Intrinsic Earthliness: Science, Materialism, and the Fleshly School of Poetry

Abstract

DURING THE ARDUOUS PERIOD IN WHICH HE WAS WRITING HIS HIGHLY WROUGHT historical novel Marius Epicurean, Walter Pater published only one minor unsigned review. In March 1883, however, he agreed, albeit rather hesitantly, to request from his friend Thomas Humphry Ward that he contribute brief introductory essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti to revised second edition of The English Poets which Ward was then compiling. (1) Pater had already followed same format three years earlier, when he had written short essay on poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for first edition of Ward's exhaustive four-volume anthology. While Coleridge had been dead for almost half century and was widely revered as one of principal progenitors of English Romanticism, Rossetti had died--a prerequisite for inclusion anthology--in only previous April, and his sensuously erotic verse was still subject of considerable controversy. Pater nevertheless resolved to put aside for time his nascent novel of Antonine Rome and instead attempt to restore reputation of literary associate he had admired so greatly and whose work was closely connected with development of aesthetic movement (Letters, p. 44). Although it appeared as part of monumental publishing project that aimed at selecting best from... vast and varied field of English poetry ... pronouncing its judgements with some degree of authority and which begins with grandiloquent general introduction by Matthew Arnold, brief essay which prefaces Pater's selection of Rossetti's verse does not aspire to such exalted critical disinterestedness. (2) Rather, it is decisive intervention fervid and protracted dispute over Rossetti's poetry which had begun at opening of previous decade, and had recently been re-ignited by his chloral-induced death. One of principal accusations made against literary value of Rossetti's contentious verse was that its flagrant advocacy of sensual animalism and apparent rejection of ethical precepts enjoined by Christianity it advanced philosophy that was distinctly materialistic. By this, Rossetti's critics meant not merely an artistic concern with material aspects of objects, but deliberate prioritization of physical body over spiritual soul, which could lead only to an atheistic unbelief. Materialism is not coherent doctrine; its most fundamental proposition is simply that nothing exists independently of matter, with even human consciousness being at some level correlate of mechanical activities of nervous system. During nineteenth century, moreover, acceptance of such thoroughgoing materialism was confined almost exclusively to German scientists and philosophers, for whom it formed part of wider miscellany of atheistic and anticlerical convictions. (3) The term was nevertheless deployed frequently Victorian Britain as pejorative label that could be used to tarnish reputation of those who challenged old tradition of natural theology and instead insisted on naturalistic -- though not materialistic --understanding of universe. With bloody horrors of French Revolution widely blamed on godless philosophy of Enlightenment Encyclopedists such as Baron d'Holbach, materialism carried dangerous connotations of unBritish foreign heterodoxy as well as home-grown atheistic working-class radicalism. (4) These associations were particularly perturbing to scientific members of intellectual elite like Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. In books, public lectures, and periodical articles, both men scrupulously endeavored to dissociate their scientific positions from any hint of materialism, but they still found themselves labelled indiscriminately with precisely that offensive designation. According to Edinburgh Review, Huxley's naturalistic account of human descent Man's Place Nature (1863) was merely a revival, under more ingenious form of extravagant views of the French Encyclopedistes and doctrines of [d'Holbach's] 'System de la Nature,' which deserved to be called harsh names because it was in distinguishable from . …