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“Truth Is Beauty, Beauty Truth: Then What?” the Nature of the Aesthetic

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“Truth Is Beauty, Beauty Truth: Then What?” the Nature of the Aesthetic “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 William Morris. The other, about Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 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 John Ruskin 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).
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