There are isolated paragraphs in their works wherein we find the imagination and the intellect fused; we cannot distinguish that which belongs to the realm of logic and that which is the result of pure emotion. Of philosophers of our own time, Bergson and Bertrand Russel have occasional passages where a profound idea is emotionalized. Hence these belong to the literature of ecstasy, or poetry. We must no longer conclude that only that is poetry which sings a song in verse. It is just because the verse lyric, epic, and tragedy are among the oldest forms of literature that the theories of poetry have been built up by examining chiefly these forms. Aristotle's Poetics, except for a few vital passages, has done more mischief in literary criticism than his Logic has done in philosophy. What a queer definition of poetry is that which includes a metrical insipid utterance or a versified fact of microscopic importance, and excludes the sublime reflections of philosophers who contemplate the nature of the entire cosmos, who fathom the mysteries of the universe, and who state for us our relation to it and give us profound conceptions of it. If one finds poetry only in the saccharine sonnets of our magazine writers and none at all in the great philosophers, he does not understand what poetry is. If you, however, call a philosophical principle poetry when you find it in verse, you must admit that the poetry was there before it was put in verse, in the prose version. For poetry, not being a branch of literature but an emotional spirit bathing all literature, also holds philosophical ideas, intellectual conceptions in solution, whenever these are in prose and move to ecstasy. Aristotle and many others were also absorbed as to the difference between poetry and history, as they had been between poetry and philosophy. He stated truly enough that Homer as a poet did not differ from Herodotus as a historian simply because of their difference in metre. He found that the difference between poetry and history lay in this, that poetry dealt with the universal and history with the particular. This definition means very little to us to-day even though commentators try to explain that Aristotle includes under poetry any treatment also of the particular which presents universal situations and depicts universal traits. History, however, also treats of the universal, for it records universal traits in the particular events which it describes. Aristotle's distinction falls, for history and poetry deal with both the particular and universal. We cannot say with Aristotle that history tells what Alcibiades actually did, while poetry would tell what any man would do. An actual emotional account of the deeds and character of Alcibiades is poetry, as you will observe by reading Plutarch. For all historical writing may be poetical and contain poems, if the ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the poetry in history is the emotion, and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's Peloponnesian War and Carlyle's French Revolution contain much poetry though they deal with the particular, but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Herodotus is poetry, and much of Homer is history. Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days of prose fiction which deals with the particular, and often with the actual, and merely changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's distinction between novels and histories, the former being true in everything but the names, and the latter being false in everything but the names. There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great historians. CHAPTER VIII 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 Madamoiselle 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 libe the artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times,cialist 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 Party! Does not aut/ understand aut's sake ! 140 THE LITERATURE OF ECSTASY was a petty, sterile and inane one. Art fought against 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 |