Portraits and Speculations

It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... 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.