So good, great, universal, religious art may be incomprehenisible to a small circle 10 of spoiled people but certainly not to any large number of plain men.
Art cannot be incomprehensible to the great masses only because it is very good— as artists of our day are fond of telling us. Rather we are bound to conclude that this art is unintelligible to the great masses only because it is very bad art, or even is not art at all. So that the favorite argument (naively accepted by the cultured crowd), that in order to feel art one has first to understand it (which really only means habituate oneself to it), is the truest indication that what we are asked to understand by such a method is either very bad, exclusive art, or is not art at all.
People say that works of art do not please the people because they are incapable of understanding them. But if the aim of works of art is to infect people with the emotion the artist has experienced, how can one talk about not understanding?
A man of the people reads a book, sees a picture, hears a play or a symphony, and is touched by no feeling. He is told that this is because he cannot understand. People promise to let a man see a certain show; he enters and sees nothing. He is told that this is because his sight is not prepared for this show. But the man well knows that he sees quite well, and if he does not see what people promised to show him, he only concludes (as is quite just) that those who undertook to show him the spectacle have not fulfilled their engagement. And it is perfectly just for a man who does feel the influence of some works of art to come to this conclusion concerning artists who do not, by their works, evoke feeling in him. To say that the reason a man is not touched by my art is because he is still too stupid, besides being very self-conceited and also rude, is to reverse the roles and for the sick to send the hale to bed.
Voltaire said that "Tous les genres sort bons, hors le genre ennuyeux;"6 but with even more right one may say of art that tous les genres sont bons, hors celui qu'on ne comprend pas, or qui ne produit pas son effet7 for of what value is an article which fails to do that for which it was intended?
Mark this above alclass="underline" if only it be admitted that art may be art and yet be unintelligible to anyone of sound mind, there is no reason why any circle of perverted people
6. Tous . . . ennuyeux [translator's note]: All 7. Tous . . . effet [translator's note]: All styles styles are good except the boring style. are good except that which is not understood,
or which fails to produce its effect.
should not compose works tickling their own perverted feelings and comprehensible to no one but themselves and call it "art," as is actually being done by the so-called Decadents.[129]
The direction art has taken may be compared to placing on a large circle other circles, smaller and smaller, until a cone is formed, the apex of which is no longer a circle at all. That is what has happened to the art of our times.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
What does Tolstoy see as the effect of separate art forms for the upper classes and the lower classes? What is Tolstoy's attitude toward the upper classes and the intellectual elite?
What is the point of Tolstoy's comparison between a work of art and a food item? What deeper comparison does he make here about the purpose of art?
What is the difference between understanding something and habituating oneself to something? What examples does Tolstoy use to illustrate this distinction?
What stories does Tolstoy use as examples of "great art"? Do you agree with the examples that he chooses?
What relationship does Tolstoy see between art and religion? Why does he believe that "a good and lofty work of art" may be unintelligible to "erudite, perverted people destitute of religion"?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Both Tolstoy in What Is Art? and Mo Tzu in "Against Music" (p. 236) criticize artistic expression that can only be enjoyed by the elite. Yet Tolstoy is a strong advocate of art, while Mo Tzu believes that music has no place in a society. What underlying differences between the two men's philosophies might be responsible for this difference?
Mohandas Gandhi (p. 560) frequently cited Tolstoy as one of his greatest influences. Can you see connections between Tolstoy's view of art and Gandhi's view of economic justice?
Compare the underlying assumptions of Tolstoy's What Is Art? with those of Hsun Tzu in "Encouraging Learning" (p. 5). Does Tolstoy believe that education is necessary to make people able to appreciate important things?
Wilde in England—that focused on works of art as completely divorced from ethical questions.
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Write a paper that analyzes Tolstoy's underlying assumptions about the purposes of art. Explain what art should and should not try to do, in the framework that he articulates in this selection.
Support or refute Tolstoy's main assertion that great art can be understood by everybody. You may consider whether or not education can increase people's understanding and appreciation of art, music, and literature.
Choose a work of art that has been especially influential in your life. It can be a book, painting, movie, television program, or popular song. Analyze this work from Tolstoy's perspective. Would he call it "great" art? Why or why not?
alice walker
Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self
[1983]
ALICE WALKER is an American novelist, poet, essayist, and political activist. She was born in 1944 in rural Georgia during racial segregation. Her parents were sharecroppers and manual laborers whose deep faith in the power of education made school a priority for their children. Walker attended Spelman College in Atlanta and Sarah Lawrence College in New York. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, she dedicated herself both to her writing career and to the civil rights movement in the South, where segregation and legalized discrimination were still common throughout state and local jurisdictions.
During the 1970s, Walker published several novels and collections of poetry, both well received. In 1983, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, since adapted into a successful movie and Broadway musical. The success of The Color Purple secured Walker's reputation as a major American writer, and she has continued to write both fiction and poetry while remaining active in civil rights and antiwar causes in the United States and elsewhere.
The essay reprinted here, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self," was first published in the collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker's follow-up to The Color Purple. In this essay, she recounts an accident that occurred when she was eight years old. While Walker and her brothers were playing "Cowboys and Indians," one brother shot her in the eye with a BB gun and convinced her to report it to her parents as an accident with a stray wire. Because the family was extremely poor, they waited a full week to take Alice to a doctor, by which time it was too late to save the eye or to prevent the buildup of substantial scar tissue.
In this personal narrative, Walker's essay explores one of the central questions of this chapter—"what makes something beautiful." She describes her life before and after the accident, using the present tense throughout as a rhetorical device to emphasize the permanent impact that past images have had on the way she views herself.