Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/299

Rh Introduce the child of the people into this world: you can do so and are all the time doing so by means of the hierarchies of educational institutions, academies, and art classes: he will feel, and genuinely feel, Ivanof's picture and the Venus of Melos and the quartet of Beethoven and Pushkin's lyric verse. But on entering into this world he will no longer breathe with full lungs ; and it will be painful and injurious to him to breathe the pure air, if by chance he happens to go into it.

As in the matter of breathing, sound common sense and physiology give the same answer, so in the matter of art the same sound common sense and pedagogy not the pedagogy—which writes programs but that which strives to find general paths of education and laws—will reply that that man lives the fullest and best life who does not live in the sphere of the arts of our cultivated class; that the demands of art and the satisfaction which it gives are fuller and more legitimate among the people than among us. Sound common sense will say this simply because it sees the majority living outside of this environment happy and powerful, not by numbers alone; the pedagogue makes his observations on the spiritual functions of the men who are found in our circle, and outside of it makes observations on the introduction of men into the pestiferous room, that is to say, on the transfer of our arts to the young generation and on the ground of those fainting fits, of that disgust which healthy natures experience on being introduced into the art atmosphere, on the ground of the diminution of spiritual functions, will conclude that the demands of the people, of art, are more legitimate than the demands of the depraved minority of the so-called cultivated class.

I have made these observations regarding music and poetry, the two branches of our arts which I know the best and which I once loved passionately, and it was a terrible thing to say: I have come to the conviction that all we have done in these two branches has been done in a false, exclusive method, having no meaning, and insignificant in comparison with those demands and