Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics

319 Pages·2017·1.82 MB·English

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‘Life as the End of Life’: Algernon Charles
Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Secular Aesthetics

Sara Lyons
Submitted for Ph.D. Examination
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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’. See Aestheticism, ix.
4 Michael W. Kaufmann, ‘The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking
the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession’, New Literary History 38.4
(2007), 616.
5 For a study of the nexus between Catholicism, aestheticism, and decadence see Hanson,
Decadence.
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and the secular) and from the writings of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, and
whose genealogy is sometimes traced to the Oxford Movement.6 So by what acts
of differentiation did aestheticism ever seek independence from religion? Given
that it has often been understood – both in the Victorian age and by subsequent
critics – as a cusp between the secular and religious, what ways of thinking about
the secular did aestheticism enable, and in what senses did it constitute an
experiment in secular aesthetics?7 To what extent did it understand itself not
simply as a witness but as an agent of secularisation?
This thesis attempts a partial answer to those questions through a close
study of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, writers who are
conventionally regarded as the two seminal figures for Victorian aestheticism but
who have rarely been studied alongside each other in detail. Both Swinburne and
Pater have nonetheless enjoyed considerable scholarly attention over the last
thirty years, and it seems newly possible to dispense with the rhetoric of critical
embattlement which has often seemed a necessary preamble to any discussion of
either writer. Yet the fact that Swinburne’s rehabilitation has been somewhat
slower and more uneven than Pater’s – and the fact that Pater is conventionally
paired with Oscar Wilde because of interest in the ways in which aestheticism
rendered modern homosexual identity legible – have obscured the extent to which
aestheticism emerged in their works as part of a complementary effort to
formulate a vibrant alternative to established models of religious doubt and
unbelief.
This was a common project partly because, while Swinburne and Pater
seem to have known each other only slightly and were temperamentally very

6 Hilary Fraser suggests that Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism has a religious
genealogy which stretches back to the Oxford Movement in Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics
and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
see183-233.
7 Some critics take the secular orientation of aestheticism as a given. For instance, Angela
Leighton remarks that aestheticism was ‘almost always impure, [and] unconformingly
materialist and secular in its outlook’. Yet it is not clear if Leighton simply conceives of
secular materialism as a non-conformist stance in the period, or understands the
secularism of aesthetes to be unconventional in some way. See Leighton, On Form:
Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
37.
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different, they emerged from the same intellectual milieu. As children, they were
profoundly influenced by the devout high Anglicanism of their respective mothers
(though Swinburne later denied that he had ever been ‘a theist’); both lost their
faith while undergraduates at Oxford, where they were near contemporaries
(Swinburne went up to Balliol in 1856; Pater to Queen’s in 1858).8 Both were
tutored by Benjamin Jowett, the Regius Professor of Greek who was one of the
contributors to the scandalous and pivotal Essays and Reviews (1860), a volume
that argued in favour of a liberalised interpretation of Christianity. Yet what
Gerald Monsman has noted of Pater is also true of Swinburne: the liberalised
Christianity then stirring controversy at Oxford seems only to have sharpened
their scepticism.9 Both were members of ‘Old Mortality’, an exclusive student
discussion club with a radical sensibility; both became known among their peers
for being provocative critics of religion; and both were avidly reading the same
French authors (Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Victor Hugo) from whom
they would derive the kernel of their shared ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ position.10 Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was published before either of them
began their careers, but on the whole, there is only oblique engagement with
evolutionary theory and with the age’s scientific debates more generally in their
works; while neither writer laments that science is unweaving the rainbow, there
is an effort to sustain a strategic distance from its discourses.11 Each would
produce a book early in his career – Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series

8 For these biographical details, see Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater (Boston: G.K. Hall,
1977), 17-47; and Rikky Rooksby, A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Aldershot: Scolar
Press,1997), 24-25 and 45-63. Swinburne claimed that he was never a theist in 1875; see
his letter to E. C. Stedman in Major Poems and Selected Prose, eds. Jerome McGann and
Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 471.
9 Monsman, Pater, 23.
10 For discussions of the influence of French writers on Swinburne and Pater, see
Charlotte Ribeyrol, ‘A Channel Passage: Swinburne and France’, in A. C. Swinburne and
the Singing Word: New Perspectives on the Mature Work, ed. Yisrael Levin (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2010), 107-122; and Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language
of Sculpture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 113-151. Leighton discusses the French origins
of the ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ slogan; see On Form, 32-36.
11 Jonathan Loesberg gives a good account of this strategic distance in relation to
Swinburne in Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13-14.
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(1866); Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) – which became a
succès de scandale because of its mixture of sensuality, irreligion, and stylistic
virtuosity, and which would define their reputations not only for their
contemporaries but also for subsequent generations of readers. Aristocratic
privilege enabled Swinburne to remain impenitent in the face of public censure;
Pater, the lower-middle-class don, made his accommodations with the Oxford
establishment (though his career would be partially stymied by an intramural
scandal over his love affair with a male student).12 The degree of mutual influence
has never been closely appraised, though we know that Swinburne enjoyed
Pater’s early essays (some of which were reprinted in The Renaissance), and was
gratified when Pater told him that he considered Swinburne’s own critical prose a
key influence.13 Both writers are often thought to have disavowed their
aestheticist positions almost as soon as they became notorious for them:
Swinburne in the name of a more idealistic and politically coherent form of
secularism in his volume in celebration of the Risorgimento, Songs Before Sunrise
(1871), and later for the sake of alcoholic detox in Putney, where – according to a
now-exploded critical orthodoxy – he produced mostly lacklustre poetry; Pater’s
position became more opaque as his prose became more byzantine, though he
clearly grew more sympathetic toward Christianity, and troubled by his reputation
as an immoralist.14 But reading their ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ positions as merely the
opening gesture and their subsequent careers as long exercises in recantation
depends upon a narrow understanding of aestheticism. Swinburne and Pater
originally developed their varieties of aestheticism partly in order to critique and
enrich what each found impoverished in contemporary conceptions of religious
doubt and unbelief, and neither writer abandoned this complicated enterprise.
Indeed, both men were in many ways loyal to their original visions, though they
continuously sought ways to refine and expand upon them.

12 On this scandal, see Billie Inman, ‘Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater,
Benjamin Jowett, and William H. Hardinge’, in Pater in the 1990s, eds. Laurel Brake and
Ian Small (Greensboro: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 1-20.
13 Swinburne received a presentation copy of The Renaissance. See Catherine Maxwell,
Writers and Their Work: Swinburne (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006), 82.
14 For analysis of Pater’s later receptivity to Christianity, see Monsman, Pater, 102-104.