The "Gold Bar of Heaven": Framing Objectivity in D. G. Rossetti's Poetry and Painting

In Lewis Carroll's novel Sylvie and Bruno, a "spectacled woman," whose conversation consists entirely of the philosophical cant of the day, pronounces to a group of alarmed party guests: "the Objective is only attainable through the Subjective!"¹ If, as Lorraine Daston argues, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's importation of Immanuel Kant to nineteenth-century England "crystallized an opposition of subjective and objective," for Coleridge himself and other romantics the preeminence of the subjective in this scheme "had yet to become a matter for regret or reproach."² By the mid-nineteenth century, however, objectivity had come to seem both newly desirable and disturbingly elusive, so that by the time of Carroll's 1880 novel the difficulty of achieving objectivity had become a cliché. Even in the natural sciences, where objectivity had come to be a core value, having replaced the traditional standard of "truth to nature," it was defined only negatively, as the absence of subjective distortion, and regarded as an unreachable, if laudable, goal.³

This oppositional epistemological framework had, of course, profound implications for those Victorian artists who, heirs of the romantics, regarded art as a vehicle for the exploration and manifestation of subjective experience. The contemporary reverence for the universality associated with objectivity squared uneasily with a conception of artistic production and consumption as idiosyncratic, and made the determination of the proper function and value of art, as witnessed in Ruskin's "A Joy Forever," an abiding critical preoccupation. Given that even contemporary economic theory—which aimed to provide a systematic account of social value—concerned itself with subjective desires and their effects on the market rather than the inherent qualities of commodities, it is perhaps unsurprising that the value of art should have seemed particularly liable to fluctuation.⁴ As William Morris lamented, "in spite of all the success I have had, I have not failed to be conscious that the art I have been helping to produce would fall with the death of a few of us who really care about it, that a reform in art which is founded on individualism must perish with the individuals who have set it going."⁵ In his preface to The Renaissance Walter Pater tries to do an end-run around the polarization of objective and subjective by means of a rhetorical sleight-of-hand:

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is. . . . The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals . . . are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces. . . . What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? . . . Does it give me pleasure?⁶

Whether deliberately or unwittingly, Pater entirely misconstrues the Arnoldian tenet with which he opens, slipping from the object into the depths of the subject. On the one hand Pater speaks of the beautiful object as a receptacle of "powers or forces," and on the other of strictly subjective responses to it. This vacillation appears to arise from the fact that the emphasis on the subjective nature of aesthetic pleasure threatens to undermine the aesthete's faith in the inherent value of the aesthetic object. In an aesthetics where the subject is so much more important than the object, the latter, in almost compensatory fashion, is described as bulging with "powers" and "forces."

Few Victorian artists have seemed to critics more resolutely individualist and idiosyncratic than D. G. Rossetti, whom one critic describes simply as a "subjective poet."⁷ Jerome McGann argues that this subjectivity is in fact so thoroughgoing that, like Blakean vision, it ultimately gives rise to poetic worlds that could be said to have their own "objective truth."⁸ I will argue, however, that the iconic character of Rossetti's art is a symptom not of achieved objectivity but of the difficulty of reconciling an investment in subjective experience with...