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henceforward know what art is it will not be Tolstoy's fault. His English translator, Mr. Aylmer Maude, has issued a third and final instalment of What is Art? (Brotherhood Publishing Co.), which proves to be, if possible, more interesting than either of its predecessors. One of the most acute of French critics has published a sympathetic appreciation of the work in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and M. Ferdinand Brunetière has made liberal use of it in his recent discourse ou L'Art et la Morale. The fact is, this calmly and cogently reasoned effort to put art on a new basis is a literary event of the first importance. Whether we agree with Tolstoy or not-and it is pretty certain that most of us will not--no one who attempts to reason out a theory of art can afford to ignore them. And, that being so, I cannot help thinking it is a pity that the English translation has been issued in such an unobtrusive-I had almost written surreptitious --a fashion. However we may deplore the fact, a fact it remains that books must be 'pushed' and 'boomed' if they are to catch the attention of readers in this country.

[The truth of Mr. Walkley's remark having been thoroughly borne in upon me, I will not apologize for quoting his further remarks about my work in this connexion, and will only remind the reader that in regard to a publisher for Tolstoy's works there is no longer any ground for complaint.] Mr. Aylmer Maude is too modest, too anxious to keep himself unspotted from the (commercial) world in the cloistered seclusion of 'Wickham's Farm, near Danbury, Essex.' He has accomplished an admirable piece of work in this translation, scholarly, solid, conscientious. His notes in their pregnant, concentrated brevity are models of what such things should be. For my sins I have to peruse a good many translations in the course of a year. I have never ▾ come across anything so good in its way as Mr. Maude's version of Tolstoy. But I must say to him what the original of Foker said to Thackeray about his lectures: 'I tell you what it is, Thack., you want a piano.' Mr. Maude wants the equivalent of a piano-some form of inviting advertisement, something to make Tolstoy' go down.'

As I was completing this pamphlet I received the Times Literary Supplement, containing a review of Tolstoy on Art,

and I have sent the following reply, from which I here omit some passages which repeat what has been said in letters already quoted:

I have strong reason to wish that your reviewer's estimate of Tolstoy on Art (or rather of What is Art? which forms its central feature) might prevail. When I had translated that book and discussed it with Tolstoy, I wrote an Introduction (Ch. XI of Tolstoy on Art) of which he wrote mo: 'I have read your Introduction with great pleasure. You have admirably expressed the fundamental thought of the book. The fundamental thought there set out bears no resemblance at all to the meaning of the book as explained by your reviewer. If we could but establish the validity of his interpretation the conclusion would naturally follow that I was the originator of the sound, sensible, and illuminating views on art therein set forth: for, if they are not Tolstoy's, whose eise can they be?

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Unfortunately, your reviewer revokes at the very start. Almost his only quotation from Tolstoy-the trump card on which his game depends-is one he had no right to play. Anyone opening Tolstoy on Art at pp. 189-190 will see that it is not taken from Tolstoy's work, and that he never authorized its publication at all. It is taken bodily from a foot-note in which I indiscreetly quote some passages Tolstoy deleted from the first draft he sent me of the work. Morcover, it never was part of his main argument, but was merely used to prove that Goodness, Beauty, and Truth has each its separate meaning, and that they should not be jumbled up into one confused trinity. Truth spoken expressly to cause annoyance certainly does not harmonize with goodness' and beauty' if we do not want mere words, but speak about what we understand-is nothing but what pleases us.' Then follows the passage the reviewer has selected to support his amazing statement of Tolstoy's 'hatred of beauty, his belief that it is in itself a thing that gives pleasure, and therefore bad,' which is an utter misrepresentation both of what Tolstoy said and of what he meant. On p. 84 he said: 'A perfect work of art will be one in which . . . the expression will be . . . beautiful' ; and on p. 293 he says, 'I fear it will be urged against me that, having denied that the conception of beauty can supply a standard for works of art, I contradict myself,'

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and he then proceeds to show that the feeling of admiration at, and delight in, a combination of lines and colours' is good subject-matter for art.

One's attention once aroused by this use of deleted matter as though quoted from the authorized work, one soon notices that the reviewer misrepresents Tolstoy in other cases. For instance, he says,' the pictures of which Tolstoy approves . . . are clearly without any merit.' Nowapart from the fact that Millet, Bastien-Lepage, Jules Breton, and the others, are sometimes thought to have some merit-it would have been but fair to mention that Tolstoy was not offering examples of pictures he considers specially well drawn or well painted, but was giving examples of what he considered good in the feeling conveyed. So also in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he does not express any opinion about its execution, but merely approves of the feeling that actuated its authoress.

The reviewer twice repeats that Tolstoy thought great art must lead to goodness by its subject-matter,' and he speaks of the perversion that results from his 'tendency to make art primarily infectious.' But what Tolstoy says is not that art should be made infectious, but that by its very nature it is infectious, that is to say, the artist's feeling if well expressed inevitably transmits itself to the receiver, 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 the art, as art. This being so, the quality of the feelings disseminated are of importance to mankind, for our whole life is influenced by our own and other people's feelings. There is nothing ridiculous in that statement-it is an obvious though often neglected truth.

The author of Anna Karenina, The Power of Darkness, What Men Live By, and What Then Must We Do? wished to explain the nature and influence of art. It took him fifteen years of intellectual effort before, in What is Art? he could present the matter in a way that satisfied him. That book he regarded as the best thought out and best arranged of all his philosophic works. Its due understanding among us is endangered by the unfortunate occurrence referred to above, and I therefore appeal to you, Sir, to publish this explanation as an act of fairness

to the memory of one who was long the leading figure in European literature.

I addressed the following letter to the Editor of The Transcript, Boston, U.S.A., in reply to a review by Mr. Dole which appeared in that paper.

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Mr. N. H. Dole in reviewing Tolstoy on Art somewhat humorously remarks that Mr. Maude defends his spelling of Tolstoy's name (with a final y).' The humour lies in speaking of Tolstoy's spelling of his own name as being my way and needing defence. The explanation of N. H. D.'s attitude is that he is connected with an edition of Tolstoy's works in which that writer's name is continually misspelt, and that, now that this error has been pointed out, he finds himself called on to defend a hopeless case.

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The shifts to which he is driven are curious. He first pleads that Men do not always select the best transliteration of their own names . . or even pronounce them correctly.' He does not actually say that Tolstoy did not know how to pronounce his own name, but he would have us believe that, though Tolstoy spoke English and corresponded in our language, he did not know how to spell his name in English. Faced by the fact that the British Academy, after appointing a Committee of acknowledged experts to draw up a scheme of transliteration from Russian, recommended one which confirms Tolstoy's practice-all N. H. D. has to say is that there are two or three difficulties in their generally excellent list.' The case, therefore, is, that we have a great writer's spelling of his own name confirmed by a most authoritative body of experts, but that N. H. D. does not like their decision.

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He has, however, other arguments in defence of his spelling. He says it is the accepted mode in France. But as in general the French system of transliteration is misleading for English readers it has properly been rejected in favour of one that indicates to us the pronunciation, at least approximately. For instance, when the French write Macha we write Masha, and so on. Next comes an argument which shows either that N. H. D. is ignorant of Russian pronunciation, or that he is ready to say anything for the sake of confusing the issue. He actually defends the spelling Tolstoï, with a view to 'making it a trisyllable and not a

dissyllable as the y does, and indicating a slightly more accurate pronunciation." But the name Tolstoy, in Russian as in English, is a dissyllable. If our common word 'toy' does not precisely indicate the Russian pronunciation, that is only because the Russian o has a somewhat different sound to our o in English. The suggestion that by substituting ï for y readers will be helped to a better pronunciation of the name is grotesquely absurd. Then follows the erroneous statement that the y 'is properly preëmpted for the final syllable of adjective names like Volkonsky, differentiated from Polish names of the same sort which end in i, like Poniatowski.' This, again, is wrong; ski is a Polish termination, and when Polish names make their way into Russian there is no good reason for converting the i into y. (Vide, once again, the British Academy's transliteration scheme.) Moreover, the question before us is not how to transliterate the termination ski, but the termination oy. N. H. D. is also in error when he intimates that one member of the Tolstoy family, Count L. L. Tolstoy, spells his name with ï in English. This is not so, for I have letters from him, and he signed his name with a y. N. H. D. has no doubt got hold of the English translation of L. L. Tolstoy's book, lately published in French. The English translator, translating from the French, has blunderingly retained the French ï. It was precisely as a result of translating from the French and not from the Russian, that the misspelling of Tolstoy's name originated, and I suspect that it was in that way that N. H. D.'s versions of Tolstoy went astray in the first instance.

I have covered the whole of his arguments except the extraordinary one that as Shakespeare spelt his name in various ways, and we, therefore, have a choice of spellings, we ought also to have a chcice of ways of spelling Tolstoy's name, despite the fact that he always spelt it consistently with a y. When a man is reduced to such an argument, he evidently knows that his cause is bad. This leaves only what Mr. Dole says about the practice of the Des Isles,' and his discussion of the form of letters in the Cyrilic alphabet undealt with, but I cannot conceive what those topics have to do with the case.

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