The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [11]
These writers—novelists, poets, and critics—were not only temperamentally attracted to in-your-face confrontation; they also felt themselves to be pushing back against a suffocating, and insufferable, tide of utilitarian moralism. Conservative critics insisted that art must be conducive to virtue; liberal critics, that art must “do good,” must be enlisted in the cause of social justice. In response to such apologists, moralists, and crusaders, whatever their political or religious doctrines, “aesthetes,” delighting in the paradox, claimed that the true use of art was to be useless.
The originator of the phrase l’art pour l’art (often translated as “art for art’s sake”) in the nineteenth century was the novelist Théophile Gautier. The phrase was used first in English by two figures associated with the Aesthetic Movement, Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The essence of art for art’s sake was captured in J. M. Whistler’s oft-quoted remark that “art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone … and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.”30
“Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless,” Gautier asserted in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), and Oscar Wilde adapted this as “All art is quite useless” in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In his preface, Gautier wrote feelingly about “moral journalists” and the “fine sermons which have replaced literary criticism in the public prints” and addressed himself directly, and at length, to “utilitarian critics” and the vexed question of “use.”
When an author tossed some or other book, novel or poetry, on to their desk—these gentlemen lay back nonchalantly in their armchairs, balanced them on their back legs, and, rocking to and fro with a knowing look, a superior air, they said:
“What is the use of this book? How can one apply it to moralization and to the well-being of the largest and poorest class? What! Not a word about the needs of society, nothing civilizing and progressive! How, instead of making the great synthesis of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of regenerating and providential inspiration, how can one produce poems and novels which lead nowhere, and do not advance the present generation along the path to the future? How can one be concerned with style and rhyme in the presence of such grave matters? What do we care, ourselves, about style, and rhyme, and form?”
The “very faithful imitation of the utilitarian style,” as he happily admitted, was Gautier’s own, and he was therefore able to offer, immediately, his scathing reply: “a book does not make jellied soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous spurt; a drama is not a railways, though all of these things are essentially civilizing, and they advance humanity along the path of progress.”31
A novel has two uses: one is material, the other spiritual, if you can use that expression about a novel. The material use is, for a start, the several thousand francs which go into the author’s pocket … The spiritual use of novels is that, while people read them, they sleep, and don’t read useful, virtuous and progressive periodicals, or other similar indigestible and stupefying drugs.32
And what of beauty, music, and painting? In a strictly utilitarian sense, none of these entities is useful, since “nothing useful is indispensable for life,” and “nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless.” Contrariwise, “everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful room in the house is the lavatory.”33
When Oscar Wilde came to adapt and adopt these sentiments almost half a century later, he focused