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What measures our distance above the beasts that perish consists in these three things - ethics, intellect, the sense of beauty. . . . On the third [our existing morality] lays no stress at all; and herein the new hedonism has its raison d'être. It is part of its mission to point out to humanity that literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, the beautifying of life by sound, and form, and word, and colour, are among the most important tasks of civilization.
-- Grant Allen, "The New Hedonism" (1894), p. 382
Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
-- Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" (1890, rev. 1891), p. 204
In his provocative polemic "The New Hedonism," Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense of fin-de-siècle aestheticism by proposing a modern ethic - the titular "new hedonism," which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891) - that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge.1At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial "New Woman" novels The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897).2Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers' shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111-28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the "beautifying of life" echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, "The Critic as Artist." "Aesthetics,"...