rms of each other's enjoyment or understanding. Each
individual of "the great masses of people who are situated in the
natural conditions of laborious life" would also have to ask himself
whether the rest of the masses were enjoying and understanding, before
he could judge; indeed, he would not feel a right to enjoy until he knew
that the rest were enjoying. That is to say, no individual would ever
enjoy art at all. The fact is that art is produced by the individual
artist and experienced by the individual man. Tolstoy says that it is
experienced by mankind in the mass, and not as individuals; Whistler
that it is not experienced at all, either by the mass or by the
individual. Each is a heretic with some truth in his heresy; what is the
true doctrine?
It is clear that every artist desires an audience, not merely so that he
may win pudding and praise from them, nor so that he may do them good;
none of these aims will make him an artist; he can accomplish all of
them without attempting to produce a work of art. It is also clear that
his artistic success is not his success in winning an audience. Those
"great masses of people who are situated in the natural conditions of
laborious life" are a figment of Tolstoy's mind. No conditions are
natural in the sense in which he uses the word; nor do any existing
conditions make one man a better judge of art than another. There is no
multitude of simple, normal, unspoilt men able and willing to enjoy any
real art that is presented to them. The right experience of art comes
with effort, like right thought and right action; and no Russian peasant
has it because he works in the fields. Nor, on the other hand, are there
any artists who are mere "sports" occupied with a queer game of their
own self-expression which no one else can enjoy. There is a necessary
relation between the work of art and its audience, even if no actual
audience for it exists; and the fact that this relation must be, even
when there is no audience in existence, is the paradox and problem of
art. A work of art claims an audience, entreats it, is indeed made for
it; but must have it on its own terms. Men are artists because they are
men, because they have a faculty, at its height, which is shared by all
men. In that Croce is right; and his doctrine that all men are artists
in some degree, and that the very experience of art is itself an
aesthetic activity, contains a truth of great value. But his aesthetic
ignores,
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