Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/271

Rh king, and the like? I began history as it is always begun—with antiquity. But neither Momsen nor Dunker, nor all my efforts, helped me to make it interesting. There was nothing in Sesostris, the Egyptian pyramids, or the Phœnicians, that appealed to them.

I hoped that they might be interested in questions such as these, for example: What peoples had relations with the Hebrews? and, Where did the Hebrews live and wander? But the pupils found no use whatever for such information. King Pharaoh, the Egyptians, the Palestines, when and where they existed, did not in the least satisfy them. The Hebrews were their Heroes; the rest were foreign, unnecessary characters.

I had no success in making the Egyptians and Phœnicians heroes for children for lack of materials. As long as we don't know in detail how the pyramids were built, what mutual position and relationship the castes had, what does it mean for us—for us, I mean the children. In those histories there are no Abraham, no Isaac, no Jacob, no Joseph, no Samson. They found something in ancient history to remember and enjoy,—about Semiramis, for instance,—but it was remembered merely accidentally, not because it cleared up anything, but because it was artistically related. But such passages were rare; the rest was dull and aimless, and I was obliged to give up the teaching of general history.

I met with the same lack of success in geography as in history. Sometimes I would tell what has happened in Greek, English, or Swiss history without any connection, but only as an instructive and artistic story.

After general history I felt obliged to make experiment with Russian history, accepted everywhere and by all as national, and I began that melancholy history of Russia, which we all knew so well—inartistic, useless—as it appears in so many paraphrases from Ishimova's to Vodovozof's. I began it twice; the first time before reading the whole Bible, and the second time after the Bible. Before reading the Bible the pupils resolutely refused to remember the existence of the Igors and Olegs. The same thing is repeated even now