of all classes and all nations. The past offers us glorious examples of such art.
“The majority of mankind has always understood and loved that which we consider the highest art: the epic of Genesis, the parables of the Gospel, the legends, tales, and songs of the people.”
The greatest art is that which expresses the religious conscience of the period. By this Tolstoy does not mean the teaching of the Church. “Every society has a religious conception of life; it is the ideal of the greatest happiness towards which that society tends.” All are to a certain extent aware of this tendency; a few pioneers express it clearly.
“A religious conscience always exists. It is the bed in which the river flows.”
The religious consciousness of our epoch is the aspiration toward happiness as realised by the fraternity of mankind. There is no true art but that which strives for this union. The highest art is that which accomplishes it directly by the power of love; but there is another art which participates in the same task, by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and indignation, all that opposes this fraternity. Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the paintings of Millet. But even though it fail to attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with sympathy and truth brings men nearer together. Such is Don Quixote: such are the plays of Molière. It is true that such art as the latter is continually sinning by its too minute realism and by the poverty of its
