which stimulates, within the limits of pleasurable action, any or all of the faculties of being, the senses, the intellect, the emotions, the imagination, and the will. (2) Criticism is the statement of an effect, or the wording of the result of the vital contact of a work of art upon an energizing personality.

Democratic criticism includes in its scope both the objective and the subjective. It takes account of the medium in space and time and also of the subjective response. It requires personal absorption. It permits the fullest play of those vital associations which are different in every person. The end of its work is not "good taste," not knowledge, but life and character.

AN INSTANCE OF CONVERSION:

TOLSTOI.

Leo Tolstoi, with respect to his personal history, may be said to describe a series of contraries. Thus he is a Russian opposed to Muscoviteism, a revolutionist who offers no resistance to evil, a follower of Christ who abjures Christianity, an artist who mocks at beauty, an author who disbelieves in copyright, a noble who preaches brotherhood, a man of over seventy years who says he is but thirty-two.

The explanation of this strange and complex history is found in the fact of his spiritual conversion in 1873. Before that date he was a Russian count, an atheist, a nihilist, an artist of the aristocratic school. But, turning from his past, and accepting Christianity in the terms of the Sermon on the Mount, it was not long before he left the palace for the fields and began to write according to a new definition of art. In Christianity and what may be called Peasantism his whole life is now contained. Christ gives him the principle of the new life, the peasant shows how it may be accomplished.

In conversation with Henry Fisher, Tolstoi recently gave the following account of his "new birth": "It's all so lifelike, I might have experienced it yesterday: A beautiful Spring morning, God's birds singing and His insects humming in the grass. My horse, tired of the great burden which I, brutelike, imposed upon his back, stood still under the wooden image of the Christ at a cross-road. I was so absorbed in the contempla

tion of the scene that I indulged the beast, allowing the reins to rest upon his neck while he rummaged for young grass and leaves. By and by a group of moujik pilgrims intruded upon my resting place and without knowing what I was doing I listened to their prayers. It was the most wholesome medicine ever administered to a doubting soul. The simplicity and ignorance of the poor moujik, the confiding moujik, the ever hopeful moujik, touched my heart. I came from under that cross a new man. When I led my beast of burden-God's creature, like myself-away, I knew that the kingdom of God is within us and that the literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount should be the crowning rule of a Christian's life." From this it appears that a peasant was the agent of Tolstoi's redemption. And Peasantism, working on in the heart of the man, disrupting his old ideas, carried forward to completion the transformation that began with a spiritual conversion. To present the whole history of Tolstoi it would be necessary, therefore, to consider the play and interaction of these two forces. It is possible, however, to separate them in thought and to trace the line of Peasantism independently.

Specifically, Peasantism displayed its effect in Tolstoi in two ways. It determined the spirit of his philosophy of life and formulated in particular one of his few practical precepts for conduct, and it furnished him a standard of judgment with reference to which he criticised the current forms of religion, government and art.

Consider the temper of his practical philosophy. By way of negation he has said, "Offend no one," "Take

no oath," "Resist not evil." For personal commands he wrote, "Be pure," "Love mankind." Then, with the full force of Peasantism upon him, he said, “Do thou labor." This precept dates from the writing of “Anna Karenina," which appeared in 1875. From the time that Levine saved himself from pessimism by dwelling a day in the fields with the mowers, Tolstoi has proclaimed the doctrine of labor. Then take into view his social criticisms. The ideas advanced to condemn the present order are those of an average respectable, intelligent peasant. It is as if a peasant spoke. Is it not, indeed, a peasant's face that confronts us in his pictures? It seems that a man, born out of his due place in the palace, found in the fields at length the place to which he was destined by his very nativity-a place in nature and among realities.

To make this latter critical attitude altogether clear, one feature only of his Peasantism may be selected for exposition, his ideas on art.

A brief historical survey will be sufficient to clear the ground for Tolstoi's definition of art. For about two centuries now art has been defined in terms of beauty. The theory of art as beauty arose among the wealthy and cultured classes of Europe in the eighteenth century, its scientific formulation being due to a German metaphysician, Baumgarten, who flourished about 1750. From that time to this the field of art has been narrowing and refining, the artist withdrawing more and more from life, and within his special realm developing technique and abstracting form, until what is called the fine arts alone receive recognition, and among fine artists only the most dextrous to manipulate form win the plaudi

of the cultured world. For two centuries, in short, art has been developing along aristocratic lines. Criticism, likewise, has been called to serve the requirements of a society devoted to pleasure. The decision as to what is good art and what not has been undertaken by the "finest nurtured." The natural result of the refining process has been the creation of an art from the enjoyment of which the great masses of men are excluded.

Now Tolstoi is one of a small company of men who perceive the necessity of a new order of art. The spirit of the new day is universality. A culture that does not carry with it the whole people is doomed to failure. And this universality is to be gained not through the extension of aristocratic culture among the people, not through the education of the masses in the philosophy of the classes, but through a new philosophy and a new criticism that shall meet the demands of a democratic society and result in an art that shall be in its own nature universal in character. I do not see that democracy means either leveling up or leveling down; it means life on wholly new terms. The old art will be destroyed, root and branch, and a new art rise that shall start from the broad basis of the people's will. For the old art is based on privilege; the new art will not be simply the extension of privilege, but the utter rejection of privilege. Whitman gives what he well calls "the sign of democracy" in the following sentence: "I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms."

In harmony with this a new definition of art:

thought, Tolstoi seeks to start "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in one