Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/296

282 How can these two absurdities be reconciled? This is no lyrical emotion such as I was seduced into on the occasion of describing the walk in No. 1,—this is only logic. No reconciliation is possible, and to think of it is self-deception. They will say, and they do say: "If drawing is necessary in a popular school, then only drawing from Nature is permissible, only technical drawing, applicable to life; the drawing of a plow, of a machine, of a building; drawing only as an art subsidiary to lineal design."

This common idea of drawing was shared by the teacher in the Yasnaya Polyana School, an account of which we present. But the very experiment we made in this method of teaching drawing convinced us of the falsity and injustice of this technical program. The majority of the pupils, after four months of strict, exclusively technical drawing, from which all sketching of men, animals, landscapes was excluded, at last grew so disgusted with the drawing of technical objects, and the feeling and necessity for drawing as an art were developed in them to such a degree, that they kept their secret note-books, in which they drew pictures of men and horses with all four legs starting from one place.

It was the same in music. The ordinary program of schools for the people does not permit singing farther than choral or church music, and precisely in such a way that either this is the dullest, most tormenting study for children—to produce certain sounds—in other words, that children become and regard themselves as throats meant to take the place of organ pipes, or else the sense of the esthetic is developed and demands satisfaction on the balalaïka or the harmonica, and frequently in some coarse song which the pedagogue would not recognize, and in which he would not think it necessary to guide his pupils. One of two things: either art in general is harmful and unnecessary—and this is not nearly so strange as it may seem at first glance—or else every one, without distinction of rank or occupation, has the right to it, and the right to abandon himself wholly to