your tool!… Our tool is the pen; our field, the human soul, which we must shelter and nourish. Let us remind you of the words of a Russian peasant, of the the first printer of Moscow, when he was sent back to the plough: ‘It is not my business to sow grains of corn, but to sow the seed of the spirit broadcast in the world.’”
As though Tolstoy had ever renounced his vocation as a sower of the seed of the mind! In the Introduction to What I Believe he wrote:
“I believe that my life, my reason, my light, is given me exclusively for the purpose of enlightening my fellows. I believe that my knowledge of the truth is a talent which is lent me for this object; that this talent is a fire which is a fire only when it is being consumed. I believe that the only meaning of my life is that I should live it only by the light within me, and should hold that light on high before men that they might see it.”[1]
But this light, this fire “which was a fire only when it was being consumed,” was a cause of anxiety to the majority of Tolstoy’s fellow-artists. The more intelligent could not but suspect that
- ↑ We find that M. de Vogüé, in the reproach which he addressed to Tolstoy, unconsciously used the phrases of Tolstoy himself. “Rightly or wrongly,” he said, “for our chastisement perhaps, we have received from heaven that splendid and essential evil: thought… To throw down this cross is an impious revolt.” (Le Roman russe, 1886.) Now Tolstoy wrote to his aunt, the Countess A. A. Tolstoy, in 1883: “Each of us must bear his cross… Mine is the travail of the idea; evil, full of pride and seductiveness.” (Letters.)
