But Tolstoy says, could the meaning of renunciation, of giving up to others, be really understood, the battle would be won, and the need of force would not exist. The only crime is for man to act inhumanly to man. A change of heart is what Tolstoy pleads for, and every man and woman, he says, can do something to help, by example and having a purpose in life. “For life,” he says in a letter to his son, “is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer at times a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal affairs.”
On seeing the terrible sight of capital punishment in France, Tolstoy wrote these striking words:
When I saw the head separate from the body and how they both jumped into the box at the same moment, I understood not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed, and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad, and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do and is not progress, but is my heart and I.
Who is to be the judge of what is right or wrong? asks Tolstoy, and answers, “A man’s own soul.” A man, he says, must not fear to stand alone. Now the fear of standing alone is not always cowardice; often a man has too little confidence in himself. In answer to the promptings of his heart or conscience he will say, “Perhaps I am wrong: after all, the majority think differently from what I do; they are probably right, for what am I?” But it is very seldom that a man’s conscience will lead him astray, and if he feels that a thing is bad or cruel, he should not stifle or ignore the instinct, but, on the contrary, trust and believe in it, for it is a divine thing created in man for his own safeguarding to direct and help him through the difficult ways of life.
Tolstoy had much in common with W. L. Garrison, whom he greatly admired, and wrote a preface to a Life of him written by a Russian. For both recognized no authority but a man’s own heart and conscience, both set themselves to the task of rousing people to a better understanding by moral persuasion, both detested force.
It is easy to say that Tolstoy was vague, unpractical, and even absurd in the things he taught. Some people think he was quite mistaken; those who honestly believe in force and government by a few privileged people must naturally think so. Tolstoy was very extreme, but what he did was to give people a higher, more spiritual ideal, to show them that life may be a noble thing.
Tolstoy realized as he grew older that we cannot be perfect all at once. Therefore he says, if you cannot love another as yourself, go as far as you can in that direction; if you cannot live in complete simplicity, live rather more simply, and so on.
By degrees we may be able to get somewhere nearer Tolstoy’s ideals, especially if we believe that we are naturally good, and not, as many of us have been taught, “by nature born in sin and the children of wrath.”
D. P.
Since this was written a great change has come about in Russia, which may affect the whole of civilized Europe.