Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/324

310 immediately after this his digression about such times having now passed and the danger of the soul being lost.

The idea of the dream was suggested by me, but the introduction of the goat with wounded legs was Fedka's, and he was particularly delighted with it. And the peasant's meditations at the time when his back was beginning to itch, and the picture of the quiet night,—all of this was the farthest removed from accidental: in all These touches can be felt such a conscious, artistic power. …

I still remember that at the time of the muzhik's going to sleep, I proposed to make him think of the future of his son and of the son's future relations with the old man, that the old man should teach Serozha his letters, and so on. Fedka frowned and said: "Yes, yes, very good," but it was evident that this proposition did not please him, and twice he forgot it. The sense of proportion was as strong in him as in any writer I know—the same sense of proportion as rare artists obtain with great labor and pains, in all its primitive strength lived in his uncontaminated childish soul.

I put an end to the lesson because I was too much excited.

"What is the matter? what makes you so pale? Truly you are n't well, are you?" my companion asked of me.

In fact, only two or three times in my life had I ever experienced such a powerful emotion as I had that evening, and it was long before I could give a rational account to myself of what I had experienced. I was uneasy, and felt as if I had been criminally spying through a glass, into a hive, at the labors of the bees, hidden from mortal gaze. It seemed to me that I had done a wrong to the peasant lad's pure, innocent soul. I had an uneasy feeling as if I had been engaged in a sacrilege.

I remembered children whom idle and debauched old men compelled to display themselves and to present voluptuous pictures so as to stir their frigid and enfeebled imaginations, and at the same time I felt a keen