Tolstoy: What is Art? & Wherein is Truth in Art (Essays on Aesthetics and Literature). Leo Tolstoy

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СКАЧАТЬ have their origin in the promptings of self-preservation and of society. These feelings, examined in their source, are means for the maintenance of the race through the individual. The first (self-preservation) is attained by nourishment, defense, and war; the second (society) by intercourse and propagation. Therefore self-defense, and war, which is bound up with it, is the source of the sublime; sociability, and the sex-instinct, which is bound up with it, is the source of beauty.[50]

      Such were the chief English definitions of art and beauty in the eighteenth century.

      During that period, in France, the writers on art were Père André and Batteux, with Diderot, D'Alembert, and, to some extent, Voltaire, following later.

      According to Père André ("Essai sur le Beau," 1741), there are three kinds of beauty,—divine beauty, natural beauty, and artificial beauty.[51]

      According to Batteux (1713-1780), art consists in imitating the beauty of nature, its aim being enjoyment.[52] Such is also Diderot's definition of art.

      The French writers, like the English, consider that it is taste that decides what is beautiful. And the laws of taste are not only not laid down, but it is granted that they cannot be settled. The same view was held by D'Alembert and Voltaire.[53]

      According to the Italian æsthetician of that period, Pagano, art consists in uniting the beauties dispersed in nature. The capacity to perceive these beauties is taste, the capacity to bring them into one whole is artistic genius. Beauty commingles with goodness, so that beauty is goodness made visible, and goodness is inner beauty.[54]

      According to the opinion of other Italians: Muratori (1672-1750),—"Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le science e le arti,"—and especially Spaletti,[55]—"Saggio sopra la bellezza" (1765),—art amounts to an egotistical sensation, founded (as with Burke) on the desire for self-preservation and society.

      Among Dutch writers, Hemsterhuis (1720-1790), who had an influence on the German æstheticians and on Goethe, is remarkable. According to him, beauty is that which gives most pleasure, and that gives most pleasure which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time. Enjoyment of the beautiful, because it gives the greatest quantity of perceptions in the shortest time, is the highest notion to which man can attain.[56]

      Such were the æsthetic theories outside Germany during the last century. In Germany, after Winckelmann, there again arose a completely new æsthetic theory, that of Kant (1724-1804), which, more than all others, clears up what this conception of beauty, and consequently of art, really amounts to.

      The æsthetic teaching of Kant is founded as follows: Man has a knowledge of nature outside him and of himself in nature. In nature, outside himself, he seeks for truth; in himself, he seeks for goodness. The first is an affair of pure reason, the other of practical reason (free will). Besides these two means of perception, there is yet the judging capacity (Urteilskraft), which forms judgments without reasonings and produces pleasure without desire (Urtheil ohne Begriff und Vergnügen ohne Begehren). This capacity is the basis of æsthetic feeling. Beauty, according to Kant, in its subjective meaning is that which, in general and necessarily, without reasonings and without practical advantage, pleases. In its objective meaning it is the form of a suitable object, in so far as that object is perceived without any conception of its utility.[57]

      Beauty is defined in the same way by the followers of Kant, among whom was Schiller (1759-1805). According to Schiller, who wrote much on æsthetics, the aim of art is, as with Kant, beauty, the source of which is pleasure without practical advantage. So that art may be called a game, not in the sense of an unimportant occupation, but in the sense of a manifestation of the beauties of life itself without other aim than that of beauty.[58]

      Besides Schiller, the most remarkable of Kant's followers in the sphere of æsthetics was Wilhelm Humboldt, who, though he added nothing to the definition of beauty, explained various forms of it,—the drama, music, the comic, etc.[59]

      After Kant, besides the second-rate philosophers, the writers on æsthetics were Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their followers. Fichte (1762-1814) says that perception of the beautiful proceeds from this: the world—i.e. nature—has two sides: it is the sum of our limitations, and it is the sum of our free idealistic activity. In the first aspect the world is limited, in the second aspect it is free. In the first aspect every object is limited, distorted, compressed, confined—and we see deformity; in the second we perceive its inner completeness, vitality, regeneration—and we see beauty. So that the deformity or beauty of an object, according to Fichte, depends on the point of view of the observer. Beauty therefore exists, not in the world, but in the beautiful soul (schöner Geist). Art is the manifestation of this beautiful soul, and its aim is the education, not only of the mind—that is the business of the savant, not only of the heart—that is the affair of the moral preacher, but of the whole man. And so the characteristic of beauty lies, not in anything external, but in the presence of a beautiful soul in the artist.[60]

      Following Fichte, and in the same direction, Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller also defined beauty. According to Schlegel (1772-1829), beauty in art is understood too incompletely, one-sidedly, and disconnectedly. Beauty exists, not only in art, but also in nature and in love; so that the truly beautiful is expressed by the union of art, nature, and love. Therefore, as inseparably one with æsthetic art, Schlegel acknowledges moral and philosophic art.[61]

      According to Adam Müller (1779-1829), there are two kinds of beauty: the one, general beauty, which attracts people as the sun attracts the planet—this is found chiefly in antique art; and the other, individual beauty, which results from the observer himself becoming a sun, attracting beauty—this is the beauty of modern art. A world in which all contradictions are harmonized is the highest beauty. Every work of art is a reproduction of this universal harmony.[62] The highest art is the art of life.[63]

      Next after Fichte and his followers came a contemporary of his, the philosopher Schelling (1775-1854), who has had a great influence on the æsthetic conceptions of our times. According to Schelling's philosophy, art is the production or result of that conception of things by which the subject becomes its own object, or the object its own subject. Beauty is the perception of the infinite in the finite. And the chief characteristic of works of art is unconscious infinity. Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. Beauty is the contemplation of things in themselves as they exist in the prototype (In den Urbildern). It is not the artist who by his knowledge or skill produces the beautiful, but the idea of beauty in him itself produces it.[64]

      Of Schelling's followers the most noticeable was Solger (1780-1819—"Vorlesungen über Æsthetik"). According to him, the idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.[65]

      According to another follower of Schelling, Krause (1781-1832), true, positive beauty is the manifestation of the Idea in an individual form; art is the actualization of the beauty existing in the sphere of man's free spirit. The highest stage of art is the art of life, which directs its activity toward the adornment of life so that it may be a beautiful abode for a beautiful man.[66]

      After Schelling and his followers came the new æsthetic doctrine of Hegel, which is held to this day, consciously by many, but by the majority unconsciously. This teaching is not only no clearer or better defined than the preceding ones, but is, if possible, even more cloudy and mystical.

      According to Hegel (1770-1831), God manifests himself in nature and in art in the form of beauty. God expresses himself in two ways: in the object and in the subject, in nature and in spirit. Beauty is the shining of the Idea through СКАЧАТЬ