this dismal weather which I simply cannot stand. You, Dr. Stenersen, surely know something about that and will pardon me.6 ... To speak about Tolstoy: I do not find his mind to be any deeper than, say, that of General Booth. They are both preachers, not thinkers but preachers. They sell existing products, popularize ready-made ideas, vulgarizing them for the masses at bargain prices and causing commotion in the world. But if you’re going to sell, you must do so at a profit. Tolstoy sells with staggering losses. Two friends once made a bet: one of them staked a shilling he would shoot a nut out of the other’s hand at twenty paces without hurting the hand. All right, he fired, missed badly, blew his whole hand to bits, and with flying colors. The other groaned and cried with his last strength, ‘You lost the bet, hand over the shilling!’ He got the money. Heh-heh, hand over the shilling, he said! ... God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people’s sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with love of God and everyman. It fills my heart with shame.7 It may sound impertinent to say that a count makes an agronomist feel deeply ashamed, but he does.... I would never have mentioned it if Tolstoy were a youth who had to overcome temptation, put up a fight, in order to preach virtue and live immaculately. But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. Well—you might say—that has no bearing on his teaching! Oh yes, it does have a bearing on his teaching! Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to a youth and say, Renounce! And the youth gives it a try; thinking it over, he recognizes it’s correct according to Scripture. And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! But when the forty years are up and the young man has himself become old, he saddles his lily-white filly and rides off, holding the banner of the cross high in his bony hand and trumpeting youthful renunciation ad nauseam, while the world listens with grave attention. Heh-heh-heh-heh, it’s an ever-recurring comedy! I find Tolstoy amusing, I’m delighted that the old man can still do so much good; he will eventually enter into the joy of the Lord! The only trouble is that he’s merely repeating what so many old men have done before him and so many old men will do after him.8 Yes, that’s the trouble.”
“Let me just remind you—to say no more—that Tolstoy has shown himself a true friend of the needy and forsaken; shouldn’t that be considered at all? Show me a blue blood in this country who has looked after the humbler members of the community the way he has. It is a rather arrogant view, I think, to class Tolstoy’s teaching, simply because it’s not followed, with that of fools.”9
“Bravo, Doctor!” the teacher roared again, his face scarlet. “Bravo! But say it more bitterly, say it gruffly. Everyone has his own opinion. An arrogant view, verily an arrogant view on your part! I shall prove it—”
“Skoal!” Nagel said. “Let’s not forget what we’re here for.10 Do you really mean to say, Doctor, that giving away a ten-ruble note when one has a cool million left is worth admiring? I can’t understand the way you, and everybody else, regard this matter; I must be differently made. For the life of me, I cannot see how anybody—least of all a wealthy man—deserves to be admired for giving a bit of alms.”
“That’s good!” the lawyer remarked teasingly. “I’m a socialist, and that’s my position.”
But this annoyed the doctor and, turning to Nagel, he exclaimed, “If I may ask, do you really know that much about how many alms Tolstoy has handed out in the course of time, and how big they’ve been? There must be a limit to what one can say, even at a bachelor party.”
“And for Tolstoy,” Nagel replied, “the situation was this: there must be a certain limit to how much to give away! For which reason he let his wife take the blame for not giving away more! Heh-heh-heh, well,