What Is Art? - Leo Tolstoy (life books to read TXT) 📗

It is only necessary, for instance, to read Schasler’s own book to convince oneself of the justice of this observation of his.

On the same subject the French writer Véron, in the preface to his very good work on aesthetics, says, “Il n’y a pas de science, qui ait été plus que l’esthétique livrée aux rêveries des métaphysiciens. Depuis Platon jusqu’ aux doctrines officielles de nos jours, on a fait de l’art je ne sais quel amalgame de fantaisies quintessenciées, et de mystères transcendantaux qui trouvent leur expression suprême dans la conception absolue du Beau idéal, prototype immuable et divin des choses réelles” (L’esthétique, 1878, p. 5).8

If the reader will only be at the pains to peruse the following extracts, defining beauty, taken from the chief writers on aesthetics, he may convince himself that this censure is thoroughly deserved.

I shall not quote the definitions of beauty attributed to the ancients⁠—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc., down to Plotinus⁠—because, in reality, the ancients had not that conception of beauty separated from goodness which forms the basis and aim of aesthetics in our time. By referring the judgments of the ancients on beauty to our conception of it, as is usually done in aesthetics, we give the words of the ancients a meaning which is not theirs.9

I begin with the founder of aesthetics, Baumgarten (1714⁠–⁠1762).

According to Baumgarten,10 the object of logical knowledge is Truth, the object of aesthetic (i.e. sensuous) knowledge is Beauty. Beauty is the Perfect (the Absolute), recognised through the senses; Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason; Goodness is the Perfect reached by moral will.

Beauty is defined by Baumgarten as a correspondence, i.e. an order of the parts in their mutual relations to each other and in their relation to the whole. The aim of beauty itself is to please and excite a desire, “Wohlgefallen und Erregung eines Verlangens.” (A position precisely the opposite of Kant’s definition of the nature and sign of beauty.)

With reference to the manifestations of beauty, Baumgarten considers that the highest embodiment of beauty is seen by us in nature, and he therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature. (This position also is directly contradicted by the conclusions of the latest aestheticians.)

Passing over the unimportant followers of Baumgarten⁠—Maier, Eschenburg, and Eberhard⁠—who only slightly modified the doctrine of their teacher by dividing the pleasant from the beautiful, I will quote the definitions given by writers who came immediately after Baumgarten, and defined beauty quite in another way. These writers were Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Moritz. They, in contradiction to Baumgarten’s main position, recognise as the aim of art, not beauty, but goodness. Thus Sulzer (1720⁠–⁠1777) says that only that can be considered beautiful which contains goodness. According to his theory, the aim of the whole life of humanity is welfare in social life. This is attained by the education of the moral feelings, to which end art should be subservient. Beauty is that which evokes and educates this feeling.

Beauty is understood almost in the same way by Mendelssohn (1729⁠–⁠1786). According to him, art is the carrying forward of the beautiful, obscurely recognised by feeling, till it becomes the true and good. The aim of art is moral perfection.11

For the aestheticians of this school, the ideal of beauty is a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. So that these aestheticians completely wipe out Baumgarten’s division of the Perfect (the Absolute), into the three forms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; and Beauty is again united with the Good and the True.

But this conception is not only not maintained by the later aestheticians, but the aesthetic doctrine of Winckelmann arises, again in complete opposition. This divides the mission of art from the aim of goodness in the sharpest and most positive manner, makes external beauty the aim of art, and even limits it to visible beauty.

According to the celebrated work of Winckelmann (1717⁠–⁠1767), the law and aim of all art is beauty only, beauty quite separated from and independent of goodness. There are three kinds of beauty:⁠—(1) beauty of form, (2) beauty of idea, expressing itself in the position of the figure (in plastic art), (3) beauty of expression, attainable only when the two first conditions are present. This beauty of expression is the highest aim of art, and is attained in antique art; modern art should therefore aim at imitating ancient art.12

Art is similarly understood by Lessing, Herder, and afterwards by Goethe and by all the distinguished aestheticians of Germany till Kant, from whose day, again, a different conception of art commences.

Native aesthetic theories arose during this period in England, France, Italy, and Holland, and they, though not taken from the German, were equally cloudy and contradictory. And all these writers, just like the German aestheticians, founded their theories on a conception of the Beautiful, understanding beauty in the sense of a something existing absolutely, and more or less intermingled with Goodness or having one and the same root. In England, almost simultaneously with Baumgarten, even a little earlier, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke, Hogarth, and others, wrote on art.

According to Shaftesbury (1670⁠–⁠1713), “That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good.”13 Beauty, he taught, is recognised by the mind only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount.

So that, although Shaftesbury regards beauty as being something separate from goodness, they again merge into something inseparable.

According to Hutcheson (1694⁠–⁠1747⁠—Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue), the aim of art is beauty, the essence of which consists in evoking in us the perception of uniformity amid variety. In the recognition of what is art we are guided by “an internal sense.” This internal