What Is Art?

Overview

About two hundred pages, published in 1897, Tolstoy’s late treatise attacking the idea that art is about beauty. He surveys two centuries of aesthetic theory, rejects it, and defines art as the transmission of feeling from one person to others by means of signs.

Good art is sincere, clear and infectious; the best art conveys religious feeling and unites people. On this test he condemns most of the art of the upper classes, including Wagner, Baudelaire and his own novels, and praises folk art and the parables of the Gospels.

What happens

The cost of art. Tolstoy opens at a rehearsal of an opera, with its exhausted workers and abusive conductor, and asks what justifies the enormous labour and money that art consumes, and whether the people who pay for it know what it is.

The theories of beauty. He surveys aesthetics from Baumgarten through Kant, Schiller, Hegel and Schopenhauer to the French and English critics, and concludes that beauty means nothing more than what pleases a certain class of people.

The definition. Art is an activity by which one person, having experienced a feeling, transmits it to others by signs, so that they are infected by it. It is a means of union among people, as speech is, and its value depends on the feelings it transmits.

Counterfeit art. Since the Renaissance the upper classes, having lost religious faith, have demanded art that gives pleasure, and have produced counterfeits by borrowing, imitation, striking effects and interest. Tolstoy examines Wagner’s Ring at length as the type of counterfeit, and the French decadents as its poets.

The tests. Real art is infectious in proportion to the individuality of the feeling, the clarity of its expression, and above all the sincerity of the artist. Good art transmits either the religious feeling of the age, which for Tolstoy is the brotherhood of man, or the simple feelings of everyday life available to everyone.

The verdict. By these tests Tolstoy condemns nearly all the celebrated art of his time and his own novels, and praises folk songs, Dickens, Hugo, Millet and the parables, ending with a call for an art that will unite people in the feeling of brotherhood.

How to read it

Read the definition of art as transmitted feeling as a serious move rather than a crank’s, one that shifted the question from the object to the relation between people and shaped later theories of expression.

Pay close attention to the test of infection, and to how it hands judgment to ordinary people and strips it from critics, and ask what that does to the idea of difficult art.

Notice that the condemnation of Wagner, Baudelaire and his own novels is sincere, and that the book’s power to unsettle comes from an author who meant it about himself.

Consider the treatise beside the plain tales Tolstoy was writing at the same time, as a defence of what he was doing as much as a condemnation of what he had done.

Read this book alongside Aristotle’s Poetics to compare two definitions of art, one by its effect on the audience’s feelings and one by its imitation of action, and notice how much they share.

Questions it raises

• Is art really the transmission of feeling, and what happens to works that seem to transmit ideas, or forms, or nothing that could be called a feeling at all?
• If infection is the test, is a work that infects millions with a cheap feeling better than one that infects a few with a deep one, and does Tolstoy’s sincerity requirement rescue him from that result?
• Should we take the condemnation of Anna Karenina seriously, and what would it mean to agree with it?
• Is the attack on art for the upper classes a critique of privilege or a distrust of difficulty, and can the two be separated?
• What is the religious feeling of our own age, if there is one, and what art would Tolstoy’s test approve now?
• Why did a book so easy to dismiss keep its hold on later writers and critics, and what does it see about art that the theories of beauty missed?