But if most people of the “cultured crowd” are impervious to true art, is it really possible that a common Russian country peasant, for instance, whose work-days are filled with agricultural labour, and whose brief leisure is largely taken up by his family life and by his participation in the affairs of the village commune—is it possible that _he_ can recognise and be touched by works of art? Certainly it is! Just as in ancient Greece crowds assembled to hear the poems of Homer, so to-day in Russia, as in many countries and many ages, the Gospel parables, and much else of the highest art, are gladly heard by the common people. And this does not refer to any superstitious use of the Bible, but to its use as literature. Not only do normal, labouring country people possess the capacity to be infected by good art—“the epic of Genesis, folk-legends, fairy-tales, folk-songs, etc.,” but they themselves produce songs, stories, dances, decorations, etc., which are works of true art. Take as examples the works of Burns or Bunyan, and the peasant women’s song mentioned by Tolstoy in Chapter XIV., or some of those melodies produced by the negro slaves on the southern plantations, which have touched, and still touch, many of us with the emotions felt by their unknown and unpaid composers. The one great quality which makes a work of art truly contagious is its _sincerity_. If an artist is really actuated by a feeling, and is strongly impelled to communicate that feeling to other people—not for money or fame, or anything else, but because he feels he must share it—then he will not be satisfied till he has found a _clear_ way of expressing it. And the man who is not borrowing his feelings, but has drawn what he expresses from the depths of his nature, is sure to be _original_, for in the same way that no two people have exactly similar faces or forms, no two people have exactly similar minds or souls. That in briefest outline is what Tolstoy says about art, considered apart from its subject-matter. And this is how certain critics have met it. They say that when Tolstoy says the test of art is _internal_, he must mean that it is _external_. When he says that country peasants have in the past appreciated, and do still appreciate, works of the highest art, he means that the way to detect a work of art is to see what is apparently most popular among the masses. Go into the streets or music-halls of the cities in any particular country and year, and observe what is most frequently sung, shouted, or played on the barrel-organs. It may happen to be “Tarara-boom-deay,” or, “We don’t want to fight, But, by Jingo, if we do.”