What Is Art?

1. Bolton Hall has recently published a little work, Life, and Love, and Death, with the object of making the philosophy contained in On Life more easily accessible in English.

2. Tolstoy’s remarks on Church religion were re-worded so as to seem to relate only to the Western Church, and his disapproval of luxurious life was made to apply not, say, to Queen Victoria or Nicholas II., but to the Cæsars or the Pharaohs.—Trans.

3. The Russian peasant is usually a member of a village commune, and has therefore a right to a share in the land belonging to the village. Tolstoy disapproves of the order of society which allows less land for the support of a whole village full of people than is sometimes owned by a single landed proprietor. The “Censor” will not allow disapproval of this state of things to be expressed, but is prepared to admit that the laws and customs, say, of England—where a yet more extreme form of landed property exists, and the men who actually labour on the land usually possess none of it—deserve criticism.—Trans.

4. Only two, or at most three, senses are generally held worthy to supply matter for artistic treatment, but I think this opinion is only conditionally correct. I will not lay too much stress on the fact that our common speech recognises many other arts, as, for instance, the art of cookery.

5. And yet it is certainly an æsthetic achievement when the art of cooking succeeds in making of an animal’s corpse an object in all respects tasteful. The principle of the Art of Taste (which goes beyond the so-called Art of Cookery) is therefore this: All that is eatable should be treated as the symbol of some Idea, and always in harmony with the Idea to be expressed.

6. If the sense of touch lacks colour, it gives us, on the other hand, a notion which the eye alone cannot afford, and one of considerable æsthetic value, namely, that of softness, silkiness, polish. The beauty of velvet is characterised not less by its softness to the touch than by its lustre. In the idea we form of a woman’s beauty, the softness of her skin enters as an essential element.

Each of us probably, with a little attention, can recall pleasures of taste which have been real æsthetic pleasures.

7. M. Schasler, Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik, 1872, vol. i. p. 13.

8. There is no science which more than æsthetics has been handed over to the reveries of the metaphysicians. From Plato down to the received doctrines of our day, people have made of art a strange amalgam of quintessential fancies and transcendental mysteries, which find their supreme expression in the conception of an absolute ideal Beauty, immutable and divine prototype of actual things.

9. See on this matter Benard’s admirable book, L’esthétique d’Aristote, also Walter’s Geschichte der Aesthetik im Altertum.

10. Schasler, p. 361.

11. Schasler, p. 369.

12. Schasler, pp. 388-390.

13. Knight, Philosophy of the Beautiful, i. pp. 165, 166.

14. Schasler, p. 289. Knight, pp. 168, 169.

15. R. Kralik, Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Aesthetik, pp. 304-306.

16. Knight, p. 101.

17. Schasler, p. 316.

18. Knight, pp. 102-104.

19. R. Kralik, p. 124.

20. Spaletti, Schasler, p. 328.

21. Schasler, pp. 331-333.

22. Schasler, pp. 525-528.

23. Knight, pp. 61-63.

24. Schasler, pp. 740-743.

25. Schasler, pp. 769-771.