Note † — Chapter IX · Actual and Possible Misapprehensions
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He begins by emphasising the enormous output of energy which is devoted to Art in civilised countries. He then very rightly asserts that it is of great importance to know what this activity is about; and he devotes thirty pages to the various definitions which have been attempted of Art and Beauty. He concludes, after ransacking the somewhat uncritical compilations of Schasler and Knight, that æsthetics have been hitherto an idle amalgam of reverie and phantasy, from which no definition of Art emerges. Partly he traces this result to the use in æsthetics of notions of beauty; partly to an anxiety in the critics to justify the existent forms of Art. They are, he insists, less concerned to discover what Art is, than to show that those things which are currently termed Art must in fact be Art. To these sections of What is Art? assent may be accorded. He then sets out his own definition. “To evoke in oneself a sensation which one has experienced before, and having evoked it in oneself, to communicate this sensation in such a way that others may experience the same sensation . . . so that other men are infected by these sensations and pass through them; in this does the activity of Art consist.”† So far excellent; if we translate ‘sensation’, the current æsthetico-psychological jargon of the art schools in Tolstoy’s day, by some more general term such as experience. But this is only a first stage of the definition; there are additions to be made. Any Art which is infective, as he uses that word in the quotation above, is pure Art as opposed to modern or adulterated Art; but in deciding the full value of any work of Art we have to consider the nature of its contents, the nature, that is, of the experiences communicated. The value of art contents is judged, according to Tolstoy, by the religious consciousness of the age. For Tolstoy the religious consciousness is the higher comprehension of the meaning of life, and this, according to him, is the universal union of men with God and with one another.