Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/229

Rh To such a study we shall consecrate a special department in our journal, and we beg all who realize the importance of this matter to send us articles on the subject.

the cause of this is our severance from the people, the enforced culture of the upper classes; and time only may help this trouble by giving birth, not to a chrestomathy, but a complete transition literature consisting of all the books now extant, and organically taking its place in a course of graded reading.

Maybe it is a fact that the common people do not comprehend, and do not wish to comprehend, our literary language, because there is nothing in it for them to comprehend, because our whole literature does not suit them at all, and they will work out their own literature. Finally, the last supposition, which seems to us more plausible than the rest, consists in this: that the apparent fault lies not in the nature of the thing, but in our insistence on the notion that the object of teaching language is to raise pupils to the degree of knowing the literary language, and, above all, in making rapid progress in the attainment of this end. It may very possibly be that the graded reading of which we dream will come of itself, and that the knowledge of the literary language will, in its own good time, reach every pupil, as we are all the time seeing it do among people who read in turn, without comprehending, the psalter, novels, and law-papers, and by this route manage somehow to attain to a knowledge of the language of books.

Yet by this hypothesis it is incomprehensible to us why all books seem to the people so bad and so contrary to their taste; and the question arises what ought schools to do in the meantime? For we cannot at all admit that, having decided in our minds that a knowledge of the literary language is useful, it would