Baldwin merely laughed. "It is droll to see what sort of hypermoral scruples some people indulge in now-a-days. So, your sense of the necessity of doing good is so keen that you actually feel wretched at the notion of your neighbours being simply happy, and no more, for an hour. You are not sure whether, by thus taking them away for a moment from the struggle with evil, letting them breathe and rest in the middle of the battle, you may not be making them sin and be sinning yourself! Why, my dear Cyril, if you condemn humanity to uninterrupted struggle with evil, you create evil instead of destroying it; if mankind could be persuaded to give up all of what you would call useless and selfish pleasure, it would very soon become so utterly worn out and disheartened as to be quite powerless to resist evil. If this is the system on which poets would reform the world, it is very fortunate that they don't think of it till they are flying to heaven."
"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you see," he went on, "you have always preached to me that the highest aim of the artist is the perfection of his own work; you have always told me that art cannot be as much as it should if any extra-artistic purpose be given to it. And while listening to you I have felt persuaded that all this was most perfectly true. But then, an hour later, I have met the same idea—the eternal phrase of art for art's own sake—in the mouths and the books of men I completely despised; men who seemed to lose sight of all the earnestness and duty of life, who had even what seemed to me very base ideas about art itself, and at all events debased it by associating it with effeminate, selfish, sensual mysticism. So that the idea of art for art's own sake has come to have a disgusting meaning to me."
Baldwin had risen from the grass, and untied the horse from the trunk of the cypress.
"There is a storm gathering," he said, pointing to the grey masses of cloud, half-dissolved, which were gathering everywhere; "if we can get to one of the villages on the coast without being half-drowned while crossing the swamps, we shall be lucky. Get in, and we can discuss art for art's own sake, and anything else you please, on the way."
In a minute the gig was rattling down the hill, among the great blasted grey olives, and the vines with reddening foliage, and the farm-houses with their fig and orange trees, their great tawny pumpkins lying in heaps on the threshing-floor, and their autumn tapestry of strung-together maize hanging massy and golden from the eaves to the ground.
Baldwin resumed the subject where they had left it: "My own experience is, that the men who go in for art for art's own sake, do so mainly from a morbid shrinking from all the practical and moral objects which other folk are apt to set up as the aim of art; in reality, they do not want art, nor the legitimate pleasures of art: they want the sterile pleasure of perceiving mere ingenuity and dexterity of handling; they hanker vaguely after imaginary sensuous stimulation, spiced with all manner of mystical rubbish, after some ineffable half-nauseous pleasure in strange mixtures of beauty and nastiness; they enjoy above all things dabbling and dipping alternately in virtue and vice, as in the steam and iced water of a Turkish bath…. In short, these creatures want art not for its own sake, but for the sake of excitement which the respectabilities of society do not permit their obtaining, except in imaginative form. As to art, real art, they treat it much worse than the most determined utilitarian: the utilitarians turn art into a drudge; these æsthetic folk make her into a pander and a prostitute. My reason for restricting art to artistic aims is simply my principle that if things are to be fully useful they must be restricted to their real use, according to the idea of Goethe's Duke of Ferrara:—
| 'Nicht alles dienet uns auf gleiche Weise; |
| Wer vieles brauchen will, gebrauche jedes |
| In seiner Art, so ist er wohl bedient.' |
I want art in general not to meddle with the work of any of our other energies, for the same reason that I want each art in particular not to meddle with the work of any other art. Sculpture cannot do the same as painting, nor painting the same as music, nor music the same as poetry; and by attempting anything beyond its legitimate sphere each sacrifices what it, and no other, can do. So, also, art in general has a definite function in our lives; and if it attempts to perform the work of philosophy, or practical benevolence, or science, or moralizing, or anything not itself, it will merely fail in that, and neglect what it could do."
"Oh yes," continued Baldwin after a minute, as they passed into the twilight of a wood of old olives, grey, silvery, mysterious, rising tier above tier on either side of the road, a faint flicker of yellow light between their feathery branches. "Oh yes, I don't doubt that were I a writer, and were I to expound my life-and-art philosophy to the world, the world would tax me with great narrowness! Things are always too narrow for people when they are kept in their place—kept within duty and reason. Of course there is an infinite grandeur in chaos—in a general wandering among the Unknown, in an universal straining and hankering after the Impossible; it is grand to see the arts writhing and shivering to atoms, like caged vipers, in their impotence to do what they cannot. Only it would be simpler to let those do it who can; and my system is the only one which can work. Despair is fine, and Nirvâna is fine; but successful and useful activity is a good deal finer. Wherefore I shall always say—'Each in his place and to his work;' and you, therefore, my dear Cyril, to yours, which is poetry."
"I think your philosophy is quite right, Baldwin, only—only, somehow, I can't get it to suit my moral condition," answered Cyril. "I do feel quite persuaded that sculptors must not try to be painters, nor musicians try to be poets, nor any of them try to be anything beyond what they are. It is all quite rational, and right, and moral, but still I am not satisfied about poetry. You see a poet is not quite in the same case as any other sort of artist. The musician, inasmuch as musician, knows only notes, has power only over sounds; and the painter similarly as to form and colours; if either be something more, it is inasmuch as he is a mere man, not an artist. But a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, knows, sees, feels a great many things which have a practical and moral meaning: just because he is a poet, he knows that there is something beyond poetry; he knows that there are in the world such things as justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness: he knows all this, which the mere musician, the mere painter, does not—and knowing it, perceiving, feeling, understanding it, with more intensity than other men, is he to sweep it all out of his sight? is he to say to justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness, 'I know you, but my work lies not with you?' Is he to do this? Oh, Baldwin, if he be a man and an honest one, he surely cannot: he cannot set aside these ideas and devote himself to his art for its own sake."