Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Of cabbages and kings, of the Cotswolds and Aesthetes

The season of Brideshead
Who were these Aesthetes anyway?

Let’s start with something really basic.

When we are children we are taught all sorts of deferred gratification. We want to do things right now and our mother tells us we have to wait. A big portion of our moral life seems to be about putting things off until later or, quite possibly, forever. Morality seems to mean a bunch of authorities and rules telling us not to do certain things.

Someday, we imagine, we will be adults and we’ll be able to do pretty much what we want. However, as we get close to adulthood, we find that it doesn’t turn out that way.

Even when we become adults, life's pleasures seem to have nothing to do with living morally. When we do treat ourselves to a pleasant meal, to sleeping in on Saturday morning, to sweets or to sex we do so with the feeling that this is a departure from real moral life. It’s okay to enjoy this but don’t enjoy it too much because real moral life is about denial.

For the Christian this is especially contradictory because we believe that a loving God created us. So why, the obvious question arises, would a loving God create us so that the some of life’s best pleasures are only momentary indulgences that risk distracting us from life’s real purpose which is denial? As Jesse Winchester once put it, "If he didn't want me watching women, he'd a left my eyeballs dead." The answer to that seems to go back to Augustine who said that the answer is because real pleasure, the only pleasure that is morally justifiable because it is the only pleasure good enough for a creature of God, will be in heaven.

Augustine allowed that we might occasionally indulge in momentary pleasures now and then as these offered us a foretaste of what was to come. Everything good comes from God said Augustine; why even sexual pleasure, because it is so good, must come from God. But the danger of being misled by the very intensity of the pleasure into mistaking it for our goal when our real goal is union with God is so great that we have to constantly suppress this desire. And sex, precisely because it is so good and clearly one of God's greatest gifts must be carefully controlled or suppressed altogether if we find it stands between us and God.

There is another alternative and that is the idea of virtue. That is the Greek idea that we are to develop our character so that we can become fully formed human beings. And part of this cultivation will be a cultivation of the pleasures. Not just any pleasures—stuffing our faces with Doritos, for example, wouldn't count. A whole human being would be as accomplished at taking pleasure as in making sacrifices.

Or even, in a Christian variation, that we develop as far down this line as we can realizing that we can only do this because God is with us and that he has promised to do even more than we can ask or imagine in the next life. That, with some complications, is the view that the scholastics pushed.

However, the Augustinian view—that everything in this life was ultimately meaningless and that morality consisted in denying ourselves in preparation for the day we can be elevated into that next life—always persisted to some degree or another.

And it was into this world that a very shy, reclusive little Oxford don named Walter Pater came. He quietly met with other people at Oxford who thought there was something wrong with all this denial. He was a very private man so no one knows what he really thought or did. He hung around with agnostics but we don’t know if he was agnostic. He hung around with homosexuals but we don’t know if he himself was a homosexual. We do know that he admired ancient lore about beauty and love. It was not terribly surprising then that he wrote a book about the Renaissance.

Much to everyone’s surprise, especially poor Walter Horatio Pater himself, all hell broke loose when the book appeared in 1873. He didn’t say anything in the book that he hadn’t been quietly saying in his lectures and conversations at Oxford but when it appeared in print the reaction was instantaneous, strong and polarized. Some people idolized him and established a new movement based on how they understood his thought in general. Others condemned him as if he were the whore of Babylon come to destroy the flower of British youth.

So, you really want to know what he said don’t you? Okay, here are three excerpts, the second of which is a really famous sentence.
  1. 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.
  2. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
  3. 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.
The second sentence is sort of the E=MC2 of Pater; people who know nothing else about him know this sentence.

The crucial thing, however, is that Pater here suggests that to live passionately right now is the key to being a whole person.

Reading it now, you might be underwhelmed, most people are. Not everyone though. I remember reading this stuff in the reading room at my college and feeling like electric current was running through me it felt so right. Later I got a little embarrassed because, logically speaking, it isn’t compelling. I realized I believed it because I wanted to believe it.

Believed what exactly? Meaning, what exactly does all this mean? Well, it almost doesn’t matter for our purposes because the ideas here don’t seem to have ever been precisely defined. But a whole movement of young people who called themselves aesthetes in Britain based itself on these inspiring paragraphs.

Actually, two whole movements did. The first ran from the publication of Pater’s book on the Renaissance until about 1895, when his most famous disciple Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour for engaging "gross indecency, read "homosexual acts". The second sprung up in the late 1910s and early 1920s in a number of places but, most famously, at Eton where two precocious young men named Brian Howard and Harold Acton inspired their friends to become aesthetes. This group of Etonians went on to Oxford where Evelyn Waugh fell under their spell.

Brian Howard in particular was a huge influence on the little group at Oxford. And here is a little tidbit to finish up on. When Brian Howard found young Miss Nancy Mitford and introduced her to the group, he wrote a letter in which he bragged of having discovered her, “Among the Cabbages of the Cotswolds.” Sound like anyone you've been reading about?

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here .

No comments:

Post a Comment