“Now AND THEN IT IS POSSIBLE TO OBSERVE the moral life in process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue. The news of such an event is often received with a degree of irony or some epoch sign of resistance. Nowadays, of course, we are all of us trained to believe that the moral life is in ceaseless flux and chat the values, as we call them, of one epoch are not those of another. We even find it easy to believe chat the changes do not always come about gradually but are sometimes quite sudden.”
Moral tenets are not unconditionally constant; thus, they adjust recurrently depending on the predominant philosophies. Literature has been contributory in illuminating the fluctuations in the benchmarks of morality. Literature can provoke opposition of shifting moral ideals which contingent on the ideology of a literary author. Culture is influential in modeling moral values; accordingly, suppositions concerning morality vary from one civilization to another. Appreciation and deference of divergent moral values fundamentally defines the universal disposition of humans.
“The word 'authenticity' comes so readily to the tongue these days and in so many connections that it may very well resist such efforts of definition as I shall later make, but I think that for the present I can rely on its suggesting a more strenuous moral experience than 'sincerity' does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man's place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life. At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification.”
As a result of cultural modifications, the assessment of authenticity has been reconditioned. Transformation of moral suppositions, which essentially delineate authenticity, has been contributory in the validation of deeds which were originally branded as inauthentic. The authenticity which is usually applied when evaluating art is principally idiosyncratic. Therefore, determination of authenticity is elastic; it varies subject to the Cultural Revolution which can be fabricated straightforwardly.
“When Edmund Burke undertakes his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, he is perfectly forthright about the social import of the opposition he sets up between the two qualities that high art may have. This brilliant young man from the provinces with a career to make and the firmest intention of making it leaves us in no doubt that his aesthetic preference, his choice of the sublime as against the beautiful, is dictated by his sense of how society is constituted and of how it may be dominated and made to serve his purpose, and by his commitment to the energies of his genius. He explicitly connects the sublime with masculinity, with manly ambition; the defining characteristic of the sublime, he tells us, is its capacity for arousing the emotion of 'terror', which calls forth in us the power to meet and master it; the experience of terror stimulates an energy of aggression and dominance. Beauty, on the contrary, is to be associated with femininity. It seduces men to inglorious indolence and ignoble hedonism.”
Edmund Burke’s methodology results in the ‘Sublimeness and Beautifulness’ binary. The binary infers that beauty inapposite for masculine art. Based on this viewpoint of aesthetics, stunning aesthetics occasion affection and desire whereas the masculine art stimulates fierceness. As a result, the viewers’ partialities are categorized into the devotees of masculinity and the fans of femininity. The theory is foregrounded on the universal dualism of masculinity versus femininity. The works of art prompt divergent feelings subject to the aesthetics which they endorse.
“To the general sincerity of the English which Emerson finds so pleasing there is one exception that he remarks, and with considerable asperity-these people, he says, have no religious belief and therefore nothing is 'so odious as the polite bows to God' which they constantly make in their books and newspapers. No student of Victorian life will now confirm Emerson in the simplicity with which he describes the state of religious belief in England. It is true that the present indifference of the English to religion apart from the rites of birth, marriage, and death-was already in train. By the second half of the nineteenth century the working classes of England were almost wholly alienated from the established Church and increasingly disaffected from the Nonconformist sects. It was the rare intellectual who was in any simple sense a believer. The commitment of the upper classes was largely a social propriety, and Emerson was doubtless right when he described it as cant. It is possible to say that the great Dissenting sects of the middle classes were animated as much by social and political feelings as by personal faith and doctrinal predilections.”
The religious standing in England proves the discrepancy between Christianity and Sincerity. Unresponsiveness towards religion is a display of the deterioration of authentic Christianity. For the ‘upper classes’, Christianity is converted into a facade of modesty which does not replicate inherent sincerity in terms of devotion towards the Christian ethics. The deficiency of intrinsic commitment towards Christianity in England designates that individuals are spraining to be sincere. Accordingly, for sincerity to be material it should transcend shallowness.
