Even the deepest reverence does not require uncritical adoration. Moreover, Tolstoï is of such phenomenal importance for us all that the narrator who can communicate his own perceptions is bound to reproduce them with the most absolute fidelity. Therefore, I believe I ought not to conceal the thoughts which refused to leave me during the walk through this village. I had to admire once more the deep humanity of the Tolstoïs when I saw the Countess Sasha, in her beauty and purity, go into the damp, dirty hovels of the peasants, and caress the ragged and filthy children, just as Katyusha, in _The Resurrection_, kissed a deformed beggar on the mouth in Easter greeting after the Easter mass. This absolute Christian brotherliness receives expression also in the whole attitude of the family. Countess Sasha says, quite in the spirit of her father: "The industrious peasant stands much higher morally than we who own the land and do not work it. Otherwise he differs in no way from us in his virtues and vices." This brotherliness, however, has this shortcoming, that it leaves the brother where it finds him, and does not compel him to conform to different and more refined ways of living. The Tolstoï family teaches the village children. It has established a little clinic in the village. But it does not make its influence felt in teaching the villagers personal cleanliness, taking, say, the German colonists in the south as a model. I cannot conceive of the peasants of Yasnaya Polyana looking as they would if the landlord were an English or Dutch philanthropist instead of a Russian; and I cannot believe, either, that the simplicity of manners or the warmth of brotherly love would suffer if the village looked, for instance, like those of the Moravians, which shine with cleanliness. To be sure, the count refrains from any pressure on the people about him, and if his muzhik feels better unwashed, as his fathers were before him, and prefers a dirty, unaired room, shared with the dear cattle, to one in which he would have to take off his shoes to prevent soiling the floor, the count will not exhort him to change into a Swabian or a Dutchman. Æsthetic demands do not form any part of the Tolstoï view of life--I believe that for this reason it will find slow acceptance in the West.