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The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic; Democracy. By Linda Dowling. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966. xiv + 133 pages.
Linda Dowling's Vulgarization of Art argues that British aestheticism, as represented by John Ruskin, William Morris, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, was riven by a central paradox. Far from being a retreat from politics, the movement was propelled by its faith that the more beautiful world it envisioned was both an expression of and a means to social revolution. But this belief, she maintains, was grounded on "an ideal of aristocratic sensibility unrecognized as such . . . as the hidden source of value in moral and aesthetic terms" (xii). For Dowling, the contradiction between aesthetic democracy and its roots in an aristocratic ideal proved irresolvable. Repressed by Ruskin and Morris, problematic for Pater, it openly haunts the works of Oscar Wilde, whose liberal politics were undermined by his recognition that art as he imagined it was incompatible with the conditions of a mass society.
Dowling traces the Victorian link between aestheticism and liberalism through the Germanic Hellenism of Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, and Hegel to the seventeenthcentury writings of the third earl of Shaftesbury. She sees Matthew Arnold's notion of disinterestedness as a return, by this circuitous route, to Shaftesbury's belief that aesthetic judgment is inseparable from moral judgment and therefore a guarantor of the well-being of a democratic commonwealth. Responding to the "Tory charge that Whig 'liberty' was nothing more than a mask for licentiousness and libertinism" (10), he argued that liberated human nature will always choose the moral because it will always choose the beautiful. However, Dowling suggests that Shaftesbury may have reached this egalitarian belief "by projecting his own aristocratic sensibility outward onto humanity as a whole" (15); and it is this paradox that resurfaces in the aesthetic utopianism of the nineteenth century. For Dowling, the four Victorian writers she addresses all make, in varying degrees, the mistake of assuming their fellow mortals to be as aesthetically giftedat least in potential-as themselves.
Dowling traces the power of Ruskin's early writing on...