pictures have, too, an oriental flavour:  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 too long hours, child labour and other evils with which the West is all too familiar.  What the Bolsheviks would not therefore willingly do to art, the Juggernaut which they are bent on setting in motion may accomplish for them.