Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/26

 natural for me to make this theory my own. I, the artist and poet, wrote and taught, myself not knowing what. For this I was paid, and I had excellent food, quarters, women, society; I had fame. Consequently, what I taught was very good.

Faith in the meaning of poetry and in progress in life was a creed, and I was one of its priests. It was very agreeable and profitable to be its priest, and I lived for a long time in that belief, never doubting its truth. But in the second and, especially, in the third year of that life I began to have my doubts about the infallibility of that faith, and started to investigate it. What gave me the first impulse to these misgivings was the fact, which I noticed, that all those priests were not at one among themselves. Some said: “We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is necessary, but the others teach incorrectly.” And others said: “No, we are the real ones, but you teach incorrectly.” And they disputed, quarrelled, scolded, cheated, and deceived each other. Besides, there were many people among us who did not trouble themselves to find out who was right and who wrong, but who simply attained their selfish ends by means of that activity of ours. AU that made me doubt the truth of our faith.

Besides, having lost faith in the truth of my literary creed, I began to observe the priests more closely, and I convinced myself that nearly all the priests of that faith, the authors, were immoral people and, for the most part, bad people, insignificant as to their character, who stood much lower than those men whom I used to meet in my former riotous and military life; but they were self-confident and self-satisfied, as only such men can be who either are great saints or who do not know what sanctity is. I got sick of those people, and I got sick of myself, and I understood that that faith was a deception.

But what is strange is that, although I soon compre-