histler's or Tolstoy's logic to ask
ourselves simply what does actually happen to us in our own experience
and enjoyment of a work of art. The fact that we are able to enjoy and
experience a work of art does liberate us at once from the tyranny of
Whistler; for clearly, if we can experience and enjoy a work of art, we
are concerned with it. It is vain for Whistler to tell us that we ought
not to be, or that we do injury to art by our concern. The fact of our
enjoyment and experience makes art for us a social activity; we know
that our enjoyment of it is good; we know also that the artist likes us
to enjoy it; and we do not believe that either the primitive artist or
the primitive man was different from us in this respect. There is now,
and always has been, some kind of social relation between the artist and
the public; the only question is how far that relation is the essence of
art.

Tolstoy tells us that it is the essence of art, because the proper aim
of art is to do good. This is implied in his doctrine that art can be
good only if it is intelligible to most men. "The assertion that art may
be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of
people, is extremely unjust; and its consequences are ruinous to art
itself." The word unjust implies the moral factor. I am not to enjoy a
work of art if I know that others cannot enjoy it, because it is not
fair that I should have a pleasure not shared by them. If I know that
others cannot share it, I am to take no account of my own experience,
but to condemn the work, however good it may seem to me. From this logic
also I can liberate myself by concerning myself simply with my own
experience. Again, if I experience and enjoy a work of art, I know that
my experience of it is good; and, in my judgment of the work of art, I
do not need to ask myself how many others enjoy it. I may wish them to
enjoy it and try to make them do so, but that effort of mine is not
aesthetic but moral. It does not affect my judgment of the work of art,
but is a result of that judgment. And, as a matter of fact, if I am to
experience a work of art at all, I cannot be asking myself how many
others enjoy it. Judgments of art are not formed in that way and cannot
be; they are, and must be, always formed out of our own experience of
art. If art is to be art to us, we cannot think of it in terms of
something else. There would be no public for art at all if we all agreed
to judge it in te