Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

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.