Emilia Dilke on Aesthetics

RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACT This article contributes to recovering the history of women’s contributions to aesthetics by examining Emilia Dilke’s writings on aesthetics from the mid-1860s to the early 1870s. Initially, Dilke took the historicist view that artworks are inescapably the products and expressions of their social and historical circumstances and that art is better, as art, the more it distils its time. Dilke also thought that in the modern world art had separated inexorably from morality and religion. On that basis she came to endorse aestheticism, arguing that art should be made for beauty’s sake and not subordinated to moral purposes. However, this ultimately led to some tensions between her aestheticism and historicism. In the end she resolved these tensions by distinguishing between various kinds of value, or uses, that artworks can have. The best artworks have properly aesthetic value and transcend history, whereas the majority of artworks have only historical value as expressions of their eras. Overall, Dilke put forward a forceful defence of aestheticism and negotiated between aestheticism and historicism in a unique way. She deserves recognition as a significant female figure in the history of aesthetics. Emilia Dilke on Aesthetics Alison Stone Lancaster University, UK CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Alison Stone Lancaster University, UK [email protected] KEYWORDS: Emilia Dilke; aestheticism; historicism; history of women philosophers; nineteenth-century British aesthetics TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Stone, Alison. ‘Emilia Dilke on Aesthetics.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no. 1 (2023): pp. 1–18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/ eeja.328 2Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 I. INTRODUCING EMILIA DILKE Emilia Dilke (1840–1904) was, by the time of her death, Britain’s pre-eminent authority on French art. She built her reputation with The Renaissance of Art in France (1879), Claude Lorrain (1884), Art in the Modern State (1888), and a four-volume book series on eighteenth-century French art (1899–1902).1 Despite her high standing in her own time, Dilke, like many historical women intellectuals, was forgotten for nearly all of the twentieth century and misleadingly omitted from histories of thinking about art in Britain. Thankfully, recent scholars have done invaluable work restoring Dilke to the historical record. The restoration began with Betty Askwith’s 1969 biography and Colin Eisler’s 1981 article on Dilke as art historian.2 Several key reinterpretations followed in the 1990s – a series of articles by Elizabeth Mansfield, an innovative critical biography by Kali Israel, and an account of Dilke’s journal contributions by Marysa Demoor.3 This has enabled further scholarship from the 2000s onwards, by Meaghan Clarke, Hilary Fraser, and John Paul Kanwit, locating Dilke within traditions of Victorian art history and criticism.4 One part of Dilke’s oeuvre still awaits recovery. Before she turned to art history, Dilke produced a substantial corpus of writing on aesthetics. Spanning the mid-1860s to the early 1870s, it includes numerous short essays and reviews and two major theoretical statements, ‘Art and Morality’ (1869) and ‘The Use of Looking at Pictures’ (1873). Dilke, then, was an aesthetician before she became an art historian. My aim here is to provide the first modern-day philosophical account of Dilke the aesthetician and unfold her distinctive position in aesthetics. To anticipate, Dilke began in the 1860s as a historicist, seeing artworks as inescapably the products and expressions of their social and historical circumstances (see Section 1 See Mme Mark Pattison [Emilia Dilke], The Renaissance of Art in France (London: Kegan Paul, 1879); Claude Lorrain (Paris: Rouam, 1884); Emilia [Lady] Dilke, Art in the Modern State (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888); French Painters of the XVIIIth Century (London: Bell, 1899); French Architects and Sculptors of the XVIIIth Century (London: Bell, 1900); French Furniture and Decoration in the XVIIIth Century (London: Bell, 1901), and French Engravers and Draughtsmen of the XVIIIth Century (London: Bell, 1902). 2 See Betty Askwith, Lady Dilke: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), and Colin Eisler, ‘Lady Dilke (1840–1904): The Six Lives of an Art Historian’, in Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979, ed. Claire Richter Sherman and Adele Holcomb (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 147–80. 3 See Elizabeth Mansfield, ‘Art, History and Authorship: The Critical Writings of Emilia Dilke’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996); ‘Victorian Identity and the Historical Imaginary: Emilia Dilke’s The Renaissance of Art in France’, Clio 26 (1997): 167–88; ‘Articulating Authority: Emilia Dilke’s Early Essays and Reviews’, Victorian Periodicals Review 31 (1998): 75–86; and ‘The Victorian Grand Siècle: Ideology as Art History’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2000): 133–47; Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Marysa Demoor, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the ‘Athenaeum’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 64–75. I should note that Israel’s complex, postmodern interpretive approach goes beyond straightforward biography. 4 See Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain 1880–1905 (London: Routledge, 2005); Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); ‘Writing Cosmopolis: The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Emilia Dilke and Vernon Lee’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 28 (2019), https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.844; and ‘Dilke [née Strong; other married name Pattison], Emilia Francis, Lady Dilke’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/32825; and John Paul Kanwit, Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). 3Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 II). This led her to reject aesthetic moralism, the then-popular view that art should serve moral purposes and be judged by moral criteria. She rejected that view on the grounds that art had become separated from morality and religion over the course of history, making aesthetic moralism inappropriate in the modern world. Dilke thus became a proponent of aestheticism, the view that art’s primary purpose is to be beautiful and that art should be judged by aesthetic criteria, not moral, political, or religious ones. Dilke defended aestheticism in ‘Art and Morality’ (see Section III). But the way she did so created a tension, ultimately, with her historicism (Section IV). After wavering between her aestheticist and historicist commitments in the early 1870s, she resolved the tension in ‘The Use of Looking at Pictures’ by distinguishing between the best artworks, which have aesthetic value and transcend history, and the majority of lesser artworks, which have only historical value as expressions of their times (see Section V). The latter works must therefore be explained and understood historically. So, Dilke concluded, the right approach to most art is historical and explanatory; hence she turned aside from aesthetics to art history (see Section VI). Why should we care? The answer is that the history of women’s contributions to aesthetics is seriously under-studied. Introducing a Hypatia special issue on ‘Women, Art, and Aesthetics’, Peg Brand and Mary Devereaux noted that feminist aestheticians had barely looked at women in the history of aesthetics.5 But Brand and Devereaux themselves did not mention any pre-twentieth-century women aestheticians, and the scholarly situation has changed little since. Actually, many women wrote on aesthetics in nineteenth-century Britain (not to mention other times and places). They include Joanna Baillie, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, and Vernon Lee, besides Dilke herself. By examining Dilke’s work we can fill in part of this rich tradition. This is important both for historical accuracy and to make aesthetics more inclusive by recognizing women’s contributions to it, present and past. Let me briefly sketch Dilke’s life and career to contextualize what follows.6 Born Emily Francis Strong but always called Francis, she grew up in Oxford in an artistically well-connected family, knowing the pre-Raphaelites (she rejected Holman Hunt’s marriage offer) and John Ruskin, at whose encouragement she studied art from 1859 to 1861 at the National Art Training School in London. She then returned to Oxford and married the rector of Lincoln College, Mark Pattison, becoming Emily Francis Strong Pattison. The couple’s unhappy marriage was widely regarded as the model for that of Dorothea and Casaubon in Eliot’s Middlemarch – Mark Pattison did, in fact, write a book on the historical Casaubon.7 Francis Pattison (as Dilke then was) began publishing in the periodical press in the 1860s. According to her second husband, Sir Charles Dilke, ‘The subjects upon which she wrote largely in her early days were in the main philosophical. […] The dominant interest [in aesthetics] soon came to the front, […] in a series of reviews of German books developing theories of aesthetics’,8 and 5 Peg Brand and Mary Devereaux, ‘Introduction: Feminism and Aesthetics’, Hypatia 18 (2003): viii–xx. 6 On Dilke’s life, see Askwith, Lady Dilke, and Israel, Names and Stories. 7 Eliot knew of Dilke’s marital woes because they were good friends and corresponded regularly; Eliot described herself in one letter as Dilke’s mother (Madre) (see Israel, Names and Stories, 299n41). 8 Charles Dilke, ‘Memoir’, in Emilia Dilke [Lady Dilke], The Book of the Spiritual Life (London: Murray, 1905), 28. 4Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 English and French books too. These 1860s pieces were in the Saturday Review, from which she progressed to publish in the prestigious Westminster Review from 1869 to 1873, and then from 1870 in The Academy, whose art editor she became in 1873.9 By then she was reviewing numerous art exhibitions as well as art books, making the turn to art history consolidated in her first book, The Renaissance of Art in France, in 1879. Also during the 1870s, she privately changed her first name to the more cosmopolitan and literary ‘Emilia’. Following Mark Pattison’s death in 1884 she married Charles Dilke in 1885, thereby becoming Lady Emilia Dilke – here, for simplicity, ‘Dilke’. Alongside her work on French art, she became immersed in the movement to unionize women workers, serving as president of the Women’s Trade Union League from 1886 to 1904. She now saw artworks as material products, contributing to the economy, and shaped by political arrangements; this naturally led her to recognize the importance of production and the political need for producers, including women producers, to secure better working conditions.10 That was where Dilke ended up; let us explore how she got there. I will move through the stages in her aesthetic thought chronologically, presenting her ideas clearly and reconstructing the reasoning behind her intellectual development. I shall quote her extensively, so that the philosophical character of her work can speak for itself. II. DILKE’S HISTORICISM Historicism was the dominant strand in Dilke’s earliest essays in the Saturday Review, for which she began writing in 1863. It was a conservative and acerbic journal, but its strict policy of anonymity and strong corporate voice gave Dilke a safe space to develop her ideas.11 We should bear in mind that anonymity was normal for prose articles in British periodicals until the mid-1860s, and in some cases later. This convention had enabling aspects for women, allowing them to publish without being censured.12 Once signature became more normal, women often held on to anonymity as best they could, sometimes by using initials rather than given names or adopting pseudonyms. But in the 1860s Dilke could still take advantage of the convention of anonymity. She worked out her approach to art using her reviews of other art theorists, for reviews and essays were not sharply differentiated in nineteenth-century British periodicals, which employed a porous essay–review format. In ‘The Art-Idea’ (1864), Dilke declared positivism the best approach to art. By contrast, James Jackson Jarves, whose book The Art-Idea she was critiquing, offered only ‘fine speculations’ and a ‘philosophy that wants but one thing – bottom’.13 His theory had not faced ‘the test of facts’. These statements exemplify what Charles 9 Mansfield, ‘Articulating Authority’, gives an excellent account of these early articles but foregrounds Dilke’s authoritative persona within them more than their philosophical arguments. 10 On Dilke’s later materialist and historicist approach, see Fraser, Women Writing, chap. 4, and ‘Writing Cosmopolis’. 11 See Hugh Craig and Alexis Antonia, ‘Six Authors and the Saturday Review: A Quantitative Approach to Style’, Victorian Periodicals Review 48 (2015): 67–86. 12 See Alexis Easley, First Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830–70 (London: Ashgate, 2004). 13 [Emilia Dilke], ‘The Art-Idea’, Saturday Review, 13 August 1864, 219. 5Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 Dilke described as ‘her invariable straightforwardness, often “brutality”, of intellect’.14 Against speculation, she recommended the ‘far more reasoned system of Comte’, which derives theory from facts.15 Dilke thus supported empiricism and positivism, and was somewhat sceptical about theory – a repeated refrain in her work. Given Dilke’s positivist sympathies, in 1865 she favourably reviewed the Philosophy of Art, by the French aesthetician Hippolyte Taine, whose blend of positivism and historicism influenced her considerably. For Taine, one understands an artwork by explaining it with reference to the artist’s whole oeuvre, in turn explained by his school, in turn explained by the ‘moral, social and […] political condition of the world around’, a world in constant historical evolution.16 Thus, for Taine, artworks are ultimately products of the artist’s historical environment; to understand artworks we must explain how these external factors have produced and shaped them. Dilke agrees: the business of aestheticians is to explain artworks by tracing the causes acting on them and working out the natural laws of art’s evolution. ‘No work of art, then, is […] isolated. The starting-point of a true philosophy must necessarily be that of the ensemble which surrounds the work, and of which it forms a part.’ She also enthuses over Taine’s practical recommendations: We find, in the principles here laid down, the clue to all true and healthy progress. Taking nature as the standard […] in the depth and breadth of organic life – we shall no longer be subject to the complaint that art is dead, or remain enslaved to the […] conventions of the past. More specifically, good art must take its inspiration from the present day, for ‘the art of an age is the presentation […] of its reality’. After all, art is invariably of its age anyway; artists should recognize and lean into this reality. For then the artist will depict individuals who embody the fundamental tendencies of the time, raising these individuals from mere individuals to representative types.17 In short, Dilke takes from Taine that artworks must be explained by the causal factors shaping them; that these causal factors are those of the historically evolving social environment, which must be analysed empirically; that good art distils the trends of its time in exemplary typical individuals; and that along this path nineteenth-century art can become both modern and vital. To clarify: by ‘good’ art Dilke means artistically good, not morally good; she distinguishes the artistic (and aesthetic) good from the morally good, as we will see. In 1868 Dilke first introduces that central aestheticist strand of thought, in a critical review of Richard St John Tyrwhitt’s Handbook of Pictorial Art, which proposed that modern art should be didactic and educate people by depicting real historical events. Dilke objects that it only made sense for art to be instructive in eras when most people were illiterate. Nowadays, art should be left free to pursue properly aesthetic ends. Tyrwhitt’s strictures would impose 14 Charles Dilke, ‘Memoir’, 12. 15 [Dilke], ‘Art-Idea’, 219. 16 [Emilia Dilke], ‘Taine’s Philosophy of Art’, Saturday Review, 21 October 1865, 520. 17 Ibid. 6Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 an unnecessary and unreasonable tyranny. In the kingdom of art, imagination is not the handmaid, but the mistress, of the understanding; and work which is not done for its own sake, in which the chief place is claimed for the historical or the moral, […] in which the contents form the weightiest part, loses its aesthetic character, and cannot possess those poetic elements which fire the fancy and rouse the emotions.18 Dilke’s central objection to didacticism is that it is inappropriate for the modern world. Didactic works might have been good art in the Middle Ages, but they have no place today. This leads into her essay ‘Religious Art in the Nineteenth Century’, also from 1868. She employs her Tainian conception of ideal types to solve the problem of what art should do in an age where it has parted from religion inexorably. Formerly, Dilke says, art and religion were ‘knit compactly in unity of organic life’. But this unity is now lost: ‘Religious art is now severed from the world’s art’. Religionists look down on art, artists have scant use for religion, and both are now detached from worldly life. Yet we cannot go back: ‘One reason why most religious art in the nineteenth century has been a failure is that it does not belong to the century.’19 Dilke proposes an alternative way for modern art to regain a serious and meaningful purpose. ‘Painters wrongly suppose that religious art means a perpetual reproduction of Saints and Holy Families, whereas the subjects arising out of daily experience’ would be more suitable. Artists should take everyday modern individuals and raise them into types exemplifying the age. This would yield a new ‘ideal realism’ – not mere naturalism, and not finding the supernatural in the natural, but finding the typical in the individual and so giving daily realities profound meaning.20 In sum, Dilke opposes any subordination of art to education, religion, or morality on the grounds that art has necessarily separated from these other factors over history and that, instead of looking backwards, we should make art that is of its time and so pursues independent aesthetic goals. The motivation for Dilke’s aestheticism, then, comes from her historicist view that art should reflect its era and that the modern era is one in which art has become independent from other aspects of social life. III. DILKE’S AESTHETICISM Dilke elaborated her version of aestheticism in the 1869 article ‘Art and Morality’, published in the heavyweight liberal journal the Westminster Review. It was anonymous, this being the journal’s general policy, of which Dilke again took advantage. Ostensibly a review of two books by the French spiritualist-cum-eclectic Victor Laprade, Dilke uses her 16,000-word piece to make a sustained case for aestheticism – doing so, notably, four years before the text usually heralded as the manifesto of aestheticism 18 [Emilia Dilke], ‘A Handbook of Pictorial Art’, Saturday Review, 22 August 1868, 262. 19 [Emilia Dilke], ‘Religious Art in the Nineteenth Century’, Saturday Review, 12 September 1868, 361. 20 Ibid. 7Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 in Britain, the conclusion to Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance of 1873.21 Dilke’s complex argument divides into stages (she did not so divide it herself; I am doing so on her behalf). Critique of Laprade, moralism, and idealism.22 Situating herself in the British empiricist and sensualist tradition, Dilke objects to Laprade’s demand that art should provide ‘moral instruction and moral advancement’ (AM, p. 184). Dilke sounds caution about aesthetic theory altogether – there is too much theorizing around, to the detriment of art and our responses to it. But, despite her ‘preference for artistic produce over artistic theory’, she must theorize in order to combat the undesirable moralist theorizing of Laprade and the broader family of idealist theories to which his belongs (AM, p. 149). These theories distinguish ideal beauty from mere sensory reality by combining Plato, Descartes, and Reid (as the French eclectics did) to postulate an idea of moral beauty, perceived by God, of which physical beauty is merely the symbol. Dilke replies that, if real beauty is ideal and grasped by reason and not the senses, then it is so far removed from ordinary sensory beauty that it is not properly called ‘beauty’ at all; these theorists have simply replaced (sensory) beauty with (ideal) morality. Sensualist account of beauty (AM, pp. 160–68). Dilke concedes that rejecting defective theories is easy, but one must put a better account in place. ‘If we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to identify that which we call beauty with a real transcendental perfection cognizable by reason, this is the place to indicate […] what we in fact mean by the word’ (AM, p. 160). She proposes ‘to explain the nature and growth of the sentiment of beauty on a basis of sensation’ (AM, p. 161). Sensations subdivide into: 1. Simple sensations produced in the body by single colours, sounds, shapes, and so on. Some of these – certain colours, curved lines, musical notes – produce feelings of pleasure in us. ‘That certain simple sensations […] are attended by an organic pleasure, must be accepted as a primitive part of our nature’ (AM, p. 162). These simple pleasures are independent of any further associations and meanings we may attach to the qualities being sensed. 2. Compound or cognitive sense-impressions, in which one sensed quality recalls others we associate with it, as when a sound suggests a waterfall or a smell suggests a rose. This is ‘the stage when sensation acquires an intellectual character’ (AM, p. 164). Some of these associations also produce pleasure, as with the smell that evokes the idea of an attractive rose. These are associative pleasures as distinct from simple pleasures (AM, p. 162). 21 This raises a question as to whether Pater was influenced by Dilke. They probably influenced one another towards aestheticism, for they knew one another well in 1860s Oxford. Dilke, then still married to Mark Pattison, who was rector of Lincoln College, hosted a ‘salon at the Rector’s lodgings, to which gravitated most of the liberal and rationalist element of the University. Pater was often a guest.’ See Lawrence Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), xxxiv. Charles Dilke also notes their longstanding friendly relations (Charles Dilke, ‘Memoir’, 29–31) – even after Dilke’s unfavourable review of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which led him to rename it The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. See also Hilary Fraser, ‘Walter Pater and Emilia Dilke’, in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism 2 (2016): 21–30. 22 [Emilia Dilke], ‘Art and Morality’, Westminster Review 35 (1869): 149–60. Hereafter: AM. 8Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 The nucleus of beauty is in sensations agreeable to sight and hearing (either simply or associatively). Sight and hearing are fundamental here, not the other senses, because they are (1) unexclusive: sounds and sights are available to many people at the same time, whereas tastes and smells are more private; (2) intellectual: sight and hearing are the most cognitive senses, that is, richest in associations; (3) sources of disinterested pleasure: we find certain sounds and sights pleasing irrespective of their utility to us (one can find a raging torrent pleasing, while knowing one would be in danger if one fell in; AM, p. 165). The pleasures caused by the other senses only become ‘artistic’ when they are joined to pleasurable sights and sounds. For example, viewing a painting of a country scene may produce simple visual pleasures (from its colours and shapes), associative visual pleasures (in the scene depicted), and by extension associative olfactory or gustatory pleasures (if one associates the scene depicted with pleasing smells of fresh grass and tasty picnics). The pleasures of smell and taste can thus be made unexclusive, intellectual, and disinterested by being attached to pleasures of sight and sound, in which case the former pleasures too become aesthetic (AM, p. 166). Additional qualities can also become ‘ingredients of the Beautiful’: harmony, utility, fitness (suitability of means to ends), power, and completeness (AM, p. 167). These qualities become beautiful either if we contemplate them in real-life events in a disinterested way or if they are present in fictional events within literary works; or, again, if they are associatively suggested to us by the look of real-life visible things or if they are present in depicted objects in pictures. Finally, novelty, variety, unity, and successful imitation are also components of beauty. If Dilke’s view of beauty begins to look rather crowded and disparate, we should remember that for her its basis is in the senses, as follows: 1. We naturally feel simple and associative pleasures in some qualities presented to our sight and hearing, and their pleasurableness makes these qualities beautiful; 2. When other pleasurable qualities (for example, smells) become attached to these pleasurable sensory and auditory qualities, they become beautiful too; 3. The above visual and auditory qualities are public and intellectual (rich in associations), and give disinterested pleasure; 4. When real or artistically depicted events or objects share in those three qualities, they become beautiful too. Clearly all this could be scrutinized further, but let me follow Dilke, who immediately proceeds to the anti-moralist implications: From an account of beauty such as the foregoing it is easy to deduce consequences subversive of […] all theories that would make moral improvement the end of fine art. If the differential character of fine art is its power to produce a certain kind of pleasure, it will be guilty of foregoing this character if it aims at producing something else. On the great principle of the separation of functions, let moral and intellectual agencies be applied to further the ends of virtue, artistic agencies to further the ends of beauty. The relations of beauty to virtue are these: virtue is beautiful because it pleases; not, beauty pleases because it is virtuous. (AM, p. 167) Art’s progressive historical separation from religion and morality (AM, pp. 168–76). Dilke now says that her anti-moralist conclusion needs to be ‘fortified by a reference 9Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 to the history of the fine arts, and to the part which the ethical or didactic element has actually played in them’ (AM, p. 168). She concentrates on classical Greece and medieval Italy. Initially Greek crafts entirely served religion, both with temples and statues of the gods. But, to make worship appealing, craftspeople began to follow artistic motives: exploring combinations of colours, adding decoration, deploying contrasts of light and shade. This properly artistic element was explored more and more: ‘the artistic motive, the love of beauty for beauty’s sake’ (AM, p. 172). Art thereby became art properly speaking, as distinct from handicraft (AM, pp. 168–69). For a time now art and religion co-operated, but eventually religion became subordinate, with artists merely using religious subjects as themes for art. Italian Christian art followed an identical course. At first, paintings and sculptures exalted the saints, angels, Christ, and Mary. But in time ‘the pleasure which such things are found to give becomes a motive of itself, and supplants the glory of God’ (AM, p. 174). Artists became interested in colour itself, in sensory details; religious and artistic motives now co-existed and co-operated. But in time the artistic motives prevailed, and so – in the Renaissance – artists turned to secular subjects as well as religious ones, and reduced the religious subjects to pretexts for exploring sensory beauty. Art’s disaggregation from religion has been not mere change but progress: We can trace a progressive evolution [in Italian art] entirely analogous to that traceable in the case of Greek art […]. That which is depicted by mature art is not ‘man as a moral being […]’ so much as man as a physical being – man in possession of bodily perfection […]. The progress of art, in short, consists in its passage from the representation of spirit to the representation of body. (AM, pp. 175–77) For its time this statement is astonishing. The best art does not realize spirit or the ideal but is that in which the sensory pleasures of the body have escaped the dominance of the idea. This sensualist conclusion comes out of Dilke’s positivism. Herbert Spencer, to whom she refers, maintained that everything undergoes evolution, defined as the ‘change from an incoherent homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity’.23 For Dilke, applied to art this means that over time art becomes heterogeneous from the religious and moral motives with which it was originally mixed incoherently. At first there was only religion and handicraft; then, in service of religion, artistic motives (the pursuit of sensory beauty) emerged; then these motives become a force in their own right; then artistic motives reduced religion to a mere pretext, whereby the domains of art and religion became separate. Two clarifications. First, despite this stress on historical progress, Dilke’s accounts of both beauty and art have an ahistorical aspect: what we find beautiful depends purely on the senses and is specifiable independently of history; and art’s historical separation from religion is progressive because previously art was mixed with religious motives that are intrinsically heterogeneous from properly artistic ones. The separation has allowed art to become itself – to realize its essential nature as art. Second, although Dilke set out to trace what part the ‘ethical or didactic element’ played in art’s historical development, she actually focuses on religion. This was because in Victorian 23 Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; London: Watts, 1937), 325. 16Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 added,34 conveying that her art-historical turn was driven by her own theoretical commitments – indeed, in part, her anti-theoretical commitments. Scepticism about theory was an abiding refrain in Dilke’s thought. She repeatedly complained that speculation and excessive systematization compromise our ability both to observe facts and to appreciate artworks’ sensory qualities (see, for example, AM, p. 149). For Dilke, we do not need theory to appreciate the beautiful, because it is built from sensory, perceptible qualities to which we are organically responsive. Nor do we need theory to appreciate the timeless human interest in great works. The more aesthetic value an artwork has, the less we need theory to appreciate it. Accordingly Dilke saw no need to write books on artworks qua aesthetic objects. Where research and explanation were needed was for that majority of artworks that possess only historical interest. There, Dilke judged that she could perform useful service. She says so to open and motivate her Renaissance of Art in France: The art of the French Renaissance depends for its charm on [the] motive by which it is animated. It is […] the expression […] of a period when the life of the few had become exceedingly rich and complex. It cannot, therefore, be appreciated by a wide public, and requires perhaps more than the art of any other time a knowledge of the conditions under which it was produced in order to arrive at an appreciation of its excellence. Art is the speech of the people only its most abstract forms. When it presents, for example, a type of physical beauty unaffected by any moral agent – as in the Antinous – or when it renders a physical ideal in which is embodied a conception of moral beauty – as in the Niobe, or the Sistine Madonna, […] – art is universally intelligible. It is a tongue which knows no accent. […] The work of the French Renaissance scarcely, however, affords any instance of this […]; but it is, on the other hand, rich in local colour, and contains […] an abundant source of interest for those who read it in the signs of the time at which it was produced.35 In other words, where art realizes sensory qualities of beauty or presents universal human interest, it transcends history, and everyone can relate to this kind of art immediately. But most art does not achieve this and remains historically bound, as with French Renaissance art. To appreciate such art, we need historical knowledge. Given Dilke’s antecedent positivism and empiricism, that means empirical knowledge about the ‘conditions under which [the art] was produced’. The correct explanatory route is from facts to meanings, not vice versa. Dilke’s art history books are not devoid of aesthetic insights, but the overarching project is to provide historical explanation through detailed, patient, documentary accounting of causal forces and sources. The aesthetic elements supplement the history. Dilke’s transition from aesthetics to art history was thereby complete. She made that transition on philosophical grounds – but ironically her philosophical standpoint led her to abandon philosophy for art history. Although Dilke concluded that she must leave aesthetics behind, we need not follow her, for her aesthetic theorizing retains interest in its own right. It includes a sustained 34 Letter from Dilke to Gertrude Tuckwell, n. d., MS Pattison 140, Pattison Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 35 Dilke, Renaissance of Art in France, 1–2. 17Stone Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.328 defence of the aestheticist thesis that art’s purpose is to be beautiful; an original attempt to combine historicism and aestheticism; an empiricist and sensualist account of beauty; a claim that art matures the more it separates from religion and morality and focuses on the body, not the spirit; and an original taxonomy of the ‘uses’ of pictures, distinguishing between aesthetic, poetic-literary, and historical value. On all these counts, Dilke deserves to be recognized as a significant female contributor to the history of aesthetics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank the referees for their very helpful comments. COMPETING INTERESTS The author has no competing interests to declare. REFERENCES Askwith, Betty. Lady Dilke: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969. 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