Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/23

 Rh piece with enthusiasm, and acted really well. In particular, V. M. Lopatin, a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, extracted from the part of the Third Peasant so much more than its author had anticipated, or even intended, that Tolstoy, in ecstasies, slapped his thighs and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks; for he was always extremely susceptible to anything really good, whether in acting or in other forms of art.

I well remember meeting at Yásnaya Polyána, on two different occasions, the sculptor Ginzburg, who was an admirable mimic. He could keep a room full of people entranced while he enacted a Jew tailor stitching clothes, or a nurse tending or neglecting an imaginary baby. None of those present expressed warmer admiration of these performances than did Tolstoy himself, and when he went for a walk with us afterwards, he said to Ginzburg with great animation:

"Ah, if our theatre realists could only be got to understand that what is wanted is not to put real babies on the stage or show the real messes they make, but to convey, as you do, by voice and feature, the real feeling that has to be expressed!"

No blunder made by Tolstoy's critics is more gratuitous or indefensible than the pretence that he was indifferent to the form of art, or de-