Beauty and Art by Elizabeth Prettejohn

Author:Elizabeth Prettejohn [Prettejohn, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780192801609
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

76 Simeon Solomon

Walter Pater, 1872

indicated his religious scepticism. Disbelieving in life after death, Swinburne can look for value only in things of this life: His only outlet of comfort is his delight in material beauty, in the fragmentary conquests of intellect, and in the feeling that the fight, once over in this world for each individual, is over altogether; and in these sources of comfort his exquisite artistic organization enables him to revel while the fit is on him, and to ring out such peals of poetry as deserve . . . to endure while the language lasts.22

William Rossetti (also an unbeliever) offers the longevity of art as some consolation for the loss of faith in personal immortality. But if art can outlast its maker, there is no hint, here or in Swinburne’s own writings, that it can transcend the limits of the material world. Perhaps this offers some kind of justification for an art of the senses, although it is a bleak one. In the words of another favourite text of the Rossetti circle, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!23

One of Swinburne’s most attentive readers was the young Oxford don, Walter Pater (1839–94, 76), just beginning his career as a critic, but already deeply learned in German philosophy. His first article, published in 1866, was on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among the earliest English writers to take an interest in recent German philosophy; in 1867 he published a study of Winckelmann, and he included German philosophy and criticism in his teaching at Oxford. Pater took up the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ immediately after it appeared in Swinburne’s William Blake. Significantly, he too used it in a context related to the Rossetti circle, giving it special prominence in the final sentence of his essay on the poetry of Rossetti’s friend William Morris (1834–96). To conclude his discussion, Pater muses on the role of beauty in human life:

. . . we have an interval and then we cease to be. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’ Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.24

The tone is elegiac rather than confrontational, but we should make no mistake: Pater is implicitly denying the Christian hope for resurrection.

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