Tolstoy has a gift of telling the essential truth in few words, and never did he sum himself up better than in the sentences, 'I am not a man of politics. Morals and art I know, love, and can.' There is hardly any possible room for doubt about the second sentence, and there is certainly none about the first, as his whole life shows. Many years later, he wrote of this event in his _Confession_: When I saw the head separate from the body, and how they both thumped into the box at the same moment, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, and is not progress, but is my heart and I. It was probably during this visit to Paris that Tolstoy witnessed and admired Chevet's popularisation of music by an easy system of instruction, of which he says: I have seen hundreds of horny-handed working men sitting on benches (under which lay the tool-bags they brought from their work) singing at sight, and understanding and being interested in the laws of music. This experience he utilised later on in his school at Yásnaya. In spring he went to Switzerland, and from Geneva he wrote to his Aunt Tatiána: [35]J'ai passé un mois et demi à Paris, et si agréablement que tous les jours je me suis dit, que j'ai bien fait de venir à l'étranger. Je suis très peu allé ni dans la société, ni dans le monde littéraire, ni dans le monde des cafés et des bals publics, mais malgré cela j'ai trouvé ici tant de choses nouvelles et intéressantes pour moi, que tous les jours, en me couchant, je me dis, quel dommage que la journée est passée si vite; je n'ai même pas eu le temps de travailler, ce que je me proposais de faire. Le pauvre Turgenef est très malade physiquement et encore plus moralement. Sa malheureuse liaison avec Madame Viardot, et sa fille, le retiennent ici dans un climat qui lui est pernicieux et il fait pitié de voir. Je n'aurais jamais cru qu'il put aimer ainsi. [35] I spent a month-and-a-half in Paris, and so agreeably that every day I said to myself that I had done well to come abroad. I went very little either into society or into the literary world, or into the world of _cafés_ and public balls; but in spite of that I found so many things that were new and interesting to me, that every day on going to bed I said to myself, 'What a pity the day has passed so quickly.' I have not even had time to work, which I intended to do.