A point to be carefully noted is the distinction between science and
art. “Science investigates and brings to human perception such truths
and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider
most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception
to the region of emotion” (p. 102). Science is an “activity of the
understanding which demands preparation and a certain sequence of
knowledge, so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing
geometry.” “The business of art,” on the other hand, “lies just in
this—to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument,
might be incomprehensible and inaccessible” (p. 102). It “infects any
man whatever his plane of development,” and “the hindrance to
understanding the best and highest _feelings_ (as is said in the gospel)
does not at all lie in deficiency of development or learning, but, on
the contrary, in false development and false learning” (pp. 102, 103).
Science and art are frequently blended in one work—_e.g._, in the gospel
elucidation of Christ’s comprehension of life, or, to take a modern
instance, in Henry George’s elucidation of the land question in
_Progress and Poverty_.
The class distinction to which Tolstoy repeatedly alludes needs some
explanation. The position of the lower classes in England and in Russia
is different. In Russia a much larger number of people live on the verge
of starvation; the condition of the factory-hands is much worse than in
England, and there are many glaring cases of brutal cruelty inflicted on
the peasants by the officials, the police, or the military,—but in
Russia a far greater proportion of the population live in the country,
and a peasant usually has his own house, and tills his share of the
communal lands. The “unperverted country peasant” of whom Tolstoy speaks
is a man who perhaps suffers grievous want when there is a bad harvest
in his province, but he is a man accustomed to the experiences of a
natural life, to the management of his own affairs, and to a real voice
in the arrangements of the village commune. The Government interferes,
from time to time, to collect its taxes by force, to take the young men
for soldiers, or to maintain the “rights” of the upper classes; but
otherwise the peasant is free to do what he sees to be necessary and
reasonable. On the other hand, English labourers are, for the most part,
not so poor, they have more legal rights, and they have votes; but a far
larger number of them live in towns and are engaged in unnatural
occupations, while even those that do live in touch with nature are
usually mere wage-earners, tilling other men’s land, and living often in
abject submission to the farmer, the parson, or the lady-bountiful. They
are dependent on an employer for daily bread, and the condition of a
wage-labourer is as unnatural as that of a landlord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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