Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/300

286 even with the productions in the same arts, specimens of which we find among the people.

I am convinced that a lyric poem, as, for example,the productions of music, like Beethoven's last symphony, are not so absolutely and universally good as the popular pyesnya about "Vanka, the steward," or the song, "Down the ancient mother Volga"; that Pushkin and Beethoven please us, not because absolute beauty is in them, but because we are as corrupt as Pushkin and Beethoven,—because Pushkin and Beethoven equally flatter our abnormal irritability and our weakness. As to the hackneyed paradox, heard till it has become insipid, that for the comprehension of the beautiful a certain preparation is needed—who said it, and what proof is of it? It is only an expedient, a loophole from an untenable position, into which we have been led by the falsity of our tendency and the exclusive adoption of our art by one class. Why is the beauty of the sun, the beauty of a human face, the beauty of the sounds of a popular melody, the beauty of an act of love and sacrifice, accessible to every one, and why do these things require no preparation?

I know that what I say will seem mere talk to the majority, the privilege of "a boneless tongue," but pedagogy—free pedagogy—by way of experiment, settles many questions, and by an endless repetition of the same phenomena leads these questions from the domain of imagination and argument into the domain of propositions proved by facts. For years I struggled vainly to transfer to our pupils the poetic beauties of Pushkin and all our literature; a countless number of teachers are trying to do the same, and not in Russia alone; and if these teachers examine the results of their efforts, and if they will be frank, all will confess that the chief consequence of the development of the poetic feeling was its destruction, that the greatest repugnance to such interpretations was shown by the most poetic natures. …. I had been struggling, I say, for years, and could obtain