Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation by Sara Lyons (review)

"Death is the mother of beauty," asserts the speaker in Wallace Stevens's 1915 poem "Sunday Morning," a gorgeous meditation on transcendence and eternity in a secular age (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens [Knopf, 1954], line 63). He means that the impermanence of life is necessary for the appreciation of beauty, which, the poem argues, is more than enough to make life worth living. In Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation, Sara Lyons persuasively reads A. C. Swinburne and Walter Pater as Victorian proponents of this point of view at a moment when it was becoming possible to articulate it as an alternative to the dominant Christian mythos, and when, she argues, religious doubt itself was becoming respectable. Lyons situates both writers within the problem of secularization, a phenomenon whose relationship to modernity has been debated since the 1990s by sociologists of religion, and which more recently has become the subject of a lively discussion within literary studies. Whereas the dominant thrust among literary scholars (at least on this side of the Atlantic) has been to challenge the secularization narrative by discovering a religious bent in the work of apparently secular twentieth-century writers or by reassessing the religiosity of earlier ones, Lyons explores both Swinburne's and Pater's aestheticism as the vehicles of an affirmative secularity.

The long and detailed discussion of the scholarship on secularization in Lyons's introductory chapter is clearly an artifact of the project's origins in a dissertation, and some readers may wish she had pared it considerably. I am grateful for its nearly encyclopedic survey of the major topoi of the debate as various scholars have developed them: the unstable, shifting religious/secular binary; a move from Weberian disenchantment to re-enchantment; the secularism-secularity-secularization triad; and Charles Taylor's "immanent frame" (7). Lyons has usefully interwoven these topics with concerns more specific to Victorians and Victorianists, such as the crisis of faith, aestheticism, Hellenism, and sexual dissidence. Her survey is leavened by two intelligent close readings: one of the madman's parable from Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882), which famously announces the death of God; and the other, a persuasively nuanced account of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867).

In Lyons's reading, neither Swinburne nor Pater sympathizes with the "note of sadness" that Arnold hears in "Dover Beach" as he contemplates the withdrawal of the "Sea of Faith" (Matthew Arnold: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, edited by Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super [Oxford University Press, 1986], lines 14, 21). Both apprehend that the tide is going out, and both hear the melancholy and regret in Arnold's writing and that of other contemporaries, but instead of lamenting their own unbelief and the epistemological conditions that led to it, both writers find positive value in a sensory world governed by impermanence and flux. Lyons demonstrates that both reject the elegiac loss-of-faith narrative that was already becoming commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century. Each takes on the task of framing alternative responses to a condition of unbelief, one in which transcendence does not sneak in through the back door.

Two long chapters trace this project in Swinburne's oeuvre by conceiving it as a series of engagements with Robert Browning, Arnold, and Alfred Tennyson. I find particularly persuasive Lyons's reading of many of Swinburne's poems as direct challenges to In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). Arguing that Swinburne saw Tennyson's redemptive construction of religious doubt as "a poetic model against which he might define himself," Lyons shows the younger poet echoing the language of the older one in defiantly non-redemptive, sometimes decadent contexts (77). She emphasizes some of the less well-known lyrics in Poems and Ballads, First Series (1867), reading them as rejections of "the melancholia and moral earnestness" that marks Tennyson's and others' expressions of religious...