Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity 9780231542531

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CR I T I CS, COT E R IES, AND P R E - R A P H A E L I T E C EL EBR IT Y

GENDER AND CULTURE A Series of Columbia University Press Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner, Series Editors Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) and Nancy K. Miller, Founding Editors For a list of titles in this series, see page 329

Critics , Coteries , and

Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity Wendy Graham

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graham, Wendy, 1957– author. Title: Critics, coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite celebrity / Wendy Graham. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Series: Gender and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017007514 (print) | LCCN 2017012626 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231542531 (electronic) | ISBN 9780231180207 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. | Arts and society— Great Britain—History— 19th century. | Celebrities— Great Britain. | Aesthetes— Great Britain. Classification: LCC NX454.5.P7 (ebook) | LCC NX454.5.P7 G73 2017 (print) | DDC 701/.03— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017007514

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of Amer ica Cover: Max Beerbohm, Rossetti in His Back Garden, 1904. Engraving. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./ Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London/Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. The Pre-Raphaelite Vanguard

1

2. Puff, Slash, Burn: Literary Celebrity 3. Fortune’s Weal

47

77

4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Aesthetic Celebrity 5. Anonymous Journalism: The Fleshly School Controversy

175

6. Henry James and British Aestheticism Afterword

239

Notes 247 Works Cited 289 Index 313

133

209

Illustrations

Fig. 1.1, Plate 1

Fig. 1.2, Plate 2 Figure 1.3

Fig. 1.4, Plate 3 Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Fig. 3.1, Plate 4 Figure 3.2 Fig. 3.3, Plate 5 Figure 3.4

Fig. 3.5, Plate 6 Figure 3.6

Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Mr William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fellows Seem to See in Gabriel, 1916. 19 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–1870. 22 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Rossetti in His Worldlier Days (Circa 1866–1868) Leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala, 1916. 24 Simeon Solomon, One Dreaming by the Sea, 1871. 31 Simeon Solomon, Love and Lust, 1865. 35 Frederick Holland Day, Study for Endymion, 1907. 43 William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts—“Strayed Sheep,” 1852. 81 Frederick Sandys, A Nightmare, 1857. 83 John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857. 83 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Is Heard for the First Time in the Western States of Amer ica, 1916. 101 Simeon Solomon, Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 1859. 106 George Du Maurier, The Mutual Admirationists, 1880. 107

Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8

Fig. 3.9, Plate 7 Figure 3.10 Figure 4.1 Fig. 4.2, Plate 8 Figure 4.3 Fig. 4.4, Plate 9 Fig. 4.5, Plate 10 Fig. 4.6, Plate 11 Fig. 4.7, Plate 12 Figure 5.1 Fig. 6.1, Plate 13 Fig. 6.2, Plate 14 Figure 6.3

Fig. 6.4, Plate 15 Fig. 6.5, Plate 16 Fig. 6.6, Plate 17

George Du Maurier, A Love Agony. Design by Maudle, 1880. 109 Ernest Howard Shepard, The Pre-Raphaelite Cocktail Party (A Thought That Came to Our Artist After Visiting the William Morris Centenary Exhibition), 1934. 121 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884. 123 Norman Mansbridge, Her First Audition, 1954. 124 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Price Boyce with Fanny Cornforth in Rossetti’s Studio, Chatham Place, 1858. 142 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864– 1868. 147 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Death of Lady Macbeth, 1875. 164 Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Friends, Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem, 1916. 166 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1864–1868. 169 Simeon Solomon, The Sleeping Endymion, 1887. 171 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia de’ Tolomei, 1868– 1880. 173 Simeon Solomon, The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, 1865. 201 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870. 218 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Tree of Forgiveness, 1881–1882. 219 W. B. Richmond, “Take Me, Take My Trunk.” By E. Burne-Jones, or, “Ty-Burn Jones,” for the Deadly Liveliness of the Figures, 1882. 221 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Garden of Pan, 1876–1887. 223 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Day, 1870. 226 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, 1873– 1875. 235

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Acknowledgments

T

he senior colleague to whom I owe the greatest debt, Susan Brisman, raised my spirits when I doubted my prospects, whether approaching tenure or streamlining a six-hundred-page manuscript. I am grateful for the support of Beth Darlington, stalwart defender of Victorian Studies at Vassar College. Brian Lukacher kept me abreast of new developments in art history. Paul Russell read an early draft of my fourth chapter and helped me focus on the Rossetti myth as a unifying thread. Dean Crawford offered imaginative solutions to the problem of addressing different audiences in the same book. Heesok Chang pushed me to refine my definition of the Victorian avant-garde. Zoltan Markus contributed to my thinking about the changing valuation of “sincerity.” Eighteenth- century scholar Julie Park helped me improve the throughline of my argument. M. Mark and Adrienne Halper offered advice on interest ing the general reader. Special thanks are due to Linda Blum, who read several chapters with great insight. Julia Stern offered encouragement and illumination. My research assistant, Jon Roth, sang Vaughan Williams’s song cycle, The House of Life, at his senior recital. Possibly, Eloy Bleifuss Prados was less inspired double-checking facts in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, but he was very efficient. Former student Paige Rozanski, curatorial assistant for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., secured my place at the symposium, “Pre-Raphaelitism and International Modernisms,” held in conjunction with the blockbuster

exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant- Garde (2013). Students of literary decadence Christopher Tatlock, Matthew Dowling, Shouvik Bhattacharya, Zoey Peresman, Jackson Reeves, Miciah Hussey, Ruth Bolster, Elliot Baker, Brian Evans, and Grace Sparapani waited a long time to see this book in print. I am profoundly indebted to the anonymous readers for Columbia University Press; this would have been a less coherent book without their incisive and constructive criticisms. I am proud to be part of the Gender and Culture series, overseen by Victoria Rosner and Nancy K. Miller, who have been unflaggingly helpful. I am especially grateful to Associate Provost and Director Jennifer Crewe for her expert management of the review process and oversight of the production staff and design team, who have done a wonderful job. An earlier version of chapter six, “Henry James and British Aestheticism,” appeared in The Henry James Review 20, no. 3 (1999), 265–74, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. Thanks to the Susan Jane Turner Fund for sponsoring my travel to the United Kingdom to study pictures and locate unhackneyed images for the book; and for funding the illustrations. Thanks also to Peggy Goldwyn, who generously permitted us to stay in her London flat and stretch the travel budget. To Matt, for his patience and companionship. It may be unwise to call attention to the fact that I have been writing Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity, on and off, for seventeen years. My daughter claims she has been involved with the project since her inception. And she has a point. She passed an AP exam in art history with flying colors, even though her school lacks any courses in the subject. Obviously, she deserves all the credit. But I like to think that the years we spent in museums conversing about art contributed to her success. My son is my partner in another form of fanat icism: Chicago Blues. This book is dedicated to my children, Ava and Graham.

[ x ] A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Introduction

P

re-Raphaelitism is a seminal but neglected chapter in the history of the avant-garde.1 This book challenges the notion that resistance to art institutions, on the one hand, and the commodification of art, on the other, sprung up suddenly circa 1900. The conditions necessary for the production of late Victorian modernity were in place in 1848, when revolutionary movements across Europe flamed, flickered, and petered out. Founded by a spirited band of young renegades, whose close personal friendships were forged during social gatherings and at art school, the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) struck contemporaries as a vanguard in lifestyle as well as artistic expression. The PRB achieved eminence as an aesthetic counterculture; they lived and worked cooperatively, creating a subculture that privileged affective and creative bonds between men. Bohemianism and iconoclasm were twin facets of their cultural activity. Their burgeoning renown was not simply due to talent. From the founding of the PRB through to the publication of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) and Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870) to the debut of the Grosvenor Gallery (1877), Pre-Raphaelite genius and eccentricity were clubbable across disciplines. As a group of painters with strong literary interests, exemplified by the poet-painter Rossetti, they welcomed writers into the fold and together pursued a fusion of the “sister arts,” a vision of imaginative activity that transcended bourgeois industry and

enterprise. The PRB briefly professed a unified vision of what art was called on to be (in other words, natural and sincere); however, internal stylistic and philosophical differences emerged early on, splintering the original collective by 1853. Despite its heterogeneity, emerging branches of the PreRaphaelite “school” were identified with the main trunk through the 1880s. Engendering confusion and dismay, as well as fierce partisanship, Pre-Raphaelitism achieved a high profile and retained visibility throughout the evolution of its concepts and personnel. With their collective identity and collaborative ethos, the PRB looked forward, as well as backward, to a time when art and spirituality penetrated all aspects of daily life. Sharing a faith in the social mission of art, the PRB both emulated and transcended Nazarene monasticism in favor of worldly engagement. In theory, the PRB’s oppositional stance and efforts at reform satisfy Peter Bürger’s criteria: “The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”2 Arguably, the “PRB” logo accompanying their signed work merely complicated the idea of individual creativity rather than negated it like Duchamp’s ready-mades. But only a purist would judge an antibourgeois art movement of the circa 1850s by the yardstick of Duchamp’s playful 1913 display of industrial commodities as works of art. My aim is to capture the PRB’s revolutionary provocations before the PRB became the victims of their own success. As Dianne Sachko Macleod remarks, “One of the inherent contradictions of PreRaphaelitism as an avant- garde movement” is that “its artists took an active interest in the mainstream marketplace” while claiming to be outsiders.3 Exactly. PRB members wrestled with contradictions that now seem disqualifying, as if they had access to the first avant-garde handbook (1909). They fretted that the business of art would tarnish their vaunted higher aims. Victorians who noted this inconsistency—paintings made to measure for nouveau riche clients—thought of it as a failure of sincerity. What are the other obstacles to restoring the PRB to the avant-garde continuum, and why bother? In cultural memory and the annals of art, Pre-Raphaelitism was outpaced in novelty by the next Eu ropean style, French impressionism, and Pre-Raphaelite literary innovation paled when judged by the benchmarks of realism and modernism. By the 1890s, PreRaphaelitism had become an accepted art convention in Britain. Further, as literary painters and pictorial naturalists vested in quattrocento Italian [ xii ]

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art, the Pre-Raphaelites had little in common with a twentieth-century avant-garde wedded to the ideal of originality. Nevertheless, there is a formal case to be made for the flat picture plane, high resolution, and allover-surface pattern of PRB works, which Victorians found jarring. The PRB debuted as a “new style” of painting and artists’ organ ization in 1849. PRB exhibits and manifestoes forced the public to grapple with new motives in art, a new art grammar, and a new vocabulary; the public was made to feel out of the loop just as art literacy seemed within its reach. PreRaphaelitism obeyed the imperatives of all revolutionary art “to demonstrate its position at the frontiers of art, in a new vanguard of expression.” 4 As an antibourgeois movement seemingly free from the trammels of Victorian sexual respectability, organized religion, and economic and cultural institutions, its affronts to the regimes of taste and official canons of propriety exceeded the culture sector.

Art historian Claire Wildsmith affirms that Victorian criticism was a hotly contested ground and “a shaping force on both the production of art and public taste, deeply embedded in the changing political, social and economic structure of the nation.”5 Yet debates over Pre-Raphaelitism would have remained internal to art and poetry circles had it not been for improvements in print technology and circulation, the development of a national audience for periodicals, and the rise of professional journalists capitalizing on the public’s fascination with culture and celebrity. Throughout the book, I stress the synergy between the aesthetic movement and the friendly journalists who helped transform Pre-Raphaelitism from a narrow coterie concern into a feature of the zeitgeist. Reviewer anonymity was the order of the day until the 1860s, at which point the question of partisan plaudits and attacks from behind a veil became fodder for media controversies and a selling point for journals advertising signed articles. Consequently, Pre-Raphaelitism’s cultural efficacy depended on professional intimacies and jealousies and the journalistic practices of the era. Victorian print journalism was a shaping force rather than a neutral arbiter of culture. That leaves unanswered the question: How did the PreRaphaelites parlay periodical reviews into Victorian celebrity and enduring renown, and why were they able to do so, given their antagonism to the academicians and bourgeoisie? I N T RO D U C T I O N

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The Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena associated with the fin-de-siècle and the publicity-mad Oscar Wilde. These include the canny marketing of the PRB, who turned themselves into a cause célèbre supported by a phalanx of freelance journalists. Scholars have begun to realize that the PRB found their niche because members shared a group identity and enjoyed unprecedented access to media outlets, through which they disseminated their ideals and brand. In 1850, the PRB founded The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art to express the group’s pictorial principles. Although The Germ failed financially within the year, after four numbers had been published, its Gothic typeface, illustrative etchings on literary and devotional subjects, and original prose and verse attracted a following. Mystifying its first audience with daring work yet antique trappings, Pre-Raphaelitism encouraged a cottage industry in explanatory lectures and articles. Slighting the anonymous “minor theorists” who wrote for The Germ, journalists cited John Ruskin’s authoritative pronouncements on Pre-Raphaelitism in The Times (1851–1854). Catalyzed by shared admiration and vision, a network of fellow travelers, acolytes, and intimates defended in print all things PRB. This “fraternity for championship,” so named by enraged competitors, produced reams of life writing, publicizing the magical private lives (and community) of artistwriters. Stimulated by the tension among the visibility of their works, the remoteness of their persons, and the obscurity of their objectives, Victorian journalists outside the circle pandered to the public’s mass attraction to (and revulsion from) Pre-Raphaelitism. In the context of the exhibition or lecture hall, and in conversations generated by shared patronage of art magazines, the explosion of interest in Pre-Raphaelitism was a mass phenomenon. Wilde was the culmination of this trend, not its instigator. Press surrogates saved my protagonists from the imputation of careerism, pushing behav ior, and unmanly ostentation, until the coterie relations that fostered individual renown came under fire. While literacy, capital, and suffrage contributed to the democratization of the bourgeois public sphere, the coterie remained a privileged space, at once prized and reviled for its exclusivity and special interests. Pre-Raphaelitism’s inner circle had the hallmarks of a clique, engendering ad hominem attacks on the principals and their lackeys. Working as journalists, infiltrating the command centers of public opinion, they diffused the perfume of their adulation for masculine genius. The “mutual admiration society” is an untapped resource for discussion across the disciplinary bound aries of art, media, celebrity, [ xiv ]

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and gender studies. To date, there is no book-length monograph on the phenomenon. Tim Barringer and Michaela Giebelhausen’s Writing the PreRaphaelites is an anthology of essays, written by art historians, explaining how Pre-Raphaelite artists were “written into prominence.”6 There is no corresponding treatment of Pre-Raphaelite writers or investigation of the sexual dynamics of the collective. Comprehensively reviewing twentyfirst-century books on Victorian art and literature, Richard Kaye complains of “a scholarly hesitancy to respond seriously to the insights, models, and achievements of Gender and Queer Studies critics.” 7 My book offers for the first time a thick description of the combination of the literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and the homoerotic frisson among the reviewers and creators of Pre-Raphaelite literature and art that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic modernity in the 1850s; Swinburne and Simeon Solomon, in the 1860s; and Walter Pater and Edward Burne-Jones, in the 1870s. Sexualized and romantic male friendship, and aesthetic collaboration and coteries, held the Victorian avant-garde and its audience in thrall. I want to press home the point that homoerotic investments among the members of this early clique have not received adequate attention, and the possibility of such investments has been neglected in favor of the “gay” 1890s and the Wilde trials.8

The backlash against the homosexual Wilde’s association with the aesthetic movement has obscured Pre-Raphaelitism’s complex history of male bonding. As I show in my first chapter, the demarcation of early / late, good / bad, healthy / sick phases of Pre-Raphaelitism was retrofitted to the movement in the wake of the Grosvenor exhibition, when the term “aestheticism” acquired a distinct connotation. At this time, PRB enthusiasts began rehabilitating the original members of the PRB by expunging sexual dubiety from their résumés. This strategy succeeded. Pre-Raphaelitism has not figured much in gay historiography, despite the various skeletons in its closet.9 Revising a history of homosexuality that others have viewed as originating in later decades, my book exhumes the collaboration among a practicing homosexual, Simeon Solomon, and the Pre-Raphaelites who befriended him and who, belatedly as well as disingenuously, expressed shock at finding a sodomite in their midst. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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Solomon’s transient appearance in the annals of Pre-Raphaelitism has direct bearing on his place in narrative history and scholarship. He was written out of history. Within literary studies, artist-prose poet Solomon is a missing or minor figure in the landscape of influential books on Victorian culture and gender.10 Solomon’s precedence in aestheticizing samesex desire strikes art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn as an “impor tant entailment” of the conventional wisdom that Wilde forged the first link between overt homoeroticism and aestheticism in the minds of the Victorian public. Yet for Prettejohn, Solomon represents “new practices in painting,” practices that distance him from his peer group.11 Allen Staley also focuses on the formal differences between early and late aestheticism.12 In fact, Victorians identified Solomon and Burne-Jones as Rossetti’s “junior allies” and lambasted the trio for belonging to the “Swinburne school of artists.” Reviewers greeted Burne-Jones’s breakthrough at the Grosvenor as a triumph of “Pre-Raphaelite” art. In offering a psychosocial model of reception, I focus on the PreRaphaelites when they were considered avant-garde rather than regarded nostalgically. My book explores the print politics of scandal and the erotic discourse of masculinity (and effeminacy) that emerged in relation to the aesthetic celebrity’s bohemian self-presentation before a shocked (or smitten) community. It was not until the debut of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads that Pre-Raphaelite poetry excited the rancor associated with its art by achieving a succès de scandale. Condemned for blasphemy and obscenity in the leading periodicals, Swinburne’s rescinded volume sold like hotcakes, and at high prices. Bizarrely, Swinburne’s critical antagonists, men who posed as models of rectitude, carefully unpacked—if need be translated— Swinburne’s obscure allusions to Greek, Latin, and French erotic texts to highlight their offensiveness. By reading avant-garde poetry in England through the prism of the scandalous modernity of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, the Victorian press underscored the connection between perverse French and contemporary English culture. While vilifying Swinburne as an enfant terrible of poetry, critics unintentionally promulgated Pre-Raphaelitism’s avant-garde qualities. Demonstrating the salience of negative publicity, Swinburne’s acid retorts to his detractors caused a publishing sensation in their own right. Media controversies over exhibits and publications dramatized new styles of self- expression, new ways of being and seeing developing on the horizon.

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Gabriel Rossetti clearly relished his bohemian self-presentation. Habitually attired in a loose, plum-colored dress coat rather than the jacket or frock coat worn by men of his class, he sported shoulder-length hair and other eccentricities of personal appearance. His promiscuity (signaling the abrogation of conventional masculinity and professional and domestic aspirations) was published abroad by William Rossetti, assiduous chronicler of the life of the family prodigy, as well as by gossips. Gabriel’s attitude, “I never do anything I don’t like,” marked him as a fascinating new type of personality.13 Though famed for his heterosexual potency, Rossetti inspired in his male admirers a longing for intimacy and a cultic devotion that was markedly erotic. Excited by sexual avant-gardism in the lives and works of the Pre-Raphaelites, male coteries locked horns with the censor morum of the press in defense of their idols. A corollary to literary fame underwritten by friendship, Rossetti’s press contacts praised studio work withheld from public view. Rossetti’s withdrawal from the exhibition scene after 1850 fueled the legend that he “never sought public fame”—a fact ascribed to the “indifference of high genius to popu lar opinion.”14 My book explores the paradox of a recluse gaining an international reputation through the agency of friendly critics. Noting Rossetti’s “power ful individuality” and “retired mode of life,” another reviewer emphasized the contrarian character of the avant-garde artist and his isolation.15 The notion that Rossetti “stood alone” supports Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that the artist’s apparent abstention from the marketplace increases the cultural and economic cachet of his creations. However, after the dissolution of the PRB, Rossetti was isolated by temperament, not exhibition politics. Taken to its logical conclusion, Rossetti’s “display of absence” anticipates (and contributes to) the iconic view of the modern artist, living, writing, and painting offstage.16 In lieu of personal appearances, photographs, exhibits, and regular publications, Rossetti soared into prominence on the wings of vicarious verbal representations of his transcendent powers and personality: “Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti at once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so magnetic a presence.”17 Hence the foundational myth of bohemian artistic celebrity was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists and men of letters whose bread and butter was unique access to reticent celebrities. At the same time, Rossetti’s celebrity mystique depended on

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the relations obtaining between the purveyors of the print culture and its consumers. While some trafficked in sober judgments, Victorian journalists were at liberty to flaunt their prejudices, sling sarcasms, and distribute accolades under the cover of critical anonymity. In an unsigned review of Poems and Ballads, the future editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley, apostrophized Swinburne as “the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs.” 18 Morley was not even Swinburne’s chief detractor. A media diet of this kind whet the audience’s appetite for sensation, for vivid writing capable of stirring the imagination in an era when print was still king.

Theater historian Joseph Roach enumerates the qualities that have distinguished candidates for fame since the late seventeenth century, citing the obvious (self- confidence and personal magnetism), as well as the incongruous (virtue combined with vice; strength, with weakness; singularity, with typicality). Enduring in cultural memory, afterimages of the “It- effect” suggest that the paradoxical union of charisma and stigma, strength and vulnerability, embodied in the actor’s mercurial persona and mortal flesh, constituted a fascinating eccentricity for audiences.19 For this reason, Roach places the notorious on a continuum with virtuous celebrity role-icons (145). Roach argues that distance from the masses, secured by the king’s station and throne, the actor’s proscenium, and the rake’s misbehavior, enhanced their allure. Anticipating the age of mass media, where proximity is assisted by technology, effigies as well as one-of-akind portraits of notables circulated, according to Roach, as the “mesmerizing image of unattainable yet wholly portable celebrity” (76). Roach’s emphasis on image-based celebrity leads him to slight the contributions of scribes and tastemakers in the facture of renown, even though they were vital to the star’s ascent. In contrast to performing role-icons, my protagonists entered the public sphere via their work, without revealing their private lives or even showing their faces; personality had to be surmised from their highly original productions and press reports. According to Richard Sennett, the shocking or pleasing affect conveyed by the highly skilled performer gave way in the nineteenth century to the alarm or charm of expressive personality: “Being expressive and having extraordinary talent—that was the formula on which personality entered the public realm.”20 Sennett’s formulation is [ xviii ]

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an apt description of Rossetti, though it leaves out his characteristic bohemianism. Rossetti’s “robustious” youth suggested to memoirist Hall Caine “a person in deliberate revolt against nearly all the conventions of society, and delighting, if only out of perversity or for devilish amusement, in every opportunity to startle well-ordered people out of their propriety by championing the worst view of Neronian Rome.”21 Sennett explicitly excludes the poet or painter, working offstage, from the transfiguration of the creative individual into a dominant personality, a new and special person.22 I do not accept Sennett’s verdict that writers and painters lacked this kind of star power. Rossetti’s pursuit of “direct and intense modes for the expression of highly intellectualized passion” in the arts shocked his contemporaries out of their propriety.23 Formally and thematically, Pre-Raphaelitism burst upon the Victorian public as a revolt against conventionality and sentimentality. Can verbal representations of celebrity charisma constitute a vicarious experience of intimacy for readers? Does the activity of novel reading fire the imagination and fret the ner vous system, as Victorian attacks on the novel of sensation claimed? Eminent theorists of modern celebrity would deny it. The stage actor is the invariable template. In her essay for Public Culture, Sharon Marcus acknowledges celebrity’s dependence on visual and verbal media but maintains that physical presence is requisite: “Celebrity combines presence and representation.”24 I am wholly on board with the notion of the “oxymoronic structure of celebrity,” which means that celebrities repel and attract, conform and defy, and crave attention and evade it, among other contradictions.25 My divergence from Marcus is a matter of historical perspective. We agree that Wilde was not the first literary celebrity to use mass media to heighten his fame. Marcus ascribes Wilde’s “impudent celebrity” to his impersonation of the actress Sarah Bernhardt; touring Amer ica, he copied her itinerary, hotel reservations, and relations with photog raphers and the press.26 This is a dazzling argument. However, Wilde’s American tour was meant to publicize Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience by acquainting American philistines with the aesthetic canon preached by Ruskin, Pater, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Arnold, whom the operetta mocks. In my view, Wilde emulated his early idols, Swinburne and Rossetti, who perfected the mode of claiming attention by defying public opinion before Bernhardt became an international star. In 1889, Wilde himself exclaimed: “Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry.”27 I N T RO D U C T I O N

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I want to obtain a hearing for a history of Victorian celebrity that is asymmetric and does not mirror the postmodern condition quite so seamlessly. As I said, I do not accept the premise that literary celebrities enjoyed only minor renown until Hugo, Dickens, and Emerson “achieved fame as heroes and sages.” Marcus claims that Wilde was the first writer to personify the “new type: the author as feminized celebrity personality.”28 I disagree. In staging the PRB’s reception, the Victorian press took advantage of literary and fine art criteria, honed by the romantic poets and their critics, based on charismatic personality (good) and personal eccentricity (the jury was deadlocked). Dating from the Cockney School of Poetry (1817–1825), a row between Blackwood’s and The Examiner circle of romantic poets, effeminacy, sexual impropriety, and emotionalism were already perceived as coextensive with the desire for fame and the unmanly ostentation that accompanied it. In 1821, the critic William Hazlitt castigated poets of “inordinate vanity” and “habitual effeminacy,” whose absurd passion for notoriety was their defining feature. Hazlitt fulminated against their posturing and insincerity for the sake of “dramatic effect,” excitement, and attention.29 Drawing on Hazlitt, whom he styles the first great theorist of fame, Leo Braudy explains that the romantic poet became emblematic of the misunderstood genius through his figurative dismemberment, in absentia, in a hostile print culture. To different degrees, Shelley (“the Hermit of Marlow”) and Byron (an expatriate) staged a “drama of ennobling neglect.”30 Yet not even the reclusive Shelley despised fame. Rather than seek fame openly, Byron and Shelley engaged in a paradoxical social per for mance, inciting public outrage over indecent verse and then pretending to ignore the hue and cry. Tracking the evolution of celebrity renown, I argue that the Pre-Raphaelites consciously emulated Byron and Shelley’s combination of reclusive genius and dissipated virtuosity. Rossetti favored the former; Swinburne, the latter. With regard to Rossetti, the subject of chapter 4, it is essential to understand that a recluse could engage in enigmatic reputation building from behind the scenes, in the fashion just described, or by enlisting aid.

The Cockney School fracas was a case of literary sniping productive of great reputations. It demonstrated the efficacy of negative publicity in securing an audience for the journal, the critic, and the critic’s targets. Though John [ xx ]

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Gibson Lockhart maintained his alias, his attacks on the Cockney School were good for Blackwood’s bottom line and in tune with its Tory politics. The row publicized the romantic poet’s combative individuality (a combination of poetic invention, social marginality, sexual nonconformity, and political radicalism), shifting attention from the work to the author. Being talked about became a crucial element in the bid for renown, leading to the paradoxical discovery that blame was as useful as praise in securing an audience. Media controversy figures centrally in my discussion of the PRB’s reception in chapter 1, the Cockney School of Poetry and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in chapter 2, and critical consternation over Pater’s The Renaissance in chapter 3. I discuss Rossetti’s reliance on friendly reviewers in chapter 4, the Fleshly School controversy in chapter 5, and the reception of the Grosvenor exhibition in chapter 6. My argument tracks PreRaphaelitism’s influence on industry and cultural trends promoting signed review articles31 and calumniating reviewer anonymity, puffery, and slander, all the while capitalizing on scandal and negative publicity to sell papers. The acrimony surrounding puffery and its converse came to a head over Robert Buchanan’s use of the Maitland alias for “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” (1871), a rehashed “Cockney School of Poetry”: “Buchanan sharpens literary criticism, on the whetstone of Blackwood’s, into a weapon for the culture wars.”32 Priggish, didactic, and partisan, Buchanan’s diatribe upheld retrograde Victorian attitudes to sexuality and art. In keeping with the axiom “No publicity is bad publicity,” Buchanan succeeded in enlarging the Pre-Raphaelites’ fame, an unintended consequence of singling them out for censure in the press. The many pitched battles over Pre-Raphaelitism foregrounded concerns about sincerity, manly reticence, impartiality, and anonymity, concerns that were central to the evolution of the signed article.33 In the 1870s, the PreRaphaelites and their cohort became staunch advocates of signature and journals that favored attribution, such as the Fortnightly Review, publisher of Buchanan, Morley, Lewes, Arnold, Swinburne, Colvin, Gosse, Pater, and Wilde. Signature was also the foundation for the accruing of cultural authority to the professional writers on the clique’s periphery. As Deborah Cherry avers, the critical literature on Pre-Raphaelitism demonstrates that “signature was vitally impor tant for a growing contingent of professional art writers who, through their writings, created art history and criticism as a specialized form of cultural knowledge.”34 Ruskin’s imprimatur was crucial to the PRB’s early success. Pater certified the literary Pre-Raphaelites’ I N T RO D U C T I O N

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ascendancy. This demonstration of critical clout anticipated by forty years The Criterion’s use of imprimatur to ensure the modernists’ commercial success. In Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Aaron Jaffe describes the “secondary literary labors” of reviewers, editors, and promoters, who acted as middlemen between the high modernists and the popu lar readership they allegedly despised.35 Covert reputation building appears to have been the default strategy of the avant-garde when faced with the temptations of fame, and was not unique to the Pre-Raphaelites. In constructing the first reception history of the aesthetic movement, I have dispensed with the practice of favoring named contributors and famous persons over the anonymous reviewers who produced the bulk of criticism before 1880.36 Though I share Rachel Teukolsky’s interest in Victorian art writing, my study differs from hers in impor tant respects. The Literate Eye gives Pre-Raphaelite innovation short shrift by postponing the debut of an “incipient Victorian avant-garde” until the advent of Pater’s The Renaissance.37 In fact, coterie propaganda, collective activity, and disdain for academies were PRB hallmarks in the 1850s. I suspect that the modernist suppression of Victorian forebears contributed to this oversight. In Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, Christopher Reed remarks on the exclusion from the modernist canon of the ceramics, textiles, and interior designs produced by Bloomsbury’s artistic collectives, which he deems a rejection of a subculture perceived as deviant, effeminate, and amateur. Conversely, Bloomsbury’s shared sense of alienation from traditional domesticity, and its revaluation of love and lifestyle, forged a power ful minority identity. Reed’s insight into what he calls Bloomsbury’s “groupiness” was a defining feature of Pre-Raphaelite subcultures as well.38 Reed only touches on Bloomsbury’s indebtedness to aestheticism and the arts and crafts movement. A period in for mant with an axe to grind against “pretty” domesticated modernism, Wyndham Lewis paid a backhanded compliment to the Pre-Raphaelites in 1930, disparaging Bloomsbury in The Apes of God as “monied middleclass descendants of victorian literary splendor.”39 Positing a revamped lineage for avant-garde aesthetics, my book provides fresh insight into Pre-Raphaelitism’s avant-garde qualities and intentions because it takes the long view afforded by twentieth-century exhibits, scholarship, and critique. Hans Robert Jauss contends that the “virtual significance” of a work or movement can be missed at the time of its advent, and must await an aesthetic evolution “that now for the first time allows [ xxii ]

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one to find access to the understanding of the misunderstood older form.” 40 By relating British aestheticism to the social organ ization of Victorian Britain, taking period snapshots of the institutional and class interests supporting or resisting aestheticism’s move from the margins (alternative culture) to inside the “selective tradition,” 41 we can observe what happens to the text, canon, or tradition during the dialogic conversation between a literate public, its press and print culture, and posterity. Between 1848 and 1910, period in for mants variously clarified or deformed the history of the aesthetic movement by filling the archive with heavi ly partisan yet presumptively authoritative firsthand accounts. Virtually none of the critics writing about Pre-Raphaelitism had a neutral or objective stance. Rather than exclude all works with an obvious bias, I provide thick description of the personal contacts and investments of people who had “skin in the game.” This book will document the Pre-Raphaelites’ transformation of the Victorian public sphere through highly publicized media campaigns (both for and against) the aesthetic innovations (or anachronisms) and bohemian lifestyles of Pre-Raphaelite luminaries. Exceptional personalities appear to enjoy (or endure) a mythic afterlife secured by memoirs, biographies, posthumous publications, and career retrospectives. Straddling the worlds of high and popu lar art, making a virtue of art’s commercial properties, Andy Warhol donned dark glasses, spoke to the public through an interpreter, surrounded himself with a clique of adoring eccentrics (a.k.a. the factory), and adhered to a strategy of enigmatic reputation building. Just as Warhol’s influence was felt in the 1960s and beyond, the interplay between the new style in art and poetry, its erotic topicality, and teamwork transfigured Victorian culture. The Pre-Raphaelites modernized Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality. They were foundational for Victorians trying to forge an artistic and personal identity within an imagined community of brother-lovers. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

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CR I T I CS, COT E R IES, AND P R E - R A P H A E L I T E C EL EBR IT Y

ONE The Pre-Raphaelite Vanguard

In the Royal Academy the works of the so-called Praeraphaelites, Millais and Hunt, are cynosures which now attract and absorb the attention of admiring multitudes. Amidst the sneers of stolid criticism, these two men have inaugurated a new era in art; and now it happens, in the fifth year of their epiphany, that many who came to laugh remain to worship. —“Art and Artists”

P

re-Raphaelitism was a catalyst and mirror of human society in a period roiled by change. Pre-Raphaelite provocations against conventional art, liter ature, and lifestyle challenged the conceptual frameworks that governed Victorian society. Nothing less than revolutionary, Pre-Raphaelite strategies of visual, verbal, temporal, and thematic defamiliarization make a compelling case for the movement’s avant-garde disposition. Pre-Raphaelitism variously embraced or contradicted Victorian notions of “traditionalism,” “antiquarianism,” “medievalism,” and “classicism,” terms entering English usage or becoming commonplace in the mid-nineteenth century.1 Probing new concepts and altered meanings of older words, such as “sincerity,” the Pre-Raphaelites participated in cultural transformation as well as aesthetic experimentation. They belonged to Hobsbawm’s “age of revolution” (1789–1848) in a double sense.2 As a passel of “youthful revolutionaries,”3 they embodied the values of the

French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. Pre-Raphaelitism emerged at the height of the Industrial Revolution, by which time the bourgeoisie had established a fluid societal order based on economic class and social mobility as opposed to the precapitalist hierarchy of rank still in force among the landed aristocracy and gentry. The increasing rationalization of economic life under capitalism led to a paradigm shift in the epistemic order, which now adhered to the law of “development-in-time.” 4 In History of Bourgeois Perception, Donald Lowe argues that the field of human perception is delimited by epistemic suppositions, which order the content of perceptions; the media of communication, which frame and facilitate perception; and the hierarchy of senses, which determines the subject’s embodied perception (1). Lowe’s phenomenological approach to the consciousness of historical subjects is germane to Pre-Raphaelite endeavor in the age of progress (evolution), print media (typographic culture), and the artists’ assault on visual and temporal conventions in the machine age. Connecting the complex reception history of Pre-Raphaelitism with the Victorian social discourse on class, work, and intimacy is the task of this chapter. Period in for mants, patrons, and the Pre-Raphaelites themselves displayed a diverse rather than homogeneous, and evolving rather than static, bourgeois consciousness. Providing a fixed set of contexts and personnel (local character) and historic span (1848–1882), Pre-Raphaelite narratives and artifacts are the type of “very densely textured facts” that can be used to link symbolic action to social structure.5 Painting and collecting (writing and publishing) involved discrete socioeconomic interactions among bourgeois factions. Rising to a position of wealth and complacency that brooked no admission of social inferiority, the British bourgeoisie helped to popular ize a narrative art that mirrored its diurnal concerns, such as Frith’s zeitgeist paintings. Another subset of this class fascinated itself with the images produced by the members of the counterculture. Whether viewed as fetish objects, status symbols, or portals to a spiritual realm far removed from the marketplace, Pre-Raphaelite art sanctified the cultural authority of the capital ist class. Industrialists and businessmen favored contemporary British artists over the old masters, partly to avoid being rooked. According to the Pre-Raphaelite critic F. G. Stephens, “The socalled middle-class of England has been that which has done the most for English art. While its social superiors ‘praised’ Pietro Perugino, neglected Turner, let Wilson starve,” Stephens averred, “the merchant princes bought of Turner, William Hunt, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti.” 6 The act of col[ 2 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

lecting became a gesture of self-assertion for a bourgeoisie anxious to demonstrate its taste, patriotism, and economic clout over and against the traditional elites. Merchants and industrialists challenged the aristocracy’s dominance in the cultural sphere, paradoxically relying on antibourgeois art to appear unapologetically bourgeois. In Art and the Victorian Middle Class, Dianne Sachko Macleod explains the unlikely attraction of middle-class businessmen of a sober and pious bent to Pre-Raphaelite art. Describing the Mancunian preference for modern art reflecting the values of work, progress, aesthetic invention, and success, Macleod confirms the ambivalence of clients toward the term “PreRaphaelite,” with its antiquated associations. She cites Holman Hunt’s recollections of his conversation with the textile manufacturer Thomas Fairbairn: “Let me advise you, when talking to Manchester people about the works of your school, not to use that term; they are disposed to admire individual examples, but the term has to them become one of such confirmed ridicule that they cannot accept it calmly!”7 Discussing the nouveau riche tendency to favor objects that suggested “costliness,” Francis Klingender explains the appeal of minutely detailed replicas of even commonplace objects, for the reproduction of these things entailed hours of labor.8 In Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853), the wood grain of the freshly polished piano, the Turkey carpet, and the eyelet lace suggest a tension between modern industrial commodities and the skilled, laborintensive work of oil painting by hand. Apart from its rightly appreciated workmanship, The Awakening Conscience instantiates the bourgeois patron’s failure to fully appreciate the artist’s aims and originality. Fairbairn instructed Hunt to soften the pained expression of the fallen woman, whose recovered sense of decency supplied the central motive for the picture. As Carol Christ claims, the PRB self-consciously relied on grotesque expression to evoke intense states of feeling (inciting charges of morbidity) in defiance of exhausted conventional symbolism.9 While the fallen woman was a staple of Victorian genre painting, Hunt’s meticulous revaluation of familiar domestic objects to convey foreboding was wholly original. Converted into symbols of shame and imminent ruin, domestic articles took on the function and emotional resonance of religious iconography (such as the picture above the mantelpiece of The Woman Taken in Adultery).10 As Ruskin pointed out in a letter to The Times, “The very hem of the poor girl’s dress, at which the painter has labored so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street.”11 Pre-Raphaelitism was a middle-class art (made for and by members of the bourgeoisie), but it was nothing like the Victorian kitsch manufactured by the yard. Members of the PRB hailed from the British middle classes but selectively incorporated middle-class ideals. Morse Peckham’s Victorian Revolutionaries: Speculations on Some Heroes of the Culture Crisis, a study of alienation and cultural transcendence, places the PRB and the poet Swinburne at the forefront of disaffected intellectuals.12 Counterintuitively, the qualities of self-assertion and self-sufficiency that fueled the rise of the industrial class also energized the bohemian rebellion against propriety and cultural institutions. Raymond Williams explains that the initial bourgeois rebellion against aristocratic privilege on the grounds of self-possessive individualism inevitably fomented internal dissent within the ranks. Focusing on the modernists’ hostility to domesticity, monogamy, and childcare as a check on personal freedom and mobile desire, Williams retroactively confirms the Pre-Raphaelites’ adherence to the ideology of the sovereign individual and vanguard rejection of the bourgeois family and the mores supporting it.13 For the Victorian capitalist class, success entailed professional, social, and domestic responsibility, inculcated by the Protestant work ethic and evangelical disdain for plea sure seeking, twin tenets that impinged on personal freedom. May- December second marriages were prevalent among the moneyed merchant class, but the bohemians routinely committed adultery, fornicated, and married “beneath them.” Gabriel Rossetti flouted the rules of bourgeois propriety in his courtship, marriage, and two-timing of Elizabeth Siddall, his fiancée for nine years. A significant number of middle- class artists, among them Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Whistler, and William Morris, married or cohabited with workingclass women. Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, Rossetti’s Found (1855), and Brown’s Take Your Son, Sir! (begun in 1851) depict the social chaos caused by love affairs between gentlemen and women of the lower classes. Merchants purchased these canvases as investments, decorations, and pictorial sermons, while the bohemians challenged class hierarchies through the representation of alternative lifestyles. As benefactor and friend of the bohemian artist, the captain of industry allied himself with creative genius but not necessarily with the outlier lifestyles and ribald collegiality of the PRB frolicking in bachelor digs. Writing to Brown on the eve of [ 4 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

Walter Deverell’s bid to join the PRB, John Tupper appended a postscript to his letter suggestive of juvenile ebullience and unfeigned interest, evidently common among the brethren, in a friend’s sexual hygiene: “Happy New Year to you! And  P.R.B. to Deverell, I suppose tonight, eh? You may interpret P.R.B. ‘Penis rather better’—which to him is impor tant.”14 A reputation for sexual adventurism, which later fostered the ill fame of Wilde, lent a kind of glamour as well as notoriety to his predecessors. The PRB challenged class and institutional hierarchies as an “Aristocracy of Talent.”15 They also afforded wealthy businessmen the opportunity to patronize aspiring men not unlike themselves. The revolutionary statements and bohemian gestures of PRB figureheads appealed to a select bourgeois clientele oppressed by ennui and dismayed by the creeping materialism of the period. Inspired by Carlyle and Ruskin’s sermonizing, the PRB addressed society’s yearning for art to take over hieratic functions in an era of scientific rationalism and religious controversy. The Pre-Raphaelites produced secular devotional art and, in Rossetti’s case, replaced organized religion with a religion of beauty.16 In both cases, the PRB’s indifference to fame and money and their faith in the social mission of art were essential values. Anticipating the emotional needs of their first constituency, the PRB advocated a return to a mode of life where literature and art served devotional and humanistic ends rather than commercial goals. This was an impor tant message in 1848. In the year of the PRB’s founding, revolutionary activity across Europe calcified class antagonism between former allies in the struggle against monarchical privilege: the industrial bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Describing the supersession of the feudal aristocracy, Marx noted that aristocratic ideals (such as chivalry, fealty, honor) benefited a sliver of the community whereas bourgeois ideology proclaimed liberty and equality for all.17 At the onset of the French Revolution, the populace embraced the new ideology of personal freedom as a universal right; its appeal was widespread and enduring. The men who patronized the PRB made their fortunes exploiting the system of wage labor for their own benefit. By purchasing PRB canvases depicting scenes of rural life, biblical and literary anecdotes, and even images of poverty and prostitution, patrons practiced vicarious liberalism. Of course, this faith in a shared humanism was based on a series of misconceptions about Pre-Raphaelitism’s religious orientation, class outlook, and respect for patrons. The Pre-Raphaelites’ claim to their “avant-garde position,” that of mortifying the Royal Academy in matters of style and the bourgeoisie in T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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matters of morality, was tenable during Rossetti’s lifetime.18 They forced Victorians to confront the incongruities in the national narrative between the feudal past and industrial present; among Protestantism, Anglicanism, and Tractarianism; between Tory and Whig politics; between traditional and avant- garde art; and between domesticity and sexual freedom. The PRB and its affiliates were forerunners of later cultural conflicts connected with the avant-garde movements that eschewed the marketplace for art and literature. As a self-named and purposeful collective, they anticipated the formation of the historical avant- garde in the very terms laid out by Williams in “The Politics of the Avant-Garde.” Between 1848 and 1853, the PRB rejected the traditional apparatuses of cultural legitimation. They banded together to protect their innovative aesthetic practices from institutional and market interference. They developed their own techniques, tools, and facilities for production (from grinding pigments to hand-blocking wallpaper). Above all, they exploited the literary character of the public sphere to attack their enemies in the cultural establishment and promote their work: “Thus the defense of a par ticu lar kind of art became first the self-management of a new kind of art and then, crucially, an attack in the name of this art on a whole social and cultural order.”19 This is a cogent summary of the movement’s raison d’être in its first five years of activity. In 1939, Clement Greenberg ascribed to “the first settlers of Bohemia—which was then identical with the avant-garde”—an insurrectionary inspiration: “Without the circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been able to isolate their concept of the ‘bourgeois’ in order to define what they were not.”20

PRB Models and Modes Not to be confused with the group of Victorian genre painters (Richard Dadd, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O’Neil) who called themselves “the clique” and actively opposed the younger men, Pre-Raphaelitism began as a cooperative venture catalyzed by talented individuals forming a clique. In 1848, Millais spurned his gold medal and accolades as the precocious boy wonder of the Royal Academy school and joined forces with Hunt, Gabriel and William Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, F. G. Stephens, and James Collinson. In 1849, Millais’s Isabella (1849) and Holman Hunt’s Rienzi (1849) debuted at the Royal Academy, and Rossetti’s The Girlhood [ 6 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

of Mary Virgin (1849) was shown at the Free Exhibition, Hyde Park Corner. The trio signed these early paintings “PRB” to the bafflement and perturbation of the art establishment: “We cannot censure at present, as amply or as strongly as we desire to do, that strange disorder of the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists who style themselves, ‘P.R.B.,’ which being interpreted means PraeRaphael-brethren. Their faith seems to consist in an absolute contempt for perspective and the known laws of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in every shape, . . . seeking out, every excess of sharpness and deformity.”21 Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti shared the impulse to treat nature and objects as emblems inviting contemplation down to the smallest detail. The PRB’s early painstaking technique (tight brushwork) created a distortion of the visual field through ultrasharp panoramic focus. The overall surface detail of PRB canvases impeded recession into the picture background, making it difficult for viewers to grasp the full scene. Yet far from producing “a fatal lack of integrity of focus,” this superfluity of detail actually enhanced the picture’s emotional intensity through the multiplicity of fully realized objects, each making an independent bid for attention.22 Eschewing technical and stylistic conventions in favor of sincerity and truth to nature (painting en plein air), they hoped to bring about a spiritual revival through art. With its refrain “work is worship,” it seems obvious that Carlyle’s Past and Present inspired Pre-Raphaelite endeavor, notable for its laborious detail and high finish.23 Like Carlyle, the PRB plumbed the repertoire in search of historical models. Carlyle’s dicta informed Pre-Raphaelite protestations of sincere and passionate sympathy with the artists of the Middle Ages, just as Ruskin’s Modern Painters influenced their return to nature. In fact, Carlyle’s definition of sincerity embraced a return to nature with childlike wonder and freshness of response comparable to Ruskin’s exhortations on the subject. Therefore the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers struck their contemporaries as a “small knot of young men united in a ‘League of Sincerity.’ ”24 Walter Pater commended the tone of perfect sincerity “common to that school and to him” in his 1889 overview of Rossetti’s trailblazing literary career: “already felt as one of the charms of that earliest poem— a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be.”25 Pater’s emphasis on “direct and unconventional T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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expression” complicated a cherished cultural construct, sincerity, by pitting it against convention and more transparent versions of itself. In much the same way, PRB sincerity called attention to the generic, mannered, and sentimental qualities of Victorian literature and art. In equal measure, earnestness and arrogance gave the principal members of the PRB courage to battle hidebound conventions while promulgating the new truths of their chosen orthodoxy: “The resolute casting aside of the received conventionalities of art, which had become its shackles—the direct recurrence and rigid adherence to the actual model in painting the details as well as the main features of a picture— and the sturdy protest it offered against some of the prevalent forms of pictorial sentimentalism have already done much good, and will do much more.”26 However sincere the Pre-Raphaelites’ intentions, their aims were neither simple nor easily understood. PRB members’ painstaking representations of natural facts clashed with their apparent retreat from real ity into archaism. They employed a style of figuration notorious for awkwardness and angularity, yet they claimed to “paint from the life.” They used their friends as models for literary and biblical subjects. Each canvas seemed to be the portrait of a living person. Riddled with outmoded elements yet looking freshly painted, a PRB picture was destined to disconcert its first audience by defying familiar standards and expectations. The aim was organic rather than fash ionable novelty, in keeping with Carlyle’s 1841 aphorism “The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.”27 Despite its debt to early Christian art, Pre-Raphaelitism rebelled against the “normalizing functions of tradition” at hand.28 The Pre-Raphaelites’ signal virtue of natu ral truth deviated from Victorian prescriptions for art, which must uplift, instruct, and give pleasure; in choosing models of ordinary aspect, the PRB violated Joshua Reynolds’s edict that the painter should correct imperfections to attain the “Grand Style.” For The Times, Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd (1851) epitomized the brethren’s aversion to beauty, with “fiery complexions, such wiry hair, and such elephantine feet,” these peasants were “not born in Arcadia.”29 Critics complained that PRB naturalism was misguided, ugly, and occasionally perverse. In an unsigned review, The Examiner chastised Hunt for “a distressing— though unintentional— burlesque of sacred thoughts” in Light of the World (1853), the “monstrosity of the picture season.” Similarly, The Examiner faulted Hunt for spoiling the moral lesson of The

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Awakening Conscience by too vivid a presentation of the “fleshly aspect of the subject.”30 Fleshliness was an attribute identified with Rossetti after the PRB; Victorians also found the term handy for censuring coarse pictorial naturalism. The National Magazine complained that Millais robbed Shakespeare’s Ophelia of her dignity and pathos by “converting her into a mere buxom girl” who looked more like a “dairymaid” than a lady of the court. Millais’s depiction of Noah’s daughters, “dressed in their bed-clothes, so scant and lank was their white costume,” violated Victorian notions of correct attire for biblical figures.31 Conceptually and materially, Pre-Raphaelitism stood for innovation and reform. The very name was selected as a challenge to reigning orthodoxies.32 Officers of the Royal Academy (founded in 1768) and the National Gallery of London (founded in 1824) met with a select committee to discuss purchases for the museum while it was under construction in 1835– 1836. They agreed on the supremacy of Raphael, for they considered paintings belonging to the period 1510–1530 the apex of art. Though one member suggested beginning with Giotto (1266–1337), it was decided that the museum would “acquire pictures from Raphael and his age, and then trace the history of art since Raphael.”33 In contrast, the PRB advertised in The Germ as a “sect in art”—“a body of young and clever painters, who, determined to know nothing of our modern ‘Pagan’ masters, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, and the like, but to look wholly to those ‘Christian’ guides who preceded them, and from whose religious simplicity and purity they so grievously degenerated.”34 Summarizing the movement’s aims, The London Journal paraphrased PRB outsider John Orchard’s “A Dialogue on Art,” which extolled Nazarene values of monasticism and the purification of modern art.35 Apart from Orchard, Charles Collins, and Gabriel Rossetti, Catholic art was not a defining PRB trait. Indeed, Rossetti’s early Marian-themed works belied his secular lifestyle. Disgusted with industrialism and its consequences, Rossetti and his comrades agreed that sacramental art and literature were the vehicles for a national revival, a rebirth of humanism.36 The Middle Ages were admired as a historical example of spirituality infusing daily life; the Italian primitives for their sincerity and close observation of nature. Though limited to four issues, The Germ represented a diversity of opinion. Orchard and Stephens decried decorative and voluptuous art.37 In contrast, Gabriel Rossetti’s prose-poem “Hand and Soul” lay the groundwork for aestheticism, with its emphasis

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on the artist Chiaro’s ecstatic communion with his “feminine” soul, a highly personal interpretation of sacred art, detached from religious dogma and moral strictures.38 The museum curator Andrea Rose denies that the PRB’s early statements support “lingering notions about the radicalism of the Brotherhood, its bohemianism and its isolation from contemporary social thought.”39 Yet William Rossetti prefaced the 1901 reprint of The Germ with the declaration: “The temper of these striplings, after some years of the current academic training, was the temper of rebels: they meant revolt, and produced revolution” (6). Their rejection of canonical art in favor of the techniques and structures of feeling belonging to the Christian Middle Ages was an avant-garde gesture. The PRB’s invocation of an alternative tradition (Italian primitivism) gave them historical legitimacy; their bravado and cheek appealed to romantic notions of artistic alienation established a generation earlier. The PRB’s selection of unfashionable medieval sources represented a “stimuli of a new creativity, against an exhausted or deformed current order” favoring Renaissance models.40 As Perry Anderson argues in “Modernity and Revolution,” art insurgencies require the “per sistence of the anciens régimes, and the academicism concomitant with them” in order to articulate their “new” program and posit their difference.41 Without the existential and creative tension provided by the regimes of taste and official canons of art, safeguarded by the Royal Academy and its ilk and presenting a common adversary, the PRB lacked a basis for unity. What struck chroniclers of the PRB was “the concentrated self-sufficiency of the whole coterie of which Rossetti was a leading figure; their persuasion of the supreme importance of their own affairs and their own views of art and life.”42 If museums were interested in Renaissance masterworks, then public buildings, interior design, and textile manufacture celebrated the Gothic Revival (1830–1860). One period in for mant described the Pre-Raphaelites as “fitted up with medieval chairs and tables, presses and cupboards, wall-papers and window hangings, all ‘brand new and intensely old,’ ” confirming a quizzical apprehension of their hankering after retroGothic rooms and furniture.43 Nevertheless, PRB medievalism had deeper roots than the wider Victorian vogue for Gothic. The PRB emulated the German Nazarenes (1809–1829), who lived collectively in an abandoned convent, cultivated flowing locks, and wore robes in imitation of Christ. The Nazarene revival of medieval fresco painting was another point in its favor.44 Men of letters, artists, and artisans, PRB members collaborated, as [ 10 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

if in a medieval workshop. In Britain, the underlying ethos of the Gothic Revival was identified with aristocrats and Tories, not anchorites. As head of the Royal Fine Art Commission, Prince Albert procured paintings and commissioned murals for civic buildings that reflected his German origins and tastes. Victorian architectural commissions favored English historical and literary subjects in pictures destined for institutions. Assisting the architect Charles Barry, Augustus Pugin designed and decorated the interiors of the new palace of Westminster, featuring frescoes drawn from Thomas Malory’s Mort d’Arthur, which lent intelligibility to King Arthur’s role as a national hero and Christ figure.45 With antiquarianism serving patriotic ends throughout the 1840s, Pre-Raphaelite medievalism was susceptible to amalgamation with the conservative agenda, heralding a national artistic and spiritual revival. Indeed, Charles Dickens’s ridicule of the so-called “Young England hallucination,” with its idealization of the feudal past, confounded Pre-Raphaelitism with a Tory political movement deferential to the monarchy and sympathetic to the establishment of a national church.46 Disraeli’s Tories wanted to bridge the gulf between the elites and the masses through a national mythos celebrating the British constitution, state religion, and empire. While the Pre-Raphaelites were staunchly opposed to industrialization and shared a romantic picture of feudalism, their resemblance to Young England can be taken only so far. Though they resented the bourgeoisie and their leveling influence on culture, the Pre-Raphaelites benefited econom ically from the free-market system, which the Tories opposed. Painting was first listed as a profession in the 1861 census report, a step that indicated the “new” respectability of that endeavor.47 Coextensive with this rise in status was the expectation that painters were autonomous gentlemen and professionals, not mere tradesmen at the beck and call of the marketplace. According to Paula Gillett, during the first half of the nineteenth century, before Reynolds’s ascendancy, the majority of artists were poorly remunerated artisans who lived among and were classed with tradesmen: “The palatial studio-houses of the sixties, seventies, and eighties were attempts to replace and deny the earlier image of the artist” as “coach painter, sign painter, hand-and-drapery painter, or face painter” (24). With the academicians’ attainment of wealth and qualified admission into fashionable society, professional artists mirrored rather than transcended middleclass pecuniary emulation. Pragmatically, the rise of the gentleman artist favored the artist’s identification with the sovereign individual, one face of T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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bourgeois citizenship. At a time when the Victorian art establishment prided itself on the achievement of professional status and even an occasional knighthood, the Pre-Raphaelites initially rejected social and professional preferment within the art world. The collective abbreviation, debuted at the inaugural exhibition of PRB paintings, nurtured the expectation that the artists would remain true to the higher aims professed in The Germ. Sincerity was both a watchword with the PRB and a fixation with its detractors, who contrived to find imposture in every tenet and gesture of the movement. Through the apocryphal etymology of “sincere” (without wax or chicanery, finely honed), the term conveyed the social anxiety inflecting critiques of Pre-Raphaelitism as a microcosm of a larger embattled semiotic field, in which self-invention and imposture were two sides of the same coin. As traditional barriers to entry into fash ionable society waned—as a result of the landed aristocracy’s declining economic base, an influx of foreign money, newly acquired commercial and industrial wealth making inroads in London society, and the acquisition by the middle classes of unprecedented social and economic capital— a certain opprobrium still clung to those eager to climb the social ladder.48 There remained hindrances to social advancement, such as the limited number of honorable professions and the social stigma attached to uncouth behavior and speech. While birth and breeding were increasingly trumped by emerging forms of social and economic capital, literary tradition and print culture continued to celebrate the sincerity of self-presentation. In this context, partly owing to Carlyle’s influence, sincerity functioned as a synonym for civic authenticity. Protestant canons of modesty and the fear of strangers in an increasingly urban society reinforced older values. Social aspirants were mistrusted as social actors or hypocrites playing a false part: “The original social meaning of the word ‘villain’ bears decisively upon its later moral meaning. The opprobrious term referred to the man who stood lowest in the scale of feudal society; the villain of plays and novels is characteristically a person who seeks to rise above the station to which he was born,” Lionel Trilling explains. “He denies and violates his social identity” because “he can achieve his unnatural purpose only by covert acts, by guile.”49 Pre- Raphaelite bohemianism was a rejection of the artist’s freshly garnered social clout and a deflection of charges of careerism and social ambition, which explains why the publicity apparatus stoking PRB renown emphasized the bohemian artist’s defiance of bourgeois values and norms. [ 12 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

Marilyn Brown critiques the myth of the outsider visionary artist, modeled on a hypothesized bohemian aggregate: gypsies, circus performers, street musicians, and brigands— a mix of radical chic attitudes and theatrical postures.50 Brown accuses T. J. Clark of grossly overstating the political radicalism of the French bohemian artist, who ignored the deprivations of the working poor while pursuing an unconventional lifestyle (8). Brown credibly postulates the “ostensible transformation from bohemian to bourgeois” circa 1845 (11), an estimate that tallies with Marxian accounts of the rise of capitalism as a unified structure of consciousness.51 Outside the clique in the mid-1850s, the movement’s detractors had begun to question the group’s sincerity with respect to the PRB’s deviation from its own carefully articulated values. The artists were accused of (and often congratulated for) making concessions to the strictures of the client (plutocrat, dealer, gallery, or popu lar audience). Moving freely among clients and their social milieus, artists combined a bohemian indifference to social preferment and institutional sanction with the partial achievement of social entrée and professional acclaim. Emboldened by genius and celebrity, they refused to curry favor with the nouveaux riches or titled aristocrats. They were above social climbing, if not above haggling over fees. The Pre-Raphaelites practiced interior decoration as an art while incidentally advertising their art wares, crafts, and textiles. This circumvented the taint of crude materialism for some observers and constituted it for others: “The Pre-Raphaelite school has trimmed and moulded itself to suit the atmosphere of Belgravia. With the decoration of altar-cloths and the worship of old china, it divides the attention of the art patrons of that prim and pious locality. That is its proper place.”52 Problematically, earnestness and ambition were conjoined—belying the cardinal tenet of the sect’s disinterested sincerity. Rather than cynically deny the PRB a reformist impulse based on their bohemian affectations, I see their revolution as doomed from the start by the historical situation of the bourgeoisie and by their own naïveté. Millais was a teenager and Hunt and Rossetti scarcely out of their teens when the three of them helped found the PRB.53 Even so, these greenhorns recognized that the business of art might compromise their vaunted aims. Though short-lived, the collegiality and idealist aesthetic program promulgated by the PRB seemed to place members of the school beyond worldly concerns. Such unfettered independence was a source of Pre-Raphaelite glamour, and largely illusory. Macleod contends that the PRB’s cultivation, T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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tinctured with resentment, of middle- class patrons “underlines one of the inherent contradictions of Pre-Raphaelitism as an avant-garde movement. Claiming to be outsiders, its artists took an active interest in the mainstream marketplace.”54 She is indisputably correct. But the PRB were an avant-garde in the making and lacked a playbook listing disqualifying activities. Its membership had to puzzle these out for themselves. At first, PRB members sold directly to clients, arranging fees for finished work and schedules for commissioned work. Participating in financial transactions would have shored up their antiestablishment convictions. Visiting the homes of their socially conservative patrons, PRB members witnessed differences in lifestyle that confirmed their bohemian- artist identity. Their campaign to épater le bourgeois was disrespectful to clients and the art public alike. More importantly, it concealed the market concessions that floated avant-garde endeavor, perhaps even from PRB members. They actively fashioned careers while disingenuously projecting an aura of indifference to the marketplace, but they had help. The burgeoning market for cultural commodities conspired with artists and critics to affirm the “singularity of the intellectual and artistic condition” by defining the work of art as something greater than a “simple article of merchandise.” Functioning within a print economy where making a name for oneself and one’s school was socially legitimating as well as profitable, the Pre-Raphaelites were continuously engaged in converting aesthetic expertise into the coin of “prestige” and “authority.”55 Within the impersonal sphere of the market, aesthetic commodities could be differentiated from other decorative merchandise by asserting the special genius or charismatic authority of the artist, who made art for art’s sake. The PRB’s collusion in the publicity surrounding the initial PreRaphaelite controversy reflected the diverse principals’ awareness of a “need for self-promotion which ensured their enduring prominence in an increasingly competitive market.” According to Matthew Plampin, the “strategic use of scandal” enabled the PRB to build “brand recognition.”56 At the same time, naked self-advertisement deprived the enterprise of its sincerity and glory. The PRB saved face by delegating much of the promotional responsibility to their journalist cohort. From the first, the PRB took advantage of the expansion of print media—from newspapers to illustrated circulars to specialized art journals like The Germ—to disseminate their core principles. Mounting a bibliophile’s campaign for a reprint of The Germ, John Ashcroft Noble refracted the movement through the [ 14 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

lens of its high spiritual aims, excusing publicity as essential to its core mission: “Reformers are necessarily propagandists,” he wrote. “In a day of newspapers and reviews a periodical publication of some kind seemed the most natural vehicle of utterance.” Victorians read The Germ as an “official manifesto or apologia of Pre-Raphaelitism,” but it was also an advertisement for the brand.57 Pre-Raphaelite improvisation of new channels of art display and distribution registered with the public as a wholesale protest against the art commodity, whereas it was equally a protest against the politics of exhibition and display. The PRB attacked the exhibition practices of the Royal Academy, which skied the paintings of younger artists, while displaying portraits of elite personages and canvases by favored academicians at the center line, where they fetched the most notice and richest purses. Ruskin disparaged the “spurious work” of PRB imitators and wryly noted that one example of the “true school” was “hung so low that it might otherwise escape attention” (Works JR, 12:332). In Marketing Modernism in Finde-Siècle Europe, Robert Jensen explains that modern artists appealed to consumers by masquerading under the banner of anticommercialism.58 This stance of “solitary genius defined in opposition to the cruelties of publicity” appears to be a default mode or reflex attitude of the avantgarde, and its provenance is nineteenth century.59 The ambience of the shop counter already threatened the sanctity of Royal Academy exhibitions. The vulgarization of art through commercial trade in stereotyped images was an omnipresent theme in Victorian journalism: “Painting is seen here for the most part under its worst aspects— not as a fine art, ennobling the artist while it instructs and refines and delights the spectator,” according to one critic, “but as a mere manufacture and a dull routine of trade.”60 Writing in 1879, Cornhill Magazine could think of no more damning indictment of the Royal Academy, long derided in the art press for cronyism, than to portray it as “a corporation” for the promulgation of the fine arts.61 The Edinburgh Review disparaged the Royal Academy as “the specially hall-marked emporium of art.” Its correspondent accused Frith of pandering to popular taste, naming repeated occasions on which a rail had to be inserted to protect the likes of Derby Day (1858) from the multitude. Frith’s “Sherry, Sir?” (1853), a painting that toed the line between mawkishness and vulgarity, provoked The Edinburgh Review to portentously intone: “There is a Nemesis in wait for artists who cultivate the mob.” 62 Thus aristocratic torpidity made way for bourgeois dullness at T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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the Royal Academy during the reign of Victoria. In this climate, the PreRaphaelites and their successors were touted as the future of pure art by a critical coterie intent on marketing the mystique of the bohemian artist. This mystique rapidly waned for Hunt and Millais as they became prominent and financially secure, but it stuck to Rossetti until his death. The PRB’s youthful ebullience and sincerity, at first widely ridiculed, contributed to the abatement of public antagonism. This rapprochement was the tipping point, at which Pre-Raphaelitism lost its novelty and gained a wider audience and customer base. While PRB members were initially conflicted about their client base, the Victorian art market eventually seduced its members. With the exception of Rossetti, they took advantage of the new avenues to wealth and prestige open to artists in the burgeoning exhibition scene, licensing images and selling engravings.63 Bristling at the charge that he had abandoned his principles, Millais blamed journalists, who influenced the taste of wealthy clients, for his capitulation to demands for middlebrow subject matter— such as lovers and children—painted with un-Pre-Raphaelite ease. Hunt also enjoyed immense popularity after the exhibition, sale, and circulation of engravings of The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860). Rossetti’s “undraughtsmanlike images” were unsuitable for engraving.64 Reproductions enlarged the fame of Millais and Hunt but contributed to the impression that they were too popu lar to be iconoclasts. As the PRB splintered, Millais and Hunt were assessed on the basis of their work. Rossetti’s absence from exhibition and rumored eccentricity rendered him an exceptional personality among the founding brethren. Discrepant self-presentation stirred controversy, and controversy was media fodder: “Rossetti is so fastidious as a painter, and abandons so many of his paintings half-finished, that Millais and Hunt, who have the greatest respect for him, are almost angry that he does not appear more evidently as their rival.”65 This 1852 article marks a turning point in the delineation of Pre-Raphaelite celebrity embodied in a band of brothers. Millais and Hunt’s visibility permitted critics to chart their deviation from PRB precepts. Curiously, Rossetti’s inaccessibility contributed to the public perception that he remained faithful to the movement’s principles. Millais became a Royal Academician in 1853, and Hunt a successful painter, but the waning of their Pre-Raphaelite cachet detracted from their celebrity aura. This circumstance makes Pre-Raphaelitism a crucial movement for understanding the incongruity between our own modern [ 16 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

ideas of celebrity (when even a cat can be a media sensation) and Victorian artistic anticipation. As visionaries and iconoclasts, the Pre-Raphaelites infuriated Victorians, particularly when the Pre-Raphaelites were considered to have sold out. Yet such contradictions tally with theories of modern celebrity, straddling mainstream and oppositional behav ior; popularity and notoriety. Next, I focus on how the reclusive Rossetti maintained his renown through what today we might call crowdsourcing.

Renown, Celebrity, Myth I have sketched a group portrait of the aesthetic movement in its heyday, praised and vilified, emerging as the cynosure of the art world and print culture. I am ready to explain how the PRB’s reputational capital was diverted to Gabriel Rossetti’s personal account following the PRB’s dissolution. Laura Marcus’s demonstration of the ploys and machinations behind Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), designed to wrest pride of place from Gabriel as the movement’s chief personage, suggests that Pre-Raphaelite life-writing has obstructed an impartial cultural history of the movement.66 Before my own, there has been no corresponding interrogation of William and Gabriel Rossetti’s efforts to install Gabriel at the forefront of the PRB. William produced a cottage industry in diaries, journals, letters, and reminiscences, which converted the life and works of Gabriel into narrative form. Reading from a prepared script, reconciling random or untoward events with the plot of an iconic life story of alienated genius—that of Dante Alighieri— Gabriel set the stage for his contemporaneous, as well as for his posthumous, reception. Christened “Gabriel Charles Dante” in 1828, Rossetti began signing his name “Dante Gabriel” in 1849, when he was twenty-one years of age and preparing for stardom as a member of the PRB.67 Why do I call him “Gabriel” rather than “Dante”? “Gabriel” was the name used by his family and intimates in the ordinary course of events; “Dante” was the name of his avatar. Throughout his life, Rossetti was exceptionally image conscious. Gabriel’s identification with literary icons and his relentless lookout for the good opinion of posterity are significant for my study of legend formation within the celebrity’s lifetime and the dispersal of renown over time. I am quite prepared to believe that Gabriel Rossetti had no hankering after ephemeral celebrity and aimed for something higher and more T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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durable. The construction of the Rossetti myth merits a whole chapter. I want to briefly point out Rossetti’s extraordinary facil ity for motivating people to defend him in the press and to stay on message. In the most famous instance, Rossetti’s apprehensions of partisan attack on Poems (1870) were well founded. He chose to be proactive in shaping the reception of his new volume of poetry prior to attack. However, the strategies enlisted to secure his reputation involved very little effort on his part. This was a pattern, not an isolated case. Rossetti’s grandiosity alternated with periods of melancholic abjection from which his family, friends, and lovers were anxious to rescue him. Victimization was a requisite chapter in Rossetti’s personal narrative of misunderstood genius, but it was also a touchstone of romantic identity: “With a certain quiet exaltation, reminding me of Keats’s calm confidence, he spoke of holding his place among the English poets after his death.”68 Rossetti was a Victorian exemplar of reclusive celebrity, whose fame was fostered by his cohort seemingly without his knowledge. Cultivating the appearance of being grandly indifferent to fame, Rossetti cynically or neurotically, actively or passively, ensured that his reputation was burnished in the Victorian print media. William Rossetti and an extended coterie of male artists, writers, and fans— such as Stephens, Swinburne, Pater, Sidney Colvin, Frederic Shields, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Hall Caine, Edmund Gosse, and William Sharp— honed Rossetti’s celebrity aura. In constructing a group portrait of the aesthetic movement, I need to discriminate among the celebrities, their understudies, and the men whose only chance of fame was relational— a tie of kinship or service. Obviously, William’s motivation for puffing his brother’s renown differed in intensity and complexion from that of his fellows. To the extent that men found Gabriel personally fascinating as well as multitalented, they tapped into the wellspring of Victorian notions of charismatic authority. In his reminiscences, the artist and poet William Bell Scott remarked that early in their acquaintance, I began to feel some sort of fascination about the personality of D. G. R., that makes one accept certain peculiarities in him. I found all his intimate associates did so, placing him in a position different from themselves, a dangerous position to the man whose temperament takes advantage of it. He was at this age just getting out of boyhood, and in transition; in the course of my experience of him he [ 18 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

FIGURE 1.1 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and his Friends, Mr William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fellows Seem to See in Gabriel, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole, 1941.

has changed his entire moral nature and views of life; but this fascination giving him a sort of supremacy, he has never changed.69 A former best friend who told unflattering stories about Gabriel, Scott’s objectivity has been challenged. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon, Mr William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fellows Seem to See in Gabriel, places the envious Scott outside the magic circle of worshippers, where a kneeling Swinburne and gesticulating William Morris form a ring of celebrants around Gabriel.70 However, Scott’s perception of Rossetti as the cynosure of his clique was indisputably valid. A member of the Oxford and Cheyne Walk sets, the painter Val Prinsep recalled: “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved,” adding, “we sank our own individuality in the strong personality of our adored Gabriel.”71 Scott’s adumbration of Rossetti’s insidious authority over his peers, who succumbed to his “magnetic fascination” and “masculine charisma,” to borrow terms from James Eli Adams, unwittingly eroticized the artistic Brotherhood.72 T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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Friends and followers subscribed to Rossetti’s personal my thology. In a memorial article written in 1883, “Rossetti as a Painter,” Sidney Colvin gushed that Rossetti was “driven by something like the same unrelaxing stress and fervour of temperament, so that even in middle age, which he had almost reached when I first knew him, it seemed scarcely less true to say of Rossetti than of Dante himself, that ‘Like flame within the naked hand, His body bore his burning heart.’ ” 73 Colvin’s article exemplified the “hysterics of advocacy”—the journalistic promotion of Rossetti’s renown and the buildup of his charismatic authority by a member of the PreRaphaelite circle.74 Revising a familiar script, I argue that this active (and largely covert) male partisanship is reminiscent of Eve Sedgwick’s characterization of the fine line between homosociality and homoeroticism in Between Men: “men-promoting-the-interests- of-men.” 75 Among his male cohort, Rossetti’s genius inspired an awe suffused with the desire to serve or salvage his renown. Appearing “increasingly eccentric and remote, famous yet unseen,” Rossetti relied on his connections to “survive and even flourish despite an almost complete absence from public exhibitions.”76 Paradoxically, Rossetti’s mystique and inaccessibility contributed to his marketability and newsworthiness. This bundle of contradictions is the definitional formula for modern celebrity. Primary in for mants neglected evidence of Gabriel’s self-fashioning and fame- seeking behav ior, with predictable results. In 1885, the polymath Frederic Myers celebrated Rossetti’s alleged independence from jealous orthodoxies and pronounced him the forerunner of “some new aristocracy— based on differences other than those of birth and wealth.” 77 Aloof and cultured, Rossetti was touted by Myers as an example of “cosmopolitan gentility among the confused and fading class-distinctions of the past” (332). While Myers steered clear of the bohemian artist stereotype, he exalted Rossetti above his bourgeois birth and upbringing. A religion of beauty and philosophy of autonomous art further distinguished Rossetti from his covetous bourgeois contemporaries, who sold out in the name of “Materialism” (332). The notion that Rossetti persevered in the Pre-Raphaelite creed was widespread: “With Rossetti there was no descending to the level of public taste, no acquiescence in second best, no acceptance of convention for truth. He did not care for popularity, and he did not win it.” 78 Millais was rebuked, respected, then lionized as a PRB member, but chastised when he later became a “society-pleasing” painter whose popularity with the masses and admission to the Royal Academy had been toxic [ 20 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

to his art: “In last year’s exhibition Mr. Millais’ pictures held their usual place in prominence and popularity; but the chief impression they left upon us was the artist’s remarkable facility of work and his sense of time’s immeasurable value, which combined with art must lead to fortune.” 79 In contrast to Rossetti’s refusal to “consider the public a little more,” Millais fell victim to a commercially informed taste in art that sought to dictate terms to artists: “Look at Millais, for instance: no one has achieved so big a success as he has. Yet if he had stuck to his early principles like you and Rossetti and Hunt and Morris and the rest, do you think for a moment he would have become the successful man he is?”80 Like Millais, Gabriel Rossetti was attuned to the marketplace and savvy about publicity. Ensconced at Cheyne Walk, Rossetti took exception to an 1865 article, even though it defended his right to withhold work from exhibition. Rossetti wrote to The Athenaeum to protest its account of his resumption of “the practice of oil-painting,” remarking that it was of “great professional importance” to him, who received commissions for watercolor drawings but chiefly worked in oil, that this point be cleared up.81 Though Gabriel Rossetti’s business transactions were privately conducted and little remarked on during his lifetime, William Rossetti’s prolific documenting of his brother’s career encouraged a cynical reconsideration of Gabriel’s trade in full-scale and modified reproductions of his canvases. More than one biographer has expressed discomfort with the idea that Rossetti subjected Beata Beatrix to replication. Having sold the original to the Cowpers, a couple of “very appreciative people,” in 1866, Rossetti called attention to his fastidiousness, telling his mother that “it is pleasanter sending a poetic work where it will be seen by cultivated folks than to a cotton-spinner or a dealer. I could have got considerably more for the picture in some such quarter, I make no doubt, as I had several requests for it.”82 The merchant William Graham acknowledged Rossetti’s “special reluctance, from the memories and associations of the Beatrice, to retread very sacred ground.” Graham insisted that his desire for a replica was motivated by genuine appreciation: “The Beatrice, from the first day I saw it, has appealed to my feeling altogether above and beyond any picture I ever saw, and the love for it has only deepened with its growth and my knowledge of its history.”83 Rossetti made replicas of Beata Beatrix in crayon, watercolor, and oils between 1867 and 1880. In fairness, he muffed several early attempts to copy Beata Beatrix, which suggests that he was uncomfortable with the idea of turning his late wife’s portrait into a commodity. T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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FIGU R E  1.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–1870. Oil on canvas.

Image © Tate, London 2015. Presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple, 1889.

As has already been noted, Rossetti’s seclusion and the privacy of his commercial transactions largely insulated him from the withering scorn directed at Millais. Known as the man who despised fame, Rossetti’s bohemian mystique survived intact; indeed, it was enlarged by his closest associates, who ought to have known better. Buttressed by the “display of absence” and partisan life-writing less insightful than a Beerbohm cartoon, [ 22 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

the Rossetti myth continues virtually unabated today. In Rossetti in His Worldlier Days (circa 1866–1868) Leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala, Max Beerbohm gently chides Rossetti for his commercialism. Depicted strolling arm in arm with Rossetti, George Sala, the artist-journalist and sometime editor of Temple Bar, is a cautionary portrait of prosperity and smugness. Smoking a cigar, dressed in showy attire (a neckcloth, a top hat, and a waistcoat that emphasizes his repulsive girth), Sala reads as the villain of the piece. Despite Rossetti’s aesthetic costume and attentive but unrevealing expression, the cartoon conveys the impression that the portly Rossetti is Sala on a smaller scale, and that Sala thinks so, too: “You and I, Rossetti, we like and we understand each other. Bohemians, both of us, to the core, we take the world as we find it. I give Mr. Levy what he wants, and you give Mr. Rae and Mr. Leyland what they want, and glad we are to pocket the cash and foregather at the Arundel”— a society for the reproduction of masterworks.84 In Beerbohm’s rendering, the “charismatic ideology” shielding Rossetti’s economic stake in his art is unmasked as a facade.85 The amalgamation of bourgeois and bohemian through the aesthetic bibelot reminds us, in Marilyn Brown’s words, “that the bohemian myth involved a dialogue between social dissidence and cultural absorption” whereby the bohemian occupied multiple positions along the bourgeois continuum.86

Simeon Solomon Reviews of Simeon Solomon’s work in the 1860s shared a negative terminology for fleshliness that Buchanan later consulted as a glossary. Buchanan was not a lonely voice in the wilderness decrying immorality; he joined a chorus in the press hullabaloo against fleshliness, parsing its familiar refrains as much as striking out on his own. While I am eager to demonstrate the modernity of Pre-Raphaelite values and inventions, I want to underscore the selective preservation of source material, a heteronormative redaction of the full range of Pre-Raphaelite provocations against Victorian sexual respectability. Exaggerating or expunging data, the PreRaphaelites and their minions rewrote history. Rossetti’s tolerance for personal and artistic nonconformity was limited despite his inviolate bohemian status. As will be shown, Swinburne was in the throes of homosexual panic in the 1870s. Simeon Solomon was “exhibit A” in both cases, T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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FIGU R E  1.3 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and His Friends, Rossetti in His Worldlier

Days (Circa 1866–1868) Leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole, 1941.

yet he was neglected for over a century, hidden from history by the people responsible for recording it. Homophobia may have informed William Rossetti’s eagerness to publicize Gabriel’s affairs with his female models and even the discreditable circumstances surrounding his wife’s death and disinterment. William’s tolerance for the Sapphic vein in Swinburne’s writings, which he defended in print, did not preclude a reaction formation against male homosexuality as a lifestyle. However, this explanation is a bit facile. Solomon was never secretive about his “exclusive desire for young men,” which grew annoying to his comrades in proportion to its notoriety. Thais Morgan reasons that the close personal friendships forged during PRB social gatherings and at work (at the Royal Academy, the Sketching Club, the Hogarth Club, the Medieval Society, the Cannibal Club, the Working Men’s College) approximated “the cross-organizational male monocultures” described by historian Jeff Hearn as simultaneously heterosexual and homosocial in import. According to Hearn, these monocultures featured a “sexualized discourse” all their own, which placed the men in any given organization in a “homosexual subtext,” including same-sex attraction, if not homosexual practice.87 Attuned to the subtext of men’s preferential desire for male companionship, Georgiana MacDonald recalled feeling a “jealous pang!” on hearing her fiancé Burne-Jones lavish praise on Solomon, “the rising genius,” who had shown him a sketchbook of original designs.88 Though an aspiring artist in her own right, Georgiana was denied access to the sanctum sanctorum of male aesthetic fellowship. The cliquishness and ribaldry of the intimate circle enveloped Solomon, an active homosexual and special favorite of Swinburne, Gabriel Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. Gabriel Rossetti introduced Solomon to prominent aesthetes (Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, George Boyce, William de Morgan) and to the nouveaux riches Thomas Plint and James Leathart, who purchased Solomon’s works directly or through the dealer Murray Marks.89 Solomon sold pictures to Rossetti’s businessmen patrons, attempting to veil homophile content with pagan, Jewish, and Christian symbolism. Allen Staley tracks the growing antagonism of these clients to homosexual themes in art. Solomon failed to convince Frederick Leyland that Sacramentum Amoris (1868) was a spiritualized rendering of Love in ideal form, half man and half woman, but not “hermaphrodite in the usual artistic way.”90 Solomon’s friendships with Oscar Browning, the homosexual Eton master; Swinburne’s friend, the Welsh homosexual George Powell; T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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and Swinburne himself required no such dissimulation of sensuous content. These friendships were contemporaneous with Solomon’s intimacy with Pater. Presumably, Pater was shown the daring compositions Solomon made for Browning and Powell. Through his Hellenic designs, such as Bacchus (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867), Solomon influenced Pater’s conception of the Greek ideal. Pater alluded to the image by a young Hebrew painter of a melancholy Dionysus tasting the bitter dregs of the brackish Lesbian grape in “A Study of Dionysus” published in the Fortnightly Review in 1876.91 Solomon’s pencil sketch of Pater (1873) is one of the few surviving portraits of the publicity-averse writer.92 It is no coincidence that Solomon’s reputation and personal popularity suffered an eclipse in the 1870s. Although Swinburne and Gabriel Rossetti were Solomon’s confederates in drunken horseplay and risqué banter, they cut Solomon dead following his arrest for attempted sodomy in 1873. Fined one hundred pounds and briefly detained in a house of correction, Solomon was spared the public pillory of having his crime reported in the newspapers. Unfortunately, word of Solomon’s misadventure got about among his closest friends, who pretended to be surprised. In an 1870 letter to William Rossetti, Swinburne had playfully alluded to Solomon’s homosexuality, signified by his indifference to “bawdy poetry”: “I know, not excepting the song of Solomon— ne plus lire Simeon, as it is none of his canticle.” In 1873, Swinburne trembled at the prospect of guilt by association (his own name was already a byword among libertines); he was no longer willing to carry on an intimacy “which might appear to involve him in equivocal or questionable relations with a person who has deliberately chosen to do what makes a man and all who associate with him infamous in the eyes of the world.” Casting about for an “unobjectionable” euphemism for homosexuality, Swinburne described Solomon as a “Platonist” who had translated “Platonic theory into Socratic practice.” 93 Shortly after Solomon’s arrest, Gabriel Rossetti wrote a letter, accompanied by the postscript “Burn this,” to Ford Madox Brown giving an account of “the horrors about little Solomon,” as confided to him by a third party: “He has just escaped the hand of the law for the second time, accused of the vilest proclivities, and is now in semi-confinement somewhere or other.” Gabriel pitied the “Poor little dev il!” but avoided him thereafter. Solomon’s behavior distressed his most considerate friend, Burne-Jones, who was reportedly “sickened to death with the beastly circumstances,” according to Gabriel.94 [ 26 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

Publicly harangued for being a “mutual admiration society,”95 the PreRaphaelites were threatened by Solomon’s openly homosexual lifestyle. They were a group of men uneasily perched on the cultural divide between respectable homosociality and disreputable homoerethism. Because the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were in an awkward and scandalized relationship to the cult of Hellenism—involving homoerotic chivalry, androgyny, and same-sex passion—they alternately embraced and recoiled from these tendencies. Wayne Koestenbaum’s exposition of the “erotics of male literary collaboration” (1885–1922) supports my reading of Pre-Raphaelite fraternalism as intensifying the bonds between men decades earlier.96 In effect, I am placing men who preferred the company of other men on the homosocial–homosexual continuum. However, unconsummated same-sex yearning is only one facet of Pre-Raphaelite intimacy. Taking a cue from Dellamora’s Friendship’s Bonds, my interests are “not restricted to sexualized male friendship,” even though my account of Victorian collegiality amplifies the homoerotic intensities and homophobic anx ieties called forth by male friendship.97 My special focus is on the obscurantism surrounding Pre-Raphaelitism’s contribution to the emerging discourse of same- sex love. By expunging all signs of Solomon from the historical record and by hyping Rossetti’s reputation as a lover of women over his status as a beloved of his male acolytes, William Rossetti neutered Pre-Raphaelite friendship. Given his vocational pursuits, the Pre-Raphaelite Boswell would have been well advised to consider the verdict of Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross: “To the future English Vasari [Solomon] will be a real gold mine”: “He enjoyed his drink, his overpowering dirt, and his vicious life. He was full of delightful and racy stories about poets and painters, policeman and prisons, of which he had wide experience.98 He might have written a far more diverting book of memoirs than the average PreRaphaelite volume to which we look forward every year, though it is usually silent about poor Simeon Solomon.”99 Instead, William equivocated: “Although I knew something of Solomon personally between some such dates as 1863 and 1871, I have since the latter date entirely lost sight of him.”100 Confronted with a paper trail linking Solomon to the Rossetti brothers, William was resolute: the “subject of Simeon Solomon is one which I avoid speaking or writing about so far as I can.”101 William invoked “the love that dare not speak its name” for his own crisscrossed purposes of recognition and disavowal. T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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Victorian distaste for anomalous sexual behav ior relied on circumlocution and innuendo: “There was a most repulsive scandal about him (not an unfounded scandal) many years ago.” Employing a still earlier trope for homosexuality, William Rossetti diagnosed a “morbid taint” that made its appearance in Solomon’s work and ominously “went on increasing”102 in the years before he became an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”103 Writing in 1903 to fend off Julia Ellsworth Ford’s queries about Gabriel’s acquaintance with Solomon, William endeavored to dispel the “delusion” that Solomon had been closely connected with Gabriel.104 This was a boldfaced lie. In real ity, Solomon was a friend (sometime roommate) and collaborator of the denizens of Cheyne Walk. Indeed, Solomon was first fêted before being banished for his scandalous behav ior: The other night [April 1864] I went to a bachelor’s party to meet Rossetti and Swinburne at Simeon Solomon’s. Such a strange evening; Rossetti is the head of the prae-raphaelites, for Millais and Hunt have seceded; spoilt so to speak by their im mense popularity; whereas Rossetti never exhibits and is comparatively unknown; this strange contempt for fame is rather grand. He is also a great poet, and his translations from the early Italian poets are the finest things in their way that have been done. As for Swinburne, he is without exception the most extraordinary man not that I ever met only, but that I ever read or heard of; for three hours he spouted his poetry to us, and it was of a power, beauty and originality unequalled. Every thing after seems tame, but the little beast will never I think be acknowledged for he has an utterly perverted moral sense, and ranks Lucrezia Borgia with Jesus Christ; indeed says she’s far greater, and very little of his poetry is fit for publication. If you like I will copy one of his very mildest which has been published, namely Faustine, and send it to you. These strange creatures all hang in a clique together, and despise everything but themselves; and really I don’t wonder.105 Without the support of his famous friends and their cronies in the press and exhibition scene, Solomon faded from prominence into a netherworld of vice and poverty. I next want to connect Solomon’s homosexuality with the Pre-Raphaelite brand through the guilt-by-association tactics of Victorian journalism, which led Solomon’s confederates to deny his name once his homosexuality became fodder for gossips. Indeed, even before Solo[ 28 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

mon’s arrest the homoerotic themes of his oeuvre led to ad hominem attacks on his moral character that masqueraded as aesthetic criticism. This conflation of man and work was a hallmark of modern celebrity, and was by no means detrimental to the renown of its target, as his detractors intended. As chapter 2 will demonstrate, beginning with the print quarrels over romanticism, both scandal and negative publicity have been as useful as critical puffs in advertising creative work and creative “genius” to an expanding culturally literate public. However, Solomon’s bohemian glamour faded once confirmation of his homosexuality transformed him into a disreputable figure, anticipating Wilde’s debacle in 1895.

Blame Game: Tactic of Guilt by Association Victorian and modern historians of the aesthetic movement were instrumental in silencing or excising the most flamboyant figures on the PreRaphaelite continuum. Some of these writers (Ford Madox Ford [née Hueffer], grandson of Ford Madox Brown; Helen Rossetti Angeli, daughter of William Rossetti; Virginia Surtees, great granddaughter of Rossetti model Ruth Herbert; and Diana Holman Hunt, granddaughter of the painter) had kinship ties with PRB members or their near associates. In the case of Ford, Angeli, and Hunt, defensiveness ruled the day. Ironically, the PRB members exulted in their fraternity and cultivated a bohemian image in the 1850s, with the exception of Millais, who aspired to prosperous respectability.106 It was the anti-Pre-Raphaelite lobby that exploited Pre-Raphaelite cronyism to demonize successors and imitators of what Vanity Fair styled the “Swinburne school of artists.”107 Building a case against Simeon Solomon’s watercolors at the Dudley Gallery, Tom Taylor connected the painter’s “sins against propriety” with those of his clique: “Any merit they may have is obscured by their sickly prurience. They correspond in painting to some of the most objectionable per for mances of Mr. Swinburne in poetry.”108 To segregate the homosexual Solomon, as a minority presence within the bohemian aggregate, requires an active suppression of his prominence. In a genuine sense, reprobation of bohemian identity threatened to open the door to “the closet.” Describing the subject of Solomon’s One Dreaming by the Sea as a figure of “uncertain sex,” former PRB member Stephens disparaged the articulation and proportion of this “emasculated personage” T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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with his “poor little feet and the ‘dandy’s legs.’ ”109 The Art-Journal, a conservative redoubt, harped on Solomon’s “aberrant eccentricities of genius.”110 Styling Solomon a “genius of eccentricity” whose color sense and poetical fancy had “run a little mad,” the anonymous reviewer appeared well on the way to indicting homosexual art. Dryly observing that Solomon’s Bacchus resembled a milquetoast who lacked the intestinal fortitude for any beverage stronger than “mead, possibly sugar and water, certainly not wine,” the reviewer hinted that the anatomical oddities of Solomon’s Heliogabalus: High Priest of the Sun, a charter member of the third sex, placed him outside the ken of both the College of Surgeons and the draftsmen of the Royal Academy.111 Solomon’s Oriental themes, praised in some quarters as ethnographic art, troubled Stephens, who found “the long, overrefined face and almond-shaped eyes” of A Saint of the Eastern Church too “voluptuous” and “strangely at variance” with the painting’s ruling idea of saintliness: “It too obviously lacks the manliness to satisfy us, even in respect to Art; yet it is very beautiful” as a treatment of gorgeous Byzantine vestments and accessories.112 Even Colvin, an admirer of all things Pre- Raphaelite, was troubled by Solomon’s pictorial imagination and his fixation on “the decadence of Rome, the history of Rome under the Empire, with its frenzy of luxury, its life alternating between ferocious passion and feverish lassitude.”113 Solomon’s “fine, if fantastic, sense of beauty, an almost passionate feeling of colour, and a power ful, though usually morbid, imagination” offset his “sins against propriety” for some reviewers, and constituted them for others.114 Despite the Dudley Gallery’s fame as an alternative exhibition space (“it would be hard to find anywhere talent associated with greater eccentricity”), there was ample participation by academicians who brought “the presence of their staid propriety” to bear on the proceedings—encouraging one reviewer to forgive the excesses of Solomon’s school as a respite from torpor in Victorian art: “Though not wholly satisfactory, we hail with gladness the advent of an Art which reverts to historic associations, and carries the mind back to olden styles, when painting was twin sister of poetry.”115 Along with the terms “morbid,” “epicene,” “unmanly,” and “eccentric,” a reviewer’s pejorative references to “medievalism” and “poetic” sentiment in the visual arts documented Pre-Raphaelitism’s perceived challenge to pillars of Victorian respectability: continence, manliness, rationality, and religion. In view of the litany of sins alleged against Solomon, it is worth recalling that, at seventeen, he was among the youngest artists to exhibit [ 30 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

FIGU R E 1.4 Simeon Solomon, One Dreaming by the Sea, 1871. Watercolor on paper.

Image © The School of Art Museum and Galleries, Aberystwyth University.

at the Royal Academy (in 1858); Millais also made his debut at seventeen (in 1846). In 1860, Solomon’s The Mother of Moses created a sensation, proving that he was conspicuous from the outset of his promising career. Solomon was good copy, as journalists are fond of saying, and the expanding market for periodicals devoted to culture welcomed the advent of new T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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personalities in practice, not just in theory: “In the Dudley Gallery we look out for and find unhackneyed talents and unfamiliar styles.”116 As a “late-Victorian protobeatnik, alcoholic, orthodox Jew turned Catholic, homosexual and, above all, gifted writer of subtle prose and outstanding draftsman and painter,” Solomon can serve as a litmus test of Victorian attitudes to sexual nonconformity.117 The “identification of a decadent eccentricity, unmanly or effeminate in nature,” pervading Solomon’s work doubled as an indictment of his persona: “The reviewer seeks to use Solomon himself, rather than his work alone, as exemplary of the corruption of a modern school of art.”118 Scholars Colin Cruise, Allen Staley, and Thais Morgan have sharpened my understanding of the negative critical reception of Solomon’s oeuvre, but I want to highlight the celebration of his “peculiar fancy” for a new type of beauty: “Among the class of rising artists whose aim it is to paint beautiful things beautifully, Mr. Simeon Solomon is certainly entitled to a place.”119 As a prominent member of a Victorian cohort exploring same-sex desire as an aesthetic motive, Solomon is central to my broader discussion of public perceptions of the aesthetic vanguard. Between 1867 and 1873, Solomon was PreRaphaelitism’s standard-bearer: “The works which next challenge notice are the contributions of Mr. Simeon Solomon, who has seldom shown in so great a brilliance or— singularity. The artist stands alone, although signs appear of a new and rising school in which he might shine as chief.”120 He was not, then, the depraved pavement artist and blackmailer whom William Rossetti and Swinburne later recalled: “That Solomon’s pictures were at first better known to the public than those of his now more famous associates is shown by Robert Buchanan confessing that he had scarcely seen any of their works except those of Solomon.”121 Solomon’s signature eccentricities were seen as representative and typical of the school he led (Edward Poynter, Walter Crane, Burne-Jones, J.  R.  S. Stanhope): “Mr. Solomon takes rank among the masters of this school; but he is an artist of real power, however quaintly and grotesquely employed.”122 Solomon was closely identified with Gabriel Rossetti at one time, despite Gabriel’s retirement from the exhibition scene and the Rossetti brothers’ dissimulations about their friendship. Described as a “very young pre-Raffaelite,” Solomon owed “an obvious debt to the influence of Mr.  Rossetti.”123 Cruise remarks on the shift in Rossetti’s work in the 1850s from “hard-edged, detailed pen-and-ink drawings and complex oil paintings to soft, shadowy water-colours and pastel drawings where the [ 32 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

outline is lost and the face seen in half-light,” a technique that helped Solomon fashion androgynous images.124 Cruise correlates the formal characteristics of Rossetti’s Titianesque women (remote gaze, exaggerated features, repetition of a type) with aspects of Solomon’s chiefly male subjects: “These figures resemble Rossetti’s in their suggestion of internality and in their distant expressions which invoke for the viewer possibilities of pleasure, fear and loss; they are fantasies of (or upon) beauty” (195). Reprising Christina Rossetti’s prescient grasp of her brother’s erotic fixation (“One face looks out from all his canvases”125), Tom Taylor described the same proclivity in Solomon’s work: “All the heads are taken from one model— the same who always serves Mr. Solomon, and has sat to him since we can remember.”126 In both oeuvres, the painter creates an atmosphere of sensuous self-absorption (a boudoir, a dreamscape) in which a figure of surpassing beauty mediates between the artist-viewer’s fleshly and divine impulses. Barred from Rossetti’s studio and clients, and drawing on his paltry acquaintance with a handful of black-and-white photographs,127 Buchanan resorted to the tactic of guilt by association against the modern Fleshly School by conflating Rossetti’s work with that of the Pre-Raphaelite colorist who was in the public eye: “Like Mr. Simeon Solomon, however, with whom he seems to have many points in common, he is distinctively a colourist, and of his capabilities in colour I cannot speak, though I should guess that they are good.”128 Although Buchanan admitted that it was unfair to form judgments based on black-and-white photographs of Rossetti’s paintings, this is precisely what Buchanan did: “Judged by the photographs, he is an artist who conceives unpleasantly and draws ill” (FS 34). This was the standard criticism of Rossetti’s work, dating from the exhibition of PRB pictures in 1849, when Rossetti was twenty-one years old. Implying that Rossetti’s closeted vices as a painter were discoverable through his presumed resemblance to his confederate, Buchanan divorced art criticism from its material basis and embraced generalization and innuendo. He reinforced the public image of the Pre-Raphaelites as a coven of depraved bohemians, if not outright inverts: “English society of one kind purchases the Day’s Doings. English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr. Solomon’s pictures—pretty pieces of morality, such as Love dying by the breath of Lust. . . . [P]ainters like Mr. Solomon lend actual genius to worthless subjects, and thereby produce veritable monsters—like the lovely dev ils that danced round St. Anthony” (FS 38), a gloss that signals T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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the intersexuality of Solomon’s figures. Solomon’s misidentified and reproved picture called forth images of same-sex eroticism even in 1871.

Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and Revisionist History In an effort to recover period points of view, I find my usage occasionally at odds with both settled and evolving scholarly opinion. Where art historians Prettejohn and Staley are eager to discriminate among the PRB, second-generation Pre-Raphaelites, and the aesthetic movement, my research suggests that Victorians placed these movements on a continuum, identifying Solomon as a Pre-Raphaelite in the 1860s and Burne- Jones as a Pre-Raphaelite in the late 1870s. Hence my use of the term “PreRaphaelite” to cover a wide swath of Victorian cultural activity across genres and disciplines requires extensive illustration and justification. Sometimes, as in the case of Swinburne, the label “Pre-Raphaelite” appears incongruous according to literary canons.129 Why go against settled opinion? I am reporting Victorian responses influenced as much by social affiliations as by stylistic affinities. Gabriel Rossetti’s personal friendships, mentoring of students, and interactions with acolytes bridged the divide between the PRB and successor movements. The first edition of Swinburne’s verse drama, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), featured front and back covers designed by Rossetti, publicizing Swinburne’s ties to the Pre-Raphaelites. Even before Rossetti’s Poems was deplored for indecency in 1870, Swinburne’s notorious Poems and Ballads (1866) was a succès de scandale. Swinburne’s personal association with Gabriel and William Rossetti communicated erotic cachet to the Pre-Raphaelite brand, of which Gabriel Rossetti was still the nominal figurehead in the 1860s despite his retirement from exhibition. Later, the maligned eroticism of Rossetti’s Poems informed discussions of Pre-Raphaelite painting. While the PRB briefly professed a unified vision, internal stylistic and philosophical differences emerged early on. The original collective could not withstand the pull of fortune for Millais, of religion for Holman Hunt, or of sensuality for Rossetti and remain intact. Elizabeth Prettejohn helpfully illuminates the continuity between the first- and second-generation Pre-Raphaelites (stylistic experiments with the motifs, compositional schemes, tonality, coloration, and media of quattrocento Italian art) despite their obvious differences: the PRB painted scenes from nature and [ 34 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

FIGU R E  1.5 Simeon Solomon, Love and Lust, 1865. Photographic print of original

drawing. Image © Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Julia Ellsworth Ford Papers.

contemporary life as well as anecdotes from the Bible and literature, whereas the aesthetes’ “frame of reference was internal to art, and never claimed a sanction in the observations of external nature, as the ‘P.R.B.’ had done.”130 Although Gabriel Rossetti figured in both the original and successor groups, as an indoor painter, he had less in common with Millais and Hunt’s naturalism than with his pupil Burne- Jones’s visionary painting.131 While Millais and Hunt painted “what they saw,” Burne-Jones’s stereotyped figures of an idealized cast belonged to a dream world that he shared with Rossetti and Solomon. Much has been made of the fact that the onset of fleshliness (1859) marked a period shift in Rossetti’s oeuvre and drove a wedge between him and his erstwhile colleagues. However, for most of the nineteenth century the terms “Pre-Raphaelite” and “Pre-Raphaelitism” encompassed the PRB, decorative Pre-Raphaelitism, and the aesthetic movement, as Julie Codell affirms: “Victorian art criticism mapped out these fractures by identifying Pre-Raphaelitism with manliness or effeminacy, Britishness or cosmopolitanism, tradition or modernity.”132 Former PRB members, as well as painters who exhibited at the Dudley and Grosvenor Galleries, flew under the banner “Pre-Raphaelite” and were presumed to belong to the same school, if not the same generation. Phases of the movement—nominally led by Rossetti in the 1850s and Solomon in the 1860s, and resurfacing at the Grosvenor Gallery (1877–1890)—included painters whose names are among the most conspicuous in British art: Frederic Leighton, George Frederic Watts, and Edward Burne-Jones. The backlash against Wilde’s association with the movement in the early 1880s set in motion a panicked revaluation of the revolutionary aims of the PRB and a whitewashing of its contrarian character. By historicizing the divide between the PRB and its successor movements, I can home in on the characteristics (such as unmanliness, sensuality, and morbidity) that were expunged from the PRB repertoire by revisionist historiography. However, it takes dexterity and patience to sift through the testimony of period in for mants and later audiences with regard to the corollary formal, social, and psychological impacts of Pre-Raphaelitism. There was much disagreement among audiences about the content and character of individual works and oeuvres. Pre-Raphaelite heterogeneity made for queer strategic alliances. It stirred both avid partisanship and fierce detraction, often with its critics and partisans rising to the same bait. As Robyn Cooper notes, the controversies generated by the PRB (concerning ideas of beauty, the relation between art and religion, between art and nature, and [ 36 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

between the art of the past and contemporary art) added to the sense of confusion reigning in critical and artistic circles: “Critics of the 1850s felt they were living in an ‘age of anarchy and disorganization’ in art.”133 Harry Quilter’s influential criticisms of “hybrid” Pre-Raphaelitism’s myriad prescriptions, so “heterogeneous as to be incapable of easy consolidation,” were tacitly acknowledged by its staunchest advocates along the broad spectrum of Pre-Raphaelite endeavor.134 Writing in “The New Renaissance; or, the Gospel of Intensity” (1880), the young art critic Quilter invidiously compared the healthy aims of the original PRB with the fleshly corruptions that followed in its wake. Quilter’s differentiation of early and late aestheticism winnowed PreRaphaelitism down to its core principles circa 1850 and required a studied obtuseness to the controversies swirling around the PRB from its inception. Quilter’s insistence on the purity of the originators’ aims enabled him to project PRB vices onto the later aesthetes: The claims of the modern gospel of intensity, and the critical theories of pure sensuousness which are proclaimed so loudly just now, have their curiously unfitting root in the pre-Raphaelite movement; and it strangely happens that the action taken by three or four clever art students, towards a reformation in art as healthy as it was needful, has ended in breeding phases of art and poetry, which embody the lowest theory of art-usefulness, and the most morbid and sickly art-results.135 The distinction urged between generations of aesthetes suppressed the revolutionary force, in social and aesthetic terms, with which the PreRaphaelites themselves resisted convention and attacked institutions: “Ironically, the earlier Pre-Raphaelite ‘conspiracy’ is now forgotten and the generation of the 1850s is romanticized as ‘young enthusiastic artists,’ who, in Quilter’s words, wish to ‘return to early painting to purify the art of nineteenth-century England.’ ”136 Aided by revisionist historiography, Pre-Raphaelitism eventually attained a patina of conventionality, if not correctness, which led to a contrapuntal affirmation of the healthy uplift practiced by the PRB as against the pathological tendencies of decorative aestheticism. Tom Taylor likewise disparaged the movement’s followers for a failure of manly self-assertion and robust individuality: “It numbers a few leaders of rare gifts and real imagination, but most of these only pass through T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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the school. The minds which continue in it are of the weaklier and more effeminate order. Of the robust and vivid imagination which detects and develops latent beauty under the most unfavourable outward conditions of actual life this school shows no trace.”137 In keeping with Jauss’s notion of the “horizon of expectations,”138 Victorian critics and the public had grown accustomed by 1880 to PRB innovations. But the waning of Pre-Raphaelite novelty does not explain the revaluation of the pallid, emaciated early Christians populating PRB canvases: the “strong touch of archaic quaintness, and that vein of languid, half morbid, melancholy which has always been a prae-Raphaelite characteristic.”139 For Ralph Wornum, a leading critic for The Art-Journal, the PRB’s chief defect consisted in evoking “the miserable asceticism of the darkest monastic ages.”140 Like the morbid sensuousness of Solomon, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones in the 1860s and 1870s, the de-idealizing realism of Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti was vociferously decried in the 1850s as a distortion of the healthy, virile, medieval Christians, whose legends, furnishings, and cruder technical facil ity the Pre-Raphaelites co-opted for their own purposes. Surveying the entire movement in 1887, John Robertson observed that “almost all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite school had from the first exhibited a willed quaintness and archaism of workmanship; Millais being indeed the only one who has well delivered himself from the spirit of eccentricity.”141 Back in 1852, The British Quarterly Review had castigated the PRB for eschewing all established ideals of beauty and delight. Reviling a  penchant for “heads phrenologically clumsy, faces strongly marked and irregular,” complexions sallow and “scrofulous,” the correspondent singled out Millais’s depiction of the Holy Family for particular condemnation.142 Restoring edge and unconventionality to the PRB, Colvin argued that the latter-day Pre-Raphaelites were at pains to correct unfavorable impressions (of awkwardness, angularity, infirmity, and ugliness) set down by their precursors: The progress of the school, both in poetry and painting, has consisted in getting rid of this appearance of a special affectation, in proving that their Art was no sickly exotic, but a robust growth suited to the air of the times; that, for all their sympathy with the archaic manner of expression, the things they had to express were no whit archaic, but modern, but classical, but perennial, and lovely for one generation no less than for another.143 [ 38 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

Here was an affirmation of “the progress of the school” across decades, at once unifying and discriminating. Contradicting Ruskin’s assessment of the salience of natural truth from one end of the Pre-Raphaelite spectrum to the other, Colvin’s 1870 article reified the movement into naturalistic and visionary phases. Practitioners of second-wave aestheticism neglected “everyday nature” in favor of “the rare and soul-exalting and enchanted nature which only some among us can see and feel, but which, to those who can see and feel it, is the delight and wonder of life” (21). For Colvin, Burne-Jones supplied charm to the mundane natural resources for his pictorial fancies. Colvin’s homage to Burne-Jones instanced the myth-making faculty and cultish affiliations inspired by the figureheads of the movement. Colvin’s expertise inhered in his sensitivity to aesthetic emotion, which earned him admission into the studios and private homes where the reclusive Burne-Jones’s work might be seen. Colvin was twenty-five when this article was published, an age of unbridled enthusiasm. As future Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, Colvin little resembled his opposite number, Ruskin, who occupied the Slade Chair at Oxford. Colvin’s effusive declarations foreshadowed Wilde’s encomiums on Pre-Raphaelite works at the Grosvenor Gallery, which later stoked T. S. Eliot’s impatience: “If we wish to understand painting, we do not go to Oscar Wilde for help. We have specialists, such as Mr Berenson, or Mr Roger Fry.”144 Sententiously deprecating the intuitive grasp of the beautiful, Eliot ignored the fact that Victorian art criticism often dealt in catchphrases and connoisseurship. Colvin’s impressions were diametrically opposed to those of Quilter as well. Such oppositions are a helpful reminder that my period in for mants struggled with the same fissures in personal and group identity that shaped Pre-Raphaelitism into a referendum on contemporary society: The war-cries that had rung for the cause of Prae-Raphaelitism and against it were sinking, but had not yet sunk, into silence. PraeRaphaelitism was just passing out of one phase into another. It was passing out of the strenuously militant and passionately earnest phase,—the phase in which its productions were marked not only by the zealous elaboration of every near and every distant detail, by a fearless application of the vividest pigments and a resolute fidelity to whatever was singular, whatever was angular, whatever was quaint or ill-modulated in the thing copied; but also by the evidences of an T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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ardent apostolate, a reforming heat not merely in art but in life. Out of this phase Prae-Raphaelitism was passing, under the influence of its chief master, Mr. D. G. Rossetti, into a second and different phase. It was due to public hostility that this change took place aloof from public observation. Its history has yet to be written.145 Pre-Raphaelitism’s shifting personnel and transience of style or aim (“passing”) made Colvin’s assessment particularly astute. Fueled by dissident energies, a fervent clique formed around Pre-Raphaelite celebrities who rendered a “new” sensibility in startling pigments and evocative rhetoric: “They could employ and adorn in their art, and still more in their poetry; shedding over them the gay and vivid colour of their own outward lives, the vivid and passionate humanity of their own inner spirits” (18). In view of the revisionist history placing the two streams of the movement at odds, how can I reconcile the two phases without minimizing the disparities? Coterie syndrome bound Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism, as concentric rings of critics, businessmen, and hangers on formed around these charismatic individuals and broadcast their attainments: Within the charmed limits you seem to hear no names but those of the regular and recognized members of the brotherhood. Nobody, it might be supposed, paints, writes poems, criticises or composes music, but the painters, poets, critics, and composers whom the school delights to honor. Like all sects originally proscribed, it is now rigidly orthodox after its peculiar canons of orthodoxy, and will allow no toleration of any teaching but its own.146 It is surprising to find the Pre-Raphaelite school identified as “the brotherhood” circa 1876. McCarthy’s terminology confirmed the perceived unity-within-multiplicity of Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism. As a coterie insider, Colvin substantiated McCarthy’s critique with his acknowledgment of the “ardent apostolate” championing both the PRB and later incarnations of aestheticism. Quilter ratified McCarthy’s point about the critical puffs penned by the clique: “Papers and magazines teemed with panegyrics eloquently incomprehensible except to the initiated.”147 Quilter contrasted this contemporary self-dealing with the supposed forthrightness of the PRB. Reading between the lines, the alleged deviation

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from the “healthy aims” of PRB forebears consisted of an uptick in sensuous content (“erotic poetry”) and congress between the enthusiasts. Wilde’s identification with aestheticism ratified this schism between the early PRB and late aestheticism. Aesthetes identified themselves as the offspring of Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, and Burne-Jones. The anxiety of influence was on the fathers’ side. A decade earlier, Rossetti had disparaged the appropriation of his legacy by camp followers: “As for all the prattle about Pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it, and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We’ve all grown out of them, I hope, by now.”148 Swinburne regarded Wilde as a “mountebank,” writing a friend in 1882: “I should think you in Amer ica must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr.  Barnum’s and his Jumbo’s.”149 Once the patriarchs tired of their youthful ventures, their allies were able to argue that the aesthetes were guilty of “misprision,” in Harold Bloom’s terminology,150 a strongly slanted take on Pre-Raphaelitism resulting in a distortion, even pastiche, of its values. Given Wilde’s stylistic affinities with and co-optation of PreRaphaelitism, it is unsurprising that the Pre-Raphaelite camp blamed Wilde for casting a pall of sexual nonconformity over early aestheticism.

Artistic Anticipation It is time to resist the suppression or omission of a homoerotic dynamic within Pre-Raphaelitism; it is time to bring “history-conscious seriousness and theoretical energy to the question of the ‘radical’ changes in relations between the sexual and sexuality” in the study of nineteenth-century British art and literature.151 Scholars are wary of retrofitting Victorian customs and manners with contemporary meanings. Excepting Linda Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford,152 Bullen warns that “some recent gender theorists” fall into the trap of “turning late nineteenthcentury Oxford into a coven of homosexuals exchanging views and experiences in a kind of erotic Morse Code.”153 Yet published accounts of Wilde’s testimony played an equal part with his imprisonment in spreading awareness of homosexuality. Barrister Edward Carson’s case against Wilde culminated in an indictment of Wilde’s linguistic habits, as speaker and writer, as legible markers of homosexuality. I argue that the discursive

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markers of sexual alterity—terms in the Oxbridge undergraduate’s classical lexicon, in the rhetoric of medieval chivalry, in denunciations of Tractarianism, and in art reviews and cartoons—predated Wilde’s exposure in 1895. Wilde’s debacle amplified and disseminated the lexicon through the offices of the periodical press, just as journalists outraged by the impiety and licentiousness of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads had “very ingeniously contrived to pick out all the worst lines and phrases, so as to convey a complete idea of the moral corruption over which they shudder.”154 In Boston Bohemia, Douglass Shand-Tucci argues that the importation of British Pre-Raphaelitism, French decadence, and Wagnerian opera enabled the Bostonian Ralph Adams Cram and his coterie to explore dissident gender identity and overt homoeroticism. Well before the 1890s, when aestheticism was virtually a cognate or “euphemism for homosexual” in certain circles, the PRB’s religious imagery radiated “an aura of repressed eroticism.”155 Shand-Tucci’s book reveals a bohemian milieu assimilating avant-garde tastes in art and lifestyle: “Pre-Raphaelitism thus introduces here (in the wake of both the Greek and the gay subtexts of the first overall aesthetic influence) the general theme of the relationship of the aesthetic and the erotic” (17). Cram and his friend, photographer Holland Day, registered Pre-Raphaelitism’s flouting of bourgeois mores, gender and sexual norms through the articulation and representation of sterility, morbidity, alternative masculinity, and menacing femininity. Holland Day was not shy about exhibiting nude images of his male protégés barely camouflaged by mythic or pastoral settings. Day’s arty and accomplished photographs, among the first to feature full frontal nudity, are strikingly reminiscent of Solomon’s oeuvre.156 With their props, retouches, and painterly feel, they occupied a twilight zone between portraiture and straight photography. Day was also the American publisher of Aubrey Beardsley and Wilde, suggesting that artistic and literary tastes built salons and imagined communities. In matters of style and conduct, the members of the Victorian avantgarde heralded emerging values and cultural conflicts. Heinz Kohut’s “hypothesis of artistic anticipation” speaks to the manner in which the great artist responds to “the dominant psychological issue of his era. The artist stands, as it were, in proxy for his generation.”157 Kohut chooses the 1890s as the decisive decade for the rise of this phenomenon, coextensive with the emergence of “modern man” and his problems: fallen idols or the lack of “idealizable” parents (286). This time line assumes that seismic shifts in sensibility occurred at the close of the Victorian period, without [ 42 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

FIGU R E  1.6 Frederick Holland Day, Study for Endymion, 1907. Photographic print

on cream mount. Image © Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

duly assessing prior challenges to patriarchal dominance such as “the Decadent and the New Woman.”158 Kohut privileges the insight of the original audience when he claims that an artist speaks to his contemporaries “with a penetrating power with which he is not likely ever to speak again to later generations” (288n10). Positing a version of reflection theory, where cultural production is constrained by social real ity, Kohut confuses cultural influence with audience identification. T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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Kohut is unsure what to make of the artist whose genius or individuality takes him “out of the mainstream” of his time (288); yet the PreRaphaelites raised and shaped social consciousness as a counterculture. For the Victorians, intensity, subtlety, and sensuality were hallmarks of Pre-Raphaelitism and signal characteristics of its leadership, testing moral strictures as well as aesthetic prescriptions. In 1873, William Davies argued that Pre-Raphaelitism was “far too intense to be largely loved and appreciated; or, indeed, to be good for us,” because it stirred and disturbed its audience in inscrutable ways: “One of the most precious qualities, perhaps, that belongs to Art is its capacity of bestowing repose. To be roused to an excess of passion without adequate reason, without being the nobler or better for it, without even knowing precisely why one is roused, is not a desirable thing.”159 Though an isolated moment in the reception history of aestheticism, Davies’s commentary recorded a generally perceived shift from the aim of equipoise to the strange beauty and thematic obscurity reflected in Pre-Raphaelitism’s myriad challenges to academic painting and conventional poetry. In 1870, an anonymous reviewer conveyed his befuddlement when tasked with reviewing a Pre-Raphaelite: “The pictures of Simeon Solomon present like interest ing problems, which whether problems in poetry, philosophy, or Art, remain, it must be confessed, after these attempted solutions or pictorial elucidations, painfully enigmatical and perplexed.”160 The Pre-Raphaelites are a good illustration of an avant-garde that acted as ferment, well beyond its heyday, by addressing the incipient sociopsychological problems of the day rather than mirroring the weltanschauung. In the context of a society organized around discrete male and female realms, as well as heterosexual hegemony, the provocations of early and late aestheticism opened the way for gender and sexual subversion reinforced by the outlier lifestyles and queer collegiality of the authors of troubling representations. The Pre-Raphaelites have been knocked off the queer continuum, even though their aesthetic, ethos, and tone informed a British aestheticism patently identified with homosexual subjectivity. It remains the case that the intimacies of this male collective, the homoerotic banter among the members of its coteries, and their adulation of charismatic leaders have been sanitized or suppressed: “By around 1908, however, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) had become an arbitrary sign of a homogeneous myth sanitized to serve the needs of British cultural politics for a national imagined community.”161 As an antibourgeois literary and art movement evangelizing [ 44 ] T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

for the liberation of libido from the trammels of Victorian sexual respectability, Pre-Raphaelitism heralded a revolution in sexual mores and gender roles. From a Marxist perspective, such an insurrection may smack of bourgeois individualism, but sexual identity and gender cut across class divisions while being shaped and constrained by them. The personal has proven to be political time and again.

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TWO Puff, Slash, Burn Literary Celebrity

It’s easy to write poetry just now— That is if you’ve a friend who’s a reviewer, He’ll place the laurel on your blushing brow, And swear no poet e’er wrote verses truer. They may, of course, be rubbish— what of that? Your friend declares them to be grand and great; Without his aid your book had fallen flat As the proverbial pancake on a plate. —“O Tempora O Mores!”

J

ürgen Habermas’s itinerary of the “literary character” of the liberal public sphere, where private citizens put their education and reason to good use, extends from the fash ionable salon to the theater, from the coffeehouse to the lending library to the newsagent’s. Emerging at the end of the eighteenth century in England, a hypothesized human aggregate saw its collective identity mirrored in the “objective entity of the Zeitgeist— a general opinion, which from that time on could scarcely be separated from the instrument of this opinion, the press.” Self- evidently, what figured as newsworthy shaped as well as catered to public opinion: “The self-interpretation of the function of the bourgeois public sphere crystallized in the idea of ‘public opinion.’ ”1 But what did the notion of a “reading

public” signify in the romantic and Victorian periods? The familiar narrative locates the explosion of literacy in the eighteenth century with an increase in the number of church and primary schools in Britain. William St Clair argues that a significant rise in national literacy was not achieved until the nineteenth century, though well before parliamentary provision for compulsory education.2 The expansion of commercial lending libraries in 1760 benefited the middle classes.3 Still, people who lacked means, education, or access to books were reading in the sense that they listened while others read aloud or read simple works, ballads, or religious-themed texts with woodblock illustrations to promote understanding.4 Reading the newspaper was an inveterate activity and essential feature of the liberal public sphere for all classes of Victorian society, though divided into specific upmarket, middle-, and down-market tranches: “The Englishman cannot exist without his newspaper,” a journalist boasted. “Give the working-man his pint of beer, and he will not ask for tea, but he must have his newspaper.”5 By 1843, there were 139 daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly, and quarterly papers (including magazines), covering every thing from the courts and parliament to the theater, art, and literature. The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855 accelerated the production of cheap mass- circulation newspapers. Core efficiencies in the production and circulation of printed matter resulted in lower costs and broader access for readers at all levels of society. The spread of literacy and the commensurate expansion of periodicals democratized access to specialized discourses on politics, religion, economics, education, and art: “Through this widening discursivity, individuals of emerging classes . . . could debate topics once reserved for aristocratic consideration.”6 These developments make it easier to understand how a rarefied art or literary controversy could (eventually) reach the masses. Newspapers and periodicals were the Victorian equivalent of the Internet, with their own version of anonymous blogging. In 2016, film critic A. O. Scott took stock of his profession in the digital age. Debunking the myth of the critic as creator and destroyer of reputations, Scott maintains that criticism has always been “a fundamentally democratic undertaking,” an exercise in persuasion “rather than a series of pronouncements.” 7 Social media permits the audience to talk back to the critic but has not altered the dialogic nature of the activity. Here, in Scott’s modest appraisal of his job, rather than in any technological advance, is a key difference between criticism past and present. Back in the day, critics [ 48 ]

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who acquired clout used it; those who lacked clout pursued it. With the English twist that freelance writers demonstrated expertise and refinement while leveling knockout punches, a lethal review was apt to be highly entertaining, a publishing coup. Given the level of our political discourse, one step above a barroom brawl and about as edifying, it makes sense to argue that negative publicity is a mainstay of twenty-first- century journalism. However, in comparing media pans then and now, contemporary reviewers suffer by comparison with their caustic historic counterparts. A recent exception had readers of the New York Times buzzing with schadenfreude, as the mighty (and prohibitively expensive) restaurant Per Se lost two of its four stars. Food critic Peter Wells buried the lead: not worth the money, deep in his scathing review. With meticulous verbal precision and obvious relish, Wells disgorged the culinary disasters of the kitchen: lobster that tasted like “gristle of the sea, . . . bouillon as murky and appealing as bong water, . . . a grain chestnut purée that tasted like peanut butter to which something horrible had been done.”8 Stomach churning (or enticing) epigrams upon food make sense, but romantic and Victorian critics wrote that way about taste in books and art. Reviewers were negotiating the viability and status of careers as journeymen writers throughout the 1800s. Early worries over economic survival and professional versus amateur status have resurfaced in the twenty-first century; however, in the 1800s these battles were fought specifically over authorial attribution. By 1870, “men of letters” was the preferred term for sages, professors, and journalists. Writers moved easily from one genre to another, serving the press in the capacity of contributor, editor, or proprietor.9 Literary journalism was a mainstay of the Victorian writer’s income, as Laurel Brake avers. In 1896, George Saintsbury called the rise of the literary periodical the most “distinctive and characteristic” development in Victorian letters.10 Today, there is a wider divide between the makers and appraisers of culture. Contemplating his mission in a decade of contraction for print journalism, film critic Scott defends what he does as an “indispensible activity”: “The real culture war (the one that never ends) is between the human intellect and its equally human enemies: sloth, cliché, pretension, cant. Between creativity and conformity, between the comforts of the familiar and the shock of the new. To be a critic is to be a soldier in this fight.” This is a power ful defense of the power of art to “ free our minds, and the task of criticism . . . to figure out what to do with that freedom” (7). It encompasses the passion and dedication of proponents of P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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the avant-garde, of every age, while implicitly dismissing the competing forces of conservatism and conformity, which have been vocal since the rise of critical discourse. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), Matthew Arnold deprecated partisan politics and coterie journalism while acknowledging the print media’s contribution of essential imaginative fodder to a nation at risk of dying of “inanition.”11 To the extent that the PreRaphaelites were selected by their environment and preserved, they were the witting beneficiaries of artful rather than spontaneous mediation. Active partisanship was instrumental in securing their ascendancy over other gifted persons, whose productions were not so prominently featured in the periodical press or exhibited. The aesthetic movement purged lesser artists and poets from the limelight while electrifying but not necessarily delighting their contemporaries. For my purposes, it is impor tant that the Pre-Raphaelites were influential without being understood, celebrated without relinquishing their antagonism to what passed for high culture among the royal academicians and litterateurs: “The world which scoffed at Pre-Raphaelites fifty years ago has learnt, if not to like the school, at least to treat it with respect.”12 The Pre-Raphaelites were Victorian rock stars, loved and hated for their renegade style and attitude.13 As we have seen, Pre-Raphaelite forays into print journalism and public provocations (signing pictures “PRB”) riled the custodians of the dominant culture. In panicked response, the anti-Pre-Raphaelite lobby instigated, circa 1850, a print war against innovation, eccentricity, and fraternity that grew nastier as the later Pre-Raphaelites drew inspiration from the fleshly. It was this perpetual controversy rather than coterie journalism per se that vaulted aestheticism into the forefront of public consciousness. It seems obvious that these disputes were culturally central or became so in consequence of their repeated dilation in the press. However, many of the terms and issues bandied about, between the debut of the PRB and the Fleshly School controversy (1848–1872), originated with earlier internecine quarrels over immorality in literature. I want to stress the gender anx ieties reflected in the debate over authorial attribution and its intercalation with aesthetic celebrity, starting with the Cockney School. Self-promotion and expressive personality were already linked with theatricality and effeminacy in the romantic period. The debate over signature reflected the shifting public verdict on authorial reticence, alternately perceived as bracingly modest or unmanly (not forthright). [ 50 ]

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The Cockney School of Poetry The shift from prior patronage systems to a market-based publishing economy in the late eighteenth century led to the proliferation of journals defending class and political interests in the guise of culture criticism. This was the age of advocacy journalism, where Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Quarterly Review defended Tory interests; their rival, The Edinburgh Review, supported the Whigs; and The Examiner took radical positions.14 Book reviews were often pretexts for conservative or reform politics. Book publishers owned the three principal reviews, excluding The Examiner. They employed reviewers to increase sales of their publishing lists. A special feature of literary debates, involving writers who both composed and reviewed literature, was their tendency to consolidate opinion and compel book reviewers to choose sides. Anticipating virtual real ity, the print media reported on the newsworthy slams and plaudits generated elsewhere in the media, drawing attention to the hubbub about the author rather than the quality of the work under review. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; a Satire (London 1809) was an instance where a maligned poet fought back and enlarged his renown. However, the Cockney School of Poetry stands out for the intensity and duration of hostilities, for the perceived fallout for poets caught in the cross fire, and for its enduring slogans and influence. In The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, William St Clair describes the early publishing industry’s marketing strategy but downplays the role of reviews in securing sales or benefiting authors’ reputations. Unable to discern a material connection between reviews and sales, St Clair is wary of treating published reviews as part of the reception history of a work, as I am doing (189). St Clair’s archival research and quantitative analysis of the production and reading of books is hard to dismiss. However, St Clair focuses on the period just before the explosion of literacy and the expansion of the print culture. St Clair’s data reflects the conventions of the age of anonymous book reviewing, whereas my research charts the rising tide of signature and the emergence of critical imprimatur. We are actually discussing different, though related, phenomena. Tracing the reception history of the aesthetic movement, its luminaries, acolytes, and enemies over 150 years, I can gauge the reviewer’s shifting valuation of professional influence and reaction to controversial figures over time. Monitoring the P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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dissemination of highbrow culture in the popu lar journals, regional newspapers, and even on the stage, I can document Pre-Raphaelitism’s move from the margins to the mainstream. My focus on print culture allows me to record changing tactics, conventions, and emphases in daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications, as well as in memoirs, diaries, biographies, and histories. It has led to the discovery that I must answer for the particulars of each genre of criticism, art and literary reviews. A review of pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy covered a range of styles and subjects—of necessity, because it was a report as well as an exercise in judgment. My first chapter discussed the campaign for and against PreRaphaelite art. This chapter will rely on published criticism to explain the content and dynamics of literary reputation, paying careful attention to media conventions (anonymity, puffery) and the production of romantic period celebrity. Attribution of poetic and fictional works was becoming commonplace in the early 1800s, whereas reviews were generally unsigned. In an era of unsigned reviews, the extravagantly laudatory review or puff was a covert form of advertisement. Advertising was highly taxed in the romantic period and contributed significantly to the costs of publishing new titles (until the repeal of the advertising tax in 1853), so publishers consolidated their overhead with review-articles. Literary reviews were expensive to manufacture. Resembling books rather than newspapers, individual print runs were often bound and reissued to promote the collection of matched sets for libraries and private homes. Beyond their core mission of providing news and instruction, the reviews began to branch out into “hard-hitting attacks” in an effort to boost sales.15 Writing anonymously under the aegis of a prestigious brand, the reviewer-for-hire could afford to be derisively critical of his subjects. The spirited attack by Blackwood’s on the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, and his cronies, made the Cockney School of Poetry the editorial bonanza of 1817–1825. Instigating a round-robin of invective, recrimination, and self-defense in the leading periodicals, the critical flap kept its victims (editor and poet, Hunt; poets, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley; painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon; and critic, William Hazlitt) continually before the public. This chapter argues that in the decades before signature became de rigueur, periodical reviewing was used, by advocates and detractors, to ratify a form of cultural celebrity predicated on connections, coteries, and savage reviews. Exhumed and reexamined in the British periodical literature, at no more than five-year intervals be[ 52 ]

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tween 1825 and 1870, the Cockney School of Poetry was a primer for Buchanan’s later assault on the Fleshly School of Poetry (discussed in chapter 5). In both cases, a critic used an alias to launch a blistering attack on an aesthetic fraternity characterized as a mutual admiration society and castigated for puffery, immorality, and effeminacy.16 Hazlitt noted a trend toward fever-pitched public discourse (“unrestrained license of opinion” and “violent effervescence of sentiment”) emerging in England during the French Revolution.17 Hazlitt equated this frenzied style with gender nonconformity, describing hectic, shrill-voiced poets usurping the mantle of philosopher-reformer and turning fanatic. Outlining the evolving relations between the public, the author, and the relatively new figure of the literary critic, Leo Braudy cites Hazlitt’s conception of his role as an “intermediary between artists and the public, chastising one to be better in achievement, the other in understanding.”18 During the Cockney School dispute, Hazlitt comported himself as one personally above the fray, but he was not indifferent to the charge of puffery, a “vile practice.”19 Braudy considers Hazlitt the premier theorist of fame of the modern era (434)—of fame and its vicissitudes, I would say, for Hazlitt disapproved of fame cheaply won. In attendance for the majority of Hazlitt’s public lectures on the En glish poets, Keats heard Hazlitt disparage popularity (“the shout of the multitude— the idle buzz of fashion— the flattery of favour or of friendship”) and extol the verdict of posterity, which the poet calmly awaits “without endeavoring to forestall his immortality, or mortgage it for a newspaper puff. The love of fame should be, in real ity, only another name for the love of excellence.”20 In “On Patronage and Puffing,” Hazlitt bristled at the widespread perception that freelance journalists could be bribed, insisting that friendship inspired puffery “for love, not money!”21 Allegations of mercenary conduct implied that middle-class writers were turning a gentleman’s calling into a profession, lowering the standard. It was clear to all that the frequently reciprocated arrangement of anonymous praise benefited authors, financially as well as professionally. The Lake Poet Robert Southey begged his friend, “Puff me, Coleridge! If you love me, puff me! Puff a couple of hundreds into my pocket.”22 Here, I would remark that the public was not equipped to discern the common interest linking the two parties to the review, so long as the reviewer maintained his (or sometimes her) anonymity. Puffery was not always a boon to the beneficiary; it stirred resentment among competitors and even retaliation for a perceived slight. In his P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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memoirs, Haydon reported that Keats was a target because he had been championed by a “set who had so much the habit of puffing each other that everyone connected with it suffered in the public estimation.”23 Writing under the pseudonym “Z,” John Gibson Lockhart published the first installment of “On the Cockney School of Poetry” in Blackwood’s in October 1817.24 Declaiming that “all the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings,” Z ridiculed the “extravagant pretensions” of Leigh Hunt’s circle, who emulated their betters in craft and life.25 Calling Byron “one of the most nobly-born of English Patricians, and one of the first geniuses,” Z attempted to inoculate the craft of writing poetry against the mercenary populist aims of men like Hunt, “a paltry cockney newspaper scribbler,” who pretended that the true aristocracy was a “nobility of talent” (41). Z caricatured Hunt as “King of the Cockneys” with an “ivy crown” fixed upon his brow “by the delicate hand of young Mister Keats.”26 The very term “Cockney” implied a tenderly reared, lately weaned mother’s pet, an effeminate muff lacking the hardihood of a country-bred lad, lodged in the city of London within earshot of the Bow bells.27 As a member of a clique, Keats’s unmanliness compromised the heterosexual respectability of his fraternity, or so Lockhart intimated. One bad apple spoils the bunch, and so forth. Strangely, even Keats’s partisans highlighted his femininity by conflating physical frailty with poetic sensibility. In “On Effeminacy of Character,” Hazlitt faulted Keats for a “deficiency in masculine energy of style.” A poet of “exquisite fancy,” Keats struck Hazlitt as wanting in the classical virtues of action, hardihood, and substance: “All is soft and fleshy, without bone or muscle. We see in him the youth without the manhood of poetry.”28 Susan Wolfson aptly calls Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) “the single most decisive nineteenth-century document in the lore of Keats’s unmanliness.”29 Shelley’s preface also stands out as an indictment of The Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s, and their ilk, whose “savage criticism” of Endymion provoked a fatal agitation in a consumptive youth of “delicate and fragile” genius. 30 Although it was the most famous and enduring, “Adonais” was not the first publication to charge that Keats had been murdered by reviewers: “To think that the paltry drudge of a bookseller should be permitted to trample in the dirt of a review such an amaranthine flower as this—worthy as it was, to have bloomed in the very Eden of Poetry!”31 In the space of three quotations, male effeminacy was excused by Keats’s youth, then by Keats’s debility, and fi nally [ 54 ]

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praised as a positive attribute, according to a reviewer who declined to sign his name. Byron’s rank and authority as a “masculine poet-celebrity” immunized him against the charges of effeminacy and sentimentalism plaguing the rising Cockney School, if not against accusations arising from his provocations against polite society.32 In 1816, he fled England for the European continent after a series of scandals; there had been rumors of homosexuality and incest. Byron was a controversial figure after the publication of the early cantos of Don Juan (1819), in which he traduced the military, politicians, religion, and female chastity. Upholding convention and propriety, Southey declared the poem “an act of high treason against English poetry.”33 In 1821, the future poet laureate Southey dubbed Byron, Shelley, and their imitators the “Satanic School of Poetry.” Tory and tendentious, Southey had been nursing his thunderbolts ever since Byron had belittled Southey’s poems in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Southey’s attack on Don Juan affirmed that it was a daring and original poem, furthering Byron’s world celebrity and renown. By 1829, Byron had achieved a “celebrity different in scale from anything that had gone before,” fueled by portraits of the poet as a romantic figure, rumors concerning his immoral life, and the poet’s exotic verse fantasies.34 Byron’s aristocratic public persona, of a Regency dandy, excused the foppery of his open-collared shirt and curling locks, immortalized in Thomas Phillips’s portrait. In an unsigned article, Hazlitt inferred that the “mutually reflected splendour” of Byron’s rank and genius “have melted the public coldness into the very wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only given dramatic interest to his works.”35 As fame theorist of the modern era, Hazlitt affirmed the inter-implication of the “dramatic interest” of Byron’s lifestyle and the public’s “wanton” appetite for his publications; scandal enhanced rather than detracted from Byron’s celebrity. Despite his notoriety and gift for attracting attention, Byron is an exemplar of reticent celebrity. In 1819, Byron professed his disenchantment with the vicissitudes of fame: “I have been cloyed with applause & sickened with abuse.”36 The emerging culture of publicity fed on the celebrity poet’s selfrevelation and eccentricity. The romantics specialized “in a mode of life characterized by intensity of feeling,” which both set them apart and piqued their contemporaries’ interest.37 The middle class, valuing rectitude and reticence, were simultaneously fascinated with and appalled by this un-English behavior. In so far as the long eighteenth century understood self-exhibition as unmanly as well as unseemly, this trend was necessarily bound up with P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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evolving definitions of masculinity and sexuality. So many of the poets personifying aesthetic celebrity on the world stage (Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gautier, Baudelaire, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Wilde) were perceived as sexually anomalous, if not explicitly homosexual. Bohemianism and deviancy functioned like a proscenium arch, dividing the exceptional personality from his audience and supplying, through distance and framing, a safe space for audiences to contemplate antisocial and unconventional behavior: “For the spectator he creates feelings which are both abnormal and safe.”38 Discoursing on Byron’s character flaws, Ruskin’s American correspondent, Charles Eliot Norton, singled out insincerity and attention-seeking behav ior: “Why do I call Byron ‘insincere’? Because he seems to me a rhetorician more than a poet by nature; a man accustomed to make a display of his feelings, & dependent for his satisfaction on the effect produced on other people by the display. He had in some measure the temperament of a tenor singer on the stage. He must be en evidence continually.”39 Victorian connotations of the word “sincere” suggest that Byron betrayed the muse by consulting his reputation and even remuneration in Norton’s view. Byron’s public persona, of a dandy and libertine, deviated from the ideal, prevalent in the Victorian era, of reserved civic masculinity. Replying to Norton, Ruskin produced a fortuitous cameo-portrait of Byron that fits Victorian perceptions of Rossetti and Swinburne like a glove: “I should call his fault—‘incontinence of emotion.’ I call him one of the sincerest— though one of the vainest of men—there is not a line he has written which does not seem to me as true as his shame for his clubfoot” (144). As conduct unbecoming a gentleman, emotionalism and immodesty offended Victorians almost as much as immorality did. Writing without attribution, Edward Hood Paxton contrasted the uproar swirling around Swinburne, exacerbated by “his rabid pamphlet,” with the manly reticence of Wordsworth, “that great, serene soul, reviled and scoffed at for a quarter of a century, but dwelling amongst his mountains, and holding his peace.”40 Paxton briefly acknowledged Swinburne’s genius while excoriating his “ridiculous adorers,” who promised the young poet both instant and eternal fame (496). For Rossetti’s critics, the paradoxical nature of romantic celebrity manifested itself in a twisted instinct of reticence: “In poems like ‘Nuptial Sleep,’ the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before a coarse public, and is gratified by their idiotic applause.”41 Critics like Buchanan saw notoriety as the goal rather than a [ 56 ]

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consequence of the celebrity’s ambivalent relationship with the marketplace for culture. During the Industrial Revolution, artists and writers throughout Europe became reliably antibourgeois. While benefiting from the new trades “open to talent,” they defied plutocrats and the bourgeoisie by depicting their alienation from contemporary life. Cut off from a “recognizable function, patron or public and left to cast his soul as a commodity upon a blind market,” the artist or poet turned himself into “a genius” castigating the tastes and values of the philistine public. Coincident with the romantics’ affiliation with the demimonde and bohème (Bohemia), terms that acquired their current connotations between 1789 and 1848, artist-writers cultivated an “erotic extremism” designed to épater les bourgeois.42 By 1798, genius had become a marketable commodity, further complicating the aesthetic prodigy’s outsider status and identification with a cherished identity construct—romantic individualism. In Romantic Genius, Andrew Elfenbein reports that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was apprehensive that the annuity he received from the Wedgwood brothers would compromise his outsider status (“traditional antiestablishment leanings”): “According to the cult of genius, geniuses existed on the margins of society and suffered from inadequate public recognition. Their status as geniuses was their only compensation for a life of neglect and incomprehension.” As we have seen, post-Enlightenment genius was a self- dramatizing modality that capitalized on reclusiveness, neglect, incomprehension, and censure. With its striking lesbian content, the poem “Christabel” was symptomatic of Coleridge’s need to compensate for his prosperity by recouping his antibourgeois credentials. Elfenbein argues that Coleridge provided a model for the association between deviance and pure art, which was central to late Victorian high culture. The poem was popu lar with the PRB circle.43 I would add that Byron and Shelley’s model of reclusive genius and dissipated virtuosity was retained by the Pre-Raphaelites, disarticulated, and then handed down to Pater and Wilde respectively. The Victorian avant-garde fostered a romantic conception of the artist as an outcast bohemian, mitigating the perceived contradiction of a counterculture rapidly assimilating into respectable society and institutional culture. Like Coleridge, Rossetti feared that timely popularity and success would dispel the aura of authenticity and originality hovering over his inventions, attesting to his heightened consciousness of the difference between popu lar fame and renown. In contradistinction to the “burden of originality” borne by all “conventional geniuses” expected to produce P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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sublime works for public consumption,44 Rossetti hunkered down in his studio in Chelsea, composing love poetry and painting erotic portraits. For Pier Pasinetti, the aesthete’s self-effacement or withdrawal in full view of the public is a “display of absence” meant to draw as well as repulse attention: “The act of retiring into the ivory tower is a public one.” If any Pre- Raphaelite gesture savored of the attitudinized self-isolation of the romantic poets, it was Rossetti’s retirement from public exhibition.45 Pasinetti’s account of the imposture of reticence paves the way for chapter  4’s illustration of the paradoxical conjuncture of reclusiveness and charismatic personality that inflamed public curiosity about Gabriel Rossetti, who was seldom seen but much discussed.

There Is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity In Sentiment and Celebrity, Thomas Baker outlines the broad historical trends—improvements in print technology and circulation, the development of a national audience, and the disuse of authorial cognomens— that enabled “entrepreneurs of print to capitalize on psychic bonds and links of desire forged between the reading public and the objects of its fascination.”46 Baker underscores the connection between signature and the rise of celebrity journalism, literary gossip, and scandalmongering in the American print media. Baker’s observations are globally relevant to Victorian print culture. Detraction and vilification are recognized components of the machinery of Victorian celebrity. Less attention has been paid, however, to scandal as a vehicle for the production of a serious reputation in British cultural circles. In Amer ica, sensation and celebrity produced mass-market success, Whitman being a notable exception.47 This discrepancy reflects the culturally distinct expectations and responses of British audiences to the carefully contrived promotion of emerging talent once the press had begun to count negative publicity in its arsenal: It is not likely that anything that Mr Buchanan says will have the smallest effect on those whom he attacks. Mr Rossetti and Mr Swinburne will not hide their heads from his fury, or, moved by his admonitions, confess their sins in sackcloth and ashes, and burn their books in the orthodox Ephesian manner. Nor can we imagine the sale of their works being in any way affected by the same cause, unless, [ 58 ]

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indeed, persecution should produce its frequent result, and enhance the value of the things persecuted.48 Notoriety signified audience fascination rather than uncritical admiration. The fleshly poets were poised to take advantage of the shift in public conceptions of the creative individual, which, under the sway of romanticism, emphasized the temperament of “a different kind of special person” rather than skill or expertise.49 Swinburne’s perverse poetics and Rossetti’s melancholy love poems proclaimed their sensuous pessimism. As bohemians rejecting bourgeois social decorum, the Pre-Raphaelites epitomized for their contemporaries, through their enigmatic poetry, pictures, and personalities, the aesthetic vanguard. For their adherents, they displayed an “outspoken honesty, a sturdy love of freedom, earnestness, poetic insight, truth and beauty of expression.”50 For their opponents, they were eccentric, epicene, perverse. Dating from the 1860s, British journals were inundated with editorials lambasting “Diseased Literature and Art.”51 The book or exhibition review became a pretext for a screed condemning immorality: Mr. Swinburne deliberately selects the most depraved stories of the ancient world, and the most feculent corruptions of modern civilization, and dwells upon them with a passionate zest and long-drawn elaboration of enjoyment, which is only less shocking than the cold, sarcastic sneer with which (after the fury of sensual passion has vented itself in every form of libidinous metaphor) he assures us that these are not only the best things in the world, but better than anything we can hope for or conceive beyond the world.52 In “The Morality of Literary Art,” the pseudonymous H. A. Page called Swinburne a “classomaniac,” a designation that aligned deviance, blasphemy, and an Oxford education through its oblique reference to Greek pederasty: “With all the field of classic and mediaeval literature before him, Mr. Swinburne has seized on the very portions of Sappho and Boccaccio which are most opposed to the spirit of our time; and he has wrought them out, not in the temper which ought to govern an artist of to-day, but rather in that of a vicious old-world pedant. There is an excessive sickliness and morbid heat about them to which we find no relief in any of the poems accompanying them.”53 Employing stigmatized tropes and topoi derived from P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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antique myth, art, and literature, Swinburne inspired another anonymous reviewer to declare him an “utter Pagan; we mean this really; he worships sensuality; he seems to have no perception of the moral sublime.”54 Reckless, intemperate, and brilliant, Swinburne preferred infamy to reputability—he had Byron’s chutzpah and example: “Such a babel has not been heard since the days of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”55 Evincing media savvy, Swinburne ignored advice to exclude the most sensational texts from Poems and Ballads, First Series (published, rescinded, and reissued in 1866). Apprised of “low mutterings from the lion of British Prudery,” George Meredith counseled Swinburne to “play savagely with a knife among the proofs for the sake of your fame.”56 It is fanciful to suppose, simply because he had hysterics when the backlash hit, that Swinburne failed to anticipate the outcry his salacious and blasphemous poetry inspired. He well understood the literary consumer’s appetite for novelty and hoped for a succès de scandale, which he achieved in spades. Calculating the potential sales of contraband literature, Reader viewed the transfer of publication rights from Moxon to a more “enterprising firm” as a “very profitable undertaking” for the new publisher: “Meanwhile copies of the forbidden fruit are selling privately at fabulous prices.”57 Swinburne’s fervid retorts to his detractors were not merely frank and spontaneous expressions of indignation. They were self-serving strategies for garnering attention, calculated to prolong rather than cut short the controversy. Swinburne’s confederate, William Rossetti, admitted as much in his defense of Poems and Ballads: Be it added that Mr. Swinburne has done his very best, or worst, to hasten this time, and to aggravate the crisis. He has courted critics to be— and still more to profess themselves—indignant and horrified; they have responded to his invitation, have exorcised his book with abundant holy water of morals and religion, the salt of literary disquisition being but sparingly used— and the result is, that the book is withdrawn from publication in England.58 Poems and Ballads was a publicity bonanza for a diverse group. The publisher of the reissued volume, J. C. Hotten, also published William Rossetti’s pamphlet and Swinburne’s Notes on Poems and Reviews.59 The literary magazines and newspapers reviewed Swinburne’s poems and rejoinders. They reported on a controversy that they had in good measure started.60 [ 60 ]

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One perceptive reviewer noted Swinburne’s appetite for press coverage, friendly or other wise. Conflating publicity with theatricality, the reviewer affirmed a figurative as well as literal basis for thinking the actor the model for literary celebrity: “The theatre of Mr. Swinburne . . . will expand, and there is no fear of his being denied an audience, or crushed by a critique. He is more likely to realize the boast of Nelson, who, finding himself unmentioned in the ‘Gazette,’ declared a day would come when he should have one to himself.”61 Though Swinburne was closely identified with the reclusive Gabriel Rossetti, who suffered unprovoked attacks, Swinburne incited controversy and avidly courted the frenzy of renown. Recalling “the nonsense that was written about Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth,” an impartial reviewer contrasted Swinburne’s affronts to decency with his original contributions to literature: “He does not in the least follow in the beaten track of the classical or common erotic poets”—a voice of reason amid the tumult of censure. However, Swinburne was more newsworthy when styled “one of the most wayward enfants terribles” of the day.62 This was how the majority of literary magazines characterized the poet. They paraphrased his blasphemies and indecencies, prompting The London Review to remark: “We are not sure that he is not justified in bringing a charge of hy pocrisy against some of his critics.” Parroting each other’s conclusions and rationales in a modality of “call and response” that made coverage of the news appear newsworthy, the pages of The London Review, Spectator, Reader, Saturday Review, and The Athenaeum resounded like an echo chamber, reviling “Anactoria” and “Dolores” as “especially horrible.”63 Eventually, Swinburne’s campaign to overthrow the conventional pieties and smug self-assertion of the bourgeoisie proved amenable to that rising class, as his critics feared: “English readers will gradually acquire a truly delightful familiarity with these unspeakable foulnesses; and a lover will be able to present his mistress a copy of Mr. Swinburne’s latest verses with a happy confidence that she will have no difficulty in seeing the point of every allusion to Sappho or the pleasing Hermaphroditus.”64 In a now familiar pattern, the tastes of the day fi nally caught up with advanced art.

Poems and Ballads, First Series The diverse participants enlisted in the media frenzy and marketing bonanza surrounding Poems and Ballads tried to ramp up rather than tamp P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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down controversy. I want to look closely at a handful of participants who navigated the shoals of print policy (the editor John Morley) and reviewer anonymity (Robert Buchanan) while dealing with vocal pushback from media peers (Alfred Austin) and struggling to find a middle ground between manly and priggish commentary on literary immorality. In fine, Swinburne’s two-pronged (poetic and critical) assault on Victorian prudery complicated the strategy of reprobation. Before assuming the helm of the Fortnightly Review, Morley published a scathing unsigned review of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads that precipitated the volume’s withdrawal from circulation.65 Morley had good reason to remain anonymous. He was Swinburne’s contemporary at Balliol College, Oxford, which Swinburne left in 1859, before graduation. They frequented the same clubs. Brake stipulates that Swinburne relied on his “personal access to a network, such as his membership in Old Mortality, an Oxford essay society,” rather than on blind submission to an unknown editor for his journalistic forays between 1857 and 1872.66 That would explain why, within a year of taking Swinburne to the woodshed, Morley published Swinburne’s rambling reviews of the poetry of Morris and Arnold respectively. Morley’s outlook was somewhat more balanced and less hypocritical than it might appear without the benefit of contextualization. Beyond the cliques, there was not yet a categorical imperative governing the reception of literary Pre-Raphaelitism, which reliably deposited opponents and proponents into discrete camps in an unbroken continuum of reprobation or adoration. As a liberal supporter of social and educational reform as well as of aesthetic innovation, Morley leavened his criticism with praise, unlike the poet’s moralizing detractors. Reviewing Poems and Ballads, Morley found fault with Swinburne’s artistic intemperance: “It is a good thing to vindicate passion, and the strong and large and rightful pleasures of sense, against the narrow and inhuman tyranny of shrivelled anchorites. It is a very bad and silly thing to try to set up the pleasures of sense in the seat of the reason they have dethroned. And no language is too strong to condemn the mixed vileness and childishness of depicting the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination, the unnamed lusts of sated wantons, as if they were the crown of character and their enjoyment the great glory of human life.”67 Morley’s invective, though sharp and incisive, failed to satisfy certain factions within the chorus of condemnation greeting Poems and Ballads,

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which voiced the broader concern that “a man of undoubted genius and culture could be found to write, and a conventionally respectable publishing firm could venture to bring out a volume of poems which offers a greater outrage to morality, decency, and even good taste than any work we know of in the literature of any land or any time.”68 The forces of propriety mustered to oppose the rise of liberal license, gaining traction in the publishing sector. Conservatives looked askance at reviews that engaged in extensive transcription. Morley’s critique sounded equivocal to The London Review because, “though he justly denounces the volume as ‘crammed with unspeakable foulnesses,’ and as presenting a poetic embodiment of many things that are ‘loathsome and horrible,’ he does not hesitate to copy and reproduce some of its grossest images, some of its most vividly prurient epithets” (178). Many reviewers succumbed to the temptation to cash in on Poems and Ballads’s notoriety and inaccessibility by reproducing the salacious bits. Morley’s qualified admiration for Swinburne’s “attempt to revivify among us the grand old pagan conceptions of Joy” (145) infuriated The London Review. Morley’s further impulse to “earnestly exonerate himself from any suspicion of squeamishness as to the sort of subjects treated in the work” captured a society in transition.69 Prudery, not prurience, seemed unmanly just at the moment. Though Morley drew the line at the blatantly sodomitical implications of Swinburne’s verse, which “glorify all the bestial delights that the subtleness of Greek depravity was able to contrive” (145), Morley sensationalized rather than censured the poetry, according to his interlocutors. In 1867, the Westminster Review published, without attribution, “Winckelmann,” Pater’s rumination on the homoerotic aesthetic of neoclassicism. Shortly thereafter, Morley printed Swinburne’s “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence,” which furnished Pater with many instances of strange and troubling beauty, among them cerebral lechers, hermaphrodites, and femmes fatales in classical dress, as themes for his impressionistic essays. Writing to Gabriel Rossetti in 1869, Swinburne praised Pater’s article on Leonardo, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review on Morley’s watch: “I confess I did fancy there was a little spice of my style as you say, but much good stuff of his own.” 70 Encumbered by reservations that never troubled Swinburne for one minute, Pater stopped short of extolling lechery, as Swinburne had done in “Dolores,” a focal point of critical condemnation of Poems and Ballads:

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Who appraise thee, adore, and abstain, O daughter of Death and Priapus, Our Lady of Pain.71 Reviewing Studies in the History of the Renaissance as the Fortnightly Review’s editor in 1873, Morley reasoned that Pater’s exquisite prose style, which combined “a firm coherency with infinite subtlety,” escaped the “peril that besets a second-rate writer who handles a style of this kind”: “effeminate and flaccid mannerism.”72 Privately, Morley temporized with the critic Frederic Harrison. As a “hired master of ceremonies,” it was incumbent upon Morley to help an unknown and cultivated young writer, whatever his sins against propriety, to quicken the public’s interest in the higher culture: “So pardon my light dealing with his transgressions.” 73 Publicly conceding that Pater’s style contained the seeds of “possible excess” and might yet tumble down into “weedy rankness or grotesque,”74 Morley carefully navigated the shoals of decadent rather than openly homoerotic literature. Hence Morley’s trajectory may be charted (it was not static) on the Pre-Raphaelite continuum without overstating the case either for his homophobia or attraction to a homoerotic thematic, beyond the value he assigned to cultured prose. Morley’s opportunism or impartiality (take your pick) was rare. Morley’s anxiety not to form a party with “shrivelled anchorites” reflected a cosmopolitan outlook on the factional conflicts dividing the public sphere in terms ratified by the aesthetes themselves: Hellenists/philistines; partisans/critics; perverts/prigs. It is impor tant that a lockstep condemnation of Swinburne’s poetry on the grounds of immorality posed certain difficulties for critics, even those enforcing Victorian moral proscriptions. Critics were quick to forefend the twin charges of prudery and backwardness: “We are no purists in such matters. We hold the sensual part of our nature to be as holy as the spiritual or intellectual part, and we believe that such things must find their equivalent in all” (“FS” 338). In the unsigned “The Poetry of the Period,” Alfred Austin was duly conscious of these risks when he noted the “absurd extravagance” of critical commentary on Poems and Ballads: “For let us hasten to say that, had a really great, adequate poet been alive, Mr. Swinburne would have failed to attract much attention, save for those qualities which even his admirers do not admire, but of which we may remark that we shall be found very tolerant.”75 Putting aside Austin’s quirky rodomontade, more objective reviewers placed the controversy in historical relief: [ 64 ]

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“It is foolish and useless either to abuse or to ignore this book, for what Mr. Swinburne has written is now a part of English literature. We all remember what diatribes on Shelley and Byron were printed in all the reviews. Yet how many now would be willing to give up those calumniated poets with all their improprieties?” 76 Critics were loath to appear retrograde in their tastes and effete in their finical aversion to the risqué element in Swinburne’s work, which contained elements of bravado as well as of sexual dubiety. In Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866), Swinburne robustly declared “that the office of adult art is neither puerile nor feminine, but virile; that its purity is not that of the cloister or harem.” He rebuked those who sought “sermons in sonnets and morality in music” and looked forward to the day when the landmarks of art would be “noble and chaste in the wider masculine sense, not truncated and curtailed, but outspoken and full grown.”77 For the poet and his critics alike, the controversy sparked decades-old concerns that poetry “stands low in our estimation, as fit to be cherished only by the sons of effeminacy and discontent.” 78 Staking a claim to the higher ground of a masculine poetic discourse, opposed to the feminine domestic variety pitched in the nursery key, Swinburne denounced his critics as “moral milkmen” for suggesting “to publish a book [was] equivalent to thrusting it with violence into the hands of every mother and nurse in the kingdom as the fit and necessary food for female infancy” (CWACS 16:373). Shrewdly, he chastised critics of “Anactoria,” mindful that among the elites, “we in England are taught, are compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat, as schoolboys, the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet,” Sappho (16:357). Swinburne was pulling rank on his interlocutors, inciting their ire and spoiling for a fight. Ever since Blackwood’s maligned Keats, an apothecary’s apprentice, by implying that he was uncouth and poorly schooled, a command of classical references was de rigueur for the literati, which obtained by persistence and acumen the dynastic Oxbridge education heretofore reserved for the offspring of the British upper classes, landowners, and financiers. In the broader context of internecine relations between the classes and the masses, the higher and lower culture, Buchanan attacked Swinburne partly to show off his erudition. On August 4, 1866, Buchanan anonymously derided Swinburne’s puerile imitations of Alfred de Musset and George Sand in The Athenaeum, implying that Swinburne demonstrated an instinctive affinity for his models’ unmanliness and inversion of gender P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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roles. Harping on the youthful Swinburne’s effeminacy (“He is quite the Absalom of modern bards,—long-ringleted, flippant-lipped, downcheeked, amorous-lidded”), Buchanan likened Swinburne to Gito, the object of same- sex desire in Petronius’s Satyricon, “seated in the tub of Diogenes, conscious of the filth and whining at the stars.” 79 Buchanan aligned Roman homoeroticism, Oxbridge classicism, and modern French literature with Victorian poetic prurience. Unaided by Buchanan’s innuendoes, the average reader of The Athenaeum might have grasped Swinburne’s prurient allusions. The following month, this review was republished in an American journal, The Albion, where the classical references were obscure to most readers. While the fracas over Poems and Ballads calls to mind the Cockney School affair, Buchanan was no John Gibson Lockhart, and his motive for arraigning Swinburne’s licentiousness before the court of public opinion was self-interest rather than snobbery. J. B. Payne had employed both Buchanan and Swinburne as editors for the Moxon Miniature Poets series. When Swinburne finished his edition of Byron, Payne asked Swinburne to undertake a selection from Keats, even though the sum paid to Buchanan for his work would be forfeited. Buchanan had been paid ten pounds in January  1866. Writing to William Rossetti, Swinburne professed himself willing to do the Keats gratis, if necessary, for the love of the work and for the “delight of trampling on a Scotch Poetaster”— a term of obloquy bandied about among the Pre-Raphaelites ever since. Payne may have ignored Swinburne’s request: “in throwing overboard your Scotch Jonah, you must make him understand that I have nothing to do with his part of the business.”80 In any case, Buchanan discovered the identity of his successor in the course of events. Revenge was not Buchanan’s sole consideration. Poems and Ballads appeared around July  16, 1866, and Buchanan’s London Poems debuted before July was out. Buchanan’s poetic transcriptions of the day’s doings for coster mongers, seamstresses, and barmaids complemented his early ballad output reproducing the trials of the Scotch peasantry. Anonymously upbraiding Swinburne for indecency, Buchanan presented his poems as the healthful antidote to Swinburne’s poison, parlaying Swinburne’s notoriety into an opportunity for his own publicity and praise. The illustrated weekly, Fun, a down-market Punch, cooperated by pairing the two poets in “Our Library Table.” Declaring that Swinburne’s latest volume of poems, “though Catullus need not have blushed for some, will not suit our present civilization,” the journal awarded the palm of poetic relevance to Buchanan, whose [ 66 ]

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“muse is no disordered Bacchanal, but a wise virgin who knows what evil is and has seen suffering.” Refining its comparison in terms still more favorable to Buchanan, Fun averred that “Mr. Swinburne may perhaps bear off the classic wreath of laurel,” in terms of canons of prosody and classical allusion, but granted Buchanan “a nobler crown, watered with human tears.”81 In 1867, The London Quarterly Review followed suit, exclaiming: “Mr. Buchanan is a poet. He can sing from the soul to the soul. You read him, and you lose yourself, and you wake up to find that your heart has been pausing. For intensity of feeling, for exquisiteness of pathos, and for moral grasp together, we scarcely know where to mark his equal among contemporary names that have not already won their immortality.” Gushing that Buchanan’s tone was “all that the most rigid purist could desire,” the review implicitly juxtaposed healthy didactic verse against the prurient poetics of Swinburne, who was not mentioned. Numbering Buchanan among “the increasingly numerous company of gifted men, whose genius is linked to all noble qualities and uses,” The London Quarterly Review overlooked criticism of Buchanan’s “Nell” and poems about unmarried lower-class women, whether mourning a lover hanged for knifing a man in a drunken brawl or giving birth to the love child fathered by an unscrupulous parson.82 The London Review acknowledged that “the prudish may perhaps object to the moral tone of this poem” but concurred with The London Quarterly in placing Buchanan “in a conspicuous position among the younger poets of the day” with respect to the pathos, sweetness, and simplicity with which he rendered misery and hard social conditions. While grateful for Buchanan’s gifts and seeming to make light of the “heights of Parnassus” to which some unnamed poets aspired, The London Review concluded that “a genius such as this we cannot regard as of the first class in poetry,” being suggestive of a natural affinity with the prosaic side of life and lacking poetry’s power to convey higher orders of beauty.83 The Athenaeum liked the book for this very reason, observing that Buchanan’s poetry was “true and genuine work; the result of real observation and personal emotion,” suggesting an affinity between the poet, his slum dwellers, and bedraggled villagers: “These verses have been lived before they were written down.”84 As a general matter, reviews celebrating the “healthy” tone of London Poems avoided invidious comparisons between Buchanan and Swinburne, which may appear to undermine my claim that Buchanan actively engineered such a comparison. In September, Buchanan came forward deprecating “The Immorality in Authorship” under his own signature in the Fortnightly Review. Although P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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Buchanan presented himself as a moralist, the article demonstrates how reactionaries within the Victorian press helped readers unpack the homoerotic double-discourse of allusions to Platonism, Hellenism, Sapphism, the “new” culture, and French literature: The list of so-called immoral books is very numerous. No writer, perhaps, is less spoken about, and yet has more attraction for students, than Petronius Arbiter. What is the effect of Petronius on the moral mind? Not, I fervently believe, an immoral effect,—if we set aside certain passages which a reader “scunners” at, passes over, and obliterates from his memory. Yet the subject is impure in the highest degree; from Gito to Trimalchio every character in the satire is wicked.85 Most importantly, through allusion to Petronius, Buchanan claimed authorship of the previous month’s anonymous attack on Swinburne (a.k.a. Gito) in The Athenaeum, inciting oblique rejoinders to Buchanan’s calumnies in articles other wise written in praise of Swinburne. One such review irrelevantly enthused over the characterization in Fraser’s of the “somewhat flatulent lyr ics of Mr. Robert Buchanan.”86 The correspondent for Reader begrudgingly reckoned London Poems above “the ordinary run of the crops of poems which are just now so plentiful, though it would be very difficult to say exactly in what their superiority consists.” The reviewer huffily concluded: “Our opinion of Mr. Buchanan’s claims to be a poet is not exalted by an article of his on ‘Immorality in Authorship,’ ” where he demonstrated a total want of insight into the tyranny of the senses informing poetic invention.87 Their names were also coupled in “Swinburne in Amer ica” of December 1866: “Mr. Robert Buchanan would have us admit that morality is the equivalent of sincerity,” Reader demurred. “But all the sincerity of a satirist cannot draw a veil of innocence and harmlessness about Petronius, in spite of the sparkle of his Latin. Mr. Swinburne’s lyr ics are evidently sincere; but few would call them moral.” As self- appointed censor morum, why had Buchanan equivocated about the moral toxicity of The Satyricon, Reader wondered?88 Was Buchanan tempted to spice up his writing with a view to expanding his readership? This was a disconcerting possibility, promoted by Buchanan’s verdict that “the moral school of writing was a little indigestible” at the time.89 An admirer, who cited Buchanan’s essay as “the magnet which has mainly drawn our scattered thoughts together,” the pseudonymous H. A. Page complained of a [ 68 ]

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strain of coarseness in Buchanan’s poetry, as irksome as Swinburne’s penchant for “morbid analysis”: “We should not like to dogmatize on the point, but we cannot help thinking that Robert Buchanan . . . seems to offend out of mere malice prepense, and the desire to have a fling at the proprieties. ‘Little Milliners’ and ‘Jane Lewsons’ are utterly unworthy to be set alongside of ‘Liz.’ Mr. Buchanan, notwithstanding his rare powers, may wreck on the Scylla of a revolt against his time, and in this respect he would do well to take a lesson from the Laureate.”90 I understand why critics availed themselves of the cloak of anonymity to avoid negotiating this fraught cultural terrain in their own characters, where they were likely to be outmaneuvered, attacked, or embarrassed in their turn. Parsing Under the Microscope, Swinburne’s highly entertaining method of “warfare against the fleas who have bitten him,” The Examiner quoted liberally from the tract for the sheer pleasure of bearing witness to its surgical strike on Buchanan’s ego.91 In fleshing out the specific channels and material modes of celebrity before Wilde, I want to call attention to Swinburne’s appetite for contention and publicity as a poetic libertine. This was the verdict of the pseudonymous Page, who expressed surprise that Swinburne welcomed the critical fracas occasioned by Poems and Ballads: “We confess we looked forward with interest to reading Mr. Swinburne’s pamphlet, and expected an ingenious defense.” But he concluded: “He is even more unlucky in his precedents than in his arguments” (174). Swinburne’s reverence for “that supreme poet,” Sappho, struck more than one reviewer as unfortunate; Swinburne’s efforts to “explain two or three of his most indecent poems,” translations of the great Sappho, struck Fun as “a little more indecent, perhaps, than the poems themselves.” In a pitchperfect imitation of Buchanan, Fun parlayed Swinburne’s defense of poetry as an “adult art” into an endorsement of the pornographic literature and illustrations found in Holywell Street, “where books ‘for men’ are sold with comparative impunity.” Fun affected amusement rather than high dudgeon up to a point. Noting that Swinburne regarded reviewers as “no better than pigs, to judge by our pamphleteer’s eight lines of epigram,” the journal took offense at Swinburne’s disparagement of writers who received “solid money for honest work.” The columnist snapped that Swinburne, a scion of the aristocracy, was “none the more virtuous for being in independent circumstances.”92 Swinburne’s bluster and avidity for argument discouraged even some partisans of aestheticism from defending him openly. In 1865, under the P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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pseudonym “Shirley,” John Skelton favorably reviewed Swinburne’s verse dramas, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, at Gabriel Rossetti’s behest. Although the editor of Fraser’s, J. A. Froude, was no fan of poetical “licentiousness,” he permitted Skelton to publish a defense of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads. Froude professed himself “very unwilling” to “follow the crew of Philistines, and bite his heels like the rest of them.”93 Predictably, Skelton’s defense appeared without attribution. The problem of signature was intercalated with the cultural and social repercussions of the succès de scandale as a harbinger of sexual and gender nonconformity within a labile print culture. Circulation swelled with controversy, but the individual journalist was often fearful of gaining “for his name an unenviable notoriety that is likely to stick to him for the rest of his career.”94 Where the bohemian artist or writer relished his outsider status as proof of his distinctiveness, professional men of letters were beholden to various constituencies. The cliques managed scandal to the advantage of aesthetic celebrities, but critics were most often facilitators rather than direct beneficiaries of publicity: Does Swinburne, reckless boy, Write verses that wise men receive with frowning? Straightaway some kindred souls, elate with joy, Declare he beats both TENNYSON and BROWNING.95 From the PRB’s inception through Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, puffery and the notion of the “mutual admiration society” increasingly defined the brand. Victorian journalists and editors were well positioned to observe the power ful coteries promulgating Pre-Raphaelitism, which Buchanan dubbed “a clique of literary Mohawks,” and to fear reprisal (FS vii).

Poetry of the Period: Aspiring Laureates Buchanan has been written into history as a stalwart of the party of critical anonymity; however, he experimented with every conceivable form of public address. Under cover of an alias, he praised (or damned) his own publications. Multiplying his personae and publishing opportunities through the use of pseudonyms, he intermittently avowed authorship for strategic ends. For all the controversy he embraced, Buchanan avoided hectoring [ 70 ]

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the public. He allied himself with the highly reputable against the jarringly innovative schools. It will be seen in chapter 5 that in the print war between Buchanan and the Pre-Raphaelites, Buchanan impersonated a Presbyterian scold. Here, I want to demonstrate Buchanan’s range, not of topics, but of modes of attack. Written in the immediate aftermath of The Fleshly School and Other Phenomena of the Day, “Tennyson’s Charm” appears to be an intramural controversy. In fact, Buchanan shrewdly recalibrated his attack and made the most of the publicity generated by the Fleshly School quarrel by signing his name.96 Instead of harping on the fleshliness of the “sub-Tennysonian School” (297), he advertised the poet laureate’s oeuvre as an antidote to the poetic poison drunk by a “certain number of dyspeptic and ner vously deranged gentlemen, who think poetry ought to be a sort of galvanic battery” and who therefore complain that the “Tennysonian epic is not half wicked enough” (283). Toning down the stridency and egoism of his recent attack on the Pre-Raphaelites, Buchanan praised the poet laureate, rather than himself, as the savior of English poetry. Apart from Buchanan’s glancing blows at his adversaries, the article was notable for its defense of canonical fiction, which essentially conflated poetry written by and for gentlemen with “middle-class” values: “I feel its tenderness and sublimity, and yet I know it is tender and sublime strictly within the circle of English middle- class morality” (297). There was an implicit demur (“and yet”) buried in the passage, which quietly acknowledged Buchanan’s false position as a man of letters speaking up for mercantile aesthetics. What need or desire had the Victorian public for a pedantic defense of its ideals and codes? Contextualizing the avant-garde’s historic animosity to its audience, Donald Kuspit argues that the public demands ratification of its ideals from the artist. Where the traditional artist is concerned with “clarifying familiar codes, esthetically revitalizing them so that their integrity and significance become all the more evident and binding,” the avant-garde artist defamiliarizes codes and defies proscriptions in order to “bespeak a new mentality.”97 Back in the day, as the darling of the Cambridge Apostles, Tennyson was himself a daring innovator. But this was not Buchanan’s theme: “Why have critics loved Tennyson from the first, and why is the entire British public learning to love him too?” Buchanan queried. “A great deal, doubtless, is due to the thoroughly unimpeachable and middle-class tone of the scenery, the sentiments, and (for the most part) of the subjects” (284). By avoiding the personal pronoun, P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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Buchanan hinted that he was an observer rather than a participant in this mutually gratifying mirroring of the Victorian home front. Buchanan candidly envied Tennyson’s knack for pleasing his public without accusing the poet laureate of pandering to popu lar sentiment. Picturing Heine dying in a garret and Browning laboring thirty years “without half the fame, or one quarter of the success,” Buchanan projected his appetite for fame and lucre onto others (282). Shadowing Buchanan’s adulatory essay was the disagreeable perception of “the public heaping all their gratitude in one vast shower of roses and yellow gold at one man’s feet, while many good men and true, to whom much is owing, stand aside comparatively unrecognized and unappreciated” (283). Far from regretting the commoditization of literature, Buchanan prayed for a “poetic gold-mine” for himself (282). As natural heir to the Miltonic and romantic traditions, Tennyson was poised to reap the harvest sown by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, for whom the populace entertained little enthusiasm. Lightly remonstrating with a public that found Wordsworth “wearisome in the extreme,” Shelley both “hysterical” and “wicked,” and Keats “hectic,” Buchanan was more eager to establish his critical bona fides than to teach the “stubborn” British reader a lesson about poetry’s range and depth (284–85). Rather than denounce philistinism, Buchanan bowed to the demand for poetry that festooned and garlanded the “domestic Idea” (285). He praised Tennyson’s portrayal of the “English maid and mother, moving against a green and gentle landscape, sprinkled with stately halls and pleasant homesteads” (292). Though he compared Tennyson’s female domestic ideal to the figures portrayed by Joshua Reynolds, Buchanan’s itinerary of stainless virgins and matrons savored of Victorian kitsch. “The walls of the Royal Academy, too, have annually told a similar tale,” according to Austin. “Mothers, wives, daughters, babies, dolls, in every conceivable touching condition; soft, sentimental canvases, made still more alluring by pathetic, not to say mawkish, titles, have year after year asserted their supremacy over the grand, the heroic, and the manly.”98 In Buchanan’s version, Tennyson’s Vivien would have offered Merlin a cup of tea. Tellingly, Buchanan refrained from commenting on the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations for the Moxon Tennyson (1857). Instead, Buchanan valorized feminine chastity, an indirect dig at Rossetti and Swinburne’s female protagonist, the “utterly degraded woman” (292).

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Concomitantly, the gendered rhetoric of this essay attempted to rehabilitate the masculine poet, who had either cast his lot with reprobates (in other words, with the fleshly poets) or had fallen out of favor with a public schooled to more domineering types of manliness. Tennyson’s “charm,” ostensibly a reference to the magic spell cast by his song, informally connoted an effete quality present in all but the coarsest versifiers. Buchanan’s silhouette of the poet laureate dovetailed with that of the correct English gentleman as a type, “quiet, unassuming, reticent, full of culture, armed at all points with the weapons of manhood, graceful, strong, winning his way by courteous self-abnegation, gaining his right when necessary with inexorable will” (286). Reprising the doctrine of muscular Christian ity without much evidence of either muscle or religious observance, Buchanan hypothesized that Tennyson’s instinctive puritanism and “courage” of reverence (286) would have made him a “religious zealot, a fiery political partisan, and the poet of old theology” under the British Commonwealth (291). With these fires banked under the reign of Queen Victoria, Tennyson was content to store his thunderbolts. A physical witness to Tennyson’s “tremendous stock of reserve strength,” Buchanan recounted the vise-like grip of the poet’s gloved hand (286). Citing Taine’s verdict that the author of “In Memoriam” was “simply a dilettante artist, whose true mission it is to reproduce in exquisite vignettes the finer and more beautiful forms of fairy my thology and elegant domestic life” (291), Buchanan conceded that Tennyson’s puissance had escaped general notice. Buchanan praised Tennyson’s elegy for his most intimate friend, Arthur Hallam, as a model of reticence: “His verse is the literary correlative of the polished courtesy and vast reserve strength of the English gentleman” (291). In fine, Tennyson’s stature as the fountainhead of the national culture, King Arthur to Robert Browning’s Lancelot (282), depended on Buchanan’s conflation of race and canon. With his “purest Saxon” diction and Protestant values (299), Tennyson was the anti-Rossetti. However, the need for a defense of canonical art as more reputable, more distinguished, more English than the noncanonical augured the twilight of Buchanan’s idol. While the poet laureate’s reticence and dignity confirmed his preeminence as the “greatest modern English poet” still living (299), the upstarts were successfully advancing their cultural agenda through strategies of shock and awe. Framing the dynamics of reception of the vanguard work in his defense of Poems and Ballads, William Rossetti reasoned that “new poets” or

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“creators—come forward with something of a new sphere of ideas and new form of words, and people have to get accustomed to both before they take to them kindly.”99 Measured by the “aesthetic distance by which it opposes the expectations of its first audience,” the “original negativity” of the avantgarde text wanes as readers begin to incorporate its novelty within the horizon of their expectations.100 When this process eventuates in the admission of the vanguard work to the selective tradition, the contest between residual and emergent culture modifies the regnant order: “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”101 The moorings of criticism shift as well, putting adherents of old- school values on the defensive. Hence the notorious infelicities of the Fleshly School inured the public to charges of indecency and preciosity. When the Victorian critic disparaged fleshliness, he ran the risk of sounding like a prig rather than an expert. Signature compounded the problem because he ran this risk in his own person, not incognito. Writing without attribution, Austin established his persona as a cultivated and virile man of the world before castigating Swinburne for serving a feminine rather than a properly masculine “muse”: “Mr. Swinburne need fear no prudish or bigoted criticism from us. Venus or virgin, it is all one to us, provided he can make fine poetry out of either.” Austin signaled his resolve not to be put out of countenance or distracted from a serious consideration of the poetry. With studied impartiality, Austin measured Swinburne’s election of the deity of Lampsacus: “He may take Priapus for his Apollo, if he will,” so long as he has the dexterity to “extol a satyr into a Celestial.” Austin faulted Swinburne primarily for travestying the Greek ideal rather than for poetic prurience: “And in what way does he travesty them? By eliminating all that was masculine—and what a masculine epoch it was!— and intensifying and exaggerating what was not masculine by aid of his modern feminine lens.”102 Yet Austin disapproved of the Victorian pairing of sexual continence and exemplary masculinity, notable in Buchanan’s codices: “I deem [Tennyson’s] ‘Vivien’ an essential pendant to that wonderful apotheosis of Masculine Chastity, which is the heart of the Arthurian epic on which the laureate has poured all his orient poetic wealth” (FS 86). Compartmentalized views of Victorian gender ideals fail upon close inspection because Austin himself sought a middle ground [ 74 ]

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between Buchanan’s chaste and Swinburne’s unmanly ideal: “But what have men—to say nothing of gods—men brave, muscular, bold, upright, chivalrous—we will not say chaste, for that is scarcely a masculine quality,” glowered Austin, “—what have these to do with Mr. Swinburne’s Venuses and Chastelards, his Anactorias and Faustines, his Dolores, his Sapphos, or his Hermaphroditus?” (460). Significantly, Austin viewed Swinburne’s inversion of gender ideals as the tone of the time rather than as an exceptional case. He eyed Coventry Patmore’s domestic goddess and Swinburne’s eternal vixen with equal distaste. In his article, Austin bemoaned the feminization of English poetry, starting with Tennyson: “Both, however, are substantially feminine muses; only one is the feminine muse of the Hearth, whilst the other is the feminine muse of the Hetairae” (469). To be sure, Austin absolved Tennyson of the taint of effeminate sensuality and unmanly fame seeking, which he deplored in Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti in his signed book-length treatment of The Poetry of the Period (1870): “To Mr. Tennyson’s credit be it spoken, he has never gone looking for fame. The ground we tread on is delicate; and I will, therefore, only add that one should have been better pleased if the author [Browning], who is now so ridiculously obtruded as his rival, had imitated him in that par tic u lar” rather than striving for “trumpery tinsel wreaths” (75–76). Auditioning for the laureateship under the auspices of the periodical press, Buchanan and Austin hypocritically reproved Browning’s unseemly ambition. Buchanan’s “flattery of his own still-living predecessor” struck one unfriendly reviewer of Master-Spirits as a means of angling for recognition: “It is our profound conviction that Mr. Buchanan is looking out for the poet-laureateship.”103 Dwelling on the feminization of poetry, the mainstream critics implied that the next laureate should pay more attention to his manhood than to his craft. Neither aspirant to the laureateship cared a farthing for poetic innovation. Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne were connected through their contributions to the development of the dramatic monologue. Extolling the “sacrifice” of the author’s personality as the apex of art, a critic anticipated the modernist theory of artistic impersonality: “The higher the art the deeper the sympathy by which the artist has passed out of his own individual sphere into that of existences different from his own.”104 Wilde agreed, praising Swinburne as “the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his own personality.” Swinburne’s decriers hoped P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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to profit from his excommunication from the hierarchy of English poets. His advocates were moved by his flights of sexual fantasy and his verbal art. As a lover of the ancient beauty proscribed in the Victorian context, Swinburne was synonymous with same-sex desire. Wilde was hardly writing for the edification of a general audience when he tartly dismissed a work of contemporary criticism under review by observing that “the only original thing in the volume is the description of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s ‘grandeur of mind.’ This is decidedly new.”105 In 1887, Wilde disparaged Alfred Austin, who would succeed Tennyson as poet laureate, as a diligent mediocrity: “Mr. Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate of England. The fact that his appointment to this high post has not been degraded by official confirmation renders his position all the more unassailable. He whom all poets love is the Poet Laureate always.”106 Presently, Ezra Pound would validate the modern urgency of Swinburne’s poetic transgressions as provocations aimed at a jaded cultural palate: “Be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era.”107 Today, Buchanan is forgotten beyond the perimeter of the Victorian culture wars, but he was a figure of ignominy for Pound as well as for Wilde.

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THREE Fortune’s Weal

Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced “Kings’ Treasuries”; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused. Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun’s head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers. The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; —Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

 F

ortune’s Weal” documents Pre-Raphaelitism’s move from the margins to the center as a selective tradition within British art and letters through its reception history. Although the outcome is clear, with Pre-Raphaelitism ascendant in the 1850s and canonical in the

“

1880s, the movement’s refractory reception history is an object lesson in how avant-gardes burst upon the scene, dispense with their posture of antagonism, and get incorporated. My concern is with the critical discourses that greeted the PRB’s debut, shaped their contemporary reception, and continued to guide critical responses to them well after their heyday. The print culture was an indispensable and essential feature of their impact. Because the battles among Victorian tastemaking institutions and the aesthetic vanguard were newsworthy, libraries and historians preserved the paper trail, which records the undercurrent of personal attractions, rivalries, and antagonisms that fueled the PRB’s avant-garde endeavor. The chapter will show that hybridity of aim made it easy for critics to shape Pre-Raphaelitism into nearly anything they wanted it to be. The Pre-Raphaelites contributed to the pervasive misconceptions of their aims by breaking ranks (controversies generated by the PRB, such as the relation between art and religion, eventually matured into controversies among PRB members, as when Millais and Hunt tired of medieval art). Ruskin’s defense of Pre-Raphaelitism was self-serving: the PRB’s notoriety reinforced Ruskin’s brand as a talent scout of contemporary art, a position he relished. For all his aesthetic insight, Ruskin found it necessary to remain blind or heedless to elements of the program that challenged his moral worldview. Ruskin wrestled with the PRB’s infidelity to his precepts. Nor was he the only partisan whose personal agenda stood in the way of an objective account. Wilde became so famous that few recognized his indebtedness to predecessors after 1895. Similarly, T. S. Eliot’s suppression of literary forebears in seminal modernist manifestoes meant that Eliot rather than Pater received credit for redefining the “historical sense,” as the interweaving of the contemporaneous with the noncontemporaneous cultural heritage.1 While peers with pens can ensure a celebrity’s timely popularity or erase a figure (such as Simeon Solomon) from history by expunging him from the archive,2 a cultural movement’s future “survival is governed, not by the period itself, but by new periods” that identify with and revalue cultural innovations and “gradually compose a tradition.”3 Ruskin and Wilde over identified with Pre-Raphaelitism; Pound and Eliot rejected it; queer modernists (such as H. D., Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes) rediscovered aestheticism’s subversive ethos; these strong readings of the aesthetic movement have shaped, even distorted, its character for posterity. This chapter will break down into subsections concentrating on the dominant (or characteristic) responses to Pre-Raphaelitism roughly by de[ 78 ]

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cade. In addition to art and literary reviews or books of criticism, period responses are drawn from letters, diaries, memoirs, biographies, plays, fiction, paintings, poetry, parodies, and cartoons, which reached a mainstream audience. My subsections triangulate period responses, recreating the “call and response” pattern (citation, refutation, re-mediation) of debates in the Victorian media. None of these artifacts is viewed as neutral or definitive, even when fully vetted. I always consider the writer’s stake in the controversy set in motion by the PRB. In many cases, the sympathetic writer treated access to the great man or his circle as a stepping-stone to personal fame, whereas critical antagonists hoped to reap acclaim as defenders of public morals. Each of these trends influenced contemporary debates about the merits of attribution (signature) over reviewer anonymity. Because Ruskin’s blessing was crucial to the PRB’s early success, he rates a subsection all to himself. Ruskin was the Platonic ideal of the masterpiece fixer, an authority who determined the self- enclosed canons for his school, a factor in the later commercial success of high modernism.4 The trajectory from anonymity to signature to imprimatur was by no means assured between the 1840s and 1860s. Authorial pretensions to professionalism awaited the resolution of the question of signature, as Ruskin’s career in print confirms. Discoursing on Ruskin’s use of an alias for Modern Painters (1843), William Sharp surveyed the mental distance Victorians had traversed from authorial reticence or literary apprenticeship to imprimatur: “In art, a prophet, though disguised as an ‘Oxford Gradu ate,’ had preached a new gospel, and with the speech of those who dwell in high places.”5 After this magisterial work made his name, Ruskin signed his letters to The Times, defending the Pre- Raphaelites against their detractors, “The Author of Modern Painters.” Willing to enter the fray on behalf of controversial modern artists but smarting from recent ad hominem attacks on The Stones of Venice, Ruskin veiled his personal authority. We are in medias res at this juncture, where the public man’s reputational capital may be skewed toward either work or personal fame.

La Peau de Chagrin: Ruskin and the PRB When the National Gallery took up residence in Trafalgar Square in 1838, only a handful of modern masters were included. English art became a rallying point for an empowered middle class and the journalistic organs of F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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popu lar opinion.6 Ruskin was a staunch supporter of British art, exhorting the museum to recognize the country’s indigenous artists in a meaningful way. At the urging of Coventry Patmore, Ruskin threw his weight and reputation behind the PRB, writing a series of letters to The Times starting in 1851. This gesture placed Ruskin at the forefront of men of letters using controversy to consolidate their cultural authority. Ruskin’s interactions with the PRB were symptomatic of the trend toward marketdriven calculation masked by highbrow aesthetic rhetoric, which turned art works into commodities and the artist (writer or even commentator) into a celebrity. Ruskin was among the first art historians to make his name promoting modern art; he needed the PRB almost as badly as they needed him.7 Recruited to defend the PRB against “the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing from the public press,” Ruskin used the newspapers as a bully pulpit for his vitriolic attacks on academic art (Works JR 12:339). Ruskin was piling on when he wrote to The Times to challenge the judgment of the old-guard academicians. Ruskin had many reasons for championing the PRB beyond their supposed adherence to his cardinal tenet: “Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing” (Works JR 3:624). (Hunt read Modern Painters, which dawned upon him as a revelation, in 1845.) Ruskin was flattered by the notion, never publicly confirmed, that the PRB had followed his injunction to represent things “as they are” instead of “according to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public,” and the cognoscenti whom Ruskin despised (Works JR 34:155). In his letters to The Times, Ruskin praised Pre-Raphaelite fidelity to observed nature. Painting outdoors, the PRB avoided chiaroscuro, a staple of traditional landscape painting, while demonstrating a novel understanding of how reflected hues created pigmented shadows, an innovation that contributed to the modern look of French impressionism in the 1870s. Painted in bright sunlight, Hunt’s Our English Coasts—“Strayed Sheep” (1852) reveals an exquisite prism of color and natural shadows on the sheep’s wool. Reporting on the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855, Théophile Gautier exulted over the realism of Hunt’s landscape: “Under the strange green of the grass, bathed in blue shadows and bronzed by the sun, you will discover plants which have been trampled by the hoofs of the sheep and places where hidden waters trickle.” Comparing Hunt’s ultrasharp focus with “the [ 80 ]

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FIGURE 3.1 William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts—“Strayed Sheep,” 1852. Oil on canvas. Image © Tate, London 2015. Presented by the Art Fund 1946.

overwhelming importance that a microscope gives to objects, and a grass blade looks as impor tant as a tree,” Gautier struck a blow for Pre-Raphaelite innovation: “There is maybe no other painting in the Salon able to shatter the eye like The Strayed Sheep.”8 Gautier mused that Millais’s Ophelia (1852) looked “rather like a doll drowning in a basin” but praised the enchantingly rendered natural details (553). Perceiving that Millais’s art straddled naturalism and pictorial invention, Gautier declared: “He goes off on his own and completely isolates himself in his own originality as if up in an ivory tower” (550). Gautier intuitively grasped that Millais and Hunt belonged to the same artistic persuasion, not yet a school to the Frenchman. He predicted that they would set a fashion in England, and wrestled with his entwined perception of their “shocking originality” and similarity— a vexing paradox for fans of romantic genius (554). To be sure, the same qualities that the French critic applauded as realistic struck the English bourgeoisie as foolish eccentricities: “Never paint just what you see, / But give each sep’rate blade of grass, / An individuality,” a mock-Millais enjoined. “Remember, when you paint a fly, / That he has forty thousand eyes.”9 Ruskin was a spokesman for F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Pre-Raphaelite originality of content and canon. It might be said that Ruskin emphasized moral over formal considerations, whereas Gautier focused on the PRB’s high-resolution images. Ruskin’s defense of the PRB publicly proclaimed his expertise and si multaneously expanded the membership of the core affinity group. By advancing the reputations of younger men, who would be grateful and perhaps even implement his ideas, Ruskin hoped to achieve a deeper connection. In “Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy: Ruskin and Rossetti,” Elizabeth Helsinger describes Ruskin’s attraction to the “unusual and joyful camaraderie that seemed to unite the early Pre-Raphaelites.”10 She recognizes that Ruskin was seeking a friendship with a “gifted, charismatic young man,” though this idea is not developed (98). Helsinger’s account of the gift exchanges that ratified Pre-Raphaelite intimacy, from which Ruskin was excluded by virtue of his cultural authority and superior wealth, is suggestive for my analysis of the bohemian/bourgeois dynamic of Pre-Raphaelite coteries. Rossetti clearly relished his bohemian self- presentation. Upon meeting Ruskin in 1854, Rossetti conveyed his impressions to Brown: “His manner was more agreeable than I had always expected, but in person he is an absolute Guy—worse than Patmore.” This vernacular term, “Guy,” eloquently summarized Rossetti’s perception that Ruskin was both “hideous” and utterly conventional, a gentleman slumming in Bohemia. Rossetti’s cheeky boast that Ruskin seemed “in a mood to make my fortune” savored of intra-class rivalry, implicitly acknowledging Ruskin’s superior clout.11 Rossetti understood Ruskin’s desire to be admitted into a fraternal relation while patronizing his artist friends. Pointing out the many difficulties with “Ruskin’s selfproclaimed membership in the PRB,” Helsinger exposes Ruskin’s thwarted desire for camaraderie: “We P.R.B.’s must do better for you than this someday,” he wrote to the poet laureate, in reference to the illustrated Moxon Tennyson.12 Ruskin’s affiliation with the PRB was negatively remarked in Sandys’s A Nightmare, an 1857 pastiche of Millais’s A Dream of the Past—Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1857). Caricatured as the eponymous knight Sir Isumbras, Millais is depicted crossing a river on the back of a braying ass with the initials “J. R. Oxon” tattooed on its rump; Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael recede into the distance on the far bank. Clutching a diminutive Rossetti, who wears a beard and a dress, like a boy of the period, Millais is tenderly embraced from behind by a gnomic Hunt, who carries a quiver of paint[ 82 ]

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FIGU R E 3.2 Frederick Sandys, A Nightmare, 1857. Sir Isumbras at the Ford, from “A

Cata logue of a Collection of Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts,” by Richard Fisher, published 1879. Lithograph. Image © Private Collection, Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images.

FIGU R E 3.3 John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857.

Oil on Canvas. Image © Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/ Bridgeman Images.

brushes on his back. A brace of peacock feathers depends from the knight’s saddle, an allusion to Rossetti’s signature decorative accessories in the mid-1850s. Sandys’s engraving reminded viewers that Ruskin’s PreRaphaelitism (1853) had given the PRB intellectual heft. However, Sandys poked fun at Ruskin’s strident defense of Pre-Raphaelite fidelity to facts in view of their archaisms: “Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working every thing, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only. Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person” (Works JR 34:157–58). Perhaps that pertained to the donkey’s resemblance to a certain critic? Sandys wryly depicted the art makers and tastemaker as belonging to separate species. The PRB took this sally in stride. Sandys became a friend of the group and a fan of the peacock feather. By 1865, Sandys was sharing studio space with Gabriel at Cheyne Walk and, for a time, rooming with him there. In contrast, the mutually beneficial and reciprocally valued bond between Ruskin and the PRB was not of long duration. By enhancing the celebrity of the PRB, Ruskin fostered their independence. Ruskin’s activities were an unpleasant reminder that PRB pictures were commodities destined for the marketplace. They were certainly aware of his acquisitiveness, as he reserved the best work for himself and foisted less prized work on his circle of admirers. Instead of being grateful to Ruskin for facilitating private exhibitions, lining up clients, writing reviews, and purchasing their works, the Brethren appear to have resented his horning in on their enterprise, because he was autocratic and demanding, as befitted a connoisseur and patron. Stephen Wildman and John Christian have called attention to Ruskin’s “almost pathological need to instruct,” another source of friction.13 Worse yet, Ruskin fancied himself a leader and inspirer of the movement.14 Rossetti’s biographer and groupie, William Sharp, took pains to place Ruskin outside the magic circle of Pre-Raphaelite insiders. Though Sharp was not an eyewitness, he emphatically declared: “Ruskin was a champion, not an originator.”15 This term, “originator,” underscored the inter-implication of a bohemian lifestyle and aesthetic innovation. As Macleod observes, Ruskin “endorsed the avant- garde intentions of the PRB, in both the social and in the artistic realms,” such as teaching at the Working Men’s College.16 However, Ruskin’s attraction to “risky art” was [ 84 ]

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counterbalanced by sexual inhibition and didacticism. Epitomized by Ruskin’s fraught effort to mentor the Pre-Raphaelites as well as to ingratiate himself with them, Victorian patronage relationships reveal a longing for intimacy between men complicated by the canons of sexual respectability. As Helsinger argues, by reason of religious training and temperament, Ruskin could not participate in Rossetti’s construction of “an alternative, counter-economy for risky art within the larger market, by marking it as an art of intimate pleasures to be acquired through networks of friendship and contemplated in the private spaces of an un-Victorian domesticity” (102). Yet there were interest ing gaps in Ruskin’s reflex censure of eroticism. Ruskin, who allegedly destroyed Turner’s pornographic sketches, or stood by while Ralph Wornum did so, treated literary obscenity rather differently. His notorious sexual continence coexisted with an inexplicable obliviousness (when it suited him) to Pre-Raphaelite personal and creative rebellion against canons of respectability, most notably in his perfervid enthusiasm for Algernon Swinburne. Swinburne’s poetry contained the very qualities of emotional intensity, morbidity, and sensuality that Ruskin deplored in Rossetti’s nude, Venus Verticordia (1868). Yet Ruskin extolled Swinburne’s salacious verses shortly before their publication in 1865: “I have MSS. all right, I like them so much, but there are redundancies yet, which you can prune—in some—not in ‘Faustine’ which made me all hot like pies with Devil’s fingers in them.” According to Philip Henderson, Ruskin listened with rapture to Swinburne’s recitation of his unpublished poems, panegyrics to sadism such as “Dolores” (“Our Lady of Pain”), at a dinner given by Lord Houghton. Ruskin surprised the company by embracing Swinburne and exclaiming, “How beautiful! How Divinely beautiful!”17 Later, when asked to join the Tory chorus in condemnation of Poems and Ballads, Ruskin flatly refused. Writing at this time, Ruskin confided to a friend: “The one thing that those who love him have to do for him is to soothe him and trust in him;—his whole being is crude and mis-create at present—the divinity in the heat of it sputtering in the wet clay—yet unconquered. But his clay is porcelain—jasper—I am bitterly anxious about him, not for the tone of his life—but for its endurance.”18 Ruskin was convinced that Swinburne’s genius was marred by degeneracy: “There is assuredly something wrong with you—awful in proportion to the great power it affects, and renders (nationally) at present useless. So it was with Turner, so with Byron. It seems to be the peculiar judgment-curse of modern days that all their greatest F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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men shall be plague-struck.” Through this genealogy of ill fame, Ruskin homed in on the synergy between the genius and the degenerate in the nineteenth-century weltanschauung: “You are rose graftings set in dung.”19 The visionary artist or writer was understood to be a Promethean figure, fated to steal fire then suffer eternal torment. Judith Stoddart argues that Ruskin’s logic was internally consistent.20 He had always defended the sanctity of the artist’s vision, as an expression of a God-given natural endowment, over the artist’s debt to society: “I should as soon think of finding fault with you,” Ruskin told the poet, “as with a thundercloud or a nightshade blossom. All I can say of you, or them—is that God made you, and that you are very wonderful and beautiful.”21 It seems to me that Ruskin might have extended the same license to Rossetti, who forfeited Ruskin’s regard by declaring his independence and pursuing his unwholesome vision. Ruskin was privy to Swinburne’s unpublished poetry at this time, whereas the press and public were grappling with his verse drama Atalanta in Calydon. Torn between dueling perceptions of tradition upheld and tradition offended, The Edinburgh Review commended the classical erudition of Swinburne’s drama, while chiding the poet for “anti-theism.” The Wellesley index attributes the piece to Lord Houghton, a freelance impresario of literary talent. As Swinburne’s patron, Houghton had good reason to conceal his identity. Puffery aside, Houghton hailed Swinburne’s tragedy as part of a rebirth of interest in the Greco-Roman tradition, diverting readers from charges of impropriety: “Classical study must remain the basis of education of the English gentleman.”22 In Notes on Poems and Reviews, Swinburne similarly excused the lesbian lyric “Anactoria” by invoking the canons of upper-class education. Neither Houghton nor Swinburne mentioned the long history of bowdlerized texts being used in place of the uncensored originals. Naughty books were a staple of Victorian conversations about upper-class schooling. Victorian critics practiced a hermeneutics of suspicion with regard to the homoerotic codes embedded in allusions to medieval and classical subjects, often correctly perceived as deviant subtexts. The satirical review Tomahawk remarked that Swinburne’s notes on art had been undertaken “to string his usual Lesbianisms on to Mr. Watts’s Clytie.”23 Visiting the “licensed libertine” Houghton at his home in 1862, Henry Adams offered a contemporary portrait of Swinburne as Ruskin knew him. Adams was dumbstruck by the genius and facil ity of memory evinced by [ 86 ]

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Houghton’s protégé. Wryly comparing Houghton’s ladyless dinner party to a “symposium,” Adams puzzled over a participant’s assessment of the boy-poet: “He’s a cross between the devil and the Duke of Argyll!”24 Adams’s period testimony affirms the raciness and modernity of Swinburne’s genius. Ever on the lookout for a promising scheme of education— factoring a classical education into the formation of young Swinburne— Adams doubted that “Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford, as muffins and pork-pies of London” (141). Here, the Bostonian Adams reasserted the dominant leitmotif of his own inferior mind and the poverty of his cultural patrimony and education: “No number of centuries could educate him to Swinburne’s level” (142–43). Adams seemed to delight in performing obeisance before the poet-comet, who was so far out of his orbit both intellectually and culturally. He asserted the tremendous charisma of Swinburne, before his celebrity, as a kind of ambrosia of young genius for lesser men. Similarly, psychosexual anomalousness in the thrall of some dimly sensed possibility of male intimacy drew Ruskin to the PRB and simultaneously prevented his assimilation into the group. Medieval and classical models of queer pedagogy, ostensibly chaste, tempted Ruskin to repeat, again and again, the mentorship experiment with a promising if unformed youth. Millais, William Stillman, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones were all Ruskin protégés. Ruskin’s mentorship of younger men followed an unenviable pattern of enthusiasm, patronage, betrayal or rebellion, and disgust. In 1853, Ruskin invited Millais to Scotland to inculcate his notion of the picturesque into a promising young genius. Millais rewarded him by eloping with Ruskin’s wife, Euphemia Gray. Given the humiliating outcome of this experiment, it is a wonder Ruskin tried it again with Stillman, founder and editor of the American Pre-Raphaelite journal The Crayon. Ruskin’s prerequisite that Stillman follow specific aesthetic guidelines may have ruined Stillman’s chances of becoming a successful painter. It is hard to trust the opinions of an embittered disciple who blamed Ruskin for all of his shortcomings as an artist.25 Ruskin’s mentorship of Rossetti is taken up in chapter 4. Here, I want to consider the celebrity fixation of Ruskin’s last male protégé, Burne-Jones, which demonstrates that critics no less than creative geniuses achieved stardom. In 1855, Ruskin wrote to Burne-Jones to acknowledge receipt of a copy of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine; the jubilation excited in Burne-Jones by this polite gesture indicates the depth of his infatuation: “I’m not Ted any longer, I’m not E. C. B. Jones F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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now—I’ve dropped my personality—I’m a correspondent with RUSKIN, and my future title is ‘the man who wrote to Ruskin and got an answer in return.’ ”26 Burne-Jones is often called “the last Pre-Raphaelite,”27 and with good reason. As a devotee of Ruskin’s writings, Burne-Jones was primed to admire the PRB’s realistic treatment of biblical subjects and nature. As founders and contributors to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, BurneJones and William Morris evinced a prior interest in Pre-Raphaelitism as an aesthetic program and homosocial brotherhood. This impressionable duo had arrived at Oxford in 1852 expecting to take clerical orders. Influenced by the Tractarian doctrine, they were disappointed by the insincere and irregular religious observances of their classmates at Pembroke College and foreswore careers in the church. After meeting Gabriel Rossetti, or so the story goes, they devoted themselves to the arts. Rossetti fascinated and drew the younger men. Morris was attracted to Rossetti’s romanticmedieval ethos and translations of Dante, which informed the younger poet’s search for authentic sagas. Designer-writer Morris was not much of a painter, but he influenced his fellow Oxonian’s literary interests and themes for pictures. As a duo of self-consciously nostalgic artists enamored of things medieval, they happened upon a homoerotic thematic while investigating chivalry and its attendant, comrade love, a theme timidly explored by Pater in 1873 (“Two Early French Stories”) and boldly enunciated in the 1890s by Charles Kains-Jackson (“The New Chivalry”) and Edward Carpenter (“Homogenic Love”). Describing the ideal friendship between Burne- Jones and his fellow undergraduate, Sharp gushed, “Through William Morris he tasted of the sweet hydromel of Chaucer, of the wild honey of Arthurian romance.”28 While Hunt and Millais abandoned medieval themes in the 1850s, Burne-Jones, Morris, Prinsep, J. R. Stanhope, John Hungerford Pollen, and Swinburne assisted Rossetti and Arthur Hughes in painting murals on the walls of the Oxford Union building in 1857. Rossetti called this venture among comrades the “jovial campaign,” evoking the Arthurian motif of the murals. Rossetti’s psychic investment in male friendship was reinvigorated by the resumption of male-male ties with a troupe of Oxford undergraduates. Under Gabriel Rossetti’s stewardship, Burne-Jones began to draw and paint like a Pre-Raphaelite, assimilating the angular physiognomy and sickly facial pallor that displeased critics of the PRB. Burne- Jones would later adopt his master’s idiosyncratic handling of [ 88 ]

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watercolors. In 1877, he wrote Rossetti, “No one ever in this world owed so much to another as I do to you.” 29 Burne- Jones had little formal art training. In every sense, he was a product of a Pre-Raphaelite education. Mentored by Ruskin, Rossetti, and Watts, he burst into public consciousness at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, which attracted extensive press coverage and transformed Burne-Jones into an aesthetic celebrity. In 1878, Ruskin published segments of The Three Colours of PreRaphaelitism in the Nineteenth Century, partly to insinuate Burne-Jones into the fraternity of revolutionary English artists whom he had lauded in 1851. Animated by disgust for Rossetti’s increasing luxuriance and defiance of his guiding principles, Ruskin cultivated Rossetti’s acolyte, “who promised to be the sweetest of all the P.R.B. designers.”30 Ruskin’s attraction-censorship of the erotic tenor of his protégé’s work is familiar. Quilter puzzled over Ruskin’s infatuation with both Rossetti and BurneJones, whose “only failing seems to us to consist in their too exclusive devotion to the sensuously beautiful. It is well known to all students of Mr. Ruskin, that their master’s teaching leads them to an entirely opposite conclusion.”31 In fact, Ruskin altered the direction of Burne-Jones’s career by prescribing a return to “grace and repose,” facilitated by two tours in Italy copying cinquecento Venetian paintings— one, in 1862, in Ruskin’s company. According to Wildman and Christian, Burne-Jones’s work took on “an almost cloying sweetness” in the 1860s, the period of Ruskin’s greatest influence.32 By 1878, Ruskin’s personal relationships with the original PRB members had dwindled, a casualty of artistic differences (with Rossetti and Hunt) and personal estrangement (from Millais). Brown’s vicious quip about Ruskin’s underdeveloped sexuality encapsulated the humiliating details publicized during the divorce proceedings: “Ruskin has been kicking up a great row about Rossetti till his wife drowned it with still greater row she has raised by bolting & publishing that the vilain has lived with her seven years long and never yet shown any per for mance, the stones of venice [sic] being the only ones as yet of which poor Mrs R has had the advantage.”33 Notwithstanding the time that had elapsed, what had Ruskin to gain by revisiting Pre-Raphaelite controversies in light of his personal tragedy? As always, Ruskin’s concerns were idiosyncratic. Hoping to attract the widest possible audience to The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, Ruskin explained, “My pupils are more likely to read it if printed in the F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Nineteenth Century than in a separate pamphlet” (Works JR 34:128). The notion of periodical literature as a virtual classroom is well supported by the pedagogical mandate exemplified by Ruskin. A more cynical reading would find Ruskin riding into the limelight on the coattails of BurneJones and the glorious Grosvenor exhibition. In 1878, Ruskin retained his sense of the Pre-Raphaelites as trailblazers, but he no longer behaved like the fourth musketeer. Ruskin had achieved critical distance from the PRB and recounted its evolution with the benefit of hindsight: “We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation” (Works JR 34:153). This was an allusion to the chorus of indignation greeting Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), whose combination of historicism and naturalism had incensed reviewers. 34 In Household Words, Dickens excoriated Millais for rendering Christ as a “hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter,” and chastised him for disrespecting religious sentiment and the rules of perspective, resulting in the depiction of Mary as a “kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster.”35 Beyond the insult conveyed by the depiction of Christ and his parents as common working folk, barefoot and dirty (realism), the Pre-Raphaelites’ retrograde aesthetic also shocked Dickens. In the eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Art, Dickens noted, the PRB turned its back on four hundred years of scientific progress and learning. Dickens’s diatribe was the most eloquent (and humorous) statement of bourgeois disaffection with the Gothic Revival, imagining a “Pre- Chaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling” and “the abolition of all but manuscript books. These Mr. PUGIN has engaged to supply, in characters that nobody on earth shall be able to read” (267). Though Ruskin defended the PRB in the 1850s, he had reservations about the religious orientation of the Brotherhood. Writing to The Times, Ruskin indicated that he disliked the Romanist aspects of PRB pictures, condemning the “painted window and idolatrous toilet table” in Millais’s Mariana and the walled seclusion of the nun in Charles Collins’s Convent Thoughts (Works JR 12:320). Still, Ruskin praised Convent Thought’s truth [ 90 ]

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to nature in spite of these doctrinal defects, relishing Collins’s botanical study of the Alisma Plantago and water lily. In “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church,” Alastair Grieve explains the Tractarian overtones and Catholic symbols employed by Millais, Collins, Rossetti, James Collinson, and Hunt, a Protestant convert, who, influenced by the evangelical emphasis on the Bible’s literal truth, set out for Palestine in 1854 to paint biblical scenes on location. 36 Though the PreRaphaelites staunchly denied any link between their aims and Anglican Tractarianism or Roman Catholicism, themes of regeneration through baptism, the innocence of the Virgin, the importance of celibacy, incarnation, and Catholic ritual (communion) were featured in many paintings. Writing for The Art-Journal in 1850, Ralph Wornum noted the “good historic harmony” between the PRB’s “morbid asceticism” and the “intolerable idea that sanctification consists in the mortification of the body; and in so far it is a monastic resuscitation in perfect harmony with its sister revival of the ecclesiastical Gothic.”37 More favorably, Edmund Gosse contended that Rossetti’s exquisite facil ity with color was inspired by the stained-glass windows of medieval churches: “No other man’s color will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples.” Among the power trio, Rossetti was the one true religious mystic in the group. Hunt and Millais were not much in sympathy with Rossetti’s pursuit of the “directly sacred field in painting,” so Rossetti curtailed his production of Catholic art before abandoning this theme entirely.38 Pious and doctrinaire in the 1850s, the Protestant Ruskin could not see that the Pre-Raphaelites appropriated religious symbols without embracing the content of religion. However, Walter Pater understood that, for the Pre-Raphaelites, the “monastic religion of the Middle Age was, in fact, in many of its bearings, like a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses,”39 rather than a totalizing consolation for Victorians troubled by manifold and irreconcilable expressions of piety in their day and age.40 Though circumstance had tempered his enthusiasm for PRB daring by 1878, Ruskin raved in The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism that the early “works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in all Eu ropean schools of Art” (Works JR 34:152). Invoking the Protestant Reformation, which had driven Popery from England, as the vehicle for his underlying point about the PRB’s reform of the sentimental tendencies of Victorian art, Ruskin F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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distorted the movement’s religious tenor. It cannot be said that the documentary realism of Millais’s depiction of the holy family annulled the painting’s symbolism: stigmata prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion and Mary’s central role. Hence no one’s elective affiliation with the PRB was more conflicted than Ruskin’s, an evangelical Protestant gentleman dedicated to typical and vital beauty rather than to angularity or sensuality, whose tastes were eclectic rather than fixated on early medieval art. He might have been a leading detractor of the PRB on religious grounds; instead, he simply minimized its Catholic topicality. Quilter was quite correct in naming Ruskin’s inconsistency: “Acceptance of Mr. Ruskin’s theories necessarily entails the acceptance of a certain system of morality, and can hardly be disassociated from religion.”41 In Great English Painters, Sharp mapped the trajectory leading from the Oxford movement through Pre-Raphaelitism to the Gothic Revival, commenting: “Different as these movements were in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual representations of interpreters, they were in real ity closely interwoven, one being the outcome of the other.” Sharp continued, “However strange it may seem to say that men such as Holman Hunt and Rossetti and, later, Frederick Shields followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and Keble, it is indubitably so.”42 “Painting has its Puseyites,” declared Tom Taylor, when describing the doctrinal antagonism of devout painters to the “vices and vulgarities” of the modern world. Based on their reversion to the spirit of the Middle Ages and status as Brotherhood, Taylor placed the PreRaphaelites on the Tractarian continuum. Tracing the advent of “Mort d’Arthurism in poetry, and the worship of Gothic run mad in architecture” to High Church influences, Taylor made no secret of his distaste for the Catholic under pinnings of Gothic Revivalism, calling it “ritualism in worship.” 43 This amalgamation of the arts with religious doctrine was supported by Gothic Revival architecture and the wide celebrity of the Nazarene-influenced frescoes at Westminster Palace. In 1882, John Ashcroft Noble expostulated that the PRB’s passion for simplicity, veracity, and spiritual truth made common cause with the Counter Reformation only in so far as Puritanism had “declared Art an unclean thing.”44 Other than Sharp, few advocates trumpeted Tractarian or Nazarene influences because the PRB’s Catholic imagery, medieval topicality, and status as a “Brotherhood” stirred contemporary prejudices (homophobia as well as anti-Catholicism). Forming a Catholic brotherhood [ 92 ]

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in 1809 and steadfastly adhering to the principles of a monastic community, the Nazarenes influenced the communal identity and reformist impulses of the PRB, bent on purifying English art through a return to pre-Renaissance methods of painting and motifs.45 The PRB consecrated its artistic mission and notion of fellowship in 1848 by invoking the concept of monasticism, which had come under fire in 1843 for encouraging an effeminate indulgence in Catholic ritual and an unmanly detachment from domestic and worldly concerns. In “UnEnglish and Unmanly: AngloCatholicism and Homo sexuality,” David Hilliard surveys a range of contemporary responses to what that muscular Christian, Charles Kingsley, styled the sectarian “foppery— even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement” in Puseyite circles. As Hilliard shows, mainstream Anglicans and evangelicals disapproved of the ritualism and cultic aspects of the Oxford movement. In cartoons such as Height of Fashion, Punch intimated that among High Churchmen the proclivity for wearing vestments, variously trimmed and embroidered, was a form of transvestism.46 Fellow PRB and Catholic mystic James Collinson occasioned a crisis in Rossetti’s career with his hagiography in oil, The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (1850), a painting so “maudlin and hysterical” that it convinced Rossetti that he should never “reach the public with art of this unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the practice of directly sacred art.”47 Disparaging a related image, The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, The British Quarterly Review chided Collinson: “An artist unmans himself if the habitual and pre-ordered forthgoing of his contemplations is along the line of these petty ecclesiasticalities.” 48 Effeminacy was closely tied to apprehensions of homosexuality by this time. Thais Morgan has shown that a disregard for heterosexual propriety or the trappings of middle- class domesticity was connected with emerging conceptions of homosexuality in Victorian England.49 In both their models and motives, the Pre-Raphaelites’ themes and guild structure baffled their contemporaries. Were they traditional or modern, celibates or perverts? In revaluing tradition as a resource for modern living in the machine age, which is my reading of the group’s aims, they became embroiled in petty sectarian conflicts, misogyny, and homophobia as they pursued their creative and social vision. What really surprises is Ruskin’s studied obtuseness or sacrifice of deeply held personal convictions in order to call himself a “PRB.” F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Ruskin’s idiosyncratic reception of Pre-Raphaelitism’s Catholic topicality makes sense when viewed through the lens of stylistic innovation. Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini (1849) struck Ruskin as a radical departure from the pictorial record of devout Mariolatry, where Madonnas bedecked in richly embroidered royal blue robes meditated under “arcades of exquisitest architecture by Bernini.” Ruskin praised Rossetti for affronting the Catholic taste for “propriety and splendour” by asking pious souls to “conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a pallet bed, in a plain room,” frankly alarmed by her ghostly herald (Works JR 34:153). Ruskin favored pictures that sent a jolt of frisson through the middle class. In The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, Ruskin emphasized the “manifestly opponent and agonistic temper” of PRB works on a variety of subjects, drawing attention to the consternation occasioned by Millais’s The Blind Girl (1856), which ignored the conventions of classically conceived landscapes with figures and forced the viewer to “contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown, and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at once to have been sent to the work house; and some really green grass and blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English common-side” (Works JR 34:154). Although Millais’s formal innovations (such as an overall sharp focus and a startling palette) went unremarked by Ruskin, topically, Millais’s painting reached the pinnacle of a socially engaged aestheticism, with very distinct antibourgeois currents. PRB militancy only occasionally transcended the grammar and values of art to represent the unbeautiful “low” forms of daily life. Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents and The Blind Girl are examples of naturalism and social realism that struck contemporaries as ugly and offensive to the point where the aim of the work of art passed beyond “art” in theorist of the avant-garde Peter Bürger’s sense.50 If not for the hostile reception of the pictures, this would be an absurd account of the Pre-Raphaelites’ activity. The Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings of Victorian Britain had the same documentary quality as their landscapes and literary and religious subjects, with every detail meticulously rendered; hence their depictions of social inequality ( labor, prostitution, emigration, poverty) may be said, in Tim Barringer’s words, to “embody a new aesthetic, an unflinching visual scrutiny of social realities,” which was deliberately provocative and disturbing.51 In a sense, Millais’s pictorial message in The Blind Girl complemented Ruskin’s efforts to commute art into a vehicle of social criticism in “The Nature of Gothic,” where young ladies were exhorted not to foster wage [ 94 ]

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slavery and the monotony of factory work by purchasing mass-produced glass beads.

Enigmatic Reputation Building: Pater Inciting a backlash among Oxford theologians and educators, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) established Pater as the lodestar of the homosexual coteries of aesthetic Oxbridge. The book gave rise to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and a host of decadent periodicals: The Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1881–1894), The Pagan Review (1892), The Spirit Lamp (1892–1893), The Yellow Book (1894–1897).52 Pater was a retiring and, like Rossetti, reclusive individual who wielded influence through his adherents and his fervid prose. This enigmatic reputation building incorporated the queer pedagogy of his tenure at Brasenose College, Oxford— another type of homosocial fraternity.53 In “The New Renaissance; Or, The Gospel of Intensity,” Quilter unearthed a coven of homophiles residing at Oxford. Preaching a jeremiad against aestheticism as covert pornography, Quilter declared that “wandering in mazes of false feeling and morbid affectation” with Swinburne, Pater, and Burne-Jones cannot “compensate us for the loss of healthy national feeling.”54 Focusing on Pater, Quilter snidely conveyed his contempt for the Oxford don’s perverse antiquarianism: “From the recesses of Oriel College Mr. Pater took every now and then dives into mediaeval French or Italian history, emerging triumphantly with some firmly-clutched improper little story which he had rescued from the oblivion into which it had unfortunately fallen, or with the name of some forgotten painter, too long allowed to slumber in peaceful obscurity” (399)— a complaint lodged against Swinburne.55 Before Pater published, the Pre-Raphaelites revised, translated, and painted “improper little stories.” Pater was nearer to the culmination than the origination of homoerotic aestheticism at Oxford, which reached back to Shelley. One critic of The Renaissance showed considerable pique on this point, denying Pater’s precedence in articulating a philosophy of sensuous pessimism. Employing an alias recycled from the Cockney School fracas ‘Z’ deprecated Pater’s “Modern Cyrenaicism” as a philosophy of pleasure stolen from the Greek Aristippus by an Oxford don and promulgated by another Oxford alumnus, the editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley.56 Conceding F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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that Pater was too much of a gentleman and closet eremite to embrace hedonism as a lifestyle, Z next bemoaned Pater’s withdrawal from the practical concerns of utilitarian philosophy in favor of skepticism: “And in a similar spirit Mr Pater, apostle of the artistic apotheosis of lotus-eating, finds life so dull and hopeless, and in a word ‘Philistine’ ” that he prefers to fritter away his time in the ivory tower (382). Bridging the gap between academic and theological Oxford, Z derided single- sex monastic community as unworldly and effete: “What we do find in attacks on the Tractarians, however, is the emergence of a gendered rhetoric that facilitated the subsequent sexualizing of gender transgression, in which effeminacy was seen not as a public failure of forthright courage, but as the outward manifestation of a private, sexual deviance.”57 In a volte-face, Z worried that his article would be read as an ad hominem attack on a dedicated, industrious, self- sacrificing college tutor. Z speculated that Pater’s theory of sensation might be nothing more than a counterweight—“the relaxation of a life sternly devoted to duty.”58 However, Z was roused to a pitch of indignation by the modern theory of “pulsations”—Pater’s soft science and exquisite consciousness of beauty passing in the moment. Conflating Pater’s enthusiasms with those of “the housemaid who revels in the sensation novels of the London Journal,” Z vulgarized a philosophy of Greek love that, as an Oxonian, he well understood: “The question is whether the pulsation philosophy is not as fully realised by the housemaid with her Miss Braddon, as by Mr. Pater with his Winckelmann” (382). Z’s conflation of a feminine craving for sensation with Paterian homoeroticism calls to mind Sedgwick’s observation that “homophobia directed by men against men is misogynistic, and perhaps transhistorically so,” in the sense that “it is oppressive of the so-called feminine in men.”59 In “Marketing Affect: The Nineteenth- Century Sensation Novel,” Ann Cvetkovich limns Victorian criticism of the untoward “craving” for sensation stimulated by the genre’s focus on the sexual transgressions of women.60 Victorians complained that such fiction “preaches to the nerves” (20), simulating hysteria and even sexual arousal. While the audience for sensation fiction was potentially unisex, critics implied that the emotional frisson inspired by its “very fleshly and unlovely record” of women “driven wild with love” was effeminating (22). Ostentation, vanity, and sensuality were female vices in the Victorian era; modesty, caution, and sensitivity, female virtues—vices and virtues subject to withering scorn when identified with a man. Travestying the homoerotic near at [ 96 ]

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hand while expounding historical Epicureanism, Z appears receptive to Spartan (in other words, more manly) desire. Misunderstood as a refined form of solipsism, Pater’s cognitive psychology replaced the object of knowledge with the object of desire. Pater’s aesthetic theory shifted attention from the finished object to the impression the object made on its interlocutor, promoting a disorder of the senses over a reasoned judgment of quality. Apostrophizing Rossetti’s pictorial power in dealing with inanimate objects in his poetry (a kind of prosopopoeia), Pater found half the charm in the picturesque effect (“lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems”) and the other half in a revival of a mythopoetic age: “To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent.”61 Using Provençal poetry as a platform for a masochistic fantasy of vassalage to the Cruel Fair—“to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement,” Pater imagined a transgender paradise “among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them, as the flame of a little taper shows through the Host. Such loves were too fragile and adventurous to last more than for a moment.”62 The “delicacies” of earthly love captured in “Poems by William Morris” (1868) burst into a “hard, gem-like flame” by 1873, with qualities of intensity and immediacy masking their evanescence.63 In “Style” (1888), Pater forged a link between the fugitive moment (the experiential flux of modern subjectivity) and sexual nonconformity, advancing a prescription for the literature of the present and future very much indebted to Rossetti’s example of sensuous intensity followed by dispersal and loss: A sonnet is a moment’s monument,— Memorial from the Soul’s eternity To one dead and deathless hour.64 The duality inherent within Rossetti’s immersion in sensual experience (immanence) and his simultaneous sense of loss (dissolution) is symptomatic of the dynamic of modernity itself. Fined down to a special moment, real ity is less accessible, not more so. Funny how time slips away, as the saying goes. Pater’s famous line “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life”65 reads like a secular restatement of Rossetti’s special moment, a fusion of sacred and profane love, of the infinite and the finite, which is unsustainable and elusive: F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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“And in regenerate rapture turns my face / Upon the devious coverts of dismay.”66 For Pater, modern literature must be “the transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinite varied form.”67 Pater’s suggestive terminology, reflecting the wide spectrum of human appetites, conflates aesthetics and sexuality, a pattern stamped on all of Pater’s meditations on Greek sculpture (on Hellenism and the cult of male beauty) and treatment of archaeological fragments of terra cotta, marble, and stained glass (symbolizing the golden age and the age of chivalry) in such works as Greek Studies, “Apollo in Picardy,” and “Denys L’auxerrois.” The imaginative prose essay concerns itself with the elaboration of same-sex love in antiquity and the parsing of homoerotic codes, as a means of addressing modern love between men.68 Pater was a transitional figure, striving at one and the same time for ascesis (reticence, self-restraint; asceticism favoring abstraction) and ecstasis— a voyage of subjectivity into the external world (lust of eyes and experience). Following Winckelmann’s example, Pater privileged the twofold demand for manly self-control and intensity: reticence over emotionalism. James Eli Adams writes compellingly of Pater’s efforts to “reinscribe norms of masculinity within the ethos of aestheticism,” a mission inspired by Pater’s attunement to the public function of criticism “as a mode of per formance” and his concomitant anxiety about the conflation of theatricality with effeminacy.69 The public crucible just faced by Rossetti, private person, in the Fleshly School controversy, informed Pater’s carefully guarded persona.

Partisans, Parodists, Opponents Walter Hamilton wrote The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882) to correct the public’s misconceptions of Pre-Raphaelitism based on caricatures and satirical plays (Patience, The Colonel). Hamilton was critical of Punch, which accommodated middle-class curiosity to form an impression of upper-class life—the “vulgar herd like to see their betters turned to scorn.”70 Hamilton’s elitism led him to class the Pre-Raphaelites, as purveyors of the higher culture, above their social station. Without explicitly charging Punch with an antiaristocratic bias, Hamilton defended Swinburne, a favorite target of Mr. Punch, by implausibly claiming that offensive passages in Poems and

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Ballads were “garbled extracts torn from their context, and ingeniously misinterpreted through the medium of [the critics’] own prurient imaginations” (64). In 1866, Punch had impugned Swinburne’s gentility: “Having read Mr. Swinburne’s defense of his prurient poetics, Punch hereby gives him his royal license to change his name to what is evidently its true form— Swine-born.” 71 Hamilton’s account underscored the social status and breeding of his numerous sources and correspondents. In the preface, he thanked “Lady Wilde” for her assistance and noted elsewhere that, whatever else he may be called, Oscar Wilde was a “gentleman” (95). Despite Hamilton’s investment in the symbolic capital of aestheticism, he was anxious to challenge society’s misapprehensions about the Rossetti persona, devolving, in part, from Wilde’s campy appropriation of his legacy: “Whatever effeminacy some critics might detect in his poetry or his pictures, his presence was robust, manly, and, in many respects, typically English” (48). In short, Hamilton set out to conventionalize aestheticism. In contrast, Wilde hitched his car to the aesthetic movement, underscoring the link between artistic originality, controversy, and renown: “There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality.” 72 Notwithstanding Wilde’s hints about the philistinism of the Victorian public, Wilde shrewdly exploited the fact that the misunderstood genius garnered the lion’s share of media attention by gratifying the public’s appetite for the naughty and the novel. Iconoclasts galvanized public sentiment and attention to a greater degree than reputable idols of the mainstream marketplace. Put another way, impropriety combined with innovation stimulated public curiosity and desire. Interest in Pre-Raphaelitism was not confined to a narrow sect before Wilde’s debut. In fact, the serial eruption of scandal galvanized interest in the Pre-Raphaelite movement from 1848 to 1882, when Gabriel Rossetti was in his death throes and late aestheticism was struggling to be born, heralded by Wilde, a self-appointed spokesman for the movement. Wilde’s enormous celebrity has overshadowed the fame of his predecessors. Through his crowd-pleasing showmanship and plays, Wilde fashioned himself into the ur-Aesthete, primary target of Du Maurier’s satirical cartoons and Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, Patience. In “Oscar Interviewed,” Punch interpolated Wilde’s theory that he was the last great exponent of Pre-Raphaelitism rather than a mere camp follower: “Swinburne had made a name, and Burne-Jones had copied

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illuminations e’er the first silky down had fringed my upper lip, but the Trinity of Inner Brotherhood was not complete till I came forward, like the Asphodel from the wilds of Arcady, to join in sweet antiphonal counterchanges with the Elder Seers. We are a Beautiful family—we are, we are, we are!” 73 I demur from the prevailing scholarship on Anglo-American commodity aesthetics encapsulated in Jonathan Freedman’s assertion that “Oscar Wilde was in many ways the first literary ‘celebrity,’ the first literary figure who consciously sought to make his career by publicizing himself in and then writing for the new mass-circulation newspapers and women’s magazines of the 1880’s and early 1890’s.” 74 Regenia Gagnier affirms the commercialization of Wilde’s genius as “a marketable ‘talent.’ ” 75 I contend that Wilde was a latecomer rather than an originator. He represented the culmination of the commercial exploitation of the Victorian public’s appetite for aesthetic personalities. Wilde’s first play, Vera, or the Nihilists, had not yet appeared on the boards, though it had been published, when F. C. Burnand’s farce The Colonel and, two months later, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience debuted in 1881. Patience has been misconstrued as a burlesque of Wilde, because Richard D’Oyly Carte cosponsored Wilde’s American tour in 1882 to help publicize the operetta by acquainting Americans with the aesthetic canon. Americans saw through Wilde’s pretense that “he has been instrumental in bringing about the art revival in England. But we all know better than that. He is a mere excrescence of the movement. Its real authors were workers like Eastlake, Morris, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Maddox Brown. Mr. Wilde connects his name with their work apparently with no higher aim than self-glorification.” 76 Professions of Taste has greatly enhanced my understanding of British texts and cultural artifacts; however, I dispute Freedman’s claim that PreRaphaelitism was a narrow “coterie concern” in the 1870s, though not his assessment of Wilde’s role in bringing the movement a wider prominence: “It might be said that Wilde’s par ticu lar ser vice was to vend aestheticism most effectively to the broadest segments of this new, engorged, but increasingly articulated marketplace” (51). This outlook reflects the early reception of Pre-Raphaelitism. The London Journal dubbed the PRB a “sect in art” in 1855: “Pre-Raphaelitism is a fashion of the day—the creed of a sect; and it will never be more.” 77 By 1870, Tom Taylor urged some necessary precaution against the predominance of one school, reproving the Pre- Raphaelites’ tendency toward “close coterieship, embracing the [ 100 ]

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FIGU R E 3.4 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and His Friends, The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Is Heard for the First Time in the Western States of Amer ica, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole 1941.

poets, critics, and painters who are penetrated by its spirit and have accepted its formulas.” 78 By 1876, the prevalence of “pre-Raphaelite painters, pre-Raphaelite poets, pre-Raphaelite novelists, pre-Raphaelite young ladies; pre-Raphaelite hair, eyes, complexion, dress, decorations, window curtains, chairs, tables, knives, forks, and coal-scuttles” convinced The Galaxy that the aesthetic tendency was running amok in London.79 Quilter denounced the contemporary fad of installing parasols in fireplaces and hanging china on the walls: “Our houses continue to assume the appearance of a compromise between a Buddhist temple and a Bond Street F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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curiosity-shop,” evincing a “spurious devotion to whatever is foreign, eccentric, archaic, or grotesque.”80 Wilde did not figure in Quilter’s jeremiad, unless he was meant for an avatar of the Cimabue Browns, Maudle, and Postlethwaite, who did.81 In Henry James’s “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), the “view of art for art” has taken hold as a lifestyle beyond Oxbridge and London: “That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England—as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals.”82 Obviously, this radical reformation of Victorian tastes did not occur abruptly upon Wilde’s debut. In 1848, the PRB had mobilized its membership in order to transform the Victorian public sphere, anticipating the concept of the total work of art. Having remade the Victorian parlor, poetry anthology, and art world, the aesthetic innovations and bohemian lifestyles of Pre-Raphaelite luminaries receded into the background of Victorian cultural memory: “With the dawn of the Nineties Pre-Raphaelitism had become an accepted art convention for those desirous of accepting it, and a subject of indifference for the rest.”83 Why did this happen? Marshaling evidence to support her thesis that Pre-Raphaelitism was, at one time, “synonymous with the avantgarde: it shines like a beacon in the industrial wasteland of Victorian bourgeois kitsch,” Macleod concedes that the movement failed to register as progressive within a few decades of its inception because “they were avant-garde in their defiance of orthodoxy and in their manipulations of the picture plane, but conventional in their oracular expectations of the canon.”84 As the model for Bloomsbury’s Omega workshops, the design concern Morris & Co.’s fortunes illustrate how quickly an innovative and socially responsible undertaking can be undermined by commercial realities. Omega’s founder, Roger Fry, worried that his modernist design collective would, one day, “fizzle out like the Pre-Raphaelites.”85 I offer another, by now self- evident, suggestion: Wilde’s notoriety obscured the contributions of his precursors for the general public, and fans of the PRB were eager to distance the movement from Wilde’s homosexuality. While Freedman is undoubtedly correct that “Wilde’s powers of selfpublicization remind us as well of the close affinities between aestheticism and the institutions of a newly forming mass culture,”86 the incipient promotional machinery of modern advertising, the sale and marketing of aesthetic commodities, and the self-promotion of persons boasting of taste and

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discernment all predated Wilde. Pre-Raphaelitism was virtually synonymous with interior design, dress reform, and tasteful knickknacks. Back in 1850, Dickens excoriated the “Pre-Perspective Brotherhood” for incorporating in order “to swear every P.P.B. [Pre-Perspective Brotherhood] to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on a soup-plate of the willow pattern.”87 Presumably, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Co.—Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and Metals (founded in 1861 to design textiles, furniture, stained glass, and articles for domestic use, manufactured the old-fashioned way, which would not have looked out of place in a medieval manor)— served as the model for The Colonel’s Aesthetic High Art Company, Limited, which had in view the “cultivation of The Ideal as the consummate embodiment of the Real, and to proclaim aloud to a dull, material world the worship of the Lily and the Peacock Feather.” Though instantly legible to the hoi polloi as a style of speech, fashion, painting, building, decorating, and writing, aestheticism stood for the arcane incarnate for both acolytes and enemies, Hellenists and philistines: “A site has been acquired by the Aesthetic Committee, on which will be built a gallery for the exhibition of inspired works of gifted but inaccessible genius”— a.k.a. the Grosvenor Gallery.88 Despite its rarefied trappings, Pre-Raphaelitism readily became a cause célèbre and remained center stage in the culture wars through the 1880s, when aestheticism passed the torch to decadence, symbolism, and eventually modernism. For its critics, Pre-Raphaelitism was a sham promoted by a coterie of charlatans determined to call attention to their friends: “If you’re anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line / as a man of culture rare, / You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, / and plant them everywhere.”89 In The Colonel, “posing” was both a theme and a stage direction. The Colonel and Patience shared the premise that aestheticism was a pose and social calculation: “In short, my medievalism’s affectation, Born of a morbid love of admiration!”90 Bunthorne’s success with the ladies inspired the Dragoon Guards to exchange their martial dress for the dandy’s foppery: “You can’t get high Aesthetic tastes like trousers, ready made. / True views on Medievalism Time alone will bring”; fortunately, they were able to retain their rigid postures and stiff upper lips: “To cultivate the trim Rigidity of limb, / You ought to get a Marionette, / and form your style on him” (84). Wilde was not an admirer of Gothic Revival angularity and awkwardness. Following in Pater’s footsteps, only up to a point, Wilde

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wanted to “forget all the maladies of medievalism,” not pursue them.91 Wilde extolled his predecessors as apostles of beauty but replaced their medieval bric-a-brac with his distinctive accoutrements. Wilde’s penchant for velvet knee britches, capes, and sunflowers influenced the sets and costumes selected for the London premiere of Patience. Superseding Burnand’s farce in receipts and raves, Patience confirmed the way late Victorian attitudes toward Pre-Raphaelitism were trending; it was widely popu lar and the butt of jokes in the wake of the spectacular debut of the Grosvenor Gallery. “Grappling with the Grosvenor” is exemplary of a spate of articles aimed at the general public, which derided Sir Coutts Lindsay’s lavish exhibition of avant-garde art to the segment of the public besotted with “that school of green decay and grim distorted flaccidness.”92 In Patience, Reginald Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” and Archibald Grosvenor, an “idyllic poet,” were patterned after Rossetti, Swinburne, and the clique of painters (Burne-Jones, Hunt, Millais, Hughes, Watts, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Leighton, Poynter, Stanhope, Albert Moore, Sandys, and Whistler) known to exhibit at the “greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery” (90). The poses, “stained-glass attitudes” (61), and aesthetic declarations of the members (and would-be members) of the play’s “Inner Brotherhood” (85) were vintage PRB, suggesting a conflation of early and fleshly waves of the aesthetic movement. Reviewers classed the lion of the Grosvenor, Burne-Jones, with “the Pre-Raphaelite school,” and later credited him with reinvigorating its somewhat tired portfolio; he was said to “re-assert its claims to notice.”93 Within Victorian cultural circles, awareness of Pre-Raphaelite antiquarianism (the tendency to “pooh-pooh whatever’s fresh and new”) coincided with a dawning apprehension of a new type of man with deranged appetites: “An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, Or a nottoo-French French bean!”94 Pre-Raphaelite antiquarianism engendered a spirit of antagonism in reviewers, especially to the erotic content of such work: “This is not classical, this is not mediaeval, feeling and thought; it is fresh strenuous paganism, emasculated by false modern emotionalism. These archaic affectations are more modern, more entirely of the nineteenth century, than is a factory or a Positivist.”95 Though an admirer of Moore’s sturdy classicism, the critic Frederick Wedmore agreed that BurneJones’s enervated Venuses were disfigured by “the exaggeration of a beauty which Greek art recognised— a beauty in which the one sex was not so

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very far removed from the other.” He also decried the painter’s election of a modern ner vous and unhealthy body type as his masculine signature: “His Day, for instance—the haggard and ill-fed youth at the Grosvenor, shivering and nude.” 96 Victorian shorthand for a catchall diagnosis of sexual neurasthenia and deviance, the terms “morbid” and “sickly” functioned as an early homosexual code—“most morbid and sickly art results.”97 Wilde reviewed the inaugural Grosvenor exhibitions while enrolled as a student at Oxford, before moving to London in 1879. On the cusp of Wilde’s celebrity, the Victorian visual, verbal, and dramatic media that satirized Pre-Raphaelitism and mimicked its style seemed both critical and knowing: “Then there’s Mr.  Streyke’s nephew, Basil Giorgione, an effeminate, sneaky sort of creature.” When asked to define Basil’s particular weakness, a young lady responds, “Painting. Look here!”98 With a nod and a wink, the movement’s detractors aligned the counterculture’s aesthetic with gender and sexual alterity. W. B. Yeats understood why Wilde “tricked and clowned to draw attention to himself ”: “Finding himself overshadowed by old famous men he could not attack, for he was of their time and shared its admirations.”99 Indeed, Wilde’s alignment of Pre-Raphaelitism with his own queer aesthetic was no distortion; homosexuality occupied a privileged position within the antibourgeois, antidomestic, modern urban milieu where monadic individualism and couplings outside the bonds of marriage were on the rise. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the artist Basil Hallward announces that Dorian’s personality has suggested to him “an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style”; Basil’s speech is a patchwork of phrases drawn from Rossetti and Pater in extrapolation of this new emotive manner inspired by Dorian: “Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void” (10). Simeon Solomon’s mystical portraits of beautiful young men— personifications of Greek deities and queer biblical subjects— ebulliently document the visual side of Pre-Raphaelite homoeroticism.100 The Pre-Raphaelites anticipated Michel Foucault’s assertion that the homosexual was the modern subject par excellence.101 Conjuring Solomon’s practice and Pater’s theory, Hallward declares, “What the invention of

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FIGU R E  3.5 Simeon Solomon, Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 1859. Pen, black and brown ink over traces of pencil on paper. Image © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinoüs was to late Greek sculpture, the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me” (10). To quote Wilde: “The new individualism is the new Hellenism”; homoerotic art the intensest expression of individuality.102 Well before Wilde became a household name, coterie journalism, plays, satirical cartoons, and critical reviews appearing in periodicals and even in mass- circulation newspapers disseminated the trappings of PreRaphaelitism: “What is perhaps most remarkable in all this is the pervasive influence of what John Morley called a ‘sect of cultivated people’ who radically changed British taste in the period; people for whom art seemed to offer an alternative to religious belief and for whom androgyny became a model for both genders.”103 Victorian critics of the social and commercial properties of Pre-Raphaelitism aligned publicity, careerism, and [ 106 ]

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FIGU R E 3.6 George Du Maurier, The Mutual Admirationists, 1880. Image © Punch

Limited.

sexual nonconformity in depictions of the British avant-garde, as it discreetly sought notoriety and influence. In 1864, Du Maurier applauded Rossetti’s indifference to fame; even then, the caricaturist had misgivings about the PRB’s craving for celebrity. By 1880, Du Maurier was satirizing the “mutual-admiration societies” decried by Buchanan, Quilter, McCarthy, the Saturday Review, and others.104 Burnand echoed this criticism of Pre-Raphaelite personality cults in The Colonel: “And of this ultra preRaphaelite, mock-hysteric, super-aesthetic school of art, Mr. Streyke is an apostle” (10). In the spectrum of responses to the ancillary qualities of the creative individual, here was evidence of an anxious redefinition of his public role. The anatomization of aesthetic celebrity was the culture-work Du Maurier performed in Punch.105 After the Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851), the enhanced profile of the art critic and the bourgeoisie’s desire for paintings and bibelots gave rise to cranks posing as aficionados: “Dilettante tastes, acquired or pretended to be acquired” circumscribed the unmanly affectations and social ambitions of the aesthetic coteries.106 In The Colonel, Professor Lambert Streyke and his nephew, Basil Giorgione, a chemist’s F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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assistant impersonating an aesthete, prattle on about “the Beauty of the Inexpressible” (12), “Intensity,” “the Ideal,” and “the Beauty of Decay” in a pitch-perfect imitation of Du Maurier’s Maudle, which is unsurprising considering that Burnand was editor of Punch (11). Pursuing economic gain and social advantage, The Colonel’s villains demonstrate how aestheticism provided cultural capital for producers and consumers of art. In consequence, it could not shake its association with the parvenu, a stereotype fostered by the print culture and in the per for mance spaces addressed to the middle class: “He’s one of your art impostors, always surrounded by admiring washed- out females with hair like birds’ nests, die-away, languishing looks, a sort of old tapestry complexion, long lank hands, upturned noses—‘tip-tilted’ they call them— and faded brick- dust gowns of the severest medieval or classic pattern.”107 In this manner, bourgeois complacency took aim at the restless and invidious aesthete, through the concatenation of exotic purchasing habits, bizarre self-presentation, and sterility, a synonym for same-sex love. Self-fashioning and aesthetic careerism threatened Myers’s conception of the hieratic function of art. Conceding that the aesthetic movement was more than a passing fashion, Myers attacked the “inevitable parasites of a rapidly-rising cause” essaying to cash in on the “social distinction” of genuinely cultivated men by mouthing platitudes about the mysteries of art.108 In contrast to his straight-backed colonels and strapping bachelors— alpha males all, with bristling mustachios—Du Maurier’s simpering striplings and their wide-hipped admirers attract women through an unmanly interest in decor, art, and literature rather than through an elemental virility. Even when they are not complete frauds, Du Maurier’s aesthetes pay for their intellectual refinement with physical deliquescence. Where is the humor in Du Maurier’s satire, Distinguished Amateurs—2. The Art-Critic, if popular audiences cannot discern a fay sensibility behind the lisping hyperbole of Prigsby regarding “the head of that supremest masterpiece of Greek sculptchah, the Ilyssus”? Dandified and monocled, Prigsby is unfavorably contrasted with “our gallant friend the Colonel,” whose flaring mustache, erect posture, and broad-shouldered physique, tapering at the waist, betoken virility and self-discipline.109 Watching his friends coo over Prigsby, “The Colonel declares that the whole thing makes him sick,” but how to account for the Colonel’s aesthetic headache if it is not reinforced by homophobia? Drawn with a “width of hip” reminiscent of Rossetti’s physique,110 Du Maurier’s archetypal aesthete Maudle triggers a herme[ 108 ]

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FIGU R E  3.7 George Du Maurier, A Love Agony. Design by Maudle, 1880. Image ©

Punch Limited.

neutics of suspicion around same-sex artistic collaboration. A Love-Agony,111 by designer-writer Maudle, features the verses of Jellaby Postlethwaite, who posed for the reclining Narcissus during a bout of food poisoning. Listless, long-necked, bow-lipped, and partially clad, the model savors of a Solomon cartoon with a male odalisque or a Rossetti damozel in drag. A Love-Agony is a transparent allusion to the collaborative ventures among Solomon, Swinburne, and Burne-Jones, as well as to Rossetti’s doubleworks of art. In addition to critical puffs and memorials, Du Maurier’s satire on aestheticism illustrates yet another modality through which the legend of Rossetti and his homophile circle was promulgated: caricature and lampoon. In deference to his cherished bohemian identity, Rossetti feigned indifference to the marketplace. He felt emasculated by criticism and covertly schemed for recognition. Within the space of a generation, a revolution in gendered and sexual subjectivities changed the face of celebrity. Wilde required no camouflage in pursuit of fame; he embraced the commercial F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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exploitation of high culture. Demonstrating the cross-pollination of notoriety and insincerity, of Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism, Du Maurier lampooned Wilde in Punch as the poet-poseur Postlethwaite, protégé of the jowly aesthetic humbug Maudle, whom Wilde would resemble in later years. Unsparing in his critique of Wilde’s “hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about,” the Hungarian physician Max Nordau underscored the intercalation of publicity, gender deviance, and sexual neurasthenia.112 Author of the international bestseller Degeneration (1892), Nordau attributed the high incidence of ner vous disease in contemporary Europe to the dissemination of unhygienic ideas and overstimulating cultural forms, including PreRaphaelitism. As the professed scourge of avant-garde movements, from Wagnerism to naturalism, Nordau located Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism on a decadent continuum, a thesis bolstered by the misbehavior and “insane” ideation of the figureheads, Rossetti, Swinburne, Ruskin, and Wilde. Nordau described Ruskin as “one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and one of the most power ful masters of style, of the present century.” For Nordau, Ruskin’s passion for laying down precepts (“He is the Torquemada of aesthetics”) was a symptom of degeneration rather than of priggishness; Ruskin was a recognizable pathological type, classed with the “emotionalists,” including Rossetti and Swinburne, in Nordau’s casebook (77). Nordau’s insistence on the continuity between Ruskin’s sermonizing and Wilde’s fame-seeking illuminates the cultural context, in which champions of the PRB strove to insulate the fraternity from the epicene taint of late aestheticism: “A great deal of harm was done to the cause which Rossetti represented, the whole-hearted pursuit of beauty, by the affectations and absurdities introduced, after, and even before, his death, by a group of self-elected followers.”113 Arthur Benson plied the English Men of Letters series, producing multiple volumes. Reviewing Benson’s Walter Pater (1906), the Wilde loyalist Robert Ross demurred over Benson’s erasure of Pater’s friendships with the homosexuals Wilde, Solomon, and Oscar Browning. Ross noted that Benson was even “careful to insist on the divergence between Rossetti and Pater.”114 This was a case of retrospective fear of guilt by association. In his biography of Rossetti, Benson complained that the “epigoni” (a term of disparagement in Benson’s vocabulary, elsewhere signifying “offspring” or “latecomers”) were “lowering the moral standard” of aestheticism because they desired “above all things monstrari digito, to be pointed out as daring innovators and contemners of existing conventions” [ 110 ]

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(216). Benson did not have to mention Wilde by name to connect the charge with him. Emulating the magnetic personalities and antisocial tendencies of the Pre-Raphaelites, the epigoni were said to hollow out their practical reforms by cultivating a shallow and insincere bohemianism rather than techniques or ideas. Asking “the reader’s pardon for using a word which has been so draggled by absurd imitators,” another critic absolved Gabriel of the affectation and extravagance noteworthy among his followers: “Rossetti’s intensity is a thing of genius, not to be compassed by Du Maurier’s ‘Postlethwayte,’ who can only get so far as to be hysterical.”115 Without question, Wilde was superior to other infatuated imitators. Benson ignored mid-century broadsides against Pre-Raphaelite attention-seeking behav ior. Wilde plotted the course of his career mindful of the attentiongrabbing strategies of his predecessors and their cliques. In a sense, Wilde learned the practical value of notoriety from the Pre-Raphaelites.

Reception Theory: Modern Reception I am guided by a historically grounded textual hermeneutics. Hans- Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method theorizes reception as a conversation between a text’s past and present mediated by the reader.116 Because every age interprets cultural forms by its own lights and values, the text is modified in the reading process. Gadamer cautions readers to remain attentive to the current standards shaping comprehension of historical artifacts. He also refutes the unexamined idealism of the original reader’s special insight. A text may be ahead of its time, mystifying its first audience. The avant-garde text awaits the advent of the right conditions (for example, the incorporation of novel techniques and content within the audience’s “horizon of expectations”) to be fully appreciated. In keeping with Jauss’s notion that “a literary past can return only when a new reception draws it back into the present,”117 I will examine Pre-Raphaelitism’s conversation with various iterations of modernist ideology. T. S. Eliot’s “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” is a good illustration of an idea copyrighted for posterity by Eliot’s fame, which actually has an older provenance.118 Pater’s writings summoned echoes of the ancient world, faintly heard from a great distance or mediated by a unique temperament (such as Winckelmann’s). Illustrating the shift from epochal conceptions of history to more dynamic approaches, F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Pater reimagined being in the world as the experience of temporality itself, the synchronous perception of creation, entropy, and death. A reader of Kant, Pater shrank the field of human endeavor to the narrow framework of the Kantian subject. Pater investigated the “Renaissance” as a phi losopher might approach an “ontological category, a state of being present at different moments of history between the twelfth century and our own ‘modern’ moment.”119 In The Renaissance, Pater announced his discovery of an “outbreak of the human spirit,” presaged by the love of physical beauty, worship of the body, and the breakdown of the repressive religious system of the Middle Ages, which could be traced back to an “earlier Renaissance within the middle age itself,” in defiance of historical rubrics.120 As the foremost exponent of avant-garde antiquarianism, Pater extolled Morris’s oeuvre as “neither a mere reproduction of Greek or mediaeval life or poetry, nor a disguised reflex of modern sentiment,” but a transfiguring idealism, which refines and combines ideals of the present and past by stacking time.121 Lacking what Yeats called a “power of emotional construction,” Pound followed in Pater’s footsteps through his stacked-time or symphonic approach to temporality in The Cantos: “There is no transmission through time, we pass without comment from ancient Greece to modern England, from modern England to medieval China; the symphony, the pattern, is timeless, flux eternal.”122 Pater’s dictum “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”123 inspired the formalist criteria employed by editor, curator, and art critic Roger Fry. Fry’s notion of musicality, or the interplay between pure form and abstract harmony— graceful linear patterns and arrangements of hues— derives from Pater.124 Fry’s objectivist bias favored “significant and expressive form” or pure form, free and clear of personal and literary associations, symbols, and the like.125 Pure art was thought to achieve its effect through a “concentration of feeling” or intensity of visual appreciation on the artist’s part, ratified by the viewer’s sensation of immediacy at second hand.126 In Pater’s handling, Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris and Morris’s Defence of Guenevere were unshackled from their plotlines to communicate a spirit of reverie and delirium through the critic’s word painting. For a moment, Pater’s ostensible subjects, a novel and a volume of poetry, dissolved and rematerialized as painting: “The strangest creations of sleep seem here, by some appalling license, to cross the limit of the dawn. The English poet too has learned the secret. He has diffused through King Arthur’s Tomb the maddening [ 112 ]

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white glare of the sun, and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down—the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish. The colouring is intricate and delirious, as of scarlet lilies.”127 Pater pursued a level of abstraction in which the mode of handling, color, and form appeal to sense and take precedence over meaning and mimesis. According to Yeats, Pater had the “entire uncritical admiration” of the generation of writers coming of age circa 1900.128 Ironically, Eliot was reluctant to acknowledge his debt to this Victorian predecessor, who fervently embraced his own precursors. While Eliot suffered from the anxiety of influence (“insecurity caused by a magnified riot of forms in literature proper that drives the notions of originality and self-possession to the brink of their own (im)possibility in the production of prose and verse alike”129), Pater disported himself with visions of queer tutelage, both local (Brasenose College) and canonical. In The Myth of the Modern, Perry Meisel describes Eliot’s “violent repression” and deceptive incorporation of Pater’s theorization of the dynamic tradition—the present actively reconstituting the past; the role of the past in the formation of any new poem (71). However, avant-garde antiquarianism was a prime specimen of Pre-Raphaelite brainwork, not Pater’s sole invention. The PRB revalued conventional iconography (substituting new meanings for old signs and employing old signs for new meanings). This bricolage, or “art of assemblage,” shocked its first audience, which admired progress and mistrusted anachronism.130 Before Pater or Gadamer, the PreRaphaelites attempted to fuse horizons, to transpose the concepts and practices of the past onto their own situation and problems. The PreRaphaelites renewed rather than simply recapitulated the arts of the Middle Ages. In turn, they were transformed by their engagement with Florentine art, which inspired their deviation from the conventional rules of picture making. This was the thrust of Ruskin’s defense of the PRB in 1851; their works represented a return to “archaic honesty” rather than a return to “archaic art.”131 In 1855, Gautier made a similar point, observing: “What distinguishes Mr. Millais’s works from comparable attempts is that he does not merely reproduce more or less successfully old paintings in facsimile, but rather studies nature with the soul and the eyes of an artist of the fifteenth century.”132 Ruskin commended “frank anachronism” in “The Nature of Gothic,” turning a perceived defect into a selling point: “The best art either represents the facts of its own day, or, if facts of the past, expresses them with accessories of the time in which the work was done. All good art, representing past events, is therefore full of the most frank anachronism, F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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and always ought to be. No painter has any business to be an antiquarian. We do not want his impressions or suppositions respecting things that are past. We want his clear assertions respecting things present.”133 The methodology of modern medievalism invoked tradition with the present as a reference point, distinguishing Pre-Raphaelitism from uncomplicated historicism. Regarding the “charming anachronisms” of Morris’s oeuvre, Pater explained that while the poet “handles an ancient subject, [he] never becomes an antiquarian, but animates his subject by keeping it always close to himself, that between whiles we have a sense of English scenery as from an eye well practised under Wordsworth’s influence.”134 The artist achieved a fusion of horizons by establishing a connection, through intuition or appreciation, between his own ideas and those of the past, as if he were holding a conversation or performing “the transposition that the concepts of the past undergo when we try to think in them.”135 Gadamer’s formulation of the reversibility of chronological time illuminates the brainwork behind Pre-Raphaelitism’s jarring configurations of temporality in paintings, poetry, and prose. Elaborating on the “pseudoclassic” disposition of Moore’s “hybrid Greek fancies,” critic William Davies was perplexed by Moore’s introduction of discordant elements, such as a modern violin, into pictures of sculpturesque figures with Grecian lineaments, “which has pretty much the same effect as a modern bonnet would have had on the head of Aspasia.”136 If we think of art and literature as models of reality belonging to discrete epochs, the stacked-time approach can disclose the arbitrary nature of the axioms and norms that govern dayto-day real ity. When two such systems are placed side by side, so-called natural or immutable laws come into conflict, stripping away their universal validity and permitting audiences to take their mea sure. Meditating on the transitory nature of experience, the evanescence of all that once seemed solid and permanent, the Pre-Raphaelites insinuated modern anxieties into their medieval (or classical) cartoons and sonnet cycles. Describing the stress of modern life as a goad to the invention of a new careworn and morbid countenance in modern art, Wedmore elected Burne-Jones the master painter of the new type: “the beauty of the Future— a beauty, by-the-by, of which at all events we should have had a foretaste in the weary subtlety of Leonardo’s women. If it were true, Mr. Burne Jones’s conscious recession into the past would be an unconscious advance into the future.”137 Wedmore’s “one step back, two steps forward” logic compactly denoted the dynamic of modern medievalism. Wedmore lifted his ideas directly [ 114 ]

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out of The Renaissance, where Pater described Leonardo’s women as “clairvoyants, through whom, as through delicate instruments, one becomes aware of the subtler forces of nature” (74). The Pre-Raphaelites’ contemporaries and near descendants recognized a radically new visual language and subjectivity in their work, whether audiences approved or disapproved of what they saw. Dreamy and lachrymose as their art appeared, morbid and antiquated in literary form, PreRaphaelitism was still considered a remedy for Victorian inanition and the epoch’s stultification of modern impulses due to its keynote “emotional intensity in expression.”138 Rossetti’s portraits of “stunners” packed a jolt of creative and sexual excitement. Rossetti’s Venetian portraits deprived viewers of the safe haven of physical and moral distance. Defying convention, the voluminous femmes fatales projected into the viewer’s space rather than receding into the picture’s background.139 Encountering several of Rossetti’s larger paintings in a private collection, a contributor to The Edinburgh Review was taken aback by the faces of the women: “sensual, almost animal in expression; women with great red lips and abnormally long necks, unlike anything in nature”; yet the canvases “produced on us an impression of astonishment at their power of colour and their extraordinary novelty of style.”140 The visceral response of Rossetti or Swinburne’s literary heirs to aspects of their craft and subject matter, while by no means homogeneous, also has a story to tell. Describing Pre-Raphaelitism’s quintessentially modern spirit, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated the movement as a revolution, “a breaking up, a violence” against the staid and conventional. Hopkins’s assessment of Rossetti’s poetry was tinged with sexual frisson, suggestive of psychical androgyny in the Jesuit poet: “the language of strange masculine genius which suddenly, as it were, forces its way into the domain of poetry, without naturally having a right there.”141 Perhaps Hopkins imagined himself a blushing acolyte of Calliope stunned by Rossetti’s coarse vernacular and frank treatment of prostitution in “Jenny”: “Nor flagrant man-swine whets his tusk; / But delicately sighs in musk / The homage of the dim boudoir; / Or like a palpitating star.”142 Hopkins’s twentieth- century interlocutor, critic Jerome Buckley, charges that the Pre-Raphaelites’ prestige, and the “medieval vogue” the Pre-Raphaelites inspired, impeded the serious artistic treatment of contemporary life until the 1890s. Buckley’s preference for literary realism obscures the quality of social relevance implicit in Hopkins’s encomium—the reappraisal of Victorian gender roles, mores, F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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and sexuality. Even Buckley, who is dubious of Pre-Raphaelitism’s claim to social relevance, admits that their “medievalized” art somehow “left its distinct mark on the far from Pre-Raphaelite generation of Joyce and Ezra Pound. And Rossetti’s personal alienation from the present and nostalgia for a more coherent past, whatever form of expression they took, foreshadowed almost every modern poet’s disaffection with an unaesthetic modern world” (137). Rossetti’s self-described dilemma (“soulless self-reflections of man’s skill”143) struck Yeats as protomodern. Alienation and boredom, especially the latter, are a modern predicament: “The more vivid his nature, the greater his boredom, a boredom no Greek, no Elizabethan, knew in like degree, if at all.”144 Where the PRB had professed the aim of redeeming society, Rossetti scarcely dared hope for the redemption of the single individual. For him, the redemption of society through art proved an illusion. Jauss’s theory of the waning of the “original negativity of the work” over time, wherein the formal innovations causing frisson in the first audience disappear for later viewers or readers, provides a compelling postmortem on the fate of Pre-Raphaelitism.145 In 1895, a contributor to the Saturday Review felt it was his “duty to call attention strongly” to William Rossetti’s invaluable and authoritative chronicle of his late brother Gabriel, a forgotten figure: “The feverish curiosity about him which existed during his lifetime has abated, and the deeper interest, which future generations will feel concerning one who did so much to turn into fresh channels the currents of our art and poetry, has hardly commenced.”146 Fiona MacCarthy documents, through auction prices, a decline in Burne-Jones’s reputation. In 1898, Love and the Pilgrim was purchased for £5,775; in 1940, it was sold for £21.147 Auction prices for Pre-Raphaelite paintings did not rebound until the 1960s. Between 1920 and 1960, Pre-Raphaelitism fell into the category Jauss calls “enjoyable culinary art” for nonacademic audiences, “so that it requires a special effort to read them ‘against the grain’ of the accustomed experience to catch sight of their artistic character once again” (26). Riding the coattails of the Gothic Revival, modern medievalism fomented all kinds of misconceptions about the aesthetic movement and continues to bedevil advocates of its modernity. Pre-Raphaelite originality was an incitement to imitation and, thereby, a precursor to obsolescence as a vanguard British brand. Finally, the movement was outpaced in novelty by French impressionism. Understandably, post-Armory Show (1913), it was difficult to see Pre-Raphaelitism as an experimental genre akin to Postim[ 116 ]

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pressionism. The invisible brushstrokes, enameled finish, and literary qualities of Pre-Raphaelite painting obscured its originality. Given Roger Fry’s disparagement of associative mechanisms in art, it is hard to believe that he “never sympathized with the impressionist attacks on literary painting,” as he claimed; however, in 1916, this champion of the avant-garde hailed Gabriel Rossetti as a “forerunner of the new ideas.”148 In The Wedding of St. George and Princess Sabra (1857), Rossetti repudiated standard perspective by organizing his composition in a pattern of overlapping rectangles, the “shingle style” later identified with the work of Cezanne.149 By blocking recession into the picture background and distorting the scale or relation of the principal figures to their setting, Rossetti impeded the viewer’s ability to gain “a coherent optical summary” of a painting crowded with surface detail.150 The flattened visual field is one of the salient features of modern art, a feature Pre-Raphaelitism shares with impressionism. Fry delighted in Rossetti’s decisive and inspired handling of the trappings of medieval chivalry, his sense of contour and experiments with values and relations of color with respect to the furniture of his watercolors: “What is surprising is that this antiquarian curiosity inspires real design.” Fry decided that Rossetti’s designs appeared “definite and truly expressive almost exactly in proportion as he was concerned with the accessories of his drama.” However, when Rossetti treated the dramatic situation or central theme of his picture, Fry claimed, “His form fell to pieces, he became a mere illustrator and not a very good one” (100). Characteristically, Fry objected to Rossetti’s descriptive realism and emphasis on psychological expression. Fry explained that it was a matter of indifference to him where the “inspiration for harmonious and expressive form came from”—from the contemplation of the kaleidoscope of external vision or from the soul’s stock of visionary images. Starting from the images that legend stirred within him, Rossetti “came nearer than any artist of the time to that close-knit unity of design which distinguishes all pure art” (109). My larger point is that although Fry saw beyond the selfevident medievalism of Rossetti’s paintings in order to appreciate their formal quality of newness, he also found it necessary to superimpose his own values on Rossetti’s work in order to do so. Hence Pre-Raphaelitism’s reception history entails a continuous process of refinement, realignment, and reciprocal influence. The historical record is a repository of iconic statements about Pre-Raphaelitism, from different periods, each proclaiming its acumen and belying its bias. F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Evelyn Waugh told readers that Rossetti’s rare flashes of brilliance (“Rossetti’s art, at fitful moments, flames into the exquisite beauty of Beata Beatrix”) presented a “problem that modern aesthetics does not seem capable of coping with.”151 Waugh had no recourse to formal or technical explanations, such as the relations of linear form and color. As a literary man, Waugh lacked what only a handful of (early) twentieth- century art critics possessed— a strategy for describing the formal innovations of PreRaphaelitism. Instead of limning the mysteries of the flat picture plane, Waugh ventured the formulation “aesthetic emotion,” or “intensity of the emotion,” as the gauge by which the value of the work of art could be assessed (222). Patently indebted to Victorian aesthetic criteria, Waugh’s terminology also resonated with Fry’s theory of “aesthetic emotion,” if not “significant form.” Ezra Pound used the phrase “emotional intensity” in 1919 to denote Rossetti’s fidelity to the spirit of the Italian poets despite the “purple plush and molasses trimmings” found in his translations.152 The perceived interdependency among the arts (as in the literary topicality of many paintings) licensed Waugh’s literary critical approach to the fine arts. Yet it was Rossetti’s iconic status as a celebrity painter-poet that determined Waugh’s outlook. Balking at an endorsement of the aesthetic career of Rossetti, a man of “ill-organization” who verged on being a “psychopathic case” (227), Waugh signaled Rossetti’s ongoing cultural importance as an exemplary bohemian: “By no means the least of the advantages to be gained from a study of Rossetti is the stimulus it gives to one’s restiveness in an era of competent stultification” (226). Resisting the stereotyped conformity of his era in two disciplines, Rossetti anticipated the modern impulse as defined by Pound: “Trying to express things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the colour-sense) of his contemporaries.”153 Pound’s words may be read literally as an invocation of Rossetti, whose “twofold greatness” stamped his paintings with “the splendour, or richness, or lurid quality of the colour, which is the perfect counterpart of the dominant feeling.”154 “The greatest colourist of modern times,” according to William Sharp, Rossetti combined the pitfalls of genius as understood by Victorians with the kind of overreaching described by Pound. As Sharp wrote, “At one period of his artistic career [Rossetti] found his colour sense intoxicated.”155 In contrast, the poet John Masefield praised the hallucinatory power of Rossetti’s double-work of art to transfer agency to the audience, which participated [ 118 ]

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in creative visualization: “The poet takes you to a place so seen that it can be painted, among presences so known that they can be felt.” Rossetti’s ekphrastic poetry suggested word-pictures to his audience, a modern note: “A new world is opened to the reader in these six lines; a new life is suggested to him; a new way of thought made real.”156 In conclusion, this chapter surveys high modernism’s covert appropriation of Pre-Raphaelite forebears (as enemies of utility and morality) and queer modernism’s embrace of Pre-Raphaelite influence. Tracing a genealogy of key terms employed by or about the Pre-Raphaelites, such as “sincerity,” “emotional intensity,” and “aesthetic emotion,” we can chart this appropriation, while remaining mindful of the outsize role sexual nonconformity and bohemian celebrity played in accounts of Pre-Raphaelitism through the 1920s.

Novelty in the “Wrong” Place: Pre-Raphaelite Perversity Discussing Rossetti’s sonnet sequence “Willowwood,” Masefield approximated the charge of philosophical hermeneutics in layman’s terms by isolating the Victorian “text’s quality of newness” or contemporaneity157: “These were very famous among us when I was young; they were known to all of us by heart. Fifty years, ten of them among the worst the world has known, have made them perhaps less regarded by the spirit of man than formerly; the survivors from my time understand them better, and rank them higher now; Time has proved them.”158 Just as PRB painting was susceptible to mismeasure by the yardstick of French impressionism, Pre-Raphaelite literary innovation paled when judged by the benchmarks of literary realism and modernism. With the advent of modernism, the emphasis shifted away from personality and back to the work. Rossetti’s oeuvre was indubitably the visual and verbal record of his experience of love and loss: “As souls disused in death’s sterility.”159 As an objective correlative for bohemian individuality, Rossetti’s poetry could not be repackaged along lines consonant with the impersonality of art thesis or modernist prosody. In Beauty’s Body, Kathy Psomiades argues that the autonomy the PreRaphaelites demanded for their art and poetry was specifically “grounded in and figured through the violation of bourgeois codes of sexual morality.” Underscoring the connection between Swinburne’s validation of art F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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for art’s sake and the perverse blasphemous content of his poetry, Psomiades declares: “Artistic autonomy and perverse sexuality are thus mutually supportive, and they result in the perversion of art and the aestheticization of the perverse.”160 By the 1890s, bohemian celebrity overshadowed the originality and negativity of avant-garde endeavor. The incomplete nature of this revolution in taste and lifestyle produced paradoxical or hybrid by-products: reclusive celebrities, antibourgeois artists creating wall furniture for nouveaux riches industrialists, modern medievalists, sincere poseurs, and bohemian homophobes. Instigating category mistakes at every critical juncture, tension rather than synthesis, Pre-Raphaelite innovation cannot be tidily compartmentalized. The concatenation of modern and medieval content and formal elements is difficult to tease apart. Noting that it was the fashion to speak only of Swinburne’s “defects,” Pound declared, “There are in Swinburne fine passages, like fragments of fine marble statues; there are fine transcripts from the Greek.”161 Apart from Swinburne’s skill as a classicist, Pound recognized his “rhythm building faculty,” likening the innovative rhythms of “Dolores” to the sound of “horses’ hooves being pulled out of mud”: “Swinburne’s surging and leaping dactyllics had no comparable forerunners in English.” Pound also praised the modern urgency of Swinburne’s provocations against a jaded cultural palate: “At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-mâché era, in a time swarming with Longellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons” (293). In spite of his ringing endorsement of Swinburne’s contentious spirit and “magnificent passion for liberty” (294), Pound rejected Swinburne as a model. Swinburne’s churning lyr ics and exquisite music were bereft of ideas and mired in solipsism. Swinburne cared more for the sound of words than their meaning; Pound deprecated linguistic abstraction and pushed for clarity in poetic diction. Pound’s aesthetic merged form and function, imparting scientific objectivity to the poet in keeping with his theory of the impersonality of art: “The best artist is the man whose machinery can stand the highest voltage” and produce “order-giving vibrations” of the emotions passing through him.162 Pound’s former lover and student, H. D., mimicked this cool and calculating theory of poetic inspiration in Paint It Today, where her alter ego, Midget, ogled the Venus de Milo (“She dared not follow the curve of the white belly”) while her companion prattled on about the “work of art [being] the materialization of the electric force of the artist, electric force plus the directing impetus [ 120 ]

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FIGU R E 3.8 Ernest Howard Shepard, The Pre-Raphaelite Cocktail Party (A Thought That Came to Our Artist After Visiting the William Morris Centenary Exhibition), 1934. Image © Punch Limited.

of the intellect.”163 The wider reception history of Pre-Raphaelitism corroborates a struggle between queer partisanship and homophobic backlash. The modernists variously embraced or rejected the optics of Victorian sexual alterity. Ernest Howard Shepard’s The Pre-Raphaelite Cocktail Party (1934) contributes a louche and modern feel to its reminiscence of Pre-Raphaelite salon culture, complete with tousled women and longhaired men in aesthetic costume.164 Prizing cool and intellect, the high modernists of London literary circles wanted nothing to do with Swinburne’s “Faustine,” even as they shored up their bohemian credentials with a “fashionable bisexuality.”165 The most influential tradition within modernist criticism disparaged Victorian poetry. Yet modernism was evidently in vibrant dialogue with late Victorian culture. Pound was eager to exploit the heterosexual sensationalism of PreRaphaelite art and poetry, devoting a subsection of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1883) and reminiscences of the Fleshly School controversy. Invoking Gautier in “Yeux Glauques” (“glauque” was a favorite word, appearing as “l’oeil glauque” in Mademoiselle F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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de Maupin),166 Pound adopts Gautier’s conceit: The eye is simultaneously an organ of “vision” and an object of “beauty.” Pound pays homage to the perennial vitality of the ways of seeing (and ideals of beauty) introduced by the precursors of modernism. Pound parlays the Pre-Raphaelite “sister arts” of painting and poetry into a rumination on the dynamic tradition: “The Burne-Jones cartons / Have preserved her eyes; / Still, at the Tate, they teach / Cophetua to rhapsodize.”167 The painting is eternally present, a relic or monument (“still”) free to form connections with new audiences, a notion implicit in the poet’s rhapsodic tone and shift to the present tense. This was no idle conceit. Following Burne-Jones’s death in 1898, King Cophetua was selected by the Memorial Committee and presented to the nation as a gift to grace the new Tate Gallery as a modern masterwork. Not all references to the painting were reverential. Back in 1884, the illustrated weekly Fun caricatured Burne-Jones’s “grand work” as seen from the philistine perspective of its fictional correspondents: “The maid must have lived in a great many casual wards to have acquired that green, gaunt, half-starved appearance.”168 In 1908, Bernard Partridge’s retro Gothic illustration of Lord Asquith, PM, acceding dubiously to the demands of a glowering suffragette in beggarly dress, reprised Burne-Jones’s picture.169 Punch again poked fun at Burne-Jones’s signature work three-quarters of a century after its completion, with every confidence that a mass audience would grasp the allusion. In Masterpieces of Victorian Art Restored, Her First Audition (1954), Norman Mansbridge updated and degraded the setting (transposed from a church to a music hall) of King Cophetua’s rapt attention to the maiden. The innocence of the original image was retroactively marred by the new situation. Significantly, the expressions of the central figures had not been revised at all; however, the countenance of Punch’s stage man ager, King Cophetua manqué, was masculinized and coarsened—no five o’clock shadows on Burne-Jones’s androgynous men.170 For Eliot, Swinburne’s expressive individuality was a source of greatness that nevertheless inspired fatigue in modern readers. Novel and daring for a Victorian, Swinburne did contribute something that “will not turn out to be a fraud,” a case of damning with faint praise if ever there was one.171 Swinburne’s “diffuseness” or verbosity contradicted every modernist tenet regarding verbal economy and concentration. According to Eliot, Swinburne’s genius was that of the special case. As a technician, Swinburne precociously deconstructed the healthy relationship of words to objects to achieve his surreal and musical effects. Pre-Raphaelite reveries shared key [ 122 ]

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FIGU R E 3.9 Edward

Coley Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884. Oil on canvas. Image © Tate, London 2015. Presented by subscribers, 1900.

FIGURE  3.10 Norman Mansbridge, Her First Audition, 1954. Image © Punch

Limited.

compositional qualities with self-consciously modern works of dematerialized pure art, such as fluidity (“For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake”172 ) and vaporousness (Swinburne’s “burning mists”). If abstraction is the negation of objective description, among other definitions, then Swinburne’s “diffuseness” (his “beauty of music” absent a “beauty of content”) should have marked him as protomodern, a verbose English Mallarmé.173 It was the modernist taste for intensification rather [ 124 ]

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than expansion of aesthetic emotion that barred Swinburne’s relevance; his love of word heaps precluded the perfect poetry of a finely wrought image “balanced on a razor edge of meaning,” in Stephen Spender’s exquisite phrase.174 Words without objective correlatives, words unsupported by objective reality, produced “statements [like those] made in our dreams”—but Eliot’s generation hungered after a vernacular poetry with contemporary reference points.175 Yeats claimed that “Eliot has produced his great effect upon his generation because he has described men and women that get out of bed or into it from mere habit; in describing this life that has lost heart his own art seems grey, cold, dry.” For Yeats, Eliot’s rebellion against Victorianism went too far, another puritan challenge to excess ornamentation and sentiment in the war to purify the “poetical diction of everybody.” Yeats, however, disliked aspects of Victorian verse that annoyed Eliot. Portraying Hopkins as “typical of his generation where most opposed to mine,” Yeats complained that his “meaning is like some faint sound that strains the ear, comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, goes back into words, his manner a last development in poetical diction.”176 The same criticism was levied at Swinburne: “As to Swinburne’s verses, I agree with you—they are ‘florid impotence,’ to my taste—the minimum of thought and idea in the maximum of words and phraseology.”177 Eliot valorized formal abstraction and technical rigor (the poet’s mind is a receptacle for storing impressions and a filament for conducting them) over the poetic exploration of the inner standing point, and this preference has been accepted as a Maginot Line dividing the high modernists’ aesthetic principles from those of their Victorian predecessors. As Jerome McGann claims, this binary notion of aestheticism in all its incarnations—as decorative, rhetorical, and sensation driven rather than concept driven like modernism—fueled Eliot’s critique of Rossetti’s poetry, in particular, and modernism’s critique of aestheticism, in general.178 Eliot’s adamantine rejection of Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, and decadence obscured his indebtedness to the Victorians’ fluid conception of tradition, a point also taken up by James Eli Adams.179 Where Eliot disparaged Rossetti’s translations of Dante as “Pre-Raphaelite tapestry,”180 Sidney Colvin praised Rossetti for having “the courage and the art to attain, by at need resigning fidelity of the letter, an inner and more vital fidelity of the spirit.”181 Colvin described Rossetti’s “attraction to mediaevalism [as] in part merely one man’s share in the claim made by modern mankind to its heritage in the entire past,” a notion consistent with modernist theory and practice. Moreover, Colvin’s romantic F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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characterization of the universality of imagination absolved Rossetti of nostalgia: “It is an idle and enervating thing to entertain any practical hankering after a return to the Middle Age, and its modes of thought and life” (41). Contemporary scholarship stresses Rossetti’s cynicism regarding the possibility of harmony between man and world. Rossetti’s notion of the “inner standing point”182 grounds representation in “an affective relation to experience,” the dramatic interest of which inheres in the contradictory emotions of the speaker, decimating his “presumptive privilege of self-identity.”183 In “Jenny,” Rossetti annulled the sympathetic contract of romantic poetry articulated in Keats’s famous declaration, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.”184 By refashioning the “romantic lyric of sincerity” into a dramatic monologue expressing feelings of doubt and uncertainty about the regenerative possibilities of love,185 Rossetti treated the poem as a space for reflecting on moral problems, not resolving them for the reader. Similarly, Swinburne’s masochistic lyric defied the Victorian precept of the redemptive powers of love, which held sway during the 1830s and 1840s among the advanced set.186 Eliot’s ideal of impersonal art (“For it is not the greatness, the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts”) was reactively reinforced by his attempt to distance himself from the sensuous pessimism of the Fleshly School: “One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.”187 Taking cover among literary axioms, Eliot primly devalued his precursors’ daring. Eliot struck out a good deal of sexually explicit material while revising “The Waste Land.” Fired by misogyny in a stretch of the poem that did not survive the final cut, Eliot conflated Fresca (a chit of a contemporary poetess) with his Victorian predecessors: “Fresca!”—“baptised in a soapy sea / Of Symonds—Walter Pater—Vernon Lee.” Charting the course of the eternal feminine, starting with “The Lazy laughing Jenny of the bard / (The same eternal and consuming itch / Can make a martyr, or plain simple bitch”), Eliot evacuated every shade of tenderness or ambivalence from Rossetti’s dramatic monologue, before commending “the motherwit of natural trull” against the intellectual pretension of the poetess. Through the technique of the inner standing point, Rossetti disclosed the narrator’s patronizing sympathy for the slumbering figure he apostrophized. But Eliot pared down the narrator’s conjectures about “Jenny” into a statement of [ 126 ]

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unadulterated ugliness: “Or strolling slattern in tawdry gown, / A doorstep dunged by every dog in town.”188 Eliot appears constitutionally averse to sensuality, incapable of nuance where sex is concerned. In contrast, H. D., Sapphic modernist, wove excerpts from Swinburne’s “Itylus,” “When the Hounds of Spring Are on Winter’s Traces,” “Fragoletta,” and “Faustine” into the narrative of her romans à clef, HERmione, Asphodel, and Paint It Today. For H. D., Pre-Raphaelitism had a talismanic role to play in girding the moderns to battle the tide of homophobia and parochialism standing in the way of personal and artistic freedom: “We are children of the Rossettis, of Burne Jones, of Swinburne. We were in the thoughts of Wilde.”189 In Paint It Today, Midget observed that following World War I, “certain prejudices and protective customs were curiously strengthened; almost Victorian prejudices and conventions sprang to life among the apparently advanced of the prewar period” (68). In this climate of censure and conservatism, Midget found solace in “the early visions of all the early poets we read when we were sixteen, whom we outgrew when we were twenty and whom we find again in our peaceful thirties” (69). I want to emphasize the crucial role that sexual nonconformity played in fashioning a protomodern outlook among the Pre-Raphaelites and their admirers, whatever their sexual persuasion. Against Freud’s claim that the repression of homosexuality stood at the gateway to culture, I argue that the acknowledgment of sexual liminality inspired aesthetic production in the Victorian period.190 Encountering the statue of Hermaphroditus, first at the Louvre and then at the Borghese Gallery, Midget recalled Swinburne’s homage to the figure in “Fragoletta” before venturing her own preferred formulation: “This was no double rose of love’s; it was no rose at all; This was a spray of honey flower caught in the shadow of a dark wall.”191 In the wake of the war and the return of the old regime with “its hissings of renewed intolerance and hatred,” Swinburne, as one of the “rebellious, the lovers of the discarded, ancient beauty” preserved in his verbal icon, helped Midget and her lover knit “our old selves and our new selves together” (66, 65). Swinburne’s Sapphic lyr ics inspired a generation of female poets invested in same-sex desire. As Richard Dellamora has shown, Radclyffe Hall rebuked Buchanan’s defamation of Swinburne’s homosexual sterility: “Far from being sterile, Swinburne had generated a Sapphic progeny.”192 The Pre-Raphaelites could sustain neither the idealized state inspiring H. D.’s accolade nor Pound’s qualified endorsement of Swinburne’s poetry. F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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Enthusiasts got around this difficulty by fixating on the youthful Swinburne, Rossetti, and their associates, complicating the reception history. Their early triumphs were fossilized in amber. Once they reached maturity, they turned in lackluster per for mances, for the most part. Swinburne presented a paradoxical figure to his ardent admirers by 1880. Resting on its laurels, literary Pre-Raphaelitism became the official counterculture after 1871 and spent its drive for aesthetic innovation in polemics (Swinburne’s Mazzini phase: Songs Before Sunrise; William Morris’s socialism).193 H. D.’s youthful engagement (age 16) with and mature reassessment (“find again”) of PreRaphaelitism submitted the facts of Rossetti and Swinburne’s later years to erasure (“outgrew”). She ignored Swinburne’s protracted convalescence from alcoholism at the Pines under the watchful eye of Watts-Dunton. Modernists hospitable to Victorian forebears wanted no part of the postbohemian cata log. In Thanks Before Going (1946), Masefield likened the poetpainter Rossetti to a juvenile supernova: “I have imaged to myself his wonderful Brother, as he must have been in the glory of his youth and happiness, when in brightness of soul he went joyously forth, and gathered his friends to bring the art of the day into a new road and widen the mind of the nation” (7). Like Peter Pan in the imaginations of his literary admirers, Rossetti never grew old or sulked majestically in his palace of art, sadly reduced to a lonely prison by its tenant’s improvidence, reclusiveness, chloral addiction, and despair: “The poem which follows this, The Blessed Damozel, is usually reckoned the most surprising work of this startling boy. He was, surely, the most splendid and amazing boy who ever kindled youth in this land. He DID kindle youth; and who can wonder that the writer of such poems should carry the youth of his time to reform the art of the age?”194 The poet Stephen Spender also heard the clarion call of Pre-Raphaelitism as a youth; “Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which made an unforgettable impression on me when I was fourteen)” kept company with adventure fiction in a boy’s library circa 1925. Reviewing William Gaunt’s The Aesthetic Adventure and The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, titles that signal the narrative arc of Pre-Raphaelitism as a rise and fall story, Spender recommended instead Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and Works as a “brilliant” guide to the ruling and unifying principles of the movement.195 Considering the source, this was a strange endorsement. Where Spender lightly reproved “the sins of children” (such as fornication, adultery, and homosexuality) marring the aesthetic careers of Rossetti and Wilde (130), Waugh tapped the late Victorian discourse of defective genius, explaining [ 128 ]

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that Rossetti lacked “that essential rectitude that underlies the serenity of all really great art.”196 Here, we encounter the politics of reception in the transmission of legacy. By commending the early Pre-Raphaelite body of work as the once and future hope of British art and letters, Masefield and H.  D. celebrated the violation of bourgeois codes of sexual morality and tastefulness, implicitly defying the still prominent discourse of somatic and moral degeneration employed by Waugh. Further, these snapshots of clashing reception experiences reflect the porous boundary between the avant-garde work and the bohemian artist or writer who stood “in the vanguard” of his time (CWACS 15:47). The conflation of “morbidity” with artistic distemper signaled the aesthetic celebrity’s role as a forerunner of or scapegoat for cultural and personal modernity. Unlike Masefield and H. D., Spender reckoned Rossetti’s prowess against his deficiencies. Spender regarded with a jaundiced eye well rehearsed in the methods of the French impressionists the PRB formula for recording natural facts. Spender correctly surmised that Rossetti “hated painting out of doors,” “cared little for the countryside,” and “was as far removed from the nature artist as it is possible to imagine anyone being” (128). The cloistered aspect of Rossetti’s work disturbed Victorian critics who gained access to his studio. A commentator for the Saturday Review urged Rossetti to “fling open a window and let in some honest daylight and some good fresh air” to purify the unwholesome atmosphere.197 In 1945, Spender was able to project Rossetti’s signature artistic style decades forward in the history of modern art. Spender argued that Rossetti “was by nature a poetic symbolist painter.” The repetitious elaboration of decorative objects in his paintings was included because Rossetti “collected objects which he loved, and their images in his pictures are crystallizations of aspects of his own personality, having the same symbolic significance of a projected egotism as the tower, the sword, the winding stair, etc., in the poetry of Yeats” (128). Symbolism paved the way for a belated recognition of Rossetti’s modernist tendencies—the tension “between the symbolic nature of the subject and the realism of its portrayal.”198 Rossetti’s double-work of art appealed to the imagination directly through the sensory impact of the images Rossetti created rather than through their “likeness to external nature.”199 Aligned with “introspective morbidities” and masochism, in Carol Christ’s view, Rossetti’s starting point was the resonance of the image in signaling strong states of emotion: “Rossetti glorifies intensity of sensation; he wants to ‘smart and agonize at e’vry pore’ to ‘die of a rose in F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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aromatic pain.’ ”200 Obviously, many theorists of modernism excluded works whose sources were external to art or betrayed a reactionary tendency to restore psychological subject matter: “The chief concern of a painter like Dali,” Hans Hoffman groused, “is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium.”201 Spender explained that Pre-Raphaelitism had been unfashionable for decades, during which time abstract art (“unmitigated painter’s vision”) was the rage; however, “it has become rather fash ionable again now that literature has crept back into painting by the back door of Surrealism” (126). Styling Burne-Jones “so dazzlingly successful a pioneer of Surrealism” that he had earned the regard of Salvador Dali, Wyndham Lewis cited the Perseus series as evidence that the artist had surmounted the “tawdry poetic accessories impairing some of his work” in order to concentrate on the painting’s central motive: “only the faces and limbs, moving to the rhythms imposed by imperious immortality, in a dream where all is sadly predestined, even escape from predestination.”202 Lewis privileged form over content as a stimulus to reverie. This was a plausible account of Burne-Jones’s affinity with surrealism; he relied on techniques of defamiliarization and synesthesia to unmoor objects from their conventional associations to approximate states of inner consciousness. The enigmatic, arcane, and outré aspects of Burne-Jones’s art were deliberately discordant with their exquisite harmony and beauty, yet elements of beauty and strangeness were, in equal measure, part of the picture. Commemorating Burne-Jones’s unmistakable originality, Sharp mused that with respect to beauty, “Strangeness is what fragrance is to the loveliness of a flower.”203 Burne-Jones’s depictions of imaginary people and objects having no standing in real ity looked forward to the modernists’ complication of the “art-life relation,” as inventing rather than copying a segment of real ity.204 I want to argue that PRB fidelity to nature (“vulgar optic”) was yet compatible with Rossetti, Solomon, and Burne-Jones’s symbolist art (“finer optic”).205 The PRB promised Enargeia (verisimilitude in the representation of natural objects, social details, and character psychology) but more consistently delivered Energeia (“enthrallment or astonishment,” “the achievement in art and rhetoric of the dynamic and purposive life of nature” independent of models).206 To paraphrase Wendy Steiner, the work of art is apprehended as a self-contained entity, with the same degree of materiality as objects in the world, rather than as a sign of something else (17); what matters most is “expressive form,” as Roger Fry would say. The British painters of the aes[ 130 ]

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thetic movement shared the avant-garde intention to shock and awe through an assault on visuality, which Gautier and Robert Rosenblum noted in 1855 and 1957 respectively: “Like the living avant-garde, the Pre-Raphaelite experience, largely unknown to American eyes, incited spectators to either extreme antipathy or adulation, but never indifference.” Attending the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of 150 years of British painting, Rosenblum pronounced the seven Pre-Raphaelite works “the major revelation of the show”: “It was rather that by flagrantly and passionately denying every premise of the twentieth-century aesthetic, the Pre-Raphaelites provoked spectators into looking and thinking. Moral purpose, scrupulous realism, bourgeois pathos, intricate narrative, shrill color and space relations—these were the heresies which outraged modern eyes.”207 Rosenblum identified formal attributes of Pre-Raphaelitism with postwar schools of painting, remarking that the “intense seeing and feeling” of Hunt, Millais, and Dyce should give contemporary sharp-focus painters pause for reflection; Rosenblum also noted a correspondence between “the incredibly crowded twodimensional pattern, which offered a multiplicity of pictorial incident” and the “over-all surface activity” of a Jackson Pollock (98, 97).208 Hunt, in par ticular, is credited with producing an “effect of reality,” both through his jarring color schemes and the “intense realism” deployed in his representation of historical, literary, or biblical events in naturalistic settings, which ignored aesthetic conventions.209 Spender offered an unflattering snapshot of Pre-Raphaelitism as a hidebound movement that relied on a set of rules to imitate nature, lacking the “new vision of nature which gave such energy to the French Impressionists.” Spender called Hunt’s famous excursion to the Dead Sea to paint a goat, supposedly “the Scapegoat,” in the proper biblical atmosphere: “the reductio ad absurdum of Pre-Raphaelite theories” (124). Opening himself up to the idea that Pre-Raphaelitism was capable of transcending its Victorian context through the PRB’s revaluation of what the canon offered the modern artist, Rosenblum bore witness: “These paintings demonstrated that in the 1850s, in the white heat of their fervor, the Pre-Raphaelites were able to persuade us that their alien values were genuine” (98). The next chapter examines the rewards of artistic anticipation and its burden of alienation for Gabriel Rossetti, modern artist.

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FO U R Dante Gabriel Rossetti Aesthetic Celebrity

A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies. — Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic

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slew of hybrid critical, biographical, and fictional works were published following Rossetti’s death in 1882. Memorializing Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunton reinforced the culture-wide apprehension of Rossetti as a charismatic personality: “Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still more wonderful, I think, as a man.”1 The cult of personality surrounding Rossetti during his lifetime shaped the biographical record and posthumous critical reception of his work, but it did not do so in a vacuum. The modern fascination with celebrity excess is a continuation of the Victorian fascination with the mystique of doomed genius, a cultural stereotype by 1820. Late Victorian life-writing sometimes emphasizes Rossetti’s prodigious youth; at other times, his descent into melancholia and chloral addiction after 1872.

Books about Rossetti often follow the narrative arc of tragedy; the artist scales mountains and then plummets to earth. Yet, and I cannot stress this enough, Rossetti produced worthwhile painting and poetry during the decade of his alleged decline. There is an unresolved tension in Rossetti studies among objective life-writing, aesthetic bildungsroman, sentimental memoir, and propaganda. Rossetti scholarship was (and remains) peculiarly susceptible to the teleological narrative impulse Hayden White has identified as “emplotment.” By alerting readers to culturally encoded conventions of romance or tragedy, biographers tell readers, in White’s words, “how [they] should feel about the thing represented.”2 This chapter challenges the either/or formula of what I call the Rossetti myth. The PRB’s vanguard rejection of art institutions and the art commodity petered out after 1853, but the glamour attached to that stance stuck to Rossetti throughout his life. Swinburne’s estimation of Rossetti’s outsider status contributed to his adulation of the poet-painter: It is well known that the painter of whom I now propose to speak has never suffered exclusion or acceptance at the hand of any academy. To such acceptance or rejection all other men of any note have been and may be liable. It is not less well known that his work must always hold its place as second in significance and value to no work done by any English painter of his time.3 Paradoxically, Rossetti’s indifference to renown was urged as the reason he was both “well known” and illustrious during his lifetime. For Rossetti partisans, his abstention from the marketplace was an iconic statement of aesthetic alienation, fueling the legend that Rossetti “never sought public fame.”4 Back in 1864, Du Maurier called Rossetti’s majestic contempt for fame “rather grand.”5 In 1865, Stephens defended Rossetti’s right to exhibit his pictures exclusively on the walls of his studio and those of his clients: “Whether a painter exhibits his productions or not is a matter for his own judgment; exhibition is merely an incident in the existence of a picture.”6 The first major public exhibitions of Rossetti’s paintings and works on paper followed his death. In The English School of Painting (1891), the Frenchmen Ernest Chesneau admitted that he had never seen a single work of Rossetti’s. For Chesneau, Rossetti’s renown was a puzzle requiring explanation: “And yet the reputation that he has gained in spite

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of this exclusiveness proves how great has been his influence on the inner circle of his friends.” 7 A lot of ink was spilled over Rossetti’s disappearance from public view. For Rossetti’s admirers, seclusion was tantamount to abstention. For his detractors, the issue was not how he earned his living; it was the insincerity of his self-presentation: “Along with his extensive list of contacts, he cultivated a ‘bohemian’ persona, appearing increasingly eccentric and remote, famous yet unseen.”8 No fan of reclusive celebrity, Buchanan disparaged Rossetti’s defection from the competitive showcases for talent: “Mr. Rossetti has been known for many years as a painter of exceptional powers, who, for reasons satisfactory to himself, has shrunk from publicly exhibiting his pictures, and from allowing anything like a popu lar estimate to be formed of their qualities” (“FS” 336). Nor was Buchanan the only critic to bemoan the fact that “Mr. Rossetti has never exhibited, and the few works of his which have been before the world in auction-rooms cannot be called his chefs d’oeuvre.”9 Critics attacked the fraternity for championship, with its anticapitalist stance yet marketing savvy, which gave Rossetti an unfair advantage in the press. In lieu of exhibition, Gabriel Rossetti “relied, as the critics pointed out, on a small but influential circle of friends and patrons, and the mystique, almost a cult, that surrounded him. It was the rare artist that could rely on his public to seek him out.”10 Writers who insist on Rossetti’s rejection of commercialism corroborate the modernist myth of the artist’s opposition to the marketplace. According to foremost Rossetti scholar Jerome McGann, Rossetti’s vexed pursuit of a bygone ideal of artistic and poetic transcendence demonstrated an untimely “quest for an art and a literature that was no longer possible.”11 I want to complicate this interpretation of the sociohistorical context in which Rossetti resisted art institutions and exhibitions, which he surely did, while remaining mindful of the tastes and economic resources of his soap and coal merchant clients. McGann celebrates Rossetti’s “genius” as an artist-painter and views his neurosis as tragic confirmation of the tribulations of genius serving at the whim of bourgeois patrons. I see my book as a response and corrective to such mythmaking, which transfers responsibility for Rossetti’s failure to resist the temptations of the marketplace onto market forces, absolving him of complicity. I believe that a less defensive and exculpatory account of Rossetti’s professional calculations will further our understanding of how a career begun as a challenge to

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institutional art ended in frustration over the insurmountable obstacles to a “worldly and sensuous imaginative practice,” as McGann claims (xvi). Sincerity and originality were the cornerstones of Pre-Raphaelite endeavor. (Rossetti had little interest in “truth to nature.”) For Rossetti and his comrades in the PRB, the commoditization of the work of art signified the de-idealization of the higher culture under the regime of bourgeois aesthetics. It was a signal and threatening feature of the emerging age of mechanical reproduction—the pressure to make images ready for the engraver’s burin, the democratization of taste, and the rise of celebrity culture. After 1865, Rossetti violated each PRB precept with his “indiscriminate copymaking” and redundant images. According to William Bell Scott, “Rossetti never had any scruple in making replicas, triplicas, quadruplicas, in fact he only attained to the command of the subject by repeating it.”12 Late in life, Rossetti took a perverse pleasure in reducing his craftsmanship to a paint-by-numbers formula: “Now I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic.”13 Although Rossetti came to regard painting as a superior form of carpentry or “task-work,” he chose an off-color metaphor (“whore”) to impugn the artist’s relationship with the marketplace. McGann hangs fire on the question of Rossetti’s sincerity and commitment to art for art’s sake. He calls Rossetti’s dichotomization of “pot-boilers,” artworks tainted by the marketplace, and pure14 poetry a heartfelt delusion: “Through it all, however, he began to imagine that what he was betraying as a painter he was preserving as a poet. His paintings were hopelessly entangled with commercial affairs, but his poetry, it seemed to him, had been nurtured apart from worldly concerns.”15 Rossetti’s professed contempt for fame and material prosperity seems disingenuous. Rossetti employed similar tactics to promote his poetry and paintings from behind the scenes. In 1895, William Rossetti was “very solicitous to deny” that Gabriel had “worked the oracle” in regard to his books; however, “it has been generally believed that on too many occasions the most favourable reviews of the poems which appeared were written by members of the poet’s own special circle of friends.”16 Rossetti organized a bevy of favorable reviews for his forthcoming Poems by D. G. Rossetti (1870). Scott recollected that Rossetti’s “ner vous fear about publishing” his first volume of original poetry induced him to “get all his friends to prepare laudatory critical articles to fill all the leading journals.”17 John Lucas Tupper, a former PRB member, informed Hunt: “D. G. R. has just [ 136 ]

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brought out his edition of poems. The book is eminently successful I hear and to some extent, perceive[d] Swinburne (in the Fortnightly Review) has set up the author as the greatest poet of the time and the greatest painter too he almost intimates.”18 Tupper was not exaggerating. In his review, Swinburne celebrated Rossetti’s gifts as a poet and personal embodiment of the quality of ripeness, a fleshly characterization: “And now that at length we receive from hands yet young and strong this trea sure of many years, the gathered flower of youth and ripe firstlings of manhood, a fruit of the topmost branch ‘more golden than gold,’ all men may witness and assure themselves what manner of harvest the life of this man was to bear.”19 At Rossetti’s behest, Dr. Thomas Hake contributed an encomium to The New Monthly Magazine; William Morris, to The Academy; and Sidney Colvin, to the Westminster Review and the Pall Mall Gazette. Favorable reviews were secured for The Athenaeum (from Philip Bourke Marston) and Fraser’s Magazine (from John Skelton) and promised by the Standard, Graphic, Telegraph, and Edinburgh Current.20 Paraphrasing Buchanan, her surrogate father and brother-in-law, Harriett Jay recollected the “praise by the entire newspaper press, to the accompaniment of rapturous salvoes from the writer’s friends and personal admirers” that greeted Rossetti’s Poems: “In all the ocean of eau sucrée which surrounded the new poet there had not been one drop of gall; and the cliques were ringing with the pretensions of the whole school to which the poet-painter belonged.”21 “Press-nobbling” was also de rigueur with respect to painting.22 William Rossetti’s jealous guardianship of Gabriel’s repute furnished Hunt with material for sarcasm when writing to Tupper: “WMR likes or loves rather you and me but but [sic] his mind has no place whatever for a doubt that his brother is the apostle in this age of both Art and Poetry— and that you are small minded in adducing the work of a crabbed[-] minded man like myself who will not recognise his brothers superiority as a leader in the Age.”23 In 1871, William Rossetti noted in his Diary that Stephens, the art critic and former PRB member, “had lately written to me, expressing a wish to insert a notice of anything there might be to see at Gabriel’s studio.”24 From that point on, Stephens boosted Rossetti’s renown in The Athenaeum, describing pictures withheld from public view, such as Astarte Syriaca and Sea-Spell (in 1873), Proserpine (in 1875), and the Blessed Damozel (in 1877). Well- connected academicians were able to assure clients of a prominent location to display their vanity portraits; in lieu of exhibition, Rossetti could assure patrons such as Frederick Startbridge Ellis that their DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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purchases would receive favorable notice in the press, attesting to the purchaser’s critical acumen and refinement: “I am thoroughly pleased at your having the picture [La Donna Della Finestra], which I am sure is one of my best and will keep your good will. I will get the frame duly inscribed with that Dantesque Sonnet; and the picture will be reviewed in the Athenaeum.”25 Gabriel playfully alluded to Stephens’s “spiriting” or enthusiastic notices of Rossetti’s paintings in a letter to Watts-Dunton, another loyal advocate and contributor to The Athenaeum and The Examiner.26 In “Mr. Rossetti’s New Pictures,” an unsigned article appearing in The Athenaeum, Stephens added to the mystique of the reclusive artist and foregrounded the privileged vantage of the critic-informant: “Mr. Rossetti has been closely engaged for some time, and we are permitted to describe the results of his labours.” Describing La Donna Della Finestra as “a profoundly pathetic exposition of the motive in a passage in Dante’s Vita Nuova,” Stephens ascribed the emotional impact of the painting partly to its literary subject, drawn from the text of Dante and His Circle.27 Stephens implied that Rossetti’s role as Dante’s translator, interpreter, and namesake merited par ticu lar commendation. Delving into unpublished correspondence, Macleod found evidence that Stephens worked up his reviews from Rossetti’s own notes on pictures, granting “the publicity-conscious painter veto power over everything he wrote about him in The Athenaeum after 1871.”28 How does this last review read, if Rossetti, and not Stephens, was its author? Rossetti’s double-work of art inspired as well as infuriated his contemporaries, depending on whether it was viewed as a sign of genius or preciosity. In 1889, Pater noted that Rossetti’s “poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published,” having been “eagerly circulated in manuscript” among his admirers: “At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakeably novel.” As was his custom, Pater upended the popu lar understanding of Rossetti’s renown as a PRB member by claiming that the curiosity aroused by the poet, as a leader of a new school, influenced perceptions of Rossetti as a painter “whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest.”29 Apart from Stephens, Rossetti’s minions fostered the idea that contemporary critical standards fell short where he was concerned. I want to underscore the conspiratorial tone and exculpatory logic of print representations of Rossetti’s wayward or bohemian genius, as well as their variety [ 138 ]

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and dissemination. Eulogizing Rossetti in 1883, Colvin praised “the courage of the artist who thus rebels against authority, and declines to profit by the teaching of his time,” even if that artist’s productions, in consequence, bear the “stamp of technical inexperience and amateurship.” The undiscerning were stymied by Rossetti’s “weaknesses, exaggerations, and self-repetitions”; however, Colvin felt the cognoscenti would overlook “the artist’s shortcomings” because Rossetti was capable of “stirring them to the deepest fibres of their souls”: “His glowing and rich vein of symbolism, whereby spiritual conceptions of a new and highly impassioned kind were invested with appropriate bodily form and colour, were things that spoke with a peculiar and thrilling power.” Blurring the line between ideational content and formal considerations, Colvin praised Rossetti’s work for the frisson of excitement it afforded his audience, as if passive reception were a form of intimate personal contact.30 In “Rossetti in Prose and Verse” (1912), William Sharp echoed Pater’s Platonic conception of poetic composition as a kind of mania, another potentially damning description turned on its head: “Those possessed by the mania of poetry look forth upon the world through a transmuting mist: an indefinable glamour glorifies their vision.” Sharp advertised Rossetti’s “faults,” in lieu of his artistic control and skill, in order to individuate the poet-painter as an exceptional personality: “Perhaps, he believed with Blake that ‘exuberance is beauty’: and so in verse we find him at times revelling in an extravagant luxuriousness of diction calculated to cloy rather than to gratify.”31 Sharp’s strategy of deification through sensationalism makes sense in light of Peter Briggs’s observation that the terms and conditions of celebrity began to change as early as 1750 with the rise and serialization of the novel: “Audiences were increasingly interested in authors as personalities rather than simply as artistic makers; idiosyncrasies that had gone unreported in an earlier generation were now seized upon as symptoms of personal character, pieces in a mosaic of personality which the reading public wished earnestly to complete.”32 Far from covering up indiscretions and imbecilities, the Pre-Raphaelites and their acolytes and executors glorified them in their firsthand accounts: “His weaknesses, his shortcomings, as a poet, are as emphatic revelations as are his powers and excellences. Natures that run to excess are the richest.”33 Colvin took this argument one step further, projecting Rossetti’s significance for posterity based on the idea that Rossetti’s ardency had transformed Victorian culture: “What any poet is going to be for another generation, it is not given to his DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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contemporaries to tell. But what Mr.  Rossetti in his own generation is may be put on record; and that is, the poet of personal passion.”34 The invention of a persona or media image was now deemed essential to the upward mobility of the Victorian artist.

“You Make Me Dizzy Miss Lizzie” My account of the male cliques, which fanned Rossetti’s self-regard and repute, contradicts many established truths about Rossetti, poet-painterlover of women. In Rossetti: Painter and Poet, J. B. Bullen makes a case for Rossetti’s modernity as an exponent of sensuous impressionism, focusing on a “libidinous aesthetic” directed toward women, “always women.”35 In contrast, I contend that Rossetti’s passion for women united him with other talented men under the auspices of the PRB and thereafter. Charismatic authority was an attribute of the Rossetti brand by 1857 through his reputation as a womanizer and mentor to younger men. Reminiscences testify to the “temperature of reverence”36 for the incandescent poet- painter enthusiastically promulgated by Rossetti’s male followers: “In his dealings with those much younger than himself, his tact and influence were unequaled; he received a shy but ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome, that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence.”37 Rossetti was the pied piper of the PRB. After meeting him, several young men dedicated their lives to art: “It was not until Solomon came under the spiritual beauty of Rossetti’s influence that he was awakened and ‘found himself.’ He did not actually study under Rossetti, but Rossetti was such a force in those days that whoever came in contact with him fell under the spell of his genius and enthusiasm.”38 Rossetti’s influence on his various acolytes has been compared to “a central flame descending upon many altars.”39 Men were envious of other men’s standing in his affections, wanting either to possess Rossetti or to be him. In 1855, Burne-Jones came across a copy of Rossetti’s haunting illustration, The Maids of Elfen-Mere, which he extolled in print as “the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen.” But he bemoaned Rossetti’s seclusion: “Why is the author of the Blessed Damozel, and the story of Chiaro, so seldom on the lips of men? If only we could hear him oftener, live in the light of his power a little longer.”40 Burne-Jones played the role [ 140 ]

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of celebrity stalker in his first sighting of Rossetti: “I was two-and-twenty, and had never met, or even seen, a painter in my life. I knew no one who had ever seen one, or had been in a studio, and of all men who lived on earth, the one that I wanted to see was Rossetti. I had no dream of ever knowing him, but I wanted to look at him.” Goaded by curiosity and hero worship, Burne-Jones sought out Rossetti at the Working Men’s College but had to ask a stranger to identify the painter, the celebrity enigma: “Lushington whispered to me that Rossetti had come in, and so I saw him for the first time, his face satisfying all my worship, and I listened to addresses no more, but had my fill of looking.” 41 This anecdote is a reminder of the gulf separating an image-based celebrity culture such as our own from the Victorian context, where photographs of artists and their works were just becoming readily available.42 In Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman resists the heteronormative arc of Pre-Raphaelitism within academia by asserting Rossetti’s psychosexual dependence on Victorian homosocial networks. Sussman makes the crucial point that Rossetti’s erotically charged depictions of women in his paintings and love poetry have obscured the homoeroticism characteristic of affinity groups. Adapting Rossetti’s various ménages to Eve Sedgwick’s formulation of the triangularization of desire, in which male rivalry and lusting after women in the company of men are connected with homosexuality, Sussman remarks: “The later relations between Rossetti and Morris form an erotic triangle where the central dynamic is less heterosexual desire acted out through marital infidelity than the intense attraction between the two men continued through the body of Jane Morris.”43 Rossetti made no effort to hide his admiration for Jane Burden from her suitor, William Morris. As Evelyn Waugh coldly put the matter, “With a last and decisive subservience to Rossetti’s taste, ‘Topsy’ married her.”44 A decade earlier, Rossetti had had an affair with Annie Miller, a model to whom Pre-Raphaelite brother Hunt had promised marriage; Hunt entrusted Annie to Rossetti’s care while on an artistic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, only to find on his return that she had modeled for and promiscuously consorted with Rossetti and his friends. Rossetti complacently shared both Miller and Cornforth’s sexual favors with George Price Boyce. Sussman’s multitiered thesis could serve as a corrective to the brilliant but tendentious feminist reading offered by Griselda Pollock in Vision and Difference, in which Rossetti is said to displace his castration anxiety onto a series of truncated female models. Sussman paraphrases Pollock’s claim DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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FIGU R E 4.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Price Boyce with Fanny Cornforth in Ros-

setti’s Studio, Chatham Place, 1858. Pen and ink on paper. Image © Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK/Bridgeman Images.

that Rossetti’s canvases are “masculinist in privileging the male gaze, in reducing the female subject to the signifier of male creativity, and in equating sexual and artistic potency within a discourse of male creativity” (171). Yet Sussman’s queer studies and Pollock’s feminist arguments dovetail in some respects. Pollock recognizes Rossetti’s paintings as significant artifacts of the struggle to resolve male gender anxiety under the sign of the emerging bohemian artist identity. She is uninterested, however, in Rossetti’s openness to feminization or in his agency in “the Bohemian construction of artistic manhood,” in Sussman’s words (166). Pollock dispenses with the author-function to treat Rossetti’s work as “a symptomatic site for the study of a new regime of representation of woman on the axis of bourgeois realism and erotic fantasy.”45 She wants to shift the discussion of Rossetti’s ideal heads away from personalities and back to the canvases themselves and their negotiation of “masculinity as a sexual position” (124). To my mind, Pollock’s suppression of the author-function forestalls any consideration of Rossetti’s status as an iconic figure of transgressive desire within the Victorian context, as a magnet for same-sex desire. By reading archetypal structural formations (such as castration anxiety, fetishism, and [ 142 ]

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the gaze) into Rossetti’s obsessively reproduced face-signs, Pollock risks decontextualizing the paintings she offers as evidence of Victorian sexual politics. I have no quarrel with Pollock’s assessment of the iconic quality of these images, combining “physical loveliness and a remote look,” which evince the work being done by Rossetti’s portraits of “stunners” toward the reproduction of masculine and feminine subjects. At the level of fantasy, these images may function as a “locus of sexualization” and prepare the way for the “installation of sexual difference” in viewers, as Pollock suggests (126–27), but they excite unease rather than recognition. Pollock leaves her reader to ponder the fact that Helen of Troy (1863) and Lady Lilith (1868) are doing the same work as staid Victorian paintings depicting idealized types of womanhood inhabiting domestic scenes, such as George Elgar Hicks’s Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood (1863), a genre popular with the British public at this time.46 The Victorian counterculture, to which Rossetti belonged despite his bourgeois upbringing, cannot be equated with tradition, because it failed to revolutionize Victorian gender and class relations. Rossetti’s contemporaries found the man and his works a puzzling amalgam of manly / effeminate and spiritual / sensual qualities: “Burne-Jones once said ‘Gabriel is half a woman’ and there was an undercurrent of homoeroticism in their friendship.”47 Indeed, Victorian accounts of Gabriel’s poems, pictures, and life reflect a need to impose sense (convention) on (gender) disorder. Pollock and Sussman buck conventional wisdom; however, their approaches betray a teleological narrative impulse that produces a predetermined plot structure. Paradoxically, the overdetermined nature of the ideologically or generically driven emplotment of facts leads to the conclusion that all findings are arbitrary. For example, it would be a simple matter to strategically redeploy the incidents of Rossetti’s courtship of Elizabeth Siddall, under the watchful eye of their mutual patron, Ruskin, to highlight the erotic character of that triangle, mimicking Sussman’s handling of Rossetti’s relationship with the Morris household. Ruskin’s intimacy with Rossetti coincided with the painter’s tempestuous affair with Siddall. A milliner’s assistant taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites as a model in 1850, Siddall enjoyed Ruskin’s patronage, as well as Rossetti’s tutelage and love. Ruskin afforded her the opportunity to transcend her class origins through education and freedom from menial labor and treated her with uncommon deference. Ruskin saw something more in Siddall than stereotypical working-class femininity. Rossetti’s enthusiasm for Siddall, lady artist, was influenced by DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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his Platonic conception of love, as evidenced by the desire for a female counterpart expressed in the prose-poem “Hand and Soul” (1849). He invented pet names for her (“Gug,” “Guggum,” “Guggums”); she called him “Gug,” as well. He told Hall Caine that she had “real genius.” 48 She was the apple of his eye, but she was not the only woman he desired. Ruskin’s attitude toward Siddall was aty pical of the antipathetic strain in Ruskin’s relations with the wives of his friends: “I loved Rossetti’s wife much, too: and bid her goodbye, and sorrowfully—with a kiss, in her coffin.” Writing to acknowledge Norton’s marriage in 1862, Ruskin frankly declared, “I am sure your wife must be nice, as you’ve chosen her; but it does not the least follow that I should like her.” Ruskin added, “Sometimes I take quite sharp antipathies to my friends’ wives.”49 Oswald Doughty claims that Ruskin had no use for Siddall’s quaint artistic per for mances and offered her a pension in order to free her lover from financial anxiety. One letter suggests that Ruskin regarded Siddall as an unwelcome distraction for his favorite protégé. Seizing on the pretext of her chronic ill health, Ruskin sent Siddall abroad to keep her out of Rossetti’s way: “I can’t have you going to Paris, nor going near Ida, till you have finished those drawings.”50 Gabriel was the principal object of Ruskin’s solicitude; he was candid enough on this score when urging Rossetti to leave Siddall or marry her so that “your own powers of art [may be] more healthily developed, and your own life made happier.” Ruskin repeatedly offered Gabriel money to defray the expense of marrying in 1855.51 Ruskin was not privy to the lovers’ fierce rows over Rossetti’s infidelities, a record of which survives in Ford Madox Brown’s diary and Rossetti’s correspondence. Ruskin attributed Rossetti’s unwillingness to marry to his poverty and to the dodgy state of Siddall’s health; Brown and Scott blamed Rossetti’s philandering. The couple did not wed until 1860, nine years after their engagement and eight years after Alexander Munro found them living together at the Hermitage: “Rossetti was every day with his sweetheart [E. S.], of whom he is more foolishly fond than I ever saw lover. Great affection is ever so to the mere looker-on, I suppose.”52 It is hardly credible that even a superannuated virgin such as Ruskin remained blind to the intimate nature of their relationship. According to observers, they were infatuated with one another: “After a while ‘Guggum’ became so much of a settled institution in the Chatham Place chambers that other people understood that they were not wanted there in and out— and I may include myself in this category.”53 None of Gabriel’s other love affairs were [ 144 ]

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exclusive or divided the painter-poet from his male friends. Heretofore an exemplar of men’s preferential desire for male companionship, Gabriel wounded his old friends (and brother) by concentrating his affections on Siddall. One way to get around this problem was to accept Siddall as an artist and peer.54 Without actively resenting Siddall’s preeminence, Ruskin complained of Gabriel’s estrangement from himself. There was a touch of the wounded lover about his letters to Rossetti, in which he accused the artist of indifference: “But what I do feel generally about you is that without intending it you are in little things habitually selfish—thinking only of what you like to do, or don’t like: not of what would be kind. Where your affections are strongly touched I suppose this would not be so—but it is not possible you should care much for me, seeing me so seldom.” Ruskin toyed with a version of the erotic triangle when he compared his desire to have Gabriel send him an unfinished sketch to Siddall’s coming downstairs to greet him in her shift: “I wish Lizzie and you liked me enough to— say—put on a dressing-gown and run in for a minute rather than not see me,” Ruskin remonstrated. “But you can’t make yourselves like me, and you would only like me less if you tried.” Déshabillé, ambiguously applied to male and female persons, was a sexually charged allusion. Ruskin’s abject posture signaled his melancholy surrender of homoerotic desire. Forlorn and morose, Ruskin admitted that he had more confidence in Mrs. Rossetti’s attachment; even though “she don’t see me, her bride’s kiss was so full and queenly-kind.” Majestic and aloof, Siddall did not threaten Ruskin, who feared to “lose hold” of Rossetti to a more venereal type of woman.55 This fear occasioned the proprietary huffiness about the misdirection of Rossetti’s art that came through in Ruskin’s complaints about the luridly erotic side of the painter’s oeuvre. The epistolary record suggests that texts often mediated discussions of a highly personal character. In his 1859 commentary on “Jenny,” a poem about a streetwalker, Ruskin tacitly acknowledged Rossetti’s scorn for bourgeois sexual propriety: “I don’t mean that an entirely right-minded person never keeps a mistress: but, if he does, he either loves her—or, not loving her, would blame himself, and be horror- struck for himself no less than for her, in such a moralizing fit.”56 Ruskin apprehended other feminine influences on Rossetti at this date. Scott comments, “The paradoxical conclusion that women and flowers were the only objects worth painting, was brought about by the appearance of other ladies besides Miss DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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Siddal [sic] coming within his orbit. Among these the most impor tant was one who must have had some overpowering attractions for him, although I never could see what they were.”57 Ruskin’s desire to regularize the Rossetti ménage was influenced by Rossetti’s desultory work habits, but it was also motivated by distaste for the emerging strain of sensuality in Rossetti’s work. Writing to congratulate Rossetti on his nuptials, Ruskin advised him that his pictures of the languid and ethereal Siddall were his best: “I think Ida should be very happy to see how much more beautifully, perfectly, and tenderly you draw when you are drawing her than when you draw anybody else. She cures you of all your worst faults when you only look at her,” a turn of phrase that suggests Ruskin was aware of Rossetti’s indulgence in the fleshpots of the town.58 Citing Ruskin’s “Puritanic over-strenuousness of moral purpose in his aesthetic teaching,” Ford Madox Hueffer explained how “after a time, Ruskin definitely fell foul of Rossetti’s luxuriance; and Rossetti saw that his own magnificence was too precious a thing to be sacrificed for ever to Ruskin’s personal feelings.”59 In 1865, Ruskin bridled at Rossetti’s perversion of the naturalistic scheme of representation Ruskin had championed since 1843 to permit the “modification of minor truths for sensational purposes.” William Rossetti excised the relevant commentary on Venus Verticordia (1868), concerning the central figure’s nudity, from the extant letter, which is spotty with ellipses. Ruskin’s full response may be inferred from his remarks on the painting’s floral emblems of lust, the lavish and abundant honeysuckle symbolizing the female genitals: “I purposely used the word ‘wonderfully’ painted about those flowers. They were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful—I can use no other word—in their coarseness: showing enormous power; showing certain conditions of nonsentiment which underlie all you are doing—now.”60 Ruskin’s commentary conformed to a diachronic narrative scheme in which Rossetti’s art and character devolved simultaneously, a notion underscored by the afterthought “now.” Siddall was divested of sexuality by her Victorian champions and by later chroniclers. Writing to Norton, Ruskin commented, “It is very pretty, however, to see how much better he draws his wife than any other model . . . all his harshness and eccentricity vanish whenever she sits.”61 Siddall’s tragic history, culminating in a purported suicide, contributed to this belated recuperation of a woman whom some saw as a conniving minx, and who used illness, real or feigned, to manipulate her lover. Her natural ability [ 146 ]

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FIGU R E  4.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864–1868. Oil on canvas.

Image © Russell- Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/Bridgeman Images.

and hauteur (Ruskin’s parents said she carried herself like a lady) exempted her from the coarse construction placed on Cornforth’s conduct: “By this time I had come to share the feeling of Rossetti’s older friends that she was still an injurious influence and, taking much upon myself, I had shown her to the door.”62 In 1940, Paull Baum claimed that Fanny had initiated Gabriel, age twenty-eight, into “the sins of the flesh.”63 Figuring crucially in Victorian and subsequent representations of Siddall was the shift in Rossetti’s own attitude. From the delicious symbiosis of “Gug(gum)” in DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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1850–1855, to Rossetti’s histrionics graveside in 1862 (Gabriel’s conscience- stricken gesture of burying the only “perfect” manuscript of his poems with his wife’s body, affectingly placed between her cheek and hair), to the aftermath of Siddall’s exhumation and the recovery of the poems in 1869—which apparently unhinged Rossetti and set the stage for his ner vous breakdown in 1872— Gabriel Rossetti increasingly identified Siddall with otherworldly influences, with the soul’s beauty, not the body’s.

“Stunners” Rossetti’s chroniclers have been unduly influenced by a moral paradigm anchored by his romantic history—the alleged wages of dissolute genius, which inevitably produced a life-narrative in the shape of a bell curve: “The influence of Fanny was revealing itself not only in Gabriel’s painting, but also in the increasing coarseness of his nature,” writes Doughty. “In his new cynicism he took a bitter pleasure in destroying whatever of his former idealization of woman remained.”64 Waugh reckoned that greed and debt, incurred in the course of his debauched and irregular lifestyle, were to blame for Rossetti’s compulsive execution of the “monotonous series of women’s heads that began with Bocca Baciata and extends throughout the rest of his life.”65 Although Bocca Baciata (1859) signaled “the beginning of the end” in most biographical accounts, it was Rossetti’s first successful half-length figure in oil and evinced a marked improvement in technique. Anticipating Willem de Kooning’s famous remark “flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented,”66 Rossetti described his success in avoiding the “stippling on the flesh”: “I have succeeded in quite keeping the niggling process at a distance this time, and am very desirous of painting, whenever I can find the leisure and opportunity, various figures of this kind, chiefly as studies of rapid flesh painting.”67 According to Scott, the half-length figure relieved Rossetti of “the waste of energy and excruciating difficulty entailed by the getting of his picture backgrounds reasonably right,” for he had poor command of perspective.68 Along with defective drawing, Rossetti’s failure to correctly represent action or movement in figure painting was noted by critics. Writing of the unfinished Found (1854), The Edinburgh Review complained that the male figure was not properly set on its legs, but praised “the face of the lost girl, as if locking up her lips from [ 148 ]

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the kiss of her old lover, [as] one of the most terribly pathetic things in modern art.”69 Bocca Baciata permitted Rossetti to circumvent technical difficulties. In sum, Rossetti’s downward moral and psychological trajectory was at odds with the upward trajectory of his art rather than synchronous with it, as often presented. My interest in the cultural significance of Rossetti’s renown requires considerable attention to Rossetti’s reputation as a womanizer and painter of women. In texts organized around the conception of Rossetti as either a romantic-idealist or a degenerate, Rossetti’s stylistic innovations are indirectly attributed to the women who inspired them. Pollock justly complains of the convention of dividing Rossetti’s career into distinct periods dominated by one or another model with whom Rossetti was having a sexual liaison.70 There are other possible templates for Rossetti’s career, such as his involvement with first- and second-wave Pre-Raphaelites, or the shift in patronage, or the date at which he acquired the management of oils, or weaned himself off narrative subjects in favor of the half-length figure, or devoted himself to poetry, or returned to painting. Accounts that take their cue from Rossetti’s self-construction (the Rossetti myth) or the subsequent deification or damnation of Rossetti as a fleshly painter-poet tend to foreground theory or thematic rather than situate Rossetti’s works within a comprehensively researched historical context. Apart from erotic paintings confined to gentlemen’s clubs, in the British art world the nude was in abeyance following the death of William Etty (1849) until the mid-1860s, when Watts, Moore, Leighton, Sandys, and Burne-Jones exhibited representations of the nude female figure. Watts’s classically inspired nudes, with their sculptural analogies, escaped censure through their association with “the highest possible tradition,” whereas Leighton’s Venus Disrobing (1867) and Helios and Rhodos (1869) inspired charges of indecency; the Spectator compared Leighton’s recent productions to “Mr. Swinburne’s maddest verses,” a far cry from the “reposeful ideal of the female nude,” as Alison Smith avers.71 Many journalists reporting on the culture sector were inhospitable to the fleshly tendency making headway in the “sister arts” in the 1860s. For such critics, there was nothing incongruous about the charge that a sensual strain in painting might be comparable to or influenced by sensuous poeticizing. Verses accompanied and inspired Pre-Raphaelite art, as Victorians well knew. Lines from Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason (“By thee the unnamed smouldering fire / Within our hearts turns to desire / Sweet, amorous, half-satisfied”) DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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appeared in the cata logue copy for Solomon’s watercolor Bacchus (1867) when it was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery.72 As a master of the doublework of art, Rossetti was a pivotal figure in this controversy—iconic for one camp, notorious for the other. It is not surprising that Rossetti’s homilies to female beauty inspired both blame and praise for their explicit carnality before 1865—“explicit” is a relative term, after all. With the exception of studies (Ligeia, Siren [1873] and The Spirit of the Rainbow [1876]) and the oil painting Venus Verticordia, Rossetti’s erotic subjects were generally painted with their clothes on. Even as his contemporaries mustered regiments of female nudes, Rossetti’s reputation as a “fleshly painter” flourished unabated, probably because his admirers invoked this quality when describing his pictures. Writing of Bocca Baciata in 1860, the artist Arthur Hughes told William Allingham that Gabriel “has lately painted a most beautiful head, a marigold background, such a superb thing, so awfully lovely. Boyce has bought it, and will I expect kiss the dear thing’s lips away before you come over to see it.”73 Breakfasting with Leighton, Prinsep, Poynter, and Sandys in 1864, Boyce debated the “treatment of flesh in pictures” and “the respective and relative merits” of Rossetti and Burne-Jones: “Whether it should be merely decorative and affording a note in the picture of no more value than any other piece of colour, or whether it should be also strictly, specially, and characteristically true and pre- eminent in perfection of rendering. (Of course I pleaded for the latter).”74 Colvin told readers of the Fortnightly Review: “On ‘the value and significance of flesh’ this painter insists to the utmost.” 75 Describing The Blue Bower in The Athenaeum in 1865, Stephens remarked on “the marvellous fleshiness of the flesh” in Rossetti’s picture.76 Swinburne waxed ecstatic over the “faultless fleshly beauty” of Lilith in “Notes on Some Pictures of 1868” (CWACS 15:212). Characteristically, the priggish Hunt took exception to The Blue Bower, writing to Tupper: “I saw a head of his called the blue chamber at Manchester of this sort in which the drawing was simply disgraceful, and the aim at beauty of the most offensive kind.” 77 Detractors of Rossetti’s stand-alone poetry and double-works of art objected to their fleshliness. Tupper told Hunt that while some of DGR’s poems of 1870 had “great power of fancy, some are very very foppish, one is intensely immoral—to me much worse than Swinburne.” 78 Mediating between the two poles of this controversy (emasculate sensuality vs. faultless beauty) was a third rationale for Rossetti’s subject matter, which subscribed to his own [ 150 ]

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theory of “regenerate rapture” that each held out to him.79 Rossetti’s nemesis, Buchanan, eventually came round to the idea that Rossetti’s archaisms and sensuality functioned as an “occult terminology” or “enchanted symbolism” employed by “this most ethereal and dreamy—in many respects this least carnal and most religious—of modern poets,” a modern Dante Alighieri, to express the well-nigh inexpressible.80 I endorse Doughty’s assessment that “Gabriel’s whole existence was chiefly an unconscious attempt to realize literary fashions in life” (417). I read Rossetti’s obsession with the Vita Nuova as an exculpatory fantasy in which the inconstant lover was not to blame for the suffering and death of the beloved. Begun two years after her death, Beata Beatrix (1864–1870) portrayed Siddall as Dante’s Beatrice, rapturously contemplating the afterlife through the medium of trance while her lover helplessly looks on. Pollock takes exception to the conflation of Rossetti’s representations of Beatrice with the historical personage, Elizabeth Siddall, who is thus deprived of her autonomy and divorced from the social imperatives that shaped her experience as a working- class woman.81 I recognize the justice of this complaint and remain attentive to the historically specific premium placed on images of pure and idealized womanhood; however, this iconic image has endured, shoring up Rossetti’s repute as a mystic in a fallen world, long after the Victorian conception of femininity or interest in spiritualism became passé. Once again, the Victorian fascination with the private lives of enigmatic celebrities was conducive to a romantic emplotment of facts. Rossetti was deep into his fleshly phase when he began painting Beata Beatrix, a detail that complicates a linear “rise and fall” narrative of Rossetti’s career. Innuendoes about Rossetti’s private life consistently doubled as aesthetic criteria. In Rossetti: His Life and Works, Waugh called Beata Beatrix a “worthy memorial, the swan-song of his own delicacy and depth of feeling.” Waugh reasoned that Rossetti was ready to part with his pictorial memorial to Siddall only after he had committed the atrocity of rifling her grave to obtain his literary papers.82 Shortly after the publication of Rossetti’s Poems, Charles Augustus Howell,83 who had assisted at the gravesite, told the Victorian public the backstory of Siddall’s disinterment. From a remote outpost of civilization, young Hall Caine became apprised of Rossetti’s existence: “This was about 1870, and through the thick mists of my moorland home there came (I cannot remember how) the rumour that a poet of Italian name, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had published a volume of poems. DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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We did not see his poems, and therefore we did not read them, but a story of how they came to be published began to be common talk among us. It was the tragic story of how the original manuscript had been buried in the coffin of the poet’s wife and then exhumed after lying seven years in the grave. I remember that a thrill came to me with that story, and then, close behind it, a sense of outrage, as if the grace of a great renunciation had been fi nally thrown away.”84 Lacking evidence of poetic prowess, Caine’s embellishment of Rossetti’s renown and his emulation of Rossetti’s masculine chivalry underscore the degree to which the aesthetic celebrity was the public man of sorrow, who articulated and glamorized the struggles (and ambitions) of everyone. Though Hall Caine passed over the “sense of outrage” inspired by the story, other commentators were less forgiving. The Edinburgh Review expressed a sense of “shock” upon learning that “the poet, repenting of this act and desiring to establish a literary reputation, had his wife’s coffin exhumed and opened and the manuscript taken out again from among the poor corrupted remains. It is inconceivable to us how any man who had loved and lost a wife could endure to do so loathsome a thing.”85 Similarly, Waugh argued that Rossetti’s avidity led him to betray his wife’s memory and his artistic calling by turning a work of commemorative art into a mere commodity: “It is more than a little shocking to find Rossetti in 1869 submitting even this sacred memorial to the profitable process of replication.”86 Channeling Ruskin, Waugh outlined a seamless chronicle in which Rossetti’s early works, bearing Siddall’s stamp, were morally and aesthetically superior to the later works, bearing Fanny Cornforth or Alexa Wilding’s countenance. This notion tallies with PreRaphaelite claims of unprecedented fidelity in portraiture, which captured the model’s character as well as her appearance. It begs the question, however, of how a drug-addled and dissipated Rossetti was able to paint (several versions of ) Beata Beatrix between 1864 and 1870. Waugh was not overly enamored of Rossetti’s oeuvre: “You can if you are so disposed dismiss with a clear conscience half at least of Rossetti’s work as artistically negligible; you can go further and denounce his whole reputation as a fraud.” Reluctantly, Waugh found himself engrossed by Rossetti’s singular achievement: But as long as Beata Beatrix hangs in the Tate Gallery there is a problem to be faced. You can say that this picture simply does not rouse any emotion in you and therefore is not a work of art; you are [ 152 ]

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then in the position of the old-fashioned Academicians who cannot imagine what all these people see in Matisse; there is no contact for argument. Or you can say that it does arouse very definite and deep emotion, but that, as it is not a picture which can be explained by the same standards as Poussin or Picasso, this emotion is not aesthetic but some other kind of emotion altogether improper to a picture.87 How can a feeling inspired by a painting be improper to a picture? Rejecting formal criteria, Waugh relied on the power of analogy to explain his fascination with Beata Beatrix: “Is this illicit emotion so different from that aroused by, say, the Mona Lisa or the mosaics at Daphne? Is there conceivably something we have missed in our austere stringing together of individual geniuses on the gut of our generalisations?”88 The Paterian echoes of this statement are useful clues to its meaning: “Ner vous, electric, faint always with some inexplicable faintness, these people seem to be subject to exceptional conditions, to feel powers at work in the common air unfelt by others, to become, as it were, the receptacle of them, and pass them on to us in a chain of secret influences.”89 The arcane and symbolic aspects of Rossetti’s portraits, likened to the “mystic smile” of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, also attracted the attention of Frederic Myers. Myers’s interests in psychology ran the gamut from spiritualism (such as life-after-death and prenatal memories) to the discovery and elaboration of the unconscious: “The exhibition of Dante Rossetti’s pictures which now (February 1883) covers the walls of Burlington House is the visible sign of the admission of a new strain of thought and emotion within the pale of our artistic orthodoxy.” 90 Praising subjectivism and individuality in the invention and appreciation of art, Myers and Waugh offered a template for parsing Rossetti’s modernity. However, Waugh allowed his distaste for Rossetti’s sultry ideal heads to spill over onto his reverential characterization of Beata Beatrix. Waugh’s punctilious terminology would have been more appropriate for a conduct manual than for a monograph on art: “clear conscience,” “denounce,” “fraud,” “old-fashioned,” “arouse,” “improper,” “pure,” “heart,” “romantically,” “emotion,” “resist,” “austere.” The term “illicit emotion” was hardly an apt description of a viewer’s response to Beata Beatrix, though it echoed reactions to Bocca Baciata, a painting some of Rossetti’s closest confederates reviled when it was semiprivately exhibited at the Hogarth Club.91 Writing in 1860, Hunt remarked: “I will not scruple to say that it DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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impresses me as very remarkable in power of execution—but still more remarkable for gross sensuality of a revolting kind, peculiar to foreign prints, that would scarcely pass our English Custom house from France.”92 Like Ruskin’s reception of Venus Verticordia, Hunt’s appraisal of Bocca Baciata was coupled with a grudging acknowledgment of Rossetti’s remarkable “power of execution.” Describing a visit to Rossetti’s studio in 1871 to see a painting of a lady “with the weary stretched arms and clenched fingers, the bushels of hair, and that marvel of marvels a face coldly, palely, unexcitedly drunk. How could we be other than exstatic? [sic],” Tupper expressed his distaste for Rossetti’s monotonous portraits of loose women, which enthralled the likes of Swinburne, Stephens, Shields, Hughes, and Boyce. Anticipating a weary time of it, mouthing insincere compliments, Tupper was startled by the onset of a “Jovian decree (attested by the fates and the furies) uttered in thunder and blood-cruddling [sic] conviction” by Rossetti and occasioned by his companion’s mild criticism of a stunner’s chin: “ ‘That Chin is absolutely perfect and beautiful,’ and every one shall be forever damned and insensible to beauty who fails to recognize it.”93 Obviously, neither Tupper nor Hunt was prepossessed with Rossetti in the later stages of friendship. Hunt envied the promotional apparatus at Rossetti’s disposal; Hunt was forever complaining about the critic Stephens’s partiality for Rossetti and the hackwork performed by “juntos” to advance Rossetti’s repute. Their penchant for ridiculing Rossetti’s behavior and the work of his hands suggests that they were biased period in for mants, yet their tales of brilliant promise, marred but not extinguished by technical incapacity and indolence, were consonant with the reports of Rossetti partisans. In 1874, Hunt acknowledged that he was “surprised at the excellence of the later of Rossetti works, they are infinitely better drawn than anything I ever saw of his.” Providing a brief, detailed account of the technical problems Rossetti had surmounted, Hunt concluded, “It is clear withal that he is working with great earnestness and undimmed power of improvement and that he will yet be able to do great things which I confess I did not believe last week.”94 Despite archival testimony, Waugh adhered to a diachronic narrative of Rossetti’s degeneration. Waugh relied on the painter’s guilt-ridden revelations to his friends and their maudlin accounts of his later years as a chloral-drinking melancholic hermit, recorded in a spate of biographies and reminiscences published after Rossetti’s death: “With so much to evoke [ 154 ]

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happiness, with the power to excel brilliantly in two arts, with fame, success, the love of a phalanx of friends to make life easy and smooth, with no apparent disease, no abatement of gusto in physical existence, D. G. Rossetti became, between his fortieth and his fiftieth year, one of the most wretched hypochondriacs it is pos sible to imagine, a being devoid of joy and a burden to his patient associates.” 95 As lawyer, critic, and Pre-Raphaelite insider Theodore Watts-Dunton feared, the rumor mill roared into action within hours of Rossetti’s death, producing sordid, exculpatory, and laudatory life-writing, often in a single volume. Watts-Dunton considered Rossetti’s poems and paintings autobiographical, and he advised the curious to look no further for the key to Rossetti’s character: “The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti’s life was the true one; the picture that now exists of him [as a chloral-drinking débauché] is false.”96 Within six months of his death, Rossetti tributes penned by the hearse-chasers Hall Caine and Sharp began rolling off the presses: “I shall never forget Watts’ vexation when Hall Caine got in first with his ‘Life’ and ‘fingered the bloom off Gabriel.’ ”97 The chatty and sensational Hall Caine biography, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882), preempted the authorized biography, which Watts-Dunton had been charged with writing. Rossetti’s biographers treated access to the great man in his later days as a stepping-stone to personal fame.98 Mary Hammond argues that WattsDunton evinced qualms about parlaying friendship into a book deal based on personal reminiscences; he had foreseen that “a lot of fellows will scribble about [Gabriel] and vulgarize his name.”99 Wilde also bemoaned the “vulgarization of Rossetti” in sensational memoirs and reminiscences and prayed for “an end to all biographies of this kind. They rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror.” Even as he flaunted his own notoriety, Wilde deprecated celebrity biography: “Rossetti’s was a giant personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.” Wary of lackeys using their connections to the famous to boost their own credibility through the disclosure of intimate secrets, Wilde sneered, “The grass was hardly green upon the quiet grave in Birchington churchyard when Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. William Sharp rushed into print with their Memoirs and recollections, then came the usual mob of magazine hacks.”100 Watts-Dunton’s reticence seems honorable, manly, and quaint even in the Victorian context, reminding readers that the Victorian print media had little use for the “gentleman critic who DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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produced objective, disinterested works.” Watts-Dunton was poorly equipped to jockey for position in a literary sphere driven by the exigencies of the “New Journalism—pithy, succinct, market-driven, made for rapid reading and achieving its apotheosis in the traveller’s newspaper— [which] was already by this time coming to stand for all that was crass and tasteless about the rapidly expanding author’s profession.”101 While WattsDunton staked out the higher ground and dithered, Caine’s biography helped establish him as a serious writer. Between 1898 and 1946, Ford Madox Hueffer, Arthur Benson, Evelyn Waugh, and John Masefield published biographies of Rossetti that enhanced their reputations as men of letters. Much of what we know about Gabriel was recorded, picked over, and disseminated by William Michael Rossetti. William was disturbed by the tenor of various unauthorized biographies making their way into print: “During these thirteen years the life of D. G. Rossetti has been essayed, in more or less fragmentary form, by an astonishing number of amateurs. His career was one of singular mystery, and everybody who divined or conjectured its features has thought it needful to inform the public of his observations,” according to the Saturday Review, which illustrated the point: “Again, a Mrs. Esther Wood, not prompted indeed by malignity, but influenced by the most startling combination of self-confidence and crass ignorance, has thought proper to oblige the world with what professes to be a life of Rossetti and a history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.” William was appalled by vicious rumors, which had been “blabbed and gossiped” and required correction: “The destruction of these false prophets, by many hasty readers accepted as true, has been no small part of Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s labour.” Unable to persuade Watts-Dunton to complete the authorized biography, an exasperated William began publishing reminiscences and sundry biographical works of his own devising. It may seem remarkable that William’s accounts were treated as objective, as well as authoritative, given his vested interest in Gabriel’s legacy. However, William’s forthright manner in deflecting idle curiosity and reproving scandalmongers impressed his contemporaries as extremely candid: “I have told what I choose to tell, and have left untold what I do not choose to tell. If you want more, be pleased to consult some other in for mant.” Moreover, William revealed “harrowing” incidents in Gabriel’s private life and unflattering personal traits, such that the Saturday Review was satisfied with the fidelity of the portrait to the original.102 As Gabriel’s staunchest advocate, [ 156 ]

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William reluctantly admitted that he was exposing his brother “to some censure for want of that masculine scorn or sturdy indifference which is the right answer to unmerited disparagement” when discoursing on the Fleshly School controversy.103 In his memoirs, William Bell Scott likened the affect of Buchanan’s fusillade to the action of a “slow poison” on Rossetti’s mental health. At one time, Scott had set the painter-poet on a pedestal—“the man thought by his world (myself among the number) one of the greatest geniuses of the age”; however, Scott came to share Buchanan’s disdain for Rossetti’s emotional incontinence, wondering at his “visibly breaking down under the paltry infliction of an article.”104 Rossetti’s family and friends insisted that Scott’s portrait was pure fiction, a combination of envy and sour grapes: “One ‘old friend,’ in particular, the late Mr. W. B. Scott, fatally inspired by one knows not what paroxysm of wounded vanity, thought it fitting to collect for posthumous publication copious notes on the character and actions of Rossetti, which would have been unhandsome if they had been true, but which can be proved, and have largely been proved, to have been false.”105 Despite these reproofs, Scott’s charges were largely borne out by William Rossetti’s accounts. Even the sympathetic contributor to the Saturday Review found it “highly humiliating that such an insect could have stung to death so great a king of men”: “But why did such results follow such trifling cause? Rossetti’s fame was never lessened, even for a moment, by the insinuations of his ‘scrofulous Scotch’ critic; he was surrounded by a bodyguard of ardent and effective friends; he was, or should have been, conscious of his own rich and elastic genius.”106 Although they recognized the “poet’s peculiar sensitiveness to criticism” as a type of persecution mania, exacerbated by his addiction to chloral, Rossetti’s friends were troubled by his abrogation of culturally coded masculine ideals or “want of manliness in meeting the world on its own terms.”107 Rossetti’s comrades and fans appeared shaken, as well as repelled, by Gabriel’s fragility. His youthful arrogance, self-sufficiency, and prowess with women lent him an aura of elemental virility, which provided cover for his besotted admirers. They were entitled to worship such a figure. Swinburne was another of Buchanan’s targets. Time and brandy must have dulled Swinburne’s memory, because he turned to Caine’s Recollections for corroboration of events he had witnessed. Incensed by Caine’s assertion that Siddall’s suicide and Buchanan’s article had contributed in equal measure to Rossetti’s ner vous breakdown, Swinburne gave out a DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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torrent of invective against his former “best friend,” Gabriel, in a letter to Watts-Dunton108: For myself, if it is really to be received as the truth that such a thing as Buchanan’s attack—less in itself than the least of a thousand onslaughts which have never for one hour affected my own peace of mind or impaired my self-reliance and self-respect—is to be classed in its effect on the victim with so fearful a catastrophe as the loss of his wife in so terrible and heart-rending a manner—in that case, remembering the loyal, devoted, and unselfish affection which I lavished for fifteen years on the meanest, poorest, most abject and unmanly nature of which any record remains in even literary history, I cannot say I wonder at the final upshot of our relations, but I can most truly say from the very depth of my heart and conscience, “I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so vile a thing.”109 Algernon and Gabriel lived together from 1862 to 1863, following Siddall’s death. Swinburne was infatuated with her and sympathized with his friend’s loss. When Swinburne and Rossetti became estranged in 1874, Rossetti wrote their mutual friend, Ford Madox Brown: “I now view him as the crowning nuisance of the whole world and have no longer the slightest tolerance for his abominable ways.”110 Swinburne repaid Rossetti’s contempt with interest by spreading an ugly rumor about Gabriel’s conduct on the night of his wife’s death. Swinburne claimed that Rossetti had ignored Siddall’s pleas to remain at home; instead, Rossetti went to see his mistress, a piece of evidence Swinburne failed to contribute at the coroner’s inquest. Would Swinburne have consented to share a house with the man he held responsible for Siddall’s suicide? As late as 1869, Swinburne warmly endorsed Rossetti’s projected recovery of the buried manuscript of his poems. Swinburne did not bear up under the critic’s lash quite as stoutly as he recalled; he was ill when Buchanan’s attack was published and made more so in consequence. Swinburne’s testimony was certainly flawed and selfserving. Yet his confident manner in reproving Rossetti on the score of unmanliness astonishes, given Swinburne’s own identity as a virgin libertine rumored to be impotent and outré in his sexual tastes by any Victorian standard. Swinburne’s attitude is a useful gauge of the split between Victorian notions of psychological or moral manliness (the rectitude of

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patriarchs) and virility. The excerpt also raises the specter of homosexuality through its vehement repudiation and enthusiastic resumption of affectional ties between men: “Thank God for the difference between my ‘best friend’ of the past and my best friend of the present.”111 Swinburne’s posthumous verdict, “I am shamed through all my nature to have loved so vile a thing,” transcribed a shameful love for an unworthy object (“abject,” “unmanly”) in terms strongly reminiscent of the homophobic language Swinburne used to blackball his former “best friend,” Solomon. Rossetti’s egotism, initially perceived as a healthy self-reliance, informed his sensitivity to criticism through the years. During and after the Fleshly School debacle, William Rossetti arranged a favorable reception, as far as he was able, for Gabriel’s work and insulated the irascible poet from unsympathetic notices of Ballads and Sonnets (1881): “If, once again, there was at first a measure of adverse criticism, Rossetti, in his failing health, was allowed to know nothing about that either. All he saw in the name of criticism was a noble and brilliant appreciation by Watts-Dunton (Athenaeum), which, as I remember, brought the tears to his eyes when he read it,” Hall Caine reminisced, “and an article, all adoration, by me.”112 Rossetti’s brilliance masked the fact that he lived on praise and could not survive without it. Noted for his mercurial temperament, Rossetti veered precipitately from moods of grandiosity to abjection: “As a human being, his commanding and attractive personality, his wit and humour, his dramatic and oratorical power, his marvellous memory, his reach of speculation and versatility of thought, his voice, countenance, and gesture, his originality and caprice, his strength and weakness, his self-assertion and dependence on friendship, made him an endearing and engrossing object of the love lavished upon him by his friends. Great as his genius was, it was incurably diseased: and this morbid side of his nature was in part the secret of the fascination.”113 A variation on the theme: natures that run to excess are richest, The Quarterly Review recognized Rossetti’s derangement as a source of tragic grandeur and enduring interest.

Blurred Genres: Criticism, Biography, Hagiography I invoke Hayden White’s discussion of blurred genres in one final example of how accounts of Rossetti’s life and works betray an overweening

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concept of genre. Doughty’s literary biography, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (1949), achieved pseudo- coherence through its focus on Rossetti’s love affairs and the possibility for “regenerate rapture” thereby afforded him. Doughty’s chronology seems reasonable enough. He regarded Siddall as the dominant figure until 1857, when Gabriel fell passionately in love with Jane Burden, later Mrs. Morris. Unable to abandon “Lizzie” for “Janey,” Rossetti threw himself into casual amours with his models, among whom “Fanny” ruled from 1859 to 1867. Doughty described Rossetti’s renewed intimacy with Jane Morris in 1867 and hinted at a romantic consummation during their joint tenancy at Kelmscott Manor. William Rossetti deleted any mention of Mrs. Morris after 1869, when he came to edit Gabriel’s correspondence (410). Anxious to disguise the identity of the woman, Jane Morris, who inspired his recent love poetry, Gabriel appended a misleading prefatory note to his Poems (1870), which suggested that many were written before Siddall’s death: “Many poems in this volume were written between 1847 and 1853.” When the sonnet sequence known as The House of Life, published as a work in progress in 1870, was completed and readied for publication in 1881, Gabriel claimed that “many among those now first added are still the work of earlier years,” a deliberate falsification; of the forty-seven new sonnets that appeared in the later edition, forty-five were written between 1869 and 1881.114 Doughty’s command of Rossetti’s writings allowed him to draw informed comparisons between early and later drafts of poems (no simple task given the misrepresentation of dates of composition). Unfortunately, Doughty was an unreliable narrator, in the sense that he was intent on his version of the events culminating in Gabriel’s monumental passion for Jane Morris, which allegedly revivified his art. Rossetti’s contemporary, Colvin, was less sanguine about late Rossetti and his obsession with Mrs. Morris’s type of beauty. According to Colvin, Rossetti became the “slave of his own predilections” for a “par ticu lar cast of beauty, with lips at once full and pining, and eyes overshadowed by a great thunder-cloud of hair—he has found this, and the length of throat, the litheness of limb and sinuousness of pose that go with it, so consonant to his imaginative mood, that he repeats them again and again, sometimes with a mechanical insistence and exaggeration, especially in the drawing and colouring of the mouth, that almost degenerate into caricature.”115 Waugh agreed that Mrs. Morris surpassed Mrs. Rossetti as the chief object of the painter’s regard and inspiration; unlike Doughty, he considered this development inimical to the best [ 160 ]

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interests of Rossetti’s art: “From then onwards her dark beauty, growing less and less human as the years went by, dominated his painting, usurping Elizabeth Siddal’s white and gold.”116 For Doughty, the substitution of Elizabeth Siddall’s golden hair for Jane Morris’s dark tresses in poems such as “Love Enthroned,” “Her Gifts,” “Youth’s Spring Tribute,” and “Venus Victrix” was a device employed to prevent identification with Mrs. Morris. The poems were franker in their discourse on sex than Rossetti’s countless pictures paying homage to Jane Morris. The British Quarterly Review lambasted The House of Life as a “House of Ill Fame.”117 Doughty claimed that Rossetti’s creative energies were unleashed by his reciprocated passion for Jane Morris. Why, then, did Gabriel brood over the poems he had sacrificed to Siddall’s memory, and why did he resort to the extraordinary mea sure of having her body uncoffined to recover the lost manuscript in 1869, at the alleged height of his poetic powers? Doughty’s theory was that Rossetti’s insomnia, abuse of chloral, fiscal irresponsibility, and dissoluteness deranged his judgment and propelled him in a downward spiral. While factually correct, Doughty’s story line was inflected with retro-Victorian outlooks. After 1882, the whitewashing of the Rossetti legend was at an end. As Waugh observed, “In Rossetti’s own day, no doubt, not a little of the adulation he aroused came from this romance of decay— a sort of spiritual coprophily characteristic of the age.”118 The emerging portrait of the “degenerate” Rossetti reflected the romantic notion of dissipated or neurasthenic genius, culminating in Nordau’s best-selling tome, Degeneration. Doughty claimed that the emotional complexities of Gabriel’s adulterous love affair precipitated his ner vous breakdown in 1872 (532). Were Swinburne, Bell Scott, Hall Caine, and William Rossetti wrong to assign blame for Rossetti’s collapse, first and foremost, to Buchanan’s media crusade? Clues gathered from Gabriel’s penchant for literary self-dramatization support Doughty’s analysis. Rossetti’s disproportionate rage, followed by depression, over the conspiracy to discredit his work during the Fleshly School controversy was fueled by guilt. Fresh from superintending Siddall’s disinterment, Howell spread a romantic story about Siddall’s wondrous hair, which continued to grow after her death, filling her casket with gold. When Rossetti’s fantasy-beloved exchanged her tresses, black for gold in his poems, she asserted Siddall’s preeminence in his psychic life. Rossetti’s reenactment of the fantasy of exhumation reprised Poe’s “Ligeia” and other tales.119 At the end of “Ligeia,” the narrator confronts an uncannily DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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familiar apparition, with long dark hair escaping from her cerements, rising from the deathbed of her blonde rival to assail him for infidelity. Similarly, Rossetti’s delusion that his possessive and hysterical wife was trying to contact him from beyond the grave was a projection of guilt and fear. She would haunt him; she would stand between him and happiness. Gabriel’s roadside encounter with a tame chaffinch, which he took for “the spirit of my wife, the soul of her has taken this shape,” suggested to observers that Rossetti’s delusions emanated from his guilt and anxiety: “Something is going to happen to me,” he was overheard to remark.120 Rossetti told Caine that he found a suicide note on the table by his wife’s bedside, a detail that was not mentioned at the coroner’s court: “Sure I am that he said that the message had left such a scar on his heart as would never be healed.”121 Moments before swallowing the contents of a bottle of laudanum in 1872, Gabriel twice called out “a term of gross and unbearable obloquy”; Doughty speculated the term was “murderer” (520n1). Aspects of Rossetti’s personality and behavior have been ascribed to his “anxiety complex” and “self-accusation” following Siddall’s death.122 And it is tempting to read Gabriel’s behavior through this Freudian lens. What unconscious purpose did the exhumation of the manuscript serve for Rossetti in the way of dredging up old associations and grief? He must have known, on some level, that his conscience would exact retribution for this deed; it would never allow him to enjoy the fame he hoped to win as a poet. In the complicated weft of self-aggrandizement and abjection, was masochism a factor? Art historian Jean Clair argues that the painter’s “evocation of the beloved is always a reconquest of time linked to an underlying suggestion of death.” The temporal skew through multiplication of images of an iconic woman in Rosa Triplex (1874) suggests that she has been transfigured by time and memory, “the only flower of consolation in the bitterest of hells,” according to Rossetti.123 Doughty poignantly summarized Rossetti’s propensity for hopeless love affairs: “Indeed all the most significant, most deeply emotional experiences of Rossetti’s life had been seized under the threat of dispossession.” From his adolescent passion for the ailing Siddall to his adulterous affair with Mrs. Morris: “Love and anxiety became for Rossetti inextricably associated, an additional strain instead of a release and renewal, though unconsciously he enjoyed the added intensity, or rather tensity, that in both cases the fear of dispossession gave to his passion” (551). I particularly admire Doughty’s assessment of Rossetti’s attraction to the “tensity” of thwarted love. Through his love affairs and representations of [ 162 ]

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romantic love, Rossetti compulsively sought and repeated a particularly fraught emotional experience. According to H. C. Marillier, Rossetti had been attracted from his youth to the weird and super natural, what Rossetti liked to call “Bogie” material.124 In 1851, he produced his first rendering of the doppelgänger legend in How They Met Themselves. The drawing portrays lovers frightened to death—literally, in the woman’s case—by specters of themselves encountered in a darkling wood. As in Beata Beatrix, the female figure resembles Siddall. Similarly, her emotional transport (rapture or swoon) divorces her from the intensely sympathetic male near at hand. If How They Met Themselves may be taken into evidence, Rossetti’s expectations for married life were not rosy; he redrew this picture, while Siddall lay ill in bed, during their honeymoon in Paris in 1860. Writing to Brown shortly before his marriage, Rossetti gave a harrowing account of her health: “I have been, almost without respite, since I saw you, in the most agonizing anxiety about poor dear Lizzie’s health. Indeed it has been that kind of pain which one can never remember at its full, as she has seemed ready to die daily and more than once a day.”125 Rossetti married Siddall convinced that she was not long for this world. He may have married her to assuage a bourgeois guilt complex born of the religious and moral rhetoric of sexual respectability, though perhaps not his own; his mother was scandalized by his affair. He may have attributed Siddall’s chronic illness and depression to a premarital miscarriage. In 1861, Siddall gave birth to a stillborn daughter, an event that precipitated a severe ner vous breakdown, not to be confused with her bouts of neurasthenia.126 It is frequently asserted that Rossetti avoided narrative painting after 1858, turning instead to explanatory titles and sonnets to invoke symbolism.127 In fact, he continued to produce narrative subjects, which have been neglected while Rossetti’s “stunners” are privileged over other images. Sharp was uncertain, but he dated Rossetti’s The Death of Lady Macbeth circa 1870. The drawing captured the psychological torment of Lady Macbeth, plagued by nightmares and visions, before she ended her own life by “self and violet hands.”128 The psychological twinship depicted in Shakespeare’s play had a counterpart in Rossetti’s life: Siddall was addicted to the painkiller laudanum; Rossetti, who took massive quantities of chloral for insomnia, attempted to kill himself using Siddall’s drug of choice. In fairness to Doughty, the facts of Rossetti’s history are in themselves so sensational, and the painter-poet’s tendency toward literary self- dramatization DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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FIGURE 4.3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Death of Lady Macbeth, 1875. Pencil on paper.

Image © Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, UK/Bridgeman Images.

so palpable, that it is hard to avoid falling into one or another generic pattern suggested by Rossetti or his cohort’s scripting of events. Doughty’s emphasis on Rossetti’s heterosexual exploits corrected a record marred by Victorian reticence about premarital and extramarital sex, but it was priggishly evasive on the score of male-male intimacy. Scholars today would have had no trouble recognizing Solomon’s homosexuality. Ordinarily an exhaustively comprehensive biographer, Doughty made scant mention of Solomon, a colorful figure. Solomon was reputedly Swinburne’s partner in drunken horseplay, as when the naked pair slid down the central banister at Tudor House while Swinburne, the Rossettis, and George Meredith resided there. By attributing this action to Algernon alone, Doughty obscured what was most salacious about the incident. In contrast, a slew of fawning tributes show that Rossetti’s contemporaries were more tolerant of intense male friendships, provided the participants abstained from sexual intimacy or, better still, never considered the possibility of sex between men: “It will, therefore, be a matter for no surprise that from that

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time forward, for several years to come, my life was my friendship with Rossetti. I shall try in this book to tell the story of that friendship, the greatest, the most intimate, the most beautiful that ever has come to me.”129 Hall Caine’s ministrations to Rossetti inspired jealousy and suspicion in his oldest friends, such as Bell Scott, a.k.a. “Scotus.” Scott wryly noted that Rossetti had “passively allowed himself to be carried” to a remote farmhouse in Cumberland by Caine, “a young man to whom he had suddenly become exclusively attached” during a severe bout of depression in 1870.130 In Max Beerbohm’s Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem, Watts-Dunton and Frederic Shields form a human wall between a reclining (declining) Gabriel and Caine.131 Scott’s “absurd fits of jealousy” and “curious reticences” about Gabriel, together with his (former) “extravagant panegyrics” and displays of “wild devotion,” conform to Wilde’s depiction of thwarted desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “He understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.”132 Sharp laid the groundwork for a theory of homoerotic collaboration in 1882, reprising the great male duos of literary history, before rhapsodizing about Gabriel’s “special friendship” with Watts-Dunton: “And in like manner it will henceforth be difficult to separate in memory Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the friend whom he loved and admired beyond other men and to whom he dedicated his most mature and greatest work.”133 Describing his experience as one of Rossetti’s satellites and well-wishers, Sharp continued: “I know that personally I found him ever affectionately considerate, and generous of heart in a way that few are able to be with men younger than themselves and with no pretensions to equality, and that his friendship as friendship has been to me one of the chief boons of my life” (30). The Greeks had a similar strategy for explaining unequal friendships between older and younger men as an altruistic pursuit on the part of the elder and wiser party. Elevating and coding illicit desire between men through classical allusion, Wilde discreetly signaled the possibility of physical attraction in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The love that he bore him—for it was really love—had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself ” (119).

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FIGURE 4.4 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and His Friends, Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole 1941.

Rossetti’s heterosexual intimacies did not interfere with his being an object of frank adoration to a host of men, who found him charismatic and handsome: “Thick, beautiful, and closely curled masses of rich brown much-neglected hair, fell about an ample brow, and almost to the wearer’s shoulders; strong eyebrows marked with their dark shadows a pair of rather sunken eyes, in which a sort of fire, instinct of what may be called proud [ 166 ]

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PLATE 1 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and His Friends, Mr William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fellows Seem to See in Gabriel, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole, 1941.

PLATE 2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–1870. Oil on canvas. Image © Tate, London. Presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple, 1889.

PLATE 3 Simeon Solomon, One Dreaming by the Sea, 1871. Watercolor on paper.

Image © The School of Art Museum and Galleries, Aberystwyth University.

PLATE 4 William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts—“Strayed Sheep,” 1852. Oil on canvas. Image © Tate, London 2015. Presented by the Art Fund, 1946.

PLATE 5 John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857. Oil

on Canvas. Image © Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/ Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 6 Simeon Solomon, Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 1859. Pen, black and brown ink over traces of pencil on paper. Image © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 7 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884. Oil on canvas. Image © Tate, London. Presented by subscribers, 1900.

PLATE 8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864–1868. Oil on canvas. Image

© Russell- Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, UK/Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 9 Max Beerbohm, from Rossetti and His Friends, Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custo-

dem, 1916. Graphite and watercolor on paper. Image © The Estate of Max Beerbohm by kind permission of Berlin Associates Ltd./Tate, London, 2015. Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole, 1941.

PLATE 10 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1864–1868. Oil on canvas. Image © Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial/Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 11 Simeon Solomon, The Sleeping Endymion, 1887. Colored chalks on paper. Image © Birmingham Museums Trust.

PLATE 12 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia de’ Tolomei, 1868–1880. Oil on canvas. Image © Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas.

PLATE 13 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870. Opaque watercolor. Image © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 14 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Tree of Forgiveness, 1881–1882. Oil on can-

vas. Image © Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 15 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Garden of Pan, 1876–1887. Oil on canvas. Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Felton Bequest/ Bridgeman Images.

PLATE 16 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Day, 1870. Watercolor, gouache, and metallic paint on paper. Image © Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.

PLATE 17 Edward Coley Burne- Jones, Laus Veneris, 1873–1875. Oil on canvas.

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK/© Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images.

cynicism, burned with a furtive kind of energy, and was distinctly, if somewhat luridly, glowing.”134 Like one of his painted female divinities, Rossetti reveled in his position as a cynosure, cultivating a variety of men as acolytes and hangers-on: “I do not think anybody who has realized . . . the space that divided me— a young fellow, untried and unknown—from this great and illustrious man will wonder that he was absolutely irresistible to me.”135 The cult of personality surrounding Rossetti burnished his repute: “What a supreme man is Rossetti!” wrote Philip Burke Marston in 1873. “Why is he not some great exiled king, that we might give our lives in trying to restore him to his kingdom?”136 Masculine charisma, combined with a “dominant personality,”137 is a hallmark of the celebrity who personifies a mode of being in the world—brilliant and unhinged— that audiences can admire but not emulate. After the publication of Poems, Rossetti became the cynosure of yet another circle of male well-wishers and acolytes, among them John Heraud and Arthur O’Shaughnessy. John Payne sent Rossetti a copy of The Masque of Shadows, inscribed: “A token (such as it is) of admiration of Mr. Rossetti’s genius.”138 Showered with encomiums by his successors, Yeats and Masefield, Rossetti’s legend was carried to preposterous lengths in subsequent novelistic treatments of his love affairs, such as Violet Hunt’s The Wife of Rossetti (1932) and Elizabeth Savage’s Willowwood (1978). Rossetti, the man, continued to claim the attention of critics, even as his pictures and poetry fell into neglect. The horizon of expectations caught up with the novelty and strangeness of his art; demotic modern verse made his poetry seem dated and epicene. As early as 1886, Sharp conceded that Christina Rossetti had achieved greater renown than her elder brother: “The name of Christina Rossetti is known intimately where perhaps that of the author of the House of Life is but a name and nothing more.”139 R. R. Bowker concurred, noting in 1888: “Christina Rossetti’s deeply spiritual poems are known even more widely than those of her more famous brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” a vivid illustration of the dichotomization of man and work.140

The Symbolist Imagination Gabriel’s niece, Helen Rossetti Angeli, speculated that the artist’s images were a casualty of the modernist bias against Victorian femininity: “The DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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legend—or myth—of the gentler sex was in basse acque, and any artist or writer who devoted his genius to exalting Woman was bound to meet with distrust and prejudice. Even in the Art Schools, the female form was at a discount, and to secure sittings women models had to starve themselves into a decline in the endeavour to look like boys. The adolescent male was in the ascendant.”141 Angeli probably had in mind Henry Scott Tuke, an acclaimed painter of male nudes disporting themselves on the water. Angeli’s description of anorexic female models that look like boys savors of Egon Schiele and Ferdinand Hodler’s work; these were artists of the Viennese Secession. British artists of queer-friendly Bloomsbury, such as Duncan Grant, actually went in for full-figure models. In 1949, Angeli’s remarks were nearly as perspicacious as they were homophobic. The ascendancy of the adolescent male was inflected with homoeroticism, though not necessarily with misogyny, as she implied. Anachronistically styling Rossetti’s oeuvre “heterosexual art,” Angeli entirely missed the point of Rossetti’s meditation on gynandrous subjectivity, through his selfprojection onto the dreamy and listless countenance of a beautiful woman: “One face looks out from all his canvasses,” wrote Christina Rossetti. “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”142 Hunt, Myers, Pollock, and Arthur Symons have remarked on Gabriel’s production of a series of women’s heads, “looking out with unsearchable eyes.”143 I read these images rather differently than Pollock does. Employing dédoublement,144 a technique of projection, Rossetti confounded the solipsistic world of the painter in his studio with the isolated, embowered femme fatale in her plush lair, ambiguating the painter’s relation to his model and picture: Was it a self-portrait, a portrait of a lover, or a symbolic picture? In Lilith (1868), the viewer gains visual access to a garden by means of a mirror; my authority for choosing “mirror” over “window,” at first glance a reasonable surmise, is the twinned reflection of heavy unlit candles, perversely adding to the gloom. Echoing modernism’s disposition, “the mimetic mirror is turned strictly outward,”145 this arrangement of objects complicates the viewer’s frame of reference. The location of the window admitting a scene of unkempt nature must be studio side, suggesting a life-copies-art paradox. Or does the painter stand en plein air, while his model brushes her hair in the perfumed darkness of the boudoir?146 Dédoublement became a favorite device of the symbolists, who were fascinated with the concept of the feminine alter ego or state of inner contradiction wherein the ego and a second self struggle for dominance. In [ 168 ]

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FIGU R E  4.5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1864–1868. Oil on canvas. Image

© Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial/Bridgeman Images.

1891, the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff debuted I Lock the Door Upon Myself, featuring his red-haired sister as model and proxy. The picture evokes Gabriel Rossetti’s images of haunting women, many of them redheads; Khnopff’s title refers to Christina Rossetti’s poem “Who Shall Deliver Me?” (1876): I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?147 DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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Through this double-barreled allusion, Christina’s words ramify as commentary on Rossetti’s projection of feelings of isolation and self-loathing onto sister-selves. Rossetti’s exaltation of female beauty, together with the thematic undercurrent of passivity, inwardness, and feminine jouissance in his works, dovetailed with emerging conceptions of male effeminacy and homosexuality. Rossetti’s alienation from traditional domesticity and revaluation of love and lifestyle forged a power ful bohemian identity inextricably connected with Pre-Raphaelite subcultures. Pace Angeli’s chronology, the fashion for androgynous subjects in Victorian England was launched by Rossetti’s “junior allies” Solomon and Burne-Jones.148 During the heyday of Rossetti’s paintings of women and flowers, Solomon and Burne-Jones’s productions were explicitly identified with Rossetti’s sphere of influence. Though Solomon’s idols were male rather than female, they achieved through their inwardness, sleeping eye-buds that made them look like beasts cutting horns, the curious mixture of spirituality and carnality of Rossetti’s “stunners.” Described as “poetic,” “beautiful,” “voluptuous,” “sensual,” and “sensational,” and often replete with exotic and gorgeous accessories, Solomon’s work was Rossetti-like in many respects.149 Having seen “some remarkable designs” by Solomon, Boyce commented that they showed “much Rossetti-like feeling.”150 In 1925, Arthur Symons, author of The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), waxed poetic while recounting the languorous visages framed by “white, sharp- edged stars” in Solomon’s The Sleepers and the One that Waketh: “These faces, with their spectral pallor, the robes of faint purple tinged with violet, are full of morbid delicacy, like the painting of a perfume. Here, as always, there is weakness, insecurity, but also a very personal sense of beauty.”151 Strikingly, Symons excused the “weakness” of Solomon’s homoerotic art as the price of refinement: “morbid delicacy.” In stark contrast, Symons traced what he described as the pernicious evolution of the “lust of the eyes”152 in Rossetti’s late work, resulting in the tautological sameness of Rossetti’s portraits: “It was one of Rossetti’s glories to paint luxuriously luxurious women, surrounded by every form of luxury.” Symons was leery of the “unintelligible menace” threatening Rossetti’s self-command: “Yet, as his intentions overpower him, as he becomes the slave and no longer the master of his dreams, his pictures become no longer symbolic. They become idols.”153 Foes and proponents of aestheticism concurred that “the aesthete’s temperament was his ability to sustain a [ 170 ]

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FIGURE 4.6 Simeon Solomon, The Sleeping Endymion, 1887. Colored chalks on paper. Image © Birmingham Museums Trust.

relation to beautiful objects characterized not by his mastery over them but by their mastery over him,” in Psomiades’s elegant phrase.154 Undisturbed by the homosexual Solomon’s abrogation of conventional masculinity, Symons resisted the notion that a dominant personality like Rossetti would abase himself in the worship of women. This susceptibility to aesthetic emotion placed Rossetti on the continuum of emotionally incontinent men “feminized” by their association with temperament rather than intellect. I do not mean to equate Rossetti’s persecution mania engendered by a hostile press with Solomon’s actual prosecution, incarceration, and banishment for homosexual proclivities. Rossetti’s reclusiveness and Solomon’s vagabondage, however, signify that Victorian England could not accommodate the needs of an artistic individuality of this magnitude. “For poor Solomon there was no place in life. Casting real ity aside, he stepped back into the riotous pages of Petronius.”155 Years after the Wilde debacle, Robert Ross opined of Solomon’s legacy: “I can imagine many people being repelled by this troubled introspective art, especially at the present day. There is hardly room for an inverted Watts” (150). Breaking molds and violating taboos entailed a redefinition of masculinity; Rossetti belongs on this continuum. As a founding member of the British avant-garde, Rossetti rejected middle-class ideals of property, progress, industry, and propriety: first, by aiming to purify British art; next, by scandalizing its audience. Jerome McGann claims what Rossetti “accomplished was a DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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critical definition of the symbolistic imagination when its work has been forced by circumstance to be carried out within a marketing and commercial frame of reference.”156 Rossetti was by no means the first to face this quandary. According to Giorgio Agamben, Baudelaire strove to restore aura and authority to the work of art in the age of the celebrity artist and commodity fetish, which drew the kind of rapt attention that had once belonged to the religious totem. By exploiting the schism in exchange and use value— having a value that inheres in uselessness (art for art’s sake) and a use that inheres in intangibility—Baudelaire pushed the process of object fetishization to its limits.157 Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting reflect this appropriation of unreality through the evocation of spiritual realms and dream worlds. By their play of associative memory and exploration of subjectivity, Rossetti’s poems record a “centrifugal journey into the interior of the self ” absent the will or ability to journey back to the outside world. For this reason, Rossetti’s poetry appears to devolve into a “tautological sterility.”158 Like Pater, Symons applauded the “tragic and narcotic, hallucinated and sinuously subtle” quality of Rossetti’s poetry, which introduced into “modern verse a certain all but unheard-of sense of strangeness” that would become a hallmark of literary symbolism. However, Symons disliked Rossetti’s intoxicated pictorial color sense.159 Rossetti reworked La Pia de’ Tolomei (1880) for over a decade. Taking its motive from Dante’s Divine Comedy, the heroine has been unjustly imprisoned by her jealous husband. Ironically, the model for La Pia, Jane Morris, was perhaps less innocent of marital infidelity than the woman she impersonated. The painting records Rossetti’s struggle with his emotions and his medium. The drawing is awkwardly done. Jane Morris’s neck is overextended; her body, twisted. With its acid colors, magnified foliage, and ill-drawn rooks, the painting achieves hallucinatory effects owing to its many defects. Symons’s commentary on the gross materiality of Rossetti’s colors resonates with viewers of La Pia de’ Tolomei: “They took on at times some strange and stealthy and startling ardours of paint, with a subtle fury.” The result of this technique was “an exaggeration, a blurred vision” that bordered on abstraction and expressed Rossetti’s “contempt for the outside world.”160 Once again, the introspective, pining beauty confined within the cloistered space of the canvas may be the painter himself. In La Pia de’ Tolomei the ceiling appears to close in on the bowed, imprisoned figure. Symons intuited Rossetti’s “hatred of real ity,” which [ 172 ]

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FIGU R E 4.7 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Pia de’ Tolomei, 1868–1880. Oil on canvas.

Image © Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas.

Freud has identified with hallucination (psychosis) and Kuspit with the artist’s dilemma in modernity—the threat of self-effacement in the crowded, indifferent, or disapproving world.161 Pleading for a “rapprochement between painters and public,” Sidney Colvin grasped the secret longing of his artist friends for legitimation in the eyes of the public— once these eyes are “opened to the radical qualities and purport of the better and neglected art of the day.” Trapped between philistine incomprehension and demands for knockoffs, struggling in the “cold shade of popu lar neglect and critical antagonism,”162 was it any wonder Rossetti declared that to be an artist was “just the same thing as to be a whore, as far as dependence on the whims and fancies of individuals is concerned”?163 Similarly, Manet and Baudelaire’s identification with the figure of the “prostitute: for hire, body and soul” signified the artistwriter’s “quintessentially modern” identity within the scheme of capitalism.164 The modern artist suffered a narcissistic injury connected with the DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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twin-pronged exigencies of the marketplace, where the need for revolutionary change was accompanied by the perception that any novelty would quickly be plagiarized or brought within the contemporary audience’s horizon of expectation. Like Courbet, Manet, and Baudelaire, Rossetti personified what Kuspit calls the “avant-garde complex.” Self-destructive, hypochondriacal, paranoid, veering wildly from feelings of impotence to omnipotence, the narcissist’s “ultimate defense against annihilation anxiety,” Rossetti withdrew into “an insular studio space that is a world unto itself ” and locked the door.165 The reclusive Gabriel Rossetti emerges from the annals of Pre-Raphaelitism as the archetypal modern celebrity: a strange, fascinating personality that flamed and burned itself out in a rage of anxiety to remain relevant. It was not Rossetti’s reticence and idealism per se that exacerbated his trials in the marketplace, but his conflicted desire for renown.

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FIVE Anonymous Journalism The Fleshly School Controversy

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

I

n a journalistic era dominated by cognomens and anonymous reviews, the emergence of signature transformed the status of the freelance critic. Attribution bolstered the journalist’s self-assertion and pretensions to expertise. In 1867, William Rossetti decried the “squalidness of anonymity,” while observing that the journalist with a byline spoke “almost ex cathedra.”1 Victorian journalists were conscious of a potentially momentous shift in authority, from collective to personal responsibility. This transformation was, however, long in the making and exposed fault lines in the British print media. Paradoxically, the politics of signature underscored the activities of the editor, who formerly dictated but now explicitly articulated a journal’s policy in this matter. In the prospectus for the Fortnightly Review (1865), editor G. H. Lewes promised readers that all “restrictions of party and of editorial ‘consistency’ which in other journals hamper the full and free expression of opinion” shall be removed.2 The Fortnightly Review would employ signature after the fashion of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a

journal extolled as a model of critical independence and diversity of opinion. Lewes reasoned that the “first condition of all writing is sincerity, and that one means of securing sincerity is to insist on personal responsibility” through signed articles.3 In the first volume of the Fortnightly Review, Anthony Trollope pressed home the point that criticism launched under the subterfuge of a nom de plume was unmanly as well as irresponsible: “I say that the man who dares to be a critic should dare to face all that his criticism may bring upon him.”4 Shifting the debate from the quality of criticism to the civic virtues of the critic, proponents of signature invoked traits of exemplary British manhood to reinforce the argument that anonymous criticism, “from behind a veil,” was an unworthy pursuit: “The habit of open dealing in all matters has been always acknowledged and reverenced as a manly— one may almost say, the manly—virtue, ever since there was a man on earth.”5 Curiously, the manly candor argument failed to quickly convert mainstream British newspapers, periodicals, and the public they served. Multiplying publishing opportunities through anonymity and use of pseudonyms, some journalists wished to retain the option of publishing in a variety of periodicals and across party lines.6 When John Morley assumed the helm of the Fortnightly Review in 1867, he championed the use of signature as the principal guarantee of quality work. By his own admission, Morley was less of a stickler on the score of clear-cut attribution than Lewes had been: “Personally I have attached less stern importance to signature as an unvarying rule than did my predecessor.” 7 Morley relaxed this standard with the potential for controversy, whether in matters of religion (the Fortnightly Review was accused of anticlerical fervor) or politics (the review stood for liberalism).8 Commencing with “Anonymous Journalism” and closing his term with “Valedictory,” Morley outlined shifts in editorial policy across the broad spectrum of periodicals and dailies during his fifteen-year tenure. In 1882, Morley reflected that rival editors initially questioned the wisdom of affixing signatures to articles written by critical antagonists in the same publication, whereas today: “The question is rather how long the exclusively anonymous periodicals will resist the innovation” of signature”9 —the reason being that anonymity promoted or passively encouraged a host of journalistic improprieties (calumny, puffery, self- dealing, lying, and libel), all on display in the Fleshly School controversy. The merits of signature figured prominently in the critical fracas erupting from the controversy, which [ 176 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

stoked an internecine battle for the soul of Victorian print media and provided tabloid quality media fodder.

Spurious Authorship The Contemporary Review, in which the opening salvo of the Fleshly School conflict appeared in October 1871 under the spurious signature of “Thomas Maitland,” was founded in 1866 by Alexander Strahan with the explicit understanding that it would publish “signed articles exclusively.”10 When James Knowles took the helm in 1870, he continued the editorial practice of recruiting prominent contributors and publishing signed articles. Whatever Strahan’s motive for appending an alias to “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” (Buchanan wished to remain anonymous, but Knowles wanted to preserve uniformity of attribution in his magazine), neither Strahan nor Buchanan was prepared for the scandal that erupted when their falsehood was exposed. As luck would have it, Strahan sent a letter to The Athenaeum denying Sidney Colvin’s charge that “Thomas Maitland” was a nom de plume for Buchanan11; at the same time, Buchanan sent a letter to The Athenaeum owning authorship of the incendiary article but disclaiming responsibility for the pseudonym. The Athenaeum, a journal with a proud tradition of unsigned contributions, wasted no time in scolding the Contemporary Review for hy poc risy: “Mr. Buchanan’s letter is an edifying commentary on Messrs. Strahan’s. Messrs. Strahan apparently think that it is a matter of no importance whether signatures are correct or not, and that Mr. Browning had as much to do with the article as Mr.  Buchanan. Mr.  Buchanan seems equally indifferent, but he now claims the critique is his. It is a pity the publishers of the Contemporary Review should be in such uncertainty about the authorship of the articles in that magazine.”12 Although the reading public was generally ignorant of the names of featured writers of leading periodicals, the journalists’ circle of professional acquaintance was better informed: “In the case of the chief writers on the Saturday Review, for example, or the Pall Mall Gazette, or the Spectator or the Economist, there is practically no anonymity.”13 Hence it was only a matter of time, or six degrees of separation, before Swinburne, Gabriel and William Rossetti, Solomon, and Morris were duly apprised of the true identity of their mutual decrier. Colvin had it “point-blank” from the editor, ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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Knowles.14 Before unleashing their wrath on Buchanan, the targets of “Maitland’s” attack expressed consternation at the suspension of a fixed editorial policy for the unexpressed purpose of savaging the figureheads of a prominent literary movement, as Gabriel Rossetti’s retaliatory pamphlet attested: “It is now some years since a good deal began to be said as to the irresponsible nature of anonymous criticism; and some literary journals were established in which the man who spoke for or against another was no more nameless at length than the man he spoke of. Such journals there are still, honestly pursuing their new course; and among these, the Contemporary Review might, for anything I know to the contrary, have been fairly reckoned till now.”15 Journals of the period accepted pseudonymity as a matter of course, although signature was gaining favor. The sticking point was that the Contemporary Review stood in the vanguard of journals featuring signed articles. This interregnum explains how an anonymous correspondent for The Athenaeum confidently reprimanded Buchanan for his use of a “habitual pseudonym which everybody knows were the same thing as an alias worn once for a special occasion.”16 It beggars credulity, but none of Buchanan’s anonymous castigators doubted their right to levy this charge. His critics shared a journalistic ethos of disinterest and sincerity, which they accused Buchanan of violating to advance his repute. The Saturday Review reported that “Mr. Rossetti and his friends protested indignantly against the unfairness of one writer of poetry disguising himself, like a bravo in slouched beaver and muffled cloak, in order to attack his more successful rivals, and indirectly, if not directly, to praise himself.” With his credibility impugned through denial, exposure, and self-dealing, Buchanan further damaged his reputation by claiming that his “alias” permitted readers to weigh the merits of his argument, a rationale that was quickly debunked: “There is no reason to suppose that his name carries with it an oracular authority which would be fatal to the free exercise of private judgment,” sniffed the Saturday Review.17 In the absence of a byline, the Saturday Review’s objectivity inhered in the balancing act performed by its contributor, censuring Buchanan for his duplicity and the Fleshly School for immorality. The Saturday Review deplored Swinburne and Rossetti’s “sickly self- consciousness, their emasculated delight in brooding over and toying with matters which healthy, manly men put out of their thoughts, not by an effort, but unconsciously, by a natural and wholesome instinct.” He likened their poetic [ 178 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

prurience to an abdication of manly reticence: “It is, in short, their utter unmanliness which is at once so disgusting, and, so far as they exercise any influence, so mischievous” (701). A pox on the spurious and the lascivious, as the case may be. Once again, an anonymous reviewer, unwilling to sign his name to an article condemning emasculate verse, had the temerity to castigate Buchanan for using an alias. Such paradoxes illuminate the atmosphere of confusion and consternation partly obscured by the vigorous affirmations and denunciations of the contestants in the Fleshly School debate. Under fire were two critical standbys: anonymity and puffery. The Saturday Review reproached the PreRaphaelite circle for “the atmosphere of mutual admiration in which they and their associates appear to live and move and have their being, and which is destructive, not only of healthy vigour, but of some of the best impulses of art” (700). Fun treated the question of the pseudonym as one of the “sideissues” drummed up by “the mutual- admiration firm of Rossetti and Co.” to besmirch Buchanan’s reputation, and greeted the appearance of Buchanan’s signed pamphlet on the Fleshly School with the enthusiasm of “all who value the purity of English Literature.”18 Once again, coterie journalism and aesthetic collaboration were unfavorably remarked by Buchanan’s limited fan base as a justification for his behav ior. Over the years, Buchanan’s many-pronged assault on the Pre-Raphaelites as a “Mutual Admiration Society” correctly identified puffery as a collective vice. Commenting on Swinburne’s encomium on Rossetti’s Poems, Buchanan complained that “Mr.  Swinburne went into a hysteria of admiration: ‘golden affluence,’ ‘ jewel- coloured words,’ ‘chastity of form,’ ‘harmonious nakedness,’ ‘consummate fleshly sculpture,’ and so on in Mr. Swinburne’s well-known manner when reviewing his friends” (“FS” 337). As we have seen, Pre-Raphaelite partisanship was conspicuous for espousing a narrow, exclusive, esoteric culture. Their penchant for circling the wagons and anointing champions was a matter of record. Henry Buxton Forman offered a line-by-line refutation of Buchanan’s allegations, so partisan as to undermine his credibility19: “When we say that Mr. Buchanan’s attack is less damaging than Mr. Forman’s defence, we do not thereby imply that Mr. Forman has a base or willful intention to injure Mr. Rossetti. He is only what some writer calls ‘that worst of enemies, your worshipper.’ ”20 Because Buchanan’s charge was substantive on the merits, William Rossetti discouraged Gabriel, Swinburne, and Ford Madox Brown from responding to Buchanan’s article and subsequent pamphlet with a partisan ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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attack, which would “be one more symptom of that camaraderie or coterie-feeling which Buchanan especially denounces, not without some reason.” William continued, “I deprecate anything like a personal defence by friends, which would only the more go to confirm one of the more substantial heads of Buchanan’s attack, viz: that Gabriel, Swinburne, etc. hang together as a coterie for mutual support.”21 Instead, the Pre-Raphaelites used their press contacts to punish Buchanan: “Buchanan’s pamphlet on The Fleshly School of Poetry is advertised for immediate publication; and that Colvin has in some way or other (Gabriel has but an imperfect knowledge of the details) provided for its being hostilely reviewed in the Saturday Review, Pall Mall, Athenaeum, Daily News, and Fortnightly.”22 Once his cover was blown, Buchanan’s critical and literary reputation suffered. He received payback in the form of negative publicity and unfavorable reviews. Yet it would be a mistake to see all criticism of Buchanan as part of a Pre-Raphaelite cabal. Rossetti booster F. G. Stephens wrote for The Athenaeum, but the journal’s editor, Norman MacColl, was not an intimate member of the circle. Buchanan’s exploitation of the veil of anonymity made it difficult for Westminster Review, The Examiner, Spectator, and The Athenaeum to uphold anonymous journalism as a safeguard against calumny, puffery, and “the new fashion of self-criticism” (CWACS 16:427): “It may be only a matter of taste, but we prefer, if we are reading an article written by Mr. Buchanan, that it should be signed by him, especially when he praises his own poems; and that little ‘inadvertencies’ of this kind should not be left uncorrected till the public find them out.”23 Swinburne reformulated this charge when ridiculing Buchanan for self-dealing in Under the Microscope (1872): “This pathetic tribute to the poet Buchanan was paid by no less a person than Buchanan the critic” (CWACS 16:426).24 Buchanan rebutted this calumny in a letter to the editor, but The Athenaeum suavely restated its case: “We doubt if one out of the enormous number of readers on whom Mr. Buchanan is modest enough to count, will discover that a writer who accuses Mr. Rossetti of copying him, and classes himself along with Mr. Matthew Arnold, is not praising his own poems.”25 Under the Maitland pseudonym, Buchanan charged that “Jenny,” Rossetti’s poem about a streetwalker, “is a production which bears signs of having been suggested by Mr. Buchanan’s quasi-lyrical poems, which it copies in the style of title” [“Jenny” not “Jennifer”] (“FS” 343). In 1872, under his own signature, Buchanan was forced to use the first person

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possessive; “Jenny” bore “signs of having been suggested by my own quasilyrical poems, which it copies in the style of title” (FS 45). Having assumed the guise of an objective and impartial critic, in the first instance, Buchanan’s revision raised eyebrows. As the squabble played out in The Athenaeum, Buchanan’s insinuations evolved into a full-blown charge of “Mr. Rossetti’s apparent plagiarism.”26 As the self-proclaimed balladeer of the Scottish peasantry and working-class London, Buchanan was protecting his literary turf; however, this posture (and his ungentlemanly behav ior) irremediably classed Buchanan in a social and literary netherworld. Even before the Fleshly School controversy, the Pall Mall Gazette played the class card against Buchanan, dismissing London Poems as “a whole work houseful of ‘Nells’ and ‘Megs’ and ‘Lizes’ and the other trulls of Mr. Buchanan’s frowsy muse.”27 George Saintsbury later deprecated Buchanan’s cherished but commonplace subjects, “half-educated persons of variable temperament” whose “mood of hysterical exaltation and admiration at things in general” the poet highly (and naively) esteemed.28 Déclassé poets threatened the temple of culture. Though he was no rustic, but a city-bred Scot, Buchanan was frequently abused by his social superiors for his “ludicrous ignorance on literary subjects.”29 Apparently, he had no right to judge other men’s quality: “It is not to be expected that any verse-monger should discriminate nicely between verse-mongers and poets.”30 Reminiscent of John Gibson Lockhart’s defense of the historical aristocracy of talent (Shelley and Lord Byron), Victorian critics were intent on thwarting Buchanan’s social desire. Noting that the “crudeness of Mr. Buchanan’s thought is as striking as his rudeness,” the Pall Mall Gazette objected to Buchanan’s ranking himself with Shakespeare and judging other writers with “vulgar flippancy.”31 Beyond the legitimate grievance against Buchanan’s “graceless vituperation of the efforts of one’s fellowworkers,” the Pall Mall Gazette perseverated about Buchanan’s absurd social and literary pretensions (11). As the Fleshly School fracas unfolded, Buchanan was incensed by articles that encapsulated his career as “the spectacle of a man who professes to be a poet endeavoring to attract attention to himself by crying down the works of his contemporaries, praising his own work by implication in the contempt he seeks to cast upon the work of others.” Registering the “impertinence and indelicacy” of Buchanan’s self-promotion, one reviewer derided Buchanan’s attempt to corner the market with his “great advertisement” for inferior goods while injuring

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legitimate trade.32 Buchanan’s contemporaries disliked his poetic populism and preening; they resented his broadsides against men and women of genius with aesthetic pretensions, indolent habits, lax morals, visiting cards, and money, the type who belong to clubs, “write for the papers,” and “publish books, often at their own expense.” Taking Buchanan at his word, The Examiner deposited Buchanan in a social stratum of persons lacking genius, culture, and status; “cultivated people” judged him “infinitely inferior” to either of his chief literary competitors, Swinburne and Rossetti.33 Though Buchanan exploited his Scottish diction to authenticate his ballads and idylls, he was ambitious to rise out of anonymity and comparative poverty. His ancestry put him at a disadvantage in certain quarters where the offspring of “fat soulless Saxon Squires,” on his mother’s side, and Celtic visionaries, on his father’s, were ignoble company for London swells; yet, Thomas Copeland complained, “There is not a trace of Celtic glamour in Mr. Buchanan’s poetry,” either.34 Though Buchanan relished a romantic Celtic provenance, Copeland classed him with the Lowland Scots (Burns, Scott, and Carlyle), who were by no means poor compatriots. Lacking Robert Burns’s humor and Walter Scott’s “Catholicity,” and being “altogether a man of smaller and narrower nature than any of these three master-spirits,” Buchanan had to content himself with Copeland’s characterization, which set him down as the “inheritor of the blood or the brains of some old border marauder and ballad-writer” (462). Liberal criminal propensities and libel would hardly endear him to a cosmopolitan audience. Bearing a Scottish surname and discrediting Buchanan’s self-presentation on yet another front, Copeland had good reason to sign his name. It is probable that Buchanan adopted the posture of a devout Scot of staunch Presbyterian leanings as a marketing strategy, for his public would have expected nothing less from a poet who wrote in dialect, incessantly advocated “purity,” and advertised himself as a defender of public morals repelled in equal measure by blasphemy and lewdness: “Then, let Mr. Swinburne burn all his French books, go forth into the world, look men and women in the face, try to seek some nobler inspiration than the smile of harlotry and the shriek of atheism— and there will be hope for him” (FS 30–31). Buchanan’s tale was cautionary because he tied himself in knots trying to satisfy each of his potential constituencies, by appearing a worldly man to his cultivated audience, a backwoods poet with a risqué sensibility to his mass audience, and a sincere and moral man to readers of his critical [ 182 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

prose. Given the preponderance of hangmen, rogues, and prostitutes in his poetry, Buchanan was hard-pressed to practice realism and chastity of sentiment at the same time under his own signature.

Calling a Thing by Its Right Name Why spend so much time discussing the machinations of “a barelyrecognised fourth-rate” Victorian poet, whose small renown did not outlive him?35 Infamous for having written “wicked insinuations” about Rossetti that unhinged Rossetti’s mind but never lessened his fame, even for a moment, Buchanan was consigned to a footnote in literary history, as the “scrofulous Scotch critic” who harassed a genius: “The fact is that ‘Thomas Maitland,’ though his murder of Rossetti is his chief claim to human recollection, need boast of it but little.”36 Buchanan was a period informant with skin in the game. He rode my protagonists’ coattails by competing with and chastising them. He represented the anti-Pre-Raphaelite lobby, which kept tabs on their relations with the press. He was himself a press stalwart. Buchanan’s critique of the fraternities for championship blazing a trail for Pre-Raphaelite luminaries was perfectly justified; however, his tactics were not above board. Speciously arguing that “the anonymous press is a tremendous check on this sort of humbug” (FS 71), Buchanan took potshots at his enemies under the double cover of pseudonymity and the banner of sincerity, as his victims charged: “I observe, pseudonymous Sir, that one point on which you feel bound to be inexorable is that of sincerity.”37 The alignment of signature with manly candor was not an empty gesture on Rossetti’s part; it was continuous with the transformation of the public sphere outlined by Lewes, Trollope, Hughes, Knowles, and Morley. It may seem ironic that the bohemian party should stake a claim to the traditional ground of transparent self-presentation. The growth and upward mobility of the metropolitan population, however, instigated a new set of anx ieties over sincerity (essential self hood) and self-fashioning. As we have seen, the PRB were conflicted about the marketplace for art. Pursuing the unvarnished truth in representation, “sincerity” was their watchword. Consequently, the primary source material overwhelmingly favors the Pre-Raphaelites’ version of events. By virtue of their association with famous persons, these artifacts are easily accessible, whereas the ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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works of Buchanan and his tiny camp have been remaindered.38 Gathering and weighing evidence often comes down to a question of Buchanan’s veracity. Even if Buchanan were not “a liar in grain,” as Oswald Doughty styled him, he was enormously self-contradictory.39 Yet without making an effort to comprehend Buchanan’s side of the argument, scholars are writing celebrity monographs, not literary history or culture studies. John Cassidy’s “Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy” must be the starting point of any revaluation of Buchanan’s motives and mindset during the 1860s and 1870s.40 Cassidy traces the “printed war” between the Pre-Raphaelites and Buchanan (66), which had begun in earnest when Buchanan anonymously panned Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in The Athenaeum, and which had heated up when William Rossetti retaliated by calling Buchanan “a poor and pretentious poetaster who was causing storms in teacups.”41 Unsatisfied with the opportunity to vent his ire in The Athenaeum, publicly (yet anonymously) lambasting William for editing “the worst edition of Shelley which has ever seen the light” in 1870, Buchanan avenged his wounded amour propre by attacking Gabriel Rossetti in 1871 under the cover of an alias (FS 35). Buchanan required a big target, a poetnemesis commensurate with his self-image. This is the familiar narrative of the Fleshly School controversy. The backstory of this conflict looks rather different from Buchanan’s perspective. Buchanan’s proffered rationale for his conduct was the excuse of an ungovernable spite, actuated by Swinburne’s gratuitous hostility to David Gray, a minor Scottish poet who died before the literary world embraced him.42 Citing class and regional prejudices as the main obstacles to success, Buchanan’s posthumous defense of Gray presented the career of poet as a viable escape route from poverty. As scion of the aristocracy and darling of the Oxford set, Swinburne’s modest criticism struck a nerve. In “Matthew Arnold’s New Poems” (1867), Swinburne had pronounced Gray the sort of naive young poet “poison[ed]” by Wordsworth’s doctrine that technical mastery was less impor tant than inspiration. In response, Buchanan fulminated that Swinburne “went some years ago far out of his way to call David Gray a ‘dumb poet’—meaning by that a person with great poetical feeling, but no adequate powers of expression.” 43 Swinburne’s comment rankled to such an extent that Buchanan included a homily to Gray’s “supreme poetic workmanship” in his anonymous essay “George Heath, the Moorland Poet,” commemorating a young rustic: “Mr. Swinburne is doubtless ashamed enough of his words by this time; [ 184 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

but would it not have been as well if, before vilifying a dead man, he had first read his works, which, if they possess any characteristic whatever, are noticeable for crystalline perfection of poetic form, unparalleled felicity of epithet (witness the one word ‘sov’reign’ as applied to the cry of the cuckoo), and emotion always expressed in simple music?44 When Mr. Swinburne and the school he follows are consigned to the limbo of affettuosos, David Gray’s dying sonnets will be part of the literature of humanity.”45 Buchanan staged a battle between provincial poets dying in obscurity and London swells wallowing in celebrity. A casual reader of “Mr. Arnold’s New Poems,” which dealt with Wordsworth’s influence on Arnold, would be mystified by Buchanan’s grievance. Grounds for complaint must be deduced from the larger argument about the inutility of poetic vision in the absence of technical facility. What Swinburne actually wrote, in close proximity to his passing reference to David Gray, was that Wordsworth’s cant about “divine faculty” made “those swagger who have not learnt to walk.”46 This cutting remark showed what profit Swinburne had gleaned from his perusal of Buchanan’s homage to “David Gray” (1864), an essay packed with instances of Gray’s overestimation of his powers: “I am so accustomed to compare my own mental progress with that of such men as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Wordsworth, that the dream of my life will not be fulfilled, if my fame equal not, at least, that of the latter of these three.”47 Swinburne’s arch little commentary on Gray also provoked a haughty rejoinder in Buchanan’s “The Fleshly School of Poetry”: “A poem is a poem, first as to the soul, next as to the form. The fleshly persons who wish to create form for its own sake are merely pronouncing their own doom” (348). Talk about a dog with a bone. Nor was this an isolated instance of Buchanan fashioning a mountain of recrimination out of a mote of insult. Cassidy correctly discerns the increased vitriol of Swinburne’s rhetoric when he revised “Matthew Arnold’s New Poems” for inclusion in Essays and Studies (1875). Swinburne added a footnote on Gray plainly designed to draw blood in the aftermath of his recent altercations with Buchanan in the print media. In the revised essay, Swinburne took the mea sure of Buchanan’s beloved “boy-poet” and found him wanting.48 Swinburne employed patronizing diminutives to describe the “poor young Scotchman,” one of the “small poets,” a “poor boy,” whose “poor little book” exemplified unconscious plagiarism: “the direct and seemingly unconscious transference of some of the best known lines or phrases from such obscure authors as ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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Shakespeare and Wordsworth into the somewhat narrow and barren field of his own verse.” Withal, Swinburne declined to confer upon the dead poet’s name “any undeserved notoriety,” a clever riposte to Buchanan’s overvaluation and puffing of Gray’s reputation. Disingenuously, Swinburne pretended to write of Gray “assuredly with no unkindlier feeling than pity for his poor little memory” and an earnest desire to educate others through the example of Gray’s regrettable folly.49 Buchanan employed the same rhetorical strategy to distance himself from the charge of malignity in The Fleshly School of Poetry: “I take occasion to say—on public grounds only, with no grudge, with no personal animosity whatever—that a number of men of real though very limited ability are, blinded by their own little knowledge, the praise of vile minds, and the applause of a heartless clique, rushing headlong to literary ruin, and dragging many of the young generation with them” (68–69). Feigning neutrality, neither Swinburne nor Buchanan could avoid vitriol. Returning to the theme of Buchanan’s legitimate grievance against the Pre-Raphaelite clique that sabotaged his burgeoning reputation,50 Cassidy notes Buchanan’s envy of the promotional apparatus that made the publication of Rossetti’s Poems, rather than his own The Book of Orm, the landmark literary event of 1870: “This book, The Book of Orm, came out within a few weeks of Rossetti’s Poems and with a preface which indicated that Buchanan considered he had achieved something new and great in poetry.” Cassidy speculates: “How rude was his awakening, when the critical returns began to come in, to find that while his own ambitious offerings were ridiculed as formless and meaningless, those of Rossetti were eulogized! To add gall to the wormwood, often the notices were in such juxtaposition that they appeared on the same page.”51 Buchanan must have experienced déjà vu. This very thing had happened back in 1866 when Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads had hogged all the attention. Morbidly sensitive to his exclusion from the “in crowd” of his day, Buchanan responded by repetitively insinuating that Rossetti’s fame was jealously guarded by a clique of friends and relations who esteemed his talents beyond their true merits: “He has been known for many years as a poet as well as a painter—as a painter and poet idolized by his own family and personal associates” (“FS” 337). Exactly so: Rossetti was the cynosure of his circle, but not without cause. Buchanan’s insinuations regarding the queer tenor of Rossetti’s relations with cliques, schools, and fraternal organ izations attempted “to draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic” in [ 186 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

order to “hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual.”52 The irony was that Buchanan recognized and exploited emerging tropes of gender and sexual nonconformity; he played to contemporary anx ieties about manliness when attacking Rossetti’s poetry: “Let the Sultan of Literature” order “the destruction of all looking-glasses, and the immediate silencing of all persons who introduce the subject of their own emotions” (FS 90).53 Buchanan’s exposition of Rossetti’s emasculated poetic persona equated feminine narcissism with a lack of civic rectitude demanded of men of the world: “Nearly all Mr. Rossetti’s effeminacy comes of eternal self-contemplation, of trashy models, of want of response to the needs and duties of his time” (FS 84). Buchanan’s insinuation that a hysterical craving for celebrity informed the confessional nature of Rossetti’s poetry, and an unmanly sensitivity to criticism lay in back of Rossetti’s reluctance to publish or exhibit conformed to this paradigm. Similarly, Buchanan likened Rossetti’s “attitudinising, posturing, and describing his own exquisite emotions” to gender deviance: “In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person” (FS 38–39).54 Buchanan tapped the public’s distaste for poetic preciosity and discomfort with the thematic undercurrent of emotionalism (masochism) in Rossetti’s works. Rossetti’s exaltation of female beauty unnerved his contemporaries: “But definitions of masculinity change over time. For the Victorians the life and work of the later Rossetti appeared not aggressively masculinist, but deeply unmanly.”55 The Victorians equated sexual continence, the acid test of self-discipline, with manliness and worldly success.56 Rossetti’s poems were “the satiated love- sonnets of a sensualist who is out of tune with the world and out of harmony with the life of men” (FS 29). Significantly, the cultural climate of the 1870s prevented Rossetti’s erotic poetry from being read as a bold assertion of phallic sexuality: At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart: And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled, So singly flagged the pulses of each heart. Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start Of married flowers to either side outspread From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red, Fawned on each other where they lay apart.57 ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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Targeting this very poem, Buchanan complained, “Here is a full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sensual mood, so careful a choice of epithet to convey mere animal sensations, that we merely shudder at the shameless nakedness” (“FS” 338). In 1872, W.  J. Courthope followed Buchanan’s lead, castigating the Fleshly School, but mainly Rossetti, for the “deification of emasculate obscenity” in an unsigned article, “The Latest Development in Lyrical Poetry”: “There is another kind of symbolism which Mr. Rossetti affects, and for which no terms of condemnation can be too strong. We allude to certain sonnets, in which he endeavours to attach a spiritual meaning to the animal passions.”58 Though Swinburne was the more vocal and tenacious adversary, Buchanan chose Rossetti for his chief rival among the fleshly poets. Due to the poet-painter’s seniority, Swinburne’s vices were widely attributed to his intimacy with Rossetti. Writing to Tennyson in 1866, Gabriel sought to dispel this “lying slander”: “As no one delights more keenly in his genius than I do, I also have a right to say that no one has more strenuously combatted its wayward exercise.”59 Buchanan caricatured Swinburne as “only a little mad boy letting off squibs,” but he chastised Rossetti, “a grown man, with the self-control and easy audacity of actual experience,” for reporting on his amorous sensations, as the more serious “danger to society” (“FS” 338).

Robert Buchanan and “the Friend” of His Youth Before his infamous article, Buchanan was a rising star in a literary firmament in which the Pre-Raphaelites had little or no interest, which must have been very galling to the Scot’s egoism. As a popu lar poet and professional scold, Buchanan was a gnat harrying skylarks. Gabriel Rossetti reputedly ignored the works of Buchanan until 1871, whereas Swinburne had been going over them with a fine-tooth comb, performing reconnaissance and collecting ammunition, since 1866. Swinburne had neither forgotten nor forgiven Buchanan’s caricature of his debut as the downy-lipped author of Poems and Ballads. Reading “David Gray,” Swinburne concluded that Buchanan was most susceptible to injury on the score of his devotion to Gray’s memory and his own independence from coteries or fash ionable [ 188 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

circles, a point of pride with Buchanan: “The admiration which he was unwilling to court he was just as unwilling to give. He was never a heroworshipper.”60 Yet in the 1860s Buchanan curried favor with Hepworth Dixon, editor of The Athenaeum; G. H. Lewes, editor of the Fortnightly Review; and the poet Bryan Proctor, each of whom warned him against trying to make a living as a writer. Buchanan also courted Richard Monckton Milnes and the poets Sydney Dobell, Browning, and Tennyson. Buchanan dedicated London Poems to Dixon and was annoyed when the Westminster Review wrote that the volume was “defaced by one of the most sycophantic prefaces we ever read.”61 For a Scottish literary adventurer, Buchanan was not quite the friendless figure that he impersonated in his memoirs. When Buchanan suffered a debilitating ner vous breakdown in 1866, and continued unwell for many years thereafter, Milnes, now Lord Houghton, persuaded Prime Minister Gladstone to award Buchanan a Civil List pension, at one hundred pounds a year, for life.62 Focusing on Buchanan’s identification with Gray as a neglected genius and outsider, Swinburne discredited Buchanan’s assertion of Gray’s incorruptible purity through allusion to the “incredible candour of expression given in his correspondence to such flatulent ambition and such hysterical self- esteem.”63 Homesick, penniless, and destined to catch his death of cold, Gray confirmed Swinburne’s characterization of his “hysterical selfesteem” when describing a visit to Westminster Abbey: “If I live I shall be buried there—so help me God! A completely defined consciousness of great poetical genius is my only antidote against utter despair and despicable failure.”64 Obviously, Swinburne’s malicious deprecation of the character and “versicles of one David Gray, a poor young poeticule of the same breed as his panegyrist (who however, it should in fairness be said, died without giving any sign of future distinction in the field of pseudonymous libel),” was driven by enmity toward Buchanan (CWACS 16:429). Swinburne intuited that Buchanan’s unexamined homoerotic admiration of David Gray made him sensitive to slights and criticism directed at Gray’s consecrated memory. The current of homoeroticism in Swinburne’s poetry, together with his disavowal of same-sex passion as a practical real ity, made Swinburne preternaturally sensitive to the strain of boy-love in Buchanan’s homilies to Gray. Precisely because Buchanan loved before the medico-scientific definition of homosexuality, he could afford to be unabashedly gushing in his idealization of Gray as a “boy-poet”65 of astonishing personal appeal: ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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“Dream-eyed and tearful, like a woman.”66 Even though Gray was the elder of the two, Buchanan reconfigured (albeit unconsciously) their personae to highlight Gray’s permanent adolescence and gender dubiety in contrast to his own comparative maturity and virility: “Be it noted, however, that there was in Gray’s nature a strange and exquisite femininity,— a perfect feminine purity and sweetness. Indeed, till the mystery of sex be medically explained, I shall ever believe that nature originally meant David Gray for a female; for besides the strangely sensitive lips and eyes, he had a  woman’s shape,—narrow shoulders, lissome limbs, and extraordinary breadth across the hips.”67 Gray’s physical and psychic effeminacy justified and explained the intimate tie between the two young men and absolved Buchanan of any personal deviance. He was the more masculine party, committed to “severer Muses,” who figuratively functioned as a beard or camouflage for the male-male duo: “Of the two I was by far the most introspective, my emotions being always tempered by purely mental impressions. His only taste was for poetry,” whereas, “Poetry to me was merely the handmaid of the severer Muses.”68 Reading the English poets in his printer-father’s library, Buchanan experienced a kind of psychosexual rapture in Gray’s company: “Nevertheless I shared his enthusiasm and rapture when we began linking hands, as it were, to thread our delightful way through the Wonderland of the English Muses.” Commemorated by Buchanan’s sacramental impulse toward the objects of their mutual perusal, Harriett Jay reported: “Robert treasured those volumes all his life, and he has often pointed out to me the ‘precious passages’ marked by Gray’s own hand.”69 As an object of reverie and a wellspring of yearning, David Gray furnished Buchanan with a homoerotic thematic for elegies. In “To David in Heaven,” love is transfigured as spiritual yearning between “tender brother-singers.” After the fashion of Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” the speaker Buchanan is divided from his lost love David by the bar of heaven: I long for you, I yearn to you, The spectral vision trances me to utt’rance wild and weak; It is not that I mourn you, To mourn you were to scorn you, For you are one step nearer to the beauty singers seek.70 [ 190 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

Writing of the belated zeal of Gray’s father, a humble weaver, for the poetry of his heretofore inscrutable son, Buchanan shifted his own emotional burden onto another subject: “He worked from the grave on one who loved him with a love transcending that of woman.” 71 This formulation has been a trope of same-sex passion from time immemorial; the love between David and Jonathan is triangulated by the elder Saul’s passion for David. In The Friend, Alan Bray traces the concepts and rituals (from eating together, sharing a bed, and communion-cum-marriage ceremonies, to the practice of interring same-sex couples in common graves) emanating from the idea of “sworn friendship in the Eucharist,” as a means of expanding the scope of gay historiography beyond evidence of physical intimacy (“the gift of the body”) or sodomy.72 Bray’s model produces a compelling archaeology of same-sex friendship that depends on an interrogation of a network of terms, such as “ ‘wedded’ brothers” (141), “marriages of the soul, and of fortunes and interests, and counsels” (142) that lend themselves to “marital imagery” (141). Buchanan’s “A Poem to David” similarly invoked a tradition of same-sex lovers divided by a cruel fate and reunited in death, culminating in a frankly erotic embrace: Were thy lips to mine, belovéd, And thine arms around me too, I think I could lie in silence, And dream as we used to do! The flesh and the bones might wither, The blood be dried like dew, The heart might crumble to ashes, Till dust was dust anew.73 Given the erotically charged rhetoric and homoerotic codes employed and deciphered by Buchanan, it might make sense to chart his progress on the homosocial continuum, ending at a position closer to that of Wilde than to that of Henry Labouchère, author of the crucial passages of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalizing homosexuality.74 The Victorian literati clearly possessed synonyms for sexual nonconformity; it remains a moot point whether these codes constituted a lingua franca of prurience for the reading public. Did Swinburne’s first audience puzzle over the gender identity of Dolores’s lovers, planting a kiss on her bosom: “Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe, / Male ringlets or feminine ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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gold?” 75 Swinburne chided Buchanan for his campaign against conventional romantic love, paraphrasing his adversary: “constant and distasteful recurrence of devotion to ‘some person of the other sex.’ ” Buchanan had thought it worthwhile to vindicate Petronius Arbiter, “a writer, I believe, whose especial weakness (as exhibited in the characters of his book) was not a ‘hankering’ after persons ‘of the other sex.’ ” Swinburne wryly concluded, “It is as well to remember where we may be when we find ourselves in the company of these anti- sexual moralists” (CWACS 16:410– 11). Homoeroticism and shaming existed cheek by jowl. In Buchanan’s case, same- sex desire was actively counteracted by a profound homophobia that left him eager to portray his homoerotic impulses as chivalrous or mystical and to excise all traces of untoward sexual yearnings from his work: Is there not awaiting Rest and golden weather, Where, passionately purified, the singers may meet together?76 Buchanan’s vehement and persistent reprobation of fleshliness in the arts, a twenty-year campaign of hectoring and vilification, spread consternation and wonder among his peers in Fleet Street. Buchanan’s perseveration on these themes was reactively reinforced by attractions that would not submit to self-censorship: “We reap the result still, in a society given over to luxury and to gold; in a journalism that has lost its manhood, and is supported on a system of indecent exposure and black-mail; in a liter ature whose first word is flippancy, whose last word is prurience, and whose victory is in the orgies of a naked Dance of Death.” 77 One contemporary compared Buchanan’s ravings about the distressing and ubiquitous display of “Legs,” in shop windows, in candy shops (as a new fashion in lollipops), on street signs, on the stage, and so forth, to an alcoholic’s delirium: “There is a well-known form of disease in which the patient is pursued by beetles or snakes, or other nasty things, always swarming before his eyes, on the floor, the walls, the roof. Mr. Buchanan is haunted by legs.”78 I read this perseverative ideation as a sentinel of the repressive apparatus, obscuring more untoward associations. In “Tennyson’s Charm” (1872), Buchanan insisted that “it would be absurd to say that the loss of Arthur Hallam has been the greatest sorrow of Mr. Tennyson’s life; no loss of a mere friend, [ 192 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

however dear and precious, can match some other losses that are felt by most of us who attain manhood.” 79 Given the cottage industry in David Gray memorabilia he maintained, Buchanan’s qualification was not a reflection of his own experience.

Fleshing Out the Fleshly Buchanan’s broadsides attest to the fact that the Victorian press helped readers unpack the homoerotic double-discourse of literary and painterly allusions to Oxford, Platonism, Hellenism, Sapphism, and French literature. The decriminalization of homosexuality after the French Revolution led the British to label sodomy the French vice.80 Buchanan’s obsession with the alien, epicene strain contaminating English poetry derived from this imputed foreign licentiousness, particularly homosexuality (“sterility of passion”) on the part of the French: “The utter sterility of passion and the hopeless stagnation of sentiment nowadays may be guessed when some little clique can set up Gautier in a niche: Gautier, that hairdresser’s dummy of a stylist, with his complexion of hectic pink and waxen white, his well-oiled wig, and his incommunicable scent of the barber-shop.”81 Apparently, Théophile Gautier’s “homosexual” tonsorial proclivities tainted his prose and poetry. While hairdressers have been casually stigmatized as possessing “homosexual” traits for over a century, a man’s preoccupation with haberdashery and cosmetics signaled his homosexual proclivities directly after the passing of Beau Brummell.82 For Buchanan, that the effeminate versifier Gautier had been able to attract a literary clique of his own, in addition to enlarging the renown of Charles Baudelaire through “literary finessing” and “intellectual fingering,” was further proof of his sexual anomalousness (FS 17). For Buchanan, Gautier’s memoir of Baudelaire reinforced the image of the poet as a “cold sensualist,” whose personal effeteness, unmanly attention to fashion (“man-millinery,” “dandyism”), and “sunless moral nature” led him to produce “worthless,” if clever, poetry and to waste his genius in hashish dens (FS 18–19). Baudelaire “sought out the most morbid themes for poetical treatment,” especially “the representation of abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease” (FS 19, 20). Buchanan particularly reviled Baudelaire’s “Femmes Damnées,” a dialogue between the lovers Delphine and Hippolyta, which he declared “the most horrid poem ever written by ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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man, a poem unmatched for simple hideousness even in Rome during the decadence.” He continued, “The interlocutors in this piece are two women, who have just been guilty of the vilest act conceivable in human debauchery, but the theme and the treatment are too loathsome for description” (FS 22). In the “Immorality in Authorship,” Buchanan had defended the treatment of such subjects, which employed the “magic of genius to spiritualise the impure,” through the artistic revelation that “in life the moral implication of sin is suffering.”83 Although he repeated this formulation in 1872 (“Truly enough did Edward Thierry say, in writing of this poetry, that ‘it is sorrow which absolves and justifies it’ ” [FS 27]), Buchanan was unwilling to extend this logic to what Swinburne called Baudelaire’s “infinite perverse refinement” of the miserable fate of the lesbians: “From the barren places of unsexed desire the tragic lyrist points them at last along their downward way to the land of sleepless winds and scourging storms” (CWACS 16:409). I pause to wonder at Buchanan’s frank, if desexualized, endorsement of the love of David and Jonathan, on the one hand, and simultaneous refusal of the fungible subject positions opened to him through the erotic representation of female same- sex couples, on the other hand. Writing of Courbet, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, Thais Morgan argues, “Their texts appeal to male viewer-readers by using the conventional symbolic field of heterosexual pornography to mediate the construction of alternative masculinities,” which safeguards “an ideal ground of Masculinity against both female femininity and male homosexual panic.”84 Male heterosexual panic might explain Buchanan’s overweening hostility to the impure female in her vicissitudes, from lesbian to vixen. Excoriating the bawdy passages in Aphra Behn’s work, Buchanan intoned, “Filth on a woman’s lips shocks us infinitely more than filth on the lips of a man. No woman can utter a ‘gaudriole’ and keep her soul feminine: she becomes a raving and sexless Atys.”85 My aim is less to categorize Buchanan’s sexual orientation than to underscore the polydirectional sexual panic driving his purity campaign against erotic literature. There was something more to this than moral grandstanding and opportunism. Although Buchanan’s pamphlet attacked the whole of the “subTennysonian School,” Swinburne, in the character of a debauched custom’s agent abetting the importation of “obnoxious matter from France,” was a special target (FS 32, 15): “This is our double misfortune—to have a nuisance, and to have it at second hand” (FS 21). Castigating Swinburne for [ 194 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

promoting vice and indecency through his imitation of French literature, Buchanan underscored the homoerotic aspects of Swinburne’s poetry, “the Sapphic vein” borrowed from Baudelaire: “Encouraged by the hideousness of ‘Femmes Damnées,’ Mr. Swinburne attempted to beat it in ‘Anactoria,’ a poem the subject of which is again that branch of crime which is generally known as the Sapphic passion” (FS 30, 22). Buchanan overstated the transparency of indecent allusions in order to justify his own role in filling in the blanks and propagating controversy: “Even Baudelaire, we should imagine, must be less harmful in the original than when his foulness is condensed, pointed, italicized, and generally elucidated by Mr. Buchanan’s prurient ingenuity.”86 Buchanan’s righteous indignation over content was never far removed from his perception that Les Fleurs du Mal had earned Baudelaire “a spurious notoriety” and that Swinburne’s chief motivation for copying the Frenchman was the hope of achieving a succès de scandale: “Some years later Mr. Swinburne thought the French poet’s success worthy of emulation, and he therefore published his Poems and Ballads, which was so very hot that his publishers dropped it like a blazing cinder in the very month of publication” (FS 22). Buchanan’s attentiongrabbing diatribes struck some of his peers as insincere, in so far as he catalogued the indecencies he censured: “In some of the expurgated editions of the classics the naughty passages used to be collected into supplements, where any one with a taste that way could find them at once without the trouble of searching for them; and Mr. Buchanan’s brochure is a handy catalogue of a similar kind.”87 I want to look more narrowly into the question of Buchanan’s facilitation of the aesthetes’ queer tutelage, as he was not a lone voice decrying the Fleshly School: “The main charge I bring against poetry of this kind is its sickliness and effeminacy” (FS 70).88 Similarly, Tom Taylor disparaged “sickly sentiment, unmanly ascetiscism [sic], and morbid clinging to the past,” when identifying Swinburne as one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ “pet poets.”89 Buchanan resented Swinburne’s status as the naughty darling of a male coterie that praised and protected him. Buchanan anticipated his attack on the Fleshly School with a review, “George Heath, The Moorland Poet,” where he charged that England was “infested at present by a school of poetic thought which threatens frightfully to corrupt, demoralise, and render effeminate the rising generation; a plague from Italy and France; a school aesthetic without vitality, and beautiful without health; a school of falsettoes innumerable,” basking in “the full hectic flush of ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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mutual admiration.”90 The so-called foreign scourge (re)introduced into hale and hearty England by the aesthetic movement had a long history, according to Buchanan. In the Fleshly School of Poetry, he claimed that the English troubadours, “singers of the falsetto school,” had widely disseminated “ballads to their mistress’s eyebrow, sonnets to their lady’s lute, and general songs of a fiddle-stick” in imitation of the Petrarchan sonnet and European courtship rituals (10). Picking up a thread from an earlier stage of my argument, where Buchanan conjectured that the delicate physiognomy of the friend of his youth was proof of intersexuality, I want to underscore the emerging medicalization of popu lar understandings of sex and gender inversion in the 1870s. Buchanan’s rhetoric of moral corruption and contagion combined a theosophical and philosophical conception of degeneracy with one derived from the emerging science of physiology and the pseudoscience: sexology. Ironically, David Gray and Swinburne were both models for Buchanan’s observation that the modern poet, in order to “develop his poetic faculty, must be an intellectual hermaphrodite” (“FS” 335). Swinburne’s famous 1881 observation that “great poets are bisexual; male and female at once” postdated Buchanan’s dictum (CWACS 14:305). When Buchanan counseled Swinburne to “abandon the falsetto” register, the implication was that Swinburne was a born invert whose gender dubiety was marked in his shrill, effeminate voice (FS 31).91 From Buchanan’s standpoint, Swinburne was the embodiment of the sexual and gender nonconformity described in his poetry. Infuriated, Swinburne satirized Buchanan’s phallic self-assertion, singling out his obscene display of ignorance concerning Greek literature in a burlesque of the Cockney School of Poetry. Swinburne parlayed the Scot’s central thesis that erudition was unmanning into a lewd indictment of Buchanan’s overestimation of his poetic prowess: “It might have been as well for him to uncover with less immodest publicity the gigantic nakedness of his ignorance” (CWACS 16:442). Ventriloquizing Buchanan’s argument, Swinburne quipped: “We congratulate ourselves that no such process as robbed of all strength and manhood the intelligence of Milton has had power to impair the virility of Mr. Buchanan’s robust and masculine genius.” Pretending to deprecate the falsetto school, “the sexless and nerveless company of shrill-voiced singers who share with Milton the curse of enforced effeminacy; from the pitiful soprano notes of such dubious creatures as Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Gray, Coleridge, Shelley, Landor,” [ 196 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

Swinburne embargoed the coarse versifier Buchanan from the ranks of poets (CWACS 16:441–42). Despite their differences, Swinburne lambasted his critic in precisely the terms (effeminacy, emasculation, perversity) that had been used to attack him. Swinburne and Buchanan were equally flustered by the perception that writing poetry was not a manly endeavor. Swinburne combated this impression through tactics of shock and awe; Buchanan, through censure. Buchanan was not the only source for Victorian cognates: effeminate = homosexual, conveyed by the term “falsettos.” Even though the practice of castrating youths to maintain their prepubescent voices had been outlawed in Italy in 1870 and even though that of substituting castrati for women on the Italian stage was discontinued in the late nineteenth century, this was a viable cultural touchstone. Locating Byron, Arnold, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne along a trajectory of masculine to feminine poets, Alfred Austin concluded that even Shelley “positively could not indulge in those falsetto notes which appear to compose most of Mr. Swinburne’s emasculated poetical voice.”92 In 1870, Robert Browning disparaged the tone of literary Pre-Raphaelitism in a private letter: “I have read Rossetti’s poems— and poetical they are,—scented with poetry, as it were—like trifles of various sorts you take out of a cedar or sandal-wood box: you know I hate the effeminacy of his school,— the men that dress up like women,—that use obsolete forms, too, and archaic accentuations to seem soft—fancy a man calling it a lilý—liliés and so on: Swinburne started this, with other like Belialisms,—witness his harp-playér, &c.” 93 Browning’s muscular rejection of Pre-Raphaelite diction drew on contemporaneous notions of Pre- Raphaelite preciosity. Buchanan took a similar tack, intimating that Rossetti’s poems evoked “a very constant suspicion that we are listening to an emasculated Mr. Browning” or transcription of the tenor part into the range of the falsetto (“FS” 344). Buchanan’s critique of the baleful influences introduced by the PreRaphaelites was noteworthy for the nativist cast of his accusations against Gabriel Rossetti, “the head of the school” (FS 31). In March 1872, a few months shy of the publication date of the Fleshly School pamphlet, Buchanan accused Rossetti of “Latinising our mother-tongue in drawl after drawl of laboured affectation.” Buchanan continued with his harangue: “Here is Euphues come again with a vengeance, in the shape of an amatory foreigner, ill-acquainted with English, and seemingly modelling his style on the ‘conversation’ of Dr. Samuel Johnson.” Buchanan’s insistence that ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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the English-born Rossetti was a “foreigner,” an “Italian,” un-English in thought and feeling, was intensely xenophobic, especially when Buchanan affected cosmopolitan literary tastes in his critical writings—an admiration for Goethe, Heine, and Hugo.94 Buchanan’s hostility to Rossetti as a carrier of the long dormant “Italian disease,” which once “raged and devastated art, literature, and society” in Britain, until the advent of Wordsworth, the Listerine of poets, and Walter Scott, the Castoria of novelists, was reactively reinforced by the perception that, as a Scot, he himself was perceived as un-English without exciting curiosity because of his exoticism or affection for his unspoiled rusticity, the quality that well served his compatriots Robert Burns and the fraud, Ossian, at an earlier date (FS 12–13). Swinburne tweaked this sensitive nerve perpetually. Indirectly responding to Buchanan’s jibes concerning Rossetti’s “Latinate diction,” Swinburne puzzled over the varieties of “Buchananese dialect” and suggested that “the library edition of Mr. Buchanan’s collected works should be furnished with a glossary for the use of students unskilled” in parsing phrases such as “affettuosos”: “Justly contemptuous as he has shown himself of all foreign affectations of speech or style in an En glish writer, such a remarkable word in its apparent defiance of analogy as the one last quoted is not a little perplexing to their ignorance. I hardly think it can be Scotch; at least to a southern eye it bears no recognisable affinity to the language of Burns” (CWACS 16:429–30). Swinburne’s clever barbs were also staunchly chauvinistic. George Storey cites the grimly disconcerting banter between William Rossetti and Swinburne, who contrived to keep Moxon’s Miniature Poets edition of Keats out of Buchanan’s hands, as we have seen: “This forthcoming Scotch edition of Keats, who hated the Scotch as much as I do,” Swinburne claimed, “has long been a thorn in my side: and apart from the delight of trampling on a Scotch Poetaster, I shall greatly enjoy bringing out a perfect edition of Keats with all his good verses and none of his bad.”95 Describing Buchanan as a “Scotch Poetaster,” Swinburne supplied William Rossetti with this handy epithet before William felt compelled to defend Poems and Ballads against Buchanan’s attack later in 1866. William Rossetti confessed to “a peculiar abhorrence of Buchanan, and satisfaction that his Caledonian faeces are not to bedaub the corpse of Keats,” inflaming Swinburne’s contempt for Buchanan.96 Reading this correspondence, it is fair to wonder whether Swinburne, rather than Buchanan, drew first blood in the conflict between them. Buchanan was known, however, to [ 198 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

be the author of the satire “Lady Letitia’s Lilliput Hand” (1862), a novelette ridiculing Ruskin’s 1851 defense of Pre-Raphaelitism through the characterization of Edward Vansittart, a painter “whose Donkey feeding on Thistles was so much commended by Mr. Buskin for the pre-Raphaelite vigour of its drawing.”97 Whether in private or public writings, the cause of cosmopolitanism at war with provincialism was not well served by turning the tables on Buchanan and indulging in territorial skirmishes with the Scot; meanwhile, this undercurrent of personal bias explained Buchanan’s efforts to vilify the Pre-Raphaelites as traitors to an exemplary British cultural heritage. Buchanan’s indictment of the second hand influence of “scrofulous French literature”98 on English poetry figured prominently in his anonymous article “Fleshing the Fleshly,” published in the Echo, a halfpenny newspaper. Speaking of his quarrel with the Pre-Raphaelites in the third person, Buchanan compared French amatory liter ature with the pornographic books and indecent photographs sold on Holywell Street and disguised under “sealed covers.” Although the spurious “author” of “Fleshing the Fleshly” professed ignorance of the “secret society” or bohemian demimonde plotting the conversion of London into a Sodom and Gomorrah on the Thames, making light of Buchanan’s own dire predictions, the article nonetheless served to acquaint a broad swath of the reading public with the terms and issues bandied about in the higher toned periodicals. Imputing and granting legitimacy to Buchanan’s aim of democratizing access to the higher culture (and to his critique of the strain of sensuality in the arts) does not explain the questionable tactic of describing himself as a “scaremonger” in the Echo: “A Platonic passion for flesh is a phase of sentiment that will have but a limited and ephemeral sway on this side of the Channel.”99 A close reading of the article, with its invidious comparisons of English virtues and French vices, suggests that Buchanan’s goal was to shore up his credentials as a British author who disclaimed any foreign influence: “But in spite of all temptations, To belong to other nations, He remains an Englishman! Hurrah! For the true-born Englishman!”100 If Buchanan, referred to in the third person, had doubts about the stainless character of the British, his rivals had betrayed their common heritage by espousing foreign canons: “We may well rejoice, meanwhile, that our contemporary blasphemy, as well as so much of our contemporary bestiality, is no home-product, but an importation transplanted from the French Scrofulous School” (FS 28). ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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Literary Libel Buchanan was not oblivious to the risks involved in attacking the PreRaphaelite clique. His recollections of the Fleshly School episode suggest that he expected Browning and Tennyson to publicly declare him their champion: “Shortly after the publication of my review, Tennyson avowed to me vivâ voce that he considered Rossetti’s sonnet on ‘Nuptial Sleep’ the ‘filthiest thing he had ever read.’ Browning in private talks had been equally emphatic. Thus encouraged, I faced at last the men who had (I thought) trampled down the flowers on poor Gray’s grave.”101 In the “Fleshly School of Poetry,” Buchanan noted Pre-Raphaelite affectations, such as the arcane vocabulary and accentuation of the last syllable of words, “which may be said to give to the speaker’s voice a sort of cooing tenderness just bordering on a loving whistle,” as evidenced by Rossetti’s line, “Between the hands, between the brows, / Between the lips of Love-Lilee!” (345). This was a virtual reprise of Browning’s views, which he apparently shared with Buchanan as well as his correspondent, Isa Blagden. While full of praise for Simeon Solomon’s Habet! (1865), Browning scoffed at Solomon’s homoerotic sketches. In Solomon’s The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865), Love trails unhappily after a young couple. The drawing inspired Browning to opine, “How I hate ‘Love,’ as a lubberly naked young man putting his arms here and his wings there, about a pair of lovers,— a fellow they would kick away, in the real ity.”102 Browning was less censorious of Solomon’s “girlish boys and boyish girls,” declaring the artist “full of talent” but his work “too affected and effeminate.”103 Was Buchanan following Browning’s lead when he called Solomon a wanton painter of “real genius”? Did the poet laureate and Browning cravenly abandon Buchanan, without making a move to aid him, once they realized his criticisms of the Fleshly School were not universally popu lar? Buchanan resented their real or imagined defection from his camp. Writing of the waxing and waning of his friendship with Browning, Buchanan hinted that the elder poet curried favor with him in 1862 because Buchanan had “power ful organs at my command at that time, and he knew it.” Portrayed as “morbidly sensitive to criticism” and so addicted to praise that he “coveted that even of his own washer woman!” Browning cut a ridicu lous figure in Buchanan’s reminiscences.104 In his memoirs, Buchanan maligned his former friends at every turn. In 1865, Lewes used his position at the Fortnightly Review to advance [ 200 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

FIGURE 5.1 Simeon Solomon, The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, 1865. Pen and Ink. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Buchanan’s repute. Despite kind intentions, Lewes damned Buchanan with faint praise: “the weakness of his talent as contrasted with the strength of his genius.” At least Buchanan had “no tawdry graces, no insincerities.” According to Lewes, the poet “is bound above all things to be exquisite, to ravish the ear with music and the mind with delicate precision. Instead of this, the verse of Mr. Buchanan is sometimes almost as languid as prose.”105 ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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Ironically, Lewes’s comments invited a comparison with another young poet. Swinburne’s “Faustine” had been published in the Spectator (1862). In his recollections, Buchanan emasculated Lewes, whose reverence for his mistress, George Eliot, was lampooned as that of worshipper for a false idol. To Buchanan, Eliot was a pompous virago whose unconventional lifestyle was another strike against her overblown literary reputation. Describing the abrupt termination of his friendship with Lewes in the wake of the Fleshly School controversy, Buchanan let on that his real offense was to have written “somewhat coldly” of Eliot’s poetry, whereas Lewes explicitly informed Buchanan that he had demonstrated “an indifference to the rights of others of which he should not have thought me capable.” Of course, Lewes’s commentary could be discounted because he had many “close friends among the pre-Raphaelite critics.”106 Buchanan’s relations with Lord Houghton terminated abruptly at this time. For all parties involved in the dispute, the pursuit of notoriety entailed the risk of unpopularity, a risk offset by the energizing effects of a controversy that thrust them into the limelight. In 1872, The Athenaeum scoffed that Buchanan had “an evident notion of having achieved immortality by the epithet” fleshly.107 To recap, an article in the Contemporary Review instigated a month-long exchange in The Athenaeum, which then excited commentary in a host of fash ionable periodicals and regional newspapers, reporting on a print war that could still be accessed in the original version. Anticipating Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, where there are copies but no originals, newspapers in the down-market tranches pounced on this newsworthy media event. This is how the Fleshly School controversy “went viral.” Buchanan was most eager to acquaint the masses, unused to trawling the pages of The Athenaeum or the Contemporary Review for aesthetic bulletins, with his part in this affair. He chose a mass- circulation newspaper as his venue, even though his ostensible purpose was to halt the spread of fleshly trends in liter ature. Christopher Murray supports attribution of “Fleshing the Fleshly” to Buchanan, citing the “modern stylometric analysis” performed by A. Q. Morton (2:195).108 “Fleshing the Fleshly” appeared on the first page of the Echo. It contained a direct challenge to Rossetti and Swinburne to take “some notice of the attack” or else be forever classed with “mere simulacra of humanity.”109 The lowerclass venue relaxed Buchanan’s inhibitions about appearing coarse and unmannerly, and whetted his appetite for personal notoriety. Ironically, Buchanan’s trick of referring to himself in the third person and criticizing [ 202 ] A N O N Y M O U S J O U R N A L I S M

his own objectivity functioned as a fingerprint rather than a disguise: “Catch them nosing me out after that!” Gabriel Rossetti ventriloquized Buchanan in his rebuttal.110 As Murray demonstrates, the Rossetti brothers were certain the article was Buchanan’s handiwork: “Significant in it is Buchanan’s by now habitual self-denigration: he accuses the writer of the pamphlet of conjuring ‘this super-sensualist community’ of Bohemians ‘out of his own imagination’ ” (2:195). From one vantage, Buchanan’s ploy signified a progressive trend rather than naked opportunism and self-advertisement: “Speculation has become entirely democratised. This is a tremendous change to have come about in little more than a dozen years,” according to John Morley. “This excitement was a sign that controversies which had hitherto been confined to books and treatises were now to be admitted to popu lar periodicals, and that the common man of the world would now listen and have an opinion of his own.”111 Buchanan’s attack on Rossetti was partly informed by a populist’s mistrust of elitism and exclusivity. Rossetti operated in a private sphere, refusing to acknowledge the weight or legitimacy of popular opinion by making a formal “appeal to the public” until the publication of Poems (“FS” 337). Buchanan’s characterization of Rossetti as a “very nuptial person writing erotic sonnets to his wife” (“FS” 339), however, drew sneers from reviewers skeptical of Buchanan’s pretense of serving the public good. For The Athenaeum, Buchanan’s epigrams upon Rossetti’s The House of Life (“sweats of animalism” and “pits of beastliness”) were essentially “advertising” hooks for a place among “that literature of ‘pimpled clerks’ which it affects to denounce.”112 Buchanan seldom missed “an occasion of administering a blow in passing to what he calls ‘the musical ravings of diseased animalism,’ ” a blow which often took the form of insulting personal remarks.113 Despite the contentious atmosphere, catholicity of outlook thrived in Victorian periodical journalism. Journals occupied a niche but were loath to alienate a less partisan readership, a departure from eighteenth-century practices. As I have shown, The Athenaeum was instrumental in undermining Buchanan’s rationale for the use of an alias during the Fleshly School fiasco. Nevertheless, The Athenaeum published without demur Buchanan’s protest against Swinburne’s cheeky allegation that the Scot was the author of the anonymous poem Jonas Fisher.114 Baiting his adversary in “The Devil’s Due” (1875), Swinburne alleged that Buchanan was hiding from bloodthirsty critics who lay in ambush for him: “But it is certainly ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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inconceivable that the authorship of any work whatever should be assignable with equal plausibility to the polypseudonymous lyrist and libeller in question and to the Satan of Milton, the Lucifer of Byron, or the Mephistopheles of Goethe.”115 After reading the aforementioned column, roguishly signed “Thomas Maitland,” and blasting Buchanan’s exculpatory claims regarding his need for an alias, Buchanan sued the owner of The Examiner, Peter Taylor, for five thousand pounds. While The Athenaeum, The Examiner, and the Contemporary Review chose sides, they also publicized the views and letters of the enemy camp. Journals such as the Saturday Review occupied a middle ground by making use of the controversy to take both Swinburne’s circle and Buchanan to task. Journals, like the individual interlocutors, stood to benefit from publicity, favorable or otherwise. Significantly, the libel action was of interest to the popu lar press and regional newspapers; the Leeds Mercury, the Birmingham Daily Post, the Manchester Times, The Standard, The Star, the Daily Telegraph, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, Reynolds’s Newspaper, the Dundee Courier and Argus, and the Western Mail, among others, all published accounts of Buchanan v. Taylor redacted from articles in national papers and disseminated in the hinterlands and abroad. During the libel trial, Buchanan v. Taylor, Buchanan denied casting aspersions on Swinburne’s character in “The Session of the Poets” (1866), which might have justified Swinburne in the mind of the jury: “Mr. Buchanan also declared upon his oath that when he wrote, in the ‘Session of the Poets,’ of Mr. Swinburne that that gentleman had a ‘neck stretching out like a gander,’ and that he had to be carried home drunk, he was referring solely to Mr. Swinburne’s writings.”116 When perusing the extensive press coverage of the trial, including reporters’ transcripts and redactions of articles covering the events, it seems clear which side the parties favored. Those skeptical of Buchanan’s case, The Athenaeum and The Examiner, made light of Buchanan’s explanation that he was only “guilty of personalities under provocation.” Buchanan’s supporters found his testimony compelling and commended the publication of his pamphlet to stem the tide of foreign and effete aestheticism: “The article in question was entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ and expressed the convictions of the writer in good, masculine English language. It forcibly expressed the idea which the writer wished to convey, and that was without pretending to any sickly mock modesty.”117

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The defense challenged Buchanan’s public bearing as a stern moralist on two fronts. First, extracts from Buchanan’s pamphlet “directed against the pandering of poets to a vile taste” were read in court in connection with a recitation of Buchanan’s poem “White Rose and Red.” The Saturday Review informed its readers, “The works of Mr. Robert Buchanan might well have been included among those which were attacked for their evil tendencies in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry.’ ”118 Second, the defense attorney charged that although Buchanan “sets himself up as a censor of morals,” Buchanan’s partiality for Whitman demonstrates that “he is not quite what he should be.”119 Peter Taylor’s legal team submitted an unexpurgated American edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for perusal by the court, passages of which, “on account of their excessive filthiness, were not read in court, but only shown to the jury.”120 Presented with a passage from Whitman’s poems “as filthy as anything he had ever read,” Buchanan admitted that he would be “ashamed of such language as this passage contains appearing in any work of mine.”121 Challenged to explain why he “got up a subscription for Walt Whitman; and did not even mention him in the ‘Fleshly School,’ ” though he was well aware that “Whitman’s poems were considered in Amer ica to be gross and indecent,” Buchanan received a timely assist from his lawyer: “It was the ‘Fleshly School’ of England that he was dealing with.”122 Alluding to the “portions of Rossetti’s work which are an abomination in the eyes of the Philistines, and have earned for him a reputed place in the ranks of what is called, with more or less of intelligence, the fleshly school,” the American journal Scribner’s Monthly tried to puzzle out Buchanan’s highly idiosyncratic argument: “It is a singular fact, that among the English critics who denounce Rossetti, and that ilk, with the greatest virulence, are to be found some of the most ardent admirers of our American Walt Whitman.”123 Buchanan’s tolerance for Whitman’s “indecent verses” and advocacy of free love struck many peers as rank hy pocrisy: “It just happens that I have been asked, honestly enough, how it is that I despise so much the Fleshly School of Poetry in England and admire so much the poetry which is widely considered unclean and animal in Amer ica.” Buchanan had a sensible response for his interlocutors and detractors, explaining that he found the American “Bard, outrageously original and creative in the form and substance of his so-called verse” (experimentation with the vernacular) (FS 96). His follow-up argument, that Whitman’s great theme was spiritual

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purity and bodily health, was less compelling because it entailed a repression of Whitman’s fleshliness: “I should say that Whitman was by no means a man of strong animal passions” (FS 97). In short, Buchanan’s idiosyncratic reading of Whitman entailed a sublimation of eros: “Walt Whitman professes to sow the first seeds of an indigenous literature, by putting in music the spiritual and fleshly yearnings of the cosmical man.”124 Mystical fleshliness was a quality Whitman shared with Rossetti, a point remarked by Buchanan’s critics: “To some there may seem to be an inconsistency in any one who enjoys Walt Whitman being shocked by Mr. Rossetti.” Acknowledging the spreading taint of sensuality, the Saturday Review “seriously doubted whether such productions as [Buchanan’s] pamphlet are not calculated rather to minister to than to check it.”125 For his contemporaries, the irony of Buchanan’s incomprehension of the obvious parallels between Whitman’s fate among “prudes”126 and Swinburne’s travails among censors was compounded by the Pre-Raphaelites’ promotion of Whitman’s repute. W. M. Rossetti acknowledged Buchanan’s early partisanship in the preface to his edition of Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), which put Whitman’s complete text in the hands of English readers for the first time. Buchanan praised William Rossetti’s excision of fifty lines of indecent verse, which obscured Whitman’s identity as a “colossal mystic,” but rejected a policy of reconciliation based on their shared championship of Whitman (FS 96). In The Fleshly School of Poetry, Buchanan went so far as to remark, “It is in a thousand ways unfortunate for Walt Whitman that he has been introduced to the English public by Mr. William Rossetti, and been loudly praised by Mr. Swinburne. Doubtless these gentlemen admire the American poet for all that is best in him; but the British public, having heard that Whitman is immoral, and having already a dim guess that Messrs. Swinburne and Rossetti are not over-refined, has come to the conclusion that his nastiness alone has been his recommendation” (97). Buchanan declared the bard’s verses “strongly masculine—unsicklied by Lesbian bestialities and Petronian abominations,” unlike those of Swinburne. Buchanan was curiously deaf to the homoerotic tenor of “adhesiveness” and “comrade love.” The only hint of an allusion to coded homoeroticism was Buchanan’s observation that Whitman was “already exercising on the youth of Amer ica an influence similar to that exercised by Socrates over the youth of Greece, or by Raleigh over the young chivalry of England.”127

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Justice Archibald instructed the jury to consider Buchanan’s advocacy of Whitman’s verses as a mitigating circumstance in assessing damages against the owner of The Examiner. While the judge disliked the sensuous strain of Pre-Raphaelite poems cited by Buchanan in his 1872 pamphlet, he sternly objected that “they were not to be rebuked except in a grave and serious way; and if, instead of this, they were made the excuse of a sensational essay, and the same faults were reproduced by repetition and unnecessary quotation,” Buchanan himself was at fault.128 Similarly, Once a Week concluded that the libel suit had succeeded in advertising a good deal of obscene poetry: “Silence would have been better in the whole case, for the consequence is that now all the boys in the school want to know what were the naughty words that . . . Swinburne, Walt Whitman, and the rest— did write.”129 The fact that Buchanan’s diatribes were attention grabbing and, thereby, self- serving, was not lost on his contemporaries. The London Quarterly Review suggested that Buchanan relished his unenviable position as a perpetual object of scorn, commenting that the incorrect attribution of Jonas Fisher to the pen of Buchanan had “thus afforded Mr.  Robert Buchanan a favourable opportunity (not altogether lost) of getting up another fuss about himself.”130 Fame was Buchanan’s muse. Swinburne’s quip “He has told us that he never can forget his first friends; he has shown us that he never can forget himself ” ridiculed Buchanan’s tireless self-advertisement and egomaniacal conviction of his place in the literary pantheon: “With the kindliest forethought, the most judicious care to anticipate the anxious researches of a late posterity, Mr. Buchanan has once and again poured out his personal confidences into the sympathetic bosom of the nursing journals. He is resolved that his country shall not always have cause to complain how little she knows of her greatest sons.” Due to Buchanan’s penchant for autobiography and personal anecdote, “none need fear that the next age will have to lament the absence of materials for a life of Buchanan” (CWACS 16:429). Regrettably, Buchanan had no coterie to fan the flames of his repute, so he took the matter in hand by promoting himself surreptitiously and drumming up controversy. Reporting on the outcome of his libel action, The Athenaeum noted, “If Mr.  Tennyson, or Mr.  Browning, or any of those better known poets with whom Mr. Buchanan loves to rank himself ” had been defamed, there would have been a more generous assessment of damages.131

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Shortly after Buchanan v. Taylor concluded, Buchanan published another incendiary article in the Contemporary Review, denouncing fleshly trends at high-priced society journals such as Vanity Fair and gossip mongering at the World. The article was unsigned, but scuttlebutt quickly disclosed Buchanan’s authorship.132 Stung by the attack but unwilling to accuse an old friend of treachery, the editor of the World, Edmund Yates, wrote to Buchanan asking him to confirm or deny the attribution. Receiving no reply, Yates unleashed a torrent of invective against Buchanan in a signed article, “A Scrofulous Scotch Poet,” published in his newspaper. Pictured as penniless, ragged, flea-bitten, and dirty, the young Buchanan literally begged Yates for work to keep starvation at bay: “As I looked at him, I could not help also thinking of the practical benevolence of the Duke of Argyll, and of the vaunted virtues of Keating’s insect powder.” Yates succored Buchanan in his time of need: “I honestly believe it was wholly and solely through me, and those acting with me, that he did not actually die of starvation, and add one more to the number of those self-sufficient lowborn lads who, confident in their own genius, exchange the dung-fork for the steel-pen, and the country farmyard for the London grave.” Berating Buchanan for disloyalty to a former benefactor and well-wisher, Yates reprised charges that Buchanan had pseudonymously “stabbed some great reputations in the back, and had had his moral ulcers laid bare by the scalpel of judicial cross examination,” a reference to the recent trial, which had focused attention on Buchanan’s hy pocrisy and duplicity. In conclusion, Yates called Buchanan the “sio-disant [sic] guide, phi losopher, and friend of ‘all cleanly people who respect honest literature and live earnest lives,’ ” in Buchanan’s dubious phrase. By turns blistering and humiliating, Yates’s article was a media sensation in its own right, prompting Yates to worry that he was “play[ing] into my enemies’ hands by giving them a gratuitous advertisement,”133 and confirming once more that scandal promoted sales. But the days of critical anonymity were numbered.

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SIX Henry James and British Aestheticism

But her affectations rubbed off on her brother’s renown, and as there were plenty of people who darkly disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person formed by his influence. It was quite possible to regard her as a warning, and she had almost compromised him with the world at large. He was the original and she the inevitable imitation. I suppose him scarce aware of the impression she mainly produced, beyond having a general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti. —Henry James, “The Author of Beltraffio”

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t has been observed that periodical journalism was a mainstay of the Victorian writer’s income. Henry James began contributing book, drama, and art reviews to American and British magazines in the 1870s.1 Like many Victorian art critics, James’s expertise was literary. An art amateur in every sense, James shared his impressions with an American audience prevented by distance and lack of access to exhibitions from keeping up with the latest trends. His métier was taste and personal relationships, which gave him entrée to studios. In 1869, Charles Eliot Norton introduced James to Ruskin, William and Jane Morris, the Rossetti brothers, Browning, and Burne- Jones, who became a friend. James settled in London in 1876. Over time, he got to know Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sidney Colvin, Arthur Benson, Du Maurier, Whistler, and Edmund Gosse, a par ticu lar friend. Among other figures mentioned in this book,

James was acquainted with Pater and Lord Houghton; Frederick Wedmore, art critic; Frederic Harrison, phi losopher and culture critic; James Knowles, former editor of the Contemporary Review and founding editor of the Nineteenth Century; and poet-critic John Addington Symonds, who privately published pamphlets on homosexuality. Through his brother, William, Henry met psychical researcher Frederic Myers and psychologist James Sully. The editor of the Fortnightly Review, John Morley, advised Macmillan’s against publishing James’s French Poets and Novelists. The late Victorian print media dismissed James’s fiction as the work of a “prude.” Writing in 1886, the novelist George Moore connected James’s prolonged bachelorhood with his characters’ romantic renunciations: “The interviewer in us would like to ask Henry James why he never married; but it would be vain to ask, so much does he write like a man to whom all action is repugnant.”2 Once again, puritanical scold Robert Buchanan dissented from the general view. Reviewing James’s Partial Portraits in 1889, Buchanan chided James for being a “Superfine Young Man,” a Pa risian “boulevardier,” or dandy, who succumbed to the “dogma of L’Art pour L’Art.”3 For my purposes, James’s value as a contemporary in for mant inheres in his cautious navigation of the gauntlet run by effete and priggish critics discussed in chapter 2. James partook of the “call and response” routines of Victorian journalism, engaging in dialogue with the published remarks of other critics. James’s reviews were beholden to the art chatter of the chief British periodicals, resurrecting the arguments and vocabulary of Buchanan’s Fleshly School diatribes, as well as contemporary screeds against aestheticism. Further, James personally experienced the crisis in understandings of sex and gender norms fomented by Pre-Raphaelitism. In 1878, Cornhill Magazine published a portion of Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and Sully’s “The Undefinable in Art,” an essay which appears to have attracted James’s attention and shaped his media persona. A Victorian pioneer in philosophical and psychological approaches to aesthetics, Sully declined to segregate intellectual and emotional responses to works of art. Yet Sully resorted to stereotypes when contrasting types of art connoisseurs: the sober man of “definite convictions,” who receives pleasure from objects and ideas through his understanding, versus the “type of man who delights to abandon himself to an unthinking emotional state, and to steep his mind, so to speak, in a stream of vague feeling.” This latter type partakes of the coterie sensibility, as he relishes “the contagion of half-expressed feeling, the delicious thrills of sympathetic emotion, and the exhilarating [ 210 ]

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expansion of soaring with a kindred spirit into the dim regions of poetic fancy.”4 Aligning homosexuality (“kindred spirit”), emotionalism, and poetry, Sully’s thumbnail sketch of the effusive art connoisseur reads like a legend from a Du Maurier cartoon featuring the aesthetes Maudle and Postlethwaite. As a reviewer, James wrestled with his conflicted feelings about the cultural freight of aestheticism. Acknowledging his attraction to its homophile and epicene subject matter piqued his homosexual panic. Lacking the courage to defend aestheticism against charges of effeminacy impaired his burgeoning sense of professional authority. James’s engagement with the train of ideas passed from Swinburne and Rossetti through Pater to Wilde is salient but also ambivalent. In the 1870s, James repeated the mambo-step of attraction-recoil performed by Pre-Raphaelite celebrities and their acolytes, who wanted to be seen as daring and modern. Their ambivalence toward male-male desire demarcated the invisible boundary dividing risqué postures from disreputable conduct.

British Aestheticism James’s reconnaissance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement is instructive for the cultural historian who would validate its avant-garde credentials into the 1870s, for James responded to this group of painters and writers with a “shock of the new.” While I am principally concerned with his published appraisals of art and literature, one story stands out for tapping the risqué current within Pre-Raphaelitism by means of allusion to fascination and “scandal.”5 In “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), Mark Ambient’s house and environs appear “copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites” (8). The story was published two years after Gabriel Rossetti’s death and one year after the first public exhibition of his major paintings at the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition ( January–March  1883) and the Burlington Fine Arts Club (1883). In 1883, when James made Rossetti a conduit for his reflections on aestheticism, the painter-poet was more famous than at any time before or since. Ambient’s masculine charisma recalls the Rossetti persona, just as the frisson of male mentorship savors of Pater, but the ramped up homoerotic tension between Ambient and his gushing male acolyte takes a pattern after Solomon’s indiscreet “Pagan” pictures (45). I can neither confirm nor deny James’s familiarity with Solomon’s history, H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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but James was surrounded by gossips—Edmund Gosse spilled the beans about Symonds’s unhappy marriage.6 Solomon’s absence from the exhibition scene haunts James’s story in the form of tenebrous allusions to the “black ‘Beltraffio’ ” and the obfuscation of its content (73). Famed for his exotic Jewish images, Solomon’s Oriental bent informs Ambient’s interest in “the East and the extraordinary forms of life to be observed in that part of the world” (28). Ambient’s “gospel of art” or “aesthetic war-cry,” ironically delivered in hushed tones in the minor key, preaches to the choir for fear of arousing the lion of British prudery that drove Solomon from public life (4). Homoerotic codes and “dog whistles” pervade the story, serving to both commend and admonish. Back in 1875, James had toed the conservative party line, gently disparaging “erudite painting” and remarking of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Leighton: “These gentlemen’s pictures always seem as if, to be complete, they needed to have a learned sonnet, of an explanatory sort, affixed to the frame.”7 This criticism was not original; prevailing canons of taste stigmatized “esoteric” painting.8 Calling the trio “exquisite,” James insinuated that the artists’ penchant for highly finished canvases, fanciful and poetic subjects, was informed by personal effeteness and foppishness, a refrain strikingly reminiscent of Buchanan’s diatribes. Buchanan’s sinister inflection of the phrase “sister arts” underscored the inversion of the natural order of things (in other words, the unnatural coupling of distinct spheres of aesthetic activity) and lent rhetorical support to his charges: “Poetry is something more than painting; and an idea will not become a poem because it is too smudgy for a picture” (FS 42). Like Buchanan, James fashioned ut pictura poesis (“As a painting, so a poem”) into a trope of sexual inversion. Harping on the perverse amalgamation intrinsic to pictorial writing and erudite painting, James underscored his perception that “Mr. Burne-Jones paints, we may almost say, with a pen” (AD 69). The Pre-Raphaelites revived the “sister arts” analogy: “One of the first principles of aestheticism is that all the fine arts are intimately related to one another.”9 Ut pictura poesis was once considered a good motive for art but became unfashionable in the wake of Lessing’s objections to “baroque motion and allegory” in painting and “emblematic verse.”10 Lessing, an eighteenth-century proponent of neoclassicism, concerned himself with matters of form. James’s remarks need to be understood as schizophrenically embracing and retreating from the critique of aestheticism that flourished in British newspapers and art journals. [ 212 ]

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In 1877, Sir Coutts Lindsay founded the Grosvenor Gallery to provide a forum for emerging artists who had been denied or had refused space at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions. He aimed to illustrate the “true status of British art” by circumnavigating “the littleness of committees, the traditions of academies, the spite of cliques, the ignorance and stupidities of half-cultured painters, jealous of their betters.”11 “Catholic” in his tastes, Sir Coutts aspired to turn a public gallery into a “sort of Fortnightly Review, or more correctly, Nineteenth Century, among exhibitions” to promote and display progressive art (AD 252). He also hoped to rectify past injustices. “Alone of the great outsiders,” Rossetti declined his invitation to exhibit at the Grosvenor. “Out of no discourtesy or contempt he has by a published letter declared, but from motives of modesty, as feeling the failure of his labour to accomplish the ideal aspiration he has set before him.”12 The Times offered a slightly different explanation, ostensibly also authorized by Rossetti: “Mr. Dante Rossetti, though cordially sympathising with Sir Coutts Lindsay, is prevented by ill-health from undertaking any work for this year, but it is hoped will be able to paint for another occasion.”13 Rossetti might have contributed a painting from his old stock, as Holman Hunt did. In fact, Rossetti objected to the plan to include royal academicians among the first exhibitors and wrote to The Times to clarify his reservations.14 A third explanation emerged when The Athenaeum blamed some intrigue for Rossetti’s failure to participate: “Everybody knows how the words of one distinguished painter were misunderstood, so that Mr. Rossetti contributes nothing to a gallery of which it was said his works would be the great ornament.”15 The Athenaeum went on to “regret intensely the absence of Mr. Rossetti’s pictures from these galleries, because with him there has been no arrest of development, and he possesses power of tone, luminosity, depth of colour, and masterly adaptation of light and shade in harmony with colour, the fundamental element of chiaroscuro, that magic of art.” Rossetti’s adoption of formerly despised illusionist techniques was contrasted with the work of J. R. S. Stanhope, Walter Crane, and BurneJones, men of “culture, over-refinement, and caprice” who still favored the look of early fifteenth-century art like recidivist PRB members (584). In Rossetti’s absence, press coverage of the inaugural Grosvenor exhibition transformed Burne-Jones into an aesthetic celebrity: “The genius of Mr. Burne-Jones will on these walls become a real ity to those to whom it had hitherto been only a report.”16 Up to this date, due to his seven-year hiatus from exhibition, Burne-Jones’s work was “comparatively unknown” H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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beyond high art circles, where it was “enthusiastically admired.”17 The Examiner proclaimed Burne-Jones “the greatest imaginative painter that England has produced” and congratulated the artist for perfecting his technique so that those who would “laugh at his invention are no longer able to poke fun at his execution.”18 The Athenaeum concurred, praising the color scheme of his new paintings: “More exquisite harmonies, or finer contrasts of delicate yet strong and vivid colour, were never presented, even by the Venetians, to whose art this and other paintings by the artist refer.”19 Anointing Burne-Jones the undisputed master of the Pre-Raphaelite school—“his work exemplifies all its doctrines in their completest form”— Tom Taylor nevertheless allowed that the paintings on exhibition struck some viewers as “unaccountable freaks of individual eccentricity” and “the strange and unwholesome fruits of hopeless wanderings in the mazes of mysticism and mediaevalism.”20 The same language had been used to lampoon Solomon’s “extravagancies and exuberant freaks of execution” when he was master of the brand.21 While critical acclaim far exceeded censure on this auspicious occasion, Burne-Jones’s triumph raised the hackles of critics, who complained about his arcane subjects, the want of manliness and health in his principal figures, and his defective drawing. In “The Picture Season in London” (1877), James hung fire between rapture and demur, wryly acknowledging “Mr. Burne-Jones’s lionship” at the Grosvenor (AD 257). Instead of joining the small Tory chorus sniping at Burne-Jones’s ascendancy, James equivocated. He dissociated himself from the complaints he had made in 1875 about the painter’s overrefinement and rhetorically projected this narrow-minded caviling with Burne-Jones’s inventive genius onto other critical consciences. By reprising these arguments, James participated in the debate without taking a stand: “It is not painting,” I hear them say, “and it has nothing to do with painting. It is literature, erudition, edification; it is a superior education, a reminiscence of Oxford, a luxury of culture. Painting is a direct rendering of something seen in the world we live in and look at, we love and admire, and in that sense there is certainly no painting here.”22 It was generally conceded that Burne-Jones’s canvases owed more to higher culture than to nature. Though Taylor identified Burne-Jones as a [ 214 ]

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Pre-Raphaelite, he acknowledged the “greatest possible difference between this, which we may call the Quattro-centisti school, in its present development, and the original Pre-Raffaelites,” who were committed to documenting what they saw.23 Paradoxically, Ruskin’s tenets were being used to deflate the rising renown of his favorite painter. In actual fact, Ruskin’s waning allegiance to PRB realism was reflected in his waxing enthusiasm for Burne-Jones’s gift of personification of the abstract idea: “Where Rossetti painted Adam and Eve, Mr.  Jones paints ‘A Day of Creation.’ ”24 Even as a novice critic, James sidestepped Ruskin’s (early) mandates, which placed special emphasis on “looking” and moral uplift. James’s aesthetic credo harmonized realism and abstraction: “There are things, and there is the intellectual reflex of things,” James wrote. Paint “not the thing regarded, but the thing remembered, imagined, desired,—in some degree or other intellectualized” (AD 31–32). James used this logic to defend Burne-Jones. Yet much as Burne-Jones’s detractors had done, James repeated the argument that Burne-Jones’s art was one of “culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of aesthetic refinement, of people who look at the world and at life not directly, as it were, and in all its accidental real ity, but in the reflection and ornamental portrait of it furnished by art itself in other manifestations; furnished by liter ature, by poetry, by history, by erudition” (AD 257). James was a cautious advocate, qualifying his endorsement by declaring himself out of sympathy with the “morbidly ingenious” aspects of Burne-Jones’s pictures: “I hasten to add that this is the opinion of a spectator not at all in sympathy with the school of art, if school there is, to which Mr. Burne-Jones belongs” (AD 257). James’s praise was coupled with “a dozen abatements,” an effort at distanciation. James was worried that Burne-Jones owed his success at the Grosvenor to people’s interest in his “queerness,” to the air of mystery surrounding his lifestyle, and to the belief that in “private prosperity his genius was growing ‘queerer’ than ever.” This terminology implied a range of deviations from norms, especially deviations relating to sex and gender, for which plainer words were either wanting or taboo.25 Burne-Jones’s queerness was not the element that drew James, or so James said (AD 257). James took refuge in technical issues, which were fodder for controversies of a milder sort. Inclined to defend Burne-Jones’s “impressiveness” as a colorist, against his detractors, James disliked the artist’s preferred type of female model, “that square-jawed, large-mouthed female visage”; James deprecated as well the H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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amateurishness of the drawing, a charge that had been leveled at the Rossetti wing of Pre-Raphaelitism since the Brotherhood’s inception (AD 258, 259). James sounded like a formalist and a prig when extolling BurneJones’s artistry as “something rare in a day of vulgar and superficial study” (AD 260). In “The Picture Season in London,” James attempted to honor the work of a brilliant but controversial artist without offending popu lar opinion and bringing down opprobrium on his own head. He also wished to avoid stoking the ire of Burne-Jones’s “large circle of friends and disciples [that] stand like a thick wall between him and such paper pellets as these.”26 Critics were unabashedly partisan, as period in for mants recalled: “Mr.  Burne Jones has been over-praised: his faults and his deficiencies, and they are many, have been exalted into virtues. So much of what is worst and least worthy in him has chimed in with what is worst and least worthy in the modern literature of a clique, and the modern taste of a clique.”27 Turning a flaw into an asset had been the preferred method of praise since the PRB’s inception. Impatient of coteries, James was nevertheless aware that Colvin wielded clout as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, a position James coveted. James risked stamping his own taste as hopelessly old-fashioned when he criticized Burne-Jones, whose debut had “brought down the pack of commonplace critics in the full cry of amazed indignation” (“How hideous! how horrid!”, the default response to “what is really excellent in modern art.”)28 In “The Author of Beltraffio,” James drolly reprised Colvin’s account of the war waged by fans of “the gospel of art” on philistinism, trivializing the enterprise: “It was a kind of aesthetic war-cry. People had endeavoured to sail nearer to ‘truth’ in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their sideboards” (4). James could not, however, ignore Colvin (or the temperature of reverence he stoked for Burne-Jones) in a magazine of art: “Since Painting was an art, it is probable that no poetry so intense as this, no invention so rich and so unerringly lovely, was ever poured into form and colour. It is better to say it without hesitation—we have among us a genius, a poet in design and colour, whose like has never been seen before.”29 As Burne-Jones’s champion, James was not obliged to insist on the perversity of his attraction. James must have been aware of the scandal attending Phyllis and Demophoön (1870), which occasioned the painting’s removal from display, as well as the painter’s resignation from the Old Water-Colour Society and hiatus from exhibition. Demophoön was the first male figure [ 216 ]

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since 1849 to be rendered totally nude, without the discreet cover of drapery. Prettejohn argues that this was one instance in which a scandal caused by a Pre-Raphaelite picture matched the uproar created by the circle’s poetry.30 The Illustrated London News condemned the painting as “nothing but a stony, bloodless figment of the fancy— something which, like the amatory poetry of the Swinburne school, might be loathsome were it not for its fantastic unreality.”31 An association with the Swinburne-Rossetti circle clearly compromised a painter of pagan subject matter. The contributor for The Art-Journal highlighted the affinity between Burne-Jones’s painting and Solomon’s oeuvre: “Mr.  Burne Jones in the Old WaterColour Society stands alone: he has in this room no followers; in order to judge how degenerate this style may become in the hands of disciples, it is needful to take a walk to the Dudley Gallery.”32 In addition to decrying the hero’s nudity as an affront to modesty (and the proportions of the figures an affront to the grammar of art), Taylor was disturbed at finding “no true characterization of sex as between the Demophoön and the Phyllis” and disagreeably impressed by the painter’s reversal of gender roles: “The expression of the pursuing nymph is, no doubt, intense; but the idea of a love-chase, with the woman for ‘follower,’ is not pleasant.”33 At the Grosvenor, James played the part of moderator rather than cheerleader (like Colvin) or judge (like Taylor). As a reviewer, James aspired to Hazlitt’s conception of the critic as an honest and intelligent mediator between the artist and the populace rather than as an art expert per se. Reviewing The Tree of Forgiveness (1882), a revamped Phyllis and Demophoön, James steered clear of controversy, emphasizing the later painting’s “grace, delicacy, tenderness, of the chord of association and memory,” and refusing to dwell on the moral “question of sickness and health” of imagination, where Burne-Jones was vulnerable to attack. James reproved Burne-Jones for a lack of realism, chaffing him for giving Demophoön, the faithless lover, “hair of a singular greenish tinge”: “If there was to be any green hair in the picture, it surely should belong to the hardly yet revivified nymph,” whom he styled, “the arborescent Phyllis.” With a light touch of humor, James brushed aside the concerns of critics who accused BurneJones of “turning real ity topsy-turvy” (AD 346). James hoped to rescue The Tree of Forgiveness from censure by playing up its mythic theme and “fantastic unreality,” the excuse less civilly proffered by the Illustrated London News concerning the first treatment of the subject. In this context, James tentatively aligned himself with daring and controversial trends in British H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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FIGU R E 6.1 Edward

Coley Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870. Opaque watercolor. Image © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/ Bridgeman Images.

art. He did not want to be written off as a male spinster agonizing over poor Demophoön’s grey-green nudity. James defended Burne-Jones’s pictorial imagination against the philistinism of his critics in a disarming fashion, by half agreeing with them. Punch ridiculed The Tree of Forgiveness in a cartoon captioned, “ ‘Take [ 218 ]

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FIGU R E 6.2 Edward

Coley Burne-Jones, The Tree of Forgiveness, 1881–1882. Oil on canvas. Image © Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

me, take my Trunk.’ By  E. Burne-Jones, or ‘Ty-Burn Jones,’ for the deadly-liveliness of the figures.”34 Punch’s Phyllis popped out of a train’s smokestack to molest Demophoön, who was dressed like a redcap. The updated image melded animosity to the new woman’s alleged sexual rapacity with hostility to Pre-Raphaelite archaism. The “female pursuer” was a mainstay of popu lar and highbrow resentment of Burne-Jones’s multiple treatments of this anecdote from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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The subject retained its poignancy for Burne-Jones because his inamorata, Maria Zambaco, posed for Phyllis, but critics were unaware of this. Admitting that the picture was “open to the grave accusation of representing a monstrosity,” echoing Taylor’s remarks about a love chase with a female pursuer, James dodged the question by turning to aesthetic considerations: “The subject was difficult, and there could be no question of making it ‘natural’; Mr. Burne-Jones has had to content himself with making it lovely” (AD 346). This belletristic emphasis left Burne-Jones open to the charge that his “mystical- decorative style” never rose above “decorative painting.”35 James addressed this complaint as well, by staging Burne-Jones’s deliberations on the limits of his medium as an interior monologue on the double-work of art: “The artist has asked himself why, if a poet may be a painter, a painter may not be a poet” (AD 346). Finishing in a period rather than a question mark, this comment may be read as an (accidental) assertion rather than as a rhetorical question. In the wake of his triumph at the Grosvenor, Burne-Jones had to be reintroduced to art audiences. Journals recapped the earlier fracas over Phyllis and Demophoön, this time calling it an aberration in critical judgment: “It is strange, in the presence of these magnificent examples of imaginative design, that only a few years ago the Society of Painters in Water-Colours was content to accept his resignation because some old gentleman had complained that the figures he painted were nude, and because the artist, recognising the fact, refused to add costume”; the contributor smugly concluded, “Such a thing would now be impossible, and that it is so is a gratifying sign of the advance of public taste, and of the increased understanding which now exists of the aims of imaginative art.”36 This alleged advance in public taste resembles the contracting horizon of expectations wherein works that once alienated audiences are later absorbed within tradition. In a now familiar pattern (outrage followed by curiosity and acceptance), the tastes of the day finally caught up with advanced art and literature. From the standpoint of reception theory, Phyllis and Demophoön functioned as a litmus test of the modern optic: virile daring or something “akin to the sickly sentiment, unmanly asceticism, and morbid clinging to the past” of the Pre-Raphaelite school.37 In The Pre-Raphaelite Body, Bullen explores the psychological and cultural roots of the Victorians’ hostility to Pre-Raphaelitism, focusing on the Victorian’s distaste for the pallid, fee-

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FIGU R E  6.3 W. B. Richmond, “Take Me, Take My Trunk.” By E. Burne-Jones, or, “Ty-Burn Jones,” for the Deadly Liveliness of the Figures, 1882. Image © Punch Limited.

ble, unmanly bodies depicted in both early and late Pre-Raphaelite masterworks: “Mr. Jones is often careful to present the soul, in an unhealthy body.”38 Tracing the evolution of the PRB through “art for art’s sake” aestheticism, Bullen remarks on the per sistence of a modern “nonconformist motive” binding personnel and on the continuity in the movement’s representation of the body as a site of “pleasure, puzzlement, and disquiet.”39 Burne-Jones was on terms of great intimacy with Simeon Solomon, when Solomon produced legions of naked youths clothed chiefly in symbolic titles (for example, Love Bound and Wounded [1868], which was a sadomasochist’s pinup). It seems likely that Burne-Jones’s friendship with Solomon paved the way for Demophoön’s full-frontal exposure in 1870. In Masculinities in Victorian Painting, Joseph Kestner notes the dearth of male nudes in the Victorian era.40 Kestner invokes the incommensurability of the penis and phallus as an explanation for this omission. He cites the power ful nudes of William Etty, which simultaneously disclosed and hid the genitals behind dark pubic hair in pictures such as Prometheus, celebrating phallic supremacy through symbolism, storytelling, and the heavi ly muscled physique (241). Whatever the truth of Kestner’s claim, there was an alternative canon of nude male figures.41 In the years before Solomon’s arrest, homosexual or closeted men felt free to enjoy and publicly praise his figures of doubtful sex without risking the imputation of homosexuality, even though his images excited unease in some viewers. Kestner’s focus on the presence or absence of the penis divests the Victorian nude of its power to shock and titillate through intimations of gender and sexual anomaly or same-sex desire. Burne-Jones’s The Garden of Pan (1887) depicts a perfectly proportioned nude male, power ful even in repose, whose back is turned on the lovely girl leaning on his shoulder.42 He gazes longingly at the boy god Pan, a diminutive version of himself. He appears transfixed by the beautiful air Pan plays on his pipes. The dual motifs of aural penetration (seduction through the porches of the ear) and the “sister arts” (painting and music) evoke the trope of sexual inversion. Even though Burne- Jones was an acknowledged master of flower painting, his trio inhabits what might be described as a fecal landscape (brown and nubby) devoid of flowers. Fun described the Garden of Pan as “an unusually rocky, ripe Stilton-cheesy piece of painting. Poor Pan is perched on a very rough, cold stone, and the unfortunate piper’s eyes are bolting out of his head through pain; but still he

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FIGURE 6.4 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, The Garden of Pan, 1876–1887. Oil on can-

vas. Image © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Felton Bequest/ Bridgeman Images.

manfully struggles to discourse Punch and Judy music from his Pandean pipes.”43 I want to call attention to the fact that an illustrated weekly a bit down-market from Punch thought its readers would be interested in the goings-on at the Grosvenor a decade beyond its sensational debut. The article rips the painting’s highbrow qualities through its coarse analogies, but the mask slips enough to reveal an educated writer’s vocabulary (“Pandean”). Here was a middle class confident in its values and learning, wistful for the higher culture but wondering whether it was not beneath its dignity to admit to this hankering. The sensual terminology (“sharp,” “smelly,” “cold,” “hard,” and “painful”) conveys the power of BurneJones’s pictures to excite a visceral response and reminds us that the figures were nude and unusually virile. Pan struggles “manfully,” whereas Perseus has to ask for help. Thais Morgan argues that the “system of interlocked rhetorical figures and connotative subcodes” associated with Victorian homosexuality generated

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“ambiguous representations (e.g., the androgyne)” rather than stable signifiers.44 Whether in admiration or for purposes of chastisement, BurneJones’s contemporaries perseverated about his deviation from gender norms: “That he has painted and apparently can paint only one face, giving to all his personages, male and female, divine and human, the same peculiar and stereotyped nose, eyes, mouth, and chin,” John Robertson continued, “imposing it on all periods, making Perseus and Andromeda not only epicene twins but lawless importations from the haggard, unreal Middle Ages of the painter’s own eternal dream.”45 Despite the “exquisite finish of execution, a richness and harmony of colour, scarcely to be over-rated,” the superficial perfection of Burne-Jones’s pictures was marred by their unmanliness and formula: “the same dreamy vacuity of expression” common to one and all.46 Burne-Jones was unable to “break away from his favourite type of female beauty, with its expression of hopeless abstracted melancholy.”47 I need hardly remind readers that this same charge was leveled against Solomon and Rossetti: “Rossetti reveals the mark of artistic monomania in his morbid passion for one incredible type of face.” 48 It would seem that the obsessive repetition of a favorite facial type was a signature of the school: “That one face runs through all Mr. Burne Jones’s drawings is an old observation.”49 Paintings were used as diagnostic tools and as fodder for screeds against immorality. Thematically, Burne-Jones’s work savored of Pre-Raphaelite morbidity and effeminacy: “Where is the great anatomic Improver on Nature, Burne-Jones?” painter of “Limp lads with their belli capelli.”50 Praising the beautiful treatment of draperies in Solomon’s A Song of Spring (1868), The London Review demurred: “The picture altogether suggests physical debility rather than mental emotion.”51 The Victorians conflated gender deviance with illness. Bearing the hallmarks of the SolomonRossetti school of imaginative painting, Burne-Jones’s handling of symbolical figures, “the miserable Day, the sickly Spring, and the over-wearied Summer,” excited controversy and speculation about the painterly sensibility that found such models beautiful: “his ‘Day,’ for instance—the haggard and ill-fed youth at the Grosvenor, shivering and nude,” like a Victorian rent boy.52 Reviewing The Days of Creation, James reprised objections to the “flaccid softness and weakness” of Burne-Jones’s figures but distanced himself from the hostile camp by praising the figures’ exquisite beauty: “The manhood, indeed, the protesting critic denies; that these pictures are the reverse of manly is his principal complaint. The people, he declares, look [ 224 ]

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debauched and debilitated; they suggest a flaccid softness and weakness. Soft they are, to my sense, and weak and weary” (AD 260). In some respects, the British perceived willful gender deviance, “mollis mentis,” as a greater problem than homosexuality. Describing the vice of dandyism in 1822, Kaleidoscope charged: “Softness, the peculiar characteristic of women now forms the chief part of our modern beaux’ demeanour, soft speaking, affected attitudes, and all the symbols of effeminacy, with this only difference, that in the one it is natural and pleasing, and appropriate to her form and texture, in the other constrained, incompatible, and disgusting.”53 Heterosexual panic, anxiety over the loss of difference evoked by the “assimilation of the types of male and female,” fueled the grievance that the latter-day Pre-Raphaelites produced the “most morbid and sickly art-results.”54 In short, the “morbidly ingenious” components of BurneJones’s work, which James himself described in 1882 as evidence of “a bad stomach and a perverted mind,” related to the body and to sexuality (AD 345). Burne-Jones did not consciously conspire with the select coterie of Oxford men who used their craft to express homoerotic desire, as did Solomon in such works as Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup (1859)55 and Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). However, Burne-Jones’s androgynous images invited such an interpretation due to their resemblance to Solomon’s homoerotically charged productions. Hence James’s rhetorical preoccupation with Burne-Jones’s gynandrous models dovetailed with the conservative cant about Burne-Jones’s monotony, morbidity, and gender deviance; yet surely James’s tone was more indulgent than proscriptive: He expresses in fact little else, and all his young women conform to this languishing type with a strictness which savours of monotony. I call them young women, but even this is talking a grosser prose than is proper in speaking of creatures so mysteriously poetic. Perhaps they are young men; they look indeed like beautiful, rather sickly boys.56 This talk was the first flowering of James’s decadent imagination. Apparently, he was inclined to remove the fig leaf covering his desires when speaking of paintings and employing the language of other critics. He was rarely so bold in his own fiction, unless we read far into the narrator’s “constant regret” concerning Mark Ambient’s beautiful little son: “I didn’t even for a moment hold Dolcino in my arms.”57 James came to terms with H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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FIGU R E 6.5 Edward Coley

Burne-Jones, Day, 1870. Watercolor, gouache, and metallic paint on paper. Image © Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop.

the legibility of homoerotic themes in art and took an indulgent view of Burne-Jones’s eccentricities, casually remarking that “a young angel, of uncertain sex,” plied the bellows in Le Chant d’Amour (AD 276); he remained, however, conflicted about the homoerotic double-discourse employed by literary advocates of sensation such as Swinburne and Pater. In the 1870s, James’s exploitation of the tropes of decadence and inversion was influenced by the heightened scrutiny of homosexuals. The difficulty of deciphering James’s attitude inheres in his simultaneous assimilation of a gay lexicon and rejection of the morbid psychology (read: perversity) of decadence. More troubling, James’s furtive alignment with aestheticism’s mood of intensity and emotionalism was achieved through his hysterical protest against amalgamation with the unmanly Oxbridge set. For James, the “pathology” of homosexuality functioned both as an identity- sign and as a moralizing posture. Thus James’s essays on Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, and literary decadence may be scrutinized both for their homoerotic content and for signs of sexual panic.

Oxford Men During his apprenticeship as an art journalist, James advanced a notion of “manly art,” which Richard Ellmann later seized on as an obfuscation of James’s homosexual inclinations.58 Yet James’s assertion of the “indefeasible manliness” of Millais’s brush registered a complaint rather than a compliment; it explained why Millais muffed his portrait of the Duke of Westminster’s beautiful daughters (AD 256). Ellmann contrasted James’s mild reception of the Grosvenor’s inaugural exhibition with Wilde’s rapturous praise. In his review, Wilde employed chiasmus as a trope of homosexual communication. Wilde addressed two sets of implied readers: “One is the cultivated reader ‘interested in art and philosophy’; the other is a group whose interest lies in male-male desire.”59 Wilde overestimated the Pre-Raphaelites’ loyalty to their erstwhile comrade when he indirectly remarked on Solomon’s absence from the exhibit: “the name of that strange genius who wrote the ‘Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.’ ”60 Wilde’s rhetorical gambit was a community building strategy. It signaled his allegiance to Solomon’s homoerotic text and scandalous lifestyle. In 1905, Wilde’s former lover and literary executor Robert Ross reminisced about Frederick Hollyer’s photographic reproductions of Solomon’s H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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homoerotic drawings, which “became the fashion in Oxford during the aesthetic fever.”61 Praising Solomon’s genius as a writer in a review nominally devoted to pictures, Wilde grafted the then current medico-juridical terminology for homosexuality, “inversion,” onto the “sister arts” analogy. The notion of uniting the arts was a rallying cry for the coteries that Wilde praised for “most materially aiding that revival of culture and love of beauty which in great part owes its birth to Mr. Ruskin, and which Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Pater, and Mr. Symonds, and Mr. Morris, and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own peculiar fashion” (126). Although I find the contrast between Wilde and James instructive, Ellmann overstated James’s reticence regarding gender-bending art. Significantly, James conflated idealization with fantasy when he spoke of Burne-Jones’s androgynous visages and the attention lavished on the nude male form as prima facie evidence of idealization. In a frank disclosure, James admitted that Burne-Jones’s figures of “uncertain sex” struck him as deliciously androgynous: “They are sublimely sexless, and ready to assume whatever charm of manhood or maidenhood the imagination desires” (AD 276, 259–60). Yes, James balked at staking out an unequivocal position as a fellow traveler of the epicene aesthetes. In all probability, it was the notorious cliquishness of the movement that disturbed James’s equanimity. On the cusp of the Grosvenor exhibition, Justin McCarthy lampooned the votaries of Pre-Raphaelitism as victims of an “aesthetic epidemic”: “The average pre-Raphaelite, then, believes Dante Rossetti, Burne Jones, and Whistler to be the greatest artists of the modern world.”62 With talk of sects, coteries, mutual admiration societies, schools, and cults dominating the published discourse on aestheticism for thirty years, James resisted being classed with those who went in for Burne-Jones for fear of being mistaken for a dilettante or groupie. James did not want to be tarred with the same brush that marked BurneJones and his cultural affiliates as “queer” and, possibly, degenerate. Crosspollination, mutual admiration, and the doctrine of the “sister arts” abetted critics who wished to snare the whole Fleshly School in one net. Disparaging the “worshippers (for really the enthusiasm of those who admire the Swinburnian school of painting knows no bounds) of Messrs. BurneJones, Spencer, Stanhope, and Co.,” a correspondent for Vanity Fair predicted that “the Grosvenor Gallery would become a merely artistic lounge for the worshippers of the Fleshly School of Art.”63 Victorian journalists made [ 228 ]

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much of the teamwork across genres that solidified coterie bonds: “And the work done by Morris has its pictorial analogue in the work done by Mr. Jones.”64 Whether meant to encourage or rebuke collaboration between kindred spirits, these articles reflected a critical consensus that painting was once more entwined with poetry: “Mr. Rossetti is stealing wholesale from Mr. Swinburne, or Mr. Swinburne has been all his life robbing Mr.  Rossetti” (FS 64). Thais Morgan identifies several projects, homoerotic in tenor, on which Solomon and Swinburne collaborated without troubling Swinburne’s conscience. For example, Solomon’s Habet! (1865) and Swinburne’s “Faustine” (1862) were complementary studies of sadistic Roman ladies watching gladiatorial games.65 No wonder these subjects excited speculation about the individuals who had produced them. Before his arrest, Solomon’s homo sexuality was the focal point of his friendship with Swinburne. Solomon surmised that Swinburne’s affections were “divided between the boy and the birch”;66 he titillated Swinburne’s fancy with vignettes of flagellation (for example, in Spartan Boys About to Be Scourged at the Altar of Diana (1865) and in firsthand reports from the 1870 trial of the transvestites Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park).67 Solomon produced Love Amongst the Schoolboys (1865) for his early patron, Oscar Browning, a master of Eton dismissed in 1875 over rumors of pederasty. It was not until 1893 that the pseudonymous “Vox in Solitudine Clamantis” wrote an exposé of the moral turpitude enveloping single-sex educational institutions, invoking the “punishment of the Cities of the Plain” for boys who failed to heed his advice at “the most critical time of their lives to ensure the horror-struck avoidance of nameless vice.”68 Vox deplored the “cowardice” of school authorities who turned a blind eye to homo sexuality and masturbation: “Every public school man knows the canker of the public school system” (43). However, Vox did not blame the masters for encouraging sexual activity between man and boy through the administration of corporal punishment (or by other means). Writing to Milnes in 1863, Swinburne described the ingenuity of an Eton tutor who encouraged him to douse his face in eau de cologne before a swishing: “Counting on the pungency of the perfume and its power over the nerves, he meant to stimulate and excite the senses by that preliminary pleasure so as to inflict the acuter pain afterwards on their awakened and intensified susceptibility”—hard usage that fixed “perfume and pain” and juvenile buttocks as triggers of the poet’s amatory disposition. Fantasies of H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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the boy and the birch were a mainstay of Swinburne’s ribald correspondence with Charles Augustus Howell and Gabriel Rossetti. In view of his later reprobation of Solomon, it is noteworthy that Swinburne was so open about his sexual tastes and tried to discern “if other fellows shared the feeling.”69 In 1865, Swinburne offered to exchange new verses of the sadomasochistic poem “Dolores” for Howell’s prose composition of a “stimulating” dialogue between a tutor and the boy he is birching: “Describe also the effect of each stripe on the boy’s flesh—its appearance between the cuts.” 70 Swinburne enjoined his artistic friends to make sketches based on his fantasies of schoolboys laboring under the tutor’s lash. These sketches were solicited in exchange for a saucy sonnet or a stanza from the poet, a barter arrangement involving mutual titillation:

Being a note of scenes like this 1) Charlie on the whipping-block; Algie holds his shirt up; Dr. Birch giving the first cut with a fresh rod on Charlie’s bottom. 2) Algie horsed on Charlie’s back for his first flogging—his bottom covered with blood: 3) Study of Algie’s bottom before flogging and after; 4) Small boys watching their big brother whipped;— and such like—71 In its description of sadomasochistic fantasy, the scene reads like an anecdote from Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” 72 The repressed desire to be sodomized is transposed as beating imagery, and “Algie horsed on Charlie’s back” implies same-sex coupling. Algernon disavows knowledge of his incestuous wish for the father’s “rod,” which is displaced onto the little ones watching their big brother being whipped. The lacuna between “Algie” and “their big brother” blurs roles, permitting the fantasy to perform a sadistic function (punishing a rival) and masochistic function (punishing a transgression). Fi nally, the elision of school and family disguises the thought: “Oh, I wish Daddy would beat [sodomize] me.” Swinburne regaled his friends with naughty puns and stories of this nature, often transmitted through the mail, so they could share the frisson of the threat of exposure and blackmail. Even in the aftermath of Solomon’s debacle, Swinburne did not sanitize his letters of ribald homoerotic fantasy, tinctured by his reading of the Marquis de Sade. In collusion with his circle, Swinburne seems to have laughed off the “moments of chaff or [ 230 ]

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Rabelaisian exchange of burlesque correspondence between friends who understand the fun, and have the watchword as it were under which a jest passes and circulates in the right quarter.” Swinburne sought Howell’s help in amicably winding down his business connection with Hotten, the risktaking second publisher of Poems and Ballads. Expressing “full confidence” in Howell as a friend with whom he was on “such intimate and brotherly terms,” Swinburne confessed that Hotten possessed certain papers of which “an unscrupulous man might possibly make some annoying use.” In describing the papers, Swinburne reconsidered the extent of his exposure: “I don’t mean that Hotten could shew any such Rabelaisian effusions from my ‘festive’ pen as Rossetti or one or two others of our circle might.” 73 It never occurred to Swinburne that his correspondents, Howell and Solomon, would later raise money by selling these letters. Swinburne’s queer pedagogy (Sappho, Sade) and Solomon’s queer demonstrations inspired biographer Philip Henderson to describe their relationship as “semi-homosexual.” 74 In 1871, Solomon asked Swinburne to puff his imaginative prose work, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, in the journal Dark Blue. Solomon promised Swinburne to do “anything for you” in return— even apply the “supplices,” or tortures, that Swinburne craved. Looking forward to the July publication of the review, Solomon told Swinburne, “I cannot tell you what pleasure it will give me to see something by you on me (that sounds rather improper) and in print.” 75 Swinburne’s review was, in the main, a prearranged piece of puffery. For Swinburne, Solomon’s illuminated text epitomized the erotically charged field of the double-work of art, a Pre-Raphaelite innovation closely aligned with Rossetti. In the review, Swinburne waxed ecstatic over a “figure bearing the eucharist of love” and rhapsodized about other androgynous figures of “super sexual beauty, in which the lineaments of woman and of man seem blended as the lines of sky and landscape melt in burning mist of heat and light,” infusing the associative field and the natu ral world with intersexual bliss (CWACS 15:453). Swinburne’s cerebral lechery illustrates Eve Sedgwick’s insight that “one’s personality structure might mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of any genital activity at all.” 76 Advised by friends that Swinburne’s homoerotic innuendos might damage his reputation, Solomon wrote a series of letters alternately reprimanding, remonstrating with, and thanking Swinburne. Though parts of their correspondence are missing, a letter from Solomon to Swinburne survives, a most abject and respectful apology for perceived ingratitude, H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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wherein Solomon expressed his terror that the article in Dark Blue would do him irrevocable harm by advertizing the (homoerotic) tendencies that had been “looked upon with suspicion, and, as I have been a false friend to myself, I have not sought to remove the impression, but I have gone on following my own sweet will.”77 Presently, Buchanan’s “The Fleshly School of Poetry” appeared, castigating Solomon for his “pretty pieces of morality,” such as the misidentified Love Dying by the Breath of Lust (339).78 Then a severely chastened Solomon wrote to inform Swinburne of his plans to go in for a “different kind of work and cultivate that element that was more prominent some years ago”; that would be Jewish themes: “I have a little picture in the Dudley of a Synagogue.” 79 Imagine a Victorian Jew (and Christian convert) seeking sanctuary in his religious background as a respite from his homosexual notoriety—that is what I call feeling trapped between a rock and a hard place. Given Swinburne’s vehement reprobation of Solomon’s proclivities and conduct following his arrest, how did Swinburne manage to resist the selfknowledge that his sexual fantasies were continuous with Solomon’s proscribed desire? The 1870s were a transitional stage in the emergence of homosexual subjectivity, as shape-shifting and fugitive as Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus” or “Fragoletta.” Once again, a paradox is a useful gauge of a paradigm shift within the cultural apprehension of sexual alterity. Homosexuality signaled a range of alternative emotional states, which made it thematically indispensable to Swinburne, even though homosexuality was not an identity category or lifestyle he could adopt. Swinburne evinced the double movement (recoil and embrace) typical of Pre-Raphaelite responses to undisguised homosexuality. Swinburne and even Pater, both Oxford men, went about their business as though the philistines had no idea what they were talking about. In the decades preceding the passage of parliamentary legislation criminalizing homosexual activity (1885), there was ostensibly less pressure to inoculate personal friendships, correspondence, and creative productions against imputations of homosexuality. Solomon’s history proves, however, that even a celebrated painter could become a pariah. In La Jeunesse de Swinburne (1928), Georges Lafourcade claimed that Swinburne’s candor about untoward sexual desires was “essentially modern”: “He sowed the seeds from which grew Pater, Wilde and the whole decadent school; but he went further than these. In refusing to suppress some of the deepest sexual tendencies of his nature he was unVictorian; in the simple, straight-forward manner in which he treats and [ 232 ]

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records those impulses, he is as unlike Wilde as possible.”80 Lafourcade neglects to mention Swinburne’s homosexual panic and thwarted genitality. It would be more accurate to say that Swinburne sought refuge in obscurity, antiquity, and poetry—imaginative spaces where he might be as honest as possible in emotionally confronting his desires. In this respect, he resembled his excommunicated friend.

Laus Veneris James was schooled in Pater’s knowing asides about male beauty and androgyny: “It is a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and the lips.” In Pater’s ruminations, sexual dubiety attracts while femininity repels: “It is so with the so-called Saint John the Baptist of the Louvre— one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted—whose delicate brown flesh and woman’s hair no one would go out into the wilderness to seek, and whose treacherous smile would have us understand something far beyond the outward gesture or circumstance.”81 Pater’s words were reminiscent of the sonnet inscribed on the frame of Rossetti’s Lady Lilith, warning of the treachery of the “Body’s Beauty”: “Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went / Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair.”82 Fatal beauties were a staple of decadent literature and criticism, but no more so than the tendency to “see far beyond the outward gesture or circumstance.” It was a type of psychologism on Pater’s part to elaborate the picture’s finer points through the audience’s perspective. What did the flesh and hair of the androgynous John the Baptist look like? Exactly like the sort of flesh and hair that no one would go into the wilderness to seek. Initially attracted by sexy ruminations and provocative double entendres, James adapted for his own purposes and to his own tastes British aestheticism’s method of talking about pictures. James had no stomach for Swinburne, Rossetti, and Pater’s sadomasochistic flights of fancy. Yet he allied himself with their perverse project when he emulated their defense of esoteric painting. James passed for an expert on aestheticism but was a novice in “nastiness.” Laus Veneris (1878) was one of several of Burne-Jones’s paintings praised by James in “The Grosvenor Gallery” (1878). In his review, James pointedly H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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ignored the connection between the canvas and Swinburne’s infamous poem of that name. Considering James’s previous commentary on the painter’s erudition, this was an odd oversight. James would have known that Swinburne had dedicated Poems and Ballads to Burne-Jones. In 1861, Burne-Jones completed a watercolor sketch for Laus Veneris, a rendering of the Tannhäuser legend. By 1862, Swinburne had begun his poem, replete with sadomasochistic imagery (in females’ sexual domination over hapless males) and blasphemy (in invidious comparisons between Christ and Venus: “Lo, she was thus when her clear limbs enticed / All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ”83). In his oil painting, Burne-Jones muted the lurid sensuality of Swinburne’s poem and omitted the blasphemy, but he retained key details to ensure that the affinity between the poem and painting would be recognized (Swinburne’s languorous, scarlet clad heroine, for instance). This relationship was a rich mine of conjecture for other critics. In 1880, Quilter wondered “whether there could be a more accurately beautiful reflection of a poet’s feeling than the reflection to be seen in, say, the great picture by Mr. Burne Jones, entitled, Laus Veneris.”84 Wedmore found the fidelity to the literary source repellant: “Laus Veneris is an uncomfortable picture, so wan and death-like, so stricken with disease of the soul, so eaten up and gnawed away with disappointment and desire, is the Queen of Love at the Grosvenor.”85 Of course, none of these qualities can be seen in the demeanor of Burne-Jones’s Venus, though they may be read there by way of Swinburne’s poem. Wedmore’s complaint was a recapitulation of Tom Taylor’s charge that Burne-Jones’s Beatrice was an “unwholesome colour, which is that of a corpse buried and dug up again.”86 According to the critics, Burne-Jones’s languid women chastened and unnerved the viewer rather than stimulated a lust of the eyes. In contrast, James’s narrative interpolation of the “grand weariness” of the “medieval Venus” and corresponding “beautiful, rapt dejection of the mysterious young warrior,” her worshipper, were keynotes belonging to the picture (AD 276). Rather than focus on the unwholesome PreRaphaelite body, James confidingly set aside his reservations: “It must be admitted that the young warrior, with his swimming eyes, has a certain perplexing femineity of expression; but Mr. Burne-Jones does not pretend to paint very manly figures, and we should hardly know where to look for a more delicate rendering of a lovesick swain” (276–77). In his reception experience, James thrilled to the inversion of gender roles typical of love affairs between phallic goddesses and mortal men, if not explicitly to the [ 234 ]

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FIGU R E  6.6 Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Laus Veneris, 1873–1875. Oil on canvas. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK/© Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images.

active and passive division of labor in sadomasochistic relations. Paradoxically, James’s thumbnail sketch of the painting, in details such as the “terrible great crown” and “gorgeous lap” of the “wonderful royal lady,” borrowed freely from Swinburne’s poem and shared little with BurneJones’s serene, scarlet-clad heroine (AD 275): Her little chambers drip with flower-like red, Her girdles, and the chaplets of her head, Her armlets and her anklets; with her feet She tramples all that winepress of the dead. Her gateways smoke with fume of flowers and fires, With loves burnt out and unassuaged desires; Between her lips the steam of them is sweet, The languor in her ears of many lyres.87 Nor was this an isolated instance, in which James failed to give the devil his due. Swinburne is the linchpin of my argument that James’s forays into aestheticism, timid as they seem in comparison with Wilde’s, represented a conscious move toward literary eroticism. Where James found Pater H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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touching and exquisite (“faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater!”88), he abused Swinburne in a manner savoring of his later philippics against Wilde. James referred to Swinburne as the author of the “too famous ‘Poems and Ballads,’ ” acerbically commenting, “To resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.”89 Swinburne’s antics as a publicity hound (1866–1876) set the stage for Wilde’s self-promotion. In James’s estimation, nothing could be further from Pater’s manly reticence and guarded privacy: “He is the mask without the face, and there isn’t in his total superficies a tiny point of vantage for the newspaper to flap its wings on.”90 James’s criticisms of the “sundry infirmities of the poetical temper of Swinburne” were indistinguishable from James’s gripes about the poet’s literary personality. In both instances, Swinburne was castigated for his corruption, indiscretion, perversity, and fame seeking. Complaining that Swinburne’s prose criticism evidenced both “the very hysterics of gross vituperation” and a kind of steamy exuberance that “effectually conceals and obliterates [its object] in the suffocating fumes of his rhetoric,”91 James deplored Swinburne’s intensity and emotionalism in a manner that looked forward to Quilter’s criticism of “The Gospel of Intensity”: “If the cultivation of hysteric self-consciousness continues to be considered as a sign of artistic faculty, and the incomprehensibility of art-criticism to be a guarantee of its profundity,” sane men might wish, “let us become frankly and thoroughly as ‘Philistine,’ as were our fathers” (400). James’s priggishness about Swinburne’s material and mannerisms can be overstated. James’s derisive remarks about Swinburne partook of the queer sensibility and camp humor he is accused of reviling.92 Admittedly, James disliked Swinburne’s “flagrant levity” and want of taste in calling Alfred de Musset “the female page or attendant dwarf ” of Lord Byron (1280). The term “disagreeable” was a constant in James’s discourse on Swinburne. This is the usual but not the whole story. James envied Swinburne his clear conscience and self-indulgence. Burdened by Amer ica’s puritanical ethos of moral probity and utility, James sniped at Swinburne, who cared for style above all. In the frequently cited passage where James charged Swinburne with a lack of moral sensibility (“What we have called the absence of the moral sense of the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature”), it is seldom noted that James’s definition of the moral sphere was highly idiosyncratic: “By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying, nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his moral plummet does not sink at all, and [ 236 ]

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that when he pretends to drop it he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the picturesque” (1282). Hoisting Swinburne on his own petard (“it is the picturesque spoiled rather than achieved”), James chiefly disliked the lack of serious analysis in Swinburne’s writing, which he found “ghastly in its poverty of insight and its pretension to make mere lurid imagery do duty as thought” (1283). This critique (echoing Arnold and Browning’s) anticipated T. S. Eliot’s summary of Swinburne’s literary vices and the modernists’ hostility to decorative aestheticism across the board. Curiously, though Burne-Jones was castigated for “barrenly decorative” painting, James never cast such aspersions on Burne-Jones’s pictures. For James, the writer’s task was more difficult than the painter’s because the writer must marry intellectual substance and high polish. For many Victorians, Pater was the prototype of the aesthete whose polished ruminations on art were freighted with “a cryptic language for fancies all his own.”93 It is well known that Pater advised Wilde to take up the imaginative prose essay as the most fertile ground for the expression of a modern sensibility, initiating Wilde’s migration from poetry to prose. Pater was not, however, the originator of this form. Corresponding with Pater’s editor, John Morley, Swinburne observed, “I admire and enjoy Pater’s work so heartily that I am somewhat shy of saying how much, ever since on my telling him once at Oxford how highly Rossetti (D. G.) as well as myself estimated his first papers in the Fortnightly, he replied to the effect that he considered them as owing their inspiration entirely to the example of my own work in the same line.”94 That would be Swinburne’s “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence” (1868), where Swinburne generated interpretive detail of a disturbing and off- color variety, bearing little relation to the actual drawing. In an extraordinary improvisation on Michelangelo’s study of Cleopatra, Swinburne raved about a poisonous female whose innocent effects (all hallmarks of decadence, such as her eastern headdress “plaited in the likeness of closely-welded scales as of a chrysalid serpent”) were said to contribute little or nothing to the impression that she was a daughter of Herodias. Strikingly, the evil was said to emanate from within: “In some inexplicable way all her ornaments seem to partake of her fatal nature, to bear upon them her brand of beauty fresh from hell; and this through no vulgar machinery of symbolism, no serpentine or other wise bestial emblem: the bracelets and rings are innocent enough in shape and workmanship; but in touching her flesh they have become infected with deadly and malignant meaning.”95 Pater’s H E N RY J A M E S A N D B R I T I S H A E S T H E T I C I S M

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1869 description of La Gioconda borrowed Swinburne’s trope: “It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”96 As a poet interpreting a drawing, Swinburne substituted his own subjectivity effects and narrative power for the artist’s debased tricks (the “vulgar machinery of symbolism” and traditional iconography). Swinburne was not playing the part of preservationist or guide. This was no Stones of Venice. He was striving after a thrilling emotional effect as the reader, mesmerized by the unfolding and intensifying document of horror, experienced masochistic jouissance when confronted by the universal dominatrix. She was Lamia, Salome, Jezebel, Venus, or “the Persian Amestris, watching the only breasts on earth more beautiful than her own cut off from her rival’s living bosom; or Cleopatra, not dying but turning serpent under the serpent’s bite” (19). With her “dark Swinburnish eyes,”97 she was the very type of woman Rossetti painted as Lady Lilith (1868) and Astarte Syriaca (1877): “To our eye the lips, the throats, the fingers of Rossetti’s beauties have something in them which is not quite human, but is like the flesh of syrens, houris, or Lamiae, those magical beings who capture the passions of men but not their hearts.”98 Swinburne’s innovation was to turn a static portrait into narrative even where the artist had not indulged a penchant for literary painting. Pater became the master practitioner of this genre, but he was not its inventor. James recognized that Swinburne’s métier was the work of “pure imagination,” not judgment (1280). Swinburne’s critique of the old masterworks is an example of what James called “pictorial writing” at its best (1283). Given Swinburne’s thematic and personal association with Burne-Jones (“the same note is continually struck by both men,” Quilter tells us), it is significant that James did not hold the writer and painter to the same standard.99 In the 1870s, James effectively defended the chastity of the verbal imagination while indulging in homoerotic fantasy inspired by painted marvels of uncertain sex. Rather than permanently dividing or sublimating the outré allurements of the “sister arts,” James’s reconnaissance of the Grosvenor and Pre-Raphaelite celebrities proved an apprenticeship in style and feeling, shattering the conventional outlook of the man of letters and novelist of manners by glamorizing (sexual) eccentricity as a motive for literary invention.

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Afterword

F

ittingly, the death knell of Pre-Raphaelite modernity (if not modishness) was sounded by the libel trial Whistler v. Ruskin (1878). Ruskin’s notorious defamation of Whistler’s “Cockney impudence” was occasioned by paintings on exhibit at the Grosvenor. Whistler’s partiality for abstraction over Pre-Raphaelite storytelling and literary allusion aggravated his estrangement from his friends, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. Summoned to appear as a witness for the defendant Ruskin, Burne-Jones was summarily transformed into a relic of the Victorian period by his testimony on the importance of finish. For this reason, Burne-Jones is sometimes called “The Last Pre-Raphaelite.”1 Yet for quite a different constituency, the Grosvenor was the renaissance rather than the end of Pre-Raphaelitism. Wilde’s review of the Grosvenor exhibition was one of his earliest publications, significant also for its oblique references to the homoerotic themes and personal obloquy of Simeon Solomon—no apparitional sodomite, but the real thing. Attending the Grosvenor in a remarkable coat of his own design, Wilde achieved instantaneous notoriety.2 Shortly thereafter, Wilde befriended the Grosvenor’s other freshly minted celebrity, Burne-Jones. Wilde did not figure in Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones’s Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904). Invoking the code for unspeakable same-sex desire, Georgiana stood “dumb” before the “tragedy of [Solomon’s] broken career,” and posthumously blackballed Wilde from the Pre-Raphaelite club.3

What is gained by documenting Solomon’s personal and professional ties to the Pre-Raphaelites? The conspiracy of silence surrounding this colorful and disreputable character neutered Pre-Raphaelite friendship. PreRaphaelite circles experienced the frisson of same- sex attraction through their collegial work and ribald play. They gleefully scandalized the bourgeoisie in their heyday. Yet on learning of Solomon’s arrest for soliciting sex in a public toilet, they cut him dead. Their very utterances (“vilest proclivities,” “sickened to death with the beastly circumstances”) conveyed a sense of abjection symptomatic of the constraints under which they operated as rebels within a repressive society. By 1874, Rossetti and Swinburne were no longer friends. The contrarian character of Pre-Raphaelitism merely forestalled its compliance with the proscriptions and canons of Victorian sexual respectability. Even Solomon considered reining in his penchant for downy-breasted male models in 1871. Swinburne lambasted his critics in precisely the terms in which they attacked “emasculate verse”: “The pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation” (CWACS 15:42). Rossetti was circumspect about the limits of Britannia’s tolerance for poetic licentiousness and blasphemy. Writing to dissuade Swinburne from publishing Poems and Ballads before his relatively innocuous verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Gabriel noted that the play was “calculated to put people in better humour for the others, which, when they do come, will still make a few not even over par ticu lar hairs to stand on end, to say nothing of other erections equally obvious.” Despite his obscene innuendoes and frank complicity with Swinburne in harrying their mutual enemies, Rossetti was genuinely fearful of going too far: “I warn you that the public will not be able to digest them, and that the paternal purse will have to stand the additional expense of an emetic presented gratis with each copy to relieve the outraged British nature.”4 Rossetti’s calculations suggest that Pre-Raphaelite eroticism and sacrilege, rather than the spontaneous expression of a bohemian sensibility, were keyed to audience response. Rossetti felt emasculated by criticism and covertly schemed for recognition. Within the space of a generation, the etiquette and bearing of aesthetic celebrity had changed. Wilde required no camouflage in pursuit of fame; he embraced the commercial exploitation of the paradoxical union of charisma and stigma he personified. In the wake of Burne-Jones’s triumph at the Grosvenor, trailing clouds of incense and effusive laudations, apologists began sanitizing the PRB brand. Defending [ 240 ] A F T E RWO R D

Rossetti against the charge of ignoble prurience at the Liverpool Free Library in 1879, Hall Caine protested, “Dante Rossetti had never painted a ‘Laus Veneris,’ nor was his passion for women that of the nature of Swinburne’s, but a Keatsean crystallised passion.”5 Given the bawdy tenor of Gabriel’s private correspondence with Swinburne, this testimonial is both suspect and a useful reminder of Rossetti’s jealous guardianship of his repute through amanuenses. What had become of Rossetti’s cherished bohemian identity? Why did he distance himself from the “visionary vanities of half-a-dozen boys”?6 There were unintended consequences of the Pre-Raphaelites’ personality- and sensation-driven marketing strategy and the popu lar notions of Victorian celebrity they fostered. Rossetti and his friends lived long enough to regret their misspent reputational capital. As we have said, Pre-Raphaelite celebrities took advantage of the shift in attention from the creative work to the personality of the author. Pre-Raphaelite supporters, acolytes, and executors transformed their leaders’ adversarial qualities into a written encomium preserved for future generations. In 1904, Valentine Prinsep memorialized the Rossetti-led troupe that decorated the interior of the Oxford Union building, concatenating the essential features of bohemian celebrity in one sentence: “I loved the peculiarities and eccentricities which served to make up their most striking personalities, without which no one could realise their individuality.”7 This was the positive construction of charismatic artistic celebrity; its flip side was the notion that “most of the considerable artistic figures were in fact consumptive or perverted or epileptic or in some way enough debased,”8 which reached its apogee with Nordau’s Degeneration (1892). In 1887, art critic John Robertson characterized Gabriel Rossetti as “a case of individuality so fantastic, so uniform in caprice, as to depend for enduring fame certainly more on his strange personal equation than on the depth of insight or range of power shown by him in either of the arts he wrought in.”9 By the 1890s, improvements in photolithography had made the circulation of photographs of celebrated personalities and works of art commonplace. Reviewing six contemporary artists’ reminiscences or memorials in 1897, The Edinburgh Review deplored the trending “popularity, in secondrate magazines, of ‘illustrated interviews’ with artists, with photographs of their dining-room, drawing-room, and studio, the latter probably introducing the figure of the artist ‘at work on his celebrated picture.’ ” This trend was recent enough to inspire a rebuke from a topflight review about A F T E RWO R D

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the dumbing down of art journalism. Blaming the commercialization of aesthetic celebrity on the publisher (“the crime lies in publishing it”), the contributor snidely condescended to “the dear public[’s]” appetite for “somebody’s record of his doings ‘In Bohemia with Du Maurier,’ ” calling it “not very refined.”10 Victorian “art gossip” formerly consisted of brief reports on pictures, exhibit openings, and auctions. The democratization of audiences for art, and the commodification of the artist’s name and brand, culminated in the paradoxical incorporation of bohemianism into a massmarketed product, the “artist’s profile.” Disdainful of popu lar audiences, the high modernists restored urgency to their predecessors’ campaign against Victorian propriety and censorship (“people who allow their literature to be blanketed by a Comstock and his successors”). Ezra Pound, however, also summarized the grounds for derogating Swinburne’s legacy, partly to mask his own indebtedness to a literary progenitor: “It is the literary fashion to write exclusively of Swinburne’s defects.”11 Pound had a hand in publicizing Swinburne’s personal vices, peccadilloes described in Edmund Gosse’s unpublished account, stored at the British Museum.12 Among other tidbits of gossip, Pound gleefully trumpeted J. A. M. Whistler’s testimony before the Arts Club committee in defense of Swinburne’s continued membership: “You ought to be proud that there is in London a club where the greatest poet of your time can get drunk if he wants to, other wise he might lie in the gutter.”13 By the 1920s, Swinburne was more notorious for his outrageous antics than notable for his poetry outside scholarly circles. As a personality in the vanguard of contemporary mores and tastes, Rossetti achieved iconic status, which carried his renown across the theoretical Maginot Line dividing Victorian kitsch from high modernism, as Max Beerbohm’s memorial suggests: “But in London, in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, rich, drab, industrial complacency, Rossetti shone, for the men and women who knew him, with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog. And so he still shines for me.”14 In place of the bold originality associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brand, the aesthetic celebrity held his ground as a personality, not as a formal innovator. The revolutionary formal interventions of the Pre-Raphaelites were short-lived. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites’ ballyhooed charismatic personalities and outlier lifestyles influenced the perception of their work as daring and modern. For decades, their notoriety enabled them to function as lodestars for future generations: “Rituals of celebrity shadow forth values—or [ 242 ] A F T E RWO R D

sometimes conflicts of values—which both the object of admiration and his celebrants feel to be culturally central.”15 Pre-Raphaelite scandals and scrapes fomented a crisis, experienced by bohemians and reactionaries alike, in Victorian understandings of sex and gender norms. “An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable,” according to Freud.16 The bohemian vanguard promoted “sexual freedom” (12:46) and insinuated that “society pays for obedience to its far-reaching regulations by an increase in ner vous illness” and thwarted lives (12:54). Pre-Raphaelite affronts to the regimes of taste and official canons of propriety thrilled Victorians on the queer spectrum, Wilde among them, by assailing a common adversary. Courting censorship and other forms of reprobation through their outré representations of the femme fatale, the androgyne, and the adolescent boy (archetypes of French decadence), the Pre-Raphaelites’ imaginative violations of sexual taboos offered the restive public a vicarious outlet for pent-up desires. However, the public at large did not embrace the bohemian artist as a potential model of manners; aesthetic and sexual dissidence functioned to demarcate bound aries and to regulate norms of behav ior.17 It is useful to think of Pre-Raphaelitism as “a point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form,” in Slavoj Žizĕk’s terminology.18 Profiting from public interest in celebrity outliers and malcontents in an era of social probity and constraint, the print media played a key role both in the dissemination and in the regulation of desires propagated by works of art and fiction, inaugurating best sellers and inciting censorship. Publicizing the deviancy of celebrities afforded society yet another tool for promoting its conception of normalcy. The state regulatory apparatus was very much in evidence. Swinburne was threatened with prosecution in 1866 under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and hounded by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Media controversies over prurient art and literature incited fears that London was devolving into a Sodom and Gomorrah on the Thames. Sensationalism provided an excuse for the regulation of sexuality, which culminated in the Labouchère rider to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized the full range of homosexual relations (between men) and redefined statutory rape of female minors to stamp out “white slavery.” Oscar Wilde was imprisoned under the statute. Rather than acknowledge Pre-Raphaelitism’s avant- garde intentions, Peter Bürger claims that the aesthetic movement represented the historical A F T E RWO R D

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terminus at which point art became the content of art, autonomous both as an institution and in terms of content.19 Bürger’s intuition that the aesthetes welcomed or initiated the divorce of art from social praxis is overly reliant on Wilde’s boast: “All art is quite useless.”20 Bürger makes nothing of their collective activity, fraternity, and attack on art institutions through manifestoes, exhibitions, and alternative methods of production and channels of distribution. Still, I accept Bürger’s assertion that aestheticism provided Victorians with a pseudo-sanctuary from the commercial side of life through its “mimetic commerce with nature” (25), allusions to same- sex religious communities, inwardness, and fanciful or mysterious subject matter, whereby values of fellowship, humanism, handicraft, and goodness were “extruded from life as it were, and preserved in art” (50). Certainly, there was a risk, even a probability, that the mode of reception and consumption of aesthetic artifacts undermined their critical content by providing society with an outlet for its frustrations, an aesthetic bromide for its ills, or a prop for its status seeking. In 1945, Stephen Spender averred that while the Pre-Raphaelites canalized “the resistance of poetic ideas to the nineteenth century and to the Industrial Revolution,” they fell short of an effective reckoning with “the standards of the age in which they lived.”21 The legacy of aestheticism is mixed.

Otto Rank is another theorist for whom the Pre-Raphaelites arrived “too early/too late.” As the old collective function of art— serving a religious, national, or even class ideology—fell into disuse, Rank claims that it was replaced by a psychological motive: the development of personality. Rank argues that this expressive, individualizing aspect of aesthetic practice is of recent vintage. Certainly, it attained fresh glamour as the routinization of modern life and the commodification of culture gained traction in the early twentieth century. Despite Rank’s unfavorable determination that the practitioners of “art for art’s sake” had not yet discovered the individualizing function described in Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, there is a nineteenth-century provenance for the idea that “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”22 Rossetti’s retirement in 1851 and deepening reclusion in 1870 were symptomatic of the modern artist’s dilemma, as described by Rank: “The harmonious unitary picture of work and creator [ 244 ] A F T E RWO R D

which the hero-worshipping public demands,” obtrudes the needs of the audience on the creator’s legacy, threatening the artist with depersonalization.23 Put another way, the egocentric artist seeks applause but fears to lose his individuality and autonomy by making art to satisfy the spiritual needs of others rather than his own. Either he renounces his natural bent and surrenders to the “dominant Philistinism,” or he hunkers down in his individuality, “with crotchets confirmed and eccentricities abnormally developed, for such patrons only as can sympathise with his art.”24 This is the tipping point, the point at which the artist’s social empathy cannot endure the threat to his artistic ego. Although much of what was flame-like in the Pre-Raphaelite movement passed with the youth of its leaders, the waning of the movement into a fash ionable sideshow reflected the manifold disabilities afflicting the contemporary painter of “original power,” who struggled against “popular neglect and critical antagonism”25 only to find that being lionized was worse. Art historian Donald Kuspit describes the inevitable rapprochement between the vanguard talent and his community: “Ironically, the avantgarde revolutionary is idealized by being plagiarized—an envious act of homage that hollows out what it copies. Plagiarism is the ultimate means by which the rebel is brought into the fold.” 26 As Victorian periodical journalism confirms, Pre-Raphaelitism succumbed to mimicry then to canonization: “But the men of genius who formed the nucleus of the pre-Raphaelite school have not been burlesqued by themselves, but by a tribe of followers who devastate our exhibitions year after year, who disguise their mediocrity in extravagance.”27 For every avant-garde thinkermaker (a Max Ernst or André Breton), there is a Salvador Dalí waiting to reap the reward. I set out to rewrite the history of the avant-garde, starting with Pre-Raphaelitism. I uncovered a familiar pattern of bright promise followed by failure. The process is cyclical, as well as diachronic. The arc of Pre-Raphaelitism from radical innovation to fashionable sideshow looks forward to Kuspit’s indictment of postwar avant-gardes, which mock and deny the possibility of art’s curative powers for the individual and society. Stripping avant-garde art of its social mission, the neo-avantgarde cynically converts modern art into cliché or “ironic value for its fashionable look,” reveling in fame and fortune (high auction prices).28 The contemporary overvaluation of the artist as a stylish symbol has its roots in the nineteenth century. Though the Pre-Raphaelites are not mentioned in Rank’s account, Rank’s description of the modern art world culminates A F T E RWO R D

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in the “art-manias of modern society, with their over-valuing of the artist” and “an increasing individualization [of ] art-forms” designed for cliques (427). A more faithful depiction of the Victorian avant-garde would be difficult to contrive. I began my reception history of Pre-Raphaelitism with the idea that the formation of art collectives and the cliques that vaunted their renown was an essential component of modernist cultural production. Homoerotic admiration was the glue that held these disparate bodies together, despite the ebb and flow of friendships and of professional and personal rivalries. My protagonists lost faith in the power of art to heal and uplift. Rossetti fell into cynicism then despair, but he never stopped using his double-work of art as a medium for passionate self-expression. The Victorian culture of publicity fed on the celebrity’s iconoclasm and eccentricity, not on his pouting cynicism. As an antibourgeois art and liter ature evangelizing for the liberation of libido from the trammels of Victorian sexual respectability, Pre-Raphaelitism heralded a revolution in sexual mores and gender expression. As Pound pithily explained: “Artists are the antennae of the race.”29 The culture work performed by Rossetti’s cohort was not filling a vacuum left by fallen idols, but attacking the suffocating propriety, family values, and work ethic that ensured success at the expense of personal freedom.

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Notes

Introduction 1. The September 2012–January 2013 blockbuster exhibition at the Tate Britain appears to belie my claim; however, the Pre-Raphaelites have been excluded from the modernist continuum. The exhibition cata log makes a case for the Pre-Raphaelites’ vanguard status but does not focus on questions of nonconforming sexuality. See Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, eds., Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, 2012): “The emphasis on complex and unresolved narrative, on social commentary, on aspects of gender, sexuality and desire, and on race, empire and travel; the dialogue with photography and mechanical image-making; the questioning of conventional values, accepted concepts and canons of beauty; the relationship of current art-making to the art of the past; and issues of appropriation and synthesis: all these are preoccupations in the art and culture of our own turbulent times that were vividly explored by the Pre-Raphaelites, the Victorian avant-garde, at the moment of the inception of modern society” (17). 2. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 49. 3. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 176. 4. Richard Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 128.

5. Claire Wildsmith, “ ‘Candid and Earnest’: The Rise of the Art Critic in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 16. 6. Tim Barringer and Michaela Giebelhausen, eds., Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2. 7. See Richard Kaye, “The New Other Victorians: The Success (and Failure) of Queer Theory in Nineteenth- Century British Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 4 (December 2014): 762. In contrast, Kaye points to groundbreaking work on European art, such as Abigail Solomon- Godeau’s Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997). I would also recommend Bridget Alsdorf ’s Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). 8. See Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Alan Sinfeld, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 9. Notable exceptions include Thais Morgan’s articles on Solomon and PreRaphaelite fraternalism, cited individually in later chapters; Richard Dellamora’s Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), which offers a model for talking about men who imaginatively enjoyed same-sex love but strug gled with interdictions against homosexuality. 10. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Kathy Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Repre sentation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 72, 2. See Kaye, “New Other Victorians,” 763–65, where Kaye sharply rebukes Prettejohn for disparaging gender studies and queer approaches to art as reductive and politically correct in favor of her rigid “Kantian aesthetic” (763). 12. See also Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011). [ 248 ]

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13. William Allingham’s Diary (Sussex: Centaur, 1967), 161. 14. Ernest Chesneau, The English School of Painting, trans. Lucy Etherington (London: Cassell, 1891), 229. 15. “Royal Academy,” The Times (London), December 30, 1882, 6. 16. P. M. Pasinetti, Life for Art’s Sake: Studies in the Literary Myth of the Romantic Artist (New York: Garland, 1985), 25. 17. Edmund Gosse, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” The Century 24 (September 1882): 718. 18. [ John Morley], “Mr. Swinburne’s New Poems,” Saturday Review, August 4, 1866, 147. 19. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 38. 20. Richard Sennett, The Fall of the Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1976), 203. 21. T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Rossetti (London: Cassell, 1928), 6. 22. Sennett, Fall of the Public Man, 201–3. 23. Sidney Colvin, “The Poetical Writings of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Westminster Review 95 (1871): 41. 24. Sharon Marcus, “Celebrity 2.0: The Case of Marina Abramovic,” Public Culture 27, no. 1 (2015): 29. 25. Sharon Marcus, “Salomé!! Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and the Drama of Celebrity,” PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011): 1001. 26. Ibid., 1001, 1018. 27. Oscar Wilde, A Critic in Pall Mall (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1922), 234. 28. Marcus, “Salomé!! Sarah Bernhardt,” 1016. 29. “On Paradox and Common-place,” in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Table Talk and Conversations with James Northcote, esq., R. A., ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 6:151. 30. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 431. 31. See Laurel Brake, “Censorship, Puffing, ‘Piracy,’ Reprinting: British Decadence and Transatlantic Re-Mediations of Walter Pater, 1893–1910,” Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 3 (September 2012): 420–21. 32. Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 262. 33. Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 125n2. 34. Deborah Cherry, “In a Word: Pre-Raphaelite, Pre-Raphaelites, PreRaphaelitism,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, ed. Tim Barringer and Michaela Gielbelhausen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 29. 35. Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–2, 3. I N T RO D U C T I O N

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36. See Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15, where she observes that canonization has obscured the degree to which iconic writers were responding to contemporary debates. 37. Teukolsky, Literate Eye, 103. 38. Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 14. 39. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1987), 123. 40. Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 35. 41. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 66.

1. The Pre-Raphaelite Vanguard 1. Donald Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 40. 2. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962). See also Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 3. John Ashcroft Noble, “A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine,” Fraser’s Magazine 629 (May 1882): 568. Victorians called the PRB “iconoclasts” and “harbingers of a new system.” [F. W. Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family—Letters,” The Quarterly Review 184 ( July 1896): 190. 4. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception, 11. 5. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 27–28. 6. George Landow, “There Began to Be a Great Talking About the Fine Arts,” in The Mind and Art of Victorian England, ed. Josef Altholz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 126. 7. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London, 1905), 2:162. 8. Francis Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (Frogmore, St.  Albans: Paladin, 1972), 156. 9. Carol Christ, The Finer Optic: The Aesthetic of Particularity in Victorian Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), 59. 10. See Lynda Nead, “The Magdalen in Modern Times,” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 1 (1984): 26–37. [ 250 ]

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11. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 12:335 (hereafter cited in text as Works JR). 12. Morse Peckham, Victorian Revolutionaries: Speculations on Some Heroes of the Culture Crisis (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 155. 13. Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avant- Garde,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 8. 14. William Fredeman, ed., The P.R.B. Journal (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 241. 15. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 34. See also Z’s attack on the “nobility of talent” in “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (October 1817): 41. 16. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty,” in Essays Modern (London: Macmillan, 1885), 312. 17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur, trans. Lawrence Wishart (New York: International Publishers, 1981), 65–66. 18. Herbert Sussman, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Their Circle: The Formation of the Victorian Avant- Garde,” The Victorian Newsletter 57 (Spring 1980): 7. 19. Williams, “Politics of the Avant- Garde,” 2–3. 20. Clement Greenberg, “Avant- Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contexualist, and PostModern Thought, ed. Sally Everett ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991), 28. 21. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” The Times (London), May 3, 1851, 8. Tom Taylor began writing art criticism for The Times in 1857, only stopping at his death in 1880. 22. Christ, Finer Optic, 61. 23. Carlyle, Past and Present, 201. 24. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 187. 25. Walter Pater, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” in English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphrey Ward (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 4:633–41. 26. “The Pre-Raphaelites,” The London Journal, July 2, 1855, 335. 27. Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 125–26, Carlyle’s emphasis. 28. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—an Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 5. 29. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy (Private View),” The Times (London), May 1, 1852, 8. 30. “Fine Arts,” The Examiner, May 13, 1854, 293, my emphasis. 31. “Millais and the Pre- Raphaelites,” The National Magazine 1, no. 4 (February 1857): 212. 1 . T H E P R E - R A P H A E L I T E VA N G UA R D

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32. Ruskin thought the name “Pre-Raphaelite” an unfortunate choice for a “nom de guerre” (Works JR, 12:321). 33. Lyndel Saunders King, The Industrialization of Taste: Victorian England and the Art Union of London (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1985), 15. 34. “The Pre-Raphaelites,” 335. 35. John Orchard, “Dialogue in Art,” in The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites (1850; reprint, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1992), 147–67. 36. John Tupper, “The Subject in Art,” The Germ, 17–18. 37. F. G. Stephens, “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” The Germ, 63. 38. Gabriel Rossetti, “Hand and Soul,” The Germ, 23–33. 39. Andrea Rose, “Preface,” The Germ, v–xx. 40. Williams, “Politics of the Avant- Garde,” 4. 41. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review 1, no. 144 (March–April 1984): 6. 42. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” The Edinburgh Review 185 (April 1897): 497–98. 43. [Tom Taylor], “General Water- Colour Exhibition. Dudley Gallery,” The Times (London), February 15, 1869, 4. 44. See Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 45. Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 29. 46. Charles Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Household Words 1, no. 12 ( June 15, 1850): 265. 47. Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 43. 48. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 14. 49. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 16. 50. Marilyn Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in NineteenthCentury France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1985), 3, 7. 51. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 98. 52. “The Pre-Raphaelites,” The London Journal, 335. 53. Millais was nineteen; Rossetti, twenty; and Hunt, twenty- one in January 1848. 54. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 176. 55. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 75, 114.

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56. Matthew Plampin, “Exhibiting the Avant-Garde: The Development of the Pre-Raphaelite Brand,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, ed. Tim Barringer and Michaela Giebelhausen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 193, 195. 57. Noble, “A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine,” 568, 569. 58. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 59. Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, 95. 60. “The Suffolk-Street and Portland Galleries,” Saturday Review, May 4, 1861, 447. 61. “Art and Democracy,” Cornhill Magazine 40 (August 1879): 225. 62. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” The Edinburgh Review, 487, 490. 63. See Malcolm Warner, “Millais in Reproduction,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, 215–36. 64. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 248, 176. 65. “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature,” The British Quarterly Review 16 (August 1852): 197–98. 66. Laura Marcus, “Brothers in Their Anecdotage: Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” in Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 12. 67. Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 62. 68. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 246–47. 69. William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott [1892], ed. W. Minto (New York: AMS, 1970), 1:289–290. 70. Max Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), plate 14. 71. Ibid., 31. 72. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 192. 73. Sidney Colvin, “Rossetti as a Painter,” Magazine of Art 7 (1883): 178. 74. Frederick Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” Temple Bar 53 ( July 1878): 335. 75. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3. 76. Plampin, “Exhibiting the Avant- Garde,” 205. 77. Myers, Essays Modern, 315–16. 78. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 190. 79. William Davies, “The State of En glish Painting,” The Quarterly Review 134 (April 1873): 303, 304. 80. William Sharp, “Edward Burne-Jones,” Fortnightly Review 64 (August 1898): 301.

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81. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Fine-Art Gossip,” The Athenaeum, October  28, 1865, 581. 82. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and Robert Wahl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–1967), 2:603. 83. Ibid., 3:969n1. 84. Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle, plate 16. 85. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 76. 86. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 5. 87. Thais Morgan, “Perverse Male Bodies: Simeon Solomon and Algernon Charles Swinburne,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities in Visual Cultures, ed. Peter Horne (London: Routledge, 1996), 64. 88. Julia Ellsworth Ford, Simeon Solomon: An Appreciation (New York: Frederic Fairchild Sherman, 1908), 19. 89. Steven Kolsteren, “Simeon Solomon and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 2, no. 2 (May 1982): 42. 90. Staley, New Painting of the 1860s, 50. 91. Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1925), 42. See Stefano Evangelista, “A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus,” Victorian Review 34 (Fall 2008): 201–18. 92. See Simeon Solomon Research Archive, http://www.simeonsolomon.com. 93. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Lang (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–1962), 2:79, 261, 264. 94. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 3:1162. 95. Justin McCarthy, “The Pre-Raphaelites in England,” The Galaxy 21, no. 6 ( June 1876): 731. 96. Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989), 3. 97. Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 24. 98. See William Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris (New York: Harrington Park, 2004), 77–78, for discussion of Solomon’s arrest for “obscene touching” in Paris, where the police continued to harass homosexuals despite legal immunity. 99. Robert Ross, “Three Portraits: Simeon Solomon,” The Bibelot 17 (April 1911): 151, 147. 100. Julia Ellsworth Ford, Simeon Solomon, 12. 101. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger Peattie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 634. 102. Ibid. 103. E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York: Norton, 1987), 159.

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104. Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, 635. 105. The Young George Du Maurier, ed. Daphne Du Maurier (London: Peter Davies, 1951), 235–236. 106. See Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin, and John Everett Millais (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), chaps. 9–10. 107. Susan Casteras, “Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle at the Palace of the Aesthetes,” in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, ed. Susan Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 83. 108. [Tom Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition,” The Times (London), February 14, 1870, 4. 109. [F.  G. Stephens], “The General Exhibition of Water- Colour Drawings. Dudley Gallery,” The Athenaeum, February  3, 1872, 150. Stephens penned unsigned weekly articles for The Athenaeum between 1860 and 1900. See Macleod, “F.  G. Stephens: Pre-Raphaelite Critic and Art Historian,” The Burlington Magazine 128 ( June 1986): 405. 110. “Dudley Gallery: Cabinet Pictures in Oil; The First Winter Exhibition,” The Art-Journal, December 1867, 269. 111. “The Fourth General Exhibition of Water- Colour Drawings: Dudley Gallery,” The Art-Journal, March 1868, 45. 112. [Stephens], “General Exhibition of Water- Colour Drawings,” The Athenaeum, February 6, 1869, 215. 113. Sidney Colvin, “English Painters of the Present Day: IV; Simeon Solomon,” Portfolio 1 ( January 1870): 34. 114. [Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 115. “Dudley Gallery: Sixth General Exhibition of Drawings,” The Art-Journal, March 1870, 87. 116. [Taylor], “General Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 117. Alfred Werner, “Simeon Solomon: A Rediscovery,” Art and Artists 9, no. 10 ( January 1975): 7. 118. Colin Cruise, “Poetic, Eccentric, Pre-Raphaelite: The Critical Reception of Simeon Solomon’s Work at the Dudley Gallery,” in Writing the PreRaphaelites, 184. 119. Colvin, “English Painters of the Present Day: IV,” 33. 120. “Dudley Gallery: Fifth General Exhibition of Drawings,” The Art-Journal, March 1869, 81. 121. Ross, “Three Portraits,” 144. 122. [Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 123. [Tom Taylor], “Cabinet Pictures, Sketches, and Drawings,” The Times (London), November 24, 1859, 9.

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124. Colin Cruise, “ ‘Lovely Dev ils’: Simeon Solomon and Pre- Raphaelite Masculinity,” in Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Ellen Harding (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 198. 125. Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio,” in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 3:264. 126. [Taylor], “General Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 127. See Alicia Craig Faxon, “Rossetti’s Reputation: A Study of the Dissemination of His Art Through Photographs,” in Art History Through the Camera’s Lens, ed. Helene Roberts (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers, 1995), 317–46. 128. Robert Buchanan, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (London, 1872), 34 (hereafter cited as FS in text). 129. See Cecil Lang, The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), xxi, where Lang identifies a brief period where Swinburne sharpened a detail in deference to PRB precepts but quickly gave that up. 130. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 126. 131. See Catherine Maxwell’s Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Lit era ture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), chap. 1. 132. Julie Codell, “Pre-Raphaelites from Rebels to Representatives: Masculinity, Modernity, and National Identity in British and Continental Art Histories, c. 1880–1908,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, 54. 133. Robyn Cooper, “The Relationship Between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Painters Before Raphael in English Criticism of the Late 1840s and 1850s,” Victorian Studies 24, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 434. 134. Harry Quilter, “The New Renais sance; Or, the Gospel of Intensity,” Macmillan’s Magazine 42 (May– October  1880): 392. (Hereafter referred to as “Gospel of Intensity,” as it was called in its day.) Quilter was the art reviewer for Spectator between 1876 and 1887. 135. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 392. 136. J. B. Bullen, Pre-Raphaelite Body, 160. 137. [Taylor], “General Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 138. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, 25. 139. Sidney Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” Fortnightly Review 2 (October 1867): 474. 140. Ralph Wornum, “Modern Moves in Art,” The Art-Journal, September  1, 1850, 271.

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141. John Robertson, “Methodism in Style,” Our Corner, November 1887, 278. 142. “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature,” 203. 143. Sidney Colvin, “English Painters of the Present Day: III; Edward Burne Jones,” Portfolio 1 ( January. 1870): 19. 144. T. S. Eliot, “The Place of Pater,” in The Eighteen-Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, ed. Walter De La Mare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 101. 145. Colvin, “English Painters of the Present Day: III,” 18. 146. McCarthy, “The Pre-Raphaelites in England,” 731. 147. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 399. 148. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 81. 149. Swinburne Letters, 5:266. 150. Harold Bloom, Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), chap. 5. 151. Kaye, “The New Other Victorians,” 768. Books that consider the role of same- sex desire in British art: Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Painted Men in Britain, 1868–1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 2012); Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 152. Dowling’s Hellenism and Homosexuality, an influential, historically grounded, and circumspect study of homoerotic currents at Oxford, largely excludes Swinburne and Rossetti. 153. Bullen, Pre-Raphaelite Body, 185. 154. “Mr. Swinburne’s Defence,” The London Review, November 3, 1866, 483. 155. Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 16, 17. 156. Compare Fig. 1.6 with Fig. 1.4, Solomon’s One Dreaming by the Sea. 157. Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (Madison, Conn.: International University Press, 1977), 285–86. 158. Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 4 (March 1979): 434–53. 159. Davies, “State of English Painting,” 300, Davies’s emphasis. 160. “Dudley Gallery: Sixth General Exhibition,” 87. 161. Codell, “Pre-Raphaelites from Rebels to Representatives,” 54. Codell limns the overlapping and contradictory qualities associated with both PreRaphaelitism and aestheticism. She does not deal with same-sex desire, though she does discuss effeminacy and degeneracy.

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2. Puff, Slash, Burn 1. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 93, 89. 2. William St  Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 5. 3. See Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing, and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006), 27–29. 4. St Clair, Reading Nation, 83. 5. “London Newspapers,” London 5 (1843): 337. 6. Laurel Brake and Julie Codell, eds., Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005), 2. 7. A.  O. Scott, “Everybody’s a Critic,” Sunday Review, New York Times, January 31, 2016, 6. 8. Peter Wells, “Slips and Stumbles at an Elite Perch,” Food Section, New York Times, January 13, 2016, D5. 9. T. W. Heyck, “From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Nineteenth- Century England,” Journal of British Studies 20, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 159. 10. Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994), xii. 11. Matthew Arnold, Essays Literary and Critical (London: Dent, 1919), 4, 10. 12. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 185. 13. See MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 529–32, on the revival of interest in Pre-Raphaelite style in 1960s. Rock stars Jimmy Page and Sting and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber are major collectors. 14. See “Preface,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1826, i–xxx. 15. St Clair, Reading Nation, 186–87. 16. Susan Wolfson, Borderlines, 262. Similarities include the use of an alias, abuse of “singers of the falsetto school,” and objections to archaisms, effeminacy, and immorality. Buchanan, however, wrote for elite and mass audiences; Z did not address the masses. 17. Hazlitt, “On Paradox and Common-place,” in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Table Talk and Conversations with James Northcote, esq., R. A., ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 6:150. Hereafter referred to as Table-Talk. 18. Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 440. 19. Hazlitt, “On Patronage and Puffing,” Table-Talk, 6:291. 20. A.  Z., “Notice of Hazlitt’s Lecture on English Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1818, 72. [ 258 ]

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21. Hazlitt, Table-Talk, 6:292. 22. St Clair, Reading Nation, 188. 23. The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Aldous Huxley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), 1:251. 24. See Andrew Lang, The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (London: John Nimmo, 1897), 152. 25. Z [ John Gibson Lockhart], “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 (October 1817): 39, 38. 26. Z, “Letter from Z. To Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (May 1818): 196, 197. 27. Wolfson, Borderlines, 245. 28. Hazlitt, Table-Talk, 6:254–55. 29. Wolfson, Borderlines, 250. See also James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 30. Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 603–4. 31. “Endymion, A Poetic Romance, By John Keats,” The London Magazine 1, no. 4 (April 1820): 380. Hazlitt and Charles Lamb wrote for The London Magazine. The effusive style is certainly not Hazlitt’s. 32. Wolfson, Borderlines, 34. 33. St Clair, Reading Nation, 323. 34. Ibid., 333. 35. [William Hazlitt], “Pope, Lord Byron, and Mr. Bowles,” The London Magazine 3 ( June 1821): 594–95. 36. Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 185. 37. Pasinetti, Life for Art’s Sake, 6. 38. Sennett, Fall of the Public Man, 202. 39. John Bradley and Ian Ousby, eds., The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 145. 40. [Edwin Hood Paxton], “Mr.  Swinburne, His Crimes, and His Critics,” Eclectic Review 11 (December 1866): 497. 41. Thomas Maitland [Robert Buchanan], “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871): 339 (hereafter cited as “FS” in the text). 42. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 308–9. 43. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 180, 200. 44. Ibid., 180. 45. Pasinetti, Life for Art’s Sake, 25, 31. 46. Thomas Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. 2 . P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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47. Joanna Levin, Bohemia in Amer i ca, 1858–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 55. Henry Clapp saw that “inciting bourgeois opposition” was a good marketing strategy for Leaves of Grass. Whitman later acknowledged: “Henry was right: better to have people stirred against you if they can’t be stirred for you—better that than not to stir them at all.” 48. “Mr. Buchanan’s Pamphlet,” The Examiner (May 1872): 508. 49. Sennett, Fall of the Public Man, 199. 50. [Henry Morley], “British Arcadians,” The Examiner, September 22, 1866, 597. 51. “Diseased Literature and Art,” The Art-Journal 38 (May 1876): 149–50. 52. “Mr. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads,” The London Review, August 1866, 130. 53. H. A. Page [Alexander Hay Japp], “The Morality of Literary Art,” Contemporary Review 5 ( June 1867): 175n1. 54. [Paxton], “Mr.  Swinburne,” 496. See “The Last Pagan,” Reader 7 ( July  28, 1866): 675. 55. “Mr. Swinburne and the Spectator,” Reader 7 (November 10, 1866): 925. 56. Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle, 24. 57. “Poetical Justice,” Reader 7 (October 20, 1866): 876. 58. Clyde Hyder, ed., Swinburne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), 58. 59. See “Mr.  Rossetti’s Criticism,” The London Review, December  1, 1866, 610–11. 60. “Mr. Swinburne Among the Fleas,” The Examiner, July 6, 1872, 673–74. 61. “Poetical Justice,” 876–77. 62. “The Defence of Mr.  Swinburne,” Saturday Review, November  17, 1866, 601. See “Mr. Swinburne’s Defence,” Sunday Times (London), November 11, 1866, 7. Using an alias, Lord Houghton cited “the methods that strove to crush Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt and Shelley and Keats.” See [Lord Houghton], “Mr. Swinburne’s Poems,” The Examiner, October 6, 1866, 627. 63. “Mr. Swinburne’s Defence,” The London Review, November 3, 1866, 483, 482; “Notes on Poems and Reviews. By Algernon Charles Swinburne,” The Examiner, October 27, 1866, 677. 64. [ John Morley], “Mr. Swinburne’s New Poems,” Saturday Review, August 4, 1866, 145. 65. See Philip Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 118–24. 66. See Laurel Brake, “ ‘A Juggler’s Trick’? Swinburne’s Journalism, 1857– 1875,” in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 73–78. 67. [ John Morley], “Mr. Swinburne’s New Poems,” 145. 68. “Critical Morality,” The London Review, August 18, 1866, 177. [ 260 ]

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69. Ibid., 178. 70. Swinburne’s Letters, 2:59. 71. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Laus Veneris, and Other Poems and Ballads (New York: Carleton, 1868), 181. 72. John Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays,” Fortnightly Review 13 (April 1873): 471. 73. R.  M. Seiler, ed., Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1980), 63. 74. Morley, “Mr. Pater’s Essays,” 472. 75. [Alfred Austin], “The Poetry of the Period,” Temple Bar 26 ( July 1869): 459, 458. 76. “Swinburne in Amer ica,” Reader 7 (December 29, 1866): 1038. 77. The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas Wise, the Bonchurch Edition (London, 1925–1927), 16:373 (hereafter cited as CWACS). 78. “Abuses of Poetry,” Western Reader, February 3, 1824, 12. 79. [Robert Buchanan], “Poems and Ballads. By Algernon Charles Swinburne,” The Athenaeum, August 4, 1866, 137. 80. Swinburne Letters, 1:146, 148. 81. “Our Library Table,” Fun 3 (August 18, 1866): 236. 82. “London Poems. By Robert Buchanan,” The London Quarterly Review, April 1867, 267. 83. “London Poems,” The London Review, September 1, 1866, 245. 84. “London Poems. By Robert Buchanan,” The Athenaeum, July 1866, 72. 85. Robert Buchanan, “Immorality in Authorship,” Fortnightly Review 32 (September 1866): 291-292. 86. “Mr. Swinburne and the Spectator,” 925. 87. “London Poems. By Robert Buchanan,” Reader, November 10, 1866, 924. 88. “Swinburne in Amer ica,” 1038. 89. Buchanan, “Immorality in Authorship,” 298. 90. Page [ Japp], “Morality of Literary Art,” 189, 188. 91. “Mr. Swinburne Among the Fleas,” 673. 92. “Poets and Reviewers,” Fun, November 17, 1866, 99. 93. Oscar Maurer, Jr., “Froude and Fraser’s Magazine, 1860–1874,” Studies in English 28 (1949): 220, 222. See [ John Skelton], “Mr. Swinburne and His Critics,” Fraser’s Magazine 74 (November 1866): 635–48. 94. [Henry Buxton Forman], “The ‘Fleshly School’ Scandal. By the Author of ‘Our Living Poets,’ ” Tinsley’s Magazine 10 (February 1872): 90. 95. “O Tempora O Mores!,” Fun, December 8, 1866, 137. 96. “Tennyson’s Charm” was published in St.  Paul’s Magazine 10 ( January– June 1872): 282–303. Buchanan inserted a footnote calling attention to his recent pamphlet (297). 2 . P U F F, S L A S H , B U R N

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97. Donald Kuspit, “Avant- Garde and Audience,” in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contexualist, and Post-Modern Thought, ed. Sally Everett ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991), 173. 98. [Austin], “The Poetry of the Period,” 464. Austin avowed authorship of his book, The Poetry of the Period (London: Richard Bentley, 1870). The book was withdrawn in 1873 because it gave offense to Tennyson and others. 99. Clyde Hyder, ed., Swinburne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), 84. 100. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, 25. 101. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1976), 49–50. 102. [Austin], “The Poetry of the Period,” 460–61. 103. Edmund Gosse, “Master-Spirits. By Robert Buchanan,” The Academy, February 14, 1874, 166. Gosse was devoted to Swinburne, whom he met in 1870; Gosse wrote Swinburne’s biography. 104. Page [ Japp], “Morality of Literary Art,” 182–83. 105. Wilde, Critic in Pall Mall, 237, 284. 106. “Oscar Wilde,” The Idler, July 1895, 403. 107. The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 293.

3. Fortune’s Weal 1. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 50. 2. Although Simeon Solomon was the subject of an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum in 2005-2006, which traveled to London and Munich, no American host could be found. In 2006, the Yale Center for British Art held a conference on Solomon without his artworks. See Kaye, “New Other Victorians,” 762. 3. Williams, Long Revolution, 66. 4. See Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, 1–2. 5. Sharp, “Burne-Jones,” 295, my emphasis. 6. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 52. 7. See Tim Hilton, John Ruskin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985–2000), 1:102. 8. Théophile Gautier, “Messrs. Millais and Hunt,” trans. Marie-Hélène Girard, Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 3 (2008): 555. 9. “The Pre-Raphaelites (by a Post-Raphaelite),” Fun, March 22, 1862, 8. 10. Elizabeth Helsinger, “Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy: Ruskin and Rossetti,” in Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 90. [ 262 ]

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11. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:185. 12. Helsinger, “Pre-Raphaelite Intimacy,” 96, my emphasis. 13. Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian ArtistDreamer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 79. 14. See Works JR 12:339. 15. William Sharp, Great English Painters (London: Walter Scott, 1886), xxx. 16. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 168. 17. Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet, 114. 18. Swinburne Letters, 1:183. 19. Ibid., 1:182. 20. Judith Stoddart, “The Morality of Poems and Ballads: Swinburne and Ruskin,” in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar, 1993), 100. 21. Swinburne Letters, 1:182. 22. [Lord Houghton], “Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon,” The Edinburgh Review 122, no. 249 (July 1865): 214, 202. Richard Monckton Milnes was made a peer in 1863. 23. “Notes on the Academy,” Tomahawk: A Saturday Journal of Satire, June 27, 1868, 257. 24. The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 1931), 141. 25. William J. Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (London: Grant Richards, 1901). 26. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 57. 27. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite. 28. Sharp, “Burne-Jones,” 295. 29. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 63. 30. Ruskin to Norton, 19 January 1862, in Bradley and Ousby, Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 69. 31. Harry Quilter, “The Apologia of Art,” Cornhill Magazine 40 (November 1879): 534. 32. Wildman, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 84. 33. Virginia Surtees, ed., The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 144n80. 34. In “Old Lamps for New Ones,” Dickens called Pre-Raphaelitism “odious, repulsive, and revolting” (265). 35. Ibid. 36. Alastair Grieve, “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Anglican High Church,” The Burlington Magazine 111 (May 1969): 294–95. 37. Wornum, “Modern Moves in Art,” 270. 38. Gosse, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 722. See Andrea Rose’s preface to The Germ, xiii–xiv, where she discusses Gabriel’s early identification with the medieval artist’s worldview, and later disavowal of Catholic terms and emblems. 3 . F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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39. Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1910), 192. 40. See “Recent Developments of Puseyism,” The Edinburgh Review 162 (October 1844): 309–75. 41. Quilter, “Apologia of Art,” 535. 42. Sharp, Great English Painters, xv. 43. [Tom Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water-Colour Exhibition,” The Times (London), February 14, 1870, 4. 44. Noble, “A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine,” 575. 45. Laurence Des Cars, The Pre-Raphaelites: Romance and Realism (New York: Harry Abrams, 2000), 17–19. 46. David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo- Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (Winter 1982): 188, 189. See also Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 254. 47. Gosse, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 722. 48. “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature,” The British Quarterly Review 16 (August 1852): 215. 49. Thais Morgan, “Victorian Effeminacies,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 110. 50. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 53. 51. Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, 86. 52. Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance went through seven editions before 1900. Lona Mosk Packer, “William Michael Rossetti and the Quilter Controversy: ‘The Gospel of Intensity,’ ” Victorian Studies 7 (December 1963): 173. 53. See Billie Andrew Inman, “Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William Hardinage,” in Pater in the 1990s, ed. Laurel Brake and Ian Small (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT, 1991), 13; Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), chap. 6; Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 169–228. 54. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 400. 55. “Mr. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads,” The London Review, August 4, 1866, 130; Page [ Japp], “ ‘Morality of Literary Art,” 176. 56. [Z], “Modern Cyrenaicism,” The Examiner, April 12, 1873, 381. 57. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 17. 58. [Z], “Modern Cyrenaicism,” 382. 59. Sedgwick, Between Men, 20. 60. Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 22. 61. Pater, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 4:636–37. [ 264 ]

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62. Pater in James Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 107. Sambrook reprints in full Pater’s 1868 essay, “Poems by William Morris.” The essay was reprinted in Pater’s Appreciations, with omissions, as “Aesthetic Poetry.” 63. Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 152. 64. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Prelude to The House of Life,” in The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Two Volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1904), 2. 65. Pater, Renaissance, 152. 66. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Monochord,” in Poems and Translations, 1850–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 154. 67. Pater, Appreciations, 10. 68. Rachel O’Connell, “Reparative Pater: Retreat, Ecstasy, and Reparation in the Writings of Walter Pater,” ELH 82 (Fall 2015): 969–86; Laurel Brake and Lesley Higgins, eds., Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (Greensboro, N.C.: ELT, 2002). 69. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 185. 70. Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves & Turner, 1882), 87. 71. “Calling a Thing by its Right Name,” Punch, no. 50 (November 10, 1866): 189. 72. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. J. B. Foreman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 1092. 73. “Oscar Interviewed,” Punch, no. 82 ( January 14, 1882): 14. 74. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 2. 75. Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 11. 76. “An Aesthetic Pretender,” The Art Amateur, February 1882, 48. 77. “The Pre-Raphaelites,” 335. 78. [Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition,” 4. 79. McCarthy, “Pre-Raphaelites in England,” 725. 80. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 400. 81. In 1881, Wilde emerged as a figure of note in London: “And many a maiden will mutter, / When Oscar looms large on her sight, / ‘He’s quite too consummately utter, / As well as too utterly quite.’ ” “The Grosvenor Gallery: A Lay of the Private View,” Punch, no. 80 (May 14, 1881): 218. 82. Henry James, “The Author of Beltraffio,” in The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribners, 1909), 16:57, 61. 83. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York: Knopf, 1922), 267. 84. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 140, 143. 85. Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms, 137. 86. Freedman, Professions of Taste, 50. 87. Dickens, “Old Lamps for New Ones,” 266. 3 . F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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88. Frank Burnand, The Colonel, 2, my emphasis, http://www.xix-e.pierre -marteau.com /ed/colonel.html 89. Patience, in Savoy Operas by W. S. Gilbert (London: George Bell, 1909), 61. https://archive.org/details/savoyoperaswithi00gilbuoft. 90. Patience, 61. 91. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 18. 92. “Grappling with the Grosvenor,” Fun, May 14, 1879, 203. 93. Claude Phillips, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Academy 627 (May 10, 1884): 336. 94. Patience, 61. 95. “The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Magazine of Art, January 1878, 81. 96. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 339, 336. 97. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 392. 98. Burnand, The Colonel, 15. 99. William Butler Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), vii. 100. See Gayle Seymour, “Simeon Solomon and the Biblical Construction of Marginal Identity in Victorian England,” Journal of Homosexuality 33 (1997): 97–119. 101. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 1:43. 102. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1104. 103. Bullen, Pre-Raphaelite Body, 192. 104. George Du Maurier, Nincompoopiana—The Mutual Admiration Society, Punch, no. 78 (February 14, 1880): 66. See also Du Maurier, “Mutual Admirationists,” Punch, no. 78 (May 22, 1880): 234. 105. See Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 106. Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), 127. 107. Burnand, The Colonel, 25. 108. Myers, Essays Modern, 315. 109. George Du Maurier, “Distinguished Amateurs—2. The Art- Critic,” Punch, no. 78 (March 1880): 114, my emphasis. 110. Ford Madox Ford [Hueffer], Rossetti: A Critical Essay on His Art (London: Duckworth, 1898), 17. 111. George Du Maurier, “A Love-Agony: Design by Maudle,” Punch, no.  78 ( June 5, 1880): 254. 112. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 317. 113. Arthur Benson, Rossetti: English Men of Letters Series (London: Macmillan, 1906), 216. [ 266 ]

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114. Robert Ross, “Mr.  Benson’s Pater,” The Academy, no.  1785 ( July  21, 1906): 62. 115. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 198. 116. Hans- Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1985). Reader-response criticism is more limited in scope. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 117. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, 25, 35. 118. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 49. 119. Freedman, Professions of Taste, 64. 120. Pater, Renaissance, xxxii. 121. Pater in Sambrook, Pre-Raphaelitism, 105. 122. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxviii, xxx, xxiv. 123. Pater, Renaissance, 86. 124. Roger Fry, “Post Impressionism,” Fortnightly Review 89 (May 1911): 862. See Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 287. 125. Fry identified significant and expressive form as the source of “esthetic emotion.” Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (New York: Brentano’s, 1926), 5. 126. Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories, 288. 127. Pater, Appreciations, 192–93. 128. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, viii. 129. Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 2. 130. Peckham, Victorian Revolutionaries, 172. 131. Works JR 12:322, Ruskin’s emphasis. 132. Gautier, “Messrs. Millais and Hunt,” 550. 133. Works JR 10:235, unnumbered note. Ruskin’s emphasis. 134. Pater, Appreciations, 195. 135. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 358. 136. Davies, “State of English Painting,” 305. 137. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 334. 138. Sharp, “Edward Burne-Jones,” 295. 139. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 213. 140. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” 501. 141. Jerome Buckley, “Pre-Raphaelite Past and Present: The Poetry of the Rossettis,” in Victorian Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 123, 124. 142. Rossetti, “Jenny,” in Poems and Translations, 73. 143. See Gabriel Rossetti’s “Saint Luke the Painter,” in Poems and Translations, 147. 144. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xviii. 3 . F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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145. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, 25. 146. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, December 1895, 838. 147. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 529. 148. Roger Fry, “Rossetti’s Water Colours of 1857,” The Burlington Magazine 29 (April–December 1916): 100. 149. Peckham, Victorian Revolutionaries, 165. 150. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 145. 151. Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928), 227. 152. Pound, Literary Essays, 268. 153. Ibid., 269. 154. [Harry Quilter?], “Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Spectator, November 25, 1882, 1512. 155. William Sharp, “Rossetti in Prose and Verse,” in Papers Critical and Reminiscent (New York: Duffield, 1912), 42. 156. John Masefield, Thanks Before Going (London: William Heinemann, 1946), 28, my emphasis. 157. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 238. 158. Masefield, Thanks Before Going, 35. 159. Rossetti, “Willowwood,” in Poems and Translations, 120. 160. Kathy Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, 72. 161. Pound, Literary Essays, 294. 162. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965 (New York: New Directions, 1973), 376. 163. H. D., Paint It Today, ed. Cassandra Laity (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 60, 61. 164. Ernest Howard Shepard, “Pre-Raphaelite Cocktail Party (A Thought That Came to Our Artist After Visiting the William Morris Centenary Exhibition),” Punch, no. 186 (February 28, 1934): 242. 165. Laity introduction to H. D., Paint It Today, xxi. 166. See John Espey, Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: A Study in Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 32–34. 167. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1957), 65. 168. “Quisby and Barkins at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor,” Fun, May 14, 1884, 209. 169. Bernard Partridge, “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” Punch, no. 134 ( June 24, 1908): 399. 170. Norman Mansbridge, Her First Audition, Punch, no. 226 (May 12, 1954): 581. 171. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 145. See Catherine Maxwell, “Atmosphere and Absorption: Swinburne, Eliot, and Drinkwater,” in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, 213–31. 172. Pater, Renaissance, 153. [ 268 ]

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173. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 145, 147. 174. Stephen Spender, “The Pre-Raphaelite Literary Painters,” in New Writing and Daylight (London: Hogarth, 1945), 127. 175. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 148. 176. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, xxi, ix, xxxix. 177. Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Thurman Hood (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1933), 136, Browning’s emphasis. 178. Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 33. 179. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 225. 180. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964), 233. 181. Colvin, “Poetical Works of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 32. 182. The phrase was used in The Stealthy School of Criticism pamphlet (unique proof Huntingon Library, 15) and in a note appended to the early poem “Ave.” 183. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10. 184. Letters of John Keats, ed. Sidney Colvin (London: Macmillan, 1921), 41. 185. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 10. 186. Peckham, Victorian Revolutionaries, 280. 187. Eliot, Sacred Wood, 55, 57–58. 188. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland: A Facsimile and Transcript, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 27. 189. H. D., Asphodel, ed. Robert Spoo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 53. 190. “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in The Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991–1993), 12:267. 191. H. D., Paint It Today, 65. 192. Richard Dellamora, Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 45. 193. Matthew Potolsky, “Eros and Revolution: Rossetti and Swinburne on Continental Politics,” Victorian Studies 57 (Summer 2015): 585–610, aligns the poets’ political outlooks with the imagery of erotic desire in their works, as evidence they are seeking a path to personal liberation. 194. Masefield, Thanks Before Going, 49, Masefield’s emphasis. 195. Spender, Daylight, 124, 125. 196. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 226–27, Waugh’s emphasis. 197. “Mr. Buchanan and the Fleshly Poets,” Saturday Review, June 1, 1872, 701. 198. Christ, Finer Optic, 57. 199. Fry, “Post Impressionism,” 862. 200. Christ, Finer Optic, 51. 201. Greenberg, “Avant- Garde and Kitsch,” 29n2. 3 . F O RT U N E ’ S W E A L

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202. Wyndham Lewis, “The Brotherhood,” The Listener, April 22, 1948, 672. 203. Sharp, “Edward Burne-Jones,” 300. 204. Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 17. 205. These are Carol Christ’s terms, Finer Optic, 51. 206. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry From Dryden To Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 11, 12. 207. Robert Rosenblum, “Art Chronicle,” Partisan Review 24, no.  1 (Winter 1957): 97. 208. Scholar and curator Robert Rosenblum took the position that modernism emerged in eighteenth- century France. 209. Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, 44.

4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), 75. 2. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 91. 3. Swinburne quoted in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2:656 n2. 4. Chesneau, English School, 229. 5. Young George Du Maurier, 235. 6. [Stephens], “Mr.  Rossetti’s Pictures,” The Athenaeum, October  21, 1865, 545. 7. Chesneau, English School, 229. 8. Plampin, “Exhibiting the Avant- Garde,” 205, my emphasis. 9. [F. G. Stephens], “Mr. E. Burne Jones’s Pictures,” The Athenaeum, June 24, 1876, 866. 10. Helene Roberts, “Exhibition and Review: The Periodical Press and the Victorian Art System,” in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 101. 11. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, xiv. 12. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 324. 13. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 80. 14. Rossetti claimed to have “done no pot-boiling” in poetry. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1976), 2. [ 270 ]

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15. Jerome McGann, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Betrayal of Truth,” in Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. David Riede (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 175. 16. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” The Edinburgh Review 185 (April 1897): 499. 17. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:128. See also Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 2:790–93. 18. James Coombs, ed., A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research, 1986), 116. 19. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), 109. 20. See Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Victorian Romantic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), 443. 21. Harriett Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and His Literary Friendships (London: Fisher Unwin, 1903), 159. 22. William Sharp, “Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott,” The Academy, December 3, 1892, 500. 23. Coombs, Pre-Raphaelite Friendship, 138. 24. The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 1870–1873, ed. Odette Bornand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 122. 25. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 4:1644–45. 26. Ibid., 4:1658. 27. [Stephens], “Mr. Rossetti’s New Pictures,” The Athenaeum, November 1, 1879, 566, my emphasis. 28. Macleod, “F. G. Stephens,” 399. 29. Pater, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 4:633–34. 30. Colvin, “Rossetti as a Painter,” 179. 31. Sharp, “Rossetti in Prose and Verse,” 42. 32. Briggs, “Laurence Sterne and Literary Celebrity in 1760,” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 4, ed. Paul Korshin (New York: AMS, 1991), 259. 33. Sharp, “Rossetti in Prose and Verse,” 39. 34. Colvin, “The Poetical Writings of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 41. 35. J. B. Bullen, Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011), 6. 36. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 204. 37. Gosse, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 718. 38. Julia Ellsworth Ford, Simeon Solomon, 18. 39. Sharp, “Burne-Jones,” 306. 40. [Edward Burne-Jones], “Essay on the Newcomes,” The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, January 1856, 60. 41. Fortunée De Lisle, Burne-Jones (London: Methuen, 1904), 22–23. 4 . DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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42. Julia Margaret Cameron photographed Tennyson in the 1860s, when he was already famous. See Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim, eds., Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 43. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, 141. 44. Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928), 87. 45. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 124. 46. Nead, “Magdalen in Modern Times,” 28. 47. MacCarthy, Last Pre-Raphaelite, 62. 48. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 98. 49. Bradley and Ousby, Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 73. 50. William Michael Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 106. I follow Pollock’s example by spelling Siddall’s name with the original double ‘l’, which Rossetti felt she should drop to facilitate her social ascent. Ida was another of Siddall’s nicknames. 51. Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism, 71, 76. 52. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:30. 53. William Michael Rossetti, “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal,” The Burlington Magazine 1 (March–May 1903): 277. 54. See Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal, ed. Roger Lewis and Mark Lasner (Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Wombat Press, 1978); Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago Press, 1989). 55. Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism, 253–54. 56. Ibid., 234. 57. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 1:316. 58. Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism, 246, my emphasis. 59. Hueffer, Rossetti: A Critical Essay on His Art, 55. 60. William Michael Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 1860–1870 (London: Sands, 1903), 136, 137. 61. Bradley and Ousby, Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 59. 62. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 258. 63. Paull Baum, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Letters to Fanny Cornforth (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 129. 64. Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 343. 65. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 98. 66. Willem de Kooning quoted in John Elderfield, de Kooning: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 39.

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67. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:358. See Joyce Townsend, Jacqueline Ridge, and Stephen Hackney, Pre-Raphaelite Painting Techniques, 1848–1856 (London: Tate, 2004), 69. 68. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:44. 69. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” 500. 70. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 131. 71. Allison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 129. 72. Staley, New Painting of the 1860s, 106; Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 170. 73. Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 254. 74. The Diaries of George Price Boyce, ed. Virginia Surtees (Norwich: Real World, 1980), 39. 75. Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” Fortnightly Review 2 (October 1867): 474. 76. [Stephens], “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures,” The Athenaeum, October 21, 1865, 546. 77. Coombs, Pre-Raphaelite Friendship, 127. 78. Ibid., 141. 79. Gabriel Rossetti, “The Monochord,” in Poems and Translations, 154. 80. Buchanan, A Look Round Literature (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), 155, 154. 81. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 114. 82. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 132. 83. Howell was Ruskin’s secretary and later Rossetti’s agent. 84. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 3. 85. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” 499. 86. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 132. 87. Ibid., 132–33. 88. Ibid. 89. Pater, Renaissance, 74. 90. Myers, Essays Modern, 326, 313. 91. Deborah Cherry, “The Hogarth Club: 1858–1861,” The Burlington Magazine 122 (April 1980): 236–44. 92. Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1:69. 93. Coombs, Pre-Raphaelite Friendship, 141. 94. Ibid., 192–93, my emphasis. 95. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, December 21, 1895, 838. 96. Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 110–11. 97. Violet Hunt, The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932), xxiiin1.

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98. Hall Caine became a best- selling novelist in the 1890s; Sharp won fame under the pen name Fiona Macleod. 99. Hammond, Reading, Publishing, 122. 100. The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 49, 51, 50, 49. 101. Hammond, Reading, Publishing, 123, 122. Hammond compares WattsDunton’s bestseller Aylwin (1898) with Hall Caine’s Prodigal Son (1904); each includes a grave-robbing scene reminiscent of Gabriel’s fateful action of burying and later disinterring his manuscript (125–28). 102. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, 838. 103. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell, 1889), 157. 104. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:168–69. 105. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, 838. See also Sharp, “Autobiographical Notes,” 499, which protests against Scott’s “bitterly prejudiced” testimony: “a malversation so unfortunate, sometimes so deplorable, occasionally so inexcusable.” 106. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, 839. 107. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 92, 198. 108. Watts-Dunton practically lived with Rossetti at Cheyne Walk from 1874 to 1875. In 1879, Watts-Dunton set up house with Swinburne at the Pines to supervise the poet’s recovery from alcoholism. 109. Swinburne Letters, 5:310–11, my emphasis. 110. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 3:1270. 111. Swinburne Letters, 5:311. 112. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 149–50. 113. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 214. 114. Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 380–81. 115. Colvin, “Rossetti as Painter,” 183. 116. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 87, my emphasis. 117. Quoted in Buchanan, Look Round Literature, 160. The British Quarterly Review was in Buchanan’s camp. 118. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 226. 119. Rossetti produced a pen-and-ink illustration of “The Raven” in 1848. 120. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:113. 121. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 198. 122. Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 520n1. 123. Jean Clair, “The Self Beyond Recovery,” in Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, ed. Pierre Théberge (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), 196. 124. H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life (London: George Bell, 1904), 28. [ 274 ]

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125. Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism, 236–37. 126. See also Gabriel Rossetti’s “Stillborn Love” and “Newborn Death” in Poems and Translations, 122, 132. 127. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 148. 128. William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study (London: Macmillan, 1882), 213. 129. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 27. 130. Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2:304. 131. Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle, 37–39, plate 20. 132. Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 117. 133. Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 30. 134. F. G. Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Seeley, 1894), 10. 135. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 105. 136. Benson, Rossetti, 207–8. 137. Sharp, “Autobiographical Notes,” 499. 138. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 403. 139. William Sharp, “The Rossettis,” Fortnightly Review, March 1886, 427. 140. R. R. Bowker, “London as a Literary Centre,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 76 (May 1888): 827, my emphasis. 141. Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 260. 142. “In an Artist’s Studio,” The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 3:264. 143. Arthur Symons, Studies in Strange Souls (London: Charles Sawyer, 1929), 8. 144. Henri Dorra remarked on Rossetti’s “aptitude for dédoublement” in Symbolist Art Theories, 19. 145. Steiner, Colors of Rhetoric, 16. 146. See also Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the art/life relation is teased apart. 147. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 1:226-227. 148. [F. G. Stephens], “Winter Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures in Oil,” The Athenaeum, October 1869, 566. 149. [Stephens], “General Exhibition of Water- Colour Drawings,” The Athenaeum, February 6, 1869, 215. 150. Diaries of George Price Boyce, 17. 151. Symons, Studies on Modern Painters (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1925), 7. 152. Symons, Strange Souls, 10. 153. Ibid., 8, 10–11. 154. Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, 149. 155. Ross, “Three Portraits,” 151. 4 . DA N T E G A B R I E L RO S S E T T I

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156. McGann, “Betrayal of Truth,” 172. 157. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 42–43. 158. Stephen Spector, “Love, Unity, and Desire in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” ELH 38 (1971): 432. 159. Symons, Strange Souls, 12, 11. 160. Ibid., 9, my emphasis. 161. Donald Kuspit, Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 340. 162. Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” 464. 163. Ainsworth, Double Work of Art, 2. 164. Kuspit, Idiosyncratic Identities, 342. 165. Ibid., 347. In 1864, Gabriel described the new French school led by Courbet as “simple putrescence and decomposition.” Visiting Manet’s studio, Rossetti encountered pictures that looked like “mere scrawls” to him. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2:527.

5. Anonymous Journalism 1. Brake, Subjugated Knowledges, 19. William Rossetti was an unpaid picture reviewer for the Spectator. 2. [George Henry Lewes], “The Fortnightly Review,” The Athenaeum, March 25, 1865, 436. See Edwin Mallard Everett, The Party of Humanity: The Fortnightly Review and Its Contributors, 1865–1874 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), 331. 3. Lewes paraphrased in John Morley, “Valedictory,” Fortnightly Review, October 1882, 514. 4. Anthony Trollope, “On Anonymous Liter ature,” Fortnightly Review 1 (May 15–August 1865): 497. Trollope was a founder of the journal. 5. Thomas Hughes, “Anonymous Journalism,” MacMillan’s Magazine 5 (November 1861–April 1862): 166, Hughes’s emphasis. 6. Buchanan stated, “I have written under pseudonyms repeatedly, and so have some of my ablest contemporaries.” “Mr.  Robert Buchanan and His Poetry,” Dundee Courier & Argus, no. 5749, January 2, 1872, page not given. 7. Morley, “Valedictory,” 513. 8. John Morley, “Anonymous Journalism,” Fortnightly Review 8 (September 1867): 287. 9. Morley, “Valedictory,” 513.

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10. Oscar Maurer, Jr., “Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing,” Studies in English 27, no. 1 ( June 1948): 5. When Knowles established the Nineteenth Century in 1877, he pushed the “star system” to such an extent that he incited a backlash against signed articles. 11. See Sidney Colvin, “Signed Articles,” The Athenaeum, December 9, 1871, 755. 12. [Editor’s note], “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” The Athenaeum, December 16, 1871, 794. 13. Morley, “Anonymous Journalism,” 290. 14. The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 132. 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Stealthy School of Criticism, 6. The pamphlet (a unique proof ) was acquired by the Huntington Library in 2001. It is available online courtesy of the Rossetti Archive. The pamphlet was dropped for fear of a libel suit. See William Michael Rossetti, Designer and Writer, 156–59. A truncated version was published. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” The Athenaeum, December 16, 1871, 792–94. 16. “The Fleshly School of Poetry. By Robert Buchanan,” The Athenaeum, May 25, 1872, 650. 17. “Mr. Buchanan and the Fleshly Poets,” 700. 18. “Turning Over New Leaves,” Fun, June 8, 1872, 239. 19. [Forman], “The ‘Fleshly School’ Scandal,” 89. 20. “Coterie Glory,” Saturday Review, February 24, 1872, 240. 21. Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 202, 203. 22. Ibid., 193. 23. [Editor’s note], The Athenaeum, December 16, 1871, 794. 24. My emphasis. Buchanan testified in court that he had written under “two or three aliases.” “A Poet Cross-Examined,” Manchester Times, July 1, 1876, 5. Buchanan used the pseudonym Walter Hutcheson in 1872 when he made an “impassioned appeal for an end to all unsigned criticism.” Christopher Murray, “D. G. Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, and R. W. Buchanan: The Fleshly School Revisited,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 212. 25. [Editor’s note], “Stealthy School of Criticism,” 887. 26. Buchanan, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” The Athenaeum, December 30, 1871, 887. 27. “Mr. Robert Buchanan’s Essays,” Pall Mall Gazette, February 1868, 11. Buchanan received high marks from some critics: “London Poems,” The London Review (September 1, 1866): 244–46; “London Poems. By Robert Buchanan,” The British Quarterly Review, October 1866, 549–50. 28. George Saintsbury, “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan,” The Academy, June 6, 1874, 625. 29. [Forman], “The ‘Fleshly School’ Scandal,” 89.

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30. Ibid. 31. “Mr. Buchanan and Goethe,” Pall Mall Gazette, October 7, 1874, 9. 32. “Mr. Buchanan’s Pamphlet,” The Examiner, May 18, 1872, 508. 33. Ibid. 34. Thomas Copeland, “Mr. Buchanan as Self- Critic and as Poet,” The Examiner, May 2, 1874, 462. 35. “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan,” The London Quarterly Review 43, no. 85 (October 1874): 213. 36. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” Saturday Review, 839. 37. Gabriel Rossetti, Stealthy School of Criticism, 19. 38. The British Quarterly Review was well disposed to Buchanan. See “The Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan,” The British Quarterly Review 118 (April 1874): 567–68. 39. Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 449. 40. John  A. Cassidy, “Robert Buchanan and the Fleshly Controversy,” PMLA 67 (March 1952): 65–93. I disagree with Cassidy’s account of Buchanan’s religious despondency. Nor is Cassidy sufficiently circumspect about the bias of Buchanan’s literary executor, Harriett Jay, the younger sister of Buchanan’s wife, an adopted “daughter” of the childless couple, who remained with Buchanan after Mary’s death in 1881. 41. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 161. 42. Swinburne’s footnote on Gray appeared a year after Buchanan made fun of Swinburne. [Caliban, pseud.], “The Session of the Poets,” Spectator, September 15, 1866, 1028. 43. [Robert Buchanan], “George Heath, the Moorland Poet,” Good Words 12 ( January 1871): 175n1, my emphasis. 44. Ibid., 175. See Edmund Gosse, “Master-Spirits,” 167. “Mr.  Buchanan has evidently forgotten that a certain William Wordsworth wrote—‘And the cuckoo’s sovereign cry / Fills all the hollow of the sky.’ ” 45. [Buchanan], “George Heath,” 175n1. 46. “Mr.  Arnold’s New Poems,” Fortnightly Review, October  1867, 428. The original version lacks the footnote on Gray appended by Swinburne in 1875. 47. This essay was later collected with others in Robert Buchanan, David Gray and Other Essays, Chiefly on Poetry (London: Sampson Low, 1868), 81. 48. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 61. 49. Swinburne, “Mr. Arnold’s New Poems,” Essays and Studies, 153n1. 50. See Roden Noel, “Robert Buchanan’s Poetry,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, November 15, 1875, 556: “Except by a clique, and perhaps by here and there a small literary buccaneer,” wrote Buchanan’s ally, “the merit of Mr. Buchanan’s poetry is, I suppose, now pretty generally acknowledged.” 51. Cassidy, “Fleshly Controversy,” 72. [ 278 ]

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52. Sedgwick, Between Men, 1–2. 53. Buchanan’s emphasis. 54. In the original, the phrase “affected choice of Latin diction” read “careful choice of diction” (“FS” 339). The revision highlights Buchanan’s desire to tap xenophobia to win converts to his cause. 55. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, 171. 56. See Peter Cominos, “Late-Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System,” International Review of Social History 8 (1963): 18–48, 216–50. 57. Rossetti, “Nuptial Sleep,” Poems and Translations, 110. 58. Courthope cited in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 3:1043n1. 59. Swinburne Letters, 1:192. 60. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 55. 61. “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review, October 1866, 531. See also Robert Buchanan, “Genus Irritabile,” The Athenaeum, November 10, 1866, 608. 62. Cassidy, “Fleshly Controversy,” 72. The pension, under consideration from 1869 to 1870, prevented Buchanan from baiting Rossetti earlier. Buchanan’s supporters claimed: “He had attained a considerable amount of eminence in his profession, and he received by the hands of Mr. Gladstone, some years ago, an award from the Royal Literary Fund, which was the more creditable as having been entirely unasked for.” “Action for Libel Against a Newspaper,” Birmingham Daily Post, June 30, 1876, 5. In fact, Buchanan demanded subsidies for writers in a signed letter, “Genus Irritabile” (608), which was picked up as “Mr.  Buchanan and the Rights of Originality,” Sunday Times (London), November 25, 1866, 7. 63. Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 153n1. Buchanan acknowledged Gray’s “extravagant letters to men of eminence” requesting patronage. See Buchanan, David Gray, 79. 64. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 59. 65. Ibid., 61. 66. Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), 1:7. 67. Buchanan, David Gray, 78–79. 68. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 39. 69. Ibid., 40. 70. Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, 1:22. 71. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 82, my emphasis. 72. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 269, 150, 5. 73. Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, 1:247. 74. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longmans, 1981), chaps. 5–6. 5. ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

[ 279 ]

75. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Laus Veneris, and Other Poems and Ballads (New York: Carleton, 1868), 176. 76. “To David in Heaven,” Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan, 1:23, my emphasis. 77. Buchanan, Look Round Literature, 198. 78. “Mr. Buchanan and the Fleshly Poets,” 701. 79. Buchanan, “Tennyson’s Charm,” 287–88. 80. Wendy Graham, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 200–201. 81. Buchanan, Look Round Literature, 197. 82. Randolph Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Early Modern Culture, 1660–1750,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 129–40. 83. Buchanan, “Immorality in Authorship,” 296. 84. Thais Morgan, “Male Lesbian Bodies: The Construction of Alternative Masculinities in Courbet, Baudelaire, and Swinburne,” Genders 15 (Winter 1992): 39. 85. Buchanan, “Immorality in Authorship,” 297. The shepherd Atys emasculated himself after betraying his vow of celibacy to the goddess Cybele, whereby he was driven mad. Buchanan suggests that a castrated male = madwoman. 86. “Mr. Buchanan and the Fleshly Poets,” 701. 87. Ibid., 701. 88. See Morgan, “Victorian Effeminacies,” 109–25. Morgan’s account of Buchanan’s defense of civic masculinity against the “contemporary avatars of the effeminati” (111) rings true generally but fails to take note of Buchanan’s inconsistency. He copied Swinburne in poetic flights, such as “Hermaphroditus,” in Robert Buchanan, The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic (London: Strahan, 1870), 237. 89. [Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition” (1870), 4. 90. [Buchanan], “George Heath,” 170. 91. See Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queens’ Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1993), 164–65, for a delineation of the cultural association, falsetto = castrato = homosexual. 92. [Austin], “Poetry of the Period,” 473, Austin’s emphasis. 93. Letters of Robert Browning, 137–38, Browning’s emphasis. 94. Buchanan, “Tennyson’s Charm,” 298n. 95. Swinburne Letters, 1:146. 96. George Storey, “Robert Buchanan’s Critical Principles,” PMLA 68, no. 5 (December 1953): 1229. Swinburne exempted Bell Scott, describing his old friend “Scotus” as “Northumbrian by adoption.” Swinburne’s Letters 1:146. Rossetti’s friends John Skelton, J. F. McLennon, and William Sharp were Scotsmen. [ 280 ]

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97. [R. W. B., pseud.], “Lady Letitia’s Lilliput Hand,” Temple Bar 4 (March 1862): 554, recalls Sandys’s parody, The Nightmare (1857). 98. Buchanan used variations on the phrase: “The Scrofulous School of Literature” (FS 15). Browning had referred to “my scrofulous French novel” in the 1842 poem “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” 99. Murray, “Fleshly School Revisited,” 2:206, 205, 207. 100. W. S. Gilbert, Pinafore; or, the Lass That Loved a Sailor (New York: A. S. Seer, 1879), 24, https://archive.org /stream / hermajestysshipp00sulliala#page/n1 /mode/2up. 101. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 162. 102. Letters of Robert Browning, 138. In “ ‘He and I’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Other Man,” Victorian Poetry 39, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 365–88, Joseph Bristow challenges the exclusive and “insistent heteroeroticism” of Rossetti scholarship (366). Bristow identifies a romantic triad in Rossetti’s poetry, which dramatizes his fixation on the superior authority of the “masculine other” meditating the poet’s thwarted pursuit of the elusive female beloved (379). 103. Dearest Isa; Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward  C. McAleer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), 331. 104. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 115, 110–11. 105. G.  H. Lewes, “Robert Buchanan,” Fortnightly Review, May  15–August  1, 1865, 457. 106. Jay, Robert Buchanan, 109. 107. “The Fleshly School of Poetry. By Robert Buchanan,” 650. 108. See “Action for Libel Against a Newspaper,” 5, confirming that Buchanan posted a paragraph in the Echo denying his authorship of Jonas Fisher. 109. Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 201. William encountered Gabriel reading this article, grimacing and darkly muttering. 110. Gabriel Rossetti, Stealthy School of Criticism, 8. 111. Morley, “Valedictory,” 518. 112. “The Fleshly School of Poetry. By Robert Buchanan,” 650. 113. “Master Spirits,” Saturday Review, January 3, 1874, 22. 114. “Mr. Buchanan Writes to Us,” The Athenaeum, December 4, 1875, 751. See James Car negie, Earl of Southesk, Jonas Fisher: A Poem in Brown and White (London: Trubner, 1876). 115. Algernon Charles Swinburne [Thomas Maitland, pseud.], “The Dev il’s Due,” The Examiner, December  11, 1875, 1388. Buchanan’s penchant for aliases was remarked in “Jonas Fisher,” The Examiner, November 27, 1875, 1336–38. 116. “Buchanan v. Taylor,” The Athenaeum, July 8, 1876, 51. 117. “Mr. Robert Buchanan and the ‘Examiner,’ ” The Standard, June 30, 1876, 6. 5. ANONYMOUS JOURNALISM

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118. “A Literary Squabble,” Saturday Review, July 8, 1876, 44. 119. “Action for Libel,” The Star, July 4, 1876, 4. 120. “Buchanan v. Taylor,” 51. 121. “The Quarrels of Poets,” Western Mail, July 3, 1876, 8. 122. “The Poetical Libel Case,” The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, July  3, 1876, 4. 123. Untitled article, Scribner’s Monthly, August 1875, 513. 124. Buchanan, David Gray, 207. 125. “Mr. Buchanan and the Fleshly Poets,” 701. 126. Buchanan, David Gray, 203. 127. Ibid., 215, 204. 128. Cassidy, “Fleshly Controversy,” 87. 129. “The Note-Book,” Once a Week 4 ( July 1876): 265. 130. “Jonas Fisher. A Poem in Brown and White,” The London Quarterly Review, January 1876, 527. 131. “Buchanan v. Taylor,” 51. 132. As Edmund Yates noted, Buchanan liked to quote Browning’s phrase, “a scrofulous French novel.” Buchanan used the term “scrofulous” in the Fleshly School articles and in “The Newest Thing in Journalism,” the unsigned article in the Contemporary Review, September 1877, 701, that so enraged Yates. 133. “A Scrofulous Scotch Poet,” Evening Post, January 12, 1878, 1.

6. Henry James and British Aestheticism 1. James contributed to The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Galaxy, The Century, and the New York Tribune. 2. Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1968), 172. 3. Robert Buchanan, “The Modern Young Man as Critic,” The Universal Review, March 1889, 355, 359. Harry Quilter edited The Universal Review. 4. James Sully, “The Undefinable in Art,” Cornhill Magazine 38 (November 1878): 559. 5. James, “Author of Beltraffio,” 16:3. 6. Symonds is frequently cited as the model for Ambient. See Freedman, Professions of Taste, 172. 7. Henry James, Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 69 (hereafter cited in the text as AD). 8. Davies, “State of English Painting,” 299.

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9. Hamilton, Aesthetic Movement in England, 108. 10. Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 155. 11. [F. G. Stephens], “The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition,” The Athenaeum, May 5, 1877, 583. 12. Agnes Atkinson, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Portfolio 8 ( January 1877): 98. 13. [Tom Taylor], “The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Times (London), March 12, 1877, 4. 14. Gabriel Rossetti, letter to The Times (London), March 27, 1877, 6. See Casteras, “Palace of the Aesthetes,” 75–77. 15. [Stephens], “Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition,” 583. 16. Colvin, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Fortnightly Review 21 ( June 1877): 825. 17. [Taylor], “Grosvenor Gallery,” March 12, 1877, 4. 18. “Grosvenor Gallery,” The Examiner, May 5, 1877, 563. 19. [Stephens], “Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition,” 583. 20. [Taylor], “Grosvenor Gallery,” The Times (London), May 1, 1877, 10. This observation will be remediated by Quilter in “Gospel of Intensity,” 400. 21. [Stephens?], “Royal Academy,” The Athenaeum, May 25, 1861, 698. This would be one of Stephens’s earliest submissions. 22. James, AD, 258. 23. [Taylor], “Grosvenor Gallery,” May 1, 1877, 10. 24. “Professor Ruskin on Burne Jones and the ‘Mythic School,’ ” The Art-Journal, July 1883, 224. 25. “Queer” did not enter the gay lexicon until the 1920s. See David McWhirter, “ ‘Saying the Unsayable’: James’s Realism in the Late 1890s,” Henry James Review 20 (Fall 1999), 238; Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 4; Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 4. 26. [Taylor], “Old Water- Colour Society,” The Times (London), April  27, 1870, 4. 27. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 335. 28. Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” 474. 29. Colvin, “Grosvenor Gallery,” 826. 30. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Rossetti and His Circle (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1997), 58. 31. Wildman and Christian, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 138. 32. “Society of Painters in Water- Colours: Sixth Exhibition,” The ArtJournal, June 1870, 173. 33. [Taylor], “Old Water- Colour Society,” 4. 34. W. B. Richmond, “ ‘Take Me, Take My Trunk.’ By E. Burne-Jones, or ‘TyBurn Jones,’ for the Deadly-Liveliness of the Figures,” Punch, no. 82 (May 20, 1882): 240.

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35. Heathcote Statham, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Macmillan’s Magazine 36 (July 1877): 113. 36. “Grosvenor Gallery,” The Examiner, 562–63; “Society of Painters in Water- Colours,” The Art-Journal, January 1871, 25–26. 37. [Taylor], “Dudley Gallery Water- Colour Exhibition” (1870), 4. 38. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 334. 39. Bullen, Pre-Raphaelite Body, 1. 40. Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), 237. 41. See also Solomon- Godeau, Male Trouble. 42. Burne-Jones said, “A woman’s shape is best in repose, but the fine thing about a man is that he is such a splendid machine, so you can put him in motion, and make as many knobs and joints and muscles about him as you please.” Wildman and Christian, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 234. 43. “The Grosvenor Gallery [Second Notice],” Fun, May 18, 1887, 214. 44. Thais Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 316. 45. Robertson, “Methodism in Style,” 279, my emphasis. 46. Statham, “Grosvenor Gallery,” 113. 47. Phillips, “Grosvenor Gallery,” 337. 48. Robertson, “Methodism in Style,” 278. 49. [Taylor], “Old Water- Colour Society,” 4. 50. “The Grosvenor Gallery: A Lay of the Private View,” 218. 51. “The Ghastly School,” The London Review, February 6, 1869, 126. 52. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 339, 336. 53. “Dandyism,” Kaleidoscope 2 (April 23, 1822): 330. 54. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 395, 392. Quilter’s article preceded the first installment of James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Macmillan’s Magazine, May– October 1880, 401–27. 55. See Plate 6, Fig. 3.5. 56. James, AD, 259–60. 57. James, “Author of Beltraffio,” 16:56. 58. Richard Ellmann, “Henry James Among the Aesthetes,” Proceedings of the British Academy 69 (1983): 211. 59. Bullen, Pre-Raphaelite Body, 188, 190. 60. Oscar Wilde, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Dublin University Magazine 90 ( July 1877): 126. Wilde was twenty-two at the time. 61. R.  R. [Robert Ross], “A Note on Simeon Solomon,” Westminster Gazette, August 24, 1905, 1. 62. McCarthy, “Pre-Raphaelites in England,” 725, 732.

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63. [Meglip], “The Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Academy,” Vanity Fair 17 (May 5, 1877): 281. 64. Colvin, “English Painters of the Present Day: III,” 19. 65. Morgan, “Perverse Male Bodies,” 73. Solomon prepared illustrations for Swinburne’s unfinished erotic novel, Lesbia Brandon (1868). 66. Simeon Solomon to Swinburne, September 1869, Swinburne Letters, 2:34. 67. Simeon Solomon to Swinburne, May 15, 1871, Ibid., 2:144. 68. Vox in Solitudine Clamantis, “Our Public Schools: Their Methods and Morals,” New Review 9 ( July–December 1893): 43, 44. 69. Swinburne Letters, 1:78. 70. Ibid., 1:123 postscript. 71. Ibid., 2:229. 72. “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in The Penguin Freud Library, 10:159–93. 73. Swinburne Letters, 2:227. 74. Henderson, Portrait of a Poet, 57. 75. Swinburne Letters, 2:143–44. 76. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 83. 77. Swinburne Letters, 2:159. 78. See Fig. 1.5. 79. Swinburne Letters, 2:163. 80. Georges Lafourcade, Swinburne: A Literary Biography (London: G. Bell, 1932), x–xi. 81. Pater, Renaissance, 74, 75–76. 82. Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2:216. 83. Swinburne, Laus Veneris, 13–30. 84. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 396. 85. Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” 339. 86. [Taylor], “Old Water- Colour Society,” 4. 87. Swinburne, Laus Veneris, 17–18. 88. Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), 3:492. 89. Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of Amer ica, 1984), 1177, my emphasis. 90. Henry James Letters, 3:492. 91. James, Literary Criticism, 544, 1278, 1279. 92. Freedman, Professions of Taste, 141. 93. Pater, Renaissance, 78. 94. Swinburne Letters, 2:240–41. 95. Swinburne, “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence,” Fortnightly Review, July–December 1868, 19.

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96. Pater, Renaissance, 80. 97. Henry James Letters, 1:93. 98. [Cornish], “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 197. 99. Quilter, “Gospel of Intensity,” 395.

Afterword 1. MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite. 2. See John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), to understand the impact of Wilde’s colorful and extravagant suits. 3. Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan, 1904), 1:260. 4. Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2:529. 5. “The Poetry of Pre-Raphaelitism,” British Architect, February 7, 1879, 58. 6. Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, 81 7. Valentine Prinsep, “A Chapter from a Painter’s Reminiscence,” The Magazine of Art 27 (1904): 167, my emphasis. 8. Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works, 226. 9. Robertson, “Methodism in Style,” 278. 10. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters,” 487–88. 11. Pound, Literary Essays, 294. 12. “An Essay (with Two Notes) on Swinburne by Sir Edmund Gosse, Based on the Manuscripts in the British Museum Hitherto Unpublished,” in Swinburne Letters, 6:233–48. 13. Pound, Literary Essays, 291. 14. Beerbohm, Rossetti and His Circle, 48. 15. Briggs, “Laurence Sterne and Literary Celebrity,” 259. 16. “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Ner vous Illness” (1908), in The Penguin Freud Library, 12:48. 17. Sennett, Fall of the Public Man, 190. 18. Slavoj Žizĕk, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 21. 19. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 49. 20. Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, xxiv. 21. Spender, Daylight, 129, 130. 22. Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 17. 23. Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), 402. 24. Colvin, “English Painters and Painting in 1867,” 464. 25. Ibid. [ 286 ]

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26. Kuspit, Idiosyncratic Identities, 339. 27. “The Ghastly School,” 125. 28. Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), iii. 29. Pound, Literary Essays, 297.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Adams, Henry, 86–87 Adams, James Eli, 19, 98, 125 aesthetic celebrity, xvi–xviii, xix–xx, 40, 50, 56, 70, 89, 107, 129, 151–52, 211, 213, 238, 240–43 aesthetic collaboration, xv, xxiii, 27, 109, 165, 179, 229 “aesthetic emotion,” 39, 118–19, 125, 153, 171 aestheticism: Bürger’s critique of, xii, 243–44; caricatures and satires of, 82, 83, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110–11, 121, 122–24, 210, 218–19, 221, 222–23, 266n104; conflation with PreRaphaelitism, 9, 34–36, 39–40, 42, 100–104; debate over distinctive characteristics, xv–xvi, 34–41; perceived as transgressive, 37–38, 50, 53, 59, 62, 78, 128–29, 140, 146, 152–53, 202, 237–38; and same-sex desire, 42–43, 63–64, 88, 95, 98–99,

104, 108–9, 120, 127, 141–42, 195–96, 235, 243–44; and Solomon, xv–xvi, 23, 25–30, 32–34, 171, 200, 211–12, 222, 224–25, 229; and Wilde, xv–xvi, 28, 36, 39, 41, 95, 99–106, 110, 127, 165, 227–28, 239. See also specific names and topics Allingham, William, 150 anachronism, xxiii, 113–14 Anderson, Perry, 10 Androgyny, 27, 33, 97, 106, 115, 122, 170, 224–25, 228, 231, 233, 243 Angeli, Helen Rossetti, 29, 167–68, 170 anonymous journalism, xiv, 8, 30, 44, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65–66, 68, 138, 179, 188, 189, 204, 208, 229; and editorial policy, xiii, xviii, xxi–xxii, 48, 51–53, 62, 69–70, 79, 175–83. See also puffery; “self-criticism”; signature

antiquarianism, xiv, 1, 3, 11, 59–60, 95, 98, 104, 112–17, 233. See also classicism; Gothic Revival; medievalism “aristocracy of talent,” 5, 20, 181, 251n15 Arnold, Matthew, xix, xxi, 50, 62, 180, 184–85, 197, 237 art collectors, middle class, xii–xiii, 2–6, 11–16, 20–23, 25, 71–72, 107, 120, 135–36 “art for art’s sake,” 14, 102, 119–20, 136, 172, 210, 222, 244 Art-Journal, The, 30, 38, 91, 217 art writing, twentieth-century, 112, 117–18, 129–31, 153, 173–74, 244–46. See also specific authors and subjects art writing, Victorian, xxii, 15, 36, 39, 49–50, 90, 209–12, 241–42, 245; and coterie journalism, xvii, xxii, 14, 16, 18, 40, 44, 50, 52, 103, 106, 216, 228; and expansion of periodical press, xiii–xiv, 14, 31, 47–49; on Royal Academy, xiii, 1, 15, 30, 72, 91, 134, 153, 213. See also specific authors and journals Athenaeum, The, 21, 67, 137–138, 150, 159, 189, 213–14; on Buchanan v. Taylor, 203–4, 207; on Fleshly School controversy, 177–78, 180–81, 202–3; policy of anonymity, 177–78, 180; on Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, 61, 65–66, 68, 184. See also Stephens, Frederic George Austin, Alfred, 62, 64, 72, 74–76, 197 avant-garde, 6, 15, 42, 50, 71, 74, 94, 110–11, 117, 174, 245; antiquarianism of, 104, 112–13; British competition with French, xii, 13, 80–81, 116, 119, 129, 131; British drawing on French, xvi, 42, 66, 68, 195; and PRB, xi– xiii, xv–xvii, xxii, 1, 5–6, 10, 14, 44, [ 314 ]

57, 78, 84, 94, 102, 107, 120, 131, 171, 211, 243, 246. See also Baudelaire, Charles; Bürger, Peter; Greenberg, Clement; Kohut, Heinz; Kuspit, Donald Barringer, Tim, xv, 94 Baudelaire, Charles, xvi, 56, 172–74, 193–95 Beerbohm, Max, 19, 22–23, 165, 242 Beerbohm, Max, works of: Mr. William Bell Scott Wondering What It Is Those Fell Seem to See in Gabriel, 19; The Name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Is Heard for the First Time in the Western States of America, 101; Quis Custodiet Ipsum Custodem, 166; Rossetti in His Worldlier Days (Circa 1866–1868) Leaving the Arundel Club with George Augustus Sala, 24 Benson, Arthur, 110–11, 156, 209 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, xx–xxi, 51–52, 54, 65 Bloom, Harold, 41 Bloomsbury, xxii, 102, 168 bohemian/bourgeois dynamic, 4–6, 12–17, 23, 57–58, 82 bohemianism, xi, xvi–xvii, xxiii, 10, 59, 70, 84, 102, 111, 128, 183, 241–42; and sexual “inversion,” 29, 33, 42, 56, 119–21, 129, 199, 203, 243. See also Rossetti, Gabriel. Bourdieu, Pierre, xvii, 14, 23 Boyce, George Price, 25, 141, 154, 170; on flesh-painting, 150 Brake, Laurel, 49, 62 Braudy, Leo, xx, 53 Bray, Alan, 191 Briggs, Peter, 139 Bristow, Joseph, 281n120 British Quarterly Review, The, 38, 93, 161 INDEX

Brown, Ford Madox, 26, 29, 82, 89, 100, 144, 158, 163, 179; Take Your Son, Sir!, 4 Brown, Marilyn, 13, 23 Browning, Oscar, 25–26, 110, 229 Browning, Robert, 70, 72–73, 75, 177, 207, 209, 237; dislike of effeminacy, 197, 200; relations with Buchanan, 189, 200; “scrofulous” French literature, 199, 281n98, 282n132 Buchanan, Robert, 62, 65–76, 77, 127, 151, 181–82; anonymity and aliases, xxi, 53, 62, 65, 69–70, 177–80, 184, 200, 202–4, 258n16, 277n24, 281n115; antipathy to Rossetti-Swinburne clique, 70, 107, 135, 137, 178–80, 183–84, 186, 198; and David Gray, 184–86, 188–93; on fleshliness, 23, 32–33, 53, 56, 192–99, 203; libel action against Swinburne and Examiner, 204–7; “murder” of Gabriel Rossetti, 157, 161, 183; negative publicity, xxi, 58–59, 180, 202, 207; queer tutelage of, 66, 68–69, 186–87, 190–93, 195, 199; “Scrofulous Scotch Critic,” 157, 183, 208; “self-criticism” of, 70, 178, 180–81; and “sincerity,” 68, 178, 182–83, 195, 201; on Walt Whitman, 205–7 Buchanan, Robert, works of: The Book of Orm: A Prelude to an Epic, 186, 280n88; David Gray and Other Essays, 185, 188–93; “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” xxi, 177, 185, 200, 204, 232; The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day, 175–208; “George Heath, the Moorland Poet,” 184, 195; “Immorality in Authorship,” 67–68, 194; London Poems, 66–69, 181, 189; INDEX

“Poems and Ballads. By Algernon Charles Swinburne,” 65–66, 68, 184, 188, 195; “Tennyson’s Charm,” 71–75, 192. See also Jay, Harriet Buckley, Jerome, 115–16 Bullen, J. B., 41, 140, 220, 222 Bürger, Peter, xii, 94, 243–44 Burnand, Frank, 104; and The Colonel, 98, 100, 103, 107–8; and Punch, 108 Burne-Jones, Edward, xv, 41, 77, 100, 116, 209; antiquarianism of, 42, 88, 114, 214, 220, 234; caricatured in Punch, 122–24, 218–19, 222–23; celebrity, xvi, 89–90, 104, 213–14, 219–20, 240; defective drawing, 214, 216, 217; decorative painting, 220, 237; erudite painting, 212–17, 223; friendship with Morris, 88; and Gabriel Rossetti, xvi, 32, 36, 88–89, 140–41, 143, 170, 224, 241; and Grosvenor Gallery, xvi, 89–90, 104, 213–38 passim, 240; hiatus from exhibition, 213; homoeroticism and effeminacy of art, 104–5, 122, 215, 217, 220, 222, 224–28, 234–35, 238; as last Pre-Raphaelite, xvi, 32, 34, 36, 38, 88, 99, 104, 170, 214–15, 240; nude figures of, 149–50, 217–18, 220, 222, 226–27; and Oxford, 87–88, 95, 227; repetition of facial type, 224; and Ruskin, 87–90, 215, 239; and Solomon, 25–26, 32, 170, 217, 222, 224–25, 239; and Swinburne, 99, 109, 217, 228, 234–35, 238, 241; as surrealist, symbolist, visionary painter, 36, 39, 130, 215 Burne-Jones, Edward, works of: Le Chant d’Amour, 227; Day, 224, 226; The Days of Creation, 224; The Garden of Pan, 222, 223; King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 121–22, 123; Laus [ 315 ]

Burne-Jones, Edward, works of (cont.) Veneris, 233–34, 235; Perseus series, 130, 223–24; Phyllis and Demophoön, 216–17, 218, 220; The Tree of Forgiveness, 217–18, 219, 220 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 25, 239 Byron, George Gordon, 51, 54, 60, 65, 66, 85, 181, 197, 204, 236; celebrity of, 55–56; dissipated virtuosity of, xx, 57; “emotional incontinence,” 56 Caine, T. Hall, xix, 18, 144, 151–52, 159, 161, 162, 165, 241; Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 155–56, 157, 274n101 Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 182; on “sincerity,” 7, 8, 12 Cassidy, John, 184–86 Catholicism, 32, 90, 232; and Nazarene painters, xii, 9–10, 92–93; Oxford movement (Puseyism, Tractarianism), 6, 42, 88, 91–93, 96; and PRB, 6–10, 38, 90–94. See also Collins, Charles Allston; Collinson, James; Gothic Revival; Rossetti, Gabriel; Ruskin, John celibacy, 89, 91, 144; and cerebral lechery, 93, 158, 231 censors and censorship, xvi–xvii, 60, 68, 86, 195, 200, 205–6, 242–43; and self-censorship, 89, 127, 192, 206, 230, 240 Christ, Carol, 3, 129 classicism, 1, 26, 38, 42, 61, 64, 65, 67, 86–87, 103, 114, 120, 149, 212; Hellenism and homoerotic codes, 27, 41, 63, 66, 68, 86–87, 98, 105–6, 165, 171, 192–93, 206, 225; pseudoclassicism, 104, 114; and Sappho, 25, 59, 61, 65, 68–69, 75, 127, 193, 195, 225, 231 [ 316 ]

cliques and coteries, 27, 40, 42, 95, 107, 188, 193, 210, 225, 229; associated with Grosvenor Gallery, 104, 213, 216, 228; “clique of literary Mohawks,” 70; “fraternity for championship,” xiv, 16, 135, 183; “mutual admiration society,” xiv, 12, 53, 70, 107, 179, 196, 228; of PRB, xiv–xv, xii, 16, 28–29, 40, 44, 82, 100, 103, 111, 180, 195, 200, 228, 246; of romantic poets, xx, 52, 54; Rossetti cynosure of, xvii, 10, 18–19, 137, 140, 186; Swinburne cynosure of, xvi, 29, 56, 70, 184, 195, 217 Cockney School of Poetry, xx–xxi, 50–55, 66, 95, 196. See also Hunt, Leigh; Keats, John; Lockhart, John Gibson Codell, Julie, 36 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 53; antiestablishment genius, 57 Collins, Charles Allston, 9; Convent Thoughts, 90–91 Collinson, James, 6, 91, 93; The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, 93; The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, 93 Colvin, Sidney, xxi, 38, 173, 209, 217; championship of Burne-Jones, 39, 213, 216; championship of Rossetti, 18, 20, 40, 125, 137, 139, 150, 160; role in Fleshly School controversy, 177, 180; Slade Professorship of Fine Art, Cambridge, 39, 216; on Solomon, 30 commodification of art, 31, 99–102, 152, 241–42; genre painting and kitsch, 2, 15, 143; mechanical reproduction of images, 16, 136, 227; Millais “sells out,” 16, 20–21, 28, 34; PRB marketing strategy, xii, xiv, 13–16; PRB resistance to market INDEX

interference, 6, 11, 15, 57, 84, 183; Rossetti’s “abstention” from the art market, xvii, 16, 20–22, 28, 133–36, 172–74; and social capital of art, 2, 14 commodification of literature, 58, 61, 72, 80, 96, 99, 100, 102, 133, 241–42; alienation of writer, 57, 109, 172–74; literacy, lending libraries, and the reading nation, 48, 51; modernists’ disdain for mass audience, xxii; potboilers and railway novels, 136, 156 Contemporary Review, 202, 204, 208, 210; and signature, 177–78 Cornforth, Fanny, 142, 147–48, 152, 160 Cornhill Magazine, 15, 210 Cruise, Colin, 32–33 Dante Alighieri, 88, 125, 138, 172; and Rossetti myth, 17, 20, 151 Dark Blue, 231–32 Davies, William, 44, 114 Day, Fred Holland, 42; Study for Endymion, 43 dédoublement, 168–170 defamiliarization, 1, 71, 130 Dellamora, Richard, 27, 127, 248n9 democratization of public sphere, xiv, 48, 136, 199, 203, 242. See also Brake, Laurel; Habermas, Jürgen Deverell, Walter, 5 Dickens, Charles, xx, 11; “Old Lamps for New Ones,” 90, 103 “display of absence,” 58 Doughty, Oswald, 144, 148, 151, 160–64, 184 Dowling, Linda, 41 dramatic monologue, 75, 126 Dudley Gallery, 29, 36, 150, 217, 232; as alternative to Royal Academy, 30, 32 INDEX

Du Maurier, George, 28, 99, 107–11, 134, 209–10, 242; A Love Agony. Design by Maudle, 109; The Mutual Admirationists, 107; Nincompoopiana.— The Mutual Admiration Society, 266n104 Echo, 199, 202 Edinburgh Review, The, 15, 51, 86, 115, 148, 152, 241 Elfenbein, Andrew, 57 Eliot, George, 202 Eliot, T. S.: debt to Pater, 78, 111, 113; deprecation of aestheticism, 39, 78, 125–27; on Swinburne, 122, 237; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 111, 126; Yeats on, 125 Ellmann, Richard, 227–28 “emotional incontinence,” 56, 157, 171 “emotional intensity,” 7, 85, 115, 118–19, 126, 129, 227, 236 emotionalism, xx, 56, 96, 98, 104, 110, 187, 211, 228, 236 emotions of male bonding, xv, 232 Etty, William, 149, 222 Examiner, The, 8, 51, 138, 180, 182, 214; on Buchanan v. Taylor, 204, 207; and Cockney School of Poetry, xx, 52; on Swinburne, 69 falsettos, 53, 108, 195–197, 258n16, 280n91; and “emasculate verse,” 179, 240 fame vs. renown, xx, 17, 20, 53, 55, 57–58, 99, 134, 174 femme fatale archetype, 42, 63, 75, 85, 115, 168, 243 Fleshly School controversy, 33, 50, 53, 98, 121, 157, 161, 175–208, 210, 232; critical anonymity v. signed articles in, xxi, 71, 176–78; Gabriel Rossetti [ 317 ]

Fleshly School controversy (cont.) on The Stealthy School of Criticism, 178, 277n15; Swinburne’s Under the Microscope, 69, 180. See also Buchanan, Robert; Knowles, James; Rossetti, Gabriel; Rossetti, William Michael; Strahan, Alexander flesh-painting, 148, 150 Ford, Ford Madox [Hueffer], 29, 146, 156 Ford, Julia Ellsworth, 28 Forman, Henry Buxton, 179 Fortnightly Review, xviii, 26, 63–64, 95, 137, 150, 180, 200, 213, 237; and signature, xxi, 62, 67, 175–76, 183. See also Lewes, George Henry; Morley, John Foucault, Michel, 105 Fraser’s Magazine, 68, 70, 137 “fraternity for championship,” xiv, 16, 135, 183 Freedman, Jonathan, 100, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 162, 173, 230, 243 Frith, William Powell, 2, 6; Derby Day, 15; “Sherry, Sir?,” 15 Fry, Roger, 39, 102, 130; debt to Pater, 112; “esthetic emotion,” 118, 267n125; formalist criteria of, 112, 117; on Rossetti, 117 Fun, 47, 66–67, 69, 122, 179, 222 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 111, 113–14 Gagnier, Regenia, 100 Galaxy, The, 101 Gautier, Théophile, xvi, 56, 121–22, 193; review of PRB, 80–82, 113, 131 Geertz, Clifford: “densely textured facts,” 2 gender: anxious revaluation of, xvi, 50, 98, 104, 142, 197, 210–11, 243; gender dissidence, 42, 44, 73, 97, 106, 110, [ 318 ]

143, 191, 215, 228; and effeminacy, xx, 36, 50, 53–55, 60, 66, 74–75, 93, 96, 99, 187, 190, 195–97, 224–25; modernization of mores and values, xxiii, 45, 70, 109, 115, 246; sexual and gender “inversion,” 65–66, 93, 104–105, 170, 196, 217, 222, 224–25, 234 genius, 4, 25, 67, 81, 87, 144, 168, 245; aberrant genius of Baudelaire, 193; aberrant genius of Burne-Jones, 213–16; aberrant genius of Byron, 54–57, 85; aberrant genius of Coleridge, 57; aberrant genius of Keats, 54; aberrant genius of Rossetti, 56, 111, 115, 118, 128, 133, 135, 138, 140, 148, 153, 157, 159, 161, 167, 183; aberrant genius of Shelley, 55–57, 72; aberrant genius of Solomon, 29–30, 33, 200, 227–28; aberrant genius of Swinburne, 56, 63, 85–87, 122, 188; bohemian indifference of genius, xvii, 13, 57; Buchanan’s genius and use of term, 182, 183, 189, 194, 196, 201, 208; charismatic genius, xiv, xx, 14, 20, 55–56, 87, 115, 140; clubbable genius, xi, 25, 81, 245; marketable genius, 57, 99–100; reclusive genius, xx, 17, 18, 39, 55, 57–58, 244; solitary and misunderstood genius, xvii, 15, 17, 32, 44, 57, 99, 103, 217, 244 Germ, The, xiv, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 263n38 Gilbert and Sullivan, 199; Patience, xix, 98–100, 103–4 “The Gospel of Intensity,” 37, 95, 236. See also Quilter, Harry Gosse, Edmund, xxi, 18, 91, 120, 209, 212, 242, 262n103 Gothic Revival, 10–11, 90, 92, 103, 116. See also Pugin, Augustus Welby INDEX

Greenberg, Clement, 6 Grieve, Alastair, 91 Grosvenor Gallery, xi, xv, xxi, 36, 239; and aestheticism, xv, 36; as alternative to Royal Academy, 213; and Burne-Jones, xvi, 89–90, 104, 209–38, 239–40; caricatures of, 103–5, 219, 222–23, 266n92, 268n168; Gabriel Rossetti’s absence, 213; review by Henry James, 209–38; review by Oscar Wilde, 39, 105, 227–28, 239, 265n81 Habermas, Jürgen, 47 Hamilton, Walter: The Aesthetic Movement in England, 98–99 Harrison, Frederic, 64, 210 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 52, 54 Hazlitt, William, xx, 52–55, 217 H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], 78, 120, 127–29 Hearn, Jeff, 25 Hellenism, 26–27, 41, 64, 68, 98, 103, 106, 193 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 82, 85 Henderson, Philip, 85, 231 Hilliard, David, 93 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1–2 Hollyer, Frederick, 227; Love and Lust (after Solomon), 35 Homoeroticism, xv–xvi, 20, 42, 96, 105, 127, 141–43, 168, 189, 192, 206, 230. See also specific names and topics Homophobia and homosexual panic, 64, 92–93, 95–96, 108, 121, 127, 159, 194, 211, 233; among PRB circle following Solomon’s arrest, 23, 25–27; backlash against Wilde, xv, 36, 102; and Buchanan, 192 Homosexuality, xv, 25, 55, 76, 93, 127, 141, 189, 193, 210, 225, 227, 232; homosocial continuum and male INDEX

monocultures, 25, 27, 44, 88, 145, 164, 187, 191, 240, 244; of Solomon, 26, 28–29, 32, 34, 164, 170–71, 222, 229; Victorian homosexual codes, 28, 41, 98, 105, 211–12, 223, 226, 228, 239; Victorian homosexual codes used by Buchanan, 66, 190–91, 194, 206; Victorian homosexual codes used by and about Swinburne, 26, 86, 191; and Wilde, 28, 41, 102, 105, 128 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 115, 125 Hotten, John Camden, 60, 231 Houghton, Lord [Richard Monckton Milnes], 85–87, 189, 202, 210, 260n62 Howell, Charles Augustus, 273n83; and disinterment of Elizabeth Siddall, 151, 161; salacious correspondence with Swinburne, 230–31 Hughes, Arthur, 88, 104, 150, 154 Hunt, Leigh. See Cockney School of Poetry; Examiner, The Hunt, William Holman, 2, 4, 21, 78, 82, 100, 104, 128, 213; archaism and angularity in, 38, 78, 88, 92; correspondence with John Lucas Tupper, 136–37, 150; deprecation of Rossetti’s coarseness, 153–54; and founding of PRB, 6–7, 13; painting technique, 7, 80–81, 131; relations with clients, 3, 16; religious convictions of, 34, 91–92; rivalry with Rossetti, 16–17, 136–37, 141, 154; and Ruskin, 80, 89; “spoilt by immense popularity,” 16, 28; “truth to nature,” 7–8, 36, 80, 131 Hunt, William Holman, works of: Awakening Conscience, 3, 4, 8–9; Our English Coasts, 80–81, 81; The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 16; The Hireling Shepherd, 8; Light of the World, 8; The Scapegoat, 131 [ 319 ]

Jaffe, Aaron, xxii James, Henry, 209; on aesthetic movement, 209–38; attraction and aversion to sexual alterity, 210–11, 215, 224–25, 227–28, 233–34; “The Author of Beltraffio,” 102, 209, 211–12, 216; on Burne-Jones, 209–38; and Pater, 210–11, 227, 233, 235–36; re-mediation of debates within Victorian art criticism, 210, 212, 214–16, 220, 224–25; on Rossetti, 209, 211–12; on “sister arts,” 212, 222, 228, 238; on Swinburne, 211, 233–38 Jauss, Hans Robert, xxii; “horizon of expectations,” 38, 111; “original negativity” of work, 74, 116 Jay, Harriet: Robert Buchanan: Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships, 137, 190, 278n40 Kaye, Richard, xv, 248n7, 248n11 Keats, John, 18, 53, 61, 66, 72, 126, 198; and Cockney School of Poetry, 52, 54, 65; effeminacy of, 54, 56; and emotional intensity, 241 Kestner, Joseph, 222 Klingender, Francis, 3 Knowles, James, 177, 183, 210, 277n10 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 27 Kohut, Heinz, 42–44 Kuspit, Donald, 71, 173–74, 245 Lafourcade, Georges, 232–33 Leighton, Frederic, 25, 36, 104, 149, 150, 212 Leonardo da Vinci, 153 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Laocoön, 212 Lewes, George Henry, xxi, 175–76, 183; relations with Buchanan, 189, 200–202. See also Fortnightly Review [ 320 ]

Lewis, Wyndham, xxii, 130 Leyland, Frederick, 23, 25 literary periodicals: coterie journalism, xiii, xvii, 40, 50, 52, 62, 70, 103, 106, 179–180; editorial control and policy, 62, 175–78; expansion of periodical press, xiii–xiv, 14, 31, 47–52, 203; stoking scandal and notoriety, xvi, xxi, 29, 34, 55, 58, 60, 70, 99, 195, 208, 217. See also negative publicity; puffery; succès de scandale Lockhart, John Gibson, 54, 66, 181; use of alias, xxi. See also Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; Cockney School of Poetry London Journal, The, 9, 96, 100 London Quarterly Review, The, 67, 207 London Review, The, 61, 63, 67, 224 Lowe, Donald, 2 MacCarthy, Fiona, 116 MacLeod, Dianne Sachko, xii, 3, 13, 84, 102, 138 Macmillan’s Magazine, 210 Mansbridge, Norman, 122; Her First Audition, 124 Marcus, Laura, 17 Marcus, Sharon, xix–xx Marx, Karl, 5 Masefield, John, 118–19, 128–29, 156, 167 McCarthy, Justin, 40, 107, 228 McGann, Jerome, 125, 135–36, 171 medievalism, 1, 11, 25, 30, 38, 78, 90–92, 103–4, 108, 234; and homoerotic chivalry, 42, 86–88; modern medievalism, 10, 112–14, 115–17, 120; Oxford Union murals, 88, 241 Meisel, Perry, 113 Millais, John Everett, xv, 29, 34, 78, 88, 104, 227; as boy wonder of Royal INDEX

Academy, 6, 31; Catholic themes of, 90–92; critical censure by traditionalists, 9, 20, 38, 90, 94; founding of PRB, 6, 13; painting technique, 7, 131; as royal academician, 16, 20; and Ruskin, 87, 89–90, 94; “spoilt by immense popularity,” 16, 20–22, 28; “truth to nature,” 7, 36, 94, 113 Millais, John Everett, works of: The Blind Girl, 94; Christ in the House of His Parents, 90; A Dream of the Past—Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 82, 83; Isabella, 6; Mariana, 90; Ophelia, 81 modernism, 4, 15, 135, 167; aestheticism as precursor to, 75, 78, 102–3, 129–30, 168, 242, 246; and high modernism, 79, 111, 119–22, 124–25; and imprimatur, xxii; knocks Pre-Raphaelitism off the avantgarde continuum, xii, xxii, 78, 111, 119, 122, 124–25, 128, 237, 242; lesbian modernism, 78, 119–21, 127; Pre-Raphaelite brainwork, 113–14. See also specific authors and subjects Moore, Albert, 104, 114, 149 Moore, George, 210 Morgan, Thais, 25, 32, 93, 194, 223, 229, 248n9, 280n88 Morley, John, xviii, xxi, 62–64, 95, 106, 176, 183, 203, 210, 237 Morris, Jane, 141, 209; intimacy with Gabriel Rossetti, 160–62, 172 Morris, William, xix, 4, 21, 41, 62, 100, 121, 149, 177, 209, 228–29; joins “jovial campaign,” 88; Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 102–3; Oxford with Burne-Jones, 88; Pater on poetry by, 97, 112, 114; relations with Rossetti, 19, 88, 137, 141, 143; socialism of, 128 INDEX

Murray, Christopher, 202–3 Museum of Modern Art: Masters of British Painting 1800–1950 (1956), 131 “mutual admiration society,” xiv, 53, 70, 107, 179, 196, 228 Myers, Frederic W. H., 108, 153, 210; “depth and remoteness of gaze” of Rossetti’s models, 168; on Rossetti’s “religion of beauty,” 20 National Gallery, London, 9, 79 National Magazine, The, 9 Nazarenes, xii, 9–10, 92–93 negative publicity, xvi, xx–xxi, 14, 29, 49, 52, 58, 60–61, 180. See also succès du scandale Nineteenth Century, 89–90, 210, 213 Noble, John Ashcroft, 14–15, 92 Nordau, Max, 110, 161, 241 Norton, Charles Eliot, 209; correspondence with Ruskin, 56, 144, 146 nude figures: in abeyance, 149; in aestheticism, 85, 149–50; male, 42, 105, 168, 217, 220, 222–24, 228 Old Water-Colour Society, 216–17 Oxford, 39, 79, 241; alma mater of coteries, 19, 62, 87, 95, 105, 184, 225, 232; and coded homoeroticism, 41, 59, 88, 93, 95, 96, 105, 193, 214, 228; and Oxford movement, 92–93, 96 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The, 87–88 Page, H. A. [Alexander Hay Japp], 59, 68–69 Pall Mall Gazette, 137, 181; policy of anonymity, 177 Paris Exposition Universelle (1855), 80 Pasinetti, Pier, 58 [ 321 ]

Pater, Walter, xv, 110, 210; aesthetic criticism, xix, xxi, 97, 126, 139, 211, 228, 237; “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” 112; antiquarianism, 88, 95; and avantgarde antiquarianism, xxii, 111–14; “to burn always with a hard gem-like flame,” 97; enigmatic reputation building of, 57, 95; and Fortnightly Review, xxi, 63–64; “fugitive moment” (contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous heritage), 78, 91, 97, 111–13; Hellenism and (more) manly desire, 26, 63, 98, 105, 211, 227, 233, 237; imaginative prose essay, 63, 98, 237–38; influence on Wilde, 103, 105, 237; Oxford, 95–96, 232; reticence and self-control of, 26, 95, 98, 232, 236; and Rossetti, 7, 18, 97–98, 138, 153, 172; on sensuous impressionism, 95–98, 115, 172, 233; and Solomon, 26, 110; and Swinburne, 63, 237–38 Pater, Walter, works of: “Poems by William Morris,” 97, 112, 114; The Renaissance (Studies in the History of the Renaissance), xxi, 64, 95, 111–12, 115, 238 Patience, xix, 98–100, 103–4 Patmore, Coventry, 75, 80, 82 Payne, J. B., 66 Peckham, Morse, 4 philistine incomprehension of aestheticism, xix, 64, 70, 103, 122, 173, 205, 216, 218, 236, 245; philistinism in general, 57, 72, 96, 99, 232 plagiarism, 181, 185, 245 Plampin, Matthew, 14 “Platonist” as euphemism, 26 Poe, Edgar Allan, 161 [ 322 ]

poet laureates, xviii, 55, 69, 71–76, 82, 200 Pollock, Griselda, 141–43, 149, 151, 168 Pound, Ezra, 116; artists as “antennae of race,” 246; on Buchanan and Fleshly School of Poetry, 76–77, 121–22; definitional formula for modernism, 112, 120; on “emotional intensity,” 118; Hugh Selwyn Moberly, 121–22; knocks aestheticism off the modernist continuum, 78, 120, 121; on Rossetti, 118; on Swinburne, 76, 120, 127, 242 PRB, 100; aesthetic counter-culture, xi–xii, xv–xvii, 4–5, 12, 15, 25, 29, 44–45, 50, 57, 82, 85, 222; avantgarde antiquarianism of, xii, xiv, 8, 10, 104, 113, 131; as avant-garde movement, xi–xiii, xvi–xvii, xxii, 1, 5–6, 10, 14, 44, 85, 94, 102, 119, 136; and bourgeois patrons, xii, 5, 13–14, 16, 136, 183; expansiveness of category: Pre-Raphaelite, xv–xvi, 9, 34–42, 78, 100–104, 110, 240; The Germ and print mediation of repute, xiv, xvii, 9–10, 12, 14, 50, 70, 78, 216; literary models of PRB, 7, 35, 95; and quattrocento painters, xii, 7, 9–10, 34, 93, 213; Rossetti as standard bearer of PRB principles, xvii, 10, 16–17, 20, 34, 107, 116, 134; Ruskin’s championship of, xiv, xxi, 3, 78–80, 82–85, 87, 89–92, 94, 113, 215; and “sincerity,” 7–8, 12–13, 16, 136, 183; and “truth to nature,” xii, 7–8, 34, 80, 94, 130, 136. See also specific names and titles of works Prinsep, Valentine, 19, 88, 150, 241 Psomiades, Kathy, 119–20, 171 puffery, 70, 86, 109, 186, 231; and Cockney School of Poetry, 52–54; INDEX

and Fleshly School of Poetry, xxi, 176, 179–80; objections to, xxi, 40, 70, 176, 179; of Rossetti’s renown, 18, 136–38, 159; utility for authors, critics, publishers, xxi, 29, 180 Pugin, Augustus Welby, 11 Punch, 66, 93, 98–99, 107–10, 121–22, 124, 218–19, 221, 223 Quarterly Review, The, 51, 54, 159 Quilter, Harry, 89, 92; “The New Renaissance; or, the Gospel of Intensity, ” 37, 39–40, 95, 101–2, 107, 234, 236, 238 Rank, Otto, 244–45 Reader, 60–61, 68 reception history and theory, xvi, xx–xxii, 2, 51, 73, 111, 117, 244–46; and mystique of doomed genius, 17–18, 129, 133, 139, 154, 159; and PRB, 44, 62, 77–78, 94, 100, 128–29; queer partisanship and homophobic backlash against aestheticism, 32, 121, 129, 220, 227, 234 Reed, Christopher, xxii reputational capital, 14, 17, 79, 241 reticence, xxi, 50, 55–56, 58, 73, 79, 98, 155, 164–65, 174, 179, 228, 236 Richmond, W. B.:“Take me, take my Trunk.” By E. Burne-Jones, or, ‘Ty-Burn Jones, for the deadly liveliness of the figures, 221 Roach, Joseph, xviii Robertson, John, 38, 224, 241 romantic poets: charismatic personality of, xx, 55, 58; dissipated virtuosity of, xx, 55–57, 65, 95; effeminacy of, xx, 54, 196–97; “emotional incontinence” of, 56; épater le bourgeois, 57, 65; participation in print INDEX

controversies, 51–52, 54–55, 60–61, 65; and Pre-Raphaelites, 18, 66, 126, 198, 241; reticent celebrity of, xx, 55, 57–58; self-revelation and eccentricity, 55. See also specific names and topics Rosenblum, Robert, 131 Ross, Robert, 27, 110, 171, 227 Rossetti, Christina, 167; “In an Artist’s Studio,” 33, 168; “Who Shall Deliver Me?,” 169 Rossetti, Gabriel, xv, 2, 4, 7, 99, 105, 108, 116, 127, 209, 212, 215, 239; and acolytes, 34, 41, 88–89, 140–41, 165–67; “abstention from market for culture,” 16, 20–23, 28, 57, 109–10, 133–36, 172–74; addiction, breakdowns, and mental illness of, 18, 110, 118, 128, 133–34, 148, 154–55, 157–61, 163, 241; aesthetic celebrity of, xvii, xix, 17–18, 56, 58–59, 101, 107, 110, 118, 133–34, 139, 151, 167, 174, 211, 228, 242; arranges puffs for Poems (1870), xxi, 18, 136–37; bohemianism of, xvii, xix, 20, 22–23, 82, 109, 118–19, 135, 138, 142, 170, 240–41; and Burne-Jones, xvi, 32, 36, 88–89, 140–41, 143, 170, 217, 224, 241; Catholic art, 9, 91–94; changes name, 17; charismatic authority of, xvii, 18–20, 23, 58, 111, 128, 133, 138–40, 159, 166–67, 241; defective drawing of, 33, 133, 139, 148, 216; double-work of art, xi, 97, 109, 118–19, 129, 138, 140, 150, 246; and Elizabeth Siddall, 4, 143–48, 151–52, 157–58, 160–63; exhumation of manuscript, 148, 151–52, 161–62; and Fanny Cornforth, 147–48, 152, 160; and Fleshly School controversy, 72–73, 98, 157, 161, 175–208; [ 323 ]

Rossetti, Gabriel (cont.) flesh-painting, 148, 150; half-length portraits by, 148–49; “inner standing point,” 125–26; and Jane Morris, 141, 160–63, 172; “pot-boilers,” 136, 270n14; and PRB, 5–7, 9–10, 13, 16, 34–38, 40–41, 88, 100, 104, 130, 136; realizing literary fashions in life, 17, 151, 161–64, 172; reclusiveness and reluctance to exhibit, xvii, xx, 16, 18, 21–22, 28, 58, 95, 131, 134–35, 213, 244; “regenerate rapture,” 98, 151, 160; relations with Ruskin, 82–87, 89, 94, 143–47; repetition of facial type, 33, 160, 168, 215, 224; replicas of artwork, 21, 136, 139, 152; in “shilling biographies,” 84, 133–34, 155–56; and Solomon, xvi, 23, 25–28, 32–33, 36, 38, 140, 164, 170–171; “special moment” of, 97; “stunners,” 115, 140, 143, 148, 154, 163, 170; and Swinburne, 34, 38, 56, 59, 61, 63, 70, 75, 128, 134, 137, 158–59, 164, 217, 229–31, 237–38, 240; watercolors by, 21, 89, 117; and William Bell Scott, 18–19, 136, 157, 161, 165 Rossetti, Gabriel, art works of: Beata Beatrix, 21, 22, 118, 151–53, 163; Bocca Baciata, 148–49, 150, 153–54; The Death of Lady Macbeth, 163, 164; Ecce Ancilla Domini, 94; Found, 4, 148; The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 6–7; G. P. Boyce and Fanny Cornforth in Rossetti’s Studio, Chatham Place, 142; Lady Lilith, 143, 168, 169, 233, 238; La Pia de’ Tolomei, 172, 173; Venus Verticordia, 85, 146, 147, 150, 154; The Wedding of St. George and Princess Sabra, 117 Rossetti, Gabriel, poetry works of: Dante and His Circle, 28, 88, 118, 125, 138; “Jenny,” 115, 126, 180–81; [ 324 ]

“Nuptial Sleep,” 56, 200; “Willowwood,” 119, 167. See also specific titles and topics Rossetti, William Michael, 29, 177; on anonymity, 175; antipathy to “Scotch Poetaster” Buchanan, 66, 184, 198; as chronicler of Gabriel Rossetti’s life and work, xvii, 10, 17–18, 21, 25, 27, 116–17, 136–37, 146, 156–57, 160–61; denial of knowledge of Solomon after 1870, 27–28, 32; and PRB, 6, 10; on puffery, 159, 179; and Swinburne, 26, 34, 60, 66, 73, 198; and Whitman, 206 Ruskin, John, xix, 5, 209, 228, 239; on anachronism, 113; authorship and renown of, xxi, 79–80, 89–90; and Burne-Jones, 87–89, 215; character and personality of, 82, 84–85, 87, 89, 110, 145; correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton, 56, 144, 146; defense of PRB, xiv, 3, 15, 78, 80, 82, 94, 113, 199; devotion to Swinburne, 85–86; marriage and divorce of, 87, 89; “masterpiece fixer,” xxi, 79, 89; patronage relationships of, 82, 84–89; and Rossetti, 82–87, 89, 94, 143–47, 152, 154, 215; Slade Professorship of Fine Art, Oxford, 39; “Torquemada of aesthetics,” 110; views on Catholic art and themes, 90–94; and Working Men’s College, 84 Ruskin, John, works of: Modern Painters, 7, 79, 80; “The Nature of Gothic,” 94; The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, 89, 91, 94 Sala, George Augustus, 23, 24 Sandys, Frederick: A Nightmare (1857), 82, 83, 84 INDEX

Saturday Review, 61, 107, 116, 129, 156–57, 180, 204–6; policy of anonymity, 177–79 Scott, William Bell, 18–19, 136, 157, 161, 165 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 20, 96, 141, 231 “self-criticism,” 40, 70, 176, 178, 180–81 Sennett, Richard, xviii–xix Sharp, William, 18, 79, 84, 88, 92, 118, 130, 139, 155, 163, 165, 167 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, xx, 52, 54–56, 61, 65, 72, 175, 196–97 Shepard, Ernest Howard: The PreRaphaelite Cocktail Party, 121 Siddall, Elizabeth: artistic ability of, 143–45; buried with and exhumation of manuscript, 148, 151–52, 161–62; relations with Rossetti, 4, 143–48, 151–52, 157–58, 160–63; and Ruskin, 143–47; Swinburne’s affection for, 157–58; working class origins of, 4, 143, 151 signature: signed articles, xiii, xxi, 50, 52, 58, 70, 183; and expertise and rise of professional critic, xxi, 51, 70, 74, 79, 175–78 “sincerity,” xii, xxi, 1, 7–8, 9, 12–14, 16, 56, 68, 119, 126, 136, 176, 178, 182–83 “sister arts,” xi, 122, 149, 212, 222, 228, 238; Pater: “all art constantly aspires towards condition of music,” 112; and synesthesia, 130, 170 Skelton, John, 70, 137 Solomon, Simeon, 32, 78, 110, 164, 171; and alcohol, 26–27, 32, 164; androgynous models and male nudes, 25, 29–30, 33–34, 42, 44, 109, 200, 222, 224–25; arrested attempting to commit sodomy, 26–27, 222, 230, 240, 254n98; as Catholic convert, 32, 232; defective drawing, 29–30, 33; INDEX

disowned by friends, xv–xvi, 23, 26–29, 32, 239–40; and Dudley Gallery, 29–30, 32, 36, 150, 217, 232; exhibits at Royal Academy, 30–31; Jewish identity and themes of, 25, 31, 211–12, 232; Pater and classical influences, 26, 105, 211, 231; praised by Burne-Jones, 25; repetition of facial type, 33, 224; ribald correspondence and friendship with Swinburne, 26, 159, 164, 229–30, 231–32; and Rossetti’s inner circle, xv–xvi, 25–26, 28, 140, 177, 240; Rossetti-like technique, 32–33, 130, 170, 224; as standard-bearer for Pre-Raphaelites in 1860s and early 1870s, xv–xvi, 29, 32, 34, 36, 38, 214 Solomon, Simeon, works of: Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 106, 225; Bacchus, 26, 30, 150; The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, 200, 201; Habet!, 200, 229; Heliogabalous: High Priest of the Sun, 30; Love Amongst the School Boys, 229; Love Bound and Wounded, 222; Love and Lust, 33, 35, 230; One Dreaming by the Sea, 29, 31; Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 225; Sleeping Endymion, 171; Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 227–28, 231–32 Spectator, 61, 149, 202; policy of anonymity, 177, 180 Spender, Stephen, 125, 128–31, 244 “statue love,” 120, 127 St Clair, William, 48, 51 Steiner, Wendy, 130 Stephens, Frederic George, 2, 6, 9, 18, 29–30, 134, 137–38, 150, 154, 180, 255n109 Strahan, Alexander, 177 [ 325 ]

succès de scandale, xvi, 34, 58, 60, 70, 195 Sully, James, 210–11 Sussman, Herbert, 141–43 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 69, 98–99, 184; and alcohol, 26, 164, 204, 242; “birching” and sadomasochistic fantasy, 126, 229–31, 233–35, 238; and Buchanan, 65–69, 180–82, 184–86, 188, 192, 194–98, 202–4, 206–7; and Burne-Jones, 234; and Charles Augustus Howell, 230–31; controversy over Poems and Ballads, xi, xvi, xviii, xxi, 34, 42, 60–66, 69–70, 73, 85, 184, 186, 188, 195, 198, 231, 234, 236, 240; on David Gray, 184–86, 188–89; and Fleshly School controversy, 177–82, 194–98; imaginative prose essay of, 63, 237; and Lord Houghton, 85–87, 260n62; and Rossetti, 34, 38, 56, 59, 61, 63, 70, 75, 128, 134, 137, 158–59, 164, 217, 229–31, 237–38, 240; Ruskin’s devotion to, 85–86; and Solomon, 26, 159, 164, 229–30, 231–32; “Swinburne school of artists,” xvi, 29, 217 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, works of: “Anactoria,” 61, 65, 75, 86, 195; “Dolores,” 61, 63, 75, 85, 120, 191, 230; “Faustine,” 28, 75, 85, 121, 127, 202, 229; “Fragoletta,” 127, 232; “Hermaphroditus,” 61, 75, 232, 280n88; “Laus Veneris,” 234–35; “Mr. Arnold’s New Poems,” 184–85; “Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence,” 63, 237–38; Notes on Poems and Reviews, 60, 65, 86; “Simeon Solomon’s Vision of Love,” 231; “Tennyson and Musset,” 236; Under the Microscope, 69, 180 [ 326 ]

symbolist movement, 103, 129–30, 168–70, 172 Symonds, John Addington, 210, 212, 228 Symons, Arthur, 168, 170–72 Taylor, Tom, 29, 33, 37, 92, 100, 195, 214, 217, 220, 234 Temple Bar, 23 Tennyson, Alfred, 70, 74–76, 82, 188, 189, 194, 197, 200, 207; and Arthur Hallam, 73, 192; as middle-class literature, 71–72; reticence of, 73 Teukolsky, Rachel, xxii Times, The (London), xiv, 3, 8, 79–80, 90, 213 Trilling, Lionel, 12 Tupper, John Lucas, 5; correspondence with Hunt, 136–37, 150, 154 Vanity Fair, 29, 208, 228 Watts, George Frederic, 36, 86, 89, 104, 149, 171 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 18, 128, 133, 138, 155–56, 158, 159, 165, 274n101 Waugh, Evelyn, 128–29, 141, 148, 151–53, 154, 156, 160–61; on “aesthetic emotion,” 118, 153 Wedmore, Frederick, 104, 114, 210, 234 Westminster Review, 137, 189; policy of anonymity, 63, 180 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 4, 104, 209, 228, 239, 242 White, Hayden: “blurred genres,” 159; “emplotment,” 134 Wilde, Oscar, xxi, 236–37, 244; aesthetic celebrity of, xix–xx, 5, 69, 78, 99–100, 105, 133, 155, 239, 240; caricatured in Victorian media, 100, INDEX

104, 110, 265n81; and Grosvenor Gallery, 39, 105, 227, 239, 265n81; homosexuality and trials of, xv–xvi, 28, 29, 41–42, 56, 102, 106, 127, 128, 171, 191, 227–28, 232, 235, 243; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 95, 105–6, 165; Pre-Raphaelite affiliation, xix, xxiii, 36, 41, 57, 75–76, 78, 99–100, 105, 111, 211, 227–28, 239; self-promotion of, xiv, xix, 102–3, 109–11, 236 Wildman, Stephen, 84, 89

INDEX

Williams, Raymond, 4, 6; on “selective tradition,” xxiii, 74, 77 Woolf, Virginia, 78 Wordsworth, William, 61, 72, 75, 114, 184–86, 198; reticence of, 56 World, The, 208 Wornum, Ralph, 38, 85, 91 Yates, Edmund, 208 Yeats, W. B., 105, 112, 113, 116, 125, 129, 167

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Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development Susan Fraiman The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture Terry Castle George Sand and Idealism Naomi Schor Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels Rachel M. Brownstein Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory Rosi Braidotti Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought Edited by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality Jay Prosser A Certain Age: Reflecting on Menopause Edited by Joanna Goldsworthy Mothers in Law: Feminist Theory and the Legal Regulation of Motherhood Edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Isabelle Karpin Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century Susan Gubar Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism Nancy Bauer Pursuing Privacy in Cold War Amer ica Deborah Nelson But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives Nancy K. Miller Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness Edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser Cool Men and the Second Sex Susan Fraiman Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life Victoria Rosner Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity Christine Froula The Scandal of Susan Sontag Edited by Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory Lynne Huffer Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics Hillary L. Chute

Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody Carolyn Williams Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2d ed. Rosi Braidotti Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory Edited by Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma Barbara Will Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti Rosi Braidotti The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time Edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins Susan Fraiman “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs Tahneer Oksman Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives Leigh Gilmore

Gender and Culture Readers Modern Feminisms: Political, Literary, Cultural Edited by Maggie Humm Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader Edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory Edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury