Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

ments which, if they could, would forever inhibit the living artist from accom-
plishing his own destiny or the progress and destiny of his art. For that art
does carry forward the banner in a vital issue with the decaying or stagnating
forces of its time must be reckoned as one of the only causes that could entitle
it to our respect.
In a book entitled “What is Art?”, Count Leo Tolstoi, among others,
once entered the lists with a sweeping condemnation of almost all that had
risen to a place of first distinction in the ranks of literature, music, or
painting since a certain period situated in the beginning of the last century.
The criterion which Tolstoi sets up for adjudging works of art is that only
that is good and worthy to be considered great in art which excites the interest
and the approval of the masses; with which dictum in a broad and synthetic
sense there can be no cause for complaint. But to proceed to argue from that,
as he does, that the interest and approval of the masses should therefore be
immediate and en masse is to pass from the language of philosophy to that of a
kind of knight-errantry or Don Quixotism of humanitarian belief and benevo-
lence. That in the main, however, his first premise may be true without his
second can scarcely be questioned.
If a savage from some unsophisticated quarter of the globe were called
upon to decide between the merits of various works of art that were presented
to his judgment, his selection, it seems fair to assume, together with his reasons
for making it (if he could assign any) would differ materially from the ordinarily
accepted ones. Or if some more or less uncultivated person from our
own midst were asked to perform the same function with regard to the same
objects, then we should already expect different results for reasons which we
could already begin to anticipate or explain. So that, if by a repetition of this
process we were to take the measure of the opinion of different people through-
out every grade and type of human society, we should probably arrive in the
end at the most perfect heterogeneity of choice; but with a far more simple
and definite arrangement of ideas on the whole subject than any which a more
complex definition of art than the one which Tolstoi has selected could offer.
What we should find indeed would be the unimpeachableness of his first pre-
mise, that only that was good or was considered good in art which each one
liked; only a more profound way of saying, ‘what everyone liked’; whilst to
carry the inquiry a stage farther would be to render it absurd, if by a process
of selection and analysis known only to ourselves we were to substitute, as
he has done, any other dogma in the second order of ideas which was already
contradicted by the first. The flaw in the Tolstoian art-syllogism is of the
commonest and most misleading type. And leads us indirectly to the verifi-
cation of the fundamental lie, lying at the basis of almost all commonly
accepted art criticism; namely, the inability to distinguish between the fact
that while we are all of us judges of art, only a few of us can be or are artists.
Or, in other words, that only art can explain art, as only diamond can cut
diamond; and that art criticism to be effective, to be any other than a dull
echo and feeble reiteration of that which we already know, or at the best can
better study for ourselves and become acquainted with at first hand in the
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