What Is Art? (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy.

Odilon Redon, Cup of Cognition (The Children's Cup), 1894 (source)

What Is Art? is the favorite book about art of the author of my favorite book about art, Brenda Ueland, whose If You Want to Write should never be far from your grasp even if you don’t want to write. I picked up an old copy years ago and have meant to dig into it ever since.

Tolstoy’s introduction relates his battle with Russian censors, which he reckons he lost by making the slightest concessions. “So, little by little, expressions crept into the book which altered the sense and attributed things to me that I could not have wished to say. So that by the time the book was printed it had been deprived of some part of its integrity and sincerity.” He concludes with an evergreen observation: “All compromise with institutions of which your conscience disapproves,—compromises which are usually made for the sake of the general good,—instead of producing the good you expected, inevitably lead you not only to acknowledge the institution you disapprove of, but also to participate in the evil that institution produces.”

Afterward, the tone turns surprisingly amusing. He describes the view from the backstage of an opera rehearsal and sees it all with the objective clarity of an alien being. The opera is banal, and the actors are condemned to dreary repetition because someone keeps botching the blocking. The director grouses inhumanely at everyone from the stage to the pit. Tolstoy is moved to ask why human beings are wasting their lives like this.

It would be difficult to find a more repulsive sight. I have seen one workman abuse another for not supporting the weight piled upon him when goods were being unloaded, or, at hay-stacking, the village elder scold a peasant for not making the rick right, and the man submitted in silence. And, however unpleasant it was to witness the scene, the unpleasantness was lessened by the consciousness that the business in hand was needful and important, and that the fault for which the head-man scolded the labourer was one which might spoil a needful undertaking.

But what was being done here? For what, and for whom? Very likely the conductor was tired out, like the workman I passed in the vaults; it was even evident that he was; but who made him tire himself? And for what was he tiring himself? The opera he was rehearsing was one of the most ordinary of operas for people who are accustomed to them, but also one of the most gigantic absurdities that could possibly be devised. An Indian king wants to marry; they bring him a bride; he disguises himself as a minstrel; the bride falls in love with the minstrel and is in despair, but afterwards discovers that the minstrel is the king, and everyone is highly delighted.

Which is to say, the show is a dog. Most of them are. “The ballet, in which half-naked women make voluptuous movements, twisting themselves into various sensual wreathings, is simply a lewd performance.” So is most criticism. “Criticism, in which the lovers of art used to find support for their opinions, has latterly become so self-contradictory, that, if we exclude from the domain of art all that to which the critics of various schools themselves deny the title, there is scarcely any art left.”

It would be bad enough if we were destroying ourselves and civilization for the sake of amusement, but worse, we’re being taxed for it. “This money is collected from the people, some of whom have to sell their only cow to pay the tax, and who never get those æsthetic pleasures which art gives.” We owe it to simple decency to come up with a cogent explanation of why this expenditure of life and treasure is worthwhile.

Tolstoy turns to the history of aesthetics and finds it wanting. These chapters, II and III, are a whirlwind tour of two centuries of aesthetics starting with Baumgarten. Note well that Tolstoy knew more than a dozen languages, and one can assume that he tackled all the mentioned texts in the original. That includes Kant.

The æsthetic teaching of Kant is founded as follows:—Man has a knowledge of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside himself, he seeks for truth; in himself he seeks for goodness. The first is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free-will). Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity (Urteilskraft), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne Begehren). This capacity is the basis of æsthetic feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.

And with that, you no longer have to read Kritik der Urteilskraft.

Tolstoy distinguishes this great pile of words into two kinds, idealist and experimental. The idealists, like Hegel, view beauty as an emanation of perfection, God, or what have you. The experimentalists, like Darwin, view beauty as a response to certain stimuli. Did you know that Darwin wrote about aesthetics? I didn’t.

After Reid (1704-1796), who acknowledged beauty as being entirely dependent on the spectator, Alison, in his Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), proved the same thing. From another side this was also asserted by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of the celebrated Charles Darwin.

He says that we consider beautiful that which is connected in our conception with what we love. … According to Charles Darwin (1809-1882—Descent of Man, 1871), beauty is a feeling natural not only to man but also to animals, and consequently to the ancestors of man. Birds adorn their nests and esteem beauty in their mates. Beauty has an influence on marriages. Beauty includes a variety of diverse conceptions. The origin of the art of music is the call of the males to the females.

Frederick Turner wrote that flowers reflect the aesthetic preferences of bees.

Tolstoy regarded the idealists as fabulists and the experimentalists as incoherent.

On the one hand, beauty is viewed as something mystical and very elevated, but unfortunately at the same time very indefinite, and consequently embracing philosophy, religion, and life itself (as in the theories of Schelling and Hegel, and their German and French followers); or, on the other hand (as necessarily follows from the definition of Kant and his adherents), beauty is simply a certain kind of disinterested pleasure received by us. And this conception of beauty, although it seems very clear, is, unfortunately, again inexact; for it widens out on the other side, i.e. it includes the pleasure derived from drink, from food, from touching a delicate skin, etc., as is acknowledged by Guyau, Kralik, and others.

Instead, he proposed that art is a transmission of emotion. “In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure, and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man.” He likens it to speech, in which the emotions of one person are communicated to another. The germane passage is worth quoting at length:

Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the wood, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced, is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf, and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the wolf, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination), expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency, and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds, so that the hearers are infected by them, and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.

This is as good of a definition of art as has ever been produced.

If it has a shortcoming—all definitions do—it’s that the audience is too present for it. The work of art remains a work of art even if the capacity to convey feeling has no recipient. The boy wants to convey the terror of the wolf to his older brother or his best friend. Aside from love poems, the artist usually has no particular person in mind to receive his work. Instead he has a kind of person in mind, someone with sensibilities like his own. He hopes that such persons who appreciate his work live in the present and will live in the future, but he cannot know them in particular. If art is an infection, it’s the kind of infection that one can pick up from a surface, without an in-person encounter. Further exploration of the metaphor quickly becomes icky, so let’s leave it at that.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

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