Pericles, or the Chinese of the Sung dynasty, or the thirteenth century
in France, or the Renaissance in Italy; and as a matter of fact he
condemns most of the great art of the world, including his own.
We can escape from the tyranny of Tolstoy's doctrine, as from the
tyranny of Whistler's, only by considering the facts of our own
experience of art. The fact that we _can_ enjoy and experience a work
of art frees us from Whistler's doctrine, because, if we can enjoy and
experience it, we are concerned with it. Because of our enjoyment, art
is for us a social activity and not a game played by the artist for his
own amusement. We know also that the artist likes us to enjoy his art,
in fact complains loudly if we do not; and we do not believe that the
primitive artist or man was different in this respect. There is now, and
always has been, some kind of relation between the artist and the
public, but not the relation which Tolstoy affirms.
According to him the proper aim of art is to do good.
'The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time
unintelligible to a great number of people is extremely unjust,
and its consequences are ruinous to art itself.'
The word _unjust_ implies that the aim of art is to do good. The artist
sins if he does not try to do good to as many people as possible, and I
sin if I am ready to enjoy and encourage a work of art which most people
do not enjoy.
But as a matter of fact a work of art is good to me, not morally good
but good as a work of art, if I enjoy it. In my estimate of the work of
art I can ask only if it is a work of art to me, not if it is one to
other people. I may wish and try to make them enjoy it, but if I do that
is as a result of my own enjoyment of it. I can't begin by asking
whether other people enjoy it; I must begin with my own experience of
it, for I have nothing else to go by.
And so it is with the artist; he cannot begin by asking himself whether
the mass of men will understand what he proposes to produce; he must
produce it, and then trust in man, and God, for its effect. Art is
produced by the individual artist and experienced by the individual man.
Tolstoy holds that it is to be experienced by mankind in the mass, not
by individuals; his audience is an abstraction. Whistler holds that it
is produced by the individual, but for himself, and not experienced by
mankind either in the mass or as individuals. Both are heretics. What is
the truth?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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