avour: there are brown Madonnas in the Russian churches,
and such an one illustrates the statistics of infant mortality in
India, while the Russian mother, broad-footed, in gay petticoat and
kerchief, sits in a starry meadow suckling her baby from a very ample
white breast. I think that this movement towards the Church tradition
may be unconscious and instinctive, and would perhaps be deplored by
many Communists, for whom grandiose bad Rodin statuary and the crudity
of cubism better express what they mean by revolution. But this
revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well,
should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp. It is would-be
primitive and popular art that is vulgar. Such at least is the
reflection engendered by an inspection of Russian peasant work as
compared with the spirit of _Children's Tales_.

The Russian peasant's artistic impulse is no legend. Besides the
carving and embroidery which speak eloquently to peasant skill, one
observes many instances in daily life. He will climb down, when his
slowly-moving train stops by the wayside, to gather branches and
flowers with which he will decorate the railway carriage both inside
and out, he will work willingly at any task which has beauty for its
object, and was all too prone under the old regime to waste his time
and his employer's material in fashioning small metal or wooden
objects with his hands.

If the _bourgeois_ tradition then will not serve, there is a popular
tradition which is still live and passionate and which may perhaps
persist. Unhappily it has a formidable enemy in the organization and
development of industry, which is far more dangerous to art than
Communist doctrine. Indeed, industry in its early stages seems
everywhere doomed to be the enemy of beauty and instinctive life. One
might hope that this would not prove to be so in Russia, the first
Socialist State, as yet unindustrial, able to draw on the industrial
experience of the whole world, were it not that one discovers with a
certain misgiving in the Bolshevik leaders the rasping arid
temperament of those to whom the industrial machine is an end in
itself, and, in addition, reflects that these industrially minded men
have as yet no practical experience, nor do there exist men of
goodwill to help them. It does not seem reasonable to hope that Russia
can pass through the period of industrialization without a good deal
of mismanagement, involving waste resulting in