POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION
The first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for art's sake was
made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface to his _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_, in 1833. The theory itself had previously also been advanced
and put into practice by Keats, and a little later by Poe. Hugo claims
to have been the first one to have used the term. He was also one of the
most bitter opponents of the idea, as the readers of his _Shakespeare_
will note. The view was supported in France by Baudelaire and Flaubert,
and by later schools like the Symbolists. In England Swinburne made an
excellent defense of it in his book on _William Blake_. The poets of
"The Nineties" like Wilde and Symons wrote in favor of it. Mention
should also be made of an exceedingly good chapter on the _Dignity of
Technique_ in R. A. M. Stevenson's _Velasquez_, and especially
Whistler's _Ten o'Clock Lecture_.
Needless to say, most of these writers had their own conception of what
art for art's sake was. They agreed on several phases of it--that the
subject matter and ideas of a work of art did not count, that the
important thing was the execution, that art was not to be judged by any
standard of morality, that it had its own morality, and that it did not
matter if from a conventional point of view it was immoral, provided it
was well executed. The theory was antagonistic to the introduction of
ideas, of humanitarian motives, of tendencies to the portrayal of life
and the analysis of emotions. Its use was certainly an undemocratic
phase of art.
In many respects the theory awakens sympathy in all lovers of
literature; it was a reaction to the moralist view which wanted art to
teach the commonplace ethical notions we all know. Art has always had an
enemy in the bourgeois moralist. He always looked for a sermon, and
stamped the artist as immoral who arrived at conclusions different from
those countenanced by the church or the state. He was not satisfied to
read of a wonderful portrayal of a passion, done as a lesson in
psychology without any moral comments by the author. He wanted the
artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times, instead of
portray. The Puritan opposed the truthful description of natural
emotions; he looked askance upon references to the body; he wanted
people drawn in obedience to laws, instead of as breaking through them.
He tried to thrust subjects upon the artist and limit him. He had no ear
for sound, no eye for color, no appreciation of beauty.
Little wonder that the artist lost patience and sent morality to the
devil, and deified technique and deliberately chose unseemly subjects.
The disciples of art for art's sake did much good to the cause of art.
They broadened its field. They gave the artist the right to write about
a corpse or delirium tremens, to describe a murder or a crime without
pointing out lessons. They permitted him to use his imagination to the
full extent, and to invent any forms he chose.
But the theory overrode itself. It became an apology for abuses of art.
Writers began to create meaningless jargon, to waste words on trite
ideas, to avoid all contact with life, to eliminate man as a subject of
art. Art lacked soul, and if it showed a personality behind it, it was
a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against intellect as well as
against morals. Even those who advocated it were writing in direct
violation of it. Flaubert's realistic novel _Madame Bovary_ and
Swinburne's _Songs Before Sunrise_ were not art for art's sake. _The
Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not art for art's sake; imprisonment had
changed Wilde's views. Men like Gautier and Swinburne, who were the most
ardent champions of the theory of art for art's sake, found themselves
in a peculiarly inconsistent predicament by being the greatest admirers
of Victor Hugo, much of whose work was written with humanitarian
motives. Hearn in America started out as a believer in the theory and
ended by attacking it.
Tolstoy wrote most bitterly against the idea, and we may say that from
the time of the appearance of his _What is Art?_ in 1897, the theory
fell into disrepute. Not that people accepted Tolstoy's views that art
should teach the love of God and man, but his idea did much to humanize
art. Before Tolstoy, Nietzsche had also taken a fling at the theory.
Critics to-day recognize that life forms the substance of art, that art
gets all its material from life and that man is properly the subject of
art, thinking man as well as emotional man. They further perceive that
literature is so human in its origins that even unconscious human
emotions are present where they were not suspected. The more we humanize
literature the greater art does it become. It is true, however, that
after the art work is completed, it has influence on life. Our lives may
be devoted to art, we may have life for art's sake, but not art for
art's sake.
Still, art for art's sake is a good theory to be invoked against the
extreme didactic-minded one who thinks nothing should be written unless
it illustrates a lesson in our commonplace and bourgeois morality, a
morality very often false and outworn. They would ask writers to show us
men conforming to this morality, instead of revolting from it. They
would make literature exalt self-sacrifice in all circumstances and
would stamp out any tendencies to liberal speculation. They demand that
poetry uphold society in all its institutions, teach obedience, and
prevail on us to bow down before the mandates of priests and
capitalists. But literary men are often at variance with the moral views
entertained by the clergy and the ruling classes, and they have the
right to illustrate the views of morality that they consider much higher
than the customs of society. An author should not be bound by the views
of his age. He should in fact expose them and show their evil influence.
He does not, however, then write in conformity with the theory of art
for art's sake, for he expresses another morality than that of
society's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. Ibsen's
greatness lies in the fact that he did not subscribe to conventional
morality: he attacked it and thus he really was an artist with a moral
aim.
Brandes has shown in his essay on Björnson how the attack upon art with
a purpose is really often a disguised means of objecting to liberal
thought in literature. Art for art's sake occasionally thus becomes an
apology for conventional morals too. Most of the great works were
written with a purpose. Dante and Milton have left records in their
prose works of the purpose of their poems. But no one objected to the
purpose of these poets, because they defend conventional morality. Yet
as soon as literature tries to advance new ideas we hear the cry against
its moralizing and didactic tendency. Art for art's sake is then the
shout of even the conventional moralist. Those who declare themselves
against the tendency of the intellectual element in literature are often
those who fear new ideas; they would want only romance, homely morals,
happy endings and impossible adventures, constant triumph of good, etc.
They do not understand what literature has to do with problems of
marriage and divorce, the state and the individual. They want it to be
separated from real life. Nevertheless, they cannot ignore the great
books of our day which deal with these questions. They have been driven
to the theory of "art for art's sake" by their hatred of liberal ideas.
"The formula, 'written with a purpose,'" says Brandes, "has been far too
long employed as an effective scarecrow to drive authors away from the
fruit that beckons to them from the modern tree of knowledge."
When Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Zola brought us messages in ecstatic
prose, the enemies of intellect in art called them preachers of filthy
ideas, misguided moralists, and would not consider them as artists and
poets. The moralist and aesthete joined forces in attacking Balzac and
Stendhal when these novelists gave us unpopular ideas emotionally
expressed. The critic who hates advanced thought exclaims that he wants
no ideas in art at all; he does not wish it to become the vehicle of
views he personally dislikes. Hence at times even the Philistine critic
who opposed the introduction of intellect in art found himself in
harmony with members of the art for art's sake school.
Nothing better illustrates the harm which may result from the theory
that shuns a purpose in art, than the neglect it brings about for books
with an unpopular message. England, for example, has neglected the best
work of one of the poets of the nineties, who intellectually ranks with
her best poets. Who reads the later work of Robert Buchanan? Attention
is riveted to his early lyrics, and good as these are, his more
thoughtful poetry has been forgotten. A. Stoddart-Walker wrote after
Buchanan's death _Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt_, and
Harriet Jay wrote a biography. Attention was called in these volumes to
the later works of Buchanan, where he stood for liberty of thought. Nor
was he didactic in his pleas, in such poems as _The City of Dreams_,
_The Wandering Jew_, _The Ballad of Mary the Mother_, _The Outcast_,
_The Devil's Case_, and _The New Rome_. Lecky called _The City of
Dreams_ the modern _Pilgrim's Progress_, and said that it would take a
prominent position in the literature of the time. But no one knows these
poems, and of Buchanan's work only a few ballads are known. Buchanan is
not any more didactic than Browning, but since he represents bold
speculation (and also made too many personal enemies) he was throttled
by Philistinism.
The opponents of utilitarianism in art have been the calumniators of
poets with ideas unacceptable to the majority. They have hindered the
popularity of pessimistic poets like Leopardi and Thomson. They are
shocked by the morbidities of Dostoievsky and Strindberg. But every
author has the right to describe emotions without being compelled to
draw a moral from them. In such case the writer becomes a great
psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual
content. Thus the stories of Poe which have no moral outlook are really
stories with a purpose for they are profound documents in psychology. To
them psychologists like Mosso have gone for studies of the emotion of
fear. One finds ideas in them that throw light on the nature of our
emotions. Hence Brownell in his well written essay on Poe which attacked
him because of his indifference to moral problems (a view in which
Howells and James concur) is wrong in denying to Poe a high place in
art. Poe did what all artists do: he drew on his emotions and if he
could portray fear and grief for death, it was because he had known
them. Graham describes the timid nature of Poe, who was afraid to be
himself alone. That feeling accounts for the _Fall of the House of
Usher_. Poe's stories are rich in ideas, in valuable psychological data.
None of them, except _William Wilson_, has an ethical aim, but they all
have an intellectual, utilitarian purport, in giving us profound
knowledge of man's hidden emotions. They are the result of Poe's keen
intellect as well as of his emotions. They have anticipated many
researches by psychologists; they have set circulating profound views of
the psychic constitution of man. They thus became art with a purpose,
not however to spread ethical truisms, but broad liberating ideas.
Those art for art's sake critics who take their inspiration from Poe's
essay on the _Poetic Principle_, sadly misunderstand their critic.
Except in two poems written as metrical and musical experiments, _The
Bells_ and _Ulalume_, Poe's intellect adorned all the poetry he wrote in
verse as well as prose. Read his prose poems, _Shadow_, _Silence_, _The
Colloquy of Monos and Una_, _The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion_,
_The Power of Words_, and _Eureka_. He was justified in his pleading
that poetry should not become the mere vehicle of moral commonplaces,
for these are not beautiful, and the vogue of the New England school was
beginning to make the moral aims of poetry too paramount.
The poet should be free and if he wants to emotionalize a social message
he should be allowed to do so, risking aesthetic value if he becomes
didactic, or is false in his views. And he should also be allowed to
describe beauty and emotions, without being compelled to draw a moral
conclusion therefrom.
Croce, who defined poetry as intuition, has helped to keep on its last
legs the idea of art for art's sake. He falsely teaches that poetry
deals with pure emotions, and that emotions and ideas are two separate
functions, one of the feeling man, the other of the thinking man.
Though Croce admits that the intellectual has its aesthetic side, that
art deals with the philosophic and moral, yet this definition of
literature in terms of intuition is not a true account of the nature of
literature, for he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to
the logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is the
combined product of all the logical faculties exercised by man in the
past, just as the action of an involuntary muscle is the continued
action of a muscle once voluntary, but which by force of habit for ages
became involuntary.
Intuition is not merely the knowledge of our hearts but of our brain as
well. The great novels and plays of the world's literature are the
artistic results of the intellect collaborating with the emotions. Croce
presents an ingenious explanation to enable him to call works of art
which are full of intellectuality, works of intuition. He says that the
effect of the work as a whole is that of an intuition. He holds that
when intellectual concepts are mingled with intuition they are not then
intellectual concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule
works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with intellectual
concepts appearing in a philosophical or scientific work, why not then
say that the intuitive quality disappears and becomes part of the
intellectual concept and that the scientific or philosophic work becomes
a work of intuition or a work of art as a whole? There is intellectual
working in Hamlet and intuitive expression in a dialogue of Plato. The
former is not wholly intuitive nor the latter wholly intellectual.
This is Croce's great fault--that he tries to rid poetry of what he
calls any suggestion of intellectualism.[146:A] He identifies the first
rudimentary form of knowledge with intuition, he distinguishes the
so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting,
unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which
involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the art for
art's sake school,--that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive
feeling.
Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling involves knowledge
and instant reflection. The bereaved poet knows and reflects on many
things at the very instant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His
intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the
psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest
English elegies philosophized while bemoaning their loss. The moral,
intellectual and logical faculties are at work along with the intuitive
faculty, or immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets.
It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art to presentation
of childish impressions or views, divested of judgment and reflection.
He discourages reasoning and thinking on the part of the artist. He
seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits
that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and mental
solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those who persist longest in
that first moment of intuition, and are innocent and childish in their
outlook.
Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of conceptual
knowledge. No, discrimination and judgment, distinction between reality
and unreality, is an important part of the poet's work, and to say that
it matters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that
correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is
to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry
does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment
enter, for these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of
imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually introduced, or
as the utterances in accordance with the truth of the character
portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.
Croce seems to think that art is expression of only intuition, but is
not expression of intellectual concepts which he claims belong to
philosophy. He who did so much to clear away the artificial divisions
reigning in the various arts, commits a greater error. He assigns one
kind of expression--intuition--to one branch of human endeavor--art; and
another kind of expression--true concepts--to another branch of human
endeavor,--logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two
moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, expressed concepts are
also literature when emotionalized, and logic is poetry when combined
with ecstasy.
Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom have what Croce
calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge free of concepts. Hence poetry
scarcely deals with intuition in Croce's understanding of the term.
Croce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation,
and from association. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but
the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails
to see why even sensation may not be intuition and hence art; some of
the world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny that intuition
includes unconscious memory is to deprive it of its essential quality.
Croce lost sight of the importance of that phase of art which deals with
the thinking man who feels, and he tried to bridge over the gap by
asserting that what determined the difference of the intellectual and
intuitive fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their
authors. Yet Virgil thought he was a poet in his _Georgics_ but he gave
us a book in farming instead. Plato sought to be a philosopher in his
_Banquet_ but he wrote a poem also.
Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His view that
philosophical passages, that is, intellectual concepts occurring in a
novel or play, become part of the intuition of the author, would mean
that the most unecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a
Shakespearean play, becomes intuition. The converse would also follow
that a passage of Shakespeare incorporated in Hegel is no longer poetry.
One of the results of Croce's aesthetic views on intuition is to drive
out of literary criticism the exercise of the intellect. He would have
us judge a book by its own standards and merely seek to find if the
author succeeded in doing what he intended. This view has been wrongly
attributed also to Goethe and Carlyle. It is, however, Maupassant's view
about the novel as he expounded it in his preface to _Pierre and Jean_.
We cannot accept this view. We must ask why does the author intend what
he does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go back of his
intentions and show him that his intellect and outlook are due to
certain causes and we must state whether or not we agree with him, and
why. An author may record his ecstasy in expounding absurd ideas. I
want to know why he believes in these ideas and I want to see if he can
make me believe them. If he does not, I cannot satisfy myself with
studying his intentions, even when they are in the form of verse or in a
novel. I also am concerned with the question whether he is right in
accepting these ideas, though I admit his sincerity.
Again I take up a Puritanical poem. I cannot judge the author by merely
studying the writer's intentions and contenting myself with the
knowledge that he has faithfully and beautifully recorded them. No, I
want to know why he is a Puritan; I seek to show the folly of his
expression; I must register my protest that I have not been moved by
him, that I consider him intellectually and morally deficient.
The great fault of Croce's views, however, is that in looking upon art
as expression he takes no interest in the question whether it meets with
sympathy. It is true he recognizes that the poet often expresses our own
intuitions for us, when he expresses his own. But he is not concerned
with the question whether the poet has a right to feel that way and
whether he has a sympathetic audience no matter how small. Yet the
artist who expresses his intuitions is always bound to have some
audience. It is because "every atom that belongs to me as good belongs
to you." He is bound to have sympathizers. If Croce had said that the
artist should not be concerned because the majority does not agree with
him, we could follow him, but only because we think the artist is right
and the majority is wrong. But to cast aside the question of sympathy
altogether, to refuse to take into consideration the emotions of any
readers, is to demoralize art and cast intelligence out of it.
It cannot be repeated then too often that poetry is not a matter of
emotions only, but of intellectual perception and moral outlook as well.
The poet who has described a painful episode in his life does not always
just merely record the pain, he goes further than his intuition. He
thinks and judges and condemns and plans. He is also a philosopher and a
moralist, excited to such states by his intuition. It wasn't intuition
that created the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, it was a moral and
intellectual vision working with the poet's intuition. Logic, science,
metaphysics, ethics, are part of the poetic material. All ideas are
philosophic or scientific, and emotionally and beautifully expressed may
become poetry or literature.
However, Croce did good service in calling for the independence of art,
since reformers and moralists often seek to force upon art a practical
end outside and beside it. He also admits that the practical and
aesthetic are often found united, and that it would be erroneous to
maintain that the artist's independence of vision should be extended to
the communication. "If art be understood as the externalization of art,
then utility and morality have a perfect right to deal with it; that is
to say, the right one possesses to deal with one's own household." Since
the artist selects from his intuitions when he writes, his selection is
governed by the economic conditions of life and of its moral direction.
Hence Croce finds the artist's use of the concepts of morality to some
extent justified.
But where the ideas dealt with by an author are such as all accept, the
beauty of the work depends on the manner in which it is written. Here he
does not write for the purpose of the underlying idea, which he uses
merely as a pretext for artistic work. He seeks to portray an emotion
and to make the reader feel it. Drawing a picture may be the object of
the author. He may merely try to reproduce with vividness what we all
see; or narrate what we all know. The importance of his work lies then
in its technique. There is no question that technique is always to be
considered in determining one's greatness as a writer.
What distinguishes the layman from the artist is that the former has no
power of craftsmanship; he does not understand the secrets of any of the
forms of literature; he does not know how to set down his thoughts or
sentiments in a pleasing or beautiful manner. There are many laymen who
have better views on morality and who possess a greater intellect than
many successful authors, but they are not artists. If by knowing how to
tell a story or sing a poem they could move the world,--if they had
craftsmanship,--then we would call them artists.
It does not follow, however, that because an author has certain
technical genius, but is destitute of any intellect, and dallies with
trite ideas, that he is a great artist. To rank among the great artists
perfection of form should be welded with great and important ideas of
life.
FOOTNOTES:
[146:A] Wordsworth was on better ground when he said, "Our continued
influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts." _Preface
to Lyrical Ballads_ (1800).