AssalamOalikum,
Shall be grateful if someone reviewed these precis for me:

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From Plato to Tolstoi art has been accused of exciting our emotions and thus of disturbing the order and harmony of our moral life.” Poetical imagination, according to Plato, waters our experience of lust and anger, of desire and pain, and makes them grow when they ought to starve with drought. “Tolstoi sees in art a source of infection. “Not only in infection,” he says, “a sign of art , but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.” But the flaw in this theory is obvious. Tolstoi suppresses a fundamental moment of art, the moment of form. The aesthetic experience – the experience of contemplation- is a different state of mind from the coolness of our theoretical and the sobriety of our moral judgment. It is filled with the liveliest energies of passion, but passion itself is here transformed both in its nature and in its meaning. Wordsworth defines poetry as “ emotion recollected in tranquility’. But the tranquility we feel in great poetry is not that of recollection. The emotions aroused by the poet do not belong to a remote past. They are “ here”- alive and immediate. We are aware of their full strength, but this strength tends in a new direction. It is rather seen than immediately felt. Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. Shakespeare never gives us an aesthetic theory. He does not speculate about the nature of art. Yet in the only passage in which he speaks of the character and functions of dramatic art the whole stress is laid upon this point. “ The purpose of playing,” as Hamlet explains, “ both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as, twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” But the image of the passion is not the passion itself. The poet who represents a passion doest not infected us with this passion. At a Shakespeare play we are not infected with the ambition of Macbeth, with the cruelty of Richard III or with the jealously of Othello. We are not at the mercy of these emotions; we look through them; we seem to penetrate into their very nature and essence. In this respect Shakespeare’s theory of dramatic art, if he had such a theory, is in complete agreement with the conception of the fine arts of the great painters and sculptors.

The true motive of art

Art is thought to incite inappropriate values among its followers by many people such as Plato and Tolstoy. Plato thought that poetry aroused such feelings in its readers which should be better left unnoticed, Tolstoy declared the degree of mutation to be the measure of the effectiveness of the art. But the actual purpose of art is to make us think , rather than submerging us into past memories. In his play Hamlet, Shakespeare reveals the true nature as a mirror to our emotions. While watching any play the audiences do not experience the emotions of the artist but they see to the depth of the character’s nature. Thus Shakespeare quite aptly describes the creation of art.

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Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. instead of deriving pleausre from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. if he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself. if this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence,and even the most useful exercise of exceptional skill. why should a medical man go to see his patients in a car when the labourer has to walk to his work? why should the scientifc investigator be allowed to spend his time in a warm room when others have to face the inclemency of the elements? why should a man who possesses some rare talent of great importance to the world be saved fromt he drudgery of his own housework? to such questions envy finds no answer. fortunately, however, there is in human nature a compensating passion, namely that of admiration. whosoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy. what cure is there for envy? for the saint there is the cure of selflessness, though even in the case of saints envy of other saints is by no means impossible. but, leaving saints out of account, the only cure of envy in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness. but the envious man may say: 'what is the good of telling me that the cure of envy is happiness? i cannot find happiness while i continue to feel envy, and you tell me that i cannot cease to be envious until i find happiness.' but real life is never so logical as this. mereley to realize the cause of one's own envious feeling is to take a long step towards curing them.

The woes of envy

Envy is considered to be one of the most unpleasant aspects of human character. The source of happiness for an envious person is not his success, rather someone else’s failure. The idea of someone else in misery is very appealing to such people, for it is other people’s agony that the envious ones draw strength from. Envy is countered by Admiration, a positive feeling characterized by happiness on seeing someone successful. The cure to happiness could be selflessness but it would be limited to saints. For normal people, happiness is considered the cure. Ironically, this is the one thing that an envious person finds impossible to feel. The recognition of the cause of enviousness would be the first step towards its cure.