Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/44

18 interpret it; it is the artist's function to embody imaginatively the development of mankind. "Beauty is life." But for this very reason, beauty, as beauty is defined by idealist aesthetics, is not the sole content of art. "All that has a general bearing on life, is the subject matter of art." Aesthetics becomes an ancillary science to ethics, to the utilitarian principle of the greatest good of the greatest number, and thus to the policy of social regeneration. From this point of view, we see that the doctrine of art for art's sake must be utterly rejected as epicureanism. To Černyševskii the work of art becomes the work of labour; labour with the axe is the starting-point of all art; Shakespeare and all poets and artists are judged by him in virtue of the utilities they have contributed and continue to contribute to society.

It is true that the artist does not work with his understanding, as does the thinker. The artist works with his imagination; but precisely for this reason he must keep all the closer to reality, seeing that imagination cannot attain to reality. But inasmuch as the artist reproduces life in his work, inasmuch as he endeavours to solve the problems set to him by life, willy-nilly (even while remaining an artist) he is compelled also to think, to become a thinker, and his work thus "acquires scientific significance." Art and science are handbooks for the beginner in practical life, and they are works of reference for the experienced.

Černyševskii wages war against false art, against romanticism and idealism, employing the latter term to denote German philosophy since the days of Kant; also against romanticist art, likewise contemned as characteristically German.

It is readily comprehensible that, from his outlook, Černyševskii should esteem poesy (imaginative literature) as the loftiest of the arts, for poesy seemed to him to have an especially close relationship to life, to be the most generally comprehensible of all the arts, and to be capable of exercising the widest possible influence through the instrumentality of the written and printed word. He does not admit that architecture can properly speaking rank as an art, and he has the same low estimate of music, at any rate in the form of song, which he regards, like speech, as a means of social expression. Painting and sculpture he esteems devoid of action, too rigid. It is natural, therefore, that he should give his full approval to imaginative literature alone, for this directly reflects and