Among the writers mentioned, English readers miss the names of John
Ruskin and William Morris, especially as so much that Tolstoy says, is
in accord with their views.
Of Ruskin, Tolstoy has a very high opinion. I have heard him say, “I
don’t know why you English make such a fuss about Gladstone—you have a
much greater man in Ruskin.” As a stylist, too, Tolstoy speaks of him
with high commendation. Ruskin, however, though he has written on art
with profound insight, and has said many things with which Tolstoy fully
agrees, has, I think, nowhere so systematised and summarised his view
that it can be readily quoted in the concise way which has enabled
Tolstoy to indicate his points of essential agreement with Home, Véron,
and Kant. Even the attempt to summarise Kant’s æsthetic philosophy in a
dozen lines will hardly be of much service except to readers who have
already some acquaintance with the subject. For those to whom the
difference between “subjective” and “objective” perceptions is fresh, a
dozen pages would be none too much. And to summarise Ruskin would be
perhaps more difficult than to condense Kant.
As to William Morris, we are reminded of his dictum that art is the
workman’s expression of joy in his work, by Tolstoy’s “As soon as the
author is not producing art for his own satisfaction,—does not himself
feel what he wishes to express,—a resistance immediately springs up” (p.
154); and again, “In such transmission to others of the feelings that
have arisen in him, he (the artist) will find his happiness” (p. 195).
Tolstoy sweeps over a far wider range of thought, but he and Morris are
not opposed. Morris was emphasising part of what Tolstoy is implying.
But to return to the difficulties of Tolstoy’s task. There is one, not
yet mentioned, lurking in the hearts of most of us. We have enjoyed
works of “art.” We have been interested by the information conveyed in a
novel, or we have been thrilled by an unexpected “effect”; have admired
the exactitude with which real life has been reproduced, or have had our
feelings touched by allusions to, or reproductions of, works—old German
legends, Greek myths, or Hebrew poetry—which moved us long ago, as they
moved generations before us. And we thought all this was “art.” Not
clearly understanding what art is, and wherein its importance lies, we
were not only attached to these things, but attributed importance to
them, calling them “artistic” and “beautiful,” without well knowing what
we meant by those words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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