in each other’s art.  In fact they notice the cups they drink out of much more than we do.  If we did notice the cups we drink out of, we should not be able to endure them.  In primitive societies there are not star pianists or singers or dancers; they all dance and make music.  Homer himself was a popular entertainer; he would have been very much surprised to hear that he was a dreamer apart.  In fact Whistler made up this pretty story about the primitive artist because he assumed that all artists must be like himself.  He read himself back into the past and saw himself painting primitive nocturnes in a primitive Chelsea, happily undisturbed by primitive critics.  He is wrong in his facts, and I believe he is wrong in his theory.  There is a relation, and a necessary relation, between the artist and his public; but what is the nature of it?  That is a difficult question for us to answer because the relation now between the artist and the public is, in fact, usually wrong; and Tolstoy in his What is Art? tried to put it right.

What is Art? is a most interesting book, full of incidental truth; but I believe that the main contention in it is false.  I will give this contention as shortly as I can in his own words.

‘Art’, he says, ’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 other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.’

Now this is well enough as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and just because it is not enough it leads Tolstoy into error.  Clearly, if art is nothing but the infection of the public with the feelings of the artist, it follows that a work of art is to be judged by the number of people who are infected.  And Tolstoy with his usual sincerity accepts these conclusions; indeed, he wrote his book to insist upon them.  He judges art entirely as a thing of use, moral use, and he says it can be of no use unless a large audience is infected by it.  A work of art that few can enjoy fails as art, just as a railway from nowhere to nowhere fails as a railway.  A railway exists to be travelled by and a work of art exists to be experienced by as many people as possible.  Here are the actual words of Tolstoy: 

’For a work to be esteemed good and to be approved of and diffused, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it will have to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life.’

Now this sounds plausible; but consider the effect of it upon yourself.  You listen to a symphony by Beethoven; and before you esteem it good, you must ask yourself, not whether it is good to you, but whether it will satisfy the demands of those great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions