“Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth: Then What?” The Nature of the Aesthetic Literary Artist at the end of the Nineteenth Century, Some Thoughts on Ruskin, Pater, Morris and Rossetti

Modern art is romantic art, marked by intimacy, colour, spirituality and yearning for the infinite, expressed by all the means that art possesses. Baudelaire 1846

In 1889, Walter Pater included two essays in his collection Appreciation with an Essay on Style. One entitled “Aesthetic Poetry,” previously published in a slightly different edition in

The Westminster Review in 1868, was essentially about the poetry of . The other, about , simply used his name for its title. Pater described Morris with his mystic spirit and mystic passion growing out from within as well as describing Rossetti’s mystic isolation “as that speech itself was the wholly natural expression of the things he really saw and felt” (Pater 206). In these two essays Pater defines the nature of the literary artist at the end of the nineteenth century, both the external and natural and the internal and supernatural or spiritual.

The on going cold war between Ruskin and Pater came to an end with the publication of

Appreciation. Pater essentially had the last word of defense of his definition of Pre-Raphaelitism as concerned finally with aesthetics, in contrast to Ruskin’s much embraced “truth to Nature” philosophy. What was Pater’s definition, then? How did his definition embrace both the classical and the romantic strands that ran through the century, including the Victorian public as audience? Moreover, for Pater, how do Morris and Rossetti represent the great primary passion under broad daylight--“Here there is no experience of mere soul while the bodily senses sleep, or wake with convulsed intensity at the prompting of imaginative love; but rather the great primary passions under broad daylight as of the pagan Veronese” (221). Why is this definition still important? It is these questions that this paper hopes to address.

The 19th Century Audience and Art Many writers on the Victorian periods (early 1837-1850, middle 1850-1871 and late

1871-1890) discuss the importance of an audience—a new middle class audience with financial resources-- to art. Houghton describes this audience succinctly, “In the new liberal theory all men were free, politically and economically, owing no one any service beyond the fulfillment of legal contracts; and society was simply a collection of individuals, each motivated—naturally and rightly—by self interest” (77). They were also a public faced with a rural economy being supplanted by industrialization. Liberal politics also led to the place for to launch his theory of art. Gilmour asserts that in 1843 with the publication of the first volume of Modern

Painters, John Ruskin encouraged this society of free individuals to turn away from the master artists they had been taught to admire and the machines invading their lives, and instead consider the beauty in the works of contemporary, living painters. “Modern Painters 1 was an act of aesthetic enfranchisement for an insecure new public” (199).

Linda Dowling, in her superb description of the history of the development of art and audience in England--which Houghton described above-- from the Whig, anti-monarchist movement against James III in 1689 to the Victorians, supports Gilmour’s view by adding that

“Ruskin’s mimetic assumption (i.e. truth to Nature) made all questions of quality, value, or

“standards” in art seem relatively simple and hence accessible to his aesthetically uninitiated public” (28). In his book, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture, Jerome Buckley agrees with both Gilmour and Dowling’s assessments and extends the definition of audience to include the idea that art, according to Ruskin, had a social source and served the society that produced it. “To Ruskin, then great art was in some measure the expression of a great society.

Yet it was also the product of a great individual, the medium by which the gifted artist passed on his vision to a public…” (152). In Modern Painters 1 and in Stones of Venice, Ruskin posited that the best literature and art objectively mirrors a complete world and suggest to the audience the depth of life. Faith in the reality of spirit and in the power of the human mind was included in this idea. In short, he, like Pater after him, located the source of spiritual value in the creative arts. Ruskin advanced the idea that no great art was ever created by a bad person. The idea, suggest Ball, that “art [is] an exponent of the social and political virtues of a nation, and of writers themselves—is an idea from Plato. It had been discussed by other writers before 1850 (Burke, Hume, Reynolds and

Carlyle) but Ruskin made it his own in England” (12). Buckley attest to Ruskin’s enormous influence, “From the forties onward, most avowed “lovers of art” were skilled picture readers with a keen appetite for character and episode and a will to find story values, even in the works of masters quite unconcerned with antidote or character” (138). Pater would later use this understanding to expand the meaning of the relationship between the artist, the audience and the work in what this author has suggested is the budding of reader response theory.

Classicism, Romanticism, the Audience and the Aesthetic Artist

Ruskin, then, was the neoclassical heir to the ideas of the eighteenth century—arts found truths and found them by holding up a mirror to Nature. The nineteenth century began with a revolt against romanticism best expressed by John Stuart Mills and Utilitarianism. The Romantic

Movement’s expressive theory of art held a mirror which reflected the consciousness of the artist, himself. The work of art was regarded as the personal expression of the artist. These distinctions are best explicated in M.H. Abrams’ 1958 book The Mirror and The Lamp:

Romantic Theory and The Critical Tradition. The idea that the artist revealed his morals in his art was maintained in the 19th century by Ruskin, as demonstrated, but also by Carlyle and

Arnold. It is worth mentioning here that these three captured this idea from Goethe, Coleridge and Shelley, especially the idea of the imagination as organic. According to Abrams, “the historical importance of Coleridge’s imagination has not been over rated. It was the first important channel for the flow of organism into the hitherto clear, if perhaps not very deep, stream of English aesthetics” (168). Ruskin’s idea of imagination, original to Coleridge, can be summarized as including the following: the psychology of the imagination is the spirit of joy; high seriousness and moral consciousness marks the imaginative mind; art is a reflection of society and society is reflected in art, as mentioned earlier; art supports individual self expression; and imagination is a selective faculty and is an agency of transformation.

Given this, Buckley emphasizes that Ruskin’s concerns about imagination and romantic art. “Ruskin’s more guarded distinction was not without meaning in his own country; romantic art, he suggested, lacked the authority of classical art, since the classic writer set down only what was “known to be true,” while the romantic expressed himself “under the impulse of passions,” which might or might not lead to new truths” (16). Ruskin, then, holds classicism and romanticism in dynamic tension through his supporting Turner, himself [Ruskin] leaning toward classicism because, among other things, of his interest in the public context of the work of art.

Like Rossetti, William Morris was a disciple of Ruskin’s, whose unique contribution was to secularized Ruskin’s ideas about art. Morris’s motto of 1861, influenced by his association with both men, “Have nothing in your house that is not both useful and beautiful” is the implementation of the Ruskin aesthetic into day to day life (Parry 17). Beautiful surroundings, then, enhance the life lived by accentuating the sensuous. As has been well documented, Morris resisted the temptation to create art for aristocratic patrons (like Rossetti was apt to do) and instead put his efforts toward the commoditization of an aesthetic-- which is still with us today primarily in the availability of Morris’ wallpaper and elegant book designs. His goods were targeted to a “democratic” mass market, in much the same way as Ruskin’s art education was.

Morris was successful because he was an artist himself; he was a poet, painter, designer, weaver and craftsman. As an aesthetic artist, he was a champion of the Decorative arts (Warner 83). It is this idea of aesthetic democracy that links Morris to Walter Pater. Morris also advanced the view that the artist’s pleasure must be related to making the object. Morris’s love, finally, then was of beauty over truth.

William Morris was also a prolific writer. His collected works published between 1910 and 1915 make up twenty-four volumes. According to Peter Faulkner, his was the first book of

Pre-Raphaelite poetry to be published in 1858 with The Defense of Guenevere and Other Poems.

As in his art, Morris does not moralize in his writing. He was interested in the classics, myth and legends and he wrote with a strong “Romantic impulse” (45).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who Oswald Dourghty called “The Victorian Romantic,” was also influenced by John Ruskin. As Stein reports, “One of the decisive moments in the history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement came when William Holman-Hunt read Ruskin and introduced

Rossetti to his writing. This meant not only Modern Painters 1, for by 1848, when the two artists were discussing common aims and interest…there was a second volume to read” (121). Unlike

Hunt, who once freed from the Academy standards, followed Ruskin’s truth to Nature philosophy for his entire career, Rossetti saw the freedom from standards as an opportunity to explore his own inner world of imagination. It was on this point, descriptive and mimetic versus the expressive, that the brotherhood split in the 1850’s. Eric Warner describes Rossetti, stating he relished the freedom and “it enabling him to render surrealistic canvases, rich with symbolic content” (102). This included literary history (the Bible, Arthurian legends and Dante), ambiguous spaces, androgynous characters, the idea of the supernatural and the enchanted. and magical events, among other things. Jerome McGann, calls Rossetti’s work “a polemic of imagination” (16). Rossetti, then was dedicated to the process, to the historical, to intellect, hard work and a variety of forms (i.e. poetry, painting, stain glass design, etc.) McGann makes two other important points: Rossetti was dedicated to his own powers, his “inner standing point” and

“the null point or degree of zero of spatiality” starting with him (10, 22,132,146).

The history of Rossetti’s relationship with Ruskin is well known. For the purposed of this paper, the most important aspect of that history is the acceptance of Rossetti by Ruskin in his

1853 essay “Pre-Raphaelitism” and Ruskin’s rejection of Rossetti in his 1883 “Art of England” lecture. In the 1853 essay Ruskin wrote that Rossetti created a “new temper” and that, “Pre-

Raphaelitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature only” (219). There is an interesting footnote from Ruskin attached to this sentence at the bottom of the page. It reads,

Or, where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened. The various members of the school are not all equally severe in carrying out it principals, some of them trusting their memory or fancy very far; only all agreeing in the effort to make their memories so accurate as to seem like portraiture, and their fancy so probable as to seem like memory.

Here, again, is Ruskin’s misgiving about romanticism while he simultaneously wants to embrace it. By 1883, one year after Rossetti’s death, Ruskin dismisses Rossetti as insincere and dedicated to myth rather than realism. It is through this history that Rossetti comes to Walter

Pater. Kenneth Daley’s compelling 2000 book The Rescue of Romanticism, convincingly proves his thesis that Pater shadowed Ruskin principals in order to simultaneously refuting them. The refutation was subtle. Pater never mentioned Ruskin by name (there is only one reference to

Ruskin by name in all of Pater’s writing.) Instead, Pater dismantled Ruskin’s arguments. He did this on Wordsworth--who Ruskin saw as evangelical and egotistical—but Pater portrayed as the embodiment of the power of pathos and a purveyor of “strange” as defined by the French (123).

Rossetti and Morris provide other examples.

The Creation of the Aesthetic Literary Artists: Walter Pater, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

In 1889, when Walter Pater included two essays in his collection Appreciation with an

Essay on Style, “Aesthetic Poetry,” about William Morris and “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” about the poet and painter of that same name he described the imagination and reflectiveness of the new, archetypal aesthetic literary artist. For Pater, Rossetti created an ideal (218). He continues to describe what would become some attributes of the aesthetic literary artist:

His own meaning was always personal and even recondite, in a certain sense learned and cauistical, sometimes complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see deliberately chosen from many competitors, as just transcript of that particular phase of the soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew it (207).

This definition is a restatement of Romanticism. According to Harmon, this means that the individual is at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and attitudes—related to the Expressive Theory of criticism. Also, the artist values fidelity in portraying this unique expression—even if comprised of incomplete experiences-- more than adherence to completeness, unity or demand of genre. “Romanticism seeks to find the absolute, the ideal, by transcending the actual” (453).

Pater described Morris’s poetry in the 1868 edition in The Westminster Review as expressing “desire here is for the body for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it”

(222). In the 1889 version, because of his own uneasiness with the interpretations pinned on him and the social backlash against , Pater reworks the sentence to less sensual and seriously altered the meaning: “Desire here is towards the body of nature for its own sake, not because a soul is divined through it” (Samborne 110). This author agrees with Buckley that this alteration can be directly traced to the 1871 Buchanan attack on Rossetti. Unfortunately Rossetti, along with Algernon Swinburne, bore the brunt of one faction of the Victorian public’s condemnation of the “Art for Arts Sake” credo.

In 1871 Robert Buchanan's, The Fleshy School of Poetry: Mr. D.G. Rossetti criticized

Rossetti's writings on moral grounds. It seems safe to postulate that Pater altered his essay on

Morris Rossetti rebuked Buchanan's remarks by responding with The Stealthy School of

Criticism (Buckley 234). An enlarged pamphlet of Buchanan's attack was published in 1872.

Later that same year, Rossetti suffered a physical and mental breakdown from which he never truly recovered. His biographers’ claim that, though he was vindicated, it hastened his death in

1882 leaving him marked as the founder of the Aesthetic Movement in England. This is quite remarkable for an artist who did not exhibit his work and was neither socially or politically active. Also, he felt no affinity toward this movement during his life.

In addition to reinstating romanticism, Pater used his essays on Morris and Rossetti to express other elements of the aesthetic literary artist: the brevity of one’s life, the need to live with passion—as Jerome McGann said of Rossetti, “He used himself up.” Consider these passages from the 1868 Morris essay: “One characteristic of the pagan spirit these new poems have which is on their surface—the continual suggestion, pensive or passionate, of the shortness of life” (113). And “This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence renewed from moment to moment of forces parting sooner or later on their way. Or if we begin with the inward world of through and feeling, the whirlpool is till more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring” (114).

Why is this important?

Modernist Culture owes a large debt to the aesthetic debate of the 19th century. Pater in creating the aesthetic archetype is also the consummate eclectic. History and myth were solid foundations to enhance the aesthetic experience. Pater posited the composite experience of all ages with us always. He thought art enabled humanity to overcome the destructive dimension of time. His “Art for Art Sake” really meant not to abandon all standards, morals and values leaving each to one’s own; he was advocating, instead, the very difficult precept-- to make all of life art.

He was a prophet for the “expansion of the powers of reception.” The artist has faithfulness to what is within. The phrase “Art for Art’s Sake” literally implies that art is an end in itself and art as a product of an age and all ages. This credo is expressed mostly clearly in the 1868 Poems by

William Morris. “The modern world is in possession of truths; what but a passing smile can it have for a kind of poetry which, assuming artistic beauty of form to be an end in itself, passes by those truths and the living interests which are connected with them, to spend a thousand cares…”

(Sambrook 113). Pater’s signature line—and consequently one motto of the Aesthetic

Movement-- “To burn always like a hard-gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” is also found in this essay (115). The quotation continues, “Failure is a form of habit; habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two things, persons or situations—seem alike.”

In addition to creating a new definition of the romantic artist, Pater also contributed to

Ruskin’s development of the audience. As this author has argued previously in this seminar,

Ruskin, Pater, Morris and Rossetti are the forefather of reader response and reception theory.

Even more than the 18th century Romantic writers, they lived in a time of rapid change where the tradition underpinnings of social systems were being redefined by liberal politics, discoveries in science and the concomitant affect on religious beliefs. I new, freer –and the first—middle class existed. In the mists of this, these four men, over seventy years, offered up the true and beautiful to encourage their country men to make all of life a work of art. In the end, the influence of John

Ruskin, an unlikely false friend, Walter Pater, an unlikely prophet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an unlikely aesthetic, and William Morris, an unlikely socialist converge to create the literary aesthetic artist who can claim Keat’s “Truth is beauty, Beauty truth.” This artist also is an individual with consciousness, sensuality, and a sense of his fleeting place in time.

Works Cited Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture.

New York: Random House, 1951.

Daley, Kenneth. The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin.

Athens, Ohio UP, 2001.

Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy.

Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1966.

Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context,

1830-1890. New York: Longman, 1993.

Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature 8th ed. Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Pater, Walter H. “Aesthetic Poetry.” Appreciations. London: Macmillan and Co., 1910.

_____. “Poems of William Morris.” Westminster Review 90 (July-October 1868): 144-49.

_____. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Appreciations. London: Macmillan and Co., 1910.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale

UP, 1957.

McGann, Jerome. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost. New Haven: Yale

UP, 2000.

Parry, Linda, ed. William Morris. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996.

Ruskin, John. Stone of Venice edited and abridged by J.G. Links. New York: Penguin

Books, 2001.

_____. Modern Painters. edited and abridged by David Barrie. New York Knopf:

Distributed by Random House, 1987.