Charles Eliot Norton on Art and Morals

Abstract

Charles Eliot Norton is well known for his Dante scholarship, other literary commentary and criticism, and for his studies in the history of fine art. He translated The New Life and The Divine Comedy and published significant studies of the work of Dante, Donne, Ruskin, Gray, Michelangelo, Holbein, and Turner, among many others.1 He spent much of his time in Europe from 1868 to 1873 collecting material for his important Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages; and on his return to America, he inaugurated courses at Harvard on the history of fine arts; in which capacity he was extremely successful and influential. Furthermore, his importance as an editor is difficult to overestimate. Along with James Russell Lowell he edited (1864-1868), and revived, the culturally strategic North American Review; and under his influence the magazine carried articles on abstruse philosophical problems and the government's American Indian policy side by side! The books he edited are legion: The Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, Early Letters of Carlyle, Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle, Letters of John Ruskin to C. E. Norton, Letters of James Russell Lowell, Orations and Addresses by George William Curtis, Chauncey Wright's Philosophical Discussions, and numerous others.2 Norton's thought and effort, however, were by no means confined to the arts; he was ardently interested in moral and social problems, both practically and philosophically. He published articles on a wide range of topics: from religious liberty, the church and religion, and recent social theories, through immorality in politics, the poverty of England, and the Indian Revolt, to dwellings and schools for the poor, model lodging houses, and the work of the sanitary commissions. And he not only wrote about, but worked for, the social reforms he believed in. Moreover, the moral element was never absent from Norton's work in the fine arts. When his eldest son, in a serious jest, suggested as a title for his father's lectures, Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients, Norton good naturedly agreed! 3 Norton's marked interest in art and morality has been interpreted in several ways; but his theoretical view in ethics and the link between his ethical and aesthetic views have never been established. This view and the link appear in his Letters and some of his unpublished correspondence. One writer has seen 4 in Norton's life interests a plain ambivalence: an abandonment to aesthetic experience and cultivation, on the one hand, and sober, shoulder-to-the-wheel moral endeavor, on the other-the two interests not incompatible but simply alternating. The comment by Norton's son, however, suggests a close rapport between art and morals in Norton's mind; namely, the view, enhanced by his friendships with Emerson, Ruskin, Arnold, and Carlyle, that art is the vehicle for moral apergus. It cannot be gainsaid that Norton's thought does exhibit this Victorian tendency; but it