was always repeating, 'Love and goodness,' and praising country life, labour, healthy appetite and sound sleep." (3) Hard, manual labor revealed many things to Tolstoy. As soon as he began to do regular physical work the greater part of his luxurious habits and wants, which were so numerous when he had been physically idle, disappeared. He no longer felt the need of the same refinements in food, in bedding, in clothes, and in baths. In fact, these things became embarrassing and impossible. He no longer cared for sweet, rich, complicated and highly spiced foods, but instead was more than content with sour cabbage soup, porridge, black bread, tea with a bit of sugar. His changed life revealed to him the fact that newspapers, theaters, concerts, parties, balls, cards, magazines, novels are inventions made for sustaining the mental life of man outside of its natural condition of labor; while many hygienic devices and medical inventions, in the way of food, drink, dwellings, ventilation, warming of rooms, clothes, medicines, mineral waters, gymnastics, electric and other cures are only necessary when one seeks to sustain one's bodily life outside of its natural condition of labor. (4)

These discoveries were agreeable; but Tolstoy had another motive for doing hard, physical labor. He felt he was giving an example to others of a better life and, in urging his admirers to do likewise, he was led to speculate on what it might mean to the world if manual labor should once become the practice of all sincere Christians. "What will come," he questions, "out of the circumstance that I, and another, and a third, and a tenth man, do not despise physical labour, but consider it necessary for our happiness, for the calming of our consciences, and for our safety? This will come of it,-that one, two, three, ten men, coming into conflict with no one, without the violence either of the government or of revolution, will solve for themselves the problem which is before all the world, and which has

appeared insolvable." (5) This has the same spirit and revolutionary intent that one finds in the life of St. Paul and later in the monastic orders. St. Paul earned his living most of the time by hard labor and constantly reminded his converts that they must not defraud each other, but love one another and work with their own hands. The same rule of life is applied by the laws governing the early monastic orders. For instance, St. Benedict in his Monastic Rule, issued about the year 630, commanded the monks to "live by the labours of their hands; as did also our fathers and the apostles." (6) Moreover, they must own absolutely nothing: "neither a book, nor tablets, nor a pen. All things shall be common to all. . . . 'Let not any man presume or call anything his own."" (7) Benedict excepted from the rule of manual labor only feeble or delicate brothers, but ordered that even they should not be permitted to be idle. Tolstoy was not a communist, but the other monastic rules of St. Benedict embrace almost the entire moral program of Tolstoy.

...

However, the rules of St. Benedict were intended to govern the lives of single men, but Tolstoy had a wife and many children. He was able to do a great deal without interfering with the lives of others, but when he tried to change the life of his family, he met with many obstacles. Not wishing to force them to do what he considered right, he had to content himself with pleadings and persuasions. He urged his children to quit their university studies and go out and learn of the peasants how to do useful work. He tried to persuade his wife to permit him to give away every penny of his possessions, to leave their large house, and to live in a peasant's cottage, where together they could share the manual labor of a small farm. The Countess was a most devoted wife but in this she could not follow her husband. She was a very practical woman, and she could not bring herself to believe that the teachings of

Christianity required her to forsake the property of her children and to bring them up as manual laborers without an education. She became terrified at the change in her husband and all sorts of misunderstandings arose between them.

She well describes her own attitude in a letter to one of her friends: "He is a leader: one who goes ahead of the crowd, pointing the way men should go. But I am the crowd; I live in its current. Together with the crowd I see the light of the lamp which every leader . . . carries, and I acknowledge it to be the light. But I cannot go faster, I am held by the crowd, and by my surroundings and habits." (8) Terribly torn between what her husband demanded and what she felt she owed to her children, fearing that the large property they possessed would be given away, and hoping that her husband, who had radically changed his views many times in life, might again change his views and regret any hasty and ill-considered action he might take, she struggled valiantly in opposition to him. She was forced to manage the estates, see to the education of the children, and revise, print, and publish her husband's works. Tolstoy, on the other hand, “began to live," says Behrs, "as if he had no estate or property, refused to receive any income himself from it, or to profit by it in any way." (9) "He tries to shut his eyes," writes Anna Seuron, once a governess in the Tolstoy family, "and is wholly absorbed in carrying out the programme of his life. He does not wish to see money, and, as far as possible, avoids taking it in his hands, and never carries it about him." (10)

As the months and even years went on, with neither of them yielding to the other, the gap between man and wife grew wider and wider, and Behrs writes: "I have noticed that he is inclined to be more exacting, and seems to be displeased and hurt that she persists in opposing his wish

to abandon his worldly possessions, and continues to educate her children after the old fashion and spirit. In her turn his wife believes that she is right in so acting, and is grieved at the hard necessity of having to thwart his dearest wish. She has been the secret witness of all his spiritual struggle, and has with anxiety watched the gradual development into full growth of his religious and social creeds. No wonder if, at times, they have filled her with a feeling of disquietude, and she has feared their baleful influence on the health and well-being of her husband. This feeling, in spite of herself, for a while generated an aversion to his creed, and a dread of its results. . . . Between husband and wife an ever-widening discordance betrayed itself, and made itself felt in mutual recriminations as to the position each had taken up towards his creed, the one point on which there ever was the slightest disagreement or misunderstanding." (11)

In the struggle between Tolstoy and his wife there is much to be said for the position taken by the Countess, and this, too, is well put by Behrs, who, although an ardent admirer of Tolstoy, appreciated the unhappy situation of his sister. "To divide their property," he says, "among strangers, and to cast her children penniless on the world, when no one else is ready or willing to do the same, she not only considers impossible, but believes it to be her duty as mother to oppose any such scheme to the uttermost. When speaking to me on this subject, she exclaimed, with tears in her eyes, 'It is hard for me now, since I have now to do all myself, whereas before I needed to be only his aid and helper. The education of the children, the care of the property, all has fallen on my shoulders. And then I am blamed for transgressing Christ's law of love and charity! As if I would not readily do all he wishes if I had no children; but he forgets all and everything for the sake of his creed."" (12) The Countess had to suffer all the trials

which it is said the wife of every artist and genius must suffer and, in addition, some of those that must come to the wife of any man who tries to follow literally in modern society the teachings of Jesus.

As time went on, Tolstoy's differences with his family became more and more serious, and he often felt himself a stranger in his own household. He lived like a common laborer among those who were spending his money to supply themselves with all the comforts and many of the luxuries of modern life, and he thus became a living rebuke to his family and naturally caused them all much anguish. Not wishing to oppose his wife by force, he could change nothing, and his property, as it appeared to him, continued to be wasted and his peasants to be exploited. He was so deeply affected by the falsity of his position that he tried again and again to bring himself to leave his family, but he always weakened at the moment of going. He continued, therefore, reluctantly, to live surrounded by luxury, though not partaking of it. He felt so keenly the opposition of his wife and children that he was led to believe what he said repeatedly-that the institution of the family was one of the greatest obstacles to a truly Christian life, and he often recalled the words of Jesus, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." He dwelt much upon this verse. Some of his conclusions as to the limitations often placed upon a Christian by family life are dealt with in The Kreutzer Sonata.

In order to explain fully the contradictory and even disastrous situation in his own household, he wrote the remarkable drama, "The Light Shines in Darkness." This is perhaps the only instance in literature of a great writer putting his autobiography into dramatic form. Tolstoy pictures himself, his family, their relatives and friends in a