So what has this to do with Charles, Sebastian and Anthony?

The season of Brideshead
Aesthetes continued
How does all this connect with Brideshead?

Experiencing beauty
This part is pretty straightforward. Let's look at the first of those Pater quotes again:

What is important then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

And compare it to the moment when Sebastian picks up Clive Bell's academic writing about art, a piece that spends a lot of time defining what significant form, the key element that makes something beautiful, is:

Collins had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me, '… the whole argument from significant form stands or falls by volume.   If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye' ... but it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the pages of Clive Bell’s Art, read ‘"Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?" Yes, I do,’ that my eyes were opened.

Note how Collins, striving for the middle way, really only questions the validity of Bell's definition. Sebastian opens Charles' eyes to the idea of learning how to experience beauty.

And if we look at a bit of the third quote:

Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which naturally come to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

We can see where Charles'  answer to Jasper comes from:

I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients, it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one another human being is the root of all wisdom.

 Charles is more excited by love than art ultimately, but the love he has for Sebastian is surprisingly like what Pater says of art, Sebastian comes to Charles promising him nothing but the highest quality to his moments with him as they pass and simply for those moments' sake.

Experiencing beauty through same sex love
Okay, you may say, but what is all this consigning this wisdom gained to the cellar so it can be brought out later for consumption?

Well, that's about homosexuality. As Waugh saw it, these same sex love affairs of adolescence were a phase one passed through but we are supposed to later transfer the lessons and experience of this to heterosexual relations. Now, before you condemn all this as either justifying perversity or, at the other end of the scale, rank homophobia consider this: a significant minority of young men and women do have same-sex experiences in their youth and then go on through life as heterosexuals perhaps cherishing memories of a secret past that only they, God and one or two other people know.

In other words, it may not be normative for you but it was formative for a lot of people and Waugh was one of them. He is writing about this kind of love in Brideshead.

And that kind of love had a lot to do with the Aesthetes. No one knows if Pater had same sex experiences but we sure know that Oscar Wilde did. We also know that Waugh did, that Brian Howard did, that Alastair Graham did, that Hugh Lygon did and quite a list of others. As Waugh said, some of these people remained homosexual and others did not. He took the did not to be normal and normative. Waugh writes as lovingly and admiringly of gay men as he does of anyone else. he and Nancy Mitford wrote letters to one another wondering why American critics insisted on seeing homosexual men as sad and depressed when all the gay men they knew where cheerful and pleasant to be with. I know it's a cliché but some of his best friends were. Waugh thought that they had not developed the way one ought but he still loved them deeply.

Experiencing beauty through irrationality and immorality
In chapter three, Sebastian will wistfully say of Catholicism that "happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it." One of the really shocking things for many Christians reading Waugh talk about conversion in Brideshead is that morality doesn't seem to have much to do with his understanding of Catholicism.

Charles never repents nor does he even think about repenting for what he does with Sebastian. Later, Julia will say that she knows she will fail morally again but that is okay so long as she doesn't permanently cut herself off from God by setting up a greater good than his. There is a notion of living correctly here but there is very little sense of penance. All lives will be sinful, the choice for Waugh is between a life of sin in which there is a relationship with God because we have been careful not to close he door to him and a life full of sin in which we have closed the door on that relationship.

Waugh's own life was like this by the way. His friends regularly expressed scandal that a man who made so much of being Catholic should sin as much as he did. Waugh's answer was to say they had no idea how much worse he'd be were he not a Catholic.

The thing is that this is not immorality. It is one of the great and common misconceptions about the aesthetes is that they thought art had nothing to do with morality. But sit down and read Oscar Wilde's plays or his Picture of Dorian Gray and you will see moral concerns on every page.

What the aesthetes were skeptical about was not morality but moral progress and especially a common moral progress. They believed, and believed profoundly, in sin and in original sin. One of the big influences on the English Aesthetes was Baudelaire who said that the devil's greatest trick was convincing people that he didn't exist.

Waugh deplores this awful age we live in but the thing to grasp is he would have done that no matter what era he had lived in. 

Experiencing beauty through Catholicism
A surprising number of Aesthetes, certainly a greater proportion than in the general population, were gay. It was also the case that a surprising number of Aesthetes, certainly a greater proportion than in the general population, converted to Catholicism. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Gerard Manley Hopkins and, of course, Waugh himself along with others converted. Others didn't swim the Tiber but they did the next best thing by embracing Anglo-Catholicism or high Anglicanism.

In Brideshead, the basis of this conversion is wholeness. It's a notion that Pater gets from Epicurus. You can see it when he tells us to make sure our passion really is passion. Masturbating to a picture of Megan Fox in her underwear might be an intense experience but it is not a great passion. From Pater and Waugh's perspective, someone who lives only in the natural world, being rational and sensible all the time, and never experiencing the supernatural, is just as incomplete as a guy whose entire experience of erotic love is two or three hours a day on line with Internet porn.

NB: This next one is for hard core Pre-Raphaelite  nerds only. Unless you are the sort of person who collects data about these guys the way baseball fans cherish earned-run averages, it won't make any sense.

Experiencing beauty through Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Pater's thought was developed entirely in resistance to people like Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin and one of the important figures in this opposition was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Waugh was heavily influenced by this and his first book was about Rossetti. he was deeply ashamed by this early work in his later days and he never let it be published again. I've never seen a copy although I would love to.

One of the big moves that the Victorian critics like Matthew Arnold made was to divide life and faith into matters of the head and the heart. Arnold, very influentially, concluded: head good, heart bad. He believed that good faith was  rational thing that inspired people to be orderly and productive Victorians. When Charles Ryder talks about people who want to eliminate the supernatural from religion so as to leave a series of moral teachings he means Arnold.

A nice, shorthand way of thinking about Pater is that he accepted all the vocabulary and concepts that the English liked to use to back up their slightly puritanical moral views but used this vocabulary and these concepts to reach opposite conclusions about morality.

And one of the figures he used to make this distinction was Rossetti. When reading Charles Ryder keeping Rossetti in the back of our head adds a little depth to what we see.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.