Page:Gorky - Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi.djvu/56

 fact, it would not have been a reconciliation, strictly speaking; for him personally the act would have been only logical: "I forgive those who hate me." It would have been a Christian act, and behind it there would have hidden a quick, ironical, little smile, which would be understood as the way in which a wise man retaliates on the fools.

What I write is not what I want to say; I cannot express it properly. There is a dog howling in my soul and I have a foreboding of some misfortune. Yes, newspapers have just arrived and it is already clear: you at home are beginning to "create a legend": idlers and good-for-nothings have gone on living and have now produced a saint. Only think how pernicious it is for the country just at this moment, when the heads of disillusioned men are bowed down, the souls of the majority empty, and the souls of the best full of sorrow. Lacerated and starving, they long for a legend. They long so much for alleviation of pain, for the soothing of torment. And they will create just what he desires, but what is not wanted—the life of a holy man and saint; but surely he is great and holy because he is a man, a madly and tormentingly beautiful man; a man of the whole of mankind. I am somehow contradicting myself in this, but it does not matter. He is a man seeking God, not for himself, but for men, so that God may leave him, the man, alone in the peace of the desert chosen by him. He gave us the Gospels in order that we might forget the contradictions in Christ; he simplified Christ's