Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/31

 to teach, because I observed that everybody was teaching in his own way, and that by disputing among themselves the men tried to conceal their ignorance; but here, with the peasant children, I thought that the difficulty might be obviated by leaving it to the children to learn what they pleased. Now it is ludicrous for me to think how I temporized in order to gratify my desire to teach, although in the depth of my soul I knew full well that I could not teach what was necessary, because I did not myself know what was necessary. After a year passed in occupations with the school, I went abroad again, in order to learn there how, without knowing anything myself, I might teach others.

I thought that I learned that abroad, and, armed with all that wisdom, I returned to Russia in the year of the liberation of the serfs and, accepting the position of a rural judge, I began to teach the uneducated masses in the schools and the educated people in the periodical which I published. Things apparently went well, but I felt that I was mentally not quite well and that it would not last long. I might have arrived even then at that despair at which I arrived fifteen years later, if I had not had another side of life, which I had not yet explored and which promised me salvation,—my domestic life.

For a year I acted as a rural judge and busied myself with my schools and my periodical, and I was so worn out, especially because I became so much involved, and my struggle in my capacity as rural judge was so oppressive to me, and my activity in the schools was so pale, and I grew so tired of wagging my tongue in my periodical, which still consisted in the same thing,—in the desire to teach others and conceal the fact that I did not know what to teach,—that I grew sick, mentally rather than physically, and gave up everything and went to live with the Bashkirs of the steppe,—to breathe the air, drink kumys, and live an animal life.