3410 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PG 3410.W22 
 
 Greater parables of Tolsto' 
 
 3 1924 027 492 507 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924027492507 
 
THE GREATER PARABLES 
 OF TOLSTOY 
 
THE GREATER PARABLES 
 OF TOLSTOY 
 
 WITH INTERPRETATIONS 
 
 AS TOLD TO HIS CONGREGATION 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER WALSH 
 
 GILFILLAN MEMORIAL CHURCH, DUNDEE 
 AUTHOR OF "THE MORAL DAMAGE OF WAR " 
 
 LONDON 
 C. W. DANIEL 
 
 3 AMEN .CORNER, E.C. 
 i906 
 

 J:syf^'^^ 
 
 -7 ,? /• 
 
 ! / 
 
 ^.«/./.u.^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 After the manner of the Galilean and his learners, 
 the preacher gave these Parables and Interpretations 
 to his congregation, on successive Sunday evenings, 
 substantially as afterwards written out and here 
 printed. He offers them now as one suggestion 
 towards that stronger and wider use of its oppor- 
 tunities the modern pulpit is feeling after. 
 
 How far they express the preacher's own views 
 does not concern the present purpose, which is to 
 accurately condense and faithfully expound the 
 stories. He has taken no liberties with his author; 
 but whilst compelled to entirely pass over multitudes 
 of incidents, he has stated and summarised the most 
 important with painstaking fidelity, and adhered with 
 absolute veracity to the course of the narratives. 
 Neither has he wilfully tampered with his author's 
 message ; but, scrupulously ignoring the assents or 
 dissents of his own mind, has anxiously endeavoured 
 to set forth the ideas he believed to be in the mind of 
 Tolstoy. The interpreter is less likely to have misled 
 his readers, since he has for many years been a 
 sympathetic student of, and in general agreement 
 with, the writings of the greatest of modern 
 Christians. 
 
 It is with the greater boldness, therefore, that as a 
 summary of Tolstoy's social and ethical ideas, and as 
 a simple and beguiling introduction to the voluminous 
 writings themselves, the preacher offers these Parables 
 and their Interpretations. 
 
 5 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 ANNA KAR^NINA 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. A PARABLE OF LAWLESS LOVE AND LOVELESS LAW . 7 
 
 2. THE INTERPRETATION ; THE LORD'S VENGEANCE . 27 
 
 II 
 
 THE KREUTZER SONATA 
 
 1. A PARABLE OF SENSUAL LOVE, COURTSHIP, AND 
 
 MARRIAGE ...... 45 
 
 2. THE INTERPRETATION : EUNUCHS FOR THE KING- 
 
 DOM'S SAKE ...... 65 
 
 III 
 
 RESURRECTION 
 
 1 . A PARABLE OF DEATH IN LUST AND LIFE IN LOVE . 83 
 
 2. THE INTERPRETATION : UNTIL SEVENTY TIMES 
 
 SEVEN ■••... lOI 
 
 IV 
 
 WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE LIGHT 
 
 1. A PARABLE OF THE WORLD'S SLAVERY AND CHRIST'S 
 
 SERVICE , . . . . .no 
 
 2. THE INTERPRETATION : LIGHT THAT NEVER FAILS . 137 
 
I 
 
 ANNA KARENINA 
 
 I 
 
 A PARABLE OF LAWLESS LOVE 
 AND LOVELESS LAW 
 
ANNA KARENINA 
 
 A PARABLE OF LAWLESS LOVE AND 
 LOVELESS LAW 
 
 This is the story of the loveless marriage of the 
 beautiful and brilliant Anna if^rkadyevna and the 
 learned and immaculate Aleks6i Aleksandrovitch 
 Kardnin ; and of the marriageless love of Anna 
 Kar^nina and the noble and handsome Aleks^i 
 Ivanovitch Vronsky — a story of worldliness and 
 animalism, of despair and death. But through these 
 dark meshes of loveless law and lawless love are 
 woven also golden threads from the honest courtship 
 and wedlock of Konstantin Dmitridvitch Levin and 
 the Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaia — a story of search 
 for the good of life, the meaning of life, the way of 
 peace, against whose shining relief the story of sin 
 appears only more pitiful. The author's purpose 
 requires us to give a short outline of this subordinate 
 tale — this story within a story. 
 
 Konstantin Dmitri^vitch Levin — a fair - com- 
 plexioned, broad-shouldered man with curly hair — 
 was a landed proprietor, a raiser of cattle, a celebrated 
 hunter, an enormous worker, a gymnast who could 
 lift two hundred pounds with one hand, and exercised 
 himself with dumb-bells weighing forty pounds each 
 
 9 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 — the genius of Russian peasanthood glorified — child- 
 like, yet greatly a man — "worth a thousand men," 
 his friends said. This simple, strong son of Nature 
 made occasional descents upon the fashionables and 
 dilettanti of St Petersburg and Moscow ; setting their 
 jaded minds astrain with his fresh views ; exploding 
 the bookish theories of liberal professors by his 
 accounts of hand-to-hand conflicts with the fatalism, 
 conservatism, and distrust of the peasants he loved and 
 lived amongst ; smashing up their liberal affectations 
 of Western civilisation and institutions ; showing that 
 the Russian character must go its own royal way to 
 perfectness. His early love for the Princess Kitty 
 Shcherbatskafa was crossed for a time by the shadow 
 of him who afterwards quite extinguished the light of 
 Anna Kar^nina's life ; but the true and simple natures 
 of both enabled them, after long trial, to triumph 
 in a union whose homespun virtues, misunderstand- 
 ings and reconciliations, tribulations and ecstasies, 
 transitory estrangements and lasting peace, form 
 a true human contrast to the infernal drama which is 
 played alongside. The story culminates in Levin's 
 rewarded search for truth, for the meaning of life, for 
 peace of soul. To this we must, however, shortly 
 return again. Meantime we turn to the chief actors 
 and darker scenes in this tragedy of marriage without 
 love, and love without marriage. 
 
 The beauty of Anna Arkadyevna was something 
 over and above her grace and elegance, her lovely 
 face, dark curly locks, gray eyes shining through 
 their long lashes ; it seemed to arise more from her 
 abounding health and vitality ; her whole person was 
 radiant with the overflowing spirits of health, happi- 
 
 lO 
 
Anna Kar^nina 
 
 ness, and youth. Yet was there a something infernal 
 glancing occasionally through her womanly charms — 
 a veiled lightning in her smile, a conflagration on her 
 brow, a deepness in her half-shut eyes, an unexpected 
 craft and mockery on her rounded cheek; a some- 
 thing that at one time suggested a whole world of 
 complicated and poetic interest, and at another a 
 terrible and cruel attraction. At times a far-seeing 
 friend had glimpses of this, and doubted ; and Anna 
 doubted herself — doubted whether there were not a 
 moral skeleton within her fair personality, another 
 being who guided her loves and hates against her better 
 self, and whom she feared. There was awful risk and 
 jeopardyinthe scheme of the intriguing aunt who forced 
 the innocent and unsuspecting Anna upon the frigid 
 and friendless Kardnin, and joined the hand of such a 
 woman to a husband such as has now to be described. 
 
 Amongst all the officials of the Russian Govern- 
 ment no minister was more respected and influential 
 than Aleksdi Aleksandrovitch Kardnin. His reputa- 
 tion as a statesman was amongst the foremost, whilst 
 his personal character was excellent, remarkable, and 
 his integrity such that not even personal friendship or 
 kin could bend him from his honest judgment. His 
 friends, who admired but could not love, summed him 
 up as talented, learned, and something divine. 
 
 This good man, however, was unfortunate in that 
 he could not throw off the official even in his home, 
 nor lose the ministerial machine in the husband. 
 Even at the fireside and in the chamber he was for- 
 ever precise, legal, formal. He talked to his wife 
 just as he prepared reports. He delivered pedantic 
 moral discourses to her when she needed admonition, 
 wrote her official letters as if she were a committee, 
 
 II 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 30 that she felt herself more like a junior minister 
 than a wife. It would be wrong to say that Kar^nin 
 did not love his wife and only son ; but he buried the 
 affection in a box, shut the box in his heart, sealed 
 it with formality, and covered up any feeling he had 
 with a prevailing habit of irony. The result was that 
 Anna Kar^nina thought him incapable of love, felt 
 all that was vital in her crushed by his presence, and 
 was compelled to live her individual life apart from 
 him. To her it seemed that he was eaten up of the 
 world, of ambition, and — womanlike — she could not 
 understand why a man should prefer the world to 
 love. In this respect he was well summed up by a 
 shrill woman who declared that, for all his cleverness, 
 Kardnin was a blockhead ! He was anxious to live 
 only in his own wise, correct tashion, to pursue his 
 own honourable career, and not to permit his wife to 
 interrupt it. His very rectitude maddened her, though 
 she could not explain why. People said he was moral, 
 upright, religious, a Christian ; but to her he seemed 
 a mean, vile man, to whose icy perfection any wrath, 
 violence, killing, would have been preferable. "Go 
 away, go away I " she said once, in a frenzy, stricken 
 with fever, pushing him with one of her burning 
 hands ; " you are too perfect ! " 
 
 Such was the wedded life of the Kardnins for some 
 time after their only child was born ; when Anna was 
 summoned to Moscow to endeavour to effect a recon- 
 ciliation between her brother Stiva — who was presi- 
 dent of one of the courts — and his wife. Stiva 
 possessed all the health, good humour, good digestion 
 which could make a man of the world popular with 
 his household, society, and himself But this had not 
 prevented him deceiving his wife, though he loved her 
 
 13 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 and her children in his own indolent fashion, taking 
 home big pears to amuse them. Even thus he was 
 still universal favourite, he was so attractive in his 
 clean, well-perfumed, healthy and happy body, his 
 good-natured amiability; and the servants felt so 
 sorry to see him snoozing on the leathern couch in the 
 library, with his gold-embroidered slippers on. So 
 his sister Anna was sent for from St Petersburg to 
 reconcile the uncomfortable husband and the injured 
 wife, and, after such conversation with them both as 
 may be imagined, she succeeded. This was Anna's 
 first acquaintance with sin; and though it was only 
 at second-hand, who would say it did not form a 
 dangerous introduction — especially in view of her 
 own unhappy married life — and start a thought 
 which, all unconscious to herself, might be taking 
 shape in her inner being? And it was at this 
 very juncture that another fateful event happened — 
 another dark thread was slipped into the loom by 
 the Destinies. 
 
 When she alighted at the railway station at Moscow, 
 Anna met the Count Aleksdi Ivanovitch Vronsky, 
 and a baleful attraction at once made itself felt 
 between them. Count Vronsky was immensely rich, 
 handsome, officially attached to the Tsar's person, 
 one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of St 
 Petersburg. He led the luxurious and dissipated life 
 usual with wealthy officers, and conformed in all 
 respects to their artificial and monstrous code of 
 honour. Yet he had fine qualities. He was chival- 
 rous — saved a woman from drowning when a mere 
 boy ; magnanimous — wanted to give up his whole 
 fortune to his brother ; generous — thrust two hundred 
 roubles into the hand of the station-master to give 
 
 13 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 to the wife of a porter who had fallen under the 
 wheels just as Anna arrived, so that to Anna he 
 immediately became a hero. Mark that omen of the 
 man crushed to death under the wheels of the engine ; 
 we shall hear more of it ! In after days it came back 
 to them in frightsome dreams of a little old man 
 rummaging in a sack or gourd, muttering unintelli- 
 gible words, shaking it over their heads ; and therein 
 lay the terror of their dream. 
 
 Anna did not remain long in Moscow ; but long 
 enough to meet Vronsky's electric glance athwart 
 lighted staircases, and be whirled by him round 
 ballrooms in all the intoxication of a new passion. 
 Terrified at herself, she telegraphed to her husband, 
 and fled home to St Petersburg. But her fate ac- 
 companied her in the shape of Vronsky, who encoun- 
 tered her at one of the side stations, and spoke words 
 her reason feared, but her heart longed to hear. Not 
 without effect, it would seem ; for as her husband 
 met her at St Petersburg, the thought started in her 
 mind was, " Ach ! why are his ears so long ? " 
 
 After this, Vronsky and Anna met frequently, 
 chiefly through his cousin as an ally — the Princess 
 Betsy Tverskaia — who facilitated their meetings at 
 her house ; and their mutual infatuation grew by 
 what it fed on. Vronsky, on his part, was conscious 
 of nothing but the beatific focus to which his 
 imagination and powers were driving with frightful 
 rapidity. He refused promotion because it would 
 have removed him from St Petersburg; for, unlike 
 Karenin, when ambition and love came into conflict, 
 it was love that triumphed. He was prepared to 
 leave everything for her and with her, to go and bury 
 themselves somewhere with their love. -Anna, for 
 
 14 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 her part, was completely swallowed up in the ruling 
 passion of her life ; and thoijgh she made a feeble 
 effort to break the silken fetters which made her 
 blush for the first time in her life, which made her 
 feel guilty in her own sight, it was only to be swept 
 away by the next breath of passion, and to convey 
 with her eyes that sinful consent her tongue refused 
 to utter. 
 
 When, after nearly a year, the impossible, the 
 terrible had happened, humiliation, horror, contempt, 
 despair chased each other through her being, and 
 flinging herself upon her lover she exclaimed, " All 
 is ended ; I have nothing but thee ! " 
 
 When ^tfama spread abroad — which it soon did, 
 Kar^nin's exalted rank giving it greater notoriety — 
 it was received just as similar things are received 
 among ourselves. Vronsky's mother was rather 
 pleased at her son's manliness ; the fast young men 
 envied him ; the fashionable young ladies were 
 jealous of Anna ; experienced people looked with 
 regret to the prospect of a disgraceful scandal ; but 
 all alike found an occasion of universal amusement, 
 and were hardly able to conceal their hilarity. It 
 was especially when they looked upon the outraged 
 husband that people were boundlessly entertained, 
 that they exhibited most derision and disdain ; so 
 that he compared himself to some poor, maimed cur, 
 howling with pain, tortured to death by other dogs 
 on account of its very misery. But all this came 
 gradually, as the sin was prolonged, intensified, re- 
 nowned ; for it is the nature of such things never to 
 grow less, but more. 
 
 And now arose that strange social complication 
 and moral confusion which is Nature's attempt to 
 
 15 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 prevent wrong-doers going further wrong. Feeling 
 the increasing necessitj^ of being all in all to each other, 
 Vronsky and Anna tried to break with the pastj 
 but the past refused to be broken clean off. Bold- 
 ness also increased, and Vronsky ventured openly 
 to visit her at her husband's house. But there was 
 her young boy, a constant obstacle to their interviews, 
 with his inquisitive face and perplexed mind ; noticing 
 that his father treated as his greatest foe the very 
 man whom he saw his mother treat as her best 
 friend; not knowing whether he should regard him 
 as foe or friend. Falsehood also grew. Anna 
 became alarmed at her increasing facility in telling 
 lies, astonished at her own tone of natural and calm 
 assurance ; she felt herself lifted up as by some 
 invisible power and clad in an impenetrable armour 
 of falsehood ; she was possessed by the demon of 
 untruth, and ruled by the very spirit of lies. Yet, by 
 a strange paradox, humiliation also increased. She 
 began now to feel a greater shame and to fear a 
 worse dishonour. She tried to assure her lover that 
 she was " proud of ... . proud of," but her tongue 
 refused to say of what ; her utterance was choked by 
 tears of shame and despair. At one time she re- 
 solved to leave her husband's house, not because of 
 the physical repulsion with which he filled her, but 
 to cut the hideous knot getting ever more tangled. 
 Then she realised that she had no power to escape 
 from her situation, false and dishonourable though it 
 was, for her position in society was still dear to her • 
 she thought how dreadful were that door shut against 
 her, never again to be opened ; and she wept. 
 Absent-mindedly she discovered that she had taken 
 her hair in her hands and was pulling it. The 
 
 i6 
 
Anna Kar^nina 
 
 position was endurable only because all believed it to 
 be transitory ; yet no one knew what to do to bring 
 it to an end. Anna hoped to <find relief from the 
 horrible oppression of shame, falsehood, uncertainty, 
 by openly confessing all to her husband ; and this she 
 did when returning with him in their carriage from 
 some races in which Vronsky had a fall, after foully 
 breaking the back of his beautiful mare Frou-Frou, 
 upon which Anna had betrayed herself, by her 
 agitation and distress, to all the onlookers. Yet 
 confession brought no relief, though it put her husband 
 in a new dilemma. Even the moral pedant could 
 not but be moved by her passionate outcry, " I fear 
 you, I hate you ! " 
 
 To do Kar^nin justice, his trouble of mind was 
 greater and more poignant than any gave him credit 
 for. He felt like a man who should come home and 
 find his house barricaded against him. The bridge 
 of his artificial life broke, and the abyss of the actual 
 yawned at his feet. He stooped as stoops only the 
 man who waits the final blow. He also felt shame 
 and horror — " I am weak, I am humiliated," he 
 murmured ; " I am wounded, I am killed, I am no 
 longer a man ! " for Kar^nin was capable of soul-felt 
 emotion, of extreme irritation ; at women's or chil- 
 dren's tears he would entirely lose his self-control and 
 the use of his faculties. When the worst came, his 
 face assumed an expression of mortal«petrifaction. 
 
 Now the dilemma that Anna's confession threw him 
 upon was this : — Either he must retain in his home a 
 wife whose sin he could no longer wink at, or he must 
 send her away and let the veil of appearances fall ; and 
 either course was repugnant to him. For a time he 
 chose the first course. He concluded that it would 
 
 17 2 
 
The Greater Parables of Tl^Istoy 
 
 be better to keep his wife under his own care, shield- 
 ing his misfortune from the eyes of the world as far as 
 possible, and punishing her by refusing her liberty. 
 Thinking still of his own worldly position, he de- 
 manded that she should keep up appearances for the 
 sake of preserving his honour. Absorbed by his ideal 
 of social hypocrisy, he determined that both his wife 
 and her sin should be for him non-existent. And as 
 the pharisee is always by to support the hypocrite, he 
 began to conjure up higher arguments which might 
 sanction this course, drawn from religion — such as 
 the possibility of her salvation. Similar reasons 
 determined him against seeking divorce ; for divorce 
 meant public revelations, and his whole aim was to 
 keep up the appearances he called his " honour." A 
 base feeling of revenge mingled also with his worldly 
 selfishness ; for by refusing divorce he would keep 
 her from Vronsky, and he was determined that her 
 fault should not turn out to her advantage ; she ought 
 not to be happy, though he saw no reason why he 
 should be unhappy too. At a somewhat later stage 
 the same feeling of revenge swayed him towards 
 divorce, as he could then separate her from her son 
 Serozha, whom she passionately loved. And thus the 
 miserable man lacerated himself and his yet more 
 miserable wife with the dilemma — either a divorce and 
 lose your son, or no divorce and lose your lover : 
 Serozha or VroiSBky — choose ! for both it cannot be. 
 He now hated Anna with all the strength of his soul 
 for the great wrong she had done him. And all the 
 time it was self and the world that absorbed him, till 
 Anna could not help seeing that his falsehood even 
 exceeded her own ; that he was all made up of social 
 lies ; that he was not a man, but a machine ; that he 
 
 i8 
 
Anna Kar^nina 
 
 positively swam in perjury. And still the situation 
 dragged on ; that which all hoped was transitory 
 threatened to become permanent, eternal. But there 
 are limits to human endurance. 
 
 It was the unfortunate creature Anna who broke 
 down first. She had felt, for some time, a presenti- 
 ment of coming death, which she had hailed as a 
 welcome termination to an intolerable position. 
 Imagining herself to be dying, she sent an urgent 
 summons to her husband (who was from home), 
 saying that she would die easier if she had his 
 forgiveness. When he arrived he found Vronsky 
 in the chamber of death, weeping. Moved by her 
 sufferings and entreaties, Kardnin gave Vronsky his 
 hand, and forgave. "Thank the Lord!" said the 
 dying woman, "now everything is right." Driven 
 crazy by her approaching death, and by Kar^nin's 
 wonderful magnanimity and forgiveness, Vronsky 
 attempted his own life, and recovered from his 
 wound only to find that Anna had marvellously 
 recovered too; when, crushed by a sense of Kardnin's 
 splendid generosity, he resolved to go away forever, 
 and no longer thrust himself between a repentant wife 
 and a forgiving husband. That resolution was never 
 carried out. Another change passed over Kar^nin. 
 
 Kar^nin became conscious of two forces now 
 struggling for the control of his life ; the one force 
 holy and spiritual, exhibiting itae^ in love and 
 generous feeling; the other brutal but all-powerful, 
 ruling his life contrary to his reason and the needs of 
 his soul ; and he knew that this irresistible force would 
 command him to push Anna over the precipice, and 
 that he would obey. Once again he determined upon 
 divorce ; when, just as he was struggling with these 
 
 19 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstov 
 
 complicated motives and passions, Anna took the 
 matter into her own hands, declined the divorce, 
 went abroad with Vronsky and the little girl who had 
 been born to them, leaving Aleksdi Aleksandrovitch 
 Kar6nin alone with his son. 
 
 It is not necessary for us to follow the unhappy 
 pair through their brief season of bliss to their long 
 misery ; nor to journey with them to Italy, where 
 Vronsky, feeling the emptiness of his life, took to 
 painting; to Vronsky's ancestral estates, where he 
 took more and more to sports and improvements, 
 giving less and less of his time to Anna; to St 
 Petersburg and Moscow, where cruel difficulties and 
 insults awaited them in view of the social ban. The 
 prolonged course of moral deterioration began to tell 
 heavily upon all concerned. Vronsky felt more and 
 more the emptiness of a life devoid of all the pro- 
 fessional and public interests which he had been 
 obliged to relinquish ; and, as a consequence, took up 
 with more company, went out more, and left Anna 
 more alone. Anna, for her part, was vexed by his 
 public activities as by slights upon the sufficiency 
 of her love ; feared that she was losing his regard, 
 whilst he feared he was losing his freedom ; and 
 that struggle began between the woman's passion for 
 love and the man's desire for independence which 
 ended only with death. It was the same conflict as 
 with Kar^nin,(«nly under different conditions. At 
 last the shattering nerves could keep themselves 
 quiet only with morphine. Moral decay visibly set 
 in ; and the Anna who was once so peerless and 
 proud fell to unpleasant coquetries with young men. 
 Even Karenin became unstrung and degenerate 
 under the trials of his life. His fortitude gave way. 
 
 20 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 He was no longer able to keep up an appearance of 
 firmness and ease ; took to evangelical mysticism and 
 spiritualism from the same feeling that took Anna to 
 morphine ; lost his leading place in the Government, 
 and became a mere tool in the hands of a neurotic 
 woman who loved him with a platonic affection. 
 Such was one portion of the ruin wrought by 
 sin. See now how ruin overtakes the authors of 
 the sin ! 
 
 The relations between Vronsky and Anna were 
 such as inevitably lead to misunderstandings. Not 
 only was Anna vexed with Vronsky's public and 
 social activities, but jealous of his relations to other 
 women — and in each case her trouble arose from the 
 same cause, viz., her desire to keep him to herself, to 
 feel that her love was sufficient, knowing he had no 
 other tie binding him to her. Scenes became more 
 frequent between them. Her fears caused her to 
 misinterpret his very looks, and the severe and stony 
 expression on his face was something new to her. 
 Her pride was great in making this imperious man 
 bow before her, and she could not rest satisfied but 
 she must make it absolute. At such times the real 
 Anna of Vronsky's love seemed to disappear, to give 
 place to a being whom he could not understand, and 
 who seemed almost repulsive to him. Feeling that 
 her irritability came from the uncertainty of her 
 position, he tried to bring her to htr senses, as her 
 husband more than once had tried, and with as little 
 success. Her unreason, uncontrollable humours, 
 tempers, jealousies drove him away from her more 
 and more, and compelled him to revise his former 
 estimate of her character. And he deliberately 
 adopted a tone of indifference and icy reserve which 
 
 21 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 still further maddened Anna, and made her ex- 
 planations impossible. 
 
 As for Anna, she was too terribly aware of what 
 was impending, yet she seemed helpless to prevent 
 it. She felt herself near to ruin every moment, and 
 she feared — she feared for herself; but a spirit of 
 evil seemed to drive her on. Vronsky caught an 
 expression of strange hatred from under her veil ; and 
 she herself was filled with fear lest she should come 
 to hate him as she had hated Kardnin. A spirit of 
 conflict loomed up between them, which neither had 
 power to control. Reconciliations after scenes be- 
 came more distant and more difficult ; and at last 
 a quarrel arose which would not be reconciled. It 
 was at Moscow, where their life had been growing 
 intolerable. She saw with terror the imconcealed 
 expression of hate on his whole face, and especially 
 in his fierce, cruel eyes ; she saw that she was dashing 
 to destruction, yet — spite of her vows and desire for 
 reconciliation — she could not stop. Again, terrified, 
 she saw in his eyes a cold, cruel judge condemning 
 her; but she answered with a look which told him 
 how impossible it was to think of reconciliation. All 
 was over. Her mind was made up. She would die. 
 She had a vague idea that her death would be the 
 best way to punish him, to take vengeance on him. 
 She told herself she never hated anybody as she 
 hated this man. When she passed his hat in the 
 ante-room she .shivered with aversion. Yet she 
 stole into the library to look on him as he lay asleep, 
 and the yearning in her heart was, " Only to live ! 
 for I love him, and he loves me, and these dreadful 
 days will go by ! " 
 
 As she went to the railway station to leave him— 
 
 22 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 going, she knew not where — to do, she knew not what 
 — murmuring to herself, " It must be that I am going 
 crazy I " — she remembered that her first meeting with 
 Vronsky was at the railway station, and recalled the 
 expression of his face, as of a submissive dog. And 
 again hope and despair filled her tortured, cruelly- 
 palpitating heart. She had entirely forgotten why 
 she had come, and felt stupid amongst the people, 
 the flashy young men who leered at her, the sounding 
 bells. A dirty, hunchbacked porter passed close to 
 the window, examining the car wheels ; then sud- 
 denly she remembered her nightmare and was 
 frightened. When she arrived at a station further on, 
 where she hoped Vronsky would meet her, according 
 to her last despairing letter, and found him not, 
 " Where shall I fly ? " she said to herself She walked 
 along the platform, stopping at the end. A truck 
 rumbled by. Suddenly she remembered the man 
 who was crushed to death the day she first met 
 Vronsky, and she understood what remained for her 
 to do. With light, swift steps she descended to the 
 rails, and stood very near the train which was slowly 
 passing by. She looked under the cars, at the chains 
 and the brake, and the high iron wheels. She made 
 the sign of the cross. With outstretched hands she 
 threw herself on her knees beneath the carriage. 
 She had time to be afraid. " Where am I ? What 
 am I doirig ? Why ? " — trying to draw back. But the 
 inflexible mass struck her on her head and threw her 
 upon her back. " Lord, forgive me all," she mur- 
 mured, feeling the struggle to be in vain. 
 
 They carried her bleeding body into the barracks 
 near by. Her head, with its heavy braids of hair 
 and light curls gathered about the temples, was un- 
 
 23 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 injured — leaning back with the eyes half closed. It 
 was thus that Vronsky saw her when he rushed like 
 a madman into the barracks, and beheld the strange, 
 wild expression which yet lingered on the face, while 
 the lips, slightly opened, seemed to utter again the 
 terrible menace of their last interview, " that he would 
 repent ! " 
 
 It is not for man to judge her. Yet the words 
 spoken by a sufferer may well stand for her epitaph 
 and sum of mortal years — " She troubled the lives of 
 two men of rare merit, and ruined herself" 
 
 As for Vronsky, they carried him back from the 
 barracks like one dead. For six weeks he spoke 
 word to none, and could not be trusted alone lest he 
 should destroy himself. He became almost insane. 
 When he recovered, it was to say of himself, " As a 
 man, I am only a ruin." His face had grown old and 
 worn and was like stone. He gave his last days to 
 the cause of Servian independence, leading a squadron 
 of cavalry against Turkey at his own expense. He 
 lived in the service of the God of this World, and died 
 in the service of the God of War. 
 
 The story of Anna Kar^nina does not end with 
 this grim tragedy and solemn warning. Against the 
 World and the God of this World, the great writer sets 
 the Soul and the God in the Soul. Over against War 
 and the God of War he sets Peace and the God of 
 Peace within. Konstantin Levin, living his life of 
 wholesome labour and family love, persevered in the 
 search for Truth till all his weary Scepticisms passed 
 away and his longing for Faith was satisfied. This 
 man, who was, as his friends said, always thinking, 
 always alone, always reading philosophical books 
 
 24 
 
Anna Karinina, 
 
 always sacrificing himself for others, at last attained 
 the Great Peace. Amid the woods and meadows, the 
 simple peasantry and the joys of labour with Nature, 
 he learned that science cannot be substituted for re- 
 ligion, that there is no rest in Church and Orthodoxy, 
 and that a man need not put himself to death in 
 order to discover, or because he cannot discover, the 
 meaning of his life. He saw that the man who lives 
 for his Soul, who remembers God, who lives according 
 to God, according to Truth — this man has Faith, this 
 man has Peace. As he strode along the highway, 
 he was filled with new impulses, new joys, insensible 
 to weariness and heat. He turned into the wood 
 to think it out, and stretched himself on the succulent 
 wood-grass, under an aspen tree. He looked down 
 to the earth-beetle crawling up the stalk of couch- 
 grass ; he looked up to the high, cloudless sky. He 
 stopped thinking. He listened to the mysterious 
 voices that seemed to wake joyfully in him. "To 
 live for God, for the Soul ! " " Is it really Faith ? " he 
 thought, fearing to believe in his happiness. Then 
 he cHed, " My God, I thank Thee ! " and, swallowing 
 down the sobs that arose, he brushed away with both 
 hands the tears that filled his eyes. 
 
 25 
 
I 
 ANNA KARENINA 
 
 2 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: THE LORD'S 
 VENGEANCE 
 
ANNA KARENINA 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: THE LORD'S 
 VENGEANCE 
 
 "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." 
 
 This is the text selected by the preacher of one 
 of the most stupendous sermons since the Epistle 
 to the Romans. Like the Rabbi turned tent-maker, 
 so the Count turned muzhik reasons of "righteous- 
 ness, temperance, and judgment to come" till modern 
 Felix trembles amid his luxurious vices. As the 
 Jewish thunderer was dismissed till a more con- 
 venient season, ultimately going, a prisoner and 
 martyr, to Rome, so the Russian witness-bearer 
 would, long ago, have been consigned to Siberia by 
 the outraged powers of this world, only that his 
 hour is not yet come. And as the awful person- 
 ality, "the prisoner of the Lord," lived on after 
 Felix passed away from the scene of his vicious 
 procrastinations — lived on to confront a Festus and 
 an Agrippa and a Bernice with the same tremendous 
 moral imperatives, and to have the sinners escape 
 their terrors only by charging madness upon the 
 prophet ; so the spirit of the excommunicated and 
 ail-but exiled Tolstoy outlives the threatening and 
 trembling powers, bearing such testimony against 
 wealth and vice and tyranny as will — even while 
 
 29 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 they deride it as the spirit of a madman — be their 
 doom. 
 
 Living for the World an* the Flesh is, this 
 preacher affirms, the great wrong. Like all the 
 great teachers, he recognises the fearful power of 
 the cosmos over the mind, and of the body over 
 the soul, the possibility of the soul's bondage, but 
 the possibility also of its final deliverance. All the 
 masters of the soul, from Moses to Wesley, have 
 lifted themselves upon the awful facts of what they 
 called " sin," and put a " sense of sin " foremost 
 amongst redemptive influences. With a style and 
 language of his own, this latest in the grand line of 
 evangelists insists that subservience of the soul to 
 the world and the flesh is the root evil. Even when 
 physical conditions appear to predetermine vice — on 
 the evidence of neurotic excitements and hysterical 
 emotions, and the inability of wrong-doers, amid 
 all their self-reproach, to conquer their physical 
 repulsion from certain persons whom, nevertheless, 
 duty tells them to love, or to suppress their physical 
 attraction for other persons duty warns them to 
 avoid — even then the soul is master of its fate and 
 is to be held guilty. Like the preacher in the Letter 
 to the Romans, the evil-doer may "find a law that, 
 when he would do good, evil is present with him," 
 may "see another law in his members warring 
 against the law of his mind, and bringing him into 
 captivity to the law of sin which is in his members " ; 
 he may set this forth in modern phraseologies about 
 a double personality — "I am always the same, but 
 there is another being within me whom I fear; it 
 
 is she who loved him, him, and hated you " but 
 
 30 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 the device avails nought in the presence of the 
 prophet who stands for the spiritual basis of life 
 and morality. It is always possible to escape from 
 " Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde " to the God within. 
 
 Love and Marriage, pursues the preacher, constitute 
 the supreme test of character, showing whether life 
 is lived for the world and the flesh, or for God and 
 the soul. Wherever womanhood is made to subserve 
 sense and pleasure, there, clearly, J:he choice of the 
 lower has been made ; character has broken down 
 under the supreme test. Not only should love be 
 considered impossible outside marriage, but marriage 
 should minister to the growth of the soul rather than 
 the gratification of the senses. The fleshly lover may 
 declare that " if there are. as many opinions as there 
 are heads, then there are as many ways of loving as 
 there are»hearts " ; the faithless husband may swear 
 that home and wife are still sacred in his eyes ; even 
 the legend of Jesus and the Woman taken in Adultery 
 may be hypocritically quoted in excuse of mixed 
 lovers ; but these are obvious tricks of mind to 
 palliate offences against morals. The world still 
 goes on condoning the flesh, holding only that a 
 man is ridiculous when hopelessly in love with a 
 young girl or unmarried woman, not that he is 
 wickec^ when he makes love to a married woman. 
 This is the state — the grossest, openest, and most 
 palpable — in which Flesh is elevated above Love 
 and Marriage. 
 
 There is another state, however, less offensive to 
 the aesthetic faculties, but not less disastrous to 
 character — the state in which the World is set above 
 Love and Marriage, in which Womanhood is sub- 
 ordinated to the World. A large part of the mighty 
 
 31 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 discourse is taken up with the exposition of this less 
 obvious and less pondered evil. Girls who cannot 
 make a choice, who can only answer " yes " or " no," 
 may be forced by designing relatives into loveless 
 union with men of rank and fashion, or they may 
 willingly purchase the world by the surrender of 
 their bodies. Men, for their part, may seek marriage 
 merely as a means of material happiness, resenting 
 its petty tribulations, shirking its graver obligations ; 
 or they maj' choose it as a social convenience, setting 
 them free for a cafeer^making it a stalking-horse 
 for their ambition. In this latter case — when men 
 take a wife for the sake of the world — the necessity 
 of choosing between wife and world soon arises, and 
 the first, inevitably, is sacrified to the second. Affec- 
 tion for wife and child is buried deep in the box of 
 formality. There is no disposition for the tender- 
 ness which endears, or the communion which sancti- 
 fies, married life. The ambitious worldling has 
 scarce time even to speak to his wife. He is anxious 
 only to avoid all domestic entanglements in a wise, 
 correct fashion, honourable to himself, pursuing his 
 own active, useful, aspiring career. His sole aim is 
 to preserve his reputation, and suffer no interruption 
 of his official duties. If he professes lofty views of 
 religion, civilisation, politics, his underlying impulse 
 is merely the desire of advancement, the craze for 
 success. Everything is means to that end. The 
 world takes precedence of the woman ; ambition 
 freezes love ; utility regulates marriage. 
 
 The wise preacher takes us, it will be perceived, far 
 from the region of vulgar vice into the almost track- 
 less realms of spiritual error. The worldling may be 
 a most virtuous person, but his virtue, like his 
 
 32 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 marriage, is only a means to an end. His ideas of 
 conjugal morality are the veriest pedantry. He 
 delivers pedantic moral discourses to a wife tempted 
 and sufiFering; writes official letters to warn and 
 admonish her ; deals with her as an Under-Secretary 
 of State, so that she is unable to believe in his mag- 
 nanimity, and afraid to appeal to a generosity she 
 never saw in him. He is *right, she echoes ; of 
 course he is right — he is always right — but his very 
 rectitude seems more cruel than murder. People 
 say he is a Christian, a religious, moral, upright, 
 honourable, intellectual man ; but he crushes all 
 that is vital ill her. She cannot explain it, but to 
 her he is a low, vile man. " Go away, go away ! " 
 she exclaims, " you are too perfect ! " The ambitious 
 worldling stands revealed as the moral pedant. His 
 stupidity before problems of the heart and soul is 
 phenomenal ; he is a man blind and without fingers 
 in a dissecting-room ; in the word of a clever woman, 
 he is " a blockhead." 
 
 The psychology of the pedantic worldling was an 
 unexplored region, but it is here mapped out with 
 ruthless pertinacity. He is a pharisee who sacrifices 
 the realities of the soul to the formalities of the 
 world, and substitutes official routine for the incom- 
 prehensible grandeur of ethical law. Careless of her 
 spirit's weal, he is willing to accept an official virtue 
 in a wife ; is more anxious to keep her formally 
 above suspicion than to preserve her from actual 
 fall ; and thinks that keeping up appearances is the 
 same as preserving his honour. The status quo is 
 so admirable on all sides that he has no difficulty 
 in conjuring up from the high sphere of religion 
 arguments to confirm the dictates of policy. Across 
 
 33 3 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 the abyss of the actual, yawning even in the hideous 
 shape of domestic infidelity, he is willing to throw 
 the bridge of the artificial, and is astonished only 
 that a writhing human spirit refuses to be conformed 
 to his social hypocrisies. He is utterly incapable 
 of understanding the cruelty and selfishness of his 
 requirements, or that a husband — committing forni- 
 cation with the powefs of this world — may be a 
 greater and less curable evil-doer than the unfortun- 
 ate wife whose adulteries are tB&se of the flesh. 
 Our judgment goes with the sinner after the flesh 
 when she exclaims that this sinner after the spirit 
 is not a man but a machine, made up of lies, 
 positively swimming in perjury, setting falsehood 
 and conventionality above everything human and 
 divine, living by that which even a wicked and lost 
 woman cannot endure-^liar that he is ! And we 
 cannot escape the conclusion driven home upon our 
 minds by this tremendous discourse— the conclusion 
 that to live, for the world and the flesh is the great 
 transgression, but that they who live for the world 
 fall into the more awful condemnation because the 
 more hopeless delusion. The conclusion is as old as 
 Jesus — the publicans and the harlots go into the king- 
 dom before the Scribes- and Pharisees^^but it is good 
 for a modern age, swallowed of wealth and convention, 
 to be called back to veracity by a preacher whosie 
 word is unerring as the lightning and commanding 
 as the thunder. " Vengeance is mine, I will repay \ " 
 
 The ethical instinct, without which any preacher is 
 merely a sounding brass and tin-kling cymbal, leads 
 the author of Anna Karenina to show, in the next 
 place, that the World and the Flesh, being trans- 
 
 34 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 gressors, have no power to put themselves right. If 
 we speak of these — the world and the flesh — as one, 
 as forming a composite thing to be spoken of in the 
 singular number, we shall simplify our words, and 
 hardly wrong the preacher, in whose mind they are 
 inseparable, if not absolutely identical. And that 
 world and flesh have no fount of healing within 
 themselves is evident from the fact that their mood 
 is frequently one of great good-nature and self- 
 satisfaction. Pleasant dispositions often go with foul 
 morals ; healthy bodies with rotten souls ; happy 
 minds with unwholesome spirits. The epicure has 
 a keen instinct for pleasure ; is adroit at avoiding 
 quarrels, clever at gaining popularity, skilful to get 
 credit for qualities he does not possess, and quite 
 wonderful in his ability to pose for the sentiment 
 appropriate to every social circumstance ; so that he 
 is frequently a universal favourite. 
 
 Sometimes the worldling's opulent egotism ex- 
 pands into positive mirthfulness in the presence of 
 wickedness. Not only does he find his vices pleasant 
 in the act, but amusing in reminiscence of the 
 escapades, predicaments, and by-play connected with 
 them. From the discovered immorality and con- 
 sequent misery of other wrong-doers he extracts 
 much merriment. The abasement of false wives and 
 the anguish of deceived husbands add vastly to the 
 amusement of diners and club-loiterers. The world 
 of adultery is, to them, not at all iniquitous, but only 
 ridiculous. They reveal this in their veiled looks of 
 amusement, the half-concealed hilarity with which 
 they inquire for the health of squirming sufferers, 
 their sensual gloating — as if they were all going to a 
 wedding. Because they find merriment in sin, there- 
 
 35 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 fore the world and the flesh have no power to deliver 
 themselves. 
 
 Sometimes, to be sure, the world and the flesh 
 experience a kind of sorrow — the sorrow which, in 
 the words of an earlier apostle, " worketh death." 
 Unpleasant circumstances emerge from self-indulg- 
 ence, such as bills of cost, rupture of domestic 
 relations, the sense of having made a fool of one- 
 self, of having managed stupidly, of being found 
 out, which substitute self-reproach for the usual vast 
 content. But even when it regrets, the carnal world 
 never repents. In the person of its devotee it may 
 even put itself to death on account of the hopeless 
 discomfort and entanglement it has brought upon 
 itself; but in killing itself it has no desire to kill 
 the wrong : it is the egotist even in death. There- 
 fore, because they can regret but never repent, the 
 world and the flesh have in themselves no means of 
 betterment. 
 
 The same moral bankruptcy displays itself in the 
 fact that the world and the flesh have no higher 
 standard than themselves, and are compelled to 
 acquiesce in the circumstances which produce guilt 
 ind calamity. Whilst the true man looks with 
 iisgust upon his life, trembles and mourns bitterly, 
 :he light-of-Iove, being also light-of-heart, gaily 
 ■eplies that the world is thus constituted, and asks, 
 tVhat can you do ? It would be incorrect to say he 
 las no principles; but they are immoral ones, or^ at 
 jest, pure expediencies. He divides society into two 
 :lasses : the first composed of old-fashioned, dull, 
 tupid, vulgar, and, above all, ridiculous people, who 
 leclare that girls should be modest, women chaste, 
 nen brave, temperate, faithful to one wedded wife 
 
 36 
 
Anna Kar^nina 
 
 careful to bring up their children, earn their bread, 
 pay their de^ts, and other absurdities; the second 
 consisting of superior beings who must, above all 
 things, be elegant, gay, extravagant, luxurious, 
 vicious, admired, flattered, and scornful of all the 
 rest. He is an honourable man, with a very strict 
 code of honour — a code which seldom fails in its 
 application, which requires him to pay his gambling 
 debts (but not his tailor's bills), forbids him to tell 
 lies (except to women), or deceive anybody (except 
 husbands), or pardon insults (but inflict many). He is 
 governed, not by laws, but by rules ; not by virtue, but 
 by convention ; not by religion, but by the usages of 
 fast society ; not by divinity, but by the god of Things- 
 as-they-are. Hence, concludes the preacher — his 
 words aa^goads fastened in a sure place — the world 
 and the flesh have no curative powers in themselves. 
 
 The terrible feeling of inward destitution compels, 
 at length, those men of the world who are not epicures 
 or sensualists to try what help may be for them and 
 for society in the improvement of machinery and the 
 reform of institutions. If it be nothing more than an 
 improved plough, the liberal reformer hopes that it 
 will, somehow, react from agriculture upon social 
 ethics. Official philanthropies are set agoing — with 
 as much hope of success as pills for dead consciences 
 and powders for broken hearts. But the great hope 
 of the world's best man is in the establishment of 
 liberal institutions, such as schools, franchises, 
 women's rights, free newspapers, constitutional 
 government, local autonomies, and so forth; — not 
 seeing that civilisation is not morality, is not even 
 happiness ; not understanding that these things, in so 
 far as they are mere externals, touching the outside 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 of man, cannot change his character, cannot make 
 him good, unselfish, happy. It pleases the tolerant 
 liberalist to glorify popular majorities^ to haze his 
 brain with theories and cigars, to write and read the 
 liberal reviews while the muzhiks cut the corn, to 
 fool himself and the people with superficial nostrums 
 which touch not even the economic sore, much less 
 the ethical disease ; but when the revolutionist arises 
 with dynamite and dagger to get some of these things 
 done, the unfortunate liberalist roars for the hangipan 
 as lustily as the rest. The world and the flesh — the 
 great materialisms — cannot be saved by materialisms 
 like themselves. The evil is in the soul, which 
 cannot be cured by sticking-plaster. Much nearer 
 the truth come the peasants with their childish 
 fatalism — harbinger at least of faith — " It will come 
 out all right-^what God will give ! " " Ve%eance is 
 mine, I will repay ! " 
 
 Thus we approach the third head of this colossal 
 sermon — ^that since the world and the flesh constitute 
 the great transgression, and since they have no heal- 
 ing energies within themselves, therefore the world 
 and the flesh come into condemnation and incur the 
 divine vengeance. The form of vengeance immedi- 
 ately repaid is misery ; and there are as many forms 
 of misery as there are forms of sin. The happiness of 
 all good people is the same, but every bad person is 
 unhappy after a fashion of his own. Even those who 
 repent and confess cannot wholly escape ; for whilst 
 they may cheat the official confessional of a material- 
 ised church, they will come up before the tribunal of— 
 let us say — a wife's dove-like purity, and feel their souls 
 scathed by her falling tears as by drops of liquid hell. 
 
 38 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 As for those who continue to tread the " primrose 
 path of dalliance," they are taught in the terrible 
 parable of Anna Karenina that the "way of trans- 
 gressors is hard." Feelings of shame take the place 
 of ecstasies; fear of dishonour supplants the joy of 
 dalliance ; disgust at last swallows up desire ; and 
 despair settles over all. To discover that she has 
 taken her hair in her hands and is pulling it, is a 
 sure sign that a woman's happiness is ruined. To 
 have her sense of loss in husband, child, home 
 dragged from her in the words, " All is over for me, 
 all is lost," betokens social ruin. And when her 
 companion in guilt moans out, " As a man, I am only 
 a ruin," we get proof of that decay which overtakes 
 even the physical nature as the result of sexual sin. 
 The remorseless preacher who sets these facts forth 
 in the scenes of this titanic parable has surely studied 
 in the same awful school of Nature and Law as he 
 studied in who said, " When lust hath conceived, it 
 bringeth forth sin : and sin, when it is finished, 
 bringeth forth death." 
 
 That catastrophic point is, however, not reached in 
 a step. Many admonitory miseries lie between — 
 like barbed wires and prickly thorns on the side of 
 the precipice, crying, " Back ! back ! this way He 
 danger and death!" These being disregarded, the 
 course of false love is an ever-accelerating down- 
 grade and an ever-accumulating misery. False 
 lovers will be given over more and more to a spirit 
 of falsehood necessitated by the thousand and one 
 complications involved in a secret and unlawful 
 correspondence. Even if falsehood and lying be 
 opposed to their natures, nothing but falsehood and 
 lies can come out of the situation. They must weave 
 
 39 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 around themselves an unbroken web of dissimulation, 
 and must practise a thousand stratagems to conceal 
 their guilt. A sense of hypocrisy will pervade their 
 intercourse Vith all innocent people, and can be 
 counteracted only by a habit of assurance so calm 
 and impudence so natural as to astonish themselves. 
 They will be dominated by a very demon of untruth ; 
 will feel themselves sustained and lifted up as by 
 some invisible power and clad in an impenetrable 
 armour of falsehood. 
 
 The habit of lying brings with it a growing shame- 
 lessness. The woman who, years ago, would have 
 exclaimed, " What ! sin with you ? sin secretly with 
 you ? sin openly with you ? elope with you and lose 
 everything ? elope with you and confess myself openly 
 your mistress ? " — that woman will live to do, in dis- 
 tinct succession, every one of these very thifigs. She 
 will live to invite her lover openly to her husband's 
 house, to refuse the divorce she once desired, to go 
 away with her paramour in perfect happiness, without 
 suffering and without shame. For it is the tendency 
 of false love to completely absorb the life ; throwing 
 the lovers more and more upon each other as society 
 withdraws ; driving the man to choose between the 
 world and the flesh, and to abandon lucrative or 
 ambitious pursuits in a vain attempt, by a frenzy of 
 devotion, to fill the ever-expanding void in his mis- 
 tress's soul ; finally uniting their fate by the infernal 
 tie of unlawful parenthood. On the heels of open 
 shamelessness other forms of wickedness follow 
 quickly. By an unavoidable revulsion they will de- 
 termine upon lust without parenthood, in order to 
 have no barriers to their companionship. Chastity 
 abandoned, coquetry takes its place, and the once 
 
 40 
 
Anna Karenina 
 
 modest wife degenerates into a universal flirt and 
 decoy. Finally, the jarred nerves and disordered 
 mind can be kept quiet only by increasing doses 
 of alcohol or morphine — a premoifttion of coming 
 doom — an incipient suicide — the shadow of certain 
 death. 
 
 The darker decrees of retribution are written in the 
 manifest destruction of every form of true love, as 
 degenerate love more and more absorbs the life. 
 The false wife will find love and pity for her husband 
 gradually supplanted by aversion and fear, and at 
 last by feelings of positive hate and scorn. The trivial 
 defects and weaknesses, which only more endear him 
 to the true wife, will irritate and estrange the heart 
 which is turning false — " Ugh ! why are his ears so 
 long? Don't crack your knuckles that way, I detest 
 it ! " So, at last, though after longer time, with the 
 false mother and her child. The shadow of the de- 
 tested husband falls upon his offspring, and the mother 
 begins to experience feelings of disillusionment, to 
 see the imp in the tiny creature she once thought 
 a cherub. With a banquet of love before her, she 
 commences to die of starvation. The child is in the 
 way with his presence, like a shadow, and his in- 
 quisitive face. He, in his turn, feels the change of 
 tone, and is puzzled in his small mind, troubled in 
 the clear waters of his little life, robbed of the birth- 
 right of childhood. After desertion of her child, the 
 undying mother-love may revive in pangs, stolen 
 visits, sad farewells, but her blighted lips cannot kiss 
 the bloom on to his young life again. And thus does 
 our great modern preacher enforce the ancient law 
 that " the sins of the fathers (and still more of the 
 mothers) are visited upon their children." 
 
 41- 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 Nor is this all; for the avenging Nemesis has 
 decreed that the false love shall, after trial, follow the 
 true love into the lake of consuming fird Apples of 
 Eden turn to apples of Sodom in the very mbuth. 
 Satiety takes the place of ecstasy, estrangement of 
 dalliance, disgust of desire. The common saw is 
 reversed — it is the course oi false love which never 
 did run smooth. Love passages decrease, whilst 
 " scenes " increase. Torn by irreconcilable contra- 
 dictions, fearing the uncertainty of her position, the 
 woman is racked by jealousies ; whilst the man begins 
 to be bored by an alliance which interferes with his 
 activities, sports, liberties ; until the countenance, 
 which, at the beginning, had been that of a submissive 
 dog, wears a studied aspect of frigid indifference. To 
 her hot jealousy he opposes an icy reserve. A spirit 
 of cruelty holds him back, whilst a spirit of conflict 
 drives her on. She feels she is near to ruin — -is 
 dashing to destruction — and is afraid, but she cannot 
 stop. " These dreadful days will go by," she promises 
 herself, as she looks at him asleep, murmuring also, 
 " for I love him, and he loves me " ; but when he 
 wakes she shivers with aversion ; his very hat hanging 
 in the hall irritates her. 'Tis thus that the love of 
 the flesh turr>s to hate of the fleshly lover — feelings of 
 hate, looks of hate, words of hate, and finally acts of 
 hate — the railway and the carriage wheel for her, 
 war and the field of death for him. All is over. 
 The death of the body is the fitting sequel to the 
 death of the soul. 'Tis thus that the great voice 
 from Russia shakes the modern world of degenerate 
 Christianity as the voice from Tarsus shook the 
 ancient world of decaying Paganism. He that 
 soweth to the flesh shall, of the flesh, reap corruption. 
 
 ,42 
 
Anna Kar^nina 
 
 The wages of sin is death. Be not deceived. God 
 is not mocked. Vengeance is mine, I will repay ! 
 # 
 It would be as great a mistake to suppose that 
 this terrific delineation represented the ultimate truth 
 of the preacher in Anna Karenina, as that the first 
 chapter of his Letter contained the whole message of 
 the preacher to the Romans. For just as Romans 
 commences with an analysis of sin, and pursues its 
 way through human experience to a gospel of 
 salvation, so Anna Karenina tracks the doom of 
 the world and the flesh only to announce the glorious 
 gospel of God and the Soul. As Paul put a saved 
 Abraham over against lost Jew and condemned 
 Gentile, so Tolstoy sets the typical regenerated 
 worker and truth-seeker in contrast with his types of 
 trespass and vengeance. Here is a man who flees 
 from corrupt society to the pure scenes of Nature, and 
 immediately feels himself a better creature; a man 
 who turns away from vain speculation to honest 
 labour, mows hay with the peasants whilst the 
 speculator thumbs the reviews and solves chess 
 problems by the help of iced lemonade, mingles 
 solicitud^ for the health of his horses and the 
 maternal happiness of his cows with interest in his 
 servants and day-labourers — yes, and with honest 
 love for homely wife and children. Here is presented 
 the labour-cure for soul-trouble, and even for cob- 
 webs on the brain. To co-operate with Nature and 
 God in the development of the earth is to enter into 
 a lif(? that is sweet, pure, wholesome, delightful, and 
 truly religious; for it unites a man with the simple 
 labourers, his brothers, and with God, his Father. 
 Under these healthful conditions the life grows 
 
 43- 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 further and further away from the world and the 
 flesh towards God and the Soul; even from the 
 intellect and the brain towards the ^irit and the 
 heart. The questions of life and death, of seen and 
 unseen, of God and Eternity, are found to be — not 
 so much intellectual and speculative, as moral and 
 practical. Clear and beautiful sounds this note 
 through the discourse — do the will, and you shall 
 know the teaching ! Thus the disciple passes from 
 flesh to faith, from the world without to the God 
 within, from turmoil to peace — a peace which passeth 
 all understanding, even his own. 
 
 '44 
 
II 
 
 THE KREUTZER SONATA 
 
 I 
 
 A PARABLE OF SENSUAL LOVE, 
 COURTSHIP, AND MARRLVGE 
 
THE KREUTZER SONATA 
 
 A PARABLE OF SENSUAL LOVE, 
 COURTSHIP, AND MARRIAGE 
 
 Here is the story of a man and a woman — Pozdnis- 
 cheff and his wife — who loved according to the World, 
 courted according to the Flesh, and married according 
 to the Devil. And as heavenly music, like heavenly 
 love, may be pressed into the service of the Hadean 
 Trinity, the writer has woven the tale round a typical 
 composition, and called it The Kreutzer Sonata. 
 
 The story is told in a railway train, in which four 
 passengers had passed two weary days and a night — 
 a mannish lady, no lotiger young, much given to 
 smoking — a talkative man, a lawyer, on terms of 
 conversational intimacy with the lady -smoker — 
 another gentleman, short, nervous, not old, but pr6- 
 riiaturely grey, who avoided intercourse, spending his 
 time in reading, smoking, or making tea, which he 
 drew forth, with other provisions, from a canvas bag ; 
 who ^d a way of emitting, from time to time, 
 peculiar sounds resembling short coughs, or laughter 
 just begun and suddenly broken of — and, last of all, 
 the writer. 
 
 Amongst other passengers continually coming in and 
 going out chanced to he a tall old merchant, who fell 
 
 47 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 to recounting tales of drinking-bouts, pranks, wild 
 escapades, and other reminiscences of the fairs when 
 he was young, pouring them into the ear of a young 
 clerk, who roared with laughter till his voice re- 
 sounded from one end of the carriage to the other. 
 The lawyer and the lady-smoker were, at the same 
 time, keeping up a lively discussion about a wife who 
 had informed her husband she would not live with 
 him any longer ; and presently the lawyer skilfully 
 drew the old merchant into the debate, which then 
 broadened out into the higher education of women, 
 frequency of divorce, freedom of women's choice, and 
 the marriage question in general. The young clerk 
 discreetly waited to come in on the winning side. 
 The lady-smoker imagined herself free to launch out 
 into wholesale eulogies of sentiment, romantic attach- 
 ments, and the love that hallows marriage, till all 
 were startled by the sudden intervention of the grey- 
 haired lonely man with the lustrous eyes, who^ 
 excited, red-faced, facial muscles nervously twitching, 
 emitting that peculiar snort as between suppressed 
 laughter and a choking sob — wanted to know what 
 she meant by the love that hallows marriage. During 
 the debate which followed, the lady-smoker vehemently 
 maintained the sufficiency of the romantic sentiments 
 to regulate marriage, descanting volubly on identity 
 of ideals, sacramental views, and so on ; whilst the 
 grey man — eyes now like burning coals — demanded 
 facts, not novels, professed scepticism of the reality 
 and wearing power of the romantic sentiments, 
 declared that such unions merely precipitated men 
 and women into hells of hate from which they 
 escaped only by killing themselves or each other, and 
 wound up by avowing himself to be that Pozdnischeff 
 
 48 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 whose trial for the murder of his wife had recently 
 created such a sensation. Shortly after this discon- 
 certing d^nouemfnt, the lawyer and the lady-smoker 
 contrived to arrange matters with the guard, ex- 
 changed carriages, and left Pozdnischeff alone with 
 the writer, to whom — after preliminary apologies and 
 drinkings of strong tea, amid the darkness of the long 
 night, his impressive and agreeable voice mingling 
 with the creaking and rattle of the train, interrupted 
 only by that peculiar sound of his as between a sob 
 and a laugh — he explained how that same romantic 
 love they so glibly praised had led him to kill his 
 wife, and told this 
 
 STORY OF THE KREUTZER SONATA. 
 " I am a landowner, a University graduate, and was 
 at one time Marshal of the Nobility. Before marriage, 
 I lived like other men in our social stratum, definitely 
 parting with my boyish innocence at the age of six- 
 teen, being bound to women thenceforward by a tie 
 financial only, but not moral. This way of life — 
 approved by the general consent of all classes, coun- 
 tenanced by the Government, and even recommended 
 by our medical advisers — I followed till I was thirty, 
 when I decided to marry. I never doubted that it 
 would be possible for me to live the happiest, most 
 ideal, family life ; or that I was entitled to select the 
 purest young girl imaginable. The young lady I 
 chose for the honour of becoming my wife was the 
 dai^ghter of a once wealthy, but now ruined, land- 
 owner; and one evening, when we had been out 
 rowing, her bewitching curls, well-shaped figure, and 
 nice-fitting jersey suddenly convinced me that this 
 was the woman to wed. I thought it my duty, how- 
 
 49 4 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 ever, and also a wise precaution, to give her some 
 ■ glimpse into my past life, which I did by means of 
 my diary; and was very much astonished that she 
 should have felt any horror, or desired to break off 
 our relations. To me, as to society, it had all seemed 
 so right. I had seen the' gilded youths — spruce, 
 washed, shaven, in spotless linen and faultless uni- 
 form, souls burdened with a hundred crimes — toler- 
 ated in every salon and ballroom. I did not under- 
 stand that — with their costumes, perfumes, exposures, 
 glittering ornaments, dances, and so forth — the 
 fashionable and the fallen women were playing for 
 exactly the same end — that is to say, the seduction 
 of men ; and that it was with this very object in 
 view that successive generations of initiated mothers 
 were bringing Up their deceived daughters. I did 
 not know that the marriage-trap was baited by fleshly 
 displays, so that men might be enslaved through 
 their senses. However, in spite of her horror at my 
 past life, the girl agreed to become my wife, and the 
 engagement went on. 
 
 " I need not say anything about our courtship — a 
 time barren of all interest or spiritual intimacy ; or 
 the church ceremonies — which I regarded merely as 
 the forms necessary to entitle me to take possession 
 of a certain woman ; or the honeymoon — an incon- 
 ceivably wearisome and disgusting episode which I 
 can compare to nothing but my earlier attempts to 
 master the art of smoking. I then saw that the 
 social arrangements — Oh, abomination ! Oh, dam- 
 nable lie ! — were deliberately made with the view of 
 inflaming, not restraining, the passions, and that the 
 wedding tour was merely a licence to unlimited 
 pleasure. 
 
 SO 
 
The KreuUer Sonata 
 
 " It was in the midst of this insufferable tediousness 
 and torture that our first quarrel occurred. On the 
 third or fourth day after our marriage, finding my 
 wife bored, and inquiring the cause, she murmured 
 something about feeling lonely without her mother ; 
 V.nd as I fell to comforting her without reference to 
 her mother, she took offence, upon which I rebuked 
 her for capriciousness ; when she fell to upbraiding 
 me with the most spiteful words, and with every 
 expression of coldness, even hatred, on her counten- 
 ance. Seized with horror, I endeavoured to soothe 
 her, but found myself face to face with such a wall 
 of impregnable, cold, venomous hostility, that I was 
 lashed into a state of extreme irritation, and we 
 addressed a number of unpleasant remarks to each 
 other. Neither of us was yet able to understand 
 that this depression and irritation were due simply 
 to the nature of our married intercourse, and the 
 consequent state of our nerves. 
 
 " This first quarrel, however, was quickly followed 
 by the second, third, fourth, and a constant succession ; 
 until I saw that this was not accident but necessity, 
 the result of the abyss that yawned between us, 
 and that it must occur again and again. Always I 
 read in her eyes the same cruel, cold hostility. I 
 had sometimes quarrelled with my father and brother, 
 but never had I known the peculiarly bitter hatred 
 that subsisted between my wife and me. At that 
 time I did not know that this was the common 
 lot; that ninety-nine per cent, of married people 
 were plunged into just such a hell, though they all 
 tried to hide it from each other, and even from them- 
 selves. Neither had I realised that the mutual 
 malignity which characterised our relations was the 
 
 SI 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 revolt of human nature against the animal nature 
 that was crushing it in both of us. Necessarily, 
 therefore, ©ur difference grew in intensity and savage- 
 ness, the insufficiency of our pretexts for quarrelling 
 being quite as remarkable as our pretences of recon- 
 ciliation. I had not remarked that these periods of 
 hatred corresponded with other periods of whaf 
 we called ' love ' — a time of vehement ' love ' 
 being invariably followed by one of as vehement 
 hate, showing that they were simply opposite poles 
 of one and the same animal feeling. As our 
 quarrelling was the result of the animal conception 
 that underlay our married relations, so also our 
 reconciliations were due to this ; whence it would 
 happen that, even whilst launching the most bitter 
 and venomous reproaches at each other, we would fall 
 into a period of silence, fijled up with smiles, kisses, 
 embraces. 
 
 " Thus it w?nt on with us for some years, during 
 which six children were born, aggravating our misery. 
 I then detected the astonishing lies people have told 
 about children with the view of hiding their family 
 wretchedness. I discovered that children are a 
 torment, and nothing more, giving the mother far 
 more suffering than happiness, and — what with their 
 diseases, conflicting methods of treatment, the hum- 
 bugging of the doctors, contentions about their 
 education, the partizanship of the older ones in the 
 quarrels of their parents — leading both father and 
 mother a dog's life, and turning the home into a hell 
 on earth. 
 
 " I found also that motherhood only aggravated the 
 differences between my wife and myself. How can it 
 be otherwise when — contrary to all the laws of nature, 
 
 52 
 
The KtcvAzer Sonata 
 
 and the example of the lower animals, a woman has 
 no freedom of her own body, and is compelled at 
 one and the same time to be the nurse of her 
 offspring and the mistress of her husband ? How 
 otherwise when the scoundrelly doctors assist in the 
 suppression of nature by forbidding now suckling, 
 and again child - bearing, thus encouraging bad, 
 irregular lives, which they try to correct, not by 
 better living, but by more medicines, more doctors, 
 and always worse health ! I see now that the only 
 remedy is a fundamental change in man's conception 
 of the position of woman ; that he must cease to 
 regard her as an object of pleasure, to degrade her 
 into the slave of his senses. Until this comes about, 
 the great art of her life will consist in captivating 
 men — the maiden, in order to have as many 
 as possible to choose from — the married woman, 
 in order to strengthen her ascendency over her 
 husband. It is from this slavery to man's senses 
 that ' nerves,' ' hysteria,' ' possession,' and what not 
 arise ; so that the life of fearful misery we led was 
 the direct physical consequence of the animal ideas 
 that regulated our intercourse. This is the reason 
 why so many married people kill each other, or blow 
 out their own brains. 
 
 "During the whole course of our wedded life, I 
 never enjoyed a moment's relief from the maddening 
 pangs of that jealousy which is the common lot of 
 all husbands who live with their wives as I did 
 with mine. After the birth of our first child, those 
 torments grew excruciating ; for my wife was for- 
 bidden by the villainous doctors to nurse her child, 
 and suddenly developed that coquettishness which 
 had previously lain dormant in her. I concluded 
 
 S3 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 that the woman who could thus lightly set at naught 
 the moral obligations of a mother, might with equal 
 facility trample upon the duties of a wife. The 
 catastrophe, however, was averted for a long time, 
 by the fact that my wife insisted on nursing the 
 next five children herself, with the happiest results 
 to her own health ; and this child-bearing and child- 
 nursing were the only things that contributed to the 
 alleviation of my jealous pangs. 
 
 "In this manner we continued to live, our rela- 
 tions growing more and more hostile, until it became 
 worse than if mere difference of view engendered 
 enmity; it was settled enmity that produced differ- 
 ence of view. We always dissented from each other 
 in advance, and held to our own opinions about the 
 most matter-of-fact subjects. Skirmishes and ex- 
 pressions of hatred were called forth by the slightest 
 step beyond our prescribed circle of conversational 
 topics, so that we were reduced to silence, or such 
 conversation as the very brutes have means of carry- 
 ing on. For myself I can say that I was boiling 
 with hatred towards her. I hated her every gesture 
 and grimace — as when she poured out tea, or lifted 
 the spoon to her mouth, or smacked her lips — ^just 
 as if she had committed a really bad action. We 
 poisoned each other's lives. We were like prisoners 
 chained together, and hating each other — 'I wish 
 you were dead like a dog! .... I am a liar, then, 
 I suppose? .... Children, here's your father beat- 
 me ! . . . . Don't tell lies ! . . . . The devil speed 
 you ! ' And thus it went on. 
 
 "What fools they are who say I murdered my 
 wife with a knife on the fifth of October ! The fact 
 
 54 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 iSj I killed her long before, just as they are all killing 
 their wives at this moment — all, aye, all of them ! 
 
 " But just when we had rendered each other's life 
 unbearable, it became necessary, in the interests of 
 the children's education, to remove from the country 
 to the city ; which had this advantage — that though 
 its continual round of social duties and its constant 
 succession of celebrities were a hollow sham, it 
 enabled us to breathe more freely, to grow less 
 susceptible to the sufferings caused by our daily 
 intercourse, 
 
 "<But just here those rascally doctors stepped in 
 once more, forbidding my wife to become a mother 
 again, and providing her with the means of executing 
 their will, which, though to me an abomination, 
 was to her law. Only country-girls throw their 
 children into ponds ; guided by the doctors, society 
 women manage to kill their children decently, 
 respectably, and with the approbation of all well- 
 bred people. Now the effect of this course of con- 
 duct upon my wife was to improve her appearance, 
 and make her more attractive than ever — like the 
 last mellow beauty of the summer — so that whenever 
 she passed she was sure to magnetise the men, to 
 make them look at her. She resembled a well-fed 
 wanton horse from whom the harness had suddenly 
 been removed. She had that provoking, perturbing 
 kind of beauty which characterises a good-looking 
 woman of thirty. I saw her — a pretty woman with- 
 out a curb. And I was seized with horror. Yes, 
 she seemed to have awakened to the fact that there 
 was a whole God's world full of joys she had for- 
 gotten, and must not let slip ; for time was flying, 
 and it would soon be too late. It was impossible 
 
 55 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 for her to feel otherwise ; for all her education had 
 been directed to persuading her that the one thing 
 worthy of attention in all the world was the thing 
 called ' love,' and since love with a husband had been 
 rendered odious by jealousy and hate, she began 
 to dream of another ' love,' and to look about her 
 as with vague expectation of something. Her former 
 concern for her children was now supplanted by 
 extreme solicitude for her personal appearance, and 
 for the accomplishments which would render her 
 attractive, so that she began to again practise the 
 piano, on which she had formerly played with a 
 certain technical skill. This was the beginning of 
 the catastrophe. It became necessary to engage a 
 teacher; and it was then that — that — (pardon this 
 exhibition !) — that individual appeared on the scene. 
 
 " He really was a vile fellow ; but the fact that 
 he was such a sorry character only shows how irre- 
 sponsible my wife truly was. Had it not been this 
 creature it would have been another. It was neces- 
 sary that this thing should come to pass. Trook- 
 hatschevsky — for that was the miserable creature's 
 name — was a violinist, partly professional, partly 
 fashionable amateur, whose father and mine had been 
 neighbours, and who, on his return to' Russia, called 
 on me. He had almond-shaped, humid eyes, rosy 
 smiling lips, waxed moustaches, hair dressed in the 
 latest fashion, and had adopted all those Parisian 
 tricks of dress which catch the eyes of a woman and 
 predispose her in favour of the wearer. He was 
 of weak build, and his face was of that agreeably 
 insipid kind which women call 'not bad-looking.' 
 This was the vile creature who, with his music, was 
 the cause of all that followed. 
 
 56 
 
The KreuUer Sonata 
 
 " And yet I don't kno^ why I should say that, for 
 though the trial proceeded on the hypothesis that I 
 had killed my wife from jealousy, to avenge my 
 outraged honour, for which reason I was acquitted, 
 the truth is that her relations with the fiddler mat- 
 tered very little to me or her either. What did 
 matter was all that I have related to you — that 
 yawning, bottomless gulf of hatred which divided us. 
 Our quarrels had grown more frequent and far more 
 savage — alternating, as of old, with bursts of headlong 
 animal appetite. I was several times on the point 
 of committing suicide, and my wife had more than 
 once attempted to poison herself Then I would run 
 away, I thought, emigrate to America, and applied 
 for a foreign passport. After some terrible scenes 
 my wife fled to her sister's, returned, and drank a 
 bottle of opium, after which we had a • reconciliation ' 
 which in turn led to new and added exasperations. 
 Scenes like these occurred once a month, now once a 
 week, now every day. Always the same old story of 
 contradictions, taunts, retorts, denunciations, curses, 
 screams, hysterics ! No variation ! No novelty ! 
 
 " Well, this was the sort of life we led when this 
 man Trookhatschevsky made his appearance. I had 
 always disliked the fellow, but some strange, fatal 
 force — I can't tell what — perhaps to try to deceive 
 myself, perhaps to prove I was not afraid — perhaps 
 to counterbalance the desire I felt to kill him on 
 the spot ; anyhow, though I suffered horribly, seeing 
 quite well what would happen, that he must conquer 
 her completely, and though my wife, poor thing, 
 frightened for herself, declined — I insisted that he 
 must come to supper, plied him with expensive wines, 
 expatiated on his musical talents, beamed upon him 
 
 57 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 with an expansive, affectidfiate smile. ... My wife 
 was a bit of a musician .... he must come to dinner 
 next Sunday and play with her ! So began the game 
 of deception all round. I smiled graciously, and pre- 
 tended to look on with delight — my wife tried with 
 all her might to look indifferent — and Trookhatschev- 
 sky appeared to be exclusively interested in the topic 
 under discussion or the piece played. 
 
 " Three or four days after this, on returning home 
 from the Exhibition, I suddenly felt my heart grow 
 like stone within me at sight of his great-coat — ^you 
 know, a fashionable great-coat — hanging up in the 
 ante-chamber. The door of the drawing-room was 
 open, and I could hear the sound of her voice and 
 his, and the measured arpeggio that was evidently 
 evoked merely for the purpose of drowning their 
 words — their kisses, perhaps ! Good God ! What a 
 wild beast was roused up within me ! I quickly 
 threw open the door. ' I am so glad you have come,' 
 she said. He shook me by the hand, and inquired 
 whether they should play simple pieces next Sunday, 
 or one of Beethoven's sonatas. All looked simple 
 and true ; yet I \yas convinced they were concerting 
 measures to play me false. I, for my part, was 
 unable to speak. I resembled a bottle held upside 
 down, from which the liquid is unable to escape, 
 owing to the bottle being too full. I wanted to load 
 them with reproaches, to expel him from the house ; 
 but in proportion as my mental sufferings grew more 
 acute, so did my manner increase in cordiality ; and, 
 remarking that I had perfect confidence in his taste, 
 and advising my wife to have the same, I accompanied 
 him with marked obsequiousness to the ante-chamber, 
 and pressed with unwonted warmth his soft white hand. 
 
 58 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 " All that day I did not speak to my wife, and when, 
 in the evening, she sought me in my study, there 
 was a terrible quarrel. For the first time I felt an 
 uncontrollable desire to give physical expression to 
 the hate which filled my being. ' Leave me, or I'll 
 kill you ! ' I screamed. Seizing the presse-papier that 
 lay on the table, and screaming once more, ' Leave 
 me!' I dashed it on the ground close to where she 
 stood. While she stood in the door, still looking at 
 me, I snatched up various articles — the candle-stick, 
 the ink-bottle — and flung them to the ground, con- 
 tinuing to cry, ' Leave me ! take yourself off! I can- 
 not answer for what I may do ! " She left, and I in- 
 stantaneously ceased. An hour afterwards the nurse 
 summoned me to her chamber, where I found her in 
 violent hysterics, really ill ; but towards morning she 
 grew calm, and we wound up the incident in the 
 usual way — under the influence of the feeling we 
 called 'love.' I confessed my jealousy to her, at 
 which she laughed in the most sincere way, and 
 declared that she had too much pride to think the 
 fiddler could be dangerous. But everything was 
 against her, poor thing — especially that accursed 
 music. Next Sunday the guests gathered together, 
 and the two performed again. 
 
 " They played the Kreutzer Sonata of Beethoven. 
 Do you know the first presto ? Eh ? Ah ! it is a 
 strange piece of music, that sonata, especially the 
 first part. One terrible effect of music is that it 
 irritates the soul. It is a terrible weapon in the 
 hands of, say, an immoral person. Take the 
 Kreutzer Sonata, for instance. I do not speak of 
 the traditional andante, with its commonplace varia- 
 tions and weak finale, but the first part of it, the 
 
 59 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 presto ; and I say that it revealed new feelings to me, 
 unfolded new possibilities, but without telling me 
 how to realise them. 
 
 " That night, Trookhatschevsky appeared to take a 
 final leave of us, and two days afterwards I departed 
 for the country. 
 
 " Two days after my arrival in the interior I received 
 a letter from my wife, the fag-end of which informed 
 me, as if it were the most trivial circumstance, that 
 Trookhatschevsky had called again ; and once more 
 the furious wild beast of jealousy roared within his 
 den. I went to bed and slept ; but woke with some- 
 thing of an electric shock, my mind full of my wife 
 and Trookhatschevsky. I recalled the passionate, 
 sensuous, lust-provoking music, her tender, blissful 
 smiles, her flushed face ; but tried to persuade myself 
 that it was absurd to suspect the hired fiddler and so 
 respectable a woman as my wife. At five o'clock I 
 was out of bed, calling for the horses ; and at eight 
 was driving off in the canvas-covered wagon. I had 
 to drive thirty miles, and then spend eight hours 
 on the railway. I cannot describe the horrors of the 
 
 journey — I was like a wild beast in a cage Oh! 
 
 how I fear . . . how I fear these railway carriages 
 .... they fill me with dread !....! thought of 
 getting out on the line and letting the train pass over 
 me; but felt I could not leave her behind, for my 
 hatred was terrible. Memory is a blank. It was 
 madness pure and simple. I knew only that some- 
 thing was impending. * 
 
 "Owing to the breakdown of the wagon, it was 
 midnight, instead of afternoon, when we reached 
 Moscow. I drove up to the door. Lights were burn- 
 ing in our rooms. I rang the bell, and the door 
 
 60 
 
The Kreutger Sonata 
 
 was opened by George the lackey. Just what I 
 thought I The first thing I saw was the great-coat 
 hanging from the clothes-rack. 'Who is here, 
 George ? ' ' Trookhatschevsky.' ' Anyone else ? ' 
 ' No ; no one else.' I could not stop the chattering 
 of my teeth, and felt a strange feeling of joy that 
 I could now give loose reins to my hatred. Through 
 the parlour came the sound of voices, and the clatter 
 of knives and plates. They were evidently eating, 
 and had not heard the bell. I rushed into my study, 
 and recalled the scene, a week ago, when I had 
 smashed the things on the table and thrust her out. 
 I now experienced the very same desire to beat, to 
 destrgy. My hate metamorphosed me into a malig- 
 nant, cunning, savage beast ; or I was like a human 
 being in times of danger, when a man acts with 
 precision, not hurriedly, yet without losing a moment, 
 and all with a single, definite end in view. 
 
 "The first thing I did was to take off my boots ; 
 then, in my stockings, I went to the wall and took 
 down a crooked Damascus blade that had never been 
 used and was exceedingly sharp. Then, stepping 
 out softly, I suddenly threw open the door. To 
 my dying day I shall not forget the expression of 
 mingled despair and terror on both their faces ; and 
 this was precisely what I desired, and gave me 
 pleasure. He was seated at the table, but started to 
 his feet and leaned his back against the cupboard. 
 For an instant I stood on the threshold, holding the 
 
 dagger behind my back ' And we were at our 
 
 music,' he began ' Well, this is a surprise,' com- 
 menced she But neither of them finished. I 
 
 felt again the insane frenzy to destroy, to assure the 
 triumph of madness, and I yielded myself up to it, 
 
 6i 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 body and soul. I threw myself upon her, to plunge 
 the dagger into her side, under her breast. (I chose 
 this spot from the very first.) He caught me by the 
 arm, and shouted at the top of his voice .... 'Think 
 of what you are doing ! Help ! ' I freed my arm 
 and rushed upon him. His eyes encountered mine, 
 his very lips became bloodless and white, his eye 
 glistened with an unwonted lustre, he dived under 
 the piano and fled from the room. I rushed after 
 him, but felt a heavy weight suspended from my left 
 arm. It was she. Her touch inflamed me ; I exulted 
 to appal her, and struck backward with all the force 
 of my left arm, hitting her in the face. She 
 screamed and let go my arm. I turned round to 
 her. She had fallen on the couch, holding her hands 
 up to her bruised eyes — eyes full of terror and hatred 
 for me, her enemy. She began to speak and to clutch 
 at my hand — the hand that held the dagger. .... 
 
 'Think of what you are doing Nothing has 
 
 passed between him and me Nothing I 
 
 swear to you ! " But the frenzy into which I had 
 lashed myself went on crescendo ; for fury has its laws 
 as well as other mental states. ' Do not lie, hell- 
 hag!' I screamed. Then, without relinquishing my 
 hold of the dagger, I caught her with my left hand by 
 the throat, threw her over on her back, and began to 
 strangle her. How tough her neck seemed ! I 
 struck the dagger with all the strength I could 
 
 muster into her left side, under the ribs 
 
 " I knew very well what I was doing ; for the more 
 I fanned the flame of my fury, the brighter burned 
 the light of consciousness within me. I felt, and still 
 remember, the momentary resistance of the corset, 
 and of something else, and then the passage of the 
 
 62 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 knife cutting its way through the soft parts of the 
 body. She seized the dagger with both her hands, 
 wounding them, but without staying its progress. I 
 drew the dagger out again, stood motionless for an 
 instant, and waited to see what would happen. My 
 wife sprang to her feet and screamed. Suddenly the 
 blood welled forth from under her corset. I lingered 
 on till she fell. The nurse ran in to her assistance, 
 and it was only then that I flung away the dagger 
 and quitted the room. I walked along the corridor, 
 sent the maid to her mistress, and went to my room. 
 I took down a loaded revolver and placed it on the 
 table ; then took out my cigarettes and began to 
 smoke. Overcome with drowsiness, I fell asleep. 
 After two hours I was awakened by a knocking at 
 the door. 'This is the police,' I thought, and took 
 up the revolver, though I knew very well I would 
 not kill myself. I went to the door, drew back the 
 bolt, and saw my wife's sister. ' Vasa, she's dying,' 
 said she ; ' go to her.' ' Wait a moment,' I ex- 
 claimed ; ' it's so stupid to go without boots ; let me 
 just draw on my slippers.' 
 
 " My wife was in bed, and the first thing that struck 
 me was her light grey dress lying on the chair, all 
 black with blood ; but 1 was most impressed by 
 her swollen and bruised face. All beauty was gone ; 
 nothing but the repulsive was left. I decided in my 
 own mind that she wanted to repent, and that I must 
 be generous and forgive her, so went close up to her 
 bedside. ' You have your way now,' she said ; ' you 
 have killed me. Yes, admire what you have done ! ' 
 Mingling with physical pain and the nearness of death, 
 I could read the old familiar look of sullen animal 
 hatred. On the threshold stood her sister with the 
 
 63 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 children. When I looked at them, then at her poor, 
 bruised face .... ' Forgive me 1 ' I exclaimed. 
 .... But, ' Forgiveness ! all that is rubbish,' she 
 
 ejaculated 'Oh, if I could only keep from 
 
 dying ! ' Then, raising herself a little, she fixed on 
 me her gleaming, feverish eyes and exclaimed .... 
 'You have worked yoilr will .... I hate you!' 
 Then as her mind wandered . . . . " Kill me, I'm not 
 
 afraid Kill him too ... . only kill them all. 
 
 .... He's gone .... he's gone! . . . .' The de- 
 lirium continued till the end. She recognised no one. 
 The same day at noon she passed away. 
 
 " I remained eleven months in prison waiting my 
 trial. They took me to the house .... (pardon this 
 weakness !).... and only when I beheld her in her 
 coffin did I see it in its true light, did I realise the 
 vast discrepancy between the mean and frivolous 
 things that had wounded me and the fateful thing I 
 
 had done Only then did I realise how, through 
 
 my instrumentality, it had come to pass that she, 
 once loving, moving, warm, was now still, waxlike, 
 cold ; and that this could be righted nowhere, never, 
 by no one Oh, oh, oh ! 
 
 "The jury acquitted me, as you know. I have 
 settled all my estates on her children, and am going 
 away. Good-bye Yes, good-bye ' " 
 
 64 
 
n 
 
 THE KREUTZER SONATA 
 
 2 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: EUNUCHS 
 FOR THE KINGDOM'S SAKE 
 
THE KREUTZER SONATA 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: EUNUCHS FOR 
 THE KINGDOM'S SAKE 
 
 "But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman lo 
 lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." 
 — Matthew v. 28. 
 
 " His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his 
 wife, it is not good to marry. But he said unto them, All men cannot 
 receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some 
 eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb : and there are 
 some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men : and there be eunuchs, 
 which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's 
 sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." — Matthew 
 xix. 10, II, 12. 
 
 To read text before sermon, always advisable, is here 
 absolutely necessary. The text speaks of absten- 
 tion, for various reasons, from the physical pleasures 
 associated with marriage. The sermon enforces the 
 text as never sermon before in this world. The text 
 declares explicitly that it is not for general appli- 
 cation, cannot expect to be universally admitted, 
 but is for those select men and women, those elect 
 souls, who are able to receive it. Let it not be 
 forgotten anywhere throughout this unparalleled, this 
 stupefying discourse. The sermon is for him who 
 can receive it. 
 
 This frightful parable was first told about a dozen 
 67 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 years ago, and the teller has informed us he adheres 
 to its teaching still ; that he has no doubt of the truth- 
 fulness of his conceptions, or their value for the human 
 family. He sees what no one else seems to see, and 
 gathers all his force to set forth the hard, the unpalat- 
 able truth. 
 
 It is necessary also to be severely true to the 
 sermonic idea ; to keep ever before us the preacher, 
 not the writer — the moralist, not the artist — the 
 parable, not the story — the judgment of sin, not the 
 tickling of the fancy. Here is something more than a 
 psychological master-piece by th#first literary genius 
 of our time. Here is an outline of the principles 
 that must be adopted to produce an ethical form 
 of civilisation and a pure humanity, an impeachment 
 of the artificial culture that manufactures neurotic 
 degenerates, a delineation of morbid immorality for 
 which our religious and social conventions are directly 
 responsible-^an expanded and lively version of Jesus' 
 terriblest philippics against the Pharisees. /Here is 
 something more than an example of the awful doom 
 of those who, being spiritual, become animal, and 
 degrade the holy discipline of matrimony into a 
 licence for sensual indulgence. Here is an assertion 
 that individual degeneracy is the result of social 
 degeneracy, and that both have their roots in the 
 corrupt soil of a conventional society ; so that when a 
 male sexual degenerate has killed a female as the 
 result of a critical sexual episode, a jury, as society^s 
 representatives, cannot do other than acquit, for 
 they instinctively feel that the crime is society's 
 rather than the individual's. / Here is a revelation 
 of that prosaic and uninteresting character which 
 cannot detach itself from the social order unlit 
 
 68 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 save by the gleams from hell which flare up in its 
 sordid chamber — lending an unholy glamour to 
 an existence too wretched to be called a farce, 
 and a death too mean to be considered a tragedy. 
 Here are torn away those rags of romance, poetry, 
 sentiment which society has carefully wrapped around 
 its " lusts which war against the soul," showing them 
 naked, hideous, repulsive, disgusting, holding them up 
 to contempt in the person ©f a creature irredeemably 
 selfish, vile, mean, jealous, devoid of principles as of 
 ideas, whose egoistic vanities punish him with the 
 most excruciating mental tortures, finally unhinging 
 his mind and reducing him to the level of a cruel and 
 crafty beast. 
 
 As the preacher pursues the horrid discourse, we 
 feel that every conventional prejudice we ever 
 cherished is being shrivelled up ; but it is no use 
 complaining, or crying " Halt ! mercy ! " for the 
 preacher is without pity, and is doing precisely 
 what he set out to do. For no other purpose did 
 he open his mouth. Mrs Grundy, for certain, will 
 not hold pews in the church where this remorseless 
 Daniel comes to the judgment of her shallow con- 
 ventions ; rather will she flee the scene, to implore 
 the editor of her religious weekly to desist from 
 reporting so much as a single word of these hideous 
 discourses! She never heard anything like it in 
 her life ! She hopes she never shall again ! If the 
 discourses, printed, are despatched through the mails 
 of Western Christianity, she will stir up Mr Grundy 
 to seize them as improper literature. Here is a great 
 reformer on the rostrum— a Puritan of Puritans — a 
 modern Augustine — a preacher who combines the 
 sanctity of a Jerome with the fury of a Savonarola 
 
 69 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 — but his discourses are too improper for publication ! 
 Never, since the Jews took up stones to stone the 
 Son in the Name of the Father, did irony further go, 
 or Pharisaism make itself so ridiculous. 
 
 The doctrines of this appalling homily may be 
 set forth under the three chief phases of sexual 
 attachment — Love, Courtship, Marriage. 
 
 The theory that " romantic " love hallows marriage, 
 and forms a sufficient basis on which to build the 
 family, is one that prevails almost universally in 
 Western Christendom. Motions purely animal are 
 considered admirable, and indeed noble, if they do 
 but present themselves in meretricious colourings 
 borrowed from the regions of sentiment and fancy — 
 body drawing charm and tint from mind. Identity 
 of ideal is supposed to lead, properly and inevitably, 
 to partnership of couch ; with the result that the 
 further question has now to be agitated — whether a 
 subsequent change of ideal ought not to be followed 
 by a corresponding change of partner ? Pressed into 
 definition, the romanticist cannot help exposing this 
 fatal flaw in the foundation of the family ; for it is 
 manifest that "the preference of one person for 
 another to the exclusion of everyone else" puts no 
 time-limit to such companionships — an hour or 
 an existence — and leaves the shorter union as per- 
 missible as the longer. The ideal state demanded 
 by the theory — the grand and heavenly sentiment 
 — works out in ways unmentionable, that cannot 
 be recalled without feelings of disgust (Nature's 
 very object ! ), and should be branded as revolting, 
 instead of being cried up as splendid and sublime. 
 
 The observer of family tragedies m.ay be pardoned 
 70 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 for his scepticism of results secured througli the 
 romantic attachments ; and for demanding facts, 
 not fictions; history, not novels. He thinks it as 
 improbable that a man's predilection for a certain 
 woman, or a woman's for the same man, will endure 
 throughout the lifetime of both, as that two peas 
 in a cartload shall lie exactly side by side ; as absurd 
 to think of loving one person sensuously through a 
 lifetime as to expect a candle to continue burning 
 as long as one lives. /Romantic love is like taking 
 opium ; the sensation is delightful while it lasts, but 
 it passes, and the awaking is dreary./ Experiences 
 drawn from the sense-functions are such that it is 
 impossible not to desire a renewal of them ; whence 
 the need of novelty, and the impingement of the 
 home upon the brothel. It is the disillusionment 
 necessarily arising from the romantic attachments 
 with their inevitable satiation, jealousy, hysteria, that 
 leads men to kill their wives, blow out their own 
 brains, fight duels with other men ; that begets all 
 those domestic tragedies whose frequency alone 
 prevents society from being horror-stricken. Thus 
 terrible is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of 
 those who persuade themselves that prettily-disguised 
 sensuality is true marriage. And it was to depict 
 the inferno of the married sensualist that the 
 preacher delivered this awe-inspiring discourse. 
 
 To assist it to self-condemnation, the preacher 
 rivets upon society a sense of grotesque inconsistency 
 in keeping its women tamed at home, like horses 
 in a field, whilst men are permitted to roam at large. 
 The prenuptial impurity of men is regarded with 
 general approval, commended to youth by older men, 
 provided for by a paternal Government ; whilst the 
 
 71 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 medical profession warrant it scientific and hygienic, 
 undertake to safeguard it against disease, and take 
 a hundred times more trouble to cure the ills it 
 creates than would suffice to prevent the evil itself. 
 Mere boys are prepared for easy fall when occasion 
 presents itself, and will presently substitute the 
 " cash-nexus " for all moral, simple, and natural 
 relations with the other sex. >Ievertheless, they will 
 be permitted to frequent the salon and ballroom, 
 spruce, neat, shaven, perfumed, in spotless linen, 
 irreproachable evening-dress or faultless uniform, to 
 approach the sisters and daughters of their friends, 
 dance with them, encircling their waists with their 
 arms, and — instead of being gently instructed to 
 retire — will be welcomed, petted, lionised. It is in 
 this way that fashionable society (in contrast with 
 the labouring man who lives on bread and drives 
 a wheel-barrow sixteen hours a day, being thereby 
 saved from ecstasies, tendernesses, poetries, and all 
 the contrivances of mamma and the dressmaker) 
 breeds young lovers as hothouses force cucumbers, 
 combining idleness and surfeit, physical inactivity 
 with stimulating foods and drinks, until their artificial 
 life passes through the prism of the romantic senti- 
 ments, and flushes up in the delightful sensation 
 called "falling in love." 
 
 It is through analysis and moral dissection like 
 this the preacher leads his shuddering audience — 
 horrible, but faithful, like Rembrandt's Anatomy 
 Lesson — till he lifts them to the clear heights of 
 virgin purity and Christian unions. It is a shame- 
 ful thing, he says, for a man to have to do with any 
 save her to whom he is to be dedicated for life; and 
 it is as unjust to insist upon the purity of one sex as 
 
 72 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 it is immoral to permit a lower standard to the other. 
 Love is here differentiated from lust in all its gay 
 and sentimental disguises — irradiated with whatever 
 hues from the leaping flames of the pit. The massed 
 shades of the sensualist's hell form a background 
 against which to set his pure conception of Christian 
 love. Love must be a union of souls rather than 
 bodies, and should seek the perfection of character 
 rather than the gratification of appetite. This is the 
 idea that is pressed home upon the mind with tre- 
 mendous force, and with a severe consistency that 
 will, to many minds, make it seem an unreal and 
 impossible conclusion, the issue of an unreal and 
 impossible conception of life. A law of life which 
 seems to contemplate the gradual cessation of the 
 human race by the slow extinction of the sexual 
 passion is not one that will commend itself to the 
 crowd. But the refined sense, piercing intellect, 
 and rare spirit of the preacher cause him to face 
 even this pitiless logic with serenity. He knows 
 very well he is a Voice crying in the wilderness* 
 of modern luxury, convention, materialism. The 
 sermon is for him who can receive it. 
 
 The main theme of this unparalleled homily now 
 advances to that phase of sexual relationship covered 
 by the term Courtship. 
 
 i Courtship may be said to begin when the sinner 
 goes in search of a wife, and carefully looks round for 
 a suitable girl, who must be young, pure, attractive, 
 and so on., The innumerable unions of the candidate 
 are not supposed to disqualify him for the lily hand 
 of a spotless maid. Nay, her very perfection is an 
 additional reason why the spotted leper should wed 
 
 73 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 her, for the correction of his own blood and the 
 chances of a future generation. Don Juan and the 
 Virgin Mary — excellent match! — let the banns be 
 published forthwith ! 
 
 It makes no difference that the female victim of 
 vice and convention should be ignorant of the pre- 
 nuptial infidelity of her suitor, and that when she 
 discovers he is not virgin-pure like herself she should 
 be filled with horror and stupefaction. Her groom, 
 she will find, prides himself on being a man of 
 honour ; society also has agreed to accept it as 
 inevitable and right ; so she will resign herself to 
 her fate and try to forget. But a blow has been 
 dealt at the security of the domestic structure. 
 Men who have sinned against innocent woman- 
 hood before marriage are not entitled to complain 
 if initiated womanhood sins against them after 
 marriage^ 
 
 Society, as a matter of fact, is arranged in the 
 interests of the sinner, and seems deliberately planned 
 * to inflame instead of to restrain the passions. It is 
 a marriage-trap wherein successive generations of 
 initiated mothers place successive generations of 
 deceived daughters. Those initiated mothers know 
 very well that what society calls sublime and 
 romantic love depends less upon moral qualities 
 than on frequent meetings, touching hands, meeting 
 knees, encircling arms, whirling dances, the cut of 
 the dress and curl of the hair. So the girls wait at 
 receptions or dance at ballrooms ; and the young 
 men go to look at them, selecting those whose 
 shoulders, busts, curls, or complexions they like 
 best. The young men stroll backwards and for- 
 wards, scrutinising, entirely satisfied, not knowing 
 
 74 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 that the watchful mother sits by, sure of the capture 
 of one or other. As for the poor girls, they, of 
 course, do not realise the plain truth, nor interpret 
 the buzz of the ball to really mean — " Take my Lily. 
 
 . . . . No, take me Do take me, dear; see what 
 
 nice shoulders I have No please take me ; 
 
 observe how I can waltz Do but hear how I 
 
 can discuss the Origin of Species ..,.!" The 
 truth is that the fashionable and the unfortunate 
 woman are precisely alike in this — that the supreme 
 object of their lives is to attract and fascinate men ; 
 the maiden, in order to have as many lovers as 
 possible to choose from ; the matron, in order to 
 command the fidelity of her husband. To this end 
 — the seduction of men — are the same toilets, ex- 
 posures, projections, glittering toys, intoxicating 
 perfumes, demoralising music. 
 
 It is fairly arguable that the old style was better — 
 the style that yet prevails amongst the Chinese, 
 Indians, Russian and other peasantry, forming the, 
 great majority of the human family — according to" 
 which the parents arranged the match. The devotees 
 of romantic love may compare it to the coupling of 
 animals, with parents in place of owners, but it 
 could at least plead that it was less stimulating and 
 less hypocritical. And, after all the glib talk about 
 the love that hallows marriage, the moralist sees 
 that to risk the stability of marriage upon the vapoijiy 
 sentiments is to open the way to all manner of in- 
 fringements and irregularities. Than our system, 
 no worse could possibly be devised. 
 
 The system, for another thing, thrusts the degra- 
 dation of woman upon us, through all our deftest 
 disguises, as a hideous reality. Though we yield 
 
 75 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 her first place, pick up her pocket-handkerchief, even 
 permit her some small position in civil government, 
 woman knows very well that her real position is 
 unmodified — she is a slave whose business is to give 
 men pleasure, as black people are slaves to bring 
 them profit. We leave her no option but to secure 
 ascendency by playing on men's sensuous organisa- 
 tion. Men enslave women to their vices, and women 
 enslave men to their social ambitions. Men enslave 
 her through her helplessness and necessities, and she 
 enslaves men through their senses. Man's humilia- 
 tion of woman compels her to restore the balance by 
 humbling him to her whims, follies, extravagances. 
 The impressive form her vengeance assumes, and 
 the result of her terrible power over her master and 
 lord, are seen in the way she condemns to the penal 
 servitude of mines and*factories millions of people, 
 generations of slaves, nine-tenths of the human race, 
 who, to provide her with the equipages, jewels, 
 ,toys, ornaments, dresses necessary to maintain her 
 ascendency over men's senses, must perish in hard 
 labour and imprisonment. Then men wonder why 
 it is that women, so far from being helpers, are 
 hinderers of the world's development. It is because 
 only by these means can women maintain their social 
 dominion. 
 
 The immediate and obvious result of this stupid 
 and wicked scheme is to reduce to barrenness what 
 should be the most luxuriant period of human 
 intercourse. Courtship between men and women 
 reared in such an atmosphere is a dry and sterile 
 business, empty of spirituality, even of intelligence ; 
 conversation being hardly possible, communion quite 
 impossible. After the topics and plans relating to 
 
 76 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 the new life have been discussed, there remains no 
 more to say, and the period of ennui and weariness 
 is curtailed only by the excitements and festivities 
 of the wedding. 
 
 The honeymoon hardly saves the situation, for, 
 in the absence of spiritual communion, it is found 
 inconceivably wearisome and disgusting — like learning 
 to smoke. The wedding-tour, with its isolation of 
 the young couple, is nothing but a licence to un- 
 limited pleasure, an endorsement of the whole sen- 
 suous theory, the commencement of sure satiation, 
 dislike, misery, disgust. 
 
 Christian love is rational and natural ; so the 
 courtship that attends it is that of beings endowed 
 with a rational and spiritual nature ; beings who 
 are guided by principle, dominated by reason, and 
 directed towards the improvement of the soul. 
 
 Who is he that speaks this? He knows that he 
 is a Voice and nothing more — a Voice crying in the 
 wilderness of modern sense and vanity. The preach- 
 ment is for the man who is able to receive it. 
 
 Marriage that follows on such Love and such Court- 
 ship must be of the same kind, for men do not gather 
 grapes of thorn, nor figs of thistle. Base views of love 
 and courtship are the fount and origin of after-suffer- 
 ing and crime, the explanation and cause of sub- 
 sequent misery and violence. It is not in the nature 
 of romantic love to endure, to result in lifelong 
 happiness. For a month the couple are happy, a year, 
 two years ; then they hate each other for the rest of 
 their lives ; spending their time paying homage to the 
 respectabilities, trying to hide the truth from the 
 world and even from themselves, believing their case 
 
 77 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 to be exceptional, not knowing that ninety-nine per 
 cent, of married people are plunged into just such a 
 hell, where they are like prisoners chained together, 
 and hating each other. The human nature in the 
 married pair rises up to protest against the animal 
 nature which is crushing it in both of them ; and it 
 reveals its presence in fierce and passionate hatred of 
 the physical tyranny which is destroying spiritual 
 freedom. Intercourse of a larger and more spiritual 
 nature is gradually restricted ; partly because their 
 mutual interest ceases to extend beyond the physical, 
 partly because the slightest excursion beyond the 
 boundaries of domestic affairs is enough to pro- 
 voke discord ; till conversation is reduced to such 
 dimensions as the very brutes have means of carrying 
 on. They come to hate each other's simplest gestures, 
 as if they were in themselves bad actions. Quarrels 
 become more frequent and savage — one a month, a 
 week, a day — always the same story, without modifica- 
 tion, without variation ; until it becomes evident that 
 conflict is not the result of accident, but necessity, 
 and must constitute the normal relation of the pair. 
 The sentiment called " love " being exhausted, its 
 place is taken by a cold, venomous hostility, until two 
 egoists stand face to face, perfect strangers to each 
 other, or look at each other across gulfs of bridgeless 
 isolation. It is true that the animal nature does its 
 best to compensate for the absence of the spiritual, 
 and so orders it that periods of " reconciliation," under 
 the influence of the feeling called "love," regularly 
 follow periods of strife. Outbreaks of anger are 
 followed by bursts of headlong appetite ; the separat- 
 ing gulfs are filled up with the vapours of " love " 
 (mere exhalations of putrescence), with smiles, 
 
 78 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 kisses, embraces ; and the reconciliations are even 
 more disgusting than the differences; the physical 
 passion that reunites more repulsive than the mental 
 passion that divided. The two passions are really 
 opposite poles of the same feeling — the animal appetite 
 and the human protest — the misused body provoking 
 the angry spirit — till hysterical excitement becomes the 
 normal condition of the woman, morose savagery that 
 of the man. When a husband kills his wife with a 
 knife, the witnesses will try to prove that the cause 
 was jealousy, and that it was justified ; but the true 
 cause is the yawning gulf between, the absence 
 of all contact between spirit and spirit, the straining 
 away from each other under the repulsive power of 
 animalism. 
 
 Jealousy of the most excruciating nature iS the com- 
 mon and inevitable lot of all husbands who live with 
 their wives after the fashion of " romantic " unions ; 
 and this never gives them a moment's respite, though 
 after certain domestic events it is aggravated till it 
 becomes unbearable, maddening, cruel as the grave. 
 Othello hates to lose the monopoly of Desdemona's 
 person, and will rather kill her. 
 
 It might be expected that motherhood, with all its 
 sacred obligations, would be sufficient to allay the 
 animal pangs of jealousy, or unite in human bonds 
 those who persistently cultivated the animal. But 
 even motherhood does not ensure the recognition of 
 the ideal ; nor eradicate the false root of egoism ; 
 nor plant the flower of altruistic sympathy and care. 
 Assisted by the doctors — who foster false notions 
 of romantic and sensual love, by discouraging now 
 the bearing, again the suckling of offspring — the 
 mother may prove a mere monster, declining the first 
 
 79 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. The 
 disordered husband will immediately conclude that 
 she who can deliberately trample upon the duties of 
 a mother may, with equal facility, despise those of a 
 wife ; and when her appearance improves, and her 
 natural coquettishness increases, his unstrung nerves 
 will behold only tokens of wantonness, magnets for 
 men, a beautiful female without a curb ! 
 
 Concomitantly with those convulsing jealousies in 
 the male bosom, the female mind will begin to really 
 entertain wandering thoughts. A husband's "love," 
 having through passion, hate, and jealousy become 
 impossible, she will begin to dream of another " love," 
 to perceive another world of joy she must not let slip, 
 to take measures to increase the attractiveness of her 
 appeararite and the number of her accomplishments. 
 A catastrophe is inevitable. 
 
 The only question that remains is how to ter- 
 minate this state of affairs ; whether by emigration, 
 suicide, or murder — 'and if by pistol, cord, knife, or 
 poison. The killing may not necessarily be with a 
 knife, on a certain day of a year, followed by a jury- 
 trial ; but such killing of a very sure sort as is being 
 perpetrated in all such establishments at this moment. 
 
 The remedy ? Our preacher is ready to declare it ; 
 but so are not his hearers to receive it. Divorce is a 
 remedy as futile as it is unvirtuous ; for it would 
 only encourage the idea that " romantic " unions may 
 be succe^ssively contracted wherever, and whenever, 
 the romantic fancy required ; whereas our preacher 
 hplds such sentiments must be altogether extin- 
 guished. Two persons must be willing to live 
 together without reference to the physical attractive^ 
 ness of either, simply to improve character; the 
 
 80 
 
The Kreutzer Sonata 
 
 moral and spiritual must supplant the physical and 
 passional as a basis for marriage. To this end 
 divorce must be impossible. 
 
 Neither will the higher education of women effect 
 any material improvement; but a radical change in 
 man's conception of her, according to which he would 
 cease to regard her as an instrument of pleasure — 
 emancipating himself from that conception embodied 
 in the entire painting, sculpture, poetry of the 
 Western world. 
 
 Continence in the married state must be carried 
 to far greater heights of honour. The road forward 
 is the road back to Nature, as exemplified in the sane 
 and wholesome brutes, which do not compel the 
 female to be the mother and nurse of her young 
 and at the same time the mistress of her mate, but 
 keep the bearing and nursing functions entirely 
 separate from the procreative. The observance of this 
 simple natural law would fundamentally reform the 
 wedded relation. The ideal must more and more 
 supplant the passional. The awful text, " whosoever 
 looketh," must be applied to one's own wife, and not 
 alone to other women. Until this change in man's 
 view of woman, and woman's view of herself, is 
 effected, she must always remain a creature of a 
 lower order, and marriage will spell demoralisation. 
 
 The Church must more carefully and assiduously 
 teach that her ceremonies are something more than 
 a warrant for taking possession of a certain woman 
 to the exclusion of other men ; though it cannot do 
 even this till it has learned to make Christianity a 
 reality, not a mere collection of words. Not till 
 then will the sacramental view of marriage become 
 a reality. A step upwards will have been taken 
 
 8i 6 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 when the Church persuades women that maidenhood 
 — now their fear and shame — is truly their highest 
 state. 
 
 If the fear be interjected that this would mean the 
 extirpation of the human race, the preacher is ready : 
 Would that be such a calamity? When humanity 
 has reached the summit of moral perfection for which 
 it was created, why should it mind ceasing to exist ? 
 There is no further reason for its existence ! Do not 
 religion and science agree in teaching that it shall, 
 one day, cease to exist at anyrate ? 
 
 It is only by these higher views of marriage that 
 the lower can be fought and overcome. Only by 
 the conception of Christian Love, Courtship, Marriage 
 can the romantic fallacies of society, with their con- 
 sequent miseries, vices, crimes, be displaced. Then 
 will come what our Tennyson has beautifully called 
 " the world's great bridals, chaste and calm." 
 
 But the Voice still cries in the wilderness of vice 
 and vanity. The message is for him who can re- 
 ceive it. 
 
 82 
 
m 
 
 RESURRECTION 
 
 I 
 
 A PARABLE OF DEATH IN LUST 
 AND LIFE IN LOVE 
 
RESURRECTION 
 
 A PARABLE OF DEATH IN LUST 
 AND LIFE IN LOVE 
 
 This tells the very common story of the ruin 
 of a young girl, Katiisha Mdslova by name ; but 
 leads on to very uncommon developments, showing 
 how her destroyer, Dmftri Ivdnovitch Nekhliidoff by 
 name, was roused by the sight of her destruction 
 to become her saviour and deliverer, and succeeded 
 in raising both himself and her to a new and risen 
 life. That is why the tale is called Resurrection, 
 
 Katiisha Mdslova was born out ot wedlock, her 
 father being a gipsy tramp, and her mother a farm- 
 worker who had already borne five undesired babies, 
 all of whom she had carefully baptised and then 
 carelessly neglected till they died. The sixth baby 
 would have shared the fate of its predecessors had 
 it not chanced to be brought forth in a cowshed 
 of a dairy-farm belonging to two maiden ladies, 
 landowners, one of whom, going out in the morning 
 to scold a milkmaid, saw the helpless little baby, 
 pitied, and offered to stand God-mother to it. Some- 
 time afterwards the mother fell ill and died ; the 
 maiden ladies took the girl waif into their home, 
 where her pretty face, black eyes, and lively spirits 
 
 85 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 greatly entertained them; and she grew up with 
 them, well-trained and educated, holding the position 
 and performing the duties of half ward and half 
 servant. 
 
 She lived in this manner till she was sixteen, when 
 Nekhludoff, the old Ikdies' nephew, a rich young 
 prince, just nineteen years of age, came to spend a 
 summer's vacation at his aunts' farm ; and Katdsha, 
 not daring to acknowledge it to herself, fell in love 
 with him. 
 
 Nekhliidoff, who was still attending the University, 
 was preparing a vacation essay on land tenure, for 
 he had already read the writings of Herbert Spencer 
 and Henry George, and, being convinced that private 
 ownership in land was wrong, had decided to give 
 up to the peasant labourers the land he had inherited 
 from his father. 
 
 Happy in the fields and woods, his horse, his boat, 
 his books, Nekhliidoff took little notice of the black- 
 eyed, quick-footed Katiisha ; for he was yet pure as 
 mother-heart could wish. But on Ascension Day 
 a few young friends came to the farm, and there 
 were games in the meadow, joined in by Katiisha, 
 whose abounding vitality and innocent joy shone 
 in her radiant face and eyes black as sloes, and 
 expressed themselves in the rapid movements of 
 her firm young limbs and well-knit body. Joining 
 hands, as the rules of the game required, and running 
 behind a lilac-bush, Nekhliidoff, not knowing how 
 it happened, stooped smiling towards the shining 
 face looking up with the glad, innocent smile, and 
 kissed Katiisha on the lips. " There, you've . done 
 it," she said, and, with a swift movement freeing 
 her hand, ran to join the other players. 
 
 86 
 
Resurrection 
 
 After this the attraction between Nekhludoff and 
 Katiisha was something they could no longer hide 
 from themselves, for it filled their lives with gladness. 
 She read his books, and they had short talks when 
 meeting on the verandah or in the yard, and some- 
 times in the old servant's room when he went to 
 drink tea. It was the love of a true-hearted lad 
 for a pure-hearted girl, fraught with no danger, 
 almost unconscious; and if the maiden aunts (who 
 had eyes) had told Nekhludoff their real fear — which 
 was that he might marry Katiisha — it is very likely 
 that, with his usual straightforwardness, he would have 
 declared his resolve to marry the sweet, merry little girl 
 with the slightly-squinting eyes that always affected 
 him so strangely, who filled his whole being with 
 gladness. When the time came to go away, he felt 
 he was leaving something beautiful, precious, some- 
 thing which would never come again, and grew very 
 sad. " Good-bye, Katiisha," he said, as he was 
 getting into the trap ; " thank you for everything." 
 "Good-bye, Dmitri Ivdnovitch," she returned, with 
 her pleasant, tender voice, keeping back the tears 
 that fillecl her eyes ; then ran away into the hall, 
 where she could cry in peace. 
 
 When, after three years, Nekhliidoff returned to 
 visit his aunts, he was completely changed. He 
 had just been promoted to the rank of officer, and 
 was going to join his regiment. His life in the army 
 had demoralised him, so that he had become fast, 
 luxurious, extravagant, filled with animal selfishness. 
 He no longer felt the same neighbourly interest in 
 the land question. He did not cherish the same 
 honourable respect for all women. 
 
 Whether or not he was already cherishing in his 
 87 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 heart those evil designs against Katusha suggested 
 by his uncontrolled animal self, it is certain that he 
 was soon compelled to acknowledge to himself that 
 he ought to go away again, that no good could come 
 of his staying; yet the attraction of this laughing, 
 open-hearted girl was so delightful to him that he 
 stayed on. 
 
 It was Easter morning at the village church, and 
 Katdsha was there with her well-shaped figure, white 
 dress, and a rapt, joyous expression on her face, by 
 which NekhMdoff knew that exactly the same that 
 was singing in his soul was also singing in hers. 
 Her eyes shining with joy, he saw her give — as 
 was the custom — the threefold Easter kiss to a 
 disgusting beggar with a red scab on his face in 
 place of a nose; and he saw that to her everything 
 was right, everything was beautiful, for she loved. 
 
 "Christ is risen," she said, blushing and drawing 
 near to Nekhludoff. "Christ is risen," he replied; 
 and they exchanged the threefold kiss. Katiisha 
 looked as if she had accomplished some joyous task. 
 Her whole chest heaved with a deep sigh ; she 
 looked straight into his face with a look of Hevotion, 
 virgin purity, and love in her black, very slightly- 
 squinting eyes. 
 
 When they reached the farm for breakfast, 
 Nekhliidoff, seizing a private opportunity, caught 
 Katiisha up and kissed her rudely. It was a 
 dreadful kiss — very different from that first thought- 
 less kiss behind the lilac-bush, or the Easter kiss 
 that morning in the churchyard, and she felt it so. 
 "Oh, what are you doing?" she cried, in a tone 
 as if he had irreparably broken something of priceless 
 value, and ran quickly away. 
 
 88 
 
Resurrection 
 
 All that day he watched for her, demented, and all 
 evening — the ungovernable animal man now alone 
 ruling him ; but Katiisha avoided him — the happy, 
 joyous smile on her face had given way to a 
 frightened, piteous look. But night came, and, with 
 night, opportunity. 
 
 When next he stood in the porch, day was 
 breaking, the mist hung thick below, lit by a 
 horned moon with horns turned upwards, from the 
 river came up the sound of breaking ice and sobbing 
 water, and Nekhliidoff was asking himself what was 
 the meaning of it all, and whether that which had 
 befallen him was a great joy or a great misfortune. 
 
 Beyond question, it was a terrible misfortune for 
 Katiisha — a misfortune for which the hundred-rouble 
 note he thrust upon her was poor compensation. 
 
 Some months after this, hearing that Nekhliidoff 
 was to pass that way by the railway, at night, 
 without calling at the farm, Katiisha, who was often 
 surprised and touched by the soft movements of 
 that which now lay beneath her heart, went to the 
 station to see him and let him know. It was a 
 wild night of wind and rain when Katiisha ran 
 across the fields and reached the station only in 
 time to see Nekhliidoff sitting with some other 
 officers in a brightly lit carriage, playing cards and 
 laughing as the train moved off; and though she 
 followed, clinging on, stumbling, falling, the train 
 vanished into darkness, leaving her crouching in the 
 mud and the rain, forsaken, and blown about by 
 the wind. From that dreadful night Katiisha ceased 
 to believe in God or goodness. 
 
 All that afterwards happened strengthened her in 
 89 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 this disbelief. Noticing her state, the maiden ladies 
 turned her away. The police-officer, the forester, 
 and the students at whose homes she successively 
 took service all appeared to consider her a creature 
 fit only for their lowest uses. Her baby died of 
 ill-treatment at the hands of ignorant and callous 
 nurses. Finally, having gone to a registry office, 
 and there met a woman with bracelets on her bare, 
 plump arms, and rings on most of her fingers, 
 Katiisha was induced to go to her home, partook 
 of the cake and sweet wine set before her, was 
 introduced to a man v/ith a white beard who looked 
 at her with glistening eyes, and became an inmate 
 of the house. For seven years Katiisha lived the 
 terrible life, learning to smoke and drink, and even 
 to submit to. the weekly medical examinations, trying 
 to find a certain pleasure in ease and vanity, harbour- 
 ing also a dim idea that thus she was avenging herself 
 for her wrong ; seven years of horror during which she 
 changed houses several times, was once in hospital, 
 and finally landed in prison as a criminal ; seven 
 awful years which she afterwards summed up in the 
 words, " It is hell — from eight till four in the morning, 
 and every night the same." 
 
 At the age of twenty-six Katiisha Mdslova found 
 herself in prison as a thief and a murderer ; and this 
 is how it happened. Smelkdff, a Siberian merchant 
 of vast proportions, had visited Mclslova at the house 
 where she lived, and, running short of money and 
 being very drunk, sent Mdslova to his lodgings tp 
 fetch him forty roubles, giving her the key of his 
 portmanteau, which she opened in the presence of 
 a man and a woman, servants at the lodging-house. 
 
 90 
 
Resurrection 
 
 They saw that the bag contained a great deal of 
 money — whole packets of hundred-rouble notes ; but 
 Mislova, taking only the forty roubles, locked the 
 portmanteau, returning with the key and the money 
 to Smelk6fif. The two servants, after she had returned 
 to the merchant, opened the bag with a false key 
 and stole the money — amounting to more than three 
 thousand roubles. Later in the day, when Mdslova 
 returned to his lodging-house with Smelk6ff, who 
 was still very drunk and struck her, giving her his 
 enormous diamond ring as a make-peace, she became 
 terribly wearied out with the importunities of the 
 dreadful man, and, going out into the passage and 
 complaining to the man-servant who had stolen the 
 money that the merchant would not let her go, was 
 advised to give him some white powder in his brandy, 
 to make him sleep, which she, in all innocence, did. 
 The powder, however, instead of being an opiate as 
 she thought, was really poison, which the man-servant 
 thought was the surest means of preventing the 
 discovery of the theft and of throwing all the blame 
 on Mdslova. And that is how it happened that, on a 
 certain spring morning, Katusha Mdslova, with white 
 face, brilliant black eyes, and bosom swelling under the 
 prison cloak, found herself standing behind the grating 
 in the criminal court, between two gendarmes holding 
 naked swords, to be tried for robbery and murder. 
 
 Now it came to pass, on that same spring morning, 
 that Nekhliidoff had been summoned to attend the 
 court as a juryman; and as he sat in his chair 
 opposite the prisoners' grating, adjusted his pince- 
 nez, and looked at the female before him, he slowly 
 awoke to the truth that, in spite of the unhealthy 
 pallor and fulness of face, that sweet, peculiar 
 
 91 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 individuality, slight squint of the eyes, naive smile, 
 and expression of readiness on the face and figure, 
 could belong to no other than that Katusha whom 
 he had once really loved, but whom he had destroyed 
 in a fit of delirious passion, then abandoned, and 
 never again brought to mind. 
 
 After the first attack of memory and conscience, 
 Nekhliidoff was filled with fear lest Mdslova should 
 recognise him, accuse him of being the author of 
 her ruin, and disgrace him before the open court. 
 He felt as one going to be judged rather than to 
 judge. But he soon saw that he was not recognised, 
 and now he began to be filled with better feelings, 
 and a fierce and complicated struggle went on in 
 his soul. In this one case he saw the cruelty, 
 cowardice, and baseness of his whole life. " What's 
 the matter?" said one of the jurymen, hearing 
 Nekhludoff utter a strange noise. It was the sound 
 of weeping fiercely kept back. 
 
 By a curious blunder, caused chiefly through the 
 impatience of the President to get away to the 
 company of his Swiss girl, Mdslova was pronounced 
 guilty, though nearly everyone was convinced of 
 her innocence, and sentenced to four years' hard 
 labour in Siberia. Many people were sorry, feeling 
 that they had made a shameful hash of the case, 
 but Nekhliidoff was determined to do all he could 
 to get the sentence reversed, no matter at what cost 
 to himself He spoke to the President, engaged a 
 leading advocate to get up a petition to the Appeal 
 Court in St Petersburg, called upon governors, 
 lawyers, police officials, visited the prisons again and 
 again ; but all in vain. His petition to the Tsar 
 was more fortunate, resulting in the commutation 
 
 92 
 
Resurrection 
 
 of the four years' hard labour to four years' exile to 
 one of the nearer districts of Siberia. 
 
 The chief interest of this period, however, centres 
 in the movements of Nekhludoff's mind and his 
 relations with Katusha Mdslova. He now saw 
 everything with different eyes — the social flattery 
 and lies beneath the grandeur of the fashionable 
 people he moved amongst, the frightful injustice 
 and cruelty connected with the entire organisation 
 of law-courts and prisons — and it all became to him 
 shameful and horrid. He saw that he must stop 
 lying and tell the whole truth. He realised that 
 he could not atone for his sin by merely paying an 
 advocate to take up Mdslova's case ; and he resolved 
 to confess his shame openly, to marry Mdslova if she 
 would let him, and share her exile in Siberia. After 
 a night of wrestling, walking his room, he stopped, 
 folded his hands in front of his breast as he used 
 to do when a little child, lifted his eyes, and prayed 
 the Lord to help him, to teach him, to enter within 
 him and purify him from all these abominations. 
 Then he went to the window, opened it, and looked 
 into the garden, murmuring, " How delightful 1 how 
 delightful! Oh, God, how delightful!" meaning, 
 not the moonlit night, but that which was going on 
 in his soul, the resurrection life beginning to stir 
 within him. 
 
 In the morning Nekhludoff visited the prison, 
 resolved to tell Mdslova everything, to beg her 
 forgiveness, and to ask her to marry him, on the 
 way confessing his sin to various people — his old 
 housekeeper, the lawyer, the governor. When, from 
 behind the wire-netting where prisoners were per- 
 mitted to converse with visitors, Mdslova first saw 
 
 93 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 him, she could not hear his broken and stammering 
 words, but his appearance reminded her of her 
 former lover, and a deep line of suffering appeared 
 on her brow. "You're like .... but no, I don't 
 know you." " I have come to ask you to forgive 
 me," he said ; " I wish to redeem my sin." Though 
 he distinctly saw the crow's-feet round her eyes, 
 the wrinkles round her mouth, and the swollen eye- 
 lids, he told her he would marry her. Mdslova, 
 however, refused, with dignified but also with violent 
 words, telling him that she was a convict and he 
 a prince, that having got pleasure out of her in this 
 life he only wanted to save himself through her in 
 the life to come, that he was disgusting to her and 
 she would rather hang herself. Nekhliidoff replied 
 mildly that in any case he would go on serving her ; 
 which he did. Henceforth he had only three objects 
 in life — the first, to redeem Mdslova ; the second, to 
 settle all his lands on the peasant labourers, for which 
 purpose he made final visits to his ancestral estates ; 
 the third, to oppose the horrible injustices and cruel- 
 ties his experiences in prison and in Siberia showed 
 him to be connected with the whole judicial system. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that Nekhliidoff succeeded 
 in his great aim of redeeming Mdslova without many 
 hindrances. The first hindrance was connected with 
 society, which laughed at him, and thought it all 
 queer and unnecessary ; but this he soon overcame. 
 The second was connected with himself, and was 
 more difficult. The tempter frequently urged him to 
 renounce and abandon Mdslova again, to permit her 
 to be buried in Siberia, whence she would never 
 emerge to remind him of her existence. Evil women 
 
 94 
 
Resurrection 
 
 rich and fashionable, also tried to draw him aside. 
 He could do nothing with this woman, he sometimes 
 thought ; he was only tying a stone round his neck ; 
 he was trying to be impossibly good, and it was no 
 use ; the sacrifice was too great. In such moods he 
 was able to restore the wavering balance of his inner 
 life only by calling on the" God in his soul. And 
 he finally triumphed over his own weakness. But 
 the greatest hindrance arose from Mdslova herself. 
 Though actual sin was, after her terrible experience 
 of it, utterly repulsive and disgusting to her mind, 
 yet her whole nature was unhinged and distorted, so 
 that she frequently repelled him by violent manners 
 and vulgar language, as well as by much drinking of 
 vodka. The coarse, luring habit of her former life 
 clung to her still. So far from being ashamed of 
 her former life, he saw that she was, at first, rather 
 proud of it, and even had a philosophy of her own 
 to justify it. But Nekhliidofif still adhered to his 
 resolution. Indeed, it was only then he began to 
 fully understand his crime. He saw that he had to 
 awaken Mislova's soul. Pity triumphed over disgust. 
 He felt the certainty that love was invincible; and 
 the feeling that no action of Mdslova's could change 
 his love for her filled him with joy, and raised his 
 resurrection life to a level never before attained. 
 The night before they left for Siberia he wrote in his 
 diary these words, " To-morrow, a new life will 
 begin." 
 
 And the unfortunate Mdslova — it must not be 
 supposed she was without her peculiar sorrows and 
 temptations. It was bad enough to be shut up in a 
 horrible prison with many vile (though a few noble) 
 people, to be subject to the hardened officials, with 
 
 95 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 the weight of an unjust sentence lying on her mind ; 
 but even worse feelings of resentment and anger were 
 awakened in her by the presence of the original 
 author of her misery, though he was animated by 
 none but the highest motives. NekhMdoff, however, 
 felt that this resentment was due to something good 
 in her, and it gave hita hope. But Mdslova had 
 other temptations. Wherever sl>e went it was her 
 misfortune to attract the notice of the men, who 
 looked on her only as a creature to be made use of, 
 and many of whom inflicted upon her attentions she 
 hated. When she was on her trial, the judges and 
 jurymen all stared and hankered after her, " like flies 
 after sugar " as a prisoner put it, more interested in 
 her physical attractions than the question of her 
 guilt or innocence. When sent back to gaol, the 
 very convicts tormented her by making love to her. 
 Promoted to be a nurse in the prison hospital, the 
 medical assistant annoyed her with his solicitations 
 till she was glad to be sent back to her cell again. 
 On the march to Siberia, the disgusting men tried 
 her quite as severely as the disgusting vermin. For 
 her, sin had lost all its charm. She also had entered 
 upon the resurrection life. 
 
 Resentment and tears for her wrecked youth began 
 to be followed by displays of positive moral energy 
 on Mdslova's part. She determinedly broke off from 
 cigarettes and vodka, abolished her ringlets and tied 
 her hair in a 'kerchief, suppressed that tendency to 
 even innocent coquetting with men which was natural 
 to her, for she saw with grief and shame that men 
 considered themselves entitled by her past to pester 
 her with those importunities which became increas- 
 ingly oflensive to her. This difficulty of reinstating 
 
 96 
 
Resurrection 
 
 herself in the respect of the world troubled her more 
 than her unjust sentence. She bestirred herself to 
 eager service on .behalf of her fellow-prisoners who, 
 like herself, had been unjustly condemned. Resent- 
 ment against Nekhliidoff yielded to the higher feeling 
 of regard for his well-being ; for that " he must live 
 too " — live his life out under better auspices than as 
 her husband. It was on the road to Siberia that the 
 inner life of Mdslova rose to its full height. 
 
 The start to Siberia was made on a blazing day 
 in July, when a gang of convicts — four hundred 
 men and fifty women, mostly criminals, but with 
 a few political prisoners — began their long, weary, 
 deadly march into exile and penal slavery, 
 Nekhliidoff accompanying them as a voluntary exile. 
 Already — at the very start, amid the crowds, the 
 shouting, the swearing, the clanking of chains and 
 sobbing of women, the flying dust and the consuming 
 heat — five convicts fall and die, smitten with sunstroke. 
 Arrived at the railway station, they are crowded into 
 carriages with grated windows — crushed, suffocated, 
 parched with drought — and a baby is born to a 
 convict mother ; but all must be driven on. 
 
 Two thousand five hundred miles they marched 
 into the steppes, Mdslova being permitted to travel 
 with the political prisoners, by which she was saved 
 the wors^ horrors of the journey — its unspeakable 
 filth, disease, vice, and the molestations of the men. 
 She could now live without being reminded of the 
 past she was so anxious to forget. Already she 
 was thankful for her new life ; the open-air walking 
 strengthened her naturally vigorous frame, and 
 fellowship with her new companions — all cultivated 
 
 97 7 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 and interesting men and women — opened out a life 
 of new thoughts and ideas which filled her with joy. 
 She came even to thank God for the unjust sentence 
 which had snatched her from her former self, and 
 given her these new interests in life and these nobler 
 friendships. It was in this Siberian exile, and amid 
 these Siberian prisoners, that Katiisha Mdslova found 
 that high place amongst her kind she was by nature 
 fitted to fill. She fully shared with Nekhliidoff the 
 joy of a traveller on discovering a new, unknown, 
 and beautiful world. As she looked at him with 
 those unfathomable, slightly-squinting eyes, telling 
 him that he had already suffered enough on her 
 account, he felt not only ashamed, but sorry to think 
 of all he was losing with her, and he exclaimed, 
 " What a good woman you are ! " 
 
 Now whether Mcislova's real reason for refusing 
 to entertain Nekhliidoff's proposal to marry her — 
 a proposal he never ceased to make all through the 
 Siberian journey — was regard for his welfare, or 
 another reason, is perhaps not quite clear ; but pro- 
 bably it was the first. The strange look out of the 
 slightly-squinting eyes, and the pathetic smile with 
 which she said, not "good-bye," but "forgive me," 
 revealed her love, and betrayed her feeling that by 
 accepting his offer she would spoil his life. She was 
 glad she had strength to set him free ; yet she 
 suffered at parting. She knew a way of burning 
 her boats behind her, and thus preventing that which 
 she regarded as his sacrifice, though he looked upon 
 it as a good. 
 
 Amongst the political prisoners was one V61demar 
 Si'monson, a dishevelled, dark young fellow, with a 
 frowning forehead, deep-set eyes, and a look of child- 
 
 98 
 
Resurrection 
 
 like kindness and innocence, who wore rubber shoes 
 and a rubber jacket because he was a vegetarian and 
 would not wear the skins of slaughtered animals, 
 being also, for similar reasons, against all war and 
 capital punishment. Sfmonson was the son of a 
 Russian civil servant ; had left the university to 
 become a village schoolmaster; was arrested for 
 revolutionary teaching, and exiled. A shy man, 
 though with a will like iron, he silently loved 
 Mdslovaj but she, being a woman, instinctively 
 discerned his secret, and the discovery that she 
 could awaken love in a man of that kind increased 
 her confidence and self-respect ; for she was certain 
 that Sfmonson was not the man to place his 
 affections unless where there existed peculiar moral 
 qualities ; and she set herself to awaken in her 
 nature all the highest qualities she could possibly 
 conceive. They did not utter a word ; but their 
 looks plainly told that they understood. 
 
 At last Sfmonson called Nekhludoff — for, of course, 
 the whole company knew their strange history — 
 and told him that he loved Katiisha Mdslova, and 
 had at last said so to her, but she would settle nothing 
 without his approval. He regarded her, he said, as 
 a splendid, unique human being, who had suffered 
 much, and whose fate he had an awful longing to 
 lighten. Nekhludoff replied that, for his part, he too 
 longed to lighten her fate, but would put no restraint 
 upon her ; he did not consider himself free, but she 
 was free to accept Sfmonson's offer. Mdslova, on 
 her part, made the simple declaration, "Where 
 Vdldemar Sfmonson goes, there I will follow." 
 What did it matter? With Sfmonson the child- 
 hearted revolutionist, or NekhMdoff the single- 
 
 99 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 hearted prince, it was the same — Katiisha Mdslova 
 had risen from the dead. 
 
 Dmftri Ivdnovitch Nekhliidofif continued to live 
 the resurrection life. All the horrible evils connected 
 with the machinery of law and government — how to 
 conquer these became the problem of his life. He 
 went to the Sermon on the Mount, and, asking 
 himself, " Is this all ? " received the answer, " Yes, it is 
 all ! " The strange, paradoxical truth became to him 
 the simplest, truest certainty. He saw that the 
 solution of the world's evil was not theoretical, but 
 practical. Not to kill or even be angry ; not to lust 
 or even look ; not to swear, whether falsely or truly ; 
 not to return evil or even resist it ; to love one's 
 friends and also one's enemies — in these laws he 
 now found the meaning of his existence. And a 
 perfectly new life dawned for Nekhliidoff. 
 
 lOO 
 
m 
 
 RESURRECTION 
 
 2 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: UNTIL 
 SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN 
 
RESURRECTION 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: UNTIL 
 SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN 
 
 The preacher is a giant, and the sermon gigantic; 
 less than four texts will not serve. 
 
 " Then came Peter to-him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother 
 sin against me, and I forgive him ? until seven times ? Jesus saith unto 
 him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times : but. Until seventy times 
 seven." — Matt, xviii. 21-22. 
 
 " And why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but 
 considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye ? " — Matt. vii. 3. 
 
 ' ' He that is witihout sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." 
 John viii. 7. 
 
 " The disciple is not above his master : but everyone when he is per- 
 fected shall be as his master." — Luke vi. 40. 
 
 Lest the title and the texts of this great puritan 
 discourse should insufficiently prepare our minds for 
 its delivery, the preacher has furnished us with a clue 
 which will lead us through its vast divisions and sub- 
 divisions to the lofty truth in which it culminates. 
 Writing to a correspondent, he says : — " In sublime 
 love, in love from an intellectual aspect, and in the 
 love of a yet higher form, which ennobles man, and 
 which has its highest expression in the ' Resurrection," 
 my new novel will represent the various aspects ol 
 love." 
 
 103 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 Like the apostolic writers of the New Testament, 
 this modern apostle starts out from the awful fact of 
 sin ; is penetrated through and through with the 
 sense of sin — sin in the individual, in society, in 
 the cosmos. Emphatic as Paul of Tarsus when he 
 declared men to be "dead in trespasses and sins," 
 and ruthless as when hq^fiissected the diseased body 
 of Greek and Roman vice, this Tolstoy of Russia 
 proclaims the deathly state of modern society, and 
 exposes the universal corruption. Mournful as John 
 the Evangelist when he asserted that the whole world 
 lieth in wickedness ; austere as when he warned his 
 disciples against the lust of the flesh, and the lust of 
 the eyes, and the pride of life ; confident as when he 
 declared that the world passeth away and the lust 
 thereof; — so does this modern gospeller depict a 
 world dead as a burnt-out moon, ghastly as the hollow 
 eye-socket of Richter's dream ; or exhibits men bound 
 in their fleshly lusts of sensuality, drunkenness, 
 gluttony; paralysed by their eye-lusts of covetous- 
 ness, envy, gold-gloating, sensuous beauty, mocking 
 drapery and embellished limb, the leer on the lovely 
 face of vanity ; or buried beneath their cosmic prides 
 of usurped authority and tyrannical government, 
 haughty contempt of the poor, scorn of human rights 
 and liberties, defiance of moral restraints, lawlessness 
 clothed as law. With a strength and genius not 
 granted to Franciscan or Dominican at their best, this 
 latter-day moralist, in opposition to the three worldly 
 lusts, preaches the three religious duties of poverty, 
 chastity, and i^wobedience ; — or if that be too strong 
 a word to use in connection with the apostle of non- 
 resistance, say non-recognition, non-acknowledg- 
 ment. These three great vows of puritan Christianity 
 
 104 
 
Resurrection 
 
 — poverty, chastity, disobedience — he enforces, not 
 only with the conviction of the faithful anchorite, but 
 with the classic genius of an Erasmus, the political 
 passion of a Savonarola, and the popular directness 
 of a Luther whose words were half battles. 
 
 If this titanic discourse is apostolic in its solemn 
 doctrine of sin, and puritanic in its stern demand for 
 virtue, it is also evangelical in its announcement of 
 the reality of the re-birth. " Marvel not," it exclaims 
 with Jesus, " that I said unto thee. Ye must be born 
 again ! " The artist-preacher significantly places the 
 chief act of sin in one spring season, and the chief 
 act of condemnation in another. Life is stirring all 
 around and within. In the soul as well as in the 
 cosmos are stirring the forces of the eternal Spring. 
 The heavenly man is coming to birth, asserting 
 himself against the habits of a lifetime and the con- 
 ventions of society. It needs only that men shall 
 trust the higher nature within as it strives against the 
 lower ; shall resist alike the promptings of the animal 
 and the dictates of the world ; and shall listen to the 
 inward voice of the spirit speaking in them as in all ; 
 bringing each into personal life and joy, and all to 
 universal peace, holiness, unity, love. The story of 
 the awakening of two human souls ; of how, after 
 losing their brief and early Eden — an Eden centering 
 in self, and sense, and gratification, and indulgence — 
 they gain a later, soberer, but abiding and blessed 
 Paradise — a Paradise of spirit, and sacrifice, and 
 renunciation, and God ; — this story is but a parable 
 setting forth the death in sin, the birth into holiness, 
 the rising into newness of life. Behold the new 
 creature, it proclaims with solemn joy, redeemed from 
 
 lOS 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 vain conversation, alive from the dead ! Old things 
 are passed away. Behold, all things are become new ! 
 
 The steps of the dead man from his grave 
 of sin to the glory of the resurrection life may 
 be traced in the developments of this prodigious 
 parable. 
 
 He takes the first step when he comes to a know- 
 ledge of his sin. Never did a Paul, an Augustine, or 
 a Bunyan experience more awful convulsions of soul ; 
 never from John to General Booth was conviction of 
 sin more poignantly depicted than here. Face to face 
 with his sin, a man can be compared to nothing more 
 fitly than to an unclean puppy, which, whining, 
 drawing back, is yet taken by the pitiless master and 
 smeared in its own nastiness. The Master of men 
 holds them to their sin without pity, that they may 
 learn to loathe it and leave it. In the condemnation 
 of those they have injured they read their own ; and 
 even, seated like Felix upon the judgment-seat, 
 tremble, as the convicted prisoner dumbly and 
 unconsciously reasons of righteousness, temperance, 
 and judgment to come. 
 
 The second step from death to life is confession 
 of sin. " Confess your faults one to another " is here 
 preached with a relentlessness the Apostle James 
 himself, austere and hair-girt, could not surpass. 
 Conviction of sin must culminate in confession of 
 sin ; for by the outpouring of guilt comes cleansing 
 of the choked-up channels of the soul. Wakened, 
 the penitent declares that he will stop lying and 
 tell everybody the whole truth — the persons actually 
 wronged, and all others who may be concerned 
 to hear; and only when he has come to this 
 
 io6 
 
Resurrection 
 
 resolution is he able to assume the attitude of his 
 pure childhood, and, hands folded in front of the 
 breast, pray, " Lord, help me, teach me, come, enter 
 within me, and purify me of all this abomination ! " 
 Purified in the bath of prayer, the resolute soul goes 
 straight to prison and to judgment, on the way con- 
 fessing guilt alike to wondering friends, hardened 
 gaolers, sneering lawyers, deriding pharisees, until — 
 in the very precincts of crime and habitations of 
 horrid cruelty, amid bolts, bars, dungeons — symbols 
 more terrifying than the overhanging mountains to 
 Bunyan's pilgrim — ^these soul-cleansing words are 
 
 heard, " I have come to ask you to forgive me 
 
 I wish to redeem my sin." 
 
 The third step on the resurrection path — reparation 
 of wrong — follows confession as naturally as gifts 
 follow love. Disposal of goods is a slight affair after 
 cleansing of spirit. Restitution of property is a mere 
 inference from renovation of character. After convic- 
 tion and confession, the wrong-doer finds it easy to 
 " atone for his sin, not by mere words, but in deed." 
 He will renounce all he has caused others to lose. 
 He will share the fate, however awful, into which his 
 sin has plunged a victim. He will voluntarily accept 
 whatever he has caused others to endure; he will 
 bear their griefs and carry their sorrows ; in all their 
 affliction he will be afflicted, and the angel of his pre- 
 sence shall save them. Even though he be a prince 
 and his victim a convict who despises and derides him, 
 he insists that he will still go on serving her. Since 
 his deathly state was compounded of three elements — 
 the lust of the flesh (gratification of appetite at the ex- 
 pense of the innocent), the lust of the eyes (enjoy- 
 ment of estates, properties, luxuries at the expense 
 
 107 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 of the poor), and the pride of life (assumption 
 of authority even to life or death over the aban- 
 doned and outraged victims of public injustice) 
 — his risen life must, he determines, follow a three- 
 fold path God ward; — not merely chastity in its 
 negative sense, but positive efforts to redeem the 
 sufferers from concupiscence ; not only a negative 
 poverty, but active bestowal of goods upon those 
 despoiled by legalised theft; not only disobedience 
 to, or disregard of, self-appointed tribunals and man- 
 made penalties, but positive obedience to the higher 
 will of God, involving lifelong efforts to deliver the 
 subjects of legal violence and social vengeance. 
 Improving upon the example of the rich young 
 nobleman in the Gospel story, he not only asks the 
 Lord what he may do to inherit eternal life, but, upon 
 the answer, " Sell all that thou hast and give to the 
 poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and 
 come, follow me," he actually gives his ancestral 
 possessions to the peasants who haijp earned them 
 by their tillage, and follows Jesus in the persons of 
 wronged harlots and outraged convicts. 
 
 The immeasurable spheres of death in opposition 
 to which the risen soul now stands are here set forth 
 with amazing distinctness and in all their staggering 
 dimensions. 
 
 Here is a dead society — a society based upon 
 brute force, compacted of shams and cruelties, balanced 
 between absurdities and atrocities, constituted, as 
 it would seem, with the very object of destroying 
 social happiness. Its uncircumcised morality is the 
 surest evidence that it, like the individuals who com- 
 pose it, is dead in trespasses and sins. It hangs a 
 
 io8 
 
Resurrection 
 
 man as a murderer if, in civilian clothes, and without 
 fee, he kills his neighbour; but if, in uniform and 
 for a shilling a day, he kills the other, it decorates 
 him with medals. If a rich prince betrays a girl 
 in humble life, he becomes only a more interesting 
 visitor to courts and drawing-rooms; but if he 
 marries her, he is ostracised and laughed at. If a 
 wealthy youth squanders his property in sowing 
 wild oats, he is considered a perfectly normal and 
 proper-spirited young gentleman ; but if he gives 
 it to the poor, he is counted eccentric, and his 
 relatives talk seriously about his mental condition. 
 The frivolous, extravagant life is praised ; the simple, 
 serious life derided. No wonder that the bewildered 
 spirit just emerging from the darkness of its grave 
 asks itself, " Am I mad because I see what others do 
 not, or are they mad who do these things that I 
 see ? " And then society turns upon those who seek 
 to reverse its downside-up morality, exclaiming with 
 the indignant Thessalonians, " These that have turned 
 the world upside down are come hither also ! " 
 
 This dead society is entombed beneath a deathly 
 system of law and government which, like a glittering 
 cenotaph of ice, it has erected over itself ; cunningly 
 devised to destroy personal relations and the sense of 
 responsibility. People who in their ordinary circum- 
 stances would be simple and humane, have only to 
 be made government functionaries in order to substi- 
 tute printed regulations for brotherly feeling and 
 official correctness for humane sense ; so that the 
 maltreatment and death of criminals passed through 
 the various shoals of impersonal officials is never 
 suspected to be official murder, cannot be laid to 
 the charge of any one person or group of persons, 
 
 109 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 but is due merely to the system. By this insensate 
 and conscienceless machinery, society lays hold of 
 men, women, even children, some of them entirely 
 innocent, others charged with acts which those who 
 condemn would commit in the same circumstances, 
 others with deeds which seemed to them entirely 
 natural and good, others condemned only because 
 they stood morally higher than the rest of the 
 community, and others because they were the victims 
 of social neglect and outrage — these people society 
 flings into gaols, labels them criminals and convicts, 
 takes infinitely more trouble to destroy them than 
 to remove the conditions which produce them, and 
 even fosters the establishments which keep turning 
 them out, such as the drink-shop, slaughter-house, 
 factory for murderous weapons, capitalistic slave 
 factories and estates, the army, thinking them 
 necessary for its own maintenance. By these 
 systems of organised demoralisation and cruelty, 
 officialdom provokes the convict execration, "Don't 
 they fear the Lord, the cursed souF-slayers ! " The 
 system which all must venerate and bow down to 
 on pain of death is framed and administered by 
 masses of officials, each one of whom is fallible, and 
 many of whom are ridiculous. There are the prose- 
 cutors and judges, troubled more about pay than 
 justice ; the lawyers, who glory in and are applauded 
 for defeating the right cause and securing verdicts 
 for the wrong; the public prosecutors, whose pro- 
 motions depend upon their securing convictions ; 
 the pedantic and affected administrators, who are 
 scrupulous about the formalities but careless about 
 the humanities ; the functionaries, who are incom- 
 petent and absurd, balanced by those who are self- 
 no 
 
Rcstmredtion 
 
 important and arrogant ; the hypocrites, who hide 
 the coarsest cupidity under fine talk about religion, 
 justice, public law, but who cannot hide the truth 
 that the law is mostly an instrument for upholding 
 the interests which are beneficial to a class. The 
 risen soul has only to contemplate this vast ac- 
 cumulation of officialism, under which brain, heart, 
 nerve, conscience lie sunk in the sleep of death, 
 persecuting humanity by a colossal scheme of courts, 
 prisons, Siberias, Dartmoors, in order to come to this 
 conclusion, "I consider all judging not only useless, 
 but immoral." 
 
 All these absurdities, wrongs, barbarities, culminate 
 in the military system which society has organised 
 for its defence and the better preservation of its 
 interests. In order that governing bodies may rest 
 securely on the dead corpse of humanity, they set 
 up a terrorising and coercing body called " the army," 
 the members of which are kept in complete idleness 
 (except for the useless exercises of rushing up and 
 down, waving swords, firing guns), are greatly petted 
 and admired, dressed in gaudy clothing, taught that it 
 is right to put the uniform and the flag before justice 
 and mercy, that he is the best soldier who thinks 
 least and obeys most beast-like, that he will be most 
 greatly honoured and rewarded who can inflict the 
 greatest cruelties upon the largest number of people. 
 
 In order that nothing may be wanting to com- 
 mend this stupendous scheme of falsehood, absurdity, 
 savagery — this " world " against which the apostolic 
 writers so solemnly warned men — it has appointed 
 a church to bless it and fortify it with the sanctions 
 of religion. This church, though it claims to have 
 been established by Christ, is frequently set up by 
 
 III 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 governments, and always has their financial or moral 
 support; for it is absolutely necessary to the co- 
 herence and solidity of the worldly fabric. Without 
 it, the official would not be able to torment, nor 
 the soldier to kill, his brother, with a quiet conscience. 
 But all these cruelties are not merely condoned and 
 forgiven by the official church ; they are even con- 
 secrated by prayer and holy song. Though this 
 church claims to teach the will of Christ, it really 
 exists to falsify and make void His law ; for whilst 
 it appoints many functionaries — some to preach, 
 others to catechise, others to perform sacred tricks, 
 others to watch for heresies, and yet others to 
 persecute by fines, banishments, even death, all those 
 who refuse to believe its superstitions or adopt 
 its mummeries — yet these officials, by the very 
 nature of officialdom, cannot help putting office 
 and emolument before God and truth. That is 
 why, to this day, the publicans and harlots go 
 into the kingdom of heaven before the Scribes 
 and Pharisees. Since they all alike perform their 
 functions for pay, the priest and the prostitute are 
 on exactly the same level. 
 
 It is the universal testimony of all those who, from 
 Abraham to Tolstoy, have made the great pilgrimage 
 from death to life, that the obstacles and impediments 
 in the resurrection road are numerous ; numerous 
 also the pushings-aside and pullings-back towards 
 the ignoble ease of the moral graveyard. All these 
 are set forth by this mighty preacher with an insight 
 
 and a power almost terrifying. They arise to 
 
 conveniently group them — from three sources : the 
 wrong-doer, the wronged, the social order, 
 
 112 
 
Resurrection 
 
 The wrong-doer will find the ancient sin haunting 
 the soul it has already enfeebled, and tempting it 
 to repetition. Through the eye of baneful beauty it 
 will look out at him and say, " Can you love me ? " 
 and his drowsing soul will reply, " I can ! " When 
 carnality fails, expediency will be tried ; he will 
 be wrested round from the pure contemplation of 
 duty, of what he ought to do, to the consideration of 
 the consequences. Selfishness will revive, persuad- 
 ing him to abandon the victims of his sin to their 
 
 fate — "You can do nothing with this woman 
 
 Why should you tie a stone round your neck?" 
 The weakness of a spirit only half reborn will shrink 
 from the sacrifice, and will urge him to retain, at 
 least, the lawful enjoyments of life — from which 
 concession, in such circumstances, the unlawful 
 pleasures would at once follow. Humility will join 
 .forces with weakness ; the old dilemma will present 
 itself — the doubt whether the inward pleader be an 
 angel from heaven, or only Satan in a garb of light ; 
 and he will feel a kind of shame, as if he were an 
 impostor trying to deceive men by a show of im- 
 possible goodness. " What is the use of trying any 
 more ? . . . . All are alike ! . . . . Such is life ! . . . . 
 Why should you try to be better than the rest?" 
 At such times, when the whole inner life wavers in 
 the balance, he is able to restore it only by calling 
 on that God in his soul who had come to his assistance 
 at first. When he has resolved to give himself up, 
 body and soul, to the salvation of the being his sin 
 had ruined, the tempter will, by a curious but natural 
 wile, change his feelings of spiritual love and sacrifice 
 into passions of fear, revulsion, and disgust in presence 
 of the very degradation he had been the cause of 
 
 113 8 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 producing in her character and manner. As if Satan 
 should hate Eve for being the very creature his 
 selfishness had made her. A hard, cruel feeling 
 begins to obtrude upon the former emotions of pity ; 
 a look of hatred flares out of the eyes that had 
 begun to soften into benignity ; the supreme tempta- 
 tion to complete the destruction begun, by com- 
 mitting, as it were, to hell the creature he had 
 damned. But this also passes. The new faculties 
 of the risen life enable him to perceive that the 
 measure of her demoralisation and his disgust is 
 the measure of his offence against her; and love, 
 at last, conquers all. He perceives that his work 
 is to awaken her soul, as his own has now been 
 quickened. The certainty that no action of hers 
 can change his love fills him with joy, and raises 
 him to a level of resurrection life never before 
 experienced. • 
 
 As to the wronged one, we here see how the 
 original wrong committed against her leads her to 
 commit new wrongs on her own account and against 
 others. Sin is not only entailed ; it is put out to 
 usury ; it grows, it lives, as the worm lives, upon the 
 corruption it has engendered. The luring habit of a 
 sinful past clings to her who has contracted it ; the 
 depraved view the world of men took of her as a 
 creature of their pleasure, has its counterpart in the 
 depraved view she takes of the world of men as 
 creatures of her profit. Society will consider that 
 her past condemns her to perpetual sin, and wicked 
 men will act on that assumption, till she comes 
 to take a certain pride in her own importance, 
 and develops quite a philosophy to justify herself. 
 The injustices of law and authority will sting her 
 
 114 
 
Resurrection 
 
 awakening conscience, till she flies to cigarettes 
 and vodka to dull the unwonted torment. With 
 a premonition of coming pain, she shrinks from 
 those who would awaken her out of her painless 
 trance. Such are the obstacles which prevent one 
 risen soul attempting to raise another to his own 
 height. 
 
 An enormous bundle of difficulties arises out of 
 the present constitution of society — its prejudices, 
 suspicions, jealousies, conservatisms, its instinct of 
 self-preservation, its insensate worship of the god 
 of Things-as-they-are. From those to whom the risen 
 soul relinquishes his earthly possessions he will not, 
 strange to say, receive thankfulness and appreciation, 
 but only suspicion, and even enmity ; for they have 
 so long been accustomed to be made gain of, to see 
 that men act only from self-interest, that it is im- 
 •possible for them to reverse that habit of mind, and 
 to believe that one may really be making a sacrifice 
 for them ; and the result is, that the new man feels 
 that he must surrender all his property without the 
 satisfaction of knowing that those who receive it 
 are made better or happier. But that will make 
 no difference to the sacrifice. Neither will the new 
 creature, eager and ardent in its new-found joy, be 
 able to make itself understood by those who are yet 
 in the bands of death. They will put him dawn 
 with a nickname — he is a " socialist," and that is 
 sufficient to nullify all his ideas ; or they will stick 
 a label on his principles — they are " anarchism," 
 hence there is no necessity to give them further 
 consideration. By these devices the world puts the 
 new man away from it. Thus he gradually comes 
 to realise that the resurrection life makes him a 
 
 115 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 strange, incomprehensible being to the old social 
 mummies, that his presence, which fills them with 
 amusement at first, afterwards causes them much 
 fear and alarm. He himself feels ill at ease in circles 
 formiHy congenial ; and he perceives that even the 
 offspring of the same parents are ill at ease in his 
 company. Thus he enters the kingdom of life alone. 
 As at first, so at every succeeding birth, man is 
 born alone. 
 
 Thus, and at last, the God within comes to full 
 consciousness, and the man is born again ; he has 
 risen from the dead. Realising that it was his dead 
 self which was bad and disgusting, others now cease 
 to be bad and disgusting to him ; he is filled with 
 love for those he formerly despised. In presence of 
 the great sacrifice he can say, " My soul is at peace, 
 and I am full of joy. .... To-morrow a new life 
 will begin ! " He experiences the joy of a traveller 
 on discovering a new, unknown, and beautiful 
 world. 
 
 But the wronged sufferer from the world's triple 
 lust — what of her ? She also will awake from the 
 dead under the vivifying influence of the spiritual 
 love flowing from the risen soul of him who had 
 wronged her. His love, invincible by her degrada- 
 tion, makes her invincible over it too, and she tramples 
 upon the grave of her past. The inward change and 
 health enables her to resist the tempters in her 
 conscience, will, nerves, members, and to become 
 pure, docile, forgiving, unselfish, spiritually loving. 
 Tears for the wrecked life give place to plans for 
 the future being. To live the true life is now the 
 great thing — "loving or not loving, what does it 
 
 ii6 
 
Resurrection 
 
 matter?" — that is, in any sensuous or sexly way. 
 The true life must be possible for all. All "must 
 live too" on the same terms. 
 
 Now spiritual love takes the place of carnal love ; 
 soul governs sense ; reason controls appetite ; service 
 supplants selfi^ness ; sacrifice displaces concupis- 
 cence ; and this is " Resurrection." 
 
 117 
 
IV 
 WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE 
 
 LIGHT 
 
 I 
 
 A PARABLE OF THE WORLD'S SLAVERY 
 AND CHRIST'S SERVICE 
 
WORK WHILE YE HAVE 
 THE LIGHT 
 
 A PARABLE OF THE WORLD'S SLAVERY 
 AND CHRIST'S SERVICE 
 
 The story of two youths ; how they lived and 
 loved ; — both generous and amiable, interesting and 
 cultivated; both handsome, manly, well-conducted, 
 vigorous in brain, ardent in study ; — but of whom 
 Julius was a pagan, whilst Pamphilius was a Christian. 
 And, in order that the contrasted personalities may 
 stand out as clearer types, they are placed in that 
 period of Roman history when the disciples of 
 Christ's disciples were yet alive and moulded their 
 lives according to the tradition of the Master. 
 
 It was in the city of Paul of Tarsus that birth and 
 rich parentage fell to the lot of Julius. His father 
 was a dealer in precious stones, of strong talents and 
 public reputation, a thinker and a doubter, but withal 
 a shrewd merchant who had reflected on the enormous 
 commercial advantage of agreeing with the faith of 
 the Emperor Trajan, and determined that his only 
 son should be trained in such a way as to spare him 
 his father's pains and perplexities. With this view, 
 he committed him, at the early age of fifteen, to the 
 entire care of a distinguished philosopher. 
 
 It happened also that a freedman of his -died, leav- 
 
 121 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 ing a son, Pamphilius, whom he decided to educate 
 along with his own, so that the lads grew up 
 excellent friends and good students — Julius inclining 
 to letters and mathematics, whilst Pamphilius drew 
 to philosophy. A year before the completion of his 
 studies, however, Pamphilius informed his patron 
 that his mother was going to settle with a few friends 
 at Daphne, that it was his wish to accompany her, 
 and so brought his studies to an abrupt conclusion. 
 
 Two years after their separation the young men 
 met in the street, when Julius invited his friend to his 
 father's house, eagerly plied him with questions, and 
 was horrified to discover that he had united himself 
 to the sect of the Christians. To be a Christian was 
 considered the same as to be a conspirator, and the 
 most frightful atrocities — such as the butchery and 
 eating of Tittle children — were attributed to them ; so 
 that Julius was filled with terror for his friend. 
 
 Explanations naturally followed, when Pamphilius 
 related how the Christians lived in a simple way, 
 having all things in common, and imparting their 
 substance even to the unworthy and unthankful, 
 treating them as dearly beloved brethren, regarding 
 this as the surest way to reclaim them. To the 
 young pagan, of course, it appeared ridiculous to give 
 to whomsoever asked ; even his father's hoards could 
 not long stand that strain ; how did they manage it ? 
 Pamphilius did not exactly know, except that they 
 were always giving, and always had enough. They 
 understood life in Christ's sense, never following 
 pleasure for its own sake, but making the will of God 
 the end of life, finding pleasure follow obedience as 
 naturally as the wheels of a cart follow the shafts. 
 
 122 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 Julius, though disposed to be critical and sceptical, 
 wqg touched, and parted promising to accept the 
 warm invitation to " come and see," and, if satisfied, 
 to abide the rest of his days. But the whirl of life 
 soon drew the young pagan in again ; and, as if in- 
 stinctively fearing that they might yet attract him, 
 missed no opportunity of pointing out the seamy side 
 of Christian disciples, reviling them by such names as 
 " hypocrite ! " " pharisee ! " " deceiver ! " It was in- 
 dispensable to his peace of mind that they should 
 always be wrong, and a pleasing luxury for himself to 
 be always right — practising just what he professed, 
 at anyrate, not saying one thing whilst doing another. 
 Quite reassured by these egoistic blandishments, he 
 continued to live as before. 
 
 It was the type-life of a rich young Roman under 
 the Empire. Business, thus far, had been entirely 
 controlled by his father, whilst the son wal free to 
 devote himself to theatres, games, slaves, mistresses, 
 excesses of eating and drinking, which paganism 
 could only stigmatise as extravagances, not extirpate 
 as sins. Thus passed another two years. 
 
 But the spoiled appetite demanded ever more 
 indulgence, and indulgence ever more money, whilst 
 the paternal patience began to give way and the 
 paternal purse to give out ; scenes became frequent, 
 in which Julius' insolence kept pace with his father's 
 fury. Having killed a man in a drunken quarrel, the 
 youthful profligate was taken into custody, and it 
 was with difficulty his father obtained his pardon. 
 Then Julius began to borrow — for the usurer ever 
 follows the mistress, the second demanding more pearls, 
 and the first more interest ; the second threatening to 
 seek a wealthier protector, and the first a more profit- 
 
 123 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 able client. In despair, he resorted to his mother, 
 loudly voting it either money or suicide ; whereugpn 
 she, true to the types of fond mother and foolish 
 son, went straightway to her husband, who bitterly 
 reproached his son. He, for his part, retorting more 
 insolence, was repaid by a blow from the paternal 
 hand, which being seized by Julius, the father shouted 
 for his slaves, commanding them to bind his son and 
 lock him up. In confinement, the son cursed the 
 father and himself, concluding that the death of one 
 or other was the only way out. A terrible battle was 
 meanwhile being waged between the foolish parents 
 — the wife reviling the husband for his harshness, 
 the husband beating the wife for her indulgence ; and 
 forgiveness was obtained at length only on condition 
 that their child would abandon his dissolute courses 
 and marry the daughter of a wealthy merchant. 
 
 ThougR he had no intention of either reforming 
 or marrying, Julius readily gave the required promise ; 
 for home had now become a hell. The following 
 day his mother abstracted some of her husband's 
 jewels and handed them to her son, remarking 
 that she would throw the blame on one of the slaves. 
 Horrified, without touching the stones, the conscience- 
 stricken youth left the house, and wandered outside 
 the city till he accidentally found himself in one of 
 the shady groves sacred to Diana, where he wrestled 
 with his conscience, sure that everyone must long 
 for his death. Wretched, lonely, loveless, he felt like 
 a wild beast at bay, superior only in that he had the 
 power to terminate his misery by death. 
 
 Prominent among the figures that now rose before 
 his distracted mind stood the calm outline of his 
 boyhood's friend. He recalled the invitation to seek 
 
 124 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 out the Christian settlement so soon as he should 
 haxe become tired of the pleasures of sin, reflecting 
 that he was wretched who had possessed all things, 
 whilst the friend who had possessed nothing was happy. 
 Certain that, at anyrate, Pamphilius loved and would 
 receive him, he took a quick resolve, exclaimed 
 aloud, " I shall go," and wended his way towards the 
 village where the Christians lived. 
 
 For some time he walked briskly forward with 
 rising spirit, but, desiring to rest, sat down beside 
 a stranger who reclined by the wayside eating his 
 evening meal of bread and olives. His new com- 
 panion was a middle-aged man of evident culture, 
 who greeted the young man with a smile, and 
 inquired whither he ^as bound. The reply that 
 he was going to join the Christian settlement led 
 to the telling of the whole story. The stranger 
 listened attentively, gathered up the remaining scraps 
 of food, adjusted his cloak, and poured upon the 
 penitent a stream of strong, steady, learned, plausible 
 dissuasives. He reminded Julius that he was young, 
 handsome, healthy, rich, with passions that demanded 
 tribute, and it was quite natural that he should long 
 for a quiet retreat such as that promised by the 
 Christians. There was, however, no such port of 
 safety, for the seat of agitation was within. Chris- 
 tians, moreover, whether from fraud or folly, refused to 
 recognise human nature; their teaching was only 
 for old men, not those in the flower of their man- 
 hood ; they founded their lives, not on Nature, but 
 on the idle sayings of Jesus. How absurd it was for 
 the Christians to pretend that the world could dispense 
 with tribunals of justice, means of national defence, 
 private property, and all the noblest results of civilisa- 
 
 I2S 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 tion ! This was only to deceive themselves, or throw 
 dust in the public eye ; since it was evident that, if 
 they had no property of their own, they must take 
 that of other people. Then look at the wickedness 
 of attempting to draw men back to savagery and 
 beastliness ; for they despised all those arts and 
 sciences which drew men nearer to the gods, such 
 as temples, statues, theatres, museums. As for the 
 founder of the sect, he was nothing but an ignorant 
 deceiver. As a youth of sense and education, Julius 
 could judge whether it was rational to discard the 
 known will of the gods and the collective wisdom 
 of humanity for unreasoning faith in the sayings of 
 one man.^ 
 
 Hearing all this flow of* argument, Julius was 
 aghast at his incredible folly in even contemplating 
 such a step. But what was he now to do? How 
 extricate nimself from the coil of difficulties ? The 
 stranger's counsel was, however, equal to his need. 
 Let him return to his father, abandon all irregularities, 
 engage in commerce, and marry according to his 
 father's wish. If he would also occupy his mind 
 with the arts and sciences, and devote himself to 
 public affairs, he would assuredly find rest and happi- 
 ness. After he had studied life as an independent 
 citizen and father of a family, he could, if so minded, 
 follow the path to retirement and quiet, which would 
 then be a genuine predilection, not a mere outburst 
 of discontent. Thoroughly convinced, Julius warmly 
 thanked the stranger and returned home ; was recon- 
 ciled to his father upon announcing his intentions, 
 especially his willingness to marry the young girl 
 chosen for him ; and three months later, duly cele- 
 brated his marriage with the beautiful Eulalia, took 
 
 126 
 
Work while yc have the Light 
 
 over a branch of his father's business, and settled 
 down into a dignified member of society. 
 
 Shortly afterwards occurred a second meeting 
 between the old school-friends. Driving into a little 
 town in the neighbourhood, Julius saw Pamphilius 
 and a girl carrying grapes for sale, and, proceeding 
 to a quiet place, engaged his friend in conversation. 
 He learned that Pamphilius was still a bachelor, 
 a Christian, increasing in happiness every year, day, 
 hour of his existence. As for Julius, he could not" 
 say he was perfectly happy — no, was not sure what 
 the word meant. Many citizens were wealthier and 
 more respected than he ; his wife was something of 
 a disappointment, but that was no proof timt happi- 
 ness could be found in their deceitful system. No; 
 it was useless to repudiate the word " deceitful," for 
 did not Christians abjure the affairs of life, nay, life 
 itself, even marriage ■^- well, if not marriage, then 
 love, and, with love, the perpetuation of the race ! 
 Pamphilius, on the other hand, proceeded to show 
 that Christians did not repudiate love, but only lust ; 
 not marriage, but mere carnality ; striving to sup- 
 plant animal desire by the sentiment proper to 
 brothers and sisters. Yes, even that pretty girl who 
 was with him, notwithstanding Julius' innuendoes, 
 was but a sister to him. Julius had selected his 
 Eulalia from a short leet of three drawn up by 
 his father on account of their wealth and beauty, 
 because she was the prettiest arid most fascinating — 
 seeking only enjoyment ; whereas a Christian chose his 
 wife by the will of God, loving her first with brotherly 
 affection and reverence, and rising to the special 
 wedded love for one. Heathen love was only a 
 
 127 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 form of violence and led to mere beastliness, as 
 the Iliad clearly showed, also to jealousy and false- 
 ness. Julius might despise Pamphilius' horny hands 
 and ragged garments, and the mean appearance of 
 the girl, his companion, whom he yet could not help 
 declaring might have been a very goddess of beauty ; 
 but it was the very aim of Christian love to get away 
 from the seductions of mere animal beauty. His 
 pagan friend might talk of this being contrary to 
 Nature, but that only raised the further question of 
 what true nature was. The heathen was true to the 
 animal nature, the Christian to the rational nature. 
 
 It was impossible, admitted. Julius, not to feel the 
 charm of this conception; but there was no getting 
 away from the fact that the Christian theory of 
 life led back to savagery, and that their pretending 
 not to care for private property was mere deception ; 
 to which Pamphilius replied that they cared for art 
 and science in so far as tbey increased the force 
 necessary to a life of labour and love, and pold 
 grapes merely to obtain the necessaries of life. 
 Christians, he continued, joyfully accepted the scorn 
 of such as Julius ; for it was evident they sought 
 only happiness, sought it by submission to violence 
 and giving all their property away. It was a mistake 
 to upbraid them for preferring the teachings of their 
 crucified Master to the accumulated wisdom of ma# 
 kind, for experience proved that all who sought 
 happiness. aright found Christ on the road before them. 
 "Was he truly happy?" Unspeakably' "Ah!" 
 said Julius, "I too might have been happy if I 
 had gone over to you, if I had not met the stranger ! 
 But now . . . ." Ah, now it was not possible. 
 He had just begun a different kind of life, and it 
 
 128 
 
Work while ye have the tight 
 
 would not be wise to break it off" too suddenly. 
 Fancy the disappointment of his^ather, friends, wife. 
 No, no, such a revolution was impossible. 
 
 At this moment the young girl came to the door, 
 having sold all her grapes, and with the proceeds 
 purchased some wheat which was carried by another 
 youth named Cyril, who, it was easy to see, stood 
 in the same relation to her that Pamphilius did. 
 A friendly contest took place between the youths 
 as to which should stay behind, each desiring for 
 the other the happiness of returning with Magdalen. 
 The brotherly struggle at length terminated in favour 
 of Pamphilius, who went away with Magdalen, carry- 
 ing the wheat. At a bend of the street he turnedi 
 smilingly nodded to Julius, made some remark to 
 Magdalen, and disappeared. "Yes," mused Julius, 
 " how much better had I gone over to the 
 Christians ! " And in his imagination a picture 
 framed itself — a pictur? of Pamphilius wedded to 
 Magdalen, contrasted with his own hearth and wife. 
 Presently, however, a merchant accosted him ; they 
 proceeded to join some comrades ; there was dinner 
 and drink to a late hour ; and at night with his wife. 
 
 In this manner passed another ten years, in which 
 the memory of his old comrade waxed dim in the 
 mind of Julius. His father had died, leaving him in 
 dilrge of the entire business. His wife had added 
 three children to his cares ; he had filled some civic 
 oifices, and, having considerable gifts, was looked 
 upon as a rising man. The new conditions, however, 
 only brought new forms of unhappiness. Absorbed 
 in the duties of a mother — what with nurses wet and 
 nurses dry — his wife was less solicitous about her 
 husband, and had, besides, lost much of her fresh- 
 
 129 9 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 ness and beauty, whilst intercourse with a Christian 
 female slave had %d her to discard much of the 
 outward gloss of paganism. Under these circum- 
 stances, Julius had contracted a friendship with a 
 light woman in whose society he spent his leisure 
 hours. Still happiness came not. Every pleasure 
 was poisoned. He was filled with the loathing that 
 comes of satiety. 
 
 Just at this period, whilst driving a chariot in the 
 Olympian races, he had a severe accident which kept 
 him three months in bed. Now just when, in the 
 retirement of a sick-room, he was filled with mournful 
 contemplations of his past Jife, a number of other 
 disagreeable events occurred : his slave robbed him, 
 his concubine deserted him, his rival supplanted him 
 in public office — and all from the trivial circumstance 
 that he had driven his chariot just half an inch too 
 much to the left ! From conversation with his wife's 
 Christian slave, he learned* of the marriage and 
 supreme happiness of Pamphilius and Magdalen, 
 which seemed in mournful contrast to his own 
 discontent. As if to decide him at this turning- 
 point, there fell into his hands a Greek manuscript 
 which pointed out the ways of Life and Death ; and 
 the reader, entering into communion with the spirit 
 of the departed teacher, saw that his life had been 
 a terrible mistake. Astonished that he could emc 
 have listened to the seductive stranger, he yet 
 remembered one part of his advice — "When you 
 have tasted life, then, if you will, go over to the 
 Christians." "I have tasted lifel" he exclaimed; 
 "I will become a Christian;" and he informed his 
 delighted wife of his resolution. 
 
 His wounds not being entirely healed, Julius was 
 130 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 induced to receive advice from a clever physician, 
 who, on being introduced, prove^ to be the identical 
 wayside stranger whose dissuasives had been so 
 powerful on the previous occasion. In reply to his 
 patient's eager question whether he would soon be 
 able to dig, he remarked that to dig seemed a 
 strange ambition for a rich man, and was informed 
 of the renewed vow to become a Christian. Then 
 he poured out another stream of sophistical dissua- 
 sions. The Christians propounded some charming 
 falsehoods, he did not deny, but had no pith or 
 marrow in their conception of life — no wars, execu- 
 tions, poverty, immorality; fondly dreaming that all 
 these great human necessities could be supplanlal 
 by the law of Christ. And w^ho, after all, was this 
 unmarried tramp they called J^sus, whose law, if 
 followed out, would speedily cause the race to 
 become extinct? As for Julius, he had children to 
 educate for the commonwealth, and it should be 
 a point of honour to fulfil his momentous public 
 duties. This was his second period of doubt ; he 
 had become morbid; let him but march on and 
 all his doubts would vanish into air 1 After he had 
 completed his service to society, then, if still in the 
 same mind, would be the tinje to test the life that 
 so attracted him. 
 
 ^ Now whether it was due to the medicine or the 
 advice, Julius began to regain strength, and his 
 former ideas seemed like the ravings of a madman. 
 He busied himself about the*new life sketched by 
 his mentor, gave himself ardently to public affairs, 
 and speedily gained immense influence in the city. 
 
 Thus passed another twelvemonth away, at the 
 131 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 end of which Julius was appointed to judge the 
 Christians at their town, which was not far off, 
 for it had been decided to stamp out Christianity in 
 Cilicia. On his way to the tribunal he was accosted 
 by Pamphilius, who was accompanied by his little 
 boy, with a request that the Christians who had 
 been publicly marked out for death might be allowed 
 to make a public profession of their faith. They did 
 not ask to be pardoned, for they held it to be their 
 mission to bear witness to the truth, indifferent 
 whether by eighty years of labour and love, or by a 
 cruel death ; they desired only that their trial and 
 execution should take place in the presence of the 
 p|ople. 
 
 After promising to do all he could, the pagan judge 
 began loftily to lectOre Pamphilius on that system of 
 self-love, faintheartedness, debility and disease called 
 Christianity — a creed for women, not men. Oh yes, 
 he knew, for he had himself been smitten. Christians 
 protested against all the institutions which bound men 
 together — such as law-courts, taxes, executions, wars 
 — reaping all the advantages without contributing 
 anything to the sum of human effort. Let them have 
 their way, and Rome would soon be slave to the 
 savage Scyths. ^^ 
 
 Presently the patient Christian had his turn. At 
 great length he showed how false and misleading wer^ 
 the notions of Julius. Christians were not proud 
 madcaps eager to be martyred; but they preferred 
 to love rather than kill their enemies, and to suffer 
 rather than share the violence of States. Christianity 
 took away the very motive for robbery, murder, 
 and violence, for it asked the individual to surrender 
 his all. It crushed and tamed the animal passions 
 
 132 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 by lives of labour and love, and thus extinguished 
 crimes arising from carnal love, jealousy, revenge. 
 It prevented the political crimes of Anarchists and 
 Nihilists, for it taught that lives of solicitude and toil 
 were better and more difficult than deeds of bloody 
 prowess. 
 
 Then how is it, inquired Julius, that people per- 
 secute and kill you as if you were the greatest of 
 evildoers? "Ah," said Pamphilius, "the source of 
 that anomaly is outside us, in the laws of Caesar so 
 far as they contradict the laws of God, which alone we 
 obey, and the vexation of those who put the legis- 
 lative measures of a State above God's will." But 
 Christians feared not them which killed the body. 
 
 At this point Pamphilius' little son rushed into 
 the room, upon which his father fondled him, sighed, 
 and rose to depart ; but was persuaded to remain to 
 dinner, as Julius was anxious to inquire into th^ 
 question of a Christian's children. It seemed to him 
 that Christianity was a religion only for the un- 
 married ; for Christian children would have no slaves 
 to attend them, nor any property to inherit. To 
 Pamphilius, on the other hand, it seemed that 
 paganism was the religion fit only for the unmarried ; 
 for the great mass of pagan children had nothing 
 but toil and oppression, whilst \he few who inherited 
 slaves and palaces were taught to live upon others 
 in idleness and luxury — and this was called making 
 provision for their children ! 
 
 Julius was silent, but reflegted that the education 
 of his children had only begun, under the best 
 masters ; when they were of age they could embrace 
 the Christian faith if sd*disposed. " As for me," he 
 said, "I can do so when I have provided for my 
 
 133 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 children." So Pamphilius and his little son departed. 
 After the trial, Julius saw him assisting to remove the 
 bodies of the martyrs, but did not accost him, or 
 invite him to his house. 
 
 Twelve years now passed away. The wife of 
 Julius was dead, but he had acquired immense 
 wealth and power. His sons were living the same 
 life of luxury and extravagance helbimself had done 
 befdre them, and with the same domestic strife that 
 had prevailed between his father and himself. 
 
 Just at that time a new viceroy was appointed 
 from Rome ; Julius was degraded and threatened 
 with banishment. He repaired to Rome, but was 
 cifmmanded to return. Reaching Tarsus, he found 
 his son banqueting with several dissolute young 
 men in the house. A report that Julius was dead 
 "had arrived, and his son was now joyfully celebrating 
 the event! The outraged father felled him to the 
 ground, leaving him for dead, and withdrew to the 
 apartment of his late wife. There he found a scroll 
 bearing the words, "Come unto Me," and, sitting 
 with the manuscript spread over his knee, reflected 
 how long he had been called, how oft he had refused 1 
 He rose and went to see his son, whom he found 
 recovered and standing on his feet. Without a 
 word he left the house, and took the road for the 
 Christian community. 
 
 The whole day he journeyed, and went into a 
 villager's house to pass the night A man who was 
 stretched out on the couch rose up as he entered, 
 and Julius found himself again confronted with the 
 physician ! " No 1 never a^in shall you dissuade 
 me," exclaimed Julius ; " now, this third time, at last 
 
 134 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 I go where I may find peace!" "Where?" "To 
 the Christians ! " Well, yes, pursued incarnate 
 Paganism, you may possibly - find peace, but you 
 will not be doing your duty. Now, just when you 
 have acquired experience apd wisdom, when your 
 services might be of inestimable value to the com- 
 monwealth, you sneak away, seeking repose and 
 tranquillity for yourself! Your wisdom has been 
 gained in society* and it is your duty to use it for 
 the benefit of society. " Wisdom ! " exclaimed the 
 unhappy penitent ; " I am a bundle of errors I True, 
 they are ancient errors ; but antiquity does not 
 transform errors into wisdom, any more than age 
 and putridity turn water into wine." And, catching 
 up his mantle, he quitted the house, resting nowhere 
 till the journey's end. 
 
 The long shadows were just passing into the dark 
 of next evening when Julius reached the town of 
 the Christians, where he received a cordial welcome. 
 Pamphilius recognised him at table, and with an 
 affable smile ran up and embraced him. He passed 
 the night in the house appointed for wayfarers, and 
 in the morning went out to work in the vineyards. 
 
 The first vineyard was a young plantation, bending 
 with rich clusters, tended by young people, and 
 had no place for the old beginner. The second was 
 past its maturity, with a smaller crop ; but the 
 brethren were working in pairs, and again Julius 
 failed to find occupation. The third was very old, 
 empty, warped, crooked, almost devoid of fruit ; and, 
 reflecting that this represented his life, he sat down 
 and wept bitterly. Suddenly a voice fell on his ear. 
 " Work, dear brother, work is sweet ! " Looking up, 
 he saw a very old man, with snow-white hair and 
 
 135 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 tottering feet, standing beside a vine, gathering rare, 
 sweet grapes here and there. He showed Julius 
 how to look for the very few clusters, and, finding 
 some, Julius brought them. " Look, look ! " said the 
 old man, "in what are these inferior?" He saw 
 that they were good, smaller, but rich and sweet. 
 "Grieve not," said his companion, "there are other 
 servants, God's work is within you. You are not 
 a workman, but a son. With God* there is neither 
 little nor great ; only straight or crooked. Enter on 
 the straight road ! Work while ye have the light ! " 
 
 Calm and peace of mind now fell on Julius. 
 Living for the good of his fellow-men, he laboured 
 joyfully for twenty years, his soul too full to perceive 
 the slow approach of physical death. 
 
 136 
 
IV 
 
 WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE 
 
 LIGHT 
 
 2 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: LIGHT THAT 
 NEVER FAILS 
 
WORK WHILE YE HAVE 
 THE LIGHT 
 
 THE INTERPRETATION: LIGHT THAT 
 NEVER FAILS 
 
 This radiant homily has been making its appeal to 
 the English-speaking world now these dozen years, 
 and, if not the greatest, is certainly the delicatest, 
 sweetest, purest of the prophet's epoch-making dis^ 
 courses. The mere novel-reader will doubtless object 
 to the flimsy framework of narrative, complain of it^ 
 plentiful lack of incident, and condemn it for beguffl- 
 ing him into recurring lengths of dissertation. From 
 the point of view of fiction, let the objection be sus- 
 tained. Yet is not the preacher to blame, for when 
 did he profess to lay aside the ethicist for the sake of 
 the fictionist, or the preacher for the novelist ? One 
 might as reasonably indict the Evangelists for ex- 
 panding at length the interpretations of the various 
 parables spoken by the Master, and exclaim against 
 the heavenly meaning tacked on to the earthly story 
 — indignant that the celestial fiction should be 
 designed to instruct instead of to amuse. If the 
 pleasure-seeker has no ears to hear, the truth-seeker 
 has, and will hearken what the Spirit now saith unto 
 
 139 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 the churches. To the angels of the churches of 
 
 Christendom write 
 
 This chaste pearl of Tolstoyan discourse presents 
 the False Life of Society in contrast with the True 
 Life of Christianity ; shows that salvation is found, 
 not in condemning the False, but in embracing the 
 True Life ; and concludes with an alluring example 
 of conversion to the True Life. 
 
 I 
 
 Following in loose fashion the usual sermonic 
 habit, the chief and longer portion of this illumined 
 utterance is found to consist of a Contrast between 
 the Fal^e Life of Society and the True Life of 
 Christianity. 
 
 (i) Several types of the False Life are presented, 
 ^11 tending to illustrate the general conditions of 
 misery, luxury, pride, ferment, rottenness, ennui, 
 Ind dying regrets which make up the worldly 
 wiy. 
 
 Here is the gilded youth, surrounded by his curios 
 and art collections, yet still so uncivilised as to follow 
 after theatres, spectacles, and every animal excess, 
 landing himself in debt and usury; heady, insolent, 
 disobedient, lawless ; a grief to his parents, a danger 
 to society, a disappointment to himself. 
 
 Here, too, is the rising publicist, his wild oats duly 
 sown, giving himself to the marriage of convenience, 
 wealth - gathering, office - seeking, rising in credit, 
 swelling in public dignity, sitting in judgment upon 
 the forces of righteousness and condemning them 
 amid universal applause. 
 
 The wealthy householder is here, transferring to 
 140 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 public ambition that devotion which should have 
 been bestowed upon his children, estranged from his 
 faded wife and inclining to lighter friendships, too 
 busy to be weary, yet too materialised to be happy, 
 proprietor of a vast domestic establishment, but 
 without a home. 
 
 The reputable commercial man is here also, self- 
 made, thrifty, shrewd, travelled, wide in experience of 
 men and affairs, not without deeper currents of being, 
 but steadily directing them along the channels of 
 public success, who, having begotten a family, thinks 
 it necessary to make vast provision for them, and 
 discovers that he has created wealth only to be their 
 ruin. 
 
 Thus do the children of this world think themselves 
 wiser than the children of light. 
 
 (2) The Worldly Life is here shown to consist 
 of the abundance of the things which it possesses ; 
 whereaa the Christian Life aims at having all things 
 in common. Property — the relation of the thing \q 
 the soul — constitutes an insurmountable rocky barrier 
 between the False and the True Life. The worldly 
 way of holding property is to refuse to use it in 
 harmony with the will of God, to imagine that it is 
 one's own, that there is nothing to pay, that all its 
 fruits may be enjoyed without more ado. Thus does 
 the property-owner drive away those who come to 
 claim God's portion ; kill them, if need be, by means 
 of police and military forces, being himself finally 
 driven away into those realms where he can carry 
 nothing with him. 
 
 Christians, on the other hand, regard nothing as 
 their own, but hold themselves bound to share the 
 fruits of their toil with all — even with those who 
 
 141 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 seem unworthy. Always giving, they always have 
 enough. They accept life as Christ interpreted it, and 
 find the forces of faith grow stronger and stronger 
 within them. Their idea is that the pleasures of 
 life are no pleasures if followed for their own sake ; 
 that true happiness is something superadded to those 
 who perform God's will ; and that if duty goes first, 
 like the shaft of the cart, pleasure, like the wheel, 
 will inevitably follow. They plant and dig, as others 
 do, yet not to increase their personal possessions, but 
 to obtain the necessaries of existefice, to supply those 
 who need, even to yield up to the extortioner and 
 the robber if it must be so, to give to him that asks, 
 and to lend, hoping for nothing again. It is absurd 
 ^to argue that industry and agriculture would cease 
 if this law prevailed ; for even now the great mass 
 of toilers toil only to increase the possessions of-'the 
 idle rich, and would surely work not less diligently 
 if the product went to benefit themselves and all 
 those they love and pity. 
 
 (3) From the possession of private property follows, 
 necessarily, all those forms of State violence which 
 society devises in order to keep its goods secure, 
 but for which the Christian, having no personal 
 goods to secure to himself, has no use. The violence 
 practised by society through its soldiers, judges, and 
 so on, is as truly abominable as that perpetrated 
 by highwaymen ; for it's sole object is to take or 
 keep that which should be shared with or given 
 wholly to others. The multiplication of repressive 
 laws and penalties is, however, found quite ineffectual 
 to prevent robberies and murders on the part of 
 individuals who take that way of asserting their claim 
 to what they consider to be their own. An entire 
 
 142 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 class of crimes are rather aggravated by repressive 
 laws — such as those which spring from revenge, 
 hatred, jealousy, carnal lust; for the persons con- 
 trolled by such passions are in a condition of animal 
 irresponsibility which obstacles only tend to inflame. 
 Sometimes the effect is to drive criminals to work 
 more cunningly and devise new forms of offence ; 
 sometimes even to afford the wrong-doer a pro- 
 tecting wing, and make crime safer. It is certain 
 that, as laws increase in number and complexity, 
 morals decrease, and criminal offences become more 
 various and artificial. The law e nter';, and ^in 
 aboAiod s. 
 
 In distinction from all this, Christianity requires no 
 legions to protect the lives and properties of its ad- 
 herents ; for they count nothing their own, and ar^ 
 willing to part with all, even to be servant to those 
 who rob them, in order to win them by love. Conse- ' 
 quently they have no enemies, offer no temptations, 
 and give no provocation to vice. Living by humility, 
 patience, and labour, they excite neither covetousness 
 nor envy, and thus obviate both the passions and 
 circumstances which lead to violence. Therefore 
 they do not need the delusive protection offered them 
 by Caesar and his legions. Christianity, in fact, 
 is the only sure way of eradicating crime ; for it 
 goes down to the source, plucks the individual 
 propensity out of the soul, removes every motive 
 and occasion of wrong-doing, tames the irascible 
 passions by labour and love, and meets the re- 
 volutionary conspirator on the common ground of 
 brotherhood. Many political and social conspiracies 
 spring from a sincere desire to improve the condition 
 of the' exploited classes ; but Christians make crime 
 
 143 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 for such ends quite impossible by teaching that a life 
 of toil and solicitude is better than one of plotting 
 and scheming ; that renunciation and living for others 
 is better as well as more difficult than deeds of bloody 
 prowess ; and that it is nobler to achieve the crown of 
 martyrdom for adhering to the law of Christ than the 
 scaffold of criminality for rebelling against the laws 
 of Caesar. 
 
 (4) The radical difference between the False Life 
 of the world and the True Life of Christ is that the 
 former accepts the animal in man as a permanent 
 necessity, whereas the latter believes it possible to 
 \\ve. accordinj T to the snnl Society imagines that 
 armies, tribunals, scaffolds, tributes, and taxes are the 
 bonds which bind it together, and is unable to con- 
 ceive how it would exist were these abolished. The 
 sentiments of anger, vindictiveness, revenge must be 
 divine, because they are essential to life as we con- 
 tinue to practise it ; and it is by the constant play of 
 passion and clash of interest that people are held fast 
 iri' their social conditions. To demolish human pas- 
 sions, therefore, is to destroy humanity itself; and 
 a society that does not include wars, executions, and 
 servitudes is as inconceivable as one that excludes 
 eating and drinking ; it would quickly fall to pieces 
 and return to pristine savagery ; the civilised man 
 would become the slave of the cannibal. It is just 
 the same with the sexual passion. It is necessary to 
 recognise human nature, to remember that not all 
 men are old, snowy, frostbitten ; that many are 
 young, strong, .handsome, made for indulgence. To 
 follow any other law than that of Nature, by attempt- 
 ing to curb and extirpate those necessary passions, 
 would have the same result as if waters were pent 
 
 144 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 up in a dam till it delved into the soil or flowed in 
 a thick muddy stream ; but to permit Nature to 
 have her way by setting the passions free for enjoy- 
 ment, would be to let loose the waters to fructify 
 field and meadow, and refresh the beasts that were 
 grazing thereon. 
 
 The very object of Christianity, on the other hand, 
 is to eradicate the animal lusts, and bring every man 
 under the sovereignty of Christ's law of love. It is 
 a creed for men as well as women. The retreat of 
 carnal desire before the advance of reverence and 
 self-control, will constitute humanity's surest progress 
 towards strong and sane existence. This will appear 
 more clearly as the preacher sets forth the next great 
 contrast. 
 
 (5) The False Life subordinates marriage to lust, 
 whilst the True Life makes marria ge subservient t o 
 character. The disciple of the world selects his wife 
 fc her beauty with a view to fleshly gratification, 
 and for her affluence with an eye to comfort and 
 worldly advancement ; and each strives to secure 
 these according to his ability. This changes the high 
 estate into beastliness, and degrades the husband 
 into a violent ravisher, since it is often the case 
 that he marries a girl who does not love him, or 
 even who loves another. The fact that personal enjoy- 
 ment is made the dominant aim breeds satieties, 
 quarrels, jealousies, falseness ; with results which may 
 be plainly read, for instance, in the Iliad of Homer, 
 in the calamities which overtake Paris, Menelaus, 
 Achilles, and the rest. A worldly marriage is really 
 a triumph of violence, like the snatching of Helen. 
 Rival men strain every nerve to excel each other in 
 offering inducements such as good looks, manly form, 
 
 145 10 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 great wealth, fine dresses, grand establishments ; and 
 sometimes they actually fight like brutes eager to win 
 the female. 
 
 What a beautiful opposite to all this is the true 
 marriage in which the well-being and spiritual good 
 of the parties is made the principal aim I Instead of 
 deliberately provoking carnal love as if it were a good 
 and proper aim in itself — which is to make it an evil — 
 Christians make it subsidiary to the improvement of 
 character, celebrate it according to the will of God, 
 and thus vindicate it as a positive good from Him. 
 To such an extent is carnality excluded, that the lust- 
 ful glance towards even betrothed maid or wedded 
 wife is forbidden; whilst Christian women, for their 
 part, so far from trying to excite carnal desire by dress 
 and other suggestion, strive to stifle those desires in 
 men, and to supplant them by the sentiments proper to 
 brother and sister. Marriage is more than the corner- 
 st one of the home ; it is the keysto n e of the whole edifi ce 
 of life ; and though it is to be regarded as the means 
 of the perpetuation of the race, yet it is to be carried 
 through under those conditions laid down by the 
 Father's will expressed both in Nature and Revelation. 
 The Spirit of Christ, love for mankind, form safer 
 and surer guides to God's will than the workings of 
 carnal alfection or material ambition. A general love 
 for all mankind is the surest guarantee of a pure, 
 exclusive love for one woman. A Christian loves a 
 woman first as a fellow-creature, with brotherly 
 affection and reverence, and only on the basis of 
 this raises the special love whose result is the family. 
 Fixing his mind on love, reverence, and service, the 
 Christian is never overcome by the seductions of 
 mere beauty, hence his wedded life is free from satiety, 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 disappointment, feud, and jealousy. Christianity alone 
 produces true manly love by making each the master 
 of his likes and dislikes, so that he avoids giving 
 loose reins to his fancies, extinguishes every coarse 
 animal motion, and achieves the same pure and 
 chivalrous relation to every woman that exists 
 between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, 
 brothers and sisters. If it happens that two Christian 
 men specially love the same woman, one sacrifices 
 himself willingly ; and if they are unable to decide 
 amongst themselves, the three call in the older and 
 wiser disciples of the Christ-life, who help them to a 
 decision. This is contrary to human nature ? Which 
 human nature — the animal, or the rational ? Here is 
 the whole difference come to a fine point — worldly 
 love puts the animal over the rational nature, whence 
 violence, adultery, incest ; whereas Christian love 
 puts the rational over the animal nature, and obtains 
 complete happiness. The whole question is, Shall 
 reason reign, or the brute ? 
 
 (6) The children born of such unions necessarily 
 present the most astonishing contrast in character 
 and destiny. Worldly wedlock produces children 
 whose horrid fate it is to be continually exposed tp 
 dangers and temptations, to snatch their livelihood 
 by exploiting the labours of others, to riot in _palaces 
 because others pine in s lums^to do no useful work, 
 but get their parents to make provision for them to 
 
 their ruin. 
 
 The offspring of Christian union, on the other part, 
 are regarded as of such infinite value that they must 
 be guarded from the lusts and idleness of the world 
 by dedication to the supreme life of labour and 
 love. On no other basis than love and labour can 
 
 147 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 the family thrive. If anything were wanting to 
 complete the Christian's assurance, it is the sad fate 
 of the world's children contrasted with the strong, 
 simple, sane, self-reliant, competent character of the 
 children of Christ. The life of the world is pardon- 
 able only in those who are without offspring. The 
 Christian alone is morally justified in marriage and 
 fertility. 
 
 (7) The False Life is so clamant and imperious that 
 it forces everything — even the Arts and Sciences 
 — into the service of lust and luxury ; whilst the 
 True Life makes Art and Science handmaidens to 
 character and moral development. The world can 
 put its divine Science to no better use than to 
 concoct ingenious schemes for making money at the 
 expense of the already poor ; or making murder 
 easier by inventing more deadly methods of war. 
 As for Art, it is employed sometimes to adorn 
 the temples of gods in which society has ceased to 
 believe, but through belief in whom it hopes to keep 
 the multitude better in hand ; sometimes to raise 
 statues to the strongest and cruellest of its tyrants, 
 whom none loves but all fear, or hang its galleries 
 with portraits of its richest robbers and their 
 pampered offspring ; sometimes to gild crime and laud 
 carnal love by theatrical displays ; sometimes by its 
 sensuous music to tickle the senses of rich gluttons, 
 melt down the moral reserves and distinctions into 
 a squash of neurotic sensations, or soothe the nerves 
 of disappointed ambition, jilted lust, wounded pride, 
 worn-out profligacy, or hysterical femininity. 
 
 The Christian life, like the worldly, has room for 
 every development of knowledge and beauty, honours 
 every divine gift and capacity, and strives to draw 
 
 14S 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 man away from the state of savagery and beastliness 
 The life of labour and love may cause a comely 
 youth to go with horny hands, or a beautiful girl 
 with peasant dress, but it does not renounce the 
 beautiful in human nature. All true Art and Science, 
 however, is known from the degree in which it 
 increases the forces necessary to labour and love. 
 It is right to take every opportunity of increasing 
 this knowledge, by leisure, by studying the be- 
 queathed wisdom of the ages, by song, picture, and 
 story ; but this knowledge should be directed to 
 fulfilling the will of God, not to the increase 
 of war, usury, sensuality, serfdom. In short, Art 
 and Science should not be made the minister of 
 the senses as with the world, but of the soul as 
 with Christianity. • 
 
 Such, according to the great Russian preacher, is 
 the False Life from which Christ came to set men 
 free ; and such the True Life lived and taught by the 
 Master and by the early Christians who still held 
 fast to His law — that eternal law common to all 
 mankind, but most fully expressed by Him — pre- 
 ferring to die rather than be unfaithful. Obedience 
 to God would sometimes necessitate disobedience 
 to Caesar, thus bringing down wrath and persecution 
 from those who gave State law precedence over 
 Divine law, and who, being quite satisfied with their 
 position as subjects of a State, were incensed at 
 those who proclaimed a nobler destiny and mission — 
 reluctant to follow this destiny for themselves, and 
 unwilling to admit it for others. Christians were 
 quite unable to put an end to such hostility ; for it was 
 impossible that they could live contrary to reason 
 
 149 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 and conscience, or cease to tacitly rebuke those 
 whose lives were founded on violence. The servant 
 was not greater than his Lord. Yet they feared not 
 those who killed the body. Their life knew no death. 
 In time their executioners would also die ; they were 
 the real sufferers, for death could not hurt the 
 Christian. And their happiness consisted in this, 
 that die who might, Christ's flock would not perish, 
 but grow and thrive. 
 
 To this end — that it may be so in these modern 
 times — the preacher has given us this pearl amongst 
 sermons, "Work while ye have the light." 
 
 II 
 
 The minor and shorter division of this chaste yet 
 searching discourse consists in showing that salvation 
 is found not merely in condemning the False Life, 
 • but by actively embracing the True Life. 
 
 (1) If a number of people be gathered together 
 under suitable circumstances — say under the hospit- 
 able roof of a rich man, and if the conversation 
 chance to take a serious turn — say about human 
 life and its purpose, neither amongst themselves 
 nor all the absent friends they may discuss will 
 they be able to find one single man who is satisfied 
 with his life, or deems himself to be living like 
 a Christian. 
 
 (2) The ardent youth, hearing all their confessions, 
 will exclaim, "Why, then, go on living this miser- 
 able way ? " and will announce his determination to 
 abandon it. He will see that his actions are bad and 
 foolish, feel alone in the universe, loved by none, a 
 burden to all ; will complain that the only difference 
 
 ISO 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 between himself and a beast is that he retains the 
 power to take away his own life, and will make 
 preparation for a complete change. He will discon- 
 tinue his studies, dispossess himself of his estates, 
 retire to the country, and work amongst the poor. 
 But Mr Worldly-wise-man, in the person of his father, 
 while pronouncing the decision a noble one, will 
 object that his son's generous enthusiasm does not 
 see the difficulties in the way; that his resolution, 
 squarely looked at, is in fact the outcome of thought- 
 lessness and pride. The wisdom of age is needed to 
 moderate the ardour of youth. Let him wait till he 
 is matured, when he will be better able to judge. All 
 the reverent seniors will applaud the father's counsel ; 
 the youth will be put to silence, and things will go on 
 as before. The whirl of the old life will draw him in. 
 Habit will chain and convenience beguile him. 
 Philosophy will befool him. Religion will deceive 
 him. Age, wisdom, and experience will dissuade him. 
 Reassured, he will go on living as before, contenting 
 himself by abusing as pharisees and deceivers those 
 who have actually committed themselves to the 
 True Life. 
 
 (3) The middle-aged married man is quite con- 
 vinced that the present way of life cannot possibly 
 confer happiness, is tired of toiling and moiling for 
 a family, with some guilt of conscience to boot, and 
 is prepared to favourably consider the True Life. 
 Presently he reflects that it will not do to break off 
 the old ways too suddenly, to disappoint his aged 
 parents, or inflict loss upon his children, or neglect 
 those duties to the commonwealth to fulfil which 
 is a point of honour. He remembers how easy it 
 is to go astray ; that he must not shirk his duties 
 
 ISi 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 to his family, but bring them lap in peace and quiet, 
 so that they may afterwards be free to choose the 
 True Life for themselves. After he has served 
 society and left his children to serve it after he is 
 gone, he can then give himself to the Life that 
 attracts him. Then he will be free. Meantime, 
 things go on as before. 
 
 (4) The old man reflects that, having brought up 
 all his children, served society, with no further duty 
 or obligation resting upon him, there is nothing to 
 hinder him from living as Christ would have him. 
 His son, however, will object that he has worked 
 hard enough in his time and must now rest; his 
 godchild will protest that he must not now give 
 up his lifelong habits and tastes ; his niece will de- 
 clare that he would only grumble under the new 
 conditions, thus incurring further sin — besides, God 
 is merciful and pardons ; whilst another aged sire 
 will interject that, as they may not have another 
 two days to live, it would be foolish to fritter 
 them away in forming new plans. So things go 
 on as before. 
 
 (5) Thus it comes about — extraordinary, incom- 
 prehensible sequel to such universal condemnation ! — 
 that all classes and ages continue to live as before. 
 All are agreed that the life of the world is bad, yet 
 no sooner is it a question of beginning to practise 
 the good life than they all discover excellent reasons 
 why they must be excepted. They all with one 
 consent begin to make excuse. The worldly 
 merchant, shrewd man, recognises the advantage of 
 falling in with the established order of things. The 
 worldly philosopher sets forth imposing sophistries, 
 whose result is to bewilder the reason and forever 
 
 152 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 dissuade men from the True Life. Young men, 
 middle-aged men, old men— no one feels himself 
 called to lead the good life. The utmost they can be 
 expected to do is to discourse about it. 
 
 (6) When their own indisposition has finally per- 
 suaded men to abide in the False Life of the world, 
 argument is not wanting to back it. Numerous 
 sophistries, plausibilities, speciosities are furnished 
 forth, salving the conscience with excellent and 
 abundant excuse. 
 
 Foremost come the imperfections of Christians, 
 which are eagerly canvassed by those who hear the 
 divine call and have an instinctive fear that it may 
 yet prove too strong for them ; for which reason 
 they discount it in advance and minimise its im- 
 portance. They watch for the seamy side of 
 Christianity — the inconsistencies of those who pre- 
 tend to give everything away, yet wear a coat or sell 
 fruit for a livelihood ; or profess to repudiate military 
 violence, yet avail 'themselves of the protection of the 
 military forces. Such persons are like a tumour, 
 which destroys the body, yet lives solely on the body. 
 It is indispensable to the waverer's peace of mind 
 that Christians should be wrong, so they are de- 
 nounced as deceivers whose only force lies in high- 
 flown phrases. 
 
 Excuse is next drawn from the general imperfection 
 of human nature. Christianity would be all very well 
 in a world of angels, but how in a world of such 
 rascals ? How can they part their goods to the lazy, 
 the incorrigible, the exploiter ? To pretend to treat 
 them as dearly beloved brethren is hypocrisy. It is 
 contrary to human nature to love rascals. To give to 
 everyone that asks is manifestly impossible, since 
 
 IS3 
 
The Greater Parables of Tolstoy 
 
 even the richest hoard would give out if dravirn 
 on for the supply of every wastrel and vagabond. 
 When the millennium comes it may be possible 
 to lend, hoping for nothing again; but meantime 
 they must take human nature as they find it, and 
 act accordingly. 
 
 Finally, it would be rash to reject the accumulated 
 wisdom of mankind. Christianity is no doubt a very 
 charming faith whose ideals appeal to the imagination 
 of all simple people ; but, after all, Jesus was but a 
 peasant in an obscure Jewish community, and it 
 would be obviously impossible to apply his precepts 
 to the complicated life of modern civilisation. After 
 political and revolutionary forces have brought 
 about a higher and simpler social order, it may 
 be practicable to conduct life on the principles 
 laid down by the unlearned, unmarried Galilean. 
 Meanwhile, we must continue to avail ourselves of 
 the experience of the ages and the accumulated 
 wisdom" of mankind. 
 
 (7) Yet is the True Life embraced at last by some 
 who have doubted and evaded through the sinful 
 years of a lifetime. When the soul sits alone amid 
 a litter of broken ideals and wrecked principles, 
 meditating on its past, recalling its opportunities, 
 it hears the Voice saying, " Come unto me, all ye that 
 labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," 
 and realises how long it has been called. Never again 
 can the man be dissuaded from carrying out his 
 resolve, for he knows that thus alone can he find 
 peace of mind. Catching up his mantle, he quits the 
 old life, and continues his journey Christ-ward with- 
 out resting. He becomes a copartner with God, a 
 sharer of His work. Going forward with God, he 
 
 154 
 
Work while ye have the Light 
 
 thinks no more of the -past He finds there is one 
 God and one Life. He obtains the peace of mind he 
 had yearned for. The life of love and labour fills him 
 with joy. The soul is too full to allow him to per- 
 ceive the slow approach of physical death. 
 " Work while ye have the light ! " 
 
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