WHAT IS ART

WHEN Tolstoy was growing old he cut circular holes in his boots, put on a silk smock, and dug in the garden. He had lived among Russian peasants and he loved them. In their poverty and simplicity they seemed to be drawing stores of virtue from the earth below their feet. He compared them with men of culture : these peasants had no leisure and no education ; they were not given many chances for exceptional service to mankind; and yet how much more downright in emotion, how much honester in mind they were ! They had a fullness of life and character that was lost from the great world, and they were free from that net of doubts and self-entangle- ments from which a sophisticated man could hardly escape. Now, Tolstoy had a conscience like a hedgehog ; and here, among the peasants, he thought he saw the mystery of inno- cence and unimpeded work. He tried to gain a mastery of those peasant virtues, to win back innocence and simplicity. He turned peasant, then—in a silk smock, in new boots neatly- punctured to convince himself that they were ragged.

His culture seemed an incubus to him ; he wished to be rid of it. He conceived a theory of art in which it was held that all creative writing is intelligible to the most illiterate of men ; for some time he practised writing in accordance with his theory. But a bigger constriction to him was his wealth ; he. would have welcomed an opportunity to destroy that, too ; but he had a wife who was by no means at one with him in the question, and he was torn between his two duties. He found a means, a most absurd means, to quieten his conscience. He made over all his property to his wife and became dependent upon her. Of course, there was no difference except in form ; he was as prosperous and as well looked after as before ; but he could at least swear to himself in private that he hadn't a penny to his name.

And a further horror descended upon him. - He grew so disgusted at his bickerings with his wife and at the reconcilia- tions prompted by his physical desires, so humiliated by his own lack of control and dignity, that he began to preach celibacy. He preached it with fire—and with courage ; for celibacy has long ceased to be a popular ideal, and Tolstoy's was a desperate crusade. The difficulty was that he himself was incapable of remaining celibate. He would make his decision with infinite confidence and resolution. After a while temptation would creep in ; there would be an agonizing battle between his will and his desire. And it would seem to him that he was in danger of committing a sin of the most miserable, most hideous kind. His temptation would over- shadow the world, and he would draw nearer and nearer to the commission of the sin he was too intent upon avoiding. It was -the same with the old hermits. They were often so determined to overcome their sensuality that the problem was always before them: It formed the bulk of their lives. Satan himself came to tempt them. They struggled all the time against alluring visions and lascivious thoughts, and dam- nation seemed to be just round the corner. A saint, we arc - told, has temptations of a magnitude and a ferocity at which ordinary mortals cannot guess ; but saints have usually invented their temptations ; they have been so horrified at their evil natures that they have contrived a continual sham fight against themselves, distressing • but unnecessary. So

with Tolstoy. It was not so much that he was of an animal nature, as that he chose to regard himself as such ; it was not so much that the problem of sex was naturally huge and in- soluble to him as that he insisted upon being haunted by the problem. And, of course, the harder he struggled the more he was anguished by his failures. He set his mind upon being chaste, he persuaded himself that he sinned abysmally if he gave way to his passions ; he set before himself the attractions of the vice he abominated, he saw himself as frail, he feared for himself, he anticipated his downfall ; daily he drew nearer to it and fought against it more heroically. When the burden and torment became more than he could bear he threw up the struggle, and loathed and despised himself as he surrendered to the beast he had been savagely baiting.

In consequence of his remorse he preached asceticism, thorough-going self-abnegation. He smelled sin everywhere ; he developed an ethic that was grandiose and puritanical. And when he wrote upon art he expounded the opinion that the root of art is morality. He was far-seeing and profound ; he was never likely to fall into half-consi..;:eraltions and shallow- nesses. He could argue well, and his plea that the end of art is not beauty but morality is energetic and penetrating. His essay, Whitt is Art ? as Mr. Bernard Shaw said, " is a most effective booby trap." For Tolstoy had considered and re- jected all counter-arguments, and there was re naivete about him. NeverthelesS, it was the compulsion of his circumstances that drove Tolstoy to this opinion, and he was never free to decide dispassionately. In the end we can always recognize his compulsion ; for when he speaks of morality and immo- rality the sin that is before his mind is unchasteness : he is a victim to the fear of sex ; indeed, he is a little ridiculous.

No ! That man was never ridiculous. Analyse hiM as you will, track home his opinions to his fears and obsessions, point out his inconsistencies and his prejudice, his genius is left un- resolved ; and his genius has impressed itself upon all his utterances. He displayed it no less in life than in art. All who knew him conceived for him reverence and love. Even Tchekhov, full of pragmatical scepticism and common sense, afraid of religion and philosophy and all abstractions, convinced that it was Tolstoy's duty to write fiction and that ethics and aesthetics should be left to the useless portion of mankind, kept his awe for Tolstoy after he had turned pamphleteer, and con- fessed that the whole of Russian literature would collapse and lose its value if Tolstoy were taken away ; that only so long as Tolstoy lived was it worth while for him and for the host of smaller men to continue writing ; that Tolstoy was the touch- stone and key to Russian literature, placed it under his aegis, gave it importance as a partitioning and dispersal of himself. Not even Tolstoy's obliquity of vision upon morality was coarse or laughable ; he was never so self-deceived as to cover up the problem of sex and mark it with a taboo. We have a picture of him roaring with uncontrollable laughter at the spinsterish prudery of Gorki ; and such dishonesties always excited in him the desire to shock fools into sense and make them see with wide open eyes. And though it was failure which haunted and obsessed his mind, he was capable in a hundred ways of heroism and renunciation ; and the whole wealth of his spirit was expended in the construction of his ideals and the attempt to live with sincerity and self-approval. In all his writings upon art, however he may err through his own self-torture, he speaks with the voice of greatness.

The aim of art is beauty, of philosophy t ruth, of religion virtue. It is pleasant paradox or sheer nonsense to affirm that " Beauty is truth, truth beauty." But it is more dangerous and more stupid to define a quality in terms of itself. When Tolstoy wrote, there was an absurd school that professed to believe that art should be undertaken " for art's sake," that beauty was its own sufficient justification. That school still drags on amongst us ; and though its confessed adherents in our own day are of little note, the doctrine itself has become a general platitude, stuck in the unconscious mind of the average culti- vated man, and oppressing our literature with its tyranny.

For it is typically a motionless and ignorant doctrine ; it narrows the subjects and the int} rests of creative writing, and, if rigorously observed, it would lea:. to an art which was merely a rearrangement and parody of prcf.-ious art ; indeed, it would kill art.

It was of great importance, then, that someone should call attention to what, for the moment, shall be called the moral

component of beauty. It was of especial importance in an age when intelligent men for the most part were irreligious, and the soul had become cowardly and dry. Beauty is the aim of art, but if art is to be a complete activity for man then beauty must include the ideals of truth and virtue. Truth had already been worked to death as an inspiration for art. The school of realism had acknowledged truth as their deity, and, with unbalanced devotion to this one divine quality, had succeeded in making fiction and poetry more tedious and uninspiring than fact. In revolt from realism came the self-worshippers, the poetS who were conscious only of being poets, the artists who confined beauty to her name and refused her substantial existence, who allowed art no applications and no bearings upon life. It is true that the vacuity of their ideal compelled them to be more rebellious than they intended.; to prove their liberation from truth and morality they immersed themselves in the false and the wicked. " Art is a beautiful lie " the most famous of them averred ; but he betrayed logic for the sake of his epigram. The ideal of art in the 'nineties was that no- subject should be4Pumed to no-account in a beautiful manner ; and it was despair of their own doctrine that drove them to perversity.

Tolstoy's diatribes were opportune. The uniform avoidance of morality as an impulse to art was opening a prospect of years of futility and insincerity in writing. Any attempt to avert that prospect was compelled to rest upon morality, because the assessment of value is moral. It is only the moral sense which informs us that art should not be futile. And Tolstoy's morality was not mock-piety. " Half a century ago," he wrote, " 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, 1 must answer thig 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."' He summarizes the conditions essen- tial to a work of art as : (1) A correct, that is a moral relation of the author to his subject ; (2) clearness of expres- sion, or beauty of form ; and (3) sincerity, that is, a sincere feeling of love or hatred of what the artist expresses.

His argument is exhilarating ; and suspicion occurs first when he applies his own criteria. The quarrel with Tolstoy is not that he condemns Baudelaire, Verlaine, Wagner, Shakespeare . . . He is openly judging by the highest standards ; he is condemning them only as incomplete, and, if we could follow and accept his grounds for condemnation, his criticism would be useful. But he became so wholly vowed to morality that he no longer paused to examine the meaning of morality, but condemned off-hand, taking for granted his instinctive and mainly sexual standar(Ls. He began by revealing with wit and profundity the necessary interdependence of art and morality ; but when he lets slip his non-rational opinions he is in danger of revolting his converts and losing them. Once again it becomes obvious that no critic should be allowed to go morality-mad ; again, we feel the desire to set up beauty as the sole and perfect aim of art.

Let us admit that beauty, in its own excellence, cannot be opposed to the excellences of truth and virtue. Let us admit that beauty can be defined only in terms of other qualities. It will appear that everything beautiful must be implicitly true and good. In the vortex of ideal qualities we catch for a moment an aspect of the whole ; and this aspect we call beauty, because we feel that the qualities of truth and virtue are contained in it, but do not express it. In the same way, the moral ideal will contain in itself and include the ideals of truth and beauty ; and no religious doctrine can be good which is not beautiful and true. The distinction between the three qualities is not one of exclusion ; it is, rather, that the qualities which are included and latent in one aspect are not named as characteristic of the aspect ; and that none of the three is found apart from the others.

Mr. Aylmer Maude has done us a great service in collecting and translating all of -T-olstoy's writings upon art ; they still retain force enough to disabuse the multitudes of men who regard virtue as an illegki natc and out-moded ideal. He has included several essays of bis- own upon Tolstoy which contain, here and there, interesting information. The trend of his apologetics, however, is disastrous. He writes, in effect, " Tolstoy didn't mean all that he said. He exaggerated, rather. If you will read him as-though he weren't 'quite serious, you will find it easy to agree with him."

ALAN PORTER.