SOURCE: Havens, Elmer A. “Lanier's Critical Theory.” ESQ 55 (1969): 83-89.

In the following essay, Havens discusses Lanier's theory that there can be no beauty without moral goodness, and traces this theory of etherealization through Lanier's literary criticism.

Although Sidney Lanier wrote much about form and the technique of literature, he understood beauty best within a moral context, which in his case is tinged by his own peculiar brand of Calvinism. He would have the “beauty of holiness” become the “holiness of beauty.” In fact, these terms may be mutually transposed when considering his judgment of any work of art as a thing of beauty.¹ With many an overtone of Emerson's dictum that “Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue,” Lanier utterly repudiates the idea that there can be any beauty isolated from moral goodness, that there can be any such thing as art for art's sake:

One hears...