Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/117

 NON-ACTING 101

especially, that you may learn to believe. The advice is not bad in itself ; it is certainly a great liappiness to rest in the certainty of a faith— no matter what it may bo ; but the worst of it is that one is not master of this virtue : it bloweth where it listeth.

I, therefore, am also going to finish by proposing to you a faith, and by beseeching you to have faith in work. Work, young people ! I well know how trivial such advice appears : no speech day passes at which it is not repeated amid the general indillerence of the scholars. But I ask you to reflect on it, and I — who have been nothing but a worker — will permit myself to speak of all the benefit I have derived from the long task that has filled my life. I had no easy start in life ; I have known want and despair. Later on I lived in strife, and I live in it still — discussed, denied, covered with abuse. Well, I have had but one faith, one strength— work ! "What has sustained me was the enormous labour I set myself. Before me stood always in the distance the goal toward which I was marching, and that sufficed to set me on my feet and to give me courage to advance in spite of all, when life's liardships had cast me down. The work of which I speak to you is the regular work, the daily task, the duty one has undertaken, to advance one step each day toward the fulfilment of one's engagement. How often in the morning have I sat down to my t^xble — my head in con- fusion — a bitter taste in my mouth — tortured by some great sorrow, physical or moral ! And each time— in spite of the revolt my suffering has caused — after the first moments of agony my task has been to me an alleviation and a comfort. I have always come from my daily task consolefl— with a broken heart, perhaps, but erect and able to live on till the morrow.

Work ! Remember, gentlemen, that it is the sole law of the world, the regulator bringing organic matter to its unknown goal ! Life has no other meaning, no other raison iVHrc ; we, each of us, appear but to [jerform our allotted task and to disappear. One cannot define life otherwise than by the movement it receives and bequeaths, and which is, in reality, nothing but work, work at the final achievement accom- plished by all the ages. And, therefore, how can we be other than modest, how can we do other than accept the individual task given to each of us, and accept it without rebellion and without yielding to the pride of one's personal