Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/573

Rh expense. But no. When at length the piece is finished, and the performer, all trembling and bathed in perspiration, rises from the piano manifestly expecting your applause, you see that it is all very serious. The same thing happens in concerts where they play pieces by Liszt, Berlioz, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and numberless composers of the new school."

It strikes us that there is much truth also in the following: "To say that a work of art is good, and that nevertheless it is incomprehensible to the majority, is as if we were to say of a certain food that it is good, but that most men should be careful not to eat it. The majority of men may not like decayed cheese or 'high' game, dainties much esteemed by persons whose taste is perverted; but bread and fruits are only good when they please the majority of men; and it is the same in art. A perverted art may not please the majority of men, but good art must perforce please everybody."

We must add a passage which contains a most powerful arraignment of the absurdities and wrongs which are every day being perpetrated in the name of art. Regarding art as an organ of human progress, the author points out the disastrous consequences which flow from its perverted action:

"The first of these consequences is too conspicuous to escape notice. It is the vast expenditure of human labor upon things that are not only useless but, as a rule, pernicious. To think that children, handsome, full of life, with every natural endowment necessary for happiness, are condemned from the moment they leave the cradle, some to practice scales six, eight, ten hours' a day, others to dance on tiptoe, others to do singing exercises, others to draw from the antique, from the nude, and others again to compose phrases destitute of meaning according to a particular system of rhetoric! From year to year these unhappy victims go on wasting in these murderous occupations all their physical and intellectual forces, all their aptitude for the comprehension of life. We often say, What a lamentable spectacle to see little acrobats twisting their legs round their neck! But is it not a still more sinister exhibition to see children of ten giving concerts, and little collegians of the same age who know by heart all the exceptions in the Latin grammar? In such pursuits they not only waste their physical and mental forces, but they undergo a process of moral depravationdeprivation [sic] which renders them incapable of any kind of service useful to human beings. Accepting in society the position of purveyors of amusement to the rich, they lose the sentiment of human dignity. A hunger for praise develops in them to so monstrous an extent that they suffer through life from this diseased condition, and expend their whole moral being in the effort to appease an insatiable craving. Yet there is something more tragic still, namely, that men who sacrifice their whole life to art, and who are lost for all other purposes, not only do nothing to advance their art, but even cause it immense damage; the reason being that in their academies and colleges and conservatories all they learn is to counterfeit art, so that they become henceforth incapable of conceiving true art or of doing aught except helping to crowd the world with the counterfeit works of an art divorced from Nature."

Before finishing his book Count Tolstoi finds time to say a needful word or two about those men of science who forget the social function of science as completely as some artists or would-be artists forget the