Beauty and Belief

Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature by Hilary Fraser, 233 pages

During the nineteenth century, and particularly in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, traditional religion came under pressure from many sides, especially developments in science, criticism, and philosophy.  Partially as a response, religious believers sought an "alignment of imagination and the transcendent" - finding a new appreciation of beauty as a pathway to God.  This emerged out of the Romantic movement, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge, and proceeded to be reconceived in turn by the theologizing Romantics Newman and Keble, the moralising Romantics Ruskin and Arnold, and finally the decadent Romantics Pater and Wilde.  Hopkins occupies a unique place, chronologically last, recapitulating many of the views and preoccupations of the others while remaining distinctly himself.

For the Tractarians, poetry was necessary to express the mysteries of God - poetry spoke truth because reality itself is somehow poetic, and the means by which we recognize beauty is intimately related to the means by which we recognize truth.  As Fraser guides us through the Victorian period, art shifts from being a handmaid of religion to religion being a form of art to art being the highest form of religion.  Art likewise revealed truth for Ruskin and Arnold, but for them the relevant truth was primarily ethical and therefore political rather than theological, while Pater and Wilde were more interested in the truth of beauty than the beauty of truth.  Fraser explores this development, and other related matters, in detail, with considerable care and apparent sympathy for his subjects.  The reader is left not only wishing that the book reached back to properly cover Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also that it continued on to consider twentieth century figures such as Chesterton and the Inklings.