"Up till that time he had felt an aversion for their cruelty, their criminal dissimulation, their attempts upon life, their sufficiency, their selfcontentment, their insupportable vanity. But when he saw them more closely, when he saw how they were treated by the authorities, he understood that they could not be otherwise."
And he admires their high ideal of duty, which implies total self-sacrifice.
Since 1900, however, the revolutionary tide had risen; starting from the "intellectuals," it had gained the people, and was obscurely moving amidst the thousands of the poor. The advance-guard of their threatening army defiled below Tolstoy's window at Yasnaya Polyana. Three tales, published by the Mercure de France,[14] which were among the last pages written by Tolstoy, give us a glimpse of the sorrow and the perplexity which this spectacle caused him. The years were indeed remote when the pilgrims wandered through the countryside of Toula, pious and simple of heart. Now he saw the invasion of starving wanderers. They came to him every day. Tolstoy, who chatted with them, was struck by the hatred that animated them; they no longer, as before, saw the rich as "people who save their souls by distributing alms, but as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the labouring people." Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that despair which makes a man capable of anything.
"It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities and on the great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do to modern civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient civilisation."
So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:
"The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing of the curbs, the convenances and public opinion, which are so strongly developed among European peoples."
Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that the rulers and the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by cries of "Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!" Did Tolstoy still condemn them? We do not know. But when, a few days later, he saw in his own village the villagers weeping while their sheep and their samovars were seized and taken from them by callous authorities, he also cried vengeance in vain against these thieves, "these ministers and their acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy traffic, or in teaching men to murder, or condemning men to deportation, prison, or the gallows—these men, all perfectly convinced that the samovars, sheep, calves, and linen which they took from the miserable peasants would find their highest use in furthering the distillation of brandy which poisons the drinker, in the manufacture of murderous weapons, in the construction of jails and convict prisons, and above all in the distribution of appointments to their assistants and themselves."
It is sad, after a whole life lived in the expectation and the proclamation of the reign of love, to be forced to close ones eye's in the midst of these threatening visions, and to feel one's whole position crumbling. It is still sadder for one with the impeccably truthful conscience of a Tolstoy to be forced to confess to oneself that one's life has not been lived entirely in accordance with one's principles.
Here we touch upon the most pitiful point of these latter years—should we say of the last thirty years?—and we can only touch upon it with a pious and tentative hand, for this sorrow, of which Tolstoy endeavoured to keep the secret, belongs not only to him who is dead, but to others who are living, whom he loved, and who loved him.
He was never able to communicate his faith to those who were dearest to him—his wife and children. We have seen how the loyal comrade, who had so valiantly shared his artistic life and labour, suffered when he denied his faith in art for a different and a moral faith, which she did not understand. Tolstoy suffered no less at feeling that he was misunderstood by his nearest friend.