Page 63 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 6.3 Art for Art’s Sake

“Art for art’s sake” is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century,
‘’l’art pour l’art’’, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is
divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes described as
“autotelic”, from the Greek autoteles, “complete in itself”, a concept that has been expanded to embrace
“inner-directed” or “self-motivated” human beings.
A Latin version of this phrase, “Ars gratia artis”, is used as a slogan by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and
appears in the circle around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in their motion picture logo.
“L’art pour l’art” (translated as “art for art’s sake”) is credited to Theophile Gautier (1811–1872),
who was the first to adopt the phrase as a slogan. Gautier was not, however, the first to write those
words: they appear in the works of Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe. For
example, Poe argues in his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850), that
We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake and to acknowledge such to
have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:—
but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately
there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more
supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this
poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

Consider the term Art for Art’s Sake in detail.
“Art for art’s sake” was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of
those who, from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism, thought
that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. “Art for art’s sake” affirmed that
art was valuable as art that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art did not need
moral justification, and indeed, was allowed to be morally subversive.
In fact, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which he discarded the accustomed role of
art in the service of the state or official religion, which had adhered to its practice since the Counter-
Reformation of the sixteenth century:
Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of
eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love,
patriotism and the like.
Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist’s distancing himself from sentimentalism. All
that remains of Romanticism in this statement is the reliance on the artist’s own eye and sensibility
as the arbiter.
The explicit slogan is associated in the history of English art and letters with Walter Pater and his
followers in the Aesthetic Movement, which was self-consciously in rebellion against Victorian
moralism. It first appeared in English in two works published simultaneously in 1868: Pater’s review
of William Morris’s poetry in the Westminster Review and in William Blake by Algernon Charles
Swinburne. A modified form of Pater’s review appeared in his Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873), one of the most influential texts of the Aesthetic Movement.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The Victorian period revolves around the political career of ...... .
2. The Victorian period was bound to be a ...... time.

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