uty, if the quality itself cannot be recognised save after previous
training? And what moral dignity, nay, what decent innocence, can
there be in a kind of relaxation from which lack of initiation
excludes the vast majority of men, the majority which really labours,
and therefore has a real claim to relaxation and refreshment?

This question of Tolstoi's arises from that same limiting of
examination to a brief, partial, and, as it happens, most transitional
and chaotic present, which has given us that cut-and-dried distinction
between work and play; and, indeed, the two misconceptions are very
closely connected. For even as our present economic system of
production for exchange rather than for consumption has made us
conceive _work_ as _work_ done under compulsion for someone else, and
_play_ as _play_, with no result even to ourselves; so also has the
economic system which employs the human hand and eye merely as a
portion of a complicated, monotonously working piece of machinery, so
also has our present order of mechanical and individual production
divided the world into a small minority which sees and feels what it
is about, and a colossal majority which has no perception, no
conception, and, consequently, no preferences attached to the objects
it is employed (by the methods of division of labour) to produce, so
to speak, without seeing them. Tolstoi has realised that this is the
present condition of human labour, and his view of it has been
corrected neither by historical knowledge nor by psychological
observation. He has shown us _art_, as it nowadays exists, divided and
specialised into two or three "fine arts," each of which employs
exceptional and highly trained talent in the production of objects so
elaborate and costly, so lacking in all utility, that they can be
possessed only by the rich few; objects, moreover, so unfamiliar in
form and in symbol that only the idle can learn to enjoy (or pretend
to enjoy) them after a special preliminary initiation and training.

X.

_Initiation and training_, we have returned to those wretched words,
for we also had recognised that without initiation and training there
could be no real enjoyment of art. But, looking not at this brief,
transitional, and topsy-turvey present, but at the centuries and
centuries which have evolved, not only art, but the desire and habit
thereof, we have seen what Tolstoi refused to see, namely, that
wherever and whenever (that is to say, e