TOLSTOYISM
The administration of charity in Chicago during the winter
following the World's Fair had been of necessity most difficult,
for, although large sums had been given to the temporary relief
organization which endeavored to care for the thousands of
destitute strangers stranded in the city, we all worked under a
sense of desperate need and a paralyzing consciousness that our
best efforts were most inadequate to the situation.
During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement
houses and miserable lodgings, I was constantly shadowed by a
certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst
of such distress. This resulted at times in a curious reaction
against all the educational and philanthropic activities in which
I had been engaged. In the face of the desperate hunger and
need, these could not but seem futile and superficial. The hard
winter in Chicago had turned the thoughts of many of us to these
stern matters. A young friend of mine who came daily to
Hull-House consulted me in regard to going into the paper
warehouse belonging to her father that she might there sort rags
with the Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a
sweatshop for a month, doing her work so simply and thoroughly
that the proprietor had no notion that she had not been driven
there by need; still two others worked in a shoe factory;--and
all this happened before such adventures were undertaken in order
to procure literary material. It was in the following winter
that the pioneer effort in this direction, Walter Wyckoff's
account of his vain attempt to find work in Chicago, compelled
even the sternest businessman to drop his assertion that "any man
can find work if he wants it."
The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been
responsible for an impression which I carried about with me
almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated
finally in a visit to Tolstoy--that the Settlement, or Hull-House
at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse
"to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share
the common lot of hard labor and scant fare.
Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I
had been in after reading Tolstoy's "What to Do," which is a
description of his futile efforts to relieve the unspeakable
distress and want in the Moscow winter of 1881, and his
inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares his own
shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them.
Doubtless it is much easier to see "what to do" in rural Russia,
where all the conditions tend to make the contrast as broad as
possible between peasant labor and noble idleness, than it is to
see "what to do" in the interdependencies of the modern
industrial city. But for that very reason perhaps, Tolstoy's
clear statement is valuable for that type of conscientious person
in every land who finds it hard, not only to walk in the path of
righteousness, but to discover where the path lies.
I had read the books of Tolstoy steadily all the years since "My
Religion" had come into my hands immediately after I left
college. The reading of that book had made clear that men's poor
little efforts to do right are put forth for the most part in the
chill of self-distrust; I became convinced that if the new social
order ever came, it would come by gathering to itself all the
pathetic human endeavor which had indicated the forward
direction. But I was most eager to know whether Tolstoy's
undertaking to do his daily share of the physical labor of the
world, that labor which is "so disproportionate to the
unnourished strength" of those by whom it is ordinarily
performed, had brought him peace!
I had time to review carefully many things in my mind during the
long days of convalescence following an illness of typhoid fever
which I suffered in the autumn of 1895. The illness was so
prolonged that my health was most unsatisfactory during the
following winter, and the next May I went abroad with my friend,
Miss Smith, to effect if possible a more complete recovery.
The prospect of seeing Tolstoy filled me with the hope of finding
a clue to the tangled affairs of city poverty. I was but one of
thousands of our contemporaries who were turning toward this
Russian, not as to a seer--his message is much too confused and
contradictory for that--but as to a man who has had the ability
to lift his life to the level of his conscience, to translate his
theories into action.
Our first few weeks in England were most stimulating. A dozen
years ago London still showed traces of "that exciting moment in
the life of the nation when its youth is casting about for new
enthusiasms," but it evinced still more of that British capacity
to perform the hard work of careful research and self-examination
which must precede any successful experiments in social reform.
Of the varied groups and individuals whose suggestions remained
with me for years, I recall perhaps as foremost those members of
the new London County Council whose far-reaching plans for the
betterment of London could not but enkindle enthusiasm. It was a
most striking expression of that effort which would place beside
the refinement and pleasure of the rich, a new refinement and a
new pleasure born of the commonwealth and the common joy of all
the citizens, that at this moment they prized the municipal
pleasure boats upon the Thames no less than the extensive schemes
for the municipal housing of the poorest people. Ben Tillet, who
was then an alderman, "the docker sitting beside the duke," took
me in a rowboat down the Thames on a journey made exciting by the
hundreds of dockers who cheered him as we passed one wharf after
another on our way to his home at Greenwich; John Burns showed us
his wonderful civic accomplishments at Battersea, the plant
turning street sweepings into cement pavements, the technical
school teaching boys brick laying and plumbing, and the public
bath in which the children of the Board School were receiving a
swimming lesson--these measures anticipating our achievements in
Chicago by at least a decade and a half. The new Education Bill
which was destined to drag on for twelve years before it
developed into the children's charter, was then a storm center in
the House of Commons. Miss Smith and I were much pleased to be
taken to tea on the Parliament terrace by its author, Sir John
Gorst, although we were quite bewildered by the arguments we
heard there for church schools versus secular.
We heard Keir Hardie before a large audience of workingmen
standing in the open square of Canning Town outline the great
things to be accomplished by the then new Labor Party, and we
joined the vast body of men in the booming hymn
When wilt Thou save the people,
O God of Mercy, when!
finding it hard to realize that we were attending a political
meeting. It seemed that moment as if the hopes of democracy were
more likely to come to pass on English soil than upon our own.
Robert Blatchford's stirring pamphlets were in everyone's hands,
and a reception given by Karl Marx's daughter, Mrs. Aveling, to
Liebknecht before he returned to Germany to serve a prison term
for his lese majeste speech in the Reichstag, gave us a glimpse
of the old-fashioned orthodox Socialist who had not yet begun to
yield to the biting ridicule of Bernard Shaw although he flamed
in their midst that evening.
Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the principles upon which
her well-founded business of rent collecting was established, and
with pardonable pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its
cottages marvelously picturesque and comfortable, on two sides,
and on the third a public hall and common drawing room for the
use of all the tenants; the interior of the latter had been
decorated by pupils of Walter Crane with mural frescoes
portraying the heroism in the life of the modern workingman.
While all this was warmly human, we also had opportunities to see
something of a group of men and women who were approaching the
social problem from the study of economics; among others Mr. and
Mrs. Sidney Webb who were at work on their Industrial Democracy; Mr.
John Hobson who was lecturing on the evolution of modern capitalism.
We followed factory inspectors on a round of duties performed with
a thoroughness and a trained intelligence which were a revelation
of the possibilities of public service. When it came to visiting
Settlements, we were at least reassured that they were not falling
into identical lines of effort. Canon Ingram, who has since
become Bishop of London, was then warden of Oxford House and in
the midst of an experiment which pleased me greatly, the more
because it was carried on by a churchman. Oxford House had hired
all the concert halls--vaudeville shows we later called them in
Chicago--which were found in Bethnal Green, for every Saturday
night. The residents had censored the programs, which they were
careful to keep popular, and any workingman who attended a show in
Bethnal Green on a Saturday night, and thousands of them did,
heard a program the better for this effort.
One evening in University Hall Mrs. Humphry Ward, who had just
returned from Italy, described the effect of the Italian salt tax
in a talk which was evidently one in a series of lectures upon the
economic wrongs which pressed heaviest upon the poor; at Browning
House, at the moment, they were giving prizes to those of their
costermonger neighbors who could present the best cared-for
donkeys, and the warden, Herbert Stead, exhibited almost the
enthusiasm of his well-known brother, for that crop of kindliness
which can be garnered most easily from the acreage where human
beings grow the thickest; at the Bermondsey Settlement they were
rejoicing that their University Extension students had
successfully passed the examinations for the University of London.
The entire impression received in England of research, of
scholarship, of organized public spirit, was in marked contrast to
the impressions of my next visit in 1900, when the South African
War had absorbed the enthusiasm of the nation and the wrongs at
"the heart of the empire" were disregarded and neglected.
London, of course, presented sharp differences to Russia where
social conditions were written in black and white with little
shading, like a demonstration of the Chinese proverb, "Where one
man lives in luxury, another is dying of hunger."
The fair of Nijni-Novgorod seemed to take us to the very edge of
civilization so remote and eastern that the merchants brought
their curious goods upon the backs of camels or on strange craft
riding at anchor on the broad Volga. But even here our letter of
introduction to Korolenko, the novelist, brought us to a
realization of that strange mingling of a remote past and a
self-conscious present which Russia presents on every hand. This
same contrast was also shown by the pilgrims trudging on pious
errands to monasteries, to tombs, and to the Holy Land itself,
with their bleeding feet bound in rags and thrust into bast
sandals, and, on the other hand, by the revolutionists even then
advocating a Republic which should obtain not only in political
but also in industrial affairs.
We had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude of
Moscow, since well known as the translators of "Resurrection" and
other of Tolstoy's later works, who at that moment were on the eve
of leaving Russia in order to form an agricultural colony in South
England where they might support themselves by the labor of their
hands. We gladly accepted Mr. Maude's offer to take us to Yasnaya
Polyana and to introduce us to Count Tolstoy, and never did a
disciple journey toward his master with more enthusiasm than did
our guide. When, however, Mr. Maude actually presented Miss Smith
and myself to Count Tolstoy, knowing well his master's attitude
toward philanthropy, he endeavored to make Hull-House appear much
more noble and unique than I should have ventured to do.
Tolstoy, standing by clad in his peasant garb, listened gravely
but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown
which unfortunately at that season were monstrous in size, he
took hold of an edge and pulling out one sleeve to an
interminable breadth, said quite simply that "there was enough
stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl," and asked me
directly if I did not find "such a dress" a "barrier to the
people." I was too disconcerted to make a very clear explanation,
although I tried to say that monstrous as my sleeves were they
did not compare in size with those of the working girls in
Chicago and that nothing would more effectively separate me from
"the people" than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of
the human form; even if I had wished to imitate him and "dress as
a peasant," it would have been hard to choose which peasant among
the thirty-six nationalities we had recently counted in our ward.
Fortunately the countess came to my rescue with a recital of her
former attempts to clothe hypothetical little girls in yards of
material cut from a train and other superfluous parts of her best
gown until she had been driven to a firm stand which she advised
me to take at once. But neither Countess Tolstoy nor any other
friend was on hand to help me out of my predicament later, when I
was asked who "fed" me, and how did I obtain "shelter"? Upon my
reply that a farm a hundred miles from Chicago supplied me with
the necessities of life, I fairly anticipated the next scathing
question: "So you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you
will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city
than you would by tilling your own soil?" This new sense of
discomfort over a failure to till my own soil was increased when
Tolstoy's second daughter appeared at the five-o'clock tea table
set under the trees, coming straight from the harvest field where
she had been working with a group of peasants since five o'clock
in the morning, not pretending to work but really taking the
place of a peasant woman who had hurt her foot. She was plainly
much exhausted, but neither expected nor received sympathy from
the members of a family who were quite accustomed to see each
other carry out their convictions in spite of discomfort and
fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously
much easier to bear than that to which, even to the eyes of the
casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his
study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its
short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning
against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule
which is the most difficult form of martyrdom.
That summer evening as we sat in the garden with a group of
visitors from Germany, from England and America, who had traveled
to the remote Russian village that they might learn of this man,
one could not forbear the constant inquiry to one's self, as to
why he was so regarded as sage and saint that this party of
people should be repeated each day of the year. It seemed to me
then that we were all attracted by this sermon of the deed,
because Tolstoy had made the one supreme personal effort, one
might almost say the one frantic personal effort, to put himself
into right relations with the humblest people, with the men who
tilled his soil, blacked his boots, and cleaned his stables.
Doubtless the heaviest burden of our contemporaries is a
consciousness of a divergence between our democratic theory on
the one hand, that working people have a right to the
intellectual resources of society, and the actual fact on the
other hand, that thousands of them are so overburdened with toil
that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of
the mind. We constantly suffer from the strain and indecision of
believing this theory and acting as if we did not believe it, and
this man who years before had tried "to get off the backs of the
peasants," who had at least simplified his life and worked with
his hands, had come to be a prototype to many of his generation.
Doubtless all of the visitors sitting in the Tolstoy garden that
evening had excused themselves from laboring with their hands
upon the theory that they were doing something more valuable for
society in other ways. No one among our contemporaries has
dissented from this point of view so violently as Tolstoy
himself, and yet no man might so easily have excused himself from
hard and rough work on the basis of his genius and of his
intellectual contributions to the world. So far, however, from
considering his time too valuable to be spent in labor in the
field or in making shoes, our great host was too eager to know
life to be willing to give up this companionship of mutual labor.
One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian
than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian
peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that love
lives in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of
people can come into affectionate relations with each other
unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian
peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the
phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor." Those
monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those
philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have
attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself
has written many times his own convictions and attempts in this
direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description
of Lavin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his
sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new
brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic
motion of his scythe became one with theirs.
At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various
traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger
children with their governess. The countess presided over the
usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the
daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge
and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-making
peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those
who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare
at the end of the day, but it is not often that we sit at the
same table with them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate
food prepared by someone else's labor. Tolstoy ate his simple
supper without remark or comment upon the food his family and
guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as well as he, had
settled the matter with their own consciences.
The Tolstoy household that evening was much interested in the fate
of a young Russian spy who had recently come to Tolstoy in the
guise of a country schoolmaster, in order to obtain a copy of
"Life," which had been interdicted by the censor of the press.
After spending the night in talk with Tolstoy, the spy had gone
away with a copy of the forbidden manuscript but, unfortunately for
himself, having become converted to Tolstoy's views he had later
made a full confession to the authorities and had been exiled to
Siberia. Tolstoy, holding that it was most unjust to exile the
disciple while he, the author of the book, remained at large, had
pointed out this inconsistency in an open letter to one of the
Moscow newspapers. The discussion of this incident, of course,
opened up the entire subject of nonresidence, and curiously enough
I was disappointed in Tolstoy's position in the matter. It seemed
to me that he made too great a distinction between the use of
physical force and that moral energy which can override another's
differences and scruples with equal ruthlessness.
With that inner sense of mortification with which one finds one's
self at difference with the great authority, I recalled the
conviction of the early Hull-House residents; that whatever of
good the Settlement had to offer should be put into positive
terms, that we might live with opposition to no man, with
recognition of the good in every man, even the most wretched. We
had often departed from this principle, but had it not in every
case been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found
antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable expenditure of energy?
The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with
animation and sincerity, for the moment stirred vague misgivings
within me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants? Could
the wrongs of life be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and
all be made right if each person performed the amount necessary to
satisfy his own wants? Was it not always easy to put up a strong
case if one took the naturalistic view of life? But what about the
historic view, the inevitable shadings and modifications which
life itself brings to its own interpretation? Miss Smith and I
took a night train back to Moscow in that tumult of feeling which
is always produced by contact with a conscience making one more of
those determined efforts to probe to the very foundations of the
mysterious world in which we find ourselves. A horde of perplexing
questions, concerning those problems of existence of which in
happier moments we catch but fleeting glimpses and at which we
even then stand aghast, pursued us relentlessly on the long
journey through the great wheat plains of South Russia, through
the crowded Ghetto of Warsaw, and finally into the smiling fields
of Germany where the peasant men and women were harvesting the
grain. I remember that through the sight of those toiling
peasants, I made a curious connection between the bread labor
advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said
to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many
theological difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of
gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands, that golden
yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's
kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the toiling
poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not
matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they
walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious
power possessed by the theorist to inhibit all experiences which
do not enhance his doctrine, I did not permit myself to recall
that which I knew so well--that exigent and unremitting labor
grants the poor no leisure even in the supreme moments of human
suffering and that "all griefs are lighter with bread."
I may have wished to secure this solace for myself at the cost of
the least possible expenditure of time and energy, for during the
next month in Germany, when I read everything of Tolstoy's that
had been translated into English, German, or French, there grew
up in my mind a conviction that what I ought to do upon my return
to Hull-House was to spend at least two hours every morning in
the little bakery which we had recently added to the equipment of
our coffeehouse. Two hours' work would be but a wretched
compromise, but it was hard to see how I could take more time out
of each day. I had been taught to bake bread in my childhood not
only as a household accomplishment, but because my father, true
to his miller's tradition, had insisted that each one of his
daughters on her twelfth birthday must present him with a
satisfactory wheat loaf of her own baking, and he was most
exigent as to the quality of this test loaf. What could be more
in keeping with my training and tradition than baking bread? I
did not quite see how my activity would fit in with that of the
German union baker who presided over the Hull-House bakery, but
all such matters were secondary and certainly could be arranged.
It may be that I had thus to pacify my aroused conscience before
I could settle down to hear Wagner's "Ring" at Beyreuth; it may
be that I had fallen a victim to the phrase, "bread labor"; but
at any rate I held fast to the belief that I should do this,
through the entire journey homeward, on land and sea, until I
actually arrived in Chicago when suddenly the whole scheme seemed
to me as utterly preposterous as it doubtless was. The half
dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the
piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual
and pressing wants--were these all to be pushed aside and asked
to wait while I saved my soul by two hours' work at baking bread?
Although my resolution was abandoned, this may be the best place
to record the efforts of more doughty souls to carry out Tolstoy's
conclusions. It was perhaps inevitable that Tolstoy colonies
should be founded, although Tolstoy himself has always insisted
that each man should live his life as nearly as possible in the
place in which he was born. The visit Miss Smith and I made a
year or two later to a colony in one of the southern States
portrayed for us most vividly both the weakness and the strange
august dignity of the Tolstoy position. The colonists at
Commonwealth held but a short creed. They claimed in fact that
the difficulty is not to state truth but to make moral conviction
operative upon actual life, and they announced it their intention
"to obey the teachings of Jesus in all matters of labor and the
use of property." They would thus transfer the vindication of
creed from the church to the open field, from dogma to experience.
The day Miss Smith and I visited the Commonwealth colony of
threescore souls, they were erecting a house for the family of a
one-legged man, consisting of a wife and nine children who had
come the week before in a forlorn prairie schooner from Arkansas.
As this was the largest family the little colony contained, the
new house was to be the largest yet erected. Upon our surprise
at this literal giving "to him that asketh," we inquired if the
policy of extending food and shelter to all who applied, without
test of creed or ability, might not result in the migration of
all the neighboring poorhouse population into the colony. We
were told that this actually had happened during the winter until
the colony fare of corn meal and cow peas had proved so
unattractive that the paupers had gone back, for even the poorest
of the southern poorhouses occasionally supplied bacon with the
pone if only to prevent scurvy from which the colonists
themselves had suffered. The difficulty of the poorhouse people
had thus settled itself by the sheer poverty of the situation, a
poverty so biting that the only ones willing to face it were
those sustained by a conviction of its righteousness. The fields
and gardens were being worked by an editor, a professor, a
clergyman, as well as by artisans and laborers, the fruit thereof
to be eaten by themselves and their families or by any other
families who might arrive from Arkansas. The colonists were very
conventional in matters of family relationship and had broken
with society only in regard to the conventions pertaining to
labor and property. We had a curious experience at the end of
the day, when we were driven into the nearest town. We had taken
with us as a guest the wife of the president of the colony,
wishing to give her a dinner at the hotel, because she had
girlishly exclaimed during a conversation that at times during
the winter she had become so eager to hear good music that it had
seemed to her as if she were actually hungry for it, almost as
hungry as she was for a beefsteak. Yet as we drove away we had
the curious sensation that while the experiment was obviously
coming to an end, in the midst of its privations it yet embodied
the peace of mind which comes to him who insists upon the logic
of life whether it is reasonable or not--the fanatic's joy in
seeing his own formula translated into action. At any rate, as
we reached the common-place southern town of workaday men and
women, for one moment its substantial buildings, its solid brick
churches, its ordered streets, divided into those of the rich and
those of the poor, seemed much more unreal to us than the little
struggling colony we had left behind. We repeated to each other
that in all the practical judgments and decisions of life, we
must part company with logical demonstration; that if we stop for
it in each case, we can never go on at all; and yet, in spite of
this, when conscience does become the dictator of the daily life
of a group of men, it forces our admiration as no other modern
spectacle has power to do. It seemed but a mere incident that
this group should have lost sight of the facts of life in their
earnest endeavor to put to the test the things of the spirit.
I knew little about the colony started by Mr. Maude at Purleigh
containing several of Tolstoy's followers who were not permitted
to live in Russia, and we did not see Mr. Maude again until he
came to Chicago on his way from Manitoba, whither he had
transported the second group of Dukhobors, a religious sect who
had interested all of Tolstoy's followers because of their
literal acceptance of non-resistance and other Christian
doctrines which are so strenuously advocated by Tolstoy. It was
for their benefit that Tolstoy had finished and published
"Resurrection," breaking through his long-kept resolution against
novel writing. After the Dukhobors were settled in Canada, of
the five hundred dollars left from the "Resurrection" funds, one
half was given to Hull-House. It seemed possible to spend this
fund only for the relief of the most primitive wants of food and
shelter on the part of the most needy families.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK
Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text
entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of
volunteer Terri Perkins.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XIII: Public Activities and Investigations." by by Jane
Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with
Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 281-309.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]