Page:Tolstoy - Tales from Tolstoi.djvu/29

Biography department of criticism." In other words, young Tolstoi refused to believe in the dawn of a new era of progress in which poets and artists were to be the priests of culture, and show the people a new and better way. Such optimistic theories struck him as mere nostrums. But listen to his own account of the matter. "I began to doubt the truth of the theory because the priests of this new religion did not agree among themselves. I found that we had not made up our minds on the essential point, what is good and what is evil, so that we, the sole teachers of truth, attacked and contradicted one another like so many Bedlamites." For Tolstoi even now was against every sort of compromise. He aimed at nothing short of absolute perfection and at perfection alone. At the same time the desire to excel everyone in everything was strong within him. Even physically it was his ambition to be stronger and more dexterous than his fellows, and he began a course of gymnastic exercises which even in his old age he was not altogether to abandon. We are told that on his return to Yasnaya Polyana his steward coming to him in the morning for orders would frequently find his master hanging in flannels, head downwards, on a trapeze, in which position he would discuss the best modes of sowing and threshing, the steward accompanying his young master round and round the room as he turned somersaults without interrupting the conversation. Forty-five years later the habitual filling of a huge water-butt for domestic purposes was to be to him what the hewing down of trees used to be to Mr. Gladstone. xxi.