ماهو الفن؟
مخاطرة كبيرة أن يسأل المرء هذا السؤال، ناهيك عن مناقشته وتحليله في إطار تاريخي تطوري وكذلك من خلال جوهره كمادة دسمة يقبع تحت عباءتها كمٌ هائل من التعريفات والفروع والخلافات والأهداف والأساليب المتبعة في تشكل المعنى الواضح للفن..


الفن ،الجمال، الأخلاق.. هذه المفاهيم الثلاثة لا يمكن لها أن تنفصل عن بعضها البعض تقترب من أن تكون متلازمة وتطرح من خلالها أسئلة بإستمرار حول مدى علاقة الفن بالإخلاق، وطبيعة الجمال في الفن، ودور الجمال في تكوين الفنون ونسبة إستحواذها على معنى الفن وإدراك المغزى من وراء علاقة الجمال بالفن كمفصل يتصور البعض أنه لا يمكن لها أن ينفصلا بأي حال من الأحوال، أو أصبح الجمال متماهياً في الفن لدرجة أنه أحياناً يصعب تكوين مفهوم واضح حول تداخل الجمال في دائرة الفن والعجز عن تصور ماهو الفرق بينهما، حتى الجمال نفسه له تعريفات لا حصر لها ومذاهب متعددة تفسر مفهموم الجمال وتقيمه على حسب نظرتها للمفهوم وعلى طبيعته وماهيته، خصص تولستوي الأجزاء الأولى من الكتاب بتعريف القارئ بتلك المذاهب والفلسفات التي أصلت وأتبعت مناهج عدة للوصول إلى الأصول الواضحة في الجمال ومادته وكيف يجب أن يكون وماذا يخدم، بين من يرى الجمال عبارة عن الصورة الحسية للأشياء ولا يرى فيه سوى الصور المتحركة التي تولد الجمال في الحواس، وبين الرأي القائل بجمال الأشياء في جوهرها وذاتها ويرى أن الجمال لا يمكن أن يدرك من الحس إذا لم يكن الجمال قابعاً متماهياً مع ذلك الشئ الذي نظن فيه الجمال، والذي يرى الجمال كأمر نسبي لا يمكن تحديده كحالة ثابته في الحواس والجواهر، وأخيراً اتباع النظرية التي تقول بنسبة الجمال إلى اللذة الحاصلة منه، فما كان شئ من لذة سوى كان البصر أو الشم او اللمس كان جميلاً ويستحق تلك الصفة وأما دون ذلك فلا وجود للجمال فيه مادمت اللذة فيه غائبة وقاصرة في توصيلها الى الحواس، هنا كان من الضروري أن يتداخل الجمال مع الفن في نقاط مفصلية عديدة أدت إلى تحويل الجمال الى المقياس الرئيسي بل احيانا الوحيد للفن وطغى هذا التحول في الفن وصار من المستحيل نزع أحدهما عن الآخر، إما فن معه جمال أو لا شئ .. يقول تولستوي عندما ظهر هذا المفهوم في أوروبا تحول الفن إلى آلة منتجة للجمال لا للفن، فما كان فناً في السابق يوصل الأحاسيس الى الناس العاديين بعفوية وهدوء وإتزان تحول إلى سباق يهرول فيه الجميع الى التعمق في إستدراج كل ما أتيح من جمال سواء كان أخلاقياً ام لا، الى الفن بإسم الفن نفسه، أصبح الفن وقتها لا يمثل إلا الطبقة الغنية الارستقراطية التي بلغت من الملل والتشبع إلى طلب فنٍ لا يحوى سوى المتعة والمشاهدة اللذيذة التي تكرس نفسها لإضفاء من التغيير الروتيني وجلب بعض الإثارة والدهشة لـ أولئك الأرستقراطين الخاملين.. وهنا ليس مقصد الجمال هو ذاك الذي يبعث على الاعجاب والسكينة، بل المقصود منه الجمال عن الطبقة المثقفة التي أحالت نفسها حكماً على الجمال نفسه..


هنا كما يقول تولستوي، إنقلب الفن رأساً على عقب، فبعدما كانت هي الوسيلة الأكثر نجاعة في غرز قيم الخير والمحبة والتسامح في قلوب البشر، أصبح لا يبحث سوى إثارة متلقيه سواء كان أدباً او رسماً أو موسيقى.. تحول الفن في رأي تولستوي إلى مطرقة ناعمة تدق في الأساسات الأخلاقية مفاهيم وحكم معلمو البشرية الأوائل ، الذين طالما حذروا من الفن كما يقول تولستوي ليس لأنه محرم في ذاته بل لأنهم كانوا على علم مسبق لأي مسار ستؤدي طرق الفن ومذاهبها ، المسيحيون الأوائل حرموا الفنون كالنحت والموسيقى وكذلك فعل المسلمون الأوائل والأنبياء من قبلعم، لأنهم أدركوا خطورة ماقد يؤدي به الفن من طرق الإفساد وتلويث الاذواق وتهديم الاسس الاخلاقية للإنسان..


لم يكن الفن الأول في نظر تولستوي سوى الفطرة الإنسانية السليمة المنقادة تحت لواء التجربة الدينية العميقة ممثلة في الأنبياء القدامى والحكماء والفلاسفة، ذلك الفن الذي كان يتحرك في داخل كل إنسان سواء كان مثقفاً أو غير ذلك، الفن الذي لم يكن بحاجة الى تلك الزخارف والتلميعات كي يرغم الناس على الإعجاب والتأثر به، ذلك الفن لم يكن بحاجة الى اضفاء الرغبات الشهوانية الخاملة في داخله، أو صورة إمرأة نصف متعرية على خشبة مسرح او لوحة فاضحة، أو مشهد دموي او حروب طاحنة لا هدف لها سوى إظهار النزعة السادية في الفنان والمتلقي على حد سواء.. كان الفن بسيطاً ساحراً يؤخذ من حياة الناس بساطتها ومن تفكيرهم قصتها ومن قضاياهم سردها وحبكتها، ومن بيئتهم وصفها وتفصيلاتها، كانت تنتمي الى الانسان بوصفه الانسان لا أكثر، لا تتطلب منه أن يكون مثقفاً وفيلسوفاً كيف يفهم رواية او قصيدة او لوحة رمزية..


ذهب تولستوي أخيراً إلى أن الفن إذا إنحدر الى ذاك المستوى السحيق المتدني لم تعد الحاجة إليه ضرورية، ويفضل ان تكون الحياة خالية من الفن على يكون الفن بذلك المستوى المتدني..


ذكر أيضاً أمثلة كثيرة على رقي جوانب كثيرة من الفن، كأدب هوجو و دوستويفسكي وبعض اللوحات التي تعني حياة الانسان في صميمها وتهدف الى رفع المعاناة عنه بدلاً من تحميله أعباء جديدة تحت مسمى الفن..


كتاب رائع، لذيذ، شيق، وصريح.. يعطيك نظرة شاملة عن الفن من منبعه وحتى عهده القريب، وأظن أن الفن الحديث هو نسخة مطابقة لما ذكره تولستوي في عصره مع مزيد من التطرف والمغالاة عن عصر تولستوي.. الكتاب ليس حرباً على الفن بقدر ما هو كشف لأقنعة الحقيقة ورؤية مستقبلية للإنسان لتجنب الوقوع في فخ الفن..

En este breve ensayo, Tolstói se propone la ardua tarea de darle respuesta a la pregunta "¿qué es el arte?".

Tras darle un breve repaso histórico a la filosofía estética, comentando las diferentes definiciones que diversos teóricos le han dado al concepto "belleza", demuestra las contradicciones que "lo bello" esconde bajo su careta artística.
Para el autor, la belleza y la moralidad no han de relacionarse, despotricando por ello contra los griegos y los renacentistas, que retoman ciertos recursos poéticos de los primeros edificando así el "falso arte", el arte de la aristocracia, el pasatiempo artístico.

Es un grito no sólo contra la elitización del arte sino también contra el academicismo y la intención de moldear la técnica y los impulsos del artista en las escuelas, ajustándolo al canon artístico imperante, destruyendo por completo el "verdadero arte" y falsificándolo en disfrute de los poderosos. Para el autor, el arte empieza donde acaba la academia.

Tolstói entiende el arte como el instrumento primordial de comunicación entre hombres, estratificando ontológicamente el arte en cuanto a su acercamiento a los sentimientos comunes de todos los hombres. Si este ha de ser guía de las relaciones sociales, la religión, según él, habrá de guiar al mismo y juntos serán capaces de edificar una nueva sociedad en la que la violencia y el odio no tengan cabida, en la que gracias al arte y a la idea religiosa plasmada en él los hombres abran los ojos y se den cuenta de que ya es hora de dejar atrás la prisión que la sociedad les impone y comenzar a convivir los unos con los otros, de forma fraternal y respetuosa. Para Tolstói esa es la verdadera finalidad del arte, redimir a los hombres e instaurar una nueva sociedad.

Le pongo 3 estrellas porque en mi opinión la obra carece de rigor científico y me parece que simplemente acude al idealismo más absoluto para dar respuesta de la manera más sencilla a una pregunta tan compleja.

You think you’re an artist? You’re no artist, punk! That’s what Leo Tolstoy says in his essay WHAT IS ART? He dismisses everyone from Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, Wagner to even some of his own writings as counterfeit. For Tolstoy art is twofold, an expression of divine devotion and brotherly love. It is not overly complex or striving for beauty, but a simple and pure emotion of the artist that has never been shared before. For Tolstoy only that of God can be infinitely new. Though his God is Christian, it isn’t often aligned with what he considers so-called religious works of the church. He dismisses all you charlatans! Only the poor working peasants know art, not the upper classes who have co-opted art and corrupted it with their perverted ways. Tolstoy reads like a nut, both Christian mystic and communist sympathizer, with a narrow definition of art that he champions as a moral imperative. Your stinking false art isn’t only bad, it’s dangerous. It’s polluting society. It’s even corrupting science, which he sees as connected to art as heart is to lungs. Both must serve the good of the person, not some esoteric navel-gazing. What a bummer. I like bad art.

A utopian treatise on creativity. Necessary reading for anyone who creates anything

Leo lists everyone who he considers an artistic sham, and then blames it on the rich/ church/ capitalism. Through this criticism, Tolstoy aims to determine and reform what makes art good or bad. This challanges the reader to personally reconsider what they value as "good art". I found myself annoyed, reforming ideas, and arguing with the author throughout the read. Fantastic, I am happy, 10/10.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a nonfiction work that’s aroused both as many strong positive opinions and as many strong negative opinions in me as this one. The speed at which Tolstoy transitions from saying something about art that really annoyed me to saying something about art that felt like an utter relief to read, and vice versa, is absurd.

I was teetering between giving this book three stars, on account of this bewildering and apparently pretty evenly balanced whirlwind of positivity and negativity I was experiencing, and giving it four stars, because it was incredibly gripping and I couldn’t wait to see where Tolstoy would go next (and because I also felt like in that context, it would be missing the point to lower my rating due to simple disagreement with his points about art).

Then I ran into this, near the end of the book:

“Strange as the comparison may sound, what has happened to the art of our circle and time is what happens to a woman who sells her womanly attractiveness, intended for maternity, for the pleasure of those who desire such pleasures. The art of our time and of our circle has become a prostitute.”

Three stars!

(I was also nearly done with this book when I found out that Tolstoy was a rapist: a fact that not only was a huge disappointment to find out but also throws the above quote into an even more disturbing light.)

that’s it. i don’t know how to rate it. i hate it so much but it’s so funny to read how much of a stupid cuck Tolstoy is that it’s entertaining in its own right. five star entertainment and one star content. congrats Lev T

Fascinating, compelling, and powerfully written. I think I may disagree deeply with Tolstoy, but I am challenged by and respect his contribution to this conversation in this volume.

Didn’t expect Tolstoy to have such forceful anger in him. Man hated on everybody, especially the vulgar overly sexualised and degenerate Frenchmen!

What is art? That which transmits the emotions of the author, as intensely as possible, to as many (understood as broad, across social classes and cultures) people as possible. And the highest art is the religious art, as that transmits the deepest of feelings - yay, it may even be a force so strong that it evokes new feelings and deepens the soul of those touched by them. Quite literally true.

I wasn’t aware that I, completely unconsciously, was under the sway of Tolstoy’s conception of Art. True for many of us I suppose. Banger!

Trying to get back to reading a little more so the following is just a short summary of my experience with this book.

Tolstoy argues here that art is increasingly at risk of becoming decadent with the perversions of man. Whether these be a fixation on aesthetics, or art that seeks only to affects us intellectually. He argues that the primary purpose of art should be to communicate feeling with sincerity, which thus creates communion between man. Despite perhaps being idealistic, I do agree with this primary purpose and his reasoning for it.

My only contentions are that although I agree this would create the highest form of art, art of other types cannot be completely dismissed. Even if they only rest upon intellectual stimulation, or our perversions, if what they represent are part of the human experience they surely still qualify as art? Albeit, a lesser form that will and should be forgotten about as they leave little emotional impact on the recipient and will not progress us forwards together.

Secondly, how can we be sure that our feeling that we receive is aligned with the artists? Okay, this was written in 1897 so it can probably be forgiven for not recognising how we shape our own experience just as much as external stimuli does. However, what brings an artist one feeling may stimulate a different one in the recipient. This doesn’t necessarily argue against Tolstoy here. However it would have been nice to see an exploration into how/what/why a recipients feeling from a piece of art may not align with the artists. (Probably save this one for the psychologists)

Overall, I enjoyed and supported his arguments and his view that the highest form of art comes in the communication of feeling between artist and recipient.

I would also absolutely love to see him in 2024 writing about our relationship with art now. Particularly AI ‘art’ (if you can even call it that) lol

I think I agree w/ the broad strokes of Tolstoy's answer to the question—i.e. art is that which communicates a feeling of the artist etc. If said feeling/emotion/experience could be stated simply it would be stated simply and not expressed through a piece of art. He rejects beauty as the primary criterion for evaluating a work of art.
Where Tolstoy goes with this, I'm not sure—his idea of "good art" is that which expresses a "good feeling" which is tied up with his Christianity. He criticizes Baudelaire (fine), Beethoven's Ninth (hm), his own work (hmm), Shakespeare (hmmm).
Besides not defining "emotion" (maybe that's fine) and holding esp literature to probably impossible standards, I did find the work really stimulating. There's definitely some brilliance in here—and, at the very least, Tolstoy does seem to think fairly consistently, even if that takes him into some odd-seeming places.

This late polemic was written over the course of 15 years following the author’s religious conversion and published in 1898. It begins in characteristic Tolstoyan fashion—with a visit to the opera. There Tolstoy observes that, “[b]esides the costumed men and women, two other men in short jackets were running and fussing about the stage.” Viktor Shklovsky later founded the literary critical school of Russian Formalism on this tactic of defamiliarization, in which, Shklovsky famously writes in his manifesto “Art as Technique,”

Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time.

But Tolstoy was no formalist. He put this technique to the end of social criticism: when he refuses to recognize the stage business as serious or even intelligible, Tolstoy renders judgment against the theater as such. He turns his attention instead to those who toil to bring the spectacle to life, to “one of the workers, his face grey and thin, wearing a dirty blouse, with dirty workman’s hands, the fingers sticking out, obviously tired and displeased.” Why should people’s lives be wasted, in an unequal society, on such insipid and debasing pleasures as the theater?

In his introduction to his and his wife Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of What Is Art? Richard Pevear explains the biographical and religious background to this iconoclastic tract:

Essentially, Tolstoy’s teaching is a form of Christian anarchism, based on the principles of brotherly love and on certain precepts from the Sermon on the Mount: do not be angry; do not commit adultery; do not swear oaths; do not resist evil; love your enemies (see Matthew 5:21-43). With this Gospel distillation he combined the general outlook of a nineteenth-century liberal and specifically the view of history as the process of moral evolution of the masses and the effacement of governments. The good, he believed, would lead mankind eventually to a stateless, egalitarian, agrarian society of non-smoking, teetotal vegetarians dressed as peasants and practising chastity before and after marriage. This would be the Kingdom of God on earth.

On the basis of this religious morality, Tolstoy believes that true art must serve “mankind’s movement forward towards perfection” and must therefore be “understood by all people.” All other art, especially the incipiently modernist art of the late 19th century, but also most European art from the Renaissance forward, deserves to be considered false art to be banished from the brotherhood of man.

Tolstoy is aware that many readers will judge his doctrines perverse—how can a theory of art that banishes Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, and Beethoven be taken seriously? Tolstoy answers with both a theoretical and a historical account. The early chapters of What Is Art? are devoted to Tolstoy’s survey of aesthetic philosophy since its inception in the 18th century. Tolstoy summarizes his vast reading with the conclusion that philosophers define art as that which is beautiful, and they justify artistic beauty in one of two ways, either by a Hegelian assertion that artistic beauty manifests metaphysical forces or by a Kantian-Darwinian view that artistic beauty gives a kind of surplus physical pleasure to humanity once we have secured our survival and probably also plays a role in our sexual reproduction.

Tolstoy dispels what he sees as the errors of the aestheticians by redefining art not as the beautiful but as the communication of feeling. Through words, he says, we express thoughts, and through art (including verbal art) we express our feelings. Artists’ goal is to “infect” others with their feelings—he uses this unappealingly viral-bacterial metaphor throughout—which means that the purpose and justification of art is to unite human beings in a universal community of emotion based on Christ’s teaching of humility and simplicity.

Tolstoy moreover argues that his view of art was widely shared in the epochs before the European Renaissance: the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Chinese—they all expected art to subserve religion and to unite their communities around shared values that, from Tolstoy’s perspective, represented authentic stages in human progress before the revelation of Christ’s true message. This message itself was perverted by the alliance of Christianity with worldly power and pagan values in the form of the Western and Eastern churches; for this reason, Tolstoy does not romanticize the ecclesiastical Middle Ages, though he allows that medieval art at least united the people to the church, however flawed.

What followed the Middle Ages was a catastrophe: the educated ruling classes rightly ceased to believe in “church religion,” but did not take the step of adopting true Christianity, which would have meant dissolving their own class privileges to join with all people and equally share their labor. Instead, this ruling class believed nothing and subsidized art to entertain them in their nihilism, an irreligious, involuted, and self-impressed art that most people outside the elite could not comprehend. Such art both worsened and legitimized vast social inequality, since the poor were excluded from the education necessary to appreciate “advanced” aesthetics, since the labor of the poor was exploited in the production of the art (think of the harassed theater worker), and since a connoisseur class is by its nature parasitic on a working class.

Tolstoy’s political and economic critique is compelling: the poor really are excluded from high culture and oppressed in a class-stratified society. The solution, one might think, is to improve their lot by redistributing both resources and opportunities to them, a development perhaps enabled by advancing technology that requires less overall human labor. But this solution is too Marxist and irreligious for Tolstoy. Though he would later be hailed by Lenin as “the mirror of the revolution,” Tolstoy dismisses “the now widely spread theory of Marx that economic progress is inevitable and consists in the swallowing up of all private enterprises by capitalism,” a theory later endorsed by Lenin himself when he praised the monopolization of capital as a prelude to the communist command economy (a concept much neglected by socialists today who are, in their moralism, rather the children of Tolstoy).

Tolstoy believes that art addressed to the ruling class is in itself perverted, a word he uses frequently, in contrast to art that can be appreciated by “simple unperverted working people.” Why are working people unperverted? Here Tolstoy echoes Hegel: the workers’ labor brings them into contact with the necessities and exigencies of the world, phenomena never experienced by the indolent privileged. This is a superficially attractive theory that will not survive a moment’s contact with reality, in my experience as a scion of farm and factory workers who wanted nothing more than to be free of labor and enjoy all manner of refreshments, from cigarettes to pork chops to unsavory entertainments, that would have horrified the fastidious aristo-turned-peasant Count Tolstoy, for whom “the poor” were just a humble aggregate of noble savages. Why else does he contrast Hamlet unfavorably with “an account of the theatre of a savage people, the Voguls”? Not out of respect for other cultures, but because he wishes to legislate for an imaginary monoculture he finds everywhere but in his own pathologically hated social state. The Christian ideal animating this elevation of the humble demands an art that celebrates not victory and strength, but rather the moralized weakness of the victim state as a source of spiritual power:

And the highest work of [Christian] art was no temple of victory with statues of the victors, but the image of a human soul so transformed by love that a tortured and murdered man could pity and love his tormentors.

On the basis of this caste metaphysics, Tolstoy judges that only art made by or comprehensible to everyone, especially society’s victims, is legitimate art. Legitimate art can either be religious or essentially neutral (here Tolstoy charmingly—and in a surely inadvertent echo of Wilde—upholds household decoration as serious business, and ornament, from fashion to dolls, as well as wholesome children’s entertainment, as superior to fine art and opera).

Everything else he deems “harmful,” the mere amusement and alibi of the un-Christian victors, from his hated Shakespeare to the mystifying late works of Beethoven, the perverse poetry of Baudelaire, the obscure poetics of Mallarmé, the sordid novels of the naturalists, the immoralism of Nietzsche and the decadents (“aesthetes like Oscar Wilde choose as the theme of their works the denial of morality and the praise of depravity”), and above all—he devotes a whole chapter to this particular hatred—the innovative operas of Wagner, which he finds “so stupid, so farcical, that one wonders how people older than seven can seriously attend it.” Of good art, he proffers a little canon:

The majority understand and have always understood what we, too, consider the highest art: the artistically simple narratives of the Bible, the Gospel parables, folk legends, fairy tales, folk songs are understood by everyone.

We might grant him the folklore, though even here I suspect that “folk” art is made by dedicated individual artists, and not by the collective mind of the volk, to a much higher degree than 19th-century Romantic intellectuals (and their 21st-century multiculturalist legatees) suspect. But the Bible is a bad example even on its face. The very fact that its narratives are “artistically simple”—that is, they do not always yield up immediately intelligible meanings—has made them objects of theological contention and even religious warfare for millennia. Why did the Talmudists and the Church Fathers spill so much ink on a text supposedly so transparent? And even the contents of the Bible were not decided by “the people” but by a council of intellectuals. As for “Gospel parables,” Christ himself insisted they were for a coterie, not for the hoi polloi (He who has ears to hear, let him hear!), appropriately enough, since they are often spectacularly obscure. I understand why Jesus cursed the fig tree less than I understand Mallarmé.

Tolstoy’s modern canon of legitimate art is far better—Schiller, Dickens, Stowe, Dostoevsky, George Eliot—though even here, he hedges in a footnote, admitting that his own judgment might have been perverted by his miseducation in elite society. Furthermore, he excludes his own early novels—the masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina—from the category of legitimate art and upholds among his own works only late parables like “God Sees the Truth but Waits.”

Finally, Tolstoy concludes that true art must not teach either “sensuality” (he is preoccupied by the idea of nudes, especially nude women, in the history of painting) or any type of patriotism or militarism that would work against the formation of a benevolent world society. In his final chapter, he adds that science, too, should be judged only by its immediate contribution to social justice and that there is no such thing as knowledge (or art) for its own sake. What should happen to illegitimate art? Tolstoy explains that “not only should [it] not be encouraged, but [it] should be banished, rejected and despised as art that does not unite but divides people.” Moreover, “all the people who wish to live a good life should be directed towards destroying this art.”

Tolstoy’s ethic of non-violence influenced Gandhi and King, but I would like to know whether or not there is any connection between Tolstoy’s late preachings and certain other modern developments. When Pol Pot forcibly depopulated Cambodia’s cities and slaughtered its metropolitans in the name of agrarian justice, when Mao ordered his cadres to immolate the vain works of tradition and smash the beneficiaries of an unequal society, did they know they had a warrant in Tolstoy? While there is a documented direct line from Maoism through the French intelligentsia of ’68 to today’s advocates of extirpating the literary canon, do these advocates know that the cry to abolish the canon is coming from inside the canon itself? While Tolstoy would seem not to approve of Pol Pot’s or Mao’s violence, does his injunction to “destroy” not give a license to the armed iconoclast? We all know what they burn after they burn books.

George Orwell, in his essay “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” cautions that those peddling attractive but perhaps unworkable messages of universal love and absolute social justice may be concealing—even from themselves—their own will to power, their own desire for victory over a humanity prostrated before their “humble” wisdom and benevolence:

The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison,’ but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics—a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage—surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

The Tolstoy of the great novels was, as a great novelist must be, a sharp enough psychologist to know this. The Tolstoy of What Is Art? knows only what the totalitarian polemicist always knows: he is right, and we must either agree with him in every detail or be “banished, rejected and despised.”