Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1862
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
In the sketch of the Yasnaya Polyana School during the months of November and December, I have now to speak of two subjects which have an entirely distinct character from all the others: these are drawing and singing the arts.
If I had not my own views, based on the fact that I don't know why any one should study either, I should be obliged to ask myself: Is the study of art profitable for peasant children, put under the necessity of working all their lives long just for their daily bread, and what is the good of it?
Ninety-nine out of a hundred would answer this question in the negative. And it is impossible to answer otherwise. As soon as this question is put, sound common sense demands such an answer: he is not to be aft artist; he will have to plow. If he has artistic demands, he will not have the power to endure the steady unwearying labor which he must endure; which, if he does not endure, the very existence of the empire would be out of the question. I use the pronoun he, I mean the child of the people. In reality this is an absurdity, but I delight in this absurdity; I do not hesitate before it, and I am trying to find the causes of it. This is another and still greater absurdity!
This same child of the people, every child of the people, has precisely similar rights what am I saying? has greater rights to the enjoyment of art than we, the children of the fortunate class, who are not reduced to the necessity of this ceaseless work, and who are surrounded by all the amenities of life.
To deprive him of the right of enjoying art, to deprive me, his teacher, of the right of leading him into that domain of the best enjoyments for which his whole being yearns with all the powers of his soul, is a still greater absurdity.
How can these two absurdities be reconciled? This is no lyrical emotion [53] such as I was seduced into on the occasion of describing the walk in No. I, this is only logic. No reconciliation is possible, and to think of it is self-deception. They will say, and they do say: "If drawing is necessary in a popular school, then only drawing from Nature is permissible, only technical drawing, applicable to life; the drawing of a plow, of a machine, of a building; drawing only as an art subsidiary to lineal design."
This common idea of drawing was shared by the teacher in the Yasnaya Polyana School, an account of which we present. But the very experiment we made in this method of teaching drawing convinced us of the falsity and injustice of this technical program. The majority of the pupils, after four months of strict, exclusively technical drawing, from which all sketching of men, animals, landscapes was excluded, at last grew so disgusted with the drawing of technical objects, and the feeling and necessity for drawing as an art were developed in them to such a degree, that they kept their secret note-books, in which they drew pictures of men and horses with all four legs starting from one place.
It was the same in music. The ordinary program of schools for the people does not permit singing farther than choral or church music, and precisely in such a way that either this is the dullest, most tormenting study for children to produce certain sounds in other words, that children become and regard themselves as throats meant to take the place of organ pipes, or else the sense of the esthetic is developed and demands satisfaction on the balalaika or the harmonica, and frequently in some coarse song which the pedagogue would not recognize, and in which he would not think it necessary to guide his pupils. One of two things: either art in general is harmful and unnecessary and this is not nearly so strange as it may seem at first glance or else every one, without distinction of rank or occupation, has the right to it, and the right to abandon himself wholly to it on this ground, that art does not permit of mediocrity.
The absurdity is not in this; the absurdity is in the very asking of such a question as the question: "Have the children of the people a right to the arts?" This question is analogous to asking: "Have the children of the people the right to eat beef?" in other words, "Have they the right to satisfy their human needs?" This is not the question, but whether the beef is good which we offer and which we refuse to the people. Just exactly as in offering the people certain funds of knowledge which are in our power, and remarking the bad influence produced on it by them, I conclude, not that the people are bad because they do not accept these studies and profit by them as we do, but that the studies are bad, not normal, and that by the aid of the people we must work out new ones which shall be suitable to all of us, both to society and the people at large. I only conclude that these studies and arts live among us and do not seem to harm us, but cannot live among the people and seem injurious to them simply because these studies and arts are not those that are generally needed; but that we live among them only because we are spoiled, only because men who have been sitting five hours without harm in the tainted atmosphere of a factory or a tavern do not suffer from that atmosphere which would kill the man who had just come into it. They will ask: "Who has said that knowledge and the arts of our cultivated class are false? Because the people do not accept them, why do you postulate their falsity?" All these questions are resolved very simply: Because we arc thousands, and they are millions.
I continue my comparison with a certain physiological fact.
A man comes from the pure air into a low, close, smoky room; all his vital functions are as yet in perfect condition; his organism, by reason of his having breathed in the pure air, has been nourished largely on oxygen. With this habit of his organism he goes on breathing in the pestiferous room; great quantities of the poisonous gases mingle with his blood; his organism becomes enfeebled, often a swooning fit ensues, sometimes death, while hundreds of people continue to breathe and live in the same pestiferous atmosphere, simply because all their functions have become enfeebled; because, in other words, their lives are weaker, less vital. If they say to me: These men live as much as the others, and who shall decide whose lives are the better and nearest to the normal? since it as often happens that a man coming from the vitiated atmosphere into the pure air faints away as the contrary the answer is easy. Not a physiologist, but any simple man of sound common sense will say merely this: "Where the most of men live, in the pure air or in pestiferous dungeons," and will follow the majority; but the physiologist will make observations on the one and the other, and will say that the functions are stronger and the nutrition more complete in the one that lives in the pure air.
The same relationship exists between the arts of our so-called cultivated society, and the arts which the people demand: I mean painting and sculpture, and music, and poetry. A painting by Ivanof will excite in the people only amazement at its technical skill, but it will not excite any poetic or religious feeling, while this same religious feeling will be excited by the woodcut of loann of Novgorod and the devil in the pitcher. [54]
The Venus of Melos will arouse only a legitimate detestation of a woman's nakedness and shamelessness. A quartet in Beethoven's last manner seems only a disagreeable noise, occasionally interesting only because one person plays on the cello and another on the violin. The best production of our poetry, Pushkin's lyric verse, seems a collection of words, but its meaning contemptible absurdities.
Introduce the child of the people into this world: you can do so and are all the time doing so by means of the hierarchies of educational institutions, academies, and a'rt classes: he will feel, and genuinely feel, Ivanof's picture and the Venus of Melos and the quartet of Beethoven and Pushkin's lyric verse. But on entering into this world he will no longer breathe with full lungs; and it will be painful and injurious to him to breathe the pure air, if by chance he happens to go into it.
As in the matter of breathing, sound common sense and physiology give the same answer, so in the matter of art the same sound common sense and pedagogy not the pedagogy which writes programs but that which strives to find general paths of education and laws will reply that that man lives the fullest and best life who does not live in the sphere of the arts of our cultivated class; that the demands of art and the satisfaction which it gives are fuller and more legitimate among the people than among us. Sound common sense will say this simply because it sees the majority living outside of this environment happy and powerful, not by numbers alone; the pedagogue makes his observations on the spiritual functions of the men who are found in our circle, and outside of it makes observations on the introduction of men into the pestiferous room, that is to say, on the transfer of our arts to the young generation and on the ground of those fainting fits, of that disgust which healthy natures experience on being introduced into the art atmosphere, on the ground of the diminution of spiritual functions, will conclude that the demands of the people, of art, are more legitimate than the demands of the depraved minority of the so-called cultivated class.
I have made these observations regarding music and poetry, the two branches of our arts which I know the best and which I once loved passionately, and it was a terrible thing to say: I have come to the conviction that all we have done in these two branches has been done in a false, exclusive method, having no meaning, and insignificant in comparison with those demands and 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,
recall the marvelous moment,
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 no results and once, by accident, I opened the collection of Ruibnikof, and the poetic demand of the pupils found full satisfaction, a satisfaction which, when I calmly, and without prejudice, compared the first song I came to with Pushkin's last production, I could not help finding legitimate. I had the same experience also in regard to music, concerning which I shall not have to speak.
I will try to sum up all that I have said. To the question, Are the arts les beaux arts necessary to the people? pedagogues generally hesitate and grow perplexed; only Plato decides this question boldly in the negative. They say: it is necessary, but with certain restrictions. To give all men the possibility of becoming artists would be harmful to the social organization. They say: certain arts and their degree can exist only in a certain class in society. They say: the arts must have their exclusive servants, devoted to one task. They say: great talents must have the possibility of coming forth from the midst of the people and devoting themselves exclusively to art. This is the greatest concession which pedagogy makes to the right of each person to be what he wishes. To the attainment of these ends all the efforts of the pedagogues are directed, as far as art is concerned. I consider this unjust. I suppose that the demand for the enjoyment of art and the service of art exists in every human being, to whatever class and environment he may belong, and that this demand is legitimate and must be satisfied.
Taking this position as an axiom, I say that if inconveniences and incongruities are presented by each person having an enjoyment of art and its reproduction, the cause of these inconveniences lies not in the method of its transference, nor in the diffusion or concentration of the arts among many or few, but in the character and tendency of the art, in which we must be dubious so as not to put what is false on the young generation, as well as to give this young generation the opportunity for working out something new both in form and in content.
I present an account of the teaching of drawing in November and December. The method of this instruction, it seems to me, may be regarded as convenient by the way whereby, imperceptibly and pleasantly, the pupils were guarded past the technical difficulties. The question of art itself is not touched upon, because the teacher who began the course took it for granted that it was inexpedient for peasant children to be artists.