AESTHETICS The emotions to be communicated by art must be emotions that can be shared by mankind in general, and not just by a pampered elite Where this is not the case we have either bad art or pseudo art Tolstoy is willing to accept that this judgement condemns many of the most admired works of music and literature—including his own novels The greatest novel of the nineteenth century, he maintained, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which spread the message of universal brotherhood across the boundaries of race and class Among the works of art Tolstoy condemned was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Does this transmit the highest religious feeling? No: no music can Does it unite all men in one common feeling? No, Tolstoy replied: ‘I am unable to imagine to myself a crowd of normal people who could understand anything of this long, confused, and artificial production, except short snatches which are lost in a sea of incomprehensibility.’ It is true that the work’s last movement is a poem of Schiller which expresses the very thought that it is feeling, in particular gladness, that unites people together ‘But though this poem is sung at the end of the symphony the music does not accord with the thought expressed in the verses; for the music is exclusive and does not unite all men, but unites only a few, dividing them off from the rest of mankind’ (WA 249) Art for Art’s Sake Tolstoy’s moralistic view of art quickly became unfashionable in the twentieth century The autonomy of art, if not its Nietzschean supremacy, was widely accepted: a work of art might be good art, and even great art, while being morally or politically deleterious The artistic merit of a work was even held to redeem its ethical dubiety, and many countries repealed laws that forbade the production and publication of works of art that had a tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ One of the most influential of twentieth-century aestheticians was the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) In metaphysics, Croce was an idealist, and developed a Hegelian system along with Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) until the two parted company in 1925 over the issue of Fascism Gentile became a theoretician of Fascism, while Croce, who was a cabinet minister in both pre-Fascist and post-Fascist Italian governments, was the leading intellectual opponent of Mussolini in the 1930s 265