Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/313

Rh teachers insisted on this object and made it paramount to others, I was often pained to look at them and see how some darling of a Kiryushka, in ragged leg-wrappers, would practise on his part:—and would be compelled to repeat it a dozen times, and how at last he would go wild, and, beating his fingers on the notes, would insist that he was singing it correctly.

We went to the church one time and our success was great; the enthusiasm was prodigious, but the singing suffered: they began to tire of the lessons, to shirk them, and when Easter came it was only with great difficulty that we collected a new chorus. Our singers became like those of the Episcopal "chapels," who often sing well, but in whom, in consequence of this act, all taste for singing is destroyed, and in reality they do not know their notes though they imagine they know them. I have often noticed how those that graduate from these schools themselves undertake to teach, not having any comprehension of the notes, and show themselves perfectly incompetent as soon as they begin to sing anything which has not been dinned into their ears.

From this trifling experience which I had in teaching the people music, I have drawn the following conclusions:—