Chapter I

THAT in the practice and pleasure of art for art's sake there lurks an unworthy element, is a superstition that recurs in every generation of critics. A most accomplished and modern disciple of the gay science but yesterday made it a reproach to the greatest living English novelist, that he, too, was all for beauty, all for art, and had no great informing purpose. "Art for art's sake" is clearly, to this critic's mind, compatible with the lack of something all desirable for novels. Yet if there is indeed a characteristic excellence of the novel, if there is something the lack of which in a novel is rightly deplored, then the real art for art's sake is bound to include this characteristic excellence. If an informing purpose is needed, no true artist can dispense with it. Otherwise art for art's sake is a contradiction in terms.

The critic I have quoted merely voices the lingering Puritan distrust of beauty as an end in itself, and so repudiates the conception of beauty as containing all the excellences of a work of art. He thinks of beauty as cut up into small snips and shreds of momentary sensations; as the sweet sound of melodious words and cadences; or as something abstract, pattern-like, imposed from without,--a Procrustes-bed of symmetry and proportion; or as a view of life Circe-like, insidious, a golden languor, made of "the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace." All these, apart or together, are thought of as the "beauty," at which the artist "for art's sake" aims, and to that is opposed the nobler informing purpose. But the truer view of beauty makes it simply the epitome of all which a work of art ought to be, and thus the only end and aim of every work of art. The beauty of literature receives into itself all the precepts of literature: there is no "ought" beyond it. And art for art's sake is but art conscious of its aim, the production of that all-embracing beauty.

What, then, is the beauty of literature? How may we know its characteristic excellences? It is strange how, in all serious discussion, to the confounding of some current ideas of criticism, we are thrown back, inevitably, on this concept of excellence! The most ardent of impressionists wakes up sooner or later to the idea that he has been talking values all his life. The excellences of literature! They must lie within the general formula for beauty, yet they must be conditioned by the possibilities of the special medium of literature. The general formula, abstract and metaphysical as it must be, may not be applied directly; for abstract thought will fit only that art which can convey it; hence the struggle of theorists with painting, music, and architecture, and the failure of Hegel, for instance, to show how beauty as "the expression of the Idea" resides in these arts. But if the general formula is always translated relatively to the sense-medium through which beauty must reach the human being, it may be preserved, while yet affirming all the special demands of the particular art. Beauty is a constant function of the varying medium. The end of Beauty is always the same, the perfect moment of unity and self-completeness, of repose in excitement. But this end is attained by different means furnished by different media: through vision and its accompanying activities; through hearing and its accompanying activities; and for literature, through hearing in the special sense of communication by word. It is the nature of this medium that we must further discover.