Certainly one cannot but admire the strong clear-headedness and common sense with which Tolstoy blows away the mists into which he had plunged us in his third chapter, and brings us into a region of daylight realities, with firm earth under our feet. Undoubtedly if man does want to get into real contact with his fellow-men he must not merely tell them what he feels, he must make them feel the same thing. And art, produced with “individuality, clearness and sincerity” has this property, to use Tolstoy’s own term, of infectiousness. Moreover it is of enormous antiquity and has exceedingly primitive forms. There may have been art before there was speech—there was certainly art before there was writing, before there was anything remotely resembling intellectual culture or religion. The metaphysical definitions of Hegel, “The Idea shining through Matter,” or of Knight, “The union of object and subject, the drawing forth from nature of that which is cognate to man,” and of the rest of the sixty and odd philosophers, do, I think, look a little irrelevant when we think of the cave-man scratching his bit of mammoth ivory. But Tolstoy’s account of the matter glows with reality. The cave-artist was struck with something in nature—the reindeer drinking at a pool, the mammoth swinging through the jungle—he longed to express it, to make others see. It can hardly be doubted that this was the origin of art _as art_.[166] I think it is its fundamental quality even now, though we must include among the objects rendered things not in external nature but in the artist’s own imagination. The questions then arise, What is it that the artist is trying to infect other people with? Is art quite indifferent to the nature of the feeling communicated? Is there any common feeling expressed by things apparently so diverse as a strain of music, a piece of pottery, a cathedral, a lyric, a statue, and a landscape painting? Tolstoy does not overlook these questions; he has, in fact, a great deal to say about them. But here, in his analysis of the æsthetic faculty, the obsession with the exclusively ethical view of things which has so much impaired his own art seems to have led him on a false track. Having decided that infectiousness is the common quality of all art, he is struck with the fact that this quality varies very much in different works, and he uses it to obtain a scale of merit:— “Not only,” he writes, “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, _i.e._ not considering the quality of the feelings it transmits.”[167]