There is the meekness and "lowliness" of early Christianity, there is an anti-Hellenic principle in the village dirt of Yasnaya Polyana. It is true that Hellenism leads in its final outcome to the abominable "Herrenmenschenthüm"[14] of Nietzsche, to Nero's hatred of the "many too many." A predominant æsthetic valuation of the good things of life leads in a negative way to the immoral in conduct. Every final consequence, however--that is, every extreme--is absurd; even absolute spirituality, indifferent to all outward things, as well as the heartless cult of mere external beauty. If we may learn from the muzhik patience in misfortune, we have also something to offer him in return for this in ideas of how to care for the body and of æsthetically refined ways of living. But Leo Tolstoï is an enemy of all compromise, and perhaps must be so. If the impulse towards the spiritualizing of our life, towards brotherly kindness and holiness, which goes out from him, is to work in its full force, it must be free from any foreign admixture, at least in him, its source. In the actual world counteracting forces are not wanting, moreover, and in some way the balance is always struck. The synthesis of Nietzsche and Tolstoï is really not so very hard to find. It was given long ago in the "kaho-kayadin" (beauty and goodness) of the ancients as well as in the rightly understood conception of the gentleman. If Tolstoï's human ideal wears the form of the muzhik and flatly rejects every concession to the claims of an æsthetic culture, the fact leads back ultimately to the repulsion which the St. Petersburg type of civilization must awaken in every unspoiled mind. One perceives there that luxury cannot uplift man. Indeed, it is easy to come to the Tolstoï conviction that it ruins instead of ennobling him. An isolated thinker like Tolstoï reaches in this revulsion very extreme consequences. In any case the bodily uncleanness of the peasants is less unpleasant to him and his daughter than the moral impurity of the town dwellers. The dirt of the peasants is for him nature, like the clinging clay of the field.