What is art? - a theory of art from Tolstoy

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy

In 1897, Tolstoy published a book called “What is Art?” Since I think art is a very important enterprise in human existence, I like to look to the huge intellectuals about what they think art amounts to. As a writer, Tolstoy was amazing, a psychologist of the highest order, a superb creator of personality, character, plot, pacing, balance, and philosophical meditator on the human condition, a great artist, writer, thinker. He is responsible for probably the two best books ever written: Anna Kerenina and War and Peace. The only books that I think come close to their size, scope, and psychological depth are Moby Dick or Les Miserables. But Melville and Hugo never produced a philosophy of art. Tolstoy did!

To Tolstoy, a work qualified as a good piece of art if it turned up the ‘good, true, and beautiful’ notch. However far the notch was turned was the judge of whether the work was more or less a successful artistic achievement. Have you ever read a book which was just a complete sequence of events, driven by the raw succession of empirical consequences? There are characters to be sure, and even a plot, but the narrative’s chief concern is the description of the actions of the characters and ensuring that the preconceived events in the author’s mind unfurl exactly as planed, with little to no philosophical or psychological interpretation of the events taking place or the characters undertaking their acts, thoughts, or motives. If you have, these authors have in mind a philosophy of art called realism.

In realism, everything is just transparently given; no attempt at interpretation is made, because the very transparency of the events is so self-evidently clear that the reader’s interpretation is almost compelled from without. This isn’t a bad view and it’s been around a while: at least, since Plato.

Or, have you ever read a book just for the sheer pleasure of it, and so the more pleasure you felt as you read, the more you were tempted to call the book great, or a great work of art, or a beautiful piece of art? If you have, then Tolstoy still doesn’t think you’ve got your hands on a good piece of art: that the connection between pleasure and art is facile, not necessary, and actually counter-productive to framing a society’s whole habit of mind to discern great art, and so counter-productive to the artistic health of society as a whole.

A key ingredient in art, according to Tolstoy, is that the art’s creator forges in the audience’s consciousness some emotion that excites or otherwise peaks the interest of the art’s observer or experiencer. After the emotion is established, the stage is set for the artist’s message to the audience, however that message will be said, in whatever mode the artist chooses to say it - this makes the primary aim of the artist ‘communication’: the artist is trying to say something. That something that is trying to be said are actually the emotions themselves, feelings that are trying to be manufactured in the audience by the artist, to get the reader in a certain frame of mind, the frame of mind necessary for properly contemplating the content of the artist’s themes.

A prisoner of war endures the hardships, torture, loneliness, and fear of being cooped up in a stench-filled cell, his ears attacked by the horrific screaming of prisoners in the next rooms; he is - against all odds - rescued by his comrades and shipped back home. After some years of recuperation, he is able to tell the story of his horror. If he succeeds in arousing in his audience feelings of loneliness, fear, claustrophobia, or hardship in general, he has communicated the emotion: he has made a good piece of art. The audience is ‘infected‘ by the emotion through artful retelling of a story, regardless of the medium.

With the idea of infection, another idea arises. To call a work of art better or worse than another: is it just a matter of - the greater the infection, the greater the art? It is this and the question of whatever subject is accompanying the infection, the emotional infection, the infection of feelings. Someone may instill in his hearers the solid, uncontaminated emotion of exhilaration by telling a story about a roller coaster ride; but we think that the same emotion, just as solidly infected in the hearers, but accompanied by the story of a heroic redemption of a child from the clutches of some impending danger the more artistically superior of the two.

Tolstoy also believes in a hierarchy of feelings: so that the greater the art, the better the feeling is infected, the more dramatic the story, and the higher up on the ladder of feelings the feeling is considered. The highest feeling on the ladder of feelings is the feeling of brotherhood with mankind: and the social institution that had this feeling the most was Christianity. Thus, the truly Christian work of art was the best, the kind that infected the audience with that feeling, and the feeling itself was the best feeling, and the feeling itself was set in the background that is the epic story of the Bible itself. This disqualifies Greek art as the best for obvious reasons: the Greeks didn’t prize brotherhood as high as, say, personal pride, magnanimity, strength, or masculinity. But I would say that in so far as these feelings can be given a Christian interpretation, the better the art could be, at least more in the minds of the audience than in the mind of the artist.

Tolstoy then says very strange things. He degrades the works of Beethoven and Wagner, saying they aren’t sincere, ‘too cerebral’, and that because of this ‘children’s songs’ are artistically superior. This might be a case of a theory having too much impact on what is plainly not the case. The 9th symphony is a better work of art than any children’s song, even if it were the case that the feeling of brotherhood is more fully established, since the 9th symphony is accompanied by its feelings to a better degree and it’s set to the backdrop of a more interesting subject-matter: the human condition. One could argue that the human condition is also the backdrop for the feelings in children’s songs: but I would then have to argue from my own experience - children’s songs haven’t moved me, haven’t ‘infected me’, as Beethoven has. To degrade or demote Beethoven because the feeling produced is inferior, leaving aside or ignoring ‘infection’, is puzzling to me.