What Is Art?

by graf Leo Tolstoy

The object of the following brief summary of a few main points is to help the reader to avoid pitfalls into which many reviewers have fallen. It aims at being no more than a bare statement of the positions—for more than that, the reader must turn to the book itself.

Let it be granted at the outset, that Tolstoy writes for those who have “ears to hear.” He seldom pauses to safeguard himself against the captious critic, and cares little for minute verbal accuracy. For instance, on page [144], he mentions “Paris,” where an English writer (even one who knew to what an extent Paris is the art centre of France, and how many artists flock thither from Russia, America, and all ends of the earth) would have been almost sure to have said “France,” for fear of being thought to exaggerate. One needs some alertness of mind to follow Tolstoy in his task of compressing so large a subject into so small a space. Moreover, he is an emphatic writer who says what he means, and even, I think, sometimes rather overemphasizes it. With this much warning let us proceed to a brief summary of Tolstoy’s view of art.

“Art is a human activity,” and consequently does not exist for its own sake, but is valuable or objectionable in proportion as it is serviceable or harmful to mankind. The object of this activity is to transmit to others feeling the artist has experienced. Such feelings—intentionally re-evoked and successfully transmitted to others—are the subject-matter of all art. By certain external signs—movements, lines, colours, sounds, or arrangements of words—an artist infects other people so that they share his feelings. Thus “art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings.”

Chapters [II.] to [V.] contain an examination of various theories which have taken art to be something other than this, and step by step we are brought to the conclusion that art is this, and nothing but this.

Having got our definition of art, let us first consider art independently of its subject-matter, i.e., without asking whether the feelings transmitted are good, bad, or indifferent. Without adequate expression there is no art, for there is no infection, no transference to others of the author’s feeling. The test of art is infection. If an author has moved you so that you feel as he felt, if you are so united to him in feeling that it seems to you that he has expressed just what you have long wished to express, the work that has so infected you is a work of art.

In this sense, it is true that art has nothing to do with morality; for the test lies in the “infection,” and not in any consideration of the goodness or badness of the emotions conveyed. Thus the test of art is an internal one. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving, through his sense of hearing or sight, another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion that moved the man who expressed it. We all share the same common human nature, and in this sense, at least, are sons of one Father. To take the simplest example: a man laughs, and another, who hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another, who hears, feels sorrow. Note in passing that it does not amount to art “if a man infects others directly, immediately, at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning,” etc. Art begins when some one, with the object of making others share his feeling, expresses his feeling by certain external indications.

Normal human beings possess this faculty to be infected by the expression of another man’s emotions. For a plain man of unperverted taste, living in contact with nature, with animals, and with his fellow-men—say, for “a country peasant of unperverted taste, this is as easy as it is for an animal of unspoilt scent to follow the trace he needs.” And he will know indubitably whether a work presented to him does, or does not, unite him in feeling with the author. But very many people “of our circle” (upper and middle class society) live such unnatural lives, in such conventional relations to the people around them, and in such artificial surroundings, that they have lost “that simple feeling, that sense of infection with another’s feeling—compelling us to joy in another’s gladness, to sorrow in another’s grief, and to mingle souls with another—which is the essence of art.” Such people, therefore, have no inner test by which to recognise a work of art; and they will always be mistaking other things for art, and seeking for external guides, such as the opinions of “recognised authorities.” Or they will mistake for art something that produces a merely physiological effect—lulling or exciting them; or some intellectual puzzle that gives them something to think about.

But if most people of the “cultured crowd” are impervious to true art, is it really possible that a common Russian country peasant, for instance, whose work-days are filled with agricultural labour, and whose brief leisure is largely taken up by his family life and by his participation in the affairs of the village commune—is it possible that he can recognise and be touched by works of art? Certainly it is! Just as in ancient Greece crowds assembled to hear the poems of Homer, so to-day in Russia, as in many countries and many ages, the Gospel parables, and much else of the highest art, are gladly heard by the common people. And this does not refer to any superstitious use of the Bible, but to its use as literature.

Not only do normal, labouring country people possess the capacity to be infected by good art—“the epic of Genesis, folk-legends, fairy-tales, folk-songs, etc.,” but they themselves produce songs, stories, dances, decorations, etc., which are works of true art. Take as examples the works of Burns or Bunyan, and the peasant women’s song mentioned by Tolstoy in [Chapter XIV.], or some of those melodies produced by the negro slaves on the southern plantations, which have touched, and still touch, many of us with the emotions felt by their unknown and unpaid composers.

The one great quality which makes a work of art truly contagious is its sincerity. If an artist is really actuated by a feeling, and is strongly impelled to communicate that feeling to other people—not for money or fame, or anything else, but because he feels he must share it—then he will not be satisfied till he has found a clear way of expressing it. And the man who is not borrowing his feelings, but has drawn what he expresses from the depths of his nature, is sure to be original, for in the same way that no two people have exactly similar faces or forms, no two people have exactly similar minds or souls.