Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/89

 —supper—and again to bed, shaken up and prepared with clean linen, and with washed utensils to be again made foul.

Thus pass the days of a man of modest life, of whom, if he is good-natured and does not possess any habits specially obnoxious to those about him, it is said that he leads a good and virtuous life.

But a good life is the life of a man who does good to others; and can a man accustomed to live thus do good to others? Before he can do good to men he must cease to do evil. Reckon up all the harm such a man, often unconsciously, does to others, and you will see that he is far indeed from doing good; he would have to perform many acts of heroism to redeem the evil he commits, but he is too much enfeebled by his life full of desires to perform any such acts. He might sleep with more advantage, both physical and moral, lying on the floor wrapped in his cloak, as Marcus Aurelius did; and thus he might save all the labour and trouble involved in the manufacture of mattresses, springs, and pillows, as also the daily labour of the laundress—one of the weaker sex burdened by the bearing and nursing of children—who washes linen for this strong man. By going to bed earlier and getting up earlier he might save window-curtains and the evening lamp. He might sleep in the same shirt he wears during the day, might step barefooted upon the floor, and go out into the yard; he might wash at the pump—in a word, he might live like those who work for him, and might thus save all this work that is done for him. He might save all the labour expended upon his clothing, his refined food, his recreations. And he knows under what conditions all these labours are performed: how in performing them men perish, suffer, and often hate those who take advantage of their poverty to force them to do it.

How, then, is such a man to do good to others and lead a righteous life, without abandoning this self-indulgent, luxurious life?

But we need not speak of how other people appear