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

DURING THE ARDUOUS PERIOD IN WHICH HE WAS WRITING HIS HIGHLYWROUGHT historical novel Marius the Epicurean, Walter Pater published only one minor unsigned review. In March 1883, however, he agreed, albeit rather hesitantly, to a request from his friend Thomas Humphry Ward that he contribute a brief introductory essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the revised second edition of The English Poets which Ward was then compiling. ¹ Pater had already followed the same format three years earlier, when he had written a short essay on the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge for the first edition of Ward's exhaustive four-volume anthology. While Coleridge had been dead for almost half a century and was widely revered as one of the principal progenitors of English Romanticism, Rossetti had died—a prerequisite for inclusion in the anthology—in only the previous April, and his sensuously erotic verse was still the subject of considerable controversy. Pater nevertheless resolved to put aside for a time his nascent novel of Antonine Rome and instead attempt to restore the reputation of a literary associate he had "admired so greatly" and whose work was closely connected with the development of the aesthetic movement (Letters, p. 44). Although it appeared as part of a monumental publishing project that aimed at "selecting the best from . . . the vast and varied field of English poetry . . . pronouncing its judgements with some degree of authority" and which begins with a grandiloquent general introduction by Matthew Arnold, the brief essay which prefaces Pater's selection of Rossetti's verse does not aspire to such exalted critical disinterestedness. ² Rather, it is a decisive intervention in the fervid and protracted dispute over Rossetti's poetry which had begun at the opening of the previous decade, and had recently been re-ignited by his chloral-induced death.

One of the principal accusations made against the literary value of Rossetti's contentious verse was that in its flagrant advocacy of sensual animalism and apparent rejection of the ethical precepts enjoined by Christianity it advanced a philosophy that was distinctly materialistic. By this, Rossetti's critics meant not merely an artistic concern with the material aspects of objects, but the deliberate prioritization of the physical body over the spiritual soul, which could lead only to an atheistic unbelief. Materialism is not a coherent doctrine; its most fundamental proposition is simply that nothing exists independently of matter, with even human consciousness being at some level a correlate of the mechanical activities of the nervous system. During the nineteenth century, moreover, the acceptance of such thoroughgoing materialism was confined almost exclusively to German scientists and philosophers, for whom it formed part of a wider miscellany of atheistic and anticlerical convictions. ³ The term was nevertheless deployed frequently in Victorian Britain as a pejorative label that could be used to tarnish the reputation of those who challenged the old tradition of natural theology and instead insisted on a naturalistic—though not a materialistic—understanding of the universe.

With the bloody horrors of the French Revolution widely blamed on the 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 the 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 the Edinburgh Review, Huxley's naturalistic account of human descent in Man's Place in Nature (1863) was merely "a revival, under a more ingenious form" of the "extravagant" views of "the French Encyclopédistes" and the "doctrines of [d'Holbach's] 'System de la Nature,'" which deserved to be called "harsh names" because it was "indistinguishable from . . . absolute materialism, and even tends to atheism." ^5...