in a state of crowd-excitement, the song-and-dance before admiring
spectators, the chorus of primitive ballads,--the crowd repeating and
altering the refrains,--the rhythmic song of laboring men and of women at
their weaving, sailors' "chanties," the celebration of funeral rites,
religious processional and pageant, are all expressions of communal
feeling, and it is this communal feeling--"the sense of joy in widest
commonalty spread"--which has inspired, in Greece and Italy, some of the
greatest artistic epochs. It is true that as civilization has proceeded,
this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the
presence of the individual artist only. We see Keats sitting at his garden
table writing the "Ode to Autumn," the lonely Shelley in the Cascine at
Florence composing the "West Wind," Wordsworth pacing the narrow walk
behind Dove Cottage and mumbling verses, Beethoven in his garret writing
music. But the creative act thus performed in solitude has a singular
potency, after all, for arousing that communal feeling which in the moment
of creation the artist seems to escape. What he produces in his loneliness
the world does not willingly let die. His work, as far as it becomes
known, really unites mankind. It fulfills a social purpose. "Its function
is social consolidation."

Tolstoy made so much of this "transmission of emotion," this "infectious"
quality of art as a means of union among men, that he reduced a good case
to an absurdity, for he argued himself into thinking that if a given work
of art does not infect the spectator--and preferably the uneducated
"peasant" spectator--with emotion, it is therefore not art at all. He
overlooked the obvious truth that there are certain types of difficult
or intricate beauty--in music, in architecture, and certainly in
poetry--which so tax the attention and the analytical and reflective
powers of the spectator as to make the inexperienced, uncultured spectator
or hearer simply unaware of the presence of beauty. Debussy's music,