There is a deal of truth in the incisive remarks of Leo Tolstoy when dealing with this question. He says [a]:
Art cannot be incomprehensible to the great masses only because it is very good, as artists of our day are fond of telling us. Rather we are bound to conclude that this art is unintelligible because it is very bad art, or even is not art at all. So that the favourite argument (naïvely accepted by the cultured crowd), that in order to feel art one has first to understand it (which really means to habituate oneself to it), is the truest indication that what we are asked to understand by such a method, is either very bad art, exclusive art, or is not art at all.
One may observe however that, as a rule, it is only inferior artists who complain of the want of public appreciation of great works of art.
[a] What is Art? Aylmer Maude translation, 1904.
[NOTE 29. PAGE 78]
According to Lessing and Watts-Dunton, what the former calls the dazzling antithesis of Simonides—"Poetry is speaking painting, and painting dumb poetry"—has had a wide and deleterious effect upon art criticism. Lessing, who wrote Laocoon about 1761, said in his preface in reference to this saying:
It was one of those ideas held by Simonides, the truth of which is so obvious that one feels compelled to overlook the indistinctness and falsehood which accompany it.... But of late many critics, just as though no difference existed, have drawn the crudest conclusions one can imagine from this harmony of painting and poetry.
Watts-Dunton, writing a few years ago, added to this[a]:
It [the saying of Simonides] appears to have had upon modern criticism as much influence since the publication of Lessing's Laocoon as it had before.
Lessing points out that the Greeks confined the saying to the effect produced by the two arts, and (evidently referring to Aristotle) did not forget to inculcate that these arts differed from each other in the things imitated and the manner of imitation.