A Mythology of Aestheticism

233 A MYTHOLOGY OF AESTHETICISM By Karl Beckson (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) Having experienced epiphanies of mortal and eternal beauty and having rejected the vocation of the Jesuits, Stephen Dedalus envisions himself as an artist, "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."1 His name recalling the first christian martyr, Stephen leans wearily on his ashplant, "the curved stick of an augur," below the colonnade of the National Library, which he transforms into an "ancient temple" (p. 225). With such imagery taken from religion and pressed into the service of a lonely and desperate art, Joyce's Portrait (I9I6) strikes one as the last great Victorian novel, as the embodiment and climax of 19th-century Aestheticism rather than a brilliant harbinger of modernism. In its depiction of Stephen as a pride-filled embryonic artist rejecting family, church, and state, Joyce's novel was influenced by Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (written 1873-1885; published I903). More importantly, however, it embodies the imagery, rhetoric, and attitudes associated with a central mythology of the Aesthetic Movement: the Religion of Art and Beauty. Despite the widespread allusions to this idea in historical and critical studies, it has been little discussed.2 In undertaking a systematic examination of its implications for the Aesthetes,3 I do not wish to imply that the Religion of Art is the only mythology4 which they subscribed to or that all Aesthetes were necessarily devoted to it; it is my contention that it is perhaps the most comprehensive and revealing mythology of the Aesthetic Movement, one that has, as we see in Joyce's Portrait (and numerous other 20th-century works), survived the fin-dë^siècle period. The sources of the Religion of Art are many and varied. The transformation of art into a "substitute religion" was, in one sense, an ironic inversion of spiritual ,loyalties on the part of many who, in the late 19th century, had either lost their Christian faith or had suffered from unsettling doubt. The quest for a new orientation to reality is dramatically told by Yeats, who, in his autobiography, reveals that Huxley and Tyndall and had deprived him of the "simple-minded religion" of his childhood. The alternative was not atheism but art, the means by which to regenerate his spiritual life: "I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition. ... I had even created a dogma."5 Inspiration was to be found in Matthew Arnold, who had written in "The Study of Poetry" (1880) that "more and more, mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us."6 By the end of the century, 234 Arthur Symons was writing that literature, "in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us. . . becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual."' Yeats, following Symons, wrote that the arts were "about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests."8 Though Yeats was indebted to Symons for his knowledge of the French Symbolists, he had earlier studied the complex symbolism of Blake, whose works he and Edwin J. Ellis edited and interpreted in the late 1880's. Since the mid-19th century, Blake "worshippers" such as Swinburne invoked his name to advance the idea of l'art pour l'art and thereby transformed Blake into the "hero of a religion of beauty."9 The affinity between Yeats and Blake was significant, for "through their individual myths," writes Morton I. Seiden, they "transformed religion into the highest form of art art. And they made art a form of spiritual belief, a way of regenerating the world."10 In their edition of Blake, Yeats and Ellis, alluding to the Imagination as "the philosophical name of the Saviour," reveal their view of the priestly artist who has the capacity to evoke transcendental reality: "The prophets and apostles, priests and missionaries, prophets and apostles of the Redemption are, - or should be...