Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/135

Rh direction consists in keeping during the summer a few pots of flowers in the windows. In this manner the peasants show a certain appreciation of surrounding nature, which is after all the forerunner of art. But beyond that the Siberian peasant's artistic taste is poor. There is, of course, in every room the usual icon, which is a brass picture of saints, often coloured very crudely, decorated with artificial paper flowers, and covered with the grease of old candles, which have dripped on to it from time to time. Then a few crudely coloured pictures, such as you find in the house of every peasant throughout the world, are used to adorn the walls. They depict the comedies and tragedies of life in little homely tales or fairy stories. One sees in a peasant's living-room a series of pictures representing the life of the child until he becomes a man, supporting his parents, raising his family, and finally sinking to old age; a fight in the Russo-Japanese War was often a favourite theme; an exciting hunt after wild animals or a shipwreck at sea; religious history and events in the lives of certain saints; pictures of heaven and the other place, according to the untutored hopes and fears of these children of nature. In fact, these represented the short but simple annals of the poor; and they are much the same among the peasants of every land, whether they be in Siberia, French Canada, Spain, Finland or rural England. The mind of the poor gravitates naturally toward the tragedies of life. The climax of the urban type might perhaps be found among the inhabitants of an East-End London slum. But the ideal of the peasant is more peaceful. His life is quiet and his mind less harassed, and so he balances more evenly the comedy and tragedy