FullReads

“You will understand that I have learnt all these ideas from my intercourse with him. I could after my own fashion make all his speeches, and that more fluently; but I believe that this exchanging one word for another, and his perpetually halting over it, made the words that he finally did choose more significant. For my part, I have written down everything that happened in our short life together.”

“Everything?”

“I mean everything that mattered at all. Everything, everything. He never wrote a line, he said he had no time, he despised it. And when death took him from me and from us all, what had I better to do? No–don’t interrupt me–let me go on telling you! He repeated the same thought from the religious point of view. It was his way to look at the same idea from every side. He said that to-day he had been to see an old woman who said that she couldn’t go to church because she had no shoes. There was no end of trouble to get her some, for the two shoe-shops wouldn’t sell any on Sunday, but she got them. He saw her afterwards go to church, just at the same time as the Queen and her suite.

“And he thought, there are so many who sit in church with wretched shoes on, and so many at home, who dare not venture to church because of their miserable shoes, or the rest of their miserable garments. Who are they who have such wretched shoes and clothing? They who have worked most, worked until they are broken with toil.

“But those who have not worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had shoes should give them to those who had none. You would gather from the preaching that Jesus Himself had taught it, Jesus had come to make all men happy, and this was the best way! For it is written, ‘He went about doing good.’

“But they all went home from church just as they came; and no exchange of shoes took place, nor exchange of clothing either. One went back to his superfluity of leisure, the other to his poverty and want, and those who had not been able to go at all, because they were too poor, remained after the service as they had been before it.

“Such, you see, is our Christianity, he said. And he had a right to speak, I can tell you, because he shared his ‘superfluity’ with others.”

“But still you live in a certain comfort?”

“Yes, in his opinion every one had a right to do so. The man who recognised that he was called on to sacrifice his comfort also should do it; but for most educated people comfort was the indispensable condition of work and help the foundation of happiness. And there was a charm of beauty about it, too, which is a rare incentive.

“No, what he demanded was that all those who could should support themselves–hear that, my daughter!–and that those who had superfluity should employ it in work which should be fruitful for others. He called that Church cowardly and shameless which did not make that demand without respect of persons.”

“Like Tolstoi, then?”

“No, they were very different. Tolstoi is a Slav by birth, Ivan the Terrible and Tolstoi both of them; for these contradictions pre-suppose each other. The one did everything by force, the other resists nothing. The one had to crush all wills under his own in order to make room for himself, the other will willingly yield, knowing that a desire, once satisfied, dies. The Slav impulse towards tyranny, the Slav impulse towards martyrdom, the same passionate excess in both. Born of the same people, and under the same conditions.