This statement is obviously meaningless unless you define the nature of the person who is to be infected. Infection is as much a matter of the mind infected as of the agent which infects. “The stronger the infection for such and such an audience ...” is what we shall have to read. The audience must be a constant element if the definition is to convey any distinct meaning. Perceiving this, as so acute a mind could not fail to do, Tolstoy falls back on exactly the same criterion as that of Bishop Butler when he endeavoured to get a universal standard of right and wrong. Butler set up as final judge in these matters the “plain honest man.”[168] You were to appeal to the unsophisticated conscience of this ideal being, and that ended the matter. So, with Tolstoy, you are to get the “unperverted” man who, like an animal, “unerringly finds what he needs.”[169] Most people in our society, says Tolstoy, “are quite unable to distinguish a work of art from the grossest counterfeit.” They like, or pretend to like, Beethoven better than a peasant folk-song! But the peasant’s, _i.e._ the untaught, appreciation, which is merely bewildered by Beethoven, is right.[170] This, we ultimately find, simply means that the “plain honest man,” as conceived by Tolstoy, is one who appreciates the _moral_ contents of a work of art, provided that it has any, and that it has infection enough to get them into his mind. And Tolstoy (the art-critic) does not care about anything except these moral contents. This is clear when he comes to deal with the element which he mentions above as having been omitted from his consideration of the comparative value of art-work, namely the quality of the feeling transmitted by the medium of art. Here he lays it down that the object of all art is to unite mankind, and to make them feel at one with God and with each other.[171] This may pass very well if by uniting is meant enabling us to enter with sympathy into the life of man, and even of things that are not man. Even so a drawing by Nettleship can make us feel at one with a python or a tigress. But Tolstoy does not mean that. His uniting is a moral and practical idea based on the doctrine that combat, and everything that could lead to combat, is wrong. Ancient religious perceptions, he argues, confined the sense of unity to the tribe or nation, and art had to glorify solely the might or greatness of the people who produced it. Modern religion, on the contrary, takes account of all humanity without exception. “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.”[172] Only two kinds of art, according to Tolstoy, “can be considered good art in our time.” These are first, “art transmitting feelings flowing from a religious perception of man’s position in the world in relation to God and to his neighbours,” and secondly, “art transmitting the