You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope!"
-- Edgar Allan Poe, "William Wilson"

For a long time there was something called the death of beauty. Recently people have been telling us that it's time for beauty to come back into the eye of the beholder. But how does one make that happen? As the unbeautiful (if otherwise impressive) Lenin might say, "What is to be done?"

The problem has been one of enlightenment and the critical spirit that enlightenment fosters. To the enlightened mind—think of Apollonius in Keats's "Lamia"—Beauty is at best just another pretty face and at worst a snake lady. Or the idea of a pretty face, the idea of a snake lady! Maybe all those things together because of their ideological entanglements with each other. Whatever; the simplest truth is that beauty disarms, seduces, takes away our critical and reflective intelligence. Or so a certain kind of enlightened mind has argued. Coleridge countered that form of skepticism with his famous theory of poetic faith and its different type of enlightenment. A "willing suspension of disbelief" would stand guard between the imagination's panoply of arresting appearances and the foundational order it mirrors and references.¹ Coleridge's is a fideist enlightenment framed to protect us from the violence within the enlightened mind of the philosophe.

A short while ago I saw and heard a different mind of enlightenment take a very different view and make a very different argument. Actually, I was confronted with two minds—Mozart's eighteenth-century mind and Franco Zeffirelli's late twentieth-century postmodern mind working together in Don Giovanni. The Met in New York staged a revival of Zeffirelli's famous 1990 production of Mozart's masterpiece.

Let's recall briefly what Mozart (and Zeffirelli) were doing with that remarkable, and remarkably self-conscious, work. Don Giovanni is an anthology of beautiful musical set pieces, as everyone knows. It is also the story of a notorious rake, rapist, and—in Mozart's version—murderer. All that beauty gets focused on this degenerate, a character who flaunts his wickedness and even sings, at one of the opera's greatest moments, that "nobody is as talented as I am."

This is one of the most self-reflexive moments in a very self-reflexive work. At one level we know that Don Giovanni is parading his erotic prowess, but at another we understand that Mozart is using the Don as a mask for himself and the action of his music. As the whole game of artifice that is this opera arises to our attention, the artifice of representation—that is to say, the illusion that the opera is an imitation of life—falls away. Don Giovanni and all his friends, enemies, acquaintances, and deeds—his rapes, his loves, his murders are illusions cast before our minds' eyes and ears in forms of beauty. And they are cast before us in these forms so that we will not let our minds fall into that worst of enlightenment illusions: that the world of art and its beauties is a reflection, an imitation, of life. It is precisely an illusion that Don Giovanni is a murderer and a rapist. Murder and rape do not happen in art; they happen in life. That is, ultimately, a part of the argument of Don Giovanni. And the function of art and its clear beauties—in Mozart's and Zeffirelli's enlightened views of the matter—is to help clarify the distinction between what is real and what is illusion. And to recelebrate the power of art's illusions. We are to leave Mozart's theatre more prepared to be truly serious —that is to say, seriously ludic—in our thinking about moral questions, including the moral question, and function, of art, which is to instruct through pleasure.

Seeing Don Giovanni makes me remember something else. Gerard Manley Hopkins posed and answered Lenin's question in a famous sonnet: "What do then? how meet beauty? Merely meet it; own, / Home at heart, heaven's sweet gift; then leave, let that alone."² That's just about how we want to encounter Don Giovanni, and the lines will set the rest of my agenda in this essay. We want to enlighten ourselves about Beauty, about how it works. And because Beauty always works by apparitions rather than by concepts, we'll take our lessons in Beauty not by instructive ideas and precepts but by some examples that, we hope, may arrest our attention and, as Blake would say, open our doors of perception.

Let me begin with a set of questions of my own, rhetorical ones. What if our environment of vision simply became too administered so that Beauty appeared to disappear along with all its certain signs: elegance, wit, surprise, wonder? What if the dismal history of the decay of Beauty were a protest testimony, a long-lamenting non serviam uttered by souls living in a hell they never made, though a hell in which they might be cooperating and for which we must still take responsibility? What if those suppositions were, as Wittgenstein would say, the case? I shall work from those hypotheses and try to prove them true. The proof will be practical and performative, as in an instruction manual. I mean to make the machine of my thinking about Beauty work.

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), 2:6.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "To What Serves Mortal Beauty?" Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges and W. H. Gardner (1918; New York, 1948), ll. 12–14, p. 104.