“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 æsthetics which amount to this—that the aim of art is beauty, that beauty is recognized 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.”[164] Now in one point at least, that which is embodied in the last sentence, these words of Tolstoy’s appear to me to go straight to the mark. Art can no more be founded on beauty than morality can be founded on pleasure. A greater than Tolstoy has spoken the same truth in a couple of his mighty lines. The great masters, says Whitman, ... do not seek beauty, they are sought, Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. But let us see what Tolstoy would set up in place of what he throws down. Art, he tells us, is “one of the means of intercourse between man and man.” “By words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings.” But the transmission must, if it is art, be intentional, premeditated. “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.” The “indications” may, of course, be a certain kind of language, or gesture, or plastic representation, or sound. If, by such means, a man has succeeded in making his own feeling _infectious_, and affecting others by it, he has, to that extent achieved art. Art is therefore “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and is indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.”[165]