but in the feeling (of admiration of and delight in the combination of lines and colours) which the artist has experienced and with which he infects the spectator. Art remains what it was and what it must be: nothing but the infection by one man of another, or of others, with the feelings experienced by the infector. Among these feelings is the feeling of delight at what pleases the sight..."

"Here and elsewhere in the same book he understands and approves of beauty, and he uses the word, as in a passage in which he denounces exclusive art produced for a select circle as having 'lost its beauty,' but he is careful not to base his definition of art on the use of the word beauty, because that would merely substitute one problem for another, since there is as much vagueness in the use of the word 'beauty' as in that of the word 'art.' 'There is no objective definition of beauty.' Tolstoy required a clear workable definition, and found one which meets the case. "The reviewer of Mr. Hind's Art and I says: "Tolstoy held that a Russian peasant, just because he was a Russian peasant, was a born judge of art.' This is again a flagrant misrepresentation. What Tolstoy says is that the highest art has been understood by simple unperverted peasant labourers; there is no special claim made on behalf of Russians. He instances the poems of Homer, admitted to be very great art yet eagerly listened to by 'men of those times who were even less educated than our labourers.' Tolstoy's argument is, that a perverted education may sterilize man's capacity to enjoy art, but that an unperverted man naturally possesses 'that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man and even to a child, that sense of infection with another's feeling-compelling us to joy in another's gladness, to sorrow at another's grief, and to mingle souls with another-which is the very essence of art.'"

It would be easy to multiply instances both of the attention paid to Tolstoy's views and of the misrepresentation of them that is still common, but the above will suffice for the present purpose.

Something happened at the time of the first appearance of What is Art? which hindered the due understanding of it. Among his many reformist activities, Tolstoy wished to see the business of publishing set on a new basis, and he assumed that it would be easy to improve on the methods employed by

the best existing publishers. Desiring no profit from his works, he was inclined to encourage the publishing experiments of people who professed agreement with his social and religious views; and it happened that What is Art? was completed just at the time when a small and impecunious group calling itself The Brotherhood Publishing Co. had started business in London, to propagate Tolstoyan views. At his wish and at that of his friend Tchertkoff this Brotherhood Publishing Co. was entrusted with the first publication of the version of What is Art? which I had made from Tolstoy's manuscript chapter by chapter in consultation with him as he wrote. It thus happened that the manager of the Brotherhood Publishing Co. received the work before anyone in France and, without asking permission, supplied to a Paris periodical the chapters in which French writers and painters of the day were drastically dealt with. The publication of this detached portion of the book apart from the chapters disclosing his general argument was much regretted by Tolstoy. It had the appearance of a wilful and unprovoked attack on a number of distinguished individuals and evoked great indignation; so that when, shortly afterwards, the book itself appeared in France, it was at once met by a storm of invective and denunciation.

Now in those days French criticism led the literary world of Europe and America, especially in regard to Russian literature, and in face of this storm only certain of the most independent English critics ventured to trust their own judgment and to testify to the value and importance of Tolstoy's work.

During the quarter of a century that has passed since then his views have so far penetrated the public mind that some of them are already becoming commonplaces, but there are many indications that his message is still far from being completely understood.

It may be of interest to see how Tolstoy's opinions on art grew and developed. At the age of thirty, in February, 1858, he joined the Moscow Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, and delivered a lecture on "The Supremacy of the Artistic Element in Literature." It was never published, and has now been lost. From the record that remains, it would seem that he argued that art should treat of what is always beautiful and of what is as unalterable as the fundamental laws of the soul, and that he condemned the utilization of art for the indictment of particular social evils in one's own age and country. Many literary men in Russia were then much concerned about the emancipation of the serfs, and Tolstoy seems to have suggested that they were making art a tool, and failing to employ it in the loftiest way. He had evidently far to travel before reaching his ultimate conclusions.

In the winter of 1861, when absorbed in the school he had started for peasant children at Yásnaya Polyána, he went for a walk late one evening with some lads of ten or twelve years of age. Their talk turned on singing, drawing, and art in general. Tolstoy's account of this walk will be found in the next chapter. He says: "We began to speak of the fact that not everything exists for use, but that there is also beauty, and that art is beauty, and we understood one another, and Fedka quite understood what singing is for. It feels strange to repeat what we said then, but it seems to me that we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty."

In another article of that period he speaks of his amazement at finding that these young peasant boys, when relieved of the technical and mechanical difficulties of writing by having it done for them, could compose stories showing high artistic feeling.

After many experiments he found that the most efficacious way of stimulating these boys was to suggest to them interest

ing themes: for instance, that they should write short stories to illustrate popular proverbs. When they became interested in framing these stories, it was not in the first instance they who had to do the actual writing, but Tolstoy who wrote at their dictation. In this way their eagerness and their creative faculty were not checked, and it was possible quickly to point out to them wherein the real difficulties of authorship lie. The real difficulty, to anyone possessed of imagination and an active mind, is to select from all the thoughts that suggest themselves those which are really most essential to the story, to avoid repetition, and to maintain a due proportion between the various parts. As soon as the boys found that they really could compose stories which interested other people (and a talented child is able to do this almost from the first if he is judiciously advised and his exuberances checked) they naturally became intensely eager to master the mechanical difficulties, especially as Tolstoy was careful not to annoy them by injudicious remarks about the tidiness of their copybooks, the quality of their penmanship, or mere grammatical errors. A mastery of these things can best be acquired through the boy's desire to avoid absurdity and to be intelligible. Tolstoy found that it merely annoys boys to be told that a certain mistake infringes a rule of grammar. They care nothing about grammar-they detest it. But if you put the thing another way round, and point out to a child that what he has said is unintelligible, or is open to misconstruction, or is not the best way of saying the thing, he understands the common sense of that, and learns his grammar or orthography in order to reach the result he desires.

Similarly with all the sciences. Things that the schoolbooks and the pedagogues often begin with, dry classifications and unknown words, have the effect of repelling a boy and making him withdraw into his shell as a tortoise does at the approach of danger. The proper way, Tolstoy says, is to

begin with things the child can verify by his own observation, and in which he can be expected to take an intelligent interest. When he already possesses an accumulation of facts which to him are real and interesting, he may be glad enough to accept classification and terminology, to enable him to sort out his facts and deal with them more easily.

With music also this is true. Tolstoy achieved remarkable success by avoiding the usual pedantry and compulsion, not obliging any boy to work at it who did not like it, and helping the pupils to get quickly at the real art of the thing in its simplest forms.

Convinced of the artistic capacity of these lads Tolstoy declared:

"I think the need to enjoy art and to serve art is inherent in every human being whatever race or class he may belong to, and that this need has its rights and should be satisfied. Taking that position as an axiom, I say that, if the enjoyment and production of art by every one presents inconveniences and inconsistencies, the reason lies in the character and direction art has taken: about which we must be on our guard lest we foist anything false on the rising generation and lest we prevent it from producing something new both in form and matter."

He was much troubled by the lack of good books for the people, and wrote: "Let us print good books for the people. . . . How simple and easy it seems, like all great thoughts! There is only one obstacle, namely, that there exist no good books for the people either here or in Europe. To print such books they must first be produced, and none of our philanthropists think of undertaking that line of work."

This was in 1862. Twenty years later Tolstoy set himself to the task he saw to be so necessary, and wrote that delightful series of short and simple stories for the people, which are collected in the volume of Twenty-Three Tales.1 He also

1 Oxford University Press, "World's Classics" series, London and New York.