"A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile obedience.[18]
"The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not obey it—that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate."[19]
At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the emotion caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic nonresistance of a people—the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in St. Petersburg, when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed itself to be shot down without a cry of hatred or a gesture of self-defence.
For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the Sectators, had been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience to the State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy of its power.[20] The absurdity of the Russo-Japanese war enabled this state of mind to spread without difficulty through the rural districts. Refusals of military service became more and more general; and the more brutally they were punished the more stubborn the revolt grew in secret. In the provinces, moreover, whole races who knew nothing of Tolstoy had given the example of an absolute and passive refusal to obey the State—the Doukhobors of the Caucasus as early as 1898 and the Georgians of the Gouri towards 1905. Tolstoy influenced these movements far less than they influenced him; and the interest of his writings lies in the fact that in spite of the criticisms of those writers who were of the party of revolution, as was Gorky,[21] he was the mouthpiece of the Old Russian people.
The attitude which he preserved, in respect of men who at the peril of their lives were putting into practice the principles which he professed,[22] was one of extreme modesty and dignity. Neither to the Doukhobors and the Gourians nor to the refractory soldiers did he assume the pose of a master or teacher.
"He who suffers no trials can teach nothing to him who does so suffer."
He implores "the forgiveness of all those whom his words and his writings may have caused to suffer."[23]
He never urges any one to refuse military service. It is a matter for every man to decide for himself. If he discusses the matter with any one who is hesitating, "he always advises him not to refuse obedience so long as it would not be morally impossible." For if a man hesitates it is because he is not ripe; and "it is better to have one soldier the more than a renegade or hypocrite, which is what becomes of those who undertake a task beyond their strength."[24] He distrusts the resolution of the refractory Gontcharenko. He fears "that this young man may have been carried away by vanity and vainglory, not by the love of God."[25] To the Doukhobors he writes that they should not persist in their refusal of obedience out of pride, but "if they are capable of so doing, they should save their weaker women and their children. No one will blame them for that." They must persist "only if the spirit of Christ is indeed within them, because then they will be happy to suffer."[26] In any case he prays those who are persecuted "at any cost not to break their affectionate relations with those who persecute them."[27] One must love even Herod, as he says in a letter to a friend: "You say, 'One cannot love Herod.'—I do not know, but I feel, and you also, that one must love him. I know, and you also, that if I do not love him I suffer, that there is no life in me."[28]
The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end can no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: "Love thy neighbour as thyself," because he finds in them a taint of egoism![29]
Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts "abstract love"?