economic conditions of Canada were not such as to permit the adoption of Free Trade, while other arguments made Protection imperative. These were set forth by Sir John in a carefully drawn-up State paper, from which the following words are taken :

That this House is of opinion that the welfare of Canada requires the adoption of a National policy, which by a judicious re-adjustment of the tariff will benefit and foster the agricultural, the mining, the manufacturing, and other interests of the Dominion; that such a policy will retain in Canada thousands of our fellowcountrymen now obliged to expatriate themselves in search of the employment denied them at home; will restore prosperity to our struggling industries, now so sadly depressed; will prevent Canada from being made a "sacrifice market"; will encourage and develope an active inter-Provincial trade, and moving (as it ought to do) in the direction of a reciprocity of tariffs with our neighbours, so far as the varied interests of Canada may demand, will greatly tend to procure for this country eventually a reciprocity of trade.'*

It was, in fact, impossible for Canada to flourish with a tariff of fifteen per cent. side by side with a rich and powerful country which levied fifty per cent. The strongest justification of the National policy is its success. It has stimulated the internal and external development of the Dominion, checked the movement for annexation to the United States and the flow of emigration thither, and above all enabled the agricultural and manufacturing industries of Canada to compete successfully with those of other countries. It has also contributed largely to the formation of a strong national sentiment, without which a colony, like a nation, is apt to drift towards political dissolution or political dependence. That he was able thus to foster local patriotism without allowing it to become provincial, to combine Colonial and Imperial interests, was perhaps the greatest mark of Sir John Macdonald's genius. He understood that unity in variety, harmony in diversity, is the essence of our political system and the condition of our national existence. One spirit in many forms must animate this Empire if it is to hold together. To infuse this spirit was the aim of Sir John Macdonald's life; to found a policy which has now been adopted by the whole British race was his almost unique achievement.

*Journals,' House of Commons, 12th March, 1878, p. 78.

ART. V.-TOLSTOI'S VIEWS OF ART.

1. Qu'est-ce que l'art? Par le Comte Léon Tolstoï. Traduit et précédé d'une Introduction par Téodor de Wyzewa. Paris: Perrin et Cie., 1898.

du russe

2. Le Rôle de l'art d'après Tolstoi. Paris: De Soye et fils, 1898.

Par E. Halpérine-Kaminsky.

3. Pensées de Tolstoi, d'après les textes russes. Par Ossip-Lourié. Paris: Alcan, 1898.

L

EO TOLSTOI'S recent volume on Art closes significantly the series of his arraignments of what we have been pleased to call civilisation. Like all his later works, be their shape polemical, illustrative, or allegorical, treatise or play or novel or parable, this volume on art shows Tolstoi in his character of lay prophet, with all its powers and all its weaknesses. For it would seem-we notice it in two other great lay prophets, Carlyle and Ruskin-that the gift of seeing through the accepted falsehoods of the present, and foretelling the improbable realities of the future, can arise only in creatures too far overpowered by their own magnificent nature to understand other men's ways of being and thinking; in minds so bent upon how things should be as to lose sight of how things are and how things came to be. While Carlyle, embodying his passionate instincts in historical narrative, was moderated at least by his knowledge of the past and of the consequent origin and necessity of the present-while Ruskin, accepting the whole moral and religious training of his times, was in so far in touch with his contemporaries-Tolstoi has broken equally with everything, if ever he had really much to break with. Destitute of all historic sense, impervious to any form of science, and accepting the Gospel only as the nominal text for a religion of his own making, he has become incapable of admitting more than one side to any question, more than one solution to any difficulty, more than one factor in any phenomenon. He has lost all sense of cause and effect, all acquiescence in necessity, and all real trustfulness in the ways of the universe. Most things are wrong, wholly, utterly wrong; their wrongness has never originated in any right, and never will be transformed into right until—well, until mankind be converted to Tolstoi's theory and practice. Economic and domestic arrangements, laws, politics, religion, all wrong; and now, art also.

Unreasonableness like this is contagious, and Tolstoi's

criticisms have often been dismissed as utterly wrong-headed. But we should not forgo the benefits which the prophetic gift can bring us, if only we know to extract them. We should endeavour to eliminate the hallucinations which usually accompany such penetrating moral insight, and to apply some of this vast spiritual energy with more discrimination than was compatible with its violent and almost tragic production. The use of a genius like Tolstoi's is to show us in what particulars human institutions, habits, and thoughts are morally wrong; it is for us to find out what his very prophet's onesidedness prevents his doing-the scientific reasons for this wrongness.

With regard to art, Tolstoi's opinion of its moral wrongness can be analysed into two very separate and independent views. Art, as practised and conceived in our times, is immoral, according to Tolstoi, first, because it fails to accomplish its only legitimate mission of directly increasing the instincts of justice, pity, and self-renunciation; and secondly, because any mission, good or bad, which it does fulfil is limited to a very small fraction of mankind. In other words, according to Tolstoi, art is a useless, often a corrupting, luxury; and a luxury of that minority which already enjoys more luxuries than are compatible with the material welfare of the rest of the world and with its own spiritual advantage.

The two propositions must be taken separately for examination in the light of certain sciences which, alas, Tolstoi condemns outright as themselves useless, mendacious, and corrupting. Now this condemnation by Tolstoi of all science, this misconception of the very nature of science, will help us to a rapid understanding of one half of his condemnation of art-its condemnation as morally useless. There is not enough justice or sympathy, not enough purity, endurance, or self-renunciation in the world that is the gospel Tolstoi has to preach; and, with prophetic onesidedness, he condemns everything which does not directly and obviously increase these virtues. So long as it is neither unjust nor cruel nor rapacious nor impure, it matters nothing to Tolstoi whether life be varied or monotonous, elastic and adaptive or narrow and unadaptive, lucid or dull, enterprising or stagnant, complete or mutilated, pleasant or devoid of pleasure; it never occurs to him that in the great organic give-and-take, those very qualities which he so exclusively desires depend for their existence on the fulness and energy of every side of human existence. Tolstoi wants virtue, and only virtue, dominant, exclusive; and he thinks that virtue can be got independent of everything else, perfect and instan

taneous. Hence he naturally disdains mere intellectual activity, and misunderstands the object of all science.

'The important and suitable object of human science,' he writes explicitly, ought not to be the learning of those things which happen to be interesting; but the learning of the manner in which we should direct our lives: the learning of those religious, moral, and social truths without which all our so-called knowledge of nature must be either useless or fatal.'

Hence, practically, no science; for Tolstoi's definition of a moral or social truth is not a moral or social fact or generalisation, but simply a precept for conduct; truth, in his special vocabulary, means no longer the faithful presentation of what is, but unflinching insistence on what ought to be. As with science, so with art.

"The religious consciousness of our time consists, speaking generally, in the recognition that our happiness, material and spiritual, individual and collective, momentary and permanent, consists in the brotherhood of all men, in our union for a life in common . . . and those works of art only should be esteemed and encouraged which grow out of the religion of our day, whereas all works of art contrary to this religion should be condemned, and all the rest of art treated with indifference.'

The

Like science, therefore, art is set by Tolstoi to enforce virtue; not, as he orders science, by precepts, but by embodying and communicating such emotion as conduces directly to greater morality, no reference being made, in this case either, to the fact that virtue cannot long exist save in a many-sided, energetic, and harmonious life, of which the impulse to art, like the impulse to science, is an essential element. On these principles, art,' continues Tolstoi, 'should always be valued according to its contents,' that is to say, according to the definite moral example which it exhibits, or the definite moral emotion-chiefly pity, of course-which it awakens. practical result is the banishing, as no longer consonant with our moral purposes, of nearly all the art of former times, including Antiquity and the Middle Ages; and the absolute condemnation of more than two-thirds of all modern art, including not merely Wagner, Impressionism, Symbolism, PreRaphaelitism, but all Tolstoi's earlier work-Anna Karénina,' and War and Peace'-nearly all of Goethe's, and, after muute examination, even the Ninth Symphony.' There remain, besides the Gospels, the more obviously moralising works of Victor Hugo and of Dickens, Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and whatever painting, sculpture, and music may be discovered having a moral purpose as definite and unmistakable as these.

This statement is crude, and Tolstoi's plea, judging from it, would seem to be mere fanatical dogmatism. But this is far from being the case: Tolstoi is learned and is subtle, and twists facts powerfully to suit his views. Tolstoi has read, or caused to be examined for his benefit, almost everything that ever has been written on the nature and aims of art; and, in a chapter where profound lack of sympathy is thinly disguised as intellectual impartiality, he has reviewed and dismissed every theory of art which differs from his own. The science of æsthetics, necessarily dependent as it is upon psychology, sociology, and anthropology, all as yet imperfect, is in a backward state; and an immense proportion of the 'philosophy of art is either pure metaphysics, scornful of concrete fact, or mere polemic founded on the practice of one school or period. This backward state of æsthetics has rendered it, from Plato to Spencer, and from Ruskin to Whistler, the happy hunting ground of every philosopher lacking the experience of art, and of every art connoisseur lacking the habit of philosophy, and has given Tolstoi the immense advantage of finding not merely a marvellous amount of foolish utterance to scoff at, but, what is more to his purpose, a mutual contradiction between all the main theories. All philosophers, Tolstoi is able to tell us, have insisted on the extreme nobility of art, and a great many have dogmatised about beauty being art's special object; but there is not one single intelligible account of beauty, and there are three or four conflicting main definitions of art—a proof that, as Tolstoi has so often proclaimed, all science and all philosophy are worthless, and that art can have no legitimate object save the moral one which he assigns to it. But it happens that even nowadays the psychological and historical treatment of æsthetics is beginning to put order and lucidity into the subject, and to reconcile while it explains the conflict in all previous views. It is in the light of such science, however much despised by Tolstoi, that we shall attempt to show that art, like science itself, like philosophy, like every great healthy human activity, has a right to live and a duty to fulfil, quite apart from any help it may contribute to the enforcement of a moralist's teachings.

It is necessary to premise that, like nearly every other writer on æsthetics, Tolstoi has needlessly complicated the question by considering literature as the type of all other art. Now it is clear that literature, although in one capacity an art as much as music or painting, is at the same time, and in varying degree, a mode of merely imparting opinion or stirring up emotion, the instrument, not merely of the artist, but of the