Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics

1 ‘Life as the End of Life’: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics Sara Lyons Submitted for Ph.D. Examination 2 ABSTRACT This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater’s efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a ‘fall’ into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne’s and Pater’s efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers – Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson – and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments p.5 Introduction p.6 1. Parleying with Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold: p.30 Blasphemy, the Dramatic Monologue, and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series 2. ‘Though Hearts Reach Back and Memories Ache’: p.61 Melancholy, Religious Doubt, and Swinburne’s Strenuous Joy i. The Carpe Diem Religion: Tennyson’s In Memoriam p.66 and Swinburne’s Minor Decadent Poems ii. ‘The Darkness of these Beaches’: Tennyson’s In Memoriam, p.85 Swinburne’s ‘By the North Sea’ and the Atheistic Sublime iii. ‘A Note of Rapture in the Tune of Life’: Arnold’s p.113 Tristram and Iseult, Tennyson’s ‘The Last Tournament’, and Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse 3. ‘A Secular, a Rebellious Spirit Often Betrays Itself’: Pater’s Early Aestheticism i. ‘Without the Sound of Axe or Hammer’: p.141 Pater’s ‘Diaphaneitè’, Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution, and the Aesthetics of Unbelief ii. ‘Neither For God nor For His Enemies’: Heresy and p.163 Disinterestedness in the Cultural Criticism of Arnold and Pater iii. ‘Experience Itself is the End’: John Stuart Mill and the p.215 Ends of Aestheticism in Pater’s ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ and the‘Conclusion’ 4. ‘Inheriting its Strange Web of Belief and Unbelief’: Walter Pater, George Eliot, and the Aura of Agnosticism. i. ‘What Face is Behind it?’: Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, p.238 Art, and Agnosticism ii. ‘Only the Thorough Sceptic Can Be the Perfect Saint’: p.260 4 Altruism and Epicureanism in Pater’s Marius and George Eliot’s Romola Coda: Magic’s Own Last Word, or, Pater and Swinburne p.287 at the Fin de Siècle Bibliography p.295 5 Acknowledgements First, I am deeply grateful to Professor Catherine Maxwell. It is no exaggeration to say that she has been an ideal mentor, intellectually and personally. She has been extraordinarily generous and supportive, and conversation with her always made me return to work with renewed energy. I feel extremely lucky to have had the benefit of a supervisor whose work I admire so much, and she has made both Victorian literature and the academic world come to life for me in many ways. Thanks are also due to Nadia Valman and Andrew Eastham, who have been very encouraging and who have asked probing questions at critical stages. I also wish to thank my family. Jack Lyons, Mark Bowyer, and Kate and Andre van Schaik have all been pillars of support despite the tyranny of distance. I also owe an enormous debt to Josh Edmonds, who had a large hand in making this enterprise possible. Lastly, I am very grateful to Noah Moxham, for reading it all a heroic number of times, and for making these past four years very happy ones. This thesis would not have been possible without the generous assistance of a Westfield Trust scholarship from Queen Mary, and an Overseas Research Student Award, both of which are gratefully acknowledged. 6 Introduction It is often remarked that Victorian aestheticism was a ‘religion of art’.1 It is a phrase whose appositeness owes everything to its ambiguity. It seems to imply that aestheticism was a secular phenomenon that elevated art at the expense of religion, or channelled religious forms and modes of feeling toward secular ends. And certainly aestheticism, or the concept of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’, was and is often defined as a rejection of the idea that art is answerable to religious criteria. As secular discourse often does, aestheticism presents itself as a realm of neutrality and freedom, a creed beyond the complications of creed. Yet the phrase ‘religion of art’ is sometimes used derisively, or with at least a shade of irony, since it implies that aesthetes did not manage to content themselves with art at all: rather, they engaged in a kind of idolatry, striving (properly or improperly, depending on the point of the view of the critic) to make art an adequate object for essentially religious impulses.2 In other words, the phrase seems at once to imply art’s usurpation of religion, and the failure of the secular to be quite secular. Likewise, the phrase seems to honour the idea that art and religion are inseparable, even equivalent, while it also suggests that this relationship can in fact be teased apart, debased, or superseded. 1 Leon Chai takes the phrase as the subtitle for his book on aestheticism (which he treats as both a Victorian and a modernist category); see Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Karl Beckson focuses on modernist writers but also discusses Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy in The Religion of Art: A Modernist Theme in British Literature, 1885-1925 (New York: AMS Press, 2006). The phrase had Victorian currency; for example, in 1883, F. W. H. Myers distinguishes between aestheticism’s ‘religion of art’ and the ‘older and more accredited manifestations of the Higher Life’. See Myers, ‘Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty’, Cornhill Magazine 47 (1883), 213. 2 This more derisory usage also had Victorian currency; for example, in 1876, a writer in the Saturday Review decries the emergence of a ‘religion of art independent of all theological restraints’, and names Algernon Charles Swinburne as the key offender, characterising him as the ‘passionate apologist’ for ‘an artistic religion of Paganism’. See ‘Christianity Between Two Foes’, Saturday Review 41 (1876), 326. Theodore Ziolkowski uses the phrase to characterise efforts to satisfy religious needs by means of art; see Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 53-82. For a more celebratory treatment of the nexus between aestheticism and faith, see Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 7 The ‘religion of art’ phrase is sometimes deployed in a way that makes aestheticism seem like a bit-player in a larger drama of secularisation: art, literature, or an Idealist cult of beauty fills the void created by the departure of God, or at least by the waning of traditional Christian forms of belief and authority.3 Yet characterising aestheticism as a surrogate for religion raises as many questions as it answers. As Michael Kaufmann points out, the argument that art or literature function as modern surrogates for religion often hinges on an ‘analogical paradox’: To arrive at a final act of differentiation, [such] narratives must initially rely on a supposed similarity. That is, the larger trajectory of a secularization narrative aims at a final differentiation between the religious and the secular, between religion and literature. And yet along the way it must assert that the two are so similar that they are practically interchangeable: literature can replace religion with very little fanfare, very little conflict ... “Secular” literary culture, so goes the theory, is analogous enough to dogmatic religion to be able to replace, and then eventually oppose it. The initial act of identification in the replacement narrative enables a final and determinative act of differentiation.4 And to the extent that Victorian aestheticism is symptomatic of a process of secularisation, it is clearly a branch of the narrative which departs from any simple progressivist trajectory: in the 1890s, aestheticism’s ‘religion of beauty’ was often pivoted toward affirmations of the beauty of religion, and – sometimes in conjunction with the equally slippery cognate discourse, ‘decadence’ – became a viable language for charting prodigal journeys back toward faith, most notably toward Rome.5 Arguably, the religious turn that Victorian aestheticism took was no turn at all, only a re-efflorescence of the religious seeds always present in an artistic and cultural movement which drew so much of its inspiration from pre- Raphaelite paintings (themselves often poised controversially between the sacred 3 For instance, Chai writes, ‘all of Aestheticism might be said to emerge out of the twilight of a waning religious faith in the later nineteenth century’.

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