ABSTRACT
T o the Crystal Palace exhibits the art critics brought memories of an aesthetic standard which the ingenious craftsmen were content complacently to ignore. Wel l aware of the principles that had guided the tastes of a less anarchic era, Wyatt and Redgrave and Owen Jones were all moved by a longing for the order of a neoclassicism vanished beyond recall. Whatever their desire to believe in the " p r o g - ress" of culture, they saw a lack of common purpose as the source of much misdirected energy; and they shook their heads at "art's decline." L ike their eighteenth-century predecessors, most early Victorian aestheticians strove to relate the beautiful to some fixed pattern in the harmony of nature, to an unchanging truth beyond the immediate object of contemplation. I f art was to mirror a larger totality, its function, they thought, must be at least implicitly "moral"; the picture or the poem, the play or the statue was to edify as well as to delight by its reflection of an immutable design. Sydney Dobell, as
we have seen, felt that art by recording a special perfection would help the soul to "rise towards Perfection Universal." 1 And Charles Kingsley, wi th all his respect for the particulars of experience, was confident that the actual, when fully realized, could by some miracle of suggestion evoke the timeless ideal and so turn the mind of man to thoughts of heaven.2 Though few could explain the exact processes by which art was to accomplish its religious mission, none questioned its ultimate relevance to the ethical needs of an aspiring people.
