Page:Leo Tolstoy - Father Sergius and Other Stories and Plays - ed. Charles Theodore Hagberg Wright (1911).djvu/24

 18 manded of it that it should always have a directly didactic intention.

Not without express purpose did he, in "What is Art?" write: "Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity;" and he then goes on to say: "Thanks to man's capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

"If men lacked this capacity of being infected by art, people would be more separated and hostile to one another, and more savage than wild beasts. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one—as important as the activity of speech itself, and as generally diffused." And in a memorable passage he adds: "We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions ; together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. … But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind—from cradle-song, jest, mimicry, the