Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/34

 28 what in real life most frightened the Countess was not that she was asked to accept poverty, but that she was asked to manage a household in which there should be no limit to the giving up.

Tolstoy held, as he says in The Demands of Love, that if people begin giving up and set any limits thereto, then "life will be hell, or will become hell, if they are not hypocrites. … Where and how can one stop? Only those will find a stopping-place who are strangers to the feeling of the reality of the brotherhood of man, or who are so accustomed to lie that they no longer notice the difference between truth and falsehood. The fact is, no such stopping-place can exist. … If you give the beggar your last shillings, you will be left without bread to-morrow; but to refuse, means to turn from that for the sake of which one lives."

Had that point, and the need of admitting to one's cottage "the tramp with his lice and his typhus," and giving away the children's last cup of milk, been pressed home in the play as it was in Tolstoy's teaching, some of the readers' sympathy would go over to the side of the wife called on to face such conditions for herself and her family; and that is why Tolstoy's artistic instinct induced him to introduce a definite proposal quite at variance with the demands of his own teaching.

And again, the conflict in the play is between