ISTo longer able to believe in the Church religion whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life’s meaning in personal enjoyment. And then took place among the upper classes what is called the “Kenaissance of science and art,” and which was really not only a denial of every religion but also an assertion that religion is unnecessary.
The Church doctrine is so coherent a system that it cannot be altered or corrected without destroying it altogether. As soon as doubt arose with regard to the infallibility of the pope (and this doubt was then in the minds of all educated people), doubt inevitably followed as to the truth of tradition. But doubt as to the truth of tradition is fatal not only to popery and Catholicism, but also to the whole Church creed with all its dogmas: the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, and the Trinity; and it destroys the authority of the 6o ІѴЯА7' IS ART?
Scriptures, since they were considered to be inspired only because the traditioд of the Church decided it so.
So that the majority of the highest classes of that age, even the popes and the ecclesiastics, really believed in nothing at all. In the Church doctrine these people did not believe, for they saw its insolvency; but neither could they follow Francis of Assisi, Keltchitsky,^ and most of the heretics, in acknowledging the moral, social teaching of Christ, for that teaching undermined their social position. And so these people remained without any religious view of life. And, having none, they could have no standard wherewith to estimate what was good and what was bad art but that of personal enjoyment. And, having acknowledged their criterion of what was good to be pleasure, i.e. beauty, these people of the upper classes of European society went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And conformably to this understanding of life a theory of art was formulated.
1 Keltchitsky, a Bohemian of the fifteenth century, was the author of a remarkable book, The Net of Faith, directed against Church and State. It is mentioned in Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within Yon. — Trans.
CHAPTER YII From the time that people of the upper classes lost faith in Church Christianity, beauty (г.е. the pleasure received from art) became their standard of good and had art. And, in accordance with that view, an aesthetic theory naturally sprang up among those upper classes justifying such a conception, — a theory according to which the aim of art is to exhibit beauty. The partisans of this aesthetic theory, in confirma- tion of its truth, affirmed that it was no invention of their own, hut that it existed in the nature of things, and was recognised even by the ancient Greeks. But this assertion was quite arbitrary, and has no foundation other than the fact that among the ancient Greeks, in consequence of the low grade of their moral ideal (as compared with the Christian), their conception of the good, to ауаѲбѵ, was not yet sharply divided from their conception of the beautiful, TO каХоѵ.
That highest perfection of goodness (not only not identical with beauty, hut, for the most part, contrasting with it) which was discerned by the Jews even in the times of Isaiah, and fully expressed by Christianity, was quite unknown to the Greeks. They supposed that the beautiful must necessarily also be the good. It is true that their foremost thinkers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — felt that goodness may happen not to coincide with beauty. Socrates expressly subordinated beauty to goodness; Plato, to unite the two conceptions, spoke of spiritual beauty; while Aristotle demanded from art that it should have a moral influence on people (каѲаро-іч).
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But, notwithstanding all this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness coincide.
And consequently, in the language of that period, a compound word (каХо-кауа^ба, beauty-goodness), came into use to express that notion.
Evidently the Greek sages began to draw near to that perception of goodness which is expressed in Buddhism and in Christianity, and they got entangled in defining the relation between goodness and beauty. Plato’s reasonings about beauty and goodness are full of contradictions. And it was just this confusion of ideas that those Europeans of a later age, who had lost all faith, tried to elevate into a law. They tried to prove that this union of beauty and goodness is inherent in the very essence of things; that beauty 'and goodness must coincide; and that the word and conception каХо-кауаѲіа (which had a meaning for Greeks but has none at all for Christians) represents the highest ideal of humanity. On this mis- understanding the new science of scsthetics was built up. And, to justify its existence, the teachings of the ancients on art were so twisted as to make it appear that this invented science of aesthetics had existed among the Greeks.
In reality, the reasoning of the ancients on art was quite unlike ours. As Benard, in his book on the aesthetics of Aristotle, quite justly remarks: “ Pow’ qui veut у regarder de pres у la theorie du beau et celle de V art sont tout a fait separees dans Aristote, comme elles le sont dans Platon et cliez tons leurs successeurs ” {Vestlietique d’Aristote et de ses successeurs^ Paris, 1889, p. 28).i And indeed the reasoning of the ancients on art not only does not confirm our science of aesthetics, but rather contradicts its doctrine of beauty. But nevertheless all the aesthetic guides, from Schasler to Knight, ^ Any one examining closely may see that the theory of beauty and that of art are quite separated in Aristotle as they are in Plato and in all their successors.
1 WHAT IS ART?
63 (івзіаге that the science of the beautiful — eesthetic science — was commenced by the ancients, by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; anji was continued, they say, partially by the Epicureans Stoics: by Seneca and Plutarch, down to Plotinus. But it is supposed that this science, by some unfortunate accident, suddenly vanished in the fourth century, and stayed away for al^ut 1500 years, and only after these 1500 years had passed did it revive in Germany, a.d. 1750, in Baumgarten’s doctrine.
lA-fter Plotinus, says Schasler, fifteen centuries passed aiRay during which there w^as not the slightest scientific iiifcrest felt for the world of beauty and art. These one 3,nd a half thousand years, says he, have been lost to aesthetics and have contributed nothing towards the erection of the lesitned edifice of this science.^ *Jn reality nothing of the kind happened. The science of «esthetics, the science of the beautiful, neither did nor could vanish because it never existed. Simply, the Greeks (just ^ -IjDie Llicke von fiinf Jahrhunderten, welche zwischen den Kunst- ; pnlfosopliischen Betrachtungen des Plato und Aristoteles und die des ' Pl6|ins fallt, kann zwar auffallig erscheinen; dennoch kann man flich nicht sagen, dass in dieser Zwischen zeit liberhaupt von ischen Dingen nicht die Rede gewesen; oder dass gar ein volliger 3І an Zusammenhang zwischen den Kunst-anschaunngen des snaniiten Philosophen und denen der ersteren existire. Preilich I die von Aristoteles begriindete Wissenschaft in Nichts dadurch ert; immerhin aber zeigt sich in jener Zwischenzeit noch jwisses Interesse flir asthetische Fragen. Nach Plotin aber, die en, ihm in der Zeit nahestehenden Philosophen, wie Longin, AiT^istin, 11. s. f. kommen, wie wir gesehen, kaum in Betracht und ' schWessen sich iibrigens in ihrer Anschauungsweise an ihn an, — ' vergehen nicht fiinf, sondern fiinf zeJm Jahrhunderte, in denen von li^md einer wissenschaftlichen Interesse flir die Welt des Schonen und jdei^unst nichts zu spiiren ist.
‘ D|ese anderthalbtausend Jahre, innerhalb deren der Weltgeist die mannigfachsten Kampfe hindurch zu einer vollig neuen *ljfe^ltung des Lebens sich durcharbeitete, sind fiir die Aesthetik, bin^chtlich des weiteren Ausbaus dieser Wissenschaft verloren. — Max Schi'sler.
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like everybody else, always and everywhere) considered art (like everything else) good only when it served goodness (as they understood goodness), and bad when it was in opposition to that goodness. And the Greeks themselves were so little developed morally, that goodness and beauty seemed to them to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life was erected the science of aesthetics, invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten’s theory. The Greeks (as anyone may see who will read Benard’s admirable book on Aristotle and his successors, and Walter’s work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.
Theories of aesthetics arose about one hundred and fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European лѵогИ, and arose simultaneously among different nations, — German, Italian, Dutch, French, and English. The founder and organiser of it, who gave it a scientific, theoretic form, was Baum gar ten.
With a characteristically German, external exactitude, ' pedantry and symmetry, he dcAdsed and expounded this extraordinary theory. And, notwithstanding its obvious I insolidity, nobody else’s theory so pleased the cultured/ crowd, or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the uppeij classes, that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it isl repeated by learned and unlearned as though it were some- j thing indubitable and self-evident.
Habent sua fata libelli pro cap/ite lectoris, and so, or even/ more so, theories habent sua fata according to the condition of error in which that society is living, among лѵЬот and foi whom the theories are invented. If a theory justifies the false position in which a certain part of a society is living, then, however unfounded or even obviously false the theory maj be, it is accepted, and becomes an article of faith to that WHAT IS ART?
65 section of society. Such, for instance, was the celebrated and unfounded theory expounded by Malthus, of the tendency of the population of the world to increase in geometrical progression, hut of the means of sustenance to increase only in arithmetical progression, and of the consequent ол''ег- population of the world; such, also, was the theory (an outgrowth of the Malthusian) of selection and struggle for existence as the basis of human progress. Such, again, is Marx’s theory, which regards the gradual destruction of small private production by large capitalistic production now going on around us, as an inevitable decree of fate. However unfounded such theories are, however contrary to all that is known and confessed by humanity, and however obviously immoral they may he, they are accepted with credulity, pass uncriticised, and are preached, perchance for centuries, until the conditions are destroyed which they served to justify, or until their absurdity has become too evident. To this class belongs this astonishing theory of the Baumgartenian Trinity — Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, according to which it appears that the very best that can be done by the art of nations after 1900 years of Christian teaching, is to choose as the ideal of their life the ideal that was held by a small, semi-savage, slave-holding people who lived 2000 years ago, who imitated the nude human body extremely well, and erected buildings pleasant to look at. All these incompatibilities pass completely unnoticed. Learned people write long, cloudy treatises on beauty as a member of the aesthetic trinity of Beauty, Truth, and Good- ness; das Schone, das Wahre^ das Gute; le Веащ le Vraiy le Bon, are repeated, with capital letters, by philosophers, aestheticians and artists, by private individuals, by novelists and by feuilletonistes, and they all think, when pronouncing these sacrosanct words, that they speak of something quite definite and solid — something on which they can base their opinions. In reality, these words not only have no definite 5 66 WHAT IS ART?
meaning, but they hinder us in attaching any definite mean ing to existing art; they are wanted only for the purpose о justifying the false importance we attribute to an art tha transmits every kind of feeling if only those feelings affor us pleasure.
CHAPTER VIII Вит if art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen, how could it he that humanity for a certain rather considerable period of its existence (from the time people ceased to believe in Church doctrine down to the present day) should exist without this im- portant activity, and, instead of it, should put up with an insignificant artistic activity only affording pleasure?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary, first of all, to correct the current error people make in attributing to our art the significance of true, universal art. We are so accustomed, not only naively to consider the Circassian family the best stock of people, but also the Anglo-Saxon race the best race if we are Englishmen or Americans, or the Teutonic if we are Germans, or the Gallo-Latin if лѵе are French, or the Slavonic if we are Russians, that when speaking of our own art we feel fully convinced, not only that our art is true art, but even that it is the best and only true art. But in reality our art is not only not the only art (as the Bible once was held to be the only book), but it is not even the art of the whole of Christendom, — only of a small section of that part of humanity. It was correct to speak of a national Jewish, Grecian, or Egyptian art, and one may speak of a now-existing Chinese, Japanese, or Indian art shared in by a whole people. Such art, common to a whole nation, existed in Russia till Peter the First’s time, and existed in the rest of Europe until the thirteenth or fourteenth 67 68 WHAT IS ART?
century; but since the upper classes of European society, having lost faith in the Church teaching, did not accept real Christianity but remained without any faith, one can no longer speak of an art of the Christian nations in the sense of the whole of art. Since the upper classes of the Christian nations lost faith in Church Christianity, the art of those upper classes has separated itself from the art of the rest of the people, and there have been two arts — the art of the people and genteel art. And therefore the answer to the question how it could occur that humanity lived for a certain period without real art, replacing it by art which served enjoyment only, is, that not all humanity, nor even any considerable portion of it, lived without real art, but only the highest classes of European Christian society, and even they only for a comparatively short time — from the commencement of the Eenaissance down to our own day.
And the consequence of this absence of true art showed itself, inevitably, in the corruption of that class which nourished itself on the false art. All the confused, unin- telligible theories of art, all the false and contradictory judgments on art, and particularly the self-confident stagna- tion of our art in its false path, all arise from the assertion, which has come into common use and is accepted as an unquestioned truth, but is yet amazingly and palpably false, the assertion, namely, that the art of our upper classes ^ is the whole of art, the true, the only, the universal art. And although this assertion (which is precisely similar to the assertion made by religious people of the various Churches who consider that theirs is the only true religion) is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust, yet it is calmly repeated by all the people of our circle with full faith in its infallibility.
^ The contrast made is between the classes and the masses: between those wdio do not and those лѵЬо do earn their bread by productive manual labour; the middle classes being taken as an offshoot of the upper classes. — Trans.
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69 WHAT IS ART?
69 The art we have is the whole of art, the real, the only- art, and yet two-thirds of the human race (all the peoples of Asia and Africa) live and die knowing nothing of this sole and supreme art. And even in our Christian society hardly one per cent, of the people make use of this art which we speak of as being the whole of art; the remaining ninety- nine per cent, live and die, generation after generation, crushed by toil and never tasting this art, Avhich moreover is of such a nature that, if they could get it, they would not understand anything of it. We, according to the current aesthetic theory, acknowledge art either as one of the highest manifestations of the Idea, God, Beauty, or as the highest spiritual enjoyment; furthermore, we hold that all people have equal rights, if not to material, at any rate to spiritual well-being; and yet ninety-nine per cent, of our European population live and die, generation after generation, crushed by toil, much of which toil is necessary for the production of our art which they never use, and we, nevertheless, calmly assert that the art which we produce is the real, true, only art — all of art!
To the remark that if our art is the true art everyone should have the benefit of it, the usual reply is that if not everybody at present makes use of existing art, the fault lies, not in the art, but in the false organisation of society; that one can imagine to oneself, in the future, a state of things in which physical labour will be partly superseded by machinery, partly lightened by its just distribution, and that labour for the production of art will be taken in turns; that there is no need for some people always to sit below the stage moving the decorations, winding up the machinery, working at the piano or Erench horn, and setting type and printing books, but that the people who do all this work might be engaged only a few hours per day, and in their leisure time might enjoy all the blessings of art.
That is what the defenders of our exclusive art say. But 70 WHAT IS ART?
I think they do not themselves believe it. They cannot help knowing that fine art can arise only on the slavery of the masses of the people, and can continue only as long as that slavery lasts, and they cannot help knowing that only under conditions of intense labour for the workers, can specialists — writers, musicians, dancers, and actors — arrive at that fine degree of perfection to which they do attain, or produce their refined works of art; and only under the same conditions can there he a fine public to esteem such productions. Free the slaves of capital, and it will be impossible to produce such refined art.
But even were we to admit the inadmissible, and say that means may be found by лѵЬісІі art (that art which among us is considered to be art) may be accessible to the whole people, another consideration presents itself showing that fashionable art cannot be the whole of art, viz. the fact that it is completely unintelligible to the people. Formerly men wrote poems in Latin, but now their artistic productions are as unintelligible to the common folk as if they were written in Sanskrit. The usual reply to this is, that if the people do not now understand this art of ours, it only proves that they are undeveloped, and that this has been so at each fresh step forward made by art. First it was not under- stood, but afterwards people got accustomed to it.
“It will be the same with our present art; it will be understood when everybody is as well educated as are we — the people of the upper classes — who produce this art,” say the defenders of our art. But this assertion is evidently even more unjust than the former; for we know that the majority of the productions of the art of the upper classes, such as various odes, poems, dramas, cantatas, pastorals, pictures, etc., which delighted the people of the upper classes лѵЬеп they were produced, never were afterлvards either understood or valued by the great masses of man- kind, but have remained, what they were at first, a mere WHAT IS ART?
71 pastime for rich people of their time, for whom alone they ever were of any importance. It is also often urged in proof of the assertion that the people will some day under- stand our art, that some productions of so-called “ classical ” poetry, music, or painting, which formerly did not please the masses, do — now that they have been offered to them from all sides — begin to please these same masses; hut this only shows that the crowd, especially the half-spoilt town crowd, can easily (its taste having been perverted) be accustomed to any sort of art. Moreover, this art is not produced by these masses, nor even chosen by them, but is energetically thrust upon them in those public places in which art is accessible to the people. For the great majority of working people, our art, besides being inaccessible on account of its costliness, is strange in its very nature, transmitting as it does the feelings of people far removed from those conditions of laborious life which are natural to the great body of humanity. That which is enjoyment to a man of the rich classes, is incomprehensible, as a pleasure, to a working man, and evokes in him either no feeling at all, or only a feeling quite contrary to that which it evokes in an idle and satiated man. Such feelings as form the chief subjects of present-day art — say, for instance, honour,^ patriotism and amorousness, evoke in a working man only bewilderment and contempt, or indignation. So that even if a possibility were given to the labouring classes, in their free time, to see, to read, and to hear all that forms the flower of contemporary art (as is done to some extent in towns, by means of picture galleries, popular concerts, and libraries), the working man (to the extent to which he is a labourer, and has not begun to pass into the ranks of those perverted by idleness) would be able to make nothing of our flne art, and if he did understand it, that which he under- ^ Duelling is still customary among the higher circles in Russia, as in other Continental countries. — Trans, 72 WHAT IS ATT?
stood would not elevate his soul, but would certainly, in most cases, pervert it. To thoughtful and sincere people there can therefore be no douht that the art of our upper classes never can be the art of the whole people. But if art is an important matter, a spiritual blessing, essential for all men (“like religion,” as the devotees of art are fond of saying), then it should be accessible to everyone. And if, as in our day, it is not accessible to all men, then one of two things: either art is not the vital matter it is represented to be, or that art which we call art is not the real thing.
The dilemma is inevitable, and therefore clever and immoral people avoid it by denying one side of it, viz. denying that the common people have a right to art. These people simply and boldly speak out (what lies at the heart of the matter), and say that the participators in and utilisers of what in their esteem is highly beautiful art, i.e. art furnishing the greatest enjoyment, can only be “schone Geister,” “the elect,” as the romanticists called them, the “ Uebermenschen,” as they are called by the followers of Metzsche; the remaining vulgar herd, incapable of ex- periencing these pleasures, must serve the exalted pleasures of this superior breed of people. The people who express these views at least do not pretend and do not try to com- bine the incombinable, but frankly admit, what is the case, that our art is an art of the upper classes only. So, essentially, art has been, and is, understood by everyone engaged on it in our society.
CHAPTER IX CHAPTER IX The unbelief of the upper classes of the European world had this effect, that instead of an artistic activity aiming at transmitting the highest feelings to which humanity has attained, — those flowing from religious perception, — лѵе have an activity which aims at affording the greatest enjoyment to a certain class of society. And of all the immense domain of art, that part has been fenced off, and is alone called art, which affords enjoyment to the people of this particular circle.
Apart from the moral effects on European society of such a selection from the whole sphere of art of what did not de- serve such a valuation, and the acknowledgment of it as important art, this perversion of art has weakened art itself, and well-nigh destroyed it. The first great result was that art was deprived of the infinite, varied, and profound religious subject-matter proper to it. The second result was that having only a small circle of people in view, it lost its beauty of form and became affected and obscure; and the third and chief result was that it ceased to be either natural or even sincere, and became thoroughly artificial and brain-spun.
The first result — the impoverishment of subject-matter — followed because only that is a true work of art which tmHsmits fresh feelings not before experienced by man. As thought-product is only then real thought-product лѵііеп it transmits new conceptions and thoughts, and does not merely repeat what was known before, so also an art- product is only then a genuine art-product when it brings 74 WHAT IS ART?
a new feeling (however insignificant) into the current of human life. This explains why children and youths are so strongly impressed by those works of art which first transmit to them feelings they had not before experienced.
The same powerful impression is made on people by feelings which are quite new, and have never before been exprfessed by man. And it is the source from which such feelings flow of which the art of the upper classes has deprived itself by estimating feelings, not in conformity with religious perception, but according to the degree of enjoyment they afford. There is nothing older and more hackneyed than enjoyment, and there is nothing fresher than the feelings springing from the religious consciousness of each age. It could not be otherwise: man’s enjoyment has limits estab- lished by his nature, but the movement forward of humanity, that which is voiced by religious perception, has no limits. At every forward step taken by humanity — and such steps are taken in consequence of the greater and greater elucidation of religious perception — men experience new and fresh feelings. And therefore only on the basis of religious perception (which shows the highest level of life-comprehension reached by the men of a certain period) can fresh emotion, never before felt by man, arise. From the religious perception of the ancient Greeks flowed the really new, important, and endlessly varied feelings ex- pressed by Homer and the tragic writers. It was the same among the Jews, лѵЬо attained the religious conception of a single God, — from that perception flowed all those new and important emotions expressed by the prophets. It was the same for the poets of the Middle Ages, who, if they believed in a heavenly hierarchy, believed also in the Catholic commune; and' it is the same for a man of to-day who has grasped the religious conception of true Christianity — the brotherhood of man.