Note 94 — Chapter VII

What is Art? was translated by me from Tolstoy’s MSS., which he sent me chapter by chapter as he wrote it. He revised his work to such an extent that some chapters were re-written three times over after he first sent them to me for translation. The following passages belonging to an early version of this chapter, though he did not retain them in his final revision, seem worth preserving, so I give them here in a foot-note:

We only need escape for a moment from the habit of considering this trinity of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, presented to us by Baumgarten, to be as true as the Trinity of religion, and need only ask ourselves what we all have always understood by the words which make up this triad, in order to be convinced of the utterly fantastic nature of the union into one, of three absolutely different words and conceptions which are not even commensurable in meaning.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are put on one level, and all three conceptions are treated as though they were fundamental and metaphysical. Whereas in reality such is not at all the case.

Goodness is the eternal, the highest, aim of our life. However we may understand goodness, our life is nothing but a striving towards the good, that is, towards God.

Goodness is really the fundamental metaphysical perception which forms the essence of our consciousness: a perception not defined by reason.

Goodness is that which cannot be defined by anything else, but which defines everything else.

But Beauty—if we do not want mere words but speak about what we understand—beauty is nothing but what pleases us. The notion of beauty not only does not coincide with goodness, but rather is contrary to it; for the good most often coincides with victory over the passions, while beauty is at the root of all our passions.

The more utterly we surrender ourselves to beauty the farther we depart from goodness. I know that to this people always reply that there is a moral and spiritual beauty, but this is merely playing with words, for by spiritual and moral beauty nothing else is understood but goodness. For the most part, beauty of soul, or goodness not only does not coincide with what is ordinarily understood as beauty, but is contrary to it.

As to truth—still less can we attribute to this member of the trinity identity with goodness, or even any independent existence at all.

By truth we merely mean the correspondence of an expression, or of the definition of an object, with reality, or with an understanding of the object common to everyone, and therefore it is a means of arriving at the good. But what is there in common between the conceptions of beauty and truth on the one hand, and of goodness on the other? Truth spoken expressly to cause annoyance certainly does not harmonise with goodness.

Not only are beauty and truth not conceptions equivalent to goodness, and not only do they not form one entity with goodness, but they do not even coincide with it. For instance, Socrates and Pascal as well as many others, considered that learning the truth about unnecessary things does not accord with goodness. With beauty, truth has not even anything in common, but for the most part is in contradiction with it, for truth generally exposes the deception and destroys the illusion which is a chief condition of beauty.

And lo and behold! the arbitrary conjunction into one, of these three conceptions which are not commensurable but foreign to one another, has served as the basis for that amazing theory according to which the difference between good art, transmitting good feeling, and bad art, transmitting bad feeling, is completely obliterated, and one of the lowest manifestations of art, art merely for enjoyment—that art against which all the teachers of humanity have warned mankind—has come to be considered the highest art.