"If he does not love his personages, even the least of them, then he must insult them in such a way as to make the heavens fall, or must mock at them until he splits his sides."[3] He does not forget to do so, in his writings on art. The negative portion of this statement--brimming over with insults and sarcasms--is so vigorously expressed that it is the only part which has struck the artist. This method has so violently wounded the superstitions and susceptibilities of the brotherhood that they inevitably see, in the enemy of their own art, the enemy of all art whatsoever. But Tolstoy's criticism is never devoid of the reconstructive element. He never destroys for the sake of destruction, but only to rebuild. In his modesty he does not even profess to build anything new; he merely defends Art, which was and ever shall be, from the false artists who exploit it and dishonour it. "True science and true art have always existed and will always exist; it is impossible and useless to attack them," he wrote to me in 1887, in a letter which anticipated by more than ten years his famous criticism of art (_What is Art?_).[4] "All the evil of the day comes from the fact that so-called civilised people, together with the scientists and artists, form a privileged caste, like so many priests; and this caste has all the faults of all castes. It degrades and lowers the principle in virtue of which it was organised. What we in our world call the sciences and the arts is merely a gigantic _humbug,_ a gross superstition into which we commonly fall as soon as we free ourselves from the old superstition of the Church. To keep safely to the road we ought to follow we must begin at the beginning--we must raise the cowl which keeps us warm but obscures our sight. The temptation is great. We are born or we clamber upon the rungs of the ladder; and we find among the privileged the priests of civilisation, of _Kultur_, as the Germans have it. Like the Brahmin or Catholic priests, we must have a great deal of sincerity and a great love of the truth before we cast doubts upon the principles which assure us of our advantageous position. But a serious man who ponders the riddle of life cannot hesitate. To begin to see clearly he must free himself from his superstitions, however profitable they may be to him. This is a condition _sine quâ non_.... To have no superstition. To force oneself into the attitude of a child or a Descartes."