Portraits and Speculations — Reading Notes

. has no other end than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and, with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they, remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”

With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner, with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him. Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown silver trumpets under its walls.

Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise. Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a sultry day when--

“... the battle was scattered from hill to hill From the windmill to the watermill.”

may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their battle-cry.

They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought, secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he who looked at a picture could find something in the external world, by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and, on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion, though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that the revolt was merely playful.