Beethoven or of Shakespeare, he is speaking in reality not of Beethoven or of Shakespeare, but of himself; he is revealing his own ideals. They do not even try to put us off the scent. Tolstoy, in criticising Shakespeare, does not attempt to make himself “objective.” More: he reproaches Shakespeare for his objective art. The painter of War and Peace, the master of impersonal art, cannot sufficiently deride those German critics who, following the lead of Goethe, “invent Shakespeare,” and are responsible for “the theory that art ought to be objective, that is to say, ought to represent human beings without any reference to moral values—which is the negation of the religious object of art.”
It is thus from the pinnacle of a creed that Tolstoy pronounces his artistic judgments. We must not look for any personal after-thoughts in his criticisms. We shall find no trace of such a thing; he is as pitiless to his own works as to those of others.[1] What, then, does he really intend? What is the artistic significance of the religious ideal which he proposes?
This ideal is magnificent. The term “religious art” is apt to mislead one as to the breadth of the conception. Far from narrowing the province of art, Tolstoy enlarges it. Art, he says, is everywhere.
“Art creeps into our whole life; what we term
- ↑ He classes his own “works of imagination” in the category of “harmful art.” (What is Art?) From this condemnation he does not except his own plays, “devoid of that religious conception which must form the basis of the drama of the future.”
