Chapter 5
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18971897

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Author : Leo Tolstoy

Translator : Aylmer Maude

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What is art, if we put aside the conception of beauty,
which confuses the whole matter? The latest and most comprehensible
definitions of art, apart from the conception of
beauty, are the following:—(1 a) Art is an activity arising
even in the animal kingdom, and springing from sexual
desire and the propensity to play (Schiller, Darwin, Spencer),
and (1 b) accompanied by a pleasurable excitement of the
nervous system (Grant Allen). This is the physiological-evolutionary
definition. (2) Art is the external manifestation,
by means of lines, colors, movements, sounds, or words,
of emotions felt by man (Véron). This is the experimental
definition. According to the very latest definition (Sully),
(3) Art is “the production of some permanent object, or
passing action, which is fitted not only to supply an active
enjoyment to the producer, but to convey a pleasurable
impression to a number of spectators or listeners, quite apart
from any personal advantage to be derived from it.”

Notwithstanding the superiority of these definitions to the
metaphysical definitions which depended on the conception
of beauty, they are yet far from exact. (1 a) The first, the
physiological-evolutionary definition, is inexact, because,
instead of speaking about the artistic activity itself, which
is the real matter in hand, it treats of the derivation of art.
The modification of it (1 b), based on the physiological effects
on the human organism, is inexact, because within the limits
of such definition many other human activities can be
included, as has occurred in the neo-æsthetic theories, which
47reckon as art the preparation of handsome clothes, pleasant
scents, and even of victuals.

The experimental definition (2), which makes art consist
in the expression of emotions, is inexact, because a man may
express his emotions by means of lines, colors, sounds, or
words, and yet may not act on others by such expression;
and then the manifestation of his emotions is not art.

The third definition (that of Sully) is inexact, because
in the production of objects or actions affording pleasure
to the producer and a pleasant emotion to the spectators
or hearers apart from personal advantage, may be included
the showing of conjuring tricks or gymnastic exercises,
and other activities which are not art. And, further,
many things, the production of which does not afford
pleasure to the producer, and the sensation received from
which is unpleasant, such as gloomy, heart-rending scenes
in a poetic description or a play, may nevertheless be
undoubted works of art.

The inaccuracy of all these definitions arises from the fact
that in them all (as also in the metaphysical definitions) the
object considered is the pleasure art may give, and not the
purpose it may serve in the life of man and of humanity.

In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all,
to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure, and to consider
it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in
this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the
means of intercourse between man and man.

Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a
certain kind of relationship both with him who produced,
or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously,
previously or subsequently, receive the same
artistic impression.

Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of
men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts
in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means
48of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means
of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man
transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he
transmits his feelings.

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man,
receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another
man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the
emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take
the simplest example: one man laughs, and another, who
hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another, who
hears, feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and
another man, seeing him, comes to a similar state of mind.
By his movements, or by the sounds of his voice, a man
expresses courage and determination, or sadness and calmness,
and this state of mind passes on to others. A man
suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms,
and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man
expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or
love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others
are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion,
fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and
phenomena.

And it is on this capacity of man to receive another man’s
expression of feeling, and experience those feelings himself,
that the activity of art is based.

If a man infects another or others, directly, immediately, by
his appearance, or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very
time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man
to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh
or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer
when he himself is suffering—that does not amount to art.

Art begins when one person, with the object of joining
another or others to himself in one and the same feeling,
expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To
take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us
49say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and,
in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced,
describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the
surroundings, the wood, his own lightheartedness, and then
the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between
himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy when
telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived
through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel
what the narrator had experienced, is art. If even the
boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of
one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt,
he invented an encounter with a wolf, and recounted it so
as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced
when he feared the wolf, that also would be art. And
just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced
either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment
(whether in reality or in imagination), expresses these
feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected
by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines
to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair,
courage, or despondency, and the transition from one to
another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by
sounds, so that the hearers are infected by them, and
experience them as they were experienced by the composer.

The feelings with which the artist infects others may be
most various—very strong or very weak, very important or
very insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love
for native land, self-devotion and submission to fate or to
God expressed in a drama, raptures of lovers described in
a novel, feelings of voluptuousness expressed in a picture,
courage expressed in a triumphal march, merriment evoked
by a dance, humor evoked by a funny story, the feeling
of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape or by a
lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful
arabesque—it is all art.

50If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the
feelings which the author has felt, it is art.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and
having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines,
colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit
that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this
is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to
others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation
of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the
æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his
excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s
emotions by external signs; it is not the production of
pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is
a means of union among men, joining them together in the
same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress
towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.

As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words,
every man may know all that has been done for him in the
realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in
the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts
of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself
hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts
he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have
arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be
infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that
is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to
him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of
years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his
own feelings to others.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts
conceived by the men who preceded them, and to pass on to
51others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or
like Kaspar Hauser.[60]

And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by
art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all,
more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one,
as important as the activity of speech itself, and as generally
diffused.

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we
hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions; together
with buildings, statues, poems, novels.... But all this is but
the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with
each other in life. All human life is filled with works of
art of every kind—from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the
ornamentation of houses, dress and utensils, up to church
services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions.
It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited
sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity
transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for
some reason select from it and to which we attach special
importance.

This special importance has always been given by all
men to that part of this activity which transmits feelings
flowing from their religious perception, and this small part
of art they have specifically called art, attaching to it the
full meaning of the word.

That was how men of old—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—looked
on art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the
ancient Christians regard art; thus it was, and still is,
52understood by the Mahommedans, and thus is it still understood
by religious folk among our own peasantry.

Some teachers of mankind—as Plato in his Republic,
and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict
Mahommedans, and the Buddhists—have gone so far as to
repudiate all art.

People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the
prevalent view of to-day, which regards any art as good if
only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that art
(as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened to) is so
highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their
wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art
than by tolerating each and every art.

Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all
art, for they denied that which cannot be denied—one of
the indispensable means of communication, without which
mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people
of civilized European society of our class and day, in
favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i.e. gives people
pleasure.

Formerly, people feared lest among the works of art
there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they
prohibited art altogether. Now, they only fear lest they
should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and
patronize any art. And I think the last error is much
grosser than the first, and that its consequences are far
more harmful.


     From : Gutenberg.org

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     Chapter 5 -- Publication : November 30, 1896

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