Beauty is an especial quality in visible or audible shapes and movements
which imposes on our soul a certain rhythm and pattern of feeling entirely
_sui generis_, but unified, harmonious, and, in a manner, consummate.
Beauty is a power in our life, because, however intermittent its
action and however momentary, it makes us live, by a kind of sympathy
with itself, a life fuller, more vivid, and at the same time more
peaceful. But, as the word _sympathy_, _with-feeling_--(_Einfühlen_,
"feeling into," the Germans happily put it)--as the word _sympathy_ is
intended to suggest, this subduing and yet liberating, this enlivening
and pacifying power of beautiful form over our feelings is exercised
only when our feelings enter, and are absorbed into, the form we
perceive; so that (very much as in the case of sympathy with human
vicissitudes) we participate in the supposed life of the form while in
reality lending _our_ life to it. Just as in our relations with our
fellow-men, so also in our subtler but even more potent relations with
the appearances of things and actions, our heart can be touched,
purified, and satisfied only just in proportion as we _give_ our
heart. And even as it is possible to perceive other human beings and
to adjust our action (sometimes heartlessly enough) to such qualities
in them as we find practically important to ourselves, without putting
out one scrap of sympathy with their own existence as felt by them; so
also it is possible to recognise things and actions, to become rapidly
aware of such of their peculiarities as most frequently affect us
practically, and to consequently adjust our behaviour, without giving
our sympathy to their form, without entering into and _living into_
those forms; and in so far it is possible for us to remain indifferent
to those forms' quality of beauty or ugliness, just as, in the hurry
of practical life, we remain indifferent to the stuff our neighbours'
souls are made of. This rapid, partial, superficial, perfunctory mode
of dealing with what we see and hear constitutes the ordinary,
constant, and absolutely indispensable act of recognising objects and
actions, of _spotting_ their qualities and _twigging_ their meaning:
an act necessarily tending to more and more abbreviation and rapidity
and superficiality, to a sort of shorthand which reduces what has to
be understood, and enables us to pass immediately to understanding
something else; according to that law of necessarily saving time and
energy.
And so we rush on, recognising, naming, spotting, twigging, answering,
using, or parrying; we need not fully _see_ the complete appearance of
the word we read, of the man we meet, of the street we run along, of
the water we drink, the fire we light, the adversary whom we pursue or
whom we evade; and in the selfsame manner we need not fully see the
form of the building of which we say "This is a Gothic cathedral"--of
the picture of which we say "Christ before Pilate"--or of the piece of
music of which we say "A cheerful waltz by Strauss" or "A melancholy
adagio by Beethoven." Now it is this fragmentary, superficial
attention which we most often give to art; and giving thus little, we
find that art gives us little, perhaps nothing, in return. For
understand: you can be utterly perfunctory towards a work of art
without hurrying away from in front of it, or setting about some
visible business in its presence. Standing ten minutes before a
picture or sitting an hour at a concert, with fixed sight or tense
hearing, you may yet be quite hopelessly inattentive if, instead of
following the life of the visible or audible forms, and _living
yourself_ into their pattern and rhythm, you wander off after dramatic
or sentimental associations suggested by the picture's subject; or if
you let yourself be hypnotised, as pious Wagnerians are apt to be,
into monotonous over response (and over and over again response) to
the merely emotional stimulation of the sounds. The activity of the
artist's soul has been in vain for you, since you do not let your soul
follow its tracks through the work of art; he has not created for you,
because you have failed to create his work afresh in vivid
contemplation.
But attention cannot be forced on to any sort of contemplation, or at
least it cannot remain, steady and abiding, by any act of forcing.
Attention, to be steady, must be held by the attraction of the thing
attended to; and, to be spontaneous and easy, must be carried by some
previous interest within the reach of that attractiveness. Above all,
attention requires that its ways should have been made smooth by
repetition of similar experience; it is excluded, rebutted by the dead
wall of utter novelty; for seeing, hearing, understanding is
interpreting the unknown by the known, assimilation in the literal
sense also of rendering similar the new to the less new. This will
explain why it is useless trying to enjoy a totally unfamiliar kind of
art: as soon expect to take pleasure in dancing a dance you do not
know, and whose rhythm and step you fail as yet to follow. And it is
not only music, as Nietzsche said, but all art, that is but a kind of
dancing, a definite rhythmic carrying and moving of the soul. And for
this reason there can be no artistic enjoyment without preliminary
initiation and training.
Art cannot be enjoyed without initiation and training. I repeat this
statement, desiring to impress it on the reader, because, by a
coincidence of misunderstanding, it happens to constitute the
weightiest accusation in the whole of Tolstoi's very terrible (and,
in part, terribly justified) recent arraignment of art. For of what
use is the restorative and refreshing power, this quality called
beauty, if the quality itself cannot be recognised save after previous
training? And what moral dignity, nay, what decent innocence, can
there be in a kind of relaxation from which lack of initiation
excludes the vast majority of men, the majority which really labours,
and therefore has a real claim to relaxation and refreshment?
This question of Tolstoi's arises from that same limiting of
examination to a brief, partial, and, as it happens, most transitional
and chaotic present, which has given us that cut-and-dried distinction
between work and play; and, indeed, the two misconceptions are very
closely connected. For even as our present economic system of
production for exchange rather than for consumption has made us
conceive _work_ as _work_ done under compulsion for someone else, and
_play_ as _play_, with no result even to ourselves; so also has the
economic system which employs the human hand and eye merely as a
portion of a complicated, monotonously working piece of machinery, so
also has our present order of mechanical and individual production
divided the world into a small minority which sees and feels what it
is about, and a colossal majority which has no perception, no
conception, and, consequently, no preferences attached to the objects
it is employed (by the methods of division of labour) to produce, so
to speak, without seeing them. Tolstoi has realised that this is the
present condition of human labour, and his view of it has been
corrected neither by historical knowledge nor by psychological
observation. He has shown us _art_, as it nowadays exists, divided and
specialised into two or three "fine arts," each of which employs
exceptional and highly trained talent in the production of objects so
elaborate and costly, so lacking in all utility, that they can be
possessed only by the rich few; objects, moreover, so unfamiliar in
form and in symbol that only the idle can learn to enjoy (or pretend
to enjoy) them after a special preliminary initiation and training.