What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy (english readers .txt) 📕

not, as it were, a parasitic growth on it⁠—but is itself the very 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, by means, not only of participation in the same ideas and beliefs, but also by means of similarity in feeling.51

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 illuminate 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.52

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 Péladan’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, n’y a pas d’autre Vérité que Dieu, il n’y a pas d’autre Beauté, que Dieu” (p. 33). 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 aesthetics 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 aesthetics 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.53

In England, during this period, the writers on aesthetics define beauty more and more frequently, not by its own qualities, but by taste, and the discussion about beauty is superseded by a discussion on 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 aesthetics are on the same lines. The prominent writers on aesthetics in England during the present century have been 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.54

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 aesthetic pleasure are threefold:⁠—(1) That “which exercises the faculties affected in the most complete ways, 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.55

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.56

Grant Allen is a follower of Spencer, and in his Physiological Aesthetics (1877) he says that beauty has a physical origin. Aesthetic 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.