Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/297

Rh this ground, that art does not permit of mediocrity.

The absurdity is not in this; the absurdity is in the very asking of such a question as the question: "Have the children of the people a right to the arts?" This question is analogous to asking: "Have the children of the people the right to eat beef?" in other words, "Have they the right to satisfy their human needs?" This is not the question, but whether the beef is good which we offer and which we refuse to the people. Just exactly as in offering the people certain funds of knowledge which are in our power, and remarking the bad influence produced on it by them, I conclude, not that the people are bad because they do not accept these studies and profit by them as we do, but that the studies are bad, not normal, and that by the aid of the people we must work out new ones which shall be suitable to all of us, both to society and the people at large. I only conclude that these studies and arts live amongst us and do not seem to harm us, but cannot live amongst the people and seem injurious to them simply because these studies and arts are not those that are generally needed; but that we live amongst them only because we are spoiled, only because men who have been sitting five hours without harm in the tainted atmosphere of a factory or a tavern do not suffer from that atmosphere which would kill the man who had just come into it. They will ask: "Who has said that knowledge and the arts of our cultivated class are false ? Because the people do not accept them, why do you postulate their falsity?" All these questions are resolved very simply: Because we are thousands, and they are millions.

I continue my comparison with a certain physiological fact.

A man comes from the pure air into a low, close, smoky room; all his vital functions are as yet in perfect condition; his organism, by reason of his having breathed in the pure air, has been nourished largely on oxygen. With this habit of his organism he goes on breathing in the pestiferous room; great quantities of