What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy (english readers .txt) 📕
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What Is Art? is an 1897 philosophical treatise by Leo Tolstoy that lays out his philosophy of aesthetics. Rejecting notions of aesthetics that center around beauty, Tolstoy instead posits that art is defined by its role in transmitting feelings between human beings. Furthermore, he argues that the quality of art is not assessed by the pleasure it gives, but whether the feelings the art evokes align with the meaning of life revealed by a given society’s religious perception. In line with his spiritual views set out in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy argues that the proper purpose of art is to transmit feelings of human unity and “to set up, in place of the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God, i.e. of love, which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life.”
Tolstoy makes a number of unconventional aesthetic judgments in the course of the book, dismissing such works as Wagner’s operas, Romeo and Juliet, and his own past works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina as “bad art.” In turn, he praises such works as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Hugo’s Les Misérables as “examples of the highest art, flowing from the love of God and the love of man.”
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- Author: Leo Tolstoy
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Then, bowing towards his dear one, his delightful, execrable wife, his inevitable, pitiless muse, and kissing her hand respectfully, he added, “Ah! my dear angel, how I thank you for my skill!”
Verlaine’s “Forgotten Airs”
No. I
“The wind in the plain
Suspends its breath.”
’Tis ecstasy languishing,
Amorous fatigue,
Of woods all the shudderings
Embraced by the breeze,
’Tis the choir of small voices
Towards the grey trees.
Oh the frail and fresh murmuring!
The twitter and buzz,
The soft cry resembling
That’s expired by the grass …
Oh, the roll of the pebbles
’Neath waters that pass!
Oh, this soul that is groaning
In sleepy complaint!
In us is it moaning?
In me and in you?
Low anthem exhaling
While soft falls the dew.
Verlaine’s “Forgotten Airs”
No. VIII
In the unending
Dulness of this land,
Uncertain the snow
Is gleaming like sand.
No kind of brightness
In copper-hued sky,
The moon you might see
Now live and now die.
Grey float the oak trees—
Cloudlike they seem—
Of neighbouring forests,
The mists in between.
Wolves hungry and lean,
And famishing crow,
What happens to you
When acid winds blow?
In the unending
Dulness of this land,
Uncertain the snow
Is gleaming like sand.
Song by Maeterlinck
When he went away,
(Then I heard the door)
When he went away,
On her lips a smile there lay …
Back he came to her,
(Then I heard the lamp)
Back he came to her,
Someone else was there …
It was death I met,
(And I heard her soul)
It was death I met,
For her he’s waiting yet …
Someone came to say,
(Child, I am afraid)
Someone came to say
That he would go away …
With my lamp alight,
(Child, I am afraid)
With my lamp alight,
Approached I in affright …
To one door I came,
(Child, I am afraid)
To one door I came,
A shudder shook the flame …
At the second door,
(Child, I am afraid)
At the second door
Forth words the flame did pour …
To the third I came,
(Child, I am afraid)
To the third I came,
Then died the little flame …
Should he one day return
Then what shall we say?
Waiting, tell him, one
And dying for him lay …
If he asks for you,
Say what answer then?
Give him my gold ring
And answer not a thing …
Should he question me
Concerning the last hour?
Say I smiled for fear
That he should shed a tear …
Should he question more
Without knowing me?
Like a sister speak;
Suffering he may be …
Should he question why
Empty is the hall?
Show the gaping door,
The lamp alight no more …
Bolton Hall has recently published a little work, Life, and Love, and Death, with the object of making the philosophy contained in On Life more easily accessible in English. ↩
Tolstoy’s remarks on Church religion were reworded so as to seem to relate only to the Western Church, and his disapproval of luxurious life was made to apply not, say, to Queen Victoria or Nicholas II, but to the Caesars or the Pharaohs. —Trans. ↩
The Russian peasant is usually a member of a village commune, and has therefore a right to a share in the land belonging to the village. Tolstoy disapproves of the order of society which allows less land for the support of a whole village full of people than is sometimes owned by a single landed proprietor. The “Censor” will not allow disapproval of this state of things to be expressed, but is prepared to admit that the laws and customs, say, of England—where a yet more extreme form of landed property exists, and the men who actually labour on the land usually possess none of it—deserve criticism. —Trans. ↩
Only two, or at most three, senses are generally held worthy to supply matter for artistic treatment, but I think this opinion is only conditionally correct. I will not lay too much stress on the fact that our common speech recognises many other arts, as, for instance, the art of cookery. ↩
And yet it is certainly an aesthetic achievement when the art of cooking succeeds in making of an animal’s corpse an object in all respects tasteful. The principle of the Art of Taste (which goes beyond the so-called Art of Cookery) is therefore this: All that is eatable should be treated as the symbol of some Idea, and always in harmony with the Idea to be expressed. ↩
If the sense of touch lacks colour, it gives us, on the other hand, a notion which the eye alone cannot afford, and one of considerable aesthetic value, namely, that of softness, silkiness, polish. The beauty of velvet is characterised not less by its softness to the touch than by its lustre. In the idea we form of a woman’s beauty, the softness of her skin enters as an essential element.
Each of us probably, with a little attention, can recall pleasures of taste which have been real aesthetic pleasures. ↩
M. Schasler, Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik, 1872, vol. i. p. 13. ↩
There is no science which more than aesthetics has been handed over to the reveries of the metaphysicians. From Plato down to the received doctrines of our day, people have made of art a strange amalgam of quintessential fancies and transcendental mysteries, which find their supreme expression in the conception of an absolute ideal Beauty, immutable and divine prototype of actual things. ↩
See on this matter Benard’s admirable book, L’esthétique d’Aristote, also Walter’s Geschichte der Aesthetik im Altertum. ↩
Schasler, p. 361. ↩
Schasler, p. 369.
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