty, not to self-advantage but to 
 self-sacrifice. He is at the opposite pole from 
 the Mr. Tucker of Boston whose maxim is that 
 ' " mind your own business " is the only moral 
 law.' His political philosophy is, as I have said, 
 a natural outcome of life in a country where the 
 centrifugal impulse has been produced by bitter 
 experience, and where agrarian communism, already 
 partly realised, would be more easily extended than 
 in any other European country. But, if in some 
 important respects Russia is approaching our own 
 position, in some others we are degenerating 
 towards that of Russia. Another Russian thinker, 
 
INTRODUCTION 41 
 
 Prince Kropotkin, in his striking work, entitled 
 Fields, Factories, and Workshops, declares that 
 the extreme division of labour that has made 
 England what she is, is everywhere doomed, and 
 that a contrary movement of decentralisation, 
 which will gradually bring about an ' integrated 
 variety' of occupations, industrial, agricultural, 
 and intellectual, in each place, is now perceptible. 
 Whether time vindicates this, or not, as a general 
 forecast, it is now plain that the Socialist formula, 
 ' the collective ownership of the means of pro- 
 duction, distribution and exchange/ leaves un- 
 touched some vital questions on which the future 
 of England depends. State-owned factories and 
 mines might be preferable to factories and mines 
 run for private profit, social trusts to private 
 trusts ; but the previous question rises more in- 
 sistently in the minds of thinking men Do we 
 want, are we destined, to continue a nation of 
 factory ' hands ' ; are the national trade and in- 
 dustry to remain substantially what they are 
 to-day ? Is this terrible London to continue 
 growing larger and larger, fattening on its yearly 
 tribute of country blood ? Are Lancashire 
 and the West Riding and the Black Country 
 to be as they are to the end of the chapter? 
 At any rate, machine slavery, the degradation 
 of town life, the curse of over-specialisation, the 
 iron doom of shop and office and factory em- 
 ployment, are hardly things which the clear- 
 sighted reformer cares to take on trust or to 
 
42 TOLSTOY 
 
 treat with the gentle plasters of the Fabian 
 Society. Socialism would have made better 
 progress if it had not seemed to be wholly or 
 primarily concerned with machinery and profits. 
 Tolstoy is stimulating as much by his insistence 
 upon the superior importance of moral over 
 material progress as by his marvellous power 
 of depicting the drama of the inner life. His 
 attempt to formulate a moral dynamic is open 
 to criticism, but it voices a hunger that is 
 spreading and deepening in every country where 
 machine industry and plutocracy are the govern- 
 ing conditions of the popular life. The com- 
 parative failure of purely economic Socialism 
 confirms the impression that the people require 
 the inspiration of a faith at once more Utopian 
 and more actual. That the economic formula 
 is so easy of acceptance that it makes no present 
 personal demand on the individual, that it has 
 become as respectable as the creeds of the 
 churches is really a fatal obstacle. Men do not 
 want an easy and respectable formula ; they want 
 a gospel which will really promise them release 
 from their present servitude. Tolstoy's doctrine 
 of bread-labour, his unbounded faith in the country 
 life and country people, do at least point the way 
 of escape from over-specialisation, from the slavery 
 of the machine, and from the manifold evils of city 
 life. A conception of the good life must, he insists, 
 precede citizenship ; a conception of the good 
 State must precede its realisation. He belongs 
 
INTRODUCTION 43 
 
 to that elder generation of humanists who never 
 learned, and were never required, to specialise 
 themselves down to the level of technical education 
 boards, county council committees, and schools 
 of economics. They stood Emerson, Carlyle, 
 Mazzini, Ruskin for morals as a whole, and 
 especially for the union of ethics and economics. 
 They were nearer to the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence and the French Revolution, for one thing ; 
 liberty, equality, and fraternity always presented 
 themselves to their minds as an inseparable 
 tri-unity. The cult of the expert can offer us 
 no substitute for a rounded conception of the 
 ideal life and the ethics which that conception 
 demands. It is absurd to suggest that the anti- 
 State sentiment natural in Russia is equally 
 proper here. But only those have a right to 
 scoff at the principle of no-government who 
 feel confident that a State which decent men 
 may loyally support is attainable, and who are 
 prepared to give their lives for its attainment 
 For the rest, Tolstoy's absorbing interest in the 
 moral potentiality of the individual, in woman, 
 in art, in the labourer, in the abolition of ruling 
 castes, established hypocrisies, and prejudices 
 and violence between nations, gives tremendous 
 force to his appeal to thousands of men who can- 
 not accept all his particular deductions. 
 
 The farcical excommunication reminds me that 
 he has escaped martyrdom, so far, just because 
 he is the one person in the empire whom the 
 
44 TOLSTOY 
 
 Tsar himself dare not touch. That fact is eloquent 
 testimony not only of his genius, which is univers- 
 ally admitted, but of the effectiveness and practi- 
 cality of his teaching, which by foreign critics 
 are very generally disputed. It is, indeed, one 
 of the most remarkable spectacles in history, 
 this immunity of the arch sedition-monger under 
 the completest despotism of the time. Hardly 
 a page that he has put forth in the last twenty 
 years but has contained some scathing indict- 
 ment of the falseness, the cruelty, of the social 
 forms maintained by imperial authority around 
 him. His contemporaries have to content them- 
 selves with indirect comments upon the diseases of 
 public life, with veiled satire and allegorical fiction. 
 He alone can say the plain truth without fear 
 of the direst penalties ; and surely the surgeon's 
 knife was never used so unsparingly. What the 
 censor forbids is secretly copied and passed from 
 hand to hand throughout the empire, and more 
 than one self-appointed missionary has suffered 
 imprisonment for zeal in this direction. 
 
 He has founded no sect, no school larger than 
 the little group of troubled peasants who gather 
 for advice and assistance under the ( poor people's 
 tree' at Yasnaya Polyana. A mere handful of 
 men have followed the extreme lengths of his 
 example in the renunciation of wealth, power, 
 and luxury. It is only in spirit that his own 
 household is united. He represents heaven, as 
 P. A. Sergyenko puts it, while his wife, the 
 
INTRODUCTION 45 
 
 excellent woman to whom the world owes so 
 much, represents the earth. But it is the spirit 
 of operative love, of unflinching sincerity and 
 faithfulness to high ideals, not the particular 
 application and precept, that is the essential 
 thing. There is no need to exaggerate the 
 material sacrifices which Leo Tolstoy has made. 
 Actually he lives in assured comfort, though in 
 perfect simplicity. In his seventy-third year he 
 still rode the horse and the bicycle, played tennis, 
 enjoyed music, romped with the children, and, in 
 brief, showed himself, a sane, highly-vitalised 
 personality, far removed from the narrowness of 
 the eastern ascetic. It is this sanity and grip of 
 real things that make his example so powerful, 
 his spirit so infectious. In the record of the last 
 decade in Europe, few finer episodes will be found 
 than the aged writer's campaigns against famine, 
 religious persecution, the flogging of peasants, 
 and militarism. No other modern teacher has 
 had to contend with such a desperate environ- 
 ment, and no other has succeeded in giving such 
 an inspiring picture of love triumphant over the 
 world. One cannot think of so very human a 
 figure as, in the false old sense, a saint. He will 
 not be canonised by any church ; and it is only 
 after long years of laborious growth into com- 
 plete self-possession and self-expression that this 
 rare mind shows us, reflected, all the agonising 
 search and struggle of the soul of our time. As 
 we glance back over the story of his life, theories, 
 
46 TOLSTOY 
 
 prescriptions, and discussions are forgotten, and 
 we can think only with love and reverence of 
 this modern patriarch, so lonely amid the daily- 
 enlarging congregation of the hearts he has 
 awakened to a sense of the mystery, the terror, 
 the splendour and joy of human destinies. 
 
 G. H. FERRIS. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 IN preparing the following extracts, I have 
 received the most generous aid from Russian 
 and English friends of Count Tolstoy, and from 
 his translators and publishers. Mr. and Mrs. 
 Aylmer Maude have given me franchise of their 
 excellent translations, and Mr. Tchertkoff has 
 extended this privilege to all the publications of 
 the Free Age Press. I am also indebted to the 
 house of Walter Scott, Limited, pioneers in pub- 
 lishing Tolstoy in English, for permission to 
 quote from some of their translations, especially 
 What must We do, then? and The Kingdom of 
 God is within You. A few extracts are now 
 translated for the first time, and a larger number 
 have been specially rendered ; for these I have 
 to thank Mr. T. Rothstein and Mr. F. Volkhovsky. 
 In the work of selection and compression, I have 
 been helped by my brother, F. F. Ferris. 
 
 It will, of course, be understood that I am solely 
 responsible for the choice of passages especially 
 for the perhaps rather impertinent experiment of an 
 autobiographical chapter and for their abbrevia- 
 tion and arrangement. The great bulk of Tolstoy's 
 writings and their richness of thought have made it, 
 
 47 
 
48 TOLSTOY 
 
 difficult to restrict this volume to its proper limits. 
 For any obscurity or apparent inconsistency I am 
 probably to blame ; but a book like this is dis- 
 tinctly intended as an introduction to, not as a 
 substitute for, the original writings. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE 
 
 I. YOUTH 
 
 WHEN I try to recollect my mother as she was at that 
 time, I am only able to picture to myself her brown eyes, 
 with their invariable expression of kindness and love, 
 the little mole on her neck just below the tiny curls, her 
 embroidered white collar, and her delicate dry hand 
 which so often caressed me and which I so often kissed. 
 Her general expression, however, eludes me. . . . When 
 mamma smiled, her face, always beautiful, became in- 
 comparably more beautiful, and everything around grew, 
 as it were, brighter and more cheerful. If during the try- 
 ing hours of life I could but catch a glimpse of that smile, 
 I should never know what sorrow means. It seems to 
 me that it is only the smile that constitutes what is called 
 the beauty of a face : if the smile adds to the charm of 
 the face, the latter is beautiful ; if it does not change it, 
 it is common ; if it spoils it, it is ugly. 
 
 The harvest was at its height. The immense shim- 
 mering yellow field was closed on one side by a high 
 bluish forest, which at that time seemed to me the most 
 distant and mysterious place on earth, beyond which 
 either the world came to an end or there extended 
 uninhabited lands. The field was covered by sheaves 
 D 49 
 
50 TOLSTOY 
 
 and people. In the tall thick rye one could see, 
 here and there, on some cleared strip, the bent back 
 of a harvest woman, the ears of corn swinging as she 
 took them between her fingers, and the figure of a 
 woman in the shade, bending over a cradle. . . . The 
 hum of human voices, the stamping of horses' hoofs and 
 the sound of cart-wheels, the gay whistling of the quails, 
 the buzzing of insects that hovered about in the air in 
 close masses, the smell of wormwood and straw and 
 the horses' steaming flanks, the thousands of various 
 tints and shades cast by the burning sun over the bright 
 yellow field and the blue distance of the forest and the 
 lily-white clouds, the white air-threads flying about or 
 settling on the fields all this I saw, heard, and felt. 
 
 The windows, which looked out to the forest, were lit 
 up by the moon, which was almost full. The long white 
 figure of the crazy fanatic was illuminated, on one side, 
 by the pale silvery rays, and was, on the other, en- 
 veloped in a black shadow which, together with that of 
 the window-frames, fell on the floor and on the walls, 
 reaching up to the ceiling. The watchman in the yard 
 was striking his brazen board. His enormous arms 
 crossed on his heart, his head bent, sighing deeply and 
 incessantly, Grisha stood silently before the holy 
 images, and then heavily knelt and began to pray. At 
 first he softly said some prayers, emphasising only a few 
 of the words. Then he repeated them, but in a louder 
 voice and with greater animation. He began to utter 
 words of his own, trying with marked difficulty to ex- 
 press himself in Slavonic. His words were incoherent, 
 but touching. He prayed for all his benefactors (by 
 these he meant all who gave him shelter) amongst others, 
 for mother and for us; he prayed for himself, asking 
 
YOUTH 51 
 
 God to forgive him his great sins, and repeating : ' Oh, 
 Lord, forgive my enemies.' Groaning, he now raised 
 himself; and then, saying over and over again the same 
 words, prostrated himself on the floor; and then once 
 more raised himself, in spite of the heavy irons that 
 made a dry and sharp sound when knocking against the 
 floor. Volodya gave me a sharp pinch in the leg; but 
 I did not even turn round only rubbed the place with 
 my hand and still followed all the movements and words 
 of Grisha with a feeling of childish surprise, pity, and 
 awe. Instead of the fun and the laughter which I 
 anticipated when entering the lumber-room, I felt a 
 nervous shiver passing through my body, my heart 
 sinking within me. . . . Plenty of water has flowed 
 since then, many memories of the past have lost their 
 importance to me and become hazy dreams, even 
 Grisha, the wanderer, has long since come to the end 
 of his pilgrimages ; but the impression he made on me, 
 and the feelings which he evoked within me, will never 
 die out of my memory. 
 
 The requiem came to an end, the face of the deceased 
 was uncovered, and all present, with the exception of 
 ourselves, approached the coffin one by one and kissed 
 the dead. One of the last to come to pay the last 
 honours was a peasant woman, holding in her arms a 
 pretty girl about five years of age, whom she had brought 
 with her, goodness knows for what purpose. At that 
 moment I dropped my wet handkerchief on the floor 
 and was going to pick it up ; but no sooner did I stoop 
 to do so than I was startled by a terrific piercing scream 
 full of such horror that, were I even to live a hundred 
 years, I shall never be able to forget it. Whenever I 
 think of it, a cold shiver passes through my body. I 
 
52 TOLSTOY 
 
 raised my head : on the footstool, by the side of the 
 coffin, there stood the same peasant woman, struggling 
 to hold the child, which, waving her little arms, her 
 frightened face thrown back and her wide eyes fixed on 
 the face of the deceased, was wildly, furiously screaming. 
 I uttered a cry which was, I think, still more frightful 
 than the one which had just startled me, and ran out of 
 the room. It was only then that I understood whence 
 the strong and heavy smell came which filled the room 
 together with the odour of the incense : and the 
 thought that the face which but a few days ago was full 
 of beauty and gentleness, the face of one whom I loved 
 more than anything else in the world, could inspire 
 such a horror revealed to me for the first time, as it 
 were, the bitter truth, and filled my soul with despair. 
 
 In the vestibule the samovar is boiling already, and 
 Mitka, the postilion, red as a lobster, blows it with all 
 his might. Outside, it is damp and misty; something 
 like steam rises from the odorous dunghill. The sun 
 illuminates brightly and cheerfully the eastern part of 
 the sky, as well as the dew-covered and glittering straw 
 roofs of the sheds which border the yard. Under the 
 sheds one sees the horses tied to their mangers and hears 
 their measured chewing. A shaggy little dog, which has 
 coiled itself up on the dry dunghill just before sunrise, 
 lazily stretches itself, and, wagging its tail, trots off to 
 another part of the yard. The busy housewife throws 
 open the creaking gate, drives the dreamy cows into the 
 street, where one could already hear the stamping, the 
 lowing, and the bleating of the herd, and exchanges a 
 few words with the sleepy neighbour. Philip, with his 
 shirt-sleeves turned up, draws a bucket from the deep 
 well by means of a wheel, splashing the clear water, 
 
YOUTH 53 
 
 and empties it into an oaken trough, near which a number 
 of ducks, already aroused from their sleep, splash about 
 in a pool. I watch with pleasure the dignified face of 
 Philip with its large and bushy beard, and the thick veins 
 and muscles that stand out sharply on his bare and 
 powerful arms whenever he makes an effort. 
 
 There, on the footpath, which winds near the high 
 road, we see a number of slowly moving figures. These 
 are pilgrim-women. Their heads are muffled in dirty 
 handkerchiefs, on their backs are birch-bark baskets, 
 their feet are wrapped up in dirty, torn rags, and clad in 
 heavy bast shoes. Rhythmically swinging their sticks, 
 and scarcely looking at us, they slowly and heavily 
 proceed one after the other, and different questions rise 
 in my mind : Whither are they going ? What for ? When 
 will the long shadows which they cast on the road join 
 the shadows of the cytisus which they will have to 
 pass by ? 
 
 Suddenly the entire country around changes its aspect 
 and falls into a gloom. A tremor passes through the 
 aspen woods; the leaves assume a turbid whitish tint, 
 forming a striking contrast with the lilac background of 
 the storm-cloud, and rustle and twirl about. The tops 
 of the big birch trees begin to swing, and bundles of dry 
 grass are blown over the road. Martins and white- 
 breasted swallows hover round our coach, as if with the 
 intention of stopping us, and pass under the very breasts 
 of our horses. Jackdaws with dishevelled wings fly 
 somewhat sideways along the wind. The edges of the 
 leathern apron, with which we have buttoned ourselves 
 up, begin to rise, letting through gusts of damp wind, 
 and, fluttering to and fro, knock against the frame of 
 
54 TOLSTOY 
 
 the coach. Suddenly a flash of lightning, in the very 
 coach as it were, blinds our eyes and illuminates for a 
 moment the grey cloth, the galloons, and the figure 
 of Volodya coiled up in the corner. Simultaneously a 
 majestic peal of thunder rolls over our very heads, and 
 then, ascending, as it were, higher and higher and sweep- 
 ing in an ever wider and wider spiral, gradually gains 
 force and finally ends with a deafening crash that makes 
 one involuntarily tremble and hold one's breath. The 
 wrath of God ! what poesy in that popular idea ! . . . 
 * Little father ! help a poor man, for Christ's sake ! ' 
 sounds a weak voice, and the beggar crosses himself and 
 bows low at every word. I cannot express the feeling 
 of cold horror that seized my soul at this moment. My 
 hair was trembling with fear, and my eyes were fixed 
 and stupidly gazing at the beggar. ... A dazzling flash, 
 suddenly filling the gorge with a fiery light, compels the 
 horses to stop. It is accompanied, without the least 
 interval, by such a deafening crash of thunder that the 
 entire vault of heaven seems to fall upon our heads. 
 The wind grows stronger; the manes and tails of the 
 horses, Vassily's cloak and the edges of the apron fly in 
 the same direction and flutter desperately in the furious 
 gusts of the wind. A heavy rain-drop falls upon the 
 leathern top of the coach, another, a third, a fourth ; and 
 all at once we hear the rolling of a drum, as it were, and 
 the country around begins to resound with the measured 
 noise of the falling rain. I can see by the movements 
 of Vassily's elbows that he is unfastening the purse ; the 
 beggar, still crossing himself and bowing, runs close to 
 the very wheels, making one tremble lest he should fall 
 under them. ' Give me something, for Christ's sake ! ' 
 At last a copper coin flashes through the air, and the 
 poor wretch, in wet rags that tightly cling to his lean 
 
YOUTH 55 
 
 limbs, stops in the middle of the road with a puzzled 
 expression on his face and, tottering from the wind, dis- 
 appears from sight. . . . Now the rain grows less. The 
 storm-cloud begins to break up into curly plumes. It 
 brightens up where the sun must be, and through its 
 greyish-white edges one can catch a glimpse of the clear 
 blue sky. Another moment, and a timid sunbeam is 
 playing already on the pools on the road, on the sheets 
 of the fine, perpendicular rain falling as through a sieve, 
 and on the cleanly washed and shining green of the 
 grass by the roadside. 
 
 'We shall not always live together, you know/ said 
 Katenka. ... * You are rich, and we are poor. . . .' 
 These words and the ideas conveyed by them appeared 
 to me uncommonly strange. . . . Still I understood that 
 it would not do to speak with Katenka about it, and a 
 sort of a practical instinct, so to say, in opposition to the 
 logical reasoning, told me that she was right, and that it 
 would be out of place to explain to her my thoughts. . . . 
 For the first time the idea clearly presented itself to my 
 mind that not we alone (that is, our family) live in the 
 world, that not all interests concentrate upon us, but 
 that there is another life of other people who have 
 nothing in common with us, who do not care about us, 
 who even have no idea of our existence. Undoubtedly, 
 I knew all this before, but I knew it not as I grasped it 
 now. I did not realise it, I did not feel it. ... With 
 our arrival in Moscow the change in my view of things 
 and persons and my attitude towards them became still 
 more marked. 
 
 During the year in which I lived a secluded, self-con- 
 centrated, and moral life, all the abstract questions about 
 
56 TOLSTOY 
 
 the destiny of man, future life, or immortality of the soul, 
 were already arising in my brain, and my feeble youthful 
 mind was trying with all the passion of inexperience 
 to solve those problems, the appreciation of which con- 
 stitutes the highest point attainable by the human mind, 
 but which no one can solve. ... It appeared to me 
 at one time that happiness does not depend on external 
 causes, but on our attitude towards them, that a person 
 who can bear pain can never be unhappy. And so, in 
 order to get used to pain, I would, for five minutes at a 
 time, hold TatischefFs Dictionaries in my outstretched 
 hands, or go to the scullery and there beat myself on the 
 bare back with a rope till tears involuntarily came to 
 my eyes. Another time, on recollecting suddenly that 
 death may come to me at any hour, at any moment, I 
 decided wondering how it was that people had not 
 grasped it up till now that man cannot be happy 
 otherwise than by enjoying the present and ignoring 
 the future; and for three consecutive days, under the 
 influence of this thought, I did not do my lessons, but 
 simply lay on my bed, reading a novel and eating cake 
 with honey, bought with my last pence. But by no 
 philosophical system was I carried away to such an 
 extent as by scepticism, which at one time nearly 
 brought me to the verge of madness. I imagined that 
 there was nobody and nothing in the world but myself, 
 that the objects around are not objects, but images 
 which only appear when one thinks of them, and dis- 
 appear as soon as one leaves off thinking of them. In 
 a word, I agreed with' Schelling that what exists is not 
 things, but solely one's attitude towards them. There 
 were moments when, under the influence of this fixed 
 idea, I attained such heights of folly that I would suddenly 
 turn round to see whether I could not find a vacuum 
 
YOUTH 57 
 
 where I was not. What a miserable, insignificant spring 
 of moral activity the human mind is ! My feeble brain 
 could not penetrate the impenetrable, but instead was 
 losing in its fruitless efforts one moral conviction after 
 the other things that for the sake of happiness in my 
 life I should never have touched. From all this heavy 
 moral toil I did not derive anything but a superfine 
 flexibility of mind that unloosened my strength of will, 
 and a habit, a predilection for constant moral analysis 
 that destroyed the freshness of my feelings and the 
 lucidity of my reason. ... I was simply losing my 
 wits. 
 
 I involuntarily long to cross as quickly as possible the 
 desert of my adolescence, and to reach that happy time 
 when again the truly delicate and noble feeling of 
 friendship illuminated the close of that period and began 
 a new one full of charm and poesy that of youth. . . . 
 Under the influence of Nekhlyudov I involuntarily 
 adopted his views, the essential part of which was the 
 enthusiastic adoration of the ideal of virtue and a belief 
 in the destiny of man to progress continually towards 
 perfection. At that time it seemed a very easy thing to 
 improve man morally, to extirpate all vice and mis- 
 fortunes of mankind; it seemed so simple to improve 
 oneself, to learn all virtue and to be happy. . . . How- 
 ever, God alone knows whether these noble, youthful 
 dreams were really so ridiculous, and whose fault it is 
 that they were not realised. 
 
 I became this summer more intimate than ever before 
 with our young ladies on account of the passion for music 
 that had suddenly awakened within me. ... I at once 
 began playing salon pieces, and played them, of course, 
 
58 TOLSTOY 
 
 with feeling avec ame as Katenka herself acknow- 
 ledged, without the least notion of time. The choice of 
 pieces was the usual one waltzes, galops, sentimental 
 songs, arrangements for the pianoforte all those things 
 by lovely composers which anyone with a grain of 
 common sense will pick out in a music-shop from a heap 
 of excellent things and say : ' These are the things which 
 you must not play. Nothing worse, more tasteless and 
 insipid has ever been put on music paper. . . . ' Notwith- 
 standing this muddle and hypocrisy, there was, however, 
 so far as I can recollect, some talent in me, as music 
 often impressed me till tears flowed from my eyes, and 
 the things which I loved, I could, without notes, make 
 out on the piano myself. Possibly, had somebody taught 
 me to regard music as an end in' itself, f, a pleasure for 
 itself, not as a means to evoke ladies' aj. plause by the 
 quickness and the sentimentality of the performance, I 
 might have, indeed, become a good musician. 
 
 Another occupation of mine during that summer was 
 the reading of French novels, of which Volodya had 
 brought a good number. ... I would find in myself all 
 the passions painted in these novels and a likeness with 
 all the characters the heroes as well as the villains 
 just as a morbid-minded person finds in himself the 
 symptoms of all possible diseases when reading a medical 
 book. . . . Thanks to those novels I even formed new 
 ideals of moral qualities which I wanted to attain. First of 
 all I wanted, in all my actions and conduct, to be noble ; . . . 
 then to be passionate, and lastly what I was inclined to 
 even before \.Q\>ecommeilfaut. . . . This latter notion 
 was in my life one of the most pernicious and false incul- 
 cated in me by education and society. . . . My comme il 
 faut consisted, first and foremost, in speaking excellent 
 
YOUTH 59 
 
 French and, especially, in pronouncing it faultlessly. The 
 second condition of comme ilfaut was to have long nails, 
 clean and polished ; the third, to be able to make a 
 graceful bow, to dance and to carry on a conversation ; 
 the fourth and very important, too to be indifferent to 
 everything, and to wear a constant expression of elegant, 
 contemptuous weariness. The relation of the boots to 
 the trousers of a man at once decided in my eyes his 
 station in life. ... It is awful to think what an amount of 
 the best time in my youth I have wasted on the acquire- 
 ment of this quality. . . . 
 
 '* The spree was at its height. I had had already a 
 glassful of hot punch, another was filled for me, my 
 temples were throbbing, the flame seemed red as fire, 
 everybody around was shouting and laughing ; and still 
 not only did it not seem merry, but I was even certain 
 that both I and the rest felt bored, though, for some 
 mysterious reason, we thought it necessary to pretend to 
 be happy. ... I remember that besides the same feeling 
 of lack of control in all my limbs which I experienced 
 during the dinner at Yar's, I had on that night such a 
 severe headache that I was awfully afraid lest I should 
 drop down dead on the spot. I also remember that we, 
 goodness knows for what purpose, sat down on the floor, 
 and, moving our arms in imitation of rowing, sang : 
 { Down the mother Volga,' I myself thinking all the time 
 that it was stupid to do all this. I further remember 
 that, lying on the floor and hardly being able to move 
 about the legs, I wrestled in the gipsy style, nearly broke 
 somebody's neck, and thought that this would not have 
 happened had he not been drunk. I remember also 
 that we had some supper and drank something else, that 
 I went for a moment outside to catch a breath of fresh 
 
60 TOLSTOY 
 
 air, and my head was cold; and when going home I 
 noticed that it was awfully dark, that the step of the 
 carriage became slanting and slippery, and that it was 
 impossible to lean on Kuzma, as he was very weak and 
 bent like a rag. Most of all, I remember that all through 
 that night I continually felt that I was acting very 
 foolishly. Each of us considered it his duty to pre- 
 tend to be jolly in order not to spoil the general merry- 
 making. Besides, strange to say, I felt it incumbent on 
 me to feign this, if only for the reason that the bowl 
 contained three bottles of champagne at ten roubles 
 each, and ten bottles of rum, four roubles each, which 
 altogether made a total of seventy roubles, besides the 
 supper. Childhood^ Boyhood, and Youth. 
 
 I was christened and educated in the faith of the 
 Orthodox Greek Church ; I was taught it in my child- 
 hood, and I learned it in my youth. Nevertheless, at 
 eighteen years of age, when I quitted the university, I 
 had discarded all belief in everything that I had been 
 taught. To judge by what I can now remember, I 
 could never have had a very serious belief; it must have 
 been a kind of trust in this teaching based on a trust in 
 my teachers and elders, and a trust, moreover, not very 
 firmly grounded. I remember once, in my twelfth year, 
 
 a boy, now long since dead, Vladimir M , a pupil 
 
 in a gymnasium, spent a Sunday with us, and brought 
 us the news of the last discovery in the gymnasium, 
 namely, that there was no God, and that all we were 
 taught on the subject was a mere invention. This was 
 in 1838. I remember well how interested my elder 
 brothers were in this news. I sympathised then with 
 the jokes of my elders, and drew from them this con- 
 clusion : that I was bound to learn my catechism, and 
 
YOUTH 6 1 
 
 go to church, but that it was not necessary to think of 
 my religious duties more seriously. I also remember 
 that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that 
 his tone of mockery amused without disgusting me. 
 The gradual estrangement from all belief went on in me, 
 as it does, and always has done, in those of the same 
 social position and culture. 
 
 The belief instilled from childhood gradually dis- 
 appeared in me, as in so many others, but with this 
 difference, that I was conscious of my own disbelief. 
 At fifteen years of age I had begun to read philo- 
 sophical works. From the age of sixteen I ceased to 
 pray, and ceased also, from conviction, to attend the 
 services of the Church, and to fast. I no longer 
 accepted the faith of my childhood, but I had a vague 
 belief in something^ though I do not think I could 
 exactly explain what. Now, when I think over that 
 time, I see clearly that all the faith I had, the only 
 belief which, apart from mere animal instinct, swayed 
 my life, was a belief in a possibility of perfection, though 
 what it was in itself, or what would be its results, I was 
 unable to say. At first, of course, moral perfection 
 seemed to me the main end, but I soon found myself 
 contemplating in its stead an ideal of general perfecti- 
 bility ; in other words, I wished to be better, not in my 
 own eyes, nor in those of God, but in the sight of other 
 men. This feeling again soon ended in another the 
 desire to have more power than others, to secure for 
 myself a greater share of fame, of social distinction, and 
 of wealth. 
 
 I honestly desired to make myself a good and 
 virtuous man; but I was young, I had passions, and I 
 
62 TOLSTOY 
 
 stood alone, altogether alone, in my search after virtue. 
 Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart 
 for a truly virtuous life, I was met with contempt and 
 derisive laughter, but directly I gave way to the lowest 
 of my passions, I was praised and encouraged. I found 
 ambition, love of power, love of gain, lechery, pride, 
 anger, vengeance, held in high esteem. I gave way to 
 these passions, and becoming like unto my elders, felt 
 that the place which I filled in the world satisfied those 
 around me. My kind-hearted aunt, a really good 
 woman, used to say to me that there was one thing 
 above all others which she wished for me an intrigue 
 with a married woman : ' Rien ne forme nn jeune homme 
 comme une liaison avec nne femme comme il faut! An- 
 other of her wishes for my happiness was that I 
 should become an adjutant, and, if possible, to the 
 Emperor. The greatest happiness of all for me she 
 thought would be that I should find a wealthy bride, 
 who would bring me as her dowry an enormous number 
 of serfs. My Confession. 
 
 II. SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 
 
 Prince Nekhlyudov was nineteen years of age when 
 he, a university graduate of the third term, visited his 
 landed estates during the summer holidays and remained 
 there all through the summer alone. In the autumn he 
 wrote to his aunt a letter in his irregular boyish hand : 
 
 ' I have made up my mind to a thing on which the entire 
 course of my life depends. I am leaving the university in 
 order to devote myself to country life, for which I feel I was 
 born. ... I found affairs there in an indescribable muddle. 
 Being desirous of putting them in order, and having closely 
 investigated them, I discovered that the root of the evil lies 
 
SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 63 
 
 in the wretched, poverty-stricken condition of the peasants 
 a thing that can only be remedied by long labour and 
 patience. ... Is it not my sacred and immediate duty to 
 take care of the seven hundred human souls for whose wel- 
 fare I shall have to answer before God? Is it not a sin to 
 leave them to the mercy of the rude elders and managers for 
 the sake simply of pleasure or ambition ? . . . I feel myself 
 quite capable of being a good landowner, and there is no 
 need, in order to become such a one (as I understand the 
 word), to have a university degree or a title such as you 
 desire for me. . . . ' 
 
 { My God, my God ! ' thought Nekhlyudov, . . . ' were 
 my dreams of the aim and duties of my life nothing but 
 empty words ? -Why do I feel so heavy and dissatisfied, 
 when, I had thought that, once I discovered this road, I 
 should always experience the same fulness of satisfaction 
 as at the time when these thoughts first dawned on my 
 mind? .*. .' With all the charm of the unknown, his 
 youthful imagination pictured to him the voluptuous 
 figure of a woman, and he thought: that is it, the 
 unexpressed desire. But another, a higher feeling 
 whispered to him : it is not that, and made him look for 
 something else. Again, his inexperienced, ardent mind, 
 ascending ever higher and higher into the sphere of 
 abstraction, discovered, as it seemed to him, the laws of 
 the universe, and he with a proud pleasure dwelt on 
 these thoughts. But once more a higher feeling whispered 
 to him : it is not that, and made him seek again, and 
 again feel uneasy. Without thoughts or desires, as 
 always happens after intense mental activity, he lay 
 down on his back under a tree and began contemplating 
 the translucent morning clouds that glided over him 
 across the deep and limitless sky. ... 'Love, self- 
 sacrifice this is the only true happiness, not subject to 
 
64 TOLSTOY 
 
 accident,' he repeated, smiling and waving his hands. 
 Applying this thought in every direction of life, and 
 finding it confirmed both in life and in that inner voice 
 which whispered to him : it is that, he experienced a 
 novel sensation of joy and ecstasy. ' And so I must 
 do good in order to be happy,' he thought, and his 
 entire future vividly presented itself before his mind not 
 in abstractions, as before, but in concrete forms of the 
 life of a landowner. *He saw before him, as it were, an 
 immense field, the life which he would devote to good, 
 and in which, therefore, he would be happy. He need 
 not look for a sphere of activity he had one ready for 
 him; he had direct duties he owned peasants. . . . 
 What a joyous and fruitful work there lay before him ! 
 * ' To influence this simple, receptive, uncorrupted people, 
 to free them from poverty, to give them contentedness, to 
 pass to the peasants the education which I, fortunately, 
 possess, to correct their vices, born of ignorance and 
 superstition, to develop their morality, to make them love 
 the Good. .*. . What a brilliant, happy future ! . . . 
 I and my wife, whom I love as no one has ever loved 
 anybody before, will live always amidst these quiet, 
 poetical, rural surroundings, with our children and, 
 perhaps, with our old aunt. We have our mutual love, 
 our love to our children, and we both know that our aim 
 and destiny in life is the good. . . . ' ' Where are 
 those dreams ? ' the young man was now asking himself 
 as he neared the house after his visits ; { for more than 
 a year I have been seeking happiness on this road, 
 and what have I found ? True, sometimes I do feel that 
 I can be content; but it is such a dry, rational content- 
 ment ! No, I am simply dissatisfied with myself ! . . . 
 Aunt was right when she wrote that it is easier to find 
 happiness for oneself than to give it to others. Have 
 
SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 65 
 
 my peasants become richer ? Have they become better 
 educated or more moral ? Not in the least ! They are 
 no happier, whilst I am getting more and more unhappy 
 with every day. If I could but see progress in my 
 undertaking ! if I could but see gratitude ! . . . No, 
 I see only false routine, vice, mistrust, helplessness. 
 I am spending the best years of my life in vain. . . . ' 
 And suddenly, as vividly as that country walk through 
 the forest and his dreams of a landowner's life had risen 
 in his mind before just as vividly he now saw mentally 
 his student's room at Moscow, where he sat late into 
 the night before a solitary candle, together with his 
 fellow-student and dear friend. Then the future was 
 full of pleasure, of every kind of activity, of glitter, of 
 success, and led them both undoubtedly to what they 
 then conceived to be the supreme good in the world 
 to fame. . . . But at this moment he was already 
 nearing the steps of his house, where about a score 
 peasants of the village and manor were standing and 
 waiting for his arrival with various requests, and he had 
 to turn from his dreams to reality. . . . ' He listened to 
 all the requests and complaints, and, having advised 
 some, settled the complaint of others and given his 
 promises to the third, he entered his room with a mixed 
 feeling of weariness, shame, helplessness and penitence. 
 A Russian Proprietor. 
 
 Disenchantment certainly awaits you if you are enter- 
 ing Sevastopol for the first time. . . . 
 
 You enter the great Hall of Assembly. You have but 
 just opened the door when the sight and smell of forty or 
 fifty seriously wounded men and of those who have under- 
 gone amputation some in hammocks, the majority upon 
 the floor suddenly strike you. Trust not to the feeling 
 
66 TOLSTOY 
 
 which detains you upon the threshold of the hall ; be not 
 ashamed of having come to look at the sufferers, be not 
 ashamed to approach and address them : the unfortunates 
 like to see a sympathising human face, they like to tell 
 of their sufferings and to hear words of love and in- 
 terest. . . . Now, if your nerves are strong, pass through 
 the door on the left. In yonder room they are applying 
 bandages and performing operations. There you will 
 see doctors with their arms bloodstained above the elbow, 
 and with pale, stern faces, busied about a cot upon which, 
 with eyes widely opened, and uttering, as in delirium, in- 
 coherent, sometimes simple and touching words, lies a 
 wounded man under the influence of chloroform. The 
 doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work 
 of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter 
 the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man 
 suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and 
 curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated 
 arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying 
 in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and 
 groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not 
 so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of 
 anticipation. You behold the frightful, soul-stirring 
 scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, 
 beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, 
 with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you 
 behold war in its real aspect in blood, in suffering, in 
 death. On emerging from this house of pain, you will 
 infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure. . . . The 
 sight of the clear sky, the brilliant sun, the fine city, 
 the open church, and the soldiers moving about in 
 various directions soon restores your mind to its normal 
 condition of frivolity, petty cares, and absorption in the 
 present alone. 
 
SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 67 
 
 Hundreds of bodies, freshly smeared with blood, of 
 men who two hours previous had been filled with divers 
 lofty or petty hopes and desires, now lay, with stiffened 
 limbs, in the dewy, flowery valley which separated the 
 bastion from the trench, and on the level floor of the 
 chapel for the dead in Sevastopol; hundreds of men 
 crawled, twisted, and groaned, with curses and prayers 
 on their parched lips, some amid the corpses in the 
 flower-strewn vale, others on stretchers, on cots, and on 
 the bloodstained floor of the hospital. And still, as on the 
 days preceding, the dawn glowed over Sapun Mountain, 
 the twinkling stars paled, the white mist spread abroad 
 from the dark sounding sea, the red glow illuminated the 
 east, long crimson cloudlets darted across the blue 
 horizon ; and still, as on days preceding, the powerful, 
 all-beautiful sun rose up, giving promise of joy, love, and 
 happiness to all who dwell in the world. 
 
 Who is the villain of this sketch, who is the hero? 
 All are good, and all are evil. Neither Kalugin, with his 
 brilliant bravery bravoure de gentilhomme and his 
 vanity, the instigator of all his deeds ; nor Praskukhin, 
 the empty-headed, harmless man, though he fell in battle 
 for the faith, the throne, and his native land; nor 
 Mikhailoff, with his shyness ; nor Pesth, a child with no 
 firm convictions or principles, can be either the heroes or 
 the villains of the tale. The hero of my tale, whom I 
 love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have 
 tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always 
 been, is, and always will be, most beautiful, is the 
 truth. Sevastopol Sketches. 
 
 I cannot now recall those years without a painful 
 feeling of horror and loathing. I put men to death in 
 
68 TOLSTOY 
 
 war, I fought duels to slay others, I lost at cards, wasted 
 the substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished 
 the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived 
 men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, 
 violence, and murder, all committed by me, not one 
 crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by 
 my equals a comparatively moral man. Such was my life 
 during ten years. 
 
 During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love 
 of gain, and pride. I followed as a writer the same path 
 which I had chosen as a man. In order to obtain the 
 fame and the money for which I wrote, I was obliged to 
 hide what was good and bow down before what was evil. 
 How often while writing have I cudgelled my brains to 
 conceal under the mask of indifference or pleasantry 
 those yearnings for something better which formed the 
 real problem of my life ! I succeeded in my object, and 
 was praised. 
 
 At twenty-six years of age, on the close of the war, I 
 came to St. Petersburg and made the acquaintance of the 
 authors of the day. I met with a hearty reception and 
 much flattery. Before I had time to look around, the pre- 
 judices and views of life common to the writers of the 
 class with which I associated became my own, and com- 
 pletely put an end to all my former struggles after a better 
 life. These views, under the influence of the dissipation 
 into which I plunged, issued in a theory of life which 
 justified it. The view taken by my fellow-writers was that 
 life is development, and the principal part in that develop- 
 ment is played by ourselves, the thinkers, while among the 
 thinkers the chief influence is again due to ourselves, the 
 poets. Our vocation is to teach mankind. 
 
SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 69 
 
 I was myself considered a marvellous litterateitr and 
 poet, and I therefore very naturally adopted this theory. 
 Meanwhile, thinker and poet though I was, I wrote and 
 taught I knew not what. For doing this I received large 
 sums of money ; I kept a splendid table, had an excellent 
 lodging, associated with loose women, and received my 
 friends handsomely; moreover, I had fame. It would 
 seem, then, that what I taught must have been good ; 
 the faith in poetry and the development of life was a 
 true faith, and I was one of its high priests, a post of 
 great importance, and of profit. I long remained in 
 this belief, and, at first, never once doubted its truth. 
 
 In the second, however, and especially in the third year 
 of this way of life, I began to doubt the infallibility of 
 the doctrine, and to examine it more closely. . . . 
 When I doubted this faith in the influence of literary 
 men, I began to examine more closely into the character 
 and conduct of its chief professors, and I convinced 
 myself that they were men who led immoral lives, most 
 of them worthless and insignificant individuals, and far 
 beneath the moral level of those with whom I had 
 associated during my former dissipated and military 
 career; these men, however, had none the less an 
 amount of self-confidence only to be expected in those 
 who are conscious of being saints, or in those for whom 
 holiness is an empty name. 
 
 I grew disgusted with mankind and with myself, and 
 discovered that this belief which I had accepted was a 
 delusion. The strangest thing in all this was that, though 
 I soon saw the falseness of the belief and renounced it, 
 I did not renounce the position I had gained by it; I 
 still called myself a thinker, a poet, and a teacher. I was 
 
70 TOLSTOY 
 
 simple enough to imagine that I, the poet and thinker, 
 was able to teach other men without knowing myself what 
 it was I attempted to teach. I had only gained a new 
 vice by my companionship ; it had developed pride in 
 me to a morbid extreme, and my self-confidence in teach- 
 ing what I did not know amounted almost to insanity. 
 
 I lived in this senseless manner another six years, up to 
 the time of my marriage. During the interval I had been 
 abroad. My life in Europe, and my acquaintance with 
 many eminent and learned foreigners, confirmed my belief 
 in the doctrine of general perfectibility, as I found the same 
 theory prevailed among them. This belief took the form 
 which is common among most cultivated men of the 
 day. It may be summed up in the word ' progress.' . . . 
 It was only at rare intervals that my feelings, and not 
 my reason, were roused against the common superstition 
 of our age, which leads men to ignore their own ignorance 
 of life. Thus, during my stay in Paris, the sight of a 
 public execution revealed to me the weakness of my super- 
 stitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided 
 from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell 
 separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, 
 but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of 
 all established things, nor of progress, could justify such 
 an act ; and that if all the men in the world from the day 
 of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing 
 necessary, it was not so it was a bad thing and that 
 therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, 
 not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what 
 I felt to be true in my heart. Another instance of the in- 
 sufficiency of this superstition of progress as a rule for life 
 occurred with the death of my brother. He fell ill while 
 still young, suffered much during a whole year, and died 
 
SOLDIER, LANDLORD, ARTIST 71 
 
 in great pain. He was a man of great abilities, of a kind 
 heart, and of a serious temper, but he died without under- 
 standing why he had lived, or what his death meant for 
 him. No theories could give an answer to these questions 
 either to him or to me, during the whole period of his long 
 and painful lingering. 
 
 " On my return from abroad I settled in the country, and 
 occupied myself with the organisation of schools for the 
 peasantry. This occupation was especially grateful to me 
 because it was free from the spirit of falseness so evident 
 to me in the career of a literary teacher. Here again I 
 acted in the name of progress, but this time I brought a 
 spirit of critical inquiry to the system on which the pro- 
 gress rested. I said to myself that progress was often 
 attempted in an irrational manner, and that it was 
 necessary to leave a primitive people and the children of 
 peasants perfectly free to choose the way of progress which 
 they thought best. In reality I was still bent on the 
 solution of the same impossible problem, how to teach 
 without knowing what I had to teach. ... It seems 
 now absurd when I remember the experiments by which 
 I carried out this whim of mine to teach, though I knew 
 in my heart that I could teach nothing useful, because I 
 myself did not know what was necessary. 
 
 After a year spent in this employment with the 
 schools, I again went abroad, for the purpose of finding 
 out how to teach under these conditions. I be, 
 I had found a solution abroad, and, armed with that 
 conviction, I returned to Russia, the same year in which 
 the peasants were freed from serfdom, and accepting the 
 office of a country magistrate or arbitrator, I began to 
 teach the uneducated people in the schools, and the 
 
72 TOLSTOY 
 
 educated classes in the journals which I published. 
 Things seemed to be going on well, but I felt that my 
 mind was not in a normal state, and that a change was 
 near. I might then, perhaps, have come to that state 
 of absolute despair to which I was brought fifteen years 
 later, if it had not been for a new experience in life which 
 promised me safety the home life of a family man. 
 For a year I occupied myself with my duties as 
 arbitrator, with the schools, and my newspaper, and 
 got so involved that I was harassed to death; my 
 arbitration was one continual struggle, what to do in 
 the schools became less and less clear, and my news- 
 paper shuffling more and more repugnant to me. 
 Always the same thing : trying to teach without 
 knowing how or what. So that I fell ill, more with a 
 mental than physical sickness, gave up everything, and 
 started for the steppes to breathe a fresher air, to drink 
 
 mare's milk, and live a mere animal life. 
 
 $ 
 
 Soon after my return I married. The new circum- 
 stances of a happy family life by which I was now 
 surrounded completely led my mind away from the 
 search after the meaning of life as a whole. My life was 
 concentrated in my family, my wife, and children, and, 
 consequently, in the care for increasing the means of 
 supporting them. The effort to attain individual perfec- 
 tion, already replaced by the striving after general 
 progress, was again changed into an effort to secure the 
 particular happiness of my family. 
 
 In this way fifteen years passed. Notwithstanding 
 that during these fifteen years I looked upon the craft of 
 authorship as a very trifling thing, I continued all the 
 time to write. I had experienced the seductions of 
 
CONVERSION 73 
 
 authorship, the temptations of an enormous pecuniary 
 reward and of great applause for valueless work, and 
 gave myself up to it as a means of improving my 
 material position, and of stifling all the feelings which 
 led me to my own life and that of society for the mean- 
 ing in them. In my writings I taught what for me was 
 the only truth that the object of life should be our own 
 happiness and that of our family. My Confession. 
 
 III. CONVERSION 
 
 By this rule I lived; but five years ago (1874) a 
 strange state of mind-torpor began at times to grow 
 upon me. I had moments of perplexity, of a stoppage, 
 as it were, of life, as if I did not know how I was to 
 live, what I was to do. I began to wander, and was 
 a victim to low spirits. This, however, passed, and I 
 continued to live as before. Later, these periods of 
 perplexity grew more and more frequent, and invari- 
 ably took the same form. During their continuance 
 the same questions always presented themselves to me : 
 c Why ? ' and ' What after ? ' . . . I became aware that 
 this was not a mere passing phase of mental ill-health, 
 but that the symptoms were of the utmost importance, 
 and that if these questions continued to recur I must 
 find an answer to them. 
 
 My life had come to a sudden stop. I was able to 
 breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. I could not, 
 indeed, help doing so ; but there was no real life in me. 
 I had not a single wish to strive for the fulfilment of 
 what I could feel to be reasonable. The truth lay 
 in this, that life had no meaning for me. Thus I, a 
 healthy and a happy man, was brought to feel that I 
 
74 TOLSTOY 
 
 could live no longer, that an irresistible force was 
 dragging me down into the grave. The idea of suicide 
 came as naturally to me as formerly that of bettering 
 my life. It had so much attraction for me that I 
 was compelled to practise a species of self-deception 
 in order to avoid carrying it out too hastily. I was 
 unwilling to act hastily, only because I had determined 
 first to clear away the confusion of my thoughts, and, 
 that once done, I could always kill myself. I was 
 happy, yet I hid away a cord to avoid being tempted 
 to hang myself by it to one of the pegs between the 
 cupboards of my study, where I undressed alone every 
 evening. And I ceased to carry a gun because it 
 offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I knew 
 not what I wanted ; I was afraid of life ; I shrank 
 from it; and yet there was something I hoped for 
 from it. 
 
 Such was the condition I had come to at a time when 
 all the circumstances of my life were pre-eminently 
 happy ones, and when I had not reached my fiftieth 
 year. I had a good, a loving, and a well-beloved 
 wife, good children, a fine estate, which, without 
 much trouble on my part, continually increased my 
 income ; I was more than ever respected by my friends 
 and acquaintances; I was praised by strangers, and 
 could lay claim to having made my name famous 
 without much self-deception. Moreover, my mind 
 was neither deranged nor weakened; on the contrary, 
 I enjoyed a mental and physical strength which I 
 have seldom found in men of my class and pursuits ; I 
 could keep up with a peasant in mowing, and could 
 continue mental labour for ten hours at a stretch 
 without any evil consequences. 
 
CONVERSION 75 
 
 The mental state in which I then was seemed to 
 me summed up in the following : My life was a 
 foolish and wicked joke played upon me by I knew 
 not whom. Notwithstanding my rejection of the 
 idea of a Creator, that of a being who thus wickedly 
 and foolishly made a joke of me seemed to me the 
 most natural of all conclusions and the one that threw 
 the most light upon my darkness. . . . Illness and death 
 would come indeed they had come if not to-day, 
 then to-morrow, to those whom I loved, to myself, 
 and nothing would remain but stench and worms. 
 All my acts, whatever I did, would sooner or later be 
 forgotten, and I myself be nowhere. Why, then, busy 
 oneself with anything ? 
 
 However I may reason with myself that I cannot 
 understand the meaning of life, that I must live without 
 thinking, I cannot again begin to do so ; I have done 
 so too long already. I cannot now help seeing that 
 each day and each night, as it passes, brings me nearer 
 to death. I can see but this, because this alone is true 
 all the rest is a lie. ... I felt a horror of what awaited 
 me; I knew that this horror was more terrible than 
 the position itself, but I could not patiently await the 
 end. However persuasive the argument might be, 
 that in any case something in the heart or elsewhere 
 would burst and all be over, still I could not patiently 
 await the end. The horror of the darkness was too 
 great to bear, and I longed to free myself from it by a 
 rope or a pistol ball. This was the feeling that, above 
 all, drew me to think of suicide. 
 
 I sought an explanation of the questions which 
 tormented me in every ^branch of human knowledge. 
 
y6 TOLSTOY 
 
 I sought that explanation painfully and long, not out of 
 mere curiosity nor apathetically, but obstinately day and 
 night. I sought it as a perishing man seeks safety, and I 
 found nothing. I sought in all directions, and, thanks 
 to a life of study, and also to the footing which I had 
 gained in learned society, all the sources of knowledge 
 were open to me, not merely through books, but through 
 personal intercourse. I had the advantage of all that 
 learning could answer to the question, * What is life ? ' . . . 
 I said to myself, c I know now all that science so obsti- 
 nately seeks to learn ; but an answer to my question as 
 to the meaning of my life is not to be obtained from 
 science.' I saw that philosophy, notwithstanding, or 
 perhaps because, an answer to my question had become 
 the direct object of its inquiries, gave no answer but the 
 one I had given to myself. ' What is the meaning of my 
 life ? It has none. Or, what will come of my life ? 
 Nothing. Or, why does all that is exist, and why do 
 I exist ? Because it does exist.' Thus my wanderings 
 over the fields of knowledge not only failed to cure me 
 of my despair, but increased it. One branch of know- 
 ledge gave no answer at all to the problem of life, 
 another gave a direct answer which confirmed my despair 
 and showed that the state to which I had come was not 
 the result of my going astray, of any mental disorder, but, 
 on the contrary, of my thinking rightly, of my being in 
 agreement with the conclusions of the most powerful 
 intellects among mankind. 
 
 Having failed to find an explanation in knowledge, I 
 began to seek it in life itself, hoping to find it in the men 
 who surrounded me ; and I began to watch men like 
 myself, to observe how they lived, and how they 
 practically treated the question which had brought me 
 
CONVERSION 77 
 
 to despair. I found that for those who occupied the 
 same social position as myself there were four means of 
 escape from the terrible state in which we all were. The 
 first means of escape is Ignorance. It consists in not 
 perceiving and understanding that life is an evil and an 
 absurdity. . . . The second means of escape is the 
 Epicurean. It consists in taking advantage of every 
 good there is in life, while we know its hopelessness. . . . 
 The third means of escape is through Strength and 
 Energy of character. It consists in destroying life when 
 we have perceived that it is an evil and an absurdity. . . . 
 The fourth means of escape is through Weakness. 
 It consists in continuing to drag on, though the evil and 
 absurdity of life are well known, though aware that 
 nothing can come of it. ... Thus do those of my own 
 class, in four different ways, save themselves from a 
 terrible contradiction. 
 
 Then I thought to myself; ' But what if there be some- 
 thing more for me to know ? Mankind as a whole have 
 always lived, and are living, as if they understood the 
 meaning of life, for, not doing so, they could not live at 
 all ; and yet I say that all this life has no meaning in it 
 and that I cannot live.' Our wisdom, indeed, the wisdom 
 of the wise, however firmly it be grounded on truth, has 
 not imparted to us a knowledge of the meaning of life ; 
 yet all the unwise millions that share in the life of 
 humanity do not doubt that life has a meaning. . . . 
 Whether thanks to my strange kind of instinctive affec- 
 tion for the labouring classes, which impelled me to 
 understand them and to see that they are not so stupid 
 as we think, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction 
 that I could know nothing beyond the advisability of 
 hanging myself, I felt that, if I wished to live and 
 
78 TOLSTOY 
 
 understand the meaning of life, I must seek it not amongst 
 those who have lost their grasp on it, and wish to kill 
 themselves, but among the millions of the living and the 
 dead who have made our life what it is, and on whom 
 now rests the burden of our life and their own. , 
 
 So I watched the life common to such enormous 
 numbers of the dead and the living, the life of simple, 
 unlearned, and poor men, and found something quite 
 different. I saw that all these millions, with rare 
 exceptions, did not come under any division of the 
 classification which I had made. ... It appeared that 
 throughout mankind there was a sense given to the 
 meaning of life which I had neglected and despised. It 
 came to this, that the knowledge based on reason denied 
 a meaning to life, and declined to make it a subject of 
 inquiry, while the meaning given by the millions that 
 form the great whole of humanity was founded on a 
 despised and fallacious knowledge. ... I was com- 
 pelled to admit that, besides the reasoning knowledge 
 which I once thought the only true knowledge, there 
 was in every living man another kind of knowledge, 
 an unreasoning one, but which gives a possibility of 
 living faith. 
 
 Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, he believes 
 in something. If he did not believe that there was 
 something to live for, he would not live. If he does not 
 see and understand the unreality of the finite, he believes 
 in the finite ; if he sees that unreality, he must believe 
 in the infinite. Without faith there is no life. . . . The 
 conception of an infinite God, of the divinity of the soul, 
 of the way in which the affairs of men are related to God, 
 of the unity and reality of the spirit, man's conception of 
 
CONVERSION 79 
 
 moral good and evil, these are conceptions worked out 
 through the infinite mental labours of mankind 
 conceptions without which there would be no life, 
 without which I should not myself exist. 
 
 I began to draw nearer to the believers among the 
 poor, the simple, and the ignorant, the pilgrims, the 
 monks, the sectaries, and the peasants. The doctrines 
 of these men of the people, like those of the pretended 
 believers of my own class, were Christian. Here also 
 much that was superstitious was mingled with the truths 
 of Christianity, but with this difference : that the super- 
 stition of the believers of my own class was not needed 
 by them, and never influenced their lives beyond serving 
 as a kind of Epicurean distraction, while'^he superstition 
 of the believing labouring class was so interwoven with 
 their lives that it was impossible to conceive them with- 
 out it it was a necessary condition of their living at all. 
 /The whole life of the believers of my own class was in 
 flat contradiction with their faith, and the whole life of 
 the believers of the people was a confirmation of the 
 meaning of life which their faith gave them. ; . . . In 
 contradiction to the theory that the less learned we are 
 the less we understand the meaning of life, and see in 
 our sufferings and death but an evil joke, these men of 
 the people live, suffer, and drawn ear to death in quiet 
 confidence and oftenest with joy. In contradiction to 
 the fact that an easy death, without terror or despair, is 
 a rare exception in my own class, a death which is 
 uneasy, rebellious, and sorrowful is among the people 
 the rarest exception of all. These men, deprived of all 
 that for us and for Solomon makes the only good in 
 life, experience the highest happiness both in amount 
 and kind. 
 
8o TOLSTOY 
 
 I began to grow attached to these men. The more I 
 learned of their lives, the lives of the living and of 
 the dead of whom I read and heard, the more I liked 
 them, and the easier I felt it so to live. I lived in this 
 way during two years, and then there came a change 
 which had long been preparing in me, and the symptoms 
 of which I had always dimly felt. The life of my own 
 circle of rich and learned men not only became re- 
 pulsive, but lost all meaning whatever. All our actions, 
 our reasoning, our science and art, all appeared to me 
 in a new light. I understood that it was all child's 
 play, that it was useless to seek a meaning in it. The 
 life of the working classes, of the whole of mankind, of 
 those that create life, appeared to me in its true signi- 1 
 ficance. I understood that this was life itself, and that 
 the meaning given to this life was a true one, and I 
 accepted it. v 
 
 I understood that I had erred, and how I had erred. 
 I had erred not so much through having thought in- 
 correctly as through having lived ill. . . . What had I 
 done during my thirty years of conscious life ? I had 
 not only not helped the life of others, I had done 
 nothing for my own, I had lived the life of a parasite, 
 and contented myself with my ignorance of the reason 
 why I lived at all. If the meaning of the life of man 
 lies in his having to work out his life himself, how 
 could I, who during thirty years had done my best to 
 ruin my own life and that of others, expect to receive 
 any other answer to my questioning of life but this, that 
 my life was an evil and had no meaning in it ? It was 
 an evil ; it was without meaning. 
 
 After this I began to retrace the process which had 
 
CONVERSION 81 
 
 gone on within myself, the hundred-times-repeated dis- 
 couragement and revival. ... I returned, as it were, to 
 the past, to childhood and my youth. I returned to faith 
 in that Will which brought me into being, and which 
 required something of me ; I returned to the belief that 
 the one single aim of life should be to become better, 
 that is, to live in accordance with that Will ; I returned 
 to the idea that the expression of that Will was to be 
 found in what, in the dim obscurity of the past, the 
 great human unity had fashioned for its own guidance ; 
 in other words, I returned to a belief in God, in moral 
 perfectibility, and in the tradition which gives a meaning 
 to life. The difference was that formerly I had un- 
 consciously accepted this, whereas now I knew that 
 without it I could not live. 
 
 Though many things belonging to the faith of the 
 people appeared strange to me, I accepted everything. 
 I attended the Church services, prayed morning and 
 evening, fasted, prepared for the communion ; and while 
 doing all this, for the first time felt that my reason 
 found nothing to object to. 
 
 It was so necessary for me at that time to believe 
 in order to live, that I unconsciously concealed from 
 myself the contradictions and the obscurities in the 
 commonly-received doctrines. ... I shall never forget 
 the painful feeling I experienced when I took the com- 
 munion for the first time after many years. The 
 service, the confession, the prayers, all this was under- 
 stood by me, and produced the glad conviction that 
 the meaning of life lay open to me. The communion 
 I explained to myself as an action done in remem- 
 brance of Christ, and as signifying a cleansing from 
 
 F 
 
82 TOLSTOY 
 
 sin and a complete acceptance of Christ's teaching. . . . 
 But when I drew near to the altar, and the priest 
 called upon me to repeat that I believed that what I 
 was about to swallow was the real body and blood, 
 I felt a sharp pain at the heart ; it was no unconsidered 
 word, it was the hard demand of one who could never 
 have known what faith was. I humbled myself again, I 
 swallowed the blood and the body without any mocking 
 thoughts, in the wish to believe ; but the shock had been 
 given, and knowing what awaited me another time, I 
 could never go again. 
 
 Notwithstanding all my doubts and sufferings, I still 
 remained in the Orthodox Church; but practical 
 questions arose which required immediate decision, and 
 the decisions of the Church, contrary to the elementary 
 principles of the faith by which I lived, compelled me 
 finally to abandon all communion with it. The questions 
 were, in the first place, the relation of the Orthodox 
 Church to other Churches, to Catholicism and the so- 
 called sectarians. 
 
 I read everything I could get on the subject, and con- 
 sulted with as many as I could, but the only explanation 
 I obtained was that of the hussar who accounts his 
 regiment the first in the world, while his friend the 
 lancer says the same of his own. . . . The second 
 point, which concerned the relations of the Church to 
 the problems of life, was her connection with war and 
 executions. . . . When I looked around me at all that 
 was done in the name of religion, I was horrified, and 
 almost entirely withdrew from the Orthodox Church. 
 I looked round on all that was done by men who 
 professed to be Christians, and I was horrified. ... I 
 
CONVERSION 83 
 
 from this time became firmly convinced that all was not 
 truth in the faith which I had joined. Formerly I should 
 have said that all in this faith was false, but now it was 
 impossible to say so. 
 
 Whence, then, came this truth and this falsehood? 
 Both the falsehood and the truth came to the people 
 from what is called the Church; both are included 
 in the so-called sacred traditions and writings. I 
 was thus, whether I would or not, brought to the study 
 and analysis of these writings and traditions, a study 
 which, up to that time, I had feared ; and I turned to 
 the study of theology, which I had once thrown aside 
 with contempt as useless. ... I would not attempt to 
 explain everything. I knew that the explanation of the 
 whole, like the beginning of all things, was hidden in 
 infinity. I wished to be brought to the inevitable 
 limit where the incomprehensible begins ; I wished that 
 what remained uncomprehended should be so not 
 because the mental impulse to inquiry was not just and 
 natural all such impulses are, and without them I 
 could understand nothing but because I had learned 
 the limits of my own mind. I wished to understand so 
 that every unexplained proposition should appear to my 
 reason necessarily unexplainable, and not an obligatory 
 part of belief. I never doubted that the doctrines con- 
 tained both truth and falsehood, and I was bound to 
 separate the one from the other. I began to do this. 
 What I found of false and true and to what results I 
 came, forms the second part of this work [i.e., 'What 
 I Believe ' or ' My Religion ']. 
 
 All the contradictions, absurdities and cruelties (of 
 conventional religion) I exposed in detail in my work 
 
84 TOLSTOY 
 
 The Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, where all the Church 
 dogmas and theses as taught in our theology are examined 
 in sequence. My Confession. 
 
 At this point salvation came salvation, which was 
 this. From childhood I had retained a vague idea that 
 in the Gospel lay an answer to the problem before me. 
 In this Gospel teaching, despite all misrepresentations 
 of it in the teaching of the Christian Churches, I felt 
 the presence of truth ; and as a last effort, putting aside 
 all interpretations, I began to read and study the Gospel 
 and penetrate its meaning. The further I penetrated 
 the more clearly a new understanding of the Gospel was 
 revealed to me, quite different from that taught by the 
 Christian Churches, and solving the problem of my life. 
 
 At length this solution became perfectly clear, and 
 not only clear, but incontestable as well : because, 
 firstly, it harmonised entirely with the demands of my 
 reason and heart, and secondly, when I came to under- 
 stand it, I saw that this was not my exclusive inter- 
 pretation of the Gospel (as it might appear), nor even 
 the exclusive revelation of Christ, but the very solution 
 of the problem of life given more or less explicitly by 
 the best among men both before and after the Gospel 
 was given a succession from Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, 
 the early Greeks, Buddha, Socrates, down to Pascal, 
 Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all those, often unnoticed 
 and unknown, who, taking no teachings on trust, thought 
 and spoke sincerely upon the meaning of life. I became 
 confirmed in this truth, and at peace ; and I have since 
 with gladness passed through twenty years of life, and 
 am with gladness drawing near to death. The Christian 
 Teaching. 
 
CONVERSION 85 
 
 Having pased the greater part of my life in the 
 country, I came, in the year 1881, to reside in Moscow, 
 where I was immediately struck with the extreme state 
 of pauperism in that city. Though well acquainted with 
 the privations of the poor in rural districts, I had not the 
 faintest conception of their actual condition in towns. 
 In Moscow it is impossible to pass a street without 
 meeting beggars of a kind quite unlike those in the 
 country, who go about there, as the saying is, 'with a 
 bag and the name of Christ,' The Moscow beggars 
 neither carry a bag nor ask for alms. In most cases, 
 when they meet you, they only try to catch your eye, and 
 act according to the expression of your face, ... I 
 have been deceived by those who stated that they only 
 wanted work, or to buy a ticket in order to return home. 
 Many of them I came to know well, and they knew me, 
 though occasionally, having forgotten me, they would 
 repeat the same false tale. Still these poor rogues were 
 very much to be pitied : they were all ragged, hungry 
 paupers, they are of the sort who die of cold in the streets 
 or hang themselves to escape living. 
 
 One cold windy afternoon in December I went to the 
 Khitrof Market, the centre of the town pauperism. . . . 
 I stood behind a file of men at the entrance to the 
 
 * Liapin free night-lodging-house.' Those nearest stared 
 at me, the expression in the eyes of all seeming to say, 
 
 * Why have you, a man from another world, stopped here 
 with us ? Who are you ? Are you a self-satisfied man 
 of wealth, desiring to be gladdened by the sight of our 
 need to divert yourself in your idleness, and to mock at 
 us, or are you that which does not and cannot exist a 
 man who pities us ? . . .' It seemed as if each face 
 were more pitiful, harassed, and degraded than the 
 
86 TOLSTOY 
 
 other. I distributed all the money I had only about 
 twenty roubles and entered the lodging-house with the 
 crowd. ... I went first into the women's dormitory 
 a large room with beds like the berths in a third-class 
 railway carriage ranged in two tiers one above the other. 
 Strange-looking women in ragged dresses, without jackets, 
 old and young, kept coming in and occupying places. 
 Some laughed and swore. I went upstairs. There, in a 
 similar way, the men had taken their places. Among 
 them I recognised one of those to whom I had given 
 money. On seeing him I suddenly felt horribly ashamed 
 and made haste to leave. With a sense of having com- 
 mitted some crime I returned home. There I entered 
 along the carpeted steps into the rug-covered hall, and 
 having taken off my fur coat, sat down to a meal of five 
 courses served by two footmen in livery with white ties 
 and white gloves. . . .* And I realised, not only with 
 my brain but in every pulse of my soul, that whilst 
 there were thousands of such sufferers in Moscow, I, with 
 tens of thousands of others, filled myself daily to reple- 
 tion with luxurious dainties of every description, took the 
 tenderest care of my horses, and clothed my very floors 
 with velvet carpets. 
 
 The town life, which had previously seemed alien 
 and strange to me, became now so hateful that all the 
 indulgences of a luxurious existence, in which I had 
 formerly delighted, now served to torment me. . . . 
 But the first keen sense of self-reproach and shame was 
 blunted, and was replaced by a sense of satisfaction at 
 my own virtue and a desire to make it known to 
 others. . . . And I began to arrange a plan of philan- 
 thropic activity in which I might exhibit all my virtues. 
 The census seemed to offer a good opportunity. ... I 
 
CONVERSION 87 
 
 began to collect money and enlist men who wished to 
 help in the work, and who would, in company with the 
 census officers, visit all the nests of pauperism, entering 
 into relations with the poor, finding out the details of 
 their needs, helping them with money and work, sending 
 them out of Moscow, placing their children in schools 
 and their old men and women in homes and houses of 
 refuge. . . . Having invented this plan, I wrote an 
 article about it, and read a proof-copy at a census meeting 
 in the Town Hall, hesitatingly, and blushing till my cheeks 
 burned again, so uncomfortable did I feel. I saw that 
 all my hearers felt equally uncomfortable. Afterwards 
 I spoke to each district manager separately; their look 
 seemed to say, ' Why, out of personal regard for you we 
 have listened to your silly proposition; but here you 
 come out with it again ! ' 
 
 The unfortunate people in the lodging-houses ranged 
 themselves in my mind under three heads : first, those 
 who had lost former advantageous positions and were 
 waiting to recover them (such men belonged to the lowest 
 as well as the highest classes of society); secondly, 
 women of the town, who are very numerous in these 
 houses, and thirdly, children. The majority of these, I 
 found, were of the first class. Unfortunately I did not 
 at first see that such people needed to be relieved, not by 
 my charity, but of their own views of the world. . . . 
 The second class of unfortunates were very numerous 
 and of every kind, from young girls still bearing some 
 likeness to women, to old and fearful-looking creatures 
 without a vestige of humanity. ... In the third com- 
 partment, I asked the woman in a pink dressing-gown 
 about the man who was asleep. She replied that he 
 was a visitor. I asked her who she was. She replied 
 
88 TOLSTOY 
 
 that she was a peasant girl from the county of Moscow. 
 * What is your occupation ? ' She laughed and made no 
 answer. 'What do you do for a living?' I repeated, 
 thinking she had not understood the question. ' I sit 
 in the inn,' she said. I did not understand, and asked 
 again. She gave no answer, but continued to giggle. 
 In the fourth room I heard the voices of women 
 also giggling. The landlord turned to the woman and, 
 as one would speak to a dog, said, * Don't be a fool ! 
 speak plainly and say you are a prostitute. She does 
 not even yet know her proper name,' he said, turning to 
 me. This manner of speaking shocked me. . . . I do not 
 remember exactly what I said. I remember only that I 
 was disgusted by the disdainful tones of this young land- 
 lord in a lodging filled with females whom he termed 
 prostitutes ; and I pitied the woman, and expressed both 
 feelings. No sooner had I said this than I heard from 
 the small compartment where the giggling had been the 
 noise of creaking bed-boards, and over the partition, 
 which did not reach to the ceiling, appeared the dis- 
 hevelled curly head of a female with small swollen eyes 
 and a shining red face ; and a second, and then a third 
 head followed. They were evidently standing on their 
 beds, and all three were stretching their necks and 
 holding their breath and looking silently at me with 
 strained attention. ... It was like the field of battle 
 covered with dead bones seen by the prophet Ezekiel, 
 on which, trembling from contact with the spirit, the 
 dead bones began to move. They continued to look at 
 me as if wondering what would come next, as if waiting 
 for me to say those words and do those acts by which 
 these dry bones would begin to come together, be 
 covered with flesh and receive life, But I felt, alas ! 
 that I had no such words or deeds to give. 
 
CONTRA MUNDUM 89 
 
 * 
 
 I discovered in my visits what I had in no way ex- 
 pected to see. On the one hand I saw in these dens 
 (as I had at first called them) men whom it was impos- 
 sible for me to help because they were working men, 
 accustomed to labour and privation, and therefore 
 having a much firmer hold on life than I had. On the 
 other hand I saw miserable men whom I could not aid 
 because they were just such as I was myself. The 
 majority of the poor whom I saw were wretched merely 
 because they had lost the capacity, desire, and habit of 
 earning their bread ; in other words, their misery con- 
 sisted in the fact that they were just like myself. My 
 principal conviction now was that with money I could 
 never reform that life of misery which these people 
 led. ... I became convinced on the one hand that we 
 rich people do not wish and are also unable to distribute 
 to the poor a portion of our superfluities (we have so many 
 wants ourselves) and that money should not be given to 
 anyone if we really wished to do good. So I dropped 
 the affair entirely and quitted Moscow in despair for 
 my own village. What must We do Then ? 
 
 IV. CONTRA MUNDUM 
 
 Having come to the practical conclusion that a man's 
 first duty is to do his own physical labour, I was struck 
 by the ease and simplicity of the solution of all those 
 problems which had formerly seemed to me so difficult 
 and complicated. ... In answer to the question, ' Is 
 it necessary to organise this physical labour, to establish 
 a society in a village upon this basis ? ' it appeared that 
 it was not at all necessary to do all this; that if the 
 labour does not aim at rendering idleness possible, and 
 at utilising other men's labour, as is the case with men 
 
90 TOLSTOY 
 
 who save up money, but merely the satisfying of 
 necessities, then such labour will naturally induce people 
 to leave towns for the country, where this labour is most 
 agreeable and productive. There was also no need to 
 establish a society, because a working man will naturally 
 associate with other working people. ... In answer to 
 the question, ' Would not this labour take up all my time, 
 and would it not deprive me of the possibility of that 
 mental activity which I am so fond of, and to which I 
 have become accustomed, and which in moments of 
 self-conceit I considered to be useful to others ? ' the 
 answer will be quite an unexpected one. In proportion 
 to bodily exercise the energy of my mental activity 
 increased, having freed itself from all that was super- 
 fluous. ... * The more intense my physical labour was 
 the more it approached that which is considered the 
 hardest agricultural labour the more I acquired enjoy- 
 ments and knowledge, the closer and more affectionate 
 was my intercourse with mankind and the more happi- 
 ness did I feel in life. ... It appeared that as soon 
 as I had made physical labour the ordinary condition 
 of my life, then at once the greater part of my false 
 and expensive habits and wants ceased of themselves, 
 without any endeavour on my part.* To say nothing 
 of the habit of turning day into night, and vice versa, 
 of my bedding, clothes, my conventional cleanliness, 
 which all became impossible and embarrassing when 
 I began to labour physically, both the quantity and 
 the quality of my food were totally changed. Instead of 
 the sweet, rich, delicate, complicated, and highly-spiced 
 food, which I was formerly fond of, I now required and 
 obtained plain food as the most agreeable, sour cabbage 
 soup, porridge, black bread, tea with a bit of sugar. . . . 
 The harder I worked the stronger, sounder, more cheerful 
 
CONTRA MUNDUM 91 
 
 and kind I felt myself. When I had plainly under- 
 stood all this, it became to me ridiculous that I, through 
 a long series of doubt, research, and much thinking, 
 had arrived at this extraordinary truth, that if man has 
 eyes, they are to be seen through ; ears, to hear by ; 
 feet, to walk with, and hands and back to work with 
 and that if man will not use these, his members, for what 
 they are meant, then it will be worse for him. What 
 must We do Then ? 
 
 .- 
 While offering [in c What is Art ? '] as examples of art 
 
 those that seem to me the best, I attach no special im- 
 portance to my selection ; for, besides being insufficiently 
 informed in all branches of art, I belong to the class of 
 people whose taste has, by false training, been perverted. 
 And therefore my old, inured habits may cause me to 
 err, and I may mistake for absolute merit the impression 
 a work produced on me in my youth. My only purpose 
 in mentioning examples of works of this or that class is to 
 make my meaning clearer, and to show how, with my 
 present views, I understand excellence in art in relation 
 to its subject-matter. I must, moreover, mention that I 
 consign my own artistic productions to the category of 
 bad art, excepting the story God sees the Truth, which 
 seeks a place in the first class (Christian Art), and The 
 Prisoner of the Caucasus, which belongs to the second 
 (Universal Art). What is Art? 
 
 From the time, twenty years ago, when I first clearly 
 perceived how happily mankind should and might live, 
 and how senselessly they torment themselves and ruin 
 generation after generation, I have kept removing further 
 and further back the fundamental cause of this folly and 
 ruin. At first, fallacious economic organisations appeared 
 
92 TOLSTOY 
 
 to be the cause ; then State coercion, which upholds these 
 organisations ; whereas I have now come to the convic- 
 tion that the fundamental cause of it all is the erroneous 
 religious teaching transmitted by education. The 
 Religious Education of the Young. 
 
 I was at first disinclined to reply to the decision of the 
 Holy Synod concerning myself [The decree of February 
 25, 1901 o.s.], but that decision has called forth a great 
 many letters. Some of these abuse me for rejecting what 
 I do not reject, others exhort me to believe in what I 
 have never 'ceased to believe, while others again express 
 an agreement in thought which in fact hardly exists, or a 
 sympathy which I cannot fairly claim. . . . The decision 
 of the Synod has many drawbacks. It is either illegal or 
 intentionally ambiguous, because if it was meant to be an 
 excommunication from the Church it does not correspond 
 with those Church rules according to which an excom- 
 munication may be pronounced. And it has been under- 
 stood as an excommunication. It is arbitrary because it 
 charges me alone with not believing all those points 
 enumerated, while in fact nearly all educated people share 
 this non-belief, and I have constantly expressed, and still 
 express it in conversation, reading, pamphlets and 
 books. ... It contains manifest untruth, as it asserts 
 that attempts to bring me to reason were made by the 
 Church which, however, were not crowned with success. 
 Nothing of the kind ever happened. It presents what 
 in juridical language is called slander, because it contains 
 unjust statements, knowingly made and circulated to 
 injure me. And lastly, it is an incitement to bad feeling 
 and bad action, since it has, as might have been expected, 
 called forth among unenlightened and unreasoning people 
 anger and hatred to ward me, going so far as threats of murder. 
 
CONTRA MUNDUM 93 
 
 That I have abjured the Church which terms itself 
 Orthodox is quite true, but this I did not because I re- 
 belled against, but, on the contrary, because I wished to 
 serve God with all the powers of my soul. Before abjuring 
 the Church and unity with the people, which unity was 
 inexpressibly dear to me, I devoted several years to the 
 investigation of the teachings of the Church, both 
 theoretical and practical . . . and I became convinced that 
 the teaching theoretically is an insidious and injurious lie, 
 while practically it is a collection of the grossest supersti- 
 tions and sorcery, which entirely obscure all the teachings 
 of Christianity. True I have abjured the Church. I have 
 ceased to observe its rites, and given instructions in my 
 will that my near ones should not allow the servants of 
 the Church to come near me when dying and that my 
 corpse should be as quickly as possible taken away with- 
 out any conjurations or prayers over it, just as any objec- 
 tionable and unnecessary thing is taken away so as not 
 to be in the way of the living. 
 
 Here is what I do believe : I believe in God, whom I 
 understand as Spirit, as Love, and as the source of every- 
 thing. I believe that He is in me and I in Him. I 
 believe that the will of God has been expressed in the 
 clearest and most intelligible way in the teaching of the 
 man Christ, to conceive of whom as God and to pray to 
 him I consider the greatest sacrilege. I believe that 
 the real happiness of man consists in men loving one 
 another. ... I believe that the meaning of every 
 man's life thus consists in increasing love within him- 
 self, and that increase of love leads the individual man 
 to greater and greater happiness. ... At the same 
 time it helps on more than anything else the establish- 
 ment in the world of the kingdom of God, that is, such 
 
94 TOLSTOY 
 
 a structure of life that discord, deceit, and violence, which 
 now reign, will be replaced by free consent, truth, and 
 fraternal love among men. I believe that there is only 
 one means for the progress of love prayer, not that 
 public prayer in temples which was directly forbidden by 
 Christ (Matt. vi. 5-13), but the prayer the example of 
 which was given us by Christ, prayer in solitude, con- 
 sisting in the renovation and strengthening in our con- 
 sciousness of the meaning of our lives, as also of our 
 dependence on God's will alone. Letter in Reply to 
 the Holy Synod. 
 
 This solution of the meaning of my life, which gives 
 me full rest and joy of life, I desire to communicate to 
 men. My age and state of health are such that I am 
 with one foot in the grave, and worldly considerations 
 have no meaning for me. Even had they, I know that 
 this exposition of my religion [' The Christian Teaching '] 
 will not contribute either to my worldly profit or my re- 
 putation, but, on the contrary, may only exasperate and 
 grieve both those unbelievers in religion who request 
 literary work from me and not theological treatises, and 
 those believers in religion who are indignant at all my 
 religious writings and abuse me for them. So that I am 
 urged to do what I do, not by wish for gain or fame nor 
 by any worldly considerations, but only by fear to fail in 
 what is required from me by Him who has sent me into 
 this world and to Whom I am hourly expecting to return. 
 
 I therefore beg all those who shall read this to follow 
 and understand my writing, putting aside, as I have 
 done, all worldly considerations, and holding before 
 them only that eternal Principle of truth and right by 
 Whose will we have come into the world, whence, as 
 
CONTRA MUNDUM 95 
 
 beings in the body, we shall very soon disappear : with- 
 out hurry or irritation let them understand and judge 
 what I say. If they disagree let them correct me ; not 
 with contempt and hatred, but with pity and love. If 
 they agree let them remember that if I speak truth that 
 truth is not mine but God's, and only casually part of it 
 passes through me, just as it passes through every one of 
 us when we behold truth and transmit it to others. The 
 Christian Teaching. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 SOCIETY 
 
 I. THE STATE IN AN AGE OF VIOLENCE 
 
 HOWEVER conscious a man may be of the new design 
 and purpose revealed to him by his reason, he goes on 
 in the old fashion until his life has become intolerably 
 inconsistent and therefore distressing. 
 
 Humanity has outgrown its social, its civic age, and 
 has entered upon a new epoch. . . . One needs but to 
 compare the practice of life with its theory to be 
 horrified at the extraordinary contradictions between 
 the conditions of life and our inner consciousness. 
 Man's whole life is a continual contradiction of what 
 he knows to be his duty. This contradiction prevails in 
 every department of life, in the economical, the political, 
 and the international. 
 
 The man of education suffers even more than a 
 workman from these inconsistencies. If he has any 
 faith whatever he believes, perhaps in fraternity at 
 least in the sentiment humanity; and if not in the 
 sentiment humanity, then in justice, and if not in 
 justice, then surely in science; and he cannot help 
 knowing all the while that the conditions of his life are 
 opposed to every principle of Christianity, humanity, 
 
 96 
 
THE STATE 97 
 
 justice and science. He affirms his faith in [the*prin- 
 ciples of fraternity, humanity, justice, and political 
 science, and yet the oppression of the working class is 
 an indispensable factor in his daily life, and he con- 
 stantly employs it to attain his own ends, in spite of his 
 principles ; and he not only lives in this manner, but he 
 devotes all his energies to maintain a system which is 
 directly opposed to all his beliefs. 
 
 We are brothers, but every morning my brother or 
 my sister performs for me the most menial offices. We 
 are brothers, but I must have my morning cigar, my 
 sugar, my mirror, or what not, objects whose manu- 
 facture has often cost my brothers and sisters their 
 health, yet I do not for that reason forbear to use these 
 things, on the contrary, I even demand them. We are 
 brothers, and yet I support myself by working in some 
 bank, commercial house, or shop, and am always trying 
 to raise the price of the necessities of life for my brothers 
 and sisters. We are brothers ; e l receive a salary for 
 judging, convicting, and punishing the thief or the prosti- 
 tute, whose existence is the natural outcome of my own 
 system of life * and I fully realise that I should neither 
 condemn nor punish. We are all brothers, yet I make 
 my living by collecting taxes from the poor, that the 
 rich may live in luxury and idleness.- We are brothers, 
 and yet I receive a salary for preaching a pseudo- 
 Christian doctrine, in which I do not myself believe, 
 thus hindering men from discovering the true one. I 
 receive a salary as priest or bishop for deceiving people 
 in a matter which is of vital importance to them. We 
 are brothers, but 'I make my brother pay for all my 
 services, whether I write books for him, educate him, 
 or prescribe for him as a physician. * We are all brothers, 
 
 G 
 
98 TOLSTOY 
 
 but I receive a salary for fitting myself to be a murderer, 
 for learning the act of war, or for manufacturing arms and 
 ammunition and building fortresses. The whole exist- 
 ence of our upper classes is utterly contradictory, and 
 the more sensitive a man's nature the more painful is 
 the incongruity. A man with a sensitive conscience can 
 enjoy no peace of mind in such a life. . . . Hence our 
 wealthy classes, whether their consciences be tender or 
 hardened, cannot enjoy the advantages they have wrung 
 from the poor as did the ancients, who were convinced 
 of the justice of their position. All the pleasures of life 
 are poisoned either by remorse or fear. Such is the 
 economic inconsistency. 
 
 Still more striking is the inconsistency of the civil 
 power. A man is trained first of all in habits of obedience 
 to State laws. At the present time every act of our 
 lives is under the supervision of the State. What is this 
 law that determines the life of mankind? In most 
 cases men recognise its injustice; they despise it, and 
 yet they obey it. It was fitting that the ancients should 
 obey their law. It was chiefly religious, and they 
 sincerely believed it to be the only true law to which 
 all men owed obedience. Is that the case with us? 
 Men have long since realised that there is no sense in 
 obeying a law whose honesty is more than doubtful, and 
 therefore they must suffer when, though privately deny- 
 ing its prerogative, they still conform to it. We recognise 
 the disadvantages of custom-houses and import duties, 
 but we are yet obliged to pay them ; we see the folly 
 of supporting the Court and its numerous officials, we 
 admit the harmful influence of Church preaching, and 
 still we are compelled to support both ; we also admit 
 the cruel and iniquitous punishments inflicted by the 
 
THE STATE 99 
 
 courts, and yet we play our part in them ; we acknow- 
 ledge that the distribution of land is wrong and im- 
 moral, but we have to submit to it ; and despite the fact 
 that we deny the necessity for armies or warfare, we are 
 made to bear the heavy burden of supporting armies and 
 waging war. 
 
 The advocates of the social life-conception usually 
 attempt to combine the idea of authority, otherwise 
 violence, with that of moral influence ; but such a union 
 is utterly impossible. The result of moral influence upon 
 man is to change his desires, so that he willingly com- 
 plies with what is required of him, whereas authority, 
 as the word is commonly understood, is a means of 
 coercion, by which a man is forced to act in opposition 
 to his wishes. In order to force a man to do something 
 for which he has an aversion, the threat of physical 
 violence, or violence itself, must be employed ; he may 
 be deprived of his liberty, flogged, mutilated, or he may 
 be threatened with these punishments. And this is 
 what constitutes power both in the past and in the 
 present. . . . All the requisitions of the State, such as 
 the payment of taxes and the fulfilment of public duties, 
 the submission to penalties in the form of exile, fines, 
 etc., to which men seem to yield voluntarily, are always 
 enforced by the physical threat or the reality of physical 
 punishment. Physical violence is the basis of authority. 
 It is the military organisation that makes it possible to 
 inflict physical violence, that organisation wherein the 
 entire armed force acts as one man, obeying a single 
 will. . . . Neither congresses, parliaments, senates, nor 
 any other means of restraint have yet proved effectual. 
 No expedient has been found to commit authority to 
 infallible men or to prevent its abuses.^ On the contrary, 
 
ioo TOLSTOY 
 
 we know that men who have the authority always are 
 more liable to become immoral, to put their own in- 
 terests first, than those who have not. Therefore it is 
 that the evil principle of violence relegated to authority 
 is ever increasing, and the evil becomes in time worse 
 than that which it is supposed to control ; whereas in the 
 individual members of society the inclination to violence 
 is always diminishing, and the violence of authority 
 becomes less and less necessary. 
 
 It is not enough that all men bound by the organisa- 
 tion of the State transfer their responsibility from one 
 to the other the peasant, for instance, who becomes a 
 soldier, to the merchant who has become an officer ; the 
 officer to the noble who occupies the position of 
 Governor ; the Governor to the Minister of State ; the 
 Minister to the Sovereign ; and the Sovereign, who in his 
 turn shifts the responsibility upon all, officials, nobles, 
 merchants, peasants they so constantly, persistently and 
 strenuously assure themselves and others that all men are 
 not equal that they begin to believe it sincerely themselves. 
 i 
 
 It is to this inequality the exaltation of some by the 
 abasement of others that we may chiefly attribute 
 men's inability to discern the folly of the existing 
 system, with the cruelty and deceptions committed by 
 some and suffered by others. There are certain men who 
 have been made to believe that they are possessed of a 
 peculiar importance and greatness, who have become 
 so intoxicated by their imaginary superiority that they 
 cease to realise their responsibility for the actions they 
 commit ; others who, on the contrary, have been told 
 that they are insignificant beings, and that it is their 
 duty to submit to those above them, and, as the natural 
 
THE STATE 101 
 
 result of this continual state of degradation, fall into 
 a strange condition of stupefied servility, and in this 
 state they too lose all sense of responsibility for their 
 actions. And as to the intermediate class, they are apt 
 to be both servile and arrogant, and they also lose the 
 sense of responsibility. ... It is this delusion in regard 
 to human inequality and the consequent intoxication of 
 power and stupefaction of servility that make it possible 
 for those associated in a State organisation to commit 
 crimes and suffer no remorse. ~r- The Kingdom of God is 
 Within You. 
 
 Before one gives money for the establishment of 
 internal order and social institutions, one must be sure 
 that the people who are to establish this order will really 
 do it j and also that the order itself will be good, and 
 the proposed social institutions indeed necessary for the 
 community. If, on the contrary (which has been the 
 case always and everywhere), the payers of taxes do not 
 believe either in the capacity or even in the honesty of 
 those who maintain the said system, and, besides, con- 
 sider the system itself evil and the proposed social 
 institutions utterly unsuited to the needs of the tax- 
 payers, then it is evident that there can exist no right to 
 levy taxes, but only violence. 
 
 We see numberless administrators the sovereign, his 
 brothers and uncles, ministers, judges, and clergy 
 receiving enormous sums gathered from the people, and 
 not even fulfilling those light duties undertaken in ex- 
 change for their remuneration. It appears, then, they 
 steal these salaries, gathered from the people, and there- 
 fore the people's property and yet it does not enter the 
 head of anyone to condemn them. 
 
102 TOLSTOY 
 
 Yet taxation, the usurpation of land, and the power 
 of capitalists, do not constitute the fundamental cause of 
 the miserable condition of the working classes, but only 
 the consequences. * The essential reason why millions of 
 working men live and labour under the orders of the 
 minority is not that the minority has usurped the land 
 and the instruments of labour, and gathers taxes, but that 
 it has the power to do so, because there is violence, 
 and because there is an army, which is in the hands of 
 the minority, and is ready to kill those who refuse to obey 
 the will of that minority. . . . The workmen wish to 
 free themselves, and yet they themselves force each other 
 to submit, and to remain in slavery ! Why do they do 
 this ? They do it because all the workmen, enlisted or 
 hired as soldiers, are subjected to a skilful process of 
 stupefaction and degradation, after which they cannot 
 help submitting blindly to their superiors, whatever they 
 may be ordered to do. . . . Therefore the existence of 
 the army is also not the fundamental cause, but only the 
 consequence. The first cause is the doctrine which 
 teaches men that military service, the aim of which is 
 only murder, is not a sinless, but even a commendable, 
 admirable, and heroic occupation. 
 
 When the Pagan monarchs Constantine, Charlemagne, 
 and Valdimir, adopted Christianity clothed in the forms 
 of Paganism, and christened their peoples in it, they did 
 not dream that the teaching they accepted destroyed the 
 power of kings, the army, and the State itself. But the 
 more Christian the peoples lived, the more clearly mani- 
 fest became the essence of Christianity, and the more 
 evident grew the danger to Paganism it presented. And 
 the greater that danger grew, the more laboriously did 
 the ruling classes try to stifle, and, if possible, to quench, 
 
THE STATE 103 
 
 the light they unconsciously brought into the world with 
 Christianity. For this purpose they used all possible 
 means : prohibition to read or translate the Gospels ; 
 slaughter of all who point out the true meaning of 
 Christian teaching; hypnotism of the masses by the 
 pomp and splendour of rituals ; and especially hair- 
 splitting and equivocal distortions of Christian precepts. 
 In proportion as these methods were employed, Christi- 
 anity became more and more modified, till at last it 
 became a teaching which not only did not contain any 
 principles destructive to the Pagan system of life, but, on 
 the contrary, justified that system from a pseudo-Christian 
 standpoint. There appeared Christian monarchs, and 
 Christian armies, and Christian wealth, and Christian law- 
 courts, and Christian executions. The Root of the Evil. 
 
 Other contradictions are but trifling in comparison 
 with the one which confronts us in the problem of our 
 international relations, and which cries aloud for solution, 
 since both human reason and human life are at stake, and 
 this is the antagonism between the Christian faith and 
 war. We, Christian nations, whose spiritual life is one 
 and the same, who welcome the birth of every wholesome 
 and profitable thought with joy and pride, from whatso- 
 ever quarter of the globe it may spring, regardless of race 
 or creed ; we, who love not only the philanthropists, the 
 poets, the philosophers and the scientists of other lands ; 
 we, who take as much pride in the heroism of a Father 
 Damien as if it was our own ; we, who love the French, 
 the Germans, the Americans and the English, not only 
 esteeming their qualities, but ready to meet them with 
 cordial friendship ; we, who not only would be shocked 
 to consider war with them in the light of an exploit 
 when we picture to ourselves the possibility that at some 
 
io 4 TOLSTOY 
 
 future day a difference may arise between us that can 
 only be reconciled by murder, and that any one of us may 
 be called upon to play his part in an inevitable tragedy, 
 we shudder at the thought. It was well enough for a 
 Hebrew, a Greek, or a Roman to maintain the independ- 
 ence of his country by murder, and even to subdue other 
 nations by the same means, because he firmly believed 
 himself a member of the one favoured people beloved 
 by God, and that all the others were Philistines and 
 barbarians. Also, in the times of the Middle Ages men 
 well might have held these opinions, and even they who 
 lived towards the end of the i8th century and at the begin- 
 ning of the last. But, whatever provocation may be offered 
 us, we cannot possibly believe as they did; and this 
 difficulty is so painful for us in these times that it has 
 become impossible to live without trying to solve it. 
 
 It is the popular belief that governments increase 
 armies as a means of defence against other nations, for- 
 getting that troops are principally needed by govern- 
 ments to protect them against their own enslaved 
 subjects. This has always been necessary, and has 
 grown more so with the spread of education, the in- 
 crease of intercourse among different nationalities ; and 
 at the present time, in view of the communist, socialist, 
 anarchist, and labour movements, it is a more urgent 
 necessity than ever. Governments realise this fact and 
 increase their principal means of defence the dis- 
 ciplined army. . . . Armies have reached the millions 
 which they now number not only from the fear of 
 foreign invasion; the increase was first caused by the 
 necessity for putting down all attempts at rebellion on 
 the part of the subjects of the State. The one de- 
 pends upon the other. The despotism of governments 
 
THE STATE 105 
 
 increases exactly in proportion to the increase of their 
 strength and their internal successes, and their foreign 
 aggression with the increase of internal despotism. 
 European governments try to outdo one another, ever 
 increasing their armaments, and compelled at last to 
 adopt the expedient of a general conscription as a means 
 of enrolling the greatest number of troops at the 
 smallest possible expense. . . . Thus all the citizens 
 took up arms to assist in upholding the wrongs that were 
 committed against them ; in fact, they became their own 
 oppressors. Every man who yields to military conscrip- 
 tion becomes an involuntary participator in all the 
 oppressive acts of the government towards its subjects. 
 
 The existing governments and the ruling classes no 
 longer care to present even the semblance of justice, but 
 rely, thanks to scientific progress, on an organisation so 
 ingenious that it is able to enclose all men within a 
 circle of violence through which it is impossible to break. 
 This circle is made up of four expedients, each connected 
 with and supporting the other like the rings of a chain. 
 The first and the oldest expedient is intimidation. It 
 consists in representing the actual organisation of the 
 State, whether it be that of a liberal republic or of an 
 arbitrary despotism, as something sacred and immutable, 
 which therefore punishes by the most cruel penalties any 
 attempt at revolution. . . . The second expedient is 
 bribery. This consists in taking the property of the 
 labouring classes by means of taxation and distributing 
 it among the officials, who, in consideration of this, are 
 bound to maintain and increase the bondage of the 
 people. . . . The third expedient I can call by no other 
 name than hypnotism. It consists in retarding the 
 spiritual development of men, and, by means of various 
 
106 TOLSTOY 
 
 suggestions, influencing them to cling to the theory of life 
 which mankind has already left behind, and upon which 
 rests the foundation of governmental authority. . . . The 
 fourth expedient consists in this : certain individuals are 
 selected from among the mass of enslaved and stupefied 
 beings ; and these, after having been subjected to a still 
 more vigorous process of brutalisation, are made the 
 passive instruments of the cruelties and brutalities indis- 
 pensable to the government. This state of brutality and 
 imbecility is produced by taking men in their youth, 
 before they have yet had time to gain any clear concep- 
 tion of morality ; and then, having removed them from 
 all the natural conditions of human life, from home, 
 family, birthplace, and the possibility of intelligent 
 labour, by shutting them up together in barracks, where, 
 dressed in a peculiar uniform, to the accompaniment of 
 shouts, drums, music, and the display of glittering gew- 
 gaws, they are daily forced to perform certain prescribed 
 evolutions. By these methods they are reduced to that 
 hypnotic condition when they cease to be men and 
 become imbecile and docile machines in the hands of the 
 hypnotiser. These physically strong young men thus 
 hypnotised (and at the present time, with the general 
 conscription system, all young men answer to this 
 description), supplied with murderous weapons, ever 
 obedient to the authority of the government, and ready 
 at its command to commit any violence whatsoever, 
 constitute the fourth and the principal means for sub- 
 jugating men. So the circle of violence is completed. 
 
 In 1891, Kaiser Wilhelm, the enfant terrible of State 
 authority, who expresses what other men only venture to 
 think, in a talk with certain soldiers, uttered publicly the 
 following words, which were repeated the next day in 
 
THE STATE 107 
 
 thousands of papers : * You have taken the oath of 
 allegiance to me; this means, children of my Guards, 
 that you are now my soldiers, that you have given your- 
 selves up to me, body and soul. But one enemy exists 
 for you my enemy. With the present socialistic 
 intrigues it may happen that I shall command you to shoot 
 your own relatives, your brothers^ even your parents (from 
 which may God preserve us !), and then you are in duty 
 bound to obey my orders unhesitatingly. 1 This man ex- 
 presses what is known but carefully concealed by all wise 
 rulers. He says outright that the men who serve in the 
 army serve him and his advantage, and should be ready 
 for that purpose to kill their brothers and fathers. 
 Roughly but distinctly he lays bare all the horror of the 
 crime for which men who become soldiers prepare them- 
 selves all that abyss of self-abasement into which they 
 fling themselves when they promise obedience. Like a 
 bold hypnotiser, he tests the depth of the slumber j he 
 applies red-hot iron to the sleeper's body ; it smokes and 
 shrivels, but the sleeper does not awaken. Poor, sick, 
 miserable man, intoxicated with power, who by these 
 words insults all that is sacred to men of modern 
 civilisation ! . . . It would seem as if these insane 
 words, offensive to all that a civilised human being holds 
 sacred, ought to rouse indignation ; but nothing of the 
 kind happens. . . . Even by savages certain objects 
 are held sacred, for whose sake they are ready to suffer 
 rather than submit. But what is sacred for the man of 
 the modern world? He is told: be my slave, in a 
 bondage where you may have to murder your own father ; 
 and he, oftentimes a man of learning, submissively offers 
 his neck to the halter. He is dressed in a clown's 
 garments, ordered to leap, to make contortions, to salute, 
 to kill, and he submissively obeys; and when at last 
 
io8 TOLSTOY 
 
 allowed to return to his former life he continues to hold 
 forth on the dignity of man, freedom, equality and 
 brotherhood. 
 
 I was told of an incident which happened to an 
 intrepid stanovoy, who, on arriving in a village where the 
 peasants had revolted, and whither troops had been sent, 
 undertook, like the Emperor Nicholas L, to quell the 
 disturbance by his personal influence. He ordered several 
 loads of rods to be brought, and having gathered all 
 the peasants into the barn, he entered himself, shut 
 himself in with them, and so terrified them by his shouts 
 and threats that in compliance with his commands they 
 began to flog each other. And so they went on flogging 
 one another until some fool revolted, and shouting to 
 his comrades, bade them leave off. It was not until 
 then that the flogging ceased and the stanovoy escaped 
 from the barn. It is this very advice of the fool that 
 men who believe in the necessity of civil government 
 seem unable to follow. They are unable to stop 
 punishing themselves, and setting an absurd example 
 for others to imitate. Such is the consummation of 
 merely human wisdom. 
 
 The progression from love of family to love of race is 
 difficult, and requires special education, which has arrived 
 at its utmost limits when the State has been reached. . . . 
 Love for a nation, Turkey, for instance, or Germany, 
 England, Austria, Russia, is almost impossible, and not- 
 withstanding the training given in that direction, it is only 
 a fictitious semblance ; it has no real existence. But the 
 man who loves humanity, what is it that he loves? 
 There is a state, there is a people, there is the abstract 
 conception of man. But humanity as a concrete 
 
THE STATE 109 
 
 conception is impossible. ... If we include all humanity 
 without exception, why should we restrict ourselves to 
 men ? Why should we exclude the higher animals, some 
 of whom are superior to the lowest representatives of the 
 human race ? We do not know humanity in the concrete, 
 nor can we fix its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and 
 therefore it cannot be loved. . . . Love founded on a 
 personal and social life-conception can go no further 
 than the love of country. The social life-conception has 
 brought men not to the consciousness of love for 
 humanity, but to a condition which evokes no feeling 
 in man, to a contradiction for which it provides no 
 reconciliation. 
 
 It is only the Christian doctrine which, by lending to 
 human life a new significance, is able to solve the 
 difficulty. Christianity presents the love of self and the 
 love of the family, as well as patriotism and the love of 
 humanity, but it is not to be restricted to humanity alone ; 
 it is to be given to every living creature ; it recognises 
 the possibility of an indefinite expansion of the kingdom 
 of love, but its object is not to be found outside itself, 
 in the aggregate of individuals, neither in the family, nor 
 in the race, nor in the state, nor in mankind, nor all the 
 wide world, but in itself, in its personality a divine 
 personality, whose essence is the very love which needed 
 a wider sphere. Patriotism is a rude, harmful, disgrace- 
 ful and bad feeling, and above all is immoral. It is 
 a rude feeling, because it is one natural only to people 
 standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting 
 from other nations those outrages which they themselves 
 are ready to inflict on others; it is a harmful feeling, 
 because it disturbs advantageous and joyous peaceful 
 relations with other peoples, and above all it produces 
 
no TOLSTOY 
 
 that governmental organisation under which power may 
 fall, and does fall, into the hands of the worst men ; it 
 is a disgraceful feeling, because it turns man not merely 
 into a slave, but into a fighting cock, a bull, or a gladiator, 
 who wastes his strength and his life for objects which 
 are not his own but his government's; and it is an 
 immoral feeling, because instead of confessing oneself a 
 son of God, as Christianity teaches us, or even a free 
 man guided by his own reason, each man under the 
 influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his 
 fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits 
 actions contrary to his reason and his conscience. 
 
 This harmful and antiquated feeling not only con- 
 tinues to exist, but burns more and more fiercely. . . . 
 This occurs because the ruling classes can retain their 
 position exceptionally advantageous in comparison with 
 that of the labouring masses thanks only to the govern- 
 ment organisation, which rests on patriotism. Every 
 official prospers the better in his career the more 
 patriotic he is; so also the army man gets promotion 
 in time of war; and war is produced by patriotism. 
 Patriotism and its result, wars, give an enormous re- 
 venue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other 
 trades. Every writer, teacher and professor is more 
 secure in his place the more he preaches patriotism. 
 Every emperor and king obtains the more fame the more 
 he is addicted to patriotism. The ruling classes have in 
 their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches, 
 and the press. ^In the schools they kindle patriotism in 
 the children by means of histories describing their own 
 people as the best of all peoples, and always in the right. 
 Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, 
 monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all, 
 
THE STATE in 
 
 they inflame patriotism in this way : perpetrating every 
 kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, 
 they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, 
 and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their 
 own people against the foreigner. 
 
 Since this servile submission of the masses to the calls 
 of patriotism, the audacity, cruelty, and insanity of the 
 governments has known no bounds. A competition in 
 the usurpation of other people's lands in Asia, Africa, 
 and America began evoked partly by whim, partly by 
 vanity, and partly by covetousness and has been ac- 
 companied by ever greater and greater distrust and 
 enmity between the governments. 
 
 It is generally said that the real, good patriotism 
 consists in desiring for one's own people or State such 
 real benefits as do not infringe the well-being of other 
 nations. . . . But the real patriotism, which we all 
 know, by which most people to-day are swayed, and 
 from which humanity suffers so severely, is not the wish 
 for spiritual benefits for one's own people (it is impos- 
 sible to desire spiritual benefits for one's own people 
 only) ; but it is a very definite feeling of preference for 
 one's own people or State above all other peoples and 
 States, and therefore it is the wish to get for that people 
 or State the greatest advantages and power that can be 
 got ; and these are always obtainable only at the expense 
 of the advantages and power of other peoples or States. 
 It would therefore seem obvious that patriotism as a 
 feeling is a bad and harmful feeling, and as a doctrine 
 is a stupid doctrine. For it is clear that if each people 
 and each State considers itself the best of peoples and 
 States, they all dwell in a gross and harmful delusion. 
 
U2 TOLSTOY 
 
 All the peoples of the so-called Christian world have 
 been reduced by patriotism to such a state of brutality 
 that not only those who are obliged to kill or be killed 
 desire slaughter and rejoice in murder, but all the 
 people of Europe and America, living peaceably in their 
 homes, exposed to no danger, are, at each war thanks 
 to easy means of communication, and to the press in 
 the position of the spectators in a Roman circus, and, 
 like them, delight in the slaughter, and raise the blood- 
 thirsty cry, { Pollice verso' Patriotism and Government. 
 
 Violence can never suppress that which is counte- 
 nanced by general custom. If public opinion would but 
 frown upon violence, it would destroy all its power. 
 What would happen if violence were not employed 
 against hostile nations and the criminal element in 
 society we do not know. But that the use of violence 
 subdues neither we do know through long experience. 
 How can we expect to subdue by violence nations whose 
 education, traditions, and even religious training all tend 
 to glorify resistance to the conqueror and love of liberty 
 as the loftiest of virtues? And how is it possible to 
 extirpate crime by violence in the midst of communities 
 where the same act regarded by the government as 
 criminal is transformed into an heroic exploit by public 
 opinion ? The power transcending all others which has 
 influenced individuals and nations since time began, 
 that power which is the convergence of the invisible, 
 intangible, spiritual forces of all humanity, is public 
 opinion. Violence serves but to enervate this influence, 
 disintegrating it, and substituting for it one, not only 
 useless, but pernicious to the welfare of humanity. 
 
 In order to win over all these outside the Christian 
 
THE STATE 113 
 
 fold, all the Zulus, the Manchurians, the Chinese, whom 
 many consider uncivilised, and the uncivilised among 
 ourselves, there is only one way. This is by the diffusion 
 of a Christian mode of thought, which is only to be 
 accomplished by a Christian life, Christian deeds, a 
 Christian example. Instead we steal their territory, sell 
 them wine, tobacco, and opium, and teach them the 
 animal lawbf strife ; having sent them a score of mission- 
 aries, who gabble an absurd clerical jargon, we quote the 
 results of our attempt to convert the heathen as an in- 
 dubitable proof that the truths of Christianity are not 
 adaptable to everyday life. 
 
 Those whom we call criminals we imprison, execute, 
 guillotine, hang. We encourage the masses in idolatrous 
 religions calculated to stultify them; the government 
 authorises the sale of brain-destroying poisons wine, 
 tobacco, opium; prostitution is legalised; we bestow 
 land upon those who need it not ; surrounded by misery, 
 we display in our entertainments an unbridled extra- 
 vagance ; we render impossible in such ways any sem- 
 blance of a Christian life, and do our best to destroy 
 Christian ideas already established ; and then, after doing 
 all we can to demoralise men, we take and confine them 
 like wild beasts in places from which they cannot escape, 
 and where they will become more brutal than ever ; or 
 we murder the men we have demoralised, and then 
 use them as an example to illustrate and prove our argu- 
 ment that people are only to be controlled by violence. 
 The Kingdom of God is Within You. t 
 
 ' Just such a dangerous creature as yesterday's culprit/ 
 thought Nekhhidoff. * They are dangerous; and we who 
 judge them ? I, a rake, an adulterer, a deceiver. We 
 
 H 
 
ii4 TOLSTOY 
 
 are not dangerous ! . . . But even so, what should we 
 do? We seize one such lad, knowing that there are 
 thousands like him whom we have not caught, and send 
 him to prison, where, in company with others weakened 
 and enslaved by the lives they have led, idleness or most 
 unwholesome, useless labour is forced on him. . . . But 
 we do nothing to destroy the conditions in which people 
 like these are produced; on the contrary, we support 
 the establishments where they are formed. These estab- 
 lishments are well known factories, foundries, work- 
 shops, public-houses, gin-shops, brothels. And we do not 
 destroy these places, but, considering them to be neces- 
 sary, we support and regulate them. . . .' Thus thought 
 Nekhludoff with unusual clearness and vividness, sitting 
 in his high-backed chair next to the colonel, listening to 
 the different intonations of the advocates', prosecutor's 
 and president's voices, and looking at their self-confident 
 gestures. ' And how much effort this pretence requires,' 
 continued Nekhludoff in his mind, glancing round the 
 enormous room, at the portraits, lamps, armchairs, uni- 
 forms, the thick walls and large windows, and picturing to 
 himself the tremendous size of the building and the still 
 more ponderous dimensions of the whole of this organisa- 
 tion, with its armies of officials, scribes, watchmen, messen- 
 gers, not only in this place, but all over Russia, who receive 
 wages for carrying on this comedy which no one needs. 
 * Supposing we spent one-hundredth of these efforts on 
 helping these castaways, whom now we regard only as 
 hands and bodies required by us for our own peace and 
 comfort ! Had someone chanced to take pity on him 
 and given him some help at the time when poverty made 
 them send him to town, it might have been sufficient,' 
 Nekhludoff thought, looking at the boy's piteous face. . . . 
 ' 111, his constitution undermined by unhealthy labour, 
 
THE STATE 115 
 
 drink and debauchery, knocking aimlessly about town, 
 bewildered as in a dream, he gets into some sort of a 
 shed, and takes some old mats which nobody needs ; 
 and here we, all of us educated people, rich or comfort- 
 ably off, meet together, dressed in good clothes and fine 
 uniforms, in a splendid apartment, to mock this unfor- 
 tunate brother of ours whom we ourselves have ruined. 
 Terrible ! It is difficult to say whether the cruelty or 
 the absurdity is greater, but the one and the other 
 seem to be brought to their climax.' 
 
 What is this astonishing institution called criminal 
 law, of which the results are that in all those other 
 places of confinement, from the Peter and Paul Fortress 
 in Petersburg to the island of Sakhalin, hundreds and 
 thousands of victims are pining ? What does this strange 
 criminal law exist for? How has it originated? From 
 his personal relations with the prisoners, from notes by 
 some of those in confinement, and by questioning the 
 advocate and the prison priest, Nekhludoff came to the 
 conclusion that the convicts, the so-called criminals, 
 could be divided into five classes. The first were quite 
 innocent people, condemned by judicial blunders. There 
 were not many of these according to the priest's words 
 only seven per cent. but their condition excited par- 
 ticular interest. To the second class belonged persons 
 condemned for actions done under peculiar circum- 
 stances, i.e., in a fit of passion, jealousy, or drunkenness; 
 circumstances under which those who judged them would 
 surely have committed the same actions. The third 
 class consisted of people punished for having committed 
 actions which, according to their ideas, were quite natural, 
 and even good, but which those other people, the men 
 who had made the laws, considered to be crimes. Such 
 
u6 TOLSTOY 
 
 were the persons who sold spirits without a license, 
 smugglers, those who gathered grass and wood on large 
 estates and in the forests belonging to the Crown, the 
 thieving miners, and those unbelieving people who robbed 
 churches. To the fourth class belonged those who were 
 imprisoned only because they stood morally higher than 
 the average level of society. Such were the sectarians, the 
 Poles, the Circassians rebelling in order to regain their 
 independence, the political prisoners, the Socialists, and 
 the strikers. According to NekhludofFs observations, 
 there were a very large percentage belonging to this 
 class ; among them some of the best of men, who, while 
 only defending their rights, were condemned for resist- 
 ing the authorities. The fifth class consisted of persons 
 who had been far more sinned against by society than 
 they had sinned against it. These were the castaways, 
 stupefied by continual oppression and temptation, those 
 depraved abnormal creatures whom the new school 
 of criminology classify as the criminal type, against 
 which, according to Nekhludoff, society had sinned 
 not directly, but through their fathers and forefathers. 
 Resurrection. 
 
 When all was ready the Governor bade the first of 
 the twelve men who were pointed out to him by the 
 landowner [as the ringleaders in an attempt to prevent 
 the arrest of their women-folk] to step forward. It so 
 happened that he was the father of a family, a man 
 forty-five years of age, respected in the community, 
 whose rights he had manfully defended. He was led 
 to the bench, stripped and ordered to lie down. He 
 would have begged for mercy, but, realising how little it 
 would avail, he made the sign of the cross and stretched 
 himself out on the bench. Two policemen held him 
 
THE STATE 117 
 
 down, and the learned doctor stood by, ready in case of 
 need to give his scientific assistance. The executioners 
 having spat upon their hands, swung the rods, and the 
 flogging began. The bench, it seemed, was too narrow, 
 and another had to be brought, while the half-naked, 
 pale and suffering man, trembling, with contracted brows 
 and downcast eyes, stood by waiting. When the bench 
 was readjusted, he was again stretched out upon it, and the 
 horse-stealers renewed their blows. His back, his legs, 
 and even his sides were covered with bleeding wounds, 
 and every blow was followed by the muffled groan which he 
 could no longer repress. In the crowd that stood by one 
 could hear the sobs of the wife and mother, the children 
 and the kinsfolk of the man, as well as of all who had 
 been called to witness the punishment. The wretched 
 Governor, intoxicated with power, who had no doubt 
 convinced himself of the necessity for this performance, 
 counted the strokes on his fingers, while he smoked 
 cigarette after cigarette, for the lighting of which several 
 obliging persons hastened to offer him a burning match. 
 After fifty blows had been given, the peasant lay motion- 
 less, without uttering a sound, and the doctor, who had 
 been educated in a government school, that he might 
 devote his scientific knowledge to the service of his 
 country and his sovereign, approached the tortured man, 
 felt his pulse, listened to the beating of his heart, and 
 reported to the representative of authority that the victim 
 had become unconscious, and declared that, from a 
 scientific point of view, it might prove dangerous to 
 prolong the punishment. But the unfortunate Governor, 
 utterly intoxicated by the sight of blood, ordered the 
 flogging to go on, until seventy strokes had been given, 
 the number which he for some reason deemed necessary. 
 After the seventieth blow the Governor said, ' That will 
 
n8 TOLSTOY 
 
 do ! Now bring on the next one ! ' They raised the 
 mutilated and unconscious man with his swollen back 
 and carried him away, and the next was brought forward. 
 The sobs and groans of the crowd increased, but the 
 tortures were continued. So it went on until each of 
 the twelve men had received seventy strokes. The 
 Kingdom of God is Within You. 
 
 II. PROPERTY, LUXURY, AND THE EXPLOITATION 
 OF LABOUR. 
 
 Slavery has long been abolished. It was abolished as 
 well in Rome as in America, and among ourselves ; but 
 the word only has been abolished, and not the evil. 
 Slavery is the violent freeing of some men from the 
 labour necessary for satisfying their wants, which trans- 
 fers this labour to others ; and wherever there is a man 
 who does not work, not because others willingly and 
 lovingly work for him, but because he has the possibility, 
 while not working himself, to make others work for him, 
 there is slavery. Slavery with its three fundamental 
 modes of operation personal violence, soldiery, land- 
 taxes maintained by soldiery, and direct and indirect 
 taxes put upon all the inhabitants, and so maintained is 
 still in operation now as it has been before. We do not 
 see it, because each of these three forms of slavery has 
 received a new justification, which hides its meaning 
 from us. 
 
 In our time, property is the root of all evil and of the 
 sufferings of men who possess it, or are without it, and 
 of all the remorse of conscience of those who misuse it, 
 and of the danger from the collision between those who 
 have it, and those who have it not. Property is the root 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY. 119 
 
 of all evil; and, at the same time, property is that 
 towards which all the activity of our modern society is 
 directed, and that which directs the activity of the world. 
 States and governments intrigue, make wars, for the sake 
 of property, for the possession of the banks of the Rhine, 
 of land in Africa, China, the Balkan Peninsula. Bankers, 
 merchants, manufacturers, landowners, labour, use cun- 
 ning, torment themselves, torment others, for the sake 
 of property ; government functionaries, tradesmen, land- 
 lords, struggle, deceive, oppress, suffer for the sake of 
 property ; courts of justice and police protect property ; 
 penal servitude, prisons, all the terrors of so-called 
 punishments all is done for the sake of property. 
 Property is the root of all evil ; and now all the world is 
 busy with the distribution and protecting of wealth. 
 
 On looking at our lives, or at the lives of rich people 
 from without, I saw that all that is considered as the 
 summum bonum of these lives consists in being separated 
 as much as possible from the poor, or is in some way 
 or other connected with this desired separation. In 
 fact, all the aim of our lives, beginning with food, dress, 
 dwelling, cleanliness, and ending with our education, 
 consists in placing a gulf between us and them. And 
 in order to establish this distinction and separation we 
 spend nine-tenths of our wealth in erecting impassable 
 barriers. . . . This applies to all the modes of living 
 expressed by the word c cleanliness.' Cleanliness ! Who 
 does not know human beings, especially women, who 
 make a great virtue of cleanliness ? Who does not know 
 the various phases of this cleanliness, which have no 
 limit whatever when it is procured by the labour of 
 others ? Who among self-made men has not experienced 
 in his own person with what pains he carefully accustomed 
 
120 TOLSTOY 
 
 himself to this cleanliness, which illustrates the saying, 
 1 White hands are fond of another's labour ' ? To-day 
 cleanliness consists in changing one's shirt daily, and 
 to-morrow it will be changed twice a day. At first, 
 one has to wash one's hands and neck every day, then 
 one will have to wash one's feet every day, and after- 
 wards it will be the whole body, and in peculiar ways. 
 A clean tablecloth serves for two days, then it is changed 
 every day, and afterwards two tablecloths a day are 
 used. To-day the footman is required to have clean 
 hands : to-morrow he must wear gloves, and clean gloves, 
 and he must hand the letters on a clean tray. And 
 there are no limits to this cleanliness, which is of no 
 other use to anyone than to separate us from others, 
 and to make our intercourse with them impossible, 
 while cleanliness is obtained through the labour of 
 others. 
 
 Who am I that desire to better men's condition? I 
 desire it ; and yet I get up at noon, after having played 
 at cards in a brilliantly lighted saloon during all the 
 previous night, I, an enfeebled and effeminate man, who 
 thus require the help and services of hundreds of people, 
 I come to help them ! these men who rise at five, sleep 
 on boards, feed upon cabbage and bread, understand 
 how to plough, to reap, to put a handle to an axe, to 
 write, to harness horses, to sew; men who, by their 
 strength and perseverance and self-restraint, are a 
 hundred times stronger than I who come to help 
 them. ... I go to help the poor. But of the two, 
 who is the poorer ? No one is poorer than myself. I 
 am a weak, good-for-nothing parasite, who can only 
 exist in very peculiar conditions, who can live only 
 when thousands of people labour to support this life 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY 121 
 
 which is not useful to anyone. And I, this very cater- 
 pillar which eats up the leaves of a tree, wish to help 
 the growth and the health of the tree, and to cure it ! 
 What then is to be Done ? 
 
 The family snare is used more than any other to 
 justify men's sins. Persons free from the snare of 
 preparation for life, or that of activity, are rarely free 
 especially if they be women from the family snare. 
 This consists in men, in the name of exclusive love for 
 the members of their own family, regarding themselves 
 as free from duties to others, and calmly committing 
 sins of avarice, ambition, idleness, and lust without 
 regarding them as sins. The evil of this snare is that, 
 more than any other, it strengthens the sin of property, 
 intensifies strife among men by exalting as a merit and 
 a virtue the animal instinct of love towards one's family, 
 and diverts men from knowledge of the true meaning of 
 life. In order not to fall into this snare, man must 
 understand and remember, firstly, that love is true, 
 bestowing life and welfare, only when it neither seeks, 
 nor expects, nor hopes for recompense, just as no other 
 manifestation of life expects recompense for its existence. 
 Secondly, that love for one's family is an animal instinct, 
 which is good only so long as kept within the limits of 
 an instinct and so long as man does not sacrifice spiritual 
 demands for its sake. The Christian Teaching. 
 
 Hundreds of times have I spoken with peasants who 
 live in towns ; and from my talks with them, and from 
 my own observations, it became clear to me that the 
 accumulation of country people in our cities is partly 
 necessary, because they could not otherwise earn their 
 livelihood, and partly voluntary, because they are 
 
122 TOLSTOY 
 
 attracted by the temptations of a town life. . . . The 
 cause is a simple one, for property passing from 
 the hands of the agriculturalist into those of non- 
 agriculturalists thus accumulates in towns. The 
 wealth of country producers passes into the hands 
 of tradespeople, landowners, government functionaries, 
 manufacturers. The men who receive this wealth want 
 to enjoy it, and to enjoy it fully they must be in town. 
 In the village, owing to the inhabitants being scattered, 
 it is difficult for the rich to gratify all their desires. 
 Another of the chief pleasures procured by wealth 
 vanity, the desire to astonish, to make a display before 
 others cannot be gratified in the country for the same 
 reason. And luxury in the country is even disagreeable 
 to a man who has a conscience, and is an anxiety to a 
 timid person. . . . Therefore rich people gather to- 
 gether in towns, where the enjoyment of all sorts of 
 luxuries is carefully protected by a numerous police. . . . 
 A countryman often cannot help going to town where a 
 ceaseless round of feasting is going on, where what has 
 been procured from the peasants is being spent; he 
 comes into the town in order to feed upon those crumbs 
 which fall from the tables of the rich; and partly by 
 observing the careless, luxurious, and universally ap- 
 proved mode of living of these men, he begins to desire 
 to order his own affairs in such a manner that he, too, 
 may be able to work less and avail himself more of 
 the labour of others. And at last he decides to settle 
 down in the neighbourhood of the wealthy, trying by 
 every means in his power to get back from them what 
 is necessary for him, and submitting to all the conditions 
 which the rich enforce. These country people assist in 
 gratifying all the fancies of the wealthy : they serve them 
 in public baths, in taverns, as coachmen and as prosti- 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY 123 
 
 tutes. They manufacture carriages, make toys and 
 dresses, and little by little learn from their wealthy neigh- 
 bours how to live like them, not by real labour, but by 
 all sorts of tricks, squeezing out from others the money 
 they have collected, and so become depraved, and are 
 ruined. It is, then, this same population, depraved by 
 the wealth of towns, which forms that city misery which 
 I wished to relieve, but could not. 
 
 I found the clerk reading prayers over the dead 
 laundry-woman. The lodgers, starvelings themselves, 
 had contributed money for the prayers, the coffin, and 
 the shroud. ... All the dead are beautiful, but this 
 one was particularly so ; her face looked weary, but kind, 
 and not sad at all, though rather astonished. And, 
 indeed, if the living do not see, the dead may well be 
 astonished. 
 
 On the day I wrote this there was a great ball in 
 Moscow. On the same night I left home after eight 
 o'clock. I live in a locality surrounded by factories ; 
 and I left home after the factory whistle had sounded, 
 and when, after a week of incessant work, people were 
 freed for their holiday. Factory-men passed by me, and 
 I by them, all turning their steps to the public-houses 
 and inns. Many were already tipsy : many more were 
 with women. Every morning at five I hear each of the 
 whistles, which means that the labour of women, children, 
 and old people has begun. At eight o'clock another 
 whistle this means half an hour's rest; at twelve the 
 third whistle this means an hour for dinner. At eight 
 o'clock the fourth whistle, indicating cessation from work. 
 By a strange coincidence all the three factories in my 
 neighbourhood produce only the articles necessary for 
 
i2 4 TOLSTOY 
 
 balls. One may, on hearing those whistles, attach to 
 them no other meaning than that of the indication of 
 time. But one may associate with them also the mean- 
 ing they in reality have that at the first whistle at five 
 o'clock in the morning, men and women, who have slept 
 side by side in a damp cellar, get up in the dark and 
 hurry away into the noisy building, and take their part 
 in a work of which they see neither cessation nor utility 
 for themselves, and work often so in the heat, in suffocat- 
 ing exhalations, with very rare intervals of rest, for one, 
 two, or three, or even twelve or more hours. And so it 
 goes on from one week to another, interrupted only by 
 holidays. 
 
 I walked on, observing these workmen in the streets 
 till eleven o'clock. . . . And now from every side 
 carriages appeared, all going in one direction. On the 
 coach-box sat a coachman, sometimes in a sheepskin 
 coat, and a footman a dandy with a cockade. Well- 
 fed horses, covered with cloth, ran at the rate of fifteen 
 miles an hour; in the carriages sat ladies wrapped in 
 shawls, and taking great care not to spoil their flowers 
 and their toilets. All, beginning with the harness on 
 the horses, carriages, gutta-percha wheels, the cloth of 
 the coachman's coat, down to the stockings, shoes, 
 flowers, velvet, gloves, scents all these articles have 
 been made by those men, some of whom fell asleep on 
 their own pallets in their mean rooms, some in night- 
 houses with prostitutes, and others in the police-station. 
 The ball-goers drive past these men, in and with things 
 made by them; and it does not even enter into their 
 minds that there could possibly be any connection be- 
 tween the ball they are going to and these tipsy people, 
 to whom their coachmen shout out so angrily. With 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY 125 
 
 quite easy minds and assurance that they are doing 
 nothing wrong they enjoy themselves at the ball. We 
 know that each woman at this ball, whose dress costs 
 a hundred and fifty roubles, was not born at the ball, 
 but she has lived also in the country, has seen peasants, 
 knows her own nurse and maid, whose fathers and 
 brothers are poor, (or whom earning a hundred and 
 fifty roubles to build a cottage with is the end and aim 
 of a long, laborious life ; she knows this ; how can she, 
 then, enjoy herself, knowing that on her half-naked body 
 she is wearing the cottage which is the dream of her 
 housemaid's brother ? 
 
 The work of mowing is one of the most important in 
 the world. If there is more hay there will be also more 
 meat for old people and milk for children. For each 
 mower here is decided the question of bread and milk 
 for himself and for his children during the winter. Each 
 of the working people, male and female, knows it : even 
 the children know that this is an important business, and 
 that one ought to work with all one's strength, carry a 
 jug of kvas for the father to the mowing place, and, 
 shifting it from one hand to another, run barefoot as 
 quickly as possible a distance of perhaps a mile and a 
 half from the village, in order to be in time for dinner, 
 that father may not grumble. Everyone knows that, 
 from the mowing to the harvest, there will be no inter- 
 ruption of labour and no time for rest. And besides 
 mowing, each has some other business to do to plough 
 up new land, and to harrow it ; the women have cloth 
 to make, bread to bake, and the washing to do ; and the 
 peasants must drive to the mill and to market; they 
 have the official affairs of their community to attend to ; 
 they have also to provide the local government officials 
 
126 TOLSTOY 
 
 with means of locomotion, and to pass the night in the 
 fields with the pastured horses. All, old and young and 
 sick, work with all their strength. The peasants work 
 in such a way that, when cutting the last rows, the 
 mowers, weak people, growing youths, old men, are so 
 tired that, having rested a little, it is with great pain 
 they begin anew; the women, often with child, work hard 
 too. It is a strained, incessant labour. . . . There is a 
 small company labouring in the hayfield three peasants 
 one of them an old man; another his nephew, who 
 is married ; and the third, the village bootmaker, a thin, 
 wiry man, with their women, including one of about 
 eighty, helping. They all draw up in line and work from 
 morning to eve under the burning sun of June. 
 
 Let us turn to the country house. In the evening, 
 when the rattle of the scythes of the returning toil-worn 
 mowers, and the sounds of hammer and anvil are heard, 
 there blend other sounds from the country house. Drin, 
 drin, drin ! goes the piano ; a Hungarian song is heard 
 through the noise of the croquet balls ; before the stable 
 an open carriage is standing, harnessed with four fat 
 horses, which has been hired for twenty shillings to 
 bring some guests a distance of ten miles. Horses 
 standing by the carriage rattle their little bells. Before 
 them hay has been thrown, which they are scattering 
 with their hoofs, the same hay which the peasants have 
 been gathering with such hard labour. In the yard of 
 this mansion there is movement; a healthy, well-fed 
 fellow in a pink shirt, presented to him for his service 
 as a house-porter, is calling the coachmen, and telling 
 them to harness and saddle some horses. Two peasants, 
 who live here as coachmen, come out of their room, and 
 go in an easy manner, swinging their arms, to saddle 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY 127 
 
 horses for the ladies and gentlemen. Still nearer to the 
 house the sounds of another piano are heard. It is the 
 music-mistress, who lives in the family to teach the chil- 
 dren, practising her Schumann. The sounds of one 
 piano jangle with those of another. Quite near the 
 house walk two nurses ; one is young, another old ; they 
 lead and carry children to bed ; these children are of 
 the same age as those who ran from the village with jugs. 
 One nurse is English : she cannot speak Russian. She 
 was engaged to come from England, not from being dis- 
 tinguished by some peculiar qualities, but simply because 
 she does not speak Russian. Farther on is another 
 person, a French woman, who is also engaged because 
 she does not know Russian. Farther on a peasant, with 
 two women, is watering flowers near the house ; another 
 is cleaning a gun for one of the young gentlemen. Here 
 two women are carrying a basket with clean linen they 
 have been washing for all these gentlefolks. In the 
 house two women have scarcely time to wash the plates 
 and dishes after the company, who have just done eat- 
 ing ; and two peasants in evening clothes are running 
 up and down the stairs, serving coffee, tea, wine, seltzer- 
 water, etc. Upstairs a table is spread. A meal has just 
 ended; and another will soon begin, to continue till 
 cock-crow, and often till morning dawns. Some are 
 sitting smoking, playing cards; others are sitting and 
 smoking, engaged in discoursing liberal ideas of reform ; 
 and others, again, walk to and fro, eat, smoke, and, not 
 knowing what to do, have made up their mind to take a 
 drive. The household consists of fifteen persons, healthy 
 men and women; and thirty persons, healthy working 
 people, male and female, labour for them. And this 
 takes place there, where every hour, and each little boy, 
 are precious, when the peasants, not having had their 
 
128 TOLSTOY 
 
 sleep out, will mow the oats at night, in order that it 
 may not be lost, and the women will get up before dawn 
 in order to finish their threshing in time. There will be 
 private theatricals, picnics, hunting, drinking, eating, 
 piano-playing, singing, dancing in fact, incessant orgies. 
 Yet we wonder at the inhumanity of a heartless Lucullus, 
 who gorged himself with fine dishes and delicious wines 
 while people were starving, and shake our heads over the 
 barbarism and inhumanity of our grandfathers, the serf- 
 owners. What then is to be Done ? 
 
 Men of science are so sure that this * culture ' is the 
 greatest of blessings, that they boldly proclaim the con- 
 trary of what the jurists once said : fiat justitia, pereat 
 mundus. They now say : fiat cultura, pereat justitia. 
 Electric lights and telephones and exhibitions are excel- 
 lent, and so are all the pleasure-gardens with concerts 
 and performances, and all the cigars, and match-boxes, 
 and braces, and motor-cars but may they all go to 
 perdition, and not they alone, but the railways, and all 
 the factory-made chintz-stuffs and cloths in the world, if 
 to produce them it is necessary that ninety-nine per cent. 
 of the people should remain in slavery, and perish by 
 thousands in factories needed for the production of these 
 articles. Truly enlightened people will always agree to 
 go back to riding on horses and using pack-horses, or 
 even to tilling the earth with sticks and with their own 
 hands, rather than to travel on railways which regularly 
 every year crush a number of people, as is done in 
 Chicago, merely because the proprietors of the railway 
 find it more profitable to compensate the families of 
 those killed than to build the line so that it should not 
 kill people. The motto for truly enlightened people is 
 not fiat cultum, pereat justitia^ but fiat justitia^ pereat 
 
PROPERTY, LUXURY, SLAVERY 129 
 
 cultura. But true culture need not be destroyed. 
 The Slavery of Our Times. 
 
 The Government and the Zemstvos, forsooth, have 
 undertaken to spoon-feed the people ! Now, who are 
 they who take upon themselves to perform the task, 
 and who is it that they thus take under their pro- 
 tecting wing? We, the noble-born tchinovniks of the 
 Russian Empire, moved by a sentiment of charity and 
 philanthropy, intend to feed our bread-winner, who 
 himself feeds us all ! The babe in arms will good- 
 naturedly suckle its nurse, the parasite supply nutriment 
 to the plant on which it lives and flourishes ! We, the 
 privileged classes, who fatten on the earnings of the 
 horny-handed people, we who cannot move hand or 
 foot without their aid, turn round and propose to feed 
 them ! In the very proposal, as it stands, there is some- 
 thing ludicrously strange, inconceivably grotesque. . . . 
 The people are hungry and exhausted, and we, the upper 
 classes, are very much concerned thereat, and would 
 gladly stretch out a helping hand to rescue them. With 
 this object we appoint committees, take an active part in 
 their sittings, collect and subscribe money, purchase corn 
 and distribute it to the destitute. But why are the people 
 hungry ? . . . It is a melancholy but undeniable fact that 
 the entire agricultural population of Russia is systemati- 
 cally drugged with vodka, and cruelly sweated by mer- 
 chants and tradesmen and all for their own selfish, 
 narrow ends. The result is writ large in the physical de- 
 generation of the people and the alarming death-rate of 
 children ; men and women are rendered weak, will-less > 
 shattered invalids, and children are killed off by the 
 thousand, in order to enable our capitalists, aristocrats, 
 and merchants to possess themselves of the wherewithal 
 
 I 
 
1 30 TOLSTOY 
 
 to repose in the lap of luxury, to continue to lead the 
 lives of sybarites in their sumptuous palaces, gorging 
 themselves at Lucullan banquets, drinking the sounds 
 of soft, sweet music at concerts and operas, listening to 
 science distilled into popular lectures, etc. Why deceive 
 ourselves? We want and care for the people only as 
 instruments, as stepping-stones to our various goals of 
 the moment ; and, much as we desire to lay the flatter- 
 ing unction to our souls that we regard and treat them 
 as members of the same family as ourselves, as men and 
 as brothers, it is a fact that our interests are diametrically 
 opposed to, and incompatible with, theirs, and that what 
 is meat to us is rank poison and death to them. The 
 Famim in Russia. 
 
 III. SOME PROPOSED REMEDIES 
 
 The cause of the miserable position of the workers 
 cannot be found in the seizure of the means of produc- 
 tion by capitalists. The cause must lie in that which 
 drives them from the villages. And the emancipation 
 of the workers from this state of things (even in that 
 distant future in which science promises them liberty) 
 can be accomplished neither by shortening the hours of 
 labour, nor by increasing wages, nor by the promised 
 communalisation of the means of production. All this 
 cannot improve their position. For the labourers' misery 
 consists not in the longer or shorter hours of work (agri- 
 culturists sometimes work eighteen hours a day, and as 
 much as thirty-six hours on end, and consider their lives 
 happy ones) ; nor does it consist in the low rate of wages, 
 nor in the fact that the railway or the factory is not theirs ; 
 but it consists in the fact that they are obliged to work 
 in harmful, unnatural conditions, often dangerous and 
 
SOME PROPOSED REMEDIES 131 
 
 destructive to life, and to live a barrack life in towns a 
 life full of temptations and immorality and to do com- 
 pulsory labour at another's bidding. . . . Everywhere, 
 notwithstanding the diminution of the hours of labour 
 and the increase of wages, the health of the operatives is 
 worse than that of country workers, the average duration 
 of life is shorter, and morality is sacrificed, as cannot but 
 occur when people are torn from those conditions which 
 most conduce to morality : family life, and free, healthy, 
 varied and intelligible agricultural work. 
 
 Economic science is so sure that all the peasants have 
 inevitably to become factory operatives in towns that, 
 though all the sages and the poets of the world have 
 always placed the ideal of human happiness amid con- 
 ditions of agricultural work though all the workers 
 whose habits are unperverted have always preferred, 
 and still prefer, agricultural labour to any other though 
 factory work is always unhealthy and monotonous, while 
 agriculture is most healthy and varied; while factory 
 work, even if the factory belongs to the workmen, is 
 always enforced, in dependence on the machines 
 though factory work is derivative, while agricultural 
 work is fundamental, and without it no factory could 
 exist yet economic science affirms that all the country 
 people not only are not injured by the transition from 
 the country to the town, but themselves desire it, and 
 strive towards it. The cause of this evidently unjust 
 assertion is that those who have formulated, and who 
 are formulating, the laws of science, belong to the well- 
 to-do classes, and are so accustomed to the conditions, 
 advantageous to themselves, in which they live, that 
 they do not admit the thought that society could exist 
 under other conditions. 
 
132 TOLSTOY 
 
 The Socialist ideal is that the workers, having become 
 masters of all the means of production, are to obtain all 
 the comforts and pleasures now possessed by well-to-do 
 people. They will all be well clothed and housed, and 
 well nourished, and will all walk on electrically-lighted 
 asphalt streets, and frequent concerts and theatres, and 
 read papers and books, and ride on auto-cars, etc. But 
 that everybody may have certain things, the production 
 of those things must be apportioned, and consequently 
 it must be decided how long each workman is to work. 
 How is that to be decided ? No statistics can show how 
 much is wanted, and what articles are needed to satisfy 
 the demand in a society where the means of production 
 will belong to the society itself, i.e., where the people 
 will be free. . . . Furthermore, how are people to be in- 
 duced to work at articles which some consider necessary 
 and others consider unnecessary or even harmful ? There 
 will always be people who consider that, besides cannon 
 and scents and whisky, exhibitions, academies, beer and 
 beef are unnecessary and even harmful. How are these 
 people to be made to participate in the production of 
 such articles ? . . . Some people will decide these ques- 
 tions and others will obey them. . . . Such division of 
 labour as now exists will evidently be impossible in a free 
 society.- The Slavery of Our Times. 
 
 Looking Backward is excellent. One thing is bad, 
 namely, the Socialist, Marxian idea that if one does 
 wrong for a very long time, good will ensue of its own 
 accord. ' Capital is accumulated in the hands of a few ; 
 it will end by being held by one. All trades unions will 
 be also united into one. There are capital and labour 
 divided. Authority or revolution will unite them, and 
 all will be well.' The chief point is that nothing in our 
 
SOME PROPOSED REMEDIES 133 
 
 civilisation will diminish, nothing recede ; there will be 
 the same mansions, the same gastronomic dinners, sweets, 
 wines, carriages, horses, only everything will be accessible 
 to all. 
 
 Individual labour is unprofitable; centralised labour 
 is more profitable, but the inequality and oppression 
 are terrible. Socialists wish to remove inequality and 
 oppression by assigning all capital to the nation, to 
 humanity, so that the centralised unit will become 
 humanity itself. But among men striving each for his 
 own welfare it would be impossible to find men suffi- 
 ciently disinterested to manage the capital of humanity 
 without taking advantage of their power men who 
 would not again introduce into the world inequality and 
 oppression. . . . Some will say, * Choose men who are wise 
 and pure.' But none but the wise and pure can choose 
 the wise and pure. And if all men were wise and pure, 
 there would be no need of any organisation, conse- 
 quently the impossibility of that which the revolutionary 
 Socialists profess is felt by all, even by themselves ; and 
 that is why it is out of date and has no success. . . . 
 However much advantages may increase, those who are 
 at the top will appropriate them for themselves. . . . 
 Wealth will all go to the men in authority as long as 
 authority exists. Some Social Remedies. 
 
 Humanity advances continually towards the enlighten- 
 ment of its consciousness, and to the institution of 
 modes of life corresponding to this consciousness. 
 Hence in every period of life and humanity there is, 
 on the one hand, a progressive enlightenment of con- 
 sciousness, and, on the other, a realisation in life of what 
 is enlightened. ... At the present day a progressive 
 
134 TOLSTOY 
 
 enlightenment of human consciousness is taking place 
 with reference to the use of land, and soon, it seems to 
 me, a progressive realisation of this must follow. And 
 in this progressive enlightenment with reference to the 
 use of land, and its realisation, which constitutes one of 
 the chief problems of our time, the fore-man, the leader 
 of the movement, was and is Henry George. ... It is 
 Henry George's merit that he not only exploded all the 
 sophism whereby religion and science justify landed 
 property, and pressed the question to the farthest proof, 
 which forced all who had not stopped their ears to acknow- 
 ledge the unlawfulness of ownerships in land, but also 
 that he was the first to indicate a possibility of solution 
 for the question. He was the first to give a simple, 
 straightforward answer to the usual excuses made by the 
 enemies of all progress, which affirm that the demands 
 of progress are illusions, impracticable, inapplicable. 
 The method of Henry George destroys this excuse by 
 so putting the question that by to-morrow committees 
 might be appointed to examine and deliberate on his 
 scheme and its transformation into law. In Russia, for 
 instance, the inquiry as to the means for the ransom of 
 land, or its gratuitous confiscation for nationalisation, 
 might be begun to-morrow, and solved, with certain restric- 
 tions, as thirty-three years ago the question of liberating 
 the peasants was solved. To humanity the indispensable- 
 ness of this reform is demonstrated, and its feasibleness 
 is proved (emendations, alterations in the single tax 
 system may be required, but the fundamental idea is a 
 possibility) ; and therefore humanity cannot but do that 
 which their reason demands. Some Social Remedies. 
 
 When I was a child I was told that if I wished to catch 
 a bird I must put salt on its tail. I took a handful 
 
SOME PROPOSED REMEDIES 135 
 
 and went in pursuit of the birds, but I saw at once that 
 if I could sprinkle salt on their tails I could catch them, 
 and that what I had been told was only a joke. Those 
 who read essays and works on Courts of Arbitration 
 and the disarmament of nations must feel very much 
 the same. . . . History, however, shows us that the 
 governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those 
 of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their 
 very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body 
 of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, 
 deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and 
 through whose agency they govern the State, will have 
 no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore, 
 governments will never consent to diminish the number 
 of those well-trained and submissive servants who 
 constitute their power and influence. . . . And there 
 really are men who spend their time in promoting 
 Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in 
 writing books ; and of course the governments sympa- 
 thise with it all, pretending that they approve of it, 
 just as they pretend to support temperance, while they 
 actually derive the larger part of their income from 
 intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty 
 of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to 
 which they owe their power; just as they pretend to 
 care for the improvement of the labouring classes, while 
 on oppression of the workmen rest the very foundations 
 of the State ; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity 
 when Christianity is] subversive of every government. 
 The Kingdom of God is Within You. 
 
 It is said that the conflicts between Governments are 
 to be decided" by arbitration. But, apart from the fact 
 that the disputes will be settled, not by representatives 
 
136 TOLSTOY 
 
 of the people, but by representatives of the Govern- 
 ments, and that there is no guarantee that the decisions 
 will be just ones, who is to carry out the decisions of 
 the court ? The army ? . . . The arbitrator's sentence 
 against the military violence of States will be carried 
 out by military violence that is to say, the thing that 
 has to be checked is to be the instrument by which it is 
 to be checked. To catch a bird, put salt on its tail ! 
 
 For international questions to be decided by courts of 
 arbitration there must be, among the Powers, full mutual 
 confidence that the decisions of the court will be re- 
 spected. If there is such confidence, no armies are 
 necessary. But if armies exist, it is obvious that this 
 confidence is lacking, and that international questions 
 can be decided only by the strength of the armies. 
 
 The Governments wish to persuade the peoples that 
 there is no need for private individuals to trouble about 
 freeing themselves from wars; the Governments them- 
 selves, at their conferences, will arrange first to reduce 
 and presently quite to abolish armies. But this is 
 untrue. Armies can be reduced and abolished only in 
 opposition to the will, but never by the will, of Govern- 
 ments. Armies will only be diminished and abolished 
 when people cease to trust Governments, and themselves 
 seek salvation from the miseries that oppress them, and 
 seek that safety, not by the complicated and delicate 
 combinations of diplomatists, but in the simple fulfil- 
 ment of that law, binding upon every man, inscribed in 
 all religious teachings, and present in every heart, not to 
 do to others what you wish them not to do to you 
 above all, not to slay your neighbours. The Pe&ce 
 Conference. 
 
SOME PROPOSED REMEDIES 137 
 
 The so-called question of woman's rights arose, and 
 only could arise, among men who had deviated from the 
 law of real labour. One has only to return to it, and 
 that question must cease to exist. A woman who has 
 her own particular, inevitable labour will never claim 
 the right of sharing man's labour in mines, or in 
 ploughing fields. She claims a share only in the sham 
 labour of the wealthy classes. 
 
 The means of serving others are various for men. 
 The whole activity of mankind, with the exception of 
 bearing children and rearing them, is open for his 
 service to men. A woman, in addition to the possibility 
 of serving men by all the means open to man, by the 
 construction of her body is called, and is inevitably 
 attracted, to serve others by that which alone is ex- 
 cepted from the domain of the service of man. The 
 service of mankind is divided into two parts one, the 
 augmentation of the welfare of mankind; the other, 
 the continuation of the race. Men are called chiefly 
 to the first, as they are deprived of the possibility of 
 fulfilling the second. Women are called exclusively 
 to the second, as they only are fitted for it. This 
 difference one should not, one can not, forget or 
 destroy; and it would be sinful to do so. From this 
 difference proceed the duties of each duties not in- 
 vented by men, but which are in the nature of things. 
 
 The vocation of man is broader and more varied ; the 
 vocation of woman more uniform and narrower, but 
 
 """ '"^ -^^ % ^^^^^^ * j^^ -^ -^ _ -.1^ _^, "--x. 
 
 more profound. And therefore it Has always~been and 
 always will be the case that man, having hundreds of 
 duties, will be neither a bad nor a pernicious man, even 
 when he has been false to one or ten out of them, if he 
 
138 TOLSTOY 
 
 fulfils the greater part of his vocation ; while woman, as 
 she has a smaller number of duties, if she is false to one 
 of them, instantly falls lower than a man who has been 
 false to ten out of his hundreds of duties. Such has 
 always been the general opinion, and such it will 
 always remain because such is the substance of the 
 matter. ... In the general vocation of serving God 
 and others, man and woman are entirely equal, not- 
 withstanding the difference of the form of that service. 
 The equality consists in the equal importance of one 
 service and of the other that the one is impossible 
 without the other, that the one depends upon the other, 
 and that for efficient service, as well for man as for 
 woman, the knowledge of truth is equally necessary. 
 
 The ideal woman, in my opinion, is one who, 
 appropriating the highest view of life of the time in 
 which she lives, yet gives herself to her feminine mission, 
 which is irresistibly placed in her that of bringing 
 forth, nursing and educating the greatest possible 
 number of children, fitted to work for people according 
 to the view which she has of life. But in order to 
 appropriate the highest view of life, I think there is 
 no need of attending lectures; all that she requires is 
 to read the gospel, and not to shut her eyes, ears, and, 
 most of all, her heart. Well, and if you ask what those 
 are to do who have no children, who are not married, 
 or are widows, I answer that those will do well to share 
 man's multifarious labour. But one cannot help being 
 sorry that such a precious tool as woman is should be 
 bereft of the possibility of fulfilling the great vocation 
 which it is proper to her alone to fulfil. What then 
 is to be Done ? 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE GREAT COMMANDMENTS 
 I. THE LAW OF REASON 
 
 To those who ask my opinion whether it be desirable 
 to endeavour by the aid of reason to attain complete 
 consciousness in one's inner spiritual life, and to express 
 the truths thus attained in definite language, I would 
 answer in the positive affirmative, that every man to 
 achieve his destiny on earth and to attain true welfare 
 the two are synonymous must continually exert all his 
 mental faculties to solve for himself and clearly to 
 express the religious foundations on which he lives 
 that is, the meaning of his life. I have often found 
 among illiterate labourers, who have to deal with cubic 
 measurements, an accepted conviction that mathematical 
 calculations are fallacious, and not to be trusted. ... A 
 similar opinion has obtained among men who, I will 
 boldly say, are bereft of true religious feelings, that 
 reason is unequal to the solution of religious questions, 
 that the application of reason to such questions is the 
 most fruitful source of error, and that the solution of 
 such questions by the aid of reason is sinful pride. . . . 
 Man has been given by God one single instrument to 
 attain knowledge of self, and of one's relation to the 
 universe : there is no other and that one is reason. . . . 
 Man cannot be conscious of anything independently of 
 
 139 
 
140 TOLSTOY 
 
 reason. It is said, Accept the truth by revelation, by 
 faith. But a man cannot believe independently of 
 reason. If a man believes this and not that, it is only 
 because his reason tells him that this is credible and 
 that is not. Demands of Love and Reason. 
 
 The law which men should follow is so plain that it is 
 accessible to every child, the more so as no man has to 
 discover anew the law of his life. Those who have lived 
 before him have discovered and expressed it, and he has 
 but to verify it with his reason, and to accept or refuse 
 those propositions which he finds expressed in tradition. 
 . . . Traditions may proceed from men and be false, 
 but reason indubitably comes from God, and cannot be 
 false. Particular intellectual qualities are needful, not 
 for the acquirement and expression of truth, but for the 
 concoction and expression of error. ... A righteous 
 God has created evil, persecutes men, demands redemp- 
 tion, and so forth ; and we, professing the law of love 
 and mercy, execute, make war, rob the poor, etc. To 
 disentangle these impossible contradictions, or rather to 
 conceal them from oneself, much mental capacity and 
 special talent are indeed necessary ; but to learn the law 
 of one's life, or, as already expressed, to bring one's faith 
 into complete consciousness, no special mental capacity 
 is required; one has but to refuse to admit anything 
 contrary to reason, not to deny reason, religiously to 
 guard one's reason and to rely on it alone. 
 
 According to the doctrine of Christ, a man who limits 
 his observation of life to the sphere in which there is no 
 freedom to the sphere of effects, that is, of acts does 
 not live a true life. He only lives a true life who has 
 transferred his life into the sphere where freedom lives 
 
THE LAW OF REASON 141 
 
 into the domain of first causes by the recognition and 
 practice of the truth revealed to him. He thus unites 
 himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes 
 not personal, individual acts that depend on conditions 
 of time and space, but acts that have no causes, but are 
 in themselves causes of all else and have an endless and 
 unlimited significance. . . . Men have but to under- 
 stand this : that they must cease to care for material and 
 external matters, in which they are not free ; let them 
 apply one-hundredth part of the energy now used by them 
 in outward concerns to those in which they are free to 
 the recognition and profession of the truth that confronts 
 them, to the deliverance of themselves and others from 
 the falsehood and hypocrisy which conceal the truth 
 and then the false system of life which now torments us, 
 which threatens us with still greater suffering, will be 
 destroyed at once without struggle. Then the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, at least in that first stage for which men 
 through the development of their consciousness are 
 already prepared, will be established. As one shake is 
 sufficient to precipitate into crystals a liquid saturated 
 with salt, so at the present time it may be that only the 
 least effort is needed in order that the truth already 
 revealed to us should spread among hundreds, thousands, 
 millions of men, and a public opinion become established 
 in conformity with the existing consciousness, and the 
 entire social organisation become transformed. It de- 
 pends upon us to make this effort. The Kingdom of 
 God is Within You. 
 
 The ideal is to take no thought for the morrow, to live 
 in the present; and the commandment the fulfilment 
 of which is the point beneath which we must not fall 
 is against taking oaths or making promises for the future. 
 
142 TOLSTOY 
 
 In order to free himself from religious deception in 
 general, man must understand and remember that the 
 only instrument he possesses for the acquisition of know- 
 ledge is reason, and therefore that every teaching affirm- 
 ing what is contrary to reason is a delusion, an attempt 
 to set aside the only instrument for acquiring knowledge 
 which God has given to man. Man can receive truth 
 only through his reason. The man, therefore, who 
 thinks that he receives truth through faith and not 
 through reason only deludes himself and uses his reason 
 for a purpose for which it was never intended namely, 
 to solve questions as to which of those who transmit 
 what is given out as truth must be believed, and which 
 rejected. Whereas reason is intended, not to decide 
 between whom one must and must not believe (this, 
 indeed, it cannot do), but to verify the truth of what is 
 presented to it. This it can always do ; for this purpose 
 it was designed. 
 
 Misinterpreters of truth generally say that one cannot 
 trust reason because its assertions vary in different men, 
 and that it is therefore better, for the sake of union, to 
 believe in revelation confirmed by miracles. But they 
 make a mistake, and, intentionally or unintentionally, 
 confuse reason with speculation and invention. Specula- 
 tions and inventions, it is true, may be, and are, infinitely 
 diverse and numerous, but the conclusions of reason are 
 the same for all men at all times. . . . Therefore, to 
 avoid falling a prey to religious deception, man must 
 understand and remember that truth is revealed to him 
 only through reason, given him by God for the purpose of 
 discovering the will of God, and that the practice of inspir- 
 ing distrust in reason is founded on the desire to deceive, 
 and is the greatest blasphemy. The Christian Teaching. 
 
NON-RESISTANCE ' 143 
 
 II. LAW OF PEACE, OR NON-RESISTANCE BY FORCE 
 
 The ideal is to bear no malice, excite no ill-will, and 
 to love all men. The commandment which forbids us 
 to offend our neighbour is one which a man who is 
 striving to attain this ideal must not do less than obey. 
 And this is the first commandment. The ideal to use 
 violence whatsoever shows that we must return good 
 for evil, endure injuries with patience, and give up the 
 cloak to him who has taken the coat. The ideal is to 
 love your enemies, to do good to them that despitefully 
 use you. In order to keep the spirit of this command- 
 ment, one must at least refrain from injuring one's 
 enemies, one must speak kindly of them, and treat all 
 one's fellow-creatures with equal consideration. All 
 these commandments are reminders of that which we, 
 in our striving for perfection, must and can avoid; 
 reminders, too, that we must labour now to acquire by 
 degrees habits of self-restraint, until such habits become 
 second nature. But these commandments, far from 
 exhausting the doctrine, do not by any means cover it. 
 They are but stepping-stones on the way to perfection, 
 and must necessarily be followed by higher and still 
 higher ones, as men pursue the course towards perfec- 
 tion. That is why a Christian doctrine would make 
 higher demands than those embodied in the command- 
 ments, and not in the least decrease its demands, as 
 they who judge the Christian doctrine from a social life- 
 conception seem to think. The Kingdom of God. 
 
 The reply to the question, What must we do ? is very 
 simple, and not merely definite, but always in the highest 
 degree applicable and practicable for each man ... for 
 
144 TOLSTOY 
 
 it demands the activity of that one person over whom 
 each of us has real, rightful, and unquestionable power, 
 namely, oneself; and it consists in this, that if a man 
 whether slave or slave-owner really wishes to better not 
 his position alone, but the position of people in general, 
 he must not himself do those wrong things which enslave 
 him and his brothers. And in order not to do the evil 
 which produces misery for himself and his brothers, he 
 should, first of a!/, neither willingly, nor under compulsion, 
 take any part in Governmental activity, and should 
 therefore be neither a soldier, nor a Field-Marshal, nor 
 a Member of State, nor a tax-collector, nor a witness, 
 nor an alderman, nor a juryman, nor a governor, nor 
 a Member of Parliament, nor, in fact, hold any office 
 connected with violence. That is one thing. 
 
 Secondly, such a man should not voluntarily pay 
 taxes to Governments, either directly or indirectly nor 
 should he accept money collected by taxes, either as salary, 
 or as pension, or as a reward, nor should Jie make use of 
 Governmental institutions supported by taxes collected by 
 violence from the people. That is the second thing. 
 
 Thirdly, a man who desires not to promote his own 
 well-being alone, but to better the position of people in 
 general, should not appeal to Governmental violence for the 
 protection of his possessions in land or in other things, nor 
 to defend him and his near ones ; but should only possess 
 land and all products of his own and the people's toil in so 
 far as others do not claltn them from him. The Slavery 
 of Our Times. 
 
 The willing acceptance of a condition by men is the 
 sole criterion of its good. And the lives of men abound 
 with such acts. . . . Roads, churches, and museums, and 
 various social and state affairs may be good for those 
 
' NON-RESISTANCE ' 145 
 
 who consider it good, and who therefore freely and 
 willingly perform it. But the work to which men must 
 be driven by force ceases to be a common good precisely 
 by the fact of such violence. What then is to be Done ? 
 
 The cruellest of snares that of the State is, like false 
 religion, transmitted to men by two modes of deception 
 inculcation of falsehood into children, and influence 
 exerted on the feelings of men by external solemnities. 
 On awakening to consciousness, almost every man who 
 lives in a State finds himself already entangled in State 
 snares, and living under the persuasion that his is a 
 superior, special people, State, country, for the welfare 
 and advancement of which he should blindly obey the 
 existing Government, and at its bidding torture, wound, 
 and slay his fellows. The evil of this snare is that, as 
 soon as we admit the possibility of ascertaining and 
 understanding what constitutes the welfare of a number 
 of people, there is no limit to conjecture as to the result- 
 ant welfare from any act whatever ; so that any act may 
 be justified the moment a man assumes that the welfare 
 or life of one man may be sacrificed for the sake of the 
 future welfare of many. There is no limit to the evil 
 that can be done in the name of such reasoning. The 
 first assumption that we can know what will promote 
 the future welfare of many has been responsible in 
 former times for torture, the Inquisition, and slavery, 
 and, in our time, for courts of law, prisons, and landed 
 property. Acting on the second assumption that of 
 Caiaphas Christ was slain in the past, and at the 
 present time millions perish by executions and war. 
 
 In order to avoid falling into this snare man must 
 understand and remember that before belonging to any 
 
 K 
 
146 TOLSTOY 
 
 State or nation he belongs to God, being a member of a 
 universal kingdom, and that so far from being able to 
 transfer to anyone the responsibility for his actions, he 
 must himself alone always be answerable for them. 
 Therefore, man must under no circumstances prefer 
 men of his own nation or State to those of another ; no 
 consideration as to the future welfare of many must ever 
 induce him to do harm to his neighbours ; and he must 
 not think that he ought to obey anyone whatever in pre- 
 ference to his own conscience. The Christian Teaching. 
 
 The first criticisms [of * My Religion '] with which I 
 deal came mostly from men of high position, either in 
 Church or State, who feel quite sure that no one will 
 venture to combat their assertions, and have forgotten 
 that there is a Christianity in whose name they hold their 
 places. They condemn as sectarian all that which is 
 Christ-like in Christianity . . . and to show that it is not 
 opposed to violence quote equivocal passages from the 
 Old and New Testaments, and all of Christ's words that 
 can possibly be misinterpreted the expulsion from the 
 Temple and other passages. Such men turn away from 
 Christ Himself, to invent an ideal and a form of religion 
 all their own, forgetful of Him in whose name both the 
 Church and the offices they hold exist. If men but 
 knew that the Church preaches an unforgiving, murder- 
 loving, and belligerent Christ, they would not believe in 
 that Church, and its doctrines would be defended by 
 none. 
 
 The second method, somewhat more awkward, con- 
 sists in affirming that though Christ did, in point of fact, 
 teach us to turn the other cheek, and to share our cloak, 
 and that these are indeed lofty moral laws, still . . . 
 
1 NON-RESISTANCE ' 147 
 
 the world abounds in evil-doers, and if these wretches 
 are not subdued by force, the righteous will perish and 
 the world will be destroyed. . . . This argument is 
 groundless, because if we allow ourselves to look upon 
 our fellow-men as evil-doers, outcasts (Raka), we sap the 
 very foundations of the Christian doctrine, which teaches 
 us that we, the children of the Heavenly Father, are 
 brothers and equal one to the other. In the second 
 place, if the same Father had permitted us to use violence 
 towards evil-doers, as there is no infallible rule for dis- 
 tinguishing the good from the evil, every individual or 
 every community might class its neighbours under the 
 head of evil-doers, which is practically the case at the 
 present time. 
 
 Whether the tyranny of the State is or is not to be 
 abolished, the position of the innocent who are oppressed 
 by the tyrants will not be materially affected thereby. 
 Men are not to be frightened by being told that the 
 wicked will oppress the good, because that is the natural 
 course and will never change. When the rulers say that 
 if their power were to be destroyed the evil-doers would 
 tyrannise over the innocent, what they really mean is 
 that the tyrants in power are reluctant to yield to those 
 other tyrants who would fain wrest from them their 
 authority. ... If State violence disappeared, it is not 
 unlikely that other acts of violence would be committed ; 
 but the sum of violence can never be increased simply 
 because the power passes from the hands of one into 
 those of another. 
 
 The third and more ingenious reply is that while to 
 obey the commandment of non-resistance is every Chris- 
 tian's duty when the injury is a personal one, it ceases to 
 
148 TOLSTOY 
 
 be obligatory when harm is done to one's neighbour, and 
 that in such an emergency a Christian is bound to use 
 force against the evil-doer. This assertion is purely 
 arbitrary and finds no justification throughout the whole 
 body of the teaching of Christ, and, in fact, amounts to a 
 direct negative. How may we define what is called 
 danger to one's neighbour? If my private judgment is 
 to be the arbiter, any violence can be excused. Magi- 
 cians have been burned, aristocrats and Girondists put 
 to death, because the men in power considered them 
 dangerous. If this important condition, which destroys 
 the significance of the commandment, ever entered into 
 the thought of Christ, it would have been formulated 
 somewhere. Not only is no such exception to the com- 
 mandment to be found throughout the Teacher's life 
 and lessons, but there is on the other hand a warning 
 against an interpretation so false and misleading, in 
 the Bible story of Caiaphas, who admitted that it was 
 not well to put to death the innocent Jesus, but per- 
 ceived the existence of a danger, not for himself, but for 
 all the people, and therefore declared it better for one 
 man to die than for a whole nation to perish. And we 
 have a still more explicit proof of the fallacy of this in- 
 terpretation in the words addressed to Peter, when he 
 tried to revenge by violence the attack upon Jesus 
 (Matthew xxvi. 51). Peter was defending, not himself, 
 but his beloved and divine Master, and Christ distinctly 
 forbade him, saying, c For all they that take the sword 
 shall perish with the sword' (Matthew xxvi. 52). It is 
 impossible to compare one act of violence with the other, 
 and to say which is the greater, that which one is about 
 to commit, or the wrong done against one's neighbour. 
 We release society from the presence of a criminal by 
 putting him to death, but we cannot possibly know that 
 
'NON-RESISTANCE' 149 
 
 the former might not have so changed by the morrow as 
 to render the execution a useless cruelty. We imprison 
 another, we believe him a dangerous man, but no later 
 than next day this very man may have ceased to be 
 dangerous, and his imprisonment has become un- 
 necessary. . . . What a vast amount of harm must and 
 does accrue from the assurance that a man feels of his 
 right to provide against a possible calamity. Ninety-nine 
 parts of the world's iniquity, from the Inquisition to the 
 bomb-throwing of the present day, and the execution of 
 tens of thousands of political criminals, so called, result 
 from this very assurance. 
 
 The fourth and still more ingenious reply consists in 
 asserting that this commandment is not denied but 
 acknowledged like all the others ; it is only the special 
 significance attributed to it by sectarians that is denied. 
 ... It has, they say, the importance, no more and no 
 less, of all the others; and one who through weakness 
 has transgressed against any of the commandments, 
 whether that of non-resistance, or another, does not for 
 that cause cease to be a Christian, provided his creed 
 be true. . . . One has, however, but to compare the 
 attitude of the clergy towards this or any of the other 
 commandments which they do acknowledge, to be con- 
 vinced that it is quite different from their attitude towards 
 this one. The commandment against fornication they 
 acknowledge without reservation, and in no case will 
 they ever admit that this sin is not an evil. . . . Clergy- 
 men have never been known to advocate the breaking 
 of any other commandment, but in regard to the teach- 
 ing of non-resistance they distinctly teach that this pro- 
 hibition must not be taken too literally, that so far from 
 always obeying this commandment we should on occasion 
 
150 TOLSTOY 
 
 follow the opposite course sit in judgment, go to war, 
 execute criminals, etc. . . . How is this command- 
 ment to become less difficult when its infraction is not 
 only condoned but directly encouraged ? 
 
 The fifth method of answering, the most popular one 
 of all, consists in quiet evasion, pretending that the 
 question was solved ages ago, in a cogent and satis- 
 factory manner, and that it would be a waste of words 
 to re-open the subject. This method is employed by all 
 the more cultured authors, who, if they made answer at 
 all, would feel themselves bound to be logical. ... As 
 a characteristic specimen of these criticisms, I will quote 
 from an article by that well-known and scholarly English- 
 man, the writer and preacher, Canon Farrar, who, like 
 so many other learned theologians, is an expert in the 
 art of silently ignoring and evading a statement. The 
 article appeared in The Forum for October 1888. . . . 
 Farrar expresses his belief that ' though actuated by the 
 noblest sincerity, Count Tolstoy has been misled by 
 partial and one-sided interpretations of the meaning of 
 the Gospel and the mind and will of Christ.' In what 
 this error consists he does not explain, but says : ' To 
 enter into the proof of this is impossible in this articled/or I 
 have already exceeded the space at my command] and con- 
 cludes with equanimity : ' Meanwhile the reader who 
 feels troubled lest it should be his duty also to forsake 
 all the conditions of his life, and to take up the position 
 and work of a common labourer, may rest for the present 
 on the principle, " securus judicat orbis terrarum." With 
 few and rare exceptions the whole of Christendom, from 
 the days of the apostles down to our own, has come to 
 the firm conclusion that it was the object of Christ to 
 lay down great eternal principles, but not to disturb the 
 
1 NON-RESISTANCE ' 151 
 
 bases and revolutionise the institutions as well as all 
 inevitable conditions. Were it my object to prove how 
 untenable is the doctrine of Communism, based by 
 Count Tolstoy upon the divine paradoxes, which can be 
 interpreted on only historical principles in accordance 
 with the whole method of the teaching of Jesus, it would 
 require an ampler canvas than I have here at my dis- 
 posal.' What a pity that he has no space ! And, 
 wonderful to relate, no one for fifteen centuries ever had 
 the space to prove that the Christ whom we profess said 
 one thing and meant another. And of course they could 
 prove it if they would ! But it is not worth while to 
 prove what everybody knows to be true. It is enough 
 to say : ' Securus judicat orbis terrarum.' The Kingdom 
 of God is Within You. 
 
 It is said that without Governments we should not 
 have those institutions enlightening, educational and 
 public that are needful for all. But why should we 
 suppose this? We see, on the contrary, that in the 
 most diverse matters people in our times arrange their 
 own lives incomparably better than those who govern 
 them arrange things for them. Without the least help 
 from Government, and often in spite of the interference 
 of Government, people organise all sorts of social under- 
 takings workmen's unions, co-operative societies, rail- 
 way companies, artels [associations of labourers in 
 Russia], and syndicates. If collections for public works 
 are needed, why should we suppose that free people 
 could not, without violence, voluntarily collect the 
 necessary means and carry out anything that is now 
 carried out by means of taxes, if only the undertakings 
 in question are really useful for everybody? Why 
 suppose that there cannot be tribunals without violence ? 
 
152 TOLSTOY 
 
 Trial by people trusted by the disputants has always 
 existed and will exist, and needs no violence. We are 
 so depraved by long-continued slavery that we can 
 hardly imagine administration without violence. And, 
 yet again, that is not true : Russian communes migrat- 
 ing to distant regions, where our Government leaves 
 them alone, arrange their own taxation, administration, 
 tribunals, and police, and always prosper until govern- 
 mental violence interferes with their administration. 
 And in the same way there is no reason to suppose 
 that people could not, by common agreement, decide 
 how the land is to be apportioned for use. 
 
 Things really produced by a man's own labour, and 
 that he needs, are always protected by custom, by public 
 opinion, by feelings of justice and reciprocity, and they 
 do not need to be protected by violence. . . . The 
 defence by violence of the rights of property immorally 
 obtained, which is now customary, if it has not quite 
 destroyed, has considerably weakened people's natural 
 consciousness of justice in the matter of using articles, 
 i.e., has weakened the natural and innate right of 
 property, without which humanity could not exist, and 
 which has always existed and still exists among all men. 
 And, therefore, there is no reason to anticipate that 
 people will not be able to arrange their lives without 
 organised violence. The Slavery of Our Times. 
 
 The question as put by Christ is not at all, Can non- 
 resistance become a general law for humanity ? but, How 
 must each man act to fulfil his allotted task, to save his 
 soul, and to do the will of God ? which are all really 
 one and the same thing. Christian teaching does not 
 lay down laws for everybody, and does not say to people, 
 
1 NON-RESISTANCE ' 153 
 
 1 You, all, for fear of punishment, must obey such and 
 such rules, and then you will all be happy'; but it 
 explains to each individual his position in relation to 
 the world, and lets him see what results, for him indi- 
 vidually, inevitably flow from that relation. 
 
 To many people of our society it would be impossible 
 to torture or kill a baby, even if they were told that by 
 so doing they could save hundreds of other people. And 
 in the same way a man, when he has developed a Chris- 
 tian sensibility of heart, finds a whole series of actions 
 become impossible for him. For certain actions are 
 morally impossible, just as others are physically impos- 
 sible. As a man cannot lift a mountain, and as a kindly 
 man cannot kill an infant, so a man living the Christian 
 life cannot take part in deeds of violence. 
 
 How (to use the stock example) is a man to act when 
 he sees a robber killing or outraging a child, and he can 
 only save the child by killing the robber ? When such a 
 case is put, it is generally assumed that the only possible 
 reply is that one should kill the robber to save the child. 
 But this answer is given so quickly and decidedly only 
 because we are all so accustomed to the use of violence. 
 ... By killing the robber he certainly kills, whereas 
 he cannot know positively whether the robber would 
 have killed the child or not. But letting that pass, 
 who shall say whether the child's life was more needed, 
 was better, than the robber's life? To decide that he 
 needs to know what would become of the child whom 
 he saves, and what had he not killed him would have 
 been the future of the robber he kills. And as he cannot 
 know this, the non-Christian has no sufficient rational 
 ground for killing a robber to save a child. If a man is 
 
154 TOLSTOY 
 
 a Christian, and consequently acknowledges God and 
 sees the meaning of life in fulfilling His will, then, how- 
 ever ferocious the robber, however innocent and lovely 
 the child, he has even less ground to abandon the God- 
 given law and to do to the robber what the robber wishes 
 to do to the child. He may plead with, the robber, may 
 interpose his own body between the robber and the 
 victim, but there is one thing he cannot do : he cannot 
 deliberately abandon the law he has received from God, 
 the fulfilment of which alone gives meaning to his life. 
 Very probably bad education, or his animal nature, 
 may cause a man (Christian or non-Christian) to 
 kill the robber, not only to save the child, but even 
 to save himself or to save his purse, but it does not 
 follow that he is right in acting thus, or that he should 
 accustom himself or others to think such conduct 
 right. 
 
 I see a robber killing a child, and I can save the child 
 by killing the robber therefore in certain cases violence 
 must be used to resist evil. A man's life is in danger, 
 and can be saved only by my telling a lie therefore in 
 certain cases one must lie. A man is starving, and one 
 can save him only by stealing therefore in certain cases 
 one must steal. . . . 
 
 1 Fais ce que tu dois^ advienne que pourra ' (' Do what you 
 ought, come what may ') is an expression of profound 
 wisdom. We each can know indubitably what we ought 
 to do but what results will follow from our actions we 
 none of us either do know or can know. Therefore it 
 follows that, besides feeling the call of duty, we are 
 further driven to act as duty bids us by the considera- 
 tion that we have no other guidance, but are totally 
 ignorant of what will result from our actions. . . , 
 
1 NON-RESISTANCE ' 155 
 
 None of us has ever yet met the imaginary robber 
 with the imaginary child, but all the horrors which fill 
 the annals of history and of our own times came and 
 come from this one thing that people will believe that 
 they can foresee the results of hypothetical future 
 actions. 
 
 It was just this sophistical justification of violence 
 that Christ denounced. When two enemies fight, each 
 may think his own conduct justified by the circum- 
 stances. Excuses can be made for every use of violence ; 
 and no infallible standard has ever been discovered by 
 which to measure the worth of these excuses. Therefore 
 Christ taught not to believe in any excuse for violence, 
 and (contrary to what had been taught by them of old 
 time) never to use violence. Letters on the Personal 
 Christian Life. 
 
 The Anarchists are right in everything, in the negation 
 of the existing order and in the assertion that, without 
 authority, there could not be worse violence than that of 
 authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken 
 only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a re- 
 volution. It will be instituted only by there being more 
 and more people who do not require protection from 
 governmental power and by there being more and more 
 people who will be ashamed of applying this power. 
 
 Dynamite and the dagger, as experience has already 
 shown, only cause reaction, and destroy the most valuable 
 power, the only one at our command, that of public 
 opinion. The alternative to come to an agreement 
 with the Government, making concessions to it, partici- 
 pating in it, in order gradually to disentangle the net 
 
156 TOLSTOY 
 
 which is binding the people, and to set them free is 
 closed, because governments have already learnt how 
 far they may allow the participation of men wishing to 
 reform them. They admit only that which does not 
 infringe, which is non-essential; and they are very 
 sensitive concerning things harmful to them sensitive 
 because the matter concerns their own existence. They 
 admit men who do not share their views, and who desire 
 reform, not only in order to satisfy the demands of these 
 men, but also in their own interest, in that of the 
 Government. ... To join the ranks of the Government 
 is also impossible one would only become its instru- 
 ment. One course, therefore, remains to fight the 
 Government by means of thought, speech, actions, life, 
 neither yielding to Government nor joining its ranks and 
 thereby increasing its power. 
 
 There can be only one permanent revolution a moral 
 one : the regeneration of the inner man. Some Social 
 Remedies. 
 
 If only the best and unfettered men, sincerely desirous 
 of serving the people, could realise that it is not possible 
 to improve, by any external means, the condition of a 
 man who thinks it wrong to eat meat on Fridays, and 
 right to punish by death a guilty individual, or one who 
 thinks it important to render the necessary homage to 
 an image or an emperor and non-important to swear 
 obedience to the will of other men and to train oneself 
 to murder ! If only men would realise that neither 
 parliaments, nor strikes, trade unions, nor co-operative 
 societies, inventions, schools, universities and academies, 
 nor revolutions, can be of any real use to men holding a 
 false religious life-conception ! If only this were under- 
 
'NON-RESISTANCE' * 157 
 
 stood, all the energies of the best men would be applied, 
 not to the consequences, but to the cause ; not to State 
 activity, or revolution, or Socialism, but to the denuncia- 
 tion of the false religious doctrine, and the rebuilding of 
 the true one. The Root of the Evil. 
 
 Of what apparent importance are such acts as the 
 refusal of a score or two of fools, as they are called, to 
 take the oath of allegiance, to pay taxes, or to take part 
 in courts of law, or to serve in the army ? Such men 
 are tried and condemned, and life remains unchanged. 
 These occurrences may seem unimportant, and yet these 
 are precisely the factors that undermine the authority of 
 the Government more than any others, and thus prepare 
 the way for the liberation of mankind. These are the 
 bees who are the first to separate themselves from the 
 swarm, and still hovering near, they wait for the whole 
 swarm to rise and follow them. The governments are 
 aware of this, and look upon such occurrences with more 
 apprehension than upon all the Socialists, Anarchists, and 
 Communists, with their conspiracies and their dynamite 
 bombs. 
 
 Such instances of a refusal to comply with the de- 
 mands of the State when opposed to Christianity, espe- 
 cially refusals to perform military service, occur not only 
 in Russia but everywhere, and become more numerous. 
 . . . What can be done with men who wish neither to 
 destroy nor to establish anything, whose sole desire is 
 to avoid in their own private lives any act that may be 
 opposed to the Christian law, and who consequently 
 refuse to perform duties which are regarded by the 
 Government as the most natural and obligatory of all ? 
 . . . They cannot be bribed or deceived or intimidated. 
 
158 TOLSTOY 
 
 . . . Neither can they be executed or imprisoned for 
 life. Their past lives, their thoughts and actions, their 
 friends, speak for them; everyone knows them to be 
 gentle, kindly, and harmless men, and it is impossible 
 to represent them in the light of criminals. . . . Con- 
 fronted with these insubordinations, governments find 
 themselves in a desperate plight. They realise that the 
 prophecies of Christianity are about to be fulfilled, that 
 it is loosening the fetters of them that are in bonds and 
 setting men free; they realise that such freedom will 
 inevitably destroy those who have held mankind in 
 bondage. Governments realise this; they know that 
 their hours are counted, that they are helpless to resist. 
 The Kingdom of God is Within You. 
 
 The abolition of governments will merely rid us of an 
 unnecessary organisation which we have inherited from 
 the past for the commission of violence and for its justi- 
 fication. c But there will then be no laws, no property, 
 no courts of justice, no police, no popular education,' 
 say people who intentionally confuse the use of violence 
 by governments with various social activities. The 
 abolition of the organisation of government formed to do 
 violence does not at all involve the abolition of what is 
 reasonable and good, and therefore not based on vio- 
 lence, in laws or law courts, or in property, or in police 
 regulations, or in financial arrangements, or in popular 
 education. On the contrary, the absence of the brutal 
 power of government, which is needed only for its own 
 support, will facilitate a more just and reasonable social 
 organisation, needing no violence. Courts of justice, 
 and public affairs, and popular education, will all exist 
 to the extent to which they are really needed by the 
 people, but in a shape which will not involve the evils 
 
* NON-RESISTANCE' 159 
 
 contained in the present form of government. What 
 will be destroyed is merely what was evil and hindered 
 the free expression of the people's will. 
 
 Understand that salvation from your woes is only 
 possible when you free yourself from the obsolete idea 
 of patriotism and from the obedience to governments 
 that is based upon it, and when you boldly enter into 
 the region of that higher idea, the brotherly union of 
 the peoples, which has long since come to life, and 
 from all sides is calling you to itself. Patriotism and 
 Government. 
 
 'All this comes,' Nekhliidoff thought, 'from the fact 
 that these people, governors, inspectors, police officers 
 and policemen, consider that there are circumstances 
 when human relations are not necessary between human 
 beings. If anything be accepted as more important 
 than the feeling of love for one's fellow-men, though it be 
 but for a single hour, or only in some exceptional case, 
 there will then be no crime that may not be committed 
 without the perpetrators feeling themselves guilty. . . . 
 I am simply afraid of these people, and really they are 
 terrible, more terrible than robbers. A robber might, 
 after all, feel pity, but they can feel no pity, they are 
 inured against pity as these stones are against vegetation. 
 That is what makes them terrible. If a psychological 
 problem were set to find means of making men of our 
 time Christian, humane, simple, kind people perform 
 the most horrible crimes without feeling guilty, only one 
 solution could be devised : to go on doing what is being 
 done. It is only necessary that these people should be 
 governors, inspectors, policemen ; that they should be 
 fully convinced that there is a kind of business called 
 
160 TOLSTOY 
 
 Government service, which allows men to treat other 
 men as things, without having human brotherly relations 
 with them; and also that these people should be so 
 United together by this Government service that the 
 responsibility for the results of their actions should not 
 fall on any one of them separately. Without these con- 
 ditions the terrible acts I witnessed to-day would be 
 impossible in our times.' 
 
 1 It all lies in the fact that men think there are circum- 
 stances when one may deal with human beings without 
 love ; and there are no such circumstances. You may 
 deal with things without love ; you may cut down trees, 
 make bricks, hammer iron without love, but you cannot 
 deal with men without it, just as you cannot deal with 
 bees without being careful. ... If you feel no love, sit 
 still, 1 Nekhludoff thought ; ' occupy yourself with things, 
 with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.' 
 
 It happened to Nekhludoff as it often happens to 
 men who are living a spiritual life. The thought that 
 seemed strange at first and paradoxical, or even to be 
 only a joke, being confirmed more and more often by 
 life's experience, suddenly appeared as the simplest, 
 truest certainty. In this way the idea that the only 
 certain means of salvation from the terrible evil from 
 which men are suffering is that they should always acknow- 
 ledge themselves to be sinning against God, and therefore 
 unable to punish or correct others, became clear to him. 
 It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had 
 been witnessing in prisons and jails, and the quiet self- 
 satisfaction of the perpetrators of this evil, were the con- 
 sequences of men trying to do what was impossible ; 
 trying to correct evil while being evil themselves ; vicious 
 
'BREAD-LABOUR' 161 
 
 men were trying to correct other vicious men, and 
 thought they could do it by using mechanical means. 
 And the result of all this is that the needs and cupidity 
 of some men induce them to take up this so-called 
 punishment and correction as a profession, and they 
 themselves become utterly corrupt, and go on unceas- 
 ingly depraving those whom they torment. Now he 
 saw clearly whence came all the horrors he had seen, 
 and what ought to be done to put a stop to them. The 
 answer he had been unable to find was the same that 
 Christ gave to Peter. It was that we should forgive 
 always an infinite number of times, because there are no 
 men who have not themselves sinned, and therefore no 
 one can punish or correct others. Resurrection. 
 
 III. THE LAW OF LABOUR. 
 
 To the question, ' What is to be done ? ' I answer first 
 of all that we must neither deceive other men nor our- 
 selves ; that we must not be afraid of the truth whatever 
 the result may be. ... We, not only rich men but 
 men in a privileged position, so-called educated men, 
 have gone so far astray that we require either a firm 
 resolution or very great sufferings on our false way in 
 order to come to our senses again, and to recognise the 
 lie by which we live. . . . The second answer to the 
 question, resulting from the first, consisted for me in 
 repenting, in the full meaning of this word, that is, en- 
 tirely changing the estimate of my own position and 
 activity. Instead of considering that position to be 
 useful and of importance, we must come to acknowledge 
 it to be harmful and trifling; instead of considering 
 ourselves educated, we must get to see our ignorance; 
 
 L 
 
1 62 TOLSTOY 
 
 instead of imagining ourselves to be kind and moral, 
 we must acknowledge that we are immoral and cruel ; 
 instead of our importance, we must see our own in- 
 significance. ... If the question had been put after 
 I had repented, ' What have I, so ruined a man, to do ? ' 
 the answer would have been easy : First of all, I must 
 try to get my living honestly that is, learn not to live 
 upon the shoulders of others; and while learning this, 
 and after I have learned it, to try on every occasion to 
 be of use to men with my hands and with my feet, as 
 well as with my brain and heart, and with all of me that 
 is wanted by man. . . . My first and unquestionable 
 business is to earn my living, clothing, heating, building, 
 and so forth, and in doing this to serve others as well as 
 myself. Every other activity of man is only lawful when 
 these first have been satisfied. 
 
 It became undoubtedly certain to me that just as all 
 those inventions of the human mind, such as newspapers, 
 theatres, concerts, parties, balls, cards, magazines, novels, 
 are nothing else than means to sustain the mental life 
 of men out of its natural condition of labour for others, 
 in the same way all the hygienic and medical inventions 
 of the human mind for their accommodation, food, 
 drink, dwelling, ventilation, warming of rooms, clothes, 
 medicines, mineral waters, gymnastics, electric and other 
 cures, are all merely means to sustain the bodily life of 
 man out of its natural conditions of labour; that all 
 these are nothing else than an establishment hermetic- 
 ally closed, in which, by the means of chemical apparatus, 
 the evaporation of water for the plants is arranged, when 
 you only need to open the window, and do that which is 
 natural, not only to men but to beasts too; in other 
 words, having absorbed the food, and thus produced a 
 
'BREAD-LABOUR' 163 
 
 charge of energy, to discharge it by muscular labour. 
 All the profound thoughts of hygiene and of the art of 
 healing for the men of our circle are like the efforts of 
 a mechanic who, having stopped all the valves of an 
 overheated engine, should invent something to prevent 
 this engine from bursting. 
 
 I picture to myself the whole matter thus : Every man's 
 day is divided by his meals into four parts, or four stages 
 as they are called by the peasants : First, before break- 
 fast; secondly, from breakfast to dinner; thirdly, from 
 dinner to poldnik (a slight evening meal between dinner 
 and supper) ; and fourthly, from poldnik to night. The 
 activity of man to which he is drawn is also divided 
 into four kinds: First, the activity of the muscles, the 
 labour of the hands, feet, shoulders, back hard labour 
 by which one perspires ; secondly, the activity of the 
 ringers and wrists, the activity of skill and handicraft; 
 thirdly, the activity of the intellect and imagination; 
 fourthly, the activity of intercourse with other men. . . . 
 And the goods which man makes use of may also be 
 divided into four kinds : First, every man makes use of 
 the productions of hard labour bread, cattle, buildings, 
 wells, bridges, and so on ; secondly, the productions of 
 handicraft clothes, boots, hardware, and so on ; thirdly, 
 the productions of mental activity science, art; and 
 fourthly, the intercourse with men acquaintanceship, 
 societies. And I thought that it would be the best thing 
 so to arrange the occupations of the day that one might 
 be able to exercise all these four faculties, and to return 
 all the four kinds of production of labour which one 
 makes use of, so that the four parts of the day were 
 devoted, first, to hard labour; secondly, to mental labour; 
 thirdly, to handicraft; fourthly, to the intercourse with 
 
1 64 TOLSTOY 
 
 men. It would be good if one could so arrange his 
 labour ; but if it is not possible to arrange thus, one thing 
 is important to acknowledge the duty of labouring, the 
 duty of making a good use of each part of the day. 
 
 For men who consider labour to be the essential thing 
 and the joy of life, the ground, the basis of it will always 
 be the struggle with nature not only agricultural labour, 
 but also that of handicraft, mental work, and intercourse 
 with men. The divergence from one or many of these 
 kinds of labour, and specialties of labour, will be per- 
 formed only when a man of special gifts, being fond of 
 this work, and knowing that he performs it better than 
 anybody else, will sacrifice his own advantage in order 
 to fulfil the demands of others put directly to him. 
 Only with such a view of labour, and the natural division 
 of labour resulting from it, will the curse disappear which 
 we in our imagination have put upon labour, and every 
 labour will always be a joy. What then is to be Done 1 } 
 
 The fundamental idea of Bondareff's work, The 
 Triumph of the Labourer^ may be given thus In all 
 practical affairs the important question is, not what is 
 good and should be known, but, of all good things and 
 needful knowledge, what is of primary importance, what 
 of secondary, and so forth. If this be the question of 
 importance in practical affairs, by so much the more is 
 it of importance in the affairs of faith, which determine 
 the duties of mankind. The same may be said of the 
 doctrine of moral duties. The misfortunes and misery 
 of mankind arise less from an ignorance of duty than 
 from a misconception of it a recognition as duty of 
 that which is not duty, and a rejection of that duty which 
 is the chief. Bondareff asserts that the misfortune and 
 
'BREAD-LABOUR' 165 
 
 misery of mankind arose from their accepting many 
 empty and harmful regulations as religious duties, for- 
 getting at the same time, and concealing from themselves 
 and others, the first, chief and indubitable obligation 
 enounced in the first chapters of the Holy Scriptures : 
 1 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' 
 
 Bondareff says in one place that, were people once to 
 accept 'bread-labour' as a religious duty, no particular 
 private occupation could hinder them from performing 
 it, just as no special occupation can induce Churchmen 
 to work on their feast-days. There are in Russia more 
 than eighty feast-days in the year, whereas to accomplish 
 one man's share of ' bread-labour ' only forty days are 
 required. However strange it may seem at first that so 
 simple a means, one that may be understood by all, and 
 containing nothing difficult or involved, should be suffi- 
 cient to cure all the innumerable existing ills of humanity> 
 it is stranger still, as will appear when the question is 
 investigated, that we, with such a simple, patent means, 
 and one which has long been recognised, at our hands, 
 should, leaving it on one side, seek to cure our ills by 
 various intricate and difficult combinations. Only think 
 over the subject, and you will see that it is so. 
 
 The teaching of Bondareff brings us back to this first 
 indubitable duty in the sphere of practical activity. He 
 proves that the performance of this duty hinders nothing, 
 presents no obstacles, and withal saves men from the 
 calamities of want and vice. The performance of this 
 duty, to begin with, puts an end to that dreadful division 
 of mankind into two classes which hate each other, and 
 by mutual advances will cover that hatred. 'Bread- 
 labour,' says Bondareff, will level all men, and will clip 
 
1 66 TOLSTOY 
 
 the wings of sensuality and luxury. It is impossible to 
 plough or to dig wells in fine clothes, and with clean 
 hands, and whilst feeding upon delicate dishes. Their 
 occupation in one sacred work common to all will bring 
 men into union. ' Bread-labour ' will give intelligence to 
 those who have lost it by a withdrawal from the natural 
 line of mankind, and will bring happiness and content 
 to people who have an undoubtedly useful and joyous 
 occupation assigned to them by God Himself or by the 
 laws of nature. ' Bread-labour ' is the remedy which will 
 save the human race. 
 
 I am afraid of injuring you, whoever you are who may 
 read me, by the pride of my mind and by my own coldness. 
 And I only ask you not to argue, not to prove, but question 
 your heart alone. Whoever you may be, however richly 
 gifted, however kind to those around you, in whatever cir- 
 cumstances you may be, can you be easy at your lunch, 
 your dinner, in your affairs of State, your artistic, scientific, 
 medical, pedagogic employments, while you can hear or 
 see upon your doorstep a hungry, cold, sick, weary man ? 
 No? But they are always there, or if not upon your 
 doorstep, ten yards or ten miles away there they are, 
 and you know it. ... Go to the bottom, or what 
 seems to you to be the bottom it is really the top; 
 place yourself beside those that feed the hungry and 
 clothe the naked ; fear nothing ; worse it cannot be with 
 you than it was, but it will be better every way. Stand 
 in line with them; begin with your weak, unpractised 
 hands the first work that feeds the hungry and clothes 
 the naked : begin the ' bread-labour,' the struggle with 
 nature, and for the first time you will feel solid ground 
 under your feet ; you will feel to be at home, free and 
 steadfast, and that you need go no farther. You will 
 
'BREAD-LABOUR' 167 
 
 experience those real unpoisoned joys which can be 
 found nowhere else ; no, not behind doors and curtains. 
 You shall know joys unknown before, and for the first 
 time become acquainted with those strong, simple men, 
 your brothers, who, far from you, have fed you until now ; 
 and to your astonishment you shall find in them virtues 
 you have not known, and modesty and kindness to you 
 in especial, which you shall feel you have not deserved. 
 Where you looked for irony and contempt you shall meet 
 with caresses and gratitude and respect, because, having 
 lived upon them and despised them all your life, you 
 have suddenly bethought yourself and tried to help them 
 with unaccustomed hands. The Triumph of Labour. 
 
 There are three means of alleviating the condition of 
 the labourers and of setting up brotherhood among men. 
 i. Not to make people work for you; neither directly 
 nor indirectly to demand work of them; not to need 
 such articles as demand extra labour all objects of 
 luxury. 2. To do for oneself, and, if possible ', for others 
 also that work which is tedious and unpleasant. 3. Not 
 in reality a means, but the result and application of the 
 second, to study the laws of nature and invent processes 
 for the alleviation of labour machinery, steam, electricity t 
 One will invent what is really needed, and nothing 
 superfluous, only when one invents in order to lighten 
 one's own labour, or at least labour which one has 
 oneself experienced. Some Social Remedies. 
 
 No ! dear friend, you are not right not in what you 
 say, but in how you say it. Do what you like, how you 
 like j yet one thing only is necessary to God, to man, and 
 to myself it is that I should have a heart free from 
 condemnation, contempt, irritation, irony, animosity 
 
1 68 TOLSTOY 
 
 towards men. And the devil take all this manual labour 
 if it removes my heart from men, and does not draw me 
 closer to them ; it would be better, like a Buddhist, to 
 go about with a bowl, begging. 
 
 The idolatry of labour is a dangerous error and a most 
 habitual one. Prayer, as the result of one's aspiration 
 towards God, is a most lawful act ; but when it becomes 
 an aim in itself, it produces ritual, which kills the moral 
 life. Mercy, help afforded one's neighbour as the result 
 of love to God, is a most lawful thing ; but when it be- 
 comes an aim in itself, it produces philanthropy. Want, 
 poverty, absence of property, as the result of abstinence 
 from violent resistance and of renunciation of indepen- 
 dent means, is a most lawful state ; but when it is placed 
 as a necessary condition, as an aim in itself, it produces 
 the formal poverty of Buddhists and of monks. It is the 
 same with manual labour. Such labour as the result of 
 the renunciation of independent means and of the desire 
 to serve others is a lawful thing, but if it becomes an aim 
 in itself, it will inevitably lead to evil. But, above all 
 above all, I say to you from soul to soul, dear friend, the 
 chief aim, infinite, joyful, always attainable, and worthy 
 of the powers which are given us, is the increase of love. 
 And increase of love is attainable by one definite effort 
 by the cleansing of one's soul from all that is personal, 
 lustful, inimical. Letters on the Personal Christian Life. 
 
 I was always astonished at the accepted opinion 
 (current especially in Europe) that work is a kind of 
 virtue. I always felt that it was only excusable in, an 
 irrational animal, such as the ant in the fable, to elevate 
 work to the rank of a virtue and to make a boast of it. 
 Even if work is not a vice it can from no point of view 
 
THE LAW OF PURITY 169 
 
 be looked upon as a merit. Work can no more be con- 
 sidered a virtue than can nutrition ; work is a necessity 
 of which one cannot be deprived without suffering, and 
 to elevate it to the rank of a merit is as monstrous as it 
 would be to do the like for nutrition. Work, the exercise 
 of our organs, cannot be meritorious, for it is simply a 
 physical necessity of man in common with all other 
 animals, as is shown by a tethered calf galloping round 
 and round, or, among ourselves, by the silly exercises to 
 which rich and well-fed people of the leisure classes be- 
 take themselves, finding no better use for their mental 
 faculties than reading novels and newspapers or playing 
 chess and cards, nor for their muscles than gymnastics, 
 fencing, lawn-tennis and horse-racing. In my opinion 
 not only is work not a virtue, but in our defectively 
 organised society it is more often a means of moral 
 anaesthesia, just as are tobacco, wine, and other means 
 of drowning thought and hiding from ourselves the dis- 
 order and emptiness of our lives. Stop and Think ! 
 
 IV. THE LAW OF PURITY 
 
 The ideal is perfect chastity, in thought no less than in 
 deed; and the commandment which enjoins purity in 
 married life forbidding adultery is one which levery 
 man who is striving to attain this ideal must not do less 
 than obey. The Kingdom of God is Within You. 
 
 1 It was easy to catch me ' (said Pozdnischefi), * seeing 
 that I had been brought up under conditions calculated 
 to breed young lovers, somewhat as cucumbers are forced 
 in hot-houses. . . . Ecstasies, tenderness, and poetry 
 were all there, in appearance at least, but in reality my 
 love was the result of the contrivances of the mamma and 
 
170 TOLSTOY 
 
 the dressmaker on the one hand, and good dinners and 
 inactivity on the other. If matchmaking by professional 
 matchmakers is found to be debasing, our system is a 
 thousand times more degrading, for, in the former case, 
 the rights and chances are equal on both sides, whereas 
 in the latter the woman is either a slave in the market or 
 a mere decoy. It is strange that while, on the one hand, 
 women are reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation, 
 they are all-powerful on the other. Their position in that 
 respect is perfectly analagous to that of the Jews. . . . 
 Millions of people, generations of slaves, perish in the 
 penal servitude of the factories merely in order to satisfy 
 the whim of woman. Women, like empresses, condemn 
 to imprisonment and hard labour nine-tenths of mankind. 
 Such is the form assumed by their vengeance on us men 
 for having degraded them and deprived them of equal 
 rights. . . . Why is it, let me ask you, that games of 
 liazard are prohibited, while women attired in meretricious 
 costumes are not prohibited ? And yet the latter are a 
 thousand times more dangerous than the former ! ' 
 
 * Woman's serfdom consists in the circumstance that 
 she is looked upon and sought after as an instrument of 
 pleasure, and that this view is considered the right one. 
 And then woman is solemnly enfranchised, is invested 
 with extensive rights, equal to those exercised by men, 
 but people continue to regard her as an instrument of 
 pleasure, continue to educate her accordingly, instilling 
 those views into her mind first in her childhood, and 
 later on by means of public opinion. And so she remains 
 what she was a degraded, demoralised serf, as the man 
 remains what he was a demoralised slave-owner.' 
 
 c Why should the human race be perpetuated ? ' he 
 
THE LAW OF PURITY 171 
 
 asked. ' Why ? ' I exclaimed, ' because otherwise we 
 should not exist.' ' But why should we exist ? If 
 there be no purpose, no aim, if life be given to us for 
 life's sake only, then there is no object in living. And if 
 that be so, Schopenhauer and the Buddhists are per- 
 fectly right. On the other hand, if there be an end and 
 object in human existence, it is clear that humanity must 
 cease to exist when that object is attained. This is per- 
 fectly evident,' he repeated with visible emotion. ' If 
 we succeed in rooting up the passions, and with them 
 this last and most powerful, the prophecies will come to 
 pass ; men will be united by the bond of love, the aim 
 and mission of humanity will have been fulfilled, and 
 there will be no longer any reason for the further exist- 
 ence of the human race.' The Kreutzer Sonata. 
 
 Within my memory has begun the deviation from the 
 law by woman, that is to say, her fall; and within my 
 memory it has proceeded farther and farther. A woman 
 who has lost the law believes that her power consists in 
 the charms of her witchery or in her skill at a pharisaic 
 pretence of intellectual labour. But children hinder the 
 one and the other. Therefore, with the help of science, 
 within my memory it has come to pass that among the 
 wealthy classes scores of means of destroying progeny 
 have appeared. The evil has spread far and spreads 
 farther every day. It will soon 'grasp all the women of 
 the wealthy classes, and then they will become even 
 with men, and together with them will lose every reason- 
 able sense of life. 
 
 But there is yet time. If only women would undeH 
 stand their worth, their power, and would use them for 
 the work of salvation of their husbands, brothers, and 
 
172 TOLSTOY 
 
 children, of all men. . . . You women and mothers 
 who submit consciously to the law of God, you are the 
 only ones who in our miserable, mutilated world, which 
 has lost all semblance of humanity, know the true mean- 
 ing of life and can show men true happiness. You are 
 the only ones who know the joy and happiness which is 
 the share of those who do not deviate from God's law. 
 You know the joy of love to your husband a joy never 
 ending, never destroyed, like all other joys, but forming 
 the beginning of another new joy love to your child. 
 You are the only ones who know, not the farcical pre- 
 tence of labour, but that true labour which is imposed 
 by God upon men, and know the rewards for it. You 
 know it when, after the joys of love, you expect with 
 emotion, fear, and hope, the torturing state of pregnancy, 
 after which comes the bliss known to you only. You 
 know it when, directly after those sufferings, without 
 rest, without interruption, you undertake another series 
 of labours and sufferings those of nursing ; for the sake 
 of which you subjugate to your feeling, and renounce, 
 the strongest human necessity, that of sleep, which, 
 according to the saying, is sweeter than father and 
 mother. And for months and years you do not sleep 
 two nights running, and often you do not sleep whole 
 nights; walking alone to and fro, rocking in your 
 wearied arms an ailing baby, whose sufferings tear your 
 heart. And when you do all this, unapproved and 
 unseen by anybody, not expecting any praise or reward 
 for it ; when you do this, not as a great deed, but as the 
 labourer of the gospel parable who came from the field, 
 considering that you are only doing your duty, you 
 know then what is false, fictitious labour for human 
 fame and what is true labour the fulfilment of God's 
 will, the indication of which you feel in your heart. 
 
THE LAW OF PURITY 173 
 
 When you are like this and there are yet such women, 
 happily for men the same law you will apply also to 
 the life of your husband, your children, and of men near 
 you. You will encourage your husband to do the same 
 labour, you will value and appreciate the worth of men 
 by it, and for it you will prepare your children. . . . 
 Such a woman will not only discourage her husband 
 from false, sham labour, the only aim of which is to 
 profit by other people's work, but will view with disgust 
 and dread an activity that will serve as a double tempta- 
 tion for her children. Such a woman will not choose 
 her daughter's husband according to the whiteness of 
 his hands and the refinement of his manners, but, 
 knowing thoroughly what is labour and what deceit, will 
 always and everywhere, beginning with her husband, 
 respect and appreciate men, will claim from them true 
 labour with waste and danger of life, and will scorn that 
 false, sham labour which has for its aim the delivering of 
 one's self from true labour. Such a mother will bring 
 forth and nurse her children herself, and, above all things 
 else, will feed and provide for them, will work for them, 
 wash and teach them, will sleep and talk with them, 
 because she makes that her life-work. Only such a 
 mother will not seek for her children external security 
 through her husband's money, or her children's diplomas, 
 but she will exercise in them the same capacity of self- 
 sacrificing fulfilment of God's will which she knows in 
 herself, the capacity for bearing labour with waste and 
 danger of life, because she knows that only in that lie 
 the security and welfare of life. Such a mother will not 
 have to ask others what is her duty ; she will know every- 
 thing beforehand, and will fear nothing. 
 
 Only a mother before her death can say to Him who 
 
174 TOLSTOY 
 
 sent her into this world, and to Him whom she has 
 served by bearing and bringing up children, beloved by 
 her more than herself only she can peacefully say, after 
 having served Him in her appointed service, 
 
 ' " Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." ' 
 
 And this is that highest perfection to which, as to the 
 highest good, men aspire. Such women who fulfil their 
 mission, are those who reign over reigning men, those 
 who prepare new generations of men and form public 
 opinion ; and therefore in the hands of these women lies 
 the highest power of men's salvation from the existing and 
 threatening evils of our time. Yes, women, mothers, in 
 your hands, more than in those of any others, lies the 
 salvation of the world ! What then is to be Done ? 
 
 If we could look into the hearts of the majority of 
 people, what should we find they most desire ? Appetite 
 for breakfast and for dinner. What is the severest punish- 
 ment from infancy upwards ? To be put on bread and 
 water. What artisans get the highest wages? Cooks. 
 What is the chief interest of the mistress of the house ? 
 To what subject does the conversation of middle-class 
 housewives generally tend ? It all comes round to the 
 subject of eating, the price of grouse, the best way of 
 making coffee, of baking sweet cakes, etc. In the 
 middle and lower classes it is perfectly evident that 
 every festivity, every funeral or wedding, means gluttony. 
 
 Many English men and women, for some reason or 
 other, are specially proud of using a great deal of soap 
 and pouring a large quantity of water over themselves. 
 
 There never has been, and cannot be, a good life 
 
THE LAW OF PURITY 175 
 
 without abstinence. Apart from abstinence no good 
 life is imaginable. The attainment of goodness must 
 begin with it. ... Abstinence is the liberation of man 
 from desires their subordination to reasonableness 
 <r<D<f>po(rvvr]. But a man's desires are many and various, 
 and in order successfully to contend with them he must 
 begin with the fundamental ones those upon which the 
 more complicated ones have grown up and not with 
 those complex lusts which have grown up upon the 
 fundamental ones. ... A man who eats too much can- 
 not strive against laziness ; while a gluttonous and idle 
 man will never be able to contend with sexual lust. 
 Therefore, according to all the moral teachings, the 
 effort towards abstinence commences with a struggle 
 against the lust of gluttony commences with fasting. . . . 
 Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life, 
 whereas gluttony is, and always has been, the first sign 
 of the opposite a bad life ; and unfortunately this vice 
 is in the highest degree characteristic of the life of the 
 majority of the men of our time. 
 
 Fasting ! And even an analysis of how to fast, and 
 where to begin ! The notion seems ridiculous to the 
 majority of men. I remember how an evangelical 
 preacher, who was attacking monastic asceticism and 
 priding himself on his originality, once said to me, c My 
 Christianity is not concerned with fasting and privations, 
 but with beefsteaks.' Christianity, or virtue in general 
 with beefsteaks ! 
 
 What, then, do I wish to say? That in order to 
 be moral people must cease to eat meat ? Not at all. 
 I only wish to say that for a good life a certain order of 
 good actions is indispensable ; that if a man's aspiration 
 
176 TOLSTOY 
 
 toward right living be serious, it will inevitably follow 
 one definite sequence, and that in this sequence the 
 irst virtue a man will strive after will be abstinence, 
 self-renunciation. And in seeking to be abstinent a 
 man will inevitably follow one definite sequence, and 
 in this sequence the first thing will be abstinence in 
 food, fasting. And in fasting, if he be really and 
 seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing 
 from which he will abstain will always be the use of 
 animal food, because, to say nothing of the excitation 
 of the passions caused by such food, its use is simply 
 immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which 
 is contrary to the moral feeling killing ; and is called 
 forth only by greediness and the desire for tasty food. 
 The First Step. 
 
 V. THE LAW OF SACRIFICE 
 
 If people of the affluent class say a man and woman 
 have left town life and have settled in the village in 
 order to attempt to realise the brotherhood of man, this 
 attempt must, if they are sincere, inevitably bring them 
 into a terrible position. With their habits (formed from 
 childhood upwards) of order, comfort, and especially of 
 cleanliness, they, on moving to the village, after buying 
 or hiring a hut, have cleared it of insects, perhaps even 
 papered it themselves, and installed some remains, not 
 luxurious but necessary, of their furniture say an iron 
 bedstead, a cupboard, and a writing-table. And so they 
 begin life. At first the country folk shun them ; expect 
 them (like other rich people) to defend their advantages 
 by force, and therefore do not approach them with 
 requests and demands. But presently, bit by bit, the 
 
THE LAW OF SACRIFICE 177 
 
 disposition of the newcomers gets known; they them- 
 selves offer gratuitous services, and the boldest and most 
 insistent of the villagers find out practically that these 
 newcomers do not refuse to give, and that one can get 
 something out of them. Thereupon, all kinds of 
 demands begin to be made upon them and constantly 
 increase. . . . Not only do they feel the need of giving 
 away their superfluity till they have only as much left as 
 each one (say as the average man) ought to have, but, 
 there being no possible definition of this f average ' no 
 way of measuring the amount which each one should 
 have there is no possibility of stopping, for crying want 
 is always around them, and they have a surplus com- 
 pared with this destitution. . . . They would have kept 
 tea and food, but had to give it to some old pilgrims 
 who were exhausted. At least it seemed right to keep 
 the house clean, but beggar boys come and are allowed 
 to spend the night, and again lice breed, after one has just 
 got rid of those picked up during a visit to a sick man. 
 Where and how can one stop? . . . The fact is, no 
 such point of stoppage can exist ; and if such a limit be 
 found, it only proves that the feeling which prompted 
 these people's act was imaginary or feigned. 
 
 What is one to do ? Not to draw back means to lose 
 one's life, to be eaten by lice, to starve, to die, and 
 apparently uselessly. To stop is to repudiate that for 
 the sake of which one has acted, for which one has done 
 whatever good has been accomplished. And one can- 
 not repudiate it, for it is no invention of mine, or of 
 Christ's, that we are brothers and must serve each other ; 
 it is real fact, and when it has once entered you can 
 never tear that consciousness out of the heart of man 
 . . . Therefore, in our society the struggle against force 
 
 M 
 
178 TOLSTOY 
 
 does not, for him who would live in brotherhood, 
 eliminate the necessity of yielding up his life, of being 
 eaten- by lice, and of dying, whilst at the same time 
 always striving against violence, preaching non-resist- 
 ance, exposing violence, and above all giving an 
 example of non-resistance and of self-sacrifice. Dread- 
 ful and difficult as is the position of a man living the 
 Christian life, amidst the life of violence, he has no path 
 but that of struggle and sacrifice sacrifice without end. 
 One must realise the gulf that separates the verminous, 
 famished millions from the over-fed, over-dressed rich ; 
 and to fill up this gulf we need sacrifices, and not the 
 hypocrisy with which we now try to hide from ourselves 
 the depth of the gulf. A man may lack the strength 
 to throw himself into the gulf but it cannot be escaped 
 by anyone who seeks after life. We may be unwilling 
 to go into it, but let us be honest about it, and say so, 
 and not deceive ourselves with hypocritical pretences. 
 And, after all, the gulf is not so terrible. Or, if it be 
 terrible, yet the horrors which await us in a worldly way 
 of life are more terrible still. . . . Only that love is true 
 love which knows no limit of sacrifice even unto death. 
 The Root of the Evil. 
 
 Mingle with a crowd, especially a town crowd ; look 
 at those harassed, agitated, sickly faces ; recall your own 
 life and that of those you have known intimately; 
 remember the violent deaths, the cases of suicide of 
 which you have heard and then ask yourself the cause 
 of all those miseries, and of that despair which ends in 
 self-murder. You will see, terrible as it seems, that 
 nine-tenths of human sufferings spring from the teaching 
 of the world ; that all these sufferings are really needless, 
 and yet unavoidable, and that the majority of men are 
 
THE LAW OF SACRIFICE 179 
 
 martyrs to the teaching of the world. . . . The teaching 
 of the world says Leave house, and fields, and 
 brothers, leave the village for the unhealthy town, pass 
 your life in a hot bathroom lathering strangers, or as a 
 petty tradesman counting coppers in a shop like a cellar ; 
 or as a public prosecutor in trials, immersed in papers, 
 and occupied in making the lives of unhappy wretches 
 still worse; or as a State minister, always signing in 
 haste useless documents; or as a captain, always bent 
 on killing others live this unnatural life, that must end 
 in a painful death, and you shall receive nothing either 
 in this world or in the world to come ! And this call all 
 obey. 
 
 Christ says Take up thy cross and follow me ; that 
 is, bear patiently the lot awarded thee, and obey God ; 
 yet none obey. But the first worthless man, fitted for 
 nothing but murder, who wears epaulettes, and takes it 
 into his head to say, Take not up a cross, but a knap- 
 sack and gun, and follow me to inflict and undergo 
 misery and certain death, is listened to and obeyed by 
 all. Abandoning family, parents, wives and children, 
 dressed like buffoons, and obeying the will of the first 
 man of higher rank they meet, starving, worn out by 
 long marches, they follow they know not where, like a 
 herd of cattle to a slaughter-house. But they are not 
 cattle, they are men. They cannot but kno% whither 
 they are driven. With the unanswered question of 
 ' Why ? ' on their lips, with despair in their hearts, they 
 march to die from cold, and hunger, and disease, from 
 the fire of bullets and cannon balls. They slay and are 
 slain ; yet not one of them knows why or wherefore this 
 is so. They are roasted alive, flayed, disembowelled; 
 but the next day, at the call of the trumpet, the 
 
i8o TOLSTOY 
 
 survivors march with their eyes open to suffering and 
 death. Yet no one finds any difficulty in obeying such 
 commands. Not only the sufferers themselves, but 
 their fathers and mothers see no difficulty; nay, they 
 even urge their children to disobedience. 
 
 There were, it is said, at one time Christian martyrs, 
 but they were exceptions; it has been calculated that 
 their number has reached 380,000 during eighteen 
 hundred years. But if we count the martyrs to the 
 world, for every single martyr to Christ we shall find 
 a thousand martyrs to the world, whose sufferings have 
 been a hundred-fold greater. By death in wars alone 
 during the nineteenth century have fallen thirty millions 
 of men ! These men were all martyrs to the teaching 
 of the world. Putting the teachings of Christ aside, 
 had they but forborne to follow that of the world what 
 sufferings and death would they have escaped ! 
 
 Christ calls us to no sacrifice; on the contrary, he 
 offers us not the worse but the better part of life. Lov- 
 ing all men, he teaches them to refrain from maintain- 
 ing themselves by violence, and from the mere heaping 
 up of riches, even as men teach men to refrain from 
 brawls and drunkenness. He tells men that, living with- 
 out violence and without property, they will be happier 
 than they are now, and by the example of his life con- 
 firms his words. He tells them that, living after his 
 teaching, they must be prepared to die at any moment 
 by violence or cold or hunger, and must not calculate on 
 a single hour of life. And this seems to us a terrible 
 demand for victims. Yet it is only a confirmation of 
 the conditions under which every one of us inevitably 
 lives. The disciple of Christ should be prepared at 
 
THE LAW OF SACRIFICE 181 
 
 every instant for suffering and death. But is not the 
 disciple of the world exactly in the same position ? . . . 
 Truly, all that we do to secure to ourselves prosperity 
 is exactly what the ostrich does, who hides his head that 
 he may not see his death. Nay, we do worse than the 
 ostrich ; for in order doubtfully to assure our lives in a 
 doubtful future, we certainly spoil them in what might 
 be a certain present. . . . Devoting our whole life to 
 making preparations for its security, we have no time 
 at all for life itself. My Religion. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 
 
 WORK for science? But the word science is a term so 
 vague and ill-defined that what some people consider to 
 be science is considered by others to be utterly futile, 
 and this is the case not only with outsiders but even 
 with the priests of science themselves. While those 
 savants who favour a spiritual explanation of life look 
 upon jurisprudence, philosophy, and even theology as 
 the most necessary and important of sciences, the 
 Positivists consider these very sciences as childish 
 twaddle devoid of scientific value; and vice versa^ soci- 
 ology, which the Positivists look upon as the science 
 of sciences, is considered by the theologians, philo- 
 sophers, and spiritualists as an arbitrary and useless 
 collection of observations and assertions. But more 
 than this, even in one and the same branch of phil- 
 osophy or natural science each system has ardent de- 
 fenders and equally ardent detractors, equally competent, 
 yet holding diametrically opposite opinions. Finally, 
 does not each year witness fresh scientific discoveries, 
 which, after exciting the wonder of the mediocrities of 
 the whole world, and bringing fame and fortune to 
 their inventors, are eventually found to be nothing but 
 ridiculous errors even by those who promulgated them ? 
 
 Just as it was not exactly in the creation of the world 
 in six days, the wound-curing serpent, etc., that the 
 
 182 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 183 
 
 Hebrew believed, but rather in the infallibility of his 
 priests, and hence in the truth of their assertions, even 
 so the great majority of the cultured people of our time 
 believe neither in the formation of the world by rotation, 
 nor in heredity, nor in comma-bacilli, but in the infalli- 
 bility of their lay priests who are called scientists, who 
 affirm whatever they pretend to know with the same 
 assurance as did the Hebrew priests. I will even say 
 that if the priests of old, amenable to no control save 
 that of their colleagues, permitted themselves sometimes 
 to digress from the truth merely for the pleasure of 
 astonishing and mystifying their public, the priests of 
 modern science have done as much with equal effront- 
 ery. The greater part of what is called religion is but 
 the superstition of the past ; the greater part of what is 
 called science is no more than the superstition of the 
 present day. The proportion of error and of truth is, 
 I suspect, about the same in the one as in the other. 
 Stop and Think I 
 
 Science, by isolating the agents of production, de- 
 clares that the natural condition of a working man 
 that is, of a man in the true sense of the word is 
 that unnatural condition in which he exists at present, 
 as in ancient times, by the division of men into citizens 
 and slaves. The question of economical science is this : 
 What is the reason of the fact that some men by means 
 of money acquire an imaginary right to the land and 
 capital, and may make slaves of those men who have 
 no money? The answer which presents itself to 
 common sense would be, that it is the result of money, 
 the nature of which is to enslave men. But science 
 denies this, and says, This arises, not from the nature 
 of money, but from the fact that some men have land 
 
184 TOLSTOY 
 
 and capital, and others have neither. We ask why 
 persons who possess land and capital oppress such as 
 possess neither ? and we are answered, Because they do 
 possess land and capital. But this is just what we are 
 inquiring about. Is not deprivation of land and tools 
 enforced slavery? Life ceases not to put this essential 
 question : and even science herself notices it, and tries 
 to answer it, but does not succeed in doing so; pro- 
 ceeding from her own fundamental principles, she only 
 turns herself round, as in a magic circle. 
 
 If the object of this sham, so-called science of Politi- 
 cal Economy had not been the same as that of all other 
 sciences of law the justification of violence it could 
 not have avoided noticing the strange phenomenon that 
 the distribution of wealth, and the depriving of some 
 men of land and capital, and the enslaving of some men 
 by others, depend upon money, and that it is only by 
 means of money that some men utilise the labour of 
 others ; in other words, enslave them. But science, with 
 full assurance, asserts that money has no connection 
 whatever with the matter in question. . . . Wherever 
 there is in society the mastery of one man over another, 
 there the meaning of money as the measure of value 
 at once yields to the will of the oppressor, and its 
 meaning as a medium of exchange of the productions 
 of labour is replaced by another, that of the most 
 convenient means of utilising the labour of others. 
 
 The position of men living by other men's labour is 
 based not only upon a certain belief but upon an entire 
 doctrine, and not only on one doctrine but on three 
 which have grown one upon another and are now fused 
 into an awful deceit, or humbug, as the English call it, 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 185 
 
 which hides from men their unrighteousness. The oldest 
 of these in our world, which justifies the treason of men 
 against the fundamental duty of labour for a livelihood, 
 was the Church-Christian doctrine, according to which 
 men, by the will of God, differ one from another, some 
 men being ordained to have dominion over others, and 
 the remainder being ordained to obey. This doctrine, 
 though already shaken to its foundations, still continues 
 to influence some men, so that many who do not accept 
 it, who often even ignore the existence of it, are, never- 
 theless, guided by it. The second is what I cannot help 
 terming the State-Philosophical doctrine. According to 
 it, as fully developed by Hegel, all that exists is reason- 
 able, and the established order of life is constant and 
 sustained, not merely by men, but as the only possible 
 form of the manifestation of the spirit, or, generally, of the 
 life of mankind. . . . The last doctrine, on which is based 
 the justification as well of leading statesmen as of leading 
 men of business and of science and art, is a scientific 
 one, not in the evident sense of the word, meaning know- 
 ledge generally, but in the sense of a knowledge peculiar 
 in form as well as in matter, termed science in particular. 
 This new doctrine appeared in Europe contemporane- 
 ously with a large class of rich and idle people, who 
 served neither the Church nor the State, and who were 
 in want of a justification of their position. . . . But as 
 time went on, this class of rich people, who did not 
 belong either to the clergy, to the government, or to the 
 army, owing to the vices of these three classes, increased 
 in number, and became a powerful party. They were 
 in want of a justification of their position. And one 
 was invented for them. . . . And what is still more 
 wonderful is this, that the former servants of Church, 
 State, and army, do not now lean upon the divineness of 
 
1 86 TOLSTOY 
 
 their calling, nor even upon the philosophy which con- 
 siders the State necessary for individual development; 
 but they set aside these supports which have so long 
 maintained them, and are now seeking the same supports 
 on which the new reigning class of men, who have found 
 a novel justification, stands, and at the head of which are 
 the men of science and art. . . . According to the 
 scientific doctrine it is only sociology based upon biology, 
 based again upon all other positive sciences, which is 
 able to give us new laws of the life of mankind. If some 
 men govern, and others obey, some live in opulence, and 
 others in want, then this takes place, neither according 
 to the will of God, nor because the State is the form of 
 the manifestation of personality, but because in societies 
 as in organisms a division of labour takes place which is 
 necessary for the life of the whole. Some men perform 
 in societies the muscular part of labour and others the 
 mental. Upon this doctrine is built the ruling excuse 
 of the age. 
 
 Modern science selects its facts upon the ground of a 
 determinate theory, which sometimes it knows, some- 
 times does not wish to know, sometimes really does not 
 know but it exists. And the theory is this : All mankind 
 is an undying organism ; men are particles of the organs 
 of this organism, having each his special calling for the 
 service of the whole. As the cells, growing into an organ- 
 ism, divide among themselves the labour of the struggle 
 for existence of the whole organism, increase one capacity, 
 and diminish another, and all together form an organ in 
 order better to satisfy the wants of the whole organism ; 
 and as among social animals ants and bees the indi- 
 viduals divide the labour among themselves, so also in 
 mankind and in human societies there takes place the 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 187 
 
 same differentiation and integration of the parts. . . . 
 These facts lead to one thing the acknowledgment that 
 the existence in human societies of division of activities 
 is organic, that is, necessary. And they therefore 
 induce us to consider the unjust position in which we 
 are, who have freed ourselves from labouring, not from 
 the point of reasonableness and justice, but merely as 
 an indubitable fact which confirms a general law. Moral 
 philosophy used also to justify every cruelty and wicked- 
 ness; but there it turned out to be philosophical, and 
 therefore incorrect ; but according to science, the same 
 thing turns out to be scientific, and therefore unquestion- 
 able. . . . And it is upon this new belief that the justi- 
 fication of idleness and the cruelty of men is built. 
 
 All this edifice was built upon the sand, upon an 
 arbitrary and incorrect assertion that mankind, collec- 
 tively considered, was an organism. This assertion was 
 incorrect, because mankind lacks the essential cha- 
 racteristic of an organism a centre of sensation or 
 consciousness; and therefore, however many other 
 general character-signs we may find out in mankind 
 and in an organism, without this the acknowledgment 
 of mankind to be an organism is incorrect. But not- 
 withstanding the arbitrariness and incorrectness of the 
 fundamental proposition of positive philosophy, it was 
 accepted by the so-called educated world with great 
 sympathy, because of that great fact, important for the 
 crowd, that it afforded a justification of the existing 
 order of things by recognising the lawfulness of the 
 existing division of labour, that is, of violence in man- 
 kind. . . . And now there appeared a similarly arbitrary 
 and incorrect assertion, not a new one at all, to the effect 
 that all living beings proceed one from another, not only 
 
1 88 TOLSTOY 
 
 one organism from another but one from many, an 
 assertion that has not been and cannot be verified, and 
 must remain a mere supposition. . . . According to 
 the theory of evolution, it appears that the variety of 
 species of living beings proceeded by themselves in 
 consequence of the infinite variety of conditions of 
 inheritance and environment in an infinite period of 
 time. The theory of evolution, speaking plainly, asserts 
 only that by chance in an infinite period of time any- 
 thing you like may proceed from anything else you 
 choose. This is no answer to the question ; it is simply 
 the same question put differently : instead of will is put 
 chance, and the co-efficient of the infinite is transferred 
 from omnipotence to time. But this new assertion, 
 enforced by Darwin's followers in an arbitrary and 
 inaccurate spirit, maintained the former assertion of 
 Comte, and therefore it became a revelation for our 
 time, and the foundation of all sciences, even that of 
 the history of philosophy and religion; and besides, 
 according to the naive confession of the very founder of 
 Darwin's theory, this idea was awakened in him by the 
 law of Malthus ; and therefore he pointed to the struggle 
 for existence not only of men, but of all living beings, 
 as to a fundamental law of every living thing. And this 
 was exactly what was wanted by.the crowd of idle people 
 for their own justification. Two unstable theories which 
 could not stand upon their own feet supported each 
 other, and received a show of stability. 
 
 The new deceit, the scientific one, is exactly such as 
 the old ones were; its essence consists in the substitu- 
 tion for reason and conscience of something external; 
 and this external thing is observation, as, in theology it 
 was revelation. The snare of this science consists in 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 189 
 
 this : that, having shown men the most barefaced per- 
 versions of the activity of reason and conscience, it 
 destroys in them confidence in both reason and con- 
 science. These men lose the conception of good and 
 evil ; all is, in their slang, conditional and subjective. . . . 
 The credulous crowd of youth, overwhelmed by the 
 novelty of this authority, not only not destroyed but not 
 yet even touched by criticism, rush to the study of these 
 facts of natural sciences as to the only way which can 
 lead to the elucidation of all questions of life. But the 
 farther they proceed in this study, the farther do they 
 remove not only the possibility of solving the questions 
 of life, but even the very thought of this solution ; the 
 more they grow accustomed not so much to observe 
 themselves as to believe upon their word other men's 
 observations (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the 
 fourth dimension of matter, and so on); the more the 
 form hides from them the contents : the more they lose 
 the consciousness of good and evil; but chiefly they 
 pass their best years in losing the habit of life, that is, 
 of labouring, and accustom themselves to consider their 
 own position justified, and thus become physically good- 
 for-nothing parasites, and mentally dislocate their brains, 
 and lose all power of thought-productiveness. And so, 
 by degrees, their capacities more and more blunted, 
 they acquire self-assurance, which deprives them for ever 
 of the possibility of returning to a simple, laborious 
 life, to any plain, clear, common, human manner of 
 thinking. 
 
 We are the brain of the people. They feed us, and 
 we have undertaken to teach them. Only for the sake 
 of this have we freed ourselves from labour. What, 
 then, have we been teaching them ? They have waited 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 years, tens of years, hundreds of years. And we are 
 still conversing among ourselves, and teaching each 
 other, and amusing ourselves, and have quite forgotten 
 them. We have so totally forgotten them that others 
 have taken upon themselves to teach and amuse them, 
 and we have not even become aware of this in our 
 flippant talk about division of labour ; and it is very 
 obvious that all our talk about the utility we offer to the 
 people was only a shameful excuse. 
 
 Science and art have done much for mankind, not 
 because, but in spite of, the fact that men of science 
 and art, under the pretext of division of labour, live upon 
 the shoulders of the working people. . . . We are so 
 accustomed to our pampered or debilitated representatives 
 of intellectual labour that it would seem very strange if 
 a learned man or an artist were to plough or cart manure. 
 We think that, were he to do so, all would go to ruin, 
 that all his wisdom would be shaken out of him, and the 
 great artistic images he carries in his breast would be 
 soiled by the manure ; but we are so accustomed to our 
 present conditions that we do not wonder at our ministers 
 of science, that is, ministers and teachers of truth, com- 
 pelling other people to do for them that which they 
 could very well do themselves, passing half their time 
 eating, smoking, chattering in ' liberal ' gossip, reading 
 newspapers, novels, visiting theatres. We are not surprised 
 to see our philosopher in an inn, in a theatre, at a ball ; 
 we do not wonder when we learn that those artists who 
 delight and ennoble our souls pass their lives in drunken- 
 ness, in playing cards, in company with loose women, or 
 do things still worse. 
 
 ' But science ! art ! You repudiate science, art ; that 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 191 
 
 is, you repudiate that by which mankind live.' I am 
 always hearing this. But it is unjust. I not only do 
 not repudiate science human reasonable activity, and 
 art the expression of this reasonable activity, but it 
 is only in the name of this reasonable activity and its 
 expression that I say what I do, in order that mankind 
 may avoid the savage state towards which they are 
 rapidly moving, owing to the false teaching of our time. 
 Science and art are as necessary to men as food, drink, 
 and clothes even still more necessary than these; but 
 they become such, not because we decide that what we 
 call science and art are necessary, but because they 
 indeed are necessary to men. . . . Since men have 
 existed, they have always had science in the plainest 
 and largest sense of the word. Science, as the sum of 
 all human information, has always been in existence ; 
 and without it life is not conceivable, and there is no 
 necessity whatever either to attack or to defend it. 
 
 But the region of this knowledge is so various, so 
 much information of all kinds enters into it, that man 
 would be lost if he had no clue which could help him 
 to decide which of all these kinds of information is 
 more, and which less, important. . . . Since mankind 
 has existed, in every nation, teachers have appeared to 
 form science in this strict sense the science about 
 what it is most necessary for men to know. This 
 science has always had for its object the inquiry as to 
 what was the destiny, and therefore the true welfare, of 
 each man and of all men. This science has served as a 
 clue in determining the importance and the expression 
 of all other sciences. Such was the science of Confucius, 
 Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Christ, Mohammed science 
 as it has been understood by all men except by 
 
1 92 TOLSTOY 
 
 our own circle of so-called educated people. Such a 
 science has not only always occupied the first place, 
 but it is the one science which has determined the 
 importance of other sciences. . . . Without knowledge 
 as to what constitutes the calling and welfare of all men, 
 all other arts and sciences become, as is really the case 
 at present with us, only an idle and pernicious amusement. 
 
 The business of science is to serve people. We have 
 invented telegraphs, telephones, phonographs, but what 
 improvements have we made m the life of the people ? 
 We have catalogued two millions of insects; but have 
 we domesticated a single animal since biblical times, 
 when all our animals had long been domesticated, and 
 still the elk and the deer and the partridge and the 
 grouse and the wood-hen are wild? Botanists have 
 discovered the cells, and in the cells protoplasms, and 
 in protoplasms something else, and in this something 
 else again. These occupations will evidently never end, 
 and therefore learned men have no time to do any- 
 thing useful. And hence from the times of the ancient 
 Egyptians and Hebrews, when wheat and lentils were 
 already cultivated, down to the present time, not a single 
 plant has been added for the nourishment of the people 
 except potatoes, and these have not been discovered by 
 science. We have invented torpedoes, house-drains; 
 but the spinning-wheel, weaving-looms, ploughs and 
 axe-handles, flails and rakes, buckets and well-sweeps, 
 are still the same as in the time of Rurik. And if some 
 things have been improved, it is not the learned who 
 have done it. 
 
 An engineer, a surgeon, a teacher, an artist, an author, 
 seem by their very professions to be obliged to serve the 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 193 
 
 people, but what do we see ? With the present tendency, 
 they can bring to the people nothing but harm. An 
 engineer and a mechanic must work with capital : with- 
 out capital they are good for nothing. . . . The 
 scientific co-operation for the people must be quite a 
 different one. It will begin when a man of science, 
 an engineer, or a surgeon, will cease to consider as 
 lawful that division of labour, or rather that taking 
 away other men's labour, which now exists, and when 
 he no longer considers that he has the right to take, 
 I do not say hundreds of thousands, but even a moderate 
 sum of one thousand or five hundred roubles as a com- 
 pensation for his services ; but when such a man comes 
 to live among labouring people in the same condition 
 and in the same way as they, then he will apply his 
 information in mechanics, technics, hygiene, to the curing 
 of working people. 
 
 A true art and a true science have two unmistakable 
 characteristics the first, an interior one, that a minister 
 of art or science fulfils his calling, not for the sake of 
 gain, but with self-denial; and the second, an exterior 
 one, that his productions are intelligible to all men, 
 whose welfare he is aiming at. What then is to be Done? 
 
 Edward Carpenter [in Civilisation; Its Cause and 
 Cure, and other Essays'] proves that neither astronomy, 
 nor physics, nor chemistry, nor biology, nor sociology 
 gives us a true knowledge of actual facts, but that all the 
 ' laws ' discovered by these sciences are only generalisa- 
 tions, which have but an approximate value as laws, and 
 that only owing to ignorance or disregard of other factors. 
 Further, that even these laws appear to be laws to us 
 only because we discover them in a domain so distant 
 
 N 
 
194 TOLSTOY 
 
 from us in time and space that we cannot perceive their 
 want of correspondence with actual fact. Besides this, 
 Carpenter also points out that the method of science, 
 consisting in the explanation of phenomena near and 
 important to us by phenomena more distant from and 
 indifferent to us, is a false method which can never lead 
 to the desired results. ... It is supposed that to reduce 
 higher questions to terms of lower ones will explain the 
 higher. But this explanation is never attained, and what 
 happens is that, descending lower and lower in its in- 
 vestigations, from the most essential questions to those 
 less essential, science at last reaches a domain quite 
 foreign to man, and only adjacent to him, to which 
 domain it confines its attention, leaving without any 
 solution all questions most important for man. 
 
 Men must live. And in order to live they must know 
 how to live. All men always well or ill have learnt 
 this, and, in accordance with their knowledge, have lived 
 and progressed. And this knowledge of how men should 
 live was always, since the times of Moses, Solon, Con- 
 fucius, considered a science the very science of 
 sciences; and it is only in our time that it has begun 
 to be considered that the science of how to live is not a 
 science at all, but that true science is only experimental 
 science, beginning with mathematics and ending with 
 sociology. And a strange misunderstanding ensues. 
 A simple and sensible working man according to the 
 old sense and common sense as well supposes that if 
 there are men studying all their life, who think for 
 him in return for being fed and provided for by him, 
 then these men are probably engaged in studying what 
 is needful for man ; and he expects from science that it 
 will solve for him those questions on which depend his 
 
SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE 195 
 
 welfare and that of all men. He expects that science 
 will teach him how to live, how to act towards the 
 members of his own family, his neighbours, and those 
 of other countries ; how to struggle with his passions ; 
 in what he should and should not believe, and much 
 besides. And what does our science reply ? It trium- 
 phantly announces how many millions of miles the sun 
 is from the earth, how many millions of undulations of 
 ether per second are produced by light, and how many 
 undulations of atmosphere by sound ; it tells of the 
 chemical composition of the Milky Way ; it tells of a 
 new element, Helior, of micro-organisms and their 
 excrements, of the points in the hand where electricity 
 concentrates, of X rays, and so on. 
 
 True science has never been appreciated by its con- 
 temporaries, but, on the contrary, has for the most part 
 been persecuted. And it could not be otherwise. True 
 science indicates to men their errors, and points to new, 
 unusual ways of life, both of which services are obnoxious 
 to the ruling part of society ; whereas the present science 
 not only refrains from counteracting the tastes and 
 demands of the ruling part of society, but completely 
 coincides with them, satisfies idle curiosity, astonishes 
 people, and promises them increase of pleasure. Whereas 
 all that is truly great is quiet, modest, imperceptible, the 
 science of our time knows no limits to its self-glorifica- 
 tion. Yet, seen in its full significance, no science in any 
 age or nation has stood on so low a plane as the present 
 one. One part of it, that which should be a study of the 
 means of making human life good and happy, is oc- 
 cupied in justifying the existing bad order of life, and the 
 other is absorbed with the solution of questions of idle 
 curiosity. Modern Science. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ART, FALSE AND TRUE 
 
 ALMOST every educated man at the present day is striving 
 unconsciously to preserve the old-time conception of 
 society, which justifies his attitude, and to conceal from 
 others and from himself its inconsistencies. Contem- 
 porary literature, philosophical, political and artistic, 
 affords a striking proof of the truth of my statement. 
 What wealth of imagination, what form and colour, 
 what erudition and art, but what a lack of serious 
 purpose, what reluctance to face any exact thought ! 
 Ambiguity of expression, indirect allusion, witticisms, 
 vague reflection, but no straightforward or candid deal- 
 ing with the subject they treat of, namely, life. Indeed, 
 our writers treat of obscenities and improprieties ; in the 
 guise of refined paradox they convey suggestions which 
 thrust men back to primeval savagery, to the lowest 
 dregs not only of pagan life, but of animal life, which 
 we outlived five thousand years ago. The Kingdom of 
 God is Within You. 
 
 That special gift called genius consists in the faculty 
 of intense, strenuous attention, applied, according to the 
 author's tastes, to this or that subject j and by means of 
 which the possessor of this capacity sees the things to 
 which he applies his attention in some new aspect over- 
 looked by others. Three qualifications, in addition to 
 
 196 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 197 
 
 genius, are indispensable to a true work of art. These 
 are: (i) a correct, that is, a moral, relation of the 
 author to his subject; (2) perspicuity or beauty of 
 expression (the two are identical) ; and (3) sincerity, *>., 
 an unfeigned feeling of love or hatred to the subject 
 depicted. 
 
 The cement which binds together every work of art 
 into a whole, and thereby produces the effect of life- 
 like illusion, is not the unity of persons and places, 
 but that of the author's independent moral relation to 
 the subject. In reality, when we read or examine the art- 
 work of a new author, the fundamental questions which 
 arise in our mind are always of this kind : ' Well, what 
 sort of a man are you? And what distinguishes you 
 from all the people I know, and what information can 
 you give me as to how we must look upon our life?' 
 Whatever the artist depicts, whether it be saints or 
 robbers, kings or lackeys, we seek and see only the soul 
 of the artist himself. And if he be an established writer, 
 with whom we are already acquainted, the question is 
 no longer : * Who are you ? ' but ' Well, what more can 
 you tell me that is new? From what standpoint will 
 you now illuminate life for me?' Therefore, a writer who 
 has not a clear, definite, and fresh view of the universe, 
 and especially a writer who does not even consider this 
 necessary, cannot produce a work of art. He may 
 write much and beautifully, but a work of art will not 
 result. Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction. 
 
 To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, 
 and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of move- 
 ments, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, 
 so to transmit that feeling that others may experience 
 
198 TOLSTOY 
 
 the same feeling this is the activity of art. Art is a 
 human activity consisting in this, that one man con- 
 sciously, by means of certain external signs, hands 
 on to others feelings he has lived through, and that 
 other people are infected by these feelings, and also 
 experience them. Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, 
 the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or 
 God; it is not, as the sesthetical physiologists say, a game 
 in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is 
 not the expression of man's emotions by external signs ; 
 it is not the production of pleasing objects, and, above 
 all, it is not pleasure ; but it is a means of union among 
 men, joining them together in the same feelings, and 
 indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being 
 of individuals and of humanity. 
 
 All human life is filled with works of art of every kind 
 from cradle-song, dance, jest, mimicry, up to church 
 services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal proces- 
 sions. It is all artistic activity. Just as speech acts on 
 us not only in sermons, orations and books, but in all 
 that talk by which we transmit our thoughts and ex- 
 periences to each other, so also art, in the wide meaning 
 of the word, permeates our whole life, and it is only 
 some of the manifestations of this art that we speak of 
 as ' Art ' in the narrow meaning of the word. 
 
 Humanity unceasingly moves forward from a lower, 
 more partial and obscure understanding of life to one 
 more general and more lucid. And in this, as in every 
 movement, there are leaders. . . . Religions are the 
 exponents of the highest comprehension of life accessible 
 to the best and foremost men at a given time in a given 
 society, a comprehension towards which, inevitably and 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 199 
 
 irresistibly, all the rest of that society must advance. 
 And therefore only religions have always served, and 
 still serve, as bases for the valuation of human senti- 
 ments. ... In every age, and in every human society, 
 there exists a religious sense, common to that whole 
 society, of what is good and what is bad, and it is 
 this religious conception that decides the value of the 
 feelings transmitted by art. 
 
 The highest perfection of goodness (not only not 
 identical with beauty, but, for the most part, contrasting 
 with it) which was discerned by the Jews even in the 
 times of Isaiah, and fully expressed by Christianity, was 
 quite unknown to the Greeks. They supposed that the 
 beautiful must necessarily also be good. . . . Plato's 
 reasonings about beauty and goodness are full of con- 
 tradictions. And it was just this confusion of ideas 
 that those Europeans of a later age who had lost all 
 faith tried to elevate into a law. They tried to prove 
 that this union of beauty and goodness is inherent in the 
 very essence of things ; that beauty and goodness must 
 coincide; and that the word and conception Ka\o-Kaya6ov 
 (which had a meaning for Greeks, but has none at all 
 for Christians) represents the highest ideal of humanity. 
 On this misunderstanding the new science of aesthetics 
 was built up. And to justify its existence, the teachings 
 of the ancients on art were so twisted as to make it 
 appear that this invented science of aesthetics had existed 
 among the Greeks. In reality, the reasoning of the 
 ancients on art was quite unlike ours. 
 
 If a theory justifies the false position in which a cer- 
 tain part of a society is living, then, however unfounded 
 or even obviously false it may be, it is accepted, and 
 
200 TOLSTOY 
 
 becomes an article of faith to that section of society. 
 Such, for instance, was the celebrated and unfounded 
 theory expounded by Malthus of the tendency of the 
 population of the world to increase in geometrical 
 progression, but of the means of sustenance to increase 
 only in arithmetical progression, and of the consequent 
 over-population of the world ; such, also, was the theory 
 (an outgrowth of the Malthusian) of selection and struggle 
 for existence as the basis of human progress. Such, again, 
 is Marx's theory, which regards the gradual destruction 
 of small private production by large capitalistic produc- 
 tion now going on around us as an inevitable decree of 
 fate. ... To this class belongs this astonishing theory 
 of the Baumgartenian Trinity Goodness, Beauty, and 
 Truth. According to this theory, Goodness, Beauty, and 
 Truth are different manifestations of the one essential 
 perfection, and therefore are conceptions equal among 
 themselves. What is important is that we have no 
 ground for such an assertion. Goodness is really the 
 fundamental metaphysical conception which forms the 
 essence of our consciousness; it is a conception not 
 denned by reason, it is that which can be denned by 
 nothing else, but which defines everything else; it is the 
 highest, the eternal aim of our life. . . . The good is 
 that which we call God. But beauty if we do not 
 want mere words, but speak about what we understand 
 beauty is nothing but what pleases us, and therefore 
 the notion of beauty not only does not coincide with 
 goodness, but rather is contrary to it, for the good most 
 often coincides with victory over the passions, but beauty 
 is at the root of all our passions. (I know that to this 
 people always say that there is a moral and spiritual beauty, 
 but this is merely playing with words, for by spiritual and 
 moral beauty nothing else is understood but goodness.) 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 201 
 
 What we call truth is merely the correspondence of 
 an expression, or of a definition of an object, with reality 
 or with an understanding of the object common to every- 
 one, and therefore it is a means of arriving at the good ; 
 but in itself truth is not goodness, and often it does not 
 even coincide with it. With beauty truth has not even 
 anything in common, but for the most part is in contra- 
 diction to it, for truth generally exposes the deception 
 and destroys illusion, which is the chief condition of 
 beauty. 
 
 Since the upper classes of the Christian nations lost 
 faith in Church-Christianity, the art of those upper 
 classes has separated itself from the art of the rest of the 
 people, and there have been two arts popular art and 
 genteel art. ... All the confused, unintelligible theories 
 of art and its stagnation in its false path arise from the 
 amazingly and palpably false assertion that the art of our 
 upper classes is the whole of art, the true, the only, the 
 universal art ... Even in our Christian society hardly 
 one per cent, of the people make use of this art which 
 we speak of as being the whole of art. 
 
 We hold that all people have equal rights, if not to 
 material at any rate to spiritual well-being; and yet 
 ninety-nine per cent, of our European population live 
 and die, generation after generation, crushed by toil, 
 much of which toil is necessary for the production of 
 our art, which they never use ; and we, nevertheless, 
 calmly assert that the art which we produce is the real, 
 true, only art all of art ! To the remark that, if our 
 art is the true art, then everyone should have the benefit 
 of it, the ordinary reply is that if not everybody at pre- 
 sent makes use of existing art, the fault does not lie in 
 
202 TOLSTOY 
 
 the art, but in the false organisation of society ; that one 
 can imagine to oneself, in the future, a state of things 
 in which physical labour will be partly superseded by 
 machinery, partly lightened by its just distribution, and 
 that labour for the production of art will be taken in 
 turns ; that there is no need for some people always to 
 sit below the stage moving the decorations, winding up 
 the machinery, and working at the piano or French 
 horn, and setting type and printing books, but that the 
 people who do all this work might be engaged only a 
 few hours per day, and in their leisure time might enjoy 
 all the blessings of art. That is what the defenders of 
 our exclusive art say. But I think they do not them- 
 selves believe it. They cannot help knowing that fine 
 art can arise only on the slavery of the masses of the 
 people, and can continue only as long as that slavery 
 lasts. 
 
 But even were we to admit the inadmissible, and say 
 that means may be found by which art (that art which 
 among us is considered to be art) may be obtainable by the 
 whole people, another consideration presents itself, show- 
 ing that fashionable art cannot be the whole of art, viz., 
 the fact that it is completely unintelligible to the people. 
 . . . Even if a possibility were given to the labouring 
 classes, in their free time, to see, to read, and to hear 
 all that forms the flower of contemporary art (as is done 
 to some extent in towns, by means of picture galleries, 
 popular concerts, and libraries), the working man (to the 
 extent to which he is a labourer, and has not begun to 
 pass into the ranks of those perverted by idleness) would 
 be able to make nothing of our fine art, and if he did 
 understand it, that which he understood would not 
 elevate his soul, but would certainly, in most cases, 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 203 
 
 pervert it. To thoughtful and sincere people there can 
 therefore be no doubt that the art of our upper classes 
 never can be the art of the whole people. But if art be 
 an important matter, a spiritual blessing, essential for all 
 men (' like religion,' as the devotees of art are fond of 
 saying), then it should be accessible to everyone. And 
 if, as in our day, a particular art is not accessible to all 
 men, then one of two things : either art is not the vital 
 matter that it is represented to be, or that art which we 
 call art is not the real thing. 
 
 Apart from the moral effects such a perversion of art 
 has had on European society, it has weakened art itself, 
 and well-nigh destroyed it. The first great result was 
 that art, by making enjoyment its aim, was deprived of 
 the infinite, varied, and profound religious subject-matter 
 proper to it. The second result was that, having only 
 a small circle of people in view, it lost its beauty 
 of form, and became affected and obscure; and the 
 third and chief result was that it ceased to be either 
 unconscious or sincere, and became thoroughly fictitious 
 and artificial. 
 
 The assertion that art may be good art, and at the 
 same time incomprehensible to a great number of people, 
 is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to 
 art itself. . . . And it turns out that those who say the 
 majority do not understand good works of art still do 
 not explain those works, but only tell us that, in order 
 to understand them, one must read, and see, and hear 
 these same works over and over again. But this is not 
 to explain, but only to habituate ! And people may 
 habituate themselves to anything, even to the very worst 
 things. As people may habituate themselves to bad 
 
204 TOLSTOY 
 
 food, to spirits, tobacco, and opium, just in the same 
 way they may habituate themselves to bad art and that 
 is exactly what is being done. 
 
 Great works of art are only great because they are 
 accessible and comprehensible to everyone. The story 
 of Joseph, translated into the Chinese language, touches a 
 Chinese. The story of Sakya Muni touches us. And 
 there are, and must be, buildings, pictures, statues, and 
 music of similar power. So that, if art fails to move 
 men, it cannot be said that this is due to the spectators' 
 or hearers' lack of understanding; but the conclusion 
 to be drawn may, and should be, that such art is either 
 bad art, or not art at all. 
 
 The business of art lies just in this to make that 
 understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, 
 might be incomprehensible and inaccessible. Usually it 
 seems to the recipient of a truly artistic impression that he 
 knew the thing before, but had been unable to express it. 
 
 Universal art arises only when some one of the people, 
 having experienced a strong emotion, feels the necessity 
 of transmitting it to others. Professional, upper-class 
 art, on the other hand, arises not from the artist's inner 
 impulse, but chiefly because people of the upper classes 
 demand amusement and pay well for it. ... Artists 
 therefore have had to devise methods of producing 
 imitations of art in order to satisfy the demands of 
 people of the upper classes. These methods are those 
 of (i) borrowing, (2) ornamenting, (3) striking (effects), 
 and (4) interesting. 
 
 An artistic impression, /.*., infection, is only received 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 205 
 
 when an author has, in the manner peculiar to himself, 
 experienced the feeling which he transmits, and not 
 when he passes on another man's feeling previously 
 transmitted to him. ... All borrowing merely recalls 
 to the reader, spectator, or listener, some dim recollec- 
 tion of artistic impressions they have received from 
 previous works of art, and does not infect them with 
 that feeling which the artist himself has experienced. 
 A work founded on something borrowed, like Goethe's 
 Faiist^ for instance, may be very well executed, and be 
 full of mind and every beauty, but because it lacks the 
 chief characteristic of a work of art completeness, one- 
 ness, the inseparable unity of form and contents express- 
 ing the feeling the artist has experienced it cannot 
 produce a real artistic impression. 
 
 The sight of the most beautiful suffering may infect us 
 very powerfully with a feeling of compassion, sympathy, 
 or admiration for the self-sacrifice of the sufferer, while, 
 on the other hand, the sight of an unquestionably beauti- 
 ful wax figure may infect us with no feeling whatever. 
 To estimate a work of art by the degree of beauty it 
 possesses is, in fact, as strange as to judge of the fertility 
 of soil by the beauty of its situation. 
 
 Neither does the method of imitating art by the use 
 of what is striking or effective coincide with real art, for 
 in effectfulness the effects of novelty, of the unexpected, 
 of contrasts, of the horrible there is no transmission of 
 feeling, but only an action on the nerves. If an artist 
 were to paint a bloody wound admirably, the sight of 
 the wound would strike me, but it would not be art. 
 One prolonged note on a powerful organ will produce a 
 striking impression, will often even cause tears, but there 
 
206 TOLSTOY 
 
 is no music in it, because no feeling is transmitted. Yet 
 such physiological effects are constantly mistaken for art 
 by people of our circle, and this not only in music, but 
 also in poetry, painting and the drama. It is said that 
 art has becomed refined. On the contrary, thanks to the 
 pursuit of effectfulness, it has become very coarse. 
 
 To speak of an interesting work of art means either 
 that we receive from a work of art information new to 
 us, or that the work is not fully intelligible, and that, 
 little by little, and with effort, we arrive at its meaning, 
 and experience a certain pleasure in this process of 
 guessing it. In neither case has the interest anything 
 in common with artistic impression. Art aims at in- 
 fecting people with feeling experienced by the artist. 
 But the mental effort necessary to enable the spectator, 
 listener, or reader to assimilate the new information con- 
 tained in the work, or to guess the puzzles propounded, by 
 distracting him, hinders the infection. And therefore it 
 may be stated that the interestingness of a work not 
 only has nothing to do with its excellence as a work of 
 art, but rather hinders than assists artistic impression. 
 
 Many conditions must be fulfilled to enable a man to 
 produce a real work of art. It is necessary that he 
 should stand on the level of the highest life-conception 
 of his time, that he should experience feeling, and have 
 the desire and capacity to transmit it, and that he 
 should, moreover, have a talent for some one of the 
 forms of art. It is very seldom that all these conditions 
 necessary to the production of true art are combined. 
 Counterfeit art is diffused in our society in enormous 
 quantities, and the number of such counterfeits is in- 
 creasing more and more. Three conditions co-operate 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 207 
 
 to cause this increase. They are (i) the considerable 
 remuneration of artists for their productions, (2) art 
 criticism, and (3) schools of art. 
 
 As soon as the upper classes acclaimed every kind of 
 art as good if only it afforded them pleasure, and began 
 to reward such art more highly than any other social 
 activity, immediately a large number of people devoted 
 themselves to this activity, and art assumed quite a 
 different character and became a profession. And as 
 soon as this occurred, the chief and most precious 
 quality of art its sincerity was at once greatly weak- 
 ened and eventually quite destroyed, and art was 
 replaced by counterfeits of art. The professional artist 
 lives by his art, and has continually to invent subjects 
 for his works, and does invent them. And it is obvious 
 how great a difference must exist between works of art 
 produced on the one hand by men such as the Jewish 
 prophets, the authors of the Psalms, Francis of Assissi, 
 the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey^ of folk-stories, 
 legends, and folk-songs, many of whom not only received 
 no remuneration for their work, but did not even attach 
 their names to it ; and, on the other hand, works produced 
 by Court poets, dramatists, and musicians receiving 
 honours and remuneration, and later on by professional 
 artists, who lived by the trade, receiving remuneration 
 from newspaper editors, publishers, impressarios, and in 
 general from those agents who come between the 
 artists and the town public, the consumers of art. Pro- 
 fessionalism is the first condition of the diffusion of 
 false, counterfeit art. 
 
 The second condition is the growth, in recent times, 
 of artistic criticism, />., the valuation of art not by every- 
 
208 TOLSTOY 
 
 body, and, above all, not by plain men, but by erudite, 
 that is, by perverted and at the same time self-confident 
 individuals. Artistic criticism did not exist could not 
 and cannot exist in societies where art is undivided, 
 and where consequently it is appraised by the religious 
 understanding-of-life common to the whole people. Art 
 criticism grew, and could grow, only on the art of the 
 upper classes, who did not acknowledge the religious 
 perception of their time. Universal art has a definite 
 and indubitable internal criterion religious perception ; 
 upper-class art lacks this, and therefore the appreciators 
 of that art are obliged to cling to some external criterion. 
 
 The chief harm done by the critics is this, that them- 
 selves lacking the capacity to be infected by art (and 
 that is the characteristic of all critics ; for did they not 
 lack this they could not attempt the impossible the 
 interpretation of works of art), they pay most attention 
 to, and eulogise, brain-spun, invented works; and set 
 these up as models worthy of imitation. That is the 
 reason they so confidently extol, in literature, the Greek 
 tragedians, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe 
 (almost all he wrote), and, among recent writers, Zola 
 and Ibsen; in music, Beethoven's last period, and 
 Wagner. ... In this connection the instance of 
 Beethoven is most striking. Among his innumerable 
 productions there are, notwithstanding their artificiality 
 of form, works of true art. But he grows deaf, cannot 
 hear, and begins to write invented, unfinished works, 
 which are consequently often meaningless and musically 
 unintelligible. But criticism, having once acknowledged 
 him to be a great composer, seizes on just these un- 
 finished and often abnormal works with special gusto, 
 and searches for extraordinary beauties in them. And 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 209 
 
 (perverting the very meaning of musical art) to justify its 
 laudations, it attributes to music the property of depict- 
 ing what it cannot depict. And imitators appear an 
 innumerable host of imitators of these sickly, crippled 
 works which Beethoven wrote when he was deaf, and 
 which he never developed to the rank of art. 
 
 The third condition of the perversion of art, namely, 
 art schools, is almost more harmful still. . . . Art is the 
 transmission to others of a special feeling experienced 
 by the artist. How can this be taught in schools ? . . . 
 No school can evoke feeling in a man, and still less can 
 it teach him how to manifest it in the one particular 
 manner natural to him alone. But the essence of art 
 lies in these things. . . . The one thing these schools 
 can teach is how to transmit feelings experienced by 
 other artists in the way those other artists transmitted 
 them; and such instruction . . . does more than any- 
 thing else to deprive people of the capacity to understand 
 true art. . . . Professional schools produce a hypocrisy 
 of art precisely akin to that hypocrisy of religion which is 
 produced by theological colleges for training priests, 
 pastors, and religious teachers generally. As it is im- 
 possible in a school to train a man so as to make a 
 religious teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a 
 man how to become an artist. 
 
 These three conditions the professionalisation of 
 artists, art criticism, and art schools have had this 
 effect : that most people in our times are quite unable 
 even to understand what art is, and accept as art the 
 grossest counterfeits of it. 
 
 To what an extent people of our circle and time have 
 o 
 
210 TOLSTOY 
 
 lost the capacity to receive real art, and have become 
 accustomed to accept as art things that have nothing in 
 common with it, is best seen from the works of Richard 
 Wagner, which have latterly come to be more and more 
 esteemed, not only by the Germans, but also by the 
 French and the English, as the very highest art, revealing 
 new horizons to us. Wagner's fundamental thought, as 
 is known, was that the music in an opera should serve 
 poetry, expressing all the shades of a poetical work. 
 This thought is incorrect, because each art has its definite 
 realm, which is not identical with the realm of other 
 arts, but merely comes in contact with them ; and there- 
 fore, if the manifestation of, I will not say several, but 
 even of two arts the dramatic and the musical be 
 united in point of time, as is done in the opera, then the 
 demands of the one art will make it impossible to fulfil 
 the demands of the other. ... In order that a pro- 
 duction in the one branch of art should coincide with 
 a production in the other branch, it is necessary that the 
 impossible should happen : that two works from different 
 realms of art should be absolutely exceptional, unlike 
 anything that existed before, and yet should coincide, 
 and be exactly alike. And this cannot be, just as there 
 cannot be two men, or even two leaves on a tree, exactly 
 alike. Still less can two works from different realms of 
 art, the musical and the literary, be absolutely alike. 
 
 Wagner's new music lacks the chief characteristic of 
 every true work of art, namely, such entirety and com- 
 pleteness that the smallest alteration in its form would 
 disturb the meaning of the whole work. In a true work 
 of art poem, drama, picture, song, or symphony it is 
 impossible to extract one line, one scene, one figure, 
 one bar from its place and put it in another without 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 211 
 
 infringing the significance of the whole work ; just as it 
 is impossible, without infringing the life of an organic 
 being, to extract an organ from one place and insert it in 
 another. But in the music of Wagner's last period, with 
 the exception of some parts of little importance which 
 have an independent musical meaning, it is possible to 
 make all kinds of transpositions, putting what was in 
 front behind, and vice vers& t without altering the musical 
 sense. And the reason why this does not alter the sense 
 of Wagner's music is because the sense lies in the words 
 and not in the music. 
 
 The chief poetical production of Wagner is The Nibe- 
 lungs Ring. ... It is a model work of counterfeit art, 
 so gross as to be even ridiculous. ... Of music, z>., 
 of art serving as a means to transmit a state of mind 
 experienced by the author, there is not even a suggestion. 
 There is something that is absolutely unintelligible 
 musically. In a musical sense a hope is continually 
 experienced, followed by disappointment, as if a musical 
 thought were commenced only to be broken off. If 
 there are something like musical commencements these 
 commencements are so short, so encumbered with com- 
 plications of harmony and orchestration and with effects 
 of contrast, are so obscure and unfinished, and what is 
 happening on the stage meanwhile is so abominably 
 false, that it is difficult even to perceive these musical 
 snatches, let alone be infected by them. Above all, 
 from the very beginning to the very end, and in each 
 note, the author's purpose is so audible and visible that 
 one sees and hears neither Siegfried nor the birds, but 
 only a limited, self-opinionated German of bad taste and 
 bad style, who has a most savage and rude conception 
 of poetry, and who, in the rudest and most primitive 
 
212 TOLSTOY 
 
 manner, wishes to transmit to us these false and mis- 
 taken conceptions of his. 
 
 Listening to this opera, I involuntarily thought of a 
 respected, wise, educated country labourer one, for 
 instance, of those wise and truly religious men whom I 
 know among the peasants and I pictured to myself the 
 terrible perplexity such a man would be in were he to 
 witness what I was seeing that evening. Not to speak 
 of an adult labourer, one can hardly imagine even a child 
 of over seven occupying himself with such a stupid, 
 incoherent fairy tale. And yet an enormous audience, 
 the cream of the cultured upper classes, sits out six hours 
 of this insane performance, and goes away imagining that 
 by paying tribute to this nonsense it has acquired a 
 fresh right to esteem itself advanced and enlightened. 
 The explanation is that, thanks to his exceptional 
 position in having at his disposal the resources of a king, 
 Wagner was able to command all the methods for coun- 
 terfeiting art which have been developed by long usage, 
 and that, employing these methods with great ability, he 
 produced a model work of counterfeit art. The reason 
 why I have selected his work for my illustration is that 
 in no other counterfeit of art known to me are all the 
 methods by which art is counterfeited namely, borrow- 
 ings, ornaments, effects, and interestingness so ably 
 and powerfully united. 
 
 People say, c You cannot judge without having seen 
 Wagner performed at Bayreuth : in the dark, where the 
 orchestra is out of sight concealed under the stage, and 
 where the performance is brought to the highest per- 
 fection.' . . . Yes, naturally ! Only place yourself in 
 such conditions, and you may see what you will. But 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 213 
 
 this can be still more quickly attained by getting drunk 
 or smoking opium. It is the same when listening to an 
 opera of Wagner's. Sit in the dark for four days in com- 
 pany with people who are not quite normal, and, through 
 the auditory nerves, subject your brain to the strongest 
 action of the sounds best adapted to excite it, and you 
 will no doubt be reduced to an abnormal condition and 
 be enchanted by absurdities. 
 
 There is one indubitable indication distinguishing real 
 art from its counterfeit, namely, the infectiousness of art. 
 . . . And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or inter- 
 esting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does 
 not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other 
 feelings) of joy, and of spiritual union with another (the 
 author) and with others (those who are also infected 
 by it). The stronger the infection the better is the art, as 
 art) speaking now apart from its subject-matter, i.e., not 
 considering the quality of the feelings it transmits. 
 
 And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends 
 on three conditions : (i) on the greater or lesser indi- 
 viduality of the feeling transmitted; (2) on the greater 
 or lesser clearness with which the feeling is transmitted ; 
 (3) on the sincerity of the artist, i.e., on the greater or 
 lesser force with which the artist himself feels the emo- 
 tion he transmits. ... I have mentioned three condi- 
 tions of contagiousness in art, but they may all be 
 summed up into one, the last, sincerity, i.e., that the 
 artist should be impelled by an inner need to express 
 his feeling. This condition is always complied with in 
 peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so 
 powerfully ; but it is a condition almost entirely absent 
 from our upper-class art, which is continually produced 
 
2i 4 TOLSTOY 
 
 by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or 
 vanity. Thus is art divided from not-art, and thus is 
 the quality of art, as art, decided independently of its 
 subject-matter, i.e. t apart from whether the feelings it 
 transmits are good or bad. 
 
 How in art are we to decide what is good and what is 
 bad in subject-matter? . . . Art transmitting feelings 
 flowing from the religious perception of our time should 
 be chosen from all the indifferent art, should be acknow- 
 ledged, highly esteemed and encouraged; while art 
 running counter to that perception should be condemned 
 and despised, and all the remaining indifferent art should 
 neither be distinguished nor encouraged. The religious 
 perception of our time, in its widest and most practical 
 application, is the consciousness that our well-being, 
 both material and spiritual, individual and collective, 
 temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brother- 
 hood among all men in their loving harmony with one 
 another. 
 
 Christian art, />., the art of our time, should be 
 catholic in the original meaning of the word, that is, uni- 
 versal, and therefore it should unite all men. And only 
 two kinds of feeling do unite all men : first, feelings 
 flowing from the perception of their sonship to God 
 and of the brotherhood of man ; and next, the simple 
 feelings of common life, accessible to everyone without 
 exception such as the feeling of merriment, of pity, of 
 cheerfulness, of tranquillity, etc. Only these two kinds 
 of feelings can now supply material for art good in its 
 subject-matter. 
 
 If I were asked to give modern examples of each of 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 215 
 
 these kinds of art religious and universal as examples 
 of the highest art, flowing from love of God and man 
 (both of the higher, positive, and of the lower, negative 
 kind), in literature I should name The Robbers by Schil- 
 ler ; Victor Hugo's Les Pauvres Gens and Les Mis'erables ; 
 the novels and stories of Dickens The Tale of Two 
 Cities, The Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and others ; 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin ; Dostoievsky's works especially his 
 Memoirs from the House of Death ; and Adam Bede, by 
 George Eliot. In modern painting, strange to say, 
 works of this kind, directly transmitting the Christian 
 feeling of love of God and of one's neighbour, are hardly 
 to be found, especially among the works of the cele- 
 brated painters. There are plenty of pictures treating 
 of the Gospel stories ; they, however, depict historical 
 events with great wealth of detail, but do not, and can 
 not, transmit religious feeling not possessed by their 
 painters. There are many pictures treating of the per- 
 sonal feelings of various people, but of pictures repre- 
 senting great deeds of self-sacrifice and of Christian love 
 there are very few, and what there are are principally by 
 artists who are not celebrated, and are, for the most part, 
 not pictures but merely sketches. 
 
 To give examples, from the modern art of our upper 
 classes, of art of the second kind, good universal art, or 
 even of the art of a whole people, is yet more difficult, 
 especially in literary art and music. If there are some 
 works which by their inner contents might be assigned 
 to this class (such as Don Quixote, Moliere's comedies, 
 David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers by Dickens, 
 Golgol's and Pushkin's tales, and some things of Mau- 
 passant's), these works are for the most part from the 
 exceptional nature of the feelings they transmit, and the 
 
216 TOLSTOY 
 
 superfluity of special details of time and locality, and, 
 above all, on account of the poverty of their subject- 
 matter in comparison with examples of universal ancient 
 art (such, for instance, as the story of Joseph) compre- 
 hensible only to people of their own circle. ... In 
 music, besides marches and dances by various com- 
 posers, which satisfy the demand of universal art, one 
 can indicate very few works of this class : Bach's famous 
 violin aria, Chopin's nocturne in E flat major, and per- 
 haps a dozen bits (not whole pieces, but parts) selected 
 from the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, 
 and Chopin. 
 
 Although in painting the same thing is repeated as in 
 poetry and in music namely, that in order to make 
 them more interesting, works weak in conception are 
 surrounded by minutely studied accessories of time and 
 place, which give them a temporary and local interest 
 but make them less universal, still, in painting more 
 than in the other spheres of art may be found works 
 satisfying the demands of universal Christian art ; that is 
 to say, there are more works expressing feelings in which 
 all men may participate. In the arts of painting and 
 sculpture, such works, universal in subject-matter, are 
 all pictures and statues in so-called genre style, depic- 
 tions of animals, landscapes, and caricatures with subjects 
 comprehensible to everyone, and also all kinds of orna- 
 ments. Such productions in painting and sculpture are 
 very numerous (e.g., china dolls), but for the most part 
 such objects (for instance, ornaments of all kinds) are 
 not considered to be art. 
 
 In the upper classes, in consequence of the loss of 
 capacity to be infected by works of art, people grow up, 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 217 
 
 are educated, and live, lacking the fertilising, improving 
 influence of art, and therefore not only do not advance 
 toward perfection, do not become kinder, but, on the 
 contrary, possessing highly-developed external means of 
 civilisation, they yet become continually more savage, 
 more coarse, and more cruel. Such is the result of the 
 absence from our society of the activity of that essential 
 organ art. 
 
 But the consequences of the perverted activity of that 
 organ are yet more harmful. And they are numerous. 
 The first consequence, plain for all to see, is the enormous 
 expenditure of the labour of working people on things 
 which are not only useless, but which, for the most part, 
 are harmful ; and more than that, the waste of priceless 
 human lives on this unnecessary and harmful business. 
 . . . The second consequence is that the productions 
 of amusement-art, which are prepared in such terrific 
 quantities by the armies of professional artists, enable 
 the rich people of our times to live the lives they do, 
 lives not only unnatural, but in contradiction to the 
 humane principles these people themselves profess. To 
 live as do the rich, idle people, especially the women, far 
 from nature and from animals, in artificial conditions, 
 with muscles atrophied or misdeveloped by gymnastics, 
 and with enfeebled vital energy, would be impossible 
 were it not for what is called art for this occupation 
 and amusement which hides from them the meaningless- 
 ness of their lives, and saves them from the dulness that 
 oppresses them. . . . The third consequence of the per- 
 version of art is the perplexity produced in the minds of 
 children and of plain folks. Among people not perverted 
 by the false theories of our society, among workers and 
 children, there exists a very definite conception of what 
 
218 TOLSTOY 
 
 people may be respected and praised for. . . . But 
 these people, children and peasants, suddenly perceive 
 that besides those praised, respected, and rewarded for 
 physical or moral strength, there are others who are 
 praised, extolled, and rewarded much more than the 
 heroes of strength and virtue merely because they sing 
 well, compose verses, or dance. They see that singers, 
 composers, painters, ballet-dancers earn millions of 
 roubles and receive more honour than the saints do ; 
 and peasants and children are perplexed. . . . The sup- 
 planting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal of what 
 is beautiful, /.<?., of what is pleasant, that is the fourth 
 consequence, and a terrible one, of the perversion of art 
 in our society. It is fearful to think of what would befall 
 humanity were such art to spread among the masses of 
 the people. And it already begins to spread. . . . 
 Finally, the fifth and chief result is that the art which 
 flourishes in the upper classes of European society 
 has a directly vitiating influence, infecting people with 
 the worst feelings and with those most harmful to 
 humanity superstition, patriotism, and, above all, 
 sensuality. 
 
 It is not only in Church matters and patriotic matters 
 that art depraves; it is art in our time that serves as 
 the chief cause of the perversion of people in the most 
 important question of social life in their sexual relations. 
 ... All art, real and counterfeit, with very few excep- 
 tions, is devoted to describing, depicting, and inflaming 
 sexual love in every shape and form. When one re- 
 members all those novels and their lust-kindling descrip- 
 tions of love, from the most refined to the grossest, with 
 which the literature of our society overflows ; if one only 
 remembers all those pictures and statues representing 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 219 
 
 women's naked bodies, and all sorts of abominations 
 which are reproduced in illustrations and advertisements ; 
 if one only remembers all the filthy operas and operettas, 
 songs and romances with which our world teems, involun- 
 tarily it seems as if existing art had but one definite aim 
 to disseminate vice as widely as possible. . . . What 
 in our society is called art not only does not conduce to 
 the progress of mankind, but, more than almost anything 
 else, hinders the attainment of goodness in our lives. . . . 
 So that, were the question put : Would it be preferable 
 for our Christian world to be deprived of all that is now 
 esteemed to be art, and, together with the false, to lose 
 all that is good in it ? I think that every reasonable 
 and moral man would again decide the question as 
 Plato decided it for his Republic, and as all the Church, 
 Christian, and Mohammedan teachers of mankind 
 decided it, i.e., would say, * Rather let there be no art at 
 all than continue the depraving art, or simulation of art, 
 which now exists.' Happily, no one has to face this 
 question, and no one need adopt either solution. 
 What is Art? 
 
 ( They played the " Kreutzer Sonata " of Beethoven ; 
 do you know the first presto ? Ah ! ' he exclaimed, ' it is 
 a strange piece of music, especially the first part of it. 
 
 And music generally is a strange thing They say 
 
 it acts on one by elevating the soul. That is absurd. 
 It acts upon us, it is true, acts with terrible effect at 
 least, I am speaking for myself but it is far from elevat- 
 ing the soul. Music forces me to forget myself and my 
 true state ; it transports me to some other state which is 
 not mine. It instantaneously throws me into that state 
 of feeling in which the composer of it found himself when 
 he wrote it. He who composed the piece Beethoven, 
 
220 TOLSTOY 
 
 for instance, in the case of the "Kreutzer Sonata" 
 knew perfectly well why he was in that mood ; it was 
 that mood that determined- him to do certain things, and 
 therefore for him that state of mind has a meaning ; for 
 me it has absolutely none. This is why it is that music 
 only causes irritation, never ends anything. It is a 
 different thing if a military march is played, then the 
 soldiers move forward, keeping time to the music, and 
 the end is attained; if dance music is played people 
 dance to it, and the object is also accomplished ; if a 
 Mass is sung I receive Holy Communion, and here, too, 
 the music is not in vain; but in other cases there is 
 nothing but irritation, and no light how to act during this 
 irritation. Hence the terrible effects that music occa- 
 sionally produces. In China music is a State concern, 
 and this is as it ought to be. Could it be tolerated in 
 any county that anyone who takes the fancy may hypno- 
 tise anyone else and then do with him whatever he has 
 a mind to, especially if this magnetiser is Heaven 
 knows who ! an immoral character, for instance ? It 
 is indeed a terrible weapon in the hands of those who 
 know how to employ it. Take the " Kreutzer Sonata," 
 for example : is it right to play that first presto in a 
 drawing-room to ladies in low dresses? to play that 
 presto^ then to applaud it, and immediately afterwards 
 to eat ice-creams and discuss the latest scandal ? Such 
 pieces as this are only to be executed in rare and solemn 
 circumstances of life, and even then only if certain im- 
 portant deeds that harmonise with this music are to be 
 performed. It is meant to be played and then to be 
 followed by the feats for which it nerves you; but to 
 call into life the energy of a sentiment which is not 
 destined to manifest itself by any deed, how can that 
 be otherwise than baneful ? ' 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 221 
 
 ' Music the most refined lust of the senses.' The 
 Kreutzer Sonata. 
 
 1 The animalism of the brute nature in man is disgust- 
 ing,' thought Nekhliidoff, ' but as long as it remains in 
 its naked form we observe it from the height of our 
 spiritual life and despise it ; and whether one has fallen 
 or resisted one remains what one was before. But 
 when that same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry 
 and aesthetic feeling and demands our worship then 
 we are swallowed up by it completely, and worship 
 animalism, no longer distinguishing good from evil. 
 Then it is awful.' Resurrection. 
 
 In all his novels after Bel Ami (I am not now allud- 
 ing to his short stories, which are his chief merit and 
 glory), Guy de Maupassant has evidently submitted 
 to the theories now reigning, not only in his Parisian 
 circle, but everywhere among artists ; theories that, for 
 a work of art, it is not only unnecessary to have any 
 clear conception of what is right and what is wrong, 
 but that, on the contrary, the artist must totally ignore 
 all moral questions, there even being a certain artistic 
 merit in his so doing. ... In the circle in which Mau- 
 passant moved, that beauty which has been, and is, 
 regarded as necessarily to be served by art, is principally 
 woman, young and pretty; and sexual intercourse with 
 her woman for the most part stripped bare. It was so 
 held, not only by all Maupassant's comrades in 'art,' 
 painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, but also by 
 philosophers, teachers of the rising generation. ... In 
 the society in which Maupassant grew up and was edu- 
 cated, the representation of feminine beauty and sex- 
 love, quite seriously, as a thing long ago admitted and 
 
222 TOLSTOY 
 
 decided by the cleverest and most learned men, was, 
 and is, regarded as the true object of the highest art, of 
 ' le grand art. 1 It is to this very theory, dreadful in its 
 absurdity, that Maupassant subjected himself when he 
 became a fashionable writer. And, as was to be ex- 
 pected, this false ideal led him, in his novels, into a series 
 of mistakes, and into work weaker and more weak. 
 
 The astonishing capacity of every man of real genius, 
 if only he does not do violence to himself under the 
 influence of false theory, lies precisely in this : that 
 genius teaches its possessor, leads him forward on the 
 road of moral development, and makes him love that 
 which deserves love, and hate that which deserves hatred. 
 An artist is only an artist because he sees things, not as 
 he wishes to see them, but as they are. With every true 
 artist, when, under the influence of his circle, he begins 
 to represent that which he ought not to represent, there 
 happens what happened to Balaam, who, wishing to bless, 
 cursed what should be cursed, and, wishing to curse, 
 blessed what should be blessed; he will involuntarily 
 do, not what he wishes, but what he should do. 
 
 The tragedy of Maupassant's life is that, being in the 
 most monstrous and immoral circle, he, by the force of 
 his genius, that extraordinary light which was in him, 
 struggled out of the views of that circle, and was already 
 near to deliverance, already breathing the air of liberty. 
 But having spent his last force upon this struggle, not 
 able to make one more effort, he perished unfreed. 
 The tragedy of this ruin consists in that it continues 
 even now for the majority of so-called educated 
 men of our time. Guy de Maupassant and the Art of 
 Fiction. 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 223 
 
 The art of our time and of our circle has become a 
 prostitute. . . . Like her it is not limited to certain 
 times, like her it is always adorned, like her it is always 
 saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous. 
 
 A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an 
 artist occasionally, as the fruit of the life he has lived- 
 just as a child is conceived by its mother. 
 
 Art of the future will consist in transmitting such 
 feelings as embody the highest religious perception of 
 our itimes. Only those productions will be considered 
 art which transmit feelings drawing men together in 
 brotherly union or such universal feelings as can unite 
 all men. Only such art will be chosen, tolerated, 
 approved, and diffused. But art transmitting feelings 
 flowing from antiquated, worn-out religious teaching 
 Church art, patriotic art, voluptuous art, transmitting 
 feelings of superstitious fear, of pride, of vanity, of 
 ecstatic admiration of national heroes art exciting 
 exclusive love of one's own people, or sensuality, will 
 be considered bad, harmful art, and will be censured 
 and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art, 
 transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of 
 people, will be considered unimportant, and will be 
 neither blamed nor praised. And the appraisement of 
 art in general will devolve, not, as is now the case, on a 
 separate class of rich people, but on the whole people. 
 
 Artistic activity will then be accessible to all men. It 
 will become accessible to the whole people, because, in 
 the first place, in the art of the future, not only will that 
 complex technique, which deforms the productions of 
 the art of to-day and requires so great an effort and 
 
224 TOLSTOY 
 
 expenditure of time, not be demanded, but, on the contrary, 
 the demand will be for clearness, simplicity, and brevity 
 conditions mastered not by mechanical exercises but 
 by the education of taste. And secondly, artistic activity 
 will become accessible to all men of the people because, 
 instead of the present professional schools which only 
 some can enter, all will learn music and depictive art 
 (singing and drawing) equally with letters in the ele- 
 mentary schools, and in such a way that every man, 
 having received the first principles of drawing and music, 
 and feeling a capacity for, and a call to, one or other of 
 the arts, will be able to perfect himself in it. 
 
 The artist of the future will live the common life of 
 man earning his subsistence by some kind of labour. . . . 
 He will understand that to compose a fairy-tale, a little 
 song which will touch, a lullaby or a riddle which will 
 entertain, a jest which will amuse, or to draw a sketch 
 which will delight dozens of generations or millions of 
 children and adults, is incomparably more important and 
 more fruitful than to compose a novel or a symphony, or 
 paint a picture which will divert some members of the 
 wealthy classes for a short time, and then be for ever 
 forgotten. The art of the future, therefore, will not be 
 poorer, but infinitely richer in subject-matter. And the 
 form of the art of the future will also not be inferior to 
 the present forms of art, but infinitely superior to them. 
 Superior, not in the sense of having a refined and com- 
 plex technique, but in the sense of the capacity briefly, 
 simply, and clearly to transmit, without any superfluities, 
 the feeling which the artist has experienced and wishes 
 to transmit. . . . And the ideal excellence of the future 
 will not be the exclusiveness of feeling accessible only to 
 some, but, on the contrary, its universality. And not 
 
ART, FALSE AND TRUE 225 
 
 bulkiness, obscurity, and complexity of form . . . but, 
 on the contrary, brevity, clearness, and simplicity of 
 expression. 
 
 The task of art is enormous. Through the influence 
 of real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that 
 peaceful co-operation of man which is now obtained by 
 external means by our law-courts, police, charitable 
 institutions, factory inspection, etc. should be obtained 
 by man's free and joyous activity. Art should cause 
 violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can 
 accomplish this. . . . The destiny of art in our time is 
 to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of 
 feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in being 
 united together, and to set up, in place of the existing 
 reign of force, that kingdom of God, i.e., of love, which 
 we all recognise to be the highest aim of humble life. 
 What is Art? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 THERE are no beginners in our school at Yasnaya 
 Polyana. The junior class reads, writes, solves problems 
 in the first three rules of arithmetic, and recites sacred 
 history. The subjects are, accordingly, distributed as 
 follows: (i) Reading, mechanical and graduated; (2) 
 writing ; (3) caligraphy ; (4) grammar ; (5) sacred his- 
 tory; (6) Russian history; (7) drawing; (8) lineal 
 drawing; (9) singing; (10) mathematics; (n) discourses 
 on natural history; (12) religion. . . . The school 
 occupies a two-storeyed house. Two rooms are taken 
 up by the school, one by the workshop, and two by 
 the teachers. At the entrance, under the fore-roof, 
 there is a bell with a cord tied to its tongue; in the 
 vestibule downstairs, bars and a rake; upstairs, also in 
 the vestibule, a bench-board. 
 
 About eight in the morning the teacher, who lives in 
 and manages the school and is a great lover of order and 
 regularity, sends one of the boys that almost invariably 
 stay with him for the night to ring the bell. The people 
 in the village get up while it is yet dark. From the 
 school there have already long been visible lights in the 
 windows, and half an hour after the bell one could see in 
 the mist, in the rain, or in the oblique rays of the autumn 
 sun, dark little figures, in twos or in threes or single, 
 
 226 
 
EDUCATION 227 
 
 mounting the hillocks (the village is separated from the 
 school by a ravine). They do not carry anything with 
 them, either books or copy-books; they have no home 
 lessons. Nay, more, they do not even carry anything in 
 their heads. The child is not obliged to remember 
 anything, any lesson that was done yesterday. He is 
 not tormented by the thought of the coming lesson. 
 He brings with him only himself, his receptive mind, 
 and his feeling of certainty that to-day it will be in 
 school just as interesting and cheerful as it was yesterday. 
 He does not think of his class till it actually starts. 
 There is no one to reproach him for his coming late, and 
 there is, in fact, no coming late, unless it be some of the 
 older children whom their fathers sometimes detain at 
 home at some work. And then those big boys come 
 running to the school, almost out of breath. So long 
 as the teacher has not arrived yet, they gather some of 
 them round the entrance, pushing each other from the 
 steps or sliding on the icy path, and some in the school- 
 rooms. When cold, they read or write or just do some- 
 thing till the teacher comes. 
 
 Suppose there is, according to the roster, mechanical 
 reading for the junior standard, graduated reading for 
 the second, and mathematics for the third. The teacher 
 enters the room and sees the children lying in a heap on 
 the floor and screaming, 'Get on the heap!' 'Boys, 
 you're squeezing me to death ! ' ' Here, that will do ; 
 leave my hair ! ' etc. . . . The teacher takes out the 
 books and gives them to those who went with him to the 
 cupboard ; those who lie on the top of the heap also ask 
 for books. The heap gradually diminishes. As soon as 
 the majority have taken their books, the rest also run to 
 the cupboard and scream : ' And for me,' ' and for me.' 
 
228 TOLSTOY 
 
 . . . The warlike spirit evaporates and the spirit of 
 reading reigns supreme. With the same enthusiasm 
 that he applied to the work of pulling Mitra by the hair 
 he now reads Koltsoff with his teeth nearly set together, 
 with his eyes sparkling, and not seeing anything round 
 but the book. It is just as difficult now to tear him 
 away from his reading as it was before to stop his 
 wrestling. 
 
 They sit wherever they like on the benches, on the 
 tables, on the window-sill, on the floor, and on the 
 armchair. The girls sit always together. Friends from 
 the same village, especially when they are young (there 
 is more comradeship between them), always sit near 
 each other. During the class I have never noticed that 
 the children whisper or pinch each other, or giggle 
 softly, or burst into suppressed laughter, or make com- 
 plaints of each other to the schoolmaster. The two 
 junior classes are installed in one room, and the senior 
 in the other. The teacher visits also the first class. They 
 gather round him by the side of the blackboard or on 
 the forms, lie or sit on the table round the teacher or 
 one of the readers. If it is a writing lesson, they sit 
 down more quietly, but continually get up from their 
 places to see each other's copy-books or to show theirs 
 to the teacher. It happens sometimes that both the 
 teacher and the scholars are carried away, and then the 
 lesson lasts three hours instead of one. It happens also 
 that the scholars cry out themselves : ' More ! more ! ' and 
 shout down those who are already bored. ' If you are 
 bored you might as well go to the little ones,' they 
 remark contemptuously. 
 
 In my opinion, this outward disorder is useful and 
 
EDUCATION 229 
 
 valuable, however strange and inconvenient it may seem 
 to the teacher. ... It frightens us only because we are 
 used to something quite different . . . and we make use 
 of violence simply in haste and for lack of respect to 
 human nature. It looks to us as if the disorder is on 
 the increase, that it has no limits, that there are no other 
 means of stopping it but by the use of force j but it is only 
 necessary to wait a little and the disorder (or animation) 
 will come to an end, and turn into an order much 
 better and more stable than any which we can think of. 
 Scholars, however young, are still human beings ; they all 
 want to learn that is why they come to school and 
 they will, therefore, easily come to the conclusion that, 
 in order to learn, they must subject themselves to certain 
 conditions. They are not only human beings, but actually 
 a society of human beings, connected by one and the 
 same thought. 
 
 Obeying only natural laws, flowing from their nature, 
 they revolt and grumble when they have to obey your 
 untimely interference. They do not believe in the 
 legality of your bells, rosters, and rules. ... I have 
 succeeded in discovering among them some rough sense 
 of justice. How often are affairs settled by them by 
 reason of one knows not what law, and yet settled in a 
 manner satisfactory to both parties ! How arbitrary and 
 unjust are, in comparison with this, all the education 
 methods in such cases ! You just leave them alone, if 
 you are not their father or mother, who simply pity their 
 child, and who, therefore, are always right when pulling 
 by the hair the one who has hit their child. You just 
 leave them, and look how all this is being cleared up 
 and settles down so simply and naturally and, at the 
 same time, so complicatedly and variously, like all other 
 
2 3 o TOLSTOY 
 
 unconscious relations of life. I believe that the school 
 ought not to interfere in the work of education proper, 
 which belongs of right only to the family. The school 
 must not and has no right of meting out rewards or 
 punishments. The best policy and administrative system 
 of a school is to allow the scholars perfect freedom of 
 learning and of governing themselves as they like. 
 
 About two, the children, already hungry, run home. 
 In spite of the hunger, they nevertheless wait about for a 
 few moments in order to learn their marks. They are 
 awfully interested in the marks, which, however, carry 
 with them no privileges. . . . However, the system of 
 marks is a mere remnant from our ancient regime and 
 is of itself declining. For the first lesson after the dinner 
 interval the scholars gather just as in the morning, and 
 just as then, wait for the teacher. Let us enter the room. 
 It is almost dark behind the frost-covered windows. 
 The elder boys, the best, are pressed by others close to 
 the teacher, and with their little heads raised hang on 
 his lips. The girl of independent character, with her 
 face expressing anxiety, invariably sits on a high table, 
 ready to swallow every word. Smaller children, not so 
 good, sit further in the room : they listen attentively, 
 almost angrily they behave just like the older ones; 
 but in spite of their attentiveness we know that they will 
 not be able to repeat anything, though they will remember 
 much. Some are leaning on the shoulders of a friend, 
 others simply stand on the table. Occasionally someone 
 will get right into the middle of the crowd, behind 
 another's back, and draw with his nail figures on that 
 back. Occasionally somebody will have a look at you. 
 . . . Recently it was the story of the life of our Saviour. 
 Draw closer in the semi-darkness and have a look 
 
EDUCATION 231 
 
 at some youngster: he sits with his eyes fixed on the 
 teacher and his forehead all in wrinkles of attention. 
 More than once he has already shaken off his shoulder 
 the hand of some leaning comrade. You tickle him in 
 his neck, he will not even smile ; he will only jerk his 
 little head as if driving a fly away, and then again yield 
 himself completely to the mysterious and poetical story 
 how the curtain in the Temple was rent, and darkness 
 enshrouded the earth. And he feels a little frightened, 
 and withal it is pleasant. 
 
 Sometimes, when the classes are interesting, and there 
 have been many of them (sometimes seven long hours in 
 a day), and the children are, consequently, tired, or it is 
 the eve of a holiday, when the ovens are being heated at 
 home for a bath, two or three boys would suddenly, 
 without a word, break into the room during the second 
 or third afternoon-lesson and hurriedly take their caps. 
 ' What are you doing ? ' ' Going home.' 
 
 Who are the boys that have decided to go home, and 
 how they took that decision, God alone knows. You 
 will never find out who was the initiator of the step. 
 They held no council, they did not conspire simply 
 they thought of going home. ' The children are going ! ' 
 and the little feet pound upon the steps, some jump 
 down in a somersault, and limping and tumbling through 
 the snow the children run home with shouts. Such cases 
 happen once or twice in a week. 
 
 In the evening we have singing, graduated reading, 
 discourses, physical experiments, and composition. The 
 most favourite of these subjects are reading*[and experi- 
 ments. Usually the classes end by eight or nine in the 
 
232 TOLSTOY 
 
 evening, unless joinery detains the elder boys for some 
 time longer. The entire crowd with shouts run together 
 to the gates and disperse in all directions in groups, 
 shouting to each other. 
 
 The opinions of the people about our school have 
 much changed since its establishment. . . . Some, of 
 the richer classes, send their children to school for 
 vanity's sake to learn * complete science ' and ' division ' 
 ( c division ' is the highest notion of school-wisdom) ; 
 others think that science is very profitable; whilst the 
 majority simply obey the spirit of the time and send 
 their children to school unconsciously. Of the boys, 
 who form the greater number of our scholars, the most 
 gratifying are exactly those whose fathers belong to the 
 latter category, but who have become so attached to the 
 school that their fathers obey now their wishes and feel 
 instinctively that something good is being done to their 
 boys, and do not dare to take them away from school. 
 The feeling of discontent with the absence of beating 
 and of discipline in the school has almost entirely dis- 
 appeared, but I have frequently had occasion to see an 
 expression of bewilderment on the face of the parent 
 who came to school to fetch his son when running about 
 and wrestling began in his presence. He is convinced 
 that the lack of order is no good, and at the same time 
 believes that they teach in school well. How both 
 things agree he is unable to comprehend. Gymnastics 
 still give rise to all sorts of rumours, and the superstition 
 that the stomachs are liable on that account to come off 
 still holds the field. 
 
 You sit in the school and open a pseudo-popular book 
 and read : c The life of the great Saint Alexis presents an 
 
EDUCATION 233 
 
 example of fervid faith, of piety, of incessant activity and 
 of warm attachment to his fatherland, to which he ren- 
 dered important services. . . . ' You give such a book 
 to a boy the eyes get dim and the boy yawns. . . . 
 The only books that are intelligible to the people, and 
 are to his taste, are not those which have been written 
 for the people, but those written by the people tales, 
 proverbs, collections of songs, legends, verses, enigmas, 
 etc. . . . Our problem is as follows : for the people to 
 become educated it is necessary to have the opportunity 
 and taste for reading good books, but good books are 
 written in a language which the people does not under- 
 stand. ... It is not the word itself that is in the great 
 majority of cases unintelligible; the scholar simply lacks 
 the idea which the word conveys. 
 
 The scholars used to write very badly, and the new 
 teacher introduced the method of writing from a copy 
 (a very easy and quiet exercise for the teacher). The 
 scholars felt bored ; we were obliged to drop caligraphy, 
 and could not think of any means of improving their 
 handwriting. The elder class themselves discovered 
 that means. On having finished sacred history, the elder 
 boys asked to be allowed to take their copy-books home. 
 The copy-books were dirty, torn, and badly written. R., 
 a very conscientious mathematician, asked for paper and 
 began copying his history. Everyone liked the idea. 
 ' Give me, too, a piece of paper, give me a copy-book ' 
 and all went in for caligraphy, a fashion which lasts in 
 the higher standard even to-day. . . . Almost every 
 one of us, when a small boy, was compelled to use bread 
 at the table a thing which somehow we did not like. 
 Now we ourselves are fond of eating bread. Almost 
 everyone of us used to be compelled to hold the pen 
 
234 TOLSTOY 
 
 with straightened fingers, but we all held it with fingers 
 crooked, as they were too short. Now, however, we 
 stretch out our fingers. Query: what did they so 
 torment us for when it was bound to happen of itself 
 as soon as it became necessary ? Will not this fondness 
 of and demand for knowledge in everything else also 
 come off in time by itself? 
 
 In the first and second standards the choice of subjects 
 for composition is left to the scholars themselves. The 
 favourite subjects with these standards is the story of the 
 Old Testament, which they write two months after it has 
 been told to them by the teacher. The same mistake is 
 being committed here as in all other branches of teach- 
 ing : the teacher thinks the easiest to be the most simple 
 and general, whilst for the scholar the easiest is the 
 complex and vivid. Almost every teacher, being guided 
 by this notion, gives as the subject for the first composi- 
 tion the definition of a table or of a chair, and is unable 
 to perceive that in order to define a table or a chair, one 
 must have attained a high level of philosophical and 
 dialectical development, and that the same scholar who 
 sheds tears over the composition on a chair will excel- 
 lently depict the feelings of kindness and enmity, the 
 meeting of Joseph with his brothers, or a fight with his 
 chums. As subjects for composition they would natur- 
 ally select some description of events, their attitude to- 
 wards some persons, or simply an account of tales heard. 
 
 The teacher's chief art in teaching the language and 
 his chief exercise with this end, when he teaches the 
 children to write compositions, is to give proper subjects, 
 and not so much to give, but to allow a good choice of 
 those subjects, as well as to fix the size of the composition 
 
EDUCATION 235 
 
 and to show the first principles of writing it. Every 
 artistic word, whether it belongs to Goethe or to Fedka, 
 differs from an unartistic one solely by the fact that it 
 gives rise to an endless number of thoughts, images, and 
 interpretations. 
 
 A healthy child is born into the world, satisfying com- 
 pletely those demands of absolute harmony as regards 
 truth, beauty, and supreme good which we possess within 
 us. ... At all times and in all countries a child is re- 
 presented as the embodiment of innocence, purity, truth, 
 beauty, and good. ' Man is born perfect ' is a good word 
 spoken by Russians . . . and each subsequent step, each 
 subsequent hour threatens to disturb this harmony and 
 puts off the hope of ever restoring it. ... Our ideal is 
 behind us, not before. Education demoralises men, not 
 corrects. The more a child is demoralised, the less we 
 have to educate him, the more he stands in need of 
 freedom. To teach and educate a child is an impossible 
 and stupid thing, for the simple reason that he stands 
 nearer than I, nearer than all adults, to that ideal of 
 truth, beauty, and good to which I, in my pride, wish to 
 raise him. The consciousness of this ideal is stronger 
 with him than with me. What he requires from me is 
 only material to complete himself harmoniously and 
 thoroughly. The School at Fairfield. 
 
 When I reflected I came to the conclusion that what 
 we term education is a deceit. The common people call 
 education fashionable dress, smart conversation, white 
 hands, and a certain degree of cleanliness. Of such a 
 man they say, when distinguishing him from others, that 
 he is an educated man. In a little higher circle, men by 
 education denote the same things, but add playing on 
 
236 TOLSTOY 
 
 the piano, the knowledge of French, good Russian spell- 
 ing, and still greater cleanliness. In the still higher 
 circle, education consists of all this, with the addition of 
 English, and a diploma from a high Government estab- 
 lishment, and a still greater degree of cleanliness. But 
 in all these shades education is in substance quite the 
 same. It consists in those forms and various kinds 
 of information which separate a man from his fellow- 
 creatures. Its object is the same as that of cleanliness : 
 to separate us from the crowd, in order that they, hungry 
 and cold, may not see how we feast. 
 
 We, priests of art and science, are most wretched 
 deceivers, who have much less right to our position than 
 the most cunning and depraved priests ever had. Pagan 
 priests, the clergy, as well Russian as Roman Catholic, 
 however depraved they may have been, had rights to 
 their position, because they professed to teach men about 
 life and salvation. And we, who have cut the ground 
 from under their feet, and proved to men that they were 
 deceivers, we have taken their place, and not only do not 
 teach men about life, we even acknowledge that there is 
 no necessity for them to learn. We suck the blood of 
 the people, and for this we teach our children Greek and 
 Latin grammars in order that they also may continue the 
 same parasitic life which we are living. What Then is 
 to be Done ? 
 
 We have become so accustomed to the religious lie 
 that surrounds us that we do not notice all the atrocity, 
 stupidity, and cruelty with which the theology of the 
 orthodox Church is permeated. We do not notice it, 
 but children do, and their souls are irreparably maimed 
 by this teaching. We have but clearly to understand 
 
EDUCATION 237 
 
 what we are really doing when we teach children this so- 
 called religion, in order to be appalled by the dreadful 
 crime thus perpetrated. ... An innocent child inquires 
 about those fundamental truths by which man should be 
 guided in life. We answer his question with a coarse, 
 incoherent, often simply stupid and, above all, cruel 
 Jewish legend, which we repeat either in its original 
 form or, worse still, in our own words. We tell him 
 assuring him that this is the sacred truth that which, as 
 we are well aware, is impossible, and has for us no mean- 
 ing. . . . We imagine there is no harm in this, and 
 even that it is useful to the child; and we listen with 
 pleasure as he repeats all these horrors, and do not 
 realise the dreadful distortion imperceptible to us be- 
 cause it is spiritual that is thereby taking place in the 
 child's soul. We think that the soul of a child is a clear 
 board on which we may write all we choose. But this 
 is not the case. The child has a vague consciousness 
 of the cause of his existence, its object, and the duties of 
 man. ... It seems unimportant to us, and yet the 
 teaching to children of this so-called religion which is 
 taking place among us is the most dreadful crime we 
 can possibly imagine. Torture, murder, the violation of 
 children are nothing in comparison with this crime. 
 
 The Government, the ruling classes, those in power, 
 stand in need of this fraud. Whereas those who desire, 
 not the maintenance of the present false social organisa- 
 tion, but, on the contrary, its reform, and, above all, 
 those who desire the welfare of the children with whom 
 they come in contact, should endeavour with all their 
 might to deliver children from this dreadful fraud. 
 
 If I now had to transmit to a child the substance of 
 
238 TOLSTOY 
 
 the religious teaching I consider true, I should say to 
 him that we have come into this world and live in it, not 
 according to our own will, but according to the will of 
 that which we call God, and that it will, therefore, be 
 well with us only when we fulfil this will. This will is 
 that we should all be happy; and for all to be happy 
 there is but one means : each must act towards others as 
 he would wish that they should act towards him. As to 
 the questions about how the world came into existence, 
 and what awaits us after death, I would answer to the 
 first by the acknowledgment of my ignorance, and of the 
 anomaly of such a question (in all the Buddhist world 
 no such question exists) ; and to the second I would 
 answer by the conjecture that the will of Him who called 
 us into this life for our welfare leads us somewhere 
 through death probably for the same purpose. The 
 Religious Education of the Young. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 I. THE NEW LIFE-CONCEPTION 
 
 THE birth of the life-conception, which always takes 
 place when mankind enters upon new conditions, and its 
 subsequent activities, is what we call religion. Religion 
 is not, as science regards it, a phenomenon which 
 formerly travelled hand in hand with the development 
 of mankind, and which has since been left behind ; on 
 the contrary, it is a phenomenon inherent to human 
 existence itself, and never more distinctly manifested 
 than at the present day. In the second place, religion 
 defines future rather than past activities, therefore it is 
 evident that an investigation of the phenomena of the 
 past can by no means touch the essence of religion. 
 The longing to typify the forces of nature is no more the 
 essence of religion than is the fear of those same forces, 
 or the need of the miraculous and its outward mani- 
 festations, as the scientists suppose. The essence of 
 religion lies in the power of man to foreknow and to 
 point out the way in which mankind must walk. It is a 
 definition of a new life which will give birth to new 
 activities. This faculty of foreknowledge concerning 
 the density of humanity is more or less common, no 
 doubt, to all people; still from time to time a man 
 appears in whom the faculty has reached a higher 
 239 
 
2 4 o TOLSTOY 
 
 development, and these men have the power clearly and 
 distinctly to formulate that which is vaguely conceived 
 by all men, thus instituting a new life-conception from 
 which is to flow an unwonted activity, whose results will 
 endure for centuries to come. 
 
 Thus far there have been three of these life-concep- 
 tions; two of them belong to a bygone era, while the 
 third is of our own time and is called Christianity. It 
 is not that we have merged the various conceptions of 
 the significance of life into three arbitrary divisions, but 
 that there really have been but three distinct conceptions, 
 by which the actions of mankind have been influenced, 
 and save through these we have no means of compre- 
 hending life. These three life-conceptions are firstly, 
 the individual or animal ; secondly, the social or pagan ; 
 and thirdly, the universal or divine. According to the 
 first of these, a man's life is his personality, and that 
 only, and his life's object is to gratify his desires. 
 According to the second, his life is not limited to his 
 own personality ; it includes the sum and continuity of 
 many personalities of the family, of the race, and of 
 the State, and his life's object is to gratify the will of the 
 communities of individuals. And according to the third 
 his life is confined neither to his personality nor to that 
 of the aggregate of individuals, but finds its significance 
 in the eternal source of all life in God Himself. These 
 three life-conceptions serve as the basis for the religions 
 of every age. . . . History is but the transcript of the 
 gradual transition from the animal life-conception of the 
 individual to the social, and from the social to the 
 divine. The history of the ancients for thousands of 
 centuries, culminating in that of Rome, is the history of 
 the evolution from the animal life-conception of the 
 
THE NEW LIFE-CONCEPTION 241 
 
 individual to that of society and the State. From the 
 advent of Christianity and the fall of Imperial Rome, we 
 have the history of that change which is still going on 
 from the social to the divine life-conception. 
 
 The distinction between the Christian doctrine and 
 those which preceded it may be thus defined. The 
 social doctrine says : Curb thy nature (meaning the 
 animal nature alone), subject it to the visible law of 
 the family, of society, and of the State. Christianity 
 says : Live up to thy nature (meaning the divine nature) ; 
 make it subject to nothing, neither to thine own animal 
 nature, nor to that of another, and then thou shalt attain 
 what thou seekest by subjecting thine outward per- 
 sonality to visible laws. The Christian doctrine restores 
 to man his original consciousness of self, not the animal 
 self, but the God-like self, the spark of divinity, as the 
 son of God, like unto the Father, but clothed in a 
 human form. This consciousness of oneself as a son 
 of God, whose essence is love, satisfies at once all those 
 demands made by the man who professes the social life- 
 conception for a broader sphere of love. Again, in the 
 social life-conception, the enlargement of the domain of 
 love was a necessity for the salvation of the individual ; 
 it was attached to certain objects, to oneself, to one's 
 family, to society, and to humanity. With the Christian 
 world-conception love is not a necessity, neither is it 
 attached to any special object ; it is the inherent quality 
 of a man's soul ; he loves because he cannot help loving. 
 The Christian doctrine teaches to man that the essence 
 of his soul is love; that his well-being may be traced, 
 not to the fact that he loves this object or that one, 
 but to the fact that he loves the principle of all 
 things God, whom he recognises in himself through 
 
 Q 
 
242 TOLSTOY 
 
 love, and will by the love of God love all men and all 
 things. 
 
 The principal reason of all the misconceptions of the 
 teaching of Christ is that men look upon it as one that 
 may be accepted or rejected without any special change 
 in one's life. . . . The universal brotherhood of man, 
 the equality of races, the abolition of property, the 
 anomalous doctrine of non-resistance, all these require- 
 ments of the Christian religion seem to us impossibilities. 
 But in olden times, thousands of years ago, not only the 
 requirements of the State, but even those of the family, 
 as, for instance, the obligation of parents to feed their 
 children, of children to support their aged parents, and 
 that of conjugal fidelity, seemed equally impossible. 
 And still more unreasonable seemed the demands of 
 the State, requiring citizens to submit to established 
 authority, to pay taxes, to perform military duty in 
 defence of their country, etc. . . . The time will come, 
 and it is already near at hand, when the Christian 
 foundations of life equality, brotherly love, community 
 of goods, non-resistance of evil by violence will seem 
 as natural and simple as the foundations of family, social, 
 and State life appear to us at the present time. The 
 Kingdom of God is Within You. 
 
 To understand philosophy and science one needs 
 study and preparation, but neither is required for the 
 understanding of religion. . . . An almost illiterate 
 sectarian peasant in Russia, without the slightest mental 
 effort, achieves the same conception of life as was 
 accomplished by the greatest sages of the world. You 
 may ask : In what, then, does the essence of this un- 
 scientific and unphilosophical knowledge consist? I 
 
THE NEW LIFE-CONCEPTION 243 
 
 can only reply that as religious knowledge is that which 
 precedes, and upon which is founded, every other know- 
 ledge, it cannot be defined, there being no means of 
 definition in existence. In theological language this 
 knowledge is called revelation. And this word, if we do 
 not give it any mystic meaning, is quite accurate, be- 
 cause this knowledge is not acquired by study, nor by 
 the efforts of individuals, but through the reception by 
 them of the manifestation of the Infinite Mind, which 
 little by little discloses itself to men. . . . The qualities 
 which give to some the power of receiving the rising 
 truth are no special activities of the mind, but, on the 
 contrary, are rather passive qualities of the heart, seldom 
 corresponding to a great and inquisitive intellect. Re- 
 jection of the vanities of the world, a sense of one's 
 material frailty, and of truthfulness, are what we observe 
 in every founder of a religion, none of whom have been 
 distinguished by philosophical or scientific acquirement. 
 
 So I answer your first question, as to what I under- 
 stand by the word ' religion,' thus Religion is a certain 
 relation of man to the eternal, infinite universe, its origin 
 and source. Out of this reply to your first question 
 follows naturally that to the second. If religion is a 
 definite relation of man to the universe which determines 
 the meaning of his life, morality is the index and explana- 
 tion of man's activity which naturally flows from one or 
 other perceived relation. And as we recognise only two 
 of these perceptions, if we include the pagan-social as 
 the enlargement of the personal relation, or three, if we 
 consider it apart, so there exist but three moral teachings : 
 the primitive , savage, individualistic ; the pagan-family- 
 State or social; and the Christian or godly, teaching man's 
 subservience to the universe or to God. 
 
244 TOLSTOY 
 
 At the present time most men only imagine they pro- 
 fess Christianity and hold the Christian morality, but in 
 reality they follow this family-State morality of paganism. 
 But it is from the third conception of man's relation to 
 the universe that there arises the loftiest morality known 
 to man the Pythagorean, Stoic, Buddhist, Brahmin, and 
 Taoist in their best aspects, and the Christian teaching 
 in its real sense, which demands the remmciation of the 
 individual will, and of the welfare, not only of the indi- 
 vidual, but of family, society, and State, in the name of 
 the fulfilment of His will who gave us the existence which 
 o^{r consciousness has disclosed. Religion and Morality. 
 
 II. THE PLACE OF ETHICS 
 
 Morality is included in the explanation of life which 
 religion offers us and therefore cannot possibly be 
 divorced from it. ... Huxley tries to prove that the 
 struggle for existence does not violate morality, and that, 
 alongside the acceptance of the law of this struggle as 
 the fundamental law of existence, morality may not only 
 exist, but may improve. Mr Huxley's article is full of 
 a variety of jokes, verses, and general views upon the 
 religion and philosophy of the ancients, and therefore is 
 so shock-headed and entangled that only with great pains 
 can one arrive at the fundamental idea. . . . Social 
 progress exists which tends to suspend the cosmic 
 process and to replace it by another an ethical one, 
 the object of which is no longer the survival of the 
 { fittest,' but of the ' best ' in the ethical sense. Whence 
 came this ethical process Mr Huxley does not explain. . . . 
 To assert that social progress produces morality is equi- 
 valent to saying that the erection of stoves produces heat. 
 Morality proceeds from religion, and social forms of life 
 
THE PLACE OF ETHICS 245 
 
 produce morality only when into these forms are put the 
 results of religious influence on humanity. . . . Ethical 
 treatises not founded on religion, only try to counterfeit 
 the natural outflux of religion. Ordinances of lay morality 
 not founded upon religious teaching are similar to the 
 actions of a man who, being ignorant of music, should 
 take the conductor's seat before the orchestra, and begin 
 to wave his arms before the musicians who are perform- 
 ing. The music might continue a little while by its own 
 momentum, and from the previous knowledge of the 
 players, but it is evident that the mere waving of a stick 
 by a man who is ignorant of music would not only be 
 useless, but would inevitably confuse the musicians and 
 disorganise the orchestra in the end. The same dis- 
 order is beginning to take place in the minds of the 
 men of our time, in consequence of the attempts of 
 leading men to teach people morality not founded on 
 that loftiest religion which is in process of adoption, and 
 is in part adopted by Christian humanity. . . . The 
 attempts to found a morality independent of religion are 
 like the actions of children when, wishing to move a 
 plant which pleases them, they tear off the root which 
 does not please and seems unnecessary to them, and 
 plant it in the earth without the root. Without a 
 religious foundation there can be no true, unsimulated 
 morality, as without a root there can be no true plant. 
 Religion and Morality. 
 
 It is true that, on the one hand, man is an animal and 
 cannot cease to be an animal while he lives in the flesh 
 but, on the other hand, he is a spiritual being, rejecting 
 all the demands of the animal in man. During the first 
 period of his life man lives without consciousness of 
 living; hence it is not he that lives, but through him 
 
246 TOLSTOY 
 
 lives that power of life which lives in all we know. Man 
 only begins to live himself when he becomes conscious 
 that he lives. He becomes conscious that he lives when 
 he knows that he desires welfare for himself and that 
 other beings have the same desire. This knowledge is 
 given him by the awakening in him of reason. Having 
 found out that he lives and desires welfare for himself, 
 and that other beings have the same desire, man in- 
 evitably also discovers that the welfare he desires for his 
 own separate being is unattainable, and that, instead of 
 the welfare he desires, unavoidable suffering and death 
 are awaiting him. Man desires to be either a beast or 
 an angel, but he can be neither the one nor the other. 
 And here we come to the solution of this contradiction 
 given by the Christian teaching. It tells man that he is 
 neither a beast nor an angel, but an angel being born 
 of a beast a spiritual existence being born of an animal 
 one and that all our life in this world is naught else 
 but this process of birth. 
 
 As soon as man is born to reasonable consciousness 
 this consciousness tells him that he desires welfare ; and 
 his reasonable consciousness being born in his separate 
 being, it seems to him that his desire for welfare relates 
 to that separate being. But that same reasonable con- 
 sciousness which showed him himself as a separate being 
 desiring welfare for himself, shows him also that this 
 separate being is incompatible with that desire for welfare 
 and life with which he associates it. He sees that this 
 separate being can have neither welfare nor life. c What, 
 then, constitutes true life?' he asks himself; and he 
 perceives that there is true life neither in himself nor in 
 those beings that surround him, but only in that which 
 desires welfare. And, having discovered this, man 
 
GOD 247 
 
 ceases to regard his own isolated bodily and mortal 
 being as himself, but regards as himself that being 
 (inseparable from others, spiritual, and therefore not 
 mortal) which is disclosed to him by his reasonable 
 consciousness. This constitutes the birth in man of the 
 new spiritual being. 
 
 The clearer and firmer reason becomes the more 
 clearly it appears, as soon as he is conscious of him- 
 self, that the true self oi man is not his body (which is 
 devoid of true life), but this very desire for welfare the 
 desire for the welfare of all that exists, *>., universal 
 welfare. The desire for universal welfare is that which 
 gives life to all that does exist ; it is that which we call 
 God. So that the being disclosed to man in his con- 
 sciousness, this being that is coming to life, that which 
 gives life to all that exists, is God. The Christian 
 Teaching. 
 
 III. GOD 
 
 God is for me that after which I strive that in striving 
 after which consists my life, and who therefore for me 
 is; but is necessarily such that I cannot comprehend 
 or name Him. If I understood Him, I should have 
 reached Him, and there would be nothing to strive after ; 
 there would be no . life. But all this seems a contradic- 
 tion : though I cannot understand nor name Him, yet at 
 the same time I know Him and the direction towards 
 Him, and even of all my knowledge this is the most 
 certain. . . . What is still more strange is that to know 
 Him more and better than I do at present is not 
 my desire now in this present life, and is not necessary. 
 . . . I have only to add that the pronoun 'He' 
 
248 TOLSTOY 
 
 somewhat destroys my idea of God, somewhat diminishes 
 Him. 
 
 God is All, that infinite All of which I am conscious 
 of being a part, and therefore all in me is encompassed 
 by God, and I feel Him in everything. . . . Somehow, 
 while praying to God, it became clear to me that God is 
 indeed a real Being, Love is that All which I just touch, 
 and which I experience in the form of love. 
 
 One should do as the Spirit-Wrestlers do bow down 
 to the ground before every man, remembering that in 
 him is God. If to bow physically is impracticable, we 
 should at all events do so spiritually. 
 
 This is what has happened to me : I began to think 
 more and more abstractly about the problems of life. . . . 
 And the Devil ensnared me, and it began to enter 
 my mind that it is possible, and especially desirable 
 for union with the Chinese Confucians, with the Budd- 
 hists, and our own atheists and agnostics, altogether to 
 avoid this conception. I thought it was possible to 
 restrict oneself to the conception and acknowledgment 
 of that God only which is in me, without acknowledging 
 any God apart from that without acknowledging the 
 one who has implanted in me a particle of Himself. 
 And, strange to say, I suddenly began to feel dull, 
 depressed, and alarmed. I did not know the cause of 
 this, but I felt that I had suddenly undergone a dreadful 
 spiritual fall, had lost all spiritual joy and energy. And 
 then only did I comprehend that this had happened 
 because I had deserted God. And I began to think, 
 and, strange to say, to guess whether there be a God or 
 not ; and I found Him, as it were, afresh. ... It is as 
 
GOD 249 
 
 if I had been within a hair's-breadth of losing, nay, had 
 thought that I had actually lost, the Being dearest to me ; 
 and yet had not so lost Him but had only realised His 
 priceless worth. . . . Perhaps this is what some call the 
 'living God'j if that be so, then I did very wrongly 
 towards them in not agreeing with but contradicting 
 them. 
 
 There is not one believing man to whom moments of 
 doubt do not come doubt of the existence of God. 
 And these doubts are not harmful ; on the contrary, they 
 lead to a higher understanding of God. We entirely 
 believe in God only when He discloses Himself afresh 
 to us. 
 
 One should never go to God, as it were, ' on purpose.' 
 Coming to God is something like getting married : one 
 should do it only when one would be glad not to come to 
 Him, or not to get married, but cannot help doing so. 
 Not that I would tell a man : ' Go purposely into tempta- 
 tions ' ; but to him who formulates the question thus : 
 ' Well, and is it certain that I will not lose by going to 
 God instead of to the devil ? ' I would cry out as loud as 
 I can, * Go, go to the devil, by all means to the devil ! ' 
 It is a hundred times better to get well scalded against 
 the devil than to keep on standing at the cross roads, or 
 insincerely going to God. 
 
 One of the superstitions that most confuse our meta- 
 physical conceptions is the superstition that the world 
 was created, that it arose out of nothing, and that there 
 is a God-Creator. In reality we have no ground for 
 imagining a God-Creator, nor any necessity. A Creator, 
 a Providence, is incompatible with the Christian God- 
 
2 5 o TOLSTOY 
 
 Father, God-Spirit. The God who is Love, a particle of 
 whom lives in me, constitutes my life ; and the manifesta- 
 tion and avocation of this particle constitutes the mean- 
 ing of my life. God the Creator is indifferent, and allows 
 suffering and evil. God the Spirit delivers from suffering 
 and evil, and is always perfect welfare. 
 
 The moral law, being founded on phenomena of life, 
 will always be local, temporary, casual, and, above all, 
 doubtful. ... No temporary law, not founded upon the 
 relation to the infinite, can ever be certain. Only such a 
 relation to the Universe, to God, as gives a certain con- 
 tinual direction of conduct can be the basis of morality. 
 
 Nothing better proves the existence of God than the 
 attempts of the evolutionists to accept morality and 
 deduce it from the struggle for existence ... to admit 
 in the form of morality that same God whom they have 
 excluded from their view of life. The other day a 
 Frenchman asked me, ' Would it not be sufficient to 
 base morality upon righteousness and beauty ? ' again 
 that same God whom they are afraid to name. 
 
 I like to address God. If there were no God, the call 
 into empty space were in itself good. From such an 
 appeal, all those weaknesses of vanity, self-complacency, 
 self-interest, from which it is hardly possible to be free 
 when appealing to men, are absent. So help me, 
 Father ! 
 
 It is said that God should be conceived as a per- 
 sonality. This is a great misunderstanding ; personality 
 is limitation. Man feels himself a personality only 
 because he is in contact with other personalities. If he 
 
SINS AND SNARES 251 
 
 were alone, he would not be a person. These two con- 
 ceptions the external world (other beings), and our own 
 personality mutually define one another. If there were 
 not the world of other beings, man would not be con- 
 scious of his own personality, nor realise the possibility 
 of the existence of other beings. And therefore a man 
 in the world cannot conceive himself otherwise than as a 
 person. But how can we say of God that He is a 
 person? Herein lies the root of anthropomorphism. 
 We can only say of God that which Mahomet and 
 Moses said : that ' He is One.' But there can be no 
 notion of number in relation to God, therefore this 
 implies not that He is one numerically, but that He is 
 one-centred : not a conception, but a being, that which 
 the orthodox call ' the living God ' in contrast to the 
 pantheistic God ; that is, the highest spiritual being who 
 lives in all. He is one in the sense that He exists as a 
 being who can be addressed; that is, that there is a 
 relation between me, a limited personality, and God, un- 
 fathomable but existing. We know God as a single 
 being, we cannot know Him otherwise, and yet we can- 
 not realise one single being as pervading all. In this we 
 find the chief incomprehensibleness of God. If God be 
 not One, then He becomes diffused, non-existent, whereas 
 if He be One, then we involuntarily represent Him to 
 ourselves as a personality, and He is no longer the Higher 
 Being, the All. And, nevertheless, to know God, to lean 
 on Him, we are forced to conceive Him both as per- 
 vading all, and at the same time as One. Thoughts on 
 God. 
 
 IV. SINS AND SNARES 
 
 The obstacles that hinder the manifestation of love 
 by man are (i) his body its separateness from other 
 
252 TOLSTOY 
 
 beings and (2) the fact that, beginning his life with 
 infancy, during which period he lives only for the animal 
 life of his separate being, he cannot later on, even when 
 reason is awakened, altogether disentangle himself from 
 desiring the welfare of his separate being, and so com- 
 mits acts opposed to love. Love, the desire for 
 universal welfare, in its efforts towards its own mani- 
 festation, meets with obstacles in man's body largely 
 because reason, which sets love free, wakes in man, 
 not at his first appearance on earth, but considerably 
 later, when he has already developed habits of animal 
 life. 
 
 For the solution of the contradiction of life, according 
 to the Christian teaching, it is necessary neither to 
 destroy the life of the separate being (which would be 
 contrary to the will of God, who has sent it), nor to 
 submit to the demands of the animal life of the separate 
 being, i.e. t to act in opposition to the spiritual element 
 which constitutes the true ( self ' of man ; but in that 
 body which encloses the true self of man to serve God 
 alone. The true 'self of man, the infinite love which 
 lives within him, always tending to increase, and con- 
 stituting the essence of his life, is enclosed within the 
 limits of the animal life of the separate being and tends 
 always to liberate itself from it. This liberation of the 
 spiritual being from the animal individuality, this birth 
 of the spiritual being, constitutes the true life of man, 
 individual and collective. Love in every separate man 
 and in all mankind is like steam confined in a boiler; 
 the steam expands, drives the pistons, and performs the 
 work. As, in order that the steam may do its work, 
 there must be the resistance of the boiler, so also, 
 that love may accomplish its work, there must be the 
 
SINS AND SNARES 253 
 
 resistance caused by the limits of the separate being 
 which encloses it. 
 
 Having in childhood acquired habits connected with 
 the personal life of his separate being, and having also 
 these same h .bits of personal life transmitted to him by 
 tradition from his ancestors, every man is always liable 
 to sins, obstacles to the manifestation of love.* There 
 are three kinds of sins : (a) Sins which proceed from 
 the ineradicable tendency of man towards his own 
 personal welfare while living in the body innate ; natural 
 sins, (b) Sins which proceed from the traditions of 
 the institutions and customs directed to the increase 
 of the welfare of separate persons traditional, social 
 sins. (c) Sins which proceed from the tendency of 
 individual man towards the greater and greater aug- 
 mentation of the welfare of his separate being -personal, 
 artificial sins. 
 
 There are six sins or obstacles to the manifestation of 
 love in man : (a) The sensual sin, which consists in 
 preparing for oneself pleasure by the satisfaction of 
 one's needs, (b) The sin of idleness, which consists 
 in liberating oneself from the labour necessary to the 
 satisfaction of one's needs. (c) The sin of avarice, 
 which consists in acquiring for oneself power to satisfy 
 one's needs in the future, (d) The sin of ambition, 
 which consists in subjugating to oneself one's fellow- 
 creatures, (e) The sexual sin, which consists in 
 arranging for oneself pleasure from sexual instinct. 
 (f) The sin of intoxication, which consists in producing 
 
 * The translator points out that Tolstoy uses words such as sin, 
 snare, prayer, etc., not in the conventional orthodox sense, but in 
 a sense which he usually defines at the outset, and adheres to. 
 
254 TOLSTOY 
 
 artificial excitement of one's physical and mental 
 faculties. 
 
 When a man eats or drinks, not being hungry ; when 
 he dresses, not for the purpose of protecting his body 
 from the cold; when he builds a house, not for the 
 purpose of sheltering himself from the weather; but 
 does these things in order to increase the pleasure 
 arising from satisfying his needs, he commits innate 
 sensual sin. When a man who has been born and bred 
 in habits of superfluity in drink, food, dress, and lodg- 
 ing, continues to maintain these habits and to profit by 
 the superfluity he possesses, such a man commits tradi- 
 tional sensual sin. When a man, already living in 
 luxury, invents additional, new, and pleasanter means of 
 satisfying his needs, such as are not used by those 
 around him ; when he introduces new and more refined 
 foods and drinks in place of his former simple fare, 
 new, finer clothing in place of the former clothing which 
 sufficed to cover his body; builds another house with 
 new adornments in place of the former small, simple 
 one and so on, such a man commits personal sensual 
 sin. 
 
 The fact that a man cannot do everything for himself, 
 and that division of labour often improves and facilitates 
 work, cannot justify a man in liberating himself either 
 from work in general, or from heavy work in favour of 
 light work. Every product of labour which a man uses 
 demands corresponding labour from him, not mitigation 
 of his labour, nor complete liberation from it. The sin 
 of idleness, innate, traditional, or personal, consists in 
 man relinquishing his own work and profiting by the 
 labour of others, the reverse of what he was intended to 
 
SINS AND SNARES 255 
 
 do, since true welfare is obtained only by service of 
 others. Besides, the man who acts thus fails to obtain 
 even that pleasure which he seeks, as, the enjoyment of 
 rest being attained only after work, the less work the less 
 enjoyment from rest. 
 
 The instinct of the continuation of the race the 
 sexual instinct is innate in man. In the animal con- 
 dition he fulfils his destiny by satisfying this instinct, 
 and in so fulfilling it finds welfare. But with the 
 awakening of consciousness it appears to man that the 
 gratification of this instinct may increase the welfare of 
 his separate being; and he enters into sexual inter- 
 course, not with the object of continuing the race, but 
 to increase his personal welfare. This constitutes the 
 sexual sin. The sexual sin differs from all others in 
 this respect : that whereas in other cases a complete 
 abstinence from innate sin is impossible and only 
 a diminution is attainable, complete abstinence from 
 the sexual sin is possible. This is so because entire 
 abstinence from the satisfaction of personal needs 
 food, clothing, shelter would destroy the individual, 
 as would also deprivation of all rest, all property, all 
 struggle; but abstinence from satisfying the sexual 
 instinct does not destroy the individual. The abstin- 
 ence of one, several, or many persons from sexual inter- 
 course would not end the race, to perpetuate which is 
 the object of the sexual instinct. So that satisfaction 
 of this instinct is not obligatory upon every man ; but 
 to each individual is left the possibility of abstaining 
 from it. 
 
 Man is, as it were, allowed the choice between two 
 ways of serving God : either, by keeping free from 
 
256 TOLSTOY 
 
 married life and its consequences, he may by his own 
 life in this world himself fulfil all that God has appointed 
 to be fulfilled by man; or else, conscious of his own 
 weakness, he may transmit to the posterity he has 
 begotten, nourished and brought up, the fulfilment, or 
 at least the possibility of fulfilment, of that which he has 
 himself neglected. The sexual sin, i.e.> mistake, for the 
 man who has chosen the service of chastity, consists in 
 this : he might have chosen the highest vocation and 
 used all his powers in the service of God, and, con- 
 sequently, for the spread of love and towards the attain- 
 ment of the highest welfare, instead of which he 
 descends to a lower plane of life and deprives himself 
 of this welfare. The sexual sin or mistake for the man 
 who has chosen to continue the race will consist in the 
 fact that by depriving himself of having children, or, at 
 all events, of family relationships, he deprives himself of 
 the highest welfare of sexual life. In addition to this 
 as with the gratification of all needs those who try to 
 increase the pleasure of sexual intercourse diminish the 
 natural pleasure in proportion as they addict themselves 
 to lust. 
 
 But for the sin of idleness, one would not on the one 
 hand see men exhausted by overwork, and on the other 
 vitiated by inaction and constant amusement; men 
 would not be divided into two hostile camps the sur- 
 feited and the famished, the festive and the over- 
 burdened. Were there no sin of avarice, there would 
 be none of that violence which is committed for the sake 
 of acquiring and retaining property ; there would be no 
 theft, robbery, and consequent imprisonment, exile, penal 
 servitude, executions. Were there no sin of ambition, 
 there would be none of that enormous and useless 
 
SINS AND SNARES 257 
 
 expenditure of human energy for the purpose of subduing 
 others and of maintaining power ; there would be neither 
 the arrogance and heartlessness of the conqueror, nor 
 the obsequiousness, deceit, and hatred of the conquered ; 
 there would be no family, social, and national divisions, 
 nor the quarrels, fights, murders, and wars arising from 
 them. 
 
 Notwithstanding prohibitions and punishments, men 
 have continued, and still continue, to sin, destroying 
 their own lives and those of their fellows. This arises 
 from the fact that for the justification of sins there 
 exist false arguments, according to which there would 
 appear to be exceptional circumstances rendering sins 
 not only excusable but even necessary. These false 
 justifications may be called 'snares.' A snare (Greek, 
 1 scandalos ') signifies a trap ; and, indeed, a moral snare 
 is a trap, into which a man is enticed by the similitude 
 of good, and in which, when caught, he perishes. . . . 
 From the time when the contradiction between the 
 animal and the spiritual life was revealed to man, from 
 the time when man began to commit sins, he began also 
 to devise justifications of sins *>., snares. There have, 
 therefore, been established among men identical traditional 
 justifications or snares ; so that a man need not himself 
 devise justifications for his sins, for the snares are already 
 invented and he has but to accept them ready-made. 
 
 There are five snares which ruin men : the personal 
 snare, or snare of preparation ; the family snare, or snare 
 of the continuation of the race ; the snare of activity, or 
 utility ; the snare of fellowship, or fidelity ; and the State 
 snare, or snare of the general good. The personal snare, 
 or snare of preparation, consists in man, while committing 
 
 R 
 
258 TOLSTOY 
 
 sins, justifying himself by the consideration that he is 
 preparing for an activity which will be useful to him 
 in the future. The family snare, or snare of the con- 
 tinuation of the race, consists in a man justifying himself 
 on the ground of his children's welfare. The snare of 
 activity, or utility, consists in a man justifying his sins by 
 urging the necessity of continuing or completing some 
 work, already begun, which shall be useful to men. 
 The snare of fellowship, or fidelity, consists in the justi- 
 fication of man's sins by the consideration of the welfare 
 of those with whom he is in some special relationship. 
 The State snare, or snare of the general good, consists 
 in men justifying the sins they commit by the considera- 
 tion of the welfare of a number of people, of a nation, 
 of humanity. This snare was expressed by Caiaphas, 
 when he demanded the execution of Christ in the" name 
 of the welfare of many. 
 
 Were it not for the snares of preparation, the family 
 activity, and the State, no one, however cruel, would be 
 able, surrounded by men dying of starvation, to profit 
 by those superfluities which the rich now enjoy; and 
 the rich could never reach that condition of complete 
 physical idleness in which they now spend their dreary 
 lives, often compelling the old, the infirm, and children 
 to perform the work they require done. If it were not 
 for these snares, which justify property, men could not 
 senselessly and aimlessly spend all their vital powers in 
 accumulating property which cannot be used ; neither 
 could they, while suffering from the results of strife, call 
 it forth in others. But for the snare of fellowship there 
 would not be a tithe of the depravity that now exists, 
 nor could people so obviously and foolishly destroy 
 their mental and physical powers by intoxication, which 
 
SINS AND SNARES 259 
 
 diminishes, instead of increasing, their energy. To 
 snares are due the permanence and sanctification of sin 
 the legalisation of the destitution and oppression of 
 some and of the opulence and idleness of others, the 
 legalisation of violence, murder, war, depravity, intoxica- 
 tion and the awful stage of development to which these 
 evils have now attained. 
 
 Having freed himself from the deception inculcated 
 in childhood, avoided that of impressive ceremonies, 
 and rejected all intermediaries between himself and God, 
 man will not yet be free from religious deception and 
 capable of understanding Christ's teaching unless he 
 liberate himself from faith in the supernatural, the 
 miraculous. It is said that miracles, i.e., the super- 
 natural, are performed with the object of uniting men ; 
 but, in fact, nothing so disunites them, for every religion 
 has its own miracles and repudiates those of all others. 
 Nor can this be otherwise. The miraculous or super- 
 natural is infinitely various ; the natural only is every- 
 where and always the same. So, to escape the deception 
 of faith in the miraculous, man must acknowledge as 
 true only that which is natural, which is in accordance 
 with his reason, and must recognise as false all that 
 is unnatural that contradicts his reason knowing that 
 all that is given out as such is human deception, as 
 are various contemporary miracles, cures, raisings of the 
 dead, miraculous images, relics, the transformation of 
 bread and wine, etc., and as are the miracles related in 
 the Bible, the Gospels, and in the Buddhist, Moham- 
 medan, Laotzian, and other Scriptures. 
 
 Though freed from religious deception, and under- 
 standing Christ's teaching, man is always in danger of 
 
260 TOLSTOY 
 
 falling into snares. The essence of all snares consists 
 in this : that having awakened to consciousness, man 
 experiences the discord and suffering caused by sin, and 
 seeks to escape both, not by striving against the sin, but 
 by justifying it. So, to escape snares, man must, above 
 all, avoid lying, especially to himself; being careful not 
 so much to abstain from lying before others as to him- 
 self, i.e. t not hiding from himself the motive of his 
 actions. 
 
 There is a connection and sequence between sins by 
 which one sin engenders others, or hinders liberation 
 from them. Man cannot liberate himself from any sins 
 so long as he addicts himself to the sin of intoxication ; 
 he cannot liberate himself from the sin of ambition if he 
 yield to that of avarice, or from avarice while he 4 is 
 addicted to the sin of idleness ; he cannot free himself 
 from sexual sin if he addict himself to sensual sin and 
 that of idleness; and he cannot liberate himself from 
 ambition and avarice so long as he yields to sensual sin. 
 This does not mean that one should not strive against 
 every sin at all times, but that for success in the contest 
 one should know with which to begin, or rather with 
 which one cannot begin. It is often only this striving 
 against sins in the wrong order which causes that want 
 of success which drives men to despair. 
 
 It is only after having liberated himself from these 
 sins after having ceased to invent new means of aug- 
 menting his personal welfare that man can begin to 
 contend against the habits and traditions of sin estab- 
 lished in his particular circle. And only when he 
 has conquered these traditional sins can a man begin 
 to strive against innate ones. 
 
SINS AND SNARES 261 
 
 The reason of men educated in human society is 
 in truth never free from perversion, for every man so 
 educated inevitably undergoes the perversion of religious 
 deception. This deception consists in men of former 
 generations instilling into succeeding ones by various 
 artificial means an understanding of the meaning of life 
 founded, not upon reason, but upon blind confidence. 
 The essence of religious deception is the intentional 
 confusion of faith and credulity, and the substitution 
 
 of one for the other. 
 
 
 
 Truth needs no external corroboration, being freely 
 accepted by all to whom it is transmitted; but false- 
 hood demands special methods by which it may be 
 transmitted to men and adopted by them; and the 
 same methods to achieve this end have always been 
 made use of by men. There are five such methods : (i) 
 The misinterpretation of truth to verbally acknowledge 
 the teaching and even deify the teacher, and at the same 
 time to conceal the essence of the truth so that it may 
 confirm the old order of life ; (2) faith in the miraculous ; 
 (3) the institution of intermediaries between God and 
 man; (4) influence exerted upon man's senses; (5) 
 the inculcation of erroneous faith into children. 
 
 Sin, causing man to at times commit acts contrary to 
 his spiritual nature to love impedes his birth to the 
 new true life. Snares, by justifying sins, lead man into 
 a life of sin ; so that he not only commits certain sinful 
 acts, but, while living an animal life, does not perceive 
 it to be in contradiction to the true life. Such a 
 position is possible only when the truth is perverted by 
 religious deception. No man whose understanding is 
 not thus perverted can be blind to the falsehood of 
 
262 TOLSTOY 
 
 snares. Religious deception is, therefore, the foundation 
 of all sins and calamities of mankind. Religious 
 deception is that which is called in the Gospel * blas- 
 phemy against the Holy Ghost,' concerning which it 
 is said that it cannot be pardoned, *.*., it can never, 
 in any life, fail to be ruinous. 
 
 In order to live according to the teaching of Christ, 
 man must first of all free himself from religious deception. 
 Only after having freed himself from this can a man 
 liberate himself from the falsehood of snares ; only after 
 seeing the falsehood of snares can he free himself from 
 sins. The Christian Teaching. 
 
 V. SCRIPTURE, THE CHURCH, PRAYER 
 
 Young men, and men of the people, doubting the 
 truth of the Church teaching in which they have been 
 brought up, often come to me and ask what * my ' teach- 
 ing is, and how * I ' understand Christ's teaching. Such 
 questions always grieve, and even shock me. Christ, 
 who the Churches say was God, came on earth to reveal 
 divine truth to men, for their guidance in life. A man 
 even a plain, stupid man if he wants to give people 
 guidance of importance to them, will manage to impart 
 it so that they can make out what he means. And is it 
 possible that God, having come on earth specially to 
 save people, was not able to say what He wanted to say 
 clearly enough to prevent people from misinterpreting 
 His words, and from disagreeing with each other about 
 them ? This could not be so if Christ were God ; nor 
 even if Christ were not God, but merely a great teacher, 
 is it possible that He failed to express himself clearly. 
 For a great teacher is great just because he is able to 
 
SCRIPTURE 263 
 
 express the truth so that it can neither be hidden nor 
 obscured, but is as plain as daylight. In either case, 
 therefore, the Gospels which transmit Christ's teaching 
 must contain truth. And, indeed, the truth is there for 
 all who will read the Gospels with a sincere wish to 
 know the truth, without prejudice, and, above all, with- 
 out supposing that the Gospels contain some special 
 sort of wisdom beyond human reason. That is how I 
 read the Gospels, and I found in them truth plain 
 enough for little children to understand, as, indeed, is 
 said in the Gospels. So that when I am asked what 
 ' my ' teaching consists in, and how I understand Christ's 
 teaching, I reply : I have no teaching, but I understand 
 Christ's teaching as it is explained in the Gospels. If 
 I have written books about Christ's teaching, I have 
 done so only to show the falseness of the interpretations 
 given by the commentators on the Gospels. 
 
 To understand any book one must choose out the 
 parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is 
 obscure or confused. And from what is clear we must 
 form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work. 
 Then, on the basis of what we have understood, we may 
 proceed to make out what is confused or not quite in- 
 telligible. It is particularly necessary thus to read the 
 Gospels, which have passed through such a multiplicity 
 of compilations, translations, and transcriptions, and 
 were composed, eighteen centuries ago, by men who 
 were not highly educated, and were superstitious. . . . 
 We know how these works were written and collected, 
 and how they were corrected and translated ; and there- 
 fore not only can we not accept them as infallible 
 revelations, but we must, if we respect truth, correct 
 errors that we find in them. How to read the Gospels. 
 
264 TOLSTOY 
 
 In no place, and in no manner whatsoever, save in 
 the assertion of the Church, is it seen that either God or 
 Christ can ever have founded anything like the Church 
 in its ecclesiastical sense. . . . There is but one exact 
 definition of what is called a Church (not the imaginary 
 Church which we may desire, but the actual Church 
 which has really existed). The Church is a body of 
 men which lays claim to the exclusive possession of 
 the truth. . . . But to claim for one's self, or for any 
 body of men whatsoever, the possession of a complete 
 apprehension and practice of the doctrine of Christ is 
 in direct contradiction to the spirit of Christ's doctrine 
 itself. 
 
 However strange the statement may appear, every 
 Church, as a Church, has always been, and always must 
 be, an institution not only foreign, but absolutely hostile 
 to the doctrine of Christ. It is not without reason that 
 Voltaire called it l Tin/time' -, it is not without reason 
 that all so-called sectarians believe the Church to be 
 the Scarlet Woman prophesied by the Revelation; it 
 is not without reason that the history of the Church is 
 the history of cruelties and horrors. Between Churches 
 in the ecclesiastical sense and Christianity, not only is 
 there nothing in common except the name, but they 
 are two utterly contradictory and hostile elements. One 
 is pride, violence, self-assertion, inertia, and death. The 
 other is meekness, repentance, submission, activity, and 
 life. 
 
 The people are coming to recognise the moral, vital 
 side of Christianity more and more plainly. . . . Let 
 the Church but pause in its effort to influence the 
 masses by hypnotising men and deceiving children for 
 
THE CHURCH 265 
 
 ever so short a time, and men will comprehend the 
 doctrine of Christ, and this comprehension will do away 
 with Churches and their influence. The Kingdom of 
 God is Within You. 
 
 People who believe in the spiritual life, in their spirit- 
 ual essence, and in a spirit God, cannot believe in the 
 miraculous. ... To say that Christ rose in the body 
 implies that the senses of those people for whom he rose 
 in the body acted irregularly, and contrarily to those 
 relations of the senses which always recur and are 
 accepted by all, and therefore one can only pity the 
 diseased state of these men. But to say that Christ 
 lives spiritually in man, and that we live in others and 
 others in us, is to express the ordinary, unquestionable 
 truth comprehensible to every man who lives in the 
 spirit. That which we have indubitably ascertained 
 concerning the super-sensuous is that, in addition to 
 what we have come to know with our five senses in 
 addition to having learnt the limits of our being through 
 contact with other beings who surround us we are 
 inevitably brought to the acknowledgment of the ex- 
 istence of something uncognisable through the senses, 
 but undoubtedly existent. . . . There is, therefore, 
 something besides that which our senses give us, but 
 the existence of which we acknowledge, not because it 
 has been shown to us by any of our senses breaking 
 those laws concerning them which we have deduced 
 and accepted, but on the contrary by our being brought 
 to a recognition of the existence of this by reason ; 
 and this recognition not only does not violate the laws 
 of relationship which we have discovered, but, on the 
 contrary, institutes a yet more reasonable connection 
 between these relations. Demands of Love and Reason. 
 
266 TOLSTOY 
 
 There is one powerful means by which man may more 
 and more clearly know himself and remember who he 
 is. This means is prayer. From the earliest times it 
 has been acknowledged that prayer is necessary to man. 
 For the majority of men prayer was, and still is, an 
 appeal made to a God or Gods, with the object of pro- 
 pitiation an appeal made under certain circumstances, in 
 certain places, and in special words or acts. The Chris- 
 tian teaching knows nothing of such prayers, but regards 
 prayer as indispensable, not for avoiding material dis- 
 asters and acquiring material welfare, but for strengthen- 
 ing man in his conflict with sins. . . . Christian prayer 
 is therefore of two kinds : that which elucidates for man 
 his position in the world occasional prayer; and that 
 which accompanies his every action, bringing it to God's 
 judgment, weighing it continual prayer. The Christian 
 Teaching. 
 
 VI. THE MEANING OF LIFE 
 
 I used to think it impossible to show people their 
 mistake and sin without hurting them. ' Is it pos- 
 sible to pull out a tooth without giving pain? Yes, 
 cocaine and chloroform can allay physical suffering ; but 
 there is nothing of the kind for the soul.' Thus I 
 thought, but then immediately said to myself, 'No; 
 there is a spiritual chloroform. Here, as in other things, 
 the body has been studied thoroughly, but the soul has 
 not yet been considered. The operation of cutting off 
 a leg or an arm is done with chloroform; whereas the 
 operation of mending a man's soul is done without, and 
 it hurts. That is why it often does not cure, but only 
 causes a worse illness that of ill-will. And yet there is 
 a spiritual chloroform, and it is well known ; it is always 
 
THE MEANING OF LIFE 267 
 
 love/ And that is not all : it is possible to perform a 
 physical operation satisfactorily without chloroform, but 
 the soul is extremely sensitive, and so every operation 
 performed without the anaesthetic of love must always 
 be disastrous. The Root of the Evil. 
 
 It is easy to learn whether there is much iron in the 
 sun, and what other metals there are in the sun and the 
 stars; but it is hard, yes, frightfully hard, to discover 
 that which convicts us of immorality. The Kreutzer 
 Sonata. 
 
 Not to see the promised land towards which one has 
 led others, or contributed ever so little to leading others 
 this is the unchangeable law of true life. The more 
 genuine the work of true life, the more remote are its 
 results ; and not only remote but endless are its conse- 
 quences : therefore we cannot see them. We can foresee 
 more than our generation will witness. A house that is 
 being built we may see, and we may reach the rank of 
 general ; but we shall not witness liberation from State 
 slavery, nor even from Land slavery. This is the most 
 evident proof that life consists, not in the realisation of 
 an aim, but in the fulfilment of an embassy. 
 
 You will ask : In what does the work accomplished 
 by the life of the universe consist ? To this I will answer 
 that we cannot know it all, but can always know when we 
 contribute towards and when we oppose it. Loving rela- 
 tions towards all that lives first of all, of course, towards 
 men, the nearest of them the experience of this feeling 
 and of its stimulation in others, is an indication of one's 
 participation in the common work. The experience of 
 the feeling of enmity, hatred, and of its stimulation in 
 
268 TOLSTOY 
 
 others, is an indication of opposition to the common 
 
 work. 
 
 We cannot know God's object, if it were for this reason 
 only that it is infinite. But we do know, and can 
 always know, whether we are fulfilling His will that for 
 which we are living, which He desires of us. He holds 
 us, as it were, with reins, and we, like horses, do not 
 know whither we are going, nor wherefore; but we do 
 know, through pain, when we are going whither we 
 ought not; and by a sense of freedom, absence of re- 
 straint, when we are going where we should. . . . His 
 will is, in the first place, that we should pay in good works 
 the rent of the life given us. Good works are those 
 which increase love in men. And the work is to aug- 
 ment, cultivate, that talent, our soul, which is also given 
 us. And one cannot do one without the other. One 
 cannot do good works which increase love without aug- 
 menting one's talent, one's soul without increasing love 
 in it; and one cannot augment one's talent, increase 
 love in one's soul, without doing good to men, increasing 
 love in them. 
 
 We all think that our duty, our calling, is to fulfil 
 various works : to educate our children, accumulate a 
 fortune, write a book, discover a law of science; but 
 one thing only is necessary that life should be a com- 
 plete, good, rational work; a work not in the eyes of 
 men, leaving behind it the memory of a good life, but 
 a work before God : to present to him oneself, one's soul, 
 better than it was, nearer to Him, more submissive to 
 Him, more in conformity. To think thus above all, to 
 feel thus, is very difficult. One keeps turning off into human 
 glory. But it is possible, and necessary. Help me, God ! 
 
THE MEANING OF LIFE 269 
 
 Remember that thy life consists only in the fulfilment 
 of the will of God on earth ; but to fulfil the will of God 
 is impossible : thou canst only cultivate thy spiritual 
 essence; and cultivate it thou canst only by maintain- 
 ing purity in thy animal, humility in thy human, and 
 love in thy divine life. For the maintenance of purity, 
 privations are necessary; for humility, bad repute and 
 humiliations ; for love, the enmity of men towards thee 
 are necessary. (' And if ye love them that love you, 
 what thanks have ye?') And, therefore, that which 
 thou callest suffering, that which thou complainest of, 
 which troublest thee, which thou regrettest, art afraid of, 
 all this is naught else than either privations and pain; 
 or evil repute, insult, humiliation; or enmity of men 
 towards thee ; and^ the one, the other, and the third are 
 necessary to thee for the maintenance of purity, humility, 
 love; for the cultivation of thy spiritual essence; for the 
 service of the Kingdom of God ; for life. And, there- 
 fore, I should be not grieved by but glad of privations 
 and humiliations and enmity. 
 
 The living man is the one who advances towards that 
 which is illuminated by the lamp moving in front of him 
 and who never reaches the limit of the illuminated space, 
 since it always recedes before him. This is life, and 
 there is no other. 
 
 That which we disdain, the immediate realisation 
 in small things of the truth we know, this alone is 
 necessary. 
 
 If I were the Tsar's ambassador in Turkey, how I 
 should control myself, watch myself! But being now 
 God's ambassador in the world I am utterly careless. 
 
270 TOLSTOY 
 
 And yet a Tsar cannot be aware of all my doings, 
 whereas here it is impossible to conceal anything. 
 
 I am still thinking of the evil of choosing an external 
 object for one's life. ' Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
 and his truth, and the rest will be added unto you.' 
 Seaman, be guided by the compass which is on thy ship 
 by the tiny needle which is a thousand times smaller 
 than the ship and not by any visible object, not 
 even the stars ; all misleads, except that which is in 
 thee! 
 
 I threw a chip into a whirlpool, and observed how it 
 spun. A steamer is a similar chip, only a little bigger; 
 the world a speck; a thousand years one minute. All 
 is nothing, all that is material is nothing; one thing 
 only is real, unquestionable the law according to which 
 everything, both small and great, is accomplished the 
 will of God. 
 
 My chief work is not merely to fulfil the five com- 
 mandments, not merely to denounce property, avoid sin, 
 etc. all this is not the work, they are only the condi- 
 tions of the works, complying with which I may be 
 certain that I am realising my calling, they are the 
 forms of my influence on others. My work itself is 
 to live to impart to the world by all the means in my 
 power the element of reason. 
 
 That which appears to us as the movement of our 
 personal life is the form our life takes when we place 
 ourselves at an angle with the life of God. But when 
 we place ourselves in the same direction, then this life 
 passes through us, we ourselves remaining stationary 
 
THE MEANING OF LIFE 271 
 
 the illusion of personal life disappears and we are 
 conscious that we are, our life is, nothing else than the 
 power of God. . . . But what is this infinite power in 
 its fulness ? This is an eternal mystery, and it is not 
 necessary for me to know any more. I know only that 
 in this state death is not fearful. ' Into Thy hands I 
 commend my spirit.' The separateness of my spirit, 
 which was produced by the form through which I was 
 passing, ceases, and I unite with the all. I have lately 
 begun to feel this that when I die I shall not really 
 die, but shall live in all the rest. The Meaning of 
 Life. 
 
 In practice the theory or ideal is never perfectly ful- 
 filled; in other words, man never attains perfection, but 
 only approaches towards it. It is impossible to draw a 
 mathematically straight line all lines are but approxi- 
 mations to the ideal ; such incomplete fulfilment of the 
 ideal is the inevitable condition of life, and is not sin 
 everyone advances towards the ideal according to his 
 powers. But concession, or compromise in theory, is a 
 great sin. If I, knowing that a straight line is a mathe- 
 matical conception, try to draw one, I shall attain an 
 approximation to a straight line; but if, seeing that it is 
 impossible to draw a perfectly straight line, I decide that 
 I may deviate from the ideal of the straight line, then 
 I stray away, God knows where. It is the same with 
 moral principles. 
 
 The question of utility must be altogether set aside by 
 the Christian. No one can decide questions of utility 
 who will be benefited, and in what way ? Utility is 
 beyond our power; but what we should do for the 
 accomplishment of the Father's will this we know and 
 
272 TOLSTOY 
 
 this we must do. What you say about your activity 
 about the necessity, or rather advantage of making 
 certain compromises, simply in order that you may be 
 able to continue your activity does not convince me. 
 The most precious thing you possess, and that you are 
 able to possess, is your soul, your spiritual personality, 
 and this is also the most powerful instrument of your 
 influence over others; therefore, the lowering of your 
 spiritual personality (and every conscious compromise is 
 such a lowering) cannot, for any purpose, be advantage- 
 ous. I am so alarmed at those customary, pernicious 
 compromises, which deprive life of all its significance, 
 that I challenge this foe everywhere, and attack him, 
 especially when I hear considerations as to the apparent 
 utility we attain. 
 
 There is only one way of serving mankind. That 
 is, to become better yourself. Letters on the Personal 
 Christian Life. 
 
 VII. HEREAFTER. 
 
 When the divine essence of the soul, which is spiritual, 
 independent of time and space, enclosed in the body in 
 this life when this divine essence leaves the body, it 
 ceases to be conditioned by time or space, and therefore 
 one cannot say of this essence that it will be. It is. As 
 Christ said, ' Before Abraham was, I am.' So also with 
 us all. If we are, we always have been, and shall be. 
 We are. It is precisely the same with the question : 
 Where shall we be ? When we say where, we speak of a 
 place. But the idea of place is only caused by that 
 condition of separation from all else in which we have 
 
HEREAFTER 273 
 
 been placed. At death this separation will cease, and 
 thus for those still living in this world we shall be every- 
 where and nowhere. For us locality will not exist. 
 
 Therefore no representation of what will be after death 
 gives such an answer as will satisfy a reasonable man. 
 Nor can this be otherwise. The question is wrongly 
 formulated. Humane reason, which can work only in 
 the conditions of time and space, seeks to give an answer 
 concerning that which is outside these conditions. One 
 thing only is known to reason : that the divine essence 
 does exist, that it has been growing while in this world, 
 and that, having attained a certain extent of growth, it 
 has passed out of these conditions. 
 
 One thing alone is certain and indubitable, that which 
 Christ said when he was dying, ' Into Thy hands I com- 
 mend My spirit ' ; that is to say, at death I return 
 whence I came. And if I believe that from which I 
 have emanated to be reason and love (and these two 
 realities I know), then I shall joyously return to Him, 
 knowing that it will be well with me. Not only have I 
 no regret but I rejoice at the thought of the passage 
 which awaits me. The Christian Teaching. 
 
 THE END 
 
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