All art is, according to Tolstoy, good qua art that succeeds in transmitting emotion.  But there is good emotion and bad emotion, and the only right material for art is good emotion, and the only good emotion, the only emotion worth expressing, is subsumed, according to Tolstoy, in the religion of the day.  This is how he explains the constant affinity in nearly all ages of art and religion.  Instead of regarding religion as an early phase of art, he proceeds to define religious perception as the highest social ideal of the moment, as that “understanding of the meaning of life which represents the highest level to which men of that society have attained, an understanding defining the highest good at which that society aims.”  “Religious perception in a society,” he beautifully adds, “is like the direction of a flowing river.  If the river flows at all, it must have a direction.”  Thus, religion, to Tolstoy, is not dogma, not petrifaction, it makes indeed dogma impossible.  The religious perception of to-day flows, Tolstoi says, in the Christian channel towards the union of man in a common brotherhood.  It is the business of the modern artist to feel and transmit emotion towards this unity of man.

Now it is not our purpose to examine whether Tolstoy’s definition of religion is adequate or indeed illuminating.  What we wish to note is that he grasps the truth that in art we must look and feel, and look and feel forward, not backward, if we would live.  Art somehow, like language, is always feeling forward to newer, fuller, subtler emotions.  She seems indeed in a way to feel ahead even of science; a poet will forecast dimly what a later discovery will confirm.  Whether and how long old channels, old forms will suffice for the new spirit can never be foreseen.

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We end with a point of great importance, though the doctrine we would emphasize may be to some a hard saying, even a stumbling-block.  Art, as Tolstoy divined, is social, not individual.  Art is, as we have seen, social in origin, it remains and must remain social in function.  The dance from which the drama rose was a choral dance, the dance of a band, a group, a church, a community, what the Greeks called a thiasos.  The word means a band and a thing of devotion; and reverence, devotion, collective emotion, is social in its very being.  That band was, to begin with, as we saw, the whole collection of initiated tribesmen, linked by a common name, rallying round a common symbol.

Even to-day, when individualism is rampant, art bears traces of its collective, social origin.  We feel about it, as noted before, a certain “ought” which always spells social obligation.  Moreover, whenever we have a new movement in art, it issues from a group, usually from a small professional coterie, but marked by strong social instincts, by a missionary spirit, by intemperate zeal in propaganda, by a tendency,