Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815-1900, by Richard Adelman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 by Richard Adelman Jonathan Loesberg (bio) Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900, by Richard Adelman; pp. viii + 233. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £75.00, $80.63. Richard Adelman's Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 is, by turns, enlightening and exasperating, frequently for the same reasons. Adelman follows a familiar path through nineteenth-century English attitudes toward aesthetics, art, and their political implications from Romantic consciousness through Victorian glorifications of work to late-century aestheticism. He revises our understanding of his line of inquiry both by considering different forms of literature within it—political economy and gothic fiction, for instance—and by making some unexpected connections among the various works he addresses. At the same time, some of these forays and connections occur through a movement from one field of inquiry to another without consideration of how the elements he analyzes change their meanings or significance. In order to understand how this occurs, we must begin by noting the more or less implicit definitions of the terms of his title. Aesthetic consciousness is not here a particular mode of perceiving artistic and natural beauty, as it was discussed in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English and German aesthetic theory. It is, rather, a particularly English Romantic phenomenon in which meditation on a natural object, whether sublime or quotidian, brings one to some kind of realization that takes one out of oneself to "open the mind to modes of being and modes of thinking beyond quotidian consciousness" (146). Idleness is a part of this consciousness because the consciousness occurs first in a moment of passive solitude. While this definition interprets well the Romantic poetry and thought Adelman discusses—Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc" (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" (1798), and John Keats's concept of negative capability—this is hardly the only (or even the usual) form of consciousness conceived of as aesthetic, nor the only kind of idleness discussed. Thus, for instance, not all idleness accompanies the aesthetic consciousness Adelman finds so positive, and some aesthetic theories concern artworks because they have their own kind of value. Let us start with idleness. One of the most interesting connections Adelman makes is between the idleness connected with aesthetic consciousness and the idleness that, as the opposite of labor, concerned political economists. The connection makes good sense with regard to John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848). That work does indeed value inactivity and rest from labor as allowing human self-cultivation and this version of idleness does indeed entail Romantic consciousness that Adelman analyzes. He is less persuasive, however, in his discussion of David Ricardo's fear of idleness as connected to aesthetic consciousness. For Ricardo, labor produces wealth, but it is also an activity in which human beings would not naturally engage. Idleness is not concomitant with an aesthetic consciousness but simply the absence of labor and something to be avoided if human beings are not to lack what their labor would produce. In a different vein, Adelmen connects Karl Marx's and William Morris's alignment of aesthetic consciousness with labor to Thomas Carlyle's connection, in his gospel of work, between work and aesthetic production. But for Carlyle, as for Ricardo, idleness was a natural but invidious human desire, and so work, which had to be willed, also produced all good things. Both Marx and Morris thought labor to be a natural human state: not a gospel of work to be preached, but a need to be fulfilled in an ideal state (alienated labor was, of course, another thing entirely). [End Page 341] Perhaps the most surprising result of Adelman's insistence on measuring all forms of aesthetic discourse against Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley arises in his reading of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. His treatment of Arnold's theory of culture as an essentially conservative, not to say panicked, response to the activity leading up to the Second Reform Bill is, of course, not that new. Adelman rejects Arnold's theory first because its demand that we know the best that has been known and thought in the world demands a...