Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

Here we sit in our well-heated rooms, and this very day a man was found frozen to death on the high-road. He was frozen to death because no one would give him a night’s lodging.
We stuff ourselves with cutlets and pastry while people are dying by thousands from famine.

The children understood what he said, but it spoiled all their childish amusements and broke up their happy life.

Tolstoy was very unhappy for a period of four or five years and could see no meaning in existence. But at last he discovered a purpose in life and a religion to help him. It was really Christianity, and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount became his gospel. The life of a Russian peasant he was convinced was the example of how to live. Man, he thought, should be simple, hardworking, and kind; he should give more than he received and he should rejoice in serving others. Tolstoy saw it was no good preaching without practising, and so he tried to live like a Russian peasant. He ate very little and lived principally upon vegetables. He dressed like a peasant too, in summer in a smock and in the winter in a sheepskin coat and cap and high boots. He refused to have any one to wait on him, and did his own room. This was not easy to him, as, though he had always hated luxury, as an aristocrat he had taken certain things for granted, such as the fact that his clothes would always be folded and brushed and put away by a servant. By nature he was very untidy, and it was really an effort to him to pick up his things and keep them in order. In earlier days, when he had dressed and undressed, he let all his clothes tumble on to the floor, and there they would lie in different parts of the room until they were picked up. To see him pack his portmanteau for a journey was said to be an unforgettable sight, the confusion and disorder was something so hopeless. But now he tried to turn over a new leaf so as not to give people trouble.

Tolstoy saw the utter uselessness of preaching what you never intend to practise. He was quite determined to carry out all he asked others to do. After all it is more by the life you lead and example rather than by words that you persuade people, and Tolstoy tells a true story in this connection. It is as follows:

The Tolstoy family took into their house a dirty, homeless little boy, to teach him and to benefit him generally. “What,” asks Tolstoy, “did the boy see and learn?”

He saw Tolstoy’s own children, older than himself and of his own age, dirtying and spoiling things, breaking and spilling things, and throwing food to the dogs which seemed to the boy delicacies, expecting other people to wait on them and never doing any work themselves. Tolstoy understood then, he says, how absurd it was to take poor people into your house and educate them, when you were yourselves leading such idle, useless lives.

Tolstoy says his one desire was to hide their life from the boy; everything that he told him or tried to teach him he felt was destroyed by the example they were all setting him.

So Tolstoy tried hard to live according to his ideals, and became something like a monk but without a monk’s narrow views and superstitious beliefs. He dropped his title quite naturally, and when a peasant called him “Your Excellency,” Tolstoy replied, “I am called simply Leo Nikolayevitch,” and went on to speak of the matter in hand. Manual labor, which had always been a pleasure to him, now became a sort of religion. Every day he worked for hours at hay-making, plowing, reaping or wood-cutting as the case might be. Nothing absorbed him like mowing, and he would stand among the peasants in his smock listening with perfect happiness to the sound of scythes. Country life, labor, healthy appetite and sound sleep was his idea of a happy life.

In the winter evenings Tolstoy learned to make boots. He engaged a black-bearded shoemaker to come and teach him, and side by side they sat on two stools in a little room near Tolstoy’s study.

Tolstoy was never satisfied until he had done the job exactly as the shoemaker did it. Groaning with the effort of threading a waxed thread, he would refuse the assistance of the bearded man. “I’ll do it!—No, no—I’ll do it myself, it’s the only way to learn,” he would say.