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Michael Miller
ENG400 - 29120
April 3, 2016
During the Romantic and Neoclassical periods of art, writers and critics still found
themselves arguing for or against the didactic necessity of literature and asked what, if not to
instruct, was the purpose of art? The critics of those ages can be roughly divided into three
schools of thought: those who believed art should be didactic, those who believed art was not
necessarily didactic or even moral but that it often ended up representing absolute truths in a
didactic manner, and those who believed that art should not be didactic, moral, or ethical, but
merely produce a great moment of feeling for the audience. The first group of critics,
represented by Friedrich von Schiller, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Matthew Arnold, argued that
not only should art be didactic, but it should inspire and motivate the audience towards moral
and ethical social change. The second group, less concerned with the authors intent and more
with the audiences reception of the art, is comprised of William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Lastly, William Pater and Oscar Wilde herald a dramatic change in arguing that
art should avoid morality and ethics, and throw off the chains of its historical didactic nature.
For the first group of critics, there was a great need for art to guide society through a
time of intense and rapid industrialization and the beginning of a globalized economy. Unlike
the critics of the past, Schiller, Shelley, and Arnold all focus on the social implications of the
morality of literature instead of the individual. Schiller was the first to argue that the artist
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should work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise, and
that it was the artists responsibility to banish from their [societys] pleasures caprice, frivolity,
and coarseness, whereby the artist can eradicate these faults from societys actions and
eventually
from their inclinations too (492). Shelley advances this argument by stating that the great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting
upon the cause (596). In A Defence of Poetry, he defends Homer and Dante as great poets
because, through their imagination, they mobilized the social conscience of their audience and
impacted all spheres of social, political, and religious life, not just that of the individual reader
(605). Matthew Arnold extends this command to the critic as well, arguing that it is the role of
the critic to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making
this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas (703). Although all three writers
explicitly believed in the necessity of didactic art, Schiller hints at the second predominant view
of this era when he states, Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-
image, that the original image will once again be restored (491).
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge make up the second class of thinkers,
believing that universal truth is always represented through art, though the artwork itself may
not necessarily be concerned with moral or ethical questions. Wordsworth leans slightly
towards the first class of thinkers since he believes that it is only through careful consideration
expressed through emotional imagery that art reflects truth in nature. Most famous for his
statement that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, Wordsworth
continues in the same breath to state that Poems to which any value can be attached, were
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never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than
usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply (562). Believing in a universal
morality, Coleridge defines two purposes of poetry that dodge the necessity of morality while
still implying the organic truth revealed by the poet: exciting the sympathy of the reader by a
faithful adherence to the truth of nature and giving the interest of novelty to the familiar by
poetic imagination (586). By pointing out that art isnt explicitly didactic, these two critics paved
the way for the third class of thinkers that throw off any shackle from art to morality.
William Pater and Oscar Wilde both believed that the individual emotional response of
the audience is the chief goal of art. Pater and Wilde, unlike their contemporaries, valued the
individual over the absolute, the experience over a sense of moral imperative, and believed art
should only seek to create a moment of beauty for the audience. Pater artfully summarizes this
position when he states, For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the
highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake (730).
Wilde propagates this claim by stating outright that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue
things, is the proper aim of Art (794). In his work The Critic as Artist, Wilde provides a long list
of beautiful liars whose art is so great that the question of morality doesnt matter. In Wildes
opinion, supposing that art should serve a purpose defeats the actual purpose of art as an
(802). For this third class of critics, the focus of any type of art should not be to impress a moral
sentiment upon its audience but to help them appreciate beauty of the natural world through
imagination.
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Until Pater and Wilde, most critics of art and literature believed that imaginative works
should be based in absolute truth and serve to instruct their audience on questions of morality
or ethics. In the Romantic and Neoclassical eras, this didactic view extended especially to the
greater notion of social consciousness, needing to move at the same pace of industrialization.
Pater and Wilde, however, argue that art should instead create a unique expression within its
Works Cited
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co,
2010. Print.
Arnold, Matthew. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. Leitch 703.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled The
Von Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A.
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802). Leitch
562.