Part 10

We do not find our individual selves in great art, but the humanity of which we are partakers. Something is brought home to us; but not to our partialities, rather to our higher selves. We are never so little selfish and hampered by our individualism as when admiring a great work of the imagination. No doubt our modern world calls for doctors of the soul in a sense that the more healthful and joyous pagan world had no need of. Still, so far as the poet is a doctor or a priest, so far does he fail to live in the spirit of the whole.

It is, I think, in these or similar considerations that we are to look for the justification of the phrase, now almost everywhere disputed, “Art for art’s sake.” It is only saying that art is to have no partial or secondary ends, but is to breathe forth the spirit of the whole. It must be disinterested; it is to hold the mirror up to nature. It may hold the mirror up to the vices and follies of the age, but must not take sides. It represents; it does not judge. The matter is self-judged in the handling of the true artist. Didactic poetry or didactic fiction can never rank high. Thou shalt not preach or teach; thou shalt portray and create, and have ends as universal as has nature.

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Our moral teachers and preachers often fail to see that the first condition of a work of pure art is that it be disinterested, that it be a total and complete product in and of itself; and that it is its own excuse for being. Its business is to represent, to portray, or, as Aristotle has it, to imitate nature, and not to preach or to moralize. Our ethical and religious writers and speakers are apt to call this artistic disinterestedness indifferentism. If the novelist does not openly and avowedly take sides with his good characters against his bad, or if, as Taine declares his function to be, he contents himself with representing them to us as they are, whole, not blaming, not punishing, not mutilating, transferring them to us intact and separate, and leaving “us the right of judging if we desire it,”--if this is his attitude, says the Reverend Washington Gladden in his late brochure on “Art and Morality,” he is guilty of indifferentism. “His work begins to be the work of a malefactor, and he himself is preparing to be fit company for fiends.” Mr. Gladden misapprehends Taine, whom he quotes, and he misapprehends the spirit and method of art. If the artist does really convey to us the impression that he is personally indifferent as to which triumphs in life, good or evil, and that he is as well pleased with the one as with the other, then he is culpable and merits this harsh language.

What art demands is that the artist’s personal convictions and notions, his likes and dislikes, do not obtrude themselves at all; that good and evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. He does not hold a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative energy. He is neither a judge nor an advocate; he is a witness on the stand; he tells how the thing fell out, and the more impartial he is as a witness, the better. We, the jury, shall watch carefully for any bias or leaning on his part. We shall try his testimony by the rules of evidence; in this case, by our acquaintance with other imaginative works and by our experience of life. The great artist works in and through and from moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism of life. He is moral without having a moral. The moment a moral or an immoral intention obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from grace as an artist. He confesses his inability to let nature speak for herself. He is inadequate to the logic of events, and gives us a logic of his own. Shakespeare is our highest type of the disinterested artist. Does he do aught but hold the mirror up to nature? Is his work overlaid with an avowed moral intention? Does he go behind the returns, so to speak? Does he tamper with the logic of events, the fate of character? What is the moral of “Hamlet”? Has any one yet found out? Yet the plays all fall within the scope of moral ideas; they treat moral ideas with energy and depth, as Voltaire said of English poetry in general.

We must discriminate between a conscious moral purpose and an unconscious moral impulse. A work of art arises primarily out of the emotions, and not out of the intellect, and is sound and true to the extent to which it repeats the method of nature. Buskin, whom Mr. Gladden quotes, was of course right when he said that the art of a nation is an exponent of its ethical state. But the condition of first importance with the artist is, not that he should have an ethical purpose, but that he should be ethically sound. He may work with ethical ideas, but not directly for them. The preacher speaks for them; the poet speaks out of them,--he plays with them, he takes his will of them; they follow, but do not lead him. Again, Ruskin says, “He is the greatest artist who has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest number of the greatest ideas;” but he is an artist only by virtue of having embodied these ideas in an imaginative form. If they run through his work as homilies or intellectual propositions, or lie upon it as moral reflections, they are not within the vital sphere of art.

Art is not thought, but will, impulse, intuition; not ideas, but ideality. None knew this better than Ruskin. No great artist can be cornered with the question, “What for?” What is creation for? What are you and I for? The catechism answers promptly enough, and the artist does not contradict it. But of necessity his answer is not so dogmatic; or rather, he does not give a direct answer at all, but lets the epitome of life which he brings answer for him. He is not to exhibit the forces of life harnessed to a purpose and tilling some man’s private domain, but he is to show them in spontaneous play and fusion, obeying no law but their own, and working to universal ends. His work is finally for our edification. If it be also for our reproof, he must conceal his purpose so well that we do not suspect it. He must let the laws of life alone speak for him. Sainte-Beuve has a passage bearing upon this subject which is admirable. He had been censured as a critic for being too lax in his dealings with the morality of works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Let me quote his reply: “If there are some readers (and I think I know some) who would prefer to see me censure it oftener and more roundly, I beg them to observe that I succeed much better by provoking them to condemn it themselves than by taking the lead and seeming to try to impose a judgment of my own every time. In the long run, if a critic does this (or an artist either), he always wearies and offends his readers. They like to feel themselves more severe than the critic. I leave them that pleasure. For me, it is enough if I represent and depict things faithfully, so that every one may profit from the intellectual substance and the good language, and be in a position to judge for himself the other, wholly moral parts. There, however, I am careful not to be crucial.” French art is less moral than English art, not because it preaches less, but because it is more given to levity and trifling, because it exaggerates the part one element plays in life, and because it draws less inspiration from fundamental ethical ideas. It may at times be guilty of indifferentism, but against very little English or American art can this charge be made.

The great distinction of art is that it aims to see life steadily and to see it whole. This is its high and unique service; it would enable us to live in the whole and in the spirit of the whole; not in the part called morality, or philosophy, or religion, or beauty, but in the unity resulting from the fusion and transformation of these varied elements. It affords the one point of view whence the world appears harmonious and complete. The moralist, the preacher, seizes upon a certain part of the world, and makes much of that; the philosopher seizes upon another part, the æsthete upon another; only the great artist comprehends and includes all these, and sees life and nature as a vital, consistent whole.

Hence it is that a work of pure art is a complete product in a sense that no other production of a man’s mind is; or, as Ruskin says, “It is the work of the whole spirit of man,” and faithfully reflects that spirit. The intellect may write the sermon, or the essay, or the criticism, but the character, the entire life and personality are implicated in a creative work.

Disinterestedness means no more in art, in letters, than it means in life. In our kind deeds, our acts of charity, in love, in virtue, we act from disinterested motives. We have no ulterior purpose. These things are their own reward. A noble life is disinterested; it bestows benefits without thought of self. But it is not indifferent. Indifference is personal,--it is a state in which one personal motive cancels another; whereas disinterestedness is impersonal,--it is the complete effacement of self. It is a high, heroic moral state, while indifference is a lax or negative state. We are disinterested when we rescue a child from drowning or stop a runaway horse, but we are not indifferent. A novelist is disinterested when he has no motives but those inherent in his story, no purpose but to hold the mirror up to nature. He is interested and departs from his high calling when he seeks to enforce a particular moral, or to indoctrinate his reader with a particular set of ideas. And yet if he betrays indifference as to the issues of right and wrong, that is a vice; it is contrary to the self-effacement which art demands. To obtrude your indifference is of the same order of faults as to obtrude your preferences. The innate necessities of the situation may alone speak.

To suppress or to ignore the world of vice and sin is not to be moral; to portray it is not to be immoral. But to gloat over it, to dwell fondly upon it, to return to it, to exaggerate it, to roll it under the tongue as a sweet morsel,--that is to be immoral; and to treat it as time and nature do or as the great artists do, as affording contrasts and difficulties, and disturbing but not destroying the balance of life, is within the scope of the moral. Art must make us free of the whole; every work must in a measure reflect the whole of life; if it dwell too much on that part called sin and evil, it is false to its ideal; it must keep the balance; it must be true to the integrity of nature. All things are permissible in their time and place. That a thing is real and true is no reason why it should go into the artist’s picture; but that it belongs there, that it is organic there, a part of a vital whole, and that that whole is a fair representation of human life--in this is the justification. Not every scene in nature composes well into a picture, and not every phase of human life is equally significant in a creative work. That nature does this of that is no reason why the artist should do it, unless he can show an equal insouciance and an equal prodigality and power. He must take what he can make his own and imbue with the spirit of life. I lately read a novel by one of our most promising young novelists, in which there was a streak of vulgar realism, forced in, evidently, under the pressure of a theory,--the theory that art is never to shrink from the true. It offended because it was entirely gratuitous; there was no necessity for it. If it was true, it was not apt; if it was real, it was not fit; it jarred; it was dragged in by main force; it was a false note. Is not anything disagreeable in a novel of the imagination a false note? Disagreeable, I mean, not by reason of the subject matter, but by reason of the treatment. Dante makes hell fascinating by his treatment.

There are three ways of treating the under side of nature. There is the childlike simplicity of the Biblical writers, who think no evil; there is the artistic frankness of the great dramatic poets, who know the value of foils and contrasts, and who cannot ignore any element of life; and there is the license and levity of the lascivious poets, who live in the erotic alone. Both Ibsen and Tolstoi have been condemned as immoral only because their artistic scheme embraces all the elements that are potent in life. Of levity, of exaggeration, they are not guilty. If Zola is to be condemned, it is probably because he makes too prominent certain things, and thus destroys the proportion. In nature nothing is detached. Her great currents flow on and purify themselves. The ugly, the unclean, are quickly lost sight of; the sky and the sun cover all, bathe all. But art is detachment: our attention is fixed upon a few points, and a drop or two too much of certain things spoils it all. In nature a drop or two too much does not matter; we quickly escape, we find compensation. A bad odor in the open air is of little consequence; but in Zola’s books the bad odors are as in a closed room, and we soon pray to be delivered from them.

VII

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE

The one new thing in the world in our day is democracy, the coming forward of the people, and that which has grown out of it, or which goes along with it,--science, free inquiry, the industrial system, the humanitarian spirit. The old and past world from which we inherit our literary tastes and standards was characterized by a condition of things quite different,--the supremacy of the few, the leadership of the hero, the strong man,--the picturesque age that gave us art, theology, philosophy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth of the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its majority. The bewitching, the delusive, the unreasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What the man loses and what he gains in passing from youth to manhood the race has lost and has gained in passing from the age of myth to the age of science. A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity, and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a reasonableness, a width of outlook, power to deal with real things, sanity, and self-control, have come. Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate. All forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities and arbitrary distinctions, all pomp and circumstance, count for less and less in the world. Art is less and less; nature is more and more. The extrinsic, the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness of priests, the divinity of kings, count for less and less, while the real, the true, the essential, in all fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art for art’s sake can ever be in the future what it has been in the past. We are too deeply absorbed in the reality; we care less and less for the symbol and more and more for the thing symbolized. The monarchical idea is dwindling; the throne as a symbol has lost its force; the old religious language of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow, archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God is fast taking the place of the idea of the despotism of God. It has taken mankind all these centuries to rise to the conception of a being with whom the language of excessive flattery and adulation seems out of place. The democratic idea will eventually penetrate and modify our religious notions. We shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity by groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne. The despot goes out, the Brother comes in. All these things and many more cluster around the word democracy.

What is the import of the word as applied to literature? How far will it carry in this field? Is the democratic movement favorable or unfavorable to the growth of true literature? It has been often said that literature is essentially aristocratic; that is, I suppose, that it implies a degree of excellence, a kind of excellence, quite beyond the appreciation of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true, and always has been true. While the mass of the people are not good offhand judges of the best literature, it is equally true that great literature--literature that has breadth and power, like the English Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that transcend the sphere of mere letters--makes its way more or less among the people. The highest ideals in any sphere can never draw the many; yet the few, the elect who are drawn by them, are probably just as sure to appear in a democracy as in an oligarchy.

To some readers democracy in literature seems to suggest only an incursion of the loud, the vulgar, the cheap and meretricious. Apparently it suggests only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose volume “Questions at Issue” contains an essay upon this subject.

Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that the summits of literature have not yet been submerged by the flood of democracy. The standards have not been lowered in obedience to the popular taste.

But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or evolution now imminent will require a new species of poetry, that this poetry will be democratic to a degree at present unimaginable, though just what it is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear to him. He says: “The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,” and he does not see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with. We shall certainly have left what we had before these types and symbols came into vogue,--nature, life, man, God. If out of these things we cannot supply ourselves with new types and values, then certainly we shall be hard put.

The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in democratic times.

Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged the reading public, and that in democratic times, as in all other times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good taste to go around.

Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,--the carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields.

The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems will imply a great body of humanity--the masses, the toilers--and will carry into emotional and ideal fields the atmosphere of these.

Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudalism, by royalty, by lords and ladies, by the fears and superstitions of the past, by mythology and ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism in all their manifold forms. Art and literature have lived upon these things for ages. Can democracy, can the worth and picturesqueness of the people, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the poets? Can science, can the present day, can the religion of humanity, the conquest of nature’s forces, inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give rise to great art rivaling that of the past? As between the past and the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not in the poverty of the material of to-day, but in the inadequacy of the man. It requires a great spirit, a powerful personality, to master and absorb the diverse and complex elements of our time and imbue them with poetic enthusiasm.

The humanitarian enthusiasm as a _motif_ in literature and art,--the inspiration begotten by the contemplation of the wrongs, the sufferings, and the hopes of the people,--undoubtedly came in with democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient and to the feudal world. To all the more vital voices of our time this enthusiasm gives the tone. How pronounced it is in two of our latest and most promising poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. William Vaughn Moody!

It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old order of things had the advantage of picturesqueness. Is it because it is so hard to free ourselves from the illusions of time and distance? Charm, enticement, dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar. The now, the here, are vulgar and commonplace. We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were done on just such a day as this, and that the actors in them were just such men as we see about us. Then the days of one’s youth seem strange and incredible; how different their light from this hard, prosy glare! Our distrust of our own day and land as furnishing suitable material for poetry and romance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.