that does not, at the first glance, appear eminently practical. A critic of modern society who has proved himself capable of entertaining more than one original idea sometimes is far from obtaining immunity from the common fate. His new ideas frequently meet a stubborn resistance from common sense, and they generally arrive at success maimed, mangled, and distorted.

I

Leo Tolstoy, of whose long life's work no one would now speak without respect, has discovered many faults in the social system, of which those who are most preoccupied with it would never have dreamed, or suggested equally undreamed-of remedies. But he has mixed fads with genuine ideas, and he is discredited as a dreamer by practical men of the world. The common criterion of a reform is its qualification for figuring in a political platform. One that is suited neither to become a party cry nor to make the program of some new association is commonly considered utopian or absurd.

Such a "utopian" reformer was Tolstoy. He spoke of himself as a Christian anarchist,' and the making of party machinery was always repellent to his instinct of political order. His mind had no natural affinity for official politics, and he early developed a rough intuitive philosophy of his own, grounded primarily in natural spirituality. As a boy of nineteen, under the influence of the radical philosophers, Rousseau, Voltaire, and other French thinkers, Tolstoy decided to leave the studies at University of Kazan without final examination and to return to his village, Yasnaya Polyana. His purpose was to devote himself to a rural life-"to work for simple, impressionable, uncorrupted people; to give them pleasure, education, and to correct their faults, which arise from ignorance and superstition; to develop their morals; to induce them to love the right." All this is a full program of social reform for improving the condition of Russian serfs! But after a few months, spent among the muzhiks, our young reformer becomes disheartened as to his plans. He is now "convinced that one cannot live by theorizing and philosophizing, but must live positively, i.e., must be a 'Cf. E. H. Schmitt, Leo Tolstoi und seine Bedeutung für unsere Kultur (Leipzig, 1901), chap. ii, p. 79.

practical man." He again enters the university (at this time of Petersburg) with a firm decision to take his degree and to enter the civil service. Again and again he fails to pass a satisfactory examination, and finally abandons the attempt, because he "does not need a university degree to be a good farmer."

For a better understanding and for more serviceable classification of Tolstoy's works we will divide his public activity into two periods. The first includes his purely literary work and lasts till 1880. In this period he is farmer and landlord, soldier and patriot, traveler and novelist. He publishes war-stories, sketches, and novels-Domestic Happiness, War and Peace, Anna Karenina. The close of his fiftieth year brings a growing sense of inward struggle. He has "gone out into the wilderness," and engaged in a terrible conflict with those specters of the mind which have always arisen to tempt prophets from their way. We have no such record of this spiritual conflict as Rousseau has given us of his valley-struggle, but the My Confession of Tolstoy was, if less boisterously triumphant, more positive and definite in character than his precursor's. After the year 1880, Tolstoy's legal and economic theories were visibly quickening in his mind. A series of publications written in that second period formed the embryo of his religious, moral, and social philosophy. Of this period are treaties with biblical titles: What Shall We Do Then (1886); Walk in the Light While There Is Light (1887); The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893); God or Mammon (1895). Of this period is his famous story The Kreuzer Sonata (1890) dealing with the sexual problem, and his tractates: The Slavery of Our Times (1900) and The End of the Age (1906), treating of labor problems and politics in general.

These remarks may somewhat explain the nature of the change which took place in Tolstoy's life in the period after 1880. He did not abandon any of the interests which had occupied him in earlier years. He still figures as an art critic, littérateur, and philosopher. But his intellectual and emotional center of gravity is shifted, with an alteration in his sense of practical morality. All his future work

2 From a letter to his brother, Sergius Tolstoy, quoted by A. Maude, The Life of Tolstoy, Vol. I (7th ed., London, 1917), chap. ii, p. 49.

really consists of the application of this morality. He endeavors to reform his own life; he renounces everything superfluous-wine, tobacco, meat and spends his time in productive work for the general welfare. Life is for him an absurd contradiction, and to paralyze this contradiction there is only one way of salvation: to renounce material pleasures, to be reborn, and to adopt love as the principle of life. Love, not in the sense of a physical preference for one above another, but a love which has as its dominating impulse the welfare of others and loving service to them rather than personal happiness as its chief end. Such love solves all the contradictions of life.*

5

Turning his attention to human intemperances and excesses, Tolstoy goes so far as to adopt asceticism as a code, and he urges others to follow his teaching. On this question he wrote several essays including the much-talked-of Kreuzer Sonata. He thinks that there are three possible relationships between the sexes: fornication, married life, and celibacy. The most important of these is celibacy. This institution was the ideal of Christianity. Christ himself never married, neither did his disciples, and he never instituted marriage. Our reformer desired to imitate Christ in everything, although it was too late for him: he had already thirteen children, and what is most curious, one of the youngest was born three years after the publication of that extravagant story! Indeed, to preach celibacy under such circumstances requires courage, even the courage of a Tolstoy! But sincerity is a high virtue; and there is something pathetic in the confession which reads: "In speaking of the manner in which the married pair ought to live, I not only do not hint at having lived or living myself as I ought to, but, on the contrary, I know from my own hard knocks how I ought to have lived only because I have not lived properly."

Cf. P. I. Birkyukov, L. N. Tolstoy. Biografiya (Berlin, 1921), Tom II, Glava XXV-xxvii.

Cf. ibid., Tom III, Glava i. Entire theory on this subject Tolstoy amplified in his work On Life, and in his scattered thoughts On the Meaning of Life (Wiener's ed., Vol. XVI, 1904).

"On the Relation between the Sexes (The Complete Works, Wiener's ed., XVIII [1904], 467).

• Ibid., p. 469.

And yet Tolstoy did not believe in celibate life at one time. In My Religion, published five years before the appearance of Kreuzer Sonata and Relations between the Sexes, he wholly adopted the teaching of St. Paul, who said that "husband and wife, having once been united, should not put one another away, and should satisfy one another in the sexual relation." Obviously this is a contradiction of his later pessimistic doctrine of abolishing marriage. But he explains to one of his disciples these apparently conflicting views in these words: "All depends on the plane in which a man finds himself if he feels he must marry, let him do so; but, if he is capable of living the celibate life, marriage is a fall, a sin."

Tolstoy's uncharitable critics have said that here we have an instance of a man who in his youth had sown wild oats and in his old age had suddenly become a soured, melancholy ascetic, and, in a sense, vindictive. But Tolstoy's gospel of the marriage problem has only one intention. He wished to show people the consequences of sexual excesses, jealousy, impure thoughts and actions; and the dreadful results of lust, vice, and luxury. He protested with utter frankness against all the institutions and customs of modern artificial society which make it hard for young men and women to live pure and honest lives. He protested against moral uncomeliness, against immodest dress, immodest dances, immodest entertainments, and indecent placards that cover our billboards and assail the eyes of the young and innocent, when the mind and the heart are most susceptible.

In devoting his pen to the fight against riches and luxury, against a complicated industrial system and so-called "high society," Tolstoy is ruthless. In a social satire, The Fruits of Enlightenment (1889), he ridicules the indolence of Russian aristocracy. He satirizes the empty, useless, and expensive pastimes of the "cultured" classes, as compared with the serious interests of the agricultural peasantry. In the Letters on the Famine he finds that the masses are not poor because they are lazy and drunken or because they have not yet had time to adopt the culture of the present. The masses are poor because we are too rich. The masses are hungry

'My Religion (Wiener's ed., Vol. XVI, 1904), chap. vi, p. 71.

'Quoted by T. S. Knowlson, Leo Tolstoy (London, 1904), chap. v, p. 125.

because we are too well fed. We buy our comforts and our luxury at the price of the sufferings of the working people.1o The education of upper classes has only one end, to be able to work in the future as little as possible and enjoy the benefits of life as much as possible.11 Our whole society, according to Tolstoy, is divided into two classes, rich and poor, exploiters and exploited.12 First are the idle and leisurely, who, though doing no work, calmly absorb other men's labors which are necessary to life. Second are the industrious and laborious, who, though doing all agricultural and other species of work, are compelled to labor for other people, and have nothing for themselves. They are enslaved and oppressed by the rich because they have no land, no means of production, and no money. From them are demanded taxes, both direct and indirect, and they are not able to pay them unless they work for others, selling their labor and their freedom.13 In our author's opinion the true cause of poverty is the accumulation of riches in the hands of those who do not produce, and are concentrated in the cities in order to enjoy and defend themselves. And the poor man comes to feed upon the snare of easy gain: by peddling, begging, swindling, or in the service of immorality.11

II

Now we come to the question, What is the way out? How shall we unravel the labor problems? Do solutions of these inquiries lie in the programs of the Liberals, of the Socialists, or some other political party? No! Tolstoy expresses his indignation and con

'Letters on the Famine (Wiener's ed., Vol. XIX, 1905), sec. v, p. 237.

10

11

Articles and Reports on the Famine, ibid., pp. 319–22.

What Shall We Do Then (Wiener's ed., Vol. XVII, 1904), chap. ix, p. 49. 12 How modern was Tolstoy in this division we see from the fact that a contemporary Labor Party in Belgium has in its political program the same division of social classes. It is said there that "all the Belgians are divided into two classes-those who are rich and have rights, and those who are poor and have burdens" (quoted by Dr. S. P. Orth in Socialism and Democracy in Europe [New York, 1913], chap. vi, sec. 2, p. 124).

13

35-36.

The Slavery of Our Times (Wiener's ed., Vol. XXIV, 1905), chap. ix, pp.

14 What Shall We Do Then (Wiener's ed., Vol. XVII, 1904), chap. xiii, pp. 73-74.