Tolstoy on How to Make a Poor Man Happy

Leo Tolstoy, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages translated from the French of Le Lotus for September 1887, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume VIII under "Misconceptions." The full article is in the site's Theosophy and Theosophists Series; what is given here is the passage on Tolstoy and a long quotation from him.

The introduction states a position before quoting anybody: that there is only one way of ever ameliorating human life, and it is by the love of one's fellow man for his own sake and not for personal gratification, so that the greatest theosophist is the one who works for and with the poor. Tolstoy is then named as a man known to intellectual Europe and America who may never have heard of the Theosophical Society, and called a perfect model for all aspirants to true theosophy — the first in the European aristocracy to have solved the problem of what one can do to make happy any poor man one meets. His own answer follows at length, and it turns on a distinction between two ways of helping. It is everyone's duty to work for those who need help, and to work with the hands for a certain portion of the day; working with and for a poor man is more practical than giving him a portion of your intellectual labour, because in the first case you help not only the man who needs it but preach by example to the lazy and the beggar, showing that you do not consider their prosaic work beneath your dignity and so instilling self-respect. If instead you work solely in your own high intellectual region and give the poor the product of it as alms, you encourage laziness and a feeling of inferiority, establish a difference of social caste between yourself and the man who accepts it, and take away his self-esteem — leaving him aspiring to escape the daily physical labour of his life for one that looks easier.

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