Modern Æstheticism [pp. 148-163]

NQIODERD; SSTIETICISM.
the evil of that school of poetry whose leaders may utter one
thing and mean another or mean nothing, and who, without any
well-defined principles of their own, ride upon the back of a few
verbal hobbies and give loose reins as they pass to every form
of sensualism. To be duped by the casuistry of such teachers
is as irritating as it is to be misled by their teachings. Hence it
is the duty of every man at all devoted to the interests of a
true literary art and morale to strip these pretentious reformers
of all their disguises; to call things by their right names, and to
seek a safer leadership. The difference between the chaste sen timent of Milton's "Comus" and the immoral spirit of the
poems of Wycherly will indicate the difference we are noting
between the presence and the absence of ethical purity in verse,
between a true and a false aestheticism.
3. Scepticism. We have already marked the mental and
moral characteristics of the school of poetry before us. In seek ing for its philosophical feature, we may speak of it as sceptical
rather than biblical. "We have," says Wilde, "a positive, spe cial, independent, metaphysical science which the mind of the
average Philistine Briton is incapable of understanding." We
admit the difficulty of understanding it. It is safe, however, to
speak of it in general terms as a compound of fatalism, panthe ism, and pessimism-the prevailing materialism or "dirt philosophy" of the day. Doubt takes the place of faith, and the
Word of God is set aside as untrustworthy and needless. If we
read in Kant of transcendental esthetics, we are now reading of
physiological esthetics. The science of the beautiful is reduced
to actual measuirement-to that physical or physiological basis
to which modern teachings are reducing all things. These are
the days of flesh and blood. We are speaking of the relations
of modern aestheticism to modern philosophy, and it is suggestive to note that Schopenhauer, the apostle of pessimism, has
taken special pains, in connection with his psychological system,
to show the exact relations thereto of ethics on the one hand
and esthetics on the other-to co-ordinate them, in fact, as a
unique, metaphysical system. While it is undoubtedly true, as
Mr. Bowen states, that Schopenhauer's "theory of esthetics is
the least objectionable portion of his system," and while in accordance with that philosophy all beauty is resolved into the
I59