rather seek for him those healthy conditions in which the child's natural desire for knowledge will revive.

We must not hope to bring up our children well so long as we ourselves live in artificial and abnormal surroundings. We cannot go on living wrongly, and yet educate them well. If the children see the parents living simply, and doing work the need for which is obvious, they will soon wish to share in the activities of the grown-up people, and will take pains to learn to do so. And if the parents are keenly alive to questions of general interest, this will excite the curiosity of the children also, and the latter will begin to think, and to pick up knowledge almost instinctively. Sending children away to school, and letting them become estranged from us just when their minds are forming, is a very bad way of shirking our duties.

Education and instruction are two different things. When it is a question of imparting instruction, it is quite right that classes should be formed, and that children should learn together. There is a natural competition among children the stimulus of which should not be lost by isolating them from their fellows.

On another occasion:

"I divide men," said Tolstoy, "into two lots. They are Freethinkers, or they are Not - Freethinkers. I am not speaking of the Freethinkers who form a political party in Germany, nor of

the agnostic English Freethinkers, but I am using the word in its simplest meaning.” Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice, and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless. A man may be a Catholic, a Frenchman, or a capitalist, and yet be a Freethinker; but if he puts his Catholicism, his patriotism, or his interest, above his reason, and will not give the latter free play where those subjects are touched, he is not a Freethinker. His mind is in bondage.

On another occasion, when we were speaking of religion, Tolstoy made the startling statement that "There are two Gods." He went on, however, to explain himself: "There is the God that people generally believe in a God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget, -the God whom we all have to serve-exists and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive."

In these matters we should be very careful not to state as a fact anything that we are not sure about. To do so will lead us into logical perplexities. We should be careful to base ourselves on what is "necessary and sufficient." To assert that there is a cause from which we receive reason

and conscience, and to call this God, whose voice speaks within us, is to recognise and express a fact of which each conscientious man has had experience. But to go on (as the books of Moses do) and say that God created the heavens and the earth, is to go beyond what I can really know, and exposes me to all sorts of difficulties. As all that I can know about the heavens, the earth, my own brain, and all else that is external to my inner self (which perceives, and approves or disapproves) is merely the effect it has on me and on other creatures like me, it would, in a sense, be truer to say, not that God made the world, but that we made it. So that the old problem: Why did a good God create pain, and sin, and failure? may not be so insoluble after all.

May 1900.

"WHAT IS ART?"

I

AN INTRODUCTION

66

Tolstoy's book, "What is Art?" appeared in 1898. The following article first appeared in the Scott Library" edition, published in April 1899.

WHAT thoughtful man has not been perplexed by problems relating to art?

An estimable and charming Russian lady I knew, felt the charm of the music and ritual of the services of the Russo-Greek Church so strongly that she wished the peasants, in whom she was interested, to retain their blind faith, though she herself disbelieved the church doctrines. "Their lives are so poor and bare, they have so little art, so little poetry and colour in their lives-let them at least enjoy what they have; it would be cruel to undeceive them," said she.

A false and antiquated view of life is supported by means of art, and is inseparably linked to some manifestations of art which we enjoy and prize. If the false view of life be destroyed, this art will cease to appear valuable. Is it best to screen the error for the sake of preserving the art? Or should the art be sacrificed for the sake of truthfulness? Again and again in history a dominant church has utilised art to maintain its sway over men.

Reformers (early Christians, Mohammedans, Puritans, and others) have perceived that art bound people to the old faith, and they were angry with art. They diligently chipped the noses from statues and images, and were wroth with ceremonies, decorations, stained-glass windows and processions. They were even ready to banish art altogether, for, besides the superstitions it upheld, they saw that it depraved and perverted men by dramas, drinking-songs, novels, pictures and dances of a kind that awakened man's lower nature. Yet art always reasserted her sway, and to-day we are told by many that art has nothing to do with morality— that "art should be followed for art's sake."

I went one-day, with a lady artist, to the Bodkin Art Gallery, in Moscow. In one of the rooms, on a table, lay a book of coloured pictures, issued in Paris and supplied, I believe, to private subscribers only. The pictures were admirably executed, but represented scenes in the private cabinets of a restaurant. Sexual indulgence was the chief sub ject of each picture. Women extravagantly dressed and partly undressed; women exposing their legs and breasts to men in evening dress; men and women taking liberties with each other, or dancing the can-can, etc., etc. My companion the artist, a maiden lady of irreproachable conduct and reputation, began deliberately to look at these pictures. I could not let my attention dwell on them without ill effects. Such things had a certain attraction for me, and tended to make me restless and nervous. I ventured to suggest that