Flawed Giant

The long decline and fall of the British Empire began, as the even longer declension of Rome had, with an influx of Oriental fantasies and new religions, and exotic attempts at escape from the weight of responsibility, from the task of upholding the fabric. It was signaled as early as 1860, when Edward Fitzgerald created his art nouveau Omar while Tennyson was still elaborating the mildly racy medievalism of his Guinevere- Victoria and Lancelot-Albert. The transition was accomplished, or reaching consummation, by the eighties and nineties—the transition from stiff collar to velvet jacket, from The Cornhill to The Yellow Book, from Browning’s syntactical perversity to Swinburne’s moral solecisms, from Arnold’s scholasticism of culture to Symons’ scholasticism of the artifact. From Erastianism to Theosophy, the Oxford Movement to the Psychical Research Society. From Ruskin to Pater to Wilde; from Constable to Rossetti to Beardsley; from Watts to Whistler.

The arts did not lapse or fail, but broke wildly out of orbit, treating the civilization as irrelevant—not worth criticizing, not worth noticing. Like the air, it had become invisible, men forgot they needed it; until, isolated in their new little rooms, they began to asphyxiate themselves with their own breathing. The aesthetes were too “original” to borrow the common air.

GW

About the Author

Garry Wills

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The long decline and fall of the British Empire began, as the even longer declension of Rome had, with an influx of Oriental fantasies and new religions, and exotic attempts at escape from the weight of responsibility, from the task of upholding the fabric. It was signaled as early as 1860, when Edward Fitzgerald created his art nouveau Omar while Tennyson was still elaborating the mildly racy medievalism of his Guinevere- Victoria and Lancelot-Albert. The transition was accomplished, or reaching consummation, by the eighties and nineties—the transition from stiff collar to velvet jacket, from The Cornhill to The Yellow Book, from Browning’s syntactical perversity to Swinburne’s moral solecisms, from Arnold’s scholasticism of culture to Symons’ scholasticism of the artifact. From Erastianism to Theosophy, the Oxford Movement to the Psychical Research Society. From Ruskin to Pater to Wilde; from Constable to Rossetti to Beardsley; from Watts to Whistler.

The arts did not lapse or fail, but broke wildly out of orbit, treating the civilization as irrelevant—not worth criticizing, not worth noticing. Like the air, it had become invisible, men forgot they needed it; until, isolated in their new little rooms, they began to asphyxiate themselves with their own breathing. The aesthetes were too “original” to borrow the common air.