Poe laid down the principle of art for art's sake that poetry deals with beauty alone and that the only faculty for appreciating it is that of taste. He held that poetry had nothing to do with truth or duty; that the intellect and the moral sense were concerned with these and hence had no field for exercising themselves either in writing or judging poetry.
As a matter of fact all three faculties, taste, intellect and moral sense, are called into use in creating and appreciating the highest kind of poetry or any other form of literature. There is no reason why a poet should not make use of all three faculties if he has them all developed. Goethe and Ibsen possessed them. The highest form of taste can scarcely be attained unless the poet's intellect and moral sense are fine. For falsehood and sin are repugnant to our taste for beauty. A book that is absolutely tainted with moral perversities or shows a foolish and inconceivable conception of intellectual values will be certainly deficient in some phases of beauty. Our consciences and our minds are unconsciously consulted in our conception of the beautiful. Not only truth, but duty is beauty. Even Poe maintained that Taste held intimate relations with Intellect and Truth and he therefore placed it between them.
The greatest classics are those that appeal to all three faculties in us and those works which offend both our intellect and moral sense do not completely satisfy our sense of beauty. The best critics from Hazlitt to Brandes understood that. Fortunately many of the classics have lost only in parts their moral and intellectual value, and hence still hold sway over us. And sometimes the beauty
is so intensely striking that we charitably overlook faults of morality and intellect.
As Professor Woodberry says in his A New Defense of Poetry in The Heart of Man: "Can there by any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation."
The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics imagine. Spingarn was mistaken when he said that we have done with all moral judgment of literature. A book is often artistically great chiefly because its ethical viewpoint is right. The rightness of it is often what creates the ecstasy. Let us take Ibsen's Ghosts. The real greatness of this play is not chiefly in its picture of heredity or of a man becoming an idiot. Its real value lies in its attitude towards the marriage problem and its contrast of the two characters, Mrs. Alving, the representative of the new order, and of Pastor Manders, representing society. The leading question there is, should Mrs. Alving have gone back to her husband, knowing that he was possessed of a loathsome disease which might be inherited by any possible progeny? Was she justified in leaving him? That these are the important questions is evident from the motive which prompted Ibsen to write the play, namely, to answer the critics of the Doll's House. The conclusion reached by Ibsen from the terrible picture is that Mrs. Alving was wrong in going back to her husband, that there are times when it is justifiable to
leave one's husband. This is the moral lesson of the play, and is conveyed with great ecstasy; in fact, the moral intensifies the ecstasy. A conventional playwright would have concluded that Mrs. Alving should have remained with her husband in obedience to duty, that the simple-minded Pastor was in the right. The play even if handled as well as by Ibsen could not have been the great work of literature that it is, if written in defense of the conventional moral code. A great author attacks conventional morality to battle for a higher morality.
The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary excellence of his work.[133-A] But this does not mean that we must go back to the old Greek idea that poetry be a vehicle for the inculcation of the commonplace ethics. Nor does it imply that we cannot appreciate a poet because we disapprove of the religion or political party with which he is affiliated.
In the conclusion of his essay on "How a Young Man Should Study Poetry," Plutarch shows that the philosopher and the poet are engaged in the same mission. He takes passages from the poets and shows us that they are similar to those he selects from the philosophers. The doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras agree with the ideas by the dramatists spoken on the stage, and with those that lyricists sang to the harp. We may accept Plutarch's views except in so far as he urges that poetry should preach dogmatic and conventional ethics.
We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Shelley may be placed parallel respectively to passages from thinkers who influenced them, Aquinas, Bolingbroke, and