of laborious life.  Tolstoy does proceed to ask himself this question about Beethoven’s Choral symphony and about King Lear, and condemns them both because, he says, a Russian peasant would not understand them.  But if we all obeyed him and asked this question about all works of art, we should none of us ever experience any work of art at all; for, while we listened to a piece of music, we should be wondering whether other people understood it; that is to say we should not listen to it at all.  And what is this Jury of people situated in the natural conditions of laborious life who are to decide not individually but as a Jury?  Who can say whether he himself belongs to them?  Who is to choose them?  Tolstoy chose them as consisting of Russian peasants; he, like Whistler, believed in the primitive, but for him it was the primitive man, not the primitive artist, who was blessed.  In his view there would be no Jury in all western Europe worthy of deciding upon a work of art, because we none of us are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life.  So we must change all our way of life or despair of art altogether.  Not one of the great ages of art would satisfy his conditions.  Certainly not the Greeks of the age of Pericles, or the Chinese of the Sung dynasty, or the thirteenth century in France, or the Renaissance in Italy; and as a matter of fact he condemns most of the great art of the world, including his own.

We can escape from the tyranny of Tolstoy’s doctrine, as from the tyranny of Whistler’s, only by considering the facts of our own experience of art.  The fact that we can enjoy and experience a work of art frees us from Whistler’s doctrine, because, if we can enjoy and experience it, we are concerned with it.  Because of our enjoyment, art is for us a social activity and not a game played by the artist for his own amusement.  We know also that the artist likes us to enjoy his art, in fact complains loudly if we do not; and we do not believe that the primitive artist or man was different in this respect.  There is now, and always has been, some kind of relation between the artist and the public, but not the relation which Tolstoy affirms.

According to him the proper aim of art is to do good.

     ’The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time
     unintelligible to a great number of people is extremely unjust,
     and its consequences are ruinous to art itself.’

The word unjust implies that the aim of art is to do good.  The artist sins if he does not try to do good to as many people as possible, and I sin if I am ready to enjoy and encourage a work of art which most people do not enjoy.

But as a matter of fact a work of art is good to me, not morally good but good as a work of art, if I enjoy it.  In my estimate of the work of art I can ask only if it is a work of art to me, not if it is one to other people.  I may wish and try to make them enjoy it, but if I do that is as a result of my own enjoyment of it.  I can’t begin by asking whether other people enjoy it; I must begin with my own experience of it, for I have nothing else to go by.