The Literature of Ecstasy

eviously 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

es" like Wilde and Symons wrote in favor of it. Mention should also be made of an exceedingly good chapter

t 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 wel

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 artist to act like a preacher and condemn at all times, instead of portray. The Pu

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,

nst 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 an

? in 1897, the theory fell into disrepute. Not that people accepted Tolstoy's views that art should teach the love o

y 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 d

endencies 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

e 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 moralist. 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,

too long employed as an effective scarecrow to drive authors away f

list 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 n

e 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 Devi

ents 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 problems (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

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

so, risking aesthetic value if he becomes didactic, or is false in his views. And he should also be

for art's sake. He falsely teaches that poetry deals with pure emotions, and that emotions

of the nature of literature, for he regards the intuitive faculty as totally opposed to the logical faculty, a Kantian relic. Intuition, however, is the combined product of all the logical

e effect of the work as a whole is that of an intuition. He holds that when intellectual concepts are mingled with intuition they are not then intellectual concepts but part of the intuition. If this be so, the rule works the other way around. If intuition is mingled with intellectual concepts appearing in a philosophical or scientific work, why not

dge with intuition, he distinguishes the so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting, unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual

g the shock of his loss. His intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest English elegies philo

and thinking on the part of the artist. He seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits that in real life sensations are followed by reflect

or says or concludes, that correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment enter,

ng in the various arts, commits a greater error. He assigns one kind of expression-intuition-to one branch of human endeavor-art; and another kind of expression-true concepts-to another branch of human endeavor,-

oce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation, and from association. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails

that what determined the difference of the intellectual and intuitive fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their authors. Yet Virgil tho

or play, become part of the intuition of the author, would mean that the most unecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a Shake

l as he expounded it in his preface to Pierre and Jean. We cannot accept this view. We must ask why does the author intend what he does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go back of his intentions and show him that his intellect and outlook are due to certain causes and we must state whether or not we agree with him, and why. An author may record his ec

e knowledge that he has faithfully and beautifully recorded them. No, I want to know why he is a Puritan; I seek to show the folly of

s a right to feel that way and whether he has a sympathetic audience no matter how small. Yet the artist who expresses his intuitions is always bound to have some audience. It is because "every atom that belongs to me as good belongs to you." He is bound to have sympathizers. If Croce had said that the artist should not be

e goes further than his intuition. He thinks and judges and condemns and plans. He is also a philosopher and a moralist, excited to such states by his intuition. It wasn't intuition that created the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen, it was a mora

roneous to maintain that the artist's independence of vision should be extended to the communication. "If art be understood as the externalization of art, then utility and morality have a perfect right to deal with it; that is to say, the right one possesses to dea

he uses merely as a pretext for artistic work. He seeks to portray an emotion and to make the reader feel it. Drawing a picture may be the object of the author. He may merely try to reproduce with vividness

w how to set down his thoughts or sentiments in a pleasing or beautiful manner. There are many laymen who have better views on morality and who possess a greater intellect than many

itute of any intellect, and dallies with trite ideas, that he is a great artist. To rank amon

TNO

Our continued influxes of feeling are modified and dire