For Art's Sake

THE AESTHETIC ADVENTURE--William Gaunt--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

When Commodore Perry sailed into the harbor of Yokohama in 1854, he had no idea that he was contributing to a new esthetic movement in Europe. The pottery and ornaments which the Japanese began to export after Perry's visit were often wrapped in the Japanese equivalent of old newspapers--sheets of popular prints engraved by native artists. Within a few years, Parisian poets and painters were ransacking Japanese packing cases as though the crumpled prints inside were an accidental answer to an occidental prayer. For the prints were a pat expression of a slogan that was sweeping France: art pour l'art--art for art's sake.

What this slogan meant, how it took root in France and invaded England, is the theme of this witty, intelligent history. Packed with anecdotes and character sketches of 19th-Century French and British bohemians, The Aesthetic Adventure is a fine companion piece to Author Gaunt's earlier, excellent account of The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (TIME, Sept. 21, 1942).

Art for art's sake reached Britain at the height of her prosperity. Painters, buyers and art critics were flourishing as never before (or since) in a happy bond of mutual agreement. On the broad walls of well-to-do Victorian homes hung immense canvases which told stories that were easily understood and appreciated--the capture of a dishonest bank clerk at a crowded railroad station, Derby Day, a bearded doctor's vigil at the bedside of a sick child, a sailor's sweetheart gazing across the ocean. Most of these painted short stories had a helpful moral.

"Don't Bother Me!" Such forthright esthetic aims filled the new generation of esthetes with scorn and contempt. By 1870, a furious, no-quarter battle was under way that lasted until the century's end. To the artistic rebels, the oldtime Victorian painter kowtowed to an ignorant, over-sentimental public. He also debased the sanctity of art by making line and form play second fiddle to maudlin subject matter and moss-backed morality.

The Japanese, said the rebels, were among those who knew better. Their exquisite prints had no truck with either nature or morals. Drawn with "uncanny delicacy," they were "as strange and detached from everyday life as if they had dropped from the moon." The figures in them were black-haired dolls" ... expressionless, self-satisfied, self-sufficient. This was art for art's sake--in which the painter recognized that natural subjects simply existed. "No poem," declared Poet Charles Baudelaire, a pioneer in the new movement, "is so great, so noble ... as that which has been written simply for the pleasure of writing a poem." "Don't bother me!" snapped the great Edouard Degas when he was asked to exhibit his work. "Is painting meant to be looked at?"

Art for art's sake shocked both conservative and radical Victorians--"its foredoomed end," said Socialist William Morris, "must be that art at last will seem too delicate a thing even for the hands of the initiated to touch." What added to the horror of the Victorians was that some of the new artists themselves were as amoral, antisocial and perverse as their works. The artist, the disciples of art for art's sake pointed out, was not a reformer, not a teacher, and certainly not a creature bound by ordinary laws. He was the last of the aristocrats in a world being turned over to mob rule. He followed his exquisite sensations wherever they might lead him; personal excess was his right. Poet Baudelaire managed to combine all the ideals: he smoked hashish, lived with Negresses, wrote brilliant, sensual, satanic poems. But, as an aristocrat, he dressed immaculately in the British manner and learned to drop phlegmatic monosyllables out of the corner of his mouth.

The Hard, Gemlike Flame. Many of the new esthetes determinedly marked themselves off from the crowd by what seemed to them the highest forms of both self-indulgence and self-martyrdom. They nourished what they chose to call nostalgie de la boue -- "the longing for the gutter." Paul Verlaine, the outstanding poet of his day, was a diseased, perverted dipsomaniac who "wrapped his suppurating limbs ... in vile rags," lived off the earnings of prostitutes, and alternated between "maudlin ferocity [and] mawkish repentance." Accused of being decadent, he replied: "I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. ... It suggests a soul capable of intense pleasures. ... It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiator ... the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation."

Imitations of the authentic French originals sprang up in England like dubious mushrooms-- gutter lovers, Beau Brummels, professional sensualists, practical jokers, drug fiends. Mildest, most influential apostle of the new, sensuous estheticism was Oxford's Walter Pater. As a child, he had loved to don a surplice and "preach sermons to his admiring Aunt Betty." As a youth, he had avoided horse play ("I do not seem to want a black eye"). As a professor, he coined a famed phrase when he solemnly urged his students "to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame." "Oh, for Crime!" But most of Pater's fellow esthetes took their rebellion more strenuously. In a series of sensuous, pagan hymns, Eton-educated Poet Algernon Swinburne (he had been expelled from the Royal Arts Club for laying the members' silk hats on the cloakroom floor and hopping on them) "shook [a] small, trembling fist" at the man he named "the Socialist of Galilee": Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,

The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake . . .

His friend, Painter Simeon Solomon, submitted to the indignant Royal Academy a series of nude saints, beautiful to look at, but wearing their halos in a very unconventional place. Art lover Charles Howell (who once hired 40 cabs to carry his 40 Japanese vases across London) became a talented embezzler. Nervous Novelist George Moore boasted of keeping a devoted python in his bedroom and went around sighing: "Oh, for crime!" Playwright Oscar Wilde made a fine art of neatly inverting the Victorian's cherished maxims ("If one tells the truth one is sure sooner or later to be found out").

Most talented, most influential painter in the new movement in Britain was American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He always denied his Massachusetts birthplace ("I do not choose to be born at Lowell"). He affected a monocle, practiced ruthless selfishness, collected Japanese china, and developed a laugh so blood-curdling that Actor Henry Irving memorized it for dramatic moments in Shakespeare's plays. His emblem was a butterfly with a sting in its tail--a sting he attempted to keep in constant use.

Who's a Paint-Flinger? Whistler, almost singlehanded, destroyed Britain's early-Victorian esthetic conventions and opened the door to the French impressionists. When art pundit John Ruskin, whose opinions could make or break any painter in England, described him as "a conceited coxcomb . . . flinging a pot of paint in the public's face," Whistler promptly sued him for libel. In one of the strangest trials ever held outside Alice in Wonderland, the British public had its first glimpse of the new art. All through a long winter's day, Whistler's now-famed, misty blue-grey impressions of the Thames were pawed over by a jury. One painting was presented upside down. Another fell, and cracked a juror's bald pate. By evening, the jury was so benumbed that when Ruskin's attorney showed them a Titian as an example of "real" art, they couldn't see the difference. "We've had enough of these Whistlers," barked one, waving Titian away. Whistler won his case.

The effect on British art circles was tremendous. Public confidence in critical guidance disappeared; prices for paintings suddenly dropped. The unhappy Ruskin retired to a country cottage suffering from what was described as a "brainstorm," finally fell into a deep lethargy from which he roused himself only once a day, when the maid tapped on his door and announced: "The sunset, Mr. Ruskin."

Death Agony. But if art for art's sake triumphed in Whistler v. Ruskin, it came a cropper in the private lives of most of its British disciples. Unlike their more adaptable, more original French contemporaries, who made Paris the authentic, though wicked, art center of the world, the Britons founded no school. They simply faded out in the squalid romanticism of the "Naughty Nineties." Oscar Wilde's brilliant career came to a catastrophic end in the world's most sensational vice trial. Poet Francis Thompson, an opium addict, was reduced to destitution, and died leaving behind his minor masterpiece of repentant self-martyrdom, The Hound of Heaven. Poet James Thomson (The City of Dreadful Night) crept starving to the bed of a blind friend, who stretched out his hands and withdrew them covered with the blood of Thomson's fatal hemorrhage. Simeon Solomon died in a poorhouse; consumption killed Ernest Dowson (Cynara) at 33. Brilliant Aubrey Beardsley, whose delicate, sensual illustrations for Wilde's Salome became more famous than the play itself, died of tuberculosis, complicated by high living, at 25, leaving a curt, harrowing letter to a friend:

Jesus is our Lord and Judge

I implore you to destroy all [my] bad drawings . . .

By all that is holy all obscene drawings

Aubrey Beardsley

In my death agony.

Most ironic fate of all was reserved for surly, misanthropic Whistler. A painting he had coldly entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black so captivated the despised, incurably sentimental public that they retitled it Mother and made it what it is today--America's favorite picture of filial piety.

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