We may deal with it summarily because it is an ultimate question and there can be no final answer to ultimate questions. As soon as we begin to ask such questions, as soon as we begin to look at any phenomenon as an end in itself, we are on the perilous slope of metaphysics, where no agreement can, or should be, possible. The question of measurement was plausible, and needed careful consideration. What is Art? is a question which, if we are wise, we shall deal with as Pilate dealt with that like question: What is Truth? How futile the question is, we may realise when we examine the book which Tolstoy in old age wrote to answer it. Here is a man who was himself, in his own field, one of the world’s supreme artists. He could not fail to say one or two true things, as when he points out that “all human existence is full of art, from cradle songs and dances to the offices of religion and public ceremonial—it is all equally art. Art, in the large sense, impregnates our whole life.” But on the main point all that Tolstoy can do is to bring together a large miscellaneous collection of definitions—without seeing that as individual opinions they all have their rightness—and then to add one of his own, not much worse, nor much better, than any of the others. Thereto he appends some of his own opinions on artists, whence it appears that Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoievsky, Maupassant, Millet, Bastien-Lepage, and Jules Breton—and not always they—are the artists whom he considers great; it is not a list to treat with contempt, but he goes on to pour contempt on those who venerate Sophocles and Aristophanes and Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and Michelangelo and Bach and Beethoven and Manet. “My own artistic works,” he adds, “I rank among bad art, excepting a few short stories.” It seems a reduction of the whole question, What is Art? to absurdity, if one may be permitted to say so at a time when Tolstoy would appear to be the pioneer of some of our most approved modern critics.