One can say of speech that it is beautiful but incomprehensible to those who do not understand the language in which it is uttered. Speech uttered in Chinese may be beautiful and yet remain incomprehensible to me if I do not know Chinese, but a work of art is distinguished from all other spiritual activity in that its language is understandable to everyone, that it infects everyone without distinction. The tears, the laughter of a Chinese will infect me in just the same way as the tears and laughter of a Russian, as will painting and music, or a work of poetry if it is translated into a language I understand. The song of a Kirghiz or a Japanese moves me, though not as much as it moves the Kirghiz or the Japanese themselves. So, too, I am moved by Japanese painting and Indian architecture and Arabian tales. If I am little moved by a Japanese song or a Chinese novel, it is not because I do not understand these works, but because I know and am accustomed to higher works of art, and by no means because this art is above me. Great works of art are great only because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. The story of Joseph, translated into Chinese, moves the Chinese. The story of Shakya-muni moves us.82 The same is true of buildings, paintings, statues, music. And therefore, if art does not move us, one must not say that the cause is the spectator’s or listener’s incomprehension, but one can and must conclude that it is either bad art or not art at all.
The difference between art and mental activity, which requires preparation and a certain sequence of learning (so that one cannot teach trigonometry to someone who does not know geometry), is precisely that art affects people independently of their degree of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, of images infects any man, on whatever level of development he may stand.
The business of art consists precisely in making understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning. Usually, when a person receives a truly artistic impression, it seems to him that he knew it all along, only he was unable to express it.
And the best, the highest art has always been so: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the stories of Jacob, Isaac, and Joseph, the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, the Gospel parables, and the story of Shakya-muni, and the Vedic hymns – all convey very lofty feelings, and in spite of that are fully understandable to us now, to the educated and the uneducated, and were understood by people of their own time, who were still less educated than our own working people. They talk of incomprehensibility. But if art is the conveying of feelings that arise from a people’s religious consciousness, how can a feeling based on religion – that is, on man’s relation to God – be incomprehensible? Such art must be, and indeed has always been, understandable to everyone, because each man’s relation to God is always the same. And therefore temples, and the images and singing in them, have always been understandable to everyone. The obstacle to understanding the best and highest feelings, as is also said in the Gospel, by no means lies in an absence of development and education, but, on the contrary, in false development and false education. A good and lofty artistic work may indeed be incomprehensible, only not to simple, unperverted working people (they understand all that is lofty) – no, but a true artistic work may be and often is incomprehensible to highly educated, perverted, religion-deprived people, as constantly occurs in our society, where people find the highest religious feelings simply incomprehensible. I know people, for example, who consider themselves most refined, and who say that they do not understand the poetry of love for one’s neighbour and of self-denial, or the poetry of chastity.
