was to clear up the "the frightful obscurity which reigns in this region of speculation."

What is Art? Its manifestations are "bounded on one side by the practically useful and on the other by unsuccessful attempts at art." But what working definition of art have we that would enable us to feel sure that this or that production of human activity is a work of art? The answer at first seems very simple to those "who talk without thinking." They are accustomed to say that "Art is such activity as produces beauty." But this only shifts the matter a step. We have now to ask for a working definition of beauty, and on careful examination we find that this has nowhere been given. Every attempt to define beauty objectively, as consisting "either in utility, or in adjustment to a purpose, or in symmetry, or in order, or in proportion, or in smoothness, or in harmony of the parts, or in unity amid variety, or in various combinations of these" (p. 161), has broken down utterly, and we have nothing left but a subjective definition which amounts to this, that beauty is "that which pleases us" without evoking in us desire. In other words, "Beauty is simply a certain kind of disinterested pleasure received by us.' This definition seems clear enough, but unfortunately it is inexact, and can be widened to include the pleasure derived from drink, from food, from touching a delicate skin, and so forth, as is done by Guyau, Kralik, and other estheticians.

A yet more serious trouble is, that different things please different people. Instead of getting a solid basis for a science, we get landed in confusion arising from the fact that tastes differ. If we use the word beauty in our definition of art, and if beauty means "that which pleases," and if different things please different people-our definition is useless. One man will say a certain thing is a work of art because it pleases him, another will reply that it is not a work of art because he does not like it.

And this is precisely what has happened and is happening. Is Walt Whitman a great poet? Yes, says A, he is, because I like his poems and agree with them. No, says B, he is not, because I don't like his poems and disagree with them.

Thus the science of esthetics has as yet failed to get even a start. It has not told us what art is, still less has it enabled us to judge of the quality of art. "So that the whole existing science of esthetics fails to do what we might expect from it, being a mental activity calling itself a science: namely, it does not define the qualities and laws of art, or of the beautiful (if that be the content of art), or the nature of taste (if taste decides the question of art and its merit), and then on the basis of such definitions acknowledge as art those productions which correspond to these laws, and reject those which do not come under them. But this science of esthetics consists in first acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us), and then framing such a theory of art that all these productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it" (p. 164).

Such being the case, reasonable men should be not merely ready but anxious to avoid the use of the word beauty in framing their definition of art, and should select words which mean the same thing to each of us who use them. Yet, strange to say, the estheticians, the specialists, and the "cultured crowd," cling tenaciously and even fanatically to the use of a word they cannot define in a serviceable manner. They are as angry with anyone who protests against its use in a scientific definition, as the Scarboro' roughs are with a Quaker who says that men ought not to kill one another.

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"As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception conveyed by a word, with the more aplomb and self-assurance do people use that word, pretending that what

1 Written soon after the Rowntrees had been attacked by a patriotic mob, whose feelings were harrowed by an attempt to hold a peace-meeting.

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is understood by it is so simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it actually means. This is how matters of orthodox religion are usually dealt with, and this is how people now deal with the conception of beauty" (p. 137).

For his part, Tolstoy prefers to understand, and to let other people understand, what he means by the words he uses, and he has therefore framed a definition of art which avoids all obscurity.

“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" (p. 173).

Art is possible because we share one common human nature. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. All who are capable of experiencing "that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man and even to a child, that sense of infection with another's feeling-compelling us to joy in another's gladness, to sorrow at another's grief, and to mingle souls with another" (p. 273), possess the mental and emotional telegraph wires along which an artist's influence may pass.

A common crowd may be swayed by an orator, but not by the ablest mathematical lecturer; for whereas thoughts can only be transferred to minds sufficiently prepared to receive them, the feelings that are the birthright of our common humanity are shared by all normal people. When an orator fails to sway his audience, we say the orator has failed, not the audience. But when a boy fails to understand the fifth proposition because he has not understood those that preceded it, we do not say that Euclid has failed but that the boy has not understood him. Science is a human activity transmitting thoughts from man to man: Art is a human activity transmitting feelings. They have some features in common. Clearness, simplicity, and compression, are desirable in both,

and the same book or the same speech may contain both science and art. It is desirable to discriminate clearly between the one and the other, though both alike are "indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist" (pp. 175 and 321).

Before passing from definitions to deductions based on them, reference should be made to the physiological evolutionary definition of Schiller, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, which Tolstoy sums up thus: "Art is an activity arising even in the animal kingdom and 'springing from sexual desire and the propensity to play' " (p. 169). This, though superior to the definitions which depend on the conception of beauty, is unsatisfactory because, “instead of speaking about the artistic activity itself, which is the real matter in hand, it treats of the derivation of art" (p. 169).

Accepting Tolstoy's definition of art, we at once see that art covers a much wider ground than we have been accustomed to suppose.

"We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, 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 cradle-song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity" (p. 174).

But we generally use the word in a special and restricted sense to mean, not all human activity that deliberately and with premeditation transmits feelings, "but only that part which we for some reason select from it, and to which we ~~ attach special importance" (pp. 174-175).

Before considering what kind of art deserves to be thus specially selected for our highest esteem, we must clearly

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distinguish between two different things: the subject-matter of art and the form of art apart from its subject-matter. This distinction is fundamentally important and, as soon as it is made, the vexed question of the relation of art to morality solves itself easily and inevitably.

Let us take art apart from its subject-matter first.

"There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its counterfeit-namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man without exercising effort, and without altering his standpoint, on reading, hearing, or seeing, another man's work experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art" (p. 274).

"And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art."

"The stronger the infection the better is the art, as art, speaking now apart from its subject-matter-that is, not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits" (p. 275).

From this point of view, art has really nothing to do with morality. The feelings transmitted may be good or bad feelings, and may produce the best or the worst results on those who are influenced by them, yet in either case the man who transmits them is an artist.

"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