"I owe it to my faith to live in peace and gladness, and to be able also, in peace and gladness, to travel on towards death."
Reading this I am reminded of the ancient saying: "that we should call no man happy until he is dead."
Were they lasting, this peace and joy that he then boasted of possessing?
The hopes of the "great Revolution" of 1905 had vanished. The shadows had gathered more thickly; the expected light had never risen. To the upheavals of the revolutionaries exhaustion had succeeded. Nothing of the old injustice was altered, except that poverty had increased. Even in 1906 Tolstoy had lost a little of his confidence in the historic vocation of the Russian Slavs, and his obstinate faith sought abroad for other peoples whom he might invest with this mission. He thought of the "great and wise Chinese nation." He believed "that the peoples of the Orient were called to recover that liberty which the peoples of the Occident had lost almost without chance of recovery"; and that China, at the head of the Asiatic peoples, would accomplish the transformation of humanity in the way of Tao, the eternal Law.[1]
A hope quickly destroyed: the China of Lao-Tse and Confucius was decrying its bygone wisdom, as Japan had already done in order to imitate Europe.[2] The persecuted Doukhobors had migrated to Canada, and there, to the scandal of Tolstoy, they immediately reverted to the property system.[3] The Gourians were scarcely delivered from the yoke of the State when they began to destroy those who did not think as they did; and the Russian troops were called out to put matters in order. The very Jews, "whose native country had hitherto been the fairest a man could desire—the Book,"[4] were attacked by the malady of Zionism, that movement of false nationalism, "which is flesh of the flesh of contemporary Europeanism, or rather its rickety child."[5]
Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in the future.
"All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye. Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates, until the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which finally becomes a tree."[6]
But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone; glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where Resurrection was translated, and where his ideas upon "the restitution of the land to the people" were being propagated.[7] The American papers interviewed viewed him; the French consulted him on matters of art, or the separation of Church and State.[8]
But he had not three hundred disciples, and he knew it. Moreover, he did not take pains to make them. He repulsed the attempts of his friends to form groups of Tolstoyans.
"We must not go in search of one another, but we must all seek God.... You say: 'Together it is easier.'—What? To labour, to reap, yes. But to draw near to God—one can only do so in isolation.... I see the world as an enormous temple in which the light falls from on high and precisely in the middle. To become united we must all go towards the light. Then all of us, come together from all directions, will find ourselves in the company of men we did not look for; in that is the joy."[9]