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Title: Tolstoy on art
Author: graf. Leo Tolstoy
Editor: Aylmer Maude
Release date: July 5, 2026 [eBook #79027]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79027
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOLSTOY ON ART ***
TOLSTOY ON ART
[Illustration: L. N. TOLSTOY and A. P. CHEKHOV
_At Gaspra, in the Crimea, during Tolstoy’s illness in 1902_]
TOLSTOY
ON
ART
BY
AYLMER MAUDE
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW TORONTO
MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA
_Printed in the United States of America_
_Press of Geo. H. Ellis Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A._
PREFACE
The title of this book calls for some explanation. What is of value
in it all belongs to, or derives from, Tolstoy. Why then is it not
issued simply as a translation of Tolstoy’s essays on art?
The case is this: When Tolstoy’s _What is Art?_ (his chief work
on the subject) appeared in 1898, it gave rise to extensive
controversy. Several critics maintained that his propositions were
incomprehensible or ridiculous.
It happened that I had translated the book into English in personal
consultation with Tolstoy, besides exchanging a score of letters
with him discussing every point in the book that was not perfectly
plain to me. When my translation was completed and he had read it
carefully, he wrote a preface for it, in which he appealed to “all
who are interested in my views on art only to judge of them by the
work in its present shape.” He also said, “This book of mine, _What
is Art?_ appears now for the first time in its true form. More than
one edition has already been issued in Russia, but in each case it
has been mutilated by the censor.”
I wrote a thirty-page Introduction to the book, in which I set out,
as clearly as I could, what I understood to be Tolstoy’s essential
meaning, and in reply to an attack on Tolstoy in the _Quarterly
Review_, I wrote another article--which appeared in the _Contemporary
Review_--recapitulating my understanding of the matter. Both
these essays received Tolstoy’s emphatic approval. Of the first
he wrote, “I have read your Introduction with great pleasure. You
have admirably and strongly expressed the fundamental thought of
the book,” and of the second he wrote, “Your article pleased me
exceedingly, so clearly and strongly is the fundamental thought
expressed.”
It therefore happens that, though I had contributed no original ideas
and had merely restated Tolstoy’s views, my articles serve as a
decisive reply to those who maintained that Tolstoy meant something
he did not mean.
As evidence of his intention, therefore, these essays are worth
reproducing. Had I let the book be published simply as a translation
of Tolstoy, while including in it so much matter of my own, I should
have been reproached for encumbering the translation with matter not
written by Tolstoy. The objections to that course seem stronger than
those to the course I have adopted; and no third way of dealing with
the matter suggested itself to me.
The book is intended less for those who specialise in some particular
sphere or art and are satisfied with the views held by their
coterie, than for readers interested in the relation of art to life
in general, and who wish to understand why art is of importance to
mankind.
The illustrations consist chiefly of copies of Russian pictures
mentioned by Tolstoy and which, since the Revolution, are not
readily procurable. It has not in all cases been possible to procure
first-rate reproductions but, such as they are, they show what
Tolstoy was talking about and, as he was directing attention to the
feelings they convey rather than to their technique, the quality of
the reproduction is not of primary importance.
It is inconvenient that the name of a great writer should be spelt
in more than one way; so I take this opportunity to mention that not
only did Tolstoy write his name with a y, as did his wife and his
literary executors, but that this is in accord with the plan laid
down by the British Academy, in its “Scheme for the Transliteration
into English of words and names belonging to Russian and other
Slavonic languages.” On the Committee that dealt with this matter
were Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Dr. Hagberg Wright, Dr. Seton Watson,
Mr. Nevill Forbes, Mr. Minns, and other eminent authorities. The
agreement of Tolstoy’s own practice with the conclusions arrived at
by such a Committee should suffice to set this vexed question finally
at rest. It is indeed seldom wise to attempt to improve on a great
modern writer’s way of spelling his own name.
This volume presents, for the first time in English, a complete
collection of Tolstoy’s essays on art, and contains some that had not
previously been translated.
_What is Art?_, which has appeared before, gives, I think, the
most lucid statement of the nature of artistic activity and of its
relation to the rest of life, that has ever been penned. The rest
of the essays are chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the
process by which Tolstoy--himself a great artist both in fiction
and in the drama--arrived at the solution of this problem, which
had occupied his mind from his youth upwards, but which he did not
succeed in solving to his satisfaction until he had reached the age
of three score years and ten.
AYLMER MAUDE.
Great Baddow
Chelmsford
England
26th September, 1924
CONTENTS
PART PAGE
I A SURVEY OF TOLSTOY’S ESSAYS ON ART (1924) 1
II SCHOOLBOYS AND ART (1861) 21
III THE LAST SUPPER (1885) 29
IV ON TRUTH IN ART (1887) 33
V “WHAT IS TRUTH?” (1890) 36
VI INTRODUCTION TO AMIEL’S JOURNAL (1893) 38
VII INTRODUCTION TO S. T. SEMËNOV’S PEASANT STORIES (1894) 43
VIII INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1894) 46
IX FROM A LETTER TO PETER VERIGIN, THE DOUKHOBOR LEADER (1895) 72
X ON ART (_c._ 1895–7) 75
XI AN INTRODUCTION TO “WHAT IS ART?” (1899) 91
XII TOLSTOY’S PREFACE TO “WHAT IS ART?” (1898) 117
XIII WHAT IS ART? (1898) 121
APPENDICES 334
XIV TOLSTOY’S VIEW OF ART (1900 & 1924) 358
XV PREFACE TO POLENZ’S NOVEL _Der Büttnerbauer_ (1902) 378
XVI AN AFTERWORD, BY TOLSTOY, TO CHÉKHOV’S STORY,
_Darling_ (1905) 388
XVII SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA (1906) 393
XVIII A TALK ON THE DRAMA (_c._ 1907) 464
XIX TWO KINDS OF MENTAL ACTIVITY (1908) 466
XX PREFACE TO N. ORLOV’S ALBUM OF _Russian Peasants_ (1909) 468
APPENDIX: _Darling_ BY ANTÓN CHÉKHOV 474
INDEX 491
ERRATA
P. 271. _For_ English Academy _read_ Royal Academy
P. 274. Illustration “Charity.” _For_ British Academy _read_ Royal
Academy
P. 465. Delete date at end.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
L. N. Tolstoy and A. P. Chékhov _Frontispiece_
_At Gaspra, in the Crimea, during Tolstoy’s
illness in 1902_
PAGE
“The Last Supper” 30
_After a painting by N. N. Gay, 1863_
“What is Truth?” 36
_After a painting by N. N. Gay, 1890_
“The Day of Judgment” 270
_A painting by V. M. Vasnetsov in Kiev Cathedral_
A Sketch illustrating Turgenev’s story, “The Quail” 272
_By V. M. Vasnetsov_
“Charity” 274
_By Walter Langley, British Academy, 1897_
“A Triumphal Procession” 288
_A drawing by I. N. Kramskoy_
“Der Salontiroler” 290
_By Franz Defregger_
“The Angels at the Tomb of Christ” 298
_By E. Manet_
“The Return from Work” 470
_By N. Orlov_
“The Monopoly” 472
_By N. Orlov_
TOLSTOY ON ART
TOLSTOY ON ART
PART I
A SURVEY OF TOLSTOY’S ESSAY ON ART
Tolstoy’s little volume _What is Art?_ being out of print in
England at present, it occurs to me that it may be well, instead
of republishing it separately, to do what has not before been done
and bring together into a single volume all Tolstoy’s writings on
art, especially as some of these which certainly deserve attention,
are not included in any of the editions of his works that have been
published in England or in America.
Tolstoy’s views on art are often referred to, but seldom correctly
presented. In the leading British literary organ, the _Times Literary
Supplement_, of 28th April 1921, for instance, two reviewers, dealing
with different works, referred to _What is Art?_ and both of them
attributed to Tolstoy views he had never either expressed or held. A
letter in reply appeared a fortnight later in the same paper, saying:
“Allow me to point out to the reviewer of Mr. Joad’s
_Common-Sense Ethics_ that Tolstoy never ‘came to the
conclusion that the word beauty means nothing and is useless.’
On the contrary, _What is Art?_ furnishes evidence--were
evidence needed--that Tolstoy knew the meaning of the word and
found it useful. For instance, he says: ‘I fear it will be
urged against me that having denied that _the conception of
beauty can supply a standard_ for works of art, I contradict
myself by acknowledging ornaments to be works of art. The
reproach is unjust, for the subject-matter of all kinds
of ornamentation consists not in the beauty, but in the
_feeling_ (of admiration of and delight in the combination
of lines and colours) which the artist has experienced and
with which he infects the spectator. Art remains what it was
and what it must be: nothing but the infection by one man of
another, or of others, with the _feelings_ experienced by the
infector. Among these feelings is the feeling of delight at
what pleases the sight’....
“Here and elsewhere in the same book he understands and
approves of beauty, and he uses the word, as in a passage in
which he denounces exclusive art produced for a select circle
as having ‘lost its beauty,’ but he is careful _not to base
his definition of art_ on the use of the word beauty, because
that would merely substitute one problem for another, since
there is as much vagueness in the use of the word ‘beauty’ as
in that of the word ‘art.’ ‘There is no objective definition
of beauty.’ Tolstoy required a clear workable definition, and
found one which meets the case.
“The reviewer of Mr. Hind’s _Art and I_ says: ‘Tolstoy
held that a Russian peasant, just because he was a Russian
peasant, was a born judge of art.’ This is again a flagrant
misrepresentation. What Tolstoy says is that the highest
art has been understood by simple _unperverted peasant
labourers_; there is no special claim made on behalf of
Russians. He instances the poems of Homer, admitted to be
very great art yet eagerly listened to by ‘men of those times
who were even less educated than our labourers.’ Tolstoy’s
argument is, that a perverted education may sterilize man’s
capacity to enjoy art, but that an unperverted man naturally
possesses ‘that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man
and even to a child, that sense of infection with another’s
feeling--compelling us to joy in another’s gladness, to sorrow
at another’s grief, and to mingle souls with another--which is
the very essence of art.’”
It would be easy to multiply instances both of the attention paid to
Tolstoy’s views and of the misrepresentation of them that is still
common, but the above will suffice for the present purpose.
Something happened at the time of the first appearance of _What
is Art?_ which hindered the due understanding of it. Among his
many reformist activities, Tolstoy wished to see the business of
publishing set on a new basis, and he assumed that it would be easy
to improve on the methods employed by the best existing publishers.
Desiring no profit from his works, he was inclined to encourage the
publishing experiments of people who professed agreement with his
social and religious views; and it happened that _What is Art?_ was
completed just at the time when a small and impecunious group calling
itself The Brotherhood Publishing Co. had started business in London,
to propagate Tolstoyan views. At his wish and at that of his friend
Tchertkoff this Brotherhood Publishing Co. was entrusted with the
first publication of the version of _What is Art?_ which I had made
from Tolstoy’s manuscript chapter by chapter in consultation with him
as he wrote. It thus happened that the manager of the Brotherhood
Publishing Co. received the work before anyone in France and, without
asking permission, supplied to a Paris periodical the chapters in
which French writers and painters of the day were drastically dealt
with. The publication of this detached portion of the book apart from
the chapters disclosing his general argument was much regretted by
Tolstoy. It had the appearance of a wilful and unprovoked attack on a
number of distinguished individuals and evoked great indignation; so
that when, shortly afterwards, the book itself appeared in France, it
was at once met by a storm of invective and denunciation.
Now in those days French criticism led the literary world of Europe
and America, especially in regard to Russian literature, and in face
of this storm only certain of the most independent English critics
ventured to trust their own judgment and to testify to the value and
importance of Tolstoy’s work.
During the quarter of a century that has passed since then his views
have so far penetrated the public mind that some of them are already
becoming commonplaces, but there are many indications that his
message is still far from being completely understood.
It may be of interest to see how Tolstoy’s opinions on art grew and
developed. At the age of thirty, in February, 1858, he joined the
Moscow Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, and delivered a
lecture on “The Supremacy of the Artistic Element in Literature.”
It was never published, and has now been lost. From the record that
remains, it would seem that he argued that art should treat of what
is always beautiful and of what is as unalterable as the fundamental
laws of the soul, and that he condemned the utilization of art for
the indictment of particular social evils in one’s own age and
country. Many literary men in Russia were then much concerned about
the emancipation of the serfs, and Tolstoy seems to have suggested
that they were making art a tool, and failing to employ it in the
loftiest way. He had evidently far to travel before reaching his
ultimate conclusions.
In the winter of 1861, when absorbed in the school he had started
for peasant children at Yásnaya Polyána, he went for a walk late one
evening with some lads of ten or twelve years of age. Their talk
turned on singing, drawing, and art in general. Tolstoy’s account
of this walk will be found in the next chapter. He says: “We began
to speak of the fact that not everything exists for use, but that
there is also beauty, and that art is beauty, and we understood one
another, and Fedka quite understood what singing is for. It feels
strange to repeat what we said then, but it seems to me that we said
all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral beauty.”
In another article of that period he speaks of his amazement at
finding that these young peasant boys, when relieved of the technical
and mechanical difficulties of writing by having it done for them,
could compose stories showing high artistic feeling.
After many experiments he found that the most efficacious way of
stimulating these boys was to suggest to them interesting themes:
for instance, that they should write short stories to illustrate
popular proverbs. When they became interested in framing these
stories, it was not in the first instance they who had to do the
actual writing, but Tolstoy who wrote at their dictation. In this
way their eagerness and their creative faculty were not checked,
and it was possible quickly to point out to them wherein the real
difficulties of authorship lie. The real difficulty, to anyone
possessed of imagination and an active mind, is to select from all
the thoughts that suggest themselves those which are really most
essential to the story, to avoid repetition, and to maintain a due
proportion between the various parts. As soon as the boys found that
they really could compose stories which interested other people (and
a talented child is able to do this almost from the first if he is
judiciously advised and his exuberances checked) they naturally
became intensely eager to master the mechanical difficulties,
especially as Tolstoy was careful not to annoy them by injudicious
remarks about the tidiness of their copybooks, the quality of their
penmanship, or mere grammatical errors. A mastery of these things
can best be acquired through the boy’s desire to avoid absurdity and
to be intelligible. Tolstoy found that it merely annoys boys to be
told that a certain mistake infringes a rule of grammar. They care
nothing about grammar--they detest it. But if you put the thing
another way round, and point out to a child that what he has said is
unintelligible, or is open to misconstruction, or is not the best way
of saying the thing, he understands the common sense of that, and
learns his grammar or orthography in order to reach the result he
desires.
Similarly with all the sciences. Things that the schoolbooks and the
pedagogues often begin with, dry classifications and unknown words,
have the effect of repelling a boy and making him withdraw into
his shell as a tortoise does at the approach of danger. The proper
way, Tolstoy says, is to begin with things the child can verify
by his own observation, and in which he can be expected to take an
intelligent interest. When he already possesses an accumulation of
facts which to him are real and interesting, he may be glad enough to
accept classification and terminology, to enable him to sort out his
facts and deal with them more easily.
With music also this is true. Tolstoy achieved remarkable success by
avoiding the usual pedantry and compulsion, not obliging any boy to
work at it who did not like it, and helping the pupils to get quickly
at the real art of the thing in its simplest forms.
Convinced of the artistic capacity of these lads Tolstoy declared:
“I think the need to enjoy art and to serve art is inherent
in every human being whatever race or class he may belong to,
and that this need has its rights and should be satisfied.
Taking that position as an axiom, I say that, if the enjoyment
and production of art by every one presents inconveniences
and inconsistencies, the reason lies in the character and
direction art has taken: about which we must be on our guard
lest we foist anything false on the rising generation and lest
we prevent it from producing something new both in form and
matter.”
He was much troubled by the lack of good books for the people, and
wrote: “Let us print good books for the people.... How simple and
easy it seems, like all great thoughts! There is only one obstacle,
namely, that there exist no good books for the people either here or
in Europe. To print such books they must first be produced, and none
of our philanthropists think of undertaking _that_ line of work.”
This was in 1862. Twenty years later Tolstoy set himself to the
task he saw to be so necessary, and wrote that delightful series of
short and simple stories for the people, which are collected in the
volume of _Twenty-Three Tales_.[1] He also published a short play
called _The First Distiller_, adapted for performance at any country
fair or by any workers’ group, and among his posthumous plays there
is another of similar character, _The Cause of It All_. They are
both included in the volume of his _Plays_ issued in _The World’s
Classics_ series.
It is of course harder to produce work which shall really convey
a feeling to a wide audience than it is for a writer to restrict
himself to a circle who have undergone the same training, culture,
and social experience, as himself. To reach the wide mass of humanity
the artist, in addition to real sincerity, must have the qualities of
brevity and simplicity, as one sees them exemplified in the Gospel
parables, the Old Testament stories, popular folk tales, the old
ballads, and in a lesser degree in such modern works as Dickens’ _The
Christmas Carol_. But if the achievement be difficult, its social
importance is immensely great, and nothing in modern literature in
this direction has been more successful than Tolstoy’s stories in
_Twenty-Three Tales_. They have made their way into all languages and
have been welcomed everywhere by young and old, learned and simple
alike.
Curiously enough, the Oxford University Press edition of Tolstoy’s
works, the aim of which is to give English-speaking readers a
more readable, reliable, authoritative, and complete, rendering
of Tolstoy’s works than had previously been produced, originated
from Tolstoy’s efforts to provide good literature for the Russian
people. When the late W. T. Stead visited him at Yásnaya Polyána
they discussed the possibility of providing popular editions of the
best literature at a cheap price. Tolstoy spoke of what was being
done in that direction under his auspices in Moscow. And Stead after
his return to England issued a series of penny booklets containing
summaries of the best books. This plan aimed too high, and was not
permanently successful; but Grant Richards, who was one of Stead’s
assistants at the time, saw the possibilities in the idea and, after
starting his own business, brought out the _World’s Classics_ series,
well-printed and well-bound at a very moderate price. One of the
volumes he issued was _Essays and Letters_ by Tolstoy. The book met
with Tolstoy’s cordial approval, and of the rendering he wrote me:
“Your translations are very good because, besides having excellent
command of both languages, you also love the thoughts you transmit;
this gives me great pleasure.” Henry Frowde, who was the London
representative of the Oxford University Press, took over the series
when Grant Richards failed, and continued it. _Twenty-Three Tales_
was the next Tolstoy volume that was added, and others followed. What
distinguishes the _World Classics_ among other series of inexpensive
books is the care devoted to the editing and to the quality of the
versions produced. In this respect it claims to be far ahead of any
other edition of Tolstoy’s works.
Tolstoy’s marriage and the production of _War and Peace_,[2] _Anna
Karénina_[2] and the _First Russian Reading Books_ occupied him for
twenty years, during which he wrote little about the philosophy of
art, though references to art in his novels and stories indicate that
its influence on life always occupied his mind. He had previously in
_Lucern_ (1857) described an itinerant Swiss musician and expressed
indignation that the wealthy tourists who enjoyed that musician’s
art failed to contribute to his needs. A year later, in _Albert_,
he described a drunken but talented violinist he met in Petersburg.
In actual life he took Rudolph (the prototype of Albert) to Yásnaya
Polyána, and there studied music with him.
In _War and Peace_[2] there is a striking passage dealing with the
effect of Natasha’s singing on Nicholas, when he returns home in
despair after heavy losses at cards (ch. 15, Book IV, pp. 434–5).
Later, in 1879, in his very interesting _Confession_,[2] in the
course of a scathing denunciation of the life of the social circles
to which he belonged he says:
“During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness,
and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To
get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was
necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. And I did
so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the
guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings
towards goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I
succeeded in this and was praised.
“At twenty-six years of age I returned to Petersburg after the
war and met the writers. They received me as one of themselves
and flattered me. And before I had time to look round I had
adopted the views on life of the set of authors I had come
among, and these views completely obliterated all my former
strivings to improve. Those views furnished a theory which
justified the dissoluteness of my life.
“The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship,
consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing,
and in this development we--men of thought--have the chief
part; and among men of thought it is we--artists and
poets[3]--who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to
teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest
itself: what do I know and what can I teach? it was explained
in this theory that this need not be known, and that the
artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was considered an
admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural
for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and
taught, without myself knowing what. For this I was paid
money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society, and
I had fame; which showed that what I taught was very good.
“This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development
of life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be
its priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a
considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity.
But in the second, and especially in the third year of this
life, I began to doubt the infallibility of this religion
and to examine it. My first cause of doubt was that I began
to notice that the priests of this religion were not all in
accord among themselves. Some said: we are the best and most
useful teachers; we teach what is needed but the others teach
wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real teachers and _you_
teach wrongly. And they disputed, quarrelled, abused, cheated,
and tricked one another. There were also many among us who did
not care who was right and who was wrong, but were simply bent
on attaining their covetous aims by means of this activity of
ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our creed.
“Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors’
creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more
attentively, and I became convinced that almost all the
priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for
the most part men of bad worthless character, much inferior
to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military
life; but they were self-confident and self-satisfied as
only those can be who are quite holy or who do not know what
holiness is. These people revolted me, and I realized that
that faith was a fraud.
“But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and
renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people
gave me: the rank of artist, poet and teacher. I naïvely
imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach
everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I
acted accordingly.
“From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice:
abnormally developed pride, and an insane assurance that it
was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what.
“To remember that time and my own state of mind and that of
those men (though there are thousands like them to-day) is sad
and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling
one experiences in a lunatic asylum.
“We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to
speak, write, and print, as quickly as possible, and that it
was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of
us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and
wrote--teaching others. And without remarking that we knew
nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: What
is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we
all, not listening to one another, talked at the same time,
sometimes backing and praising one another in order to be
backed and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one
another--just as in a lunatic asylum.
“Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their
strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions
of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still
went on teaching, and could in no way find time to teach
enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was
not paid us.
“It was terribly strange, but it is now quite comprehensible.
Our real innermost concern was to get as much money and
praise as possible. To gain that end we could do nothing
except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order
to do such useless work and to feel assured that we were
very important people we required a theory justifying our
activity. And so among us this theory was devised: ‘All that
exists is reasonable. All that exists develops. And it all
develops by means of culture. And culture is measured by the
circulation of books and newspapers. And we are paid money
and are respected because we write books and newspapers, and
therefore we are the most useful and the best of men.’ This
theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous,
but as every thought expressed by one of us was met by a
diametrically opposed thought expressed by another, we ought
to have been driven to reflection. But we ignored this; people
paid us money, and those on our side praised us; so each of us
considered himself justified.
“It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic
asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and, like all
lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.”
And further on he says:
“Art, poetry?... Under the influence of success and the praise
of men I had long assured myself that this was a thing one
could do though death was drawing near--death which destroys
all things, including my work and its remembrance; but soon
I saw that that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art
was an adornment of life, an allurement to life. But life had
lost its attraction for me; so how could I attract others?
As long as I was not living my own life but was borne on the
waves of some other life--as long as I believed that life had
a meaning, though one I could not express--the reflection of
life in poetry and art of all kinds afforded me pleasure: it
was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art. But when
I began to seek the meaning of life, and felt the necessity
of living my own life, that mirror became for me unnecessary,
superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. I could no longer soothe
myself with what I now saw in the mirror, namely, that my
position was stupid and desperate. It was all very well to
enjoy the sight when in the depth of my soul I believed that
my life had a meaning. Then the play of lights--comic, tragic,
touching, beautiful, and terrible--in life amused me. But when
I knew life to be meaningless and terrible, the play in the
mirror could no longer amuse me.”
But it is plain that in his _Confession_ Tolstoy is not primarily
concerned with the philosophy of art. He introduces it only as part
of his scathing indictment of the life of the well-to-do classes.
Similarly in _What Then Must We Do?_ (1884) his terrific indictment
of modern civilisation includes frequent reference to art and
science, but there is no separate discussion of art, and his main
point is that, if art is as necessary and beneficial to man as
is generally supposed, a civilization is morally indefensible
that practically excludes the mass of the people from its
enjoyment--including those who spend their whole lives in printing
books, building theatres, libraries, and picture galleries, making
paints and canvas for artists, or providing food, clothing, shelter,
fuel and conveyance, for all who devote themselves to art. If the
labourer produces material food that the artist consents to consume,
the artist should in common fairness produce mental and spiritual
food adapted for the labourer’s consumption. But we, says Tolstoy,
consume what the labourer produces for us and then write books,
sonnets, and sonatas, not for him but for one another, dishonestly
leaving his mental needs unsatisfied. That indictment, powerful as it
is, is a thing apart from Tolstoy’s elucidation of the philosophy of
art, and finds its place better in _What Then Must We Do?_ (which is
due to appear shortly in the _World’s Classics_ series) than in this
volume.
In 1889 appeared _The Kreutzer Sonata_,[4] containing some striking
references to music.
The opinions there expressed are put into the mouth of Pózdnyshev,
a man mentally unbalanced, who has killed his wife without any
convincing proof that his jealousy was well-grounded. Tolstoy makes
Pózdnyshev’s abnormality quite clear. He is described as terribly
nervous and excitable, “with unnaturally glittering eyes which kept
rapidly moving from one object to another.” Pózdnyshev says that he
was “on the very point of suicide”; remarks that “you can drive me to
madness. I cannot answer for myself.” We are told of “the mad animal
jealousy in him.” And he says, “I could not have said what it was I
wanted. It was downright madness!”
His whole way of expressing himself is extreme, and granting that
Tolstoy uses him to express in exaggerated form views he himself
arrived at while writing the book, we have no right to add anything
to such emphatic utterances.
What then does this Pózdnyshev say? He says:
“One of the most distressing conditions of life for a
jealous man (and every one is jealous in our world) are
certain society conventions which allow a man and woman the
greatest and most dangerous proximity. You would become a
laughing-stock to others if you tried to prevent such nearness
at balls, or the nearness of doctors to their women-patients,
or of people occupied with art, sculpture, or especially
music. A couple are occupied with the noblest of arts,
music; this demands a certain nearness, and there is nothing
reprehensible in that, and only a stupid jealous husband can
see anything undesirable in it. Yet everybody knows that it is
by means of those very pursuits, especially of music, that the
greater part of the adulteries in our society occur....”
In another passage he continues his narration:
“The dinner was, as dinners are, dull and pretentious. The
music began pretty early. Oh, how I remember every detail
of that evening! I remember how he brought in his violin,
unlocked the case, took off a cover a lady had embroidered
for him, drew out the violin, and began tuning it. I remember
how my wife sat down with pretended unconcern, under which I
saw that she was trying to conceal great timidity--chiefly
as to her own ability--sat down at the piano, and then the
usual a on the piano began, the pizzicato of the violin,
and the arrangement of the music. Then I remember how they
glanced at one another, turned to look at the audience who
were seating themselves, said something to one another and
began. He took the first chords. His face grew serious, stern,
and sympathetic, and listening to the sounds he produced, he
touched the strings with careful fingers. The piano answered
him. The music began....
“They played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Do you know the
first presto? You do? Ugh! Ugh! It is a terrible thing, that
sonata. And especially that part. And in general music is a
dreadful thing! What is it? I don’t understand. What is music?
What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say
music exalts the soul. Nonsense, it is not true! It has an
effect, an awful effect--I am speaking of myself--but not of
an exalting kind. _It has neither an exalting nor a debasing
effect, but it produces agitation._ How can I put it? Music
makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me
to some other position, not my own. Under the influence of
music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel,
that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what
I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music acts like
yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see
some one yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I
laugh when I hear people laughing.
“Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental
condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges
with his and together with him I pass from one condition into
another; but why this happens, I don’t know. You see, he who
wrote, let us say, the Kreutzer Sonata--Beethoven--knew of
course why he was in that condition; that condition caused
him to do certain actions, and therefore that condition had a
meaning for him, but for me--none at all. That is why music
only agitates and doesn’t lead to a conclusion. Well, when
a military march is played, the soldiers step to the music
and the music has achieved its object. A dance is played, I
dance, and the music has achieved its object. Mass has been
sung, I receive Communion, and that music too has reached a
conclusion. Otherwise it is only agitating, and what ought
to be done in that agitation is lacking. That is why music
sometimes acts so dreadfully, so terribly. In China, music is
a State affair. And that is as it should be. How can one allow
anyone who pleases to hypnotize another, or many others, and
do what he likes with them. And especially that this hypnotist
should be the first immoral man who turns up?
“It is a terrible instrument in the hands of any chance user!
Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first
presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked
dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to
eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should
only be played on certain important significant occasions,
and then only when certain actions answering to such music are
wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to.
Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to
the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot
but act harmfully. At any rate on me that piece had an awful
effect; it was as if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of
which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me.
‘That’s how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but
that way,’ something seemed to say within me. What this new
thing was that had been revealed to me, I could not explain
to myself, but the consciousness of this new condition was
very joyous. All those same people, including my wife and him,
appeared in a new light.
“After that allegro they played the beautiful, but common and
unoriginal, andante with trite variations, and the very weak
finale. Then, at the request of the visitors, they played
Ernst’s Elegy and a few small pieces. They were all good,
but they did not produce on me one-hundredth part of the
impression the first piece had. The effect of the first piece
formed the background for them all.
“I felt lighthearted and cheerful the whole evening. I had
never seen my wife as she was that evening. Those shining
eyes, that severe, significant expression while she played,
and her melting languor and feeble, pathetic, and blissful
smile after they had finished. I saw all that, but did not
attribute any meaning to it except that she was feeling what
I felt, and that to her as to me new feelings, never before
experienced, were revealed or, as it were, recalled. The
evening ended satisfactorily and the visitors departed.”
Subsequently Pózdnyshev says:
“Only then did I remember their faces that evening when, after
the Kreutzer Sonata, they played some impassioned little
piece, I don’t remember by whom impassioned to the point of
obscenity.”
These allusions of Pózdnyshev to music have frequently been
misrepresented, owing no doubt to the title of the story. But
anyone who reads it carefully will see that he does not attribute
any dissolute influence to the _Kreutzer Sonata_. He expressly says
that it was some little piece by a composer whose name he does not
remember which was “sensual to the point of obscenity.” Of the
_Kreutzer Sonata_, and of music generally, what he says is that it
can have a “terrible” influence, because it lifts a man out of his
ordinary condition and arouses emotions which upset his balance and
expose him to various influences, which, amid certain surroundings,
may be bad.
It is an instance of the thoughtlessness with which works of fiction
are often read, that these utterances attributed to Pózdnyshev have
been taken as an indication that Tolstoy himself regarded Beethoven’s
_Kreutzer Sonata_ as an immoral work! One should compare Pózdnyshev’s
utterances with what Tolstoy had said in _War and Peace_, when
Nicholas Rostov felt his whole mood altered by his sister’s singing,
and ceased to despair or for a time even to feel his losses. Music
in both cases lifted people out of their customary or accidental
mood, and released energies which might flow in different directions
according to circumstances.
“Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that
was best in Rostov’s soul! And this something was apart from
everything else in the world. What were losses and Dólokhov
and words of honour?... All nonsense! One might kill and rob
and yet be happy!”
To see more clearly what was Tolstoy’s considered opinions about
music, one must turn to _What is Art?_ p. 287:
“Sometimes people who are together, if not hostile to one
another, are at least estranged in mood and feeling, till
perhaps a story, a performance, a picture ... but oftenest of
all music, unites them all as by an electric flash, and in
place of their former isolation and even enmity, they are all
conscious of union and mutual love. Each is glad that another
feels what he feels; glad of the communion established not
only between him and all present, but also with all now living
who will yet share the same impression; and more than that, he
feels the mysterious gladness of a communion which, reaching
beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past who have
been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the future
who will yet be touched by them.”
That passage effectually disposes of the suggestion that Tolstoy
regarded the normal effects of music as harmful.
Tolstoy felt that all art, by its power to sway man’s feelings,
contains much that is dangerous and terrible as well as much that is
necessary and ennobling, but one cannot read _What is Art?_ without
recognizing how strongly he felt the beneficial effect music may have.
Besides these references in his novels and stories before he had
fully cleared the matter up in his own mind and had expressed it in
_What is Art?_ Tolstoy dealt with various aspects of the matter,
more particularly from the ethical side, in a series of articles,
most of which aimed at drawing attention to stories or pictures of
which he specially approved. Among the earliest of these were a note
to accompany a reproduction of his friend Gay’s picture, _The Last
Supper_,--a very simple account of the incident depicted, and an
article _On Truth in Art_, which served as preface to a book intended
for children; these were followed by an important and discriminating
preface to Guy de Maupassant’s works which greatly interested
Tolstoy, and by an appreciative preface to Semënov’s Peasant Stories.
After these came an essay _On Art_, in which Tolstoy attempted
to deal with the general philosophy of the matter, but he was
dissatisfied with this attempt and withheld it from publication till
the matter had completely cleared itself up in his mind, and he had
expressed it in _What is Art?_ in a way that seemed to him adequate.
When _What is Art?_ appeared, Bernard Shaw wrote: “This book is a
most effective booby trap. It is written with so utter a contempt for
the objections which the routine critic is sure to allege against
it that many a dilettantist reviewer has already accepted it as a
butt set up by Providence.... Whoever is really conversant with art
recognizes in it the voice of the master.” And Mr. A. B. Walkley
said: “This calmly and cogently reasoned effort to put art on a new
basis is a literary event of the first importance.” Now the “booby
trap” of which Shaw speaks can be tried in this way. Induce some
friend--preferably one interested in art, or who has preconceived
opinions on the subject,--to read Tolstoy’s book, and if you find
that on reading it he concentrates on the dross he can find in it
and devotes himself to points and examples he can disagree with,
while remaining blind to the gold it contains, you have caught your
booby! For there is much gold to be found in it, and the gold is more
valuable than the dross.
Before that (in 1893) he had published a preface to a translation of
extracts from Amiel’s _Journal_. Later he wrote prefaces to a Russian
translation of W. von Polenz’s German novel, _Der Büttnerbauer_ (in
1902), and to Chékhov’s story, _Darling_ (in 1905), and notes to
reproductions of _Orlóv’s Pictures of Peasant Life_ (in 1909).
Besides these, in his last years, he wrote his highly controversial
article _On Shakespeare_, in 1906, of which one may say that, though
he read English with facility, Tolstoy was not so at home in our
language that he could be “enchanted by the mere word music that
makes Shakespeare so irresistible in English,” to borrow a phrase
from Bernard Shaw. But Tolstoy’s experience as a dramatist caused
him to acknowledge that “the movement of feeling, its increase,
alteration, and the combination of many contradictory feelings, are
often expressed truly and strongly in some of Shakespeare’s scenes.
And when performed by good actors this evokes, at least for a time,
sympathy with the characters presented. Shakespeare, himself an actor
and a clever man, knew how to express not by speech only but by
exclamations, gestures, and the repetition of words, the spiritual
conditions and variations of feeling that occur in the characters he
presents in his plays. So, for instance, in many places Shakespeare’s
characters, instead of uttering words, only exclaim or weep, or in
the middle of a monologue often show by a gesture the strain of their
position (as when Lear says ‘Pray you undo this button’), or in a
moment of strong emotion they repeat a question, and cause a word
that has struck them to be repeated, as is done by Othello, Macduff,
Cleopatra, and others. Similar clever methods of revealing the
movements of feeling, furnishing good actors with opportunities of
showing their powers, have often been mistaken, and are mistaken, by
many critics for the presentation of character.”
Apart from this practical mastery of stage-craft, which gives actors
and actresses such great opportunities, Tolstoy denies the claims
usually made on behalf of Shakespeare as a thinker or a faithful
presenter of characters true to life. He gives reasons, examples,
and instances, for his opinion, and if he is in error it should not
be difficult for Shakespeare-lovers to furnish as closely reasoned a
reply. All that need here be said is that, knowing what a strongly
established opinion he was challenging, he perhaps emphasised his
statement the more--for moderation was never a characteristic of his.
There is some indication that he was conscious of another side of the
case, for once, when his friend, A. P. Chékhov, came to see him when
he was ill in bed, he pressed the latter’s hand at parting and said,
“Good-bye, Anton Pávlovich. You know how fond I am of you, and how I
detest Shakespeare. Still, he did write plays better than you do.”
_A Talk on the Drama_ has been added, which is taken from I.
Tenerómo’s _Life and Talks of L. N. Tolstoy_ (St. Petersburg,
undated, but _c._ 1907). This bears many signs of authenticity,
corresponds with what one knows of Tolstoy’s views, and seems
sufficiently interesting to justify its inclusion.
In an Appendix is given a translation of Chékhov’s _Darling_, that
readers of Tolstoy’s preface to that work may see what he was writing
about.
PART II
SCHOOLBOYS AND ART
The following account of Tolstoy’s walk with boys from his
school at Yásnaya Polyána is taken from Chapter VIII, The
Schools, in Aylmer Maude’s _Life of Tolstoy_, Volume 1,
(Constable, London). It shows how Tolstoy, for the second
time, found himself faced by the question: What is Art? which
had arisen when he spoke to the Society of Lovers of Russian
Literature. This time it was put to him by a ten-year-old
peasant boy, and it then seemed to him that “we said all that
can be said about utility and plastic and moral beauty.”
The classes generally finish about eight or nine o’clock (unless
carpentering keeps the elder boys somewhat later), and the whole band
run shouting into the yard, and there, calling to one another, begin
to separate, making for different parts of the village. Occasionally
they arrange to coast down-hill to the village in a large sledge that
stands outside the gate. They tie up the shafts, throw themselves
into it, and squealing, disappear from sight in a cloud of snow,
leaving here and there on their path black patches of children
who have tumbled out. In the open air, out of school (for all its
freedom), new relations are formed between pupil and teacher: freer,
simpler and more trustful--those very relations which seem to us the
ideal which School should aim at.
Not long ago we read Gógol’s story _Viy_[5] in the highest class. The
final scenes affected them strongly, and excited their imagination.
Some of them played the witch, and kept alluding to the last
chapters....
Out of doors it was a moonless winter night, with clouds in the sky,
not cold. We stopped at the crossroads. The elder boys, in their
third year at school, stopped near me asking me to accompany them
further. The younger ones looked at us and rushed off down-hill. They
had begun to learn with a new master, and between them and me there
is not the same confidence as between the older boys and myself.
“Well, let us go to the wood” (a small wood about one hundred and
twenty yards from the house), said one of them. The most insistent
was Fédka, a boy of ten, with a tender, receptive, poetic yet daring
nature. Danger seems to form the chief condition of pleasure for him.
In summer it always frightened me to see how he, with two other boys,
would swim out into the very middle of the pond, which is nearly one
hundred and twenty yards wide, and would now and then disappear in
the hot reflection of the summer sun and swim under water; and how he
would then turn on his back, causing fountains of water to rise, and
calling with his high-pitched voice to his comrades on the bank to
see what a fine fellow he was.
He now knew there were wolves in the wood, and so he wanted to go
there. All agreed; and the four of us went to the wood. Another boy,
a lad of twelve, physically and morally strong, whom I will call
Sëmka, went on in front and kept calling and “ah-ou-ing” with his
ringing voice, to some one at a distance. Prónka, a sickly, mild, and
very gifted lad, from a poor family (sickly probably chiefly from
lack of food), walked by my side. Fédka walked between me and Sëmka,
talking all the time in a particularly gentle voice: now relating
how he had herded horses in summer, now saying there was nothing to
be afraid of, and now asking, “Suppose one should jump out?” and
insisting on my giving some reply. We did not go into the wood: that
would have been too dreadful; but even where we were, near the wood,
it was darker, the road was scarcely visible, and the lights of the
village were hidden from view. Sëmka stopped and listened: “Stop, you
fellows! What is this?” said he suddenly.
We were silent and, though we heard nothing, things seemed to grow
more gruesome.
“What shall we do if it leaps out ... and comes at us?” asked Fédka.
We began to talk about Caucasian robbers. They remembered a Caucasian
tale I had told them long ago, and I again told them of “braves,”
of Cossacks, and of Hadji Murad.[6] Sëmka went on in front,
treading boldly in his big boots, his broad back swaying regularly.
Prónka tried to walk by my side, but Fédka pushed him off the
path, and Prónka--who, probably on account of his poverty, always
submitted--only ran up alongside at the most interesting passages,
sinking in the snow up to his knees.
Everyone who knows anything of Russian peasant children knows
that they are not accustomed to, and cannot bear, any caresses,
affectionate words, kisses, hand-touchings, and so forth. I have
seen a lady in a peasant school, wishing to pet a boy, say: “Come,
I will give you a kiss, dear!” and actually kiss him; and the boy
was ashamed and offended, and could not understand why he had been
so treated. Boys of five are already above such caresses--they are
no longer babies. I was therefore particularly struck when Fédka,
walking beside me, at the most terrible part of the story suddenly
touched me lightly with his sleeve, and then clasped two of my
fingers in his hand, and kept hold of them. As soon as I stopped
speaking, Fédka demanded that I should go on, and did this in such a
beseeching and agitated voice that it was impossible not to comply
with his wish.
“Now then, don’t get in the way!” said he once angrily to Prónka,
who had run in front of us. He was so carried away as even to be
cruel; so agitated yet happy was he, holding on to my fingers, that
he could let no one dare to interrupt his pleasure.
“More! More! It is fine!” said he.
We had passed the wood and were approaching the village from the
other end.
“Let’s go on,” said all the boys when the lights became visible. “Let
us take another turn!”
We went on in silence, sinking here and there in the snow, not
hardened by much traffic. A white darkness seemed to sway before our
eyes; the clouds hung low, as though something had heaped them upon
us. There was no end to that whiteness, amid which we alone crunched
along the snow. The wind sounded through the bare tops of the aspens,
but where we were, behind the woods, it was calm.
I finished my story by telling how a “brave,” surrounded by his
enemies, sang his death-song and threw himself on his dagger. All
were silent.
“Why did he sing a song when he was surrounded?” asked Sëmka.
“Weren’t you told?--he was preparing for death!” replied Fédka,
aggrieved.
“I think he said a prayer,” added Prónka.
All agreed. Fédka suddenly stopped.
“How was it, you told us, your Aunt had her throat cut?” asked he.
(He had not yet had enough horrors.) “Tell us! Tell us!”
I again told them that terrible story of the murder of the Countess
Tolstoy,[7] and they stood silently about me watching my face.
“The fellow got caught!” said Sëmka.
“He was afraid to go away in the night, while she was lying with her
throat cut!” said Fédka; “I should have run away!” and he gathered my
two fingers yet more closely in his hand.
We stopped in the thicket beyond the threshing-floor at the very end
of the village. Sëmka picked up a dry stick from the snow and began
striking it against the frosty trunk of a lime tree. Hoar frost
fell from the branches on to our caps, and the noise of the blows
resounded in the stillness of the wood.
“Lëv Nikoláevich,” said Fédka to me (I thought he was again going
to speak about the Countess), “why does one learn singing? I often
think, why, really, does one?”
What made him jump from the terror of the murder to this question
heaven only knows; yet by the tone of his voice, the seriousness with
which he demanded an answer, and the attentive silence of the other
two, one felt that there was some vital and legitimate connection
between this question and our preceding talk. Whether the connection
lay in some response to my suggestion that crime might be explained
by lack of education (I had spoken of that), or whether he was
testing himself--transferring himself into the mind of the murderer
and remembering his own favourite occupation (he has a wonderful
voice and immense musical talent), or whether the connection lay in
the fact that he felt that now was the time for sincere conversation,
and all the problems demanding solution rose in his mind--at any rate
his question surprised none of us.
“And what is drawing for? And why write well?” said I, not knowing at
all how to explain to him what art is for.
“What is drawing for?” repeated he thoughtfully. He really was
asking, What is Art for? And I neither dared nor could explain.
“What is drawing for?” said Sëmka. “Why, you draw anything, and can
then make it from the drawing.”
“No, that is designing,” said Fédka. “But why draw figures?”
Sëmka’s matter-of-fact mind was not perplexed.
“What is a stick for, and what is a lime tree for?” said he, still
striking the tree.
“Yes, what is a lime tree for?” said I.
“To make rafters of,” replied Sëmka.
“But what is it for in summer, when not yet cut down?”
“It’s no use then.”
“No, really,” insisted Fédka; “why does a lime tree grow?”
And we began to speak of the fact that not everything exists for
use, but that there is also beauty, and that Art is beauty; and we
understood one another, and Fédka quite understood why the lime tree
grows and what singing is for.
Prónka agreed with us, but he thought rather of moral beauty:
goodness.
Sëmka understood with his big brain, but did not acknowledge beauty
apart from usefulness. He was in doubt (as often happens to men with
great reasoning power): feeling Art to be a force, but not feeling in
his soul the need of that force. He, like them, wished to get at Art
by his reason, and tried to kindle that fire in himself.
“We’ll sing _Who hath_ to-morrow. I remember my part,” said he. (He
has a correct ear, but no taste or refinement in singing.) Fédka,
however, fully understood that the lime tree is good when in leaf:
good to look at in summer; and that that is enough.
Prónka understood that it is a pity to cut it down, because it, too,
has life:
“Why, when we take the sap of a lime, it’s like taking blood.”
Sëmka, though he did not say so, evidently thought that there was
little use in a lime when it was sappy.
It feels strange to repeat what we then said, but it seems to me that
we said all that can be said about utility, and plastic and moral
beauty.
We went on to the village. Fédka still clung to my hand; now, it
seemed to me, from gratitude. We all were nearer one another that
night than we had been for a long time. Prónka walked beside us along
the broad village street.
“See, there is still a light in Masánov’s house,” said he. “As I was
going to school this morning, Gavrúka was coming from the pub, as
dru-u-nk as could be! His horse all in a lather and he beating it! I
am always sorry for such things. Really, why should it be beaten?”
“And the other day, coming from Túla, my daddy gave his horse the
reins,” said Sëmka; “and it took him into a snowdrift, and there he
slept--quite drunk.”
“And Gavrúka kept on beating his horse over the eyes, and I felt so
sorry,” repeated Prónka again. “Why should he beat it? He got down
and just flogged it.”
Sëmka suddenly stopped.
“Our folk are already asleep,” said he, looking in at the window of
his crooked, dirty hut. “Won’t you walk a little longer?”
“No.”
“Go-o-od-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!” shouted he suddenly, and tearing
himself away from us as it were with an effort, he ran to the house,
lifted the latch and disappeared.
“So you will take each of us home? First one and then the other?”
said Fédka.
We went on. There was a light in Prónka’s hut, and we looked in at
the window. His mother, a tall and handsome but toil-worn woman, with
black eyebrows and eyes, sat at the table, peeling potatoes. In the
middle of the hut hung a cradle. Prónka’s brother, the mathematician
from our second class, was standing at the table, eating potatoes
with salt. It was a black, tiny, and dirty hut.
“What a plague you are!” shouted the mother at Prónka. “Where have
you been?”
Prónka glanced at the window with a meek, sickly smile. His mother
guessed that he had not come alone, and her face immediately assumed
a feigned expression that was unpleasant.
Only Fédka was left.
“The travelling tailors are at our house, that is why there’s a light
there,” said he in the softened voice that had come to him that
evening. “Good-bye, Lëv Nikoláevich!” added he, softly and tenderly,
and he began to knock with the ring attached to the closed door. “Let
me in!” his high-pitched voice rang out amid the winter stillness
of the village. It was long before they opened the door for him. I
looked in at the window. The hut was a large one. The father was
playing cards with a tailor, and some copper coins lay on the table.
The wife, Fédka’s stepmother, was sitting near the torch-stand,
looking eagerly at the money. The young tailor, a cunning drunkard,
was holding his cards on the table, bending them, and looking
triumphantly at his opponent. Fédka’s father, the collar of his shirt
unbuttoned, his brow wrinkled with mental exertion and vexation,
changed one card for another, and waved his horny hand in perplexity
above them.
“Let me in!”
The woman rose and went to the door.
“Good-bye!” repeated Fédka, once again. “Let us always have such
walks!”
PART III
THE LAST SUPPER
_Letter-press to accompany a Half-tone Reproduction of N. N. Gay’s
Picture, “The Last Supper.”_
John XIII, v. 1–35 inclusive.
Jesus said: “Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
enemies....”
At the last supper Jesus showed this by his acts.
Having washed the feet of his twelve disciples, he said: “I have
given you an example, that ye also should do as I have done to you.”
What had Jesus done, and what was the example he gave to his
disciples?
When after supper Jesus began to wash the feet of his disciples and
Simon Peter wished to oppose it, Jesus said to him: “What I do thou
knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter. Ye are clean
but not all.”
Neither Simon Peter nor the other disciples then understood why he
said this. Only Judas Iscariot understood what Jesus was doing when,
kneeling before him, he washed his feet.
Having washed the feet of his betrayer, Jesus rose, put on his
garment, and having again sat down, said: “Know ye what I have done
to you? Ye call me Master, and ye say well; for so I am.”
But they, not knowing that Judas was a traitor, did not understand
what he had done and what he was teaching them.
Then, being troubled in spirit, Jesus said: “Verily, verily, I say
unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”
And again they did not understand what he was doing or what he was
saying to them. They only looked at one another seeking to discover
of whom he spoke.
Meanwhile the beloved disciple of Jesus was reclining on his bosom.
And Simon Peter, raising himself, beckoned to the beloved disciple
that he should ask the teacher of whom he spoke.
And the beloved disciple, leaning back on Jesus’ breast, asked him.
But Jesus did not give a direct reply, knowing that if he named his
enemy the disciples would be indignant and would want to punish the
traitor.
Wishing not to destroy but to save Judas, Jesus, instead of replying,
reached out his hand, took a piece of bread, and said softly: “He it
is for whom I shall dip the sop and give it him,” and when he had
given the sop to Judas he said: “What thou doest do quickly.”
The disciples, having heard this, thought that Jesus was sending
Judas into the town to buy what was needed for the feast.
But Judas understood that Jesus was saving him from the wrath of the
disciples, and immediately arose.
That is what is shown in the picture.
The beloved disciple, John, is the only one who knows who is the
traitor.
[Illustration: “THE LAST SUPPER”
_After a painting by N. N. Gay, 1863_]
He leaps up from his seat and stares at Judas. He does not
understand, does not believe that a living man can hate one who so
loves him. He is sorry for the unfortunate man and terrified for him.
Simon Peter guesses the truth from John’s look, and turns his eyes
now on John, now on Jesus, and now on the betrayer; and in his ardent
heart anger and desire to defend his beloved teacher flame up.
Judas has risen, gathered up his garment, thrown it around him, and
taken the first step, but his eyes cannot turn away from the saddened
face of the teacher. There is still time. He can still turn back and
fall at his feet confessing his sin, but the devil already possesses
his heart.
“Do not submit!” he says to him. “Do not yield to weakness, do not
subject yourself to reproaches from the proud disciples. They are
looking at you and only awaiting a chance to humiliate you. Go!”
Jesus lies leaning on his arm. He is not looking, but sees all, and
knows what is going on in Judas’ heart, and he waits and suffers on
his account. He pities the son of perdition. Jesus with his own hand
has fed his enemy, washed his feet, saved him from human punishment,
and until the end calls him to repentance and forgives him. Yet Judas
does not return to him.
And Jesus grieves for Judas, and for all who do not come to him.
Judas went out and hid himself in the darkness of the night.
Hardly had the door closed before the disciples all realized who the
betrayer was. They are agitated and indignant. Peter wants to run
after him. But Jesus raises his head and says: “Little children, yet
a little while I am with you. A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye love
one another. By this shall it be known that ye are my disciples,
if ye have love one to another.” And only then did Simon Peter and
the other ten understand what Jesus had done. Only then did they
understand that having all his life long shown them an example of
love of one’s neighbour, he has now given an example of love of one’s
enemy.
To the last moment he loved and pitied Judas, his enemy, called him
to himself and despite his unrepentance saved him from the anger of
the disciples.
PART IV
ON TRUTH IN ART
_Preface to a Miscellany, “The Flower Garden,” for Children._
“O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good
things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth
speaketh. The good man out of his good treasure bringeth
forth good things: and the evil man out of his evil treasure
bringeth forth evil things. And I say unto you, that every
idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account
thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be
justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” (Matt.
xii, 34–37.)
In this book besides stories in which true occurrences are narrated
there are also stories, traditions, proverbs, legends, fables, and
fairy tales, that have been composed and written for man’s benefit.
We have chosen such as we consider to be in accord with Christ’s
teaching, and therefore regard as good and truthful.
Many people, especially children, when reading a story, fairy-tale,
legend, or fable, ask first of all: “Is it true?” and if they see
that what is described could not have happened, they often say: “Oh,
this is mere fancy, it isn’t true.”
Those who judge so, judge amiss.
Truth will be known not by him who knows only what has been, is, and
really happens, but by him who recognizes what should be, according
to the will of God.
He does not write the truth who describes only what has happened, and
what this or that man has done, but he who shows what people do that
is right, that is, in accord with God’s will, and what people do
wrong, that is, contrary to God’s will.
Truth is a path. Christ said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
And so he will not know the truth who looks down at his feet, but he
who discerns by the sun which way to go.
All verbal compositions are good and necessary not when they describe
what has happened, but when they show what ought to be; not when they
tell what people have done, but when they set a value on what is good
and evil--when they show men the narrow path of God’s will, which
leads to life.
And in order to show that path one must not describe merely what
happens in the world. The world abides in evil and is full of
offence. If one is to describe the world as it is, one will describe
much evil and the truth will be lacking. In order that there may be
truth in what one describes, it is necessary to write not about what
is, but about what should be; to write not the truth of what is, but
of the kingdom of God which is drawing nigh unto us, but is not as
yet. That is why there are mountains of books in which we are told
what really has happened or might have happened, yet they are all
false if those who write them do not themselves know what is good
and what is evil, and do not know and do not show the one path which
leads to the kingdom of God. And there are fairy-tales, parables,
fables, legends in which marvellous things are described which never
happened, or ever could happen, and these legends, fairy-tales and
fables are true because they show wherein the will of God has always
been, and is, and will be: they show the truth of the kingdom of God.
There may be a book, and there are indeed many novels and stories,
that describe how a man lives for his passions, suffers, torments
others, endures danger and want, schemes, struggles with others,
escapes from his poverty, and at last is united with the object of
his love and becomes distinguished, rich, and happy. Such a book,
even if everything described in it really happened, and though there
were in it nothing improbable, would nevertheless be false and
untrue, because a man who lives for himself and his passions, however
beautiful his wife may be and however distinguished and rich he
becomes, cannot be happy.
And there may be a legend of how Christ and his apostles walked on
earth and went to a rich man, and the rich man would not receive him,
and they went to a poor widow, and she received him. And then he
commanded a barrel full of gold to roll to the rich man and sent a
wolf to the poor widow to eat up her last calf, and it might prove a
blessing for the widow, and be bad for the rich man.
Such a story is totally improbable, because nothing of what is
described ever happened or could happen; but it may all be true
because in it is shown what always should be--what is good and what
is evil, and what a man should strive after in order to do the will
of God.
No matter what wonders are described, or what animals may talk in
human language, what flying carpets may carry people from place to
place, the legends, parables, or fairy-tales will be true if there
is in them the truth of the kingdom of God. And if that truth is
lacking, then everything described, however well attested, will be
false, because it lacks the truth of the kingdom of God. Christ
himself spoke in parables, and his parables have remained eternally
true. He only added, “Take heed, how ye hear.”
PART V[8]
WHAT IS TRUTH?
It was in 1890 that N. N. Gay painted the well-known picture of
Tolstoy in his room at Yásnaya Polyána.
The picture which aroused most interest at Yásnaya that year,
however, was not a portrait of Tolstoy, but Gay’s “What is Truth?”
which had been exhibited in Petersburg early in the year and
prohibited. After being exhibited privately, Gay brought it to show
to Tolstoy, on whom it made a deep impression.
Already in January, when Gay had sent him a drawing of it, Tolstoy
had written to him:
“I am always thinking about you and your picture. I am longing
to hear how it is received. I am troubled over the figure of
Pilate which, with that arm, seems wrong somehow. I don’t say
it is, I only ask. If the connoisseurs say that that figure is
correct, I shall be satisfied. About the rest I know, and have
no need to ask anyone’s opinion.”
Though Tolstoy knew very well that Pilate’s arm was not well drawn,
he was immensely pleased with the treatment of the subject and the
thought and feeling expressed. Feinermann tells us:
“Leo Tolstoy, when he saw that painting, was so shaken and
agitated that for days after he could hardly speak of anything
else.
[Illustration: “WHAT IS TRUTH?”
_After a painting by N. N. Gay, 1890_]
“‘I am in raptures,’ he said. ‘That’s a master! I confess
that I myself only now understand the deep and true meaning
of that short passage which always appeared to me, as it has
to all the Bible commentators, unfinished and abrupt. Pilate
asked, “What is Truth?” and then went out to the crowd without
waiting for a reply. And everybody reads and understands it
that way. But this picture gives a different interpretation.
Pilate does not _ask_ what truth is, expecting a reply. No!
in the form of a question he contemptuously _replies_! When
Christ says that he has come into the world as a witness of
Truth, Pilate with a laugh and a contemptuous gesture throws
the words carelessly at him: “And what _is_ Truth? Truth
is a relative thing; everybody takes it his own way!” and,
evidently considering his retort decisive, he went out to
the crowd. That is the light in which the moment is seized.
It is new, it is profound, and how strongly and clearly the
picture expresses it! That fat shaven neck of the Roman
Governor, that half-turned, large, well-fed, sensual body,
that out-stretched arm with its gesture of contempt--are all
splendid--it is alive. It breathes and impresses itself on
the memory for ever. And the face.... Together with all the
dignity of that Roman figure there goes a slavish anxiety
about himself: the mean trepidation of a petty soul. He is
afraid he may be denounced at Rome.... And this smallness of
soul is wonderfully caught by Gay, and notwithstanding the
toga, and his height, and his majestic pose, Pilate appears so
petty before the wornout sufferer who has undergone during the
night arrest, judgment, and insults.... A wonderful picture!
That is the way to paint!’
“Gay, touched and deeply moved by Tolstoy’s delight, embraced
and kissed him, and said: ‘Do not praise it.... You will
praise me so that I shall become proud. I am afraid of
that.... I shan’t be able to paint!’”
PART VI
INTRODUCTION TO AMIEL’S “JOURNAL.”
About eighteen months ago I chanced for the first time to read
Amiel’s book, _Fragments d’un journal intime_. I was struck by
the importance and profundity of its contents, the beauty of its
presentation, and above all by the sincerity of this book.
While reading it I marked the passages which specially struck me. My
daughter[9] undertook to translate these passages and in this way
these extracts from _Fragments d’un journal intime_ were formed:
that is to say, they are extracts from the whole many-volumed diary
Amiel wrote day by day during thirty years, much of which remained
unprinted.
Henri Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821, and was soon left an orphan.
Having completed a course of higher education at Geneva, Amiel went
abroad and spent some years at the universities of Heidelberg and
Berlin. Returning in 1849 to his native land he, a young man of 28,
obtained a professorship at the Geneva Academy, first of Esthetics
and afterwards of Philosophy, which he held till his death.
Amiel’s whole life was passed at Geneva, where he died in 1881, in no
way distinguished from the large number of those ordinary professors
who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books on
their specialities, pass them on in an equally mechanical way to
their hearers, and from the yet greater number of writers of verse
lacking in substance, who supply these wares, which though no one
needs them are still sold by tens of thousands in the periodicals
that are published.
Amiel had not the slightest success either in the academic or
literary field. When he was already approaching old age he wrote of
himself as follows:
“What have I been able to extract from the gifts bestowed upon
me, and from the special circumstances of my life of half-a-
century? What have I drawn from my soil? Is all my scribbling
collected together--my correspondence, _these thousands of
sincere pages_, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my various
memoranda--anything but a collection of dry leaves? To whom and
for what have I been of use? And will my name live for even a
day after me, and will it have any meaning for anyone? An
insignificant, empty life! _Vie nulle!_”
Two well-known French authors have written on Amiel and his _Journal_
since his death--his friend, the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and
the philosopher Caro. It is interesting to note the sympathetic but
rather patronizing tone in which both these writers refer to Amiel,
regretting that he lacked the qualities necessary for the production
of real works. Yet the real works of these two writers--the critical
works of Scherer and the philosophical works of Caro--will hardly
long outlive their authors, while the accidental, unreal work of
Amiel, his _Journal_, will always remain a living book, needed by men
and fruitfully affecting them.
For a writer is precious and necessary for us only to the extent to
which he reveals to us the inner labour of his soul--supposing, of
course, that his work is new and has not been done before. Whatever
he may write--a play, a learned work, a story, a philosophic
treatise, lyric verse, a criticism, a satire--what is precious to us
in an author’s work is only that inner labour of his soul, and not
the architectural structure in which usually, and I think always,
distorting it, he packs his thoughts and feelings.
All that Amiel poured into a ready mould: his lectures, treatises,
poems, are dead; but his _Journal_, where, without thinking of
the form, he only talked to himself, is full of life, wisdom,
instruction, consolation, and will ever remain one of those best of
all books which have been left to us accidentally by such men as
Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Epictetus.
Pascal says: “There are only three kinds of people: those who, having
found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are engaged in
seeking Him, and those who, though they have not found Him, do not
seek Him.
“The first are sensible and happy; the last are senseless and
unhappy; the second are unhappy, but sensible.”
I think that the contrast Pascal makes between the first and the
second groups, between those who, as he says in another place, having
found God, serve Him with their whole heart, and those who, not
having found Him, seek Him with their whole heart, is not only not so
great as he thought, but does not exist at all. I think that those
who with their whole heart and with suffering (_en gémissant_, as
Pascal says) seek God, are already serving Him. They are serving Him
because by the suffering they endure in their search they are laying,
and revealing to others, the road to God, as Pascal himself did in
his _Pensées_, and as Amiel did all his life in his _Journal_.
Amiel’s whole life, as presented to us in this _Journal_, is
full of this suffering and whole-hearted search for God. And the
contemplation of this search is the more instructive because it never
ceases to be a search, never becomes settled, and never passes into
a consciousness of having attained the truth, or into a teaching.
Amiel is not saying either to himself or to others, “I now know the
truth--hear me!” On the contrary it seems to him, as is natural
to one who is sincerely seeking truth, that the more he knows the
more he needs to know, and he unceasingly does all he can to learn
more and more of truth, and is therefore constantly aware of his
ignorance. He is continually speculating on what Christianity and the
condition of a Christian should be, never for a moment pausing on the
thought that Christianity is the very thing that he is professing,
and that he is himself realizing the condition of a Christian. And
yet the whole _Journal_ is full of expressions of the most profound
Christian understanding and feeling. And these expressions act
on the reader with special force just by their unconsciousness
and sincerity. He is talking to himself, not thinking that he is
overheard, neither attempting to appear convinced of what he is not
convinced of, nor hiding his sufferings and his search.
It is as if one were present without a man’s knowledge at the most
secret, profound, impassioned inner working of his soul, usually
hidden from an outsider’s view.
And therefore while one may find many more shapely and elegant
expressions of religious feeling than Amiel’s, it is difficult to
find any more intimate or more heart-searching. Not long before his
death, knowing that his illness might any day end in strangulation,
he wrote:
“When you no longer dream that you have at your disposal tens of
years, a year, or a month, when you already reckon in tens of hours
and the coming night brings with it the menace of the unknown,
obviously one renounces art, science, politics, and is content to
talk with oneself, and that is possible up to the very end. This
inner conversation is the only thing left to him who is sentenced
to death but whose execution is delayed. He (this condemned man)
concentrates within himself. He no longer emits rays, but only talks
with his own soul. He no longer acts, but contemplates.... Like a
hare he returns to his lair, and that lair is his conscience, his
thought. As long as he can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude he
concentrates before that echo of himself, and holds converse with God.
“This is however not a moral investigation, not a repentance, not an
appeal; it is only an ‘Amen’ of submission.
“‘My child, give me thine heart.’
“Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for
others, because I want nothing. I should only like not to suffer.
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed for that same thing. Let us
say with him: ‘Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done!’ and
let us wait.”
Such was he on the eve of his death. He is not less sincere and
serious throughout his _Journal_, in spite of the elegance, and (in
passages) apparent choiceness of his phrasing, which had become
a habit with him. In the course of the whole thirty years of his
_Journal_ he felt what we all so carefully forget--that we are all
sentenced to death and our execution is only deferred. And that is
why this book is so sincere, serious, and useful.
PART VII
INTRODUCTION TO S. T. SEMËNOV’S PEASANT STORIES
I long ago laid down for myself the rule of judging every artistic
production from three aspects, first from the side of its content; in
how far is that which the artist reveals from a new side important
and necessary for man; for any production is, I think, a work of
art only if it reveals a new side of life: secondly, in how far
is the form of the work good, beautiful, and in accord with its
contents: and thirdly, to what extent is the relation of the artist
to his subject sincere, that is, in how far does he believe in what
he presents to us. This last quality always seems to me the most
important in artistic work. It gives its force to a work of art, and
makes it infectious, that is, it evokes in the spectator, the hearer,
or the reader those feelings which the artist himself experiences.
And Semënov possesses that quality in the highest degree.
There is a well-known story of Flaubert’s which Turgenev has
translated, _La légende de Julien l’hospitalier_; the last episode,
intended to be the most touching in the story, is one in which
Julien lies down in the same bed with a leper and warms him with his
own body. This leper is Christ, who carries off Julien to heaven
with him. All this is told with great mastery, but I always remain
perfectly cold when I read that story. I feel that the author himself
would not have done and would not even have wished to do what his
hero does, and therefore I myself do not wish to do it and do not
experience any agitation at reading of this amazing exploit.
But Semënov describes the simplest story and it always touches
me. A village youth comes to Moscow to find a place and, helped
by a coachman from his part of the country who is living with a
rich merchant, he gets a job as the yard-porter’s assistant. This
place had previously been held by an old man. The merchant, by his
coachman’s advice, had discharged the old man and taken the lad in
his place. The lad comes in the evening to begin his service, and
standing in the yard he hears the old man complain in the porter’s
lodge that through no fault of his he has been dismissed, merely to
give place to a younger man. The lad suddenly feels pity for the old
man and is ashamed to have pushed him out. He considers the matter,
hesitates, and finally decides to give up the situation which he
needs so much and would have been so glad to take.
All this is told in such a way that every time I read it I feel that
the author would not only have wished to, but certainly would, have
acted in that way under similar circumstances; his feelings infect me
and I feel pleased, and it seems to me that I too should have done,
or have been ready to do, something good.
Sincerity is Semënov’s chief merit. But besides that, his content is
always important: important because it relates to the most important
class in Russia, the peasantry, whom Semënov knows as only a peasant
can know them who himself lives in the laborious village; and the
content of his stories is also important because, in them all, the
chief interest is not in external events or in the peculiarity of
the life, but in the way men approach or fall away from the ideal of
Christian truth, which is present clearly and firmly in the author’s
soul and supplies him with a safe standard and appraisement of the
quality and importance of human actions. The form of the stories
fully corresponds to their content: it is serious and simple,
the details are always correct, and there are no false notes.
What is particularly good is the language, often quite original
in its expressions, but always natural and strikingly strong and
picturesque, in which the characters of the story speak.
PART VIII
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT
(This article was written by Tolstoy in 1894, to serve
as preface to a Russian edition of a selection of Guy de
Maupassant’s stories.)
It was, I think, in 1881 that Turgénev while visiting me took out of
his portmanteau a small French book entitled _La Maison Tellier_, and
gave it to me.
“Read it some time,” said he in an off-hand way just as, a year
before, he had given me a number of _Russian Wealth_ that contained
an article by Gárshin, who was then only beginning to write.
Evidently on this occasion, as in Gárshin’s case, he was afraid
of influencing me one way or the other and wished to know my own
unbiassed opinion.
“It is by a young French writer,” said he. “Have a look at it. It
isn’t bad. He knows you and appreciates you highly,” he added as
if wishing to propitiate me. “As a man he reminds me of Druzhínin.
He is, like Druzhínin, an excellent son, an admirable friend, _un
homme d’un commerce sûr_,[10] and, besides that, he associates
with the working people, guides them, and helps them. Even in his
relations with women he reminds me of Druzhínin.” And Turgénev told
me something astonishing, incredible, of Maupassant’s conduct in that
respect.
That time (1881) was for me a period of most ardent inner
reconstruction of my whole outlook on life, and in this
reconstruction the activity called the fine arts, to which I had
formerly devoted all my powers, had not only lost the importance I
formerly attributed to it, but had become simply obnoxious to me on
account of the unnatural position it had hitherto occupied in my
life, as it does generally in the estimation of the people of the
well-to-do classes.
And therefore such works as the one Turgénev was recommending to me
did not then interest me in the least. But to please him I read the
book he had handed me.
From the first story, _La Maison Tellier_, despite the indecency
and insignificance of the subject of the story, I could not help
recognizing that the author had what is called talent.
He possessed that particular gift called talent, which consists in
the capacity to direct intense concentrated attention according to
the author’s tastes on this or that subject, in consequence of which
the man endowed with this capacity sees in the things to which he
directs his attention some new aspect which others have overlooked;
and this gift of seeing what others have not seen Maupassant
evidently possessed. But judging by the little volume I read, he
unfortunately lacked the chief of the three conditions, besides
talent, essential to a true work of art. These are: (1) a correct,
that is, a moral relation of the author to his subject; (2) clearness
of expression, or beauty of form,--the two are identical; and (3)
sincerity, that is, a sincere feeling of love or hatred of what the
artist depicts. Of these three, Maupassant possessed only the two
last and was quite lacking in the first. He had not a correct, that
is a moral, relation to the subjects depicted.
Judging by what I read I was convinced that Maupassant possessed
talent, that is to say, the gift of attention revealing in the
objects and facts of life with which he deals qualities others have
not perceived. He was also master of a beautiful style, expressing
what he wanted to say clearly, simply, and with charm. He was also
master of that condition of true artistic production without which
a work of art does not produce its effect, namely, sincerity; that
is, he did not pretend that he loved or hated, but really loved or
hated what he described. But unfortunately lacking the first and
perhaps the chief condition of worthy artistic production, a correct
moral relation to what he described--that is to say, a knowledge
of the difference between good and evil--he loved and described
things that should not have been loved and described. Thus, in this
little volume, the author described with great detail and fondness
how women seduce men, and men women; and in _La femme de Paul_ he
even describes certain obscenities difficult to understand. And he
presents the country labouring folk not merely with indifference but
even with contempt, as though they were animals.
This unconsciousness of the difference between good and evil is
particularly striking in the story, _Une partie de campagne_, in
which is given, as a very pleasant and amusing joke, a detailed
description of how two men rowing with bare arms in a boat tempt and
afterwards seduce at the same time, one of them an elderly mother and
the other a young girl, her daughter.
The sympathy of the author is evidently all the time so much on the
side of these two wretches that he not merely ignores, but simply
does not see, what must have been felt by the seduced mother and
the maid (her daughter), by the father, and by a young man who is
evidently engaged to the daughter; and therefore, not merely is an
objectionable description of a revolting crime presented in the
form of an amusing jest, but the occurrence itself is described
falsely, for what is given is only one side, and that the most
insignificant--namely, the pleasure received by the rascals.
In that same little volume there is a story, _Histoire d’une fille
de ferme_, which Turgénev particularly recommended to me and which
particularly displeased me, again by this incorrect relation of the
author to his subject. He evidently sees in all the working folk he
describes mere animals, who rise to nothing more than sexual and
maternal love, so that his descriptions give one an incomplete and
artificial impression.
Lack of understanding of the life and interests of working people and
the presentation of them as semi-brutes moved only by sensuality,
spite, and greed, is one of the chief and most important defects of
most recent French writers, including Maupassant, who not only in
this but in all his other stories where he refers to the people,
always describes them as coarse, dull animals at whom one can only
laugh. Of course the French writers should know the nature of their
own people better than I do; but despite the fact that I am a Russian
and have not lived among the French peasants, I nevertheless affirm
that in so representing their people the French authors are wrong,
and that the French labourers cannot be such as they represent them
to be. If France--such as we know her, with her truly great men and
the great contributions those great men have made to science, art,
citizenship, and the moral development of mankind--if this France
exists, then that working class which has maintained and maintains
on its shoulders this France with its great men, must consist not of
brutes but of people with great spiritual qualities, and I therefore
do not believe what I read in novels such as _La terre_[11] and in
Maupassant’s stories; just as I should not believe it if I were told
of the existence of a beautiful house standing without foundations.
It may very well be these high qualities of the people are not
such as are described to us in _La petite Fadette_ and _La mère
aux diables_,[12] but I am firmly convinced that these qualities
exist, and a writer who portrays the people only as Maupassant does,
describing with sympathy only the _hanches_ and _gorges_[13] of the
Breton servant girls and describing with detestation and ridicule
the life of the labouring men, commits a great artistic mistake,
because he describes his subject only from one, and that the least
interesting, physical, side and leaves quite out of sight another,
and the most important, spiritual, side wherein the essence of the
matter lies.
On the whole, the perusal of the little book handed me by Turgénev
left me quite indifferent to the young writer.
So repugnant to me were the stories, _Une partie de campagne_, _La
femme de Paul_, _L’historie d’une fille de ferme_, that I did not
then notice the beautiful story, _Le papa de Simon_, and the story,
excellent in its description of the night, _Sur l’eau_.
“Are there not in our time, when so many people want to write, plenty
of men of talent who do not know to what to apply this gift, or who
boldly apply it to what should not, and need not, be described?”
thought I. And so I said to Turgénev, and thereupon forgot about
Maupassant.
The first thing of his that fell into my hands after that was _Une
Vie_, which someone advised me to read. That book at once compelled
me to change my opinion of Maupassant, and since then I have read
with interest everything signed by him. _Une Vie_ is excellent,
not only incomparably the best of his novels, but perhaps the best
French novel since Hugo’s _Les Misérables_. Here, besides remarkable
talent--that special strenuous attention applied to the subject,
by which the author perceives quite new features in the life he
describes--are united in almost equal degree all three qualities of
a true, work of art, first, a correct, that is a moral, relation of
the author to his subject; secondly, beauty of form; and thirdly,
sincerity, that is, love of what the author describes. Here the
meaning of life no longer presents itself to the author as consisting
in the adventures of various male and female libertines; here the
subject, as the title indicates, is life--the life of a ruined,
innocent, amiable woman, predisposed to all that is good, but ruined
by precisely the same coarse animal sensuality which in his former
stories the author presented as if it were the central feature of
life, dominant over all else. And in this book the author’s whole
sympathy is on the side of what is good.
The form, which was beautiful in the first stories, is here brought
to such a pitch of perfection as, in my opinion, has been attained
by no other French writer of prose. And above all, the author here
really loves, and deeply loves, the good family he describes; and he
really hates that coarse debauchee, who destroys the happiness and
peace of that charming family and, in particular, ruins the life of
the heroine.
That is why all the events and characters of this novel are so
life-like and memorable. The weak, kindly, debilitated mother; the
upright, weak, attractive father; the daughter, still more attractive
in her simplicity, artlessness, and sympathy with all that is good;
their mutual relations, their first journey, their servants and
neighbours; the calculating, grossly sensual, mean, petty, insolent
suitor, who as usual deceives the innocent girl by the customary
empty idealization of the foulest instincts; the marriage, Corsica
with the beautiful descriptions of nature, and then village life,
the husband’s coarse faithlessness, his seizure of power over the
property, his quarrel with his father-in-law, the yielding of the
good people and the victory of insolence; the relations with the
neighbours--all this is life itself in its complexity and variety.
And not only is all this vividly and finely described, but the
sincere pathetic tone of it all involuntarily infects the reader. One
feels that the author loves this woman, and loves her not for her
external form but for her soul, for the goodness there is in her;
that he pities her and suffers on her account, and this feeling is
involuntarily communicated to the reader. And the questions: Why, for
what end, is this fine creature ruined? Ought it indeed to be so?
arise of themselves in the reader’s soul, and compel him to reflect
on the meaning of human life.
Despite the false notes which occur in the novel, such as the
minute description of the young girl’s skin, or the impossible and
unnecessary details of how, by the advice of an abbé, the forsaken
wife again became a mother--details which destroy all the charm of
the heroine’s purity--and despite the melodramatic and unnatural
story of the injured husband’s revenge; notwithstanding these
blemishes, the novel not only seemed to me excellent, but I saw
behind it no longer a talented chatterer and jester who neither knew
nor wished to know right from wrong--as from his first little book
Maupassant had appeared to me to be--but a serious man penetrating
deeply into life and already beginning to see his way in it.
The next novel of Maupassant’s that I read was _Bel-Ami_.
_Bel-Ami_ is a very dirty book. The author evidently gives himself
a free hand in describing what attracts him, and at times seems to
lose his main negative attitude towards his hero and to pass over
to his side: but on the whole _Bel-Ami_, like _Une Vie_, has at its
base a serious idea and sentiment. In _Une Vie_ the fundamental idea
is perplexity in face of the cruel meaninglessness of the suffering
life of an excellent woman ruined by a man’s coarse sensuality;
whereas here it is not only perplexity, but indignation, at the
prosperity and success of a coarse, sensual brute who by that very
sensuality makes his career and attains a high position in society;
and indignation also at the depravity of the whole sphere in which
the hero attains his success. In the former novel the author seems
to ask: “For what, and why, was a fine creature ruined? Why did it
happen?” Here in the latter novel he seems to answer: all that is
pure and good has perished and is perishing in our society, because
that society is depraved, senseless, and horrible.
The last scene in the novel--the marriage in a fashionable church of
the triumphant scoundrel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, to the
pure girl, the daughter of an elderly and formerly irreproachable
mother whom he had seduced; a wedding blessed by a bishop and
regarded as something good and proper by everybody--expresses this
idea with extraordinary force. In this novel, despite the fact that
it is encumbered with dirty details (in which it is to be regretted
that the author seems to find pleasure) the same serious demands are
presented to life.
Read the conversation of the old poet with Duroy when after dinner,
if I remember rightly, they are leaving the Walters. The old poet
bares life to his young companion, and shows it as it is, with its
eternal and inevitable concomitant and end--death.
“She has hold of me already, _la gueuse_,”[14] says he of death.
“She has already shaken out my teeth, torn out my hair, crippled my
limbs, and is now ready to swallow me. I am already in her power. She
is only playing with me, as a cat does with a mouse, knowing that
I cannot escape. Fame? Riches? What is the use of them, since they
cannot buy a woman’s love? For it is only a woman’s love that makes
life worth living, and that too death takes away. It takes that away,
and then one’s health, strength, and life itself. It is the same for
everyone, and there is nothing else.”
Such is the meaning of what the old poet says. But Duroy, the
successful lover of all the women who please him, is so full of
sensual energy and strength that he hears and does not hear,
understands and does not understand, the old poet’s words. He hears
and understands, but the source of sensual life throbs in him so
strongly that this unquestionable truth, foretelling the same end for
him, does not disturb him.
This inner contradiction, besides its satirical value, gives the
novel its chief significance. The same idea gleams in the fine scenes
of the death of the consumptive journalist. The author sets himself
the question: What is this life? How solve the contradiction between
the love of life, and the knowledge of inevitable death? He seems to
seek, pauses, and does not decide either one way or the other. And
therefore the moral relation to life in this novel continues to be
correct.
But in the novels that follow, this moral relation to life grows
confused. The appraisement of the phenomena of life begins to waver,
to grow obscure, and in the last novels it is quite perverted.
In _Mont-Oriol_ Maupassant seems to unite the motives of his two
previous novels and repeats himself to order. Despite the fine
descriptions of the fashionable watering-place and of the medical
activity in it, which is executed with delicate taste, we have
here the same bull-like Paul, just as empty and despicable as the
husband in _Une Vie_; and the same deceived, frank, meek, weak,
lonely--always lonely--good woman, and the same impassive triumph of
pettiness and triviality as in _Bel-Ami_.
The thought is the same, but the author’s moral relation to what
he describes is already much lower, lower especially than in _Une
Vie_. The author’s inner appraisement of right and wrong begins to
get confused. Notwithstanding his abstract wish to be impartially
objective, the scoundrel Paul evidently has all his sympathy, and
therefore the love story of this Paul and his attempts at and success
in seduction produce a discordant impression. The reader does not
know what the author intends: is it to show the whole emptiness and
vileness of Paul (who turns indifferently away from, and insults, a
woman merely because her waist has been spoilt by her pregnancy with
his child); or, on the contrary, is it to show how pleasant and easy
it is to live as this Paul lives?
In the next novels, _Pierre et Jean_, _Fort comme la mort_, and
_Notre cœur_, the author’s moral attitude towards his characters
becomes still more confused, and in the last-named is quite lost.
All these novels bear the stamp of indifference, haste, unreality,
and, above all, again that same absence of a correct moral relation
to life which was present in his first writings. This began from the
time when Maupassant’s reputation as a fashionable author had become
established and he became liable to the temptation, so terrible in
our day, to which every celebrated writer is subject, especially
one so attractive as Maupassant. In the first place the success
of his first novels, the praise of the press, and the flattery of
society, especially of women; in the second the ever increasing
amount of remuneration (never however keeping up with his continually
increasing wants); in the third the pertinacity of editors outbidding
one another, flattering, begging, and no longer judging the merits
of the works the author offers but enthusiastically accepting
everything signed by a name now established with the public. All
these temptations are so great that they evidently turn his head, and
he succumbs to them; and though he continues to elaborate the form of
his work as well as or sometimes even better than before, and even
though he is fond of what he describes, yet he no longer loves it
because it is good or moral and lovable to all, or hates it because
it is evil and hateful to all, but only because one thing pleases and
another thing happens to displease him.
On all Maupassant’s novels, beginning with _Bel-Ami_, there lies
this stamp of haste and still more of artificiality. From that time
Maupassant no longer did what he had done in his first two novels.
He did not take as his basis certain moral demands and on that
ground describe the actions of his characters, but wrote as all hack
novelists do, that is, he devised the most interesting and pathetic,
or most up-to-date persons and situations, and made a novel out of
them, adorning it with whatever observations he had opportunity to
make which fitted into the framework of the story, quite indifferent
as to how the incidents described were related to the demands of
morality. Such are _Pierre et Jean_, _Fort comme la mort_, and _Notre
cœur_.
Accustomed as we are to read in French novels of how families live
in threes, always with a lover known to everyone except the husband,
it still remains quite unintelligible to us how it happens that
all husbands are always fools, _cocus et ridicules_,[15] but all
lovers (who themselves in the end marry and become husbands) are
not only not _cocus et ridicules_, but are heroic! And still less
comprehensible is it how all women can be depraved, and yet all
mothers saintly.
And on these unnatural and unlikely, and above all profoundly
immoral, propositions _Pierre et Jean_ and _Fort comme la mort_ are
built, and therefore the sufferings of the characters so situated
affect us but little. The mother of Pierre and Jean, who can live her
whole life deceiving her husband, evokes little sympathy when she
is obliged to confess her sin to her son, and still less when she
justifies herself by asserting that she could not but avail herself
of the chance of happiness which presented itself. Still less can we
sympathize with the gentleman who, in _Fort comme la mort_, having
all his life deceived his friend and debauched his friend’s wife, now
only regrets that having grown old he cannot seduce his mistress’s
daughter. The last novel, _Notre cœur_, has even no kernel at all
beyond the description of various kinds of sex-love. The satiated
emotions of an idle debauchee are described, who does not know what
he wants, and who first lives with a woman yet more depraved than
himself--a mentally depraved woman, who lacks even the excuse of
sensuality--then leaves her and lives with a servant girl, and then
again rejoins the former, and, it seems, lives with them both. If
in _Pierre et Jean_ and _Fort comme la mort_ there are still some
touching scenes, this last novel excites only disgust.
The question in Maupassant’s first novel, _Une Vie_, consists in
this: here is a human being, good, wise, pleasing, ready for all
that is good, and this creature is for some reason offered up as
a sacrifice first to a coarse, small-minded, stupid animal of a
husband, without having given anything to the world. Why is this?
The author puts that question and as it were gives no answer, but
his whole novel, all his feeling of pity for her and abhorrence of
what has ruined her, serves as answer. If there is a man who has
understood her suffering and expressed it, then it is redeemed, as
Job put it to his friends when they said that no one would know of
his sufferings. When suffering is recognized and understood, it is
redeemed; and here the author has recognized and understood and shown
men this suffering, and the suffering is redeemed, for once it is
understood by men it will sooner or later be done away with.
In the next novel, _Bel-Ami_, the question no longer is, Why do good
persons suffer? but Why do wealth and fame go to the unworthy? What
are wealth and fame? How are they obtained? And as before, these
questions carry with them their own answers, which consist in the
repudiation of all that the crowd of men so highly prize. The subject
of this second novel is still serious, but the moral relation of the
author to the subject he describes already weakens considerably, and
whereas in the first novel blots and sensuality which spoil it only
appear here and there, in _Bel-Ami_ these blots have increased and
many chapters are filled with dirt alone, which seems to please the
author.
In the next book, _Mont-Oriol_, the questions: Why, and to what end,
does the amiable woman suffer and the savage male secure success and
happiness? are no longer put; but it seems tacitly admitted that it
should be so, and hardly any moral demands are felt. But without the
least necessity, uncalled for by any artistic consideration, dirty
sensual descriptions are presented. As an example of this violation
of artistic taste, resulting from the author’s incorrect relation
to his subject, the detailed description in this novel of the
heroine in her bath is specially striking. This description is quite
unnecessary, and is in no way connected either with the external or
the inner purpose of the novel: “Bubbles appear on her pink skin.”
“Well, what of that?” asks the reader.
“Nothing more,” replies the author. “I describe it because I like
such descriptions.”
In the next novels, _Pierre et Jean_ and _Fort comme la mort_,
no moral demand at all is perceptible. Both novels are built on
debauchery, deceit, and falsehood, which bring the actors to tragic
situations.
In the last novel, _Notre cœur_, the position of the actors is most
monstrous, wild, and immoral; they no longer struggle with anything,
but only seek satisfaction for their vanity, sensuality, and sexual
desires; and the author appears quite to sympathize with their aims.
The only deduction one can draw from this last novel is that the
greatest pleasure in life consists in sexual intercourse, and that
therefore one must secure that happiness in the pleasantest way.
Yet more striking is this immoral relation to life in the half-novel,
_Yvette_. The subject, which is horrible in its immorality, is as
follows: A charming girl, innocent in soul and depraved only in
the manners she has learned in her mother’s dissolute circle, leads
a libertine into error. He falls in love with her, but imagining
that this girl knowingly chatters the obscene nonsense she has
picked up in her mother’s society and repeats parrot-like without
understanding--imagining that she is already depraved--he coarsely
offers her an immoral union. This proposal horrifies and offends her
(for she loves him); it opens her eyes to her own position and to
that of her mother, and she suffers profoundly. This deeply touching
scene is admirably described: the collision between a beautiful
innocent soul and the depravity of the world. And with that it might
end; but the author, without either external or inner necessity,
continues to write and makes this man penetrate by night to the girl
and seduce her. Evidently in the first part of the story the author
was on the girl’s side, but in the later part he has suddenly gone
over to the debauchee, and the one impression destroys the other--the
whole novel crumbles and falls to pieces like ill-kneaded bread.
In all his novels after _Bel-Ami_ (I am not now speaking of the short
stories, which constitute his chief merit and glory--of them later)
Maupassant evidently submitted to the theory which ruled not only in
his circle in Paris, but which now rules everywhere among artists:
that for a work of art it is not only unnecessary to have any clear
conception of what is right and wrong, but that, on the contrary,
an artist should completely ignore all moral questions, there being
even a certain artistic merit in so doing. According to this theory
the artist may or should depict what is true to life, what really
is, what is beautiful and therefore pleases him, or even what may
be useful as material for “science”; but that to care about what is
moral or immoral, right or wrong, is not an artist’s business.
I remember a celebrated painter showing me one of his pictures
representing a religious procession. It was all excellently painted,
but no relation of the artist to his subject was perceptible.
“And do you regard these ceremonies as good and consider that they
should be performed, or not?” I asked him.
With some condescension to my naïveté, he told me that he did not
know about that and did not want to know it; his business was to
represent _life_.
“But at any rate you sympathize with this?”
“I cannot say so.”
“Well then do you dislike these ceremonies?”
“Neither the one thing nor the other,” replied, with a smile of
compassion at my silliness, this modern, highly cultured artist who
depicted life without understanding its purpose and neither loving
nor hating its phenomena.
And so unfortunately thought Maupassant.
In his preface to _Pierre et Jean_ he says that people say to a
writer, “_Consolez-moi, amusez-moi, attristez-moi, attendrissez-moi,
faites-moi rêver, faites-moi rire, faites-moi frémir, faites-moi
pleurer, faites-moi penser. Seuls quelques esprits d’élites demandent
à l’artiste: faites-moi quelque chose de beau dans la forme qui vous
conviendra le mieux d’après votre tempérament._”[16]
Responding to this demand of the _élite_ Maupassant wrote his novels,
naïvely imagining that what was considered beautiful in his circle
was that beauty which art should serve.
And in the circle in which Maupassant moved, the beauty which should
be served by art was, and is, chiefly woman--young, pretty, and for
the most part naked--and sexual connection with her. It was so
considered not only by all Maupassant’s comrades in art--painters,
sculptors, novelists, and poets--but also by philosophers, the
teachers of the rising generation. Thus the famous Renan, in his
work, _Marc Aurèle_, p. 555, when blaming Christianity for not
understanding feminine beauty, plainly says:
“_La défaut du christianisme apparaît bien ici. Il est trop
uniquement moral; la beauté, chez lui, est tout-à-fait sacrifiée.
Or, aux yeux d’une philosophie complète, la beauté, loin d’être un
avantage superficiel, un danger, un inconvénient, est un don de Dieu,
comme la vertu. Elle vaut la vertu; la femme belle exprime aussi bien
une face du but divin, une des fins de Dieu, que l’homme de génie
ou la femme vertueuse. Elle le sent et de là sa fierté. Elle sent
instinctivement le trésor infini qu’elle porte en son corps; elle
sait bien que, sans esprit, sans talent, sans grande vertu, elle
compte entre les premières manifestations de Dieu. Et pourquoi lui
interdire de mettre en valeur le don qui lui a été fait, de sertir
le diamant qui lui est échu? La femme, en se parant, accomplit un
devoir; elle pratique un art, art exquis, en un sens le plus charmant
des arts. Ne nous laissons pas égarer par le sourire que certain mots
provoquent chez_ LES GENS FRIVOLES. _On décerne le palme du génie à,
l’artiste grec qui a su résoudre le plus délicat des problèmes, orner
le corps humain, c’est à dire orner la perfection même, et l’on ne
veut voir qu’une affaire de chiffons dans l’essai de collaborer à la
plus belle œuvre de Dieu, à la beauté de la femme! La toilette de la
femme, avec tous ses raffinements est du grand art à sa manière. Les
siècles et les pays qui savent y réussir sont les grands siècles,
les grands pays, et le christianisme montra, par l’exclusion dont il
frappa ce genre de recherches, que l’idéal social qu’il concevait ne
deviendrait le cadre d’une société complète que bien plus tard, quand
la révolte des gens du monde aurait brisé le joug étroit imposé
primitivement à la secte par un piétisme exalté._”[17]
(So that in the opinion of this leader of the young generation
only now have Paris milliners and coiffeurs corrected the mistake
committed by Christianity, and re-established beauty in the true and
lofty position due to it.)
In order that there should be no doubt as to how one is to understand
beauty, the same celebrated writer, historian, and savant wrote
the drama, _L’Abbesse de Jouarre_, in which he showed that to have
sexual intercourse with a woman is a service of this beauty, that
is to say, is an elevated and good action. In that drama, which is
striking by its lack of talent and especially by the coarseness of
the conversations between d’Arcy and the abbesse, in which the first
words make it evident what sort of love that gentleman is discussing
with the supposedly innocent and highly moral maiden, who is not
in the least offended thereby--in that drama it is shown that the
most highly moral people, at the approach of death to which they
are condemned, a few hours before it arrives, can do nothing more
beautiful than yield to their animal passions.
So that in the circle in which Maupassant grew up and was educated,
the representation of feminine beauty and sex-love was and is
regarded quite seriously, as a matter long ago decided and recognized
by the wisest and most learned men, as the true object of the highest
art--_Le grand art_.
And it is this theory, dreadful in its folly, to which Maupassant
submitted when he became a fashionable writer; and, as was to be
expected, this false ideal led him in his novels into a series of
mistakes, and to ever weaker and weaker production.
In this the fundamental difference between the demands of the novel
and of the short story is seen. A novel has for its aim, even for
external aim, the description of a whole human life or of many
human lives, and therefore its writer should have a clear and firm
conception of what is good and bad in life, and this Maupassant
lacked; indeed according to the theory he held, that is just what
should be avoided. Had he been a novelist like some talentless
writers of sensual novels, he would, being without talent, have
quietly described what was evil as good, and his novels would have
had unity, and would have been interesting to people who shared his
view. But Maupassant had talent, that is to say, he saw things in
their essentials and therefore involuntarily discerned the truth.
He involuntarily saw the evil in what he wished to consider good.
That is why, in all his novels except the first, his sympathies
continually waver, now presenting the evil as good, and now admitting
that the evil is evil and the good good, but continually shifting
from the one standpoint to the other. And this destroys the very
basis of any artistic impression--the framework on which it is built.
People of little artistic sensibility often think that a work of art
possesses unity when the same people act in it throughout, or when
it is all constructed on one plot, or describes the life of one man.
That is a mistake. It only appears so to a superficial observer.
The cement which binds any artistic production into one whole and
therefore produces the illusion of being a reflection of life, is not
the unity of persons or situations, but the unity of the author’s
independent moral relation to his subject. In reality, when we read
or look at the artistic production of a new author the fundamental
question that arises in our soul is always of this kind: “Well, what
sort of a man are you? Wherein are you different from all the people
I know, and what can you tell me that is new, about how we must look
at this life of ours?” Whatever the artist depicts--saints, robbers,
kings, or lackeys--we seek and see only the artist’s own soul. If
he is an established writer with whom we are already familiar, the
question no longer is, “What sort of a man are you?” but, “Well, what
more can you tell me that is new?” or, “From what new side will you
now illumine life for me?” And therefore a writer who has not a clear
definite and just view of the universe, and especially a man who
considers that this isn’t even wanted, cannot produce a work of art.
He may write much and admirably, but a work of art will not result.
So it was with Maupassant in his novels. In his first two novels,
and especially in the first, _Une Vie_, there was a clear, definite,
and new relation to life, and it was an artistic production; but
as soon as, submitting to the fashionable theory, he decided that
this relation of the author to life was quite unnecessary and began
to write merely in order _faire quelque chose de beau_ (to produce
something beautiful), his novels ceased to be works of art. In _Une
Vie_ and _Bel-Ami_ the author knows whom he should love and whom
he should hate, and the reader agrees with him and believes in
him--believes in the people and events he describes. But in _Notre
cœur_ and _Yvette_ the author does not know whom he should love and
whom he should hate, and the reader does not know either. And not
knowing this, the reader does not believe in the events described and
is not interested in them. And therefore, except the two first or,
strictly speaking, excepting only the first novel, all Maupassant’s,
as novels, are weak; and if he had left us only his novels he would
have been merely a striking instance of the way in which brilliant
talents may perish as a result of the false environment in which he
developed and of these false theories of art that have been devised
by people who neither love nor understand it. But fortunately
Maupassant wrote short stories in which he did not subject himself
to the false theory he had accepted, and wrote not _quelque chose de
beau_, but what touched or revolted his moral feeling. And in these
short stories--not in all, but in the best of them--we see how that
moral feeling grew in the author.
And it is in this that the wonderful quality of every true artist
lies, if only he does not do violence to himself under the influence
of a false theory. His talent teaches its possessor and leads him
forward along the path of moral development, compelling him to
love what deserves love and to hate what deserves hate. An artist
is an artist because he sees things not as he wishes to see them
but as they really are. The possessor of a talent, the man, may
make mistakes, but his talent if only it is allowed free play,
as Maupassant gave it free play in his short stories, discloses,
undrapes the object, and compels love of it if it deserves love
and hatred of it if it deserves hatred. With every true artist,
when under the influence of his circle he begins to represent what
should not be represented, there happens what happened to Balaam,
who, wishing to bless, cursed what should be cursed, and wishing to
curse, blessed what should be blessed: involuntarily he does, not
what he wishes to do but what he should do. And this happened to
Maupassant.
There has hardly been another writer who so sincerely thought that
all the good, all the meaning of life, lies in woman--in love, and
who with such strength of passion described woman and her love from
all sides; and there has hardly ever been a writer who reached such
clearness and exactitude in showing all the awful phases of that very
thing which had seemed to him the highest and the greatest of life’s
blessings. The more he penetrated into the question the more it
revealed itself, and the more did the coverings fall from it and only
its horrible results and yet more horrible essence remain.
Read of the idiot son, of the night with a daughter (_L’ermite_),
of the sailor with his sister (_Le port_), _Le champ d’oliviers_,
_La petite Roque_, of the English girl (_Miss Harriet_), _Monsieur
Parent_, _L’armoire_ (the girl who fell asleep in the cupboard),
the wedding in _Sur l’eau_, and last expression of all, _Un cas de
divorce_. Just what was said by Marcus Aurelius when devising means
to destroy the attractiveness of this sin in his imagination, is what
Maupassant does in most vivid artistic forms, turning one’s soul
inside out. He wished to extol sex-love, but the better he came to
know it the more he cursed it. He cursed sex-love for the misfortunes
and sufferings it bears within it, and for the disillusionments and,
above all, for the falsification of real love, for the fraud which is
in it from which man suffers the more acutely the more trustingly he
has yielded to the deception.
The powerful moral growth of the author in the course of his literary
activity is recorded in indelible traits in these charming short
stories and in his best book, _Sur l’eau_.
And not alone in this involuntary and therefore all the more
powerful dethronement of sex-love is the moral growth of the author
seen, but also in the more and more exalted moral demands he makes
upon life.
Not alone in sex-love does he see the innate contradiction between
the demands of animal and rational man; he sees it in the whole
organization of the world.
He sees that the world as it is, the material world, is not
only not the best of worlds, but might on the contrary be quite
different--this thought is strikingly expressed in _Horla_--and that
it does not satisfy the demands of reason and life. He sees that
there is some other world, or at least the demand for such another
world, in the soul of man.
He is tormented not only by the irrationality of the material world
and its ugliness, but by its unlovingness, its discord. I do not know
a more heart-rending cry of horror from one who has lost his way and
is conscious of his loneliness, than the expression of this idea in
that most charming story, _Solitude_.
The thing that most tormented Maupassant and to which he returns many
times, is the painful state of isolation, spiritual isolation, of
man; the barrier standing between him and his fellows; a barrier, he
says, the more painfully felt the nearer one’s bodily connexion.
What is it torments him, and what would he have? What can destroy
this barrier? What end this isolation? Love--not feminine love, which
has become disgusting to him, but pure, spiritual, divine love. And
that is what Maupassant seeks. Towards it, towards this saviour of
life long since plainly disclosed to all men, he painfully strains
from those fetters in which he feels himself bound.
He does not yet know how to name what he seeks. He does not
wish to name it with his lips alone, lest he should profane his
holy-of-holies. But his unexpressed striving, shown in his dread of
loneliness, is so sincere that it infects and attracts one more
strongly than many and many sermons about love, uttered only by the
lips.
* * * * *
The tragedy of Maupassant’s life is that being in a most monstrous
and immoral circle, he by the strength of his talent, by that
extraordinary light which was in him, was escaping from the outlook
on life held by that circle, and was already near to deliverance,
was already breathing the air of freedom but, having exhausted his
last strength in the struggle and not being able to make a last
effort--perished without having attained freedom.
The tragedy of that ruin lies in what still afflicts the majority of
the so-called cultured men of our time.
Men in general never have lived without an expression of the
meaning of their life. Always and everywhere, highly-gifted men
going in advance of others have appeared--the prophets, as they are
called--who have explained to men the meaning and purport of their
life; and always the ordinary, average men, who had not the strength
to explain that meaning for themselves, have followed the explanation
of life their prophets have disclosed to them.
That meaning was explained eighteen hundred years ago by
Christianity, simply, clearly, indubitably, and joyfully, as is
proved by the lives of all who acknowledge it and follow the guidance
of life which results from that conception.
But then people appeared who misinterpreted that meaning so that
it became meaningless, and men are placed in the dilemma either of
acknowledging Christianity as interpreted by Orthodoxy, Lourdes,
the Pope, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and so forth, or
of going on with life according to the teachings of Renan and his
kind, that is, living without any direction or understanding of life,
following only their lusts as long as they are strong, and their
habits when their lusts become feeble.
And people, ordinary people, choose the one or the other, sometimes
both, first dissoluteness and then Orthodoxy; and thus whole
generations live, shielding themselves with various theories,
invented not to disclose the truth but to hide it. And ordinary, and
more especially dull, people are content.
But there are others--not many, they are rare--such as Maupassant,
who with their own eyes see things as they are, see their
significance, see the contradictions in life concealed from others,
and vividly realize to what these contradictions must inevitably lead
them--and seek to solve them in advance. They seek these solutions
everywhere except where they are to be found, namely in Christianity,
because Christianity appears to them outlived and discarded,
repelling them by its absurdity. And vainly trying to find these
solutions for themselves, they come to the conviction that there are
no solutions, and that it is inherent in life that one should always
bear in oneself these unsolved contradictions. And having come to
such a conclusion, if these people are feeble unenergetic natures,
they put up with such meaningless life and are even proud of their
position, accounting their ignorance a quality and a sign of culture.
But if they are energetic, truthful, and gifted natures, such as
Maupassant was, they do not endure this, but one way or other try to
get out of this senseless life.
It is as if men thirsting in a desert sought water everywhere
except near those people who, standing round a spring pollute it
and offer stinking mire instead of the water that unceasingly flows
beneath the mire. Maupassant was in this position; he could not
believe--evidently it never even entered his head--that the truth he
sought had long ago been found and was so near him; but neither could
he believe that man can live in such contradiction as that in which
he felt himself to be living.
Life, according to the theories in which he had been brought up,
which surrounded him and were corroborated by all the lusts of his
young, and mentally and physically strong, being--life consists
in pleasure, of which the chief is to be found in woman with her
love, and in the reproduction of this pleasure in its reflection,
in the presentation of this love, and in exciting it in others. All
this might be well; but on examining these pleasures quite other
things emerge, alien and hostile to this love and this beauty:
woman for some reason is disfigured, becomes unpleasantly pregnant
and repulsive, gives birth to children, unwanted children; then
come deceptions, cruelties, moral suffering, then mere old age, and
ultimately death.
Then is this beauty indeed beauty? And why is all this so? It would
be all very well if one could arrest life, but life goes on. And what
does that mean? “Life goes on” means that the hair falls out, turns
grey, the teeth decay, and there are wrinkles and offensive breath.
Even before all is finished, everything becomes dreadful, repulsive:
the rouge, the powder, the sweat, the smell, and the disgustingness,
are evident. Where then is that which I serve? Where is beauty? But
she is all! And if she is not, there is nothing left. There is no
life!
But not merely is there no life in what seemed to be life: one begins
to forsake it oneself, one becomes weaker, more stupid, one decays;
others before one’s eyes seize those delights in which all the good
of life lay. Nor is that all. Some other possibility of life begins
to glimmer on one’s mind; something else, some other kind of union
with men, with the whole world, one which does not admit of all these
deceptions, something which cannot by any means be infringed; which
is true and forever beautiful. But this cannot be. It is only the
tantalizing vision of an oasis when we know that it does not exist
and that there is nothing but sand everywhere.
Maupassant reached that tragic moment in life when the struggle
begins between the falseness of the life about him and the truth of
life of which he began to be conscious. Pangs of spiritual birth had
already begun in him.
And it is these pangs of this birth that are expressed in his best
work, especially in the short stories printed in this edition.
Had he not been fated to die while still suffering, but to fulfil
all his possibilities, he would have left us great and illuminating
works; but even what he gave us in the midst of his pain is much. Let
us then be thankful to this strong and truthful man for what he has
given us.
PART IX
FROM A LETTER TO PETER VERIGIN, THE DOUKHOBOR LEADER
The thoughts expressed in your letter about the advantage of living
intercourse over intercourse by means of dead books pleased me
greatly and I share them. I write books, and therefore know all the
evil they produce. I know how people who do not wish to receive the
truth can avoid reading books, or understanding what goes against
the grain and exposes them, and I know how they can misinterpret
and pervert--as they have done with the Gospels. All this I know,
but yet I consider books to be, in our time, inevitable. I say “in
our time” in contradistinction to the Gospel times, when there
were no printing-presses and books were not used and the means
of communication were vocal. Then it was possible to do without
books, for the enemies of truth had none. But now one cannot leave
this powerful engine entirely for the enemies of truth to use for
deception, but must also see that it is used on the side of truth.
To refuse to make use of a book or a letter to convey one’s thoughts,
or to get at the thoughts of others, would be like refusing to use
one’s strength of voice to convey to many people at once what one
has to say, or the use of one’s ears to understand what some one is
saying in a loud voice. It would be like refusing to acknowledge the
possibility of conveying thought except tête-à-tête or in a whisper.
Writing and printing have but multiplied a thousand, a hundred
thousand, times the number of people by whom the thoughts expressed
may be heard; but the relation between him who expresses and him
who receives the thoughts remains as before. As in conversation the
hearer may grasp and understand what is said or may let it go in at
one ear and out at the other, so it is with printed matter. As the
reader of a book may twist it this way or that, so also may he who
hears spoken words. As in books (and we constantly see this) much
may be written that is superfluous and empty, so it is with speech.
A difference exists, but it is a difference that is sometimes to the
advantage of vocal sometimes of printed communication. The advantage
of vocal communication is that the hearer feels the spirit of the
speaker, but the disadvantage is that very often empty talkers (for
instance lawyers), having a gift of words, sway men not by their
reasonableness but by their mastery of oratorical art, which is not
so with books. Another advantage of verbal communication is that a
hearer who has not understood a matter can ask questions, but there
is the accompanying disadvantage that those who have failed to
understand (often purposely failed) can put questions which are not
to the point and thus divert the stream of thought--which is not so
with books.
The disadvantages of books are: first, that paper can endure all
things, and people can have any nonsense printed causing enormous
labour to be wasted in paper-making and type-setting, which is not
so with vocal communication, for people can refuse to listen to
nonsense. Secondly, that books are multiplying enormously, so that
the good ones get lost in the sea of empty and harmful ones. But then
again the advantages of the press are very great, and consist chiefly
in the fact that the circle of hearers is extended a hundredfold or a
thousandfold as compared to the hearers of the spoken word. And this
increase in the circle of readers is important, not because there are
many readers, but because, among the millions of people of different
nations and stations to whom a book becomes accessible, those who
share similar thoughts discover one another, and while living
thousands of miles apart, not knowing one another, are yet united and
live by one spirit, having the spiritual joy and encouragement of
feeling that they are not alone. Such communication I now have with
you and with many, many, men of other nations--men who have never
seen me, but who yet are nearer to me than sons or brothers of my own
blood.
The chief consideration in favour of books is, that since men reached
a certain stage of development in the external conditions of life,
books and printing in general have become a means of communication
among men and therefore must not be neglected. So many harmful books
have been written and circulated that the evil can only be met by
other books. One wedge drives out another! Christ said: “What I tell
you in the ear proclaim upon the housetops.” Printing is just that
proclamation from the housetops. The printed word is a tongue--a
tongue that reaches very far; and for this reason all that is said of
the tongue relates also to the printed word: “Therewith bless we the
Lord; and therewith curse we men, made after the likeness of God.”
Therefore one cannot be too careful what one says and listens to, nor
what one prints and reads....
The above extract is from a letter written to Verigin while he
was in exile at Obdórsk, near the mouth of the Obi in Northern
Siberia. The whole letter is given in _Essays and Letters_ by
Tolstoy, in the “World’s Classics” series. Oxford University
Press.
1895.
PART X
The essay _On Art_ that follows was the last attempt Tolstoy
made, after many years’ reflection, to express his views on
art, before he wrote _What is Art?_ This essay (_On Art_) did
not satisfy him, but in several respects it drew very near to
what he was finally to say. What he had not arrived at when
he wrote it was (1) the clear-cut working definition of art
which he gives in his later work, and (2) the clear perception
of the importance and necessity of appraising separately the
_form_ of a work of art, which makes it infectious, and the
_subject-matter of feeling_ which connects it with the whole
of life, and which benefits or harms mankind.
One feels, in _On Art_, that Tolstoy is still treading warily
a path he has not fully explored; it was only later--in _What
is Art?_--that he let himself go, careless of the eggs he
broke and feelings he disturbed, and asserting his convictions
with emphasis and exuberance.
ON ART:
What is and What is not Art; And When is Art Important
and When is it Trivial?
I
In our life there are many insignificant or even harmful activities
which enjoy a respect they do not deserve, or are tolerated merely
because they are considered to be of importance. The copying of
flowers, horses and landscapes, such clumsy learning of musical
pieces as is carried on in most of our so-called educated families,
and the writing of feeble stories and bad verses, hundreds of which
appear in the newspapers and magazines, are obviously not artistic
activities; and the painting of indecent, pornographic pictures
stimulating sensuality, or the composition of songs and stories of
that nature, even if they have artistic qualities, is not a good
activity worthy of respect.
And therefore, taking all the productions which are considered among
us to be artistic, I think it would be useful, first, to separate
what really is art from what has no right to that name; and secondly,
taking what really is art, to distinguish what is important and good
from what is insignificant and bad.
The question of how and where to draw the line separating Art from
Not-art, and the good and important in art from the insignificant and
evil, is one of enormous importance to life.
A great many of the wrong-doings and mistakes in our life result from
our calling things art which are not art. We accord an unmerited
respect to things which not only do not deserve it, but deserve
condemnation and contempt. Apart from the enormous amount of human
labour spent on the preparation of articles needed for the production
of art: studios, paints, canvas, marble, musical instruments, and
the theatres with their scenery and appliances,--even the lives of
human beings are actually perverted by the one-sided labours demanded
in the preparation of those who train for the arts. Hundreds of
thousands if not millions of children are forced to one-sided toil,
practising the so-called arts of dancing and music. Not to speak of
the children of the educated classes who pay their tribute to art in
the form of tormenting lessons,--children devoted to the ballet and
musical professions are simply distorted in the name of art to which
they are dedicated. If it is possible to compel children of seven or
eight to play an instrument, and for ten or fifteen years to continue
to do so for seven or eight hours a day; if it is possible to place
girls in the schools for the ballet,[18] and then to make them cut
capers during the first months of their pregnancy, and if all this is
done in the name of art, then it is certainly necessary to define,
first of all, what really is art--lest under the guise of art a
counterfeit should be produced; and then also to prove that art is a
matter of importance for mankind.
Where then is the line dividing art, an important and necessary
matter valuable to humanity, from useless occupations, commercial
productions, and even from immorality? In what does the essence and
importance of true art lie?
II
One theory--which its opponents call “tendentious”--says that the
essence of true art lies in the importance of the subject treated of:
that for art to be art, it is necessary that its content should be
something important, necessary to man, good, moral, and instructive.
According to that theory the artist--that is to say the man who
possesses a certain skill--by taking the most important theme which
interests society at the time, can, by clothing it in what looks like
artistic form, produce a work of true art. According to that theory
religious, moral, social, and political truths clothed in what seems
like artistic form are artistic productions.
Another theory, which calls itself “esthetic,” or “art for art’s
sake,” says that the essence of true art lies in the beauty of its
form; that for art to be true, it is necessary that what it presents
should be beautiful.
According to that theory it is necessary for the production of art,
that an artist should possess technique, and should depict an object
which produces in the highest degree a pleasant impression; and
therefore a beautiful landscape, flowers, fruit, a nude figure, and
ballets, will be works of art.
A third theory--which calls itself “realistic”--says that the essence
of art consists in the truthful, exact presentation of reality:
that, for art to be true it is necessary that it should depict life
as it really is.
According to that theory, it follows that works of art may be
anything an artist sees or hears, all that he is able to make use of
in his function of reproduction, independently of the importance of
the subject or beauty of the form.
* * * * *
Such are the theories; and on the basis of each of them so-called
works of art appear which fit the first, the second, or the third.
But, apart from the fact that each of these theories contradicts
the others, not one of them satisfies the chief demand, namely,
to ascertain the boundary which divides art from commercial,
insignificant, or even harmful productions.
In accordance with each of these theories, works can be produced
unceasingly, as in any handicraft, and they may be insignificant or
harmful.
As to the first theory (“tendency”), important subjects--religious,
moral, social, or political--can always be found ready to hand,
and therefore one can continually produce works of so-called
art. Moreover, such subjects may be presented so obscurely and
insincerely that works treating of the most important of them will
prove insignificant and even harmful when the lofty content has been
degraded by insincere expression.
Similarly according to the second theory (“esthetic”), any man having
learned the technique of any branch of art can incessantly produce
something beautiful and pleasant, but again this beautiful and
pleasant thing may be insignificant and harmful.
Just in the same way according to the third theory (“realistic”),
everyone who wishes to be an artist can incessantly produce objects
of so-called art, because everybody is always interested in
something. If the author is interested in what is insignificant and
evil, then his work will be insignificant and evil.
The chief point is that, according to each of these three theories,
“works of art” can be produced incessantly, as in every handicraft,
and that they actually are being so produced. So that these three
dominant and discordant theories not merely fail to fix the line that
separates art from not-art, but, on the contrary, they serve more
than anything else to stretch the domain of art and to bring within
it all that is insignificant and harmful.
III
Where then is the boundary dividing art that is needful and important
and deserves respect from that which is unnecessary, unimportant, and
deserves not respect but contempt--such as productions which have a
plainly depraving effect? In what does true artistic activity consist?
To answer this question clearly we must first discriminate between
artistic activity and another activity (usually confused with it),
namely, that of handing on impressions and perceptions received from
preceding generations--separating such activity as that, from the
reception of new impressions--those namely which will thereafter be
handed on from generation to generation.
The handing on of what was known to former generations, in the sphere
of art, as in the sphere of science, is an activity of teaching and
learning. But the production of something _new_ is creation--the real
artistic activity.
The business of handing on knowledge--teaching--has not an
independent significance but depends entirely on the importance
people attach to that which has been created--what it is they
consider it necessary to hand on from generation to generation. And
therefore the definition of what a creation is will also define what
it is that should be handed on. Moreover, the teacher’s business is
not usually considered to be artistic; the importance of artistic
activity is properly attributed to creation--that is to artistic
production.[19]
What then is artistic (and scientific) creation?
Artistic (and also scientific) creation is such mental activity as
brings dimly-perceived feelings (or thoughts) to such a degree of
clearness that these feelings (or thoughts) are transmitted to other
people.
The process of “creation”--one common to all men and therefore known
to each of us by inner experience--occurs as follows: a man surmises
or dimly feels something that is perfectly new to him, which he has
never heard of from anybody. This something new impresses him, and
in ordinary conversation he points out to others what he perceives,
and to his surprise finds that what is apparent to him is quite
unseen by others. They do not see or do not feel what he tells them
of. This isolation, discord, disunion from others, at first disturbs
him, and verifying his own perception the man tries in different ways
to communicate to others what he has seen, felt, or understood;
but these others still do not understand what he communicates to
them, or do not understand it as he understands or feels it. And the
man begins to be troubled by a doubt as to whether he imagines and
dimly feels something that does not really exist, or whether others
do not see and do not feel something that does exist. And to solve
this doubt he directs his whole strength to the task of making his
discovery so clear that there cannot be the smallest doubt, either
for himself or for other people, as to the existence of that which
he perceives; and as soon as this elucidation is completed and the
man himself no longer doubts the existence of what he has seen,
understood, or felt, others at once see, understand, and feel as
he does, and it is this effort to make clear and indubitable to
himself and to others what both to others and to him had been dim and
obscure, that is the source from which flows the production of man’s
spiritual activity in general, or what we call works of art--which
widen man’s horizon and oblige him to see what had not been perceived
before.[20]
It is in this that the activity of an artist consists; and to this
activity is related the feeling of the recipient. This feeling has
its source in imitativeness, or rather in a capacity to be infected,
and in a certain hypnotism--that is to say in the fact that the
artist’s stress of spirit elucidating to himself the subject that
had been doubtful to him, communicates itself, through the artistic
production, to the recipients. A work of art is then finished when
it has been brought to such clearness that it communicates itself
to others and evokes in them the same feeling that the artist
experienced while creating it.
What was formerly unperceived, unfelt, and uncomprehended, by them
is by intensity of feeling brought to such a degree of clearness that
it becomes acceptable to all, and the production is a work of art.
The satisfaction of the intense feeling of the artist who has
achieved his aim gives pleasure to him. Participation in this same
stress of feeling and in its satisfaction, a yielding to this
feeling, the imitation of it and infection by it (as by a yawn), the
experiencing in brief moments of what the artist has lived through
while creating his work, is the enjoyment those who assimilate a work
of art obtain.
Such in my opinion is the peculiarity distinguishing art from any
other activity.
IV
According to this division, all that imparts to mankind something
new, achieved by an artist’s stress of feeling and thought, is a
work of art. But that this mental activity should really have the
importance people attach to it, it is necessary that it should
contribute what is good to humanity, for it is evident that to a
new evil, to a new temptation leading people into evil, we cannot
attribute the value given to art as to something that benefits
mankind. The importance, the value, of art consists in widening
man’s outlook, in increasing the spiritual wealth that is humanity’s
capital.
Therefore, though a work of art must always include something new,
yet the revelation of something new will not always be a work of art.
That it should be a work of art, it is necessary:
(1) That the new idea, the content of the work, should be of
importance to mankind.
(2) That this content should be expressed so clearly that
people may understand it.
(3) That what incites the author to work at his production
should be an inner need and not an external inducement.
And therefore that will not be a work of art in which no new thing is
disclosed; and that which has for its content what is insignificant
and therefore unimportant to man will not be a work of art, however
intelligibly it may be expressed and even if the author has worked at
it sincerely from an inner impulse. Nor will that be a work of art
which is so expressed as to be unintelligible however sincere may be
the author’s relation to it; nor that which has been produced by its
author not from an inner impulse but for an external aim, however
important may be its content and however intelligible its expression.
That is a work of art which discloses something new and at the same
time in some degree satisfies the three conditions: content, form,
and sincerity.
And here we come to the problem of how to define that lowest degree
of content, beauty, and sincerity, which a production must possess to
be a work of art.
To be a work of art it must, in the first place, be a thing which has
for its content something hitherto unknown but of which man has need;
secondly, it must show this so intelligibly that it becomes generally
accessible; and thirdly, it must result from the author’s need to
solve an inner doubt.
A work in which all three conditions are present even to a slight
degree, will be a work of art; but a production from which even one
of them is absent will not be a work of art.
But it will be said that every work contains something needed by
man, and every work will be to some extent intelligible, and that
an author’s relation to every work has some degree of sincerity.
Where is the limit of needful content, intelligible expression, and
sincerity of treatment? A reply to this question will be given us by
a clear perception of the highest limit to which art may attain: the
opposite of the highest limit will show the lowest limit, dividing
all that cannot be accounted art from what is art. The highest
limit of content is such as is always necessary to all men. That
which is always necessary to all men is what is good or moral.[21]
The lowest limit of content, consequently, will be such as is not
needed by men, and is a bad and immoral content. The highest limit
of expression will be such as is always intelligible to all men.
What is thus intelligible is that which has nothing in it obscure,
superfluous, or indefinite, but only what is clear, concise, and
definite,--what is called beautiful. Conversely, the lowest limit of
expression will be such as is obscure, diffuse, and indefinite,--that
is to say formless. The highest limit of the artist’s relation to his
subject will be such as evokes in the soul of all men an impression
of reality--the reality not so much of what exists, as of what goes
on in the soul of the artist. This impression of reality is produced
by truth only; and therefore the highest relation of an author to his
subject is _sincerity_. The lowest limit, conversely, will be that in
which the author’s relation to his subject is not genuine, but false.
All works of art lie between these two limits.
A perfect work of art will be one in which the content is important
and significant to all men, and therefore it will be _moral_. The
expression will be quite clear, intelligible to all, and therefore
_beautiful_; the author’s relation to his work will be altogether
sincere, and heartfelt, and therefore _true_. Imperfect works, but
still works of art, will be such productions as satisfy all three
conditions though it be but in unequal degree. That only will be no
work of art, in which either the content is quite insignificant and
unnecessary to man, or the expression quite unintelligible, or the
relation of the author to the work is quite insincere. In the degree
of perfection attained in each of these respects lies the difference
in quality between all true works of art. Sometimes the first
predominates, sometimes the second, and sometimes the third.
All the remaining imperfect productions fall naturally, according
to the three fundamental conditions of art, into three chief kinds:
1) those which stand out by the importance of their content, 2)
those which stand out by their beauty of form, and 3) those which
stand out by their heartfelt sincerity. These three kinds all yield
approximations to perfect art and are inevitably produced wherever
there is art.
Thus among young artists heartfelt sincerity chiefly prevails,
coupled with insignificance of content and more or less beauty of
form. Among older artists, on the contrary, the importance of the
content often predominates over beauty of form and sincerity. Among
laborious artists beauty of form predominates over content and
sincerity.
All works of art may be appraised by the prevalence in them of
the first, the second, or the third quality, and they may all be
subdivided into 1) those that have content and are beautiful, but
have little sincerity; 2) those that have content, but little beauty
and little sincerity; 3) those that have little content, but are
beautiful and sincere, and so on, in all possible combinations and
permutations.
All works of art, and in general all the mental activities of man,
can be appraised on the basis of these three fundamental qualities;
and they have been and are so appraised.
The differences in valuation have resulted, and do result, from the
extent of the demand presented to art by certain people at a certain
time in regard to these three conditions.
So for instance in classical times the demand for significance of
content was much higher, and the demand for clearness and sincerity
much lower than they subsequently became, especially in our time. The
demand for beauty became greater in the Middle Ages, but on the other
hand the demand for significance and sincerity became lower; and in
our time the demand for sincerity and truthfulness has become much
greater, but on the other hand the demand for beauty, and especially
for significance, has been lowered.
V
The valuation of works of art is necessarily correct when all three
conditions are taken into account; and inevitably incorrect when
works are valued not on the basis of all three conditions but only of
one or two of them.
And yet such valuation of works of art on the basis of only one of
the three conditions is a particularly prevalent error in our time,
lowering the general level of what is demanded from art to what can
be reached by a mere imitation of it, and confusing the minds of
critics, and of the public, and of artists themselves, as to what is
really art and as to where its boundary lies--the line that divides
it from craftsmanship and from mere amusement.
This confusion arises from the fact that people who lack the capacity
to understand true art judge of works of art from one side only, and
according to their own characters and training observe in them the
first, the second, or the third side only, imagining and assuming
that this one side perceptible to them--and the significance of art
based on this one condition--defines the whole of art. Some see only
the importance of the content, others only the beauty of form, and
others again only the artist’s sincerity and therefore truthfulness.
And according to what they see, they define the nature of art itself,
construct their theories, and praise and encourage those who, like
themselves, not understanding wherein a work of art consists, turn
them out like pancakes and inundate our world with foul floods of all
kinds of follies and abominations, which they call “works of art.”
Such are the majority of people and, as representatives of that
majority, such were the originators of the three esthetic theories
already alluded to, which meet the perceptions and demands of that
majority.
All these theories are based on a misunderstanding of the whole
importance of art, and on severing its three fundamental conditions;
and therefore these three false theories of art clash, as a result
of the fact that real art has three fundamental conditions, of which
each of those theories accepts but one.
The first theory, of so-called “tendencious” art, accepts as a work
of art one that has for its subject something which, though it be not
new, is important to all men by its moral content, independently of
its beauty and spiritual depth.
The second (“art for art’s sake”) recognizes as a work of art only
that which has beauty of form, independently of its novelty, the
importance of its content, or its sincerity.
The third theory, the “realistic,” recognizes as a work of art
only that in which the author is sincerely related to his subject
and which is therefore truthful. The last theory says that however
insignificant or even nasty may be the content, with a more or less
beautiful form, the work will be good if the author’s relation to
what he depicts is sincere and therefore truthful.
VI
All these theories forget one chief thing--that neither importance,
nor beauty, nor sincerity, provides the requisite for works of art,
but that the basic condition of the production of such works is that
the artist should be conscious of something new and important. And
that, therefore, as it always has been so it always will be necessary
for a true artist to be able to perceive something quite new and
important. For the artist to see what is new, it is necessary that he
should observe and think, and not occupy his life with trifles which
hinder his attentive penetration into, and meditation on, life’s
phenomena. In order that the new things he sees may be important
ones, the artist must be a morally enlightened man and he must not
live a selfish life, but must share the common life of humanity.
If only he sees what is new and important, he will be sure to find a
form which will express it, and the sincerity which is an essential
content of artistic production will be present. He must be able to
express the new subject so that all may understand it. For this he
must have such mastery of his craft that when working he will think
as little about the rules of that craft as a man when walking thinks
of the laws of motion. And in order to attain this, the artist must
not look round on his work and admire it, must not make technique
his aim, as one who is walking should not contemplate and admire his
gait, but should be concerned only to express his subject clearly and
in such a way as to be intelligible to all.
Finally, to work at his subject not for external aims but to satisfy
his inner need, the artist must rise superior to motives of avarice
and vanity. He must love with his own heart and not with another’s,
and not pretend that he loves what others love or consider worthy of
love.
And to attain all this the artist must do as Balaam did when the
messengers came to him, and he went apart awaiting God, so as to
say only what God commanded; and he must not do as that same Balaam
afterwards did when, tempted by gifts, he went to the king against
God’s command, as was evident even to the ass on which he rode,
though not perceived by him while blinded by avarice and vanity.
VII
In our time nothing of that kind is demanded. A man who wishes to
follow art need not wait for some important and new perception to
arise in his soul, which he can sincerely love and having loved can
clothe in suitable form. In our time a man who wishes to follow art
either takes a subject current at the time and one praised by people
who in his opinion are clever, and clothes it as best he can in what
is called “artistic form”; or he chooses a subject which gives him
most opportunity to display his technical skill, and with toil and
patience produces what he considers to be a work of art; or having
received some chance impression he takes what caused that impression
for his subject, imagining that it will yield a work of art since it
happened to produce an impression on him.
And so there appear an innumerable quantity of so-called works of
art; which, as in every mechanical craft, can be produced without
the least intermission. There always are current fashionable notions
in society, and with patience a technique can always be learnt, and
something or other will always seem interesting to someone. Having
separated the conditions that should be united in a true work of art,
people have produced so many works of pseudo-art that the public, the
critics, and the pseudo-artists themselves, are left quite without
any definition of what they themselves hold to be art.
The people of to-day have as it were said to themselves: “Works of
art are good and useful; so it is necessary to produce more of them.”
It would indeed be a very good thing if there were more; but the
trouble is that you can only produce to order works which are no
better than works of mere craftsmanship because of their lack of the
essential conditions of art.
A really artistic production cannot be made to order, for a true
work of art is the revelation (by laws beyond our grasp) of a
new conception of life arising in the artist’s soul, which, when
expressed, lights up the path along which humanity progresses.
PART XI
AN INTRODUCTION TO “WHAT IS ART?”
Tolstoy’s _What is Art?_ both in Russian and in my
translation, appeared in separate parts during the first half
of 1898. I wrote the following Introduction about a year
later, for an edition issued in April 1899.
An estimable and charming Russian lady I knew, felt so strongly the
charm of the music and ritual of the services of the Russo-Greek
Church that she wished the peasants, in whom she was interested, to
retain their blind faith though she herself disbelieved the Church
doctrines. “Their lives are so poor and bare, they have so little
art, so little poetry and colour in their lives--let them at least
enjoy what they have; it would be cruel to undeceive them,” said she.
Suppose a false and antiquated view of life is supported by means of
art and is inseparably linked to some manifestations of art which we
enjoy and prize; if the false view of life be destroyed this art will
cease to appear valuable. Is it better to screen the error for the
sake of preserving the art? Or should the art be sacrificed for the
sake of truth?
Again and again in history a dominant Church has utilized art to
maintain its sway over men. Reformers (early Christians, Mohammedans,
Puritans, and others) have perceived that art bound people to the old
faith and have been angry with art. They diligently chipped the noses
from statues and images, and were wroth with ceremonies, decorations,
stained-glass windows, and processions. They were even ready to
banish art altogether, for besides the superstitions it upheld, they
saw that it depraved and perverted men by dramas, drinking-songs,
novels, pictures, and dances, of a kind that awakened man’s lower
nature. Yet art always re-asserted her sway and to-day we are told
by many that art has nothing to do with morality--that art should be
followed for art’s sake.
I went one day with a woman artist to the Bodkin Art Gallery, in
Moscow. In one of the rooms, on a table, lay a book of coloured
pictures, issued in Paris and supplied, I believe, to private
subscribers only. The pictures were admirably executed, but
represented scenes in the private cabinets of a restaurant. A
particular crisis of sexual indulgence was the chief subject of each
picture: women extravagantly dressed and partly undressed; women
exposing their legs and breasts to men in evening dress; men and
women taking liberties with each other, or dancing the _can-can_,
etc., etc. My companion the artist, a maiden lady of irreproachable
conduct and reputation, began deliberately to look at these pictures.
I could not let my attention dwell on them without ill effects. Such
things had a certain attraction for me and tended to make me restless
and nervous. I ventured to suggest that the subjects of the pictures
were objectionable. But my companion (who prided herself on being an
artist) remarked with conscious superiority that from an artist’s
point of view the _subject_ was of no consequence. The pictures being
very well executed were artistic, and therefore worthy of attention
and study. Morality had nothing to do with art.
Here again is a problem. One remembers Plato’s advice not to let our
thoughts run upon women for if we do we shall not think clearly about
anything else, and one knows that to neglect this advice is to lose
tranquillity of mind; but then one does not wish to be considered
narrow, ascetic, or inartistic, or to lose artistic pleasures which
those around us esteem so highly.
Again, the newspapers not long ago printed proposals to construct a
Wagner Opera House, to cost, if I recollect rightly, £100,000--about
as much as a hundred labourers may earn by five or ten years’ hard
work. The writers thought it would be a good thing if such an Opera
House were erected and endowed. But I had a talk lately with a
man who, till his health failed him, had worked as a builder in
London. He told me that when he was younger he had been very fond of
theatre-going, but later, when he thought things over and considered
that in almost every number of his weekly paper he read of cases of
people whose death was hastened by lack of sufficient food, he felt
it was not right that so much labour should be spent on theatres.
In reply to this argument it is urged that food for the mind is as
important as food for the body. As the labouring classes work to
produce food and necessaries for themselves and for the cultured, so
some of the cultured class work to produce plays and operas. It is a
division of labour. But this again invites the rejoinder that, sure
enough, the labourers produce food for themselves and also food that
the cultured class accept and consume; but that the artists seem too
often to produce their spiritual food for the cultured only--at any
rate a singularly small share seems to reach the country labourers
who work to supply the bodily food! Even were the division of labour
shown to be a fair one, the division of products seems remarkably
one-sided.
Once again: How is it that often when a new work is produced,
neither the critics, the artists, the publishers, nor the public,
seem to know whether it is valuable or worthless? Some of the most
famous books in English literature could at first hardly find a
publisher, or were savagely derided by leading critics; while other
works once acclaimed as masterpieces are now laughed at or utterly
forgotten. A play[22] which nobody now reads was once passed off as a
newly-discovered masterpiece of Shakespeare’s, and was produced at a
leading London theatre. Are the critics playing blindman’s buff? Are
they relying on each other? Is each following his own whim and fancy?
Or do they possess a criterion never revealed to those outside the
profession?
Such are a few of the many problems relating to art which present
themselves to us all, and it is the purpose of Tolstoy’s _What is
Art?_ to enable us to reach such a comprehension of art, and of the
position art should occupy in our lives, as will enable us to answer
these questions.
The task is one of enormous difficulty. Under the cloak of “art” so
much selfish amusement and self-indulgence tries to justify itself,
and so many mercenary interests are concerned in preventing the
light from shining in upon the subject, that the clamour raised by
this book can only be compared to that raised by the silversmiths of
Ephesus when they shouted, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” for
about the space of two hours.
Elaborate theories block the path with subtle sophistries or
ponderous pseudo-erudition. Merely to master these and expose them
was by itself a great labour, necessary in order to clear the road
for any fresh view. To have accomplished this in a couple of chapters
is a remarkable achievement. To have done it without making the book
intolerably dry is more wonderful still. In Chapter III (where a
rapid summary of some sixty esthetic writers is given) even Tolstoy’s
powers fail to make the subject interesting, and he has to plead
with his readers “not to be overcome by dulness, but to read these
extracts through.”
Among the writers mentioned, English readers miss the names of John
Ruskin and William Morris, especially as much that Tolstoy says is in
accord with their views.
Of Ruskin, Tolstoy has a very high opinion. I once heard him say,
“I don’t know why you English make such a fuss about Gladstone--you
have a much greater man in Ruskin.” As a stylist, too, Tolstoy
spoke of him with high commendation. Ruskin, however, though he
wrote on art with profound insight and said many things with which
Tolstoy fully agrees, as well as some things he dissents from, has,
I think, nowhere so systematized and summarized his view that it can
be readily quoted in the concise way which has enabled Tolstoy to
indicate his points of essential agreement with Home (Lord Kames),
Véron, and Kant.[23]
As to William Morris, we are reminded of his dictum that art is the
workman’s expression of joy in his work, by Tolstoy’s “As soon as
the author is not producing art for his own satisfaction--does not
himself feel what he wishes to express--a resistance immediately
springs up” (p. 267); and again, “In such transmission to others of
the feelings that have arisen in him, he (the artist) will find his
happiness” (p. 316). Tolstoy sweeps over a far wider range of
thought, but he and Morris are not opposed. Morris was emphasizing
part of what Tolstoy is implying.
A difficulty not yet mentioned lurks in the hearts of most of us.
We have enjoyed works of “art.” We have been interested by the
psychology analysed in a novel, or we have been thrilled by an
unexpected “effect”; have admired the exactitude with which real
life has been reproduced, or have had our feelings touched by
allusions to, or imitations of, works--old German legends, Greek
myths, or Hebrew poetry--which moved us long ago, as they moved
generations before us. And we thought all this was “art.” Not clearly
understanding what art is and wherein its importance lies, we were
not only attached to these things, but attributed importance to them,
calling them “artistic” and “beautiful” without well knowing what we
meant by those words.
But here is a book that obliges us to clear our minds. It challenges
us to define “art” and “beauty,” and to say what grounds we have for
attaching _importance_ to these things that happen to please us.
As to beauty, we find that the definition given by esthetic writers
amounts merely to this, that “Beauty is a kind of pleasure received
by us, not having personal advantage for its object.” But it follows
from this, that “beauty” is a matter of taste, differing among
different people; and to attach special importance to what pleases
_me_ (and others who have had the same sort of training that I have
had) is merely to repeat the old, old mistake which so divides human
society: it is like declaring that my race is the best race, my
nation the best nation, my Church the best Church, and my family the
best family. It indicates ignorance and selfishness.
But “truth angers those whom it does not convince”; there are people
who do not wish to understand these things. It seems, at first, as
though Tolstoy were obliging us to sacrifice something valuable. We
do not realize that we are being helped to select the best art, but
we do feel that we are being deprived of our sense of satisfaction in
Baudelaire.
Both the magnitude and the difficulty of the task were therefore
very great, but they have been surmounted in a marvellous manner. In
its construction, in co-ordination, in concise presentation of many
converging thoughts, this is, probably, the most masterly of all
Tolstoy’s works.
He was indeed peculiarly qualified for the task he has accomplished.
It was after many years of work as a writer of fiction, and when
he was already standing in the very foremost rank of European
novelists,[24] that he found himself compelled to face, in deadly
earnest, the deepest problems of human life. He not only could
not go on writing books, but he felt he could not live, unless he
found clear guidance, so that he might walk with a sure foot and
know the purpose and meaning of his life. Not as a mere question of
speculative curiosity but as a matter of vital necessity, he devoted
years to re-discover the truths which underlie all religion.
To fit him for this task he possessed great knowledge of men and
books, a wide experience of life, a knowledge of languages, and
freedom from bondage to any authority but that of reason and
conscience. He was pinned to no Nicene Creed, nor was he in receipt
of any retaining fee he was not prepared to sacrifice. Another
rare gift was his wonderful sincerity, and (due, I think, to that
sincerity) an amazing power of looking at the phenomena of our
complex and artificial life with the eyes of a child; going straight
to the real, obvious facts of the case and brushing aside the
sophistries, conventionalities, and “authorities” by which they are
obscured.
He commenced the task when he was about fifty years of age, and
during the following twenty years produced a dozen philosophical
works of first-rate importance, besides many stories and short
articles.
And all this time the problems of Art--What is Art? What importance
should we attach to it? How is it related to the rest of life?--were
working in his mind. He was a great artist, often upbraided for
having abandoned his art. He, of all men, was bound to clear his
thoughts on this perplexing subject and to express them. His whole
philosophy of life--the “religious perception” to which, with such
tremendous labour and effort, he had attained--forbade him to detach
art from life, and place it in a water-tight compartment where it
should not act on life or be re-acted upon by life.
Life to him is rational. It has a clear aim and purpose, discernible
by the aid of reason and conscience. And no human activity can be
fully understood or rightly appreciated until the central purpose of
life is perceived.
You cannot piece together a puzzle-map as long as you keep one bit
in a wrong place, but when the pieces all fit together you have
a demonstration that they are all in their right places. Tolstoy
used that simile years ago when explaining how the comprehension of
the text, “resist not him that is evil,” enabled him to perceive
the coherence of Christ’s teaching, which had long baffled him.
So it is with the problem of Art. Wrongly understood, it tends to
confuse and perplex one’s whole comprehension of life. But the clue
supplied by true “religious perception” enables us to place art so
that it fits in with a right understanding of politics, economics,
sex-relationships, science, and all other phases of human activity.
The basis on which the work rests is a perception of the meaning
of human life. This was lost sight of by some reviewers, who when
the book first appeared misrepresented what Tolstoy said and then
demonstrated how stupid he would have been had he said what they
attributed to him. Leaving his premises and arguments untouched, they
dissented from various conclusions--as though it were all a question
of taste. But such criticism can lead to nothing. Discussions as to
why one man likes pears and another prefers meat do not help towards
finding a definition of what is essential in nourishment; and, just
so, “the solution of questions of taste in art does not help to make
clear what this particular human activity which we call art really
consists in.”
The object of the following summary of a few main points is to help
the reader to avoid pitfalls into which many reviewers fell. 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 266, 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 say “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 sometimes overemphasises 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 feelings 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 emotions.”
In Chapters II to V of _What is Art?_ we have 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
precisely what this definition indicates.
Having got our definition of art, we first consider art independently
of its subject-matter, that is 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.
But 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, and so forth.” Art begins when someone, _with the object of
making others share his feeling_, expresses that feeling by certain
external indications.
This faculty of being infected by the expression of another man’s
emotions is possessed by all normal human beings. 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 recognize a work of art; and they
will always be mistaking other things for art, and seeking for
external guides, such as the opinions of “recognized 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 country peasant, for
instance, whose working-days are filled with labour, and whose
brief leisure is largely taken up by his family life and by his
participation in the affairs of his village--is it possible that
_he_ can recognize 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 many countries, as has been the case in 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
religious 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, and so forth, which are works of true
art. Take as examples the works of Burns or Bunyan, and the peasant
women’s song mentioned in Chapter XIV of _What is Art?_; 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
impart 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.
That, in brief outline, is what Tolstoy says about art considered
apart from its subject-matter. And this is how certain critics have
met it. They say that when Tolstoy says the test of art is internal,
he must mean that it is external. When he says that country peasants
have in the past appreciated, and do still appreciate, great works
of art, he means that the way to detect a work of art is to see what
is apparently most popular among the masses. Go into the streets
or music-halls of the cities in any particular country and year,
and observe what is most frequently sung, shouted, or played on the
barrel-organs. It may happen to be
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,”
or,
“We don’t want to fight,
But, by Jingo, if we do!”
But whatever it is, you may at once declare these songs to be the
highest musical art, without pausing to ask to what they owe their
vogue: what actress, or singer, or politician, or wave of patriotic
passion has conduced to their popularity! Nor need you consider
whether that popularity is merely temporary and local. Tolstoy has
said that works of the highest art are understood by unperverted
country peasants, and here are things which are popular with a town
mob--_ergo_, these things must be the highest art. The critics then
proceed to say that such a test is utterly absurd. And on this point
we may agree with the critics.
Some of these writers commence their articles by saying that Tolstoy
is a most profound thinker, a great prophet, an intellectual force,
etc. Yet when Tolstoy, in his emphatic way, makes the sweeping remark
that “good art always pleases everyone,” the critics do not read on
to find out what he means, but reply: “No! good art does not please
everyone; some people are colour-blind, and some are deaf, or have no
ear for music.”
It is as though a man strenuously arguing a point were to say,
“Everyone knows that two and two make four,” and a boy who did not
at all see what the speaker was driving at were to reply: “No,
our new-born baby doesn’t know it!” It would be true enough, and
would distract attention from the subject in hand, but it would not
elucidate matters.
There is, of course, a verbal contradiction between the statements
that “good art always pleases everyone” (p. 224), and the remark
concerning “people of our circle,” artists and public and critics
who, “with very few exceptions ... cannot distinguish true works
of art from counterfeits, but continually mistake for real art the
worst and most artificial” (p. 273). But I venture to think that no
unprejudiced and intelligent person, reading the book carefully,
should fail to reach the author’s meaning.
A point to be well noted is the distinction between science and
art. “Science investigates and brings to human perception such
truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society
consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region
of perception to the region of emotion.” Science is an “activity of
the understanding which demands preparation and a certain sequence
of knowledge, so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing
geometry.” “This business of art”, on the other hand, “lies just
in this: to make that understood and felt which in the form of an
argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible” (p. 225). It
“infects any man, whatever his plane of development,” and “(as is
said in the Gospel) the hindrance to understanding the best and
highest _feelings_ does not at all lie in deficiency of development
or learning, but, on the contrary, in false development and false
learning” (p. 226). Science and art are frequently blended in one
work, _e. g._, in the Gospel elucidation of Christ’s comprehension of
life, or, to take a modern instance, in Henry George’s elucidation of
the land question in _Social Problems_.
The class distinction to which Tolstoy repeatedly alludes needs
some explanation. The position of the lower classes in England and
in Russia is different. In Russia a much larger number of people
live on the verge of starvation, the condition of the factory-hands
is much worse than in England, and there are many glaring cases
of brutal cruelty inflicted on the peasants by the officials, the
police, or the military; but in Russia a far greater proportion of
the population live in the country, and a peasant usually has his
own house and tills his share of the communal lands. Though Tolstoy
puts forward no claim that the Russian peasants are more susceptible
to art than men of other nationalities, yet he had them before his
eyes and in speaking of an “unperverted country peasant” he was no
doubt thinking of a man who perhaps suffered grievous want when
there was a bad harvest in his province but who was accustomed to
the experiences of a natural life, to the management of his own
affairs, and to a real voice in all the arrangements of the village
commune. The Government interfered from time to time to collect its
taxes by force, to take the young men for soldiers, or to maintain
the “rights” of the upper classes; but otherwise the peasant was free
to do what he saw to be necessary and reasonable. On the other hand,
English labourers are, for the most part, not so poor, they have more
legal rights and they have votes; but a far larger number of them
live in towns and are engaged in unnatural occupations, while even
those that do live in touch with nature are usually mere wage-earners
tilling other men’s land, and living often in abject submission to
the farmer, the parson, or the lady-bountiful. They are dependent on
an employer for daily bread, and the condition of a wage-labourer is
as unnatural as that of a landlord.
The tyranny of the Petersburg bureaucracy was more dramatic but
less omnipresent, and probably far less fatal to the capacity to
enjoy art, than the tyranny of our respectable, self-satisfied, and
property-loving middle-class. I am, therefore, afraid that we have
no great number of “unperverted” country labourers to compare with
those of whom Tolstoy spoke, some of whom I have known personally.
But the truth Tolstoy elucidates lies too deep in human nature to be
infringed by such differences of local circumstance. Whatever those
circumstances may be, the fact remains that in proportion as a man
approaches towards the condition not only of “earning his subsistence
by some kind of labour,” but of “living on all its sides the life
natural and proper to mankind,” his capacity to appreciate true art
tends to increase. On the other hand, when a class settles down into
an artificial way of life--loses touch with nature, becomes confused
in its perceptions of what is good and what is bad, and prefers
the condition of a parasite to that of a producer--its capacity to
appreciate true art must diminish. Losing all clear perception of
the meaning of life, such people are necessarily left without any
criterion which will enable them to distinguish good from bad art,
and they are sure to follow eagerly after beauty, that is to say
after “that which pleases them.”
The artists of our society can usually only reach people of the upper
and middle classes. But is the great artist he who delights a select
audience of his own day and class, or he whose works link generation
to generation and race to race in a common bond of feeling? Surely
art should fulfil its purpose as completely as possible. A work of
art that united every one with the author and with one another would
be perfect art. Tolstoy, in his emphatic way, speaks of works of
“universal” art, and (though the profound critics hasten to inform us
that no work of art ever reached everybody) certainly the more nearly
a work of art approaches to such expression of feeling that every
one may be infected by it, the nearer (apart from all question of
subject-matter) it approaches perfection.
But now as to subject-matter. The subject-matter of art consists of
feelings which can be spread from man to man, feelings which are
“contagious” or “infectious.” Is it of no importance _what_ feelings
increase and multiply among men?
One man feels that submission to the authority of _his_ Church, and
belief in all that it teaches him, is good; another is imbued by a
sense of each man’s duty to think with his own head: to use for his
guidance in life the reason and conscience given him. One man feels
that his nation _ought_ to wipe out in blood the shame of a defeat
inflicted on her; another feels that we are brothers, sons of one
spirit, and that the slaughter of man by man is always wrong. One
man feels that the most desirable thing in life is the satisfaction
obtainable by the love of women; another man feels that sex-love is
an entanglement and a snare, hindering his real work in life. And
each of these, if he possess an artist’s gift of expression and if
the feeling be really his own and sincere, may infect other men. But
some of these feelings will benefit and some will harm mankind, and
the more widely they are spread the greater will be their effect.
Art unites men. Surely it is desirable that the feelings in which it
unites them should be “the best and highest to which men have risen,”
or at least should not run contrary to our perception of what makes
for the well-being of ourselves and of others. And our perception
of what makes for the well-being of ourselves and of others is what
Tolstoy calls our “religious perception.”
Therefore the subject-matter of what we in our day can esteem as
being the best art, can be of two kinds only:--
1) Feelings flowing from the highest perception now attainable by man
of our right relation to our neighbour and to the Source from which
we come. Of such art, Dickens’s _Christmas Carol_, uniting us in a
more vivid sense of compassion and love, is a ready example.
2) The simple feelings of common life, accessible to every one,
provided that they are such as do not hinder progress towards
well-being. Art of this kind makes us realize to how great an extent
we already are members one of another, sharing the feelings of one
common human nature.
The success of a very primitive novel, the story of Joseph, which
made its way into the sacred books of the Jews, spread from land
to land and from age to age, and continues to be read to-day among
people quite free from bibliolatry--shows how nearly “universal” may
be the appeal of this kind of art. This branch includes all harmless
jokes, folk-stories, nursery rhymes, and even dolls, if only the
author or designer has expressed a feeling (tenderness, pleasure,
humour, or what not) so as to infect others.
But how are we to know what _are_ the “best” feelings? What is good?
and what is evil? This is decided by religious perception. Some such
perception exists in every human being; there is always something he
approves of, and something he disapproves of. Reason and conscience
are always present, active or latent, as long as man lives. Lady
Lugard tells us that the most degraded cannibal she ever met drew the
line at eating his own mother: nothing would induce him to entertain
the idea, his moral sense was revolted by the suggestion. In more
advanced societies the religious perception they have reached--the
foremost stage which has been discerned in mankind’s long march
towards perfection--has been clearly expressed by someone, and more
or less consciously accepted as an ideal by the many. But there are
transition periods in history when the worn-out formularies of a past
age have ceased to satisfy men, or have become so incrusted with
superstitions that their original brightness is lost. The religious
perception that is dawning may not yet have found such expression as
to be generally understood, but for all that it exists, and shows
itself by compelling men to repudiate beliefs that satisfied their
forefathers, the outward and visible signs of which are still endowed
and dominant long after their spirit has taken refuge in temples not
made with hands.
At such times it is difficult for men to understand each other, for
the very words needed to express the deepest experiences of men’s
consciousness mean different things to different men. So, among us
to-day, to many minds “faith” means “credulity,” and “God” suggests a
person of the male sex, father of one only-begotten son, and creator
of the universe.
This is why Tolstoy’s rational religious perception, expressed
in the books he wrote during the last thirty years of his life,
is frequently spoken of by people who have not grasped it, as
“mysticism.”[25]
The narrow materialist is shocked to find that Tolstoy will not
confine himself to the “objective” view of life. Encountering in
himself that “inward voice” which compels us all to choose between
good and evil, Tolstoy refuses to be diverted from a matter of
immediate and vital importance to him by discussions as to the
derivation of the external manifestations of conscience which
biologists are able to detect in remote forms of life. The mystic,
on the other hand, shrinks from Tolstoy’s desire to try all things
by the light of reason, to depend on nothing vague, and to accept
nothing on authority. The man who does not trust his own reason,
fears that life thus squarely faced will prove less worth having than
it is when clothed in mist.
In this work, however, Tolstoy does not recapitulate at length what
he has said before. He does not pause to re-explain why he condemns
patriotism, that is, each man’s preference for the predominance of
_his own_ country, which leads to the slaughter of man by man in war;
or Churches, which are sectarian, that is, which (striving to assert
that _your_ doxy is heterodoxy, but _our_ doxy is orthodoxy) make
external authorities (Popes, Bibles, Councils) supreme, and cling
to superstitions (_their own_ miracles, legends, and myths), thus
separating themselves from communion with the rest of mankind. He
merely summarizes it all in a few sentences, defining the “religious
perception” of to-day, which alone can decide for us “the degree
of importance both of the feelings transmitted by art and of the
information transmitted by science.”
“The religious perception of our time, in its widest and most
practical application, is the consciousness that our well-being,
both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and
eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among men--in their loving
harmony with one another” (p. 281).
And again:--
“However differently in form people belonging to our Christian
world may define the destiny of man: whether they see it in human
progress in whatever sense of the words, in the union of all men in
a socialist realm, or in the establishment of a commune; whether
they look forward to the union of mankind under the guidance of one
universal Church, or to a federation of the world--however various in
form their definitions of the destination of human life may be, all
men in our times already admit that the highest well-being attainable
by men is to be reached by their union with one another” (p. 309).
This is the foundation on which the whole work is based. It follows
necessarily from this perception that we should consider as most
important in science “investigations into the results of good and
bad actions, considerations of the reasonableness or unreasonableness
of human institutions and beliefs, considerations of how human life
should be lived in order to obtain the greatest well-being for each;
as to what one may and should, and what one cannot and should not
believe; how to subdue one’s passions, and how to acquire the habit
of virtue.” This is the science that occupied the greatest sages of
the ancient world, and it is precisely to this kind of scientific
investigation that Tolstoy devoted most of the last thirty years of
his life, and for the sake of which the author of _Resurrection_ was
often said to have “abandoned art.”
Since science, like art, is “a human activity,” that science best
deserves our esteem, best deserves to be “chosen, tolerated,
approved, and diffused,” which treats of what is supremely important
to man; which deals with urgent, vital, inevitable problems of actual
life. Such science as this brings “to the consciousness of men the
truths that flow from the religious perception of our times,” and
“indicates the various methods of applying this consciousness to
life.” “Art should transform this perception into feeling.”
Experimental science studies questions of pure curiosity, or things
harmful to mankind (such as quick-firing cannon), or technical
improvements which in a better state of society would lighten the
workers’ burden. But, even at its best, such science “cannot serve as
a basis for art,” for it is occupied with subjects unrelated to human
conduct.
Naturally enough, the last chapter of the book deals with the
relation between science and art. And the conclusion is, that:
“The destiny of art in our time is to transmit from the realm of
reason to the realm of feeling, the truth that well-being for men
consists in being united together, and to set up, in place of
the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God--that is, of
love--which we all recognize to be the highest aim of human life” (p.
333).
And this art of the future will, in subject-matter, not be poorer,
but far richer, than the art of to-day. From the lullaby--that will
delight millions of people, generation after generation--to the
highest religious art, dealing with strong, rich, and varied emotions
flowing from a fresh outlook upon life and all its problems, the
field open for good art is enormous. With so much to say that is
urgently important to all, the art of the future will, in matter
of form, also, be far superior to our art in “clearness, beauty,
simplicity, and compression” (p. 315).
For beauty (which is “that which pleases”)--though it depends on
taste, and can furnish no _criterion_ for art--will be a natural
characteristic of work done, not for hire nor even for fame, but
because men, living a natural and healthy life, wish to share the
“highest spiritual strength which passes through them” with the
greatest possible number of others. The feelings such an artist
wishes to share he will transmit in a way that will please him and
will therefore please other men who share his nature.
In the subject-matter of art that really lives, morality is as
unavoidable as in life itself. It is in the nature of things and we
cannot escape it.
In a society where each man sets himself to obtain wealth, the
difficulty of obtaining an honest living tends to become greater
and greater. The more keenly a society pants to obtain “that which
pleases,” and puts this forward as the first and great consideration,
the more puerile and worthless will its art become. But in a society
which seeks primarily for right relations between its members, an
abundance will be obtainable for all; and when “religious perception”
guides a people’s art beauty inevitably results, as has always been
the case when men have seized a fresh perception of life and of its
purpose.
Tried by such tests the enormous majority of the things we have been
taught to consider great works of art are found wanting. Either they
fail to infect (and attract merely by being interesting, realistic,
dramatic, or by borrowing from others) and are therefore not works of
art at all; or they are works of “exclusive art,” poor in form and
capable of infecting only a select audience trained and habituated to
such inferior art; or they are bad in subject-matter, transmitting
feelings harmful to mankind.
But strive as we may to be clear and explicit, our approval and
disapproval is a matter of _degree_. The thought which underlay the
remark: “Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, even God,”
applies, not to man only but to all things human.
Tolstoy does not shrink from condemning his own artistic productions;
with the exception of two short stories,[26] he tells us, they are
works of bad art. Take, for instance, the novel _Resurrection_, of
which he has somewhere spoken disparagingly, as being “written in
my former style.” What does this mean? The book is a masterpiece
in its own line; it undoubtedly infects many people, and the
feelings transmitted are in the main such as Tolstoy approves of: in
fact, they are the feelings to which his religious perception has
brought him. If for a moment lust is shown, the reaction follows as
inevitably as in real life and is transmitted with great artistic
power. Tolstoy approved of treating all the problems of life,
including the sex-question, quite plainly and explicitly. To guide us
in life we need, not ignorance nor evasion of facts, but soundness of
religious perception, clearness of thought, and a right direction
and development of feeling. In subject-matter then _Resurrection_ is
as clearly a work of religious art as any novel mentioned by Tolstoy
in _What is Art?_ And with regard to the manner in which the matter
is presented, I think it may safely be said that in “clearness,”
as well as in “simplicity and compression,” it stands easily first
among Tolstoy’s novels. Of its “individuality and sincerity,” to say
that it equals his former works is to say that it is unsurpassed in
those qualities by any novel we possess. Why the work did not satisfy
Tolstoy is, I think, because it is a work of “exclusive art,” laden
with details of time and place. “Simplicity and compression” it
possesses, but not in the degree required in works of “universal”
art. It is a novel appealing mainly to the class that has leisure for
novel-reading because it neglects to produce its own food, make its
own clothes, or build its own houses. But if these considerations
apply to _Resurrection_, they apply with at least equal force to all
the best novels extant. If Tolstoy is sometimes severe on others, it
must be admitted that he is at least as severe on himself, and to
enable us to discern the _comparative_ merits of different works of
art we may use his principles without applying them as exactingly as
he does himself.
There is one defect in Tolstoy’s writings in general which needs to
be noted. It is observable in his novels, but it is more serious in
his essays and in his philosophical works. He does not write in a
style always easy to read. He expects more strenuous co-operation
from his readers than can safely be looked for from the ordinary
man. His sentences are often long, sometimes extremely involved, and
occasionally even faulty in structure. The strenuous labour he puts
into his work all goes to elucidate his perception of the matter,
and the sequence of the ideas. For the mere phraseology he trusted
to his great power of expression, and he had as little inclination
to polish it on a final revision as when writing the first rough
draft. He would re-shape an article again and again if the thoughts
expressed did not satisfy him. But he would sometimes leave
uncorrected a careless sentence which might baffle many an unwary
reader. This characteristic was not noticeable in his earlier works,
when the matter he wrote about was less absorbingly important.[27]
He certainly in his later years cared nothing at all for the elegant
phraseology so highly prized by writers who having nothing particular
to express attach supreme importance to their power of expression.
But his readers have occasionally to pay for his indifference.
_What is Art?_ itself is a philosophical work, though many passages,
and even some whole chapters, appeal to us as works of art, and we
feel the contagion of the author’s hope, his anxiety to serve the
cause of truth and love, his indignation (sometimes rather sharply
expressed) at whatever blocks the path of progress, and his contempt
for much that the “cultured crowd” in our erudite, perverted society
have persuaded themselves, and would fain persuade others, is the
highest art.
One result which follows inevitably from Tolstoy’s view (and which
illustrates how widely his views differ from the fashionable esthetic
mysticism), is that art is not stationary but progressive. It is
true that our highest religious perception found expression eighteen
hundred years ago, and then served as the basis of a literary art
which is still unmatched, and that similar cases can be instanced
from the farther East. But allowing for such great exceptions--to
which, not inaptly, the term “inspiration” has been specially
applied--the subject-matter of art improves, though long periods of
time may have to be viewed to make this obvious. Our power of verbal
expression may be no better now than it was in the days of David,
but we must no longer esteem as good in _subject-matter_ poems which
appeal to the Eternal to destroy a man’s private or national foes;
for we have reached a religious perception which bids us have no
foes, and the ultimate source (undefinable by us) from which this
consciousness has come, is what we mean when we speak of God.
PART XII
WHAT IS ART?
_Tolstoy’s Preface to the First English Edition, translated
by Aylmer Maude from the Original Mss._
This book of mine, “What is Art?” appears now for the first time
in its true form. More than one edition has already been issued in
Russia, but in each case it has been so mutilated by the Censor
that I request all who are interested in my views on art only to
judge of them by the work in its present shape. The causes which led
to the publication of the book--with my name attached to it--in a
mutilated form, were the following: In accordance with a decision I
arrived at long ago,--not to submit my writings to the Censorship
(which I consider to be an immoral and irrational institution),
but to print them only in the shape in which they were written,--I
intended not to attempt to print this work in Russia. However, my
good acquaintance Professor Grote, editor of a Moscow psychological
magazine, having heard of the contents of my work asked me to print
it in his magazine, and promised me that he would get the book
through the Censor’s office unmutilated if I would but agree to a few
very unimportant alterations, merely toning down certain expressions.
I was weak enough to agree to this, and it has resulted in a book
appearing under my name, from which not only have some essential
thoughts been excluded, but into which the thoughts of other
men--even thoughts utterly opposed to my own convictions--have been
introduced.
The thing occurred in this way. First Grote softened my expressions
and in some cases weakened them. For instance, he replaced the
words: _always_ by _sometimes_, _all_ by _some_, _Church_ religion
by _Roman Catholic_ religion, “_Mother of God_” by _Madonna_,
_patriotism_ by _pseudo-patriotism_, _palaces_ by _palatii_,[28]
etc., and I did not consider it necessary to protest. But when the
book was already in type, the Censor required that whole sentences
should be altered, and that instead of what I said about the evil of
landed property, a remark should be substituted on the evils of a
landless proletariat.[29] I agreed to this also and to some further
alterations. It seemed not worth while to upset the whole affair for
the sake of one sentence, and when one alteration had been agreed to
it seemed not worth while to protest against a second and a third.
Thus 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. But there was consolation
in the thought that the book, even in this form, if it contains
something good, would be of use to Russian readers whom it would
otherwise not have reached. Things however turned out otherwise.
_Nous comptions sans notre hôte._ After the legal term of four
days had already elapsed, the book was seized and, on instructions
received from Petersburg, it was handed over to the Spiritual Censor.
Then Grote declined all further participation in the affair, and
the Spiritual Censor proceeded to do what he liked with the book.
The Spiritual Censorship is one of the most ignorant, venal, stupid,
and despotic institutions in Russia. Books which disagree in any way
with the recognised State religion of Russia, if once it gets hold
of them, are almost always totally suppressed and burnt; which is
what happened to all my religious works when attempts were made to
print them in Russia. Probably a similar fate would have overtaken
this work also, had not the editors of the magazine employed all
means to save it. The result of their efforts was that the Spiritual
Censor, a priest who probably understands art and is interested in
art as much as I understand or am interested in church services,
but who gets a good salary for destroying whatever is likely to
displease his superiors, struck out all that seemed to him to
endanger his position, and substituted his thoughts for mine wherever
he considered it necessary to do so. For instance, where I speak of
Christ going to the Cross for the sake of the truth he professed, the
Censor substituted a statement that Christ died for mankind, that
is, he attributed to me an assertion of the dogma of the Redemption,
which I consider to be one of the most untruthful and harmful of
Church dogmas. After correcting the book in this way, the Spiritual
Censor allowed it to be printed.
To protest in Russia is impossible; no newspaper would publish such
a protest, and to withdraw my book from the magazine and place the
editor in an awkward position with the public was also impossible.
So the matter has remained. A book has appeared under my name
containing thoughts attributed to me which are not mine.
I was persuaded to give my article to a Russian magazine in order
that my thoughts, which may be useful, should become the possession
of Russian readers; and the result has been that my name is affixed
to a work from which it might be assumed that I quite arbitrarily
assert things contrary to the general opinion, without adducing my
reasons; that I only consider false patriotism bad, but patriotism
in general a very good feeling; that I merely deny the absurdities
of the Roman Catholic Church and disbelieve in the Madonna, but
that I believe in the Orthodox Eastern faith and in the “Mother of
God”; that I consider all the writings collected in the Bible to be
holy books, and see the chief importance of Christ’s life in the
Redemption of mankind by his death.
I have narrated all this in such detail because it strikingly
illustrates the indubitable truth, that 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 expect, inevitably lead you not only
to acknowledge the institution you disapprove of, but also to
participate in the evil that institution produces.
I am glad to be able by this statement at least to do something to
correct the error into which I was led by my compromise.
I have also to mention that besides reinstating the parts excluded by
the Censor from the Russian editions, other corrections and additions
of importance have been made in this edition.
LEO TOLSTOY.
_29th March 1898._
NOTE:
When a subscription edition of Tolstoy’s works edited by Professor
Leo Wiener, was published in 1904, by Dana Estes in U. S. A. and G.
M. Dent & Co. in London, this request of Tolstoy’s to “all who are
interested in my views on art only to judge of them by the work in
its present shape,” was disregarded, another version was substituted,
and incidentally this preface was omitted from that “complete
edition” of his works.
PART XIII
WHAT IS ART?
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Time and labour spent on art--Lives stunted in its
service--Morality sacrificed to, and anger justified by,
art--The rehearsal of an opera described.
CHAPTER II
Does art compensate for so much evil?--What is art?--Confusion of
opinions--Is it “that which produces beauty”?--The word “beauty”
in Russian--Chaos in esthetics.
CHAPTER III
Summary of various esthetic theories and definitions, from
Baumgarten to the present day.
CHAPTER IV
Definitions of art founded on beauty--Taste not definable--A clear
definition needed to enable us to recognise works of art.
CHAPTER V
Definitions not founded on beauty--Tolstoy’s definition--The extent
and necessity of art--How people in the past distinguished good
from bad in art.
CHAPTER VI
How art for pleasure came into esteem--Religions indicate
what is considered good and bad--Church Christianity--The
Renaissance--Scepticism of the upper classes--They confound
beauty with goodness.
CHAPTER VII
An esthetic theory framed to suit the view of life of the ruling
classes.
CHAPTER VIII
Who have adopted it?--Real art needful for all men--Our art
too expensive, too unintelligible, and too harmful, for the
masses--“The elect” in art.
CHAPTER IX
Perversion of our art--It has lost its natural subject-matter--Has
no flow of fresh feeling--Transmits chiefly three base emotions.
CHAPTER X
Loss of comprehensibility--Decadent art--Recent French art--Have
we a right to say it is bad, and that what we like is good
art?--The highest art has always been comprehensible to normal
people--What fails to infect normal people is not art.
CHAPTER XI
Counterfeits of art produced by: Borrowing; Imitating; Arranging
effects; Creating interest--Qualifications needful for the
production of real works of art, and those sufficient for
production of counterfeits.
CHAPTER XII
Causes of production of
counterfeits--Professionalism--Criticism--Schools of art.
CHAPTER XIII
Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung” a type of counterfeit art--Its
success, and the reasons thereof.
CHAPTER XIV
Truths fatal to preconceived views are not readily
recognised--Proportion of works of art to
counterfeits--Perversion of taste and incapacity to recognise
art--Examples.
CHAPTER XV
The quality of art, considered apart from its subject-matter--The
sign of art: infectiousness--Incomprehensible to those whose
taste is perverted--Conditions of infection: Individuality;
Clearness; Sincerity.
CHAPTER XVI
The quality of art, considered according to its subject-matter--The
better the feeling the better the art--The cultured crowd--The
religious perception of our age--New ideals put fresh demands to
art--Art unites--Religious art--Universal art--Both co-operate
to one result--The new appraisement of art--Bad art--Examples of
art--How to test a work claiming to be art.
CHAPTER XVII
Results of absence of true art--Results of perversion of art:
Labour and lives spent on what is useless and harmful--The
abnormal life of the rich--Perplexity of children and
plain folk--Confusion of right and wrong--Nietzsche and
Redbeard--Superstition, Patriotism, and Sensuality.
CHAPTER XVIII
The purpose of human life is the brotherly union of man--Art must
be guided by this perception.
CHAPTER XIX
The art of the future not the possession of a select minority, but
a means toward perfection and unity.
CHAPTER XX
The connection between science and art--The mendacious sciences;
the trivial sciences--Science should deal with the great
problems of human life and serve as a basis for art.
APPENDICES
Appendix I. Translations of French poems and prose quoted in
Chap. X of _What is Art?_
Appendix II. Translation from Mallarmé.
Appendix III. Poems by Henri de Régnier, Vielé-Griffin, Verhaeren,
Moréas, and Montesquiou, with translations.
Appendix IV. The contents of Wagner’s _Nibelungen Ring_.
(This Table of Contents is compiled by the translator.)
CHAPTER I
_Time and labour spent on art. Lives stunted in its service.
Morality sacrificed to, and anger justified by, art. The
rehearsal of the opera described._
Take up any one of our ordinary newspapers and you will find a part
devoted to the theatre and music. In almost every number you will
find a description of some art-exhibition or of some particular
picture, and you will always find reviews of new works of art that
have appeared: of volumes of poems, of short stories, or of novels.
Promptly and in detail as soon as it has occurred, an account is
published of how such and such an actress or actor played this or
that rôle in such and such a drama, comedy, or opera, and of the
merits of the performance; as well as of the contents of the new
drama, comedy, or opera, with its defects and merits. With as much
care and detail or even more, we are told how such and such an
artist has sung a certain piece, or has played it on the piano or
violin, and what were the merits and defects of the piece and of the
performance. In every large town there is sure to be at least one,
if not more than one, exhibition of new pictures, the merits and
defects of which are discussed in the utmost detail by critics and
connoisseurs.
New novels and poems, in separate volumes or in the magazines, appear
almost every day, and the newspapers consider it their duty to give
their readers detailed accounts of these artistic productions.
For the support of art in Russia (where for the education of the
people only a hundredth part is spent of what would be required to
give everyone an opportunity of instruction) the Government grants
millions of roubles in subsidies to academies, conservatoires, and
theatres. In France twenty million francs are assigned for art, and
similar grants are made in Germany and elsewhere.
In every large town enormous buildings are erected for museums,
academies, conservatoires, dramatic schools, and for performances
and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen,--carpenters, masons,
painters, joiners, paperhangers, tailors, hairdressers, jewellers,
moulders, type-setters,--spend their whole lives in hard labour to
satisfy the demands of art; so that hardly any other department of
human activity, the military excepted, consumes so much energy as
this.
Not only is enormous labour spent on this activity, but in it as in
war the very lives of men are sacrificed. Hundreds of thousands of
people devote their lives from childhood to learning to twirl their
legs rapidly (dancers), or to touch notes and strings very rapidly
(musicians), or to draw with paint and represent what they see
(artists), or to turn every phrase inside out and find a rhyme to
every word. And these people, often very kind and clever and capable
of all sorts of useful labour, grow savage over their specialised
and stupefying occupations and become one-sided and self-complacent
specialists, dull to all the serious phenomena of life and skilful
only at rapidly twisting their legs, their tongues, or their fingers.
But even this stunting of human life is not the worst. I remember
being once at the rehearsal of one of the most ordinary of the new
operas which are produced at all the opera houses of Europe and
America.
I arrived when the first act had already commenced. To reach the
auditorium I had to pass through the stage-entrance. By dark
entrances and passages, past immense machines for changing the
scenery and for lighting the stage and the theatre, I was led
through the vaults of an enormous building; and there in the gloom
and dust I saw workmen busily engaged. One of these men--pale,
haggard, in a dirty blouse, with dirty, work-worn hands and cramped
fingers, evidently tired and out of humour--went past me, angrily
scolding another man. Ascending by a dark stair, I came out on the
boards behind the scenes. Amid various poles and rings and scattered
scenery decorations and curtains, stood and moved dozens, if not
hundreds, of painted and dressed-up men in costumes fitting tight to
their thighs and calves, and also women, who were as usual, as nearly
nude as might be. These were all singers, or members of the chorus,
or ballet-dancers, awaiting their turns. My guide led me across the
stage and, by means of a bridge of boards, across the orchestra (in
which perhaps a hundred musicians of all kinds, from kettle-drum to
flute and harp, were seated), to the dark pit-stalls.
On an elevation between two lamps with reflectors and in an arm-chair
placed before a music-stand, sat the director of the musical part,
_bâton_ in hand, managing the orchestra and singers and in general
the production of the whole opera.
The performance had already commenced, and on the stage was being
represented a procession of Indians who had brought home a bride.
Besides men and women in costume, two other men in ordinary clothes
bustled and ran about on the stage: one was the director of the
dramatic part, and the other, who stepped about in soft shoes and ran
from place to place with unusual agility, was the dancing-master,
whose salary per month exceeded what ten labourers earn in a year.
These three directors arranged the singing, the orchestra, and the
procession. The procession, as usual, was enacted by men and women
in couples with tinfoil halberds on their shoulders. They all came
from one place and walked round and round again and then stopped.
The procession took a long time to arrange: first the Indians with
halberds came on too late, then too soon; then at the right time, but
crowded together at the exit; then they did not crowd, but arranged
themselves badly at the sides of the stage,--and each time the whole
performance was stopped and recommenced from the beginning. The
procession is preceded by a recitative, delivered by a man dressed
up like some variety of Turk, who, opening his mouth in a curious
way, sings, “Home I bring the bri-i-ide.” He sings, and waves his
arm (which is of course bare) from under his mantle. The procession
commences. But here the French horn, in the accompaniment of the
recitative, does something wrong; and the director, with a shudder as
if some catastrophe had occurred, raps with his stick on the stand.
All is stopped, and the director, turning to the orchestra, attacks
the French horn, scolding him in the rudest terms, as cabmen abuse
one another, for taking the wrong note. And again the whole thing
recommences. The Indians with their halberds again come on, treading
softly in their extraordinary boots; again the singer sings, “Home I
bring the bri-i-ide.” But here the pairs get too close together. More
raps with the stick, more scolding, and a recommencement. Again “Home
I bring the bri-i-ide,” again the same gesticulation with the bare
arm from under the mantle, and again the couples, treading softly
with halberds on their shoulders, some with sad and serious faces,
some talking and smiling, arrange themselves in a circle and begin
to sing. All seems to be going well, but again the stick raps and
the director, in a distressed and angry voice, begins to scold the
men and women of the chorus. It appears that when singing they had
omitted to raise their hands from time to time in sign of animation.
“Are you all dead, or what? Cows that you are! Are you corpses,
that you can’t move?” Again they re-commence, “Home I bring the
bri-i-ide,” and again, with sorrowful faces, the chorus women sing,
first one and then another of them raising their hands. But two
chorus-girls speak to each other,--again a more vehement rapping with
the stick. “Have you come here to talk? Can’t you gossip at home? You
there in red breeches, come nearer. Look at me! Begin again!” Again
“Home I bring the bri-i-ide.” And so it goes on for one, two, three
hours. The whole of such a rehearsal lasts six hours on end. Raps
with the stick, repetitions, placings, corrections of the singers,
of the orchestra, of the procession, of the dancers,--all seasoned
with angry scolding. I heard the words, “asses,” “fools,” “idiots,”
“swine,” addressed to the musicians and singers at least forty times
in the course of one hour. And the unhappy individual to whom the
abuse is addressed--flautist, horn-blower, or singer,--physically
and mentally demoralised, does not reply and does what is demanded
of him. Twenty times is repeated the one phrase, “Home I bring the
bri-i-ide,” and twenty times the striding about in yellow shoes with
a halberd over the shoulder. The conductor knows that these people
are so demoralised that they are no longer fit for anything but to
blow trumpets and walk about with halberds and in yellow shoes,
and that they are also accustomed to dainty easy living, so that
they will put up with anything rather than lose their luxurious
life. He therefore gives free vent to his churlishness, especially
as he has seen the same thing done in Paris and Vienna, and knows
that this is the way the best conductors behave, and that it is a
musical tradition of great artists to be so carried away by the great
business of their art that they cannot pause to consider the feelings
of other artists.
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 necessary and important and that the fault
for which the Elder 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
why 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.
That there never were, or could be, such Indians, and that they
were not only unlike Indians, but that what they were doing was
unlike anything on earth except other operas, was beyond all manner
of doubt; that people do not converse in such a way as recitative,
and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet,
waving their arms to express their emotions; that nowhere, except
in theatres, do people walk about in such a manner, in pairs, with
tinfoil halberds and in slippers; that no one ever gets angry in such
a way, or is affected in such a way, or laughs in such a way, or
cries in such a way; and that no one on earth can be moved by such
performances,--all this is beyond the possibility of doubt.
Instinctively the question presents itself: For whom is this being
done? Whom _can_ it please? If there are occasionally good melodies
in the opera to which it is pleasant to listen, they could have been
sung simply, without these stupid costumes and all the processions
and recitatives and hand-wavings.
The ballet, in which half-naked women make voluptuous movements,
twisting themselves into various sensual wreathings, is simply a lewd
performance.
So one is quite at a loss as to whom these things are done for. The
man of culture is heartily sick of them, while to a real working man
they are utterly incomprehensible. If anyone can be pleased by these
things (which is doubtful), it can only be some young footman or
depraved artisan, who has contracted the spirit of the upper classes
but is not yet satiated with their amusements and wishes to show his
breeding.
And all this nasty folly is prepared, not simply, nor with kindly
merriment, but with anger and brutal cruelty.
It is said that it is all done for the sake of art, and that art
is a very important thing. But is it true that art is so important
that such sacrifices should be made for its sake? This question is
especially urgent, because art, for the sake of which the labour of
millions, the lives of men and, above all, love between man and man,
are all being sacrificed,--this very art is becoming something more
and more vague and uncertain to human perception.
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 to which the critics of various
schools themselves deny the title, there is scarcely any art left.
The artists of various sects, like the theologians of various sects,
mutually exclude and destroy one another. Listen to the artists of
the schools of our times, and in all branches you will find each
set of artists disowning others. In poetry the old romanticists
deny the parnassians and the decadents; the parnassians disown the
romanticists and the decadents; the decadents disown all their
predecessors and the symbolists; the symbolists disown all their
predecessors and _les mages_; and _les mages_ disown all, all their
predecessors.
Among novelists we have naturalists, psychologists, and
“nature-ists,” all rejecting each other. And it is the same in
dramatic art, in painting, and in music. So that art, which demands
such tremendous labour-sacrifices from the people, which stunts human
lives and transgresses against human love, is not only _not_ a thing
clearly and firmly defined, but is understood in such contradictory
ways by its own devotees that it is difficult to say what is meant by
art, and especially what is good, useful art,--art for the sake of
which we might condone such sacrifices as are being offered at its
shrine.
CHAPTER II
_Does art compensate for so much evil? What is art? Confusion
of opinions. Is it “that which produces beauty”? The word
“beauty” in Russian. Chaos in esthetics._
For the production of every ballet, circus, opera, operetta,
exhibition, picture, concert, or printed book, the intense and
unwilling labour of thousands and thousands of people is needed at
what is often harmful and humiliating work. It were well if artists
made all they require for themselves, but as it is they all need
the help of workmen, not only to produce art, but also for their
own usually luxurious maintenance. And one way or other they get
it, either through payments from rich people, or through subsidies
given by Government (in Russia, for instance, in grants of millions
of roubles to theatres, conservatoires and academies). 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 esthetic pleasures which art
gives.
It was all very well for a Greek or Roman artist, or even for a
Russian artist of the first half of the nineteenth century (when
there still were slaves and it was considered right that there should
be), with a quiet mind to make people serve him and his art; but in
our day, when in all men there is at least some dim perception of the
equal rights of all, it is impossible to constrain people to labour
unwillingly for art, without first deciding the question whether it
is true that art is so good and so important an affair as to redeem
this evil.
If not, we have the terrible probability to consider, that while
fearful sacrifices of the labour and lives of men and of morality
itself are being made to art, that same art may be not only useless
but even harmful.
And therefore it is necessary for a society in which works of art
arise and are supported, to find out whether all that professes to
be art is really art; whether (as is presupposed in our society) all
that is art is good, and whether it is important, and worth those
sacrifices which it necessitates. It is still more necessary for
every conscientious artist to know this, in order that he may be
sure that all he does has a valid meaning,--that it is not merely
an infatuation of the small circle of people among whom he lives
which excites in him the false assurance that he is doing a good
work--and that what he takes from others for the support of his often
very luxurious life will be compensated for by those productions at
which he works. And that is why answers to the above questions are
especially important in our time.
What is this art, which is considered so important and necessary for
humanity that for its sake these sacrifices of labour, of human life,
and even of goodness, may be made?
“What is art? What a question! Art is architecture, sculpture,
painting, music, and poetry in all its forms,” usually replies the
ordinary man, the art amateur, or even the artist himself, imagining
the matter about which he is talking to be perfectly clear, and
uniformly understood by everybody. But in architecture, one inquires
further, are there not simple buildings which are not objects of art,
and buildings with artistic pretensions which are unsuccessful and
ugly and therefore not to be considered as works of art?--wherein
lies the characteristic sign of a work of art?
It is the same in sculpture, in music, and in poetry. Art, in all its
forms, is bounded on one side by the practically useful and on the
other by unsuccessful attempts at art. How is art to be marked off
from each of these? The ordinary educated man of our circle, and even
the artist who has not occupied himself specially with esthetics,
will not hesitate at this question either. He thinks the solution has
been found long ago, and is well known to everyone.
“Art is such activity as produces beauty,” says such a man.
If art consists in that,--then is a ballet or an operetta art? you
inquire.
“Yes,” says the ordinary man, though with some hesitation, “a good
ballet or a graceful operetta is also art, in so far as it manifests
beauty.”
But without even asking the ordinary man what differentiates the
“good” ballet and the “graceful” operetta from their opposites (a
question he would have much difficulty in answering), if you ask him
whether the activity of costumers and hairdressers, who ornament
the figures and faces of the women for the ballet and the operetta,
is art; or the activity of Worth, the dressmaker; of scent-makers
and men-cooks, then he will in most cases deny that their activity
belongs to the domain of art. But in this the ordinary man makes a
mistake, just because he is an ordinary man and not a specialist, and
because he has not occupied himself with esthetic questions. Had he
looked into these matters, he would have seen in the great Renan’s
book, _Marc Aurèle_, a dissertation showing that the dressmaker’s
work is art, and that those who do not see in the adornment of
woman an affair of the highest art are very small-minded and dull.
“_C’est le grand art_,” says Renan. Moreover, he would have known
that in many esthetic systems--for instance, in the esthetics of the
learned Professor Kralik, _Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen
Æsthetik, von Richard Kralik_, and in _Les problèmes de l’Esthétique
Contemporaine_, by Guyau--the arts of costume, of taste, and of touch
are included.
“_Es Folgt nun ein Fünfblatt von Künsten, die der subjectiven
Sinnlichkeit entkeimen_” (There results then a pentafoliate of arts,
growing out of the subjective perceptions), says Kralik (p. 175).
“_Sie sind die ästhetische Behandlung der fünf Sinne._” (They are the
esthetic treatment of the five senses.)
These five arts are the following:--
_Die Kunst des Geschmacksinns_--The art of the sense of taste (p.
175).
_Die Kunst des Geruchsinns_--The art of the sense of smell (p. 177).
_Die Kunst des Tastsinns_--The art of the sense of touch (p. 180).
_Die Kunst des Gehörsinns_--The art of the sense of hearing (p. 182).
_Die Kunst des Gesichtsinns_--The art of the sense of sight (p. 184).
Of the first of these--_die Kunst des Geschmacksinns_--he says: _Man
hält zwar gewöhnlich nur zwei oder hochstens drei Sinne für würdig
den Stoff künstlerischer Behandlung abzugeben, aber ich glaube nur
mit bedingtem Recht. Ich will kein allzugroses Gewicht darauf legen,
dass der gemeine Sprachgebrauch manch andere Künste, wie zum Beispiel
die Kochkunst kennt._[30]
And further: _Und es ist doch gewiss eine ästhetische Leistung,
wenn es der Kochkunst gelingt aus einem thierischen Kadaver einen
Gegenstand des Geschmacks in jedem Sinne zu machen. Der Grundsatz
der Kunst des Geschmacksinns (die weiter ist als die sogenannte
Kochkunst) ist also dieser: Es soll alles Geniessbare als Sinnbild
einer Idee behandelt werden und in jedesmaligem Einklang zur
auszudrückenden Idee._[31]
This author, like Renan, acknowledges a _Kostümkunst_ (Art of
Costume) (p. 200), etc.
Such is also the opinion of the French writer, Guyau, who is highly
esteemed by some authors of our day. In his book, _Les Problèmes de
l’esthétique contemporaine_, he speaks seriously of touch, taste, and
smell as giving, or being capable of giving, esthetic impressions:
_Si la couleur manque au toucher, il nous fournit en revanche une
notion que l’œil seul ne peut nous donner, et qui a une valeur
esthétique considérable, celle du_ doux, _du_ soyeux, _du_ poli.
_Ce qui caractérise la beauté du velour c’est sa douceur au toucher
non moins que son brillant. Dans l’idée que nous nous faisons de
la beauté d’une femme, le velouté de sa peau entre comme élément
essentiel._
_Chacun de nous probablement avec un peu d’attention se rappellera
des jouissances du goût, qui out éte de veritables jouissances
esthétiques._[32] And he recounts how a glass of milk drunk by him in
the mountains gave him esthetic enjoyment.
So it turns out that the conception of art as consisting in making
beauty manifest is not at all so simple as it seemed, especially now,
when in this conception of beauty are included our sensations of
touch and taste and smell, as they are by the latest esthetic writers.
But the ordinary man either does not know, or does not wish to know,
all this, and is firmly convinced that all questions about art
may be simply and clearly solved by acknowledging beauty to be the
content of art. To him it seems clear and comprehensible that art
consists in manifesting beauty, and that a reference to beauty will
serve to explain all questions about art.
But what is this beauty which forms the content of art? How is it
defined? What is it?
As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception
conveyed by a word, with the more _aplomb_ and self-assurance do
people use that word, pretending that what is understood by it is so
simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it
actually means.
This is how matters of orthodox religion are usually dealt with,
and this is how people now deal with the conception of beauty. It
is taken for granted that what is meant by the word beauty is known
and understood by everyone. And yet not only is this not known, but
after whole mountains of books have been written on the subject by
the most learned and profound thinkers during one hundred and fifty
years (ever since Baumgarten founded esthetics in the year 1750),
the question, What is beauty? remains to this day quite unsolved,
and in each new work on esthetics it is answered in a new way. One
of the last books I read on esthetics is a not ill-written booklet
by Julius Mithalter, called _Rätsel des Schönen_ (_The Enigma of
the Beautiful_). And that title precisely expresses the position
of the question, What is beauty? After thousands of learned men
have discussed it during one hundred and fifty years, the meaning
of the word beauty remains an enigma still. The Germans answer the
question in their manner, though in a hundred different ways; the
physiological estheticians, especially the Englishmen: Herbert
Spencer, Grant Allen, and his school, answer it each in his own way;
the French eclectics, and the followers of Guyau and Taine, also
each in his own way; and all these people know all the preceding
solutions given by Baumgarten, and Kant, and Schelling, and
Schiller, and Fichte, and Winckelmann, and Lessing, and Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, and Schasler, and Cousin, and Lévêque and
others.
What is this strange conception of “beauty,” which seems so simple
to those who talk without thinking, but in defining which all the
philosophers of various tendencies and different nationalities can
come to no agreement during a century and a half? What is this
conception of beauty, on which the dominant doctrine of art rests?
In Russian, by the word _krasota_ (beauty) we mean only that which
pleases the sight. And though latterly people have begun to speak of
“an ugly deed,” or of “beautiful music,” it is not good Russian.
A Russian of the common folk, not knowing foreign languages, will not
understand you if you tell him that a man who has given his last coat
to another, or done anything similar, has acted “beautifully,” that a
man who has cheated another has done an “ugly” action, or that a song
is “beautiful.”
In Russian a deed may be kind and good, or unkind and bad. Music may
be pleasant and good, or unpleasant and bad; but there can be no such
thing as “beautiful” or “ugly” music.
Beautiful may relate to a man, a horse, a house, a view, or a
movement. Of actions thoughts character or music, if they please us,
we may say that they are good, or, if they do not please us, that
they are bad. But beautiful can be used only concerning that which
pleases the sight. So that the word and conception “good” includes
the conception of “beautiful”; but the reverse is not true; the
conception “beauty” does not include the conception “good.” If we say
“good” of an article which we value for its appearance, we thereby
say that the article is beautiful; but if we say it is “beautiful,”
it does not at all mean that the article is a good one.
Such is the meaning ascribed by the Russian language, and therefore
by the sense of the people, to the words and conceptions “good” and
“beautiful.”
In all the European languages, that is, in the languages of those
nations among whom the doctrine has spread that beauty is the
essential thing in art, the words “_beau_,” “_schön_,” “beautiful,”
“_bello_,” etc., while keeping their meaning of beautiful in form,
have come also to express “goodness,” “kindness,” that is to say,
have come to act as substitutes for the word “good.”
So that it has become quite natural in those languages to use such
expressions as “_belle âme_,” “_schöne Gedanken_,” or “beautiful
deed.” Those languages no longer have a suitable word wherewith
expressly to indicate beauty of form, and have to use a combination
of words such as “_beau par la forme_,” “_beautiful to look at_,” and
so forth, to convey that idea.
Observation of the divergent meanings which the words “beauty” and
“beautiful” have in Russian on the one hand, and in those European
languages now permeated by this esthetic theory on the other hand,
shows us that the word “beauty” has among the latter acquired a
special meaning, namely, that of “good.”
What is remarkable, moreover, is that since we Russians have begun
more and more to adopt the European view of art, the same evolution
has begun to show itself in our language also, and some people
speak and write quite confidently, and without causing surprise,
of beautiful music and ugly actions, and even of beautiful or ugly
thoughts; whereas forty years ago, when I was young, the expressions
“beautiful music” and “ugly actions” were not only unusual but
incomprehensible. Evidently this new meaning given to beauty by
European thought begins to be assimilated by Russian society.
And what really is this meaning? What is this “beauty” as understood
by the European peoples?
In order to answer this question, I must here quote at least a small
selection of those definitions of beauty most generally adopted in
existing esthetic systems. I particularly beg the reader not to be
overcome by dulness, but to read these extracts through, or still
better to read some one of the erudite esthetic authors. Not to
mention the voluminous German estheticians, a very good book for this
purpose would be either the German book by Kralik, the English work
by Knight, or the French one by Lévêque. It is necessary to read
at least one of the learned esthetic writers in order to form at
first-hand a conception of the variety of opinion and the frightful
obscurity which reigns in this region of speculation; not in this
important matter trusting to another’s report.
This for instance is what the German esthetician Schasler says in the
preface to his famous, voluminous, and detailed work on esthetics:--
“In hardly any sphere of philosophic science can we find such
divergent methods of investigation and exposition, amounting even to
self-contradiction, as in the sphere of esthetics. On the one hand
we have elegant phraseology without any substance, characterised in
great part by most one-sided superficiality; and on the other hand,
accompanying undeniable profundity of investigation and richness
of subject-matter, we get a revolting awkwardness of philosophic
terminology clothing the simplest thoughts in an apparel of abstract
science as though to render them worthy to enter the consecrated
palace of the system; and finally, between these two methods of
investigation and exposition, there is a third, forming as it were
the transition from one to the other, an eclectic method,--now
flaunting an elegant phraseology and now a pedantic erudition....
A style of exposition that falls into none of these three defects
but is truly concrete, and having important matter expresses it in
clear and popular philosophic language, can nowhere be found less
frequently than in the domain of esthetics.”[33]
It is only necessary, as an example, to read Schasler’s own book to
convince oneself of the justice of this observation of his.
On the same subject the French writer, Véron, in the preface to his
very good work on esthetics, says, “_Il n’y a pas de science, qui ait
été plus que l’esthétique livrée aux rêveries des métaphysiciens.
Depuis Platon jusqu’aux doctrines officielles de nos jours, on a fait
de l’art je ne sais quel amalgame de fantaisies quintessenciées, et
de mystères transcendant aux qui trouvent leur expression suprême
dans la conception absolue du Beau idéal, prototype immuable et divin
des choses réelles_” (_L’esthétique_, 1878, p. 5).[34]
If the reader will only be at the pains to peruse the following
extracts defining beauty, taken from the chief writers on esthetics,
he may convince himself that this censure is thoroughly deserved.
I shall not quote the definitions of beauty attributed to the
ancients,--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others, down to
Plotinus,--because, in reality, the ancients had not that conception
of beauty separated from goodness which forms the basis and aim of
esthetics in our time. By referring the judgments of the ancients on
beauty to our conception of it, as is usually done in esthetics, we
give the words of the ancients a meaning which is not theirs.[35]
CHAPTER III
_Summary of various esthetic theories and definitions, from
Baumgarten to the present day._
I begin with the founder of esthetics, Baumgarten (1714–1762).
According to Baumgarten,[36] the object of logical knowledge is
Truth, the object of esthetic (_i. e._, sensuous) knowledge is
Beauty. Beauty is the Perfect (the Absolute), recognised through the
senses; Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is
the Perfect reached by moral will.
Beauty is defined by Baumgarten as a correspondence, that is, an
order of the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in
their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please
and excite a desire, “_Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlangens_.”
(A position precisely the opposite to Kant’s definition of the nature
and sign of beauty.)
With reference to the manifestations of beauty, Baumgarten considers
that the highest embodiment of beauty is visible to us in nature, and
he therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature.
(This position also is directly contradicted by the conclusions of
the latest estheticians.)
Passing over the unimportant followers of Baumgarten,--Maier,
Eschenburg, and Eberhard,--who only slightly modified the doctrine
of their teacher by dividing the pleasant from the beautiful, I
will quote the definitions given by writers who came immediately
after Baumgarten and defined beauty in quite another way. These
writers were Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Moritz. They, in contradiction
to Baumgarten’s main position, recognise as the aim of art not
beauty, but goodness. Thus Sulzer (1720–1777) says, only that can
be considered beautiful which contains goodness. According to his
theory, the aim of the whole life of humanity is welfare in social
life. This is attained by the education of the moral feelings, to
which end art should be subservient. Beauty is that which evokes and
educates this feeling.
Beauty is understood almost in the same way by Mendelssohn
(1729–1786). According to him, art is the development of the
beautiful, obscurely recognised by feeling, till it becomes the true
and good. The aim of art is moral perfection.[37]
For the estheticians of this school the ideal of beauty is a
beautiful soul in a beautiful body. So that these estheticians
completely wipe out Baumgarten’s division of the Perfect (the
Absolute), into the three forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; and
Beauty again merges into the Good and the True.
But this conception is not only not maintained by the later
estheticians, but the esthetic doctrine of Winckelmann arises, again
in complete opposition. This divides the mission of art from the aim
of goodness in the sharpest and most positive manner, makes external
beauty the aim of art, and even limits it to visible beauty.
According to the celebrated work of Winckelmann (1717–1767), the law
and aim of all art is beauty only, beauty quite separated from and
independent of goodness. There are three kinds of beauty:--(1) beauty
of form, (2) beauty of idea, expressing itself in the position of the
figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, attainable only
when the two first conditions are present. This beauty of expression
is the highest aim of art, and is attained in antique art; modern art
should therefore aim at imitating ancient art.[38]
Art is similarly understood by Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by
Goethe and by all the distinguished estheticians of Germany till
Kant, from whose day, again, a different conception of art commences.
Native esthetic theories arose during this period in England, France,
Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were
equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like
the German estheticians, founded their theories on a conception of
the Beautiful; understanding beauty in the sense of a something
existing absolutely and more or less intermingled with Goodness, or
having one and the same root. In England almost simultaneously with
Baumgarten, even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home,
Burke, Hogarth, and others, wrote on art.
According to Shaftesbury (1670–1713), “That which is beautiful is
harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable
is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of
consequence agreeable and good.”[39] Beauty, he taught, is recognised
by the mind only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness
proceed from the same fount.
So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as being something
separate from goodness, they again merge into something inseparable.
According to Hutcheson (1694–1747--_Inquiry into the Original of our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue_), the aim of art is beauty, the essence
of which consists in evoking in us the perception of uniformity and
variety. In the recognition of what is art we are guided by “an
internal sense.” This internal sense may be in contradiction to the
ethical one. So that according to Hutcheson beauty does not always
correspond with goodness, but separates from it and is sometimes
contrary to it.[40]
According to Home, Lord Kames, (1696–1782), beauty is that which is
pleasant. Therefore beauty is defined by taste alone. The standard
of true taste is that the maximum of richness, fulness, strength,
and variety of impression, should be contained within the narrowest
limits. That is the ideal of a perfect work of art.
According to Burke (1729–1797--_Philosophical Inquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_), the sublime
and beautiful, which are the aim of art, have their origin in the
promptings of self-preservation and of society. These feelings,
examined at their source, are means for the maintenance of the race
through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by
nourishment, defence, and war; the second (society) by intercourse
and propagation. Therefore self-defence and war, which is bound
up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability and the
sex-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.[41]
Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the
eighteenth century.
During the same period, the writers on art in France, were Père André
and Batteux, with Diderot, D’Alembert, and to some extent Voltaire,
following later.
According to Père André (_Essai sur le Beau_, 1741), there are three
kinds of beauty--divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial
beauty.[42]
According to Batteux (1713–1780), art consists in imitating the
beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.[43] Such also is Diderot’s
definition of art.
The French writers, like the English, hold that it is taste that
decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not
laid down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same
view was held by D’Alembert and Voltaire.[44]
According to Pagano, the Italian esthetician of that period, art
consists in uniting the beauties dispersed in nature. The capacity to
perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one
whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that
beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.[45]
According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori
(1672–1750),--_Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e
le arti_,--and especially Spaletti,[46]--_Saggio sopra la bellezza_
(1765),--art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with
Burke) on the desire for self-preservation and society.
Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720–1790), who had an influence
on the German estheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According
to him, beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives
most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of perceptions in
the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the
greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest
cognition to which man can attain.[47]
Such were the esthetic theories outside Germany during the last
century. In Germany, after Wincklemann, there again arose a
completely new esthetic theory, that of Kant (1724–1804), which
more than all others clears up what this conception of beauty, and
consequently of art, really amounts to.
The esthetic 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 also
the judging capacity (_Urteilskraft_), which forms judgments without
reasoning and produces pleasure without desire (_Urtheil ohne Begriff
und Vergnügen ohne Begehren_). This capacity is the basis of esthetic
feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is
that which in general and necessarily, without reasoning and without
practical advantage, pleases; and in its objective meaning it is the
form of an object suitable for its purpose in so far as that object
is perceived without any conception of its utility.[48]
Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among
whom was Schiller (1759–1805). According to Schiller, who wrote much
on esthetics, the aim of art is, as with Kant, beauty, the source of
which is pleasure without practical advantage. So that art may be
called a game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, but in
the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without
other aim than that of beauty.[49]
Besides Schiller, the most remarkable of Kant’s followers in the
sphere of esthetics was Wilhelm Humboldt, who, though he added
nothing to the definition of beauty, explained various forms of
it,--the drama, music, humour, etc.[50]
After Kant, besides the second-rate philosophers, the writers on
esthetics were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their followers.
Fichte (1762–1814) says that perception of the beautiful proceeds
from this: the world--that is, nature--has two sides: it is the
sum of our limitations, and it is the sum of our free idealistic
activity. In the first aspect the world is limited, in the second
aspect it is free. In the first aspect every object is limited,
distorted, compressed, confined--and we see deformity; in the second
we perceive its inner completeness, vitality, regeneration--and
we see beauty. So that the deformity or beauty of an object,
according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the observer.
Beauty therefore exists, not in the world but in the beautiful
soul (_schöner Geist_). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful
soul, and its aim is the education, not of the mind only--that is
the business of the _savant_; not of the heart only--that is the
affair of the moral preacher; but of the whole man. And so the
characteristic of beauty lies not in anything external, but in the
presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.[51]
Following Fichte, and in the same direction, Friedrich Schlegel and
Adam Müller also defined beauty. According to Schlegel (1772–1829),
beauty in art is understood too incompletely, one-sidedly, and
disconnectedly. Beauty exists not only in art but also in nature and
in love; so that the truly beautiful is expressed by the union of
art, nature, and love. Therefore, as inseparably one with esthetic
art, Schlegel acknowledges moral and philosophic art.[52]
According to Adam Müller (1779–1829), there are two kinds of beauty:
the one, general beauty, which attracts people as the sun attracts
the planet--this is found chiefly in antique art--and the other,
individual beauty, which results from the observer himself becoming a
sun attracting beauty,--this is the beauty of modern art. A world in
which all contradictions are harmonised is the highest beauty. Every
work of art is a reproduction of this universal harmony.[53] The
highest art is the art of life.[54]
Next after Fichte and his followers came a contemporary of his, the
philosopher Schelling (1775–1845), who has had a great influence
on the esthetic conceptions of our times. According to Schelling’s
philosophy, art is the production or result of that conception of
things by which the subject becomes its own object, or the object
its own subject. Beauty is the perception of the infinite in the
finite. And the chief characteristic of works of art is unconscious
infinity. Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,
of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and
therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. Beauty is the
contemplation of things in themselves as they exist in the prototype
(_in den Urbildern_). It is not the artist who by his knowledge of
skill produces the beautiful but the idea of beauty in him itself
produces it.[55]
Of Schelling’s followers the most noticeable was Solger
(1780–1819--_Vorlesungen über Aesthetik_). According to him, the idea
of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see
only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination,
may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to
creation.[56]
According to another follower of Schelling, Krause (1781–1832), true,
positive beauty is the manifestation of the Idea in an individual
form; art is the actualization of the beauty existing in the sphere
of man’s free spirit. The highest stage of art is the art of life,
which directs its activity towards the adornment of life so that it
may be a beautiful abode for a beautiful man.[57]
After Schelling and his followers came the new esthetic doctrine of
Hegel, which is held to this day, consciously by many but by the
majority unconsciously. This teaching is not only no clearer or
better defined than the preceding ones, but is if possible even more
cloudy and mystical.
According to Hegel (1770–1831), God manifests himself in nature and
in art in the form of beauty. God expresses himself in two ways:
in the object and in the subject--in nature and in spirit. Beauty
is the shining of the Idea through matter. Only the soul and what
pertains to it is truly beautiful, and therefore the beauty of nature
is only the reflection of the natural beauty of the spirit--the
beautiful has only a spiritual content. But the spiritual must appear
in sensuous form. The sensuous manifestation of spirit is only
appearance (_schein_), and this appearance is the only reality of the
beautiful. Art is thus the production of this appearance of the Idea,
and is a means, together with religion and philosophy, of bringing to
consciousness, and of expressing, the deepest problems of humanity
and the highest truths of the spirit.
Truth and beauty according to Hegel are one and the same thing; the
difference being only that truth is the Idea itself as it exists in
itself and is thinkable. The Idea, manifested externally, becomes to
the apprehension not only true but beautiful. The beautiful is the
manifestation of the Idea.[58]
Following Hegel came his many adherents: Weisse, Arnold Ruge,
Rosenkrantz, Theodor Vischer and others.
According to Weisse (1801–1867), art is the introduction
(_Einbildung_) of the absolute spiritual reality of beauty into
external, dead, indifferent matter, the perception of which latter
apart from the beauty brought into it presents the negation of all
existence in itself (_Negation alles Fürsichseins_).
In the idea of truth, Weisse explains, lies a contradiction between
the subjective and the objective sides of knowledge, in that an
individual _ego_ discerns the Universal. This contradiction can be
removed by a conception that should unite into one the universal and
the individual, which fall asunder in our conceptions of truth. Such
a conception would be reconciled (_aufgehoben_) truth. Beauty is such
a reconciled truth.[59]
According to Ruge (1802–1880), a strict follower of Hegel, beauty is
the Idea expressing itself. The spirit, contemplating itself, either
finds itself expressed completely, and then that full expression
of itself is beauty; or incompletely, and then it feels the need
to alter this imperfect expression of itself, and becomes creative
art.[60]
According to Vischer (1807–1887), beauty is the Idea in the form of
a finite phenomenon. The Idea itself is not indivisible, but forms a
system of ideas which may be represented by ascending and descending
lines. The higher the idea the more beauty it contains; but even the
lowest contains beauty, because it forms an essential link of the
system. The highest form of the Idea is personality, and therefore
the highest art is that which has for its subject-matter the highest
personality.[61]
Such were the theories of the German estheticians in the Hegelian
direction, but they did not monopolise esthetic dissertations. In
Germany, side by side and simultaneously with the Hegelian theories,
there appeared theories of beauty not only independent of Hegel’s
position (that beauty is the manifestation of the Idea), but directly
contrary to this view, denying and ridiculing it. Such was the line
taken by Herbart and more particularly by Schopenhauer.
According to Herbart (1776–1841), there is not and cannot be any
such thing as beauty existing in itself. What does exist is only
our opinion, and it is necessary to find the base of this opinion
(_Aesthetisches Elementarurtheil_). Such bases are connected with our
impressions. There are certain relations which we term beautiful;
and art consists in finding these relations, which are simultaneous
in painting, the plastic art, and architecture; successive and
simultaneous in music; and purely successive in poetry. In
contradiction to the former estheticians, Herbart holds that objects
are often beautiful which express nothing at all, as, for instance,
the rainbow, which is beautiful for its lines and colours, and not
for its mythological connection with Iris or Noah’s rainbow.[62]
Another opponent of Hegel was Schopenhauer, who denied Hegel’s whole
system, his esthetics included.
According to Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Will objectivizes itself in
the world on various planes; and although the higher the plane on
which it is objectivized the more beautiful it is, yet each plane has
its own beauty. Renunciation of one’s individuality and contemplation
of one of these planes of manifestation of Will gives us a perception
of beauty. All men, says Schopenhauer, possess the capacity to
objectivize the Idea on different planes. The genius of the artist
has this capacity in a higher degree, and therefore makes a higher
beauty manifest.[63]
After these more eminent writers there followed, in Germany, less
original and less influential ones, such as Hartmann, Kirchmann,
Schnaase, and, to some extent, Helmholtz (as an esthetician),
Bergmann, Jungmann, and an innumerable host of others.
According to Hartmann (1842), beauty lies, not in the external world,
nor in “the thing in itself,” neither does it reside in the soul of
man, but it lies in the “seeming” (_Schein_) produced by the artist.
The thing in itself is not beautiful, but it is transformed into
beauty by the artist.[64]
According to Schnaase (1798–1875), there is no perfect beauty in the
world. In nature there is only an approach towards it. Art gives what
nature cannot give. In the energy of the free _ego_, conscious of
harmony not found in nature, beauty is disclosed.[65]
Kirchmann (1802–1884) wrote on experimental esthetics. All aspects
of history in his system are joined by pure chance. Thus according
to him there are six realms of history:--the realm of Knowledge,
of Wealth, of Morality, of Faith, of Politics, and of Beauty; and
activity in the last-named realm is art.[66]
According to Helmholtz (1821–1894), who wrote on beauty as it relates
to music, beauty in musical productions is attained only by following
unalterable laws. These laws are not known to the artist; so that
beauty is manifested by the artist unconsciously, and cannot be
subjected to analysis.[67]
According to Bergmann (b. 1840) (_Ueber das Schöne_, 1887), to
define beauty objectively is impossible. Beauty is only perceived
subjectively, and therefore the problem of esthetics is to define
what pleases whom.[68]
According to Jungmann (d. 1885), firstly, beauty is a suprasensible
quality of things; secondly, beauty produces in us pleasure by merely
being contemplated; and thirdly, beauty is the foundation of love.[69]
The esthetic theories of the chief representatives of France,
England, and other nations, in recent times have been the following:--
In France during this period the prominent writers on esthetics were
Cousin, Jouffroy, Pictet, Ravaisson, Lévêque.
Cousin (1792–1867) was an eclectic and a follower of the German
idealists. According to his theory, beauty always has a moral
foundation. He disputes the doctrine that art is imitation and that
the beautiful is what pleases. He affirms that beauty may be defined
objectively and that it essentially consists in variety in unity.[70]
After Cousin came Jouffroy (1796–1842), who was a pupil of Cousin’s
and also a follower of the German estheticians. According to his
definition, beauty is the expression of the invisible by those
natural signs which manifest it. The visible world is the garment by
means of which we see beauty.[71]
The Swiss writer Pictet repeated Hegel and Plato, supposing beauty
to exist in the direct and free manifestation of the divine Idea
revealing itself in sense forms.[72]
Lévêque was a follower of Schelling and Hegel. He holds that beauty
is something invisible behind nature--a force or spirit revealing
itself in ordered energy.[73]
Similar vague opinions about the nature of beauty were expressed by
the French metaphysician Ravaisson, who considered beauty to be the
ultimate aim and purpose of the world. “_La beauté la plus divine et
principalement la plus parfaite contient le secret du monde._”[74]
And again:--“_Le monde entier est l’œuvre d’une beauté absolue, qui
n’est la cause des choses que par l’amour qu’elle met en elles._”[75]
I purposely quote these metaphysical expressions in the original,
because, however cloudy the Germans may be, the French, once they
absorb the theories of the Germans and take to imitating them, far
surpass them in uniting heterogeneous conceptions into one expression
and putting forward one meaning or another indiscriminately. For
instance, the French philosopher Lachelier, when discussing beauty,
says:--_Ne craignons pas de dire, qu’une vérité, qui ne serait pas
belle, ne serait qu’un jeu logique de notre esprit et que la seule
vérité solide et digne de ce nom c’est la beauté_.[76]
Besides the esthetic idealists who wrote and still write under the
influence of German philosophy, the following recent writers have
also influenced the comprehension of art and beauty in France: Taine,
Guyau, Cherbuliez, Coster, and Véron.
According to Taine (1828–1893), beauty is the manifestation of the
essential characteristic of any important idea more completely than
it is expressed in reality.[77]
Guyau (1854–1888) taught that beauty is not something exterior to the
object itself,--is not, as it were, a parasitic growth on it,--but
is itself the actual blossoming forth of that on which it appears.
Art is the expression of reasonable and conscious life, evoking in us
both the deepest consciousness of existence and the highest feelings
and loftiest thoughts. Art lifts man from his personal life into
the universal life, not only by participation in the same ideas and
beliefs, but also by similarity in feeling.[78]
According to Cherbuliez, art is an activity, (1) satisfying our
innate love of forms (_apparences_), (2) endowing these forms with
ideas, (3) affording pleasure alike to our senses, heart, and reason.
Beauty is not inherent in objects, but is an act of our souls. Beauty
is an illusion; there is no absolute beauty. But what we consider
characteristic and harmonious appears beautiful to us.
Coster held that the ideas of the beautiful, the good, and the true,
are innate. These ideas illumine our minds and are identical with
God, who is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. The idea of Beauty includes
unity of essence, variety of constitutive elements, and order, which
brings unity into the various manifestations of life.[79]
For the sake of completeness, I will further cite some of the very
latest writings upon art.
_La Psychologie du beau et de l’art, par Mario Pilo_ (1895), says
that beauty is a product of our physical feelings. The aim of art
is pleasure, but this pleasure (for some reason) he considers to be
necessarily highly moral.
The _Essai sur l’art contemporain, par Fierens Gevaert_ (1897), says
that art rests on its connection with the past and on the religious
ideal of the present which the artist holds when giving to his work
the form of his individuality.
Then again, Sar Peladan’s _L’art idéaliste et mystique_ (1894) says
that beauty is one of the manifestations of God. _Il n’y a pas
d’autre Réalité que Dieu, il n’y a pas d’autre Vérité que Dieu, il
n’y a pas d’autre Beauté, que Dieu_ (p. 33).[80] This book is very
fantastic and very illiterate, but is characteristic in the positions
it takes up, and noticeable on account of a certain success it is
having with the younger generation in France.
All the esthetics diffused in France up to the present time are
similar in kind, but among them Véron’s _L’esthétique_ (1878) forms
an exception, being reasonable and clear. That work, though it does
not give an exact definition of art, at least rids esthetics of the
cloudy conception of an absolute beauty.
According to Véron (1825–1889), art is the manifestation of emotion
transmitted externally by a combination of lines, forms, colours, or
by a succession of movements, sounds, or words subjected to certain
rhythms.[81]
In England during this period, writers on esthetics define beauty
more and more frequently not by its own qualities but by taste, and
the discussion of beauty is superseded by a discussion of taste.
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. Richard Knight’s work, _An Analytical
Inquiry into the Principles of Taste_, also tends in the same
direction.
Most of the English theories of esthetics are on the same lines.
The prominent writers on esthetics in England during the nineteenth
century were Charles Darwin (to some extent), Herbert Spencer, Grant
Allen, Ker, and Knight.
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.[82]
According to Herbert Spencer (b. 1820), the origin of art is
play, a thought previously expressed by Schiller. In the lower
animals all the energy of life is expended in life-maintenance and
race-maintenance; in man however there remains, after these needs are
satisfied, some superfluous strength. This excess is used in play,
which passes over into art. Play is an imitation of real activity,
so is art. The sources of esthetic pleasure are threefold:--(1)
That “which exercises the faculties affected in the most complete
way, with the fewest drawbacks from excess of exercise,” (2) “the
difference of a stimulus in large amount, which awakens a glow of
agreeable feeling,” (3) the partial revival of the same, with special
combinations.[83]
In Todhunter’s _Theory of the Beautiful_ (1872), beauty is infinite
loveliness, which we apprehend both by reason and by the enthusiasm
of love. The recognition of beauty as being such, depends on
taste; there can be no criterion for it. The only approach to a
definition is found in culture. (What culture is, is not defined.)
Intrinsically, art--that which affects us through lines, colours,
sounds, or words--is not the product of blind forces but of
reasonable ones, working with mutual helpfulness towards a reasonable
aim. Beauty is the reconciliation of contradictions.[84]
Grant Allen is a follower of Spencer, and in his _Physiological
Æsthetics_ (1877) he says that beauty has a physical origin. Esthetic
pleasures come from the contemplation of the beautiful, but the
conception of beauty is obtained by a physiological process. The
origin of art is play: when there is a superfluity of physical
strength man gives himself to play; when there is a superfluity
of receptive power man gives himself to art. The beautiful is
that which affords the maximum of stimulation with the minimum of
waste. Differences in the estimation of beauty proceed from taste.
Taste can be educated. We must have faith in the judgments “of the
finest-nurtured and most discriminative” men. These people form the
taste of the next generation.[85]
According to Ker’s _Essay on the Philosophy of Art_ (1883), beauty
enables us to make part of the objective world intelligible to
ourselves without being troubled by reference to other parts of it,
as is inevitable in science. So that art destroys the opposition
between the one and the many, between the law and its manifestation,
between the subject and its object, by uniting them. Art is the
revelation and vindication of freedom, because it is free from the
darkness and incomprehensibility of finite things.[86]
According to Knight’s _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, Part II (1893),
beauty is (as with Schelling) the union of object and subject, the
drawing forth from nature of that which is cognate to man, and the
recognition in oneself of what is common to all nature.
The opinions on beauty and on art here mentioned are far from
exhausting what has been written on the subject. And every day fresh
writers on esthetics arise, in whose disquisitions appear the same
enchanted confusion and contradictoriness in defining beauty. Some
by inertia continue the mystical esthetics of Baumgarten and Hegel,
with sundry variations; others transfer the question to the region
of subjectivity, and seek for the foundation of the beautiful in
questions of taste; others--the estheticians of the very latest
formation--seek the origin of beauty in the laws of physiology; and
finally, others again investigate the question quite independently
of the conception of beauty. Thus, Sully in his _Sensation and
Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Æsthetics_ (1874) dismisses
the conception of beauty altogether; art, by his definition, being
the production of some permanent object or passing action fitted to
supply active enjoyment to the producer and a pleasurable impression
to a number of spectators or listeners, quite apart from any personal
advantage derived from it.[87]
CHAPTER IV
_Definitions of art founded on beauty. Taste not definable.
A clear definition needed to enable us to recognise works of
art._
To what do these definitions of beauty amount? Not reckoning the
thoroughly inaccurate definitions of beauty which fail to cover the
conception of art and suppose beauty to consist either in utility,
or in adjustment to a purpose, or in symmetry, or in order, or in
proportion, or in smoothness, or in harmony of the parts, or in unity
amid variety, or in various combinations of these,--not reckoning
these unsatisfactory attempts at objective definition, all the
esthetic definitions of beauty lead to two fundamental conceptions.
The first is that beauty is something having an independent existence
(existing in itself), that it is one of the manifestations of the
absolutely Perfect, of the Idea, of the Spirit, of Will, or of God;
the other is that beauty is a kind of pleasure received by us, not
having personal advantage for its object.
The first of these definitions was accepted by Fichte, Schelling,
Hegel, Schopenhauer, and the philosophising Frenchmen: Cousin,
Jouffroy, Ravaisson, and others, not to enumerate the second-rate
esthetic philosophers. And this same objective-mystical definition of
beauty is held by a majority of the educated people of our day. It is
a conception very widely spread especially among the elder generation.
The second view, that beauty is a certain kind of pleasure received
by us, not having personal advantage for its aim, finds favour
chiefly among the English esthetic writers, and is shared by the
other part of our society, principally by the younger generation.
So there are (and it could not be otherwise) only two definitions
of beauty: the one objective, mystical, merging this conception
into that of the highest perfection, God--a fantastic definition,
founded on nothing; the other on the contrary a very simple, and
intelligible, subjective one, which considers beauty to be that
which pleases (I do not add to the word “pleases” the words “without
the aim of advantage,” because “pleases” naturally presupposes the
absence of the idea of profit).
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, that is, it includes
the pleasure derived from drink, from food, from touching a delicate
skin, and so forth, as is acknowledged by Guyau, Kralik, and others.
It is true that, following the development of the esthetic doctrines
on beauty, we may notice that though at first (in the times when
the foundations of the science of esthetics were being laid) the
metaphysical definition of beauty prevailed, yet the nearer we get
to our own times the more does an experimental definition (recently
assuming a physiological form) come to the front, so that at last
we even meet with estheticians such as Véron and Sully, who try to
escape entirely from the conception of beauty. But such estheticians
have very little success, and with the majority of the public as well
as of artists and the learned, a conception of beauty is firmly held
which agrees with the definitions contained in most of the esthetic
treatises, that is, which regards beauty either as something mystical
or metaphysical, or as a special kind of enjoyment.
What then is this conception of beauty, so stubbornly held to by
people of our circle and day as furnishing a definition of art?
In its subjective aspect, we call beauty that which supplies us with
a particular kind of pleasure.
In its objective aspect, we call beauty something absolutely perfect,
and we acknowledge it to be so only because we receive from the
manifestation of this absolute perfection a certain kind of pleasure:
so that this objective definition is nothing but the subjective
conception differently expressed. In reality both conceptions of
beauty amount to one and the same thing, namely, the reception by us
of a certain kind of pleasure; that is to say, we call “beauty” that
which pleases us without evoking in us desire.
Such being the position of affairs, it would seem only natural that
the science of art should decline to content itself with a definition
of art based on beauty (that is, on that which pleases), and should
seek a general definition applicable to all artistic productions, by
reference to which we might decide whether a certain article belonged
to the realm of art or not. But no such definition is supplied, as
the reader may see from those summaries of esthetic theories which
I have given, and as he may discover even more clearly from the
original esthetic works if he will be at the pains to read them. All
attempts to define absolute beauty in itself--whether as an imitation
of nature, or as suitability to its object, or as a correspondence
of parts, or as symmetry, or as harmony, or as unity in variety, and
so forth--either define nothing at all, or define only some traits
of some artistic productions and are far from including all that
everybody has always held and still holds to be art.
There is no objective definition of beauty. The existing definitions
(both the metaphysical and the experimental) amount only to one and
the same subjective definition which is (strange as it seems to say
so), that art is that which makes beauty manifest, and beauty is that
which pleases (without exciting desire). Many estheticians have felt
the insufficiency and instability of such a definition and in order
to give it a firm basis have asked themselves why a thing pleases.
And they have converted the discussion on beauty into a question
of taste, as did Hutcheson, Voltaire, Diderot, and others. But all
attempts to define what taste is must lead to nothing, as the reader
may see both from the history of esthetics and experimentally. There
is and can be no explanation of why one thing pleases one man and
displeases another, or _vice versâ_. So that the whole existing
science of esthetics fails to do what we might expect from it, being
a mental activity calling itself a science, namely, it does not
define the qualities and laws of art, or of the beautiful (if that
be the content of art), or the nature of taste (if taste decides
the question of art and its merit), and then on the basis of such
definitions acknowledge as art those productions which correspond to
these laws and reject those which do not come under them. But this
science of esthetics consists in first acknowledging a certain set of
productions to be art (because they please us), and then framing such
a theory of art that all these productions which please a certain
circle of people should fit into it. There exists an art-canon
according to which certain productions favoured by our circle are
acknowledged as being art,--the works of Phidias, Sophocles, Homer,
Titian, Raphael, Bach, Beethoven, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and
others,--and the esthetic laws must be such as to embrace all these
productions. In esthetic literature you will incessantly meet
with opinions on the merit and importance of art founded not on
any certain laws by which this or that is held to be good or bad
but merely on the consideration whether this art tallies with the
art-canon we have drawn up.
The other day I was reading a far from ill-written book by Folgeldt.
Discussing the demand for morality in works of art, the author
plainly says that we must not demand morality in art. And in proof
of this he advances the fact that, if we admit such a demand,
Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_ and Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_ would
not fit into the definition of good art; but since both these books
are included in our canon of art, he concludes that the demand is
unjust. And therefore it is necessary to find a definition of art
which shall fit the works; and instead of a demand for morality,
Folgeldt postulates as the basis of art a demand for the important
(_Bedeutunsvolles_).
All the existing esthetic standards are built on this plan. Instead
of giving a definition of true art and then deciding what is and
what is not good art by judging whether a work conforms or does
not conform to the definition, a certain class of works, which for
some reason pleases a certain circle of people, is accepted as
being art, and a definition of art is then devised to cover all
these productions. I recently came upon a remarkable instance of
this method in a very good German work, _The History of Art in the
Nineteenth Century_, by Muther. Describing the pre-Raphaelites, the
Decadents, and the Symbolists (who are already included in the canon
of art), he not only does not venture to blame their tendency, but
earnestly endeavours to widen his standard so that it may include
them all, since they appear to him to represent a legitimate reaction
from the excesses of realism. No matter what insanities appear in
art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our
society a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them;
just as if there had never been periods in history when certain
special circles of people recognised and approved false, deformed,
and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been
utterly forgotten. And to what lengths the insanity and deformity
of art may go, especially when as in our days it knows that it is
considered infallible, may be seen by what is being done in the art
of our circle to-day.
So that the theory of art founded on beauty, expounded by esthetics
and in dim outline professed by the public, is nothing but the
setting up as good of that which has pleased and pleases us, that is,
pleases a certain class of people.
In order to define any human activity it is necessary to understand
its sense and importance. And in order to do this, it is primarily
necessary to examine that activity in itself, in its dependence on
its causes, and in connection with its effects, and not merely in
relation to the pleasure we can get from it.
If we say that the aim of any activity is merely our pleasure and
define it solely by that pleasure, our definition will evidently be
a false one. But this is precisely what has occurred in the efforts
to define art. Now if we consider the food question, it will not
occur to anyone to affirm that the importance of food consists
in the pleasure we receive when eating it. Everyone understands
that the satisfaction of our taste cannot serve as a basis for our
definition of the merits of food, and that we have therefore no right
to presuppose that the dinners with cayenne pepper, Limburg cheese,
alcohol, and so on, to which we are accustomed and which please us,
form the very best human food.
In the same way, beauty, or that which pleases us, can in no sense
serve as a basis for the definition of art; nor can a series of
objects which afford us pleasure serve as the model of what art
should be.
To see the aim and purpose of art in the pleasure we get from it, is
like assuming (as is done by people of the lowest moral development,
for instance by savages) that the purpose and aim of food is the
pleasure derived when consuming it.
Just as people who conceive the aim and purpose of food to be
pleasure cannot recognise the real meaning of eating, so people
who consider the aim of art to be pleasure cannot realise its true
meaning and purpose, because they attribute to an activity the
meaning of which lies in its connection with other phenomena of
life, the false and exceptional aim of pleasure. People come to
understand that the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of
the body, only when they cease to consider that the object of that
activity is pleasure. And it is the same with regard to art. People
will come to understand the meaning of art only when they cease to
consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, that is to say,
pleasure. The acknowledgment of beauty (that is, of a certain kind
of pleasure received from art) as being the aim of art, not only
fails to assist us in finding a definition of what art is but, on the
contrary, by transferring the question into a region quite foreign
to art (into metaphysical, psychological, physiological, and even
historical discussions as to why such a production pleases one person
and such another displeases or pleases someone else), it renders
such definition impossible. And since discussions as to why one man
likes pears and another prefers meat do not help towards finding
a definition of what is essential in nourishment, so the solution
of questions of taste in art (to which the discussions on art
involuntarily come) not only does not help to make clear what this
particular human activity which we call art really consists in, but
renders such elucidation quite impossible until we rid ourselves of a
conception which justifies every kind of art at the cost of confusing
the whole matter.
To the question, What is this art, to which is offered up the labour
of millions, the very lives of men, and even morality itself? we
have extracted replies from the existing esthetics which all amount
to this: that the aim of art is beauty, that beauty is recognised
by the enjoyment it gives, and that artistic enjoyment is a good
and important thing, because it _is_ enjoyment. In a word, that
enjoyment is good because it is enjoyment. Thus what is considered
the definition of art is no definition at all, but only a shuffle to
justify existing art. Therefore, however strange it may seem to say
so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art no exact
definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is
that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.
CHAPTER V
_Definitions of art not founded on beauty. Tolstoy’s
definition. The extent and necessity of art. How people in the
past distinguished good from bad in art._
What is art if we put aside the conception of beauty, which
confuses the whole matter? The latest and most comprehensible
definitions of art, apart from the conception of beauty, are the
following:--(1) _a_, Art is an activity arising even in the animal
kingdom, and springing from sexual desire and the propensity
to play (Schiller, Darwin, Spencer), and _b_, accompanied by a
pleasurable excitement of the nervous system (Grant Allen). This is
the physiological-evolutionary definition. (2) Art is the external
manifestation, by means of lines, colours, movements, sounds, or
words, of emotions felt by man (Véron). This is the experimental
definition. According to the very latest definition (Sully), (3) Art
is “the production of some permanent object or passing action which
is fitted not only to supply an active enjoyment to the producer,
but to convey a pleasurable impression to a number of spectators or
listeners, quite apart from any personal advantage to be derived from
it.”
Notwithstanding the superiority of these definitions to the
metaphysical definitions which depended on the conception of beauty,
they are yet far from exact. The first, the physiological-evolutionary
definition (1) _a_, is inexact, because instead of speaking about the
artistic activity itself, which is the real matter in hand, it treats
of the derivation of art. The modification of it, _b_, based on the
physiological effects on the human organism, is inexact because
within the limits of such definition many other human activities
can be included, as has occurred in the neo-esthetic theories which
reckon as art the preparation of handsome clothes, pleasant scents,
and even of victuals.
The experimental definition, (2), which makes art consist in the
expression of emotions, is inexact because a man may express his
emotions by means of lines, colours, sounds, or words, and yet may
not act on others by such expression--and then the manifestation of
his emotions is not art.
The third definition (that of Sully) is inexact because in the
production of objects or actions affording pleasure to the producer
and a pleasant emotion to the spectators or hearers apart from
personal advantage, may be included the showing of conjuring tricks
or gymnastic exercises, and other activities which are not art. And,
further, many things the production of which does not afford pleasure
to the producer and the sensation received from which is unpleasant:
such as gloomy, heart-rending scenes in a poetic description or a
play, may nevertheless be undoubted works of art.
The inaccuracy of all these definitions arises from the fact that
in them all (as also in the metaphysical definitions) the object
considered is the pleasure art may give and not the purpose it may
serve in the life of man and of humanity.
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.
Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind
of relationship both with him who produced or is producing the art,
and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently,
receive the same artistic impression.
Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as
a means of union among them, and art serves a similar purpose. The
peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it
from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas
by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he
transmits his feelings.
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 which moved the man who expressed
it. To take the simplest example: one man laughs and another, who
hears, becomes merry; or a man weeps and another, who hears, feels
sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man, seeing him,
is brought to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the
sounds of his voice a man expresses courage and determination or
sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A
man suffers, manifesting his sufferings by groans and spasms, and
this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his
feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain
objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same
feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same
objects, persons, or phenomena.
And it is on this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression
of feeling, and to experience those feelings himself, that the
activity of art is based.
If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his
appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he
experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he
himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself
is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is
suffering--that does not amount to art.
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, and so forth. 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 he
had experienced--is art. Even if 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 them by sounds so that the hearers are
infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the
composer.
The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most
various--very strong or very weak, very important or very
insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love of one’s
country, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed
in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of
voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a
triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humour evoked by a
funny story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening
landscape or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a
beautiful arabesque--it is all art.
If only the spectators or auditors are infected by the feelings which
the author has felt, it is art.
_To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and, having
evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colours,
sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that
others experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art._
_Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others
feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these
feelings and also experience them._
Art is not as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some
mysterious Idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the esthetical
physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of
stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by
external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and,
above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men,
joining them together in the same feelings and indispensable for the
life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man
may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by
all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this
capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in
their activity and can also himself hand on to his contemporaries and
descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others as well as
those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity
to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that
is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him,
as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago,
and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to
others.
If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived
by the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own
thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kasper Hauser.[88]
And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art,
people might be almost more savage still, and above all more
separated from, and more hostile to, one another.
And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as
important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.
As speech does not act on us only in sermons, orations, or books,
but in all those remarks by which we interchange thoughts and
experiences with one another, so also art, in the wide sense of
the word, permeates our whole life, but it is only to some of its
manifestations that we apply the term in the limited sense of the
word.
We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see
in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings,
statues, poems, novels.... But all this is but the smallest part of
the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human
life is filled with works of art of every kind--from cradle-song,
jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, to
church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It
is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the
word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but
only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which
we attach special importance.
This special importance has always been given by all men to that
part of this activity which transmits feelings flowing from their
religious perception, and this small part they have specifically
called art, attaching to it the full meaning of the word.
That was how men of old--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--looked on
art. Thus did the Hebrew prophets and the ancient Christians regard
art. Thus it was, and still is, understood by the Mohammedans, and
thus is it still understood by religious folk among our own peasantry.
Some teachers of mankind--as Plato in his _Republic_, and people
such as the primitive Christians, the strict Mohammedans, and the
Buddhists--have gone so far as to repudiate all art.
People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the prevalent
view of to-day which regards any art as good if only it affords
pleasure) held and hold that art (as contrasted with speech, which
need not be listened to) is so highly dangerous in its power to
infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by
banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art.
Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they
denied what cannot be denied--one of the indispensable means of
communication, without which mankind could not exist. But not less
wrong are the people of civilised European society of our class and
day, in favouring any art if it but serves beauty, that is, gives
people pleasure.
Formerly, people feared lest among the works of art there might
chance to be some causing corruption, and they prohibited art
altogether. Now they only fear lest they should be deprived of any
enjoyment art can afford, and patronise any art. And I think the last
error is much grosser than the first, and that its consequences are
far more harmful.
CHAPTER VI
_How art for the sake of pleasure has come into esteem.
Religions indicate what is good and bad. Church Christianity.
The Renaissance. Scepticism of the upper classes. They
confound beauty with goodness._
But how could it happen that that very art which in ancient times was
merely tolerated (if tolerated at all), should have come in our times
to be invariably considered a good thing if only it affords pleasure?
It has resulted from the following causes. The estimation of the
value of art (that is, of the feelings it transmits) depends on men’s
perception of the meaning of life; depends on what they hold to be
the good and the evil of life. And what is good and what is evil is
defined by what are termed religions.
Humanity unceasingly moves forward from a lower, more partial and
obscure, understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.
And in this as in every movement there are leaders--those who have
understood the meaning of life more clearly than others--and of
these advanced men there is always one who has in his words and
by his life expressed this meaning more clearly, lucidly, and
strongly than others. This man’s expression of the meaning of life,
together with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies which
usually form round the memory of such a man, is what is called a
religion. Religions are the exponents of the highest comprehension
of life accessible to the best and foremost men at a given time in
a given society; a comprehension towards which all the rest of that
society must inevitably and irresistibly advance. And therefore
religions alone have always served, and still serve, as bases for
the valuation of human sentiments. If feelings bring men nearer the
ideal their religion indicates, if they are in harmony with it and do
not contradict it, they are good; if they estrange men from it and
oppose it they are bad.
If the religion places the meaning of life in worshipping one God
and fulfilling what is regarded as His will, as was the case among
the Jews, then the feelings flowing from love of that God and of
His law, successfully transmitted through the art of poetry by the
prophets, by the psalms, or by the epic of the book of Genesis, are
good, high art. All opposing that, as for instance the transmission
of feelings of devotion to strange gods, or of feelings incompatible
with the law of God, would be considered bad art. Or if, as was the
case among the Greeks, the religion places the meaning of life in
earthly happiness, in beauty and in strength, then art successfully
transmitting the joy and energy of life would be considered good
art, but art transmitting feelings of effeminacy or despondency
would be bad art. If the meaning of life is seen in the well-being
of one’s nation, or in honouring one’s ancestors and continuing
the mode of life led by them, as was the case among the Romans and
the Chinese respectively, then art transmitting feelings of joy at
the sacrifice of one’s personal well-being for the common weal, or
at the exaltation of one’s ancestors and the maintenance of their
traditions, would be considered good art; but art expressing feelings
contrary to these would be regarded as bad. If the meaning of life is
seen in freeing oneself from the yoke of animalism, as is the case
among the Buddhists, then art successfully transmitting feelings that
elevate the soul and humble the flesh will be good art, and all that
transmits feelings strengthening the bodily passions will be bad art.
In every age and in every human society there exists a religious
sense, common to that whole society, of what is good and what is
bad, and it is this religious conception that decides the value of
the feelings transmitted by art. And therefore among all nations art
which transmitted feelings considered to be good by this general
religious sense was recognised as being good and was encouraged, but
art which transmitted feelings considered to be bad by this general
religious sense was recognised as being bad and was rejected. All the
rest of the immense field of art by means of which people communicate
one with another was not esteemed at all and was only noticed when it
ran counter to the religious conception of its age, and then merely
to be repudiated. Thus it was among all nations,--Greeks, Jews,
Indians, Egyptians, and Chinese,--and so it was when Christianity
appeared.
The Christianity of the first centuries recognised as productions
of good art only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers and
hymn-singing, evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to
follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the
love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal
enjoyment they considered to be bad and therefore rejected, for
instance, tolerating plastic representations only when they were
symbolical, they rejected all the pagan sculptures.
This was so among the Christians of the first centuries, who accepted
Christ’s teaching if not quite in its true form at least not in the
perverted, paganised form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale
conversion of nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of
Constantine, Charlemagne, and Vladimir, there appeared another, a
Church-Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ’s
teaching. And this Church-Christianity, in accordance with its own
teaching, estimated quite otherwise the feelings of people and the
productions of art which transmitted those feelings.
This Church-Christianity not only did not acknowledge the fundamental
and essential positions of true Christianity,--the immediate
relationship of each man to the Father, the consequent brotherhood
and equality of all men, and the substitution of humility and love
in place of every kind of violence,--but on the contrary having set
up a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology and having
introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of
apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, and not only of these divinities
themselves but also of their images, it made blind faith in the
Church and its ordinances the essential point of its teaching.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity,
however degraded not only in comparison with true Christianity but
even with the life-conception of Romans such as Julian and others,
it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher
doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and
bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and
on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And
art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints,
and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear
of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was
considered good; while all art opposed to this was held to be bad.
The teaching on the basis of which this art arose was a perversion
of Christ’s teaching, but the art which sprang up on this perverted
teaching was nevertheless a true art, because it corresponded to the
religious view of life held by the people among whom it arose.
The artists of the Middle Ages, vitalised by the same source of
feeling--religion--as the mass of the people, and transmitting in
architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, or drama, the
feelings and states of mind they experienced, were true artists; and
their activity, founded on the highest conceptions accessible to
their age and common to the entire people, though for our times a
mean art, was nevertheless a true one, shared by the whole community.
And this was the state of things until, in the upper, rich,
more educated classes of European society, doubt arose as to
the truth of that understanding of life which was expressed by
Church-Christianity. When, after the Crusades and the maximum
development of papal power and its abuses, people of the rich classes
became acquainted with the wisdom of the classics, and saw on the one
hand the reasonable lucidity of the teaching of the ancient sages and
on the other hand the incompatibility of the Church doctrine with
the teaching of Christ, they lost all possibility of continuing to
believe the Church teaching.
If in externals they still kept to the forms of Church teaching,
they could no longer believe in it, and held to it only by inertia
and for the sake of influencing the masses, who continued to believe
blindly in Church doctrine, and whom the upper classes for their own
advantage considered it necessary to encourage in those beliefs.
So that a time came when Church-Christianity ceased to be the
general religious doctrine of all Christian people: some--the
masses--continued blindly to believe in it, but the upper
classes--those in whose hands lay the power and wealth and therefore
the leisure to produce art and the means to stimulate it--ceased to
believe that teaching.
In regard to religion the upper circles of the Middle Ages found
themselves in the position the educated Romans were in before
Christianity arose, that is, they no longer believed in the religion
of the masses, but had no beliefs to put in place of the worn-out
Church doctrine, which for them had lost its meaning.
There was only this difference, that whereas for the Romans who lost
faith in their emperor-gods and household-gods it was impossible to
extract anything further from all the complex mythology they had
borrowed from all the conquered nations, and it was consequently
necessary to find a completely new conception of life, the people of
the Middle Ages when they doubted the truth of the Church teaching
had no need to seek a fresh one. That Christian teaching which they
professed in a perverted form as Church doctrine, had mapped out
the path of human progress so far ahead that they had only to rid
themselves of those perversions which hid the teaching announced
by Christ, and to adopt its real meaning--if not completely then
at least in some greater degree than that in which the Church had
held it. And this was partially done not only in the reformations
of Wyclif, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, but by all that current of
non-Church Christianity, represented in earlier times by the
Paulicians and the Bogomilites,[89] and afterwards by the Waldenses
and the other non-Church Christians who were called heretics. But
this could be, and was, done chiefly by poor people--who did not
rule. A few of the rich and strong, as Francis of Assisi and others,
accepted the Christian teaching in its full significance even though
it undermined their privileged positions. But most people of the
upper classes (though in the depth of their souls they had lost faith
in the Church teaching) could not or would not act thus, because
the essence of that Christian view of life which stood ready to be
adopted when once they rejected the Church faith, was a teaching
of the brotherhood (and therefore the equality) of man, and this
negatived those privileges on which they lived, in which they had
grown up and been educated, and to which they were accustomed. Not in
the depth of their hearts believing in the Church teaching,--which
had outlived its age and had no longer any true meaning for
them,--and not being strong enough to accept true Christianity, men
of these rich, governing classes--popes, kings, dukes, and all the
great ones of the earth--were left without any religion, with but the
external forms of one, which they supported as being profitable and
even necessary for themselves, since these forms supported a teaching
which justified the privileges they made use of. In reality these
people believed in nothing, just as the Romans of the first centuries
of our era believed in nothing. But at the same time these were the
people who had the power and the wealth, and these were the people
who rewarded art and directed it.
And, let it be noticed, it was just among these people that there
grew up an art esteemed, not according to its success in expressing
men’s religious feelings but in proportion to its beauty,--in other
words, according to the enjoyment it gave.
No 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 Renaissance of science and art,
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
Scriptures, since they were considered to be inspired only because
the tradition 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, Peter
of Chelczic,[90] and most of the heretics, in acknowledging the
moral, social teaching of Christ, for that teaching undermined their
social position. 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, that is 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.
CHAPTER VII
_An esthetic theory framed to suit the view of life of the
ruling classes._
From the time that people of the upper classes lost faith in
Church-Christianity, beauty (that is to say, the pleasure received
from art) became their standard of good and bad art. And in
accordance with that view, an esthetic 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 esthetic theory in confirmation of its truth affirmed that
it was no invention of their own, but that it existed in the nature
of things and was recognised even by the ancient Greeks. But this
assertion was quite arbitrary and had no foundation other than
the fact that among the ancient Greeks, in consequence of the low
level of their moral ideal (as compared with the Christian), their
conception of the good, τὸ ἀγαθόν, was not yet sharply divided from
their conception of the beautiful, τὸ καλόν.
That highest perfection of goodness (not only not identical with
beauty but 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 (κάθαρσις). But notwithstanding all
this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness
coincide.
Consequently, in the language of that period, a compound word
(καλοκἀγαθία, 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,
but got entangled in defining the relation between goodness and
beauty. Plato’s reasoning about beauty and goodness is 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 καλοκἀγαθία
(which had a meaning for Greeks but has none at all for Christians)
represents the highest ideal of humanity. On this misunderstanding
the new science of esthetics was built up: and to justify its
existence the teachings of the ancients on art were twisted so that
it should appear that this invented science of esthetics 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 esthetics of Aristotle, quite
justly remarks: _Pour qui veut y regarder de près, la théorie du
beau et celle de l’art sont tout à fait séparées dans Aristote,
comme elles le sont dans Platon et chez tous leurs successeurs_
(_L’esthétique d’Aristote et de ses successeurs_, Paris, 1889,
p. 28).[91] And, indeed, the reasoning of the ancients on art
not only does not confirm our science of esthetics, but rather
contradicts its doctrine of beauty. But nevertheless all the esthetic
guides, from Schasler to Knight, declare that the science of the
beautiful--esthetic science--was begun by the ancients, by Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle; and was continued, they say, to some extent by the
Epicureans and 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 about
1500 years, and only after these 1500 years had passed did it revive
in Germany, A. D. 1750, in Baumgarten’s doctrine.
After Plotinus, says Schasler, fifteen centuries passed away during
which there was not the slightest scientific interest shewn for the
world of beauty and art. These one and a half thousand years, says
he, have been lost to esthetics and have contributed nothing towards
the erection of the learned edifice of this science.[92]
In 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 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 esthetics, 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
esthetics.
Esthetic theories arose about one hundred and fifty years ago among
the wealthy classes of the Christian European world, and arose
simultaneously among different nations,--German, Italian, Dutch,
French, and English. The founder and organiser of it, who gave it a
scientific and theoretic form, was Baumgarten.
With a characteristically German external exactitude, pedantry, and
symmetry, he devised and expounded this extraordinary theory. And
notwithstanding its obvious lack of substance, no one else’s theory
so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with
such an absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper
classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic
character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated
by learned and unlearned as though it were something indubitable and
self-evident.
_Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli_,[93] and so, or even
more so, theories _habent sua fata_ according to the condition
of error in which that society lives among whom and for 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 may be, it is accepted and becomes
an article of faith to that 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 but of the means of subsistence to increase only in
arithmetical progression, and of the consequent over-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 be, they are credulously accepted, pass uncriticised, and are
preached, perhaps 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
esthetic trinity of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; _das Schöne_, _das
Wahre_, _das Gute_; _le Beau_, _le Vrai_, _le Bon_, are repeated
with capital letters by philosophers, estheticians, 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
meaning, but they hinder us in attaching any definite meaning to
existing art; they are wanted only for the purpose of justifying the
false importance we attribute to an art that transmits every kind of
feeling if only those feelings afford us pleasure.[94]
CHAPTER VIII
_Who have adopted this esthetic theory? Real art needful for
all men. Our art too expensive, too unintelligible, and too
harmful, for the masses. The theory of “the elect” in art._
But 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 be 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 important activity, and instead of it should put up with
an insignificant artistic activity only affording pleasure?
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 naïvely 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 we 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 was once held to be the
only book),--it is not even the art of the whole of Christendom, only
of a small section of our part of humanity. It was correct to speak
of a national Jewish, Greek, 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 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 happen that
humanity lived for a certain period without real art, replacing it by
art which served enjoyment only, is that not the whole of 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
Renaissance down to our own day.
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 unintelligible theories of art, all
the false and contradictory judgments on art, and particularly the
self-confident stagnation of our art in its false channels--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[95] 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 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, which
moreover is of such a nature that if they could get it they would
not understand anything of it. We, according to the current esthetic
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 in face of this,
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 everybody at present
does not make 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 French 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 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 hardship
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 that only under
the same conditions can there be a fine public to appreciate 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 which art (that art which is considered to be art among
us) may be made accessible to the whole people, another consideration
presents itself showing that fashionable art cannot be the whole of
art, namely 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. It has never been understood at first, but afterwards
people have become 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 it, say the defenders of our art. But this
assertion is evidently even more untrue 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, and so forth, which delighted people of the upper classes
when they were produced, never were afterwards either understood
or valued by the great masses of mankind, but have remained, what
they were at first, a mere pastime for the 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
understand 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; but 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 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,[96] 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 to see, to
read, and to hear, in their leisure time, 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 fine art, and if he did understand it, what
he understood would not elevate his soul, but would certainly in
most cases pervert it. To thoughtful and sincere people there can
therefore be no doubt 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 found 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, namely, denying that the common
people have a right to art. These people simply and boldly speak out
and say (what goes to the heart of the matter) that the participators
in and utilisers of what in their esteem is highly beautiful
art, that is, art furnishing the greatest enjoyment, can only be
_schöne Geister_, the elect, as the romanticists called them, the
_Uebermenschen_, as they are called by the followers of Nietzsche;
the vulgar herd which remains, incapable of experiencing 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 combine the incombinable, but frankly admit what
is the case, that our art is an art of the upper classes only. So in
reality art has been, and is, understood by everyone engaged on it in
our society.
CHAPTER IX
_The perversion of our art. It has lost its natural
subject-matter. Has no flow of fresh feeling. Transmits
chiefly three base emotions._
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,--we 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,
out of the whole sphere of art, of what did not deserve such a
valuation, and the acknowledgment of it as important, 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 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 transmits fresh
feelings not before experienced by man. As thought-product is only
then real thought-product when 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 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 expressed by man. And it
is the source from which such feelings flow that the art of the
upper classes has deprived itself of 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 established by his nature,
but the movement forward of humanity, which expresses itself in
religious consciousness, 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 expressed by Homer and the tragic writers. It was
the same among the Jews, who 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.
The variety of fresh feelings flowing from religious perception
is endless, and they are all new, for religious perception is
nothing else than the first indication of that which is coming
into existence, namely, a new relation of man to the world around
him. But the feelings flowing from the desire for enjoyment are on
the contrary not only limited, but were long ago experienced and
expressed. And therefore the lack of belief of the upper classes of
Europe has left them with an art fed on the poorest subject-matter.
The impoverishment of the subject-matter of upper-class art was
further increased by the fact that, ceasing to be religious, it
ceased also to be popular, and this again diminished the range of
feelings which it transmitted. For the range of feelings experienced
by the powerful and the rich, who have no experience of labour
for the support of life, is far poorer, more limited, and more
insignificant, than the range of feelings natural to working people.
People of our circle, estheticians, usually think and say just
the contrary of this. I remember how Goncharev the author, a very
clever and educated man but a thorough townsman and an esthetician,
said to me that after Turgenev’s _Sportsman’s Notebook_ there was
nothing left to write about in peasant life. It was all used up.
The life of working people seemed to him so simple that Turgenev’s
peasant stories had used up all there was to describe. The life of
our wealthy people, with their love affairs and dissatisfaction with
themselves, seemed to him full of inexhaustible subject-matter. One
hero kissed his lady on the palm of her hand, another on her elbow,
and a third somewhere else. One man is discontented through idleness,
and another because people don’t love him. And Goncharev thought that
in this sphere there is no end of variety. And this opinion--that
the life of working people is poor in subject-matter, but that our
life, the life of the idle, is full of interest--is shared by very
many people in our society. The life of a labouring man, with its
endlessly varied forms of labour and the dangers connected with
labour on sea and underground; his migrations, his intercourse with
his employers, overseers, and companions, and with men of other
religions and other nationalities: his struggles with nature and
with wild beasts, his association with domestic animals, his work in
the forest, on the steppe, in the field, the garden, the orchard:
his intercourse with wife and children, not only as with people
near and dear to him but as with co-workers and helpers in labour,
replacing him in time of need: his concern in all economic questions,
not as matters of display or discussion but as problems of life for
himself and his family: his pride in self-suppression and service of
others, his pleasures of refreshment; and the permeation of all these
interests by a religious re-action towards the facts: all this to us,
who have not these interests and possess no religious perception,
seems monotonous in comparison with those small enjoyments and
insignificant cares of our life,--a life, not of labour nor of
production, but of consumption and destruction of that which others
have produced for us. We think the feelings experienced by people of
our day and our class are very important and varied; but in reality
almost all the feelings of people of our class amount to but three
very insignificant and simple feelings--the feeling of pride, the
feeling of sexual desire, and the feeling of weariness of life.
These three feelings, with their off-shoots, form almost the only
subject-matter of the art of the rich classes.
At first, at the very beginning of the separation of the exclusive
art of the upper classes from universal art, its chief subject-matter
was the feeling of pride. It was so at the time of the Renaissance
and after it, when the chief subject of works of art was the
laudation of the strong--popes, kings, and dukes. Odes and madrigals
were written in their honour, they were extolled in cantatas and
hymns, and their portraits were painted, and their statues carved, in
various adulatory ways.
Next, the element of sexual desire began more and more to enter into
art, and (with very few exceptions, and in novels and dramas almost
without exception) it has now become an essential feature of every
art product of the wealthy classes.
The third feeling transmitted by the art of the rich--that of
discontent with life--appeared yet later in modern art. This feeling,
which at the commencement of the present century was expressed only
by exceptional men: by Byron, by Leopardi, and afterwards by Heine,
has latterly become fashionable and is expressed by most ordinary and
empty people. Most justly does the French critic Doumic characterise
the works of the new writers: ... _c’est la lassitude de vivre,
le mépris de l’époque présente, le regret d’un autre temps aperçu
à travers l’illusion de l’art, le gout du paradoxe, le besoin de
se singulariser, une aspiration de raffinés vers la simplicité,
l’adoration enfantine du merveilleux, la séduction maladive de la
rêverie, l’ébranlement des nerfs,--surtout l’appel exaspéré de
la sensualité_ (_Les Jeunes_, René Doumic).[97] And, as a matter
of fact, of these three feelings it is sensuality, the lowest
(accessible not only to all men but even to all animals), which forms
the chief subject-matter of works of art of recent times.
From Boccaccio to Marcel Prévost, all novels, poems, and verses
invariably transmit the feeling of sexual love in its different
forms. Adultery is not only the favourite, but almost the only theme
of all the novels. A performance is not a performance unless, under
some pretext, women appear with naked busts and limbs. Songs and
romances--all are expressions of lust idealised in various degrees.
A majority of the pictures by French artists represent female
nakedness in various forms. In recent French literature there is
hardly a page or a poem in which nakedness is not described, and in
which, relevantly or irrelevantly, their favourite thought and word
_nu_ is not repeated a couple of times. There is a certain writer,
Remy de Gourmont, who gets printed and is considered talented. To
obtain an idea of the new writers, I read his novel, _Les Chevaux
de Diomède_. It is a consecutive and detailed account of the sexual
connections some gentleman had with various women. Every page
contains lust-kindling descriptions. It is the same in Pierre Louÿs’
book, _Aphrodite_, which met with success; it is the same in a
book I lately chanced upon, Huysmans’ _Certains_, and with but few
exceptions it is the same in all French novels. They are all the
productions of people suffering from erotic mania. And these people
are evidently convinced that as their whole life, in consequence
of their diseased condition, is concentrated on amplifying various
sexual abominations, therefore the life of all the world is similarly
concentrated. And these people, suffering from erotic mania, are
imitated throughout the whole artistic world of Europe and America.
Thus, in consequence of the lack of belief and the exceptional manner
of life of the wealthy classes, the art of these classes became
impoverished in its subject-matter and has sunk to the transmission
of the feelings of pride, discontent with life, and above all of
sexual desire.
CHAPTER X
_Loss of comprehensibility. Decadent art. Recent French art.
Have we a right to say it is bad? The highest art has always
been comprehensible to normal people. What fails to infect
normal people is not art._
In consequence of their unbelief, the art of the upper classes became
poor in subject-matter. But besides that, becoming continually more
and more exclusive it became at the same time continually more and
more involved affected and obscure.
When a universal artist (such as were some of the Greek artists
or the Jewish prophets) composed his work he naturally strove to
say what he had to say in such a way that his production should be
intelligible to all men. But when an artist composed for a small
circle of people placed in exceptional conditions, or even for a
single individual and his courtiers--for popes, cardinals, kings,
dukes, queens, or for a king’s mistress--he naturally only aimed
at influencing these people, who were well known to him and lived
in exceptional conditions familiar to him. And this was an easier
task, and the artist was involuntarily drawn to express himself
by allusions comprehensible only to the initiated and obscure to
everyone else. In the first place, more could be said in this way;
and secondly, there is (for the initiated) even a certain charm in
the cloudiness of such a manner of expression. This method, which
showed itself both in euphuism and in mythological and historical
allusions, came more and more into use, until it apparently at last
reached its utmost limits in the so-called art of the Decadents.
It has come, finally, to this: that not only are haziness,
mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness (shutting out the
masses) elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic
art, but even incorrectness, indefiniteness, and lack of eloquence,
are held in esteem.
Théophile Gautier, in his preface to the celebrated _Fleurs du
Mal_, says that Baudelaire as far as possible banished from poetry
eloquence, passion, and truth too strictly copied (“_l’éloquence, la
passion, et la vérité calquée trop exactement_”).
And Baudelaire not only did this, but maintained this thesis in his
verses, and yet more strikingly in the prose of his _Petits Poèmes
en Prose_, the meanings of which have to be guessed like a rebus and
remain for the most part undiscovered.
The poet Verlaine (who followed next after Baudelaire, and was also
esteemed great) even wrote an _Art poétique_, in which he advises
this style of composition:--
_De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose._
_Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint._
* * * * *
And again:--
_De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours._
_Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin,
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym ...
Et tout le reste est littérature._[98]
After these two comes Mallarmé, considered the most important of the
young poets, and he plainly says that the charm of poetry lies in our
having to guess its meaning--that in poetry there should always be a
puzzle:--
_Je pense qu’il faut qu’il n’y ait qu’allusion_, says he. _La
contemplation des objets, l’image s’envolant des rêveries suscitées
par eux, sont le chant: les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose
entièrement et la montrent; par là ils manquent de mystère; ils
retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu’ils créent._
Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du
poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer,
voilà le rêve. _C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le
symbole: évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme,
ou, inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par
une série de déchiffrements._
... _Si un être d’une intelligence moyenne, et d’une preparation
littéraire insuffisante, ouvre par hasard un livre ainsi fait et
prétend en jouir, il y a malentendu, il faut remettre les choses à
leur place._ Il doit y avoir toujours énigme en poésie, _et c’est
le but de la littérature, il n’y en a pas d’autre,--d’évoquer les
objets_.--_Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire_, Jules Huret, pp. 60,
61.[99]
Thus is obscurity elevated into a dogma among the new poets. As the
French critic Doumic (who has not yet accepted the dogma) quite
correctly says:--
_Il serait temps aussi d’en finir avec cette fameuse “théorie de
l’obscurité” que la nouvelle école à élevée, en effet à la hauteur
d’un dogme._--_Les Jeunes, études et portraits_, René Doumic.[100]
But it is not only French writers who think thus. The poets of
all other countries think and act in the same way: German, and
Scandinavian, and Italian, and Russian, and English. So also do
the artists of the new period in all branches of art: in painting,
in sculpture, and in music. Relying on Nietzsche and Wagner, the
artists of the new age conclude that it is unnecessary for them to
be intelligible to the vulgar crowd; it is enough for them to evoke
poetic emotion in ‘the finest nurtured,’ to borrow a phrase from an
English esthetician.
In order that what I am saying may not seem to be mere assertion, I
will quote at least a few examples from the French poets who have led
this movement. The name of these poets is legion. I have taken French
writers because they, more decidedly than any others, indicate the
new direction of art and are imitated by most European writers.
Besides those whose names are already considered famous, such as
Baudelaire and Verlaine, here are the names of a few of them: Jean
Moréas, Charles Morice, Henri de Régnier, Charles Vignier, Adrien
Remacle, René Ghil, Maurice Maeterlinck, G. Albert Aurier, Rémy de
Gourmont, Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique, Georges Rodenbach, le comte
Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. These are Symbolists and Decadents.
Next we have the “Magi”: Joséphin Péladan, Paul Adam, Jules Bois, M.
Papus, and others.
Besides these there are yet one hundred and forty-one others whom
Doumic mentions in the book referred to above.
Here are some examples from the work of those of them who are
considered to be the best, beginning with that most celebrated man,
acknowledged to be a great artist worthy of a monument--Baudelaire.
This is a poem from his celebrated _Fleurs du mal_:--
No. XXIV
_Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne,
O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne,
Et t’aime d’autant plus, belle, que tu me fuis,
Et que tu me parais, ornement de mes nuits,
Plus ironiquement accumuler les lieues
Qui séparent mes bras des immensités bleues._
_Je m’avance à l’attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts,
Comme après un cadavre un chœur de vermisseaux,
Et je chéris, ô bête implacable et cruelle,
Jusqu’à cette froideur par où tu m’es plus belle!_[101]
And this is another by the same writer:--
No. XXXVI
_DUELLUM_
_Deux guerriers ont couru l’un sur l’autre; leurs armes
Ont éclaboussé l’air de lueurs et de sang.
Ces jeux, ces cliquetis du fer sont les vacarmes
D’une jeunesse en proie à l’amour vagissant._
* * * * *
_Les glaives sont brisés! comme notre jeunesse,
Ma chère! Mais les dents, les ongles acérés,
Vengent bientôt l’épée et la dague traîtresse.
O fureur des cœurs mûrs par l’amour ulcérés!_
* * * * *
_Dans le ravin hanté des chats-pards et des onces
Nos héros, s’étreignant méchamment, ont roulé,
Et leur peau fleurira l’aridité des ronces.
Ce gouffre, c’est l’enfer, de nos amis peuplé!
Roulons-y sans remords, amazone inhumaine,
Afin d’éterniser l’ardeur de notre haine!_[102]
To be exact, I should mention that the collection contains verses
less comprehensible than these, but not one poem which is plain
and can be understood without a certain effort--an effort seldom
rewarded, for the feelings which the poet transmits are evil and very
low ones. And these feelings are always, and purposely, expressed
by him with eccentricity and lack of clearness. This premeditated
obscurity is especially noticeable in his prose, where the author
could speak clearly if he wanted to.
Take, for instance, the first piece from his _Petits poèmes en
prose_:--
_L’ÉTRANGER_
_Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? ton père, ta mère, ta
sœur, ou ton frère?_
_Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère._
_Tes amis?_
_Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce
jour inconnu._
_Ta patrie?_
_J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située._
_La beauté?_
_Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle._
_L’or?_
_Je le hais, comme vous haïssez Dieu._
_Et qu’aimes-tu done, extraordinaire étranger?_
_J’aime les nuages ... les nuages qui passent ... là bas, ... les
merveilleux nuages!_[103]
The piece called _La Soupe et les nuages_ is probably intended to
express the unintelligibility of the poet even to her whom he loves.
This is the piece in question:--
_Ma petite folle bien-aimée me donnait à dîner, et par la fenêtre
ouverte de la salle à manger je contemplais les mouvantes
architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs, les merveilleuses
constructions de l’impalpable. Et je me disais, à travers ma
contemplation: “Toutes ces fantasmagories sont presque aussi belles
que les yeux de ma belle bien-aimée, la petite folle monstrueuse aux
yeux verts.”_
_Et tout-à-coup je reçus un violent coup de poing dans le dos, et
j’entendis une voix rauque et charmante, une voix hystérique et comme
enrouée par l’eau-de-vie, la voix de ma chère petite bien-aimée, qui
me disait, “Allez-vous bientôt manger votre soupe, s.... b.... de
marchand de nuages?”_[104]
However artificial these two pieces may be, it is still possible with
some effort to guess at what the author meant them to express, but
some of the pieces are absolutely incomprehensible--at least to me.
_Le Galant Tireur_ is a piece I was quite unable to understand.
_LE GALANT TIREUR_
_Comme la voiture traversait le bois, il la fit arrêter dans le
voisinage d’un tir, disant qu’il lui serait agréable de tirer
quelques balles pour_ tuer _le Temps. Tuer ce monstre-là, n’est-ce
pas l’occupation la plus ordinaire et la plus légitime de chacun?--Et
il offrit galamment la main à sa chère, délicieuse et exécrable
femme, à cette mystérieuse femme à laquelle il doit tant de plaisirs,
tant de douleurs, et peut-être aussi une grande partie de son génie._
_Plusieurs balles frappèrent loin du but proposé; l’une d’elles
s’enfonça même dans le plafond; et comme la charmante créature riait
follement, se moquant de la maladresse de son époux, celui-ci se
tourna brusquement vers elle, et lui dit: “Observez cette poupée,
là-bas, à droite, qui porte le nez en l’air et qui a la mine si
hautaine. Eh bien! cher ange_, je me figure que c’est vous.” _Et
il ferma les yeux et il lâcha la détente. La poupée fut nettement
décapitée._
_Alors s’inclinant vers sa chère, sa délicieuse, son exécrable femme,
son inévitable et impitoyable Muse, et lui baisant respectueusement
la main, il ajouta: “Ah! mon cher ange, combien je vous remercie de
mon adresse!”_[105]
The productions of another celebrity, Verlaine, are not less
affected and unintelligible. This, for instance, is the first poem in
the section called _Ariettes oubliées_:
“_Le vent dans la plaine_
_Suspend son haleine._”--FAVART.
_C’est l’extase langoureuse,
C’est la fatigue amoureuse,
C’est tous les frissons des bois
Parmi l’étreinte des brises,
C’est, vers les ramures grises,
Le chœur des petites voix._
_O le frêle et frais murmure!
Cela gazouille et susurre,
Cela ressemble au cri doux
Que l’herbe agitée expire ...
Tu dirais, sous l’eau qui vire,
Le roulis sourd des cailloux._
_Cette âme qui se lamente
En cette plainte dormante,
C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas?
La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
Dont s’exhale l’humble antienne
Par ce tiède soir, tout bas?_[106]
What “_chœur des petites voix_,” and what “_cri doux que l’herbe
agitée expire_,” and what it all means, remains altogether
unintelligible to me.
And here is another Ariette:--
VIII.
_Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable._
_Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune._
_Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées._
_Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune._
_Corneille poussive
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres,
Quoi done vous arrive?_
_Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable._[107]
How does the moon seem to live and die in a copper heaven? And
how can snow shine like sand? The whole thing is not merely
unintelligible, but under pretence of conveying an impression it
passes off a string of incorrect comparisons and words.
Besides these artificial and obscure poems there are others which
are intelligible, but make up for it by being altogether bad both
in form and in content. Such are all the poems under the heading
_La Sagesse_. The chief place in these verses is occupied by a very
poor expression of the most commonplace Roman Catholic and patriotic
sentiments. For instance, one meets with verses such as this:--
_Je ne veux plus penser qu’ à ma mère Marie,
Siège de la sagesse et source de pardons,
Mère de France aussi DE QUI NOUS ATTENDONS
INÉBRANLABLEMENT L’HONNEUR DE LA PATRIE._[108]
Before citing examples from other poets, I must pause to note the
amazing celebrity of these two versifiers, Baudelaire and Verlaine,
who are now accepted as being great poets. How the French, who had
Chénier, Musset, Lamartine, and above all Hugo,--and among whom quite
recently flourished the so-called Parnassians: Leconte de Lisle,
Sully-Prudhomme, etc.--could attribute such importance to these two
versifiers who were far from skilful in form and most contemptible
and commonplace in subject-matter, is to me incomprehensible. The
life-conception of one of them, Baudelaire, consisted in elevating
gross egotism into a theory and replacing morality by a cloudy
conception of beauty--especially artificial beauty. Baudelaire had
a preference, which he expressed, for a woman’s face painted rather
than in its natural colour, and for metal trees and a theatrical
imitation of water rather than real trees and real water.
The life-conception of the other, Verlaine, consisted in weak
profligacy, in confession of moral impotence, and, as an antidote
to that impotence, in the grossest Roman Catholic idolatry. Both
moreover were quite lacking in naïveté, sincerity, and simplicity,
and both overflowed with artificiality, forced originality, and
self-assurance. So that in their least bad productions one sees more
of M. Baudelaire or M. Verlaine than of what they were describing.
But these two indifferent versifiers form a school, and lead hundreds
of followers after them.
There is only one explanation of this fact: it is that the art of the
society in which these versifiers lived is not a serious, important
matter of life, but a mere amusement. And all amusements grow
wearisome by repetition. And in order to make wearisome amusement
again tolerable it is necessary to find some means to freshen it up.
When, at cards, ombre grows stale, whist is introduced; when whist
grows stale, écarté is substituted; when écarté grows stale, some
other novelty is invented, and so on. The substance of the matter
remains the same, only its form is changed. It is the same with this
kind of art. The subject-matter of the art of the upper classes
growing continually more and more limited--it has come at last to
this, that to the artists of these exclusive classes it seems as if
everything has already been said and that to find anything new to say
is impossible. And therefore to freshen up this art they look out for
fresh forms.
Baudelaire and Verlaine invent such a new form, furbish it up
moreover with hitherto unused pornographic details, and--the critics
and the public of the upper classes hail them as great writers.
This is the only explanation of the success not of Baudelaire and
Verlaine only, but of all the Decadents.
For instance, there are poems by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck which have
no meaning, and yet, for all that or perhaps on that very account,
are printed by tens of thousands, not only in various publications
but even in collections of the best works of the younger poets.
This, for example, is a sonnet by Mallarmé:--
_A la nue accablante tu
Basse de basalte et de laves
A même les échos esclaves
Par une trompe sans vertu._
_Quel sépulcral naufrage (tu
Le sais, écume, mais y baves)
Suprême une entre les épaves
Abolit le mât dévêtu._
_Ou cela que furibond faute
De quelque perdition haute
Tout l’abîme vain éployé_
_Dans le si blanc cheveu qui traîne
Avarement aura noyé
Le flanc enfant d’une sirène._[109]
(“Pan,” 1895, No. 1.)
This poem is not exceptional in its incomprehensibility. I have
read several other poems by Mallarmé, and they also had no meaning
whatever. I give a sample of his prose in Appendix II. There is a
whole volume of this prose, called _Divagations_. It is impossible to
understand any of it. And that is evidently what the author intended.
And here is a song by Maeterlinck, another celebrated author of
to-day:--
_Quand il est sorti,
(J’entendis la porte)
Quand il est sorti
Elle avait souri ..._
_Mais quand il rentra
(J’entendis la lampe)
Mais quand il rentra
Une autre était là ..._
_Et j’ai vu la mort,
(J’entendis son âme)
Et j’ai vu la mort
Qui l’attend encore ..._
_On est venu dire,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
On est venu dire
Qu’il allait partir ..._
_Ma lampe allumée,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
Ma lampe allumée
Me suis approchée ..._
_A la première porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la première porte,
La flamme a tremblé ..._
_A la seconde porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la seconde porte,
La flamme a parlé ..._
_A la troisième porte,
(Mon enfant, j’ai peur)
A la troisième porte,
La lumière est morte ..._
_Et s’il revenait un jour,
Que faut-il lui dire?
Dites-lui qu’on l’attendit
Jusqu’à s’en mourir ..._
_Et s’il m’interroge encore
Sans me reconnaître?
Parlez-lui comme une sœur.
Il souffre peut-être ..._
_Et s’il demande où vous êtes
Que faut-il répondre?
Donnez-lui mon anneau d’or
Sans rien lui répondre ..._
_Et s’il veut savoir pourquoi
La salle est déserte?
Montrez-lui la lampe éteinte
Et la porte ouverte ..._
_Et s’il m’interroge alors
Sur la dernière heure?
Dites lui que j’ai souri
De peur qu’il ne pleure ..._[110]
(“Pan,” 1895, No. 2.)
Who went out? Who came in? Who is speaking? Who died?
I beg the reader to take the trouble to read through the samples I
cite in Appendix III of the celebrated and esteemed young poets:
Régnier, Griffin, Verhaeren, Moréas, and Montesquiou. It is important
to do so in order to form a clear conception of the present position
of art, and not to suppose as many do that Decadentism is an
accidental and transitory phenomenon. To avoid the reproach of having
selected the worst verses, I have copied out of each volume the poem
which happened to stand on page 28.
All the other productions of these poets are equally unintelligible,
or can only be understood with great difficulty and then not fully.
All the productions of those hundreds of poets, of whom I have
named a few, are the same in kind. And among the Germans, Swedes,
Norwegians, Italians, and us Russians, similar verses are printed.
And such productions are printed and made up into book-form, if not
by the million then by the hundred-thousand (some of these separate
works sell in tens of thousands). For type-setting, paging, printing
and binding these books, millions and millions of working days are
spent--not less, I think, than went to build the Great Pyramid. Nor
is this all. The same is going on in all the other arts: millions
and millions of working days are being spent on the production of
equally incomprehensible works in painting, in music, and in drama.
Painting not only does not lag behind poetry in this matter, but
rather outstrips it. Here is an extract from the diary of an amateur
of art,[111] written when visiting the Paris exhibitions in 1894:--
“I was to-day at three exhibitions: the Symbolists’, the
Impressionists’, and the Neo-Impressionists’. I looked at the
pictures conscientiously and carefully, but again felt the same
stupefaction and ultimate indignation. The first exhibition, that of
Camille Pissarro, was comparatively the most comprehensible, though
the pictures were out of drawing, had no content, and the colourings
were most improbable. The drawing was so indefinite that you were
sometimes unable to make out which way an arm or a head was turned.
The subject was generally, ‘_effets_’--_Effet de brouillard_, _Effet
du soir_, _Soleil couchant_. There were some pictures with figures,
but without subjects.
“In the colouring, bright blue and bright green predominated. And
each picture had its special colour with which the whole picture
was, as it were, splashed. For instance in ‘A Girl guarding Geese’
the special colour is _vert de gris_, and dots of it were splashed
about everywhere: on the face, the hair, the hands, and the clothes.
In the same gallery--‘Durand-Ruel’--were other pictures: by Puvis de
Chavannes, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, who are all Impressionists.
One of them, whose name I could not make out,--it was something
like Redon,--had painted a blue face in profile. On the whole face
there is only this blue tone, with white-of-lead. Pissarro has a
water-colour all done in dots. In the foreground is a cow entirely
painted with various-coloured dots. The general colour cannot be
distinguished, however much one stands back from, or draws near
to, the picture. From there I went to see the Symbolists. I looked
at them long without asking anyone for an explanation, trying to
guess the meaning; but it is beyond human comprehension. One of the
first things to catch my eye was a wooden _haut-relief_, wretchedly
executed, representing a woman (naked) who with both hands is
squeezing from her two breasts streams of blood. The blood flows
down, becoming lilac in colour. Her hair first descends and then
rises again and turns into trees. The figure is all coloured yellow,
and the hair is brown.
“Next--a picture: a yellow sea on which swims something which is
neither a ship nor a heart; on the horizon is a profile with a halo
and yellow hair, which changes into the sea, in which it is lost.
Some of the painters lay on their colours so thickly that the effect
is something between painting and sculpture. A third exhibit was
even less comprehensible: a man’s profile; before him a flame and
black stripes--leeches, as I was afterwards told. At last I asked a
gentleman who was there what it meant, and he explained to me that
the _haut-relief_ was a symbol, and represented ‘_La Terre_.’ The
heart swimming in a yellow sea was ‘_Illusion perdue_,’ and the
gentleman with the leeches was ‘_Le Mal_.’ There were also some
Impressionist pictures: elementary profiles, holding some sort of
flowers in their hands; in monotone, out of drawing, and either quite
blurred or else marked out with wide black outlines.”
This was in 1894; the same tendency is now even more strongly
defined, and we have Böcklin, Stuck, Klinger, Sasha Schneider, and
others.
The same thing is taking place in the drama. The play-writers give us
an architect who, for some reason, has not fulfilled his former high
intentions, and consequently climbs on to the roof of a house he has
erected and tumbles down head foremost;[112] or an incomprehensible
old woman (who exterminates rats), and who, for an unintelligible
reason, takes a poetic child to the sea and there drowns him;[113] or
some blind men, who, sitting on the seashore, for some reason always
repeat one and the same thing;[114] or a bell of some kind, which
flies into a lake and there rings.[115]
And the same is happening in music--in that art which more than any
other one would have thought should be intelligible to everybody.
An acquaintance of yours, a musician of repute, sits down to the
piano and plays you what he says is a new composition of his own or
of one of the new composers. You hear the strange, loud sounds, and
admire the gymnastic exercises performed by his fingers, and you see
that the performer wishes to convey to you that the sounds he is
producing express various poetic strivings of the soul. You see his
intention, but no feeling whatever except weariness is transmitted
to you. The execution lasts long, at least it seems very long to you
because you do not receive any clear impression, and involuntarily
you remember the words of Alphonse Karr, “_Plus ça va vite, plus ça
dure longtemps._”[116] And it occurs to you that perhaps it is all
a mystification; perhaps the performer is trying you--just throwing
his hands and fingers wildly about the key-board in the hope that you
will fall into the trap and praise him, and then he will laugh and
confess that he only wanted to see if he could hoax you. But when at
last the piece does finish, and the perspiring and agitated musician
rises from the piano obviously anticipating praise, you see that it
was all done in earnest.
The same thing takes place at all the concerts with pieces by Liszt,
Wagner, Berlioz, Brahms, and (newest of all) Richard Strauss, and the
numberless other composers of the new school, who unceasingly produce
opera after opera, symphony after symphony, piece after piece.
The same is occurring in a domain in which it seemed hard to be
unintelligible--in the sphere of novels and short stories.
Read _Là-Bas_ by Huysmans, or some of Kipling’s short stories, or
_L’annonciateur_ by Villiers de l’Isle Adam in his _Contes Cruels_,
etc., and you will find them not only “_abscons_” (to use a word
adopted by the new writers) but absolutely unintelligible both in
form and in substance. Such, again, is the work by E. Morel, _Terre
Promise_, now appearing in the _Revue Blanche_, and such are most of
the new novels. The style is very high-flown, the feelings seem to be
most elevated, but you can’t make out what is happening, to whom it
is happening, and where it is happening. And such is the bulk of the
young art of our time.
People who grew up in the first half of this century, admiring
Goethe, Schiller, Musset, Hugo, Dickens, Beethoven, Chopin, Raphael,
da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Delaroche, being unable to make head or
tail of this new art, simply attribute its productions to tasteless
insanity, and wish to ignore them. But such an attitude towards
this new art is quite unjustifiable because, in the first place,
this art is spreading more and more, and has already conquered for
itself a firm position in society similar to that occupied by the
Romanticists in the third decade of this century; and secondly and
chiefly because, if it is permissible to judge in this way of the
productions of the latest form of art, called by us Decadent art,
merely because we do not understand it, then remember, there are
an enormous number of people--all the labourers and many of the
non-labouring folk--who, in just the same way, do not comprehend
those productions of art which we consider admirable: the verses of
our favourite artists--Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo; the novels of
Dickens, the music of Beethoven and Chopin, the pictures of Raphael,
Michael Angelo, da Vinci, and so forth.
If I have a right to think that great masses of people do not
understand and do not like what I consider undoubtedly good because
they are not sufficiently developed, then I have no right to deny
that perhaps the reason why I cannot understand and cannot like the
new productions of art is merely that I am still insufficiently
developed to understand them. If I have a right to say that I, and
the majority of people who are in sympathy with me, do not understand
the productions of the new art simply because there is nothing in
it to understand and because it is bad art, then with just the same
right the still larger majority, the whole labouring mass, who do not
understand what I consider admirable art, can say that what I reckon
as good art is bad art and there is nothing in it to understand.
I once saw the injustice of such condemnation of the new art with
especial clearness, when in my presence a certain poet, who writes
incomprehensible verses, ridiculed incomprehensible music with gay
self-assurance; and shortly afterwards a certain musician, who
composes incomprehensible symphonies, laughed at incomprehensible
poetry with equal self-confidence. I have no right and no authority
to condemn the new art on the ground that I (a man educated in the
first half of the century) do not understand it; I can only say
that it is incomprehensible to me. The only advantage the art I
acknowledge has over the Decadent art lies in the fact that the art
I recognise is comprehensible to a somewhat larger number of people
than present-day art.
The fact that I am accustomed to a certain exclusive art and can
understand it, but am unable to understand another still more
exclusive art, does not give me a right to conclude that my art
is the real, true art, and that the other one, which I do not
understand, is an unreal, a bad art. I can only conclude that art,
becoming ever more and more exclusive, has become more and more
incomprehensible to an ever-increasing number of people, and that,
in this its progress towards greater and greater incomprehensibility
(on one level of which I am standing, with the art familiar to me),
it has reached a point where it is understood by a very small number
of the elect, and the number of these chosen people is becoming ever
smaller and smaller.
As soon as ever the art of the upper classes separated itself from
universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be
incomprehensible to the masses. And as soon as this position was
admitted it had inevitably to be admitted also that art may be
intelligible only to the very smallest number of the elect, and
eventually to two, or to one, of our nearest friends, or to oneself
alone. Which is practically what is being said by modern artists:--“I
create and understand myself, and if anyone does not understand me so
much the worse for him.”
The assertion that art may be good art, and at the same time
incomprehensible to a great number of people, is extremely unjust
and its consequences are ruinous to art itself; but at the same time
it is so common, and has so eaten into our conceptions, that it is
impossible sufficiently to elucidate the whole absurdity of it.
Nothing is more common than to hear it said of reputed works of art,
that they are very good but very difficult to understand. We are
quite used to such assertions, and yet to say that a work of art is
good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as
saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people
can’t eat it. The majority of men may not like rotten cheese or
putrefying grouse, dishes esteemed by people with perverted tastes;
but bread and fruit are only good when they are such as please the
majority of men. And it is the same with art. Perverted art may not
please the majority of men, but good art always pleases everyone.
It is said that the very best works of art are such that they cannot
be understood by the masses, but are accessible only to the elect who
are prepared to understand these great works. But if the majority
of men do not understand, the knowledge necessary to enable them to
understand should be taught and explained to them. But it turns out
that there is no such knowledge, that the works cannot be explained,
and that those who say the majority do not understand good works
of art, still do not explain those works, but only tell us that in
order to understand them one must read, and see, and hear, these same
works over and over again. But this is not to explain, it is only
to habituate! And people may habituate themselves to anything, even
to the very worst things. As people may habituate themselves to bad
food, to spirits, tobacco, and opium, just in the same way they may
habituate themselves to bad art--and that is exactly what is being
done.
Moreover it cannot be said that the majority of people lack the
taste to esteem the highest works of art. The majority always
have understood, and still understand, what we also recognise as
being the very best art: the epic of Genesis, the Gospel parables,
folk-legends, fairy-tales, and folk-songs, are understood by all.
How can it be that the majority has suddenly lost its capacity to
understand what is high in our art?
Of a speech it may be said that it is admirable, but incomprehensible
to those who do not know the language in which it is delivered.
A speech delivered in Chinese may be excellent, and may yet
remain incomprehensible to me if I do not know Chinese; but what
distinguishes a work of art from all other mental activity is
just the fact that its language is understood by all, and that
it infects all without distinction. The tears and laughter of a
Chinaman infect me just as the laughter and tears of a Russian; and
it is the same with painting and music, and also poetry, when it is
translated into a language I understand. The songs of a Kirghiz or
of a Japanese touch me, though in a lesser degree than they touch a
Kirghiz or a Japanese. I am also touched by Japanese painting, Indian
architecture, and Arabian stories. If I am but little touched by a
Japanese song and a Chinese novel, it is not that I do not understand
these productions, but that I know and am accustomed to higher works
of art. It is not because their art is above me. Great works of art
are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to
everyone. The story of Joseph, translated into the Chinese language,
touches a Chinese. The story of Sakya Muni (Buddha) touches us.
And there are, and must be, buildings, pictures, statues, and
music, of similar power. So that if art fails to move men it cannot
be said that this is due to the spectators’ or hearers’ lack of
understanding; but the conclusion to be drawn may be, and should be,
that such art is either bad or is not art at all.
Art is differentiated from activity of the understanding, which
demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that
one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry), by the fact
that it acts on people independently of their state of development
and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms,
infects any man, whatever his plane of development.
The business of art lies just in this: to make that understood and
felt which in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and
inaccessible. Usually it seems to the recipient of a truly artistic
impression that he knew the thing before, but had been unable to
express it.
And such has always been the nature of good, supreme art; the
_Iliad_, the _Odyssey_; the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph; the
Hebrew prophets, the psalms, the Gospel parables; the story of Sakya
Muni, and the hymns of the Vedas: all transmit very exalted feelings,
and are nevertheless quite comprehensible now to us, educated or
uneducated, as they were comprehensible to the men of those times
long ago, who were even less educated than our labourers. People
talk about incomprehensibility; but if art is the transmission of
feelings flowing from man’s religious perception, how can a feeling
be incomprehensible which is founded on religion, that is, on man’s
relation to God? Such art should be, and has actually always been,
comprehensible to everybody, because every man’s relation to God
is one and the same. This is why the churches and the images in
them were always comprehensible to everyone. The hindrance to an
understanding of the best and highest feelings (as is said in the
Gospel) does not at all lie in deficiency of development or learning,
but on the contrary in false development and false learning. A good
and lofty work of art may be incomprehensible, but not to simple,
unperverted peasant labourers (all that is highest is understood by
them)--it may be and often is unintelligible to erudite, perverted
people destitute of religion. And this continually occurs in our
society, in which the highest feelings are simply not understood.
For instance, I know people who consider themselves most refined
and who say that they do not understand the poetry of love to one’s
neighbour, of self-sacrifice, or of chastity.
So that good, great, universal, religious art may be incomprehensible
to a small circle of spoilt people, but certainly not to any large
number of plain men.
Art cannot be incomprehensible to the great masses only because it is
very good,--as artists of our day are fond of telling us. Rather we
are bound to conclude that this art is unintelligible to the great
masses only because it is very bad art, or even is not art at all. So
that the favourite argument (naïvely accepted by the cultured crowd),
that in order to feel art one has first to understand it (which
really only means habituate oneself to it), is the truest indication
that what we are asked to understand by such a method is either very
bad, exclusive art, or is not art at all.
People say that works of art do not please the people because they
are incapable of understanding them. But if the aim of works of art
is to infect people with the emotion the artist has experienced, how
can one talk about not understanding?
A man of the people reads a book, sees a picture, hears a play or
a symphony, and is touched by no feeling. He is told that this is
because he cannot understand. People promise to let a man see a
certain show; he enters and sees nothing. He is told that this is
because his sight is not prepared for this show. But the man knows
for certain that he sees quite well, and if he does not see what
people promised to show him he only concludes (as is quite just) that
those who undertook to show him the spectacle have not fulfilled
their engagement. And it is perfectly just for a man who does feel
the influence of some works of art, to come to this conclusion
concerning artists who do not, by their works, evoke feeling in him.
To say that the reason a man is not touched by my art is because he
is still too stupid, besides being very self-conceited and also rude,
is to reverse the rôles, and for the sick to send the hale to bed.
Voltaire said that “_Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre
ennuyeux_”;[117] but with even more right one may say of art that
_Tous les genres sons bons, hors celui qu’on ne comprend pas_, or
_qui ne produit pas son effet_,[118] for of what value is an article
which fails to effect what was intended?
Mark this above all: if only it be admitted that art may be
unintelligible to anyone of sound mind and yet still be art, there is
no reason why any circle of perverted people should not compose works
tickling their own perverted feelings, and comprehensible to no one
but themselves, and call it “art,” as is actually being done by the
so-called Decadents.
The direction art has taken may be compared to placing on a large
circle other circles, smaller and smaller, until a cone is formed,
the apex of which is no longer a circle at all. That is what has
happened to the art of our times.
CHAPTER XI
_Counterfeits of art produced by: Borrowing; Imitating;
Striking; Interesting. Qualifications needful for production
of real works of art, and those sufficient for production of
counterfeits._
Becoming ever poorer and poorer in subject-matter and more and more
unintelligible in form, the art of the upper classes in its latest
productions has even lost all the characteristics of art and has
been replaced by imitations of art. Not only has upper-class art
in consequence of its separation from universal art become poor
in subject-matter and bad in form, that is, ever more and more
unintelligible,--it has in course of time ceased even to be art at
all and has been replaced by counterfeits.
This has resulted from the following causes. Universal art arises
only when some one of the people having experienced a strong emotion
feels the necessity of transmitting it to others. The art of the rich
classes on the other hand arises not from the artist’s inner impulse,
but chiefly because people of the upper classes demand amusement and
pay well for it. They demand from art the transmission of feelings
that please them, and this demand artists try to meet. But it is a
very difficult task, for people of the wealthy classes spending their
lives in idleness and luxury desire to be continually diverted by
art; and art, even the lowest, cannot be produced at will, but has to
generate spontaneously in the artist’s inner self. And therefore, to
satisfy the demands of people of the upper classes, artists have had
to devise methods of producing imitations of art. And such methods
have been devised.
These methods are those of (1) borrowing, (2) imitating, (3) striking
(producing effects), and (4) interesting.
The first method consists in borrowing whole subjects, or merely
separate features, from former works recognised by everyone as being
poetic, and in so re-shaping them with sundry additions that they
should have an appearance of novelty.
Such works, evoking in people of a certain class memories of artistic
feelings formerly experienced, produce an impression similar to art,
and provided only that they conform to other needful conditions
they pass for art among those who seek for pleasure from art.
Subjects borrowed from previous works of art are usually called
poetic subjects. Objects and people thus borrowed are called poetic
objects and people. Thus in our circle all sorts of legends, sagas,
and ancient traditions, are considered poetic subjects. Among
poetic people and objects we reckon maidens, warriors, shepherds,
hermits, angels, devils of all sorts, moonlight, thunder, mountains,
the sea, precipices, flowers, long hair, lions, lambs, doves, and
nightingales. In general all those objects are considered poetic
which have most frequently been used by former artists in their
productions.
Some forty years ago a stupid but highly cultured--_ayant beaucoup
d’acquis_--lady (since deceased) asked me to listen to a novel
written by herself. It began with a heroine who in a poetic white
dress, and with poetically flowing hair, was reading poetry near some
water in a poetic wood. The scene was in Russia, but suddenly from
behind the bushes the hero appears, wearing a hat with a feather
_à la Guillaume Tell_ (the book specially mentioned this) and
accompanied by two poetical white dogs. The authoress deemed all this
highly poetic, and it might have passed muster if only it had not
been necessary for the hero to speak. But as soon as the gentleman in
the hat _à la Guillaume Tell_ began to converse with the maiden in
the white dress, it became obvious that the authoress had nothing to
say, but had merely been moved by poetic memories of other works,
and imagined that by ringing the changes on those memories she could
produce an artistic impression. But an artistic impression, that is
to say, infection, is only received when an author has in the manner
peculiar to himself experienced the feeling which he transmits, and
not when he passes on another man’s feeling previously transmitted
to him. Such poetry from poetry cannot infect people, it can only
simulate a work of art, and even that only to people of perverted
esthetic taste. The lady in question being very stupid and devoid of
talent, it was at once apparent how the case stood; but when such
borrowing is resorted to by people who are erudite and talented and
have cultivated the technique of their art, we get those borrowings
from the Greek, the antique, the Christian or mythological world,
which have become so numerous, and which particularly in our day
continue to increase and multiply, and are accepted by the public as
works of art if only the borrowings are well mounted by means of the
technique of the particular art to which they belong.
As a characteristic example of such counterfeits of art in the realm
of poetry, take Rostand’s _Princesse Lointaine_, in which there is
not a spark of art, but which seems very poetic to many people, and
probably also to its author.
The second method of imparting a semblance of art is that which
I have called imitating. The essence of this method consists in
supplying details accompanying the thing described or depicted. In
literary art this method consists in describing in the minutest
details the external appearance, the faces, the clothes, the
gestures, the tones, and the habitations, of the characters
represented, with all the occurrences met with in life. For instance
in novels and stories, when one of the characters speaks we are told
in what voice he spoke and what he was doing at the time. And the
things said are not given so that they should have as much sense
as possible, but as they are in life, disconnectedly, and with
interruptions and omissions. In dramatic art, besides such imitation
of real speech, this method consists in having all the accessories
and all the people just like those in real life. In painting
this method assimilates painting to photography and destroys the
difference between them. And strange to say this method is used also
in music: music tries to imitate, not only by its rhythm but also by
its very sounds, the sounds which in real life accompany the thing it
wishes to represent.
The third method is by action, often purely physical, on the outer
senses. Work of this kind is said to be “striking,” “effective.” In
all arts these effects consist chiefly in contrasts; in bringing
together the terrible and the tender, the beautiful and the hideous,
the loud and the soft, darkness and light, the most ordinary and the
most extraordinary. In verbal art, besides effects of contrast there
are also effects consisting in the description of things that have
never before been described. These are usually pornographic details
evoking sexual desire, or details of suffering and death evoking
feelings of horror, such, for instance, as when describing a murder,
to give a detailed medical account of the lacerated tissues, of the
swellings, of the smell, quantity, and appearance of the blood. It
is the same in painting: besides all kinds of other contrasts, one
is coming into vogue which consists in giving careful finish to one
object and being careless about all the rest. The chief and usual
effects in painting are effects of light and the presentation of the
horrible. In the drama the most common effects, besides contrasts,
are tempests, thunder, moonlight, scenes at sea or by the seashore,
changes of costume, exposure of the female body, madness, murders,
and death generally: the dying person exhibiting in detail all the
phases of agony. In music the most usual effects are a _crescendo_,
passing from the softest and simplest sounds to the loudest and
most complex crash of the full orchestra; a repetition of the same
sounds _arpeggio_ in all the octaves and on various instruments; or
for the harmony, tone, and rhythm, to be not at all those naturally
flowing from the course of the musical thought but such as strike
one by their unexpectedness. Besides these, the commonest effects in
music are produced in a purely physical manner by strength of sound,
especially in an orchestra.
Such are some of the most usual effects in the various arts, but
there yet remains one common to them all, namely, to convey by
means of one art what it would be natural to convey by another: for
instance, to make music describe (as is done by the programme music
of Wagner and his followers), or to make painting, the drama, or
poetry, induce a frame of mind (as is aimed at by all the Decadent
art).
The fourth method is that of interesting (that is, absorbing the
mind) in connection with works of art. The interest may lie in
an intricate plot--a method till quite recently much employed in
English novels and French plays, but now going out of fashion and
being replaced by realism, that is, by detailed description of some
historic period or some branch of contemporary life. For example,
in a novel interest may consist in a description of Egyptian or
Roman life, the life of miners, or that of the clerks in a large
shop. The reader becomes interested, and mistakes this interest for
an artistic impression. The interest may also depend on the very
method of expression; a kind of interest that has now come much into
use. Both verse and prose, as well as pictures, plays, and music,
are constructed so that they must be guessed like riddles, and this
process of guessing, again, affords pleasure and gives a semblance of
the feeling received from art.
It is very often said that a work of art is very good because it
is poetic, or realistic, or striking, or interesting; whereas not
only can neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, nor the
fourth, of these attributes supply a standard of excellence in art,
but they have not even anything in common with art.
Poetic--means borrowed. All borrowing merely recalls to the reader,
spectator, or listener, some dim recollection of artistic impressions
received from previous works of art, and does not infect with feeling
experienced by the artist himself. A work founded on something
borrowed, like Goethe’s _Faust_ for instance, may be very well
executed and be full of mind and every beauty, but because it lacks
the chief characteristic of a work of art--completeness, oneness,
the inseparable unity of form and content expressing the feeling
the artist has experienced--it cannot produce a really artistic
impression. In availing himself of this method the artist only
transmits the feeling received by him from a previous work of art;
therefore every borrowing, whether it be of whole subjects or of
various scenes, situations, or descriptions, is but a reflection of
art, a simulation of it, but not art itself. And therefore, to say
that a certain production is good because it is poetic,--that is,
resembles a work of art,--is like saying of a coin that it is good
because it resembles real money.
Equally little can imitation, realism, serve, as many people suppose,
as a measure of the quality of art. Imitation cannot be such a
measure, for the chief characteristic of art is the infection of
others with the feelings the artist has experienced, and infection
with a feeling is not only not identical with description of the
accessories of what is transmitted, but is usually hindered by
superfluous details. The attention of the receiver of the artistic
impression is diverted by all these well-observed details, and they
hinder the transmission of feeling even when it exists.
To value a work of art by the degree of its realism, by the accuracy
of the details reproduced, is as strange as to judge of the nutritive
quality of food by its external appearance. When we appraise a work
according to its realism, we only show that we are talking, not of a
work of art but of its counterfeit.
Neither does the third method of imitating art--by the use of what is
striking or effective--coincide with real art any better than the two
former methods, for in effectiveness (the effects of novelty, of the
unexpected, of contrasts, of the horrible) there is no transmission
of feeling but only an action on the nerves. If an artist were to
paint a bloody wound admirably, the sight of the wound would strike
me, but it would not be art. One prolonged note on a powerful organ
will produce a striking impression, will often even cause tears,
but there is no music in it, because no feeling is transmitted.
Yet such physiological effects are constantly mistaken for art by
people of our circle, and this not only in music but also in poetry,
painting, and the drama. It is said that art has become refined. On
the contrary, thanks to the pursuit of effects, it has become very
coarse. A new piece is brought out and accepted all over Europe,
such, for instance, as _Hanneles Himmelfahrt_,[119] in which play the
author wishes to transmit to the spectators pity for a persecuted
girl. To evoke this feeling in the audience by means of art, the
author should either make one of the characters express this pity
in such a way as to infect everyone, or should describe the girl’s
feelings correctly. But he cannot or will not do this and chooses
another way, more complicated in stage management but easier for the
author. He makes the girl die on the stage; and still further to
increase the physiological effect on the spectators, he extinguishes
the lights in the theatre, leaving the audience in the dark, and to
the sound of dismal music shows how the girl is pursued and beaten
by her drunken father. The girl shrinks--screams--groans--and falls.
Angels appear and carry her away. And the audience, experiencing
some excitement while this is going on, are fully convinced that
this is true esthetic feeling. But there is nothing esthetic in such
excitement, for there is no infection of man by man, but only a
mingled feeling of pity for another and of self-congratulation that
it is not I who am suffering: it is like what we feel at the sight of
an execution, or what the Romans felt in their circuses.
The substitution of effect for esthetic feeling is particularly
noticeable in musical art--that art which by its nature has an
immediate physiological action on the nerves. Instead of transmitting
by means of a melody the feelings he has experienced, a composer
of the new school accumulates and complicates sounds, and by now
strengthening now weakening them, he produces on the audience a
physiological effect of a kind that can be measured by an apparatus
invented for that purpose.[120] And the public mistake this
physiological effect for the effect of art.
As to the fourth method--that of interesting--it also is frequently
confounded with art. One often hears it said, not only of a poem,
a novel, or a picture, but even of a musical work, that it is
interesting. What does this mean? To speak of an interesting work of
art means either that we receive from a work of art information new
to us, or that the work is not fully intelligible and that little by
little, and with effort, we arrive at its meaning and experience a
certain pleasure in this process of guessing it. In neither case has
the interest anything in common with artistic impression. Art aims
at infecting people with feeling experienced by the artist. But the
mental effort necessary to enable the spectator, listener, or reader,
to assimilate the new information contained in the work, or to guess
the puzzles propounded hinders this infection by distracting him. And
therefore the interest of a work not only has nothing to do with its
excellence as a work of art, but rather hinders than assists artistic
impression.
We may, in a work of art, meet with what is poetic, and realistic,
and striking, and interesting, but these things cannot replace the
essential of art--feeling experienced by the artist. Latterly, in
upper-class art most of the objects given out as being works or
art are of the kind which only resemble art and are devoid of its
essential quality--feeling experienced by the artist. And for the
diversion of the rich such objects are continually being produced in
enormous quantities by the artisans of art.
Many conditions must be fulfilled to enable a man to produce a real
work of art. It is necessary that he should stand on the level of
the highest life-conception of his time, that he should experience
feeling and have the desire and capacity to transmit it, and that
he should moreover have a talent for some one of the forms of
art. It is very seldom that all these conditions necessary to the
production of true art are combined. But in order--aided by the
customary methods of borrowing, imitating, introducing effects,
and interesting--unceasingly to produce the counterfeits of art
which pass for art in our society and are well paid for, it is only
necessary to have a talent for some branch of art; and this is very
often to be met with. By talent I mean ability: in literary art
the ability to express one’s thoughts and impressions easily, and
to notice and remember characteristic details; in graphic arts to
distinguish and remember lines, forms, and colours; in music to
distinguish the intervals and to remember and transmit the sequence
of sounds. And a man in our time if only he possesses such a talent
and selects some speciality, may after learning the methods of
counterfeiting used in his branch of art,--if he has patience and if
his esthetic feeling (which would render such productions revolting
to him) be atrophied--unceasingly to the end of his life turn out
works which will pass for art in our society.
To produce such counterfeits, definite rules or recipes exist in each
branch of art. So the talented man, having assimilated them, may
produce such works _à froid_, cold-drawn, without feeling.
In order to write poems, a man of literary talent needs only
these qualifications: to acquire the knack, conformably with the
requirements of rhyme and rhythm, of using, instead of the one
really suitable word, ten others meaning approximately the same;
to learn how to take any phrase which to be clear has but one
natural order of words, and despite all possible dislocations still
to retain some sense in it; and lastly, to be able, guided by the
words required for the rhymes, to devise some semblance of thoughts,
feelings, or descriptions, to suit these words. Having acquired these
qualifications, he may unceasingly produce poems--short or long,
religious, amatory, or patriotic, according to the demand.
If a man of literary talent wishes to write a story or novel, he
need only form his style--that is, learn how to describe all that he
sees--and accustom himself to remember or note down details. When he
has accustomed himself to this, he can, according to his inclination
or the demand, unceasingly produce novels or stories--historical,
naturalistic, social, erotic, psychological, or even religious, for
which latter kind a demand and fashion begins to show itself. He can
take subjects from books or from the events of life, and can copy the
characters of the people in his book from his acquaintances.
And such novels and stories, if only they are decked out with
well-observed and carefully noted details, preferably erotic ones,
will be considered works of art, even though they may not contain a
spark of feeling experienced.
To produce art in dramatic form, a talented man, in addition to
all that is required for novels and stories, must also learn to
furnish his characters with as many smart and witty sentences as
possible, must know how to utilise theatrical effects, and how to
entwine the action of his characters so that there should be no
long conversations, but as much bustle and movement on the stage as
possible. If the writer is able to do this, he may produce dramatic
works one after another without stopping, selecting his subjects from
the reports of the law courts, or from the latest society topic, such
as hypnotism, heredity, etc., or from deep antiquity, or even from
the realms of fancy.
In the sphere of painting and sculpture it is still easier for the
talented man to produce imitations of art. He need only learn to
draw, paint, and model--especially naked bodies. Thus equipped he
can continue to paint pictures, or model statues, one after another,
choosing subjects according to his bent: mythological, or religious,
or fantastic, or symbolic; or he may depict what is written about in
the papers: a coronation, a strike, the Turko-Grecian war, famine
scenes; or, commonest of all, he may just copy anything he thinks
beautiful--from naked women to copper basins.
For the production of musical art the talented man needs still less
of what constitutes the essence of art, that is, feeling wherewith
to infect others; but on the other hand he requires more physical,
gymnastic labour than for any other art, unless it be dancing. To
produce works of musical art he must first learn to move his fingers
on some instrument as rapidly as those who have reached the highest
perfection; next he must know how in former times polyphonic music
was written, must study what are called counterpoint and fugue;
and, furthermore, he must learn orchestration, that is, how to
utilise the effects of the instruments. But once he has learned all
this, the composer may unceasingly produce one work after another:
whether programme-music, opera, or song (devising sounds more or less
corresponding to the words), or chamber music, that is, he may take
another man’s themes and work them up into definite forms by means of
counterpoint and fugue; or, what is commonest of all, he may compose
fantastic music, that is, he may take a conjunction of sounds which
happens to come to hand, and pile every sort of complication and
ornamentation on to this chance combination.
Thus in all realms of art counterfeits of art are manufactured to a
ready-made, prearranged recipe, and these counterfeits the public of
our upper classes accept for real art.
And this substitution of counterfeits for real works of art was the
third and most important consequence of the separation of the art of
the upper classes from universal art.
CHAPTER XII
_Causes of production of counterfeits. Professionalism.
Criticism. Schools of art._
In our society three conditions co-operate to cause the production
of objects of counterfeit art. They are (1) the considerable
remuneration of artists for their productions and the professionalism
which this has produced among artists, (2) art criticism, and (3)
schools of art.
While art was as yet undivided, and only religious art was valued
and rewarded while indiscriminate art was left unrewarded, there
were no counterfeits of art or, if any existed, being exposed to the
criticism of the whole people they quickly disappeared. But as soon
as that division occurred, and the upper classes acclaimed every kind
of art as good if only it afforded them pleasure, and began to reward
such art more highly than any other social activity, a large number
of people immediately devoted themselves to this activity and art
assumed quite a different character and became a profession.
And as soon as this occurred the chief and most precious quality of
art--its sincerity--was at once greatly weakened and eventually quite
destroyed.
The professional artist lives by his art and has continually to
invent subjects for his works, and does invent them. And it is
obvious how great a difference must exist between works of art
produced on the one hand by men such as the Jewish prophets, the
authors of the Psalms, Francis of Assisi, the authors of the _Iliad_
and _Odyssey_, of folk-stories, legends, and folk-songs, many of whom
not only received no remuneration for their work but did not even
attach their names to it, and, on the other hand, works produced
by court poets, dramatists, and musicians, receiving honours and
remuneration; and later on by professional artists who lived by the
trade, receiving remuneration from newspaper editors, publishers,
impresarios, and in general from the agents who come between the
artists and the town public--the consumers of art.
Professionalism is the first condition of the diffusion of false,
counterfeit art.
The second condition is the growth in recent times of art criticism,
that is, the valuation of art not by everybody, and above all not by
plain men, but by erudite, that is, by perverted and at the same time
self-confident individuals.
A friend of mine, speaking of the relation of critics to artists,
half-jokingly defined it thus: “Critics are the stupid who discuss
the wise.” However partial, inexact, and rude this definition may be,
it is yet partly true, and is incomparably juster than the definition
which considers critics to be men who can explain works of art.
“Critics explain!” What do they explain?
The artist, if a real artist, has by his work transmitted to others
the feeling he experienced. What is there, then, to explain?
If a work is a good work of art, then the feeling expressed by the
artist--be it moral or immoral--transmits itself to other people.
If transmitted to others, then they feel it and all interpretations
are superfluous. If the work does not infect people, no explanation
can make it contagious. An artist’s work cannot be interpreted.
Had it been possible to explain in words what he wished to convey,
the artist would have expressed himself in words. He expressed it
by his art, only because the feeling he experienced could not be
otherwise transmitted. The interpretation of works of art by words
only indicates that the interpreter is himself incapable of feeling
the infection of art. And this is actually the case for, however
strange it may seem to say so, critics have always been people less
susceptible than other men to the contagion of art. For the most part
they are able writers, educated and clever, but with their capacity
for being infected by art quite perverted or atrophied. And therefore
their writings have always largely contributed, and still contribute,
to the perversion of the taste of that public which reads them and
trusts them.
Art criticism did not exist--could not and cannot exist--in societies
where art is undivided, and where, consequently, it is appraised by
the religious conception of life common to the whole people. Art
criticism grew, and could grow, only on the art of the upper classes
who did not acknowledge the religious perception of their time.
Universal art has a definite and indubitable internal
criterion--religious perception; upper-class art lacks this, and
therefore the appreciators of that art are obliged to cling to
some external criterion. And they find it in “the judgments of the
finest-nurtured,” as an English esthetician has phrased it, that
is, in the authority of the people who are considered educated; nor
in this alone, but also in a tradition of such authorities. This
tradition is extremely misleading, both because the opinions of “the
finest-nurtured” are often mistaken, and also because judgments
which were valid once cease to be so with the lapse of time. But the
critics, having no basis for their judgments, never cease to repeat
their traditions. The classical tragedians were once considered
good, and therefore criticism considers them to be so still. Dante
was esteemed a great poet, Raphael a great painter, Bach a great
musician--and the critics, lacking a standard by which to separate
good art from bad, not only consider these artists great, but regard
all their productions as admirable and worthy of imitation. Nothing
has contributed, and still contributes, so much to the perversion
of art as these authorities set up by criticism. A man produces a
work of art, expressing in his own peculiar manner, like every true
artist, a feeling he has experienced. Most people are infected by
the artist’s feeling, and his work becomes known. Then criticism,
discussing the artist, says that the work is not bad, but all the
same the artist is not a Dante, nor a Shakespeare, nor a Goethe, nor
a Raphael, nor what Beethoven was in his last period. And the young
artist sets to work to copy those held up for his imitation, and he
produces not only feeble works but false works, counterfeits of art.
Thus, for instance, our Púshkin writes his short poems, _Evgéni
Onégin_, _The Gipsies_, and his stories--works all varying in
quality, but all true art. But then, under the influence of false
criticism extolling Shakespeare, he writes _Borís Godunóv_, a cold,
brain-spun work, and this production is lauded by the critics, set up
as a model, and imitations of it appear: _Mínin_ by Ostróvski, and
_Tsar Borís_ by Alexéy Tolstóy, and such imitations of imitations as
crowd all literatures with insignificant productions. The chief harm
done by the critics is this, that themselves lacking the capacity to
be infected by art (and that is the characteristic of all critics,
for did they not lack this they could not attempt the impossible--the
interpretation of works of art), they pay most attention to, and
eulogise, brain-spun invented works, and set these up as models
worthy of imitation. That is the reason they so confidently extol, in
literature, the Greek tragedians, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare,
Goethe (almost all he wrote), and, among recent writers, Zola and
Ibsen; in music, Beethoven’s last period, and Wagner. To justify
their praise of these brain-spun invented works, they devise entire
theories (of which the famous theory of beauty is one); and not only
dull but also talented people compose works in strict deference to
these theories; and often even real artists, doing violence to their
genius, submit to them.
Every false work extolled by the critics serves as a door through
which the hypocrites of art at once crowd in.
It is solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude,
savage, and, for us, often meaningless works of the ancient Greeks:
Sophocles, Euripides, Æschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or,
of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting,
all of Raphael, all of Michael Angelo, including his absurd “Last
Judgment”; in music, the whole of Bach, and the whole of Beethoven,
including his last period,--thanks only to them, have the Ibsens,
Maeterlincks, Verlaines, Mallarmés, Puvis de Chavannes, Klingers,
Böcklins, Stucks, Schneiders; in music, the Wagners, Liszts,
Berliozes, Brahmses, and Richard Strausses, etc., and all that
immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of these imitators, become
possible in our day.
As a good illustration of the harmful influence of criticism, take
its relation to Beethoven. Among his innumerable hasty productions
written to order, there are, notwithstanding their artificiality of
form, works of true art. But he grows deaf, cannot hear, and begins
to write invented, unfinished works, which are consequently often
meaningless and musically unintelligible. I know that musicians
can imagine sounds vividly enough, and can almost hear what they
read, but imaginary sounds can never be the same as real ones, and
every composer must hear his production in order to perfect it.
Beethoven however could not hear, could not perfect his work, and
consequently published productions which are artistic ravings. But
criticism, having once acknowledged him to be a great composer,
seizes on just these abnormal works with special gusto and searches
for extraordinary beauties in them. And, to justify its praises
(perverting the very meaning of musical art), it attributed to music
the property of describing what it cannot describe. And imitators
appear--an innumerable host of imitators of these abnormal attempts
at artistic productions which Beethoven wrote when he was deaf.
Then Wagner appears, who at first in critical articles praises just
Beethoven’s last period, connecting this music with Schopenhauer’s
mystical theory that music is the expression of Will--not of
separate manifestations of will objectivised on various planes, but
of its very essence--which is in itself as absurd as this music
of Beethoven. And afterwards he composes music of his own on this
theory, in conjunction with another still more erroneous system of
the union of all the arts. After Wagner yet new imitators appear,
diverging yet further from art: Brahms, Richard Strauss, and others.
Such are the results of criticism. But the third condition of the
perversion of art, namely, art schools, is almost more harmful still.
As soon as art became, not art for the whole people but for a rich
class, it became a profession; as soon as it became a profession,
methods were devised to teach it; people who chose this profession
of art began to learn these methods, and thus professional schools
sprang up: classes of rhetoric or literature in the public schools,
academies for painting, conservatoires for music, schools for
dramatic art.
In these schools art is taught! But art is the transmission to others
of a special feeling experienced by the artist. How can this be
taught in schools?
No school can evoke feeling in a man, and still less can it teach him
how to manifest it in the one particular manner natural to him alone.
But the essence of art lies in these things.
The one thing these schools can teach is how to transmit feelings
experienced by other artists in the way those other artists
transmitted them. And this is just what the professional schools do
teach; and such instruction not only does not assist the spread
of true art but, on the contrary, by diffusing counterfeits of art
does more than anything else to deprive people of the capacity to
understand true art.
In literary art people are taught how, without having anything they
wish to say, to write a many-paged composition on a theme about which
they have never thought and, moreover, to write it so that it should
resemble the work of an author admitted to be celebrated. This is
taught in schools.
In painting the chief training consists in learning to draw and paint
from copies and models, the naked body chiefly (the very thing that
is never seen, and which a man occupied with real art hardly ever has
to depict), and to draw and paint as former masters drew and painted.
The composition of pictures is taught by giving out themes similar to
those which have been treated by former acknowledged celebrities.
So also in dramatic schools--the pupils are taught to recite
monologues just as tragedians, held to be celebrated, declaimed them.
It is the same in music. The whole theory of music is nothing but
a disconnected repetition of those methods which the acknowledged
masters of composition made use of.
I have elsewhere quoted the profound remark of the Russian artist
Bryulov on art, but I cannot here refrain from repeating it, because
nothing better illustrates what can and what can not be taught in the
schools. Once when correcting a pupil’s study, Bryulóv just touched
it in a few places, and the poor dead study immediately became
animated. “Why, you only touched it a _wee bit_, and it is quite
another thing!” said one of the pupils. “Art begins where the _wee
bit_ begins,” replied Bryulóv, indicating by these words just what is
most characteristic of art. The remark is true of all the arts, but
its justice is particularly noticeable in the performance of music.
That musical execution should be artistic, should be art, that is,
should carry infection, three chief conditions must be observed.
There are many others needed for musical perfection: the transition
from one sound to another must be interrupted or continuous; the
sound must increase or diminish steadily; it must be blended with one
and not with another sound; the sound must have this or that timbre,
and much besides,--but take the three chief conditions: the pitch,
the time, and the strength of the sound. Musical execution is only
then art, only then infects, when the sound is neither higher nor
lower than it should be, that is, when exactly the infinitely small
centre of the required note is taken; when that note is continued
exactly as long as is needed; and when the strength of the sound
is neither more nor less than is required. The slightest deviation
of pitch in either direction, the slightest increase or decrease
in time, or the slightest strengthening or weakening of the sound
beyond what is needed, destroys the perfection and consequently the
infectiousness of the work. So that the feeling of infection by
the art of music, which seems so simple and so easily obtained, is
a thing we receive only when the performer finds those infinitely
minute degrees which are necessary to perfection in music. It is
the same in all arts: a wee bit lighter, a wee bit darker, a wee
bit higher, lower, to the right or the left--in painting; a wee bit
weaker or stronger in intonation, a wee bit sooner or later--in
dramatic art; a wee bit omitted, over-emphasised, or exaggerated--in
poetry, and there is no contagion. Infection is only obtained when
an artist finds those infinitely minute degrees of which a work of
art consists, and only to the extent to which he finds them. And it
is quite impossible to teach people by external means to find these
minute degrees: they can only be found when a man yields to his
feeling. No instruction can make a dancer catch just the tact of the
music, or a singer or a fiddler take exactly the infinitely minute
centre of his note, or a sketcher draw of all possible lines the
only right one, or a poet find the only meet arrangement of the only
suitable words. All this is found only by feeling. And therefore
schools may teach what is necessary in order to produce something
resembling art, but not art itself.
The teaching of the schools stops where the _wee bit_ begins--
consequently where art begins.
Accustoming people to something resembling art, disaccustoms them to
the comprehension of real art. And that is how it comes about that
none are more dull to art than those who have passed through the
professional schools and been most successful in them. Professional
schools produce an hypocrisy of art precisely akin to that hypocrisy
of religion which is produced by theological colleges for training
priests, pastors, and religious teachers generally. As it is
impossible in a school to train a man so as to make a religious
teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man how to become an
artist.
Art schools are thus doubly destructive of art: first, in that they
destroy the capacity to produce real art in those who have the
misfortune to enter them and go through a seven or eight years’
course; and secondly, in that they generate enormous quantities of
that counterfeit art which perverts the taste of the masses and
overflows our world. In order that born artists may know the methods
of the various arts elaborated by former artists, there should
exist in all elementary schools such classes for drawing and music
(singing) that, after passing through them, every talented scholar
may, by using existing models accessible to all, be able to perfect
himself in his art independently.
These three conditions--the professionalisation of artists, art
criticism, and art schools--have had this effect: that most people in
our times are quite unable even to understand what art is, and accept
as art the grossest counterfeits of it.
CHAPTER XIII
_Wagner’s “Nibelungen Ring” a type of counterfeit art. Its
success, and the reasons thereof._
To what an extent people of our circle and time have lost the
capacity to receive real art, and have become accustomed to accept
as art things that have nothing in common with it, is best seen from
the works of Richard Wagner, which have latterly come to be more and
more esteemed not only by the Germans but also by the French and the
English as the very highest art revealing new horizons to us.
The peculiarity of Wagner’s music, as is known, consists in this,
that he considered that music should serve poetry, expressing all the
shades of a poetical work.
The union of the drama with music, devised in the fifteenth century
in Italy for the revival of what they imagined to have been the
ancient Greek music-drama, is an artificial form which had, and
has, success only among the upper classes, and among them only
when gifted composers such as Mozart, Weber, Rossini, and others,
drawing inspiration from a dramatic subject, yielded freely to the
inspiration and subordinated the text to the music, so that in their
operas the important thing to the audience is merely the music on a
certain text, and not the text at all, which latter even when it was
utterly absurd, as for instance in the _Magic Flute_, still does not
prevent the music from producing an artistic impression.
Wagner wishes to correct the opera by letting music submit to the
demands of poetry and unite with it. But each art has its own
definite realm, which is not identical with the realm of other
arts but merely comes in contact with them; and therefore if the
manifestations, I will not say of several but even of two arts--the
dramatic and the musical--be united in one complete production,
then the demands of the one art will make it impossible to fulfil
the demands of the other, as has always occurred in the ordinary
operas, where the dramatic art has submitted to, or rather yielded
place to, the musical. Wagner wishes that musical art should submit
to dramatic art and that both should appear in full strength. But
this is impossible, for every work of art, if it be a true one, is
an expression of the intimate feelings of the artist, which are
quite peculiar to him and not like anything else. Such is a musical
production and such is a dramatic work, if they be true art. And
therefore, in order that a production in the one branch of art should
coincide with a production in the other branch, it is necessary that
the impossible should happen: that two works from different realms of
art should be absolutely exceptional, unlike anything that existed
before, and yet should coincide and be exactly alike.
And this cannot be, just as there cannot be two men, or even two
leaves on a tree, exactly alike. Still less can two works from
different realms of art, the musical and the literary, be absolutely
alike. If they coincide, then either one is a work of art and the
other a counterfeit, or both are counterfeits. Two live leaves cannot
be exactly alike but two artificial leaves may be. And so it is with
works of art. They can only coincide completely when neither the one
nor the other is art, but both are only cunningly devised semblances
of it.
If poetry and music may be joined, as occurs in hymns, songs, and
_romances_--(though even in these the music does not follow the
changes of each verse of the text as Wagner wants to, but the song
and the music merely produce a coincident effect on the mind)--this
occurs only because lyrical poetry and music have, to some extent,
one and the same aim: to produce a mental condition, and the
conditions produced by lyrical poetry and by music can, more or
less, coincide. But even in these conjunctions the centre of gravity
always lies in one of the two productions, so that it is one of
them that produces the artistic impression while the other remains
unregarded. And still less is it possible for such union to exist
between epic or dramatic poetry and music.
Moreover, one of the chief conditions of artistic creation is the
complete freedom of the artist from every kind of preconceived
demand. And the necessity of adjusting his musical work to a work
from another realm of art is a preconceived demand of such a kind as
to destroy all possibility of creative power; and therefore adjusted
works of this kind are and must be, as has always happened, not works
of art but only imitations of art, like the music of a melodrama,
titles of pictures, illustrations to books, and librettos to operas.
And such Wagner’s productions are. A confirmation of this is
to be seen in the fact that Wagner’s new music lacks the chief
characteristic of every true work of art, namely, such entirety and
completeness that the smallest alteration in its form would disturb
the meaning of the whole work. In a true work of art--poem, drama,
picture, song, or symphony--it is impossible to extract one line, one
scene, one figure, or one bar from its place and put it in another,
without infringing the significance of the whole work, just as it is
impossible without infringing the life of an organic being to extract
an organ from one place and insert it somewhere else. But in the
music of Wagner’s last period, with the exception of certain parts
of little importance which have an independent musical meaning, it
is possible to make all kinds of transpositions, putting what was in
front behind and _vice versâ_, without altering the musical sense.
And the reason why these transpositions do not alter the sense of
Wagner’s music is because the sense lies in the words and not in the
music.
The musical score of Wagner’s later operas is like what would result
should one of those versifiers--of whom there are now many, with
tongues so broken that they can, on any theme to any rhymes in any
rhythm, write verses which sound as if they had a meaning--conceive
the idea of illustrating by his verses some symphony or sonata of
Beethoven, or some _ballade_ of Chopin, in the following manner. To
the first bars of one character, he writes verses corresponding in
his opinion to those first bars. Next come some bars of a different
character, and he also writes verses corresponding in his opinion
to them, but with no internal connection with the first verses,
and moreover without rhymes and without rhythm. Such a production,
without the music, would be exactly parallel in poetry to what
Wagner’s operas are in music, if heard without the words.
But Wagner is not only a musician, he is also a poet, or both
together; and therefore, to judge of Wagner one must know his poetry
also--that same poetry which the music has to subserve. The chief
poetical production of Wagner is the _Nibelungen Ring_. This work
has attained such enormous importance in our time and has such
influence on all that now professes to be art, that it is necessary
for everyone to-day to have some idea of it. I have carefully read
through the four booklets which contain this work, and have drawn up
a brief summary of it, which I give in Appendix III. I would strongly
advise the reader (if he has not perused the poem itself, which would
be the best thing to do) at least to read my account of it, so as
to have an idea of this extraordinary work. It is a model work of
counterfeit art so gross as to be even ridiculous.
But we are told that it is impossible to judge of Wagner’s works
without seeing them on the stage. The Second Day of this drama, which
as I was told is the best part of the whole work, was given in Moscow
last winter and I went to see the performance.
When I arrived the enormous theatre was already filled from top to
bottom. There were Grand-Dukes, and the flower of the aristocracy, of
the merchant class, of the learned, and of the middle-class official
public. Most of them held the libretto, fathoming its meaning.
Musicians--some of them elderly, grey-haired men--followed the music,
score in hand. Evidently the performance of this work was an event of
importance.
I was rather late, but I was told that the short prelude with
which the act begins was of slight importance and that it did not
matter having missed it. When I arrived, an actor sat on the stage
amid decorations intended to represent a cave and before something
which was meant to represent a smith’s forge. He was dressed in
trico tights, with a cloak of skins, wore a wig and an artificial
beard, and with white, weak, genteel hands (his easy movements and
especially the shape of his stomach and his lack of muscle revealed
the actor) beat an impossible sword with an unnatural hammer in a way
in which no one ever uses a hammer; and at the same time, opening
his mouth in a strange way, he sang something incomprehensible. The
music of various instruments accompanied the strange sounds which
he emitted. From the libretto one was able to gather that the actor
had to represent a powerful dwarf who lived in the cave, and who was
forging a sword for Siegfried, whom he had reared. One could tell he
was a dwarf by the fact that the actor walked all the time bending
the knees of his trico-covered legs. This dwarf, still opening his
mouth in the same strange way, long continued to sing or shout.
The music meanwhile runs over something strange, like beginnings
which are not continued and do not get finished. From the libretto
one could learn that the dwarf is telling himself about a ring a
giant had obtained and which the dwarf wishes to procure through
Siegfried’s aid, while Siegfried wants a good sword, on the forging
of which the dwarf is occupied. After this conversation or singing
to himself has gone on rather a long time, other sounds are heard
in the orchestra, also like something beginning and not finishing,
and another actor appears with a horn slung over his shoulder and
accompanied by a man running on all fours dressed up as a bear, whom
he sets at the smith-dwarf. The latter runs away without unbending
the knees of his trico-covered legs. This actor with the horn
represented the hero, Siegfried. The sounds which were emitted in the
orchestra on the entrance of this actor were intended to represent
Siegfried’s character and are called Siegfried’s _leit-motiv_. And
these sounds are repeated each time Siegfried appears. There is one
fixed combination of sounds, or _leit-motiv_, for each character,
and this _leit-motiv_ is repeated every time the person whom it
represents appears; and when anyone is mentioned the _motiv_ is heard
which relates to that person. Moreover each article also has its own
_leit-motiv_ or chord. There is a _motiv_ of the ring, a _motiv_ of
the helmet, a _motiv_ of the apple, a _motiv_ of fire, spear, sword,
water, etc.; and as soon as the ring, helmet, or apple is mentioned,
the _motiv_ or chord of the ring, helmet, or apple, is heard. The
actor with the horn opens his mouth as unnaturally as the dwarf,
and long continues in a chanting voice to shout some words, and in
a similar chant Mime (that is the dwarf’s name) makes some reply to
him. The meaning of this conversation can only be discovered from
the libretto; and it is that Siegfried was brought up by the dwarf
and therefore, for some reason, hates him and always wishes to kill
him. The dwarf has forged a sword for Siegfried, but Siegfried is
dissatisfied with it. From a ten-page conversation (by the libretto),
lasting half-an-hour and conducted with the same strange openings
of the mouth and chantings, it appears that Siegfried’s mother gave
birth to him in the wood, and that concerning his father all that is
known is that he had a sword which was broken, the pieces of which
are in Mime’s possession, and that Siegfried does not know fear, and
wishes to go out of the wood. Mime however does not want to let him
go. During the conversation the music never omits, at the mention of
father, sword, etc., to sound the _motiv_ of these people and things.
After these conversations fresh sounds are heard--those of the god
Wotan--and a wanderer appears. This wanderer is the god Wotan. Also
dressed up in a wig, and also in tights, this god Wotan, standing in
a stupid pose with a spear, thinks proper to recount what Mime must
have known before, but what it is necessary to tell the audience. He
does not tell it simply, but in the form of riddles which he orders
himself to guess, shaking his head (one does not know why) that he
will guess right. Moreover, whenever the wanderer strikes his spear
on the ground, fire comes out of the ground, and in the orchestra the
sounds of spear and of fire are heard. The orchestra accompanies the
conversation, and the _motivs_ of the people and things spoken of
are always artfully intermingled. Besides this the music expresses
feelings in the most naïve manner: the terrible by sounds in the
bass, the frivolous by rapid touches in the treble, and so forth.
The riddles have no meaning except to tell the audience what the
_nibelungs_ are, what the giants are, what the gods are, and
what has happened before. This conversation also is chanted with
strangely opened mouths and continues for eight libretto pages, and
a correspondingly long time on the stage. After this the wanderer
departs and Siegfried returns and talks with Mime for thirteen pages
more. There is not a single melody the whole of this time, but
merely intertwinings of the _leit-motivs_ of the people and things
mentioned. The conversation shows that Mime wishes to teach Siegfried
fear and that Siegfried does not know what fear is. Having finished
this conversation, Siegfried seizes one of the pieces of what is
meant to represent the broken sword, saws it up, puts it on what is
meant to represent the forge, melts it, and then forges it and sings:
“Heiho! heiho! heiho! Ho! ho! Aha! oho! aha! Heiaho! heiaho! heiaho!
Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!” and Act I finishes.
Upon the question I had come to the theatre to decide, my mind was
fully made up, as surely as on the question of the merits of my
lady acquaintance’s novel when she read me the scene between the
loose-haired maiden in the white dress and the hero with two white
dogs and a hat with a feather _à la Guillaume Tell_.
From an author who could compose such spurious scenes, outraging all
esthetic feeling, as those which I had witnessed, there was nothing
to be hoped; it may safely be decided that all that such an author
can write will be bad, because he evidently does not know what a true
work of art is. I wished to leave, but the friends I was with asked
me to remain, declaring that one could not form an opinion by that
one act, and that the second would be better. So I stopped for the
second act.
Act II, night. Afterwards dawn. In general the whole piece is crammed
with lights, clouds, moonlight, darkness, magic fires, thunder, etc.
The scene represents a wood, and in the wood there is a cave. At the
entrance to the cave sits a fourth actor in tights, representing
another dwarf. Dawn appears. Enter the god Wotan, again with a spear
and again in the guise of a wanderer. Again his sounds, together with
fresh sounds of the deepest bass that can be produced. These latter
indicate that the dragon is speaking. Wotan awakens the dragon. The
same bass sounds are repeated, growing yet deeper and deeper. First
the dragon says, “I want to sleep,” but afterwards he crawls out of
the cave. The dragon is represented by two men: it is dressed in a
green scaly skin, and waves a tail at one end while at the other it
opens a kind of crocodile’s jaw that is fastened on and from which
flames appear. The dragon (who is meant to be dreadful, and may
appear so to five-year-old children) utters some words in a terribly
bass voice. This is all so stupid, so like what is done in the booth
at a fair, that it is surprising that people over seven years of age
can witness it seriously; yet thousands of quasi-cultured people sit
and attentively hear and see it, and are delighted.
Siegfried with his horn reappears, as does Mime also. In the
orchestra the sounds denoting them are emitted, and they talk about
whether Siegfried does or does not know fear. Mime goes away, and a
scene commences which is intended to be most poetic. Siegfried, in
his tights, lies down in a would-be beautiful pose and alternately
keeps silent and talks to himself. He ponders, listens to the singing
of birds, and desires to imitate them. For this purpose he cuts a
reed with his sword and makes a pipe. The dawn grows brighter and
brighter; the birds sing. Siegfried tries to imitate the birds. In
the orchestra is heard the imitation of birds, alternating with
sounds corresponding to the words he speaks. But Siegfried does not
succeed with his pipe-playing, so he plays on his horn instead. This
scene is unendurable. Of music, that is, of art serving as a means to
transmit a state of mind experienced by the author, there is not even
a suggestion. There is something that is absolutely unintelligible
musically. In a musical sense a hope continually arises, followed by
disappointment, as if a musical thought were commenced only to be
broken off. If there are something like musical beginnings, these
beginnings are so short, so encumbered with complications of harmony
and orchestration and with effects of contrast, are so obscure and
unfinished, and what is happening on the stage meanwhile is so
abominably false, that it is difficult even to perceive these musical
snatches, let alone to be infected by them. Above all, from the very
beginning to the very end and in each note, the author’s purpose is
so audible and visible that one sees and hears neither Siegfried nor
the birds, but only a limited self-opinionated German of bad taste
and bad style, who has a most false conception of poetry, and in the
rudest and most primitive manner wishes to transmit to me these false
and mistaken conceptions of his.
Everyone knows the feeling of distrust and resistance always evoked
by an author’s evident predetermination. A narrator need only to say
in advance, “Prepare to cry,” or “to laugh,” and you are sure neither
to cry nor to laugh. But when you see that an author prescribes
emotion at what is not touching but only laughable or disgusting, and
when you see moreover that the author is fully assured that he has
captivated you, a painfully tormenting feeling results similar to
what one would feel if an old, deformed woman put on a ball-dress and
smilingly coquetted before you, confident of your approbation. This
impression was strengthened by the fact that around me I saw a crowd
of three thousand people, who not only patiently witnessed all this
absurd nonsense but even considered it their duty to be delighted
with it.
I somehow managed to sit out the next scene also, in which the
monster appears to the accompaniment of his bass notes intermingled
with the _motiv_ of Siegfried; but after the fight with the monster,
and all the roars, fires, and sword-wavings, I could stand no more of
it, and escaped from the theatre with a feeling of repulsion which
even now I cannot forget.
Listening to this opera, I involuntarily thought of a respected,
wise, educated, country labourer--one, for instance, of those wise
and truly religious men whom I know among the peasants,--and I
pictured to myself the terrible perplexity such a man would be in
were he to witness what I was seeing that evening.
What would he think if he knew of all the labour spent on such
a performance, and saw that audience, those great ones of the
earth,--old, bald-headed, grey-bearded men, whom he had been
accustomed to respect--sit silent and attentive, listening to and
looking at all these stupidities for five hours on end? Not to speak
of an adult labourer, one can hardly imagine even a child of over
seven occupying himself with such a stupid, incoherent fairy tale.
And yet an enormous audience, the cream of the cultured upper
classes, sits out five hours of this insane performance, and goes
away imagining that by paying tribute to this nonsense it has
acquired a fresh right to esteem itself advanced and enlightened.
I speak of the Moscow public. But what is the Moscow public? It is
but a hundredth part of that public which while considering itself
most highly enlightened, esteems it a merit so to have lost the
capacity of being infected by art that not only can it witness this
stupid sham without being revolted, but can even take delight in it.
In Bayreuth, where these performances were first given, people who
considered themselves finely cultured assembled from the ends of the
earth, spent, say, £100 each to see this performance, and for four
days running went to see and hear this nonsensical rubbish, sitting
it out for six hours each day.
But why did people go, and why do they still go to these
performances, and why do they admire them? The question naturally
presents itself: How is the success of Wagner’s works to be explained?
That success I explain to myself in this way: thanks to his
exceptional position in having at his disposal the resources of a
king, Wagner was able to command all the methods for counterfeiting
art which have been developed by long usage, and employing these
methods with great ability he produced a model work of counterfeit
art. The reason why I have selected his work for my illustration is,
that in no other counterfeit of art known to me are all the methods
by which art is counterfeited--viz., borrowings, imitations, dramatic
effects, and interest--so ably and powerfully united.
From the subject borrowed from antiquity, to the clouds and the
risings of the sun and moon, Wagner in this work has made use of all
that is considered poetic. We have here the sleeping beauty, and
nymphs, and subterranean fires, and dwarfs, and battles, and swords,
and love, and incest, and a monster, and singing-birds: the whole
arsenal of the poetic is brought into action.
Moreover everything is imitative: the decorations are imitated and
the costumes are imitated. All is just as, according to the data
supplied by archæology, they would have been in antiquity. The very
sounds are imitative, for Wagner, who was not destitute of musical
talent, invented just such sounds as imitate the strokes of a hammer,
the hissing of molten iron, the singing of birds, etc.
Furthermore, in this work everything is in the highest degree
striking in its effects and in its peculiarities: its monsters, its
magic fires, and its scenes under water; the darkness in which the
audience sit, the invisibility of the orchestra, and the hitherto
unemployed combinations of harmony.
And besides, it is all interesting. The interest lies not only
in the question who will kill whom, and who will marry whom, and
who is whose son, and what will happen next?--the interest lies
also in the relation of the music to the text. The rolling waves
of the Rhine--now how is that to be expressed in music? An evil
dwarf appears--how is the music to express an evil dwarf?--and how
is it to express the sensuality of this dwarf? How will bravery,
fire, or apples, be expressed in music? How are the _leit-motivs_
of the people speaking to be interwoven with the _leit-motivs_ of
the people and objects about whom they speak? And the music has a
further interest. It diverges from all formerly accepted laws, and
most unexpected and totally new modulations crop up (as is not only
possible but even easy in music having no inner law of its being);
the dissonances are new, and are allowed in a new way--and this, too,
is interesting.
And it is this poeticality, imitativeness, effectfulness, and
interestingness which, thanks to the peculiarities of Wagner’s talent
and to the advantageous position in which he was placed, are in
these productions carried to the highest pitch of perfection, which
so act on the spectator, hypnotising him as one would be hypnotised
who should listen for several consecutive hours to maniacal ravings
pronounced with great oratorical power.
People say, “You cannot judge without having seen Wagner performed at
Bayreuth: in the dark, where the orchestra is out of sight concealed
under the stage, and where the performance is brought to the highest
perfection.” And this just proves that we have here no question of
art, but one of hypnotism. It is just what the spiritualists say. To
convince you of the reality of their apparitions they usually say,
“You cannot judge; you must try it, be present at several séances,”
that is, come and sit silent in the dark for hours together in the
same room with semi-sane people and repeat this some ten times over,
and you shall see all that we see.
Yes, naturally! Only place yourself in such conditions, and you
may see what you will. But this can be still more quickly attained
by getting drunk or smoking opium. It is the same when listening
to an opera of Wagner’s. Sit in the dark for four days in company
with people who are not quite normal, and through the auditory
nerves subject your brain to the strongest action of the sounds
best adapted to excite it, and you will no doubt be reduced to an
abnormal condition and be enchanted by absurdities. But to attain
this end you do not even need four days; the five hours during which
one “day” is enacted, as in Moscow, are quite enough. Nor are five
hours needed; even one hour is enough for people who have no clear
conception of what art should be, and who have concluded in advance
that what they are going to see is excellent, and that indifference
or dissatisfaction with this work will serve as a proof of their
inferiority and lack of culture.
I observed the audience present at this representation. The people
who led the whole audience and gave the tone to it were those who had
previously been hypnotized and who again succumbed to the hypnotic
influence to which they were accustomed. These hypnotized people,
being in an abnormal condition, were perfectly enraptured. Moreover
all the art critics, who lack the capacity to be infected by art and
therefore always especially prize works like Wagner’s opera where
it is all an affair of the intellect, also with much profundity
expressed their approval of a work affording such ample material for
ratiocination. And following these two groups went that large city
crowd (indifferent to art, with their capacity to be infected by it
perverted and partly atrophied), headed by the princes, millionaires,
and art patrons, who, like sorry harriers, keep close to those who
most loudly and decidedly express their opinion.
“Oh yes, certainly! What poetry! Marvellous! Especially the birds!”
“Yes, yes! I am quite vanquished!” exclaim these people, repeating
in various tones what they have just heard from men whose opinion
appears to them authoritative.
If some people do feel insulted by the absurdity and spuriousness of
the whole thing, they are timidly silent, as sober men are timid and
silent when surrounded by tipsy people.
And thus, thanks to the masterly skill with which it counterfeits
art while having nothing in common with it, a meaningless, coarse,
spurious production finds acceptance all over the world, costs
millions of roubles to produce, and assists more and more to pervert
the taste of people of the upper classes and their conception of art.
CHAPTER XIV
_Truths fatal to preconceived views are not readily
recognised. Proportion of works of art to counterfeits.
Perversion of taste and incapacity to recognise art. Examples._
I know that most men--not only those considered clever, but even
those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most
difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems--can
very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it
be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they
have formed, perhaps with much difficulty--conclusions of which
they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they
have built their lives. And therefore I have little hope that what
I adduce as to the perversion of art and taste in our society will
be accepted or even seriously considered. Nevertheless, I must state
fully the inevitable conclusion to which my investigation into the
question of art has brought me. This investigation has brought me
to the conviction that almost all that our society considers to
be art, good art, and the whole of art, far from being real and
good art and the whole of art, is not even art at all, but only a
counterfeit of it. This position, I know, will seem very strange and
paradoxical; but if we once acknowledge art to be human activity by
means of which some people transmit their feelings to others (and
not a service of Beauty, or a manifestation of the Idea, and so
forth), we shall inevitably have to admit this further conclusion
also. If it is true that art is an activity by means of which one
man having experienced a feeling intentionally transmits it to
others, then we have inevitably to admit further that of all that
among us is termed art (the art of the upper classes)--of all those
novels, stories, dramas, comedies, pictures, sculptures, symphonies,
operas, operettas, ballets, etc., which profess to be works of art,
scarcely one in a hundred thousand proceeds from an emotion felt by
its author, all the rest being but manufactured counterfeits of art,
in which borrowing, imitation, effects, and interest, replace the
contagion of feeling. That the proportion of real productions of art
is to the counterfeits as one to some hundreds of thousands or even
more, may be seen by the following calculation. I have read somewhere
that the artist painters in Paris alone number 30,000; there will
probably be as many in England, as many in Germany, and as many in
Russia, Italy, and the smaller states combined. So that in all there
will be in Europe, say, 120,000 painters; and there are probably
as many musicians and as many literary artists. If these 360,000
individuals produce three works a year each (and many of them produce
ten or more), then each year yields over a million so-called works
of art. How many then must have been produced in the last ten years,
and how many in the whole time since upper-class art broke off from
the art of the whole people? Evidently millions. Yet who of all the
connoisseurs of art has received impressions from all these pseudo
works of art? Not to mention all the labouring classes who have no
conception of these productions, even people of the upper classes
cannot know one in a thousand of them all, and cannot remember those
they have known. These works all appear under the guise of art,
produce no impression on anyone (except when they serve as pastimes
for the idle crowd of rich people), and vanish utterly.
In reply to this it is usually said that without this enormous number
of unsuccessful attempts we should not have the real works of art.
But such reasoning is as though a baker, in reply to a reproach that
his bread was bad, were to say that if it were not for the hundreds
of spoiled loaves there would not be any well-baked ones. It is true
that where there is gold there is also much sand; but that cannot
serve as a reason for talking a lot of nonsense in order to say
something wise.
We are surrounded by productions considered artistic. Thousands of
verses, thousands of poems, thousands of novels, thousands of dramas,
thousands of pictures, thousands of musical pieces, follow one after
another. All the verses describe love, or nature, or the author’s
state of mind, and in all of them rhyme and rhythm are observed. All
the dramas and comedies are splendidly mounted and are performed by
admirably trained actors. All the novels are divided into chapters;
all of them describe love, contain effective situations, and
correctly describe the details of life. All the symphonies contain
_allegro_, _andante_, _scherzo_, and _finale_; all consist of
modulations and chords, and are played by highly-trained musicians.
All the pictures, in gold frames, saliently depict faces and sundry
accessories. But among these productions in the various branches
of art there is in each branch one among hundreds of thousands not
only somewhat better than the rest, but differing from them as a
diamond differs from paste. The one is priceless, the others not
only have no value but are worse than valueless for they deceive and
pervert taste. And yet externally they are, to a man of perverted or
atrophied artistic perception, precisely alike.
In our society the difficulty of recognising real works of art is
further increased by the fact that the external quality of the work
in false productions is not only no worse, but often better, than
real ones; the counterfeit is often more effective than the real,
and its subject more interesting. How is one to discriminate? How
is one to find a production in no way distinguished in externals
from hundreds of thousands of others intentionally made precisely to
imitate it?
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 among
a thousand others in wood or forest. The animal unerringly finds
what he needs. So also the man, if only his natural qualities have
not been perverted, will without fail select from among thousands of
objects the real work of art he requires--that infecting him with the
feeling experienced by the artist. But it is not so with those whose
taste has been perverted by their education and life. The receptive
feeling of these people is atrophied, and in valuing artistic
productions they must be guided by discussion and study, which
discussion and study completely confuse them. So that most people in
our society are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the
grossest counterfeit. People sit for whole hours in concert-rooms
and theatres listening to the new composers, consider it a duty
to read the novels of the famous modern novelists and to look at
pictures representing either something incomprehensible or just the
very things they see much better in real life; and, above all, they
consider it incumbent on them to be enraptured by all this, imagining
it all to be art, while at the same time they will pass real works
of art by not only without attention, but even with contempt, merely
because in their circle these works are not included in the list of
works of art.
A few days ago I was returning home from a walk feeling depressed,
as sometimes happens. On nearing the house I heard the loud singing
of a large choir of peasant women. They were welcoming my daughter,
celebrating her return home after her marriage. In this singing, with
its cries and clanging of scythes, such a definite feeling of joy
cheerfulness and energy was expressed, that without noticing how it
infected me I continued on my way towards the house in a better mood
and reached home smiling and quite in good spirits. That same evening
a visitor, an admirable musician famed for his execution of classical
music and particularly of Beethoven, played us Beethoven’s sonata,
Opus 101. For the benefit of those who might otherwise attribute my
judgment of that sonata of Beethoven to non-comprehension of it, I
should mention that whatever other people understand of that sonata
and of other productions of Beethoven’s later period, I, being
very susceptible to music, understand equally. For a long time I
used to attune myself to delight in those shapeless improvisations
which form the subject-matter of the works of Beethoven’s later
period, but I had only to consider the question of art seriously,
and to compare the impression I received from Beethoven’s later
works with those pleasant, clear, and strong, musical impressions
which are transmitted, for instance, by the melodies of Bach (his
arias), Haydn, Mozart, Chopin (when his melodies are not overloaded
with complications and ornamentation), and of Beethoven himself in
his earlier period, and above all, with the impressions produced
by folk-songs,--Italian, Norwegian, or Russian,--by the Hungarian
_csárdäs_, and other such simple, clear, and powerful music, and the
obscure, almost unhealthy, excitement from Beethoven’s later pieces
which I had artificially evoked in myself, was immediately destroyed.
On the completion of the performance (though it was noticeable that
everyone had become dull) those present, in the accepted manner,
warmly praised Beethoven’s profound production and did not forget
to add that formerly they had not been able to understand that last
period of his, but that they now saw he was really then at his very
best. And when I ventured to compare the impression made on me by the
singing of the peasant women--an impression which had been shared by
all who heard it--with the effect of this sonata, the admirers of
Beethoven only smiled contemptuously, not considering it necessary to
reply to such strange remarks.
But for all that the song of the peasant women was real art
transmitting a definite and strong feeling, while the 101st sonata
of Beethoven was only an unsuccessful attempt at art, containing no
definite feeling and therefore not infectious.
For my work on art I have this winter read diligently, though with
great effort, the celebrated novels and stories, praised by all
Europe, written by Zola, Bourget, Huysmans, and Kipling. At the same
time I chanced on a story in a child’s magazine, by a quite unknown
writer, which told of the Easter preparations in a poor widow’s
family. The story tells how the mother managed with difficulty to
obtain some wheat-flour, which she poured on the table ready to
knead. She then went out to procure some yeast, telling the children
not to leave the hut and to take care of the flour. When the mother
had gone, some other children ran shouting near the window, calling
those in the hut to come to play. The children forgot their mother’s
warning, ran into the street, and were soon engrossed in the game.
The mother, on her return with the yeast, finds a hen on the table
throwing the last of the flour to her chickens, who were busily
picking it out of the dust of the earthen floor. The mother, in
despair, scolds the children, who cry bitterly. And the mother begins
to feel pity for them--but the white flour has all gone. So to mend
matters she decides to make the Easter cake with sifted rye-flour,
brushing it over with white of egg and surrounding it with eggs.
“Rye-bread which we bake is as good as a cake,” says the mother,
using a rhyming proverb to console the children for not having an
Easter cake made with white flour. And the children, quickly passing
from despair to rapture, repeat the proverb and await the Easter cake
more merrily even than before.
[Illustration: “THE DAY OF JUDGMENT”
_A painting by V. M. Vasnetsóv in Kief Cathedral
An example of a sort of picture Tolstoy disliked_]
Well! the reading of the novels and stories by Zola, Bourget,
Huysmans, Kipling, and others, handling the most harrowing
subjects, did not touch me for one moment, and I was provoked with
the authors all the while as one is provoked with a man who considers
you so naïve that he does not even conceal the trick by which he
intends to take you in. From the first lines you see the intention
with which the book is written, the details all become superfluous,
and one feels dull. Above all, one knows that the author had no other
feeling all the time than a desire to write a story or a novel, and
so one receives no artistic impression. On the other hand I could
not tear myself away from the unknown author’s tale of the children
and the chickens, because I was at once infected by the feeling
the author had evidently experienced, re-evoked in himself, and
transmitted.
Vasnetsóv is one of our Russian painters. He has painted
ecclesiastical pictures in Kief Cathedral, and everyone praises
him as the founder of some new, elevated kind of Christian art. He
worked at those pictures for ten years, was paid tens of thousands
of roubles for them, and they are all simply bad imitations of
imitations of imitations, destitute of any spark of feeling. And this
same Vasnetsóv drew a picture for Turgénev’s story “The Quail” (in
which it is told how a son pitied a quail that he had seen his father
kill) showing the boy asleep with pouting upper lip, and above him,
as a dream, the quail. And this picture is a true work of art.
In the English Academy of 1897 two pictures were exhibited together;
one of which, by J. C. Dollman, was the temptation of St. Anthony.
The Saint is on his knees praying. Behind him stands a naked woman
and animals of some kind. It is apparent that the naked woman pleased
the artist very much, but that Anthony did not concern him at all;
and that so far from the temptation being terrible to him (the
artist) it is highly agreeable. And therefore if there be any art in
this picture, it is very nasty and false. Next in the same book of
academy pictures comes a picture by Langley, showing a stray beggar
boy, who has evidently been called in by a woman who has taken pity
on him. The boy, pitifully drawing his bare feet under the bench,
is eating; the woman is looking on, probably considering whether he
will not want some more; and a girl of about seven, leaning on her
arm, is carefully and seriously looking on, not taking her eyes from
the hungry boy and evidently understanding for the first time what
poverty is, and what inequality among people is, and asking herself
why she has everything provided for her while this boy goes barefoot
and hungry? She feels sorry and yet pleased. And she loves both the
boy and goodness.... And one feels that the artist loved this girl,
and that she too loves. And this picture, by an artist who, I think,
is not very widely known, is an admirable and true work of art.
I remember seeing a performance of _Hamlet_ by Rossi. Both the
tragedy itself and the performer who took the chief part are
considered by our critics to represent the climax of supreme dramatic
art. And yet, both from the subject-matter of the drama and from the
performance, I experienced all the time that peculiar suffering which
is caused by false imitations of works of art. And I lately read of a
theatrical performance among a savage tribe--the Voguls. A spectator
describes the play. A big Vogul and a little one, both dressed in
reindeer skins, represent a reindeer-doe and its young. A third
Vogul, with a bow, represents a huntsman on snow-shoes, and a fourth
imitates with his voice a bird that warns the reindeer of their
danger. The play is that the huntsman follows the track that the doe
with its young one has travelled. The deer run off the scene and
again reappear. (Such performances take place in a small tent-house.)
The huntsman gains more and more on the pursued. The little deer
is tired and presses against its mother. The doe stops to draw
breath. The hunter comes up with them and draws his bow. But just
then the bird sounds its note, warning the deer of their danger. They
escape. Again there is a chase and again the hunter gains on them,
catches them, and lets fly his arrow. The arrow strikes the young
deer. Unable to run, the little one presses against its mother. The
mother licks its wound. The hunter draws another arrow. The audience,
as the eye-witness describes them, are paralysed with suspense; deep
groans and even weeping are heard among them. And from the mere
description I felt that this was a true work of art.
[Illustration:
A sketch illustrating Turgenev’s story,
“THE QUAIL”
_By V. M. Vasnetsóv_]
What I am saying will be considered irrational paradox at which
one can only be amazed; but for all that I must say what I think,
namely, that people of our circle, of whom some compose verses,
stories, novels, operas, symphonies, and sonatas, paint all kinds
of pictures and make statues, while others hear and look at these
things, and again others appraise and criticise them all: discuss,
condemn, triumph, and generation after generation raise monuments
to one another--that all these people, with very few exceptions,
artists, and public, and critics, have never (except in childhood and
earliest youth, before hearing any discussions on art) experienced
that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man and even to a child,
that sense of infection with another’s feeling--compelling us to
rejoice in another’s gladness, to sorrow at another’s grief, and to
mingle souls with another--which is the very essence of art. And
therefore these people not only cannot distinguish true works of art
from counterfeits, but continually mistake for real art the worst and
most artificial, while they do not even perceive works of real art,
because the counterfeits are always more ornate, while true art is
modest.
CHAPTER XV
The quality of art, considered apart from its
subject-matter--_The sign of art: infectiousness.
Incomprehensible to those whose taste is perverted. Conditions
of infection: Individuality; Clearness; Sincerity._
Art, in our society, has become so perverted that not only has bad
art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what
art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about
the art of our society it is, therefore, first of all necessary to
distinguish art from counterfeit art.
There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its
counterfeit--namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man, without
exercising effort, and without altering his standpoint, on reading,
hearing, or seeing another man’s work experiences a mental condition
which unites him with that man and with other people who are also
affected by that work, then the object evoking that condition is a
work of art. And however poetic, realistic, striking, or interesting,
a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that
feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of
spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who
are also infected by it).
It is true that this indication is an _internal_ one, and that there
are people who have forgotten what the action of real art is, who
expect something else from art (in our society the great majority are
in this state), and that therefore such people may mistake for this
esthetic feeling the feeling of diversion and a certain excitement
which they receive from counterfeits of art. But though it is
impossible to undeceive these people, just as it may be impossible
to convince a man suffering from colour-blindness that green is not
red, yet, for all that, this indication remains perfectly definite to
those whose feeling for art is neither perverted nor atrophied,
and it clearly distinguishes the feeling produced by art from all
other feelings.
[Illustration: “CHARITY”
_By Walter Langley, British Academy, 1897_]
The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the recipient of a true
artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if
the work were his own and not someone else’s--as if what it expresses
were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of
art destroys, in the consciousness of the recipient, the separation
between himself and the artist, nor that alone, but also between
himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing
of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting
of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great
attractive force of art.
If a man is infected by the author’s condition of soul, if he feels
this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has
effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be
not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the
same work--then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign
of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of
excellence in art.
_The stronger the infection the better is the art_, as art, speaking
now apart from its subject-matter--that is, not considering the
quality of the feelings it transmits.
And the degree of the infectiousness of art depends on three
conditions:--
(1) On the greater or lesser individuality of the feeling
transmitted; (2) on the greater or lesser clearness with which the
feeling is transmitted; (3) on the sincerity of the artist, that is,
on the greater or lesser force with which the artist himself feels
the emotion he transmits.
The more individual the feeling transmitted the more strongly does
it act on the recipient; the more individual the state of soul into
which he is transferred the more pleasure does the recipient obtain
and therefore the more readily and strongly does he join in it.
The clearness of expression assists infection because the recipient
who mingles in consciousness with the author is the better satisfied
the more clearly the feeling is transmitted which as it seems to
him he has long known and felt and for which he has only now found
expression.
But most of all is the degree of infectiousness of art increased by
the degree of sincerity in the artist. As soon as the spectator,
hearer, or reader, feels that the artist is infected by his own
production and writes, sings, or plays, for himself and not merely
to act on others, this mental condition of the artist infects the
recipient; and, contrariwise, as soon as the spectator, reader, or
hearer, feels that the author is not writing, singing, or playing,
for his own satisfaction--does not himself feel what he wishes
to express--but is doing it for him, the recipient, resistance
immediately springs up and the most individual and the newest
feelings and the cleverest technique not only fail to produce any
infection but actually repel.
I have mentioned three conditions of contagion in art, but they may
all be summed up into one, the last, sincerity, that is, that the
artist should be impelled by an inner need to express his feeling.
That condition includes the first; for if the artist is sincere he
will express the feeling as he experienced it. And as each man is
different from everyone else, his feeling will be individual for
everyone else; and the more individual it is--the more the artist
has drawn it from the depths of his nature--the more sympathetic and
sincere will it be. And this same sincerity will impel the artist to
find a clear expression of the feeling which he wishes to transmit.
Therefore this third condition--sincerity--is the most important
of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and
this explains why such art always acts so powerfully; but it is a
condition almost entirely absent from our upper-class art, which
is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of
covetousness or vanity.
Such are the three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits,
and which also decide the quality of every work of art considered
apart from its subject-matter.
The absence of any one of these conditions excludes a work from the
category of art and relegates it to that of art’s counterfeits. If
the work does not transmit the artist’s peculiarity of feeling and is
therefore not individual, if it is unintelligibly expressed, or if it
has not proceeded from the author’s inner need for expression--it is
not a work of art. If all these conditions are present, even in the
smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of
art.
The presence in various degrees of these three conditions:
individuality, clearness, and sincerity, decides the merit of a work
of art, as art, apart from subject-matter. All works of art take rank
of merit according to the degree in which they fulfil the first, the
second, and the third of these conditions. In one the individuality
of the feeling transmitted may predominate; in another, clearness
of expression; in a third, sincerity; while a fourth may have
sincerity and individuality but be deficient in clearness; a fifth,
individuality and clearness, but less sincerity; and so forth, in all
possible degrees and combinations.
Thus is art divided from what is not art, and thus is the quality of
art, as art, decided, independently of its subject-matter, that is to
say, apart from whether the feelings it transmits are good or bad.
But how are we to define good and bad art with reference to its
content or subject-matter?
CHAPTER XVI
_The quality of art, considered according to its
subject-matter. The better the feeling the better the art.
The cultured crowd. The religious perception of our age.
New ideals put fresh demands to art. Art unites. Religious
art. Universal art. Both co-operate to one result. The new
appraisement of art. Bad art. Examples of art. How to test a
work claiming to be art._
How in art are we to decide what is good and what is bad in
subject-matter?
Art, like speech, is a means of communication and therefore of
progress, that is, of the movement of humanity forward towards
perfection. Speech renders accessible to men of the latest
generations all the knowledge discovered by the experience and
reflection both of preceding generations and of the best and
foremost men of their own times; art renders accessible to men
of the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their
predecessors, and those also which are felt by their best and
foremost contemporaries. And as the evolution of knowledge proceeds
by truer and more necessary knowledge dislodging and replacing what
is mistaken and unnecessary, so the evolution of feeling proceeds
through art,--feelings less kind and less needful for the well-being
of mankind being replaced by others kinder and more needful for
that end. That is the purpose of art. And, speaking now of its
subject-matter, the more art fulfils that purpose the better the art,
and the less it fulfils it the worse the art.
And the appraisement of feelings (that is, the acknowledgment of one
set of feelings or another as being more or less good, more or less
necessary for the well-being of mankind) is made by the religious
perception of the age.
In every period of history and in every human society there
exists an understanding of the meaning of life which represents
the highest level to which men of that society have attained,--an
understanding defining the highest good at which that society
aims. This understanding is the religious perception of the given
time and society. And this religious perception is always clearly
expressed by a few advanced men, and more or less vividly perceived
by all the members of the society. Such a religious perception and
its corresponding expression exists always in every society. If it
appears to us that in our society there is no religious perception,
this is not because there really is none but only because we do not
want to see it. And we often wish not to see it because it exposes
the fact that our life is inconsistent with that religious perception.
Religious perception in a society is like the direction of a flowing
river. If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a
society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the
direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.
And so there always has been and is a religious perception in every
society. And it is by the standard of this religious perception that
the feelings transmitted by art have always been estimated. It has
always been only on the basis of this religious perception of their
age that men have chosen, from the endlessly varied spheres of art,
that art which transmitted feelings making religious perception
operative in actual life. And such art has always been highly valued
and encouraged; while art transmitting feelings already outlived,
flowing from the antiquated religious perceptions of a former
age, has always been condemned and despised. All the rest of art,
transmitting those most diverse feelings by means of which people
commune with one another, was not condemned, and was tolerated if
only it did not transmit feelings contrary to religious perception.
Thus for instance among the Greeks, art transmitting the feeling of
beauty, strength, and courage (Hesiod, Homer, Phidias) was chosen,
approved, and encouraged; while art transmitting feelings of rude
sensuality, despondency, and effeminacy, was condemned and despised.
Among the Jews, art transmitting feelings of devotion and submission
to the God of the Hebrews and to His will (the epic of Genesis,
the prophets, the Psalms) was chosen and encouraged, while art
transmitting feelings of idolatry (the golden calf) was condemned and
despised. All the rest of art--stories, songs, dances, ornamentation
of houses, of utensils, and of clothes--which was not contrary to
religious perception, was neither distinguished nor discussed. Thus
in regard to its subject-matter has art been appraised always and
everywhere and thus it should be appraised, for this attitude towards
art proceeds from the fundamental characteristics of human nature and
those characteristics do not change.
I know that according to an opinion current in our times religion
is a superstition which humanity has outgrown, and it is therefore
assumed that no such thing exists as a religious perception common to
us all by which art in our time can be estimated. I know that this is
the opinion current in the pseudo-cultured circles of to-day. People
who do not acknowledge Christianity in its true meaning because it
undermines all their social privileges, and who therefore invent all
kinds of philosophic and esthetic theories to hide from themselves
the meaninglessness and wrongness of their lives, cannot think
otherwise. These people intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally,
confuse the notion of a religious cult with the notion of religious
perception, and think that by denying the cult they get rid of
religious perception. But even the very attacks on religion, and
the attempts to establish an idea of life contrary to the religious
perception of our times, most clearly demonstrate the existence of a
religious perception condemning the lives that are not in harmony
with it.
If humanity progresses, that is, moves forward, there must inevitably
be a guide to the direction of that movement. And religions have
always furnished that guide. All history shows that the progress of
humanity is accomplished no otherwise than under the guidance of
religion. But if the race cannot progress without the guidance of
religion,--and progress is always going on, and consequently also
in our own times,--then there must be a religion of our times. So
that whether it pleases or displeases the so-called cultured people
of to-day, they must admit the existence of religion--not of a
religious cult, Catholic, Protestant, or another, but of religious
perception--which even in our times is the guide always present where
there is any progress. And if a religious perception exists amongst
us, then our art should be appraised on the basis of that religious
perception; and as has been the case always and everywhere art
transmitting feelings flowing from the religious perception of our
time should be chosen from amongst all the indifferent art, should
be acknowledged, highly valued, and encouraged; while art running
counter to that perception should be condemned and despised, and all
the remaining indifferent art should neither be distinguished nor
encouraged.
The religious perception of our time, in its widest and most
practical application, is the consciousness that our well-being,
both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and
eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among men--in their loving
harmony with one another. This perception is not only expressed by
Christ and all the best men of past ages, it is not only repeated in
the most varied forms and from most diverse sides by the best men of
our times, but it already serves as a clue to all the complex labour
of humanity, consisting, as this labour does, on the one hand in the
destruction of physical and moral obstacles to the union of men, and
on the other hand in establishing the principles common to all men
which can and should unite them in one universal brotherhood. And
it is on the basis of this perception that we should appraise all
the phenomena of our life, and among the rest our art also; choosing
from all its realms and highly prizing and encouraging whatever
transmits feelings flowing from this religious perception, rejecting
whatever is contrary to it, and not attributing to the rest of art an
importance not properly belonging to it.
The chief mistake made by people of the upper classes at the time
of the so-called Renaissance,--a mistake we still perpetuate,--was
not that they ceased to value and to attach importance to religious
art (people of that period could not attach importance to it
because, like our own upper classes, they could not believe in what
the majority considered to be religion), but their mistake was
that they set up in place of religious art which was lacking, an
insignificant art which aimed only at giving pleasure, that is, they
began to choose, to value, and to encourage, in place of religious
art, something which in any case did not deserve such esteem and
encouragement.
One of the Fathers of the Church said that the great evil is not
that men do not know God, but that they have set up, instead of God,
that which is not God. So also with art. The great misfortune of the
people of the upper classes of our time is not so much that they are
without a religious art, as that, instead of a supreme religious art
chosen from all the rest as being specially important and valuable,
they have chosen a most insignificant and, usually, harmful art,
which aims at pleasing certain people, and which therefore, if only
by its exclusive nature, stands in contradiction to that Christian
principle of universal union which forms the religious perception of
our time. Instead of religious art, an empty and often vicious art
is set up, and this hides from men’s notice the need of that true
religious art which should be present in life in order to improve it.
It is true that art which satisfies the demands of the
religious perception of our time is quite unlike former art,
but, notwithstanding this dissimilarity, to a man who does not
intentionally hide the truth from himself what does form the
religious art of our age is very clear and definite. In former
times, when the highest religious perception united only some people
(who even if they formed a large society were yet but one society
surrounded by others--Jews, or Athenian or Roman citizens), the
feelings transmitted by the art of that time flowed from a desire for
the might, greatness, glory, and prosperity of that society, and the
heroes of art might be people who contributed to that prosperity by
strength, by craft, by fraud, or by cruelty (Ulysses, Jacob, David,
Samson, Hercules, and all the heroes). But the religious perception
of our times does not select any one society of men; on the contrary
it demands the union of all--absolutely of all people without
exception--and above every other virtue it sets brotherly love to all
men. And therefore the feelings transmitted by the art of our time
not only cannot coincide with the feelings transmitted by former art,
but must run counter to them.
Christian, truly Christian, art has been so long in establishing
itself, and has not yet established itself, just because the
Christian religious perception was not one of those small steps by
which humanity advances regularly, but was an enormous revolution
which, if it has not already altered, must inevitably alter the
entire life-conception of mankind, and consequently the whole
internal organisation of their life. It is true that the life of
humanity, like that of an individual, moves regularly; but in that
regular movement come, as it were, turning-points which sharply
divide the preceding from the subsequent life. Christianity was
such a turning-point; such at least it must appear to us who live by
the Christian perception of life. Christian perception gave another,
a new, direction to all human feelings, and therefore completely
altered both the content and the significance of art. The Greeks
could make use of Persian art and the Romans could use Greek art, or,
similarly, the Jews could use Egyptian art,--the fundamental ideals
were one and the same. Now the ideal was the greatness and prosperity
of the Persians, now the greatness and prosperity of the Greeks,
now that of the Romans. The same art was transferred into other
conditions and served new nations. But the Christian ideal changed
and reversed everything, so that, as the Gospel puts it, “That which
was exalted among men has become an abomination in the sight of
God.” The ideal is no longer the greatness of Pharaoh or of a Roman
emperor, not the beauty of a Greek nor the wealth of Phœnicia, but
humility, purity, compassion, love. The hero is no longer Dives, but
Lazarus the beggar; not Mary Magdalene in the day of her beauty, but
in the day of her repentance; not those who acquire wealth, but those
who have abandoned it; not those who dwell in palaces, but those
who dwell in catacombs and huts; not those who rule over others,
but those who acknowledge no authority but God’s. And the greatest
work of art is no longer a cathedral of victory[121] with statues of
conquerors, but the representation of a human soul so transformed by
love that a man who is tormented and murdered yet pities and loves
his persecutors.
And the change is so great that men of the Christian world find it
difficult to resist the inertia of the heathen art to which they have
been accustomed all their lives. The subject-matter of Christian
religious art is so new to them, so unlike the subject-matter of
former art, that it seems to them as though Christian art were
a denial of art, and they cling desperately to the old art. But
this old art, having no longer in our day any source in religious
perception, has lost its meaning, and we shall have to abandon it
whether we wish to or not.
The essence of the Christian perception consists in the recognition
by every man of his sonship to God, and of the consequent union of
men with God and with one another, as is said in the Gospel (John
xvii. 21[122]). Therefore the subject-matter of Christian art is such
feeling as can unite men with God and with one another.
The expression _unite men with God and with one another_ may seem
obscure to people accustomed to the misuse of these words which is so
customary, but the words have a perfectly clear meaning nevertheless.
They indicate that the Christian union of man (in contradiction to
the partial, exclusive union of only some men) is that which unites
all without exception.
Art, all art, has this characteristic, that it unites people. Every
art causes those to whom the artist’s feeling is transmitted to
unite in soul with the artist and also with all who receive the same
impression. But non-Christian art, while uniting some people, makes
that very union a cause of separation between these united people
and others; so that union of this kind is often a source not only of
division but even of enmity towards others. Such is all patriotic
art, with its anthems, poems, and monuments; such is all Church
art, that is, the art of certain cults, with their images, statues,
processions, and other local ceremonies. Such art is belated and
non-Christian, uniting the people of one cult, only to separate them
yet more sharply from the members of other cults and even to place
them in relations of hostility to one another. Christian art is such
only as tends to unite all without exception, either by evoking in
them the perception that each man and all men stand in like relation
towards God and towards their neighbour, or by evoking in them
identical feelings, which may even be the very simplest provided
only that they are not repugnant to Christianity and are natural to
everyone without exception.
Good Christian art of our time may be unintelligible to people
because of imperfections in its form or because men are inattentive
to it, but it must be such that all men can experience the feelings
it transmits. It must be the art not of some one group of people, nor
of one class, nor of one nationality, nor of one religious cult; that
is, it must not transmit feelings which are accessible only to a man
educated in a certain way, or only to an aristocrat, or a merchant,
or only to a Russian, or a native of Japan, or a Roman Catholic, or
a Buddhist, and so on, but it must transmit feelings accessible to
everyone. Only art of this kind can be acknowledged in our time to
be good art, worthy of being chosen out from all the rest of art and
encouraged.
Christian art, that is, the art of our time, should be catholic in
the original meaning of the word, that is, universal, and therefore
it should unite all men. And only two kinds of feeling do unite all
men: first, feelings flowing from the perception of our sonship to
God and of the brotherhood of man; and next, the simple feelings
of common life accessible to everyone without exception--such as
feelings of merriment, of pity, of cheerfulness, of tranquillity, and
so forth. Only these two kinds of feelings can now supply material
for art good in its subject-matter.
And the action of these two kinds of art, apparently so dissimilar,
is one and the same. The feelings flowing from the perception of
our sonship to God and of the brotherhood of man--such as a feeling
of sureness in truth, devotion to the will of God, self-sacrifice,
respect for and love of man--evoked by Christian religious
perception; and the simplest feelings--such as a softened or a merry
mood caused by a song or an amusing jest intelligible to everyone,
or by a touching story, or a drawing, or a little doll: both alike
produce one and the same effect, the loving union of man with man.
Sometimes people who are together, if not hostile to one another,
are, at least estranged in mood and feeling, till perhaps a story,
a performance, a picture, or even a building, but oftenest of all
music, unites them all as by an electric flash, and in place of their
former isolation or even enmity they are all conscious of union and
mutual love. Each is glad that another feels what he feels; glad of
the communion established not only between him and all present but
also with all now living who will yet share the same impression;
and, more than that, he feels the mysterious gladness of a communion
which, reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all men of the past
who have been moved by the same feelings and with all men of the
future who will yet be touched by them. And this effect is produced
both by the religious art which transmits feelings of love to God and
one’s neighbour, and by universal art transmitting the very simplest
feelings common to all men.
The art of our time should be appraised differently from former art
chiefly in this, that the art of our time, that is, Christian art
(basing itself on a religious perception which demands the union of
man), excludes from the domain of art good in its subject-matter
everything transmitting exclusive feelings, which do not unite but
divide men. It relegates such work to the category of art bad in its
subject-matter, while on the other hand it includes in the category
of art good in subject-matter a section not formerly admitted as
deserving to be chosen out and respected, namely, universal art
transmitting even the most trifling and simple feelings if only they
are accessible to all men without exception and therefore unite
them. Such art cannot, in our time, but be esteemed good, for it
attains the end which the religious perception of our time, that is,
Christianity, sets before humanity.
Christian art either evokes in men those feelings which, through love
of God and of one’s neighbour, draw them to closer and ever closer
union and make them ready for and capable of such union; or evokes
in them those feelings which show them that they are already united
in the joys and sorrows of life. And therefore the Christian art of
our time can be and is of two kinds: 1) art transmitting feelings
flowing from a religious perception of man’s position in the world in
relation to God and to his neighbour--religious art in the limited
meaning of the term; and 2) art transmitting the simplest feelings of
common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the
whole world--the art of common life--the art of a people--universal
art. Only these two kinds of art can be considered good art in our
time.
The first, religious art,--transmitting both positive feelings of
love to God and one’s neighbour, and negative feelings of indignation
and horror at the violation of love,--manifests itself chiefly in the
form of words, and to some extent also in painting and sculpture: the
second kind, universal art, transmitting feelings accessible to all,
manifests itself in words, in painting, in sculpture, in dances, in
architecture, and, most of all, in music.
If I were asked to give modern examples of each of these kinds of
art, then, as examples of the highest art flowing from love of God
and man (both of the higher, positive and of the lower, negative
kind), in literature I should name _The Robbers_ by Schiller;
Victor Hugo’s _Les Pauvres Gens_ and _Les Misérables_; the novels
and stories of Dickens--_The Tale of Two Cities_, _The Christmas
Carol_, _The Chimes_, and others; _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; Dostoevski’s
works--especially his _Memoirs from the House of Death_; and _Adam
Bede_ by George Eliot.
[Illustration: “A TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION”
_A drawing by I. N. Kramskóy_]
In modern painting, strange to say, works of this kind, directly
transmitting the Christian feeling of love of God and of one’s
neighbour, are hardly to be found, especially among the works of
the celebrated painters. There are plenty of pictures treating of
the Gospel stories; they however, while depicting historical events
with great wealth of detail, do not, and cannot, transmit religious
feelings not possessed by their painters. There are many pictures
treating of the personal feelings of various people, but of pictures
representing great deeds of self-sacrifice and Christian love there
are very few, and what there are are principally by artists who are
not celebrated, and are for the most part not pictures but merely
sketches. Such for instance is the drawing by Kramskóy (worth many
of his finished pictures), showing a drawing-room with a balcony,
past which troops are marching in triumph on their return from the
war. On the balcony stands a wet-nurse holding a baby, and a boy.
They are admiring the procession of the troops, but the mother,
covering her face with a handkerchief, has fallen back on the sofa
sobbing. Such also is the picture by Walter Langley to which I have
already referred, and such again is a picture by the French artist
Morlon, depicting a lifeboat hastening in a heavy storm to the
relief of a steamer that is being wrecked. Approaching these in kind
are pictures which represent the hard-working peasant with respect
and love. Such are the pictures by Millet, and particularly his
drawing, “The Man with the Hoe,” also pictures in this style by Jules
Breton, Lhermitte, Defregger, and others. As examples of pictures
evoking indignation and horror at the violation of love to God and
man, Gay’s picture “Judgment” may serve, and also Leizen-Mayer’s
“Signing the Death Warrant.” But there are very few of this kind
also. Anxiety about the technique and the beauty of the picture for
the most part obscures the feeling. For instance, Gérôme’s “Pollice
Verso” expresses, not so much horror at what is being perpetrated as
attraction by the beauty of the spectacle.[123]
To give examples, from the modern art of our upper classes, of
art of the second kind, good universal art, or even of the art of
a whole people, is yet more difficult, especially in literature
and music. If there are some works which by their inner contents
might be assigned to this class (such as _Don Quixote_, Molière’s
comedies, _David Copperfield_ and _The Pickwick Papers_ by Dickens,
Gógol’s and Púshkin’s tales, and some things of Maupassant’s),
these works for the most part--from the exceptional nature of the
feelings they transmit, and the superfluity of special details of
time and locality, and above all on account of the poverty of their
subject-matter in comparison with examples of universal ancient art
(such, for instance, as the story of Joseph)--are comprehensible
only to people of their own circle. That Joseph’s brethren, being
jealous of his father’s affection, sell him to the merchants; that
Potiphar’s wife wishes to tempt the youth; that having attained the
highest station he takes pity on his brothers, including Benjamin
the favourite,--these and all the rest are feelings accessible
alike to a Russian peasant, a Chinese, an African, a child or an
old man, educated or uneducated; and it is all written with such
restraint, is so free from any superfluous detail, that the story
may be told to any circle and will be equally comprehensible and
touching to everyone. But not such are the feelings of Don Quixote or
of Molière’s heroes (though Molière is perhaps the most universal,
and therefore the most excellent, artist of modern times), nor of
Pickwick and his friends. These feelings are not common to all men
but very exceptional, and therefore to make them contagious the
authors have surrounded them with abundant details of time and
place. And this abundance of detail makes the stories difficult of
comprehension to all people not living within reach of the conditions
described by the author.
[Illustration: “DER SALONTIROLER”
_A Society Huntsman_
_By Franz Defregger_]
The author of the novel of Joseph did not need to describe in detail,
as would be done nowadays, the blood-stained coat of Joseph, the
dwelling and dress of Jacob, the pose and attire of Potiphar’s wife,
and how adjusting the bracelet on her left arm she said, “Come to
me,” and so on, because the content of feeling in this novel is so
strong that all details except the most essential--such as that
Joseph went out into another room to weep--are superfluous and would
only hinder the transmission of emotion. And therefore this novel is
accessible to all men, touches people of all nations and classes,
young and old, and has lasted to our times, and will yet last for
thousands of years to come. But strip the best novels of our time of
their details, and what will remain?
It is therefore impossible in modern literature to indicate works
fully satisfying the demands of universality. Such works as exist are
to a great extent spoilt by what is usually called “realism,” but
would be better termed “provincialism,” in art.
In music the same occurs as in verbal art and for similar reasons. In
consequence of the poorness of the feeling they contain, the melodies
of the modern composers are amazingly empty and insignificant. And
to strengthen the impression produced by these empty melodies, the
new musicians pile complex modulations on to each trivial melody not
only in their own national manner, but also in the way characteristic
of their own exclusive circle and particular musical school.
Melody--every melody--is free and may be understood of all men;
but as soon as it is bound up with a particular harmony, it ceases
to be accessible except to people trained to such harmony, and it
becomes strange, not only to common men of another nationality, but
to all who do not belong to the circle whose members have accustomed
themselves to certain forms of harmonisation. So that music, like
poetry, travels in a vicious circle. Trivial and exclusive melodies,
in order to make them attractive, are laden with harmonic, rhythmic,
and orchestral complications and thus become yet more exclusive, and
far from being universal are not even national, that is, they are not
comprehensible to the whole people but only to some people.
In music, besides marches and dances by various composers which
satisfy the demands of universal art, one can indicate very few works
of this class: Bach’s famous violin _aria_, Chopin’s nocturne in E
flat major, and perhaps a dozen bits (not whole pieces, but parts)
selected from the works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and
Chopin.[124]
Although in painting the same thing is repeated as in poetry and in
music--namely, in order to make them more interesting, works weak in
conception are surrounded by minutely studied accessories of time and
place which give them a temporary and local interest but make them
less universal--still in painting more than in the other spheres of
art may be found works satisfying the demands of universal Christian
art; that is to say, there are more works expressing feelings in
which all men may participate.
In the arts of painting and sculpture, all pictures and statues in
so-called genre style, representations of animals, landscapes and
caricatures with subjects comprehensible to everyone, and also all
kinds of ornaments, are universal in subject-matter. Such productions
in painting and sculpture are very numerous (for instance, china
dolls), but for the most part such objects (for instance, ornaments
of all kinds) are either not considered to be art or are considered
to be art of a low quality. In reality all such objects, if only they
transmit a true feeling experienced by the artist and comprehensible
to everyone (however insignificant it may seem to us to be), are
works of real, good, Christian art.
I fear it will here be urged against me, that having denied that
the conception of beauty can supply a standard for works of art, I
contradict myself by acknowledging ornaments to be works of good
art. The reproach is unjust, for the subject-matter of all kinds
of ornamentation consists not in the beauty but in the feeling (of
admiration at, and delight in, the combination of lines and colours)
which the artist has experienced, and with which he infects the
spectator. Art remains what it was and what it must be: nothing but
the infection by one man of another or of others with the feelings
experienced by the infector. Among those feelings is the feeling of
delight at what pleases the sight. Objects pleasing the sight may be
such as please a small or a large number of people, or such as please
all men. And ornaments for the most part are of the latter kind. A
landscape representing a very unusual view, or a genre picture of a
special subject, may not please everyone, but ornaments, from Yakútsk
ornaments to Greek ones, are intelligible to everyone and evoke a
similar feeling of admiration in all, and therefore this despised
kind of art should in Christian society be esteemed far above
exceptional pretentious pictures and sculptures.
So that there are only two kinds of good Christian art: all the rest
of art not comprised in these two divisions should be acknowledged
to be bad art, deserving, not to be encouraged but to be driven
out, denied, and despised, as being art not uniting but dividing
people. Such in literary art are all novels and poems which transmit
ecclesiastical or patriotic feelings and also exclusive feelings
pertaining only to the class of the idle rich: such as aristocratic
honour, satiety, spleen, pessimism, and refined and vicious feelings
flowing from sex-love--quite incomprehensible to the great majority
of mankind.
In painting, we must similarly place in the class of bad art all
ecclesiastical, patriotic, and exclusive pictures; all pictures
representing the amusements and allurements of a rich and idle life;
all so-called symbolic pictures, in which the very meaning of the
symbol is comprehensible only to the people of a certain circle;
and above all pictures with voluptuous subjects--all that odious
female nudity which fills all the exhibitions and galleries. And to
this class belongs almost all the chamber and opera music of our
times,--beginning especially with Beethoven (Schumann, Berlioz,
Liszt, Wagner),--by its subject-matter devoted to the expression of
feelings accessible only to people who have developed in themselves
an unhealthy nervous irritation evoked by this exclusive, artificial,
and complex music.
“What! the _Ninth Symphony_ not a good work of art!” I hear exclaimed
by indignant voices.
And I reply: Most certainly it is not. All that I have written I
have written with the sole purpose of finding a clear and reasonable
criterion by which to judge the merits of works of art. And this
criterion, coinciding with the indications of plain and sane sense,
indubitably shows me that that symphony of Beethoven’s is not a
good work of art. Of course, to people educated in the worship of
certain productions and of their authors, to people whose taste
has been perverted just by being educated in such a worship, the
acknowledgment that such a celebrated work is bad is amazing and
strange. But how are we to escape the indications of reason and
common sense?
Beethoven’s _Ninth Symphony_ is considered a great work of art. To
verify its claim to be such I must first ask myself whether this work
transmits the highest religious feeling? I reply in the negative,
for music in itself cannot transmit those feelings; and therefore I
ask myself next, Since this work does not belong to the highest kind
of religious art, has it the other characteristic of the good art of
our time,--the quality of uniting all men in one common feeling: does
it rank as Christian universal art? And again I have no option but
to reply in the negative; for not only do I not see how the feelings
transmitted by this work could unite people not specially trained
to submit themselves to its complex hypnotism, but I am unable to
imagine to myself a crowd of normal people who could understand
anything of this long, confused, and artificial production, except
short snatches which are lost in a sea of what is incomprehensible.
And therefore, whether I like it or not, I am compelled to conclude
that this work belongs to the rank of bad art. It is curious to note
in this connection, that attached to the end of this very symphony
is a poem of Schiller’s which (though somewhat obscurely) expresses
this very thought, namely, that feeling (Schiller speaks only of
the feeling of gladness) unites people and evokes love in them. But
though this poem is sung at the end of the symphony, the music does
not accord with the thought expressed in the verses; for the music
is exclusive and does not unite all men, but unites only a few,
dividing them off from the rest of mankind.
And just in this same way, in all branches of art, many and many
works considered great by the upper classes of our society will have
to be judged. By this one sure criterion we shall have to judge the
celebrated _Divine Comedy_ and _Jerusalem Delivered_, and a great
part of Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s work, and in painting every
representation of miracles, including Raphael’s Transfiguration, etc.
Whatever the work may be and however it may have been extolled,
we have first to ask whether this work is one of real art or a
counterfeit. Having acknowledged, on the basis of the indication of
its infectiousness even to a small class of people, that a certain
production belongs to the realm of art, it is necessary, on this
basis to decide the next question, Does this work belong to the
category of bad exclusive art, opposed to religious perception, or
to Christian art, uniting people? And having acknowledged a work to
belong to real Christian art, we must then, according to whether it
transmits the feelings flowing from love to God and man or merely the
simple feelings uniting all men, assign it a place in the ranks of
religious art or in those of universal art.
Only on the basis of such verification shall we find it possible to
select, from the whole mass of what in our society claims to be art,
those works which form real, important, necessary spiritual food,
and to separate them from all the harmful and useless art and from
the counterfeits of art which surround us. Only on the basis of such
verification shall we be able to rid ourselves of the pernicious
results of harmful art and avail ourselves of that beneficient action
which is the purpose of true and good art, and which is indispensable
for the spiritual life of man and of humanity.
CHAPTER XVII
_Results of absence of true art. Results of perversion of art:
labour and lives spent on what is useless and harmful. The
abnormal life of the rich. Perplexity of children and plain
folk. Confusion of right and wrong. Nietzsche and Redbeard.
Superstition, Patriotism, and Sensuality._
Art is one of two organs of human progress. By words man interchanges
thoughts, by the forms of art he interchanges feelings, and this with
all men not only of the present time but also of the past and the
future. It is natural to human beings to employ both these organs of
intercommunication and therefore the perversion of either of them
must cause evil results to the society in which it occurs. And these
results will be of two kinds: first, the absence in that society
of the work which should be performed by the organ, and secondly,
the harmful activity of the perverted organ. And just these results
have shown themselves in our society. The organ of art has been
perverted, and therefore the upper classes of society have to a great
extent been deprived of the effect that it should have produced. The
diffusion in our society of enormous quantities, on the one hand,
of those counterfeits of art which only serve to amuse and corrupt
people, and on the other hand, of works of insignificant exclusive
art, mistaken for the highest art, have perverted most men’s capacity
to be infected by true works of art, and have thus deprived them of
the possibility of experiencing the highest feelings to which mankind
has attained, which can only be transmitted from man to man by art.
All the best that has been done in art by man remains strange to
people who lack the capacity to be infected by art, and is replaced
either by spurious counterfeits of art or by insignificant art,
which they mistake for real art. People of our time and of our
society are delighted with Baudelaires, Verlaines, Moréases, Ibsens,
and Maeterlincks, in poetry; with Monets, Manets, Puvis de Chavannes,
Burne-Joneses, Stucks, and Böcklins in painting; with Wagners,
Liszts, Richard Strausses, in music; and they are no longer capable
of comprehending either the highest or the simplest art.
In the upper classes, in consequence of this loss of capacity to be
infected by works of art, people grow up, are educated and live,
lacking the fertilising, improving influence of art, and therefore
not only do not advance towards perfection, do not become kinder,
but, on the contrary, possessing highly-developed external means of
civilization, they yet tend to become continually more savage, more
coarse, and more cruel.
Such is the result of the absence from our society of the activity
of that essential organ--art. But the consequences of the perverted
activity of that organ are yet more harmful. And they are numerous.
[Illustration: “THE ANGELS AT THE TOMB OF CHRIST”
_By E. Manet_
_An example of a sort of picture Tolstoy disliked_]
The first consequence, plain for all to see, is the enormous
expenditure of the labour of working people on things which are not
only useless but, for the most part, are harmful; and more than that,
the waste of priceless human lives on this unnecessary and harmful
business. It is terrible to consider with what intensity and amid
what privations, millions of people--who lack time and opportunity to
attend to what they and their families urgently require--labour for
ten, twelve or fourteen hours on end, and even at night, setting the
type for pseudo-artistic books which spread vice among mankind, or
working for theatres, concerts, exhibitions, and picture galleries,
which for the most part also serve vice; but it is yet more terrible
to reflect that lively, kindly children, capable of all that is good,
are devoted from their early years to such tasks as these: that for
six, eight, or ten hours a day, and for ten or fifteen years, some
of them should play scales and exercises; others should twist
their limbs, walk on their toes, and lift their legs above their
heads; a third set should sing solfeggios; a fourth set, showing
themselves off in all manner of ways, should recite verses; a fifth
set should draw from busts or from nude models and paint studies; a
sixth set should write compositions according to the rules of certain
periods; and that in these occupations, unworthy of a human being,
which are often continued long after full maturity, they should
waste their physical and mental strength and lose all perception
of the meaning of life. It is often said that it is horrible and
pitiful to see little acrobats putting their legs over their necks,
but it is not less pitiful to see children of ten giving concerts,
and it is still worse to see schoolboys of ten who as a preparation
for literary work have learnt by heart the exceptions to the Latin
grammar. These people not only grow physically and mentally deformed
but also morally deformed, and become incapable of doing anything
really needed by man. Occupying in society the rôle of amusers of
the rich, they lose their sense of human dignity and develop in
themselves such a passion for public applause that they are always
a prey to an inflated and unsatisfied vanity which grows in them to
diseased dimensions, and they expend their mental strength in efforts
to obtain satisfaction for this passion. And what is most tragic of
all is that these people, who for the sake of art are spoilt for
life, not only do not render service to this art, but on the contrary
inflict the greatest harm on it. They are taught in academies,
schools, and conservatoires, how to counterfeit art, and by learning
this they so pervert themselves that they quite lose the capacity to
produce works of real art, and become purveyors of that counterfeit,
or trivial, or depraved, art which floods our society. This is the
first obvious consequence of the perversion of the organ of art.
The second consequence is that the productions of amusement-art,
which are prepared in such terrific quantities by the armies of
professional artists, enable the rich people of our times to live
the lives they do, lives not only unnatural, but in contradiction to
the humane principles these people themselves profess. To live as
do the idle rich people, especially the women, far from nature and
from animals, in artificial conditions, with muscles atrophied or
misdeveloped by gymnastics, and with enfeebled vital energy, would be
impossible were it not for what is called art--for this occupation
and amusement which hides from them the meaninglessness of their
lives and saves them from the dulness that oppresses them. Take from
all these people the theatres, concerts, exhibitions, piano-playing,
songs, and novels, with which they now fill their time in full
confidence that occupation with these things is a very refined,
esthetic, and therefore good occupation; take from the patrons of art
who buy pictures, assist musicians, and are acquainted with writers,
their rôle of protectors of that important matter art, and they will
not be able to continue such a life, but will all be eaten up by
ennui and spleen, and will become conscious of the meaninglessness
and wrongfulness of their present mode of life. Only occupation
with what among them is considered art renders it possible for them
to continue to live on, infringing all natural conditions, without
perceiving the emptiness and cruelty of their lives. And this support
afforded to the false manner of life pursued by the rich is the
second consequence, and a serious one, of the perversion of art.
The third consequence of the perversion of art is the perplexity
produced in the minds of children and plain folk. Among people not
perverted by the false theories of our society, among workers and
children, there exists a very definite conception of why people
should be respected and praised. In the minds of peasants and
children the ground for praise or eulogy can only be either physical
strength: Hercules, the heroes and conquerors; or moral, spiritual,
strength: Sakya Muni giving up a beautiful wife and a kingdom to save
mankind, Christ going to the cross for the truth he professed, and
all the martyrs and the saints. Both are understood by peasants and
children. They understand that physical strength must be respected,
for it compels respect; and the moral strength of goodness an
unperverted man cannot fail to respect, because his whole spiritual
being draws him towards it. But these people, children and peasants,
suddenly perceive that besides those praised, respected, and rewarded
for physical or moral strength, there are others who are praised
extolled and rewarded much more than the heroes of strength and
virtue, merely because they sing well, compose verses, or dance. They
see that singers, composers, painters, ballet-dancers, earn millions
of roubles and receive more honour than the saints do: and peasants
and children are perplexed.
When fifty years had elapsed after Púshkin’s death and, simultaneously,
the cheap editions of his works began to circulate among the people
and a monument was erected to him in Moscow, I received more than a
dozen letters from different peasants asking why Púshkin was raised
to such dignity? And only the other day a literate[125] man from
Sarátov called on me who had evidently gone out of his mind over this
very question. He was on his way to Moscow to expose the clergy for
having taken part in raising a monument to Mr. Púshkin.
Indeed, one need only imagine to oneself what the state of mind of
such a man of the people must be when he learns from such rumours and
newspapers as reach him, that the clergy, Government officials, and
all the best people in Russia, are triumphantly unveiling a statue
to a great man, the benefactor, the pride of Russia--Púshkin, of
whom till then he had never heard. On all sides he reads or hears
about this, and he naturally supposes that if such honours are
rendered to anyone, then without doubt he must have done something
extraordinary--either some feat of strength or of goodness. He tries
to learn who Púshkin was, and having discovered that Púshkin was
neither a hero nor a general but a private person and a writer, he
comes to the conclusion that Púshkin must have been a holy man and a
teacher of goodness, and he hastens to read or to hear his life and
works. But what must be his perplexity when he learns that Púshkin
was a man of more than easy morals, who was killed in a duel when
attempting to murder another man, and that all his service consisted
in writing verses about love, which were often very indecent.
That a hero, or Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or Napoleon,
was great, he understands, because any one of them could have crushed
him and a thousand like him; that Buddha, Socrates, and Christ, were
great he also understands, for he knows and feels that he and all men
should be such as they were; but why a man should be great because he
wrote verses about the love of women he cannot make out.
A similar perplexity must trouble the brain of a Breton or Normandy
peasant who hears that a monument, “_une statue_” (as to the
Madonna), is being erected to Baudelaire, and reads, or is told, what
the contents of his _Fleurs du Mal_ are; or, more amazing still, to
Verlaine, when he learns the story of that man’s wretched, vicious
life, and reads his verses. And what confusion it must cause in
the brains of peasants when they learn that some Patti or Taglioni
is paid £10,000 for a season, or that a painter gets as much for
a picture, or that authors of novels describing love-scenes have
received even more than that.
And it is the same with children. I remember how I passed through
this stage of amazement and stupefaction and only reconciled myself
to this exaltation of artists to the level of heroes and saints by
lowering in my own estimation the importance of moral excellence and
by attributing a false, unnatural meaning to works of art. And a
similar confusion must occur in the soul of each child and each man
of the people when he learns of the strange honours and rewards that
are lavished on artists. This is the third consequence of the false
relation in which our society stands towards art.
The fourth consequence is that people of the upper classes, more and
more frequently encountering the contradictions between beauty and
goodness, put the ideal of beauty first, thus freeing themselves from
the demands of morality. These people, reversing the rôles, instead
of admitting, as is really the case, that the art they serve is an
antiquated affair, allege that morality is an antiquated affair which
can have no importance for people situated on that high plane of
development which they opine that they occupy.
This result of the false relation to art showed itself in our society
long ago; but recently, with its prophet Nietzsche and his adherents,
and with the decadents and certain English esthetes who coincide with
him, it is being expressed with especial impudence. The Decadents,
and esthetes of the type at one time represented by Oscar Wilde,
select as a theme for their productions the denial of morality and
the laudation of vice.
This art has partly generated and partly coincides with a similar
philosophic theory. I recently received from America a book entitled
_The Survival of the Fittest: Philosophy of Power_, 1896, by Ragner
Redbeard, Chicago. The substance of this book, as it is expressed
in the editor’s preface, is that to measure right by the false
philosophy of the Hebrew prophets and weepful Messiahs is madness.
Right is not the offspring of doctrine, but of power. All laws,
commandments, or doctrines as to not doing to another what you
do not wish done to you, have no inherent authority whatever, but
receive it only from the club, the gallows, and the sword. A man
truly free is under no obligation to obey any injunction, human or
divine. Obedience is the sign of the degenerate. Disobedience is the
stamp of the hero. Men should not be bound by moral rules invented by
their foes. The whole world is a slippery battlefield. Ideal justice
demands that the vanquished should be exploited, emasculated, and
scorned. The free and brave may seize the world. And therefore there
should be eternal war for life, for land, for love, for women, for
power, and for gold. (Something similar was said a few years ago by
the celebrated and refined academician, de Vogüé.) The earth with its
treasures is booty for the bold.
The author has evidently by himself, independently of Nietzsche, come
to the same conclusions which are professed by the new artists.
Expressed in the form of a doctrine these positions startle us.
In reality they are implied in the ideal of art serving beauty.
The art of our upper classes has educated people in this ideal of
the superman,--which is in reality the old ideal of Nero, Sténka
Rázin,[126] Genghis Khan, Robert Macaire,[127] or Napoleon, and all
their accomplices, assistants, and adulators,--and it supports this
ideal with all its might.
It is this supplanting of the ideal of what is right by the ideal
of what is beautiful, that is, of what is pleasant, that is the
fourth consequence and a terrible one of the perversion of art in our
society. It is fearful to think of what would befall humanity were
such art to spread among the masses of the people. And it already
begins to spread.
Finally, the fifth and chief result is that the art which flourishes
in the upper classes of European society has a directly vitiating
influence, infecting people with the worst feelings and with those
most harmful to humanity--superstition, patriotism, and, above all,
sensuality.
Look carefully into the causes of the ignorance of the masses and
you may see that the chief cause does not at all lie in the lack of
schools and libraries, as we are accustomed to suppose, but in those
superstitions, both ecclesiastical and patriotic, with which the
people are saturated and which are unceasingly generated by all the
methods of art. Church superstitions are supported and produced by
the poetry of prayers, hymns, paintings, by the sculpture of images
and of statues, by singing, by organs, by music, by architecture, and
even by dramatic art in religious ceremonies. Patriotic superstitions
are supported and produced by verses and stories (which are supplied
even in schools), by music, by songs, by triumphal processions, by
royal meetings, by martial pictures, and by monuments.
Were it not for this continual activity in all departments of art,
perpetuating the ecclesiastical and patriotic intoxication and
embitterment of the people, the masses would long ere this have
attained to true enlightenment.
But it is not only in Church matters and patriotic matters that art
depraves; it is art in our time that serves as the chief cause of
the perversion of people in the most important question of social
life--in their sexual relations. We nearly all know by our own
experience, and those who are fathers and mothers know in the case
of their grown-up children also, what fearful mental and physical
suffering, what useless waste of strength, people suffer merely as a
consequence of dissoluteness in sexual desire.
Since the world began, since the Trojan war which sprang from that
same sexual dissoluteness, down to and including the suicides and
murders of lovers described in almost every newspaper, a great
proportion of the sufferings of the human race have come from this
source.
And what is art doing? All art, real and counterfeit, with very few
exceptions, is devoted to describing, depicting, and inflaming,
sexual love in every shape and form. If one remembers all those
novels and their lust-kindling descriptions of love, from the most
refined to the grossest, with which the literature of our society
overflows; if one only remembers all those pictures and statues
representing women’s naked bodies, and all sorts of abominations,
which are reproduced in illustrations and advertisements; if one only
remembers all the filthy operas and operettas, songs and ballads,
with which our world teems, involuntarily it seems as if existing art
had but one definite aim--to disseminate vice as widely as possible.
Such are the most direct though not all the consequences of that
perversion of art which has occurred in our society. So that what in
our society is called art not only does not conduce to the progress
of mankind, but more than almost anything else hinders the attainment
of goodness in our lives.
And therefore the question which involuntarily presents itself to
every man free from artistic activity and not bound to existing art
by self-interest, the question asked by me at the beginning of this
work: Is it just that to what we call art, to a something possessed
by but a small section of society, should be offered up such
sacrifices of human labour, of human lives, and of goodness, as are
now being offered up? receives the natural reply: No; it is unjust,
and these things should not be! Such is also the answer of sound
sense and unperverted moral feeling. Not only should these things not
be, not only should no sacrifices be offered up to what among us is
called art, but, on the contrary, the efforts of those who wish to
live rightly should be directed towards the destruction of this art,
for it is one of the most cruel of the evils that harass our section
of humanity. So that were the question put: Would it be preferable
for our Christian world to be deprived of _all_ that is now esteemed
to be art, and together with the false to lose _all_ that is good in
it? I think that every reasonable and moral man would again decide
the question as Plato decided it for his _Republic_, and as all the
early Church-Christian and Mahommedan teachers of mankind decided it,
that is, would say, Rather let there be no art at all than continue
the depraving art, or simulation of art, which now exists. Happily no
one has to face this question and no one need adopt either solution.
All that man can do, and that we--the so-called educated people
who are so placed that we have the possibility of understanding
the meaning of the phenomena of our life--can and should do, is to
understand the error we are involved in, and not harden our hearts in
it, out seek for a way of escape.
CHAPTER XVIII
_The purpose of human life is the brotherly union of man. Art
must be guided by this perception._
The cause of the lie into which the art of our society has fallen was
that people of the upper classes, having ceased to believe in the
Church teaching (called Christian), did not resolve to accept true
Christian teaching in its real and fundamental principles of sonship
to God and brotherhood to man, but continued to live on without any
belief, endeavouring to make up for the absence of belief--some by
hypocrisy, pretending still to believe in the nonsense of the Church
creeds; others by boldly asserting their disbelief; others by refined
agnosticism; and others, again, by returning to the Greek worship of
beauty, proclaiming egotism to be right, and elevating it to the rank
of a religious doctrine.
The cause of the malady was the non-acceptance of Christ’s teaching
in its real, that is, its full, meaning. And the only cure lies in
acknowledging that teaching in its full meaning. Such acknowledgement
in our time is not only possible but inevitable. Already to-day a
man standing on the height of the knowledge of our age, whether he
be nominally a Catholic or a Protestant, cannot say that he really
believes in the dogmas of the Church: in God being a Trinity, in
Christ being God, in the Scheme of Redemption, and so forth; nor can
he satisfy himself by proclaiming his unbelief or scepticism, nor by
relapsing into the worship of beauty and egotism. Above all he can no
longer say that we do not know the real meaning of Christ’s teaching.
That meaning has not only become accessible to all men of our times,
but the whole life of man to-day is permeated by the spirit of that
teaching and consciously or unconsciously is guided by it.
However differently in form people belonging to our Christian world
may define the destiny of man: whether they see it in human progress
(in whatever sense of the words), in the union of all men in a
socialistic realm, or in the establishment of a commune; whether
they look forward to the union of mankind under the guidance of one
universal Church, or to the federation of the world--however various
in form their definitions of the destination of human life may be,
all men in our times already admit that the highest well-being
attainable by men is to be reached by their union with one another.
However people of our upper classes (feeling that their ascendency
can only be maintained as long as they separate themselves--the rich
and learned--from the labourers, the poor, and the unlearned) may
seek to devise new conceptions of life by which their privileges
may be perpetuated--now the ideal of returning to antiquity, now
mysticism, now Hellenism, now the cult of the superior person
(supermanism)--they have, willingly or unwillingly, to admit the
truth which is becoming clear upon all sides voluntarily and
involuntarily, namely, that our welfare lies only in the union and
brotherhood of man.
Unconsciously this truth is confirmed by the construction of
means of communication,--telegraphs, telephones, the press, and
the ever-increasing attainability of material well-being for
everyone--and consciously it is affirmed by the destruction of
superstitions which divide men, by the diffusion of the truths of
knowledge, and by the expression of the ideal of the brotherhood of
man in the best works of art of our time.
Art is a spiritual organ of human life which cannot be destroyed,
and therefore, notwithstanding all the efforts made by people of the
upper classes to conceal the religious ideal by which humanity lives,
that ideal is more and more clearly recognised by man, and even in
our perverted society is more and more often partially expressed by
science and by art. During the present century works of the higher
kind of religious art, permeated by a truly Christian spirit, have
appeared more and more frequently both in literature and in painting,
as also works of the universal art of common life accessible to all.
So that even art knows the true ideal of our times and tends towards
it. On the one hand, the best works of art of our time transmit
religious feelings urging towards the union and the brotherhood
of man (such are the works of Dickens, Hugo, Dostoevski; and, in
painting, of Millet, Bastien Lepage, Jules Breton, Lhermitte, and
others); on the other hand, they strive towards the transmission,
not of feelings which are natural to people of the upper classes
only, but of such feelings as may unite everyone without exception.
There are as yet few such works, but the need of them is already
acknowledged. In recent times we also meet more and more frequently
with attempts at publications, pictures, concerts, and theatres, for
the people. All this is still very far from accomplishing what should
be done, but already the direction in which good art instinctively
presses forward to regain the path natural to it can be discerned.
The religious perception of our time--which consists in acknowledging
that the aim of life (both collective and individual) is the union
of mankind--is already so sufficiently distinct that people have
now only to reject the false theory of beauty, according to which
enjoyment is considered to be the purpose of art, and religious
perception will naturally take its place as the guide of the art of
our time.
And as soon as this religious perception which already unconsciously
directs the life of man is consciously acknowledged, then immediately
and naturally the division of art into art for the lower and art
for the upper classes will disappear. There will be one common,
brotherly, universal art; and then first, that art will naturally
be rejected which transmits feelings incompatible with the religious
perception of our time--feelings which do not unite, but divide
men--and later that insignificant, exclusive art will be rejected to
which an unmerited importance is now attributed.
And as soon as this occurs, art will immediately cease to be, what it
has been in recent times, a means of making people coarser and more
vicious, and it will become what it always used to be and should be,
a means by which humanity progresses towards unity and blessedness.
Strange as the comparison may sound, what has happened to the art of
our circle and time is what happens to a woman who sells her womanly
attractiveness, intended for maternity, for the pleasure of those who
desire such pleasures.
The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute. And
this comparison holds good even in minute details. Like her it is not
limited to certain times, like her it is always adorned, like her it
is always saleable, and like her it is enticing and ruinous.
A real work of art can only arise in the soul of an artist
occasionally, as the fruit of the life he has lived, just as a child
is conceived by its mother. But counterfeit art is produced by
artisans and handicraftsmen continually, if only consumers can be
found.
Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no
ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be
decked out.
The cause of the production of real art is the artist’s inner need
to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the
cause of sexual conception was love. The cause of counterfeit art, as
of prostitution, is gain.
The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into
the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife’s love is the
birth of a new man into life.
The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man,
pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man’s spiritual
strength.
And this is what people of our day and of our circle should
understand, in order to avoid the filthy torrent of depraved and
prostituted art with which we are deluged.
CHAPTER XIX
_The art of the future not the possession of a select
minority, but a means towards perfection and unity._
People talk of the art of the future, meaning by art of the future
some especially refined new art which they imagine will be developed
out of that exclusive art of one class which is now considered
the highest art. But no such new art of the future can or will be
found. Our exclusive art, that of the upper classes of Christendom,
has found its way into a blind alley. The direction in which it
has been going leads nowhere. Having once let go of that which is
most essential for art (namely, the guidance given by religious
perception), that art has become ever more and more exclusive and
therefore ever more and more perverted, until finally it has come to
nothing. The art of the future, that which is really coming, will
not be a development of present-day art but will arise on completely
other and new foundations having nothing in common with those by
which our present art of the upper classes is guided.
Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as shall be
chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind, will consist,
not in transmitting feelings accessible only to members of the rich
classes as is the case to-day, but in transmitting feelings that
embody the highest religious perception of our times. Only those
productions will be considered art which transmit feelings drawing
men together in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can
unite all men. Only such art will be chosen, tolerated, approved,
and diffused. But art transmitting feelings flowing from antiquated,
worn-out religious teaching,--ecclesiastical art, patriotic art,
voluptuous art, transmitting feelings of superstitious fear, of
pride, of vanity, of ecstatic admiration of national heroes,--art
exciting exclusive love of one’s own people, or sensuality, will be
considered bad, harmful art, and will be censured and despised by
public opinion. All the rest of art, transmitting feelings accessible
only to a section of people, will be considered unimportant and will
be neither blamed nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general
will devolve, not as is now the case on a separate class of rich
people, but on the whole people; so that for a work to be thought
good, and to be approved and diffused, it will have to satisfy the
demands, not of a few people living under similar and often unnatural
conditions but of all those great masses of people who undergo the
natural conditions of laborious life.
Nor will the artists producing the art be, as now, merely a few
people selected from a small section of the nation, members of the
upper classes or their hangers-on, but they will consist of all those
gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of, and have a
leaning towards, artistic activity.
Artistic activity will then be accessible to all men. It will become
accessible to the whole people because (in the first place) in the
art of the future not only will that complex technique which deforms
the productions of the art of to-day and requires so great an effort
and expenditure of time not be demanded, but on the contrary the
demand will be for clearness, simplicity, and brevity--conditions
brought about not by mechanical methods but through the education
of taste. And secondly, artistic activity will become accessible to
all men of the people because, instead of the present professional
schools which only some can enter, all will learn music and graphic
art (singing and drawing) equally with letters, in the elementary
schools, in such a way that every man, having received the first
principles of drawing and music and feeling a capacity for, and a
call to, one or other of the arts, will be able to perfect himself in
it.
People think that if there are no special art-schools the technique
of art will deteriorate. Undoubtedly if by technique we understand
those _complexities_ of art which are now considered an excellence,
it will deteriorate; but if by technique is understood clearness,
beauty, simplicity, and compression, in works of art, then even
if the elements of drawing and music were not to be taught in the
national schools, the technique will not only not deteriorate but, as
is shown by all peasant art, will be a hundred times better. It will
be improved because all the artists of genius now hidden among the
masses will become producers of art and supply models of excellence
which (as has always been the case) will be the best schools of
technique for their successors. For every true artist even now learns
his technique chiefly, not in the schools, but in life, from the
examples of the great masters; then--when art will be produced by the
best artists of the whole nation and there will be more such examples
and they will be more accessible--such part of school training as
the future artist will lose will be a hundredfold compensated for by
the training he will receive from the numerous examples of good art
diffused in society.
Such will be one difference between present and future art. Another
difference will be that art will not be produced by professional
artists receiving payment for their work and engaged on nothing else
besides their art. The art of the future will be produced by all the
members of the community who feel the need of such activity, but they
will occupy themselves with art only when they feel such need.
In our society people think that an artist will work better and
produce more if he has a secured maintenance. And this opinion would
prove once more quite clearly, were such proof yet needed, that what
among us is considered art is not art but only a counterfeit. It is
quite true that for the production of boots or loaves division of
labour is very advantageous, and that the bootmaker or baker who need
not prepare his own dinner or fetch his own fuel will make more boots
or loaves than if he had to busy himself with these matters. But art
is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has
experienced. And sound feeling can only be engendered in a man when
he is living in all respects a life natural and proper to man. And
therefore security of maintenance is a condition most harmful to an
artist’s true productiveness, since it removes him from the condition
natural to all men--that of struggle with nature for the maintenance
of both his own life and that of others--and thus deprives him of the
opportunity and the possibility of experiencing the most important
and most natural feelings of man. There is no position more injurious
to an artist’s productiveness than that position of complete security
and luxury in which artists usually live in our society.
The artist of the future will live the common life of man, earning
his subsistence by some kind of labour. The fruits of that highest
spiritual strength which passes through him he will try to share with
the greatest possible number of people, for in such transmission
to others of the feelings that have arisen in him he will find
his happiness and reward. The artist of the future will be unable
to understand how an artist, whose chief delight is in the wide
diffusion of his works, could give them only in exchange for a
certain payment.
Until the dealers are driven out, the temple of art will not be a
temple. But the art of the future will drive them out.
And therefore the subject-matter of the art of the future, as I
imagine it to myself, will be totally unlike that of to-day. It
will consist, not in the expression of exclusive feelings: pride,
spleen, satiety, and all possible forms of voluptuousness, available
and interesting only to people who have freed themselves by force
from the labour natural to human beings; but it will consist in the
expression of feelings flowing from the religious perception of our
times, or open to all men without exception and experienced by a man
living a life natural to all men.
To people of our circle who do not know and cannot or will not
understand the feelings which will form the subject-matter of the art
of the future, such subject-matter appears very poor in comparison
with those subtleties of exclusive art with which they are now
occupied. “What is there fresh to be said about the Christian feeling
of love to one’s fellow-man?” “The feelings common to everyone are so
insignificant and monotonous,” think they. And yet in our time the
really fresh feelings can only be religious, Christian feelings, and
such as are open and accessible to all. The feelings flowing from the
religious perception of our times, Christian feelings, are infinitely
new and varied, only not in the sense some people imagine,--not
because they can be evoked by depicting Christ and Gospel episodes or
by repeating in new forms the Christian truths of unity, brotherhood,
equality, and love,--but because all the oldest, commonest, and most
hackneyed phenomena of life evoke the newest, most unexpected and
poignant emotions as soon as a man regards them from the Christian
point of view.
What can be older than the relations between married couples, of
parents to children, of children to parents; the relations of men
to their fellow-countrymen and to foreigners, to an invasion, to
defence, to property, to the land, or to animals? But as soon as a
man regards these matters from the Christian point of view, endlessly
varied, fresh, complex, and strong emotions immediately arise.
And in the same way, that realm of subject-matter for the art of the
future which relates to the simplest feelings of common life open
to all will not be narrowed but widened. In our former art only the
expression of feelings natural to people of a certain exceptional
position was considered worthy of being transmitted by art, and even
then only on condition that these feelings were transmitted in a
most refined manner, incomprehensible to the majority of men; all
the immense realm of folk-art and children’s art--jests, proverbs,
riddles, songs, dances, children’s games, and mimicry--was not
esteemed a domain worthy of art.
The artist of the future will understand that to compose a
fairy-tale, a touching little song, a lullaby or an entertaining
riddle, an amusing jest, or to draw a sketch which will delight
dozens of generations or millions of children and adults, is
incomparably more important and more fruitful than to compose a novel
or a symphony, or paint a picture, which will divert some members of
the wealthy classes for a short time and then for ever be forgotten.
The region of this art of the simple feelings accessible to all is
enormous and it is as yet almost untouched.
The art of the future therefore will not be poorer but infinitely
richer in subject-matter. And the form of the art of the future will
also not be inferior to the present forms but infinitely superior.
Superior, not in the sense of having a refined and complex technique,
but in the sense of the capacity briefly, simply, and clearly to
transmit, without any superfluities, the feeling the artist has
experienced and wishes to transmit.
I remember once speaking to a famous astronomer who had given public
lectures on the spectrum analysis of the stars of the Milky Way,
and saying it would be a good thing if, with his knowledge and
masterly delivery, he would give a lecture merely on the formation
and movements of the earth, for certainly there were many people
at his lectures on the spectrum analysis of the stars of the Milky
Way, especially among the women, who did not well know why night
follows day and summer follows winter. The wise astronomer smiled as
he answered, “Yes, it would be a good thing, but it would be very
difficult. To lecture on the spectrum analysis of the Milky Way is
far easier.”
And so it is in art. To write a rhymed poem dealing with the times
of Cleopatra, or paint a picture of Nero burning Rome, or compose
a symphony in the manner of Brahms or Richard Strauss, or an opera
like Wagner’s, is far easier than to tell a simple story without any
unnecessary details yet so that it shall transmit the feelings of
the narrator, or to draw a pencil-sketch which should touch or amuse
the beholder, or to compose four bars of clear and simple melody
without any accompaniment, which should convey an impression and be
remembered by those who hear it.
“It is impossible to us, with our culture, to return to a primitive
state,” say the artists of our time. “It is impossible for us now
to write such stories as that of Joseph or the Odyssey, to produce
such statues as the Venus of Milo, or to compose such music as the
folk-songs.”
And indeed for the artists of our society and day it is impossible,
but not for the future artist who will be free from all the
perversion of technical improvements hiding the absence of
subject-matter, and who, not being a professional artist, and
receiving no payment for his activity, will only produce art when he
feels impelled to do so by an irresistible inner impulse.
The art of the future will thus be completely distinct, both in
subject-matter and in form, from what is now called art. The only
subject-matter of the art of the future will be either feelings
drawing men towards union, or such as already unite them; and the
forms of art will be such as will be open to everyone. And therefore
the ideal of excellence in the future will not be exclusiveness
of feeling, accessible only to some, but, on the contrary, its
universality. And not bulkiness, obscurity, and complexity of form,
which are now valued, but, on the contrary, brevity, clearness, and
simplicity of expression. Only when art has attained to that, will
it neither divert nor deprave men as it does now, calling on them to
expend their best strength on it, but be what it should be--a vehicle
wherewith to transmit religious, Christian perception from the realm
of reason and intellect into that of feeling, and really drawing
people in actual life nearer to the perfection and unity indicated to
them by their religious perception.
CHAPTER XX
_The connection between science and art. The mendacious
sciences; the trivial sciences. Science should deal with the
great problems of human life, and serve as a basis for art._
CONCLUSION
I have accomplished, to the best of my ability, this work which has
occupied me for fifteen years, on a subject near to me--that of art.
By saying that this subject has occupied me for fifteen years, I do
not mean that I have been writing this book fifteen years, but only
that I began to write on art fifteen years ago, thinking that when
once I undertook the task I should be able to accomplish it without
a break. It proved however that my views on the matter then were so
far from clear that I could not arrange them in a way that satisfied
me. From that time I have never ceased to think on the subject, and
I have recommenced writing on it six or seven times; but each time,
after writing a considerable part of it, I have found myself unable
to bring the work to a satisfactory conclusion and have had to put
it aside. Now I have finished it; and however badly I may have
performed the task, my hope is that my fundamental thought on the
false direction the art of our society has taken and is following, on
the reasons of this, and on the real destination of art, is correct,
and that therefore my work will not be without avail. But that this
should come to pass, and that art should really abandon its false
path and take the new direction, it is necessary that another equally
important spiritual human activity--science--in intimate dependence
on which art always rests, should abandon the false path which it
too, like art, is following.
Science and art are as closely bound together as the lungs and the
heart, so that if the one organ is vitiated the other cannot act
rightly.
True science investigates and brings to human perception such
truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society
consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region
of perception to the region of emotion. If therefore the path chosen
by science be false so also will be the path taken by art. Science
and art are like a certain kind of barge with kedge-anchors which
used to ply on our rivers. Science, like the boats which took the
anchors upstream and made them secure, gives direction to the forward
movement; while art, like the windlass worked on the barge to draw
it towards the anchor, causes the actual progression. And thus a
false activity of science inevitably causes a correspondingly false
activity of art.
As art in general is the transmission of every kind of feeling,
but in the limited sense of the word we call nothing art unless
it transmits feelings acknowledged by us to be important, so also
science in general is the transmission of all possible knowledge, but
in the limited sense of the word we give the name of science to that
which transmits knowledge admitted by us to be important.
And the degree of importance, both of the feelings transmitted by
art and of the information transmitted by science, is decided by the
religious perception of the given time and society, that is, by the
common understanding of the purpose of their lives possessed by the
people of that time or society.
What most of all contributes to the fulfilment of that purpose will
be studied most; what contributes less will be studied less; what
does not contribute at all to the fulfilment of the purpose of human
life will be entirely neglected or, if studied, such study will not
be accounted science. So it always has been and so it should be now,
for such is the nature of human knowledge and of human life. But the
science of the upper classes of our time, which not only does not
acknowledge any religion, but considers every religion to be mere
superstition, could not and cannot make such distinctions.
Scientists of our day affirm that they study _everything_
impartially; but as everything is too much, is in fact an infinite
number of objects, and it is impossible to study all alike, this is
only said in theory, while in practice not everything is studied,
and study is applied far from impartially--only that being studied
which, on the one hand, is most wanted by, and on the other hand, is
pleasantest to, those people who occupy themselves with science. And
what the members of the upper classes who are occupying themselves
with science most want is the maintenance of the system under which
those classes retain their privileges; and what is pleasantest are
such things as satisfy idle curiosity, do not demand great mental
effort, and can be practically applied.
And therefore one side of science, including theology and philosophy
adapted to the existing order, as also history and political economy
of the same sort, are chiefly occupied in proving that the existing
order is the very one which ought to endure; that it has come into
existence and continues to exist by the operation of immutable
laws not amenable to human will, and that all efforts to change
it are therefore harmful and wrong. The other part, experimental
science--including mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, physics,
botany, and all the natural sciences--is exclusively occupied with
things that have no direct relation to the purpose of human life:
with what is curious, and with things of which practical application
advantageous to people of the upper classes can be made. And to
justify that selection of objects of study which (in conformity with
their own position) the men of science of our times have made, they
have devised a theory of science for science’s sake, quite similar
to the theory of art for art’s sake.
As by the theory of art for art’s sake it appears that occupation
with all those things that please us--is art, so, by the theory of
science for science’s sake, the study of that which interests us--is
science.
So that one side of science, instead of studying how people should
live in order to fulfil their mission in life, demonstrates the
righteousness and immutability of the bad and false arrangements
of life which exist around us; while the other part, experimental
science, occupies itself with questions of simple curiosity or with
technical improvements.
The first of these divisions of science is harmful, not only because
it confuses people’s perceptions and gives false decisions, but also
by its mere existence, occupying the ground which should belong to
true science. It does this harm, that every man, in order to approach
the study of the most important questions of life, must first refute
these erections of lies which have for ages been piled around each of
the most essential questions of human life, and which are propped up
by all the strength of human ingenuity.
The second division--the one of which modern science is so
particularly proud, and which is considered by many people to be the
only real science--is harmful in that it diverts attention from the
really important subjects to insignificant subjects, and is also
directly harmful in that, under the evil system of society which the
first division of science justifies and supports, a great part of the
technical gains of science are turned not to the advantage but to the
injury of mankind.
Indeed, it is only to those who are devoting their lives to such
study that it seems as if all the inventions which are made in the
sphere of natural science were very important and useful things.
And to these people it seems so only when they do not look around
them and do not see what is really important. They only need tear
themselves away from the psychological microscope under which they
examine the objects of their study, and look about them, in order to
see how insignificant is all that has afforded them such naïve pride,
all that knowledge not only of geometry of n-dimensions, spectrum
analysis of the Milky Way, form of atoms, dimensions of human skulls
of the Stone Age, and similar trifles, but even our knowledge of
micro-organisms, X-rays, and so forth, in comparison with such
knowledge as we have thrown aside and handed over to the perversions
of the professors of theology, jurisprudence, political economy,
financial science, etc. We need only look around us to perceive that
the activity proper to real science is not the study of whatever
happens to interest us, but the study of how man’s life should be
established,--the study of those questions of religion, morality,
and social life, without the solution of which all our knowledge of
nature will be harmful or insignificant.
We are highly delighted and very proud that our science renders it
possible to utilise the energy of a waterfall and make it work in
factories, or that we have pierced tunnels through mountains, and so
forth. But the pity of it is that we make the force of the waterfall
labour, not for the benefit of the workmen but to enrich capitalists
who produce articles of luxury or weapons of man-destroying war. The
same dynamite with which we blast the mountains to pierce tunnels, we
use for wars, which latter we not only do not intend to abstain from
but consider inevitable, and unceasingly prepare for.
If we are now able to inoculate preventatively with diphtheritic
microbes, to find a needle in a body by means of X-rays, to
straighten a hunchback, cure syphilis, and perform wonderful
operations, we should not be proud of these acquisitions (even were
they all established beyond dispute) if we fully understood the true
purpose of real science. If but one-tenth of the efforts now spent
on objects of pure curiosity or of merely practical application
were expended on real science organising the life of man, more than
half the people now sick would not have the illnesses from which
a small minority of them get cured in hospitals. There would be
no poor-blooded and deformed children growing up in factories, no
death-rates, as now, of 50 per cent. among children, no deterioration
of whole generations, no prostitution, no syphilis, and no murdering
of hundreds of thousands in wars, nor those horrors of folly and of
misery which our present science considers a necessary condition of
human life.
We have so perverted the conception of science that it seems strange
to men of our day to allude to sciences which should prevent the
mortality of children, prostitution, syphilis, the deterioration
of whole generations, and the wholesale murder of men. It seems
to us that science is only then real science when a man in a
laboratory pours liquids from one jar into another, or analyses
the spectrum, or cuts up frogs and porpoises, or weaves in a
specialised scientific jargon an obscure network of conventional
phrases--theological, philosophical, historical, juridical, or
politico-economical--semi-intelligible to the man himself and
intended to demonstrate that what now is, is what should be.
But science, true science,--such science as would really deserve
the respect which is now claimed by the followers of one (the least
important) part of science,--is not at all of this kind: real science
lies in knowing what we should and what we should not believe, in
knowing how the associated life of man should and should not be
constituted: how to treat sexual relations, how to educate children,
how to use the land, how to cultivate it oneself without oppressing
other people, how to treat foreigners, how to treat animals, and
much more that is important for the life of man.
Such has true science ever been and such it should be. And such
science is springing up in our times; but, on the one hand, such true
science is denied and refuted by all those scientific people who
defend the existing order of society, and, on the other hand, it is
considered empty, unnecessary, unscientific science by those who are
engrossed in experimental science.
For instance, books and sermons appear, demonstrating the
antiquatedness and absurdity of Church dogmas, as well as the
necessity of making clear the reasonable religious perception
suitable to our times, and all the theology that is held to be
real science is only engaged in refuting these works and in
exercising human intelligence again and again upon finding support
and justification for superstitions long since out-lived, which
have now become quite meaningless. Or a sermon appears showing
that land should not be an object of private possession and that
the institution of private property in land is a chief cause of
the poverty of the masses. Apparently science, real science,
should welcome such a sermon and draw further deductions from
this position. But the science of our times does nothing of the
kind: on the contrary, political economy demonstrates the opposite
position, namely, that landed property, like every other form of
property, must be more and more concentrated in the hands of a small
number of owners. Again, in the same way, one would suppose it to
be the business of real science to demonstrate the irrationality,
unprofitableness, and immorality of war and of executions; or the
inhumanity and harmfulness of prostitution; or the absurdity,
harmfulness, and immorality of using narcotics or of eating animals;
or the irrationality, harmfulness, and antiquatedness of patriotism.
And such works exist, but are all considered unscientific; while
works to prove that all these things ought to continue, and works
intended to satisfy an idle thirst for knowledge lacking any relation
to human life, are considered to be scientific.
The deviation of the science of our time from its true purpose is
strikingly illustrated by those ideals which are put forward by
some scientists, and are not denied but admitted by the majority of
scientific men.
These ideals are expressed not only in stupid, fashionable books,
describing the world as it will be a thousand or three thousand years
hence, but also by sociologists who consider themselves serious men
of science. These ideals are that food, instead of being obtained
from the land by agriculture, will be prepared in laboratories
by chemical means, and that human labour will be almost entirely
superseded by the utilisation of natural forces.
Man will not, as now, eat an egg laid by a hen he has kept, or bread
grown on his field, or an apple from a tree he has reared and which
has blossomed and matured in his sight; but he will eat tasty,
nutritious food prepared in laboratories by the conjoint labour of
many people, in which he will share to a small extent. Man will
hardly need to labour, so that all men will be able to yield to
idleness as the upper, ruling classes now yield to it.
Nothing shows more plainly than these ideals to what a degree the
science of our times has deviated from the true path.
The great majority of men in our times lack good and sufficient food
(as well as dwellings and clothes and all the first necessities of
life). And this great majority of men is compelled, to the injury of
its well-being, to labour continually beyond its strength. Both these
evils can easily be removed by abolishing mutual strife, luxury, and
the unrighteous distribution of wealth--in a word by the abolition
of a false and harmful order and the establishment of a reasonable,
human manner of life. But science considers the existing order
of things to be as immutable as the movements of the planets, and
therefore assumes that the purpose of science is, not to elucidate
the falseness of this order and to arrange a new, reasonable way of
life, but, under the existing order of things, to feed everybody
and enable all to be as idle as the ruling classes, living depraved
lives, now are.
And, meanwhile, it is forgotten that nourishment by corn, vegetables,
and fruit, raised from the soil by one’s own labour, is the
pleasantest, healthiest, easiest, and most natural nourishment, and
that the work of using one’s muscles is as necessary a condition of
life as is the oxidation of the blood by breathing.
To invent means whereby people, while continuing our false division
of property and labour, might be well nourished by means of
chemically-prepared food and might make the forces of nature work for
them, is like inventing means to pump oxygen into the lungs of a man
kept in a closed chamber the air of which is bad, when all that is
needed is for the man no longer to be confined in a closed chamber.
In the vegetable and animal kingdoms a laboratory has been arranged
for the production of food such as can be surpassed by no professors,
and to enjoy the fruits of this laboratory and to participate in it
man has only to yield to that ever joyful impulse to labour without
which his life is a torment. And lo and behold! the scientists
of our times, instead of employing all their strength to abolish
whatever hinders man from utilising the good things prepared for
him, acknowledge the conditions under which man is deprived of these
blessings to be unalterable; and instead of arranging the life of man
so that he may work joyfully and be fed from the soil, they devise
methods which will cause him to become an artificial abortion. It is
like not helping a man out of confinement into the fresh air, but
devising means, instead, to pump into him the necessary quantity
of oxygen, and arranging so that he may live in a stifling cellar
instead of living at home.
Such false ideals could not exist if science were not on a false path.
And yet the feelings transmitted by art grow up on the bases supplied
by science.
But what feelings can such misdirected science evoke? One side of
this science evokes antiquated feelings which humanity has exhausted,
and which in our times are bad and exclusive. The other side,
occupied with the study of subjects unrelated to the conduct of human
life, by its very nature cannot serve as a basis for art.
So that art in our times, to be art, must either open up its own
road independently of science, or must take direction from the
unrecognised science which is denounced by the orthodox section of
science. And this is what art, when it even partially fulfils its
mission, is doing.
It is to be hoped that the work I have tried to perform concerning
art will be performed also for science: that the falseness of the
theory of science for science’s sake will be demonstrated; that
the necessity of acknowledging Christian teaching in its true
meaning will be clearly shown, and on the basis of that teaching
a reappraisement be made of the knowledge we possess and of which
we are so proud; that the secondariness and insignificance of
experimental science, and the primacy and importance of religious,
moral, and social knowledge, will be established; and that such
knowledge will not, as now, be left to the guidance of the
upper classes only, but will form a chief interest of all free,
truth-loving men, such as those who, not in agreement with the upper
classes but in their despite, have always forwarded the real science
of life.
Astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological science, as also
technical and medical science, will be studied only in so far as
they can help to free mankind from religious, juridical, or social
deceptions, or can serve to promote the well-being of all men and not
of any single class.
Only then will science cease to be what it is now--on the one hand
a system of sophistries, needed for the maintenance of the existing
worn-out order of society, and on the other hand a shapeless mass
of miscellaneous knowledge, for the most part good for little or
nothing--and become a shapely and organic whole having a definite and
reasonable purpose comprehensible to all men, namely, the purpose of
bringing to the consciousness of men the truths that flow from the
religious perception of our times.
And only then will art, which is always dependent on science, be what
it might and should be, an organ co-equally important with science
for the life and progress of mankind.
Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great
matter. Art is an organ of human life transmitting man’s reasonable
perception into feeling. In our age the common religious perception
of men is the consciousness of the brotherhood of man--we know that
the well-being of man lies in union with his fellow-men. True science
should indicate the various methods of applying this consciousness to
life. Art should transform this perception into feeling.
The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art,
aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful co-operation of
man which is now maintained by external means,--by our law-courts,
police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, and so
forth,--should be obtained by man’s free and joyous activity. Art
should cause violence to be set aside.[128]
And it is only art that can accomplish this.
All that now, independently of the fear of violence and punishment,
makes the social life of man possible (and already this is an
enormous part of the order of our lives)--all this has been brought
about by art. If by art has been inculcated how people should treat
religious objects, their parents, their children, their wives, their
relations, strangers, foreigners; how to conduct themselves towards
their elders, their superiors, towards those who suffer, towards
their enemies, and towards animals; and if this has been obeyed
through generations by millions of people, not only unenforced by
any violence but so that the force of such customs can be shaken in
no way but by means of art: then by art also other customs, more in
accord with the religious perception of our time, may be evoked. If
art has been able to convey the sentiment of reverence for images,
for the Eucharist, and for the king’s person; of shame at betraying a
comrade, devotion to a flag, the necessity of revenge for an insult,
the need to sacrifice one’s labour for the erection and adornment of
churches, the duty of defending one’s honour, or the glory of one’s
native land--then that same art can also evoke reverence for the
dignity of every man and for the life of every animal; can make men
ashamed of luxury, of violence, of revenge, or of using for their
pleasure that of which others are in need; can compel people freely,
gladly, and without noticing it, to sacrifice themselves in the
service of man.
The task for art to accomplish is to make that feeling of brotherhood
and love of one’s neighbour now attained only by the best members
of society, the customary feeling and the instinct of all men. By
evoking under imaginary conditions the feeling of brotherhood and
love, religious art will train men to experience those same feelings
under similar circumstances in actual life; it will lay in the souls
of men the rails along which the actions of those whom art thus
educates will naturally pass. And universal art, by uniting the most
different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation,
will educate people to union, and will show them, not by reason but
by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds
set by life.
The destiny of art in our time is to transmit, from the realm of
reason to the realm of feeling, the truth that well-being for men
consists in their being united together, and to set up, in place
of the existing reign of force, that kingdom of God--that is, of
love--which we all recognise to be the highest aim of human life.
Possibly in the future, science may reveal to art yet newer and
higher ideals which art may realise; but in our time the destiny of
art is clear and definite. The task of Christian art is to establish
brotherly union among men.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
Translations of French poems and prose quoted in Chapter X.[129]
_BAUDELAIRE’S “FLOWERS OF EVIL”_
No. XXIV
I adore thee as much as the vaults of night,
O vessel of grief, taciturnity great,
And I love thee the more because of thy flight.
It seemeth, my night’s beautifier, that you
Still heap up those leagues--yes! ironically heap!--
That divide from my arms the immensity blue.
I advance to attack, I climb to assault,
Like a choir of young worms at a corpse in the vault;
Thy coldness, oh cruel, implacable beast!
Yet heightens thy beauty, on which my eyes feast!
_BAUDELAIRE’S “FLOWERS OF EVIL”_
No. XXXVI
_DUELLUM_
Two warriors come running, to fight they begin,
With gleaming and blood they bespatter the air;
These games, and this clatter of arms, is the din
Of youth that’s a prey to the raging of love.
The rapiers are broken! and so is our youth,
But the dagger’s avenged, dear! and so is the sword,
By the nail that is steeled and the hardened tooth.
Oh! the fury of hearts aged and ulcered by love!
In the ditch, where the ounce and the pard have their lair,
Our heroes have rolled in an angry embrace;
Their skin blooms on brambles that erewhile were bare.
That ravine is a friend-inhabited hell!
Then let us roll in, oh woman inhuman,
To immortalise hatred that nothing can quell!
FROM BAUDELAIRE’S PROSE WORK ENTITLED
‘LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE’
_THE STRANGER_
Whom dost thou love best? say, enigmatical man--thy father, thy
mother, thy sister, or thy brother?
“I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.”
Thy friends?
“There you use an expression the meaning of which till now remains
unknown to me.”
Thy country?
“I know not in what latitude it is situated.”
Beauty?
“I would gladly love her, goddess and immortal.”
Gold?
“I hate it, as you hate God.”
Then what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
“I love the clouds ... the clouds that pass ... there ... the
marvellous clouds!”
_THE SOUP AND THE CLOUDS_
My beloved little silly was giving me my dinner, and I was
contemplating, through the open window of the dining-room, those
moving architectures which God makes out of vapours, the marvellous
constructions of the impalpable. And I said to myself, amid my
contemplation, All these phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as
the eyes of my beautiful beloved, the monstrous little silly with the
green eyes.
Suddenly I felt the violent blow of a fist on my back, and I heard a
harsh, charming voice, an hysterical voice, as it were hoarse with
brandy, the voice of my dear little well-beloved, saying, Are you
going to eat your soup soon, you d---- b---- of a dealer in clouds?
_THE GALLANT MARKSMAN_
As the carriage was passing through the forest he ordered it to be
stopped near a shooting-gallery, saying that he wished to shoot off
a few bullets to _kill_ Time. To kill this monster, is it not the
most ordinary and the most legitimate occupation of everyone? And
he gallantly offered his arm to his dear, delicious, and execrable
wife--that mysterious woman to whom he owed so much pleasure, so much
pain, and perhaps also a large part of his genius.
Several bullets struck far from the intended mark--one even
penetrated the ceiling; and as the charming creature laughed wildly,
mocking her husband’s awkwardness, he turned abruptly towards her and
said, Look at that doll there on the right with the haughty mien and
her nose in the air; well, dear angel, _I imagine to myself that it
is you_! And he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The doll was
neatly decapitated.
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.”--FAVART.
’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
Breathed forth 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,
Mists in between.
Wolves hungry and lean,
And famishing crow,
What happens to you
When acrid 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
Words did the flame outpour....
To the third I came,
(Child, I am afraid)
To the third I came,
Then died the little flame....
Should he one day return,
And see you lying dead?
Say I longed for him
When on my dying bed....
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....
APPENDIX II
This is the first page of Mallarmé’s book _Divagations_, referred to
in Chapter X, page 215.
_LE PHÉNOMÈNE FUTUR_
Un ciel pâle, sur le monde qui finit de décrépitude, va peut-être
partir avec les nuages: les lambeaux de la pourpre usée des couchants
déteignent dans une rivière dormant à l’horizon submergé de rayons
et d’eau. Les arbres s’ennuient, et, sous leur feuillage blanchi
(de la poussière du temps plutôt que celle des chemins) monte la
maison en toile de Montreur de choses Passées: maint réverbère
attend le crépuscule et ravive les visages d’une malheureuse foule,
vaincue par la maladie immortelle et le péché des siècles, d’hommes
près de leurs chétives complices enceintes des fruits misérables
avec lesquels périra la terre. Dans le silence inquiet de tous les
yeux suppliant là-bas le soleil qui, sous l’eau, s’enfonce avec le
désespoir d’un cri, voici le simple boniment: “Nulle enseigne ne
vous régale du spectacle intérieur, car il n’est pas maintenant un
peintre capable d’en donner une ombre triste. J’apporte, vivante (et
préservée à travers les ans par la science souveraine), une Femme
d’autrefois. Quelque folie, originelle et naïve, une extase d’or, je
ne sais quoi! par elle nommé sa chevelure, se ploie avec la grâce des
étoffes autour d’un visage qu’ éclaire la nudité sanglante de ses
lèvres. A la place du vêtement vain, elle a un corps; et les yeux,
semblables aux pierres rares! ne valent pas ce regard qui sort de sa
chair heureuse: des seins levés comme s’ils étaient pleins d’un lait
éternel, la pointe vers le ciel, les jambes lisses qui gardent le sel
de la mer première.” Se rappelant leurs pauvres épouses, chauves,
morbides et pleines d’horreur, les maris se pressent: elles aussi par
curiosité, mélancoliques, veulent voir.
Quand tous auront contemplé la noble créature, vestige de quelque
époque déjà maudite, les uns indifférents, car ils n’auront pas eu la
force de comprendre, mais d’autres navrés et la paupière humide de
larmes résignées, se regarderont; tandis que les poètes de ces temps,
sentant se rallumer leur yeux éteints, s’achemineront vers leur
lampe, le cerveau ivre un instant d’une gloire confuse, hantés du
Rythme et dans l’oubli d’exister à une époque qui survit à la beauté.
_THE FUTURE PHENOMENON_--BY MALLARMÉ
A pale sky, above the world that is ending through decrepitude, about
perhaps to pass away with the clouds: shreds of worn-out purple of
the sunsets wash off their colour in a river sleeping on the horizon,
submerged with rays and water. The trees are weary and, beneath their
whitened foliage (whitened by the dust of time rather than that of
the roads) rises the canvas house of “Showman of Things Past.” Many a
lamp awaits the gloaming and brightens the faces of a miserable crowd
vanquished by the everlasting sickness and the sin of ages, of men
by the sides of their puny accomplices pregnant with the miserable
fruit through which the world will perish. In the anxious silence
of all the eyes there supplicating the sun, which sinks under the
water with the desperation of a cry, this is the plain announcement:
“No sign-board regales you with the spectacle that is inside, for
there is no painter now capable of giving even a sad shadow of it. I
bring, living (and preserved by sovereign science through the years),
a Woman of other days. Some kind of folly, naïve and original, an
ecstasy of gold, I know not what, by her called her hair, clings with
the grace of drapery round a face brightened by the blood-red nudity
of her lips. In place of vain clothing, she has a body; and her
eyes, resembling precious stones! are not worth that look which comes
from her happy flesh: breasts raised as if full of eternal milk, the
points towards the sky; the smooth legs, that keep the salt of the
first sea.” Remembering their poor spouses, bald, morbid, and full of
horrors, the husbands press forward: the women too, from curiosity,
gloomily wish to see.
When all shall have contemplated the noble creature, vestige of
some epoch already damned, they will look at each other, some
indifferently, for they will not have had strength to understand,
but others broken-hearted and with eye-lids wet with tears of
resignation, while the poets of those times, feeling their dim eyes
rekindled, will make their way towards their lamp, their brain for an
instant drunk with confused glory, haunted by Rhythm and forgetful
that they exist at an epoch which has survived Beauty.
APPENDIX III
Poems referred to in Chapter X, page 217.
No. 1
The following verse is by Henri de Régnier, from page 28 a volume of
his poems:--
_L’ACCUEIL_
Si tu veux que ce soir, à l’âtre, je t’accueille--
Jette d’abord la fleur, qui de ta main s’effeuille;
Son cher parfum ferait ma tristesse trop sombre;
Et ne regard pas derrière toi vers l’ombre,
Car je te veux, ayant oublié la forêt
Et-le vent, et l’écho et ce qui parlerait
Voix à ta solitude ou pleur à ta silence!
Et debout, avec ton ombre qui te devance,
Et hautine sur mon seuil, et pâle, et vénue
Comme si j’etais mort ou que tu fusses nue!
Henri de Régnier: _Les jeux rustiques et devins_.
_THE WELCOME_
If you want us to-night by my fireside to greet--
Drop the flower you hold that sheds petals so sweet;
Its dear scent would render my sadness too black;
And do not on the shadows behind you look back,
For I want you, forgetful of forest and wind,
Of echoes and all you’d recall to your mind
Giving voice to your silence, to solitude tears,
At my door, while before you your shadow appears,
And haughty and pale and erect you stand there--
Just as if I were dead, or that naked you were.
No. 2
The following verses are by Vielé-Griffin, from page 28 of a volume
of his poems:--
_OISEAU BLEU COULEUR DU TEMPS_
1.
Sais-tu l’oubli
D’un vain doux rêve,
Oiseau moqueur
De la forêt?
Le jour pâlit,
La nuit se lève,
Et dans mon cœur
L’ombre a pleuré;
2.
O chante-moi
Ta folle gamme,
Car j’ai dormi
Ce jour durant;
Le lâche emoi
Où fut mon âme
Sanglote ennui
Le jour mourant ...
3.
Sais-tu le chant
De sa parole
Et de sa voix,
Toi qui redis
Dans le couchant
Ton air frivole
Comme autrefois
Sous les midis?
4.
O, chante alors
La mélodie
De son amour,
Mon fol espoir,
Parmi les ors
Et l’incendie
Du vain doux jour
Qui meurt ce soir.
FRANCIS VIELÉ-GRIFFIN: _Poèmes et Poésies_.
_BLUE BIRD COLOUR OF THE TIMES_
1.
Canst thou forget
In dreams so vain,
Oh, mocking bird
Of forest deep?
The day doth set,
Night comes again,
My heart has heard
The shadows weep;
2.
Thy tones let flow
In maddening scale,
For I have slept
The livelong day;
Emotions low
In me now wail,
My soul they’ve kept:
Light dies away ...
3.
That music sweet.
Ah, do you know
Her voice and speech?
Your airs so light
You who repeat
In sunset’s glow,
As you sang, each,
At noonday’s height.
4.
Of my desire,
My hope so bold,
Her love--up, sing,
Sing ’neath this light,
This flaming fire,
And all the gold
The eve doth bring
Ere comes the night.
No. 3
And here are some verses by the esteemed young poet Verhaeren, which
I also take from page 28 of his Works:--
_ATTIRANCES_
Lointainement, et si étrangement pareils,
De grands masques d’argent que la brume recule,
Vaguent, au jour tombant, autour des vieux soleils.
Les doux lointaines!--et comme, au fond du crépuscule,
Ils nous fixent le cœur, immensément le cœur,
Avec les yeux défunts de leur visage d’âme.
C’est toujours du silence, à moins, dans la pâleur
Du soir, un jet de feu sondain, un cri de flamme,
Un départ de lumière inattendu vers Dieu.
On se laisse charmer et troubler de mystère,
Et l’on dirait des morts qui taisent un adieu
Trop mystique, pour être écouté par la terre!
Sont-ils le souvenir matériel et clair
Des éphèbes chrétiens couchés aux catacombes
Parmi les lys? Sont-ils leur regard et leur chair?
Ou seul, ce qui survit de merveilleux aux tombes
De ceux qui sont partis, vers leurs rêves, un soir,
Conquérir la folie à l’assaut des nuées?
Lointainement, combien nous les sentons vouloir
Un peu d’amour pour leurs œuvres destituées,
Pour leur errance et leur tristesse aux horizons.
Toujours! aux horizons du cœur et de pensées,
Alors que les vieux soirs éclatent en blasons
Soudains, pour les gloires noires et angoissées.
ÉMILE VERHAEREN,
_Poèmes_.
_ATTRACTIONS_
Large masks of silver, by mists drawn away,
So strangely alike, yet so far apart,
Float round the old suns when faileth the day.
They transfix our heart, so immensely our heart,
Those distances mild, in the twilight deep,
Looking out of dead faces, with their spirit eyes.
All around is now silence, except when there leap
In the pallor of evening, with fiery cries,
Some fountains of flame that Godward do fly.
Mysterious trouble and charms us enfold,
You might think that the dead spoke a silent good-bye,
Oh! too mystical far on earth to be told!
Are they the memories, material and bright,
Of the Christian youths that in catacombs sleep
’Mid the lilies? Are they their flesh or their sight?
Or the marvel alone that survives, in the deep,
Of those that, one night, returned to their dreams
Of conquering folly by assaulting the skies?
For their destitute works--we feel it, it seems,
For a little love their longing cries
From horizons far--for their wanderings and pain.
In horizons ever of heart and thought,
While the evenings old in bright blaze wane
Suddenly, for black glories anguish fraught.
No. 4
And the following is a poem by Moréas, evidently an admirer of Greek
beauty. It is from page 28 of a volume of his poems:--
_ÉNONE AU CLAIR VISAGE_
Énone, j’avais cru qu’en aimant ta beauté
Où l’âme avec le corps trouvent leur unité,
J’allais, m’affermissant et le cœur et l’esprit,
Monter jusqu’à cela, qui jamais ne périt,
N’ayant été créé, qui n’est froidure ou feu,
Qui n’est beau quelque part et laid en autre lieu;
Et me flattais encor d’une belle harmonie
Que j’eusse composé du meilleur et du pire,
Ainsi que le chanteur qui chérit Polymnie,
En accordant le grave avec l’aigu, retire
Un son bien élevé sur les nerfs de sa lyre.
Mais mon courage, hélas! se pâmant comme mort,
M’enseigna que le trait qui m’avait fait amant
Ne fut pas de cet arc que courbe sans effort
La Vénus qui naquit du mâle seulement,
Mais que j’avais souffert cette Vénus dernière,
Qui a le cœur couard, né d’une faible mère.
Et pourtant, ce mauvais garçon, chasseur habile,
Qui charge son carquois de sagette subtile,
Qui secoue en riant sa torche, pour un jour,
Qui ne pose jamais que sur de tendres fleurs,
C’est sur un teint charmant qu’il essuie les pleurs,
Et c’est encore un Dieu, Énone, cet Amour.
Mais, laisse, les oiseaux du printemps sont partis,
Et je vois les rayons du soleil amortis.
Énone, ma douleur, harmonieux visage,
Superbe humilité, doux-honnête langage,
Hier me remirant dans cet étang glacé
Qui au bout du jardin se couvre de feuillage,
Sur ma face je vis que les jours out passé.
JEAN MORÉAS: _Le Pélerin Passionné_.
_ENONE OF THE CLEAR VISAGE_
Enone, in loving thy beauty I thought
(Where the soul and the body to union are brought)
I should mount, by strengthening my heart and my mind,
Till that which knows nothing of Death I should find:
Uncreated, which is not here ugly, there fair,
Nor cold in one part and on fire otherwhere.
I flattered myself that the better and worse
To a harmony perfect should move in my verse;
As the poet who serves Polyhymnia can bring
The grave and the piercing to concord, and ring
Notes loftier still from the nerves of his lyre.
But my courage which now does but faintly suspire,
Nigh to death, hath proclaimed that the arrow--ah, woe!--
Which pierced me, and first with this love made me moan,
Was no arrow dispatched from the easy-bent bow
By a Venus who sprang from a father alone.
But ’twas that other Venus who caused me to smart,
She, born of frail mother with cowardly heart.
Yet this naughty rascal, this hunter so bold,
Whose quiver does arrows of subtlety hold,
Who, laughing and shaking his torch (for a day!),
Never rests but upon tender flowers and gay,
And on a sweet skin dries his tears as they flow--
’Tis a God still, Enone, this Love that we know.
Let it pass, for the birds of the springtime are fled,
And I see the last rays of a sun that’s nigh dead.
Enone, my grief, ah harmonious face,
Humility grand, words of virtue and grace,
I looked yestere’en in the pond frozen fast,
Strewn with leaves at the end of the garden’s fair space,
And I read in my face that those days are now past.
No. 5
And this is also from page 28 of a thick book, full of similar poems,
by M. Montesquiou.
_BERCEUSE D’OMBRE_
Des formes, des formes, des formes
Blanche, bleue, et rose, et d’or
Descendront du haut des ormes
Sur l’enfant qui se rendort.
Des formes!
Des plumes, des plumes, des plumes
Pour composer un doux nid.
Midi sonne; les enclumes
Cessent; la rumeur finit ...
Des plumes!
Des roses, des roses, des roses
Pour embaumer son sommeil,
Vos pétales sont moroses
Près du sourire vermeil.
O roses!
Des ailes, des ailes, des ailes
Pour bourdonner à son front,
Abeilles et demoiselles,
Des rythmes qui berceront.
Des ailes!
Des branches, des branches, des branches
Pour tresser un pavilion,
Par où des clartés moins franches
Descendront sur l’oisillon.
Des branches!
Des songes, des songes, des songes
Dans ses pensers entr’ouverts
Glissez un pen de mensonges
A voir le vie au travers.
Des songes!
Des fées, des fées, des fées,
Pour filer leurs écheveaux
Des mirages, de bouffées
Dans tous ces petits cerveaux.
Des fées.
Des anges, des anges, des anges
Pour emporter dans l’éther
Les petits enfants étranges
Qui ne veulent pas rester ...
Nos anges!
COMTE ROBERT DE MONTESQUIOU-FEZENSAC,
_Les Hortensias Bleues_.
_THE SHADOW LULLABY_
Forms, forms, forms
White, blue, and gold, and red
Descending from the elm trees,
On sleeping baby’s head.
Forms!
Feathers, feathers, feathers
To make a cosy nest.
Twelve striking: stops the clamour;
The anvils are at rest ...
Oh feathers!
Roses, roses, roses
To scent his sleep awhile,
Pale are your fragrant petals
Beside his ruby smile.
Oh roses!
Wings, wings, wings
Of bees and dragon-flies,
To hum around his forehead,
And lull him with your sighs.
Oh wings!
Branches, branches, branches
A shady bower to twine,
Through which, oh daylight, faintly
Descend on birdie mine.
Branches!
Dreams, dreams, dreams
Into his opening mind,
Let in a little falsehood
With sights of life behind.
Dreams!
Fairies, fairies, fairies,
To twine and twist their threads
With puffs of phantom visions
Into these little heads.
Fairies!
Angels, angels, angels
To the ether far away,
Those children strange to carry
That here don’t wish to stay ...
Our angels!
APPENDIX IV
These are the contents of the _Nibelungen Ring_:
The first part tells that the nymphs, the daughters of the Rhine,
for some reason guard gold in the Rhine and sing: Weia, Waga, Woge
du Welle, Walle zur Wiege, Wagalaweia, Wallala, Weila, Weia, and so
forth.
These singing nymphs are pursued by a dwarf (a nibelung) who desires
to seize them. The dwarf cannot catch any of them. Then the nymphs
guarding the gold tell the dwarf just what they ought to keep secret,
namely, that whoever renounces love will be able to steal the gold
they are guarding. And the dwarf renounces love and steals the gold.
This ends the first scene.
In the second scene a god and a goddess lie in a field in sight of a
castle which giants have built for them. Presently they wake up and
are pleased with the castle, and they relate that in payment for this
work they must give the goddess Freia to the giants. The giants come
for their pay. But the god Wotan objects to parting with Freia. The
giants grow angry. The gods hear that the dwarf has stolen the gold,
and promise to confiscate it and to pay the giants with it. But the
giants won’t trust them, and seize the goddess Freia in pledge.
The third scene takes place under ground. Alberich, the dwarf who
stole the gold, for some reason beats another dwarf, Mime, and takes
from him a helmet which has the power both of making people invisible
and of turning them into animals. The gods, Wotan and others, appear
and quarrel with one another and with the dwarfs, and wish to take
the gold, but Alberich won’t give it up, and (like everybody all
through the piece) behaves in a way to ensure his own ruin. He puts
on the helmet, and becomes first a dragon and then a toad. The gods
catch the toad, take the helmet off it, and carry Alberich away with
them.
Scene IV. The gods bring Alberich to their home and order him to
command his dwarfs to bring them all the gold. The dwarfs bring it.
Alberich gives up the gold but keeps a magic ring. The gods take the
ring. So Alberich curses the ring and says it is to bring misfortune
on anyone who has it. The giants appear; they bring the goddess Freia
and demand her ransom. They stick up staves of Freia’s height, and
gold is poured in between these staves: this is to be the ransom.
There is not enough gold, so the helmet is thrown in, and they demand
the ring also. Wotan refuses to give it up, but the goddess Erda
appears and commands him to do so because it brings misfortune. Wotan
gives it up. Freia is released. The giants, having received the ring,
fight, and one of them kills the other. This ends the Prelude, and we
come to the First Day.
The scene shows a house in a tree. Siegmund runs in tired, and lies
down. Sieglinda, the mistress of the house (and wife of Hunding),
gives him a drugged draught and they fall in love with each other.
Sieglinda’s husband comes home, learns that Siegmund belongs to a
hostile race, and wishes to fight him next day; but Sieglinda drugs
her husband and comes to Siegmund. Siegmund discovers that Sieglinda
is his sister, and that his father drove a sword into the tree so
that no one can get it out. Siegmund pulls the sword out, and commits
incest with his sister.
Act II. Siegmund is to fight with Hunding. The gods discuss the
question as to whom they shall award the victory. Wotan, approving
of Siegmund’s incest with his sister, wishes to spare him, but under
pressure from his wife, Fricka, he orders the Valkyrie Brünnhilda to
kill Siegmund. Siegmund goes to fight. Sieglinda faints. Brünnhilda
appears and wishes to slay Siegmund. Siegmund wishes to kill
Sieglinda also, but Brünnhilda does not allow it, and he fights with
Hunding. Brünnhilda defends Siegmund, but Wotan defends Hunding.
Siegmund’s sword breaks, and he is killed. Sieglinda runs away.
Act III. The Valkyries (divine Amazons) are on the stage. The
Valkyrie Brünnhilda arrives on horseback, bringing Siegmund’s body.
She is flying from Wotan, who is chasing her for her disobedience.
Wotan catches her, and as a punishment dismisses her from her post
as a Valkyrie. He also casts a spell on her, so that she has to go
to sleep and continue asleep until a man wakes her. When someone
wakes her she will fall in love with him. Wotan kisses her; she falls
asleep. He lets off fire, which surrounds her.
We now come to the Second Day. The dwarf Mime forges a sword in a
wood. Siegfried appears. He is a son born from the incest of brother
with sister (Siegmund with Sieglinda), and has been brought up in
this wood by the dwarf. In general the motives for the actions of
everybody in this production are quite unintelligible. Siegfried
learns his own origin, and that the broken sword was his father’s.
He orders Mime to re-forge it, and then goes off. Wotan comes in the
guise of a wanderer and relates what will happen: that he who has not
learnt to fear will forge the sword and will defeat everybody. The
dwarf conjectures that this is Siegfried, and wants to poison him.
Siegfried returns, forges his father’s sword, and runs off, shouting,
“Heiho heiho heiho! Ho ho! Aha! oho! aha! Heiaho! heiaho! heiaho! Ho!
ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!”
And we get to Act II. Alberich sits guarding a giant, who, in form
of a dragon, guards the gold he has received. Wotan appears, and
for some unknown reason foretells that Siegfried will come and kill
the dragon. Alberich wakes the dragon and asks him for the ring,
promising to defend him from Siegfried. The dragon won’t give up
the ring. Exit Alberich. Mime and Siegfried appear. Mime hopes the
dragon will teach Siegfried to fear. But Siegfried does not fear.
He drives Mime away and kills the dragon, after which he puts his
finger, smeared with the dragon’s blood, to his lips. This enables
him to know men’s secret thoughts, as well as the language of birds.
The birds tell him where the treasure and the ring are, and also that
Mime wishes to poison him. Mime returns and says out loud that he
wishes to poison Siegfried. This is meant to signify that Siegfried,
having tasted dragon’s blood, understands people’s secret thoughts.
Siegfried, having learnt Mime’s intentions, kills him. The birds tell
Siegfried where Brünnhilda is, and he goes to find her.
Act III. Wotan calls up Erda. Erda prophesies to Wotan, and gives
him advice. Siegfried appears, quarrels with Wotan, and they fight.
Suddenly Siegfried’s sword breaks Wotan’s spear, which had been
more powerful than anything else. Siegfried goes into the fire to
Brünnhilda and kisses her; she wakes up, abandons her divinity, and
throws herself into Siegfried’s arms.
Third Day. Prelude. Three Norns plait a golden rope and talk about
the future. They go away. Siegfried and Brünnhilda appear. Siegfried
takes leave of her, gives her the ring, and goes away.
Act I. By the Rhine. A king wants to get married and also to give his
sister in marriage. Hagen, the king’s wicked brother, advises him
to marry Brünnhilda and to give his sister to Siegfried. Siegfried
appears; they give him a drugged draught, which makes him forget all
the past and fall in love with the king’s sister, Gutrune. So he
rides off with Gunther, the king, to get Brünnhilda to be the king’s
bride. The scene changes. Brünnhilda sits with the ring. A Valkyrie
comes to her and tells her that Wotan’s spear is broken, and advises
her to give the ring to the Rhine nymphs. Siegfried comes and by
means of the magic helmet turns himself into Gunther, demands the
ring from Brünnhilda, seizes it, and drags her off to sleep with him.
Act II. By the Rhine. Alberich and Hagen discuss how to get the ring.
Siegfried comes, tells how he has obtained a bride for Gunther and
how he spent the night with her but put a sword between himself and
her. Brünnhilda rides up, recognises the ring on Siegfried’s hand,
and declares that it was he, and not Gunther, who was with her. Hagen
stirs everybody up against Siegfried, and decides to kill him next
day when hunting.
Act III. Again the nymphs in the Rhine relate what has happened.
Siegfried, who has lost his way, appears. The nymphs ask him for
the ring but he won’t give it up. Hunters appear. Siegfried tells
the story of his life. Hagen then gives him a draught which causes
his memory to return to him. Siegfried relates how he aroused and
obtained Brünnhilda, and everyone is astonished. Hagen stabs him
in the back, and the scene is changed. Gutrune meets the corpse
of Siegfried. Gunther and Hagen quarrel about the ring, and Hagen
kills Gunther. Brünnhilda cries. Hagen wishes to take the ring
from Siegfried’s hand, but the hand of the corpse raises itself
threateningly. Brünnhilda takes the ring from Siegfried’s hand, and
when Siegfried’s corpse is carried to the pyre she gets on to a horse
and leaps into the fire. The Rhine rises, and the waves reach the
pyre. In the river are three nymphs. Hagen throws himself into the
fire to get the ring, but the nymphs seize him and carry him off. One
of them holds the ring; and that is the end of the matter.
The impression obtainable from my recapitulation is of course
incomplete. But however incomplete it may be it is certainly
infinitely more favourable than the impression which results from
reading the four booklets in which the work is printed.
PART XIV
TOLSTOY’S VIEW OF ART
The substance of the following article appeared in the _Contemporary
Review_, August 1900, as a reply to critics who had misquoted,
misrepresented, or misunderstood Tolstoy. Their attacks were too
ephemeral for it to be necessary to reproduce the polemical part of
the reply; but, as previously remarked, what is worth preserving
is an explanation of Tolstoy’s position, which as it obtained his
unqualified approval is conclusive on certain matters in dispute.
In order to give the statement in the words Tolstoy endorsed I have
retained some passages which have appeared in previous chapters of
this book, and can only apologize to my readers for these repetitions.
Tolstoy had great difficulty in presenting his opinions (especially
his religious and philosophic opinions) to the world. Several of
his books were prohibited in Russia. Those printed in Geneva were
carelessly edited, and (missing the attention Tolstoy usually gave to
his proof-sheets) contained errors that tripped up his translators.
Other works of his, permitted in Russia, were tampered with by the
Censor, who struck out what Tolstoy wrote and inserted words he
objected to, as, for instance, was the case in the Russian edition of
_What is Art?_
But, for non-Russian readers, the heaviest blow to Tolstoy’s
reputation as a clear and sane thinker was struck, not by the Censor,
but by translators who failed to reproduce his thought. Versions of
some of his most serious works appeared containing much absolute
nonsense. They were issued at a time when readers, surprised that a
novelist should undertake philosophic work, were wondering whether
they ought to regard Tolstoy seriously in his new rôle; and they
caused some to conclude that, as a philosopher, he need not be taken
seriously.[130]
A man who spoke the truth as he saw it under constant risk of
persecution, whose works were suppressed or mutilated at home and
badly edited abroad, who was translated so that he was made to assert
what he in fact denied, has a special claim to fair treatment at the
hands of reviewers. But this claim was not always recognized.
His rank among the foremost writers of fiction was not questioned;
but some of his philosophical works treating of human conduct,
activities, institutions, and beliefs, had a different fate. When
_What is Art?_ appeared, it had a mixed reception, though some
leading critics saw its value and one of them hailed it as “the most
important essay in pure criticism of recent years, and destined to
become a classic.”
Tolstoy had in this book said much that was new, startling, and not
quickly digestible; and he had expressed it so caustically, had
been so severe on critics, specialists, professional artists, and
art-schools, as well as on whole groups of people from spiritualists
to scientists--including fifty or more well-known people then living,
into the bargain--he had, in fact, hit out so freely and so hard that
counter-attacks of considerable asperity were inevitable. In reply to
such attacks the following pages were written.
No department of science, as Véron justly remarks, has been more
generally abandoned to the dreams of the metaphysicians than esthetic
philosophy. The task Tolstoy undertook was to clear up the “the
frightful obscurity which reigns in this region of speculation.”
What is Art? Its manifestations are “bounded on one side by the
practically useful and on the other by unsuccessful attempts at
art.” But what working definition of art have we that would enable
us to feel sure that this or that production of human activity is
a work of art? The answer at first seems very simple to those “who
talk without thinking.” They are accustomed to say that “Art is such
activity as produces beauty.” But this only shifts the matter a
step. We have now to ask for a working definition of beauty, and on
careful examination we find that this has nowhere been given. Every
attempt to define beauty _objectively_, as consisting “either in
utility, or in adjustment to a purpose, or in symmetry, or in order,
or in proportion, or in smoothness, or in harmony of the parts, or in
unity amid variety, or in various combinations of these” (p. 161),
has broken down utterly, and we have nothing left but a _subjective_
definition which amounts to this, that beauty is “that which pleases
us” without evoking in us desire. In other words, “Beauty is simply
a certain kind of disinterested pleasure received by us.” This
definition seems clear enough, but unfortunately it is inexact, and
can be widened to include the pleasure derived from drink, from food,
from touching a delicate skin, and so forth, as is done by Guyau,
Kralik, and other estheticians.
A yet more serious trouble is, that different things please different
people. Instead of getting a solid basis for a science, we get landed
in confusion arising from the fact that tastes differ. If we use the
word _beauty_ in our definition of art, and if beauty means “that
which pleases,” and if different things please different people--our
definition is useless. One man will say a certain thing is a work of
art because it pleases him, another will reply that it is not a work
of art because he does not like it.
And this is precisely what has happened and is happening. Is Walt
Whitman a great poet? Yes, says A, he is, because I like his poems
and agree with them. No, says B, he is not, because I don’t like his
poems and disagree with them.
Thus the science of esthetics has as yet failed to get even a start.
It has not told us what art is, still less has it enabled us to
judge of the quality of art. “So that the whole existing science
of esthetics fails to do what we might expect from it, being a
mental activity calling itself a science: namely, it does not
define the qualities and laws of art, or of the beautiful (if that
be the content of art), or the nature of taste (if taste decides
the question of art and its merit), and then on the basis of such
definitions acknowledge as art those productions which correspond to
these laws, and reject those which do not come under them. But this
science of esthetics consists in first acknowledging a certain set of
productions to be art (because they please us), and then framing such
a theory of art that all these productions which please a certain
circle of people should fit into it” (p. 164).
Such being the case, reasonable men should be not merely ready
but anxious to avoid the use of the word beauty in framing their
definition of art, and should select words which mean the same thing
to each of us who use them. Yet, strange to say, the estheticians,
the specialists, and the “cultured crowd,” cling tenaciously and even
fanatically to the use of a word they cannot define in a serviceable
manner. They are as angry with anyone who protests against its use
in a scientific definition, as the Scarboro’ roughs[131] are with a
Quaker who says that men ought not to kill one another.
“As is always the case, the more cloudy and confused the conception
conveyed by a word, with the more _aplomb_ and self-assurance do
people use that word, pretending that what is understood by it is so
simple and clear that it is not worth while even to discuss what it
actually means. This is how matters of orthodox religion are usually
dealt with, and this is how people now deal with the conception of
beauty” (p. 137).
For his part, Tolstoy prefers to understand, and to let other people
understand, what he means by the words he uses, and he has therefore
framed a definition of art which avoids all obscurity.
“_Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others
feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by
these feelings and also experience them_” (p. 173).
Art is possible because we share one common human nature. One
touch of nature makes the whole world kin. All who are capable
of experiencing “that simple feeling familiar to the plainest
man and even to a child, that sense of infection with another’s
feeling--compelling us to joy in another’s gladness, to sorrow at
another’s grief, and to mingle souls with another” (p. 273), possess
the mental and emotional telegraph wires along which an artist’s
influence may pass.
A common crowd may be swayed by an orator, but not by the ablest
mathematical lecturer; for whereas _thoughts_ can only be transferred
to minds sufficiently prepared to receive them, the _feelings_ that
are the birthright of our common humanity are shared by all normal
people. When an orator fails to sway his audience, we say the orator
has failed, not the audience. But when a boy fails to understand the
fifth proposition because he has not understood those that preceded
it, we do not say that Euclid has failed but that the boy has not
understood him. Science is a human activity transmitting thoughts
from man to man: Art is a human activity transmitting feelings. They
have some features in common. Clearness, simplicity, and compression,
are desirable in both, and the same book or the same speech may
contain both science and art. It is desirable to discriminate clearly
between the one and the other, though both alike are “indispensable
means of communication, without which mankind could not exist” (pp.
175 and 321).
Before passing from definitions to deductions based on them,
reference should be made to the physiological evolutionary definition
of Schiller, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, which Tolstoy sums up thus:
“Art is an activity arising even in the animal kingdom and ‘springing
from sexual desire and the propensity to play’” (p. 169). This,
though superior to the definitions which depend on the conception of
beauty, is unsatisfactory because, “instead of speaking about the
artistic activity itself, which is the real matter in hand, it treats
of the _derivation_ of art” (p. 169).
Accepting Tolstoy’s definition of art, we at once see that art covers
a much wider ground than we have been accustomed to suppose.
“We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see
in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings,
statues, poems, novels.... But all this is but the smallest part of
the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human
life is filled with works of art of every kind--from cradle-song,
jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up
to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions.
It is all artistic activity” (p. 174).
But we generally use the word in a special and restricted sense to
mean, not all human activity that deliberately and with premeditation
transmits feelings, “but only that part which we for some reason
select from it, and to which we attach special importance” (pp.
174–175).
Before considering what kind of art deserves to be thus specially
selected for our highest esteem, we must clearly distinguish between
two different things: the _subject-matter_ of art and the _form_ of
art apart from its subject-matter. This distinction is fundamentally
important and, as soon as it is made, the vexed question of the
relation of art to morality solves itself easily and inevitably.
Let us take art apart from its subject-matter first.
“There is one indubitable sign distinguishing real art from its
counterfeit--namely, the infectiousness of art. If a man without
exercising effort, and without altering his standpoint, on reading,
hearing, or seeing, another man’s work experiences a mental condition
which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake
of that work, then the object evoking that condition is a work of
art” (p. 274).
“And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of
infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.”
“_The stronger the infection the better is the art_, as art, speaking
now apart from its subject-matter--that is, not considering the
quality of the feelings it transmits” (p. 275).
From this point of view, art has really nothing to do with morality.
The feelings transmitted may be good or bad feelings, and may produce
the best or the worst results on those who are influenced by them,
yet in either case the man who transmits them is an artist.
“The feelings with which the artist infects others may be most
various--very strong or very weak, very important or very
insignificant, very bad or very good: feelings of love for native
land, self-devotion and submission to fate or to God expressed
in a drama, raptures of lovers described in a novel, feelings of
voluptuousness expressed in a picture, courage expressed in a
triumphal march, merriment evoked by a dance, humor evoked by a funny
story, the feeling of quietness transmitted by an evening landscape
or by a lullaby, or the feeling of admiration evoked by a beautiful
arabesque--it is all art” (pp. 172–173).
If you have not lost the capacity--usually possessed by people
leading a sane and natural life--to share the feelings expressed by
others, you may try the quality of a production first of all by this
internal test: Does it unite you in feeling with its author and with
others who are exposed to its influence? Only if it does this, have
_you_ any right to testify to its being a work of art.
If you are infected by the work, and are therefore sure that it is
a work of art, the next question is whether it is a weak work of
“exclusive” art, or a great work of “universal” art. It may influence
you--who have, perhaps, been specially trained and accustomed to that
kind of art, or who share the prepossessions of the artist and belong
to his set, class, school, sect, or race,--but is it capable of
influencing men of other classes, races, and ages? Here the primary
internal test is supplemented by an external one. There are works
of “universal” art (using the word, of course, in a comparative and
not in an absolute sense). The _Iliad_, the _Odyssey_, the story
of Joseph, the _Psalms_, the Gospel parables, the story of Sakya
Muni, the hymns of the _Vedas_, the best folk-legends, fairy-tales,
and folk-songs, are understood by all. If only they are adequately
rendered, and are received not superstitiously but with an open mind,
they are “quite comprehensible now to us, educated or uneducated, as
they were comprehensible to the men of those times, long ago, who
were even less educated than our labourers” (p. 226).
Even a strictly national art, such as Japanese decorative art, may
be admirable and “universal.” “The _feeling_ (of admiration at, and
delight in, the combination of lines and colours) which the artist
has experienced, and with which he infects the spectator” (p.
295), may be so sincere that it acts on men of other races without
demanding from them any laborious preparation before they can enjoy
it.
When we find ourselves admiring “exclusive art,” we must beware of
flattering ourselves with the supposition that great masses of people
do not like what _we_ consider undoubtedly good--because _they_ are
not sufficiently developed, while _we_ are very superior people.
Perhaps we admire and enjoy these things, not because they are very
good but merely because we have trained ourselves to admire them
and have got into the habit of doing so. But “people may habituate
themselves to anything, even to the very worst things. As people may
habituate themselves to bad food, to spirits, tobacco, and opium,
just in the same way they may habituate themselves to bad art--and
that is exactly what is being done” (p. 224).
Nor should we let our self-sufficiency blind us to the obvious
lesson of history: “we know that the majority of the productions of
the art of the upper classes, such as various odes, poems, dramas,
cantatas, pastorals, pictures, and so forth, which delighted people
of the upper classes when they were produced, never were afterwards
either understood or valued by the great masses of mankind, but have
remained what they were at first, a mere pastime for the rich people
of their time, for whom alone they ever were of any importance” (pp.
194–5).
“Art is a human activity,” and, consequently, does not exist for
its own sake, but is valuable or objectionable in proportion to the
benefit or the harm it brings to mankind. Its subject-matter consists
of feelings which are contagious or infectious--that is, which can
spread from man to man. Is it not supremely important _what_ feelings
spread among us?
From this point of view the connection between morality and art is
intimate and inevitable. It is a fact of human life from which we can
no more escape than we can from gravitation.
Art unites men; and the better the feelings in which it unites them
the better it will be for humanity.
But which are the best and highest feelings? How are we to discern
or to define them? They have differed, and men’s definitions of
them have differed, from age to age; but, as Tolstoy explains, each
age has had its dominant view of life, which may be called its
“religious perception.” Humanity progresses, and our view of life,
our religious perception, is in many things different from that, say,
of the ancient Greeks. In relation _not to the forms of art but to
its subject-matter_ it would be a mistake to suppose “that the very
best that can be done by the art of nations after nineteen hundred
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 two thousand years ago, who imitated the nude human
body extremely well, and erected buildings pleasant to look at” (pp.
188–189).
And Tolstoy, having begun by giving us his definition of art,
concludes by giving us a statement of the view of life he has
accepted and which he believes is influencing us all whether we know
it or not. It is, he says, Christ’s teaching in its real--and not in
its customary and perverted--meaning.
“That meaning has not only become accessible to all men of our times,
but the whole life of man to-day is permeated by the spirit of that
teaching, and consciously or unconsciously is guided by it” (pp.
308–309).
“The religious perception of our time in its widest and most
practical application is the consciousness that our well-being, both
material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and
eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood among men--in their loving
harmony with one another” (p. 281).
And whether we accept this view of life or some other, it is certain
that the view we hold will influence our approval or disapproval of
the various feelings transmitted by art.
Accepting Tolstoy’s standpoint, we should allow the highest honour to
“positive feelings of love to God and one’s neighbour, and negative
feelings of indignation and horror at the violation of love”; but the
realm of subject-matter for good art includes much more than that.
“The artist of the future will understand that to compose a
fairy-tale, a touching little song, a lullaby or an entertaining
riddle, an amusing jest, or to draw a sketch in such a way that
it will delight dozens of generations or millions of children and
adults, is incomparably more important and more fruitful than to
compose a novel or a symphony, or paint a picture, of the kind
which will divert some members of the wealthy classes for a short
time and then for ever be forgotten. The region of this art of the
simple feelings accessible to all is enormous and it is as yet almost
untouched” (p. 318).
The artist should know that this art of the simple feelings of common
life, like the highest religious art, tends to unite us all and to
exclude none, as in the example Tolstoy gives on p. 287 of the effect
of music.
Thus, apart from subject-matter, the best art is that which best
accomplishes its purpose of infecting others with the feelings the
artist wishes to impart. And the best subject-matter is that which,
directly or indirectly, tends to forward brotherly union among all
men.
The good art of the future should be superior to our present art in
“clearness, beauty, simplicity, and compression,” for one penalty of
forgetting the primary aim of art is that we greatly lose that which
is a natural accompaniment of art--the pleasure given by beauty. We
are like men who, living to eat, eventually lose even the natural
pleasure food affords to those who eat to live.
Such, in brief outline, are Tolstoy’s essential views of art. Even
so bare and incomplete a recapitulation, stripped as it is of the
convincing arguments, the brilliant examples, and the masterly
support and elucidation which are crammed into the pages of his
remarkable book may suffice to show that it is a work deserving
careful consideration.
To the above, written soon after _What is Art?_ was first published,
I should like now, in 1924, to add a few words.
The chief idea in _What is Art?_ besides its definition of art, is
Tolstoy’s insistence on the need to discriminate between the _form_
and the _content_ of art. For its full assimilation this requires
reflection, which--either because the philosophy of art does not
interest them, or because they are satisfied with previously adopted
opinions they do not wish to disturb--not all are willing to accord
to it. But the test of a great philosophy, I once heard Tolstoy say,
is that the idea it generalizes can be so simply stated that an
intelligent boy of twelve approaching the subject free from prejudice
can understand it in half-an-hour: and I think both Tolstoy’s
definition, and his explanation of the need to consider the form of
art as a matter distinct from our approval and disapproval of the
feeling the artist transmits, will stand that crucial test. They
can be put so simply that an unprejudiced boy of twelve can readily
understand them.
One must however be on one’s guard against confusing the _subject_
treated of (a particular event: a murder, a seduction, a marriage--or
an object, such as the sea, the sky, a house, a tiger, or a baby)
with the _subject-matter of feeling_, which is the real content of a
work of art. In Tolstoy’s definition it is a feeling or feelings,
and their transitions, that when expressed by an artist, form the
subject-matter of art. The events treated of--in a book, a play,
a picture, or song--are merely material used in expressing that
feeling, and must not themselves be thought of as the subject-matter.
The affection of a child for its mother or its dog may be the
subject-matter of a work of art, so may an appreciation of the
effect of certain arrangements of colours and shapes, the mirth and
jollity expressed and inspired by a dance-tune or by the movements
of a dance, the feelings of awe produced by the representation of
a terrible storm, or any other possible feelings or transitions of
feeling: the rage of an excited crowd, the triumph of a victorious
nation, the despair of a man ruined or betrayed, or feelings evoked
by the play of light and shade, by the delicate bloom of a flower,
or by the graceful tracery of a tree seen against a winter sky. When
asking oneself whether a certain production is a work of art, one
has to consider whether we feel something the artist has felt and
caused us to share. If one feels that, it is evident that we have
before us a work of art--our own feelings witness to the artist’s
achievement. Sometimes however the pleasure this union of feeling
with the artist--and perhaps with many spectators, auditors or
readers--would naturally produce, is infringed by a consciousness
that one disapproves of, or disagrees with, the feelings that for the
moment have infected us.
For instance, many Irishmen are born orators, and oratory is an
art. Suppose one went to two great public meetings, addressed by
two really first-rate speakers. Each of these is moved by a genuine
and passionate feeling. Each has the gift of arranging his matter
admirably and expressing it forcibly and eloquently, and possesses an
excellent voice. Each sways his audience to laughter and tears, and
plays on their emotions as on an organ, compelling them to sympathize
with his detestation for what he abhors and his enthusiasm for what
he prizes. We may feel that we have heard great orations admirably
delivered, but the feelings underlying these speeches have clashed
with one another. One of the speakers was moved by ardent desire to
maintain and intensify an age-long struggle, and repudiates with
contumely any idea of union with a section of the population that
he hates and despises. He was genuinely moved by the recollection
of racial wrongs and sincerely devoted to leaders he regarded as
heroes and martyrs; but animosity, hatred, and revenge, possessed his
soul. The other orator was moved by a desire to bind up the nation’s
wounds, to forgive and forget past wrongs, and to see a neighbouring
people become a united and peaceful nation at harmony with itself and
its neighbours. One might sympathize with either tendency, but it is
impossible to sympathize equally with them both, or to close one’s
eyes to the fact that the welfare of human beings will be influenced
by whichever feeling prevails. Tolstoy explains that when we judge
whether a certain production (such as one of these speeches) is a
work of art, we must remember that our approval or disapproval of a
man’s purpose or aspiration must have nothing whatever to do with our
estimation of the excellence of the _form_ in which he presents his
subject-matter. To that extent art “has nothing to do with morality.”
The best and the worst emotions may alike be conveyed with great
artistic power and be great works of art, and that is just why art,
besides being vastly important, can also be very dangerous.
But when we have seen that a certain production is artistic, and
have even perhaps ourselves been touched by it, the question arises
whether the “content” (the subject-matter of feeling) dealt with
is good, bad, or indifferent. The actions of men flow from their
feelings. Their feelings are formed, nurtured, and swayed, by the
art they enjoy and partake of, so that there was much reason for
Fletcher of Saltoun to say, “Let me make a nation’s songs, and who
will may make its laws.”
We live in a world in which sane human beings cannot but distinguish
between what appears to them abominable and what appears to them
admirable. When therefore we are moved by our artists we cannot be
indifferent to the effect their works produce.
If art had nothing to do with the feelings of men it would be an
empty and insignificant amusement; but all that influences man’s
feelings affects his work, his conduct, and the society to which he
belongs. Yet, obviously, to say that the morality of an artist’s aim
decides the artistic merit of his work, and that, for instance, a
novel must be a fine one because it advocates temperance principles,
though people can only be got to read it if they are forced to do so,
would show that the speaker had never thought about the matter, or
that his artistic perceptions were atrophied.
But we are still not at the end of the matter. Who is to decide what
is good and what is bad in the feeling which forms the subject-matter
of art? Such judgment must vary from age to age, from land to land,
and even from man to man; for while all sane human beings have their
approvals and disapprovals, the outlook on life (or what Tolstoy
calls “the religious perceptions”) guiding such approvals and
disapprovals vary greatly.
It comes to this, that the subject-matter of feeling transmitted by
artists to those who receive their art is of necessity appraised by
us in accordance with our own outlook on life. Tolstoy rightly points
out this inevitable contact of art with ethics, but his own ethical
standards, his “religious perceptions” are not those generally
accepted among us. A discussion of his ethics would be out of place
here. Elsewhere I have ventured to join issue with him on some
matters, while on others it seems to me that he made straight the
pathway of the Lord.
Now obviously when--passing from the acknowledgment of various
productions as works of art because their form is adequate and
they achieve their purpose of infecting us with the feelings their
creators had experienced--Tolstoy discusses, as a separate matter,
whether certain feelings these artists transmitted are beneficial or
otherwise, it is inevitable that those who differ from his ethical
views should disagree with his conclusions. But this difference as
to ethics should not hinder an appreciation of the importance of his
understanding of art! He was a great artist, a first-class novelist,
dramatist, and story-writer, besides being an amateur musician,
keenly interested in painting, sculpture, and other forms of art, and
he was also well acquainted with artists of all kinds and with the
whole literature of art. Is it not worth our while to understand his
message and grasp his meaning clearly before attempting to answer him?
As an example of criticism tending to confuse matters, I will
instance this case: after making the broad distinction between the
form of art and its subject-matter, Tolstoy passes on to the totally
different question of what feelings commended themselves to him. He
says he attaches no special importance to the examples he cites but
offers them merely to elucidate his meaning. Among books expressing
feelings of which he approved, he instances _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_,
and immediately certain critics pounced upon this, and say that as
Mrs. Beecher Stowe did not write as well as someone else whom they
mentioned, Tolstoy’s example shows that he was incapable of judging
about art! Such criticism shows a curious incapacity to understand
what is being discussed. Similarly objections to pictures mentioned
by Tolstoy as good in subject-matter--on the ground of alleged
defects in form--miss the point of the discussion.
When a book deals frankly and plainly with an important subject it is
strange that anyone, instead of seeking the gold in the mine, should
prefer to search for obscurity, contradiction, over-emphasis, or any
ill-advised examples that can be detected; and that some critics
should go the length of asserting that the author meant the opposite
of what he plainly says.
I do not see why anyone should object to, or disagree with, Tolstoy’s
explanation of art and of its influence on life; nor with his
assertion that when we pass from a consideration of the form of works
of art to a consideration of the value of the feelings they convey,
our appraisement of these latter is inevitably influenced by our
outlook on life. But an important reservation must be made when we
come to his assurance that “the religious perception of our time,
in its widest and most practical application, is the consciousness
that our well-being both material and spiritual, individual and
collective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth of brotherhood
among all men, in their loving harmony with one another,” and that
“all men of our times already admit that the highest well-being
attainable by men is to be reached by their union with one another.”
If all men had such a religious perception, there would be a much
greater consensus of opinion concerning the value of feelings
transmitted by art. But it is just here, it seems to me, that the
real clash of opinion and feeling comes in. There are among us many
worshippers of Mars, Mammon, Venus and Bacchus (under whatever
disguises), and though they may not publicly proclaim or explain
their religious perceptions, it is impossible for them honestly to
sympathize with what Tolstoy wishes them to approve of. During the
last thirty years of his life Tolstoy disapproved of patriotism and
of private property. Rudyard Kipling approves of both. Each of these
men was an artist in words. The divergence of their estimates of
what is good and what is bad did not prevent them from producing
works of art; but neither of them could think that all the feelings
with which the other infected his readers were desirable. Before
considering the matter, people are sometimes apt to resent the idea
that ethical standards vary from place to place or from time to
time; or, on realizing that such is the fact, they try to think that
it is possible for a sane man to cease to approve or disapprove of
anything. It does not however need much experience to perceive that
men cannot live in the chaos that results when they have no sort of
chart or guide by which to steer their course through life. In other
words whether a man is a materialist or a spiritualist, and whatever
his aspirations may be, he always, more or less consciously and
definitely, has what Tolstoy calls “a religious perception.”
In an interesting essay on _Religion and Morality_[132] (1894)
Tolstoy classified existing “religious perceptions” in three groups:
(1) Selfishness--the religion, for instance, of all the babies who
desire as much milk and warmth for themselves as possible, and do
not care what happens to the rest of the world; (2) Patriotism--the
religion of all who make the welfare of their family, clan, group,
or nation (or even, as in the case of the Positivists, the whole of
humanity) the chief aim of their life; and (3) those who recognize
some supreme Lord or Law, whose service transcends any calculable
advantage accruing to themselves or to their group.
There is truth in that classification, but one need only admit it,
to realize that appreciation of the feelings conveyed by art _must_
differ among us according to whether we adhere to the first, the
second, or the third of those groups.
This divergence relating to feelings which are the subject-matter of
art, should not extend to what Tolstoy says about the form of art, or
its interrelation with the rest of life. Whatever God one worships
can be greatly served by means of art.
In an admirable little article on _How to Read the Gospels_
(1896)[133] Tolstoy says:
“To understand Christ’s real teaching the chief thing is not
to interpret the Gospels, but to understand them as they are
written. And therefore, to the question how Christ’s teaching
should be understood, I reply: If you wish to understand
it read the Gospels. Read them, putting aside all foregone
conclusions; read them with the sole desire to understand what
is said there. But read them considerately, reasonably, and
with discernment, and not haphazard or mechanically, as though
all the words were of equal weight.
“_To understand any book one must choose out the parts that
are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure or
confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the
drift and spirit of the whole work._ Then, on the basis of
what we have understood, we may proceed to make out what is
confused or not quite intelligible. That is how we read all
kinds of books.
“Therefore we must first of all separate what is quite simple
and intelligible from what is confused and unintelligible and
must afterwards read this clear and intelligible part several
times over, trying fully to assimilate it. Then, helped by the
comprehension of the general meaning, we can try to explain
to ourselves the drift of the parts which seemed involved and
obscure. That was how I read the Gospels, and the meaning of
Christ’s teaching became so clear to me that it was impossible
to have any doubts about it. And I advise everyone who wishes
to understand the true meaning of Christ’s teaching to follow
the same plan.”
This advice, showing how “all kinds of books” should be read, is
particularly applicable to the reading of Tolstoy’s _What is Art?_
The views there expressed are those of a man born nearly a century
ago, who differed widely from ourselves in race, nationality,
up-bringing, circumstances, and class,--for he was a Russian nobleman
of the old régime. That some of his feelings and ideas should differ
from our own was inevitable, but the really remarkable thing is that
so much of what he says makes us conscious of oneness with him. He
was accustomed to express himself strongly, and assumed that those
who read his works would wish to understand them and would not
desire to twist his meaning. Those who deal with his work in the way
he advised can certainly obtain a clear view of the subject, as he
understood it. If what he has said is true, in whole or in part, it
is desirable to grasp that truth and, even if he be in error, it is
desirable to understand his meaning before attempting any refutation.
In _What is Art?_ Tolstoy says:
“I have accomplished to the best of my ability this work
which has occupied me for fifteen years, on a subject near to
me--that of art.... I began to write on art fifteen years ago
thinking that when once I undertook the task I should be able
to accomplish it without a break. It proved however that my
views on the matter were so far from clear that I could not
arrange them in a way that satisfied me. From that time I have
never ceased to think on the subject, and I have recommenced
writing on it six or seven times; but each time, after writing
a considerable part of it, I have found myself unable to bring
the work to a satisfactory conclusion, and have had to put it
aside.” (p. 321)
That was written in 1897, and the fifteen years mentioned bring us
nearly back to the time when his _Confession_ was written, and the
statement indicates that all the earlier essays in this book, while
expressing some part of his thought, fail to elucidate the matter as
he desired, and it is only in _What is Art?_ that we must look for
the final conclusions that solved the matter to his satisfaction.
PART XV
PREFACE TO POLENZ’S NOVEL “DER BÜTTNERBAUER”
W. VON POLENZ was born in 1861 and died in 1903. His novels, _Der
Pfarrer von Breitendorf_ (1893), _Der Büttnerbauer_ (1895), are
descriptions of village life. His _Grabenhäger_, _Thekla Lüdekind_
and _Liebe ist ewig_ (1900) describe the life of the landowning and
town classes. _Wurzellocker_ (1902) describes a literary society.
_Note by A. M._
“For you will find, if you think deeply of it, that the chief
of all the curses of this unhappy age is the universal gabble
of its fools, and of the flocks that follow them, rendering
the quiet voices of the wise men of all past time inaudible.
This is, first, the result of the invention of printing,
and of the easy power and extreme pleasure to vain persons
of seeing themselves in print. When it took a twelvemonth’s
hard work to make a single volume legible, men considered
a little the difference between one book and another; but
now, when not only anybody can get themselves made legible
through any quantity of volumes, in a week, but the doing so
becomes a means of living to them, and they can fill their
stomachs with the foolish foam of their lips, the universal
pestilence of falsehood fills the mind of the world as cicadas
do olive-leaves, and the first necessity for our mental
government is to extricate from among the insectile noise, the
few books and words that are Divine.”
Ruskin, in _Fors Clavigera_, Letter 81.
Last year a friend of mine, in whose taste I have confidence, gave me
a German novel, _Der Büttnerbauer_, by von Polenz to read. I read it
and was astonished that such a work, which appeared a couple of years
ago, was hardly known by anyone.
This novel is not one of those works of imitation-art that are
produced in such enormous quantities in our time, but a really
artistic production. It is not one of those descriptions of events
and of people, destitute of all interest, which are artificially put
together merely because the author, having learned the technique of
artistic descriptions, wants to write a new novel; nor is it one of
those dissertations on a given theme set in the form of a drama or
novel, which also in our day pass as artistic productions: nor does
it belong to the class of works called “decadent,” which particularly
please the modern public just because, resembling the ravings of a
madman, they present something of the nature of rebuses, the guessing
of which forms a pleasant occupation, besides being considered a sign
of refinement.
This novel belongs neither to the first, nor to the second, nor to
the third, of these categories, but is a real work of art, in which
the author says what he feels he must say because he loves what he
is speaking about, and says it not by reflections or hazy allegories
but in the one manner by which an artistic content can be conveyed,
by poetic images, not fantastic extraordinary unintelligible images
with no essential inner connexion one with another, but by the
presentation of the most ordinary simple persons and events united
one with another by an inner artistic necessity.
But not only is this novel a genuine work of art, it is also an
admirable work of art, uniting in a high degree all the three chief
conditions of really good artistic production.
In the first place, its content is important, relating as it does
to the life of the peasantry--that is, to the majority of mankind,
who stand at the basis of every social structure and in our day, not
only in Germany but in all European countries, are enduring trying
alterations of their ancient, age-long condition. (It is remarkable
that almost simultaneously with _Der Büttnerbauer_ there has appeared
a French novel, Réné Bazin’s _La Terre qui meurt_, which is not at
all bad, though far less artistic.)
In the second place, this novel is written with great mastery, in
admirable German, particularly forcible when the author makes his
characters speak the coarse peasant-labourer’s Plattdeutsch.
In the third place, this novel is thoroughly imbued with love of
these people whom the author sets before us.
In one of the chapters, for instance, there is a description of how
after a night passed in drunkenness with his comrades, the husband,
when it is already morning, returns home and knocks at the door.
The wife looks out of the window and recognizes him; she loads him
with abuse and is purposely slow about letting him in. When at last
she opens the door for him, the husband tumbles in and wants to go
into the large living-room, but the wife does not let him, lest the
children should see their father drunk, and she pushes him back. But
he catches hold of the lintel of the door and struggles with her.
Usually a mild man, he suddenly becomes terribly exasperated (the
cause of his exasperation is that, the day before, she had taken out
of his pocket some money his master had given him, and had hidden it)
and in his rage he flings himself upon her, seizes her by the hair,
and demands his money.
“I won’t give it up, I won’t give it up for anything!” says she in
reply to his demands, trying to free herself from him.
Then he, forgetting himself in his anger, strikes her where and as he
can.
“I’ll die before I’ll give it up!” says she.
“You won’t give it up!” he answers, knocking her off her feet and
falling on her himself, while continuing to demand his money. Not
receiving a reply he, in his mad drunken anger, wants to throttle
her. But the sight of blood which trickles from under her hair and
flows over her forehead and nose, causes him to stop. He becomes
frightened at what he has done and, letting go of her, staggers and
falls down on his bed.
The scene is truthful and terrible. But the author loves his
protagonists and adds one small detail which suddenly illuminates
everything with such a vivid ray as compels the reader not only to
pity, but also to love these people, despite their coarseness and
cruelty. The wife who has been beaten comes to herself, rises from
the floor, wipes her bleeding head with the hem of her skirt, feels
her limbs and, opening the door leading to the crying children,
quiets them, and then seeks her husband with her eyes. He is lying on
the bed as he has fallen, but his head has slipped from the pillow.
The wife walks over to him, carefully raises his head on the pillow,
and after that adjusts her dress and picks off some of her hair that
had been pulled out.
Dozens of pages of discussions would not have said all that is said
by this detail. Here at once the reader is shown the consciousness,
educated by tradition, of conjugal duty and the triumph of a decision
maintained--not to give up the money needed, not for herself but for
the family; here also is the offence, forgiveness of the beating,
and pity, and if not love, at least the memory of love for her
husband, the father of her children. Nor is that all. Such a detail,
illuminating the inner life of this woman and this man, lights up
for the reader the inner life of millions of such husbands and wives
who have lived or are now living, and not only teaches respect and
love for these people who are crushed by toil, but compels us to
consider why and wherefore they, strong in soul and body, with such
possibilities in them of good loving life, are so neglected, crushed,
and ignorant.
And such truly artistic traits, which are revealed only by love of
what the author describes, are met with in every chapter of this
novel.
It is undoubtedly a beautiful work of art, as all who read it will
agree. And yet it appeared three years ago, and, though translated
into Russian in the _Messenger of Europe_, has passed unnoticed both
in Russia and in Germany. I have asked several literary Germans
whom I have met recently about this novel--they had heard Polenz’s
name but had not read his book, though they had all read the last
novels of Zola, the last stories by Kipling, and the plays of Ibsen,
d’Annunzio, and even of Maeterlinck.
Some twenty years ago Matthew Arnold wrote an admirable article
on the purpose of criticism.[134] In his opinion the purpose of
criticism is to find among all that has been written, whenever and
wherever it may be, that which is most important and good, and to
direct the attention of readers to this that is important and good.
In our time, when readers are deluged with newspapers, periodicals,
books, and by the profusion of advertisements, not only does such
criticism seem to me essential, but the whole future culture of
the educated class of our European world depends on whether such
criticism appears and acquires authority.
The over-production of any kind of article is harmful; but the
over-production of articles which are not an aim but a means is
particularly harmful when people consider this means to be an aim.
Horses and carriages as means of conveyance, clothing and houses as
means of protection against changes of weather, good food to maintain
the strength of one’s organism, are very useful. But as soon as
men begin to regard the possession of means as an end in itself,
considering it good to have as many horses, clothes, and houses, and
as much food as possible, such articles become not only useless but
simply harmful. And this has come about with book-production among
the well-to-do circle of people of our European society. Printing,
which is undoubtedly useful for the great masses of uneducated
people, among well-to-do people has long ago become the chief organ
for the dissemination of ignorance and not of enlightenment.
It is easy to convince oneself of this. Books, periodicals, and
especially newspapers, have become in our time great financial
undertakings for the success of which the largest possible number of
purchasers is required. But the interests and tastes of the largest
number of purchasers are always low and vulgar, and so for the
success of the productions of the press it is necessary that these
productions should correspond to the demands of this great mass of
purchasers, that is, that they should treat of mean interests and
correspond to vulgar tastes. And the press fully satisfies these
demands, having ample opportunity of doing so since among those who
work for the press there are many more with the same mean interests
and coarse tastes as the public than there are men with lofty
interests and refined taste. And since with the diffusion of printing
and the commercial methods applied to newspapers, periodicals, and
books, these people receive good pay for matter that they supply
corresponding to the demands of the masses, there appears that
terrible ever increasing and increasing deluge of printed paper,
which by its quantity alone, not to speak of the harmfulness of its
contents, forms a vast obstacle to enlightenment.
If in our day a clever young man of the people, wishing to educate
himself, is given access to all books, periodicals, and newspapers,
and the choice of his reading is left to himself, he will, if he
reads for ten years assiduously every day, in all probability read
nothing but stupid and immoral books. It is as improbable that
he will strike on a good book as it would be that he should find
a marked pea in a bushel of peas. What is worst of all is that,
continually reading bad books, he will more and more pervert his
understanding and his taste, so that when he does come on a good work
he will either be quite unable to understand it or will understand it
perversely.
Besides this, thanks to accident or to masterly advertisement, some
bad works, such, for instance, as _The Christian_ by Hall Caine, a
novel false in its content and inartistic, which has been sold to
the extent of a million copies, obtains, like Odol or Pears’ Soap, a
great notoriety not justified by its merits. And this great publicity
causes an ever greater and greater number of people to read such
books, and the fame of an insignificant, or often harmful, book grows
and grows like a snowball, and in the heads of the great majority of
men an ever greater and greater confusion of ideas forms, also like a
snowball, involving complete incapacity to understand the qualities
of literary productions. And therefore in proportion to the greater
and greater diffusion of newspapers, periodicals, books, and printing
in general, the level of the quality of what is printed falls lower
and lower, and the great mass of the so-called educated public is
ever more and more immersed in the most hopeless, self-satisfied, and
therefore incurable, ignorance.
Within my own memory, during the last fifty years, this striking
debasement of the taste and common sense of the reading public
has occurred. One may trace this debasement in all branches of
literature, but I will indicate only some notable instances best
known to me. In Russian poetry, for instance, after Púshkin and
Lérmontov (Tyútchev is generally forgotten) poetic fame passes
first to the very doubtful poets, Máykov, Polónski, and Fet, then
to Nekrásov, who was quite destitute of the poetic gift, then to
the artificial and prosaic versifier, Alexéy Tolstóy, then to the
monotonous and weak Nádson, then to the quite ungifted Apúkhtin, and
after that everything becomes confused and versifiers appear whose
name is legion, who do not even know what poetry is, or the meaning
of what they write, or why they write.
Another astonishing example is that of the English prose writers.
From the great Dickens we descend, first to George Eliot, then to
Thackeray, from Thackeray to Trollope, and then already there begin
the indifferent fabrications of Kipling, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard,
and so forth. The same thing is yet more striking in American
literature. After the great galaxy of Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell,
Whittier and others, suddenly everything crumbles and there appear
beautiful publications with beautiful illustrations, but with stories
and novels it is impossible to read because of their lack of any
content.
In our time the ignorance of the educated crowd has reached such a
pass that all the really great thinkers, poets, and prose writers,
both of ancient times and of the nineteenth century, are considered
obsolete, and no longer satisfy the lofty and refined demands of
the new men; it is all regarded with contempt or with a smile of
condescension. The immoral, coarse, inflated, disconnected babble of
Nietzsche is recognised as the last word of the philosophy of our
day, and the senseless artificial arrangements of words in various
decadent poems united by measure and rhythm, is regarded as poetry of
the highest order. In all the theatres pieces are given the meaning
of which is unknown to anyone, even to the authors, and novels that
have no content and no artistic merit are printed and circulated by
millions, under the guise of artistic productions.
“What shall I read to supplement my education?” asks a young man or
girl who has finished his or her studies at the high-school.
The same question is put by a man of the people who has learned
to read and to understand what he reads, and is seeking true
enlightenment.
To answer such questions the naïve attempts made to interrogate
prominent men as to which they consider to be the best hundred books
is of course insufficient.
Nor is the matter helped by the classification existing in our
European society, and tacitly accepted by all, which divides writers
into first, second, and third class, and so on--into those of
genius, those who are very talented, and those simply good. Such a
division, far from helping a true understanding of the excellences of
literature, and the search for what is good amid the sea of what is
bad, still more confuses this aim. To say nothing of the fact that
this division into classes is often incorrect and maintained only
because it was made long ago and is accepted by everybody, such a
division is harmful, because writers acknowledged to be first-class
have written some very bad things, and writers of the lowest class
have produced some excellent things. So that a man who believes
in the division of writers into classes, and thinks everything by
first-class writers to be admirable, and everything by writers of
the lower class or those quite unknown, to be weak, will only become
confused, and deprive himself of much that is useful and truly
enlightening.
Only real criticism can reply to that most important question of our
day, put by the youth of the educated class who seeks education, and
by the man of the people who seeks enlightenment--not such criticism
as now exists, which sets itself the task of praising such works as
have obtained notoriety, and devising foggy philosophic-esthetic
theories to justify them; and not criticism that makes it its task
more or less wittily to ridicule bad works or works proceeding
from a different camp; still less such criticism as has functioned
and still functions in Russia, and sets itself the aim of deducing
the direction of the movement of our whole society from some types
depicted by certain writers, or in general of finding opportunities
to express particular economic and political opinions under guise of
discussing literary productions.
To that enormously important question, “What, of all that has been
written, is one to read?” only real criticism can furnish a reply:
criticism which, as Matthew Arnold says, sets itself the task of
bringing to the front and pointing out to people all that is best
both in former and in contemporary writers.
On whether such disinterested criticism, which understands and loves
art and is independent of any party, makes its appearance or not, and
on whether its authority becomes sufficiently established for it to
be stronger than mercenary advertisement, depends, in my opinion, the
decision of the question whether the last rays of enlightenment are
to perish in our so-called educated European society without having
reached the masses of the people, or whether they will revive, as
they did in the Middle Ages, and reach the great mass of the people
who are now without any enlightenment.
The fact that the mass of the public do not know of this admirable
novel of Polenz’s any more than they do of many other admirable works
which are drowned in the sea of printed rubbish, while senseless,
insignificant, and even simply nasty, literary productions are
discussed from every aspect, invariably praised, and sold by millions
of copies, has evoked in me these thoughts, and I avail myself of
the opportunity, which will hardly present itself to me again, of
expressing them, though it be but briefly.
_1902._
PART XVI
AN AFTERWORD, BY TOLSTOY, TO CHEKHOV’S STORY, “DARLING”
There is profound meaning in the story in the Book of Numbers, which
tells how Balak, king of the Moabites, sent for Balaam to curse the
people of Israel who had come to his borders. Balak promised Balaam
many gifts for his service; and Balaam, being tempted, went to Balak,
but was stopped on the way by an angel who was seen by his ass but
whom Balaam did not see. In spite of this Balaam went on to Balak and
went with him up a mountain, where an altar had been prepared with
calves and lambs slaughtered in readiness for the imprecation. Balak
waited for the curse to be pronounced, but instead of cursing them
Balaam blessed the people of Israel.
_Ch. XXIII, v. 11._ “And Balak said unto Balaam, What hast thou done
unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast
blessed them altogether.
_v. 12._ “And he answered and said, Must I not take heed to speak
that which the Lord putteth in my mouth?
_v. 13._ “And Balak said unto him, Come with me unto another place
... and curse me them from thence.”
And he took him to another place, where also altars had been prepared.
But again Balaam, instead of cursing, blessed them.
And so it was a third time.
_Chapter XXIV, v. 10._ “And Balak’s anger was kindled against Balaam,
and he smote his hands together; and Balak said unto Balaam, I called
thee to curse mine enemies, and thou hast blessed them these three
times. Therefore now flee thou to thy place: I thought to promote
thee unto great honour; and, lo, the Lord hath kept thee back from
honour.” And so Balaam departed without receiving the gifts, because
instead of cursing Balak’s enemies he had blessed them.
What happened to Balaam very often happens to true poets and artists.
Tempted by Balak’s promises of popularity, or by false views
suggested to them, the poet does not even see the angel that bars his
way whom the ass sees, and he wishes to curse but yet he blesses.
This is just what happened with the true poet and artist Chékhov when
he wrote his charming story, _Darling_.
The author evidently wanted to laugh at this pitiful creature--as he
judged her with his intellect, not with his heart--this “Darling,”
who, after sharing Kúkin’s troubles about his theatre, and then
immersing herself in the interests of the timber business, under the
influence of the veterinary surgeon considers the struggle against
bovine tuberculosis to be the most important matter in the world, and
is finally absorbed in questions of grammar and the interests of the
little school-boy in the big cap. Kúkin’s name is ridiculous, and
so even is his illness and the telegram announcing his death. The
timber-dealer with his sedateness is ridiculous, and the veterinary
surgeon and the boy are ridiculous; but the soul of “Darling,” with
her capacity to devote herself with her whole being to the one she
loves, is not ridiculous but wonderful and holy.
I think that in the mind though not in the heart of the author when
he wrote _Darling_, there was a dim idea of the new woman, of her
equality of rights with man; of woman, developed, learned, working
independently, as well as man if not better, for the benefit of
society; of the woman who has raised and insists upon the woman
question; and in beginning to write _Darling_ he wanted to show what
woman ought not to be. The Balak of public opinion invited Chékhov
to curse the weak, submissive, undeveloped woman, devoted to man, and
Chékhov ascended the mountain, and the calves and sheep were laid
upon the altar, but when he began to speak, the author blessed what
he had meant to curse. I, at any rate, despite the wonderful gay
humour of the whole work, cannot read without tears some passages of
this beautiful story. I am touched by the description of the complete
devotion with which she loved Kúkin and all that he cared for, and
also the timber-dealer, and also the veterinary surgeon, and yet more
by her sufferings when she was left alone and had no one to love, and
by the account of how finally with all the strength of her womanly
and motherly feeling (which she had never had the opportunity to
expend on children of her own) she devoted her unbounded love to the
future man, the school-boy in the big cap.
The author makes her love the ridiculous Kúkin, the insignificant
timber-dealer, and the unpleasant veterinary surgeon; but love is not
less sacred whether its object be a Kúkin or a Spinoza, a Pascal or
a Schiller, whether its object changes as rapidly as in the case of
_Darling_, or remains the same for a whole lifetime.
I happened long ago to read in the _Nóvoe Vrémya_ an excellent
feuilleton by M. Ata about women. In this feuilleton the author
expressed a remarkably wise and profound thought. “Women,” he says,
“try to prove to us that they can do everything we men can do. I not
only do not dispute this, but am ready to agree that women can do all
that men do and perhaps even do it better, but the trouble is that
men cannot do anything even approximately approaching what women can
accomplish.”
Yes, that is certainly so, and it is true not only of the bearing,
nursing, and early education of children, but men cannot do what is
loftiest, best, and brings man nearest to God--the work of loving,
of complete devotion to the beloved, which has been so well and
naturally done, and is done, and will be done, by good women. What
would become of the world, what would become of us men, if women had
not that faculty and did not exercise it? Without women doctors,
women telegraphists, women lawyers and scientists and authoresses,
we might get on, but without mothers, helpers, friends, comforters,
who love in man all that is best in him--without such women it
would be hard to live in the world. Christ would be without Mary or
Magdalene, Francis of Assisi would have lacked Claire, there would
have been no wives of the Decembrists in their exile, nor would the
Doukhobors have had their wives, who did not restrain their husbands
but supported them in their martyrdom for truth. There would not have
been those thousands and thousands of unknown women--the very best
(as the unknown generally are)--comforters of the drunken, the weak,
and the dissolute, who more than anyone else need the consolation of
love. In that love, whether directed to Kúkin or to Christ, is the
chief, grand strength of women, irreplaceable by anything else.
What a wonderful misconception is the whole so-called woman’s
question, which has obsessed (as is natural with every empty idea)
the majority of women and even of men!
“Woman wants to improve herself!” What can be more legitimate or more
just than that?
But the business of a woman by her very vocation is different from
a man’s. And therefore the ideal of perfection for a woman cannot
be the same as the ideal for a man. Let us grant that we do not
know in what that ideal consists, but in any case it is certainly
not the ideal of perfection for a man. And yet to the attainment
of that masculine ideal all the absurd and unwholesome activity of
the fashionable woman’s movement, which now so confuses women, is
directed.
I am afraid that Chékhov when writing _Darling_ was under the
influence of this misunderstanding.
He, like Balaam, intended to curse, but the God of poetry forbade
him to do so and commanded him to bless, and he blessed, and
involuntarily clothed that sweet creature in such a wonderful
radiance that she will always remain a type of what woman can be in
order to be happy herself and to cause the happiness of those with
whom her fate is united.
This story is so excellent because its effect was unintentional.
I learned to ride a bicycle in the great Moscow riding-school,
in which army-divisions are reviewed. At the other end of the
riding-school a lady was learning to ride. I thought of how to avoid
incommoding that lady and began looking at her. And, looking at
her, I began involuntarily to draw nearer and nearer to her, and
although she, noticing the danger, hastened to get out of the way,
I rode against her and upset her, that is to say, I did exactly the
opposite of what I wished to do, simply because I had concentrated my
attention upon her.
The same thing has happened with Chékhov, but in an inverse sense: he
wanted to knock down “Darling,” and directing the close attention of
a poet upon her, he has exalted her.
PART XVII
SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA
I
An article by Ernest Howard Crosby[135] on Shakespeare’s attitude
towards the people has suggested to me the idea of expressing the
opinion I formed long ago about Shakespeare’s works, an opinion quite
contrary to that established throughout the European world. Recalling
the struggle with doubts, the pretences, and the efforts to attune
myself to Shakespeare, that I went through owing to my complete
disagreement with the general adulation, and supposing that many
people have experienced and are experiencing the same perplexity,
I think it may be of some use definitely and frankly to express
this disagreement of mine with the opinion held by the majority,
especially as the conclusions I came to on examining the causes of
my disagreement are, it seems to me, not devoid of interest and
significance.
My disagreement with the established opinion about Shakespeare is not
the result of a casual mood or of a lighthearted attitude towards
the subject, but it is the result of repeated and strenuous efforts,
extending over many years, to harmonise my views with the opinions
about Shakespeare accepted throughout the whole educated Christian
world.
I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I
had expected to receive a great esthetic pleasure, but on reading,
one after another, the works regarded as his best, _King Lear_,
_Romeo and Juliet_, _Hamlet_, and _Macbeth_, not only did I not
experience pleasure but I felt an insuperable repulsion and tedium,
and a doubt whether I lacked sense, since I considered works
insignificant and simply bad, which are regarded as the summit of
perfection by the whole educated world; or whether the importance
that educated world attributed to Shakespeare’s works lacks sense. My
perplexity was increased by the fact that I have always keenly felt
the beauties of poetry in all its forms: why then did Shakespeare’s
works, recognised by the whole world as works of artistic genius, not
only fail to please me, but even seem detestable? I long distrusted
my judgment, and to check my conclusions, during fifty years I
repeatedly set to work to read Shakespeare in all possible forms--in
Russian, in English, and in German in Schlegel’s translation, as
I was advised to. I read the tragedies, comedies, and historical
plays, several times over, and I invariably experienced the same
feelings--repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. Now, before writing
this article, as an old man of 75,[136] wishing once more to check my
conclusions, I have again read the whole of Shakespeare, including
the historical plays, the _Henrys_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _The
Tempest_, and _Cymbeline_, etc., and have experienced the same
feeling still more strongly, no longer with perplexity but with a
firm indubitable conviction that the undisputed fame Shakespeare
enjoys as a great genius, which makes writers of our time imitate him
and readers and spectators, distorting their esthetic and ethical
sense, seek non-existent qualities in him, is a great evil--as every
falsehood is.
Although I know that the majority of people have such faith in
Shakespeare’s greatness that on reading this opinion of mine they
will not even admit the possibility of its being correct, and will
not pay any attention to it, I shall nevertheless try as best I can
to show why I think Shakespeare cannot be admitted to be either a
great writer of genius, or even an average one.
For this purpose I will take one of the most admired of Shakespeare’s
dramas--_King Lear_, in enthusiastic praise of which most of the
critics agree.
“The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of
Shakespeare,” says Dr. Johnson. “There is perhaps no play which keeps
the attention so strongly fixed, which so much agitates our passions
and interests our curiosity.”
“We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about
it,” says Hazlitt. “All that we can say must fall far short of the
subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to
give a description of the play itself or of its effects upon the mind
is mere impertinence; yet we must say something. It is then the best
of Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was most in
earnest.”
“If the originality of invention did not so much stamp almost
every play of Shakespeare,” says Hallam, “that to name one as the
most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that
this great prerogative of genius was exercised above all in Lear.
It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than _Macbeth_
or _Othello_, or even more than _Hamlet_, but the fable is better
constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of
the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two.”
“King Lear may be recognised as the perfect model of the dramatic art
of the whole world,” says Shelley.
“I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur”; says
Swinburne. “There are one or two figures in the world of his work of
which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another
of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts
is not one for talk. The niche set apart for them to inhabit in our
secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common
day. There are chapels in the cathedral of man’s highest art, as in
that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and feet
of the world. Love and Death and Memory keep charge for us in silence
of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final
miracle and transcendent gift of poetry that it can add to the number
of these and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names
and memories of its own creation.”
“Lear, c’est l’occasion de Cordelia,” says Victor Hugo. “La maternité
de la fille sur le père; sujet profonde; la maternité vénérable entre
toutes, si admirablement traduite par la légend de cette romaine,
nourrice, au fond d’un cachot, de son père veillard. La jeune
mammelle près de la barbe blanche, il n’est point de spectacle plus
sacré. Cette mammelle filiale c’est Cordelia.
“Une fois cette figure rêvée et trouvée Shakespeare a créé son
drame.... Shakespeare, portant Cordelia dans sa pensée, a créé cette
tragédie comme un dieu, qui ayant une aurore à placer, ferait tout
exprès un monde pour l’y mettre.”[137]
“In _Lear_ Shakespeare’s vision sounded the abyss of horror to its
very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor
faintness at the sight,” says Brandes. “On the threshold of this
work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as on the threshold of the
Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling-frescoes by Michael Angelo, only
that the suffering here is far more intense, the wail wilder, the
harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the discords of
despair.”
Such are the judgments of the critics on this drama, and therefore,
I think I am justified in choosing it as an example of Shakespeare’s
best plays.
I will try as impartially as possible to give the contents of the
play, and then show why it is not the height of perfection, as it is
said to be by the learned critics, but is something quite different.
II
The tragedy of Lear begins with a scene in which two courtiers,
Kent and Gloucester, are talking. Kent, pointing to a young man who
is present, asks Gloucester whether that is his son. Gloucester
says that he has often blushed to acknowledge the young man as his
son, but has now ceased to do so. Kent says: “I cannot conceive
you.” Then Gloucester, in the presence of his son, says: “Sir,
this young fellow’s mother could; whereupon she grew round-wombed,
and had, indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband
for her bed....” He goes on to say that he had another son who was
legitimate, but “though this knave came somewhat saucily before he
was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his
making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.”
Such is the introduction. Not to speak of the vulgarity of these
words of Gloucester, they are also out of place in the mouth of a
man whom it is intended to represent as a noble character. It is
impossible to agree with the opinion of some critics that these
words are put into Gloucester’s mouth to indicate the contempt for
illegitimacy from which Edmund suffered. Were that so, it would in
the first place have been necessary to make the father express the
contempt felt by people in general, and secondly Edmund, in his
monologue about the injustice of those who despise him for his birth,
should have referred to his father’s words. But this is not done,
and therefore these words of Gloucester’s at the very beginning of
the piece, were merely for the purpose of informing the public in
an amusing way of the fact that Gloucester has a legitimate and an
illegitimate son.
After this trumpets are blown, King Lear enters with his daughters
and sons-in-law and makes a speech about being aged and wishing
to stand aside from affairs and divide his kingdom between his
daughters. In order to know how much he should give to each daughter,
he announces that to the daughter who tells him she loves him most
he will give most. The eldest daughter, Goneril, says that there
are no words to express her love, that she loves him “dearer than
eyesight, space, and liberty,” and she loves him so much that it
“makes her breath poor.” King Lear immediately allots on the map to
this daughter her share, with fields, woods, rivers and meadows, and
puts the same question to his second daughter. The second daughter,
Regan, says that her sister has correctly expressed her own feelings,
but insufficiently. She, Regan, loves her father so that everything
is abhorrent to her except his love. The king rewards this daughter
also, and asks his youngest, favourite daughter, in whom, according
to his expression, “the wine of France and milk of Burgundy strive
to be interess’d”--that is, who is courted by the King of France and
the Duke of Burgundy--asks Cordelia how she loves him. Cordelia, who
personifies all the virtues as the two elder sisters personify all
the vices, says quite inappropriately, as if on purpose to vex her
father, that though she loves and honours him and is grateful to him,
yet, if she marries, her love will not all belong to him, but she
will love her husband also.
On hearing these words the king is beside himself, and immediately
curses his favourite daughter with most terrible and strange
maledictions, saying, for instance, that he will love a man who
eats his own children as much as he now loves her who was once his
daughter.
The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and reliev’d,
As thou, my sometime daughter.
The courtier, Kent, takes Cordelia’s part, and, wishing to bring the
king to reason, upbraids him with his injustice and speaks reasonably
about the evil of flattery. Lear, without attending to Kent, banishes
him under threat of death, and calling to him Cordelia’s two suitors,
the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, proposes to each in turn
to take Cordelia without a dowry. The Duke of Burgundy says plainly
that he will not take Cordelia without a dowry, but the King of
France takes her without dowry, and leads her away. After this the
elder sisters, there and then conversing with one another, prepare to
offend their father who had endowed them. So ends the first scene.
Not to mention the inflated, characterless style in which Lear--like
all Shakespeare’s kings--talks, the reader or spectator cannot
believe that a king, however old and stupid, could believe the words
of the wicked daughters with whom he had lived all their lives, and
not trust his favourite daughter, but curse and banish her; therefore
the reader or spectator cannot share the feeling of the persons who
take part in this unnatural scene.
Scene II begins with Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son,
soliloquising on the injustice of men who concede rights and respect
to a legitimate son but deny them to an illegitimate son, and he
determines to ruin Edgar and usurp his place. For this purpose he
forges a letter to himself, as from Edgar, in which the latter
is made to appear to wish to kill his father. Having waited till
Gloucester appears, Edmund, as if against his own desire, shows him
this letter, and the father immediately believes that his son Edgar,
whom he tenderly loves, wishes to kill him. The father goes away,
Edgar enters, and Edmund suggests to him that his father for some
reason wishes to kill him. Edgar also at once believes him, and flees
from his father.
The relations between Gloucester and his two sons and the feelings
of these characters, are as unnatural as Lear’s relation to his
daughters, if not more so; and therefore it is even more difficult
for the spectator to put himself into the mental condition of
Gloucester and his sons and to sympathise with them, than it was in
regard to Lear and his daughters.
In Scene IV the banished Kent, disguised, so that Lear does not
recognise him, presents himself to the king who is now staying with
Goneril. Lear asks who he is, to which Kent, one does not know why,
replies in a jocular tone quite inappropriate to his position: “A
very honest-hearted fellow and as poor as the King.” “If thou be’st
as poor for a subject as he’s for a King, thou art poor enough,”
replies Lear. “How old art thou?” “Not so young, sir, to love a woman
for singing, nor so old as to dote on her for anything,” to which the
King replies that if he likes him not worse after dinner, he will let
him remain in his service.
This talk fits in neither with Lear’s position nor with Kent’s
relation to him, and is evidently put into their mouths only because
the author thought it witty and amusing.
Goneril’s steward appears and is rude to Lear, for which Kent trips
him up. The King, who still does not recognise Kent, gives him
money for this, and takes him into his service. After this the fool
appears, and a talk begins between the fool and the King, quite out
of accord with the situation, leading to nothing, prolonged, and
intended to be amusing. Thus for instance the fool says, “Give me an
egg, and I’ll give thee two crowns.” The King asks what crowns they
shall be. “Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the
meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’the
middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass on thy back
o’er the dirt; thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou
gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him
be whipped that first finds it so.”
In this manner prolonged conversations go on, producing in the
spectator or reader a sense of wearisome discomfort such as one
experiences when listening to dull jokes.
This conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Goneril. She
demands that her father should diminish his retinue: instead of a
hundred courtiers he should be satisfied with fifty. On hearing this
proposal Lear is seized with terrible, unnatural rage, and asks:
Does any here know me? This is not Lear!
Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied. Ha! Waking? ’tis not so,
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
and so forth.
Meanwhile the fool unceasingly interpolates his humourless jokes.
Goneril’s husband appears and wishes to appease Lear, but Lear curses
Goneril, invoking sterility upon her, or the birth of such a child as
would repay with ridicule and contempt her maternal cares, and would
thereby show her all the horror and suffering caused by a child’s
ingratitude.
These words, which express a genuine feeling, might have been
touching had only this been said, but they are lost among long
high-flown speeches Lear continually utters quite inappropriately.
Now he calls down blasts and fogs on his daughter’s head, now desires
that curses should “pierce every sense about thee,” or addressing
his own eyes, says that if they weep he will pluck them out and cast
them, with the waters that they lose, “to temper clay.”
After this, Lear sends Kent, whom he still does not recognise, to his
other daughter, and notwithstanding the despair he has just expressed
he talks with the fool and incites him to jests. The jests continue
to be mirthless, and besides the unpleasant feeling akin to shame
that one feels at unsuccessful witticisms, they are so long-drawn-out
as to be wearisome. So for instance the fool asks the King, “Canst
thou tell why one’s nose stands i’ the middle of one’s face?” Lear
says he does not know.
“Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side one’s nose: that what a man
cannot smell out he may spy into.”
“Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the fool asks.
“No.”
“Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.”
“Why?”
“Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and
leave his horns without a case.”
“Be my horses ready?” asks Lear.
“Thy asses are gone about ’em. The reason why the seven stars are no
more than seven is a pretty reason.”
“Because they are not eight?” says Lear.
“Yes, indeed; thou wouldst make a good fool,” says the fool, and so
forth.
After this long scene a gentleman comes and announces that the horses
are ready. The fool says:
She that’s a maid now and laughs at my departure,
Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter,
and goes off.
Scene I of Act II begins with the villain Edmund persuading his
brother, when his father enters, to pretend that they are fighting
with their swords. Edgar agrees, though it is quite incomprehensible
why he should do so. The father finds them fighting. Edgar runs away
and Edmund scratches his own arm to draw blood, and persuades his
father that Edgar was using charms to kill his father and had wanted
Edmund to help him, but that he had refused to do so and Edgar had
then thrown himself upon him and wounded him in the arm. Gloucester
believes everything, curses Edgar, and transfers all the rights of
his elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The Duke of
Cornwall, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.
In Scene II before Gloucester’s castle, Lear’s new servant Kent,
still unrecognised by Lear, begins without any reason to abuse
Oswald (Goneril’s steward), calling him “a knave, a rascal, an eater
of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; ... the son and heir
of a mongrel bitch,” and so on. Then drawing his sword he demands
that Oswald should fight him, saying that he will make of him a “sop
o’ the moonshine,” words no commentator has been able to explain,
and when he is stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest
abuse, saying, for instance, that he, Oswald, has been made by a
tailor, because “a stone-cutter, or a painter, could not have made
him so ill, though they had been but two hours at the trade.” He also
says that, if he is allowed, he will tread this unbolted villain into
mortar, and daub the wall of a privy with him.
And in this way Kent, whom nobody recognises,--though both the king
and the Duke of Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present,
should know him well,--continues to brawl, in the character of a new
servant of Lear’s, until he is seized and put in the stocks.
Scene III takes place on a heath. Edgar, flying from his father’s
pursuit, hides himself in a tree, and he tells the audience what
kinds of lunatics there are, beggars who go about naked, thrust pins
and wooden pricks into their bodies, and scream with wild voices and
enforce charity, and he says that he intends to play the part of
such a lunatic in order to escape from the pursuit. Having told the
audience this he goes off.
Scene IV is again before Gloucester’s castle. Lear and the fool
enter. Lear sees Kent in the stocks and, still not recognising him,
is inflamed with anger against those who have dared so to treat his
messenger, and he calls for the Duke and Regan. The fool goes on
with his queer sayings. Lear with difficulty restrains his anger.
The Duke and Regan enter. Lear complains of Goneril, but Regan
justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril and, when Regan tells
him he had better go back to her sister, he is indignant and says:
“Ask her forgiveness?” and goes on his knees, showing how improper
it would be for him abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity
from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the most terrible
curses, and asks who has dared to put his messenger in the stocks.
Before Regan can answer Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more angry
and again curses Goneril, and when he is told that the Duke had
ordered the stocks he says nothing, for at this moment Regan tells
him that she cannot receive him now and that he had better return
with Goneril, and in a month’s time she will herself receive him but
not with a hundred but with only fifty followers. Lear again curses
Goneril and does not want to go with her, still hoping that Regan
will receive him with all his hundred followers, but Regan says she
will only accept him with twenty-five, and then Lear decides to go
back with Goneril who allows fifty. Then, when Goneril says that
even twenty-five are too many, Lear utters a long discourse about
the superfluous and sufficient being conditional conceptions, and
says that if a man is allowed only as much as is necessary he is no
different from a beast. And here Lear, or rather the actor who plays
Lear, addresses himself to a finely-dressed woman in the audience,
and says that she too does not need her finery, which does not keep
her warm. After this he becomes madly angry, says that he will do
something terrible to be revenged upon his daughters but will not
weep, and so he departs. The noise of a storm that is commencing is
heard.
Such is the second Act, full of unnatural occurrences, and still more
unnatural speeches not flowing from the speaker’s circumstances, and
finishing with the scene between Lear and his daughters which might
be powerful if it were not overloaded with speeches most naïvely
absurd and unnatural and quite inappropriate moreover, put in Lear’s
mouth. Exceedingly touching would be Lear’s vacillations between
pride, anger, and hope of concessions from his daughters, were they
not spoilt by these verbose absurdities which he utters about being
ready to divorce Regan’s dead mother should Regan not be glad to see
him, or about evoking “fen-sucked fogs” to infect his daughter, or
about the heavens being obliged to protect old men as they themselves
are old, and much else.
Act III begins with thunder, lightning, and storm--a special kind of
storm such as there never was before, as one of the characters in the
play says. On the heath a gentleman tells Kent that Lear, expelled by
his daughters from their houses, is wandering about the heath alone,
tearing his hair and throwing it to the winds, and that only the fool
is with him. Kent tells the gentleman that the Dukes have quarrelled,
and that a French army has landed at Dover, and having communicated
this, he despatches the gentleman to Dover to meet Cordelia.
Scene II of Act III also takes place on the heath. Lear walks about
the heath and utters words intended to express despair: he wishes
the winds to blow so hard that they (the winds) should crack their
cheeks, and that the rain should drench everything, and that the
lightning should singe his white head and thunder strike the earth
flat and destroy all the germs “that make ingrateful man!” The fool
keeps uttering yet more senseless words. Kent enters. Lear says that,
for some reason, in this storm all criminals shall be discovered
and exposed. Kent, still not recognised by Lear, persuades Lear to
take shelter in a hovel. The fool thereupon utters a prophecy quite
unrelated to the situation, and they all go off.
Scene III is again transferred to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester
tells Edmund that the French king has already landed with an army and
intends to help Lear. On learning this, Edmund decides to accuse his
father of treason in order to supplant him.
Scene IV is again on the heath in front of the hovel. Kent invites
Lear to enter the hovel, but Lear replies that he has no reason
to shelter himself from the storm, that he does not feel it as
the tempest in his mind, aroused by his daughter’s ingratitude,
overpowers all else. This true feeling, if expressed in simple words,
might evoke sympathy, but amid his inflated and incessant ravings it
is hard to notice it and it loses its significance.
The hovel to which Lear is led turns out to be the same that Edgar
has entered disguised as a madman, that is to say, without clothes.
Edgar comes out of the hovel and, though they all know him, nobody
recognises him any more than they recognise Kent, and Edgar, Lear,
and the fool, begin to talk nonsense which continues with intervals
for six pages. In the midst of this scene Gloucester enters (who also
fails to recognise either Kent or his own son Edgar), and tells them
how his son Edgar wished to kill him.
This scene is again interrupted by one in Gloucester’s castle, during
which Edmund betrays his father and the Duke declares he will be
revenged on Gloucester. The scene again shifts to Lear. Kent, Edgar,
Gloucester, Lear, and the fool, are in a farm-house and are talking.
Edgar says: “Frateretto calls me and tells me, Nero is an angler in
the lake of darkness....” The fool says: “Nuncle, tell me, whether a
madman be a gentleman, or a yeoman?” Lear, who is out of his mind,
says that a madman is a king. The fool says: “No, he’s a yeoman,
that has a gentleman to his son; for he’s a mad yeoman, that sees
his son a gentleman before him.” Lear cries out: “To have a thousand
with red burning spits come hissing in upon them.” And Edgar shrieks
that the foul fiend bites his back. Then the fool utters an adage
that one cannot trust “the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a
boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.” Then Lear imagines that he is trying
his daughters. “Most learned justicer,” says he addressing the naked
Edgar. “Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes!” To this
Edgar says:
Look, where he stands and glares!
Wantonest thou eyes at trial, madam?
Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me!
and the fool sings:
Her boat hath a leak,
And she must not speak
Why she dares not come over to thee.
Edgar again says something, and Kent begs Lear to lie down, but Lear
continues his imaginary trial.
Bring in the evidence.
Thou robed man of justice, take thy place; (_to Edgar_)
And thou, his yoke-fellow of equity, (_to the fool_)
Bench by his side. You are of the commission, (_to Kent_)
Sit you too.
“Pur! the cat is grey,” cries Edgar.
“Arraign her first; ’t is Goneril,” says Lear. “I here take my oath
before this honourable assembly, she kicked the poor King her father.”
_Fool_: Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?
(_addressing a joint-stool_)
_Lear_: And here’s another.... Stop her there! Arms, arms,
sword, fire! Corruption in the place! False justicer,
why hast thou let her ’scape?
and so on.
This raving ends by Lear falling asleep, and Gloucester persuading
Kent, still without recognising him, to take the King to Dover. Kent
and the fool carry Lear off.
The scene changes to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester himself is
accused of treason, and is brought in and bound. The Duke of Cornwall
tears out one of his eyes and stamps on it. Regan says that one eye
is still whole and that this healthy eye is laughing at the other
eye, and urges the Duke to crush it too. The Duke wishes to do so,
but for some reason one of the servants suddenly takes Gloucester’s
part and wounds the Duke. Regan kills the servant. The servant dies
and tells Gloucester that he has still one eye to see that the
evil-doer is punished. The Duke says: “Lest it see more, prevent it:
out, vile jelly!” and tears out Gloucester’s other eye and throws
it on the floor. Here Regan mentions that Edmund has denounced his
father, and Gloucester suddenly understands that he has been deceived
and that Edgar did not wish to kill him.
This ends the third Act. Act IV is again in the open country. Edgar,
still in the guise of a maniac, talks in artificial language about
the perversities of fate and the advantages of a humble lot. Then,
curiously enough, to the very spot on the open heath where he is
comes his father, blind Gloucester, led by an old man, and he too
talks about the perversities of fate in that curious Shakespearean
language the chief peculiarity of which is that the thoughts arise
either from the sound of the words, or by contrast. He tells the old
man who leads him to leave him. The old man says that without eyes
one cannot go alone, because one cannot _see_ the way. Gloucester
says:
“I have no way, and therefore want no _eyes_.”
And he argues that he stumbled when he _saw_ and that our defects
often save us.
“Ah! dear son Edgar,” adds he,
The food of thy abused father’s wrath.
Might I but live to _see_ thee in my touch,
I’d say I had eyes again!
Edgar, naked, in the character of a lunatic, hears this, but does not
disclose himself; he takes the place of the old man who had acted as
guide, and talks with his father, who does not recognise his voice
and believes him to be a madman. Gloucester takes the opportunity to
utter a witticism about “when madmen lead the blind,” and insists
on driving away the old man, obviously not from motives which might
be natural to him at that moment, but merely, when left alone with
Edgar, to enact an imaginary leap over the cliff. Edgar, though he
has only just seen his blinded father and learned that he repents
of having driven him away, utters quite unnecessary sayings, which
Shakespeare might know, having read them in Harsnet’s book,[138] but
which Edgar had no means of becoming acquainted with, and which,
above all, it is quite unnatural for him to utter in his then
condition. He says:
“Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidicut;
Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder;
and Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses
chamber-maids and waiting-women.”
On hearing these words, Gloucester gives Edgar his purse saying:
That I am wretched
Makes thee the happier. Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That braves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.
Having uttered these strange words, the blind Gloucester demands that
Edgar should lead him to a cliff that he does not himself know, but
that hangs over the sea, and they depart.
Scene II of Act IV takes place before the Duke of Albany’s palace.
Goneril is not only cruel but also dissolute. She despises her
husband, and discloses her love to the villain. Edmund, who has
obtained his father’s title of Gloucester. Edmund goes away, and a
conversation takes place between Goneril and her husband. The Duke
of Albany, the only character who shows human feelings, has already
grown dissatisfied with his wife’s treatment of her father and now
definitely takes Lear’s part, but he expresses himself in words which
destroy one’s belief in his feelings. He says that a bear would lick
Lear’s reverence, and that if the heavens do not send their visible
spirits to tame these vile offences, humanity must prey on itself
like monsters, and so forth.
Goneril does not listen to him, and he then begins to denounce her.
He says:
See thyself, devil!
Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid, as in woman.
“O vain fool!” says Goneril.
Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame,
Be-monster not thy feature. Were it my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones:--Howe’er thou art a fiend,
A woman’s shape doth shield thee,
continues the Duke.
After this a messenger enters and announces that the Duke of
Cornwall, wounded by a servant while he was tearing out Gloucester’s
eyes, has died. Goneril is glad, but already anticipates with fear
that Regan, being now a widow, will snatch Edmund from her. This ends
the second scene.
Scene III of Act IV represents the French camp. From a conversation
between Kent and a gentleman, the reader or spectator learns that the
King of France is not in the camp and that Cordelia has received a
letter from Kent and is greatly grieved by what she learns about her
father. The gentleman says that her face reminded one of sunshine and
rain.
Her smiles and tears
Were like a better day: Those happy smilets,
That play’d on her ripe lip, seem’d not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp’d,
and so forth. The gentleman says that Cordelia desires to see her
father, but Kent says that Lear is ashamed to see the daughter he has
treated so badly.
In Scene IV Cordelia, talking with a physician, tells him that Lear
has been seen, and that he is quite mad, wearing on his head a wreath
of various weeds and roaming about, and that she has sent soldiers to
find him, and she adds the wish that all secret medicinal virtues of
the earth may spring to him in her tears, and so forth.
She is told that the forces of the Dukes are approaching; but she is
only concerned about her father, and goes off.
In Scene V of Act IV, which is in Gloucester’s castle, Regan talks
with Oswald, Goneril’s steward, who is carrying a letter from Goneril
to Edmund, and tells him that she also loves Edmund and that as she
is a widow it is better for her to marry him than for Goneril to do
so, and she asks Oswald to persuade her sister of this. Moreover she
tells him that it was very unwise to put out Gloucester’s eyes and
yet to let him live, and therefore she advises Oswald, if he meets
Gloucester, to kill him, and promises him a great reward if he does
so.
In Scene VI Gloucester again appears with his unrecognised son Edgar,
who, now dressed as a peasant, is leading his father to the cliff.
Gloucester is walking along on level ground, but Edgar assures him
that they are with difficulty ascending a steep hill. Gloucester
believes this. Edgar tells his father that the noise of the sea
is audible; Gloucester believes this also. Edgar stops on a level
place and assures his father that he has ascended the cliff and that
below him is a terrible abyss, and he leaves him alone. Gloucester,
addressing the gods, says that he shakes off his affliction as he
could not bear it longer without condemning them, the gods, and
having said this he leaps on the level ground and falls, imagining
that he has jumped over the cliff. Edgar thereupon utters to himself
a yet more confused phrase:
And yet I know not how conceit may rob
The treasury of life, when life itself
Yields to the theft; had he been where he thought,
By this had thought been past,
and he goes up to Gloucester pretending to be again a different man,
and expresses astonishment at the latter not having been killed by
his fall from such a dreadful height. Gloucester believes that he
has fallen, and prepares to die, but he feels that he is alive, and
begins to doubt having fallen. Then Edgar assures him that he really
did jump from a terrible height, and says that the man who was with
him at the top was a fiend, for he had eyes like two full moons, and
a thousand noses, and wavy horns.
Gloucester believes this, and is persuaded that his despair was
caused by the devil, and therefore decides that he will despair no
longer but will quietly await death. Just then Lear enters, for some
reason all covered with wild flowers. He has gone mad, and utters
speeches yet more meaningless than before. He talks about coining
money, about a bow, calls for a clothier’s yard, then he cries out
that he sees a mouse which he wishes to entice with a piece of
cheese, and then he suddenly asks the password of Edgar, who at once
replies with the words, “Sweet Marjoram.” Lear says, “Pass!” and
the blind Gloucester, who did not recognise his son’s or Kent’s,
recognises the King’s voice.
Then the King, after his disconnected utterances, suddenly begins
to speak ironically about flatterers who said “ay and no” like the
theologians and assured him that he could do everything, but when
he got into a storm without shelter, he saw that this was not true;
and then he goes on to say that as all creatures are wanton, and
as Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father than his own
daughters had been to him (though Lear, according to the course of
the play, could know nothing of Edmund’s treatment of Gloucester),
therefore let copulation thrive, especially as he, a King, lacks
soldiers. And thereupon he addresses an imaginary, hypocritically
virtuous lady who acts the prude while at the same time, like an
animal in heat, she is addicted to lust. All women “but to the girdle
do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiend’s ...” and saying this
Lear screams and spits with horror. This monologue is evidently meant
to be addressed by actor to audience, and probably produces an effect
on the stage, but is quite uncalled for in the mouth of Lear--as is
his desire to wipe his hand because it “smells of mortality” when
Gloucester wishes to kiss it. Then Gloucester’s blindness is referred
to, which gives an opportunity for a play of words on eyes and
Cupid’s blindness, and for Lear to say that Gloucester has “no eyes
in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a _heavy_
case, your purse in a _light_.” Then Lear declaims a monologue on the
injustice of legal judgment, which is quite out of place in his mouth
seeing that he is insane. Then a gentleman enters with attendants
sent by Cordelia to fetch her father. Lear continues to behave madly
and runs away. The gentleman sent to fetch Lear does not run after
him but continues to tell Edgar lengthily about the position of the
French and the British armies.
Oswald enters and, seeing Gloucester and wishing to obtain the reward
promised by Regan, attacks him; but Edgar, with his stave, kills
Oswald, who when dying gives Edgar (the man who has killed him)
Goneril’s letter to Edmund, the delivery of which will earn a reward.
In this letter Goneril promises to kill her husband and marry Edmund.
Edgar drags out Oswald’s body by the legs, and then returns and leads
his father away.
Scene VII of Act IV takes place in a tent in the French camp. Lear
is asleep on a bed. Cordelia enters with Kent, still in disguise.
Lear is awakened by music and, seeing Cordelia, does not believe she
is alive but thinks her an apparition, and does not believe that he
is himself alive. Cordelia assures him that she is his daughter,
and begs him to bless her. He goes on his knees before her, begs
forgiveness, admits himself to be old and foolish, and says he is
ready to take poison, which he thinks she probably has prepared for
him, as he is persuaded that she must hate him.
For your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong;
You have some cause, they have not.
Then little by little he comes to his senses and ceases to rave. His
daughter suggests that he should take a little walk. He consents and
says:
You must bear with me:
Pray you now, forget and forgive: I am old and foolish.
They go off. The gentleman and Kent, who remain on the scene, talk in
order to explain to the audience that Edmund is at the head of the
forces and that a battle must soon begin between Lear’s defenders and
his enemies. So Act IV ends.
In this Fourth Act the scene between Lear and his daughter might have
been touching had it not been preceded in three previous acts by the
tedious monotonous ravings of Lear, and also had it been the final
scene expressing his feelings, but it is not the last.
In Act V Lear’s former cold pompous artificial ravings are repeated,
destroying the impression the preceding scene might have produced.
Scene I of Act V shows us Edmund and Regan (who is jealous of her
sister and offers herself to Edmund). Then Goneril comes on with her
husband and soldiers. The Duke of Albany, though he pities Lear,
considers it his duty to fight against the French who have invaded
his country, and so prepares himself for battle.
Then Edgar enters, still disguised, and hands the Duke of Albany the
letter, and says that if the Duke wins the battle he should let a
herald sound a trumpet, and then (this is 800 years B. C.) a champion
will appear who will prove that the contents of the letter are true.
In Scene II Edgar enters leading his father, whom he seats by a
tree, and himself goes off. The sounds of a battle are heard, Edgar
runs back and says that the battle is lost; Lear and Cordelia
are prisoners. Gloucester is again in despair. Edgar, still not
disclosing himself to his father, tells him that he should not
despair, and Gloucester at once agrees with him.
Scene III opens with a triumphal progress of Edmund the victor. Lear
and Cordelia are prisoners. Lear, though he is now no longer insane,
still utters the same sort of senseless, inappropriate words, as, for
instance, that in prison with Cordelia,
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage,
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness.
(This kneeling down comes three times over.) He also says that when
they are in prison they will wear out poor rogues and “sects of great
ones that ebb and flow by the moon,” that he and she are sacrifices
upon which “the gods throw incense,” that “he that parts them shall
bring a brand from heaven, and fire us hence like foxes” and that
The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep,
and so forth.
Edmund orders Lear and his daughter to be led away to prison, and
having ordered a captain to do them some hurt, asks him whether he
will fulfil it. The captain replies “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat
dried oats; but if it be man’s work I will do it.” The Duke of
Albany, Goneril, and Regan enter. The Duke wishes to take Lear’s
part, but Edmund opposes this. The sisters intervene and begin to
abuse each other, being jealous of Edmund. Here everything becomes
so confused that it is difficult to follow the action. The Duke of
Albany wants to arrest Edmund, and tells Regan that Edmund had long
ago entered into guilty relations with his wife and that therefore
Regan must give up her claim on Edmund, and if she wishes to marry
should marry him, the Duke of Albany.
Having said this, the Duke challenges Edmund and orders the trumpet
to be sounded, and if no one appears intends himself to fight him.
At this point Regan, whom Goneril has evidently poisoned, writhes
with pain. Trumpets are sounded and Edgar enters with a visor which
conceals his face, and without giving his name challenges Edmund.
Edgar abuses Edmund; Edmund casts back all the abuse on Edgar’s head.
They fight and Edmund falls. Goneril is in despair.
The Duke of Albany shows Goneril her letter. Goneril goes off.
Edmund while dying recognises that his opponent is his brother. Edgar
raises his visor and moralises to the effect that for having an
illegitimate son, Edmund, his father has paid with the loss of his
sight. After this Edgar tells the Duke of Albany of his adventures
and that he has only now, just before coming to this combat,
disclosed himself to his father, and his father could not bear it
and died of excitement. Edmund, who is not yet dead, asks what else
happened.
Then Edgar relates that while he was sitting by his father’s body
a man came, embraced him closely, cried out as if he would burst
heaven, threw himself on his father’s corpse, and told a most piteous
tale about Lear and himself, and having told it “the strings of
life began to crack,” but just then the trumpet sounded twice and
he, Edgar, left him “tranced.” And this was Kent. Before Edgar
had finished telling this story a gentleman runs in with a bloody
knife, shouting, “Help!” To the question “Who has been killed?” the
gentleman says that Goneril is dead, who had poisoned her sister.
She had confessed this. Kent enters, and at this moment the bodies
of Regan and Goneril are brought in. Edmund thereupon says that
evidently the sisters loved him greatly, as the one had poisoned
the other and then killed herself for his sake. At the same time he
confesses that he had given orders to kill Lear and hang Cordelia in
prison, under the pretence that she had committed suicide; but that
he now wishes to prevent this, and having said so, he dies and is
carried out.
After this Lear enters with Cordelia’s dead body in his arms (though
he is over eighty years of age and ill). And again there begin his
terrible ravings which make one feel as ashamed as one does when
listening to unsuccessful jokes. Lear demands that they should all
howl, and alternately believes that Cordelia is dead and that she is
alive. He says:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack.
Then he recounts how he has killed the slave who hanged Cordelia.
Next he says that his eyes see badly, and thereupon recognises Kent
whom all along he had not recognised.
The Duke of Albany says that he resigns his power as long as Lear
lives, and that he will reward Edgar and Kent and all who have been
true to him. At that moment news is brought that Edmund has died;
and Lear, continuing his ravings, begs that they will undo one of
his buttons, the same request he made when he was roaming about the
heath. He expresses his thanks for this, tells them all to look
somewhere, and with these words he dies.
In conclusion the Duke of Albany, who remains alive, says:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
All go off to the sound of a dead march. This ends Act V of the play.
III
Such is this celebrated play. Absurd as it may appear in this
rendering (which I have tried to make as impartial as possible),
I can confidently say that it is yet more absurd in the original.
To any man of our time, were he not under the hypnotic influence
of the suggestion that this play is the height of perfection, it
would be enough to read it to the end, had he patience to do so, to
convince himself that far from being the height of perfection it is
a very poor, carelessly constructed work which, if it may have been
of interest to a certain public of its own day, can among us evoke
nothing but aversion and weariness. And any man of our day free
from such suggestion would receive just the same impression from
the other much praised dramas of Shakespeare, not to speak of the
absurd dramatised tales, _Pericles_, _Twelfth Night_, _The Tempest_,
_Cymbeline_, and _Troilus and Cressida_.
But such free-minded people, not pre-disposed to Shakespeare worship,
are no longer to be found in our time and in our Christian society.
Into every man of our society and time, from an early period of his
conscious life, has been instilled the idea that Shakespeare is a
poetic and dramatic genius and that all his works are the height of
perfection. And therefore, superfluous as it would seem, I will
try to indicate in the play of _King Lear_ which I have chosen, the
defects characteristic of all Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies,
as a result of which they not only fail to furnish models of dramatic
art but fail to satisfy the most elementary and generally recognised
requirements of art.
According to the laws laid down by those very critics who extol
Shakespeare, the conditions of every tragedy are that the persons
who appear should, as a result of their own characters, actions, and
the natural movement of events, be brought into conditions in which,
finding themselves in opposition to the world around them, they
should struggle with it and in that struggle display their inherent
qualities.
In the tragedy of _King Lear_ the persons represented are indeed
externally placed in opposition to the surrounding world and struggle
against it. But the struggle does not result from a natural course
of events and from their own characters, but is quite arbitrarily
arranged by the author, and therefore cannot produce on the reader
that illusion which constitutes the chief condition of art. Lear
is under no necessity, and has no reason, to resign his power. And
having lived all their lives with his daughters he also has no
reason to believe the words of the two elder, and not to believe the
truthful statement of the youngest; yet on this the whole tragedy of
his position is built.
Equally unnatural is the secondary and very similar plot: the
relation of Gloucester to his sons. The position of Gloucester
and Edgar arises from the fact that Gloucester, just like Lear,
immediately believes the very grossest deception, and does not even
try to ask the son who had been deceived, whether the accusation
against him is true, but curses him and drives him away.
The fact that the relation of Lear to his daughters is just the same
as that of Gloucester to his sons, makes one feel even more strongly
that they are both arbitrarily invented and do not flow from the
characters or the natural course of events. Equally unnatural and
obviously invented is the fact that all through the play Lear fails
to recognise his old courtier, Kent; and so the relations of Lear and
Kent fail to evoke the sympathy of reader or hearer. This applies
in an even greater degree to the position of Edgar, whom nobody
recognises, who acts as guide to his blind father and persuades him
that he has leapt from a cliff when Gloucester has really jumped on
level ground.
These positions in which the characters are quite arbitrarily placed
are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable either to
sympathise with their sufferings or even to be interested in what he
reads or hears. That in the first place.
Secondly, there is the fact that both in this and in Shakespeare’s
other dramas all the people live, think, speak, and act, quite out
of accord with the given period and place. The action of _King Lear_
takes place 800 years B. C., and yet the characters in it are placed
in conditions possible only in the Middle Ages: Kings, dukes, armies,
illegitimate children, gentlemen, courtiers, doctors, farmers,
officers, soldiers, knights in armour, and so on, appear in it.
Perhaps such anachronisms (of which all Shakespeare’s plays are full)
did not infringe the possibility of illusion in the 16th century and
the beginning of the 17th, but in our time it is no longer possible
to interest oneself in the development of events one knows could not
have occurred in the conditions the author describes in detail.
The artificiality of the positions, which do not arise from a natural
course of events and from the characters of the people engaged, and
their incompatibility with the period and the place, is further
increased by the coarse embellishments Shakespeare continually makes
use of in passages meant to be specially touching. The extraordinary
storm during which Lear roams about the heath, or the weeds which
for some reason he puts on his head, as Ophelia does in _Hamlet_,
or Edgar’s attire--all these effects, far from strengthening the
impression, produce a contrary effect. “_Man sieht die Absicht und
man wird verstimmt_”[139] as Goethe says. It often happens--as for
instance with such obviously intentional effects as the dragging out
of half-a-dozen corpses by the legs, with which Shakespeare often
ends his tragedies--that instead of feeling fear and pity one feels
the absurdity of the thing.
IV
But not only are the characters in Shakespeare’s plays placed in
tragic positions which are quite impossible, do not result from
the course of events, and are inappropriate to the period and the
place, but they also behave in a way not in accord with their own
definite characters and that is quite arbitrary. It is customary
to assert that in Shakespeare’s dramas character is particularly
well expressed, and that with all his vividness his people are as
many-sided as real people, and that while exhibiting the nature of a
certain given individual they also show the nature of man in general.
It is customary to say that Shakespeare’s delineation of character is
the height of perfection. This is asserted with great confidence and
repeated by everyone as an indisputable verity, but much as I have
tried to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare’s dramas, I have
always found the reverse.
From the very beginning of reading any of Shakespeare’s plays I was
at once convinced that it was perfectly evident that he is lacking
in the chief, if not the sole, means of portraying character, which
is individuality of language--that each person should speak in a way
suitable to his own character. That is lacking in Shakespeare. All
his characters speak, not a language of their own but always one and
the same Shakespearean, affected, unnatural language, which not only
could they not speak, but which no real people could ever have spoken
anywhere.
No real people could speak, or could have spoken, as Lear
does--saying that, “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb” if
Regan did not receive him, or telling the winds to “crack your
cheeks,” or bidding “the wind blow the earth into the sea,” or “swell
the curl’d waters ’bove the main,” as the gentleman describes what
Lear said to the storm, or that it is easier to bear one’s griefs
and “the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip, when grief hath mates,
and bearing fellowship” (“bearing” meaning suffering), that Lear is
“childed, as I father’d,” as Edgar says, and so forth--unnatural
expressions such as overload the speeches of the people in all
Shakespeare’s dramas.
But it is not only that the characters all talk as no real people
ever talked or could talk; they are also all afflicted by a common
intemperance of language.
In love, preparing for death, fighting or dying, they all talk at
great length and unexpectedly about quite irrelevant matters, guided
more by the sound of the words and by puns than by the thoughts.
And they all talk alike. Lear raves just as Edgar does when feigning
madness. Kent and the fool both speak alike. The words of one person
can be put into the mouth of another, and by the character of the
speech it is impossible to know who is speaking. If there is a
difference in the speech of Shakespeare’s characters, it is only that
Shakespeare makes different speeches for his characters, and not that
they speak differently.
Thus Shakespeare always speaks for his kings in one and the same
inflated, empty language. Similarly all his women who are intended
to be poetic, speak the same pseudo-sentimental Shakespearean
language: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Mariana. In just the
same way also it is Shakespeare who always speaks for his villains:
Richard, Edmund, Iago, and Macbeth--expressing for them those
malignant feelings which villains never express. And yet more
identical is the talk of his madmen, with their terrible words, and
the speeches of his fools with their mirthless witticisms.
So that the individual speech of living people--that individual
speech which in drama is the chief means of presenting character--is
lacking in Shakespeare. (If gesture is also a means of expressing
character, as in the ballet, it is only a subsidiary means.) If the
characters utter whatever comes to hand and as it comes to hand and
all in one and the same way, as in Shakespeare, even the effect
of gesture is lost; and therefore whatever blind worshippers of
Shakespeare may say, Shakespeare does not show us characters.
Those persons who in his dramas stand out as characters, are
characters borrowed by him from earlier works which served as the
bases of his plays, and they are chiefly depicted, not in the
dramatic manner which consists of making each person speak in his
own diction, but in the epic manner, by one person describing the
qualities of another.
The excellence of Shakespeare’s depiction of character is asserted
chiefly on the ground of the characters of Lear, Cordelia, Othello,
Desdemona, Falstaff, and Hamlet. But these characters, like all the
others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from
previous dramas, chronicles, and romances. And these characters were
not merely not strengthened by him, but for the most part weakened
and spoilt. This is very evident in the drama of King Lear which we
are considering, and which was taken by Shakespeare from the play of
_King Leir_ by an unknown author. The characters of this drama, such
as Lear himself and in particular Cordelia, were not only not created
by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened by him and deprived
of personality, as compared with the older play.
In the older play Leir resigns his power because, having become a
widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters
about their love for him in order, by means of a cunning device, to
keep his youngest and favourite daughter with him on his island.
The two eldest are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to
contract a loveless marriage with any of the neighbouring suitors
Leir offers her, and he is afraid she may marry some distant
potentate.
The device he has planned, as he explains to his courtier Perillus
(Shakespeare’s Kent), is this: that when Cordelia tells him that she
loves him more than anyone, or as much as her elder sisters do, he
will say that in proof of her love she must marry a prince he will
indicate on his island.
All these motives of Lear’s conduct are lacking in Shakespeare’s
play. Then, when (according to the older play) Leir asks his
daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not reply (as
Shakespeare has it) that she will not give her father all her love
but will also love her husband if she marries--to say which is quite
unnatural--but simply says that she cannot express her love in words
but hopes her actions will prove it. Goneril and Regan make remarks
to the effect that Cordelia’s answer is not an answer, and that their
father cannot quietly accept such indifference. So that in the older
play there is an explanation, lacking in Shakespeare, of Leir’s anger
at the youngest daughter’s reply. Leir is vexed at the non-success
of his cunning device, and the venomous words of his elder daughters
add to his irritation. After the division of his kingdom between
the two eldest daughters in the older play comes a scene between
Cordelia and the King of Gaul which, instead of the impersonal
Shakespearean Cordelia, presents us with a very definite and
attractive character in the truthful, tender, self-denying youngest
daughter. While Cordelia, not repining at being deprived of a share
in the inheritance, sits grieving that she has lost her father’s love
and looking forward to earning her bread by her own toil, the King
of Gaul enters, who in the disguise of a pilgrim wishes to choose a
bride from among Leir’s daughters. He asks Cordelia the cause of her
grief. She tells him her woe. He, having fallen in love with her, in
his pilgrim guise woos her for the King of Gaul, but Cordelia says
she will only marry a man she loves. Then the pilgrim offers her
his hand and heart, and Cordelia confesses that she loves him and,
notwithstanding the poverty and privation that she thinks awaits her,
agrees to marry him. Then the pilgrim discloses to her that he is
himself the King of Gaul, and Cordelia marries him.
Instead of this scene Lear, according to Shakespeare, proposes to
Cordelia’s two suitors to take her without dowry, and one cynically
refuses, while the other takes her without our knowing why.
After this in the older play, as in Shakespeare, Leir undergoes
insults from Goneril to whose house he has gone, but he bears these
insults in a very different way from that represented by Shakespeare:
he feels that by his conduct to Cordelia he has deserved them, and
he meekly submits. As in Shakespeare so also in the older play, the
courtier, Perillus (Kent) who has taken Cordelia’s part and has
therefore been punished, comes to Leir, only not disguised, but
simply as a faithful servant who does not abandon his King in a
moment of need, and assures him of his love. Leir says to him what
in Shakespeare Lear says to Cordelia in the last scene--that if his
daughters whom he has benefited hate him, surely one to whom he has
done evil cannot love him. But Perillus (Kent) assures the King of
his love, and Leir, pacified goes on to Regan. In the older play
there are no tempests or tearing out of grey hairs, but there is a
weakened old Leir, overpowered by grief and humbled, and driven out
by his second daughter also, who even wishes to kill him. Turned out
by his eldest daughters, Leir in the older play, as a last resource,
goes with Perillus to Cordelia. Instead of the unnatural expulsion
of Leir during a tempest and his roaming about the heath, in the
old play Leir with Perillus during their journey to France very
naturally come to the last degree of want. They sell their clothes
to pay for the sea-crossing, and exhausted by cold and hunger they
approach Cordelia’s house in fishermen’s garb. Here again, instead
of the unnatural conjoint ravings of the fool, Lear, and Edgar,
as presented by Shakespeare, we have in the older play a natural
scene of the meeting between the daughter and father. Cordelia--who
notwithstanding her happiness has all the time been grieving about
her father and praying God to forgive her sisters who have done him
so much wrong--meets him, now in the last stage of want, and wishes
immediately to disclose herself to him, but her husband advises her
not to do so for fear of agitating the weak old man. She agrees and
takes Leir into her house, and without revealing herself to him takes
care of him. Leir revives little by little, and then the daughter
asks him who he is, and how he lived formerly. If, says Leir,
... from the first I should relate the cause,
I would make a heart of adamant to weep.
And thou, poor soul,
Kind-hearted as thou art,
Dost weep already ere I do begin.
Cordelia replies:
For God’s love tell it, and when you have done,
I’ll tell the reason why I weep so soon.
And Leir relates all he has suffered from his elder daughters, and
says that he now wishes to find shelter with the one who would be
right should she condemn him to death. “If, however,” he says, “she
will receive me with love, it will be God’s and her work, and not
my merit!” To this Cordelia replies, “Oh, I know for certain that
thy daughter will lovingly receive thee!” “How canst thou know this
without knowing her?” says Leir. “I know,” says Cordelia, “because
not far from here, I had a father who acted towards me as badly as
thou hast acted towards her, yet if I were only to see his white
head, I would creep to meet him on my knees.” “No, this cannot be,”
says Leir, “for there are no children in the world so cruel as mine.”
“Do not condemn all for the sins of some,” says Cordelia, falling
on her knees. “Look here, dear father,” she says, “look at me: I am
thy loving daughter.” The father recognises her and says: “It is not
for thee, but for me to beg thy pardon on my knees for all my sins
towards thee.”
Is there anything approaching this charming scene in Shakespeare’s
drama?
Strange as the opinion may appear to Shakespeare’s devotees, the
whole of this older play is in all respects beyond compare better
than Shakespeare’s adaptation. It is so, first because in it those
superfluous characters--the villain Edmund and the unnatural
Gloucester and Edgar, who only distract one’s attention--do not
appear. Secondly, it is free from the perfectly false “effects” of
Lear’s roaming about on the heath, his talks with the fool, and
all those impossible disguises, non-recognitions, and wholesale
deaths--above all because in this play there is the simple, natural,
and deeply touching character of Leir, and the yet more touching
and clearly defined character of Cordelia, which are lacking in
Shakespeare. And also because there is in the older drama, instead of
Shakespeare’s daubed scene of Lear’s meeting with Cordelia and her
unnecessary murder, the exquisite scene of Leir’s meeting with
Cordelia, which is unequalled by anything in Shakespeare’s drama.
The older play also terminates more naturally and more in accord with
the spectators’ moral demands than does Shakespeare’s, namely, by the
King of the Gauls conquering the husbands of the elder sisters, and
Cordelia not perishing, but replacing Leir in his former position.
This is the position as regards the drama we are examining, borrowed
from the old play _King Leir_.
It is the same with _Othello_, which is taken from an Italian story,
and it is the same again with the famous _Hamlet_. The same may
be said of Antony, Brutus, Cleopatra, Shylock, Richard, and all
Shakespeare’s characters; they are all taken from antecedent works.
Shakespeare, taking the characters already given in previous plays,
stories, chronicles, or in Plutarch’s _Lives_, not only fails to make
them more true to life and more vivid, as his adulators assert, but
on the contrary always weakens them and often quite destroys them,
as in _King Leir_: making his characters commit actions unnatural
to them, and making them, above all, talk in a way natural neither
to them nor to any human being. So in _Othello_, though this is--we
will not say the best, but the least bad--the least overloaded with
pompous verbosity, of all Shakespeare’s dramas, the characters of
Othello, Iago, Cassio, Emilia are far less natural and alive in
Shakespeare than in the Italian romance. In Shakespeare Othello
suffers from epilepsy, of which he has an attack on the stage.
Afterwards in Shakespeare the murder of Desdemona is preceded by
a strange vow uttered by Othello on his knees, and besides this,
Othello in Shakespeare’s play is a negro and not a Moor. All this
is unusual, inflated, unnatural, and infringes the unity of the
character. And there is none of all this in the romance. In the
romance also the causes of Othello’s jealousy are more naturally
presented than in Shakespeare. In the romance Cassio, knowing whose
the handkerchief is, goes to Desdemona to return it, but when
approaching the back door of Desdemona’s house he sees Othello coming
and runs away from him. Othello perceives Cassio running away, and
this it is that chiefly confirms his suspicion. This is omitted in
Shakespeare, and yet this casual incident explains Othello’s jealousy
more than anything else. In Shakespeare this jealousy is based
entirely on Iago’s machinations, which are always successful, and
on his crafty speeches, which Othello blindly believes. Othello’s
monologue over the sleeping Desdemona, to the effect that he wishes
that she when killed should look as she is when alive, and that he
will love her when she is dead and now wishes to inhale her “balmy
breath” and so forth, is quite impossible. A man who is preparing to
murder someone he loves cannot utter such phrases, and still less
after the murder can he say that the sun and the moon ought now to be
eclipsed and the globe to yawn, nor can he, whatever kind of a nigger
he may be, address devils, inviting them to roast him in sulphur, and
so forth. And finally, however effective may be his suicide (which
does not occur in the romance) it quite destroys the conception of
his firm character. If he really suffers from grief and remorse then,
when intending to kill himself, he would not utter phrases about his
own services, about a pearl, about his eyes dropping tears “_as fast
as the Arabian trees their medicinable gum_,” and still less could
he talk about the way a Turk scolded a Venetian, and how “_thus_” he
punished him for it! So that despite the powerful movement of feeling
in Othello, when under the influence of Iago’s hints jealousy rises
in him, and afterwards in his scene with Desdemona, one’s conception
of Othello’s character is constantly infringed by false pathos and by
the unnatural speeches he utters.
So it is with the chief character--Othello. But notwithstanding the
disadvantageous alterations it has undergone in comparison with
the character from which he is taken in the romance, Othello still
remains a character. But all the other personages have been quite
spoilt by Shakespeare.
Iago in Shakespeare’s play is a complete villain, a deceiver, a
thief, and avaricious; he robs Roderigo, succeeds in all sorts of
impossible designs, and therefore is a quite unreal person. In
Shakespeare the motive of his villainy is, first, that he is offended
at Othello not having given him a place he desired; secondly, that
he suspects Othello of an intrigue with his wife; and thirdly that,
as he says, he feels a strange sort of love for Desdemona. There
are many motives, but they are all vague. In the romance there is
one motive, and it is simple and clear: Iago’s passionate love for
Desdemona, changing into hatred of her and of Othello after she had
preferred the Moor to him and had definitely repulsed him. Yet more
unnatural is the quite unnecessary figure of Roderigo, whom Iago
deceives and robs, promising him Desdemona’s love and obliging him to
do as he is ordered: to make Cassio drunk, to provoke him, and then
to kill him. Emilia, who utters anything it occurs to the author to
put into her mouth, bears not even the slightest resemblance to a
real person.
“But Falstaff, the wonderful Falstaff!” Shakespeare’s eulogists
will say. “It is impossible to assert that he is not a live person,
and that, having been taken out of an anonymous comedy, he has been
weakened.”
Falstaff, like all Shakespeare’s characters, was taken from a play by
an unknown author, written about a real person, a Sir John Oldcastle,
who was the friend of some Duke. This Oldcastle had once been accused
of heresy, but had been saved by his friend the Duke. But afterwards
he was condemned and burnt at the stake for his religious beliefs,
which clashed with Catholicism. To please the Roman Catholic public
an unknown author wrote a play about Oldcastle, ridiculing this
martyr for his faith and exhibiting him as a worthless man, a boon
companion of the Duke; and from this play Shakespeare took not only
the character of Falstaff but also his own humorous attitude towards
him. In the first plays of Shakespeare’s in which this character
appears he was called Oldcastle; but afterwards, when under Elizabeth
Protestantism had again triumphed, it was awkward to mock at this
martyr of the struggle with Catholicism, and besides, Oldcastle’s
relatives had protested, and Shakespeare changed the name from
Oldcastle to Falstaff--also an historical character, notorious for
having run away at the battle of Agincourt.
Falstaff is really a thoroughly natural and characteristic
personage, almost the only natural and characteristic one depicted
by Shakespeare. And he is natural and characteristic because, of
all Shakespeare’s characters, he alone speaks in a way proper to
himself. He speaks in a manner proper to himself because he talks
just that Shakespearean language, filled with jests that lack humour
and unamusing puns, which, while unnatural to all Shakespeare’s
other characters, is quite in harmony with the boastful, distorted,
perverted character of the drunken Falstaff. That is the only reason
why this figure really presents a definite character. Unfortunately
the artistic effect of the character is spoilt by the fact that it
is so repulsive in its gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, rascality,
mendacity, and cowardice, that it is difficult to share the feeling
of merry humour Shakespeare adopts towards it. Such is the case with
Falstaff.
But in none of Shakespeare’s figures is, I will not say his inability
but his complete indifference, to giving his people characters so
strikingly noticeable as in the case of _Hamlet_, and with no other
of Shakespeare’s works is the blind worship of Shakespeare so
strikingly noticeable--that unreasoning hypnotism which does not even
admit the thought that any production of his can be other than a work
of genius, or that any leading character in a drama of his can fail
to be the expression of a new and profoundly conceived character.
Shakespeare takes the ancient story--not at all bad of its
kind--relating: _avec quelle ruse Amlet qui depuis fût Roy de
Dannemarch, vengea la mort de son père Horwendille, occis par Fengon,
son frère, et autre occurrence de son histoire_, or a drama that was
written on the same theme fifteen years before him; and he writes his
play on this subject introducing inappropriately (as he constantly
does) into the mouth of the chief character all such thoughts of his
own as seem to him worthy of attention. Putting these thoughts into
his hero’s mouth: about life (the grave-diggers); about death (“To
be or not to be”); those he had expressed in his sixty-sixth sonnet
about the theatre and about women--he did not at all concern himself
as to the circumstances under which these speeches are delivered, and
it naturally results that the person uttering these various thoughts
becomes a mere phonograph of Shakespeare, deprived of any character
of his own; and his actions and words do not agree.
In the legend Hamlet’s personality is quite intelligible: he is
revolted by the conduct of his uncle and his mother, wishes to be
revenged on them, but fears that his uncle may kill him as he had
killed his father, and therefore pretends to be mad, wishing to wait
and observe all that was going on at court. But his uncle and his
mother, being afraid of him, wish to find out whether he is feigning,
or is really mad, and send a girl he loves to him. He keeps up his
rôle, and afterwards sees his mother alone, kills a courtier who was
eavesdropping, and convicts his mother of her sin. Then he is sent to
England. He intercepts letters, returns from England, and revenges
himself on his enemies, burning them all.
This is all intelligible and flows from Hamlet’s character and
position. But Shakespeare, by putting into Hamlet’s mouth speeches he
wished to publish and making him perform actions he needed to secure
effective scenes, destroys all that forms Hamlet’s character in the
legend. Throughout the whole tragedy Hamlet does not do what he
might wish to do, but what is needed for the author’s plans: now he
is frightened by his father’s ghost, and now he begins to chaff it,
calling it “old mole”; now he loves Ophelia, now he teases her, and
so on. There is no possibility of finding any explanation of Hamlet’s
actions and speeches, and therefore no possibility of attributing any
character to him.
But as it is accepted that Shakespeare, the genius, could write
nothing bad, learned men devote all the power of their minds to
discovering extraordinary beauties in what is an obvious and glaring
defect--particularly obvious in Hamlet--namely, that the chief person
in the play has no character at all. And, lo and behold, profound
critics announce that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is
most powerfully presented a perfectly new and profound character,
consisting in this, that the person has no character; and that in
this absence of character lies an achievement of genius--the creation
of a profound character! And having decided this, the learned critics
write volumes upon volumes, until the laudations and explanations
of the grandeur and importance of depicting the character of a man
without a character fill whole libraries. It is true that some
critics timidly express the thought that there is something strange
about this person, and that Hamlet is an unsolved riddle; but no one
ventures to say, as in Hans Andersen’s story, that the king is naked;
that it is clear as day that Shakespeare was unable, and did not
even wish, to give Hamlet any character and did not even understand
that this was necessary! And learned critics continue to study and
praise this enigmatical production, which reminds one of the famous
inscribed stone found by Pickwick at a cottage doorstep,--which
divided the scientific world into two hostile camps.
So that neither the character of Lear, nor of Othello, nor of
Falstaff, and still less of Hamlet, at all confirms the existing
opinion that Shakespeare’s strength lies in the delineation of
character.
If in Shakespeare’s plays some figures are met with that have
characteristic traits (mostly secondary figures as Polonius in
_Hamlet_, and Portia in _The Merchant of Venice_) these few life-like
figures--among the five hundred or more secondary figures, and with
the complete absence of character in the principal figures--are far
from proving that the excellence of Shakespeare’s dramas lies in the
presentation of character.
That a great mastery in the presentation of character is attributed
to Shakespeare arises from his really possessing a peculiarity
which, when helped out by the play of good actors, may appear to
superficial observers to be a capacity to manage scenes in which a
movement of feeling is expressed. However arbitrary the positions in
which he puts his characters, however unnatural to them the language
he makes them speak, however lacking in individuality they may be,
the movement of feeling itself, its increase and change and the
combination of many contrary feelings, are often expressed correctly
and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes. And this, when
performed by good actors, evokes, if but for a while, sympathy for
the persons represented.
Shakespeare, himself an actor and a clever man, knew not only by
speeches but by exclamations, gestures, and the repetition of words,
how to express the state of mind and changes of feeling occurring
in the persons represented. So that in many places Shakespeare’s
characters instead of speaking, merely exclaim, or weep, or in
the midst of a monologue indicate the pain of their position by
gesture (as when Lear asks to have a button undone), or at a moment
of strong excitement they repeat a question several times and cause
a word to be repeated which strikes them, as is done by Othello,
Macduff, Cleopatra, and others. Similar clever methods of expressing
a movement of feeling--giving good actors a chance to show their
powers--have often been taken by many critics for the expression of
character. But however strongly the play of feeling may be expressed
in one scene, a single scene cannot give the character of a person,
when, after the appropriate exclamations or gesture, that person
begins to talk lengthily not in a natural manner proper to him, but
according to the author’s whim--uttering things unnecessary and not
in harmony with his character.
V
“Well, but the profound utterances and sayings delivered by
Shakespeare’s characters?” Shakespeare’s eulogists will exclaim.
“Lear’s monologue on punishment, Kent’s on vengeance, Edgar’s on his
former life, Gloucester’s reflections on the perversity of fate, and
in other dramas the famous monologues of Hamlet, Antony and others?”
Thoughts and sayings may be appreciated, I reply, in prose works,
in essays, in collections of aphorisms, but not in artistic
dramatic works the aim of which is to elicit sympathy with what is
represented. And therefore the monologues and sayings of Shakespeare,
even if they contained many very profound and fresh thoughts, which
is not the case, cannot constitute the excellence of an artistic and
poetic work. On the contrary, these speeches, uttered in unnatural
conditions, can only spoil artistic works.
An artistic poetic work, especially a drama, should first of all
evoke in reader or spectator the illusion that what the persons
represented are living through and experiencing, is being lived
through and experienced by himself. And for this purpose it is not
more important for the dramatist to know precisely what he should
make his acting characters do and say, than it is to know what he
should not make them say and do so as not to infringe the reader’s
or spectator’s illusion. However eloquent and profound they may
be, speeches put into the mouths of acting characters if they are
superfluous and do not accord with the situation and the characters,
infringe the main condition of dramatic work--the illusion causing
the reader or spectator to experience the feelings of the persons
represented. One may without infringing the illusion leave much
unsaid: the reader or spectator will himself supply what is needed
and sometimes as a result of this his illusion is even increased; but
to say what is superfluous is like jerking and scattering a statue
made up of small pieces, or taking the lamp out of a magic lantern.
The reader’s or spectator’s attention is distracted, the reader sees
the author, the spectator sees the actor, the illusion is lost, and
to recreate it is sometimes impossible. And therefore without a sense
of proportion there cannot be an artist, especially a dramatist. And
Shakespeare is entirely devoid of this feeling.
Shakespeare’s characters continually do and say what is not merely
unnatural to them but quite unnecessary. I will not cite examples
of this, for I think that a man who does not himself perceive this
striking defect in all Shakespeare’s dramas will not be convinced
by any possible examples or proofs. It is sufficient to read _King
Lear_ alone, with the madness, the murders, the plucking out of eyes,
Gloucester’s jump, the poisonings, and the torrents of abuse--not to
mention _Pericles_, _A Winter’s Tale_--or _The Tempest_, to convince
oneself of this. Only a man quite devoid of the sense of proportion
and taste could produce the types of _Titus Andronicus_ and _Troilus
and Cressida_, and so mercilessly distort the old drama of _King
Leir_.
Gervinus tries to prove that Shakespeare possessed a feeling of
beauty, _Schönheit’s Sinn_, but all Gervinus’s proofs only show
that he himself, Gervinus, completely lacked it. In Shakespeare
everything is exaggerated: the actions are exaggerated, so are their
consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated, and
therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is
infringed.
Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by
Shakespeare’s works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it
is certain that he was not an artist, and that his works are not
artistic productions. Without a sense of proportion there never was
or could be an artist, just as without a sense of rhythm there cannot
be a musician. And Shakespeare may be anything you like--only not an
artist.
“But one must not forget the times in which Shakespeare wrote,” says
his belauders. “It was a time of cruel and coarse manners, a time
of the then fashionable euphuism, that is, an artificial manner of
speech--a time of forms of life strange to us, and therefore to judge
Shakespeare one must keep in view the times when he wrote. In Homer,
as in Shakespeare, there is much that is strange to us, but this does
not prevent our valuing the beauties of Homer,” say the belauders.
But when one compares Shakespeare with Homer, as Gervinus does, the
infinite distance separating true poetry from its imitation emerges
with special vividness. However distant Homer is from us, we can
without the slightest effort transport ourselves into the life he
describes. And we are thus transported chiefly because, however alien
to us may be the events Homer describes, he believes in what he says
and speaks seriously of what he is describing, and therefore he never
exaggerates and the sense of measure never deserts him. And therefore
it happens that, not to speak of the wonderfully distinct, life-like,
and excellent characters of Achilles, Hector, Priam, Odysseus, and
the eternally touching scenes of Hector’s farewell, of Priam’s
embassy, of the return of Odysseus, and so forth, the whole of the
_Iliad_ and particularly the _Odyssey_, is as naturally close to us
all as if we had lived and were now living among the gods and heroes.
But it is not so with Shakespeare. From his first words exaggeration
is seen: exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feeling, and
exaggeration of expressions. It is at once evident that he does
not believe in what he is saying, that he doesn’t need it, that he
is inventing the occurrences he describes, is indifferent to his
characters, and has devised them merely for the stage, and therefore
makes them do and say what may strike his public; and so we do not
believe either in the events, or in the actions, or in the sufferings
of his characters. Nothing so clearly shows the complete absence of
esthetic feeling in Shakespeare, as a comparison between him and
Homer. The works which we call the works of Homer, are artistic,
poetic, original works, lived through by their author or authors.
But Shakespeare’s works are compositions devised for a particular
purpose and having absolutely nothing in common with art or poetry.
VI
But perhaps the loftiness of Shakespeare’s conception of life
is such as, even though he does not satisfy the demands of
esthetics, discloses to us so new and important a view of life
that in consideration of its value all his artistic defects become
unnoticeable. This is indeed what some belauders of Shakespeare say.
Gervinus plainly says that besides Shakespeare’s significance in the
sphere of dramatic poetry, in which in his opinion he is the equal
of “Homer in the sphere of the epic; Shakespeare being the greatest
judge of the human soul, is a teacher of most indisputable ethical
authority, and the most select leader in the world and in life.”
In what then does this indubitable authority of the most select
teacher in the world and in life consist? Gervinus devotes the
concluding chapter of his second volume (some fifty pages) to an
explanation of this.
The ethical authority of this supreme teacher of life, in the opinion
of Gervinus, consists in the following: “Shakespeare’s moral view
starts from the simple point,” says Gervinus, “that man is born with
powers of activity,” and therefore, first of all, says Gervinus,
Shakespeare regarded it as “an obligation to use our inherent power
of action.” (As if it were possible for man not to act!)[140]
“_Die thatkräftigen Männer, Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Alcibiades,
Octavius spielen hier die gegensätzlichen Rollen gegen die
verschiedenen Thatlosen; nicht ihre Charaktere verdienen ihnen
Allen ihr Glück und Gedeihen etwa durch eine grosse Ueberlegenheit
ihre Natur, sondern trotz ihrer geringern Anlage stellt sich
ihre Thatkraft an sich über die Unthätigkeit der Anderen hinaus,
gleichviel aus wie schöner Quelle diese Passivität, aus wie
schlechter jene Thatigkeit fliesse._”[141]
That is to say, that active people like Fortinbras, Bolingbroke,
Alcibiades and Octavius, Gervinus informs us, are contrasted by
Shakespeare with various characters who do not display energetic
activity. And, according to Shakespeare, happiness and success are
attained by people who possess this active character, not at all as
a result of their superiority of nature. On the contrary, in spite
of their inferior talents, their energy in itself always gives them
the advantage over the inactive people, no matter whether their
inactivity results from excellent impulses, or the activity of the
others from base ones. Activity is good, inactivity is evil. Activity
transforms evil into good, says Shakespeare, according to Gervinus.
“Shakespeare prefers the principle of Alexander to that of Diogenes,”
says Gervinus. In other words, according to him, Shakespeare prefers
death and murder from ambition, to self-restraint and wisdom.[142]
According to Gervinus, Shakespeare considers that humanity should
not set itself ideals, but that all that is necessary is healthy
activity, and a golden mean in everything. Indeed Shakespeare is so
imbued with this wise moderation that, in the words of Gervinus,
he even allows himself to deny Christian morality, which makes
exaggerated demands on human nature. “How thoroughly penetrated
Shakespeare was with this principle of wise moderation,” says
Gervinus, “is shewn perhaps most strongly in this, that he ventured
even to oppose Christian laws which demand an overstraining of
human nature; for he approved not that the limits of duty should be
extended beyond the intention of nature. He taught therefore the
wise and human medium between the Christian and heathen precepts”
(p. 917)--a reasonable mean, natural to man, between Christian and
pagan injunctions--on the one hand, love of one’s enemies, and on the
other, hatred of them!
“That it is possible to do too much in good things, is an express
doctrine of Shakespeare, both in word and example.... Thus excessive
liberality ruins Timon, whilst moderate generosity keeps Antonio in
honour; the genuine ambition which makes Henry V great overthrows
Percy, in whom it rises too high. Exaggerated virtue brings Angelo
to ruin; and when in those near him the excess of punishment proves
harmful and cannot hinder sin, then mercy, the most Godlike gift
that man possesses, is also exhibited in its excess, as the producer
of sin.”
Shakespeare, says Gervinus, taught that one _may do too much good_.
He teaches, says Gervinus, “that morality, like politics, is a matter
so complicated with relations, conditions of life, and motives, that
it is impossible to bring it to final principles” (p. 918).
“In Shakespeare’s opinion (and here also he is one with Bacon and
Aristotle) there is no positive law of religion or morals which could
form a rule of moral action in precepts ever binding and suitable for
all cases.”
Gervinus most clearly expresses Shakespeare’s whole moral theory by
saying that Shakespeare does not write for those classes for whom
definite religious principles and laws are suitable (that is to say,
for 999 out of 1000 of mankind), but for the cultivated, who have
made their own a healthy tact in life and such an instinctive feeling
as, united with conscience reason and will, can direct them to worthy
aims of life. But even for these fortunate ones, in the opinion of
Gervinus, this teaching may be dangerous if it is taken incompletely.
It must be taken whole. “There are classes,” says Gervinus, “whose
morality is best provided for by the positive letter of religion and
law; but for such as these Shakespeare’s writings are in themselves
inaccessible; they are only readable and comprehensible to the
cultivated, of whom it can be required that they should appropriate
to themselves the healthy measure of life, and that self-reliance
in which the guiding and inherent powers of conscience and reason,
united with the will, are, when consciously apprehended, worthy aims
of life” (p. 919). “But even for the cultivated also, Shakespeare’s
doctrine may not always be without danger.... The condition on which
his doctrine is entirely harmless is this, that it should be fully
and completely received and without any expurging and separating.
Then it is not only without danger, but it is also more unmistakable
and more infallible, and therefore more worthy of our confidence,
than any system of morality can be,” (p. 919).
And in order to accept it all, one should understand that according
to his teaching it is insane and harmful for an individual to rise
against, or “disregard the bonds of religion and the state” (p. 921).
For Shakespeare would abhor a free and independent personality who
strong in spirit should oppose any law in politics or morals and
should disregard the union of the state and religion “which has kept
society together for centuries” (p. 921). “For in his opinion the
practical wisdom of man would have no higher aim than to carry into
society the utmost possible nature and freedom, but for that very
reason, and that he might maintain sacred and inviolable the natural
laws of society, he would respect existing forms, yet at the same
time penetrate into their rational substance with sound criticism,
not forgetting nature in civilization, nor, equally, civilization
in nature.” Property, the family, the state, are sacred. But the
aspiration to recognize the equality of man, is insane. “It’s
realization would bring the greatest harm to humanity” (p. 925).
“No man has fought more strongly against rank and class prejudices,
than Shakespeare, but how could his liberal principles have been
pleased with the doctrines of those who would have done away with
the prejudices of the rich and cultivated, only to replace them
with the interests and prejudices of the poor and uncultivated? How
would this man, who allures so eloquently to the course of honour,
have approved, if in annulling rank, degrees of merit, distinction,
we extinguish every impulse to greatness, and by the removal of
all degrees, ‘shake the ladder to all high designs’? If indeed
no surreptitious honour and false power were longer to oppress
mankind, how would the poet have acknowledged the most fearful force
of all, the power of barbarity? In consequence of these modern
doctrines of equality, he would have apprehended that everything
would resolve itself into power; or if this were not the final lot
which awaited mankind from these aspirations after equality, if love
between nationalities and endless peace were not that ‘nothing’ of
impossibility, as Alonso expresses it in the _Tempest_, but could be
an actual fruit of these efforts after equality, then the poet would
have believed with this time the old age and decrepitude of the world
to have arrived, in which it were worthless to the active to live”
(p. 925).
Such is Shakespeare’s view of life as explained by his greatest
exponent and admirer. Another of the recent belauders of Shakespeare,
Brandes, adds the following:
“No one, of course, can preserve his life quite pure from injustice,
from deception, and from doing harm to others, but injustice and
deception are not always vices, and even the harm done to other
people is not always a vice: it is often only a necessity, a
legitimate weapon, a right. At bottom, Shakespeare had always held
that there were no such things as unconditional duties and absolute
prohibitions. He had never, for example, questioned Hamlet’s right
to kill the King, scarcely even his right to run his sword through
Polonius. Nevertheless he had hitherto been unable to conquer a
feeling of indignation and disgust when he saw around him nothing
but breaches of the simplest moral laws. Now, on the other hand, the
dim divinations of his earlier years crystallised in his mind into
a coherent body of thought: no commandment is unconditional; it is
not in the observance or non-observance of an external fiat that
the merits of an action, to say nothing of a character, consists:
everything depends upon the volitional substance into which the
individual, as a responsible agent, transmits the formal imperative
at the moment of decision.”[143]
In other words Shakespeare now sees clearly that the morality of
the aim is the only true, the only possible one; so that, according
to Brandes, Shakespeare’s fundamental principle, for which he is
extolled, is that _the end justifies the means_. Action at all costs,
the absence of all ideals, moderation in everything, the maintenance
of established forms of life, and the maxim that “the end justifies
the means.”
If one adds to this a Chauvinistic English patriotism, expressed
in all his historical plays: a patriotism according to which the
English throne is something sacred, the English always defeat the
French, slaughtering thousands and losing only scores, Jeanne d’Arc
is a witch, Hector and all the Trojans--from whom the English are
descended--are heroes while the Greeks are cowards and traitors, and
so forth: this is the view of life of the wisest teacher of life
according to his greatest admirer. And anyone who reads attentively
the works of Shakespeare cannot but acknowledge that the attribution
of this view of life to Shakespeare by those who praise him is
perfectly correct.
The value of every poetical work depends on three qualities:
1) The content of the work: the more important the content, that is
to say, the more important it is for the life of man, the greater is
the work.
2) The external beauty achieved by the technical methods proper to
the particular kind of art. Thus in dramatic art the technical method
will be: that the characters should have a true individuality of
their own, a natural and at the same time a touching plot, a correct
presentation on the stage of the manifestation and development of
feelings, and a sense of proportion in all that is presented.
3) Sincerity, that is to say that the author should himself vividly
feel what he expresses. Without this condition there can be no work
of art, as the essence of art consists in the infection of the
contemplator of a work by the author’s feeling. If the author has
not felt what he is expressing, the recipient cannot become infected
by the author’s feeling, he does not experience any feeling, and the
production cannot be classed as a work of art.
The content of Shakespeare’s plays, as is seen by the explanations
of his greatest admirers, is the lowest, most vulgar view of life,
which regards the external elevation of the great ones of the earth
as a genuine superiority; despises the crowd, that is to say, the
working classes; and repudiates not only religious, but even any
humanitarian, efforts directed towards the alteration of the existing
order of society.
The second condition is also absent in Shakespeare except in his
handling of scenes in which a movement of feelings is expressed.
There is in his works a lack of naturalness in the situations, the
characters lack individuality of speech, and a sense of proportion is
also wanting, without which such works cannot be artistic.
The third and chief condition--sincerity--is totally absent in
all Shakespeare’s works. One sees in all of them an intentional
artificiality; it is obvious that he is not in earnest but is playing
with words.
VII
The works of Shakespeare do not meet the demands of every art, and
besides that their tendency is very low and immoral. What then is the
meaning of the immense fame these works have enjoyed for more than a
hundred years?
To reply to this question seems the more difficult because if the
works of Shakespeare had any kind of excellence, the achievement
which has produced the exaggerated praise lavished upon them, would
at least be to some extent intelligible. But here two extremes
meet: works which are beneath criticism, insignificant, empty, and
immoral--and insensate, universal laudation, proclaiming these works
to be above everything that has ever been produced by man.
How is this to be explained?
Many times during my life I have had occasion to discuss Shakespeare
with his admirers, not only with people little sensitive to poetry,
but also with those who felt poetic beauty keenly, such as Turgénev,
Fet,[144] and others, and each time I have encountered one and
the same attitude towards my disagreement with the belaudment of
Shakespeare.
I was not answered when I pointed out Shakespeare’s defects; they
only pitied me for my want of comprehension and urged on me the
necessity of acknowledging the extraordinary supernatural grandeur
of Shakespeare. They did not explain to me in what the beauties of
Shakespeare consist, but were merely indefinitely and exaggeratedly
enthusiastic about the whole of Shakespeare, extolling some favourite
passages: the undoing of Lear’s button, Falstaff’s lying, Lady
Macbeth’s spot which would not wash out, Hamlet’s address to the
ghost of his father, the “forty thousand brothers,” “none does
offend, none, I say none,” and so forth.
“Open Shakespeare,” I used to say to these admirers of his, “where
you will or as may chance, and you will see that you will never
find ten consecutive lines that are comprehensible, natural,
characteristic of the person who utters them, and productive of an
artistic impression.” (Anyone may make this experiment.) And the
belauders of Shakespeare opened pages in Shakespeare’s dramas by
chance, or at their own choice, and without paying any attention
to the reasons I adduced as to why the ten lines selected did not
meet the most elementary demands of esthetics or good sense, praised
the very things that appeared to me absurd, unintelligible, and
inartistic.
So that in general in response to my endeavours to obtain from
the worshippers of Shakespeare an explanation of his greatness, I
encountered precisely the attitude I have usually met with, and
still meet, from the defenders of any dogmas accepted not on the
basis of reason but in mere credulity. And just this attitude of the
belauders of Shakespeare towards him--an attitude which may be met
with in all the indefinite, misty articles about Shakespeare, and in
conversations about him, gave me the key to an understanding of the
cause of Shakespeare’s fame. There is only one explanation of this
astonishing fame: it is one of those epidemic suggestions to which
people always have been and are liable. Such irrational suggestion
has always existed, and does exist in all spheres of life. Glaring
examples of such suggestion, considerable in scope and deceptiveness,
were the mediæval Crusades, which influenced not only adults but
also children, and many other epidemic suggestions astonishing in
their senselessness, such as the belief in witches, in the utility
of torture for the discovery of truth, the search for the elixir of
life, for the philosopher’s stone, and the passion for tulips valued
at several thousand guilders a bulb, which overran Holland. There
always have been and always are such irrational suggestions in all
spheres of human life--religious, philosophic, economic, scientific,
artistic, and in literature generally, and people only see clearly
the insanity of such suggestions after they are freed from them. But
as long as they are under their influence these suggestions appear
to them such undoubted truths that they do not consider it necessary
or possible to reason about them. Since the development of the
printing-press these epidemics have become particularly striking.
Since the development of the press it has come about that as soon
as, from accidental circumstances, something obtains a special
significance, the organs of the press immediately announce this
significance. And as soon as the press has put forward the importance
of the matter, the public directs yet more attention to it. The
hypnotization of the public incites the press to regard the thing
more attentively and in greater detail. The interest of the public is
still further increased, and the organs of the press, competing one
with another, respond to the public demand.
The public becomes yet more interested, and the press attributes
yet more importance to the matter; so that this importance, growing
ever greater and greater like a snowball, obtains a quite unnatural
appreciation, and this appreciation, exaggerated even to absurdity,
maintains itself as long as the outlook on life of the leaders of
the press and of the public remains the same. There are in our day
innumerable examples of such a misunderstanding of the importance
of the most insignificant occurrences, occasioned by the mutual
reaction of press and public. A striking example of this was the
excitement which seized the whole world over the Dreyfus affair.
A suspicion arose that some captain on the French staff had been
guilty of treason. Whether because this captain was a Jew, or from
some special internal party disagreements in French society, this
event, which resembled others that continually occur without arousing
anyone’s attention and without interesting the whole world or even
the French military, was given a somewhat prominent position by the
press. The public paid attention to it. The organs of the press,
vying with one another, began to describe, to analyse, to discuss the
event, the public became yet more interested, the press responded
to the demands of the public, and the snowball began to grow and
grow, and grew before our eyes to such an extent that there was not
a family which had not its disputes about _l’affaire_. So that Caran
d’Ache’s caricature, which depicted first a peaceful family that had
decided not to discuss the Dreyfus affair any more, and then the
same family represented as angry furies fighting one another, quite
correctly depicted the relation of the whole reading world to the
Dreyfus question. Men of other nationalities who could not have any
real interest in the question whether a French officer had or had not
been a traitor--men moreover who could not know how the affair was
going--all divided for or against Dreyfus, some asserting his guilt
with assurance, others denying it with equal certainty.
It was only after some years that people began to awaken from the
“suggestion” and to understand that they could not possibly know
whether he was guilty or innocent, and that each one of them had
a thousand matters nearer and more interesting to him than the
Dreyfus affair. Such infatuations occur in all spheres, but they
are specially noticeable in the sphere of literature, for the press
naturally occupies itself most of all with the affairs of the press,
and these are particularly powerful in our day when the press has
obtained such an unnatural development. It continually happens that
people suddenly begin to devote exaggerated praise to some very
insignificant works, and then if these works do not correspond to the
prevailing view of life suddenly become perfectly indifferent to them
and forget both the works themselves and their own previous attitude
towards them.
So within my recollection, in the eighteen-forties, there occurred in
the artistic sphere the exaltation and laudation of Eugène Sue and
George Sand; in the social sphere, of Fourier; in the philosophic
sphere, of Comte and Hegel; and in the scientific sphere, of Darwin.
Sue is quite forgotten, George Sand is being forgotten and replaced
by the writings of Zola and the Decadents, Baudelaire, Verlaine,
Maeterlinck and others. Fourier, with his phalansteries, is quite
forgotten, and has been replaced by Karl Marx. Hegel, who justified
the existing order, and Comte, who denied the necessity of religious
activity in humanity, and Darwin, with his law of struggle for
existence, still maintain their places, but are beginning to be
neglected and replaced by the teachings of Nietzsche, which though
perfectly absurd, unthought-out, obscure, and bad in their content,
correspond better to the present-day outlook on life. Thus it
sometimes happens that artistic, philosophic, and literary crazes in
general, arise, fall rapidly, and are forgotten.
But it also happens that such crazes, having arisen in consequence of
special causes accidentally favouring their establishment, correspond
so well to the view of life diffused in society and especially in
literary circles, that they maintain their place for a very long
time. Even in Roman times it was remarked that books have their fate,
and often a very strange one: failure in spite of high qualities,
and enormous undeserved success in spite of insignificance. And a
proverb was made: _Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli_, that
is, that the fate of books depends on the understanding of those who
read them. Such was the correspondence of Shakespeare’s work to the
view of life of the people among whom his fame arose. And this fame
has been maintained, and is still maintained, because the works of
Shakespeare continue to correspond to the view of life of those who
maintain this fame.
Until the end of the 18th century Shakespeare not only had no
particular fame in England, but was estimated less than his
contemporaries: Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and others. His fame
began in Germany, and from there passed to England. This happened
for the following reason:
Art, especially dramatic art which demands for its realisation
extensive preparations, expenditure, and labour, was always
religious, that is to say, its object was to evoke in man a clearer
conception of that relation of man to God attained at the time by the
advanced members of the society in which the art was produced.
So it should be by the nature of the matter, and so it always had
been among all nations: among the Egyptians, Hindoos, Chinese,
and Greeks--from the earliest time that we have knowledge of the
life of man. And it has always happened that, with the coarsening
of religious forms, art had more and more diverged from this
original aim (which had caused it to be recognised as an important
matter--almost an act of worship) and instead of the service of
religion, it adopted instead of religious aims worldly aims for the
satisfaction of the demands of the crowd, or of the great ones of the
earth, that is to say, aims of recreation and amusement.
This deflection of art from its true and high vocation occurred
everywhere, and it occurred in Christendom.
The first manifestation of Christian art was in the worship of God in
the temples: the performance of Mass and, in general, of the liturgy.
When in course of time the forms of this art of divine worship
became insufficient, the Mysteries were produced, depicting those
events regarded as most important in the Christian religious view
of life. Afterwards, when in the 13th and 14th centuries the centre
of gravity of Christian teaching was more and more transferred from
the worship of Jesus as God, to the explanation of his teaching and
its fulfilment, the form of the Mysteries, which depicted external
Christian events, became insufficient and new forms were demanded;
and as an expression of this tendency appeared the Moralities,
dramatic representations in which the characters personified the
Christian virtues and the opposite vices.
But allegories by their very nature, as art of a lower order, could
not replace the former religious drama, and no new form of dramatic
art corresponding to the conception of Christianity as a teaching
of life had yet been found. And dramatic art, lacking a religious
basis, began in all Christian countries more and more to deviate from
its purpose, and instead of a service of God became a service of
the crowd (I mean by “crowd” not merely the common people, but the
majority of immoral or non-moral people indifferent to the higher
problems of human life). This deviation was helped on by the fact
that just at that time the Greek thinkers, poets, and dramatists,
with whom the Christian world had not hitherto been acquainted, were
re-discovered and favourably accepted. And therefore, not having
yet had time to work out for themselves a clear and satisfactory
form of dramatic art suitable to the new conception entertained of
Christianity as a teaching of life, and at the same time recognising
the previous Mysteries and Moralities as insufficient, the writers of
the 15th and 16th centuries, in their search for a new form, began
to imitate the newly discovered Greek models, which were attractive
by their elegance and novelty. And as it was chiefly the great ones
of the earth who could avail themselves of the drama--the kings,
princes, and courtiers--the least religious people, not merely quite
indifferent to questions of religion but for the most part thoroughly
depraved--it followed that to satisfy the demands of its public the
drama of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries was chiefly a spectacle
intended for depraved kings and for the upper classes. Such was the
drama of Spain, England, Italy, and France.
The plays of that time, chiefly composed in all these countries
according to ancient Greek models, from poems, legends, and
biographies, naturally reflected the national characters. In Italy
what was chiefly elaborated were comedies with amusing scenes and
characters. In Spain the worldly drama flourished, with complicated
plots and ancient historical heroes. The peculiarity of English drama
was the coarse effects produced by murders, executions, and battles
on the stage, and popular comic interludes. Neither the Italian, nor
the Spanish, nor the English, drama had European fame, and each of
them enjoyed success only in its own country. General fame, thanks
to the elegance of its language and the talent of its writers, was
enjoyed only by the French drama, which was distinguished by strict
adherence to the Greek models, and especially to the law of the three
Unities.
So matters continued till the end of the 18th century, but at
the end of that century this is what happened: in Germany which
lacked even mediocre dramatists, (though there had been a weak and
little known writer, Hans Sachs), all educated people, including
Frederick the Great, bowed down before the French pseudo-classical
drama. And yet at that very time there appeared in Germany a
circle of educated and talented writers and poets who, feeling
the falsity and coldness of the French drama, sought a newer and
freer dramatic form. The members of this group, like all the upper
classes of the Christian world at that time, were under the charm
and influence of the Greek classics and, being utterly indifferent
to religious questions, thought that if the Greek drama depicting
the calamities, sufferings, and struggles of its heroes supplied
the best model for the drama, then for drama in the Christian world
such representation of the sufferings and struggles of heroes would
also be a sufficient subject, if only one rejected the narrow
demands of pseudo-classicism. These men, not understanding that the
sufferings and strife of their heroes had a religious significance
for the Greeks, imagined that it was only necessary to reject the
inconvenient law of the three Unities, and without containing any
religious element corresponding to the beliefs of their own time,
the representation of various incidents in the lives of historic
personages, and of strong human passions in general would afford a
sufficient basis for the drama. Just such a drama existed at that
time among the kindred English people and, becoming acquainted with
it, the Germans decided that just such should be the drama of the new
period.
The masterly development of the scenes, which constitutes
Shakespeare’s speciality, caused them to select Shakespeare’s dramas
from among all other English plays which were not in the least
inferior, but often superior, to Shakespeare’s.
At the head of the circle stood Goethe, who was then the dictator of
public opinion on esthetic questions. And he it was--partly from a
wish to destroy the fascination of the false French art, partly from
a wish to give freer scope to his own dramatic activity, but chiefly
because his view of life agreed with Shakespeare’s--he it was who
acclaimed Shakespeare a great poet. When that falsehood had been
proclaimed on Goethe’s authority, all those esthetic critics who did
not understand art threw themselves upon it like crows upon carrion,
and began to search Shakespeare for non-existent beauties, and to
extol them. These men, German esthetic critics--for the most part
utterly devoid of esthetic feeling, ignorant of that simple direct
artistic impression which for men with a feeling for art clearly
distinguishes artistic impression from all other, but believing the
authority that had proclaimed Shakespeare as a great poet--began to
belaud the whole of Shakespeare indiscriminately, selecting passages
especially which struck them by their effects or expressed thoughts
corresponding to their own view of life, imagining that such effects
and such thoughts constitute the essence of what is called art.
These men acted as blind men would if they tried by touch to select
diamonds out of a heap of stones they fingered. As the blind man,
long sorting out the many little stones, could finally come to no
other conclusion than that all the stones were precious and the
smoothest were especially precious, so the esthetic critics, deprived
of artistic feeling, could come to no other result about Shakespeare.
To make their praise of the whole of Shakespeare more convincing
they composed an esthetic theory, according to which a definite
religious view of life is not at all necessary for the creation of
works of art in general, or for the drama in particular; that for
the inner content of a play it is quite enough to depict passions
and human characters, that not only is no religious illumination of
the matter presented required, but that art ought to be objective,
that is to say, it should depict occurrences quite independently of
any valuation of what is good or bad. And as this theory was educed
from Shakespeare, it naturally happened that the works of Shakespeare
corresponded to this theory, and were therefore the height of
perfection.
And these were the people chiefly responsible for Shakespeare’s fame.
Chiefly in consequence of their writings, the inter-action of
writers and the public came about which found expression, and is
still expressed, by the insensate belaudment of Shakespeare without
any rational basis. These esthetic critics wrote profound treatises
about Shakespeare (eleven thousand volumes have been written about
him, and a whole science of Shakespeareology has been formulated);
the public became more and more interested, and the learned critics
explained more and more, that is to say, they added to the confusion
and belaudment.
So that the first cause of Shakespeare’s fame was that the Germans
wanted to oppose something freer and more alive to the French drama
of which they were tired, and which was really dull and cold. The
second cause was that the young German writers required a model for
their own dramas. The third and chief cause was the activity of the
learned and zealous esthetic German critics who lacked esthetic
feeling and formulated the theory of objective art, that is to say,
deliberately repudiated the religious essence of the drama.
“But,” I shall be asked, “what do you mean by the words ‘religious
essence of the drama’? Is not what you demand for the drama
religious instruction, didactics: what is called a tendency--which
is incompatible with true art?” By “the religious essence of art,”
I reply, I mean not an external inculcation of any religious truth
in artistic guise, and not an allegorical representation of those
truths, but the expression of a definite view of life corresponding
to the highest religious understanding of a given period: an outlook
which, serving as the impelling motive for the composition of the
drama, permeates the whole work though the author is unconscious of
it. So it has always been with true art, and so it is with every true
artist in general and with dramatists especially. Hence, as happened
when the drama was a serious thing, and as should be according
to the essence of the matter, he alone can write a drama who has
something to say to men--something highly important for them--about
man’s relation to God, to the universe, to all that is infinite and
unending.
But when, thanks to the German theories about objective art, an idea
had been established that, for drama, this is not wanted at all,
then a writer like Shakespeare who in his own soul had not formed
religious convictions corresponding to his period, and who had even
no convictions at all, but piled up in his plays all possible events,
horrors, fooleries, discussions, and effects, could evidently be
accepted as the greatest of dramatic geniuses.
But all these are external reasons: the fundamental inner cause of
Shakespeare’s fame was, and is, that his plays fitted _pro captu
lectoris_, that is to say responded to the irreligious and immoral
attitude of the upper classes of our world.
VIII
A series of accidents brought it about that Goethe at the beginning
of the last century, being the dictator of philosophic thought and
esthetic laws, praised Shakespeare; the esthetic critics caught up
that praise and began to write their long foggy erudite articles, and
the great European public began to be enchanted by Shakespeare. The
critics, responding to this public interest, laboriously vied with
one another in writing fresh and fresh articles about Shakespeare,
and readers and spectators were still further confirmed in their
enthusiasm, and Shakespeare’s fame kept growing and growing like
a snowball, until in our time it has attained a degree of insane
laudation that obviously rests on no other basis than suggestion.
“There is no one even approximately equal to Shakespeare either among
ancient or modern writers.” “Poetic truth is the most brilliant gem
in the crown of Shakespeare’s service.” “Shakespeare is the greatest
moralist of all times.” “Shakespeare displays such diversity and such
objectivity as place him beyond the limits of time and nationality.”
“Shakespeare is the greatest genius that has hitherto existed.”
“For the creation of tragedies, comedies, historical plays, idylls,
idyllic comedies, esthetic idylls, for representation itself as
also for incidental verses, he is the only man. He not only wields
unlimited power over our laughter and our tears, over all phases
of passion, humour, thought and observation, but he commands an
unlimited realm of imagination, full of fancy of a terrifying and
amazing character, and he possesses penetration in the world of
invention and of reality, and over all this there reigns one and the
same truthfulness to character and to nature, and the same spirit of
humanity.”
“To Shakespeare the epithet of great applies naturally; and if
one adds that independently of his greatness he has also become
the reformer of all literature, and moreover has expressed in
his works not only the phenomena of the life of his time, but
also from thoughts and views that in his day existed only in germ
has prophetically foreseen the direction which the social spirit
would take in the future (of which we see an amazing example in
Hamlet)--one may say without hesitation that Shakespeare was not only
a great, but the greatest of all poets that ever existed, and that in
the sphere of poetic creation the only rival that equals him is life
itself, which in his productions he depicted with such perfection.”
The obvious exaggeration of this appraisement is a most convincing
proof that it is not the outcome of sane thought, but of suggestion.
The more insignificant, the lower, the emptier, a phenomenon is,
once it becomes the object of suggestion, the more supernatural and
exaggerated is the importance attributed to it. The Pope is not only
holy, but most holy, and so forth. So Shakespeare is not only a good
writer, but the greatest genius, the eternal teacher of mankind.
Suggestion is always a deceit, and every deceit is an evil. And
really the suggestion that Shakespeare’s works are great works
of genius, presenting the climax both of esthetic and ethical
perfection, has caused and is causing great injury to men.
This injury is two-fold: first, the fall of the drama and the
substitution of an empty immoral amusement for that important organ
of progress, and secondly, by the direct degradation of men by
presenting them with false models for imitation.
The life of humanity only approaches perfection by the elucidation
of religious consciousness (the only principle securely uniting men
one with another). The elucidation of the religious consciousness of
man is accomplished through all sides of man’s spiritual activity.
One side of that activity is art. One part of art, and almost the
most important, is the drama.
And therefore the drama, to deserve the importance attributed to
it, should serve the elucidation of religious consciousness. Such
the drama always was, and such it was in the Christian world. But
with the appearance of Protestantism in its broadest sense--that is
to say, the appearance of a new understanding of Christianity as a
teaching of life--dramatic art did not find a form corresponding to
this new understanding of religion, and the men of the Renaissance
period were carried away by the imitation of classical art. This was
most natural, but the attraction should have passed, and art should
have found, as it is now beginning to find, a new form corresponding
to the altered understanding of Christianity.
But the finding of this new form was hindered by the teaching, which
arose among German writers at the end of the 18th and beginning of
the 19th centuries, of the so-called objectivity of art--that is
to say, the indifference of art to good or evil--together with an
exaggerated praise of Shakespeare’s dramas, which partly corresponded
to the esthetic theory of the Germans and partly served as material
for it. Had there not been this exaggerated praise of Shakespeare’s
dramas, accepted as the most perfect models of drama, people of the
18th and 19th centuries and of our own, would have had to understand
that the drama, to have a right to exist and be regarded as a serious
matter, ought to serve, as always was, and cannot but be, the case,
the elucidation of religious consciousness. And having understood
this they would have sought a new form of drama corresponding to
their religious perception.
But when it was decided that Shakespeare’s drama is the summit of
perfection, and that people ought to write as he did without any
religious or even any moral content--all the dramatists, imitating
him, began to compose plays lacking content, like the plays of
Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and, among us Russians, Púshkin, and the
historical plays of Ostróvski, Alexéy Tolstóy, and the innumerable
other more or less well-known dramatic works which fill all the
theatres and are continually produced by anyone to whom the thought
and desire to write plays occur.
Only thanks to such a mean petty understanding of the importance of
the drama do there appear among us that endless series of dramatic
works presenting the actions, situations, characters, and moods of
people, not only devoid of any spiritual content but even lacking any
human sense. And let not the reader suppose that I exclude from this
estimate of contemporary drama the pieces I myself have incidentally
written for the theatre. I recognise them, just like all the rest, to
be lacking in that religious content which should form the basis of
the future drama.
So that the drama, the most important sphere of art, has become in
our time merely an empty and immoral amusement for the empty and
immoral crowd. What is worst of all is that to the art of the drama,
which has fallen as low as it was possible to fall, people continue
to attribute an elevated significance, unnatural to it.
Dramatists, actors, theatrical managers, the press--the latter most
seriously publishing reports of theatres, operas, and so forth--all
feel assured that they are doing something very useful and important.
The drama in our time is like a great man fallen to the lowest stage
of degradation, who yet continues to pride himself on his past,
of which nothing now remains. And the public of our time is like
those who pitilessly get amusement out of this once great man, now
descended to the lowest depths.
Such is one harmful effect of the epidemic suggestion of the
greatness of Shakespeare. Another harmful effect of that bepraisement
is the setting up of a false model for men’s imitation.
If people now wrote of Shakespeare that, for his time, he was a
great writer, he managed verse well enough, was a clever actor and
a good stage-manager, even if their valuation were inexact and
somewhat exaggerated, provided it was moderate, people of the younger
generations might remain free from the Shakespearean influence. But
when to every young man entering on life in our time are presented
as models of moral perfection, not the religious and moral teachers
of mankind, but first of all Shakespeare, about whom it is decided
and transmitted by learned men from generation to generation as an
irrefragable truth that he is the greatest of poets and the greatest
of teachers of life, a young man cannot remain free from this harmful
influence.
On reading or hearing Shakespeare the question for a young man is
no longer whether Shakespeare is good or bad, but only to discover
wherein lies that extraordinary esthetic and ethical beauty of which
he has received the suggestion from learned men whom he respects, but
which he neither sees nor feels. And forcing himself, and perverting
his esthetic and ethical feeling, he tries to make himself agree
with the prevailing opinion. He no longer trusts himself, but trusts
to what learned people, respected by him, have said (I myself have
experienced all this). Reading the critical analyses of the plays,
and the extracts from books with explanatory commentaries, it begins
to seem to him that he feels something like an artistic impression,
and the longer this continues the more is his esthetic and ethical
feeling perverted. He already ceases to discriminate independently
and clearly between what is truly artistic, and the artificial
imitation of art.
But above all, having assimilated that immoral view of life
which permeates all Shakespeare’s works he loses the capacity to
distinguish between good and evil. And the error of extolling an
insignificant, inartistic, and not only non-moral but plainly immoral
writer, accomplishes its pernicious work.
That is why I think that the sooner people emancipate themselves
from this false worship of Shakespeare the better it will be--first
because people when they are freed from this falsehood will come to
understand that a drama which has no religious basis is not only not
an important or good thing, as is now supposed, but is a most trivial
and contemptible affair. And having understood this they will have
to search for and work out a new form of modern drama--a drama which
will serve for the elucidation and confirmation in man of the highest
degree of religious consciousness. And secondly, because people,
when themselves set free from this hypnotic state, will understand
that the insignificant and immoral works of Shakespeare and his
imitators, aiming only at distracting and amusing the spectators,
cannot possibly serve to teach the meaning of life, but that, as long
as there is no real religious drama, guidance for life must be looked
for from other sources.
PART XVIII
A TALK ON THE DRAMA.
Reported by I. Teneromo, _ca._ 1907
I recently had the opportunity of talking with Leo Tolstoy about the
theatre.
“What dramas, what heartrending dramas, are being enacted before our
eyes: national dramas, class dramas, caste dramas! And the individual
drama! Has there ever been a time so full of terrible suffering,
of mutual destruction? Only think what has passed before us during
these last four years of horror! What a din of battle, what a storm
of insurrection, what shrieks of massacres with their heaps of
mutilated bodies in the streets, in the fields, and at the bottom of
the sea! And now that the noise is past, how many secret executions,
secret suicides, and how much secret madness! And in spite of such
a plenitude of subjects the stage is impoverished. We have no
tragedies, no moving drama, not even a healthy amusing repertoire, no
humor....
“It is as though life and the drama were made of one piece of dough,
and if more is allotted to the one, there remains less for the other.
The well-spring of plays for the stage has dried up, and there is
only the dull sticky liquid of adaptations left at the bottom.
“Oh, those adaptations! Of course, what will not hunger drive one
to invent? But the idea of adaptation is a perfectly childish one.
To take a novel, or a story, and rearrange it as a play is like
what children do when they cut a figure out of a picture along the
outline, stick it to a bit of cardboard, fix it on a stand, and are
quite delighted. It stands up, therefore it is a statue! A novel or
a story is pictorial work: in it the master works with his brush,
putting on dabs of paint, producing backgrounds, shadows, half-tones.
A play is sculptor’s work. One has to work with a chisel: not to put
on dabs of paint but to cut out in relief.
“I first understood the wide difference between a novel and a play
when I sat down to write my _Power of Darkness_. At first I set to
work using a novelist’s usual methods, to which I was accustomed. But
after the first few pages I found that they were not the right thing
here. For instance, on the stage it is impossible to prepare for
the important moments lived through by the hero, impossible to make
him think and call up memories, or to throw light on his character
by referring back to the past: it all comes out dull, forced, and
unreal. A ready-formed state of mind, ready-formed resolutions, must
be presented to the public. Only soul-images like these--sculptured
in relief and in mutual collision--agitate and touch the onlooker.
“It is true I myself could not resist it, and put into _The Power of
Darkness_ a few monologues; but while doing so I felt it was not the
right thing.”
The above is taken from _The Life of Tolstoy_, Vol. II, by
Aylmer Maude.
_c. 1917._
PART XIX
TWO KINDS OF MENTAL ACTIVITY
(The following article was written by Tolstoy to serve as
an introduction to a collection of thoughts, aphorisms, and
maxims by La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and
Montesquieu, which a friend of Tolstoy’s had translated into
Russian.)
The activity of human reason directed to the elucidation of the laws
that govern human life has always manifested itself in two different
ways. Some thinkers have tried to systematize all the phenomena and
laws of human life into definite connection with one another. Such
were the originators of all the systems of philosophy, from Aristotle
to Spinoza and Hegel.
Others have helped the elucidation of the laws of human life not by
elaborating shapely systems but by detached observations and apt
expressions indicating the eternal laws that rule our life. Such were
the sages of the ancient world who formed collections of aphorisms,
the Christian mystic writers, and especially the French writers of
the XVIth, XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, who brought this style of
writing to the highest degree of perfection.
Such are the thoughts and maxims of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère,
Pascal, Montesquieu and Vauvenargues, not to mention the wonderful
Montaigne, whose writings partly belong to this class.
If we compare all knowledge of the laws of human life to a ball
continually enlarged by fresh acquisitions, then thinkers of the
first, systematic class should be likened to men who try to enfold
the ball with more or less solid and thick stuff in order to enlarge
it equally all over. Thinkers of the second category are like men
who, disregarding inequalities in the increase of the surface of
different parts of the ball, enlarge it, not all over but at various
points of the radii along which their thoughts naturally travel,
generally outreaching the thinkers of the first kind and furnishing
future systematizers with material to work upon.
The advantages on the side of thinkers of the first category
are: coherence, completeness, and symmetry in their doctrines.
The disadvantages are: artificiality in their structure, forced
connection of the parts, often evident deviations from truth to
secure coherence of the whole teaching, and (resulting from this)
frequent obscurity and mistiness in the manner of exposition.
The advantages on the side of the second category of thinkers
are: directness, sincerity, novelty, boldness, and, as it were,
an impulsiveness in their thoughts, a freedom from shackles, and
a corresponding vigour of expression. Their disadvantages are:
fragmentariness and sometimes external inconsistency--though this
latter is usually more apparent than real.
Their greatest advantage however is that whereas works of the first
class--philosophic systems--often repel by their pedantry or, if
they do not repel, weaken the mind of the reader by subduing him
and depriving him of independence, books of the second class always
attract by their sincerity, elegance, and brevity of expression.
Above all, they do not crush the independent activity of the mind
but, on the contrary, evoke it by obliging the reader either to
deduce further conclusions from what he has read or sometimes, when
he quite disagrees with the author, to contest his positions and thus
arrive at new and unexpected conclusions.
Of this kind are the detached thoughts both of ancient and modern
writers generally, and such are the thoughts of the French writers
whose maxims are collected in the work before us.
_1908._
PART XX
PREFACE TO N. ORLOV’S ALBUM OF “RUSSIAN PEASANTS”
Tolstoy willingly called attention to pictures, as well as to
stories, of which he approved; and he was particularly ready
to do so if the artists’ subject was one that might interest
the peasants, for whom he considered that artists have done
too little.
Work such as Orlóv’s (himself of peasant origin) which, by
the disapproval it showed of the Government’s treatment of
the peasants, involved risk to the artist, was specially
calculated to attract his sympathy.
“Be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able
to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy
both soul and body.” (Matt. X. 28.)
The publication of Orlóv’s pictures in album form is an excellent
thing. Orlóv is my favourite artist because the subject of his
pictures is my favourite subject--the Russian people: the real
Russian peasant-people, not that people which vanquished Napoleon
and conquered and subdued other nations, not that people which
unfortunately has so quickly learnt to make machines, railways, and
revolutions as well as Parliaments with all conceivable sub-divisions
of parties and tendencies, but that meek, hard-working, Christian,
gentle, much-enduring people which has reared and bears on its
shoulders all those who now torture and diligently corrupt it.
And what Orlóv and I love in these people is one and the same
thing: namely, the meek, patient peasant-soul, enlightened by true
Christianity, which promises so much to those who can understand it.
In all Orlóv’s pictures I see that soul, which like the soul of a
child retains all possibilities and above all the possibility
(while avoiding the depravity of western civilization) of following
the Christian path which alone can lead Christendom out of that
enchanted circle of sufferings in which, with torment to themselves,
men now incessantly revolve.
Here in a smoky hut on a bed of straw lies a dying woman. A burning
taper has, according to custom, been placed in her hands which are
already growing cold. Near her, in solemn submissive calm, stands
her husband; and by his side, in a coarse smock (her only garment),
stands their eldest daughter, a thin little girl, crying. Beside a
rude cradle, hanging from the ceiling, the grandmother soothes a
crying infant. Neighbours stand talking near the door.
This picture evokes in me a wonderful and elevating feeling of tender
pity and also, strange as it may seem to say so, a feeling of envy of
that holy poverty and of the attitude towards it here revealed.
The same elevating feeling of consciousness of the vast spiritual
strength of the people to whom not by my life but by my race I
have the good fortune to belong, is produced in me by two other
pictures of similar character, which always move me profoundly--_The
Emigrants_ and _The Soldier’s Return_.
Apart from the fact that the departure of the emigrants, who are
saying good-bye to those they are leaving behind, is important in
its subject-matter (showing us as it does in vivid images what, in
spite of the difficulties placed in their way by the Government and
the landowners, the Russian people are accomplishing: populating and
cultivating enormous tracts of country), this picture is rendered
particularly touching not merely by the wonderful old man in the
foreground, but by all the figures, full of movement and life,
excited by the thoughts of departure or doubtful at being left behind.
_The Soldier’s Return_ is a picture I am particularly fond of.
Having pined for years far from home in hard army service uncongenial
to his soul, Pahóm or Sídor, a dutiful son, a loving husband and a
good worker, has at last struggled back to liberty and home. And what
does he find there? He has already heard the news before he reached
his hut. During his absence his Matrëna has had a baby.
This is their first meeting: the wife kneels before her husband,
and the child--the evidence of her fault--is also there. The
mother-in-law is egging on her son (woman’s way) and telling how she
had said, “Mind, Matrëna, your husband will return....” But the old
father, still filled with that Christian spirit of forgiveness and
love by which the best representatives of the Russian people have
lived and still live, interrupts the old woman’s shrill speech and
reminds them of that which settles all accounts and wipes out all
offences and all anger: he reminds them of God--and all reckonings
are at an end, all tangles straightened out.
However painful it may be to the son, however hurt he may feel,
however he may have wished to avenge his shame on his wife, he is his
father’s son and the same divine spirit lives in him: the spirit of
mercy, forgiveness and love; and this spirit--so alien to the uniform
he wears--awakes within him, and he waves his hand and experiences
the touching joy of forgiveness. “God will forgive you! Rise,
Matrëna, that will do!”
The other six pictures are equally important and beautiful. I have
separated these six from the three first only because, besides the
traits common to them all, in these six are vividly depicted the
temptations and depraving influences against which the Christian soul
of the Russian people has to contend and does contend, and by which
it has not been subdued.
These pictures are peculiarly attractive in that they depict the
struggle without deciding whose the victory will be. Will the whole
people follow the path of spiritual and mental depravity along
which the so-called educated classes, wishing to make it like
themselves, invite it, or will it hold to the Christian principles by
which it has lived, and, in a vast majority of cases, still lives?
[Illustration: “THE RETURN FROM WORK”
_The Tax Collector in a Peasant’s Hut_
_By N. Orlóv_]
(_See illustration facing this page._) A picture of this kind is the
one in which a village Elder--who has come to collect taxes from a
poor man just returned from wage-work carried on far from home--is
standing over the man awaiting an answer. Only the old father gives
that answer, regardless of all consideration of the needs of the
Government, speaking of God, and the sin of exploiting a worker
barely able to support his family. Very pathetic in this picture,
besides the master of the house, are the mistress who stands by
the table on which she has just spread a meal, from which everyone
has been torn away, and the child who gazes perplexed and full of
sympathy at his excited grandfather.
Of similar kind are the remaining pictures of the series, which
depict a struggle between good and evil in which men of the people,
partly or completely depraved, side with evil.
Such is the picture _Arrears of Taxes_, depicting the sale of a poor
widow’s cow--the support of her children. A rich peasant money-lender
is buying, and the District Elder is selling, the cow, while the
Village Elder notes down the transaction.
Similar pictures are the one, full of matter, in which a poor widow
who lives by the illicit sale of vodka (thereby diminishing the State
revenue) is caught in the act; and _No. 7_ (_see next page_), which
depicts the consecration of one of the vodka-shops which are now
(1908) a Government monopoly. This picture is specially remarkable
for its technique, for the delicacy and exactitude with which the
ideas are expressed, and for the accuracy of its types.
Yet another such picture is the one with the revolting theme,
_Corporal Punishment_.
Besides a true portrayal of the still unperverted Russians, which
is the chief subject of the whole series, in all these last six
pictures, types are shown of that already depraved part of the nation
which wishes, for its own profit, to pervert its still unperverted
brothers.
The Village Elder who is collecting taxes from the man whose payments
are in arrear has not yet broken all links uniting him to his
fellows, and evidently suffers for his fellow-man as well as from his
own participation in the cause of that suffering.
But the over-fed District Elder in the picture in which the cow is
being taken, no longer feels any remorse at fulfilling his cruel
duty, and the usurer buying the cow has no consideration for anything
but his own profit. In the picture of the illicit vodka-seller,
the policeman and the District Elder and the clerk are performing
their task unabashed, and they even admire the cleverness of the
man in disguise who has trapped the vodka-seller. Only the old man,
a representative of the soul of the Russian people, disturbs the
general complacency by his bold words.
In the picture of _The Monopoly_, besides the fat publican grieved
at the loss of his business, the peasant crossing himself before
the icon with evident hypocrisy is very striking, and so is the
tattered fellow who has pushed inopportunely in at the door of the
institution which has brought him to his present condition, and has
so successfully corrupted--and continues for the State’s profit to
corrupt--a large part of the population.
Again in the picture of _Corporal Punishment_, all those present,
except the old man who is praying for the sins of men, and the little
boy aghast at man’s cruelty, have reached the point at which they can
regard their shameful deeds as necessary duties.
[Illustration: “THE MONOPOLY”
_The Consecration of a State Vodka Shop_
_By N. Orlóv_]
The last picture, expressing all that is said in the final six of
the series, is particularly powerful and dreadful in that it shows in
the simplest and most comprehensible way what lies at the bottom of
the demoralization to which the people are subjected, and the chief
danger that faces them.
“Go, go! God will help you!” says the girl, refusing to give to the
beggar. “You see, his Reverence is here!”
Yes, it is a terrible picture!
The strength of a nation lies in the degree of truth in that
religious understanding of the laws of life which guides its actions.
I say the degree of truth, for a complete understanding of God is
never possible to man. Man can but draw ever nearer and nearer to
the one and the other. And the greatest amount of true religious
understanding of life in our days has been and still is to be found
among the illiterate, wise and holy Russian peasant-population.
And in all kinds of ways: by Law Courts, taxation, conscription,
and alcoholic poisoning for revenue’s sake, they are surrounded by
terrible temptations, and the most awful of these is the religious
fraud which claims greater importance for the Church and its
ministers than for mercy and brotherly love.
All this is presented in Orlóv’s pictures, and so I think that I am
not wrong in loving them.
These pictures show us the danger now menacing the spiritual life
of the Russian people. And to realize a danger that was not noticed
before is a step towards averting it.
_1908._
APPENDIX
DARLING
_By Antón Chékhov_
Olenka, the daughter of a retired civil servant, Plemyánnikov, sat
musing in her back porch. It was hot, the flies were pertinaciously
teasing, and it was pleasant to reflect that it would soon be
evening. Dark rain-clouds were coming up from the east and bringing
with them an occasional whiff of moisture.
In the middle of the courtyard Kúkin, who lived in a small house
in the same courtyard and was manager and proprietor of the Tivoli
Gardens, stood looking at the sky.
“Again!” he exclaimed despairingly. “It’s going to rain again! Rain
every day, every day, as though to spite me. One might as well hang
oneself! It’s ruination! Fearful losses every day!”
He raised and clasped his hands in despair, and turning to Olenka
continued:
“There, Olenka Semënovna, that’s the life we lead. It’s enough to
make one cry. One works, tries hard, wears oneself out, gets no sleep
at night, and racks one’s brains what to do for the best--and what’s
the result? On the one hand there’s the ignorant boorish public! I
give them the very best operetta, a fairy-like masque, splendid comic
singers, but is that what they want? Do you suppose they understand
anything of all that? What they want is what is given in a booth at
a fair! Trash, is what they demand! On the other hand, look at the
weather! Rain almost every evening. As it started on the 10th May, so
it went on the whole of May and June. It’s simply awful! The public
don’t come, but I have to pay the rent and the artistes!”
Next evening the clouds again began to gather, and Kúkin said with an
hysterical laugh:
“Well, what of it? Rain away! Let it flood the whole garden with
me in it! Let me have no luck in this world or the next! Let the
artistes take proceedings against me! What is a trial? Even if I go
as a convict to Siberia! Or to the scaffold! Ha, ha, ha!”
The next day it was the same again.
Olenka listened to Kúkin silently and seriously, and sometimes
tears came into her eyes. In the end Kúkin’s misfortunes touched
her and she came to love him. He was short and lean, with a sallow
complexion, twists of hair were curled on his temples, he spoke in
a thin tenor voice, and when he spoke his mouth twisted, and his
face always expressed despair, but still he aroused in her a real
and profound affection. She always loved someone and could not
exist without it. Formerly she had loved her papa, who now sat in
an armchair in a dark room, ill, and breathing with difficulty; she
loved her aunt, who sometimes--once in two years--came from Byansk;
and before that, when she was at the secondary school, she had loved
her French master. She was a quiet, soft-hearted, compassionate young
woman, with a mild tender look in her eyes and very good health.
At the sight of her plump rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a
dark little mole on it, and the kind naïve smile which appeared on
her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes,
she’s all right,” and smiled too, and lady-visitors could not refrain
from suddenly seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation and
exclaiming with a gush of delight: “You darling!”
The house in which she had lived since her birth and which had been
left her in her father’s will, was on the outskirts of the town in
the Gipsy Suburb, not far from the Tivoli Gardens. In the evenings
and at night she could hear the band playing and rockets going off
with a bang in the Gardens, and it seemed to her that Kúkin was
fighting his fate and taking his chief foe, the indifferent public,
by assault: her heart melted tenderly, she had no wish to sleep,
and when he returned home towards morning she tapped softly at her
bedroom window and, letting him see only her face and one shoulder
through the curtains, gave him a friendly smile.
He proposed, and they were married. And when he had a good view of
her neck and her plump healthy shoulders, he threw up and clasped his
hands and said: “Darling!”
He was happy but, as it rained on their wedding day and the whole of
the following night, the despairing expression never left his face.
After the wedding they lived happily together. She sat in his
booking-office, saw that the Tivoli Gardens were in order, entered up
the accounts and paid the salaries; and her rosy cheeks, her sweet
naïve smile, shining like a halo, appeared now at the window of the
booking-office, now behind the scenes, now at the refreshment-bar.
And she began to tell her acquaintances that the theatre was the
most remarkable, most important, and most necessary thing in the
world--that only at the theatre could one obtain true pleasure and
become cultivated and humane.
“But do you think the public understands that?” she said. “They want
a common booth! Yesterday we put on ‘Faust Inside Out,’ and almost
all the boxes were empty, but if Vánichka and I were to give some
common trash, believe me the theatre would be packed. To-morrow
Vánichka and I are giving ‘Orpheus in Hell’; mind you come!” And
what Kúkin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated; she
despised the public as he did, for their indifference to art and
their ignorance; she took part in the rehearsals, corrected the
actors, kept an eye on the behaviour of the musicians, and when the
local paper criticised their theatre unfavourably she cried, and
afterwards went to the newspaper office for explanations.
The actors were fond of her and called her “Vánichka and I,” and “the
Darling.” She was sorry for them and used to lend them small sums,
and if it happened that they did not pay her, she cried in secret,
but made no complaint to her husband.
And in the winter they got on quite well. They took a theatre in the
town for the whole winter and sub-let it for short periods, now to an
Ukrainian troupe, now to a conjuror, now to a local dramatic company.
Olenka grew plumper and was all beaming with pleasure, but Kúkin
grew thinner and sallower and complained of terrible losses, though
business had not been bad all winter. He used to cough at night,
and she gave him raspberry or lime-blossom tea, rubbed him with
eau-de-Cologne, and wrapped him up in her soft shawls.
“What a splendid dear you are!” she said, quite sincerely, smoothing
his hair. “What a good-looking pet you are!”
In Lent he went to Moscow to gather a troupe, and without him she
could not sleep, but sat by the window looking at the stars. She
compared herself, at the time, to the hens who keep awake all night
and are restless when the cock is not in the hen-house. Kúkin was
detained in Moscow and wrote that he would return for Easter, and his
letters already contained arrangements about the Tivoli Gardens. But
on the Monday in Passion Week, late in the evening, an ominous knock
was suddenly heard at the gate; someone was hammering at the gate as
if on a barrel: boom, boom, boom! The sleepy cook, splashing with her
bare feet through the puddles, ran to open the gate.
“Open for goodness’ sake!” said someone in a thick bass voice.
“There’s a telegram for you!”
Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before, but this time
for some reason she grew quite faint. She opened the telegram with
trembling hands, and read as follows:
“Iván Kúkin passed away to-day suddenly pasway awaiting instructions
fuferal Tuesday.”
It was typed “fuferal” in the telegram, and there was also the
incomprehensible word ‘pasway.’ The signature was that of the manager
of an operatic troupe.
“My precious!” sobbed Olenka. “Vánichka, my dearest, my precious. Why
did I ever meet you? Why did I ever know and love you? Whom have I
left? Why have you deserted your poor, unfortunate Olenka?”
Kúkin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagánkov cemetery in Moscow.
Olenka returned home on Wednesday and as soon as she entered her
house she fell on her bed and sobbed so loud that she could be heard
in the street and in the neighbouring houses.
“The darling!” said the neighbours, as they crossed themselves.
“Darling Olga Semënovna, how she does take on!”
Three months later Olenka was returning from Mass, melancholy and
in deep mourning. It happened that a neighbour, Vasíli Andréich
Pusloválov, who was also returning from church, walked beside her. He
was manager of the merchant Babakáev’s timber-yard. He wore a straw
hat, a white waistcoat and a gold watch-chain, and looked more like a
squire than a tradesman.
“Everything has its own order, Olga Semënovna,” he said gravely, in a
tone of sympathy, “and if any one of those near us dies, it must be
that God willed it so, and so we must not forget ourselves but must
bear it submissively.”
Having accompanied Olenka to the gate he took his leave of her and
went on. All day after that she seemed to hear his dignified voice,
and whenever she closed her eyes she saw his dark beard. He pleased
her very much. And apparently she had also made an impression on
him, for shortly afterwards an elderly lady with whom she was but
slightly acquainted came to drink coffee with her, and as soon as she
was seated at the table began to talk about Pustoválov and say what
a good and reliable man he was, whom anyone would be glad to marry.
Three days after that, Pustoválov himself came to call on her; he did
not stay long, not more than ten minutes, and did not say much, but
Olenka fell in love with him, so much in love that as if she were
in a fever she did not sleep all night, and in the morning she sent
for the elderly lady. The match was soon arranged, and then came the
wedding.
Pustoválov and Olenka lived happily after their marriage. He was
usually in the timber-yard till dinner and then went out on business,
and Olenka took his place and sat in the office till the evening,
writing out accounts and despatching goods.
“Now timber rises twenty per cent in price every year,” she said
to customers and acquaintances. “Just think, we used to sell local
timber, but now Vánichka has to go to Mogilév province every year to
buy timber. And the freights!” she went on, covering both her cheeks
with her hands in horror, “what freights!”
She felt as if she had dealt in timber quite a long time; that the
most important and most necessary thing in life was timber; and there
was something intimate and touching to her in the words: “balk,
joist, pole, plank, scantling, batten, beam....”
At night when she slept, she dreamed of whole mountains of planks
and boards, and long unending rows of carts conveying timber to
distant places beyond the town. She dreamed of how a whole regiment
of twenty-eight foot, nine-inch beams was marching on end to attack
the timber-yard; joists, beams and boards knocked against one another
with a resounding crash of dry wood, all falling down and rising
again, piling themselves on one another. Olenka cried out in her
sleep and Pustoválov said tenderly: “Olenka, what’s the matter,
darling? Cross yourself!”
Her husband’s thoughts were hers too. If he thought the room too hot,
or business slack, she thought so too. Her husband did not care for
any entertainments and stayed at home on holidays, and so did she.
“You are always at home or in the office,” her acquaintances said to
her. “You should go to the theatre, darling, or the circus.”
“Vánichka and I have no time to go to theatres,” she answered
sedately. “We are hard-working people and have no time for trifling.
What good are those theatres?”
On Saturdays Pustoválov and she went to evening service, on holidays
to early service, and they returned from church side by side with
a softened expression on their faces, both diffusing an agreeable
perfume, and her silk dress rustling pleasantly. At home they had tea
with fancy bread and different kinds of jam, and then cake. Every
day at noon an appetising smell of beet-root soup and roast mutton
or duck, or on fast days of fish, was noticeable in their yard and
in the street outside, and one could not pass their gate without
beginning to feel an appetite. In the office a samovar was always
boiling, and customers were treated to tea and biscuits. Once a week
the couple went to the baths and returned from there together, both
red in the face.
“Yes, we get on all right,” Olenka used to say. “Thank heaven! God
grant everyone a life such as Vánichka’s and mine.”
When Pustoválov went to the Mogilév province to buy timber she was
much depressed and lay awake at night, crying. Sometimes in the
evening the regimental veterinary surgeon, Smírnin, who rented their
lodge, used to come to see her. He would tell her some news, or play
cards with her, and that distracted her a little. She was specially
interested in what he told her of his own family life: he was married
and had a boy, but was separated from his wife because she had been
unfaithful to him, and now he hated her but sent her forty roubles
a month for his son’s maintenance. As she listened to this Olenka
sighed, shook her head, and felt sorry for him.
“Well, God be with you,” she would say when he took his leave, and
as she lighted him with a candle to the staircase. “Thank you for
sharing my dullness. May the Queen of Heaven grant you good health!”
She always expressed herself thus sedately and sagaciously, imitating
her husband, and when the veterinary surgeon was already disappearing
beyond the door below, she would call after him:
“Do you know, Vladímir Platónych, you should make it up with your
wife. Forgive her, if only for your son’s sake! The little boy no
doubt understands.”
And when Pustoválov returned she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy family life, and they both sighed,
shook their heads, and spoke of the boy who no doubt pined for his
father, and then, by some strange sequence of ideas, they went up to
the icons, bowed to the ground, and prayed that God would send them
children.
So the Pustoválovs lived quietly and peaceably in love and full
accord for six years. But then one winter Pustoválov at the
timber-yard went out without his cap, after drinking hot tea, to send
off some timber, and caught cold and fell ill. He was treated by the
best doctors, but got worse, and died after four months’ illness. And
Olenka was again a widow.
“Whom have I now that you have forsaken me, my precious?” she
sobbed, after she had buried her husband. “How am I to live without
you, grief-stricken and wretched! Pity me, good people, utterly
forlorn....”
She wore a black dress with weepers, gave up hats and gloves for
good, and hardly ever went out except to go to church and to her
husband’s grave, and at home she lived like a nun. It was only after
six months had passed that she left off the weepers and opened the
shutters of the windows. She was sometimes seen going to market with
her cook to buy provisions, but how she now lived, and what went on
in her house, could only be conjectured. People made conjectures, for
instance, from seeing her drinking tea in her little garden with the
veterinary surgeon, who read the newspaper aloud to her, and also
from the fact that, meeting a lady she knew at the post-office, she
had said to her:
“There is no regular veterinary inspection in our town, and therefore
there is much illness. One is always hearing of people falling ill
from the milk, and being infected by cows and horses. The health of
domestic animals should really be looked after as carefully as the
health of human beings.”
She repeated the veterinary’s thoughts and was now of his opinion
about everything. It was clear that she could not live a year without
some attachment and had found her new happiness in the lodge of her
own house.
Another would have been censured for this, but no one could think ill
of Olenka; everything she did was so natural. The veterinary surgeon
and she never spoke to anybody about the change in their relations
to one another, and they tried to conceal it, but did not succeed in
this, for Olenka could have no secrets. When visitors, his comrades
in the service, came to see him, she while pouring out the tea or
serving supper would begin to speak about cattle-plague, or bovine
tuberculosis and municipal slaughter-houses, while he would become
dreadfully confused, and after the visitors had gone would seize her
hand and hiss angrily:
“Didn’t I ask you not to speak of what you don’t understand? When we
veterinaries talk among ourselves, please don’t join in. It’s really
annoying!”
And she would look at him with amazement and agitation and would ask:
“Volódichka dear, what am I to speak about?”
And she would embrace him and with tears in her eyes entreat him not
to be angry, and they would both be happy.
That happiness however did not last long. The veterinary left with
his regiment and left for good, as the regiment was ordered to some
very distant place, perhaps to Siberia. And Olenka was left alone.
She was entirely alone now. Her father had died long ago, and his
armchair lay covered with dust and with a leg broken off, in the
garret. She grew thinner and paler and people she met in the street
no longer looked at her as they used to do; it was evident that her
best years were over and left behind, and that a new unknown life was
beginning about which it was better not to think. In the evenings she
sat in her porch and could hear the music playing and the rockets
bursting in the Tivoli Gardens, but they did not now awaken any
thought in her. She looked indifferently at her empty yard, thought
of nothing, wished for nothing, and afterwards when night came on
she went to sleep, and saw in her dreams the empty yard. She ate and
drank as if unwillingly.
But the principal thing and the worst of all was that she no longer
had any opinions whatever. She saw the objects around her, and
understood all that took place, but could form no opinions and did
not know what to speak about. And how awful it is not to have any
opinions! One sees, for instance, how a bottle is standing, or rain
falling, or a peasant is driving his cart, but what the bottle, or
rain, or peasant, is for, what sense there is in them, you can’t
say--not even if someone gave you a thousand roubles to do so.
While she had Kúkin, Pustoválov, and afterwards the veterinary
surgeon Olenka was able to explain everything and express her
opinions about anything you liked; but now there was the same void
in her mind and heart as in her yard. And it was harsh and bitter as
wormwood in the mouth.
The town was gradually expanding on all sides; the Gipsy Suburb was
now called a street, and where the Tivoli Gardens and the timber-yard
had been, houses had sprung up, and several side streets had formed.
How fast time flies! Olenka’s house had grown dingy, the roof had
rusted, the outhouse had a slant to one side, and the whole yard was
overgrown with docks and stinging nettles. Olenka herself had grown
elderly and plain; in summer she sat in the porch, and her soul as
before was empty, oppressed, and savoured of wormwood; in winter
she sat at a window looking at the snow. When there was a scent of
spring, or the wind brought the sound of the church bells, a flood
of memories from the past would well up, her heart would contract
with tender emotion and tears would flow freely from her eyes, but
this was only for a moment, then again emptiness returned and she did
not know why she lived. Brýska, her black cat, would rub against her
softly and purr, but these feline caresses did not touch Olenka. Were
they what she needed? She wanted a love that would absorb her whole
being, her whole soul and reason, would give her ideas and a purpose
in life, and would warm her ageing blood. And she brushed away black
Brýska, and told her crossly:
“Get away ... you’ve no business here!”
And so she went on day after day, year after year, without a single
joy, and without any opinions. Whatever Martha the cook said, that
was right.
Towards the evening of a very hot July day, just as the town herd
of cows was being driven through the streets and the whole yard was
filled with clouds of dust, someone suddenly knocked at the gate.
Olenka went herself to open it and was dumbfounded by what she
saw: at the gate stood the veterinary Smírnin, now grey-haired and
in civilian dress. She suddenly remembered everything, could not
restrain herself, began crying, and let her head fall on his breast
without saying a word, and in her great excitement did not notice how
they both entered the house and sat down to tea.
“My dearest!” she muttered, trembling with joy. “Vladímir Platónych!
From where has heaven sent you?”
“I want to settle here for good,” he told her. “I have left the army,
and want to try my luck as a free man, and to live a settled life.
Besides it is time to send my son to the high school. He’s a big boy.
Do you know, I have made it up with my wife.”
“And where is she?” asked Olenka.
“She is at the hotel with our son, and I am hunting round looking for
a lodging.”
“Oh goodness, my dear soul, take my house! What’s wrong with it? Oh,
Lord, why, I won’t charge you anything,” said Olenka, excitedly, and
again began to cry. “You live here, and the lodge will do well for
me. What joy, oh, my goodness!”
Next day the roof of the house was already being painted and the wall
whitewashed, and Olenka, her arms akimbo, went about the yard giving
directions. The old smile beamed on her face and she was fresh and
full of life again, as though she had waked up from a long sleep. The
veterinary’s wife arrived--a thin, plain lady with short hair and a
peevish face, and with her came the boy, Sásha, small for his age
(he was going on for ten), plump, with clear blue eyes and dimples in
his cheeks. Scarcely had the boy entered the yard before he rushed
after the cat, and his merry joyous laughter immediately filled the
air.
“Auntie, is this your cat?” he asked Olenka. “When she pups let me
have a kitten. Mama is awfully afraid of mice.”
Olenka talked to him, gave him tea, and her heart suddenly grew warm
and contracted tenderly, just as if he were her own son. And in
the evening, when he sat down in her dining-room and prepared his
lessons, she looked at him with emotion and pity and whispered:
“My pretty one, my precious ..., my little child! Fancy your being
born so clever and so fair!”
“An island is a portion of dry land surrounded on all sides by
water,” he read.
“An island is a portion of dry land ...” she repeated, and that was
the first opinion she expressed with conviction after so many years
of silence and absence of thought.
And she already had opinions of her own, and at supper she spoke to
Sásha’s parents of how difficult it was for children nowadays to
learn in the high-schools, but that a classical high-school education
was, all the same, better than a commercial one, as after finishing
at the high-school all careers were open to you, whether you wished
to be a doctor or an engineer.
Sásha began going to the high-school. His mother went to stay with
her sister in Khárkov, and did not return; his father went away
somewhere every day to inspect herds of cattle, and would sometimes
be away from home for three days at a time; it seemed to Olenka that
they had quite abandoned Sásha, that he was not wanted at home, that
he was being starved, and she took him to her lodge and arranged a
little room there for him.
Half-a-year has already passed now since Sásha came to live in her
lodge. Every morning Olenka comes into his room; he is fast asleep
with his hand under his cheek, scarcely breathing. She is sorry to
wake him.
“Sáshenka,” she would say sadly, “get up, dear! Time to go to school.”
He gets up, dresses, says his prayers, and then sits down to
breakfast. He drinks three tumblers of tea and eats two big plain
cakes and half a French roll with butter. He is not quite awake yet,
and therefore not in a good temper.
“But, Sáshenka, you did not quite learn your fable,” Olenka says,
gazing at him as if she was seeing him off on a long journey. “I am
troubled about you. You must take pains to learn, dearest ... and
obey your masters.”
“Oh, do leave me alone!” says Sásha.
When he goes along the street to school, himself small but wearing
a big cap and with a satchel on his back, Olenka follows him
noiselessly.
“Sáshenka!” she calls.
He turns round and she slips a date or a caramel into his hand. When
they turn into the side street where the school stands he feels
ashamed of being followed by a tall, stout woman; he looks round and
says:
“You go home, auntie; I can go on alone now.”
She stops, and follows him with her eyes fixedly until he disappears
into the school doorway. Oh, how she loves him! Not one of her former
attachments had been so deep, never before had her soul surrendered
itself so freely, so disinterestedly, and so joyously, as it did now
when the maternal feelings grew more and more ardent within her. For
this boy, who was not hers, for the dimples in his cheeks, for his
peaked cap, she would have laid down her life, given it gladly and
with tears of emotion. Why? Who can tell why?
Having seen Sásha to school she returns home quietly, so content,
serene, and full of love. Her face, which has grown younger-looking
during the last half-year, is smiling and radiant, those she meets
look at her with pleasure, and say:
“Good morning, Olga Semënovna, darling! How are you, darling?”
“The work at the high-school is very difficult nowadays,” she relates
when she goes marketing. “It’s no joke,--in the first class yesterday
they had a fable to learn by heart, a Latin translation, and a sum as
well.... How is a little fellow to do it all?”
And she begins talking about teachers, lessons, and the lesson-books,
saying just what Sásha says about them.
After two o’clock they dine together, and in the evening they do
Sásha’s home work and cry together. When tucking him up in bed,
she spends a long time making the sign of the cross over him and
whispering a prayer; then, when she goes to bed, she dreams of the
dim and distant future when Sásha, having finished the course and
become a doctor or an engineer, will have a big house of his own with
a carriage and horses, and will marry, and children will be borne to
him.... She falls asleep still thinking of the same thing, and the
tears roll down her cheeks from under her closed eye-lids. The black
cat lies at her side and purrs. “Prr ... prr ... prr....”
Suddenly there is a loud knock at the gate. Olenka wakes up
breathless with fear, and her heart beats violently. Half-a-minute
passes and the knocking is repeated.
“It’s a telegram from Khárkov,” she thinks, beginning to tremble
all over. “His mother demands that Sásha should be sent to her in
Khárkov.... Oh, God!”
She is in despair. Her head, her feet and hands, grow cold; there is
nobody in the world more unhappy than she. But another minute passes,
voices are heard: it is the veterinary surgeon returning from the
club.
“Well, thank God!” she thinks.
The weight is gradually lifted from her heart, and it feels light
again. She lies down and thinks about Sásha, who is fast asleep in
the next room and sometimes mutters in his dream:
“I’ll give it you! Be off! Don’t fight!”
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Oxford University Press, “World’s Classics” series, London and
New York.
[2] Oxford University Press, “World’s Classics” series, London and
New York.
[3] In Russian the word ‘poet’ is used not only of writers of verse,
but also of writers of fiction and poetic prose.
[4] Oxford University Press, “World’s Classics” series, London and
New York.
[5] The _Viy_ is an Earth-Spirit, and Gógol’s tale is gruesome.
[6] A daring leader of the hill-tribes, who was prominent at the time
Tolstoy was serving in the Caucasus.
[7] Some details of this crime are given in “Why do Men Stupefy
Themselves?” in _Essays and Letters_, published in the _World’s
Classics_.
[8] From _The Life of Tolstoy_ Vol II, by Aylmer Maude.
[9] That is, Márya Lvóvna, Tolstoy’s second daughter, who was devoted
both to her father and to his teachings.
[10] A reliable man.
[11] By Zola.
[12] Stories by Georges Sand.
[13] Hips and throats.
[14] The old hag.
[15] Deceived and ridiculous.
[16] “Console me, amuse me, sadden me, touch my heart, make me dream,
make me laugh, make me tremble, make me weep, make me think. Only a
few chosen spirits bid the artist compose something beautiful, in the
form that best suits his temperament.”
[17] The defect of Christianity is clearly seen in this. It is too
exclusively moral; it quite sacrifices beauty. But in the eyes of a
complete philosophy beauty, far from being a superficial advantage,
a danger, an inconvenience, is a gift of God, like virtue. It is
worth as much as virtue; the beautiful woman expresses an aspect of
the divine purpose, one of God’s aims, as well as a man of genius
does, or a virtuous woman. She feels this, and hence her pride. She
is instinctively conscious of the infinite treasure she possesses in
her body; she is well aware that without intellect, without talent,
without great virtue, she counts among the chief manifestations of
God. And why forbid her to make the most of the gift bestowed upon
her, or to give the diamond allotted to her its due setting? By
adorning herself woman accomplishes a duty; she practises an art, an
exquisite art, in a sense the most charming of arts. Do not let us be
misled by the smile which certain words provoke in the _frivolous_.
We award the palm of genius to the Greek artist who succeeded in
solving the most delicate of problems, that of adorning the human
body, that is to say, adorning perfection itself, and yet some people
wish to see nothing more than an affair of _chiffons_ in the attempt
to collaborate with the finest work of God--woman’s beauty! Woman’s
toilette with all its refinements is a great art in its own way. The
epochs and countries which can succeed in this are the great epochs
and great countries, and Christianity, by the embargo it laid on
this kind of research, showed that the social ideal it had conceived
would only become the framework of a complete society at a much later
period, when the revolt of men of the world had broken the narrow
yoke originally imposed on the sect by a fanatical pietism.
[18] The schools for training ballet-dancers, as well as the theatres
where the chief ballets were performed, were State institutions in
Russia.
[19] The most usual and widely diffused definition of art is that
art is a particular activity not aiming at material utility, but
affording pleasure to people; a pleasure, it is usually added,
“ennobling and elevating to the soul.”
This definition corresponds to the conception of art held by the
majority of people; but it is inexact and not quite clear, and admits
of very arbitrary interpretation.
It is not clear, for it fuses in one conception art as a human
activity producing objects of art, and also the feelings of the
recipient; and it admits of arbitrary interpretation, because it does
not define wherein lies the pleasure that “ennobles and elevates the
soul.” So that one person may declare that he receives such pleasure
from a certain production from which another does not receive it at
all.
And therefore to define art it is necessary to define the peculiarity
of that activity, both in its origin in the soul of the producer and
in the peculiarity of its action on the souls of the recipients. This
activity is distinguished from any other activity of craftsmanship,
or trade, or even science (though it has great affinity with this
last), in that it is not evoked by any material need, but supplies
to both producer and recipient a special kind of so-called “artistic
satisfaction.” To explain to oneself this characteristic we must
understand what impels people to this activity--that is, how artistic
production originates.
[20] The division of the results of man’s mental activity into
scientific, philosophic, theological, hortatory, artistic, and other
groups, is made for convenience of observation. But such divisions
do not exist in reality; just as the divisions of the River Volga
into the Tver, Nizhigorod, Simbirsk and Saratov sections, are not
divisions of the river itself, but divisions we make for our own
convenience.
[21] Half-a-century ago no explanation would have been needed of the
words “important”, “good”, and “moral”, but in our time nine out
of ten educated people, at these words, will ask with a triumphant
air: “What _is_ important, good or moral?” assuming that these words
express something conditional and not admitting of definition and
therefore I must answer this anticipated objection.
That which unites people, not by violence but by love: that which
serves to disclose the joy of the union of men with one another, is
“important”, “good”, or “moral”. “Evil” and “immoral” is that which
divides them, which leads men to the suffering that is produced by
disunion. “Important” is that which causes people to understand and
to love what they previously did not understand or love.
[22] Ireland’s _Vortigern_.
[23] I leave this as it stood in the first edition, but after it was
written I heard from Tolstoy twice on the subject. First, my friend
Paul Boulanger wrote from Yásnaya Polyána (24th June 1901, O.S.),
during an illness of Tolstoy’s as follows:--
“You ask why Tolstoy did not mention Ruskin in _What is Art?_ He asks
me to reply that he did not do so: first, because Ruskin attributes a
special moral importance to beauty in art; and, secondly, because all
his writings, rich as they are in depth of thought, are yet not bound
together by any one ruling idea.”
After Tolstoy’s recovery, a letter (undated) reached me on 17th
August 1901, in which he wrote:--
“I have forgotten what I wrote you about Ruskin, and fear it was not
correct. I have lately read an excellent book about him, _Ruskin et
la Bible_, I think by Brunhes. Ruskin’s chief limitation was that he
could never quite free himself from the Church-Christian outlook upon
life. At the time he commenced his work on social questions, when he
wrote _Unto this Last_, he freed himself from the dogmatic tradition,
but a cloudy Church-Christian understanding of the demands of
life--which made it possible for him to unite ethical with esthetical
ideals--remained with him to the end and weakened his message. It was
also weakened by the artificiality, and consequent obscurity, of his
poetic style. Do not imagine that I deny the work of this great man,
who has quite rightly been called a prophet. I always was charmed and
am charmed by him, but I point out spots which exist even on the sun.
He is specially good when a wise writer, in accord with him, makes
extracts from him, as is done in _Ruskin et la Bible_ (which read),
but to read all Ruskin consecutively, as I did, greatly weakens his
effect.”
[24] _Boyhood, Childhood and Youth_ were published in 1851–7.
_Sevastopol_ 1855–6. _Family Happiness_ 1859. _The Cossacks_ and
_Polikushka_ in 1863. _War and Peace_ 1864–9, and _Anna Karénina_
1875–7.
[25] As the term “mystic” is used in more than one sense in English,
I must explain that I use it to denote one who believes in a wisdom
“sacredly obscure or secret” (_Chambers’s Dictionary_), or “not
discriminated or tested by the reason” (_Century Dictionary_). This
is the sense in which it would generally be used in Russian, and in
which Tolstoy uses the word.
[26] Both of which were written in the interval between _War and
Peace_ and _Anna Karénina_ (1869–1872) and are included in the volume
of _Twenty-three Tales_.
[27] Indeed, in the earlier period of his literary activity he
devoted much attention to style, and spent great pains upon it. About
the period at which he wrote _Three Deaths_ (1859), it is said, the
style of his great artistic contemporary, Turgénev, exercised much
influence on his own.
[28] Tolstoy’s remarks on Church religion were re-worded 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 Cæsars or the Pharaohs.
[29] The Russian peasant was usually a member of a village commune,
and had therefore a right to share in the land belonging to the
village. Tolstoy disapproved of the order of society which allows
less land for the support of a whole village full of people than was
sometimes owned by a single landed proprietor. The Censor did not
allow disapproval of this state of things to be expressed, but was
prepared to admit that the laws and customs, say, of England--where
a yet more extreme form of landed property existed and the men who
actually labour on the land usually possessed none of it--deserved
criticism.--A. M.
[30] 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.
[31] And yet it is certainly an esthetic 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.
[32] 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 esthetic 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 esthetic pleasures.
[33] M. Schasler, _Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik_, 1872, Vol. I,
p. 13.
[34] There is no science which more entirely than esthetics has been
handed over to the dreams 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.
[35] See on this matter Bernard’s admirable book, _L’esthétique
d’Aristote_, also Walter’s _Geschichte der Aesthetik im Altertum_.
[36] Schasler, p. 361.
[37] Schasler, p. 369.
[38] Schasler, pp. 388–390.
[39] Knight, _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, Vol. I, pp. 165, 166.
[40] Schasler, p. 289. Knight, pp. 168, 169.
[41] R. Kralik, _Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Aesthetik_,
pp. 304–306.
[42] Knight, p. 101.
[43] Schasler, p. 316.
[44] Knight, pp. 102–104.
[45] R. Kralik, p. 124.
[46] Schasler, p. 328.
[47] Schasler, pp. 331–333.
[48] Schasler, pp. 525–528.
[49] Knight, pp. 61–63.
[50] Schasler, pp. 740–743.
[51] Schasler, pp. 769–771.
[52] Schasler, pp. 786, 787.
[53] Kralik, p. 148.
[54] Kralik, p. 820.
[55] Schasler, pp. 828, 829, 834–841.
[56] Schasler, p. 891.
[57] Schasler, p. 917.
[58] Schasler, pp. 946, 1085, 984, 985, 990.
[59] Schasler, pp. 966, 655, 956.
[60] Schasler, p. 1017.
[61] Schasler, pp. 1065, 1066.
[62] Schasler, pp. 1097–1100.
[63] Schasler, pp. 1124, 1107.
[64] Knight, pp. 81, 82.
[65] Knight, p. 83.
[66] Schasler, p. 1121.
[67] Knight, pp. 85, 86.
[68] Knight, p. 88.
[69] Knight, p. 88.
[70] Knight, p. 112.
[71] Knight, p. 116.
[72] Knight, pp. 118, 119.
[73] Knight, pp. 123, 124.
[74] “The most divine and especially the most perfect beauty contains
the secret of the world,” _La philosophie en France_, p. 232.
[75] “The whole world is the work of an absolute beauty, which is
only the cause of things by the love it puts into them.”
[76] “Let us not fear to say that a truth which is not beautiful,
is but a logical play of our intelligence, and that the only truth
that is solid and worthy of the name is beauty.” _Du fondemont de
l’induction._
[77] _Philosophie de l’art_, Vol. I, 1893, p. 47.
[78] Knight, pp. 139–141.
[79] Knight, p. 134.
[80] There is no other Reality than God, there is no other Truth than
God, there is no other beauty than God.
[81] _L’esthétique_, p. 106.
[82] Knight, p. 238.
[83] Knight, pp. 239, 240.
[84] Knight, pp. 240–243.
[85] Knight, pp. 250–252.
[86] Knight, pp. 258, 259.
[87] Knight, p. 243.
[88] “The foundling of Nuremberg,” found in the market-place of that
town on 23rd May 1828, apparently some sixteen years old. He spoke
little, and was almost totally ignorant even of common objects. He
subsequently explained that he had been brought up in confinement
underground, and visited by only one man, whom he saw but seldom.
[89] Eastern sects well known in early Church history, who rejected
the Church’s rendering of Christ’s teaching and were cruelly
persecuted.--A. M.
[90] Peter of Chelczic, a Bohemian, was one of the successors of John
Huss. In 1457 he was leader of the non-resistants called the United
Brethren. He 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 You_.--A. M.
[91] Anyone 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.
[92] Die Lücke von fünf Jahrhunderten welche zwischen den
Kunst-philosophischen Betrachtungen des Plato und Aristoteles und
die des Plotins fällt, kann zwar auffällig erscheinen; dennoch kann
man eigentlich nicht sagen, dass in dieser Zwischenzeit überhaupt
von ästhetischen Dingen nicht die Rede gewesen; oder dass gar ein
völliger Mangel an Zusammenhang zwischen den Kunst-anschauungen
des letztgenannten Philosophen und denen dei ersteren existire.
Freilich wurde die von Aristotle begründete Wissenschaft in Nichts
dadurch gefördert! immerhin aber zeigt sich in jener Zwischenzeit
noch ein gewisses Interesse für ästhetische Fragen. Nach Plotin
aber, die wenigen, ihm in der Zeit nahestehenden Philosophen,
wie Longin, Augustin, u. s. f. kommen, wie wir gesehen, kaum in
Betracht und schliessen sich übrigens in ihrer Anschauungsweise an
ihn an,--vergehen nicht fünf, sondern _fünfzehen Jahrhunderte_, in
denen von irgend einem wissenschaftlichen Interesse für die Welt des
Schönen und der Kunst nichts zu spüren ist.
Diese anderthalbtausend Jahre, innerhalb deren der Weltgeist durch
die mannigfachsten Kämpfe hindurch zu einer völlig neuen Gestaltung
des Lebens sich durcharbeitete, sind für die Aesthetik, hinsichtlich
des weiteren Ausbaus dieser Wissenschaft verloren.--Kritische
Geschichte der Aesthetik, von Max Schasler. Berlin, 1872, p. 253, §
25.
* * * * *
The gap of five hundred years, which occurred between the
artistic-philosophic observations of Plato and Aristotle and those of
Plotinus, may indeed appear striking, but one cannot exactly say that
in this interval of time there was absolutely no mention of esthetic
matters; or even that a complete lack of correspondence exists
between the art-views of the last-named philosopher and that of the
former. It is true that the science founded by Aristotle was not in
any way advanced thereby; but, for all that, during this interval
a certain interest in esthetic questions still appears. But after
Plotinus (the few philosophers near him in time, such as Longinus,
Augustinus and so forth, hardly come into question as we have seen,
and moreover they adhere to him in their views) there passed not
five, but _fifteen_ centuries in which there is no indication of any
sort of scientific interest for the world of the beautiful and of art.
These one-and-a-half-thousand years, within which the world-spirit
worked out a completely new foundation of life, are lost for
esthetics as regards any further construction of this science.
[93] The fate of books depends on the head of the reader.
[94] _What is Art?_ was translated by me from Tolstoy’s MSS., which
he sent me chapter by chapter as he wrote it. He revised his work
to such an extent that some chapters were re-written three times
over after he first sent them to me for translation. The following
passages belonging to an early version of this chapter, though he did
not retain them in his final revision, seem worth preserving, so I
give them here in a foot-note:
We only need escape for a moment from the habit of considering this
trinity of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, presented to us by Baumgarten,
to be as true as the Trinity of religion, and need only ask ourselves
what we all have always understood by the words which make up this
triad, in order to be convinced of the utterly fantastic nature
of the union into one, of three absolutely different words and
conceptions which are not even commensurable in meaning.
Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are put on one level, and all three
conceptions are treated as though they were fundamental and
metaphysical. Whereas in reality such is not at all the case.
Goodness is the eternal, the highest, aim of our life. However we may
understand goodness, our life is nothing but a striving towards the
good, that is, towards God.
Goodness is really the fundamental metaphysical perception which
forms the essence of our consciousness: a perception not defined by
reason.
Goodness is that which cannot be defined by anything else, but which
defines everything else.
But Beauty--if we do not want mere words but speak about what we
understand--beauty is nothing but what pleases us. The notion of
beauty not only does not coincide with goodness, but rather is
contrary to it; for the good most often coincides with victory over
the passions, while beauty is at the root of all our passions.
The more utterly we surrender ourselves to beauty the farther we
depart from goodness. I know that to this people always reply
that there is a moral and spiritual beauty, but this is merely
playing with words, for by spiritual and moral beauty nothing else
is understood but goodness. For the most part, beauty of soul,
or goodness not only does not coincide with what is ordinarily
understood as beauty, but is contrary to it.
As to truth--still less can we attribute to this member of the
trinity identity with goodness, or even any independent existence at
all.
By truth we merely mean the correspondence of an expression, or of
the definition of an object, with reality, or with an understanding
of the object common to everyone, and therefore it is a means of
arriving at the good. But what is there in common between the
conceptions of beauty and truth on the one hand, and of goodness on
the other? Truth spoken expressly to cause annoyance certainly does
not harmonise with goodness.
Not only are beauty and truth not conceptions equivalent to goodness,
and not only do they not form one entity with goodness, but they do
not even coincide with it. For instance, Socrates and Pascal as well
as many others, considered that learning the truth about unnecessary
things does not accord with goodness. With beauty, truth has not
even anything in common, but for the most part is in contradiction
with it, for truth generally exposes the deception and destroys the
illusion which is a chief condition of beauty.
And lo and behold! the arbitrary conjunction into one, of these three
conceptions which are not commensurable but foreign to one another,
has served as the basis for that amazing theory according to which
the difference between good art, transmitting good feeling, and bad
art, transmitting bad feeling, is completely obliterated, and one of
the lowest manifestations of art, art merely for enjoyment--that art
against which all the teachers of humanity have warned mankind--has
come to be considered the highest art.
[95] The contrast made is between the classes and the masses: between
those who do not and those who do earn their bread by productive
manual labour; the middle classes being taken as an offshoot of the
upper classes.--A. M.
[96] Duelling was still customary among the higher circles in Russia,
as in other Continental countries when this was written.--A. M.
[97] ... it is weariness of life, contempt for the present epoch,
regret for another age seen through the illusion of art, a taste for
paradox, a desire to be singular, a sentimental aspiration towards
simplicity, an infantile adoration of the marvellous, a sickly
tendency towards reverie, a shattered condition of nerves,--and,
above all, the exasperated demand of sensuality.
[98]
Music, music before all things!
The eccentric still prefer,
Vague in air, and nothing weighty,
Soluble. Yet do not err,
Choosing words; still do it lightly,
Do it with contemptuous mind:
Dearest are grey songs where mingle
The Defined and Undefined!
* * * * * * *
Music always, now and ever!
Be thy verse the thing that flies
From a soul that’s gone, escaping,
Gone to other loves and skies.
Gone to other loves and regions,
Following fortunes that allure,
Mint and thyme and morning crispness ...
All the rest’s mere literature.
[99] I think there should be nothing but allusions. The contemplation
of objects, the flying image of reveries evoked by them, make the
song. The Parnassians state the thing completely, and show it, and
thereby lack mystery; they deprive the mind of that delicious joy
of imagining that it creates. To _name an object is to take away
three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which consists in the
happiness of guessing little by little: to suggest it, that is the
dream_. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the
symbol: little by little to evoke an object in order to show a state
of the soul; or inversely, to choose an object, and from it to
disengage a state of the soul by a series of decipherings.
... If a being of mediocre intelligence and insufficient literary
preparation chances to open a book made in this way and pretends to
enjoy it, there is a misunderstanding--things must be returned to
their places. _There should always be an enigma in poetry_, and the
aim of literature--it has no other--is to evoke objects.
[100] It were time also to have done with this famous “theory of
obscurity,” which the new school has practically raised to the height
of a dogma.
[101] For translation, see Appendix I.
[102] For translation, see Appendix I.
[103] For translation, see Appendix I.
[104] For translation, see Appendix I.
[105] For translation, see Appendix I.
[106] For translation, see Appendix I.
[107] For translation, see Appendix I.
[108]
I do not wish to think any more, except about my mother Mary,
Seat of wisdom and source of pardon,
Also Mother of France, _from whom we_
_Steadfastly expect the honour of our country_.
[109] This sonnet seems too unintelligible for translation.--Trans.
[110] For translation, see Appendix I.
[111] It was Tolstoy’s eldest daughter, Tatiana, Mme. Sukhotin; who
was herself a talented art-student.--A. M.
[112] Ibsen’s _The Master-Builder_.--A. M.
[113] Ibsen’s _Little Eyolf_.--A. M.
[114] Maeterlinck’s _Les Aveugles_.--A. M.
[115] G. Hauptmann’s _Die versunkene Glocke_.--A. M.
[116] “The quicker it goes the longer it lasts.”
[117] All styles are good except the wearisome style.
[118] All styles are good except that which is not understood, _or_
which fails to produce its effect.
[119] By G. Hauptmann.
[120] An apparatus exists by means of which a very sensitive arrow,
in dependence on the tension of a muscle of the arm, will indicate
the physiological action of music on the nerves and muscles.--L. T.
[121] There is in Moscow a magnificent “Cathedral of our Saviour,”
erected to commemorate the defeat of the French in the war of
1812.--A. M.
[122] “That they may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I
in Thee, that they also may be in us.”
[123] In this picture the spectators in the Roman Amphitheatre are
turning down their thumbs to show that they wish the vanquished
gladiator to be killed.--A. M.
[124] While offering as examples of art those that seem to me the
best, I attach no special importance to my selection; for, besides
being insufficiently informed in all branches of art, I belong to the
class of people whose taste has, by false training, been perverted.
And therefore my old, inured habits may cause me to err, and I may
mistake for absolute merit the impression a work produced on me in
my youth. My only purpose in mentioning examples of works of this
or that class is to make my meaning clearer, and to show how, with
my present views, I understand excellence in art in relation to
its subject-matter. I must moreover mention that I consign my own
artistic productions to the category of bad art, excepting the story
_God sees the Truth but Waits_, which seeks a place in the first
class, and _The Prisoner of the Caucasus_, which belongs to the
second.--L. T.
(Both the stories mentioned are included in _Twenty-Three Tales_ in
the Maude Tolstoy “World’s Classics” series.--A. M.)
[125] In Russian it is customary to make a distinction between
literate and illiterate people, that is, between those who can and
those who cannot read. _Literate_ in this sense does not imply that
the man would speak or write correctly.--A. M.
[126] Sténka Rázin was by origin a common Cossack. His brother was
hanged for a breach of military discipline, and to this event Sténka
Rázin’s hatred of the governing classes has been attributed. He
formed a robber band, and subsequently headed a formidable rebellion,
declaring himself in favour of freedom for the serfs, religious
toleration, and the abolition of taxes. Like the Government he
opposed, he relied on force, and though he used it largely in defence
of the poor against the rich he still held to
“The good old rule, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
Like Robin Hood he is favourably treated in popular legends.--A. M.
[127] Robert Macaire is a modern type of adroit and audacious
rascality. He was the hero of a popular play produced in Paris
in 1834, and of one written by R. L. Stevenson and W. E. Henley,
1897.--A. M.
[128] Tolstoy’s doctrine of Non-Resistance to “him that is evil” by
any use of physical force has caused much perplexity and is accepted
in its completeness by but few people in the Western world. In this
passage however he states it in a form to which it would be hard to
raise any objection. Never before had the doctrine of Non-Resistance
been put so briefly, persuasively, and attractively.--A. M.
[129] The translation in Appendices I, II and IV are by my wife,
Louise Maude. The aim of these renderings has been to keep as close
to the originals as the obscurity of meaning allowed. The sense (or
absence of sense) has therefore been more considered than the form of
the verses.--A. M.
[130] The existence of such editions was a factor in inducing one
hundred and twenty very distinguished English and American writers,
dramatists, critics, and publicists, to endorse a letter written by
G. Bernard Shaw to the press, in 1922, asking the public to support
the “Maude Tolstoys,” in the Oxford University Press edition, and
thus make commercially possible the completion of a reliable and
satisfactory rendering of Tolstoy’s works in English.
[131] Written soon after the Rowntrees had been attacked by a
patriotic mob, whose feelings were harrowed by an attempt to hold a
peace-meeting.
[132] _Essays and Letters_, “World’s Classics” series.
[133] _Essays and Letters_, “World’s Classics” series.
[134] _The Function of Criticism at the Present Time_, in _Essays in
Criticism_.
[135] E. H. Crosby was for some time a member of the New York State
Legislature; subsequently he went to Egypt as a judge in the Mixed
Tribunals. While there he began reading the works of Tolstoy, which
had a great influence upon him. He visited Tolstoy, and afterwards
co-operated with him in various ways. In a remarkable essay on
“Shakespeare and the Working Classes” E. H. Crosby drew attention to
the consistently anti-democratic tendency of that poet’s plays. It is
to this essay that Tolstoy here refers.--A. M.
[136] Tolstoy was born in 1828. This essay appeared in 1906, so that
Tolstoy began his re-reading of Shakespeare three years before he
published the article.
[137] “Lear is the occasion for Cordelia. The daughter’s maternity
towards the father; profound subject; maternity venerable among all
other maternities, so admirably rendered by the legend of that Roman
girl, nurse, in the depths of a prison, of her old father. The young
breast near the white beard, there is no spectacle more holy. That
filial breast is Cordelia.
“Once this figure was dreamed and found Shakespeare created his
drama.... Shakespeare carrying Cordelia in his thoughts, created
that tragedy as a god, who having an aurora to place makes a world
expressly for it.”
[138] “A Declaration of egregious popish impostures, etc.,” by Dr.
Samuel Harsnet, London 1603, which contains almost all that Edgar
says in his feigned madness.--A. M.
[139] “One sees the intention and one is put off.”
[140] This and the quotations in English that follow are taken from
_Shakespeare’s Commentaries_, by Dr. G. G. Gervinus, translated by F.
G. Bennett, London, 1877.
[141] _Shakespeare_, Von G. G. Gervinus, Leipzig, 1872. Vol. II, pp.
550–51.
[142] Tolstoy’s essay _Non-acting_ (see _Essays and Letters_ in the
“World’s Classics” series) deals with a controversy that occurred in
1893 between Zola and Dumas. In it Tolstoy controverts the opinion
that activity in itself, lacking moral guidance, is beneficial.
[143] _William Shakespeare_, by Georges Brandes, translated by
William Archer and Miss Morison. London, 1898, p. 921.
[144] A Russian poet of much delicacy of feeling, for many years a
great friend of Tolstoy’s. He is frequently referred to in my _Life
of Tolstoy_.--A. M.
INDEX
Academy, Royal, of 1897, 271.
_Albert_, a story by Tolstoy, 8
Alison, _Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste_, 157–8
American publications, 385
Amiel’s _Journal_, 18, 38–42
Andre, Père, _Essai sur le Beau_, 146
“Animal of unspoilt scent,” 268
Appraisement of feelings made by religious perception, 278
Approval, a matter of degree, 113
Aristotle, 141, 184
Arnold, Matthew, _The Function of Criticism_, 382
Art
artisans of, 237
basis of action of, 171
blind alley, 313
“can evoke reverence for the dignity of every man,” 332
canon of, 164
Christian, 285, 288, 293–4
a. Religious, 296
b. Universal, 296, 333
of Church Christianity, 179
“comprehensible to men less educated than our labourers,” 226
content of, 85
definition of, 80–1, 171, 173, 362–3
experimental, 169
physiological evolutionary, 169, 170
metaphysical, 169, 170
destiny of, 333
dramatic form, qualifications needed to produce in, 239
effect on children, 198
empty and vicious, 283
essence of, 237
essential organ, 298
for art’s sake, 77, 87
for enjoyment, first esteemed by whom, 182
future, 313, 318, 320, 368
good of two kinds, 286
impoverishment of subject-matter of, 199
indestructible spiritual organ, 309
indispensable means of communication, 175
infection by, 171
influence of, 287
limited sphere of our, 193
means of intercourse, 170
means of union, 173
and Science: the difference, 225
of Middle Ages, 179–81
neo-esthetic theories of, 170
organ of human progress, 297
organ transmitting man’s reasonable perceptions into feelings, 331
patriotic, 285
productions that were “a temporary pastime,” 195
prostitute of our circle, 311
realistic, 87
recognized by early Christians, 178
should cause violence to be set aside, 331
simple feelings, 318
subject matter of, 197, 287
task to make feeling of brotherhood customary, 332
tendencious, 87
vehicle to draw men towards perfection, 320
which has left no trace, 166
“will lay in the souls of men the rails along which their actions
will naturally pass,” 333
will be an organ co-equally important with science for the life
of mankind, 331
Artist of the future, 318, 368
Artistic impression, when produced, 231
productions that are “as unintelligible as Sanskrit,” 194
sects exclude one another, 130
Bach, J. S., 269, 292
Ballet-dancers receive more honour than the Saints, 301
Barge with kedge-anchors, 322
Bastien-Lepage, 310
Batteux, 146
Baudelaire, P. C., 207–214, 334–6
_Duellum_, 208, 334–5
_Fleur du mal_, 207, 302, 334
_La Soupe et les nuages_, 209, 335–6
_Le Galant Tireur_, 210, 336
_L’étranger_, 209, 335
_Petits poemes en prose_, 204, 335
Baumgarten, A. G., 143, 187–8
Bayreuth, performances at, 260, 262
Bazin, Réné, _La Terre qui meurt_, 380
Beauty, 83–5, 143, 148–163, 166–8, 182, 186–7, 189–90, 196, 293,
303, 361, 369
definition of, 163–4
furnishes no criterion of art, 112
is “that which pleases,” 163
Truth and Goodness, 143–7, 156, 189–90
Beecher-Stowe, Harriet, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 373
Beethoven, L. von, 14, 245–6, 292
Ninth Symphony, 294–5
Opus 101, 269
Benard’s, _L’esthétique d’Aristote_, 142, 185, 187
Bergmann, J., _Ueber das Schöne_, 154
Boccaccio, 201
Bodkin Art Gallery (Moscow), 92
Booby Trap, 17, 18
Books for the people, 6
Brandes, Georges, 396, 444
Brevity, clearness and simplicity, 314, 320
Bryulov, K. P., “Art begins where the wee bit begins,” 247
Burke, Edmund: _The Sublime and Beautiful_, 146
_Büttnerbauer, Der_, by W. von Polenz, 18, 378–87
Byron, 201
Caine, Hall, _The Christian_, 384–5
Caricatures, 293
Cathedral of Victory, 284
_Cause of it All, The_, by Tolstoy, 7
Cervantes, _Don Quixote_, 290
Chamber music, 294
Chékhov, A. P., 18–19
_Darling_, 18, 388–92, 474–89.
Cherbuliez, C. V., 156
Children perverted in service of art, 298
Choir of peasant women, 268
Chopin, F. F., 269
_Nocturne in E flat major_, 292
Christianity, a turning point, 284
Christ, the teaching of, 308
Church music and ritual, 91
Classification (usually accepted) of writers is harmful, 386
Cloudy conceptions “usually presented with _aplomb_,” 137, 361
Coins that “resemble real money,” 234
Cold-drawn works of art, 238
Comte, Auguste, 450–1
Condemnation of new art unjust, 222
Conditions of production of art, 238
counterfeit art, 237–40
tragedy, 420
Cone of art, the, 228
_Confession_, Tolstoy’s, 8–12
Confusion of religious cult with religious perception, 280
Corruption of class nourished by false art, 192
Coster, G. H. de, 156
Counterfeits of art, how manufactured, 237–240
caused by:
a) Professionalism ⎫
b) Art Criticism ⎬ 241–6
c) Schools of Art ⎭
Cousin, Victor, 154
Criticism, 382, 386–7
great importance of, 387
Critics, 242
Crosby, Ernest H., _Shakespeare on the Working Classes_, 393
Dancer, 248
Dante, 296
_Darling_, by A. P. Chekhov, 18, 388–92, 474–89.
Darwin, Charles, 169, 450–1
_Descent of Man_, 158
Darwin, Erasmus, 158
Dealers in the temple of art, 316
Decadent art, 233
Decadents, 207, 214, 217, 221–2, 228
Definition of art, 80–81, 171, 173, 362–3
needed, of art, 133
of any human activity, 166
Diamonds differ from paste, 267
selecting by touch, 455
Dickens, Charles, 7, 288, 310, 385
_Christmas Carol_, 7, 107
_David Copperfield_, 290
_Pickwick Papers_, 290
Diderot, D., 146
Dostoevski, F. M., 288–9, 310
_Memoirs from the House of Death_, 289
Doumic, René, _Les Jeunes_, 201, 206–7
Dragon, the, in _Siegfried_, 257–8
Drama, 219, 232, 247, 452–5
physiological effects in, 235
Dreyfus affair, 449–450
Druzhínin, A. V., 46
Durand-Ruel, art gallery, 218
Elementary Schools, 314–5
Eliot, George, 385
_Adam Bede_, 289
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 385
Erections of lies obstruct study of life, 324
_Essays and Letters_, Tolstoy’s, 8
Essence of art: “that simple feeling compelling us to mingle souls
with another,” 273
Esthetic theory, the, of indifference of art to good or evil,
456–7, 460
Euphuism, 203, 438
Exclusive art, 365
Fairy-tale, lullaby, riddle, jest, or sketch, 318
Falstaff, 431–2
Fashionable art depends on the slavery of the masses, 194
Feelings, the highest, 367
conveyed, quality of feelings, 107
simple, 362
three, the subject-matter of upper-class art, 200
Fichte, J. G., 148–9
_First Distiller, The_, by Tolstoy, 7
Folgeldt, on art, 165
Folk-art and children’s art, 7, 318
Food, 223–4, 369
for body and mind, 93
question, the, 166–7
Form of art, 364–5
Fourier, F. M. C., phalansteries, 450–1
Francis of Assisi, 181, 183
French drama, 454
Gárshin, V. M., 46
Gautier, Théophile, 204
Gay, N. N., _The Last Supper_, 17, 29–32
_What is Truth?_, 36–7
_Judgment_, 289
_Genesis_, “the epic of,” 224
George, Henry, 104
Gérôme, Leon, _Pollice Verso_, 290
Gervinus, Dr. G. G., 438–444
Gevaert, Fierens, _Essay sur l’art contemporain_, 157
Goethe, J. W., 296, 455, 458, 461
_Wilhelm Meister_, 165
_Faust_, 234
Goncharev, I. A., 199
“Good art pleases everyone,” 224
Gospel parables, 224, 226
Gourmont, Rémy de, _Les Chevaux de Diomède_, 202
Grant Allen, 169
_Physiological Æsthetics_, 159
Greeks, ancient, 184, 187, 279–80, 367
a small, semi-savage, slaveholding people, 188
Grot, Professor, 117, 118
Guyau, _Les Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine_, 136, 156
Habituation to bad art, 224, 366
Hallam, Henry, 395
Hamlet, 272, 394, 432–5, 444
lack of character, 432–4
Harsnet, Dr. Samuel, 409
Hartmann, Edward von, 153
Hauptmann, G., _Hanneles Himmelfahrt_, 235
_Die versunkene Glocke_, 220
Hauser, Kaspar, 174
Hazlitt, William, 395
Hebrew art, 280
prophets, 198, 203
Hegel, G. W. F., 150–1, 450–1
Heine, Heinrich, 201
Helmholz, H. von, 154
Hemsterhuis, Frans, 147
Herbart, J. F., 152
Herder, J. G. von, 144
Hero, with hat _à la Guillaume Tell_, 230, 257
Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 146
Homer, 102, 198, 438–9
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, 226
and Shakespeare, 438
_How to Read the Gospels_, 376
Hugo, Victor, 50, 310, 288, 396
_Les Misérables_, 50, 310, 396
_Les Pauvres Gens_, 288
Human life filled with art, 363
Humboldt, W., 148
Hungarian _csárdäs_, 269
Huret, Jules, 206
Hutcheson, Francis, _Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of
Beauty and Virtue_, 145
Huysmans, J. K., _Là-Bas_, 221
Hypnotic and epidemic suggestions, 263, 448–51, 453–9
Ibsen, Henrik: _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_, 219–220
Imitation art, methods of producing:
a. Borrowing ⎫
b. Imitating ⎪
c. Action on nerves ⎬ 230–6, 261
d. Interesting ⎭
Important what feelings spread, 366–7
Impressionist and Neo-impressionist art, 218–9
Infectiousness of art, 364–8
Injurious effect of security and luxury on artist, 316
Internal test of art, 365
Japanese art, 365
Jest, riddle, fairy-tale, lullaby, or sketch, 318
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 395
Joseph, the story of, 225, 290
Jouffroy, T. S., 154–5
Jungmann, J., 154
Kant, I., 145, 147–8
Karr, Alphonse, 220
Ker, W. P., _Essay on the Philosophy of Art_, 159
_King Lear_, 394 et seq.
_King Leir_, superior to Shakespeare’s _King Lear_, 424–429
Kipling, Rudyard, 221, 270, 385
Kirchmann, Julius von, 153–4
Knight, Wm., _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, 159–160, 185
Knight, R., _An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste_,
158
Kralik, R., _Weltschönheit_, 134–6, 140
Kramskoy, I. N., 289
Krause, K. C. F., 150
_Krasota_ (Russian word)--how used, 138
_Kreutzer Sonata_, 14–16
Labour, enormous, expended on art, 125 et seq.
La Bruyère, Jean de, 466
Lachelier, J., 155
Langley, W., 272, 289
Language of art understood by all, 225
La Rochefoucauld, F., Duc de, 466
Latin grammar, 299
Lear’s inappropriate talk with fool, 401
unnatural credulity and distrust, 399, 420
verbose absurdities, 405–6
Leopardi, J., 201
Lepage, Bastien, 310
Lérmontov, M. Yu., 384
Lessing, G. E., 144
Lévêque, C., 138, 140, 154–5
Lhermitte, Léon, 310
Life, understanding of, 176
Loss of capacity to be infected by art, 298
Lowell, J. R., 385
_Lucern_, by Tolstoy, 8
Lullaby, fairy-tale, riddle, jest, or sketch, 318
Lyric poetry, 251–2
_Macbeth_, 394
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 214
_Les Aveügles_, 220
Mallarmé, S., 205–6, 214–5
_Devagations_, 215
Malthus, T. R., 188
“Man sieht die Absicht und man wird verstimmt,” 422
Marcus Aurelius, 66
Marx, Karl, 188
Materialism, 109
Maupassant, Guy de, 17, 46–71, 290
_Bel-ami_, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 64
_Fort comme le mort_, 55–8
_Histoire d’une fille de ferme_, 48, 50
_Horla_, 67
_La Femme de Paul_, 48, 50
_La Maison Tellier_, 46
_La Petite Roque_, 66
_L’armoire_, 66
_Le champ d’oliviers_, 66
_Le papa de Simon_, 50
_L’ermite_, 66
_Miss Harriet_, 66
_Monsieur Parent_, 66
_Mont Oriol_, 54–5, 58
_Notre cœur_, 55–6, 58, 65
_Pierre et Jean_, 55, 58, 60
_Solitude_, 67
_Sur l’eau_, 50, 66
_Un cas de divorce_, 66
_Une vie_, 50–2, 54, 57, 64
_Une partie de campagne_, 48, 50
_Yvette_, 58–9, 65
Mayer, von Liesen, _Signing the Death Warrant_, 289
Melody, 291–2
Men seldom recognise truth that exposes falsity of their pet
beliefs, 265
Mendelssohn, 144
Middle Ages, 86, 198
Millet, Jean Francois, 310
_The Man with a Hoe_, 289
Mithalter, Julius, _Rätsel des Schönen_, 137
Molière, 290
Montaigne, M. E. de, 466
Montesquieu, C. de S., Baron de la Brèda, et de, 466
Montesquiou-Fezensac, le comte Robert de, 207, 217, 350–2
Moralities (plays), 452
Morality regarded as “an antiquated affair,” 303
Morality and art, 364, 371–2
Morel, E., _Terre Promise_, 221
Morris, William, 94–6
Moscow, performance of _Siegfried_, 253–60
Mozart, W. A. C., 269, 292
_Magic Flute_, 250
Müller, Adam, 149
Muratori, L. A., 147
Music, 6, 13, 14–16, 17, 220, 232–3, 235–6, 245, 247–8, 291–2, 294–5
Musical art, qualifications needed to produce, 239
Muther, Richard, _The History of Art in the Nineteenth Century_, 165
Mysteries (plays), 452
Mysticism, 109
Mythological allusions, 203
Nadson, S. Ya., 385
Natasha Rostova (in _War and Peace_), 8
Negro melodies, 102
Nekrásov, N. A., 385
Nicholas Rostov, (in _War and Peace_), 8, 16
Nietzsche, F. W., 206, 303, 385, 451
Obscurity in art esteemed, 203–4
_On Art_, 75–90
“One touch of nature,” 362
Opera, rehearsal of an, 125–9
_Siegfried_, 253–60
Orators, 362, 370–1
Ornaments, 293
Ostróvski, A. N., 461
_Minin_, 244
_Othello_, 429–31
powerful movement of feeling in, 430
Pagano, F. M. S. A. C. P., 147
Painting, 232, 244, 292
and sculpture, qualifications necessary to produce, 239, 293
Paris exhibitions, 218
Parnassians, 205–6, 213
Pascal, Blaise, 40, 190, 466
Pastime for the idle crowd of rich, some art merely a, 366
Patti, Adelina, 302
Peasant art, 277
labourers, 105
Péladan, Joséphin, 157, 207
Perplexity of plain folk, 300
Peter of Chelczic, 183
Petersburg, 9
Pleasure of art, 82
_Pickwick Papers, The_, 435
Pictet, Adolph, 155
Pierre Louÿs, _Aphrodite_, 202
Pilate, Pontius, 36–7
Pilo, Mario, _La Psychologie du Beau et de l’Art_, 156–7
Pissarro, Camille, 218
Plato, 92, 141, 183–7
_The Republic_, 175, 307
Poems, qualifications needed to write, 238
Poetic, “means borrowed,” 234
subjects, 261
Polenz, W. von, _Der Büttnerbauer_, 18, 378 et seq.
Popularity, 103
Pózdnyshev (in _The Kreutzer Sonata_), 12–15
Predetermination (an author’s) evokes distrust, 259
Prévost, Marcel, 201
Printed matter a vast obstacle to enlightenment, 383
the necessity of, 73
Printing, 383
Purpose of art, the, 278
Pushkin, 301–2, 384, 461
_Tales_, 290, 384, 461
_Borís Godunóv_, 244
_Evgéni Onégin_, 244
_The Gipsies_, 244
Puvis de Chavannes, P. C., 218
Qualities, Three--of works of art
a) Content ⎫
b) Beauty ⎬ 445–6
c) Sincerity ⎭
Ragnar Redbeard, 303
Raphael, 296
Ravaisson, F., _La Philosophie en France_, 155
Realism in art, 77–8, 234
Re-appraisement of knowledge needed, 330
Reformers’ objection to art, 91
Reid, Thomas, 157
_Religion and Morality_, by Tolstoy, 375
Religious art, 310
Religious perception, 108, 176–8, 197–200, 278, 281–5, 310, 317,
322, 367, 372, 374–5
lack of, 182
the consciousness of the brotherhood of man, 331
Renaissance, The, 182, 200, 282, 453, 460
Renan, Ernest, _Marc Aurèle_, 61, 62, 134
_L’Abbesse de Jouarre_, 62
_Resurrection_, by Tolstoy, 111
Riddle, fairy-tale, lullaby, jest, or sketch, 318
Rider Haggard, 385
Romanticists, 221
_Romeo and Juliet_, 394
Rossi, Ernesto, 272
Royal Academy of 1897, 271
Ruge, Arnold, 151
Ruskin, John, 94–5, 378
Russian poetry, 384
_St. Anthony, The Temptation of_, 271
Sand, George, 49, 450–1
_La petite Fadette_, 49
_La mère aux diables_, 49
Schasler, M., _Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik_, 140–1, 186–7
Schelling, F. W. J., 149, 150
Schiller, J. C. F. von, 148, 169, 288, 295
Schlegel, F., 149
Schnaase, Karl, _Geschichte der bildenden Künste_, 153
Schopenhauer, A., 153, 246
Science, 30, 321–29
and art closely united, 322
for science’s sake, 324
inventions in natural, 324
of esthetics has failed, The, 361
purpose of real and pretended, 325–6
Sexual relations, 305
Shaftesbury, A. A. C., third Earl of, 145
Sketch, fairy-tale, lullaby, riddle, jest, 318
Shakespeare, William, 18, 19, 393–463
devoid of sense of proportion, 437
his apt use of gestures, 435
his characters are borrowed from earlier works, 424
do not accord with their period or place, 421
lack individuality of language, 422
talk as real people never could talk, 423
his delineation of character, 422
effect on the young of laudation of Shakespeare, 462–3
his exaggeration, 438
his fame: first cause of, 456
_King Lear_, 394–429, 436–7
Albany’s unnatural speech, 410
Edgar and Kent not recognized by people who knew them well, 406
Gloucester’s unnatural credulity, 400, 403, 412
his Kings, 399, 423
his masterly development of scenes, 455
movement of feeling powerfully expressed by, 435
not an artist, 438
his patriotism, 445
his practical mastery of stage-craft, 19
_Romeo and Juliet_, 165
“The end justifies the means,” 445
Thoughts arising from sound of words, 409
Shaw, Bernard, 17
Shelley, P. B., 395
“Sick send the hale to bed, the,” 227
Simple direct artistic impression, 455
Sincerity in Art, 84–5
Socrates, 141, 184, 186, 190
Solger, K. W. F., _Vorlesungen über Æsthetik_, 150
Spaletti, _Saggio sopra la bellessa_, 147
Spectrum Analysis of Milky Way, lecture on, 318
Speech, 170, 173–4, 224, 297
Spencer, Herbert, 158, 169
Spiritual Censor (Russian), 119
Spiritualists, 262
Stead, W. T., 7
Sténka Rázin, 304
Story of an Easter Cake, 270
Story or novel, qualifications needed to write, 238
Subject, and subject-matter, 369
Subject-matter of art, 364
Sue, Eugène, 450–1
Sully, James, _Sensation and Intuition_, 160, 169, 170
Sulzer, George, 144
“Supremacy of Artistic Element in Literature,” 4
Swinburne, A. C., 396
Symbolic pictures, 294
Symbolists, 207, 218, 219
Taglioni, Maria, 302
Taine, Henri, 156
Tasso, Torquato, _Jerusalem Delivered_, 296
Tatiana Lvóvna (Mme. Sukhotin), 218
“Tendencious art,” 77
Test of great philosophy, 369
Thackeray, W. M., 385
Three religions, 375
“To be or not to be,” 433
Todhunter, John, _Theory of the Beautiful_, 158–9
Tolstoy’s final conclusions on art, 377
fitness to deal with the problem, 97, 98, 373
lecture on literature, 4
view of life, 367
Tolstoy, Alexey, 385, 461
_Tsar Borís_, 244
Truth, 190
Turgénev, K. S., _The Quail_, 271
_A Sportsman’s Notebook_, 199
_Twenty-three Tales_, by Tolstoy, 7, 8
“Two live leaves cannot be exactly alike,” 251
Tyútchev, Th. I., 384
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 288, 373
“Understand the error we are involved in,” 307
Understood by men less educated than our labourers, art was, 226,
365
Unintelligible art, 223
Union with men of the past and the future, through art, 287
Universal art, 106, 229, 310, 365
Vasnetsov, V. M., 271
Vauvenargues, Marquis de, 466
Vedas, hymns of the, 226
Verbal art, 232
Verlaine, Paul, 207, 210–4, 302, 336–7
_Ariettes oubliées_, 211, 212
_La Sagesse_, 212, 213
Veron, _L’esthétique_, 157, 169, 170
Versifiers, with broken tongues, 253
Villiers de l’Isle Adam, _Contes Cruels_, _L’Annonciateur_, 221
View of life, 9
View of life unconsciously permeating artistic work, 457
Vischer, Theodor, 152
Vogüé, C. J. M. Marquis de, 394
Vogul play, 272
Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 147, 227
Wagner, Richard, 206, 233, 250–64
“a limited self-opinionated German of bad taste,” 259
explanation of his success, 260–262
his great ability, 261
his “model work of counterfeit art,” 253
Walkley, A. B., 18
Walter, _Geschichte der Æsthetik im Altertum_, 142
on Plato, 187
_War and Peace_, 8, 16
Weisse, C. H., 151
Welfare lies in union, 309
_What is Art_, 1, 91–377
premature publication of in Paris, 3
_What Then Must We Do?_, 12
Whittier, J. G., 385
Wilde, Oscar, 303
Winckelmann, J. J., 144
Wolf, encounter with a, 172
Yakútsk ornaments, 293
Yásnaya Polyána, 4, 21
Yawning, 171
Zola, Émile, 270
_La Terre_, 49
Concerning the Proposed Centenary Edition of Tolstoy’s Works
In February 1922, Mr. Bernard Shaw addressed the following letter
to the Press and it appeared in _The Times_, _Daily Telegraph_,
_Manchester Guardian_ and many other papers, receiving, then and
subsequently, the endorsement of the numerous distinguished people,
here and in America, whose signatures are appended.
10 ADELPHI TERRACE,
W.C.2.
_28 February 1922._
SIR,
We desire to call public attention, especially in circles
interested in literature and in general cultural questions,
to the lack of a complete edition of the works of Leo Tolstoy
in the English language. Unfortunately the means adopted by
Tolstoy to secure the widest possible circulation for his
books had just the opposite effect. He invited all publishers
in all countries to take the fullest advantage of the
absence of international copyright between Russia and other
countries by publishing his writings in such translations
as they could procure without any reference to his moral or
legal rights. In the case of any less famous author this
step would have prevented his works being translated at all,
as it is practically impossible to engage modern capital in
publishing, or any other enterprise, without property rights.
In Tolstoy’s case it led to the appearance of a great number
of translations, including some very incompetent ones, of a
few of his books which were considered specially interesting
as stories, or were capable of being turned to account for
propaganda. These few books have consequently become more or
less well known; but the profits of their publication have
been so divided that they have in no instance been able to
carry a complete edition on their backs. Accordingly, no
complete edition has yet appeared; and the one projected for
the Tolstoy Centenary of 1928 by the Oxford University Press,
translated by Aylmer Maude, whose competence and acceptance
by Tolstoy himself are unquestionable, may prove commercially
impossible unless the public, by spontaneously giving it the
privileges of a copyright edition, both by subscribing for
complete sets and specifying this edition in their purchases
of separate volumes, makes up for the absence of legal rights
and for the miscarriage of Tolstoy’s public-spirited intention
in the matter.
The Oxford Press translation will be complete and unique,
and certain to remain so, as it is not now possible for any
new English writer to bring to a translation of Tolstoy’s
works the personal knowledge of the author, and the peculiar
experience of Russian life and of the Tolstoyan social
experiments that followed the first publication of his
writings, enjoyed by Mr. Aylmer Maude and his wife and
collaborator, who is a native of Russia. We feel that its
failure to appear would be a grave loss to our national
literary equipment; and we earnestly hope that the opportunity
of completing the nineteenth-century bookshelf both of our
public and private libraries by a complete edition of his
works in English will not be missed.
Yours truly,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
LIST OF SIGNATORIES TO SHAW’S LETTER.
Henry Ainley (Fedya of _Reparation_)
Meggie Albanesi (Alexandra of _Reparation_)
Rev. Cyril Alington, D.D., Head Master of Eton
William Archer
Lena Ashwell (Katusha of _Resurrection_)
J. F. Baddeley
John Bailey
Hon. Maurice Baring, O.B.E.
Dr. Ernest Barker, Principal, King’s College
Sir Alfred Bateman, K.C.M.G.
H. Wansey Bayly, M.R.C.S.
Ian Hay Beith, C.B.E.
Marie Belloc-Lowndes
Arnold Bennett
J. D. Beresford
Rt. Hon. Sir Geo. W. Buchanan, P.C., G.C.B., C.V.O., formerly
Ambassador, Petrograd
Rt. Hon. Lord Carnock, P.C., G.C.B., K.C.V.O., formerly
Ambassador, Petrograd
Sir Hall Caine, K.B.E.
Edward Carpenter
Clementine S. Churchill (Mrs. Winston Churchill)
A. Clutton Brock, B.A.
W. L. Courtney, L.L.D., Editor of _Fortnightly Review_
A. Emil Davies, L.C.C.
H. Walford Davies, F.R.C.O.
Brig.-Gen. Guy Payan Dawnay, C.M.G., M.V.O., D.S.O.
James Douglas, Editor of _Sunday Express_
J. D. Duff, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, LL.D.
Havelock Ellis, L.S.H.
Nevill Forbes, Ph.D., Reader in Russian, Oxford
J. L. Garvin, Editor of _Observer_
G. P. Gooch, D.Litt.
L. Haden Guest, M.R.C.S., M.P.
Cicely Hamilton
Austin Harrison
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
John H. Hobson, M.A.
Silas K. Hocking
E. A. Brayley Hodgetts, Chairman of Russian Section, London Chamber
of Commerce
Sonia E. Howe, Authoress of _A Thousand Years of Russian History_
W. W. Jacobs
Edgar Jepson, B.A.
Jerome K. Jerome
Henry Arthur Jones
Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P.
Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., D.Sc.
Lady Constance Lytton
Sir Lynden Macassey
Justin Huntly MᶜCarthy
Miles Malleson
Hugh Macnaughten, Vice-Provost of Eton
W. Somerset Maugham, M.R.C.S.
Dorothy Massingham
H. W. Massingham
Cyril Maude
W. B. Maxwell
P. E. Meadon
Baron A. Meyendorff
Eustace Miles, M.A.
Gilbert Murray, D.Litt., Regius Professor, Oxford
Cathleen Nesbitt
Henry W. Nevinson
Sir Sidney Olivier
Sir Bernard Pares, K.C.B., Professor of Russian History, University
of London
Rt. Hon. Sir Gilbert Parker, P.C., D.S.L.
Geo. Paston
Edw. R. Pease
John Pollock, M.A.
H. Hesketh Prichard, D.S.O.
Sir Henry Penson, K.B.E.
Arthur Rackham
Rt. Hon. Lady Rhondda
Rt. Hon. G. H. Roberts, J.P.
Sir E. Denison Ross, Ph.D.
Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
St. John Ervine
May Sinclair
Rt. Hon. Lady Sybil Smith
A. B. Stodart, Hon. Sec. British Russia Club
Marie C. Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D.
Lord Treowen, C.M.G.
Mrs. Alec-Tweedie, F.R.G.S.
Leslie Urquhart
Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford
Graham Wallas
A. B. Walkley, F.R.S.L., Dramatic Critic of _The Times_
Hugh Walpole
Lt.-Col. John Ward, C.B., M.P.
Rt. Hon. Lord Weardale
H. G. Wells
Rebecca West
Rt. Hon. J. H. Whitley, P.C.
Norman Wilks
Harold Williams
C. Hagberg Wright, LL.D., Librarian, London Library
AMERICAN
Jane Addams
James Lane Allen
Sherwood Anderson
James Branch Cabell
George W. Cable
Theodore Dreiser
Horace Howard Furness
Hamlin Garland
Ellen Glasgow
Robert Underwood Johnson
Robert Morse Lovett
Edwin Markham
H. L. Mencken
Harriet Monroe
Eugene O’Neill
William Lyon Phelps
Chas. Ed. Russell
Booth Tarkington
Lucy E. Textor
Hon. Henry Vandyck
Owen Wister
Beside those who have signed Shaw’s letter, Thomas Hardy wrote:--
‘Although I have no first-hand knowledge of the details mentioned in
Mr. Bernard Shaw’s letter on translations of Tolstoy, I agree with
the opinion that a good rendering of his works into English--so far
as that is possible--should be made practicable by the concentration
of effort on one production; and I believe that Mr. Aylmer Maude’s
competence for the task is special and trustworthy.’
Sir Edmund Gosse wrote to Mr. Aylmer Maude:--
‘I wish to express my appreciation of your admirable labours
and those of Mrs. Maude.’
Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer wrote:--
‘I fully agree with contents of the letter.’
Professor Gilbert Murray wrote:--
‘I am in the most cordial agreement with Shaw’s letter and
will most gladly sign it. It is a great public service that
you and the Oxford Press between you are undertaking. The
wonder to me has always been how Tolstoy contrived to make
such a tremendous and characteristic impression through such
an opaque and distorting medium as the average Anglo-American
translation.’
* * * * *
A score of letters containing Tolstoy’s very emphatic authorization
and endorsement of the Maude versions of his work (such as he gave to
no other translator) have been deposited with the Oxford University
Press. These expressions of approval begin in 1897, when Mr. Maude
translated _What is Art_, and were continued till 1910, the year of
Tolstoy’s death. The following are a few extracts from these letters
of Tolstoy’s:
5 Sept. 1897. ‘I have written to Tchertkoff asking him to leave it to
you to do the translation. That will give me more satisfaction.’
18 Oct. 1897. ‘You have filled in correctly the word omitted on p.
31. In general I see that you are doing the translation with great
care, for which I am very grateful. I am almost certain I shall be
in accord with all your comments, but still send them to me. I, too,
will examine them carefully.’
Nov. 1897. ‘I will begin to reply in sequence to your admirable
remarks, which are of great use to the undertaking.... With all the
rest of your remarks I quite agree, and prompted by them I have made
alterations in my (Russian) text. Please make more such.’
Dec. 1897. ‘I yesterday received both your letters, dear friend, and
hasten to answer them. I also received the translation. I have gone
through it and have not found anything that held me up, except the
words “admirable book of Verm” (p. 22). It should be “very good” and
not “admirable”. The translation seems to me to be very good.’
Dec. 1898. ‘I have received your letter, dear friend Maude, and
am very glad that you are again in England and wish to work at
translating my writings. I do not desire a better translator, both on
account of your knowledge of the two languages and of your strictness
with yourself in everything.’
Jan. 1899. ‘I am very glad that your dear wife is doing the
translation of _Resurrection_.’
May 1900. ‘Your translations are very good because you have an
admirable mastery of both the languages, and besides that, to my
great pleasure, you love the thoughts you transmit.’
Sept. 1900. ‘To lose such translators as you and your wife would be
very, very unpleasant. Better translators, both in your knowledge of
both languages and in your penetration into the very meaning of the
matter translated, could not be invented.’
Feb. 1901. ‘I think that your and your wife’s splendid translation of
what has previously been published and badly translated should find a
publisher.’
Nov. 1901. (From a letter written by the Countess Olga Tolstoy.) ‘I
am writing instead of Leo Nikolaevich, who sends many excuses for not
having sooner replied to your two letters, and about the fine book,
_Sevastopol_, you have sent. All this time Leo Nikolaevich has been
very unwell.... He asks me to convey to you his great gratitude for
the letters and for _Sevastopol_. He finds both the translation and
the edition excellent, and that one could not desire anything better.’
23 Dec. 1901. ‘I think I have already written you how unusually
pleased I was with the first volume of your edition. All is
excellent--the edition, the notes, and chiefly the translation, and
even more the conscientiousness with which all this has been done. I
opened it accidentally at the _Two Hussars_ and read on to the end
just as if it were something new and had been written in English.’
6 Oct. 1903. _A common friend in replying to an inquiry Mr. Maude
made concerning his re-translation of a work, the previously
published (Free Age Press) edition of which appeared faulty._ ‘L.
N. (Tolstoy) asks me to reply to your inquiry about the exactness
of your translation of _What is Religion?_ that your translation
expresses his meaning more exactly, and he is quite satisfied.’
11 Dec. 1903. ‘Thank your kind friend Maude for sending me the volume
of _Essays and Letters_ (World’s Classics series). The edition is
very good.’
1 Aug. 1909. ‘I am always glad to hear news of you and of your
occupation, so closely connected with me, on excellent translations
of my writings. Your loving Leo Tolstoy.’
18 Jan. 1910. ‘I am better now and add a line to say a few words,
namely that the edition of your translations of my writings can only
give me pleasure, because your translations are very good and I do
not desire better ones.... My approval of your translations in my
letters, you can, of course, publish.’
* * * * *
The Tolstoy Centenary occurs in 1928, and the form the projected
complete Maude-Tolstoy Centenary Edition may take has not yet been
decided, but the material for it is being prepared and a pocket
edition of as much of it as is quite ready is appearing in the
World’s Classics series, which already contains the following twelve
volumes.
THE ‘MAUDE’ TOLSTOY
THE ‘WORLD’S CLASSICS’ SERIES
Pocket size, 6 by 4 inches. On thin opaque paper. Cloth, 2s. net;
sultan-red leather, 3s. 6d. net.
=The Cossacks= _and_ =Tales of the Caucasus.=
Including: _The Raid_, _The Wood-Felling_ and _Meeting a Moscow
Acquaintance in the Detachment_.
‘The best story that has been written in our
language.’--_Turgenev._
=War and Peace= (3 vols.).
‘We feel that we were ourselves there; that we knew those
people; that they are a part of our very own past.’--_Maurice
Baring._
‘It is among the greatest works ever made by man, and the
country is under a debt to Louise and Aylmer Maude for
rendering it into English.’--_New Labour Leader._
=Anna Karénina= (2 vols.).
‘Anna Karénina as an artistic production is perfection ...
a thing to which European literature of our epoch offers no
equal.’--_Dostoevski._
=Confession _and_ What I Believe= (1 vol.).
One of the sincerest and most remarkable confessions in all
literature.
=Twenty-Three Tales.=
Containing: _God Sees the Truth_, _A Prisoner in the Caucasus_, _What
Men Live By_, _Two Old Men_, _Where God is Love is_, _Ivan the Fool_,
_The Three Hermits_, _The Imp and the Crust_, _How Much Land does a
Man Need?_ _The Empty Drum_, _Too Dear_, etc.
‘I regard them as the most perfect tales ever
written.’--_Carmen Sylva, Queen of Roumania._
=The Kreutzer Sonata, Family Happiness, _and_ Polikushka= (1 vol.).
The first full translation, giving the passages suppressed by the
censor. It is the most powerful and the most widely discussed of
Tolstoy’s shorter novels.
=Plays.=
A complete edition (including the posthumous plays): _The First
Distiller_, _The Power of Darkness_, _The Fruits of Enlightenment_,
_The Live Corpse_, _The Cause of it All_, _The Light Shines in
Darkness_.
‘Nothing in the whole range of drama fascinated me more than
the old soldier in _The Power of Darkness_.’--_Bernard Shaw._
=Essays and Letters.=
Including: _Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves? Afterword to the Kreutzer
Sonata_, _The First Step_, _Non-Acting_, _Religion and Morality_,
_Shame!_, _Letters to Verigin_, _Non-Resistance_, _How to Read the
Gospels_, _Letters on Henry George_, _Modern Science_, _Patriotism
and Government_, ‘_Thou Shalt Not Kill_’, _Reply to Synod’s
Excommunication_, _What is Religion? An Appeal to the Clergy_, and
fifteen other articles.
‘Gives an excellent idea of the vast range of Tolstoy’s
intellectual activities.’--_Daily News._
=Resurrection.=
‘Undoubtedly the most important novel that has appeared in
Europe for many years.’--_Edward Garnett._
_Ready Shortly._
=What then must we do?=
Tolstoy’s remarkable study of social conditions.
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
* * * * *
WHAT IS ART?
(Now included in the volume, _Tolstoy on Art_.)
‘This book is a most effective booby trap. It is written
with so utter a contempt for the objections which a
routine critic is sure to allege against it, that many a
dilettantist reviewer has already accepted it as a butt set
up by Providence.... Whoever is really conversant with Art,
recognizes in it the voice of the master.’--_G. Bernard Shaw_
in _The Daily Chronicle_.
‘This calmly and cogently reasoned effort to put Art on a new
basis is a literary event of the first importance.... I have
never come across anything so good in its way as Mr. Maude’s
version of Tolstoy. The translation reads like an original:
you feel that Tolstoy has lost nothing in transit. And what a
wonderful artist in prose this Tolstoy is! How vigorous and
succinct! How persuasive!’--_A. B. Walkley._
‘Tolstoy’s book is the most important essay in pure
criticism of recent years, and it is destined to become a
classic.’--_Star._
‘The powerful personality of the author, the startling
originality of his views, grips the reader, and carry him,
though his deepest convictions be outraged, protesting through
the book.’--_Pall Mall Gazette._
‘Mr. Aylmer Maude’s translation is admirable--a better piece
of work has rarely been performed; and Mrs. Maude’s English
renderings of the French poems, whether as to meaning, spirit
or rhythm, are so felicitous that they amount to a _tour de
force_.’--_M. H. Spielmann_ in _Literature_.
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London, E.C.4.
THE LIFE OF TOLSTOY.
=First Fifty Years.= By AYLMER MAUDE. Seventh Edition. 8
Illustrations. Demy 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.
‘Will stand, I think, among the big biographies of our
literature.’--_G. Bernard Shaw._
‘The book is no sooner opened than it begins to
exercise a sort of charm from which it is impossible to
escape.’--_Westminster Gazette._
(The Second Volume: LATER YEARS is out of print, and will be revised.)
THE ‘MAUDE’ TOLSTOY.
=Resurrection.= With 14 Illustrations by Pasternak. 7s. 6d. net.
‘A special word of praise must be given to the illustrations.
They illustrate the author with a sympathy and an insight
which Tolstoy has never before enjoyed.’--_Glasgow Herald._
=Plays.= (Complete Edition. Six Plays.) 7 Illustrations. 7s. 6d. net.
‘A vivid picture of life, full of light and colour and
contrast; full, too, of wisdom and the wit that knows just
where to hold its hand.’--_The Times_ on ‘Fruits of Culture.’
=Sevastopol and Other Stories= (including TWO HUSSARS, etc.).
Photogravure Portrait and Map. 1s. 6d. net.
‘In these thrilling “Letters from the Front” Tolstoy
realizes war ... as no other writer has ever done before or
since.’--_Contemporary Review._
Constable and Co., 10 Orange Street, W.C.2.
* * * * *
=Leo Tolstoy.= By AYLMER MAUDE. 8vo. 7 Illustrations. 6s. net.
A complete biography, with an account of Tolstoy’s home-leaving and
death, and an explanation of what led to it.
‘Mr. Maude is our best English authority on Tolstoy, not
alone because he knew Tolstoy intimately, but because,
whilst admiring and loving him for his genius and his
sincerity, he judges calmly, and is not carried away by
hero-worship.’--_Yorkshire Post._
Methuen and Co., 36 Essex Street, London, W.C.2.
* * * * *
=The Life of Marie C. Stopes.= By AYLMER MAUDE. With 14
Illustrations. 5s. net.
An authorized biography giving, for the first time, the story of her
childhood, academic life, marriage, writings, opponents and inner
life.
Williams and Norgate, 14 Henrietta Street, W.C.2.
Transcriber’s Note:
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=.
Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged, as were
obsolete and alternative spellings. Obvious printing errors, such as
backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters and punctuation,
were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and
abbreviations were added. One excess semi-colon was deleted.
Use of accents on Russian names is inconsistent. Diacriticals in
French were corrected.
In the index, surnames were added to ‘Darwin, Erasmus’ and ‘Knight,
R.’ Accents missing on words and names in the index were adjusted to
agree with related text.
Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of
the book. There are four anchors for footnote [2].
The following were changed:
‘hynotist’ to ‘hypnotist’
‘divisons’ to ‘divisions’
‘auszudrückendem’ to ‘auszudrückenden’
‘Wohlegefallen’ to ‘Wohlgefallen’
‘Asthetisches’ to ‘Aesthetisches’
‘-ziet’ to ‘-zeit’ (several instances)
‘Kunsc’ to ‘Kunst’
‘letztgenamten’ to ‘letztgenannten’
‘einer’ to ‘einem’
‘benfit’ to ‘benefit’
‘Rémy de Gourment’ to ‘Remy de Gourmont’
‘Le soir’ to ‘Le sais’
‘Himmelfaht’ to ‘Himmelfahrt’
‘Byulóv’ to ‘Bryulóv’
‘staking’ to ‘shaking’
‘abnominably’ to ‘abominably’
‘infectuous’ to ‘infectious’
‘Lontainement’ to ‘Lointainement’
‘Hagan’ to ‘Hagen’ (twice)
‘indued’ to ‘imbued’
‘enlightment’ to ‘enlightenment’
‘transcendant’ to ‘transcendent’
‘make’ to ‘makes’
‘maligant’ to ‘malignant”
‘Schonheit’s’ to ‘Schönheit’s’
‘thatfräftigen’ to ‘thatkräftigen’
‘Trojons’ to ‘Trojans’
‘Shakepeare’ to ‘Shakespeare’
‘Turgéney’ to ‘Turgénev’
‘accidently’ to ‘accidentally’
‘irrefragible’ to ‘irrefragable’
‘unbashed’ to ‘unabashed’
‘Sanscrit’ to ‘Sanskrit’
‘Pissaro’ to ‘Pissarro’
‘Tyúchev’ to ‘Tyútchev’
‘Geschicht’ to ‘Geschichte’
‘Olgo’ to ‘Olga’
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