Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature, 1860–1960 (review)

This learned and engaging study traces the roots of modernist “moral” aestheticism through German and English Romanticism back to Plato’s vision of beauty carrying virtue and goodness in its train. Mao locates—sometimes controversially—the loftiest expression of moral aestheticism in Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde; follows it in Joyce and Dreiser; and unearths the seeds of its undoing in Rebecca West and Auden. I admired Mao’s literary readings, but I was particularly fascinated by his argument that, far from fleeing its hegemony, aestheticism was informed by science. Seeing life as a continuing adjustment of malleable organisms to their world, aestheticist ideology anchored the substance of each human personality in minute and unconscious interactions with its environment. It was a short step from there to the thought that children would make a better and more virtuous go at life if they were exposed to art and beauty rather than squalor and ugliness. Most surprising, aestheticism—like naturalism—acknowledged the scientific picture’s causal determinism. Pater, for instance, located freedom in the contemplation of the forces that have inevitably made us what we are: “Natural laws we shall never modify, embarrass us as they may; but there is still something in the nobler or less noble attitude with which we watch their fatal combinations.” The conceptual problems here are complex, but the faith of this brilliant constellation of people in the redemptive power of beauty now appears deeper and more tragic. Mao suggests that shifting attention from environment to heredity in the late twentieth century may account for the parallel decline of moral aestheticism, but the depressing lessons of history are arguably more important. And although many today want to locate beauty in our genetic and evolutionary heritage, the hope that this move may realize Plato’s dream seems to me as dim as Wilde’s confidence that ugly wallpaper “must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a career of crime” seems misplaced.