Browning's dramatic monologues, Henry James's short stories, were not
written for Tolstoy's typical peasant. They would "transmit" to him
nothing at all. But although Tolstoy, a man of genius, overstated his case
with childlike perversity, he did valuable service in insisting upon
emotion as a basis for the art-impulse. The creative instinct is
undeniably accompanied by strong feeling, by pleasure in the actual work
of production and in the resultant object, and something of this pleasure
in the harmonious expression of emotion is shared by the competent
observer. The permanent vitality of a work of art does consist in its
capacity for stimulating and transmitting pleasure. One has only to think
of Gray's "Elegy" and the delight which it has afforded to generations of
men.

Another conception of the artistic impulse seeks to ally it with the
"play-instinct." According to Kant and Schiller there is a free "kingdom
of play" between the urgencies of necessity and of duty, and in this
sphere of freedom a man's whole nature has the chance to manifest itself.
He is wholly man only when he "plays," that is, when he is free to create.
Herbert Spencer and many subsequent theorists have pointed out the analogy
between the play of young animals, the free expression of their surplus
energy, their organic delight in the exercise of their muscles, and that
"playful" expenditure of a surplus of vitality which seems to characterize
the artist. This analogy is curiously suggestive, though it is
insufficient to account for all the phenomena concerned in human artistic
production.

The play theory, again, suggests that old and clairvoyant perception of
the Greeks that the art-impulse deals with aesthetic appearances rather
than with realities as such. The artist has to do with the semblance of
things; not with things as they "are in themselves" either physically or