FIRST EDITION, November, 1901.
SECOND EDITION, June, 1904.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

CHAP.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE

i. Youth-ii. Soldier, Landlord, Artist-iii. Con-

version-iv. Contra Mundum.

PAGE

47

49

II. SOCIETY

96

i. The State in an Age of Violence-ii. Property,

Luxury, and the Exploitation of Labour-

iii. Some Proposed Remedies.

III. THE GREAT COMMANDMENTS

139

i. The Law of Reason-ii. The Law of Peace, or

Non-Resistance by Force-iii. The Law of

Labour-iv. The Law of Purity-v. The Law

of Sacrifice.

IV. SCIENCE, FALSE AND True.

V. ART, FALSE AND TRUE

VI. EDUCATION.

VII. RELIGION

i. The New Life-Conception-ii. The Place of

Ethics-iii. God-iv. Sins and Snares-v.

Scripture, The Church, Prayer-vi. The

Meaning of Life-vii. Hereafter.

164357

The Life and Teaching of
Leo Tolstoy

INTRODUCTION

THE genius of Leo Tolstoy speaks for itself. What I wish rather to emphasise in these introductory pages is the actuality and inevitability of the man and his gospel. Academic foot-rules are useless here; it is no armchair philosopher, bombinans in vacuo, no mere preacher of a school of doctrine, that we have before us. Tolstoy arises in a time of need out of the hard facts of life, as all the great prophets have done-as Moses, Jesus, Sakya Muni did in the ancient world. With ear close to earth and the popular heart, as the unwritten age-old songs of the peasantry are caught by the traveller, was this gospel of real life set down. Under the hand of the grand artist it takes form. As we consider it more, it seems like a pure diamond flashing forth the light of heaven in a single piercing beam or a prism of many colours. In essentials as old as the human conscience, it is yet the last lesson of human experience; in the courts

A

re

of the Babylonian kings, the Pharaohs, the despots of the hoary East, in Pilate's hall, in the arena at Rome, in the dungeons of the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastile, the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul, in the sweating dens of London and New York, it has 'made its proofs' and given its testimony to the indestructibility of the soul. Only the new applications seem strange amid the artificialities, the more fined cruelties and sins, of our modern western life. Then appears the prophet, mediator between what is and what may be, demonstrator of the ideal as the practical, the real, the inevitable; and suddenly we recognise that our present state can no more be final than was that of the Church before Luther or French society under the later Bourbons. Here stands Leo Tolstoy, then, the Luther and the Rousseau of our day, heralding a new reformation in religion, a new revolution in politics and social relations. We have the privilege, but also the disadvantage, of watching him at comparatively close quarters as contemporaries. Let us anticipate the hardest scientific tests, and consider him in relation to his environment: the wonder of what he has already effected will be the greater. We see him, with feet always firmly planted on the Russian earth, towering up into a rare cosmopolitan ether. The western Philistine shouts that he is one of those mad Russians, and supposes the matter settled. Thus his ancestors may have