In contrast to its effect on the cultured public the Post-Impressionist exhibition aroused a keen interest among a few of the younger English artists and their friends. With them I began to discuss the problems of æsthetic that the contemplation of these works forced upon us.
But before explaining the effects of these discussions upon my æsthetic theory I must return to consider the generalisations which I had made from my æsthetic experiences up to this point.
In my youth all speculations on æsthetic had revolved with wearisome persistence around the question of the nature of beauty. Like our predecessors we sought for the criteria of the beautiful, whether in art or nature. And always this search led to a tangle of contradictions or else to metaphysical ideas so vague as to be inapplicable to concrete cases.
It was Tolstoy’s genius that delivered us from this _impasse_, and I think that one may date from the appearance of “What is Art?” the beginning of fruitful speculation in æsthetic. It was not indeed Tolstoy’s preposterous valuation of works of art that counted for us, but his luminous criticism of past æsthetic systems, above all, his suggestions that art had no special or necessary concern with what is beautiful in nature, that the fact that Greek sculpture had run prematurely to decay through an extreme and non-æsthetic admiration of beauty in the human figure afforded no reason why we should for ever remain victims of their error.
It became clear that we had confused two distinct uses of the word beautiful, that when we used beauty to describe a favourable æsthetic judgment on a work of art we meant something quite different from our praise of a woman, a sunset or a horse as beautiful. Tolstoy saw that the essence of art was that it was a means of communication between human beings. He conceived it to be _par excellence_ the language of emotion. It was at this point that his moral bias led him to the strange conclusion that the value of a work of art corresponded to the moral value of the emotion expressed. Fortunately he showed by an application of his theory to actual works of art to what absurdities it led. What remained of immense importance was the idea that a work of art was not the record of beauty already existent elsewhere, but the expression of an emotion felt by the artist and conveyed to the spectator.