PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE. 1909 EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910 THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911 OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912 PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS BY ARTHUR RANSOME MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1913 _Copyright_ TO JOHN MASEFIELD NOTE Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,” and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers on Daudet and Coppée were prefixed to collections of stories by these writers: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for permission to reproduce them here. CONTENTS PAGE ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE 1 ALOYSIUS BERTRAND 35 ALPHONSE DAUDET 57 THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE 71 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 87 WALTER PATER 129 REMY DE GOURMONT 161 THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI 187 KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH 207 ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... has no other end than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and, with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they, remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”