It is thus seen that for the last eighty years, beginning with Venevítinoff and Nadézhdin, Russian art-critics have worked to establish the idea that art has a _raison d’être_ only when it is “in the service of society” and contributes towards raising society to higher humanitarian conceptions--by those means which are proper to art, and distinguish it from science. This idea which so much shocked Western readers when Proudhon developed it has been advocated in Russia by all those who have exercised a real influence upon critical judgment in art matters. And they were supported _de facto_ by some of our greatest poets, such as Lérmontoff and Turguéneff. As to the critics of the other camp, like Druzhínin, Annenkoff and A. Grigórieff, who took either the opposite view of “art for art’s sake,” or some intermediate view--who preached that the criterium of art is “The Beautiful” and clung to the theories of the German æsthetical writers--they have had no hold upon Russian thought. The metaphysics of the German æsthetical writers was more than once demolished in the opinion of Russian readers--especially by Byelínskiy, in his _Review of Literature for 1847_, and by Tchernyshévskiy in his _Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality_. In this _Review_ Byelínskiy fully developed his ideas concerning Art in the service of mankind, and proved that although Art is not identical with Science, and differs from it by the way it treats the facts of life, it nevertheless has with it a common _aim_. The man of science _demonstrates_--the poet _shows_; but both _convince_; the one by his arguments, the other--by his scenes from life. The same was done by Tchernyshévskiy when he maintained that the aim of Art is not unlike that of History: that it _explains to us life_, and that consequently Art which should merely reproduce facts of life without adding to our compensation of it would not be Art at all. These few remarks will explain why Tolstóy’s _What is Art?_ produced much less impression in Russia than abroad. What struck us in it was not its leading idea, which was quite familiar to us, but the fact that the great artist also made it his own, and was supporting it by all the weight of his artistic experience; and then, of course, the literary form he gave the idea. Moreover, we read with the greatest interest his witty criticisms of both the “decadent” would-be poets and the librettos of Wagner’s operas; to which latter, let me add by the way, Wagner wrote, in places, wonderfully beautiful music, as soon as he came to deal with the universal _human passions_,--love, compassion, envy, the joy of life, and so on, and forgot all about his fairy-tale background.