Abstract

It is widely believed that the essence of art is the expression of feeling or emotion, a view often simply assumed to be true by students, critics and even very great artists. Thus Tolstoy in What Is Art? asserts that “art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them” (Tolstoy 1930: 123). I shall call this view “expressivism.”