Art and Tolstoi

It is perhaps the prerogative of genius or greatness that it can contradict itself in the consciousness that everything uttered would pass muster. Tolstoi is no exception, though he is made up into a seer and a prophet. Every minute he was conscious that he had the prophet’s role to play; and when he took upon himself this prophet’s role he was practically clothing his artistic self in an attire that was a misfit. He played the preacher’s part to the rest of the world, which, he believed, was his erring flock. He remained an aristocrat–he was born such–to the end of his life. His religion is a "cold psychology" merely. This made him dogmatic to a degree. Powers of persuasion based on ‘sweet reasonableness’ he had none, although his logic was sometimes as sharp as the doctor’s knife. He was deeply moral with a code of ethics, which was his own. He was deeply sincere and frank about himself and the outside world when it suited him. The superiority complex in him made him a carping critic of all persons and things he had the fortune or the misfortune not to agree with. He was impulsive, and his acts were seldom ‘the outcome of serene reflection’. In this he was certainly living in a glass-house: but, the idea of his greatness forbade all thought of stones being pelted at him. But in his own time he was regarded as "a mad Mullah of Christianity"; some even twirled their moustaches at him and swore at him. They made no bones about dissecting him and displaying him to his erring believers. Matthew Arnold put a big question mark on his sincerity. J. M. Robertson, while convincing himself that the Russian seer was a great man, falls out with his apologist, Aylmor Maude, in his general estimate of him. He does not give him an equal place even with the pure literary men like Turgeniev and Dostoevsky.

Tolstoy, after 15 years of assiduous labour, brought out his "What is Art?" Tolstoi’s definition of art as given in that book runs as follows:

(a) "To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds or forms expressed in words, so as to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling–that is the activity of art."

(b) "Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that the people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

But a few further lines may have to be examined to arrive at a just estimate of his definition. They are:

(1) "…….all human life...." is "filled with works of art of every kind from cradle song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments and triumphal procession."

(2) "The feelings evoked must be feelings ‘flowing from their religious perception’ as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle regarded."

(3) "Good art’ is a thing that is understood by the uncultured majority (peasants), while ‘bad art’ is a thing not so understood by them, but only by the idle rich classes who are impervious to religious feeling."

(4) "Art is one of the two organs of human progress. By words man interchanges thoughts, by the forms of art he interchanges feelings and this with all men, not only of the present time, but also of the past and the future. It is natural to human beings to employ both these organs of inter-communication and therefore the perversion of either of them must cause evil results to the society in which it occurs."

These passages are quoted at some length to give a bird’s-eye-view of Tolstoi’s conception and scope of art.

A believer in Christ and his teachings, Tolstol could not dispense, with the relationship of man with God. He wants art to be moral. Nowhere does he define in this book the nature and scope of the morality he contemplates as the content of art. His ‘morality’ could only be inferred. It is ethics that regulates the conduct of man on this earth. The elements of religiousness and morality contemplated in his definition are no higher than the didacticism of wordsworth. There is not the higher sense of either religion or morality that transcends the narrow personal conviction or predilection or choice, which comprehends the entire universe of creation and informs its elemental impulses common to all humanity. Even this ethical conception of the function of art is high enough for the commonalty to understand and appreciate. Tolstoi’s intellect was sharp and sensitive enough to appreciate this fact, if it had not been clouded by his blind belief that only the peasant section of humanity merited all love, sympathy and help. If humanity was one and indivisible and if intellect and virtue were not the monopoly of any one class, and, above all, if Tolstoi was the true seer and saint as he is acclaimed to be, how comes it, then, that he hates one class while loving the other? There is a sort of self-righteous obsession, as it were, in him against the higher classes. The majority of individuals of the higher classes might waste their time, money and energy in luxury and unwholesome pursuits and be blind or callous to the dictates of their conscience. They may even be moral rebels or turn out to be the veriest scum on the face of this earth. But to stigmatise the higher classes in the mass as wicked or wanting in the ‘necessary intellect or understanding’ to appreciate ‘good art’ is wrong.

Tolstoi divides art into the good and the bad. He subdivides the good art into (a) the religious art and (b) the universal art. The test he prescribes for the religious art is that it must raise a man looking at it into a spiritual plane towards the godhead, and establish his kinship with God. The nearer it tends to draw one towards God the higher is its quality. Even if a specimen of art has this quality of ennoblement, it does not necessarily follow that it can raise everyone to the same spiritual level. For, the degree of infection depends upon the quality of the onlooker’s spiritual constitution. So, Tolstoi’s conception of religious art is nothing but an attempt on the part of the artist to approach God and attain Him. Whether it could infect all persons to the same degree so as to make them experience the very feelings the artist has experienced is a matter of doubt. A work of art that is good in itself might become bad according to Tolstoi, because it fails to infect the poor understanding of the onlooker and raise him to the same spiritual level that the artist has reached in his production. Tolstoi’s assumption that every receiver is as good as the transmitter, and that all the receivers together with the transmitter belong to one spiritual plane, cannot be justified. Further, the understanding of any relationship with God means the understanding of Him in both himself, and the rest of His creation, in which He necessarily dwells and moves. The religious artist, therefore, sees the One in the many and the many in one. Tolstoi ignored this great truth, because he had put the ‘upper’ classes out of the pale of his consideration.

He defines universal art as the one which is appreciated by the peasants and which knits individuals together. It is, therefore, the communistic tendency in art that he calls the universal art. In plainer language, art attains the full stature of universality only when (a) it is understood by the ‘majority of uncultured’ men and (b) when it aims at joining them together. These tests are prescribed not for universal art merely, but for all ‘good art’ which includes the ‘religious art’. ‘Bad art’, Tolstoi defines as the one which is so understood by the uncultured majority but liked only by the ‘idle rich classes’ "who were impervious to religious feelings". To put it in a nutshell, Tolstoi’s quality of art is dependent upon the understanding or otherwise of the ‘uncultured majority’. In this Tolstoi assumes that the ‘uncultured majority’ alone have the necessary culture to understand ‘good art’. An uncultured peasant cannot grow into a cultured personality all at once when face to face with a work of art, to justify Tolstoi’s tests.

If the inferior intellect of the ‘uncultured majority’ could under stand his ‘good art’ there is no reason why the superior intellect of the ‘idle rich’ cannot understand it.

No real art can fail to be universal in its appeal and in its high functions. Art that appeals to one section of humanity is only secular and inferior. Toistoi’s definition on art, based upon the above understanding, in spite of the high aims set out, narrows itself down to a secular form of art, and does not comprehend the true function and scope of the divine nature of genuine art.

While attacking some of the definitions of art, Tolstoi falls foul of Baumgarten’s Trinity of ‘Goodness, Beauty and Truth,’ on the ground that his definition is based on ethics, which, he says, ought not to be an ingredient of ‘good art’. But Tolstois ideas of ‘religious, perception’ as well as the communal nature of ‘good art’ are certainly based upon principles of the good of mortals. True religious perceptions as well as communistic feelings are the necessary outcome of good conduct. Tolstoi contradicts himself in this condemnation.

Tolstoi’s art consists "in evoking in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself," transmits "that feeling that others may experience the same feeling". Further on he says that " art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously …..hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that the people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." The words italicised in the above passage mean only the recapture of a feeling that has boon previously experienced by the artist. This is a tame paraphrase of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity".

When Tolstoi admits the element of ‘religious perception’ in art, his condemnation of the theories of the German metaphysicians is not sustainable. Schelling defines art

"as the product or result of that perception of things by which the subject-matter becomes its own object, or the object its own subject. Beauty is the perception of the infinite in the finite. The chief characteristic of works of art is the unconscious infinity....It is not the artist who by his knowledge or skill produces the beautiful, but the idea of beauty in him itself produces it."

Solger, following Schelling, defines the idea of beauty as "the fundamental idea of everything". He proceeds:

"In the world we see distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation."

Thus, art becomes a means for the harmonization of the various seeming contradictions in the world; and when achieved, this harmonization, according to Muller, amounts to beauty.

The highest stage of art is the art of life, which directs its activity towards its adornment, so that it may be a beautiful abode for a beautiful man. When we come to Hegel, we find the various spiritual conceptions of art further elucidated and expressed more clearly. He says,

"God manifests himself in two ways: in the object and in the subject, in nature and in spirit. Beauty is the shining of the idea through matter. Only the soul, and what pertains to it, is truly beautiful; and therefore the beauty of nature is only the reflection of the natural beauty of the spirit–the beautiful has only a spiritual content. But the spiritual must appear in the sensuous form. The sensuous manifestation of the spirit is only appearance and this appearance is the only reality of the beautiful. Art is thus the production of this appearance of the idea and is a means, together with religion and philosophy….of expressing the deepest problems of humanity and the highest truths of the spirit."

In spite of Tolstoi’s ridicule of the German definitions, they comprise more consistent, more comprehensive and more truthful ideas of the birth, the scope, and the function of art than Tolstoi’s. The employment of metaphysical terms, like ‘the self,’ ‘the spirit,’ ‘the soul,’ ‘the infinite,’ ‘the fundamental truth,’ ‘the fundamental idea’, ‘annihilation’, ‘universe,’ etc., should not have scared away a mighty intellect like Tolstoi’s and made him regard art as quite independent of metaphysics.

Artists as artists have absolutely no motives, such as the setting up of any religious or moral or universal standards of conduct, which, for Tolstoi, appear to be the sole end of life. Their art is instinctive and spontaneous as the song from the bird’s throat. If they establish any such moral order, it is only unconsciously and indirectly. In the words of Robertson, Tolstoi has fallen "into the snare of a typical prophet" in attempting by mandate to force, "all this cosmic play of variation to the moulds of a sectarian gospel that merely pretends to be universalist".

It is as such a moralist that Tolstoi approaches the problem of "aesthetic criticism. He has but preached his notions of morality through this criticism on art. As long as he remained a pure artist his productions remained truly artistic. But when he began to take on himself the role of a prophet he found it had to reconcile his religious beliefs with the high function of art. The result is this volume–"What is Art"–containing untenable dogma and much contradiction.

Tolstoi’s religious beliefs instead of widening his horizon cramped his understanding of the true and spiritual function of art. His tenets forbid all attempts at evolving a comprehensive and consistent idea of the spiritual strength in art. In the words of Dillon, "he deceived himself". In his later years he mistook the voice of the devil for the voice of God; for, he said, "the more we turn ourselves to beauty, the further we are removed from goodness". This brings to light one of his greatest contradictions, for it was he himself who immortalised beauty in his pantheistic hymn to the solemn beauty of nature in the "Caucasus". Later on, it is the same genius who described Beauty as coming not from God but from the devil!

His contemporary Maxim Gorky saw in him

"some sort of wizard endowed through his genius with spiritual wealth."

But in the words of Robertson the position is more aptly summed up:

"Tolstoi is aesthetically and intellectually a kind of Jekyll and Hyde, a compound personality in which the Jekyll of humanity now and then supervenes on the Hyde of self-assertion and over-mastering bias."