that “all constraint is dangerous and argues want of proper method,” and that “teachers ought to consult not their own convenience but the convenience of their pupils.” Accordingly his pupils were allowed practically to do as they liked. They could come and go at will, might sit on chairs, huddle into corners, or stand at the window with their backs to their teachers as the mood took them, and no discipline of any sort was countenanced. To interest the pupils while they taught them was to be the sole aim of their schoolmasters. This school created some little sensation in its day. French savants and experts raised their hands to Heaven in amazement, and professed they could not understand how order could be evolved from the midst of anarchy; and when the school payed their superior insight the bad compliment of actually succeeding, they could only explain the marvel by emphasizing the difference of temperament between lively French children and the more phlegmatic Slavs. In Russia itself some of the higher officials were uncomfortably agitated by Tolstoi’s revolutionary pedagogic methods. The Minister of the Interior, an inveterate adherent of the old non-progressive school, complained to his colleague, the Minister of Education (October 14th, 1862), that, in his opinion, the school of Yasnaya Polyana, and the journal of the same name, threatened to undermine the very foundations of religion and morality, especially as the director and editor was “endowed with a remarkable, I may even say, attractive literary style.” Moreover, laments the much perturbed official, Count Tolstoi’s convictions
29
