ive this
contention as shortly as I can in his own words.

'Art', he says, 'is a human activity, consisting in this--that
one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on
to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people
are infected by these feelings and also experience them.'

Now this is well enough as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and
just because it is not enough it leads Tolstoy into error. Clearly, if
art is nothing but the infection of the public with the feelings of the
artist, it follows that a work of art is to be judged by the number of
people who are infected. And Tolstoy with his usual sincerity accepts
these conclusions; indeed, he wrote his book to insist upon them. He
judges art entirely as a thing of use, moral use, and he says it can be
of no use unless a large audience is infected by it. A work of art that
few can enjoy fails as art, just as a railway from nowhere to nowhere
fails as a railway. A railway exists to be travelled by and a work of
art exists to be experienced by as many people as possible. Here are the
actual words of Tolstoy:

'For a work to be esteemed good and to be approved of and
diffused, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few
people living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it
will have to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of
people who are situated in the natural conditions of laborious
life.'

Now this sounds plausible; but consider the effect of it upon yourself.
You listen to a symphony by Beethoven; and before you esteem it good,
you must ask yourself, not whether it is good to you, but whether it
will satisfy the demands of those great masses of people who are
situated in the natural conditions 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
be