Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism

5. Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante

171 f i v e Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti To Art: I loved thee ere I loved a woman, Love. — d a n t e g a b r i e l r o s s e t t i On the Surface . . . . . . no artist appears more appropriate than Dante Gabriel Rossetti for inclusion in a study of the aestheticism that emerges in the wake of Romanticism. “Five English Poets,” the late sonnet-sequence Rossetti composed on the topic of Romantic poetry, is arguably the most engaged Victorian reading we have of Romantic poetics and is one index of Rossetti’s acute sense, even late in life, of his participation in what Wilde called “our Romantic movement.” Indeed, one consequence of Rossetti’s various reflections on and reprises of Romanticism is to restore the aestheticism that was always at work in those “Five English Poets.” Art-Lover, Art-Catholic: on the surface, no Victorian writer appears more suited than Rossetti to an examination of the aestheticism of which he was accused and that he courted. And yet none of the writers I am considering seems a less likely candidate than Dante Gabriel Rossetti for an exploration of the radicality of aestheticism . Rossetti’s aestheticism seems too obvious, too apparent to be regarded as radical in any genuine sense. From the beginning with Rossetti there has 172 Superficiality been the perception of slightness, in the poetry, the pictures, and the subsequent criticism of both. Each of the authors I have addressed to this point has elicited a distinguished record of criticism. The same cannot be said for Rossetti : with some notable exceptions, the history of Rossetti criticism possesses none of the power or distinction of the critical heritages of Shelley or Keats, Dickinson, or Hopkins.1 This is not to say that there have not been insightful contributions to Rossetti criticism from distinguished scholars; but there is something about the work of this poet-painter from which our major critics have turned away, something in Rossetti that fails to elicit the kind of book or article in literary studies that everyone in the field is expected to read, something that prevents scholars from engaging Rossetti’s poetics in the way that Wasserman reads Shelley or that Cameron reads Dickinson. Whether it is the dense and often forbidding sonnets, many of which exhibit a musicality almost bereft of meaning, the depthless surfaces of the paintings, the rhetorical acrobatics of the poems, or the apparently superficial images and merely decorative details of poems as well as paintings, Rossetti’s work provokes either cultish connoisseurship or critical aversion. It is not merely that Rossetti’s contribution appears too slight to warrant sustained critical attention: there is something about Rossetti and his poems and pictures that strike readers and viewers as superficial. It is my belief that such a judgment of Rossetti is not so much wrong as its fundamental “rightness” has been fundamentally misevaluated . My argument here is that the genuine significance of Rossetti—and the special form of his acute engagement with a radical aestheticism—is best grasped not in spite of, but by virtue of his superficiality. I invoke “superficiality” both as a description and as a judgment, the latter of which is more ethical than aesthetic in nature, and one that is routinely invoked not only in the case of Rossetti’s painting and poetry, but as a response to any form of aestheticism. If, for example, we follow Hegel and understand the aesthetic as “the sensory manifestation of the Idea,” this understanding implies the perpetual risk not only that “sensory manifestation” might obscure or even negate the “Idea,” but that mere sensory manifestation might itself come to be regarded as the Idea. By definition the superficial is simply that which pertains to the surface or that which takes place on the surface. As such superficiality refers to an inherent quality of the medium of painting and is particularly pertinent for the pictures of this poet-painter for whom the name “Pre-Raphaelite” referred to the immediacy of the surface in the old Italian artists he most admired. This “superficiality” is visible in the image reproduced above: Giotto Painting Dante’s Portrait (c.1859), a faux fresco What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti 173...