In defense of art for the sake of art

Reading Robert Lazu Kmita’s recent CWR essay condemning art for art’s sake as poisonous, I noticed two significant omissions. While his article is devoted to literature, Kmita ignores some of the greatest Christian novelists, poets, and playwrights to have lived since the Aesthetic Movement he criticizes. And, while he admits that art need not be deliberately didactic, he fails to see a middle ground between Oscar Wilde’s amoral aestheticism and his own insistence that art must be capable of serving a didactic purpose.

Art, rather obviously, can and should be divided into the morally acceptable and the morally reprehensible. But it is one thing to say art should not undermine morality and quite another to say it must have characteristics which promote it. That art for art’s sake is legitimate and that such art can be aesthetically superior to art that promotes morality is easily demonstrable.

Martin Seymour-Smith’s 1975 Guide to World Literature professed to analyze every twentieth-century writer of any significance and included well over a thousand authors. Yet it omitted a man whom Hilaire Belloc described as “the best writer of English now alive,” whom Evelyn Waugh called “the master,” and whose multitude of admirers included George Orwell and Max Beerbohm—all four of whom were included. That man was P.G. Wodehouse. His bizarrely chaotic plots are the closest the Anglophone novel has ever come to the comedies of Shakespeare. Each of his characters is a unique and, apart from their comically absurd elements, believable individual. His rhetorical style is superb, with many noting a particular gift for similes. For Bertie Wooster to use phrases like “eggs and b.” (for bacon) reveals his personality and creates an atmosphere in a way that no lengthy description could. If Wodehouse’s light comedy points to truth, it is in a minimalist, technical, and virtually meaningless way.

Similar minimalism, technicality, and virtual meaninglessness might allow the application of the word “art” to certain works which take a novelistic form but are really extended parables rather than artistic literature. The obvious example—and I do not mean to challenge its value as a parable—is Lord of the Rings. Even if the greatest of its kind, its plot remains that of a generic fantasy epic. J.R.R. Tolkien’s straightforward prose could work in a biography but is a shortcoming in a novel, while his efforts to be more rhetorical are clumsy. His characters are parabolic rather than artistic, exemplars of particular virtues or vices, their personalities those of types (ruler, warrior, etc.) rather than individuals. Gandalf is meant to exemplify wisdom and acts the way he does because that is how Tolkien believed a wise man acts.

Unless satirizing evil, avoiding the parabolic and combining high art with an explicit moral message is among the most difficult tasks a writer can set himself. One of the few successes, and the best known in the Anglophone world, is Brideshead Revisited. But it succeeds because its moral message is a subtle undercurrent which only occasionally takes center stage, while its main characters are well-developed, unique individuals. Bridey does not collect matchboxes because it is what a dull and priggish devout Catholic aristocrat would do. A devout Catholic aristocrat just as dull and priggish could still be a sports fan, or could have a boring but highly intellectual hobby. Bridey collects matchboxes because it fits his individual personality.

Other works by Waugh were exercises in art for art’s sake, as were some by the other of the two greatest Anglophone literary artists—T.S. Eliot, whose absurdist poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are unlikely to be particularly loved by those approaching literature from a moralistic perspective. Kmita gives no consideration to either, or to Flannery O’Connor or Muriel Spark or any other practicing Christian who was primarily an artistic writer. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who appreciated art for art’s sake, were essayists whose brilliance in that genre was not equaled in their poetry or fiction. Tolkien was a philologist. Joseph Conrad publicly expressed hostility to Christianity.

Oscar Wilde, interestingly enough, had a lifelong interest in Catholicism and was a deathbed convert—though he is a poor choice of exemplar of the Aesthetic Movement. The Aesthetic Movement originated as opposition to utilitarian belief that art must be able to serve a didactic purpose, affirming that because beauty is good, it is morally good to pursue it for its own sake, and was associated with (and overlapped) the Pre-Raphaelite Movement—an indirect influence on Belloc and direct influence on Waugh.

Wilde was part of the Decadent Movement, which largely spoke the language of Aestheticism but agreed with the utilitarian belief that pursuing beauty for its own sake is not a moral good and claimed to pursue art for the sake of art while actually pursuing art for the sake of decadence. His work does not merely refrain from condemning debauchery that serves an artistic purpose. It wallows in it and can, at times, seem as much a vehicle for decadence as Tolkien’s is one for a positive moral message.

Leaving aside philosophical questions of how all beauty in some way points to truth merely by being beautiful, or the fact that any contents of a book will point to some realities, if beauty is good in itself, then it logically follows that literary beauty need not point to truth in any other way.