I know nothing whatever (I regret to say) about the art of Kramskoy or of Morlon, but one imagines, from Tolstoy’s way of talking about the works referred to, that they are attempts to capture admiration for a work of art by the aid of something which is not art, but sentiment. At any rate, that is just what Tolstoy desires them to do. Is art, then, entirely indifferent to subject, as some of the philosophers of the Impressionist school contend? Not at all—so long as the subject is something _in the picture_, and capable of being expressed in the medium of that branch of art. A crew of men pulling a boat through a heavy sea may be a good subject for a painting, but to the artist it does not matter a pin’s point whether they are going to rescue life or to board an enemy or to catch lobsters. Under the circumstances they will all look just the same. The wreck in the offing has its value in the design of the picture, no more and no less. And those who are always on the look out for false values, sentimental values, will never learn what art really has to teach them, what art alone can teach. What is this? The master key with which we have tried to open certain doors in biology and in ethics will, I hope, serve us also in discovering the principles of art. I accept fully Tolstoy’s postulate of infectiousness as a primary quality of art. There can be no art which does not communicate to others the feeling of the artist. This implies that the artist must have a distinct and sincere feeling to communicate. But it does not at all imply that the finest art is that which is most widely or powerfully communicable at its first appearance or at any given period in history. To say that infectiousness is an essential characteristic of art is not the same thing as to say that the more it infects, either extensively or intensively, the better art it is. One might as well say that if, as has been done, you define man as ‘a political animal,’ it would follow that the more strenuously political he was the more he fulfilled the purpose of his being as a man. But politics and art are both of them simply ways in which man endeavours to remould his universe “nearer to the heart’s desire.” How does he make use of political methods _for his true purpose_? How does he make use of art and its infectiousness _for his true purpose_? These are the real, the decisive questions.