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 selfsacrifice 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 moral

ist. 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 prob

lems (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