The Persistence of Beauty

The notion of beauty, in its various meanings and manifestations, has long fascinated authors and critics. Its appeal fuelled the artistic endeavours of the nineteenth century, captivated its audiences, and haunted the literary movements of the last 100 years. Walter Pater, in the opening lines of The Renaissance, a touchstone for Victorian aestheticism, observed how attempts to ‘define beauty’ have most often been conducted ‘in the abstract’. Pater’s call for the ‘student of æsthetics’ to observe beauty in its specific instances – in separate works of art, experienced by individual observers – holds in play the idea of beauty both as an eternal value and a fleeting impression: a universal truth and nothing more than a fluctuating emotion subject to the vagaries of time and change. In his conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater declares that ‘art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass’.¹ And yet, like Keats’s Grecian urn that suspends one beautiful moment in art, many attempts have been made to halt such passings, and surrender worldly time to poetic timing. The narratives of literature may be destined to end, but, as Keats’s urn implies, the single portrait of beauty, captured in painting or in sculpture, may exist, though paralysed, throughout time. With the rise of photographic art, beauty in the physical form was ever more susceptible to capture; as the early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron wrote in 1874, ‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me.’²

When the fin de siècle gave way to the twentieth century, so we are told, beauty’s days were numbered. From intellectual reactions against the ideologies of the world wars to the functional designs of architectural modernisers, beauty, allegedly, was found wanting. This growing distrust over beauty’s value was joined by a feeling pre-empted by the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman (1903): ‘Beauty is all very well at first sight’, she states; ‘but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?’³ The rise of aesthetic movements across Europe, and the continued lyrical innovations in English poetry throughout the nineteenth century, may have driven a desire for new styles. Yet who laid down these declinist narratives in such stark terms in the first place? I. A. Richards, as Angela Leighton suggests, was one leading influence on these literary-critical narratives. Between the scepticism and the latent hostility, however, rejections of beauty are rarely so absolute.

Recent critical revivals of beauty have defended its virtues while, at their best, resisting such narratives of decline. Over the last two decades, more than a dozen books have taken beauty as either their theme or muse. Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Denis Donoghue’s Speaking of Beauty (2003), and Richard Scholar’s The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe (2005) represent but a few of these critical reassessments. The Persistence of Beauty furthers and analyses this revival by re-examining the notion of artistic beauty, and its fate in the literary and critical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its essayists include Sarah Wootton writing on Charlotte Brontë, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Charles Dickens, Simon J. James on the trials of Oscar Wilde, Seamus Perry on T. S. Eliot, Mark Sandy on Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, and Tony Sharpe on W. H. Auden. Joining these opening chapters are contributions by Angela Leighton on Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, Michael O’Neill on Hopkins, Yeats, Crane, and Spender, Fran Brearton on Robert Graves and Louis MacNeice, and Timothy Morton on Kant. What results is a wide-reaching exploration of such concepts as the beauty of style, the morality of aesthetics, and the relations between truth and the imagination as they twist and turn at the hands of individual writers.

Challenging simplistic notions of naive ‘Romantic beauty’, the...