It turns out that Tolstoy, a writer I love to no end, hates almost everything. The tenderness and compassion he shows even his most flawed characters is apparently completely out of commission when considering pretty much every artist except Hugo and Doestoevsky.
In What is Art? (a title that, whenever mentioned aloud in my household, is sung to the tune of this), Tolstoy is unimpressed by Shakespeare, very much dislikes Beethoven, devotes basically a whole chapter to his deep disdain for Wagner (even detailing how he walked out in the middle of a performance: “Somehow I managed to sit through the next scene with the entrance of the monster … but more I could not endure, and I rushed from the theatre with a feeling of revulsion I still cannot forget”), says he finds the impressionist painters we consider masters today even worse than contemporary poets, from whom he reproduces poems only to show how absurdly incoherent they are (“How is it that the moon lives and dies in a sky of brass, and how is it that snow shines like sand?” he asks of a poem from Verlaine). And he’s sure to cover his bases: “To avoid reproach of having picked out the worst poems, I have cited from each book the poem that happened to appear on the twenty-eighth page. All the poems of these hundreds of poets, of whom I have named only a few [like Baudelaire, Mallarme, the aforementioned Verlaine], are the same.”
Ouch.
By the time Tolstoy is putting his thoughts together about art, over the course of 15 years and published in 1898 (years after Anna Karenina and War and Peace), he’s read a tremendous amount of aesthetic philosophy — and he's eager to prove it to you. In short summaries he recounts the views of recent philosophers — only to show how insufficient they are: Baumgarten and his followers collapse art into beauty and then seek to define what beauty is. Thinkers who depart from Baumgarten — such as Mendelssohn and some, from my stance here in 2020, lesser known others — claim that the aim of art isn’t beauty but the good, which can be taken so far as demanding an instance of moral perfection in a work of art. Tolstoy deals with Kant in three paragraphs or so, then the German idealists in another couple of pages, and from the Germans he travels to the French — also utterly summarizable, and such ease of summary seems to suggesting how small the thoughts of these thinkers and, therefore, how thoroughly unimpressive they and their lifeworks are. Even where I want to pause, think, and wait for him to say more, he moves on at a steady clip. I wanted to stop for longer in England, for instance, based on these quick passages that take naturalism as foundational for any account of art:
According to Charles Darwin in his Descent of Man (1871) beauty is a feeling proper not only to man but to animals, and therefore to the ancestors of man as well. Birds adorn their nests and appreciate the beauty of their mates. Beauty has an influence on marriage. Beauty includes the notion of differing characters. The art of music originated in the calling of male to female.
According to Spencer, the origin of art is play — a thought already expressed by Schiller. In the lower animals, all the energy of life is spent on maintaining and continuing life itself; but in man, after these needs have been satisfied, there remains a surplus of energy. It is this surplus that is used in play, which passes into art. Play is a likeness of real action; art is the same.
But Tolstoy is eager to get to his questions: “What then follows from all these definitions of beauty offered by the science aesthetics?” These lifeworks all basically fall into two categories split up by two definitions of beauty: 1) Beauty is something that exists in itself, “a manifestation of the absolutely perfect — idea, spirit, will, God” (you almost hear “yadda yadda” at the end of this sentence). 2) Beauty is “a certain pleasure we experience, which does not have personal advantage as its aim.”
Then Tolstoy decides to trash beauty altogether:
To the question, what is this art to which are offered in sacrifice the labours of millions of people, the very lives of people, and even morality, the existing aesthetic systems give answers all of which come down to saying that the aim of art is beauty, and that beauty is known by the pleasure it gives, and that the pleasure given by art is a good and important thing. That is, that pleasure is good because it is pleasure. So that what is considered the definition of art is not a definition of art at all, but is only a ruse to justify those sacrifices which are offered by people in the anime of this supposed art, as well as the egoistic pleasure and immorality of existing art. And therefore, strange as it is to say, despite the mountains of books written on art, no precise definition of art has yet been made. The reason for this is that the concept of beauty has been placed at the foundation of the concept of art.
Tolstoy’s problem is that the people who are interested in defining art in the first place — as something somehow mystically capturing the truth and good in the beautiful — are merely seeking justification for their bourgeois, superficial diversions and pleasures, without being concerned with art’s actual originary function in human life.
So what does Tolstoy really think? He does finally pause where I’d wanted him to and gives a shout-out to the physiological-evolutionary definition, as he calls it, that’s based on the understanding of human beings as the kind of creature who evolved to have enough energy (after managing to stay alive, of course) to play. Because this definition doesn’t seek some grounding in beauty, it holds a bit more sway for Tolstoy, but he still ultimately finds it to be imprecise because it follows from it that there’s no reason to distinguish works of craftsmanship, or even a really instagrammable meal, from art. Presumably, the reason Tolstoy has spent 15 years trying to understand aesthetic philosophies is to, at least partly, understand that thing to which he’s devoted his own life.
The imprecision of all these definitions proceeds from the fact that in all of them, just as in the metaphysical definitions, the aim of art is located in the pleasure we derive from it, and not its purpose in the life of man and of mankind.
In order to define art precisely, one must first of all cease looking at it as a means of pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Considering art in this way, we cannot fail to see that art is a means of communion among people.
Every work of art results in the one who receives it entering into a certain kind of communion with the one who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously with him, before him, or after him, have received or will receive the same artistic impression.
As the word which conveys men’s thoughts and experiences serves to unite people, so art serves in exactly the same way. The peculiarity of this means of communion, which distinguishes it from communion by means of the word, is that through the word a man conveys his thoughts to another, while through art people convey their feelings to each other.
[I find this account of the function and importance of art profound and persuasive right up until the word “feelings,” which seems to be here slightly distanced from “thoughts.” The division between feeling, and thinking seems to do similar violence to art that Plato did to poetry when he banished the poets from the city. Since then, art has been relegated to the realm of feelings rather than thoughts. At the same time, there is a profound expression of humanity in the idea that a person can recreate their own feelings in someone else. But this is not immune to skepticism, and in my next entry, perhaps I will go into detail about why this could be a problem.]
Tolstoy sees that much of the art of his day is not concerned with what he considers the essentially unifying character of art. He attributes this to the increasingly stratified class structure of society on which the force of religion is less and less potent as a unifying force.
As soon as the art of the upper classes became separated from the art of the whole people, there arose the conviction that art can be art and yet be incomprehensible to the masses.
As a result, he sees the new art of his day to be concerned with novelty and amusement and not with comprehensibility, and he suspects that, within it, perhaps there is nothing to comprehend.
Art is not pleasure, consolation, or amusement; art is a great thing. Art is an organ of mankind’s life, which transmutes people’s reasonable consciousness into feeling. In our time, the common religious consciousness of men is the consciousness of the brotherhood of men and their well-being in mutual union. True science should indicate various ways of applying this consciousness to life. Art should transmute this consciousness into feeling. [How?]
For how much disdain Tolstoy has for so many artists of his day, he seems to remain extremely hopeful that this structure is still achievable, despite the increasingly splintering lifeworlds of people within one society, despite the rivalry between religion and the new science for dominance in the realm of truth and common sense. Tolstoy doesn’t seem to give credence to the force of the skepticism that arises in those fissures and fractures between groups. This optimism that mutual union is still possible, sans God, may be doomed to failure. From our vantage here in 2020 it seems an antiquated notion. But should it be?
Tolstoy continues:
The task facing art is enormous: art, genuine art, guided by religion with the help of science, must make it so that men’s peaceful life together, which is now maintained by external measures — courts, police, charitable institutions, workplace inspections, and so on — should be achieved by the free and joyful activity of men. Art should eliminate violence.
Yep, definitely doomed to fail.
And yet perhaps we need to still behave as if this is the aim of art. Have the artists of today, without even realizing it, accepted their fates as marginalized amusers, even the most politically minded of artists? Have we forgotten that what made us fall in love with art in the first place were the feelings [and — so I want to eventually argue — thoughts] that dead artists managed to summon up in us from beyond the grave? Should we be passing judgment on ourselves for our own limited comprehensibility?
❂
The beautiful thing about the notion of appeal is that it’s a public call for reconsideration. I’ve come to think that reconsideration is the duty of an artist and a thinker, yet it doesn’t seem like something that’s very highly valued these days. (Reconsidering a position means compromising the force and cohesion of one’s personal “brand.” We cannot escape the capitalist paradigm, yadda yadda; more on that, I’m sure, at another time.)
In this space, the column I’m calling Appeals, I want to appeal to whatever might remain of our shared sense of unity. I want to appeal to common sense, even if there’s no such thing or if such a concept is problematic. I want to understand why such a thing might be problematic. I want to appeal to reason to try to explain our feelings — or lack thereof — about art and its role in our lives, culture, and thinking. I want to consider and reconsider what the thinkers and writers of the past have posited about the role of art. Finally, I want to take the judgements I’ve come to make about art and hold them up for appeal, always allowing for the possibility of revision.
I do this in good faith and for nothing, other than, perhaps my own stubborn optimism that some consensus, some communion, or even (dare I say) unity is still — even now at the beginning of October 2020 — possible. And I’m always open for discussion. I’m not yet ready to rush from the theatre.