In the future "artists will all be endowed." Artistic activity will be made accessible to all "by the introduction into the elementary schools of instruction in music and painting, which will be taught to the child simultaneously with the first principles of grammar." For the rest, art will no longer call for a complicated technique, as at present; it will move in the direction of simplicity, clearness, and conciseness, which are the marks of sane and classic art, and of Homeric art.[13] How pleasant it will be to translate universal sentiments into the pure lives of this art of the future! To write a tale or a song, to design a picture for millions of beings, is a matter of much greater importance--and of much greater difficulty--than writing a novel or a symphony. It is an immense and almost virgin province. Thanks to such works men will learn to appreciate the happiness of brotherly union. "Art must suppress violence, and only art can do so. Its mission is to bring about the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of Love."[14] Which of us would not endorse these generous words? And who can fail to see that Tolstoy's conception is fundamentally fruitful and vital, in spite of its Utopianism and a touch of puerility? It is true that our art as a whole is only the expression of a caste, which is itself subdivided not only by the fact of nationality, but in each country also into narrow and hostile clans. There is not a single artist in Europe who realises in his own personality the union of parties and of races. The most universal mind of our time was that of Tolstoy himself. In him men of all nations and all classes have attained fraternity; and those who have tasted the virile joy of this capacious love can no longer be satisfied by the shreds and fragments of the vast human soul which are offered by the art of the European cliques. [1] _What shall we do?_ p. 378-9. [2] In time he even came to justify suffering--not only personal suffering, but the sufferings of others. "For the assuagement of the sufferings of others is the essence of the rational life. How then should the object of labour be an object of suffering for the labourer? It is as though the labourer were to say that an untilled field is a grief to him." (_Life,_ chap, xxxiv.-xxxv.) [3] February 23, 1860. _Further Letters,_ pp. 19-20. It was for this reason that the "melancholy and dyspeptic" art of Tourgenev displeased him. [4] This letter (October 4, 1887) has been printed in the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine,_ 1902, and in the _Further Letters_ (_Correspondance inédite_), 1907. _What is Art?_ appeared in 1897-98; but Tolstoy had been pondering the matter for more than fourteen years. [5] I shall return to this matter when speaking of the _Kreutzer Sonata._