Before dealing with the criticisms of some of these writers, it may be useful to give a bare skeleton of the work itself. Tolstoy once remarked to me that the sign of any great philosophy is that it gives a broad generalization of much that had previously been perplexing, and does this so clearly that it can be explained to an intelligent boy of twelve in a quarter-of-an-hour. What is Art? in Tolstoy's own opinion and in mine, was the best thought out and best arranged of his philosophic works, and I will try to apply his own test to it, so that no one need fail to grasp it unless his brain be stuffed past praying for by one of the hundred-and-fifty current æsthetic theories which obscure the matter.

? First, there is the definition of Art already quoted, which declares it to be an activity by means of which people are infected by feelings the artist has experienced and intentionally transmitted by external signs: movements, lines, colours, sounds, or arrangements of words.

Secondly, it is necessary to discriminate clearly between the form of a work of art, and the subject-matter, that is to say, the feeling conveyed. As to the form, the stronger the infection-that is, the more completely and the more widely the artist's feeling is conveyed to others-the better is the art. For this reason Tolstoy esteems most highly works of art that infect masses of people and reach not merely the artist's own class, race, and period, but all classes, races, and ages. To produce works of this 'universal' type is a rare, difficult, and supreme achievement; but it has been accomplished as, for instance, by some of the parables of Jesus, by such stories as that of Joseph and his brethren, and by some folk-stories and folk-songs. The sign manual of such work is brevity, simplicity, and sincerity.' Whenever these characteristics are absent or deficient, the fitness of the work to transmit the artist's feeling widely and powerfully is lessened or destroyed.

The feeling conveyed may be strong or weak, good or bad, but the artist will fail to infect others with it-that is, will fail to produce a work of true art-if he fails to find an adequate form for it. He must have experienced a feeling, either in real life or in imagination, must have wished to express it, must have the skill to do so, and must succeed in infecting someone with it, before there is a work of art for

us to consider. An enormous quantity of matter intended to be art is not art at all, since it fails to convey the artist's feeling to others. Such failures cannot be discussed as works of art, and suggestions that excellence in subject-matter can compensate for inadequacy in execution are therefore sheer nonsense.

But when we have real works of art, conveying feeling to their readers, spectators, or audience, an appraisal of the subject-matter of art becomes necessary. This subjectmatter consists of the feelings transmitted by the artists. It is of tremendous importance to mankind what feelings become prevalent, and therefore the quality of those conveyed by the artist cannot be a matter of indifference to us.

The activity of art diffuses feelings, as the activity of science diffuses thoughts, and these feelings influence our minds, characters, conduct, and our whole life. They cannot therefore fail to benefit fail to benefit or injure mankind immensely. So we are faced by the problem of deciding what feelings are beneficial and what feelings are detrimental to mankind. Tolstoy, a man of very decided opinions who had worked out a view-of-life he felt sure of, did not hesitate to add to his theory of art a statement of his outlook on life. Before quoting it, I must point out that whether we accept, or reject, or modify that view-of-life, his theory of art remains equally true, and can fit any other view-oflife equally well-unless, indeed, we suppose that there is nothing in life to approve or disapprove of. Every sane man, however, does approve and disapprove of something, and if he cares at all for his own welfare or for that of his fellow-men, he is not indifferent when he finds that by means of art things he approves of are made repulsive, and things he disapproves of are popularized. It is this intimate connexion between art and the rest of life, and the influence art exercises through our feelings, that should make it an organ co-equally important with science for the life and progress of mankind' (p. 331).

Two great orators are endowed with the qualities enabling them to sway great audiences. The one exerts himself with eloquence and power to rouse his hearers to a race-war or a class-war; the other, with equal eloquence and power, speaks for peace, co-operation, and good-will. We may be moved as we listen to each of them in turn, and may admit

that as orators they are equally great. But we cannot approve equally of both appeals. If we approve of the one we must disapprove of the other. Therefore works of art which we believe to benefit mankind, besides being works of art, that is, infectious,' must transmit feelings we approve of; and all ordinary feelings not repugnant to our sense of right, by passing from man to man knit us together, make us conscious of the bonds of our common humanity, prevent our becoming isolated and hostile units, and are therefore beneficial.

But to come now to Tolstoy's view-of-life-which the reader may accept or reject or for which he may substitute any standard of his own without upsetting the validity of the explanation of the nature of art-which is the main subject of the book. He says that we should be governed by the religious perception of our time, which in its widest and most practical application is the consciousness that our well-being, both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among men-in the loving harmony with one another.' In our approval of feelings which are the subjectmatter of art, he thinks we should be guided by that perception.

That, in outline, is Tolstoy's philosophy of art, which I have nowhere seen refuted. Many reviewers have treated it scornfully, but the method adopted is always either to quarrel with examples he has employed, to misrepresent what he has said-attributing to him nonsense which is then easily refuted-or simply to ignore his explanations and re-state problems he has dealt with as though he had never referred to them.

A curious case was that of Mr. Harold Laski's review of Tolstoy on Art in the Sunday Times, in which a remark was made of a kind to which the author of a book is usually allowed to reply. But the letter quoted below, which I sent in on 17th March, has, I think, not been inserted:

A review of Tolstoy on Art in your issue of the Ist inst. puts a specific question, which can be answered by a quotation from my Introduction, of which your reviewer is kind enough to say that it is 'extremely clear and helpful.' The question put is: If a work of art may not have an

appeal unintelligible to a moujik, is the same true of a work of science and philosophy and, if not, why not?' The reply given on page 104 of the work under review is: 'A point to be well noted is the distinction between science and art. Science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important (Tolstoy alludes not so much to experimental science, as to the philosophic explanation of life). Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion. Science is an activity of the understanding which demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge, so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry. The business of art, on the other hand, lies just in this: to make that understood and felt which in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible (p. 225). It infects any man, whatever his plane of development, and (as is said in the Gospel), the hindrance to understanding the best and highest feelings does not at all lie in deficiency of development or learning, but on the contrary in false development and false learning' (p. 226).

In general, when errors have been made in reviews of this book, editors have been very good about allowing such errors to be pointed out. For instance the Manchester Guardian inserted this letter :

I read the lucid and well-written review of Tolstoy on Art in your paper with much satisfaction till near the end, where I came on a sentence or two that call for comment.

Tolstoy, as your reviewer notes, discriminates between the form of a work of art (which must be good or the artist's feeling is not conveyed to others, and the work is a failure) and the 'subject-matter of feeling,' which by its diffusion may injure or benefit mankind. Your reviewer considers this discrimination of content from form 'a vulnerable point,' and alludes to Rembrandt - as other critics have referred to paintings which convey an aesthetic emotion purely by their significant form, the placing of the parts, and the arrangement of the lines and colours. The doubt suggested is: What are the human feelings here. appraisable separately from the 'form' of the work? The reply is that the aesthetic feeling- the feeling of admiration

at and delight in the combination of lines and colours which the artist has experienced and with which he infects the spectator' (p. 293)-is one of the many human emotions properly supplying subject-matter for art. In this special case it happens that the form and the subject-matter are so identical that we cannot well discuss them apart, and to the question whether they are good or bad Tolstoy's reply is that they are good, for they give a 'mysterious gladness of a communion which, reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the future who will yet be touched by them' (p. 287). The difference between such æsthetic emotions and the feelings aroused by a good novel, play, or picture in genre style is that in these latter cases we share the author's feelings while we read or look, but can also approve or disapprove of the influence that his feeling may have. People who talk without thinking, and suppose that the æsthetic emotion is the only one suitable for artists to deal with, have said that Tolstoy's theory shows that he did not understand art-which is as though a boy who only knew that it is noon when the two hands of the clock stand in line and point to twelve were to assume that anyone paying attention to the clock at times when the hands point different ways does so only through ignorance of the nature of time and clocks.

Tolstoy's main point in What is Art? is that if art were confined within the narrow limits to which some artists would restrict it, art would be of no serious human importance; but that just because it covers the whole range of human feelings and diffuses these in a thousand formsfrom the lullaby at a baby's cradle to the funeral march at a man's grave-it is a human activity which influences our institutions, manners, customs, and the whole of our lives enormously.

The Glasgow Herald inserted this:

I am grateful for the capital review of Tolstoy on Art in your issue of 20th inst., but beg leave to clear up a misconception which appears in its last paragraph, where it is said that Tolstoy's criterion for the right judgement of art is, we believe, in the main a true one but not an invulnerable one. . . . It takes practically no account of the technical