142 LITEEAKY VALUES 



and joyous pagan world had no need of. Still, so 

 far as the poet is a doctor or a priest, so far does he 

 fail to live in the spirit of the whole. 



It is, I think, in these or similar considerations 

 that we are to look for the justification of the phrase, 

 now almost everywhere disputed, " Art for art's 

 sake." It is only saying that art is to have no par- 

 tial or secondary ends, but is to breathe forth the 

 spirit of the whole. It must be disinterested ; it is 

 to hold the mirror up to nature. It may hold the 

 mirror up to the vices and follies of the age, but 

 must not take sides. It represents ; it does not 

 judge. The matter is self-judged in the handling 

 of the true artist. Didactic poetry or didactic fiction 

 can never rank high. Thou shalt not preach or 

 teach ; thou shalt portray and create, and have ends 

 as universal as has nature. 



Our moral teachers and preachers often fail to see 

 that the first condition of a work of pure art is that 

 it be disinterested, that it be a total and complete 

 product in and of itself ; and that it is its own excuse 

 for being. Its business is to represent, to portray, 

 or, as Aristotle has it, to imitate nature, and not to 

 preach or to moralize. Our ethical and religious 

 writers and speakers are apt to call this artistic dis- 

 interestedness indifferentism. If the novelist does 

 not openly and avowedly take sides with his good 

 characters against his bad, or if, as Taine declares his 

 function to be, he contents himself with •*^u"mm' 

 ing them to us as they are, whole, not bl • artist who 



