Abstract
‘Tomes of aesthetic criticism,’ writes the philosopher George Santayana, ‘hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.’1 Aesthetics, the ‘science of art’, has always existed not only to describe (and in some cases quantify) the pleasure human beings take in art, but also to control it: to legislate an acceptable balance between pleasure and moral instruction. Pleasure is the wicked fairy of aesthetics, competing for status with its sister-imperatives Beauty, Truth, the Good, Instruction, Mimesis. Conflicts arise not because of the weakness of pleasure as an ingredient of art, but because of its strength. Plato (reluctantly) went so far as to banish poets — even his beloved Homer — from the ideal republic, not because they failed to please, but, on the contrary, because the pleasure they gave was so strong that it was liable to overturn the principles of good order which underpinned the moral education of his rulers.2 Aesthetics has traditionally attempted to neutralise pleasure’s subversive potential by co-opting it for art’s beneficial power over its audience: right representations please, art teaches by pleasing, the beautiful gives pleasure. It becomes ‘safe’ as the sugar coating on the bitter moral pill.
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© 1996 Susan Manning
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Manning, S. (1996). Burns and Wordsworth: Art and ‘The Pleasure which there is in life itself’. In: Porter, R., Roberts, M.M. (eds) Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24962-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24962-6_9
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