Portraits and Speculations

Transcriber’s Note
Cover created by Transcriber and placed into the Public Domain.
A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: Studies in the development of Narrative. 1909
EDGAR ALLAN POE: A Critical Study. 1910
THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911
OSCAR WILDE: A Critical Study. 1912
PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS
BY ARTHUR RANSOME
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1913
Copyright
TO JOHN MASEFIELD
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.”