Princess Casamassima

[Glenn Scheper]

Mention of anarchism herein causes me to post quote.
Prior P-list mention of Princess Casamassima too.
Too far past my circle of interest to be even called tangential.
I take it, the demands of beauty (for me, truth) make him an anarchist?

Socialist. Aesthete. We can scarce bear that our loves, our various and varying 
loves, should not be able, always and fully, to tolerate each other - and so it 
is that the child continues to live with the adult - and yet, such is the demand 
placed upon any self, any being that would aspire to wholeness as a person. 
Hilary Robinson, the aesthete of economically modest background, is the means by 
which Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima, dramatised such claims upon 
wholeness: if, at one point, the point of acculturation, of social acceptance 
and passage into the privilege of ease, art is adornment, soon, the space of 
breathing provided by ease, makes of art an attainment and one that is 
irreversible, and being so its claims upon oneself intransigent.

How, then, must the aesthete Hilary Robinson - since he must he must - reconcile 
the attainment of beauty and its claims upon full consciousness with the social, 
ethical and political claims of conscience, equally intransigent, and, unlike 
the ease of art, without the auroras of seductions?

As is well known, the dilemmas, feints, velleities and losses entailed in the 
tensions lead the anarchist and aesthete that was Hilary Robinson to 
self-slaughter - but the tensions dramatised in James' novel, published in 1886 
- year of Symbolism, vers libre, anarchist attentats - have never gone away, 
indeed, they are the politico-existential core of modernist and avant-garde 
sensibility, wheter in an Eliot or a Debord.
  -- http://www.artcritical.com/stone-richards/MSRwollheim.htm
  m stone-richards tribute to richard wollheim

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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