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 rhythmic words.  It may have been the genius of a single dancer that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the others felt.  He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as his own.