e great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt.
If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare.

That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems
and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in
the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people,
neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish
music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that
any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet,
the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive
without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as
the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least
it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact
that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an
affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also
an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to
feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings
which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his
chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the
religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even
in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and
experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed:
he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever
coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal
potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_
nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people
who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in
embryo.

At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average
man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry.
All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open
to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a
perfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely,
both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous
emotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the
dancers--Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gave
place to r