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Michael Miller

Dr. Jeffrey W. Timmons

ENG400 - 29120

April 3, 2016

To Be or Not to Be Didactic: The Struggle Continues

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

individual expression of a Beauty [that] reveals everything, because it expresses nothing

(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

audience without imparting any type of universal code of morality.

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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.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Leitch 586.

Pater, William. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Leitch 730.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled The

Four Ages of Poetry. Leitch 596.

Von Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A.

Willoughby. Leitch 491-492.

Wilde, Oscar. The Decay of Lying: An Observation. Leitch 794.

---, The Critic as Artist. Leitch 802.

Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802). Leitch

562.