For a time, he says, he gladly believed this theory, because he earned a great deal of money and praise and everything else he desired. He firmly believed in the theory of progress, and that he himself, though unconsciously, helped it. After some two years, however, he became discontented, and it was his fellow-writers who disenchanted him; they were more dissolute even than his former military associates, and full of vanity. His connection with them, he declares, only added another vice to his character--that of morbid and altogether unreasonable pride. "Hundreds of us wrote, printed, and taught, and all the while confuted and abused each other. Quite unconscious that we ourselves knew nothing, that to the simplest of all problems in life--what is right and what is wrong--we had no answer, we all went on talking together without one to listen, at times abetting and praising one another on condition that we were abetted and praised in turn, and again turning upon each other in wrath; in short we reproduced the scenes in a madhouse." There is surely something of unfairness here, and we may suspect that it was the proud and defiant spirit of Tolstoy which made him resent the contradictions of his literary friends. But, as we have pointed {68} out, it was always Tolstoy's fault to underrate the intellectual powers of others, and also, to the end of his life, he underrated the value of intelligence in human affairs. It was this pride which prevented him from nobly loving, as he might have done, men of the stamp of Turgénief, and, great artist as he was, it prevented him from that entire, humble absorption in his work which has saved the soul of many a lesser man. Tolstoy had to save his soul by a longer and a darker road. On his tour abroad he still sought for satisfying moral ideas, and still found them, as he believed, in the conception of progress; he thought, at the time, that it had a real meaning. "In reality I was only repeating the answer of a man carried away in a boat by the waves and the wind, who to the one important question for him, 'Where are we to steer?' should answer, saying 'We are being carried away somewhere.'" Tolstoy refers to the execution in Paris as shaking his belief in progress, and giving him a real moral shock. The death of his brother marked another crisis in his mentality. The terrible sense of loss, the cruel fear of death in his brother, were things that made the doctrine of "progress" seem idle and tiresome. Tolstoy next reviews his educational activity, and judges that too most harshly; he did not, he says, really know what to teach the children, so he evaded the difficulty by trying to make them teach themselves, with results which he describes as whimsical.