Life — December 8, 1910 — page 10: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“ While there is Life there's Hope.” No. 1467 VOL. LVI, DECEMBER 8, 1910. Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY JA. MITCHELL, Prost, A. MILLER, Serty and Trear 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York 'OLSTOI was so great and so good a man that it has perplexed many obser- vers that he should have been so unwise, as they see it, in so many particulars, and so unsafe a leader for others in the con- cerns of life. They think that a man who is great and good ought to be wise, and they think he was not wise, and they can't account for it. He was fav- erably born and reared, saw to ad- vantage the polite world of his youth, was a soldier and saw war in the Crimea; left the army, lived long in the country on his inherited estate and knew the peasant and the condi- tions of peasant life. He wrote two great novels about Russia and life as he knew them. Then he underwent, by a gradual process, that phase of spiritual change and enlightenment called conversion, and whereas he was a decent man before and a conven- ,tional Christian, he got really interes- ted in finding out what the Christian life is and trying to live it. Now a thoroughly converted man, especially if he is a man of mental powers, is a very curious phenomenon. He looks his world all over anew and measures everything by a new stand- ard. Whatever he is converted to he searches. If it is Christianity, he searches that. So with Tolstoi. With comprehension that the concerns of the spirit were really of more moment than the concerns of the body, and shot through with the great Christian ‘LIFE: principle of the brotherhood of men, he began to search Christianity and try to apply it. In that effort he floundered a good deal. Men usually do flounder more or less in that experiment, testing what they can as they may, putting empha- sis usually where experience and re- flection may convince them later it did not belong, taking up and laying down, querying, accepting the doubtful and doubting the acceptable, but still, floun- derwise, always progressing if only the compelling spirit in them is sound and lasting. But Tolstoi’s flounderings were of more moment than those of most good men trying to be better, be- cause he was so able and earnest and famous a man, and because he floun- dered through the bog of contempo- rary Russia and carried the whole life of Russia on his back. Of course, the State Church of Russia, with its poli- tics, corruptions and superstitions, was of no use to him as a guide, but was indeed part of his load. The air he breathed was the air of despotism or else of revolution; there was no such leading in it as there is in ours. And so he made many mistakes—as it seemed to us—contradicted himself often, gave bad counsel sometimes, de- nied approval sometimes—as to the Douma—when, as we see it, he should have given it. We wonder because he did not behave in politics like an Iowa Insurgent and in religion like Edward Everett Hale or Phillips Brooks, but after all, he was not a Massachusetts man, nor an Iowan, nor even a Kan- san, but a Russian, breathing a cold- storage atmosphere two or three cen- turies behind the times. Moses was a great man, but put him down in Kansas and they would say he was not up to date. Tolstoi was a great man, and his great books are appreciable even in Kansas, but the Kansans would feel that his applica- tions of Christianity to conduct were very much behind the times. We guess they were—some of them, but his spirit was not. As for his ideas, as personally applied by him to his own case, they were not so bad. He was a non- resister. The scope of the New Tes- tament teaching about turning the other cheek and letting the tail go with But however the doctrine is applied there the hide is very much mooted. is a curious strength about it. The Jews have been oppressed for many centuries and not able to hit back to any advantage, with the result that Gentiles in all countries are all but sleepless with anxiety for fear the Chosen Race will presently own the whole Earth, including Alaska. The ladies—God bless them!—have never possessed equal physical strength with men, and have been used these many centuries sometimes to turn the other cheek. Behold, how they have thriven; how much better their habits are than those of their oppressors; what gains they have made in liberty, wealth and power until now it is a question whether man had not better bestow upon them what remnants he has left, and modestly arrange himself in the class of the rudimentary organs! The hopefulest news for man is that the suffragettes have stooped to force and blows. Mr. Depew said the other day that he had never hit back, could never bring himself to do it even in politics, because it seemed so wasteful and so futile. We fear that Mr. Rockefeller, if a man took his barrel, would so far deviate from the spirit of Scripture as to try to retain the bung, but that is only because he hates waste. Re- taliation has never been charged against him. It is uneconomical. Non- resistance not only has some remark- able points in its favor, but a large measure of it is much more generally practiced by individuals—both the good and the astute—than is common- ly appreciated. In other respects, his life was quite sensible and happy. He gave two- thirds of his property to his wife and children and the rest to the peasants, lived peasantlike on very simple food, worked daily in the fields and woods and spent about four hours a day in writing. To have his methods gain gen- eral acceptance in these States would be bad for business, and unfavorable to the progress of our civilization. which is working out on different lines. But in Russia as he practiced them they had their use and value, and even in his peculiarities he was a much wiser old man than the giddy world supposes, or can understand.