A Discourse, at Temple Keneseth Israel,
by
Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, D. D.

Philadelphia, December 18th, 1910.

[ResumÉ—Discourse I: Reason for my visit to Russia and for my calling on Tolstoy. Description of his appearance and personality. Some of his views on Russia, its statesmen, its religion, its misgovernment. A pause under Poverty Tree beneath which he now lies buried.]

Tolstoy recalled aid sent from Philadelphia to famine-stricken in Russia.

The first question count Tolstoy put to me, after his long silence, was from what part of the United States I hailed. Upon my telling him that Philadelphia was my home, he expressed himself as much pleased. He recalled the two shiploads of food we sent from our port, two years earlier, for the relief of the famine-stricken of Russia, and of the distribution of which he had had personal charge, and he spoke with pleasure and appreciation of Mr. Francis B. Reeves, our fellow-townsman, who had accompanied the food-relief.

Said first aid came from Sacramento synagogue.

With even keener delight he recalled that the first aid received from the United States was from the Jewish congregation of Sacramento, California, which to him was all the more remarkable from the fact that the district stricken was, through governmental restriction, uninhabited by Jews. The expression of pleasure turned to one of sorrow when he remarked that Russia had little deserved such generous treatment at the hands of Jews,—and he lived to see the manner in which it was repaid in Kishineff and other places.

Was fond of Quakers.

Reverting to our city, he said that the name of Philadelphia had always had a pleasant sound for him, partly because of its meaning "Brotherly Love," and partly because it was founded by William Penn. He expressed a high admiration for Quakers, and asked how strong they were numerically and whether they are still as opposed to war and resistance as their founders were. Upon answering his question to the best of my ability, he asked: "Why is it that war, which is the greatest curse of mankind, has so many advocates, and peace, the greatest of all blessings, so few?" After some discussion we both agreed that it was due to that strange perversity of human nature that sees the right and approves of it, and yet often willfully chooses the wrong.

Blamed school for many of present-day wrongs.

He blamed the schools for many of the errors that obtain in society, and claimed that there was too much education of the wrong kind, and too little of the right. In discussing this statement of his, I chanced to mention that education in the lower grades was compulsory with us. To this he strongly objected. All compulsion, he said, was wrong. Man must be gotten to do right by the law of love and not by the rule of force. Upon my telling him that but for compulsory education some parents would never send their children to school, he said: "What of it? The children would probably be no less moral and no less happy than those of highest education. I have associated with the learned and the ignorant, and I have found more honor and honesty, more fear of the Lord and more true happiness, among the unlettered than among the lettered. The more of education we cram into the heads of the people the more of the fear of God is crowded out of them. The world lives by the love of God and not by the primer or the multiplication table." "What, if you had had no education?" I ventured to ask. Quickly and feelingly came the answer "The world would have been none the worse, and I would have been the happier." "What if Jesus and the other prophets had had no schooling?" I asked. To which he replied "It was not what they got out of their schools that made them the spiritual and moral powers they became, but what they got out of their hearts. God puts more education into the human heart than man has ever been able to put into the head. Some of the wisest and best people hereabouts are peasants who have never seen the inside of a school, and who do not know one letter from another." "What of Paul," I asked, "who certainly enjoyed the benefits of the Greek schools of his day?" To which he replied "The schools made of Paul a theologian, and Christianity would have been the better without the theology of Paul."

Warped by unfavorable surroundings.

Other objections to some of his paradoxical views on education suggested themselves to me, but I left them unsaid. I perceived that while tolerant of objections, his opinions were fixed. He apparently judged of world-conditions from the view-point of his limited and unfavorable horizon. Under different conditions, some of his opinions on education, and on a number of other subjects which we discussed, would probably have been quite different.

Well informed of political and social conditions in United States.

The conversation turned to social conditions in the United States, and on these matters he displayed an amount of knowledge that was amazing. The more I listened the more I wondered, till finally I could not but ask him how he who wrote and worked so much could find time to keep himself so well informed of a country so far away as the United States. To which he replied "Your country has interested me even more than mine. I have lost hope in mine; all my hope was, at one time, centered in yours. But yours is a disappointment as much as mine. You call yourselves a Republic; you are worse than an autocracy. I say worse because you are ruled by gold, and gold is more conscienceless, and therefore, more tyrannical than any human tyrant. Your intentions are good; your execution is lamentable. Were yours the free and representative government you pretend to have, you would not allow it to be controlled by the money powers and their hirelings, the bosses and machines, as you do. I have read Progress and Poverty by Henry George, and I know what Mr. Bryce says about you in his The American Commonwealth, and I have read and heard even worse things about your misgovernment than what they say."

Deplored rule of gold and growth of cities.

We were all right, he continued, as long as we were an agricultural people. Our modes of life, then, were simple, and our ideals were high. Politics then was a religion with us and not a matter of barter and sale. We became prosperous; prosperity brought luxury, and luxury, as always, brings corruption. The thirst of gold is upon us, and, in our eagerness to quench it and to gratify our lust of luxury, our one-time lofty principles and aspirations are dragged down and trampled in the mire. We build city upon city, and pride ourselves in making one greater than the other, and, in the mean time, we wipe out village after village, whence have come our strength and moral fibre. The price of real estate in the cities is soaring to the skies, while farms are deserted and farm-houses decay. We tempt the farmer's son and daughter from field to factory, and when we have exhausted them of their health and morals we think ourselves charitable when we prolong their miserable existence in hospitals or reformatories. We forget that our greatness lay in the pursuit of husbandry, and we seek our salvation in commerce and in the industries.

Prophesied war of classes.

With all our stupendous wealth, our slums are as bad, if not worse, as those of European cities, and we are building up a proletariat class which will some day prove our undoing. Our rich become degenerates, and our poor become desperates, and in the struggle to come the desperate will rise up and slay the degenerate. We keep things quiet by throwing crumbs of charity to those who are in need of justice more yet than they are in need of bread. Some day they will tire of crumbs, and will ask their full share of what the rich eat and have, and, if denied, they will make short work of it. Our origin and our destiny should have warned us against repeating the fatal errors of the past. But for our colossal resources, we would long since have been dashed against the rocks. We may yet save ourselves by going back to the farm, and taking up anew the life and labors of our fathers.

Disagreed, yet kept silent.

In this strain he continued for quite awhile, and the longer he spoke the sadder grew his speech and the more prophetic became his look. At length he ceased speaking, and an oppressive quiet ensued. I recognized that he was deeply moved, and I therefore did not care to contradict some of his statements which were obviously based on error. In other of his statements I fully agreed with him, yet, loyalty to my country forbade my seconding the gloomy prospect he held out for us.

Description of his relationship with wife and family.

A fortunate interruption relieved the situation. His wife approached with a letter or manuscript in hand. He arose, proceeded toward her, and, for a while, the two conferred together. In all probability it was a manuscript of his which she was translating or revising. I was told that she was always doing something of that sort. She was his consultant, his reviser, his translator, while his daughter, Tatiana, was his correspondent in a number of different languages. It is said that his wife copied twenty-one times the four large volumes of his novel War and Peace, and that there has been no novel nor little else of his writing, since their marriage in 1862, that did not pass through her hands. He found in her, in the fullest sense of the word, his help-mate, a woman of great culture as well of great practical sense, who looked after his literary interests no less than after those of the household, and who often found it no easy task to be, as has been well said, "the patient wife of an impatient genius." She bore him thirteen children, six of whom passed away in their early youth. She fairly idolized him and skilfully managed to slip, unknown to him, those little comforts into his life which he required for his well-being and which he had renounced. Neither she nor the children shared his view respecting the distribution among the peasantry of his estate and other property, and keeping for himself no more than an equal share with all the others. The family believed in availing themselves of the benefits of civilization, and for that they required the income of the farm and the royalty of his books. There was quite a wrangle, for a time, between the family and its head, but it was amicably disposed of in the end, the count agreeing to their living as they chose, on the condition that they permitted him to live as he pleased. And so in his Moscow home as well as in that at Yasnaya Polyana, while the family rooms are said to be comfortably furnished, his own were poorly fitted out, and while they have servants and butlers and footmen, he attended to his own wants, fetched his own water, cobbled his own shoes, and, in summer time, labored in the field, from morn to night, alongside the commonest peasant.

Description of his working room.

Stopping suddenly in his conversation with his wife, and begging us to excuse him for leaving us, I asked him whether he knew where my bag was put, as I wanted to get to my writing material for the purpose of dropping a line to the American Minister. Mr. White had feared that, not being wanted in Russia, I might get into trouble soon after leaving the protection of our embassy in St. Petersburg, and he had enjoined upon me that I keep in constant touch with him, as well as with the American consuls, while in the interior. The count informing me that my bag had been placed into his working-room, on the ground floor of the house, I had a glimpse of the room in which some of the greatest writings of our time, of all times, first saw the light of day. It was a small room with an ordinary, bare floor somewhat the worse for wear, with a vaulted ceiling, and with very thick walls that gave it the aspect of a mediaeval cloister cell. I have since read that at one time it was a storeroom, and that from the hooks in the ceiling were formerly suspended the ham supply for the family. Besides a crude writing-desk and a few chairs, there seemed to be no other furniture in the room, and its only ornaments, as far as I can recall, were some farm implements, tools, and seed bags. The desk was littered over with books and papers, and showed the kind of disorder one would expect of a genius like Tolstoy.

Favored suppression of lawyers.

Upon my return to the tree, I found the count in conversation with my companion, who told me later that upon Tolstoy's asking him what his occupation was, and upon his replying that he had graduated from the law-school of the University of Moscow, and that, owing to restrictive laws against Jews, he was not permitted to practice, the count had remarked that the government had done at least one good thing, it had diminished the number of lawyers.

Amazed at the amount of poverty in New York.

Resuming my seat alongside of him, he asked me whether it was true that New York expended as much as one hundred thousand dollars daily in public charity. I told him that it probably was true. He then returned to his discussion on the appalling contrast between the very rich and the very poor of the large cities in Europe and America. The rich, he said, would never be as rich as they are nor the poor as poor if the latter were scattered as farmers over the land. It is their congregating in large numbers in the cities, he said, that makes possible the extensive industries and commercial enterprises which enslave them, and which build up the great fortunes of the rich.

Belittled his own novels.

"Have you read my book What To Do?" he suddenly asked me. I was obliged to answer "No." I have read it since, and several times, and profitably, too, but, though I had read quite a number of his books before I met him, it was exceedingly embarrassing to be questioned concerning the particular book which I had not read. Not to appear altogether ignorant of his writings, I proceeded to tell him that I had read his "War and Peace," "Anna KarÉnina," etc., etc., and started telling him how much I admired them, when, with an impatient look and gesture, he interrupted me, saying "These works are all chaff, chaff, play-toys, amusing gilded youth and idle women. It is my serious writings which I want the world to read. I have ceased publishing novels because readers do not know the meaning of them. They look for entertainment and not instruction, and even though I write only for the uplift of man, for the purification of society, they, like the hawk, seek out only the carrion. They neither recognize themselves under the fictitious name I adopt, nor do they see their share in the wrongs and vices and injustices depicted, neither do they perceive that it is for their co-operation that the novelist appeals when he pleads for the kingdom of heaven on earth."

Spoke of his book What To Do.

Returning to his book What To Do, he said, "even if you have not read it, you have read the Prophets, and having read them, you know my teachings. The book is an appeal for pity for the submerged, for justice for the wronged, for liberation of the oppressed and persecuted, and for the application of the only remedy—a return to the simple life and labor on the soil. As our subsistence comes from the soil so can justice and right and happiness come from it alone. Help can never come from wealth, for wealth is the creator of poverty and inequality and injustice. It can not come from the government for that exists largely for the purpose of keeping up inequality and injustice. It cannot come from the church, for she fears the Czar more than she fears God. It cannot even come from the schools which tend to train a class of people who think themselves too good for manual labor."

Saw solution of Jewish problem only in agriculture.

"Your plan to lead your people back to the soil," he continued, "back to the occupation which your fathers followed with honor in Palestinian lands, is of some encouragement to me. It shows that the light is dawning. It is the only solution of the Jewish problem. Persecution, refusal of the right to own or to till the soil, exclusion from the artisan guilds, made traders of the Jew. And the world hates the trader. Make bread-producers of your people, and the world will honor those who give it bread to it."

Made a request of me.

"There is little chance at present," he continued, "for a Jewish colonization scheme in Russia. The government does not want to see the Jews rooting themselves on Russian soil, and spreads the report that they are unfit for agricultural labor, though I have been reliably informed that in the few Jewish agricultural colonies that have been tolerated on the steppes from the time of Alexander I they are as successful farmers as are the best." And he asked me as a favor that I make a special trip to those colonies and report to him, preferably in person, the result of my observations. I was only too anxious to consent to his request.

And yet another promise he asked of me, and which I gave no less cheerfully. But of this I shall speak in my next discourse.