The Religion of Art

It is more than fitting that Karl Beckson contributed this eighth volume in the AMS Studies in Cultural History Series. For many in the field, his has been a consistent, powerful, and authoritative voice for over forty years. His sixteen books (fifteen of them on Aesthetes and Decadents, on Wilde, Symons, and others), his studies of England and the literary culture of the 1890s, his numerous journal articles and reviews, some in these pages, and his work on the Incomparable Max catalogued in the Mary Lago Collection at the University of Missouri have made his name a household word among those working in the field that ELT represents. It is all the more delightful, then, to find this collection of studies in the history of the religion of art coming as a late flowering of Beckson's lifelong engagement with the theories, tenets and figures he presents in this volume.

Beckson's scholarly portraits are well worth reading, especially when a sort of discordia concors happens, as in the case of classifying Hardy and Shaw as followers of the religion of art in all its modernist glory. He sets up his premise in a prologue that muses upon and then elaborates on a statement of Jacques Barzun's about "The Rise of Art as a Religion" from his 1974 volume, The Use and Abuse of Art. Barzun and Beckson find that Wordsworth and Keats set the stage for Arnold and Ruskin, Goethe and Berlioz, and particularly for Walter Pater, to serve as acolytes and priests in the religion of art. And from Pater's dicta and writings we have Wilde and Yeats as high priests of the new and rival religion. This short prologue is well argued, persuasive, and just satisfying enough to position the series of portraits Beckson later presents in his perspective.

His first subject is Thomas Hardy, whom some would not single out at first blush as a devotee in this religion of art. Under Beckson's guidance, it is apparent that Hardy's personal experience with the organized religion of sorrow influenced his negative treatment of religion and his elevation of art in its place in such works as Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. So, antireligion? Yes, of course. A proponent of a religion of art? Equally of course. Especially worth noting is Beckson's examination of Hardy's poems as elaborations of his thought about the Immanent Will suppressing the concept of "God." Beckson further demonstrates that "Hardy's substitution for 'God'—such as the 'Spinner of Years'—permits the use of Fate without a conventional Christian theology."

As is well known, Oscar Wilde, a more usual figure in the "art for art's sake" circle, frequently used religious language in secular contexts. What Beckson does is to frame these uses in the context of Wilde's ambivalence regarding the Roman Catholic Church. Highly attracted to the rituals and forms of the church, he was also unprepared to accept its authority. A spiritualist and a sensualist, Wilde could not deny the one aspect of his personality for the sake of the other. Focusing principally on Wilde's short stories, Beckson locates the Christian echoes in the fairy tales firmly in the religion of art.

Certainly while some might argue vehemently with Beckson's assertion that George Bernard Shaw seems to be sympathetic to those artists who subscribe to l'art pour l'art in the contexts of Candida and Man and Superman, all will agree that "he has a greater scorn for lawless bohemians." Curiously leagued with writers who seem antithetical to Shaw, he nonetheless falls into the category of those who sought to replace received religion and its deities through their art, in Shaw's case, as Beckson demonstrates, through the development of his theory of a creative or Life Force engaged in creative evolution. Beckson draws upon dialogue from such plays as The Devil's Disciple, John Bull's Other Island, Major...