For all historical writing may be poetical and contain poems, if the ecstasy is there. What distinguishes the poetry in history is the emotion, and all history that is a dry narrative is history and not poetry. Thucydides's _Peloponnesian War_ and Carlyle's _French Revolution_ contain much poetry though they deal with the particular, but they are made poetry by the ecstasy. Some of Herodotus is poetry, and much of Homer is history.
Again Aristotle's distinction is obsolete in these days of prose fiction which deals with the particular, and often with the actual, and merely changes the names. And these novels often contain poems. We recall Fielding's distinction between novels and histories, the former being true in everything but the names, and the latter being false in everything but the names.
There is poetry in Livy, Tacitus, in Gibbon, Froude, and all great historians.
[133:A] "Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism. . . . The values of literature are in the last resort moral. . . . Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails."--J. Middleton Murry.
POETRY RISES ABOVE ART FOR ART'S SAKE AND INTUITION
The first lengthy formulation of the theory of art for art's sake was made, I believe, by Gautier in the preface to his _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, in 1833. The theory itself had previously also been advanced and put into practice by Keats, and a little later by Poe. Hugo claims to have been the first one to have used the term. He was also one of the most bitter opponents of the idea, as the readers of his _Shakespeare_ will note. The view was supported in France by Baudelaire and Flaubert, and by later schools like the Symbolists. In England Swinburne made an excellent defense of it in his book on _William Blake_. The poets of "The Nineties" like Wilde and Symons wrote in favor of it. Mention should also be made of an exceedingly good chapter on the _Dignity of Technique_ in R. A. M. Stevenson's _Velasquez_, and especially Whistler's _Ten o'Clock Lecture_.
Needless to say, most of these writers had their own conception of what art for art's sake was. They agreed on several phases of it--that the subject matter and ideas of a work of art did not count, that the important thing was the execution, that art was not to be judged by any standard of morality, that it had its own morality, and that it did not matter if from a conventional point of view it was immoral, provided it was well executed. The theory was antagonistic to the introduction of ideas, of humanitarian motives, of tendencies to the portrayal of life and the analysis of emotions. Its use was certainly an undemocratic phase of art.